Afterall: Spring 2011, Issue 26

Foreword — Stephanie Smith

As I write from Chicago in December 2010, many of my fellow North Americans are busy debating the recent censorship of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly (1986— 87). A few weeks ago, a religious group and conservative politicians roiled the waters by claiming that a few brief seconds of Wojnarowicz’s dark montage — depicting ants crawling across a crucifix — constitute anti-Christian hate speech. The work was pulled from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition ‘Hide /Seek’, a comprehensive and well-received exploration of queer portraiture. This has in turn generated intense debate about an interlocked set of topics, including the social roles of art, artists and cultural institutions; the health of US constitutional protections on free speech and separation of church and state; and the degree to which queer identity has been embraced as a fact of North American experience. And it has prompted art spaces and museums across the country to quickly organise screenings and discussions based on the belief that this work of art deserves to be experienced in full and discussed in depth, rather than sound-bit into a tool for ideological polemics. 1 Now, this debate may remain a localised one that won’t deeply touch the consciousness of those Afterall readers not living in the United States. Even for readers currently enmeshed in the conversation, it seems likely that this set of events will have faded from collective consciousness by the time this issue of the journal is printed — as distant a memory as the snow that now falls outside my window. But the urgency generated around these questions seems useful to hold in mind as a potential frame for this issue of Afterall, resonating with several of the specific essays that follow, while also offering a broader reminder of Afterall’s aims as a journal. Afterall is never organised around one specific topic; rather, each issue of the journal offers a compendium of essays that examine carefully selected clusters of artists, exhibitions and ideas that seem especially relevant at the time of discussion. These essays are (almost always) grounded by a primary consideration of the works of art themselves and strive (without fail) to situate art within the world, history and social contexts. And they (often) foster text-to-text interplay, with broad themes recurring and amplifying across one issue of the journal. Several of the essays in this issue of Afterall address the range of both repressive and emancipatory possibilities that might be articulated within pedagogically oriented formulations of artistic and institutional practice. This is particularly true of Carmen Mörsch’s interrogation of the challenges and potential at stake in crafting a critically engaged role for museum/gallery education and Roger M. Buergel’s reassessment of Lina Bo Bardi’s radically democratic approach to museum and exhibition design, while Andrew Stefan Weiner explores political rhetoric in his meditation on recent performance and video works that problematise considerations of ‘evidence and event’. Herman Asselberghs considers Jean-Luc Godard’s changing relationship to didacticism, as illustrated by his new work, Film Socialisme (2010). These loose thematic concerns apply to varied degrees to the three artists featured in this issue. Group Material’s generous, activist and deeply pedagogical work is especially relevant to this line of thought. Catherine Sullivan’s filmic and performative projects are produced through collaborative processes and engage with issues of labour and economics; in these works the socially engaged strata of content emerges more through peripheral vision than direct speech. And Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, the third artist addressed in this issue, likewise touches on political processes and pedagogical strategies within his subtle 1

At my home institution, the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, we have chosen to host a month-long series of screenings and a one-night discussion.

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materialist work. By sketching out some of these connections — and lacks of connection — I don’t want to overdetermine any readings of these artists’ works but simply to draw out a few threads that were on the minds of the editorial team as we assembled this issue. Issue 26 of Afterall is the first that I had a hand in creating, having joined the publication in spring 2010 as a contributing editor. My participation grew out of Afterall ’s evolving relationship with the University of Chicago. This relationship is currently in the pragmatic form of distribution via the University of Chicago Press, but we hope that it will continue to grow into a full research partnership. Such a partnership has the potential to become one of the pillars of the university’s growing strengths in contemporary art, from its faculty of extraordinary art historians and artists to the Renaissance Society’s long history of sharp-eyed excellence and the past decade of experimental projects at the Smart Museum. Afterall ’s mission resonates especially strongly with the work of the Open Practice Committee — an intimate, loosely structured group of scholars, artists and curators who are invested in creating and linking rich opportunities to experience and discuss contemporary art. OPC is growing into a robust platform for critical debate, experimental programming and the production of knowledge around and through contemporary art. It could become a strongly collaborative partner for Afterall, completing a dynamic framework for the creation, study, display and discussion of contemporary art at Chicago. And so to begin to link back to the beginning: I am now one of two North Americans in the active editorial group (along with London-based Managing Editor Melissa Gronlund). While I would never attempt to play The Voice of America within editorial conversations, I do seek out connections between my experience on the ground here and issues we seek to address in the journal. And right now I’m depressed by the return of the repressed in the form of the inflammatory commentary that has circled around the Wojnarowicz issue. The rhetoric on both sides recalls the polarising, chilling impact of the ‘culture wars’ that plagued our country and decimated public spending for the visual arts twenty years ago. But I’ve also found it inspiring to follow the current debates while working on this foreword. In part that’s because the Wojnarowicz debate reminds me of the larger context of Group Material’s participation in the vibrantly oppositional art worlds of New York in the 1980s — scenes worth careful re-examination now for the impact and salience of the issues artists tackled, the aesthetic strategies they deployed and the reception they received then and over time. As one point of entry, my old copy of Democracy: A Project by Group Material (1990) includes several brief but terrific texts by William Olander, the late curator who commissioned a pivotal project by the AIDS activist group ACT UP for the New Museum’s front window. Setting the project within a larger context of historical works of art created in part to serve political aims, Olander wrote:

The point is a simple one: not all works of art are as ‘disinterested’ as others, and some of the greatest have been created in the midst, or as a result of a crisis. Many of us believe we are in the midst of a crisis today. Let the record show that there are many in the community of art and artists who chose not to be silent in the 1980s. 2

Both the reality and the perception of crisis are, of course, quite different here and now, but it’s been heartening to witness and participate in the strong counter-show of support from press and institutions and individuals who are speaking out in response to the cynical (mis)use of art in ways that mobilise fear and bigotry. And beyond the exigencies of the moment, it is useful to be reminded to step back, breathe and seek a wider perspective. That’s exactly what Afterall can offer — as here in an unexpectedly timely consideration of Group Material’s work. In those and the other texts included in this issue, we hope you will find nuanced, rigorous thinking about the many ways that art matters, and useful assessments of the tangles that bind aesthetic creation, dissemination and reception within specific social contexts and political realities.

2

William Olander, ‘The Window on Broadway by ACT UP’, Democracy: A Project by Group Material (exh. cat.), New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1990, p.278.

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Büro trafo.K, ‘So, what does this have to do with me, anyway?', Transnational Perceptions of the History of National Socialism and the Holocaust, Vienna 2009—11, funded by the ‘Sparkling Science' programme of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Science and Research. Courtesy Büro trafo.K

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Alliances for Unlearning: On the Possibility of Future Collaborations Between Gallery Education and Institutions of Critique — Carmen Mörsch

… [G]allery education, as it has developed since the mid-1970s, has been both a distinct and overlapping artistic strategy which is integrally connected to radical art practices linked to values aired and explored in the liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s, and particularly the women’s movement. It is an individual strategy among many (including, for instance, small-scale exhibition, small press and small magazine publishing, alternative libraries and archives) to shift art from a monolithic and narcissistic position into a dialogic, open and pluralist set of tendencies that renegotiate issues of representation, institutional critique and inter-disciplinarity. 1

This is how Felicity Allen, head of the ‘Learning’ department at Tate Britain until recently, began an article in 2008 titled ‘Situating Gallery Education’, in which she undertook to contextualise this field of practice in England with regard to both history and feminism. This was one of the first attempts to theorise and historicise gallery education in this Facing the omission of gallery education way. Gallery education is located — also from recent discussions of pedagogy, and especially in conjunction with the ‘educational’ or ‘pedagogical’ turn in Carmen Mörsch presents critical gallery curating — at the edges of the art field and education as an alternative to the bind of the attention of those writing within between emancipation through the will it. Stating this does not necessarily mean lamenting the situation: operating at to educate and emancipation through the the edges and developing a semi-visible presumptive equality of all subjects. practice has special potentials and qualities.2 This article contains speculations of its own about the functions of gallery education for the institutions in which it takes place, and about the concepts of pedagogy and learning that are inscribed in these functions.3 It also speculates about the pedagogical functions of the absence of educators (who are generally female) and of the gallery education that does not take place in institutions that regard themselves as ‘institutions of critique’ in Andrea Fraser’s sense. 4 1 2 3 4

Felicity Allen, ‘Situating Gallery Education’, Tate Encounters [E]dition 2: Spectatorship, Subjectivity and the National Collection of British Art (ed. David Dibosa), February 2008. Available at http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/tate-encounters/edition-2/ (last accessed on 18 October 2010). Visibility means not only improved opportunities for agency and articulation, but also an increase in control and regulation. See the allusion in F. Allen, ‘Situating Gallery Education’, op. cit.; Veronica Sekules, ‘The Edge Is Not the Margin’, in Access all Areas, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010, pp.235—53; and Carmen Mörsch, ‘Kunstcoop©: Kunstvermittlung als kritische Praxis’, in Viktor Kittlausz and Winfried Pauleit (ed.), Kunst — Museum — Kontexte: Perspektiven der Kunstund Kulturvermittlung, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006, pp.177—94. I use the term ‘function’ not in a determinist, functionalist sense, but rather based on the concept of the ‘author function’ as introduced by Michel Foucault: as a historically evolved, non-intentional occurrence, which is still structured by power relations and domination, and which is involved in producing the mechanisms of order and exclusion, by which it is itself conditioned. See M. Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ (1969), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp.113—38. I prefer ‘function’ rather than effect, in order to leave no doubt that the use, the concrete arrangement and the dispensing of gallery education along with the associated consequences does not necessarily involve individually intended effects, but nevertheless those that are based on active actions guided by certain interests. These effects can be analysed in terms of which interests are respectively dominant at a certain time and in a certain context and which narratives are hegemonic. ‘It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalise, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art is internalised, embodied, and performed by individuals, these are the questions that institutional critique demands we ask, above all, of ourselves.’ Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique’, Artforum, vol.44, no.1, September 2005, pp.278—83.

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Allen’s article was published in the second edition of the e-journal Tate Encounters [E]ditions. This publication accompanies the research project ‘Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture’ that Tate Britain conducted from 2007 to 2010 in cooperation with the London South Bank University and Chelsea College of Art & Design. In this project a research group composed of academics, museum staff and undergraduate students with various ties to immigration investigated how Britishness is produced through the displays of the museum. 5 The data and intermediate results made available on the project’s website show that during its course the museum’s Cultural Diversity Policy, among other things, was radically called into question, and this implied the need for changes in the educative and curatorial work of Tate Britain. ‘Tate Encounters’ is informed by insights from decades of feminist and critical museology, and by attempts to develop ideas of institutional practice accordingly.6 In their engagement with the displays and the staff of Tate Britain, for instance, the students developed their own visual and verbal approaches, which they linked through the production of ‘ethnographic videos’ to other contexts specifically relevant to them. These ‘co-researcher productions’ were in turn associated with a series of interviews with various experts on topics such as education practice within the museum; the status of digital media in museum practice and culture; the racialisation of cultural policy and the role of museums in social regeneration; and narratives of British visual culture that could be accessed through curatorship.7 The project sought to dissolve the hierarchies between researchers and the researched, and between teachers and students, in favour of a transversal alliance, but without trivialising the power relations and hierarchies of the setting. Indeed, in this attempt to conduct ‘visitor research’ as ‘research in cooperation with visitors’, the project is highly self-reflective and meticulous in its treatment. Gallery educators in the German-speaking world have conducted similar projects as a research component of their work as a critical practice.8 Twenty freelance and precariously employed gallery educators worked as a team at documenta 12 (2007), for example, to carry out analyses aimed at changing the practice and conditions of gallery education into forms of ‘militant research’ — that is, as performance and intervention. 9 My own involvement in the documenta project consisted of leading and supervising a team-based research process, and resulted in the thesis that gallery education, depending on how it is organised, fulfils various institutional functions: 10 an affirmative function, when it conveys information about art institutions and what they produce to an initiated and already interested audience as smoothly as possible, and a reproductive function to the extent that it endeavours to bring in children, young people and others uninitiated to these institutions and thus ensure the continuation of their audiences. It can also assume a critical deconstructive function when it joins together with the participants to question, disclose and work on what is taken for granted in art and its institutions, and to develop knowledge that enables them to form their own judgements and become aware of their own position and its conditions. Finally, gallery education can sometimes have a 5 6 7 8 9 10

There were two conditions for participating in the research project: the undergraduate students had to come from a family that had migrated to England (from where was irrelevant) and in which they were the first to attend a university. See http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/ tate-encounters/ (last accessed on 18 October 2010). This project will be published as: Andrew Dewdney, David Dibosa and Victoria Walsh (ed.), Post Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum, London and New York: Routledge, 2011. The extensive output of visual productions and research papers is accessible in its entirety at: http://process.tateencounters.org/ (last accessed on 13 November 2010). Current examples of this would be the project ‘Doing Kinship with Pictures and Objects: A Laboratory for Public and Private Practices of Art’ (2009—12) at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art, where the research team includes the two gallery educators Andrea Hubin and Karin Schneider; see A. Hubin and K. Schneider, ‘Doing Research with Anthropologists, Designers, Mediators and a Museum: A Project on, for and with Families in Vienna’, Engage Magazine, issue 25 (‘Family Learning’), Spring 2010, pp.31—40. There are also the research and education projects of trafo.K, the Viennese agency for cultural education described in Nora Sternfeld, ‘Unglamorous Tasks: What Can Education Learn from Its Political Traditions?’, e-flux journal, issue 14, March 2010. Available at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/125 (last accessed on 29 October 2010). For a contextualisation of this project, see Janna Graham, ‘Spanners in the Spectacle: Radical Research at the Front Lines’, Fuse Magazine, April 2010, n.p. Also available at http://www.faqs.org/ periodicals/201004/2010214291.html (last accessed on 13 November 2010). On the concept of ‘militant research’, see Marta Malo de Molina, ‘Common Notions, Part 1: Workers-inquiry, Co-research, Consciousness-raising’ (ed. Notas Rojas Collective Chapel Hill, trans. Maribel Casas-Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias), February 2006, http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en (last accessed on 29 October 2010). For more detail on this and for an explanation of gallery education as critical practice, see C. Mörsch, ‘At a Crossroads of Four Discourses: documenta 12 Gallery Education in Between Affirmation, Reproduction, Deconstruction and Transformation’, in C. Mörsch et al. (ed.), documenta 12 education #2: Between Critical Practice and Visitor Service, Berlin and Zürich: diaphanes, 2010, pp.9—31.

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transformative effect, in the sense of changing society and institutions, if it does not content itself with critical questioning, but rather seeks to influence what it conveys — for example, by shifting the institution in the direction of more justice and less discursive and structural violence. These four functions are not to be imagined hierarchically or as strictly chronological — in the sense of arising from sequential stages of development. In gallery education practice there are usually several of these functions active at the same time. A deconstructive or transformative gallery education, for instance, can hardly be imagined without some affirmative and reproductive aspects. At the same time, the friction between gallery education and its host institution increases the more the critical functions come into play. The various functions are additionally affiliated with different discourses on pedagogy and education: implicit conceptions of what education is, how it occurs and whom it addresses. For instance, neither the affirmative nor the reproductive function is self-reflective in the sense that their engagement in education is not queried in terms of its value codings and normalisations. Yet these two strategies differ in the question of the how and the who of education. The affirmative function addresses, first and foremost, the expert audience — players in the art field.11 The methods used for this type of educational work — although it is rarely called that — are developed in the academic field, derived from methodological canons that are generally instructive and limited to verbal expression in the form of lectures or debates. The reproductive function, on the other hand, is oriented (from the perspective of the institution) towards the excluded, i.e. specifically absent parts of the public, especially children, young people and families. They are imagined as ‘remote from art’ and as ‘laypeople’. For this reason,methods of playful learning are often derived from primary school and kindergarten educational practices and from institutionalised leisure activities for children and young people. They are oriented to the constructivist turn in learning theory,12 according to which it is less a matter of instruction in contents than of providing environments that stimulate manifold and complex processes of independently constructed meaning. Along with learning ‘specifics’, the point in these programmes is also ‘general’ in the sense of learning a love of art: 13 generating positive experiences within the institution, recognising art’s values and relevance and generating a desire to return. In comparison, the deconstructive and the transformative functions are based on a self-reflective understanding of education and learning. Education itself becomes the object of deconstruction or transformation: subject matter, addressees and methods are subjected to a critical examination of the power relations inscribed in them, and this in turn becomes the subject of the work with the audience. Questions are raised, such as: who determines what is important to communicate? Who categorises ‘target groups’ and to what end? What gallery education is permitted within the institution, and what is considered inappropriate and by whom? How do certain methods of teaching and learning implicitly create the subjects of teaching and learning? Sometimes the positions of those teaching and those learning change in this practice of querying: that is, the educational process is understood as a mutual process, even though it is structured by the aforementioned power relations. With the deconstructive function, the primary educational objective is the development of a critical attitude. This does not necessarily mean aspiring to change the conditions of the educational framework itself. 14 In the understanding of education associated with this function, engaging with art and its institutions is a relatively sheltered area of experiments under complex conditions, which aim to enhance the capability for agency, critique and creativity. Methods borrowed from artistic procedures are applied more often here. For its part, the transformative function emphasises the structural progression of the institution in the direction of more social justice and less epistemological and 11 12 13 14

Due to a lack of self-reflexivity in terms of educational methodology, however, this is rarely made explicit, but is articulated instead through discursive practices: through the manner of addressing the audience, the content of the research and the context of the discussion. George E. Hein, ‘The Constructivist Museum’, in Eileen Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), The Educational Role of the Museum, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp.73—79. See Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public (1966, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman), Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Deconstruction depends on the existence of the dominant text in order to be able to work in it. ‘The practitioner of deconstruction works within a system of concepts, but with the intention of breaking it open.’ Jonathan Culler, Dekonstruktion. Derrida und die poststrukturalisitische Literaturtheorie, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988, p.95.

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structural violence in the world at large, an objective linked with fostering critique and self-empowerment. For this reason, the transformative methodological instruments are also oriented towards strategies of activism and towards the epistemologies and methods of critical pedagogy — with a special reference to Paulo Freire, for whom the transformation of language and of verbal action was a constitutive (although not the sufficient) element for an education aiming to change the world. In this logic there are no fixed and predefined addressees. The concept of ‘target groups’, which is common for the reproductive approach, is superseded by an interest in forming alliances and in cooperation. Of course, however, here too there is a ‘hidden curriculum’: what is expected and claimed is the fundamental affirmation of a critical appropriation of art and its institutions. Gallery education that understands itself as a critical practice focuses on elements of the deconstructive and the transformative function. It conveys knowledge as represented by exhibitions and institutions and examines their established functions while rendering its own position visible. Accordingly, it attaches special importance to providing the necessary conceptual tools for appropriating knowledge, and adopts a reflective stance towards the means of education, instead of relying on ‘individual aptitude’ or a striving for ‘self-fulfilment’. While it seeks to broaden the institution’s audience, it does not indulge in the illusion that learning in the exhibition space is solely connected to play and recreation. 15 Ideally, gallery education acknowledges the aforementioned constructivist concept of learning processes, as well as the enriching potential of gaps found within language and comprehension. 16 That the knowledge of both visitors and educators is considered equal sets this practice apart from mere service work: critical gallery education opts for controversy. In theoretical and methodological terms, it works along the lines of a critique of domination, addressing issues such as the production of gender, ethnicity or class categories in the institution, and the related structural, material and symbolic devaluation of gallery education, which I will return to later. It analyses the functions of (authorised and unauthorised) speech and the use of different linguistic registers in the exhibition space. Recipients are not regarded as subordinate to any institutional order; rather, the focus is directed at their possibilities for agency and code-exchange in the sense of a ‘practice of everyday life’. 17 It also favours a reading of institutional order that, far from being conceived as static, leaves leeway for working within the gaps, interstices and contradictions generated by the configuration of rooms and displays of the exhibiting institution. 18 Furthermore, critical gallery education addresses the ways in which the market influences the structure, presentation, perception and reception of art, and thereby counters the middle-class illusion that art is detached from the economy to which it is actually closely tied. It considers the cultural and symbolic capital of art and its institutions as constituents of inclusionary and exclusionary processes in the art field. At the same time, it acknowledges and communicates the fact that symbolic capital gives rise to a desire, and develops both strategic and sensuous ways to appropriate such capital. Finally, it seeks to transform the institution into a space in which those who are explicitly not at the centre of the art world can produce their own articulations and representations. In this sense, it links institutions to their outside, to their local and geopolitical contexts. The field thus derives its complexity from art, the core subject on which its methodological repertoire is grounded. Summarised so programmatically — one could almost say paradigmatically — the approach of a critical gallery education practice seems to be something that must be in 15 16 17 18

One example of this is the activities of the group Kunstcoop© in the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin, 1999—2001. This group worked with artistic and performative means and involved groups that would not have visited the Kunstverein otherwise. The formats usually associated with fun and pleasure were simultaneously serious confrontations with the contents of the exhibitions and the art institution itself, which called for a high degree of engagement and concentration on the part of the participants, offering a space at the same time to reflect together on the didactic means that were used and to change them as needed. See Shoshana Felman, ‘Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable’, Yale French Studies, The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre, no.63, 1982, pp.21—44; and Jürgen Oelkers, ‘Provokation als Bildungsprinzip’, in Landesverband der Kunstschulen Niedersachsen, Bielefeld: Bilden mit Kunst, 2004, pp.93—113. See Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien: Les Arts de faire, Paris: Gallimard, 1980. See Irit Rogoff, ‘Looking Away — Participations in Visual Culture’, in Gavin Butt (ed.), Art After Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp.117—33; or the research project ‘Tate Encounters’ mentioned above.

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a permanent state of what Derrida called ‘à venir’, in coming. 19 Just as in other fields — such as curating, for example — a critical approach (in this case, gallery education as a critical practice) is a minority position. However, as Felicity Allen describes, the historical connections (in personnel, content, structure) of this field of work to civil rights movements, to feminism and to the intersection of art and political activism show that the critical paradigm in gallery education does exist. 20 Indeed, it has been present for at least forty years as an aspiration. One current example relevant in this context is the work by the Youth Council of the National Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, initiated by Janna Graham and now under the direction of Syrus Marcus Ware, which was established in 2000. In this project adolescents and young adults developed a programme in cooperation with other groups from the city, with contributions (exhibitions, performances, interventions in the collection, zines, lectures, radio programmes, workshops) on topics such as the function of the gallery in relation to national citizenship; policing and police violence in urban space; or the link between art, activism and institutions in Toronto. 21 In Vienna the organisation trafo.K produces gallery education projects for the Museum of Modern Art Vienna (MUMOK), the international book fair Buch Wien, the Vienna Mozart Year, the Critical gallery educators Museum of the City of Linz and others that, have to navigate manifold according to Nora Sternfeld, ‘overcome ambivalences. They are the function of reproducing knowledge representatives of the and become something else — something unpredictable and open to the possibility institution, so they have no of a knowledge production that, in tones opportunity to imagine an strident or subtle, would work to challenge uncompromised ‘outside’ the apparatus of value-coding’. 22 Adela for their work or themselves Železnik, Curator for Public Programmes as heroic figures. at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, is part of the Radical Education Collective (REC), which was founded in 2006 ‘to find ways of “translating” radical pedagogy into the sphere of artistic production, with education being conceived not merely as a model but also as a field of political participation’. 23 In Oldenburg, Germany, Nanna Lüth and her colleagues at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art conduct media (art) education with the aim of encouraging its participants ‘to better understand the strategies and codes of a media world that is entirely commercial in character’. The latter project is one of the few I know of that is located in a small art institution, which at least partly sees itself as an ‘institution of critique’. 24 Perhaps surprisingly, gallery education projects that attempt to be critical and aim for changes in the sense described above are usually part of large, often national art institutions, which accordingly have a powerful position in the art system and operate as global players in the art market. Projects there become entangled in special contradictions. Their critical potential is particularly exposed to the dangers of neoliberal appropriation, becoming instrumentalised in the 19 20 21 22 23 24

See Jacques Derrida, Voyous, Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2003. For historical examples, see C. Mörsch, ‘From Oppositions to Interstices: Some Notes on the Effects of Martin Rewcastle, The First Education Officer of the Whitechapel Gallery, 1977—1983’, in Karen Raney (ed.), Engage Magazine, no.15, 2004, pp.33—37; and C. Mörsch, ‘“To Take All That Learning and Put It Together with All That Art”: Loraine Leeson’s Artistic-Educative Projects in the Context of English Cultural Policies’, in NGBK (ed.), Art for Change — Loraine Leeson, Berlin: Vice Versa, 2005. For examples from the 1990s, see the work by the group Kunstcoop© at the NGBK in Berlin, in ibid., pp.108—33; the project ‘Stördienst’ at the Museum for Modern Art Vienna, in NGBK (ed.), Kunstcoop©, Berlin: Vice Versa, 2001; and E. Sturm, ‘Zum Beispiel: StörDienst und trafo.K — Praxen der Kunstvermittlung aus Wien’, in Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Kunstvereine (AdKV ) (ed.), Kunstvermittlung zwischen Partizipatorischen Kunstprojekten und interaktiven Kunstaktionen, Berlin: Vice Versa, 2002, pp.26—37. See http://www.ago.net/youth-council-archive (last accessed on 22 October 2010). See also J. Graham and Yasin Shadya, ‘Reframing Participation in the Museum: A Syncopated Discussion’, in Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans (ed.), Museums after Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.157—72. N. Sternfeld, ‘Unglamorous Tasks’, op. cit. See http://radical.temp.si/history/ (last accessed on 25 October 2010). As the Edith Russ Site describes itself, ‘The focus is on the content of the artwork and technology’s influence on shaping and defining artistic ideas. Beyond the programme of discussions and presentations, we will also hold exhibitions intended to address subjects which are socially relevant and future-oriented.’ The exhibition programme, which is largely publicly funded, frequently takes into consideration queer, feminist and media-activist positions. See http://www.edith-russ-haus.de/index.php/Kunstvermittlung/Kunstvermittlung?userlang=en (last accessed on 25 October 2010).

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context of an imperative positing of education in the so-called ‘knowledge society’ and the concomitant revaluation of ‘soft skills’ within society. 25 In some cases they are almost fig leaf measures in conjunction with diversity and audience development policies. They assist the institutions in presenting themselves as progressive and socially responsible, while leaving the internal logics of operation, which usually function in a strictly hierarchical and less socially aware way, unchanged. More recently, there have been discussions about examples in England, where major art institutions like to make use of the added value of artistic-pedagogic collectives in the sense of radical chic, but (re-)act inconsistently when these collectives question the logic of operations and the structures of the host institutions with the same radicality. 26 Not least of all, gallery education projects intended to have a transformative effect frequently have, at best, only reforming effects within the institution. This is evident in the case of the documenta 12 research and education programme. The documenta 12 programme was possible because the educational turn in curating was taken up and continued by the artistic director Roger M. Buergel and curator Ruth Noack. With their support, education at documenta 12 was able to operate self-reflectively within the framework of the exhibition and to open up space for experiments (though adequate financial resources were not made available by the institution). Yet the reception of this experiment was and is limited almost exclusively to specialists, taking place within the professional community of gallery education. 27 At the institutional level it was not possible to establish gallery education as a critical practice, as the management of the documenta GmbH argued that the mode of gallery education was the responsibility of the respective artistic directors. Based on the same argument, it was not possible to extend the collaboration with a local audience that had been initiated through the project’s ‘Local Advisory Board’ after the exhibition closed. 28 What was achieved, however, was the institution of a principle of openness on the part of documenta for future work with children and young people in the exhibition. It is possible that this will change in the 2012 iteration of the exhibition, but it is too early to tell. 29 ‘Institutions of critique’, on the other hand, rarely work together with gallery educators, even when their resources allow them to do so. I would like to speculate on the reasons for this and on the function of the absence of gallery educators in these spaces. The fine line between disrupting and stabilising dominant orders is very narrow for critical practices in neoliberalism, where critical gallery educators have to navigate manifold ambivalences. They are representatives of the institution, so they have no opportunity to imagine an uncompromised ‘outside’ for their work or themselves as heroic figures. Due to the presumption that their position is insufficiently radical, they are frequently subjected to disregard or contempt from critically positioned actors in the art field, from whom they would prefer to receive interest and support. In reflections on pedagogy currently undertaken by curators and artists, gallery education does not appear as an independent practice with its own history and controversial discourses, but is treated instead — if at all — in casual asides. ‘(Here should I be clear that I am not referring to the work traditionally carried out by museum and state-funded gallery education and interpretation departments…),’ emphasises Andrea Phillips in brackets in her article about 25 26 27 28 29

See Pen Dalton, The Gendering of Art Education, Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2001. See, for example, the consequences of the invitation to the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination to conduct a workshop with the title ‘Disobedience Makes History’ for Tate Modern (January 2010). The group ‘Liberate Tate’ came out of the workshop, which in turn used activist strategies learned in the workshop to denounce the employment and sponsoring practices of Tate itself. See http://www.frieze.com/blog/entry/unhappy_birthday/ (last accessed on 25 October 2010). Another example is the discussions that arose about the exhibition and event series ‘C-Words’ by the group Platform at the Arnolfini in Bristol, where the art institution itself became the centre of attention as a polluting factor. See http://blog.platformlondon.org/content/c-words-ripples-continuing (last accessed on 25 October 2010). The activities and results of the project have been gathered in two volumes: Ayse Gülec, Claudia Hummel, C. Mörsch, Sonja Parzefall, Ulrich Schötker and Wanda Wieczorek (ed.), documenta 12 education 1: Engaging Audiences, Opening Institutions. Methods and Strategies in Education at documenta 12, Berlin and Zürich: diaphanes, 2009; and C. Mörsch et al. (ed.), documenta 12 education 2, op. cit. It would be interesting to investigate whether and which long-term changes might be effected by a project like the Youth Council on the institutional policy and the structures of the NGO by ‘Tate Encounters’ in Tate Britain, or by the Edgware Road Project of the Serpentine Gallery, which should also be mentioned in this context. See http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2009/06/edgware_road. html (last accessed on 25 October 2010). For the deconstructive approach of ‘Hatching Ideas’, the children and young people’s programme at documenta 12, see C. Hummel, ‘What Does aushecken — Hatching Ideas — Mean?’, in A. Gülec et al., documenta 12 education 1, op. cit.

10 | Afterall

‘Education Aesthetics’ in the publication Curating and the Educational Turn (2010). 30 In the same book, Simon Sheikh reflects on Andrea Fraser’s 1984 performance Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, taking it for granted that gallery education, which he calls ‘mediation’, still exists in 2010 solely to teach people the ‘right’ way to look, from the perspective of the institution, and the ‘right’ way to understand the works. 31 Has he not noticed the post-structuralist and power theory reflections in this field? It is hard to imagine that a protagonist from gallery education would write an article about the ‘functions of curating’ without basic knowledge of this practice. That this does not seem to be a problem the other way around indicates the hierarchies between curating and educating: the lack of knowledge about the history and discourses of gallery education involves a ‘sanctioned ignorance’, in Gayatri Spivak’s sense, an unknowing that strengthens one’s own position of power. 32 This could be considered the first pedagogical function of the absence of gallery education in institutions of critique. For a gallery education that sees itself as a critical practice could be also realised in this kind of institution, i.e. it could question and work on mechanisms of exclusion, naturalisations and power relations there as well. This, however, could be seen as calling the critical position on the part of curators and artists into question. If curators did not want this to happen, then it would be a sensible strategy of territorialisation to regard their actions as being identical with the actions of gallery education. 33 This is not the case, however. The audience attracted by events organised by curators and artists is far more delimited than the groups accessed by gallery educators. The many ‘academies’, ‘schools’, ‘seminars’, ‘workshops’, ‘sessions’, ‘encounters’ and ‘lessons’ initiated in the course of the ‘educational turn’ are largely attended — at least as far as I have been able to observe — by people who are similar in habits, lifestyle and attitudes to those of the curators. For those who accept the invitation, being in these spaces and engaging in social interaction and collective artistic and intellectual production signifies an increase in symbolic and cultural capital. In this way, these spaces are no different from the art spaces that are regarded as hegemonic and bourgeois. Critical gallery education practice, on the other hand, involves a tremendous capacity for embarrassment. It takes places in rooms that sometimes smell more of sweat and squashed lunch packages than of brand new furniture and freshly painted walls. It requires a willingness to take seriously views that substantially deviate from one’s own position and aesthetics much different from one’s own taste; it requires radically alternating between registers of language and aesthetics. Pedagogical expertise means having an idea of how to react to the effects of educational and knowledge hierarchies in the face of different world views, utopias and desires, other than by feeling embarrassed, turning up one’s nose, becoming defensive or being helplessly silent. Moreover, gallery educators cannot expect that their audience will be willing to accept a critical stance. An audience that rejects this expectation eludes the educational intentions inherent to the deconstructive and transformative functions of promoting a capacity for critique and agency. There is a pedagogical paradox here, which is constitutive for gallery education work: in certain situations, a participant’s refusal to take part in working on deconstruction/transformation and his or her insistence on different, independent interests could be a self-empowering act. These and other paradoxes call for a mode of ‘unlearning privilege’ on the part of critical gallery educators, 34 an active reflection — in other words, one that is consequently also articulated in action — in relation to the privilege of one’s own position, colliding languages and habitual constitutions. Nora Sternfeld aptly calls this work an ‘unglamorous task’. 35 And this could be seen as the second function of the absence of gallery educators in institutions of critique: enabling the concentration on glamorous tasks, the collectively produced preservation of the aura and exclusivity through the peer group. 30 31 32 33 34

Andrea Phillips, ‘Education Aesthetics’, in Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (ed.), Curating and the Educational Turn, London and Amsterdam: Open Editions and de Appel, 2010, pp.83—96. Simon Sheikh, ‘Letter to Jane (Investigation of a Function)’, in ibid., pp.61—75. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (ed.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Hemel Hempstead: Harester Wheatsheaf, 1994, pp.66—111. Since the term ‘education’ is now in vogue, curators and artists increasingly refer to themselves as educators, implying that their practice is already educative, since it is already a mediating practice. See G.C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (ed. Sarah Harasym), New York and London: Routledge, 1990, p.9.

Contexts: Gallery Education | 11

It is in this context that the current popularity of the philosopher Jacques Rancière, and especially his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1983),36 in the art field is significant. There is hardly a statement in conjunction with the ‘educational turn’ that can do without a reference to the radical democratic vision of self-learning, which Rancière discusses using the historical example of the linguistics and literature professor Jean-Joseph Jacotot and the method of universal learning he developed in Leuven in 1818. According to this conception, the pedagogical relationship has always been constitutive of inequality, because one person presumes to have knowledge to be conveyed to others. In contrast, an emancipatory process of learning is self-controlled. The position of the teacher is superfluous, because every individual has in principle the same intelligence. Yet what other preconditions did Jacotot’s students have? They most likely came from bourgeois families and schools, because who else went to the university in Leuven in the nineteenth century? Jacotot’s students, who taught themselves French on the basis of a bilingual text, remained among themselves, just as self-learning groups in the pedagogical spaces of the art field usually do. Among the latter, the everyday use of Rancière’s theses has the function of framing their own exclusionary actions as a radical democratic gesture and thus no longer questioning, let alone changing them. The reference to every subject’s capability for self-empowerment ironically leads to a belief in distinction — as one does not feel obliged or even entitled to make an effort to reach those who do not feel they belong in emancipatory spaces, because that would be paternalistic, after all. Ruth Sonderegger, a philosopher who specialises in Rancière’s work, notes that regardless of Rancière’s dislike (‘Abneigung’) of Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses, it still remains necessary to pay attention to normalisation and exclusion in the art field:

In my view, it is quite astonishing that Rancière does not see Bourdieu’s research on the art field as a complementary endeavour. Indeed, both are interested in the question of what art can contribute to the classification of social space as a practically sensual physical space […] with the only difference that one emphasises emancipatory effects and the other normalising effects. Rancière’s archival evidence for the self-emancipation of joiners, floor layers and metal smiths with a love of literature seems just as convincing to me as Bourdieu’s evidence that the discourse maintained by various institutions about the disinterestedness of art beginning in 1750 is anything but disinterestedness, but rather a strategic means of establishing and fixing class boundaries along a new kind of capital: namely cultural capital. 37

On 18 and 19 September 2010, there was a symposium in Vienna with the title ‘educational turn: Internationale Perspektiven auf Vermittlung in Museen und Ausstellungen’ (‘International Perspectives of Education in Museums and Exhibitions’). 38 In her introductory lecture, Sternfeld, one of the organisers, called this event a re-appropriation of the discourse taking place in the curatorial field by gallery education with a critical self-image. She also referred to how gallery educators and their knowledge have previously been consistently overlooked in the attempt to propose curatorial action, in the course of the ‘reflective turn’, as a way of generating, conveying and experiencing knowledge beyond setting up exhibitions. In her view, curatorial action comes closer in this way to gallery education. It adapts the promises of the pedagogical, but without having to be confronted with the tension between these promises and the impossibility of fulfilling them entirely in pedagogical practice. She emphasised that this is a patriarchally structured omission, because it is based on hierarchically placing production over reproduction and distribution (in this specific case: generating knowledge in comparison with passing on knowledge). Unlike the present text, which attempts to illuminate the reasons for this omission and to raise the question of which function inheres in it (or also: who exactly 35 36 37 38

N. Sternfeld, ‘Unglamorous Tasks’, op. cit. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (trans. Kristin Ross), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Ruth Sonderegger, ‘Institutionskritik? Zum politischen Alltag der Kunst und zur alltäglichen Politik ästhetischer Praktiken. Symposium of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Ästhetik’, paper given at the conference ‘Ästhetik und Alltagserfahrung’ at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, 2 October 2008. The symposium was organised by schnittpunkt, an exhibition theory and practice network. See http://www.schnitt.org (last accessed on 25 October 2010).

12 | Afterall

profits from it and how), Sternfeld’s lecture stressed the common interests and potential possibilities for cooperation between the two fields. Ultimately, in her view, both educative and curatorial action with critical aspirations involve the attempt, a minoritised one, to make the actualisation of critical, pedagogical approaches productive for a new institutional practice, away from representation towards processual spaces of agency, and to turn the disciplinary link (from a historical perspective) between art and education into an emancipatory project. Janna Graham, for her part, emphasises in her article ‘Spanners in the Spectacle: Radical Research at the Frontlines’ (2010) the shared battle against precarious working conditions in the art field and against the neoliberal appropriation of creativity as an economic factor, seeing here the urgent necessity of forming alliances between artists, curators and gallery educators, and especially between these and activists:

If the project of an ‘educational turn’ is indeed to find new strategies for opposing, exiting or even surviving these new regimes of arts education, it is necessary then to move beyond professional distinctions, to include those actively engaged in the struggle between the education of a neoliberalised ‘creative class’ and the creation of emancipatory and critical education. 39

In conclusion, I would like to emphasise another potential shared interest between curatorial and educational action in conjunction with the ‘educational turn’: engendering queer spaces in the sense that the desire to become free from contradictions, in one way or another, gives way to the logic of action of open-ended work in and with the contradictions. The antinomy, alluded to above, between emancipation through the will to educate and emancipation through emphasising the presumed principle equality of all subjects (represented here by the two theoretical positions of Rancière and Bourdieu respectively), between exclusionary action and paternalist action, is complex and not to be resolved in practice. Critical gallery educators are just as aware of this irresolvability as critical curators — but they may sometimes draw different conclusions from it. In my view, collaboration under these auspices, bringing these conflicts into the artistic-educative spaces of the ‘educational turn’, would in fact open up new possibilities for what an institutional practice following institutional critique could be. It would be hard work, though. A precondition for forming an alliance of this kind — if it wants to do justice to the egalitarian claims of the ‘educational turn’ — would be the recognition of gallery education as an independent cultural practice of knowledge production in the curatorial field as well, while simultaneously questioning and processing the aforementioned hierarchisation of production and reproduction/distribution. Another precondition would be to make room in art spaces in the sense of ‘unlearning privilege’, and that the occupation of space should be motivated by activist positions — with all the possibly disastrous consequences this might have for the aesthetic and intellectual glamorousness of the peer groups previously operating in it. It may be possible to create these conditions as one effect of productive encounters in coming years — in case the ‘educational turn’ proves to be a real turn and not ‘simply another in a string of long-term social and political projects that are routinely “discovered” (like Columbus “discovered” America) by the contemporary art world to satiate an endless demand for circulation of the “new”’.40

39 40

J. Graham, ‘Spanners in the Spectacle’, op. cit. Ibid.

Translated from German by Aileen Derieg.

Contexts: Gallery Education | 13

Previous spread: Group Material, Inserts, 1988. Insert into the 22 May 1988 Sunday New York Times

16 | Afterall

Group Material, The People's Choice (Arroz con Mango), 1981. Installation view, 244 East 13th Street, New York. Both images courtesy the artists and Four Corners Books

Citizen Artists: Group Material — Alison Green

‘The dismantling of the progressive economic and cultural changes of the 1960s began in earnest in the 1980s, and Group Material’s overall project was imagined in this period of attempted historical erasure.’ 1 So opens Doug Ashford’s text in the recent publication Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (2010). It is an apt beginning to remembering how embattled the Left was in the 1980s, and to thinking retrospectively through the impact and importance of the trenchant and timely work of Group Material, the New Yorkbased collective active from 1979 to 1996.

Alison Green discusses the contemporary relevance of Group Material’s use of artistic and activist strategies, and how their practice might disrupt current narratives of the ‘social turn’. Like all good art practices, Group Material’s seems utterly contemporary. It can be discussed in any number of ways: as a collective rather than individual practice, as activists and ‘brand hackers’, as a clever employment of postmodernist theory and of their innovations as artists working curatorially. The group’s projects foreshadowed the ‘social turn’ in recent art, as well as ‘relational’, ‘context’ or ‘participatory’ practices, and especially the production of critically oriented installations in museum exhibitions and biennials. But Group Material seems curiously absent from recent discussions about contemporary art, perhaps occluded by its most famous member, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Show and 1 2 3 4

Tell, edited by Julie Ault, a long-time member of Group Material, provides a good occasion to address many of these issues. The book itself is many things — a resource on the group’s history, a study of archiving and a manual for how (or how not) to organise a collective art practice.2 (Reading about the first year of Group Material tells you two things: don’t try to work with too many people, and don’t get bogged down paying rent on a gallery space. Later entries are bracing in their revelations of discord, disaffection and burn out.) So this is a compelling moment to look at their particular form of productive opposition. It is also a moment, hopefully, to resist — as I think Show and Tell does — hagiography or the conclusion that a political-critical practice is no longer possible. In what follows, this text proposes that Group Material’s most significant legacy is the processes that their work produced, and the discursiveness that became crucial to their projects’ different forms and contexts. Group Material began as a group of artists, all interested in social issues and in — that 1980s concept — the ‘politics of representation’. 3 There were between ten and thirteen members at first, but during the second year this unwieldy number fell to three, and the group’s size henceforth fluctuated between three and four. 4 Group Material — the name itself allowing for flexibility and signifying a ‘materialist’ approach — organised itself around several motivations, such as working as a collective against individual art practices, working against ‘careerism’ and reconnecting art’s production and reception. The group’s

Doug Ashford, ‘An Artwork Is a Person', in Julie Ault (ed.), Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material, London: Four Corners Books, 2010, p.220. At the same time as the book was being prepared, an archive was created and deposited in the Downtown Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, at New York University’s Bobst Library. See J. Ault, ‘Case Reopened: Group Material’, in Ibid., pp.209—16. Jan Avgikos uses this term in her essay ‘Group Material Timeline: Activism as a Work of Art’, in Nina Felshin (ed.), But Is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995, p.87. Show and Tell lists the members as they join and depart the group. In the second year, Ault, Tim Rollins and Mundy McLaughlin were the three left from the original group. Doug Ashford joined early on, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres joined in 1987, coincident with Rollins’s departure. Karen Ramspacher was active from 1988 until around 1991, and the German artists Thomas Eggerer and Jochen Klein joined the group near its end.

Artists: Group Material | 17

origins, concurring with the late conceptual and activist practices of Martha Rosler and Conrad Atkinson and coinciding with a resurgence of expressionist painting in galleries, made them an important foil for the commercial and conservative mainstream of the 80s. A number of the early members had studied with Joseph Kosuth at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and Group Material’s founding overlapped with some members’ joining Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, organised by (among others) Kosuth, Lucy Lippard, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and Carl Andre. 5 In a mid-80s article, Lippard set Group Material in the context of other artist-activist projects and alternative spaces that had recently developed in New York — from Colab and Fashion Moda to the Alliance for Cultural Democracy — reflecting an ‘influx of belligerently disillusioned and/or idealistic young artists, well-trained and ambitious, but dissatisfied with the narrowness and elitism of the art world into which they were supposed to blend seamlessly’. 6 Group Material was certainly idealistic, and also experimental; as founding member Tim Rollins recalled about one of their early shows, ‘It was full of fantasy and surprise and joy and humor and wit — all of the things so often lacking in political art.’ 7 What is also striking was their use of design: ideas found visual form and were articulated in texts, whether a press release or exhibition announcement, or in visual and textual interfaces developed for exhibitions. The notion of an expanded practice was not new, but Group Material employed a remarkable range of ‘curatorial’ strategies involving working collectively, politically and in relation to specific cultural situations. Their first move was to rent a storefront gallery. Rollins described it as a ‘not a space but a place, a laboratory of our own’. 8 Another article of faith, as it were, was the post-Conceptual practice of not producing art. Instead they solicited contributions from other people, ranging 5 6 7 8 9 10

from their community of artists to non-professional artists and non-artists. Asked to show at the New Museum in 1985, they invited 200 people to each contribute a 12-by-12-inch flat object, which took their places alongside album covers and magazine ads in a grid spelling out the word ‘MASS’. For a show at Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, DC, they invited ‘responses’ from across the United States by putting small advertisements in local newspapers. The press release for Messages to Washington (1985) states: ‘Group Material is tired of hearing people’s opinions as watered down by “public opinion polls”, distorted by the mass media and through their letters as interpreted by President Reagan. We have an idea other people feel the same way.’ 9 An early exhibition they organised, The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango) (1981), in their own Lower East Side gallery was conceived in opposition to artists’ participation in the gentrification of outlying neighbourhoods. To create a tight loop between audience and location, they put out a request to their mostly Latino neighbours to loan things from their own walls and shelves, ‘things that might not normally find their way into an art gallery’.10 In rejecting the role of the artist-as-maker they became something else — producers, organisers, interpreters of art and other artefacts, ‘cultural workers’, even. They mobilised the exhibition as an active site where all things were under scrutiny: institutional power, aesthetics, cultural value and political discourse. As a curatorial practice, Group Material made exhibitions both political and aesthetically innovative. The People’s Choice was made up of a hundred or so diverse objects, including class photographs and collectibles, a mural by local kids, posters, ‘folk art’, kitsch and religious icons. They were installed floor to ceiling as they arrived. Labels identified the owners, some of which included a personal story about the object. The significance this ‘democratic’ attitude — especially

Rollins describes being involved with the AMCC’s Anti-catalog, an alternative history of American art put together in response to the Whitney Museum of American Art’s bicentennial exhibition of the collection of John D. Rockefeller, which included no artists of colour and only one woman. See ‘Tim Rollins talks to David Deitcher — ’80s Then — Interview’, Artforum, vol.41, no. 8, April 2003, pp.78—79. See also Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power’, in Brian Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New York and Boston: New Museum and David Godine, 1984, pp.351—52. L.R. Lippard, ‘Trojan Horses’, op. cit., p.353. ‘Tim Rollins talks to David Deitcher,’ op. cit., p.78. T. Rollins, ‘What Was to Be Done?’, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.218. ‘Messages to Washington’, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.111. ‘Dear Friends and Neighbors of 13th Street’, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.35.

18 | Afterall

Group Material, Americana, 1985. Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photograph: Geoffrey Clements. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

in relation to other artists who make installations of multitudes of things (Thomas Hirschhorn’s and Jason Rhoades’s more packed ones come to mind) — is not the rejection of the programme of the white cube, but how the display supported the set of meanings already granted by the owners of the objects. In a review of the show, Thomas Lawson commented: ‘The value of these artifacts lay precisely in their sentimentality, a quality that is absent from most artwork that strives to mean something to a general audience.’ 11 Accordingly, The People’s Choice might be distinguished from exhibitions seeking to problematise divisions between high and low culture but which result in reasserting the hierarchy. The key to the difference is in the act of a positive representation of a particular community, initiated by a social process: the community was specific, nameable and present, even if open and internally diverse. Nevertheless, The People’s Choice and its local success (as well as its recognition within the art world) did not lead Group Material to become a community-based art practice. Internal group discussions over 11 12 13 14

the following year revealed there were those who wanted to be activists, those who wanted art careers and those — the ones who continued to work as Group Material — who were interested in activism and art.12 As Ashford writes in Show and Tell: ‘Group Material’s self-assignment was to locate the dissensual feelings associated with activism, its emotional reverberations and actual evocations, into a realisable model or design.’ 13 The group’s main point of resistance was the commercial art world and its reliance on named artists and discrete, saleable objects. The People’s Choice tried to open this closed circle of aesthetic value. In a later show like Americana, their contribution to the 1985 Whitney Biennial, Group Material proposed a ‘precise and innovative exhibition design’, 14 a layered and salon-style hanging of mass-produced commodities (such as a clothes washer and dryer, pop music and a TV continually broadcasting one of the networks) alongside historical works of social critique by artists under-recognised by the Whitney and works of contemporary art critical of

Thomas Lawson, ‘The People’s Choice, Group Material’, Artforum, vol.19, no.8, April 1981, p.67, reprinted in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.32. See Peter Hall, ‘Group Material: An Interview’, RealLife Magazine, no.11/12, Winter 1983—84, quoted in J. Avgikos, ‘Group Material Timeline’, op. cit., p.102. See also J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., pp.48—49. D. Ashford, ‘An Artwork is a Person’, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, p.225. Proposal for ‘Americana’, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.94.

Artists: Group Material | 19

North American culture.15 Group Material’s self-stated aim was to ‘demonstrate how art is dependent on a social context for its meaning’.16 Effectively, they curated an alternative show, critiquing the way the Whitney represented American culture and tacitly arbitrated success in the New York art world in their biennials. The other key strategy in Group Material’s practice was using channels outside art circuits. At one point or another in their run of projects, they used every form of public advertisement available: bus and subway posters (M5, 1981—82; AIDS and Insurance, 1990; and Subculture, 1983); newspaper inserts (Inserts, 1988 and Cash Prize, 1991); commercial billboards (Your Message Here, 1990); shopping bags (Shopping 15 16 17

Bag, 1989); and all of them in concert in one show in Berlin that addressed German reunification (Democracy Poll, 1990). The initiation of such projects in 1981 roughly coincided with abandoning their gallery space. At the time they explained: ‘It is impossible to create a radical and innovative art if this work is anchored in one special gallery location. Art can have the most political content and right-on form, but the stuff just hangs there silent unless its means of distribution make political sense as well.’ 17 In the case of using fly posters — the series of works Group Material called DA ZI BAOS after the Chinese ‘big character posters’ — it was not the intervention per se but the discourse it produced that made the interventions effective. Contrast the twelve

Kim Levin’s review of the Biennial touches on flashpoints in the so-called culture wars of the 1980s — she accuses Group Material of being handmaidens to the Whitney’s effort at inclusion inclusiveness that year, and also of bringing the ‘quality’ of the show down. K. Levin, ‘The Whitney Laundry’, The Village Voice, 9 April 1985, reprinted in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.96. Proposal for ‘Americana’, op. cit., p.94. Also on ‘Americana’, see J. Ault, ‘Three Snapshots from the Eighties: On Group Material’, in Paul O’Neill (ed.), Curating Subjects, London: Open Editions, 2007, pp.34—36. Quoted in J. Avgikos, ‘Group Material Timeline’, op. cit., p.99. It has been argued elsewhere that interventions like these are only marginally effective, especially as they are ultimately co-opted by capitalism itself. For a recent text that addresses advertising’s appropriation of avant-garde gestures, see Friedrich von Borries and Matthias Böttger, ‘False Freedom: The Construction of Space in Late Capitalism’, in BAVO (ed.), Urban Politics Now, Rotterdam: NAi, 2007, pp.128—40.

20 | Afterall

Group Material, Democracy Poll, 1990, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK), Berlin. Interview statement installed at U-Bahn station. Photograph: Regina von Pock. Courtesy the artists and Four Corners Books

each was accompanied by a town meeting led by public figures, artists and members of the group. As an example of their discursive strategy, the town meeting, titled Politics and Election, opened with the statement that just because you invite the public to a meeting doesn’t mean they become empowered. This was followed by a discussion about site, in which questions were raised about Dia’s being chosen as the meeting’s location — thus offering that very rare thing: dialogue, rather than consensus.21 And this dialogue runs right through to the everyday aspects of Group Material’s practice: reading between the lines in Show and Tell, there is Far from the distinct, identifiable and fluid evidence of how communities Group Material aimed their their working work at, audiences now are museum audiences, process remained government target groups, or most de-politicised as open and discursive as of all, individuals. the exhibitions, despite the group’s small size and intimate The timing and siting of these projects was interrelations. Their projects had hundreds crucial. To stage an exhibition on AIDS of participants, from artists to activists in 1989 in the Bay Area and advertise it to the staff of the institutions with whom on the outside of a museum was to deploy they were working. 22 this space as a site for political action. 19 Many of Group Material’s projects Of all their works, Group Material’s developed forms of discourse that tested ‘timelines’ might constitute their best out issues of participation and inclusion, undoing of institutional contexts. The as well as self-criticality. 20 When offered timelines, which used works of art, artefacts and found documents, were the an exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation most didactic of Group Material’s projects, in New York, they staged a four-part show, and the ones in which the group’s political Democracy (1988—89), which addressed agenda was most strategically keyed into four topical issues: education, election the format of the show. 23 Chronological politics (the show overlapped with the 1988 presidential election of George H.W. structure signalled authority and evidence, Bush), cultural participation and AIDS. but in other ways the timelines are classic There were four different installations, and examples of intertextuality. A lineup of posters, alternating red and yellow, which they put up on a façade of a bankrupt department store in Union Square, New York, in 1982, to Daniel Buren’s iconic striped posters pasted on Paris billboards in the late 1960s. DA ZI BAOS represented public, though not official, discourse. Texts presented different voices speaking in different modes, from man-on-the-street opinion to position statement. And this was targeted toward an issue: the Democracy Wall that accompanied Group Material’s AIDS Timeline exhibition at the University of California at Berkeley in 1989 and 1990 represented campus opinion on AIDS.18

18 19 20 21 22 23

The question they asked was ‘How does AIDS affect you, and your lifestyle?’ Responses ranged from ‘testing must remain anonymous’ and ‘My whole life has changed due to AIDS […] I live with a constant thought of death and how to prepare for it…’ to ‘AIDS doesn’t affect me at the moment; I don’t sleep around’. See J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., pp.160—61 and 250—51. For the Democracy Wall at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, Group Material solicited position statements from right-wing organisations, including the National Front. A text offered by the National Cleansing Campaign was particularly shocking in its rant against the ‘complete destruction that faces the Anglo-Saxon and kindred people’ through ‘drugs, brainwashing, homosexuality, rape and murder’. See ibid., pp.100—05. For an important period account of art, activism and AIDS see Douglas Crimp, ‘AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism', October, vol.43,Winter 1987, pp.3—16. Recent discussions of Jacques Rancière’s writings on dissensus are important here. See Janina A. Ciezadlo, ‘Pluralistic Conversation’, Afterimage, vol.36, no.4, January/February 2009, pp.3—4, which summarises the conference ‘Disruptions: The Political in Art Now’, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2008, which included both Rancière and Doug Ashford as speakers. Politics and Election transcript, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. See also B. Wallis (ed.), Democracy: A Project of Group Material (Discussions in Contemporary Culture # 5), New York and Seattle: Dia Art Foundation and Bay Press, 1990. See ‘Behind the Timeline: Collected Histories’, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., pp.238—53. The first instance of Group Material using the format was Timeline: A Chronicle of U.S. Intervention in Central and Latin America, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 1984, in a show that was itself part of a national campaign to protest US intervention in the region. The AIDS Timeline was installed in three North American museums from 1989 to 1991 (UC Berkeley; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; and the 1991 Whitney Biennial). It also appeared in a print version that ran simultaneously in a number of art magazines and journals to coincide with the 1 December 1990 Day Without Art.

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magazine covers referenced the mass media’s (inflammatory) discussion of AIDS while agitprop paraphernalia from protest groups like ACT UP and Gran Fury demonstrated the smart, growing political movement against the US government. Works of art were multivalent: in some cases they were as informative as the timeline’s running text; in others they represented a critical position; and some eulogised death.24 Other inclusions were aimed to educate people (and possibly shock them), as in Robert Buck’s Safer Sex Preview Booth (1989), which screened instructional/pornographic sex videos made by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. 25 The significance of the timelines as exhibition strategies was in their heterogeneous attempt to inform, politicise and represent a particular community, while also activating a general audience. In effect, Group Material created ‘other spaces’, or heterotopias, in Michel Foucault’s sense of places where ‘real’ sites of culture are ‘simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’.26 The knowledge presented in these exhibitions was complex, contentious and often contradictory. Richard Meyer, who worked on AIDS Timeline at UC Berkeley as a postgraduate student and curatorial intern, commented that it was not documentary in its approach: it was, rather, ‘this really complicated notion of a visual and lived history, where images don’t have fixed representation’.27 What seems relevant in this observation is how the show facilitates the production (rather than the reproduction) of meaning, and thereby reflects other strategies the group used to produce dialogue. This is not the de-politicised ‘mash-up’ of contemporary postmodernism, but something more akin to critical discourse in its best sense. Recent evaluations of socially engaged practice provide some ground for evaluating Group Material’s work 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

in contemporary rather than historical terms, although it is notable that they are minimally present in the current wave of critical writings about both innovative curatorial practices and social engagement. To mention only one thread in a complex dialogue, Claire Bishop’s description of aesthetics as the ‘ability to think contradiction’ functions well as a descriptor of Group Material’s practice. 28 She points to the ‘critical space’ produced by both institutions and aesthetic practice itself, and argues that it functions as a brake against the instrumentalisation of art for (merely) social ends. 29 Strikingly similar discussions took place on the pages of The Village Voice about Group Material’s Dia show AIDS and Democracy: A Case Study (1988—89). Critic Elizabeth Hess found the mixed — she called it ‘conceptual’ — use of agitprop, works of art and visual culture created distance, and this allowed for critical reflection. Whilst Bishop’s opposition is between aesthetics and what she calls ‘ethics’, Hess’s was barricade politics, as made clear in a follow-up review by Kim Levin, who charged Group Material with becoming ‘traditional curators’ and merely ‘preaching to believers’. For Levin the appropriate response to the AIDS crisis was to get out and protest. 30 In fact, Group Material did both: they did a lot of marching in addition to organising exhibitions. Despite the similarities of these discussions, there are significant differences between Group Material and the more recent practices being cited. Bishop argues, for example, that Phil Collins’s video installation they shoot horses (2004), which documents the two dance marathons he staged (separately) for Palestinian and Israeli teenagers, produces critical reflection. Indeed it may do so in many ways, but it is tempting to imagine that Group Material’s response to a politicised subject like the Arab-Israeli conflict would raise the stakes of the

Crimp notes that early responses to AIDS both by and about the art community were limited to catharsis and transcendence, and makes the argument for political action. D. Crimp, ‘AIDS’, op. cit., pp.3—6. Nonetheless, it is important to realise now that the political was personally experienced: in the lead-up to putting AIDS Timeline in the 1991 Whitney Biennial, Gonzalez-Torres was mourning the loss of his partner to AIDS. See the entries by Robert Buck and Larry Rinder in ‘Behind the Timeline: Collected Histories’, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.246, which indicate how controversial some of the material in the AIDS Timeline was. Michel Foucault, ‘Des Espaces Autres’, (1967), trans. Jay Miskowiec, 1984, available at: http://foucault. info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (last accessed on 27 September 2010). J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.239. Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’, in Margriet Schavemaker and Mischa Rakier (ed.), Right About Now: Art & Theory Since the 1990s, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007, p.68. Ibid., p.65. Both articles are reprinted in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op.cit., pp.153—54.

22 | Afterall

Felix Gonzalez-Torres on the opening day of Group Material, AIDS Timeline, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, 30 September 1990. Courtesy the artists and Four Corners Books

audience’s engagement quite a lot higher than Collins’s work does. Against the institutionalisation of participatory practices, it might be useful to revive the term activism. Lippard early on contextualised Group Material in the traditions of 1960s Conceptualism and Institutional Critique, and, crucially, as part of a new wave resolving the division between activism and aesthetic practice. Jan Avgikos’s informative mid-1990s essay on the group positioned them as the middle way between ‘the market’ and ‘political correctness’ (which she describes as an impossible politics); to this end she coined the term ‘cultural activism’ to describe the hybrid nature of their practice. A decade later, in her influential book One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, Miwon Kwon cited Group Material as occupying a productive role in the culture wars of the 1990s, in the context of how both progressives and neoconservatives learned how to mobilise ‘communities’. 31 Recent discussions like Bishop’s shift significantly away from the ‘public’ in public art and towards established art-world circuits. Far from the 31

distinct, identifiable and fluid communities Group Material aimed their work at, audiences now are museum audiences, government target groups or, most de-politicised of all, individuals. One might well ask where the commitment to ‘activate’ or ‘empower’ visitors to such exhibitions has gone. Where are the points of difference crucial to the notion of critique? Also germane to this discussion are the different fates of Group Material and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who — posthumously — is an ever-present figure on the exhibition circuit, and whose work, although made of ‘poor’ and endlessly replenishable commodities, has been seamlessly incorporated into the art market’s and art museum’s proclivities. Standing in front of Gonzalez-Torres’s sculpture ‘Untitled’ (Supreme Majority) (1991), white and mute, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this summer, I wondered if any of the art-going audience there knew he was a member of Group Material. How does one see the politics of this work? In this context, it produces very little. It turns out the written history is (partially) to

Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2002, p.147 and note 31. Kwon wrote more extensively about Group Material in a text on their final project: ‘Three Rivers Arts Festival: Pittsburgh, PA’, Documents, no.7, 1996, reprinted in Texte zur Kunst, vol.23, August 1996, pp.149—51.

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blame for the erasure of Group Material from Gonzalez-Torres’s biography; most sources underplay his participation in the group.32 Writing for the catalogue of the last major show before his death, Nancy Spector asserted:‘Gonzalez-Torres’s career as an individual artist has developed quite separately from his ongoing collaboration with Group Material, but reverberations from its collective effort to generate social awareness, without dictating specific meaning, are readily detectable in his work.’ 33 Such divisions seem difficult to countenance now, for both parties involved, since the strategies in Gonzalez-Torres’s work — the candy spills, the lights, the billboards, wall texts, paper stacks — are so evident in Group Material’s repertoire of engagement. And here is the point: Gonzalez-Torres’s minimalism lends itself to the elegiac reading it has received, the slow loosening of the aesthetic and political conjunction it created. One might also speculate that his key position within Nicolas Bourriaud’s 32 33 34

Relational Aesthetics (2002) has contributed to the evacuation of political specificity in his work, especially because of the terms by which ‘relational’ forms of art practice have been embraced by institutions. Bourriaud’s emphasis on art that replicates already existing situations is problematically generalised against the way GonzalezTorres’s work emphasised difference and critique (how can there be any politics in replication?). More recent writing on Gonzalez-Torres is somewhat corrective, as in the 2006 monograph edited by Ault, and also Joe Scanlan’s provocative Artforum article from last year. 34 Although neither of these explicitly realigns Gonzalez-Torres with Group Material, both recontextualise his politics in terms that resonate with the group’s aspirations as activists. An additional point of reference for this discussion is provided by a recent publication on Tim Rollins, who pursued a practice outside Group Material that was collaborative, socially-engaged,

To mention just a few one might consult: Wikipedia’s entry, accessed on 9 September 2010, doesn’t mention Group Material. Oddly, the 58-page-long biography on the website of Gonzalez-Torres’s long-time dealer, Andrea Rosen lists only three of the more likely figure of seventeen projects he did with or as part of Group Material. MoMA’s website cites his early involvement with the group, but separates it from his individual practice. Nancy Spector, ‘From Criticism to Collaboration: The 80s’, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres (exh. cat.), New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995, p.13. As with other sources, Group Material is not present in the book’s bibliography or exhibition history, even though the latter includes individual, group and ‘collaborative two-person exhibitions'. Ibid., pp.198—217. J. Ault (ed.), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Göttingen: Steidl, 2006; and Joe Scanlan, ‘The Uses of Disorder’, Artforum, vol.48, no.6, February 2010, pp.162—69.

24 | Afterall

Group Material, YOUR MESSAGE HERE, 1990, Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago. Billboard by Stephen Lapthisophon. Courtesy the artists and Four Corners Books

Group Material, DA ZI BAOS, 1982, Union Square, New York. Photograph: Andres Serrano. Courtesy the artists and Four Corners Books

discursive and — fancy that! — commercially successful. 35 The history drawn up by this book fleshes out the overlaps and continuities between Rollins’s relationship to Group Material and his practice as Tim Rollins and KOS. It’s hard not to feel that Group Material broke significant ground but missed the party. The year they broke up, 1996, coincides with a proliferation of new forms of social practice lately successful in museum exhibitions and biennials, whether in the work of Francis Alÿs or Jeremy Deller, or equally in that of later artists like Paul Chan and Jeanne van Heeswijk. It’s also hard not to feel — if Gonzalez-Torres’s ‘success’ is any measure — that the politics of social practices must be negotiated carefully and continually. As one might expect, Group Material addressed this in their work: their contribution to documenta 8 was a self-contained, circular installation titled The Castle (1987). Its point of departure was an orphaned quotation from Kafka’s novel Das Schloss (The Castle, 1922), in which a land surveyor, known only by the initial K., is informed posthumously that his application for citizenship to the 35 36

walled town has been denied. He would nonetheless be permitted to live and work there. This is as good a metaphor as any for activist art’s place in the art world — it’s useful to have around but it will never enter into its commodified heart. As for Group Material’s place in history? As Fredric Jameson wrote, ‘History is what hurts.’ 36

See Ian Berry (ed.), Tim Rollins and KOS: A History, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2009. Rollins left the group in 1987 because it wasn’t activist enough. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Art, London: Methuen, 1981, p.102.

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26 | Afterall

Group Material, Timeline: A Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America, 1984. ‘For Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America', P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Photograph: Dorothy Zeidman. Courtesy the artists and Four Corners Books

Counter-Time: Group Material’s Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and South America — Claire Grace The fact is that spatial form is the perceptual basis of our notion of time, that we literally cannot ‘tell time’ without the mediation of space. — W.J.T. Mitchell 1 History is, in effect, a science of complex analogies, a science of double vision […] History in this sense is a special method of studying the present with the aid of the facts of the past. — Boris Eikhenbaum 2

In this examination of Group Material's Timeline, Claire Grace considers the ambivalent relationship to time and historicisation embedded within their use of a graphic, linear timeline with which to represent history. For some in the early 1980s, time seemed to circle back on itself. Shadows of the Vietnam War loomed large as the Reagan Doctrine, at the time still emergent, galvanised late-Cold War CIA and military operations in South and Central America, in particular in El Salvador against the 1 2 3 4 5 6

FDR and the FMLN, and in Nicaragua against the Sandinista Liberation Front. 3 Images of state-sponsored atrocities appeared regularly in The New York Times, magnifying the long-running history of United States military action elsewhere south of the border. As the crisis mounted, activists across the Americas responded in kind. In New York, political exiles and local sympathisers formed a network of diverse organisations, both small and large, including CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), Casa Nicaragua, Taller Latinoamericano, INALSE (Institute of El Salvadorian Arts and Letters in Exile) and others, including, in the summer of 1983, Artists Call Against US Intervention in Latin America.4 Active between 1983 and 1985, Artists Call broadcast a message of solidarity throughout the art world in a national campaign of exhibitions and other events organised in hundreds of alternative and established cultural institutions across the country. 5 In New York alone, more than seven hundred artists participated, including many well-known figures. 6 One of the most remarkable contributions, Timeline: The Chronicle of US Intervention in Central

W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory’, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), The Language of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p.274. Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘Literary Environment (Leningrad 1929)’, in Ladislav Matejka and Krystnya Pomorska (ed.), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1978, p.56. Cited in Leah Dickerman, ‘The Fact and the Photograph’, October, vol.118, Fall 2006, p.152. The first letter Artists Call (see below) sent out to ‘Fellow Artists’ in the summer of 1983 opened: ‘We’re starting down the Vietnam road again. After the ’60s, we felt a sense of defeat, but in fact we helped deflect the full might of this country from landing on the Vietnamese. Now we have to hold back the fist in Central America.’ Letter reproduced in Doug Ashford, ‘Aesthetic Insurgency: Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America (1982—1985)’, in System Error: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (exh. cat.), Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2007, p.104. The FDR (Revolutionary Democratic Front) formed in 1980 as a grouping of social democratic parties and political organisations. The FMLN (The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) formed in 1980 as a coalition of left-wing revolutionary guerrilla organisations (and has since become one of two major political parties in El Salvador). See D. Ashford, ‘Aesthetic Insurgency’, op. cit., pp.111—19. Email from Julie Ault, 20 November 2010. Organised by an ad-hoc coalition of artists, activists and other cultural practitioners, Artists Call raised tens of thousands in donations for the National University of El Salvador, the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers and a coalition of Salvadoran labour organisations. Exhibitions, performances and other events took place beginning in January 1984. As Jamey Gambrell put it at the time, ‘fund raising was almost a secondary activity — the expression of art-world opposition to official US policy in [Central America] was, above all, intended to draw greater public attention to the “unofficial" war being fought there’. ‘Artists Call was […] about artists participating in the formation of political consciousness [… Many] organizers had participated in artist protests against the Vietnam War…’ J. Gambrell, ‘Art Against Intervention’, Art in America, May 1984, pp.9 and 15. Participants included Louise Bourgeois, Jimmy Durham, Leon Golub, Hans Haacke, Joyce Kozloff, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sol LeWitt, Ana Mendieta, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Mark di Suvero and many others.

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and Latin America, was made by Group Material, a collective of young New York artists that formed in 1979 and whose members included two key figures in Artists Call (Doug Ashford and Julie Ault). 7 Timeline exemplifies Group Material’s installation practice in a number of key respects, not least in its status as a temporary, one time only project specific to both its time (a two-month period in the winter of 1984) and its place (P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York). 8 Consistent with the ephemeral nature of many of Group Material’s projects, Timeline also exemplifies the collective’s curatorial approach to installation art. Filling a room at P.S.1, a loose, salon-style hanging chequered all four walls with a multitude of cultural artefacts, all presented on equal footing: newspaper clippings; press photographs; a scarf and banner from the FMLN and the Sandinista Liberation Front; and artworks made in response to the crisis by close to forty contemporary artists, including littleknown figures and many prominent ones. Contributors included artists as diverse as Ida Applebroog, Conrad Atkinson, Sue Coe, Mike Glier, Leon Golub, Michael John Gonzalez, Louis Laurita, Faith Ringgold, Nancy Spero, Haim Steinbach, members of Group Material and numerous others. Timeline also displayed original works by historical figures such as Honoré Daumier, Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera. 9 A selection of agricultural products referenced North-South trade relations: coffee grinds lined the edges of the room; a small heap of fresh bananas emitted a pungent scent; ten large tobacco leaves clung to one wall, while on another cotton sheeting hung in gauzy folds; and sheets of copper were also displayed. In the centre of the room stood a massive, bright red sculpture in the shape of a maritime navigation buoy, which had featured in a 7 8 9 10 11

recent protest in Washington, DC against US policy in Central America. Timeline’s ‘archival impulse’ 10 operated much like other Group Material installations: it pooled relevant artefacts to create a chamber for reflection on a pressing matter of public concern, in this case the impact of US military intervention on political, cultural and economic conditions in South and Central America. But in its representation of chronological time, the 1984 project marked an important shift in Group Material’s practice. A red band three-inches wide encircled all four walls, hand-painted at intervals with crisp black frets and four-digit numbers enumerating the years of US interventions in the region.11 Though the timeline itself included no explanatory text, its dated trajectory provided a framework in which the multifarious collage of images and objects assembled above and below could come together as a richly reflective, if ultimately abstract, historiography. Mapping a temporal axis onto a spatial one, Timeline introduced the model of factographic installation later developed by Group Material in what has become perhaps their most well known work, AIDS Timeline (1989).12 Little has been published on the 1984 precursor, or on either work’s ambivalent relationship to the graphic form they inhabit, the modern timeline.13 This essay explores that ambivalence in the context of the 1984 project, looking closely at its implications for historical representation and spectatorship. Like Group Material’s 1989 chronicle of the AIDS crisis, the 1984 work is anything but a straightforward timeline. Codified in late-eighteenth-century England, this powerfully reductive representational device was linked from the start with the idea of teleology. Its linear horizontal form provided what has recently been described as ‘an intuitive

During the making of Timeline, Group Material’s members were: Ashford, Ault, Mundy McLaughlin and Tim Rollins. See J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material, London: Four Corners Books, 2010, p.59. Other key figures in Artists Call’s organisation included Zoe Anglesey, Daniel Flores Ascencio of the newly formed INALSE, Coosje van Bruggen, Josely Carvalho, Leon Golub, Kimiko Hahn, Ted Hannon, Jon Hendricks, Thomas Lawson, Lucy Lippard, Thiago de Mello and others. Though not the subject of this essay, the diversity of Artists Call’s organising body was central to the work that was accomplished. Email from D. Ashford, 5 November 2010. Group Material’s exhibition (22 January—18 March 1984) took place long before P.S.1 — a converted school building in Long Island City, Queens — officially became affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art in 2000. P.S.1 was then a thriving non-traditional venue for experimental art and site-specific installation. A complete list of the artists and cultural artifacts represented in Timeline, as well as a written description of the work and a series of installation photographs all appear in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., pp.83—90 and 258. Information on originals from an email from J. Ault, op. cit. Group Material anticipates the ‘archival impulse’ coined for a tendency in art production in the 1990s in Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, vol.110, Fall 2004, pp.3—22. Timeline’s numbers were hand-painted by Tim Rollins using an overhead projector and Letraset layout transparencies prepared in advance. Email from J. Ault, op. cit.

28 | Afterall

visual analogue for concepts of historical progress that were [then] becoming popular’.14 In its use by Group Material just over two centuries later, seemingly anachronistically within the burgeoning postmodernism of the 1980s, Timeline deftly adapts this Enlightenment-era form, applying it just enough to mark a path away from the anxieties postmodernism harbours for both history and time (the former regarded as the pen of oppression, and the latter seen as too fugitive to chart or trace).15 But even as Timeline moves towards temporal and historiographic clarity, it is far from a smooth rehabilitation of the early-modern graphic form it marshals. True to its historical moment, Timeline is also shot through with ambivalences of its own. Confronting the certitudes of the timeline with postmodern doubt, Timeline works these two temporalities against one another, and in so doing opens up a very different kind of historical encounter. History Lessons The bright red band that extended horizontally across Timeline ’s four walls hovered at a common eye-level about five feet from the floor. Its vivid colour referenced the 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

palette of post-revolutionary Soviet graphic design (an important source for Group Material’s practice generally), and alluded to the blood lost in the struggles in South and Central America. With these overtones, the crimson timeline not only unified the installation’s kaleidoscopic visual field, but also commanded attention as its ‘red thread’ — its single formal constant and most prominent feature (complimented by the giant protest sculpture at the centre of the room). 16 Spanning from 1823 to 1984, the timeline’s scope connected current interventions, naturalised in the US Cold War media as necessary or even heroic, with interventions in the distant past, whose moral depravity was easily identifiable in retrospect.17 By chronicling the patterns of a silenced history of oppression, Timeline functioned as a work of countermemory,18 reflecting in this regard the ‘incredulity’ toward master narratives of progress described in François Lyotard’s generation-defining book, The Postmodern Condition, first published in English the year of Group Material’s installation. 19 If Timeline participated in critical postmodernism by virtue of its subject matter, its ‘red thread’ cut against the grain. Abiding by the conventions of the

The term ‘factography’ derives from Soviet Productivist art of the 1920s and 30s, which was, along with Constructivism, an important influence for Group Material. ‘Factography’ refers to the presentation within the sphere of art of contemporary and historical data relating to social, economic and political issues. See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘From Faktura to Factography’, October, vol.30, Fall 1984, pp.82—119. As Buchloh summarises in a later essay on Hans Haacke, factography extends from the assumption that ‘the new masses of industrial societies would warrant new participatory forms of art production that directly related to their daily experiences and thus transcended the traditional class limitations imposed by the esoteric standards of advanced bourgeois visual culture’. B.H.D. Buchloh, ‘Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason’ (1988), Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955—1975, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2000, pp.239—40. AIDS Timeline, which traces the political roots of the AIDS crisis and its demographic and cultural impact, was first exhibited in 1989 at the MATRIX art gallery of the University of California, Berkeley, and was reconfigured for the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1990 and the Whitney Biennial in 1991. The subject merits volumes. My own work considers these two projects as works of counter-memory that détourne both modern representational devices they occupy, the timeline (as I discuss here) and the archive. I also develop a reading of these projects as embodied spatialisations of memory reminiscent of classical mnemonic techniques in which narrative is mapped onto imagined architectural spaces (see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010, p.245. As the authors demonstrate, the art of graphically representing chronological time has a long history of its own. Tabular formats developed in the fourth century remained popular through the eighteenth century and beyond, and in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance chronographers experimented with an extraordinarily imaginative repertoire of graphic forms, including elaborate systems of roots and trees and anatomical renderings of Christ as well as of dragons and other fantastical creatures. Soon after its emergence in the 1770s, the single-axis horizontal timeline almost completely supplanted these earlier models, catching on precisely because it ‘captured the historical spirit of the moment’. Ibid., p.19. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989; and Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, vol.146, 1984, pp.53—92. See Thomas Lawson, ‘Group Material, Timeline, P.S.1’, Artforum, vol.22, no.8, May 1984, p.83. As just one example, Newsweek’s 10 October 1983 cover story vaunts what it calls ‘The CIA’s Secret Warriors’, referring by this brassy description to the Special Forces (‘Green Berets’ by another name), the elite military division dispatched in many Cold War operations during this period, the ranks of which swelled under President Reagan. The term and concept of counter-memory is drawn from Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D.F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, op. cit.

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timeline’s modern form, its single-axis, diachronic extension suggests continuity and definition where postmodernism insists on multiplicity and fragmentation. However appropriate to Group Material’s enduring pedagogical investments, and to the specific site of display in this particular case (a former classroom in P.S.1’s repurposed school building), Timeline ’s measured progression of dates affirms precisely the genre of historical and temporal coherence that the anxious pressures of postmodernism had already scattered and dissolved. Indeed, in Group Material’s immediate art historical context, from the 1960s at least through the mid80s, artistic production in the US often steered clear of historical representation. As Mark Godfrey has argued, in the few instances where historical subject matter surfaces in this period, it tends to place less emphasis on the history it addresses than on the limits of historical representation in a world heavily mediated by press photography and television. 20 There are, of course, a number of crucial exceptions, and it is one of the claims of this essay that Group Material’s 1984 Timeline helped chart an emergent, countervailing trend of historicism in post-War and contemporary avant-garde practice. Among other artists whose work engaged this historical turn early on, Atkinson, Golub, Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler and Spero informed Group 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Material’s development to varying degrees as mentors or interlocutors, either for the collective generally or for individual members. 21 Timeline ran counter not only to the historical scepticism that characterises post-War art production in the US, but also to its ‘almost obsessional uneasiness with time and its measure’, a prevailing anxiety Pamela M. Lee describes in Chronophobia (2004). 22 In ‘nonlinear paradigms of seriality’, ‘recursion’ and endless duration, the art of this period strips time bare of historical meaning even while compulsively belabouring its passage.23 Examples abound: 1960s Minimalist sculpture, which quite radically emphasises time as a factor of perceptual understanding, nonetheless scours phenomenological experience clean of its historical conditions.24 The work of Robert Smithson fragments and refracts time to such an extent that although historical practice flickers insistently in a work like Spiral Jetty (1970), it ultimately drains away, spiralling vertiginously out of our grasp. 25 Hanne Darboven’s ‘temporal sublime’, 26 from 1968 onwards, only in exceptional cases acknowledges the historical content of the days it endlessly tabulates.27 Likewise, in the white-on-black date paintings of On Kawara’s Today series (1966–ongoing), the artist’s disciplined registration of days methodically empties time of historical meaning. 28

See Mark Godfrey, ‘The Artist as Historian’, October, vol.120, Spring 2007, pp.141—42. See also B.H.D. Buchloh, ‘A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977’, October, vol.48, Spring 1989, pp.88—109. Atkinson, Golub, Rosler and Spero were also frequently represented in Group Material’s installations and projects (including Timeline), along with Jenny Holzer, Juan Sanchez, Mike Glier, Hans Haacke and many other consistent contributors. Group Material had other key mentors that should be mentioned, among them Margaret Harrison and Lucy Lippard; five members of the original group also studied with Joseph Kosuth at the School of Visual Arts (though, with the exception of Rollins, these members had left the group by 1981). Ashford studied with Rosler and Haacke at Cooper Union from 1980 to 1981, and subsequently maintained relationships with both artists. Email from J. Ault, op. cit.; J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., pp.7, 49 and 59; and email from D. Ashford, op. cit. Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2004, p.xii. Lee’s account of the centrality of time in the art of the 1960s has been enormously helpful for this essay. Whether these temporal preoccupations took on specifically phobic dimensions, as she insists, is largely beside the point. Certainly, however, what Lee calls the ‘chronophobia’ of 1960s art (which she attributes primarily to new developments in technology and the rise of the information age) has roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the increasingly simultaneous temporality afforded by new inventions such as photography, telephone and radio. The modernist avant-garde responded by theorising time as relative and non-sequential (one thinks of Man Ray’s Indestructable Object, 1923, and other works from Dada and Surrealism; Joyce and Woolf in the sphere of literature; and Bergson, Freud and Einstein in philosophy and science). See Leesa Fanning, ‘Dada and Surrealist Time’, in Jan Schall (ed.), Tempus Fugit, Time Flies, Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2000, p.88. P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.xxiii. Ibid., p.278. Also see H. Foster, ‘The Crux of Minimalism’, The Return of the Real, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1996. See Jennifer Roberts, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, pp.5,138 and 139. P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.288. Alexander Alberro goes so far as to insist that Darboven’s tables of countless sequenced dates have ‘nothing to do with the world at all’. A. Alberro, ‘Time and Conceptual Art’, in Jan Schall (ed.), Tempus Fugit, op. cit., p.151. Darboven’s monumental Kulturgeschichte 1880—1983 (Cultural History 1880— 1983) (1980—83) stands as an important exception, perhaps more archival in nature than specifically historical. Dating from the same time frame as Group Material’s 1984 project, it offers an important point of comparison, particularly since both projects are, as I explore in my current research, poised between the archive and the timeline. See Dan Adler, Hanne Darboven: Cultural History 1880—1983, London: Afterall Books, 2009.

30 | Afterall

Group Material, AIDS Timeline (New York City 1991), 1991. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photograph: Ken Schles. Courtesy the artists and Four Corners Books

Lee struggles to carve a space for historical agency within the yawning ‘temporal extensiveness’ she describes. 29 But as her account itself suggests, the ultimate effect of these tireless enumerative systems is to clear time of any trace of historical narrative or incident.30 Wan and still, they cast their spectator adrift in a kind of post-historical ennui, a world in which, it seems, nothing much happens or matters and no action seems capable of making much difference.31 Timeline forecloses on this cool indifference. Unlike the vacuous 28 29 30 31

metronomic temporality of Conceptual art, or the clean phenomenological time of Minimalism, Timeline pumped its 161-year span full of historical affect. Its resonance as history resulted from Group Material’s decision to cross their signature approach to three-dimensional collage with a graphic representation of time. In this regard, however spare the timeline’s numerical typography remained throughout (a minimalist, hand-rendered sans serif as reminiscent of Kawara’s as of Constructivist graphic design), contextualised by the installation’s

Kawara lines each painting’s storage box with a page from that day’s newspaper. Not meant for exhibition purposes, this practice redundantly corroborates each painting’s time and place, but accords little historical meaning to reported events. See P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.293. Other examples include: Christine Kozlov’s 271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding to 271 Days of Concepts Rejected (1968); Douglas Huebler’s Duration Piece (1969); Eva Hesse’s Metronomic Irregularity II (1966); Dennis Oppenheim’s Time Pocket (1968); and any number of others. Even in the work of Hans Haacke, where history and chronology often play an important role, registering the passage of time does not necessarily grant it historical meaning. In Haacke’s News (1969—70), five teletype machines print reams of information transmitted live from commercial wire services. Even while the printed scrolls disrupt the ostensible neutrality of the ‘white cube’ and insist on the gallery’s inscription within politics and history, the endlessly accumulating surfeit of information remains illegible as ‘news’. The few instances of linear, chronological progressions in the art of the period tend not to address historical time but rather to evoke a more personal commentary: Sophie Calle’s The Shadow (1981), Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972) or Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969). Though not acknowledged by Group Material as a source for their work, it should be mentioned that Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974—79) not only stands as an important example of historicism in late-twentieth-century art in the US (the work’s monumental banquet table, place settings, tiled floor and other elements represent 1,038 women in history), but also includes a wall-mounted historical timeline in the form of seven ‘Heritage Panels’, photo-and-text collages that document the lives of 999 women dating from prehistory to the twentieth century. P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.278. See ibid., p.307. At least in Smithson’s case, this temporal sensibility provided a kind of ‘cosmic endorsement for his own aversion to activism, political or otherwise’. J. Roberts, Mirror-Travels, op. cit., p.9. More important than the careers and activist credentials of any one of these artists is the kind of spectatorship their work presupposes.

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layered accumulation of display objects, the four-digit numbers registered not merely as abstract symbols of time, but also as moments of history. Likewise, however richly associative the installation’s cultural artefacts might have been on their own, only in the context of the timeline’s numbered extension do they come alive as historically articulate objects. Consider Richard Prince’s re-photograph of a Marlboro ad, mounted in Timeline above

Unlike the vacuous metronomic temporality of Conceptual art, or the clean phenomenological time of Minimalism, Timeline pumped its 161-year span full of historical affect. the year ‘1823’. One of many works from Prince’s Cowboy series (1980—92), the image shows a cowboy from behind as he reaches towards a horse’s bridle, perhaps about to mount, or else ‘breaking’ the animal to follow his commands. In the context of the installation, the visual metaphor for conquest suggested by Prince’s work directs attention to the mutually reinforcing roots of North American myths of masculinity and expansionist foreign policy. But it is Group Material’s wall-mounted timeline that makes these connections register as specifically historical: 1823 is the year the Monroe Doctrine was first introduced, solidifying the US’s expansionist position in the Western hemisphere and providing the rhetorical arsenal cited on numerous future occasions to legitimise US interventions in the Americas. Timeline’s commitment to history reflects Group Material’s immersion in efforts to support the struggle for selfdetermination in Central America. By 1982, they had formed relationships with exiled artists and intellectuals from that region, and had plugged into the activities of CISPES, Casa Nicaragua, the Taller 32 33 34 35

Latinoamericano and other organisations that together occupied the first floor of 19 West 21st Street, where, joining these organisations, Group Material rented an office space beginning in the autumn of 1982. 32 It was there at the Taller Latinoamericano that Group Material presented Luchar! (Struggle!, 1982) the previous spring. An important precursor for Timeline (as well as for Artists Call), Luchar! assembled a range of works made in response to the crisis in Central America, including many by artists later included in Timeline.33 Not unlike Timeline, Luchar! vividly addressed the realities of torture, state violence and human rights abuses in the region.34 The 1982 project included no timeline or chronology, however, and remained focused on present-tense conditions rather than their deeper historical roots. The year-and-a-half transition between Luchar! and Timeline opened the door to historical time, a shift for which Group Material’s involvement in Artists Call and the organisations of West 21st Street was perhaps central. CISPES made the cumulative, historical depth of current events explicit by producing a flyer chronicling the dates of US interventions between 1868 and 1983 — a chronology that contributed to Group Material’s move towards the marked historicism of Timeline, which included the flyer as a scaled-up Photostat mounted on the entrance wall immediately to the right of the title. 35 Many other points of reference informed Group Material’s turn towards Timeline’s chronographic ethos. Too numerous to detail fully here, it should be stressed that the collective’s historical sensibility extended perhaps less from precedents in the realm of visual art than from popular culture. In this regard, CISPES’s flyer joined the many graphic charts and timelines printed regularly in Newsweek, Time magazine and other similar publications. The exhibition design of Charles and Ray Eames also played a

Or in North American English, the second floor. Luchar! included projects by Bolivar Arellano, Golub, Lawson, Lippard, OSPAAL (Organisation of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America), Susan Meiselas, Rosler, Christy Rupp, Anton van Dalen, members of Group Material and about forty others. J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.258. The link between Luchar! and Artists Call is described in D. Ashford, ‘Aesthetic Insurgency’, op. cit., pp.114—16. As described in Show and Tell, ‘A work by Anne Pitrone — a life-size piñata that depicts a figure in the strappado torture position — generates some controversy. Its symbolically powerful presence is disturbingly evocative of lived reality to some staff members of and visitors to the organisations on the same floor.’ J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit. pp.74—75. Conversation with D. Ashford, 10 September 2010; and conversation with J. Ault, , 20 November 2010. CISPES’s timeline is reproduced in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.90.

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role; Mathematica: A World of Numbers … and Beyond (1961) and The World of Franklin and Jefferson (1975—77) both included wall-mounted timelines, for instance. 36 The installations of British Conceptual artist Conrad Atkinson made a strong impression as well. Atkinson’s first exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York, Material–Six Works (1979), included wall-mounted displays chronicling various politically-significant histories, including the struggle in Northern Ireland and the nexus of industrial pollution and public health. 37 One further precedent should be mentioned here, if only as a heuristic point of comparison: Hans Haacke’s ManetPROJEKT (1974). In this work’s ten sequential panels, Haacke charts the provenance of Édouard Manet’s 1880 painting Une Botte d’asperges (A Bunch of Asparagus), which had just entered the permanent collection of the WallrafRichartz Museum in Cologne. Conceived for (and ultimately censored by) this museum, Haacke’s work exposes the Nazi-era career of the painting’s previous owner, Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann Josef Abs, who had been a prominent figure in the economic establishment of the Third Reich. A timeline of sorts, ManetPROJEKT deploys historical chronology to expose the political contradictions of cultural patronage. 38 As Haacke pointed out in a 1984 interview, inverting the ‘art historian’s custom to trace the provenance 36 37 38 39 40 41

of a work’, provenance serves here not to authenticate the object but rather to expose its underside. 39 The forensic historicism of Haacke’s work and certainly its prehistory in Soviet productivism share points in common (as well as many differences) with Group Material’s practice, including projects such as Timeline and AIDS Timeline. If less concretely factographic than Manet-PROJEKT, and broader in its social and political ramifications, Timeline could be said to extend in part from a similarly historicising, chronographic impulse. Significantly, too, each work explodes the expectations of the traditional historical form it inhabits. 40 Historical Polysemy Timeline subjects linear historiography to a series of displacements that initiate the viewer into a mode of spectatorship quite different from the one the timeline customarily invites. If expanding the timeline at an architectural scale is now somewhat common (in museum displays, for instance), it is rare in the larger history of the form, whose power as a synoptic medium more often exploits the disembodied, ‘at a glance’ scale of the printed page. 41 Pulling this totalising view apart, Timeline recasts the two-dimensional medium in a three-dimensional volume, opening it out to create a chronographic space. Rather than providing a bird’s eye view, it implicates the spectator as a subject embodied within

First mounted in 1961 at the California Museum of Science and Industry, Mathematica was subsequently installed semi-permanently in Chicago, Boston and New York. The World of Franklin and Jefferson was organised in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and travelled to various venues in Europe before opening in New York in 1976. Group Material encountered these exhibitions primarily through their published documentation. Email from J. Ault, op. cit. Combining diverse cultural and historical material, Atkinson’s work and the Eameses’ exhibitions paralleled and contributed to the archival, anti-hierarchical inclusiveness of Group Material’s installations. T. Rollins, ‘Art as Social Action: An Interview with Conrad Atkinson’, Art in America, vol.68, February 1980, pp.119—23. Ault also names Constructivism as a point of reference for Group Material’s historicism. Email from J. Ault, op. cit. I am grateful to Dennis Tenenboym for pointing out that post-revolutionary Soviet graphic design not infrequently incorporates temporally arranged presentations of data, such as graphs and tables. B.H.D. Buchloh, ‘Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason’, op. cit., pp.222—28. Yve-Alain Bois, D. Crimp, Rosalind Krauss and H. Haacke, ‘A Conversation with Hans Haacke’, October, vol.30, Fall 1984, p.37. In an unpublished portion of an interview with Group Material that appeared in Parachute magazine in 1989, Jim Drobnik prompts Ault, Ashford and Felix Gonzalez-Torres to reflect on the relationship between their practice and Haacke’s Manet-PROJEKT. Their responses convey quite different perspectives, though on the whole their comments draw a distinction between the muckraking specificity of Haacke’s work and Group Material’s more interrogative and expansive approach. Even while retaining this more inquiry-based, inclusive approach, however, the ‘forensic’ historicism of a work like AIDS Timeline nonetheless resembles the ‘real-time’ analysis for which Haacke’s work is known, in particular in projects such as Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971). This connection has been pointed out in David Deicher, ‘Polarity Rules: Looking at Whitney Annuals and Biennials, 1968—2000’, in J. Ault (ed.), Alternative Art New York 1965—1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, pp.244—45. See also J. Drobnik, Interview with Group Material, 21 June 1989, Group Material Archive, Box 7, Interview Transcripts 1, The Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University; and J. Drobnick, ‘Dialectical Group Materialism’, Parachute, no.56, October—December 1989, p.29. D. Rosenberg and A. Grafton, Cartographies of Time, op. cit., pp.122 and 241.

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time’s unfolding. It presents time not only as a linear progression accumulating from left to right, but also as a loop that encircles all four walls, enfolding the past cyclically within the present, and vice versa. Timeline further dislodges the narrative authority of its form by the uncertain relationships it constructs between the dates charted along the wall and the artworks and artefacts arranged around it. Rather than a chronological survey of objects dating from the years the timeline maps, the majority of visual and cultural material dates from the 1970s and 80s, while the timeline plunges back a century and a half earlier. This means that while some years (especially the more recent ones) are paired with synchronically complimentary objects — Atkinson’s For Chile (1973), for example, hangs just after ‘1973’, the year of Chilean President Salvador Allende’s assassination — temporal dissonance largely prevails. Mike Glier’s Clubs of Virtue (1979) hangs below ‘1854’; Denise Greene’s Revolution #2 (1983) hangs above ‘1932’; a cover from the X-Men comic book series (published since 1963) 42 43

hangs just shy of ‘1823’, and inches behind Francisco Goya’s print They Carried Her Off (1797—99, plate 8 of Los Caprichos). Even when works appear near their date of production — Daumier’s Le Rêve d’un marguillier (The Churchwarden's Dream, 1850), for example, hangs not far from ‘1854’ — more often than not the conceptual distance between numbered events and visual objects demands leaps in cognition to connect the dots across culture and geography, if not time as well. It may not be immediately apparent, for example, that Daumier’s caricature of the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century France also illuminates Church politics in the very different context of Central America. 42 In the relative absence of temporal consonance, thematic correspondence provides Timeline with a second organising principle.43 Electoral corruption in El Salvador in ‘1982’ thus finds its counterpart in a 1933 photomontage by John Heartfield, which shows voters driven by intimidation to cast ballots for the Nazi party. 44 But as the above description suggests, most of Timeline’s thematic correlations stretch

Group Material, proposal, Timeline: A Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America, New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, January 1984, Group Material Archive, Box 1, Timeline: The Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America, 1984, The Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. See ibid. and J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.85.

34 | Afterall

Group Material, Subculture, 1983, project on the New York City subways. Work shown by Dennis Adams. Courtesy the artists and Four Corners Books

the imagination just as far, since many objects, rather than cued to an isolated year, resonate meaningfully at any number of points along the timeline’s four-wall extension. As apposite as Prince’s Marlboro ad re-photograph is for ‘1823’, its aesthetic of Manifest Destiny also reflects the numerous subsequent years in which US government officials cited the Monroe Doctrine as a rationale for intervention (including several years listed on the timeline, such as ‘1954’, which references the coup d’état in Guatemala that year, organised and sponsored by the CIA). Likewise, hanging above the year ‘1896’, a poster from Barbara Kruger’s series You make history when you do business (1982) precisely describes a much larger historical context of economically motivated military intervention. In Tina Modotti’s photograph Hands Resting on Tool (1926), which hangs between ‘1865’ and ‘1885’, a labourer’s hands pack the closely cropped frame, simultaneously conceding to work while issuing a silent refusal. The photograph conveys volumes about the exploitation of labour during Timeline’s entire historical span. As these examples suggest, restless at their given location on the timeline, most objects echo just as meaningfully across all four walls. Their eloquence across time signals the continuity of oppression in the past and present.45 By the same token, no single artwork or cultural artefact tells the full story of any one year; instead each intervention appears as an overdetermined complex whose narrative disperses across a heterogeneous constellation of objects. Ultimately, then, the timeline’s twodimensional trajectory serves not as a historical absolute but as a structuring device that encourages viewers to diagram 44 45 46 47 48

a virtual, three-dimensional web of connections across both space and time.46 The installation thereby rethinks the timeline less as a representational form than as an interrogative one, designed as much as anything to provoke the viewer’s historical imagination. Timeline further disrupts the conventions of linear historiography by presenting three different competing timelines. Each chronicles the same general subject matter, without coinciding. Multiplied three ways, the work’s rival timelines thus cast doubt on the narrative authority of the work as a whole. At P.S.1, Group Material’s red and black wall-mounted chronology vied for attention with the timeline provided by CISPES, which describes interventions between 1868 and 1983, each with a single line of text, and which Group Material mounted in a scaled-up version on Timeline’s entrance wall.47 The third chronology consists of a series of black-and-white posters designed by New York artist Bill Allen. Group Material elected to display Allen’s posters as part of Timeline after having featured them one year earlier in Subculture (1983), an exhibition project organised by Group Material in New York City subways.48 Allen’s posters each follow an identical diptych format. The right side reproduces a grainy photograph of a soldier confronting another man. On the left side, in simple typeface against a stark white background, the name of a country in South or Central America or the Caribbean floats above the year of a US invasion in that country. If Allen’s spare and repetitive image-text aesthetic takes the timeline to the brink of Conceptual art’s temporal blankness, its ultimate emphasis is, as one contemporary reviewer put it, the ‘harrowing’ repetition of the oppression it

Heartfield’s image illustrates the cover of a 1933 edition of the German leftist magazine, AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, or Workers' Pictorial Newspaper). Group Material describes this connection in its proposal for Timeline, op. cit. Thus, as Thomas Lawson put it in a review at the time, ‘Those seeking exact correspondences between dates and display items would have been disappointed, for the evidence was put to different use. A point-by-point demonstration would simply have been another accretion of power, another construction of influence.’ T. Lawson, ‘Group Material, Timeline, P.S.1’, op. cit., p.83. This point is indebted to a discussion about AIDS Timeline between Ault and Richard Meyer following Ault’s presentation at ‘A Museum of Ideas — Contemporary Conversations (2)’, 27 March 2010, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Conversation with J. Ault, op. cit. CISPES’s chronology also appeared in a catalogue P.S.1 published on all the exhibitions on view at the time. In addition to CISPES’s chronology, the section dedicated to Timeline also includes an updated version of Group Material’s initial proposal for Timeline, as well as a floor-plan sketch by Rollins. P.S.1 Museum; Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Winter: January 22 — March 18, 1984 (exh. cat.), New York: Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1984. Allen’s posters were designed for Group Material’s 1983 project Subculture, in which the collective invited one hundred artists to exhibit in 1,400 rented advertising spaces on New York City trains. Falling between Luchar! and Timeline, Allen’s chronology (along with CISPES’s timeline and the other reference points cited above) contributed to Group Material’s shift toward the historicising emphasis of the 1984 project. Allen’s posters also hung on the walls of Group Material’s office on West 21st Street. Conversation with D. Ashford, op. cit.; and email from D. Ashford, op. cit.

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chronicles.49 Moreover, in the context of Timeline the posters formed a dotted line near the ceiling, contributing to the larger work’s historical polysemy, where three rival chronologies coexist, highlighting by their differences the problem of historical representation itself.50 If Timeline’s three chronologies represent history in different terms, they also represent different historical content. The crimson timeline lists only a small selection of dates enumerated in CISPES’s version. The latter begins in 1868, while the former begins more than forty years earlier. Many of the dates in Allen’s timeline fail to appear in either of the other two (which is only partly explained by Allen’s inclusion of interventions in the Caribbean, a region they exclude). On one wall, Allen’s timeline lingers at the turn of the century, counting off the years ‘1898’, ‘1906’ and ‘1909’, while below it Group Material’s red line rushes ahead to ‘1954’. On another wall, Allen’s timeline roughly aligns with the temporal frame below, with both marking years between 1820 and 1860, but even here the two timelines are syncopated. Only in a handful of instances do their dates coincide. With three different temporal frames of reference potentially visible at once — the crimson timeline at eye level, the Allen timeline up above and the CISPES timeline on the entrance wall — Group Material’s Timeline offers anything but a definitive account of history. Timeline is in this regard as much about exposing the fallibility of historical representation and the impossibility of narrative closure as it is about presenting a fixed and didactic account of the past. Diachronic as a chronicle, it is also synchronous as a spatialised and multiple form. Definitive as a timeline, the work’s juxtaposition of conflicting chronologies shows each one as, in part, a construction. Beyond the installation’s representation of time, its existence in time is just as elusive. If the timeline as a form lays claim to the permanence of narrative authority, 49 50 51

Group Material’s Timeline defies the model once again. Specific to its time and place, when the installation closed in March 1984 the objects it had gathered dispersed forever. From the vantage point of the present, to experience the installation as it once was is impossible. One has to rely instead on the few existing installation shots and the memories of those who witnessed the work firsthand. Even during the course of the exhibition, Timeline emphasised its ephemeral constitution. Bananas ripened, tobacco leaves browned and coffee grinds lost their scent. If these material transformations chart a temporal trajectory, their deterioration and ultimate disintegration suggest decay rather than teleology or linear progress. Counter to conventions of the timeline as a form (as well as to conventions of the art object), the work made itself just as elusive as the historical representation it offered. As this essay has argued, Timeline occupied the form its title names only by inverting many of its conventions. In exploding the expectations of the formal device it inhabits, the work substitutes a different kind of historical encounter for the one the timeline might otherwise invite. In so doing, it not only succeeds in bringing an occluded history to light but also encourages its viewers to think critically and historically about the present, and about the role of narrative form in all historical representations. Rather than the fluid and singular voice of the conventional timeline, here the historical record fragments and divides, multiplying across an intricate circuitry of temporal registers and visual forms. Neither able to settle on any one object, nor fully trust any narrative voice, the viewer must rely on his or her own historical imagination to make sense of the past.51 As a work of historical representation, therefore, Timeline casts doubt on the possibility of any single authoritative account. But if Timeline raises the sceptre of the post-historical, it does so only to prove this notion wrong. Though the work refuses

J. Gambrell, ‘Art Against Intervention’, op. cit., p.15. By including these three different chronologies, Group Material may not have specifically intended for Timeline to represent such divergent accounts of the past. However, they were certainly very familiar with both Allen’s and CISPES’s chronologies prior to executing the wall-mounted timeline. As mentioned above, they invited Allen to exhibit the black-and-white posters as part of Timeline after they had been included in Group Material’s project Subculture. Similarly, working in the environment of West 21st Street they had certainly read CISPES’s chronology, if not discussed it at meetings. This suggests some degree of intentionality around the historical multi-vocality that ultimately results. The descriptions in this paragraph draw closely on Godfrey’s fascinating and pertinent discussion of the work of Matthew Buckingham. M. Godfrey, ‘The Artist as Historian’, op. cit., p.149.

36 | Afterall

Group Material, Timeline: A Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America, 1984. ‘For Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America', P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Photograph: Dorothy Zeidman. Courtesy the artists and Four Corners Books

the authority of linear historiography, it remains recognisable as a timeline nonetheless. By combining this form with strategies of abstraction (the lack of explanatory texts and the loose cognitively challenging connections between dates and objects) and multiplicity (the profusion of objects and narrative voices), Timeline exhorts its viewers (as well as its makers) to act as historians themselves. Refusing postmodernism’s pessimism towards historical labour and representation, the work insists on the necessity of both tasks, not just for artistic practice but also as modes of spectatorship. 52 History is only part of Timeline’s lesson, however, for its centre of gravity is an object of political agency, a massive bright red sculpture that had been brandished a few weeks before the exhibition opened at a public protest in the nation’s capital. Created by Bill Allen, Ann Messner and Barbara Westermann, the sculpture takes the form of a giant maritime navigation buoy. At the demonstration, its bell 52

rang a repeated toll of warning, marking time not metronomically but according to the jostling movements of protestors holding it aloft by the beams at its base. In Timeline, though silenced and stilled by the exhibition context, the buoy’s earlier life was referenced in a photograph documenting the Washington demonstration, prominently mounted on the crimson timeline as the very final image of 1984, the installation’s culminating moment, when history slips into the present. The chromatic bond between the sculpture and Group Material’s timeline establishes a connection between historical analysis and public dissent in the present tense. The red at the centre also marks time along the walls, underscoring collective protest as a force as constant as the chronicle of oppression itself. In turn, the lessons of history that unfold along the walls ultimately converge at the focal point of collective action, interpellating Timeline’s viewers not only as historians but also as potential activists.

See B.H.D. Buchloh, ‘A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977’, op. cit. M. Godfrey’s ‘The Artist as Historian’, op. cit. makes the case that history, relatively absent from Anglo-American post-War art, has recently become a primary concern in artistic practice. Notable examples relevant for Group Material’s work include: Rosler’s installation Fascination with the (game of the) exploding (historical) hollow leg (1985); Richter’s series October 18, 1977 (1988); Mary Kelly’s Mea Culpa (1999); and, more recently, Chto delat?’s timeline projects (2008—10) and the ‘Potosí Principle’ exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, curated by Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer and Andreas Siekmann. My current project undertakes a more thoroughgoing comparison with works such as these.

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Previous spread: Hans Eijkelboom, Sunday 24 August 1997, US. New York, Manhattan, alongside Hudson River, 10.50—11.20 a.m., 1997, C-print, 50 × 70cm. From the series Photo Notes, 1992—2007

40 | Afterall

Hans Eijkelboom, Identiteit (Identity), 1976, photograph and text, 42 × 60cm. One of a series of ten. Both images courtesy the artist

The Mass Ornament — Revisited: Reading From Hans Eijkelboom’s Photo Notes — Dieter Roelstraete

Repeatability is the very essence of a sign. — Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man 0. Preliminary One By the time this issue of Afterall hits the newsstands, the Shanghai World Expo 2010, titled ‘Better City, Better Life’, will have been committed to memory, restoring the balance of power among China’s leading cities after the 2008 Olympic extravaganza thrust Beijing onto the world stage as a so-called ‘alpha world city’. This will (almost certainly) not signal the end, however, of the steady stream of publications with titles such as China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia (Columbia University Press, 2009); China Rising: Will the West Be Able to Cope? (World Scientific Publishing Company, 2009); China’s Rise: Challenges and Opportunities (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009); China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power (Random House, 2007); China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World (Scribner, 2005); The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Dieter Roelstraete looks Your Job (Wharton School Publishing, 2006); The Rise of China: at Hans Eijkelboom’s How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower (W.W. Norton & Company, 1994); The Rise of China: Essays on the momentous photographic Future Competition (Encounter Books, 2009); The Rise of China project of classification and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy (Monthly and documentation, Review Press, 2009); China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future (Mariner Books, 2007); and Dragon Rising: Photo Notes, to argue for An Inside Look at China Today (National Geographic, 2007). a humanism that staves The first thing to observe here is the obvious lack of imagination off the fear of the same. among Western authors in capturing the global phenomenon of ‘China rising’. More important, however, is the distinct sense of fear, if not outright panic, that informs these various analyses of ‘China rising’ and what it means for your (really ‘our’) job. Posing as sincere scholarly interest in the Chinese economy, a relatively unrefined brand of sinophobia is easily unmasked in these writings — the real subtext of the thousand-year-old history of the West’s ever-hesitant, ambivalent relationship with the ‘Empire of the Middle’.1 Many different fears come together in the aforementioned complex history, but for now (i.e. with an eye on what will follow shortly) I want to single out one source of anxiety in this cauldron of orientalist fantasies, namely the spectral terror of oriental sameness — of repetition on a mass (i.e. industrialised) scale — which led even so sensitive and empathic a thinker as Emmanuel Levinas, normally so attuned to the mysteries of alterity, to regress to the xenophobic atavism of fear of the ‘yellow peril’ 2 — fear of numbers. 1 2

I am indebted to Monika Szewczyk for pointing out many of the titles listed above. The topic of the West’s enduring fascination with China’s phoenix-like rise to global prominence is one subject that is dealt with rather extensively in her essay ‘Negation Notes (while working on an exhibition with Allan Sekula featuring This Ain’t China: A Photonovel)’, published in e-flux journal #13, February 2010, also available at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/110 (last accessed on 26 October 2010). ‘The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there does not filter any familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past.’ This passage is taken from what Slavoj Žižek calls ‘arguably [Levinas’s] weirdest text, “The Russo-Chinese Debate and the Dialectic” (1960)’. Quoted in Slavoj Žižek, ‘Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule’, in Mao Tse-Tung, On Practice and Contradiction, London and New York: Verso, 2007, p.3.

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0. Preliminary Two On a closely related note, anyone one who has flown into the gargantuan Chinese manufacturing centres of Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing, will have noticed — exhaust fumes permitting — the dense patchwork of gleaming blue roofs that cover hundreds of square miles of built-up land on these urban archipelagos’ fractured outskirts. Indeed, the view from above these monochromatic mosaics of factory buildings, many of which clog together in actual factory towns, which may in turn form dense clusters of factory metropolises, certainly helps to remove any remaining doubt that the world as we know it is indeed ‘made in China’ — from the laptop I’m using to write this (and what is its emphatic claim of having been designed in California other than a desperate attempt to cover up its indebtedness to Chinese Vernunft ?) and the digital camera I used to immortalise the view which sparked this insight, to the thermos I’m pouring my coffee from, to whatever else I’m about to go out shopping for. And of course this endless list of things ‘made in China’ also includes the equipment used by Hans Eijkelboom to produce the work we are about to discuss — a significant portion of which also has China as its subject. So many things, in fact, are now made in China that a US journalist named Sara Bongiorni wrote a best-seller chronicling her family’s resolution to live one whole year without buying or consuming a single thing ‘made in China’ (this was in 2007; one cannot help but wonder what has happened to the family since) 3 — yet more self-conscious civic awareness, in other words, that is easily unmasked as crude consumerist sinophobia. 1. Artist Who is Hans Eijkelboom? The short answer is: a Dutch photo-artist, born in 1949, who lives and works in Amsterdam and in a dozen other places around the world where his faux-anthropological photo-expeditions may happen to take him at any given time. Only slightly younger than his compatriots Bas Jan Ader, Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk and Wim T. Schippers, Eijkelboom was an active local member of the burgeoning Conceptual art movement that made Holland, and Amsterdam in particular, such a crucial avantgarde art destination in the late 1960s and early 70s. At age 22 he was the youngest participant, among such luminaries as Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson, in the landmark exhibition ‘Sonsbeek 71: Sonsbeek buiten de perken’ (1971), organised in his hometown of Arnhem. Inspired by Concept art’s groundbreaking experiments with machine-like image (re-)production and a radically deskilled (‘anti’) photography — Douglas Huebler’s practice, along with that of Ed Ruscha, is perhaps the dominant model here — Eijkelboom already in the early 1970s settled on the serial imaging procedure that would become the hallmark of his practice, with the singular characteristic that almost all of his early work (roughly made in the period between 1971 and 1980) amounted to an extensive exercise in self-portraiture. In 1973, Eijkelboom succeeded in appearing in one newspaper photograph each day for ten consecutive days (mostly grainy pictures of regional non-events, relegated to the back pages); in 1976 he made a series of portraits documenting his encounters with the leading politicians and artists of the day; in eight pictures made in 1978 he appears as a model appraising such consumer items as Cockburn’s port, Heineken beer and Van Nelle tobacco. Equally early on, another pivotal pictorial precept emerged in the sartorial motif that, along with the serial procedure (and its formal expression, in exhibition formats, through the figure of the grid), continues to define his work to this day: in a photo series from 1973, he photographed different people wearing his clothes; in De Drie Communisten (The Three Communists, 1975), the artist posed next to portraits of Marx, Lenin and Mao, each time in matching ‘Marxist’, ‘Leninist’ and ‘Maoist’ outfits (the different hats give the story away faster than anything else); in the extensive series Identiteit (Identity, 1976), Eijkelboom photographed himself dressed up in such a way as to correspond to the image some of his childhood acquaintances had formed of the artist, as recounted to an assistant, ten years after having last seen him; in De Ideale Man (The Ideal Man, 1978), one hundred women were sent questionnaires in which they were asked to describe their ‘ideal man’, and the ten best answers were used for yet more shape-shifting sartorial experimentation from Eijkelboom. And in 1979 came the final defining element of the diaristic — the humdrum record of a man’s daily doings — and with it the decisive turn towards the Other, in greater or lesser numbers, most easily and furtively encountered in the street. 3

See Sara Bongiorni, A Year Without ‘Made in China’: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007.

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Hans Eijkelboom, Advertising Poster Project, 1978, Cibachrome, 80 × 110cm. Collection Museum of Modern Art Arnhem

2. Artwork Eijkelboom’s early experiments with ‘street’ photography, that honourable genre that includes such distinguished practitioners as Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Gary Winogrand — the trusted purveyors of the exact type of ‘fine arts’ photography that early Conceptual art did so much to discredit — still bear the marks of his debt to Douglas Huebler et al.: for Mooi — Lelijk (Beautiful — Ugly, 1980), for example, he asked random passersby in the city centre of Tilburg to point out someone in the crowd whom they found beautiful and someone whom they found ugly; in each resulting series of photographs, a portrait of the ‘participant’ was shown in the middle, flanked by the objects of his or her aesthetic judgment to the left and right. This, then, is also where the crowd — classes, groups, masses, multitudes — begins to come into focus as the artist’s true subject (around the same time he stopped taking pictures of himself); it is no coincidence that in 1981, Eijkelboom embarked on his appropriately titled Hommage aan August Sander (Homage to August Sander), a project for which he asked people he encountered in the street ‘When you look at the world and acknowledge that not all people are the same, what is the first division into groups or sorts that comes to mind?’, upon which they were invited, after having been photographed, to take a walk through Arnhem with Eijkelboom to point out people in the crowd who corresponded to this division. The humorous, outlandish crudeness of some of the resulting typologies — ‘authoritarian types’, ‘housewives’, ‘junkies’, ‘office people’, ‘scum’, ‘the super-rich’ — already points the way towards the

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parodic typo-logic that would become the driving force behind Eijkelboom’s magnum opus, the so-called Photo Notes he made on a daily basis from 8 November 1992 until 8 November 2007. Encompassing thousands of photographs of what are, without a doubt, individuals — there are some exceptions to this rule in the form of pairs or couples, mothers and daughters and the like, but these, too, are very much portraits, pictures of highly individual ‘faces in the crowd’ 4 — Eijkelboom’s Photo Notes effectively constitutes an amateur (visual) anthropology of the global village at a turning point in its history, precisely at a moment in time (the 1990s and 2000s) when globalisation as such took effect. Here, again, the importance of scrupulous photographic attention to sartorial detail cannot be overstated, although Eijkelboom is of course not a fashion photographer. His interest in clothing concerns the levelling qualities of the uniform much more than the fashionista’s illusory logic of individuation, the provision of which the garment industry must by its very definition found itself upon. It is repetition (or sameness) rather than difference, then, that matters, in spite of how laborious or sincere the effort on the part of the wearer is to ‘differ’ or otherwise stand out from the crowd by clothing alone. By far the most amusing pages from Eijkelboom’s kaleidoscopic ‘diary’ are those in which he has brought together all the photographs made on the Dam in Amsterdam, one August afternoon in 2003, of young black men wearing Scarface T-shirts; or those depicting young women in unnecessarily tight white tank tops licking ice creams; or fully-grown men, clearly civilians, dressed from head to toe in camouflage gear (26 November 1997, from 1 pm till 1.30 pm, on the corner of Broadway and 14th Street in New York City). For this is Photo Notes’s single governing principle, that which both invites immediate comparison with August Sander’s monumental Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century, 1924—27), and decisively sets it apart from its legendary precedent: the artist takes to the street not only armed with his camera, but also but with a set of rigorous, 4

This is a reference to the following famous haiku by Ezra Pound: ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough’ — the informal motto of an exhibition organized by Iwona Blazwick and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and Castello di Rivoli in Turin in 2004 and 2005. Pound’s celebrated poem ‘powerfully evokes the situation of the individual in the metropolis: personalities suspended in a moment within the life of the city’. The exhibition was intended ‘as an exploration of this condition of modernity seen in realist art, especially art of the human face and form. [… It] traces a history of avant-garde figuration from a new perspective.’ Clearly, it should have included the work of Hans Eijkelboom. See I. Blazwick and C. Christov-Bakargiev, Faces in the Crowd: The Modern Figure and Avant-Garde Realism (exh. cat.), London and Turin: Whitechapel Art Gallery and Castello di Rivoli, 2005.

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Hans Eijkelboom, Paris–New York– Shanghai, 2007, C-print, 80 × 162cm each. Courtesy the artist

non-negotiable rules. Photographing only takes place in a precisely determined spot, for a precisely determined length of time (both facts are always included at the bottom of the resulting arrangement of photographs as crucial bits of information), and the ‘subject’ is correspondingly narrowly defined to ensure maximum sameness. Young girls with Spice Girl T-shirts, young men with Che Guevara T-shirts (most of them, though not all, Rage Against the Machine merchandise) or middle-aged men with Rolling Stones T-shirts; topless types on rollerblades; middle-aged mothers and teenage daughters schlepping shopping bags while talking on their mobile phones; people who are not emergency workers yet still wear yellow coats — as a document of changing fashions, Photo Notes creates the impression that what was in reality only a decade-and-a-half ago is light years away in time. In 2007, Eijkelboom published Paris–New York–Shanghai, a selection of a staggering 1,218 photographs taken in the title’s locations during the closing years of Photo Notes’s decade-and-a-half — the project’s epitaph so to speak, named after the capitals of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as the artist himself has remarked in a conversation with the author. (This is where we return, at long last, to our inaugural discussion of sinophilia and sinophobia. Seen through Eijkelboom’s lens, Luckily, the artist does not seem to suffer from either: Eijkelboom’s China, that the rise of China that is so bewildering Empire of the Numbers, often the source of all kinds of is as much a site of difference as it is a site xenophobic anxieties becomes of sameness, just like every other culture in the globalised capitalist world.) In all a rather more colourful, three cities, the same precarious balance comical affair — a carnival between difference and sameness, articuof subtle, nearly imperceptible lated by the way people dress and comport differences. themselves in public, persists. In retrospect, one question in particular — a telling measure of the changes wrought upon the world in the couple of decades that the artist has been snapping away, changes that perhaps nowhere have made themselves felt more acutely than in both China and the China in our minds — cannot so easily be answered: would the Chinese chapter of this triptych have made any sense in the communist Shanghai of the early 1980s, of which our image is a rather drab and monochrome one? Would the monolithic spectacle of an army of similarly clad Chinese men and women on identikit bicycles have made for insufficiently

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heterogeneous photographic subject material? However it be, the ancient Western fear of oriental sameness, really a fear of numbers, here appears assuaged by the seemingly benign differentiating effects of global capitalism: seen through Eijkelboom’s lens, the rise of China that is so often the source of all kinds of xenophobic anxieties becomes a rather more colourful, comical affair — a carnival of subtle, nearly imperceptible differences. 3. Reception, Interpretation One thing that strikes me whenever I return to Eijkelboom’s work, whether in book form — he has authored an impressive catalogue of self-published artist’s books — or as an amalgamation of art objects (i.e. finely framed prints), is its persistent good humour, the lucidity of what is in essence its ‘humanist’ spirit. The photographs’ subject is the comédie humaine, this time rendered surveyable thanks to the artist’s commitment to a handful of tried-and-tested ‘minimalist’ or serialist rules — of a kind more commonly associated, paradoxically, with the anti-humanist gaze of a sociology of structures, patterns and numbers, reducing the ‘dignity of difference’ (to paraphrase Jonathan Sacks) to the mere spectacle of a human zoo or, worse still, cogs in a machine. Yet we never get the impression that the subject of Eijkelboom’s camera-eye is being ridiculed or literally looked down upon (even though the persistence of either class distinction or class consciousness — of the existence of social strata — certainly is one important element of the work), which raises a number of questions involving the apparently academic issue of detachment and distancing, and of the importance of the proximity of photographer to subject: where exactly does the artist stand when he makes these pictures, many of them detailed enough to register the intricate finery of his subjects’ facial expressions? Does the artist submerge himself in the crowd he is immortalising? Does this tell us something about the difference (or identity) of the people, the crowd, the multitude? Hans Eijkelboom is a tall man, making it easy for him to command a panoramic outlook, but his is not the merciless bird’s-eye view of a scientist noting the variety of exotic rituals in which his temporary hosts indulge. Subtly satirising the objectivist optic of the social sciences, his work is animated by the

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Hans Eijkelboom, Saturday 24 January 1998, NL. Arnhem, Ketelstraat, 11.30— 12.30 p.m., 1998, C-print, 50 × 70cm. From Photo Notes, 1992—2007. Courtesy the artist

distinctly heart-warming glow of a humanist empathy with his subject — something which again leads us back, past apocalyptic, Foucauldian visions of the End of Man, via Douglas Huebler, to August Sander. 5 It is perhaps inevitable that we should conclude the present discussion of Eijkelboom’s forensic view of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ with a cursory glance back at Siegfried Kracauer’s landmark essay ‘The Mass Ornament’, published in 1927 (predating the publication of Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time) by two years). In this widely read text, without a doubt a key chapter in the long history of the occidental fear of numbers, Kracauer is highly critical both of the so-called mass ornament — his most famous example of such a novel aesthetic phenomenon being the synchronised legwork of the Tiller Girls, a manically eroticised echo of the modern factory’s pitiless Taylorist regime — as well as of intellectuals’ misguided disdain for such revolutionary entertainments. Kracauer’s ambivalence is emblematic here, and particularly insightful with regards to our current discussion of Eijkelboom’s work in relation to the atavistic fear of dizzying, innumerable multitudes:

Educated people — who are never entirely absent — have taken offense at the emergence of the Tiller Girls and the stadium images. They judge anything that entertains the crowd to be a distraction of that crowd. But despite what they think, the aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental mass movements is legitimate. Such movements are in fact among the rare creations of the age that bestow form upon a given material. 6

And so ‘the masses who so spontaneously adopted these patterns are superior to their detractors among the educated classes to the extent that they at least roughly acknowledge the undisguised facts’ 7 — the undisguised fact, that is, of mankind’s enslavement to the daemonic machine of mass production, and of the production of sameness (this is where Kracauer emerges as a progenitor of 1970s apparatus theory): that which is both manned by and which produces the masses as such. Sometime before that, Kracauer noted the ornament’s resemblance to ‘aerial photographs of landscapes and cities in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the given conditions, but rather appears above them. Actors likewise never grasp the stage setting in its totality, yet they consciously take part in its construction.’ 8 This casual reference to the alienating particulars of the thespian profession leads us directly back to Hans Eijkelboom’s Photo Notes, in which it often appears as if all the world’s a stage indeed. Many people who appear in Eijkelboom’s pictures may perhaps not be aware that they are being photographed — and this certainly qualifies as one of the series’s more potent mysteries — but quite a few of them clearly strut around in anxious, unspoken expectation of some camera crew appearing out of nowhere. If they are not actually living in a movie, at least when seen together their images make up a movie unfolding before our very eyes — that of the rise and fall and rise (etc.) of ‘public man’.

5 6 7 8

Douglas Huebler’s status as ‘perhaps the most important overlooked figure in Conceptual art’ has long been closely linked to what curator Jenni Lomax called the ‘humane and humorous vein in Huebler’s work’ — to his humanism, so to speak. An emphatically unironic work such as Variable Piece #34 (1970), for instance, for which Huebler photographed forty random passersby in the street immediately after telling them ‘You have a beautiful face’, remains an anomaly in the dour canon of 1960s and 70s US Concept art: in a catalogue essay published on the occasion of Huebler’s first ever retrospective exhibition in the UK, organised at Camden Arts Centre in 2002, Mark Godfrey notes that of the four figureheads of the movement captured in a famous photograph from 1969 (the other artists are Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner), Huebler is the only one who is smiling. Would it be too much of a stretch to call Hans Eijkelboom the Douglas Huebler of the Dutch Concept art scene? Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (trans. Thomas Y. Levin), Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005, p.79. Italics in the original. Ibid., p.85. Of some members of the educated classes who choose to remain oblivious to these undisguised facts, Kracauer says that ‘they fail to grasp capitalism’s core defect: it rationalises not too much but rather too little’. See p.81. Ibid., p.77.

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50 | Afterall

Previous spread and opposite: SESC Fábrica da Pompéia, São Paulo, window detail. Conversion by Lina Bo Bardi, 1977—86. Photograph: Nelson Kon. Courtesy Nelson Kon Fotografías

‘This Exhibition Is an Accusation’: The Grammar of Display According to Lina Bo Bardi 1 — Roger M. Buergel

There are two good reasons, at least, to lay claim to the architectural legacy of Lina Bo Bardi, her technologies of display and her sense of spatial texture. The first reason is artistic: the formal stagnation that haunts contemporary exhibition design. While curators are willing to talk endlessly about mediation (and are taught in so many curatorial courses to do just that) the realm of display gets shamelessly neglected. Art is made to look as if it were tied to nothing but artistic production, Roger M. Buergel finds in while context gets reduced to mere text. The second reason is Lina Bo Bardi’s exhibition political: Bo Bardi is exceptional in her formal understanding designs mediations between of that equally vast and mysterious entity called ‘the social’. Her poetics of sensual collaboration could be the antidote to audience and object that the populist inclinations of Western art institutions (including allow art’s social function their predilection for big exhibitions). Faced with the relative disappearance of their traditional constituency (the educated to unfold. middle class) and simultaneously challenged by a curious mob of aesthetic illiterates, art institutions need to learn that cultural illiteracy will only be sustained by the business of mediation — at least as long as the latter is conceived to be primarily a service for unenlightened savages to which institutions eagerly ‘reach out’. Bo Bardi, in contrast, took clues from Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ — she based her work on the creative resources of the populace and advocated the democratisation of knowledge. 2 Learning from Bo Bardi today entails conceiving of institutions in terms of their self-perforation, their own undoing. They have to learn how to dramatise their key dilemma — namely, what counts as teachable and why. Attempting to epitomise the gold-standard of legitimate knowledge in a world of crumbling canons is ridiculous. Attempting to epitomise contemporary sexiness is worse. A methodology is needed that addresses audiences as neither consumers nor infants, but as partners. Bo Bardi’s most mature and extensive work hardly belongs to the sphere of art and culture proper. SESC Fábrica da Pompéia is a huge recreational complex on the outskirts of São Paulo, built on an old factory constructed in the early twentieth century in the style of François Hennebique, a pioneer of reinforced-concrete engineering. 3 With an area of 16,500 square metres (and a floor area of 23,500 square metres), its size corresponds to that of a small industrial village. From 1977 till 1986, in a period of slow and painful transition from the rigidities of military rule to the ambiguities of an inexperienced 1 2 3

The quote stems from Bo Bardi’s ‘Account Sixteenth Years Later’, in Marcelo Carvalho FerrazandMarcelo Suzuki (ed.), L’Impasse del design. Lina Bo Bardi: L’esperienza nel Nordest del Brasile, Milan and São Paulo: Edizioni Charta and Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, 1995, p.5 (of the English insert). In 1980 Bo Bardi started editing material for this book, which was to become a testimony of her Northeastern period, which will be discussed further on in this text. In 1981 Bo Bardi stopped the editing, convinced that the whole undertaking would be of ‘no use, all this is going to fall into a void’ (p.1). Fortunately, the Instituto Bo Bardi, which fights for the preservation of Bo Bardi's legacy, continued and eventually finished the editing. From the account the book provides, it becomes clear that the research done from the late 1950s until 1964 was part of a larger collective effort that, like Glauber Rocha with his ‘aesthetics of hunger’, pursued an artistic agenda with the aim of aligning the practical, mostly raw aspects of this culture with a politics that sought to address the actual living conditions of its people. An excellent source that covers the wider history of this period in Bahia is Roger Sansi’s Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007). See in particular chapter 6, ‘Modern Art and Afro-Brazilian Culture in Bahia’. Paulo Freire, born in 1921 in Recife, was a highly influential educational thinker whose programmes to teach and emancipate the illiterate poor became officially implemented in Brazil in the early 1960. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), a treatise about an education that was both modern and anti-colonial, he states that ‘[n]o pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption’. P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (trans. Myra Bergman Ramos), New York: Continuum, 1970, p.54. SESC, or Social Service for Commerce, is a private non-profit organisation that promotes cultural and educational facilities all over Brazil.

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democracy, Bo Bardi worked on this site in many different capacities — first as a planner, architect and designer, and later as its administrator, programme manager and exhibition organiser. She shaped the site in almost every regard while allowing herself, in turn, to be shaped and informed by this evolving sprawl of planned and spontaneous activities:

The second time I went there, a Saturday, the atmosphere was different — no longer the elegant and solitary Hennebiquen structure, but happy people, children, mothers, parents and OAPs [old age persons] went from one shed to another. Kids ran, youngsters played football in rain falling through broken roofs, laughing as they kicked the ball through the water. Mothers barbecued and made sandwiches at the entrance of Rua Clécia; there was a puppet theatre near it, full of children. I thought, it has to continue like this, with so much happiness. I returned many times, Saturday and Sundays, until I really got it… 4

Until she really got what? By looking through the ‘structure’, the reinforced concrete of the derelict factory space, Bo Bardi was able to access the site’s psychic resonances. And while the particular value of these resonances emanated from a typical weekend feel of pleasure and boredom — as well as from a sense of place in a community of mostly migrant workers from the Brazilian Northeast and Europe — the actual material condition of the space seemed to matter, too. The social energy perceived and celebrated by Bo Bardi was a result of the precarious condition of the once solid structure. Dysfunctionality kicked off happiness. Given Bo Bardi’s biography, her embrace of the little festival of affects is easily comprehensible, and so is her aim to sustain its energy. After more than a decade of military rule in which her public engagement, like that of most Brazilian cultural figures, was severely restricted, she might have felt ready for a new beginning. Her sense of beginning must, however, have been tinged by another beginning a few decades earlier. In 1946 Bo Bardi migrated to Brazil, leaving post-War Italy physically behind while preserving the memory of the ‘civiltà mussoliniana’. Educated in Milan, where she became a co-editor of the magazine domus in 1943, she must have been equally sensitive about modern architecture’s stance when it came to vitalism, planning, progress and the New Man. 5 Also on her sceptical mind in 1977, most likely, were the heated architectural debates that shaped the Brazil of the 1950s and early 60s — debates that were fuelled by the utopian dream of a new country with a planner’s fantasy called Brasilia as its capital, which were laid to rest with the establishment of the US-backed military dictatorship in March 1964. The Pompéia Factory was conceived with a capacity of up to 15,000 visitors per day. Bo Bardi decided to keep the old complex of brick buildings, preserving the industrial memory, but took out the partition walls to create a fluid interior space. This open space comprises a temporary exhibition area; a more solid, almost sculptural unit with a library and a videotheque; and, next to it, a multi-use space around a longish, elegantly-shaped lake — an allusion to the São Francisco River, the artery of the Brazilian Northeast. The spatial layout not only corresponds to but actually favours the arbitrary ways in which people circulate if they are not governed by definite destinations, aims or intents, while a multiplicity of architectural details, like the shells in the cement floor or the line of textiles suspended above the restaurant, disrupt the perception of a unified totality. The second part of the factory complex houses a grand foyer leading onto a theatre for 1,200 people, and a workshop area for making ceramics and other crafts. This workshop area follows a different spatial grammar. Lush openness is scaled down in favour of a labyrinthine wall-system built from raw bricks that slightly protects the respective working areas. However, these differences in structuring divisions of consciousness seem insubstantial. 4 5

The quote comes from Olivia de Oliveira, Subtle Substances: The Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, Barcelona and São Paulo: Editorial Gustavo Gili and Romano Guerra Editora, 2006, p.205. The book, which is based on Oliveira’s doctoral thesis, offers a particularly rich and careful account of Bo Bardi’s architectural principles. Italy’s finest architects, it is well known, supported the Fascist cause more or less openly. Razionalismo, Italy’s most radical branch of modern architecture, was unambiguous about its Fascist leanings. And it was Pietro Maria Bardi, later Lina Bo’s husband, who organised in 1931 in his gallery in Rome the second exhibition of ‘Architettura Razionale’, a show accompanied by a manifesto in open praise of the ‘civiltà mussoliniana’. The point here is not to denounce the Italian architectural milieu of the 1930s and 40s, years in which Lina Bo finished her studies and started to work in association with Gio Ponti in Milan. It suffices to say that Lina Bo was in a privileged position to contemplate the sinister affair between advanced architecture and planning on the one side and an utterly perverted res publica on the other.

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They are subordinated to a general rhythm — a rhythm that is less a matter of architectural composition (which is, by its very nature, static) but that originates from the imponderable ways in which space is practised. The rhythm therefore varies according to the intensity of lived experience. On the remaining plot of land, Bo Bardi erected a Brutalist, deliberately ugly complex of two high towers and a tall fake chimney, all built in raw concrete. 6 In contrast to the old factory space, this complex enters into open competition with the urban environment. Quite literally, its own towers face the city, with its high-rises, eye to eye. While the compact tower houses a swimming pool in the basement and four gyms stacked upon one another, the smaller tower, arranged in a pattern that is a foil to the pattern on the larger tower, contains the staircase and the facilities. The towers are connected on each floor by Y- or V-shaped bridges or gangways, the spatial design of which is reminiscent of the expressive constructivism of Liubov Popova. And although Bo Bardi toyed with the idea of painting the cement in bright colours she finally abstained from it, reserving colour for the door and window frames, or for the ventilating tubes — for elements, that is, which help to punctuate the grey, bunkerish mass. To get to the gym or back to the showers and changing rooms, the athletes, mostly adolescents, have to cross the open, weather-exposed gangways, thus undergoing a kind of rite of passage that purifies them and readies them for the excitement and exuberance of play. The architecture’s own playfulness becomes evident with the correlation of each of the gym’s floors to the colour code and name of a season — a football team thus meets in ‘winter’ — and with the spectacular details of the gaping apertures in the walls, with their violently irregular but also somewhat organic shapes. Contrary to most gym spaces, the outside world is not closed off. It is confronted or challenged from within the arena. The violent thrill that accompanies every animated game, the momentous fantasy of annihilating one’s adversary, is subtly diverted toward the megalopolis outside: São Paulo, or, in Bo Bardi’s words, ‘the world champion of self-destruction’.7 The festivities for the inauguration of the Pompéia Factory were planned by Bo Bardi down to minutiae like the colour of food. For the opening period she conceived of an exhibition for which people were supposed to bring ‘all kinds of objects forgotten or rejected by “civilisation’’’, 8 while the gym towers were celebrated with an exhibition about the history of football in Brazil — a colourful dream of documentary material, devotional objects, players’ shirts and banners from all teams, ‘even the most mediocre’ ones. 9 Later exhibitions by Bo Bardi at the Factory included ‘Mil brinquedos para a criança brasileira’ (‘A Thousand Toys for Brazilian Kids’, 1980) and ‘Design no Brazil: História e realidade’ (‘Design in Brazil: History and Reality’, 1982). There is a common tune to these proposals: an unconcealed emphasis on radical inclusiveness (‘all things’), on the material unconscious (‘objects forgotten or rejected’) and on what might be called the psychic texture of objects (ask any football fan about his or her team scarf or any child about his or her favourite toy). A similar tune can be already detected in Bo Bardi’s early Brazilian exhibition activities, like the breathtaking installation of the ‘Bahia no Ibirapuera’ exhibition during the fifth Bienal de São Paulo in 1959, or the display she conceived for the exhibition ‘Civilização do Nordeste’ (‘Civilisation of the Northeast’) at the Museu de Arte Popular at the Solar do Unhão, in Salvador de Bahia in 1963. Historically, both exhibitions belong to the window of utopian dreaming that preceded the military dictatorship. The Bienal de São Paulo, from the moment of its inception in 1951, partook in this dream and, for better or worse, carried it along. It not only celebrated modern art in all its universalist splendour, but also fed the generation of Tropicália with a repertoire of forms that had to be devoured 6 7 8 9

The architectural language of progressive ‘ugliness’ with its bunkerish masses and unfinished surfaces is characteristic of the Paulista School (Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Joao Batista Vilanova Artigas and others). Its aesthetics were heavily inspired by Oscar Niemeyer’s self-criticism in the late 1950s, when he condemned his own former striving for originality and surface appearance at the cost of architecture’s social functioning. Bo Bardi explicitly stated: ‘I want SESC to be even uglier than MASP.’ Quoted in O. de Oliveira, Subtle Substances, op. cit., p.203. It should also be mentioned that at the time SESC Pompéia was planned, the integration of the suburbs became part of the official line in urban politics. Selfmanagement models based on neighbourhood groups or participatory building sites were especially encouraged. Bo Bardi also called São Paulo a ‘pile of bones’. Quoted in O. de Oliveira, ibid., p.245. Her sensitivity for questions of cultural heritage and its preservation drew her back to Salvador de Bahia in 1986, where she was invited by the mayor to intervene in the historic district around the Pelourinho. See L. Bo Bardi, ‘Obra construida/Built Work’ (text by O. de Oliveira), in 2G International Architecture Review, no.23/24, 2003, p.142. See O. de Oliveira, Subtle Substances, op. cit., p.246. Ibid., p.248.

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and ‘vomited’ (as Glauber Rocha put it) before being prepared for the artistic aims of a decidedly local modernism. The Bahia exhibition of 1959, conceived by Bo Bardi and Martim Gonçalves, looks retrospectively like a comment on, if not an answer to, the key question of how modern universalism could be reconciled with a local agenda. (And without questioning Hélio Oiticica’s genius, it needs to be said that Bo Bardi pioneered her environmental aesthetics years before Oiticica built his Penetrávels, the labyrinthine environments he began to make in the late 1960s.) The show, according to its own definition, took an anthropological rather than aesthetic view on popular artefacts created in the Brazilian Northeast — a region defined by poverty, a high rate of illiteracy and a mode of production Bo Bardi characterised as ‘pre-craftsmanship’ 10. In the Northeast, ‘objects of desperate survival’ were basically made out of garbage. One section of the exhibition was devoted to documentary photographs of the Afro-Brazilian religions macumba and candomblé. The photographs (by Pierre Verger and others) were informally mounted on a fragile wooden scaffolding — the material sensibility of which was closer to the consistency of the life depicted on them than to the institutional self-assuredness of, say, ‘Family of Man’, the exhibition Edward Steichen organised at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1955. Among the artefacts were almost life-size statuettes of Orisha spirits; musical instruments; patchwork quilts made of reclaimed scraps of leftover cloth; fifós, or oil lamps, built from empty medicine bottles and pieces of tin plates; carrancas, or figureheads, from river boats of the São Francisco; ceramics; mats; hammocks; earthenware pans; pots for drinking water; and so on. ‘I could say that this exhibition reveals above all the creative force of a people who do not give up under the severest conditions,’ summarises Jorge Amado in an account written at that time. 11 The open exhibition space in Ibirapuera Park, next to the biennial, was primarily structured by a system of freestanding walls, most of them elevated on pedestals in the shape of white cubes. The rather compact walls provided conspicuously solid support for the hand-crafted objects — which were, all in all, either rude or tiny and brittle. While the elevated walls were coloured in different shades, one particular wall was covered with gold leaf as if to mirror the spiritual radiance of the religious sculpture displayed in front of it. The ex-votos, on the other hand, were directly fixed onto a whitewashed brick wall. By drawing on the analogy between the bareness of the wall and the wooden rawness 10 11

See M. Carvalho Ferraz and M. Suzuki (ed.), L’Impasse del design, op. cit., p.1. Ibid., op. cit., p.5.

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Lina Bo Bardi, ‘Civilização do Nordeste’ (‘Civilisation of the Northeast'), 1963. Installation view, Museu de Arte Popular do Unhão. Photograph: Armin Guthmann. Courtesy Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi and Armin Guthmann

of those sculptures, their stubborn dumpiness was transformed into an almost heroic expression: it embodied resistance against the disenchantment of the world. The whitecube pedestals were scattered all over the space, serving larger-size objects like the carrancas and Orishas as pedestals. A few artificial trees were planted here and there, one adorned with weather vanes, while the entire floor was covered with pitanga leaves. In the background, before the row of Orishas, the exhibition was sealed off by a huge, long curtain. This device, reminiscent of display strategies practised by Lily Reich in the 1920s and 30s, provided the space with an air of privacy while simultaneously underscoring its highly theatrical décor. In short, the language of display spoke many different tongues and thus appealed to a multiplicity of perceptual registers. It spoke less about objects than out of them. The exhibition’s true subject was indeed neither artistic form nor anthropology; it was, as its title suggests, the spirit of a place and its possible transposition. In her love for Bahia, Bo Bardi chose an even more emphatic term for this immaterial entity than the ‘spirit of a place’. She called it the ‘popular soul’ and — this was the exhibition’s wager — she tried to convey it less by the objects themselves than by their appearance. 12 Their appearance had to be revealed, not just their factual presence shown. In Bo Bardi’s still acute memory, Italian Fascism had both vampirised and exorcised the popular soul. Under the Fascist regime, popular production or craft became ‘irreversibly’ transformed into folklore or kitsch, while genuine popular art was defined by its ‘perfect reversibility’. While a kitsch object was thus defined as a psychic dead end that puts man’s desire to rest, popular art kept the soul alert and ready to look for ever new and transformative ways to shape the world. 13 The Bahia exhibition had to fight two enemies. One was folklore. The other was the naïveté of utopian design that had become dominant in Brazil in the 1950s and what this represented: the ludicrous fantasy that an underdeveloped country with feudal structures could be transformed overnight into an industrial society. Presenting the popular soul in action or revealing the reversibility of popular art called for a particular kind of display in which the object’s essentially transitional character would be shown. This aim was achieved by a double operation. On the anthropological level the objects were linked to specific religious or labour practices. The photographs of Pierre Verger, for example, demonstrated their use in ritual. However, the objects were also paraded as being in excess of themselves, or, rather, as transcending any conceptual framework that would fix and guarantee their meaning. This was achieved by dislocating them into a deliberately artificial environment that highlighted their utter strangeness. This particular quality they had to borrow or even extract from modern art’s claim to autonomy — a claim that was excessively stated, even propagated at the nearby biennial. The popular soul was, above all, volatile. Or, as Bo Bardi put it: ‘To carefully search for the cultural bases of a country (whatever they may be: poor, miserable, popular) when they are real, does not mean to preserve the forms and materials, it means to evaluate the original creative possibilities.’ 14 • Bo Bardi’s activities in Bahia in the 1950s and early 60s opened her eyes to what she called ‘the real Brazil, not the one of European immigrants’. 15 The experience was profound; it made her into ‘another person’.16 What ‘the real Brazil’ stands for is no mystery either: a sedimentation of layers of violently disruptive colonial rule. At Bahia Bo Bardi recognised how intricately linked the Western project of modernity was to colonialism — and in her subsequent projects it was clear that she was looking for an intelligent way to deal with this problem. Though she was asked in 1957 to build the Museu de Arte de São 12 13 14 15 16

What I have in mind here is an operation called ‘cathexis’ in Freudian discourse, by which an object assumes a particular value or embodies beauty primarily because it comes to symbolise a much-desired lost object. Kaja Silverman conceptualises the relation between appearance and visual affirmation in her book World Spectators. Any theory of display would have to start from this question: how can appearance be initiated from the side of the object rather than from that of the visitor? See K. Silverman, World Spectators, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. For Bo Bardi’s concept of ‘reversibility’, see M. Carvalho Ferraz and M. Suzuki (ed.), L’Impasse del design, op. cit., p.4. Ibid., p.3. O. de Oliveira, Subtle Substances, op. cit., p.323. Ibid.

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Paulo (MASP), the process was temporarily suspended, and in the late 1950s she moved to Salvador, Brazil’s third largest city (and until 1763 its capital, through which the slave trade was organised well into the nineteenth century), following an invitation to teach at the university and to build and direct a museum of modern art there. 17 The building offered to her, the sixteenth-century Solar do Unhão complex at the waterfront, was in dire need of restoration and demanded an attitude towards the problematics of historical legacy. Neither trying to conceive of the building in its original form nor treating it as a neutral space, her ‘project unmasked this pseudo-problem by considering the compound in all its different forms: mill, slave quarters, nobleman’s residence, industrial complex, meeting place for political activists, snuff factory, cocoa factory, waterfront warehouse, warehouse for fuel, marine barracks, slum tenement, ruin, not forgetting the splendid location’, as Olivia de Oliveira puts it in her extensive monograph on the architect. 18 Bo Bardi’s main intervention in the complex was the building of a huge wooden staircase, aptly called ‘an event’ by Aldo van Eyck, making the people ‘who go up and down feel like nobility’. 19 ‘People’ here is not a general term but points precisely at the poor and illiterate who were denied any social visibility by the racist bourgeoisie and its apparatus. While the massive steps of the monumental staircase seem to hover in the air as they rotate around a central column, with additional support provided by five outer beams, the wooden elements are connected by a traditional mortise and tenon system. Besides the Museu de Arte Moderna, the building complex also housed the Museu de Arte Popular, an institution that was inaugurated in 1963 with the exhibition ‘Civilisation of the Northeast’. Consisting of about a thousand pieces from Bo Bardi’s own collection, this display differed radically from the modernist atmosphere at Ibirapuera. The space was crammed like a Baroque church, and the institutional shell was almost entirely made of local building materials. The abundance of popular artefacts was displayed as if they all belonged to various families of forms, with each family representing a particular order. The ceramic bowls, for example, were framed and arranged according to their height on raw wooden shelves, while the oil lamps in the adjacent shelf contradicted this hierarchic principle and suggested a purely morphological pattern. Other objects, like a millstone, sat on the floor as if for sale on the local market. While Bo Bardi’s ample display affirmed the basic function of ordering — of a system — as a way to render popular artefacts significant that were by and large considered insignificant, it also let the objects expose the arbitrary character of any such orderly arrangement. Basically, the objects were allowed to talk about themselves. But it would be wrong to consider this discourse merely in terms of object-presentation: what was actually displayed was the dynamic interlocking of the popular artefacts with visitors who were also invited to talk about themselves, this time by taking and enjoying pride of place. The display at the Solar do Unhão was realised by Bo Bardi at about the same time as she conceived the building and revolutionary display for the collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, which was finally completed in 1968 following her design. It seems evident that the lesson learnt from Bahia profoundly shaped the presentation of MASP’s collection of predominantly Western art. The charmingly eclectic mix of sculptures and paintings, ranging from the baroque to modernism, was acquired from an impoverished post-War Europe by Assis Chateaubriand, a Brazilian entrepreneur, media mogul and art connoisseur who also had the idea to invite Pietro Bardi, Bo Bardi’s husband, to become the museum’s first director. (The popular highlight of the collection is Renoir’s double portrait Pink and Blue (or Alice et Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers, 1881), of which Blue, or Elisabeth, died on her way to Auschwitz in 1944.) The story of the ‘fixed tropical greenhouse’, as Bo Bardi called her extraordinary museum building at Avenida Paulista, is rather well known. Also known is the sad fact that her ingenious display was destroyed in the 1990s and replaced by a conventional wall system. 20 Photographs give at least an idea of the single, 17 18 19 20

The planning and building of MASP is a remarkable story in itself, with Bo Bardi acting in many different capacities. It was she who secured the site at Avenida Paulista in a backroom deal with the local governor, after which her husband, nominally the museum’s director, characterised her bold plans as a ‘beautiful female dream’. See O. de Oliveira’s interview with Bo Bardi, in 2G, op. cit., p.244—46. Ibid., p.82. Ibid., p.81. The controversy about the demolition of Bo Bardi’s display within the museum and other narrowminded architectural changes at MASP are summarised by de Oliveira in 2G, op. cit., pp.8—20. Unfortunately, this is no singular case and many of Bo Bardi’s buildings and urban proposals were destroyed or carelessly altered in the decades following her death.

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Lina Bo Bardi, interior installation display, 1957—68, Museum of Art of São Paulo. Photograph: Paolo Gasparini. Courtesy Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi and Paolo Gasparini

enormous exhibition space into which the visitor was drawn as if into a jungle of paintings. Each of the paintings, with their often quite prominent gilt frames, was mounted on huge vertical glass panes that were fixed on cubic concrete bases. While the artwork was thus radically singularised and exposed, the space, with its hundred or so transparent glass panes on which the paintings were suspended as if in the air, relativised the authority of the single piece. Each artwork was shown to be its own site, a display mode that attested both to the migratory destiny of the pieces, but also, and more importantly, to a lack of institutional framing. Art’s ontological status was no longer treated as a given. 21 While all the paintings’ surfaces were facing one direction — towards the viewer who entered the space — each work contained a short, basic description on its back. Of course, presenting classical Western painting in such a spectacular display as a total image in and of itself — an image of artistic labour — put an end to all received wisdoms of systematicity (be they chronology, genre, style, -isms, national school). It laid any universal claim about the Western idea of art to rest. Education — self-education — would have to start from another angle, namely from the singular passage each individual viewer had to make, thus creating a rather personal set of affiliations between the artworks — something one might even want to talk about later and share. The artworks would appear primarily as instances of subjective memorising and not as containers of legitimate knowledge about art and its history. It needs to be emphasised, though, that subjective memories are not merely subjective but necessarily draw from a cultural repertoire of available forms. Consequently, the truly engaging work of art mediation, the poetics of sensual collaboration mentioned at the beginning of this essay, would have to address the gap between the given elements of this repertoire and each single individual’s conscious or unconscious interpretation and transformation of them. Only here, in this interlocking of subjectivities and objecthoods, could art’s social function truly come alive. Bo Bardi’s aim at MASP was again to restore art to its ‘creative possibilities’. However, while the egalitarian space promises the individual free circulation, an open encounter between faces and surfaces, this promise is invested with a substantial threat — a threat visibly expressed by the unmediated competition between the artworks. Like a ward with newborns who cannot make it on their own, they all crave simultaneously for the viewer’s attention. And this is the message conveyed by Bo Bardi’s display (and a truth regularly suppressed by the art institution): art demands too much of our lives. 21

Theodor W. Adorno opens his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory with the famous remark that ‘nothing can be taken for granted anymore when it comes to art [...] not even its right of existence’. T.W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970, p.11. Translation the author’s.

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60 | Afterall

Previous spread and opposite: Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Algunas maneras de hacer esto (Some Ways of Doing This), 1969/2007. Installation view, ‘A Theatre Without Theatre', MACBA, Barcelona, 2007. Photograph: © Tony Coll. Courtesy MACBA

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina’s Constellations — Esteban Pujals Gesalí

Four years ago, when the Spanish Ministry of Culture awarded him the National Prize for the visual arts, those who were aware of Isidoro Valcárcel Medina’s work received the news with a mixture of puzzlement and delight. The brief text in which the Ministry justified granting the prize mentioned ‘the coherence and rigour’ of Valcárcel Medina’s work, ‘developed over four decades’, which described in a concise manner the tireless devotion of this artist to his task. However, the text also referred to ‘a committed attitude, detached from the dynamics of the art market’, 1 words that seemed to allude with calculating vagueness to the chasm that has always separated

Esteban Pujals Gesalí surveys the rich literary history of the Spanish artist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, whose poetic works deny a separation between art and the rules that govern everyday life. Valcárcel Medina’s creative practice from the ways in which both cultural institutions and the large majority of artists understand art. Those who valued Valcárcel Medina’s activities couldn’t help wondering about the prize’s significance. Did the highest Spanish art institution share a view of art that for half a century has appeared to conflict with that of museums and art centres? Could the Ministry of Culture afford to support the work of an artist who time and again has stated his complete disagreement with the notion of art that cultural institutions uphold and promote, an artist who has never concealed his scorn for these institutions, which he sees as isolating art from the life of citizens so as to better serve their own political ends? The paradoxes generated in 2007 by granting Valcárcel Medina the National Prize were not new. The last few decades 1

have made it clear that the institutions charged with the task of constructing and increasing the value of artworks in the global market are not content with promoting the kinds of art that adjust themselves to their ends; these institutions also aspire to absorb into their fold modes of creativity opposing their aims or happening beyond their fringes. This kind of institutional voracity has prompted the apparition of a particularly repulsive type of pseudo-artist, convinced that resisting institutions is just another means of self-promotion, and this phenomenon has encouraged the production of large amounts of pseudo-art, as well as complicating the reception of modes of art that are genuinely critical. In the context of Spanish contemporary art, within and without what its institutions manage to absorb or contain, Valcárcel Medina is surely an extreme case: an artist who has been granted a National Prize despite the fact that no museum holds any of his work. In this, as in so many other aspects of his work, Valcárcel Medina applies a particularly stringent version of an understanding of art that spread in the 1960s and 70s among radical artists. This view of art countered the fetishisation of the art object and the artist’s conversion into myth by displacing the value of the work from the object to the process of its creation and from the author to the context in which the artist operates. From this perspective, collecting works of contemporary art becomes an impossible task, as the art object, thus understood as a byproduct rather than as the result of the creative process, lacks what is its most valuable dimension: the circumstances of its invention and development, its temporality, its breath, its life. With respect to the question of why, in almost half a century of uninterrupted creative activity, no art institution has ever

Ministerial Order CUL/3742/2007 of 5 December 2010, Boletín Oficial del Estado, 20 December 2007. This is the publication in which all Spanish state decisions appear. All translations from Spanish by the author

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programmed a retrospective exhibition of Valcárcel Medina’s work, the answer, once more, lies in the artist’s obstinate refusal, anchored in a conviction of the link between the contemporary artwork and the specific timing of its execution; once that moment is past, the work stops being a work of art, and the only value assignable to the materials that are left over from the process of its production is documentary. Or, to employ the artist’s own words: ‘My art is not repertory art’; ‘I am neither a ruminant nor a vulture feeding off the old.’ 2 So, how has this author of ephemeral works, this evasive artist of conciseness, whose CV since 1969 consists of the simple enumeration of the years he has lived since 1937, come to be known? How did news of his quiet, discrete activity, materially slight and almost undistinguishable from the everyday life of common citizens, reach the ears of the Ministry of Culture? The only possible answer is that half a century is a very long time and it carries rumour very far. On the other hand, it is surprising to realise how often commercial galleries have exhibited his invariably unsellable works. Which takes us back to the mechanism of seduction and to the attraction exerted on museums and art galleries by that which they are programmed to exclude. Conceptual Constructivism I have referred to Valcárcel Medina’s creative activity as materially scant, discrete in its manner of occurring, always concise and measured — the extreme opposite of the grandiloquent or spectacular. To this characterisation one has to add a peculiar nomadism among art traditions and media that would seem designed to minimise the importance of the materials that he has worked in, whether physical (metal, photographs, writing or sound) or conceptual (as in his pieces of ‘legal art’). This characteristic feature of his work places it in the company of modern poetry and painting at the time of Cubism — the tradition that prompted Stéphane Mallarmé to conceive the form of the most astonishing of poems and led thereafter to the invention of collage, and a tradition that is as visible in Marcel Duchamp’s contempt for the odour of turpentine and 2 3

the fetishisation of the painter’s rituals as it is in Vladimir Tatlin’s and Alexander Rodchenko’s progress through techniques and disciplines. Valcárcel Medina has extended and broadened this tradition by a unique display of the artistic potential of any material. Particularly memorable instances, because they are so extreme, of the tendency in his work towards an expansion of art by means of unusual material manifestations were the drafting of the text of the Act Regulating the Exercise, Enjoyment and Commercialisation of Art, discussion of which was vetoed by the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Spanish Parliament, in October 1992, and the conceptualising as a work of art of the proceedings he brought against the city council of Valladolid and an insurance company in 2000 over their respective liability for the destruction of one of his artworks (E pur si muove,3 exhibited from 13 November to 13 December 1998 in the Museo de la Pasión, Valladolid), which the judge ruled impossible to restore. The Chamber of Deputies, in the former case, and his opponents at the trial (the judge who heard the case and the witnesses), in the latter, all became Valcárcel Medina’s collaborators in these trans-material and interpersonal artistic processes. In the years around 1970 Valcárcel Medina’s work was commonly regarded as ‘constructivist’, a label that suggests exactly the intimacy with his materials to the exclusion of other possible considerations, usually of a political kind, in the Conceptual art produced at the time. As a matter of fact, Valcárcel Medina’s work was exhibited in group shows that specifically invoked this term, along with artists like Elena Asins and Eusebio Sempere, whose later careers have been consistent with those beginnings. And it is true that all of Valcárcel Medina’s work — that which was produced thirty or forty years ago as well as recently — shows something closely akin to the constructivist yearning to make the materials talk by and about themselves, about their nature and their potential as materials. Let us examine one of his best known pieces from those years, Motores (Engines, 1973). The work consisted of a tape

Valcárcel Medina in conversation with José Díaz Cuyás and Nuria Enguita Mayo, ‘Valcárcel Medina Speaks Out’, Ir y venir de Valcárcel Medina (exh. cat.), Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002, p.235. Valcárcel Medina does not title his works; however, for the purposes of clarity I have here referred to them by the titles commonly used elsewhere.

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Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, E pur si muove, 1998, poster paper and steel cable; 40,000 strips of paper; panel 6 × 3m, strips 8mm each. Installation view, Valcárcel Medina in the Museo de la Pasión, Valladolid. Courtesy the artist

recording of the sound of two car engines, one with a small cylinder capacity (the ‘treble’) and the other more powerful (the ‘bass’), both travelling over the same route (from Madrid to El Escorial) and recorded on separate tracks so that they could be listened to simultaneously. The recording was accompanied by a ‘score’, consisting of a descriptive table, which at the time the Spanish Ministry of Public Works drew up for the development of public highways. Each table described, at intervals of one hundred metres, the incidence of the incline of the terrain or of the bends in the road, including the radius of the curve towards the left or right. When the recording was played back, listeners could, at least theoretically, ‘follow’ the music shown on the table and read, through the

gear changes, the higher or lower pitch of the engines of the two cars and the squeal of the tyres on the bends, the precise mileage or the stage of the journey reached. The simplicity of Motores is clearly one of the most constant features of Varcárcel Medina’s works, which generally contain the bare minimum of material substance or action, or the least of what is required to embody the suggestion or revelation proposed. This tendency recalls the syntactic concerns that obsessed the concrete poets of the 1950s and 60s, and which led Ian Hamilton Finlay to examine the possibilities of the one-word poem. We might think, for instance, of Valcárcel Medina’s ‘appropriating’ of fifty, one hundred and one thousand peseta notes bearing inscriptions like ‘Mobile art’,

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‘Art in movement’ or ‘Money as art’. From 10 April to 7 August 1979 he put 201,300 of these pesetas into circulation, stopping when one of the notes issued by him returned to his possession. Or let us take the example of the justness, the suitability to its occasion, of the work Scottex, the result of faxing a roll of paper towels in response to the announcement of a ‘fax art’ competition by the Museo de Electrografía in Cuenca in 1992. In both works a minimum manipulation of the media used resulted in their essential properties being brought to visibility: pure circulation in the case of the banknotes, and, in the case of the paper, the fundamentally rolled-up nature of the fax medium as opposed to its common conceptualisation in the two-dimensional terms of the page. Though the ‘constructivist’ trend I mentioned earlier is still apparent in Valcárcel Medina’s recent work, endowing it with a measure of restraint and discipline, as well as a certain irony linked to his choice of means and materials less and less detachable from the interaction of people, and though his radically de-institutionalised view of art as a phenomenon alien to market laws is already visible in his work from the 1960s, his work gradually radicalised from that

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period onwards, in that his procedures, materials and intentions have become better and better adapted to the project he seems to have mapped out from the start. Works such as No necesita título (No Title Required, 1990) — presented in the show ‘Madrid. Espacio de interferencias’ (1990) at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, in which meals, dishes and cutlery picked up each day from Madrid charities were exhibited during the two-and-a-half months the show lasted — or the show I.V.M. Oficina de gestión (I.V.M. Management Ltd, 1994) — when Valcárcel Medina opened an office for a month, on a 9 am-to-4 pm basis, at Madrid’s Galería Fúcares, devoted to the management of customers’ ideas — are entirely aimed at social interrelation. Valcárcel Medina has outlined his poetics on numerous occasions, sometimes very clearly and explicitly, in statements that form an integral and essential part of his work as an artist. Like all his work, these explanations are also an exploration of both means and materials. A clear case of this is the thoroughly tectonic analysis he has conducted over the last decade of the public lecture as a type of discourse, a course of enquiry which once again brings to mind the adjective ‘constructivist’. One of the most accurate explanations

Above and right: Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Proyecto para una retrospectiva (Project for a Retrospective), 2009, Otoño de 2009, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Photograph: Román Lores & Joaquín Cortés. Courtesy Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

of his work that Valcárcel Medina has provided appears in the 1991 piece La chuleta (The Student’s Crib Sheet). This consists of a handwritten text on a narrow strip of paper that is rolled up tightly at its top and bottom, like the classic device used by cheating students. The rolled

This view of art countered the fetishisation of the art object and the artist’s conversion into myth by displacing the value of the work from the object to the process of its creation. ends are held together with an elastic band, enabling the reader to turn them with just one hand as he or she advances through the text. The text itself consists of a general discussion of art in which, under headings such as ‘The Everyday Nature of Art’ or ‘The Historic Moment (The Truth of Testimony)’, 4 Valcárcel Medina expounds upon the approach he has been testing out in his practice for half a century. Of the headings into which the text of La chuleta 4 5

is arranged, perhaps the most surprising — in a context in which every aspect of life, and everything connected with art, could be said to be under the sway of the market’s modes of operation — is the one that reads ‘Art, a Moral Occupation by Its Very Nature’. Under this heading we read, amongst other remarks, the following: ‘The basic “justification” of works of art is that they have been produced, and that the act of producing them was supposedly just.’ Further on, under the heading ‘The Historic Moment (The Truth of Testimony)’, the text reads: ‘A work of art must be so faithful to its moment that it becomes the moment itself.’ 5 These statements are an open invitation to reconsider our perception of Motores, since they suggest that a key facet of the work is that the journeys made between Madrid and El Escorial in 1973 actually took place and that the existence of the tape-recording registering the sound they made constitutes evidence of this. There is no doubt that, as a whole, Valcárcel Medina’s work shows the qualities of coherence and rigour that the

‘El carácter cotidiano del arte’, ‘El momento histórico (la realidad del testimonio)’ and, below, ‘El arte, menester ético por naturaleza’. ‘La razón fundamental que “justifica” a las obras es que se han realizado y que supuestamente esa acción ha sido justa’; ‘La obra de arte ha de ser tan fiel a su momento que sea el momento mismo.’

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Ministry of Culture attributed to it when it granted him the National Prize. Indeed, both in his more visual work as well as in the work consisting of verbal explanations in lectures, public statements and written pieces, such as the discrete La chuleta, the artist has insistently denounced what he sees as the dispossession of what one could call citizens' ‘artistic life’ by the cultural and educational institutions whose main function is to sequester art in spaces institutionalised as ‘art spaces’ — so as to remove it from citizens by separating it from work, everyday interaction and, more generally, the common life of society. Valcárcel Medina shares this perception of an art integrated into life with others who have dared see in the tasks of art the most ambitious and noble manner of living a human life: John Ruskin, the first to imagine the social consequences of the transformation of citizens into artists; the poets and artists of Russian CuboFuturism; Marcel Duchamp; John Cage. And, like theirs, his work offers an obsidional resistance to the degradation of art into fetish. But to refer to this resistance in terms of coherence and rigour, with the suggestion of hardness and rigidity that these adjectives carry, is a very partial

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and inadequate characterisation of his activities: his work displays an intensified kind of vitality or fertility, of that which the Spanish Baroque masters called ‘wit'. And one has to add that it is the characteristically quiet, concise and discrete manner in which this artist executes his projects that provides their closeness to life, to the point of being inseparable from it. Verbal Constructivism It is hardly surprising that among the many art modes and kinds that Valcárcel Medina has traversed, often submitting them to a reduction that lies between the scientifically ruthless and the ironically neo-pre-Socratic, that of poetry should be foremost. The ability to speak is surely the most characteristic of human skills and the condition of speaker the most abstract definition of the human being, which places verbal art at the centre of this poetics focused on the most basic and generalisable characterisation of human experience. In the remote past Valcárcel Medina composed poems in verse (‘En tinta azul’ (‘In Blue Ink’, 1958), ‘Pájaro en su órbita’(‘Bird in Its Sphere’, 1961)), but it was only after composing El libro

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Puntualizaciones poéticas (Poetic Remarks), 1995, text on paper. Courtesy the artist

transparente (The See-Through Book, 1970), one of the most beautiful fruits of Spanish concrete poetry, that his work as a poet became visible on the Spanish contemporary poetic horizon. The unusual quality of this production could be said to result from an attempt to combine three diverse orientations. In the first place, it is obvious that Valcárcel Medina’s poetry projects share with the tradition of Spanish poetry after Antonio Machado, who was writing in the first third of the twentieth century, the aim of being rooted in vernacular Spanish. In a completely different direction, and in full agreement with the whole of his work, his poetry pieces explore the material limits of verbal art, often weakening or erasing the borders separating poetic form from other artistic modes, an orientation that tends to complicate their recognition as poetry. Finally, and in the best modern tradition after Mallarmé, each of Valcárcel Medina’s poetic works appears committed to an analysis of the verbal medium itself, an analysis focused on highlighting the paradoxes and aporias that inhere in the combination of various levels of linguistic articulation — that is, in his attentive care both to the tensions between what is spoken and written as well as to the exceptions, oddities and open contradictions that often result precisely from applying grammatical norms in the everyday usage of speakers. Two recent works that exemplify this threefold orientation are Topología hermenéutica o bien hermenéutica topológica (Hermeneutic Topology or Topological Hermeneutics), an artist’s book screenprinted by the Spanish press Ahora in 2005, and El envés de la ortoescritura (The Back of Orthography), a project executed in 2009 for the ‘Escrituras en libertad’ exhibition at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid. In the first of these works the twenty handwritten even-numbered pages develop a metadiscourse on the notion of an art book, a discourse that continues and broadens the reflection of the concrete poets of the 1950s and 60s on the behaviour of linear writing, while the twenty oddnumbered pages would seem to constitute a visual counterpart to this discourse, highlighting the downward progression of certain colour shapes. Among these can 6

be seen the letters of the Greek alphabet, which regulates the book as a whole. The book would seem to movingly suggest a synaesthetic dissolution, carried out plastically, of the borderline separating the sensible from the intelligible. In the installation El envés de la ortoescritura, Valcárcel Medina gives up the book format and enquires into the tension between linguistic conventions and their consistent infraction in speakers’ usage, sometimes due to ignorance or carelessness, but often because of the ambiguous, blurred or contradictory nature of linguistic norms themselves. The space in which this installation was presented was the strongroom of the bank that today houses the Instituto Cervantes, and the poet set himself the task of composing brief poems that invoked grammatical rules while at the same time exemplifying language’s helplessness regarding ‘abnormal’ usage. There were as many poems as there were boxes in the room (2,700), each of them placed on the inner side of the doors of the boxes, so the viewer had to open the boxes in order to read the poems. In one of his most exciting intuitions Jacques Derrida characterised human speech as writing: anyone’s utterance is thus already a kind of inscription in air, ephemeral as an event but grammatised — that is, subject to memory and repetition. In a similar sense, each of Valcárcel Medina’s works would seem to consist of a dance exercise on life, a dance that scarcely touches the most common words, the most common human gestures and movements, but in which life itself is delicately scanned, measured, scored. As Mallarmé once said in an interview: ‘Les choses existent; nous n’avons pas à les créer; nous n’avons qu’à en saisir les rapports.’ 6 In the end perhaps there is no better metaphor to characterise Valcárcel Medina’s dances among people and things than that of the constellation.

‘Things exist; we do not have to create them — we only have to grasp their relations.’ Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (ed. Bertrand Marchal), vol. II, Paris: Gallimard, 2003, p.702.

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Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Hombre anuncio (Man Advertising), 1976, performance, Madrid. Courtesy the artist

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The Everyday Fact as Peripety — José Díaz Cuyás

The title of this essay — a phrase taken from his book Rendición de la hora (Surrendering of the Hour, 1996) — points to what I find most distinctive and fundamental in the work of Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. A first reading of the phrase would probably situate it alongside the poetics of the everyday and the currents of art and life that thrived in the 1960s and the early 70s. Indeed, that is the time and context from which his practice emerges, and it is there that we find the knot of problems that runs through his subsequent trajectory as an artist; a trajectory that — in keeping with his original stance — has been characterised by a protean will for a constant shifting of

José Díaz Cuyás considers Isidoro Valcárcel Medina’s measurements of time and contingency as appeals to political effectivity. positions. His mature work developed in a conjuncture that would prove extremely fertile in the artistic arena of the late 1960s: the fusion between a formal literalism — associated with Neo-Concretist and Minimalist practices — and what we might call a ‘situational literalism’, referring to a variety of intermedia practices in which the meaning of a work was no longer contained in the individual pieces, but had to be sought in their function, in their ability to activate an event that exceeded them. This polarity between the extreme literal nature of forms and an equally literal character of the situation, between concrete figures (from geometry to media reification) and the traces of the event (from process to action) generates in its tension the set of questions that the most significant works of the period were grappling with. This was apparent in the international scene, just at that moment when for the first time, thanks to advances in communication technologies, it had become possible to speak of an intercontinental artistic debate. The globalisation of the art scene (which

significantly coincided with the radicalisation and the subsequent undoing of the myth of the avant-garde) generated an increased awareness and dissemination of the multifarious practices and styles that vied for attention in the main artistic centres. But beyond a canonical history of the succession of movements in the late avant-garde, or a schematic history of influences between the centre and the periphery, what is truly remarkable about that period of expansion of the society of the spectacle is the fact that artists who were so distant from each other shared the same horizon of problems and, working individually and from very localised positions, managed to develop concepts and practices that over time would reveal a common affinity. Among these artists was Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. Although he is today known as one of the main exponents of Conceptualism in Spain, Valcárcel Medina does not belong to the generation of artists who worked under that banner in the early 1970s. In fact, as mentioned above, his career started a decade earlier, in the early 60s, when, moving away from a practice based on geometric abstraction (a reaction against Art Informel), he embarked upon an investigation of painting by means of formal reduction. From 1962, when he had a solo show at Galería Lorca in Madrid, until the end of that decade, Valcárcel Medina was repeatedly included in exhibitions of ‘constructive’ or ‘objective’ art, a loose movement that was never constituted as a coherent group and was never legitimated under a common programme. Spanish art critics of the time understood that movement’s ‘normative’ approach to art as an attempt to find some rationality in the context of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, set in contrast to the expressive subjectivism of an earlier generation. But, in fact, the same could be said of the two idioms that were dominant in Spain at the time: ‘cold’ figurative Pop with political content, and social realism.

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That is, in the general context of that ‘decade of ideologies’, the vitiated and contradictory political and moral climate of life under Franco unduly encouraged an all-too-direct and schematic political interpretation of artistic practices. In Spain the climax of Conceptualism took place between 1973 and 1975 — the dictatorship’s final years, which were characterised by a hardened environment. As in Argentina, some of the most active members of the movement opted for what was already known by then as ‘ideological Conceptualism’. 1 Valcárcel Medina did not develop his career in this arena; rather, his work has always been able to maintain a subtle distance from the seductive allegorical link that the twentieth century has tried to establish between avant-garde art and revolutionary praxis — a link that reached a point of maximum confusion during those years. Even at that point, the way he understood art and politics, the public and the common, had very little to do with ideological doctrines or partisan militancy. We could say that, instead, the ethical sense manifest in his practice is precisely what endows his work with its radical political content. The ethico-political link becomes clearer if we attend to a development that took him from that early literalism of the form to what we have called a ‘literalism of the situation'. Already in his first series of works made following a constructivist approach, Pinturas secuenciales (Sequential Paintings, 1962), we find the interrelation of the themes of time and measure that becomes a constant in his subsequent work — being, of course, aware that time, and our way of understanding and structuring it, is in itself no more than a measure, and that only when it is conceived as separate from mere calculation does it reveal itself as that immediate and infinite present we are always already immersed in. In fact, despite his prolific versatility, all of Valcárcel Medina’s work points to the paradoxes produced by the encounter between that reified, measurable and socially ordered time, and that other temporality of becoming as a permanent present. Taking the measure of time — that would be a fitting description of his work. 1 2 3

The development of his practice during the 1960s, as it moves away from NeoConcretist painting and towards the construction of environments and installations, foregrounds his interest in these two modes of temporality: the measurable one and that of a current and immeasurable present. During this period, marked by a process of formal rationalisation, Valcárcel Medina was well aware of the temporal implications of form and place: ‘Time,’ he insisted, ‘is a geometrical place.’ 2 But beyond a strict geometry, measure was used as a way of adjusting and composing the shape of things, the same way a tailor refers to measurements when making a suit, or a poet to measures when writing verse. Measuring presupposes a method of comparison based on logic and system; its results allow for a precise and objective description of the problem or thing at hand, but only inasmuch as they are understood as exteriorities. Art that is based on systematic procedures — as is the case with Neo-Concretism and Minimalism — implies a neutralisation of the author’s self-expression; however, the fact that such work does not deal with ‘inner’ issues does not hinder its ability to describe. Measuring here is not just counting in the numerical sense, but also recounting, giving an account of things with an accurate figure and establishing relationships of ‘adjustment’ between the ‘figures of the exterior’ — contributing to the obsessive recourse to seriality at the time. Valcárcel Medina’s paintings from 1962 were made up of neutral planes traversed by a few horizontal lines that unfolded and extended between their upper and lower edges. They referred to a network of electric cables in the landscape as seen from a train window, an image that inevitably turned the viewer into a spectator facing a screen in a projection room. They were like still frames, ordered in series and, potentially, composing a narrative sequence based on the model of the filmic time-image — according to Deleuze a ‘direct’ image of time. 3 This was painting at the limit of the geometric, the sequential and the serial — painting with a propensity to objectify itself through its action and in the present, as befits a literalism of form, but also one

See Simón Marchán Fiz, Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (1972), Madrid: Akal, 1986, p.271. Isidoro Valcárcel Medina et al., Rendición de la hora (1996), Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2006, p.57. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (trans. Hugh Tomlinson), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

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Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, La chuleta (The Student's Crib Sheet), 1991, ink on paper, 5 × 5cm. Courtesy the artist

that betrayed a will towards description or narrative. Valcárcel Medina has spoken about his work of this period as telling ‘a spatial story, reflected in the images that were placed one after the other, normally suited to the habit of reading (from left to right, from top to bottom…)’. 4 In the series Armarios (Wardrobes, 1964—67), which earned its name because ‘you could keep things’ in them, 5 the structure of the stretcher itself called out from the ‘measured’ surface of the wall to the current time of the spectator. This series was followed by Lugares (Places, 1968— 70), in which monochrome panels and geometrical structures organised and divided the space of the gallery on the condition that ‘something went on in them’. 6 Another of these ‘installactions’ (as Valcárcel Medina likes to call them) was titled Algunas maneras de hacer esto (Some Ways of Doing This, 1969) and consisted of a ‘book made for a place and a place made for a book’. 7 The viewer had to visit the installation with the help of a publication titled Secuencia (Sequence) that was made specifically for the occasion. The space, which had been conceived to accommodate its reading, was structured in three different areas that gave place to three different reading moments, 4 5 6 7 8

corresponding to the book’s chapters. In the installation A continuación (Next, 1970), that will to produce a narrative understood as description was underscored by its subtitle, Un relato en doce jornadas: lugares, sonidos, palabras (A Tale in Twelve Days: Places, Sounds, Words), while at the same time the work reflected the actual temporality of the spatial and aural ‘measures’. The installation consisted of Perspex modules shaped like three-sided parallelepipeds that slotted into each other to configure the space in a different way each day. Everyday a cassette tape was used to record the successive accumulation of sounds produced by a signal generator. ‘What was important for me was that only someone who had visited the gallery on twelve consecutive days could claim to have “seen” the show. I liked the fact that only Fefa — the gallerist — and I actually saw it.’ 8 This cycle of Valcárcel Medina’s work closed with Estructuras tubulares (Tubular Structures, 1972), in which this will to tell a story in the present, this desire for ‘something to happen’, is taken to the streets. The work was installed in the context of the Encuentros de Pamplona 1972, an extraordinary large-scale festival, held in an atmosphere of underlying

I. Valcárcel Medina, ‘La memoria propia es la mejor fuente de documentación: Entrevista a Valcárcel Medina’, Sin título, issue 1, 1994, p.35. I. Valcárcel Medina, quoted in Ir y venir de Valcárcel Medina (exh. cat.), Barcelona, Granada and Murcia: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, p.118. I. Valcárcel Medina, quoted in ibid., p.96. I. Valcárcel Medina, quoted in ibid., p.124. I. Valcárcel Medina, ‘La memoria propia’, op. cit., p.35. Fefa Seiquer ran the Galería Seiquer in Madrid, where the exhibition took place.

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hostility under Franco’s rule, that brought together the Spanish and international avant-garde. 9 Estructuras tubulares was, as its title indicates, tubular structures normally used in industrial scaffoldings that Valcárcel Medina used to construct spaces in which to walk, stand, sit or lie down along a city boulevard. Placing those iron structures amidst the flow and transit of the city had a profound effect on him: ‘I presented a work that could be called “plastic”, but soon realised that it was an exclusively social work.’ 10 This realisation signalled a decisive shift in his career and determined all his subsequent work. From then on, he abandoned the attempt to create ‘inhabitable’ art by way of madeto-measure forms — however reasonably adjusted — and instead devoted himself to an ‘art of inhabiting’. The task was no longer to construct spaces suitable for something to go on inside them, but rather to abandon himself in the city, without recourse to conventional media or preestablished ideas, in order to offer a precise description of the system of rules and regulations that govern the city, in order to give an account of what happens in a public place. After this, he produced works such as Relojes (Clocks, 1973), for which he 9 10

used photographic registers of the calendar clocks placed in the streets of Madrid to construct a story about urban time; or 12 ejercicios de medición sobre la ciudad de Córdoba (12 Measuring Exercises about the City of Córdoba, 1974), which consisted of a series of physical and symbolic measurements of the environment and traffic of that city. These exercises were followed by public exams, anonymous photographs, travelling art actions, dictionaries of common use, telephone recordings and polls. In this new phase of public art — understanding ‘public’ in a strict sense as that which concerns the citizen — Valcárcel Medina’s artistic practice remained consistent with his earlier forays into painting. From the construction of carefully measured and calibrated installations, where his descriptive will was activated in the present time, he moved on to measure and calibrate the ‘readymade’ places of the city, focusing on their transit and describing through actions the forms of their exteriority. This he did not in an attempt to reorder the spaces and flows of the city, to impose a criterion on it or to explain through some kind of theory the surrounding reality. Rather, it was an active

See José Díaz Cuyás (ed.), Encuentros de Pamplona 1972: Fin de fiesta del arte experimental (exh. cat.), Madrid: Museo de Arte Nacional Reina Sofía, 2009. I. Valcárcel Medina, ‘La memoria propia’, op. cit., p.36.

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Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Relojes (Clocks), 1973, 365 photographs and cardboard box. Courtesy the artist

and present description of the maladjustments and the disproportionate contradictions created by the different logics or systems that shape municipal life. His work since then has continued to revolve around such straightforward, uncomplicated and elemental topics as time and measurement, and has continued to exhibit that desire to describe and produce an accurate figure of what happens. This is apparent in the artist’s book Surrendering of the Hour, the work with which I began this text. Surrendering of the Hour is divided into two parts, with the first a proposal for the changing of the clocks. The reader is invited to modify the time on his or her clock on a daily basis, as a conscious exercise by which to compensate for the absurdity of ‘gaining’ or ‘losing’ an hour every year. The proposal is an example of an ‘art of addition’, and it goes so far as to offer exact tables of the fractions of time by which clocks should be brought forwards or backwards each day. Between one number and the next, each day is signalled by a phrase that is tied to the second part of the work, which consists of an updated version of the daily proverbs that appear on wall calendars — a series of sentences, comments and aphorisms about light and time. The last one — number 365 — reads: ‘Last will: make a sand-clock out of my ashes.’ Likewise, in the introduction to this comically cosmic book, which Valcárcel Medina has called a ‘premonition of an inexcusable art of the hour’, we find an explanation of the master plan for the work that could well be taken for a general comment on his particular method: ‘The project that is presented here hides no other message, no other intention than that of adjusting social convention to celestial reality.’ 11 The idea, then, is to adapt and adjust the clocks, counting the hours; the work does not need anything else in order to function as a ‘signifying machine’. It is enough to compare social norms to the laws of physics in order to reveal with precision the nonsense which we incur when we try to subject one to the legislation of the other from the standpoint of a common experience, from our perception of duration and light as mere corporeal beings. Much the 11 12 13 14

same could be said of such diverse works as the series Arquitecturas prematuras (Premature Architectures, 1984—92), which is based on a fruitful ‘adjustment’ between the logic of construction (as economic practice) and constructive logic (as technical practice); of La ley promotora y reguladora del ejercicio, disfrute y comercialización del arte (Law for the Promotion and Regulation of the Practice, Enjoyment and Commercialisation of Art, 1992), a literal example of legal art; of I.V.M Oficina de Gestión (I.V.M. Management Ltd, 1994), in which the public was offered a service for the management of ideas; and of 2000 d. de J.C. (2000 A.D., 1995—2000), a colossal history of the Christian West in which the logic of facts is confronted with that of historical narrative. The same could also be said of the variety of interventions that took place on the occasion of his exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in the autumn of 2009.12 When I use the terms ‘logics’ and ‘norms’, I am not alluding to arcane structures that must be sought in recondite places, but rather to simple but fundamental practices that anyone can observe. In fact, we could say that all these projects belong to a territory that, since the 1980s, Valcárcel Medina’s work has often visited: the land of Perogrullo, populated by truths that are so obvious as to be available for everyone, but which prevailing cynicism compels us to overlook. 13 ‘Today,’ he declared in 2000, ‘I believe that obviousness (or even silliness) contains the maximum degree of creativity.’ 14 It is not difficult to conclude that contemporary art itself, its protocols and institutions, is one of the most fertile grounds for this kind of practice. As we have seen, it was the rigour with which Valcárcel Medina assumed a literalist position in formal — external — matters that allowed him to move in such a coherent but seemingly abrupt manner to that other literalism which we have called situational (and which is equally external). But I would go so far as to say that it has been the conviction with which he accepted the consequences of artistic literalism — the resolution with which he devoted himself

See I. Valcárcel Medina et al., Rendición de la hora, op. cit., p.2. A complete list of his works until the year 2009 can be found in J. Díaz Cuyás (ed.), Ir y venir de Valcárcel Medina, op. cit. Perogrullo is a character who makes such obvious pronouncements that uttering them seems pointless or silly. In Spanish such truisms are called ‘verdades de Perogrullo’ (Perogrullos’s truths) or even ‘perogrulladas’. The adjective ‘perogrullesco’ has also been coined. I. Valcárcel Medina, ‘Arquitectura prematura’, Fisuras, vol.8, January 2000, n.p.

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Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Estructuras tubulares (Tubular Structures), 1972. Installation view, Encuentros de Pamplona 1972. Courtesy the artist

to a succinct description of exteriority — that has endowed his work with real value and with political potency. The term ‘literalism’ must not be understood here as merely dealing with formal problems, but rather as a historical will and a sign of its time, as the result of a desire to proscribe metaphor, to eliminate anything in art that is fictitious, figurative or conventional — that perpetually unfulfilled desire to show the immediacy of a naked truth beyond any self-expressive flightiness. This will did not stop with its application in the Art Concret of the interwar period, nor was it restricted to the theoretical scuffles around the question of literalism that certain artists associated with Minimalism engaged in. 15 Rather, its influence goes beyond formal problems, as a drive that runs through the twentieth century with varying degrees of intensity and whose most extreme and radical expression can be found in the last of the avant-gardes of the late 1960s and early 70s. It is reminiscent of what Alain Badiou has called the ‘passion for the real’ that was distinctive of the twentieth century, a collective will that makes the artistic gesture equivalent to ‘an intrusion into semblance — exposing, in its brute state, the gap of the real’. 16 This desire has made 15 16 17

art turn towards the act and away from the work, for the practice of the avantgarde ‘is only thought in the present’. The phrase which gives this text its title, ‘the everyday fact as peripety’, alludes to a particular way of understanding this potency of the actual. 17 In Spanish, the word ‘peripecia’ — from the Greek ‘peripétia’, or adventure — has a double meaning. Its literary use coincides with the English ‘peripety’, and refers to a sudden and unforeseen change of circumstances within tragedy. In common parlance it preserves a sense of unpremeditated accident, but loses its teleologic, dramaturgical and providential character to refer to those simple events or vicissitudes, those unanticipated novelties, that surprise us in our daily lives. In this ‘profane’ sense, every day — like every journey — contains a series of peripeties, small strokes of fortune that with their capricious interruptions keep on altering and complicating our existence. However, although we could think of them as things that ‘happen to us’, the chance that determines them, far from imposing itself on the way we plan our time, is actually a condition of our temporality. We live, as Deleuze would say, embroiled in the aleatory — in a permanent chaosmos, in perpetual self-gestation. Something close

See Lynn Zelevansky (ed.), Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940—1970s, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2004, p.10ff. Alain Badiou, The Century (trans. Alberto Toscano), Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2007, p.50. The potency of the actual alludes to the historical will that attempts to evade artistic mediation in order to capture the immediate — the literal, the ‘here and now’ — in the artwork. It is a paradoxical will which, carried to the extreme, invokes an experience of the self as mere facticity: that of someone who knows that one is nothing but his or her ways of being, someone who accepts being made up of ‘now’, or whose potency cannot be restricted to his or her individual will or personal time schedules.

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to this is what Valcárcel Medina refers to as ‘the permanent and obstinate perseverance of chance as the stable substance of our contingency’. 18 This is why he cannot conceive of any art that is not an art ‘of chance’, but — as the reader might have guessed — this has little to do with what is normally understood as aleatory art. An art of chance does not refer to an inclination for gambling, but rather to acting in the spirit of accepting the result of the gamble whatever that is, for it is not in the result that its creative future lies, but in the way in which measures are taken to set off in the path that this result dictates; a path that must be undertaken just as any other path that could have ‘come up’ would have been undertaken.19 This radical self-experience of the potency of the actual, open to the contingent and devoted to facticity, is expressed in his work through the multiple and diverse peripeties of his ‘art of the everyday’. This allows us to say that Isidoro Valcárcel Medina has intertwined his own life with his art. As he has written, his work does not aim to become a ‘testimony of reality’, but rather to establish itself as ‘the reality of the testimony’. ‘As if it were a moral question — and God knows it is! — the artwork has to be so faithful to its moment so as to become the moment itself. After mani