Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art 9780226035802

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of what one cannot speak

D or i s S a l c e d o’s P ol i t ic a l A rt

M i e k e Bal

of what one cannot speak The University of Chicago Press  Chicago and London

Mieke Bal is academy professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and cofounder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of many books, including Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past, also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2010 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America 19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10    1  2  3  4  5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03578-9 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-03578-6 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bal, Mieke, 1946– Of what one cannot speak : Doris Salcedo’s political art / Mieke Bal. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03578-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-03578-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Salcedo, Doris, 1958—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Sculpture—Colombia—20th century. 3. Sculpture—20th century —Political aspects—Colombia. 4. Art—Political aspects. I. Title. NB379 .S25B35 2010 709.2—dc22 2010011141 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

List of Illustrations  •  viii Acknowledgments  •  x Introduction  •  1 The Case The World The Book

1

2

Metaphoring: Singularity in Negative Space  •  29

The Politics of ­Anthropomorphism  •  75

Metaphor and Negative Space

The Anthropomorphic ­Imagination

Metaphoring Negativity The Insistence of Metaphor The Act of Metaphoring Metaphor as Skin Atrabiliarios as Political Object

Locating Violence House without Spouse Theaters of Gender On the Move

3

4

5

Timing  •  121

The Agency of Space: Installation  •  157

Acts of Memory  •  191

Negations of Place No More Bones Foreshortening Foreshortening Time

Listening to Time in Space Abduction into Pain History and the Event in the Present New Space

An Act in Search of an Agent

Conclusion: Political Art Takes Place  •  243 Epilogue  •  253

Perception and Memory for Witnessing

References  •  255

Acting Memory

Index of Terms and Concepts  •  267

Meanwhile: Herenow Active Space Shibboleth of Past and Present

Index of Names and Titles  •  275

I.1: Shibboleth, 2007  •  xii I.2: Shibboleth (detail), 2007  •  xiii I.3: Shibboleth after “burial”  •  xiv 1.1: Atrabiliarios, 1992–93  •  35 1.2: Atrabiliarios (detail), 1992–93  •  36 1.3: Atrabiliarios (detail), 1992–93  •  48 1.4: Atrabiliarios (detail), 1992–93  •  61 2.1: Untitled Furniture (Armoire), 1995  •  74 2.2: Untitled Furniture (Armoire) (detail), 1995  •  76 2.3: Untitled Furniture (High Chair), 1995  •  78 2.4: La Casa Viuda IV, 1994  •  84 2.5: La Casa Viuda IV (detail), 1994  •  85 2.6 Untitled, 1989–90  •  91 2.7 La Casa Viuda II (detail), 1993–94  •  99 2.8 La Casa Viuda II (detail), 1993–94  •  100 2.9: La Casa Viuda I, 1992–94  •  108 2.10: La Casa Viuda I (detail), 1992–94  •  109 2.11: Untitled Furniture (Armoire), 1998  •  116 2.12 Untitled Furniture (Armoire) (detail), 1998  •  117 2.13: Untitled Furniture (Armoire), 1992 (“fallen soldier”)  •  119 3.1: Unland, 1995–98 (installation overview)  •  122 3.2: La Casa Viuda VI, 1995  •  131 3.3: Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic (detail), 1997  •  132 3.4: Unland: Irreversible Witness, 1995–98  •  133 3.5: Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic (detail), 1997  •  138 3.6: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1601–2  •  145 3.7: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Conversion of Saint Paul, 1601–2  •  145 4.1: Thou-less, 2001–2  •  158

4.2: Installation shot, documenta xi  •  165 4.3: Installation of untitled works, 1989–95  •  169 4.4: Untitled, 1995  •  170 4.5: Untitled, 1997  •  171 4.6: Untitled, 1999  •  172 4.7: La Casa Viuda III, 1994  •  174 4.8: Noviembre 6, 2001  •  179 4.9: Noviembre 6, 2001  •  180 4.10: Noviembre 6, 2001  •  181 4.11: Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, 1999–2000  •  183 4.12: Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985 (detail), 1999–2000  •  185 5.1–5.6: Noviembre 6 y 7, 2002  •  192, 194–99 5.7: Project for the Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá, 2007  •  201 5.8: Project for the Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá, 2007  •  201 5.9: Installation for the Eighth International Istanbul Biennial, 2003  •  216 5.10: Installation for the Eighth International Istanbul Biennial (detail), 2003  •  217 5.11: Installation for the Eighth International Istanbul Biennial, 2003  •  219 5.12: Neither, 2004  •  227 5.13: Neither, 2004  •  228 5.14: Neither, 2004  •  229 5.15: Abyss (doorway), 2005  •  231 5.16 Abyss (detail), 2005  •  233 5.17: Abyss, 2005  •  234 5.18: Abyss (detail), 2005  •  235 5.19: Shibboleth (detail), 2007  •  239 5.20: Shibboleth (detail), 2007  •  241 E.1: Plegaria Muda (detail), 2009–10  •  252

This project has gone through a number of jumps and starts. It began in 2002 at the J. Paul Getty Research Institute, but got filed when the occasion for it fell through. At later stages it has been generously supported by the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). I have benefited from the ideas, inspiration, and advice of many colleagues and friends, most of whom appear in the references. Personal conversations with Charles Merewether, in the early stages, and with Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, in the later stages, have been particularly stimulating. As always, Ernst van Alphen remains my toughest, and thereby most helpful, critic. The draft has been expertly edited, first by Bregje van Eekelen and in a second round by Stefan van der Lecq. I wish to thank especially Doris Salcedo, primarily for her work, but also for her ongoing feedback and openness.

The world is everything that is the case.

L u d w i g W i t t g e n s t e i n , Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first sentence Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

L u d w i g W i t t g e n s t e i n , Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, last sentence

F i g u r e I.1 (previous spread, verso) Shibboleth, 2007. Crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall, filled with concrete and wire fence, approx. 167 m. Tate Modern, London. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

F igu r e I.2 (previous spread, recto) Shibboleth (detail), 2007. Crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall, filled with concrete and wire fence, approx. 167 m. Tate Modern, London. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

F i g u r e I .3 Shibboleth after “burial.” Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

Sometimes you go to see an artwork, and when you enter the space, you look around in bewilderment. Where is the artwork? Then, retrospectively, you realize that first turn of your head was already a response—something the work had made you do. And so the game called “art” begins. Shibboleth, an artwork by Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo, is such a work. At first sight, there seems to be no artwork at all. It was created for the 2007 annual Unilever commission for the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. It consisted of a long cut in the floor of that huge hall. For the rest, the hall was entirely empty. Beginning at one end as an extremely thin line, a crack made by means of a dentist’s drill, the cut became wider, meandering through the length of the space, until it became wide enough to open up its inside. There, wire fence encrusted in irregularly shaped but smoothly polished concrete sides demonstrated that this crack was different from the cracks carved by earthquakes. Standing at one end and looking to the other end, I saw a long, somewhat unsettling fissure, as if my personal safety was no longer guaranteed. Walking along the opening to the other end, I stopped frequently and looked inside. Teasingly, the bottom of the cleft was never clearly visible. After the tenure of the installation expired, in April 2008, it was filled up again. The work was buried. But a trace of it remains. Concrete, like human societies, cannot render entirely invisible what lies below its surface. This work, or installation, “ist der Fall”—it is the case. It exists, in real time and space. Moreover, it is “the case” not only as artwork, but also as breach. The fissure is a fissure, not a representation of one. As such it is, according to Wittgenstein’s opening sentence in the Tractatus, in and of the world, in addition to being “on” (as in about) that world. It is part of the reality in which we all live—some under better circumstances than others, as [1]

Introduction

Shibboleth intimates. I discuss this work here because Shibboleth challenges common conceptions of what art might be. At the same time, it challenges common ideas of political art. For, as it is a non-representational, silent work, its potential to contribute to the political is not obvious either. For these reasons, I devote this study on political art to the work of this artist. For, as both Shibboleth and Salcedo’s own conceptions of art make clear, the two elements of the phrase political art cannot possibly be separated. This simple insight is key to the question of the relationship between art and politics. It is not as if there is art, some of which happens to be political. Political art is art because it is political; it is art by virtue of its political “nature.” Neither art nor the political are defined by subject matter. They are domains of agency, where acting becomes possible and can have effects. In the case of political art, that agency is one and the same; it “works” as art because it works politically. This series of reflections is devoted to the inseparability of those two elements, which nevertheless remain irreducible to one another. Political art such as Salcedo’s shows that they can neither be equated nor severed. Instead, they deeply affect each other. In exploring what makes art political, I explore where art’s political efficacy can be located; how it performs; how it exerts agency; and what the point is of art’s political agency for the larger domain of culture. This study explores political art in the medium of still sculpture, the thematic of mourning, and takes as its theoretical starting point Theodor Adorno’s indictment of art “after Auschwitz.” A second volume I plan to write looks at the moving image, the representation of and cohabitation with what has been called, rather infelicitously, otherness, and considers the tensions between affect and representation. The third volume of the prospective tripartite series examines the political potential of abstraction. Each study puts forward a different emphasis, an aspect of both the medium in which the art is made and of the political issues it addresses. With the three volumes together I hope to offer a variety of ideas concerning the agency of art—or, to use a politically suspicious word, its power. Although I am not particularly focused on or even interested in what artists themselves say about their art, I find this artist’s articulations of what she believes her art to be doing often very relevant and engaging. Whenever I quote or otherwise refer to her words, I do not do so to invoke an authority or an intention, but rather to seek an alliance of a political-artistic kind. Thematically, Salcedo’s work is involved in mourning. Looking at the world obliquely, from the a-central position of the artist engaged with it, Salcedo handles materials as a form of “hopeless mourning.” This material handling of hopeless mourning, it seems to me, can hint at the function political art might have today. As I learned from an interview with the art[2]

The Case If I put forward a view of political art for our present time through and with the work of Salcedo, it is because her art relentlessly keeps together the three components of such art that I find important as well as distinctive for our present time: the affective—albeit oblique—engagement with the present, the refusal to excise the past from that present, and the displacement or “migratoriness” so characteristic of today’s world. The first component, affect, makes the art compelling, without dictating in what way viewers will be affected. The second, the implication of the past in the present, turns perception—an indispensable element of the process of art—into memory. The third, displacement, is a spatial condition for the efficacy of art.2 All three components are involved in the cut in the floor of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The work “happens” in the present, whenever viewers contemplate the empty space where an artwork, a sculpture, was expected. The perception of a fissure in a sturdy and stable concrete floor 1 

All views I attribute to the artist here have been drawn from the interview with Carlos Basualdo (2000). In general I am not keen on involving artists’ information in my analyses, because I consider it the task of the critic to establish connections between art as it functions in the public domain and its viewers. To do some justice to the fact that all three artists I intend to discuss are explicitly and consciously committed to make their art political, I will use some artist information in this prospective book series, albeit sparingly. For my arguments against the “intentionalist” position, see Bal 2002, chap. 7. 2  I do not use the term migratoriness as an equivalent of displacement. The latter term points to violence and involuntary, one-sided, and unidirectional movements. The former term, which I coined for contexts I studied earlier, is meant to acknowledge a feature of (especially but not exclusively contemporary) culture where populations mix, move, and merge. Displacement happens to people who are pushed around by powers; migratoriness characterizes the culture that both longer-term inhabitants and newcomers share. See Bal and Hernández-Navarro 2008. [3]

Introduction

ist herself, such art is a priori in displacement, in ways this book will articulate. The importance of the concept of displacement for Salcedo’s work is an indication of where I will look for the political function of art. By vocation displaced, according to her definition of the artist in general, Salcedo rubs the past into the present. In so doing she blocks the process of forgetting. Art can accomplish this; it can construct, solicit, and even enforce a gaze that, in spite of the fragility of its merely passing caress, will itself bear the traces of the horror encrusted, scarred, or entombed in the work. Horror, not the narratives of it; affect, as process, not its specific semantic content; experience through empathy, balanced by distance—this is what Salcedo effectuates without sentimentality.1

Introduction

brings memories from the past, of images of earthquakes, or landscapes, or people huddled together who lost their homes to the roaring earth. All these memory images are metaphors that make the possible meanings of ground shift between the institution, the artwork, and the viewers. They are metaphors of the divisions that the cut articulates, actively widening the circle of involvement to the past and to other places. And they are metaphors of the montage that exhorts us, the viewers, to make the narratives required to act against cultural amnesia; to de-silence the past and to mobilize once again that which has become stagnant. A second reason why I have chosen Salcedo for the articulation of issues pertaining to political art lies in the clarity and consistency of her work, and in the constantly transformative innovations that characterize her practice. Thus, her work is not only “the case,” as in Wittgenstein’s opening phrase, where the phrase refers to existence, the real, and the present; it is also the “case” I can rely on to make my own “case,” in a third sense of that noun. With a tenacity bordering on obsession, Salcedo tirelessly experiments with a great variety of aesthetic strategies, as if never entirely convinced that the affective power she has conjured up through one of these could suffice. This makes her work effective beyond itself, beyond its own causes and triggers. For these reasons combined, Salcedo’s art can help us consider the more general, pressing question of how to make art that is political: politically effective and offering a real contribution to the political makeup of today’s world—art that is “the case.” Her experiments build ever-wider circles of inclusivity, employing strategies that set up aesthetics itself as a political tool. That is why I contend that the relevance of art’s political potential can be articulated through her work. At the same time, however, I should insist that Salcedo’s work does not illustrate a theory of political art. One of the many reasons I have selected her work is, precisely, that it does the opposite: it is, in a strict sense of the word, singular, in spite of associations one can perceive with other art. Moreover, its political thrust concerns singularity. This is why Salcedo’s body of art and her artistic practice cannot simply be “a case.” The relationship between the singular and the general that these formulations suggest complicates the notion that Salcedo’s art is my case. Although I began with the multiple meanings of the notion of “the case,” this book both is and is not what is usually called a “case study.” With its long history, ranging from seventeenth-century Jesuit casuistry through case law and psychoanalytic case histories, the case study has acquired a dubious reputation as a facile entrance into theoretical generalization and speculation. As Lauren Berlant wrote in her introduction to the first of two volumes of Critical Inquiry devoted to the case study, the genre is “a [4]

3 

This is a paraphrase of Berlant 2007b, 1. [5]

Introduction

problem-event that has animated some kind of judgment” (2007a, 663). In the introduction to the second volume, she elaborates that, typically, when something becomes a case of something, this “becoming a case” is itself an event. That event verifies something in a system or series. This has consequences for such a system or series, which is why the “becoming a case of” constitutes an event. When certain symptoms are named, this event can lead to a diagnosis. Alternatively, it can occasion a reframing of a cluster of objects or activities. The new case may trigger a solidifying of the cluster or series, or transform them. They may also be explained through the new case.3 The major problem the case study poses, Berlant suggests, is that of generalization on the basis of a single case; an overextended form of induction. This book appears to sin against the rules of reasoning in that sense. I contend, however, that this appearance is false. Rather than over-­generalizing, my analysis is, if anything, over-singularizing, and this in two directions. My starting point is broad enough. I am addressing the art of an artist whose achievements amply warrant a book-length study. But this is not a monograph. Salcedo’s art has been adequately published, described, and interpreted, so it would seem superfluous to provide yet another series of descriptions, as any artist’s monograph would require. Neither am I inclined to write a biographical account of this extraordinary artist. More relevant, this cannot be a monograph because I also develop general ideas about how art can be politically effective. Hence, I also abduct and perhaps even abuse the art for another purpose, which is only justified if I can make my case for the inherent bond between art and the political. Yet, the book is not a theoretical treatise either, for as soon as I formulate this broader question, I narrow the scope again, looking at single works by this one artist. Instead of writing in either of these two opposed genres— the monograph and the theoretical essay—I narrow the one through the other, in both directions and at same time. I consider Salcedo’s art primarily through the lens of my interest in the question of political art. Conversely, the questions this interest compels me to raise, with or through a body of work that belongs to a single artist’s output, are inevitably limited. Rather than deploring that limitation, however, the focus on one artist’s work helpfully limits any generalizing claims that, hyperbolically, I might be tempted to make. In both directions my gaze is myopic, perhaps even microscopic. Rather than generalizing on the basis of a singular case, then, I am constantly going back and forth between one special view and another. In

Introduction

terms of the logic of reasoning, this movement is neither deductive nor inductive but what the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, with an idiosyncratic term, called abductive. Jan van der Lubbe and Aart van Zoest define it as follows: “In general abduction is considered as that type of inference which leads to hypothetical explanations for observed facts. In this sense it is the opposite of deduction” (1997, 805). Abduction goes from consequence (Wittgenstein’s “what is the case”) to possible cause. As Van der Lubbe and Van Zoest write, this type of logic is “diagnostic” (806). Deduction, in contrast, reasons from cause to consequence and is thus prognostic. Abduction is the way through which new ideas become possible. It makes creative leaps and has the singular as its starting point. It thrives on uncertainty and speculation, but its origin in observable fact remains primary.4 Abduction is a paradoxical form of logical inference. “Peirce holds both that hypotheses are the products of a wonderful imaginative faculty in man and that they are products of a certain sort of logical inference,” writes philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt in a critical examination of the logical procedure. Frankfurt proceeds to undo this paradox by reformulating abduction not as the formation of but as the (provisional) adoption of hypotheses. The term working hypothesis comes to mind. Although this makes abduction logically unproblematic, I contend that what Frankfurt considers a paradox is in fact a description of the case study when redefined according to the multiple meanings of “the case.” The case, in the practice of casuistry, is also a dispute or discussion, and in law it is a quite precise form of abduction. According to Wittgenstein, the real existence in the world of the thing that is the case—here, art, as the “wonderful imaginative faculty in man”—is a condition I gladly adopt.5 True to the provisional nature of abduction, I will not come up with general “rules” about how to make politically effective art. Instead, I will say why, under which conditions, and in what ways Salcedo’s art shows us how its political potential is deployed and performed in the singular. What I infer from my (avowedly limited) analysis of Salcedo’s work are “thoughts” about those conditions, circumstances, modes, or strategies; these thoughts are, in turn, up for discussion—they are neither recipes nor prescriptions. The artworks—not only the objects but their conditions of making, of exhibition, and of becoming-public—are able to offer visual thoughts that I, as a critic, aim to articulate. The artwork does not think like a person, nor is the artist the thinker behind it; but the artwork in situ, 4  5 

For an overview of the term and the sources in Peirce’s oeuvre, see Frankfurt 1958. This paragraph takes issue with Frankfurt 1958. The quoted passage is from p. 594.

[6]

6 

As I explain below, I view such searching artworks as theoretical objects, or as what Ernst van Alphen, following Hubert Damisch, calls “art that thinks” (in Art in Mind, 2005). 7  The distinction between particularity and singularity underlies my view of the qualified “case study” I am offering here. “Ce qui apparaît, apparaît singulièrement” writes Georges Didi-Huberman. And he continues: “Est singulier ce qui est irréductible et, donc, porteur d’étrangeté” (2004, 111). [What appears, appears singularly. . . . What is irreducible and, hence, carries strangeness is singular.] This is very different from the anecdotal and from the individualism that characterizes particularity.

[7]

Introduction

in process, inspires thoughts that pertain to the social collective that in turn inspired it.6 Among other reasons that will unfold in the course of this study, Salcedo’s work lends itself particularly well to such a collective reflection that ignores any subject–object opposition between artwork and critic because the artist seeks to make art that does not belong to her. She is not invested in leaving her signature, but instead considers art as a means to affect the world outside of herself. Art, that is, has the potential to produce knowledge greater than that of its creator. This knowledge is neither reducible to individual psychology nor to the great categories of sociology. It is a type of knowledge that is constantly on the move, since its fragile articulations can only occur in a singular relationship to viewers, users, or readers of a work of art. In this sense, Salcedo’s work is singular but not particular. Her art is also the product of collaboration and dialogue. I do not mean the obvious collaboration with coworkers here, but the social buzzing around her to which she responds. This is how the political—on which more shortly— is present from the start.7 Instead of the term case study, which has been overly inflected by exemplarity and comprehensiveness, and which has also, paradoxically, been marred by generalization, I am more inclined to use the alternative, equally overextended but more specific term theoretical object. As Hubert Damisch, the creator of that term, explains it in an interview with Bois, a theoretical object “obliges you to do theory but also furnishes you with the means of doing it. Thus, if you agree to accept it on theoretical terms, it will produce effects around itself . . . [and] forces us to ask ourselves what theory is. It is posed in theoretical terms; it produces theory; and it necessitates a reflection on theory” (Damisch, quoted in Bois et al. 1998, 8). In the dynamic among the works as objects, their viewers, and the time in which these come together, accompanied by the social buzz that surrounds all, a compelling collective thought process emerges. To return to the starting point, Shibboleth, the metaphoric buzz around “ground,” the metonymic shifts departing from the void of the cut, and the narrative activity compelled by

Introduction

the montage that a cut also is are the sites of these thought processes, this triple theoretical activity that Damisch mentions.8 For the work of Doris Salcedo, the term theoretical object is therefore better suited to situate my approach than the simpler one of case study, on the condition that we broaden it to cover more than single works. Here again, within the corpus of Salcedo’s work, the dialectic of singularity and generalization plays itself out. The object is not this or that artwork, but Salcedo’s entire oeuvre, even if the reflections that follow mostly take single works as their starting points. Between single work and oeuvre there is no simple accumulative, let alone developmental logic at play. Instead, each work begins to do what, along with other works, viewers do, in an ongoing performativity. This performativity is significant for work, such as the work of this artist, that is still—mute and unmoving—sculpture. It is also, and will always be, “becoming.” By that Deleuzian term I mean something quite specific. The becoming of an oeuvre implies a retrospective temporal logic according to which each new work recasts the terms in which the previous work could be understood. Each new phase of that becoming is informed by a later work that retrospectively glosses an earlier work. Each work puts a spin on the ensemble of what came before it. In that becoming as an oeuvre, the body of work named “Salcedo” is my theoretical object. This does not mean that I discuss every piece of which that oeuvre consists. Rather, the theoretical impact of each work I bring up affects all of Salcedo’s other works. Rather than the idea of an individual “development” from promising beginner to mature genius, it is this retrospective impact that is the point of studying an oeuvre as a whole. And so, if this book ends up in proximity to the two opposed genres of the monograph and the theoretical essay, it is both more and less than the sum of these two. Rather than proceeding by individual works, I consider modes of making art so that it can be performed by its viewers. In each work or set of works that I put at the center of the chapters to follow, some aesthetic issue, strategy, or move will come up. And each new aesthetic strategy, it turns out, although not necessarily foregrounded, was already present in the previous one. These aspects, moves, or strategies form a kind of rhizome, parts of which pop up above ground while others stay underground yet continue to grow and work (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). While the book is more than the sum of its two components, it is also 8  Damisch’s concept of the theoretical object sometimes seems to suggest that these are objects around which theories have been produced. At other times, as in the interview quoted here, he attributes to the artwork the capacity to motivate, entice, and even compel thought.

[8]

The World What is the case, in the world, is what art is part of, as well as what art addresses. In this admittedly broad sense, all art, it seems, partakes of the political. This generalization does not hold, however. Only some works of art address their participation in the political and make the political part of what they do. This is the kind of art I call “political”: it works not only in but with and for “the political.” Throughout my reflections in this book, I will use that term, the political. And, while I use that term rather broadly, it is often used too vaguely; hence, it is necessary to explain how I use it here: broadly but nevertheless specifically. It indicates a specification of what Wittgenstein calls “the world,” namely, a practice that takes place in and hence “is the case” in the world. The term the political as I use it here is understandable only in distinction from politics. Although both belong to the domain where social life is [9]

Introduction

less than each. It is clearly less than a monograph. I do not discuss all of Salcedo’s works extant to date, and those I do bring up have not been fitted into a chronologically or generically coherent scheme, as a monograph would probably do. Nor do I aim to discuss comprehensively the works I do put forward. I outline aspects of Salcedo’s art through a rather stubbornly one-sided emphasis on their political potential. I discuss these in terms of aesthetic strategies as I see them. In fact, these strategies often coincide with and reinforce one another. Hence, since I have selectively chosen works and aspects to analyze, I offer less than a monograph. As for the political aspect of the discussion, I also refrain from an over-ambitious project. Though it brings to the fore important political effects of art, this is by no means a survey of possible approaches to political art. Part of my motivation to discuss the issue of political art in three volumes, as I plan to do, is resistance to generalization—to convey the fragmentation of any knowledge we can possibly develop of political art. The reason for choosing this artist for the present book lies in the issues her work poses, elaborates, and experimentally attempts to answer. In Wittgenstein’s terms, her work “is the case,” and therefore it cannot be a “case study” in the classical sense: it emphatically endorses the inescapable fact that it is part of the world in which it occurs—in which and, hence, for which it is the case. The philosopher’s opening phrase binds existential and performative claims together: as part of the world, the work labors for its transformation. The art of Salcedo is “worldly” in a double sense: it emerges from the world in which she exists, while the themes and modes she takes on are dictated by that world—a world that posits its conditions of possibility for effective art.

Introduction

structured and to which it is subjected, these two terms are each other’s opposites. In a concise book about this distinction, Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe defines the two terms as follows: “By ‘the political’ I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by ‘politics’ I mean the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political” (2005, 9). “The dimension of antagonism” does not at first sound very appealing. In this distinction, politics is the organization that settles conflict; the political is where conflict “happens.” Yet, it is by virtue of the political that social life is possible. It can thrive, be alive, and also be dangerous. No wonder, then, that we usually seek to avoid conflict by means of consensus. Politics comes in to avert the potential of danger. Politics, which responds to it, constantly attempts to dampen the political. This positive view of conflict might sound counterintuitive, since most of us love to hate politics as domineering and menacing. We tend to attribute the negativity of conflict to politics rather than to its counterpart, yearning to be reassured by political leaders that conflict can be eradicated. And true enough; in our own social environment we eschew conflict. Yet, as Mouffe cogently argues, the culture of consensus resulting from politics does not at all eliminate conflict; it suppresses conflict, and thus leaves it to its own, underground, and hence potentially volcanic devices. Politics is in fact highly exclusivist, and lives by “the negation of the ineradicable character of antagonism” (10). It is also in blatant contradiction to the lived social reality, in which conflict is generally present. French philosopher Jacques Rancière (1999) makes a similar distinction, but his terms are different. Mouffe’s politics becomes Rancière’s police, and what Mouffe calls the political corresponds to politics in Rancière’s work. Both thinkers argue in favor of the conflictual nature of social life and the need to disagree. Rancière uses the term mésentente to describe this conflictual element of social reality. This is an untranslatable word that combines misunderstanding with not getting along. Unfortunately, it is unilaterally translated as “disagreement.” The misunderstanding part is, however, just as crucial. For practical reasons I use Mouffe’s terminology throughout, but I do want to keep in mind the dual resonance of Rancière’s mésentente.9 9 

Although his analysis is farther-going and more profound than Mouffe’s, I find Rancière’s terminology confusing and even a bit manipulative, since the term police has a clear, established meaning that turns the broader use of it into a somewhat paranoid suggestion about what Althusser called “Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971, 121). Badiou discusses

[10]

Rancière’s concepts and distinctions (2005c, 107–123) and says this about the distinction: “He has the tendency to pit phantom masses against an unnamed State” (121). Badiou considers the political militant the “central subjective figure of politics” (122) and thereby demonstrates that the distinction does not matter to him. 10  The concept of singularity is mostly discussed in philosophy. The distinction I propose here between particularity and singularity does not play a major role there, and the two are frequently used interchangeably. See, for example, Badiou 2005c, 23. A more concrete discussion, although it lacks clarity on the key concept itself, is Attridge 2004. For a review, see Clark 2004.

[11]

Introduction

Mouffe continues her presentation of the two antagonistic domains of politics and the political with reference to an area of real conflict in contemporary societies: “the dominant tendency in liberal thought is characterized by a rationalist and individualist approach which forecloses acknowledging the nature of collective identities. This kind of liberalism is unable to adequately grasp the pluralistic nature of the social world, with the conflicts that pluralism entails; conflict for which no rational solution could ever exist” (10). Paradoxically, then, individualism, which takes multiplicity as its starting point, is unable to deal with the actual plural nature of the social world. The hypostasis of individual freedom is in fact a severe limitation of multiplicity. The repression of group identities in the name of the individual makes for an easy slide from individualism to consensus or, worse, dictatorship. Between the Scylla of particularity and its underlying individualism, voyeurism, and anecdotal irrelevance, on the one hand, and the ­Charybdis of generality with its erasure of specificity, on the other, I propose the term singularity. I find that term most apt to responsibly account for the elements of multiplicity without either erasing or hyperbolically and defensively hypostatizing group identity. I understand singularity in a relation of opposition to generality in order to acknowledge and focus on the strictly irreducible differences between people and what happens to them. At the same time, this distinctiveness is not reducible to anecdotal information. Instead, the singular is that which maintains difference without turning it into the (generalizable) ground for group identity. As will become clear throughout this book, singularity allows for an active life of the political where particularity would be silenced and generality would turn out to be irrelevant.10 Working with conflicts is necessary, not to eradicate them at the cost of plurality, but to turn enemies into adversaries, Mouffe contends. The former, the notion of enemy, draws sharp us /them distinctions that cast “them” in the role of enemies to be fiercely combated, so that there is no

need to come to terms with the conflict; the latter, the notion of adversary, accepts such distinctions between groups but still acknowledges the legitimacy of “them,” the adversary, as worthy of engagement in debate. Hence, the adversary is not a “them” but a “you”—another to be faced, with whom discussion and disagreement are possible and on whose account the hope that mésentente can one day be resolved is never quite given up. This does not mean that politics and the political can be firmly distinguished. On the contrary, the distinction is indispensable precisely because they cannot. In this perspective, Michael Taussig’s diary of a systematic campaign of violence in a Colombian town, called a limpieza, is suggestive of the reality of such a political domain under what he calls a “law in a lawless land.” Such a law of lawlessness emerges when the political is not acknowledged and accepted. This description encourages a longing, indeed, for simple adversaries. When considering what the political can possibly mean in a country where terror is an ordinary way of life, he writes the following words that intimate the impossibility of the existence of the ­political:

Introduction

La política means Navarro [a friend] reaching for the sky, where heaven and hell fuse so as to invigorate each other through the putrefying medium of death—dead bodies, dead horses, dead sofas, the glint of cocaine and gold in the form of rings and neck-chains lost in dirty plastic bags along with shapeless shoes. This is the drug we take daily, this is la política as when P. asserts that eight out of ten people in this town are glad the paras are here assassinating wild youth. This is la política, where Popó gets 2-million-peso contracts for supplying 200 votes, where the factories rising up out of the good earth of the prehistoric valley floor cut deals with the town’s administration, and then with the paras. (2003, 181)

The political is drugged by the habit of violence. Politics permeates the political, and the two, far from aiding dispute, make antagonistic discussion impossible. Antagonism is violently silenced, which de facto kills the political. And, while I do not wish to suggest a deterministic perspective on context, it deserves mention that what Taussig describes here is the primary environment or “habitat” in and for which Salcedo makes her art.11 Mouffe allies the political with both the possibility of conflict and with the powers, structures, and choices that constitute the field of possibilities for action. Other theorists have made similar distinctions, but many 11 

I use the term habitat here in reference to Emily Apter’s term critical habitat, on which more below. [12]

[13]

Introduction

theorize what happens in each of these two domains without proposing a terminological distinction. Throughout her prolific oeuvre, political theorist Wendy Brown, for example, offers a stimulating discussion. Her work is specifically attractive for my purposes because it is keenly aware of the resistance against poststructuralist thought among feminist and postcolonial theorists. Although I cannot fully address that resistance here, I take it as seriously as Brown does. For now, I see her definition of politics, which she bases on the Greek antecedent word, as being very close to Mouffe’s “political”: “The rich connotative content of politeia suggests that politics refers always to a condition of plurality and difference, to the human capacity for producing a world of meanings, practices, and institutions, and to the constant implication of power among us—its generation, distribution, circulation, and effects” (Brown 1995, 38; emphasis in text). For Brown, the conditions of a functioning political domain are the formation of judgments, the performance of democratic acts, and the availability of what she calls “political spaces.” As will become apparent, Salcedo’s art not only presents and addresses these three conditions; her art operates through them as well as results in them. This is why it is profoundly political, not as a side effect or thematic preoccupation, but qua art. The first two of Brown’s conditions are alternatives to the predominant derivation of the good from the true and to the institutionalized rituals of democracy, respectively. Salcedo’s art disentangles the good from the true. It compels viewers who are affected by it to make judgments about justice, not truth. Making such judgments is an exercise of democratic agency. I understand the latter term to require contexts where the issues that make up the political can be spoken. Where this is not possible (“of what one cannot speak”), other means must be invented to prevent Wittgenstein’s conclusion, which, abducted to this context, becomes dreadfully negative because of its submissiveness (“thereof one must be silent”). Such a logic silences agency in the way the violence that Taussig describes does. The contexts that democratic agency necessitates are contexts in which the antagonisms can be enacted without resulting in the enmity that leads to war and other forms of lawless violence. They are places where, instead, judgments of justice and acts of democratic dispute—even silently, in the form of thought and deliberation—are not only allowed but actively enabled. It is in the absence of such spaces, especially (but not at all exclusively) in Salcedo’s working environment, that Salcedo’s art seeks to open them up. In this sense, the entire life project of this artist is deeply political: she constructs political spaces. Let me return to Brown to give a summary context to this project. Brown, who argues from within a feminist position, defines the political

spaces needed today in distinction from classical alternatives that have been derived from three prominent political philosophies articulated by Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas, respectively. Because Brown’s survey intelligently sums up the dilemmas implicit in the older theories, I quote it at some length.

Introduction

In contrast with Aristotle’s formation, feminist political spaces cannot define themselves against the private sphere, bodies, reproduction and production, mortality, and all the populations and issues implicated in these categories. Unlike Arendt’s, these spaces cannot be pristine, rarified, and policed at their boundaries but are necessarily cluttered, attuned to earthly concerns and visions, incessantly disrupted, invaded, and reconfigured. Unlike Habermas, we can harbor no dreams of nondistorted communication unsullied by power, or even of a “common language,” but we recognize as a permanent political condition of partiality of understanding and expression, cultural chasms whose nature may be vigilantly identified but rarely “resolved,” and the powers of words and images that evoke, suggest, and connote rather than transmit meanings. (1995, 50)

As it happens, and as the following chapters demonstrate, all the terms and conditions that Brown mentions here turn out to be relevant for Salcedo’s art and further help articulate its political character. In contradistinction to the Aristotelian view, her art is deeply anchored in the private sphere, which it seeks to wrench out of its isolation and confinement. It addresses head-on the way in which the disruption of the political destroys bodies, mortality being her primary concern. The “cluttered” nature of the spaces, against Arendt, is the condition of possibility of art that “works.” Although less hopeful than Habermas, Salcedo does not proclaim power-free communication but labors to create alternatives in the face of its impossibility. Only through that creation can she face, and answer, Wittgenstein’s judgment that the unspeakable must be kept silent. Indeed, the fundamental “semiotic” that Salcedo deploys is what Brown describes so tersely, yet is so hard to achieve: “images that evoke, suggest, and connote rather than transmit meanings.” Once we succeed in understanding how meaning can “work” without being transmitted we have, I speculate, created a vision of a political space.12 12 

I am, of course, aware that Wittgenstein’s final sentence is here taken out of its logicalphilosophical context. I rather use it as a catchphrase or shorthand for a dilemma that has been strongly discussed in relation to political violence and the resulting trauma. To the rich bibliography on this topic in the Anglo-Saxon world, I would add the work of French

[14]

The Book In spite of what I wrote above about Salcedo’s art as theoretical object, in no case can my interpretations be attributed to the artist; I alone remain responsible for their articulation. The fundamental difference between art and any writing about it must remain in place. Seeing the artworks as theoretical objects that help articulate what political art can be, I consider it necessary to describe them in enough detail to enable readers to follow that interaction between art and thought, but I limit myself to those aspects that enable me to think about this art as political. I provide enough detail, that is, to enable readers to check and verify my interpretation. I attempt to do this even when I am aware my interpretations diverge from the artist’s own view. It is this activity of articulation “through” the artworks that, I speculate, Damisch had in mind when he laid out the multiple relations between the artwork as theoretical object and the activity of theorizing that it solicits, stimulates, compels, and enables. psychoanalyst Françoise Davoine, who categorically refuses the conclusion in the case of people silenced—and /or driven to madness—by that logic. I consider her work later on. Here, I just point out that the alternative this psychoanalyst proposes coincides with Salcedo’s: of what one cannot speak, one must show.

[15]

Introduction

Throughout this study, a further understanding of political space, its features, and its susceptibility to qualitative improvement and enrichment is one of the horizons of my theoretical approach. First of all, in line with Nietz­sche, it is necessary to give up the specifically moral claims that can only be grounded in the truth-equals-good of traditional epistemology (1969). Morality is the trap that assigns right (“us”) and wrong (“them”) and leads to more violence and war rather than preventing it. Second, in the wake of this relinquishing of moral claims, the centrality of resentment in political debate is no longer productive. Resentment is by definition hopelessly negative and hence incapable of bringing about change. It is an attitude through which “a human being can only esteem its sense of selfhood by negating that of others and declaring itself to be ‘superior’” (Ansell Pearson 1994, 32). Instead of recrimination, active and goal-oriented struggle is necessary. Third and finally, resistance alone is not enough. “Resistance-aspolitics does not raise the dilemmas of responsibility and justification entailed in ‘affirming’ political projects and norms. . . . Resistance is an effect of and reaction to power, not an arrogation of it” (Brown 1995, 49). In the analyses that follow, I seek alternatives to these three features for the qualitative benefit of political space as a condition for democratic life.

Introduction

I treat some of Salcedo’s aesthetic moves separately only to demonstrate the complexity of the aesthetic of an art that seeks to intervene in the world; an art, that is, that seeks to be political because it is aesthetic, and vice versa. Whereas political art addresses, and works both with and for, tensions within the political, there is no categorical tension between art and politics. As (Salcedo and) I argue, art can only be art in the specific sense I will here attribute to the term—art that is of and for the world— if it is political. This formulation does not propose synonymy between the two terms, nor overlap between the two domains. Instead, it rigorously rejects the still-lingering “Kantian” idea that art stands outside the world. Instead, the intertwinement—not the identification—of art and politics is essential rather than incidental.13 Salcedo’s art stimulates thought about how these intertwinements might work in the work of other artists and, indeed, in very different forms of art as well. While I found it necessary to limit my discussion to this single body of art in order to address the singularity of art precisely in terms of its engagement with the political, this limitation must not be seen as an undue privileging and, hence, isolation of this artist. On the contrary, Salcedo’s art is premised on the community within which it is positioned; it is only possible because it is not alone. I single her work out for the power of its rigorous rejection of the above-mentioned severance of art from the political, and for the artistic subtlety and richness of the way this rejection is developed in her practice. But, while I seek to avoid undue generalization, I consider all art worthy of its name as potentially conducive of “political spaces” à la Brown—that is, democratic spaces—rather than of spaces of isolation. As I intend to argue in later work, this is the case both for ­representation-based art and for abstract art, and, I contend, Salcedo’s art is neither of these. I open the discussion of political art with one of Salcedo’s most widely known and exhibited works, Atrabiliarios, from 1992–93, and one of the most widely discussed and used theoretical terms, metaphor. This work is constitutive of the politics of the trace, which here takes the form of the material refusal to let the past rest, recede, and go underground. In Atrabiliarios, the art pursues the question of the human form to the extreme and beyond. Here, the traces of people are all there is. They have been worn and worn out, have taken the shape of the individual foot and supported the individual walking—or, given the elegance of some of the shoes, dancing— 13 

I put “Kantian” in quotation marks because I do not accept that this vulgarized alibi that justifies social indifference and even requires such indifference as a feature of true art is truly derived from Kant. [16]

14 

The term holocaust effect stems from a very relevant study of aesthetic strategies in facing mass violence. See Van Alphen 1997. For the choice of Celan’s poems, see Salcedo 2000, 106–13. The first of these poems accompanies a photograph of Atrabiliarios. Of course, Salcedo is not the only artist of her caliber to work with the Adornian problem. Alfredo Jaar’s delicately insistent work with the genocide in Rwanda (1994–2000), especially his The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996), is just one example of art that, while vastly different from Salcedo’s in medium, mood, and meanings, pursues a similar question. [17]

Introduction

the earth in search of a life. As such, they are powerful metaphors; all the more potent as they are metonymically motivated, showing the real, negative form of the foot. There are several reasons to begin with this work. One is to strengthen the link between the artistic and the theoretical sides of the workings of the theoretical object. The paradigmatic status of the footprint in semiotic theory overdetermines the effect of the shoe as an index of presence past. The footprint is a key example of the trace. In Wittgenstein’s opening words, the trace “is the case” and, thanks to Salcedo’s work, remains so even if the person of whom it is a trace is long dead. A second reason is to engage history in this dynamic between art and theory. The history of violence of the twentieth century further overdetermines the power of worn shoes, while this history, in turn, has demanded a redefinition of the relationship between art and politics, a relationship that is a precondition of political art. This reflection brings the discussion of political art famously initiated by Adorno to bear on Salcedo’s art, but also works the other way around. Beginning with Salcedo’s work with shoes is, therefore, a willful overdetermination on my part of the issue central to the present book. Adorno and Salcedo have in common a position in a state of violence. Where Adorno, the philosopher par excellence of post-Holocaust art, had to leave off, Salcedo takes that discussion up again. Adorno’s question concerning what we can do with culture after mass violence remains as urgent as it ever was. After mass violence—indeed, after genocide—what remain present are heaps of shoes, mountains of them, testifying to the lives destroyed. For each pair of shoes, one person died. Shoes, especially in large quantities, carry what has been called, in another important discussion of the bond between art and politics, a “holocaust effect.” In her choice of shoes for Atrabiliarios, then, Salcedo places her art in that lineage, a legacy that she clearly values, as her “artist’s choice” of poems by Paul Celan also demonstrates.14 But Salcedo, who lives and works in a state of violence today, did not heap shoes. Instead, she individualized them, burying each one in a separate niche in a wall and subsequently covering that niche with animal skin. Thus, I argue, through a form of translation, she retrieved the singular from

Introduction

the abstraction of generality. This turns the work into the equivalent of a case study in the overdetermined sense outlined above, and once more transforms the art into a form of thought. At the same time, the animal skin that covers the niches—itself overdetermined and, thanks to Joseph Beuys, also an artistic conveyor of a holocaust effect—decreases the readability of the shoes. I argue that she thus reworked metaphor and its discontents, confronting this rhetorical figure with the need of translation (literally the Latinate synonym of the Greek word metaphor), so that singularity can be preserved, precariously, and yet brought to affective performance in other places.15 The operative concept in such a practice of translation is displacement— a concept central to Salcedo’s work and world. This interpretation of metaphor brings that theoretical concept and the artistic practice based on it closer to its traditional “other,” metonymy. I contend that only through such a work, which places singularity in a “holding environment” while making its affect accessible elsewhere, can art be effectively political. This dialectic-without-resolution is the artistic guide and companion to my writing, which is hovering between monograph and theory, and which is a performance of the theoretical object.16 In the first chapter I develop this precarious balance of singularity with the possibility of translation or metaphoric extension to other communities in order to create political spaces. The newly coined verb to metaphor stands for a movement of affect and meaning that enables this art to maintain that precarious balance, if not to reconcile singularity with generality, so as to reach out beyond its own grounding. The trace, thus, becomes the tool of such extension. The second strategy I discuss is itself a trace, this time not of overly real existence but of barely noticeable leftovers of what could be seen as, but is not quite, representation. In the second chapter I discuss the issue of representation—the problems it poses as well as the need we have for it. This is again one of the major concepts of art theory and of discussions of art. Salcedo’s work is important in this respect because, like the shoes of Atrabiliarios, it tends to be anchored in real, material traces of past life, of past suffering. But at the same time, these traces can hardly be considered representations. Instead, they are an alternative to that semiotic mode. In this chapter, I follow what, in contrast, I consider the struggle with representa15 

This is how such a work can become “migratory,” according to my concept of “migratory aesthetics” explained elsewhere (Bal and Hernández-Navarro 2008). 16  The term holding environment comes from object-relations theory in psychoanalysis. It has been brought to bear on contemporary art by Janneke Lam (2002).

[18]

17 

In a subsequent study, I intend to conduct this discussion starting from the opposite end. While Salcedo’s work challenges representation through the real existence of the objects of which the sculptures consist, the central artist in the second volume of this series, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, works with representation as a starting point. The third volume, on the abstract art of Ann Veronica Janssens, takes a third starting point, the categorical rejection of representation, but her endpoint, abstraction, is diametrically opposed to that of either Salcedo or Ahtila. In this sense, the three studies will form a true triangle. For the issue of representation, see chapter 2.

[19]

Introduction

tion in the insertion of small, barely visible things I prefer to call anthropomorphisms. In many of Salcedo’s sculptures some human form—or a trace of it—insists that the live past of the objects must not be erased. A small anthropomorphic presence remains in a surface otherwise elaborated like a great abstract painting. Thus, the work rejects abstraction and its mediumspecificity, its “purity,” as well as representation or figuration as the more habitual tool of political art, while invoking both. To a dilemma posed by Santiago Villaveces-Izquierdo concerning the problematic nature of, yet irrepressible need for, representation, Salcedo’s art replies with a tease.17 The artist inserted herself into modernism, engaging its major issues, but only to subvert it from within—acknowledging its power yet declaring it inadequate to the mission of political art. Whether or not these small but insistent anthropomorphic traces were metaphorical or materially real, the metonymic principle at work safeguarded the presence of the victims of violence, otherwise disappeared. This oblique, near-invisible presence of the human form recalls the predominance of the representation of the human body in the history of Western art. It recalls, that is, art’s complicity in its acts of honoring the human body that inevitably erased those bodies that violence had dishonored. Beauty and pain are bound together. Some of the well-known, frequently exhibited Untitled Furniture pieces, but mostly works from the La Casa Viuda series (1992–94) are embodiments of this aesthetic of anthropomorphism as politics, and they are central to my analysis of this strategy. In some sculptures, the focus of the aesthetics but not of the politics seems to have shifted. In those works, while continuing with the first and second strategies, Salcedo deploys a third: working with duration. Here, our preconceptions of still sculpture as immobile are deeply disturbed. These works are temporal solicitations of their viewers, demanding them to donate considerable time to victims we tend to look away from because their pain disturbs us. These are the works in which, on the one hand, the fragility of the surfaces is daunting, so that one barely dares to approach; on the other hand, the tables of the Unland series (1997) are hardly “visible”

Introduction

as art—in order to see them, one feels beckoned to take a closer look. The point is that looking at the sculptures requires surrender: not to a shape of grief but to its temporality. In the third chapter, I argue that Salcedo’s work with temporality is a tool to compel viewers to traverse two episodes. Viewers are first led to open themselves up to the affective impact of the work and make themselves vulnerable to grief; then, they are exhorted to turn that grief into something more politically productive, such as the articulation of a grievance. I make the case for this interpretation through an aesthetic analysis. Looking at the works from the Unland series entails duration; the viewer is asked, even compelled, to donate time, made inevitable by means of what I term temporal foreshortening. For the articulation of this concept, which I coined in order to account for this 1997 work, I call on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration.18 The aesthetic strategies of tracing, anthropomorphism, and temporal foreshortening, all of them uniquely Salcedo’s inflections of political art and simultaneously suggestive of possibilities elsewhere, are especially powerful due to a fourth aspect, or strategy. This is, to put it simply, installation—the arrangement of things in space. I argue that this is her way of constructing a literal “political space” according to Brown’s condition for democracy. In Salcedo’s version of it, installation is not about exhibitionary harmony. On the contrary, she seeks to achieve disharmony, misfits. Through the breaks between work and surroundings, she configures an outof-placeness for the work. This is a necessary consequence of the aesthetic her work embodies, in which translation, or “metaphoring,” and the displacement it implies are central.19 Just as the artist seeks to bracket her personal signature in favor of what she has called an “active anonymity,” she also brackets the autonomy of the artwork, another of those tenacious dogmas of modernism, and puts it in tension with these. This autonomy is always illusory, yet desired—a desire not surprising in an art world that remains organized around names and fames. In the fourth chapter I briefly consider the question of auton18 

I borrow the phrase “from grief to grievance” from Cheng 2001, 3. The discussion of duration has been brought to the present by Deleuze’s books on cinema (1986; 1989), which are unlikely yet highly relevant companions for Salcedo’s time-based works. This discussion also prefigures the discussion of Ahtila’s work in the second volume. 19  As will become clear, this aspect can be usefully related not only to the subject of violence and its roots in the Colombian situation (albeit it is, alas, only too translatable to other singular situations), but also to an aesthetic of disharmony commonly attributed to the Latin American modern-day baroque. See Sarduy 1986–87, 154.

[20]

20 

Menke (1999, 173). This study integrates deconstructive and dialectical negativity. Menke exposes mostly Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1984) and Negative Dialectics (1973a).

[21]

Introduction

omy in spatial terms through the issues raised by some installations of Salcedo’s work. Instead of insisting on its own autonomy, Salcedo’s work is invested in creating political spaces; its aesthetic project is to transform both what can be experienced through the senses and that which politics has rendered insensible. This is what Rancière (2004) has termed a redistribution of the sensible: le partage du sensible. In such an aesthetic, where the space we share is the primary material with which the art works, autonomy is no longer at issue or even thinkable. This does not mean, however, that art is either subsumed as just another practice or that it duplicates social reality. While the modernist idea that art is autonomous has fallen by the wayside, so has the reflection theory of representation, according to which art offers a reduplication, a particular version of the world. Instead, the contemporary idea of the sovereignty of art firmly belongs in the Adornian legacy of aesthetic negativity, and must be taken into consideration. Rather than being either autonomous or dependent on the social-political domain—within which it functions anyway—art can transform that domain in sovereign fashion. For this to be possible, art must be considered not in its “being” but in its repercussions. In a thorough discussion of this idea, Christoph Menke argues that the sovereignty of art does not lie in its capacity to tear down the boundaries between aesthetic and nonaesthetic experience, but in its capacity to bring about a crisis for the discourses through which we routinely function and on which those boundaries are premised. In opposition to the Romantic idea of art’s sovereignty, according to which art overcomes “mere” reason, he follows in meticulous detail the arguments in the writings of Adorno and Derrida that propose that art subverts reason (1999, xiii). At the same time, Menke distinguishes forms of aesthetic experience rather than claiming sovereignty for art itself. He considers (negative) aesthetic experiences that stabilize—experiences that are compensatory, alleviating, or, I would add, redeeming—to be bound up with particularity. Such experiences occur alongside other discourses and practices, on which they therefore have no impact. He calls such experiences “servile enactments.” In contrast, “He or she who enacts the experience of aesthetic negativity in any place or realm and thus releases its destabilizing consequences for nonaesthetic discourses (and practices) enacts it in a sovereign fashion.”20 Such experiences are especially enabled in the work with space to which all

Introduction

sculpture is devoted. Here, once more, Salcedo’s art is an emblematic, even literal, enactment of a more general potential of art.21 Because Salcedo’s works are always installed with extreme care, space and light engage in critical dialogue. Lighting becomes an integral part of the sculpture, as does the space around it. Traditionally, both contribute to the elevation of the works from the drab reality of everyday life to the temporary suspension of time and clutter necessary for art to do its political work when it returns viewers to that clutter. Light has a long, dual tradition in art practice. It has traditionally had a vital impact on the exhibition of art, mostly helping the object’s visibility, but also helping art to appear special, isolated, and sublime. Floodlights determine and delimit the space of spectacle, a boundary not to be crossed by its spectators. Salcedo engages and questions these two traditions of light. While they are installed to be integrated in their space, her installations never become spectacles; in fact, they actively refuse that status. As we will see, Salcedo uses light to eliminate such enhancing effects and instead deploys it as color or, conversely, as the absence of color.22 Space, too, is made part of the work, yet it is never used to enhance it. Sometimes, the works are placed at odd angles from the viewer, suggesting a warehouse rather than an exhibition. The difficult visual access intimates modesty, the need to be discreet, and the sense that we as viewers commit an intrusion into other people’s lives. Hence, it instills an awareness of our inevitable complicity, which can be productive only if it is recognized. Sometimes, in contrast, an even, gloomy, gray light reinforces the sense of loss the pieces embody, along with the incapacity to absorb the conditions of that loss.23 There is an aspect to Salcedo’s work that is usually mentioned first, yet, so far, I have not mentioned it at all. This purposeful postponement was meant to prepare a ground for its discussion that shifts it a bit from the usual, somewhat repetitive ways of considering Salcedo’s art. This aspect is memory: public remembrance and the cultural retrieval of the forgotten dead. Space, the tool of the sculptor, serves as a holding environment for memory. In chapter 4, memory is considered as the content of space, and space features as memory’s “mother.” Behind every sculpture lies a dead person; and from it emerges a forgotten subject of grief, enabled to become 21 

In spite of its title, Badiou’s book on “inaesthetics” (2005a) is not at all based on such negativity. Instead, Badiou sees art as one of four “philosophical conditions” where truth can be pursued, the others being love, science, and politics. 22  On the function of light in art exhibitions, art practices, and artworks, see Katzberg 2009. 23  On the productivity of acknowledged complicity, see Spivak 1999. [22]

[23]

Introduction

a subject of grievance. Many of the disappeared have never been found; hence, they cannot be buried, not given a final resting place where the bereaved can gather to stay in touch with the dead. Salcedo’s deployment of negative space constructs symbolic graves. The way the sculptures are installed, their unyielding negativity, intimates this subliminal function. From these installations of her works one may already surmise that sitespecificity is going to be another important aspect of the installation of the works, or of the works that are installations. As I discuss in chapter 5, Salcedo has proceeded to make a number of greater, immovable works, which we can only call installations. The inquiry into forms of memory continues in that final chapter. Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, from 2000, has all the features of an installation. The work needed a space of specific dimensions— or adapted its dimensions to those of the available space. This set of chairs with extremely elongated legs that pierce through the walls of the exhibition space requires a gallery with dimensions fitting for the length of the legs. Lead-covered, the elements of the work are made even gloomier by the light that is uniformly gray, precluding the formation of shadows and thus challenging the word Tenebrae of the title. In 2003 Salcedo made a huge installation for the Eighth International Istanbul Biennial, filling a space between buildings on a city street with more than 1,500 chairs, neatly stacked in what is only apparently a disorderly fashion. Neither, a combination of chicken-wire fencing and white walls from 2004, further enhanced the “installatory” character of the work, which was no longer based on furniture or its forms. Instead, this work is one among several that explore the meanings and affects pertaining to walls—an issue that Neither makes clear because, as with time in Unland, if you miss that issue, there is nothing else to see. Retrospectively, walls already had a strong presence and meaning earlier on. In Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, for example, the spokes coming out of the chairs reach the walls of the space on two sides and seem to penetrate in them. In the 2003 Istanbul installation, where the chairs are disposed between walls but—more strikingly, even incredibly—form a perfectly plane wall themselves. In both these works, the walls participate in and, indeed, determine the transition from single sculpture to installation. Abyss, a work built in the Castello de Rivoli in 2006, is a key work in this sense of an increasing absorption of sculpture into installation and of walls taking over from furniture. Here, the artist prolonged the brick vault of a room in the castle to a distance so close to the floor that the ceiling came to threaten the viewer with imprisonment. Instead of invoking a king’s castle from the past, the work brings to mind by antiphrasis the detention centers where people are held in the present, sometimes in deadly peril. The

Introduction

a­ ssault on the freedom of those who suffer confinement in the contemporary world is brought home with great, indeed monumental, power. This last phrase brings in a politico-aesthetic strategy not yet mentioned, a strategy that underlies every artistic gesture Salcedo has ever made. This is the entangled and polemical relationship of her sculpture to monumentality. Monuments are constructed to aid collective memory and to honor the dead who fell in service to their country. They are inextricably entangled with nationalistic impulses. They also tend to become so normalized that, instead of commemoration—their ostensive mission—they encourage forgetting. This issue has been extensively discussed apropos of Holocaust memorials. Monuments relate to memory and to scale, and Salcedo addresses both these aspects repeatedly. In general—and this would be extremely relevant for an artist like ­Salcedo—monuments are tokens of memory. In France, for example, every­where, down to the smallest villages, there is a Monument aux Morts, mostly a very conventional memorial to the unknown soldiers who died for the glory of their country. One wonders if their omnipresence and their conventional aesthetics render such monuments invisible and the rightly called “unknown” soldiers even more dead and forgotten. Robert Musil thought so, as Andreas Huyssen reminds us: “There is nothing as invisible as a monument” (2003, 320). Salcedo considers the traditional public monument a token of “the very failure of memory” (1998). In recognition of this problem, a whole range of countermonuments has been invented. Such countermonuments embody the disagreement that defines the political. In a study of public monuments, Sergiusz Michalski writes that “the principal aim of a counter-monument is to register protest or disagreement with an untenable prime object and to set a process of reflection in motion” (1998, 207; emphasis added). As this complication of the monument suggests, Salcedo’s works always imply a critical relationship with the traditions in which she must also situate them. But Salcedo never simply makes “anti”-works. If her work is ­political—rather than propaganda, critique, or protest—it is because there is always a more complex political position at stake—one of debate with “antagonists” rather than a rejection and exclusion of “enemies.” In the case of monumentality, monuments are also potential “memory sites” (Nora 1989) in a more positive sense. In a different context (the commemoration of the “discovery” of America), Taussig describes their function in the following words: “Monuments create public dream-space in which, through informal and often private rituals, the particularities of one’s life makes [sic] patterns of meaning. These patterns are neither terribly conscious nor totalizing but instead contain oddly empty spaces capable of obtuse and [24]

[25]

Introduction

contradictory meanings swirling side by side with meanings reified in objects” (1992, 46). The latter meanings, “reified in objects,” would be, in my view, associated with those all-too-common monuments that we only notice when they are absent. The former, dream-spaces, are potentially constructive of political spaces. The question is how this dream-space can reattach the isolated mourner attached to the “unquiet dead” (Hertz, quoted in Taussig 1992, 48) to a life-giving social space and thus fulfill its political function—in our terminology here, for the political, not in politics. When we consider the wall as a monument, as a mode of suspending time and slowing down perception, the question of monumentality invokes the memorial function of art as a political tool. The relationship between Salcedo’s large works—the ones I term installations—and temporality is of crucial importance for an assessment of her work’s relationship—of complicity, of resistance—to the monumental. To understand these connections from within the monumental tradition, we will consider Salcedo’s interventions—being ephemeral, they are less well known by definition— which we must term performances. In Noviembre 6 y 7, an intervention that took place in Bogotá in 2002, innumerable chairs were slowly lowered along the wall of the new Palace of Justice, a nondescript structure built after the extermination of more than a hundred civilians by thirty-five guerrillas who invaded the palace. The descent of Salcedo’s chairs lasted for the duration of that violent event to which, all those years ago, the artist had been an eyewitness. Witnessing thus becomes a socio-political strand of reflection in the chapter. The chairs, empty of their occupants, became the wall, the façade behind which the dark side of state power hid its terror; and the wall, hence, came down with them, as it did in Rivoli. In Istanbul, the four-story space of 142 square meters was completely filled with chairs that became constitutive of the space behind the walls—walls behind which displaced people went invisible in the relentless temporal linearity of globalization. This function of the wall would, I speculate, resonate strongly in a country such as Turkey, from whence many immigrants came to Western Europe, first needed and therefore invited, but then, as the economy declined, redundant and hence met with hostility. Mobility, under conditions of displacement, equals a form of incarceration—the great contradiction of the inherent migratory aspect of the contemporary world. These works redefine monumentality. Refusing to relinquish that mode of turning public space into an “affection image” that holds the viewer and slows down the time whose rapid passing is conducive to forgetting, Salcedo instead recaptures the memorializing function of monumentality. Instead of making a monument that can endure, gathering dust and casting those it memorializes

Introduction

into oblivion, Salcedo embraces the bond between memory, memorials, and monuments in order to perform what I will call “acts of memory.” In addition to memory, monumentality is always, also, an issue of scale. Scale, the shock of disproportion, is yet another one of Salcedo’s aesthetic strategies for making political art. In this she joins a “baroque” critical inquiry into visibility and harmony, denaturalizing as well as validating human scale as the measure of all things. If there is an aspect of Salcedo’s art that, from the vantage point of contextualist art history, one would wish to connect to her place of work, it is this baroque vision. Nowhere more emphatically than in Latin America has baroque thought been revitalized, both in literature and in visual art. Yet, as I argue throughout this book, Salcedo works to make the “translation” of her own singularity into other singularities the motor of her effort. In this sense, too, she is a world artist whose work cannot be reduced to local specificity. Thus, the works by Salcedo that employ scale—and many of them do—denaturalize the “everydayness” of this baroque wavering between the excessively huge and the infinitely small by means of the insertion of human scale. The resulting paradox guides my inquiry. In order to do justice to Salcedo’s context in a particular area of the world, Latin America, and specifically the violenceridden country of Colombia, the work must be wrested away from its context of origin.24 Scale is a tool to perform the politics of place most literally. Hence, when she was invited to make a work for the disproportionately spacious Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, it was inevitable that she would deploy that strategy. Of all the aesthetic modes I have outlined so far, I can now say that scale affects them all. In the Tate, Salcedo contended with a space that recalls another aspect of Abyss—an aspect, moreover, that the artist never leaves out of sight in her elaborate work on surface. This is ­labor—the inhumane exploitation that keeps humanity so near slavery. How can Marxist ideas on this subject, clearly inevitable, be brought back into the present, without nostalgia, naïveté, and an unwarranted utopianism? Building 24 

I discuss Salcedo’s work as specifically baroque in a forthcoming article. Two additional reasons compel me to be reticent in relating Salcedo’s work to the area of Latin America. One is the need to be honest about the limits of my knowledge. I know Salcedo’s work from my perspective, which is limited. And while this is evidence of her status as a world artist, it is simply my lack of knowledge that keeps me from addressing her context adequately. On the other hand, as the following chapters demonstrate, attempting to do so would also betray my own vision of art and the approach I seek to advocate. This approach is based on the rigorous decision to consider the relationship between the artwork and its audience, leaving the artist herself mostly out of sight.

[26]

Silencing serves not only to preserve memory as nightmare within the fastness of the individual, but to prevent the collective harnessing of the magical power of (what Robert Hertz, in his classic 1907 essay on the collective

[27]

Introduction

that vault against gravity to make gravity, in Rivoli, capitalistically absurd, was an act of solidarity with the downtrodden of the earth, an attempt to experience in weeks and weeks of grueling labor what many experience during their entire lives. Labor as aesthetic strategy is an attempt to share the suffering of others, to demonstrate the impossibility of remaining outside of what one critiques; yet, at the same time, when deploying it in something so “useless” as this empty artwork, it is an attempt to question through parody the dehumanizing effects of capitalism. The title reveals as much: building as making an abyss, a gap, is yet another act of negativity. The crushing weight of the exercise of oppression fills the empty space. It fills it, totally, with the murmurings of innumerable people silenced and erased by power. With this in mind, enter the Turbine Hall, and I will wind up this introduction with an imaginary visit to that space in 2007–8, hoping to make the issues appear as concretely and as immediate as possible by way of Salcedo’s art. This is a political space par excellence. The installation Shibboleth is no longer an installation. Nothing has been brought into the space to add to it, or so it seems. It is, rather, an intervention. For the fundamental gesture performed in a floor that, for this work and this artist, stands for the entire earth, is the cut. She cut through a seemingly smooth surface beneath which inequities, torture, and imprisonment are the order of the day. From the first to the last work to date, Salcedo’s art has been protesting, reminiscing, deploring, reenacting, and exorcising, but never redeeming the rule of violence. With Shibboleth, she cuts, committing a violent act herself. And strangely, through this cut that stands for a divide in the world, she returns to representation—that artistic strategy she always refrained from using for its proximity to voyeurism, pornography, and redemption—but with a vengeance. Cutting violently into the floor of the establishment of modern art, she breaks through the silence and thus qualifies possible meanings of Wittgenstein’s famous last sentence of the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Anthropologist Michael Taussig has written extensively about the violence of silence, including but not exclusively the violence that he witnessed during his research in Colombia. His writing makes concrete what the statistics cannot begin to convey:

Introduction

r­ epresentation of death called) “the unquiet souls” of the space of death— the restless souls that return again and again to haunt the living, such as the souls of those who died violent deaths. This haunting contains a quotient of magical force that can be channeled by the individual . . . [who can] by means of this achieve magical relief from the problems of unemployment, poverty, failed love, and sorcery. (1992, 27)

It is this activity of silencing, a form of violence that magnifies violence, that Salcedo’s Shibboleth indicts and breaks. Yes, she agrees with the German philosopher that certain things must remain unsaid—things we do not understand, things we cannot know. But the “cannot” of the sentence is open for ambiguity. For Wittgenstein, it is the speaker’s own limitations that must be acknowledged, the arrogant pretension to know it all that must be checked. “Can” is a feature of knowledge and understanding. But there is also a “cannot” inflicted by others, by those who consider and treat antagonists as enemies. “Can” is, here, a feature of violence—of the law of lawlessness. In this interpretation of the verb, Shibboleth is not to be silenced, because to silence is an active verb. Again, Taussig makes that distinction: “‘Shh! In this town, you can’t say anything!’ But I always think the real silence—what people in the village sometimes call ‘the law of ­silence’—is so silent, you don’t know the other person is being silent” (2003, 21). The worst silencing is that which makes itself invisible. But when it comes to silence, linguistic forms can be deceptive. Just as emptiness can be filled, silence can be active. Refraining from speaking is not doing something; but the German schweigen is an active verb. If we take Salcedo’s work into account, schweigen is not by definition the opposite of speaking in the broader semiotic sense. It may be the only manner in which the issues at stake in Salcedo’s art can be addressed, made audible—as one Unland work’s title has it, after a poem by Paul Celan, in the mouth. To make audible in the mouth whereof one cannot speak: this is as good a description as any for political art today.25

25  For a fabulous—in both senses of the word—inquiry into Wittgenstein’s sentences, see Davoine 1992.

[28]

1 Singularity in Negative Space

The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek word meta (which means from one place to another) and pherein (which means to carry), and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn’t. This means that the word metaphor is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

M a r k H a d d o n , The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

In this book, epigraphs are more than suggestive phrases. My epigraphs are guides that accompany the artistic-intellectual journey of which the chapter gives an account. The quotation above comes from a novel whose narrator is an autistic fifteen-year-old boy. I invoke it here to stage an encounter with Doris Salcedo’s most famous and most widely exhibited installation, Atrabiliarios (Defiant), from 1991. In this work the silence of death and disappearance is made visible (Princenthal 2000, 49). It is an installation in a gallery wall, in which niches are dug. These niches are flush with the wall. They are covered with animal skin, coarsely sewn to the wall with surgical thread, reminiscent of post-autopsy stitching. Inside each niche, behind the translucent skin, a pair of shoes is displayed with care. They are disposed upright or obliquely leaning to the wall. They are never flat on the niche’s floor. The shoes and their nooks are quite a precise fit; there is a sense of minimal space around the shoes. While unsoiled, the shoes are visibly worn. This worn quality makes visible the traces of life: in the way the leather has adapted to the shape of the feet, in the discolorations, in the wear and tear to which articles of clothing or domestic objects are subject.1 The question of what this installation means—and how this meaning is produced—can be illuminated by Haddon’s autistic child-narrator. If the second paragraph of Haddon’s passage—in which the narrator calls metaphor a lie—displays a literalism that, at first sight, may seem inappropriate in a reflection on art, the first paragraph—in which he calls a metaphor a metaphor—shows that this narrator is no fool. Hence I see no objection 1 

It is an installation of variable dimensions. Some installations use the typical modernist white wall; others have darker walls. Sometimes the installation is accompanied by boxes made from animal skin, within which more shoes are hidden. [31]

Chapter One

to keeping him to his literalist word and taking up the challenge that the passage poses: how to think metaphor in such a way that it escapes this indictment of the flight of fancy and instead enables and sustains a “carrying from one place to another” in meaningful, productive ways. Atrabiliarios, a mute work of art, will be the narrator’s interlocutor in this reflection.2 I mention the criteria of “meaningful” and “productive” to suggest the direction of my search for a vision of political art in this book. Art, multiple and indefinable as it is, cannot be reduced to any particular political meaning. It is not propaganda, and it is impossible to “catch.” This makes art congenial to metaphor. Metaphor, as I argue below, does not simply change meaning but enriches it, and confronts its recipients or users with dilemmas of understanding that activate them. This gives them the autonomy of thought and affect required to deploy more fully their social agency— which is what I understand by the word productive. Hence, I should qualify the literal aspect of metaphor as “in meaningful and hence productive ways.” My interpretation of metaphor here converges with my conclusions about political art. Metaphor, here used as a metaphor of sorts (Haddon: “the word metaphor is a metaphor”), is therefore a first concept or entrance into the discussion of what political art can mean (“meaningful”) and do (“productive”) in the world today. What metaphor carries over is meaning, but a meaning that includes the affective charges that all meaning-production entails. Meaning is always more than what the dictionary discloses. And in this surplus charge things “really” happen between the participants of signification. This charge, or affect, needs to be carried over from one singular situation to another so that it can reach and have an impact on the domain of political efficacy. Instead of the noun, metaphor, burdened as it is with a history of redundancy or falsehood—Haddon’s narrator is not so far off the mark—I will use a nonexistent verb, to metaphor, to indicate this efficacy. Throughout this chapter, I argue that the productivity of metaphoring comes from a focus on singularity as something transferable: from singular to singular. Against the mass violence that heaps innumerable shoes as a trace of 2 

Edlie L. Wong (2007) also begins her analysis of Salcedo’s work with Atrabiliarios. This article overlaps partly with Wong 2001. Her focus is on memory, trauma, and witnessing. I return to her analysis in chapters 4 and 5. Vera Mackie’s reflection on this installation offers a broad range of associations, some of which I mention below. The most extensive analysis of Atrabiliarios—both closely descriptive and theoretically astute—is also the best-known text, the long survey article in Princenthal 2000 (49–57). Princenthal offers no fewer than fourteen interpretive frameworks for the installation. My use of the word literalist here is more than a casual reference. On the value of a certain literalism, in distinction from fundamentalism, see my book on the subject (Bal 2008). [32]

3 

It is somewhat ironic that the title of the work I engage to make an argument on translation is itself, strictly speaking, untranslatable. There is, however, an antiquated English approximation in the adjective atrabilious, meaning “affected by black bile” or “melancholic.” The Spanish title Atrabiliarios is composed from the Latin words atratus and bilis. The former refers to clothing in black (for mourning), and the latter to bile or rage. Highly significant, these two terms neatly sum up what the work is about. See Sullivan 2007, 227. [33]

Metaphoring

mass murder but neglects the irreducible singularity of each victim, Salcedo’s art performs a searching inquiry into singularity. Her work conceives of singularity as a tool with which art acquires an effective type of cultural agency that has consequences for the domain called “the political.” In this chapter I probe a single aspect of such searching, “thinking,” art in an effort to locate the production of meaning that mediates, or translates, between the singularity that triggered the work and the equally singular effectivity that substantiates its claims. That mediation is a qualified form of what we have known all along as the transference between maker (or, in semiotic terminology, sender) and viewer (or receiver). Unlike more traditional views, however, this mediation is not a simple, one-directional handover. Moreover, between maker and viewer, something happens that cannot be of the order of understanding only. For art to be politically effective—to have agency within the domain of the political—its context of emergence, not necessarily knowable to the receiver, must somehow be “translated” into a context from within which the receiver might be sensitive to the work’s urgency. This mediation takes place through the activity of “metaphoring.”3 As for the artistic issues this work raises, I first examine the implications of its sculptural nature, foregrounding the way space is used negatively here. Atrabiliarios is a clear and extreme instance of a negative trace. It exhibits shoes worn by actual people whom political violence has caused to disappear. These remnants of the everyday existence of people no longer alive are the primary aspect of the trace in this work. The traces are spatially present, but their temporality is cut off from the present. The empty, negative space that testifies to a terminated presence is a second aspect of the trace, one even more directly indicative of the individuals who used to wear the shoes. These are strategies of negative dialectics. It should be no surprise, then, that this chapter ends with a discussion of Adorno. I consider Adorno’s position on political art to be a starting point for any contemporary discussion of this topic. The primary political issue emerges from the careful preservation of singularity. To explore this, I focus on the para-synonyms metaphor and translation. The former leads to a consideration of the relationship between artwork and referent; the latter to the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of the activity it allegedly

performs. In the end, translation is seen as the performance of a transformation. Through a reconsideration of Adorno, then, the joint necessity and impossibility of translation in turn becomes emblematic for the same aporia in the relationship between art and politics in general.

F i g u r e 1.1 Atrabiliarios, 1992–93. Wall installation with sheetrock, wood, shoes, animal fiber, and surgical thread in ten niches with eleven animal-fiber boxes sewn with surgical thread, 99 × 388.6 × 14.6 cm. Collection: Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis, MO. ­Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube,

Chapter One

London.

Metaphor and Negative Space Sculpture works in space, and space is its primary medium. In Atrabiliarios, this characteristic is elaborated negatively. Generally speaking, Salcedo’s sculptural work, and Atrabiliarios in particular, can be characterized through three negative modalities that subvert the traditions of the history of art, representation, and the rhetoric of address, respectively. Both the subtle allusions to anthropomorphism, which stop short of becoming fullfledged figures or characters, and the extreme slowdowns that foreshorten time, as in the Unland installation from the mid-1990s, are defining features of Salcedo’s political art. They appeal to and then refuse to collude with artistic strategies to which we have become so accustomed that they have lost their power to move. A third negative modality, the one central to the present chapter, is the trace. Salcedo deploys the trace as an alternative to representation and its abstracting effects. It becomes an alternative to the generalizations of humanistic categories, as well as to fiction as it distracts from reality. I contend that the power of the trace in Atrabiliarios ­resides first of all in the absolute singularity that is its primary feature. Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios instantiates the operations of the trace. In semiotic terms, the trace is an emblematic instance of the index; perhaps its most convincing and strongest incarnation. Like all indices, it has no content, only a void that points to a content in the past or future. This is its primary negativity. It vacates the present. In Atrabiliarios, the trace is material. It is the shoe where a foot has been, should be, can be again. Precisely because of that materiality, the trace is marked by the absence of the content of which it is literally the senseless container. This is the material paradox: it is both material and materially empty. Yet, even though it is empty, the trace is also absolutely singular. This is so for several reasons, the primary one being the absent yet, at some other point in time, present content. More importantly for a work of political art, the trace as an index “takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object” (Peirce 1992, 1:226).4 Therefore, as Mary Ann Doane points out, “indices always refer to singulars—single units, individuals, unique events” (2002, 101). 4 

For a brilliant and wide-ranging essay on the early deployment of the logic of the index in the humanities, see Ginzburg 1980. The trace is an artistic strategy that is frequently deployed to invoke exile and other forms of displacement. A well-known instance is the work of Ana Mendieta. For an analysis, see Blocker 1999. [34]

Metaphoring

The trace is visible because it takes place—literally—in space. It is somewhere, even if that location is remote, buried deep, or, as in the case of Atrabiliarios, buried in the recesses of a wall. Precisely because it is located in space, the trace is also singular, substantiating the previous, unique presence of someone or something of which it is the trace. That presence, however, is no longer actual, and the person who disappeared has ceased to be particular. Salcedo never reveals names or circumstances of death, nor particular information on how she found the objects. It is this suspension between particular and singular that makes the shoes, in their exhibition [35]

F igu r e 1.2 Atrabiliarios (detail), 1992–93. Wall installation with sheetrock, wood, shoes, ­animal fiber, and surgical thread in ten niches with eleven animal-fiber boxes sewn with surgical thread, 99 × 388.6 × 14.6 cm. Collection: Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis, MO. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube,

Chapter One

London.

l­ ocation, traces of precarious existence. As Madeleine Grynsztejn sees it, the uncertain, suspended space evokes the precarious state of the survivors. These have no certainty about the fate of their loved ones, who were made to disappear, precisely, without a trace.5 The distinction between particularity and singularity is crucial for a full understanding of Atrabiliarios as a theoretical object. In order to understand how the trace can work beyond the confines of the particularity to 5  Grynsztejn 1995, 14. An extremely relevant text regarding precariousness is Butler’s book Precarious Life (2004). This book in its entirety philosophically addresses the issues that Salcedo addresses in her practice.

[36]

6 

In this discussion I use the terms referent and referentiality as shorthand for a belief in the adequacy of language and the possibility of denotation. I make this shortcut through semiotic theory—where such a conflation between denotation or “proper” meaning as an integral part of the sign and referent as external to the sign is a deadly sin—in order to simplify a technical discussion about meaning and to bracket one on the reality status of art. With a metaphor quite suitable for Salcedo’s work, the semiotic discussion can be resolved by saying that the referent is external to the sign but clings to it as its shadow. Of the second discussion I can say that I avoid a general discussion because it is, in a more specific way, the theme of this book in its entirety. [37]

Metaphoring

which it also, and importantly, points, and with which it keeps in touch— but which it does not signify—I deploy metaphoring as a conceptual tool. Because it indicates a proliferation of meaning and, hence, a move away from the singular, metaphor may seem an unlikely candidate to assist in the pointing of the trace. Yet I contend that, on the contrary, metaphor not only pluralizes but also orients meaning. In this sense, metaphor can be seen as both a move forward, toward plurality, and backward, toward the trace of its originating singularity. In this refusal to stay put it offers yet another form of negativity. The semantic and narrative axis on which Salcedo’s sculptures perform their engagement with metaphor negatively is space. As with anthropomorphism and representation, Salcedo’s strategy is deployed to perform negatively—that is, to invoke and dismiss, or refuse—the traps of ­sentimentality, of exoticizing or “othering,” and of a location so particular that distancing becomes too easy. Atrabiliarios demonstrates this negative deployment of space clearly and emphatically. In Atrabiliarios, niches, shoes of desaparecidos, of disappeared people (mostly women, and a few men) are buried, half hidden behind the animal skins. The word buried, of course, is deliberately chosen; it is a metaphor. There are no literal corpses, there is no burial site, and no burial rituals are being performed. We are still in a gallery, alone, facing the installation. But then, there are no actual corpses in the site of horror evoked and invoked by this work either. The violence that is the referent of this work is all of a sudden expressed literally. As Edlie L. Wong writes, “Those left behind cannot recover or recognize the violated body, bury the dead and ­begin the work of mourning” (2007, 175). Because of this staggering ­absence / ­presence of referentiality, only possible by means of negativity, metaphoring is our sole option.6 Confronted with this absence of a referent yet so literally denoted, with our desire to come to terms with this work, respond to it, or even simply see it as art, we are left to our own devices. It is only through association and, hence, added meaning that the niches in the wall recall the ­columbaria

Chapter One

that harbor the ashes of the cremated dead—in the wall, for example, of the San Michele cemetery in Venice. Hence, small as they are, they leave room for imagined, dead human bodies. In fact, in a departure from columbaria, we actually do see a human body part in each of these niches, albeit negatively. That is, the shoes bear the literal, physical imprint of that body part, the foot, negatively. Moreover, by virtue of another metaphoring, the shape left by the disappeared foot is like a photographic negative taken ­literally. Why would it make sense to use the concept of metaphor here? According to a now-obsolete yet tenacious tradition, the notion of metaphoricity, attached to the larger issue of figurative language use, or tropes, presupposes that its defining “other” is what is usually called “literal” or “proper” language: the language that is considered unambiguous, denotative, and, at one more remove, referential. Hence, and paradoxically, distinguishing tropes by way of that oppositional logic means clinging to the idea of the referentiality of language. This clinging to referentiality may be problematic—and I argue below, with Derrida and Deleuze, that it is so, even in its barely noticeable modern forms. But neither is it possible, as Salcedo’s work with the trace suggests in reply, to sever the tie between signs and reality entirely. Even if we do not know the person evoked, indeed, if we cannot even know whether the person died by violence, it is just as important to keep the absence of the foot and the singular body to which it was attached present, albeit a presence in absence. Salcedo, I argue, takes issue with semiotic and linguistic theory by means of the problematic concept of metaphor. And absence, negative space, is her “argument.” Thus, Atrabiliarios gives the lie to those who think that images cannot perform negation.7 In the tradition of Aristotle’s powerful and still widely credited theory of metaphor, this figure of meaning, or trope, tends to be construed as the transfer of meaning from one element, the evoked alien one, to another, the target element, which ordinary or literal language cannot or does not adequately describe. Various terminological pairs circulate, the clearest of which seem to be tenor, for the element in need of description, and vehicle, for the imported element called in to help illuminate certain aspects of the tenor. Note that the latter term implies movement. In my example, burial is the vehicle that helps us understand the mournful effect of the tenor, the shoes in the niches. The vehicle imports the element of death into what could otherwise be seen as, say, a display of shoes.8 7 

See, for instance, Gombrich 1949 and Burke 1966. On tenor and vehicle, see Richards 1936. For a lucid survey of theories of metaphor, see Culler 2001, 209–33. 8 

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9 

Derrida 1974; Deleuze and Guattari 1987. On thingness, see Brown 2001. [39]

Metaphoring

Indeed, as Jonathan Culler argues, this theory, like most theories of metaphor, is contingent upon an overt or covert assumption of referentiality (2001). The effectivity of a metaphor is measured through comparison with the referent. The vehicle of burial transfers the mood of mourning onto what would otherwise just be ordinary shoes. This metaphor works because the allegedly literal meaning would be inappropriate; it would miss the point entirely. The referent “shoes” does exist; they can be seen and pointed out; we do not doubt that if they were not buried, they could actually be touched. But, at the same time, to call these objects simply “shoes” would be to speak about a class of objects from which these shoes were taken, while repressing the difference between ordinary, not yet worn, generic shoes, and these shoes with their trail of life events inscribed in them, shoes which are laden with pastness and death. In this sense, “referentialism”—including the often-heard hammering on the real existence of art’s referents in the polemic against poststructuralism—may be the most perverse tool of repression. Moreover, in these shoes there is no match between referentiality and either tenor or vehicle. The shoes are referential in that they are “real shoes” in their emphatic thingness, but so, also, is the death that inheres in them, which the metaphor of “burial” brings to the fore. The distinction between tenor and vehicle is superimposed on a presumed distinction between literal and figurative. This presupposes that such a distinction can be made in the first place. However, convincing arguments have been put forward that question the possibility of literal language, of which both Derrida’s “White Mythology” and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus are the most influential. They differ in so far as Derrida’s argument against the possibility of literal language moves toward a generalized metaphoricity, while Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis denies the usefulness of a concept of metaphoricity altogether.9 Derrida’s argument—which has its own long tradition, especially in German philosophy—is based on the idea that language is itself already metaphorical—hence the rejection by semiotics of the semiotic relevance of the referent (Eco 1976). What only seems literal is a metaphor whose metaphoricity has been forgotten. Such forgetting is the result of overuse. Nietzsche made this argument in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” from 1873. In this essay, the German philosopher compares expressions that appear to be literal with coins that have changed hands so often that the images and letters have disappeared. This view not only questions the distinction between literal and figurative, but also implies the need for con-

Chapter One

stant innovation and, hence, for the ongoing production of metaphors.10 Deleuze and Guattari come to the rejection of the metaphorical /literal opposition from another angle. Their view of language is, in fact, much more positive than Derrida’s. For Deleuze and Guattari, speaking of metaphor already implies the “representationalist” view of language that they reject. Concepts that appear metaphorical, they argue, are simply imprecise. They need to be, since they designate things that are themselves not precise; in this sense, they are actually precise. As Deleuze says in another publication, this “anexactitude” is needed to “designate things exactly.” In order to allow language use to be up to its task of designating and analyzing, and performing and intervening in, not describing, the world, they advocate the development and use of mobile concepts. These philosophers and their followers contend with the issue of metaphor because they resist a representational conception of language altogether, even though no alternative is readily available. They also seek to develop a concept of metaphor that accounts for the possibility of language to exercise its performative potential and its capacity for intervention. As a theoretical object, Atrabiliarios performs by means of spatial negativity: the trace of what was says that someone or something was there, but is no longer. And it says this with a surplus of meaning that affects the viewer deeply.11 With the help of Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios, then, I submit that metaphor can be reconceptualized within a non-representationalist, “performatist” view of language and, by extension, of semiotic systems, or forms of meaning-making in general. Such a conception is put forward in Salcedo’s work. She negates the distinctions on which the concept is based and instead proposes an activity I refer to as “metaphoring.” In order to grasp that position, it is useful to first go along with Ivor A. Richards’s terminology of tenor and vehicle, provided we assume that this theory does not necessarily imply a hierarchy. Where two terms are somehow brought together, they interact with each other, and neither remains unaffected. It is only logical, then, that each term can serve the function of either vehicle or tenor. Take a look, then, at these niches. The vehicle of burial helps prevent misunderstandings that would virtually destroy the tenor if the latter were severed from a metaphorical interpretation, as Haddon’s narrator recommends in the first paragraph of the epigraph to this chapter. Such a meta10 

Nietzsche 1979; for a “postcolonial” approach to catachreses (metaphors that have lost their literal meaning), see Spivak 1987. 11  Deleuze and Guattari 1987. The quotation is from Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 3, quoted by Paul Patton 2006. Patton’s article is very helpful in understanding Deleuze’s view of language beyond the usual idealization of his major concepts (such as “nomadism”).

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12 

On productive misreadings, see Bloom 1973; 2003. Bloom’s powerful theory of influence among artists is widely known. See Bryson 1984 and Lord 1999 for critical revisions.

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phor prevents us from misreading these shoes as, for example, a critique of the capitalist process that entices people to buy new clothes even if they do not need them. Unlike productive misreadings, such a misreading can hardly be considered adequate, but, more important, it cannot be taken to be the literal meaning. The capitalist use of shoes, that is, is not inherently more “literal,” logical, or referential than the use of shoes for mourning, memory, or art.12 The word buried, and, in the visual artwork, the state of being “buried,” have the merit of interactively linking the normal use of shoes, which was put to a violent end, with the use to which Salcedo’s work has put them. It maintains the narrativity of violence’s perversion. Metaphor is thus no less important than a possibly “literal” term. Nor is it decorative: buried does not add any aesthetic quality to the description. Moreover, literal interpretation is not adequate either. More drastically, as Derrida has pointed out, it is often impossible to make a distinction between literal and figurative metaphoric meaning. What other word could be used here, for example, that would avoid the connotations of buried? Inserted, dug, incrusted? None of these appear adequate, but, what is more relevant for the status of metaphor, neither are they more “literal.” The reason buried seems to be the most directly adequate term, even if, or perhaps because, it is clearly metaphorical, is that it implicates what is most obviously at stake in this work but what eludes representation—that is, death and its aftermath: disappearance, pastness, negativity. It is in this sense that Jane Calow (2003) used the idea of burial to compare Salcedo’s work with a literal, architectural burial of a walkway in Birmingham, filled up with concrete because it was no longer considered safe. From (almost) literal, the word burial as a potent metaphor quickly becomes a nodal point of many associations. Burial belongs to the realm of death; yet, Haddon’s literalist would remind us, no one has died in the gallery. To call this a metaphor, however, would be to miss the point of the work entirely. It is only possible to undergo and be transformed by the affect of this work—its performative power to intervene—if one takes the work, in a strong sense, literally. Only then can the political, in which an acceptance of forgetting and silencing paralyzes agency, be inflected, so that, for example, the singularity of violent death comes to the fore, inspiring rejection. Only then, that is, does its political impact strike us as forcefully as it can and should. Hence the work has theoretical implications for the possibility of art to

Chapter One

work politically; for not only does this work need metaphor to work, but, conversely, it can only work through a recasting of metaphor. What I am going to claim is that Atrabiliarios re-theorizes metaphor. It does so by recasting it, in denial, so to speak. Such an implied denial is captured by the phrase in this chapter’s title, “negative space.” Metaphoring Negativity Atrabiliarios’s re-theorizing of metaphor takes off from the aspects of metaphor discussed above. The presupposition that metaphor is the “other” of literal language is given up. Deleuze’s “precise” language that is adequate to the “imprecise” reality opens the possibility to intervene—performatively—in the world. Here lies the work’s negativity—which, in this conception, is a positivity in disguise: the refusal of a wrong (idealistic, platonic, binary, and, in the end, paralyzing) conception of language makes a more incisive view of language possible. In addition to or, rather, as a consequence of its fundamental negativity, metaphor needs to be taken as an activity, rendered by a verb. In that neologism, it is a near-synonym of translating. Thus, “to metaphor” becomes an act that bridges. Like translation, metaphoring “transfers” something. It triggers displacement, but again, this seemingly negative word, when taken as a verb of activity, becomes positive. Rather than solely referring to enforced displacement—which the notion stubbornly keeps present nevertheless—the verb becomes an act of turning such severing displacements into bridging ones. This “something” that metaphor transfers is not a meaning in a referential or representational sense, but a preoccupation that requires reenactment in each event of occurrence. In the process, a gap is bridged, at the expense of loss and with the reward of gain.13 But metaphor is not a mere synonym of translation; the former only approximates the latter, like a para-synonym. These two concepts have things in common, which renders them both comparable and different—and it is precisely this similarity with a difference that makes the comparison meaningful. Unlike translation, metaphor’s starting point is not a particular language but a situation that needs adequate expression. This situation 13 

This argument is made more fully in Bal 2002 (56–95). The analyses there engage, among other sources, Benjamin’s unorthodox vision of translation (in 1968a) as what brings out the untranslatability of the alleged original. See also Lawrence Venuti’s incisive studies of translation (1994; 1995; 1996). On translation as survival and invigoration, see Brodzki 2007. Translation is usefully connected to nation and ethics in a volume edited by Bermann and Wood (2005). Translation as a visual practice is discussed in Bal and Morra 2007.

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14 

The need to bind metaphor to truth claims is the hornet’s nest in Donald Davidson’s work on metaphor, from 1978 (“What Metaphors Mean”) to 2001 (Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation).

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Metaphoring

is inherently “mobile” (Deleuze’s favorite word for the dynamism at stake). It is also particular; hence, when engaged not for its particularities but for its uniqueness, it can be treated as singular. According to traditional conceptions of metaphor, this particular situation can be generalized. One can take the instance of the political violence that killed those who wore these shoes, for example, as a metaphor of all political violence that kills people every day, anywhere in the world. This is one legitimate and plausible reading of the work. Salcedo’s installation holds this possibility of generalization in check, suspends it, but not without probing it first. Through generalization, the violent death of a woman we do not know becomes a case of the violence that concerns us all. This might be helpful in enticing us to feel concerned, but in the end it may also make it easier to shrug it off, to acknowledge the horror but feel powerless and compelled to move on. A second, related risk is that the violent death can be essentialized through generalization: then the violence is a token of the shortcomings of human nature or of the tragedy of history. Again, there is nothing we can do about that nature, or that tragedy. Generalization and essentializing, as this example suggests, easily mislead us into believing that states and situations are so easily comparable that they come to appear inevitable. This would be devastating for the possibility of political agency. Here, rather than in the “unique” nature of the Nazi genocide against the Jews, lies a good ground for the rejection of comparisons or generalizations of the Holocaust to other genocides. Hence, in order to avoid the disabling abstraction that such generalization entails, a new singularity must be mobilized in the wake of that singular woman’s destroyed life. This second singularity involves but does not equal the recipient of the metaphor. Through this second singularization, art can reach out over geographical distance, across temporal separation, and from one individual to another, from one social group to the next, without losing sight of the singularity of every instance of violence. This second singularity resists essentializing truth claims and prevents the figurativity of the situation from being forgotten. Such figurativity—the recognizable visual shape, color, and texture of each shoe—is not a feature of representation but of presentation.14 This second step requires agency and performance. Here, the activity of the reader or viewer is indispensable. This is how the artist, as Salcedo

Chapter One

i­ ntimates, produces a knowledge greater than her own. The relevance of Salcedo’s work depends on its being anchored in very specific situations. The stock phrase used to describe her work’s thrust, “political violence in her native Colombia,” even without the word native, cannot begin to do justice to this anchoring; it is already a generalization. I intend to demonstrate how this agency is built into the work and is indeed inevitable if the viewer is even to see it as art. This is one forceful aspect of the shoes buried in the niches. At the same time, the work can only affectively “hit” the viewers who see it all over the world—I first saw it in Sydney, for example—and who have no access to the specific knowledge that informs the work, if it is able to “metaphor,” transfer, convey, or translate this specificity without losing it either to generality or essentialism.15 The need to move from singular back to (another) singular becomes clear when we consider this work in relation to its obvious iconographic precedents. One quite plausible, polemical intertext for this work, for example, is the well-known imagery of heaps of shoes in Nazi concentration camps. These heaps are devastating because they combine the particularity of each shoe, which evokes the individual who wore it, with the gigantic, dehumanizing mound. Against the backdrop of that monumental mass of shoes—a monument to infernal violence—the modest niches in which the shoes are buried in Salcedo’s work become shrines. While carrying the traces of deadly violence, each one of them comes to pay homage to the individual whom the violence attempted to de-individualize. In this respect, the care with which each shoe or each combination of two shoes has been arranged in its niche turns the latter into a protective home, an affective “holding environment.” Since the work has not been able to protect the individual wearer from violent death, the least it can do, it seems to say, is protect his or her individual singularity from generalizing appropriation. Translatability, then, also entails responsibility for the preservation of singularity. Only on that condition can we provisionally and temporarily generalize, as the artist indicates: “The Colombian situation is a capsule of condensed experience that is valuable to the rest of the world” ­(Basualdo 2000, 35). Singularity is a function of the index and, hence, of its key instance, the trace. There is an inherent bond between the trace as the most material kind of index on the one hand and the insistence on singularity that Atra15 

Mack (2004–5), who develops the position of Salcedo in her country, is one among many who use this stock phrase and its variations; Wong’s excellent article is the most recent instance I have come across (2007, 174).

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[45]

Metaphoring

biliarios embodies on the other. This bond is the reality that the negativity of the trace paradoxically entails. This is best clarified in a passage by the primary theorist of the index, Charles Sanders Peirce. He even proposed a systematic bond between the index and singularity. His argument is based on the notion of experience: “To say that a singular is known by sense is a confusion of thought. It is not known by the feeling-element of sense, but by the compulsion, the insistency, that characterizes experience. For the singular subject is real; and reality is insistency. That is what we mean by ‘reality.’ It is the brute irrational insistency that forces us to acknowledge the reality of what we experience, that gives us our conviction of any singular” (1932, 234). This crucial passage invokes the viewer’s agency as triggered, indeed, compelled by the singularity of the trace. What Peirce calls “the compulsion, the insistency” as characteristic of experience stems from the fact that it is (only) that singularity that is real. This explains once more, if necessary, why language cannot be seen as one side of a binary relation between sign and reality, between meaning and referent. Instead, language is performative (“the brute irrational insistency that forces us to acknowledge”) of reality. Its performative effect is the inclusion of the language user or subject in that reality—hence her agency to act upon it (“that gives us our conviction of any singular”). It is that realness that must and can be metaphored to viewers far removed from the originating singularity. Without it, agency is mangled or erased, and the paralysis of a hopeless generality sets in. When considered as a translation from one singularity to another by means of the overcoming of generality, metaphor acts on a number of different levels. As I argued above, the metaphoricity involved is primarily negative. Moving from particularity to singularity, then to generality and on to the second singularity, the metaphors are denials of generalities that belong to the self-evidences by which we live. Depending on the viewer’s individual baggage, any one of these metaphors can be the starting point, the first aspect one notices. I discuss four of these metaphors in a random order, focusing on their negativity and the enabling force of their negation. First, the shoes are empty but worn: these shoes are emphatically not objects on display in shop windows. They are neither fashionable nor new, even if they share common features—almost all are women’s shoes, and they are elegant, perhaps more fitting for a dance than for labor. These common elements make them a series while preserving their singularity. But because of their most important common feature, their worn quality, they are not available for consumption; they are metaphors of a generalized non-availability. In this they resist interpretations along the lines of,

Chapter One

say, Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. Fredric Jameson invokes the latter work in his articulation of the “cultural logic of late capitalism” in the opening chapter of the eponymous book (1991, 8). Where Warhol, according to Jameson’s reading, shows a deadly version of commodity fetish­ism as a “powerful and critical statement,” Salcedo withholds such a rhetorical appeal to representation. The niches support this metaphor of non-­availability. They embody a space that is not quite part of the gallery space and, hence, does not belong to the viewer’s space. They recede beyond the space into the gallery’s wall. At the same time, by extending the gallery space, they also foreground the permeability of the latter for a world touched by art. But whereas shop windows entice their viewers to enter the shop, these niches are dead ends. There is no accessible space beyond them. Second, the shoes are not readily available, not even for visual consumption, for they are hard to see. The animal skins shield them from our gaze. Only a clouded vision is possible. This is how they compel agency on the part of the viewer while also claiming agency for themselves as active, political art. In the predicament they oppose to an easy, quick, consumerist vision, they start a discussion on the importance of a deliberately hampered vision. In agreement with Peirce’s view of the index, they surpass perception by including experience, as a more worked-through version of perception. Experience in this sense anchors the interaction between subject and object of viewing in a subjective experience that suspends that ­binary. Like consumerism, visibility is a general condition in the world that sheds its self-evidence in this work. The covering of these ordinary shoes with animal skin makes visibility a kind of “literal” meaning, which only seems literal because we have forgotten its metaphorical nature. Seeing is not a natural condition, these skins seem to remind us. It is an act that requires effort and entails a transgression of some sort. It is an act that involves the viewer’s body and being, an act for which one is responsible. From a generality, then, vision is “metaphored” into an utterly singular act for which visibility is the specific and variable condition. Their limited visibility is, moreover, unequal. Here, a third negative metaphor comes in that again concerns the tension between generality and singularity. We cannot oversee the various constellations of shoes and build a story around them. Such a story would be a metaphorical recapturing of what we see. Narratives are particularizing versions of something that is either more general or particular in a different way. This inequality of visibility posits a denial of the coherence that narrative requires. Instead, the temporal unfolding that narrative implies takes place in the event of viewing itself. This event decomposes into a series of events, because the

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16 

For an extensive discussion of atrocity photographs, see Reinhardt, Edwards, and Duganne 2007.

[47]

Metaphoring

uneven translucency of the skins not only changes the form of the shoes but also delays the focus on them. Peering through the mist of perception, linearity is broken, and our restless eyes move randomly through the rows of niches, seeking visibility. Some shoes are immediately recognizable as shoes. Others have to be peered at in the niche for a while. A fourth metaphor is produced on the level of the tension between surface and depth, a tension that produces an overdetermined deadness. Here death shows its face in more ways than one. The niches extend into the wall, whereas the skins, in contrast, close these recesses off with a rigorous surface or boundary, like shrouds. These shrouds are themselves made of dead, previously alive matter: animal skins. Their surfaces negate the depth of the niches. Thus the skins embody yet another sense of negative space. Because the skins are flush with the wall, the shoes look like old photographs. This resemblance in difference overdetermines the work’s effect. The analogy establishes most obviously a contrast with the loud “atrocity photographs” that bombard us on a daily basis, whose counterpart these nonphotographic images of shoes clearly are. These are the kind of photographs that Paul Virillio targets in his critique of the speed in visual culture that promotes disappearance (1991). Wong spells out what such photographs do: they “emphasize the numbing hypervisibility of violence and elicit the immediate shock of recognition in its viewers.” In the view I am proposing here, the immediacy of the shock and the recognition by the viewers are both elements that Salcedo attempts to counter. Against immediacy, she posits a demand for duration, and against a recognition that naturalizes one experience in the terms of the viewer’s own, she posits the risk of transferring one singularity into another, whose difference is as important as its comparability. Wong contrasts this effect of atrocity photo­ graphs—speed and cognitive appropriation—with Salcedo’s very different “language of grief that expresses the diffuse melancholic temporality of traumatic loss” (2007, 175).16 But the resemblance to photographs, specifically old photographs, goes farther than this media critique. Ever since Roland Barthes’s melancholy essay Camera Lucida, photographs have embodied our visual relationship with time passing and death. Old sepia-toned photographs foreground this relationship with temporal particularity: that one relative who is no longer. Old photographs show not only the past, but also a past long gone, rigorously cut off from life. This historicizing pastness demonstrates how

F i g u r e 1 .3 Atrabiliarios (detail), 1992–93. Four niches: plywood, shoes, animal fiber, and thread. Collection: The Progressive Corporation, Cleveland, OH. Photo: D. James Dee. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White

Chapter One

Cube, London.

close particularity is to generality. The particular loss becomes the general condition of loss inherent in time. Moreover, the connotation of pastness easily becomes a sentimental consolation for suffered loss. In addition, as distinct from such photographs, the objects in Atrabiliarios’s images—not persons but shoes—turn them into still lives, stillborn lives, or natures mortes, compounding the relationship with death through yet another layer hinting at mortality. The relation to atrocity photographs, the violence to which these tend to numb us, and the melancholic effect of old photographs become even more intense when we consider that the most horrific events of the first half of the twentieth century, the genocides in Namibia, Armenia, and Nazi Germany, took place at the time when such quiet, sepia-toned, portrait photographs emerged as memorabilia and were often the only remaining

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17 

For an excellent study of photography, see Batchen 1997. For a thorough examination of the connections between photography and death, see Baer 2002. See also Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” (1999) and Barthes 1981. The background of the genocides is powerfully evoked in Hirsch 1997; 1999 and, in connection to translatability, by Brodzki 2007 (190–206). In mystery novels, autopsy is invariably presented first as respectful and singularizing, before even its forensic interest (particularizing). Genocides in the second half of the twentieth century, such as that in Rwanda, also became subjects of media reproduction and attempts to deal with the mourning. A particularly poignant political work of art addressing the relationship between media and atrocity in Rwanda is a 1996 work by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar called The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (see Reinhardt, Edwards, and Duganne 2007). For an excellent catalogue of Jaar’s work, see Jaar 2008.

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object through which to remember the dead. Perhaps this comes across most clearly in the contrast between the soft-looking animal skin and the violent black thread of the stitching. For, as if these three appearances of death—photography as such, old photographs, and dead objects in them— were not enough, the images shown have scars, ragged seams on which surgical violence has been performed. Thus they look like corpses cut open and sewn shut again through the violent, but also identifying and singularizing procedure of autopsy.17 This fourth metaphor of death—the tension between surface and depth—is particularly powerful in its quality of denial. The simple material condition of the niches as perfectly flush with the wall and the resulting absolute flatness of the installation are the embodiment of that tension. Through its overdetermined insistence on death, the work contradicts the temptation of redemption. To be sure, death is an utterly generalized, transcendental generality—the most general of all events. Yet here death is singularized as violent. And in spite of the multiple practices of violence, it is utterly singular each time it is committed. Surgical thread denotes violence performed on one who is already the victim of violence, in the autopsy that comes after death. Traveling back from the surgical thread, the sight that emerges for the viewer, even in the viewer’s body, is an image. Salcedo, the sculptor, here mobilizes Salcedo, the painter, the producer of surfaces that matter. We will encounter this image-aspect of the sculptures throughout this book. Moreover, these images are, if not representations, at least allusions to that mode. In the face of theories of metaphor that shun representationalist conceptions of language and, by extension, all cultural productions of meaning, the collocation of death and the image powerfully imposes an awareness of the violence of representation itself. Indeed, to look at images of violence is to accept that even violence can be represented, recast on a flat image for contemplative consumption. The

Chapter One

metaphor moves from the particular surface we see—each piece of skin with its unequal translucency—to the resistant depth, bouncing the eye back to the surface. Once steeped in the violent death that creeps up on us through the means I have indicated, the viewer’s agency and the act of looking that it produces can no longer shed the sense of collusion. This is how the metaphor’s negativity operates to deny the redemptive quality of art. In these four different ways, Atrabiliarios metaphors negation. The polemical thrust of the work I have foregrounded here is necessary as a method of clearing. It clears the confrontation between the work and the viewer of four fundamental operations that are so deeply ingrained in contemporary culture that removing them, stripping them of their self­evidence, is an act of violence in itself. It seems violent, indeed, to deprive viewers of what they consider most naturally theirs. This takes force. The force that is required resides in the intimate embrace of the metaphors, for they do not operate in isolation. The metaphors are paired together instead. Two pairs, or dispositifs, have been undermined, but not altogether neutralized—which is impossible. In the first pair, the availability of goods, as in globalized capitalism, is made to appear unnatural, as is the availability of sight. Together these forms of availability constitute the fundamental conditions of art: availability as commodity and as visual experience. In the second pair, narrative has been turned from a passively consumed logic into an active performance, and from events happening to others into a self-inflicted struggle to see. But narrative is also a form of life that ends in death. Hence, the second metaphor of this pair, death inflicted by the image, counters the unfolding of narrative with a death already in place, mute and still. Noticing, respectively, the surgical thread of post-mortem violence, the stilling effect of turning life into image, and the doubly deadening effect of old photographs, the viewer traverses an anachronistic narrative. This narrative could just possibly offer a glimpse of life in the form of agency. Metaphor is the indirect imposition of singularity “beyond” the generalization that must draw the art out of its entrenched particularity into its own “context.” How can such a trope fulfill the task of activating viewers into a potential political position, in ways specific to its operations? The Insistence of Metaphor In literary theory, such a view of metaphor is not at all new. Jonathan Culler ends his analysis of metaphor with a plea for a reception-oriented conception of that trope. Rather than designating a property either of language or of speech, metaphor, he writes, is “a description of certain interpretive operations performed by readers when confronted by a textual in[50]

18 

See De Man 1979 and Genette 1972. [51]

Metaphoring

congruity, such as the assertion of a patently false identity” (2001, 232). In other words, he suggests a way of replying to Haddon’s narrator. Atrabiliarios would be an excellent case for such a trigger of interpretive operations. While we have seen that the attempt to make a distinction between metaphorical and literal meaning leads either to a generalization or a refusal of metaphor, a second distinction falls victim to the attempt to distinguish within the domain of rhetoric one trope, metaphor, from another, metonymy. Paul De Man associates metaphor with necessity, or essence, and metonymy with chance, while substituting the chance associations of words to the spatial association in the world. Before him, Gérard Genette had declared metonymy to be at the heart of metaphor. For Genette, metaphors are motivated by semantic or even referential relations between the particular tenor and the vehicle this tenor attracts. In Genette’s case a specific church tower is the tenor, whereas the cornfields surrounding the tower, the vehicle, call into being the metaphor of ears of corn to describe the surface structure of the tower’s roof.18 Word or sign versus world? Surely this difference would be unacceptable to art that works precisely in order to make the former an active intervention in the latter. When looking at Atrabiliarios, whether from afar and seeing only abstract forms, or from close up and noticing the figurativity of the shoes, it takes awhile to notice that they are worn shoes. Hence the first negative metaphor (they are not commodities) and the second (they are not readily available visually) work together to deprive the viewer of her ordinary interpretive stock of metaphors. This emptying out is necessary to gain access to new meanings. As a preparation for interpretative performance, it corresponds with, and comments on, the need for innovation implied in Nietzsche’s metaphor of used coins. The near-invisibility of the blurred image is, however, not negative in itself. It only works by means of negativity. Instead of precluding vision, it sharpens our gaze in the end, activating the viewer to take the risk of looking. Accustomed to being primarily curious and eager to see, in the aesthetic sense, the viewer visiting an art gallery is enticed to come closer. In fact, the viewer is compelled to come dangerously close; dangerously close both in view of the taboo on touching art and because of the shock that approaching holds in store for the viewer. And art is what you see: beautiful forms, unreadable shapes. Until, that is, you overcome the usual passivity of viewing—the consumerist posture of scanning a shop window, or the representationalist search for the recognizable—to peer in, performing the act of looking instead of being offered

Chapter One

a sight. Then the shock hits you: a shock bound up with the impossibility of separating metaphor from literality. A theory of metaphor is enacted at this point, through the interaction between viewer and work. This theory stipulates that the issue at stake in metaphor is not the distinction between metaphorical and literal signification but the ongoing struggle to mediate between general and particular, in order to preserve singularity in the metaphoring. To make this point, in this moment of the viewer’s shock in seeing, Atrabiliarios skips the indirection often attributed to metaphor. Behind the abstract sheet of animal skin, with its own variation of thick and thin that draws abstract forms on the skin, abstraction suddenly yields to a most concrete, hyper-figurative shape. The viewer is in charge of performing that transformation. But metaphor keeps insisting: there is no opportunity to revert to literal meaning or referentiality, or to keep those at bay. This is not exactly a metaphor, however; it is more the experience of metaphor’s primacy, its “literalness.” But again, albeit in a different way, representation is insinuated between abstraction and reality, at the moment of transformation itself, when abstraction lets off and reality is still a dim image. It is, however, almost bypassed. One has to slow down, even come to a halt, in order to savor that moment. Even if we do not take perceptual time into account, generality—shoes as tokens of a type—yields to extreme singularity: to the uniquely individual, worn shoe still containing the trace and shape of the foot no longer able to walk in it. There is no formal transition, only an extremely brief temporal point of transference between abstraction and a suddenly occurring clarity of figuration. From abstraction, one is thrown into reality, without the cushioning of softening figurative representation. A worn shoe, buried like an urn cemented into a wall, difficult to see but nevertheless visible, confronts you with death and your own immodesty. Before getting close enough—mind the temporal gap!—the viewer only sees beautiful, enticing suggestions of form, but that form is not at all anthropomorphic. It remains “safely” abstract. Abstraction seems to be a condition for the tranquil enjoyment of beauty as an escape from politics. After the approach, by contrast, the viewer is beyond the divide that separates art from life, or word from world. But that brief moment of the enticement of the anthropomorphic, that moment of transition, is crucial as well. In the next chapter I focus on the workings of the anthropomorphic imagination as a tool for, or as, political art.19 19 

As I explain in the next chapter, the term anthropomorphic imagination refers to a range of strategies in literature and the visual arts in which “thinking through the body” (Gallop 1988) is the primary rhetoric. The most obvious instances are the human figure in art and the character in literature, but also, in humanistic scholarship, the “hand” of the artist, [52]

the “voice” of the narrator, and any interpretation of texts in terms of the unconscious or the psyche. The idea that abstraction facilitates escape from politics is, of course, a highly political reduction of abstraction, wrong but no less tenacious. I plan to devote a subsequent book to this issue. [53]

Metaphoring

A worn shoe, with traces of sweat and dirt, of corns, calluses, and the distortions of bones that come with aging and labor, of the idiosyncrasies of the toes and bones of a particular individual whom we have never met and will never meet because she is dead or otherwise disappeared—is that art? It is, and more than that. This work says that only this, or something that operates in such a way, can be art—but only owing to the fact that it is not a representation. Like the furniture, these shoes are real, but they are art to the extent that they are isolated, foregrounded, and framed as traces. As such, they establish a sharply painful indexical connection between the former live body of the wearer and the live presence of the viewer, now standing, in her own shoes, in front of these niches. This connection happens; it is an event. Doane, in the discussion of Peirce’s thoughts on the index mentioned above, formulates the event of indexicality in terms strikingly suitable for Atrabiliarios: “They [indices] are dependent upon certain unique contingencies: the wind blowing at the moment in a certain direction, a foot having landed in the mud at precisely this place, the camera shutter opening at a given time. Unlike icons, indices have no resemblance to their objects, which, nevertheless, directly cause them . . . [an index] is a hollowed-out sign” (2002, 92; emphasis added). In addition to the insistence on singularity—Doane phrases this as “unique contingencies”—her examples of such indexical events collocate shoes, land, photography, and the unique moment, or instant, in that utterly fugitive element that is the wind. The instant is that of the present—such a contentious issue in the philosophy of time at the beginning of the twentieth century. Neither Peirce nor Bergson believed in the instant, however, because, as Deleuze wrote in his actualization of Bergsonian thought for our time, Bergsonism, “Bergsonian duration is defined less by succession than by coexistence” (1988, 60). As they hover between moments, the shoes also hover between invisibility and over-visibility, between abstraction and overly precise figuration, toppling over, at the precise moment they become visible, from representation into simulacrum. But even though there are no “original” shapes of shoes, and every single shoe is as banal as any copy of a copy, they are, at the same time, hyper-real. They transcend their reality and particularity by means of their hyper-particularity, which bridges the gap between the former wearer, whose staying power is in the trace, and the viewers, who are in charge of perpetuating that staying power. This is how the trace melds singularity to reality.

Chapter One

Precisely because we are not allowed to know who that individual is, we “bring her along” into the general and then back into our own singularity, our “heart”—even though the complications of that metaphor and its implications for political art are still to be examined. This hospitality, if I may so call it, is helped along by the “beauty” of the work (if that cliché is also permitted)—to wit, by the multilayered perception it offers and the suspension of haste it requires. This ongoing dialectic between singular and general cannot accommodate a universalism as its endpoint. Instead, this “bringing along” of the singular into the general, which preserves the traces of the singular that enrich the general and transfers back to the singular the generality of the political domain where violence must be dealt with, is an act of metaphor, in the stubbornly literal sense of translation. The Act of Metaphoring As an engagement and dialogue between bracketed particular, singular, and general happenings—here, of violence—metaphoring stands for art’s possibility to act. This possibility is important, because the fast pace of today’s world does not allow for procrastination or discouragement, both of which lead to indifference. In the face of disaster, violence, and terror, in the presence of enduring war, hence as in the present, Salcedo’s metaphoring shows that art is a worthy—even indispensable—contribution to the collective efforts toward making societies livable. Part of her contribution is theoretical, to the extent that her works can be considered theoretical objects, and in that sense they are both conceptual and generalizable. This is why I engage this body of work to make a more general case for the political agency of art. But I make this claim with the qualification, drawn from Salcedo’s work, that such agency is always exercised in singularity. This, in turn, compels a view of the political as being equally singular. Whenever we use the word political as distinct from the affiliated yet opposed notion of ethics with which it is often confused in the humanities, we are necessarily framing whatever this word qualifies in a specific time and place. If the domain of the ethical is or aspires to be universal, the political is particular. Hence, the political is always liable to fall into generalization, but it can also resist that tendency and carefully guard singularity. Because of the very nature of the political as always occurring in specific situations, times, and places, the question of how art can be political cannot be answered in any generalizing sense; that is, no generalizing view of artistic agency will suffice. What singularity is involved, then, and how can metaphoring encompass it? This question requires a negotiation between, on the one hand, the affective process of which the particularity cannot be specified because the viewer is a full-fledged party in the transaction and, [54]

20 

In the 1980s and 1990s, when politically correct was still a positive term (as reflected in the attempts to implement identity politics, and, most important perhaps, a specific kind of reading), large contingents of the humanities were involved in political thought. In the mid-1990s, the key term suddenly became ethical. This alternative came from those who most opposed the political turn, yet it was endorsed by the formerly politically inclined scholars, probably in an attempt at reconciliation following the “culture wars.” I wish to argue that this replacement is problematic and, at the present time, no longer tenable. 21  Quoted in Roca (2004, 150). To give the current war against various Arabic and Asian countries a somewhat arbitrary start, I follow Etienne Balibar (2003), who proposes the date of 1991 (the Gulf War) as the beginning. The name of the war has changed from the Gulf War to the War on Terror, and it encompasses the war against Afghanistan that began in 2002 as well as the war against Iraq, begun in March–April 2003. Neither war has an end in sight, although the latter might be displaced onto the former. [55]

Metaphoring

on the other hand, the need to cathect on the basis of the dual singularity between the beginning and the ending of that process.20 This need to be specific begins with the thematic aspect addressed. While political art can address any thematic aspect of the political, Salcedo’s work centers on extreme violence. This theme is not a personal choice. As she states in an interview, “I think that art is always a product of necessity, and I think that in Colombia the artists don’t have the option to choose the themes of their work because these themes are already imposed upon us” (Villaveces-Izquierdo 1997, 238). Without representing it, she addresses this violence in its consequences. Hence, she positions herself on the side of the people left in the destruction wrought by the violence. In particular, this destruction results in disturbed (inter)subjectivity, and displacement. For now, I am attempting to show the inextricable intertwinement of these issues through the seemingly simple, straightforward—“literal”—shoes. But there is a further reason for the specific relevance of the thematic focus of Salcedo’s work, particularly in the case of Atrabiliarios, in relation to the wider field of political art. This reason concerns translatability. Violence, subjective “disturbance,” and displacement are of all times, yet they have taken on a global status since “the war” in our present day and age “began.” The current state of the world-at-large is one of war. It is impossible to change anything in the political without taking this presentness of violence into account. If the qualifier political in the phrase political art means anything, violence is likely to be within its orbit. In different ways according to moment and location, its consequences—subjective disturbance and displacement—are also of the present and never far away. Violence, in Salcedo’s view, de-centers the subject because it enforces the need to identify with the victims, which is both inevitable and impossible: “Their suffering becomes mine; the center of that person becomes my center and I can no longer determine where my center is.”21

Chapter One

In view of the stubborn focus that the generalized presentness of these two states requires, the motif of shoes in Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios receives yet another meaning. I will put this in simple terms. Shoes are for walking: they are objects employed in the simplest, most elementary manner of mobility. But the owners, the inhabitants of these shoes, walked under coercion, for displacement is an inherent facet of violence. In terms of place, the current state of the world is paradoxical. It is clear that the current multiple instances of violence in particular are no longer containable, although many try hard to make us believe this violence is limited to the non-Western world. The attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., in 2001 demonstrate the impossibility of placing arbitrary limits on violence, and so do the almost permanent states of violence in Latin America, Africa, the Middle and Far East, around the southern border of the United States, and in Middle and Eastern Europe, not to speak of the everyday violence that rages in our midst. Making shoes the focus of this installation, Salcedo’s art resists both a generalizing abstraction—everyone walks, everyone wears shoes—and a particularizing standoffishness that relegates violence to other places—worn shoes are mundanely particular, in addition to being poignantly singular. This turns the works into a powerful allegory. Such singularization is necessary because, although violence is of all times and all places, the universalization of violence puts it out of reach for critical engagement and facilitates the kind of intellectual laziness that condones indifference. In other words, it gives up on the political and leaves it to politics to deal (or fail to deal) with the violence. More important for my argument, this violence, pervasive as it is, takes on different particularities in different places. Salcedo sees this particularity not in terms of anecdotal information but in terms of her own way of being affected by it: “Even two years after a massacre, there’s a special feeling” (quoted in Viso 1996, 86). It is through this shift from the particular massacre to the artist being affected by the “feeling” of the place that particularity can become singularity. I contend that instead of numbing us, insight into the “globalization” of violence that the dialectic of singularity and generality enables can reactivate us to look around to other places where violence is of the order of the day. In this way, such insight helps us to better understand its “differences within” and to militate against the generalizations that make its victims invisible and forgotten. This is one of the links between violence, the assault on subjectivity, and the enforced displacement that results.22 22 

The concept of “the difference within” is borrowed from Barbara Johnson’s lucid deployment of deconstruction for a political literary analysis (1987).

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23  The discussion of whether or not war can be justified has a long and painful history. The discussion is based on the already biased concept of “just war,” even in contemporary collections. See Reichberg, Syse, and Begby 2006.

[57]

Metaphoring

Indeed, these three issues are inherent in each other. Their articulation is a task of translating where no “original” exists. Translation, therefore, is at the heart of this chapter, its major critical tool, perhaps even its utopian goal, but it needs acts of metaphoring in order to be meaningfully performed. Instead of universalizing violence, therefore, I argue that the singular violence of one place can and must be metaphored into that of another. This necessity informs my choice of the art I am engaging here. At this point I must resist the desire to be more particular and to tell stories of the violence Salcedo encounters in her research. The reasons for this reticence include the risk of voyeurism, condescendence, and, more fundamentally, unwarranted leaps into positive definitions and thematic specifications of what “the political” encompasses. The conceptual problem at issue is comparable to that of defining “culture.” In an essay on the predicament, in anthropology, of the compulsion to define “culture” and the impossibility of doing so, Johannes Fabian offers a convincing plea for a rigorously negative (non-)definition of this concept (2001, 87–102). He invokes confrontation and negotiation as the moments in which “the cultural” emerges. This formulation avoids positive, reifying definitions that are inherently “othering,” while at the same time foregrounding process as the domain of culture. The formulation is so close to Mouffe’s definition of “the political” that they can easily slide into becoming para-synonyms. Instead, I suggest that the closeness of the two formulations intimates that “the cultural” is always necessarily political, while the political “happens” in the cultural. Any arbitrary attempt at delimitation between the two domains—parallel to the protectionist distinction between “art” and “reality,” “life,” or the political—is therefore futile. Fabian’s concept of “the cultural” thus involves temporality, agency, and plurality without falling into the traps of self-congratulatory celebrations of multiplicity and freedom, of idealizations of the possibility of democracy, and of the insidious imposition of particular values as universal.23 But it is also too easy—too generalizing—to identify the cultural with the political. Although they can never be severed, the two domains are distinguished by a difference of perspective, or what I have termed, in narrative theory, focalization. Allegedly cultural negotiations can ostensibly be focused on seemingly mundane issues and superfluous things, while political ones concern disagreement and (group) identities (and their ­interests).

Chapter One

Only if we understand that the former determine how we consider the latter—determine, in other words, if we are able to debate what bothers us, emotionally, aesthetically, in someone else’s “culture” as antagonistic instead of casting it out as inimical—can the bond between the cultural and the political be put to socially productive use. Along similar lines of reasoning, I would like to learn from Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios how to grasp—without imprisoning it in positivity and reification—the idea of political art. This reflection is not new. Indeed, the phrase political art traditionally possesses a number of meanings that we can now bracket or discard. First, obviously, political art is not overtly and explicitly about politics. Such a thematic concentration would disempower art that may be more effective for not being explicit. Second, the phrase cannot mean state-sponsored or state-censored art. In fact, I tend to try to steer away from the sensitive issue of censorship that this conception entails. This tradition, which, in the West, has its starting point in Plato’s Republic, limits the notion of political art to art that either resists or supports “official” politics. This focus on official politics makes invisible the infractions of politics on people’s private lives, possible because of the erasure of the political. It would thus defeat the purpose of Salcedo’s art, since this work insists on how the breakdown of the distinction between public and private is, in fact, an imposing feature of war. Hence rethinking reasons to protect that distinction may well be the most appropriate area for an inquiry into political art.24 In an unfortunate misunderstanding of the phrase, the “conceptual overview” article in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics bases its conceptualization of the issues of political art on just such a simplistic relationship between art and politics; bases it, precisely, on the erasure of the political as a viable domain of artistic agency. In such cases, art and politics remain two separate domains that are more or less incidentally connected. The obsoleteness of that binary—of support versus critique—is one of the reasons we need to rethink political art (Stopford 1998).25 24  The most effective discussion of this issue I have found appears in Jill Bennett’s book on art, affect, and trauma (2005). I discuss her approach at more length in my article “The Pain of Images” (Bal 2007). 25  A good attempt to develop the relationship between art as an influence and politics as a recipient of this influence is offered in Edelman 1995. In general terms his view is plausible enough. He justifies his view as follows: “Because it [art] excites minds and feelings as everyday experiences ordinarily do not, it is a provocation, an incentive to mental and emotional alertness. Its creation of new realities means that it can intrude upon passive acceptance of conventional ideas and banal responses to political clichés. For that reason art can help foster a reflective public that is less inclined to think and act in a herd spirit

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or according to the cues and dictates provided by a privileged oligarchy” (143–44). For my purposes, this study is, however, too narrowly focused on the actual, thematic influence of art on politics. As a consequence, the focus is almost exclusively on representational art. 26  Grant H. Kester’s Conversation Pieces is a good example (2004). The art or art events that he discusses are certainly politically worthy. To what extent they work qua art is not so easy to decide, however. For a similar discussion, see Fotiadi 2009. 27  Roei’s project is as ambitious as it is important. I can only refer to elements of the larger project that she has already published (2006; forthcoming). On the necessary contemporariness of political art, see Ruby 2007 (15). [59]

Metaphoring

Third, we cannot define political art as one-issue protest, as a singular political statement presented within the framework of the art world, although such art is certainly possible. But such art, political as it may be, is not political qua art; it is art, and it has a political meaning, perhaps even striking force. While it may be very effective in its particular situation with regard to its target, for my attempt at conceptualization its limited range may well hinder rather than help our understanding of how art can act politically. Such art may be effective, as effective as protest marches, parliamentary lobbying, or actual warfare, but if so, it is not effective qua art.26 Of course, some art can be political art in the sense I am developing as well as perform one-issue protest. As Noa Roei has cogently argued, much art that engages the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is punctually political, and some of it would certainly still qualify as political art in the sense Salcedo proposes. Indeed, avoiding “the Conflict” is as impossible in Palestinian and in Israeli art as it is, in Colombian art, to avoid the theme of violence. But thematic focus does not specify artistic strategy. The difference—not opposition—between these two categories is what I am trying to establish in this book. The French philosopher Christian Ruby defines the contemporariness of art in such political terms when he writes that the contemporary emerged after the shift from a regime of commitment to a regime of interference. Interference, for him as for me, is a condition for political art. I just seek to suspend the thematic standard, which would risk distracting us from the inquiry into “what works” as political art and what does not.27 These three senses in which the phrase political art functions have in common that they suggest, as their alternative, a universal—and universally valuable—kind of art that protects itself from political “contagion.” This art is pure, ethereal, and strictly aesthetic only; Adorno disparagingly calls it “the work [of art] that wants nothing but to exist.” It encourages us to forget that this fetishization of aesthetics is “an apolitical stance that is in fact highly political” (2003b, 240). I prefer, therefore, to acknowledge the political nature—however problematic, politically and artistically— of art that claims to be outside or above the political. Only through such

F igu r e 1.4 Atrabiliarios (detail), 1992–93. Wall installation with sheetrock, wood, shoes, animal fiber, and surgical thread in ten niches with eleven animal-fiber boxes sewn with surgical thread, 99 × 388.6 × 14.6 cm. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube,

Chapter One

London.

a­ cknowledgment can that antipolitical political conception of art be effectively opposed.28 There are three other meanings of political art, however, that are more difficult to discard, since they are not caught up in this false binary of political versus “universally” aesthetic. These meanings emerge from another distinction that veers toward opposition, namely, that between art and life rather than between aesthetics and politics. They emerged from postHolocaust philosophy and have in common a delicacy, a modesty, and a need to draw limits around the tragedy of “real life” so that victims are not revictimized. Because of the centrality of violence in her work, Salcedo’s art must be situated in relation to these concerns. Atrabiliarios’s insistence on singularity combined with the lack of disclosure of particularity points in that direction. These concerns are inevitably bound up with the name of Adorno, who formulated these thoughts not only in the aftermath of the Holocaust but also under the sway of its cultural trauma. To bring this chapter as close as possible to the relationship between art and what could be called “the cultural politics of horror,” then, I wish to situate Salcedo’s deployment of the act of metaphoring in relation to the concerns that Adorno expressed but was not quite able to resolve in his time.29 The first of these meanings is the kind of aestheticizing or, as Adorno would say, stylizing, of real-world politics, including—especially, I would add—violence. It is, in my view, the fourth meaning of political art that needs to be suspended in this exercise in negativity: art that represents events or effects of violence. The problem here is representation itself, an issue that is further developed in the next chapter. According to this critique, Adorno perceives representation as turning violence—events, victims, consequences—into something that can be perceived as “art” rather than as documentation, journalism, or critical writing. This is fundamentally the problem of representation, a cultural form of expression whose problems have been examined in great detail by cultural analysts since the 1970s. In relation to this problematic, the fact that Atrabiliarios both deploys real shoes instead of representing them and, at the same time, presents these shoes as hard to see, constitutes an answer to this Adornian critique. Instead of stylizing and mitigating the violence, the combination of 28  All further quotations from Adorno are taken from Can One Live After Auschwitz? (2003a), a recent collection of his writings related to his initial indictment of “poetry after Auschwitz,” on which more below. This publication will hopefully put an end to the indirect, decontextualized, and often untraceable citations of Adorno’s position that have plagued critical theory for the last decade. 29  The specific way Salcedo opposes the regime of generalized terror (“terror as usual”) primarily concerns her attempt to construct social spaces. I discuss this issue in chapter 4.

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Chapter One

translatability and untranslatability that the visual presentation entails replaces stylistic mitigation with perceptual slowdown.30 But understandably, given his time of writing, Adorno also offers alternatives that I propose to bracket. Political art made under the dilemma of representation would either refuse art itself, limiting itself to documentary commemoralization, or refuse the representation (of violence). This does not mean that representation in all its guises must be tabooed, as Adorno’s initial statement has often been taken to mean. It is true that representation stylizes by definition. I submit that it does not, however, necessarily stylize violence away. I contend, instead, that Salcedo has been exploring artistic strategies that enable her to do neither of these two things. The mode of representation can be such that it works to “undercode” the violence it is addressing. Instead of either stylizing the violence out of sight or repressing representation entirely, she undercodes the violence so that its presence in the resulting work, which is partly representational and partly anti-representational, is all the more tenacious and acute. Her tool is the metaphoring between the particular to the singular, then to the general and back, in order to preserve singularity at both ends. This is the function of the difficulty of seeing to which the distance between the niches further contributes. Once we are close enough to the niches to see the real traces of violence in the shoes’ worn quality, it is no longer possible to see the installation as a whole. One can only see them as real shoes if they are viewed one at a time. And once we are so close, our own singularity and that of our specific baggage are inevitably implicated. This is why it is important to realize that Salcedo’s installations are never simply symbolic.31 In its various formulations, Adorno’s objection remains as paradoxical as it is valid. He argued that turning horror into beauty, far from being a civilized thing, is, indeed, barbaric. Allegedly, art would destroy the civilized world, or at least be in collusion with that destruction, because it makes the violence palatable and even risks making it pleasurable. The ­effect is the total obliteration of the violence and the concomitant suffering. For there is no more radical way of erasing violence or, to use that other concept, of “translating” it away—than to make something appealing out of it, thus mitigating it, giving it beauty, and, unwittingly, redeeming it. Adorno’s indictment of art “after Auschwitz”—to cite the title of one 30 

Chapter 3 is devoted to the slowdown and its political potential. For the notion of undercoding, see Eco 1976. Critics often resort to symbolism to justify their own associations, however inspiring these may be, so that the specific and singular political operations of the work remain unexamined. See, for instance, Birkhofer 2008 and Roca 2004. 31 

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32  See Adorno 1973b. Strangely, this essay is not included in the 2003 volume. For a lucid discussion of the two implications of Adorno’s initial position (the ethical and the semiotic inadequacy of art after the Holocaust), see Van Alphen 1997.

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of the later essays in which he returns to the issue—has been extensively alluded to in Holocaust and testimony studies, often to advocate documentation as the only “proper” way of representing the Holocaust or other atrocities. Its influence has been such that it is worth revisiting today with regard to an artwork, Atrabiliarios, that so relentlessly focuses on the aftermath—the disturbed subjectivity and the displacement that are inherent in the worn shoes. The original statement appears in the context of a rather savagely critical examination of what was to become cultural studies: the progressive, critical study of culture.32 One of the typical, enigmatic, dialectical paradoxes he refers to in this essay is something that cultural studies has insufficiently taken to heart: “such [cultural] criticism is ideology as long as it remains mere criticism of ideology” (2003c, 153). The reason for this severe judgment becomes clear in a later formulation, which states that the problem appears to lie with the definition of culture underlying this critique of ideology. Hence Adorno prefigures Fabian’s negative and dynamic concept of emerging culture or “the cultural”: “Such critical consciousness remains subservient to culture insofar as its concern with culture distracts from the true horrors” (155). This “distraction” is what Salcedo’s acts of metaphoring attempt to overcome. In line with these attempts, which I have characterized above as attempts at translation between singularity (of the particular) and the general, Adorno writes, “the task of criticism must be not so much to search for the particular interest groups to which cultural phenomena are to be assigned, as to decipher the general social tendencies that are expressed in these phenomena and through which the most powerful interests realize themselves” (2003c, 158). Due to the confusion between particularity and generality—the individualism underlying particularity and, at the same time, the desire to erase singularity—this task has been ill understood and snowed under by a U.S.-style identity politics of which we have only recently become weary. And although some of Adorno’s statements in this essay suggest that self-reflection is urgently necessary, he equally relentlessly points out the limitations of that activity: “Even the most radical reflection of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remains only reflection, without altering the existence to which its failure bears witness” (160; emphasis added). It is within this last phrase that the continuing relevance of Adorno’s thoughts on post-Holocaust art for cultural ­reflection

Chapter One

resides. Is it possible, Salcedo’s shoes appear to ask, to deploy art not only as reflection, but also as a form of witnessing that does alter the existence of what it witnesses? It is at the end of his in-depth commentary on radical cultural critique that Adorno’s famous indictment of poetry after Auschwitz first appears. In protest against the frequent isolation of this sentence, I quote the preceding and the following one as well, so as to foreground the fact that Adorno’s addressee is the cultural critic, whether an academic or not: “Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today” (2003c, 162; emphasis added). Adorno wrote this in 1949. I do not think we are finished addressing this statement yet, especially if we see it in the light of an even earlier, equally remarkable piece, first published in Minima Moralia (1974) but written in the fall of 1944 (2003d). During the slow ending of the war that so marked his thinking, Adorno realized the war was not going to be over in 1945. In that short text, Adorno describes in one devastating sweep the permanent state of war the world is in and which we are only now beginning to notice; the role of the media in obliterating this state from perception; and the financial interests of global proportions that sustain that war and even make it indispensable. Atrabiliarios deploys different ways of engaging these same issues. Isolating the shoes from the gallery space by burying them, the artist withdraws the traces of the persons who died and of the violence that killed them from historical time, so as to indict time for its relentlessly ongoing movement. She refuses to tell the particular stories yet fills the niches with narrativity. And, as I mentioned above, she singularizes the shoes, alluding to but precluding the thematization of the critique of capitalism. Atrabiliarios is no more able to come up with a noncontradictory answer than Adorno is, but the work does at least attempt to address the situation on its own, real terms by profiting from the fact that art, too, is a medium. Metaphor as Skin In later writings, Adorno gives three slightly different reasons for his aversion, each entailing an implicit or explicit alternative. In one of his most famous formulations, from Negative Dialectics, his negative judgment receives a semiotic grounding. It concerns his fear that art may suggest some sense in which the horror did not and cannot make sense: “After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate” (1973b, 361; emphasis added). It is [64]

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultured question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the [65]

Metaphoring

worth noting that in terms of Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics, the word positivity already points to a near-total ban on representation, at least representation with a claim to “matching” its object. Stylized representation makes matters worse because it diminishes the suffering while rendering its representation enjoyable. Sense, as Adorno uses the word here, would emerge from stylizing representation. Stylizing, it appears, is an act of excision. I contend that what is excised, according to this view, is not so much content as affect. Stylizing, then, entails cutting off affect from meaning and making us believe and be content with the latter. In a later essay, devoted to what he calls “committed art,” and in which he again primarily discusses literature, the issue is not sense, as in “making sense,” an entry into acceptance or even redemption, but, plainly and disturbingly, pleasure: “The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed out from it” (2003b, 252). That same verb, squeezed, betokens the violent relationship between art and horror, whether sense or beauty metaphors the blood squeezed out of the victims. The danger here, to put it bluntly, is akin to the effect of pornography. Needless to say, any art that risks exposing its viewers to this effect would not even begin to qualify for the status of political art as I am trying to articulate the concept here. On the other hand, though, in both “After Auschwitz” and “Commitment,” Adorno qualified his indictment almost immediately. The result is the fifth meaning of political art that I wish to bracket. This meaning is related to expressionism, to making the voice of the victims audible so that they can speak out and be heard. This possibility made Adorno nuance his forbidding original formulation, albeit only to displace the burden from the poet to the survivor, and from the ethical domain to the psychological. This shift not only gave his essay the status of a politico-aesthetic guideline, but also showed his deep understanding of trauma. The following excerpt, from which the title of the recent Adorno volume was derived, contains a formulation that suggests an intimate bond between the two domains of ethics and psychology:

Chapter One

­ rastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued d by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ­ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier. (1973b, 362–63)

In view of the acutely adequate rendering of trauma in the painful state of the survivor described in the major part of this excerpt, the first part almost passes unnoticed in its particular aesthetic. To summarize the issue rather succinctly: art as “scream,” as expression, is both legitimate and, Adorno says, necessary. In light of my discussion of political art in this book, let me say that this expressionist aesthetic serves a political purpose (which may be utterly necessary), but not, by definition, an artistic one. The two can go together, but that again, to put it polemically, is a more or less fortuitous coincidence. Salcedo provides a radical alternative to the need for expression. Instead of expression in the scream, she ­compels her viewers to listen to the silence. This double shift—from scream to silence and from speaker to listener—attends, even more carefully than does Adorno, to the traumatic nature of the remnants of violence. This is particularly forceful in her work with concrete on furniture, where the sheer weight of the entombed and hence silenced furniture “crushes things into moments.”33 The reason is that the expressionist view leaves unanswered what art can do that documentation, journalism, and critical writing cannot—in other words, it leaves open the question of the agency of art as such. More important, it also remains caught up in a primary particularity that is confining and in tension with the need for art to mobilize translation—to meta­phor. This second reason is related to the first, so that it makes the question of “high” art in relation to other domains of culture a moot one, even though this question appears to be embedded in the first reason. Finally, the kind of art from which Atrabiliarios seems most at pains to distinguish itself as political art is the utterly particularizing, “sympathizing,” and sentimentalizing art that induces commiseration under the fashionable banner of compassion. Compassion without an identification that is both specific and heteropathic leads us to an emotional realm where the fear of violence can be made objectless and where it can be turned into a vague thrill of feel-good sentimentality about violence. A brief discussion of compassion and its risks is called for at this juncture. Marjorie Garber, for example, tersely phrases the problem of compassion by characterizing it as a hovering “between charity and condescension” (2004, 20). A fierce debate about the productivity of compassion occurred 33 

See Viso 1996, 94. The next chapter is devoted to these furniture sculptures. [66]

34  I rely here on a volume in which many different views and cases of compassion converge on the notion that there is something fishy or suspicious about a feeling that entails superiority of the subject feeling compassion (Berlant 2004). Nelson’s close reading of Arendt in this volume appears on pages 224–26. For a good number of elements from the discussion around Arendt, see Aschheim (2001).

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Metaphoring

earlier, when Hannah Arendt uncompromisingly refused to be compassionate in her report on the Eichmann trial (1994). Her critique of sentimentality can serve here to bind the need for singularity and the reality embodied in the trace to the problematic nature of compassion. In a lucid account of that debate, in which the author offers a wonderful and exemplary close reading of Arendt’s wording, Deborah Nelson writes, “The love of a people, like many abstractions for Arendt, is dangerously vague; the love of a person, like all concrete matters, is like a fact, specific and difficult to generalize into illusion. Heartlessness would therefore be a necessary component of Arendt’s most fundamental charge to her readers: face reality” (2004, 225).34 Nelson’s analysis implicitly demonstrates why the six conceptions of political art I have bracketed or discarded, not only the last one, are indeed potentially harmful to the political agency that political art seeks to facilitate. The appeal to sentimentalizing compassion, to an identification that leads to appropriation and vicarious suffering and, in the end, to distance rather than proximity to the victims of violence in fact encompasses the others. A small but firm measure of distance, then, is a necessary condition for the facing of reality that Arendt advocates. This is why the word heart in the preceding discussion of metaphoring singularity had to be surrounded by scare quotes. Salcedo proposes a solution to this predicament of the simultaneous need for distance and proximity; the involvement of the “heart” and the heartlessness that imposes modesty. Significantly, that necessary distance in Atrabiliarios is both imposed and embodied by the material that culturally signifies proximity in the closeness of the touch—namely, skin. ­Between our gaze and the trace of life wrenched out of the victims yet still visible in the shoes that remain, a layer of translucent skin distorts and discolors the hypervisible particularity. It is that layer and the stitches that bind it to the negative space of the niches that, through our own particular experience of violence witnessed or undergone, embody the severance as well as the connection between the particular and the general. Our own experience is decidedly different, but it can be mobilized without merciful sentiment. The sheet of skin allows that connection beyond the particular between the singular and the general, up to a point. Like the two sides of a sheet of paper—Saussure’s metaphor for the connection and severance between

Chapter One

signifier and signified—the sheet of skin is a metaphor of metaphor: translucent, impermeable, imprisoning the eye caught in distortion in a negative space where indifference is not possible. “People do not have skeletons in their cupboards” said the narrator of Haddon’s novel. But they do have skins that hurt and eyes that see. Atrabiliarios as Political Object In conclusion, I want to consider briefly the difference between interpreting art—as political or otherwise—and responding to its power as theoretical object in the political. Atrabiliarios lends itself to such a comparison because it is so richly interpretable; so bristling with meaning and thus enticing interpretation. As a theoretical object, however, it resists interpretation as the final word on it. Not that there is anything wrong with interpreting this work; on the contrary, the dense associative and intertextual nets it casts also cast the spell on the viewer that is needed for the political work to take effect. None of the current approaches to art seem quite ­adequate to capture this effect. In art history, three interpretive moves have been made, on contemporary art in general and on this work in particular. Art works are routinely placed in their time; they are compared to other (“comparable”) works, and they are interpreted for their own sake by the critic who provides them with possible interpretive frameworks. In the first chapter of his seminal book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson takes up the famous case of the painting by Van Gogh of a pair of peasant boots discussed by Heidegger, Schapiro, and Derrida. Through that discussion, Van Gogh’s painting has become a theoretical object in its own right, a bit like Velázquez’s Las Meninas. This would be the first of two meanings of the concept, the less vital one, where the more or less incidental fact that many critics have written about the theoretical implications of their appraisal of the work turned the latter into a theoretical object. In such cases, I prefer to speak of “theory icons.” In this instance, Van Gogh’s painting has been the occasion of a furthering of visual rhetoric; it has been taken to refer, synecdochically, to the whole world of agricultural misery, the poverty of the rural areas in the era of industrialization (1991, 7).35 Such an interpretation is quite common and belongs to reflection theories of representation. The leap from worn shoes to agricultural misery 35 

Among the figures of meaning or tropes, synecdoche presents a part for the whole from which it was taken. Another Latin term is pars pro toto. The figure is considered by some to be an autonomous figure, by others a variant of metonymy. For a useful, albeit somewhat technical discussion, see Ken-ichi 1999.

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36 

There are many relevant theories of objects, from Marx’s to Freud’s concept of fetishism (very adequately explained in Mitchell 1986), Winnicott’s “transitional object” (1989), Mauss’s animated objects of gift and exchange that retain something of their givers in their new lives (2000), and Baudrillard’s Marxian mixture of many of these ideas (1996). Lorraine Daston’s study on “object lessons” (2004) can be situated between the undertheorized thoughts on theoretical objects and the thing-oriented approach of Brown (2004).

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is, however, potentially stereotyping. Salcedo’s installation would resist such stereotyping, in the first place through the selection of mostly elegant, feminine shoes. Jameson proposes to see a utopian gesture or an act of compensation in the transformation of a drab object into glorious color. Such a desire for redemption would founder against Salcedo’s protective shield of animal skin, which protects the shoes-turned-sculpture from a greedy, appropriating gaze that would like to see glorious form, texture, and rhythm in the arrangement of these worn objects. Such a reading also confirms Menke’s (1999) distinction between “servile” and “sovereign” enactments of aesthetic negativity; it would fall on the “servile” side. Salcedo’s shoes, as I have pointed out above, are emphatically singular and made to appear so, even if that appearance is hampered by the animal skins. That singularity, however, does not remain abstract, a matter of principle only. Because they are visibly worn yet elegant and cared for, they stand out as “evocative objects” in the sense developed by Sherry Turkle. Objects “we think with,” as the subtitle of Turkle’s book has it, are more than simple, instrumental things. They are “active life presences” which “bring together thought and feeling” (2007, 9). In the relationship between object and person, an intimacy grows. The significance of Salcedo’s work with shoes lies precisely at the intersection between the artwork as theoretical object and the singular shoes as “evocative objects”—the inter­ action between “art” and “life” where both remain irreducibly singular and thereby succeed in bearing upon each other. This requires no compensation, redemption, or sublimation.36 Rendering Heidegger’s view of the painting, Jameson goes on to suggest the rift between the meaningless materiality of the world of the body and nature, to which only history and the social realm can give redeeming meaning. From there, Jameson moves, as I have mentioned above, to Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes in order to develop the possibility of political or critical art (writing before Ruby’s contemporary moment, he still equates the two) in the postmodern period of late capitalism (1991, 9). I have already pointed out how Salcedo’s work does not allow such a critique of capitalism to take the forefront. There is a good reason for this reluctance. As Wendy Brown has observed, “Postmodern capitalist power, like

Chapter One

­ ostmodern state power, is monopolized without being concentrated or p centered: it is tentacular, roving, and penetrating, paradoxically advanced by diffusing and decentralizing itself” (1995, 32). This makes engagement with it in the political—as interference (Ruby 2007), not critical engagement only—a daunting task, easier claimed than actually taken on. This is not to say that Salcedo’s work turns its back on capitalist exploitation; the violence she addresses is frequently at least indirectly informed by financial interests. She would be likely to underwrite Jameson’s diagnosis that, in the era of American military and economic domination throughout the world, “in this sense, as throughout class history, the under­side of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror” (1991, 5). Avoiding the reduction of a representational view of art (one that can only lead to critical statements), her work shifts from such a focus to the affective realm while resisting the gendered sentimentality of the Heideggerian “peasant woman.” The period interpretation also fails to account for the space-­specificity and generally moves away from the singularity that is so central to Salcedo’s work.37 The second approach is even more problematic in that respect. Van Gogh’s and Heidegger’s shoes also appear in Vera Mackie’s reading of Atrabiliarios. This author deploys the second move I just mentioned, the typical art-historical method of comparison. Seeking to grasp the melancholic nature of the work, she reads the stitches that attach the skins to the wall as evoking the barbed wire of incarceration. Here lurks the trap of a representationalist conception of art. After a persuasive account of the melancholic mood of the work, her associative impulse widens to all possible cultural investments in shoes. The step from mood to thematics is small, but the consequences are daunting. From fairy tales (“Cinderella,” “The Red Shoes”) to shoes in cinema and foot binding in traditional China, there seems to be no limit to the possible resonances. Warhol’s “ghostly traces of commodity culture and advertising” establish the link to Jameson’s analysis (2008, 8). The typical phrase “one might also be reminded of” connects the piece to the piles of shoes in the museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, of which the individual shoes are then a close-up (10). While comparison can potentially bring out specificity in the differences between the two compared items, it will not have escaped the reader that the basis of comparison here is somewhat simplistically thematic. Only because of the iconographic topic—shoes—do all these intertextual references appear to be 37  Jameson explicitly seeks to make a “periodizing hypothesis” and is aware of the resistance against that reductionism (1991, 3–4).

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38  Such reductionism can become quite ludicrous in the hands of less astute critics. Thus, after a lecture on Salcedo, I was asked whether the iconography of the gaucho was not relevant, given that she was from Latin America. Never mind that the questioner had the countries mixed up. Equally misplaced seemed a question about the rhythm of samba in certain works. Such responses make me want to run the other way when requirements of context are brought up.

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fitting. After Jameson’s periodization, art history’s iconography seems reductive as well.38 In contrast, an interpretation that remains focused on the singular ­object—here, Atrabiliarios—does not depend on such iconographic reduction. As I mentioned above, I am particularly impressed by Nancy Princenthal’s exhaustive analysis of the installation. This author deploys her keen and detailed eyes to propose different possible frameworks within which the installation makes sense. It evokes a relic or fetish because of the relation between the part (the absent foot) and the whole (the disappeared body). The niches suggest they contain mementos of the deceased. In their resemblance to cemetery memorials, such niches also remind us of the burial that is denied to the disappeared (2000, 49). As the critic mentions, these are not interpretations the artist would favor. For my point in this chapter it is more important, however, that even such “wrong” interpretations can do their political work simply by holding the viewer to her agency, as I argue in the next chapter. Other interpretations are likely to be more clearly in line with the artist’s own view. The yellowed animal skins also suggest that violence produces unhealable emotional abscesses for survivors. These skins also turn the shoes into images rather than objects. And qua images they are photographic, hence, in Barthes’s terms (1981) and especially in Baer’s terms, spectral (2002, 50). Through the association with photographs, the shoes become a tableau vivant of sorts; a still life (nature morte) or a death mask. This, in turn, allows for a possibility of healing—I have argued that this is possible because of the careful preservation of singularity that opposes generalizing violence. This care leads to a further tension between what Princenthal calls “individuality and anonymity, the insular and the social.” Thus, the work intimates “both the always exceptional nature of violence, experienced by one body at a time in catastrophic isolation, and also its (equally horrific) universality” (2000, 54). Princenthal follows with a discussion of the temporal distance as an effect, which in turn evokes the perceptual “dimness associated with remembering trauma.” The blur stands for the difficulty of traumatic recall. In this sense, the critic says, the difficulty of seeing it is a form not “of expressive

Chapter One

discretion but rather of brutal candour” (2000, 55). Here glimmers a first distinction between interpretation and heeding the work as a theoretical object that triggers thought about political art. Politically speaking, the two effects—discretion and candor—are not mutually exclusive but importantly intertwined. The need for discretion does not, after all, disappear in the face of the brutal candor that rubs our faces into the trauma—a ­singular trauma, the particulars of which we cannot access. Princenthal ends her multifold interpretation with a note on the work performed by the “seam where image meets physical, quotidian context” (2000, 57). This seam—embodied both by the realness of the shoes and the stitches that sew the skins to the wall—is the joint, both impossible and indispensable, between the past experience of the singular other and the present time and space of the viewer. These interpretations are all connected, and the unfolding of their meaning is riveting. I am convinced of their validity, and any art historian contending with this powerful work will gain from reading the essay.39 What makes Atrabiliarios a political object is not that validity in and of itself, however. The work works politically—both as a contribution to the political and as an interference that disturbs the complacency of art enjoyment (Adorno’s caution against pleasure)—in its appeal to a rigorous need to interpret that goes hand in hand with the difficulty of doing so. This means that the viewer, who is both at a loss to make sense of mere shoes and unable to take a quick glance at the work, is compelled to come up with any sense whatever, to use a Deleuzian phrase. The work posits the need, that is, to not refrain from interpretation, yet never be satisfied with any particular interpretation. In Menke’s account (1999), the work enables, indeed enforces, a crisis in interpretive reason. This need and the concomitant crisis entail several consequences that turn the work from an interpretable artwork into a political theoretical object. First and foremost, it makes the viewer spend time with, instead of just glancing at, the work. As I have argued, along with Princenthal and others, this compulsion to spend time is built into the work. Without time, one cannot see it. This is a first step in the imposition of agency on the viewer. It compels an enactment of aesthetic negativity as sovereign. ­Second, the need to interpret combined with the insufficiency of any particular inter­ pretation compels viewers to occupy several positions at once. This is, again, a political posture as well as an aesthetic one. Identifying with a victim is barely possible, yet highly desirable. Identifying with the abandoned 39  In addition to these interpretations, Princenthal also comments on the boxes made out of animal skin that are part of the installation in some of its venues.

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s­ urvivor is almost inevitable once one notices the worn quality of the shoes, yet it is also a move whose immodesty is intimated at the same time. It is even difficult to refrain from transgressing, which brings the viewer close to the perpetrators of the violence. Viewers are compelled to dirty their hands and make themselves guilty, at the very least of indiscretion, voyeurism, and ignorance. Third, the work is a political object because, like all theoretical objects, it empowers the viewer. This empowerment is the other side of the coin of the compulsion it imposes. As Damisch said about any theoretical object, it “obliges you to do theory but also furnishes you with the means of doing it” (Bois et al. 1998, 8). At this point, it seems safe to claim that theoretical objects are by definition political in this aspect of empowering the agency of the viewer that they also require. Conversely, the focus on this agency in relation to the horrific consequences of violence makes an additional step, a more forceful step, into the political. This relationality, this making-social of what isolates victims and survivors, is the precise, singular political contribution this piece makes. In this respect it demonstrates the concept of political art. Fourth, the specific kind of agency that is bestowed on the viewer involves, beyond relationality in general, a competence to move from singularity to universality to another singularity. This is the great value of the meticulously close analysis of each shoe, each niche, that Princenthal performs (2000, 54–55). This analysis of singularity within the series matches exactly the sentence from Levinas with which Salcedo closes her interview with Charles Merewether: “We are all responsible for everyone else—but I am more responsible than all the others” (2000, 145). With the insights thus gained, we can confidently enter another realm of Salcedo’s work, with which I did not want to start because of its problematic history and its pervasive and obscuring presence in art: that of representation. Having learned from Haddon’s narrator not to yield to the pressure of metaphor as a move away from the literal, however, we will strictly subject our encounter with representation to a non- or other-referential literality.

2

Every image of the past that is not recogni­zed by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. 

W a l t e r B e n j a m i n (“Theses on the Philosophy of History”)

F i g u r e 2.1 (previous spread, verso) Untitled Furniture ­(Armoire), 1995. Wood, concrete, cloth, glass, and steel, 162 × 99.5 × 37 cm. Private collection, San Francisco, CA. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

F igu r e 2.2 Untitled Furniture ­(Armoire), detail, 1995. Wood, concrete, cloth, glass, and steel, 162 × 99.5 × 37 cm. Private collection, San Francisco, CA. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

In a study of non-representational art, I would not bring up the topic of representation at all without addressing the issue of relevance—but one has to make explicit why representation matters all the same. Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history are an excellent place to start. Who would disagree with Benjamin’s powerful and frequently quoted fifth thesis: an image of the past only matters for the present when it is seen “as one of its own concerns”? If it is not identified as such, the image will disappear. Since extinction is forever, according to the well-known ecological slogan, we could phrase the question that should be raised as follows: How can art prevent the extinction of the past so that the present can make it matter for itself? First of all, through images of it; images that represent the past; that come to us from the past; and that make the past matter for the present. Those are the three meanings of the preposition “of” that resonate in Benjamin’s sentence. The operative verb in his urgent warning is “to recognize.” The images of the past must be recognized—and recognized in their relevance for the present—so that we can effectively bring them to bear on the present. The penalty for failing to do so is the irretrievable loss not simply of the past but of its images—hence, also of the three forms of relevance that the preposition “of” suggests they have. The two meanings of recognition, one cognitive—to know again—and one social—to give ­acknowledgment to, to recognize something “as”—are bound up together. In both senses, recognition pertains to the dialectic of similarity, or repetition, and of difference, or innovation, that constitutes representation. The cognitive sense insists on similarity in the new act and, hence, on similarity and innovation as two distinct moments in time, whereas the social sense intimates similarity between both self and other as equipped to take the [77]

F i g u r e 2.3 Untitled Furniture (High Chair), 1995. ­Concrete, wood, steel, and leather, 96 × 44 × 49 cm. Courtesy of Alex­ander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube,

Chapter Two

London.

roles of first and second person in turns. Time and intersubjectivity are thus at issue in the concept of recognition, as they are, too, in Benjamin’s statement. I hope it is clear by now that I deploy the statements by well-known philosophers such as Benjamin and Wittgenstein not so much as philosophical sources but rather as “theoretical objects” in their turn—hence their presence as epigraphs hovering over the chapters. These statements are put on a par with Salcedo’s works, empowered to respond to them as the artistic works propel us into thought. Hence, in light of Benjamin’s view of the need to make images matter for the present, the question arises what we as viewers should do with works such as the 1995 sculpture Untitled Furniture (Armoire), which consists of unspectacular pieces of used furniture. These are not representations, since they “look like” what they “really are”: pieces of used furniture. If “images of” are representations, then these works are not images, because they do not represent the furniture. They are not images of the past; they are things, objects that come from the past. They activate the second meaning of the preposition “of.” They do not look like human forms at all, unless we consider the human form to be the measure of

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The Politics of Anthropomorphism

all things, which would seem to reflect a tunnel vision and an absence of interest in what we are looking at. These sculptures literally stay close to home, touching the fabric of everyday life and intimacy, but the hubris of a humanism that only sees what it already knows—recognizing without opening itself up to new experiences—is firmly held at bay. Salcedo made a whole range of such works, all called Untitled. Perhaps second only to Atrabiliarios, they are among the works that made the artist internationally famous. The bulk of the series dates from 1989 to 2001. They consist of tables, chairs, armoires, chests, all ordinary, all modified, often cut into halves, and with their surfaces, already damaged by the wear and tear of the ordinary lives in which they used to function, further scraped, hit, and cut. Modified, they are literally images of the past: they look like the furniture they were, but no longer are. And yet these tables, chairs, beds, and armoires, non-representational as they are, have an undeniable reality status; they cannot be called representations of past furniture. It is as if the theoretical-political object competes with the evocative object, combats it, and wants to do violence to it—or rather, evoke the violence that was done but that cannot be seen directly in the object. Most characteristically, they are affected by that gray, dead material of concrete: buried, silenced, painted, or just dusted with concrete. The qualifier used, in the phrase used furniture, brings in, if only marginally, the idea of “images of the past”: they are both reminiscent of and coming from a past that, according to Benjamin, should matter to us in the present. In this case, however, a past we cannot know is made to matter in ways we cannot master. The use value of the used furniture has been violated, damaged, and ultimately eliminated. The notion of used furniture does more than locate the furniture in the past, though; it brings in the element of singularized human existence in the past. It is that singular existence that must be made to matter for the present as “one of its own concerns.” Each and every piece of used furniture featured in these works was an “evocative object” before it was turned into an artwork of theoretical import and, hence, into a theoretical object. The past participle used hints at a narrative, with subjects (characters) doing the using in a time now gone. People—who? what kind of people? of what age, gender, and physical appearance?—have been sitting in those chairs, perhaps reading, knitting, chatting, or thinking; mending or cooking; doing things we can “recognize as part of our own concerns.” The tables have held steaming dishes; how did they smell, how did they taste, and who sat there eating the food at the end of a working day? In the armoires, clothes were kept—summer and winter clothes, work, school, and Sunday clothes; of adults, of children.

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Spatially, too, the very things these sculptures consist of contribute to a sense of narrative. Each piece is a synecdoche of the everydayness of a life. These pieces of furniture belong in homes and are now in galleries; hence, they have been displaced. What has happened between their routine use and their transformation into artworks, their displacement into the gallery? The idea of violence creeps in here, in that combination of pastness and displacement: the mere fact that these pieces of used furniture are now displayed in a museum indicates that the private realm of the home has somehow been violated. The displayed and displaced piece of furniture insists that an act of violation has taken place, and someone—a character— has been affected by it; crucially, this character is not here, now. Something has happened, in the past. This is how narratives start to flow. Characters figure in unfolding narratives, whether we imagine them concretely and bodily or only as agents who act and to whom actions happen. Yet in Untitled Furniture (Armoire) there is no one—no figure, no character—to be seen. Thus, while pushing narrativity to the fore, these sculptures refuse the kind of fictionalizing representation that makes characters or figures stand in for particular people. Narrativity therefore flows, evolves, without facilitating the emergence of stories that congeal. This aimless, objectless narrativity partakes of the cultural pervasiveness of narrativity that underlies my own ongoing interest in that semiotic mode. In the context of this study, I propose that the domain I call “the political” here is primarily structured by way of narrative.1 In the Untitled Furniture series, however, narrativity is held in check. Singularity is one thing; particularity another, and in its goal of accounting for singularity, narrative lives off the particular. There is a fine line, one that Salcedo is committed to exploring time and again, between creating narrativity, making it flow, and refusing to flesh it out with particularity. This fine line is a form—literally and concretely, the form of the ­artwork—of recognition. Such recognition is cognitive as well as social, and concerns the inevitable collusion of all participants in the political with what happens there. This includes collusion with what one abhors, such as violence. Even though they are usually meant to indict violence, all stories of violence must inevitably reiterate it because of the focus on the particular that excludes the addressees from the narrated atrocities. Recognizing such 1 

Narrative was my first object of study when I started out as an academic, and it remains the only way I can imagine to sum up “what I do.” Perhaps not coincidentally, a revised edition of my early book Narratology has been published a few months before the present book.

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2 

I am alluding to a concept I developed in an earlier publication, “The Politics of Citation” (1991). 3  Belgian sculptor Ann Veronica Janssens is a good example of an artist known as “abstract” who refuses to see abstraction as a flight into transcendence. Her art is rigorously abstract as well as political. I plan to develop this connection between abstraction and political art in a later study.

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complicity is key to a new understanding of political art after Adorno’s indictment of such collusion.2 In the previous chapter, the tension brought forward by the artwork was the impossibility and simultaneous necessity of a relationship to referentiality. This motivated the centrality of metaphor beyond its traditional clinging to referentiality. Here, something of the same order can be said of representation. While referentiality concerns the relationship between art and reality, representation, which is also invested in that relationship, shifts the issue to the temporal tension between past and present that haunts the history of art. Art, and political art in particular, has for a long time devoted itself to representation. While “recognizing” its subjects in both senses of that verb, however, representation is necessarily also reductive—or, as Adorno would say, bent on stylizing. But Adorno had more to say about representation than what his overquoted “art after Auschwitz” outcry contained. As Huyssen explains in a brilliant essay on Art Spiegelman’s contested two-part comic book Maus (1996), Adorno’s reflections on mimesis complicate any taboo on representation—indeed, his reflections stipulate that mimesis is necessary (2003, 122–37). As a general solution, the move to abstraction as an avoidance of representation is not satisfactory. My starting point in this chapter is that contemporary political art is groping for strategies that avoid the drawbacks of reductive representation, facile emotion, and instant recognition of critical issues—three meanings of political art I have bracketed in the previous chapter. At the same time, it is also continually seeking ways in which it can act as art: How is it possible for the work to perform something for someone? Representation in that interactive sense is an indispensable tool for art to act qua art. For all these reasons, a relationship with representation—no matter how tenuous or negative—is indispensable for art to be able to act.3 Obviously, Salcedo is not the first artist to question representation. The twentieth century has perhaps produced more anti-representational than representational art with staying power. I am interested here in Salcedo’s response to the dilemma that representation posed and that abstraction could only answer provisionally. This dilemma is not confined to art alone.

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To put it succinctly: The question of representation concerns the relation between art as a mode of making meaningful things on the one hand and representation as a mode of meaningfully rendering things on the other. Along with the work of many other artists, Salcedo’s non-representational art is steeped in reflections on representation. Representation has two sides to it: the question of adequacy, enabling recognition in the cognitive sense, and that of position, compelling recognition in the social sense. I discuss both extensively below. As Villaveces-Izquierdo formulates it in a commentary on Salcedo’s work, this duality yields two opposed problems: “On one hand, the recognition of the limits of re-presenting and, with it, the exploration of the shadowy terrain of the intractable, the unspeakable, and the immemorial. On the other hand, the challenges that are imposed by free-floating simultaneously in the constantly less bounded spheres of “the local” and “the global” and with it, the need to permanently address the complexities that are imposed on the circulation of experiences, cultures, and interpretations” (1997, 237). Both adequacy and position are at stake in Salcedo’s work in an almost hyperbolical manner, which points to the power of the work as a theoretical object. The artist seeks not merely to be adequate to the object of representation; she also seeks to do justice and remediate that which cannot be represented. Moreover, as I have argued in the previous chapter, she is invested in speaking artistically to political situations elsewhere, constantly “translating” without ever losing sight of the singularity of what she addresses. But if we consider the field Salcedo’s art addresses and in which it is steeped—political violence—we must above all recognize the impossibility of representation for the primary Adornian reason of “stylizing away.” Salcedo’s work addresses violence as a state of the world, as a political problem, and, most importantly, as something inflicted on people, for whom she seeks recognition. As such, violence is something we need to contend with in a relationship that cannot be distanced by the reductions of representation. Her art thus seeks to contribute to how we can think violence and act upon the resulting thought. For this, representation is no longer the primary tool, as it was in earlier times. Artworks like Francisco de Goya’s devastating series of engravings, Los Desastres de la Guerra, from the second decade of the nineteenth century, although still gripping, would not be able to muster political agency so easily today. Representation has sunken under the weight of its own success, that is, the near-monopoly it has gained in the domain of visual culture. Nor can Goya’s commendable universalism, on which his work insisted in a time of particularizing partisanship, be a model for the present. For in

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The Anthropomorphic Imagination To account for the subtle distinction as well as the affiliation between the two invocations of horror, I need to introduce a new concept at this juncture. I contend that Salcedo deploys what I will call here the anthro­ pomorphic imagination as an acknowledgment of as well as an alternative 4  Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) produced the eighty aquatint prints between 1810 and 1820; they were published in 1863, thirty-five years after Goya’s death. On artists who do take Goya as their source of inspiration, see Grenier 2008, 43–61. For an excellent edition of Los Desastres de la Guerra, see Blas Benito, Matilla, and Aguilar 2000.

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the present, representation is dominated by media coverage in such a way that it elides the line between particularity and universality. Villaveces-Izquierdo continues by putting the dilemma of representation tersely: “On one hand, Salcedo’s art challenges the representational tactics used by mass media by arguing that realist depictions of violence turn violence itself into a mere spectacle in which the depth of the human tragedy is erased. On the other hand, her art serves also the purpose of providing an indirect critique to the ways in which violence is addressed by academics as well as legal discourses by highlighting the lack of awareness that these discourses have toward suffering” (1997, 237). In its time, Goya’s solution to this dilemma was clear and to the point: generalization was necessary to take particularizing blinders away and show the horror, the utter stupidity, and the devastation of violence. Although Goya was one of several artists to respond to the gruesome Napoleonic wars, his etchings focus on the horrors of war in general. They are not a nationalistic protest but a humane one. This was crucial for the striking force of the series at a time of opportunistic, nationalistic protest. As such a rallying cry, it is still effective today. But as we have seen, when it comes to addressing violence and the suffering it causes, singularity is of the essence, lest we bypass what suffering is and does. Universalizing the issue would distract us from that singularity and, hence, from suffering as such. Goya did not simply represent the horrors of war, however. Astonishingly, he did so with humor; in other words, he infused mood into the representation. His figures of violence become fanciful monsters. Caricature adds judgment to depiction. He also added texts to the images, often virulently sarcastic. As the last of the old masters as well as the first modern artist in Western Europe, Goya, partly by antinomy, partly by affiliation, helps the contemporary artist position herself more specifically in relation to the tradition of modern art on the one hand and to her own time on the other.4

F igu r e 2.4 La Casa Viuda IV, 1994. Wood, fabric, and bones, 257.5 × 46.5 × 33 cm. Courtesy of Alex­ander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

F i g u r e 2.5 La Casa Viuda IV ­(detail), 1994. Wood, fabric, and bones, 257.5 × 46.5 × 33 cm. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

to ­rep­resentation. The problematic nature of the use of representation as a tool for political art emerges from two series of works: the Untitled ­Furniture series and the La Casa Viuda series. All the works in these series consist of pieces of used furniture. The crucial differences between the two series do not affect the way both insert references to representation. As we have seen, the tables, chairs, beds, and armoires of the Untitled Furniture are worked over by, filled with, and occasionally entombed in concrete. This material is less prominent in the La Casa Viuda series. Moreover, while furniture is used in the latter series as well, a key element in each piece of this series is a door—a door that blocks access and sight; a door that intimates the possibility that it could have been or could be otherwise, that there was or is an opening, a point of access. Although the doors are found objects, their height often appears exaggerated. And many of these works have bones inserted into the wood.5 The works of the La Casa Viuda series contain unexpected, subtle allusions to the human figure. La Casa Viuda IV, for example, consists of a tattered, narrow door with broken glass panels. Two wooden headboards 5  For this series, too, the most extensive description and interpretation is offered by Princenthal (2000, 57–70).

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­ rotrude on either side of the door. These “look like”—can be recognized p as—clumsy arms without hands, extended into feet. The door becomes anthro­pomorphic; but as this transformation takes place, it is simultaneously disabled. One missing pane of glass is replaced by a stiffened curtain, equally tattered, intimating a more rigorous blockage of sight. On eye level, a slender bone is inserted. Both series of sculptures refer so subtly to the human figure that they refrain from representing, which is why I discuss them together here. I contend that they deploy the human figure allusively. They cloud the human figure in concealment, as silent nuclei—and these terms, which I borrow from an essay on the Latin American Baroque in literature, are, in Salcedo’s case, to be taken in two ways. They refer both to the strategies deployed in the art and to the violence of concealment and silencing that art addresses (Sarduy 1986–87). In the quotation from Benjamin, the key word “recognized” does not clarify the ambiguous preposition “of” in “image of the past.” Does “of” indicate provenance or subject matter? In other words, is Benjamin talking about images that come from the past or images that represent the past? I contend that the irresolvable ambiguity defines Salcedo’s relationship to representation. It is through this ambiguity that the sculptures can do their political work. Although these works are entirely visual (they use no words other than their titles, and the only sound they emit is that of emphatic silence), the art’s very visuality—its forms, colors, and matter— also ­carries out conceptual work, all the while making its viewers do the same. We have already seen an instance of this conceptual work in the way Atrabiliarios functioned as a theoretical object in the domain of the political. The same status is earned by a number of other works by Salcedo from these two series. But the work is not didactic. Her art offers its viewers tools for moving beyond fixed concepts into the uncertain realm of mobile concepts, and challenges its viewers to endorse that mobility. I therefore take these sculptures as, again, philosophically relevant. More specifically, I would like to group these works under the rubric of “practical philosophy” rather than that of “visual philosophy” because they reflect on how we can deal with the suffering of singular people caused by political violence. That “dealing with”—occurring only after the suspension of compassion—posits the intersection between the singular and the general, the once-only and the enduring as the site of the political. It also harbors the ambiguity of the preposition of. According to the performative conception of art, the art participates in the political—it does not simply represent it; rather than merely critiquing, it intervenes. For such interference to be possible, art needs to possess as

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6  The ambiguity of full and empty characterizes the work of an entire generation of Latin American artists influenced by Brazilian Lygia Clark. Of many commentaries on Clark’s work, see in particular Rolnik (1999), who uses the empty/full dialectic in the essay’s title. There are also relevant comments in Clark and Bois 1994; Brett 1994; and Osthoff 1997. Clark’s prominent presence in the exhibition entitled documenta X has made her even more known in Europe than she already was. The articles tend to focus more on the body than any comparison of Salcedo with Clark would warrant. The topic where the two artists might meet is that of healing, although in Salcedo’s case, there is much less of a ­utopian mood than in Clark’s.

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well as bestow agency. I look first at the place representation has in such a search for art’s political agency. I do this in order to articulate possibilities for making cultural interventions such as art practices concretely relevant without the need to resort to representation and its drawbacks of repetition, reduction, and distancing—“stylizing.” I understand relevant in the sense of being incisive for the domain in which differences of opinion are recognized and treated as antagonisms; and antagonism as the alternative to enmity. In ways similar to those we have seen in the case of Atrabiliarios, Salcedo does not simply refuse, disavow, or reject those artistic and intellectual strategies she seeks to question. Likewise, representation retains a place—however problematical, minimal, and subverted it may be. Specifically, I look at the way Salcedo deploys the significant strategy of the anthro­pomorphic imagination instead of representation. The works from Untitled Furniture and from La Casa Viuda consist of ­utterly concrete, recognizable forms, such as household furniture. Like the shoes of Atrabiliarios, these works are what they look like; they are actual pieces of furniture and do not represent them. They are, again, traces, albeit less individual ones. But the presence of domestic furniture in public spaces once more generates a tension, even a conflicted sense of displacement. Yet, instead of creating negative space as did the niches and the empty shoes in Atrabiliarios, these pieces create full spaces. They are filled up, mostly with concrete. But here, full equals empty; where concrete overtakes space, there must be a void first.6 There is again a metaphoring taking place that brings burial and death to the fore, this time not by recession into the wall but, on the contrary, by filling the furniture up, suffocating and silencing it. There is therefore a huge difference between the small objects buried inside the wall of Atrabiliarios and the larger, tangible objects placed in the gallery like any other piece of sculpture. I engage the way Salcedo’s sculptures intimate—without resorting to outright representation—human presences, again indexically pointing them out through their absence. Thus, instead of ­representing

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e­ ither the people she seeks to put in the foreground, their suffering, or the violence done to them, she discreetly but no less insistently appeals to, and politically mobilizes, what I call the anthropomorphic imagination. Let me state briefly what I mean by this term. The idea that the arts and sciences have often taken the human body as the measure of all things underlies the cultural tradition of humanism that, in turn, is the ground of the humanities as an academic field of inquiry. Specifically, the human figure constitutes the primary, although by no means exclusive, subject matter of figurative art. In literature, especially in narrative, the human figure likewise has pride of place and takes on the propulsion of narrative thrust. As agent or patient, the figure initiates or undergoes the action that is the motor of the plot. Here this figure is named character. Both figure and character can be seen as figurations: they are figurative in that they embody ideas shaped in forms, and they become figures of anthropomorphic appearance because they exist, act, and appear. It is this convergence of figure and character in the guise of figurations that I explore in relation to Benjamin’s injunction in this chapter. I introduce this concept at length in view of the theoretical implications that the anthropomorphic imagination carries. Many near-dogmatic principles in the humanities are anchored in this imagination. Think, for example, of the anthropomorphisms used to convey a certain sense authenticity, such as “the hand of the artist,” or the connoisseur’s “eye.” In literary theory, the concept of “voice” is a prime example, presupposing an unwarranted one-text /one-speaker structure. Psychological and psychoanalytic criticism employ anthropomorphism as well and use it to project artistic subjectivity onto works of art. The literary concept of character, like it or not, is premised on a psychological profile of such textual figures. Behind my use of the concept of the anthropomorphic imagination is the idea that artistic and theoretical premises cannot be disentangled. But neither can the critique of this topos lead to its dismissal; it is too firmly anchored in our thinking for that. Beyond sheer representation, both figure and character communicate between artwork and literary text, on the one hand, and, on the other, between the cultural agents who engage these in the present by looking and reading. They accomplish this through the transformative work of the imagination. Such figurations cannot by definition be dismissed as either politically or artistically fraught with the problems of classical humanism, such as idealization, generalization, and sentimentality. I argue that the issue of the anthropomorphic imagination needs to be taken extremely seriously, as both problematic and indispensable, and the sculptures central to this chapter will explain why. To anticipate my conclusion in this chapter: [88]

7  This is where my work intersects with Mary Jacobus’s on the nuances and cultural occurrences of affect, and with Dominick LaCapra’s on trauma and affect in history (Jacobus 2003; LaCapra 2001 and 2004). I am particularly indebted to Jill Bennett (2005) and Ernst van Alphen (2008), two scholars with whose work I am in permanent dialogue. 8  I have discussed the triple importance of this first–second person exchange—in linguistic, social, and psychological interaction—at length in my book Double Exposures (1996, 165–94).

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Since they exist as living proof that mind and body cannot be separated, Salcedo’s sculptures are invested affectively.7 Salcedo employs the anthropomorphic imagination in ways that make her works, and the evocative objects that are her primary material, theoretical objects, offering embodied reflections on this issue. They do this through binding the anthropomorphic imagination to the double sense of recognition and the way these two possible meanings affect representation. In this way, the sculptures flesh out, indeed, embody and thereby prove the feasibility and conditions of Benjamin’s “demands of history” (Steinberg 1996) as formulated in the epigraph to this chapter. Shifting from the cognitive to the social sense of the word, Salcedo gives a measure of movement to those mute, immobile works. Of course, Salcedo’s work is sculptural. As such, it is “still” art, involving neither sound nor movement. Given its insistence on death, this stillness is fitting. Yet, as I have already suggested, it moves us. I mean this quite literally, in both the physical and the emotional sense. What this moving quality means for the political effectivity of art and how the anthropomorphic imagination is one of its tools is nowhere more conspicuous than in the sculptures from the La Casa Viuda and ­Untitled Furniture series. The deployment of the anthropomorphic imagination is a way of simultaneously keeping present and keeping at bay the cognitive, repetitive ­aspect of recognition, and thus privileging the social aspect of ­“recognition-as,” turning the viewers into second persons called upon to take turns in firstpersonhood. The two strategies of stretching time and shimmering representation come together in the notion that being human implicates the body’s form in time. In the next chapter, I analyze time in this respect. ­Using these two strategies, Salcedo visually reflects on how the political must account for dialogue between the particular and the universal in favor of the singular, so that what affects only a few now affects all of us, and political indifference can no longer be an option.8 In dialogue with the work of scholars such as Jill Bennett, Ernst van Alphen, Mark Reinhardt, and others keen to understand how human figuration functions in the arena of political art, I seek to understand some of the nuances of the work of and with affect. These fine gradations of affect

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emerge from artistic practices that deploy the anthropomorphic imagination without falling into the traps of the traditional, figurative, aesthetically stylized representation that Adorno’s paradoxical indictment called barbaric. It is impossible to reflect on these theoretical issues without learning from the actual practices. Rather than holding these practices up to our criteria and insights—as if they were passive objects of inquiry—I call on Salcedo’s furniture sculptures to develop this reflection. Two strategies materialize and perhaps merge in the furniture works. There are some works in which it seems as if the violence has been committed against the furniture, so to speak—as if some form of repetition was inevitable, and as if the collusion with perpetrators is the only way to productively encounter the victims. This is a harsh diagnosis, but certainly a necessary one. It recalls Adorno’s use of the verb squeezing to diagnose art that repeated the violence it indicted. With regard to the series La Casa Viuda, I take the opposite perspective and argue that it is possible to approach violence that is insinuated from the perspective of the victim, on the condition that the work stays aloof to representation without pushing it out of sight. This results in interpretive problems that play out what the political is: a transformation from enmity into antagonism, and a shift from fighting to a more manageable form of dispute.9 Locating Violence A single work from 1989–90 does not belong to either series but deserves a place in this discussion. It consists of stacks of white shirts, neatly folded, starched with plaster. These are impaled on metal spikes in stacks of different heights. The spikes are always much taller than the stack would seem to require, as if to foreground the inescapability of the “totalitarian bureaucrat’s dream of death” (Princenthal 2000, 45). There may be a history, a story behind this piece; a specific incidence of mass murder. We do not need to know that story to realize the allusion to violence. But just as strongly, the neatly folded, pristine white shirts also evoke the loving hands of the person who washed and folded them. And they invoke the multitude of victims. In life, each shirt was alone, since terror keeps society atomized. But the loving care is only intimated metonymically. The violence, in contrast, is represented. It is figured in the spikes that have pierced the shirts. But while representing the violence to a certain extent, the piece also holds its representation at bay. The spikes do not pierce the shirts at a place where a 9  The relationship with representation is also at work through differences in genres. Genres in art are forms that appeal to recognition and in so doing can help circumvent representation. See chapters 4 and 5.

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F i g u r e 2.6 Untitled, 1989–90. Cotton shirts, plaster, and steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

vital organ would have been. They are shifted outside of the danger zone, a shift that moves representation outside of its danger zone. Both narrativity and figuration are implicated and resisted at the same time. Representation of the human figure and narrative frequently go hand in hand. Above I suggested that narrativity is put to work in Salcedo’s art, but that narrative is stopped in its tracks. The subtle play with—allusions to, then frustration of—the anthropomorphic imagination is Salcedo’s working method in this respect. In this, she also obliquely addresses cultural habits in dealing with art. [91]

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Perhaps it is that frustrating narrativity without an object that makes critics fall back on the primary anthropomorphism of criticism that is authorial intention and restore the authority that allows that alleged intention to dictate meaning. Salcedo fiercely resists this tendency. She claims anonymity, even if it is an active anonymity (Basualdo 2000, 35). The frustration of narrative is also compensated by a heavy-handed appeal to that other staple of the humanities: context. Criticism on Salcedo, like most art criticism, is at pains to deploy the artist’s statements to uncover her intentions. The master-narrative that Salcedo’s work appears to solicit is expressed in one set phrase that much criticism on her work cannot help but reiterate: that she represents, evokes, addresses, or otherwise engages with, the “political violence in her native Colombia.” The four elements of this phrase need closer scrutiny. Violence, yes; it is inevitably visible in these dead, buried traces of human presence. But does she represent it? In other words, what is visibility here? Political, without a doubt; even regardless of the notion that all violence is to some extent political. But here, the question is whether the violence belongs to politics or to the political—to the institutions that disempower us or to the social domain in which we are complicit but in which we can also acquire agency to interfere. For now I leave that question open. Because “political violence” is at issue in this work, I have selected it to probe the notion of political art. I do not seek to diminish the importance of this starting point for Salcedo’s work. But in its near-formulaic iteration, the two other elements of the phrase (and, hence, the phrase as a whole qualified by these elements) risk exoticizing Salcedo’s work—relegating it, as well as the violence it works against, to the Latin American continent or, worse, to the “Third World.” This is emphatically not to dismiss the relevance of Colombian violence for Salcedo’s work, nor to underestimate the context of it, including the fellow-artists struggling with this issue and her influence on them. On the contrary: as recently as in 2009, an exhibition in Medellín devoted to “beheaded memory” (La Memoria Decapitada) demonstrated once again the actuality of Salcedo’s chosen focus. While the exhibition is primarily devoted to art addressing the specific situation in Medellín, the author of the catalogue fully acknowledges the key importance of Salcedo’s work in this regard (Piedrahíta 2009). To give only one example of the “local” relevance of Salcedo’s work, Piedrahíta focuses on Salcedo’s use of the body as a locus of the materiality of violence in resistance not only against the actuality of the violence but also against the age-old disparagement and repression of the body in (Catholic) Latin American culture (42). One might even maintain that art in Colombia would not be what it is without the urgency artists feel to connect to their surroundings, where violence is the order of [92]

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the day. In that sense, acknowledging the way Salcedo obeys the ethical imperative of her habitat is necessary. This ambivalence entails a predicament, perhaps an aporia. On the one hand, as Huyssen has forcefully argued, “Salcedo leaves no doubt as to the identity of this unland [the title of a work discussed in the next chapter]. . . . It is her homeland, Colombia” (2000, 92). What is at stake, however, is not her authorial identity, but her singularity as an artist. To address violence in one’s own habitat is also a necessary condition of acknowledging collusion, on which more below. On the other hand, as a focalization by ­others —viewers and critics—the specificity of the Colombian situation is no excuse for indifference elsewhere, because, I quote the artist again, “the ­Colombian situation is a capsule of condensed experience that is valuable to the rest of the world. Our horror is, in a way, a paradigmatic one” ­(Salcedo, quoted in Basualdo 2000, 35). In the current academic and critical context, however, the place-name “Colombia” in Salcedo criticism is just a little too close to an apologetic identity politics. Despite the indispensable interference wrought by identity politics in an earlier moment of history, it is necessary to see the downside of that movement. I see identity politics, precisely when overextended to an artist such as Salcedo, to use Wendy Brown’s cogent formulation, “partly as a reaction . . . to an ensemble of distinctly postmodern assaults upon the integrity of modernist communities producing collective identity” (1995, 35). Such an identity politics is defensive in three ways. It defensively lays claims on liberal tolerance and egalitarianism and literally puts “the other” in her place. Moreover, it shields the speaker from the violence itself. Thus, when used by writers whose habitat is not Colombia, the placename “Colombia” puts that work at a safe distance, where violence cannot touch “us”—presumably Western, presumably safe—in a way that, say, Palestine as a place-name would not; that name would touch us because both the keen and close historical complicity and the real threat of the violence reaching “us” preclude the defensive shield of identity politics. The place-name appeals, that is, to compassion, without specific identification; to a sentimental domain where the fear of violence sheds its object and is transformed into the incidental, self-congratulatory pleasure of empathizing with distant victims—the fleeting warmth of being “touched” by others. Hence both the phrase and the criticism it generates serve an interest to dwell in the area of emotions stripped of their objects. They shun the painful need to step over the divide that separates emotions geared to particular objects from feelings as reflexive and active processes that are not opposed to thought but include it. The distancing implied in this phrase under­mines what I consider the essence of Salcedo’s work, in the active sense of the

Chapter Two

l­ atter word. That work aims, I contend, precisely to overcome or—perhaps, given the stakes—to work through the self /other divide ­between antagonism and enmity and, most importantly, the opposition between particular and general, so as to preserve singularity without locking the work up in particularity.10 Finally, when qualifying a place situated outside of the self-styled center of the world, the word native, to indicate the artist’s birth and dwelling place, is redundantly insistent, since Salcedo still lives in Colombia. Because of this redundancy, and added to the location of Colombia in what is tenaciously considered the “third” or “developing” world, or the “periphery,” the qualifier suggests a nativism that we would not invoke when speaking, for example, of an artist who came from New York, or Amsterdam, or from any place that we vaguely consider “Western,” unless the artist had since left that place. And even when the word is used, the resonance is not the same. While suggesting a rather condescending sympathy for “natives” and proclaiming respect for the unique knowledge offered by the “native informant,” the redundant qualifier native places the violence in the semifantasmatic realm of alterity, strangeness, and “not-here.”11 Hence, in terms of my argument for an inherent, metaphoring bond between singularity and generality, the phrase that most frequently characterizes or, at least, introduces Salcedo’s work also gives it a specificity that is treacherous. On the one hand, the work is very specific, much more so than this phrase as such indicates. For example, it is known—the ­artist, somehow, has made it known—that she begins each work with extensive research and fieldwork with victims and survivors of specific acts of violence, murder, and forced displacement. Often, her works use materials given to her by the people she encounters during that research. Only on a single occasion did she give a bit more information about the child who gave her the object she subsequently used. On the other hand, the stories that that knowledge generates do not materialize any more easily than the stories that the pieces of furniture suggest, set in motion, but refrain from fleshing out.12 There is a crucial tension between concrete, historically real acts of violence to which the works’ indexicality points and the frustration that the 10 

Richard Courtney has brought this somewhat simple distinction between emotions and feelings to bear on drama in Drama and Feeling: An Aesthetic Theory (1995). 11  The “native informant” has a long and tenacious history in anthropology. It is a figure that Gayatri Spivak mobilizes against its own history in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). 12  The story of the child’s tunic comes up, carefully and anonymously, in some of the artist’s comments on her work Unland, in which the tunic appears. See chapter 3. [94]

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lack of access to these specifics entails. This is the tension between narrativity and the impossibility of telling and immersing ourselves into stories. That tension is, I think, central to Salcedo’s work in its political strategies. And, given the status of theoretical object I construe for the works here, such friction is also crucial to politically effective art in general. I therefore wish to argue for close attention to the inseparable bond and tension between the particular and the general, with the singular as an alternative to both, in view of the issue of representation. The particular that would feed anecdotal knowledge to reassure the viewer and solicit her compassion yields to singularity, the sense that only this, here, now can do what it does. This singularity is its real quality, which becomes all the more strong as we are denied access to its content. In other words, the model of the trace looms large again, albeit in different ways. Ours is not a time when we can locate political violence on a continent that most of “us”—the supposedly Western readers of this book—only visit or see in images but do not inhabit as our “native” place. I claim that the specificity of Salcedo’s work, including her decision to stay and work in Bogotá, addresses, recognizes, and then declines the universal horror of the violence that we call political because it makes human persons anonymous, sacrificed to so-called greater causes—the violence of politics. At stake is not a choice to pay attention to the particular in order to avoid stylizing away the horror, but a vital need to see the singular as the universal, and vice versa. That is the specific political meaning of Salcedo’s work with representation and the anthropomorphic imagination, and, by extension, of much other art that retains relevance to today’s world—art that “is the case.” This is where the category of “art” comes in. One way to begin thinking about this tension between the particular and the universal through singularity, or the specific and the general through “metaphorable” exemplarity, is to reflect on the potential efficacy of those objects that we call, with a general label, “art.” We can articulate this in a quite simple, down-to-earth manner. When all is said and done, what matters to an artist—as opposed to a journalist, a political activist, or a documentary filmmaker (all things Salcedo declines to be)—is what happens in the gallery. Whether this gallery is located in New York or in Bogotá, it is the site of art in action; of art in motion. The art gallery is a place relatively isolated in time and space; in a sense, it is a space of fiction. Of course, this space can exist in places that are not designed for art exhibition, but even if art is displayed in a subway station, a cathedral, or the street, that place is temporarily transformed into just such a fictional space. It is by definition a place in the present. It is the place, in other words, where we must recognize the images of and from the past as being “of our own concern.”

Chapter Two

There, political art must take effect. And there, consequently, the violence begins: with the displacement of mundane household furniture into a public space. It is displaced, taken out of homes—taken, also, out of its time. In my view, the crossover between space and time is crucial to an understanding of Salcedo’s artistic strategies—which are political strategies (even if this equation is not reversible; obviously, not all political strategies are artistic). The first of these is the viewer’s productive encounter with complicity. I see in this necessary collusion a homeopathic medicine—a poison of which a small amount can cure our vulnerability to a deadly dosage. The recognition of complicity is the primary element in the distinction between older versions of ideology critique and their artistic counterparts, on the one hand, and the new political art I am groping to understand here, on the other; the focus is shifted from critical engagement to inter­ ference. Only when we recognize our participation in the “systems of violence” (Richani 2002) can we productively engage with it, and only then does resistance beyond defensive negativity become possible. In terms of recognition as the condition of representation, this means that a small measure of the cognitive sense is required for the social sense to become possible.13 Complicity as a homeopathic acknowledgment of the inevitable fact that we inhabit what we critique, detest, or abhor is starkly opposed to the sheer repetition of violence. Such a repetition occurred, for example, when customs officers at John F. Kennedy International Airport destroyed several of Salcedo’s sculptures. These were traveling to be exhibited at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. The artist phrases the issue quite precisely in an interview on this incident: “They were not just looking for drugs inside the pieces because they literally destroyed them. One single cut would have done the job, but they had five, six, seven cuts. It was an act of brutality. It was something redundant. The piece had already gone through all that; the piece came from an act of brutality and they returned it to that” (Villaveces-Izquierdo 1997, 249). Obviously, such repetition of violence is diametrically opposed to a homeopathic one; it is addressed to an enemy, fiercely hated, not to an antagonist with whom the officers could have discussed the issue. The repetition is, as Salcedo’s word “redundant” intimates, over the top, blowing the violence out of proportion and motivated by the compulsion to destroy. This compulsion, in turn, was instigated by stereotypical opinions about Colombia. This is a brutal and mindless complicity—one based on opinion as op13 

The idea of a cultural or semiotic use of homeopathy comes from Derrida’s revisiting of Plato in “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Dissemination, 2004). [96]

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posed to thought, as Deleuze would have it. This is the problem of either near-dogmatic or near-automatic attempts to frame Salcedo’s art in terms of the artist’s identity. As political scientist William E. Connolly has stated, identity is problematic and unstable because it entices a projected “alterization.” The anecdote of the destroyed sculptures is an excellent case in point. Connolly wrote: “An identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences, it would not exist in its distinctness and solidity. . . . Identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty” (Connolly 1991, 64). Homeopathic violence, in contrast, is minimal, literally leaving room for another kind of expansion, from singularity to multiplicity to a new singularity. Displacing furniture that was already displaced because the house had been “widowed” and bringing it into a new social space where it can be rendered no longer anonymous employs precisely a small addition of violence in order to reduce it when cognitive recognition opens the space for social recognition. That displacement entails a suspension that causes what I have mentioned above, a flowing of narrativity without the possibility of fleshing out the stories. Thus, the deployment in Salcedo’s work of the anthropomorphic imagination is key to understanding the place of character, narrative, and event in it. This place is fundamentally negative, according to the model of negative space elaborated in chapter 1. Narrativity is a tool to understand this, as it is a semiotic mode not confined to any particular medium. Narrativity is at issue in many different objects, most notoriously in novels and stories. And although narrativity is not medium-bound, there are major differences between figures in visual art and characters in texts. The former are represented primarily as bodies, the latter as the agents of the actions that constitute the plot. Consequently, the former are immobile, whereas the latter move along the pages. The former can be clearly identified visually; the latter, although often the object of elaborate descriptions, need not have a recognizable physical appearance—a freedom that becomes apparent when novels are turned into films, and viewers do not recognize “their” Emma Bovary, for example. At that moment, familiar and cherished age-old characters suddenly adopt the appearance of a specific actor. Our occasional willingness to accept that face as fitting the identity that we had, up to that moment, endowed with a totally different face in our mind’s eye, even if such a shift from character to figure requires adjustments of the previous image, is evidence of the communicative and transformative nature of the anthropomorphic imagination.

Chapter Two

As a critical tool, the label anthropomorphic imagination indicates an almost compulsive tendency to approach representations as if they “look like” human beings, giving them meaning through the lens or frame of human form, that is, through anthropomorphisms. In the many cases where representations do look like people, the tools of analysis are thus made congruent to the objects. This tendency is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can and must be scrutinized with suspicion as a narcissistic desire to reduce the object-world to our proprioceptive sense of self (seeing and feeling ourselves from the inside out). This reduction implies fallacies such as unwarranted unification and coherence, projections of origin, and the self-sameness that closes us off from heteropathic identification—identification at a distance. This qualifies our engagement with alterity. Such specific forms of engagement with others can and must be thought through so as to hold their consequences in check. For example, the narratological concept of “voice” and the art-historical concept of the “artist’s hand,” both bound up with notions of authenticity, require critical reflection. The tendency to imagine anthropomorphically can also easily lead to a self-indulgent sentimentality, the kind of compassion that, according to Garber, hovers between charity and condescension. At the opposite end of the spectrum, it can also lead to an authoritative objectivism. Such objectivism grounds knowledge in unexamined self-evidence when it comes to what questions matter and how we can answer them. On the other hand, the tendency to think, feel, and perceive anthropomorphically is also a useful mechanism for cultural binding that artists can deploy for the sake of an aesthetic that is politically effective. In what follows I discuss Salcedo’s ongoing negotiation with this productive sense of the anthropomorphic imagination. Salcedo’s work lends itself to this discussion because it escapes the categories that have traditionally shaped our intellectual and aesthetic responses to cultural propositions such as art. As I have mentioned above, Salcedo’s work cannot, for example, be categorized in terms of the opposition of abstraction versus figuration or representation. Nor can it be boxed in as sculpture at the expense of painting. In addition, as I explain in chapter 4, her pieces under consideration here are neither autonomous nor elements of installation art. And, most importantly, they undermine the tacit opposition between aesthetic and political art. Through their evasion of standard categories and the oppositions through which these tend to be conceptualized, the furniture sculptures enforce a fresh look at the way art contributes to theorizing urgent contemporary issues. The works construct a space of violence and invite us in to deal with it.

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La Casa Viuda II (detail), 1993–94. Wood, metal, fabric, and bone, 260 × 80 × 60.5 cm. Collection: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

House without Spouse The violation of the home is, in a sense, represented in Salcedo’s early work, or so it seems. According to Charles Merewether, some of her early pieces look like wounded surfaces: “Chairs are covered by a fine skin of lace as if seared into the wood, bones are embedded into the side of a cabinet, a spoon is forced between the seams of wood of a kitchen bureau” (1998, 21). Descriptive language is never neutral. Words such as “seared,” “embedded,” and especially “forced” intimate that the works cannot escape the repetition of violence inherent in representation—no more than, in fact, the words used to describe it. And so the violence remains present. Not that representation is only repetitive; but to be recognizable, the “model” represented must to some extent be “copied,” made recognizably present in the representation. Hence the millennia-long discussion of mimesis in terms of realism. Neither quite representational nor abstract, Salcedo’s work demonstrates that realism is not the only possible mode of repre­sentation.14 14 

I have argued elsewhere that this standard is actually based on a misreading of Aristotle’s concept of mimesis, or rather, his use of the verb mimeisthai (Bal 1982).

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F i g u r e 2 .7

F igu r e 2.8 La Casa Viuda II (detail), 1993–94. Wood, metal, fabric, and bone, 260 × 80 × 60.5 cm. Collection: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Courtesy of Alex­ander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

In the accompanying illustrations we see a tall door and a small, quite unremarkable cabinet or desk. It has been filled with concrete, and the surfaces appear as if they were polished back into visibility after having been obliterated by dust. In one of the seams, the miraculous anthropomorphization of the entire work takes place, for there we see a zipper. This zipper is incongruous, out of place. Thus, it performs Culler’s programmatic conception of metaphor: “a description of certain interpretive operations performed by readers when confronted by a textual incongruity” (2001, 232). Let me, then, play the role of such a reader struck by an incongruity [100]

15  Wong derived this phrase from Veena Das’s contribution to Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997 (67–92), a volume that contains many essays relevant for Salcedo’s work.

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while engaging in theoretical reflection with or through this work. For me, as a reader, the zipper jammed into a desk in La Casa Viuda II (1993–94) makes this a strong instance of a work based on a polemical relationship with representation as it is anchored in the anthropomorphic imagination. It is no more evidently anthropomorphic than the works from the more widely known Untitled Furniture series, where household goods are irreversibly and totally buried in concrete. Belonging to the domain of clothing, the zipper appears to be a trace of someone disappeared into a small cabinet. Its subtlety is part of its effectivity. Next to the zipper, the texture of some coarse, checkered fabric that could be a piece of denim looms up through the wooden surface of the cabinet. The desk is attached to an incongruous, seemingly free-standing door of a lighter color. Depending on where one stands, the desk seems small compared to the high door. To see the zipper, one needs to bend over. Although many aspects of this sculpture allude to violence—the way the desk has been rammed through the door, for example, or the bones on the desk surface that evoke death—only the zipper is blatantly anthropomorphic. It turns the desk into the lower part of a body. For me the zipper immediately evoked a pair of trousers. I imagined these trousers as blue jeans. I saw the cabinet as blue jeans, but without blue and without a wearer. All that was there were the zipper and that tiny fragment of fabric. These elements are emphatically synecdoches, parts standing for the whole they come from and to which they point as traces. This suggests that the rest for which they stand is also present—or rather, has been present, and now only persists as an afterimage. But that presence is not simply rhetorical, as the figure of synecdoche evokes them. They have been buried in the concrete that has taken over the desk, no longer filled with papers and useful documents. The buried jeans anthropomorphize the desk, barely yet inevitably. The desk supposedly stands inside that cold, widowed, and therefore absent house; at the same time, however, the desk itself constitutes a house—it contains the buried fabric, zipper, and bones. Although these elements “inhabit” the desk as a house, they also escape it by protruding outwards. That leaves only the gallery, the space of the visitors, to fulfill the role the widowed house can no longer provide: to give a home to pain (Wong 2007, 180).15 Salcedo’s furniture sculptures—both of the Untitled Furniture and of the La Casa Viuda series—are recognizably real, yet not at all realistic. If they are “about” violence, in the sense of being concerned with violence,

Chapter Two

the household look of the furniture does not in itself “depict” that violence at all. The artist works hard to make each work singular, not only in terms of the background, about which she will not give any specific information other than telling us it is specific, but, more importantly, in the strategies deployed. Each piece harbors a different trace or mode of representation with a sometimes radically different effect. What matters are not the specifics but the modes of representation that insinuate and at the same time bury anthropomorphism. I emphasize the former verb from Merewether’s description, and the latter from my first chapter. The verb to insinuate must be taken quite literally, in both its concrete, material sense and in its logical, semiotic sense. I seek to examine how these insinuations work to turn the anthropomorphic imagination into a semiotic tool for affective communication. This is just one of Salcedo’s strategies. In chapter 3 I show how Salcedo also deploys an anti-anthropomorphic visual mode to estrange us from anthropomorphic imagining, as if to isolate the affect that such imagination entails and project it in a different way. The concept of burying, which points to the other aspect of Salcedo’s work with anthropomorphism, recalls the recurring mode in which this “insinuative” representation manifests itself. Buried and hence metaphoring death, the works also insinuate and bury our attempts to “read” them as images. Already in the title of the series La Casa Viuda, “the widowed house,” Salcedo proclaims her invocation of anthropomorphism as displaced representation. This title is not to be confused with the more current phrase “the house of the widow.” The feminine word viuda qualifies the house itself. This is important because the victims of violent death and displacement cannot be reduced to one gender, nor to any age, race, or class. More to the point, the doubtlessly numerous widows left behind after the violent attacks were, precisely, not in their houses—or they would be dead as well. Nor, obviously, is the furniture in the house, because while it synecdochically signifies the houses, it is here, in the gallery, in front of us. Instead, the house itself is widowed. The title suggests, then, the primary manner—I am tempted to say, ground, in the semiotic sense—on which the anthropomorphic imagination is deployed in this particular series. The house is subjected to personification—a special case of metaphoring that brings it into the orbit of human life. The anthropomorphism that resides in the personification of a house that we do not get to see suggests a space only invoked through the imagination. Of the two components of the anthropomorphic imagination, Salcedo here makes astute use of the latter one. The imagination, including

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16 

Conley’s work is devoted to such moves with and through space (1996; 2007). I use the terms place and space in line with Michel de Certeau’s distinction between abstract, geometrical place and inhabited or used space (1984).

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its acknowledged fictionality, gives that posture a renewed, indeed, indispensable relevance. This space has been brought in a state of deprivation. The pieces of furniture we do see—the chairs, tables, and doors constituting the works of La Casa Viuda—ought to have been somewhere else, but are no longer there. That deprivation, an event in the past of a narrative of which we do not know the specifics, is the widowing; and this becomes a powerful agent of several rhetorical moves. To say the house is widowed simultaneously makes the house into a widow through fictionalization, like a widow through metaphoric extension, and the site of widowhood through metonymic encapsulation. It retains, that is, the stubbornly concrete spatial dimension that is importantly singular while at the same time opening itself up to generalization.16 This is not to say that Salcedo or her art are gender-blind. The artist is in fact very strongly engaged with, specifically, the widows left by violence. She says in an interview, “The conditions of abandonment in which these women are, the lack of affection, the impossibility to make sense of their own life, the impossibility of constructing a perspective by means of which they can understand the tragedy—all of these factors have an immense impact on their own affective realms” (Villaveces-Izquierdo 1997, 238). But this interest in the women affected by the violence does not commit her to representation of their state or situation. Instead, it is the affective depletion that she seeks to address, invoke, and, if possible, remedy: “I would rather say that my concerns lie on the affective dimension of violence. I am not interested in the actual body that has been hit by violence, but on how a violent event transforms the lives of the people that are surrounded by it” (238). This commitment to the women—widows or mothers who lost children, for example—is neither more nor less gender-specific than the violence itself. But beyond the particularity of gender that leaves mostly mothers, wives, and children as the people who lost all the affective “flesh” of the house, it is the space itself, the widowed house that allows the artist to move from each singular suffering to an affective singularity that recognizes the losses. As Wendy Brown has it, “Certainly gender can be conceived as a marker of power, a maker of subjects, an axis of subordination, without thereby converting it to a ‘center’ of ‘selves’ understood as foundational” (1995, 40). In other words, gender—in this case, already implied

Chapter Two

by the language—is not an exclusive but an intensifying category here. Metonymically encapsulated in the anthropomorphic imagination, the only remaining possible mode of contact when the inhabitants have been displaced, the house grieves. It mourns because, far from being a neutral, impersonal, and simply material place, the house as space is filled with human presence. When this presence is destroyed, the house grows cold—a coldness signified by the house’s physical absence from the works named for it; there is no actual house in sight. The series’ title, then, contains an artistic program. The human form is insinuated rather than totally, concretely, or distractingly represented. Yet its presence /absence operates on many levels at once. It is, to use the terms of Tom Conley’s work, the absence being written in spacetime. This brings me back to La Casa Viuda II. The furniture’s resilient ordinariness keeps the desk “real” and thus preserves the work of the trace. Helped by that concrete but not iconically represented human presence, the zipper enticed me (and, I suppose, other viewers as well) to fill in or flesh out the piece as a work charged with human affect—a work that somehow “represented” a human figure. The trace as index stimulates the anthropomorphic imagination, enticing its viewer to provide the missing icon, so that the relationship to the real can be restored. Not that you actually see the human figure out there in the piece, but, after noticing the zipper, you do see it in your imagination—which, in modern cultures, is infected by anthropomorphism. This is almost unavoidable due to the space of art in which we see it. For, what else can this desk have to say as a work of art? In other words, how else did this ordinary piece of furniture end up in an art gallery? As in the case of Atrabiliarios, the agency is not free for the taking; it is imposed as well as bestowed. The bare, negative aesthetic all but enforces the anthropomorphic imagination. In order to see this desk as a work of art, one must see the zipper. To make sense of that detail, one must narrativize it so that it becomes a trace of a former presence; subsequently, it is necessary to project stories of violence onto it. This desk can, in other words, only work (politically) as art on the condition that we first turn it into a human figure and then turn that figure into a victim of political violence. But we are the ones who must do so; in collusion with a tradition that seeks the human form, we must make up and provide the narrative singularity that the artist intimates and then withholds. We cannot help doing this, thus deploying our anthropomorphic imagination; we feel compelled to do so in order to save the work from irrelevance as just a desk; we need this anthropomorphizing to respond to the work. We experience it as what

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Rather, it’s more like something being worn away through use, like the elbow of a coat, the knee of a pair of blue jeans, or an old and much-used knife whose cutting edge becomes curved and worn from years of sharpening. Here, history lies in the absence; in the cloth that’s been worn, in the hole in the knee, and in the smooth arc of the cutting edge. Even more than in the absence, history lies in the adaptation of materials to time, to the exigencies of life, much as a door handle loses its shine or the keys of a keyboard lose their lettering. (2003, 135) 17 

Deleuze takes this concept from Plato’s Republic (7.523b–525b), where the author distinguishes between recognizable things that leave us alone and encountered signs that force us to think. This encounter is not without violence. See Deleuze 1964, 123 et passim; 1994, 182. For a discussion, see Zabunyan 2006, 34–41.

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Deleuze calls an “encountered sign”: a sign that enforces thought because it does not satisfy the senses.17 I will return to the operation of this encountered sign in the context of La Casa Viuda II because, in accordance with the artist’s own project, the anthropomorphic imagination also entails affective investment. Here, I wish to point out a visual paradox, which in turn takes us to a conceptual paradox. Once noticed, a zipper as a trace radiates outwards, blows itself up to include a body, but there is no room for a body in this small desk. Hence, through the very imposition of the projection of a human figure, the piece also dehumanizes the human presence. This is how the anthropomorphic imagination is absolutely indispensable. We need to deploy it to see both the human individual and his demise; the life and its annihilation. And once you are working with the piece in this way, you notice white bones on top of the desk, suggestive of a spine once you see them, yet easily overlooked if you stay on eye level with the zipper. And that angle, which is necessary to really see the zipper and, hence, the entire piece, provides the moment of skin-to-skin contact between the artwork and the viewer. Because he or she is enacting the same posture, the viewer can now imagine a bent-over figure inside the cabinet: someone who is still at work, frozen in the act, forever imprisoned in a cruelly confining space. This is what the trace evoked for me: a figure in blue jeans bending over. As such, it became an image of the inhuman condition of forcefully displaced persons. The viewer “makes” this image, actively. She is co-producer of the art’s work. Such co-production can counter historical erasure, imposed forgetting, and active silencing. Taussig’s poetic evocation of forgetting resonates quite precisely with La Casa Viuda II, among other works. He writes,

Chapter Two

Only if the viewer, at risk of making factual, even material mistakes, is willing to co-produce the work can the actively forgotten be restored to the present. Due to this operation on and then of the viewer, a modest, discreet degree of anthropomorphism generates this art’s political effectivity. The modesty is key to this power. Again, we are confronted with the metaphoring from singular to general to a renewed and displaced singularity. This metaphoring is important for our understanding of the political agency of this piece. First of all, Salcedo’s work does not dictate a realistic view of representation: it refrains from prescribing specific imaginary contents. It is, in fact, quite minimalist. But there is a second issue that I must open up at this juncture. Theaters of Gender Through the contrast of the coarse fabric with the lace in other works by Salcedo (on which more shortly), the “blue jeans” I saw as invoked by the zipper here might specifically call to mind an underpaid male worker, as it did for me. I felt compelled to flesh out the story. Importantly for my argument, this also happens to be an interpretation that the artist herself firmly contradicted.18 As she wrote in response to an early draft of this text, the work was not meant to be gender-specific. She also revealed that the fabric next to the zipper, far from coming from blue jeans, was taken from a woman’s skirt. Hence my interpretation was clearly “wrong” in terms of the work’s genesis and its representational clarity. Yet, at the same time, I maintain it is “right” in that it did the political work of charging the piece with an affective contagiousness that helped me to “face the reality”—to recycle ­Arendt’s terms—of working conditions in precarious states. For it was this contamination with affect that moved me to bring in my own baggage, incurred in other political situations; my memories of activism, which related this unreflective act of gendering less to gender than to class issues. The—­ factually mistaken—secondary particularization is an indispensable part of the work’s metaphoring operation. Hence I must evoke my error here to make my theoretical point.19 This erroneous interpretation further explains the point made in the 18 

Salcedo, private correspondence, 2003. The heading “Theaters of Gender” is meant to invoke Yasco Horsman’s book Theaters of Justice (forthcoming). Although Horsman does not discuss Salcedo’s work, much of his study is directly relevant for the issues I am considering here. 19  This is why, at the end of chapter 1, I located the political work of Atrabiliarios in its capacity to generate multiple interpretations rather than in a specific political meaning. [106]

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previous chapter, that singularity must be metaphored to other singularities. The specific particularizing association I just made for this work bridged the space between the object and “me,” its incidental viewer. It made recognition in the first, cognitive sense flip over into the second, social sense. It also counters the objectless emotion evoked above, which, since it encourages a feel-good sentimentality, would be unsatisfactory for the artist’s ambition to be politically effective. But bringing up my factual error as evidence of the work’s success is also important for the understanding of the key concept I am developing in this chapter in the wake of the discussion of metaphor(ing). Engaged with the metaphoring from chapter 1, the viewer must also answer for the anthropomorphic imagination. For the artwork, at the same time, carefully avoids the semantic clarity according to which my response could be judged either right or wrong. In order to face reality, the factual truth must both remain valid and yield to the truth of the work’s political agency. In retrospect, therefore, my error and its later acknowledgement were necessary. Culler’s words at the end of the sentence in which he proposed a program for the analysis of metaphor, cited the example of, precisely, identity: “the assertion of a patently false identity” (2001, 232). Of course, the situation is different in that the assertion comes from the reader (me) and not from the “text” (Salcedo’s sculpture). But given the performative, interactive conception of metaphor that Culler develops, that reversal is in fact immaterial. On the work’s terms, gender and class identity recede, together with the piece of clothing, into the wood of the household item, the desk, which has eaten them up, “disappeared” them—an active, transitive verb in this context. And “disappearing people” is what the perpetrators of violence do; hence, this is another instance of collusion as a necessary tool, like a homeopathic medicine. The anthropomorphism remains, now transferred to the piece as a whole, to the door and the desk, to the largerthan-life-size door looming over the smaller-than-life-size desk, which is for me evocative of a child being barred by an adult from reentering the home, in a perversion of the care due to the child. The child displaces the worker I had seen first. Both figures, figments of my imagination, are part of the tragedy that, without being quite represented, unfolds in my viewing experience. In this process, affect is solicited—and almost imposed, to the extent that affect-less looking remains devoid of anything that transforms an ordinary desk into a politically and aesthetically effective artwork. This process of affective contagion lies, I contend, at the heart of what I like to call the “new” political art. This is art that engages political thought, metaphoring from place to place, from here to there, the pressing political

F i g u r e 2.9 La Casa Viuda I, 1992–94, Wood and fabric, 258 × 39 × 60 cm. Collection: Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA. Photo: D. James Dee. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

i­ ssues of today’s world. It does this beyond the recourse to representation that Goya was still able to perform; in other words, this is political art after Adorno. Such postGoya political art does not submit a vision to the viewer, nor does it present such a vision in order to persuade and convince. Today’s political art must confront issues such as violence and the cultivation of fears based on artificially foregrounded distinctions. Here, for example, this affective operation emanates from art that engages global violence through an engagement with the particular violence and the singular instances of suffering it generates. The all-too-easy appeal to the artist’s “native Colombia” denies that metaphoring. Let me further clarify this point through the juxta­ position of La Casa Viuda II with another work from the same series. The gender identity of the zipper-­generated anthropomorphic figure in La Casa Viuda II was, as it turned out, subject to doubt, a doubt which, I take it, is part and parcel of the effect that the work sets out to solicit. In this sense it was truly an “encountered sign”— one that enforced thought, but did not prescribe what to think. In contrast, in La Casa Viuda I (1992–94), fabric and lace irresistibly and immediately denote the gender identity of the evoked victims as feminine. This femininity makes the furniture more overtly anthropomorphic. The feminine fabric also makes the surface stand out as a token of innocence. Again, the situation of a viewer in a gallery is a relevant, indeed, indispensable element in the production of meaning. And here, too, the particularity of the semantic filling, produced by the active search for an object of emotion, is barred by a doubt that makes generalizing possible. The artwork actively stimulates such doubt, and one of the strategies it deploys to do so is a further development of the anthropomorphic imagination. The curved feet of the chair, for example, were quite common in ordinary furniture in Colombia during the 1940s. In this sense, they are just a case of catachresis, the kind of anthropomorphic signs that have no “original,” “literal” meaning. Incidentally, the “legs” of tables or chairs are the textbook example of catachresis in rhetorical theory. There is no need to get all emotional about the feet of a chair, even if, as catachresis, the word stubbornly keeps the human figure present. But that presence can be ­forgotten, [108]

F i g u r e 2 . 1 0   La Casa Viuda I (detail), 1992–94. Wood and fabric, 258 × 39 × 60 cm. Collection: Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA. D. James Dee. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

Chapter Two

­ ecome abstract, even if it can be reactivated any time. Here, for examb ple, we are not let off the hook so easily. Through a very simple but limpidly effective artistic intervention, the legs have been reversed, so as to foreground the feet as clumsy and unfit for walking. But this small inter­ vention works in two ways. In combination with other details, the curved feet evoke for me, in this contrast between the two works, the pointed shoes of a ballet dancer. This turns the clumsiness into a great skill, adding to the activities cut off by violence. Suddenly these feet become poignantly ­personal. The other elements of La Casa Viuda I contribute to this poignancy. In contrast to the minimalist zipper, they gender the piece rather emphatically. The lace skirt, half-concealed—squeezed, to recall Adorno’s violent term—behind the chair, trapped forever between the chair and the door, evokes women as the makers and users of material. But in my anthropomorphic imagination, a somewhat hyperbolic narrative emerges. Exposed and ironed flat into the chair, legs spread, and dress cascading backwards: for me the scene of rape and murder is hard to keep at bay. I should, however, caution against a possible misreading of my interpretation. It is crucial to keep in mind that this work is not “about” rape, any more than the previously discussed work is “about” the exploitation of labor. They do, precisely, not represent rape and labor. This is why I take the politics of Salcedo’s work as a significant instance of a “new” political art. There is, for example, no application of red paint evoking blood, as might have been used in a more traditional representation. This association is carefully kept at bay as too symbolic and stylizing, hence, as falling under Adorno’s definition of “barbaric.” The overt thematic of the series is not violence as such, as a topic (of conversation, for example) but the distortion of life after forceful displacement. Yet, through the small, barely noticeable, and surely not predominant anthropomorphisms, the trace of a woman’s presence after violence, and as a consequence of violence, is somehow exposed—or should I say, insinuated. Exposed, here, is to be taken in the multiple senses that I develop in my book Double Exposures, as “made visible,” as self-exposure, and honoring (in ancient Greece, laudatory) argument (1996). The artist mentions this word for its meaning of vulnerability as well (Princenthal 2000, 87). Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher whose work has greatly inspired Salcedo, described this vulnerability in the following words, which I find apt for a reflection on Salcedo’s sculptures: “The subjectivity of a subject is vulnerability, exposure to affection, sensibility, a passivity more passive still than any passivity, an irrecuperable time, an unassemblable diachrony of patience, an exposedness always to be exposed the more, an exposure to [110]

20  This quotation is a fragment included by Salcedo in her “Artist’s Choice” section of Princenthal, Basualdo, and Huyssen 2000, from a 1960 speech published in Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being (1974). It accompanies a photograph of La Casa Viuda III. In this work a child’s dress is half-hidden, half-exposed between two tall doors. 21  For the triple meaning of the Greek verb apo-deiknumai, see the introduction to my 1996 book Double Exposures. For a longer and historical discussion, see Nagy 1979, a study also relevant for the issue of heroism, so troubling in a discussion of the political. 22  For the functioning of temporality in Salcedo’s work, see chapter 3.

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The Politics of Anthropomorphism

expressing, and thus to saying, thus to giving” (Levinas 2000, 122).20 This multilayered word, exposure, then, corresponds with the double meaning of recognition with which I began this chapter. The disappeared woman is kept present. By means of its anthropomorphism, which is both subtle and exuberant, La Casa Viuda I is both the trace and the trigger of the image of a woman victimized yet still able to stay. Index as trace, icon as image; but no image is out there, in the work. It is metaphored from the work’s singularity, through the generalization that includes the viewer, to the singularity he or she is encouraged to bring to bear on it.21 I invoke these two works of the La Casa Viuda series in order to demonstrate the differences within Salcedo’s minimally representational work. Since it veers away from what might seem to be the emotional exuberance and figurative legibility of La Casa Viuda I—deceptive as that legibility is— La Casa Viuda II does not immediately foreground the traces of buried human presence, nor does it bind them so strongly to the domestic sphere. It takes more time to notice the zipper and the fabric. Through this reticence, the zipper and fabric point to the kind of temporality that underpins Salcedo’s political aesthetic. This temporality includes the two-phased temporality usually attributed to the allographic arts. Those arts—theater, film, music, and video, for instance—sever the making from the reproducible product that is the performance and separate each performance from its score. Specifically, such a double temporality involves viewers who would be at a loss even to recognize these objects as art if they remained insensitive to the anthropomorphism—whatever it is they make of it, project on it, and take away from it. In all their modesty and discreet, undercoded presence, these traces not only stimulate but even demand the viewer’s participation in metaphoring. Through such participation, the viewer moves into the new singularity of her political orbit.22 In two different ways—one exuberant, the other discrete—Salcedo’s sculptures affectively put forward the violation of the private lives of victims of violence through a minor instance of or, rather, an allusion to representation. Ironing fabric into wood or forcing a zipper into the seam between two planks constitutes the performance of violence on objects taken

Chapter Two

out of everyday lives. In this, they insinuate or even resemble the people who were themselves dragged out of their homes to be displaced and frequently slaughtered or, at any rate, to be added to the anonymous group of “the disappeared.” Salcedo reverses the movement, moving in the opposite direction: whereas the violence took the victims out of the private realm into the limbo of anonymity, she pulls them forward from the private life where they should still have been into the public space, where we can at least recognize what happened to them. This is the stake of her insistence on singularity. In these two pieces, as in all of Salcedo’s work, the furniture, although beautifully crafted, is stylistically “normal” but, at the same time, ever so slightly anthropomorphized by means of minimal interventions. As a result, they enact the violence that depleted, or “widowed,” its territory— the home. It is as if the small things that evoke the idea of being wounded have taken to mimicry, adapting to the environment of the outside world so as to become less noticeable. Consequently, the effectivity of Salcedo’s work resides in its ability to travel into different environments. This is the stake of the generalizability built in by the operation of metaphoring, but which is stubbornly resisted by the phrase that would frame all criticism of her art as “local.”23 There is one more aspect to the strategy that invokes, deploys, and resists representation. Above, I mentioned theater as a two-phased art form. One of the aspects of the moving quality of Salcedo’s work is, indeed, a certain theatricality. This, too, is an aspect of the anthropomorphic imagination that addresses multiple issues—issues that can be seen as parallel to the double relationship to representation. But this time, they lean toward the emotional realm, with which they entertain just such an ambivalent relationship. First, according to cultural generalization, theatricality invests the time-honored tradition of catharsis, the need to infuse the furniture with stories, to flesh out the invoked human figures so that the viewer can traverse, on a minor scale, the emotions the hero goes through. Classically, these are emotions of admiration and pity. The goal of that invocation is identification, so that we may subsequently distance ourselves from the figure’s adventures and unfortunate fate. At the same time, the lack of semantic specification invokes, by altogether different means, the Brechtian tradition that considers identification-based catharsis a misplaced and politically ineffective sentimentality. The temporalization involves a staggered movement from the temptation of cathartic need—the narrativity 23  This idea resonates with Lacan’s remarks on mimicry in his essay on the mirror stage (1977, 1–7).

[112]

24  The process of theatricalization is much more visible in Salcedo’s installations; see chapter 4.

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The Politics of Anthropomorphism

run wild, objectless—to the realization that identification is being checked and subsequently to the need to amend and redirect one’s own affect-laden projections. Inserting the sculptures into that double tradition, the temporality of these works turns the event of viewing into an engaged event of a theater without a specific style or text. There is, however, more at stake in the touch of theatricality that these sculptures perform. As opposed to sculpture, theater is what is called a “time-based art.” Second, then, human bodies exist in time and are affected by time. To abstract them out of time, as eternalizing classical sculpture did, is not only a form of aggrandizing, in a megalomaniac humanism, but also a way of diminishing. It makes them less than human, since they lack the time-specificity that makes people human and that necessarily involves them in politics. Theatricalizing the sculptures is a way for the artist to make the temporality inherent in human existence present. In the face of lives cut short, deprived of the time to which they were entitled, this temporality loses its “natural” rhythm, leaving the viewer with the task of “feeling”—aesthetically reflecting on as well as affectively investing in—the bond between the human form and time.24 These two sculptures’ engagement with theater broaches a third issue. This is, once more, a form of singularity. In this context, the difference between La Casa Viuda I and La Casa Viuda II is the difference between two forms of theater, one derived from melodrama as a form of popular culture, the other taken from minimalism and ensconced in “high” art. Why invoke these two forms in this context? Simply put, to show how the aesthetic reflexivity of the latter imposes its reflexive work on the former’s strong emotional tensions. Melodrama, in these works of “high” art, is both indispensable and in need of being reframed, hence, “upgraded.” This is one way Salcedo’s work acknowledges the realm of popular culture, acknowledging in the same move the social realm from which most victims of violence stem. As Peter Brooks argued long ago, the stakes of analyzing what he calls “the melodramatic” in “high” literature concern the “defining and sharpening [of] the adjective by the substantive” (1976, xii). Among the features that he transfers from the noun and the practice it indicates to the qualifier and the aesthetic specificity it names is the mixture of social classes. This is another way of bridging the gap between the particular and the general to reach the singular. In addition, there is “a certain fictional system for making sense of experience,” or another way of deploying the anthropomorphic

Chapter Two

imagination to facilitate affective engagement (xiii). Together these two forms of theater encompass and hence void the distinction between reflexively powerful “high” art and emotionally powerful “popular”—in fact, trans-class—art. The theatricality moves in different but complementary ways, straddling the singularity of each and the generalizing communality between them. This is yet another instance of metaphoring. This is an old tension between modernism and its others, both in time and in class. But it is at the same time more specific than that. One background for this productive tension staged between popular and elite art, through theatricality, could be a specific Latin American tension, through which renouncing the universal automatically makes art “local.” This would be the case in an area already subjected to a “localizing” world politics. A statement by Lygia Clark made in 1966 phrases it clearly: “A whole group of people clearly sees that modern art doesn’t communicate, increasingly becomes an elitist issue. So they turn to popular art, hoping to fill the gulf that separates them from the majority. Result: they cut the ties that attach them to the development of universal art and fall back onto a form of expression that is local in character” (Clark and Bois 1994, 105). Clark’s words sound rigidly binary and dismissive. Yet, coming from this highly cosmopolitan artist, this dismissal has a deeper and more noteworthy motivation. It points to a clear and understandable sensitivity to being held against the “local” standard as a way of denying access to the universal. This threat remains today and is one of the reasons I am dealing with Salcedo’s art almost entirely outside of the Latin American context. The fact remains, that is, that the “falling back” onto something “that is local” is a particular risk in places the outside world has already typecast as “local,” their art already denied the universal status that art from, say, New York accesses much more easily. For this reason, I take the potential melodramatic aspect of La Casa Viuda I as a polemical aspect that harbors a sting directed at the inter­ national art world as much as a sword raised against Colombian, and then universal, violence. The other aspect of my view of these two sculptures concerns theatricality, and these aspects are just as political and polemical. Theatricality is often considered to be an artificial, insincere mode of representation. Its invocation in the context of Salcedo’s disaster-related art seems almost disrespectful. As Dutch theater scholar Maaike Bleeker has cogently argued, this negative view of theatricality is disastrous in itself. Not only does it do an injustice to an art form that has traditionally been rather “democratic,” it also sheds a falsely positive light on its opposite, the allegedly sincere public acts and speeches of, for example, politicians. Instead, Bleeker asserts in an analysis of political theater that the performance she is analyz­ [114]

25 

This quotation comes from a brilliant analysis of the relationship between politics and theatricality through a critique of both George W. Bush’s political behavior and Michael Moore’s critique of it in Fahrenheit 9/11. [115]

The Politics of Anthropomorphism

ing “deploys theater and theatricality as a ‘critical vision machine’ to point to the relationship between political actors, their performances, and their point of view. Theater here is not a matter of spectacle, exaggeration, or make-believe, but a matter of becoming aware of how we are implicated in the performance of others addressing us” (2008b, 259).25 “A critical vision machine”: this seems as good a characterization as any of Salcedo’s work with traces of the anthropomorphic figure in sculptures otherwise mute— gagged and silenced, bound and stopped—that nevertheless also contain “little resistances” (Hernández-Navarro 2008). This conception of theatricality can be seen in the light of Adorno’s manifold conception of representation or, as he and Horkheimer call it in the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, mimesis (1997). Like Salcedo, the philosophers do not lightly dismiss the concept, knowing full well that the iconophobia that is its counterpoint only represses its role in culture. Huyssen’s analysis of Adornian mimesis by way of Art Spiegelman’s Maus makes the multiple meanings of the concept into a valuable analytical tool (2003, esp. 123). In Huyssen’s reading, mimesis becomes a palimpsest of different, overlapping meanings, ranging from its power of reification (“stylizing”) and its anthropomorphic appeal to its unquestioned concept of “human nature.” Some of these meanings have been discussed above. As a strategy of survival, mimetic behavior in animals was foregrounded by scientist Roger Caillois in the 1930s, an insight of which Lacan has made much in his psychoanalytic theory of the mirror stage (1977). In his own analysis, Huyssen makes most of the ambivalent aspects of identification and projection in mimesis. His concern—“if, how, and when to represent historical trauma” (2003, 123)—remains key to Salcedo’s circumspect way of dealing with representation. She, like Huyssen’s Spiegelman, carefully negotiates it “both in its insidious and in its salutary aspects that, as Adorno would have it, can never be entirely separated from each other” (125). It is in the theatrical exposition of these ambivalences that, I contend, Salcedo’s sculptures manage to keep “identity and nonidentity together as nonidentical similitude and in unresolvable tension with each other” (127). Moreover, they also expose—in the sense of exposure, making ­vulnerable —the participant-viewer to the dilemmas and turn the taking of a nuanced yet forceful attitude toward them into an attractive proposition. This is how agency is bestowed.

F i g u r e 2.11 Untitled Furniture ­(Armoire), 1998. Wood, concrete, glass, cloth, and metal, 183.5 × 99.5 × 33 cm. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube,

Chapter Two

London.

On the Move Let me bring this chapter to a close through a move of my own between singularity and generalization. Salcedo often fills the pieces of furniture with concrete, as in the examples shown here. It has been noted many times: this filling with concrete is a form of burying. As if to emphasize the twoway operation of metaphoring, this use of the metaphor of burying is itself a two-way operation. We realize this when we consider the dynamic of container and contained. Is the armoire buried in concrete, or is the concrete buried, locked up, in the armoire? Strange as this may sound—we can clearly see which is which, after all—the dilemma remains undecided.26 The furniture buried in concrete mobilizes theatrical temporal phasing in yet another way, which at the same time can help me generalize about how this art works politically. In the series Untitled Furniture, also 26 

See Calow 2003 for a discussion of burial in the Untitled Furniture pieces in relation to architecture. Calow takes the stability of metaphor for granted, to the detriment of the metonymic, narrative, and affective operations involved. The ambiguity goes back to the empty/full issue, evoked above apropos of Lygia Clark (see note 6). [116]

F i g u r e 2 . 1 2   Untitled Furniture (Armoire), detail, 1998. Wood, concrete, glass, cloth, and metal, 183.5 × 99.5 × 33 cm.

Chapter Two

s­ ustained by representational strategies, moments of time appear to be in violent conflict with each other, owing to the anthropomorphic imagination invoked. In Untitled (Armoire) from 1992, the “armoire,” or cupboard, seems to be lying down, like a body, and each visitor is urged to provide a story. Again, the issue is not to agree upon a particular narrative or upon a meaning attached to the human figure whose shadow hovers over the piece. For me, the armoire lies like a fallen soldier, sideways, with its face to the wall. Two superposed chairs fixed to its feet also turn their backs to us. Another chair is encased in concrete, which fills the entire combination. The moments of the story that this piece tells—or that I tell in its stead—remain present: the hero falls; the house, now void of inhabitants, is made ready for total emptiness as if the furniture were stacked away under sheets; the two chairs are imprisoned together with the armoire but also in solidarity with it. The pieces have been muted, gagged, and bound by concrete. Steel poles stick out like instruments of murder for those who primarily see violence here. For those who focus on the victims, however, they also look like prostheses that are expected to stand while all else crumbles. The simultaneous possibility of violence and survival invests the work with the kind of anthropomorphic wavering between figurative art and narrative. At the same time, Untitled (Armoire) also demonstrates the impossibility of either going the whole mile and narrativizing the work’s power away or, alternatively, of putting an end to its movement. How exactly does this work? How, in other words, does the anthropomorphic imagination make still sculptures move? It accomplishes this by moving us and making us move, so as to connect past violence and its traumatic aftermath with people living in a violent world. Although it is a word from the realm of emotions, the qualifier moving does not signify a sentimental appeal to easy identification. Even in bringing such an appeal to identification dangerously close, the anthropomorphism of Salcedo’s sculptures simultaneously foregrounds both the genuine emotional demand and the risk of sentimental complacency by way of its narrative reticence. As a lack and as an active refusal, it thus nevertheless resists this appeal. For, at the same time, the sculpture’s modesty, its reticence, seems inclined to want to push the awareness of its agency to the edge of consciousness. In a literal, concrete way—and I cannot help the pun on concrete here—the specific moments of violence that occurred in the past and in a specific place that is not-here are set in stone. Then a viewer comes in, armed with anonymous actuality. The first sight offers tombs, self-effacing forms that are no longer meaningful. But the viewer brings specificity back to life through a recognition of the difference between the chair ensconced in the back of the armoire and the two [118]

F i g u r e 2.13 Untitled Furniture ­(Armoire), 1992 (“fallen soldier”). Wood, concrete, and metal, 114.5 × 187 × 51 cm. Collection: Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

heaped chairs, mundane yet different; and, above all, through the desire to turn the piece around and look it in the face that it lacks. This is how the temporality of “at first sight” joins forces with the anthropomorphic “at face value.” There is not a single face in Salcedo’s oeuvre. Yet, turned away from the viewer, many pieces invoke faces that are withheld. Unless she is totally indifferent and hence unable even to notice the artwork, the viewer is bound to take some of these steps, to ask some of these questions, have some of these desires. Still, the mute, heavy, composed, and undramatic piece will not move or show its face. The task of performing the piece’s [119]

Chapter Two

moving quality falls to the viewer, who, as Plato had it, is forced to think.27 The very stillness of the work slows down the viewer. It is dead but still human and, hence, caught up in human time. This is why the art can only do its political work—move us into a desire for political agency rather than emotional self-indulgence—by being ontologically and semantically still. In this case, human time is both asymmetrical and heterogeneous. The stories buried in concrete happened first and are irredeemable. The concrete burial cannot be reversed. But the viewer’s acts of thinking them up and bringing them back into the human time of actuality symmetrically undo the burial and the stillness. In this way, a glimpse of what was, in the past and in another place, can be retrieved in actuality. Analogous to Bergson’s concept of spatial extensity, time is called back from its vanishing point to move in the opposite direction. But like human space, human time is hetero­geneous. Effective as it is as a trigger of remembrance, this temporality of the works does not give the illusion that vicarious suffering is possible or desirable.28 To counter this risk, the art deploys temporality in its heterogeneity. The one minute, two minutes, or five minutes that the viewer spends to infuse actuality with human content and the one minute, two minutes, or five minutes that it took for the victims of violence to be dragged from their beds or chairs, killed in front of their families or “disappeared” without a trace—do not have the same duration. Here, the heterogeneity of time is itself conveyed in a moment of viewing. This is the moment when the viewer, caught in collusion with representation, is enabled to (cognitively) recognize, then (socially) recognize-as, something that connects to—but is not—the past. This connection is compelled by the negativity of a work not otherwise accessible as art. In the next chapter, I turn to works that counter the anthropomorphic imagination and its bond with representation. For this chapter, it matters that the full ambiguity of Benjamin’s “of the past” be unpacked, so as neither to disavow Salcedo’s oblique and polemical engagement with representation, nor to naively absorb her work in that tenacious category of figurative art. Both misconceptions would leave in place a reductive binary view of art. Such a view disempowers what makes this art most effective as political art by appropriating it within the categories most in need of being addressed in the political.

27  28 

Republic 7.523b–525b. On faces, see chapter 4. For more on Bergson, see chapter 3. [120]

3

F i g u r e 3.1 Unland, 1995–98 (installation overview). Installation: “Unland /Doris Salcedo,” SITE Santa Fe, NM, 1998. Collection: Fundaçio “la Caixa,” Barcelona. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

The human experience of perception hence pivots upon a temporal lag, a superimposition of images, an inextricability of past and present. 

M a r y A n n D o a n e, The Emergence of Cinematic Time

I entered into a relationship with Salcedo’s work at the moment of a chance encounter. The three-piece installation Unland (1995–98) was the first work of hers I ever saw. There are at least two ways of describing this installation. Both describe it as radically anti-anthropomorphic, although not entirely non-anthropomorphic. From a distance, at first sight, one sees nonhuman, sculptural forms. These forms are utterly recognizable, even banal. They are, simply, tables. These tables are distorted. Each of the three distorted tables is pieced together from two tables, with slightly discrepant tops, both missing a set of legs. The tops look a sickly gray in some places. Alternatively, from close up, the forms become invisible, and one sees only a painterly surface. This surface is rich in texture and shows a nuanced spectrum of shades, ranging from off-white to dark gray and from beige to brown. Here, one mobilizes whatever small portion of one’s anthropomorphic imagination the work admits so as to see something resembling the skin of scar tissue. The surface consists of hundreds of tiny follicles, crisscrossing threads, tattered, translucent silk, and, on one table, a child’s cot sunk into the wooden planks of the table’s surface and then sewn onto it.1 This chapter takes its starting point from the realization that these two visions do not connect. They are incommensurable. And, to begin addressing the domain to which this chapter is devoted, incommensurability takes time. It is the impossibility of seeing both visions at the same time that triggers reflections on temporality as a tool for political art. It is also this 1 

I saw Unland in the New Museum in New York in 1998. For a detailed analysis of this work, see Barson 2004. See also Wong 2007, 175–80. The analysis by Andreas Huyssen is to my knowledge the most detailed and multifaceted reading of a single sculpture from Unland, namely, Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic (Huyssen 2000). See also the chapter on Salcedo in his later book (2003). [123]

Chapter Three

impossibility that makes the sculptures of Unland “moving,” in the double sense of the word. The work is strictly impossible to see because, in order to see it as the artwork it is, one must see both visions simultaneously. Like Wittgenstein’s famous rabbit /duck drawing, the two are equally true and even equally necessary. Yet because of the difference in distance required to practice these ways of seeing, they are physically incompatible. This incompatibility is, as I will try to demonstrate, a bit torturous, painful, and even, at moments, physically nauseating. This nauseating effect is, of course, not an act of sadism on the part of the artist. Instead, it is a hyperbolic expression of the need for bodily involvement in the realm of the political, where Salcedo’s work operates.2 After standing near these tables and stalking around them for an extraordinarily long time, painfully aware of one’s own perceptual inadequacy, it is as if the furniture itself becomes unsteady. It is this wavering, this destabilizing effect on its viewers, that constitutes the aesthetics, which is to say, in this case, the politics of Unland and various other works by Salcedo. I contend that it achieves this perceptual and affective mobility from within the extremely delicate moral and artistic position of addressing violence. The “material” that the artist deploys in Unland—what we could perhaps call her medium and what I discuss below as the “foreshortening of time”— offers a third strategy for political art. Belated, yet moving still; commemorating those we cannot know; activism after the fact: the paradoxes of Salcedo’s work raise the issue of time in an exemplary fashion. Why is time so important, especially with art that is, for the most part, still? Time is what we live by in routine, everyday life. But violence that causes suffering perverts the ordinary course of time. Pain makes time excruciatingly slow; hunger makes every minute unbearable; imprisonment is punishment meted out in time; backbreaking labor accumulates harm to the body with time; and death stops time forever. The heterogeneity of temporal experience, thus, is potentially a deeply political issue. For this reason, the present chapter is devoted to the issue of the temporality of art-in-process. I start from the paradox that most of Salcedo’s work is still. Technically, it is still because it does not move; it is silent; but it is also still in terms of mood. Yet, as I have argued in the preceding chapter, it is moving— not primarily emotionally but politically—because of the strong affective ­impact that compels agency without prescribing what the agent must do. It is also moving perceptually, as I experienced in front of Unland. As a con2  See Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1958, 193 et passim). For an extensive commentary on the concept of “seeing as” or “aspects” that Wittgenstein derives from the rabbit /duck ambiguity, see Mulhall 1990. [124]

3  For a subtle and persuasive argument for continuing to use some notion of “human nature” against the odds of a tenacious tendency to theorize generalities in terms of privileged norms, see Antony 1998. How Salcedo’s work relates to issues of space is discussed in chapter 4. 4  The issue of memory comes up again in chapter 5. [125]

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sequence, Salcedo’s work, which is committed to stillness for reasons that make her art deeply political, is able to overcome the formal opposition between “still” and “moving” images. It also negotiates the gap between an object and its affective charge or, in other words, between the object perceived at a distance and the viewer whose act of viewing affects her. While the radical incommensurability between looking at a distance and looking up close is a theoretical issue, Salcedo, true to her commitment to make theoretical objects as political objects, turns this incommensurability into a literal and experiential aspect of vision. Among the consequences of this paradoxical “state” is a complex relationship, not only with representation, figuration—the work with the human form discussed in the previous chapter—and space, but also with another aspect of “human nature”: its existence in time. The temporality of human existence precludes stability and warrants constant transformation.3 In this chapter, I address different aspects of temporality: heterogeneous time, slowdown, the past cut off from the present, and the need for and productive nature of active acts of looking in actuality. Together these temporal aspects invoke the issue of memory, which runs through all of Salcedo’s work. I address these various forms of temporality in order to develop a concept that seems helpful for grasping the specificity of Salcedo’s artistic strategy with time. The concept, or unifying theoretical theme, is a form of foreshortening, not of spatial perspective but of time.4 In view of my earlier remarks about Salcedo’s insinuation of narrative activity without ever giving in to the desire to know, it would be worth exploring this visual and visible work with duration in terms of narratological categories (such as duration, order, and frequency, to recall Genette’s classic distinctions [1982]). However, in order to avoid re-narrativizing Salcedo’s work—a general tendency I seek to counter—I opt for the more difficult route toward a visual understanding of this eminently literary category. To pursue that, I first explain foreshortening, a device for the representation of three-dimensional space on a flat surface, and then present its temporal equivalent. The fact that the three-dimensional forms of the tables cannot be seen simultaneously with the crucial surfaces of the tabletops is indicative of this possibility. Instead of bones, those more traditional symbols of death, Salcedo uses hair to signify the durational politics of this work. From negative space, the issue central to chapter 1, I now move to the more drastic

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negation of space, a move necessary for the focus on time at issue here. The anthropomorphism that kept insisting in the La Casa Viuda and the Untitled Furniture series is not entirely absent but has now become a trigger for a temporal foreshortening. This term, which I will unpack slowly by first considering the more usual spatial foreshortening of the art-historical tradition and then translating it into a device that extends duration, is the focus of the exploration in this chapter of the potential of political art. For this exploration I consider Salcedo’s art in terms of a contemporary Baroque aesthetic.5 Negations of Place Foreshortening, as it is commonly understood, is a technique for producing the illusion of three-dimensionality on a flat surface. It partakes of the perspectival rendering of space. I attempt to translate foreshortening— the technique and its effects—into its temporal equivalent by examining how, in Salcedo’s work, it serves the production of temporality in a still medium so as to offer encountered signs. In principle, this effect is as illusory as it is real. I contend, however, that Salcedo’s deployment of the temporal equivalent of foreshortening succeeds in breaking the illusion in favor of a real engagement with the temporality that the work “designs.” This is how her work moves us—both in the affective and perceptual senses in which we, as viewers, are the objects of the verb, and in the sense that the verb has both a direct object (us) and an indirect one (it moves us to act). Like theatricality and, to a certain extent, within theatricality, the artist deploys temporal foreshortening as a “critical vision machine.”6 On the most primary level, the act of exposing pieces of used furniture in an art gallery in and of itself compels the viewer to think about their previous owners and users and, hence, about a certain past time. It positions the pieces in the past in which they were used—unspectacularly ensconced in the private sphere. The sheer displacement of the pieces from homes to gallery thus already interferes in the temporality of the furniture. In chapter 2, I argued for the political thrust of the furniture works in terms of place, claiming that it is in the gallery that political art must take effect. Mundane household furniture is displaced, taken out of homes, put into a public space. As a consequence, the violation of the home is necessarily also perpetrated by the artist, the gallerist, and the viewer. Rather 5  I call it contemporary Baroque to avoid the frequently used neo-Baroque, which tends to refer to decorative exuberance rather than to the philosophically and politically powerful baroque thought as it can be embodied and elaborated in art such as Salcedo’s. Others have used the term ultra Baroque (Armstrong and Zamudio-Taylor 2000). 6  The phrase real engagement is intended to recall the discussion of the trace in chapter 1.

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7  For this reason, I refrain from invoking the idea, common in art history, that the artist’s oeuvre can be divided into “periods.” This would detract attention from the accumulative operation underlying the constant innovations.

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than being a deplorable form of abuse, as a rigid moralist might judge, this co-perpetration offers an opportunity for working through, and with, productive complicity. Here, this collusion is a matter of time: always coming to the works after the fact of the primary violation, we see they require a double vision that we cannot provide. So far, this temporal aspect of displacement coincides with the anthropomorphic aspect I discussed above. In Unland, however, Salcedo insists that the furniture be taken out of its time as well. The tables—and, by retrospective extension, the chairs, doors, and wardrobes as well—have been displaced through time, first becoming “widowed,” when violence deprived them of their familiar users, and then forcibly taken to the present. In my view, the crossover between form and time—between human form and its traces, and between human time in all of its heterogeneity—is crucial to an understanding of one of Salcedo’s major artistic strategies—which, I emphasize once more, are necessarily political strategies as well. In contrast to the works I discussed for their anthropomorphic strategies, the pieces in Salcedo’s Unland exhibition are committed to a fundamentally different mode of working, one that understands, proposes, then rejects and offers alternatives to the predicament of the connection between art and horror in representation. As we know from the work of Holocaust theorists such as Dominick LaCapra and Ernst van Alphen, this connection is still as much a source of worry in contemporary thought as it has been since Adorno first cautioned us. It is therefore not surprising that an artist who devotes her life’s work to the subject of horror constantly experiments with new ways of addressing that relationship. This is why the topics of each of the previous chapters remain current in the remainder of this book. The negative side of the ambivalent relationship this work entertains with regard to representation, both in the narratological sense of creating characters and in the visual sense of the figuration of the human form, underlies all other strategies. The temporality discussed here uses that issue as a support, in the sense of a carrier.7 In Unland we can no longer speak of representation even as a marginal aspect or trace, as we still could, however tenuously, in La Casa Viuda I and II, and in many of the untitled, concrete-filled pieces of furniture, as well as perhaps, albeit even more negatively, in Atrabiliarios. No traces of human bodies are buried in Unland—at least, not buried. Here, the difference

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­ etween the representation of traces and the absence of representation b puts an altogether different gloss on the artist’s earlier work. But, as we will see, this does not make the critical engagement with the anthro­pomorphic imagination irrelevant. Looking at the earlier work in the light of the Unland installation, we see that there, in a sense, violence was represented by being repeated. This is what Merewether alluded to in his violence-filled sentence quoted above (“Chairs are covered by a fine skin of lace as if seared into the wood, bones are embedded into the side of a cabinet, a spoon forced between the seams of wood of a kitchen bureau,” [1998, 20–21]). I used the word mimicry to indicate that environment-specific hint of representation. The violence was, so to speak, perpetrated on the furniture. That violence was, however, displaced, shifted away from the victim to the domestic items. The relationship between victim and violence was established on the basis of indexical signification. In some works this was done by inserting kitchen utensils into pieces of furniture as extensions of the victims, evoking the latter by way of those synecdoches of their lives. In La Casa Viuda I and II, this was done through the violent immersion of clothing—an even more intimate trace of live bodies—into furniture that was left behind. The zipper and the piece of lace are metonyms of the person dislodged from the home. The traces they constitute were, in turn, treated with violence. Arguably, violence itself was perpetrated on the objects by means of other objects, so that it, and not the victim, was visually represented. This is an astute and subtle way to represent violence without representing the resulting suffering; these are not images of horror but intimations of it. These two works, then, use anthropomorphism not to follow in Goya’s footsteps but to demonstrate the impossibility of continuing the Spanish artist’s project to deal with contemporary horror. It is important to realize, however, that this theoretical “debate” performed by the sculptures is not a simple prohibition of representation, a representational reticence informed by discretion. Since the persistent discussions about the ethical possibility of representing violence inaugurated by Adorno’s indictment of post-Holocaust poetry, representational reticence has been quite generally promoted. As I have argued, however, Adorno’s phrase specifically indicted the aesthetic principle of stylization that in itself already promoted reticence and was thereby, precisely, barbaric in the philosopher’s eyes. It is not because of representation as such (either its difficulty or its potentially pornographic effect) but because of the transformation that aesthetic stylization performs, mitigating horror in a way that does injustice to the victims, that Adorno, in his paradoxical formulation, indicts poetry after Auschwitz. In other words, the transformation, [128]

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the mitigation, the softening—in a sense the very reticence—is barbaric, not the representational exuberance (1973b, 362). This is, however, one of the places where recalling Salcedo’s living and working environment is crucial. There, reticence has not been the central bone of contention it has been in Adorno’s aftermath. In an environment where people are systematically displaced, claiming a space as a habitat is more important than any discretion concerning the evocation of place, for example. Where silencing people is an everyday routine, speaking and other forms of expression are a vital necessity. This is not a realistic obsession but a necessary recuperation, if the art displayed in La Memoria Decapitada is any indication (Piedrahíta 2009). Likewise, despite her undeniably reticent aesthetic, Salcedo’s minimal perpetration of violence on the furniture does the opposite of averting her eyes in piousness or modesty. She does not leave the violence out of sight, but she does not stylize it to make it beautiful either. It is the works that are hauntingly beautiful, not the violence and suffering they bring up. Nor does she “express” the violence. On the contrary, small and marginal though it may be within the pieces, the violence is there, ready to be blown up, but by the viewer who is affected by it. This is why “beauty” is one of the issues in the history of art that Salcedo questions, as I argue in the final chapter. No stylizing, then, but no simple reticence either; such a tactic might join forces with an iconophobia that represses what we cannot bear to see. And Salcedo compels us to see, even if what we see is not hers to prescribe. Moreover, Adorno had cause to return to this indictment later on. Those who, against the grain of the tradition of reticence, have invoked Adorno’s other pertinent statement have not seen that his retraction was as forceful as the original indictment. Adorno never gave up on art. In the later reflection, he pairs reticence with an urgent plea for alternative forms of making art, in the sense of poiesis. Such art keeps relating to us the horror of mass violence that the Holocaust, especially but not uniquely, embodies. “Literature must resist precisely this verdict,” he wrote. He continues that suffering “demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids; hardly anywhere else does suffering still find its own voice” (2003b, 252). The concept of voice, used here as an ordinary word, yet still pertaining to the anthropomorphic imagination, suggests a need for expression that facilitates communication between those who suffered and a public who did not. This is necessary, not only because there is a need to speak (out), but also a need to speak to, in order to remedy the ignorance of the segment of humanity that is in charge of the further management of the culture that allowed the suffering to occur. The word-concept voice invoked here suggests a bridge between unspeakable suffering and the public in need of

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learning and ­subsequent activation. Salcedo’s work shows a struggle with this tension between reticence and need, which is why I engage it.8 The distinction between ordinary words and concepts is important here. As I have argued in Travelling Concepts (2002), many of the words we use can also appear as concepts. A relevant example is meaning. Concepts, in the first place, look like words. As Deleuze and Guattari noted in their introduction to What is Philosophy? some need etymological fancy, archaic resonance, or idiosyncratic folly to do their work; others require a Wittgensteinian family resemblance to their relatives; still others are the spitting image of ordinary words (1994, 3). The point is that concepts are not fixed slogans, nor rigid denominators, but enticements to think. Meaning, like voice, is a case of just such an ordinary word-concept that casually moves back and forth between semantics and intention. Because of this flexibility that makes semantics appear as intention, the pervasive predominance of intentionalism—the conflation of meaning with the author’s or the artist’s intention—with all its problems, is due to this unreflective conflation of words and concepts. To say that concepts can work as shorthand theories has consequences that pertain to the deployment of the concept of “theoretical object,” here specified as “political object.” Concepts are not ordinary words, even if words are used to speak (of) them. Similarly, works of visual art are not ordinary objects, even if ordinary objects are used to make them. Salcedo hyperbolically makes this point through her use of ordinary household furniture, subject to routine use. But the scraping, filling, and covering of the ordinary objects turn them from simple things into the visual equivalent of concepts. As we have seen before, Salcedo turns aesthetic-political principles into something literal, or embodied. This is why I keep insisting that in her works, the agency of the viewer is not only enabled and empowered but also enforced: if a viewer does not wish to take the trouble and spend the time, there is nothing to see. This is the primary force of her art. It is, in a sense, her Adornian reticence. Democratically available, the work itself selects its viewers. Only those willing to engage with it on the level of bodily commitment that I have suggested regarding Unland can actually see the art in front of them. But this “nothing to see” left for the hasty, lazy, or indifferent viewer is forcefully countered by the beauty of the piece, which compels viewers to stay “caught” by the work.9 8  Voice is one example of the word-concepts I discuss in Travelling Concepts (2002, 174–212). 9 

The use of the participle caught, semantically as well as syntactically evocative of passivity, is derived from Van Alphen’s use of it in titles such as Caught by History (1997) and “Caught by Images” (2002). Both publications are directly relevant for the present dis­cussion. [130]

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Figu r e 3.2 La Casa Viuda VI, 1995. Wood, metal, and bone, three parts: (1) 190.5 × 99 × 47 cm; (2) 160 × 119.5 × 56 cm; (3) 159 × 96.5 × 47 cm. Installation: “Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s,” Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1996. Collection: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

In some of her work, traces of anthropomorphic form seem indispensable for making the violation visible. The most daring, concrete instance is, perhaps, La Casa Viuda VI from 1995. Again, doors and bones are put in conjunction. But the most conspicuous element is a small metal seat, ­anchored to the horizontal door and given precarious balance by two coiled rib bones. It is attached to the standing door by a curved metal rod that is disproportionately thick. Before its fixation to the door, the seat was used for a child on the back of a bicycle. The attachment to the standing door blocks the (former) occupant of the seat from the ordinary movement of a bicycle. As Princenthal suggests, that attachment to an impermeable door also blocks easy emotional projection (2000, 70). Yet, with its small size and anthro­pomorphic shape, the absent child cannot be repressed from [131]

sight. We ­cannot cuddle it for its cuteness nor deplore its untimely death, but neither can we ignore its presence as a ghost. Unland, however, radically transforms the mode of ambivalent engagement with representation by rejecting representation altogether. We do not see violence or its traces; there is no “voice,” not even a metaphorical one. Instead, I contend that by circumventing the ambiguity of “voice” and thus avoiding the traps that so alarmed Adorno and his followers, this work operates almost entirely by means of duration. The work’s concept— its statement as a theoretical object—lies there.

F i g u r e 3 .3 Unland: The Orphan’s ­Tunic (detail), 1997. Wood, cloth, and hair,

No More Bones This installation consists of three sculptures: The Orphan’s Tunic (1997), Irreversible Witness (1995–98), and Audible in the Mouth (1998). In these works, duration becomes the major tool for turning the direction of the narrative from third-person—out-there, concerning the other—to second-person— here. This directionality touches the viewer in the most concrete, bodily way possible. A first tool of this work with duration is the materiality of the sculptures. Importantly, although the kitchen tables and the small cot that are their major components were utterly sturdy when still in use, these sculptures are extremely fragile, nearly impossible to construct, and virtually impossible to see. The material is still furniture, but the signifying element is extreme, in its finesse, its fragility, and, in spite of those qualities, its durability: human hair and a bit of silk.

80 × 245 × 98 cm. Collection: Fundació “la

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Caixa,” Barcelona.

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F i g u r e 3 . 4   Unland: Irreversible Witness, 1995–98. Wood, cloth, metal, and hair, 112 × 249 × 89 cm. Collection: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

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The anthropomorphic is not entirely absent from Unland, as if to convey the point that, in order to make the singularity of human tragedy universally important and available for metaphoring, human presence-in­absence is indispensable. The Orphan’s Tunic combines human-worn silk with human hair to produce a surface that evokes death in its gray discoloration, yet is enduring in its shiny surface. Irreversible Witness has a metal cot sewn onto a table by means of an intricate fabric of silk and hair. The cot is the lone element of anthropomorphism in this chilling space. It is a trace, the negative form of a child now absent, as absent as the child dislodged from the bike seat in La Casa Viuda VI. This is an absence on the order of that associated with the shoes in Atrabiliarios, but it is also somewhat representational in the anthropomorphism of the relationality. It figures this relationality in the way it is joined to the table: it is driven into the wooden surface, then sewn onto it by innumerable human hairs— a “threading of pain and its memories through the surface of history,” as Huyssen wrote beautifully (2000, 101). Driven into the wood and lovingly fixed, the cot evokes the child clinging to its mother, which, in a situation of danger, means that both die. Alternatively, at a later moment in the chronology of violence, in Doane’s “temporal lag,” it evokes perhaps the paralyzed fixity of melancholy. The duration of the work’s making, which the viewer can deduce from the surface, becomes a significant element in the effect of the Unland sculptures. This is not a matter of the artist’s intention but of the visible materiality of her labor. The surface speaks of patience, repetition, finesse, and endless duration. While irresistibly invoking the existential contiguity of indexical meaning production, the sheer number of hairs used bears testimony to the time of the work’s making—as homage to the dead, whose bodies remain remembered through their hair only. However, this material is a cause, not a consequence, of that duration. The hair dictates the labor, so to speak. To weave hair through wood is nearly impossible. The phrase “labor of love” has never been more aptly and sadly applicable. In and of itself, the choice of hair as the medium of attachment is multiply significant. It is, of course, in the first place, a trace, poignantly material, particular, and temporal. It is the one anthropomorphic element in the work, the pure and real trace, synecdoche of the live body. Hair is also in itself a theoretical object that implicates duration. Hair grows rather rapidly. Yet it is one of the most durable bodily tissues, as durable as bone. The use of durability here is an act of resistance against “disappearing” (again used here in the transitive sense), a strategy of warfare. But, in contrast to the durability of bones, the fragility of hair, which accrues symbolic value, also stipulates that this resistance cannot give hope; it cannot endure, even if [134]

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the hair itself can. At the same time, the fragility is a function of the viewer, who is compelled to come dangerously close but must decide to leave the hair alone lest the work that preserves it be destroyed. The choice of hair over bone is also an aesthetic decision. As such, it is an issue of temporality. First, the relation of bones to death is too ordinary and predictable, as well as overly universalized. The choice of hair points to the dialectic of singularity that the artist clearly values. Hair, in contrast to bones, is what was once lovingly combed, what shone and framed the singular, real face now gone. Hair is what people have while they are alive; bones only become visible after death. Whereas bones denote death mercilessly and unambiguously, hair is so close to the living face that its poignancy increases to the extreme. It denotes neither life nor death. Instead, it connotes both, as well as the perverted chronology in which they succeed each other in the situation of violence. The ambiguity is crucial, for, as we have already seen, there is a necessary complicity involved in political art. The hair “unnerves the viewer” and becomes “completely strange” (Barson 2004, 4). Second, the hairs are separated, singularized; not only is it hair from a particular individual, but each hair is separated, manipulated, and attached to its new support with extreme care. While this act, too, carries a subliminal connotation of the inevitable collusion with violence, it is primarily a form of care. This labor of separating and manipulating hair by hair implies a work with and for singularity that is centrally relevant to Salcedo’s project. Imagine the effort of taking one hair at the time, drilling a hole for it, weaving it through the hole, drilling another hole, and bringing the hair back to the surface. For a working method that is not invested in the individual “hand” of the artist, this handiwork is significantly durational, and that duration is visible. As an almost absurd endeavor, weaving the hair is, as Huyssen noted, “an imaginative reversal of the basic nature of the materials.” The hair holds fast where the wood almost collapses (2000, 101). Third, and most important because it implicates the viewer, the fragility of single hairs imposes respect and distance, as an extreme form of the “don’t touch” taboo that applies in venerable art museums. Thus, the hair addresses the gallery visitor as concretely and specifically as it itself has been treated. By invoking this taboo and by thus making it a gesture of protection, of care, the three parts of Unland firmly position Salcedo’s work alongside that of the great masters and also make it irreducibly political— through the shift from respect for art to respect for the dead. But the most important performance of Unland is to offer the experience of the near-impossibility of seeing. It is this near-impossibility that

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serves as a tool for the foreshortening of time. To actually see what makes these ordinary tables different from those in our own homes and what makes them worth putting in a museum, the viewer needs to come closer to them; dangerously close. Danger looms large, not only for the works that could so easily be damaged or even destroyed, but also for the viewer, since awareness of the fragility of the objects makes approaching them feel like perpetrating violence. This, again, is crucial. One of the indispensable elements in political art is “contagion,” or complicity; a complicity without which no affective engagement can be sustained. But here something new appears in Unland as political object. Respecting the work by staying at a distance is not possible. Distance makes the table recognizable as an ordinary thing, but not as artwork; it offers us neither its political nor its theoretical implications. The act of approaching the artwork is necessary if one wishes to see it as something other than a broken table. And here the trouble begins. One is never close enough to see the surface “properly.” While the Untitled Furniture pieces and the works of La Casa Viuda are open to viewing from variable distances, Unland makes a radical break between seeing the thing—the table—and seeing the work, as well as between seeing the form (sculpture) and seeing the surface (painting). And yet, although the break is radical, it takes duration to traverse the break. The use of duration to bridge epistemic breaks is not new in itself. Indeed, the best way to clarify the stunning theoretical import of this durational break is to look at the famous passage from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in which the protagonist approaches Albertine for the first kiss. This passage is but one in a series of reflections on the irreconcilable opposition between distant and close perception in the French novelist’s work.10 Although Proust, who was a contemporary of Bergson and who was probably influenced by the philosopher’s theory of memory, made ample use of detail in his own writings, he abhorred detail in visual arts. His rejection is based on the impossibility of seeing the whole and the detail at the same time, and this is, precisely, the dilemma Unland poses. Proust’s rejection of the detail in the matter of art is explicit. Detailed perception, where painting is concerned, is a resounding failure. No “correction” is supplied to remedy the ridiculousness of the pompous snob Biche, who tries to look closely and, in so doing, fails to see anything: “I went up to one of them,” he begins, “just to see how it was done. I stuck my nose into it. Well let me tell you! Impossible to say whether it was done with glue, with soap, with sealing-wax, with sunshine, with leaven, with caca!” (1981, 1:278). Stick10 

This paragraph and the next rely on my book on Proust and vision (1997). [136]

11 

The question of detailed perception in painting is elaborated in Didi-Huberman 1990 and, in general, by Bachelard 1927; 1980. A relevant discussion of Bachelard’s discourse and its pictorial aspects can be found in Culler’s work, which has been influential for mine (1988). [137]

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ing your nose into it is precisely what Unland forbids. Proust’s passage is a ­blatant parody, even though it is directed not only at a member of the little clan who claims to be an amateur of the arts and will later turn up as the paradigmatic painter Elstir, but also at a prestigious and serious predecessor such as Rembrandt, about whom similar anecdotes abound. For our purposes here, though, the heavy irony should not conceal the primacy of matter in the passage. The detailed materiality of the surfaces of Unland could not be farther removed from the sticky gels evoked by Biche. Salcedo’s work requires an alternative to sticking one’s nose in it. In terms of the theory of perception invoked here, the question is whether detail can be seen and what that act of seeing does to the perception of the whole. Proust offers one answer, in that this passage undeniably resembles the other moment of close-up perception when Marcel kisses Albertine. On this occasion the force of the passage is so striking that it would be impossible to ignore its implications, despite the irony which, once again, is not missing: “Suddenly my eyes ceased to see, then my nose, crushed by the collision, no longer perceived any odour, and, without thereby gaining any clearer idea of the taste of the rose of my desire, I learned, from these obnoxious signs, that at last I was in the act of kissing Albertine’s cheek” (1981, 2:379). Close-up perception reduces itself to nothing in the aporia of the detail, the theory of which dates back to Gaston Bachelard. The act of looking at something close up splits the subject into two, making communication between minutiae and clarity impossible.11 It is important that the novelist is not preoccupied with aesthetic issues, but with perception. The question raised in these two passages does not concern art. In the discourse on painting there is no detailed elaboration of the visual image. Rather, as soon as the image is described, it comes to life, and the painting dissolves into “life.” Unland takes up this dilemma and replies to the challenge to visibility. Proust’s kiss takes a different turn when, in a similar slow approach, the viewer comes closer to Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic, not to kiss but to see it “at last.” One comes closer and closer, feeling less and less comfortable and more and more voyeuristic, penetrating the home of this bodily presence while, at the same time, trespassing the imaginary line that the public gallery has drawn around the work. Here, however, unlike in the passage from Proust, aesthetic issues are implicated. Aesthetically, one is painfully forced to abandon sight of the form in favor of the surface that must give the form meaning. This approach is a moment

Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic (detail), 1997. Wood, cloth, and hair, 80 × 245 × 98 cm. Collection: Fundaçio “la Caixa,” Barcelona. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

12 

See Derrida 2004. I consider attention here in a synchronic perspective. It is, however, also a historical and thus variable notion. Think of Walter Benjamin’s famous critique of the shift in attention in mechanically reproducible media (1968c). For a history of attention in modernism, see Crary 1999. [139]

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F i g u r e 3 .5

of harrowing complicity. Thus, the public /private ­divide and all it entails is experienced with great intensity, as museums and imaginary homes both fail to offer protection for that divide. And then, when one approaches and bends over, where Proust’s protagonist stops perceiving anything, quite suddenly the surface comes into sharp visibility. Even with forewarning, the actual perception of the details—the tiny holes, the sewing, the braiding, the woven hair—comes as a shattering shock. At that moment, which inaugurates a repulsion, the viewer sees, and realizes, that actual human hair is the stuff of this weaving. This moment of shock is truly forceful and violent. This is an encountered sign if ever there was one; a sign that enforces thought, but in and with as much as on the body. It is an effect of the temporal discrepancy between the times of the past and the present, when our acts of viewing ­become, suddenly, acts of a different nature than just that of routine looking in a continuum. This is the necessity of that radical break. In Proust, the process simply ends when perception is no longer possible. In Salcedo, perception shifts from whole to detail, from volume to surface, and from thing to artwork. Something happens that links the violence, the disappearance itself, to us, now. Huyssen phrases it as follows: “Salcedo’s memory sculpture unlocks itself only within the flow of time because temporality itself is inscribed into the work” (2000, 92–93). This inscription of time is a mobilization of actuality. Attention and actuality together begin to approach the kind of temporality that is at stake in Salcedo’s ongoing search for an effective, newly conceived political art through temporal foreshortening. Actuality comes out of its dreariness, stretched out. The shiny, alive-looking hairs are deeply, physically disconcerting. This effect does not become mitigated in repetition. As we step backward, then forward again, the shock is equally intense. Compared to La Casa Viuda I and II, we move from theater to performance art. Representational, third-person narrative as a readerly attitude is no longer possible here, not at all, not even as an allusion, as it might still have been with the works discussed earlier. The representation of the violation of lives and homes through kitchen spoons or bones, or zippers or lace inserted into wooden furniture, is now replaced by the sole performance of attention. Whereas this slow, myopic attention allows the viewer to feel, in her own body, what intrusion into someone’s life is like, the attention does not repeat the violence as in the Derridian pharmakon; it counters it.12

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If there is a shift in Salcedo’s work—and I hesitate to call it that—it is here that we can locate it. From a bold, polemical deployment of problematic modes, such as the tiny allusions to representation, she now rigorously moves to the here and now, where the viewer is tightly implicated in the aesthetic act. I hesitate to speak of a shift, however, because the bottom line of both aesthetic strategies is the same: remembering the dead does not redeem them, no more than reflecting on one’s intrusion takes the sting of voyeurism out of looking-in. But between complicit repetition and problematic redemption lies the cultural activity of stretching the course of time, whose ordinary pace makes the passing of repetition too easy by offering it protection under the wings of redemption.13 The Unland sculptures work on the basis of the performance of duration. They slow the viewing down, to the extreme. Physically, they make you dizzy with their back-and-forth movement between microscopic and macroscopic looking. As a consequence, looking itself becomes tortuous, almost torturous. Psychically, the surfaces recall Caravaggesque confinement within the space of shadows and sparing luminosity, where body parts are so foreshortened that they enter the viewer’s space and make her recoil. The structure of microscopic detail of these surfaces conjures up such massive violence as to make it impossible for any historical or journalistic account to encompass it. Instead, the surfaces foreshorten time so as to enter the viewer’s lifetime and break its linearity and regularity. They stick to you long after the intense experience of time has faded back into everyday life. I now wish to elaborate on the visual “technique” that achieves this effect: the mode or medium of these works’ performativity. Probing this in some detail will, I hope, enhance understanding of how it is that art, today, can act in the political. Foreshortening Salcedo’s intervention in art, her radical political turn in this work, is to deploy duration in a form that is the temporal equivalent of foreshortening. As an invention, skill, or pictorial device, foreshortening is such an ingrained practice in figurative art that it may seem farfetched to talk about it in relation to Salcedo’s art, which, formally and aesthetically, is more readily qualified as minimalist than as, say, baroque. Yet, there are several reasons to consider Salcedo’s work at least partly also from the point of view of a baroque vision. As we have already seen, the “melodramatic” tone of her La Casa Viuda I invokes a popular interpretation of the latter 13 

See Bal and Bryson 2001 for looking-in. Once more, I recall Bersani’s important discussion of and caution against art as redemption (1990). [140]

14 

Sarduy 1986–87 offers a detailed analysis of the contemporary Baroque in Latin America. Although his starting point is literature, he brings the phenomena he describes systematically to bear on visual art as well, citing examples of visual works displaying the same phenomena. I use the qualifier minimal rather than minimalist because Salcedo cannot be appropriated for the modernist movement of minimalism. [141]

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aesthetic. Moreover, the qualifier baroque indicates more than a “look” of artworks. It is a philosophy, comprising, among other features, a polemical relationship to the body that resists the catholic terror to which the historical Baroque was subjected, only occasionally able and willing to subvert it from within. In terms of Salcedo’s own place of work, in a culture where bodies are treated like disposable rejects, a vision that separates body from soul is deeply complicitous with the routine, silencing violence that Salcedo’s work is meant to counter. Baroque becomes, then, a holistic view in which people are bodies, because there is nothing else, nothing that matters more than their integrity. In addition, as the surfaces of her works make clear, Salcedo is also a kind of painter. She has this in common with many other artists of her continent who are sculptors, have a baroque perspective on bodies, and treat surfaces in a painterly manner. Finally, if her work is effective as a “new” political art, it is also due to the collaboration in it between “theater” and “painting.” This collaboration is premised on the inevitable centrality of performance—the impossibility for the viewer of remaining aloof and distant. For it is precisely that collaboration that solicits the viewer’s performance. For all these reasons together, it is relevant that she would deploy a painterly strategy such as foreshortening, and do so on the twodimensional surface, even in a strictly sculptural work with a rather minimal aesthetic.14 Significantly, the term foreshortening, although commonly used, is poorly defined in art-term reference books. The 1994 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Art has no entry on it at all. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary only defines the verb to foreshorten. To foreshorten is “to cause to be apparently shortened in the direction not lying perpendicular to the line of sight. Also, to delineate so as to represent this effect.” The discourse, here, is that of linear perspective. The definition is preciously tautological: a transitive verb is defined as “to cause to be,” whereas “apparently” begs the question of how this comes about. Given the near-dogmatic status of perspective in the history of art and its de facto predominance during the highest phases of Western art, tampering with perspective is an incisive act in itself. Perspective is considered a method for the technical perfection of the transformation of three dimensions into two dimensions—of representation into illusion. ­Subsuming

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foreshortening under the heading of the dominant term perspective constitutes the kind of humanistic obedience that Salcedo’s project attempts to shun. When considered as an alternative to perspective rather than as a method of it, foreshortening, although also involved in the production of three-dimensional illusion, is the opposite of linear perspective on three grounds: it extends space forward instead of backward, it involves the body, and it emphatically uses distortion against illusion. In the technique of perspective, the represented space is encompassed from the viewer’s disembodied, “retinal” position—the viewpoint—by means of receding and narrowing bands of space that turn the farthest visible line—the horizon—into an opposite point, the so-called vanishing point. As the latter term indicates, this is the point where vision vanishes into the realm of the invisible. The viewer grasps, takes hold of, the entire space that this vanishing point delimits. Perspective is still generally taken to be much more dominant than it really is, even within histories of Western art, from the Renaissance to modernism. This is because, although the distortions of linear perspective have been brought to light, as a device it continues to look systematic, clear, and real. It is the utmost form of realism. This effect may be due mainly to the fact that straight lines have something straightforward and honest about them.15 Let me take a slightly recalcitrant position. In one sense, foreshortening is the opposite of perspective. Here, too, by means of distortion, space becomes more real. By being shortened in length and extended in width, the limbs become longer, not in the picture plane but toward us, perpendicular to the plane. Far from catering to the one-eyed, disembodied viewer, however, foreshortening creates the illusion that the object extends into the viewer’s space. The object thus leaps off the canvas and pierces the imaginary wall that separates the represented space and everything that occurs there from the space where the viewer stands. As a result, foreshortening assaults the very illusionary disembodiment of the viewer that linear perspective promotes. Instead, it enforces the viewer’s performance. In its goal it may be similar, but in its effect foreshortening is the opposite of perspective. This is the paradox of foreshortening. Although allegedly serving the realistic illusion of representation, giving “body” to the flat surfaces that constitute the figures in the scene, its effect is very different. Thus, while linear perspective moves backward to produce a space the viewer can possess, 15 

The complications of linear perspective have been definitively pointed out by Hubert Damisch in a brilliant study (1994); for a concise explanation of Damisch’s theory, see Van Alphen 1997.

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16 

For the conception of baroque that I am touching on all too briefly here, see my book on the subject (1999). The view of perception that I allude to is taken up again in chapter 5.

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colonize, but not enter, foreshortening moves forward, to bring the figures to life so that they can approach the viewer. In the same move, therefore, it challenges the viewer’s imaginary safety. As a result, foreshortening breaks the realistic illusion just as it supports it. Or rather, it changes it and its modalities of viewing from a distanced and disembodied viewing to an engaged and embodied one. With foreshortening, the mode of the artwork shifts away from representation, with all its illusions, into a realm of performance that binds the work to the viewer. I cannot help but see the trick; hence, I refuse to fall for its illusionism. But, at the same time, I willfully allow it to impose engagement. For, in the ambiguous realm where I know I am overstepping a boundary yet feel compelled and am delighted to risk doing so, what happens instead is perhaps even more crucial to what art can accomplish. Far from being a variation of perspective, however, foreshortening has operated much longer, without any relationship to perspective. Foreshortening as a technique is much older than the perspective it is alleged to serve. Gombrich dates it to “a little before 500 B.C.,” and explains it through a Greek vase (1950, 53–54). But as a principle of art’s spatial interactivity—a trigger of an experience of ontological transgression—it became a ground for experimentation and innovation after the heyday of perspective. When the wonder of the visual mastery of space in relation to the horizon was no longer new, movement in the opposite direction became the source of an altogether different kind of wonder. The experience of foreshortening—not the technique or the trick, but what it triggers interactively—might be called something akin to baroque. For me this muchabused term stands not for an art-historical movement but for a visual philosophy of perception through the body. It is this concept that I believe to be crucial to Salcedo’s art.16 To associate foreshortening with “baroque” takes our reflection on the concept out of linear time. Rather than being a predecessor of perspective, the technique comes (again) in its wake. And, importantly, it is in this polemically pre-posterous sense that it has taken such hold on contemporary Latin American art. Baroque implies a profound questioning of the ontological distinctions that define fiction as distinct from reality. On the face of it, in the wake of the jubilant endorsement of the recently invented linear perspective, foreshortening as a typically baroque device served the further “post-Renaissance” pursuit of illusionism. Within that pursuit, however, it was also sometimes used to fulfill an opposite function—as

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an ironic wink, so to speak. Instead of preceding it, the technique took on a new life as a critical modifier of perspective. Like all posteriorities, it also turned against what it sought to bring to perfection. “After” denotes a chronological position, including the burden of antagonism and “knowing better.” But “post-” also implies a movement through that which the later moment supersedes. Moreover, a sense of “working through” in the more pointed sense can also inhere in posteriority. In this respect, a pre-posterous baroque view is also steeped in the syncretism that enabled aboriginal imagery to resist erasure after the Catholic conquest.17 If it is to be a triply “post-” linear perspective in this way, foreshortening can be expected, either alternately or simultaneously, to obliquely comment on perspective. It can thus subvert it, which would make it a suitable strategy for a political artist. It can be more illusionistic than Renaissance perspective, it can be critical of perspectival illusionism, and it can change it from within by “working through” it. The triple engagement of what was so successful before is reminiscent of Salcedo’s complicating work with representation. Before turning to the artist’s invention of temporal foreshortening, though, l would first like to consider which tradition of spatial foreshortening is involved in this artist’s mobilization of the potential of that device.18 Since Caravaggio’s practice is also the most thoroughly physical one I know, I invoke Caravaggio as a master of post-Renaissance spatial innovation. I do this with reference to two of his most relevant paintings in this respect, the Crucifixion of Saint Peter and the Conversion of Saint Paul, both from 1601–2, painted as companion pieces for the chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, where they can still be found today. I chose these two works because, although different from Salcedo’s work in all other respects (mood, aesthetics, and style), they are similar to it in that they are not autonomous pieces. They are anchored to their specific locations, and their work with foreshortening embodies that embeddedness. Their mode of painting, indeed, their use of foreshortening, requires the installation site, as well as the viewer’s bodily presence and acts of looking 17 

Paradoxically, my reluctance to pin Salcedo down to her “Latin Americanness” is perfectly in sync with this polemical preposterous deployment of baroque visions that itself is characteristic of Latin America. For the survival of the aboriginal visual imagination, see Gruzinski 1990. 18  I am more familiar with Caravaggio’s work than with the many works of the Latin American Baroque that might also serve as examples here. On Latin American Baroque, see the volume edited by Moser and Goyer (2001), which also contains illuminating theoretical discussions of Baroque art, then and now.

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F i g u r e 3.6 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1601–2. Oil on canvas, 230 × 175 cm. Cerasi Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome. Photo: Alinari / Art Resource, NY.

F i g u r e 3 .7 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Conversion of Saint Paul, 1601–2. Oil on canvas, 230 × 175 cm. Cerasi Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome. Photo: Scala / Art ­Resource, NY.

in ways that Salcedo’s work also requires them. What experiences, then, do these paintings solicit and enhance by means of foreshortening?19 First, as with Unland, the effectivity of these two paintings depends on the experience of the difficulty of seeing that is inherent to the space in which they are exposed. To view the paintings fully, one must stand between them, something the casual visitor is not allowed to do. As far as temporality is concerned, this pressure ironically makes up for the limited access, for on this utterly mundane level, one is made acutely aware of bodily frustration and the effect of duration. Machines allow visitors to insert coins to see the paintings illuminated for a short duration. Lack of spatial access and limited duration of luminous visibility are inherent to this viewing experience: it is characterized by a sense of the partial and 19  For more extensive analyses of these two paintings, see Sapir 2008, 204–45; esp. 213– 16, 226–27, 244–45; and Bal 2006, 394–403. On the political implications of the Conversion, see Taylor 2008. An even more obvious, indeed, spectacular instance would be Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1601). I chose not to use that particular work, however, because that painting, now in the National Gallery in London, does not depend on the site as much as do the two apostle paintings.

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the transient, of the impossibility of possessing these images. One cannot stare at them at leisure, own them, or objectify them. I see in this practical situation of the works in situ an instructive analogy to Salcedo’s sophisticated, casual-seeming mode of installing the Unland works. Here, too, the intervention of the museum, comparable to the coin-light machine in Rome, puts its stamp on the experience before the visitor reaches visibility of the sculptures. A sign warning us of the fragility of the works is actually the only indication that, back in that attic room, those tables are likely to be art. The second aspect of the experience of viewing these two works pertains to the kind of representations that both images offer. They are figurative pieces, proposing not just a fictional happening but also a specific bias toward that happening. Strange as it may sound, and in keeping with Salcedo’s nonfigurative practice, these paintings make void the usual divide between figuration and abstraction. They are very obviously figurative, but so is, I would think, the display of a table, a desk, a door, or a child’s cot. The point is that their figuration cannot do the work of art. Their painterly mode clashes with their mise en scène: these paintings are totally illusionistic in their texture yet totally artificial in their figurativity. It is in this collaboration-through-disjunction between painting and theatricality that I see an affiliation between Caravaggio’s paintings and Salcedo’s work, which is most radically represented in Unland.20 Third, the experience of the disjunction between illusion and realism sharpens the qualification of illusionism as a tool to attract the embodied look, which the figuration further elaborates by, among other means, foreshortening. The scenes in these two paintings are utterly theatrical, so much so that their theatricality counters the illusionism. This theatricality is powerfully visible, for example, in the figure of Peter, who lifts his head and shoulder to look away, as if from boredom at having to pose in an uncomfortable position for too long. Duration is irresistibly represented here, in the figure’s body and facial expression. Similarly, Paul displays his muscles, tense from holding up his arms for the length of time it takes to paint him so painstakingly. The Crucifixion of Saint Peter manifests this antinarrative activism that is specifically directed against narrative third-person distancing and the temporal closure it entails. It does this most famously in the figure of the 20  With my remark on happening and its “coloring” by bias, I am alluding to the narrative structure of any representation of happenings, where a narration—here, in paint—is inevitably colored by a represented vision, either the narrator’s or a represented character’s. For the narrative theory underlying these remarks, where I proposed the term focalization for this coloring, see Bal 2009.

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man holding the shovel. He has the dirty feet of a street worker, the rough, reddish elbows of a manual laborer, and an incredibly lively, fleshy pair of buttocks that, thanks to foreshortening, press through his pants so as to make you look twice at his behind and at the shapely, manly shoulder. His male body is totally real. Its back is turned obliquely toward the viewer, seducing you to come in or, at least, to stay captivated. Peter’s body as a whole is foreshortened, ending with his feet closest to us. This technique makes the body appear utterly corporeal, and him, real; not as a saint, but as an actor. The arm of the man with the shovel is depicted in an even more distorted way. The upper arm is too long, the lower arm too short. The rough elbow, a trace of physical labor, points toward us like a pustule. Peter, however, whose crucifixion will be upside-down, still recedes away from us, from left to right. Foreshortening here hints at perspective’s tricks. The painting to the right in the chapel, the Conversion of Saint Paul, continues the spatial captivation in a time-consuming process. It also seems to comment on a feature of the Crucifixion: the fact that this painting resists eye contact, a resistance which is figuration’s mode of reticence. In both paintings, but especially in the right-hand one, space is confined. Caravaggio has been accused of lacking spatial skills; it has been alleged that his spaces are overcrowded, sometimes arbitrarily cropped, and unharmonious. But the Conversion clearly demonstrates that Caravaggio knew exactly what he was doing with this famous confined spatiality. It is this un­harmonious use of space that connects his work to Salcedo’s, whose ­installations are as much interventions in negative space as they are displays of sculptures— even though, in Unland, there is too much rather than too little space. When I first saw the tables of Unland, ignorant of this artist’s work, they were almost casually placed in a large space with a low ceiling—distant, too far away, so that at first sight you might erroneously think you had entered a warehouse or an attic. (Incidentally, the exhibition was on the upper floor of the museum.) Between the bewildered question “Where is the art?” and the experience of shock that I described earlier in this chapter, the viewer going from the top of the stairs to the works at the other end of the space traverses a number of heterogeneous moments in both time and space. The Conversion of Saint Paul is a study in foreshortening. The depiction of Paul’s body as a whole is foreshortened: he lies with his legs spread open, one thigh almost twice as long as the other, his similarly unequal arms and hands outstretched to receive whatever it is that the light brings. This story invites ordinary people with live bodies into the scene, just as the depiction of the helper and his buttocks did in the Crucifixion. The space has grown more confined, the body more passive and receptive. In this way,

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the erotic ­quality becomes poignantly concrete, so that the figures’ blindness comes to signify the substitution of touch for sight, a radicalization of the thought of visual tactility. Tactility also defines Salcedo’s surfaces, on which there is so little to be seen. Yet, tantalizingly, we cannot touch it, for that would be a violation, liable to destroy the works. The combination of tactile appeal and the taboo on touching—enhanced by a sign that says the sculptures are extremely vulnerable—can only result in an awareness of tactile looking. In art theory, such looking is called “haptic.” Haptic looking, an idea put forward by Aloïs Riegl (1999) in 1901 and developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 614ff.), is much discussed today, although not in relation to Salcedo’s work. Yet, this work is more haptic than any and, again, literalized or embodied in ways that make her works theoretical objects. Haptic, from the Greek aptô (touching) is characterized by three primary features. It solicits proximity, inviting viewers to caress the image with the eyes; it is formless, and lines change their function. Salcedo inflects these features while maintaining them in near-hyperbolic force. Proximity in her work does not lead to the impressionist fusion of foreground and background. Instead, the works hinder that fusion, maintaining the intense experience of the incommensurability of distance and proximity. Formlessness shifts gears as well. The crisscrossing hairs, for example, maintain their individuality, since the difficulty of seeing them enforces respect for each hair so painstakingly visually conquered. Finally, the hairs as lines do not, as in optic lines, connect two points, but while they remain moving between points, as haptic lines do, their movement precludes access to any points whatsoever. Looking back from Unland to the two Caravaggios, astonishingly the earlier works seem to change into a post-Salcedo commentary, an allegiance to her inflection of haptic visuality. In one sense, these two Caravaggio paintings are a systemic counterpoint to Salcedo’s tables. Whereas Salcedo’s tables refrain from telling any story, the two paintings tell official stories of martyrdom and shock. But whereas Salcedo’s sculptures effectuate the tragic mood in their mode of address, the visual-spatial effect of Caravaggio’s paintings shifts the mood from tragic to erotic. So powerful is the way space is set up to change a flat surface into a three-dimensional space that, through foreshortening and other devices, it absorbs the viewer into the realm of the senses. But the means the paintings deploy to achieve this are haptic-according-to-Salcedo. Space, in Caravaggio, is what Bergson called a “natural feeling,” and not—as in Renaissance perspective—geometrical, and hence measurable and identical for everyone who perceives it. This natural feeling is hetero­

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Foreshortening Time We now have all the elements that will allow us to follow the imaginative leap that I claim Salcedo’s work makes by transforming foreshortening into a temporal device for political effect. Foreshortened time is distorted— made wider or thicker—and condensed. It thus comes forward to touch the viewer, so that she experiences the almost tangible pull of time. It also challenges the ontological, temporal cut made between past and present. In terms of grammar, time becomes what the French linguist Émile Benveniste (1971) called “discourse” (as opposed to “story”). It is expressed in tenses that connect the past to the present, as opposed to ones that separate the two moments, and in verb forms of the first and second person

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geneous, different for everyone wherever they stand. This heterogeneity ­resists the Deleuzian fusion while being the more forceful as it is strictly haptic. Like Salcedo’s tables, the paintings can be seen either from a distance or up close, or in form and surface simultaneously. Yet, such Bergsonian space can be neither divided nor measured. Bergson calls this space “extensity.” Emanating from the subject, it extends outward; hence the term. In fact, extensity is foreshortening considered in reverse. Foreshortened space extends from the “other” toward the subject, not the other way around. The other—the affective load of the works—thus touches the viewer. Coming from the philosopher of duration, it is likely that this concept can be refracted temporally. Time, as I intimated earlier, is heterogeneous, and even more so in situations of violence. Working with time is, thus, a form of political resistance along the lines of Salcedo’s approach to the political. She remains within extensive space—or rather, spacetime, because, as opposed to the perpetration of violence that completely disempowers its victims, here the victims are the source of extensity, the ones re-empowered to act. In this activation of time she is not alone. Again, it is Lygia Clark who also deployed time as a “healing” strategy in her work, which she called “anthropofagy.” She called the time necessary to “do” her anthropofagic works called Beasts, “internal expressive time” (Clark and Bois 1994, 97). For Clark, the art required actual acts, the single duration involved in taking her pieces and, for example, cutting them (99). “Space is now a kind of time ceaselessly metamorphosed through action,” she said (104; emphasis in text). Salcedo achieves this, too, but in her work, the action is not a physical action of cutting or rolling a ball, or any of the other actions Clark compelled her visitors to perform; with her minimal aesthetic, she reduces action to vision only; but slow vision, in the duration of extensive spacetime.

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between which speech emerges, rather than in those of the third person who is being spoken about. This is a version of that “temporal lag, a superimposition of images, an inextricability of past and present” that Doane discussed (2002, 77). It is also an extreme and emblematic case of what Princenthal wrote about Salcedo’s work in general, in the first sentence of her article: “Doris Salcedo’s quietly spellbinding sculpture is born of the greatest urgency, but speaks in a language of obstacle and delay” (2000, 40). The device of delay, the “temporal lag,” is most precisely embodied in the foreshortening of time. If, by means of slow time, the viewer is drawn into the work, this is a standard result of discourse—visual as well as linguistic. This drawing in happens because, as the second person to whom the artwork speaks, the viewer must in turn take on the exchangeable role of first person. With foreshortened time, this happens specifically between the viewer’s present and the past that the work so precariously holds.21 Bergson’s philosophy of time, put to such brilliant use by Deleuze in his books on cinema, is also helpful for an understanding of the point of temporal foreshortening. As is well known, Bergson revolutionized the current conceptions of time. He replaced measurable, dividable, and spatialized time with continuous duration. In the chapter “The Idea of Duration” in Time and Free Will (1960), the French philosopher explains the importance of a conception of duration based on continuity. The key to understanding this is Bergson’s concept of multiplicity. Partly in discussion with his British colleague and friend Bertrand Russell, who maintained the possibility of breaking up duration into discrete instants, Bergson distinguished two ways of considering multiplicity, or two kinds of multiplicity, to argue for the continuity of duration: “that of material objects, in which the conception of number is immediately applicable; and the multiplicity of states of consciousness, which cannot be regarded as numerical without the help of some symbolical representation, in which a necessary element is space” (2002, 54; emphasis in original).22 Instead of a numerical conception of duration as a succession of instants, he proposes the idea that living in duration is a form of gathering: each moment is accompanied by the memory of the preceding ones. The formulation of the distinction in this passage between countable objects (in space) and states of consciousness might wrongly suggest a phe21 

For a useful overview of different conceptions of time, see Munn 1992. Of the many philosophical analyses of time, I found Casarino’s Deleuzian-Marxist one very helpful (Casarino and Negri 2008, 219–45). 22  Originally published in English in Bergson 1960. This text is more readily available in Bergson 2002. This volume contains a good selection of Bergson’s writings and an excellent introduction. See also his Matter and Memory (1991) and Creative Evolution (1983). [150]

23 

Spacetime or timespace is the term for the unity of time and space that Mikhail Bakhtin has theorized as chronotope (1996, esp. 84). On the relevance of this concept for contemporary (popular) culture, see Peeren 2008. While paying scarce attention to the duration that, for me, is absolutely central, Tanya Barson’s analysis of Unland is the most detailed and associative one I know of (2004). It includes a comparison with Celan’s poem “An Eye, Open” (published in 1959) from which the title of one of the pieces, Audible in the Mouth, was derived. While she speaks of the faltering of language in Celan’s work, the author fails to interpret the consequences of the fact that the poem’s first and thematically central word is “hours” (see esp. 5–6). [151]

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nomenological, subjectivist account. Instead, the two forms of multiplicity can be said to merge in the occurrence of perception that involves both the materiality of objects and that of the human body. This is not a mentalist, subjectivist, or phenomenological conception to the extent that Bergson considers the body to be a material entity and perception, likewise, a material practice. As a result, Bergson’s struggle to eliminate space from the theory of time, useful as it is to realize the gathering aspect of duration, ultimately leads to a renewed sense not of time alone but of spacetime, in which duration is the over-arching dimension or, as Bergson would have it, medium. My suggestion is that duration is precisely that: the medium of Salcedo’s Unland series.23 Bringing the time of the work, which comes from the past, including the past of the dead it has taken upon itself to hold, into the time of the viewer is a powerful deployment of that temporal density Bergson put forward. With this density the present holds the past as its contemporary. The present is in flow, it passes, not in spite of but precisely because the past is contemporaneous with it. This temporal density is required to make possible a contact, or “interface,” both with others, such as viewers, and with other times. In the face of violence—that brutal stretching out of time to its breaking point—the importance of duration and of the temporal density imparted by temporal foreshortening stems from the need to counter oblivion. As I have already suggested above, in her sculptures of the Untitled Furniture and the La Casa Viuda series, Salcedo makes the visualization of duration the crucial weapon in her art, which wages war against violence and its obliteration through anonymity. I wish to emphasize that the anonymous violence in the past is the black hole of a temporal linear perspective. Her sculptures militate against anonymity and the concomitant forgetting by making used furniture the site of the vanishing of the dead. This is why slowness, delay, and a stretching out of time are vital for this art. Salcedo attempts to break the wall between private and public by ­bringing the disappeared victims of violence into the public domain,

Chapter Three

from which their murderous deaths had torn them away. Spatially, she accomplishes this by using clunky, old, “found” furniture as the ground for her sculptures. She then disposes these pieces in gallery spaces, but in ­unexpected, often awkward positions that tend to make them hard to see and at the same time make them somewhat anthropomorphic. In this sense they are rigorously site-specific—or rather, site-dependent, as I explain in the next chapter. Here, it is relevant that such a spatial disposition also counters a perspectival viewing. The gallery offers no position from which to have an overview of the installation. Similarly—and this is my main point here—Salcedo’s works are both time-specific and time-dependent, in terms of the works themselves, the past they carry, and their relationship to the viewer. They are bound to specific events in the past that the artist has painstakingly researched but does not recount. Instead, she makes this past cling, like the child’s cot to the mother table—to the object as well as to the moment of viewing. Temporally, she gives them—in many different ways, so that there is no fixed device that can wear out—a foreshortened duration. Comparable to the way Proust’s Biche literally “rubs in” the impossibility of perceiving in detail, Salcedo’s work with surfaces demonstrates that this difficulty is only too real. Yet, in view of the violence that so stretches out time and yet so thoroughly silences its victims, the struggle against this difficulty takes on a major political relevance. In view of the need to counter that silencing, she offers, with Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic, a lasting actuality. This is how I see Huyssen’s paradox take concrete shape. He writes that the table of Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic “speaks a language that is aesthetically complex without being aestheticizing, and subtly political without resorting to a direct message” (2000, 93). Only then, when the political is subtle enough to avoid either aestheticizing or direct messages, are viewers able to overcome the melancholy the pieces convey like a contagious disease. Only then, that is, can we shift our subjectivity from paralysis to political agency, “from being a subject of grief to being a subject of grievance” (Cheng 2001, 3).24 Grievance is what we can express in the political spaces with which the political domain must be littered. Only there can grievance be a form of agency. Grievance must be sharply distinguished from its paralyzing, apoliticizing because moralizing counterpart, which Nietzsche, in his On the Genealogy of Morals, called ressentiment (1969). Resentment, discussed by Wendy Brown in relation to identity (Brown 1995, 60–61), is one of three 24 

A newer version of Huyssen’s essay was published in his book Present Pasts, which contains other relevant essays for our topic (2003, esp. chaps. 2, 8, and 10).

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25 

I do not invoke Brown’s view of resistance as hampering political agency here to suggest that all resistance is vain. Rather, resistance becomes negative when it is the exclusive motivation of subjects, without the more positive elements in which alternative visions can be shaped.

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factors that hamper the development of the political. The other two are morals—mostly visible in moralism—and resistance. Grievance is the result of an overcoming of the limitations of resentment and resistance.25 Salcedo’s work is so fastened to the idea that memory is a necessary counterforce against the erasure of violence that it is worthwhile specifying what this means. Concerning the relationship of Salcedo’s work to the erasure of violence, the enforced forgetting, a remark by Taussig is worth noticing. Writing on violence in Colombia, this anthropologist has pointed out that the silencing is not an attempt to erase memory. “The point is to drive the memory deep within the fastness of the individual so as to create more fear and uncertainty in which dream and reality commingle” (1992, 27). Unland, as a theoretical object addressing the political, offers an answer. The crux of Taussig’s remark is the word individual. Driving the memory deep into the individual who is at the same time silenced, such violence wrenches the individual out of the social domain where the political plays itself out. As I explore at greater length in chapter 5, Salcedo’s attempt to make actuality last is embedded in her performance of acts of memory of a collective nature. The purpose of such acts is to wrench the individual out of that isolation where the memory of the violent act and the ensuing solitude holds her imprisoned, severing her from social reality. Salcedo opposes to this isolation not the individual stories but the production of a social space within which “social time” is given the time to, so to say, work. Actuality is the arena in which Salcedo works. It is the Jetztzeit, or “nowtime,” of the viewer to whom she seeks to bind the traces in her work. Of the existence and significance of this actuality the viewer is hardly aware. In George Kubler’s poetic account, “Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events” (1962, 17). This artist takes one such instant—between the ticks of the watch, a dark moment between the flashes of ordinary life—and captures it, in a desk, a table, a cot, where it then lingers. Salcedo fights the anonymity of actuality that allows time to remain single-stranded and to deny the clinging past. She fills its voids, stretching its space to make time for a remembrance of the dead who died

Chapter Three

in the past but who are violently dead in actuality. Time is foreshortened to the extent that it is distorted, so as to reverse the black hole of linearity. Foreshortening remains an illusion, but one that blatantly reveals its own deception. This double nature of the device, this simultaneous appearance of illusion and its dis-illusion, is what makes baroque foreshortening so radically different from linear perspective. Likewise, foreshortened time is both irresistible and disenchantingly unreal. At no time does the foreshortened duration offer us a bridge to the past, yet it makes time so adhesive that it seems as if the past is touching us. For it is not as if we can suffer for or with the victims. Sympathy, compassion, even identification, do nothing to reduce the unspeakable suffering we can glean from the fossils, the traces of what was buried in another time. If Caravaggio was helpful for our understanding of foreshortening, it is because the notion of “foreshortening time” suggests an interpretation of Salcedo as a baroque artist, rather than, say, as an exclusively minimal one who could be recuperated as minimalist. But of course, such an interpretation is only possible if baroque is understood not as an art-historical movement but as a visual philosophy of perception through the body. In this sense, Bergson is the most eminently baroque philosopher of time. It is in this sense that, I believe, baroque is crucial to Salcedo’s art. It implies a profound questioning of the ontological distinctions that define fiction as distinct from reality. And thus, I contend, refraining from a knee-jerk appeal to Latin American contexts is, in fact, a very Latin-American thing to do.26 I have presented temporal foreshortening here primarily through Unland. In doing so I aimed to clarify the subtle yet radical difference in strategy between earlier works, such as La Casa Viuda I and II, and some of the Untitled Furniture pieces, where violence is to some extent represented, however minimally and discreetly. In Unland, the response to foreshortening is no longer representation but the mobilization of the viewer into a temporal “extensivity.” I do not wish to fall back on a chronology of Salcedo’s oeuvre. Rather, my view of Salcedo’s chronology is retrospective, or, as I call it, pre-­posterous: a later piece reveals an aspect that was inherent but also less marked in an earlier work. The resistance to representation, for example, which achieves a radical break with representation in Unland, is already powerfully active in earlier work. But only in Unland does this resistance gain its full force. From the vantage point of Unland, then, the struggle with representation in the Untitled Furniture pieces becomes not only more visible but more 26  This theoretical point is a spin-off from my Quoting Caravaggio (1999). See also Gallop 1988 for the link between body, perception, and thought.

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­ olitically powerful. Salcedo’s work is an ongoing search for ways to efp fectuate the foreshortening of time without erasing the interval between past and present. For this reason, I devote the next chapter to work from her more recent Tenebrae series, in which that interval is most explicitly foregrounded. Temporal aspects, such as discrepancy, belatedness, heterochrony, delayed focusing, vanishing and reemergence, and performance, are linked to temporal foreshortening as devices of primary importance. This is what makes Salcedo’s work political in a specific way, addressing what happens in Colombia without being “about” Colombia. Her temporal foreshortening deploys the specificity of heterogeneous time to establish a connection between specific violence and the generalized presence of violence, so that each viewer is “touched” by it within her own subjectivity and environment. The “inextricability of past and present” (Doane 2002) is the primary condition for this touch.

4

Installation

F i g u r e 4.1 Thou-less, 2001–2. Stainless steel in nine parts, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

Pain is the equivalent in felt-experience of what is unfeelable death.

El a i n e S c a r r y , The Body in Pain

Toward the end of the 1990s, Salcedo departed from the deployment of used furniture. Thou-less (2001–2) consists of an ensemble of chairs that can no longer be disentangled. The sculpture is made from scratch; it is not a recycling of used furniture. The traces of real chairs are here, simply, in the forms themselves, but these are so hard to see that even counting the number of chairs remains a daunting task. Here is Carlos Basualdo’s description of this work: “What initially looked like two other chairs, then appear to be two pairs of chairs whose backs are leaning against each other, until one sees that they are rather hooked to the deformed seats of another respective pair of chairs that are pushing up from underneath” (2004, 30). The description seems adequate to me, not only factually—it matches my memory of seeing this work—but also temporally. The act of seeing comprises at least three moments, or realizations. These three moments each come with a verb, which provides the description with an affective charge—a charge I remember very well. “Leaning,” “hooked,” and “pushing” are the slightly personifying words that gradually bring the violence close to home; “from underneath” transforms the perspective to an impossible position of looking from the inside. Moreover, with “pushing” we are almost back in the realm of Adorno’s “squeezed.” But, ambivalent as always, once the sense of anthropomorphism becomes active, the entangled elements also seem huddled together, as if seeking refuge. This is yet another instance of the ambivalence installed in the pathological public sphere that Mark Seltzer has called to mind (1997). The one element pushing from underneath can evoke both an unbearable violence, a pain inside the body seeking to destroy it from within, and a child hiding underneath the table, or under its mother’s skirt. What ­matters is that, in both interpretations, the space around the work instills a sense [159]

Chapter Four

of absolute loneliness—the loneliness that pain imposes (Scarry 1985). The work’s title establishes the relationship between the pain of the distorted forms and the loneliness of the empty space around the work. The work is “thou-less”—it lacks a second person who acknowledges the pain. In addition to disease and suffering, which is otherwise induced, Elaine Scarry’s analysis lucidly covers the political nature of such disturbing instances as torture and war. Tellingly, and as if answering Adorno’s call for expression, the first subheading of her introduction is “The Inexpressibility of Physical Pain.” In this regard, the question arises whether physical pain is easier to see, hence, to represent visually, than to articulate verbally. Salcedo’s installations, including Thou-less, offer a reflection on the issue, suggesting a possible dialogue with Scarry’s study. Since the artist is essentially a sculptor, Salcedo’s art is by definition spatial. As I have suggested in previous chapters, the way the three elements of Unland are installed draws attention to this spatiality through a negative move. In the New Museum in New York, the pieces seemed lost in the back of the second-floor space, which had the look of an attic more than a gallery. These pieces, like many of the installations of Untitled Furniture works, are meticulously installed to look different from the average art sculpture. Here, I explore in more depth the implications of the particular mode of installing that this artist practices and, in so doing, broach a new aspect of political art: the way it is physically and spatially presented to its viewers. I follow some of Salcedo’s interventions in space in which I see possibilities for a further specification of political art as the creation of political spaces, in the sense in which Wendy Brown (1995) posits such spaces as a condition for the thriving of the political. The central term in this chapter is, therefore, installation. This term refers to two practices that are conventionally treated as distinct matters. One is the installation of exhibitions consisting of several distinct artworks; the other is installation as an art form, where the installation becomes a single work. The former primarily aims to display each work to its best advantage; the latter primarily creates an environment. My discussion of Unland has already suggested that sometimes this distinction does not hold. In my experience of it, Unland is first of all a single-installation work. For others, it may consist of three singular pieces before being an installation, and Huyssen’s close reading of one of them, Unland: The ­Orphan’s ­Tunic, suggests that this is the case for him (2000). Both forms of installation point to the importance of the space in which art is arranged and made available for the encounter with viewers, in other words, the environment of art objects and, in the end, of social interaction in and with space when people willfully see artworks. Salcedo’s installations, including those [160]

1 

Earlier, I have devoted a book-length study to this phenomenon, with a special focus on painting in major museums, but also considering some other instances, and even the [161]

The Agency of Space

of very different sculptures, intimate that more is at stake than just making the art visible to its best advantage. Exhibitions are constructed on the basis and in view of particular ways to present artworks that are exhibited together. A traditional form, for example, is the ordering of works according to an itinerary that allows visitors to see works in their historical chronology. Another classic model is the thematic arrangement of several works that are thematically related and, for that reason, kept together on one wall or in one space. Both these models are somewhat prescriptive and, as such, reassuring: they tell people how to look and what to see in what order or grouping. This is helpful for those who feel inadequate to decide for themselves how they wish to group artworks together; such arrangements suggest to viewers how to interpret the exhibited works as a collective artistic statement. However, deciding a priori that viewers will feel that inadequacy is, for the same reason, also potentially condescending, as well as self-fulfilling. Having an itinerary already mapped out makes it more difficult for visitors to develop their own creative capacities, to be actively involved, to “perform” their encounter with the artworks. From being helpful, it might, in a worst-case scenario, become a kind of curatorial dictatorship that makes the viewer lazy. In Rancière’s terms, it prescribes how “the sensible”—the things that can be perceived—should be “distributed” so that what can be seen and what not is determined by someone else—an authority (2004). The result is the opposite of a political space. This dilemma between helpful guidance and curtailing an enriching and empowering autonomy also plays itself out on the micro level, within an exhibitionary unit, from one work to the other. The arrangement of different works in the same space obviously influences the way we perceive and interpret each of them. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The juxtaposition of one painting with another makes the boundaries between the two permeable, in spite of the rigid frames that surround both works. This is due to the signifying capacity of space. Hanging a work painted by the leader of an artistic movement smack in the middle and two works by younger artists on each side, for example, is an act that may be motivated by the sense of a harmonious ensemble or a thematic connection, but it inescapably also reinforces the oedipal power structure within such groups. Viewers who are used to such structures will not even notice this, but that does not mean that they are not influenced, in the sense of reassured, by the apparent inevitability of such structures.1

Chapter Four

In order to make the case for temporal foreshortening in the previous chapter, I selected Caravaggio’s paintings in the Cerasi Chapel in Rome because they were so site-specific. Painting, although two-dimensional, has often demonstrated a vested interest in spatiality. The entire dispositif of linear perspective emerged from this preoccupation with space. I argued that, in distinction from perspective, foreshortening simultaneously builds the illusion of space and ironically comments on it. It also implicates the viewer bodily, whereas perspective encourages the illusion of disembodied, retinal looking. For this reason, the double look encouraged by foreshortening is predicated upon a space where participants such as viewers are empowered to choose between going along with the proposed modes of looking, or resisting either alternative. Hence, such paintings create a political space. Clearly, compared to paintings, space-bound art such as sculpture is even more sensitive to the arrangement in the space. And here, too, space can either be naturalized as a neutral environment or self-reflectively propose itself as a political space. In modern sculpture, the works’ placement in space is both more open and more difficult, since many sculptures are not dependent on walls. Salcedo has always deployed the possibilities of undermining expectations in the ways she has arranged her works in gallery spaces, both on the small scale of the way a single piece is placed, and on the larger scale of the placement of all the works in an exhibition within the available space. These arrangements have often claimed the need for ample space, for large dimensions that enable the works to struggle with space for their specific place in it. This integration of “autonomous” space in the arrangement as participant is another aspect of Salcedo’s use of negative space. In Salcedo’s work, emptiness is an indispensable element.2 Several instances of the work of emptiness have already come up. In addition to Atrabiliarios, in chapter 3 I suggested that the three pieces from the series Unland were placed at an unusually great distance from the entrance to the gallery and arranged rather casually, as if they were in a warehouse. Because, as I just mentioned, I first saw it in that arrangement, to structures of authority within single paintings or literary texts (1996). I avoid reiterating those arguments here. Kwon (2002) analyzes the political implications of spatial arrangement in installation. Her focus is more on art that claims site-specificity in a “spatio­political problematic” (2), and less on art that actually makes space. In spite of her skeptical view of a genre of site-specific art, her argument evolves within the genealogy and possibilities of such a “genre.” Salcedo’s art, perhaps apart from the works discussed in the next chapter, would not fall under Kwon’s purview. 2  On different relations of modern sculpture in space, and the detachment of modern sculpture from the wall, see Krauss 1977. [162]

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me these works seemed to be a three-part single work—what official genre classifications would call an installation. All three consist of two staggered tables, all three show a surface that is enigmatic and melancholic, and all three have similar discolored colors. These similarities enforce the notion of the series, but this does not necessarily turn them into a single work. What did begin to turn them into a single work was their relative proximity to one another in an otherwise empty space. Not that they huddled together, but they were closer to one another than to the rest of the space, the latter delimited by its surrounding walls but embodied by its empty volume. Without discussing this issue of installation, I have treated them in the analysis as something in between three autonomous artworks and a single installation. On other occasions, too, Salcedo’s work seems to hover between these two forms of spatiality. In this chapter I examine a few of these instances in order to formulate my contention that the sculptural works, even the singular pieces, are close to installation in the second sense. This is easy to see when it is negated. More than in the case of other sculptures, I find “bad” installations of Salcedo’s work disturbing. Since many of her works are single sculptures, inevitably they are often invited in group exhibitions. Then it can happen that they are put in a space that is too crowded, thus depriving the sculptures of the surrounding space that is intended as part of them. In my memory this happened, for example, in documenta XI (2002). There, a few sculptures, a group called Thou-less, appeared to be literally lost in space, crowded out by other works. This is not to say the gallery was stuffed with other sculptures. When I now see the installation photographs, they seem to have ample space. The sense of crowdedness came from something else. In a place where paintings were hung on the wall, the crowdedness seemed to come from color. There were paintings on the wall that assaulted the gray, dull metal of the Thou-less works with colors that the sculptures themselves reject. These paintings, by Leon Golub, although thematically related—this ­gallery seemed devoted to the topic of violence—had an aesthetic effect so unrelated to Salcedo’s emphatically colorless sculptures that the effect of her works seemed, not so much weakened or diluted—they are too strong for that—but suffocated. And this in spite of the large space—which makes my judgment here unfair, emphatically subjective, and the product of a distorting act of memory. As a consequence, in my memory image, Thou-less appeared as if it had a “thou,” but an indifferent one. Because the vibrancy in the space was not happening between Thou-less and the space around it, which was occupied by Golub’s colors, the sculpture could not construct a political space; only an apathetic one. I may have over-reacted. But at the

Chapter Four

time, the exhibition seemed to capitalize on disaster art and almost justify the disturbing suspicion that this attention to violence and trauma was just a passing fad. I saw the gallery walls devoted to mostly figurative art of ­catastrophe, coming off willy-nilly through its thematic coherence and ­visual noisiness as a disturbing, exploitative representation—as everything Salcedo so carefully avoids. If my response seems somewhat over the top, this is another instance, like my “wrong” interpretation of La Casa Viuda II, of the documentary value of such a response as a step in a theorizing practice that works through a political object. In its possible excess, it demonstrates or at least hints at the utter sensitivity of Salcedo’s work to the space of exhibition. This dependence of the sculptures on the space where they are shown indicates the importance of space itself; its signifying capacity, its power to affect us; its potential to become a political space or the opposite, a space of consumption that breeds indifference. The sculptures, thus, connect the space that surrounds them to their own meaningful existence. This alone testifies to the physical, material quality of space. This quality is generated by what I have called, the “social buzz” to which the artist responds. Here, I argue that not only the artist but also, in her fundamental absence, the artworks respond to and participate in that social buzz. The space in which art is installed embodies that materiality of the social. Even when no one is there, the space is filled with sociality, so strongly so that even still sculptures cannot do their work without enough space to make those connections out of which the social buzz consists. For this reason, the present chapter proposes that space is a medium, and that, as such, it is politically performative. It is not surprising, then, that more recently Salcedo has been taken to make works that are firmly installations in the second sense. Her 2004 Neither, an installation that needs to be built up in the specific space where it is subsequently shown, is no longer a sculpture because it is immovable. Once it is there, it is not possible to move it around to see if another arrangement would work better. Similarly, the 2005 work Abyss in Rivoli cannot change places. It could not even be taken away in segments for purposes of storage. Painfully, after the tenure of the exhibition, it had to be taken apart, brick by brick. More drastically still, Shibboleth, the work that was the buzz of London in fall 2007 through spring 2008 had to be filled up after the show ended. This brings the artist’s relationship to space full circle: after burying shoes and filling furniture with concrete, Salcedo now saw an entire work all but disappear under concrete.3 3  Fortunately, the work is not entirely lost: concrete always keeps a trace of what lies under­neath. It loses relief but it keeps color, or rather, discoloration. See Salcedo 2007. [164]

Figu r e 4.2 Installation shot, ­documenta XI. Photo:

Listening to Time in Space What disturbed me in the arrangement at documenta XI of a work from the series Thou-less (2001) was precisely that it was put there—it was not staged theatrically, in the sense developed in chapter 2. And it was placed in what I found a less than adequate setting. But in this instance, too, mistakes were helpful to understand something relevant. For this made me aware of the fact that the work not only needs to be placed in a position where it has enough “breathing space”—to use a standard phrase—to acquire the best visibility. Space brings in other senses than seeing; it is synaesthetic. While the surfaces have a haptic quality that involves the touch, albeit at a distance, Thou-less’s most prominent other sense is hearing. The work needs to be able to “speak.” Moreover, the work intimates that hearing itself is ­synaesthetic; that it cannot function without collaboration with

Ryszard Kasiewicsz / documenta Archiv.

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There is a meaningful connection, I contend, between the use of burial for metaphoring, so recurrent in Salcedo’s oeuvre, the related preference for concrete as one of her materials of choice, and the endorsement of the dependency of sculpture on space. I trace this connection first through an analysis of a few instances of installation in the first sense, considering a series of works, starting with Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, from 1999–2000, and Noviembre 6 from 2001. I consider these as they were presented in two different exhibitions. An exhibition in the cathedral in Liverpool of the series Untitled Furniture provides evidence of the importance of installation and the power of adequate installation, where the empty space speaks as strongly as the works themselves.

Chapter Four

seeing. Hence, it also needs the visual quiet that allows it to be “heard.” In other words, the spatial arrangement itself, including the space around the work, is not monologic but dialogic; it stages, and thus facilitates, the social buzz. Although Salcedo makes visual art, not audio art, “listening” is a key activity required to productively process her work. I would even contend that it is de facto “audio” work in the sense of appealing to hearing by requiring (visual) silence. The acoustic quality of this work stems from the ambition to witness so as to compel the viewer, in turn, to witness as the work’s second person takes his turn to speak. This is the primary meaning of Thou-less. In the next chapter I say more about the way witnessing is a crucial element in the political thrust of Salcedo’s art. If I use the metaphor of listening here, it is to anticipate that discussion while, for now, involving the position of the viewer in the dialogue that space must mediate and help to conduct if the work is to be effective in its exhibitionary politic. Listening implies the need for quiet and the attitude of wavering attention. The ­silence is not a general, sacred silence, imposed out of respect for Great Art. Instead, this palpable silence is the building block of a political space. According to Wong, “Rather than posing speech against silence, Salcedo explores the productive power of silence to evoke the particular experience of witnessing disappearance” (2007, 179). In addition to qualifying Wong’s emphasis on particularity according to my earlier remarks on singularity, I would also add a layer to what this silence is set up to do. Serving as a political space in which democratic acts and judgments become possible (Brown 1995), the silence also tunes the ear and eye to the singularity the viewer herself can thus endorse for these acts and judgments. The silence is also polemical in two distinct ways. First, as a spatial quality, it takes the political space of the work outside the busy, urban political spaces of which Rosalyn Deutsche speaks in her work on “urban-aesthetic” (1996, xi). To bring the sound of silence into the installation is an emphatic gesture of isolating the space. Secondly and more specifically, the silence combats another silence in an implicit duel within the political against politics. Again, Wong phrases it clearly: “Her work recontextualizes and, thereby, critically transforms repressive silence into a publicly acknowledged intersubjective engagement with the victims’ experiences” (2007, 179). This appropriation of silence and the transformation from a political tool of oppression to a tool for democratic acts is an immensely helpful example to our understanding of the inextricable bond between the artistic and the political in political art. It also demonstrates that even still sculpture must be regarded as in process if it is to work at all. And clearly, the viewer is an agent in this process. [166]

4 

Although it would go too far to discuss Salcedo’s work in terms of music, the impact of sound—or its absence—on the construction of subjectivity to which art contributes is worth examining. See Steinberg 2004. [167]

The Agency of Space

This implies an attitude of mind and body together that is focused and open, ready, willing and able to hear things unheard of, so that we can begin to imagine and relate to the unimaginable. For this difficult but immensely enriching task, the space is enlisted to assist us. It must provide the quiet and the mood necessary for that activity of intense listening. And, in terms of the translating or metaphoring activity discussed in the first chapter, it must participate in that activity, taking turns to also listen to the viewer.4 At this point, a misunderstanding could easily come up. By resisting the way Thou-less was crowded out in documenta XI, chromatically and thereby acoustically, I am not advocating a traditional, modernist, whitecube ­aesthetic. In asserting the need for a quiet environment, I do not mean anything like visual, aesthetical, or otherwise unmarked space, where The Work of Art can achieve autonomy. Such an aesthetic is rather opposed to the creation of political space; it seeks to facilitate the isolationism of a work of art that Adorno calls “the work [of art] that wants nothing but to exist” (2003b, 240). Salcedo’s works do not thrive in such a space, precisely because the space that surrounds them is not neutral or empty but part of the work. In fact, her works demand gray, not white, as the predominant (non-)color of floors and walls—and even of light. And the works do not pursue autonomy. The space must not be neutral at all. On the contrary, it must “speak.” It should not distract the viewers from the works but mediate and focus the mood the works propose as the affective ambiance within which the dialogue between works and viewers can take place. This is why these works are made of a different material, so that their surfaces participate even as they do not, like the tops of the Unland sculptures, enforce close proximity. Compared to the concrete-filled wooden Untitled Furniture, these works’ semi-dull metal sheen is almost shiny. The timid sheen captures light as if to temper it, to force the light to adapt to the mood of the unrelenting lead. No light is subtler than these semi-sheens emanating from dull surfaces. These works help put the issues of the three previous chapters in a unifying perspective. Even more clearly than any of the preceding works, these works make the bond between, on the one hand, those tiny, squeezedin instances of anthropomorphic imagining and the resulting affect, and, on the other hand, between anthropomorphic imagining and the hetero­ geneous temporality that infuses humanity. This work thus radicalizes certain aspects of the earlier work and gives it a retrospective gloss.

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Of the many Untitled works based on furniture of the early 1990s, a large work at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, which we have already discussed, makes a good case (see fig. 2.13). It consists of a sizeable wardrobe lying on its side, facing the wall. It is filled with concrete, and a chair next to it is, in turn, almost entirely drowned, suffocated in concrete. On the left, above the chair, two iron poles stick out, hinting at violence. The chair itself stands upright, as if firmly determined to avoid falling. This is not surprising, since inside the front of the wardrobe another chair is horizontally buried. Of this chair, only a flat surface of its back remains visible. It has lost its third dimension. Both this chair and the wardrobe that encompasses it look like defeated, fallen soldiers. The one chair that remains upright is bound to the fallen ones; it cannot escape. Why does this wardrobe have to lie with its front to the wall, its top against the other wall? Surely, this is a strange way to display sculpture, which is supposed to stand proudly in a space, accommodating visitors who wish to walk around it. Here, everything prevents a candid look. ­Display, therefore, is not the right term. Display suggests pride; the narcissism of art. The chair on the side is also turning its face to the wall. The relief characteristic of sculpture is flattened. The concrete surface is flat, the corners sharp, the edges straight. Nothing distracts us from the mournful mood into an aesthetic pleasure alien to that mood—a extremely ­precise response to Adorno’s fear that beauty would be “squeezed” out of the suffering. Instead of display—a form of facing outward—this installation draws us into a mournful mood while preventing us from entirely going there. The work combines dignity and weight in self-effacing forms that command the same respect as do tombs. It is an instance of Clark’s “time ceaselessly metamorphosed through action” (Clark and Bois 1994, 104), specified in Salcedo’s work as “[a record of] the ruptures in time that result from violence, which ‘crushes things into moments.’”5 In the exhibition entitled Carnegie International 1995 in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, a large number of works from the Untitled Furniture series were displayed. Again, the word displayed sounds wrong. Although there are many works, and the space is large, the installation is inharmoniously distributed, the use of space unbalanced. In the far ­corner, a number of works are huddled together. On top of one of them, two ­concrete-drowned chairs have been stacked. On the other side of a doorway, again two works are stacked, with two others placed directly in front of these, preventing passage. Of the works in the corner, one stands a bit 5  Olga Viso, quoted in Birkhofer 2008, 61. Except for the last point, this description is indebted to Princenthal’s rich essay (2000, esp. 72).

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F i g u r e 4 .3 Installation of untitled works, 1989–95. Installation: Carnegie International 1995, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

detached from the others. This is a wardrobe filled with concrete with a bed frame half inserted into it. This piece, Untitled (1995), emphatically foregrounds its infraction of the privacy of previous users in three ways. First, the bed frame protrudes from the rest of the work. This has still-visible ornamental detail, fine lines, perfectly polished and shaped wood. Second, the wardrobe behind it cannot be further approached; the bed stands guard. On the front of the wardrobe, we see an ensemble of delicately worked surfaces that miraculously integrate an unfinished quality with the upcoming erasure of burial. The larger surface is smoothed, flattened, and scratched. Third, the plank of the side of the bed is driven into the concrete. Four smaller surfaces are also made of concrete, but here, disturbingly, some trace of fabric remains visible. A trace of blue and pink is visible on the upper left surface; some lace flowers can be discerned on the right side. As with the zipper in La Casa Viuda II, the fabric suggests that a person is buried here. The colors and the lace flowers in their separate compart­ments evoke little girls. The left panel—smooth and large—has the ­dimensions and form of a coffin. Under the three surfaces on the right, four ­drawers [169]

Figur e 4.4 Untitled, 1995. Wood, concrete, cloth, and steel, 196.5 × 124.5 × 193 cm. Installation: Carnegie International 1995, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White

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Cube, London.

with ornamental handles are glued shut with concrete, but they look as if the concrete has been wiped off after having covered them. The surfaces are incredibly detailed and meticulously finished. This is one of those cases where Salcedo’s training as a painter comes to the fore. The bed frame that forbids close access also delimits the space in front of these surfaces. It is both confining and protecting. [170]

F i g u r e 4 . 5   Untitled, 1997. Wood, concrete, and fabric, approx. 198 × 122 × 188 cm. Collection: Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

F i g u r e 4.6 Untitled, 1999. Wood, concrete, steel, and fabric, 196.5 × 124.5 × 193 cm. Installation: Trace, Anglican Cathedral, Liver­pool, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, 1999. Collection: Moderna Museet,

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Stockholm.

A comparable work, now in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, has the same general structure, surfaces, and buried fabric. Here, too, the traces of absence demand the respect that the viewer owes the work, a respect that is regulated by its strategy of spatial delimitation. When it was installed in the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool, during the Biennial of Contemporary Art in 1999, the work stood in front of the steps to the altar, visually blocking one’s ascent (see fig. 4.6). I contend that the way Salcedo installs her sculptures is analogous to the spatial structure of the sculptures as such. The installation adds an emphasis on the need to listen to the sculptures’ silence. I now explore the consequences of this analogy.6 6 

Space has long been neglected in cultural studies. Most surprisingly, the recently reprinted remake of Raymond Williams’s Keywords, Edgar and Sedgwick’s Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts, listing more than one hundred key concepts, includes neither time nor [172]

space (2008)—despite the “spatial turn,” initiated by politically informed social geographers and philosophers (see, e.g., Casey 1997). See Pain 2004 for an overview of the political activism inherent in social geography. [173]

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Abduction into Pain This brings me back to La Casa Viuda II. In chapter 2, I argued that this work contains, almost literally, a human body, evoked through the anthropomorphic element of the zipper inserted into one of the two front panels of the desk. It thus draws attention to the fact that the desk is otherwise closed; there is no trace of the doors, which are covered in concrete. What I did not discuss there is the high door attached to the side of the desk. This door is of a lighter beige color. Seen from the back of that door, the edges of the desk press through it. Violently and painfully, the desk—to which the anthropomorphic element has already assigned a sliver of human presence—now appears to have been subjected to violence as a whole. On the back of the door, we see that the edges of the desk’s side have been pushed through the door’s wood. Similar symptoms of violence are everywhere in Salcedo’s work with furniture. In an installation of untitled works in Le Creux de l’Enfer in Thiers, France (1996), beautifully documented in the Phaidon book, we see it in several pieces, and from different perspectives (Princenthal, Basualdo, and Huyssen 2000, 130–31). A dauntingly stern wardrobe has a massive block of concrete in front of it, into which an ordinary chair has all but disappeared. Smaller than the wardrobe, the chair that faces the larger piece of furniture reminds me of a child. So does the isolated, small nightstand behind the wardrobe, half obscured by concrete and its gloomy gray (non-)color. A bit further back, a cupboard with a dresser attached to it shows the back of a chair, which was clearly pushed into it. The angle behind the larger piece hides a fallen chair, unable to stand up due to the heavy chunk of concrete that has overturned it. Visual heaviness is a feature in Baroque painting— consider the body of Christ in Caravaggio’s Descent from the Cross in the Vatican, for example. As such, and as this example suggests, it is related to death, to dead bodies as much as to the graves wherein they are whisked away from sight. Paradoxically, in the face of the “natural” heaviness of concrete, this heaviness is, then, indirectly another kind of subtle anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism and the trace of movement appear to struggle with the emptiness and silence of the space. The way the pieces turn away from the entering viewer compel a walk around the gallery, yet they also make that walk feel like an act of intrusion. This ambivalence is what La Casa ­Viuda II demonstrates with great clarity. The trace of violence is visible only if the work is disposed in space accordingly. The impression of a body bent and compressed inside the desk is developed to bring physical unease into

F i g u r e 4 .7 La Casa Viuda III, 1994. Wood and fabric, two parts, 258.5 × 86.5 × 6 cm; 83.5 × 86.5 × 5 cm. Installation: Displace-

the social space of the gallery. The space between a compassionate, empathic look and an uneasy feeling of complicity becomes hard to avoid. But at the same time, the space around the piece, which is required to step into that awareness, also opens the viewing space up to the back of the desk. And this desk, surprisingly, is empty. Again, in spite of all the filling with concrete, the philosophy of space Salcedo proposes is anchored in emptiness. The body we thought we could imagine is, of course, not “really” inside the desk. But neither is anything else, nor is the space closed from the back—if it were, we could continue

ments: Miroslaw Balka, Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1998. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White

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Cube, London.

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to imagine a body. Instead of allowing ongoing projection, the emptiness requires us to reconsider our own response. What do we do now with that imagined, suffering body? First, the zipper-as-trace is the only remaining element, like the shoes in Atrabiliarios, it is a trace of an irredeemably absent past. Spatial emptiness brings in its wake the relentless emptiness of the present that remains after the disappearing of people. Second, the zipper is also a trace of what modesty forbids us to appropriate visually. The sudden sensation of the emptiness in the desk deprives the viewer of the comforting possibility of compassion. And third, with the sensation of pain evoked by the compressed edges on the backside of the door, the sense of complicity deepens. Together, these three effects lead to what Seltzer has described as a symptom of a “pathological public sphere” in which there is a “breakdown between the psychic and social registers” (1997, 11). The pathological public sphere would then be the culture of violence that Salcedo’s work evokes and consequently brings to bear on the gallery space—translating or meta­ phoring it into this space, so to speak. Political space is, in this sense, already filled with politics, just as the private space is invaded by the public domain. To give an even stronger, more direct example of what this means, I call on La Casa Viuda III from 1994. Princenthal alleged Seltzer’s vision by way of a consideration of this work. She describes it as follows: “A wall is intersected by the headboard of a wooden bed, the footboard of which disappears opposite it, across a narrow hallway. To view this work is to stand, literally, in the place of the bed, violating property in a way that makes witnesses perilously akin to vicarious perpetrators” (Princenthal 2000, 63). This work is both a single work and an installation. It is as close as it can possibly come to the boundary between the two genres. What exactly, then, is the difference? Julie H. Reiss’s assertions about installation also inevitably hold true, at least in principle, for the larger and more heterogeneous ensembles that form exhibitions: “There is always a reciprocal relationship of some kind between the viewer and the work, the work and the space, and the space and the viewer. . . . One might add that in creating an installation, the artist treats an entire indoor space (large enough for people to enter) as a single situation. . . . The spectator is in some way regarded as integral to the completion of the work” (1999, xiii). This “single situation” condenses and intensifies the dialogic work of space mentioned above. According to Salcedo’s work, there is no rigorous distinction to be made between exhi­ bitions (of single works) and installations (as one work). Exhibitions are what installations explicitly seek to be: “critical habitats,” to recycle ­Emily

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Apter’s ­felicitously named concept. Such habitats can serve as political spaces. These are especially politically productive if the visitors are able and willing to keep their double vision active, so that they can critique what they inhabit.7 What makes La Casa Viuda III so powerful as a theoretical object, an object that theorizes the issue of installation, is less its status as an installation (as opposed to that of a single work) than the way it goes straight to the heart of the relevance of installation, in either sense, for political art. Princenthal’s description demonstrates this. The physical need to step into the space of the bed itself—between headboard and footboard—while, at the same time, simply walking a corridor in the gallery space, forces the visitor to commit the violation, not only of property, as Princenthal has it, but also of privacy. This is the privacy that the violence has destroyed, but that the work, at least retrospectively, and partially, restores. From the vantage point of the present, the ambivalent restoration of privacy—in a public space, and forcing the visitors to assault it by stepping inside it— entails an embodied complicity. But if, as Reiss has it, installation regards the spectator as integral to the completion of the work, then this entrance into complicity is also accompanied by the sharing of the pain suffered by the owners (property) or inhabitants (privacy) of this bed. Hence, visitors share the space of both perpetrators and victims. Space is even more intensely implicated, however, if we consider the work’s title. The bed, here, is the central element of the house it synecdochically evokes—the most intimate part. And since, according to the ­title of the series, the house was “widowed” before it came into the visitor’s purview, it must have been “married” earlier. The house once belonged to a family, but is now deprived of its loved one(s). This personification of the work makes the invasion of its space a personal assault, while the implication of the pain of the victims makes the pain both physical (the violence) and psychic (the deprivation). Yet, these implications are both voluntary (one can pass through the passage quickly, without stopping) and enforced (if one does not stop, one misses the work). Seeing the work, then, comes with the pain. This ambiguity, in turn, is a precise depiction of the psychic state of people living in a constant condition of civil war. The violence of civil war is, in a profound sense, a form of routine violence. This term has been developed 7  Critiquing what you inhabit is fundamentally Gayatri Spivak’s intellectual posture (1999). Apter defines a critical habitat as “art informed by geopolitics; by an ecologically engaged conceptualism . . . that critiques the relationship between media and environment and explores forms of global identification” (2002, 22).

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for the case in India by Gyanendra Pandey (2006), and is as disturbing as it is precise. Different as that situation is from the Colombian predicament, the theoretical principles can be “translated”—in the sense I developed in chapter 1—to the Colombian situation, and from there again to places most likely to affect particular viewers. These principles are social fragmentation, confusion between secular and religious issues, uncertainty about the relationship between citizens and the state, and ambiguous and confused positions in relation to tradition and modernity. It is easy to realize that such principles produce a domain of the political where agency is diminished. It is also easy to see how they entail routine violence in many places. When such principles rule, as Taussig writes about everyday brutality in Colombia, violence casts off its institutional moorings: “Bands of killers like these do not always fit easily into national organizations, especially hierarchical ones like the army. Their inclination to cruelty, romance, and anarchy fits them better for what has been called ‘the war machine,’ which has few rules—or else keeps changing them” (Taussig 2003, 11; citing Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Of this state of civil war and its routine violence we only get a small taste, of course, but one that, homeopathically, affects us. Routine violence in a permanent state of civil war is more insidious still. In such a situation, one’s daily life is afflicted by the awareness of violence being committed all the time, all around. At the same time, one needs to live on, so that a certain degree of indifference becomes a condition for the ability to live at all. In that indifference, indispensable for survival, complicity emerges. Thus, a continued state of ambivalence is an inevitable affective feature of life under such conditions. The awareness of the pain inflicted on others so nearby is a slighter, yet forceful form of vicarious suffering that still eats away at the well-being of the people. The necessary indifference, similarly, is a slighter, yet forceful form of vicarious complicity. This ambivalence is characteristic of civil war. Hence, civil war is different from international war, especially on the level of affect. The primary difference is the proximity between warring parties. Beyond the obvious problem of trust entailed in this closeness, one of the consequences is a sense of reluctant complicity. In the introduction to a collective volume primarily focused on the case of Lebanon, Jean Hannoyer spells out how difficult it is to stay aloof from such a feeling of complicity. One cannot help but interiorize the violence that ravages the everyday, the intimacy, and relationships. One recognizes, also, a share of violence in oneself, at least a share of responsibility for it, and it is hard to maintain that there are “innocent” civilians. This is the texture of civil-war sociality. Moreover, the moments and places where boundaries of belonging are transformed into

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war-generating fractures are ever uncertain. Third, it is difficult to judge the war without starting it again (Hannoyer 1999, 10–11).8 It is the resulting ambivalence that is enacted, subliminally but still inevitably, in the migratory situation where the installation is displaced from the place of origin. In the gallery—whether this gallery is located in Bogotá or in London, in Qatar or in Sydney—the work is approached as an aesthetic object. The viewer is prepared to admire, love, or remain indifferent to the work as object. But as soon as one is in the least engaged with it— having elected to visit this exhibition—one is almost inevitably sensitized to its affective power. For from the heart of it—the empty space through which one must walk—comes the double affect of guilt and suffering. And when affect reaches us, we cannot help but “translate” it into specific emotions applicable to our own environment. Salcedo offers a devastating critique of attempts to decline the opportunity for such translation that her spaces offer. As a textbook on Colombian modern art has it, “Doris Salcedo implements realities that are valid at any latitude; this is why she affirms that the idea that her work only refers to violence in Colombia is a form of evasion and a defense mechanism of critics and the public in developed countries who seek to elide awareness of their own violent realities.”9 I see in this statement an updated version of Adorno’s indictment of cultural studies in 1949 (2003c). It does not only hit the nail on the head; it also imposes modesty on any inclination to “contextualize” Salcedo’s work. Affect—and affect is the medium with which Salcedo’s spaces create their political nature—is by definition involved in translation. This is how, this work stipulates, affect in art serves a political purpose. Of course, visitors interact with art with different intensities. But unlike most art, Salcedo’s enforces a degree of willingness to be affected. This is not a vague speculation but an actual feature of her art. That feature is best indicated as the limitation of visibility. As I have intimated several times already, Salcedo enforces openness to affect by making art that is, if one remains indifferent to its impact, not even visible as such. Within the classical, retinal mode of looking, with the eyes detached from an indifferent body, there 8  For a study of civil war in Lebanon, see also Boer 2006, 43–69. For the relation between violence and art in Colombia, see Zea de Uribe and Medina 1999. An informative sociological study relevant for this issue is Riaño Alcalá 2003. Several times Salcedo’s work is brought to bear on the urban problematic they analyze (see 28–29, 41, 43). 9  Doris Salcedo plantea realidades que son válides en todas latitudes; por eso mismo sostiene que la idea de la suya como una obra referida sólo a la violencia colombiana, es una forma de evasión y un mecanismo de defensa de críticos y público de las naciones desarrolladas que quieren evitar la toma de consciencia de sus propias realidades violentes (Fernández Uribe 2007, 72; my translation).

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F igu r e 4.8 Noviembre 6, 2001. Stainless steel, lead, wood, resin, and steel in three parts, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

History and the Event in the Present The works that, in my view, were not entirely adequately installed at documenta XI were part of a series that represents a new departure in the artist’s work. As I mentioned above, while still based on furniture, particularly chairs, these are no longer wooden chairs encrusted into or filled with concrete, but made of stainless steel and lead. The series to which Tenebrae (1999–2000) also belongs contains the first pieces in Salcedo’s oeuvre that the artist made entirely from scratch rather than from assembled, used furniture. While furniture remains the primary, poignant form, old ­furniture

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is simply nothing left to see. But this art is not bossy; far from prescribing particular emotions, this affective charge enforces the freedom to respond in one’s own way with emotions appropriate to the political space where agency is granted, but its exercise is not ruled. This is probably the closest I can get to an articulation of what makes art political.

F i g u r e 4 .9 Noviembre 6, 2001. Stainless steel, lead, wood, resin, and steel in three parts, dimensions variable. Courtesy

is not visibly present at all, at least not in the first three parts. In particular, chairs provide forms that are both recognizable and made strange by their distortions and metal coating. These forms are also iconic and indexical, two semiotic grounds on which meaning is based that are here held together in a tight embrace. The forms iconically “look like” domestic life, and in their particular shapes they indexically bear the trace of the people who should normally be sitting on them. But unlike the wooden chairs in earlier sculptures, these chairs have erased, or never had, the traces of actual sitters. Disappearance here takes on a more “literal” shape. The violence committed on them is even deeper than before: the chairs are themselves distorted, deformed, pressed into one another. Yet, in a novel manner, these works raise the question of whether pain can be represented and made visible. On the basis of Thou-less I submit that pain can be, but is not systematically, visible; in a different way, it is just as hard to represent visually as it is to express verbally, as Scarry (1985) so cogently argued. Here lies the importance of singularity. Pain cannot be made visible in itself, but only in its affective charge. Reversing the perspective and siding with the sufferer is necessary ethically but even intellectually, if we are to further our insight on this question. While relentless in its pursuit

of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube,

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London.

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The Agency of Space

F i g u r e 4.10 Noviembre 6, 2001. Stainless steel, lead, wood, resin, and steel in three parts, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

of an understanding of the real horror of her subjects, Scarry’s work also attempts to offer insights that are potentially helpful for the sufferer. Her major tool is the imagination. Salcedo’s work, and particularly her use of space as itself a medium of the necessary ambivalence mentioned above, explores this possibility. In light of Scarry’s study, I see works such as Thou-less struggle with the tension between the invisibility of pain and the need to “speak” it— or what Scarry, in another of her eloquent subheadings calls “The Transformation of Body into Voice.” Voice, here, is one potential interface between the “radical subjectivity of pain,” which comes with “the simple and [181]

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a­ bsolute ­incompatibility of pain and the world” (1985, 50), on the one hand, and the world of which, in our case, the museum-going public cannot help but be a part.10 Since many of Salcedo’s works are untitled, those titles that are brought in cannot be taken as simple linguistic additions. Thou-less is an extraordinarily precise title, a theoretical program of the further articulation of what political art can be and do. In the framework of Scarry’s book, I find it remarkably apt that this work’s title refers to a staple in linguistic theory, namely deixis.11 This term refers to those words that have no meaning outside of the situation of communication. Words such as pointers—here, there—or indicators of temporal proximity—yesterday, tomorrow, now— but also personal pronouns such as I and you are deictic. They are also called shifters. The old form thou, resonating with biblical solemnity, points to the quintessential shifter: the “you” that is indispensable for the “I” to even exist. The “you” is indispensable to acknowledge the “I” as a speaker. The relationship between “I” and “you” is, ideally, fundamentally democratic. Hence, a “thou-less” work is an orphan in danger of extinction. How can this life-threatening lack be remedied? The space of installation is infused with grayish light. What could be misunderstood as a white space is the empty space of social purgatory. The soft reflections from the brushed steel or lead, materials that barely shine but nevertheless shine dully, are also gray. Whereas white, the color of the allegedly neutral “white cube” museum aesthetic, is in fact a merging of all colors, gray is a tint that refuses to be an inherent color. It reflects the colors around it. This is also characteristic of the emotional suspension of the work’s affective charge. It only reflects—putting “thou” in charge of filling in the emptiness. And then, suddenly, in the midst of this circulation of spatial air, time kicks in, and a date begins to haunt the series. Noviembre 6 refers to a date, in a particular language. The latter is easily interpreted as (Colombian) Spanish, more or less specifying a place, but the date? A day, a month, but where in history is this date situated? Does it refer to a future or a past, an event or a birthday? Other works will elucidate this question. For now, the informational reticence is here to activate our imagination. A moment in time, worthy of becoming a title, cannot be arbitrary in relation to what Basualdo called a “model of pain” (2004). Pain, and a date: history creeps 10 

For a short survey of the issues raised in Scarry’s book, the section “The Political Consequences of Pain’s Inexpressibility” in the book’s introduction is the best place to start (1985, 11–19). 11  On deixis and its consequence, “second-personhood,” see chapter 5 of my book Double Exposures (1996). This discussion is indebted to Silverman 1983 and, for the linguistic basis, to Benveniste 1971. [182]

Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, 1999–2000. Lead and steel, overall installation dimensions: 8.32 × 13.02 m. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

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F i g u r e 4.11

in. The history of facts, events, tragedies; of pain inflicted and incurred. A hint of specificity enters the imagination. Yet its provisional reticence to complete the date conveys a sense of the permanence of violence. The date is a snippet of speech; as if the pain had not (yet) entirely managed to destroy the subject’s language. Elaine Scarry, whose extraordinary book hovers over my reflections on Salcedo, not only drew our attention to the incompatibility of pain and language. She also spelled out the political consequences of pain’s inexpressibility. The first one is simple: two people can be in a room together, one in pain, the other not knowing of the other’s pain. How is that possible? The very situation also allows the possibility that the unknowing person is the one inflicting the pain. Second, there is no language for pain. Yet, third, under the pressure to eliminate pain, a fragmentary means of verbalization is available—small and hard to get as it is. Fourth, pain is at once undeniable and unknowable (1985, 12–13). This feature brings pain under the sway of a politically exploitable philosophical skepticism. No wonder Adorno insisted on the scream, and Salcedo on the silence beyond the scream. This is the cause of the most radically isolating element that separates the one who is certain to be in pain from the others who doubt that pain. I speculate that Salcedo seeks to bridge the gap between the sufferer and the others through the deployment of a shared space. The date noviembre 6 brings in, carefully and only partially, an undeniable referent. This is one instance of why singularity is so crucial to her work. Singularity remains indispensable. Another work from the same series, Noviembre 6 from 2001, consists of a single chair and several tangles of four

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distorted chairs. The single chair is bent and folded upon itself. The result is again a pained form. In the assembled clusters, chairs are locked together in an oppressive embrace. All the chairs at the bottom of the clusters are uniformly made from lead. The date is now supplemented with a year. History is here, in full force. It is present in that colorless, empty gallery. Indeed, this date is inscribed in history books. The series further comprises a larger ensemble, closer to installation in the second sense, Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985 from 1999–2000, which consists of thirteen such chairs whose legs are elongated and driven into the lateral walls. The chairs block the passage to the next, smaller room, in which another eleven chairs are crammed. The extremely elongated legs, although more brightly illuminated, cast no shadows; they are the shadows. I first saw two of these installations very effectively arranged in the Camden Arts Centre in London, a gallery space that was both excessively clean, with shiny floors, and gloomy, in an even, gray light. Neither white-cube white nor loud colors distracted from the installations’ intensity. In its consistent deployment of gray light, the Camden Arts Centre, doubtlessly under ­Salcedo’s guidance, demonstrated that a radical alternative to both the opposed modes of exhibiting is possible. As the titles of these works intimate, space is firmly welded to time. In a short text in a catalogue for an exhibition of these works in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2000, Merewether offers a multilayered interpretation of the double title of these works. This exegesis helps us understand the politics of timespace in all of Salcedo’s work as it is deployed in the installation ensembles of her single works. The main title of the first piece, Tenebrae, indicates a spatial element, shadow. This Latin word emphasizes the universalizing scope of the title. But shadows are not only spatial figurations, simultaneous traces of an unseen body; they are also temporally moving, shortening as we get closer to midday; lengthening toward evening. They are in space, they depend on space, but they do not take space. The subtitle, on the contrary, refers to a very specific date—that same date again. Hence, the universalized shadow comes to us, now, from one particular day in the past. Clearly that date matters, as does historical specificity. It matters because, right after Salcedo’s return from New York where she had earned a Master’s degree at New York University, horror hit home. It was the day the Colombian army destroyed the Palace of Justice, which had been seized by a guerrilla group of thirty-five. More than a hundred people died, including the judges present. The army destroyed all the evidence. Not a trace remained; again, the tactic of anonymity was at work. The artist witnessed it, however. That is the trace. With this series of works named after the event, she bears witness to her own witnessing. The event [184]

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F i g u r e 4.12 Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985 (detail), 1999–2000. Lead and steel, overall installation dimensions: 8.32 × 13.02 m. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

has been described many times. But no description is adequate. As a result, writers have taken to citing Salcedo’s engagement with it—on which more shortly—as an indispensable supplement to their historical description.12 That date, which must be extremely important in an oeuvre where so many works are titled “Untitled,” refers to an event. Events, in recent philosophy, are no longer the stuff of historical certainty, where a one-time ­actuality in the past provides the occurrence with epistemic visibility. Historians, in particular those of a group known as the Annales School, began 12 

See, for example, the political study of urban spaces by Irazábal, who describes the event through Salcedo’s work (2008, 30). [185]

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to see history less as a string of events than as a mixture of states in a variety of durations (e.g., Braudel 1972). They argued that the focus of history on events remained limited to the surface of the past. Their critique opened up possibilities for thinking events differently. Philosophers such as JeanFrançois Lyotard (1991), Alain Badiou (e.g., 2005b), and Jacques Derrida (e.g., 1978) argue for a different conception of events, closer to Salcedo’s invocation of 6 and 7 November 1985. Stuart McLean explains Lyotard’s view in his study of an equally traumatogenic historical context, the terror of events in Irish history. He writes that Lyotard “invokes the ‘event’ as pure singularity, recalcitrant to historiographic recuperation insofar as it affirms the impossibility of grasping the present in the moment of its selfpresentation, thus testifying that ‘the self is essentially passible to a recurrent alterity’” (McLean 2004, 13, quoting Lyotard 1991, 59). Badiou (2005b) sees the event as something that stays with you, something you can be loyal to, and something that can become a point of orientation for your life, in the way, for example, that the events of May 1968 in France marked a great many people of a generation. The event thus becomes an affective impact, as if marking someone’s subjectivity. This makes it temporally ambivalent in that the temporal texture is perforated. It is of the past and punctual, as well as of the present and durative. For this effect to be possible, the event by definition needs to be singular; hence the relevance of Lyotard’s view. For Derrida, the philosopher of uncertainty, events are what cannot be experienced in actuality. That view comes close to the standard definition of trauma.13 Although we cannot know and are ethically bound not to probe into other people’s personal life tragedies, witnessing the violence that led to the death of more than a hundred individuals, many of whose mission it was to uphold justice, surely seems a potentially traumatogenic event in the life of an artist who was already focused on the violence around her. But for the viewers, the knowledge of the artist’s personal experience is not necessary. This event is an instance of the Bergsonian conception of experience as arising in the broader field. What is there for subjects to select from for that marking of their subjectivity, which Badiou suggests they must do (2005b), is larger than the subject’s own experience. For, as Marrati asserts in a study of Bergson’s concept of innovation, “human experience arises in the broader field of experience as such out of the needs and necessities of life” (2005, 1101). Bergson’s view is crucial here because the violence the artist witnessed was massively “broader” than her subjectivity could accommodate. 13 

Discussion with Hayden White, University of Amsterdam, 27 May 2008. [186]

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But Salcedo is no moralist. According to Nietzsche’s caution against moral judgments, the slow unveiling of the nature and the participants of the event in the Noviembre works is key to Salcedo’s position—anonymous, hence, not attributable but sculpturally embodied and taking place instead. The guerilleros invaded and occupied, the army killed, the justices died, the Palace of Justice disappeared, and the government colluded: Salcedo deplores and mourns but does not make moral distinctions between good and evil. Violence is beyond that. Taussig’s diary of a “limpieza” in ­Colombia—an intense, active series of killings in a short period for a purpose alleged to “clean up” a town—begins with an event: “This event, the explosion of a bomb outside a hotel in Cali, remained without claimed author­ship. This was an event that came from nowhere. This kind of event transforms lives—the dead leaving their intimates behind; the wounded and mutilated; the community that lost its sense of security” (2003, 1). Taussig reconsiders why this event became, for him, an event in Badiou’s sense: “And why, given all the terrible things that come my way—why would this particular event stand out so? My guess is that it’s not ‘violence’ per se—whatever that means—but experiencing violence transfigured by the law absorbing the violence and magnifying it” (47). This particular kind of ­horror—a violence not only condoned, absorbed, but magnified by the law—comes close to Salcedo’s Noviembre event. The date is there, on the caption, and it lies in the past, pointing to a specific day, hence, stating that there was an event that matters for the work, now. The impossibility of fully experiencing the horror, of letting it penetrate one’s consciousness and so begin the process of working through it that eventually leads to healing, is “translated” or “metaphored” in the gloom of the light, reinforcing the noncolor of the material and the impossibility of seeing the entire work that carries the burden of violence. This metaphoring makes it possible to share, retrospectively and belatedly, the grief of the event that occurred—hence, that had the actuality of the classical conception of the event—but that at the same time could not be fully experienced, if only because it remained an occurrence behind walls. It also became the event that, as these works intimate, took the role of being a point of orientation in the artist’s life. It became just that because, as Derrida would have it, it could not be experienced in its actuality. The delay itself—from the smell of incinerated flesh and the sound of guns to the knowledge of the death of all those people—would just as much forever mark the subjectivity of the witness. The event of November 1985 went down in history books as a blunder on the part of the oppositional urban guerilla movement called M-19. In the early 1980s the movement had some considerable successes, both

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­ aterial and symbolic, embarrassing the Colombian army and gaining conm cessions from the government. But then Noviembre 6 y 7 happened. The movement lost its credibility with a large part of the population and subsequently was forced to demobilize. In addition to her witnessing of this event, I speculate that the event had such a strong marking impact on the artist’s work for other reasons inherent in what happened.14 The event was a disturbing demonstration—a demonic incarnation— of the principal features of civil war that I have described above. Precisely because a movement that allegedly stood for social justice initiated the ­violence, and because it—the event, rather than either party—killed both the guerilleros and the magistrates, the ambivalences and uncertainties of the boundaries between “good and evil” as well as between friend and foe became sharper than ever, harder to live down, yet impossible to discard. I contend that this event as it is invoked in Salcedo’s work is itself the shadow of which the titles speak. This has consequences for the work’s theoretical meaning. The event turns all of these works together into a theoretical object that revises the different conceptions of the event by reconciling them. And even if only on this philosophical level, reconciliation, in the context of desperately permanent violence, is somewhat comforting—in the way art can bring comfort after first hitting its viewers with the grief it metaphors. The actualization that inheres in the event in the classic conception is not relinquished, as Derrida would have it, nor is it only a matter of personal orientation, as it would be for Badiou. Instead, in its singularity (Lyotard) it holds on to the actuality of the classic conception, but turns it inside-out, so to speak. It places its actuality after the delay, in the present. This present time that we enter when we visit these works as they are exhibited maps the unlimited complexity of the traumatogenic events that keep occurring in the space of exhibition, where the visitor, required to take her time, is affectively touched by that one event, metaphored into others. This is why, more than being a simple environment, space in—or I should say, around and in-between—this work is active, dialogic, “speaking” and “listening.” New Space With Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985 we reach the second sense of installation— where the works are no longer distinguishable, and the viewer is an integral part of the work. Yet, instead of being spatially forced into the work, as in La Casa Viuda III, the opposite happens here. The viewer is kept out. The 14  See Safford and Palacios, who use the word blunder (2002, 359–60). Bushnell calls it “the most sensational of all M-19 operations” (1993, 254) in an analysis of the mix of violence and normalcy (252–68). [188]

15 

The photograph on page 39 of Salcedo 2004 shows the invisible portion of Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985. [189]

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chairs, largely stylized by the elongations, make access impossible. They are precariously balanced, and no one would be tempted to sit on them. This, too, is an emphatic statement on the importance of space. The remnants of the chairs and their stylizing elongations literally bar us from access, including visual access, to the next room. In order to see that the bars are not simply and literally bars that bar us from seeing, but that, instead, these bars end in chairs, we would have to look around the corner, which is impossible. What kind of torture is taking place that we must not witness?15 With this work we have reached two limits, one in space and one in time. In space, this work suspends the boundary between single works and installation in the second sense. The wall serves as the equivalent of a linguistic shifter between these two genres. Disposed against the wall as in a single work, but seeming to be driven into the wall as in an installation, the poles demonstrate the fine line between reality and fiction. That fine line is what makes political art possible: pertaining to reality, it creates a fiction where the imagination is enabled. That fiction’s unfolding is possible in the space that this installation with its gray light has turned into a political space. Here can take place what Bergson understood in 1907 as “creative evolution” (1983). Such an evolution occurs when understanding and action are imbricated. “If we take evolution seriously,” writes Marrati in a helpful commentary on this idea, “we will have to recognize that the faculties of understanding and action are intimately related” (2005, 1101). Indeed, without such an understanding, we would remain powerless to effectuate change, and political art would be impotent. No lives can be saved by art, but lives can be changed, if only by that experiential understanding that can potentially lead to action in the political space. Bergson’s vision of the élan vital, or the tendency of life, is predicated upon the creative power of time; the potential of duration to innovate, to act. Salcedo demonstrates—visually “argues”—that point and how this might indeed be the key to agency in the political. Her deployment of space in actual time and the duration that this requires but that also enables us, her viewers, to act, corresponds to Bergson’s definition of “life.” In Marrati’s words, “The tendency of life, which is its very essence, is not the coming into existence of a possibility. It is an ongoing process of actualization that creates new and different forms of life along with new concepts, ideas, and affections” (2005, 1109). The extraordinary artistic achievement is the literal embodiment of this potential in what is, to all intents and purposes, a fictional space that, again literally, merges into a political space.

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In the suspension of boundaries that Salcedo’s installations produce, the understanding that arises is itself already a form of action. The sheer need to take a place, to take place in that exhibition space in order to see the works, to peek around the corner, to hear the silence, enforces action, even if it is only the slightest sliver of action, in the willingness to participate. The suspension of that boundary is reiterated in the suspension of light and color. The light is gray so as to distinguish it from the white-cube aesthetic that would turn the work back to its status as an autonomous artwork; it factually transforms the white walls into gray ones. In a similar way, the gray suspends the filling in of colors, so that the lacking “thou” can enter the space with her own colors. Every visitor to this suspended space changes the look of it; hence, given that it is an installation as much as a single work, she changes the look of the work itself. Such events—because they are events—of the transformation of space are necessarily singular, even if each visitor encounters the signs of their condition. “To the singularity of objects of experience must correspond the singularity of concepts that aim at grasping them,” writes Marrati, with reference to Bergson’s 1903 work The Creative Mind (1992). But what the works under consideration here intimate with special force is that such a political action in and on space is also temporal; we have reached a limit in time. The teasing hint of temporal specificity in Noviembre 6 began to suggest a temporal positioning whose direction we could not even determine. Noviembre 6, 1985, inscribed history into the gallery, with the specific events that form its skeleton. And Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, referring to the (almost) identical historical date, hence, the same event but now evoked on the next day, including the immediate aftermath, casts its shadow over it; the shadow of smoke, as in “smoking guns.” A shadow that moves, a movement that, as the phrase has it, takes place in time. It seems appropriate, now, to suspend the generic category discussed in this chapter and to do so mid-work, so to speak—or mid-event. The event evoked in different ways and in different degrees of specificity in these leaden works has also been the occasion for a unique work-event, in which the artist commemorated the violence of Noviembre 6 y 7. This work, which mimicked the time-specificity as well as the site-specificity of the historical event, challenges yet another boundary: that between installation as, still, a tangible work and performance. Performance is ephemeral and rigorously time-bound. Retrospectively, performance is also the ephemeral occurrence that all works discussed so far solicit when a visitor enters the gallery.

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5

F i g s . 5 .1–5 .6 Noviembre 6 y 7, 2002. 280 chairs. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

In concrete perception, memory intervenes, and the subjectivity of sensible qualities is due precisely to the fact that our consciousness, which begins by being only memory, prolongs a plurality of moments into each other, contracting them into a single intuition.

H e n r i B e r g s o n , Matter and Memory

The date was November 6, first without a year, then with one. The event was a mass killing. It happened eighteen years ago, at the same moment that Salcedo staged her unique installation; perhaps we should call it a performance. Its simple title was Noviembre 6 y 7—that date again. All that remains of the performance are photographs, documentation taken at different moments of the fifty-three hours’ duration of the performance and of the event it commemorated. In these photographs we see shadow, in different shades of the concept “tenebrae.” When I trace the sequence of photographs (Salcedo 2004, 21–23), I get a clear sense of the timespace continuity that shadows produce (see figs. 5.1–5.6). The first photo shows a wall without shadow and without clear light, although the photograph is obviously taken by daylight. We see a stern white wall, a traffic sign on the corner, and people walking by purposefully, probably on their way to work. A bit above the middle of the wall and toward the left-hand corner, a chair seems to float. It is more or less upright, and seems to be suspended on a piece of rope. I can well imagine that no one would look up. The second photograph shows another chair, a bit higher than the first, and this one upside down. The light is the same as in the first image, and, as in the gallery where the related works are installed, it lacks character, not even leaving a shadow. Clouds obscure most of the visible sky, which explains the lack of shadows and the nondescript light. Whoever happens to look up would probably assume furniture is being moved. In the third photograph, this mundane explanation becomes a bit more difficult to sustain. There are more chairs now, also on the sides of the building, one of which is now illuminated by bright sunlight. There, on the left of the image, the chairs cast shadows. The larger group on the right wall still shows neither light nor shadow, but the chairs are now so numerous [193]

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that we begin to assume a certain duration in time. Although we cannot judge that duration specifically, it is there for us to see. On the far right, two small figures might be looking up. Others continue to go about the every­ day business of their lives. The images that follow are a bit enigmatic. The fourth is clearly shot by night, but the fifth is in daylight again, whereas the sixth suggests artificial light. There is something wrong with the sequence here. The increasing number of chairs is at odds with the light and darkness. At this point we can no longer be certain whether the chairs are being lowered or lifted. Nor can we count them. There are too many of them, and shadows can no longer be distinguished from solid matter. The enlarged photographs on the next two pages demonstrate that the chairs produce more than one shadow, depending on how far they are removed from the surface of the wall, and on the angle at which they are placed in relation to the light source. We reach another boundary here: of time, of space, and of the shadow that binds them. These chairs are not exactly traces. But they do bear witness; they propose evidence of something, a violence that happened in the past. They do this by embodying a statement of absence. It is a tragic irony that the Palace of Justice should be the theater of the destruction of justice—the ­evidence destroyed, after all, was the trace of a crime that allows retrospective justice to come about. In Tenebrae, the artist of still sculpture uses temporal specificity to substitute for the absent traces an act that can restore the bond to memory. She performs, that is, an act of memory. She had done that before, when, in August 1999, she and her colleagues placed five thousand red roses along the 150-meter stretch of a wall to commemorate and protest the violent death of the humorist Jaime Garzón. She has done it since then when, on June 29, 2007, eleven members of the State Parliament of Valle in Colombia were murdered after having been held captive for five years by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). Salcedo organized a commemoration on July 3. On the central Plaza de Bolívar, twenty-four thousand candles were lit in a perfect grid. This act required collective doing. People came to help light the candles in a simple, silent gesture. She will do it again, because bearing witness to violence is what she does. But why, in Noviembre 6 y 7, use chairs to speak up?1 Each chair was different, and none was spectacularly beautiful. Moreover, as if to foreground their differences, they moved at different speeds. 1  Such acts of memory are responses to events and therefore subject to improvisation. Although much more structured, they are in some sense comparable to the “spontaneous shrines” discussed in Santino 2006. The events are public, memorials to violent death, and collectively performed.

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F i g u r e 5 .7 Project for the Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá, 2007. Square filled with 24,000 candles. Photo: Juan Fernando Castro.

F igu r e 5.8 Project for the Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá, 2007. Square filled with 24,000 candles. Photo: Juan Fernando Castro.

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Thus they were endowed with formal and temporal singularity. These chairs are just what they are: pieces of ordinary household furniture—the ­material, or medium, that Salcedo has used so frequently, always in conjunction with a sense of memory, trace, or real, human use. Chairs are used, particularly, by individuals to sit on. The chairs in this performance—for lack of a better term—are simple, ordinary, neither emphatically denoting kitchens and other warm domestic spaces, nor offices and the cold environment in which the event took place. As generic chairs, they seem to bring into tension the universal idea of the chair as “type” and the particularity of ­“ascriptive ideology, which is by definition particularistic” (Kohn 2002, 192). Their ordinariness is a symptom of neither and highlights the tension between the two. I see in the ordinariness of these chairs a theoretical statement concerning what political scientists have noticed as the paradox of universalism. In the context of racism in the United States, Mark Reinhardt (1997) and Margaret Kohn (2002), among others, have analyzed the paradoxical fact that the universalism that underlies the liberal-democratic political system in the Northern American states actually led to more intense racial prejudice there than in the slavery states in the South (Kohn 2002, 187). Kohn spells out the stakes, which I propose to extend to the issue of the precariousness of human life (Butler 2004) in a situation of routine violence: “If racism were an alternative, even antithetical tradition, then liberal democracy would not be implicated in racism’s violent history. If, on the contrary, liberalism and racism were interdependent, then liberalism does not provide an unproblematic solution to the patterns of exclusion” (171). This logic can be brought to bear on the ambiguities noted in the previous chapter concerning the psychic consequences of civil war. Salcedo aims to overcome this paradox, which, in more abstract terms, concerns both the impossibility, the exclusive nature, of universalism itself and the ideological partisanship inherent in particularism. The generic chairs, differentiated but inconspicuously so, keep the singularity of each former user in purview without telling any particular story about the users. The temporal and spatial specificity of the performance itself, as an event linked to a previous event that was life-orienting, likewise keeps the two together and keep the drawbacks of each at arm’s length. Again, once we pay attention to their specificity, such ephemeral performances do hark back to earlier works, even though these appear to be quite dissimilar. In earlier pieces, Salcedo started from personal contacts with survivors. Incipient anecdotes did emerge there, but names, places, or dates were never mentioned. Nothing in the works tells us who the vic-

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2 

For an essay on the issue of specificity in Salcedo’s work, see Schmerler 2000. The author is caught in a binary opposition between general and particular, which is exactly what Salcedo is undermining: “Salcedo, however, doesn’t provide this information to the general public. Instead, she seems to want the piece to function on a purely formal level” (81). Here, the alternative to particularity is form.

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tims and survivors are. By withholding the actual stories, she attempted to break the violence of anonymity without falling into the opposite trap of voyeurism, exploitation, and sentimentalism. Thus, the distinction between particularity and singularity is enacted to the letter. Again, what I call literalism serves here to foreground the power of the works as theoretical objects (Bal 2008). In addition to the traps mentioned above, particular anecdotes would preclude the migratoriness, the potential for translation, which, as I have argued all along, is crucial for Salcedo’s practice of making political art. In the Bogotá performance Noviembre 6 y 7 it is the moment, not the individuals, whose erasure the work serves to fight. Yet the historical information is not necessary for us (latecomers) to experience and understand the work. On the contrary; the explicit title insists that we be aware of our belatedness, which is as inevitable as our complicity.2 That is the point of this work, as well as its distinctiveness from earlier pieces: the moment can only be put into the work because, as the artist insists through the title, it is irremediably severed from the present. The shadow in the title—the shadow that the chairs both cast and are—hovers over us, imposing yet ungraspable. The chairs cannot be traces of what happened, only of what was seen. The interval is frozen. The chairs do not cast shadows all the time; this is because time is temporality slowed down to the extreme, whereas shadows are an effect of time as much as of light. In this sense, this performance is a work on duration, like Unland. As Merewether writes, “There is between . . . the event and its aftermath, between these two lines an irreducible distance, an interval.” This interval cannot be filled; it remains a gap, stubborn and interfering. It stipulates that we have come too late, after the fact: “To arrive too late means not only an inability to be present but also to be witness to an event” (2001, 137–38). This experience of belatedness—in the “broader field” beyond individual human consciousness—is, ultimately, what the political thrust of Salcedo’s work brings about. Time fails us, which is something we need to be aware of; but time in the sense of duration is also the material basis of the possibility to make new concepts, ideas, and affections. Along with duration, space is the medium that can connect us to the time beyond the interval through the power of form. It is the intersection of form and time as the

Chapter Five

construction site of a politically effective affect toward which Salcedo’s deployment of the anthropomorphic imagination works. The interval that separates us from the past where the violence occurred is the moment, the submoment, of actuality that is foreshortened: not quite frozen but slowed down beyond perceptible time. As a result we cannot ensconce ourselves in the ethical indifference of aesthetic contemplation defined in a misguided distortion of Kantian disinterestedness, for we are “touched” and hence interested by that moment, even though we cannot appropriate it. The “infinitesimally small but ultimately real” (Kubler 1962, 17) interval of actuality sticks to us. But we cannot reach out and feel that our identification with the suffering “other” can somehow redeem the violence, “make it better,” as the mother’s kiss does a child’s scraped knee. There is no hope, no redemption, only the closeness to complicity, and the threat of a second disappearance. This threat can be countered by the imposition of an ethical non-indifference, a real engagement from within the acknowledged complicity, which is a matter of human time. For, to recall Benjamin’s caution, “Every image of the past that is not recogni­zed by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (1968b, 255). I have explored the implications of this statement in terms of recognition in chapter 2; here my focus is on the temporality of such acts of recognition—the past and its images as a concern of the present—which provide memory with a temporal density. If summing up an artist’s work with a single term would not be the ultimate reduction, one would think Salcedo is devoted to memory. This memory is one of dissent: a combative protest against the violence that erases its own traces. She creates memories where none exist; she squeezes memory out of tiny glimpses into the past; she draws the dead out of oblivion without giving away their names. She thus inflects the very idea of memory to make it profoundly political: memory becomes an issue of social agency. Memory can now do its job according to Bergson, prolonging a plurality of moments and then merging them.3 In the first sentence of her description of this project, the artist wrote, “On 6 and 7 November 2002, I will make an Act of Memory to mark the tragic events that occurred at the Palace of Justice in Bogotá on 6 and 7 November 1985” (2007, 83; emphasis in original). The ambiguity of the phrase “make an act” is central to my analysis here. On the one hand, the verb to make should ordinarily result in a thing made, an object—an artwork for ­example. And 3  Bergson 1991, 218–19. On memory as a tool for dissent, see Guerney 2003, which takes Salcedo’s work as the first and most prominent example.

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An Act in Search of an Agent The short moment, the interval where recognition of the past “as one of its own concerns” inscribes itself into the present: performing this moment is the most timely political intervention to which Salcedo’s itinerary has led her. It seems logical, then, that the final piece of the Tenebrae series, Noviembre 6 y 7, pushes this engagement with the evanescence of time and the need to belatedly slow it down. It pushes it to the extreme of an ephemeral intervention that is both extremely short-term, lasting only fifty-three hours, and extremely lengthy—the movement is so slow it cannot be perceived. This intervention provides consolation for the singularity of the irretrievably lost moment by means of a spatial specificity that is breathtakingly incisive. To call Noviembre 6 y 7 a performance in one sense risks suggesting, wrongly, that the artist, whose absence from her works and installations has always been such a powerful element of their politics, was “doing” the piece herself. That would be suggested, at least, if “performance” were seen as “performance art.” But if seen as theatrical, which includes the notion that it is a collective work, the event provides insight into the possibilities of a temporally based distinction between the three aspects of (theatrical) events—doing, acting, and performing in space.4 Doing refers to the technological, motoric aspect of producing movement: it can produce an event, defined as the transformation of one state into another. But events seen as the product of doing can be natural as well as man-made. Acting implies an intention—which may be conscious, 4 

For a helpful analysis of these three aspects of events, see Rayner’s phenomenological account of action in the theater (1994).

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this is what an artist who is a sculptor usually does. On the other hand, an act is an expression of human agency, aiming to transform a state or situation. In this particular case, it is the marking of what has hitherto remained unmarked. Between the objecthood and the agency, Salcedo’s ­artistic program takes shape. If the project in Bogotá tipped the balance from the former to the latter, it also demonstrated retrospectively (“pre-posterously”) that in political art the two are inextricably merged. In this chapter I explore what it means to say that memory is an act. For this exploration, the subjects and concepts of the previous chapters are reframed. The trace takes its temporal shape out of the shadow; representation its theatricality; time will have to surrender its elusiveness; space its silence. Properly speaking, therefore, there are no objects in this chapter, only events.

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nonreflective, or even unconscious—an “I” who is acting, bringing about events by means of movement. Performing refers to the effect as much as the doing and acting; it entails the participation of the addressee, the “you” affected by the act. By virtue of performativity, the work is no longer “thouless.” Performing in the sense of speech-act theory entails the positioning of the second person in a mutual and exchangeable relationship to the first person. Such a positioning was at stake in the second, social sense of recognition, according to Benjamin. Now the title Thou-less of one of the Tenebrae pieces, a still work banned from performance because it is lacking a “thou,” a second person, becomes programmatic for the challenges Salcedo poses to her viewers. That sculpture of loneliness and inadequacy, with its distorted surfaces, unsuitable seat, and unstable legs, now appears as a complaint. It cannot participate in the theatrical performance. Perhaps Noviembre 6 y 7 was needed to restore the possibility of a “thou.” That proposition gives to “us,” the art’s “thou,” a serious responsibility. Normally, we do not distinguish these three aspects of theater, but in the case of violence, suffering, and catastrophe it is important to do precisely that and with utmost care. The doing, the motoric work of slowly lowering the chairs, is severed from the acting, the commemorating. To bind the two anew, wrenching them out of the routine of violence, requires performing, both in the theatrical sense of enacting a scripted part and in the philosophical sense of bringing about an effect on a “thou.” I consider theater—more precisely, its defining feature, theatricality—the most ­helpful frame for an understanding of Salcedo’s event-works and, by retro­ spective extension, all of her work. As Maaike Bleeker cogently argues, theater has been neglected in visual studies because it foregrounds the historicality of seeing, and thus undermines the universalisms and essentialism inhering in that field. She writes, This relationship between seers and what they see is a fundamental characteristic of the theatrical event. The word theatre is derived from the Greek theatron which denotes the place from where the theatrical event is seen. The theatre organizes the relation between those seeing and what they see, mediating in a specific relationship between the two. The theatre, therefore, (or so it would seem) presents the object par excellence for an analysis of visuality as a phenomenon that takes place within the relationship between the one seeing and what is seen and against the backdrop of culturally and historically specific visual practices. All the more striking is the almost total absence of references to the theatre in interdisciplinary textbooks and studies on visuality. (in prep.) [206]

5  Horsman (in press). Horsman’s brilliant study of the intertwinement of theatricality and justice, or, rather, of trials and judgment, is based on close analyses of three classic cases of post-Holocaust and post-communist discussions: philosopher Hannah Arendt’s 1963 trial report Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1994); several poems by the French writer and Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo; and a 1930s play about a fictional Communist Party show trial by German playwright Bertolt Brecht. His conclusions bear, however, on a vast array of instances, and Salcedo’s event-works could also be seen as critical examinations of these. 6  See also Bleeker 2008b.

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Only with a keen eye for the historical and social specificity—the singularity—of each event of seeing can Salcedo’s event-works be understood as effective. The “thou” is to be produced, every time anew, in its vocation of response. The reason theater is such an indispensable framework is best understood when we consider simultaneously the theatricality of events of justice. Yasco Horsman conducts a critical examination of events where trials and theater have been combined deliberately, as in the Truth Commissions first established in Argentina and then in South Africa after apartheid.5 For this to be possible, a particular perception—of this work of art, to use a helpfully ambiguous term—must be wed to memory of the event of horror lost in an atemporal history by means of such a double performance. Bergson has pointed out that perception, unlike common views, is neither subjective (it is lodged in the object) nor lodged in time (it is locked up in an impossible instant). He writes, “This perception, which coincides with its object, exists rather in theory than in fact: it could only happen if we were shut up within the present moment” (1991, 218). But this is impossible. Therefore, the philosopher continues, memory contaminates perception. This is what theatricality brings to the fore, as both Bleeker (in her analysis of political theater) and Horsman (in his political analysis of theatrical trials) demonstrate for actual instances of political-cultural practice, thereby making Bergson’s theory usefully concrete. As the epigraph to this chapter explains, “In concrete perception, memory intervenes, and the subjectivity of sensible qualities is due precisely to the fact that our consciousness, which begins by being only memory, prolongs a plurality of moments into each other, contracting them into a single intuition” (1991, 218–19). In other words, time is necessarily plural, and, thanks to the overlap between moments, memory is possible. And this possibility saves perception, already deprived of its apparent subjectivity, from a pure objectivity that would make it distant from us.6 In the time- and place-based event Noviembre 6 y 7 in 2002, Salcedo took this view of perception to heart. She deployed the distension of time into

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real and sensed multiple times to achieve a disjunction of the different ways subjectivity is implicated in the production of events. Thus, she deployed what Bleeker calls elsewhere a “critical vision machine” (2008b, 259). The event of the performance happened on November 6 and 7 in 2002. It was the commemoration of an event of violence eighteen years earlier. As such, it enacted a kind of burial. The commemoration was performed by means of chairs; it was performed in space, specifically, in the same place where the violence took place, and in time, specifically, within the same time span of the earlier event. The chairs, pieces of furniture that belong inside, showed up outside, turning the space inside out. This reversal brought the passers-by outside a little bit inside. In putting the specific date on the event, the artist also broke the anonymity to which the army had condemned it. She gave the event a name. Although she never names the victims whose plight triggered her works, as a contemporary Antigone she wrenched them out of anonymity in other ways. The real existence, in the past, of the household use of the furniture, the actually worn quality of shoes or the tattered leftovers of a child’s dress, all serve to counter anonymity while refraining from particularizing. Taussig told a story about the use of a name that demonstrates the ambivalence with which Salcedo works: “The place of the name in terror’s talk is the place occupied by literal language, pre-lapsarian, the God-given world of names. But the name is also, as State-ordained identification, an essential requisite of bureaucratic procedure. This meeting of God and State in the Name, no less than the strange laws of reciprocity pertaining to the folk doctrine of Purgatory and Sin, is also open to a certain appropriation in what I take to be a particularly male sphere of interaction between private and public spheres.” Taussig proceeds to tell a story pertaining to names, which ends thus: “Forcing his way into the cells, Iván screamed out the man’s name again and again, for this would be the last possible chance, and, like a miracle, the disappeared man’s voice could be heard calling back. He was there” (1992, 28–29). Naming the event by its date is a bit like Iván’s resurrecting the man from the tomblike cell. Above, I read the photographs as a sequence of images. Now I describe the event—at which I was not present—as a collective theatrical performance in a way I can imagine it. Salcedo’s hallmark chairs do not look anthropomorphic, but they “do,” they act like humans; motorically they come to life; they move. They “hold” the perception—perception is lodged in them. The passers-by do not all look at them; yet the chairs were there, “in” perception. The slight anthropomorphism of the chairs reminds us of this; it enacts Bergsonian perception. And this implies that they also enact the

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[209]

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subjectivation imported by memory. That, I speculate, is the core of the “act” of memory. This is how an act of memory can bind the individual to the social, respecting singularity while suspending particularity. An act of memory as Salcedo’s art proposes it goes against the grain of the somewhat facile distinctions in cognitive memory theory. These can range from exuberantly diversified to stunningly simple. One example of the former is Connerton’s analysis of “types of forgetting” that is predicated upon the diversification of types of memory (2008). An example of the latter is the view, implicit in so many considerations of memory, that the presence or absence of language is decisive for the kind of memory that emerges: “Memories are stored in two primary formats: as ‘declarative’ or language-accessible information and as non-language-based ‘procedural’ or habit memories” (Emilien et al. 2004, 2). With the way she articulates the subliminal anthropomorphism in the chairs with the emphatic temporal distension, Salcedo keeps cutting through such divisions. Her performance “argues,” as a political object, that relegating all nonlinguistic memory to the domain of routine is a way of disempowering the inhabitants of the political. These participants would then only be able to answer routine violence by making a routine, a habit, out of it. The anthropomorphic effect of the chairs was enhanced by the fact that they moved during those fifty-three hours in 2002, although their movement was too slow to be caught in the act. They crept down from the roof of the building over the wall as if returning, like the ghosts of the victims casting their shadows before going away again. They also came one by one, in singularity, before forming a crowd—a multitude. This happened so slowly that it was not the movement itself that was perceived and hence anthropomorphized, but the event of their descent—one moment they were not there, the next they were. Between slow time and appearance, the instant plays out its impossibility. This impossibility entails a few implications. A chair appeared over the edge of the roof. Ten minutes later it was halfway down the wall. Nevertheless, it was almost impossible to follow the exceptionally slow movement. Hence, in the attempt to see only the “doing,” even the motoric aspect of the event was separated from the two states between which the transformation occurred. An element of willful, intentional agency was, of course, at work here; the artist Doris Salcedo and her staff did this. For this reason, I would prefer to call the work, simply, an act. But since the artist remained out of sight, emphatically and willfully, and the chairs were empty, it presented itself as an act in search of an agent; an act of an anonymity that homeopathically reenacted the anonymity of the violence it commemorated,

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and that requested its viewers to be its new agents. This is how it was an act of memory. The act took place on the façade of the new Palace of Justice in Bogotá on the occasion of the seventeenth anniversary of the original event of mass violence. There could not be a more precise deployment of the implications of the theatricality of justice and of the social nature of memory at the same time. Perception and Memory for Witnessing The artist was a witness, then, in 1985. She remembers more than an image. The sounds of gunshots, the smell of charred flesh, the sight of horror: this is one of those events that inscribe themselves in one’s body and thus mark one’s life. Clearly, this was a traumatic event. What does it mean to say that, and how can I say it without overstepping the self-imposed boundary of modesty and decency that I fully intend to respect? In saying that the event is traumatic, I am not attributing personal trauma to the artist, nor am I denying the possibility of such a personal trauma. Instead, I contend that, as an event, collectively and culturally, the violent event has the status of a traumatogenic one. Symbolically, the event-performance of 2002 treats it as such—a verb that refers both to a representation or signification and to a behavior that affects others thus treated. The verb to treat, moreover, includes the sense of treatment for healing. In this section I attempt to articulate how that is possible: that an artwork or art event may “work through” a collective trauma. As traumatogenic, the historical event, while marking the society that underwent it in Badiou’s sense of such events, is inaccessible to narrative memory.7 Instead, the event behaved as the French psychoanalyst Janet, a contemporary of Freud and a colleague of his at the Parisian hospital La Salpêtrière, had theorized. According to Janet, traumatic events elude subjective elaboration and remain rigorously outside of the subject’s grasp, as if to forcefully demonstrate Bergson’s concept of perception quoted as the epigraph to this chapter. This is why I mentioned the experience of “perceptual inadequacy” above, in my confrontation with Unland. Janet deployed the horizontal model of dissociation as an alternative to Freud’s vertical model of repression to account for the inaccessibility of trauma to memory, in spite of its insistent presence “on the surface.” Dissociation is a splitting off of what is unbearable. If we think of dissociation in theatrical terms, 7  Salcedo spoke about the witnessing and the way this affected her senses to Carlos Basualdo. She literally uses words that recall Badiou’s conception of the event: “It left its mark on me” (Basualdo 2000, 14).

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8  In this paragraph and the next, I recycle what I wrote elsewhere on this issue (Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999, viii–ix). On Janet’s “horizontal” model of trauma, see Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1995.

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the split-off portion recedes into the wings. But it returns on stage, repeatedly and outside of the subject’s volition.8 In narratological terms, the difference between the Freudian and the Janetian model of traumatic recall is relevant for the position Salcedo enacted as a double witness in Noviembre 6 y 7. Repression, in narrative, results in ellipsis, the omission of narrative elements. Dissociation, on the other hand, doubles the strand of the narrative series of events by splitting off a sideline. But in both conceptions, the traumatic event recurs, assaulting the subject unable to process it. Again narratologically speaking, the traumatogenic event keeps recurring outside of the subject’s control. This is why, in Bergson’s terms, it is a perception, not a memory. Such a perception deprived of subjectivizing memory remains objective: lodged in the object; outside the subject’s grasp; cold. It is this coldness that Noviembre 6 y 7 addressed and attempted to thaw. Perception that offers no link to memory is traumatic: that is what this event “argues” in its role as political object. The “treatment” consists of establishing that link, belatedly. As the ambiguity of the word treatment intimates, the theatricality of the artevent is able both to “instruct” the public, that is, to recall and inflect, and to “cure” the traumatic nature of the anonymity that has blocked memory from deploying itself socially. Slow, almost timeless duration, relentless repetition without homeopathic difference, and narrative splitting-off are the key elements that explain the affective operation of the commemoration in Bogotá. Salcedo, like many of her fellow Bogotians, was a witness to the historical event. Whether or not she was traumatized by it, she chose to deploy that wounded subjectivity to “do, act, and perform” this work. The event marked her, as an event according to Badiou; it kept assaulting her, as a trauma according to Janet; and being timeless, it took all the time in the world, according to Salcedo’s politics of time. Slow, sensible, perceptible time is her tool. Open, public space, a building turned inside out, is her stage. And staging—deploying theatrically to solicit a “thou” to implicate him- or herself—is her act. In the event of Noviembre 6 y 7, she witnessed again, actively, after all these years—in the present—the now of Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, for which the memory is “its own concern” according to his fifth thesis (1968b, 255). She subjectivized the objective, cold perception with the help of memory, that memory that had remained inaccessible. For this thawing of cold

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­ erception, memory must be “heated” out of its grave. This is the “therap peutic” significance of the theatrical act of memory. Perception, from this point of view, is only an “occasion for remembering,” and “there is for us nothing that is instantaneous. In all that goes by that name there is already some work of our memory.”9 The result is a perception subjectivized by memory; a perception that is possible, accessible, “warm.” That thawing itself, rather than the resulting memory, is the artist’s act of memory. As an agent of that act, Salcedo again used time as an anchoring in the present, so that the present could be fleshed out, filled with past and future. But unlike Unland, which compelled the viewer to endorse that position and perform that task, she now put herself on the line, even while remaining out of sight. For it was her position as a witness then and now that structured the work as an event. Moreover, by deploying time as real, in all its slowness as creative duration and in its multiplicity as prolonging a plurality of moments into each other, she inserted the work into the theatricality within which trauma is best addressed. Theatricality is most adequate to trauma because, coming from the outside, assaulting the subject who is powerless, traumatogenic events are themselves fundamentally theatrical. How can such an assertion be substantiated? This argument requires three steps. First, I reiterate Bleeker’s view of theatricality: “Theater here is not a matter of spectacle, exaggeration, or make-believe, but a matter of becoming aware of how we are implicated in the performance of others addressing us” (2008b, 259). The key element in this description is “implication.” The implication in the performance or in a traumatogenic event means that the participants, including the involuntary and powerless witnesses, become part of the art work. To understand how the theatrical aspect works in the case of traumatogenic events, we can, second, look at American psycho­ analyst Christopher Bollas’s theatrical description of dreams. In his theatricalization of the dream, Bollas phrases his theory by using all the terms one tends to bring to bear on mise-en-scène: “I regard the dream as a fiction constructed by a unique aesthetic: the transformation of the subject into his thought, specifically, the placing of the self into an allegory of desire and dread that is fashioned by the ego” (Bollas 1987, 64; emphasis added). His insistence that the ego, not the subject, “directs” the play has specific relevance in the context of trauma. The ego is, indeed, “other” to the subject. This alone makes subjectivity theatrical. The subject cannot take hold of, grasp, or confine the ego. As a consequence, the sleeper is both 9 

Doane 2002, 66; 69. From here on, I limit my reflections on memory to what goes by the name of “cultural memory.” For recent examples of this approach, see Till 2005; Jelin 2003; and the new journal Memory Studies. [212]

10 

For the third step of this argument, I lean on the spectacularly original and incisive work of Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière (2004) and Françoise Davoine (1998; 2008). Davoine brings literature and psychoanalytic theory to bear on one another in an inquiry into the sources of madness in war and other forms of violence, and into the potential that psychoanalysis has, against its own theoretical principles, to restore the broken social bond that produces madness. It is in the recognition that psychoanalysis is a social science that Davoine’s and Gaudillière’s work begins to take effect. A concise and ­lucid analysis of trauma is offered in Van Alphen 1999. [213]

Acts of Memory

the subject of the dream—the dreamer as well as the ­subject ­matter—and emphatically not the dream’s subject: not its narrator, its director, or its writer/painter. The third step in this argument concerns trauma and the events that cause it. I suggest that witnessing an event so overwhelming as the one Salcedo commemorates in her art-event brings powerless and horrified witnesses into a state of dreaming as described by Bollas. Dreaming—in the specific form of having nightmares, is exactly the kind of perception where the subject remains exiled from him- or herself, since there are no frameworks within which the event witnessed can be given meaning. But this disempowerment of the subject is enhanced and further enforced by the solitude of an event where perception exiles the perceiver from the spectacle. The social bond is broken; the agency of the collectivity is impaired; the resulting solitude is literally maddening. It is the restoration of that ­social bond that the commemorating event is able to perform first of all. Its capacity to begin that restoration is due to the implication “in the performance of others addressing us,” as Bleeker has it.10 In staging a theatrical event, Salcedo again used a small measure of that which she sought to treat: recall, “cure,” or redress. The involuntary re­ enactments of traumatic experience that make trauma so hard to live with take the form of drama, not narrative. This is, I speculate, the “deep,” systemic reason why Salcedo refrains from telling stories while she endorses theatricality. In this aspect these reenactments are dependent on the time frame of the “parts” scripted by the dramatist—here, the agents of ­violence. All the manipulations at the disposal of a narrator are inaccessible. The traumatized subject cannot expand and reduce, summarize, highlight, underscore, or minimize elements of the story at will. The traumatized subject is powerless in relation to the traumatogenic event. In ­addition to the reasons mentioned earlier—the traps of voyeurism, the need for modesty, the anecdotal nature of particularity—this is the reason that, for Salcedo, narrative would be useless. Wong comments along similar lines on Salcedo’s a-narrative mode: “In seeking to represent subjects who fall outside of established systems of

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representation, she purposely moved away from narrative, which organises unfolding events along a teleological or etiological continuum. Narrative, in this sense, imposes an artificial order upon an experience in the effort to rationalise or ‘make sense’ of loss by turning it into story.”11 Instead of deploying narrative, if trauma causes doubling, a splitting off, then the artist can use this feature, homeopathically, to take possession of her memory. At 11:35 a.m. on November 6, 2002, the first of a large number of chairs appeared, hanging in front of the wall like a giant ant suspended in the extreme slowdown of its crawling. This was the precise moment at which the first person was killed seventeen years earlier; a strong, concrete doubling of time in time, of an instant in a different moment. The event ended fifty-three hours later, the moment when the episode of war ended, then and there. A punctual memory of an event on the crowded map of ­violent events is given back its duration. No longer an objective perception, it is cushioned within the “plurality of moments” that allows a single, subjective “intuition” to take shape. And if duration can be extended so as to overlap with real time, it cannot do so without belatedness. What the act commemorates is, then, also that: the irrecoverable interval. The “single intuition” that Bergson sees as the result of the merging of moments is the temporal side of an act of memory. The same happens with space. In the modernist, new, emphatically “neutral” building over whose walls the chairs crawled, nothing is visible of the smoking ruins that doubled as a mass grave. As the army destroyed all archives, so modernist architectural reticence has erased all traces of what was there before it disappeared. Except for the chairs that, I imagine, trembled slightly as they were lowered, the ruins of memory would have been erased; the indifferent, coldly objective building of perception without memory could overshadow them. As with time, so with space: Salcedo’s act assaults the walls’ neutral look. The event can take place in the exact same spot, but the spot is no longer the same. Here, too, there is something like an interval, and this, too, is commemorated. What can such an act do to the space where it takes place, its environment, the streets adjacent to the building? When the first chair appeared, passers-by might, in confusion, have thought the offices were being moved. But this “move” became estranging because no one in particular was moving; “doing” and “acting” were disunified, disassociated. This disjunction 11 

Wong 2007, 174. I am not quite so convinced that narrative is inherently artificial and rationalizing as Wong seems to be. Stories can offer a healing sense-making, but they can also remain disconcertingly opaque. The deep convergence between trauma and drama— and trauma’s “treatment” in theatrical fashion—seems to me a more valid reason to privilege the latter mode. [214]

Acting Memory Ephemeral and brief, the appearance and disappearance of the chairs in Noviembre 6 y 7 did not figure as a monument. Rather, the fugitive nature of this work, its short duration as an artwork, was paired with its exasperatingly long duration as a repetition of real time. It was this temporal repetition-with-difference, the duration that was this time subject to volition, which turned the event in the most literal sense into an act of remembrance. This too addresses an aspect of trauma. Cathy Caruth, one of the most prominent trauma theorists, sees in the temporality of trauma a “breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world.” The consequence is the paradox that lies at the heart of trauma: “The most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it” (1996, 91–92).12 If time is broken, then using time as primary material to sculpt a witness statement is a way of making that knowing possible. This enabling of knowing does not entail cognitive success but makes knowing possible within the seeing itself. This is one possible motivation for Salcedo’s consistently visual and otherwise silent work. As the provisional outcome of an ongoing search for the possibility of deploying time as a weapon against oblivion, the gap of seventeen years between the occurrence and its remembrance was made starkly visible. The event flared up for those same, but belated, hours in the present of 2002 that the violence itself had occupied in the past. The memory could only effectively inscribe itself—in the culture whose memory it was—in the brief experience, in the shock of recognition of the passers-by who were witnessing it. Their acts of seeing constituted the visual event it was this work’s ambition to be. 12 

For a critical survey of trauma theories, see Leys 2000. [215]

Acts of Memory

mimics with horrific precision the disjunction of doing and acting in states of violence, when subjects are deprived of their subjectivity and turned into will-less mechanisms. Over time, the overwhelming number of chairs casting ghostly shadows made such a “realist” interpretation of a simple event of moving impossible. The chairs themselves were doing the moving. Between the intentional act, lacking an author, and the mechanical but physically powerful doing of the chairs’ moving, the event’s only personal pronoun could be the “you,” the passers-by to whom the event spoke. The exact moment when normalcy turned into the spectral return of these traces of lives long lost was different for each person who walked by and raised her head in astonishment or refrained from doing so. Whereas doing was separated from acting, acting was merged into performing.

F i g u r e 5.9

F i g u r e 5.10

Installation for the Eighth International Is-

Installation for the Eighth International Istan-

tanbul Biennial, 2003. 1,550 chairs. Courtesy

bul Biennial (detail), 2003. 1,550 chairs. Cour-

of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay

tesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and

Jopling / White Cube, London.

Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

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The concept “act of memory” serves to remind us that memory is something we do, not a passive occurrence. It is also something we do, necessarily, in the present, and when we do it, we are in a specific place. This work, then, continues the discussion of translation, of the possibility of migrating to other places without losing the singularity that informs the work and constitutes its political thrust as a trace. The installation for the Eighth International Istanbul Biennial allows us to consider this again, now in a more integrated way. Here, 1,550 chairs of different styles filled the entire space between two buildings, a void doubtlessly created by demolition. The arrangement of the chairs was such that, incredibly flush with the neighboring houses, they formed a completely flat fourth wall. There are two terms in this brief description that draw attention to the act of memory this work involves—far removed as it is this time from the artist’s own living situation. These are fourth wall and demolition. The term fourth wall comes from theater theory, where it indicates the unspoken convention that no direct communication is possible between the actors on the stage and the spectators in the theater. One space is fictional, the other real. While theater is traditionally an art of affect—think of ­Aristotle’s ­concept of catharsis that was so influential for Freud—the ways in which the ­spectators are affected are never directly diegetic. The fourth wall means precisely that. It guarantees the spectator’s comfort and safety from the diegetic events on stage.13 But then, consider this wall in Istanbul. It is a systematic instance of a typical Salcedian paradox, full of ambiguities, that makes processing it quite a task. First, it is constructed out of pieces of furniture meant for indoor, domestic spaces, which are here subjected to the weather, displayed on a gigantic scale and in the public eye. Second, the chairs are so diverse, in shape and shade as well as in pose, that they foreground an apparent messiness that makes the flat plane of the fourth wall hard to see, and paradoxical in visual logic. Third, the volume is also paradoxical. On the one hand, the volume is compact, so that the chairs do not leave empty space within which domestic life could be led. No chair is simply standing on its four feet on the floor. On the other hand, the volume is not entirely compact. In between the chairs and their elements there is optical and physical space, tight as 13 

The narratological term diegesis goes back to Plato and Aristotle, where it referred to the world of the (imaginary) events presented on the stage or in the story. It is a synonym of certain usages of plot and story but is, specifically, limited to the (mostly, but not necessarily) fictitious world created, conjured up, or otherwise represented. Diegetic as a qualifier is a useful term where clumsy circumscriptions would otherwise be necessary. For this and other narratological terms, see Bal 2009. [218]

Installation for the Eighth International Istanbul Biennial, 2003. 1,550 chairs. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

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F i g u r e 5.11

the amassment may be. Fourth, the upper plane of the installation is not flat. In aerial photographs it looks caved in, ostensibly due to weight, although that, too, is a fiction. As a result, aerial photographs that demonstrate the huge scale of this installation also show a portion of the back wall of the (non)building. The cavedin mass of chairs foregrounds the fact that the building itself, due to the demolition, is caved in. Finally, the sheer number of chairs makes any illusion that there is a wall—imaginary, as in the theater, but insuring privacy in social reality—entirely implausible. Tongue-in-cheek, the fourth wall, like its theatrical counterpart, presents itself as a fiction, reminding us of its own impossibility. This turns the theatrical allusion into a tool to implicate the viewers. Of course, these viewers may be walking by without even bothering to look up, as we saw people doing in the documentary photographs of Noviembre 6 y 7, and as we see them again in the photographs of this installation in Istanbul. But if they were concerned at all, they would be sensitive to the paradoxical, inside-outside nature of the installation and thus be translated, so to speak, between private lives and street life. The impossibility of the fourth wall is charged by the politics of that other notion, housing demolition. Housing demolition, while sometimes necessary for reasons of public safety, is frequently the consequence of political tension, or “disagreement” (in the double sense of Rancière’s term mésentente). It is often caused by speculation, investments being considered more important than the continuity of private lives and the neighborhoods they constitute. It may be a way to capitalize on the price of the square meters of the lot. If this installation was positioned in the center of the city, the price of the space would be astronomical; judging from the adjacent houses, however, especially the artisan’s shop on the left, the building that has been demolished was worth less than the real estate of its location. In this sense, demolition is a capitalist version of the violation of domesticity to which Salcedo’s work is so consistently devoted. Housing demolition, however, is also a political tool that states deploy to enforce public order. In that sense, it is a tool of political repression. The dubious honor of inventing this use of the act of demolishing perfectly

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inhabitable houses goes doubtlessly to Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who demolished entire neighborhoods in Paris after the 1848 Revolution, just in time for the Commune revolt in 1871, in order to make military surveillance easier and popular uprisings more difficult. The destruction affected not only the houses themselves, but also the neighborhoods and the communities that constituted their social fabric. Since then, housing demolition has been used for any combination of the two issues—political­military and political-economic, in the realm of politics and in the realm of the ­political—but, of course, always with similarly destructive social ­results. The worst instance that comes to my own mind is the demolition of Palestinian houses, sometimes as a form of collective punishment for a suicide attack—a primitive form of retribution that goes against the grain of modern justice—and sometimes to secure yet more of the contested territory, allegedly necessary for security (along the infamous wall, for example) yet constituting a de facto increase in colonization.14 On the face of it, then, the installation in Istanbul commemorates housing demolition—in the present, but without excluding its long history—as a political issue with reference to the theater. It appeals to theatricality as a machine for experimenting with visions other than those one’s own everyday life would provide (Bleeker 2008b). And with reference to housing demolition, the visions most likely to occur to spectators are those most keenly relevant for one’s own environment. This is how installation—the temporary occupancy of a space within which the spectator is implicated— can constitute an act of memory for others. Another aspect of the theater is mustered here. This act is by definition collective. I have mentioned Salcedo’s commitment to an “unsigned” art— an art that exists and functions within the social buzz. This commitment addresses memory itself. The memorial presence of the past takes many different forms and serves many purposes. These range from conscious recall to unreflective reemergence, from nostalgic longing for what is lost to polemical use of the past to reshape the present. But unlike personal, individual recall, what is today called cultural memory is the product of a collective agency. Installations such as the one in Istanbul address the collective nature of cultural memory. The sheer number of chairs, greater than in any of the previous works, hyperbolically foregrounds this collective agency. But while making this clear, on the one hand, the principle of am14 

That housing demolition has been a military strategy from the beginning of the state of Israel is made clear in Ilan Pappé’s study of the demolition of Palestinian houses as part of the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine” (2006). Roei’s analysis of the artists in Bil’in, a Palestinian village, brilliantly illuminates the form of political art deployed by the resistance movement in the village (forthcoming). [220]

Meanwhile: Herenow The appeal to perform acts of memory does not serve an idealistic purpose such as redemption. In the wake of catastrophic violence, people have often looked to art not to undo, redeem, or console, but to remember, in ways that avoid the traps of the sentimentality and moralizing that so easily merge in compassion. It has also been looked upon with suspicion. ­Adorno’s famous indictment of art after horror was counterbalanced by his ongoing and, to my mind, passionate search for the potential of art to do something meaningful in the face of horror. Clearly, even if Adorno’s negative dialectic makes it impossible to approve of any artistic strategy, he cannot let go of art altogether, knowing full well that the abhorred isolationism of art as fiction also harbors its potential to act in the political. Salcedo’s art would, I speculate, have been very exciting to Adorno. And Adorno is not the only philosopher to whom Salcedo speaks. In the article mentioned before, Charles Merewether quotes Emmanuel ­Levinas, who wrote about time as if he had Salcedo’s Noviembre 6 y 7 in mind: “Art freezes time, it is about a meanwhile, a duration in the interval, in that sphere which a being is able to traverse, but in which its shadow is mobilized” (Merewether 2001). Beyond the everyday bombardments of fleeting images, art seems a suitable place for us to stop and invest these deaths with cultural duration, as we have seen most prominently in Unland. And this duration needs to take place, as Salcedo’s careful engagement with space demonstrates. In Istanbul, that place is in the middle of a commercial street in a popular neighborhood. Since the installation fills an empty space left by house demolition, there is a clear place of violence, even if that violence itself remains unspecified, according to Salcedo’s insistence that narrativity is necessary while narratives are to remain veiled in modesty. In placing the event at the site of the violence, Salcedo makes a statement on the importance of spatial specificity of the same order as the one she made with exact duration in Noviembre 6 y 7. But, according to my inter­ pretation of temporal foreshortening, Salcedo’s art thickens time to the [221]

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biguity that activates and implicates the viewer requires, on the other hand, a lack of clarity. This is why the work foregrounds collective agency, but—­ reminiscent of the universal /particular tension—it does so without preempting the spectator’s own, individual investment in it; nor does it dictate the precise nature of the recall—conscious, or unreflective, or even traumatically precluded. For even though, strictly speaking, traumatic memory is a contradiction, the violence these works compel us to commemorate requires the inclusion of the traumatized, whose capacity for recall was ­destroyed along with the houses.

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extreme without entirely freezing it. Time becomes as slow as a shadow. The shadows we see in the photographs of Noviembre 6 y 7 bind slow time to the discrepant space, the same yet different, skirting but not enacting representation: a space where the act takes place. The “meanwhile” that Levinas mentions is a time frame within which time continues to work, slowed down, thick as tar on a hot day. Within it, the shadow is mobilized—in two meanings of that verb. “Meanwhile” is a Jetztzeit in which the present engages the past, forcefully holding on to it without allowing sheer repetition or the softening of stylized representation. “The human experience of perception [hence] pivots upon a temporal lag, a superimposition of images, an inextricability of past and present,” wrote Doane in a commentary on the Bergsonian view that is my guideline in this chapter (2002, 77). Deleuze’s terse comment that “Bergsonian ­duration is defined less by succession than by coexistence” gives another formulation to this “meanwhile” (1988, 60). Meanwhile’s suspension allows neither erasure nor collapse. Instead, the “meanwhile” is heterogeneous. It is this heterotopy cum heterochrony that characterizes memory. Essential to Salcedo’s ephemeral works or acts is the variation of temporal density. This density plays between moments in a time frame. Equally essential is spatial density when the site remains but one building is displaced by another. Ultimately, what is at stake between the past and the present that Salcedo links together on this spot in Istanbul, or during those fifty-three hours in Bogotá—that is, in the interval of durable actuality here-now—is neither redemption nor ­identification, but a kind of memory that one can conceive of as heteropathic. We in the present are compelled to remember the suffering, death, and mourning of others in an ungraspable past.15 But the question that indicts representation also arises in relation to memory art. How can art serve memory without falling into the repetitive representation of what must be neither forgotten nor reiterated? There is no simple way for art to represent horror and violence. As we have seen, this is a problem that is subject to inquiry in Salcedo’s early work and that her ongoing quest aims to overcome. Representing violence in art leads to charges of having made beauty out of horror, fiction out of a reality whose realness is so utterly important to maintain, and also, given the experiential intensity of horror, of representing the unrepresentable. Yet, important as these cautionary discussions are, it is equally important that for 15 

The qualifier heteropathic was proposed by Silverman (1996) for identification with others on those others’ terms, as opposed to idiopathic identification, which absorbs the other into the self cannibalistically. [222]

16 

For a clear account and convincing argument in favor of alternative modes of “keeping in touch” with the Holocaust, see Van Alphen 1997. In another publication Van ­Alphen explains why traumatogenic horror defeats representation or, to be more precise, why, for the subject suffering from it, trauma cannot be connected with the horrific event that caused it (1999). The reasons for this are of a very different order than the Adornian modesty argument. 17  For an overview of this discussion, see Luckhurst 2008, 164–76. I have contributed to the discussion in Reinhardt, Edwards, and Duganne 2007, a project (exhibition and book) that is entirely devoted to this question. [223]

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these same reasons the violence not be allowed to disappear from the cultural scene.16 Moralizing prescriptions of what art can or cannot focus on are out of place—as much as out of time—in an era as riddled with violence as ours. Discussions of photojournalism, for example, initiated by writers such as Susan Sontag (1966; 1977; and up to her last book in 2003) tend to end in indictments like the following: “Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they “care” more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention” (2003, 69–70). Others, however, including the greatest artists of the genre (Sebastião Delgado, Luc Delahaye), make the point that it is the universalizing thrust of such photographs that do this damage, for “the more general they are, the less likely they are to be effective” (Sontag 1977, 17). Žižek adds to this important political argument by claiming that universalism “relies on a violent gesture of depolitization, depriving the other of any political subjectivization” (2005, 128). In this he joins the arguments made by political scientists such as Reinhardt (1997) and Kohn (2002). This goes to support my argument, made throughout this book, for singularity as the basis of the aesthetic that Ross Chambers (2004) has called “aftermath aesthetic.”17 Salcedo’s art cannot exist within the confines set by the prescriptive view of what art can and cannot “properly” do. In fact, this view is grounded in a resilient formalism. Using actual furniture and other used objects, she refuses to be typecast as either a formalist or a realist artist. The hostility against art that deals with the Holocaust—understandable and made commonplace since Adorno first proclaimed it—is only reasonable within a ­formalist conception of art. Only within such a conception is art isolated from reality—and hence fictional, in a sense that opposes fiction to reality —and pleasing, which was Adorno’s point. As I have argued in this book, Salcedo’s art cannot even be seen within those confines. Seeing is never “just seeing,” as Bleeker insists, which is why the theatricality that proposes a “critical vision machine” is so well

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placed to substitute for that naive and escapist simplification (2008a and 2008b). Such critical vision machines are what Salcedo’s art-events create. Ultimately, it is in that tension between the hypervisibility of actual objects and the invisibility of “art” for the lazy eye that the political intervention this art makes takes place. For, as I have said before, without the other world—the outside world of the political and its necessary complicity with the politics of violence—there is, in Salcedo’s sculptures, which are large and discreet, ordinary and stunningly powerful, simply nothing to see: no representational image, no beauty as we know it, no forms that can stand on their own. There is only duration, to be experienced at that place. The violence itself is nowhere in sight. But the ordinariness of the traces—the chairs moving through duration or being amassed between buildings—makes any attempt at a formalist interpretation as inadequate as a realist reading. By putting the exact date of the event in the title of the Bogotá event, the artist adamantly resists such categories. The moment in the present covers the moment of the past exactly, like a simulacrum.18 There is another issue concerning time that pertains to installation space, and of which Noviembre 6 y 7 again offers an extremely precise, hence, illuminating demonstration. In addition to Adorno’s concern about the temptations of poetry’s barbaric stylizing “after Auschwitz,” the oftenoverlapping concern is with speed and the fugitivity of experience. For speed entails the distraction of an art that passes by us too quickly and in too many forms in this age of mechanical and electronic reproduction. Salcedo’s search to constantly transform her extremely fragile, nonreproducible works integrates these two concerns. While acknowledging the danger of proliferating representations of ­violence, Salcedo refuses to retreat from this arena into the hostile forgetting that iconophobia promotes. The public nature of her art works to overcome the divide between private and public, to instate, or set up, a dialectic between them. Caution must stop short of censoring; tact and delicacy, of erasure. Geoffrey H. Hartman, one contributor to this debate about generalized iconophobia, is more specific than that. He speaks of “the loss or subsumption of the past in the present, a present with very little presence beyond the spotlight moment of its occurrence” (1996, 106). As a generalization of the media in relation to memory, Hartman’s view seems excessively condemnatory and essentializing, precluding differentiation in the immensely rich domain of the media. But as a counterweight to an idealized, collective, communal memory, it makes a good point. As a caution 18 

This is why the opposition between factual information and the “purely formal” is so utterly misguided (Schmerler 2000, 81). [224]

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against an erasure of the past, however, it becomes countereffective, particularly when what the author calls the “subsumption of the past in the present” is equated with loss. The difficulty of memory in the face of horror has yet another side to it. Memory is not served by the increase in information storage. Data banks do not store (or “story”) the affective side of the past. Instead, a productive memorialization of the kind Salcedo’s art seeks to facilitate comes closer to what Huyssen has called one of the functions of the museum, namely, to provide “a space for creative forgetting” (1995, 34). In my understanding, Salcedo’s sculptures demonstrate a deployment of memory that is contrary to what Hartman fears, and this brings her work closer to what Huyssen’s sensitive and politically savvy analysis advocates. Her work does not promote the subsumption but the willful, dialogic, critical, and empathic touching of the past within the present so as to hold the present accountable for what happens to both it and the past. She accommodates Hartman’s caution—the past remains on the other side of the interval— through a Bergsonian conception of temporally dense memory, refusing to accept the facile option of simply refraining from what is difficult, yet urgently necessary: bringing the past within the viewer’s temporality in its belated­ness. Her unique act of commemoration suggests how time and space can work together to make this possible. Hartman’s discussion also points to another basis for distinction, namely mood, which I take up briefly and bring to bear on Salcedo’s work with time and space. Hartman’s avowedly moralistic view of cultural memory (collective as well as public) usefully integrates the affective aspect with the political. This integration is of crucial importance to the present discussion, which focuses on how working with time helps cultural memory as an involved activity. Through the interactive production of duration literally stitched to a particular space, Salcedo’s art produces the stickiness of the past through a strong sense of mood, in this case a tragic and rebellious mood, tender and at times even humorous, but one that always fights melancholic paralysis. The past is by definition out of our grasp. We always arrive too late. Even for future violence, we are already too late. The war machine was already in motion, ready to erase human life, thought, and emotion. Before anyone has been killed, the violence is already taking place in the inexorable threat. What can art do? It can know. To know is important. In a variation on the verb to know, in the strong biblical sense, in which to know means to leave one’s imprint on the body of another whose subjectivity changes forever through the encounter, the foreshortening of time touches the other with knowledge. This touch is truly a performance. Noviembre 6 y 7

demonstrates literally what such a performance can be. In its political deployment of the timespace touch, then, it makes clear how space, even the empty space surrounding sculptures, can be invested with agency. But emptiness is not by definition social. The battle between politics and the political might be fought over the way emptiness is either traumatogenic or “treatable.” Emptiness can be produced by politics, and it can be reterritorialized in the political. The Istanbul installation, in contrast, was based on the rejection of empty space as violent.

F i g u r e 5.12 Neither, 2004. Plasterboard and steel, 494 × 740 × 1500 cm. Collection: Inhotim Collection, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Photo: Stephan White. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White

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Cube, London.

Active Space Installation, then, is an artistic genre that makes acts of memory possible. The fictional space welcomes spectators, visitors who are inside it and are affected by the installation. Three huge installations take leave from the specific location of Colombia, as if to belie those who seek to lock this art into an identity politics. As we have seen, identity politics has been historically useful but also constitutes a trap, which Brown tersely phrased as “the limited usefulness of a discussion of identity either in terms of the timeless metaphysical or linguistic elements of its constitution or in terms of the ethical-political rubric of good and evil” (Brown 1995, 54). The three installations I am invoking are devoted to a common theme or association, the plight of refugees or immigrants “sin papeles,” although none is in the least representational. These three works, each in their own very different way, “theorize” the memorial aspect of installation according to Berg­ sonian memory. I am referring to Neither (2004), Abyss (2005), and Shibboleth (2007). These three works are not as clearly punctual acts of memory as the Noviembre works are, although, as I will explain, they do refer to moments and experiences of loss, suffering, and confinement. They have in common an activation of space, confinement as a spatial theme, and the global present moment as their domain of address. These works undermine the notion that Salcedo’s work is essentially related to Colombia. Neither, as its title intimates, concerns a negative ambiguity. The main materials are chain-link fence and plasterboard. These are simple, colorless, and belonging to the realm of labor, where they are used to close off spaces—in a sense, to make or construct spaces. But unlike such fencing in its normal use, this fence is not transparent. The wire fence appears to have been embedded in the gallery wall, although in reality it was pressed into a layer of plasterboard—a skin of sorts. That plasterboard, in turn, has been seamlessly placed against the wall. The result is a wall that needs no fence, and a fence that should be transparent. This creates a first ambiguity.19 19 

The catalogue produced for the work’s first installation offers an extensive analysis by Mengham (2004) and an article by Basualdo (2004). [226]

F i g u r e 5.13 Neither, 2004. Plasterboard and steel, 494 × 740 × 1500 cm. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube,

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London.

Two out of twelve wire fence panels that constitute the work have been placed at a slight distance from the plasterboard. As Rod Mengham writes in the catalogue for the first exhibition of this work in the London White Cube, “They suggest a possible escape route from the perimeter fence— they might have been loosened in an escape attempt” (2004, 11). This produces a second ambiguity: any attempt to pierce through the fence hits the blank, white wall. The slight space between the fence and the wall foregrounds the fence’s normal transparency. Seen frontally, the double layer of wire fence produces a shadow, reminiscent of the uses of shadow in the titles of some of the Noviembre works and in the performance in Bogotá. [228]

Acts of Memory

F i g u r e 5.14 Neither, 2004. Plaster­ board and steel, 494 × 740 × 1500 cm. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

The wire fence is the cheapest and most commonly used material, produced “in unimaginable quantities by manufacturers in the security industry” (Mengham 2004, 11). It has commonly been used in the construction of chicken coops. Today, it is more frequently used to build holding pens for illegal immigrants. It is used for the construction of concentration camps for prisoners endlessly awaiting trial, as in Guantánamo Bay. And it is used to prevent trespassing on real estate, reconfirming and enforcing the divide between rich and poor. With time, this material has accrued more and more unsettling uses and meanings. “From the back-garden fence to the border between the Israelis and Palestinians, the twenty-first century [229]

F i g u r e 5.15 Abyss (doorway), 2005. Brick, cement, steel, and epoxy resin, 441 × 1386 × 1624 cm. Installation: T1 Triennial of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin.

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Photo: Paolo Pellion.

understanding of security renders the relationship between inclusion and exclusion increasingly ambivalent” (11). Applying this wire fence to the interior walls of the White Cube gallery—a gallery named after a ­convention in art exhibition that Salcedo consistently challenges—she effectively ­reverses inside and outside. This “hesitation of thresholds” (Mengham 2004, 11) immerses the viewer in a space that embodies a defensive, paranoid posture. Yet, rather than feeling safe, as one is supposed to do when one’s property is surrounded by a secure fence, the viewer is in a place not her own, a public space within which one is confined. The nontransparency of the fence adds to this experience. The visitor is not looking at art, but walking inside it. Other than the strangely quiet walls, silent like tombs, one is looking at nothing. Time, too, is suspended. The stagnation of time makes us aware that, in the camps that this installation evokes, waiting is the only (non)activity possible: “Time is suspended, the prisoner’s life is on hold, and history unravels into an interminable present tense” (11). Neither, in its silence and lack of form, constitutes a topography of confinement. As the artist wrote in her project description, “Concentration camps are the essential expression of the political structure of our time.” She also writes about an “immobilized duration,” a duration that is “suspended in a dislocated time that breaks the thread of chronological order” (2007, 109). Spatially, this enmeshing is expressed in the way background and foreground merge. Silence, confinement, and ambiguity are also the main ingredients for the installation Abyss at the Castello di Rivoli for the Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2005. It is in relation to this work that the artist most explicitly resists the idea that space is passive. Instead, she writes, “Abyss intends to show that space can play an active role in the construction of consciousness” (2007, 119). As in Bogotá, a punctual historical memory, this time far removed from the artist’s own life, triggers the space’s active nature. The activity of the space is underscored by the history of this particular room, where Carlo Emanuele III immured his father, King Vittorio Amedeo. For once, particularity is brought in. Thus, the space was an active agent of confinement. It was also a political tool, used for the perverse relationship of the power of a son over a father. The present prisoners in detention centers are no kings, but the walls—wire fences, most likely—are just as active, ­oppressive, and time-arresting. The site, an eighteenth-century space within the castle of Rivoli, a space once used for politics inside the domestic space, was already quite like what the artist then proceeded to make of it. It had a huge, brick vault. Working, “simply,” to lower this vault by extending its walls downward, Salcedo built the perimeter so as to lower the sides and construct a more literal, less [230]

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i­ nvisible prison. Extending the walls so low that the windows opening to the outside remained only partially visible as tantalizing but inaccessible openings to a world of light and freedom, the wall was literally weighing down. She thus created a space that was at the same time empty and enclosed. This theme of enclosure is another example of the rich complexity of Salcedo’s work. It was already immanent in, for example, the gray, confining light in the installation of Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, but here in Rivoli it is taken to its literal extremity. In Abyss, the vault or abyss weighs down not only on the visitor but also on time itself, which is suspended in an in-between moment. How does the imprisonment of a king by his own son “translate” into contemporary politics? How does the particularity of this historical event become of such contemporary urgency that it needs to be put upon us with such monumental gravity? First of all, it does so through the singularity of each affect-laden state of confinement. This singularity must be built up, in this case, by first deploying the particular specificity. This was necessary because of the acute site-specificity of this work. It was here, in this room, that the son imprisoned his father. This is an instance of the act of translation from the particular to the singular, then to a qualified accessibility to another singular—that act through which we can and must be in touch with the suffering of others while avoiding the depoliticizing universalism. The violence, this time, is qualified as imprisoning, suffocating immurement. The “site-specificity” resides in that momentary experience of being held prisoner by one’s own. The height where the brick walls of Abyss leave off is about 120 centi­ meters (four feet). For most adult viewers, this is lower than eye level, leaving a space shorter than body height, so that the outside remains alluring but strictly invisible. The wall is visually suspended, so that one feels the suspense of time. It is a temporal, breath-stopping suspension: will the wall continue to descend, immure us completely? Salcedo’s answer to monumentality, as I contend below, is to bring in time by suspending it: the ­spatial suspension of time that counters time’s erasures into eternity. The simple-seeming vault, consisting of individually laid bricks with ­cementing—cement as a material we recognize from the Untitled ­Furniture works—is beautifully crafted. It is also an impressive work of physical labor. This brings manual labor into artistic practice and turns the humble craft into a testimony to labor in art. Moreover, it looks different from each side. Viewed through an entrance with a simple but elegant frame, flanked by carved columns, the brick contrasts vividly with those ornamental finishes and with the mosaic on the floor. One can see its thickness, which contrasts with the open entrance (fig. 5.15). In corners, the height varies (fig. 5.16). [232]

F i g u r e 5.16 Abyss (detail), 2005. Brick, cement, steel, and epoxy resin, 441 × 1386 × 1624 cm. Installation: T1 Triennial of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin. Photo: Paolo Pellion.

Seen from the back wall, the vault’s scale is overwhelming. Under­neath its lower edge, light comes in through the small part of the French doors left bare, and shapes beautiful reflections on the floor. These reflections foreground the confinement rather than mitigating it. Their elegance contrasts sharply with the thick, unfinished layer of bricks one sees when one ­approaches—perhaps with longing—the windows one cannot open. The third of these three installations is the most recent and exhibits most clearly another feature they share. They are all anti-architectural. ­Neither displaced the gallery walls and turned the gallery space inside out. Abyss [233]

F i g u r e 5 .17 Abyss, 2005. Brick, ­cement, steel, and epoxy resin, 441 × 1386 × 1624 cm. Installation: T1 Tri­ennial of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin.

all but covered over the gallery by repeating its form and erasing or overwriting the specific detail indexical of royalty, replacing it with other details, those of labor. Shibboleth went farther in its anti-architectural gesture. It boldly destroyed the architecture’s literal foundation—the floor it stands on. The Tate Modern’s past as a place of work also recalls the way Shibboleth cuts into the foundation of the political space, where inequity reigns, and labor, although indispensable, is made to appear all but ­invisible. Shibboleth was commissioned for the huge Turbine Hall. In an exhibition space so monumental as to require works especially made to accommodate it, one expects something huge. The Turbine Hall is so enormous that one needs the spatial reassurance of an artwork that is not dwarfed by it. The most successful installations to date had been the first, by ­Louise Bourgeois, where not only one of her signature gigantic spiders filled the

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F i g u r e 5.18 Abyss (detail), 2005. Brick, cement, steel, and epoxy resin, 441 × 1386 × 1624 cm. Installation: T1 Tri­ennial of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin.

space, but also three huge towers that visitors queued to climb; and The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson in 2005, which created an artificial sun under which visitors actually laid down to bask in its (nonexistent) warmth. Scale, in other words, is the common denominator among the annual commissions. This simple spatial situation makes a certain complicity with the self-congratulatory monumentality of such prestigious temples of art as the Tate Modern almost inevitable.20 For this space, Salcedo had proposed something less than huge. She boldly braved the dimensions of the hall and proceeded to destroy its foundation. Instead of making a fitting sculptural work inside it, taking on the height, she has made an inscription in the floor. This word is to be taken ­literally: both in- , as in insertion, invasion, incorporation, and -scription, as in writing. For her acts of engraving, she used the equivalent of an ancient stylo, a cutting instrument that leaves indelible traces, negatively defined, hollow. The result of her intervention was a negative space, an emptiness not remedied but exacerbated, cut into two halves that are each other’s negatives. 20 

Both artists have been extensively published in books and catalogues. On the particular efficacy of Bourgeois’s “buildings” (cells, as well as these towers), see Bal 2001; for a recent book on Eliasson’s work, see Grynsztejn 2007. [235]

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Yet, this negativity is as hugely ambitious as the hall is enormous. No object is placed in the space, yet “the work,” the inscription, the negative sculpture, traverses it in its entirety. It is not a sign or representation of something. It signifies nothing, and at the same time, because of that negativity, everything. For the negative, logically, is all-encompassing; it harbors everything that its positive counterpart does not stipulate. Hence, in the empty hall, the incised or “inscripted” negative space opens up an abyss of unlimited meaning. Here, absence is the trace, the physical memory of violence—like an enormous scar. If the scale of the Turbine Hall can be seen as an experiential and semiotic totality, then the inscription encompasses it all. This “stylo-ized” construction of negative space, the latest to date of Salcedo’s works that I have been able to see, sums up what is at stake in this artist’s endeavor to make art as an intervention in the political; to put it succinctly, to make political art by mobilizing and then activating space so that it can become political space.21 Shibboleth of Past and Present The political thrust of this work is strong, in the obvious but no less significant way that made it the talk of the town. I seek to hint at some of the processes it sets in motion so as to push forward a possible discussion of what political art can be and how acts of memory are involved in that endeavor. First, the ground on which the inscription has been applied is visibly in pain; that ground is “all”—the earth. This seems to turn the work from the past to the present and, hence, from memory into geography. I contend, however, that this is a false appearance. Placing the act of memory so firmly on this side of the past /present divide, Shibboleth instead brings memory firmly into the present where political agency must be ­located if it is to thrive.22 Ground is also a term from semiotic theory, referring to the basis on which certain things make meaning. Some call it a code, but that would amount to presuming a systematic character that is not always relevant or possible. And of course, ground is also a political term—to “stand one’s ground,” in the everyday sense in which the political pervades our lives; or the equivalent of territory, in the institutional sense of politics. Ground is also what real-estate politics in Istanbul valued more highly than inhabitable space. Together, these meanings of ground link the cultural and the 21 

I use this phrase in the precise sense developed in the introduction by way of Brown’s theory (1995). My use here in the generic singular is slightly at odds with Brown’s insistent pluralization of the concept, but I feel this use is justified because of Salcedo’s insistence on the extension of space around her works. 22  Adams, Hoelscher, and Till (2001) make this move from memory to geography. [236]

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political in the interaction among people by means of perceptible, meaningful things called “signs.” Let’s call it a “common ground” and continue to explore how that common ground is in pain. Second, the ground suffers because the cut divides. The hall, the earth, is cut into two halves; between these, there is nothing. Nothing, here, includes everything that has disappeared into the abyss. History in its guise as willful amnesia and its aftermath—the history of the present in which history vanishes—leaves its scars only for those who care to see them, helped by the artist who insists on showing the scars. Instead of a series of meanings of one word, we here have an ongoing shift, a string of metonymies that only ends where the artist’s work reaches and touches me from the void of that abyss. This aspect of the Tate Modern commission links systemic divisions among people to the illusory division between past and present. Here, too, semiotic thought based on divisions—binary oppo­sitions, mostly—clashes with another semiotic vision, anchored in gradation and overlayering while also pertaining to the political in its two senses. The political within which everyday social life unfolds largely takes for granted the divisions implemented by the politics of the institutions that organize our lives. This is that complicity of which the condition of civil war is the more openly violent version. But in the political by which we live, change is possible. This possibility comes with art. Salcedo deploys the cut to make that point. In reference to the quintessential art of the twentieth century, cinema, we could see what Salcedo has achieved here as, literally, an aesthetics of the cut. This is a third element that joins forces with ground, and metaphor, and metonymy to enable the art to operate politically. The cut of montage is the negative space where the imagination is activated. To put it extremely briefly: the cut enforces activity because one needs to fill in the gaps. From one clip to the next, “nothing” asks to be turned into narrative. Montage can be so smooth that it becomes erasure and manipulation, lulling viewers into the passivity of consumption. It can also foreground the cuts. This is an art-theoretical reason why Salcedo’s work is not narrative. Instead, it is concerned with narrative erasure. It seeks to counter such erasure in a move from smooth to ragged, activating montage. It has been consistent in its passionately precise preoccupation with the politics of memory, resisting and countering the erasure of the memory of the pain of others. Hence, this artist tells no stories. The narrative force of montage compels us to “do” narrative nevertheless, by making use of the material cut she offered in the Tate Modern. In Salcedo’s hands, the literal materialization of montage is a strong form of activation.

F i g u r e 5.19 Shibboleth (detail), 2007. Crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall, filled with concrete and wire fence, approx. 167 m. Tate Modern, London. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White

Chapter Five

Cube, London.

By way of this gigantic cut, we can retrospectively see all her work as montage: as cutting out, making voids, refusing to fill in for us, yet enticing us to do so by the ostentatious, material lack of information that accompanies the tantalizing remainders of what lies beneath. For more than two decades, she has been working over extant material things to allow them to become sites of grief. While the things stubbornly held on to whatever they were before, she took them on, she rubbed, scraped, painted, and otherwise added to them, abducting them from the realm of household invisibility to become memorials of loss. In that transformation she hinted at and yet purposely bypassed narrative and clear, unambiguous signification. The space of the Tate Modern emphatically belongs to modernism— both in its previous function as a power station, and in its current incarnation as a space where art can boast its importance, its monumental proportions. Salcedo played with this monumentality, taking it at its word, so to speak. She left it entirely empty, thereby filling it with the entire world— with the scar tissue of its divisions, histories, differences, and repressions. The negative space, a huge version of that of Abyss, remained open. One could enter and exit the hall at will. But once within visual reach, the earth tore open as if severed by an earthquake. There is no comfort, no consolation for the destruction of the ground on which we stand. Again, the aesthetics of negativity traverses all the strategies previously deployed in order to give them a new urgency. This time, no escape into particularity is even remotely possible. The viewer is addressed directly, relentlessly, and violently. History is brought into the present with renewed forcefulness. Everything here is concrete and literal. And yet, no facile reading can be made; no absorption of meaning will let the viewer escape into safe and stylized intellectual understanding. The understanding the work brings forth is Bergsonian in the sense evoked above: “understanding and action are intimately related” (Marrati 2005, 1101). The negative space is literally bottomless. Like a chasm produced by an actual earthquake, the cut provides no visual access; gazing into the jagged line that traverses the hall does not yield images. And because we cannot see the bottom, there is none; in the realm of fiction, epistemology equals ontology. Here, the artist acted like an antisculptor, underscoring her own acknowledgment of complicity. Sculpture has traditionally been an activity of elimination. Through millennia, sculptors have carved into stone until a beautiful form emerged, and Pygmalion has demonstrated his power. Here, the carving goes downwards, into the depth of the concrete floor, and no beauty is unearthed. The kind of beauty bodied forth in classical white marble is disqualified and is no longer allowed to define what it is to be European, or human. This piece indicts beauty as we know it as complicit with [238]

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F igu r e 5.20 Shibboleth (detail), 2007. Crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall, filled with concrete and wire fence, approx. 167 m. Tate Modern, London. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White

Chapter Five

Cube, London.

domination and exclusion; with the division it creates, this piece embodies and, in doing so, by digging deep, it paradoxically brings to light. There is no beauty here. Or is there? There is, in fact—and there must be if the concept of beauty is of any use in political art. Since beauty arrests its viewers, “captivating them,” as the saying goes, slowing them down, an incipient political effect is never far away. Salcedo works with beauty in this sense, in full awareness of the complicity this entails. As I have intimated all along in this inquiry, Salcedo’s art is hauntingly beautiful, a beauty that remains hard to see, playing hard to get. It becomes visible only when the viewer is willing to see it, to take her time, devote the attention and the effort required in order to live the full experience of the work—understanding and action. As we saw earlier, the collaboration between sculpture and painting warrants a contest between forms, between volumes and surfaces. Unland only offers the most striking, radical, and literal instance of this competition. Beauty in Shibboleth must again be earned, paid for with time and the acknowledgment of complicity as currency. Hence the present tense of this work, predominating in spite of the act of memory that warms cold perception. The interior surfaces of the cut are unexpectedly elaborated, with wire fence pressed into the concrete and then polished to an eggshell sheen, and with vertical mountain landscapes that are entirely diversified. But no landscape, here, is “natural.” The wire fence pressed into the mountain flanks keep insisting that it is politics that presses half of the world population out of sight, that locks people up in chicken coops, and that the beauty of these surfaces emerges in complicity with this unrelenting internment. Beauty, now, becomes the ultimate tool of political art. It is the heater. It is what makes memories act, developing political agency in the present where people are locked up and otherwise deprived of the means of sustenance and survival. One can gaze for a long time, after all; Salcedo the painter has been at work here in great detail. That detailing is yet another way of challenging the monumentality of the huge hall. Like all of Salcedo’s sculptures, fragile as they are, Shibboleth appeals to a tactility that it also prohibits. In the case of the sculptures, the visible fragility and the vulnerability of surfaces stipulate that prohibition in practice. Shibboleth makes it tangible by the literal depth in which the surfaces are ensconced. I have seen people in crisp business suits lying on the floor to peer into the crevice. Tactility is also implicated by the coarse wire fence that cannot be ignored or severed from the smooth, eggshell landscapes. From this perspective, nature is not only indistinguishable from the human being who attempts to sever that link so as to replace it with domination; it is also, more strongly (and perhaps allegorically), an instance of [240]

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merging between landscape and the body of the onlooker who can no longer disavow that body. The means of art, the kind of art in which freedom and slow time are still possible—specifically, the means of sculpture, that art of social space—­ allow the production of the disconcerting pain that forces us to stop and foreshorten duration. As with this artist’s earlier work, this cut requires slow processing, or else there is nothing to see but damage to an institution. The hall remains empty. But helped by the tactility of the surfaces inside, the cut through its concrete floor is, ultimately, also anthropomorphic. It recalls that it is in the flesh of human beings, that huge underclass of world citizens excluded from the minimal conditions of humanity, that cuts such as these have been and continue to be made. At the edge of social life, the people affected by the great divide are, for once, central to art.

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Anything which startles us is an index, in so far as it marks the junction between two portions of experience.  Ch a r l e s S a n d e r s P e i r c e I think that art is always a product of necessity.  D o r i s S a l c e d o

Political Art Takes Place

Shibboleth is a truly startling work. I have rarely heard so many different responses to a single artwork, but they all conveyed a sense of being unsettled. It is as if in that startling effect, Shibboleth sums up what was at stake in Salcedo’s art all along. This work places the arena where political agency is called for in the present, so that it “is the case.” In that hyperbolic whole world that the cut in the ground conjures up, the artist seems to be avoiding two things. She avoids the art world’s expectations of a monumental recognition and spatial filling of the Tate Modern’s hall. And she avoids another reduction of her work. This work, Shibboleth stipulates, is not reducible to “memory,” the categorical label that has been attached to some of her earlier work. The recent boom in memory studies has been a little too quick to appropriate Salcedo’s work under its banner. That, too, might risk becoming a reductively thematic approach. Unless memory is rigorously theorized in terms of temporality and singularity, this interest in memory easily entails a tendency to sentimentalizing, a reduction to the particular, and a protective projection onto the past. Moreover, it locks Salcedo’s work up in the context of Colombian violence, a reduction I have already criticized several times. The predicament with which such readings threaten the art constitutes the aporia of the universal /particular opposition. This entails the risk of losing the alternative, singularity, which is indispensable once the suffering of people is at stake. Singularity is also what characterizes both suffering and art. But to understand Shibboleth, for its own sake and as a ­theoretical-political object, we must understand singularity as inextricably bound up with multiplicity. The divide between “the West and the Rest” that the artist digs into, parodies, indicts, and cancels out inflects singularity in the direction of a hyperbolic multiplicity. This is why this work [243]

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c­ annot be summarized in terms of memory. Both in the political and in art, the bond between singularity and multiplicity is key to the very possibility of political “life” and of “live” art, respectively. To understand what this means and how it tightens the bond between art and the political, we must turn to Deleuze one last time. Toward the end of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze wonders under which conditions one can speak of multiplicity (1994, 131). Three conditions are relevant here. The first is negative, or rather, puts our general assumptions on hold: the elements of a multiplicity have no perceptible form, conceptual meaning, or assignable function. Instead, they are in a state of becoming. This typical Deleuzian formulation remains quite abstract, but can serve here to caution against a facile leap to group identities, for example. Groups are important and are too frequently bypassed by a politics stuck in the particularity of individualism that leads to a false universalism. But a fixation of the features of groups and of people into groups, in turn, stifles becoming and hampers multiplicity from thriving. Second, the elements of a multiplicity, negatively defined above, are connected, so that no autonomy in the strict sense is possible. This makes individualism illusory. And third, among the elements, a relation of differentiation holds. The keywords that define relationality are, then, connection and differentiation. As Mireille Buydens sums it up, multiplicity depends on the respective positions of the elements that compose it. The reciprocal ­relationships among singularities define a multiplicity (2005, 27). The Deleuzian metaphor that Buydens deploys is illuminating for many reasons at once: “Every multiplicity can thus be thought like a Sahara, the map of which is always to be redrawn according to the whim of the sands.”1 Like the singularities that compose it, any multiplicity is in constant flux. The futility of drawing maps—representing territories, abstracting these, fixing them—is immediately apparent, and that includes fixing affiliations among artists and their contexts, but also fixing the boundaries of nationstates. Thus, through its single fissure, Shibboleth invokes—without representing—the two inexorably separated multiplicities of the singularities of the privileged and the nonprivileged; the living and the dying or barely living; the free and the unfree; the sedentary and the mobile. Of course, such a general binary is provisional, and can only be addressed effectively in the political once the distinction of the cut is specified for singular issues and cases. But my point is that these oppositions, strong as they are, remain fragile and unstable. As Deleuze’s theory of singularity, inspired by Leibniz, stipulates, singularities are always, in essence, mobile, always susceptible 1 

“Chaque multiplicité pourrait ainsi être pensée comme un Sahara, dont la carte serait toujours à refaire au gré des sable” (Buydens 2005, 28; my translation). [244]

2  I repeat the quotations from chapter 5: “Perception, from this point of view, is only an ‘occasion for remembering,’” and “there is for us nothing that is instantaneous. In all that goes by that name, there is already some work of our memory” (Doane 2002, 66, 69). [245]

Political Art Takes Pl ace

to changes in their position on the map. This makes anyone’s position on the favored side of the divide unstable enough to feel concerned; this insecurity is what Shibboleth is betting on. There is another philosophical side to the way Shibboleth digs deeper, so to speak, than memories anchored in Colombia alone. Salcedo is a political artist, deploying her work as a visual artist. So, memory itself must be considered from the angle of visual perception. Memory is both larger— as in cultural memory—and smaller, being only one facet of the act that presides over any intercourse with visual art: perception. In the framework of the philosophers of the early twentieth century that I have especially drawn on—Bergson and Peirce—the role of memory is both crucial and partial. Memory is a trace, the paradigmatic instance of the index, according to Peirce; and memory is also that which turns perception into a meaningful act while simultaneously opening it up to subjective processing, according to Bergson. Doane sums up the main point of Bergson’s conception of perception as, in turn, both larger—it is outside us—and smaller than the individual subject. This perception, she points out, cannot occur without memory.2 This is why memory is indispensable as well as insufficient to account for Salcedo’s work. Because of the input of memory in perception, the past remains in the present, the trace becomes a sign, and the subject is responsible for dealing with it. Through the integration of Peirce’s concept of the trace and Bergson’s view of perception, memory, instead of bringing Salcedo’s work into the orbit of “her native Colombia,” enables it to operate as a truly political art: as “metaphorable,” from singularity to singularity; as a montage between those singularities; and thus, as enabling—indeed, compelling—activation within the political. “The human experience of perception . . . pivots upon a temporal lag, a superimposition of images, an inextricability of past and present” (Doane 2002, 69). In other words, while residing outside the subject, once it is turned into an experience perception is identical to what Wittgenstein said “is the case”: the world. Shibboleth is not as obviously about memory as is most of Salcedo’s work; at least, it is not about specific memories. Yet, it concerns perception at one remove, in that depth that hosts not only the entire world but also the intricate relationship between past (including colonialism and the history of art) and present (including lawlessness, exclusion, and ongoing violence). Hence, it does concern memory, but both literally and hyper­ bolically, so that it cannot fall into the trap of an over-enthusiastic interest

Conclusion

in a particularized memory. With her most recent major work to date, the artist thus retrospectively crosses the t’s and dots the i’s of all her works. For all her sculptures and installations, Wittgenstein’s opening sentence in the Tractatus holds: “The world is everything that is the case.” It is the case: it is real. It is the case: it exists in the present. It is only on these conditions that it is also the case: as an exemplary oeuvre, it serves as a “case” that shows us the way into political art. This is how Salcedo’s art as a “case study” can supersede the presupposition of exemplarity that would turn her work into an allegory—a discourse (gorein) on otherness (allos). It addresses the world, and it takes part in it, by necessity, singularly. It operates from the inside of “the world.” The spatial art of sculpture makes that participation “literal”—which, as we have seen, is a form of metaphoring: it takes place. This is the first argument for the relevance of this work in an articulation of political art. To say it one more time: I am not defining what political art is through Salcedo’s work; I am, literally, moving through that work to make visible some features that enhance the chances that art can manage to be political. This insideness precludes a number of positions, acts, and emotions that frequently render art that wants to be political quite powerless. It makes any illusion of clean hands untenable. As I have argued through Salcedo’s homeopathically anthropomorphic sculptures, complicity is inevitable, especially in situations of civil war but no less in other situations for which civil war is only a more intense model. But complicity is also productive; it is even a condition sine qua non for the possibility of actively participating in the work’s work. Several features of Salcedo’s art bring such a productive acknowledgment of inevitable collusion home to us. To recall just one example: the animal skins that make vision difficult, and thereby compel viewers’ activity in Atrabiliarios, simultaneously compel a self-aware voyeurism as well as a sliver of cruelty once we realize this skin is predicated upon the slaughter of the animal. Moreover, the surgical stitches make us traverse such connotations as barbed wire and autopsy, as well as crude assaults on live skin; nevertheless, the potential association with healing is not entirely negated. By means of the stretching of time, the skins make the viewer stay attached to all these troubling connotations. Meaning, here, is not conveyed but made present. To reiterate Brown’s phrase, they are “images that evoke, suggest, and connote rather than transmit meanings” (1995, 50). If, even now, at the end of this book, I am unable to wind up making my case without recalling the case through which I made it, it is because Salcedo’s art is not a case; it is “the case.” It does not stand for the whole range of political art any more than my conclusions drawn from her work [246]

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can stand for all approaches to political art. Instead, this art “is the case,” and that roots it firmly in the world. From its inside position, it insures that those people, things, and events that are “the case” in the world but “whereof one cannot speak”—those at the other side of the divide or inside the fissure of Shibboleth—are also “the case.” Then, perhaps, the alternative to speaking is no longer schweigen but showing, performing, and participating. Along with an acknowledged insider position, then, the equally inevitable present­ness is a second key feature of political art—an insistent presentness embodied by that other meaning of the phrase that binds Witt­genstein’s definition to Salcedo’s sculpture: “to take place.” There are two aspects to that presentness that militate against cultural habits that have been so predominant as to inure us to the affect necessary to mobilize political agency. One is the habit of historicism; the other is the convention of representation. If art is by definition complicit as well as in the present tense, due to perception’s bond with memory, then art is never without its bond to history, and that includes the history of art. Sever­ing that bond would be pointless, since preceding art is just as much “the case” as is contemporary art. Whether the artists whose work comes to us from history aimed to take their place in the political sphere of the world or not, they could not avoid their inherent complicity either. And nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the fact that in the history of art the bond between “beauty” and “representation” predominates. Representation has made exclusion and abuse possible. It has made it possible, too, for the enjoyment of art to actively exclude the awareness of such political acts of exclusion and abuse. Salcedo addresses representation, critically but with acknowledgment of complicity; but she severs it from the beauty that is otherwise strongly present in her work. This compromises any attempts to place her art firmly within the history of art from the start. To be sure, many associations between Salcedo’s art and other artworks can be opened up, and critics have done so adequately—for example, with regard to Joseph Beuys, Rachel Whiteread, and other social sculptors (Princenthal), or with all kinds of shoe art, from Van Gogh to Warhol (Mackie). These associations, a staple in the practice of art history, have never managed to show unexpected connections, however. Instead, the cited art always seemed weak compared to the Salcedo works to which they were supposed to add a dimension. Other than pointing out the obvious—that no artist works on her own and that art is greater than any single artist—I have not found such associations, mostly iconographic, to be persuasively illuminating for what makes this art so keenly political. I suppose this failure to persuade is due to the fact that they have never added anything to the conception of political art that Salcedo’s work

Conclusion

c­ ontinues to elaborate—this work’s becoming political art. Salcedo’s art establishes as well as severs that bond with other, older art in several ways, all significant for those seeking to make art politically effective. But when is it that art can be politically effective? At this point, I speculate that when art simultaneously deals with its position in the world (as being “the case”) and its position qua art, in relation to the major tenets of the history of art (as being “a case”), it is in the most adequate position to be just that. Most prominently, it is the restrained, qualified deployment of representation—the allusions to it, then the refusal of it—that makes Salcedo’s art theoretically relevant in this respect. This deployment both invokes and distances the history of art. Moreover, her worked-over surfaces accomplish something similar. There is no need to invoke old masters to see that the surfaces in her sculptures are “painterly.” But at the very moment that we notice this quality of the surfaces (“beauty”), they are no longer readable as representations. The mountain landscapes we can see inside the crevices of Shibboleth are riddled with wire fence; the pristine walls behind some portions of wire fence of Neither show up their shadows as drawings at the precise moment when we press through the holes in the fence, stepping inside the prison. The gorgeous cement work on the walls of Abyss becomes invisible, due to counter light, as soon as we approach the windows whose delicate reflections instill longing for the outside. In chapter 2 I have demonstrated how Salcedo works through representation—and I use this Freudian term metaphorically but seriously. Here again, Deleuze’s view, this time at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), is helpful in summing up the drawbacks of representation that Salcedo invokes, rejects, and overcomes. First, representation puts what it represents at a distance. The interval this produces is triangular, between the represented, the subject doing the representation, and the addressee or witness. This distancing is totalizing, which goes against the grain of singularity. It also has a temporal aspect, placing the object of representation at a remove, beyond the interval—in the past tense. Second, representation objectifies or, at least, emanates from a belief, even if only in the imagination, in the objective existence of what is represented. And this again promotes distance, an illusion of autonomy, and the deceptive idea that the object is in a state that is stable and necessary instead of being simply contingent. Third, representation is spectacular, offering a spectacle in the sense of illusion and sensation.3 Salcedo does not disavow the power of representation. But instead of 3  Again I rely on Buydens’s excellent account of Deleuze’s thought for this shorthand view of representation (2005, 32–33).

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simply performing it, she pulls it into her work’s orbit only to protect the “object” from these distancing devices. The delicate relationship to representation becomes even more important because of the public nature of sculpture—its taking place—and the memorial function that is so important for Salcedo’s art. The proximity to monumentality, comparable to the allusions to representation—emphatic, if only in terms of scale—forbids the hypothesis of a simple rejection. Here again, a small dose of homeopathic poison, that is, of productive complicity, is indispensable. Huyssen rightly notes the differentiations within the category of the monumental: “While the monument may always be big and awesome, with claims to eternity and permanence, differing historical periods obviously have distinct experiences of what overwhelms, and their desire for the monumental will differ both in quality and in quantity” (2003, 40). The term counter­monument does not quite fit her work either, however. Huyssen writes, with tongue in cheek, “Only if we historicize the category of monumentality itself can we step out of the double shadow of a kitsch monumentalism of the nineteenth century and the bellicose anti-monumentalism of modernism and postmodernism alike” (40). In this, Salcedo is fundamentally an artist of our time; a contemporary who seeks to interfere, not simply deplore, reject, or critique. I have attempted to demonstrate that Salcedo never simply rejects or disavows what she objects to. Her Shibboleth is monumental, modest, and negative. It is monumental in scale, that is, formally as well as in content; modest, since she allowed it to be buried after seven months; and negative, carving into the depth of the space instead of erecting something up high. In spite of Huyssen’s well-put caution, the idea of the antimonument still goes a long way in contemporary criticism. As Michalski wrote about countermonuments, “Even the extreme form of a truly “invisible” monument forces the viewer to concentrate—in these visually overstimulated times—on its essential message; . . . it is a truthful expression of the demise of universally accepted figurative imagery and of our disturbed state of mind” (1998, 207). Salcedo’s art complicates this view. It is with monumentality as it is with representation, figuration, memory, temporal pastness, and the occupation of space. The critique of figuration, for example, does not equal its demise. Salcedo’s homeopathic use of what she scrutinizes also implies the acknowledgment that art must work with, not against culture, if only because culture includes the political—it is its home. Instead—and here, the issues of memory, representation, iconography, and monumentality come together—I believe all contextualizations, while necessary, are also reductive. In this respect, placing this art within the history of art is no different from pinning down the artist as working in and

Conclusion

for Colombia (only, or even primarily). Taussig, likening context to a talisman, argues that the act of contextualizing “open[s] up as much as it pins down truth and meaning” (1992, 44). He is, in fact, even more drastic in his rejection of context: “I say, to the contrary, that this [the invocation of context] is a deeply mystifying political practice in the guise of Objectivism, and that first and foremost the procedure of contextualization should be one that very consciously admits our presence, our scrutinizing gaze, our social relationships and our enormously confused understandings of history and what is meant by history” (45). Such contextualizations deny their own acts of framing, not only as providing the art with an interpretive frame of reference, but as frame-up.4 A frame-up points the finger of guilt at an innocent party. It exploits for purposes of deception a tendency that, in general, predominates in the contemporary political. This tendency concerns the confusion of (moral) guilt and (political) responsibility. Such a confusion, I contend, is the systemic opposite of Salcedo’s active, militant anonymity—both her own and that of the people who occasioned her works. It is also the reason why her relationship to her home country is both important and redundant. This leads me to one last remark on the relevance of Salcedo’s work as political art. This concerns her art’s contribution to an understanding, extension, and “thickening” of the political as such. To assess how this contribution is not only powerful, but powerful through its artistic work, it is necessary to foreground the contemporariness of the political in which Salcedo intervenes. The contemporary is that domain which, defined by temporal nearness, even presentness, is open to interference. Brown, whose terminology is bound up with the discussions of postmodernism, insists on a reconsideration of that fraught term as “a time, circumstance, and configuration rather than an intellectual tendency or political position” (1995, 33). This view can be extended to the contemporary in general. In consequence, postmodernism—or any other name one likes to give to the contemporary, for that matter—cannot be discarded as a position one does not agree with, framed (as in a frame-up) as the guilty party in a nostalgically lost purity of identity. Instead, she argues, “It is quite possible that our greatest impediments to developing cogent oppositional politics today arise not from the academically crumbled foundations of Truth, activity, or the modernist subject, . . . but rather from certain “material” features of our age: the expanding hegemony of technical reason, cultural-spatial disorientation, and 4 

See my extensive discussion of framing in Travelling Concepts (2002). For an excellent critique of context within art history, see Norman Bryson 1994. Bryson based his critique on Derrida’s The Truth in Painting (1987). [250]

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a political tendency produced by this disorientation—“reactionary foundationalism” (1995, 33). She develops the issue of identity in ways that go far in explaining the active anonymity in Salcedo’s work. All attempts to bind the artist to a context and identity try to undermine such active anonymity: “What constitutes this strategy as reactionary rather than merely conservative is its truncated, instrumental link to a foundational narrative; it is rooted not in a coherent tradition but in a fetishized, decontextualized fragment or icon of such a narrative. . . . Fundamentalists select one aspect of the dogma, one “text of foundation” with regard to which they declare all attempts at hermeneutics politically subversive” (36). In her cogent argument for an active exercise of political space, Brown emphasizes what is necessary if the contemporary political is to shed the powerlessness and paralysis that appear to characterize it. After having dwelled in the vicinity of Salcedo’s work for so long now, it is possible for us to envision how such reempowering is possible. This brings Brown’s caution against resentment and resistance back to mind. A potential misunderstanding of Salcedo’s art might take it to be an art of protest and resistance. This would be a reduction and a disempowerment, not only of this art but of the political as such, hence, also of all attempts at political art. Protest—grievance—and resistance are surely ­implicated in such works that invoke a history even without telling the story. But what I have attempted to argue throughout is, precisely, that the ways in which these works operate—making traces, alluding to representation, deploying duration, activating space, and interfering in history— embody strong and specific acts of interference beyond the reactive acts of protest and resistance. The interferences the works perform and enable can and must be completed by the viewers in relation to the memories that infuse the perception of the works in their space. This transference of agency becomes possible because of the way the works instill their moods into the viewers. Once the boundary between self and other, or viewer and work, is thus made permeable, the experience Peirce calls “startling” can take place. Between the work and the viewer, the “junction of experiences” occurs. To make that happen is necessary, lest the work remain mute and powerless. This, after the disasters that dictate their themes to the artist, is ultimately the necessity out of which art emerges. These interferences can be what Brown values most as agency in the political: judgments (“beyond good and evil”), democratic acts, and the ongoing production, or creation, of political spaces where such judgments and such acts can take place. This taking place is the soul of Salcedo’s art. It is the “becoming” of spatial art. Here lies its fundamental political striking force. This is how it is the case.

F i g u r e E.1 Plegaria Muda (detail), 2009–10. Wood, grass, soil, and cement compound, dimensions variable. Installation for Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; Moderna Museet, Malmö. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Jay Jopling / White Cube, London.

As this book goes to press, the artist continues her work, her search for an art that can be meaningful in the political. I want to position this book in that present of art-making. Salcedo is currently working on a new installation, Plegaria Muda, to be first exhibited in 2011. This work will consist of 111 sculptures, identical but for small variations in size and color. The artist returns to furniture as her raw material, but with a difference. Two tables, one on top of the other; one standing on its legs, the other with its legs up in the air, like a dead animal. In between them there is a thick layer of soil in the shape of a coffin. Incredibly enough, grass is growing through the upper table, emerging out of the wood. The title Plegaria Muda refers to silence—it means something like ­“silent prayer.” But the Spanish muda signifies more strongly than its English equivalent the action of the outside on the incapacity to speak. We could interpret it as the prayer of the silenced; those who pray against the silence, in spite of it. Likewise, the grass grows in spite of the obstacle of the wood that covers it, covering up what lies below. When we think of that, the positive, hopeful tone of this deployment in the sculptures of resilient grass is stopped in its tracks. Before hope comes tragedy. The artist undertook this work in the aftermath and reminiscence of the search of families for their disappeared loved ones. In thirteen cases, the artist participated personally in the search. In an e-mail responding to my question about her current project, the artist comments on that search: “It is a terrible process that leads me to think that in a country with more than thirty-five thousand disappeared people, the common grave is the only ‘object’ capable of telling the history of the past three decades in this country.” Grass is not only resistant to the forces that attempt to contain and reduce life, but it is also itself the instrument of erasure. Like other [253]

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a­ rtists in other contexts, Salcedo is sensitive to that contradiction. I am led to think of the Dutch artist Armando, who devoted all his work to a struggle against erasure: by time, by nature, and by people. He made endless numbers of “guilty trees”—guilty of overgrowing the site of crime. Grass eats up the abandoned houses when people flee from violence. Grass overgrows mass graves, so that the bereaved cannot even bring home the remains of those whom they have lost. And grass must be dug into, pierced through, to reach the physical remains of individuals, so that their singularity, their singular death, can be brought to light. Sometimes the remains are found, but in many cases even that is not possible. Under the grass there is nothing but more soil. One hundred and eleven sculptures are exhibited in a single space. A sense of reclaiming space is created: visitors roaming around a huge room, smelling soil and grass, and seeing each work in its singularity while simultaneously being overwhelmed by their number. This work is a forceful metaphor for the singularity-in-multitude of mass murder. Balancing the mournful and the hopeful connotations of the growing grass, Salcedo rejects the need to determine which direction gets the upper hand through three acts of refusal. She refuses to choose the particular over the general, and refuses to surrender singularity in the face of multitude. She also refuses to yield to the negativity of violence or to the utopianism of hope. And she refuses to cast the past away from the present. This new project intimates with ever‑increasing force that, for Salcedo, to be the case means to carry, physically, the past into a present that has a future.

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abduction, abductive, (Peirce), 5, 6, 13, 173, 238 abstract, abstracting, abstraction, 2, 16, 19, 34, 51–53, 56, 69, 81, 98, 99, 103, 113, 146 acting, 205, 206, 214, 215 action, 12, 149, 168, 189, 190, 205, 238, 240 activism, 106, 124, 173 act of memory. See under memory actuality, 120, 125, 139, 152–54, 186–88, 204 aesthetic, aesthetically, aesthetics, 4, 8, 9, 16, 17, 19–21 and passim; aftermath (Ross), 223 aesthetic negativity. See under negativity affect, affective, affectively, 2–4, 18, 20, 32, 58, 65, 70, 89 and passim agency, 2, 13, 32, 33, 41, 43–46 and passim allegory, 246 allographic, 111 anonymity, anonymous, 71, 95, 97, 112, 151, 153, 184, 187, 203, 208, 209, 211; active, 20, 92, 250, 251 anthropofagy, anthropofagic (Lygia Clark), 149 anthropomorphic, anthropomorphically, 19, 52, 88, 98, 102, 108, 115, 118, 119, 127, 131, 134, 152, 167, 246; anti-, 102, 123 anthropomorphic imagination, 52, 83, 87–112, 118, 120, 123, 128, 129, 204 anthropomorphism, anthropomorphisms, 19, 20, 34, 37, 75, 88, 92, 98, 102, 104, 118, 126, 173, 209 antimonument. See countermonument appearance, 88, 97, 209

art, 1 and passim; abstract, 16, 19; disaster, 164; figurative, 88, 118, 120, 140, 164; “high,” 66, 113, 114; modern, 27, 83, 114; performance, 139, 205; popular, 114; visual, 26, 97, 130, 141, 245; Western, 19, 141, 142. See also political art art history, 26, 68, 71, 127, 247, 250 artwork, artworks, 4, 6–8, 20, 22, 26, 33, 80, 88, 105, 139, 160, 161, 190, 210 atrabilious, 33 atrocity photographs, 47, 48 attention, 139 authority, 2, 92, 161, 162 autonomy, autonomous, 20, 21, 98, 144, 161–63, 167, 190, 244, 248 autopsy, 31, 49, 246 background, 148, 230 barbarism, barbaric, 62, 64, 90, 110, 128, 129, 224 baroque, 20, 26, 126, 140, 141, 143, 144, 154 Baroque, 126, 141, 143, 144, 173; LatinAmerican, 86, 144; neo-, 126; ultra, 126 beauty, 19, 52, 54, 62, 65, 129, 168, 222, 224, 238, 240, 247, 248 becoming (Deleuze), 8, 244, 248, 251 belatedness, 155, 203, 214, 225 body, 19, 37, 38, 46, 49, 52, 69, 71, 88, 89, 92, 103, 124, 139–43 burial, 37–41, 71, 87, 116, 120, 165, 169, 208 burying, 102, 116 capitalism, capitalist, capitalistically, 27, 41, 46, 50, 64, 68–70, 219

[267]

Index of Terms and Concepts

case (Wittgenstein), 1, 3–6, 246–48 case study, 4–9, 18, 246 catachresis, catachreses, 40, 108 catharsis, cathartic, 112, 218 catholic, 92, 141, 144 character, characters, 34, 52, 79, 80, 88, 97, 127, 146 chronology, chronological, chronologically, 9, 144, 154, 161, 230 chronotope, 151 collusion, 50, 80, 81, 93, 96, 107 color, colors, 22, 86, 163, 182, 190 commemoration, 24, 200, 208, 211, 225 communication, 14, 102, 129, 182 compassion, compassionate, 66, 67, 86, 93, 95, 98, 154, 174, 175, 221 complicity, complicit, 22, 81, 96, 127, 135, 136, 139, 140, 174–77, 203, 204, 224, 237, 238, 240, 246, 247, 249 concentration camps, 44, 229, 230 concepts, 40, 86, 130, 172, 189, 190, 203 confinement, 24, 226, 230, 232, 233 contemporary, contemporariness, 59, 69, 250 context, contexts, 12, 13, 26, 33, 50, 71, 92, 244, 250, 251 contextualize, contextualist, contextualization, 26, 178, 249, 250 continuity, 150, 193 countermonument, countermonuments, 24, 249 creative evolution (Bergson), 189 critical habitat. See under habitat critical vision machine (Bleeker), 115, 126, 208, 223, 224 criticism, 63, 64, 88, 92, 93, 112, 249 culture, cultural, cultures, 2–4, 17, 33, 49, 50, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, 66, 70, 82, 87, 88, 98, 104, 115, 236, 249; commodity, 70; Latin American, 92; popular, 113, 151; studies, 63, 172, 178; visual, 47, 82; wars, 55 cut, 8, 27, 149, 237, 238, 244 date (time), 182–85, 187, 190, 193, 208, 224 deduction, 6 deixis, 182 delay, 150, 151, 188 democracy, democratic, 13, 15, 16, 20, 57, 114, 166, 182, 202, 251

[268]

denotation, 37 density: temporal, 151, 204, 222; spatial, 222 depth, 47, 49, 50 detail, detailing, 136, 137, 139, 152, 240 detention centers, 23, 230 dialogic, 166, 175, 188, 225 diegesis, diegetic, 218 difference, 11, 13, 47, 56, 77, 97, 211 differentiation, 224, 244 disagreement, 10, 12, 24, 57, 219 disappear (transitive verb), disappeared, disappearing, 19, 33, 35–37, 53, 71, 101, 107, 111, 112, 120, 134, 152, 175, 208, 253 disappearance, 31, 41, 47, 139, 166, 180, 204 discourse, discourses, 21, 83, 137, 149, 150, 246 discretion, discrete, 72, 111, 128, 129, 150 displacement, 3, 18, 20, 25, 34, 42, 55, 56, 80, 94, 96, 97, 102, 110, 127 display, 168 dissociation, 210, 211 distance, distances, 3, 67, 71, 125, 135, 136, 148, 248 distortion, 68, 142 distraction, 63, 224 doing, 205, 206, 209, 214, 215 drama, 94, 213, 214 dream, dreams, 153, 212, 213 duration, durational, 19, 20, 47, 53, 120, 125, 126, 132, 134–36 and passim; foreshortened, 152, 154 ego, 212 élan vital (Bergson), 189 ellipsis, 211 emotion, emotions, 81, 93, 94, 107, 108, 112, 118, 178, 179, 225, 246 empty, emptiness, 87, 116, 162, 173, 174, 226 engagement, 56, 70, 96, 98, 114, 126, 128, 136, 143 epistemology, epistemic, 15, 136, 185, 238 erasure, 105, 153, 222, 224, 237, 253, 254 essentialism, essentializing, 43, 44, 206 ethics, ethical, 42, 54, 55, 63, 65, 93, 128, 180, 186, 204, 226 event, events, 5, 34, 42, 60, 97, 179, 185–88, 190, 200, 205, 206, 208, 210–15, 247 exclusion, 202, 230, 240, 245, 247 exhibition, exhibitionary, exhibitions, 6, 20, 22, 95, 160–66, 175, 178, 188, 190, 230

feeling, feelings, 45, 56, 58, 64, 69, 93, 94, 113, 148 fetish, 71 fetishism, fetishization, 59, 69; commodity, 46 fiction, fictional, fictionality, fictionalizing, 34, 80, 95, 103, 113, 143, 146, 154, 189, 212, 218, 219, 221–23, 226, 238. See also space figuration, figurative, figurativity, 19, 38, 39, 41, 43, 52, 88–91, 98, 125, 127, 146, 147, 249. See also under art figure, figures, 34, 80, 88, 97. See also under human focalization, 57, 146 foreground (noun), 148, 230 foreshorten, 141 foreshortening, 124–26, 136, 140–50, 154, 162; temporal, 20, 126, 139, 144, 150, 151, 154, 155, 162, 221 forgetting, 3, 24, 25, 41, 105, 151, 153, 209, 224, 225 form, forms, 52, 69, 80, 86, 88, 89, 123, 127, 131, 136, 137, 149, 179, 180, 203, 240, 244 formalism, formalist, 223, 224 fourth wall, 218, 219 frame-up, 250 gallery, 95, 126, 178 gender, 103, 106 general, generality (opposite of particular and singular), 4, 11, 18, 44–46, 48, 52, 54, 56, 62, 63, 67, 86, 94, 95, 106, 113, 203, 254 generalization, 4, 5, 7–9, 43, 50, 51, 54, 88, 103, 111, 116 geography, 236 geometrical, 103, 148 grass, 253, 254 grave, graves, 23, 214, 253, 254 grief, grievance, 20, 22, 23, 47, 152, 153, 188, 238, 251 ground, 4, 7, 236, 237 groups, 12, 63, 244

guerilla, guerilleros, 187, 188 guilt, 178, 250 habitat, 12, 93, 129; critical (Apter), 12, 175, 176 haptic 148, 149, 165; looking. See looking healing, 71, 87, 149, 187, 210, 214, 246 hearing, 165, 166 heterochrony, 155, 222 heterogeneity, heterogenous, 120, 124, 125, 127, 147, 149, 155, 167, 175, 222 heterotopy, 222 historicism, 247 history, historical, historically, 17, 43, 69, 77, 89, 93, 94 and passim holding environment, 18, 22, 44 Holocaust, 43, 60, 127, 129, 207, 223; effect, 17, 18; memorials, 24; post-, 17, 60, 63, 128, 207; studies, 63 home, homes, 80, 99, 112, 126 homeopathy, homeopathic, homeopathically (Derrida), 96, 97, 107, 177, 209, 211, 214, 246, 249 horizon, 142, 143 horror, 3, 60, 62–65, 83, 127, 129, 221–23, 225 housing demolition, 219, 220 human: body, 19, 38, 88, 151; figure, 52, 84, 86, 88, 91; form, 16, 19, 78, 98, 104, 113, 125, 127; scale, 26 humanism, humanistic, 34, 52, 79, 88, 113, 142 humanities, 54, 55, 88, 92 hypervisibility. See visibility icon, icons, 53, 104, 111, 251; theory, 68 iconic, iconically, 104, 180 iconography, iconographic, 70, 71, 247, 249 iconophobia, 115, 129, 224 identification, 66, 67, 93, 112, 113, 115, 118, 154, 176, 208; heteropathic, 66, 98, 222 identity, 11, 51, 93, 97, 107 identity politics, 55, 63, 226 ideological state apparatuses, 10 idiopathic, 222 illusion, illusions, 67, 141–43, 146, 154, 248 illusionism, illusionistic, 143, 144, 146 image, 49–51, 72, 77, 86, 111, 137, 148, 204, 224 imagination, 88, 102, 181–83, 189, 237, 248. See also anthropomorphic imagination

[269]

Index of Terms and Concepts

experience, experiences, 3, 21, 44–47, 50, 82, 93, 113, 124, 186, 190, 213, 214, 224, 243, 251 exploitation, 26, 70, 110, 203 extensity, extensivity (Bergson), 120, 149, 154

immigrants, 25, 226, 229 imprisonment, imprisoning, 23, 27, 124, 232 index, indexical, indexicality, indices; 34, 44–46, 53, 87, 94, 104, 111, 128, 134, 180, 234, 243, 245 indifference, indifferent, 16, 54, 56, 68, 93, 164, 119, 130, 163, 177, 178, 214; ethical, 204; political, 89 individual, individuality, individuals, 11, 27, 28, 34, 43, 52, 71, 153, 209 individualism, individualist, 7, 11, 63, 244 inscription, 235, 236 installation, installations, 20, 23, 25, 31, 98, 157, 160–65, 175, 176, 188–90, 220, 226 instant, instants, 53, 150, 209 intention, intentional, intentions, 2, 130, 134, 205, 209; authorial, 92 intentionalism, intentionalist, 3, 130 interference, 59, 70, 86, 96, 250, 251 interpretation, interpretations, 40, 41, 68, 71, 72, 82, 224 intersubjectivity. See under subjectivity intervention, interventions, 25, 27, 40, 87, 147, 205, 224, 236

Index of Terms and Concepts

Jetztzeit. See now-time judgment, judgments, 5, 13, 83, 166, 187, 207, 251 justice, justices, 13, 186, 187, 200, 207, 210, 220 knowledge, 7, 9, 28, 94, 95, 98, 225 labor, 26, 27, 45, 53, 110, 124, 147, 226, 232, 234 language, 37, 38, 40, 42, 45, 49, 50, 151, 183, 209; descriptive, 99; literal, 38, 39, 42, 208 liberalism, 11, 202 light, 22, 23, 146, 147, 167, 182, 184, 187, 189, 190, 193, 200, 203, 232, 233, 248 limpieza, 12, 187 linearity, 47, 140, 154 listening, 165–67, 188 literalism, literalist, literality, 31, 32, 54, 73, 203 local, 26, 82, 92, 112, 114 loneliness, 160, 206 looking, 50, 51, 88, 107, 125, 137, 139, 140, 144, 162; haptic, 148; retinal, 162, 178

[270]

madness, 213 martyrdom, 148 mass murder, 33, 90, 254 materiality, 34, 69, 132, 134, 151, 164 meaning, meanings, 13, 14, 17, 18, 24, 25, 31–33, 37–42, 45, 49, 51, 52, 65, 68, 69, 92, 98, 108, 130, 134, 180, 182, 236, 246, 250; political, 59, 95, 106 meaningful, meaningfully, 32, 42, 57, 82, 118, 164, 221, 237, 245, 253 meanwhile (Levinas), 221–22 media, 47, 49, 64, 83, 139, 176, 224 medium, 2, 17, 34, 64, 97, 124, 126, 140, 151, 164, 178, 181, 202, 203; -specificity, 19 melodrama, melodramatic, 113, 114, 140 memorialization, 225 memory, 3, 22–24, 26, 27, 32, 41, 125, 136, 153, 193, 200 and passim; act of, acts of, 26, 153, 163, 191, 200 and passim; “beheaded,” 92; collective, 24, 224; cultural, 212, 220, 225, 245; heteropathic, 222; traumatic, 221 memory studies, 243 mésentente (Rancière), 10, 12, 219 metaphor (noun), metaphoric, metaphorical, 7, 16, 18, 31–34, 37–52 and passim metaphor (verb), metaphoring, 18, 20, 29, 32, 33, 37 and passim metaphoricity, 38, 39, 45 metonymy, 18, 51, 68, 237 migratory, migratoriness, 3, 18, 25, 178, 203; aesthetics, 18 mimesis, 81, 99, 115 mimicry, 112, 128 minimal, minimally, 87, 97, 111, 112, 129, 141, 149, 154 minimalism, minimalist, 106, 110, 113, 140, 141, 154 mise en scène, 146, 212 modernism, modernist, 19–21, 31, 93, 114, 139, 141, 142, 167, 214, 238, 249, 250 modernity, modern, 38, 83, 104, 162, 177, 220 modesty, modest, 22, 67, 106, 175, 210, 213, 221, 223 moment, moments, 55, 66, 69, 144, 149, 150, 168, 177, 193, 203–5, 207, 212, 214, 222, 226 monograph, 5, 8, 9, 18 monologic, 166

narrative, narratives, 3, 4, 7, 37, 46 and ­passim; second-person, 132; thirdperson, 132 narrativity, 41, 64, 80, 91, 92, 95, 97, 112, 221 narratological, narratologically, 98, 125, 127, 211, 218 narrator, 53, 146, 213 native, natives, 44, 94, 95; nativism, 94; “her native Colombia,” 44, 92–95, 108, 245 native informant, 11, 94 natures mortes, 48 necessity, 33, 51, 55, 57, 129, 243, 251 negative, negatively, negativity, 10, 17, 27, 33 and passim; aesthetic, 21, 69, 72; space. See space negative dialectic, negative dialectics, 33,64, 221. See also under Adorno neighborhood, neighborhoods, 219–21 normalcy, 188, 215 now-time, 153 object, objects, 5, 7, 8, 22, 24, 25 and passim; evocative (Turkle), 69, 79, 89; political, 68, 72, 73, 79, 125, 130, 136, 164, 209, 211, 243; theoretical (Damisch), 7, 8, 15, 17, 18, 54, 68, 69, 72, 73, 78, 79, 82, 89, 95,

125, 130, 132, 148, 188, 203; transitional (Winnicott), 69 objecthood, 205 objectivism, 98, 250 objectivity, objective, 207, 211, 214, 248 object-relations theory, 18 oblivion, 26, 151, 204, 215 oedipal, 161 ontology, ontological, ontologically, 120, 143, 149, 154, 238 ordinariness, 104, 202, 224 other, others, 15, 27, 28, 38, 42, 50 and passim “othering,” 37, 57 otherness, 2, 97, 246 pain, 19, 65, 101, 124, 134, 159, 160, 173, 175–77, 180–83, 236, 237, 242 painful, painfully, 66, 124, 164, 173 paint, 110, 146 painter, painterly, 49, 123, 137, 141, 146, 170, 213, 240, 248 painting, paintings, 19, 68, 69, 137, 144–49, 161–63 painting (verb), 98, 136, 137, 141, 144–46, 161, 162, 173, 240, 250 parody, 27, 137 partage du sensible (Rancière). See under sensible particular, particularity, 7, 11, 21, 35, 36, 43–48, 50, 52–54, 56 and passim particularism, particularizing, 46, 49, 56, 66, 82, 83, 202, 208 passive, passively, 50, 58, 90, 110, 147, 218 past, pastness, 3, 4, 16, 19, 34, 39, 41, 47, 48, 77 and passim pathological public sphere. See under sphere perception, 3, 25, 46, 47, 64, 123, 136–139, 143, 151, 154, 193, 207–14, 222, 240, 245 performance, performances, 18, 25, 34, 43, 50, 51, 111, 114, 115, 141–43, 155, 190, 205–8 performance art. See under art performatist, 40 performativity, performative, perfor­ matively, 8, 9, 40, 41, 45, 86, 107, 140, 164, 206 period, periods, 70, 127, 249 periodization, periodizing, 70, 71

[271]

Index of Terms and Concepts

montage, 4, 8, 237, 238, 245 monument, monuments, 24–26, 215, 249; aux Morts, 24. See also counter­ monument monumental, monumentalism, monumentality, 24–26, 44, 232, 234, 235, 238, 240, 243, 249 mood, 17, 70, 83, 124, 144, 148, 167, 168, 225, 251 moralism, moralist, moralistic, moralizing, 127, 152, 153, 221, 223, 225 morality, moral, 15, 124, 187, 250 mourning, 2, 33, 37, 39, 41, 49, 222 move, moving, 34, 89, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120, 124–26 movement, movements, 3, 38, 64, 89, 112, 118, 131, 144, 148, 173, 205, 206 multiplicity, 11, 57, 97, 150, 151, 212, 243, 244 multitude, 90, 209, 254 museum, museums, 135, 136, 139, 146, 161, 225 myopic, 5, 139

Index of Terms and Concepts

person (grammar), 78, 89, 149, 150, 160, 166, 206 personification, 102, 176 perspective, 57, 125, 139, 141–44, 147, 148, 159, 162; linear, 141–44, 151, 154, 162 pharmakon, 139 phenomenological, 151, 205 pictorial, 137, 140 place, places, 26, 31, 32, 35, 54, 56, 57, 87, 94 and passim pleasure, 65, 72, 93, 168 plot, 88, 97, 218 poiesis, 129 polemical, polemically, 24, 44, 50, 66, 101, 114, 120, 140, 141, 143, 144, 166, 220 police (Rancière), 10 political, politically, 2 and passim; agency, 2, 43, 54, 67, 82, 87, 106, 107, 120, 152, 153, 236, 240, 243, 247; correct, 55; object, 68, 72, 73, 79, 130, 136, 164, 209, 211, 243; space. See space political art, 2–5, 9, 15–17, 19, 20, 26, 28, 32–34, 52, 54, 55, 58–60 and passim politics, 2, 9–13, 15–17, 19, 21, 22 and ­passim pornography, pornographic, 1, 27, 65, 128 positivity, 42, 58, 64, 65 postmodernism, postmodern, 69, 70, 93, 249, 250 precariousness, 36, 202 pre-posterous, pre-posterously, 143, 144, 154, 205 present, presentness, 3, 4, 23, 26, 33, 34, 53–56, 77 and passim privacy, 169, 176, 219 private, 58, 139, 151, 224 proprioceptive, 98 protest, protesting, 24, 27, 59, 251 proximity, 67, 148, 167, 182 psychoanalysis, 18, 213 psychology, 7, 65, 224, 225 public domain, 3, 152, 175 realism, realist, realistic, 83, 99, 101, 106, 129, 142, 143, 146, 215, 223, 224 reality, 12, 34, 38, 42, 45, 52, 57, 67, 79, 81, 106, 107, 143, 154, 189, 222, 223; social, 10, 21, 153, 219 recall, 71, 211, 213, 220, 221

[272]

recognition, recognize, recognized, recognizing, 47, 77, 78, 80–82, 86, 89, 90, 96, 97, 107, 111, 120, 204, 206, 243 reconciliation, 55, 188 redemption, 27, 49, 65, 69, 140, 204, 221, 222 reduction, reductions, 71, 82, 87, 98 reductionism, reductionist, 70, 71, 243, 251 re-emergence, 155, 220 referent, referents, 33, 37, 39, 45 referentialism, referential, referentiality, 37–39, 41, 42, 51, 52, 73, 81 refugees, 226 relationality, 73, 134, 244 remember, remembering, 140, 221, 245 Renaissance, 142–44, 148 repetition, 77, 87, 134, 139, 140, 211, 215, 222 representation, representational, 2, 18, 19, 21, 27, 34, 37, 41 and passim; anti-, 62, 81; non-, 2, 40, 77, 79, 82; stylized, 65, 90, 222 representationalism, representationalist, 40, 49, 51, 70 repression, 11, 39, 92, 211, 219, 238; (Freud), 210 resentment, 15, 152, 153, 251 resistance, 15, 25, 92, 96, 134, 149, 153, 251 respect, 135, 148, 166, 168, 172 response, responses, 1, 58, 71, 98, 154, 164, 175, 200, 207 responsible, responsibility, 15, 46, 73, 206, 245, 250 ressentiment. See resentment reticence, reticent, 57, 111, 118, 128–30, 147, 182, 183, 214 retrospective, retrospectively, 8, 154, 205 scale, 24, 26, 235, 249 schweigen (Wittgenstein), 28, 247 sculpture, 8, 22, 23, 34, 113, 136, 160, 162, 165, 168, 238, 240, 242, 246, 249; modern, 162; still, 2, 8, 19, 166, 200 seeing, 46, 62, 124, 135, 137, 145, 165, 166, 206, 207, 215, 223 semantic, semantically, semantics, 3, 37, 51, 107, 108, 112, 120, 130 semiotic, 14, 18, 28, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 63, 64, 80, 96, 97, 102, 180, 236, 237 semiotic theory, semiotics, 17, 37–39, 236

stylo, “stylo-ized,” 235, 236 subjectivity, 56, 63, 88, 110, 152, 155, 167, 181, 186, 187, 193, 207, 208, 211, 212, 215, 255; inter-, 55, 78 suffering, 18, 55, 62, 65, 67, 83, 86, 88, 103, 108, 124, 128, 129, 154, 160, 168, 178, 206, 222, 223, 226, 232, 243; vicarious, 67, 120, 177 surface, surfaces, 26, 47, 49, 50, 99, 123, 125, 126, 134, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 148, 149, 165, 240, 248 surgical thread (Atrabiliarios), 31, 49, 50 survivor, survivors, 36, 65, 66, 71, 73, 94, 202, 203 sympathy, 94, 154 synecdoche, synecdochically, 68, 101 tactility, tactile, 148, 240, 242 temporality, temporal, 20, 25, 43, 46, 47, 57, 71 and passim. See also under fore­ shortening tenebrae, 23, 193 tenor (metaphor), 38–40, 51 tense (of verb), 149, 240, 247, 248 terror, 12, 54, 60, 70, 90, 208 theater, 111–15, 139, 141, 205–7, 218,–20 theatricality, theatrical, theatrically, 112–16, 126, 146, 165, 205–8, 210–13, 219, 220, 223 theatricalization, theatricalizing, 113, 212 thematic, thematically, thematics, 55, 57, 59, 70, 161, 164, 243 theoretical essay, 5, 8 thingness, thing-oriented, 39, 69 thou, 160, 163, 182, 190, 206, 207, 211 thought, thoughts, 6, 15, 18, 72, 93, 97, 105, 107, 139, 154, 212, 225 time, 20, 22, 23, 25, 34, 47, 48, 52, 53, 64, 68, 72 and passim timespace. See spacetime trace, tracing, 16–18, 20, 33–38, 40, 44, 45, 53, 54 and passim translation, 17, 18, 33, 34, 42, 54, 57, 64, 66, 178, 203, 218, 232 trauma, 14, 32, 58, 65, 66, 71, 72, 89, 164, 186, 210–15, 223; collective, 210; cultural, 60; historical, 115 traumatic, 47, 66, 71, 118, 210, 211, 213, 221 traumatogenic, 186, 188, 210–13, 223, 226

[273]

Index of Terms and Concepts

sense, senses (faculty), 21, 45, 105, 148, 165, 210 sensible, 21, 161, 193, 207, 211; partage du sensible (Rancière), 21, 161 sentimentalism, sentimental, sentimentality, sentimentalizing, 3, 37, 48, 66, 67, 70, 88, 93, 98, 107, 112, 118, 203, 221, 243 shadow, shadows, 24, 140, 184, 188, 190, 193, 200, 203, 211, 222, 228, 248 shifter, shifters, 182, 189 shoes, 17, 18, 32, 39, 41, 44, 56, 68, 69, 70 shrines, 44; spontaneous, 200 sight (sense), 50, 137, 141, 148 sign, signs, 37, 38, 45, 51, 236, 237, 245; encountered, 105, 108, 126, 139 signification, 32, 52, 128, 210, 238 silence (noun), 27, 28, 66, 166, 172, 173, 183, 190, 205, 230, 253 silence, silencing (verb), 27, 28, 41, 86, 105, 129, 152, 153; de-, 4 similarity, 42, 77 simulacrum, 53, 224 singularity, singularities, 4, 7, 8, 11, 16, 18, 26, 32 and passim site-specificity, site-specific, 23, 152, 162, 190, 232 slowdown, 34, 62, 125 social buzz, social buzzing, 7, 164, 166, 220 sound, 89, 167 space, 1, 21, 22, 27, 33–37, 87, 95–97 and passim; fictional, 95, 189, 226; negative, 23, 29, 33, 34, 38, 42, 47, 67, 68, 87, 97, 125, 147, 162, 23–38; political, 14, 15, 20, 27, 161–67, 175, 179, 234, 236; public, 25, 96, 112, 126, 176, 189, 211, 230, 251; social, 25, 97, 153, 174, 242 spacetime, timespace, 104, 149, 151, 184, 193, 226 speak, speaking, 28, 129, 165, 167, 181, 188, 247, 253 spectacle, spectacles, 22, 115, 212, 213, 248 spectator, spectators, 175, 176, 218, 220, 221, 226 speculation, 219 speed, 47, 224 sphere, 82, 221; domestic, 111; pathological public (Seltzer), 159, 175; political, 247; private, 14, 126, 208; public, 208 story, 149, 218

treat, 210, 213 treatment, 210, 211, 214

voice, 53, 88, 98, 129, 130, 181 volume, 139, 218, 240

universalism, universality, universalizing, 73, 83, 202, 223

wall, walls, 23, 25, 162, 189 war, 13, 15, 54, 55, 58, 64, 83, 160, 213, 225; civil, 176–78, 188, 202, 237, 246; Gulf, 55; international, 177; just, 57; second world, 64; on Terror, 55 white-cube aesthetic, 167, 182, 190 widowing, 103 wire fence, 229, 230, 240 witness, witnessing, 25, 32, 64, 166 words (as concepts), 130 work, works, 7–9, 20, 34, 52, 59, 62, 68, 81, 88, 130, 143, 150, 160–62, 166, 167, 175, 176, 178, 190, 212, 251. See also artwork working through, 144

Index of Terms and Concepts

vanishing point, 142 vehicle (metaphor), 38–40, 51 victim, victims, 19, 33, 49, 55, 56, 60, 64, 65 and passim viewing, 46, 51, 113, 120, 125, 139, 140, 143, 145, 152 violence, 3, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 27, 28, 37 and passim; in Colombia, 12, 20, 26–28, 55, 56, 59, 92–95, 153, 177, 178, 187, 188, 200, 210; homeopathic, 97; mass, 17, 32, 129, 210; political, 14, 33, 43, 44, 82, 86, 92, 95, 104; routine, 176, 177, 202, 209 visibility, 26, 46, 92, 137, 178; hyper-, 47, 224 vision, 46, 125, 136, 149; double, 127, 176

[274]

zipper (La Casa Viuda II), 100, 101, 104–6, 110, 111, 128, 173, 175

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abyss. See Salcedo, Doris Adams, Paul C., 236 Adorno, Theodor W., 2, 17, 21, 33, 59, 60, 62–66, 81, 90, 108, 115, 128–29, 159, 167, 168, 178, 221, 223, 224; Adornian, 17, 21, 60, 82, 115, 130, 223; Aesthetic Theory, 21; “After Auschwitz,” 65; Can One Live After Auschwitz?, 60; “Commitment,” 65; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115; Minima Moralia, 64; Negative Dialectics, 21, 64 Aguilar, Isla, 83 Ahtila, Eija-Liisa, 19, 20 À la recherche du temps perdu, 136–37 Alphen, Ernst van, 7, 17, 63, 89, 127, 130, 142, 213, 223; Art in Mind, 7; Caught by History, 130; “Caught by Images,” 130 Althusser, Louis, 10 “An Eye, Open,” 151 Anglican Cathedral (Liverpool), 165, 172 Ansell Pearson, Keith, 15 Antony, Louise M., 125 Apter, Emily, 12, 176 Arendt, Hannah, 14, 67, 106; Eichmann in Jerusalem, 207 Aristotle, 14, 38, 99, 218; Aristotelian, 14 Armando, 254 Armstrong, Elizabeth, 126 Aschheim, Steven E., 67 Atrabiliarios. See Salcedo, Doris Attridge, Derek, 11 Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum, 70

Bachelard, Gaston, 137 Badiou, Alain, 10–11, 22, 186, 187, 188, 210, 211 Baer, Ulrich, 49, 71 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 151 Bal, Mieke, 3, 18, 32, 42, 58, 99, 136, 140, 145, 146, 203, 211, 218, 235; Double Expo­ sures, 89, 110, 111, 182; Narratology, 80; “The Politics of Citation,” 81; Quoting Caravaggio, 154; Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, 130, 250 Balibar, Etienne, 55 Barson, Tanya, 123, 135, 151 Barthes, Roland, 49, 71; Camera Lucida, 47 Basualdo, Carlos, 3, 44, 92, 93, 111, 159, 173, 182, 210, 226 Batchen, Geoffrey, 49 Baudrillard, Jean, 69 Beasts, 149 Begby, Endre, 57 Benjamin, Walter, 42, 77, 79, 86, 88, 89, 120, 139, 204, 206, 211; “Little History of Photography,” 49; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 77 Bennett, Jill, 58, 89 Benveniste, Émile, 149, 182 Bergson, Henri, 20, 53, 120, 136, 148–51, 154, 186, 189, 193, 204, 207, 210, 211, 214, 245; Bergsonian, 53, 149, 186, 208, 222, 225, 226, 238; Creative Evolution, 150; The Creative Mind, 190; Matter and Memory, 150, 193; Time and Free Will, 150

[275]

index of Names and Titles

Berlant, Lauren, 4–5, 67 Bermann, Sandra, 42 Bersani, Leo, 140 Beuys, Joseph, 18, 247 Bil’in (Palestine), 220 Birkhofer, Denise, 62, 168 Blas Benito, Javier, 83 Bleeker, Maaike, 114–15, 206, 207, 208, 212, 213, 220, 223–24 Blocker, Jane, 34 Bloom, Harold, 41 Boer, Inge E., 178 Bogotá, 25, 203–5, 210, 211, 222, 224, 228, 230 Bois, Yve-Alain, 7, 73, 87, 114, 149, 168 Bollas, Christopher, 212, 213 Bourgeois, Louise, 234, 235 Braudel, Fernand, 186 Brecht, Bertolt, 207; Brechtian, 112 Brett, Guy, 87 Brodzki, Bella, 42, 49 Brooks, Peter, 113–14 Brown, Bill, 39, 69 Brown, Wendy, 13–14, 15, 16, 20, 93, 103, 152, 160, 166, 226, 236, 246, 250, 251 Bryson, Norman, 41, 140, 250 Burke, Kenneth, 38 Bush, George W., 115 Bushnell, David, 188 Butler, Judith, 202; Precarious Life, 36 Buydens, Mireille, 244, 248 Caillois, Roger, 115 Calow, Jane, 41, 116 Camden Arts Centre (London), 184 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 144, 147, 148, 154, 162; Caravaggesque, 140; Conversion of Saint Paul, 144–48, 145; Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 144–47, 145; Descent from the Cross, 173; Supper at Emmaus, 145 Carlo Emanuele III (duke of Savoy), 230 “Carnegie International” 1995 (exhibition), 96, 168 Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), 168, 169, 170 Caruth, Cathy, 215 Casarino, Cesare, 150 Casa Viuda, La, series. See Salcedo, Doris

[276]

Casa Viuda I, La. See Salcedo, Doris Casa Viuda II, La. See Salcedo, Doris Casa Viuda III, La. See Salcedo, Doris Casa Viuda IV, La. See Salcedo, Doris Casa Viuda VI, La. See Salcedo, Doris Casey, Edward, 173 Castello de Rivoli, 23, 230 Celan, Paul, 17, 28, 151; “An Eye, Open,” 151 Cerasi Chapel, 144 Certeau, Michel de, 103 Chambers, Ross, 223 Cheng, Anne Anling, 20, 152 Clark, Lygia, 87, 114, 116, 149, 168; Beasts, 149 Clark, Timothy, 11 Colombia, 26, 27, 55, 92–94, 96, 108, 153, 155, 177, 178, 187, 200, 226, 245, 250; Colombian, 1, 12, 20, 44, 59, 92, 93, 114, 177, 178, 182, 184, 188, 243 Conley, Tom, 103, 104 Connerton, Paul, 209 Connolly, William E., 97 Conversion of Saint Paul, 144–48, 145 Courtney, Richard (Drama and Feeling), 94 Crary, Jonathan, 139 Creux de l’Enfer, Le (Thiers), 173 Crewe, Jonathan, 211 Critical Inquiry, 4 Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 144–47, 145 Culler, Jonathan, 38, 39, 50–51, 100, 107, 137 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The (Haddon), 31 Damisch, Hubert, 7, 8, 15, 73, 142 Das, Veena, 101 Daston, Lorraine, 69 Davidson, Donald, 43; Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 43; “What Metaphors Mean,” 43 Davoine, Françoise, 15, 28, 213 Delahaye, Luc, 223 Delbo, Charlotte, 207 Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 20, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 53, 97, 105, 130, 148, 150, 177, 222, 244, 248; Bergsonism, 53; Deleuzian, 8, 72, 149, 150, 244; Difference and Repetition, 244; A Thousand Plateaus, 39, 148, 248; What is Philosophy?, 130

Eco, Umberto, 39, 62 Edelman, Murray, 58 Edgar, Andrew (Cultural Theory), 172 Edwards, Holly, 47, 49, 223 “Eighth International Istanbul Biennial” (exhibition), 23, 218 Eliasson, Olafur (The Weather Project), 235 Emilien, Gérard, 209 Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Stopford), 58 Eyes of Gutete Emerita, The (Jaar), 17, 49

Gombrich, E. H., 38, 143 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de, 82, 83, 108, 128; Los Desastres de la Guerra, 82, 83 Goyer, Nicolas, 144 Grenier, Catherine, 83 Gruzinski, Serge, 144 Grynsztejn, Madeleine, 36, 235 Guantánamo Bay, 229 Guattari, Félix, 8, 39, 40, 130, 148, 177, 248; A Thousand Plateaus, 39, 148, 248; What is Philosophy?, 130 Guerney, Sarah, 204 Habermas, Jürgen, 14 Haddon, Mark, 31–32, 40, 41, 51, 68, 73; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 31 Hannoyer, Jean, 177–78 Hart, Onno van der, 211 Hartman, Geoffrey H., 224, 225 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 220 Heidegger, Martin, 68, 69, 70; Heideg­ gerian, 70 Hernández-Navarro, Miguel Á., 3, 18, 115 Hertz, Robert, 25, 27–28 Hirsch, Marianne, 49 Hoelscher, Steven, 236 Horkheimer, Max (Dialectic of Enlightenment), 115 Horsman, Yasco, 106, 207; Theaters of Justice, 106 Huyssen, Andreas, 24, 81, 93, 111, 115, 123, 134, 135, 139, 152, 160, 173, 225, 249; ­Present Pasts, 152

Fabian, Johannes, 57, 63 Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore), 115 FARC, 200 Fernández Uribe, Carlos Arturo, 178 Fotiadi, Eva, 59 Frankfurt, Harry G., 6 Freud, Sigmund, 69, 210, 218; Freudian, 218, 248 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), 200

Installation for the Eighth International Istanbul Biennial. See Salcedo, Doris Irazábal, Clara, 185 Israel, 220; Israeli, 59 Istanbul, 25, 218–22, 236

Gallop, Jane, 52, 154 Garber, Marjorie, 66, 98 Garzón, Jaime, 200 Gaudillière, Jean-Max, 213 Genette, Gérard, 51, 125 Ginzburg, Carlo, 34 Gogh, Vincent van, 68, 70, 247 Golub, Leon, 163

Jaar, Alfredo, 17; The Eyes of Gutete Emerita, 17, 49 Jacobus, Mary, 89 Jameson, Fredric, 46, 68–71; Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 68 Janet, Pierre, 210, 211; Janetian, 211 Janssens, Ann Veronica, 19, 81

[277]

index of Names and Titles

Delgado, Sebastião, 223 De Man, Paul, 51 Derrida, Jacques, 21, 38, 39, 40, 68, 96, 139, 186, 187, 188; Derridian, 139; Dissemination, 96; “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 96; The Truth in Painting, 250; “White Mythology,” 39 Desastres de la Guerra, Los (Goya), 82, 83 Descent from the Cross (Carravagio), 173 Deutsche, Rosalyn, 166 Diamond Dust Shoes (Warhol), 46, 69 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 7, 137 Doane, Mary Ann, 34, 53, 123, 134, 150, 155, 212, 222, 245; The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 123 “documenta xi” (exhibition), 163, 165, 167, 179 Duganne, Erina, 47, 49, 223

Jelin, Elizabeth, 212 John F. Kennedy International Airport, 96 Johnson, Barbara, 56

index of Names and Titles

Kant, Immanuel, 16; Kantian, 16, 204 Katzberg, Michael, 22 Ken-ichi, Seto, 68 Kester, Grant H. (Conversation Pieces), 59 Kleinman, Arthur, 101 Kohn, Margaret, 202, 223 Kolk, Bessel A. van der, 211 Krauss, Rosalind, E., 162 Kubler, George, 153, 204 Kwon, Miwon, 162 Lacan, Jacques, 112, 115 LaCapra, Dominick, 89, 127 Lam, Janneke, 18 Latin America, 26, 56, 71, 141, 144; Latin American, 20, 86, 87, 92, 114, 143, 144, 154 Lebanon, 177, 178 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 244 Levinas, Emmanuel, 73, 110–11, 221, 222; “Otherwise than Being,” 111 Leys, Ruth, 215 “Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art” 1999 (exhibition), 165, 172 Liverpool Cathedral, 165, 172 Lock, Margaret, 101 Lord, Catherine, 41 Lubbe, Jan C.A. van der, 6 Luckhurst, Roger, 223 Lyotard, Jean-François, 186, 188 Mack, Joshua, 44 Mackie, Vera, 32, 70, 247 Marrati, Paola, 186, 189, 190, 238 Marx, Karl, 69; Marxian, 69; Marxist, 26, 150 Matilla, José Manuel, 83 Maus (Spiegelman), 81, 115 Mauss, Marcel, 69 McLean, Stuart, 186 Medellín (Colombia), 92 Medina, Àlvaro, 178 “Memoria Decapitada, La” (exhibition), 92, 129 Memory Studies, 212 Mendieta, Ana, 34

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Mengham, Rod, 226, 228, 229–30 Meninas, Las (Velázquez), 68 Menke, Christoph, 21, 69, 72 Merewether, Charles, 73, 99, 102, 128, 184, 203, 221 Michalski, Sergiusz, 24, 249 Mitchell, W. J. T., 69 M-19, 187, 188 Moderna Museet (Stockholm), 172 Moore, Michael (Fahrenheit 9/11), 115 Morra, Joanna, 42 Moser, Walter, 144 Mouffe, Chantal, 10–11, 12, 13, 57 Mulhall, Stephen, 124 Munn, Nancy D, 150 Museo d’Arte Contemporanea del Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli), 23, 230 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), 184 Musil, Robert, 24 Nagy, Gregory, 111 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), 207 National Gallery (London), 145 Negri, Antonio, 150 Neither. See Salcedo, Doris Nelson, Deborah, 67 New Museum (New York), 123, 160 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15, 39, 40, 51, 152, 187; On the Genealogy of Morals, 152; “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” 39 Nora, Pierre, 24 Noviembre 6. See Salcedo, Doris Noviembre 6 y 7. See Salcedo, Doris Osthoff, Simone, 87 Oxford Dictionary of Art, 141 Pain, Rachel, 173 Palace of Justice (Bogotá), 25, 184, 187, 200, 204, 210 Palacios, Marco, 188 Palestine, 220; Palestinian, 59, 220 Pandey, Gyanendra, 177 Pappé, Ilan, 220 Paris, 220; Parisian, 210 Parnet, Claire, 40 Patton, Paul, 40 Paul, Saint, 146–47

Rancière, Jacques, 10, 11, 21, 161, 219 Rayner, Alice, 205 Reichberg, Gregory M., 57 Reinhardt, Mark, 47, 49, 89, 202, 223 Reiss, Julie H., 175, 176 Republic. See Plato Riaño Alcalá, Pilar, 178 Richani, Nazih, 96 Richards, Ivor A., 38, 40 Riegl, Aloïs, 148 Rivoli, 23, 230 Roca, José, 55, 62 Roei, Noa, 59, 220 Rolnik, Suely, 87 Ruby, Christian, 59, 69, 70 Russell, Bertrand, 150 Rwanda, 17, 49 Safford, Frank, 188 Salcedo, Doris, 17, 24, 55, 56, 73, 93, 96, 106, 110, 111, 164, 189, 193, 210, 230, 243; Abyss, 23, 26–27, 164, 226, 230–34, 231, 233–35, 238, 248; Atrabiliarios, 16–18, 31– 73, 35, 36, 48, 61, 79, 86, 87–88, 104, 106, 127, 134, 162, 175, 246; La Casa Viuda I, 108, 109, 110–14, 127, 128, 139–41, 154; La Casa Viuda II, 99, 100, 101, 104–14, 127, 128, 139, 154, 164, 169, 173–75; La Casa Viuda III, 111, 174, 175, 176, 188–89; La Casa Viuda IV, 84, 85, 86; La Casa Viuda VI, 131, 132, 134; La Casa Viuda series, 19, 84–90, 99–115, 126–32, 136; Installation for the Eighth International Istanbul Biennial, 23, 25, 216–17, 218–21, 219, 222, 226; Neither, 23, 164, 226, 227–29, 228–30,

233, 248; Noviembre 6, 165, 179–81, 182– 83, 190; Noviembre 6 y 7, 25, 188, 190, 192, 193, 194–99, 200, 202–26; Plegaria Muda, 252, 253–54; Project for the Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá, 2007, 200, 201; Salcedian, 218; Shibboleth, xii–xiv, 1–4, 7–8, 27–28, 164, 226, 234–38, 239, 240, 241, 242–49; Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, 23, 165, 179, 183, 184, 185, 188–90, 232; Tenebrae series, 155, 159–90, 193, 200, 202–15, 221–26; Thou-less, 158, 159–67, 180–82, 206; Unland: Audible in the Mouth, 28, 132, 151; Unland: Irreversible Witness, 132, 133, 134; Unland series, 19–20, 23, 34, 94, 122, 123–55, 160, 162, 167, 203, 210, 212, 221, 240; Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic, 94, 123, 132, 134, 137, 138, 152, 160; Untitled (1989–90), 90, 91; Untitled (1995), 169, 170; Untitled (1997), 171; Untitled (1999), 172; Untitled Furniture (Armoire) (1992, “fallen soldier”), 118, 119, 168; Untitled Furniture (Armoire) (1995), 74, 76, 78, 80; Untitled Furniture (Armoire) (1998), 116, 117; Untitled Furniture (High Chair), 78; Untitled Furniture series, 19, 79, 80, 84, 87, 89, 101, 102, 116, 126, 136, 151, 154, 160, 165, 167, 168, 232 Salpêtrière, La, hospital (Paris), 210 San Michele Cemetery (Venice), 38 Santa Maria del Popolo (Rome), 144 Santino, Jack, 200 Sapir, Itay, 145 Sarduy, Severo, 20, 86, 141 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 159, 160, 180–83; The Body in Pain, 159 Schapiro, Meyer, 68 Schmerler, Sarah, 203, 224 Sedgwick, Peter (Cultural Theory), 172 Seltzer, Mark, 159, 175 Shibboleth. See Salcedo, Doris Silverman, Kaja, 182, 222 Sontag, Susan, 223 Spiegelman, Art (Maus), 81, 115 Spitzer, Leo, 211 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 22, 40, 94, 176; A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 94 Steinberg, Michael P., 89, 167 Stopford, John (Encyclopedia of Aesthetics), 58

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index of Names and Titles

Peeren, Esther, 151 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 6, 34, 45, 46, 53, 243, 245, 251 Peter, Saint, 146, 147 Piedrahíta Orrego, Lucrecia, 92, 129 Plato, 96, 120, 218; platonic, 42; The Republic, 58, 105, 120 Plegaria Muda. See Salcedo, Doris Princenthal, Nancy, 31, 32, 71–72, 73, 84, 90, 110, 111, 131, 150, 168, 173, 175, 176, 247 Project for the Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá, 2007. See Salcedo, Doris Proust, Marcel, 136–37, 139, 152; À la recherche du temps perdu, 136–37

Sullivan, Edward J., 33 Supper at Emmaus (Caravaggio), 145 Syse, Henrik, 57

index of Names and Titles

Tate Modern (London), 1, 3, 26, 234, 235, 237, 238, 243 Taussig, Michael, 12, 13, 24–25, 27–28, 105, 153, 177, 187, 208, 250 Taylor, Jane, 145 Tenebrae series. See Salcedo, Doris Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985. See Salcedo, Doris Thou-less. See Salcedo, Doris Till, Karen E., 212, 236 “T1 Triennal of Contemporary Art” 2005 (exhibition), 230 Triennial of Contemporary Art 2005 ­(exhibition), 230 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 207 Truth Commission (Argentina), 207 Truth Commission (South-Africa), 207 Turbine Hall. See Tate Modern (London) Turkey, 25 Turkle, Sherry, 69 Unland: Audible in the Mouth. See Salcedo, Doris Unland: Irreversible Witness. See Salcedo, Doris Unland series. See Salcedo, Doris Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic. See Salcedo, Doris Untitled (1989–90). See Salcedo, Doris Untitled (1995). See Salcedo, Doris Untitled (1997). See Salcedo, Doris Untitled (1999). See Salcedo, Doris Untitled Furniture (Armoire) (1992, “fallen soldier”). See Salcedo, Doris

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Untitled Furniture (Armoire) (1995). See Salcedo, Doris Untitled Furniture (Armoire) (1998). See Salcedo, Doris Untitled Furniture (High Chair). See Salcedo, Doris Untitled Furniture series. See Salcedo, Doris Vatican, 173 Velázquez, Diego (Las Meninas), 68 Venuti, Lawrence, 42 Villaveces-Izquierdo, Santiago, 19, 55, 82, 83, 96, 103 Virillio, Paul, 47 Viso, Olga M., 56, 66, 168 Vittorio Amedeo II (King of Sardinia), 230 Warhol, Andy, 46, 70, 247; Diamond Dust Shoes, 46, 69 Weather Project (Eliasson), 235 White, Hayden, 186 White Cube (London), 228, 230 Whiteread, Rachel, 247 Williams, Raymond (Keywords), 172 Winnicott, D.W., 69 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 4, 6, 9, 13, 14, 17, 27, 28, 78, 124, 245, 246, 247; Philosophical Investigations, 124; Tractatus Logico­Philosophicus, 1, 27, 246; Wittgensteinian, 130 Wong, Edlie L., 32, 37, 44, 47, 101, 123, 166, 213–14 Wood, Michael, 42 Zabunyan, Dork, 105 Zamudio-Taylor, Victor, 126 Zea de Uribe, Gloria, 178 Žižek, Slavoj, 223 Zoest, Aart J. A. van, 6