Art and migration: Revisioning the borders of community 9781526149718

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Art and migration

SERIES EDITORS

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by SERIES EDITORS foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its

These acknowledge impact of recentwork scholarship on our understanding of the mostbooks basicwill structures by the foregrounding that challenges complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-wide the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of across national and trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas traditionalborders. art history, and addressing a wide range of visual continental

cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

Also available in the series

Horizontal together: Art, dance, and queer embodiment in 1960s New York Paisid Aramphongphan

These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies Bound together: Leather, sex, archives and contemporary art Andy Campbell that have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political Staging art and Chineseness: The politics of trans/nationalism and global expositions Jane Chin Davidson colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas Travelling images: Looking across the borderlands of art, media and visual culture Anna Dahlgren across national and continental borders. Empires of light: Vision, visibility and power in colonial India Niharika Dinkar Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias Mia L. Bagneris

Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro-García and Victoria H. F. Scott (eds) Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing Kimberly Lamm Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai Jenny Lin Engendering an avant-garde: The unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism Leah Modigliani The ecological eye: Assembling an ecocritical art history Andrew Patrizio Migration into art: Transcultural identities and art-making in a globalised world Anne Ring Petersen

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18/02/2010 09:35

Art and migration Revisioning the borders of community

Edited by Bénédicte Miyamoto and Marie Ruiz

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2021 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4970 1 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover: Holly Bynoe, Imperial, 2010. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

To all migrants, may art mediate their power

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors

1

page ix xiii

Revisioning art and migration – Bénédicte Miyamoto and Marie Ruiz 

1

Part I: Art, migration, and borders

2 3 4 5

Empathy, migration, and art: an interview with Dieter Roelstraete 

35

Silenced migrants: an interview with David Antonio Cruz 

45

Memorable mobilities: an interview with Axel Karlsson Rixon 

54

Ambiguous attachments: creations of diasporic aesthetics and migratory imagery in Chinese Australian Art – Birgit Mersmann 

63

6

Retracing colonial choreographies in contemporary Native American art – Christopher T. Green 

88

7

Race, migration, and visual culture: the activist artist challenging the ever-present colonial imagination – Claudia Tazreiter 

113

8

Precarious temporalities: gender, migration, and refugee arts – Rachel A. Lewis 

133

Part II: Migrants’ paths in the arts 

9 10 11

Global and translocal: an interview with Marina Galvani

155

Portrait of the artist as migrant: an interview with Robyn Asleson

166

Stories of Global Displacement: an interview with Massimiliano Gioni

176

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12

A publication of one’s own: identity and community among migrant Latin American artists in New York c. 1970 – Aimé Iglesias Lukin 

186

13

‘Nobody’s darlings’? Edith May Fry and Australian expatriate art in the 1920s – Victoria Souliman 

211

14

Agostina Segatori and the immigrant Italian models of Paris – Susan Waller 

235

15

Gardens, migrations, and memories: aesthetic and intercultural learning and the (re)construction of identity – David Bell

262

Part III: Mapping the researcher’s identity

16

Photographing migrants and positionality: an interview with Leslie Ureña

287

17

Reflections on positionality – Bénédicte Miyamoto and Marie Ruiz

297

Index

306

Illustrations

2.1 3.1 4.1 4.2

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 6.1

6.2 6.3

Olaf Holzapfel (2007) Trassen, exhibition Documenta 14. Courtesy of Olaf Holzapfel. page 36 David Antonio Cruz (2019) suddendly,youandiwillwaitinyourdreams … tonight. Courtesy of David Antonio Cruz. 46 Axel Karlsson Rixon (14 September 2018–6 January 2019) exhibition Mobilité Mémorable / Memorable Mobility, installation. Courtesy of and photo credit: Axel Karlsson Rixon. 55 Axel Karlsson Rixon (14 September 2018–6 January 2019) exhibition Mobilité Mémorable / Memorable Mobility, photograph. Courtesy of and photo credit: Axel Karlsson  Rixon. 58 Ah Xian (1991) Heavy Wounds n° 7. Courtesy of Ah Xian. 70 Ah Xian (1999) China China – Bust n° 34. Courtesy of Ah Xian. 72 Dong Wang Fan (1995) Descendant – Red Environment #1. Courtesy of Dong Wang Fan. 75 Dong Wang Fan (1996) Descendant Bodies #1. Courtesy of Dong Wang Fan. 76 Dong Wang Fan (1997–1999) Shifting Perspectives and the Body. Courtesy of Dong Wang Fan. 78 Dong Wang Fan (1997–1999) Double Screens #1. Courtesy of Dong Wang Fan. 80 Dong Wang Fan (1997–1999) Bardi Madonna #2. Courtesy  of Dong Wang Fan. 81 Postcommodity (Raven Chacon [Navajo/Diné], Cristóbal Martínez [Mestizo], and Kade L. Twist [Cherokee]) (2015) Repellent Fence / Valla Repelente. Courtesy of Postcommodity and Bockley Gallery. Photo credit: Michael Lundgren. 89 Kent Monkman (2005) Taxonomy of the European Male. Courtesy of Kent Monkman. 91 Maria Hupfield (2015) Jiimaan (Canoe). Courtesy of Maria Hupfield. 98

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Illustrations

6.4 Maria Hupfield (2015) Jiimaan (Canoe). Courtesy of Maria Hupfield. Photo credit: Louis Philippe Cote, UQAM. Collection Julia and Robert Foster. 100 6.5 Nicholas Galanin and Oscar Tuazon (2017) Indian Water – The Native American Pavilion. Courtesy of Nicholas Galanin and Oscar Tuazon. 102 6.6 Jerrod Galanin (2017) contribution to Nicholas Galanin and Oscar Tuazon’s exhibition Indian Water – The Native American Pavilion. Courtesy of Nicholas Galanin and Oscar Tuazon. 103 6.7 Alan Michelson (2019) Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World). Courtesy of Alan Michelson. 107 7.1 Hoda Afshar (2018) Remain. Courtesy of Hoda Afshar. 121 7.2 Hoda Afshar (2018) Portrait of Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island. Courtesy of Hoda Afshar. 122 8.1 Meskela Gebreslassie Negeste (2012) Waiting. Courtesy of Meskela Gebreslassie Negeste. 139 8.2 Andrew Bolton and disabled asylum seekers (2013) Bristol Disability Murals, mural painting in Bristol. With credit to contributors, disabled asylum seekers, particularly to Kamil Ahmad who was murdered on 7 July 2016. 143 9.1 Scherezade Garcia (2010) Catedral / Cathedral. Courtesy of Scherezade Garcia. Photo credit: William Vazquez. 156 10.1 Yun Suknam (1993; 2018 version) Mother III. Courtesy of Yun Suknam. 167 11.1 Adrian Paci (2007) Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary Detention Centre). Courtesy of the artist and kaufmann repetto, Milano/New York and Peter Kilchman, Zurich. 177 12.1 Museo Latinoamericano and Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural de Latinoamérica (1971) Contrabienal. Courtesy of Archivo del Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo – La Plata, Argentina. 193 12.2 Luis Wells (1971) Contrabienal. Courtesy of A Archivo del Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo – La Plata, Argentina. 199 12.3 Luis Camnitzer (1971) Contrabienal. Courtesy of Archivo del Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo – La Plata, Argentina. 200 12.4 Antonia Galbraith (1971) Contrabienal. Courtesy of Antonia Guerrero. 201 12.5 Cha/Cha/Cha. A Magazine of Art Criticism Dedicated to the Investigation of the Latin-American Artistic Production (date unknown). Courtesy of Archivo del Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo – La Plata, Argentina. 204

Illustrations

George Coates (1932) Miss Edith Fry. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria. 13.2 George Coates (c. 1912) Arthur Walker and his Brother Harold (The Walker Brothers). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria. 13.3 Arthur Streeton (1896) The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria. 13.4 Elioth Gruner (1917) Frosty Sunrise. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photo credit: Brenton McGeachie. 13.5 Fred Leist (1924) Silver and Blue. Courtesy of National Library of Australia. Permission from copyright owner. 14.1 Vincent Van Gogh (1887) In the Café: Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin. Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 14.2 Vincent Van Gogh (1887) The Italian Woman (Agostina Segatori). Courtesy of Musée d’Orsay. Photo credit: Hervé Lewandowski.  14.3 Jean-Victor Schnetz (1831) The Flood: A Family of Contadini  Surprised by a Quick Overflow of the Tiber Fleeing through the Waters. Courtesy of Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. Photo credit: Philipp Bernard. 14.4 William Bouguereau (1879) Rest. Courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art. 14.5 Thomas Couture (c. 1877) Young Italian Street Musician. Courtesy of Minneapolis Institute of Art. 14.6 Frédéric de Haenen (4 January 1890) Le Marché aux modèles, Place Pigalle, Paris (The Model Market, Place Pigalle, Paris). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Creative Commons. 14.7 Henri Meyer (28 August 1879) Paris Pittoresque: Modèles et Pifferari de la Place Jussieu (Picturesque Paris: Models and  Pifferari in la Place Jussieu). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Creative Commons. 14.8 Eugène Atget (1898–1899) Jardin du Luxembourg. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Creative Commons. 14.9 Jules Chéret (1883) Au Tambourin. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Creative Commons. 14.10 Vincent Van Gogh (1887) Portrait of Agostina Segatori. Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 15.1 David Bell, Shakkei (2018). Courtesy of and photo credit: David Bell.  15.2 David Bell, Mon and Chūmon Gates, and Roji (2018). Courtesy of and photo credit: David Bell.  15.3 David Bell, Wabi, Sabi, Chaniwa, Roji (2018). Courtesy of and photo credit: David Bell. 13.1

214 217 221 228 229 236 237

240 245 246 247

249 250 253 254 272 275 277

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16.1

Lewis Wickes Hine (1911) Italian family living 428 E. 116th St., 2 floor back. They were so illiterate I couldn’t get their names. Have been in US only one month. Mother is learning to make lace for factory near by. Location: New York, New York (State).

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Notes on contributors

Robyn Asleson is  curator of the Prints and Drawings Department at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, and organised the  Portraits of the World: Switzerland  exhibition (15  December 2017–12 November 2018). David Bell is Professor of Education at the University of Otago College of Education in Dunedin, New Zealand. He teaches in graduate and postgraduate programmes in teacher education, specialising in visual arts, art history, and learning theory. He has also taught Japanese visual culture courses for the Department of Art History and published extensively on ukiyo-e ‘floating world picture’ subjects, on the work of Katsushika Hokusai, and on learning in cultural institutions. His research interests embrace pedagogies for aesthetic learning, Japanese art history and aesthetics, and museums as sites for learning transculturalism. David Antonio Cruz is an artist and Art Professor at  the School  of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. He fuses painting and performance to explore the visibility and intersectionality of Brown, Black, and queer bodies, and this is evident in his Chocolate Series. Marina Galvani is curator of the World Bank art collection. She has previously worked in Guatemala, India, Iran, Italy, and Tunisia at the InterAmerican Development Bank and UNESCO. Massimiliano Gioni is artistic director of the New Museum, New York. He curated the Phillips Collection’s The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement exhibition (22 June–22 September 2019, Washington DC). Christopher T. Green is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University New York. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Native American art, the representation and display of Indigenous culture, and the various primitivisms of the historic and neo avant-gardes. His scholarly and critical writing has appeared in Art in America, Frieze, The

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Notes on contributors

Brooklyn Rail,  ARTMargins,  Winterthur Portfolio, and  ab-Original, among others, and he has co-edited issue 11 of SHIFT: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture entitled ‘BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL’. In 2018–2019, he was a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, and he is a 2019–2020 Dedalus Foundation Dissertation Fellow. His dissertation considers the interplay between Euro-American modernism and Northwest Coast Native art.  Aimé Iglesias Lukin is an art historian and curator born in Buenos Aires and currently living in New York. She is finishing her PhD in Art History at Rutgers University with a dissertation entitled ‘This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York 1965–1975’, which maps the international artistic networks in which migrant artists from along the hemisphere are involved in the city, and the role of identity and nostalgia in their art. She completed her MA at The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and her undergraduate studies in Art History at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her writing has been published in Guggenheim USB MAP’s blog Perspectivas, Artl@s Bulletin, and Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, among others, and she has contributed to the College Art Association 2016 and 2018 Annual Conferences, among other symposia. She has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Institute for Studies in Latin American Art, and Fundación Proa. Axel Karlsson Rixon is a Swedish visual artist and photographer. They have published four books, including  Queer Community through Photographic Acts and At the Time of the Third Reading (both 2016). Their main interest lies in photography’s performative aspects in relation to identity, community, othering, and activism. Rachel A. Lewis is Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program at George Mason University. Her research and teaching interests include transnational feminisms, queer theory, sexuality, race and immigration, human rights, and media and cultural studies. She has published articles and book chapters in  The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature; Political Asylum and the Politics of Suspicion; The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender; Teaching Transnational Cinema and Media;  Feminist Formations; Sexualities; International Feminist Journal of Politics; Social Justice; The Journal of Lesbian Studies; and Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Birgit Mersmann is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She is the co-founder of the research group Art Production and Art Theory in the Age of Global Migration

Notes on contributors

established in 2013, and a member of the DFG research network Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents (2018–2021). Her interdisciplinary research covers: image and media theory; visual cultures; modern and contemporary East Asian and Western art; global art history; migratory aesthetics; biennials and new museums in Asia; visual translation; interrelations between script and image; and documentary photography. Recent monographs and edited books include: Handbook of Art and Global Migration: Theories, Practices, and Challenges (2019); Die Ausstellung als ‘Parlament der Dinge’: Theorie und Praxis der Gedankenausstellung bei Bruno Latour (2019); The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity (2016); Schriftikonik: Bildphänomene der Schrift in kultur- und medienkomparativer Perspektive (2015); Transmission Image: Visual Translation and Cultural Agency (2009). Bénédicte Miyamoto is Associate Professor in British History and History of Art at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and a member of the International Art Market Association (TIAMSA). She is a 2019 Folger Shakespeare Library ShortTerm Fellow. Her research focuses on the artistic professions and their relationship to the emergent market of art in the Modern period. She is co-editor with Louisiane Ferlier of Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688–1832 (2020). She has published her research in: London & the Emergence of a European Art Market (c. 1780–1820), edited by Huemer and Avery-Quash (2019); Moving Pictures: Intra-European Trade in Images, 16th–18th Centuries, edited by De Marchi and Raux, Brepols (2014); Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present, edited by Gould and Mesplede (2012, re-released as Routledge paperback, 2016). Dieter Roelstraete is curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. He was a member of the curatorial team that organised the 2017 Documenta 14 in Kassel and in Athens. Marie Ruiz FRHistS is a Research Fellow at Université de Paris (CNRS, LARCA, F-75013 Paris France) and Associate Professor in British History at Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UR CORPUS 4295, F80025, Amiens, France). She is the Chair of COST network Women on the Move (CA19112) and series editor of the Anthem Series in British History. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Bibliographical Society of Canada’s 2021 Tremaine Fellow and 2019 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library, her research focuses on nineteenth-century British female emigration societies. She is the author of British Female Emigration Societies and the New World, 1860–1914 (2017), editor of International Migrations in the Victorian Era (2018), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crises with Cecilia Menjivar and Immanuel Ness (2019).

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Victoria Souliman has recently completed her PhD in Art History at the University of Sydney and Université de Paris. Her research focuses on issues of national identity, expatriatism, and women’s agency in the artistic exchanges between Australia and Britain during the interwar years. Souliman is a member of the Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Cultures Anglophones at Université de Paris. She currently teaches art history at the University of Sydney. Her publications include ‘British Modernism from an Australian Point of View: Clarice Zander’s 1933 Exhibition of British Contemporary Art’ in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 17:1, 84–96. Claudia Tazreiter is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research is in the fields of political sociology, social theory, visual cultures, race, ethnicity, and migration, with a focus on: the social and affective impacts of forced and irregular migration on human rights culture; the role of civil society in social change; and visual cultures of dissent. She is the author of numerous articles, chapters, and books including: Asylum Seekers and the State: The Politics of Protection in a Security-Conscious World (2004, 2006); Fluid Security in the Asia Pacific: Transnational Lives, Human Rights and State Control (2016); and the Handbook on Migration and Global Justice, edited with Leanne Weber (forthcoming). She convenes the Forced Migration Research Network at the University of New South Wales. She has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Political Science, University Vienna (2018), Center for Place, Culture and Politics, City University New York (2014) and the Centre de recherches internationales at Science Po (2011) and is a Fellow at the Institute for Migration and Intercultural Studies, University Osnabrück. Leslie Ureña is associate curator of photographs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She was curator of In Mid-Sentence (2019) and One Life: Marian Anderson (2019), She also serves on the curatorial team for the ongoing series ‘Portraiture Now’, which includes the upcoming exhibition Kinship (2021). Susan Waller is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Missouri-St Louis. Her books include: Women Artists in the Modern Era: A Documentary History (1991, 2002); The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830–1870 (2006); and Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris: Strangers in Paradise, 1870–1914 (2015), co-edited with Karen L. Carter. In addition, her research has been published in: The Art Bulletin; Art History; Oxford Art Journal; History of Photography; Feminist Modernist Studies; Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide; Source; and Woman’s Art Journal.

Revisioning art and migration Bénédicte Miyamoto and Marie Ruiz

I’m often asked the same question: What in your work comes from your own culture? As if I have a recipe and I can actually isolate the Arab ingredient, the woman ingredient, the Palestinian ingredient. People often expect tidy definitions of otherness, as if identity is something fixed and easily definable. (Antoni and Hatoum, 1998: 54)

Art history and migration studies in dialogue

How can we rethink art history to uproot its expectations of ‘tidy definitions of otherness’? The borders of cultural identity are often drawn according to a ‘fiction of authenticity’.1 Plural art histories help us challenge the discipline’s geographical subfields. They tap into the artistic communities’ experiences of ‘transcultural or hybrid forms of subject formation and construction of cultural identities, … the multi-directional processes of migration [affecting] migrating individuals as much as it does the receiving communities’ (Chikukwa, 2016: 80). Transnational artistic influences and the migration of artistic communities have long challenged national definitions of identity and heritage. In essence, transnationalism ties international communities through networking and the circulation of ideas between migrants’ home countries and receiving lands. Art and Migration: Revisioning the Borders of Community focuses on the conceptual link between art and migration, challenging physical, political and ethnic frontiers, as well as the frontiers of the art community itself – a supposedly globalised community re-assessed in this volume as also structurally bordered by art market dynamics, career constraints and patronage networks for example. What are the reasons that propel artists into migration and what goals do they pursue? How much does migration impact work and career? What does assimilation, integration and/or multiculturalism mean for artistic encounters and creation? What does art history have to bring to migration studies? These questions highlight the need for an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history and migration studies. Such an exchange helps uncover how

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Contents Art and migration

impactful and manipulative the representations of migration have been and continue to be, offering critical tools to those who study the contours of socalled migration ‘crises’, their reception and the resulting policies they trigger. In an increasingly international art scene and market, art challenges the structural forces that expound migration as disruptive and that construct the migration experience as an anomaly and impoverishment, when it is in fact a long-standing and fertile human phenomenon. Through its intensifying transnational display and visibility, artistic creation acts as a unifying and global power on our perception of current events, having both the potential to shed light on and overcome physical frontiers and human stigmatisation. Migrations studies increasingly emphasise that ‘the cultural construction of citizenship does not take place only within the confines of the policy sphere, but it is also shaped by the continuous re-elaboration of discourse in the  public sphere’ (Ambrosini et al., 2020: 9) The arts are undoubtedly one of the most powerful discursive structures of the public sphere, actively renegotiating the definition of borders and identity. In keeping with the objectives of the Rethinking Art Histories series, Art and migration challenges the geographical dividing lines conventionally imposed on art history. It aims to bring to the fore how the myriad trajectories of transnational artworks and artists’ careers, far from being marginal phenomena, are the very fabric of the art worlds, sustaining international art centres by the density and dynamism of the networks they create through cross-border movements. If migration has increasingly taken centre stage in contemporary art, this mainly derives from artists claiming the universality of the experience and artistic paradigm of migration – an in-depth re-evaluation that is far more than a reaction to a sense of current ‘crisis’ (Mathur, 2011). Shifting geographies of artistic encounters are a historical continuum in art, as exemplified by the cyclical relocation of art centres underpinned by migration as well as the waxing and waning of cities’ economic attraction and critical mass. This has seen power transfer from Rome and Florence in Italy, to Delft and Antwerp in the Netherlands in the Early Modern period, to the markets and cultural centres of Paris and London in the Modern period. Artworks and artists then transferred from Old Europe to the New World in the Gilded Age. Chinese art saw its attractive power centres shift from court to court, from the city of Chang’an to Luoyang under the Shang to Zhou dynasties, from Bianjing to Li’nan during the Song dynasty, and from Shangdu to Khabaliq under the Yuan dynasty – each move had repercussions on the hybridity and cosmopolitanism of the artistic styles developed. How did art history explain and analyse these shifts of power and their relation to creativity? It is well documented in art history that after the First World War, some American artists continued to train in France, which had become a destination of choice for artists in the nineteenth century, with

Revisioning art and migration

internationalising art schools (such as the École des Beaux-Arts) and galleries. In turn, these American artists introduced French artists to new artistic forms, and during the Second World War, some French artists fled to New York, which subsequently became a booming art scene attracting a diversity of rich artistic currents and developing the movements of surrealism, expressionism, and abstractionism, among others. In the same vein, in the 1870s, London artists welcomed and supported the integration of many activist artists and Impressionists fleeing the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris siege and the aftermath of the Paris Commune. This also influenced French artists’ use of colour, and Monet famously came back at the turn of the century to produce a large collection of London paintings. These interactions between French, British, and American art have long been celebrated with blockbuster exhibitions and museum shows that underline the interplay of artistic influences – but until recently, these Western-centric art histories tended to be narrated with the vagaries of war as contextual background, and rarely with these cross-border experiences as the backbone and catalyst of artistic creation. Artistic centres in Europe and America have ceded some power in the twenty-first century to more regional locations through globalisation, with the art market allegedly recently experiencing an ‘Asian century’. The rise of new markets in the Global South – a term encompassing such diverse country profiles as South America, Africa, India, South-Eastern Asia, and Southern Europe, for example, and used to refer to emerging economies – has disrupted the art market worldwide, also thanks to South–South cross-cultural flows. Increasingly recognised as persistent and specific, the Global South’s contribution to the worldwide art market has persuaded art historians to revise how they construed local art as ethnic and embedded in local networks, and international art as highly marketable and universalist, since these labels proved progressively ineffective due to their Western-centric hierarchy. The realisation that the study of art, artists and currents has much to gain from highlighting the inextricable link to migration has sent the discipline of art history itself in a propitious flux: ‘The “whither” may go hither and thither, but perhaps in the crisscrossing of space and time, art history, though it loses its connecting thread, may gain in its conceptual amplitude’, concludes Parul Dave Mukherji in her analysis of the global turn (Mukherji, 2014). Art and migration acknowledges the cultural relevance of mediating the migrant experience to the world at large. Artworks are semiotic goods, bearers of signs that are perceived in a specific cultural context, and which at the same time disrupt this context. As such, they are both potent revealers and irritants of complex cultural links, of shared beliefs and values (Luhmann, 2000). Historically, even national art schools or academies have somehow questioned national perspectives and values, and canonical art has largely

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been influenced by international artistic heritage. Artworks on migration – and discussion of artworks on migration – have increasingly escaped the tropes of exile and have defeated binary analyses that position migrationinspired artworks as the visions of mere in-betweeners and insist on their hyphenated status (Kaplan, 1996). For instance, artists such as Icy and Tot cannot be summed up by the binary label of Iranian-born and Brooklynbased artists – migration has been a recurrent art theme for them, and has arguably contributed to a celebration and inquiry of rootlessness and displacement, their street art mixing, as it does, cultures and languages, on walls in Shanghai or Norway. These artists revision art’s histories by challenging our localised understanding of art, and showing us that the artist, ‘protean in its adaptative capacity and signif(ying) a subversive force from within any system’, mirrors the experience of migrants who ‘operate at the thresholds of space and politics language and power and in so doing constantly negotiate and produce new concepts of transcultural identities, both personal and collective, that are destabilising to established orders, systems, and codifications’ (Lum, 2020: 140). Recent curatorial concerns about the visibility of migration in collections and archives are not just reactions to the heightened visual presence of the so-called migration ‘crisis’ in the media and popular discourse. These concerns tap into a reappraisal of the historic formation of national identities increasingly seen as constructed under international visual influences. Yet, if hybridisation of stylistic references, formats, and subject matters have time and again demonstrated the mediating powers of artistic production, the art world has not yet completely erased the North–South divide. For example, in the case of African and African diaspora artists, ‘several factors serve to undermine their visibility; among the mix is the exoticizing taste of gatekeepers of international cultural platforms and the lack of cooperative engagement of concerned bodies inside and outside the continent’ (Hassan and Oguibe, 2001: 5). In reaction, museums have taken steps more recently to give centre stage to transnational artistic influences. In 2012, the Tate Britain exhibited Migrations: Journeys into British Art. In 2014 the Smithsonian American Art Museum debuted Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, an exhibition that toured America. In 2015, the MOMA reunited, for its OneWay Ticket exhibition, the 60 panels of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series, thereby sealing its iconic status in history painting. In 2018, the Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin staged New/Old Homeland – Artist’s R/emigration, reinvestigating post-war Germany’s artistic practice in the light of exile and its connections to international modernity. And the thirteenth edition of Senegal’s Dak’Art, one of the most important African art biennials, was inaugurated by the arrival of six artists in a yellow molue – an iconic Lagos bus – having conquered the incessant checkpoints along the South–South migration road

Revisioning art and migration

from Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Ivory Coast under the initiative of the Nigerian installation and performance artist Emeka Udemba. By celebrating migration, curators and artists concur that artistic styles and currents are profoundly impacted by migration, and that the will to create is often the origin of migration itself. The Singapore-based Malaysia-born artist Heman Chong’s short-term migration to Berlin in 2006 meant ‘circulation’ and ‘the access to a huge pool of people that could either influence or extend your practice’, escaping the craft tradition transmitted by Singapore’s colonial past, for example (Chong, 2006: 33–35). Experiences vary widely, with artists migrating in search of a better life, of an international career, of more enlightened patrons, or to escape censorship or neo-imperial patterns, but artists’ interviews often underline the defining impact of circulation on their work. As such, Art and migration investigates how movements and exchanges become producers of culture. Art – through the visual materiality of artworks – gives shape and form to the dynamic relationships between artistic communities and both host and home cultures. Art is always a representation of borders, and a commentary on the contours of cultural exchanges, may these artistic encounters be local, regional, or international – and even museums result from these exchanges. Many museums were originally endowed with a historical mission, that of articulating and consolidating a national identity – but they have long been in fact the products of transnational networks of personnel, objects, technologies, and ideas, and are increasingly seen as conduits of diversity, documenting how sedenterisation has rarely been the norm for artists or works of art (Meyer and Savoy, 2014; Whitehead et al., 2017). In successfully bringing together the Dutch and Flemish scene and the English practice of sociability, as in An English Family at Tea (Tate Britain, c. 1720), migrant painter Joseph Van Aken became a successful artistic mediator in Georgian London. So much so that his works, like many of his contemporaries and fellow nationals, have often been attributed to leading British painters (Tate Britain, 2014, ‘Collection and Display’ #5: Former Hogarths). Recent vigorous research in art history has emphasised that the worlds of art have historically operated on a transcultural system, which involved migration for training, the reliance on transnational finances and commissions, and intercultural provenance trails (Wrapson et al., 2019). With artists travelling from court to court, and with guilds struggling to repell artists from other cities, while academies fostered training across borders, the art worlds have contended with art crossing borders. Since medieval and pre-modern times, artists have travelled from court to court, crossing the borders of communities, patronage, and polities. Artists, as highly skilled migrants, built upon kinship and merchant networks to gain craft guild membership in host cities and citizenship rights, while academies fostered training across borders (Ojala-Fulwood, 2018).

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Erasure and appropriation are not new phenomena but are still at work in contemporary museums. In their manifesto for curatorial activism, Maura Reilly and Lucy remind us that only 14 percent of the works displayed at MoMA in 2016 were by non-white artists (Reilly and Lippard, 2018). This racism inherent in the display of collections intersects with the lack of representation or even erasure in art history at large of artists who have migrated. British-Ghanaian artist Godfried Donkor’s 2001 A Section of Lord Byron’s Drawing Rooms, or the 2010 series of ‘Self Portrait as a White Man’ by the Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda, along with works such as The Great Italian Nude Tryptich or his Merchant of Venice, remind us of the need to reinsert the migrant self into the tableau. These works rewrite contemporary art history by decentring its canonicity in general and its modernism in particular, and highlight the circulation and transfer of art in Europe, which has been migratory for longer than tends to be acknowledged. Amy Lonetree’s call to loosen the curators’ control over exhibitions dealing with Native American artefacts, culture, and artists resonates with these migrant artists’ own demands for selfdetermination in the display space (Lonetree, 2012). Uncovering and reappraising migrations – often silenced by normative archives or by nationalist attribution practices – is part of the workload of revisioning art history and decolonising museums. Migration terminology: a road map

If the art worlds have long been terrains of migration, clear benefits are to be reaped from a rapprochement between the discipline of art history and that of migration studies – notably to equip art histories with a terminology that keeps out of political quicksand. Stemming from the Latin verb migrare, meaning to leave or to die, migration refers to a movement resulting in temporary or permanent change of residence. Yet, the terminology generally used to refer to migration today is exemplary of the modern appropriations of the now politically constructed meaning of ‘migration’. Has migration – a natural phenomenon that has existed since the dawn of humanity – been turned into an anomaly? Far from unprecedented, migration has marked world history, and understanding that intensified periods of migration have existed before the twenty-first century is necessary to ground current migration patterns in  the tradition of human mobility. Yet, an increase in migration flows is sometimes used as justification for popular and political representations of racial and cultural differences, which may explain why the term ‘migration’ has evolved to somehow become pejorative. Migration flows clearly intensified during the Industrial Revolution, the two World Wars and the decolonisation period. These specific periods triggered tougher control on migration, which framed it as an irregularity affecting the consolidation

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of emerging nation-states, endangering their stability and security. In such contexts, migrants and migration have often become easy targets defined as problematic. An article published by the BBC news online magazine in 2015, entitled ‘The battle over the words used to describe migrants’, revealed the general misuses in migration terminology (Ruz, 2015). People indeed often associate migration with the condition of asylum seekers or even refugees, when these are very different terms and realities. Therefore, a road map of the evolution of migration terminology seems necessary. The BBC article shows how the originally neutral term ‘migrant’ acquired pejorative connotations, and how it is sometimes mistakenly associated with the negatively perceived term ‘asylum-seeker’, as if it were synonymous. ‘Asylum-seeker’ is then incorrectly replaced by ‘refugee’. A refugee is a migrant who has been granted refugee status at the end of an often long and difficult process to prove the existence of a danger of persecution in their country of origin and the necessity to seek protection elsewhere. On the contrary, an asylum seeker is seeking refugee status and is waiting for a response to their application. Uninvited and unauthorised, asylum seekers are often deemed unwanted in the receiving country, which may perceive them as economic and social burdens or threats, their integration not yet being given legal status. Hence, these are official terms that are regularly applied inappropriately outside the context in which they were created. Asylum seekers are thus commonly perceived as irregular migrants and are in danger of being deported as non-nationals if refused refugee status. The reason why the term ‘migrant’ has evolved to be perceived negatively may be explained by its association with the notion of volition, whereas the word ‘refugee’ is identified with coercion – refugees having no other choice but to leave their home country because of identified dangers and persecution. Yet, some may argue that there is a degree of volition in all migration processes, and this does not prevent ‘refugees’ being cast as problematic, especially when migration terminologies are inappropriately used. Another such semantic inaccuracy concerns ‘economic migrants’ who are sometimes associated with asylum seekers accused of migrating with no serious persecution threat, only to enjoy the receiving countries’ benefits, whereas the term actually refers to people who migrate to improve their quality of life. A common understanding of migration terms is necessary to better apprehend the conceptual link between art and migration, as well as the challenges it entails. It is vital for art historians to approach the debate by avoiding imprecise and controversial language, often stemming from widespread misappropriations used in the press. Greussing and Boomgaarden have shown that media descriptions of migrants can generally be split into three representational categories: passive victims, national threats, or dehumanised anonymous. These uses are not without consequences because representing

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migrants as victims may lead to viewing them in desperate need of external support, and thus easily perceived as burdens to the receiving nations. In general, the media describe migrants in a way that suggests societies have no power to regulate the arrival of groups of migrants. The term ‘caravan’ is a recent case in point. Depicted as threats – generally wrongly associated with crime and terrorism – they can be pictured as dehumanised others, disregarded and rendered invisible (Greussing and Boomgaarden, 2017). Similarly, the misuse of the term ‘diaspora’, originally referring to the dispersion of the Jews, entails the perception of a disorganised and uncontrolled large-scale group migration, when the word actually refers to communities who maintain links with their home country, in a transnational perspective that fosters socio-cultural bonds. Resorting to a combination of corpus-based approach and critical discourse analysis of British and American liberal and conservative press, Boeva has unveiled the negative stance taken by the media and political actors, as well as their power to shape people’s perception of migration as anomalous. She has also revealed that the migrants’ countries of origin are an important determinant of anti-immigration discourses, which set the desirable at odds with the undesirable migrants. Boeva has shown that the water imagery regularly used to describe migrant arrivals (‘flows’, ‘stream’, ‘influx’) connotes the uncontrollable nature of population movements and is often associated with perceived high numbers of migrants, in turn inevitably raising popular panic (Boeva, 2016). Discourses based on fear of foreigners can be fuelled by visual representations of invasion, an example being British pro-Brexit party UKIP’s Breaking Point poster during the 2016 Brexit campaign – reminiscent of Nazi antiimmigration visual propaganda. According to Lucassen, many factors have paved the way for the evolution of the definition of ‘migration’ as a negative term: general dissatisfaction with globalisation since the 1980s, recent terrorist attacks, and the rise of populism have led to the current perception of migration as a threat to national security and stability (Lucassen, 2015). What has also led to the pejorativisation of the term ‘migrant’ is an obsession with preserving whiteness, a preference for assimilation, and a fear of multiculturalism perceived as a danger to the stability of receiving countries’ dominant culture. Restrictive migration legislation has inevitably legitimised the exclusion of newcomers, and has thus fuelled fear of otherness, borderlessness, and social unrest. Today’s so-called ‘migration crisis’ is a crisis of ‘otherness’ inasmuch as ‘others’ are perceived as threats coming from outside one’s community. This has laden the term ‘migrant’ with a heritage that is often rejected even when researchers concede that its definitions are operational and descriptions accurate (Sontag, 2018). On 25 April 2015, during a protest at the European Commission in London, the Movement Against Xenophobia’s slogan was ‘Migrant Lives

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Matter’, echoing the American watchword ‘Black Lives Matter’, thus openly linking migration to the question of race. According to De Genova, today’s ‘migrant crisis’ is in fact a racial crisis because, despite dominant discourses’ racial denial, migrants are often racialised as non-white, a social construct meant to reassert racialised domination and social hierarchies, but above all white supremacy. Blackness is not a question of skin colour, but rather the significant of the construction of hierarchies and power relations (De Genova, 2017a). Fear of immigrants goes hand in hand with questions of assimilation, cultural and ethnic identity, and national borders. The nationstate ideologies, grounded on ethnic and cultural homogeneity, contradict the understanding of migration as a natural phenomenon – borderlessness representing a danger to national homogeneity. Yet, migrating art and artists regularly show that national cultures cannot be understood in isolation but need to be comprehended as transnationally interconnected. In such context, art production and art exhibitions can function as forms of cultural diplomacy against political discourses on racial homogeneity that sustain the structuration of ethnic hierarchies and lead to the perception of migrants as deviant and a danger to the nation-state unity. This volume proposes an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history and migration studies that highlights art’s power to challenge political representations of migration as an anomaly, as well as the ensuing entrenchment of borders between communities. Such interdisciplinary dialogue can be conducted through transnational approaches that underline the parallels between two mobile communities – that of artists and migrants – their mutual understanding, as well as individual and communal bonds. As such, artists and art forms on the move are key actors of cultural mobility. In a dialogue across the boundaries between art history and migration studies, methodological differences are easily reconcilable, the transnational turn being key to developing understanding of migrant communities as well as the art world’s mobility and hybridisation. In the same vein, the recent focus on infrastructures of migration – at the meso level between artists/migrants, artworks/non state actors and institutions – also ties in artistic infrastructures, brokerage and migration systems, essential to understanding both art and migration. Against the macro-narrative that regularly frames migration as an anomaly, thus reinforcing the rigidity of national borders, Art and migration challenges the stability of politically constructed frontiers by critically examining art’s mediating power to overcome structural boundaries. The objective is also to bring art history to the fore in the debate on how migration is represented and understood. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, art stands as a resisting force that undermines and reconfigures the intensification of national borders, and this has often meant a subversion and reconfiguration of the traditional

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networks of display, partnerships, and exhibitions. The ‘difficulty of matching the gravity of the issue with an appropriate artistic expression … seemed to disallow exhibition’, and entailed a necessity to renegotiate power (Berggren, 2019: 115). In keeping with the contentious nature of their topic, many of these art forms and visual shocks have stood as public critiques of politically constructed borders by also eschewing the traditional presentation spaces reserved for their genre – visuals have been installed in public spaces without authorisation, and documentaries have chosen alternative distribution networks. In 2019 local charities and NGOs and the network Rete Oltre il Ponte set up an unauthorised exhibition of Drowning Hands, a stark visual installed guerrilla-style in the main square of Pescara, Italy, in protest against Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigration policies (see Mezzofiore, 2019). Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2017 VR installation-drama about immigrants, Carne y Arena literally de-centred and disoriented the Cannes festival audience, through its immersive experience set up at Cannes-Mandelieu airport. Similarly, Ai Weiwei sought to disrupt the annual Berlinale film festival in 2016 with his installation of 14,000 life jackets wrapped around the columns of the Konzerthaus in Berlin, a gesture that highlighted his #safepassage campaign. These controversial and media-savvy moves spark a necessary political dialogue between art and migration, and they generally display viralready iconography, staying rooted in shock – and stock – images of migration and crisis. Hence, art and migration meet around the notion of border, a major impediment to human mobility, especially at times of political restrictions and border closing. Borders also represent an inspiration for artists engaged with borderlessness and nomadic subjects as the new norm and the future of the artistic community. Their works actively challenge the strict definition of politically controlled borders and restricted human mobility. As such, Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili explores the ambiguities of borders as limitations and opportunities by exhibiting minorities performing their resistance narratives and strategies against structural powers. Mostly working with installation, print, video, and photography, she represents the multifaceted dimension of migration infrastructures – both negatively inhibiting and positively enabling mobility. She thus uses individual experiences to represent collective stories that envisage borderless communal structures, as in her series of videos The Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011) and the Constellations Series (2011). This volume agrees that art history cannot be ‘independent of the history of exile, migration and economic exchange’, and that ‘the local has always been irradiated, as it were, by the larger world’ (Greenblatt, 2010: 3–4). However, it argues that the term ‘cultural mobility’ is understated and indirect, thus rendering it ineffective. The book advocates instead for a wider use of the

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unromanticised and politically unambiguous term ‘migration’ in art historical narratives. If ‘cultural mobility’ has been increasingly adopted by art historians, it is because it is a useful term to also discuss the flow of materials, artefacts, and techniques through human mediation (Tilley, 2001; Knappett, 2005). In order for art history’s gaze to remain firmly fixed on the agent-provocateurs behind the flow of objects, ideas, currents, and avant-gardes, a shift in terminology needs to be favoured. The term ‘migrant’, ‘with allowances for voluntary movement and self-willed acts of mutability and becoming’ (Demos, 2017: 18) should be favoured since it implies cultural mobility without being bottled up by it. Reclaiming the term ‘migration’ will help us explain why the term has become subjected to judgement, and found guilty of ‘desertion [that] amounts to transgression’ compared, for example, to the term ‘diaspora’ (Guha, 1998). And, in turn, art history should engage a reflection on the strict accuracy of terms such as ‘bohemian’, ‘itinerant’, ‘peripatetic’, ‘nomadic’, ‘exiled’, and ‘refugee’. These labels are linked to a category of reasons – supposedly discernible, measurable and autonomous – why the person migrated, and they are employed in ways that often overstretch even their precise periodical, political, sociological, and cultural definitions (Bruneau, 2010; Hicks and Mallet, 2019: 47–65). Contrary to Anne Ring Petersen, we vouch that analytical precision necessitates the term ‘migrant’ to be used more systematically, precisely because we must put rest to the idea that definitions are only operative if they gauge how ‘voluntary’ or ‘self-willed’ the act of migration is, has been or will continue to be (Petersen, 2017: 6). Art and borders

Recent studies of art crossing borders have evidenced that the supposed fixity of national identities was actually an intellectual construct elaborated in reaction and in parallel to the tightening of cross-border informational networks, the increase in market integration, and the international expansion of careers – and that this phenomenon, which was full blown in the nineteenth century, started as soon as the Early Modern era (Baetens and Lyna, 2019). The nation-state ideal that emerged in the Modern era has entrenched politically constructed borders by defining national identities as key and uniform, thus excluding undesirable non-nationals as threats to national homogeneity. Yet, art has constantly used non-national models as sources of inspiration and fascination, choosing its models and visual references from cultures beyond its perimeters, and contradicting the nation-state ideal of racial and cultural homogeneity. The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s symposium ‘A Line that Birds cannot See’: Mexican/US Arts and Artists Crossing Borders in the 20th Century (November 2018) derived its title from Alberto Ríos’ poem The Border: A Double Sonnet (2015) to underline the soft power of the arts,

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and how it can influence public opinion on migration against the polarisation induced by politically constructed borders: The border is a line that birds cannot see. … The border is the blood clot in the river’s vein. The border says stop to the wind, but the wind speaks another language, and keeps going. … The border is a big, neat, clean, clear black line on a map that does not exist.

Comprehension of population movements has been affected by the standardisation and the literal ‘bad press’ of repetitive and harrowing displays of migrant visuals, filmed and photographed according to ethnographic and quasi ‘war zone’ documentary style. This has impoverished the debate on art and migration and obscured the historical continuum of so-called migration ‘crises’. The foregrounding of the plight of the migrant has led to many artistic reactions, creations, and events that have set their goal on raising awareness by relying on the shock experience and powerful mediation of artworks. The portmanteau word ‘artivism’ joins ‘art’ and ‘activism’ to categorise art that primarily intends to push a political agenda or a social message. Artivist artists have been confronted with the difficulty of establishing an artistic dialogue with the stereotypical migrant visuals, and yet meeting the goals of triggering empathy as well as shame in the audience. These issues are at the heart of the recent development of cross-cultural visual politics (Danko, 2018). Dutch artist Lonnie Van Brummelen’s 2004–2005 triptych film entitled Grossraum (Borders of Europe) is a reflection on the current public concern for migration and the states’ ‘tactics of bordering’ (Anzaldúa, 2007; De Genova, 2017b). She chose to represent border crossings from ‘a high point of view at an appropriate distance from the frontier post, so that individual persons cannot be recognised’ – a choice that was led by the necessity to comply with security regulations in a UN-controlled territory where even photography is forbidden without permission, and the subverting irony of choosing to present silent travellings in grainy Agfa colours on 35mm film, thus smacking of surveillance films. The artwork operates fully with its appended 40-page dossier ‘Formal Trajectory’ documenting her arduous application process for official authorisation. It professes multiple times, for example – tongue firmly in cheek – that ‘any possible misunderstanding of the Green Line as an official border will not occur’ (Van Brummelen, 2005), and provides a clear parallel with the migrants’ daily encounter with the absurd administrative labyrinth. However, there has also been increasing interrogation within the artistic community about the efficacy of representing the migrants’ plight, given the exploitative pitfalls of the subject matter, in the context ‘of an emergent politics of documentation and the counter-politics of witnessing’ (Hicks and Mallet, 2019: 20). Questions have repetitively arisen over the moral

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acceptability, and the limits of art’s ethical responsibility when the audience is faced with art installations of salvaged migrant objects – from the recurring trope of migrant shoes to the 2019 Barca Nostra exhibit of a shipwrecked migrant ship at the 58th Venice Biennale.2 Critics have also questioned the methodological blind spots of video art that choose poor quality image and sound, or unedited and extensive footages pretending to document as close as possible the reality of a life ‘on the move’, as if unmediated documentation was a possibility and as if visual samples could in any way become generalised (Yanow, 2014). Questions have also arisen over the potentially harmful choice of offering visually stunning images in noble, extensive, and canonical materials – such as Rebeca Belmore’s 2017 marble tent Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) created for Documenta 14 in Athens – thus rendering scenes of suffering beautiful (Demos, 2013b; Ong, 2017). The theme of migration places these works of art at the centre of a turmoil of questions and current disputes on visual politics and the ethics of representation. Emma Chubb, Smith College Museum of Art’s curator, underlines that too often representation of migration ‘rely on visible markers of racial, linguistic, and geographic difference in ways that recall earlier Orientalist and colonialist representations of the “Other”’ (Chubb, 2015: 268). She questions ‘to what extent does art reproduce exotic scenes of subjection, already so ubiquitous in European media outlets, for the pleasure of the art tourist and the cultural capital of the exhibiting museum, gallery, or organization?’ (Chubb, 2016: 30). The many intersections between artistic experimentations with current issues and problematic responses to migration viewed as an anomaly provide fertile ground to explore both aestheticism and the flirting with visual media stereotypes that is often at the heart of artivism – itself over-determined by a sense of urgency. This has often elicited artistic responses solely focused on non-Western, South–North, and Mediterranean migration, and wrapped up in documenting emergency. Artistic reactions to the phenomenon of migration have also deepened reflections about the transformative power of the arts in the face of current events described as crises, and ultimately, this has opened up crucial discussions on how, for what and for whom art works. The growing endeavour of artists to claim art as a social consciousness trigger has been one of the most important discussions accompanying the museum and art scene’s turns from art as canonicity and authority, to art as education and documentation, and more recently to art as empathy and counter-witnessing (Demos, 2015; Hicks and Mallet, 2019). In this process, art on migration or by migrant artists has been a catalyst for these deconstructions, making for a ‘catalogue of other places, moments, and a constellation of dispossession in the world … a critique of the structure of feeling that Said has referred to as the “quasi-religious authority of being at home among one’s people”’ (Said, 1983: 16; Mufti, 2011: 193).

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How can art mediate the experience of dislocation and movement by creating images of migration that revitalise the gaze of the audience? The concept of migration in artistic practice is increasingly viewed as challenging frontiers, as creator of in-between and uncertain spaces where multiple contexts, places and times encounter and contradict the fixity of state-controlled structures. The topics these practices tackle have widened the dialogue in a way that narratives centred on the voyage have not. The latter have latched on a point in time, and are influenced by the fallacy of the term ‘crisis’. They represent migration by locating its ‘decisive point’ – a synonym for ‘crisis’ – in the act  of passage. But more rounded representations of migration also broach topics of memory, loss and grieving, resettlement and translocation, immobility and state of limbo, and the trauma of hybridised, violated, and estranged identities. For instance, UK-born of West Indian descent Hurvin Anderson’s Jersey (Tate Gallery, London) represents the interior of a barbershop in Kingsland, Jamaica. Anderson’s work exemplifies the notion of in-betweenness and documents the post-war arrival of Caribbean migrants in the UK as well as the interplay of transnationalism and assimilation. Allying photo-realistically depicted objects and the incongruity of brightly coloured squares and implausible shadows dispersed in the picture as floating elements, it plays on absence and presence, and the blurring of memory  – a testimony to the in-betweenness of the migrant. It reflects the triangular socio-cultural relationship between the welcoming and sending societies and the in-between spaces where second-generation migrants create their lives. Far from being solely limited to disrupted identities, in-betweenness is also a creator of hyphenated identities, a space of exchange where practices and references hybridise. Expressing diverse experiences of culture and identity, as well as the intersecting importance of migration and racialisation, Anderson’s work is diasporic. It reflects a sense of in-between and a lasting discrepancy between migrants’ self at departure and their adjustment to their new home – in pictures where figures are often absent, or at best turning their back on the audience. The migrant’s struggle for public and political visibility is the central question in these images, and their ontological struggle lies in the ‘capacity to appear’ (Rancière, 2003). It is noteworthy that the notion of home has been challenged as an unstable notion by recent scholarship in migration and border studies, and the term of in-betweenness has the merit of highlighting the emotional toll for migrants – who struggle to reach the ‘final destination of their geographical and moral journey’ (Belloni, 2019) – that often also translates into the political and social burden of being treated as a labour pawn rather than a citizen. The ‘national situation’, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, is for many artists an inescapable situation and depends neither on ideology or choices, since ‘the continued existence of nation-states is tied to labor … [artists]

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work in that, and what they can do they do in that. What they can’t do is dictated in that. It’s a boundary that cannot really be transgressed’ (Jameson, 2010: 14). The setting up of the migrant as a reference image of cross-border universalism is part of the resistance to analysis of art in terms of ‘culturalism’ and national specificities, but in some cases it can also miss the point. It can distort the reality of the migrant experience in both the home and host countries in favour of a supposed state of mobility that for many is only episodic, rarely disconnected, and even more rarely freeing from labour constraints. Although art – as this volume underlines – is by essence a questioning and transgression of borders, the flow across borders of art – and even more so of artists – remains difficult and significantly hampered by national barriers and state lines. The redistribution of power between centres and peripheries thanks to the migration of art and artists, if not a recent phenomenon, is still also far from prevailing yet (Velthuis and Baia Curioni, 2015). Migration and global art worlds

Art and migration underlines the linkage between migration and art as a long standing, rather than new, phenomenon with regional and transnational perspectives. Art history of geographically defined areas is now rarely conducted as an essentially national project framed by the space of the nation-state, and comparisons between international contexts and transnational contacts are not marginal anymore, but are analysed as defining and integrated causalities, with artistic exchanges firmly placed as the root of stylistic developments for example. As historian of migration Dirk Hoerder notes, ‘the customary way of approaching the world’s vast territorial expanses has been the division into continents, clearly bordered and named entities. However, in the last decades scholarship has become critical of “borderlines” and for almost a century has been critical of “place”’ (Hoerder, 2019: 22). Hoerder contends that geographical fixity restricts analyses of migrations to established terminologies and prevents human conceptualisations. He also suggests that dividing physical geography into macro-regions of human connectedness is more efficient, as macro-regions take into account physical resources and human activity. According to him, ‘research requires an inclusive and analytical historical narrative as a basis for socialization into ways of thinking about migrations’ (Hoerder, 2019: 35). Studies in the globalisation of the art worlds have not erased borders by opting for a study through the lens of world economy. Rather, they have reinforced the analysis of the subnational phenomenon of global cities, and enhanced attention to their transnational (rather than international) coordination of vibrant and denationalising networks (Sassen, 2006). In the art world, this decrease of inter-state power and national framings has been

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relayed through city branding and organised fairs and biennials. Yet, curatorial autonomy and progressive and/or radical political messages are often at odds in these major, money-making and highly staged fairs, biennials and exhibitions, which tend to be held in conventional venues that have a long history of institutional shows of power (Jones, 2016). Critics of these events and of the attractive power of global art centres show that the global ‘turn’ is not so much a global momentum as an overreach of market forces, and that global nodes reproduce a colonial model of synergy and authority between the centre and the peripheries (Quemin, 2004). Critics also often underline that both Western art historical practices and Western art market networks are not as far-reaching and all-encompassing as the term ‘global’ would convey, and that both local biases as well as literally off-centre art historical practices thrive in other parts of the globe (Chakrabarty, 2000; Vermeylen, 2015). Refusing to reinforce state borders, questioning how colonial practices are reproduced in fairs, and generally reappraising how much movement, porosity and interstitiality actually animates the art worlds have become pressing questions for art historians, curators and practitioners. Already in 2010, the imperative was pressed upon art historians: ‘Since so much of the art market and international art practices have to do with global travel, global art display, and global markets, [we need to see] what kinds of inclusions and exclusions are at stake there’ (Valiavicharska, 2010: 6). Country specific exhibition pavilions, for example, used to be the defining architecture that sustained and fed national artistic narratives. The 57th Venice Art Biennale exploded these constructs in 2017 by rebranding them as ‘trans-pavilions’ in its Viva Arte Viva Core Exhibition at Arsenale, and organising the biennials according to flux and themes (Macel, 2017). These are more than just label changes or the sign of shifting territories in art historical disciplines. Discussing the broader dialogue between art and other international borders initiated by the  1984 Border Art Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF), Ila Nicole Sheren concludes: There is enormous potential in thinking of art in terms of change rather than as objects. Even when socially motivated artists generate an aesthetic product – such as … Téllez’s cannonball [One Flew over the Void (Bala Perdida), 20053] – the object is only part of the whole. It is not that the physical product ceases to matter, but that it coexists with the post-autonomous. (Sheren, 2015: 135)

Revitalising the theme of borders in art leads to the reorganising of (display) space, to a questioning of the self referentiality of art and, as a political discourse, it leads to examining colonisation and the effects of globalisation in art practices. In a post autonomous thinking and practice, art has a potential for change, since its role is mediation, and the physicality of the art object is just one stage – the trigger – in developing art that is completed

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in the audience’s reception, experience and re-action. The focus on art ‘on the move’ has also led, however, to juxtapositions that have been accused of being disingenuous at best or offering only lip service to the ‘global turn’. In Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, Marsha Meskimmon reminds us that the increased ‘passage’ of art originating in migration does not mean that the imperialist structures (which after all rest on increased circulation of goods) do not impact the interpretation or distort the meaning and discipline the reception of that art (Meskimmon, 2011). These controversies have shaken many a biennial and an exhibition, from the universalist attempts of the Magiciens de la Terre 1989 Pompidou Center exhibition to the globalised artivism of the 2017 Documenta 14, which attempted to decentralise by holding its exhibitions both at the recurring host-city of Kassel as well as  in Athens (Bydler, 2004; Green and Gardner, 2016; Floyd, 2017). It is in this chaotic field that Art and migration wants to resituate the phenomenon of migration and reappraise the term itself. Connecting art to conflict zones and burning issues, the curator of Documenta 14 Adam Szymczyk intended to show that ‘the contradictions of the contemporary world, embodied by loaded directionals like East and West, North and South, meet and clash’ (Szymczyk, 2015) and are necessary to decolonise the art scene. But the determination to ‘insist on the importance of “trans” thought … as an opportune way of referring to the circulations-translations-displacements-exchanges between different countries, cultures, persons and artworks’ (Dulguerova, 2017: 2) has sometimes transformed the themes of migration into an uncritical catchall, while at the same time paradoxically trying to praise and normalise the phenomenon of migration by erasing the term. The shift in focus initiated by the ‘global turn’ has made especially clear that global node cities can only be recognised as ‘art worlds’ if these cities can be defined as ‘extended’ – meaning that they rely on cross-border networks and provide avant-garde movement (While, 2003: 252). This has also driven home the realisation that the phenomenon of migration in art is far from recent, and that there is a pressing need for a historical perspective to further investigate how these centres have wielded power over the peripheries, and how they have organised the cultural and economic flow. The global art world has often been portrayed as a liberation of national borders but we hope this volume will further open up new ways of criticising the enduring power of global node art scenes. Their structural power over creation, access and careers needs to be reassessed in a historical continuum that highlights the colonial roots of globalisation (King, 1990), and which underlines that ultimately, these nodes are and have been heavily dependent on transnational movements of artworks and artists. Furthermore, not only has migration become a focus of contemporary curatorship, but migration has affected the support network of the art market itself.

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State of the art

Influenced by the surge of the migration turn in the 1990s, social and political scientists as well as historians have growingly challenged territorialism and localism in order to chart in-, out- and internal migration and the societal impacts of population movements in general. Major works on migration include Dirk Hoerder’s study of individual and group systems of migration, Donna Gabaccia’s work on constructed migrant identities, Marlou Shrover’s deconstruction of categories of migrants as well as geographical interdependences in globalised contexts, Leo Luccassen’s analysis of global migration history and migration systems, and Eric Richards’s methodology engaging a dialogue between micro and macro experiences of human mobility. Since the turn of the twenty-first century and even more so in the past decade, many works on migration have tended to deconstruct the so-called ‘crises’ of migration by focusing on how structural forces portray migration as problematic, and these generally fall within three main themes: how the media frame migration as an anomaly (see Hier and Greenberg, 2002; Cisneros, 2008; An and Gower, 2009; Georgiou, 2012; Van der Meer et al., 2014; Holmes and Castañeda, 2016); the political structures’ contribution to cast migration as an anomaly (see Boin, 2004; Boin et al., 2009; Mainwaring, 2012; McAdam, 2014; Lindley, 2014); and finally a focus on human rights and NGO’s involvement in defining migrants as passive victims and consequently migration as disruptive (see Weiner, 1995; Tacoli, 2009; Schuetze, 2015). Art historians have recently explored the interplay between art and migration, whereas this is rarely the case in migration studies, with exceptions to be found in the present volume with Tazreiter and Lewis, both migration scholars who are focusing on the connections between art and migration in this volume. Art history studies of migration generally fall within the following categories: the first one focuses on transnational approaches of cross-culturalism with specific case studies of migrant artists’ communities and their international networks (see Mercer, 2008; Mathur, 2011; Waller and Carter, 2015; Wagner and Klemenčič, 2017). The second category brings to the fore questions of aesthetics, culture, and memory (see Del Guidice, 2014; Mosland et al., 2015). Finally, a political exploration of the interplay between art and migration has also been proposed by art historians (see DiMaggio and Fernandez-Kelly, 2010; Cooks, 2011; Demos, 2013a). The major lacuna that this literature review reveals is the limited presence of art history works by migration scholars. One such exception is John MacKenzie’s work on colonial museums and orientalism (MacKenzie, 1995; 2009). Studies of migration are wide ranging as far as chronologies, intersecting disciplines, and methodologies are concerned. Yet, although transdisciplinarity has been successfully promoted by established scholars such as Hoerder,

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Schrover, and Lucassen, research on migration has mostly been limited to  specific disciplines, geographical and social contexts as well as specific time spans. Since the publication of the pioneer work by Leslie Page Moch in 1992 – Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 – a growing body of work has challenged fixed chronological borders and taken long views proving that migration phenomena are long-lasting features of societies (Canny, 1994; Fauri, 2015). Yet, until very recently, migration studies and art studies functioned as two different spheres and little attempt has been made by scholars to reconcile methodological differences, so the involvement of migration scholars in art studies has remained limited. This volume identifies three critical points in the state of the art. First, traditional art studies focusing on national borders – since challenged by transnational approaches – have long excluded cross-cultural interactions. At the same time, they have created an artificial dichotomy between domestic and international arts. Less attention has been paid to the political construction of borders, and the art world’s soft power has been mostly excluded by migration scholars. However, this volume adopts a borderless approach and shows art’s power to overcome politically constructed borders. Second, a scientific dialogue between the artistic scholarship and migration studies is being engaged mostly by art historians, challenging the fixed boundaries between those two fields’ methodologies and going beyond the limited scope of cross-culturalism. A survey of the literature on art and migration clearly shows a focus on contemporary situations, yet art has long informed and challenged the essential role of migration in past societies too. The phenomenon of migration has been primarily examined through the prism of its current economic, social, political, or security implications, and the cultural inferences have only been addressed very recently. Third, artists and the art world have been influenced and inspired by migration, yet the art world’s artivism and involvement in socio-political debates have mainly been overlooked, to favour a focus on aesthetics. This volume addresses those gaps by taking micro- and macro-level analyses to show the artificiality of fixed borders in local as well as global perspectives. The book also includes a wide range of actors, situations, and locations, with chapters focusing on art’s borderlessness. It thus bridges the gap between national and international art in a transnational perspective, and shows the fecund interaction between art and migration studies. To deal with the paucity of transdisciplinary studies of art and migration, it is necessary to show how the art world questions the consolidation of national identities and borders. The chapters in Art and migration reveal that, although the sheer scale of migration movement might be a current concern, art has long been critically addressing statelessness and cross-border experiences, and its market was early on an international one. Art and migration is not confined to one

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single form of art, but includes a variety of art forms that inform migratory influences in the arts in general. The historical disruption of borders by art makes it crucial to assess and compare the different long-standing artistic strategies to mediate experiences of migration, making them familiar, empathetic, and legitimate, and countering the politically motivated images of the migrant tooled as a dehumanised other and alien. For instance, Mona Nicole Sfeir’s Pinpoint – exhibited in Washington DC in 2016 – relies on the imagery of stars once used by navigators to find their way across the oceans to draw attention to forced migrants’ hopes. Another case in point is the Tate Modern’s exhibition Hyundai Commission: Tania Bruguera (October 2018– February 2019), grounded on ‘forced empathy’ to raise awareness of the global migration ‘crisis’. Hence, this book deals with a controversial and crucial theme, and covers significant case studies on the linkage between art and migration. Mirroring the connection of statelessness between art and migration, it includes the study of a variety of ethnic groups and geographical areas as well as in-, out- and internal migrations. It combines newly published chapters on the production and circulation of artists and artworks and is neither limited in time nor in geographic scope, but rather reflects the globalised links between art and migration, art’s inclusive power, and experiences of exclusion (individual and group experiences). As such, it offers a dialectical approach to the relationship between art and migration. Long-standing artistic mobility has led to the increasing hybridisation of art and culture, a cross-pollination that is essential to the vitality of culture. Challenging the binary opposition between spaces of departure and arrival, Anderson’s conception of ‘diasporic imaginary’ intersects the notions of transnationalism and nationalism (Anderson, 1991). Today, ‘global imaginary’ and ‘national imaginary’ combine around the acceptation of shared global ideologies of a nation (Steger, 2008) and multiple belongings, rethinking the concept of diaspora in terms of hybridity. We still need more comparative study of how nations and territories approach the shared issues of regional or global significance in the arts – and how artistic encounters ‘on the move’ are far more than simple centre–periphery dynamics. Furthermore, if art has the power to defy territorial entities defined by their physical or politically constructed borders, the study of migrant artists and artworks also reveals the existence of socio-spatial and socio-cultural borders in the art world. Indeed, collaboration strategies, the presence of gatekeepers and the issues of access to the art scene often results from intense and opaque filtering processes, or the contours of communities of interests, artists’ collectives and inter-regional connections through workshops or schools (Chang, 2009). Structural borders exist in the art world itself and have to be highlighted, given that migration studies remind us on the one hand that controls on migration movement have

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been imposed on all but a wealthy elite and, on the other hand, that art market studies emphasise the extant inequality and wage disparity on the art scene. Globalisation is a largely unequal process. Any study of art and migration has to emphasise the interconnected networks and the borders that forge the artists’ migration routes, as well as the many liminal spaces between recognition and exclusion that make or break a migrant artist’s career. Organisation of the book

The chapters included in this volume offer a wide range of responses and theoretical approaches to account for the fruitful relationship between art and migration. They all commonly investigate the very existence of borders and art’s power to mediate migration experiences. As such, Art and migration challenges the dichotomy between migrant and non-migrant art and questions the oppositions between individual experience and group knowledge of migration. It presents migration as decidedly fragmentary – a class-ridden, gendered, and racialised experience – but also as informing group comprehension and cultural values. It delineates how memory and experience of migration shape the present artistic culture and challenge the notion of national identities in a globalised context. The book is divided into three parts, each beginning with interviews of artists and curators inspired by migration. These are precious additions to the academic chapters that shape the volume as they offer tangible perspectives on the interrelation between art and migration at the time of writing. In giving a voice to people who are not academics – a voice to the stakeholders and mobilisers of the art community – we are making what we believe to be an ethical choice. We consider including these voices as necessary when assessing and criticising the notion of ‘art community’. These interviews inform the study of identity politics and vividly account for the challenges of working in the art world. They are not just secondary illustrations of the interplay between art and migration in the art world, but are significant testimonies from actors and actresses of the interaction between migration studies and art history; they are accounts of lived experiences by witnesses and stakeholders of art and migration. They authentificate the fruitful relationship between the art world and the phenomenon of migration, and they demonstrate that both art and migration inform each other and are interdependent. What we glean from these interviews is that the role of artists in hot debates and politicial issues is one marked by in-betweeness – sometimes an uncomfortable place for witnesses with the power to show, insinuate and illustrate current scandals, yet with a wish to take a back-seat and not to overtly influence viewers. What we also learn from these interviews is that curators face a variety of constraints from national, non-national,

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international and global structures – realpolitik – when dealing with politically laden themes. The interviewees all concur that art challenges politically constructed borders, that artists are mobile, and that such trends partake in the redefinition of the ‘national’. Starting with the interplay between art, migration and the notion of border, the first section reveals the artistic power of migration and exposes how both sending and receiving countries have nourished artistic creations, whether through idealisation or deprecation. The hybridisation of artistic influences is central in this part, which also explores the links between art and diasporic aesthetics, and discusses how cultural exposure and artistic migration mirror geopolitical engagements and economic relationships. The first part of the book opens with an inverview with Dieter Roelstraete, curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, on the contemporary art exhibition Documenta 14 (Athens, 2017). Among other topics, he describes his collaboration with German artist Olaf Holzapfel on an installation entitled Zaun (‘Fence’), which questioned the inbetweenness of borders – paradoxical generators of both constraints and possibilities. This is followed by an interview with American artist David Antonio Cruz on his Chocolate Series created between 2011 and 2015 in response to the framing of migrants as threats, and which largely featured in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery  Portraiture Now: Staging the Self  exhibition that toured the United States from 2014 to 2016. He describes how the Chocolate Series exemplifies his artivism and was created in reaction to anti-immigration policies in America. This is followed by an interview with Swedish artist Axel Karlsson Rixon, whose exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, France, was entitled Mobilité Mémorable. They describe how they were inspired by Évariste-Vital Luminais’s Les Énervés de Jumièges, as well as by a visit to the infamous migrant camp sadly called the ‘Jungle of Calais’, and their exploration of the migration history of the Normandy region. The first academic chapter of Art and migration is Birgit Mersmann’s study of the diasporisation of the Chinese art scene. This transnational perspective of migration and diaspora is grounded in the case study of two Chinese artists who migrated to Australia – Ah Xian and Dong Wang Fan – and who exemplify the construction of diasporic aesthetics and Chineseness in Australia. This is followed by Christopher T. Green’s study of North American Indigenous art exhibitions both retracing and challenging colonial and imperialist history. Green grounds his work in Indigenous art at international biennials and transmotive geometries to unveil underlying deimperialising gestures. This analysis ties in with Claudia Tazreiter’s examination of the persistence of colonial imagery, racialisation, and artists’ power to tell the stories of silenced and invisible migrants. She evokes the prickly situation of Australia’s detention camps, and brings to the fore the art world’s intervention and impact on

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such remarkable political and social issues. This political science approach to the interconnection between art and migration is further enhanced by Rachel Lewis’s chapter on female refugees and asylum seekers, which examines politics, art and migration through the prism of participatory arts projects in the United Kingdom and the timely concepts of deportability and temporality. What binds the chapters of the first part of Art and migration together is the display of art’s discursive power, with many artists’ political activism often intimately affected by the recent so-called ‘crises’. Indeed, art creates a space to contest anti-migration campaigns as well as the structural forces that generate migration ‘crises’. Art has an undeniable educational mission because visual representations of migration have the power to influence public opinion on migrants, and to popularise migration experiences. The notions of mobility and activism are significant in this section, which unveils the power of art in worldwide political issues as well as its contribution to shaping global visions of migration. As such, while art history has increasingly been written transnationally, it continues to mix national and homogenised ethnic labels, reproducing an asymmetrical power relation. This leads to an examination of gender and race in the arts through the scope of national and transnational values. The second part of the book focuses on the migrants’ paths in the arts. The level of integration of the artists in their home and settling countries is assessed by case studies of their career, their reception, and recognition. The perception of their identities are often paradoxical in both countries. The thorny question of how artistic production is measured, defined, and used by proponents or opponents of integration is also of interest here. Art and museum structures (collectors, galleries, and subsidising networks) generally trigger cultural re-evaluation and cultural resistance to assimilation by focusing their exhibitions on contemporary concerns. Media coverage may also affect the frequency of cultural events as well as the labelling of artistic groups. Cultural connectivity, cross-cultural engagement and the circulation of knowledge are exemplified by new cultural networks and the internationalisation of the art market. As such, court, diplomatic, religious or political networks – which may influence the migration of art and artists – are key, along with the existence of unions, guilds, cultural centres, or prizes and artist-in-residence programmes. Private patronage and public support partake in the celebration of roots and identity – delineating a past history in the sending country – but are also acts that take pride in social mobility, empowerment and success – boasting a host country experience. This section opens with an interview with Marina Galvani, art  curator of the World Bank art collection, focusing on the exhibition Uprooted: The Resilience of Refugees, Displaced People and Host Communities  (November 2017–November 2018), which showcased artists – some of whom were refugees themselves –  dealing with migration  and  the impact of transience on

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individual lives and entire communities of people. Galvani engages in a discussion on the World Bank’s Art Program and the constraints of curating activist exhibitions in the face of political turmoil. This is followed by an interview with Robyn Asleson, assistant curator in the Department of Prints, Drawings and Media Arts at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and curator of Portraits of the World: Switzerland (December 2017–November 2018), who talks about the nation-building narrative and transnationalism of American art, with a specific focus on cultural exchanges with Switzerland. She also evokes the notion of global feminism and institutional aspects of curatorship. Then comes an interview with artistic director of the New Museum, New York, Massimiliano Gioni, who curated the Phillips Collection’s The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement exhibition (22 June–22 September 2019, Washington, DC). Gioni reflects on his personal experience of migration as an Italian-born migrant to the United States. He mentions the political influence of the media and governments in generating dramatic scenes of migration, especially across the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the art world’s responsibility in documenting history in the making. Aimé Lukin’s chapter focuses on the New York art scene in the 1960s–1970s and the integration of artists of Latin American origin. She examines the impact of a dual North–South cultural origin, as well as institutional influences and the art market. She also accounts for the participation of artists of Latin American origin in avant-garde movements and how they redefined stigmatised perceptions of Latin American art in the United States. She bases her study on Contrabienal (1971) and Cha Cha Cha (1974), which stemmed from artistic networks, to reveal that New York was a much more cosmopolitan art scene than is usually presented in historiography. This chapter is followed by Victoria Souliman’s analysis of Australian artists’ expatriatism in the 1920s. Australian artists in the London art scene often felt ostracised in Britain as well as in Australia. Souliman thus proposes a singular case study of in-betweenness within the geographical sphere of the British Empire. Then comes Susan Waller’s study of Agostina Segatori, an Italian model in Paris. Waller analyses the adjustment of an Italian artistic community – and especially models – in nineteenth-century Paris. The debates on Italian immigration, cultural differences and ideals of modernity conflicted with the interest of Parisian artists for Italian models. She thus unveils the construction of Italianicity in the nineteenth-century context of transnational artistic experiences. David Bell’s chapter concludes this section with an examination of the in-betweenness of Japanese-style gardens in Oregon, USA, and the processes of alienation, and dispossession of Nikkei Japanese American communities during the twentieth century. This study offers a fresh perspective on conceptions of cultural and intercultural identity set in spatiotemporal movements. An innovative aspect of this section is that it shifts the focus away from the

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individual to the social aspects of art, i.e. from individual artistic practices to understudied artistic communities in Western metropoles. In doing so, the authors disclose some overlooked roots of identity politics in the art world, and how artists have, from early on, challenged national perceptions and narratives of art. Finally, the concluding section is dedicated to the question of positionality – mapping the researcher’s identity – with the goal of stepping away from the neutrality of academic observers and revealing the contributors’ personal experience of the interplay between art and migration. It starts with an interview with Leslie Ureña, associate curator of photographs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She describes the integration of foreign artists in the National Gallery, which focuses on American history but also includes non-Americans who have made a significant contribution to American history. She also evokes photography’s power to represent migration both positively and negatively, as well as the diversity of migration experiences against fixed homogenous perceptions of migration. This chapter is followed by a conclusion on the notion of positionality which includes a note from all contributors as well as both editors to unveil their personal experience of migration and involvement in art and migration. The following chapters show that art, and its mediation of multifaceted cultural viewpoints, conveys experiences of migration that resonate worldwide, and offers a powerful and continuous counterpoint to specific events of migration that have emerged at particular historical moments and have been portrayed as singularly other and destructive. Art and migration challenges the dichotomy between migrant and non-migrant art by reflecting on art’s power to transcend politically constructed borders. By replacing the neatly defined and ultimately sterile border lines with the myriad lines of artistic creation, art replaces normative borders with subjective ones. By creating and feeding cultural currents that make borders pliable, art highlights that the political attempts at containment through borders are inoperative. Art has indeed constantly created points of encounter and convergence between individuals, places, and objects. It serves as a cultural crossroads, which challenges normative borders’ stillness and propounds transnational identities, social intersections, and the deployment of multiple reference points. As such, it is a collective response to and effect of migration, the mediation process of artistic creation having long undermined the construct of migration ‘crises’ episodically deployed for strategic purposes. These political attempts reinforce the idea that globalisation is a profound and recent cultural shift that reverses centuries of cultural fixity and homogeneity – a narrative that art historians have long been engaged in revisioning, in terms and with methodologies shared by the social sciences, busy elaborating an histoire croisée of the circulation and production of knowledge (Werner and Zimmermann, 2003).

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Notes 1 A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad is the title of the exhibition of African and African diaspora artists organised by Shannon Fitzgerald and Tumelo Mosaka for the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, 20 September, 2003–3 January, 2004. 2 Some of the more critically acclaimed salvage of migrant objects involved fundraising, and use and transformation of the objects rather than installation exhibitions, such as the works of Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Sean Scully, Julian Opie, and Jeremy Deller using crayons salvaged from the Calais Jungle for the Multicolor March 2019 exhibition by the refugee charity Migrate Art. www.phillips.com/article/42168298/in-conversation-with-simon-butler-of-migrate-art? Accessed 1 May 2020. 3 One Flew over the Void (Bala Perdida) is a 2005 video of a parade organised by Javier Téllez in Las Playas, on the border of Tijuana and San Diego ending with a  human cannonball being shot over the border into the United States (Solomon 2005).

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DiMaggio, P. and P. Fernandez-Kelly (2010) Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). Dulguerova, E. (2017) ‘Thinking with Large-Scale Exhibitions about Space, History, and Art’, Critique d’Art, 49, 47–55. Fauri, F. (ed.) (2015) The History of Migration in Europe: Perspectives from Economics, Politics and Sociology (Abingdon and New York: Routledge). Floyd, K.M. (2017) ‘The Museum Exhibited: Documenta and the Museum Fridericianum’, in Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Melania Savino (eds), Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology Contact Zones, Vol. 3 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter), 65–90. Georgiou, M. (2012) ‘Introduction: Gender, Migration and the Media’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35:5, 791–799. Green, C. and A. Gardner (2016) Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell). Greenblatt, S. (2010) Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Greussing, E. and H.G. Boomgaarden (2017) ‘Shifting the Refugee Narrative? An Automated Frame Analysis of Europe’s 2015 Refugee Crisis’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43:11, 1749–1774. Guha, R. (1998) ‘The Migrant’s Time’, Postcolonial Studies, 1:2, 155–160. Hassan, S.M. and O. Oguibe (2001) ‘Introduction’, in S.M. Hassan, O. Oguibe, Siemon Allen, and Forum for African Arts (eds), Authentic/Ex-centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art (Ithaca, NY: Forum For African Arts), 10–24. Hicks, D. and S. Mallet (2019) Lande: The Calais Jungle and Beyond (Bristol: Bristol University Press). Hier, S.P. and J.L. Greenberg (2002) ‘Constructing a Discursive Crisis: Risk, Problematization and Illegal Chinese in Canada’, The Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25:3, 490–513. Hoerder, D. (2019) ‘Migrations and Macro-Regions in Times of Crises: Long-Term Historiographic Perspectives’, in C. Menjivar, M. Ruiz, and I. Ness (eds), The Handbook of Migration Crises (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 21–36. Holmes, S.M. and H. Castañeda (2016) ‘Representing the “European Refugee Crisis” in Germany and Beyond: Deservingness and Difference, Life and Death’, American Ethnologist, 43:1, 12–24. Jameson, F. (2010) ‘The National Situation’, in J. Elkins, Z. Valiavicharska, and A. Kim (eds), Art and Globalization, Volume 1 of Stone Art Theory Institutes (Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press), 13–22. Jones, C.A. (2016) The Global Work of Art: World’s Fair, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Kaplan, C. (1996) Question of Travel, Post-Modernistic Discourse of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). King, A.D. (1990) Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London (London: Routledge). Knappett, C. (2005) Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press).

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Lindley, A. (2014) Crisis and Migration: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge). Lonetree, A. (2012) Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press). Lucassen, L. (2015) The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 (Chicago and Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press). Luhmann, N. (2000) Art as a Social System (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Lum, K. (2020) Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018 (Montreal: Concordia University Press). Macel, C. (2017) Viva Arte Viva: Biennale Arte 2017: la Biennale di Venezia 57 (Venice: Venice Biennale). MacKenzie, J. (1995) Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press). MacKenzie, J. (2009) Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Mainwaring, C. (2012) ‘Constructing a Crisis: The Role of Immigration Detention in Malta’, Population, Space and Place, 18:6, 687–700. Mathur, S. (ed.) (2011) The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (Williamson: Sterline and Francis Clark Institute; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). McAdam, J. (2014) ‘Conceptualizing “Crisis Migration”: A Theoretical Perspective’, in S.F. Martin, S. Weerasinghe, and A. Taylor (eds), Humanitarian Crisis and Migration: Causes, Consequences and Responses (London: Routledge), 28–49. Mercer, K. (2008) Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press). Meskimmon, M. (2011) Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London: Routledge). Meyer, A. and B. Savoy (eds) (2014) The Museum is Open: Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940 (Berlin: De Gruyter). Mezzofiore, G. (2019), ‘“Drowning Hands” Guerrilla Artwork Protests Italy’s Hard Line on Migrants’, CNN, 7 February. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/artinstallation-drowning-hands-italy-scli-intl/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0YpRFXRY 8aAtwosKS0WAT6cUv9Q_PflX2CHApuk4Psom_A-NTJoj0C9O4. Accessed 10 March 2019. Mosland, S.P., A.R. Petersen, and M. Schramm (2015) The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories (London and New York: I.B. Tauris). Mufti, A.R. (2011) ‘Zarina Hashmi and the Arts of Dispossession’, in S. Mathur (ed.), The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (Williamson: Sterline and Francis Clark Institute; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 174–195. Mukherji, P.D. (2014) ‘Whither Art History in a Globalizing World’, The Art Bulletin, 96:2, 151–155. Ojala-Fulwood, M. (2018) Migration and Multi-Ethnic Communities: Mobile People from the Late Middle Ages to the Present (Berlin: De Gruyter). Ong, A. (2017) ‘The Successes and Failures of Documenta in Athens’ Apollo: The International Art Magazine [online magazine], 16 May. www.apollo-magazine.com/ the-successes-and-failures-of-documenta-in-athens. Accessed 10 March 2019.

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Petersen, A.R. (2017) Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-Making in a Globalised World (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Quemin, A. (2004) ‘The Illusion of the Elimination of Borders in the Contemporary Art World: The Role of the Different Countries in the “Era of Globalization and Métissage”’, in J. Bakoš (ed.), Artwork through the Market (Nadácia: Centrum Súčasného Umenia), 275–301. Rancière, J. (2003) ‘Politics and Aesthetics: An interview’, Angelaki, 8:2, 191–211. Reilly, M., and L.R. Lippard (2018) Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethic of Curating (London: Thames & Hudson). Ríos, A. (2015) A Small Story About the Sky (Washington, DC: Copper Canyon Press) Ruz, C. (2015) ‘The Battle over the Words used to Describe Migrants’, BBC News Magazine, 28 August. www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34061097. Accessed 10 December 2019. Said, E.W. (1983) The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Sassen, S. (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Schuetze C. (2015) ‘Narrative Fortresses: Crisis Narratives and Conflict in the Conservation of Mount Gorongosa, Mozambique’, Conservation & Society, 13:2, 141–153. Sheren, I.N. (2015) Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera since 1984 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press). Solomon R. (2005) One Flew over the Void (Bala Perdida) (Guggenheim Museum, 2014:52). Sontag, K. (2018) Mobile Entrepreneurs: An Ethnographic Study of the Migration of the Highly Skilled (Toronto: Verlag Barbara Budrich). Steger, M. (2008) The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Szymczyk, A. (2015) ‘Editors’ Letter’, South as a State of Mind: Documenta 14 vol. 1. www.documenta14.de/en/south/12_editors_letter. Accessed 3 March 2019. Tacoli, C. (2009) ‘Crisis or Adaptation? Migration and Climate Change in a Context of High Mobility’, Environment and Urbanization, 21:2, 513–525. Tilley, C. (2001) ‘Ethnography and Material Culture’, in P.A. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland and L. lofland (eds), Handbook of Ethnography (London: Sage), 258–272. Valiavicharska, Z. (2010) ‘Second Introduction’, in J. Elkins, Z. Valiavicharska, and A. Kim (eds), Art and Globalization, Volume 1 of Stone Art Theory Institutes (Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press), 5–7. Van Brummelen, L. (2005) The Formal Trajectory (Berlin: Pro-qm). www.vanbrummelendehaan.nl/Van_Brummelen_%26_De_Haan/The_Formal_Trajectory_en_ne_2. html#0. Accessed 3 March 2019. Van der Meer, T., P. Verhoeven, H. Beentjes, and R. Vliegenthart (2014), ‘When Frames Align: The Interplay between PR, News Media, and the Public in times of Crisis’, Public Relations Review, 40:5, 751–761. Velthuis, O. and S. Baia Curioni (2015) ‘Making Markets Global’, in O. Velthuis and

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S. Baia Curioni (eds), Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1–30. Vermeylen, F. (2015) ‘The India Art Fair and the Market for Visual Arts in the Global South’, in O. Velthuis and S. Baia Curioni (eds), Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 31–54. Wagner, K., J. David, and M. Klemenčič (2017) Artists and Migration, 1400–1850 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars). Waller, S., and K.L. Carter (2015) Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870–1914: Strangers in Paradise (Aldershot: Ashgate). Weiner, M. (1995) The Global Migration Crisis: Challenge to States and to Human Rights (New York: Harper Collins). Werner, M. and B. Zimmermann (2003) ‘Penser l’Histoire Croisée: entre Empirie et Réflexivité’ Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 58:1, 7–36. Wrapson, L., V. Sutcliffe, and S. Woodcock (2019) Migrants: Art, Artists, Materials and Ideas Crossing Borders (London: Archetype). While, A. (2003) ‘Locating Art Worlds: London and the Making of Young British Art’, Area, 35:3, 251–263. Whitehead, C., K. Lloyd, S. Eckersley, and R. Mason (2017) Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe: Peoples, Places and Identities (London: Routledge). Yanow, D. (2014) ‘I Am Not a Camera: On Visual Politics and Method. A Response to Roy Germano’, Perspectives on Politics, 12:3, 680–683.

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Part

Art, migration, and borders

I

Empathy, migration, and art: an interview with Dieter Roelstraete

Date of interview: 28 November 2018

Dieter  Roelstraete  is the curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, a research institute at the University of Chicago, which fosters research on societies’ challenges. Its gallery reflects such inquiries on societal concerns through exhibitions of visual arts. Roelstraete  served on the curatorial team convened by artistic director Adam Szymczyk to organise the 2017 edition of the prestigious contemporary art exhibition, Documenta 14, usually held in Kassel every five years, and which in 2017 was also held in Athens. As Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 2012 until 2015, he organised Goshka Macuga: Exhibit, A (2012); The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2013); Simon Starling: Metamorphology (2014); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now (2015, co-curated with Naomi Beckwith); and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016, co-curated with Ian Alteveer and Helen Molesworth; travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). From 2003 to 2011, he was a curator at the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA) in his native Belgium, where he organised large-scale group exhibitions as well as monographic shows, including Emotion Pictures (2005); The Order of Things (2008); Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner – A Syntax of Dependency (2011); A Rua: The Spirit of Rio de Janeiro (2011); and Chantal Akerman: Too Close, Too Far (2012). In this interview, Dieter Roelstraete discusses the very definition and uselessness of bordering, of unnatural frontiers sometimes set in incongruous places. He also reflects on the role of the art world in political and social debates. This discussion raises several questions about the place of the arts in societal events: should artists get involved in contentious issues or rather take a back-seat position and stage the dissemination of ideas? Editors: We are very interested to talk to you about the way the museums are going beyond educational programmes, and now work towards

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2.1

Olaf Holzapfel (2017) Trassen, part of ZAUN (Fence), exhibition Documenta 14 in Kassel in the Karlsaue, painted wood, 550 × 400 × 850 cm.

developing empathy. Could you tell us more about Documenta 14, which in 2017 happened both at its traditional location and in Athens to raise awareness of migration issues. How do museums and exhibitions use empathy, and make visible issues which haven’t been debated before? Dieter Roelstraete: In Documenta 14, one of the projects I was deeply involved in, was a small exhibition within the exhibition by a German artist, Olaf Holzapfel, and together we made a project called Zaun, which is the German translation of ‘fence’ and this multiple works installation was very much an interrogation of the problem and the possibilities of the borders. Olaf Holzapfel was born in what was once called East Germany, he’s from Dresden, and he made an exhibition in the exhibition, inside the Palais Bellevue [Kassel] on the first floor. He is mainly a sculptor, the artist behind the sculpture in a park as well: a castle in a park that resembles a wooden structure, called Trassen (in der Kasseler Karlsaue) (Lines [in the Karlsaue in Kassel], 2017) (see Figure 2.1). It was a reference to bordering, demarcation, closing and enclosing. Olaf’s project had to do with this notion of the border as a limit but also as a place of possibilities, of in-between. So, my interest in that project was that he looked at the border not only as a purely negative element, as it has now become with the Mediterranean border focus, but also as something that brought possibilities. I liked that it was not only negative.

Empathy, migration, and art

Editors: What was the medium, the material, used for that border? Dieter Roelstraete: Well, the small exhibition within the exhibition in Kassel was an entire floor of the Palais Bellevue, so it was a different object. There were drawings, documents, videos, sculptures, structures.1 An anecdote: Olaf’s formal experience for this project, the spark that triggered this installation, was when a couple of years ago he travelled to Argentina and Chile. He spent a lot of time actually in those countries, and he travelled in Patagonia in particular. Every now and then he would encounter these fences erected in the middle of nowhere. Wooden structures that really looked totally absurd. They were meant to fence in something that is completely impossible to fence in. So, for him, this impression brought home the reality that borders can be incredibly meaningless. I mean, it’s a very human instinct to want to erect borders, but they can be completely powerless in a way. So, Olaf and I were interested in this idea of the border as a very powerful intervention that is at the same time also very powerless, and I think this was an ambiguity or an ambivalence, or duplicity that ran through a number of documents that had to do with this idea of fortress Europe. Of course, this idea of Europe as a fortress is on the one hand politically very vivid and right now incredibly powerful, but also closing the borders is in a way impossible. Editors: The Trassen (in der Kasseler Karlsaue) (Lines [in the Karlsaue in Kassel], 2017) is indeed absurd: it’s in the middle of nowhere and it’s blocking nothing. But at the same time, I’m amazed that it’s in polished wood, in a noble material. It reminds me of Rebecca Belmore’s marble tent in Athens, Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside, 2017), at the Documenta 14. Both have decided to take the noblest material of art to talk about things that are normally pictured as trash or background, background to instant use … Dieter Roelstraete: Yes, beautiful, amazing piece, on something normally pictured as abject, for sure. Editors: Had you collaborated with Olaf Holzapfel in the past or was the Documenta 14 the first time? Dieter Roelstraete: No, I had worked with him in the past. I’ve known him for some time. He was one of the people I already knew. He would have something to say about Documenta. The interesting thing about Olaf is that he’s very proud of his East German heritage. He’s the child of a country that no longer exists and this is something that informs a lot of what he does. He lives in Berlin and is a member of the international art world, the global art world. He has shows about everywhere in the country and in the world, but he’s very aware of his roots so to speak and the fact that these roots are located in a country that

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is no longer with us in a way. Obviously the geographical reality’s still there, Dresden as a city is still there, but the German Democratic Republic no longer exists. For an artist like him, Documenta is this monument of German culture. When Germany was still divided, Documenta was also a symbol of freedom from oppressed Germany as opposed to the oppression of East Germany. So, for him, as an East German artist or an artist who grew up in East Germany, to be one of the few German artists in a German exhibition – because there were very few ethnically German artists in Documenta – that was quite meaningful. So, it felt like the right person to invite to come to Kassel to complicate a little bit this picture of Documenta’s relationship with German history, and with Europe. Back then when Documenta was founded, this would not have created an issue. But obviously it does now – Olaf Holzapfel is also from that part of Germany that is the birthplace of a new formal extreme right-wing politics in Germany. The Alternative für Deutschland, and PEGIDA [Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes] are indeed the products of cities like Dresden. So, xenophobia and this kind of East German pathology is something that he’s very well aware of. When he talks about his identity as an East German artist, and as an East German man, he also knows that this is compromised by these associations. Editors: More generally, what is your answer as a curator to these labels? What place do you think should be given to terms like ‘foreign artists’, ‘settled artists’, ‘migrant artists’ or ‘expatriate’, ‘exiled’, and similar terms? What do you do with the hyphenated labels that spring up whenever you curate migrant art, or art that has migrated? Dieter Roelstraete: Artists are quintessentially migratory paradigms anyway. The vast majority of artists are people who were born in one place and travelled very far to work in some other place. If you look at the New York art world – still de facto the economic capital of the global art world or the financial capital of the global art world – it is a venue that attracts vast numbers of artists who moved there because they want to be close to where the action is, and they moved from everywhere. They moved from Buenos Aires or Djakarta or Dakar or Tokyo or Moscow, wherever. And the same is true of places like London, like Paris, like Berlin. Modern art history in particular has long been a diasporic history. The idea of the artists as a nomad is very deeply entwined with ideas of modernity. So, in a way, artists are the nomadic cultural phenomenon par excellence, and this of course makes the artist somehow a privileged witness or commentator on the drama of migration, but also in a way compromised, because of course as a nomad, I mean, migrants are forced to go some place, and nomads choose to go some place. And this is of course the defining dialectic.

Empathy, migration, and art

Editors: Have you found this to be the profile of artists at Documenta 14? Dieter Roelstraete: There was one artist in Documenta that I found to be a very good example of this complex, complicated situation and that is Bouchra Khalili. She was born in Casablanca, so she’s a Moroccan national. She lives in Berlin and teaches in Oslo. She’s made one of the exemplary paradigmatic works about migration of the last ten years, The Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011), a series of videos on transit throughout the Mediterranean basin. Bouchra herself is Moroccan, French, German, Norwegian or you know she lives in Casablanca, Paris, Berlin, Oslo and this is just one life. She was invited to participate in Documenta and her work was shown in Athens and Kassel – she made one showroom that was shown in both places. She made this film for Athens in particular where she basically worked with Greek actors of migrant backgrounds, she cast them to discuss where Europe is heading right now and she’s the person behind the camera. She’s the artist, as nomad behind the camera – and in front of the camera are refugees and the status is very different. Of course, the experience may be similar, or the narrative art of lives can be very similar, but obviously they’re also hugely different. I mean art is always going to be on a privileged plan, the artists are always going to be a privileged being, you know. Many artists do work in precarious situations, but Bouchra is a well-regarded artist, who has a studio in Berlin, she teaches also in Oslo. So, there are complexities there, which she is obviously very aware of, and every artist is. Editors: In migration studies, the difference between forced migration, refugee movement, and migrants is also the same. There’s choice at the root of migration whereas refugee policies have to take into account that they’re moving towards a place of safety, and not towards a place of opportunity. But the art world, as you said, is an elite place especially when we  talk about the globalised art world. Yet, when we say ‘globalised art world’ this hides the idea that the movement of artists, or artworks, the money exchange are not done with equal ease depending on what side of the borders you start from. We often hear about a globalised art world in ways that imply that the borders of the art system have now been pried open, or that the access to fairs and biennial exhibitions have eased, but it’s of course not true as you just reminded us, some artists are in tense disadvantaged situations. What curatorial procedure have you encountered that work to minimise these borders? Dieter Roelstraete: It’s true, I sometimes find that mobility is overrated in two ways: first of all, sometimes it’s uncritically glamorised or glorified  –

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you know like mobility for the sake of mobility – and on the other hand, sometimes it’s also basically claimed when really it doesn’t exist in the way that we think it does. Crossing the borders within the European Union has become quite meaningless, but if you as a curator or an artist are interested in travelling to Russia or as a Russian artist or curator travelling anywhere, of course you’re reminded that borders are everywhere and incredibly present still. I sometimes have real problems with the assumption of privilege in the art world, about mobility and nomadism. There’s this assumption that people can just get up and go wherever they want to go next. That has to do with basically the social structure of the art world as this kind of elite – the art world that I obviously inhabit, because here I am, studying in my office in Chicago as a Belgian who has worked in Germany and next in January, I have four international talks coming up each weekend. So, I’m very well aware of the fact that I should be wary of glamorising or glorifying this rootlessness. Editors: Art history is well aware that this is not new at all – the mobility of artists in the Early Modern and Modern world happened through refugee and emigrés status like the Huguenots, or because you were commissioned from one court to the other, for example. This stratification of migration has always existed, and is still reflected today. Dieter Roelstraete: You’re evoking the example of courts, which is totally on point. I mean Rubens is the primeval example and there’s many contemporary Rubenses. My compatriot Tymon de Laat is the best possible candidate for a twenty-first-century Rubens, basically travelling from court to court to paint murals for the local kings. I still have to answer your question about concrete curatorial initiatives to lower thresholds. Indirectly, if you think about one of the defining characteristics of the art world in the last 25 years, basically post-89, -91, or -92, there has been this explosion of biennial exhibitions around the world. Biennials today are often located in Europe obviously, but the definition of the biennial is that it happens in a place like Djakarta, or in Dakar, or Cairo, or Johannesburg, or Ecuador. So what I think is that what curators have been able to do – and this I think has been an admirable achievement – is actually bring art and, instead of lowering the border for people to come to the centres of the art world, to actually take the art world on the road and expand its geographical reach to also go to places like Bichkek in Kyrgyzstan, or Yekaterinburg in the USSR, to stay in the post-Soviet sphere. One of the great contributions of the biennial model is the ‘roaming’ art in a way. In that sense, I think that borders have become a little more porous, and whereas people cannot always travel as easily as we think they do, exhibitions can more easily it seems.

Empathy, migration, and art

Editors: Do you feel that the intensity of the political moment right now has made art more or less able to mediate those debates on migration? Has it become more difficult? Dieter Roelstraete: That’s an interesting question. I think that the debate is so acrimonious right now and the political stakes – I’m not sure, the stakes are so high – but the entire kind of refugee/migration discourse is so highly charged politically that my intuition is that I’m not sure that art should meddle all that much right now. I’m not sure if it’s that wise, or if elements of the art world can move in. ‘Meddling’ might not be the right word, but I’m not sure if the right thing for art to do right now is to basically move in, in search of subject matter. Right now I think it’s a difficult period for art – art is in bad shape – and that’s probably because the world in such terrible shape itself, in a really terrible place. This has obviously not always been the case, I think there have been sunnier times, and there have been moments in the last two decades when it was perhaps a little easier for artists to comment on these current issues. Then again, I’m not saying that artists should enter into silence and wait for these storms to blow over. Editors: Do you think that the traditional practices of museum shows, exhibitions, leaflets, blurbs, and catalogues are not maybe the right medium? Dieter Roelstraete: I think that Documenta is a case in point. The idea of Documenta 14 relocated in Athens, of artists going to a Greek island off the coast of Turkey: the problem is often one of preaching to the converted. Ai Wei Wei’s refugee-themed art in recent years is the perfect example of how ridiculous, how idiotic art can look in the face of this tragedy. But of course, we have to say something, we have to intervene. It’s the same thing with the whole issue of climate change, which obviously is very deeply, intimately related with the issue of worldwide migration streams. People are basically fleeing desertification and heat and rising water, but climate change is probably the single most catastrophic challenge that we are facing as a planetary species, and to me it just doesn’t make sense for artists or for museums, or for galleries or for exhibitions: I just don’t see the point of an exhibition about global warming. Global warming is something that we have to do something about in our daily life. Of course, art can contribute to spreading a message and sensibilising. Of course, somebody could probably make a beautiful film about a giant plastic island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but the traditional mode of the artist as an activist, I’m not sure. To a certain extent, I think we have to choose: either you make an artwork about it, or you do something about it. And I’m not sure making an artwork about it is really doing something about it.

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Editors: That’s what I was wondering about ‘What’s Next? A five-hour marathon conversation and more on immigration, migration and home’, which took place at the Logan Center Gallery, University of Chicago, with the artist Pope.L, in January 2018.2 You’re saying that spreading the message is not enough, but wouldn’t this idea of empathetic conversation be how art is supposed to tackle those things now? Art does seem to have a decreased educational power, with things being so divisive. But can art reach people, not through traditional educational practices, but thanks to  this empathetic turn. Is that what motivated you as curator of this event? Dieter Roelstraete: I was not the engineer of this event, but I was deeply involved. Now, I have to contradict myself a little bit and recreate my steps a little bit because when I did this event in January, what I felt was very powerful about it. What happened was that we got people from different walks of life and different parts of society participating. We had a human rights lawyer talking to a room full of art people. What I think was powerful about this event was that there was still a need for more information: we needed to know more, and we needed to hear more, and we recognised it. People talk about migration this, and migration that, but have I ever met somebody who actually crossed the Mexican–American border? So, in that sense I felt like I could never hear enough testimonies, and that we don’t know enough yet, and here art can do something. Art spaces can provide platforms, so there’s still a role there, but it’s a role in which I think artists and curators have to take a backseat position and maybe build a platform where other people come to talk. If I want to know more about the refugee crisis, then I want to listen to an actual refugee, I want to listen to somebody like Médecins Sans Frontières, or I want to listen to a lawyer, I don’t want to listen to an artist, I don’t want to listen to a curator. I want to hear the people on the ground. For me, looking back at Documenta, I felt like maybe there was a little bit too much of mediation on the part of the artworks, and that these voices were not directly present enough. So, this is something where I feel that art can do something. But, we can do something by stepping out of ourselves a little bit. Editors: A lot of the modern art is actually moving toward these sorts of immersive experiences through the means of recordings, installations, or performance art, rather than actually producing objects. The fact that mediums are more and more becoming places where events are set up and not just where exhibitions are hung, this might actually be something that develops around this idea that you have to give empathy and not just a message that has been cut and pasted by the curators.

Empathy, migration, and art

Dieter Roelstraete: Of course, the art world for the last 20 years has been moving towards a place, an atmosphere, which has become very useful for the dissemination of ideas that no longer resides in objects alone. Editors: I just wanted to know more about your current curatorship. You’re curating an American artist who lives in Berlin and you’ve probably got two more events planned. Is national origin important in the way you select your artists? Dieter Roelstraete: No, absolutely not. Of course, if you’re a curator and you work in a museum and you make a group show, you have to make sure that in your artist cluster there’s enough diversity. These things matter. You can no longer do a show with 10 men, that’s impossible, unless it’s about masculinity. And you can no longer agree to a show with 10 Americans unless it’s an exhibition about American art. In this sense, I think about the origin of the artist, and I’m very interested in that question: where are you from? The first show I did here in Chicago was a Chilean artist who had been living in New York for a long time, and my second show was an Israeli artist who lives in Chicago together with a Slovak artist who lived in Moscow for many years, and now I’m doing a show with Jason Dodge, who’s an American artist who lives in Berlin and he’s bringing a poet to Chicago who teaches at Cornell, but who’s actually originally from Jamaica. So, I’m surrounded everywhere by people with complicated trajectories and obviously this often makes for a very good conversation. So, that’s a factor in my choices. I just organised an exhibition in Venice, Machine à Penser at Prada Foundation (26 May–25 November 2018), in conjunction with the Architecture biennial. It was an exhibition about the phenomenon of the philosopher’s hut and the idea of that exhibition had to do with escape, and about this notion of retreat that many thinkers have developed, their need for intellectual isolation in a place. And of course the idea of escape, as the exhibition conveyed, is in a way like the flipside to the fact of exile. There’s one more anecdote that I have about national origin: I’m myself from Belgium, but I’m a terrible patriot, I don’t really care for Belgium. I don’t ever think of Belgian art, obviously I have friends there and my family’s there and there’re some Belgian art that I like, but I’ve never been interested in fostering Belgian art abroad and so when Documenta opened in Athens in April 2013 at the opening reception I met the Belgian Ambassador to Greece and of course when he heard that I was Belgian, the first thing he asked me was: ‘Where are the Belgian artists?’ This to me was such an incredibly annoying question, but of course I understand, he’s the Ambassador. Then, I basically told him: ‘Well, the Belgian artists in Documenta are the following five people’. I named five artists with very foreign, un-Belgian names, not Spanish, not French. One is Congolese, another one is Greek, a third one is Cameroonian,

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and then a fourth one is from Benin, another Nigerian. But these are all artists who had lived in Belgium long enough to really identify as Belgian artists. They all lived in Brussels. But for this Ambassador, this was meaningless. So, this was a good example of how stubborn these old-fashioned ideas are about national identity. Editors: That an artist can have more than one nationality. It would be actually quite difficult to make an exhibition about an artist who’s only Belgian or has never left his/her country … Dieter Roelstraete: It would be hard to find an artist who was born in a place and still lives and works there, yes. You know, unless it’s New York again. To me, this was very revelatory. Notes 1 The Palias Bellevue, Kassel, installation assembled Kreuzung (Crossroads, 2010), Trassen (Lines, 2012), Sternengerüst (Star scaffold, 2013), Latitud 40° (2017), Pyramide (Pyramid, 2017), Querfeldein (Across country, 2017), Die Täler (Escartons du Briançon) (The Valleys [Escartons du Briançon], 2017), Zaun: Interviews mit Menschen aus Aysén über die Grenzen ihres Landes (Interviews with the people of Aysén about the borders of their land, 2017). The curated presentation of this installation can be found at www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13509/olaf-holzapfel. Accessed 29 November 2018. 2 Logan Center: https://arts.uchicago.edu/logan-center/logan-center-exhibitions/ events/whats-next-five-hour-marathon-conversation-and-more. Accessed 29 November 2018.

Silenced migrants: an interview with David Antonio Cruz

Date of interview: 26 November 2018

David Antonio Cruz, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1974, trained in painting and printmaking at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and Yale University School of Art. He was a resident at the LMCC Workspace Residency Program, New York, in 2016, in  Project  For  Empty Space, and is a recipient of a 2013 Franklin Furnace Fund Grant and the Urban Artist Initiative Award in 2011. His most recent solo exhibitions were For I Am – Or I was, thereturnofthedirtyboys at the Gateway Project Spaces, Newark NJ (2016), and  One Day I’ll Turn the Corner and I’ll Be Ready  For  It  (2019) at Monique Meloche’s gallery in Chicago.  At the time of the interview, David Antonio Cruz was working on his extended series of paintings  wegivesomuchandgivenothingatall, paintings for  Richard, an  homage to trans people  murdered since 2017, which would become the basis for his 2019 show at Monique Meloche’s gallery. He explained to us that his artivism was first expressed in the Chocolate Series he painted in 2015, a reaction to the intense backlash against immigration in America.  The Chocolate Series was created between 2011 and 2015. It was a response to how immigration was presented as a threat and as a crisis in the United States and how the Black and Brown bodies were suppressed in the public discourse. A large body of this series was featured in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Portraiture Now: Staging the Self exhibition that toured the United States from 2014 to 2016. The work of David Antonio Cruz often relies on intense colour portraits, brushed through with classical modeling of shadows and reminiscent of art historical poses. Juxtaposed with background interweaving patterns, objects, and intimate tokens, these collages of the solemn and the intimate rework Brown and Black histories in revisioned art history. The homage portrait illustrating this interview (see Figure 3.1) is the portrait of a trans woman whose request for refugee status in the USA was denied. She died in 2019, shortly after being deported.

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3.1

David Antonio Cruz (2019) suddendly,youandiwillwaitinyourdreams … tonight, oil on latex and wood, 61 × 47.5 × 7.6 cm.

Editors: Can you tell us more about the portrait, and how this has also reverberated in your recent works? David Antonio Cruz: The series is in honour of someone I knew, Richard, who started transitioning in the 80s in Junior High – I was amazed at his

Silenced migrants

bravery. I have made the choice to address the community rather than the current administration to focus on the people being affected. This started in the Chocolate Series, when I decided to address the issue of migrant visibility. In times of emergency, people are looking at us for these images, we have to be that marker. We need to tell these stories, like the stories of the trans women who were murdered, because with these events, we tend to be fixated with the act. We forget what people felt like, we forget individuals and their families, we tend to disconnect from their humanity. Just yesterday, we saw Border Agents shooting tear-gas at a march at the US–Mexico border – we need to see that image of that mother holding her children by the arms, that desperation. That moment can’t be forgotten, and it has to be the impact of art, we have to grab the humanity of these people and freeze it in time. Editors: So your responsibility as an artist is to counteract the shock and stock images, the dehumanised images? Do you feel that the current hyper-mediatised visuals of migrants – as hordes, waves, caravans – have suppressed the migrant’s voice, and erased personal narratives? David Antonio Cruz: Yes – the news say it’s a bus – it is so telling how quickly, with a few selective words, it allows people to disconnect. We say no, it’s people on a bus. The problem is to do with how we do history. We cannot wash away the violence, we cannot celebrate away Thanksgiving, for example, we have to own up to how things happened, we have to address the violence, because the events are not closed, they have long-term effects on our people. Editors: Do you intend this decolonisation in your art? David Antonio Cruz: The reason I do what I do is to oppose this narrative, because so many markers are invisible, so many things are not addressed: ‘Aren’t you looking? This has happened. We are here. This is not the first time this has happened. We are not going away’. History and art history are told from one point – a place of power. The narrative of this woman yesterday at the border is never talked about. When I lecture in class, I try to tell the history from the other side. Not from the outside looking in, but the people having a voice. Editors: What migration specialists are explaining is that the term ‘migration crisis’ does not apply to the present-day situation – and that this narrative is dramatised and used as a tool, and constructed by the closing of the borders. Is the theme of migration still important to your work? David Antonio Cruz: It’s been a lifelong interrogation for me. I lost my father right after school, I got to spend some time in the hospital with him. My

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extended family had moved to New York and Philadelphia early on, before he moved with my mother to Philadelphia. But I couldn’t quite understand why he moved. I was born in this country, but it didn’t make sense why he would choose the separation of culture, of language, of food. I was watching Lolita Lebròn at the time, working on a project about her attack on Congress, and growing up as second generation Puerto Rican. Why did you move here? I was never answered. Him speaking Spanish affected his life, affected his healthcare. He had a level of invisibility in hospital, they needed a translator to speak to him. There was always some distance in the way he was treated. And that is what inspired the Chocolate Series, the staining, the smearing, treating people at a remove. The racism towards Brown people that was always related to immigration. It came from the way people were not addressing the problem. Editors: Tell us more about this series and its links to migration. David Antonio Cruz: Not addressing people of colour is at the heart of this series, and it is a violent series. They start as a conventional portrait, but then they are erased. I first choked them with fabric and clothes, I laid on costumes, discarded objects, scraps – a whirl sitting on top of the paintings. How you dress, how we perform roles are modes, they are ways to pass, to not be called out, they are how people identify you, how we perform roles. Lolita Lebròn got into Congress with a gun, because she looked the part, she had dressed in a suit, no one thought to check her purse. This series started out as portraits, to which are added all the strata of how we pass – but then comes the act of erasing and covering all in Browness, in the chocolate paint. It is, ultimately, a stain. The skin doesn’t go away, we have to address that Browness. Editors: Portraiture Now: Staging the Self (Smithsonian, 2015) staged artists of Latinx background – a common aspect was the refusal to see portraiture as establishing a stable, definitive self. Can you tell us a bit more about how you present fluid identities in your portraits, rather than fixed IDs? You are often presented as a versatile artist, interdisciplinary, using a variety of media – how important is it to you that your work challenges limits and borders in art history? David Antonio Cruz: There is so much beauty about things that don’t quite fit, that don’t quite work, about giving new purpose to broken pieces. There was a time when I ran away from labels – the label of the migrant artist, for example. These markers annoyed me. What does it mean to be second generation? On top of that, what does it mean to be queer? What does that look like? I am a continuous. But now I feel that I have a responsibility for those coming after me to embrace these labels even if they don’t quite fit. Do I see myself

Silenced migrants

as a migrant artist? It is not solely my focus, but I do deal with these subjects, they are the things I want to make visible. It is impossible anyway to talk about Browness without dealing with migration. What is this Brown box – because they all want to put us in a box in this country, to give us a label – when people from South Asia and the Caribbean do not speak the same language or share the same culture? Editors: You are a Philly born New Yorker artist – but you are also from a family originally from Puerto Rico. Many terms can be used – second generation, of heritage, or any terms bearing hyphens – and some are highly charged. What are the terms that you feel are uncomfortably or unhelpfully applied by the art market system – by agents, galleries, critics, or curators? David Antonio Cruz: Typically, these labels would come with expectations. How does that relate to you being Puerto Rican? How can you be this, if you are not doing this? How come you are doing this, as a Latino artist? How come you are not doing this, as a queer artist? I am multiple things, I am a person, and you can’t determine me! I have been working on the fluidity of the body, and this goes beyond being a ‘hybrid’, I felt. But right now, I do feel more comfortable with the labels of migrant and queer – as a form of protest. Let’s address this, I am multiple things, and I am not what you are portraying me and my community to be. I am not the exception, and I am not the other. Editors: Some of your work has been compared to the work of Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon – except that your paintings do away with the sense of a place. There is no recognisable studio, chairs seem to slip off with no discernable ground to stand on, the walls have no corners or borders … David Antonio Cruz: I don’t like edges! I don’t like a line! I was raised to stay in the line, keep to your neighbourhood, know when you’ve crossed the line … Those pictures are psychological places, my models are on a stage or platform that acts like a presentation. I use unconventional house paints and enamel, they have a density with which I can create a continuous false wall behind my subjects – either chalky flat or glossy. It looks like a void, you can fall in! The space behind the subject is dead space, what better way to talk about the fluidity of identity when it is non-located? I think for the rest of my life, I will be trying to figure out ‘Where is home?’ Editors: You have described your work as ‘fragments left behind’1 after the performance – shattered china and spilt chocolate. Tell us why it is important to document the experience of diaspora? What is the part of memories in your art, for example in iwishrainydayscamewithasliceofmango, which

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incorporates, according to the museum medium label, a ‘mother’s plate’ bearing palm trees? David Antonio Cruz: Well what better memory trigger than smell, and chocolate? These pieces were created by a performance, and the audience was overwhelmed not only by the movements, but by the smell! And chocolate has such a problematic history, in the narrative of colonialism – colonialism that set out to absorb everything. When we are kids, we are handed chocolate when we are good. As adults, if we have had a bad day, we reach for the chocolate! When you are watching the work, you should also remember all the other dimensions. And that is also hidden in the plate, with its cheap imitation gold. It’s a fragment with a palm tree – the fantasy of the Caribbean, the exoticism of the tropical paradise, the sex tourism, a place to go play. But people live there, and this is something that is especially important to remember right now, after the storm in Puerto Rico. Editors: Our volume Art and migration attempts to trace the social history of migration for artists. Often, the rise of a first- or second-generation artist is analysed first and foremost with the filter of migration. What is really the weight and worth of your community’s (or communities’) cultural links as a widely recognised artist? Has migration impacted your community of models, your networks of collectors, the artists you exhibit with? Can you set the record straight? David Antonio Cruz: No, my models and collectors are not all Puerto Ricans. That is one of the things as a second-generation artist of colour – I have a gorgeous world! Yes, I use the Spanish word familia for my crew, but my crew is extremely diverse! When I went on to perform TAKEABITE; elduendealwaystravels … light for El Museo del Barrio in 2012, I had 25 people on the stage – from Irish red heads to West Indian 12-year-olds to an opera singer from Japan. But people still assume that someone from a certain background will have Puerto Rican performers. The fact is that I have grown up in this country, and my concerns are from different parts of the world, the people I have grown up with. And migration is not just a Latino concern! And it’s the hardest part for some curators and collectors. They still expect me to be doing a certain kind of work, like the works that deal with Puerto Rican identity early on in my career. One of the works that was identified early on as dealing strongly with a Puerto Rican theme is the portrait of my mother and me, Puerto Rican Pieta en la Calle de la Fortaleza. It is now in a museum – and I love what they did with it [shows a pedagogical leaflet provided by the museum to the audience, in which you can draw in yours and your own mother’s portrait in the outline of the work]. See, we’re all part of that family, this is when I realised the cross-border power of that

Silenced migrants

image, how important to see that, the power of seeing that link in the Brown community – and this was even before the terrible images of mothers and children at the border. My collectors tended to be Puerto Rican at the beginning, but not anymore. My collectors now tend to be very broad, and my works tend to talk about themes – break and loss, wanting to belong – that connect with a wide range of audiences. But labels from the museums are harder to shift. Editors: Our volume Art and migration tries to uncover the discrimination of traditional art history in the terms applied to migrant artists – and shows how this historically very common phenomenon of migration in art has been consistently minimised, and swept under the carpet. As a queer Latinx artist, what are the terms that matter, that you would like to see proudly embraced, and which you feel would be helpful spotlights for a re-reading of art history? David Antonio Cruz: I was making work for which I had no markers. I was doing work as a Puerto Rican, and at the same time loading it up with really queer subtext. And people, especially men, had a really difficult time with my work, it caused a stir, but they have come round. I never thought about myself as an artivist – I have only recently had to take on this work with the Girls – which is how I call my series depicting the murdered trans persons. But I realised then that this is what I had been doing since Chocolate – and people had a hard time writing about my work. How truthful do you want to be, how truthful can they be when dealing with Browness? It was easier for them to talk about the objects, versus the actual subject. It was less hard to critique how they were technically brought together, versus the political part of the work – because then we have to address our country. Editors: You were selected for Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) programme at the Bronx Museum – an artist-training programme offering to guide artists through the often opaque professional practices of the art world. Did they specifically reflect on art and migration? David Antonio Cruz: AIM is a great programme, that brings out a lot of resources – I was selected in 2006, while I was completing my nude selfportraits, queer pieces that were about migration and being Puerto Rican. The programme is meant to teach you how to address your work, how to present the work – it’s like a finishing school, so you can navigate the art market, and to give you the information that you don’t get anywhere else. It also fosters a sense of community, but it doesn’t specifically address the issue of migration. It has been around for quite a bit, but now in the last couple of years we’ve seen programmes develop from non-profits and institutions that

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purposefully address migration. In New York, one programme is tailored to artists newly arrived to the country, another one is targeted at reaching the communities, through artistic workshops, creating access for them to talk about migration with the help of an artist. Other projects offer support  to artists that go to these communities for artivism, creating works with the community as protest. One is from Queens Museum, one is the Newark Gallery – it is definitely a growing practice. And it is definitely an issue I address in my classroom! Editors: Can art amend history, as Titus Kaphar portends, for example, in his piece Absconded from the Household of the President of the United States (2016) in which shreds of the President’s ledger of enslaved servants are nailed to his classical portrait, forming an absurd beard? It reminds us of your use of historical documents, in your piece forapieceofapple (2013), which incorporates paper planes made out of identity files from Puerto Rican migrants. David Antonio Cruz: These documents were from the Bureau of Identification and Documentation (1930–1948), which produced English-language ID to show as proof of US citizenship, now kept at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, NY. Specifically, it was a way to identify you for work purposes. The files are in English, and the fascinating thing is that each document has the photograph, the name, and the address on arrival, in New York – but they felt they still needed to identify the person by skin. Each document had an entry filled in by the office clerk grading the migrant’s appearance – light skin, dark skin, moreno, etc. Although the photo was attached! Reading these files, how these people were described was part of their journey to prove they were legitimate citizens. And sometimes you get a very clear lens of how the person sitting behind the desk saw these people, as they were filling in these files – because some of these photos don’t fit the descriptions – I look at the photos and the description of dark skin doesn’t fit! There are also photographs from a huge file at the Center, from a family that has donated all their archives. It goes from their upbringing when they moved to New York, their military training, weddings, and all the photos from before the move, how they celebrated, photos from quinceañeras, Christmas festivals, the markets, the whole island community. It is such a complete history in front of you – so they had to be inserted in the painting. Editors: Migrants are always shown as newcomers – but as these photos remind us, they have a long history, a long trail of personal belongings and memories.

Silenced migrants

David Antonio Cruz: Yes, and that piece has fragments of costumes, copper, gold, dishes. It’s quite a heavy piece! It’s a full history. There are ribbons hanging from it, and so much stuff attached to it, as if a whole closet had been emptied over it. The performance, when it was created, was quite violent – it is weighed down by so much that has been slapped on. And it’s seven feet tall! I spent a lot of time trying to be invisible in my earlier life, so that I wouldn’t be taunted, that I wouldn’t be called out, that I wouldn’t be tortured for being queer, so that I wouldn’t feel like I didn’t belong. So now, when I make work, the work is often big, and the performance is loud, and it’s a moment to angrily claim a space. The audience needs to be paying attention. And you hope that people are touched and moved. It’s part of my responsibility as an artist, to make sure we were counted. Becoming part of the United States for these Puerto Rican families often meant entering the military, joining the war. And people do not write about this too much, it isn’t something that is looked at. And here they are, part of a painting called pieceofapple. And there’s nothing so American as apple pie, right? So my claim is that this is also part of American art, it is American, and also this, this, this … Note 1 National Portrait Gallery: https://npg.si.edu/exhibit/staging/. Accessed 23 November 2018.

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Memorable mobilities: an interview with Axel Karlsson Rixon

Date of interview: 26 February 2019

Axel Karlsson  Rixon  is a Swedish photographer and fine arts graduate from the California Institute of the Arts, and they hold a PhD from the Valand Academy at the University of Gothenburg. Their published thesis is entitled Queer Community through Photographic Acts: Three Entrances to an Artistic Research Project Approaching LGBTQI Russia (2016). They are also the author of At the Time of the Third Reading (2016), which presents photographs from a lesbian summer camp in Russia, along with Russian activists’ written documents. In the mid-1990s, they started working on the Portraits in Nordic Light project, which is a series of portraits in dialogue with Scandinavian paintings from the last turn of the century. Karlsson Rixon’s work mainly focuses on performative qualities of identity and the ability of photography to bring to light, and produce, communities, as well as reflecting on outsider and insider positions in society.  Karlsson Rixon was previously Professor in Photography at the School of Photography, University of Gothenburg, and has exhibited work at institutions such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Göteborg Art Museum, Malmö Art Museum, Norrköping Art Museum and Hasselblad Center. Currently a member of the working party for the Visual Arts Fund and the International Artist’s Studio Program in Sweden, Karlsson Rixon has been awarded grants by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee amongst others, and was invited to the International Artist Residency Program at 18th Street Art  Center in Los Angeles in the autumn of 2018. They regularly collaborate with other artists and researchers, most recently with Mara Lee making the artist’s book Nakenakt, as well as with Mikela Lundahl Hero.  In this interview, Karlsson Rixon recalls the experience of visiting migration sites in Northern France and the ‘Jungle’ of Calais. Their voyages and discoveries have been sources of inspiration. Yet, they also balance the role of the artist as activist as the question of the place of artists in political debates is raised. Karlsson Rixon actively engages in voluntary work.

Memorable mobilities

Axel Karlsson Rixon (14 September 2018–6 January 2019) Mobilité Mémorable / Memorable Mobility, installation, 10 × 4 m. Exhibition at Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France.

Editors:  Can you tell us about your contribution to the  Rouen Musée des Beaux-Arts  (France) and your exhibition entitled Mobilité Mémorable (Memorable Mobility)? Axel Karlsson Rixon: I would like to start with a brief description of the installation at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen. The installation was set in a special project room integrated with the rest of the museum, the dimensions are 10 × 4 metre with very high ceiling and dark grey walls (see Figure 4.1). The entrance is at one of the ends, and on the other side I placed a large grid with 35 photographs of shoes laying on the ground. The grid was lit up with spotlights, otherwise the room had no light more than the small lightboxes of ocean views, six on each side leading up to the large grid of the shoe images. I would say that the room had quite a monumental feel to it. Outside the room was a large board displaying one of the Les Énervés de Jumièges sketches, as well as title and information about the project. We also placed a pedestal with the exhibition catalogue including Lundahl Hero’s essay. In the summer of 2016, I was an artist in residence in Grez-sur-Loing not too far from Paris and I read in a newspaper about ‘the Jungle’, you know the large refugee camp in Calais. My book on the lesbian summer camp in Russia

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was just about to be printed and I guess I was paying attention to camping because of this project, which led to reflecting on how camps generally had become so palpable and visible in Western society – refugee camps, Roma camps, homeless people camping in the centre of cities … So, the notion of the camp was somewhere planted in my mind. Back at Grez in November the same year I was introduced to the French curator Gabriel Bauret who invited me to take part in a larger project presented under the title Lumière Nordique where photographers from the Nordic countries were invited to show at institutions along the Seine River. What brought the project together was the connection between Normandy and the Nordic countries which goes all the way back to the Vikings invading this part of France. In other words, early migration to the areas which now are widely romanticised. At this point, the camp in Calais was demolished by the French authorities and around 6,000 people were moved to camps in other cities or simply left to nothing. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen was the institution that Mr Bauret connected me to and I was specifically invited to make a work that related to something in the permanent collection of the museum. Then, I kind of did the reverse since I already had a specific subject in the area that I wanted to investigate: instead of looking for something in the collection that would inspire a new work, I was rather looking for something in the Museum that would respond to my idea. Editors: The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen (France) includes Les Énervés de Jumièges by Évariste-Vital Luminais – how and why did it inspire you? How have you managed to draw a connection with today’s migrants who travel by boat – stereotyped as ‘boat migrants’? Axel Karlsson Rixon: I spent two days at the Museum in the fall of 2017 going through the collection and literally looking at every artwork, also most of the paintings in storage and I had some marvellous help from the people working there. I discovered this painting, Les Énervés de Jumièges, which is on display in one of the larger rooms, but I also found two sketches in storage that were made beforehand, of which one I later used in connection with my installation. The painting represents two young men on a raft, which is something in between a raft and a bed, on the river Seine and you can actually see the water opening in the back – which could be the ocean. In a contemporary reading, ignoring the actual mythological background to the painting as well as the time when it was made, it could well be a refugee raft. So, it was a kind of appropriation of the painting into a contemporary situation, scenarios that are in many people’s minds because of all the migrants turning to Europe on deficient and overcrowded boats – images we see in media just about daily. So

Memorable mobilities

I literally gave the Les Énervés painting a contemporary eye to investigate how it can be relevant in relation to what is going on in Europe today. How can we use the Museum collection to bring up to date recent events? Editors: Can you tell us more about your inspiration from your travels around Northern France and the link with your work on migration? Axel Karlsson Rixon: Well, I had the demolished Calais camp and the refugee situation in Europe in mind, and in the fall of 2017, I spent a week in Rouen starting out with the two days at the museum. I had invited a colleague and friend, Mikela Lundahl Hero to collaborate with me on the project. I knew I wanted to do something on migration and it was relevant to the work she is doing as well. She is a postcolonial feminist theorist and she works at the Global Studies Department at the University of Gothenburg. During the week Mikela and I went to Calais to look at the site where the former camp, the ‘Jungle’, had been situated. We wanted to see how it had affected the area and what was left. At the time there was only one building left from the refugee camp, for the rest there were bulldozers doing some major land work. On the way, we passed this small forest between an industrial area and a domestic neighbourhood. We noticed a small group of young Black men walking along the road and into this forest, and there was also a police van with a bunch of police officers. It was obvious that there was some action going on. We just passed and didn’t actually go there this time, but the scenario got stuck in both our minds and we continued to talk about this image during the rest of our travel. In the spring of 2018 we went back and spent nearly three weeks travelling alongside the coastline of the English Channel. We had decided to search for sites where migrations had taken, or are taking, place in the area; we wanted to look into how different kinds of migration were treated by society. We started by going back to Calais to find out what was going on in the forest we had passed in the fall. We had found various information via the internet and knew that there were still refugees in Calais, but also a number of different volunteer initiatives. As expected, we did find refugees, not actually in the forest, but behind it where there were several tents put up but also a temporary school bus, an information truck, and other volunteers and we got a chance to talk to people. In the forest, there was a massive amount of trashed tents, clothing, food packages, fences … I took a number of photographs, specifically of abandoned shoes (see Figure 4.2). Continuing travelling, we went to other cities, like Ouistreham, where contemporary migration was palpable, i.e. refugees gathering hoping to be able to move on to Great Britain. We also went to the Second World War landing sites and Le Havre, which harbour began flourishing during the

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4.2

Axel Karlsson Rixon (14 September 2018–6 January 2019) Mobilité Mémorable / Memorable Mobility, photograph. Exhibition at Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France.

sixteenth century. It was one of the three points of the slave trade, with goods like tobacco and leather being sent as payments to Europe, Le Havre becoming the second largest trade port in France at the time. There were few signs of this migration in Le Havre now; we could locate one small museum in an old ship house displaying objects from the time, more of an object museum then actually problematising colonialism and slave trade. We were also searching for signs from the Viking era, which was the root of this exhibition on the connection between Normandy and Scandinavia. This we found was mostly manifested in names of places like Langrune and a historic theme park named Ornavik. While travelling, I documented whatever traces of migration we could find, or that we happened to run into. Mikela and I had a continuous discussion on what we experienced, and both my installation and Mikela’s text in the catalogue are based on our mutual conversations. It turned out to be a very productive work method combining our special knowledge and shared interests, and we are now continuing to work on the subject of migration, now focusing on the role of the volunteer, starting out in our own hometown Gothenburg but also going back to Calais, as well as volunteering at the camp Skaramangás outside Athens in Greece.

Memorable mobilities

Editors: Another aspect of the exhibition is the shoes photos. The shoe has been a recurring motive in art dealing with migration – as, for example, Helen Zughaib’s The Places They Will Go (2015–2016). It is also a powerful symbol in memorial places commemorating the Holocaust. Can you unpack the effect of the shoe motive on the viewers? Axel Karlsson Rixon: Well, when in the new Jungle camp in Calais, where migrants are gathering trying to move on to Great Britain, there’s a big parking lot in the industrial area with a number of refugee organisations, and predominantly British activists, regularly showing up to support the refugees. They have an organised space with a kitchen, an information and press centre in another industrial area. There’s no actual ‘official’ camp there, it’s constantly being demolished and people are being chased away by the police at least once a week. We returned to the camp a couple of times, spoke to some of the refugees, and spoke to numerous activists working there. There were no tents in the actual forest anymore, and it was filthy with wrecked tents, clothing, and anything everywhere. Apparently, people had to leave over and over again very rapidly from the space. I was contemplating how the situation of the refugees at the site could be represented in the artwork. I did not want to photograph the young men for ethical reasons, but also because of the character of what we intended to do, look into traces of migration. So, I started to take pictures of the shoes because it’s such a strong symbol of mobility and leaving behind your shoes must mean that you had to leave in a rush, especially considering the amount of shoes that was left behind. I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC in 2007, where they had a big gathering of shoes from one of the concentration camps in Poland, and from what I have heard there are other similar representations of Holocaust in other institutions. Also, studying the history of photography, you have these images of shoes and migration in mind. Or the lack of shoes as a sign of poverty, for example in Dorothea Lange’s series of the migrant mother and her children. So, I thought it would be a useful motif for what was going on in the area as well as connecting the project to a history of representing migration. I mean, if one doesn’t know where the photographs were taken, they can represent a scenario in many other places. As an example, I recently showed the images for a feminist critique group in Los Angeles, and they immediately connected them to homeless camps in that city because that is what you have in the forests north of LA: camps with homeless people, which are very similar to the camp in Calais, or to camps in the forest of suburban Stockholm where Roma people live, also being chased away by the police on a regular basis. What appeared as striking was that some of the shoes were overgrown with moss and more or less covered with soil, others looked like someone

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just stepped out of them an hour ago. And everything in between. So, it became a kind of archaeological survey within this small area. This new camp where migrants gathered had only been there around a year and a half and it was very interesting to have this kind of time span embedded in the photographs. And, considering that in the painting Les Énervés de Jumièges, the two young princes are hamstrung because they tried to take over their father’s kingdom while he was travelling – they do not wear shoes, their feet are bandaged and appear in the foreground of the painting. So, the photographed shoes also connect to the painting in the museum in a very direct way: imagining that the shoes in the forest could be the young men’s, as well as the young men in the painting could be contemporary refugees, playing with a sliding temporality while interpreting the art piece in the museum. I also photographed an abandoned mattress in the forest that resembles the bed/raft in Les Énervés de Jumièges. This image was never used in the exhibition, but it is printed in the catalogue. Editors: The ocean theme is central in this exhibition in Rouen, can you tell us more about it? How did you manage to link the water theme with your artistic work on migration? Axel Karlsson Rixon: Although I was also taking many photographs of monuments connected to migration in the area, I ended up using the ones of the ocean because the ocean is what stops people from moving on further, but also constitutes a way to arrive at the area. The ocean is also present in Les Énervés de Jumièges hit by beaming sunlight on the horizon. It’s a symbol of hope. So, I chose twelve photographs from different migration places, but the only reference to the ocean horizons are the name of the beach, city, or town. The intention was to connect the refugee migration that is happening today with other kinds of migration that historically have taken place in the area, also considering aspects of memory: how do we grieve and who do we attribute a grieving space to? Will the great migration that is going on today be honored and remembered? Editors: The title Mobilité Mémorable raises the question of the distinction between visible and invisible migrants – the ones who have deserved public attention (and commemoration) and the ones no one ever sees. It may also draw a link with the differences in treatment between migrants. Can you explain how the themes of memory and migration are interwoven in your work? Axel Karlsson Rixon: Mobilité Mémorable is a site- and context-specific work, set in relation to the history of, as well as contemporary, migration in the

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region of Normandy extended up to Dunkirk, i.e. along the English Channel. I used this work to make a connection with the actual scenario rather than the story itself: young men on a raft drifting on the ocean. What does that mean? If I said ‘I’m presenting a photo of two men on a raft out on the ocean’, what would you think about? You wouldn’t think about a mythological image of two princes, you would rather think of refugees coming over the ocean. It’s such a strong image for us because it’s been reccurring in the media for years now. It has become an iconic image of the refugee. I believe that connection is quite obvious to anyone if you give a hint towards that reading. Editors: Can you tell us about other artists that have recently moved you, precisely because they made migration visible? Do you think that art can transcend politically constructed borders?  Axel Karlsson Rixon: I was lucky to see Bouchra Khalili’s installation at Le Jeu de Paume (Paris) in the fall. She’s French-Moroccan and the work I am referring to is titled Mapping Journey. She challenges the notion of geographical borders and national borders by representing the act of migration as a radical challenge to States’ political systems, not only as a mode of escape and suffering. So, she’s following different people, undocumented migrants predominantly to Europe, and also in Palestine. It’s a really wonderful work: interviews of people talking about their journey, like why they’re moving and how and why they’re drawing on the map. It’s really an amazing work. Editors: Museums seem to draw on empathy when dealing with migration today, as well as the media of course when they do not blame the migrants. You avoided empathy in your work: the exhibition in Rouen is powerful but also leaves the viewer free, how did you manage to avoid the vulnerability trope? Axel Karlsson Rixon: I think it is important to turn the gaze back to the audience, and avoid creating art that manifests an ‘us’ and a ‘them’: images of suffering people being looked at by privileged people in a space remote from where the suffering actually is taking place. We see this every day in the media. And human rights organisations resort to empathy, and I don’t blame them because it’s an efficient way to raise money and they need that money in the urgent crises everywhere. As an artist, but also a researcher, I am trying to find other ways to approach the subject and my aim is to engage the audience in a different way, asking themselves: who am I in this system? And as mentioned before, one has to keep in mind that the site for the exhibition is crucial for how the artwork is conducted: it is a site-specific project. Mobilité Mémorable was made for a specific institution in relation to the painting Les Énervés de Jumièges, but also in relation to the Lumière Nordique

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project and the Normandy area as a whole. Hopefully, the people that took part in the installation understood something about their own history and how one is treating migration as a historical phenomenon in relation to the migration that is taking place today. Editors: Do you feel that the intensity of the political moment right now has made art more or less able to mediate those debates on migration? Has it become more difficult?  Axel Karlsson Rixon: Of course, artists are getting more and more engaged in those issues in different ways. Many artists conduct activism. I’m signing up to spend evenings at this refugee home in Gothenburg, researching for a new project but also feeling that I need to engage. One important example of artists engaging in the current refugee situation is the Trampoline House in Copenhagen. The Danish artist Morten Goll and Danish curator Tone Olaf Nielsen started an independent community centre for refugees. They have for a couple of years incorporated a gallery within the space and they exhibit established artists approaching issues that are relevant to the centre. It’s a quite amazing initiative and they’ve been doing it for probably eight years at least now.

Ambiguous attachments: creations of diasporic aesthetics and migratory imagery in Chinese Australian art Birgit Mersmann

Global migration and the diasporisation of Chinese art

The increasing diasporisation of art and culture is a far-reaching and profound shift resulting from global migration and its rapidly changing nature. As a global transnational process, migration has produced global diasporas (Cohen, 1997) that fuel the dissemination of ‘diasporic imaginaries’ (Mishra, 1996). To take account of these developments, diaspora research has undergone a process of reorientation over recent decades. Along with transcending the limiting classical notions of diaspora as anchored in the Jewish tradition, it has diversified in scope on every level, extended its definitions, and repositioned itself at the intersection of (trans)migration, transnational, and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial and anthropological theories of transversality, transculturation, and translation, as exemplified by Édouard Glissant’s Traité du Tout-monde (1997), Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993), and James Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997), have contributed to rethinking the concept of diaspora in terms of hybridity and redefining it as a feature, structure, and social practice of translational migratory culture oscillating between integrity and discontinuity (Quayson and Daswani, 2013). The global migration of Chinese mainland artists since the 1980s has elicited a diasporisation of the Chinese art scene. It is an undeniable fact that, to a large extent, the global ascendency of Chinese art is due to the – virtually connected – communities of Chinese overseas artists who have, from different edges, regions, and places of the world, contributed to the construction and shaping of the global imaginary of Chinese contemporary art. This particular constellation requires a rethinking of global contemporary Chinese art from the transnational perspective of migration and diaspora studies – a scholarly field still underrepresented in both Chinese art history and global art studies. This area of research will be developed from the viewpoint of the migrant image. Conditions of global migration and interdependence have reshaped the production, dissemination, and reception of art (Dogramaci

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and Mersmann, 2019; Wrapson et al., 2019), resulting in the development of a particular ‘migratory aesthetics’ (Durrant and Lord, 2007) and the emergence of the ‘migrant image’ in contemporary art practice, serving as a critical, even resistant visual operator in times of global crisis (Demos, 2013a). These transformations make it necessary to study art in relation to ‘The Migrant’s Time’ and rethink art history from the perspective of transnational migration and diaspora studies (Mathur, 2011). To explore the production of diasporic Chineseness in the art creation of Chinese Australian migrant artists, I mainly draw on the philosophical definition of the migrant image by Thomas Nail, who attempts to overcome static and secondary conceptions of the migrant and the image. Nail defines the ‘migrant image’ beyond representational image theory as a mobile process of reflection. He emphasises the ‘mobile and migratory nature of the image itself’ and acknowledges a reciprocal formation of ‘a becoming migrant of the image and a becoming image of the migrant at the same time’ (Nail, 2019: 67). His call for a kinetic theory of the migrant image is based on the argument that ‘the social primacy of the migrant and aesthetic primacy of the mobile image are two dimensions of the same historical zeitgeist at the turn of the twenty-first century in which everything appears to be characterised by the primacy of motion’ (Nail, 2019: 54, emphasis in original). Applied to art historical migration studies, this means that artistic images must be investigated through the perspective of movement – their displacements and shifts, and that the becoming image of the migrant artist should take centre stage in the study of migratory imagery. By focusing on two Chinese overseas artists – Ah Xian and Dong Wang Fan, who share the experience of emigrating from mainland China to Australia in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 and building new careers as successful Chinese Australian artists in Australia and abroad – this chapter discusses conditions for, and elements of, diasporic aesthetics and migratory imagery. It intends to explore the production of diasporic Chineseness in Chinese Australian art with regard to the global transnationalisation of contemporary Chinese art. The aim of this casestudy analysis is to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of migration and diasporic experience on the creation of art, in particular on the role of transculturations between Chinese and Western art traditions and image cultures (Mersmann, 2004; Mersmann and Schulz, 2006). In response to the rise of China as a major regional and world power, the notion of ‘Chineseness’ surfaced in mainland China cultural debates at the beginning of the 1990s (Zhang et al., 1994). Its formation was part of the discourse on defining the particularities of ‘cultural China’ (Tu, 1991) and delimiting Chinese cultural modernity from Chinese imitation and appropriation of Western-style modernity. Chineseness was recognised as ‘the new model of knowledge’ that ‘emphasises both cultural diversity and the unique

Ambiguous attachments

Chinese experience, both universal values and Chinese subjectivity’ (He, 2012: 548). Scholars from the Chinese diaspora in particular criticised the concept of Chineseness as a nativist cultural theory of post-1989 China (Xu, 1998) and warned against the danger of a monolithic sinocentrism pushed by mainland China (Chow, 1998). This critique is also reflected in art historical studies on Chineseness in contemporary Chinese art outside China. Chinese art history has long been reluctant to acknowledge the major contribution of Chinese art in the diasporas to the creation of a global contemporary Chinese art and its promotion on the international art market.1 The Asian art historian John Clark was one of the first to study Chinese diaspora artists. He chose a point of view that foregrounded the artists’ dilemmas of (dis-)attachment to their homeland China (Clark, 1998). Under the title Breakout, Melissa Chiu contributed a comprehensive survey on Chinese art outside China (Chiu, 2006). Starting from the emergence of Chinese contemporary art between 1989 and 1999, she investigated ‘Chinese art abroad’, focusing on Chinese artists who had migrated from mainland China to countries of the Western hemisphere, among them the United States, France, and Australia. Although limited in its regional scope, the study offered initial insights into a diasporic art history of contemporary Chinese art. Beside cross-cultural art discourses on East–West encounters, Chineseness was discussed as both an international branding strategy and interventionist cultural strategy of Chinese artists living and working outside of China. With regard to the subversive strategic orientation of Chineseness, the argument followed a statement made by Gao Minglu and Hou Hanru that Chinese artists are ‘critiquing and deconstructing “mainstream” discourses and practices in Western art by incorporating their Chinese background at the center of their work’ (Gao and Hou, 1998: 185). Even though the artistic analysis of Chineseness was bound up in migration and diaspora study contexts, it missed the opportunity to locate and expand on the transversality of diasporic Chineseness as a migratory phenomenon of transcultural imagery. My investigation of Chinese Australian art shall demonstrate how crossculturally migrating perspectives on space representation, materiality, artistic techniques and image genres produce multiple, even ambiguous, senses of Chinese attachment and belonging. The concept of ‘diasporic Chineseness’ that I intend to adopt in this chapter for art historical migration and diaspora studies was introduced in contemporary Chinese cultural studies by the publication Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China (Kuehn et al., 2013). It enables to review the role that members of Chinese diasporic groups have played since the 1980s in rethinking and reinterpreting the cultural production of Chineseness as a response to the rise of China to the status of a global superpower. Integrating the diasporic mo(ve)ment into the cultural concept of Chineseness allows to take the

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scholarly shift of a ‘diasporization of diaspora studies’ markedly propelled by Asian Australian studies (Khoo and Lo, 2008) into account. Chineseness has inscribed itself into a global Chinese diaspora; it has dispersed all over the globe, forming varieties of Chinese contemporary diasporas in Europe and North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Asia-Pacific region, and on the African continent (Chee-Beng, 2013; Zhou, 2017). Historically speaking, this is not a new phenomenon, since Chinese communities have emigrated and spread all over the world throughout history – with some 20 million Chinese leaving China between the 1840s and 1940s (Chan, 2018: 1) for overseas labour opportunities in the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, and Australia.2 However, in an age of accelerated globalisation and network communities, the (trans)migration3 of Chinese people has increased, producing growing Chinese diasporas as ‘exemplary communities of the transnational moment’ (Tölölyan, 1991: 3)4. Chinese artists are part of this recent diasporisation move; they are reinventing Chineseness as a cultural identity and social community marker through the local lens of diverse diasporic experiences. In a globalised art world of mutual interconnectedness, their artistic discourse on Chineseness conducted outside of China is not an isolated one, it feeds back into the discourse on Chineseness inside the People’s Republic of China; vice versa, the debate on the cultural concept of China/Chineseness inside the nation-state of China informs the cultural discourse on China in the communities of the Chinese diaspora. Recent research in Chinese diaspora studies has shifted focus, investigating diasporic Chineseness not against, but in relation and connection to the Chinese nation-state and its cultural nationalist conceptions of a global transnational Chineseness (Kuehn et al., 2013). Within this research domain, the migratory conceptualisation of diasporic Chineseness can act as a counter-model to the all-inclusive and identity-fixing notion of the one Chinese diaspora as a globally uniting and culturally homogenising entity with mainland China as its ineluctable reference point. It acknowledges the global diversity and cultural pluralism of Chinese diasporas and respects their reorientation and resettling in new national, cultural, and social environments. Following Maravillas’ argument on Chinese art in the diaspora, diasporic Chineseness can be defined as a migrating mode of cross-cultural identification, a spectral entity ‘that both haunts, and is haunted by, the work and identity of … diasporic Chinese artists’ (Maravillas, 2007: 255). As a cultural pattern and production form of ‘mutual haunting’, it is constitutive for the experience of diaspora. Migration pathways and exchange routes towards Chinese Australian art

The overseas migration of a significant number of Chinese artists, curators and critics in the late 1980s and early 1990s was mainly oriented towards the

Ambiguous attachments

West, i.e. the European countries, the United States, and Australia after it had reinforced its regional economic and cultural engagement with East Asia and the Asian-Pacific. The reasons for the massive exodus of Chinese mainland artists were two-fold. While some left their home country in response to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and the subsequent suppression of pro-democracy expressions, others took advantage of the global opening of the contemporary art scene, the global expansion of the art market, and the internationalisation of art funding through newly founded artist-in-residency programmes and art grants. In some cases, the two reasons came together.5 Among the group of Chinese Australian exile artists can be counted Jiawei Shen, the artist couple Lu Xiao and Song Tang, Xiao Xian Liu, Zhiyuan Wang, and Shaomin Shen; the group of migrant artists with pronounced scholarly interests is represented by Guan Wei, Ah Xian, and Dong Wang Fan. Ah Xian and Guan Wei migrated to Australia after artist-in-residencies at the Tasman School of Art in Hobart in 1989. Dong Wang Fan came to Australia in 1990 where he pursued a scholarly and artistic career. Diasporic Chinese artistic communities formed in Australia alongside institutionalised migration paths, cultural and political exchange programmes, educational opportunities, and career options. The so-called ‘Asianisation’ of Australia’s political, economic, and cultural agenda at the beginning of the 1990s was mainly propelled by market interests. One key outcome of the Australia Council’s reorientation towards the Asia-Pacific region was new funding opportunities for art and culture. The Australia and Regional Artist Exchange programme (ARX) was one of the first initiatives that brought together artists from Australia and the Asia Pacific for cultural exchange purposes. Founded and run by a collective of artists and cultural producers in Perth, it was active from 1987 until 2000. The Asialink programme, set up in 1990 as a joint initiative of the Australian government’s Commission for the Future and the Myer Foundation, one of Australia’s oldest and largest philanthropic organisations, established reciprocal residencies for artists and organised touring exhibitions to export Australian art to Asia. The foundation of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, launched in 1993 by the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, strongly contributed to bringing art from the Asia-Pacific region to the urban dynamic of the Australian art scene. As a result of its great success, it continues to run today, presenting new and significant art from across the Asia Pacific by challenging conventional definitions of contemporary art. The art link to China in particular emerged as a salient feature of the history of Asian Australian art exchanges through the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In 2011, the increased (market) interest in Chinese art led to the establishment of the Australia China Art Foundation, a ‘not-for-profit organisation dedicated to supporting artists and building active links in the field of contemporary art

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between Australia, China and the Asia-Pacific region’.6 The foundation supports artist residencies, runs an Arts Can Do Program to promote community arts, and finances exhibitions of local and visiting artists. A follow-up initiative in the academic field was the opening of the Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture at the Western Sydney University in 2016. Since then, it has established itself as ‘a hub and national resource centre for cultural exchange between Australia, China, and the Sinosphere (including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and other centres of Chinese culture), and for collaborative action in the arts and cultural fields’.7 In the first phase of cultural dialogue and art exchange, Australian art institutions viewed and exhibited Chinese art as an import article. Particular attention was directed either towards mainland Chinese art or towards Chinese overseas art that toured through the global exhibitions of the cosmopolitan art market, satisfying the desire for Chineseness as exotic otherness. For a relatively long period, Chinese art in the Australian diaspora was excluded from Australian exhibitions of contemporary Asian art. The new presence of Asian artists in the Australian art environment slowly penetrated the public consciousness of art institutions and exhibition curation. Only in 1999 were the Chinese-Australian artists Guan Wei and Ah Xian represented as border-crossing art figures at the Asia Pacific Triennial exhibition. Melissa Chiu, the author of Breakout: Chinese Art outside China, has argued that ‘Asian Australian artists presented the greatest challenge to the binary distinctions that maintain the construct of Asia’s “other”, and furthermore, Australia as the West’ (Chiu, 2006: 170). According to her findings, the 1993 exhibition Here Not There, curated by Hiram To and Nicholas Tsoutas at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, was one of the first ‘to include Asian Australian artists in an Australian discourse about Asia’ and to explore ‘the idea of diaspora as a way of complicating strict and rigid ideas of Australia’ (Chiu, 2006: 170). Through the exhibition Above and Beyond: Austral/Asian Interactions (1996), curated by Clare Williamson and Michael Snelling for the Institute of Modern Art and the Australian Center of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, the representation of a diverse diaspora community of Chinese artists became more prominent, as proven by the inclusion of Hong Kongbased artists John Young and Kate Beynon, the Australia-based Chinese artists Guan Wei and Ah Xian as well as the Malaysian Chinese artist Emil Goh. This curatorial concept emphasised an evolving Asian-Pacific regionalism in Chinese contemporary art networked by Chinese artists living in the AsianPacific diaspora. With the 1998 exhibition Transit at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Asian diasporisation of Australia’s art scene became an officially recognised fact. Its curator Anthony Bond presented the work of seven Asian Australian artists from different backgrounds and generations focusing on their different responses to the diasporic living and production conditions

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in Australia. The noticeable avoidance of the term ‘Asian Australian artist’ clearly announced the acceptance of cross-cultural artist identities, and their migratory and transitional nature.8 By this shift of perception, the issue of diasporic Chineseness is revealed as a new dimension of Australian, Chinese and diasporic art and art history. Inside out. Outside in. Ah Xian’s China portraits of remigration

Globally dispersed Chinese artists have proven to be extraordinarily powerful agents of visual ‘migrations of Chineseness’ (Gabriel, 2011). The work of the Chinese Australian artist Ah Xian, who was born in Beijing in 1960 and emigrated to Sydney in 1998, is a particularly impressive example of this. Key characteristics shared by members of modern diaspora communities, as defined by William Safran (1991: 83f.), are reflected in Ah Xian’s artwork, such as his preservation of a collective memory of his original homeland China, its local history, and artistic achievements, as well as his continued cultivation of enduring personal and professional relations with China. However, one criterion in Safran’s diaspora theory, the vision of a real or realistically hoped-for return to the homeland, is substituted by the fantasy of an imagined remigration to Chinese culture and art. Ah Xian is a self-taught artist. When living and working in China, he created paintings and site-specific installations. After his migration to Australia, his artistic work shifted in both content and media. While living at a distance from mainland China, the artist discovered a novel freedom of personal expression and peacefulness of mind. The first phase of artistic creation after his move to Australia was still affected by reflections on the political situation in his homeland China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and defined by his new role as Chinese minority artist in Australia. In the painting series Heavy Wounds (1991), Ah Xian depicts traumatic experiences of bodily violence and loss in a surreal manner. Stylised figures who recall the representation of workers and party leaders on propaganda posters are shown as heavily wounded humans, as in picture no. 7 of the Heavy Wounds Series (see Figure 5.1); their arms, hands, fingers, and even heads are bandaged; they are tied up or bound together in an endless repetitive chain of collectivised bodies thereby expressing immobility and mass woundedness. Experiences of displacement, disorientation, and relocation are the main features of his second artistic phase after migration. Ah Xian’s repositioning between Eastern and Western culture in his installation work Deduction#2 (1996) conveys a tongue-in-cheek commentary on cultural stereotypes and binary thinking. It seems to ironically reappropriate the in-between representation of the Korean artist Nam June Paik who portrayed himself in a triangle configuration with a sculpture of Buddha and Rodin’s Thinker

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5.1

Ah Xian (1991) Heavy Wounds n° 7, oil on canvas, 110 × 90 cm.

(Triangle, 1976). The installation Deduction#2 is composed of three fax machines which, when the work was exhibited, spewed endless paper copies of three portraits: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as an icon of Western Renaissance art; the image of Buddha as a symbol of Eastern culture; and a photo self-portrait of the artist. The artist presented himself in-between the Mona Lisa and the Buddha image, thus demonstrating his dialoguing between artistic and cultural spaces and his negotiation of aesthetic and

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philosophical differences between conceptions of the West and the East. Based on his cross-cultural migratory experience, he even devised a map listing the main differences between Eastern and Western civilisation (printed in Chiu, 2006: 186). The return to Chinese culture, media, and art traditions is particularly impressive in Ah Xian’s porcelain series China, China (1998–1999). According to Chiu, this work group ‘can be understood as the culmination of Ah Xian’s thoughts on the migratory experience as well as his thoughts about his homeland after ten years in Australia’ (Chiu, 2006: 183). After emigrating to Australia, he gained entrance to the ceramics workshop at the Sydney College of Arts, where he began to experiment with porcelain, a material which plays a prominent role in the tradition of Chinese craftsmanship. A nine-month Australia Council grant enabled him to familiarise himself with traditional porcelain-making techniques at Jingdezhen, the historic centre of Chinese porcelain manufacture during the Ming and Qing dynasties, which is still active today as a manufacturing facility. The (con)temporary return to this former craftsmanship contributed to the strengthening of the Chinese references in the work of Ah Xian and brought to light new aspects of Chineseness. The resulting arts and crafts experimentation with decoratively painted porcelain busts represents a kind of cultural-symbolic re-import of Chinese pictorial motifs and material aesthetics to the artistic site of the diaspora. Ah Xian draws from the centuries-old motif and design foundations of Chinese porcelain production: he transfers traditional motifs from porcelain manufacturers’ sample books, such as the imperial dragon pattern, bird, and flower motifs, as well as landscape scenes, to the surface of the busts. As an effect of this overlapping, the human faces and figures seem to sink underneath. Considering the final practical technical process of firing the porcelain busts in the blast furnaces of Jingdezhen, one might even posit that the artist burns the historical image culture/s of his Chinese homeland onto the bodies and heads of his portrait busts, in both a figurative and material sense. However, the Chinese material aesthetics of porcelain appear to be broken by the form of the image carrier – the bust. In the Chinese premodern tradition of porcelain crafts, only small-sized full-body porcelain figures can be found, but no porcelain busts. The genre of the bust is rooted in a long Western art tradition of portraiture reaching back to ancient Greek art (Davies, 1991; Kohl and Müller, 2007; Kammel, 2013). It flourished in the Roman Empire in the form of imperial hero, philosopher, and poet busts and experienced a new blossoming with the rise of bourgeois society. Depending on the context, the preferred materials were marble and bronze, occasionally wood and terracotta. Within art history, the bust stands in the tradition of the portrait with mimetic representation as one of its key features. As a semiplastic human form, it is used for a broad range of portrait representations,

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spanning from idealised portraits of rulers to more realistic portraits of civilians. The image-media related cultural disruption that Ah Xian creates by the hybridised form of the porcelain bust is particularly evident in the piece China, China – Bust 34 (see Figure 5.2). The porcelain bust is covered by socalled Bogu shapes and motifs in red iron oxide glaze on a white porcelain surface. Bogu (literally ‘comprehending the antiquity’) is a collection of precious

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Ah Xian (1999) China China – Bust n° 34, overglaze iron-red on porcelain, 42 × 40 × 22 cm.

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antique objects such as cupboards, drawers, lanterns, vases, etc. Some of the objects are carved as if in relief so that they stand out from the bust form. To better situate the disjoint between bust and porcelain décor, image carrier, and image, it is crucial to know that Ah Xian takes his bust form from living models: from friends, family members, acquaintances, or even porcelain factory staff in Jingdezhen who produce the busts for him. This means that he adopts the occidental pictorial tradition of the bust as a basic plastic form of human representation. However, by ornamentally coating the bust with attached objects that embody its attachment to Chinese art history and cultural heritage, the identity of the person is made to disappear. The Chinese world of things overwrites the subjectivity of the bust figure, it grows over body and face like a bubonic plague, besieges, and decomposes the persona depicted in the form of the bust. The reifying coating produces facelessness. Significant in this context is that the figures do not look. Their closed eyes can be compared to the tradition of the death mask, but also to the introverted, self-directed view of Buddha. The hermetic seclusion of the person, its inner absorption, can be interpreted as a sign of inner emigration – the diasporic individual, scattered and dissolved in wandering motifs, has withdrawn into her/his own subject condition. In the form of its outer shell – the porcelain bust – an idealising monument for the commemoration of Chinese culture is established. A material-aesthetic peculiarity of Ah Xian’s work is the indirect, quasivirtual transfer of the pictorial culture tradition of his homeland China to the busts. While the creative image design process takes place in the virtual design space of the computer, the material production process, i.e. the production and painting of the porcelain busts, is outsourced to the China porcelain manufactory in Jingdezhen. The concrete sculptural act is thus remotely controlled from the place of the Australian artist diaspora. Due to this split constellation, it could be defined as an appropriative practice of tele-application. Overseas Chinese artist Ah Xian has his busts produced and glazed by mainland Chinese porcelain artists. In doing so, he emphasises not only the collectivity of artisan factory production, but also the centuriesold historical significance of the Chinese art market in the field of porcelain production, spanning to the present day. As a parallel phenomenon to the entrepreneurial outsourcing of labour production to low wage countries of the global economy, artistic outsourcing as an artistic strategy under conditions of global migration can also be subject to criticism. The professional migrant artist of the global art economy exploits the labour market structures and production conditions in his/her own homeland for personal artistic benefit and profit. It is important to take this shadowy side of migratory art practice into account when analysing transitory material aesthetics.

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Back and forth. Forth and back. Visual ambiguity in Dong Wang Fan’s sculptural painting

In the painterly work of the Chinese Australian artist Dong Wang Fan, the translational aesthetic of diasporic imagery becomes tangible through ‘shifting perspectives’ (Fan, 1999). Perspective changes are used to manifest the movement of space-related viewpoints and intellectual/ideological world views in response to migratory experiences. Dong Wang Fan has framed the concept of ‘shifting perspective’ as both a method and metaphor of his own artwork and artistic research. It is directly connected to his migratory in-between stance moving back and forth between Chinese and Australian perceptions, positions, and experiences. Accessed from a methodological viewpoint, shifting perspective signifies the examination of ‘how the system of space representation in artworks differs due to the artist’s divergent cultural conditions’. Viewed from a metaphorical standpoint, it means the investigation of social and cultural outlooks, including ‘the body’s various philosophical, political, technological, sexual and emotional perspectives’ (Fan, 2013a: 7). The interweaving of these two approaches forms the core of Dong Wang Fan’s diasporic art aesthetics. It is deeply rooted in the artist’s personal emigrant experience: ‘The idea of shifting perspective that I develop in my work can also be used to describe my own personal experience and identity as a Chinese artist living in Australia’ (quoted in Maravillas, 2007: 262). Born in China and now based in Sydney, Dong Wang Fan studied traditional Chinese art at the Shanghai School of Arts and Crafts where he received training in classical Chinese techniques, such as brush calligraphy, ink painting, and low-relief carving in wood, ivory, and jade. He was able to establish himself as a renowned Shanghai artist before he moved to Australia in 1990 to continue his art studies at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales. After finishing his Master of Arts, he received a Post Graduate Award and completed a Doctorate of Creative Art at Wollongong University. The theoretical model of ‘shifting perspectives’ was established in his doctoral thesis published under the title The Dancing Shadows: Shifting Perspectives and the Body (Fan, 1999). Conceived as a project of artistic research, the study included the creation of painterly work that visualised and reflected the issue of ‘shifting perspectives’ as an effect of migratory transculturation and artistic diasporisation. In the artwork of Dong Wang Fan, the body in both human and object form appears as the central pictorial subject for demonstrating the visual shifting of perspective as a switching between Western and East Asian codes of spatial visual representation. This is exemplified by the painting series Descendant, Descendant Bodies, and Shifting Perspectives and the Body. In these cycles, the shift of perspective in the history of Western art, described

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by the artist as a move ‘from linear perspective to the modernist objects and background perspective’ (Fan, 2013a: 21), is shifted once again – or even virtually augmented – by a so-called shadow perspective which, according to the artist, ‘serves aesthetic and symbolic purposes’ (Fan, 2013c: 18). It enables the artist to fuse painting and sculpture into the hybrid genre of ‘sculptural painting’. With the invention of this intermedia art form between flat and plastic imagery, Dong Wang Fan migrates a particular Chinese art and craft tradition – low-relief carving – to the Western art tradition of oil and acrylic painting. The figure-ground/object-surface relation, essential for a clearcut visual perception, is disturbed and displaced, thereby conveying the impression of spatial ambiguity. In Descendant – Red Environment #1 (1995) (see Figure 5.3), for instance, the background patterns of floral elements – flowers, tendrils, and leaves – move forward in the foreground, growing over the top  of the trompe l’oeil three-dimensional objects that stick onto the surface of the ground. It appears as if ‘the patterns themselves become objects and the objects underneath them become background’ while ‘at that moment  there is another background created beneath the objects’ (Fan, 2013a: 22). Besides foreground–background oscillations, visual perception shifts are enacted by changing bodily perspectives. Imaginary visions of a spatially extended body image of transborderness9 figure most prominently in Dong

Dong Wang Fan (1995) Descendant – Red Environment #1, acrylic on canvas, 114 × 180 cm.

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Dong Wang Fan (1996) Descendant Bodies #1, acrylic on canvas, 178 × 254 cm.

Wang Fan’s painting series Descendant Bodies. Therein, the artist makes use of the Western art ideal and motif of the naked Renaissance body, as based upon the classical ideal of the human figure in Greek and Roman art, deconstructing, fragmenting, and – spatially – deterritorialising it. In Descendent Bodies #1 (1996) (see Figure 5.4), fragments of powerful muscular bodies, such as arms, legs, and torsos, swirl over the canvas in vortical flow. Although in terms of iconography they represent human bodies, their painterly rendering transmutes them into inorganic plaster parts. Through their floating around in a floral pictorial space together with other plastic objects, they are dehumanised, depersonalised, and physically objectified. ‘The structure of this painting creates a new opportunity for the body to perceive, to shift, and to travel from context to context and space to space’ (Fan, 2013a: 26). The diasporic imagery of bodily representation rejects any boundaries between subject and object, organic and inorganic, mental and physical. The corporal identities of human bodies and physical objects become interchangeable; on their migratory pathways through space, human bodies can even fuse with mechanical objects. Considered in relation to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of assemblage in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), they are defined by the artist as ‘assembled bodies’ (Fan, 2013a: 26). The relationship of their component parts is not stable but rather fluid; bodily elements can be displaced and replaced within and among

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other bodies. In Dong Wang Fan’s theory of shifting perspectives, the concept of the assembled body is closely connected to the postmodern idea of a shifting body, the inability of boundaries to contain it. Bodies, independent of whether they qualify as subjects or objects, ‘are series of flows, energies, movements, strata, segments, organs, intensities – fragments capable of being linked or severed in potentially infinite ways other than those which congeal them into identities’ (Grosz, 1994 quoted in Fan, 2013a: 29). In addition to this postmodern understanding, I would stress the argument that the model of the body as assemblage strongly reflects the migratory diasporisation of the body, its unlimited exchangeability and fluidity in terms of de- and recomposition. The shifting perspective of the body is supplemented by a shifting figureground perspective as previously analysed. Bodies are captured in a constant flow of movement, they seem to move forward, figuring in the foreground, but at the same time, they withdraw, dissolving into the background. Their spatial identification is characterised by extreme ambiguity as they oscillate back and forth through the floral pattern tissue that appears to be the ground plane of the picture. This effect is also due to the shadow perspective that Dong Wang Fan has introduced as a new transmedia concept of space representation in painting. The shadow-perspectival approach to creating shifting body/object representations is continued in the painting Shifting Perspectives and the Body (1997–1999), but with the addition that it is extended towards the spatial perspectivisation by the viewer. The monumental acrylic-on-canvas painting measuring 2.4 × 9 m in total is composed of 5 individual panels (see Figure 5.5). With this serial narrative arrangement of the picture, the artist alludes to different traditional media forms of pictorial representation in Western and Chinese/East Asian art history – the altar image and the (folding) screen – in order to shift perspectives of painting media and pictorial mediality between Western and Eastern image cultures. The moving of the viewer’s perspective from one pictorial space, historical context, and visual culture to the other is playfully enacted on different levels of the picture, reaching from iconography to pictorial representation modes. On the iconographic level, the viewer is confronted with a crude mixing of iconic motifs and representational stereotypes from Western Renaissance art history, traditional Chinese art history and politics, and Australian contemporary media and Pop culture – implying a radically ironic take on art and visual culture migrations. Figures, compositions, and narrative scenes of existing pictures are adapted and rearranged as pictures within a picture to form a transcultural(ised) metapictorial assemblage. Its main feature is based on the migration of visual data from two different picture sources selected as characteristic examples of shifting the system of space representation in classical Western and Chinese art: Sandro Botticelli’s sacra conversazione

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Dong Wang Fan (1997–1999) Shifting Perspectives and the Body, acrylic on canvas, 240 × 900 cm.

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painting Madonna con Santi (c. 1485), also entitled Bardi Madonna, and Zhou Wenju’s ink and colour painting Playing Go under Double Screens from the Five Dynasties Period (c. tenth century). From the artist’s perspective, the choice of Botticelli’s painting is representative of the modern shift to the onepoint linear perspective in European Renaissance painting, combining a flat two-dimensional window frame with the representation of three-dimensional scenery. The selection of Zhou’s painting is related to the ambiguity of the double screen as a medium and representation in Chinese painting, allowing for multiple viewpoints and shifting perspectives between real and pictorial image. In the first picture of the painting series, entitled Double Screens (see Figure 5.6) in reference to Zhou’s work, the holy figures of St Peter the Baptist and St John the Evangelist, adopted from Botticelli’s Madonna con Santi, are placed in front of a traditional Chinese screen and a computer screen, watching Australian rugby players fight against Mao’s Red Guards. In comparison to their original placement in Botticelli’s painting, the two holy figures have moved in space, and have changed their places; in addition, the head of the Jesus child has migrated to replace the face of the long-bearded figure of St John the Evangelist, thus leaving the viewer with the unsettling impression of shifting age and double-coded identity. In the second panel of the painting cycle, entitled Bardi Madonna (see Figure 5.7), the reference to the Botticelli painting is made more explicit. The spatial composition  of the original painting, architecturally graded from the foreground to the background, is largely adopted by Dong Wang Fan. However, the content of the sacra conversazione scene has been completely re-placed. The holy side-figures in the foreground are shifted backwards into the niches where they appear as ghostly body shadows, and the central figure of the Madonna with the Jesus child is replaced by the representation of an Australian rugby player. The loving Madonna picture is transformed into a violent fight scene of convulsive carnality. Beside the migration of art historical iconographies, motifs, and compositions derived from Western and Chinese artworks to construct a diasporic space of entangled art and image worlds, Dong Wang Fan reverts to the double screen as a visual device of traditional Chinese figurative painting as a way of representing shifting perspectives. Based on Wu Hung’s study The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (1997), the artist distinguishes three functions of the screen that might even merge in one: 1. the screen as an object utilised to create real space and transform it into manageable subspaces; 2. the screen as a painting medium offering a multiplicity of viewpoints; and 3. the screen as a pictorial representation in a picture. With reference to Zhou Wenju’s painting Playing Go under Double Screens, he stresses the use of the image-medial function of the double screen to create metaphorical space within a metonymic space and construct a

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Dong Wang Fan (1997–1999) Double Screens #1, from the series Shifting Perspectives and the Body, acrylic on canvas, 244 × 180 cm.

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Dong Wang Fan (1997–1999) Bardi Madonna #2, from the series Shifting Perspectives and the Body, acrylic on canvas, 244 × 180 cm.

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metapicture in the definition of picture theorist Mitchell, who has classified it as a reflection of ‘pictures about pictures … that are used to show what a picture is’ (Mitchell, 1994: 35). The double-screened framing of figurative scenes, as shown in Zhou’s and Dong Wang Fan’s painting, shifts the visual perspectives between different spaces and imageries. These entail the double perception of ‘a painting within a painting’, the re-representation of pictorial representation,10 the ambiguous identity between real image and pictorial image produced, and the double status of the screen as a (space-dividing) object and image. In the painting Double Screens (see Figure 5.6) from the series Shifting Perspectives and the Body, these dimensions of the double screen are particularly evident. The general motif of a group of people in front of a double screen has been adopted from Zhou Wenju’s painting. However, the spacereflective frame of the double screen has been split media-technologically into a traditional Chinese painting screen and a computer screen. Both screens serve, according to Dong Wang Fan, as ‘effective visual devices to display images imported from other spaces, and to help viewers to shift their perspectives from place to place, reality to art, and to construct spaces accordingly’ (Fan, 2013b: 17). They enable the migration of images into different contexts and frameworks. The computer screen as technological media device is believed to extend the metapictorial function of the traditional painting screen via its capacity to display multiple screens within its main visual screen. By representing double screens that allow for a potentially endless multiplication of representation within representation, a visual interpictorial dialogue between pastness and presence, and tradition and contemporaneity is opened. It demands that the viewer’s gaze transmigrates between different spaces and layers of visual representation – an oscillating move forth and back, back and forth. The mobility of visual perception in Double Screens even involves a shifting of perspective as symbolic form (Panofsky, 1991) between the visual representational concept of the window image, as modelled upon the constructive principles of a unified perspective in Renaissance art, and the screen image as a visual model of Chinese/East Asian art relying on multi-perspectivity and wandering viewpoints. A kind of synthesis is provided by the computer display, combining screen and window image. The double screen as a metaphoric space within a metonymic space thus becomes itself a metaphor for the double identity of the diasporic imaginary and the double-consciousness of postmigratory art. Aesthetic ambiguities of diasporic Chineseness in Chinese Australian art

The analysis of the work of Ah Xian and Dong Wang Fan has demonstrated that these artists migrate, translate, and transform the ‘Chineseness’ of their

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homeland art and visual culture by reimag(in)ing it in the new cultural context and living environment of Australia. This finding supports Maravillas’ argument that ‘diasporic Chinese artists both haunt, and are haunted by, the “Chineseness” of their originary culture’ (Maravillas, 2007: 255). Spectrality as an art-transformative element of diasporic Chineseness becomes apparent through a complex web of visual ambiguities. As presented above, these pervade the domains of visual perception and viewer perspective, representation and medialisation, and embodiment and identification. Technical materiality and image mediality, artistic genre traditions, and symbolic forms such as perspectival constructions prove to be central sites of aesthetic diasporisation and image migration. Visual ambiguity between two and three dimensionality, surface and depth, foreground and background, screen image and window image, painting and sculpture emerges as a major feature of Chinese Australian art-migrancy. Inter-art as an expression of interculturally mediated and negotiated art is informed by ‘in-between’ medialities produced by technical art and craft transfers. In Ah Xian’s diasporic work, traditional Chinese porcelain manufacturing and design techniques are translated into human bust sculpturing, creating individual porcelain portraits with diasporic Chinese ornamentation; in Dong Wang Fan’s artistic oeuvre, classical Chinese carving and relief techniques are translated into acrylic painting to shape sculptural painting as an ambiguous inter-art genre. Within the more general discourse on art and global migration, visual ambiguity can be described as a characteristic of diasporic, migratory aesthetics. It should be studied carefully from a transcultural perspective when considering issues of identity and belonging in diasporic art. Often enough, the ambiguous double-codification, present in Chinese Australian art (but also in overseas Chinese art in general), is overlooked or misread. Art historians, art critics, and art curators have especially criticised Chinese migrant artists living in the Western hemisphere for making explicit use of Chineseness as a marker of identity to play up to oriental stereotypes and national clichés in order to succeed on the Western art market. Wang Nanming, for instance, accuses Chinese artists living abroad of producing artwork that ‘conforms to the “Chinese characteristics” mandated by the West’, thus contributing to what is classified as ‘Chinatown culture’ (Wang, 2001: 265–266). Although this definitely applies to a number of artists who aim towards selling labelled ethnicity on the art global market, it represents a short-sighted analysis of the phenomenon. In my view, the diasporicity inherent in Chineseness as a category of migratory culture has been largely ignored. As demonstrated, Chinese Australian art can shift perspectives between perceptions, conceptions, and codifications of Chinese and Western art and aesthetics as determined by historical (trans)formations. It can challenge traditions and identities of

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Chinese art and culture in the same way as it may question the national and cultural identity of Australian art and art history as traditionally rooted in Western art traditions (Smith, 2011; Lowish, 2018). Icons of Identity – this was the title of Dong Wang Fan’s exhibition of dragon paintings in the 541 Art Space in Sydney in 2017 – are visual representations of double, even multiple identities and belongings. In recent work groups, the artist has started to paint markers and symbols of Chinese and Australian culture, such as dragons and gum trees, in parallel, switching from one cultural world and aesthetic space to the other. In the long run, diasporic Chineseness in Australian art has the potential to disrupt cultural image stereotypes and contribute to a decolonisation and de-‘whitening’ of Australian art. This move is comparable to the relatively recent recognition of contemporary Aboriginal art as genuinely Australian art (see Smith, 2009: 133–148; see McLean, 2011), which has helped to shift perspectives on what can and should by qualified as Australian. Contrary to the hegemonic sinisation of Australian art, as observed and feared by some critics (Fisher, 1995; Wang, 2001), this development creates the possibility of an optimistic outlook of a creative transculturalisation of Australian art. The success on the global art market of diasporic Chinese art could be paired with that of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art. Diasporic Chineseness in art thus contributes to feeding the global imaginary of migrating art worlds. Notes 1 The push onto the global art market was facilitated by the inauguration of international, regional, and local art biennials throughout Asia since 1995, the opening of foreign auction houses like Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams in Hong Kong, and Artcurial in Shanghai in 2008, as well as the establishment of international art fairs such as the Shanghai Art Fair in 1997 (which transformed into the ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair in 2013), the Art HK in 2008 (taken over by the Art Basel Hong Kong in 2011), and the ART SG in Singapore opening its doors in November 2019. In 2017, China overtook the United Kingdom as the second biggest art market after the United States. For developments in the international and mainland China art market for contemporary Chinese art, see https://arttac tic.com/categories/art-markets/chinese-art-market/ and www.cn.artnet.com/en/ chinese-art-auction-market-report/#download. Accessed 5 February 2019. 2 The Chinese mass emigration all over the world was a response to Qing China’s defeat by Britain in the First Opium War and its forced opening to the West in 1842. 3 The concept of transmigration is closely connected to the concept of transnationalism. Laurence J.C. Ma notes that ‘ideas about transmigration and diaspora encompass more dynamic, flexible, conceptually richer and more inclusive perspectives than the traditional conceptions of international migration. Transmigration and

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diaspora are among the most important constituent elements of the concept of transnationalism’ (Ma, 2003: 4). Transmigration can be defined as transit migration and the development of social relations and networks that link two or more communities simultaneously. For numbers of size and geographic distribution of the Chinese overseas, see Ma, 2003: 12 ff. Shen Jiawei, for instance, went to Australia in 1989 to study English. After he was blacklisted by the Chinese authorities for denouncing the Communist party leadership, he decided to stay in Australia. http://acaf.org.au/. Accessed 19 November 2018. www.westernsydney.edu.au/aciac/about. Accessed 19 November 2018. In the short brochure accompanying the exhibition, Bond spoke of the artists’ interest in ‘identity and cross-cultural references’ (quoted in Chiu, 2006: 173). In globalisation studies, transborderness is described as an effect of deterritorialisation and trans-border movement. This definition can be applied to study the impact of global migration on spatial representations and perspectives in the visual arts. This refers to the display of Han Xizai’s screen painting Night of Entertainment on the painting screen depicted as a backdrop of the go scene in the foreground in Zhou’s work.

References Chan, S. (2018) Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press). Chee-Beng, T. (ed.) (2013) Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora (London and New York: Routledge). Chiu, M. (2006) Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China (Milano: Edizione Charta). Chow, R. (1998) ‘On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem’, Boundary 2, 25:3, 1–24. Clark, J. (1998) ‘Dilemmas of (Dis-)attachment in the Chinese Diaspora’, Visual Arts and Culture: An International Journal of Contemporary Art, 1, 16–46. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press). Davies, G. (1991) Plaster and Marble: The Classical and Neo-classical Portrait Bust (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Demos, T.J. (2013) The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Dogramaci, B. and B. Mersmann (eds) (2019) Handbook of Art and Global Migration: Theories, Practices, and Challenges (Berlin and Boston: DeGruyter). Durrant, S., and Lord, C.M. (2007). Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural Practices between Migration and Art-making (Amsterdam: Rodopi). Fan, D. (1999) The Dancing Shadows: Shifting Perspectives and the Body (PhD thesis, Wollongong, NSW, University of Wollongong, microfilm).

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Fan, D. (2013a) ‘Shifting Perspectives and the Body. Introduction and Chapter 1 – The Western Vision’ (see homepage of the artist under https://docs.wixstatic. com/ugd/eeb221_884307e97d9f482fb8371845d4d8e8a2.pdf, 2013a), 5–31. Accessed 19 November 2018. Fan, D. (2013b) ‘Double Screen: A Picture Within A Picture. Extract from  Shifting Perspectives and the Body Chapter 2: The Chinese Dispersing Panorama’ (see homepage of the artist under https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/eeb221_2e3d0eac5898 42d39fdb378886634f41.pdf, 2013b), 1–19. Accessed 19 November 2018. Fan, D. (2013c) ‘My Dancing Shadows: Extract from  Shifting Perspectives and the Body Chapter 3: A Visual Solution: Shadow Perspective’ (see homepage of the artist under https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/eeb221_943cd477155c495f97c64721deaaa77c. pdf, 2013c), 1–21. Accessed 19 November 2018. Fisher, J. (1995) ‘Some Thoughts on “Contaminations”’, Third Text, 32, 3–7. Gabriel, S.P. (2011) ‘“Migrations of Chineseness”: In Conversation with Ien Ang’, InterAsia Cultural Studies, 12:1, 122–131. Gao, M. and H. Hou (1998) ‘Strategies of Survival in the Third Space: A Conversation on the Situation of Overseas Chinese Artists in the 1990s’, Inside out: New Chinese art [exhibition catalogue] (New York: Asia Society Galleries), 33–51. Glissant, Édouard (1997) Traité du Tout-monde (Paris: Gallimard). Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies (Sydney: Allen & Unwin). He, C. (2012) ‘The Ambiguities of Chineseness and the Dispute over the “Homecoming” of Turandot’, Comparative Literature Studies, 49:4, 547–464. Hung, W. (1997) The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press). Kammel, F.M. (2013) Charakterköpfe: Die Bildnisbüste in der Epoche der Aufklärung (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum). Khoo, T. and J. Lo (2008) ‘Introduction. Asia@home: New Directions in Asian Australian Studies’, Journal of Australian Studies, 32:4, 425–432. Kohl, J. and R. Müller (eds) (2007) Kopf/Bild: Die Büste in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (München: Deutscher Kunstverlag). Kuehn, J., K. Louie, and D.M. Promfret (eds) (2013) Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China: Communities and Cultural Production (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press). Lowish, S. (2018) Rethinking Australia’s Art History: The Challenge of Aboriginal Art (New York and London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group). Ma, L.J.C. (2003) ‘Space, Place, and Transnationalism in the Chinese Diaspora’, in L.J.C. Ma and C. Cartier (eds), The Chinese Diaspora: Space, Place, Mobility, and Identity (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield), 1–50. Maravillas, F. (2007) ‘Haunted Cosmopolitanisms: Specters of Chinese Art in the Diaspora’, Thamyris/Intersecting, 16, 253–282. Mathur, S. (ed.) (2011) The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). McLean, I. (ed.) (2011) How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: Writings on Aboriginal Contemporary Art (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art). Mersmann, B. (2004) ‘Bildkulturwissenschaft als Kulturbildwissenschaft? Von der

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Notwendigkeit eines inter- und Transkulturellen Iconic Turn’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 49:1, 91–109. Mersmann, B. and M. Schulz (eds) (2006) Kulturen des Bildes (München: Fink). Mishra, V. (1996) ‘The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora’, Textual Practice 10:3, 421–447. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Nail, T. (2019) ‘The Migrant Image’, in B. Dogramaci and B. Mersmann (eds), Handbook of Art and Global Migration: Theories, Practices, and Challenges (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter), 54–69. Panofsky, E. (1991) Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books). Quayson, A. and G. Daswani (2013) ‘Introduction – Diaspora and Transnationalism: Scapes, Scales, and Scopes’, in A. Quayson and G. Daswani (eds), A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism (Oxford: Blackwell). Safran, W. (Spring 1991) ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1:1, 83–99. Smith, T. (2009) What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Smith, T. (2011) ‘Writing the History of Australian Art: Its Past, Present and Possible Future’, Journal of Art Historiography, 4, 1–25. Tölölyan, K. (1991) ‘The Nation-State and its Others: In Lieu of a Preface’, Diaspora, 1:1, 3–7. Tu, W. (Spring, 1991) ‘Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center’, Daedalus, 120:2, 1–32. Wang, N. (2001) ‘The Shanghai Art Museum Should not Become a Market Stall in China for Western Hegemonism – A Paper Delivered at the 2001 Shanghai Biennale’, in W. Hung (ed.), Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West (London and Hong Kong: Institute of International Visual Arts and New Art Media), 265–268. Wrapson, L., V. Sutcliffe, S. Woodcock, and S. Buklow (eds) (2019) Migrants: Art, Artists, Materials and Ideas Crossing Borders (London: Archetype Publications). Xu, B. (1998) ‘“From Modernity to Chineseness”: The Rise of Nativist Cultural Theory in Post-1989 China’, Positions, 6:1, 255–284. Zhang, F., Y. Zhang, and Y. Wang (1994) ‘Cong “Xiandai Xing” dao “Zhonghua Xing”: Xin Zhishi Xing de Tanxun’ [‘From “Modernity” to “Chineseness”: An Inquiry into a New Mode of Knowledge’], Wenyi zhengming [Debates of Literature and Art] 2, 10–20. Zhou, M. (2017) Contemporary Chinese Diasporas (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan).

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Retracing colonial choreographies in contemporary Native American art Christopher T. Green

Introduction

Contemporary Indigenous artists frequently highlight the arbitrary nature of the borders that define and control the territories which settler-colonial nations in North America claim today. For centuries Indigenous peoples have resisted and lived through the imposition of maps, reservation boundaries, and other arbitrary cartographic notations on lands plundered through bloody conquest and broken treaties. Since the 1960s in particular, Indigenous artists have taken up various visual strategies in painting, photography, text, and multimedia to disrupt the border lines of colonial regimes, striving to image alternative geographies in pursuit of sovereignty over representational and territorial rights. The project Repellent Fence / Valla Repelente (2015) by the art collective Postcommodity is one recent example that challenges the border controlling movement along the North– South axis of the United States (see Figure 6.1). Founded in 2007 with the goal of communicating a shared Indigenous lens and voice, the US-based interdisciplinary collective included, at the time of the project, Cristóbal Martínez (Xicano and Mestizo), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee), and Raven Chacon (Diné [Navajo]). Repellent Fence was a temporary land art installation comprising twenty-six tethered helium balloons that went up along the United States–Mexico border for three days in October 2015. The two-mile stretch of balloons ran imperfectly perpendicular to the border between the small towns of Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora. Thirteen balloons in each country bi-directionally reached across the border ‘as a suture that stitches the peoples of the Americas together – symbolically demonstrating the interconnectedness of the Western Hemisphere by recognizing the land, Indigenous peoples, history, relationships, movement and communication’ (Postcommodity, 2015). The balloons, following the subtle variations of the natural landscape, swayed in the wind, shifting the line and creating the effect of a naturally snaking curve. The balloons’ design, an ‘evil eye’ in yellow, red, and black, is based on a bird  repellent and recalls the colours of the medicine wheel and

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Postcommodity (Raven Chacon [Navajo/Diné], Cristóbal Martínez [Mestizo], and Kade L. Twist [Cherokee]) (2015) Repellent Fence / Valla Repelente, land art installation and community engagement (earth, cinder block, para-cord, pvc spheres, helium). Installation view, US–Mexico Border, Douglas, Arizona / Agua Prieta, Sonora.

other Indigenous iconography. By collaborating on the project with many Indigenous and settler individuals, local communities, and sovereign bands and nations, Postcommodity created a work which pointed to the traditional territories that such borders artificially divide. Repellent Fence reveals the border to be a contingent and performed space, a borderscape that is ever porous and whose binaries break open even as the demands for a ‘physical barrier’ reached a feverous pitch in the 2018–2019 United States federal shutdown of essential government functions (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 9–14). Many Indigenous communities are forced to navigate the US–Canada borders that bisect their territories, from the Haudeosaunee who subtend New York and Ontario, to Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian communities that claim unceded territories on both sides of the Alaska–British Columbia divide. The border has accordingly been a potent site for Indigenous artists who have for decades challenged the hegemony of the settler colonial nation-state and revealed the porous nature of the border (Morris, 2011, Morris 2019; Watson, 2015). But the legacy of another axis shadows both countries. The East–West axis is the dominant pole of the colonisation of North America, the vector along which the first migrants cum occupiers travelled from Europe, and along which America further expanded from the East coast to the West coast, from

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centre to periphery, from imperial centre to colony. Westward has been the primary direction of North American colonialism’s movement, stretching beyond the coast and across the Pacific once that oceanic boundary was reached. The Western frontier, as Elizabeth Povinelli has described, was a topological fantasy through which the horizon of liberal political ideology and its sovereign claims to violently colonised Indigenous bodies could be asserted (Povinelli, 2018). The movement of these Indigenous bodies ahead of the ever unfolding frontier was the great choreography of colonialism, the planned, as well as spontaneous and derelict, deterritorialisation of Native Americans who were forcibly dislocated to reserves on so-called Indian Land.1 As this chapter will argue, contemporary Indigenous artists have in recent decades consciously retraced the paths that such missionaries, settlers, and ethnographers travelled across the Atlantic. In ironic and satirical gestures they swap the positions of European explorer and Indigenous subjects, and in doing so reverse the colonial current’s direction. Yet beyond that, one might ask to what extent the strategy of reversal, by retracing the linear movement of colonialism, offers alternatives to the organising geometries of modern Western liberalism. How can engaging colonial trajectories interrupt or reimagine the linear temporality of progress towards an undefined horizon? What happens when Indigenous travellers arrive at the point of colonial origin? By building on previous studies of the exhibition of Indigenous art at international biennials, this chapter evaluates such axial movement in a critical fashion. It suggests that recent projects by Indigenous artists on the periphery of the Venice Biennale go further than merely retracing such colonial choreographies in order to rupture the aesthetic horizon line. When artistic manoeuvres retrace such paths to the imperial centre, they shift the frontier such that it becomes a border site ‘punctured or perforated’, per Povinelli, by their critiques, reimaginings, and resistances. By explicitly engaging the East–West trajectory, such projects visualise Indigenous sovereign motion at European centres of empire. Reversing, retracing Columbus

In his own white clad version of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, Cree artist Kent Monkman’s alter-ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, retraces the colonial directions of the ethnographic gaze. For the 2005 work Taxonomy of the European Male, Miss Chief, described as a wandering artist from the Great Plains, journeyed Eastward across the Atlantic to study the unspoiled European Male in his native habitat (see Figure 6.2). Bedecked in high-heeled platform shoes and white feather-boa headdress, Monkman’s drag persona took on the role of amateur artist-ethnographers such as George Catlin and Edward Curtis, whose anachronistic depictions of Native Americans were attempts to

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Kent Monkman (2005) Taxonomy of the European Male, colour film, 16:36 minutes. Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK.

capture the peoples they saw as doomed to disappear before destiny’s progress. She found male subjects (Robin Hood and Friar Tuck) through which to study the physiological characteristics of the ‘European tribes’ and engage in flirtatious competition. Miss Chief’s journey to England, where she was greeted by eager audiences, retraced the paths such artist-ethnographers travelled across the Atlantic (recalling, for example, Catlin’s 1839 European tour of his famed Indian Gallery). It likewise reversed the colonial current of European ethnographers who travelled to North America to bring cultural specimens back to metropoles like London, Paris, and Berlin. The reversal-as-critique turned the journeys and strategies of ethnography back onto themselves in a deconstruction of the colonial gaze. The work is an ironic twist on the ‘artist as ethnographer’ and Monkman has often used homoeroticism and humour to challenge the asymmetrical representations of Native America by (white, heterosexual, Christian) Euro-American imagemakers. In his paintings, Monkman depicts Miss Chief in control of the colonial encounter, leading her would-be conquistadors along by their (typically sexually overcome and desirous) noses. Her tricksterish journey (back) across the Atlantic recalls the writing of Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor. In The Heirs of Columbus (1991), Vizenor upturns the history of the purported ‘discovery’ of the Americas by re-imagining Christopher Columbus to have been a voyager of Indigenous Mayan descent, returning to his ancestral lands. The novel tells the story of Columbus’s modern-day descendants and

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their own voyage across the Atlantic to retrieve and repatriate the remains of Columbus and Pocahontas. As Vizenor has described, he ‘turned around the Columbus story to serve healing rather than victimization; there is much to be gained politically from victimization, but there is more to be gained from the power of a good story that heals, and I think my story heals the victims in a poetic and imaginative way’ (Vizenor, 1990–1991: 103). Vizenor’s trickster reversal of Columbus’s journey, like Monkman’s reversal of the ethnographic expedition, ironically shifts the terms and directions of colonialism’s historical conditions and removes the burden of pre-modern victimisation from Native American shoulders (Hardin, 1998: 34–37). Monkman’s performance likewise unbinds Indigenous sexuality from temporal and geographic limits imposed by colonialism’s repression of Two Spirit or queer identities. Vizenor’s concept of ‘survivance’, the assertion of innovative, persistent, and active Indigenous survival and presence that resists sentiments of tragedy and the legacy of victimry (Vizenor, 2008), has been essential to analyses of contemporary Native American art. Yet, The Heirs of Columbus and Monkman’s performance are important illustrations of another of his related concepts, one often underdiscussed in relation to visual art: that of transmotion.2 First described in Vizenor’s Fugitive Poses, transmotion is ‘that sense of native motion and an active presence, is sui generis sovereignty. Native transmotion is survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty’ (Vizenor, 1998: 15). For Vizenor, survivance is an ongoing presence, while transmotion is a related assertion of sovereignty through the freedom of motion through both physical space and in the imagination. Sovereignty as transmotion is ‘tacit and visionary’, the right to real and metaphorical movement, not necessarily linear, across imagined boundaries and through time and ancestral territory. Ledger art of the Plains is one visual example that embodies transmotion for Vizenor, as its visionary scenes of warriors and horses move across the page to communicate memory and consciousness in an active sense of sovereignty (Vizenor, 1998: 178–179). Likewise Monkman’s performance of Taxonomy of the European Male can be understood through the terms of transmotion as the assertion of Miss Chief’s right to movement across not only oceans and space, but also through time and stories as she travels through different Englands to encounter Robin Hood and his comrades. The movement of Monkman’s gender-bending character, here and in painted form, embodies that ‘spirited and visionary sense of natural motion’ that Vizenor considers transmotion to be, as a ‘visionary resistance to cultural dominance’ (Vizenor, 2015). As an aesthetic theory, transmotion offers us a means by which to ‘interpret and compare the modes, distinctions, situations, and the traces of motion in sacred objects, stories, art, and literature’ (Vizenor, 2015: 65). Vizenor deploys transmotion in a manner that situates motion and sov-

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ereignty explicitly outside of Western conceptions of borders, boundaries, and territory. Transmotion is the means by which creative Native acts move around national constructs and documents of control; passports, visas, and national pavilions at international biennials do not figure control (Miles, 2011: 44). Sovereignty, for Vizenor, is read beyond the concepts of diaspora, exile, or deterritorialisation that typically structure conversations about global artistic movements. Rather, transmotion emerges from migrations as natural stories, dreams, and memories of creation and sustenance: The presence of natives on this continent is obvious, a natural right of motion, or transmotion, and continuous sovereignty; in other words, natives are neither exiles nor separatists from other nations or territories. […] Native transmotion is an original natural union in the stories of emergence and migration that relate humans to an environment and to the spiritual and political significance of animals and other creations. (Vizenor, 1998: 181–183)

Transmotion exists outside of borders, and this refusal to acknowledge is a refutation of them. Yet even in The Heirs of Columbus, Vizenor describes how imperialist forces and the boundaries of the Western legal system act against the efforts of Columbus’s descendants. When Indigenous artists and their projects and personas reverse the trajectories and choreographies of colonial actors, what lasting effect is enacted on the landscapes of the borders they might traverse but which nonetheless structure the movements of other bodies? While artistic projects at home might enact decolonisation against settlercolonial nation-states, the international movements of Indigenous artists through transmotion have another potential. Deimperialisation, as defined by cultural studies scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen, is differentiated from decolonisation. Chen says ‘Decolonization is the attempt of the previously colonized to reflectively work out a historical relation with the former colonizer, culturally, politically, and economically’, yet ‘deimperialization, which is no less painful and reflexive, is work that must be performed by the colonizer first, and then on the colonizer’s relation with its former colonies’ (Chen, 2010: 4). Deimperialisation occurs at the site of theory, policy, and practice in the imperial centre rather than at the site of the (post)colony. Thus, while Indigenous artists tend to be concerned with decolonisation, that is the  uprooting or undoing of the settlement and occupation of their home territories, deimperialisation occurs at the metropolitan centre from which emerges the ideology that advocates for the active domination over their territories, cultures, and minds. Chen says that ‘Historical processes of imperialization, colonization, and the Cold War have become mutually entangled structures, which have shaped and conditioned both intellectual and popular knowledge production’ (Chen, 2010: 212). If the imperial method includes remote control through economic and cultural hegemony, deimperialising is a necessity to break

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up the illusion, as Walter Mignolo has written, ‘that all knowledges are and have to originate in the imperial form of consciousness’ (Mignolo, 2007). The potential of transmotion by Indigenous artists through an international network of biennials and exhibitions is to avoid the replication of imperialist structures and modes of consciousness through the reversals or retracings of historic colonial movements. At the imperial centre, I suggest, Indigenous artists instead assert transmotive narratives and spatial relations that pose alternative modes in the imperial aesthetic imaginary. Indigenous art at the Venice Biennale

The mnemonic landscape of Venice is thick with the traces of its own military and mercantile empire, and a skim of Baroque nostalgia coats the canals and flagstones of the home of infamous explorers like Marco Polo. An island city built on water, Venice is most relevant today as an artificially maintained tourist hub and as the symbolic seat of a cultural empire – that of the hegemonic global culture industry we think of as the ‘art world’. Begun in 1895, the Venice Biennale is a privileged gathering place of global capital (cultural and financial) in the framework of nationalist pavilions that crystallises artistic moments and extends influence, just as Venice once launched fleets of merchant vessels and explorers’ ships. As art historian W.J.T. Mitchell has noted, traditional cultural exports such as the fine arts tended to support the authority of the imperial centre as a ‘civilizing influence’, which reminded the colonies that ‘civilization’ remained located in the imperial centre (Mitchell, 1992). This logic has extended to the accumulation of cultural capital and contemporary prestige and influence in Venice. The Venice Biennale has of late dabbled with the inclusion of Indigenous art in its central Arsenale exhibition. As some astute critics observed following the 2017 edition of the Biennale, primitivist fantasies emerged alongside these inclusions (Davis, 2017).3 The presence of Indigenous art is far from a new development, as recent scholarship has shown (Berlo, 2009; Horton, 2015; Horton and Berlo, 2015); Pueblo watercolours were shown in the US Pavilion of 1932 in an early example of the incorporation of Indigenous art into nationalist American artistic narratives. As perhaps the most prestigious exhibition in the world, Venice has nonetheless been the focus of initiatives over the past three decades to include Native American artists that have otherwise been, for the most part, historically excluded from such fine art exhibitions and contexts. As a primary centre of the cultural empire of the Euro-American-centric art world, Venice likewise becomes an integral site for deimperialising that structure. Much attention has been paid to the few Native American artists who have shown in national and corollary pavilions at the Biennale. In 1995 Edward

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Poitras (Métis) became the first Indigenous artist to represent Canada at the 46th Venice Biennale. Following that, Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe) represented Canada at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 with her projected video installation Fountain (2005). While not technically part of the US national pavilion, in the same year the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) sponsored a collateral exhibition of performances and installations by James Luna (Luiseño/Puyukitchum, Ipai, and Mexican American) titled Emendatio. The collateral model was reprised in 2007, when Cheyenne-Arapahoe artist Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds represented the NMAI with his exhibition Most Serene Republics. Canada was represented by Inuit artists for the first time at the 58th Biennale in 2019, showing the artist collective Isuma, an Inuit video-based production company led by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn. These few examples have been the focus of divergent views in debate over the intersection of Native American art and the global art ecosystem. A central question posed by scholars has been whether an essentialist reading of contemporary Indigenous art, one that emphasises place-based land rights and relationships, self-determination over representation, and issues of identity, can be reconciled with a nomadic, circulatory, and transnational art world. Following his curation of Poitras at Venice in 1995, Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree/Siksika First Nation) asked how in a global context ‘local cultural identities act as centers for nomadic subjects?’ and whether the cultural identities of Indigenous people can remain stable while they ‘struggle to reclaim land and to hold onto their present land’ (McMaster, 1999: 85). On the occasion of the 2005 Biennale, the NMAI sponsored a symposium about the role of Indigenous art on the world stage (National Museum of the American Indian, 2006). A consistent theme amongst the published proceedings is whether the Biennale’s nationalist context, discourses of hybridity and postmodernism, and concerns for global visibility serve Indigenous interests and worldviews and how Indigenous artists contest and subvert dominant global frameworks (Mithlo, 2004; Martin, 2006; McMaster, 2006).4 Bill Anthes has argued that the problematic of ‘going global’ for Native artists threatens to divorce them of their indigeneity and grounding in specific local landscapes, incompatible with the logic of the nomadic or itinerant artist of today’s art world. Anthes asks ‘How can the currency of a theory of nomadism in the contemporary art world be reconciled with the urgencies of place-based identity/culture/ politics espoused by Indigenous artists and intellectuals? Is global visibility incompatible with Native identity?’ (Anthes, 2009: 110). He posits that defining Native artists in terms of rootedness and emplacement limits their scope and visibility by erasing more complex histories of displacement and exile, and further ‘excludes Native artists from the privileged discourses of the contemporary art world’ (Anthes, 2009: 121). Yet this argument, in seeking

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to liberate Indigenous artists from essentialised identity, nonetheless creates a false dichotomy between the ‘Indigenous content’ of artists such as Luna, Belmore, and Heap of Birds and the global and contemporary mediums and contexts of their work. Other scholars strive to break down this dichotomy, challenging the ahistoric essentialism of land-based identity being distinct from transmotive migration and movement. Recent work suggests that no reconciliation is needed between Indigenous art and international contexts. Tuscarora artist and historian Jolene Rickard argues that Indigenous art has long been transnational and engaged global networks before and beyond the international biennial system. While Anthes argues that the national model of the Venice Biennale reinforces the notion that Native artists are defined foremost by their identity, Rickard notes that artists who seek to be in dialogue in networks extending across Indigenous borders, often ignited by global exhibitions, visually express nation-to-nation sovereignty (Rickard, 2013: 56–58). Art historian Jessica Horton has likewise written extensively on the international display of contemporary Native art and asserts that an Indigenous politics of and relationship to place can exist beyond the limited boundaries of the local (Horton, 2012; Horton, 2017). Horton reads the work of the artists who participated in Venice in the 1990s and 2000s as neither uncritically reiterating the terms of nomadism that are prevalent in the global biennial system nor retreating to essentialised conceptions of place and identity. Instead she understands these artists to reconfigure the spatial and temporal relations of Europe’s contested territories and entangled histories. By envisioning ‘former metropoles long filled with Indigenous persons, objects, and meanings’ such artists revitalise Indigenous spatial politics through neglected material and temporal dimensions, crossing time and space (Horton, 2015: 2).5 Rather than itinerant or nomadic exiles, I would further suggest that such movement exemplifies Vizenor’s conception of transmotion, and exists outside of a migrant-postmigrant framework (Schramm et al., 2019). The aforementioned artistic projects reinforce that the movements of Indigenous artists must be considered as part of a transhistorical network that approaches temporality as a cyclical return rather than as a progressive and forward motion. Luna’s Emendatio involved multiple days of performances around a ‘sacred’ circle of low-income commercial products, like cans of spam, while morphing through a series of stereotypical costumes (Lowe and Smith, 2005). His circular pseudo-ritual space evoked the geometries of the medicine wheel and cardinal directions while delineating an Indigenous space, if a humorous and de-essentialised one (González, 2008: 24, 62). Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain was likewise projected onto a constantly circulating sheet of water. Nonetheless, in our consideration of the deimperialising potential of such projects, it is essential to evaluate by what logic

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such movements sustain sovereign claims. Since 1999, Chiricahua Apache curator and scholar Nancy Marie Mithlo has spearheaded ongoing interventions through the Indigenous Arts Action Alliance to represent Native artists at the Venice Biennale through exhibitions, performances, and public programmes. Mithlo has emphasised the need for a ‘proactive frame of reference’ for Indigenous artists and agendas at the Biennale, grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems and ontologies (Mithlo, 2004). Without such a frame, she argues, the structures of non-Indigenous politics, economies, and intellectual disciplines might override Indigenous communal and social values (Mithlo, 2004: 234). To this list of non-Indigenous structures I would add established colonial trajectories and choreographies of movement, which must be explicitly countered rather than merely retraced. Through independent projects such as Mithlo’s, a new generation of artists is producing different relations than what the preceding generation accomplished in their breakthrough exhibitions of the 1990s and 2000s. These artists do not rely on historical and archival work to uncover past histories and create Indigenous sites of sovereign temporality. Such past and future presences, rather, are made immanent. Transmotive expressions take up the freedom of movement of a global art world without being tied to an essentialist patch of soil or heritage. Felt canoes and copper briccole: navigating Native waterways in Venice

In 2015 Anishinaabe performance artist Maria Hupfield directly engaged the Venetian audience to create a deimperialising space through activated movement. Jiimaan (Canoe) (2015) was a performance consisting of three 20-minute parts (see Figure 6.3). It was conducted over three consecutive days for the exhibition Ga ni tha, a project curated by Mithlo independent of any national pavilion. Hupfield, who hails from the Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario and at the time lived and worked in Brooklyn, entered the international space as an independent traveller, bringing with her a 9-foot canoe handmade from industrial felt. Hupfield carried the canoe, styled after Anishinaabe birchbark canoes, throughout the city’s gondola-filled waterways. Made of soft and pliable felt, the canoe was functionally useless – it could not float or hold any weight on water. Yet as a vehicle for her performance, the canoe brought a transmotive quality to the Venetian piazza that Hupfield transformed into a space of memory, shared experience, and mobile relations to place. Each of Hupfield’s three performances was enacted twice: once before the public audience each evening at sunset, and then again the following morning at sunrise, when Hupfield would recreate the performance alone and from memory. The performances were documented and later exhibited as a dualfeed video installation. In the installation, each performance is set side by

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Maria Hupfield (2015) Jiimaan (Canoe), stills, two channel video installation, 1:15:00.

side with its re-enactment. In the video Hupfield carries her felt canoe into a colonnaded piazza. In the centre of the flagstone-paved square is an octagonal stone well. Its form evokes that of a fountain, explicitly recalling Belmore’s 2005 Biennale piece, Fountain. Like Belmore, Hupfield engages the tradition of commemorative fountains and monuments as symbols of European power. Rickard has described Belmore’s Fountain as a work that uses such

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symbols to move fluidly within the hegemony of the West, revealing how conditions of dispossession are normalised in the age of globalisation and empire, and critiquing it from within (Rickard, 2005).6 Hupfield, too, moves fluidly through the systems of Venice. Her subtle sequences of geometric choreographies, though, avoid overdetermination and essentialised readings. Hupfield carries her canoe in a circle around the well in the style of a portage – the common trek across dry land connecting waterways in the Great Lakes area – its limp form draping over her back like a hooded cape, or at other moments hanging from a strap like an oversized shoulderbag. The canoe is representative of an essential relationship to place that is foundational to Anishinaabe world views, one that is inscribed upon the land throughout the Great Lakes by thousand year-old pictographic rock paintings dotted throughout the waterways and river systems of the region. These pictographs, painted by Anishinaabeg travelling throughout the waters of their territories, often depict migration stories that are central to the oral histories of Anishinaabe origins, when their ancestors moved to the Great Lakes from lands to the east. Such dynamic migratory motion is a sovereign freedom of movement that situates the canoe as a vehicle of transmotion. As Vizenor writes, ‘Natives have always been on the move, by chance, necessity, barter, reciprocal sustenance, and by trade over extensive routes; the actual motion is a natural right, and the tribal stories of transmotion are a continuous sense of visionary sovereignty’ (Vizenor, 1999: ix). The canoe and Hupfield’s transportation through Venice are transmotive assertions of sovereignty in a European centre. For Hupfield her pillowy felt canoe is both transport and vessel. At various points in Jiimaan, Hupfield sets the canoe down and pulls out props – bright ribbons, jingles, and other felt constructions that she lays out on the paving stones, wears, or offers to the audience. The canoe is a vessel of cultural transmission, but the forms of Hupfield’s felt sculptures – light bulbs, boots, a walkman, some of which were pulled from the canoe in Venice – resist singular readings. Art historian Richard Hill, in discussing Jiimaan, has described the canoe as ‘a medium for human interaction with water, but here it is limp, possibly injured, unable to float and in need of the artist’s assistance’ (Hill, cited in Köchling, 2017: 86). When displayed in galleries and exhibitions, the canoe is indeed hung from the ceiling, bodily and listless, as Hill suggests (see Figure 6.4). Yet during the performance, Hupfield’s expressive movements render the pliant felt into a variety of forms, particularly as a vessel for interaction with the piazza and, throughout her performances, the audience. During the public iterations, Hupfield extensively engaged her viewership. As seen in the video, she sidles by observers as she enters the piazza, rubbing past them with the curving volume of the felt canoe. In the first performance, after tracing circular movements around the well, she linked

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Maria Hupfield (2015) Jiimaan (Canoe), industrial felt, custom carry gear with handles. Collection Julia and Robert Foster.

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audience members by the hand and pulled them into that same orbit. While circling she engaged the audience in an improvised verbalisation game by exchanging Anishinaabemowin and Osage words with participants. The words, from both sides of the US and Canadian border, were repeated in echoes around the  small circle. Throughout the video, the doubling of movements in the side-by-side display of the before and after performances emphasises Hupfield’s constant circling of peoples, tables, and the well, carrying her canoe or wearing jingling accoutrements. It also calls attention to the absence of the audience in next morning’s re-enactment – the second feed goes black at moments in the performance that featured audience interaction, as Hupfield omitted those portions from the reprised performance. The act of circling is common in Hupfield’s oeuvre. In a 7 December 2013 performance at the NMAI, New York, titled Artist Tour Guide, she linked audience members by hand and circled them around display cases of historic Anishinaabe works. These objects, including drums and feast dishes considered in Anishinaabe worldviews to be ceremonial beings, were labelled with the identification ‘Anishinaabe artist, Unknown’. Reading each label aloud as she passed, Hupfield repeated the phrase ‘Anishinaabe artist, Unknown’ over and over, becoming both chant and eulogy. The audience, circling the display cases with Hupfield, became part of this eulogic movement. The effect of audience activation and creation of solidarity recurred in Jiimaan, where Hupfield led the entire audience in circles around the well. At one point in the final performance Hupfield removed herself, connecting the front person to the last in the chain, and set the circle to moving without her. She began to shake rattles, healing instruments, and then handed the rattles to people in the circle, creating a lasting Indigenous spatial structure without incorporating her own body. It demonstrated a performative potential for deimperialisation. The video ends with Hupfield creating a drumming circle around the well’s slab sides. Hupfield leads the circle in the Anishinaabe Strong Women Song and encourages others to lead the group. Simultaneously, in the video feed of the reenactment, Hupfield, standing alone, wraps the canoe in a blue tarp and hangs it from the bucket post. It is a marker left in the piazza like a surveyor’s flag to stake a presence as the video fades out. The marking of the stone well is an act of glyphing, as termed by Karyn Recollet for the ways that music, dances, and other forms of persistent Indigenous motion activate specific spatial and temporal cartographies in the same manner that petroglyphs activate Indigenous presence on land and throughout waterways (Recollet, 2015). In the installation, the transported canoe is hung in the gallery alongside the video, a physical trace of the Atlantic journey and its deimperialising potential. While the illusive and transitory nature of performance well-suits the concept of transmotion, it can also be expressed in material and concrete

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Nicholas Galanin and Oscar Tuazon (2017) Indian Water – The Native American Pavilion, exhibition in the Giardino di Ca’Bembo, Venice.

forms. In 2017, Tlingit/Unangaxˆ artist Nicholas Galanin collaborated with Los Angeles-based artist Oscar Tuazon to produce Indian Water: The Native American Pavilion, an independent project for the 57th Venice Biennale (see Figure 6.5). On the lawn of the Giardino di Ca’Bembo, one of the largest green spaces in Venice, the artists erected a circle of worn wooden posts in the (modified) tradition of the longhouse. The posts were reclaimed briccole, pilings used to guide boats along safe passages in the Venetian waterways, which Galanin and Tuazon gathered from local salvage. Most of the pilings were so eroded that they could support only a single crossbeam on the structure. Invited artists were initially intended to occupy the pavilion throughout the run of the exhibition and make work on each of the posts. In the end only Galanin’s brother, Jerrod Galanin, contributed a series of miniature tináa (ceremonial shield-shaped coppers representing wealth and status on the Northwest Coast), which he nailed to one of the posts (see Figure 6.6). Larger scale coppers were historically given as extravagant gifts at potlatches. The scaled-down tináa were reminiscent of jewellry iterations of the ceremonial form, popular in the heavily commodified Northwest Coast art industry, yet also underscored the historical role of the longhouse as ceremonial site of welcome. On the Northwest Coast, as in Venice, visitors would typically arrive by water, pulling canoes up to the shore.

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Jerrod Galanin (2017) contribution to Nicholas Galanin and Oscar Tuazon’s exhibition Indian Water – The Native American Pavilion (Giardino di Ca’Bembo, Venice).

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Galanin’s life and work are accordingly closely tied to the water. He practises subsistence fishing and hunting on the Pacific waters of his home in Sitka, Alaska, and is well versed in the carving traditions of the Tlingit in conjunction with his contemporary practice. As his frequent collaborator Merritt Johnson writes, ‘Galanin’s work is deeply informed by what water has to teach and the ways water has shaped Tlingit art and culture, generating strength in recognition, in affinity, and in connection’ (Johnson, 2018: 18). Water is central to life and artistic practice on the Northwest Coast, yet Galanin’s use of water-logged materials in Indian Water is a contrasting commentary on the relationship to water in the Venetian context. The heavy, rotting briccole, driven into the ground and incapable of floating, are far from the buoyant cedar of a hand-hewn Tlingit canoe, the likes of which Galanin has participated in building. It is as if wood, in Venice, operates differently in the dirty waterways than it does on the open ocean of the Pacific Northwest. Like Hupfield’s evocation of the Anishinaabe birchbark canoe, the Tlingit canoe is tied to a history of mobility, distant trade, and migration on the Northwest Coast. And just as the felt material of Hupfield’s canoe suggests a failure of that mobility, the rotting pilings of Indian Water suggest a failed buoyancy at the heart of Venice. By bringing the previously submerged briccole into the Giardino, Galanin and Tuazon call attention to the anxiety of Venice as a flooding and sinking city. The briccole, partially visible above water to indicate the unseen dangers below, are here elevated from their typical depth. The elevation of the briccole above the water surface to the garden level reminds that the water levels are already rising. Venice’s frequent flooding evidences the threat that climate change and rising sea levels poses to the city, and the global art exhibition with it. Bruno Latour has described this as an invasion of Europe’s borders by the very resources of the Earth itself: Europe has made a pact with the other terrestrials, who are also setting out to invade its borders: the water of the seas, dried-up or overflowing rivers, forests obliged to migrate as fast as possible so as not to be overtaken by climate change, microbes and parasites, all these too, aspire to a great replacement. … [N]ow these resources, having become actors in their own right, have set out, like the Birnam Wood, to recover what belongs to them. (Latour, 2018: 103–104)

The longhouse calls attention to the onslaught of water with the materiality of the rotting briccole. Indian Water reminds that similar pilings, weak and failing, are holding up the city streets, and unsettles faith in the foundations of the floating city. Such structural deterioration materially resonates with a subversive undercurrent of the pavilion – that of the Biennale’s own failures and stagnations, particularly involving Indigenous art. While Indian Water’s

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stated goal of inviting many (Indigenous) collaborators to participate never came to fruition, it did prove the artists’ point that Venice and its nationalist frameworks has long been exclusionary to such artists. The failure of collaborative participation in a purpose-built space further reflects the eco-political concerns of Galanin and Tuazon, namely the failure of the settler nation-states to responsibly administer the land, space, and resources of North America. Water-based politics have been a flash point for Indigenous rights activists protesting the development of pipelines, salmon farms, and other polluting industries that pose a danger to the livelihood of subsistence communities. Protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock adopted the Lakota phrase mni wičoni, or ‘water is life’, and called themselves ‘water protectors’. Galanin and Tuazon participated in the protests at Standing Rock, and sought to put the Venetian waterways into conversation with the work of the Indigenous activists fighting for clean water. The artists dedicated the pavilion to ‘the artistic movement that flourished around Standing Rock’ and intended for performances and readings to take place for the duration of the programme (Zuecca Projects, 2017). The site of the pavilion, however, is polluted: an incinerator located in the garden in the nineteenth century poisoned the soil with dangerous levels of dioxin. Despite this, the garden has been occupied for several years by students who are protesting its sale by Ca’ Foscari University to commercial interests. Indian Water was thus erected illegally with the cooperation of the occupying students, and while the University has largely abandoned the Giardino to the students, indicators of its contested status remain. At the time of the exhibition the main doors to the Giardino were locked and signs declared the space closed due to health risks, making it difficult for visitors to find and access the work. In opposition, Galanin and Tuazon erected a sign inside the garden that read ‘NO ONE IS ILLEGAL’, connecting the students’ occupation of the Giardino to the broader refugee and migrant crisis. The sign also evoked a slogan that emerged from Standing Rock in response to the Trump administration’s Muslim ban: ‘No ban on stolen land’. T.J. Demos has suggested that artists who investigate past colonial injustices reveal that the spectre of the colony enters the metropole, just as the spectre of civilisation from the metropole haunts the colony (Demos, 2013: 17–18). Yet at Indian Water, Galanin and Tuazon reversed Demos’s spectral figure such that the briccole, ghostly salvage of the metropole, rather than haunted memories of the colony, address the imperial present. Indian Water thus connects the water, free movement, and mobility of sovereign transmotion, as manifested in the cedar canoe of the Northwest Coast, to injustices of present-day immigration politics. Galanin and Tuazon created a space, albeit a temporary one, for such transmotion to be received in an environment that typically does not recognise Indigenous claims to sovereignty. Indian Water used the local context

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and building materials to articulate a spatial claim by and for Native artists unrepresented by other pavilions in Venice. The nationalist atmosphere of the Venice Biennale has long posed a challenge for Indigenous artists who are resistant to the colonial terms of statehood enforced by the pavilions. But Galanin declared Indian Water to be the ‘Native American Pavilion’ independent of any nation and circumvented the Biennale’s game. The briccole camouflaged the Native American space in a ship-repellant technology. While the pilings’ functional purpose is to safely guide, as much as to deter, ships laden with potential biennial explorers and visitors, Galanin used them to deter the non-Native viewer. ‘For me’, the artist said, ‘the approach to that was through the idea of camouflaging ourselves in the briccole and creating an Indigenous space that signalled danger to these ships, so they wouldn’t move in those directions’.7 Combined with the nature of the longhouse as a meeting place and Jerrod’s coppers as elements of Northwest Coast welcoming protocol, Indian Water proposes that Indigenous models of hosting in protected sovereign spaces might have a place in the nationalist context that otherwise precludes them. In this duality of welcoming and repelling, Indian Water asks what the history of the Americas would be like if European vessels had been likewise repelled from their shores. While Hupfield’s movement-based assertion of an Indigenous space makes referents back to land and water through abstract choreographies, Galanin’s Indian Water is an outpost of claimed space for the (re)insertion of Indigenous protocols and ontologies, which thematises broader settler-colonial failures. Latour identifies the ordeal of modernisation as having made the attachment of oneself to ‘a particular patch of soil’ (land, or more accurately place) contradictory to having access to the global world (Latour, 2018: 12). Yet projects like Indian Water demonstrate that Indigenous artists en route to European centres create transnational networks and find and create patches of their own sovereign soil in sites of motion and hosting. As James Luna said of his exhibition in Venice, ‘every place is a Native place’ (Martin, 2007: 32). To deimperialise the metropole through circular geometries and nonlinear epistemologies is to reposition it as no longer centre. The migratory return of transmotion, the (re)turning of the wheel, shifts the centripetal forces of empire to another coeval axial position. As a concluding example, a 2019 project by Mohawk artist Alan Michelson suggests that transmotive narratives can visualise such a shift. ‘Volume 0’, again organised by Zuecca Projects, and curated by anthropologist Max Carocci, to coincide with the Venice Biennale, asked Michelson and Nadia Myre (Anishinaabe) to respond to European perceptions of Native Americans in order to comment on the historical role of Venice in the development of Native North America’s place in the European imaginary. Michelson’s contribution, titled Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), consisted of four videos projected

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Alan Michelson (2019) Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), four-channel video with sound, marine buoys, variable dimensions.

sequentially onto an installation of four white globes arranged in a crossshaped constellation (see Figure 6.7). The title is drawn from the first modern European world atlas, but the format of the installation references more specifically the Scenographia Systematis Copernicani from the Harmonia Macrocosmica (1708) by Andreas Celarius, an illustration of the Copernican heliocentric astronomical model in which four planetary bodies orbit the sun. The videos play a series of archival documents, maps, illustrations, and films that Michelson deploys in order to retell five hundred years of colonial history from a contemporary Indigenous vantage point. The curator characterised the exhibition as ‘an act of de-colonization of the historical relationships that connect [the artists] to Venice’, yet Michelson’s video installation is better understood as a de-imperialising response to the vectors of movement I have described above (Zuecca Projects, 2019). The video narrative, played over four movements, draws on moments of historical contact in order to implicate Venetian Empire, a mapmaking centre, in the colonial process. The spherical screens, inflatable nautical buoys, reference the large globes in the map room of the Palazzo Ducale. Footage of galleons at sea overlays maps of transatlantic crossings and portraits of European explorers. Narration by Ellen Gabriel, a Mohawk activist, contradicts the heroic explorer mythos by characterising Jacques Cartier and

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Columbus as ‘not the greatest minds of their societies. These were pirates! They raped and they pillaged’. As the installation plays, the Copernican model on which the installation is based dissolves into one better understood as representative of Mohawk relations. The video loop moves in a circular fashion around the four globes, a cosmological number suggestive of the cardinal directions of the medicine wheel. The final movement of the piece depicts portraits of Haudenosaunee elders, historical leaders, and community members shifting through time and place while Catholic hymns sung in Mohawk dialect play. Michelson’s installation, by constructing a non-linear temporality through his returns to past stories and histories, reverses the narrative of the colonial current through a transmotive visual score. While Hupfield’s felt canoe and Galanin’s sunken briccole suggest susceptibility to the water, Michelson’s buoy screens evoke flotation. His installation depicts the survivance of Indigenous perspectives, bobbing over the floodwaters of colonial history, as seen from another shore. ‘We were always already global as Indigenous people’, the Anishinaabe curator Wanda Nanibush recently asserted at the Whitney Museum of American Art on the occasion of Michelson’s solo exhibition Wolf Nation (Michelson et al., 2019). The artworks discussed here do not just reverse the directionality of colonial and imperial hegemony; they aestheticise axes of movement different from the East–West/centre–periphery dichotomy. And rather than retracing and reversing the Western line of colonial expansion and Enlightenment progress, such alternatives are made visible as transmotive performances, structures, and narratives. The circular geometry that defines these projects entails a return wherein the past, present, and future are located on the same trajectory. The return is present in Hupfield’s re-enactments, Galanin’s materiality, and Michelson’s loop. Their work goes beyond reversing colonial movement to write over and turn around the formal characteristics of colonial linearity. The Venice Biennale is but one centre – there are other empires, other colonies, to which future projects and efforts will turn. Notes 1 The United Nations Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples acknowledged in 2007 that ‘indigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, thus preventing them from exercising, in particular, their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests’. United Nations, ‘Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, UN General Assembly, 107th plenary meeting, 13 September 2007, Resolution 61/295. 2 Mique’l Dangeli (2015) considers the ‘transmotion of protocol’ in Northwest Coast dance to be a process of negotiating and asserting protocol before movement.

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3 Kananginak Pootoogook was the first Inuit artist to be shown in the Biennale’s Arsenale in 2017, yet Davis points to primitivism’s problematic return in Christine Macel’s curation. Ernesto Neto’s Um Sagrado Lugar (A Sacred Place) (2017), a shamanic pavilion or lounge, was accompanied by written pleas calling attention to the plight of Indigenous Brazilians yet which, Davis notes, was subsumed into a shamanistic sub-theme that came across as a half-thought-through primitivism (Davis 2017). 4 McMaster’s introduction nuances his appraisal of the position of Native artists and hybridity vis-a-vis the shifting and multivalent relationship between the centre and periphery on national and international scales (McMaster 2006). Lee-Ann Martin, anticipating transnational readings to come, calls attention to the ways in which global trade networks intertwined the history of Europe and the Americas as an essential node in the formation of modernity (Martin 2006). Nancy Marie Mithlo, meanwhile, reacts against the discourses of hybridity and postmodernism, which, she suggests, while liberatory in appearance, can in fact be reifying (Mithlo 2006). 5 Bill Anthes describes how Edgar Heap of Birds’s project Most Serene Republics creates a sense of temporal return and lays bare ‘layers of historical geography, adding his own psychogeographical exploration of the site as a location of Native American experience and a point in a global itinerary that he himself was now following’ (Anthes 2015: 156–158). But while Anthes contrasts the cyclical nature of time and history in Heap of Birds’s project, based in a Plains cultural ontology, with Western modernity’s conceptions of historicity, European modernists such as the Futurists have also engaged Venice as a site of memory. See Scappettone (2014). On Heap of Birds see Anthes (2015), 156–161, and Ash-Milby and Lowe (2009). 6 Rickard reads Anishinaabe cosmological concepts in Belmore’s work, yet also says it transcends cultural reference, noting that Belmore’s final gesture of flinging a bucket of blood-red liquid at the camera ‘provides a connection between viewer and water – an act that symbolises how water connects the entire world, and in this moment we are connected to all of humanity’ (Rickard 2005: 73–74). On Belmore’s Fountain see also Hill (2006); Martin (2005); Townsend-Gault (2006). 7 Interview with the author, Sitka, AK, 23 July, 2017.

References Anthes, B. (2009) ‘Contemporary Native Artists and International Biennial Culture’, Visual Anthropology Review, 25:2, 109–127. Anthes, B. (2015) Edgar Heap of Birds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Ash-Milby, K. and T. Lowe (eds) (2009), Most Serene Republics: Edgar Heap of Birds (Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian). Berlo, J.C. (2009) ‘The Szwedzicki Portfolios of American Indian Art, 1929–1952’, American Indian Art Magazine, 34:2–3, Part 1: 36–45; Part 2: 58–67. Chen, K.H. (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

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Dangeli, M. (2015), ‘Dancing Sovereignty: Protocol and Politics in Northwest Coast First Nations Dance’ (PhD thesis, University of British Columbia). Davis, B. (2017) ‘In the Venice Biennale’s “Viva Arte Viva”, Shamanism Sneaks Back into the Picture’, Artnet, 12 May. https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/venice-biennale2017-viva-art-viva-review-958238. Accessed 17 January 2019. Demos, T.J. (2013) Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press). González, J.A. (2008) Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Hardin, M. (1998) ‘The Trickster of History: The Heirs of Columbus and the Dehistorization of Narrative’, MELUS 23, 4, 25–45. Hill R. (2006), ‘Built on Running Water: Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain’, Ruse 29:1, 49–51. Horton, J.L. (2012) ‘Alone on the Snow/Alone on the Beach: “A Global Sense of Place” in Atanarjuat and Fountain’, The Journal for Transnational American Studies, 4:1, special forum on Charting Transnational Native American Studies, 1–25. Horton, J.L. (2015) ‘A Cloudburst in Venice: Fred Kabotie and the US Pavilion of 1932’, American Art, 29:1, 54–81. Horton, J.L. (2017) Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Horton, J.L. and J.C. Berlo (2015) ‘Pueblo Painting in 1932: Folding Narratives of Native Art into American Art History’, in J. Greenhill, J.A. Davis, and J.D. LaFountain (eds), A Companion to American Art History (London: Blackwell), 264–280. Johnson, M. (2018) ‘Introduction’, in N. Galanin, M. Johnson, and N. Kudumu, Nicholas Galanin: Let them Enter Dancing and Showing their Faces (Seattle, WA: Minor Matters Press), 15–18. Köchling, C. (2017) Maria Hupfield: The One who Keeps on Giving (Toronto: The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery). Latour, B. (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press). Lowe, T. and P. Chaat Smith (2005) James Luna: Emendatio (Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian). Martin, L.A. (2005), ‘The Waters of Venice: Rebecca Belmore at the 51st Biennale’, Canadian Art 22:2, 48–53. Martin, L.A. (2006) ‘Performance and Artistic Mobility’, in National Museum of the American Indian (ed.), Vision, Space, Desire: Global Perspectives and Cultural Hybridity (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian), 99–102. Martin, L.A. (2007) ‘Cross Over with Mr. Luna’, in J.H. Nottage (ed.), Diversity and Dialogue: The Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art (Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art), 25–32. McMaster, G. (1999) ‘Towards an Aboriginal Art History’, in W.J. Rushing (ed.), Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories (London and New York: Routledge), 81–96. McMaster, G. (2006) ‘Introduction: New Art/New Contexts’, in National Museum of the American Indian (ed.), Vision, Space, Desire: Global Perspectives and Cultural

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Hybridity (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian), 15–29. Mezzadra, S. and B. Neilson (2013) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Michelson, A., R. Bell, W. Nanibush, and C. Iles (2019) ‘Contemporary Indigenous Art in a Global Context’, 26 October. https://whitney.org/watchandlisten/43968. Accessed 19 April 2020. Mignolo, W.D. (2007) ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modenity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammer of De-coloniality’, Cultural Studies, 21:2–3, 449–514. Miles, J.D. (2011) ‘The Postindian Rhetoric of Gerald Vizenor’, College Composition and Communication, 63:1, 35–53. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1992) ‘Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism’, Transition 56, 11–19. Mithlo, N. (2004) ‘“We Have All Been Colonized”: Subordination and Resistance on a Global Arts Stage’, Visual Anthropology 17:3, 229–245. Mithlo, N. (2006) ‘“Give, Give, Giving”: Cultural Translations’, in National Museum of the American Indian (ed.), Vision, Space, Desire: Global Perspectives and Cultural Hybridity (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian), 85–97. Morris, K. (2011) ‘Running the “Medicine Line”: Images of the Border in Contemporary Native American Art’, American Indian Quarterly 35:4 (Fall), 549–578. Morris, K. (2019) Shifting Grounds: Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press). National Museum of the American Indian (ed.) (2006), Vision, Space, Desire: Global Perspectives and Cultural Hybridity (Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution). Postcommodity (2015) Repellent Fence. Artists’ statement. http://poscommodity.com/ Repellent_Fence_English.html. Accessed 15 January 2019. Povinelli, E.A. (2018) ‘Horizons and Frontiers, Late Liberal Territoriality, and Toxic Habitats’, e-flux 90 (April). Recollet, K. (2015) ‘Glyphing Decolonial Love through Urban Flash Mobbing and Walking with Our Sisters’, Curriculum Inquiry 45:1, 129–145. Rickard, J. (2005) ‘Rebecca Belmore: Performing Power’, in J. Bradley and J. Rickard (eds), Rebecca Belmore: Fountain (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery), 69–76. Rickard, J. (2013) ‘The Emergence of Global Indigenous Art’, in G.A. Hill, C. Hopkins, and C. Lalonde (eds), Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada), 54–60. Scappettone, J. (2014) Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (New York: Columbia University Press). Schramm, M., S.P. Moslund, A.R Petersen, M. Gebauer, H.C. Post, S. Vitting-Seerup, and Wiegand, F. (eds) (2019) Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition (New York: Routledge). Townsend-Gault, C. (2006), ‘Rebecca Belmore and James Luna on Location in Venice: The Allegorical Indian Redux’, Art History 29:4, 721–755.

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Vizenor, G. (1990–1991) ‘Gerald Vizenor: The Trickster Heir of Columbus: An Interview’, interview by L. Coltelli, Native American Literatures Forum 2:3, 101–116. Vizenor, G. (1991) The Heirs of Columbus (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press). Vizenor, G. (1998) Fugitive Poses:  Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press). Vizenor, G. (1999) Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press). Vizenor, G. (ed.) (2008) Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press). Vizenor, G. (2015) ‘The Unmissable: Transmotion in Native Stories and Literature’, Transmotion 1:1, 63–75. Watson, M. (2015) ‘Unsettled Borders and Memories: A “Local” Indigenous Perspective on Contemporary Globalization’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 7:1, www.tandfon line.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v7.26583. Zuecca Projects (2017) ‘Indian Water – The Native American Pavilion’, 10 May. www. zueccaprojects.org/project/indian-water-the-native-american-pavilion/. Accessed 25 March 2019. Zuecca Projects (2019) ‘Volume 0’, 9 May. www.zueccaprojects.org/project/volume-0/. Accessed 17 November 2019.

Race, migration, and visual culture: the activist artist challenging the ever-present colonial imagination Claudia Tazreiter

Introduction

This chapter is grounded in a critique of the colonial values and imagination that persist in contemporary nation-states, often expressed in racism and exclusion observable as systematised devaluation of some humans. Racialisation takes many forms, perhaps most commonly in state implemented policies, laws, and administrative measures of dividing and categorising populations. While the political context is important in understanding the felt experience of racialisation, here, my focus is on the role of art, visual culture, and activist artists in interdisciplinary fields of sociology, art history, anthropology, and cultural studies. I am interested in the synergies of activist artists and social change. The experiences of minorities, migrants, and Indigenous populations are highlighted in investigating the archive as artefact linking the present to the past. The case studies developed in the chapter are situated in the contemporary Australian context, yet also have global resonances with the Gurindji story of Indigenous Australians curated and collated by artist Brenda Croft, and the work of writer, filmmaker, and activist, Behrouz Boochani, who remains detained under Australia’s ‘sovereign borders’ policies enacted on asylum seekers arriving by boat. The chapter also draws more widely on a number of contemporary artists and artist activists whose work engages with the dilemmas that obliterate, silence, and forget some histories and memories. For example, De Souza comments on ‘the will to forget and the will to remember’, ‘How and what does one remember, if a (pre) dominant modernism produces a culture of forgetting? How does art function as islands of forgetting within seas of turmoil’ (De Souza, 2018: 18)? A number of writers, artists, and critical theorists bring together the concepts of memory, affect, emotion, colonisation, and race with the control over mobility and the social and political role of affect and emotions (Turner, 2005; Best, 2014; Pedwell, 2017); with art in action/social change (Levine and Levine, 2011; Demos, 2015; Clammer and Giri, 2017) and art as a ‘politics’ (Eder and Klonk, 2016; Minh-ha, 2016; Petersen, 2019). This theoretical field

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is the background framework of ideas through which the artist as activist is considered. In considering the work of activist artists, I draw on both the Western archive as official repository of knowledge, planning, and action and as a corollary, the deeds and misdeeds of the state. Archives are also ‘living’ documentation that encapsulates other, often less visible, traditions and realities through oral and visual culture (Biber and Luker, 2014). In Western thought, or perhaps more clearly defined through the culture of modernity, the archive as repository of a certain kind of knowledge – scientific, rational, calculated, and thereby also exclusive and exclusionary – remains dominant (Steedman, 2001). These archives are as relevant to contemporary artists and art historians as they are to researchers more generally in the arts and social sciences. Steedman’s review of the famous lecture by French philosopher Jacques Derrida on ‘archive fever’, reminds us of the fever or ‘sickness’ of the archive in collecting and documenting the exercise of power and authority of the state (Steedman, 2001: 1159), in reading and also in repressing records, and thereby memories, held collectively. Before turning to the case studies of artworks and activist artists that exemplify a type of contentious politics, I first highlight the key role of emotions, feeling, and ‘affect’. I do this in order to later draw alignments between the artists and artwork discussed and the idea of ‘affect’. Affect is understood as prior to the cognitive decision-making involved with the expression of emotions. That is, while people may have emotional reactions to art, the visceral capacities for affect are felt in the body, not necessarily processed and judged along the traditional lines of Western epistemology. For example, Grosz reminds us that Deleuze suggests, in opposition to those philosophical or phenomenological approaches to the arts that analyse their intentionality or the mutual engagements of subjects and objects in artworks, that the arts produce a general intensity, that which directly impacts the nervous system and intensifies sensation. Art is the art of affect more than representation, a system of dynamized and impacting forces rather than a system of unique images that function under the regime of signs. (Grosz, 2008: 3)

It is precisely in the spirit of this affective approach to the arts that this chapter proceeds. That is, the works discussed below, drawing on Indigenous and refugee artists, deliberatively invoke the power of the official archive and generate affecting visual interventions to the logics of official archives, which deny, obliterate, or normalise the histories and experiences of marginalised peoples. The field of visual culture and more recently the new scholarship in  visual  sociology draws heavily on philosophy and psychoanalysis

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(Merleau-Ponty,  1968) and is centrally concerned with the affective realm (Ahmed, 2004). Visual forms of communication and cultures are thereby impactful through the ability to generate deep feelings in response to an image or immersive experience (performance or installation), such as  the work of Indigenous Australian artist Brenda Croft, discussed later in the chapter. The approach to the intersecting concepts and issues I draw on and relate to artistic practice proceeds from the social fact of the ubiquity of the figure of the migrant and other outsiders. This, together with the ubiquity of contemporary digital technologies, allows ordinary and everyday events to be transformed into moments of artistic visual communication through the reach of the digital tool – the mobile phone and its camera, such as in the work of Behrouz Boochani discussed below. Art, activism, and artists

My interest in the intersections of contemporary artistic practice and visual culture is motivated by the work of a number of prominent and emerging artists with a great variety of art practices, working in many parts of the world. My focus is on artists engaging with the exclusionary practices of racialisation and the systems, logics, and archives of the state. In Australia, Brook Andrew’s work, The Right to Offend is Sacred, opened at the National Gallery of Victoria on 3 March, 2017. It draws on the record and reimagining historical legacies of colonialism and the resulting hierarchies of humans that are central to the ideas that motivate this chapter in the links between racialised visions and attitudes, and contemporary experiences of migrants and migration. Andrew draws heavily on archival material in his works, which refers to the ugly historical legacy of colonisation practices in Australia as a ‘mess’, and ‘re-divides’ or re-enchants these images. Andrew uses the mediums of photography, video, neon, text, collage, printmaking, assemblage, sculpture painting, and installation to challenge stereotypical ideas of history and memory, identity and race. Brenda Croft’s curatorial and artistic work in the exhibition, Still in My Mind: Gurindji Location, Experience and Visuality (UNSW Galleries, 5 May–29 July, 2017), brings together multiple visual mediums utilising historical and contemporary images of the struggle for paid work/fair work and the right to land for the Gurindji stockmen. Works from this exhibition are considered in more detail below. Other Australian artists, such as Vernon Ah Kee, Ricky Maynard, Shaun Tan, Hossein Vilamanesh, Fiona Foley, and many more, engage with the key themes of racialised exclusion and its social affects. Before considering Indigenous forms of reimagining the colonial logic in Australia through artistic practice and visual culture, a brief overview of white Australian imaginaries and history are outlined below.

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The politics of remembering or social amnesia in white Australian relations with Indigenous Australians

Historians Lake and Reynolds document the ascendancy of the ‘politics of whiteness’ in their study, Drawing the Global Colour Line, also offering critique and context to Australian colonial practices (Lake and Reynolds, 2008). As a ‘politics’, this approach to implementing a hierarchy of humans is firmly established during the nineteenth century in the colonised ‘New World’, evident in North America, Australasia, and South Africa. As will be explored later through visual works, the state and law are centrally implicated in these processes as well as social process of attitudes and felt experience – the affective realm. Archives and artefacts document these processes including considerable photographic and drawn evidence. Nevertheless, these histories of racialised organisation of society and resources are regularly denied and made invisible. Connell, for example, reminds us that fundamental ideas, values and cultures have been in constant negotiation since the colonisation of Indigenous people in Australia. Western ideas such as ownership of land and the imposition of these values through law clash with fundamental values of Australian Aboriginal peoples. The difficulty was that the ensemble of these rights and relationships was so different from ownership in European or colonial capitalism that there was no easy translation into language familiar to a state instrumentality such as the Supreme Court. […] The tenure that is recognised in Yolngu relations with the land derives ultimately from the spirit beings who formed the landscape, in the time of the founding dramas of the world that in English is called the Dreaming. The spirit beings created and named the groups on whom the land was bestowed. Their travels across the landscape created links among the groups who are connected with the specific sites along the way. A certain hillside, a river bend, a rock formation, a place where the vegetation changes may be a centre or a boundary. The process of naming is central, and all names have connection with specific sites. (Connell, 2007: 200)

In Australia, the ‘politics of whiteness’ was entrenched in the first Bill passed by the Commonwealth of Australia after Federation in 1901 – the Immigration Restriction Act, commonly referred to as the White Australia Policy. Though initially aimed at the expulsion of Pacific Islanders (called ‘Kanakas’), the White Australia Policy discriminated against all non-white people wanting to enter Australia on the grounds of race: white Australia was protecting itself. In addressing parliament in 1901, Attorney General Alfred Deakin said ‘We here find ourselves touching the profoundest instinct of individual or nation – the instinct of self-preservation – for it is nothing

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less than the national manhood, the national character and the national future that are at stake’ (Lake and Reynolds, 2008: 140). Indigenous people were also the target of this sentiment and related policies. By 1902, the White Australia Policy was extended through the Franchise Act, which granted full political rights to white women, while denying male and female Aboriginal people the vote. The repugnant politics of racial purity and racial hygiene remained dominant tropes enacted with legislative power in many parts of the world through to the mid-twentieth century. The work of Brenda Croft and the Indigenous artists she curates in the exhibition Still in My Mind: Gurindji Location, Experience and Visuality, discussed later, responds to, critiques, and acts as a counterpoint to this history. The end of the White Australia Policy came in 1973 with the removal of the last of the racial qualifications for immigration along with the introduction of a ‘multicultural’ approach to immigration replacing assimilation. Social attitudes are not temporally bound in the way legislation is. Attitudes do not suddenly alter with the repeal of a policy or law. Indeed, being mindful that one of the key concerns of this chapter is drawing attention to the relationship between memory-making and the ‘politics of reconciliation’, the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians remains in ‘perennial crisis’. Contemporary Australian society, as other societies shaped by post-Enlightenment, liberal-democratic values, has privileged instrumental reason over other forms of knowledge – the linear, growth oriented ‘progress’ of modernity. In the terms of this chapter, we can extrapolate several consequences. First, past memories – damaging to the ‘rational’ project of growth and progress – would more likely be forgotten, part of the fold or pleat of history. Second, national memories – collective memories that respond to popular myths – are likely to be deployed in imagining a past as well as calibrating a shared future. Themes of protection from threats, both external and from within, have been potent in popular myths and legends since the early days of colonisation. It is notable that this logic continues to recent decades also in the treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boat as ‘suspect populations’ and has justified the cruel practices of indefinite off-shore detention. The founding myths that accompany colonisation in Australia, as well as its origins as a penal colony, carry significant lessons when reflecting on an Australian national imaginary. White Australia was founded on imprisonment, fear, and exclusion. The Aboriginal population was typified as a wild and not fully human enemy, as was the fear of dangerous hordes from the north that could invade without sufficient vigilance (unwanted immigrants). ‘White’ Australia justified its exclusionary logic through regular reference to these ‘wild hordes’ from within and from outside the nation-state (Lake and Reynolds, 2008). Such potent tropes of danger and protection are traced

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through management of the convict population to the treatment of the Indigenous population through settlements, missions, and later the policies of removal of Aboriginal children from their families – all strategies aimed at containment, separation, and purity. Suspect populations were to be contained, separated from citizens – citizens who were to be kept safe. Collective memory and the social imaginary in Australia are ‘underpinned by feelings of anxiety’ (Elder, 2007:10), and such anxieties are evident in contemporary responses to the claims for visibility by Indigenous people and also by ‘irregular migrants’ such as asylum seekers who object to the exercise of state power in detaining, deporting, and separating them from citizens. The Gurindji story

In 2017, the exhibition Still in My Mind: Gurindji Location, Experience and Visuality was curated by contemporary artist and Indigenous woman, Brenda Croft. It showcased archival and contemporary artwork, demostrating the history of the ‘Walk-Off ’ at the Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory by Aboriginal cattle workers in protest against poor wages and conditions led by Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari on 23 August, 1966. Only in 1967 was a law passed that included Aboriginal people in the Australian government census, recognising their shared and equal humanity. In explaining the claim of the Gurindji people, Lingiari stated: I came from Daguragu, Wattie Creek station … I came down here to ask all these fellas here about the land rights. What I got (is this) story from my old father or grandfather. That land belongs to me, belongs to Aboriginal men before the horses and the cattle came over on that land where I am sitting now. That is what I have been keeping on my mind and I still got it on my mind. That is all the words I can tell you. (Croft, 2017: 4)

On 16 August, 1975, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s government restored the lands to the Gurindji with the words: Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people and I put into your hands part of the earth itself as a sign that this land will be the possession of you and your children forever. (Croft, 2017: 14)

The exhibition Still in My Mind: Gurindji Location, Experience and Visuality brings together archival documents, photographs and other artefacts with contemporary Indigenous artists on the theme of connection to land, justice, and historical memory across generations. Brenda Croft’s art and interventions are a key aspect of the exhibition, featuring etchings, video work, and photography. Croft is a descendent of the Gurindji, and parts of her

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artistic work for the exhibition are strongly biographical and autobiographical. Croft’s return to Guridji country in 2014 is documented in a series of photographs and drawn responses to found objects. In June 2014, while on a journey to document cultural sites with senior traditional custodians, our convoy stopped at a place known as No. 17 Bore. It was the first day in a fortnight of travels through Gurindji homelands with these senior knowledge-holders …. Immutable Gurindji cosmologies were revealed, alongside disclosures of colonial conflict by the arrival of cattlemen in the late 1800s. The latter accounts are steeped in blood – massacre narratives, festering wounds, carved like scarification marks into the collective, corporeal Gurindji soul. As I stepped down from the Toyota ‘troopie’ I had been driving, my eyes were drawn to the rocky terrain beneath my feet. Despite the impact on the land from untold head of cattle for over 130 years, a cultural talisman caught my eye and I bent down to pick up a magnificent stone axe. My aunt Violet Nanaku Wadrill, watching from another vehicle, beckoned me over and I handed the axe to her through the window. In my care for the time being, this axe has become my Venn diagram. Whenever I feel I am losing my way – in the archives, within my research, or when creating artworks – I return to this object and the images I took that day. As I turn the axe over, fitting it perfectly within my palm, I am awed by the skill of the maker who shaped it at an indefinable moment in time. (Croft, 2017: 27)

The series Blood/Type shows portraits of Croft overprinted with the words ‘ABO’, ‘Native’, ‘Quarter caste’, ‘Full/blood’, ‘HALF-CASTE’, ‘Octaroon’. The images are moody, shot in black-and-white with blood-red overprinting. The  images connect to the policies, attitudes, and mentalities of white colonial rule in Australia, that stripped land, identity, and also children from Indigenous people in a racist and eugenic history which continues to the present. Croft, and other Indigenous Australian artists, not only rework the violent colonial past and excavate archives that are forgotten or denied, they also reimagine futures. The violent state practices of segregation, dehumanisation and annihilation are present in the bodies of today’s generations. The second case study of artistic and advocacy work in response to Australian state practices of punishment of asylum seekers who happened to arrive by boat through indefinite off-shore detention will not be elaborated. In important ways this case study connects with the history of treatment and exclusion of Indigenous Australians, as the deep fissures of the White Australia Policy are felt in social attitudes and anxieties toward other ‘outsiders’ who challenge the collective memory of the white Australian nation.

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The Australian asylum seeker narrative

Many states have responded to refugee flows with policies and practices that deter, detain, and deport asylum seekers, refugees, and other persons labelled as ‘irregular migrants’, justifying such punitive responses through rhetorical and emotive assertions of fear and danger. However, the case of Australia explored here – evidenced through the interventions of asylum seekers, refugees, and their supporters, who take exception to state practices, and to the rhetorical and affective messages and moods of danger and of hatred – is stark as an extreme example of a state criminalising and punishing asylum seekers. The creation of de-territorialised spaces is evident in Australia’s practice of ‘off-shore’ detention of asylum seekers on the Pacific island nation of Nauru and on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea – which is akin to Augé’s concept of ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1992), which are also ‘spaces of disappearance’ as national borders are politicised (Tazreiter, 2017). The advocacy and artistic creations of Behrouz Boochani – a KurdishIranian journalist detained on Manus Island since July 2013 – accumulated over the seven-year period of his detention in the ‘Manus prison’ as he calls it, are important evidence of the potency of visual and literary culture. In 2017, Boochani, along with collaborator and co-director, Arash Kamali Sarvestani, released the film Chauka, Please Tell us the Time, which documents life in the detention centre told over time and pieced together with hundreds of mobile phone clips and written texts. This, along with other forms of visual and material culture and communication have allowed the Australian public access to counter-narratives to the dominant government narratives that generate fear, mistrust, and hatred toward refugees and asylum seekers. In the film, the story of the men and boys who live in the prisonlike immigration detention facility emerges through narrative form (see Figure  7.1).  The film is a meditation on the way everyday life proceeds in detention on a remote island such as Manus, giving Australians an account of the physical and psychological strain and trauma of those detained. The film is particularly powerful in the context of the Australian policies that have rendered asylum seekers and refugees as invisible to the Australian public – essentially ‘disappeared’ through media and information blackouts, which also include visa restrictions for lawyers and human rights organisations. Chauka is the name of a solitary confinement cell within the detention centre and is also the name of a bird only found on the Island, and is the symbol of the island, decorating its flag. The sound of the chauka bird singing is a constant aural presence, woven regularly into the film, as is the regularity of one of the detainees singing a Kurdish folksong. Chauka, Please Tell us the Time is a film that defies easy categorisation. It is neither documentary, nor feature film. Rather, it is a poetic intervention, using the visual medium

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Hoda Afshar (2018) Remain, still, 1-channel digital video, 24 minutes, colour, sound.

of time to take the viewer into the unimaginable pain of separation experienced through long-term immigration detention. Ongoing conversations between local Manus Island men reveal the deep significance of the chauka bird, and the continuance of colonial history on the island. Chauka is at once the name of this indigenous bird and the name given to the high security prison within the detention complex, used as a place of isolation and punishment. With the release of the film, Chauka, Boochani received numerous invitations to appear at International Film Festivals for the premiere. The Australian government denied him a visa to travel to any. Nevertheless, Boochani has appeared for interview at numerous public events and launches of his film via social media links with the assistance of his translator, friend, and collaborator, Omid Tofighian. In this way, the Australian public and an international public have come to know the work, the face, and the voice of Boochani and his fellow detainees. Boochani has also collaborated with a number of artists, including Hoda Afshar, in producing photographic and video works that comment on life in off-shore detention (see Figure 7.2). A work that exemplifies this collaboration is the video Remain. This is a collaboration with refugees who have been detained on Manus Island since 2013. The work engages with the situation that refugees face in being detained on the remote Manus Island. It is a layered work that addresses absence and invisibilities. The work depicts the ongoing mistreatment of refugees, including the remembrance invoked by the refugees themselves of their murdered comrade, Reza Barati, who was beaten to death by detention centre guards. Yet the work brings the viewer into the natural beauty of the island. It invokes

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Hoda Afshar (2018) Portrait of Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island, pigment ink jet-print 100 × 86 cm.

resistance and human agency in the strong bodies of the refugee men. A haunting presence of the interwoven stories of presence and those absent (those who have died and family members far away) echoes through the work. One man recites poetry, another sings a Kurdish folk song in the seemingly idyllic setting of the lush tropical rainforest of Manus Island. Afshar, in reflecting on the artistic practice of co-creating Remain with the refugees depicted in the video and still photographs says:

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My aim with Remain was to avoid this approach by working with you guys to create something that was more incongruent with our usual expectations so that the audience would have to pause to confront what they think they know. There is already the disjunction between your surroundings, which seem to us like a tropical paradise but which you obviously see and narrate differently in the video because of the horror that you have experienced there. But we do not confront that horror directly or see the situation neatly laid out in linear fashion. Instead, what we get through your testimony is this brief glimpse into your world and its brute circularity – the cycle of death, trauma, boredom, anticipation – but in a way that resists our understanding. (Afshar and Boochani, 2019)

The image of Behrouz Boochani (Figure 7.2) is a still photograph in a series that accompanies the video Remain. Boochani reflects on the distinction between the image Afshar creates of him and the passivity and victimhood that dominates images of refugees, as he stated in 2018: However, the portrait of me by Hoda Afshar stands in opposition to a fixed and static image [of the refugee]. It is a critique of the hackneyed impression of a refugee that has become idealised around the world. In this work, the subject is not passive; rather, he is fully aware of the image-making process and active in the production. In fact, he is a co-creator. One might say that the subject is also the creative source behind this work. In this portrait, one can see fire, one can see smoke – clearly, the context of the image is not unlike a comprehensive mise en scene produced by an artist. (Boochani, 2018)

Linking art to theorising racialisation and borders

Having considered examples of Indigenous and refugee art generated by artists working deliberatively for social change, I now turn to consider the theoretical framing of racialisation and new border technologies that generate the work and interventions of such activist artists. The profound and rapid socio-political ruptures since the end of the Cold War period are generative of new forms of racialisation of minority groups, with migrants and Indigenous people targeted in paticular. Many of these processes and moments of contestation manifest in new eruptions of hatred of outsiders, in racism, neo-nationalism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia. The root of these emotions and actions are often to be found in social, political, and economic problems such as job insecurity, shrinking state infrastructures, and welfare states, where citizens misrecognise the root cause of the everyday problems they experience, blaming the most visible newcomer or outsider rather than the amorphous and dispersed forces of neoliberal capital and the carceral state (Gilroy, 2005; Tazreiter, 2015; Wang, 2018). With this global political

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context in mind, I want to asses the key role of art and artists in reimagining the world in relation to the divisions created in various political projects through the category of race. Art theorist Marcus Verhagen typifies many contemporary artists as nomads in the era of globalisation where border crossing relates to cultures, images, and information as well as to goods and people (Verhagen, 2017). At the same time, in the practice of many artists, the question of origin is important. Are works understandable when remote from their genesis? Drawing on theorist Bourriaud, who focuses on ‘radicant artist-translators’, Verhagen discusses works that resonate in different contexts (Verhagen, 2017: 94). The case study outlined earlier, of Indigenous artists intervening in the representation of their histories points to the relationship between memorymaking and the ‘politics of reconciliation’ – in this case in Australia. As Fisher argues; The many strands of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement – though continuous with older, precolonial traditions – can be mapped closely against the political changes that have taken place since the 1960s. Indeed in some ways the story of Aboriginal art can be read as the poetic manifestation of two interrelated projects of the post-assimilation era: on the one hand, a dispossessed people’s struggle for emancipation and recognition, and on the other, a redemptive programme pursued by governments and members of civil society to embrace Indigenous people’s difference and establish a positive space for this difference within the nation. Aboriginal art has amplified Indigenous demands for justice and recognition and confronted contemporary forms of racism and discrimination. It has also been a vital forum for asserting Indigenous land custodianship and picturing the aftermath of dispossession and colonisation. Yet as much as it has been a platform for Indigenous cultural expression, it has been a medium through which non-Indigenous Australians have encountered this amorphous thing called ‘Aboriginal culture’, contemplated the miracle of its survival and regeneration, and contended with the question of how they themselves are implicated in the ethical problems that sit at the heart of the settler state condition. (Fisher, 2016: 13)

Fisher also renders an important critique of the international art market and the position of Australian Indigenous art within it, documenting the rapid escalation of interest and price in Australian Indigenous art from the 1980s, with Sotheby’s staging contemporary Aboriginal art auctions from the mid1990s. Interest in less expensive forms of Aboriginal art also increased in this period, with decorative and inexpensive paintings, souvenirs, and other products being licensed, leading to a commodification of Aboriginal art (Fisher, 2016: 112).

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Connections to the politics of race and migration

Historically, the institutions of the state often administered policies and practices of segregation, punishment, and removal of minority groups and outsiders, based on racial and ability hierarchies. Archives collect and collate these histories and continue to play a key role as material repositories, with the collation of textual, numerical, and visual material. In turn, museums and galleries gather, curate, and present archival material and critical artistic responses to this material to diverse publics. Many of the past practices collected in archives across the world include evidence of policies and practices premised on a politics of eugenics, integral historically to colonising logics and practices. These practices in different national contexts, were accompanied by detailed evidence and documentation, including drawings, images, and photographs, which show the people who were segregated, detained, and at times annihilated. The biopolitical nature of the coercive policies and actions of state schemes that politicise life1 result, in some cases, in a ‘social death’, in others in a ‘slow death’ of targeted populations, and in yet others, in ‘annihilation’ (Arendt, 1951; Foucault, 1997; Agamben, 1998; Foucault, 2003; Berlant, 2011). Central to the key concerns that guide and motivate this chapter, as well as the key concerns of the artists explored earlier, are the processes that allocate value to the human and the subsequent development of hierarchies applied to persons through the practices of segregation and exclusion in forced settlements, labour camps, and concentration camps, as well as in immigration detention and deportation, and in policies that separate families and remove children from kin and culture. What is the role of art and artists in telling and retelling histories – particularly histories of silenced, forgotten, or invisible populations? Are other archives, such as the ‘invisible archives’ of oral and visual traditions also able to play a role in shaping futures? The answers to these questions are evident through the case studies explored earlier, particularly through the work of Indigenous artist Croft and refugee artist Boochani. As outlined earlier in terms of the utility of the archive, I am interested in the specific impact of the visual record, and the depiction and reinterpretation of these racist practices. Often it is photography that constitutes this visual archive through the state, journalists, and other witnesses (Azoulay, 2008; Lydon, 2018; Batchen et al., 2012). As has already been demonstrated in this chapter, artists focusing on the experience of racialised groups such as refugees and Indigenous people draw heavily on both the official and invisible archives in developing artistic interventions and critique. Indeed, a historical arc is evident in state implemented practices of population sorting and segregation, manifest in exclusion and in annihilation of outsiders, such as asylum seekers, irregular migrants, and Indigenous people, linking these

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practices to biopolitical racialisation such as the politics of eugenics. For example, some images and depictions of the segregation and punishment of outsiders are manifest as visual ‘trophies’ of state-sanctioned violence. These trophies are documented, for example, in photographic evidence – of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison; of the euthanasia centres of National Socialism during the Second World War; of the segregation of Indigenous people from white settler communities in Australia; and in the exploitation of modern slavery (Robinson, 1983; Taylor, 1998; Butler, 2007). To return to the theorisation of racialisation that frames this chapter, significant international progress has been made in conceptualising the ‘politics of difference’ and new racism, importantly noting its seamlessness with racial capitalism and the experience of Blackness (Mbembe, 2013; Moten, 2017; Puar, 2017). Intersectional analysis, which recognises the reality of multiple and overlapping identities, pushes these theories further, eschewing the orthodoxies that entrench social attitudes, law and public policy, and the categorisations attached to identity markers (Yuval Davis, 2012), and significantly to biopolitical markers such as race, gender, ethnicity, and disability. What many writers and theorists seek to highlight are the entrenched and perhaps naturalised hierarchies of persons, which attach differential value to persons based on biological characteristics or cultural difference, implemented in institutional violence that is supported and fostered through the symbolic as well as the visualised outsider. The violence of biopolitical hierarchies of persons enacted through state policies operate through the logic of the sovereign entity of nation-state, protecting a selected population of citizens and residents through the exclusion and erasure of other populations deemed troublesome, or polluting. New conceptualisation emerging in the Black radical tradition contributes original and important theorisation of the affects that result from these exclusions – affects that carry across time, space and generations. Avery Gordon’s use of the concept of haunting is a powerful case in point. He uses the language of haunting to convey an experiential modality in understanding organised force, abusive systems, and their impacts on everyday life; impacts not only on the oppressed, but on wider society and on the bystander (Gordon, 2008). The links between the past and the present, and the haunting presence of actions and figures from a violent past come to the fore with the two case studies of artistic inventions in the form of the Gurindji story from Indigenous Australian artists and the work of Behrouz Boochani, detained under Australia’s refugee policies. Borders, affects, and the persistence of hierarchies

The creation and maintenance of a hierarchy of humans through stateinstituted practices of segregation and exclusion, as explored above, relates

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closely to the multiple meanings and uses of the concept of border. These are problems that appear to be intractable to human societies despite technological, economic, and moral development, innovation and ‘progress’ over generations. Therefore, ever new forms of racialised discrimination and hierarchisation of persons emerge, as, arguably, the very foundations of modernity are implicated in the creation and subsequent exploitation of difference and cleavage between people and cultures through colonisation and imperialism as well as financialised capitalism. One such manifestation of this ‘politics’ is that of eugenics as a scheme of sifting and separating populations with a ‘use value’ attached to persons. The ‘science’ of eugenics was the background and justification for separation of humans deemed unable to work or to be otherwise ‘useful’ in policies, which saw the separation, institutionalisation, and annihilation of persons with physical and mental disabilities, persons deemed as ‘misfits’ or ‘polluting’, such as Roma and racialised groups such as Jews and also Indigenous people through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century in many parts of the world (Ehrlich, 1968). The inability to work, or to be considered useful, as well as slave labour schemes, was premised on the dehumanisation of some groups. Today, migrants are often considered by the state as labour but not as citizens (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) – their use value is their labour and without citizenship status their humanity and equal status as human is diminished. The historical and contemporary systems of value  attached to persons are at the heart of the critique mounted by the artists and artworks to be considered later in challenging and exposing human experiences resulting from this politics of separation, discrimination, and dehumanisation. I now briefly explore the concept and materiality of the border. The border is, first of all, a concept, an idea, rather than the materiality of territorial state borders that often comes to mind. Indeed, the concept is rich with multiple meanings and differentiated utility. In migration studies, the border defines territory and thereby the gatekeeping role of the state, yet simultaneously the concept does the cultural work of sifting and sorting affiliations, loyalties, and social ties built across generations and often in defiance of the geographically fixed spatiality of the nation-state. New transdisciplinary scholarship argues for the polysemy of border as a coextensive concept, physical, metaphysical, and relational (Mezzadra and Nielson, 2013). The multiple meanings and applications of border are resonant through the forms of human subjectivity and cultural hybridity that are, for example, a key aspect of the visual interpretations and representations of human suffering (Sontag, 2003). Adding complexity is the analysis of the border as membrane (Bauböck, 2015; Tazreiter et al., 2016), or ‘chapter barrier’ through bureaucratic exclusion, where rather than the physical barrier of the border, it is the complex layers of law and bureaucratic procedure that mediate the opportunities of potential migrants through chapter barriers. In addition, new

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bordering techniques relate to the ‘non-places’ and extra-territorial zones (Augé, 1992), such as the zones that refugees are often subject to in seeking to cross borders and subject to ‘capture’ in detention, deportation, and other forms of forced onward movement. Often overlooked in the intense, vile, and often harmful public discourses on race and racism – and on migration and refugee arrivals; on cultural and religious diversity and difference – is the role of the past in the present. Hate speech and the many other manifestations of violence and exclusion targeting outsiders, minorities, and vulnerable groups are in many cases manifestations of a societal retreat from confronting past violence through a politics of social amnesia and erasure. The extensive literature conceptualising new understandings of neo-imperialism and coloniality, as well as new feminist, queer, and black studies, provides a scaffold of critique important for this chapter, elaborated further below (Robinson, 1983; Butler, 2004; Berlant, 2011; Mbembe, 2013; Weheliye, 2014; De Souza, 2018). As outlined earlier, the visual documentation and traces of outsider can be mapped through the official archives of the state held in public libraries, museums, and also in universities. However, not insignificant are the unofficial and invisible archives held by families, communities, and language groups that are reflected in everyday accounts as well as in artistic practice. Tschofen indicates the contemporary reiteration of the Frankfurt School’s foundation in art and artistic practice, nurtured by critical theory’s theorisation of the life of the mind, and indeed of life itself, as a fundamental critique of systems of regulation and control of populations (Tschofen, 2016). Following this argumentation, new possibilities are opened up through digital means for material and virtual artefacts to produce unique exchanges. In their contemporary manifestations, and through the proliferation of new digital technologies, these ideas have transformed through screens, both individual and public screens, which disperse visual cultures and artefacts with unprecedented speed and ubiquity (Pastageriadis, 2016). Screens, for example, are part of contemporary spectatorship for artists in contemplating the spatial and temporal possibilities for works that are film- or video-based (Mondlock, 2010: 60). The transformative potential of digital technologies for the artworld, and for communicative media more generally, is reminiscent of Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid modernity’ with the momentary and fluid nature of contemporary exchange and interaction, as well as Verhagen’s earlier reference to globalised art and artforms (Verhagen, 2017). The reach and importance of new digital technologies is also directly relevant to the second case study explored earlier, of the literary and artistic interventions of Behrouz Boochani from Manus Island. All of the works produced by Boochani are created and transmitted by mobile phone using applications such as WhatsApp.

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The contemporary traces of racialised exclusion can be traced through past events and processes of exclusion in the practices of encampment, punishment, removal, and in some cases, annihilation. The examples explored later demonstrate the practices of exclusion premised on racialised and/ or eugenic policies and provide some insight into the visual interpretations that challenge and reframe the racialised, ethnicised bodies made into outsiders through intersecting identity markers, race/identity and migration/ citizenship status. These links are made visible through the two case studies of artistic practice and advocacy: first, with the case of Indigenous artists challenging and reframing the colonial setter narrative and second, the case of off-shore processing of asylum seekers and the work of Behrouz Boochani, detained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Significant international scholarship such as postmemory studies also shows the complexity of photographic and artistic forms of documenting human rights abuses and crimes – where such evidence has been part of truth telling, the search for justice and reworking the past (Hirsch, 2012). Archival images are supplements to other forms of evidence having a particular potency to unsettle stories that circulate about a particular event, incident, or memory (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2006: 254). The significant literary, artistic, and critical work on memory and postmemory studies is motivated by systematic and horrendous examples of state misdeeds and crimes motivated by racial and ability hierarchies of persons and by the politics of eugenics such as the Holocaust (Levy and Sznaider, 2006). It is in remaking the world, individually, in families, neighbourhoods, and communities both locally and globally that new forms of sociality emerge. How are these forms then depicted, communicated, and also mediated through artistic and visual means? Through the case studies revealed earlier in the chapter, the dominant state’s implicated hierarchies of persons crumble. They are inverted and transposed, revealing untold histories and new stories. The state-orchestrated processes of racialisation evident in the building of hierarchies of human outlined at the beginning of the chapter are revealed through the artists explored. In the first case, Indigenous artists weave unique cosmologies through works that bring untold, hidden, and erased stories and histories to contemporary audiences. In the second, the horrors of off-shore detention carried out by the Australian government are kin to Avery Gordon’s ‘haunting’ (Gordon, 2008), appearing and reappearing through works such as those of Behrouz Boochani, as reverberations that ripple out to every Australian – whether they turn away or not. The two cases of artistic interventions explored here challenge the embedded Western value of the archive as repository of textual and visual histories of state actions that tells a unitary story of the past. Drawing on official archives, but also challenging their power, artists also dwell on and add to the living archive that encapsulates other – often less visible traditions – through

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oral and through visual culture (Biber and Luker, 2014). In doing so, artists not only create a new type of living archive, but also foster a reimagining of ‘official’ archives and the hierarchies of humans they privilege. Note 1 Biopolitics is the concept that describes the processes of making, unmaking, and remaking the physical body through political regimes of power and authority, as outlined by the French theorist, Michel Foucault (1997). The body variously requires care, protection, and nurturing, and is also the target of control, restraint, and separation at times when fears of contagion or harm to others are identified. The migrant body is a particular target of state control, restraint, and separation, with irregular and unwanted migrants such as asylum seekers and refugees subject to punitive sanctions by the state that limit freedom of movement and in many cases access to basic human rights.

References Afshar, Hoda and Behrouz Boochani (2019) ‘Beyond Human: Artists in Conversation’, UN Magazine, 13:1. http://unprojects.org.au/magazine/issues/issue-13-1/behrouzboochani-hoda-afshar. Accessed 1 June 2020. Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Arendt, H. (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt Publishing). Augé, M. (1992) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. J. Howe (London: Verso). Azoulay, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books). Batchen, G., M. Gidley, N.K. Miller, and J. Prosser (eds) (2012) Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books). Bauböck, R. (2015) ‘Rethinking Borders as Membranes’, in L. Weber (ed.), Rethinking Border Control for a Globalizing World (London: Routledge). Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press). Best, S. (2014) Visualising Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-Garde (New York: I.B. Tauris). Biber, K. and T. Luker (2014) ‘Evidence and the Archive: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Emotion’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 40:1, 1–14. Boochani, Behrouz (2018) ‘This Human Being’, The Saturday Paper, November, 24–30. Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso, London). Butler, J. (2007) ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25, 951–966. Clammer, J.R. and K. Giri, A (eds) (2017) The Aesthetics of Development: Art Culture and Social Transformation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

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Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin). Croft, B. (2017) Still in My Mind: Gurindji Location, Experience and Visuality (The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, Sydney: UNSW Galleries). De Souza, A. (2018) How Art Can be Thought: A Handbook for Change (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Demos, T.J. (2015) ‘Between Rebel Creativity and Reification: For and Against Visual Activism’, Journal of Visual Culture, 15:1, 85–102. Eder, J. and C. Klonk (eds) (2016) Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Ehrlich, P.R. (1968) The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine). Elder, C. (2007) Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity (Crowns Nest: Allen & Unwin). Fisher, L. (2016) Aboriginal Art and Australian Society: Hope and Disenchantment (Melbourne: Anthem Press). Foucault, M. (1997) ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’, in P. Rabinow and J.D. Fubion (eds), Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth (New York: New Press), 73–79. Foucault, M. (2003) ‘Society Must be Defended’, Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976, trans. D. Macey (New York: Picador). Gilroy, P. (2005) Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press). Gordon, A.F. (2008) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minnesota, MN: Minnesota University Press). Grosz, E. (2008) Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press). Hirsch, M. (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press). Hirsch, M. and L. Spitzer (2006) ‘What’s Wrong with This Picture? Archival Photographs in Contemporary Narratives’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 5:2, 229–252. Lake, M. and H. Reynolds (2008) Colour Bar: The International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Levine, E. and S. Levine (2011) Art in Action: Expressive Arts Therapy and Social Change (London: Kingsley Publishers). Levy, D. and N. Sznaider (2006) The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press). Lydon, J. (ed.) (2018) Visualising Human Rights (Crawley: UWA Publishing). Mbembe, A. (2013) ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15:1, 11–40. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). Mezzadra, S. and B. Neilson (2013) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Minh-ha, T. (2016) ‘The Image and the Void’,  Journal of Visual Culture, 15:1, 131–140. Mondlock, K. (2010) Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Moten, F. (2017) Stolen Life (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press).

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Pastageriadis N. (ed.) (2016) Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Pedwell, C. (2017) ‘Mediated Habits: Images, Networked, Affect and Social Change’, Subjectivity, 10:2, 147–169. Petersen, A.R. (2019) ‘“Say It Loud!” A Postmigrant Perspective on Postcolonial Critique in Contemporary Art’, in M. Schramm, S.P. Moslund, and A.R. Petersen (eds), Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts. The Postmigrant Condition (London: Routledge), 75–93. Puar, J.K. (2017) The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press). Robinson, C.J. (1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: University of North Carolina Press). Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Steedman, C. (2001) ‘Something she Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust’, American Historical Review, 106:4, 1159–1180. Taylor, J. (1998) Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Tazreiter, C. (2015) ‘Lifeboat Politics in the Pacific: Affect and the Ripples and Shimmers of a Migrant Saturated Future’, Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 99–107. Tazreiter, C. (2017) ‘The Unlucky in the “Lucky Country”: Asylum Seekers, Irregular Migrants and Refugees and Australia’s Politics of Disappearance.’ Special Issue of Australian Journal of Human Rights, 23:2, 242–260. Tazreiter, C., et al. (2016) Fluid Security in the Asia Pacific: Transnational Lives, Human Rights and State Control (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Tschofen, M. (2016) ‘The Denkbild (“Thought-Image”) in the Age of Digital Production’, Theory Culture & Society, 33:5, 139–157. Turner, C (ed.) (2005) Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific (Canberra: Panadanus Books). Verhagen, M. (2017) Flow and Counterflows: Globalisation in Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press). Wang, J. (2018) Carceral Capitalism (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e)). Weheliye, A.G. (2014) Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Yuval Davis, N. (2011) The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (London: Sage).

Precarious temporalities: gender, migration, and refugee arts Rachel A. Lewis

Introduction

A 2017 report published by the World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced populations experience a higher rate of mental health issues in comparison with individuals who are citizens of one or more nation-states (WHO, 2017). As a result of these findings, the WHO, the European Union, and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) recommend that the mental health challenges faced by refugees and asylum seekers be viewed as a global priority (WHO, 2017; UNHCR, 2018). Indeed, the WHO has since shifted its approach to refugees from a purely humanitarian-based perspective to one that actively seeks to strengthen the physical and mental health of displaced populations (WHO, 2017). As the WHO maintains, global and national policies designed to manage the mental health consequences of displacement have not kept pace with the rapid increase in forced migration in the twenty-first century. In addition to providing legal support and counselling services for refugees and asylum seekers, many organisations and charities are increasingly turning towards creative work and participatory arts projects to assist with the mental health needs of displaced populations. This is part of a growing recognition that refugees and asylum seekers appear to benefit from engagement in participatory arts projects, which often provide a space for working through traumatic memories in ways that are not always easily accessible via legal or narrative testimony (Rose et al., 2018). Participatory arts workshops can also provide opportunities for refugees and asylum seekers to engage with other displaced populations and thus counter the potential social and emotional isolation caused by exile from one’s country of origin. Since 2010, organisations and charities supporting refugees and asylum seekers through participatory arts projects have grown exponentially in the United Kingdom, for example (Rose et al., 2018: 2). From 2016 to 2017, at least 200 organisations in the United Kingdom provided programmes related to participatory arts with refugees and asylum seekers (Rose et al., 2018: 2). The majority of

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these projects seek to illustrate the rehabilitative potential of participatory arts workshops with refugees and asylum seekers in terms of addressing trauma and promoting feelings of well-being (Rose et al., 2018). What is less discussed in the literature on participatory arts with refugees and asylum seekers is how artistic practices can provide critical modalities for thinking about migration. How, in other words, might participatory arts projects with refugees and asylum seekers constitute politically charged practices that ignite social critique through making visible what hegemonic state immigration discourses obscure? This chapter explores how participatory arts projects can open up a space for articulating the negative impact of political asylum policies on the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers. While current scholarship on forced migration has begun to address the material forms of violence inflicted upon refugees and asylum seekers by the global detention and deportation regime (Gibney, 2008; Anderson et al., 2010; De Genova and Peutz, 2010), less attention has been paid to the psychic forms of violence and dispossession that repeated exposure to detention and deportation produce. And yet, dispossession from a political community often results in an inability to participate in the kinds of social activities that provide a sense of security and comfort in the familiarity and regularity of everyday life – these are less visible but no less meaningful forms of violence to which refugees and asylum seekers are subjected by the global deportation regime. As Maja Sager has commented, ‘Deportability intersects with gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and nationality in ways that define subject positions on the labor market, in family life, in relation to the body, and even imaginations of the future’ (Sager, 2014: 191). This chapter examines how participatory arts projects with refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom reflect upon the everyday practices and embodied experiences associated with deportability. By deportability, I am referring to the lived experience of the constant threat of removal, as well as to the ways in which immigration laws and policies render specific migrants legally vulnerable to deportation (De Genova, 2002; De Genova and Peutz, 2010; De Genova, 2016). As I will suggest, these participatory arts projects seek to recast migrant precarity resulting from state immigration and asylum policies as a question of temporality. Recent scholarship in migration studies has shown that engaging with the concept of time can help us to better understand refugees’ and asylum seekers’ experiences of displacement. For example, Catherine Brun and Nadia El-Shaarawi have examined the temporal narratives of displaced Iraqi refugees in Egypt and Georgia respectively (El-Shaarawi, 2012; Brun, 2015), while Melanie Griffiths has addressed the changed relationship to time experienced by rejected male asylum applicants living in the United Kingdom (Griffiths, 2014). This work powerfully demonstrates how paying

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attention to the concept of temporality not only provides important insights into the condition of migrant deportability, but to the framing of social life produced by state bureaucratic systems more generally. While migration scholars have begun to highlight the issue of time in studies of political asylum and immigration bureaucracy, however, there has been very little attention to how the temporal violences created by political asylum bureaucracies intersect with questions of gender, sexuality, age, or ability. And yet, as I have argued elsewhere, practices of credibility assessment in the political asylum process are linked to the state’s reproduction of homonationalist and neoliberal ideologies of sexual citizenship – ideologies that have a disproportionately negative impact upon refugee women, children, sexual and gender minorities, and individuals with disabilities (Lewis, 2014). Closer attention to the ways in which diverse groups of asylum seekers engage with the concept of temporality in the context of participatory arts projects can help us to better account for the multiple and intersecting forms of violence inflicted upon migrant populations by the contemporary global deportation regime. The first part of the chapter examines participatory arts projects with female refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, together with the ways in which their artworks critically reflect upon the concept of migrant temporality. The second part discusses the Bristol Disability Murals painted by a group of disabled asylum seekers living in the United Kingdom – an art project that illustrates the disabling and debilitating effects of political asylum policies on the mental health of refugees. The final part of the chapter considers the political implications of narratives of temporality in participatory arts projects with refugees and asylum seekers in terms of critical theories of citizenship and human rights. This section will also address possibilities for conceptualising immigrant agency emerging from spaces of deportability and consider how migrant re-appropriations of temporality through art can facilitate refugee healing and resistance. In doing so, my goal is twofold: firstly, I seek to offer a discussion of participatory arts projects with asylum seekers in the United Kingdom that centre the experiences of refugee women and individuals with disabilities; and, secondly, I aim to show how refugee arts can provide news ways of thinking about the deadly forms of violence that underwrite state immigration controls. Countering art history’s preoccupation with questions of mobility and movement in approaches to migration (Petersen, 2017), my goal is to address how refugee arts projects mediate women’s and disabled migrants’ experiences of immobility and temporal stasis in the context of the political asylum process.

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‘Time is passing’ or the temporality of asylum in Home Sweet Home (Women for Refugee Women, 2011)

Founded in 2006 by journalist Natasha Walter, the charity Women for Refugee Women was created to assist migrant women seeking political asylum in the United Kingdom. In addition to offering advice on immigration and housing, as well as providing English classes, yoga, and optional drama classes, Women for Refugee Women’s primary goal is to challenge the injustices experienced by female asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. Along with publishing numerous policy reports and briefings documenting the disproportionately negative impact of political asylum policies on refugee women – policies that frequently result in unfair hearings, detention, and deportation – Women for Refugee Women provides female asylum seekers with the opportunity to publicly speak out about the hostile treatment they have received within the United Kingdom (Dorling et al., 2012). Unlike many domestic charities, whose primary goal is to provide humanitarian assistance for refugees and asylum seekers, Women for Refugee Women seeks to expose the multiple forms of state violence committed against refugee women within the context of the UK asylum system. The organisation’s critique of state violence extends into its participatory arts projects with female refugees and asylum seekers. Alongside featuring the voices of female refugees in their media campaigns, policy reports, and public events, participatory arts projects have been a crucial component of the charity’s mission since 2006 to end the unfair treatment of migrant women within the UK asylum system. Their 2018 creative project, Lives Interrupted with artist Caroline Walker, features portraits of five female asylum seekers located in various spaces throughout London, including shelters, hospitals, church basements, and hostels. The portraits, which were painted in collaboration with the refugees themselves, are designed to show the struggles of refugee women trying to build a ‘home away from home’,1 while simultaneously navigating the challenges of the UK asylum process. All of the refugee women involved in the project have been in the United Kingdom for several years and all are in the process of applying, or reapplying, for political asylum. Indeed, some of the women featured in the Lives Interrupted exhibit have been waiting to be granted asylum in the United Kingdom for as long as nine years. In one particularly powerful image, a refugee woman is positioned in the corner of a dark room in her hostel, which she compares to a prison cell – a testimony to the psychological as well as material forms of violence inflicted upon migrant women by the UK asylum system. Exhibited in Kettle’s Yard Gallery at the University of Cambridge from 10 February to 6 May, Lives Interrupted was part of curator Andrew Nairne’s collection entitled Actions: The Image of the World Can Be

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Different. In her paintings of female refugees, artist Caroline Walker makes use of everyday objects and settings to illustrate the extent to which a person’s mundane effects can serve to highlight their social vulnerability and serve as an important site of political critique. In addition to facilitating collaborations between female artists and women seeking political asylum in the United Kingdom, Women for Refugee Women also provides a space for migrant women to engage in participatory arts projects that are self-driven. One of the charity’s most compelling exhibits with refugee women to date is the photography project, entitled Home Sweet Home, from 2011. In this project, refugee women document the challenges they face in navigating the political asylum process, as well as their everyday struggles for survival in the United Kingdom. The exhibition – which was shown to MPs in Parliament as well as at the Riverside Studios in London – grapples with the question of what ‘home’ means in the context of exile and displacement. The women involved in the project come from a variety of countries, including Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Burundi, Iraq, and Cameroon. As so-called ‘failed’ asylum seekers, many of the refugee women featured in Home Sweet Home are destitute, having spent months – and in some cases, years – living on the streets while fighting the UK asylum system; forced to move from place to place, many are homeless with no right to benefits and no right to work. Intended less as an intervention into the London art scene and more to spark outrage and effect policy change on the part of Members of Parliament, Home Sweet Home elicited significant attention from the British media (see for example, Kellaway, 2011). In Home Sweet Home, each of the refugee women involved in the project was asked to create a single photograph and accompanying verbal text to describe their experiences of seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. All of the photographs and narratives that appear in Home Sweet Home document the women’s daily struggles for survival in a world where suitcases typically remain unpacked and hot water bottles provide one of the few sources of refuge against the cold. As Madeleine, the author of My Things2 comments, ‘I do not unpack because I don’t know when I’ll have to leave. My friend lets me stay here but it is not forever’ (Dorling et al., 2012: 19). Madeleine’s image of piled up suitcases in a cramped bedroom alludes to a common theme within visual art addressing migration. Recent artwork produced by refugees has utilised the concept of the suitcase to call attention to ongoing traumatic memories that remain with refugees wherever they travel (see for example, World Bank Group, 2018). Unlike the common trope of the suitcase as a metaphor for holding onto trauma, however, Madeleine uses the image of multiple suitcases to convey that it is not violence in her home country that has left her feeling ‘uprooted’, but rather state violence in the context of the

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UK asylum process that has left her feeling vulnerable and constantly fearful of deportation. Esther, another female asylum seeker involved in the Home Sweet Home project similarly testifies to the sense of precarity experienced by refugee women living in the United Kingdom in her photograph Window. As she writes: I waited years to get my papers. During that time I was often sleeping outside and moving from place to place – sometimes staying in hostels, but other times I was homeless and I slept in churches, on buses. Always moving. Today I live in a hostel and this is the view from my window. It doesn’t look like home to me. I know it is temporary, that soon I will have to move again. (Dorling et al., 2012: 25)

Esther’s image of her bedroom window, which is grey, blurry, and spattered with rain, reveals her vantage point of feeling trapped in her home as a result of waiting years to have her asylum claim processed. The fact that her image is dark and out of focus conveys her sense of lack of clarity and control over her life caused by the experience of seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. In Home Sweet Home, the idea of waiting and of time passing are presented as central to the experience of what it means to be a female refugee living in the United Kingdom. One of the most poignant images in the collection of photographs is simply titled Waiting and depicts a woman standing in line for a bus, a mode of transport that many female asylum seekers use to pass the time and to protect themselves from the cold (see Figure 8.1). As Meskela Gebreslassie Negeste,3 the author of Waiting comments in her photography’s caption: ‘People who are seeking asylum spend a lot of time on the buses. If home is bad, they stay on the bus all day and go around and around. Or at night, if they are homeless, they may stay on the bus all night’ (Dorling et al., 2012: 41). The photographic image Waiting, which is a black-and-white still of a woman waiting for a bus to arrive, illustrates how waiting for the future to arrive forms part of the practice of daily life for female asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, whereby prohibitions against work generate excessive time in which they have little to occupy themselves other than to wait. For female refugees, everyday life itself becomes shaped by the experience of waiting, by a slowing down or stillness of time. Unable to move on with their lives, the experience of exile and displacement becomes one of marking time and waiting for life to resume. In Meskela Gebreslassie Negeste’s photograph, the distorted and blurry perspective combined with the absence of sunlight conveys her lack of certainty over her life as a result of the asylum system’s attempt to reduce female refugees to a position of temporal stasis.

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Meskela Gebreslassie Negeste (2012) Waiting, black and white photograph.

Confronted with an excessive amount of free time by the asylum process, many refugees are left attempting to find ways to kill time. As another female refugee, Evelyne, comments regarding the message behind her photograph, Shadow, which depicts a close up image of the artist’s foot and shoe in reflection, precariously extended to cross the divide between pavement and road, taken from a top down perspective which forces the spectator to adopt the artist’s point of view, ‘I have no place to live and no money. I have nothing except what people give me out of charity. I walk the streets in the day. Today the weather is nice so it’s okay, but some days the weather is so bad and I have nowhere to go. On days like those it is easy to feel hopeless and lost’ (Dorling et  al., 2012: 3). Like many of the other photographic images in Home Sweet Home, Evelyne’s depiction of her shadow is unsettled, out of focus, and lacks any reference to a human gaze. Her body is outside the frame of the photograph and her shadow takes up more space than her actual physical presence. In this way, the image not only conveys her feelings of disembodiment and lack of place, but alludes to the ways in which the asylum system attempts to reduce female refugees to shadows of their former selves; in her image, Evelyne’s shoe is the only part of herself that has not been reduced to a shadow. In her work on the temporal challenges faced by male asylum seekers living in the United Kingdom, Melanie Griffiths has discussed the affective state of boredom that frequently accompanies the experience of being an asylum seeker with no right to work, no access to benefits and, in some cases, no right to travel outside a designated holding area. As she observes, ‘boredom becomes a symbol of protracted displacement and represents a feeling of

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being stuck in a meaningless present – waiting for a future that does not come’ (Griffiths, 2014: 29). Numerous studies on the mental health of refugees have shown how the kind of restructuring of temporal relations for those navigating the political asylum bureaucracy contributes to emotional suffering and to a lack of mental well-being (Rose et al., 2018). Griffiths argues that a significant source of the instability caused by the asylum and detention systems is the tension between anticipating constant change (as in sudden deportation) and the fear of indefinite stasis (Griffiths, 2014). For refugees awaiting a decision on their asylum cases, anxiety emerges from the asylum process itself being both indefinite and temporary (Griffiths, 2014). While depression often has the effect of slowing down time, anxiety or panic attacks frequently cause time to unravel or to speed up (Kafer, 2013: 38). As the photographic images in Home Sweet Home illustrate through their depiction of forced immobility and temporal stasis, the condition of deportability – or being condemned to live in a state of precarious temporality – actively works to regulate the psychic life and emotional well-being of refugees. For the female refugees who participated in Home Sweet Home, time was perceived to drag in a way that negatively influenced their mental and emotional well-being. Not only did the women’s sense of time being ‘wasted’ relate to the asylum system’s prohibition against work and travel, but to the actual time taken to process their applications (in some cases as long as eight years). As Madeleine, one of the women involved in the Home Sweet Home project, comments regarding her experiences of being an asylum seeker in the United Kingdom, ‘My mind is all over the place. I am not at peace. I want to work to help myself – but time is passing’ (Dorling et al., 2012: 19). Through their visual and aesthetic emphasis on concepts of waiting and of time passing, the photographic images created by the refugee women involved in the Home Sweet Home project demonstrate how the experience of being made to wait, and its attendant production of feelings of depression and/or anxiety, is bound up in normative power relations and is connected to forms of bureaucratic domination. As Melanie Griffiths has argued, the imposition of waiting for asylum, always with the promise of eventual change, is part of the technique of state immigration controls that seek to sustain the marginality and passivity of migrants through placing them in a position of directionless stasis (Griffiths, 2014: 1996). Confined to living in the present, those faced with the constant threat of removal are unable to plan for more than a few days ahead. Without any idea of how long they will have to wait for their claims to be heard, many asylum seekers in the United Kingdom are confined to living in an endless present in which they struggle to imagine a future or to invest in their future lives. As Lois McNay has written, ‘The emotion of hope … is crucially linked to a particular social position, most especially to the agent’s objective ability to manipulate the potentialities of the present in order to

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realise some future project’ (McNay, 2008: 281). One’s ability to experience hope is contingent upon one’s ability to imagine alternatives to the present. Hope allows us to access a temporal sense of potential. Deportability, however, produces migrant illegality not merely as an anomalous juridical status, but as an ‘enforced orientation to the present’ (De Genova, 2002: 427), one which, by definition, withholds all promises of the future. In this way, the condition of deportability frequently leaves refugees unable to make long-term plans, and in some cases unable to imagine any kind of viable future at all. As Saron, one of the women featured in the Home Sweet Home project, comments regarding the debilitating effects of the political asylum process on the mental health of refugee women, ‘I used to be so full of hope. Even when I came to this country I thought I would survive and make a good life for myself. It wasn’t what happened to me in my home country which broke me. It was what happened to me here. That was what broke my spirit’ (Dorling et al., 2012: 31). The photographs and accompanying texts in Home Sweet Home illustrate how state violence towards female refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom is linked not only to their deportable status, but to state regulations of their temporal existence. Faced with the unsettling reality of potential deportation, many deportable asylum seekers suffer from the precarity created by living with an uncertain sense of time, one that simultaneously confines them to an endless present, but that can also bring change at any moment. As one of the women in the Home Sweet Home project observes regarding the debilitating effects of the political asylum process on her sense of mental well-being, ‘Being destitute affects your mind, body and soul. I found that when I was destitute, I couldn’t plan my life. You feel useless and down; you are not steady, you become like a child’ (Dorling et al., 2012: 30). Through its visual and aesthetic emphasis on concepts of immobility and temporal stasis, the Home Sweet Home project demonstrates how UK immigration policies attempt to transform female asylum seekers into diminished and impoverished subjects in a way that creates serious obstacles to their credibility when they seek political asylum. In doing so, Home Sweet Home not only shows how art can provide new ways of thinking about migration, but calls attention to the ethical dimensions of participatory arts projects with female refugees as politically charged practices that seek to instigate critical dissent and policy change by making visible the violence that state asylum discourses obscure. ‘I’d rather die than be deported’, or the debilitating effects of political asylum in the Bristol Disability Murals (2012)

The extent to which UK immigration policies produce debilitating and disabling conditions for refugees, which seek to strip them of their political

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agency, is further evident in the Bristol Disability Murals (2012), painted by a group of disabled asylum seekers living in Britain. The murals were displayed in Bristol town centre on 23 March with the intention of eliciting comments and dialogue from passersby. Organised by public artist Andrew Bolton and researcher Rebecca Yeo, the murals were designed to raise attention amongst the British public about the challenges faced by disabled refugees and asylum seekers living in the United Kingdom. The following statement was released about the Bristol Disability Murals on the group’s website: On March 23rd disabled asylum seekers officially claimed a space for their messages to be heard in the heart of Bristol. A painted mural composed of the drawings, ideas and messages of disabled asylum seekers was installed in the so-called Bear Pit, the multi-road roundabout at the heart of the city, close to the famously cosmopolitan Stokes Croft district. People who are rarely heard by anyone, not the disability movement, not the refugee community and not the government, are using art to claim a voice and a public space. (Disability Murals, 2012)

As the Disability Murals website indicates, disabled refugees face particular challenges when applying for political asylum on the basis of disability-related forms of persecution. While refugees with disabilities are regarded as vulnerable populations by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, they are rarely granted asylum on the basis of their disability. In order to qualify for political asylum, applicants have to prove a well-founded fear of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. Unlike LGBTQ applicants, who are often perceived to be fraudulently claiming to be gay for the purposes of obtaining political asylum (Lewis, 2014), however, disabled refugees are not suspected of being fraudulent regarding their disabilities. Instead, disabled refugees are frequently regarded as failing to fall within the categories of protection offered by international refugee law and state asylum laws. The failure of states to recognise disability-related forms of persecution is partly due to the fact that the concept of disability itself blurs the economic-political dichotomy of persecution at the heart of the asylum system. As Amy Shuman and Carol Bohmer have argued, the challenges of proving membership of a particular social group for individuals with disabilities is connected to the enduring legacy of the medical model of disability in immigration controls and the failure of officials to comprehend the ways in which disabilities are socially constructed (Shuman and Bohmer, 2016). They suggest that in order to award asylum, officials would have to embrace the ‘social model of disability’, according to which the remedy is to change the social situation through resettlement, rather than relying on the medical model of disability as requiring a rehabilitative solution in the home country (Shuman and Bohmer, 2016).

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Given the challenges of seeking political asylum on the basis of disability alone, it is perhaps not surprising that the Bristol Disability Murals largely focus on the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers with disabilities living in Britain and less on the challenges they face in proving disabilityrelated forms of persecution in the political asylum process. In the murals, the disabled refugees and asylum seekers involved in the project critically reflect upon the relationship between the experience of having physical or mental disabilities and the kinds of disabling conditions that affect all refugees who are forced to navigate the UK asylum process. Pointedly asking the question, ‘Who made me disabled?’, Ahmed, a disabled refugee from Iraq who participated in the painting of the murals answers: ‘The government. Britain, America, Iraq. The governments fought. They made me disabled. They injured my leg in an explosion. I lost my mind. I lost my brother’ (Disability Murals, 2012). Ahmed goes on to give a highly politicised account of his current disabilities resulting from state violence at the hands of the UK asylum system. In one of the images from the murals, he illustrates the tortuous reality of living with the constant threat of deportation, as the people around him continue forward with their everyday lives, engaging in routine leisure activities, such as sipping coffee, oblivious to the pain and anxiety of those denied access to citizenship rights (see Figure 8.2):

Andrew Bolton and disabled asylum seekers (2013) Bristol Disability Murals, mural painting in Bristol.

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Ahmed’s narrative in the Bristol Disability Murals resonates with Melanie Griffiths’ suggestion that ‘It is this different, pointless time that entrenches alterity, making failed asylum seekers and detainees fundamentally different from the busy people around them’ (Griffiths, 2014: 19). Many of the disabled refugees and asylum seekers who participated in the murals similarly speak of this sense of endless, suspended time created by the political asylum bureaucracy as a source of oppression in which the prohibitions against employment made their lives unproductive and prevented them from achieving their desired social goals and personal progress. More specifically, they comment upon how being forced to navigate the UK asylum process had the effect of actively excluding them from participating in the pleasures and vicissitudes of social ageing by preventing them from exercising adult-like self-determination over their lives, reducing them to conditions of child-like dependency on the state. This is strikingly evident in the images themselves, which are painted in bright colours, and contain children’s images of Paddington Bear alongside the image of what appears to be a young boy, stating ‘Please, hold my hand, don’t hate me’. Placed in the corner of the mural, the latter image is painted to appear in the guise of a crayon-like drawing produced by a child. Diminutive and fragile, the image conveys vulnerability and precarity, perhaps strategically aiming to elicit an emotional response and sense of outrage from passerby regarding the plight of disabled refugees in the UK. Rather than seeking humanitarian assistance as a result of their original displacement, however, the refugees in the Bristol Disability Murals are demanding to be rescued from state violence in the form of the UK deportation regime. In one particularly powerful image from the murals, a woman named Mary is seen throwing herself out of her bedroom window, revealing how she would rather commit suicide than be deported to her home country. As she writes, ‘If the police come to my house I will kill myself. I won’t stop to ask what they want; I’d rather die than be deported’ (Disability Murals, 2012). Mary’s statement not only provides a chilling testimony to how the temporal violences created by conditions of deportability in the political asylum process produce emotional suffering and psychological trauma for refugees living in the United Kingdom. Rather, her image encourages us to view the state as the producer of criminal activity through its violent abuse of migrants in the context of the detention and deportation process.4 The Bristol Disability Murals demonstrate the extent to which the traumatic impact of political asylum policies on the mental health of refugees is part of a state biopolitics not of disability alone, but of debilitation, or what Jasbir Puar has referred to as ‘a slow wearing down of populations by the activity of reproducing life instead of the event of becoming disabled’ (Puar, 2017: xiv). Puar suggests that ‘The biopolitics of debilitation is not intended to

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advocate a facile democratization of disability, as if to rehash the familiar cant that tells us we will all be disabled if we live long enough’, but to recognise that ‘[s]ome of us will simply not live long enough, embedded in a distribution of risk already factored into the calculus of debilitation’ (Puar, 2017: xiv). In the Bristol Disability Murals, the biopolitics of debilitation produced by the UK asylum system is linked to the state’s attempt to regulate disabled migrants’ temporal existence and thus, by extension, their access to discourses of hope and futurity. By placing the artwork produced by disabled asylum seekers in a public space, the organisers of the Bristol Disability Murals not only aim to elicit critical commentary and feedback from passersby, but they engage in a form of creative protest against the state violence directed towards disabled refugees in the United Kingdom. Perhaps most importantly, however, their participation in the creation of the murals and their accompanying political protest allow the disabled refugees involved in the project to reclaim their agency and sense of control over their own time – temporal possibilities that are severely circumscribed as a result of the asylum process. As scholars in feminist and queer disability studies have shown, the manipulation of discourses of temporality and futurity frequently operate in the service of reproducing heteronormative, ableist, and colonialist ideologies. Lee Edelman, for example, argues in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive that the figure of the child is used to buttress discourses of heteronormative reproductive futurism because of the child’s position within chronological, developmental narratives of progress beginning in childhood dependency and ending in independent adulthood (Edelman, 2004). Building on Edelman’s analysis, feminist/queer/crip theorists such as Alison Kafer have discussed how anxieties about aging similarly result from heteronormative assumptions about appropriate temporality. Within such a discourse, anyone who metaphorically or literally gets labelled as disabled – i.e. queers, older people, children, communities of colour – is written out of the future. As postcolonial critics have similarly pointed out, such discourses of heteronormative reproductive futurism are not only grounded in the idea of able-normativity, but in narratives of Western exceptionalism (Agathangelou and Killian, 2016: 2). In the same way that compulsory able-normativity casts those with disabilities as without a future, and queer subjects as unreproductive obstacles to heteronormative futures, Western exceptionalist discourses grounded in colonialist logics similarly imagine those living in the Global South as ‘lagging behind’ Western progress and development. Thus, concepts of time and, by extension, temporality are far from neutral, but actively work to reinforce existing social and political inequalities. As Agatha Agathangelou and Mark Killian have argued, unhinging time from its ‘presumed neutrality’ is crucial to articulating an anti-racist, decolonial vision of world politics, one that seeks to break free from contemporary neoliberal temporalities grounded

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in the idea of civilising missions in order to articulate desire outside colonial imaginaries (Agathangelou and Killian, 2016: 2). Through their cultivation of visual protest aesthetics, the Bristol Disability Murals illustrate how the contemporary deportation regime enacts crimes against disabled refugees through condemning them to a state of precarious temporality, calling attention to the UK immigration system as a site of legalised violence by which refugees with disabilities are differentially deprived of the resources needed to make credible asylum claims. In the context of the UK asylum process, the precariousness of refugee women and individuals with disabilities constitutes a socially assigned disposability that is produced as an effect of state-sanctioned forms of xenophobic racism, ableism, and heterosexism. As the visual iconography and verbal narratives in Home Sweet Home and the Bristol Disability Murals seek to highlight, the kind of dispossession migrant populations experience as a result of political asylum policies not only encompasses literal forms of state violence such as detention and deportation. Rather, their images show how the mental torture inflicted upon refugee women and individuals with disabilities by the UK asylum system produces emotional debility, or what Ann Cvetkovich calls ‘sovereignty of an emotional kind’ (Cvetkovich, 2012: 143), as a specific form of vulnerability that targets migrants for premature death by depriving them of the ability to imagine the future. As discussed in the next section of the chapter, however, participatory arts projects with refugees and asylum seekers also open up a space for displaced subjects to reclaim control over the temporality of their everyday lives. Reclaiming temporality: human rights and refugee time

In her landmark chapter, ‘The Origins of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man’, Hannah Arendt provocatively articulates the question of refugee vulnerability in terms of the paradoxes of human rights. As Arendt persuasively argues, human rights only become meaningful within the context of citizenship rights. For Arendt, it is not that the stateless and the dispossessed are ‘unequal before the law’, but rather that ‘no law exists for them’ (Arendt, 1973: 296). For this reason, she argues, the refugee can only become intelligible as a subject by way of criminalisation. As she puts it, since the refugee was ‘the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomaly for which the law did provide, that of the criminal … Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it’ (Arendt, 1973: 296). While Arendt’s critique of rights has been widely used by scholars working on both international migration and human rights to account for the contemporary criminalisation of refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented

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populations, what has not been taken up in the existing scholarship on migration to date is Arendt’s theorisation of the concept of refugee time. As Arendt discusses in The Human Condition, dispossession from a political community not only results in the removal of one’s citizenship rights and thus, by extension, one’s human rights, but also culminates in the inability to participate in the kinds of social activities that instill a sense of comfort and security in the familiarity of everyday life. In her chapter, ‘We Refugees’, Arendt explains how refugees’ loss of home entails the loss of ‘the familiarity of daily life’ and ‘the rupture of their private lives’ (Arendt, 2007: 264–265). As she notes, refugees are often compelled to live under conditions that make it difficult for them to engage in the repetitive forms of work, labour and creative action that bestow a sense of trust in the regularity of everyday life. Indeed, it is no coincidence that none of the images in the participatory arts projects with refugees discussed earlier depict work or traditional forms of human labour, thereby illustrating the debilitating effects of political asylum policies on refugees’ sense of trust in their everyday lives. For Arendt, however, it is precisely these repetitive, cyclical activities or forms of work that provide human beings with a sense of vitality and liveliness. She argues that it is primarily by engaging in these repetitive forms of creative labour that human beings enjoy ‘the sheer bliss of being alive’ (Arendt, 2007: 264–265). Arendt suggests that when this ‘cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration’ is ‘thrown out of balance’, we lose ‘the elemental happiness that comes from being alive’ (Arendt, 1998: 108). Without these creative forms of labour, human beings lose trust in the reality and meaningfulness of everyday life. These cycles of pain and pleasure are what, for Arendt, enable human beings to endure their ‘mortal condition’ by gesturing towards the possibility of a creative existence that transcends the finite dimensions of human life. Arendt’s conceptualisation of the linkages between work, labour, and creative action helps to account for some of the less visible – but no less meaningful – forms of violence and dispossession illustrated in the participatory arts projects with refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. As Ruth Russell and Frances Stage have observed regarding the experiences of Sudanese women living in refugee camps, in the absence of quotidian activities that constitute the basis of everyday life, coupled with a lack of opportunities to share their stories and be believed, refugee women often find themselves trapped in ‘long periods of unstructured time’, or the stillness of an ‘endless present’ (Russell and Stage, 1996: 114). The images in Home Sweet Home – many of which consist of black-and-white stills – similarly convey refugee women’s experiences of immobility, stillness, and unstructured time resulting from the political asylum process. Indeed, part of what constitutes this sense of ‘an enforced orientation to the present’ (De Genova, 2002: 427), according to Arendt, is the way in which refugees’ position outside the

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law has the effect of producing everyday life as a burden, rather than as an opportunity for ‘self-fulfillment and creative action’. For Arendt, the right to freedom of movement is contingent upon the possibility of creative action, or what Nicholas De Genova has referred to as ‘our capacity to creatively transform our objective circumstances’ (De Genova, 2010: 39). Both Arendt and De Genova see hope – the emotion or affective state that enables us to access a temporal sense of potential – as inextricably linked with the freedom of movement as a human right. It is precisely the freedom of movement as a human right – or the freedom to truly live – that refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced populations are repeatedly denied. Given the connections between migrant temporality and the freedom of movement as a human right, it is perhaps not surprising that the project of rendering visible time’s presumed neutrality has become central to the politics of refugee resistance. Despite being unable to plan their futures, many asylum seekers still seek to embrace the present as an opportunity to enjoy freedoms that may otherwise have been circumscribed (see for example, Kohli and Kaukko, 2017). Participatory arts in particular can provide refugees and asylum seekers with ways of transforming spaces of suspended time into ones of creative productivity, reconceptualising the present and the everyday as meaningful time in and of itself. Indeed, what is crucial about the participatory arts and cultural activism with refugee women and individuals with disabilities discussed here is not only the way in which it serves as a form of political protest against state attempts to regulate the temporal existence of migrants, but that it redefines the concept of refugee labour to account for some of the less visible forms of precariousness and dispossession resulting from the experience of displacement. As Hannah Arendt reminds us, the concept of refugee labour emerges simultaneously as that which is both vulnerable to exploitation and that which is in need of cultural preservation. In Home Sweet Home and the Bristol Disability Murals, the focus of the artwork is not merely on the final performance or artistic product, but on the creative process itself. An important goal of these participatory arts projects with refugees is to intervene in the political asylum system’s production of women and individuals with disabilities as disposable populations by reclaiming the practices of self-narration that underwrite the political asylum process – practices that consistently pose a credibility problem for asylum applicants by failing to engage with the intersectionality of migrant experiences. The aim of the participatory arts projects, by contrast, is to open up a space for refugees and asylum seekers to reflect upon – and ultimately critique – the ways in which the state seeks to regulate their temporal existence. By engaging in forms of cultural labour that challenge the state-sanctioned modes of violence which seek to reduce migrants to the realm of precarious temporality, participatory arts projects with refugees and asylum seekers

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powerfully attest to the ways in which deportable subjects can imagine themselves to be otherwise – creatively, artistically, and narratively. Through enabling refugees and asylum seekers to take control of their own time – to transform spaces of suspended time into spaces of creativity – participatory art, by its very existence, offers a potential solution to the problems of heteronormative reproductive futurism and ableism that it portrays. Rather than being condemned to live in the realm of what queer disability scholars have referred to as ‘prognosis time’ (Puar, 2009) – where the concept of futurity itself becomes precarious – refugees and asylum seekers can use participatory arts projects as a vehicle for critiquing the neoliberal state’s investment in the very idea of compulsory futures, a narrative upon which the cultural logics of heteronormativity and able-normativity depend. Instead, visual art projects produced by refugees encourage us to imagine a different kind of futurity, one that rather than seeking to eradicate differences, invites us to invest in public cultures that are capable of welcoming our particular vulnerabilities to come. Conclusion

By engaging with the concept of the exceptional everyday – or the convergence of the exceptional and the everyday in the lives of refugees and asylum seekers – participatory arts projects can open up a space for articulating some of the less visible forms of temporal violence experienced by displaced populations, forms of violence that consistently haunt refugee narratives. As I have argued here, participatory arts projects with refugee women and individuals with disabilities show how efforts to assist refugees and asylum seekers must acknowledge the question of temporal violence, or the ways in which state immigration and asylum policies seek to reduce migrants to a state of precarious temporality. Understanding how everyday time functions in the context of displacement may open up new theoretical and political possibilities for activists, scholars, artists, and policymakers alike. By showing how UK asylum policies are structured in a way that renders migrant women and individuals with disabilities disposable populations, participatory arts projects with refugees and asylum seekers point towards the need for coalitions between feminists, immigrants, and disability rights activists. In doing so, they demonstrate the limits of current Marxist approaches to immigrant deportability (De Genova, 2002) – approaches that not only marginalise questions of gender and ability in refugee experience, but that fail to account for the ambivalent nature of migrant labour and creative action as that which is both vulnerable to exploitation and that which is in need of cultural preservation. In this way, participatory arts projects with refugees and asylum seekers not only recast migrant precarity as a question of temporality, but constitute an important form of creative resistance in their own right.

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Notes 1 www.nesta.org.uk/blog/home-away-home-innovations-support-refugee-inclu sion-cities/ (6 Janurary, 2020). Accessed 10 February 2020. 2 The photograph can be viewed in Dorling et al. (2012). 3 In the report by Dorling, Girma, and Walter, Refused: The Experiences of Women Denied Asylum in the UK, where the photograph Waiting was first published, Meskela Gebreslassie Negeste is referred to as N. Yeman, which was the pseudonym she used while an asylum seeker. By the end of this volume’s publication process, she had been granted refugee status and now signs her artistic photographs with her real name. 4 The framing of state violence in the language of administrative process means that deportation deaths rarely lead to prosecution. As Smith and Marmo (2014) note, for example, none of the twelve deportation deaths in Britain between 1993 and 2007 led to police officers or border removal agents being prosecuted for manslaughter. They argue that, rather than perpetuating normative conceptualisations of migration as a potentially criminal act that requires a coercive and violent state response, it is crucial that we shift our understanding of migration in order to view the state and not the migrant as the enforcer of criminal activity.

References Agathangelou, A.M. and K.D. Killian (eds) (2016) Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De)fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives (New York and London: Routledge). Anderson, B., M. Gibney, and E. Paoletti (2010) ‘Citizenship, Deportation and the Boundaries of Belonging’, Citizenship Studies, 15:5, 547–563. Arendt, H. (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Books). Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Arendt, H. (2007) ‘We Refugees’, in J. Kohn and R. Feldman (eds), The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books), 264–274. Brun, C. (2015) ‘Active Waiting and Changing Hopes: Toward a Time Perspective on Protracted Displacement’, Social Analysis 59:1, 19–37. Cvetkovich, A. (2012) ‘Depression is Ordinary: Public Feelings and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother’, Feminist Theory, 13:2, 131–146. De Genova, N. (October 2002) ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 419–47. De Genova, N. (2016) ‘Detention, Deportation, and Waiting: Toward a Theory of Migrant Detainability’, Global Detention Project Working Paper, 18, 1–10. De Genova, N. and N. Peutz (eds) (2010) The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Disability Murals (2012) www.disabilitymurals.org.uk/bristol.php. Accessed 5 March 2019.

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Dorling, K., M. Girma, and N. Walter (2012) ‘Refused: The Experiences of Women Denied Asylum in the UK’, Women for Refugee Women, May. www.refugeewomen. co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/women-for-refugee-women-reports-refused. pdf. Accessed 5 March 2019. Edelman, L. (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press). El-Shaarawi, N. (2012) ‘Living an Uncertain Future: Temporality, Uncertainty, and Well-Being among Iraqi Refugees in Egypt’, Social Analysis 59:1, 38–56. Gibney, M.J. (2008) ‘Asylum and the Expansion of Deportation in the United Kingdom’, Government and Opposition: An International Journal of Comparative Politics 43:2, 146–167. Griffiths, M. (2014) ‘Out of Time: The Temporal Uncertainties of Refused Asylum Seekers and Immigration Detainees’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40:12, 1991–2009. Griffiths, M. (2019) ‘Living with Uncertainty: Indefinite Immigration Detention’, Journal of Legal Anthropology 3, 263–286. Kafer, A. (2013) Feminist/Queer/Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Kellaway, K. (2011) ‘Asylum Life: The Trials of Women Refugees, Through Their Own Eyes’, Guardian, 13 August. www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/14/asylum-seekershome-photography. Accessed 5 March 2019. Kohli, R.K.S. and M. Kaukko (2017) ‘The Management of Time and Waiting by Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Girls in Finland’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 31:4, 488–506. Lewis, R.A. (2014) ‘“Gay? Prove It”: The Politics of Queer Anti-Deportation Activism’, Sexualities 17:8, 958–975. McNay, L. (2008) ‘The Trouble with Recognition: Subjectivity, Suffering, and Agency’, Sociological Theory, 26:3, 271–296. McRuer, R. (2006) Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York and London: New York University Press). Menjivar, C. and D. Kantstrom (eds) (2014) Constructing Immigrant Illegality: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Petersen, A.R. (2017) Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-Making in a Globalised World (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Puar, J. (2009) ‘Prognosis Time: Towards a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility and Capacity’, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 19:2, 161–172. Puar, J. (2017) The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press). Rose, E., A. Bingley, M. Rioseco, and K. Lamb (2018) ‘Art of Recovery: Displacement, Mental Health, and Wellbeing’, Arts 7:4, 94. Russell, R.V. and F.K. Stage (1996) ‘Leisure as Burden: Sudanese Refugee Women’, Journal of Leisure Research, 28:2, 108–121. Sager, M. (2016) ‘Constructions of Deportability in Sweden: Refused Asylum Seekers’ Experiences in Relation to Gender, Family Life, and Reproduction’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 24:1, 30–44. Shuman, A. and C. Bohmer (2016) ‘The Uncomfortable Meeting Grounds of Different

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Vulnerabilities: Disability and the Political Asylum Process’, Feminist Formations, 28:1, 121–145. Smith, E. and M. Marmo (2014) Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). UNHCR (2018) UNHCR Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017 (Geneva: UNHCR). WHO (2017) Refugee and Migrant Health (Geneva: World Health Organization). www. who.int/migrants/en/. Accessed 19 December 2020. Women for Refugee Women (2011) ‘Home Sweet Home’, Guardian, 14 August. www. theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/14/asylum-seekers-home-photography. Accessed 5 March 2019. World Bank Group (April–October 2018) Uprooted: The Resilience of Refugees, Displaced People and Host Communities, World Bank Visitor Center, Washington DC, USA.

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II

Global and translocal: an interview with Marina Galvani

Date of interview: 4 February 2019

Marina Galvani is the third art curator of the World Bank art collection, where she organises exhibitions on development topics such as human trafficking, child labour, and climate change, as well as on regional focuses highlighting the wealth of creativity and its importance in the economic and social fabric of the world. She previously worked on the preservation and promotion of cultural heritage in Guatemala, India, Iran, Italy, and Tunisia at the Inter-American Development Bank, and UNESCO. She holds an MA from the University of Maryland (2003).  Among the museums where she acted as curator were Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), Museo del Prado (Madrid), Gallerie dell’Accademia (Venice), and the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC). She curated a multi-dimensional art exhibition at the World Bank, entitled, Uprooted: The Resilience of Refugees, Displaced People and Host Communities  (November 2017 – November 2018). This exhibition showcased artists – some of whom were refugees themselves – from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Colombia, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Central African Republic, Burundi, and Guinea, for example, dealing with migration and the impact of transience in individual lives and entire communities of people. In this interview, she reflects on the structural and institutional constraints on World Bank art programmes, but also how realpolitik and worldwide political events affect the logistics of international art institutions, which often depend on the support of authorities and are affected by international conflicts, and also creators of partnerships. She also explains how the World Bank supports and protects artists worldwide, with a focus on vulnerable artists. Editors: Can you tell us more about your contribution – what does being the curator of a World Bank Art Program entail, and how long has the position existed?

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Scherezade Garcia (2010) Catedral / Cathedral, from the series Theories of Freedom, inflatable lifesavers, gold spray paint, multi-coloured rubber bands, safety ties, and prayer cards, 8 × 5 feet.

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Marina Galvani: The piece Catedral / Cathedral (2009) by the Dominican artist Scherezade Garcia is a good place to start. It is one of the first World Bank art pieces that had resonance with migration – an installation of gold painted pool buoys, towering but slowly deflating, adorned with ex-votos. And I think that subliminally, this influenced the people working here. When it was installed, the theme of migration was still not mainstream in the social and economic focus of the World Bank, and the effort we made with the World Bank Art Program on this exhibition brought it to the forefront, and at the same time contributed to change the institution’s understanding of our Art Program, to see it as more than beautification. … It took time for the Art Program to be recognised as more than just PR tool, but a channel for countries to communicate. It took time for the artists to be recognised as barometers and ambassadors for their societies. Here at the World Bank, the Art Program is still part of the General Services, and managed as an asset. The artworks are assimilated in the budget with furniture, and this makes the collection very static, and inconvenient to work on social topics in partnership, to support the institution’s projects. But we have managed to veer much more towards artworks with a social content from emerging countries. We are increasingly lending to other UN institutions, and now some museums, and our mission is better understood now as being the face of development. Editors: Would you see the Art Program as participating in artivism? Marina Galvani: We still have to be supported by the institution. One of the first exhibitions that I curated at the Art Program was on theatre activism in Eastern Europe, but was a mixed success – although I still think it should have been a great event. We invited theoreticians from Solidarność, or people who came to talk about the role of theatre in Kyrgyzstan; actors from the DAH experimental theatre group in Belgrade created in times of darkness and violence, as the first formal opposition of Milosevic; actors who performed under snipers, or under censorship. But it didn’t have much attraction, although the ideas seemed to be in line with what the World Bank was supporting. The constraints on our Art Program, also from the member countries, means such activist exhibitions have to be scaled down, and we need to build strategic partnership alliances with specific projects, making sure the exhibition is not operating on its own but is linked to a project and builds good faith. For example, we have successfully partnered with projects working on national disasters – working with the hub team on this subject in Tokyo. And this brought them much needed visibility, it brought the subject to the forefront. We started working in partnership on gender-based violence when it was still taboo, in a field that tended to speak of women only in positive terms – our programme brought to the forefront, made visible, the statistics of what the reality is for

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most women in the world. But these types of mediations take time – four years of negotiation behind the scene for the gender violence exhibition, and remain subject to budget constraints. The repercussions of the financial crash of 2008 hit just as the artworks selected after the call for participation were literally being loaded into the airplanes, and we were forced to scale down, and cut the budget dramatically, especially for participation from the Caribbean and Latin America. Years later, we managed to revive the event and, out of respect for them, reconnect with the artists from these regions. This time, the subject of migration had taken prominence in debates of social justice – and this led to the exhibition The Central Matter. However, by then, the presidential election had taken place, the support teams in the White House for this project around art and migration disappeared, and this marvellous, very conceptual exhibition suffered from it. This time the artworks were here, but the people were not. We as an institution are submitted, have to respond to the political turmoil of the world, to the relationship of the world, to realpolitik. Editors: Was this the event at which Scherezade Garcia’s piece Catedral / Cathedral was exhibited, in the entrance? Marina Galvani: Yes. When you ask artists to work on social topics, you see different levels of sophistication, or different choices of focus when you ask them ‘what do you want to change’, in the very large topic of social injustice. Some choose global injustice, some local social injustice, others individual social injustice. The Garcias are two Dominican sisters – Scherezade and Iliana Emilia – and they were having a look at what it means to migrate for their communities. Communities forced to leave, having so little opportunity. Iliana Emilia Garcia’s piece was very introspective, looking at the psychological reality, the personal approach of solitude and neglect. Scherezade Garcia was addressing the social issue, the crisis at large, this was an artist being an ambassador for her people – and this was more in line with the work of an Art Program for an institution like the World Bank: art as a platform, to convey, and to build some empathy towards, the plights of people migrating. We also saw similarities and common approaches. For example – the ex-votos in Scherezade Garcia’s piece – we found them in many artworks, and they came up again when we organised a programme on internal displacement in Colombia. This repetition was striking, and took on many layers in this social justice art. It builds a set of references. The internal displacements saw many people disappearing – and these ex-votos were their shadows. Editors: Do you think that installation art is better suited to elicit this empathetic response from the audience, and to comment on topics of social justice?

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Marina Galvani: I would say scene art rather than art with aesthetic value traditionally displayed. For example, when we had the exhibition About Change: In Latin America and the Caribbean (2011), it wasn’t simply an art exhibition, it was also cultural diplomacy. We showed, for example, Hilandi Fino / Fine Threading (2009), a life size installation by the Chilean artist Catalina Mena Ürményi. Replica chairs hung from a fine thread nailed to the ceiling. This suspended dinner set was about instability and social injustice and the fragility of access to food. The influence was subtle and seeped in slowly. Another piece had the same subject – but was more frontal, it was slogan based, with the word EAT displayed in a sea of grains by the Costa Rican artist Lucía Madriz. EAT (2008) was a direct criticism of agricultural lobbies and the food industry in Central America damaging farmers and access to food. This was vehemently opposed in the exhibition, but Hilando Fino was better received – we have to push the envelope gently, to have people be more sympathetic to these issues. Editors: Calls to revision art history and decolonise art programmes are shaking up curatorship practices. Have you witnessed specific curatorial changes in the last decade to reflect migration, here at the World Bank Art Program, or at museums? Marina Galvani: We were ahead of the curve for a little while. We have expertise and experience on the collapse and birth of institutions, we have been working on how to build human capital. We could have a strong voice and impact, indeed. But what we see is that client countries of the World Bank tend to want to bring in nationalistic types of art to represent their country, some largely stereotypical, rather than contemporary art from their country about social topics. A lot of this nationalistic art often flirts with the ideology of their governments in one form or another. And this is a globalised problematic. The level of the Biennale de Dakar/Dak’Art has recently decreased from its stellar position – what the local government has been supporting is very stereotypical, more traditional art – while contemporary and conceptual art is put on the side to make way for a Festival des Arts Nègres. Our collection is very uneven and contains many of these stereotypical pieces, often through donations – and client countries sometimes ask for this kind of art to be displayed when delegations come to the World Bank. We try to focus our exhibitions on subjects such as migration and social justice, and then we try to acquire out of these exhibitions artworks that are more on the artivist line. We also try to acquire from the countries direct or from the artists direct, and through these methods we are trying to listen to the artists on the ground – and when artists no longer exist on the ground, such as in Afghanistan – we try to work with the diaspora, to hear the most

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original voices on the heritage of the country. On the ground, we are trying to research, excavate what is left of the art of a country. This is similar to the work of the cultural heritage preservation at the World Bank, and we share the same goals, I used to be on the board. So, basically we don’t want a beautified image of the Taj Mahal, but we do want work from artists steeped into that tradition. Editors: Is supporting the work and livelihood of the artists in their countries at all part of the World Bank Art Program, to promote creativity as wealth? To establish their careers and prevent these holes in the cultural fabric of the homeland? Marina Galvani: We certainly don’t want to become just the administrators of the art, and treat the artists just as makers. In terms of development of careers, in many cases we have helped indirectly or directly – through commissions, but also by exposure, by bringing back contacts and we share them with institutions, university galleries and museums. The Smithsonian African Art Museum has been rotating exhibitions of artists, some of which I brought back in 2009, for example. Many of the artists we supported have then received a scholarship, their status changed, they received recognition. We have been assisting for the last ten years the World Bank office in Cameroon, which in turn has supported contemporary artists from Cameroon. We may be ready now to help them to go to the Venice Biennale. The other aspect is when artists are working in countries where they are vulnerable, or when their topics make them particularly exposed – we try as much as possible to build a network of protection. We have multiple cases of artists who have been arrested or tortured just for being activists in their homeland. I am trying to use the contacts in the Bank to build a network of protection, and I raise awareness in the World Bank on how risky it is in some parts of the world to be an artist and activist. Editors: Can you tell us more about the Uprooted: The Resilience of Refugees, Displaced People and Host Communities exhibition that you recently hosted, and its particular practical difficulties? Marina Galvani: Well, getting some of the artists to the exhibition was, in some cases, particularly difficult. But this was also the case for many of the previous exhibitions. In 2014, we were asked to do an exhibition on the Syrian civil war, and this already raised many complications. This allowed us to build rapport on the topic of Syria, and from this it evolved later on into an exhibition specifically about the refugee plight, with the idea of forced displacement, and shared prosperity. And for this exhibition, we thought that on top of bringing the artworks, we should also bring the artists to talk about their work

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or create them within the World Bank walls, to have a conversation. This is when it became a challenge. Art works travel much better than the artists. But on the other hand, this forced a perception change on the use of art in the World Bank – much more than if the artworks had come on their own. The conversation happened. And the despair and the artists’ plight was heard – so now we want to make the second part of this exhibition – on human capital. We talked about despair, now let’s talk about opportunities, and the energy of these displaced people. Editors: You chose to have a shelter shack installation transformed into artworks in the exhibition, by Suhaib Attar, son of Palestinian refugees, by Iraqi artist Marina Jaber, by Diala Brisly, a refugee and artist from Syria, and Didier Kassai from Central African Republic. So you chose to centre that first exhibition on despair? Marina Galvani: Several exhibitions have already addressed this, and have chosen symbols visually connected to the migrants’ plight. It can be, for example, the marble tent by Rebecca, which is close symbolically to our painted shelter shack. We decided to have the shack placed in front of the board of directors’ meeting, which coincided with the exhibition with the painting happening in situ – and at first not only the personnel was inconvenienced, but the artists too were dismayed by having to work in such a restricted space, with so many protocol rules, and to have to perform. We had to manage expectations and disappointments on both sides. But soon this became a conversation opportunity, and ultimately a good experience. However, the visual artists, once this event was over, many were brought back in, because of visa problems, and many opportunities that were opening up, shut down immediately, because of the situation in this country. The next conversation to happen, the next exhibition on this subject, we want to focus on the energy of displaced people, and their humanity – the primordial energy, the id – so we want to bring a chorus to pitch this to the audience, to highlight what it means to be human, and what you need to invest in this human to obtain the best out of them. We hope for a human encounter through the art, to celebrate resilience. This is how we used art to support projects of the World Bank in Lebanon, where personnel working on social development were telling us that the different communities, local and displaced communities, from Syria for most, were not communicating at all, although funds for projects were available. The idea of Butterfly Project was to have art mediation workshops for children of these communities, from kindergarten to high-school, where they would come together and create stories together. They had to invent stories that showed commonalities, through more than 130 workshops in 22 Lebanese schools, and which became stories as well as paintings as an

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expression of the chidren’s interpretation of ‘home’ and shared value. From this, emerged exhibitions that came to Washington and then presented in Beyrouth. Editors: Do you feel that art in itself cannot mediate the migrant experience on its own. Nathalie O’Connor, the exhibition coordinator of Central Matter [8–24 February, 2017, World Bank] dealing with youth migration in Central America, states that the art exhibition’s purpose was to showcase artworks as the ‘artists’ raw responses to their experiences, which cannot be unseen and cannot be forgotten’.1 That you need there to be a mediating event to start the conversation? That there needs to be an involvement for art to trigger reflections on social issues? Marina Galvani: Another project we are pursuing is to invest places such as train stations in Europe – which have been the scene of clashes over migration issues, events that have been highly mediatised and repurposed multiple times – and have artists hold social projects through huge murals, painted with migrant and non-migrant kids’ involvement; or from corporate environment like migrant and non-migrant personnel from hotel chains and private companies, to talk about and represent the future of these cities. The change would happen by working and creating side-by-side. It was an orchestrated effort of art not per se, but as a process. As a platform. Editors: Do you feel that the agency or activism of the art object, their power to educate and move is a cultural construct? That the kind of empathy you talk about is only reached through such orchestrated events? This is one of the criticisms that came up during the Documenta 14 event, that the art had come to the same place as the displaced and migrating people, but that a meeting of minds had not taken place, that they operated on different planes? Marina Galvani: We are actually sitting in front of an artwork depicting this very process of meeting and empathy building – the Argentinian artist Leandro Waisbord, aka TEC, focuses on street and public art, and he created this mural, Untitled (2010), in-situ, outside of the World Bank, and destined to be incorporated to the World Bank Art’s collections, to create a dialogue during the About Change exhibition. This artist now lives in Buenos Aires, and paints in the neighbourhoods that were witnessing a collapse of society. This street art was an answer to mobilise the communities. He took it on himself to become a social worker and commentator, and the aesthetics was coming from the community, not from the outside, or foreign aid.

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Editors: Our volume Art and migration underlines how much artists have always been mobile – born in a place, active in another – and cross-border careers is a reality of the globalised art world. Can you tell us more about that? Marina Galvani: Artists that used to be collected by the World Bank were often artists that had acquired such notoriety that they had made the transfer to London or New York. What I notice in the way we work now is that most artists that enter in the collection or that we meet from exhibitions have not made a South–North migration, but a South–South one. They have moved within their regions. And we tend to concentrate on these artists that don’t have the exposure of a South–North migration, who did not receive a training abroad or a scholarship. This is the opportunity we want to offer. This is particularly linked to our idea that we want to support artists that are ambassadors for their country, and this becomes more difficult if they are in-betweeners, transnational, if they are no longer talking from their homeland. The risk of course is that we concentrate on artists whose pride is strongly linked to nationalism, and the relationship can be difficult according to who controls the art market in their countries – it can be the insurances, it can be the individual art dealers, it can be the galleries, each country has its own art market particularities. Editors: The art system – its museums, its cycles of fairs and biennials, and its public auctions and private sales – has been increasingly labelled ‘global’. Has it erased the pull of the New York hub (akin to the pull of the London art scene in the nineteenth century, or the pull of Paris in the eighteenth century)? What does this process of globalisation mean for artists’ careers, and their need for a tight-knit support community? Marina Galvani: These fairs often serve the local purposes of the local collectors, or the local government, and they have a local bias. Why not create museums of contemporary art in certain parts of Africa, rather than biennials – but biennials attract more media attention, although they don’t form archives of art movements for younger generations. The difference is heritage and restoration support on one side, when biennials are buying opportunities. Dak’Art – although a shadow of itself – is still worth visiting, but most biennials in the African regions are exercises in frustrations. The best way to meet the artists is actually not the biennial experience, it’s going from studio to studio. In the biennials, the globalisation that happens is not more access for more geographically different artists. Editors: A realisation for art audiences has recently been growing, uncomfortable for some and liberating for others – it is that art has operated and still operates in a colonial context.

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Marina Galvani: Post-colonial, yes. What you see at biennials is increasingly homogenised, it’s the trend of the big buyers and rich brokers, it’s the same kind of art. You can see it online and in magazine, but that is not the platform to see something new. Editors: In the museum field, a current trend is Migration Museums – the older US Ellis Island Museum and South Australia Adelaide Museum have inspired new European foundations recently. But these tend to be social history museums. What do you think art has to offer on the subject of migration – especially in the recent turn, which has seen museums eager not only to educate their audience, but also to develop empathy? Marina Galvani: There are two different topics here. One is talking about migration in the past, a documentary view of migration, as a social event. It builds a justification for where these populations are right now, a justification for their existence, and also partly builds empathy for the new generations of migrants – an underlying reason for the curators of such museums. I worked in 1993 in Mannheim in a museum about how to build better understanding in the local population, which at the time was very industrial, and where xenophobia existed, for the migrant population. They were organising festivals, such as the Chinese lunar year festival. The idea was to show the beautiful culture of the Chinese Germans, to show where they came from to a German population from Silesia, for example – the idea was to meet in the middle, we are rebuilding together Mannheim destroyed during the war. But these experiences were not successful, the social tension in the city didn’t scale down. Stones were thrown at the festival processions. The museums then started working with younger generations, and spent a much longer time doing it. It isn’t an instantaneous mediation on these topics. Having a historic museum talking about migration is very important, because it gives you roots, and pride in these roots. If I’m Italo-American and someone brings me to the Brooklyn Museum or the Ellis Island museum, a museum about me, I feel like I was the courageous one. I didn’t leave because of despair or poverty, I left because I was part of the brave ones. If this is a construct that you need to have to be proud, then fine. However, now, migration is a phenomenon of such speed, that it needs contemporary artists to react quicker, and it needs museums to open their doors to react quicker, to open their space to multiple projects, to shun projects that are simply display, and be very patient about their results, by building from the ground level, involving teachers and schools, etc. Also because we are coming up against a backlash, politically, that has mediatic power, and more power generally. As you know, the issues caused by migrations are much more complex in developing countries, but it is the Northern countries that have brought the backlash to the forefront, with full mediatic impact. We

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ask ourselves, what can artists do? But in the Southern countries, many of the artists working on these issues, discussing them in their art, they have been doing so for a long time. Of the artists in the Uprooted exhibition, many have been engaged since their early career on that topic. The Syrian artist Diala Brisly strove to teach children to continue to learn to read, and was part of a children’s magazine. The Palestinian artist Suhaib Attar has been part of Awareness and Prevention Through Art (aptART), with a painting project that redecorated shacks of the Azraq refugee camp with the help of the children refugees, to bring them hope. They don’t pretend that art can mediate instantly, and they want to be involved in the process and display. The mediation moment is a process, and only when the audience experiences the doing of something do they have the revelation – and this poses the question of the role of monument and memory. … The artists are intelligent ambassadors and barometers, they should be used more conversantly, and more and more. Note 1 World Bank exhibition leaflet, The Central Matter (Washington DC: World Bank Art Group, February 2017).

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Portrait of the artist as migrant: an interview with Robyn Asleson

Date of interview: 4 October 2018

What is the cultural relevance of mediating the experience of migration to the world at large? Recent exhibitions have focused on this highly topical theme, and have capitalised on how art makes accessible this experience of both roots and loss. While structural forces have largely cast migration as disruptive, and constructed the migration experience as an anomaly, the modern museum experience often highlights that it is in fact a long-standing human  phenomenon. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC has unveiled the first in a series of exhibitions on  Portraits of the World. Robyn Asleson is curator of the Prints and Drawings Department and curator of Portraits of the World: Switzerland (15 December 2017–12 November 2018). To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the National Portrait Gallery of Washington has started a series of shows hosting a portrait of a nonAmerican painted by a non-American. The introduction to the first show reads: ‘The National Portrait Gallery tells the story of the United State through the people who have shaped American history and culture. It is a story that cannot be told in isolation’.  In this interview, Robyn Asleson shows how politically constructed borders are defied by art and artists, who are mobile beings par excellence. She also challenges the traditional definition of the ‘national’ by explaining that the National Portrait Gallery considers to be American anyone who has lived long enough in the United States to contribute to the society and culture. This cultural definition clearly contradicts nation-centric institutional definitions of community belonging. Editors: Tell us more about why you chose to curate a series of exhibitions, launched the year of the National Portrait Gallery’s 50th anniversary, that specifically underlines that the ‘American story cannot be told in isolation’?

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Yun Suknam (1993; 2018 version) Mother III, acrylic on wood, 200 × 100 × 30 cm.

Robyn Asleson: We kicked off the Portraits of the World exhibition series during our 50th anniversary year in recognition of the fact that although the Portrait Gallery’s mission is to tell the story of people who have influenced American history and culture, we can’t completely tell that story without bringing in people from other countries who were here for a short time, or

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who were never here at all, but who nonetheless are enmeshed in our narrative. In the twentieth century, the emphasis was on American exceptionalism. In art history, there was interest in identifying aspects of American art that were different from art anywhere else – Luminism, for example. We aren’t particularly interested in telling that story anymore. It’s a false, or at least incomplete, narrative that ignores several centuries of transnational interconnectivity. Editors: It was a very particular nation-building narrative … Robyn Asleson: Yes, exactly. There was a desire to find exceptional aspects of American art. We recognise now that it has always been a transnational world, with artists travelling back and forth across borders that probably meant very little to them. Even early on, when it was difficult to travel, they were surprisingly mobile. So we wanted to bring in a series of portraits, one at a time, that would allow us to talk about different aspects of portraiture around the world, but also about aspects of cultural exchange between the United States and the particular country we are featuring each year. The choice of Switzerland for the first exhibition was itself for reasons of cultural exchange. When the Portrait Gallery first opened in 1968, our inaugural exhibition had loans from all over the United States, but one foreign country – Switzerland – was also a very generous lender. Swiss national collections lent a total of five paintings by Frank Buchser, a Swiss artist who had come to the United States in the 1860s to paint Civil War generals as well as other important American cultural figures, and had taken his paintings back home with him when he returned home. Switzerland regarded the United States as a sister republic and kept a close eye on developments during the American Civil War, so there was great interest in Buchser’s representations of American leaders. One hundred years later, in 1968, Switzerland stepped up to lend those paintings and support the National Portrait Gallery as it was just getting started, so we decided it was only appropriate to honour Switzerland in the first Portraits of the World exhibition, rounding out the circle of cultural exchange. Ferdinand Hodler is the great national painter of Switzerland – not only because he tried to define a Swiss style, but also because although he travelled outside his country, he came back to Switzerland and was most active there, whereas many of his compatriots left to pursue their careers elsewhere. One thing I found through working on this exhibition is how hard it is to remain circumscribed within a country’s borders. It is difficult to find an artist who is representative of a country and who stays in that country, and whose works also stay within the country – and at the same time, one who had an international impact and relevance to the idea of cultural exchange.

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Editors: That was your discovery in the curatorial process, that art most always transcends the politically constructed borders? Robyn Asleson: Absolutely. At the outset, it seemed quite easy to select any portrait from any country. But fitting all the criteria proved difficult – especially as we wanted to feature artists who are not already well known in the United States, but who relate in some way to portraits in our collection. Editors: Femme en Extase by Ferdinand Hodler arrived here as a singlepicture loan. This Portraits of the World project – set to be continued in the same format for some years to come – is very different from the loan of an entire exhibition, for which rooms are cleared for the exhibition to be hung, and then packed to leave, and make little connection with the receiving institution. This picture is rooted in the museum’s collection, it weaves narrative threads with the exhibited items from the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection that fill the room vis-a-vis Femme en Extase. Robyn Asleson: The Portraits of the World project is different from the norm, yes. The idea was to display the borrowed portrait for almost an entire year, which is also out of the ordinary, and a further complication. It isn’t easy to secure the loan of a major portrait for a year, especially in Switzerland’s case, since 2018 was Ferdinand Hodler’s centenary year and there were exhibitions of his works across Europe. The point was to have the portrait embedded here, immersed in the collection along with related works. The unifying thread is the theory of eurhythmics, developed in Switzerland by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, an Austrian-born composer who went on to create an influential music institute in Germany. Eurhythmics influenced Hodler, as well as several pioneers of American modern dance, who travelled to Europe and encountered the theory there. We display portraits of a number of those dancers in the exhibition to flesh out the complex web of transnational connections. Michio Ito, for example, left Japan to study opera in Paris, but after witnessing a performance by Isadora Duncan, decided to become a dancer instead. He studied at Dalcroze’s eurhythmics institute in Germany and then pursued a dance career in New York, where he developed a unique style informed by the various influences he had absorbed in his travels. Editors: Any exhibition is the story of objects in migration, and the biography of an art object lists as essential information the exhibitions the object has travelled to. But in this case, the aloneness of Femme en Extase, isolated on one large white wall, reminds the audience of the materiality and vulnerability of the artwork’s voyage. She’s the only foreign body in the room.

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Robyn Asleson: Yes, that is true. We wanted to keep the focus on her and make it clear that this painting is the centrepiece of the exhibition. At the same time, colour and other design elements integrate the painting with the complementary display of portraits of American dancers from the National Portrait Gallery’s collection. Giulia Leonardi, the woman portrayed in Femme en Extase, was an Italian guitarist and dancer whom Hodler saw performing in a Swiss café and became inspired to paint – so here again is another aspect of transnational cultural exchange. She has also inspired new art at the Portrait Gallery. Dana Tai Soon Burgess, our choreographer-in-residence, came with his company and created a dance inspired by the painting, and performed it in this space on several occasions. We wanted to use the gallery space for events of that kind in order to forge connections between the featured work and portraits from our collection and to encourage viewers to see the continuity of artistic influence across time and place. Editors: The position of Femme en Extase in this space is striking – a lone female, standing her ground, right across the corridor from the gigantic and iconic American landscape The Chasm of the Colorado in the Smithsonian American Art Museum … Robyn Asleson: Yes, you couldn’t get more American than that rugged, expansive scene – and yet Femme en Extase stands up to it. It is the painting of a very powerful woman, confident and comfortable in her muscular body. Hodler preferred strong, independent women, and that’s another aspect of transnational cultural exchange – the rise of the New Woman that gained momentum internationally around the turn of the century. The conception of women in many of Hodler’s paintings reflects his admiration for Isadora Duncan, a pioneer of American modern dance who promoted the liberation of the female body. She had to leave the United States and relocate to Europe in order to give full rein to her creativity and explore the freedom of movement that American audiences were not yet prepared to accept. Editors: The goal of the Art and migration volume is to write about the relationship of regionalism and cosmopolitanism in art, its representation and its constant circulation. And you’ve actually just come back from Korea, because you are arranging the next loan, that of Yuk Suknam’s Mother III, for the second series in the Portraits of the World exhibition. Can you tell us a little bit more about that choice, knowing also that the US is the country with the second largest Korean population living outside Korea? Robyn Asleson: Yes, and many live in the area around Washington. The confrontation of regionalism and cosmopolitanism is actually an interesting

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tension. To come back to Hodler for a moment, he was really trying to express Swiss values in his style – strength, and vigour, and ruggedness. And yet you can also see the influence of Klimt and the Vienna Secession in the golden background and abstract red dots in Femme en Extase. So he is integrating things from across the borders with his more inward-looking national style. It’s the same with the next artist we are featuring, Yun Suknam, from Korea. Yun was not an established artist when she came to New York in the late 1980s, determined to understand herself better by becoming an artist. She didn’t know very much English, and so she just looked. She constantly went to museums, she studied at the Art Students’ League, looking at art being made. For an entire year, she soaked up everything she could see, and then went back to Korea and reinterpreted traditional Korean motives and materials, using what she had learned in the United States about what art could be, about what women could be. It was a kind of alchemy – bringing these different things together, and doing something no one had done before. Editors: Yun Suknam is perceived as an essentially Korean artist, but she’s Chinese-born Korean and, as you said, she had her artistic education – late in life – in the United States. And the artists that you will retrieve from the Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection for this second exhibition are very much transnationally mobile. Robyn Asleson: There is Louise Bourgeois, a US naturalised French artist; Louise Nevelson, born in present-day Ukraine, and immigrated as a child to the US; Marisol, a French sculptor of Venezuelan heritage, naturalised as an American in the 1960s … Editors: Just as you had migrant artists, travelling dancers, and transnational identities for the first exhibition – you confront Femme en Extase with Isadora Duncan, who was both French and American, and Michio Ito who was a Japanese immigrant to the US … Robyn Asleson: … and Ruth St Denis who travelled to India. Again and again  – at both micro and macro levels, these artists are about movement. They went looking for inspiration beyond their borders, and had to be incredibly mobile to keep feeding their creativity with fresh influences. Portraits of the World is all about the enriching effects of geographic mobility and cultural cross-pollination. Editors: So there is more to it than an international loan – these exhibitions uncover transnational common themes. For example, the next exhibition is going to be very much about feminism?

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Robyn Asleson: Global feminism, yes. The exhibition highlights the transnational dissemination of feminist ideas through art. Yun Suknam subverted traditional Korean art forms to develop her own original mode of expression, but her underlying message resembled that of her American feminist counterparts – in both cases, it was a critique of the constraining societal roles imposed on women. Many of the themes that underlie Yun Suknam’s art – such as maternity and aging – were also explored by the American feminist artists that we will feature in a complementary display of portraits drawn from the Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection. Editors: So standing underneath Louise Bourgeois’ Mother, or standing in front of Yuk Suknam’s Mother, you get to experience that these mobile artists mediate transnational experiences, that art has the power to overcome and blur national borders. Robyn Asleson: And that these artists form transnational bonds. Not everyone, when they see a Louise Bourgeois spider, thinks about a mother, and protection, and cleverness, the way Louise Bourgeois did. But Yuk Suknam recognised that immediately, and responded to it. It is an understanding, an insight that artists often have into each other’s work, across cultures and regardless of national boundaries. Editors: At the museum level, there have been increasing questions around artistic representativeness and nation-building goals. Museums have been criticised for not being complete enough in their acquisition politics, for example. And some museums have been criticised when they invoked the saturation of exhibition space. Interestingly, these debates have tended in fact to use the same vocabulary as the migration debate. Since when and how has the National Portrait Gallery been tackling these issues? Robyn Asleson: The director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, has been very interested in opening up the concept of portraiture. Dorothy Moss, curator of Painting and Sculpture, focuses amongst other things on performance art as portraiture. She is bringing to the Portrait Gallery artists whose performances have to do with biography and identity. They are not creating conventional portraits, but rather portraits that exist in real time, unfolding, and often interactive. They begin on one floor of the building and move through the architecture. There is no lasting work of art – and no problem of saturation of space – the work of art is ephemeral. Editors: So these are artworks in transit … Robyn Asleson: Yes, and the traditional point of portraiture is to be fixed and permanent, to physically document someone’s existence and preserve it

Portrait of the artist as migrant

as a record for posterity. So we are challenging that convention. We are also opening up who we have on our walls, who we recognise as a person, who has made significant contributions to American history and culture. For example, we recently acquired a portrait of the Chinese-born acrobat and magician Long Tack Sam, whose global career took him to the continents of Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, but who was a major vaudeville star and a household name in the US during the first decades of the twentieth century. The portrait we are using to tell his story is a large chromolithographic poster that imitates the Chinese imagery of Sam’s stage performances, but was actually designed and published in Germany, and (judging from the wording) it was intended for English-language audiences. The transnationalism inherent in the portrait is especially appropriate, given the transnationalism of Long Tack Sam’s life. Editors: Can you remind us of the selection process to be displayed on these walls – because many probably think you would need to have American citizenship to be the sitter, or even the artist. Robyn Asleson: It is not necessary to be an American citizen to be represented here – the only requirement is a period of activity in the US that had a significant impact on American history or culture. Paradoxically, the lack of a citizenship requirement allows us to tell the American story more completely by including people who came here and left, but who made an indelible mark. We are looking at this in a very different way now from fifty years ago. We have a team of historians who evaluate potential candidates to make sure they have more than just a local influence and that it’s of lasting consequence. Taína Caragol, the Portrait Gallery’s curator of Latino Art and History, has greatly expanded our collection of Latino subjects and artists. We now have 170 additional works that we didn’t have when she started in 2013. We are also trying to tell the story of slavery in a more accurate and nuanced way. It is difficult to do this when so few portraits exist for the people whose stories we would like to tell, and we are thinking quite a bit about how to redress  those lacunae. In our recent exhibition Unseen: Our Past in a New Light (co-curated by Taína Caragol and Asma Naeem), the artists Titus Kaphar and Ken Gonzales Day responded to the challenge of making absences present. Editors: How are the acquisitions selected, and how many of them are commissions? Robyn Asleson: We don’t commission many portraits, but if we see that someone has already had a significant impact and we can’t find a suitable portrait, we will very occasionally commission one. The Portrait Gallery used to

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require that a sitter be dead for ten years before we could accept their portrait. The idea was to wait and see what their impact ultimately was, and not be swayed by pressure to accept certain portraits. But by then it was often too late to get a portrait of someone we really felt should be represented. Editors: And museum displays have now become very mobile, arrangements on the wall are not perennial, and someone’s portrait can be taken down. Robyn Asleson: Yes, that’s true. And one thing that’s unusual about this museum is that because we’re trying to open up our definition of portraiture as well as expand the people we represent, our paintings and sculptures are integrated with many prints, drawings, and photographs, which tend to be more democratic forms of portraiture, representing a broader swathe of society. Photographs and works on paper are sensitive to light, however, so we have to rotate them frequently to preserve them, which allows us to show more of our collection. Unfortunately, the year-long loan period for Portraits of the World rules out light-sensitive media, so we could not consider, for example, a wonderful Chinese portrait on silk. And the space itself is too large for a small portrait, such as a Persian miniature. These practical considerations add to the long list of criteria that guide our choice of the country to focus on and the portrait to borrow. Editors: This is a question for the archivist. Migration, or the fact that the artist was a migrant or moved about frequently, is not easily indexed information in the collection search engines of museums or libraries. Terms that would enable to easily retrieve a corpus of migrant artists are very numerous – the term ‘immigrant’, ‘emigrant’, ‘migrant’, ‘diaspora’, ‘refugee’, ‘of x-descent’ or ‘heritage’, ‘first/second/third-generation’ – they form a whole thesaurus of terms. And these terms draw a whole constellation of belongings, upsets, political and social affiliations, as well as stereotypes. These connections would be hard to define permanently, to be used as a controlled value for both cataloguing and retrieval. Gender studies have been updating former databases so that gender can be retrieved for bigdata crunching. In the case of migration studies, this appears to be more complicated. Robyn Asleson: TMS is our collections-management software here at the  Portrait Gallery, as at many other museums. And it does allow us to document specific geographical locations of activity – an artist is tagged with the  various locations where he or she has been active. This requires a fair amount of research, which has not yet been done systematically for every artist.

Portrait of the artist as migrant

Editors: And it is actually crucial information for a lot of artists of the earlier periods. As you said, artists have now become more globally mobile, with the development of an international art scene and market, and the ubiquity of international fairs and blockbuster touring exhibitions. But art has intersected with migration since a much earlier date, since at least the seventeenth century. Robyn Asleson: Right – it’s very important to know where people have been, and we’re definitely tracking artists’ migrations. If all museums track this information and we find a way to combine the data, we might see some fascinating insights emerge from it. Editors: For now, if you look up the Library of Congress subject headlines such as ‘Emigration and immigration in art’ or ‘Expatriate artists’, these tend to retrieve small amounts of results. And when you text search in the gloss produced by an artist’s gallery or agents, the information about migration is not always transparent, and often used and misrepresented – put forward or attenuated – according to an exhibition’s context. Robyn Asleson: You were just talking about the thesaurus – there are so many synonyms for the mobility that you are talking about. At the moment, interviews with living artists and good old-fashioned research are the only ways to find the data that can go into spreadsheets, timelines, etc. There is no other way around it yet. But this is the work that needs to be done.

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Stories of Global Displacement: an interview with Massimiliano Gioni

Date of interview: 27 November 2019

Massimiliano Gioni is the artistic director of the New Museum, New York, which asserts in its Mission & Value that the ‘free flow of ideas and of people is essential to what we do’. The Phillips Collection partnered with the New Museum in New York to explore stories of migration, immigration, and displacement through the work of more than sixty international artists, and Massimiliano  Gioni curated the Phillips Collection’s  The  Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement exhibition (22 June–22 September 2019, Washington DC).  He also  curated such exhibitions as  Younger Than Jesus  and  Ostalgia  at the New Museum, and was curator of the 2013 Venice Biennale, the 2005 Manifesta 5, and the 2006 Berlin Biennale. He is director of the Trussardi Foundation in Milan, which organises itinerant exhibitions. He was the curator of the 2010 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea.  In this interview, Massimiliano Gioni contends that art travels more easily than artists because of structural constraints. He also reflects on the longstanding interaction between history of art and history of migration. His reflection on the universalism of artworks illustrated art’s power to transcend politically constructed borders. Editors: The exhibition you curated for the Phillips Collection is based on the exhibition The Restless Earth, which was shown at the Triennale in Milan in 2017, which underlined that ‘the artists’ role is to raise awareness among the public of a dramatic situation that we come across every day only through the media. It encourages us to seek out a different vision’. (Trussardi 2017: 13) Massimiliano Gioni: The Restless Earth was intimately connected with Italy, and my own personal experience – and yours too, as Europeans, I would assume. We are tragically very familiar with this ongoing – we can’t say ritual, as that would belong to the realm of fiction – but this constant returning

Stories of Global Displacement

Adrian Paci (2007) Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary Detention Centre), still, video, colour, sound, 4:32 minutes.

tragedy every summer as migration picks up new speed in the Mediterranean sea, and new deaths and shipwrecks occur. Every summer these tragedies seem to gain new momentum in the news and in the coverage in the media and yet nothing seems to be done, and nothing seems to prove tragic enough to bring change. The idea of doing the show came from this experience that repeats itself year after year, becoming an almost daily experience of coexistence and proximity with death and with a tragedy not only of humanitarian proportions but of very specific, individual life stories that are wiped away and that for some reason we just seem to tolerate and even accept as part of our everyday life. I was particularly taken by how this phenomenon is so obviously amplified by the media and yet presented as perennially repeating itself without any differentiation. And sadly, when your government is right-wing, you see this reporting getting even worse. The media coverage – its immobilism and repetition – becomes almost a genre in itself. Of course, I am glad that the media can still raise awareness – but they result in a sense of helplessness and instability that becomes frightening. There was a quality to the Milano exhibition that was therefore of course political and directly inspired by these cognitive ends. But my job is also as an art historian, art critic, and curator – and the show was also inspired by the shift in art history for the past twenty years in which many artists have taken upon themselves the responsibility of documenting the world around themselves and history in the making. This documentary shift has meant the

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widening of the provenance in artworks, particularly by Italian standards, with artworks from other countries typically not represented in the discourse of our contemporary history of art. The show was therefore also meant to be a summary of a contemporary art history that has not yet been put into context or even recorded – at least in the Italian institutions. Italy – as many other European countries – has been a nation of migrants. From 1861 to the first decades of the twentieth century, something like 26 million people left the country, which corresponds to half of the current Italian population, an almost biblical migration out of Italy. Presenting migration first as a historical event that has gone on for centuries and millennia, and secondly as a position we as a nation had been in before was therefore a rhetorical and political device to trigger the viewers’ empathy. Editors: As a build-up to the exhibition, the Phillips Collection team took the bold move of taking down all artists hanging on the permanent collection’s walls who shared a personal history of migration. They filled these conspicuous voids with a notice explaining how current immigration legislation would have made these iconic works de facto ‘illegal’. For the show at the Phillips Collection, you made a decided effort to include more historic works. Can you tell us more about that? Massimiliano Gioni: The idea of expanding the historical parameters of the show at the Phillips Collection, reaching all the way to the beginning of the twentieth century, was exciting in this regard, because it meant that I got access to Modern and pre-Modern artists typically out of bounds for a curator of contemporary art, such as Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, works by Arshile Gorky, Dorothea Lange, or William Edouard Scott. The Phillips Collection has works from international artists that came to the US in the 1940s, whose ideas of modernism were intimately tied to the idea of migration. One of the subtexts of the exhibition is that certain ideas of modernity – and the birth of abstraction, of abstract expressionism – are linked to an idea of international or supra-national community of peers, who believed in the dream of a world with no borders. These ideas were often born out of dramatic personal experiences of displacement. Languages such as abstractionism were founded on the idea that a universal visual language could transcend individual nationalistic languages. Both Lawrence’s Migration Series and Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother are basically from the same years, and are both created by artists trained in traditions of realism, but who are gravitating toward abstraction precisely because abstraction was becoming the language of a community of peers, who had freed themselves from the burden of nationalism. Of course there is a lot of sentimental heroism in this utopian view – and certain short-sightings

Stories of Global Displacement

springing from abstractionism were conservative, and held restrictive and macho ideals of beauty and independence – but I do believe that we should be reminded that some of the foundational myths of modernism, which were centred on ideals of internationalism, on the belief that art could help build communities beyond borders, well some of those myths are still very fruitful today. Migration as a theme and as an experience has intersected the history of art of the twentieth century. Artists have been at the forefront of this dream of international dialogue and integration – anticipating in fact subsequent discussions that led to international cooperations, such as the UN or other tools of communications between nations. After all, political internationalism can be traced back to the historical avant-gardes, to the dreams of the surrealists and futurists who wished to transcend borders, for example, and create new international alliances across borders, in the name of shared values of art. Editors: T.J. Demos, in the catalogue to The Restless Earth, explains  the benefits of considering ‘contemporary art through the lens of migration. With that shift of historical perspective comes a terminological distinction, moving away from “eile”, with its associations with empire … towards “migrant,” a more impartial term with allowance for voluntary movement’. Do you think people share the same experiences of migration? How does the exhibition represent the diversity of migration categories? Massimiliano Gioni: T.J. Demos’s Migrant Image was foundational for the exhibition, and for my thinking on media art, even before I started actually working on the show. One of his arguments is that some contemporary artists are creating images that are opaque or oblique, partial or personal – and that by doing so they problematise the hyper-visibility of the media, which typically offers an exploitative or consolatory view of those events. One of the premises of the show was also to present – or attempt to come to terms with – a few examples of artists who have raised the question of the documentary, of the reportage, and that have taken upon themselves the responsibility to chronicle current events, and find new ways of doing so. One of the strategies adopted by some of the artists in the exhibition is what I refer to as the practice of the sentimental documentary or the lyrical reportage, of which the works of John Akomfrah and Chantal Akerman are the most apparent examples. These and other artists dealing with the language of the documentary today are trying to find new ways of engaging with moving images and problematising the innate spectacularisation of moving images that defines the way media and information operate today. T.J. Demos defines ‘the migrant image’ as a kind of self-questioning form of representation, an

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image that contains within itself a questioning or a critical attitude towards image making: the migrant image as Demos describes it (and he points to Yto Barrada’s photography as an example) is an image that is at the same time documenting a situation while also inserting a coefficient of doubt or skepticism towards the presumed transparency of images. This idea was very inspiring for me, as I tried to bring together the work of various artists who could engage with current events, with dramatic and even traumatic images, but who could also create images that are complex, layered, that question themselves and the viewers about the legitimacy of representation and about any presumption of objectivity. I think it was precisely through the work of many artists who shared a similar attitude towards images that the exhibition succeeded in presenting different experiences of migration and a multiplicity of points of views, a polyphony of narratives. I think for me personally it was important to find a balance between personal and individual experiences and some shared notion of humanity. Of course when working on shows like this, it is easy to fall in a kind of over-sentimental universalism, that ends up being quite vacuous and ultimately just self-consolatory and self-congratulatory. The very notion of universalism has become itself suspicious, because we know what has been claimed in its name, how it has been used as a force of exclusion. And yet I cannot do away completely with such a notion. Maybe it’s just because I was raised as a Catholic, but I do believe that there is a shared humanity that we need to be reminded of, because it is through this process of identification that we can better understand the pain of others. The exhibition, more or less openly, asked: what experiences of universalism, of communal belonging, are still fruitful, or available to us? What is global citizenship? And is such an idea still even possible? Some of these questions for me are enlightened by the writings of Ariella Azoulay and her reflection around photography as a form of social affirmation. The Warmth of Other Suns was very much an exhibition about photography and the role of the camera as a tool that has defined ideas around identity, citizenship, human rights, throughout the entire twentieth century. Just think of the identity card and the passport photograph as the founding tools for the definition of citizenship as we still know it and practise it today. The experience of migration is intimately connected to technologies that define the self through photographic images. After all, I thought of the show also as an exhibition about portraiture, and I realise this might sound overly sentimental but it always struck me that the foundational myth about the birth of painting is Pliny’s story of a maiden who traces the silhouette of her lover’s face on the wall the night before he is to sail away to sea. So, from the very beginning, the birth of portraiture is intimately connected to the experience of displacement, to the experience of

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loss and longing, to nostalgia and separation. We make pictures of those we are about to lose, those who are about to go away – be it on a journey towards death, or a journey beyond the seas. Experiences of migration resonate with existential questions about abandonment and belonging, about solitude and community. These ideas, these – dare I say? – archetypes were very important for me in the preparation of the show. That is why the first gallery in the show brought together the portraits Arshile Gorky painted in The Artist and his Mother – which incidentally was originally based on a photograph sent to his migrant father – and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. Both are extraordinary portraits and both are images of loss and longing. You asked me how the exhibition attempted to represent the diversity of migration. Obviously I don’t know if it succeeded but as much as I could, I tried to stay as close as possible to personal, individual experiences, as captured by the artists, many of whom were also, or had been, migrants themselves. I always think of literature as an effective example: the more precise and individualised a story and an experience in a novel are, the more, paradoxically, those very same stories will feel universal or anyway they will be naturally shared by other people. Editors: What aspect of the migrant experience do you think Rokni Haerizadeh’s The Sun Shines on a Graveyard and a Garden Alike, and the Rain a Loyal Man for Traitor Knows not (2015–2017), Hiwa K’s Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) (2017), or Adrian Paci’s video Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary Detention Centre) (2007) translate for the museum-goers? Can you comment on how apt the immersive video medium is for the topic of migration? Massimiliano Gioni: I strove to find videos for the exhibition that would take the audience through very individual experiences. Hiwa K is a great example – the artist deals with dramatic, historic, almost devastating experiences, but he does so in the first person, through his own experience. This was a recurring choice I returned to throughout the preparation of the exhibition. I wanted the stories to be punctual and personal. One exception might be the  grand  narrative of John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea, which in its ambition is quite remarkable and somewhat all encompassing, and yet it’s a narrative based on fragments and archival materials, which allows it to remain oblique and partial rather than pretending to an overarching, master narrative in itself. Editors: The border as a source and location of violence is particularly well represented in the exhibition – can you talk to us, for example, about the photographs of Griselda San martin The Wall (2015–2017), or Pascale

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Marthine Tayou’s 2011 crystal and mixed media scuptures Sauveteur (Passport vendor 1) and Sauveteur (Passport vendor 2)? And what has your  logistical and practical experience of borders and art exhibitions been? Massimiliano Gioni: The two exhibitions were quite different in the ways they described or represented certain borders. The Restless Earth was very much an exhibition about the sea. At its centre it had, for example, Bouchra Khalili’s very large eight-video installation piece, The Mapping Journey Project, which is focused upon the Mediterranean crossing. Those short videos are harrowing stories not only of people crossing borders but also – and more sadly – of borders crossing people. In DC we had a beautiful and sombre image of the sea photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans: what appeared to be a neo-romantic shot of a seascape was in fact a picture of the place where British waters turn into international waters. The ocean obviously knows nothing about borders, the water moves freely across the borders: Tillmans’s photograph just revealed the absurdity and arbitrariness of borders. In the exhibition in DC we also paid closer attention to the ways in which artists depicted borders on land, particularly looking at the ways in which artists have described the Southern border of the United States. Many of the works in the show – Chantal Akerman’s video From the Other Side (De l’autre coté) filmed on the Mexico–US border, Griselda San Martin’s The Wall series, Guillermo Galindo’s sculpture Listo (Ready to Go) and Paulo Nazareth’s Noticias de America series of photographs – dealt with the representation of the southern border of the United States. What struck me the most when working on both the show in Milan and the show in DC was the realisation, upon which many artists insist, that goods and commodities can cross borders more easily than people. In some specific cases, when working on contemporary art shows, one finds that artworks can still travel more easily than their authors, and that actually testifies to the power of art to raise fundamental questions about freedom. For example, when I first showed Khaled Jarrar’s video about the Israel–Palestine border crossings at the New Museum – the video that was also included in The Warmth of Other Suns – Jarrar could not come to NY because he could not leave Israel as the borders had been closed down by Israeli police. A few years ago, in South Korea, I showed a piece by the Chinese video maker Liu Wei about the Tianammen protests: getting the video out of China took some effort and the moment it was presented in the Gwangju Biennale, the Chinese embassy lodged a formal protest and asked to remove the piece. Editors: Contemporary curation is increasingly aware of needing to showcase art (especially contemporary art) in culturally conscious setting. Can you share best practices to decolonise the art scene?

Stories of Global Displacement

Massimiliano Gioni: I am not sure I have an answer to this question, and I am afraid there are no best practices that I am aware of, or that I can suggest. Unfortunately, it is the responsibility of art and artists to capture and preserve complexity. For all the limits of romantic and sentimental notions of universalism, I do believe artworks still have the ability of transcending borders and creating their own communities, and this is the power of art I still believe in. Throughout the centuries, artworks have crossed borders and created new shared ideals and values, and have changed the world, as naive as that might sound. So, I think there is still a value to that. Artworks are now split between forms of visual entertainment, market, and then these more important functions that artwork still performs today. We have definitely taken the limits of universalism. But we also live in a moment in which we tend to measure the limits of concepts and point to their shortcomings. Although it is important to evaluate the borders and prejudices of concepts, we also need to look for their potential. Yes, artists cannot cross the borders as easily as their artworks, and there is a parochialism of art – but there are also many instances of artworks crossing and transcending these borders for them. When books managed to travel out of prisons, out of goulags, even if their authors could not, the world changed – and this is true for the world of visual art. I also believe there is a value in staying close to the art. As much as both The Restless Earth and The Warmth of Other Suns were clearly animated by certain political ideas or, more broadly, by certain human, basic beliefs in justice and equality, I still believe that art has a specificity that needs  to be  valued. I want to come to share certain human ideals specifically through art, rather than just supplanting art with politics. I am not even sure  I know how to express exactly what I mean, but I do think that it is in  art  – and in contemporary art in particular – that we learn to coexist with  what we don’t understand. I believe art is an exercise in complexity, and  so through art we can understand more about other people’s experiences and points of view, more than we would probably ever do in any other field. The exhibition in Washington had of course an added site-specificity, and since shows feed off the ecology of where they are implanted, it was relevant that this show could be in Washington rather than anywhere else – not that I thought Trump would see it, or that I pinned my hopes on politicians being moved by it. In New York, it would have been self-serving. In Washington, it had a sense of necessity as though it really belonged to that time and place. It also had a sense of urgency. Doing the show in the Phillips Collection rather than the Hirshorn museum, for example, also had a specific meaning to me, because of the collection’s history and its loyal audience typically accustomed to more traditional art.

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For what it’s worth, I do think this is the most diverse show the Phillips has ever put on and it’s a show in which contemporary art gets seen through the perspective of historical works. So, for me it was an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which the history of modern art is built on a history of migration and exile and also on certain ideas of universalism that perhaps are worth revisiting. Editors: The Phillips exhibition Warmth of Other Suns has deployed a schedule centred on social justice and the intervention of speakers normally foreign to the museum walls (Doctors Without Borders, Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, the Annapolis Immigration Justice Network, and the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition etc.). Can you tell us more about this engagement, and how this fulfills the positionality statements of the original exhibition? Massimiliano Gioni: The public programming was conceptualised and executed by the Phillips Collection, independently of me or of the exhibition itself or, better, it was organised in parallel with the exhibition, so I am not sure I can really say much about the public programmes, of which of course I was aware, but that I didn’t have any part in organising. I do know that the Phillips Collection team felt a strong sense of responsibility, both to the subject of the exhibitions and to the many communities touched by the exhibition itself or by the themes discussed in the exhibition. Making a show around the topic of migration without a solid collateral programme would have been a self-congratulatory exoneration, it could have fallen into the trap of grandiose sentimental exculpation; whereas at the Phillips, I really believe it became a process of self-discovery both for the audience and the museum staff. An important conversation has been initiated. Editors: What piece was especially meaningful to you, when you saw it installed for the first time in the exhibition? Can you take us through your experience, your own perception of the migrant experience this particular work encapsulates? How did that resonate with or mediate your own experience or perception of migration? Massimiliano Gioni: I will be so candid that some of this might be used against me, but to be honest, being able to work with the Arshile Gorky’s portrait was a once in a life-time experience. This is a portrait based on a photograph taken before Gorky’s escape from Europe and from the Armenian genocide. Gorky’s mother – who is the central subject of the portrait and of the photograph the portrait is based on – died of starvation while escaping the Armenian genocide. So the painting is an incredible testimony that immediately speaks of displacement and exile, and it is one of the

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most touching depictions I know of the loss of the mother – a mother that is biological but also an allegory for an entire cultural landscape, a mother that is also the loss of the mother tongue, of the mother country. That painting is a dive, a vertiginous fall into twentieth-century life, its history, and its complexities. It is painted from a 1912 photograph that Gorky held on to all his life in America. But it was painted 30 years after the photograph has been taken. This is a mother that perhaps he barely remembered, since he was eight years old when the photo was taken: the image is his foundational memory. How many people still today come to the United States carrying the photo of their mother in their pocket, or – more likely – in their cell phones? This experience repeats itself over and over again. Some of these people will become artists, some of them will become – although I despise this term – another ‘success story’ in the great American dream. But some will be unknown and forgotten. Every time I work on an exhibition, every time I encounter an artwork I am touched by, I cannot help thinking of how many other stories and images have been lost. Why do we admire and preserve certain artworks? And how many other stories do we simply ignore? For me artworks are visual evidence of existential adventures. How many other lives such as Gorky’s do we know nothing about? Our responsibility is to make these life stories accessible – as many as possible – and to do it accurately, and to do it modestly, with a sense of respect. When standing in front of Gorky’s portrait, in front of any portrait of such intensity, I am always shocked and moved by the fact that these few square feet of canvas and few grams of paint can give you an extraordinary sense of closeness to a stranger: those images, those marks on a canvas encapsulate some of the most dramatic moments in the history of the twentieth century – and they can give you this almost epidermic closeness to a removed, and remote individual who was alive more than one hundred years ago, someone about whom we really know nothing, and with whom we suddenly enjoy a sense of proximity and commonality. We make images of what we lose, of what we want to keep – images are essentially linked to loss, and as such they are close relatives to the migrant experience.

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A publication of one’s own: identity and community among migrant Latin American artists in New York c. 1970 Aimé Iglesias Lukin

Introduction

In the winter and spring of 1971, dozens of expatriate Latin American artists gathered in apartments and studios of New York, to discuss politics and art, and – although they did not know it – to reclaim the identity of Latin American art. Through their activism and common art practice, they were able to contest stereotyping labelling of the region’s culture and to gain visibility in the competitive milieu of the Big Apple, collectively creating a space of their own. Their case brings light to the diversity of the neo avantgarde movements of late 1960s New York, proving the fundamental role that migrant artists had for the consolidation of the city as an experimental art centre. In addition, these artists’ production, with its in-between cultural belonging, puts into question canonical narratives of centre-periphery artistic influence, demonstrating a complex network of cultural exchange along the hemisphere. The present chapter explores the formation and consolidation of a new artistic scene of Latin American artists who migrated to New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s, focusing on the role of politics for their conformation as a community of expatriates reunited around their regional origin. Two publications remain as testimonies of the surge and self-determination of this group, Contrabienal (1971) and Cha/Cha/Cha (1974). Published by collectives of artists, they are proof of these artists’ efforts to create a community for themselves and to share experiences and ideas with other artists of Latin American origin through international networks. Latin Americanism became thus not a category that defined their origin or location, but instead their feeling of belonging. Interestingly, it was in contact with similar groups of expatriates in Europe that these artists gained force as a community, proposing a model of Latin Americanism that was born and propelled from outside the continent. For them, Latin America was not a label to which they intricately identified at their arrival. Back in their home countries, their sense of belonging was usually attached to national narratives. Migration thus is here understood not simply as the crossing of borders but as a culturally and politically constructed cat-

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egory. For them Latin Americanism came to express not their regional origin but a sense of community that developed in contact with other expatriates and through the often-difficult experience of being a migrant. While art history tends to organise around national narratives, this study proposes to look at these immigrant artists through the lens of the in-between character (Bhabha, 2004) of their collective experience, and to read New York as a contact zone (Pratt, 1992) of uneven exchange. The role of institutions in creating stereotyped readings of Latin American art through their support of certain artists and exhibitions is contrasted with these artists’ collective efforts to mobilise their power and propose alternative identity constructions. By focusing on the publications they created, I propose to read them as archeological remains of the community they imagined (Anderson, 2010) for themselves. A new Nueva York

By the mid-1960s, New York had displaced Paris as the new world art centre and the preferred destination for artists seeking to participate in new art tendencies. This process, which began after the Second World War and was aided by a series of orchestrated governmental efforts, was also supported by a critical and historiographical apparatus led by Clement Greenberg and placing Abstract Expressionism as the victorious conclusion of a teleological understanding of abstraction and avant-garde (Guibault, 1983). This discourse placed American art as a continuation and achievement of the goals set during the early twentieth century by the historical avant-gardes in Europe, in an interpretation that concealed the multiplicity and diversity of modernity at the same time that it served a nationalistic purpose to fortify US dominance during the Cold War. Nonetheless, it was the immigrants in the city – including pivotal ones such as Marcel Duchamp – that fuelled the experimentation in the arts that allowed the city to become the centre of novelty in the arts. As part of this process of culturally positioning the United States in the international exchange of ideas, exacerbated by the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the menace of communism spreading in the region, the United States government promoted a series of policies aimed at establishing cooperation with Latin America. The private sector responded with similar efforts, and programmes were instituted through institutional connections, exhibitions, and grants to allow artists and curators to travel in both directions (Alonso, 2010; Fox, 2013). The Guggenheim Fellowship was the main vehicle through which Latin American artists could spend time working and studying in New York City, supporting, among others, Luis Camnitzer, Nicolás García Uriburu, Leandro Katz, Jorge de la Vega, David Lamelas,

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Marta Minujín, and Luis Felipe Noé.1 Since then, Latin American artists from all over the continent replaced Paris for New York when planning their study trip, changing a tradition that had been established since the late nineteenth century. During the Modern period, artists from Latin America had to travel to Paris and other cities in Europe to study and get in contact with the metropolitan avant-garde art scenes of the continent. They were supported by their governments or by private sponsors, with the idea that they would contribute to shaping modernist circles in the Americas upon their return home. This was the case of many artists and writers in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Diego Rivera, Tarsila do Amaral, and Emilio Pettoruti (Montgomery, 2017). This reasoning responded to the Europe-driven colonialist mind of Latin American elites, which presupposed that culture had universal values that could transfer from the centre (Europe) to the young modern states they were trying to shape in the New World. In reality, these cultural transfers were far more hybrid, and artists combined elements learnt in Europe with those originating in their Latin American culture and visuality. Still, the dream of Europe as a cultural model was rooted in most intellectual circles of the region. In contrast, the artists of the post-war era who occupy this study belonged to a new reality regarding intellectual circles and art worlds. Metropolises in Latin America had, by the 1960s, strong experimental art scenes, which developed through a different narrative than the path of American modernism previously mentioned. In cities like São Paulo or Buenos Aires, abstract art had fortified in the 1940s and 1950s thanks to ideas of concretism through the influence of Max Bill and other early European avant-gardists, and abstraction was not associated with expressionism like in the United Stated (García, 2011). By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Informalism gained followers among young artists, and Pop would take particular strength in Brazil after the 1967 Ninth São Paulo Biennial, also known as the ‘Pop Biennial’, which brought examples from all over the continent, nonetheless creating an idea of Pop associated to the social and political realities of the country and not with American culture (Calirman, 2012). In Argentina, the artists around Instituto Di Tella and the Grupo de Rosario were experimenting with Pop, Happenings and Conceptual Art. These ebullient art scenes provided artists with a strong informational and intellectual base and warn us against any reading of them being in a provincial position at the time of arrival to New York. Several studies have demonstrated the complexity and richness of cultural milieus of Latin America during the period as part of art history revisionism and a new attention to global art history. This study lies on such historiographical revision, at the same time that it proposes one step forward to demonstrate not only the importance of the so-called peripheries, but more specifically the globalism and diversity of art practices at the centre itself.

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While New York was gaining force as a destination for education and exchange, it was also becoming a symbol of imperialist America. Among the many fronts of US interventionism in the world, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was a turning point that positioned the country as a menace for liberties and an enemy for left-wing intellectuals in the hemisphere. By this time, the United States’ logistic and financial support of totalitarian regimes in the continent was also becoming public. New York became – following Mary Louise Pratt – a contact zone: ‘a space of [post] colonial encounters … in which peoples historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’, where subjects engaged in highly asymmetrical relations of power but that offered unique exchange possibilities (Pratt, 1992). There, migrant artists from all over the continent came, following promises of avant-garde and success, but in the centre of the capitalist state, which their left-wing ideologies opposed. Trapped in the midst of the Cold War, these artists had to carve space ‘in-between’ their cultural and ideological frameworks and that of the United States. As described by Homi Bhabha, nationhood and community are negotiated in ‘interspaces’ in late modernity, and not rooted in great discourses. These artists prove, precisely because of the contradictions of their migrant experience, an identitarian belonging that transcended the borders of their origin nations, of their newly adopted home, and of the region to which they were associated due to their origin. Their experience was a result of all those cultural and intellectual belongings, in a unique mix that proved contradictory and rich at the same time (Bhabha, 2004). We cannot explain the work of these artists by looking at the general conditions of Latino migrants to New York, as they were not part of collective diasporas in the city – such as the Newyorican or Dominican communities – or responding to larger migration trends, but instead their travel responded to personal and professional trajectories and the search of professional growth in the centre of art power. Still, these Latin American artists arrived in a New York art scene that was undergoing important changes. First of all, it must be remembered that the entire social sphere was shaken by the 1968 revolts and widespread opposition to the Vietnam War and the fight for Civil Rights, and the New York art scene was in the midst of a very radicalised moment which resulted in, for example, the 1969 foundation of the Art Workers’ Coalition, a collective including Lucy Lippard, critic John Perrault, and artist Carl André, which used assembly and union’s tactics to press museums and institutions for anti-war, feminist, and left-wing reforms (Bryan-Wilson, 2009). At the time of their arrival to New York, this generation of Latin American artists was already experimenting with new media and using happenings and performances that radically questioned the disciplinary boundaries of traditional painting and sculpture. Thanks to the active hemispheric exchange that

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brought curators and artists down South, they arrived in New York with contacts and quickly connected with the diverse circles of the artistic renovation. Minujín, for example, became deeply involved with Wolf Vostell’s and Andy Warhol’s social circles. Jaime Davidovich was in touch with the artists of Leo Castelli’s gallery, and later worked with George Maciunas. César Paternosto and Alejandro Puente became friends and neighbours of Lucy Lippard, introduced to her by Sol Lewitt. Indeed, 1960s’ New York was a space of rapidly increasing network density, where migrants had a capital role in the city’s cultural expansion, much of which was facilitated and sometimes orchestrated by cultural agents and institutions pressing for these connections to take place (Harvey, 2006; Candela, 2007). Latin America(s)

Most of these artists did not identify as Latin American or Hispanic back home, but discovered it upon the arrival to a city that would label them as such. But in that labelling there was also a lot of conflating, as Latin American refers to a large, linguistically and ethnically diverse continent. Through the new community they created for themselves, these artists created a new sense of Latin Americanisms that found unity not in blanketing and stereotyping but in regional solidarity and shared struggle. In this effort, these artists offer us an example of decolonising labelling that allows us to attend a much more complex dynamic of cultural identity. Indeed, as explained by Walter Mignolo, ‘Latin American’ is a complex and relatively new category, first used in 1836 by Michel Chevalier, a Saint Simonian intellectual who coined the reference to associate it with Latin Europe, as opposed to North America’s relation with the Anglo-Saxon colonial world. Mignolo argues that ‘“Latinidad” was precisely the ideology under which the identity of the ex-Spanish and ex-Portuguese colonies was located […] in the new global, modern/colonial world order’ (Mignolo, 2005: 59). The term was later adopted by the creole-Mestizo elites to differentiate from Spanish and Portuguese culture, in a process that would become a double-edged sword, as even though it gave them independence from homeland, it would frame them under a new system of world dominance. As previously explained, the beginning of the twentieth century was dominated by the relationship of Latin American elites with Europe, and artists and writers were encouraged to travel to the Old World to educate themselves on the Western tradition. Still, the United States had started looking to Latin America since the beginning of their engagement with modernity. Marius de Zayas, a Mexican artist and writer, was associated with Alfred Stieglitz and, with him, was responsible for the introduction of European Cubism to the

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United States. Secondly, Latin American art was associated with the origins of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of the Museum’s founders, was an active collector of Mexican artists. The Museum’s first director, Alfred Barr, met Diego Rivera during a trip to the Soviet Union, and in 1931 the artist was the subject of MoMA’s second monographic exhibition. MoMA’s investment in Latin American art grew following the 1941 establishment of the Inter-American Fund, which by 1974 had allowed for the purchase of nearly 650 works for the museum collection. The first presentation of the collection was the 1943 exhibition The Latin-American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (Kirstein, 1943). Thanks to these efforts, MoMA would become one of the most active museums collecting and presenting art of the Americas, and its role promoting Mexican Muralism in the United States determinant in the expectations of institutions and collectors. Artists from across the continent who did not ascribe to the social figurative style associated with Muralism or modern abstraction with local – folkloric – elements did not fit the ‘canon’ of what Latin American art was (Basilio, 2004). In addition, the reading blurred the cultural diversity of the continent into one single label, erasing the borders of these countries’ identities into a single cultural experience. By the 1960s, a series of exhibitions in the United States, such as the Carnegie International and The Latin American Spirit, curated by Thomas Messer at the Guggenheim Museum in 1964, reveal a new interest for contemporary Latin American art in the United States (Solomons, 2014). These shows presented contemporary creators from along the continent, focusing on abstract lyricism, new figuration, and Pop to demonstrate the bonds in between the two parts of the continent to respond to the previously described efforts to improve hemispheric relations in the midst of the Cold War. Still, a colonialist and folklorist understanding of the region prevailed, opposed to the cosmopolitan realities of the South American metropoles, and it was the community of artists here studied who would press for change and propose a new understanding of Latin American art that better represented their art and ideology. Contrabienal

Towards the end of the 1960s, a new generation of migrant artists arrived in New York and would change the scenario of Latin American art in the United States for good, while also diversifying that of American art. They came from experimental art scenes in their home countries, and pretended to participate in the artistic renewal that New York was leading at the time. Upon their arrival, the difficulty of inserting themselves in the existing art circles and the existing expectations with regards Latin American

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art proved to be an obstacle to their goals, one which they would fight back collectively, associating in political groups of artists. As we will see, the collective art book Contrabienal is a testimony of their conscious effort to consolidate as a community and to claim an identity labelling that best fitted their artistic and political goals.2 Contrabienal was published in 1971 (see Figure 12.1) to promote an international boycott of the XI São Paulo Biennial, which was to be held between 4  September and 15 November of that year, in protest of the spiraling censorship and torture in dictatorial Brazil. Contrabienal was aesthetically heterogeneous, including artists from across a number of nationalities, generations, and movements. Its organisers – Luis Camnitzer, Eduardo Costa, Leandro Katz, Rubens Gerchman, César Paternosto, Carla Stellweg, Liliana Porter, and Teodoro Maus, among others – nonetheless shared being part of the strong shift toward Conceptualism then taking place in New York City. Irrespective of national or aesthetic origin, for those gathering around this emerging movement, Contrabienal represented a key moment of intersection between conceptualist artistic practices and nascent identity politics among New York’s young Latin American expatriate community, creating a unique network of international exchange among migrant artists who identified as Latin American. To defend their right to practise, and to be identified with new artistic trends such as conceptual art, became for them not simply an artistic search but an identity struggle to escape the expectations pressed on them by the existing canon. Contrabienal, also known as the ‘printed biennial’, is a 114-page, limitededition book (only 500 copies were made), which participants distributed among their artistic circles (Camnitzer, 2013). After two manifesto-style introductions written by each organising group, the book proceeds to a series of written and photographic testimonies denouncing governmental torture and murder in Brazil. The remainder of the book includes contributions from 61 artists as well as collective letters of support signed by another 112 sympathisers from throughout the Americas and Europe. While some participants verbalised specific demands and principles, others chose to use irony and humour in graphic form, and a few included explicitly violent images to raise awareness of the repression on their continent. The two main groups behind the publication of Contrabienal, Museo Latinoamericano and Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural Latinoamericana (MICLA), were originally created to protest the conservative and US-oriented cultural politics of the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR, today the Americas Society), the main agency promoting  Latin American art in New York at the time (Adams, 2006; Serviddio, 2010). These groups gathered together and set up a space to discuss a variety

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Museo Latinoamericano and Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural de Latinoamérica (1971) Contrabienal, cover image, 28 × 21.5 cm. Collection Luis Camnitzer, New York.

12.1

of artistic and political issues related to the United States and Latin America. It was through these associations that a large number of Latin American artists coalesced around a regional identity oriented toward common action – one that stemmed not from shared aesthetic principles but from allied political

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ideals and goals. The best account of the events that led to the publication of Contrabienal is Luis Camnitzer’s memoir (Camnitzer, 2006). As we will see, a new map thus shaped around the circles of participation and influence through which a number of these artists coalesced under the label ‘Latin American’ in a new, ideologically charged artistic campus.3 Here we follow art historian Burcu Dogramaci, in that mapping is not simply a transnational approach but a tracing of the aesthetics that surge in these contact areas, speaking to the ‘polysemantic nature of maps, to borders, but also subjective mapping’ (Dogramaci, 2019: 24). Contrabienal and the associations that organised it – Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA – were unifying political forces for New York-based Latin American artists, whose lives and work were affected by being collectively slotted into such a category. Inter-Americas

The representational spaces that opened up to the Latin American artists settling in the city were centralised in one institution in particular, which would have a key role in these artists’ political associations: the Center for Inter-American Relations. Established in 1966 as a private organisation for the promotion of society and culture of the Americas, its mission was twofold: policy-related and cultural. In the area of policy, the CIAR sought ‘more effective communications among those concerned with the process of political, economic and social development in the Hemisphere’. With regard to its cultural strategy, the organisation attempted to promote ‘greater awareness in the United States of the artistic traditions and cultural accomplishments’ of Latin America (Lukas, 1967). In the words of its founder, David Rockefeller, CIAR’s cultural mission was to challenge the ‘false images of indolence, poverty and inferiority as characteristic of the entire region [which] had become firmly embedded in the consciousness of almost every US citizen’ (Rockefeller, 2000: 22), and cited President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress initiative as an important precedent. Thus, we can situate CIAR’s mission as part of the broader effort of cultural diplomacy to enhance Western internationalism in the 1960s (Giunta, 2007; Alonso, 2010). Stanton Catlin, an art historian specialising in Latin American art, was appointed curator of the Center’s art gallery, which, as publicised in the New York Times article announcing the programme, would be ‘New York’s first real exhibition centre for the art of the Americas’. Catlin also promised that the Center would look to ‘right the balance’ for the lack of attention to hemispheric contributions in the city (Glueck, 1967). Very quickly after its foundation, the CIAR became, for Latin American artists in New York, both a promise of a new space for visibility and the focus for their redefinition of what Latin American art should be. In September

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1967, a group of artists mobilised to protest Artists of the Western Hemisphere: Precursors of Modernism, 1870–1930, the exhibition that inaugurated the Center’s visual art’s space (CIAR, 1967). The show had been heavily criticised by New York Times art critic John Canaday, who stated that ‘the international gesture backfires by giving the impression that … modernism in Latin America was a matter of ill-understood imitation of the school of Paris by amateurs unveiling the colonizing mentality behind the curatorial proposal’ (Canaday, 1967). The artists’ protest was novel in two ways: first, it involved a group of artists uniting together under the Latin American label, and second, it was one of the first public demonstrations against the presentation of Latin American art in exhibitions. Eighteen artists sent a letter to the editor, which was published in the ‘Art Mailbag’ section of the New York Times on 8 October, 1967: they stated that ‘as a group of Latin American artists residing in New York, [we] regret that this necessary institution should open with a show that exhibits an aspect of colonial culture’ and that the show presented a chronology in which Latin American art emerged first from European and  later from North American models (Anon., 1967: 25). In this, they assumed the necessity of institutional support for artistic visibility, one that they would try to surpass through artist-run initiatives like Contrabienal. Still, these artists were aware that such independent endeavours would not be sufficient, and their efforts to intercede in the CIAR were an attempt to also fight the machine from within. Yet this particular complaint did not lead to further action, and some of those same artists later participated in CIAR’s activities. Being the main centre for the promotion of Latin American art in the city, the CIAR would become the primary target of the developing activism and political protests of these artists. In 1971, the artists led a pivotal demonstration that resulted in a formally organised artists’ association. At the time, Catlin was curating an event called Latin American Art Week, set to take place from 29 April to 30 June 1971, in which the CIAR and a series of galleries would display the work of Latin American artists residing in New York. This prompted a quick and vocal reaction among many artists who were worried about the way the event would be promoted and about how the participants would be selected. They found particularly offensive the short duration of the exhibitions, proof that they would be included only as a token. Catlin soon resigned, and his successor, Hans van Weeren-Griek, called for a meeting, in January 1971, to address the artists’ concerns about the event and CIAR’s mission more broadly. The new director promised to elevate the complaints to the board and to reformulate the event in a way that would be more representative of these artists. However, Van Weeren-Griek’s assurances would not quell the artists’ political claims, and meetings continued at the artists’ studios and homes. The group presented a document signed by thirty-four artists that extended the demands, calling for the removal of certain board

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members as well as an extensive left-wing reformulation of the CIAR’s mission and activities.4 Van Weeren-Griek, in agreement with the artists, took the requests to the board and, after their predictable refusal to accede, decided to resign his position. An article published by Grace Glueck in the New York Times on 20 March 1970, registered these events under the headline ‘Show is Suspended as Artists Dissent’ (Glueck, 1971: 13) citing some of the demands of the artist, that included ‘a drastic revision’ of the centre’s board of directors, with removal of those ‘who symbolise United States imperialist activity in the Hemisphere’ (Glueck, 1971: 13). Glueck finished her account by presenting the artists’ proposal for the creation of El Museo Latinoamericano, which they envisioned as ‘an information center and gathering place for the Latin American creative community, [which] would develop a programme of cultural activities, help to set up courses in Latin American art at universities, and disseminate “moral information” about censorship and suppression of cultural activities’ (Glueck, 1971: 13). From today’s contemporary viewpoint, we can see in the creation of El Museo how these migrant artists were ‘mining the museum’ and thus advancing a postcolonial institutional critique of Western culture, equivalent to the contemporary cases described by Anne Ring Petersen (Petersen, 2018: 113–141). Latinoamericanos

The protest against CIAR was the cornerstone for the formation of El Museo Latinoamericano, a virtual alternative space for the discussion and representation of their art. In the words of Camnitzer, the foundational document, signed in February 1971, ‘showed an unprecedented level of consciousness in the Latin American art community’ (Camnitzer, 2006: 218). It was signed by the Canadian-Mexican Arnold Belkin, the Brazilian Ruben Gerchman, the Colombian Leonel Góngora, the Ecuadorian Luis Molinari Flores, the Venezuelan Rolando Peña, and the Argentines Leandro Katz, César Paternosto, and Alejandro Puente, who formed the original group. Soon thereafter, the Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer, the Argentines Eduardo Costa, Liliana Porter, and Luis Wells, and the Mexicans Teodoro Mauss and Carla Stellweg, among others, joined their meetings. The group would quickly take on more adherents, and the gatherings – held in members’ studios and homes – ultimately included dozens of participants. The Museo Latinoamericano’s unity would soon be challenged by the divergent position of its members regarding the methods by which to negotiate with CIAR. Some would disagree with the group pushing so strongly for a progressive political agenda, instead arguing that it should focus on demanding space for the artists to promote their work. Around March 1971, the most radical members of the group seceded under the name Movimiento por la

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Independencia Cultural Latinoamericana (MICLA). They continued with their anti-CIAR board demands and plans for a wider field of political action. This division would not prevent the two groups from working together, and they continued joint activities through lectures and private exhibitions for members. The groups had also agreed, before separating, on a course of action that would become their most famous stand: a protest against the Eleventh São Paulo Biennial, the most important international art event in the hemisphere. Boycott

Contrabienal was inspired by an important precedent: Non à la Biennale, the 1969 boycott of the São Paulo Biennial encouraged by Latin American artists living in Paris. Responding to the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil and the 1968 issuance of the infamous Ato Institucional Número Cinco [Institutional Act No. 5], also known as AI-5 – a broad measure giving the government power to supervise and censor all public statements and other publications in the press, including all art forms – a group of artists led by Julio Le Parc met in Paris to debate France’s official participation in the event (Calirman, 2012; Plante, 2013).5 Emboldened by the success of the 1969 boycott, the artists affiliated with Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA decided in 1971 to call for a movement against participation in the 1971 edition of the Biennial and to prepare a similar publication. The call for participation was made to the artists’ network of contacts in their home countries, and submissions were sent by mail. Once funds had been raised through a raffle of artworks, a press was installed in a house shared by Maus and Stellweg, and the almost five hundred copies were printed and distributed for free among participants and members’ networks. The letter inviting artists to join the boycott and to submit works to Contrabienal was later published as an introduction to the book, and claimed to be ‘rejecting a cultural event organized by a government that employs a system of repression based on brutal torture’ and the São Paulo Biennial as an ‘instrument of cultural colonization in our countries’. This continental identification also meant an ideological positioning against North American imperialism, and its cultural and military dominance in the region, by declaring that even though national realities were different, the group action of Latin Americans was key to creating a common consciousness, and that as distant as Brazil’s violent dictatorship might seem, it was only on the ‘avant-garde’ of what could happen to other countries. History would prove them right: in the following years dictatorial regimes would spread throughout South America, and censorship, torture, and killing would increase and become commonplace.

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The call for participation explicitly excluded Brazilian artists to prevent the possibility of them becoming the object of reprisals in their home country. However, Rubens Gerchman and Hélio Oiticica were involved in the group meetings and the book’s production. In their place, the publication dedicated twenty-four pages to descriptions, graphic images, and testimonies of censorship and violence in Brazil, which had reached the hands of the organisers of Contrabienal through a contact of Maus, possibly in connection to the material published in Paris in 1971 by B. Kucinki and I. Tronca (Kucinki and Tronca, 1971: 215–216). The literal relation between text and image in these pages, an illustrative strategy meant to emphasise the violence described in the testimonies, contrasted with the more metaphoric approach of most of the other participants in the project. Contrabienal had no stylistic goals; the invited artists differed in their creative processes and in their view of art, but they remained united for political and identity-related reasons. Luis Wells used a sexualised metaphor, playing with the similarity between the words ‘Pablo’ (the Spanish translation of São Paulo) and ‘palo’ (stick) to create an advertisement-style graphic for a suppository (see Figure 12.2) he dubbed ‘san palo via anal’, with ‘imported scents, and fragrances: minimal, conceptual, systemic and more!!’, thus accounting for the concern regarding the imposition of mainstream styles and categories to their art and culture. Other artists used resources from journalism to highlight the condemnatory purpose of the book. Camnitzer’s page presented, under the headline ‘Content: Body of Carlos Marighella’, a photographic record of the cadaver of the Brazilian politician and leader of the dictatorship’s opposition movement, who was killed by the government in 1969 (see Figure 12.3). In Antonia Galbraith’s drawing entitled ‘Latinoamérica’ (see Figure 12.4), the Mexican artist addressed North American interventionism in the region by depicting a scissor tagged ‘Made in USA’ next to silhouettes with simulated cutout lines, reminding the viewer of paper dolls, denouncing the way in which North American institutions labelled Latin American art in a folklorist way. For many, participation in Contrabienal was not only an opportunity to air a specific complaint but also a chance to help create a new space for discussion that would permit them to identify as a group (Latin Americans) and even allow for an altered consciousness that could facilitate new stylistic expressions beyond the stereotype pressed upon them. Such utopian views are reflected in Liliana Porter’s handwritten letter, where she claims that the participation is also ‘a communication device with colleagues around this new consciousness’, and closes by saying that ‘[m]aybe, this shared focus can create a new language’, revealing the awareness that these artists had about the importance of their identity struggle and the role of linguistics in cultural identity. Porter proposed a new language, created by an international

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Luis Wells (1971) Contrabienal, submission page, 28 × 21.5 cm. Collection Luis Camnitzer, New York.

network of Latin Americans, which was propelled from outside the continent but that nonetheless gave unity to the cultural identity of the region. This survey of the book reveals it to function as a multi-dimensional and varied platform, presenting diverse visual and rhetorical strategies to address equally diverse ideological concerns, reflective of the hybridity of Latin American culture and opposed to the unidimensional labelling proposed by institutions. Ironically, in these varied expressions, the artists ultimately grouped themselves under the same contested label, ‘Latin American’, and

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Luis Camnitzer (1971) Contrabienal, submission page, 28 × 21.5 cm. Collection Luis Camnitzer, New York.

as Camnitzer remarked, the actions offered them an unparalleled sense of community, thereby in some senses claiming for themselves and then repurposing a collective identity that was initially externally derived. Contrabienal would thus become an empowering symbolic battle over the regionalist denominator ‘Latin American’.

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Antonia Galbraith (1971) Contrabienal, submission page, 28 × 21.5 cm. Collection Luis Camnitzer, New York.

Imagined communities

‘Latin American’ was and still remains a complicated but necessary category. Contrabienal offered a group of artists the possibility to at least partially contest the negative construction of Latin America offered by CIAR. Distance from their home countries gave these artists a greater need for regional identification. As Camnitzer states: ‘one could say that the idea of one unified

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Latin America (as opposed to a conglomeration of countries) was closer to reality in exile than in the continent itself’ (Camnitzer, 2007: 225). Almost four decades after Contrabienal, Camnitzer reviewed the project and some of its limitations, saying that the initiative ‘could only bring politics into the art scene and stir up, but not change, the artistic parameters. The group’s publication revealed the simultaneous expansion and dilution of Latin America’. The diaspora of Latin American artists had ‘a two-sided effect … the artists had lost their sense of place, but they maintained their allegiance to their culture’ (Camnitzer, 2007: 226). The use of categories such as ‘Latin American’ and ‘Latin American conceptualism’ thus becomes a double-edged sword, offering methodological tools for understanding a series of artistic manifestations but also packaging identity for scholarly and commercial purposes. In this respect, it is useful to refer to Benedict Anderson, as the association of artists under the groups Museo Latinoamericano and Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural de Latinoamérica depended on a regional identification that can be understood as an imagined community.6 As we have seen, what Contrabienal shows us goes well beyond the particular case of the CIAR or the São Paulo Biennial. It works also as a case study to reveal the complexity underscoring the use of cultural categories and the role they play as labels or identity markers. These artists were also aware of the political implications of this collective task. As Paternosto explained, ‘New York was consolidating the geopolitical power of its art, and Latin America was, particularly with regard to visual arts, more than ever “the backyard”. And a Latin American artist, especially if he or she aspired to make avantgarde art in New York, was perceived as an annoyance or as an intruder’ (Paternosto, 2013). The circulating images of Contrabienal had a very specific role for migrant artists like the ones in this study, similar to what Erik Berggren describes as the identification role of political art (Berggren, 2019). The battleground of categories was, in the first place, a dispute over exhibition spaces and visibility in the city. Contrabienal reunited both concerns, that of cultural representation and of political agitation, and internationalised the concern by including artists residing all over the world. As such, it offered a virtual space of representation where ‘the intruders’ could express themselves – a space of their own where they were no longer invaders and where they could assert their own identity. Forty years later, for some it may be hard to understand the importance of regionalism to these artists. Backed by the supposed virtues of a globalised art scene, many artists now prefer to consider themselves beyond labels. In this respect, it is important to remember that the artists who gathered around Contrabienal in 1971 did not typically identify as Latin American when they first arrived in the United States. As César Paternosto states, ‘it was in New York that I discovered that I was “Latin American”. Coming from Buenos

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Aires, we all aimed to be “universal” artists … but the category of “Latin American” was very much present. It was a label that they would stick on you as soon as you arrived’ (Paternosto, 2013). Porter, who has lived in New York for the past five decades, echoes this sentiment: ‘I was not so conscious of being Latin American … You had an accent and you were aware that you were from another place. But I think that the stronger differentiation appeared later with the category “Hispanic”’ (Giunta, 2009: 45). The meaning of being Latin American was something that needed to be fought for. Cha/Cha/Cha

In 1974, Marta Minujín, Julián Cairol, and Juan Downey created the magazine Cha/Cha/Cha to promote the work of Latin American artists living in the United States. Though it was never published or even designed, circulating as a typewritten document around New York’s underground, Cha/Cha/Cha gained mythical status and played a key role in the history of contemporary Latin American art. Its conception demonstrates the group consciousness shared by these migrant artists and their search for strategies of cultural insertion to overcome the difficult status of being halfway between the North American art scene and their countries of origin.7 For decades Cha/Cha/Cha’s existed only as a rumor (see Figure 12.5), mentioned by artists in conversation.8 However, the magazine’s press release and a few of the interviews made for it were recently recuperated during the reorganisation of Marta Minujín’s archive in Buenos Aires. In the magazine’s press release, the editors identified one of the main problems of Latin Americans in New York: that their work ‘remain[ed] unknown to the[ir] countries of origin’. For that reason, the magazine would have a double goal of ‘restor[ing] this cultural patrimony and mak[ing] it known in all Latin America and within the Latin community [“comunidad latina”] in this country [the US]’. It would also disseminate ‘material concerning the artistic activities taking place in Latin American countries and Europe’. While information exchange was the immediate goal, the authors were aware that their mission was even more ambitious: attempting to redefine regional culture to serve as a ‘critical document for the investigation of the significance of Latin American artistic production’. Thus, Cha/Cha/Cha identified how the metropolitan scenery of New York offered an alternative space for identity formation and regional political awareness to overlap. In this context, the struggle for visibility changed the traditional attachments to the nation-state, proposing instead a Pan-American consciousness. As explained by Julián Cairol in his interview with Juan Downey, ‘the magazine attempts immediately a problem of consciousness – that eternal disintegration – because [the Latin American artist in the United States]

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12.5

Cha/Cha/Cha. A Magazine of Art Criticism Dedicated to the Investigation of the LatinAmerican Artistic Production (date unknown). Archives Marta Minujín, Buenos Aires, Folder ‘Cha Cha Cha’.

is integrated neither here nor there’. However, such indeterminacy was seen not simply as a disadvantage, but also as a possible critical condition through which to avoid ‘being swallowed by American life’ (Cha/Cha/Cha, 1974). Cha/Cha/Cha was distributed manually among the New York arts community, and never achieved its goal of printing ‘100,000 copies which will

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be distributed in universities, museums, schools, libraries, and cultural centers’ (Cha/Cha/Cha, 1974). Although the dream was to add materials by ‘outstanding critics, artists and intellectuals living in Latin America, the United States and Europe’, the magazine really only consisted of interviews between its founders and a few invited guests (Cha/Cha/Cha, 1974). In their absurdly ambitious goals of circulation and distribution, Cha/Cha/Cha aimed at a more established and continuous presence than Contrabienal. The last was created by artists with the specific political goal of boycotting the Biennial, and in the process of doing so, they discovered their identity as a group and the publication’s potential as a tool of communication between communities. Cha/Cha/Cha, nonetheless, was created three years later by a group already self-assumed as Latin American migrants, and with the specific purpose of serving an existing community which they saw as active but in the need of representation and exchange. Even though if Cha/Cha/Cha failed as a magazine, it succeeds as a document in proving the advance of this community in the city and their more solid position towards the middle of the decade. The dialogues in Cha/Cha/Cha were not necessarily focused on the answers of the interviewees. The questions, extensive and creative, often became their own formulations. A good example of this was the 30 March 1974 interview between the editorial committee, comprising Cairol, Minujín, and Claudio Badal, and Chilean artist Enrique Castro-Cid. The second question stated, ‘Latin American artists [position themselves] beyond the universal status conferred by their profession, and unlike other foreign artists, in an antagonistic position [that] suggests a problem of consciousness [and an] opposition to a society that for political and economic reasons is recognised all over Latin America as opposed to their interests’ (Cha/Cha/ Cha, 1974). Marilys Belt Downey, wife of the Chilean artist Juan Downey, also collaborated with the magazine. In her interview with Julián Cairol, they discussed how to cook Cuban-style rice and the use of bananas, or ‘male plantains’ [plátano macho], which offered an excuse for debate on issues of gender (‘there is no banana that can be called feminine’), cultural identity, and nationalism. On this, hemispheric affiliations became a central part of argument: Cairol, who was Argentinean, confessed that ‘the only thing that relates me to Cuba is being from Latin America, in a way I adopt an idea of Cuba because I believe I can recognise it inside my Latin American being’ (Cha/ Cha/Cha, 1974). By addressing the unity and at the same time the hybridity of Latin American culture, Cairol and Belt Downey proposed a more nuanced and rich vision of Latin Americanism. The name of the magazine, honouring the eponymous Cuban dance and rhythm, was chosen by its association with celebration and playfulness. Perhaps the artists dreamed their artistic

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production, just as Latin American as cha cha chá, could be equally successful and popular in the United States as the music (Minujín, 2017). Interestingly, the name of the rhythm is also debated: Enrique Jorrín, the musician who created and popularised the cha cha chá, explains it as a onomatopoeia of the rapid syncope of the rhythm, but other authors associate the term with ritualistic dances of local cultures, in which the Native peoples used seed-pod rattles called ‘cha cha’ as percussion.9 Even in the etymological discussion about the musical term, we see the role of folklorism in cultural identity. The artists behind Cha/Cha/Cha, well aware of these stereotypes, claimed the cliché for themselves and made an irony of it. A publication of one’s own

Contrabienal and Cha/Cha/Cha were communicating vehicles for a community that was carving a space of its own in the effervescent but exclusionary milieu of New York. Instead of attempting to simply insert into the utopian melting pot of the metropolis, these artists recognised the necessity for their own space of belonging, which would relate to their new lives in the United States at the same time that it would represent their origins and their connections to the art scenes in their home countries. More than that, they recognised the uniqueness of their location in-between cultures. The political associations El Museo and Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural Latinoamericana were not simply contesting exhibition space in New York or boycotting the São Paulo Biennial. They were creating a symbolic space of their own, where their categorisation as Latin Americans would be redefined in their own political and aesthetic terms. A few years later, Cha/ Cha/Cha demonstrates a change of paradigm among these migrant artists in New York, with a hemispheric affirmation of identity that was self-conscious and assertive. While the post-war developmentalist dream led these artists toward internationalist definitions, the realpolitik of the migrant experience, the political and economic crisis throughout the continent, and the incipient failure of the revolutionary utopias made identification as Latin American at least necessary, even if not desired. Latin Americanism thus became a framework and common stand in a New York that was not inclusive for migrants (Dogramaci, 2019: 21). The struggle of categories reunited these artists through specific goals and demands that surpassed the bonds of every day experience. This way, and initially unwarily, they became a movement, one guided not by style but through their experience of identity. In this way, these artists were some of the pioneers who opened the path for identity politics that was to gather

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strength in the following decade with the arrival of multiculturalism. This change of paradigm would replace the focus of class and anti-imperialism with a vocabulary based around ethnicity, postcolonialism, and gender. Still today, the category ‘Latin American’ – historically changing, subjective, and symbolic – has proved to be more demanding than ever. In contesting it and redefining it on their own terms, the generation of Contrabienal and Cha/ Cha/Cha advanced the fight for equality in difference, proposing a new sense of identity that transcended the nation-state borders of their countries of origin, at the same time that it defied the ideological borders of the United States’ cultural dominance. They created, thus, a space in-between, the only that could be of their own. Notes 1 The Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship is offered to distinguished professionals in their fields. There is a specific category for artists coming from Latin America and the Caribbean. 2 My research on Contrabienal is based on my Master’s thesis, supervised by Professor Edward Sullivan at The Institute of Fine Arts at NYU in 2013. Preliminary versions of this chapter were published at Art@s Bulletin’s special issue ‘Highways of the South’, and as the recipient of the Peter C. Marzio Award for Outstanding Research in 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. See Iglesias Lukin (2014) and Iglesias Lukin (2016). 3 My use of campus here follows Pierre Bourdieu’s notion (1968), which describes social fields in which agents interact according to social positions and functions that are conditioned not only by capital and by their habitus of behaviour, but also by rules specific to the field. 4 They were also to abstain from relations with any organisation involved in repressing activities not conductive to the liberation of Latin American countries, and were implored to include Chicano and Puerto Rican activities in programming (Camnitzer, 2006: 218). 5 ‘To Bienal or not to Bienal: San Pablo: Protesta y Abstención’ (29 July 1969) Análisis (Buenos Aires), ‘Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art’, ICAA Record ID 774207; Takis [Panagiotis Vassilakis] (17 January 1969) ‘Letter to Pierre Restany’ (New York), Julio Le Parc Archive, Paris. ICAA Record ID 774652. 6 A study of nationalism, the text explores the notion of community in modernity and how it merges with political and ideological constellations in a historically dynamic process. Anderson uses a series of methodological tools that also may prove valuable for art history, in particular regarding art’s role in regional identification (Anderson, 2010). 7 A version of this research appeared in the blog Cite, Site, Sights Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Art and Ideas from Latin America. See Aimé Iglesias Lukin ‘Cha/ Cha/Cha. A Latin American Twist to 1970s New York’, Collection Cisneros (23 April

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2018). www.coleccioncisneros.org/editorial/statements/chachacha-latin-americantwist-1970s-new-york. Accessed 5 December 2018. 8 The magazine is briefly mentioned by Minujín in Quiles (2010). 9 Enrique Jorrín, ‘Origen del chachachá’, Signos 3 (1971), 49. For more details on disputing the rhythm’s individual invention, see Malcomson, 2011: 268.

References Adams, B.A. (2006) ‘Latin American Art at the Americas Society: A Principality of Its Own’, in J.L. Falconi and G. Rangel (eds), A Principality of Its Own: 40 years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society (New York: Americas Society), 24–41. Alonso,  R. (2010) Imán, Nueva York: Arte Argentino de los Años 60 (Buenos Aires: Fundación Proa). Anderson, B. (2010) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). Anon. (8 October 1967) ‘Art Mailbag: Dressing the Wounds for Derain, Reinhardt, and Latin America’, New York Times, 25. Basilio, M. (2004) Latin American & Caribbean Art: MoMA at El Museo (New York: El Museo del Barrio and Museum of Modern Art). Berggren, E. (2019) ‘Representation, Victimization or Identification Negotiating Power and Powerlessness in Art on Migration’, Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 4:2, 113–136. Bhabha, H. (2004) The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge). Bourdieu, P. (1998 [1968]) Les Règles de l’Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire (Paris: Seuil). Bryan-Wilson, J.  (2009) Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Calirman, C. (2012) Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Camnitzer, L. (2006) ‘The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA’, in J.L. Falconi and G. Rangel (eds), A Principality of Its Own: 40 years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society (New York: Americas Society), 216−229. Camnitzer, L. (2007) Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press). Camnitzer, L. (2013) Interview with the author, 6 November 2013. Canaday, J. (14 September 1967) ‘Art: From the Americas. “Precursors of Modernism” Opens Series at Inter-American Relations Center’, New York Times, 55. Candela, I. (2007) Sombras de Ciudad: Arte y Transformación Urbana en Nueva York, 1970–1990 (Madrid: Alianza Formas). Cha/Cha/Cha. A Magazine of Art Criticism Dedicated to the Investigation of the LatinAmerican Artistic Production (undated [1974]) and unpaged document in folder ‘Cha Cha Cha’ (Buenos Aires: Marta Minujín Archives). CIAR (1967) Artists of the Western Hemisphere; Precursors of Modernism: 1860–1930, Inaugural Loan Exhibition, Sept. 19–Nov. 12, 1967 (New York: Center for InterAmerican Relations).

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Dogramaci, B. (2019) ‘Toward a Migratory Turn. Art History and the Meaning of Flight, Migration and Exile’, in B. Dogramaci and B. Mersmann (eds), Handbook of Art and Global Migration (Berlin: De Gruyter), 17–38. Fox, C.F. (2013) Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). García, M.A. (2011) El Arte Abstracto (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores). Giunta, A. (2007) Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties, trans. P. Kahn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Giunta, A. (2009) ‘A Conversation with Liliana Porter and Luis Camnitzer’, in PérezBarreiro, Davila-Villa, and McDaniel Tarver,  The New York Graphic Workshop, 1964–1970 (Austin, TX: Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin), 45. Glueck, G. (30 July 1967) ‘Latins for Manhattan’, New York Times, 93. Glueck, G. (20 March 1971) ‘Show is Suspended as Artists Dissent’, New York Times, 13. Guibault, S. (1983) How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Harvey, D. (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism (London: Verso). Iglesias Lukin, A. (2014) ‘Contrabienal: Art, Politics and Identity Conformation among Latin American Artists in New York in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s’, in Daniel Quiles (ed.), Artl@S Bulletin 3, no. 2 (Fall), 68−82. Iglesias Lukin, A. (2016) ‘Contrabienal: Redefining Latin American Art and Identity in 1970s New York’, ICAA Documents Project Working Papers, 4 (November). Jorrín, E. (1971) ‘Origen del Chachachá’, Signos, 3, 49. Kirstein, L. (1943) The Latin-American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art). Kucinki, B. and I. Tronca (1971) ‘“Pau de Arara” La Violence Militaire au Brésil’ (Paris: Cahiers Libres), 215−216. Lukas, A. (9 September 1967) ‘Ex-Soviet Mission on Park Ave. Will Reopen as a Latin Center: The House with the Famous Balcony Rescued from Wreckers by a Marquesa, Is Ready to Receive Visitors’, New York Times, 33–48. Malcomson, H. (May 2011) ‘The “Routes” and “Roots” of “Danzón”: A Critique of the History of a Genre’, Popular Music, 30:2, Special Issue on Crossing Borders: Music of Latin America, 263–278. Mignolo, W. (2005) The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). Minujín, M. (2017) Interview with the artist, December 2017. Montgomery, H. (2017) The Mobility of Modernism (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press). Paternosto, C. (2013) Interview with the author, 1 November 2013. Petersen, A.R. (2018) Migration Into Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Plante, I. (2013) Argentinos de París: Arte y Viajes Culturales Durante los Años Sesenta (Buenos Aires: Edhasa). Pratt, M.L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge). Rangel, G. (2015) Marta Minujin: Minucode(s) (New York: Americas Society). Rockefeller, D. (2000), ‘Creating a Space’, in Ilona Katzew (ed.), A Hemispheric Venture:

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Thirty-Five Years of Culture at the Americas Society, 1965–2000 (New York: Americas Society), 17–25. Quiles, D. (2010) ‘1000 Words: Marta Minujín’, Art Forum, 48:9–10, 159. Serviddio, F. (Winter 2010) ‘Exhibiting Identity: Latin America between the Imaginary and the Real’, Journal of Social History, 44:2, 481−498. Solomons, D. (2014) ‘Staging the Global: Latin American Art in the 1960s Carnegie and Guggenheim Internationals’, Journal of Curatorial Studies, 3:2–3, 290–319. Trussardi, B. (2017) ‘Introduction’, in The Restless Earth/La Terra Inquieta (Milan: La Triennale di Milano, 29 April–20 June).

‘Nobody’s darlings’? Edith May Fry and Australian expatriate art in the 1920s Victoria Souliman

Introduction

In 1924, Australian artists based in London were prevented from exhibiting in the Australian pavilion of the Empire Exhibition alongside their compatriots. Consequently, the display of Australian expatriate art was required to be exhibited along with British artworks. A special London representative for the Melbourne Herald newspaper explained: The result has been that instead of a collective show of works in the Australian pavilion by Australians in Australia and Australians in England, the pictures of those in England will probably be displayed separately in the British section. … Therefore they are not recognised as English painters, while being debarred from exhibiting with the Australians. They may thus be considered to be nobody’s darlings. They would like to know, what their nationality is. (Anon., 1924a: 7)

Being exhibited in the British pavilion, although placed in a separate section, reflected the idea that – in the eyes of the British at least – Australian expatriate artists were considered more British than Australian. Such a situation therefore led these artists in England to question their identity, as they were differentiated from Australian artists based back home, and were yet to be fully accepted in the British artistic scene at the time. They may thus be considered ‘in-between’, which in Homi Bhabha’s terms refers to the state of being caught in the ‘liminal space, in-between the designations of identity’ (Bhabha, 2012: 5). To this extent, Australian expatriate artists at the time were left having to negotiate both their identity and the cultural space in which they produced art – a position which may be described in terms of ‘situational laterality’ and ‘transnational attachements’ according to more recent discourses on cultural identity (Petersen, 2017: 90). During the period between the two World Wars, the approximately 20,000 Australians – including writers, intellectuals, and artists – who travelled to Britain reinforced the strong cultural exchange between Australia and Europe (Morton, 2009: 259). In the minds of many Australians, Britain

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was still considered as ‘Home’ and London as the centre of the Empire. In the 1920s, the metropolitan capital was the primary point of reference for Australian artists: English and Scottish tastes, styles, techniques, aesthetic ideologies, and institutional forms dominated Australian artistic life (T. Smith, 2002: 30). As a modern metropolis, London offered urban conditions of artistic creativity to the artists who travelled there (Wedd et al., 2001). Historians of Australian art have drawn attention particularly to the role these expatriate artists played in the development of modernism in Australia (Topliss, 1996; Alomes, 1999; Stephen et al., 2007; Maloon, 2013). For instance, between 1905 and 1936, artists travelled to Europe to study modern art firsthand because they were hardly represented in Australian galleries. These expatriate artists saw a number of exhibitions, particularly in London and Paris, and learned about modern art there. Upon their return, they subsequently instated a pedagogy of modern art in Australian art schools, thus disseminating new artistic approaches. One example is Margaret Preston, who spent time in London before and during the First World War where she became familiar with the modern aesthetics promoted by Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury group, exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts and with the New English Art Club. When she returned home, she disseminated British approaches to modernism through her work and the articles she published in Art in Australia and The Home magazine (Maloon, 2013). Therefore, it has been argued that the mobility of Australian artists between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ contributed to the said ‘arrival’ of modern art in Australia. However, the use of these theoretical terms is of little practicality, apart from underlining the dependence of the Australian market on the London centre, and explaining the development of modern Australian art in broad terms of neo-imperial timeline.1 When considering the spatiality of art systems, London was not only a centre for the production and diffusion of new aesthetics and artistic approaches. It was also, through its cosmopolitanism, an established ‘global node’ for art exchange (King, 1990: 150; While, 2003). In that respect, expatriate artists also took part in the production of the artistic culture of the metropolitan centre. Past histories of Australian art have considerably marginalised expatriatism in favour of nationalistic and patriarchal narratives, restricting the definition of Australian art as being strictly produced within the geographical borders of Australia (B. Smith, 1962; Hughues, 1970; Sayers, 2001). To this effect, expatriatism, and in a broader sense spatial mobility, can be seen as producing instability and cultural changeability that disrupts the canonical systems of art history (Dogramaci, 2019: 18). Yet, in more recent years, Australian art historians have contested such nationalistic conception and proposed narratives of ‘UnAustralian art’, considering a more inclusive historiography of Australian art and re-evaluating Australian artists as being involved in art throughout



‘Nobody’s darlings’

the world (Butler and Donaldson, 2007; Speck and Downey, 2008/2009). In doing so, they particularly stressed the significance of expatriate art in the construction of transnational culture, bringing the role of expatriate artists as agents into the network of commerce, experience, and representation of modernity, and as creating an art that transcends national boundaries (Kaplan, 1996: 47). More specifically, they have argued that Australian expatriate artists who travelled to Europe in the modernist period, motivated to enrich their artistic career, were immersed in the cosmopolitan culture of the metropolitan centres – London and Paris – and constructed cosmopolitan identities for themselves, yet still maintained a relationship with home (Speck and Downey, 2008/2009). Such an approach has defied the dominant model of Australian art as a ‘national art that reflects the life of Australian people and their movement in the imbricated structure of Australian society’ (B. Smith, 1979: 30). This study therefore aligns with this art historical approach by considering the experience of Australian expatriate artists in the 1920s and how they negotiated both their identity and the borders of Australian art. In the years following the end of the First World War, although Australia patriotically supported Britain and had proven its loyalty to the British Empire, it sought to reinforce its distinctive national character. Australian cultural custodians at the time sought to promote an art that was unique to and expressive of the nation, free of foreign influences, and that evoked nationalism, placing high value on works depicting the Australian landscape. This consequently left Australian art stuck in the figurative and conservative artistic traditions and excluded expatriate art (Williams, 1995). However, as early as the 1920s, a number of individuals sought to assert Australian art as existing beyond the geographical boundaries of Australia, and defended the place of Australian expatriate artists within a broader art historiography. Among them, Edith Fry (see Figure 13.1) championed the tradition of Antipodean expatriatism and fought for the recognition of expatriate artists who were ostracised by their homeland. From New South Wales, Australia, Fry studied art in Sydney and subsequently went to Paris, including a stint at the Académie Colarossi, to complete her training. After the First World War, she relocated to London, where she became involved in expatriate art and literary circles, exhibiting both in Paris and London (Fry, 1922a: 2). More importantly, from 1914 to 1927, she contributed articles for several magazines, newspapers, and art journals in both England and Australia in which she reported on the achievements of Australian artists abroad. These included Rupert Bunny, Bessie Davidson, Agnes Goodsir, and Fred Leist, all of whom were actively involved in the artistic scenes in Paris and London. Today, Fry’s publications provide significant evidence of the discrimination and ostracism experienced by Australian expatriate artists during the interwar period; these articles may even be considered pioneers in championing a more

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13.1

George Coates (1932) Miss Edith Fry, pencil, 27 × 15.6 cm [irreg. 36.5 × 25.2 cm]. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

‘Nobody’s darlings’

cosmopolitan view of Australian art historiography. Edith Fry also curated two exhibitions of Australian art in London to support the work of her fellow expatriate artists. These exhibitions were attempts to rectify the definition of Australian art that conservative art custodians advertised to the metropole. Among them, Sydney Ure Smith was an influential art patron and arbiter of taste. For instance, as publisher of art and society magazines, such as Art in Australia and The Home, Ure Smith did not permit the reproduction of abstract artworks in his publications, conveying a constricted view of modern art (Underhill, 1991: 23; Chanin and Miller, 2005: 136). He also took part in committees responsible for the selection for art scholarships, commissions, acquisitions, and exhibitions, championing the work of traditional Australian artists but dismissing that of modernists and those living abroad. In the opening chapter ‘Artists Abroad’ of the second volume of The Story of Australian Art, William Moore explained: ‘As a writer and an organiser, no one has done more for Australian artists abroad than Edith Fry’ (Moore, 1934: 12). Despite Moore’s statement, it appears that art historians have mostly overlooked Edith Fry’s work as an artist, curator, art critic, and writer. While this study discusses the treatment of expatriate artists in Australia during the interwar years and how it led to a reassessment of Australia’s artistic borders, it also aims to bring Edith Fry’s contribution to Australian art history back into the limelight. From protectionism to ostracism

In the early twentieth century, Australian artists continued the tradition of travelling overseas to complete their training, further their career, and gain new artistic experiences. This mobility was encouraged through the travelling scholarships awarded by the Melbourne National Gallery School, which enabled Australian artists – including an increasing number of women between 1908 to 1932 – to study in Europe.2 However, when they arrived in London, Australian artists rapidly faced disillusionment. Besides having to adapt psychologically to the culture of the metropole, they were also confronted by London’s highly competitive art scene, which relied on private dealers and exhibition societies.3 These difficulties were further compounded by Australia’s lack of support for its expatriate artists, as this 1924 report in the Australian press testifies: Australian artists in London are just now utterly disgusted with the attitude of their countrymen here. … On the whole it is disgraceful how little support Australian artists get from both Australian people and Australian authorities in England. This is another prime reason why artists of all branches of the arts and from all the self-governing dominions have now formed a Dominion Artists’

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Club in London. … A strong committee … [is] working hard to deal with the many serious problems which artists have to face. (Anon., 1924b: 12)

Here, the journalist exposed the discontent of Australian expatriate artists, which was reinforced after a series of incidents that occurred in relation to the Empire Exhibition the same year. Once Australian expatriate painters were prevented from exhibiting in the Australian pavilion, it was then the turn of performance artists to be underappreciated and exploited: first, the Australian Exhibition authorities, Australia House, and The British Australasian newspaper in London failed to sell tickets for the concerts that were allotted to Australia for the exhibition and consequently it had to be cancelled; second, Australian artists were requested to perform at another concert for free. This led these artists to form the Dominion Artists’ Club in London as a force to protect their interest and assert their place within London’s artistic community. Arts clubs were indeed facilitators of cultural and artistic assimilation for Australian expatriates at the time. The Dominion Artists’ Club organised several art exhibitions and provided accomodation to student artists and musicians from the dominions (Woollacott, 2001: 85–86). Through the club, these artists could also tap an extensive network of Australian and other dominion artists, thus obtaining advisory support and bolstering their social connections. Although this reinforced the sense of community amongst expatriate artists in London and contributed to the shaping of their cosmopolitan identity, Australians at the time remained a rather isolated group, even refered to as the ‘Australian colony in London’ (Woollacott, 2001: 73). This reflects the fact that these artists maintained identification with Australian identity and retained a strong sense of belonging to their homeland. However, Australian artists’ relationship with their homeland while abroad was further hindered by the protectionist tax imposed on artworks imported to Australia (including those by its own artists), which became an important debate among artists both abroad and in Australia. In 1921, representatives in the Australian Parliament amended the law on this tax and extended from five to seven years the period of residence abroad during which an Australian artist’s picture may come to Australia for free. Through her articles, Edith Fry defended Australian expatriate artists and consistently criticised this policy imposed by the Australian government, describing it ‘as crude, as wasteful, and as stupid as it is unjust’ (Fry, 1924a: 20). She argued that this tax constituted a financial burden for Australian artists living abroad as it discouraged them from returning home, exhibiting their work, and maintaining a place in the art scene in Australia altogether. For instance, Fry exposed the experience of George Coates, who refrained from coming back to Australia with one of his most valuable works, Arthur Walker and his Brother Harold (the Walker Brothers) (c. 1912) (see Figure 13.2). This portrait of the

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George Coates (c. 1912) Arthur Walker and his Brother Harold (The Walker Brothers), oil on canvas, 163 × 133.3 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

English sculptor Arthur George Walker and his brother sitting casually did not only testify to Coates’ relationships with artists outside the Australian community in London, it also demonstrated Coates’ aesthetic and painterly skills, particularly his daring use of negative space, which reinforced attention to the subjects. The praise the painting received when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1912 and at the New Salon in 1913 led to Coates being

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elected an associate and obtaining more portrait commissions (Robertson, 2019). However, because Coates could not afford to pay the Australian tax on imported pictures, he was unable to exhibit the work in Australia. Consequently, this protectionist policy deprived Australia of significant cultural and national assets (Fry, 1924a: 20). Furthermore, the tax and the limited number of years of absence jeopardised Australian expatriate artists’ learning experience and career abroad, to the detriment of Australia’s position on the international art scene. Fry explained: ‘to the immediate monetary risk must be added that of losing touch with a growing clientele in Europe, and the fear that work which had held its own in the most critical city of the old world might yet be too “new”, might not be readily enough understood in Australia sales to be certain’ (Fry, 1922b: 7). In effect, by compelling artists to return precociously to their homeland, this law compromised the art networks they established between Australia and the metropolitan centres, affecting both the market and production of art at the time. In fact, it could be seen that it was a way to restrain Australia’s contact with artistic influences from abroad, disconnecting artists in Australia from contemporary artistic trends emanating from the metropolitan centres of which their compatriots overseas were also taking part. As a consequence, this tax constituted a means to assert the borders of art in Australia as being limited to its geographical borders, excluding Australian expatriate artists from Australia’s art historiography. Butler and Donaldson (2010: 18) have argued that the effect of this tax also meant that ‘artists in Australia tended towards self-complacency, to the easy acceptance of the faith that Australian art is already a finished product, and [Australian artists] have nothing further to learn from the outside’. Edith Fry already understood this issue and denounced discrimination against Australian artists abroad and the ostracism implemented by Australia. In one of her articles she recounted the experience of Australian expatriate artists, explaining: The Australian artist abroad was, to all intents and purposes, ostracised by a law passed without even giving him sufficient notice to make the preparations necessary for the voyage home. An official at Australia House informs him that he has forfeited his nationality by seven years’ residence abroad …. ‘I can never afford to go back now’, said one. ‘They have outlawed us’, was the remark of another, one of the most promising of our younger portrait-painters. (Fry, 1924b: 11)

This ostracism effectively resonated with the fear of the foreign that prevailed in Australia in the years following the end of the First World War. Indeed, modernism in Australia was primarily seen as a cultural threat from Europe that could potentially destroy tradition; therefore, modern artists

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were accused of negating the language of pictorial art (Williams, 1995: 241; Chanin and Miller, 2005: 88). Australian expatriate artists were equally seen as a threat because, through their experience overseas, their work was influenced or took part in the development of modern aesthetics. It may be argued that, according to such conservative ideology, these artists were considered no longer able to convey the character of their nation through their art and produced work perceived irrelevant to Australia, consequently being disowned by their nation. This did not mean, however, that Australian expatriate artists were considered European, or British in the case of those who left for London. In 1920, the trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria disapproved of two artworks that the London Committee, whose role was to advise on acquisitions of European art for the national collection, had purchased in London. These were works by Australian artists who lived and worked in London: Embarkation at Southampton by Dora Meeson and On the Somme by Charles Bryant (Reed, 2013: 112). This shows that the trustees made a clear distinction between European art and Australian art. To them, Australian artists based in Britain were not part of the British art scene and, when acquiring British works, they considered that the latter needed to be painted exclusively by British artists. Perhaps this came from the idea that the quality of Australian artists’ work was not as good as that of British artists, or rather because these artists were considered exiles or even deserters, and were thus considered as unworthy of being represented in national collections. This attitude of rejection, implemented primarily through the protectionist tax on imported artworks, created jealousy amongst Australian artists themselves, and this ostracism persisted throughout the following decade. This was exemplified by Dora Meeson and George Coates who, after sending their solo exhibitions to Australia in 1928 and 1934, were prevented by Australian-based artists from exhibiting as fellow countrymen in several major Australian exhibitions in London. For long-term Australian expatriate artists in England, this situation of struggle produced a crisis of identity, since they found themselves wedged between English and Australian antagonisms (Scott, 2013: 111). Indeed, whilst attempting to adjust to the art scene of the metropole and maintaining identification with Australia, these expatriate artists also had to face exclusion from their homeland. This idea was further reinforced by the fact that at the time, Australia sought to shape its own national identity as distinctive from that of Britain. Culturally, this was reflected through Australia’s desire to assert its own school of art. However, because of their cosmopolitan outlook, the work produced by Australian expatriate artists was believed to sit outside of the nationalist canon.

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Sydney Ure Smith’s 1923 exhibition of Australian art

Scholars have contended that in the process of building its cultural identity, Australia experienced a sentiment of inferiority in relation to Britain – an important aspect of the postcolonial Australian psyche also known as ‘cultural cringe’. For instance, Arthur Phillips explained: ‘Above our writer – and other artists – looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon achievement. Such a situation almost inevitably produced the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe’ (Phillips, 1980: 89). They have debated over the idea that Australia’s peripheral status reinforced a relationship of cultural and artistic dependence upon the European metropolitan centres and that, because of the absence of endogenous artistic traditions, artists and writers in Australia emulated overseas trends, leaving them trapped within the provincialist bind (B. Smith, 1962, B. Smith 1979; T. Smith, 1974). Such construct may be evidenced through the exhibition of Australian art in London organised by Sydney Ure Smith in 1923 at the Royal Academy, Burlington House. The show was advertised as follows: ‘[this exhibition is] thoroughly representative of the best Australian art available [and aims] to gain some recognition in London for the work of Australian artists’ (Ure Smith, 1923). Despite the intent to gain artistic recognition by the metropole, this exhibition reinforced the reputation of Australian art as being aesthetically conservative and provincial in various ways. First, the exhibition showcased works that predominantly depicted landscapes. Indeed, at the time, landscape painting was the most pervasive genre in Australian art to express national identity. In fact, art historians have argued that landscape painting has remained the definitive genre in Australia, which reflected the overarching theme of nation-building, expansion as the settlements spread across the continent, and progress (B. Smith, 1985; Bonyhady, 1985; Hoorn, 2007) – an imagery also primarily associated with patriarchal order (Burn, 1990: 104). Portraiture, on the other hand, was considered as positioning artists ‘on universal ground, [making it] difficult to define anything particularly Australian in work, which anywhere in the world, is fashioned under the same conditions of lighting’ (Lindsay, 1923). Painting landscapes was thus a way to capture the essence of the land, creating images that would reflect national identity, or Australianness. An example of a work by Arthur Streeton that was included in the show is The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might (1896) (see Figure 13.3), a panoramic view of the Hawkesbury River looking across the Blue Mountains in New South Wales: the blue water in the foreground seems translucent, surrounded by vast green fields and stretching out to the mountains in the background, which are enveloped in the haze of a pale hot sky. This picture, testifying to Streeton’s ability to recreate Australian colours and quality of light, appealed to the

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Arthur Streeton (1896) The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might, oil on canvas, 123 × 123 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. 

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idea of the essence of place and became regarded as a symbol of Australian nationalism (Clark and Whitelaw, 1986: 104; G. Smith, 1995: 130). Streeton, a founding member of the Heidelberg School of painting, sought to emphasise Australian qualities in his works, which at the time contributed to making landscape painting Australia’s national art. Secondly, the exhibition did not receive critical acclaim, as British critics stated that the works were too old-fashioned for the Royal Academy: ‘It is no more than the truth to say that, compared with the pictures to be seen at the annual exhibitions of that highly decorous and conservative institution, the Royal Academy, most of the exhibits in the Australian show seemed disconcertingly old-fashioned’ (Owen, 1923: 12). The English art critic, Paul George Konody, in his review reprinted in the Australian press, pointed out

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‘a sameness, a kind of monotony, lack of experiment, about the whole exhibition’ and went on to explain: On many occasions the work of individual Australian residents in London figured at local exhibitions. And in almost every case, long residence in Europe had left its mark upon their practice almost to the elimination of all that might be described as national peculiarities. … At the Burlington House, it would be a mistake to suppose that there is anything in the present show that might pass for the work of an English artist. Australian soil, air and sun, with Australian psychology, produce a vision entirely individual to the Southern Continent, although this is expressed by means of a technique not a whit different from that of the academic phase of painting in the Mother Country. (Konody, 1924: 63)

Perhaps surprisingly, such commentary played in Ure Smith’s favour because it meant that he had successfully demonstrated that Australian art was unaffected by the European modernist influence, which was at the time perceived as ‘the “stunt” art that has ravaged the older civilisations’ (Lindsay, 1923: 13). Ure Smith made this idea clear at the opening of the exhibition when he declared that ‘it was a healthy sign that [Australian artists] depended for their appeal on normal, and not distorted vision, what might be termed “jazz painting” being practically non-existent in [Australia]’ (Anon., 1923: 14). For Ure Smith, this exhibition was therefore an opportunity to prove to England that Australia was an artistically sane nation. Although Konody clearly acknowledged Britain’s artistic influence through the techniques used by Australian artists, the fact that Australian art on display was considered deprived of English character was also understood, in Ure Smith’s terms, as an achievement. Indeed, since Australian art had to differentiate itself from the art of other countries, especially that of the metropole, this exhibition was an attempt to show the London artistic scene how Australian artists managed to create their own national imagery. Edith Fry shared similar criticism to Konody’s towards Ure Smith’s exhibition but she specifically emphasised the fact that it failed to acknowledge the contribution of artists who worked in London or Paris. She argued that the 1923 exhibition only displayed the works of Australian artists who ‘remained singularly untouched by the new ideas which, during the last quarter of a century, have revolutionised European art’ (Fry, 1924c: 2). Indeed, out of the  ninety-five artists represented, none were Australian artists currently based overseas. However, Fry stressed the importance of artistic training overseas for the artists whose work was on display at the 1923 exhibition: The outstanding portraits were there [sic] of E. Phillips Fox, Hugh Ramsay, John Longstaff, and G. W. Lambert, all of whom owe much to their years of training

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in London or Paris. Strong figure-work was also shown by a group of artists who have definitely made their homes in Australia, some of them, however, becoming repatriated after spending a considerable time abroad. … If this group be compared with the former one a gulf will be at once apparent between the two. It is, perhaps, not so wide as that which separates figure-painters resident in Australia from those who are accepted as naturalised Londoners, or, to a still more marked degree, naturalised Parisians. (Fry, 1924c: 2)

Most artists mentioned in the above excerpt spent on average one year studying in Paris – joining the Académie Julian, Académie Colarossi, or Atelier Delécluze for instance – before working in London for a few years and returning to Australia. As for artists who were living abroad at the time – like Dora Meeson, George Coates, and Fred Leist, who had left Australia in 1896, 1897, and 1908 respectively, and who were exhibiting at the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy and gaining recognition in the London art scene – they were not represented in the 1923 exhibition. It may be argued that the artists were selected based on where they had established their career and, above all, whether after spending a short time abroad for their artistic training they returned to Australia. What is most striking when looking at the list of artists whose work was on display is that even Charles Conder – who, despite being born in England, established his career in Australia and became a founding member of the Heidelberg School – was not represented. Fry thus shed light on the fact that expatriate artists had been discriminated against in Ure Smith’s exhibition and this constituted a way to constrain the borders of Australian art, marking a critical gap with art produced in the metropolitan centres. This inevitably raised the difficulty of defining Australian art, as well as who was and who was not an Australian artist. In his introductory chapter for the catalogue of the 1923 exhibition, Lionel Lindsay – Australian artist and strong opponent to modern art – touched upon this question, explaining: It’s difficult considering the number of our painters who have developed abroad, to define what is, or is not an Australian artist. Birth alone will not decide the issue, for some of our resident Englishmen have identified themselves more closely with Australia than the native born. Streeton is ambidextrous. Returning to Australia he succumbs to the charms of his old mistress – Nature. In England he imposes upon her something of the swagger mode of the hour. Miss Proctor, Mrs Preston and Mr John Moore are with the modern movement. Their work had its roots in Europe; its inspiration owes nothing to this country. These are cosmopolitans. (Lindsay, 1923: 10–11)

Lindsay’s statement implied that, to a certain extent, because the work of Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston, and John Moore was rooted in Europe, it

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therefore did not comply with being considered Australian. Just as Konody stated in his review, Australian artists who were long established in London were thought to have lost their national particularities due to their exposition to European artistic influence and consequently their work could no longer be considered Australian. Instead, they were defined as ‘cosmopolitan’ because the multicultural dimension of the metropolitan centre affected the making of their art. As Iwona Blazwick explains, the metropolis ‘can generate an experience both of unbearable invisibility and liberating anonymity; of alienating disconnectedness, indeed impotence; and of unbounded creativity’ (Blazwick, 2001: 9). To this extent, through their experience as expatriates, these artists found their identity changed and more fluid, engaging with new styles and more specifically modernism (Kaplan, 1996; Speck and Downey, 2008/2009). For Lindsay, unless the identity of these expatriates remained unchanged, in that they preserved their Australian integrity and returned to paint the Australian bush, their work could no longer have a place in the Australian art scene. Fry, however, strongly criticised such definition of Australian art, explaining: The fallacy that a native-born Australian art can develop independently of European influence, if it ever were seriously upheld in Australia, must have been exploded by the reception given to the recent exhibition at Burlington House. Criticism has spoken with no uncertain voice – Australian art as such cannot be said to exist. Unless one is to go back again to the primitive scribblings of the cave man, we can never get away from tradition in art, and in Australia it has been for years in the grip of the bad Victorian tradition in which it was born, from which a happy release is being gradually won under the influence of later European movements. (Fry, 1924a: 20)

This argument by Fry is a forerunner of the view that Bernard Smith – known as the father of Australian art – developed in the 1960s and 1970s (Butler and Donaldson, 2010). According to Smith, failure to recognise the cultural traffic between Australia and Europe reflected a eurocentric mindset, which contributed to the belief that Australian art was ‘an exotic art … standing outside the Renaissance tradition’ (McLean, 2011: 11–12). In other words, he contested the idea that Australian art could be imagined within a hierarchical system as radically different from and less advanced than European art. To Fry, Australian art developed through the framework of British imperialism, thus existing within the European artistic tradition, but it was also perceived as stuck in the Victorian artistic tradition, symptomatic of the persisting imperial influence. She therefore encouraged the inclusion of broader European artistic influences in order for Australia to maintain its place within global artistic exchange. By excluding and discriminating

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Australian expatriate artists in the 1923 exhibition, Ure Smith conveyed an image of Australian art as provincial and unable to take part in the new aesthetics and ideas that were being developed in Europe. The exhibition therefore only reinforced the preconception that Australian art was not being up-to-date with the then influential avant-garde movements from Europe. Fry subsequently went on to counteract such views by organising two exhibitions of Australian art in London in 1924 and 1925. Rectifying the borders of Australian art

Edith Fry’s Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Australian Artists in Europe was held at the Faculty of Arts Gallery, London, from 23 June to 12 July 1924.4 It displayed 152 artworks, including oil paintings, watercolours, etchings, and sculptures; and represented the work of fifty-two artists who were all residing in London or Paris. As stated in the foreword of the catalogue, this exhibition was a way to rectify the understanding of Australian art that Ure Smith’s exhibition had presented the previous year: It should be made clear that this show represents the work of Australian artists who have worked in Europe. It does not include pictures by artists who have remained in Australia, a retrospective exhibition of whose work of the past 30 or 40 years was held last winter at Burlington House. Most of the present exhibitors are members of the London colony – mostly to be found in Chelsea – and those in Paris and other Continental art centres, who were excluded by reason of their residence in Europe from the Burlington House Exhibition. (Davies, 1924: 5)

A direct response to Ure Smith’s exhibition, Fry’s 1924 exhibition displayed work of artists selected by an organising committee consisting of Margaret Baxter, Marion Jones, Dora Meeson, Hugh D. McIntosh, George Coates, Isaac Cohen, Fred Leist, Sydney Long, Horace Brodzky, James Quinn, and Edith Fry herself, all of whom were Australian expatriates based in – mostly – London (Group of the Faculty of Arts, 1924: 6). The majority of them were artists who were not included in Sydney Ure Smith’s 1923 exhibition and who found themselves marginalised, belonging neither to England nor Australia. This marginalisation positioned these artists between two fixed identities – Australian and British – reinforcing their status as ‘in-betweeners’, to take up Bhabha’s theory, and forcing them to entertain a cultural hybridity. This exhibition therefore constituted a platform that allowed them to negotiate their identity and cultural values. Fry particularly acknowledged the transformative impact of the experience  of expatriation upon Australian artists in Europe. In 1924, she explained:

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The careers of the artists who have left home for the purpose of study give a striking illustration of the truth that it is by travel and by study that the artist succeeds in finding himself, and frees himself from the expression of his own individuality. Take a group chosen from amongst our greatest portrait painters – Bunny, Coates, Cohen, Lambert, Leist, Longstaff, and a few others. A striking convergence is noticeable between the styles of these men when they come under the more varied influences of Europe, bringing an inevitable broadening of the artist’s viewpoint. (Fry, 1924a: 20)

Fry praised expatriate experience because it allowed Australian artists to broaden their artistic skills and be in competition with the art from the European artistic centres. She believed that these artists ‘freed themselves from the expression of their individuality’ because their mobility destabilised the fixed standards of their own culture, broadening their artistic techniques and perception. The idea that distance from home, or geographical displacement, provides a better vantage point for artistic and cultural criticism than centrality and stability has been conceptualised by feminist scholars. For instance, Caren Kaplan and Janet Wolff have taken up Deleuze and Guattari’s term of ‘deterritorialisation’ to suggest that displacement (such as exile, travel, or relocation) has enabled women writers to negotiate their identity (in relation to home and their new location) in a new way (Kaplan, 1987; Wolff, 1995). Wolff particularly stressed the positive impact of displacement: Displacement (deterritorialization) can be quite strikingly productive. First the marginalisation entailed in forms of migration can generate new perceptions of place and, in some cases, of the relationship between places. Second, the same dislocation can also facilitate personal transformation, which may take the form of ‘rewriting’ the self, discarding the lifelong habits and practices of a constraining social education and discovering new forms of self-expression. (Wolff, 1995: 9)

This approach may be applied to the experience of Australian expatriate artists in Europe and is useful in understanding their place in the defining of the borders of Australian art and historiography. Prior to moving to London or Paris, these artists were, for instance, constrained by the art training offered in Australia at the time. The Sydney Art School and the National Gallery School in Melbourne were the two leading art schools in the country and continued to teach in accordance with nineteenth-century artistic practice, more specifically naturalism and impressionism, well into the first few decades of the twentieth century. While the Sydney Art School championed the techniques of the Barbizon School and plein air painting, the curriculum of the National Gallery School adhered to conservative and outmoded academic principles formerly followed by the Royal Academy Schools. Students were

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still drawing from live models, antique heads, and anatomical figures, and painting from classical casts and still life (Topliss, 1996: 30–33). Whether Australian artists chose to remain in academic art schools when overseas – the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade School in London, or the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris – or to attend the freer and more independent private ateliers in Paris, displacement constituted a liberating experience for them and allowed a reassessment of their artistic practice. This is evident when comparing the works of artists who were represented in both Ure Smith’s exhibition in 1923 and Edith Fry’s in 1924. Elioth Gruner’s style, for instance, changed significantly after his first year spent in Europe. Gruner attended classes at the Sydney Art School and became a prominent landscape painter in Australia. From 1923 to 1925, he travelled to England and to France. When comparing Frosty Sunrise (1917) (see Figure 13.4) on display in 1923 with Spring Time in Devon (1924)5 shown in 1924, the latter testifies to Gruner’s adaptability to paint and capture the atmosphere of pastoral scenery other than in Australia. Although both paintings depict pastoral scenes, Spring Time is more sombre in tonality than Frosty Sunrise, which is dominated by high-keyed colours in scales of pink, cream, ochre and warm browns. In Frosty Sunrise, the colours seem to be bleached out by the sun and give the impression of a dried environment that lacks shade. Spring Time depicts the opposite: a pastoral ideal with shade, water, trees, cows, and where grass grows bright green. Gruner therefore managed to adapt and capture the quintessence of the English countryside. His work was, however, not well received in Australia. In fact, critics stressed Gruner’s poor performance in capturing the atmosphere of pastoral England, with comments such as ‘this “Pastoral Scene in Devon” might as easily have been Parramatta, and five years ago. He disappoints’ (MacDonald, 1925: 4). It is probably not so much that Gruner did not produce a good painting, but rather that Australian critics saw one of their best painters in the process of losing his so-called ‘national peculiarities’ and wanted to maintain Gruner’s reputation as an Australian artist, in Ure Smith’s conservative terms. More importantly, Spring Time is painted with thinner brushstrokes and more flattened forms. This testifies to Gruner’s reassessment of his artistic practice following his experience in England and his attempt to take into account the comments made by William Orpen – then Royal Academician and one of the leading fashionable portrait painters in Britain – about his work when it was exhibited at Burlington House the previous year. Indeed, Orpen criticised The Valley of the Tweed (1921) to Gruner himself during the Exhibition of Australian art in London in 1923, without knowing that Gruner had painted it. As Bernard Smith explains, ‘though Gruner resented the attack, Orpen’s advocacy of thin dry paint and pastel-like surfaces was not altogether lost upon him. He did not attempt the big landscape again; and later paintings … contain less sentiment, more

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Elioth Gruner (1917) Frosty Sunrise, oil on canvas on wood, 44.8 × 48.2 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales.

drawing, and a greater concern with composition and the anatomical structure of the countryside depicted’ (B. Smith et al., 2001: 187–188). Gruner’s time in Europe therefore allowed him to broaden his practice, steering towards an English style of modernism, which caused concerns among the conservative art critics in Australia (Nairn and Serle, 1983). Inevitably, the artworks exhibited in 1924 were more progressive and modern than the ones exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1923, and this was not only visible with the landscape paintings but through the portraits on display. For example, Fred Leist presented Blue and Silver (1924) (see Figure 13.5), a portrait of a woman wearing a blue dress sitting against a grey curtain.6 Leist’s portrait testifies to his draughtsmanship, which enabled him to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy, but most importantly to the modernist vein in which he painted, stressing decorative colour arrangements, flatness, and free brushstrokes. Fry championed Leist’s works, calling him

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Fred Leist (1924) Silver and Blue, oil on canvas, 76 × 63.5 cm (here on the cover of The Home magazine, vol 10, n° 5, 1929). National Library of Australia.

‘a colourist’ with ‘a decorative gift’. She explained that by ‘aiming at simple effects, he arrives at simplicity by means of directness of attack and the sureness of hand, coming from thoroughly mastered technique’ (Fry, 1924d: 46). Fry’s comments particularly echoed the openness to new aesthetics and technical skills that living in the metropolitan centres entailed. In comparison to

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the periphery where artistic training was predominantly academic, Australian artists based in London or Paris had the possibility to study and experiment with modernist principles. For instance, those who spent time in the metropole were influenced by the theories of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, who particularly stressed the importance of design, colour, and forms. The exhibition organised by Fry was much richer in portraits, but also still life and interior paintings, than the 1923 exhibition. Interior paintings, mostly painted by women artists, were often praised for their decorative component and colour arrangements, and therefore Fry’s exhibition sought to give more consideration to this genre. Bessie Davidson’s An Interior (c. 1920), which was part of Fry’s 1923 exhibition, depicts the colourful corner of an apartment filled with light streaming in through a window, featuring an upholstered empty armchair near a desk and a table with a vase of flowers, and a young girl sitting reading on the floor. Such interior painting depicted French middle-class life and was praised by the French critics (Speck and Downey, 2008/2009). At the Salon des Beaux-Arts exhibition in 1922, one of her interior paintings was said to demonstrate a ‘finesse and effective handling of a very complicated play of sunlight’ (Little, 2003: 90). Davidson was also an example of cosmopolitan fit, since she travelled to both Paris and London, and was eventually fully accepted as a Parisian when, at her solo exhibition of 1928 at the Galerie Ecalle, René Xavier Prinet (one of her teachers) declared her as being ‘absolutely one of us’ (Little, 2003: 36). With such progressive artworks on display at the exhibition she organised, Fry therefore aimed to change the predominant view of Australian art as being a site-specific art that strictly reflected the life of Australian people in Australian society. Instead, the exhibition demonstrated that travel and expatriation was a crucial aspect of the Australian artistic experience, allowing artists to broaden their artistic skills and engage in cosmopolitan spaces. Fry’s exhibition was successful enough for the whole collection to be subsequently shown at the Art Gallery in Brighton (Moore, 1934: 12). The following year, she organised another exhibition of Australian art which also included the art of expatriate artists, but this time, it was held at the Spring Gardens Gallery, Trafalgar Square in London. Following the success of her 1924 exhibition, she founded the Australian Artists in Europe group, which gathered approximately fifty Australian (and a few New Zealand) expatriate artists who had established their career in London or Paris, including George Coates, Fred Leist, and Dora Meeson. Conclusion

As early as the 1920s, Edith Fry sought to assert a more inclusive narrative of Australian art, which was defined as being part of a global art historiography.

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Through her publications and the exhibitions she organised, she denounced the marginalisation of Australian expatriate artists and called for a reassessment of Australia’s artistic borders. Because spatial mobility sometimes destabilises cultural standards, expatriate artists have had to negotiate their identity between their homeland and their adopted culture through their art, broadening their artistic styles and subject matters and creating a cosmopolitan identity for themselves. In the case of Australian artists based in the metropolitan centres – particularly London – in the years following the end of the First World War, they produced art that, according to nationalist cultural custodians in Australia at the time, could no longer be considered part of the Australian artistic canon. However, Australian art as defined by the constraining tenets of nationalism – having to be produced by artists in Australia, representing the Australian landscape in an impressionistic style – led it to be stuck in a peripheral position, seen as provincial and less advanced than European art. Instead, Fry gave visibility to Australian expatriate artists who were actively taking part in the global node of artistic exchange in the metropolitan centres, revealing that they still maintained a strong sense of identification with and belonging to Australia. To this extent, the spatial mobility of Australian artists showed that Australian art existed beyond the national borders of Australia, constituting an integral component in the defining of Australian art. Notes 1 For further criticism of the centre–periphery model, see Ferrão and Jensen-Butler (1984). 2 Women artists’ applications for the travelling scholarship of the Melbourne National Gallery School were systematically rejected from its inception in 1887 to 1905 (Woollacott, 2001: 208–209). 3 Woollacott draws on postcolonial theories to investigate the meaning of whiteness, bringing to the fore the excitement of Australians who finally made it ‘Home’ only to be shocked by their reception as ‘colonials’, forcing them to redefine their selfidentity (Woollacott, 2001). In 1903 the Australian writer Barbara Baynton highlighted the difficulty for Australian expatriate artists to break into the London art scene: ‘I  should like to sound a note of warning to artists […] about going to London. For artists, especially, it generally means starvation. […] Sometimes an Australian artist gets a picture in the Academy, or accepted by the Paris Salon, and then his hopes run high; but, the pictures invariably come back to the studio unsold’ (Gray and Lambert, 1996: 36). This hardship continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s. 4 Information about this exhibition, how it was organised and financially supported, is very limited. Only two copies of the catalogue are available in Australia (one at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, and the other at the State Library of Queensland, Brisbane).

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5 A reproduction of the image can be found at www.mutualart.com/Artwork/SpringTime-in-Devon/DF8B5A1BBD8DBF9E. Accessed 27 November 2019. 6 Fred Leist’s Silver and Blue has been dated 1929. This date is erroneous, since this painting was exhibited at the Exhibition of Australian Artists in Europe in 1924.

References Alomes, S. (1999) When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Anon. (13 June 1923) ‘Australian Pictures for Exhibition in London’, Sydney Mail, 14. Anon. (13 March 1924a) ‘Nobody’s Darlings: Australian Artists in London, Resent Exhibition Muddle’, Herald, 7. Anon. (9 August 1924b) ‘Australians in London: Taboo their Own Artists’, Smith’s Weekly, 12. Bhabha, H. (2012 [1994]) The Location of Culture (London: Routledge). Blazwick, I. (2001) Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (London: Tate Publishing). Bonyhady, T. (1985) Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting, 1801–1890 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press). Burn, I. (1990) National Life and Landscape: Australian Painting 1900–1940 (Sydney: Bay Books). Butler, R. and A.D.S. Donaldson (2007) ‘A Short History of UnAustralian Art’, in I.  North (ed.), Visual Animals: Crossovers, Evolution and the New Aesthetics (Adelaide: Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia), 107–121. Butler, R. and A.D.S. Donaldson (2010) ‘French, Floral and Female: A History of UnAustralian Art 1900–1930 (part 1)’, Melbourne Art Journal E-MAJ, 5. https:// emajartjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/butlerdonaldson.pdf. Accessed 27 December 2018. Chanin, E. and S. Miller (2005) Degenerates and Perverts: The 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art (Carlton, Vic.: The Miegunyah Press). Clark, J. and B. Whitelaw (1986) Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond (Melbourne: International Cultural Corporation of Australia). Davies, C. (1924) ‘Foreword’, in Group of the Faculty of Arts, Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Australian Artists in Europe (London: Faculty of Arts Gallery). Dogramaci, B. (2019) ‘Toward a Migratory Turn: Art History and the Meaning of Flight, Migration and Exile’, in B. Dogramaci and B. Mersmann (eds), Handbook of Art and Global Migration: Theories, Practices, and Challenges (Berlin: De Gruyter), 17–37. Ferrão, J. and C. Jensen-Butler (1984) ‘The Centre–Periphery Model and Industrial Development in Portugal’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2:4, 375–402. Fry, E.M. (1922a) ‘Australian Artists Abroad’, The Home, 3:2. Fry, E.M. (18 March 1922b) ‘Australian Artists in Paris’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7. Fry, E.M. (16 February 1924a) ‘Exiles: The Australian Artists Abroad’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20.

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Fry, E.M. (12 July 1924b) ‘Retrospect: Twelve Years from Home’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11. Fry, E.M. (1 January 1924c) ‘Australian Art at the Burlington House’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2. Fry, E.M. (1924d) ‘The Work of Fred Leist’, Art in Australia, 8, 46–51. Gray, A. and Lambert, G. (1996) George Lambert (Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House). Group of the Faculty of Arts (1924) Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Australian Artists in Europe (London: Faculty of Arts Gallery). Hoorn, J. (2007) Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape (Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Press). Hughes, R. (1970) The Art of Australia (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books Australia). Kaplan, C. (1987) ‘Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse’, Cultural Critique, 6, 187–198. Kaplan, C. (1996) Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). King, A. (1990) Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London (London and New York: Routledge). Konody, P.G. (1924) ‘The Exhibition of Australian Art in London’, Art in Australia, 3:7, 63–67. Lindsay, L. (1923) ‘Australian Art’, in S. Ure Smith (ed.), The Exhibition of Australian Art in London, 1923: A Record of the Exhibition Held at the Royal Academy and Organised by the Society of Artists (Sydney: Art in Australia), 5–13. Little, P. (2003) A Studio in Montparnasse, Bessie Davidson: An Australian Artist in Paris (Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House). MacDonald, J.S. (14 October 1925) ‘Work of Herbert, Lindsay and Gruner’, The Herald, 4. Maloon, T. (2013) ‘The Pedagogy of Modern Art: The Quest for Modernity by Australian Artists Abroad’, in D. Edwards, D. Mimmocchi, and D. Thomas (eds), Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales), 236–251. McLean, I. (2011) ‘Reverse Perspective: Bernard Smith’s Worldview and the Cosmopolitan Imagination’, Journal of Art Historiography, 4, 1–18. Moore, W. (1934) The Story of Australian Art: From the Earliest Known Art of the Continent to the Art of To-Day, Volume II (Sydney: Angus & Robertson). Morton, P. (2009) ‘Australia’s England, 1880–1950’, in P. Pierce (ed.), The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press), 255–281. Nairn, B. and G. Serle (1983) Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 09, 1891–1939 (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press). Owen, H. (8 December 1923) ‘London Finds Faults, Too Old-fashioned’, The Herald, 12. Petersen, A. (2017). Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-Making in a Globalised World (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Phillips, A. (1980 [1966]) The Australian Tradition: Studies in Colonial Culture (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire).

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Reed, S. (2013) ‘Policy, Taste or Chance? Acquisition of British and Foreign Oil Paintings by the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1874 to 1935’ (MA dissertation, University of New South Wales). Robertson, K. (2019) Identity, Community and Australian Artists, 1890–1914: Paris, London and Further Afield (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing). Sayers, A. (2001) Australian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Scott, M. (2013) How Australia Led the Way: Dora Meeson Coates and the British Suffrage (Canberra: Commonwealth Office of the Status of Women). Smith, B. (1962) Australian Painting: 1788–1960 (London: Oxford University Press). Smith, B. (1979) Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press). Smith, B. (1985) European Vision and the South Pacific (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Smith, B., T. Smith, and C.R. Heathcote (2001) Australian Painting: 1788–2000 (South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press). Smith, G. (1995) Arthur Streeton, 1867–1943 (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria). Smith, T. (1974) ‘The Provincialism Problem’, Artforum, 13:1, 54–59. Smith, T. (2002) Transformations in Australian Art The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House). Speck, C. and G. Downey (2008/2009) ‘Cosmopolitanism and Modernism: On Writing a New Australian Art History’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 9:1/2, 101–117.  Stephen, A., A. McNamara, and P. Goad (eds) (2007) Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture, 1917–1967 (Carlton, Vic: Miegunyah Press). Topliss, H. (1996) Modernism and Feminism: Australian Women Artists, 1900–1940 (Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House). Underhill, N. (1991) Making Australian Art, 1916–1949: Sydney Ure Smith, Patron and Publisher (South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press). Ure Smith, S. (ed.) (1923) The Exhibition of Australian Art in London, 1923: A Record of the Exhibition Held at the Royal Academy and Organised by the Society of Artists (Sydney: Art in Australia). Wedd, K., L. Peltz, and C. Ross (2001) Creative Quarters: The Art World in London 1700–2000 (London: Merrell). While, A. (2003) ‘Locating Art Worlds: London and the Making of Young British Art’, Area, 35:3, 251–263. Williams, J. (1995) The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wolff, J. (1995) Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Woollacott, A. (2001) To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press).

Agostina Segatori and the immigrant Italian models of Paris Susan Waller

Introduction

In 1887 Vincent Van Gogh, who had arrived in Paris in March 1886, produced two paintings that have been identified as likenesses of Agostina Segatori (b. 1841, Ancona, d. 1910, Paris), but present her in very different guises. In the Café: Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin (see Figure 14.1), painted between January and March, shows her wearing an elaborate hat and tailored jacket with brass buttons over a patterned skirt (Welsh-Ovcharov, 1976: 176, WelshOvcharov, 1981: 100–101; Cachin et al., 1988: 86–87; Hendriks and Tilborgh, 2011: 294–296, 299). Sitting at a metal café table decorated with a red rim, cigarette in hand and glass of beer before her as she stares into the middle distance, she is very much a modern Parisienne. The Italian Woman (Agostina Segatori) (see Figure 14.2), painted in the autumn of the same year, again shows her seated at a table, facing the viewer, but in an undetermined location (Welsh-Ovcharov, 1976: 193–195; WelshOvcharov, 1981: 188; Cachin et al., 1988: 170–171; Hendriks and Tilborgh, 2011: 299–302).1 This table is covered with a brightly patterned cloth, while her blue chair is constructed out of simple, straight planks. She wears peasant dress, and on her head is a red scarf. Segatori has been linked to Van Gogh’s turbulent emotional life: his letters and the recollections of colleagues point to a relationship – likely sexual  – between artist and model in the spring of 1887 (Welsh-Ovcharov, 1976: 55, 60; Welsh-Ovcharov, 1981: 100–101; Cachin et al., 1988: 86; Hendriks and Tilborgh, 2011: 294–296, 299–302). The two paintings have been examined within the context of Van Gogh’s stylistic evolution and his engagement with colour theory (Welsh-Ovcharov, 1976: 194–195; Zemel, 1997: 115; Hendriks and Tilborgh, 2011: 296). But the discrepancy between Segatori’s personas in these two paintings is not only a matter of colour or aesthetic style: the contrast between a modern urban woman and a rural contadina points to her immigrant identity. Segatori was born in Ancona, Italy, in 1841 and emigrated to Paris, where she was working as a model by the 1860s; in the mid-1880s, she owned a restaurant, and she died in Paris in 1904.2 She was thus part of the

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Vincent Van Gogh (1887) In the Café: Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin, oil on canvas, 55.5 × 47 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

wave of Italian immigration that washed over France in the second half of the nineteenth century (Vecoli, 1995: 114). In 1851, the first year when the French census included questions about residents’ nationality, the population of Paris was over a million and included 8,512 Italians – under 1 percent (Milza, 1981: 176, Milza, 1989: 55). As Pierre Milza has charted, during the Third Republic the proportion of Italians burgeoned: in 1871, when the population of Paris increased to 1,851,792, the

Segatori and the immigrant model

Vincent Van Gogh (1887) The Italian Woman (Agostina Segatori), oil on canvas, 81 × 60 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

number of Italians grew to 11,530, and five years later the number of Italians rose to 21,577 or 9.6 percent (Milza, 1989: 56). It would remain at approximately this level till the end of the century. After 1900, as the number of Belgians in France declined, Italians became the largest group of immigrants

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in France. This pattern of emigration from Italy to France, and in particular Paris, forms part of what has been called the ‘Italian diaspora’ – the mass emigration of Italians between 1876 and 1914 (Rosoli, 1985: 99–109; Vecoli, 1995: 114–116).3 Italian models working in Parisian studios were a small group within the larger immigrant Italian population. Posing was not a professional category recorded for official census records, so in order to arrive at a figure for their numbers it is necessary to extrapolate from a variety of sources (Seine, 1887: LXV).4 In 1886, a survey conducted by an unnamed official agency was summarised in the daily newspaper L’Intransigeant: it polled 671 women – both French and foreign – who posed for painters, sculptors, and photographers (Beaux-Arts, 1886).5 The greatest number – 230, or over a third – were Italian. The high proportion of Italian models listed is corroborated by institutional archives and the private records of individual artists.6 The total number of models given in the 1886 survey seems low, however, when compared with anecdotal accounts: journalist Hugues Le Roux suggested in 1889 that there were about 500 Italian models working in Paris, and Raniero Paulucci di Calboli, who was posted in the Italian embassy, suggested in 1901 that there were 800 to 850 Italian models in Paris (Le Roux, 1888: 128, Le Roux, 1889: 134; Paulucci di Calboli, 1909: 52–53). This chapter situates Agostina Segatori’s life and the representations of her produced in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century within the context of the history of Italian immigration to France and French perceptions of Italy and immigration. At a period when the French population was in decline, some believed that immigration offered a necessary economic resource, but others viewed immigrants with suspicion and distaste: as Nancy Green has written, France was caught between xenophobia and economic needs (Green, 1985: 148). Agostina Segatori’s passage from the Italian peninsula to the French hexagon and the images of her and other Italian models produced by Parisian artists illuminate both the perception of ‘Italianicity’ in the French imagination and the models’ negotiation of the transnational experience.7 Segatori and models in Rome

The city of Segatori’s birth, Ancona, is a port on the Adriatic, which tourist guides in the later nineteenth century lauded for its antique Greek ruins and its beautiful women (Blewitt, 1850: 122–217; Baedeker, 1867: 94–95). Because of its excellent harbour, strategic location, and the inhabitants’ commitment to the cause of Italian independence and unification, the city was the object of political and military contestation, from the defeat of Napoleon until 1860, when it became part of the newly forming Italian nation. During the years when

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Segatori came of age, the city experienced considerable instability; if her personal reasons for leaving Ancona are unclear, the insecurity created by political circumstances had long been a factor in internal migrations within Italy. Segatori’s path from Italy to France almost certainly took her through Rome, and it seems likely that she may have worked as an artist’s model in the Eternal City, where a community of models who posed for visiting foreign artists emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century (Brettell and Brettell, 1983: 13–16). Painters and sculptors from northern Europe who worked in the traditions fostered by state-sponsored art academies had long come to Italy to study the visual traditions of the Renaissance and antiquity, which were fundamental to the production of history paintings. But in the early nineteenth century they discovered and were fascinated by the rural culture of the peninsula (Craske, 1997: 111–115). During the Napoleonic era, brigands like Fra Diavolo had led resistance to the French occupation of Italy; after Napoleon’s defeat, the Bourbon rulers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies persisted in repressing ‘bandits’ and ‘brigands’ to assert their political control (Hauptman, 1981: 23–24; Davis, 1998: 71–76). French artists and writers who chafed under the Restoration government viewed the bandits as violent, primitive, and heroic. In 1819, when a band from the village of Sonnino was imprisoned by the Roman authorities, Bartolomeo Pinelli, Jean-Victor Schnetz, and Léopold Robert were given permission to visit the prison and draw the captives (Gassier, 1983: 79–96; Craske, 1997: 111; Collardeau, 2000: 72–74; Bann, 2007: 74–75). Pinelli, a Roman sculptor and engraver, believed that the peasants of the region derived their independence and liberty from antique Rome, and engraved idealised scenes of rural life that became very popular as souvenirs (Craske, 1997: 112). Robert and Schnetz, who both studied in Paris under Jacques-Louis David, turned from the examination of ancient sculpture to the study of Italy’s rural cultures and merged the idealisation of history painting with the representation of folkloric peasant life (Gassier, 1983: 79–96; Craske, 1997: 115; Collardeau, 2000: 72–74). Schnetz’s painting The Flood, also titled A family of Contadini Surprised by a Quick Overflow of the Tiber Fleeing through the Waters (see Figure 14.3) is typical of the works that emerged from this school. It shows a family of four – a man and wife with a young boy and an elderly parent – escaping through rising waters against a background of a dark and threatening storm clouds. In the foreground the mother, wearing a white dress covered by a blue apron and a folded cloth headdress, holds the hand of her young son. Her husband follows her, carrying an aged woman – the young boy’s grandmother – through the water. The figures recall depictions of Aeneas carrying Anchises from burning Troy and retain the idealisation seen in antique and Renaissance works, but their folkloric costumes situate the scene in the Roman campagna (Collardeau, 2000: 77).

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Jean-Victor Schnetz (1831) The Flood: A Family of Contadini Surprised by a Quick Overflow of the Tiber Fleeing through the Waters, oil on canvas, 295 × 247 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen.

Paintings of this sort were soon produced by a coterie of French, German, and even American artists (Brettell and Brettell, 1983: 19–21). When the works were exhibited in Paris, some critics sneered that they were merely genre scenes, but others compared their style with that of historical painters in the neo-classic tradition (Collardeau, 2000: 77–79; Bann, 2007: 81–83). The Salon of 1831 marked a highpoint in the popularity of the new genre, which

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continued to appeal to audiences through the July Monarchy and into the Third Republic (Chavanne, 2009: 15–23). For the French public, the most famous models associated with the paintings of Robert, Schnetz, and other artists working in Rome were Maria Grazia and Teresina Boni, sisters who had been married to brigands from Sonnino before they took up the métier of the pose (Waller, 2006: 97–100). Their histories were recounted by several Parisian critics, friends of Schnetz and Robert, who met the women while visiting Rome. The accounts in the French press not only linked the sisters to the paintings exhibited at the Salon, but also presented them as the artists’ muses and lovers. After Robert’s suicide in 1835, Alphonse de Lamartine, for example, described the painter’s relationship with Teresina as ‘a great and tragic attraction’: She was soon to die, leaving a shadow on the heart of her lover and a dazzling youth in his eyes. Are not the Beatrice of Dante, the Laura of Petrarch and so many others – are they not of this family of apparitions, who shine and die to leave celestial and indelible dreams in the memories of those who first saw them? (Lamartine, 1858: 462)8

In fact, Teresina outlived Robert by several years, and his death was in no way tied to hers (H., 1850: 89). By linking the pair to celebrated lovers from the past, Lamartine sought to give the history of Robert and Teresina mythic status. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz have demonstrated that since antiquity the genre of artistic biography has fostered the notion that a beautiful woman is the male artist’s inspiration and the object of his desire, but as Frances Borzello has argued, this topos often obscures the lived experience of models (Kris and Kurz, 1979: 116–119; Borzello, 1983: 5–14). In describing the sisters  who posed for Robert and Schnetz, French critics largely ignored the fact that for Maria Grazia, Teresina, and other peasants from the campagna, posing in the studios of Rome soon became – in the words of the American painter Asher B. Durand – a ‘business’ (Stebbins, 1992: 194). Work for foreign artists offered peasants an alternative to the struggles of rural life (Waller, 2006: 96–107). In many agrarian regions of the Italian peninsula, families who were engaged in subsistence agriculture found their land holdings insufficient to supply their needs, and they practised temporary seasonal migration to find work in neighbouring areas (Woolf, 1979: 275–293; Davis, 1998: 66–70). Posing for the Académie de Française in Rome, as well as visiting artists from northern Europe and the Americas, provided impoverished peasants a livelihood and a métier (Santulli, 2011: 23–75).9 Models in search of work – along with indigent beggars and musicians – routinely gathered on the Spanish Steps, not far from the Villa Medici, the site of the French Academy. They were observed by travellers and tourists, like Grace Greenwood, who described the scene in 1855 for the New York Times:

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There are often to be seen picturesque and varied groups, and single figures of striking character. Handsome peasant women, with charming brown babies – wild, long-haired boys from the mountains – raven-bearded young men and snowy-headed old men – and coquettish young girls, with flashing eyes and dashing costumes. There is one grand-looking old man, with a bounteous white beard, who is said to do a great business in the saintly and patriarchal line. … These various candidates for artistic favor seem to have the most social and agreeable relations with each other – indeed, I have remarked the patriarch chatting and laughing with the brigand in a familiar manner scarcely in keeping with his own venerable character. But, let an artist or two ascend the steps, and presto! The dark-eyed young girls cease their idle gossip, and spring into position – look archly over the left shoulder, or with clasped hands modestly contemplate the pavement; the pretty peasant woman snatches up the baby she had left to creep about at its own sweet will, and bends over it tender and Madonna-like; while at a word from her, a skin-clad little shepherd boy drops his game of pitch-penny, and takes up his role of St. John. (Greenwood, 1855)

Greenwood’s account draws attention to the similarities between the peasants’ attitudes as they ‘posed’ for potential employers and the conventional gestures of figures in religious paintings, suggesting that in their effort to find work the models had learned and adopted the traditional iconography of Christian themes. They were becoming professionalised. Italian models in Paris

After the Revolution of 1848, some Roman models, perhaps encouraged by artists associated with the Villa Medici, made their way to Paris, marking the start of the emigration of the modelling community. The records of the École des Beaux-Arts indicate that the numbers of Italians increased over the decades: in 1854, of nineteen men hired, one had an Italian name, but by 1874, when sixty-five individuals were contracted to pose, about 40 percent were Italian.10 The increasing numbers of Italian immigrant models in the Second Empire and Third Republic follows the general pattern of Italian emigration, as instabilities caused by the Italian wars of unification exacerbated the desperate situation of many peasants (Vecoli, 1995: 114–116; Chavanne, 2009: 25–53). Though the kingdom of Italy was officially declared in 1861, the situation in the southern provinces, which had formerly made up the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, remained politically volatile and economically impoverished, pushing many to seek their fortunes beyond the peninsula throughout Europe and on the far side of the Atlantic (Vecoli, 1995: 116–118). There was an established pattern of skilled Italian artisans in fields associated

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with the visual arts emigrating in search of work: as Eckard Marchand has demonstrated, figurinai, itinerant plaster cast traders from Tuscany, migrated to northern Europe in the eighteenth century and were followed in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by formatori, trained professional cast makers (Marchand, 2019). Immigrants to France in the nineteenth century included agricultural and urban labourers. In Paris a large group pursued itinerant trades that took them to the streets: they were organ grinders, pipers (known as pifferari), chimney sweeps, figurine venders, glass workers, boot blacks, and artists’ models (Milza, 1981: 194–198, 233–235, Milza, 1989: 59–60). Successive French governments, sometimes in collaboration with Italian authorities, made repeated efforts to repatriate them, citing concerns about child labour (Zucchi, 2009: 67–70). Models, who performed in artists’ studios rather than public spaces, were somewhat protected, and their numbers continued to grow. Posing for artists was a relatively well-paid métier. Male models routinely earned four francs for a session (séance) of four hours, while women were paid five (Le Roux, 1888: 74–75). This was a comparatively high wage at a time when women in Paris routinely earned an average of 2.14 francs a day and men averaged 4.75 (Sullerot, 1986: 102–103). But models’ work was irregular. Between September and the opening of the annual Salon in May, models might readily work two séances a day, from 8am to noon and from 1 to 5pm, with ten minutes of rest every hour (Le Roux, 1888: 74–75). In the summer months, however, when many artists left Paris for the seaside or other rural enclaves, there was very little work to be had (Anon., 1910: 644–645). A model who established an ongoing relationship with an artist might sustain a middle-class lifestyle, but for others the search for work was a perpetual scramble (Waller, 2014). After 1870, the growing number of immigrant models in Paris contributed to the general internationalisation of the field of cultural production. As economists Elish Kelly and John O’Hagan have pointed out, from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, prominent artists had tended to cluster in centres of wealth, and in the nineteenth century, Paris emerged as the destination city for both French and non-French artists (Kelly and O’Hagan, 2007). O’Hagan and Christiane Hellmanzik noted that during this period Paris drew an unusually large international community of artists – Italian, Dutch, Belgian, Germanic, Russian, British, and American (O’Hagan and Hellmanzik, 2008). Following the careers of 181 prominent artists born in the late nineteenth century, they noted that about 80 percent were born in Europe and 170 undertook internal or international long-term migrations. Of the 181, 102 moved within or to France and 70 moved to Paris. In the Parisian imagination of the later nineteenth century, the modèle italien joined the flâneur, the cocotte and the femme nouvelle among the

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familiar urban types that had emerged in the 1840s in what Walter Benjamin dubbed the panoramic literature, but the significance of the image of the modèle italien was unstable (Sieburth, 1984; Abélès et al., 1993: 1–20; Benjamin et al., 2006: 18). On the one hand, the modèle italien was linked to the beau idéal: Italian models were considered the living embodiment of the generalised and exemplary body associated with the classical and Renaissance artistic conventions emulated by French artists trained in the academic tradition. On the other hand, representations of the modèle italien in the popular press were shaped by a xenophobic discourse that reflected growing discomfort with the presence of foreigners within the Parisian urban fabric. Italian models might signify ‘Italianicity’, but the qualities associated with this signifier shifted with the context. The qualities that made Italian models desirable to French artists were described by journalists and art critics who frequented artists’ studios and reported on the trends and customs of the art world. In the words of François Thiébault-Sisson, ‘the Italian type in general is remarkably pure. Harmony of proportions and plentitute of form are its distinguishing features and make the Italian the living image of the marvelous types of women conceived by the Greek genius and carved by sculptors’ (Thiébault-Sisson, 1895: 531). Paul Dollfus described Italian models in a popular study of artists’ models: ‘The women have very classic and very regular forms until around the age of twenty. And it is the entire body which is especially attractive’ (Dollfus, 1888: viii).11 Dollfus and many others believed that the proportions of the contemporary modèle italien were comparable to those of the models who had posed for ancient and Renaissance masters. For French artists schooled in the story that Raphael’s Virgins were posed for by the humble baker’s daughter who was the master’s mistress, contemporary Italian models seemed to furnish a link between modern Paris and Renaissance Rome: their bodies were a kind of living bridge that spanned centuries of history and miles of geography (Waller, 2006: 89–95). In the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the presence of Italian models in Paris facilitated the production of paintings – and photographs – of genre scenes of picturesque contadine in colourful embroidered dresses and wandering pifferari carrying their distinctive bagpipes (Chavanne, 2009: 122–129; Font-Réaulx, 2012: 203–205, 265–66). William Bouguereau, who was among those who relied on Italian immigrant models, imagined them in the Roman countryside, producing paintings that found a ready audience among wealthy American collectors (Beckwith, 1890). Rest (see Figure 14.4) shows a mother with two children seated on the ground in an attitude that recalls  the Madonnas of Raphael. In the distance, the dome of St Peter’s locates the group in the campagna. Like Robert and Schnetz in the first half

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William Bouguereau (1879) Rest, oil on fabric, 164.5 × 117.8 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art.

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of the century, Bouguereau sought to merge the idealism of history painting with genre scenes of peasant life. In contrast, Thomas Couture eschewed historical references to represent a contemporary Italian immigrant: Young Italian Street Musician (see Figure 14.5) shows a pifferaro seated at a café table (Boime, 1980: 379–382). Behind him are Parisian roofs and a streetlight – signifier of modernity – and

14.5

Thomas Couture (c. 1877) Young Italian Street Musician, oil on canvas, 81.12 × 67.95 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art.

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before him are a wine bottle and glass, but his hat and vest and the bagpipes set on the ground beside him mark him as an alien in the urban setting. If Bouguereau’s contadina evokes a fantasy of plentitude linked to the past, Couture’s pifferaro, set firmly in the present, reveals the contradictions – the simultaneous opportunity and loss – that Thomas Nail describes as intrinsic to the migrant experience (Nail, 2019: 54–56). Italian models in peasant dress were a common sight on the streets of Paris. Traditionally, models had made the round of artists’ studios, knocking on doors to introduce themselves, but after 1880 this familiar routine was supplemented by open-air ‘markets’ in several areas of Paris (Paulucci di Calboli, 1909: 37, 53–54). In 1890, the popular French weekly L’Illustration reproduced a drawing by Frédéric de Haenen depicting a crowd, which the caption identified as the model market in Place Pigalle (see Figure 14.6). The drawing shows an informal gathering of women wearing the folkloric costumes made familiar by the paintings of Italian peasants regularly exhibited at the Salon. Most of the women stand in casual conversation, but one sits on the curb to nurse an infant as another woman leans against her shoulder to nap – oblivious to the debris that litters the gutter.

Frédéric de Haenen (4 January 1890) Le Marché aux modèles, Place Pigalle, Paris (The Model Market, Place Pigalle, Paris) from L’Illustration. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

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Chantiers or open-air labour markets for workers in trades which employed a shifting labour force, such as washerwomen or construction workers, had long existed and were a familiar sight on the streets of Paris (Scott, 1986: 356). The ‘model markets’ seem to have been an innovation initiated by Italian immigrants – a restaging of the Roman custom that had brought models to the Spanish Steps in search of work. The Parisian model markets, which persisted until the outbreak of the First World War, took place on Mondays, the day when teaching ateliers traditionally selected their models. There were three markets. In addition to the gathering in Pigalle, there were two on the left bank: on the rue Bonaparte outside the École des Beaux-Arts and on the rue de la Grande Chaumière, near the Académie Colarossi and other private teaching studios in Montparnasse (Lemaistre, 1889: 1; Bayard, 1927: 347–348). Guides to Paris, particularly those which described the artistic community, regularly associated the ‘model markets’ with Italians (Virmaitre, 1888: 77). Paulucci di Calboli, a member of the Italian consular delegation investigating the situation of Italian immigrants, reported that most of the Italians who worked as models came from the regions of Abruzze and Latium (Paulucci di Calboli, 1909: 48, 51). In Paris, they clustered in the quartiers Saint-Victor and Jardin des Plantes in the 5th arrondissement, and records from the École des Arts Décoratifs indicate that they also moved into the 14th arrondissement, where a number of French artists and models lived.12 In both neighbourhoods Paulucci di Calboli found them living in squalid apartments and maisons garnies or rooming houses. On Sundays and holidays, Italian immigrants gathered in neighbourhood squares, as represented in an illustration by Henri Meyer from Le Journal Illustré, on 28 August 1879, Paris Pittoresque: Modèles et Pifferari de la Place Jussieu (Picturesque Paris: Models and Pifferari in the Place Jussieu) (see Figure 14.7). The wood engraving presents a throng of Italian men, women, and children gathered under the trees in a sociable group, not unlike those in other Parisian settings, such as those seen in Eugène Atget’s photograph of families passing the afternoon in the Jardin du Luxembourg (see Figure 14.8). Traditionally the elaborate embroidered costumes worn by peasant women had distinguished residents of one region of the Italian peninsula from those of another (Craske, 1997: 115). In Paris, these garments proclaimed the wearer’s métier as a model and signalled an ‘Italian’ rather than a regional identity: it seems likely that in the years after unification, as the new national government found it challenging to knit together local identities and create a national ‘Italian’ identity, emigrants living abroad, as Donna Gabaccia has argued, were often the first to think of themselves as Italian (Gabaccia, 2000: 47, 522–557). In Paris, the costume also served to distance the immigrants from the dominant urban and bourgeois culture. De Haene’s drawing for

Segatori and the immigrant model

Henri Meyer (28 August 1879) Paris Pittoresque: Modèles et Pifferari de la Place Jussieu (Picturesque Paris: Models and Pifferari in la Place Jussieu) from Le Journal illustré. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

L’Illustration juxtaposes the folkloric dress of the Italian women with that of an artist, whose striped pants, polka-dotted vest, and natty goatee identify him as a bit of a dandy. Models and artists form a crowd that summarises the colourful and unorthodox bohemian community of Montmartre that formed in the Third Republic (Seigel, 1987: 215–249).

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14.8

Eugène Atget (1898–99) Jardin du Luxembourg, album in print from glass negative. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Meyer’s drawing for Le Journal Illustré similarly emphasises the Italians’ folkloric costumes. The women’s headdresses cast shadows over their eyes, so that they peer at the world from an ominously secretive darkness. The wrapped leggings and shaggy animal-skin vests of the men contrast with the dress of the Parisian flâneur, who scrutinises them from the upper left corner of the image. The flâneur’s suit, top hat, and neatly trimmed beard not only identify him as an urban bourgeois, but embody middle-class values of modesty, sober self-control, and propriety (Perrot, 1996: 29–34). In contrast, the soft hats and shaggy beards of the Italian men – one even sports an earring – serve to mark their alien otherness. These are exotic invaders from a distant and undeveloped land who are interlopers in the modern city. The Parisian suspicion of foreigners is strongly underscored in popular texts that explained such images. Hugues Le Roux, writing for La Vie Artistique in 1889, described a crowd of Italians in the Place Linné as a scene from a comic opera: Groups of kids, a curly headed chorus, play knucklebones and rock, paper, scissors. Young girls, their elbows tucked in, sit stationary at the foot of the trees,

Segatori and the immigrant model

knitting gaudy sweaters. The old women, with necks like tortoises, go in search of water at the fountain, their heads erect under the weight of their pitchers. Then there are the Virgins of Bouguereau and Hebert, the matre deolorosa who all have an infant at their breast. (Le Roux, 134)13

Paul Dollfus’s account of a similar gathering in the Place St Victor, which appeared in his study of artists’ models, has a harsher tone. He wrote: ‘In the shade of thin trees, on green benches, is a debauchery of loud colours – red, yellow, blue, orange – mixed in a bizarre and not particularly attractive blend’.14 Looking more closely, Dollfus saw ‘horribly old [women] wrinkled like dried apples and dry like leather’, young men with an ‘insolent manner’, children who are ‘unimaginably dirty’. The entire crowd, ‘jabbers in a bizarre and incomprehensible tongue which tears at the ears’. The ‘swarm’ of people ‘infests the entire neighborhood with the vermin which they drag everywhere with them like a family’ (Dollfus, 1888: 46–48).15 Dollfus’s and Le Roux’s minute descriptions of the Italian crowds – which compare the old women to tortoises and the entire ‘swarm’ to ‘vermin’ – are couched in the language of xenophobia. Frantz Fanon noted that zoological language, equating foreigners with animals, was central to xenophobic discourse, and Gerard Noiriel has explored its role in stigmatising foreigners in the literature of late nineteenth-century France (Fanon, 1963: 7; Noiriel, 1996: 203–205). The sense of the Italians as ‘other’, as visualised and described in popular journals, forms the background to what Gerard Noiriel has characterised as the immigration crisis of the 1880s (Noiriel, 1996: 191, 198). Between 1881 and 1893, French workers’ hostility to Italian immigrants precipitated riots in Marseille, Lyon, and Aigues-Mortes. If Parisian antagonism towards Italian community did not reach this level, the persistent notion of the Italians as outsiders remained. In the studios, artists might see Italians as the living personification of a classical ideal; on the streets they were seen as – at best – a colourful manifestation of the bohemian community and – at worst – as dirty invaders of the urban fabric. But in either case, modèles italiens were perceived as alien to modern Parisian culture. Segatori as model and as restaurateur

Sometime in the early 1860s, Agostina Segatori began posing in Paris. In 1869 the photographer Etienne Carjat, in response to an inquiry from Gustave Courbet, wrote that Agostina – ‘Or if you prefer the French, Augustine’ – lived at 16, rue Duperré, close to Place Pigalle, was the mistress of the painter Edouard Dantan, and was much in demand as a model.16 Records of models working in the École des Beaux-Arts include an ‘Augustine’ who posed in the teaching studios of Francisque Duret, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Alexandre

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Cabanel, and Isidore Pils between 1865 and 1867 (Paris, Archives Nationales, F/21/633–635). In the twentieth century Segatori has frequently been associated with works featuring women in Italian peasant dress by a diverse group of painters – including Jean-Léon Gérôme, Edouard Manet, and Camille Corot – but whether she in fact posed for these artists is difficult to confirm (Hendriks and Tilborgh, 2011: 296).17 It seems likely that Segatori met Dantan, who began studying with Pils in 1864, at the École des Beaux-Arts. Sometime in the 1860s the pair began a liaison that would continue until 1884 (Juvigny, 2002: 38–39).18 Segatori does not seem to have posed frequently for Dantan, but his studio records list several unlocated works which represent her, including a portrait made en loge in 1872 when he competed for the Prix de Rome19 and a study of a woman in Italian dress produced in 1875. Dantan and Segatori’s son, Jean-Pierre, was born in 1873, and although Dantan did not officially recognise the boy as his child, Jean-Pierre was embraced by his family (Juvigny, 2002: 38–39). About the time that Segatori and Dantan separated, she seems to have given up the métier of the pose and turned to a new venture – a café-brasserie known as Le Tambourin located on the rue de Richelieu (Frerebeau-Oberthur, 1979: 49–54; Welsh-Ovcharov, 1981: 26–27, 100–101; Oberthur, 1984: 55–57; Juvigny, 2002: 39; Hendriks and Tilborgh, 2011: 299 f.6). A poster designed by Jules Chéret in 1883 (see Figure 14.9) to advertise the café – also identified as the Maison Segatori – shows a young woman in Italian costume: she carries a tambourine which functions as a serving dish and emits a cloud of steam, which the poster suggests is from the incomparable timbale Bolonaise (Bargiel and Le Men, 2010: 292). In 1885 the restaurant relocated to 62, boulevard de Clichy, slightly west of the fountain where models gathered each week and close to the Chat Noir and other cafés that were part of the burgeoning nightlife of the area (Anon., 1888: 678, 931, 2258; Hendriks and Tilborgh, 2011: 299, f.6). The waitresses continued to wear Italian dress and the tambourine became the unifying motif of the decor: they served as trays, tables, and outdoor signage, and tambourines decorated by well-known artists hung on the wall (Grand-Carteret, 1886: 159; Groom, 2011). Describing the ambiance in his guide to Parisian cafés, John Grand-Carteret wrote ‘Italy reigns here as a mistress, in the dress of the servants as well as in the ornamentation’ (Grand-Carteret, 1886: 159).20 Le Tambourin’s Italian theme, capitalising on the associations that had accrued in the Parisian imagination to the Italian dress worn by immigrant models, was consistent with the type of decoration featured in the cafés clustered in Montmartre (Oberthur, 1984). In these venues the décor was an art form and part of their popular appeal: L’Auberge de clou presented itself as rural enclave; the short-lived Taverne du Bagne flaunted prison motifs; and at le Divan Japonais ‘everything is Chinese’ (Oberthur, 1984: 56).21 Le

Segatori and the immigrant model

Jules Chéret (1883) Au Tambourin, colour lithograph, 83 × 61 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Tambourin proved a popular gathering place for artists – like Van Gogh, who used the café as a gallery – but whether it was as attractive to the wider public is not clear: Ambroise Vollard recalled that Segatori was perpetually in debt and by late 1887 the venture had closed (Vollard, 1937: 66).22 In adopting the Italian motifs for her restaurant, Segatori employed signifiers of ‘Italianicity’, but in her personal life she seems to have preferred the ‘modern’ dress of a Parisienne. Only two securely identified likenesses of her

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remain, aside from Van Gogh’s two paintings of 1887 described earlier: a small profile study which the Dutch artist completed the same year (see Figure 14.10) and a portrait by the Swedish artist August Hagborg (Welsh-Ovcharov, 1981: 100–110; Hendriks and Tilborgh, 2011: 294). Both show Segatori in modern dress, distancing her from her Italian roots and suggesting that she was becoming integrated into the dominant Parisian culture.23

14.10

Vincent Van Gogh (1887) Portrait of Agostina Segatori, oil on canvas, 27.2 × 22 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Segatori and the immigrant model

Other Italian models, relying on their associations with and knowledge of Parisian studio culture, also turned to entrepreneurial ventures. They were taking advantage of changes in the French institutional culture of artistic production, as the state-sponsored system that dominated the first half of the century was displaced by private ventures: private galleries and exhibition societies replaced the state-sponsored Salon, independent academies competed with the École des Beaux-Arts, and new publications provided information for the art-loving public (White and White, 1993: 76–110; Carter and Waller, 2017: 9–12). Filippo Colarossi, who began as model in the École des Beaux-Arts and exhibited as a sculptor for several years, took over the Académie Suisse, a well-established ‘open studio’ run by a former model, and in 1882 transformed it into Académie Colarossi at 10, rue de la Grande Chaumière, where numerous students from across Europe and the United States studied in the coming decades (Archives nationales, Paris, F/21/633–641; Stevens, 1887: 380; Pawlawsli, 1925: 322; Ayral-Clause, 2002: 27). Another former model, Carmen Rossi, briefly ran the Académie Carmen in the Passage Stanislas, where James McNeill Whistler taught (Holroyd, 1975: 70–74). D. Socci established a short-lived agency for artists’ models (Le Roux, 1888, 80–82) and Rosalie Tobia, who had posed for Redon and Bouguereau, opened a crémerie at 3, rue Campagne Première, which became a favourite of the artistic community and persisted from 1906 until 1926 (Klüver and Martin, 2001: 524–526). For members of the Italian community who continued to pose, life became more challenging as the nineteenth century advanced towards the turn of the twentieth century. As the academic tradition was increasingly displaced by ‘modern’ styles, Italian models began to seem incompatible with the dominant aesthetic ideal. When Dollfus published his popular study of the artist’s model, he devoted one chapter to the modèle italien and named few individual models, but he committed six chapters to the modèle modern, providing a series of biographies of men and women who posed (Dollfus, 1888). The bureaucracy of the Third Republic increasingly distinguished between French and foreign residents, and by 1912 enacted a law that attempted to control itinerant groups – which would have included most models – by requiring that they carry a carnet de nomade (Noiriel, 1996: 51–61; Torpey, 2000: 105–108). Some models seem to have left Paris for London or New York, and with the outbreak of the First World War, the Parisian community of Italian models largely dispersed. A few Italian models continued to pose for French artists in the folkloric dress of the contadina, but others adopted modern costume (Chavanne, 2009: 129; Spurling, 2011). Agostina Segatori passed away in 1910 and did not see these changes. Her trajectory – from model to mistress to restaurant owner – is at odds with that of the stereotypical modèle italien. Her death certificate indicates that

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at some point she married a Frenchman – Gustave Julien Morière – and her son would take this man’s name, continuing the process of integrating into French culture. Notes 1 August 1888 has also been proposed as the date of this work (Dorn, 2000: 152, 157, 253, n.35). 2 Cachin et al., 1988: 86 f.1–f.2; Archives de Paris: 18D 239, Actes d’État Civil, 1910, Décès, 2–15 avril, p. 6, #1399. 3 Because Italians emigrated for economic reasons, rather than in response to a traumatic event, not all agree that ‘diaspora’ is appropriate to describe their relocation (Luconi, 2011). 4 In the census of 1886, for example, painters, sculptors, engravers, photographers, and musicians were grouped under ‘Sciences, Lettres et des Arts’; models, if they were counted, were most likely considered ‘Individus non-classés’. 5 My thanks to Martha Ward for bringing this article to my attention. The original report from which this summary was taken remains unlocated. 6 Archives nationales, Paris, AJ/53/171: École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs: Comptabilité Reçus de Paiement des Modèles; Pinet, 1990: 112–119. 7 ‘Italianicity’ was the neologism coined by Roland Barthes to denote ‘the condensed essence of everything that could be Italian, from spaghetti to painting’ and, as he noted, would signify to non-Italians, but not Italians (Barthes, 1997: 37, 48–49). 8 ‘Un grand et sombre attrait …. Elle devait bientôt mourir, afin de laisser une ombre sur le coeur de son amant et un éblouissement de jeunesse dans ses yeux. La Béatrice de Dante, la Laure de Pétrarque et tant d’autres n’étaient-elles pas de cette famille d’apparitions, qui brillent et qui meurent pour laisser, à ceux qui les ont vues les premiers, des rêves célestes et ineffaçables dans la mémoire?’ 9 Michele Santulli has made a prodigious effort to trace the histories of Italian models from the Ciociari region working in Rome, Paris, and London (Santulli, 2011). As the documentary evidence for illiterate immigrants is limited, the identification of particular works with specific models remains largely inconclusive. 10 Archives nationales, Paris, F/21/629–641: Administration des Beaux-Arts, École des Beaux-Arts, Dépenses (1850–1874). 11 ‘Les femmes ont des formes très classiques et très régulières jusque vers l’âge de vingt ans. Et c’est l’ensemble du corps, surtout, qui, chez elles, est attrayant’. 12 Archives nationales, Paris, AJ/53/171: École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs: Comptabilité Reçus de Paiement des Modèles; Bayard, 1927: 333–334. 13 ‘Des groups de marmots, frisés comme des enfants de choeur, jouent aux osselets et à la mourre. Le coude au corps, immobile au pied des arbres, des jeunes filles travaillent à des tricots voyants. Des vieilles, au cou de tortue, vont chercher de l’eau à la fontaine, la tête droite sous le poids des cruches. Puis ce sont les vierges de Bouguereau et d’Hebert, les matre dolorosa qui toutes ont un bambino pendu a la mamelle’.

Segatori and the immigrant model

14 ‘À l’ombre des arbres maigres, sur les bancs peints en vert, c’est une débauche de couleurs criardes, rouge, jaune, bleu, orangé mêlées en des accords bizarres et peu attrayants pour la vue’. 15 ‘D’horribles vieilles, ridées comme des pommes de reinette, sèches comme des cuirs … des jeunes, l’air insolent, … sales d’une saleté inimaginable, des brimbelles d’enfants, petits garçons et petites filles …. Tout ce monde jacasse en un langage bizarre, incompréhensible et qui déchire les oreilles … infestant tout le voisinage d’une vermine qu’ils traînent partout avec eux’. 16 Courtial, 2016; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie: Microfilm P127878, Papiers de Courbet [Documents sur Gustave Courbet réunis par Et. Moreau-Nélaton et Georges Riat, venus de Castagnary, Bernard Prost et la famille Courbet]. 17 Santulli asserts she posed for a number of additional works (Santulli, 2011: 93–102). 18 Juvigny dates the liaison to 1873, the year in which their son, Jean-Pierre Segatori was born (Juvigny, 2002: 38). 19 Musée des Yvelines, Saint-Cloud: Edouard Dantan, Esquisse de Catalogue Raisonné de l’Œuvre d’Édouard Dantan (1848–1897): Livre de raison: http://web museo.com/ws/musee-des-avelines/app/report/livre-de-raison-DANTAN.html. Accessed 1 January 2020. 20 ‘L’Italie y règne en maitresse, par le costume des servants comme par l’ensemble de l’ornementation’. 21 ‘Tout y est chinois’. 22 Paul Gauguin – whose relationship with Van Gogh had been difficult – reported in his semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional diary that the café was closed by the police because some notorious criminals had met there (Gauguin, 1923: 177–178). Other reports suggest that Agostina closed the restaurant when it began to attract a lesbian clientele (Wilson, 1991: 211–213). Van Gogh’s relationship with Segatori collapsed in part because of a conflict over the works he exhibited at the café (Jansen et al., 2009: letter 571). 23 I am grateful to the Van Gogh Museum for making available reproductions of works in their collection.

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Milza P. (1981) Français et Italiens à la fin du XIXe siècle, I: Aux Origines du Rapprochement Franco-Italien de 1900–1902 (Rome: École française de Rome). Milza, P. (1989) ‘L’Émigration Italienne a Paris jusqu’en 1945’, in A. Kaspi and A. Marès (eds), Le Paris des Étrangers depuis un Siècle (Paris: Imprimerie nationale), 55–71; notes pp. 373–375. Nail, T. (2019) ‘The Migrant Image’, in B. Dogromaci and B. Mersmann (eds), Handbook of Art and Global Migration: Theories, Practices, and Challenges (Berlin: De Gruyter), 54–69. Noiriel, G. (1996) The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). O’ Hagan, J. and C. Hellmanzik. (2008) ‘Clustering and Migration of Important Visual Artists: Broad Historical Evidence’, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 41:3 (Summer), 121–136. Oberthur, M. (1984) Cafés and Cabarets of Montmartre (Salt Lake City: G.M. Smith). Paulucci di Calboli, R. (1909) Larmes et Sourires de l’Émigration Italienne (Paris: F. Juven). Pawlawsli, G. de (1925) ‘Les Livres: Gustave Fuss-Amoré et Maurice des Ombiaux, Montparnasse’, Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires: Revue Populaire Paraissant le Dimanche, 2205 (27 September), 322. Perrot, P. (1996) Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Pinet, H. (1990) Rodin et ses Modèles: Le Portrait Photographié (Paris: Musée Rodin). Rosoli, G. (1985) ‘Italian Migration to European Countries from Political Unification to World War I’, in D. Hoerder (ed.), Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,), 95–116. Santulli, M. (2011) Modelle e Modelli Ciociari nell’arte Europea a Roma, Parigi, Londra nel 1800–1900 (Arpino: Edizioni Ciociaria Sconosciuta). Scott, J.W. (1986) ‘Statistical Representations of Work: The Politics of the Chamber of Commerce’s Statistique de l’Industrie à Paris’, in S. Kaplan and C. Koeppl (eds), Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 335–363. Seigel, J.E. (1987) Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (New York: Penguin). Seine, Préfecture, service de la Statistique Municipale (1887) Résultats Statistiques du Dénombrement de 1886 pour la Ville de Paris et le Département de la Seine, et Renseignements relatifs aux Dénombrements Antérieurs (Paris: G. Masson). Sieburth, R. (1984) ‘Same Difference: The French Physiologies, 1840–42’, in N.F. Cantor (ed.), Notebooks in Cultural Analysis: An Annual Review, Vol. 9 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 163–200. Spurling, H. (2011) ‘Matisse’s Italian Models’, in A. Dumas (ed.), Matisse and the Model (New York: Eykyn Maclean), 64–75. Stebbins, T.E. (1992) The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience: 1760–1914 (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts Boston). Stevens (1887) ‘L’Académie Colarossi’, Le Panthéon de l’Industrie: Journal Hebdomadaire Illustré (13 November), 380.

Segatori and the immigrant model

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Gardens, migrations, and memories: aesthetic and intercultural learning and the (re)construction of identity David Bell

Introduction

This chapter examines the ways that two Japanese-style gardens in Portland, Oregon, provide places for learning about aesthetics and between cultures, and for maintaining constructs of cultural identity. It builds on the belief that gardens can function as places of learning (like ‘classrooms’ outside schools), as museum collections and curatorial constructions of culturally significant knowledge, and as artworks. As learning sites, these Portland gardens function as places where visitors can enjoy aesthetically rich somatic experiences while learning about intercultural histories, and the narratives of Japanese American settlement and internal migrations during the twentieth century. As museums, they can mediate learning between cultures, and between the present and past (Tan, 2019: 2). As artworks, they can enrich culturally informed sensibilities, aesthetic knowledge, and culturally conditioned values. These gardens are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory (Boer, 2008; Assmann, 2011; Bublatzky, 2019), which sustain traces of the past that continue to condition appreciations of the present. Their amalgamations of aesthetic and intercultural learning opportunities echo the complex narratives of immigration, settlement, alienation, incarceration, and resettlement of Japanese and Japanese American citizens, and their challenges for conceptualising a sense of identity and belonging in ‘New World’ communities (Petersen, 2018: 10). This research builds on garden and related museum visitation, the literature on Japanese garden culture, garden aesthetics, Nikkei (Japanese American) history, and memory and learning, and on each garden’s online resources that support learning about these settings for school-based learners, visitors, and distance learners. It finds metaphors for migrations and intercultural tensions, and media informing the reconstruction and repositioning of cultural identities of Nikkei Japanese American citizens today (Petersen et al., 2019: 5) in the spatiotemporal experiences of movements and transitions, border-crossings and passages of Japanese-style gardens.

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Japanese migrations: from Issei to Nikkei

The first wave of migration of Japanese citizens to North America followed the dramatic reforms initiated in Japan after the Restoration of the Emperor Meiji in 1868. Issei, or ‘first generation’ immigrants arrived in Hawaii, and subsequently in port cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle in the United States, and Vancouver in Canada. By 1904 over 2,500 Japanese had settled in Oregon: ‘nine out of ten were men. Railroad builders, lumberers, farmers, entrepreneurs – Japanese settlers shared in the early boom years of the state. They were pioneers’ (Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, n.d.). After 1910 more women and families arrived. Immigration slowed as xenophobic hostilities were aimed at Chinese, and subsequently Japanese, citizens. The following decades saw an unfolding ‘history of exclusion’, in which Asian Americans occupied a ‘liminal position … both “official nationals” and “foreigners-within”’ (Yoon, 2012: 45) – situated between cultures ‘neither One nor the Other, but something else besides, inbetween’ (Bhabha, 2012: 314). The Federal Immigration Law of 1924 almost completely stemmed the immigration of Japanese to the United States. By the 1930s the Portland Nihonmachi ‘Japantown’ was established between Northwest Broadway and the Williamette River. A second Japantown developed in Southwest Portland. Nihonmachi’s cluster of family-owned businesses, including hotels, laundries, and restaurants, nurtured the development of close social bonds and a sense of a Japanese American cultural identity. The first generation of Americanborn children were known as Nisei, the following generation as Sansei. Today, the term Nikkei refers to Japanese emigrants, mainly people of Japanese American descent living in the United States or Canada – communities still culturally located in the ambiguous interstitial spaces between difference and belonging. A second wave of ‘internal migrations’ occurred through the experiences of alienation, internment, and resettlement of Japanese and Japanese American citizens during and after the Second World War. Prejudices sustained through the 1920s and 1930s intensified from the outbreak of the war. Escalating tensions and fear of a Japanese ‘fifth column’ generated increasing support for the forced evacuation of Japanese citizens. The War Department supported the total expulsion of ‘all people of Japanese descent living in a  security zone that eventually included all of California, Oregon, Washington, and a portion of western Arizona’ – almost 120,000 citizens (Wollenberg, 2012: 30). Events came to a head after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7  December 1941. The first roundups began quietly within 48 hours of the attack (Frail, 2017). On 19 February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued ‘Executive Order 9066’ for the ‘relocation’ of Japanese and Japanese

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American citizens from the Pacific coast to ‘desolate internment camps’ (Yoon, 2012: 46). General Eisenhower approved the construction of ten ‘military secured camps’ (Wollenberg, 2012: 32). With only what they could carry, Japanese citizens were moved into ‘assembly centers’ at racetracks and fairgrounds, then ‘shipped to ten “relocation centers”, primitive camps built in the remote landscapes of the interior West and Arkansas’ (Frail, 2017). Frail notes there was no parallel ‘incarceration of US residents who traced their ancestry to Germany or Italy’. Ironically, in 1943 the War Department began planning the recruitment of internees into service in the armed forces. Young people were administered a ‘Selective Service’ questionnaire, asking them to indicate their willingness to serve in US forces, and to swear allegiance to the United States of America. ‘No-no boys’, those who entered a cross to both questions, were imprisoned (Yoon, 2012: 46). Internal prejudice intensified: Home Front Commandos sponsored a ‘Slap the Jap’ campaign, urging supporters to ‘keep the Japan rats out of your hair’ (Wollenberg, 2012: 40). In the words of one State Governor ‘If you bring the Japanese to my state, I promise they will be hanging from every tree’; and from the Governor of Idaho: ‘the Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats’ (Wollenberg, 2012: 32). This feeling extended to the armed forces: ‘While their families were regarded as “enemy aliens”, over 33,000 Nisei served in the US Armed Forces’ (Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, n.d.). One internee volunteer felt he was ‘fighting two battles instead of one – against the Axis and against intolerance among my fellow Americans … [H]e and his brother faced so much hostility that they were “the loneliest two soldiers in the army”’ (Wollenberg, 2012: 45). The first resettlements began in late 1944, and continued through 1945, to the closure of Lake Tule camp in 1946. ‘Denied a place as citizens’ in the camps (Yoon, 2012: 47), internees returned home to anti-Japanese sentiment, harassment and violence (Wollenberg, 2012: 51). After release, they found themselves caught between an instinct to reclaim their places of the past, and the post-war impetus to integration and participation in the middleclass ‘American Dream’ of home ownership, national belonging, and sharing ‘the good life’. Instead, ‘returned internees were in urgent need of an act of re-membering against dis-membering by reconfiguring their lives’ as they struggled to reconstruct their sense of a culturally distinct identity as Japanese Americans within a climate of post-war America conformism tempered by a history of ‘Asian American experiences of exclusion’ (Yoon, 2012: 47, emphasis in original). In one sense, the subsequent history of Nikkei citizens has been little short of heroic: many have responded to the opportunities for education, employment, and community participation, even to the highest levels of American administration, afforded during the growth decades that followed the war. Within these narratives of success, however, lies the subtext of a community challenged to reconstruct some sense of identity and

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cohesion, a ‘desire to reclaim a place of their own’ (Yoon, 2012: 47) amidst a climate of sustained post-war hostility and exclusion. The sense of dispossession, alienation, and ‘the injustice of Japanese American internment camps resonates strongly to this day’ (Frail, 2017). For today’s communities, the constructions of Japanese-style gardens in Portland (and elsewhere) provide clearly defined and culturally loaded spaces within which they can find objects and rediscover the sensibilities that can inform some resolution and sense of location between the ‘interstitial … claims of the past and the needs of the present’ (Bhabha, 2012: 314). The sustained spatial and temporal transitions (Hurd et al., 2017: 1) of the 1942–1949 Nikkei migrations challenge notions of border crossings as voluntary, one-way, or transnational phenomena. These were internal interventions, compulsory dislocations in the lives of American citizens of Japanese heritage. Their experiences, imposed in a climate of intense international and domestic crisis (Menjívar et al., 2019), were complex and traumatic. The forced transitions displaced Nikkei citizens: from urban to rural residence; freedom to incarceration; economic independence to dispossession; family units to complex communities; and from citizen to alien status. Postinternship transitions were no less confusing. These border transitions were relocated, not back to Nihonmachi or South-West Portland, but to different worlds of displaced residence, social alienation, and changes in education, employment, class, and social standing in the ‘no place in particular’ of the new suburbs (Yoon, 2012: 45). These layered experiences of family, community, cultural, and economic instability characterised appreciations of ‘border-crossings’ not as clearly framed transitions, but as sustained ‘mobilizations’ (DiMaggio and Fernández-Kelly, 2010: 2). These were prolonged, multi-dimensional ‘processes’ (Wilson and Donnan, 2012: 13), which drove culturally and emotionally disorienting experiences of change. Crisis experiences like these demand holistic, multi-dimensional explanations to understand ‘the social forces that shape human mobility’ (Menjívar et al., 2019: 15). Their complexities require more fluid and comprehensive appreciations of transition in which ‘a border is not so much an object or a material artefact as a belief, an imagination that creates and shapes the world’ (Houtumn et al., 2005: 3). The Nikkei imaginary, and their sense of identity, belonging and belief, were profoundly changed (Petersen et al., 2019: 11). Gardens as artworks

Gardens can assume the status of artworks because they are aesthetically satisfying and the products of human intention and effort (Beardsley, 1983: 306). They achieve this aesthetic object status because ‘they are meaningful and their form is not merely pleasant, but the means by which meaning is

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discovered’ (Miller, 1988: 267). Gardens can be considered to be artworks because they share two necessary characteristics: they perform functions of providing pleasure and of sustaining culturally significant concepts and motifs (Davies, 1991: 27), and they embody in their forms the procedures through which they have been created (and can be experienced) according to conventional rules and processes (Davies, 1991: 30). In particular, Miller cites the capacities of gardens for ‘the creation’ of spatiotemporally experienced ‘virtual worlds’ (Miller, 1988: 279). Their pleasures and significance can be enjoyed through the somatic experience of ‘wandering’ or ‘travelling’ that Chinese literati referred to as you (Han, 2012: 297). In their ‘playful physical movement’ through the garden, ‘wanderers’ might even achieve a sense of ‘transcendental spiritual freedom’ (Han, 2012: 299). In the psycho-physical experience of moving through these ‘virtual worlds’ in Portland, visitors can experience something of a metaphoric echo of the migratory transitions of Issei immigrants and Nikkei citizens in North America as they encounter culturally significant motifs, practices, and sensibilities of Japanese origin. Miller and Han both focus on the capacities of embodied, sensory experience as non-textual media of meaning-making and pleasurable experience. One dimension of Miller’s notion of the concept of the ‘virtual worlds’ of gardens as media and ‘means by which meaning is discovered’ is their capacities for metaphor. In Japanese, or Japanese-style, gardens in particular, this manifests in the construction of each garden, and each garden aspect, as conceptual exercises in the art of ‘contrived naturalism’. Gardens guide their visitors through sequences of metaphoric miegakure, ‘seen-hidden’ views of ‘landscape’ vistas. For Japanese garden visitors, immersive encounters in these ‘natural worlds’ of garden settings can evoke an aesthetic sensibility, a fuzei feeling, or sentiment of empathy with the moving atmosphere of nature. More significantly, however, for Nikkei Japanese American communities, Japanese-style gardens embrace culturally significant metaphoric iconographies (Bruneau, 2010: 38) of passages, borders, and border transitions. Roji (literally, ‘dewy ground’) pathways (see Figure 15.2), or tobi-ishi stepping stones (see Figure 15.3) in gardens suggest notions of passage or movement. Streams, clay and stone walls, and fences, even fragile kekkai hooped cane frames, offer metaphors for borders. Mon gateways (see Figure 15.2) and  engetsu ‘half-moon bridge’, or yatsuhashi ‘eight-planked bridge’ wetland crossings provide metaphors for crossings or transitions. In the Portland Japanese Garden, those transitions guide visitors’ spatiotemporal passage from one kind of garden to another, or in a broader metaphorical sense,  through the experience of moving from one ‘world’ into another. A  single garden arrangement may act as a metaphor for a sequence of

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border-crossing transitions from one psycho-somatic state to another (see Figure 15.3). The chaniwa tea garden (sometimes itself referred to as a roji) in Portland thus guides visitors through a sequence of transitions, first, away from the main garden pathway, then through a verdant ‘outer garden’ setting, and to a place of rest in a machiai shaded arbour; thence through a modest wicket gate into an ‘inner garden’, and along an irregular steppingstone path to a stone water basin. The intense concentration of walking on broken stones and the self-purification with water empties their minds of mundane matters as they prepare for a further transition, through a low, small hatch, into a mugen ‘no-mind’ state within the humble ‘new world’ of the chashitsu tea room interior. Art works of migration or diaspora can find locations ‘between traditional cultural forms [and the] adoption of host-country genres [in] hybrid forms, reworking traditional ones to express new realities and inflecting host-country styles [and] the shared migrant experience’ (DiMaggio and Fernández-Kelly, 2010: 2). Gardens like the Portland Japanese Garden are the products of conceptual, aesthetic, and culturally conditioned ‘border crossings’ between different times and different worlds. Most North American Japanese-style gardens are designed (often by Japanese garden designers) around precedents from Edo period (1603–1868) Japan, transplanted to settings in mid-twentieth-century America. Most are ‘hybrid’ phenomena, melding the iconographies, constructs, and even sensibilities of those eighteenth-century Japanese precedents with the landscapes and ecosystems of their new North American ‘host’ locations. These are evident in Portland in their adoptions of local flora – spruce, for example, or aspens, interspersed with plantings of pines, maples, and mosses, many imported from Japan. They juxtapose immersive experiences in shanshui ‘mountain-river’ dry stone gardens or the delicate musical play of water and stone with shakkei, ‘borrowed views’ through clusters of maple or firs, into the Washington Park forests, or across the city, and to Mount Hood in the distance (see Figure 15.1). In one sense this material and conceptual hybrid status reflects habits of ecological practicality. In another, it demonstrates a sincere desire for visitors to enjoy experiences as close as possible to those of a Tokyo, Nara, or Kyoto garden today. These syntheses are shaped as much by the meetings of different communities as by border-crossings between ecosystems. As hybrid constructs and as iconographic metaphors of passage and transit (Bruneau, 2010: 38), gardens like these today maintain culturally  charged sensibilities significant for Japanese, American, or tourist visitors alike. Ironically, perhaps, they echo  precedent hybrid constructs in the earliest adoptions of  aesthetic sensibilities and garden conventions of Chinese origin into early garden designs in late medieval Japan.

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Gardens as learning settings, museums, and lieux de mémoire

Gardens like the Portland Japanese Garden can function as ‘classroom’ spaces for informal learning (Portland Japanese Garden, n.d.). Their settings can inform learning in the sciences, social sciences, or the arts. These experiences can include intercultural or aesthetically rich learning. Experiences of learning outside the school may cultivate socio-constructivist learning; enjoyable sensory experiences in gardens also favour positive learning dispositions, engagements, and conditions ripe for aesthetic attention. These kinds of gardens can inform transcultural, border-crossing understandings through their museum status as accessible spaces for the conservation, research, and communication of ‘the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment’ (International Council of Museums, n.d.). Gardens often also perform museum collection roles. Just as Kew Gardens collects international plant species, Portland Japanese Garden ‘collects’, or reconstructs, different garden types or styles (albeit adopting North American flora) within its broader design. Garden settings and experiences, like those of museums, can also be curated to clarify the significance of their collections, and inform visitor learning experiences. ‘Living museum’ gardens (Fehr, 2015: 166) can make important contributions to the way communities construct their frameworks of cultural identity, or learn about the culturally constructed worlds of others. There are many Japanese-style gardens in North America (Brown, 2017). Some, like that at Huntingdon, are privately initiated (Li, 2013). Many more are community projects, ‘Friendship Gardens’ conceived in the decades following the Second World War. They provide places where the public can enjoy the pleasures of distraction and contemplation. They are also intended as sites of post-war reparation of relationships between the United States and  Japan, though their reconstructions of goodwill during the 1950s and 1960s seem more focused on international relations than on local Nikkei communities. This reconstructive process has been realised through the forging of social relationships, in exchanges of artistic or technological learning, in the diplomatic and cultural exchange of sister-city arrangements, and through public events that cultivate knowledge of the arts and aesthetic dispositions of Japan. These gardens are experienced through the movement of strolling, and the sensory enjoyment of enlivening plays of light and shade, their gentle, sometimes surprising, revelations of diverse landscape views, and their carefully contrived aspects on the natural world. Visitors can learn about culturally conditioned attitudes to nature by experiencing them first-hand.

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Methodology

This selective case study research employs an ethnographic methodology that draws on theoretical concepts of the roles that material artifacts of memory play in the construction of cultural identity and intercultural understandings (Shirane, 1998; Boer, 2008; Assmann, 2011; Bublatsky, 2019). It emerges from a 2018 abductive inferential study exploring how Chinese- and Japanese-style gardens foster aesthetic and intercultural learning experiences. The study embraced public gardens in Montreal, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Vancouver, Victoria in Canada, and in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco in the United States of America. Data were recorded during guided and self-guided garden visits, in unstructured interviews, and some semi-structured written interview correspondence with garden educators or managers. They were contextualised in relation to historical narratives, photographic documents, and media supporting public education in these institutions. In each instance, the garden administration – and the enthusiasm and generosity of their educators  – confirmed their commitments to fostering sensoryaesthetic experiences of their gardens. Their tour narratives informed visitor appreciations of the histories of the conception, development, maintenance, and activities of their communities today that were consistent with their agendas of enhancing intercultural understandings. In Portland – and in Nitobe Garden in Vancouver, the Nikkei Community Centre in Burnaby, or the Japanese-style gardens in Lethbridge or Seattle – these garden experiences have raised a sense of intercultural consciousness. They have done this by constructing accessible and convincing engagements with motifs and settings, sensory and physical experiences of places of transcultural significance, and supported these experiences by providing rich educational programmes. In conjunction with other linked cultural experiences within each community, they reveal poignant insights into how gardens can sustain aesthetic and historical memories through time, and between cultures, and inform processes of the reconstruction of social cohesion and identity in displaced communities (Bublatzky, 2019: 281). Gardens as lieux de mémoire: the Japanese American Historical Plaza

The migrations and border crossings of the incarceration years are commemorated today in cultural institutions like the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, and in the Japanese American Historical Plaza garden – public projects initiated and developed by twenty-first-century Nikkei communities. Art works like the Plaza garden themselves constitute ‘migrated’ aesthetic experiences and sensibilities: they draw on aesthetic ‘symbols and points of view’ (DiMaggio and Fernández-Kelly, 2010: 7) learned from earlier generations,

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and rooted in the art conventions and tastes of Japan’s Edo and Meiji period (1868–1912) to sustain those sensibilities of earlier eras for new generations (Dogramaci, 2019: 33). Such public art ‘monuments’ remember the events of the past, and simultaneously affirm the identities of today’s Nikkei through the cultural memories of their parents and forbears. The Japanese American Historical Plaza is located in Portland, in a narrow common squeezed between the old Nihonmachi district and the Williamette River. The Plaza is designed in the form of an expansive Japanese-style garden. It was opened in August 2009 ‘to raise greater public awareness about the diversity of cultural experiences in America’ (Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, n.d.). In one sense, its juxtapositions of waterway, grass, carefully positioned rocks, and avenue of sakura cherry blossom trees, its changing plays of light through trees and buildings, and webs of pathways look back to the strolling gardens of the Kamakura period (1185–1333) for precedence. In others, it is decidedly contemporary. This public space is open to all, both a place of social gathering, and a more liminal field of passage. This liminality echoes the lived experiences of Nikkei immigration, early themes of arrival and settlement in this area, conditional integration into the commercial, educational, and social institutions of North America, and the subsequent alienation, expulsion from their urban homes, and eventual resettlement and reconstruction of their identities as Japanese American citizens. Visitors are reminded of these histories as they move through the transitions between the garden’s pictorial representations, texts, and documentary commentaries of the historical migrations of Issei and Nikkei communities. The somatic experiences of entering and wandering through this garden are striking. In contrast to the shadowed tramway and business area just metres away, the garden is light and airy, open to the elements. It is a busy social world, accommodating families, commuters, and tourists. Entering from the urban side of the garden, visitors walk along a broad paved pathway, between two bronze pillars. The bas-relief surfaces on each cylinder depict images of people, old and young, alone and in family groups: figures in transit. The pillars represent mon, ‘gates’, or chūmon ‘gateless gates’ – emblems of passage from one world to another. Here, this passage from an urban to a ‘natural’ world embraces the memorial media of granite and bronze to share inscriptions of the past, of the arrivals of Japanese immigrants, of the motifs of Japanese cultural values. These values can underpin constructions of a new sense of Japanese American identity, which can inform transitions through the tangible barriers to assimilation experienced even by fourth generation Nikkei citizens. The portraits are of Japanese American citizens, pictured as they are transported to the isolated camps in which most will spend the next three to four years of their lives, or as soldiers in action. As visitors pass between these solid columns, they move towards three huge granite boulders.

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Ten place names are engraved on the face of one standing rock: Gila, Granada, Heart Mountain, Jerome, Manzanar, Minidoka, Poston, Rohwer, Topaz, and Tule Lake. These are the ten concentration camps in which the 120,000 citizens were incarcerated. Spreading left and right along the banks below overhanging branches of sakura, a reminder of the impermanence of things, are smaller stones and bronze plaques – emblems of permanence. One bronze plate cites the inalienable promise of freedom for all granted by the American Bill of Rights. The verses engraved on the others were written by camp survivors Hisako Saito, Lawson Inada, Masaki Kinoshita, and Shizue Iwatsuki. Walking northward along this avenue of poetic ‘traces of dreams’ (Shirane, 1998) visitors can track the narrative of Oregon’s Nikkei alienation during the Second World War. The early verses are optimistic, revealing pre-war Japanese immigrants’ aspirations to integration and security: ‘Sure, I go to school/Same as you/I’m an American’. Towards the centre of this avenue, a physical break in this walk  allows visitors to reflect on that time of loss and pain, dispossession and displacement. The incised verses reveal the harsh experiences of wartime incarceration: ‘Rounded up/In the sweltering yard/Unable to endure any longer/Standing in line/Some collapse’, before moving to words of resettlement and recovery. In the second to last stone, standing against a shakkei ‘borrowed scenery’ backdrop of the Williamette and modern Portland, they reveal some sense of recovery, reconstruction of identity, and even optimism: ‘With new hope/We build new lives/Why complain when it rains?/This is what it means to be free’ (see Figure 15.1). A final plaque carries the text of the 1988 Congress letter of apology to Nikkei communities. The garden’s poetic walk is a lieux de mémoire that mediates visitors’ cognitive and emotional passage through the history of Japanese immigration to America, and through the evolving identities of Issei pioneers, through Nisei and Sansei, to Nikkei. For today’s Nikkei citizens, and for the many Americans passing through the park every day, it offers an ironic juxtaposition of the promise of justice and belonging against histories of alienation and dispossession. It also provides evidence of an astonishing recovery and reconstruction of identity and security, as a positive affirmation of ‘ideals that are among the highest of the nation’ (Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, n.d.). Though very much a statement of the present, this construction is also a reclamation of aesthetic and culturally significant tropes of the past. Its compositions of granite wall borders, earth mounds, flowing water (the Williamette – where the Issei pioneers had arrived in Portland), and sakura echo the conventional elements of stone, water, and plant that have long underpinned garden design in Japan. Stone has a particular significance here. Stones are the ‘bones of the garden’ (Portland Japanese Garden, n.d.).

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David Bell (2018) Shakkei, photograph of ‘borrowed views’ to the Willamette River.

15.1

The arrangement of a central standing stone surrounded by ‘acolyte’ stones in the Nikkei garden echoes the anthropomorphic arrangements of the karesansui dry stone garden in the Portland Japanese Garden. In Shintō animist traditions, go-shintai and tōrai-shintai rocks have been thought of as the abodes of kami sacred spirits (Walker, 2017: 13), and Chinese-sourced geomantic principles for the arrangements of stones inform the design of this layout. For centuries, Japanese garden design has been conditioned by conventional practices for ‘the art of setting stones’ (Takei and Keane, 2008: 3) formulated in Sakutei-ki (Notes on Garden Making) compiled by the courtier Tachibana no Tashitsuna (1028–1094; Addiss et al., 2006: 58). Shintō iwakura ‘spirit rocks’ and iwasaka ‘seat rocks’ or ‘boundary rocks’ delineate sacred spaces (Walker, 2017: 12) and stone Jizō figures mark liminal spiritual spaces between life and death (Glassman, 2012: 6). These qualities are echoed in the liminality of Japanese American notions of identity and ‘home’ during the concentration camp years, and during their subsequent period of re-integration into new North American locations. The Nikkei garden embraces other conventional elements of Japanese garden design. It is a hira-niwa ‘flat’ or ‘level garden’, conceived in the tradition of the kaiyū-shiki-teien ‘excursion style garden’ stroll garden (Deane, n.d.). Its roji pathways embody a concept of shugyō, or ‘way’, and ‘set out both

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a physical journey and a poetic way of seeing’ (Walker, 2017: 30). Where the rocks reflect the timelessness of ancient structures, the experience of moving through the passage of gradually unfolding narratives suggests the sensation and passage of time experienced in those acts of journeying and seeing. The constant flow of waters of the Williamette, and the passage of cyclists, joggers, and picnickers complement these notions of transition, journeying, and temporality. In Japanese traditions, again, those temporal qualities are embodied in the unfolding, blooming, and eventual fall of the sakura cherry blossom as an emblem of the rich potentials, but inevitable impermanence of beauty and life. The amalgam of these components embodies the in-yō (yin-yang) dualities of stillness and movement, permanence and transience, and past and present of Nikkei status in the Oregon communities. Despite the bustle of human presence flowing through and around it, the Nikkei garden manifests a poignant sense of melancholy, encouraging contemplative reflection on the nature of beauty, of belonging and identity, and on the precarious status of human relationships. More optimistically, it reminds visitors that ‘although the period of forced removal and incarceration is painful to remember, a growing number of Americans have come forward to ensure that important lessons learned from the past are not forgotten, and that the mistakes that weakened the Constitution and the entire nation are not repeated’ (Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, n.d.). Though it draws on conventions of the private gardens of earlier eras, the public setting and openness of the Nikkei garden thus offer tangible expressions of a mature sense of community cohesion and social inclusion (Petersen et al., 2019: 31). Like the small Nikkei Cultural Centre garden in Burnaby, Vancouver, its reassertion of the cultural legacies, iconographies, and aesthetic sources of the past establishes a medium through which the most recent generation of Nikkei have been able to ‘recompose cultural legacies’ of their forbears as a means to ‘reclaim honour’ and a sense of place in a public articulation of ‘personal and collective identity [and] pride’ (DiMaggio and Fernández-Kelly, 2010: 8). Aesthetic and intercultural learning: lessons from the Portland Japanese Garden

While the Nikkei Plaza sustains significant memories of traumatic pasts and signals positive potentials for the future, the Portland Japanese Garden in the western hills of Washington Park offers a medium through which Nikkei can reclaim memories of their distant Japanese heritage to inform their own  constructions of difference and identity. The Portland Japanese Garden was conceived in the late 1950s, and formally opened in 1967. It is a ‘Friendship Garden’, dedicated to ‘providing the citizens of Portland with a garden of great beauty and serenity, while forging a healing connection to Japan on the heels of World War II. … Needing no translation, an American

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could experience firsthand Japanese ideals and values, communicated simply through nature’ (Heartquist, n.d.). Central to that ‘healing’ process, though unspecified in this brief, was understanding the history of Japanese migrations to, and within, America, and the social, cultural, and spiritual recovery of Oregon’s Nikkei Japanese American community. The garden was designed by Professor Tono Takuma of Tokyo Agricultural University. His intention was to represent different historical developments in Japanese garden architecture (Heartquist, n.d.). Unusually, the Portland concept envisaged five different Japanese garden styles spread through a 5.5-acre park setting – today it embraces eight gardens in an expanded 12-acre space. As the garden has evolved, its architecture has been enriched with the addition of the Japanese constructed Kashintei Tea House (1968), the Pavilion Gallery exhibition space, and, from 2017, a new three-building Cultural Village. Each addition has been absorbed into the fabric of garden arrangements to complement spatial experiences, frame views into the gardens, and provide settings for informal learning, conferences, and administration. The garden has received acclaim ‘by a number of visiting Japanese dignitaries as one of the most beautiful and authentic Japanese gardens in the world outside of the island nation, as well as one of the foremost Japanese cultural organisations in North America’ (Heartquist, n.d.). As a construction of a ‘Japan outside of Japan’, a place for learning and consular intercourse, the garden has emerged as a site of soft-power diplomacy informing enhanced cross-cultural understandings in Oregon communities. Experiencing the Portland Japanese Garden

Moving through the Portland Japanese Garden, visitors experience complex sensory, spatial, and temporal ‘journeys’ through networks of passages and resting-places, borders, and border crossings. In doing so, each negotiates their own excursions around, or across, ‘not only the borders themselves, but the practices, memories, and narratives that differentiate and define the timespaces they enclose’ (Hurd et al., 2017: 1). For Japanese and non-Japanese visitors alike, the garden offers culturally laden encounters with emblems of Japanese precedent – stone lanterns, timber, stone and kekkai bamboo boundaries, stepping stone pathways, weathered timber mon or machiai waiting arbours. The unfolding revelations of miegakure ‘seen/hidden’ plays of concealed and unfolding aspects guide encounters with carefully contrived constructions of ‘natural’ views. The sensory encounters developing through visitor’s spatial and temporal psycho-physical movement through these gardens, their multi-sensory experiences of sounds, colours, and textures, light and shade, warm and cool, open and closed spaces, inform aesthetic experiences in the garden (see Figure 15.2). That aesthetic engagement can nurture

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David Bell (2018) Mon and Chūmon Gates, and Roji, photograph of pathway networks.

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an awareness and a sense of empathy for the cultural habits and contemplative sensibilities of Japanese feelings towards nature. The overwhelming experience is a sense of passage, or transition, from one world into another, which echoes the margin-crossing transitions of Issei and Nikkei communities since the nineteenth century. Thus, as they arrive, visitors climb upwards, leaving the West Coast American world below, and moving into the serene Japanese world of the garden complex above. The zigzagging roji of the ‘Entry Garden’ guides them up past stone borders, markers, and lanterns, through terraces over rock gardens, tumbling water gardens, and rich green plantings. Each turn affords a different view, down into a waterfall, out over a city vista, across into verdant forests, or upward to their destination. In the chisen kaiyu shiki teien ‘strolling pond garden’ complex of streams, ponds, and winding paths, they wander through unfolding transitions, through mon and roji, a tsubo-niwa ‘courtyard garden’, past bonsai (literally: ‘planted in a container’) miniature landscapes, through forest paths and open glades. As they ‘travel’, they encounter a cha-niwa tea garden, zoki no niwa ‘natural garden’, and the intimate, cloistered space of the karesansui ‘dry landscape garden’. Some features – the ‘upper and lower ponds’, ‘heavenly falls’, shakkei ‘borrowed scenery’ aspects, or the hira-niwa ‘flat garden’ and its viewing platform invite visitors to pause, contemplate the views. Others, the roji garden path, a striking ‘moon bridge’, or a humble yatsuhashi ‘eight-plank-bridge’ are emphatically sites of transit, passages from one garden world to another. The gardens invite the rich sensory experiences of plays of light and shrouded shadow, the warmth of sunlight and cool stillness of shade, aromas of wet foliage and resin, and sounds of the breeze rustling the foliage above, moss-muffled quiet, and the music of dancing waters below. These sensory experiences complement encounters with enduring emblems of aesthetic significance: the intimate wabi ‘artlessness’ or ‘plainness’, and sabi patina of age of the cha-niwa and its offer of temporary departure from the mundane world, or numinous suggestions of the sensibility of yugen ‘depth and mystery’ in the dark hollows of forest pathways (see Figure 15.3). The Portland Japanese Garden is a place of contemplative pleasures. Strolling, pausing, listening, seeing, or talking in the garden afford sensory insights, introducing visitors to Japanese garden conventions and fuzei aesthetic sensitivities to the charm and beauty of nature. The pleasure of this physical, non-verbal learning enhances a sense of empathy for the tropes of Japanese cultural heritage. Non-Japanese can learn something of the habits of Japanese culture from earlier eras, while Nikkei can reconstruct the memories of the values of their Japanese forbears who settled in America – memories which informed their changing sense of identity as they struggled to find a place for themselves in Oregon. At the garden’s International Japanese

Gardens, migrations, and memories

David Bell (2018) Wabi, Sabi, Chaniwa, Roji, photograph. 

Garden Training Centre, in its extensive website resources, or in its rich programme of public exhibitions and events, both Nikkei and other visitors can enhance their appreciations of the Japanese cultural contexts for these gardens. They might learn of historical precedents for strolling gardens, the roots of karesansui dry stone garden design, the aesthetic principle of yohaku-no-bi, ‘beauty of blank space’, or allusions to tales of the Buddha (Portland Japanese Garden, n.d.). Nikkei visitors may find echoes of their distant literary heritage in the yatsuhashi eight-plank bridge, of the nostalgic verse-writings of Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise), when the exiled Heian court Prince Ariwara no Narihara (825–880) encounters an expanse of iris, intersected by a yatsuhashi bridge. Struck by loneliness he composes a waka poem for his distant lover in which the first characters of each line spell out the word kakitsubata, or iris. They may remember ‘a floating bridge of dreams’ in Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh-century novel Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji), and its mitate allusions to transitions between consciousness and dream, or corporeal and spiritual states (Shikibu, 1977: 1081). The shards of memories from almost forgotten pasts conveyed through these moments echo poignant sensibilities of distance, loneliness, and loss, and the aesthetic notion of mono no aware – a sensitivity to the sadness of things. They enrich the consciousness of heritage so central to the reconstruction of identity for post-war Nikkei communities. The garden offers a feast of experiences and resources supporting learning of Japanese arts and culture. It hosts Japanese festivals (O-shogatsu New Year,

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or Kodomo-no-hi Children’s Day); cultural demonstrations (ikebana flower arrangement, or chanoyu tea ceremony); and exhibitions (Gion Matsuri: The World’s Oldest Urban Festival; Manga Hokusai Manga). Online visitors can enjoy a ‘virtual tour’, or learn about mitate ‘to see with new eyes’ allusion, ‘Living in Harmony with Nature’, or the beauty of stones. The Haiku Alive! educational programme offers teacher support resources with lesson plans focusing on ‘Garden Sense: Exploring the Five Senses’, ‘Haiku: Poetry in the Garden’, or ‘Stones: The Bones of the Garden’ (Portland Japanese Garden, n.d.). The genesis of the Portland Japanese Garden during the Cold War years was informed by a charter of commitment to healing the wounds of the past and enhancing international relations and peace: ‘Born out of a hope that the experience of peace can contribute to a long-lasting peace. Born out of a belief in the power of cultural exchange’ (Portland Japanese Garden, n.d.). That agenda for the cultivation of ‘mutual respect and harmony with all connected communities’ emerged from the painful experiences of the Second World War, but only implicitly acknowledges the Japanese migrations to West Coast America between 1868 and 1924, and the dispossession, incarceration, and resettlement of Japanese Americans during and after the war. The close proximity in Washington Park of The Oregon Holocaust Memorial (Oregon Holocaust Memorial, n.d.) and The Garden of Solace for Oregon’s Viet Nam Veterans (Wallace, n.d.) remind us of the roles of gardens as memorial sites, places of contemplation, learning, or reconciliation, and metaphors for recovery and growth. They provide settings for remembering traumatic experiences, and peaceful surroundings for nurturing communities through the processes of recovery. For Nikkei, this synthesis of sensory-aesthetic and cognitive experience provided the grist with which they could re-establish their connections with their cultural roots in the customary practices, values, and sensibilities of Japan (Bublatzky, 2019: 282). Ironically, though in a positive sense, this more informed position still finds Nikkei ambiguously situated within a ‘third space’ interstice (Bhabha, 2012: 310). If their differences seem more clearly posited by others, they now seem more empowered to manage a positive assertion of their own sense of difference, to ‘initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining [their place in] the idea of society itself’ (Bhabha, 2012: 2). Conclusion

In their different ways, the Japanese American Historical Plaza and the Portland Japanese Garden have brought great pleasure and rich learning experiences to local communities and tourists alike. These gardens both embody concepts migrated in space and time from those of earlier Japanese

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origin (DiMaggio and Fernández-Kelly, 2010: 2) in their adoptions of transnationally and transculturally transposed conventions of Japanese garden design and their constructions of stone, water, light, and vegetation (Hurd et al., 2017: 1). Each garden can thus offer visitors something of a shakkei, ‘borrowed view’, into the worlds of other cultural contexts of both Japanese and Japanese American cultural histories. These gardens maintain a deeper cultural significance for Nikkei citizens, however. They provide fertile lieux de mémoire, culturally laden touchstones against which Nikkei can gauge their own evolving sense of identity against their troubled histories and long search for ‘a place of belonging in the space between cultures’ (Fehr, 2015: 165). They are sites through which Nikkei today can mediate their appreciations of their dual cultural heritage in America to inform the ways they position themselves in their present, and prepare for their futures (Petersen, 2018: 10). They inform these mediations through acts of ‘transplanting’, or bringing the culturally significant motifs of Japanese custom to the Portland Garden, by maintaining documentary histories of change in the Nikkei garden, and by providing educational programmes to support Nikkei and public appreciations of difficult histories. Each garden has been effective in different ways, but their successes have depended on four key factors. First both gardens offer the psycho-physical experience of garden wandering – a spatiotemporal experience that need not require translation (Heartquist, n.d.). These gardens provide sites of pleasurable aesthetic experience where visitors can encounter the conventional constructs of Japanese garden culture in the synergies of light, water, stone, and plants. They engage all five senses, as visitors experience their settings somatically, moving, pausing, listening, smelling, seeing, touching, and feeling their way through each garden. Interactive sensory learning experiences can enhance tolerant and empathetic learning exchanges (Bell, 2017: 785). Turner cites Jay Winter’s observation that ‘memorials are not simply looked at; interaction is often more dynamic. Touching … is an important part of the ritual’ of remembering, interpreting, responding to and sharing the insights that memorial objects can evoke (Turner, 2015: 92). Through sensory experiences visitors may notice a heightened sensitivity to the passages of time, of daily cycles of sun, breeze, light, and shadow, of the seasonal cycles of fecundity, growth, withering, and decay, and of the inevitable passage of time in human relations. For informed visitors, or those who care to research beyond the resources of the gardens themselves, these moments of awareness may slowly reveal deeper Japanese sensibilities – a sense of yugen, ‘depth and mystery’, in the darkest recesses and fissures of the landscape, a wabi appreciation of humble simplicity, and the sabi dignity of age and decay in teahouses and their gardens, and in the experience of mono no aware pathos and its allusions to the ephemerality of their own fragile place within the cycles of nature.

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Second, both gardens offer informal informative learning experiences. The festival activities, workshops, exhibitions, and performances at the Portland Garden, for example, foster enjoyable social learning. Both gardens offer carefully tailored educational tour experiences, and both support this, or any distance learning, with an accessible and comprehensive range of age specific and curriculum linked teaching and learning resources available through their websites. Positive learning experiences can inform empathetic appreciations of, and soft-power intercourse between, communities of difference. Third, the design and iconographic conventions of each garden’s roots in culturally significant traditions, and visitor consciousness of the exceptionality of their settings, establish tangible loci for remembering through a sense of ‘the materiality of mourning, memory and memorialization, with an emphasis on how the body was used to create a humanistic aesthetics of remembrance and reconstruction’ (Turner, 2015: 73). Though the significance of each garden is open to individual or collegially constructed responses and interpretations, their ambiguous liminal locations – both as spatiotemporal phenomena characterised by constant change and regeneration and as cultural constructs of great durability – accommodate visitor mediation through their discourse with a ‘poetics of permanence’ (Turner, 2015: 94). Fourth, these gardens have been generated by their own communities of remembering and understanding (Petersen et al., 2019: 5). The Japanese American Historical Plaza was ‘conceived and guided’ by the Oregon Nikkei Endowment, supported by Portland Parks and Recreation, Metropolitan Arts Commission, Portland Development Commission, and Shokookai of Portland, and by seven charitable trusts (Heartquist, n.d.). Its educational services are organised through the neighbouring Japanese American History Museum. These close relationships cultivate mutual agendas of fostering the public understandings of Nikkei histories. Like other Cold War ‘Friendship Gardens’, the Portland Japanese Garden was developed to reconstruct and maintain peaceful international relations. Its social networks originate from the collaborative conception of Portland community members and their Mayor Terry Schrunck in the late 1950s. It has been funded by municipal commitment, public subscription (currently of 17,000 members), entry charges, and international contributions. Portland’s sister-city arrangement with Sapporo, and appointments of a Japanese designer and directors have ensured that a Japanese ‘knowledge base’ and community liaisons have been maintained in the city (Brown, 2017: 72). The garden supports ‘Cultural Partner’ relationships with local communities of artists, performers, and cultural experience presenters, and maintains ten volunteer programmes and an International Japanese Garden Training Center. These community collaborations inform rich offerings of enjoyable and accessible intercultural learning experiences.

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These gardens have ‘accomplished their aims’ by informing intercultural appreciations of ‘cultivated nature’, the appreciation of peace and contemplative tranquility, ‘performative’ experiential learning, and of the ‘contemporary relevance of Japan’s traditions’ today (Brown, 2017: 14). Their broad aim of cultivating intercultural appreciations thus appears to be successfully achieved. For Nikkei citizens, especially, these gardens have effected processes of reparation on an immediately significant level. Their settings temper memories of injustice and loss. As lieux de mémoire they have provided experiences for mediating culturally significant memories of events and experiences of the past for new visitors, and new learners, in new times. Both gardens have contributed to reconstructions of cognitive and aesthetic memories of the past, to transformative empathetic appreciations of the experiences of migration, and to constructions of cultural identity and a sense of community (Petersen, 2018: 31; Petersen et al., 2019: 5). As growing, evolving phenomena, these gardens are themselves appropriate metaphors for the changing ‘seasons’ of Nikkei community migrations – the border crossing transitions of the 1940s and beyond. As such, they invite visitors to explore, learn about, or even – for older Oregon citizens – remember earlier experiences of place, belonging, movement, dispossession, border-crossing, and change. If those memories echo the pain, loss, and trauma of transitions in crisis (Menjívar et al., 2019), their significance today extends beyond immediate agendas of reparation. They do commemorate these events, but they also invite reflection on transitions themselves as more fluid, and more sustained, community experiences of spatiotemporal journeys, in which ‘borders are seen as processes, as floating signifiers, as waypoints and conduits in the flow of peoples, goods, capital’ (Wilson and Donnan, 2012: 17). References Addiss, S., G. Groemer, and J.T. Rimer (2006) Traditional Japanese Arts and Culture: An Illustrated Sourcebook (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press). Assmann, A. (2011) Cultural Memory and Western Civilisation: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press). Beardsley, M. (ed.) (1983) The Aesthetic Point of View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Bell, D. (2017) Aesthetic Encounters and Learning in the Museum’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48:8, 778–787. Bhabha, H.K. (2012) The Location of Culture (Abingdon Oxon and New York: Routledge). Boer, P. (2008) ‘Loci Memoriae – Lieux de Mémoire’, in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter), 19–25.

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Brown, K.H. (2017) Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America (Tokyo, Rutland Vermont and Singapore: Charles E. Tuttle). Bruneau, M. (2010) ‘Diasporas, Transnational Spaces and Communities’, in R. Bauböck and T. Faist (eds), Diaspora and Transnationalism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 35–49. Bublatzky, C. (2019) ‘Memory, Belonging, Engaging: Artistic Production in a Migrations Context’, in B. Dogramaci and B. Mersmann (eds), Handbook of Art and Global Migration: Theories, Practices, and Challenges (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter), 281–314. Davies, S. (1991) Definitions of Art (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press). Deane, A.R. (n.d.) A Japanese Garden Handbook. www.japanesegardening.org/site/ stroll-garden/. Accessed 18 December 2018. DiMaggio, P. and P. Fernández-Kelly (2010) Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press). Dogramaci, B. (2019) ‘Toward a Migratory Turn: Art History and the Meaning of Flight, Migration and Exile’, in B. Dogramaci and B. Mersmann (eds), Handbook of Art and Global Migration: Theories, Practices, and Challenges (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter), 17–37. Fehr, K. (2015) ‘Representing Other: Finding Reflections of Myself from a Space inbetween a Garden and a Museum’, in D. Anderson, A. de Cosson, and L. McIntosh (eds), Research Informing the Practice of Museum Educators: Diverse Audiences, Challenging Topics, and Reflective Praxis (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers), 165–181. Frail, T.A. (2017) ‘American Incarceration’, Smithsonian Magazine. www.smithso nianmag.com/history/injustice-japanese-americans-internment-camps-resonatesstrongly-180961422/. Accessed 19 December 2018. Glassman, H. (2012) The Face of Jizō: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press). Han, C. (2012) ‘The Aesthetics of Wandering in the Chinese Literati Garden’, Studies in the History of Garden and Designed Landscapes, 32:4, 297–301. Heartquist, E. (n.d.) A Look Inside the Portland Japanese Garden. japanesegarden.org/ media-information/. Accessed 17 December 2018. Houtumn, H., O.T. Van Kramsch, and W. Zierhofer (2005) B/ordering Space (Aldershot: Ashgate). Hurd, M., H. Donnan, and C. Leutloff-Grandits (2017) ‘Introduction: Crossing Borders, Changing Times’, in D. Hastings, M. Hurd, and C. Leutloff-Grandits (eds), Temporality and the Crossing of Borders in Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1–24. International Council of Museums (n.d.) ICOM Definition of a Museum. archives. icom.museum/definition.html. Accessed 7 September 2018. Li, J. (2013) One Hundred Years in the Huntington’s Japanese Garden: Harmony with  Nature (Sacramento: Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens). Menjívar, C., M. Ruiz, and I. Ness (2019) ‘Migration Crises: Definitions, Critiques, and Global Contexts’, in C. Menjívar, M. Ruiz and I. Ness (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crises (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1–18.

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Miller, M. (1988) ‘The Garden as Significant Form’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2:4, 267–287. Oregon Holocaust Memorial (n.d.) www.ojmche.org/educate/education/holocaustmemorial. Accessed 27 November 2018. Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center (n.d.) Japanese American Historical Plaza. www.ore gonnikkei.org/plaza.htm. Accessed 15 December 2018. Petersen, A.R. (2018) Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art Making in a Globalised World (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Petersen, A., M. Schramm, and F. Wiegand (2019) ‘Introduction: From Artistic Intervention to Academic Discussion’, in M. Schramm, S.P. Moslund, and A.R. Petersen (eds), Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition (New York and Oxon: Routledge), 3–9. Portland Japanese Garden (n.d.) https://japanesegarden.org/. Accessed 17 December 2018. Shikibu, M. (1977) Tale of Genji, trans. E. Seidensticker (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Shirane, H. (1998) Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Takei J. and M. Keane (2008) Sakutei: Visions of the Japanese Garden (Tokyo, Rutland Vermont, and Singapore: Tuttle Publishing). Tan, L.Y. (2019) An Examination of Voice and Spaces of Appearance in Artistic Representations of Migration Experiences: Art Practices in a Political Arena. http:// ls00012.mah.se/handle/2043/30012. Accessed 22 April 2020. Turner, S.V. (2015) ‘The Poetics of Permanence? Inscriptions, Memory and Memorials of the First World War in Britain’, Sculpture Journal, 24:1, 73–96. Walker, S. (2017) The Japanese Garden (London and New York: Phaidon). Wallace, K. (n.d.) ‘The Garden of Solace Honors Oregon’s Vietnam Veterans’. www. opb.org/artsandlife/series/vietnam/oregon-veteran-memorial-history/. Accessed 19 December 2018. Wilson, D.M. and H. Donnan (2012) A Companion to Border Studies (London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd). Wollenberg, C. (2012) ‘“Dear Earl”: The Fair Play Committee, Earl Warren, and Japanese Internment’, California History, 89:4, 24–60. Yoon, S. (2012) ‘“No Place in Particular”: Inhabiting Postinternment America, Articulating Postinternment Anxieties in John Okada’s No-No Boy’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 43:1, 45–65.

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Part III

Mapping the researcher’s identity

Photographing migrants and positionality: an interview with Leslie Ureña

Date of interview: 8 March 2019

Leslie  Ureña  is associate curator of photographs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.  She received her PhD and MA in  Art  History from Northwestern University. Her dissertation, ‘Lewis Hine at Ellis Island: The Photography of Immigration and Race, 1904–1926’, investigated how Hine’s photographs of newcomers shaped and were shaped by competing discourses on race in America. She has a BA in Art History from Yale University.  Previously, Leslie Ureña was a curatorial research associate and research assistant in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (2013–2016) and a curatorial assistant in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2008–2010). She also worked at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. At the gallery TKG+ in Taipei, Taiwan, she curated solo exhibitions of the Taiwanese artists Wang Yahui (TKG+, Taipei, 2012) and Wu Tien-Chang (Tina Keng Gallery, Beijing, 2012), as well as a group show of video art by emerging artists (TKG+, Taipei, 2012). She also co-curated Captured by a Portrait: 20 Photobooks from the Indie Photobook Library at  GuatePhoto  in Guatemala City, Guatemala (2012). She has taught at the George Washington University (Washington DC); the Taipei National University of the Arts; the National Taiwan Normal University; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is a contributing writer for Artforum.com.  In this interview, Leslie Ureña offers a reflection on positionality in the art world. She stresses the influence of the context of creation of artworks – being as important as the subject itself. For instance, Hine presented migrants sympathetically, yet was a man of his time and 1914 discourses on migration must be taken into account to understand his work, his positionality, and his artistic production. Ureña highlights that the experience of migration cannot be unique; it is singular and multifocal, but also migration impacts artists and this is clearly represented in family photographs for instance. She explains

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Lewis Wickes Hine (1911) Italian family living 428 E. 116th St., 2 floor back. They were so illiterate I couldn’t get their names. Have been in US only one month. Mother is learning to make lace for factory near by. Location: New York, New York (State). Library of Congress, National Child Labor Committee collection, Album Tenement homework no. 2714.

that as a curator of photographs at the National Gallery, she selects people that are ‘nationals in scope’ because they have contributed to the United States, which offers a revision of national histories and opens the scope of national borders. She thus fruitfully reflects on the limit between art and documentary photography. Editors: Can you tell us more about your contribution to the National Portrait Gallery, and how you use your expertise on the subject of art and migration? Leslie Ureña: I am currently associate curator of photographs and have been at the National Portrait Gallery since 2016, and work alongside our senior curator of photographs Ann Shumard. Overall, the Portrait Gallery’s curatorial department is not very big – we have 7 curators, including our chief curator. We also have historians who are part of the team. My job is mainly to grow and expand the collection, and I have drawn on my interest in art and migration by approaching collecting and exhibitions in an interdisciplinary manner. One recent acquisition was a portrait of Ronnie Spector by the

Photographing migrants

Dominican American photographer Winston Vargas, and while Spector herself was born in the United States, she went to school in Washington Heights, in New York City, a neighbourhood that went on to become a Dominican enclave. Vargas was part of the diaspora that settled in the area. We also work collaboratively, and have many discussions with the curatorial team about acquisitions, expanding the collection, and exhibitions. In my role, I have had the opportunity to look at the history of the collection. The Department of Photographs has the largest collection at the museum, with over 11,000 objects, running the gamut from daguerreotypes to contemporary photographs. A large portion of that includes over 5,400 negatives from the Mathew B. Brady Studios (1856–1869). During her tenure Ann Shumard has expanded the collection a great deal. Editors: So what would you say are the ‘holes’ in this National collection? Leslie Ureña: Any museum has holes in its collection, even those you would think have a complete history of photography. Our mission is focused on the history of the United States – through the people who have made significant contributions that are national in scope. Neither the sitters nor the artists have to have been born in the United States. For example, we have a 1933 photograph of Robert Capa (born Endre Ernő Friedmann in Budapest in 1913) taken by Kati Horna. Capa was influential to the history of photography, especially images of the Second World War, which have become the source of how we visualise the beaches of Normandy and other theatres of the war. Our focus is on the contribution to history, ranging from the sciences and mathematics, to the performing and visual arts. We acquire portraits of people who have changed something – how music is danced, how sports are played, and this people-focus is part of what makes it such an interesting collection. Editors: Your expertise in this story telling is around migration. Can you give us an example of something you brought to the collection that has to do with migration, something that introduced a new perspective, like a new acquisition? Was there a moment when you thought: ‘I can’t believe the museum doesn’t have this!’ Leslie Ureña: Acquisitions are mainly collaborative. I can’t think of a specific object. I’ll get back to you. Editors: It does feel like the pace of revisioning art history, revisioning the national story has picked up – just like the New York Times ‘Overlooked’ project, that tells the stories of remarkable women who were left out of the Times’s obituary pages.

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Leslie Ureña: I love that section of the Times, we do keep an eye on it, and we are very excited when we already have the people in the collection – being ahead of the New York Times! As people look back, more varied histories are emerging, often informed by the contemporary moment. We no longer have a ten-year dead rule that required that we wait ten years after a person’s death before considering them for the collection. We can now commission portraits. We can also look at the works of contemporary photographers; for instance, we recently acquired the portrait of the composer and playwright of Puerto Rican descent Lin-Manuel Miranda in the guise of Alexander Hamilton. Editors: What is the place given to foreign artists, settled artists, and migrant artists in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery? How does the National Portrait Gallery mark borders and nationalities on its museum labels? Are there any markers of migration? Leslie Ureña: We include the birthplace of the sitter. Robert Capa, born Budapest, Hungary, for example. We do not specify nationality, however. Some artists do not want to be categorised, or have changed nationalities mid-career, or use one nationality in one place and not another, and it may be difficult to pin-point, especially if they are from countries that are in flux, geo politically. Even with the birthplace – some city and country names have changed. Editors: You have described the National Portrait Gallery as a museum of biography. How do you combine a small-scale people-focused approach with large-scale societal phenomena such as migration? Leslie Ureña: The people focus means that we do not talk about migration in terms of ‘waves’ or ‘crises’. We can clearly mention that the phenomenon is part of so many of our stories here at the National Portrait Gallery. We refer to the person’s movement, factually – the career was carried out in that location; they migrated from here to there, settled in X, Y, and Z place. It is natural that there is this movement. Sometimes the movement is very much part of the story, for example with the portraits of Celia Cruz and other Cuban artists by Alexis Rodríguez-Duarte and Humberto ‘Tico’ Torres that are part of a project called Cuba out of Cuba,1 and are represented in our permanent collection. In that case, the story of exile is part of the focus of their series. For the portrait of Cruz, we discuss her career, how her music changed when she came to the United States; we focus on how she influenced American musical history. Editors: The people you honour in the National Portrait Gallery are the face of success, most of the time – they are inspirations or role models.

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How do you keep away from the image of the ‘good migrant’, the ones that fit in, the ones that made it? Leslie Ureña: Yes – usually they have been very successful, they’ve made positive contributions. But we do have some criminals, including Butch Cassidy, and Bonnie and Clyde, and other stories that are beyond a positive narrative. We have 150 words in our labels – so the discussions are somewhat limited. For example, I am working on a show about the American contralto Marian Anderson, and all the testimonies of people who knew her were glowing, everyone loved her, as far as we can tell. But while looking through her FBI file (she underwent a background check because she was nominated by President Eisenhower for a role at the United Nations), there is one testimony that disparages her, and there were also concerns about her affiliations and her possible closeness to communists. While I discuss the concerns about her connections to potential communists, the one ‘diva’ comment is not part of my discussion. Or for instance, Al Capone was born to immigrant parents, but this would not be referenced in the label as it is irrelevant to what he came to be known for. Editors: You have written about the representation of migration and how it fed into the race discourse. Do you feel that the intensity of the political moment has made art more or less able to mediate these debates on migration – especially in photography? Leslie Ureña: The subject has come up a lot in recent art fairs, and I have been following the works of artists on these subjects – whether they are looking at it historically or as a contemporary phenomenon or experience. Photographing migration has always been a difficult and political topic. But our accessibility to photographs, the fact that we can distribute images in general so much more quickly is the historical difference. Looking at it from the perspective of the history of photography, if we consider the photographs that Lewis Hine took at Ellis Island, we can see a dramatic difference in terms of distribution. Had he been able to distribute them even more widely, there would certainly have been more of a reaction, more of a backlash against them along the way. It is important when looking at the representation of immigrants to remember the dissemination and context, and who uses these images and how, and who labelled them. We have to remember the context versus the actual object on its own; we have to look at the caption critically, because they do impact our perception of these images. Each viewer brings something to the image, and if someone in 1914 is picking up The Old World in the New; the Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People … Illustrated with many Photographs, by Edward Alsworth Ross, they’re picking it up for a certain reason – they are interested in his vein of writing, perhaps in his call for

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severe restrictions on immigration. As opposed to how we are now looking at the text, mostly as a historical document. But in 1914, those who were reading it would have been impressed by the vivid descriptions and photographs in the book. In that context, they would have possibly focused on the negative approach to the people that were represented in these photographs. But Lewis Hine’s photographs appeared in different types of publications, including others that were more sympathetic, and this impacted how the photos were perceived. Lewis Hine also used his photos at the school where he taught, as pedagogical tools at a school that was fairly liberal. During that period there are sometimes links and overlaps between ethnographic, typological, and even criminal photography. Some of the photographers of that period may have been familiar with ethnographic photography, which was often loaded with a racialised discourse. Editors: Hine is generally understood as having had a compassionate representation of migrants. But you point out that the way he set about his works and how he labelled them was not immune from the antiimmigration feelings that pervaded the discourse at the time. Leslie Ureña: He also changed these captions over time! There are no names on these labels, and sometimes there are very generic captions scribbled on the back of the photograph – such as ‘Slavic Woman’. As far as we can tell from the historic records of his activities and how he set about creating these photos, he wasn’t out there to try to present these people in a negative light. For him, it was a positive endeavour, and a positive categorisation – trying to teach people about the different groups that were arriving at Ellis Island. That was his intention. But it is in these definitions that things become problematic – and if you look at photos by the Danish-born social reformer Jacob A. Riis and others, there is a troubling way of photographing people once they had arrived, and the visual language that was used to point at the settling in. The early photojournalism in Jacob A. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) is riddled with stereotypes, although it was perceived that he was trying to weigh in positively in the debate. The visual representations are caught in the history of language and how definitions change. It is important to consider the photographs not only from the perspective of the intention of the author, but also within the perspective of these broader definitions, because these photos also had another potential, another use, and while Hine tried to use the veneer of art to disrupt assumptions about immigrants, in some cases, the photographs still carried with them the very stereotypes he tried to contest. They could have a negative impact, because they could become illustrations for the other books. The fact that Hine was behind the camera meant he was providing a comment, and he did work according to specific categories – some of his photos follow artistic

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models, for example. When he photographs an Italian immigrant woman with a child as ‘Madonna and Child’, he is working with art historical tropes to elicit sympathy. He chose a subject, he identified her as representative, she fit within Italian art history tropes, along with the nice folds of clothing, her jewellery, and the baby in her arms. Editors: The exploration of the immigrant in photography can be used as a means of surveillance and identification, and in your dissertation, you remind us that how migrant people are photographed is closely intertwined with the emergence of disciplinary institutions. You also say that Hine’s ‘photographs of types both internalised that repressive force, and reinforced it publicly’ (Ureña, 2009: 37–39, 75–76).2 Leslie Ureña: This is especially true if you remember the historical framework. At Ellis Island, people used to come, sign up, and gawk at the recently arrived immigrants from viewing platforms installed by officials following popular demand – to view these moments of ‘unification’. Immigrants were therefore examined by the authorities in Ellis Island, but also by the public. Editors: You chalk up part of the responsibility of this racialisation to the medium of photography. Can you explain the photographic art’s limits in mediating migration? Do you find the same limits, or even failures, in the empathetic projects of contemporary migration photography (for example the Migration and Refuge agency-wide project at Magnum to document the so-called ‘migrant crisis’)? Leslie Ureña: Photographic projects of this kind have at heart debunking the idea that there is such a thing as an immigration experience. There is not one experience. There are shared experiences when you go through the process of migration, but it’s a personal story, and everyone has a different interaction with that process. These projects put a human face, a human story back into it. But it is important to remember that it is too much to ask of any medium, and of photography in this instance, to ‘show me the experience’. Ultimately, there is a lot we don’t know about someone’s story or reason for migrating. I worry a lot about expecting a visual medium to bring in a surrogate experience – as many ask of video art or photography. It might provide more context, more empathy, but the visual medium can only provide additional information, not mediate an experience. Editors: Documentary photography on global migration seems to have generally favoured a perspective framed by trauma and forced displacement …

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Leslie Ureña: Yes – and any photograph that shows suffering, that chooses suffering for its subject, that is emotional, it can be dangerous – or should I say tricky – even more so in our time of heightened dissemination. I’d like to think that these migration projects start from a good place, that they are not meant to capitalise on any way on the suffering – and the other places where we see this dangerous ambivalence is in photos of war or social unrest, where the limits between the documentary and the shock value are difficult to place. And the question is also ‘where did we see it?’ We all saw the photo of the little Alan Kurdi who brushed up on the shore – we saw it in one context, we saw it in the newspapers, and then we saw it again and again, and innumerable people used that specific image – but what about the rest of the image, what was the cropping, what happens when these images are always invoked to explain what happens and what is happening? We must remember that we should never expect the unvarnished truth – we always bring something to it – whether it’s the photographer or the viewer … Many of the photos are from the point of view of the onlooker, and they often offer a portion of the scene rather than context. Jacob A. Riis’s photos of sweatshops are photos of the environment of the migrants, but they are still from his outsider point of view. Editors: When you saw the artistic portrait of a young migrant by César Dezfulli, which won the 2017 Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize 2017, what was your reaction? In your dissertation, you showed how images of migrant women labelled ‘Madonna and Child’ could in the press be perceived as threatening, because Hine ran ‘the risk of further stoking the existing fears of the threat of immigrants’ fertility to the so-called American stock’ (Ureña, 2009: 79). César Dezfulli’s portrait of Amadou Sumaila was perceived with a similar ambivalence by some critics, who labelled the young man from ‘determined’ to ‘desperate’, fuelling, for some, the knee-jerk reaction to the so-called ‘migrant crisis’. Leslie Ureña: The interpretation of a portrait in particular is highly contentious  – the reading of the emotions is going to be up to the viewers who come with their own particular outlook. Each photograph requires a careful deciphering: in this case, why was it cropped so closely? Why is the ocean behind such an important element? Was he aware that he was being photographed? Was the photograph part of a larger project, and if so, what was the initial goal, and why was this one selected? Does the audience have the bigger picture about the project? It is of prime importance to be aware of these questions, especially in a museum that has audiences coming from everywhere, and I have become much more sensitive to this. I don’t know what the audiences are going to make of each portrait, and it is vital that we are careful in how we present them so that distortions do not happen. Context, again, is so important!

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Editors: The recent context does not help audiences to receive such images of the migrant in an appeased way. The context has been repetitively framed as a ‘crisis’, immigration laws have been tightened, and the ‘Fortress Europe’-inspired discourse and its hostility to migrants is not a fringe attitude anymore. This has created a mainstream distrust and a feeling of emergency. In parallel, documentary photography on global migration seem to have generally favoured a perspective framed by trauma and forced displacement … Has art photography brought another vision? Leslie Ureña: The distinction between art and documentary photography is, again, blurred and difficult to pinpoint securely. But there are artists who look past the event and look at their own history of migration, making it personal to themselves. This idea of looking at the generational history is more appealing to me, it’s the long history of migration, a narrative that is therefore different from the narrative most people see through the news. I’m intrigued by the uses of family photos, how these works look at your place in the world. These are not selfish projects, they help create links with the viewers who can then think: ‘Well I also have family who moved from x, y, z place to here and there – and how does that affect my history, and the history of those around me?’ With it, we’re only taking out a little slice of migration, but these projects make you reflect on what impacted you, what impacted them along the way, how migration changed the way they looked at life. These works that have an archival perspective, a memory approach – they may start as personal, but they actually have aspects that expand beyond the personal. These are projects that may deal with trauma, but by taking the historical long view – again, by considering in more context – they take us away from the feeling of emergency that you describe when you mention the problematic documentary photographs on migration. I have been looking at the work of Tomie Arai and her projects at the Tenement Museum in New York – and she directly linked the Lewis Hine pictures of Ellis Island to contemporary immigration. She worked with English as a Second Language students, and had them look at images of Chinese immigration, at problematic labels (see Figure 16.1) and this helped them work through their own contemporary history of migration. Editors: There is a deep divide in the civil discourse over the use of ‘undocumented’ and ‘illegal’ to describe immigrants. Do you feel that contemporary photography is set on recording migration so as to offer documentation of a sort? Can it sometime backfire? As one of your recent exhibitions emphasised, there is something unsettling in the use of the term ‘captured’ when talking about a photographed subject … Leslie Ureña: Providing more ‘exposure’ – that is another technical photographic term – to what is happening and to what has happened.

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Exposure brings more information to the table, if you want to learn more about the people who are experiencing migration. But again, everything goes back to context – why do you want to know more, what motivates the person looking for information? And similarly, does the person want or have they agreed to be exposed? ‘Captured’ can go back to the Foucauldian idea of surveillance in photography; having a moment and freezing it is a basic photographic principle. But ‘captured’ can also be more positive, it can mean ‘holding a moment’. Editors: Working within a portrait gallery and as an expert on migration photography, can you tell us more about the use of the portrait shot in contemporary photography about migration (such as Holly Bynoe’s Imperial series, for example)? How do these photos mock, question, or transcend borders? Leslie Ureña: This actually doesn’t only apply to a migration subject, to a history of migration. There is particular resonance with the passport photo of course, but I haven’t noticed this as a particular grouping on migration specifically. Especially because the ID photo is largely criticised, and played upon in contemporary photography. Its limits are very obvious to photographers, and to the photography theory we have grown up with; it isn’t a document that is to be trusted, and we are very aware that it was produced for a very specific purpose … ID photos are problematic – but group photos of migrants are also a problematic choice. Notes 1 Cuba out of Cuba started in 1994 as a portrait series when Torres and RodríguezDuarte were commissioned for a shoot for Art & Antiques featuring Cuban artists who lived in the United States. 2 See John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).

Reference Ureña, J.L. (2009) ‘Lewis Hine at Ellis Island: The Photography of Immigration and Race, 1904–1926’ (PhD Thesis: Northwestern University).

Reflections on positionality Bénédicte Miyamoto and Marie Ruiz

What I’ve found, making work in Britain, is that when you make work about your origins, all it can be about is your origins. But if you don’t make work about your origins, people will say you’re an African artist who doesn’t make work about African subjects, so your identity becomes suspect. (Shonibare, 1995: 39).

This book has explored the roots of identity through the prism of art and migration, as ideologies of otherness – which were thought to have ‘exhaust[ed] themselves in an era of increasingly global interdependence’ (Shonibare, 1995: 41) – are now rearing their ugly heads again. The shared experiences of injustices and the dislocation of self – for migrants, migrant artists, and artists dealing with the subject of migration – are met with a thirst for cultural exchange, and these constantly redraw the borders of their communities. These experiences, partaken in or mediated through art, reclaim identities from reification, assert the need for embodied action in a shared space, and defeat expectations of ‘tidy definitions of otherness’ (Antoni and Hatoum, 1998: 54). This volume would not be complete without a discussion on our personal positioning – a reflexive exercise meant to nuance our supposedly neutral academic point of view. Dongxiao Qin’s definition of positionality reads: ‘Positionality is about how people view the world from different embodied locations. The situatedness of knowledge means whether we are researchers or participants, we are differently situated by our social, intellectual, and spatial locations, by our intellectual history, and our lived experience, all of which shape our understandings of the world and the knowledge we produce’ (Qin, 2016). Reflecting on how academics position themselves and are influenced by their background, race, gender, and class as identity markers allows to better grasp the scholar’s knowledge of their object of study, knowledge being the product of their positionality. The interviews presented in this volume did not fail to consider positionality, since all interviewees mentioned personal stories or experiences, and grounded their practice in their life stories, most having

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themselves migrated and such experience having certainly shaped their work. As Erin Frost contends in her reflection on multi-layered positionality – i.e. embedded social and political issues related to gender, race, and culture – it is important that our readers know why and how we write. She defines positionality as the limits in scope that affect our knowledge production, ‘the perspective a researcher maintains relative to other entities in the world  – whether those entities are theories, ideas, things, situations, people etc. In other words, my positionality is the perspective from which I view the world’ (Frost, 2019: 44). In keeping with the approach taken by our interviewees, this conclusion offers a reflection on our own voices, each contributor participating in concluding the volume and reflecting on how they position themselves in relation to the migrant, diasporic Indigenous and/or minoritised artists they wrote about. It focuses on what predisposed us to work on art and migration, what drew our attention to specific societal issues, artists, and movements, how our constructed identities and lived experiences drew us to such topics. It also shows that the experience of migration is a singular and personal one that can be shared, told, or actively interpreted and reconstituted, but whose essence remains individual and whose borders are necessarily fluctuating. Claims of a defining migrant identity ‘established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognised’ would have to organise themselves around a constitutive exclusion (Connolly, 2002: 64). Both socially situated and eminently physical in its exposure to mobility, experience of migration remains fragmented and fluid, making for a flexible and extensible definition of migrant communities. However, the migration experience certainly varies in degrees of hardship according to the subjects’ position vis-à-vis the dominant oppressive structural forces. In a translocational perspective, Anthias defines positionality as located at the intersection between diverse social spaces. As such, positionality can be construed as ‘a reference to social position (as a set of effectivities: as outcome) and social positioning (as a set of practices, actions and meanings: a process). That is, positionality is the space at the intersection of structure (social position/social effects) and agency (social positioning/ meaning and practice)’ (Anthias, 2009: 243, emphasis in original). As editors of this volume, our perspective is certainly shaped by our background as academic researchers, but also the fact that we are both white women from France, trained in anglophone studies. As Europeans, we have both been moved and influenced by the way migration has increasingly been perceived and represented as a problem for the Western world. Horrific scenes of inhumane treatments of migrants have certainly given birth to our wish to contribute – with our own weapons, i.e. academic enquiry – to raise awareness on the growing dehumanisation of migration, while homeless migrants

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live in tents in the middle of the most privileged neighbourhoods of wealthy cities – be it Paris or many others. These makeshift habitats contain children, women, men, families, of all ages and backgrounds, who may have come for a better future and are now cast as disruptive and unwanted – a perceived burden the authorities often fail to treat humanely, and which urged our reaction. I (Marie Ruiz) decided to specialise in migration history as a Master’s student living in Ireland, where I witnessed the return of many expats searching for their roots. This rang a very personal bell as the daughter of a mother born in a privileged winery estate in colonial Morocco, yet who had to leave it all for a life of impoverishment back in France in the 1960s. My father was born on a farm in Spain and was an economic migrant in France, where he never really felt at ‘home’. The in-betweenness described in the volume’s case studies very much reflects my personal experience of migration. As a student in Ireland meeting expats looking for their roots, I knew that I was going to be a migration scholar, as this was deeply rooted in me, felt personal and important: I could feel migration and understand it better as the daughter of two migrants with diverse experiences but the same sense of rootlessness. This is in keeping with Anthias’s definition of positionality as ‘socially produced through the interplay of processes and outcomes of social relations’ (Anthias, 2009: 247). Ever since, I have worked on the history of the British Empire, female migration, and recently the construction of migration crises. I am now turning to the questions of letter writing and migrants’ training. Migration studies has become a personal and academic passion. I (Bénédicte Miyamoto) grew up white and middle class in South Africa, Chile, Great Britain, and France, and now live in the United States. I recognise the cultural enrichment frequent migration has woven in my personal life, and this has shaped my enduring interests as a historian of the circulation of knowledge and artefacts engaged in reconstructing the French and Huguenot emigrés community of artists in Early Modern and Modern London. I was deeply touched by Barthélémy Toguo’s Mamadou, Clandestin, France, Carte de Séjour, 2010, exhibited at the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, Paris, depicting death-dealing French official immigration seals transformed into decapitated busts. At each of my migrations, I have experienced that all passports are not created equal, and I have been protected from the structural and racial violence of visa policies by my French documents, as my children are by their Japanese passports. I agree with Professor of the Humanities Paula Moya that we should refuse in our fields the ‘call for a form of cosmopolitanism that requires us to transcend our identities by downplaying the significance of our situatedness’ (Moya, 2011: 81). Situatedness enables me to speak about others while signalling that I do not speak for them. I conceptualised this edited volume with Marie Ruiz

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as an answer to the increasingly harmful narratives on migration, weaponising my skills in the field of art history precisely because art is a medium of both exposure and empathy. As Moya explains, non-involved actors rarely interest themselves in societal dynamics they haven’t personally experienced as they don’t shape their identity. She takes the example of straight people rarely studying heteronormativity or white scholars failing to understand the effects of racialisation, leading to non-involved actors’ scholarly blind spots. According to her, ‘scholarly production is structured by an unacknowledged logic of identity’ (Moya, 2011: 2). All our contributors have been affected by migration, even if not migrants themselves, which has undeniably shaped their academic identity and knowledge production. For instance, Aimé Iglesias Lukin, whose chapter considers migrant Latin American artists in 1970s New York, declares: It is quite obvious in my case that my research is somehow autobiographical or, to be more precise, an attempt to understand my own migration through the experience of those before me. Like the artists in my dissertation project, I also moved to New York – in 2011 – to discover that I was Latin American. While the geographical location of Argentina and Buenos Aires was very clear for me growing up, it was not until I moved to New York, a multicultural city in the so-called ‘first world’ that I truly understood that I was born in a remote country with strong ethnical, cultural and historical roots with the rest of the Americas, despite their difference. Since moving to New York, a city with a small Argentine diaspora, my social, professional and intellectual life has been enriched with my contact with migrants from all over the world, but especially with Latin American peers. 

This testimony is echoed by Victoria Souliman’s work on Australian expatriates in London in the 1920s. She acknowledges that her personal experience of migration has shaped her identity and academic career: I am aware that living at a particular place and time in history certainly influenced my thinking about art history. Growing up in France and spending a substantial amount of time in England undoubtedly shaped my understanding of the history of art in a rather Eurocentric manner. However, relocating to Australia at the age of 21 to pursue my studies in visual arts was an eyeopening experience and changed my perspective, which led me to question various constructs such as those of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, and further raised my interest in the historiography of Australian art. My positionality led me to reflect on my own sense of transnational belonging as well as that of Australian artists who travelled or migrated to Europe. Looking at the case of Edith May Fry and her efforts to give expatriate artists a place in the history of Australian

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art was therefore a way to look at issues related to expatriatism, translocation and cosmopolitanism.

Most scholars in this volume originate from the Global North, yet they also address and deconstruct the dichotomy between Northern and Southern perspectives. They offer what Petersen calls ‘differential perspectives on art and cultural identity’ (Petersen, 2015). The chapters in this volume concur to show that indigenous knowledge systems can efficiently be appraised by non-involved actors. This is exemplified by Christopher T. Green’s work on Indigenous American art. To the question of positionality, he answers: As a settler (non-Native) scholar, my position is favoured by free movement between the settler colonial nation states of Canada (my birth nation) and the United States (the nation in which I have been educated, work, and currently reside). An expanded interpretive horizon, encouraged by the Indigenous artists with whom I work, repositions that movement as between places and host nations. I was raised in a white, upper-middle-class home located on unceded Squamish, xwməθkwəy´əm, and Tsleil-Waututh territory. I conceptualised this chapter while working and studying in Lenapehoking on the island of Mannahatta, and benefited from the words, knowledge, and conversation of the diverse Indigenous artists and community members now inhabiting New York City. This text was written while working between Mannahatta and Powhatan, Nanticoke, and Piscataway territory in the Chesapeake region. To contend with a potentially uninhabitable future, we must fluently register the work of artists who, with no contradiction, are situated in an Indigenous knowledge of place and utilise contemporary tools and idioms legible to audiences in many different sites.

Although ‘identity’ has somehow become an inflated catch-all notion, it can efficiently be summed up by the dual reference to the internal perception of the core self on the one hand, and people’s external point of view and identification of others on the other hand, which can be creator of group identity, or even identity politics when political questions are involved (Anthias, 2009: 231). Such questions are addressed by Birgit Mersmann’s study of diasporic aesthetics in Chinese Australian art. She explains that although a non-involved actress, i.e. white Western art historian, she still contributes to decolonising art history: Through global migrations of artists, artworks, and art institutions, the Westrooted discipline of art history is put under noticeable pressure to rethink its own geopolitical positionality. My interest and ambition as an art historian, trained in the West, is to critically reflect on the occidentalist condition of art history in theory, methodology,  and practice  by engaging with migrant  art histories and image-aesthetic practices. Only if art-historical research operates

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transculturally, can  it do justice to the processes of transmission, exchange, and interweaving through which art practices, art theories, and visual cultures are  (trans)formed. In my perception, global contemporary art echoes migration-hood as a ubiquitous condition of living and working, sensing and thinking. I share Gregory Feldman’s view that ‘We are all migrants’. Although I can’t surpass my own  scholarly  position as a white and Western art historian  and image theoretician, I  embrace the  search for a  migratory trans-positionality  that can contribute to a transcultural  deessentialisation and decolonisation of art-historical studies.

Although most contributors represent the Global North, they also show an  appreciation and deep interest for Southern perspectives and, as Mersmann evokes, contribute to the decolonisation of art studies. Can a Northern observer efficiently account for Southern artistic production? Our discussion on positionality leads us to acknowledge the subjective source of our scientific enquiry, that our knowledge production, research questions, and enquiry approaches are influenced by our identities, either dominant or not. Such questions have been addressed by the two migration scholar contributors to this volume. Claudia Tazreiter’s focus on Australian identity politics through migration leads her to reflect on her interest in intersectionality: Throughout my time as a researcher and teacher, questions of biography, personal and ‘official’ identity and positionality feature at the core of my practice. As a sociologist of race, ethnicity, human migrations, and belonging, questions of social and institutional stigma and segregation inform my theoretical and methodological orientations. My own position, as a first-generation migrant woman conditions my values and worldview, causing me to regularly reflect on apparent epistemic certainties represented by political elites in many parts of the world. I seek approaches to research that foreground intersectional experiences of inequality.

In the same vein, Rachel Lewis’s work on female migrants in London has been shaped by her personal experience of migration; although a privileged one, it has still drawn her attention to precariousness and displacement. Her testimony accounts for the deterritorialisation of hierarchies of observers, the dichotomy between internal and external actors. She says: My own immigrant experiences applying for permanent residency in the United States, though not without their challenges, have been informed by my racial and class privilege as a white British citizen. As a former international student navigating the harsh realities of the academic job market in the United States, however, I am nonetheless attuned to how temporality functions through migration policies and visa categorisations, both as a disciplinary mechanism, and as part of the precarious labour experiences of immigrant

Reflections on positionality

workers. I am acutely sensitive to the emotional consequences of indeterminate waiting for the right to remain and its associated feelings of precariousness. These experiences have encouraged me to pay attention to the temporal and affective dimensions of asylum seekers’ visual and textual narratives when assessing the impact of non-citizenship status on the lives of displaced populations.

How significant is identity in knowledge production? If identity politics might be perceived as fragmentary, entrenching cultural differences and marginalisation, the neutralisation of identities can be viewed as cultural denial and interaction refusal. Transcending identity politics being a lost cause, a fruitful dialogue between dominant and subservient identities must be engaged and this is what David Bell, author of the chapter on Japanese gardens, proposes: As a New Zealand pākeha academic of European descent, working at the southwest circumference of the Asia-Pacific rim, I am acutely aware of the cultural diversity of the region and its perimeter, and the roles arts experiences and learning in cultural institutions – including gardens – play in enhancing intercultural and aesthetic learning. As a teacher-researcher in visual arts education I appreciate the ways formal and informal learning with artwork phenomena can enrich engagements with art-historical contexts and communicating and interpreting about artworks – art historical and aesthetic learning. As an art historian studying Japanese visual culture, I am committed to addressing the ways viewer/audience experiences of aesthetic phenomena are conditioned by enhanced knowledge of the social-cultural contexts within which these phenomena evolved, and were conceived, made and received, or against which they may be encountered today. I acknowledge these factors inevitably shape the nature of my own experiences of the themes of this chapter, and also the ways they inform my appreciations of them and lend some sense of their significance for my readers.

Engaging in a dialogue across cultures, identities, and disciplines is also what Susan Waller did with her chapter on Italian models, which deconstructs the alienation of non-nationals in the art world. Her views on positionality are exemplary of its influence on knowledge production: Though I would not have recognised the term at the time, ‘positionality’ first became a concern for me almost five decades ago. Having recently completed an undergraduate degree in art history, I encountered Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists’ and was stunned to recognise that my education had focused exclusively on the work of men. They were, of course, exclusively white and of European descent. Later, exploring the careers of women artists, I confronted another boundary within

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the discipline of art history: the valorisation of ‘high arts’ and the marginalisation of ‘decorative arts’. I came to value scholarship which examined and challenged the prevailing institutional structures underpinning histories of artistic production. Though I am neither a model nor an immigrant, my current work on immigrant models explores a practice and a community whose role within the history of art has been largely ignored.

In conclusion, what this volume has proposed is to step away from binary oppositions such as us/them, we/others, national/non-national, migrant/ non-migrant, North/South, art history/migration studies to consider encompassing identities and essential multiplicities. Art and Migration: Revisioning the Borders of Community has shown how our positionality and position in hierarchies of privileges may shape our knowledge building and influence our research insight. It has also highlighted the limits of the dichotomy between involved and non-involved actors, insider and outsider perspectives and the influence of positionality in the construction of (im)partial knowledge. Comparable to Salman Rushdie’s stereoscopic vision, the contributors to this volume are both insiders (migrants) and outsiders (observers of migration) (Rushdie, 1991). This is ‘who we are and from where we speak’ (Moya, 2011, emphasis in original). References Amin, S. (2011) Global History: A View from the South (Cape Town: Pambazuka Press). Anthias, F. (2008) ‘Thinking through the Lens of Translocational Positionality: An Intersectionality Frame for Understanding Identity and Belonging’, Translocations: Migration and Social Change, 4:1, 5–20. Anthias, F. (2009) ‘Intersectionality, Belonging and Translocational Positionality: Thinking about Transnational Identities’, in G. Rosenthal and A. Bogner (eds), Ethnicity, Belonging and Biography: Ethnographical and Biographical Perspectives (Berlin, Münster: Lit Verlag), 229–250. Antoni, J. and M. Hatoum (1998) ‘Mona Hatoum’, BOMB, 63, 54. Connolly, W. (2002) Identity Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Frost, E. (2019) ‘A Perspective on Positionality’, in A. Blakeslee and C. Fleisher (eds), Becoming a Writing Researcher (New York: Routledge), 44–46. Moya, P. (2011) ‘Who We Are and From Where We Speak’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1:2, 79–94. Petersen, A.R. (2015) ‘Global Art History: A View from the North’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 7:1, 1–12.

Reflections on positionality

Qin, D. (2016) ‘Positionality’, in N.A. Naples (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), 1–2. Rushdie, S. (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books). Shonibare, Y. (1995) ‘Art That is Ethnic in Inverted Commas’, Frieze, 25, 38–41.

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Note: page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Notes are referenced by the page number followed by note number. able-normativity 145 aboriginal art 84, 124 see also indigenous artists About Change: In Latin America and the Caribbean (World Bank, 2011) 159, 162 Above and Beyond: Austral/Asian Interactions (Brisbane, 1996) 68 Absconded from the Household of the President of the United States (Titus Kaphar, 2016) 52 Abstraction (art form) 178–179, 187 Académie Colarossi, Paris 255 Académie Française, Rome 241 academies see art education Académie Suisse, Paris 255 Actions: The Image of the World Can Be Different (Kettle’s Yard, 2018) 136–137 activism 23, 54, 59, 62, 105, 113–115, 124, 157, 162, 186, 195 see also artivism affect (concept) 114–115 African artists 4–5, 26n.1, 44, 160, 297 Afshar, Hoda 121, 121, 122, 122–123 Agathangelou, Agatha 145–146 Ah Kee, Vernon 115 Ah Xian 64, 67, 68, 69–73, 82–83 Ai Weiwei 10, 41 Akerman, Chantal 179, 182 Akomfrah, John 179, 181 Alteveer, Ian 35 Amaral, Tarsila do 188 American artists 2, 166–168, 171 American Indians see Native Americans Americas Society 192

Anderson, Benedict 202, 207n.6 Anderson, Hurvin 14, 20 Anderson, Marian 291 André, Carl 189 Andrew, Brook 115 Angolan artist 6 Anthes, Bill 95, 96, 109n.5 Anthias, Floya 298 anti-imigration discourses 8 Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA) 35 Arai, Tomie 295 archives 113, 116, 124, 128 Arendt, Hannah 146–147, 148 Argentina 37, 188 Argentinian artists 162 ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair 84n.1 Art Basel Hong Kong 84n.1 art centres 2–3, 16, 17, 38 London 2, 38 New York 3, 24, 38, 163, 187 Paris 2, 38, 188, 243 Artcurial, Shanghai 84n.1 art education 5, 51–52 see also study trips; travelling scholarships art exchanges 67–68, 212 Art Gallery of New South Wales 68 art histories 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 10–11, 15, 18, 23, 40, 65, 177–178, 303–304 Art HK 84n.1 Arthur Walker and his Brother Harold (the Walker Brothers) (George Coates, c. 1912) 216–217, 217

Index Art in Australia 212, 215 artist as activist 12, 13, 23, 45, 62, 113–115, 162, 195 as mediator 12, 14, 16, 20, 25, 41, 62, 165 as nomad 38, 124 Artist and His Mother, The (Arshile Gorky, c.1926–c.1942) 178, 181, 184–185 artistic representation of migration 3–4, 10, 12–14, 20, 23, 47, 64, 146 see also visual imagery of migration Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) (Bronx Museum) 51 artists’ communities 9, 25 Australian expatriates 216 Latin American 190, 192, 201–202, 205 artists’ models 235–261 Artists of the Western Hemisphere: Precursors of Modernism, 1870–1930 (CIAR, 1967) 195 artivism 12, 13, 17, 41, 45, 157–158 art market 16, 21 for Australian Indigenous art 124 for Chinese art 68, 83, 84, 84n.1 Global South 3 art schools see art education arts clubs 216 ART SG in Singapore 84n.1 Art Students’ League 171 art studies and migration 1, 9, 19 art therapy 133 Art Workers’ Coalition, New York 189 art works representing migration 4, 10, 12–14, 41, 42 female refugees and asylum seekers 136–141 Japanese gardens 267 migration museums 164–165 National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, USA 166, 169–171 New Museum, New York / Phillips Collection 178–182 photography 125, 291–295 World Bank Art Program 157, 158, 159, 162 art worlds 5, 15–17, 23, 163 globalised 15–16, 20–21, 39 see also art centres A Rua: The Spirit of Rio de Janeiro (Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA), 2011) 35 Asialink 67 Asian artists see Chinese diaspora Asian Australian artists 68–69

Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 67 Asleson, Robyn 166–175 ‘assembled bodies’ 76–77 asylum policies 134, 135, 144 affecting female asylum seekers 136, 137, 141 United Kingdom 134, 135, 136, 137, 141, 146, 149 see also immigration policies asylum seekers 7, 119 with disability 141–146 female 136–141 mental health 133, 134, 140 participatory arts projects 133–134 Atget, Eugène 248, 250 Attar, Suhaib 161, 165 At the Time of the Third Reading (Axel Karlsson Rixon, 2016) 54 auction houses 84n.1, 124 Australia, immigration policies 116–117, 120, 125 Australia and Regional Artist Exchange programme 67 Australia China Art Foundation 67–68 Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture 68 Australian art 212, 213, 215, 219, 220–222, 224–225 Australian artists 67, 212–213 expatriates in the 1920s 211, 213–231, 231n.3, 300 Australian Artists in Europe 230, 232n.6 Australian Center of Contemporary Art (Brisbane) 68 Australian Chinese migrants 63–87 Au Tambourin (Jules Chéret, 1883) 253 Avant-garde 17, 24, 179, 187, 188, 225 Awareness and Prevention Through Art (aptART) 165 Azoulay, Ariella 180 Bacon, Francis 49 Badal, Claudio 205 Barati, Reza 121 Barca Nostra, 1919 13 Bardi Madonna: Shifting Perspectives and the Body (Dong Wang Fan, 1999) 79, 81 Barr, Alfred 191 Barrada, Yto 180 Barthes, Roland 256n.7 Bauman, Zygmunt 128 Bauret, Gabriel 56

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Index Baxter, Margaret 225 Baynton, Barbara 231n.3 Beckwith, Naomi 35 Belgian artists 43–44 Belkin, Arnold 196 Bell, Clive 230 Bell, David 262–283, 272, 275, 277, 303 Belmore, Rebecca 13, 37, 95, 98, 109n.6 Benjamin, Walter 244 Berggren, Erik 202 Berlin 4, 5, 10, 39, 43 Berlinale film festival, 2016 10 Beynon, Kate 68 Bhabha, Homi 189, 225 biennials (exhibitions) 13, 16, 40, 163 Dakar/Dak’Art (Senegal) 4, 159, 163 Venice Biennale 13, 16, 94, 96, 97, 102, 106 Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) (Rebeca Belmore, 2017) 13, 37 Bill, Max 188 biopolitics 130n.1, 144–145 Blazwick, Iwona 224 Blood/Type 118 Blue and Silver (Fred Leist, 1924) 228, 229 ‘boat migrants’ 56 Boeva, Alyona 8 Bohmer, Carol 142 Bolton, Andrew 142, 143 Bond, Anthony 68, 85n.8 Bonhams 84n.1 Boni, Teresina 241 Boochani, Behrouz 113, 115, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 128, 129 Boomgaarden 7–8 Border Art Workshop (Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, 1984) 16 borders 10, 11–12, 15, 25, 36–37, 127–128, 182 see also Mediterranean crossing; Mexican– US border; mobility Borzello, Frances 241 Botticelli. Sandro 77, 79 Bouguereau, William 244–246, 245, 255 Bourdieu, Pierre 207n.3 Bourgeois, Louise 171, 172 Bourriaud, Nicolas 124 Brazil 192, 197 Brazilian artists 198 Brexit 8 Brighton Art Gallery, Brighton, UK 230 Brisly, Diala 161, 165

Bristol Disability Murals (2012) 135, 141–146, 143, 148 British-Ghanaian artist 6 British-West Indian artist 14 Brodzky, Horace 225 Bronx Museum 51 Brun, Catherine 134 Bryant, Charles 219 Buchser, Frank 168 Bunny, Rupert 213 Burden of Representation, The: Essays on Photographies and Histories (John Tagg, 1968) 296n.2 Burgess, Dana Tai Soon 170 Butler, Rex 218 Butterfly Project (Beirut and Washington DC, 2017) 161 Cabanel, Alexandre 251–252 Cairol, Julián 203, 205 Calais Jungle see ‘Jungle, The’, Calais Calboli, Raniero Paulucci di 238, 248 Cameroon artists 160 Camnitzer, Luis 187, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 201–202 Canaday, John 195 canonicity 6, 13, 186 Capa, Robert 289, 290 Caragol, Taína 173 Caribbean see Cuban artists; Puerto Ricans Caribbean migrants in the UK 14 Carjat, Etienne 251 Carnegie International 191 Carne y Arena (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2017) 10 Carocci, Max 106 Castro-Cid, Enrique 205 Catedral / Cathedral, Theories of Freedom (Scherezade Garcia, 2010) 156, 157, 158 Catlin, George 90 Catlin, Stanton 194, 195 Celarius, Andreas 107 Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR, today the Americas Society) 192, 194, 196, 201 Central Matter (World Bank, 2017) 158, 162 centre-periphery 15, 16, 109n.4, 186, 231n.1, 231n1 Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary Detention Centre) (Adrian Paci, 2007) 177, 181

Index Cha/Cha/Cha (1974–) 186, 203–206, 204, 208n.8 Chacon, Raven 88 Chantal Akerman: Too Close, Too Far (Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA), 2012) 35 Chauka, Please Tell us the Time (Boochani and Sarvestani, 2017) 120, 121 Chen, Kuan-Hsing 93 Chéret, Jules 252, 253 Chevalier, Michel 190 Chile 37 Chilean artists 159, 205 China 2, 84n.1 China, China (Ah Xian, 1998–1999) 71, 72, 72 ‘Chinatown culture’ 83 Chinese art 84n.1 Chinese artists 182 Chinese Australian art 63–87 Chinese diaspora 63–87, 85n.4 Chinese mass emigration 84n.2 Chineseness 64–65, 65–66, 68, 69, 71, 83 Chiu, Melissa 65, 68 Chocolate Series (David Antonio Cruz, 2015) 45, 47, 48 Chong, Heman 5 Christie’s 84n.1 Chubb, Emma 13 circulation of artists and art works 5, 6, 17 citizenship 2, 127, 180 citizenship rights 146–147 Clark, John 65 Clifford, James 63 climate change 41 Coates, George 214, 216–218, 219, 223, 225, 230 Cohen, Isaac 225 Colarossi, Filippo 255 collections 6 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 191 National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC 173–174, 289–290 World Bank 159, 163 collections management 174 see also curatorship collective memories 117, 118 College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia 74 colonialism 16, 92 Australia 115, 116, 117 North America 89–90 see also decolonisation/deimperialisation; neo-imperialism

communities of artists see artists’ communities Conceptualism 192 Conder, Charles 223 Connell, Raewyn 116 Constellations Series (Bouchra Khalili, 2011) 10 Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 17 Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis 26n.1 Contrabienal (Museo Latinoamericano and Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural de Latinoamérica, 1971) 186, 192–194, 193, 195, 197, 198–202, 199, 200, 201, 206, 207n.2 Corot, Camille 252 cosmopolitan identities 24, 170, 299 Australian expatriate artists 213, 216, 223, 224, 230 Costa, Argentines Eduardo 196 Costa, Eduardo 192 Costa Rican artists 159 costume see dress Courbet, Gustave 251, 257n.16 Couture, Thomas 246, 246–247 criminalisation 120, 146 Croft, Brenda 113, 115, 117, 118–119 cross-cultural engagement see also cultural networks; intercultural understanding; international networks Cruz, Celia 290 Cruz, David Antonio 45–53 Cuba 205 Cuban artists 290, 296n.1 Cuba out of Cuba (Alexis Rodríguez-Duarte et al., 1994–) 290, 296n.1 Cubism 190 cultural diplomacy 9, 159, 194 cultural diversity 186, 188, 191, 270, 303 cultural exchanges 297 Australia and the Asia Pacific 67–68 cultural identity 1, 11, 95, 202, 298, 301 Australian expatriate artists 211, 220, 224 Chineseness 64–65, 65–66, 68, 69 Japanese Americans 262, 265, 268, 270, 273, 276, 279 see also cosmopolitan identities; hybridisation/hybridity; national identity; transcultural identities cultural mobility 9, 10–11, 20

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Index cultural networks 5, 10, 17, 23, 96 Latin American 186, 190, 192, 199 curatorship 4, 6, 21–22, 40, 43, 159, 168–169, 172–174 National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC 289–290 Curtis, Edward 90 Cvetkovich, Ann 146 Dak’Art (Biennale de Dakar), Senegal 4 dancers 169–170 Dancing Shadows, The: Shifting Perspectives and the Body (Dong Wang Fan, 1999) 74 Dangeli, Mique’l 108n.2 Danish artists 62 Dantan, Edouard 251, 252 David, Jacques-Louis 239 Davidovich, Jaime 190 Davidson, Bessie 213, 230 Day, Ken Gonzales 173 Deakin, Alfred 116–117 decolonisation/deimperialisation 6, 16, 17, 47, 84, 93–94, 101, 106, 107, 108, 159, 301–302 Deduction#2 (Ah Xian, 1996) 69–70 De Genova, Nicholas 9, 148 Deleuze, Gilles 76, 114, 226 Deller, Jeremy 26n.2 Demos, T.J. 105, 179, 180 deportability 134–135, 140, 141, 143–144, 149 see also temporality deportation 146 Derrida, Jacques 114 Descendant (Dong Wang Fan, 1995) 74–75 Descendant Bodies (Dong Wang Fan, 1996) 74–75, 76 Descendant – Red Environment (Dong Wang Fan, 1995) 75, 75, 76 De Souza, Allan 113 detention of migrants 120–121, 129 see also internment deterritorialisation 76, 90, 93, 226, 302 Dezfulli, César 294 diaspora aesthetics 64, 65–66, 71–73, 82–84 diasporas African 4 Chinese 22, 63–84 Italian 238 Latin American 202 terminology 8

digital technologies 115, 128 disabled migrants 141–146 discrimination Australian expatriate artists 116, 216, 218, 219, 223 France, Third Republic 255 see also exclusionary practices; racism displacement see deterritorialisation Documenta 14: 13, 17, 35, 36, 36–37, 39, 41, 44n.1, 162 documentaries 179–180 Dodge, Jason 43 Dogramaci, Burcu 194 Dollfus, Paul 244, 251, 255 Dominion Artists’ Club 215–216 Donaldson, A.D.S. 218 Dong Wang Fan 64, 67, 74–83 Donkor, Godfried 6 Dorling, Kamena 150n.3 Double Screens: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Wu Hung, 1997) 79 Double Screens: Shifting Perspectives and the Body (Dong Wang Fan, 1997–1999) 79, 80, 82 Downey, Juan 203, 205 Downey, Marilys Belt 205 Drawing the Global Colour Line (Lake and Reynolds, 2008) 116 Dresden 36, 38 dress 48, 248–250 Drowning Hands (Rete Oltre il Ponte, 2019) 10 Duchamp, Marcel 187 Duncan, Isadora 170, 171 Durand, Asher B. 241 Duret, Francisque 251 Dutch artists 5, 12 EAT (Lucía Madriz, 2008) 159 École des Beaux-Arts 3, 227, 242, 248, 251, 252, 255 Edelman, Lee 145 Edgar Heap of Birds 95 El-Shaarawi, Nadia 134 Embarkation at Southampton (Dora Meeson, 2015) 219 Emendatio (James Luna, 2005) 95 Emil Goh 68 Emotion Pictures (Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA), 2005) 35

Index empathy 12, 20, 36, 61, 162, 164, 276 Les Énervés de Jumièges (Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1880) 56, 60 English Channel 57, 61 eugenics 125, 126, 127, 129 eurhythmics 169 exclusionary practices 115, 117, 129, 147 Japanese Americans 263 mental health effects 134 UK asylum seekers 137, 139–140, 141, 144 Exhibition of Australian Artists in Europe (London, 1924) 232n.6 Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Australian Artists in Europe (London, 1924) 225–226, 227, 230, 231n.4 exhibitions (in general) 4, 16 see also biennials (exhibitions); fairs (in general) expatriate communities see artists’ communities; diasporas; migrant communities ex-votos 157, 158 Faculty of Arts Gallery, London 225 fairs (in general) 16, 163 see also biennials (exhibitions) Fanon, Frantz 251 Feldman, Gregory 302 female artists (in general) 230, 231n.2, 231n.2, 303 female asylum seekers 136–141 feminism 24, 145, 172, 226 Femme en Extase (Ferdinand Hodler, 1911) 169–170, 171 Festival des Arts Nègres (Dakart, 1966) 159 Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad, A (Siemon Allen, 2003) 26n.1 films see video art Fisher, Laura 124 Fitzgerald, Shannon 26n.1 Flood, The (Jean Victor-Schnetz, 1831) 239, 240 Flores, Luis Molinari 196 financial support 68 Foley, Fiona 115 forapieceofapple (David Antonio Cruz, 2013) 52 Fortress Europe 37 Foucault, Michel 130n.1 Fountain (Rebecca Belmore, 2005) 95, 98, 109n.6

Freedom Principle, The: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2015) 35 French Academy in Rome 241 French artists 3, 10, 171, 239, 244 Freud, Lucian 49 From the Other Side (De l’autre coté) (Chantal Akerman, 2002) 182 Frost, Erin 298 Frosty Sunrise (Elioth Gruner, 1917) 227, 228 Fry, Edith 213–215, 216, 218, 222, 224, 225–226, 227, 228–229, 230–231, 300 Fry, Roger 212, 230 Fugitive Poses (Gerald Vizenor, 1998) 92 Futurists 109n.5 Gabaccia, Donna 18, 248 Gabriel, Ellen 107 Galanin, Jerrod 102, 103, 105, 106, 108 Galanin, Nicholas 102–104, 103 Galbraith, Antonia 198, 201 Galerie Ecalle 230 Galindo, Guillermo 182 galleries and museums (in general) 4, 5, 6 see also migration museums Galvani, Marina 155–165 Garcia, Scherezade 156, 157, 158 gardens, Japanese 262, 265–268, 269–281 Gauguin, Paul 257n.22 gender 92 see also feminism; sexuality; transexuality geographical borders see borders Gerchman, Rubens 192, 196, 198 German artists 22, 36, 38 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 38 Germany 38 see also Berlin; Dresden Gérôme, Jean-Léon 251, 252 Gilroy, Paul 63 Gioni, Massimiliano 176–185 Girma, Marchu 150n.3 Gladwell, Shaun 115 Glissant, Édouard 63 globalisation 3, 15, 21, 25, 163 Global South 3, 145 see also North–South divide global ‘turn’ 3, 16, 17 Glueck, Grace 196 glyphing 101 Goll, Morten 62 Góngora, Leonel 196

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Index Goodsir, Agnes 213 Gordon, Avery 126, 129 Gorky, Arshile 178, 181, 184–185 Goshka Macuga: Exhibit, A (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012) 35 Grand-Carteret, John 252 Grazia, Maria 241 Green, Christopher 88–112, 301 Green, Nancy 238 Greenberg, Clement 187 Greenwood, Grace 241–242 Greussing, Esther 7–8 Griffiths, Melanie 134, 139–140, 144 Grossraum (Borders of Europe) (Lonnie Van Brummelen, 2004–2005) 12 Grosz, Elizabeth 77, 114 Gruner, Elioth 227–228 Guan Wei 67, 68 Guattari, Félix 76, 226 Guggenheim Fellowship 187, 207n.1 Haenen, Frédéric de 247, 247, 248 Haerizadeh, Rokni 181 Hagborg, August 254 Hamilton, Alexander 290 Han, Christina 266 Hanru, Hou 65 Han Xizai 85n.10 hate speech 128 health and wellbeing see mental health; state violence Heap of Birds, Edgar 109n.5 Heavy Wounds (Ah Xian, 1991) 69, 70 Heidelberg School 221, 223 Heirs of Columbus, The (Gerald Vizenor, 1991) 91–92, 93 Hellmanzik, Christiane 243 Henda, Kiluanji Kia 6 Here Not There (Brisbane, 1993) 68 Hero, Mikela Lundahl 55, 57, 58 heteronormativity 145, 149, 300 Hilandi Fino / Fine Threading (Catalina Mena Ürményi, 2009) 159 Hill, Richard 99 Hine, Lewis 287, 288, 291, 292–293, 294 Hiram To 68 hispanics 190, 203 historical perpectives see also art histories history painting 4 Hiwa K 181

Hodler, Ferdinand 168–170, 171 Hoerder, Dirk 15, 18 Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC 59 Holzapfel, Olaf 36, 36–38 Home, The 212, 215, 229 Home Sweet Home (Women for Refugee Women, 2011–) 137–138, 146, 147, 148 Hong Kong artists 68 Horna, Kati 289 Horton, Jessica 96 hostility of French workers, to Italian immigrants 251 to Japanese Americans in WW2 264, 265 How the Other Half Lives ... (Jacob A. Riis, 1890) 292 Human Condition, The (Hannah Arendt, 1998) 147 human rights 18, 108n.1, 129, 146–149 Hupfield, Maria 97, 98, 99–101, 100, 101, 108 hybridisation/hybridity 4, 14, 20, 63, 109n.4, 188, 199, 267 see also transcultural identities hyphenated labels/identities 4, 14 Hyundai Commission: Tania Bruguera (Tate Modern, 2018–2019) 20 iconography in Chinese diasporic art 76, 77 Japanese-style gardens 266 Icons of Identity (Dong Wang Fan, 2017) 84 Icy and Tot 4 identity 49, 301 see also cultural identity; national identity identity politics 192, 206, 301, 302, 303 imagery see migratory imagery immersive experiences 10, 42, 115, 266, 267 see also installation art; performance art immigrant communities see artists’ communities; diasporas; migrant communities immigration policies 6–7, 39 Australia 116–117, 120, 125 France 10 mental health effects 134, 141 United Kingdom 8, 136, 141–142, 146, 149 see also asylum policies imperialism/imperialisation see neoimperialism

Index import taxes 216, 218 Iñárritu, Alejandro González 10 in-betweenness 14, 21, 83, 225, 263 see also hybridisation/hybridity; hyphenated labels/identities Indian Water: The Native American Pavilion (Nicholas Galanin and Oscar Tuazon, 2017) 102, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106 indigenous artists Inuit 95, 109n.3 Native American 88–112 see also aboriginal art Indigenous Arts Action Alliance 97 indigenous Australians 84, 113, 115, 116–119, 124 indigenous Brazilians 109n.3 indigenous people rights of 108n.1 see also Native Americans installation art 10, 36, 36, 44n.1, 55, 61, 70 World Bank Art Program 158–159, 161 Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane) 68 integration see social integration intercultural understanding 268, 269, 273–274, 278, 303 interdisciplinary approaches 9 Interior, An (Bessie Davidson, c. 1920) 230 internal displacement 263–265 international art centres see art centres internationalism 179, 194 international networks see also cross-cultural engagement internment 263–265 In the Café: Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin (Van Gogh, 1887) 235, 236 Inuit artists 95, 109n.3 Iraqi artists 161 Iraqi refugees 134, 143 Israel–Palestine border 182 Italian family living 428 E. 116th St., 2 floor back (Lewis Wickes Hine, 1911) 288 Italian models of Paris 238, 242–251 Italian emigrants 238, 256n.3 Italian Woman, The (Agostina Segatori) (Van Gogh, 1887) 235, 237 Italy 2, 10, 178 see also Venice Biennale Ito, Michio 169, 171 iwishrainydayscamewithasliceofmango (David Antonio Cruz, 2012) 49–50

Jaber, Marina 161 Jameson, Fredric 14 Japanese American Historical Plaza 269–273, 278–281 Japanese Americans 262–263, 264–265 Japanese immigration to North America 263 Japanese-style gardens 262–283 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile 169 Jardin du Luxembourg (Eugène Atget 1898–99) 250 Jarrar, Khaled 182 Jersey (Hurvin Anderson, 2008) 14 Jiawei Shen 67 Jiimaan (Canoe) (Maria Hupfield, 2015) 97, 98, 99–101, 100, 101 Johnson, Merritt 104 Jones, Marion 225 Jorrín, Enrique 208n.9 ‘Jungle, The’, Calais 26n.2, 55, 57, 59 Juvigny, Sophie de 257n.18 Kafer, Alison 145 Kaphar, Titus 52, 173 Kaplan, Caren 226 Kapoor, Anish 26n.2 Karlsson Rixon, Axel 54–62 Katz, Leandro 187, 192, 196 Kelly, Elish 243 Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2016) 35 Kettle’s Yard Gallery 136 Khalili, Bouchra 10, 39, 61, 182 Killian, Mark 145–146 Konody, Paul George 221–222, 224 Korean artists 69, 170, 171 Kris, Ernst 241 Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin 4 Kurdi, Alan 293 Kurz, Otto 241 Laat, Tymon de 40 labels (identities) 3, 11, 48–49, 202–203 see also hyphenated labels/identities; stereotyping Lake, Marilyn 116 Lamartine, Alphonse de 241 Lamelas, David 187 land art 88 landscape painting 220–221, 227 Lange, Dorothea 59, 178, 181

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Index Latin American artists 48 New York-based 186–203 Latin Americanism 186–187, 190, 206 Latin American Spirit, The (Guggenheim Museum, 1964) 191 Latino Americans 48 Latinx artists 51 Latour, Bruno 104 Lawrence, Jacob 4, 178 learning experiences 262, 268 Lebanon 161 Lebròn, Lolita 48 Le Havre 57–58 Leist, Fred 213, 223, 225, 228, 229, 230, 232n.6 Leonardi, Giulia 170 Lewis, Rachel A. 133–152, 302 Lewitt, Sol 190 Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner – A Syntax of Dependency (Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA), 2011) 35 lieux de mémoire 262, 269–271 Lindsay, Lionel 223, 224 Line that Birds cannot See, A (Alberto Ríos, 2015) 11 Lingiari, Vincent 118 Lippard, Lucy 189, 190 Listo (Ready to Go) (Guillermo Galindo, 2015) 182 Liu Wei 182 Lives Interrupted (Caroline Walker, 2018) 136–137 ‘living museum’ gardens 268 Logan Center Gallery, University of Chicago 42 London 2, 3 Australian artists in 24, 211–231, 231n.3, 300 female asylum seekers in 136–141, 302 Lonetree, Amy 6 Long, Sydney 225 Luccassen, Leo 18, 19 Lukin, Aimé Iglesias 186–210, 300 Lumières Nordiques (Normandy, 2018–2019) 56, 61 Luminais, Évariste-Vital 56 Luna, James 95, 96, 106 Lu Xiao 67 Ma, Laurence J.C. 84n.3 Macel, Christine 109n.3 Machine à Penser (Venice, 2018) 43

Maciunas, George 190 McIntosh, Hugh D. 225 MacKenzie, John 18 McMaster, Gerald 95, 109n.4 McNay, Lois 140–141 macro-regions 15 Madonna con Santi (Botticelli, c. 1467) 79 Madriz, Lucía 159 Magiciens de la Terre (Centre Pompidou, 1989) 17 Malaysian artist 5 Malaysian Chinese artist 68 Mamadou, Clandestin, France, Carte de Seìjour (Barthélémy Toguo, 2010) 299 Manet, Edouard 252 Mapping Journey Project, The (Bouchra Khalili, 2008–2011) 10, 39, 61, 182 Maravillas, Francis 66, 83 Marchand, Eckard 243 Marché aux modèles, Le, Place Pigalle, Paris (Frédéric de Haenen, 1890) 247, 247 marginalisation 225, 226, 231 see also in-betweenness Marmo, Marinella 150n.4 Martin, Lee-Ann 109n.4 Martínez, Cristóbal 88 Mathew B. Brady Studios 289 Maus, Teodoro 192, 196 Maynard, Ricky 115 media representation of migrants 7–8, 12, 18, 177 Mediterranean crossing 13, 36, 177, 182 Meeson, Dora 219, 223, 225, 230 Melbourne National Gallery School 215, 231n.2 memory 14, 60, 117, 124, 129, 262, 269 mental health 133, 134, 140, 141, 144 Mersmann, Birgit 63–87, 301–302 Meskimmon, Marsha 17 Messer, Thomas 191 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 35 Mexican artists 190, 191, 198 Mexican–US border 42, 47, 88, 182 Meyer, Henri 248, 249, 250 Michelson, Alan 106–108 Mignolo, Walter 94, 190 migrant camps 55–56, 57, 59 migrant communities 9 Japanese American 265, 266, 268, 269 see also artists’ communities; diasporas

Index migrant experiences 162, 179, 180–181, 247, 293, 299–300 see also migrant stories migrant identities see cultural identity Migrant Image (T.J. Demos, 2013) 179 Migrant Mother (Dorothea Lange, 1936) 181 migrant status 7 migrant stories 5, 161–162 Migrate Art 26n.2 migration controls see immigration policies migration ‘crises’ 4, 8–9, 12, 14, 47, 295 see also media representation of migrants migration museums 164 Migration Series (Jacob Lawrence, 1941) 178 Migrations: Journeys into British Art (Tate Britain, 2012) 4 migration studies 2, 18–19 migration terminology 6–8, 11 migratory aesthetics see diaspora aesthetics migratory imagery see visual imagery of migration Miller, Mara 266 Milza, Pierre 236 Minglu, Gao 65 Minujín, Marta 188, 190, 203, 205 Miranda, Lin-Manuel 290 Miss Edith Fry (George Coates, 1932) 214 Mitchell, William John Thomas 82, 94 Mithlo, Nancy Marie 97, 109n.4 Miyamoto, Bénédicte 299–300 Mobilité Mémorable / Memorable Mobility (Axel Karlsson Rixon, 2018-19) 55, 55, 58, 60–61 mobility 39–40, 175, 226, 231 see also cultural mobility Moch, Leslie Page 19 model markets 248 models see artists’ models Modernism 178–179, 188, 212, 218–219, 228, 230 Molesworth, Helen 35 Mon and Chumon Gates, and Roji (David Bell, 2018) 275 Monkman, Kent 90, 92 Moore, John 223 Moore, William 215 Morière, Gustave Julien 256 Moroccan artists 39 Moroccan-French artist 10 Mosaka, Tumelo 26n.1 Moss, Dorothy 172

Most Serene Republics (Edgar Heap of Birds, 2007) 95, 109n.5 Mother (Louise Bourgeois, 1999) 172 Mother III (Yun Suknam, 1993/2018) 167, 170, 172 Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural Latinoamericana (MICLA) 192, 196–197, 202, 206 Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Leslie Page Moch, 1992) 19 Moya, Paula 299, 300 Mukherji, Parul Dave 3 Multicolor (Migrate Art, 2019) 26n.2 murals/muralism 162 Bristol Disability Murals (2012) 135, 141–146, 143, 148 Mexican 191 Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, France 55, 56, 60 Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, Paris 299 El Museo Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires 192, 194, 196, 197, 202, 206 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 35 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 4, 6, 35, 191 museums see migration museums Myer Foundation (Australia) 67 Myre, Nadia 106 Naeem, Asma 173 Nail, Thomas 64, 247 Nairne, Andrew 136 Nam June Paik 69 Nanibush, Wanda 108 national art schools/academies 3 national borders see borders national cultures 9 National Gallery of Victoria, Australia 115, 219 National Gallery School, Melbourne, Australia 226–227 national identity 4, 5, 11, 43–44 nationalism 207n.6 nationalistic art 159, 207n6 Australia 212, 213, 221, 231 Venice Biennale 105, 106 World Bank Art Program 159, 163 National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) 95, 101

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316

Index National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, USA 45, 53n.1, 166–175, 288 nation states 9, 11, 14–15 Native American art 88–112, 301 Native Americans 6, 109n.5 Nazareth, Paulo 182 negative views of migration 6–7, 8 Negeste, Meskela Gebreslassie 138, 139, 150n.3 neo-imperialism 17, 189 Netherlands 2, 5 Neto, Ernesto 109n.3 Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society 35 New Museum, New York, USA 176 New/Old Homeland – Artist’s R/emigration (Kunsthaus Dahlem, 2018) 4 New York 3, 24, 38, 52, 163, 292, 295 Latin American artists in 186–207, 300 Nielsen, Tone Olaf 62 Nigerian artists 4, 44 Night of Entertainment (Han Xizai, c. 1163–1224) 85n.10 Nochlin, Linda 303 Noé, Luis Felipe 188 No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Lee Edelman, 2004) 145 Noiriel, Gerard 251 Nordic countries 54, 56 North–South divide 4, 301 Noticias de America (Paulo Nazareth, 2012) 182 ocean theme 60–61 O’Connor, Nathalie 162 O’Hagan, John 243 Oiticica, Hélio 198 Old World in the New, The ... (Edward Alsworth Ross, 1914) 291 One Flew over the Void (Bala Perdida) (Javier Téllez, 2005) 26n.3 On the Somme (Charles Bryant, 1917) 219 Opie, Julian 26n.2 Order of Things, The (Michel Foucault, 2008) 35 Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center 269 ‘Origins of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man, The’ (Hannah Arendt, 1973) 146 Orpen, William 227 ‘otherness’ 1, 8 Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (Smithsonian, 2014) 4

Paci, Adrian 177, 181 Palestinian artists 165 Parc, Julio Le 197 Paris 2, 188, 213 Australian artists in 222–223, 225, 227, 230 Italian models of Paris 24, 235–261 Latin American artists in 197 Paris Pittoresque: Modèles et Pifferari de la Place Jussieu (Henri Meyer, 1879) 248, 249, 250 Paris Salon 223, 231n.3 participatory arts projects 133–134, 136–137, 148–149 partnerships 157 Patagonia 37 Paternosto, César 190, 192, 196, 202 pejorative connotations 6–7, 8 Peña, Rolando 196 performance art 49–50, 50, 92, 96, 97, 101, 172 Perrault, John 189 Petersen, Anne Ring 11, 196, 301 Pettoruti, Emilio 188 Phillips, Arthur 220 Phillips Collection 176, 178, 183–184 photography 174, 180, 185, 287–296 archives 52–53, 125–126, 129 specific art works 54, 55, 56, 58, 59–60, 118–119, 123, 137–141, 139, 150n.3, 182 see also video art Pils, Isidore 252 Pinpoint (Nicole Sfeir, 2016) 20 The Places They Will Go (Helen Zughaib, 2015–2016) 59 Playing Go under Double Screens (Zhou Wenju, 10th c.) 79, 82 Poitras, Edward 94–95 political activism see activism political asylum see asylum policies; asylum seekers political campaigns/protest see activism; artivism political representations of migration 6, 8, 9, 18 political responses see asylum policies; detention of migrants; immigration policies Pompidou Center, Paris 17 Pootoogook, Kananginak 109n.3 Pop art 188 Pope.L 42 porcelain busts (Ah Xian, 1998–1999) 71–73

Index Porter, Liliana 192, 196, 198, 203 Portland Japanese Garden 265–269, 272, 273–281 Portrait of Agostina Segatori, (Vincent Van Gogh, 1887) 254 Portrait of Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island (Hoda Afshar, 2018) 122, 123 Portraits in Nordic Light (Axel Karlsson Rixon, 1998) 54 Portraits of the World (National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, 2017–2018) 166–171, 174 portraiture 45–47, 48, 50, 71–72, 136, 172–173, 180–181 Portraiture Now: Staging the Self (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, 2014–2016) 45, 48 positionality 297–305 Postcommodity 88–89, 89 postmemory studies 129 Povinelli, Elizabeth 90 Pratt, Mary Louise 189 Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) (Hiwa K, 2017) 181 Preston, Margaret 212, 223 Prinet, René Xavier 230 Proctor, Thea 223 propaganda 8, 10, 69 Puar, Jasbir 144–145 Puente, Alejandro 190, 196 Puerto Rican Pieta en la Calle de la Fortaleza (David Antonio Cruz, 2014) 50 Puerto Ricans 49, 50–51, 52–53 Purple Noon’s Transparent Might, The (Arthur Streeton, 1896) 220, 221 Qin, Dongxiao 297 ‘queer’ 49, 51, 54, 145 Queer Community through Photographic Acts (Axel Karlsson Rixon, 2016) 54 Quinn, James 225 racialisation 9, 14, 113, 115, 123, 126, 127, 129, 293 racism 6, 9, 48, 128 see also xenophobia Raphael 244 Recollet, Karyn 101 reconciliation 117, 124, 278 Redon, Odilo 255 re-enactment 98, 101, 108

reflexivity 93 refugees 7, 39 with disability 141–146 and human rights 146–149 mental health 133, 134, 140 participatory arts projects 133–134, 137–146 see also asylum seekers Refused: The Experiences of Women Denied Asylum in the UK (Dorling, Girma, and Walter, 2012) 150n.3 regionalism 3, 170–171, 202–203 see also centre-periphery rehabilitation 133–134 Reilly, Maura 6 Remain (Hoda Afshar, 2018) 121, 121, 122–123 remigration, imagined 69 repatriation 223, 243 Repellent Fence / Valla Repelente (Postcommodity, 2015) 88–89, 89 resettlement 142, 263–265, 271 Rest (William Bouguereau, 1879) 245 Restless Earth, The (Milan, 2017) 176, 177, 179, 182, 183 Rete Oltre il Ponte 10 Reynolds, Henry 116 Richards, Eric 18 Rickard, Jolene 96, 98–99, 109n.6 Right to Offend is Sacred, The (Brook Andrew, 2017) 115 Riis, Jacob A. 292, 294 Ríos, Alberto 11 Rivera, Diego 188, 191 Riverside Studios, London, UK 137 Robert, Léopold 239, 241 Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich 191 Rockefeller, David 194 Rodríguez-Duarte, Alexis 290, 296n.1 Roelstraete, Dieter 35–44 Ross, Edward Alsworth 291 Rossi, Carmen 255 Rouen Musée des Beaux-Arts, France 55, 56, 60 Roux, Hugues Le 238, 250–251 Royal Academy, London 220, 221, 223, 227, 231n.3 Ruiz, Marie 299 Rushdie, Salman 304 Russell, Ruth 147 Safran, William 69 Sager, Maja 134

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318

Index Sajet, Kim 172 Salon des Beaux-Arts 230 Sam, Long Tack 173 San Martin, Griselda 181, 182 Santulli, Michele 256n.9, 257n.17 São Paulo Biennial 188, 192, 197 Sarvestani, Arash Kamali 120 Sauveteur (Passport vendor) (Pascale Marthine Tayou, 2011) 182 Schnetz, Jean-Victor 239, 240, 241 Scott, William Edouard 178 Scully, Sean 26n.2 ‘sculptural painting’ 75 sculpture 36, 37, 99, 225 Second World War 263–264, 289 Segatori, Agostina 235–236, 238–239, 251–252, 255–256, 257n.22 segregation see state responses to migration self-determination 144, 186 semantics see migration terminology Senegal, Dak’Art 4 sexuality 92, 135 see also gender; heteronormativity Sfeir, Mona Nicole 20 Shakkei (David Bell, 2018) 272 Shanghai Art Fair 84n.1 Shanghai School of Arts and Crafts 74 Shaomin Shen 67 Shen Jiawei 85n.5 Sheren, Ila Nicole 16 ‘shifting perspectives’ 74–75, 77, 79, 83, 84 Shifting Perspectives and the Body (Dong Wang Fan, 1997–1999) 74–75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81 shoes motive 58, 59–60, 139 Shrover, Marlou 18, 19 Shuman, Amy 142 Shumard, Ann 288, 289 Silver and Blue (Fred Leist, 1929) 229, 232n.6 Simon Starling: Metamorphology (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2014) 35 Singapore artist 5 Sitka, A.K. 109n.7 Smith, Bernard 224, 227 Smith, Evan 150n.4 Smith, Sydney Ure 215, 220, 222, 227 Smithsonian African Art Museum 160 Smithsonian American Art Museum 4, 11 Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery see National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, USA

Snelling, Michael 68 Socci, D. 255 social identity see cultural identity social integration 23, 24, 203–204, 270, 271 social justice 158–159, 184 Song Tang 67 Sotheby’s 84n.1, 124 Souliman, Victoria 211–233, 300 South America 37 South–North migration 13, 163 sovereignty 92, 93 spatial representation in painting 74–75, 77 Spector, Ronnie 288–289 Spring Gardens Gallery, London 230 Spring Time in Devon (Elioth Gruner, 1924) 227, 232n.5 Stage, Frances 147 state borders see borders state responses to migration see asylum policies; detention of migrants; exclusionary practices; immigration policies state violence 136, 141, 143, 145, 146, 150n.4 Steedman, Carolyn 114 Stellweg, Carla 192, 196 stereotyping 13, 292 see also labels (identities) Stieglitz, Alfred 190 Still in My Mind: Gurindji Location, Experience and Visuality (Brenda Croft, 2017) 115, 117, 118–119 street art 4, 162 Streeton, Arthur 220–221, 223 study trips 188–189 Sudanese female refugees 147 suddendly,youandiwillwaitinyourdreams … tonight (David Antonio Cruz, 2019) 45–47, 46 Suknam, Yun 167, 170, 171, 172 Sullivan, Edward 207n.2 Sumaila, Amadou 294 Sun Shines on a Graveyard and a Garden Alike, The (Rokni Haerizadeh, 2015–2017) 181 Swedish artists 54 Swiss artists 168 Switzerland 168 Sydney Art School, Australia 226, 227 Sydney College of Arts 71 symbols of migration see visual imagery of migration

Index Syrian artists 160–161, 165 Syrian refugees 161 Szymczyk, Adam 17, 35 Tagg, John 296n.2 TAKEABITE; elduendealwaystravels … light, (El Museo del Barrio, 2012) 50 Takuma, Tono 274 Taller de Arte Fronterizo (Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, 1984) 16 Tan, Shaun 115 Tate Gallery, London 4, 5, 14, 20 taxes see import taxes Taxonomy of the European Male, (Kent Monkman, 2005) 90, 91, 92 Tayou, Pascale Marthine 182 Tazreiter, Claudia 113–132, 302 Téllez, Javier 26n.3 temporality 134–135, 136–141, 144–145, 148–149 Tenement Museum, New York 295 terminology see migration terminology theatre activism 157 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World) (Alan Michelson, 2019) 106–108, 107 Thiébault-Sisson, François 244 Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) 76 Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) 64, 67, 69, 182 Tillmans, Wolfgang 182 titled Artist Tour Guide (Maria Hupfield, 2013) 101 Tobia, Rosalie 255 Tofighian, Omid 121 Toguo, Barthélémy 299 Torres, Humberto ‘Tico’ 290, 296n.1 traditional motifs 71, 77, 79, 171, 267 Trampoline House, Copenhagen 62 transborderness 75, 85n.9 transcultural identities 4, 83 transdisciplinary approaches 18 transexuality 45, 51, 90, 92 Transit (Sydney, 1998) 68, 85n.8 transmotion 92–93, 94, 96, 106 transnationalism 1, 4, 9, 20, 84n.3 trans-pavilions 16 Trassen, part of ZAUN (Fence) (Olaf Holzapfel, 2017) 36–37

travelling scholarships 215, 231n.2 Triangle (Nam June Paik, 1976) 70 Tschofen, Monique 128 Tsoutas, Nicholas 68 Tuazon, Oscar 102, 103, 105 Turner, Sarah Victoria 279 Twist, Kade L. 88 Udemba, Emeka 4 UKIP 8 Um Sagrado Lugar (A Sacred Place) (Ernesto Neto, 2017) 109n.3 United Kingdom asylum policies 134, 135, 136, 137, 141, 146, 149 female asylum seekers 136–141 see also London United Nations Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples 108n.1 United States 187 Japanese-style gardens in 262–283 Mexican–US border 42, 47, 88, 182 US–Canada borders 89 see also American artists; New York universalism 15, 180, 183 Unseen: Our Past in a New Light (National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC) 173 Untitled (Leandro Waisbord, 2010) 162 Uprooted: The Resilience of Refugees, Displaced People and Host Communities (World Bank, 2017–18) 155, 160, 165 Ureña, Leslie 287–296 Uriburu, Nicolás García 187 Ürményi, Catalina Mena 159 Valley of the Tweed, The (Elioth Gruner, 1921) 227 Van Aken, Joseph 5 Van Brummelen, Lonnie 12 Van Gogh, Vincent 235, 236, 237, 253, 254, 254, 257n.22 Vargas, Winston 289 Vega, Jorge de la 187 Venice Biennale 13, 16, 94, 96, 97, 102, 106 Verhagen, Marcus 124, 128 Vertigo Sea (John Akomfrah, 2015) 181 video art 13, 26n.3, 39, 95, 97–101, 98, 106–108, 107, 120–123, 121, 177, 181, 182 Vilamanesh, Hossein 115 visual ambiguity 75, 77, 79, 83

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320

Index visual cultures 77, 83–84, 115 visual imagery of migration 8, 20, 56, 59, 60, 61, 64, 74–75, 82, 83, 137, 161, 179–180, 182 visual propaganda 8, 10, 69 Viva Arte Viva Core Exhibition 16 Vizenor, Gerald 91–93, 96, 99 Vollard, Ambroise 253 Vostell, Wolf 190 Wabi, Sabi, Chaniwa, Roji (David Bell, 2018) 277 Waisbord, Leandro 162 Waiting (Meskela Gebreslassie Negeste, 2012) 138, 139, 150n.3 Walker, Caroline 136–137 Wall, The (Griselda San Martin, 2015–2017) 181, 182 Waller, Susan 235–261, 303–304 Walter, Natasha 136, 150n.3 Wang Nanming 83 Ward, Martha 256n.5 Warhol, Andy 190 Warmth of Other Suns, The: Stories of Global Displacement (Washington DC, 2019) 176, 180, 182, 183, 184 Way of the Shovel, The: Art as Archaeology (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2013) 35 Weeren-Griek, Hans van 195–196 wegivesomuchandgivenothingatall, paintings for Richard (David Antonio Cruz, 2018) 45 Wells, Luis 196, 198, 199 Whistler, James McNeill 255

White Australia Policy 116–117 Whiteread, Rachel 26n.2 white supremacy 9 Whitlam, Gough 118 Whitney Museum of American Art 108 Williamson, Clare 68 Winter, Jay 279 Wolff, Janet 226 Wolf Nation (Alan Michelson, 2019) 108 Wollongong University 74 women see female artists (in general); female asylum seekers Women for Refugee Women, London 136 Woollacott, Angela 231n.3 World Bank Art Program 155, 157–163, 165n.1 World Health Organization (WHO) 133 Wu Hung 79 xenophobia 8, 244, 251 Xiao Xian Liu 67 Yeman, N. (Meskela Gebreslassie Negeste) see Negeste, Meskela Gebreslassie Yeo, Rebecca 142 Young, John 68 Young Italian Street Musician (Thomas Couture, c. 1877) 246, 246–247 Yuk Suknam 170 ZAUN (Fence) 36 Zayas, Marius de 190 Zhiyuan Wang 67 Zhou Wenju 79, 85n.10 Zughaib, Helen 59