Other Planes of There: Selected Writings 9780822376484

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OTH ER PL A N E S OF TH ER E

O T H E R P L A N E S O F T H E R E​

Introductory Essay by G L O R I A S U T T O N​

Selected Writings

|

RENÉE GREEN

duke university press Durham and London 2014

© 2014 Duke University Press

front cover art : Renée Green,

All rights reserved

Archipelago in Parts, 2011–. Courtesy

Printed in the United States

of the artist and Free Agent Media.

of America on acid-free paper ♾

back cover art : Sites of Genealogy,

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

1991. Installation view. P.S.1 Contem-

Typeset in Arno Pro by

porary Arts Center, Long Island City.

Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Photo: Tom Warren. epigraph on p. v is from Sun Ra, The Immeasurable

Library of Congress Cataloging-

Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose,

in-Publication Data

compiled and edited by James L. Wolf

Green, Renée. Other planes of there : selected writings / Renée Green.

and Hartmut Geerken (Wartaweil: Waitawhile, 2005).

pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

duke university press gratefully

isbn 978-0-8223-5692-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

acknowledges the support of the

isbn 978-0-8223-5703-2 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Green, Renée. 2. Art, American—20th century. I. Title. n6537.g693a2 2014 700—dc23 2014007341

humanities, arts, and social sci‑ ences fund at the massachusetts institute of technology, school of architecture and planning, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

For my father Friendly Green Jr. For my brothers, Greg Green and Derrick Green. For my distant friends, Karim Aïnouz, Minsuk Cho, and Joe Wood.

OTHE R PL A N ES OF THE RE

The displaced years Memory calls them that They were never were then; Memory scans the void And from the future Comes the wave of the greater void A pulsating vibration Sound span . . . bridge to other ways and Other planes of there . . . Sun Ra ​“Other Planes of There” Saturn, 1964

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi

INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS Other Planes, Different Phases, My Geometry, Times, Movements: Becomings Ongoing 1 Remarks on the Writings of Renée Green, by Gloria Sutton 19

GENEALOGIES

1. Sites of Criticism: A Symposium. Practices: The Problem of Division of Cultural Labor. Statement (1992) 35



2. Discourse on Afro-­American Art: The Twenties (1981) 42



3. I Won’t Play Other to Your Same (1990) 53



4. What’s Painting Got to Do with It? Representing Gender and Sexuality in the Age of Post-­Mechanical Reproduction (1990) 57



5. From Camino Road (1994) 64

CIRCUITS OF EXCHANGE

6. Open Letter #1: On Influence (1992) 73



7. Open Letter #2: Another Attempt (1993) 78



8. Collectors, Creators, and Shoppers (1994) 83



9. Peripatetic at “Home” (1995) 89



10. Free Agent Media / FAM (1995) 94



11. Situationist Text (2001) 99



12. Introductory Notes of a Reader and “A Contemporary Moment” (2001) 103

ENCOUNTERS

13. Trading on the Margin (1991) 119



14. Democracy in Question (1991) 128



15. Notes from a User: L’informe (1996) 134



16. Spike Lee’s Mix: Calculated Risks and Assorted Reckonings (1996) 141



17. Compared to What? (1998) 152



18. Notes on Humanist and Ecological Republic and Lac Mantasoa (2000) 156



19. Other Planes of There (2004) 163



20. Archives, Documents? Forms of Creation, Activation, and Use (2008) 176



21. On Kawara’s Solutions to Living (2010) 191

POSITIONS

22. “Give Me Body”: Freaky Fun, Biopolitics, and Contact Zones (1995) 197



23. Dropping Science: Art and Technology Revisited 2.0 (1995) 210



24. Site-­Specificity Unbound: Considering “Participatory Mobility” (1998) 225



25. Slippages (1997) 230



26. Affection Afflictions: My Alien/My Self, or More “Reading at Work” (1998) 256



27. Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae (2001) 271



28. Beyond (2006) 289



29. Place (2006) 297

OPERATIONS 30. Sites of Genealogy (1990) 309 31. VistaVision: Landscape of Desire (1991) 312 32. Tracing Lusitania: Excerpts from an Imagined Prototype (1995) 317 33. Secret, Part 1. Practiced Places (1992–1993) 320 34. Secret, Part 2. Scenes from a Group Show: Project Unité (1993) 323 35. Inventory of Clues (1993) 335

36. Eighteen Aphoristic Statements (1994) 340



37. Collecting Well Is the Best Revenge (1995) 346

38. The Digital Import/Export Funk Office (1995) 354 39. Wavelinks Transmitted amidst “Dangerous Crossings”: Reflections in 2006 (2000, 2006) 364 40. Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems (2002) 375 41. Sound Forest Folly: Intermediary Units of a Variable Number (2004) 379 42. Why Systems? (2004) 381 43. Relay (2005) 388 44. Index (From Oblivion): Paradoxes and Climates. Thought Experiments: Warm-­up Notes (2005) 392 45. Climates and Paradoxes (2005) 396 46. Why Reply? (2007) 403

47. Now It Seems Like a Dream (2007) 408

48. Imagine This Wherever and Whoever You Are (2008) 411 49. Come Closer: Prelude to Endless Dreams and Water Between (2008) 419 50. Come Closer (2008) 422 51. Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009) 428

Plate Captions 453 Publishing History 463 Curriculum Vitae 469 Index 491

AC K NOW L E D GM E N T S

My acknowledgments will inevitably be incomplete. A glance at the index accompanying this volume will indicate to the curious name seeker those with whom I’ve been in conversation through time. Too long a list to name here, but I continue to be grateful for the sustenance of varying kinds I’ve received from these participants. I thank Alex Alberro for the initial invitation to compile a selection of my dispersed writings into a single unified language volume. The process of a book’s coming into existence can be a surprisingly long and circuitous one. I thank Kobena Mercer for prompting me to move these words and Fred Moten for encouraging me to share my initial manuscript with Ken Wissoker. Ken’s immediate enthusiasm and that of the manuscript readers allowed this book to grow to the measure I’d imagined. My warmest gratitude extends to everyone I worked with at Duke University Press ( Jade Brooks, Jessica Ryan, and Amy Buchanan) who’ve made the publishing process for this volume such a lovely one. For her incisive and informative introduction I thank Gloria Sutton. I thank my friends through time in different parts of the world for existing. Special thanks to all of the editors who invited and commissioned writings, as well as to all of the curators and institutions who invited me to produce works that in the intricate process of working, thinking, and feeling led to these writings. I also thank mit ’s School of Architecture + Planning for its hass Award, as it has allowed the book to be lavishly illustrated. Among the various efforts to animate these words while waiting to publish them I wish to heartily thank the Reading Performance Workshop participants who gave life to the manuscript with their voices and performances in San Francisco back in 2010.

Unless stated, all works and images are by the artist and Free Agent Media. Other Planes of There is dedicated to my families: the Green family, the Cochran family, and the Anguera Phipps family. And sin duda, perennial love to Javier Anguera Phipps, without whom, to again quote Sun Ra’s words, “Nothing Is.”

xii Acknowledgments

I NTRODUCTORY E SSAY S

R e n é e Gr e en

Other Planes, Different Phases, My Geometry, Times, Movements Becomings Ongoing

When I look at the many shelves of books in my library and focus on the section of books and catalogues in which my work resides, the titles and covers all look interesting in their own way, yet I continue to search. I don’t find what I’m looking for, it hasn’t been made, yet I can imagine something other than what I’m finding. I return to the manuscript of this book you now read. I think about the vast breadth and varying depths of the events and encounters throughout my life as an artist and as a writer as I select what to give you at this time. I don’t think of this as the definitive book of my work, as I’m still alive, writing and working, “wondering as I wander,” yet there are some combinations and words I’d like you to be able to read, which I haven’t yet read elsewhere. For that reason I feel compelled to give you these words. A note to myself: “A certain boredom with ‘artist’s books’ and ‘artist’s writings.’ What about writing? What about one’s perspective as it is informed by living and thinking and feeling and enacting? In this case, to enact living and thinking and feeling as an artist. Can I think of examples? And beyond. Ongoing becomings. Limiting classifications challenged. More paradoxes of democracy. Letters of all kinds.” I find these words written on a notebook page. What sparked these? What chasm am I indicating? What other writing can I imagine? What have I attempted to write differently? What is constricting about the categories I mention? What do these connote in contrast to another kind of writing I imagine and attempt? These questions are followed and elaborated in this book.

There are many years, dates, and addresses inscribed in my filled notebooks—my most consistent companions on all of my travels, along with my journals, which differ in function. A source to which I return. Part of a working process. A reference to what I’ve made and written. The notebooks contain a running internal dialogue in relation to my work as an artist with what is encountered in the world; questions, reflections, ideas, and indications of works and transmutations to come. As a prelude to Other Planes of There, I offer these recent transmuted excerpts as one way of telling a story, for example, “Other Planes, Different Phases, My Geometry, Times, Movements: Becomings Ongoing.” . . . Fluidity and Architecture: Time Flow, Change-­Acceptance as Its Condition; Space Variation; as in Music—Moveable Parts or Units/Notes, Sounds—­ Composed + Improvised I like architecture because there is in it the knowledge of building something up, as well as tearing something down—quite literally. That is its history and its practice. Ruins may be romantic fragments that archaeologists and poets can mine to learn about past humans. Living architecture means an acceptance of ruin to come. This differs from the historic notion of art, as matter made timeless, meant to last, an illusory wish, yet this somehow persists. We see the persistence of this wish at art auctions, a wish that art and money could mean something real and permanent rather than speculative, illusory, and fleeting. But with architecture and art, as with music, there is a plan, drawings, a score, based on what was designed or composed, something that can be reanimated by someone else at another time in another space. Passed on to the living. One dream of “conceptual art,” at least that of Sol Lewitt’s. . . . When reading particularly about art, sometimes it seems that the twentieth century ended in the 1960s. In terms of any hopes and dreams. Afterward everything that followed became post- or neo-­. Strange to be born in and grow up in a time that appears to be an extension of something perceived to have been authentic. If one carefully reads what was published during the years even from

2 Introductory Essays

one’s birth to the present, what can be discovered can astonish, as well as satisfy nagging curiosity, temporarily. The ah-­ha! effect. Speculative puzzle parts click into place, for a moment. The story I have to tell is an artist’s story. This becomes the story of many people through time. It is a growing seed. . . . 1959: Steve Lacy reads Lao Tzu; The Way (Tao) emerged based on Witter Bynner’s translation; 1967: First song written of a six-­song cycle. 1979: Quintet recorded the full version. Mom and Steve Lacy were born in 1934. And Joan Didion. The premiere issue of The Wire (Summer 1982) reprinted the interview between Brian Case and Steve Lacy, “The Spark, the Gap, the Leap,” from Melody Maker (7 April 1979). . . . I go deeper into the works and words of artists. After art? Steve Lacy, for example. Chris Marker, for example. Yes, both born in the twentieth century, living into the twenty-­first century, and both now physically dead. Yet the works amaze still. And me, having lived forty years in what was called the twentieth century and having also lived twelve more in what is called the twenty-­first century? Who determines what anything is called or designated in the present? What is this clutching onto memories about? . . . Reading Phillip Lopate’s expanded edition of Writing New York: A Literary Anthology compels me to think of a version of such a book that would include authors I imagine would make it more interesting—or excerpts of some of the included authors that could differ; more interesting for me, of course. I like the book. I bought the book, yet I like imagining another book. It would include Samuel Delany, Muriel Rukeyser, Joe Wood, Lynne Tillman, and more. It too would span time. Jimmie Durham would be included. Different people who were here but are gone, as well as those who return— these people would be included. Every-­goodbye-­ain’t-­gone people will be included. “Will” means a future project. While writing I’ve convinced my-

Other Planes, Different Phases 3

self. Perhaps it will be broader than what’s conceived of as “literary.” Words. Phrases. Sentences. Works. Sounds. Music. Graphics. Images. The Mix. Raymond Gervais and Yves Boulaine: It was more a social situation than a musical one finally? Steve Lacy: Yes. The fact is that the participants were becoming mean. At the beginning, they were very grateful and nice, and after a while they became mean. I don’t know why. RG and YB: Wasn’t it because you were destroying your status as a well-­known professional musician, on a pedestal? SL: Yes, something like that. Even so, I don’t regret it. It was really good for us and for them too. And it was better for us, because they didn’t continue. That’s what is really artificial and it’s the reason why I don’t give many lessons. If I continue for twenty-­five or thirty years, the others are only passing through.1 Following the path of one’s changing thoughts and works through the traces, the writings, as well as the returns and deeper and further explorations and ripenings. Oneself as another through time. We do so many things now with our little portable computer interfaces, from Facetime conversations between Prague and Somerville to making little movies, printing texts and images, texting across the room during dull lectures, presentations, or meetings, occasionally with images. We can do many things, yet we can’t break the screen-­distance barriers. We can use additional lenses and microphones to create higher definition representations. We can transmit, yet this is not the same as touching a person or a distant place or thing. Our kisses remain on the tiny screen, leaving blurry marks. No skin contact. No Videodrome yet. . . . To be american + artist in different centuries and decades and years. Issues, wishes, acts. A search. The Making of Americans, Stein. A realization/ realizations. The Recognitions, Gaddis. Morrison’s complete oeuvre. Going beyond/exceeding/excess. Newness, oldness, and everything in between. Portugal, Pocahontas, pilgrims, pioneers, pirates, pyrotechnics, Pyrrhic victories. to articulate this complexity + to simplify. To concentrate. To compress. To code. To compose. In a form.

4 Introductory Essays

Intro 1.1 The Live Creature, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches.

Discovering the recent past, that is, what is designated as the twentieth century. Designations, assignations, for example, the Anthropocene. According to? Compared to? what ? Yes, precedents, but again, According to? Compared to? what ? Or Incomparable? Beyond category? . . . “There is a discourse about the arts, rarely written and at times unspoken, which is neither that of historians so deeply tied to time and space nor that of critics concentrating on personal views about the arts or on contemporary judgments about whatever it is that they see. It is the discourse of sensibilities affected by the excitement of visual impressions, it is the discourse of love.”2 Rereading Ellison. Yardbird Reader, volume 5. Lewis Hyde. Jimmie Durham. Michael Dorris. Revisiting, rereading, rethinking, encountering freshly.

Other Planes, Different Phases 5

After having lived in Mexico, Europe, and California. After having lived thirty years more since first encountering their words. After having lived through various demarcations of time. After having lived through times during which events happened. Now living through times that continually reverberate with the residue of past events, even if these are forgotten rapidly and selectively remembered/commemorated, which is the way of humans, it seems. Both “newness” and “oldness” being claims. Made by someone. . . . Although I always paid rent in New York and exhibited in the United States, from 1991 to 2003 I worked primarily outside of the States; I supported myself touring, or the artist’s equivalent of such: working with galleries and with curators on every continent, something that became possible differently in the 1990s with the global capital spreads, the changing forms of circulation and ways of imagining access in contrast to the former Age of Three Worlds, designated as having ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism. In 2003 I moved to Santa Barbara, California, after having lived and worked in Vienna since 1997. The U.S. war with Iraq began in March 2003. A right-­wing politician elected in Austria came into office in 2000. The World Trade Center in New York was hit in 2001. Perceptions of any nation, as well as how to be an artist, were in a state of flux, which preceded that moment and which hasn’t abated. These writings gathered in Other Planes of There reflect one person’s encounters during many shifts. . . . Around me I have many books collected during the twentieth century. I didn’t keep many things besides these, a little vinyl, digital recordings, and things in storage that I’d made back then. I kept replacing my recording and computer equipment every few years. These are still operational.

6 Introductory Essays

After California As I’m finally really no longer living in California, waking up from years of another dream, I look at the dreamlike ice and snow and sunlight from my windows in Somerville. With more of my unpacked collected notebooks and books amassed over the years within reach, I can now reflect differently about these past years, places, people and how it feels now to recall any of this. Coming closer and distanciation are linked. To assert that something is over before it has even been told is a tendency, it seems. No one else will tell these particular stories if they are not written, appearing somewhere, legible, to be recognized by someone. An anthropocentric someone, presumably. I find this in my notebook: “Letters—sending messages in writing between people over distances and through time—are often necessary for survival, yet most have forgotten this need.” Thinking about the Anthropocene in relation to art, culture, and technology, even these three conjunctive elements can be rethought, with people whose ideas and work I enjoy engaging, living or dead. the need : for poetry, song, letters—missives, correspondence back and forth, reciprocal exchange, open letters—pre-­blog rants, manifestos, et cetera; encountering and imagining these now, as there is a wish for them now. All that fills the time span from 1959 to 2013. The desire to express and to feel continues. fragile chance : Having the chance, the opportunity to read and think one’s own thoughts. This in itself is huge. To sit undisturbed in one’s own room, wherever that may be. To be free of laboring for another. Stupendous! Freedom and the Anthropocene, how will it work? How will work function? some people : For June Jordan, who collaborated with Buckminster Fuller but who was not credited by Esquire magazine in 1964. For Chris Marker, Gilles Deleuze + Félix Guattari, Félix González-­Torres, Michel Foucault, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Muriel Rukeyser, Joanna Russ, Lynn Margulis, Greg Bear, plus additional references piled in a stack by my bed. Make a list and put the books away. . . .

Other Planes, Different Phases 7

In relation to the combination art, culture and technology we can think about investigating, to continue Deleuze’s and both Félixes’s thoughts about new notions of placement, production, and originality; in relation to the plane of sensation (composition of art/percepts), the plane of immanence (philosophy/concepts), and the plane of reference (science/function/functives). We who have certain propensities to be artists, for example, who think about life in many ways, who respond in various ways with “forms of organized complexity” to other “forms of organized complexity” in science or in philosophy. Quoting, naming, listing in hope of a resonance beyond oneself, a power stronger than itself, reaching beyond the quotes, the names, the lists, the things, through time. That’s a wish. A dream. Enacted in made things. Not deferred. . . . . . . From inside. How something is composed. Analyzing Sol LeWitt (MoMA, 1978). Captions and images. Selections. Structure. I’m happy my book is called Other Planes of There. It was also the name of my last exhibition with Pat Hearn Art Gallery (phag ), 2000. February? March? It was cold. I think we remember Henry James, in part, because of the writings he allowed to remain, as well as via some he didn’t control, additional notebooks. He burned many papers. He attempted to compose the life that continued, or that was found, via conflagration. Historicizing my formation: twentieth-­century dreams of wholeness + the fragmentary post- ______s. Emerging from a murky interdisciplinary jewel-­studded swamp or glistening fog of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s into another plane of where/ there. Perspectival and kaleidoscopic. Sky, mountain, sea, underwater, views, sounds, sensations transmitted and to transmit. Cellular planes. Synaptic sparks. Muriel (Rukeyser), Berenice (Abbott), June ( Jordan), the Tonis (Cade Bambara and Morrison). Their needs and our needs. Intersections. Imagined. Felt. Finding things and reading them. 8 Introductory Essays

Reading in the “anthropocene.” Composing in the “anthropocene.” Just combine any activity you might have with the notion of “anthropocene,” as you understand it and experience what takes place. Anything special? What does the combination affect/effect? Does it move beyond opinion to become a concept, sensation or function? What does the combination generate? “Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience.”3

Afters—Ongoing Becomings Questions: What will be saved (retained), transmuted (retained, recognized), understood (recognized)? What happens to artists in the United States, depending on where they are from—the elaborate genealogy constructed, dismissed, or ignored— and how they circulate in the Americas and elsewhere in the world? Many interesting cases. Formations of many combinations and combination people . . . While musing on the writer John Updike, after noting the prevalence of his name on book blurb endorsements in my library yet facing a vacuum when I attempt to recall any of his words as a novelist, I’m reminded of an endemic North American mode of a particular type, that has since spread. Something connected to Warhol or the 1960s and old ideas of celebrity linked to one’s name being present, like an advertisement. An advertisement of what, though? A self? Wasn’t there a book by Norman Mailer, another writer who emerged in the 1950s, with a title like Advertisements for Myself? Easy enough to find out online now. . . . Thinking about 1993 in 2013 seems to be of more interest to those who weren’t conscious of that year in any particular way then, or who weren’t born yet, more than it interests me now. I don’t hold on to the past, yet I contemplate it and continue to flow. The title of Paul Bowles’s autobiography, Without Stopping, makes poignant sense somehow. Who can ever “remember” what others want to know? Who can ever “deliver” what others Other Planes, Different Phases 9

claim to “design,” that is, the many cultural events in metropoles around the world, like Berlin or New York or Cairo or Abu Dhabi? I prefer to pursue my own ideas and what I’m developing; to work with a constellation of people who resonate with these processes, whatever these become wherever this can take place. As Billie Holiday once said when being welcomed “back,” “They never ask you where you’ve been.” Much is always going on, whether or not it is mediatized. Some were amazed to read about Billie Holiday’s relationship with Orson Welles in the book Lady Sings the Blues, but why were they surprised? That’s my question. What do people imagine life is in relation to how it continually unfolds? . . . Geopolitics in retrospect. What appealed to me in my encounters with Europeans in Cologne in the early 1990s was the way the people I met each had their own spaces where they worked at what they chose to do: in offices and galleries that were efficient and functional looking, with tables that could be cleared for meetings and conversations. They determined their own pace and the content of what they were doing. Agency appeared in abundance. There was also a person born in the United States of Palestinian and Lebanese descent, a key participant and analyst, who introduced me to his perspective of the scene. The ability to seriously engage with all aspects of art and thinking, all day every day, and being able to walk to gather for socializing in a bar, the Grüne Ecke, was to encounter what seemed like a missed time, something that had occurred before my birth in New York at the Cedar Tavern but that was taking place in the present around current themes by people from different parts of Germany, with a strong Hamburg sector, as well as a Schwäbisch aspect, and other locations; some from the London vicinity, occasional North Americans from New York and L.A., maybe one assimilated German Turkish person, one Swiss person, who was gay, in a hetero-­dominant and macho environment—and, am I leaving out anyone? Oh yes, expatriate former Israelis. But no one else of the present Combination People, not yet, beyond my female self. Why do I use descriptions reflecting nations, regions, cities, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference, yet not class? That was the mode of designating people, even if unstated, at the time in that place in that art milieu, by these sorts of distinctions. When I later moved to Berlin I was introduced to other locations that 10 Introductory Essays

appeared, from my 1993 New York perspective, to have been from what I’d imagined to be a vanished bohemian time, at least a decade gone in New York. Sometimes with a scary neo-­Nazi edge. I was warned to stay away from Alexanderplatz at night by an Italian friend, back then. . . . Returning again and again to what I’ve gathered, to write this introduction. In this room in New York and in my rooms in Somerville and in Cambridge. My spaces to contemplate and to create. All of them with windows to stare out of, or to watch the light filter in and out of. Paths and genealogies of affinity are appearing with these ongoing becoming returns. “Repetition and difference.” “Refraction and diffraction.” Contemplation, time and space, plus resources to live allow these. All artists, philosophers, scientists, and people attempting to use the power of their agency have needed resources to allow continuous creation. Resources include being in a body. Being alive. Being conscious. Not being enslaved. . . . I made a film in 2009, Endless Dreams and Water Between, calling out to my dispersed loved ones. To Jimmie Durham, for example. Across waters. To islands and between. 1993 indeed. I think Jimmie was then the same age as I am now, fifty-­ three. I’m rereading his book, A Certain Lack of Coherence. His name is bigger than the title on the cover and on the spine, making it seem that the title could be Jimmie Durham and the author could be named A Certain Lack of Coherence. Interesting. He was born in 1940, I read on the book’s back cover, and graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-­Arts, Geneva, in the visual arts. This means something different to me now than it did in 1993, as I’ve been many times during the past years to Geneva and I’ve worked there and continue to work with colleagues there. I noted by the price tag, £11.95, that I’d bought the book in London. It was copublished with the Institute of International Visual Arts, Iniva. Actually, what appears on the cataloguing page is: First published in 1992 by Kala Press. The isbn numbers list both hardcover and paperback versions. It has a catalogue record from the British Library. The book was published under the Arts Council of Great Britain’s Publishing Franchise for Iniva Other Planes, Different Phases 11

and in collaboration with the Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-­ Arts, Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels, with the support of the Flemish Community, Belgium. 1993. That was the same year Jimmie and I were both in the muhka show in Antwerp. The same year that my work, a massive installation entitled Inventory of Clues, was mysteriously “lost.” Lost “clues” in Belgium. Curious. The same year a gallerist in Antwerp, who I met just once, told me that I needed to better manage my affairs. The same year a curator from London approached me about perhaps doing a Phaidon monograph, but first it was necessary to see how the Jimmie Durham monograph would do, commercially, and then later we could revisit the discussion about my possible monograph. I heard nothing more. Yes, 1993. In Los Angeles I had a solo exhibition that year at moca , World Tour. I moved that year to Berlin on a daad fellowship. A time of transitions in Europe and throughout the world, only a few years after the Berlin Wall had come down. Many things followed and continue. Other Planes of There provides one person’s view of some of what happened since then. Now the New Museum in New York is producing a show with 1993 as its premise. My work will be included. What is wanted of 1993 in 2013? . . . After a 1995 conference held in London at the ica and cosponsored by Iniva, Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, I decided I wanted to radically shift the focus of how I was working and how the work could be perceived. It became evident to me that I needed to focus more specifically on time-­based media, as well as on different forms of diffusion, placement, and contact. I’d been working with these forms previously, but I’d initiated this shift for myself in 1994 with the invention of Free Agent Media, which I launched with the publication of my novel and video Camino Road in Madrid at the Museo Reina Sofía. I’d already produced works using video and sound and I wanted to push this further into filmmaking and digital modes. There were several reasons. My visceral reactions to ways of being positioned was a definite indication to me that I needed to find a way of working more suitable to the varied dimensions of creation I wanted to express. As language and sound have always been aspects of my ways of thinking and creating, as is indicated in many of the discrete works I’ve 12 Introductory Essays

made, I wanted to be able to animate in a simultaneous yet contrapuntal, layered way, visually and aurally. To bring the parts together into one form. I also found it irritating to keep speaking to a public on panels. I wanted to be able to show a clip of a film, something that had already been thought and formed, with images and sound and movement. I needed to shift, and I did. I wanted to create in a form that others could respond to without needing an intermediary. A popular form that could also be erudite, containing worlds, with kaleidoscopic potential. A form that didn’t require a docent. The tour was contained within the form itself, if a tour was desired. Each percipient following their own mental path, with its myriad associations, while encountering a composed form in a space, whether on a tiny screen or projected in labyrinthine rooms. I’d been primed for this most of my life. From childhood tv studio experiences and appearances, through my studies of photography and its history, to courses in video and film in New York that I took after working day jobs, as well as having grown up with an electronic engineer, my father. Once I’d made the decision to shift I had a little help from friends who were already working in the field of film and video. My first exhibition in which I used time-­based media extensively was in 1992, Import/Export Funk Office at Christian Nagel Gallery in Cologne. Why I made the conscious decision in 1995 was related to the lag in terms of recognition of the fact that I was continually growing and becoming, exceeding the categories then used while attempting to classify my work, which used installation as a format, within which were videos, films, still photos, prints, books, audio, computers, and sculptures, which entailed attention to specific formats, as well as to different relationships at play between these and the percipient’s attention. Besides, as one person said, I was a “one-­woman diaspora,” physically on the move in addition to moving between forms. “Issues of identity” were never appropriate as a sole container, yet various attempts were made to squeeze what didn’t fit into this or that mold. It never worked. An excess of slippages. Yet there are lots of books and catalogues that have been produced by many, attempts of all sorts, as attested by my shelves. The residue of curious times and movements of art and culture throughout the world during the past two decades. P.S. Jimmie Durham lives in Europe, and it is said he will not return to the United States. The same is said of Adrian Piper. I hope they live happily ever after. Other Planes, Different Phases 13

. . . Another trajectory I followed in writing this book has been to explore the writings of artists. Including the two above. I include a range of artists from different disciplines within the arts. This has been an enjoyable endeavor. I can imagine writing a book on these interests. My favorites. Most are dead and are introduced by others. For the living, their own introductions are sometimes brief. Sometimes they are longer. After all of the words included in this book I don’t wish to add too many more. My wish is to suggest some planes it’s been possible to move along, to traverse. My perspective on this changing earth in this changing life. Some artists thank those it’s been possible to have good conversations with in different decades. I echo this sentiment. Another feels remorse: “If only I could take my words back: If only I could have spoken.” He also refers to things that still can’t calmly be discussed. I feel no remorse, but his reference to things that still can’t calmly be discussed continues to resonate. I am back here in this place, called at this time North America, surrounded by ghosts, still writing and communing with these distant friends, relatives, and ancestors, sending my voice across the waters and through time to the loved ones. To write retrospectively requires distance. I’ve been too much in the midst of the soup of life to gain this perspective consistently. But perhaps I’m moving into another phase as time passes, no matter how intertwined the various aspects of inhabiting the earth continue to be. It can take some time, as I can attest, to grasp this, beyond an intuitive inkling, no matter how educated one is. “Educated fool”: what song lyric does that phrase come from? Yes, Curtis Mayfield, “Don’t Worry”: “Educated fools from uneducated schools . . . don’t worry, I say don’t worry” (echo effect). Music is embedded in my mind and in my life. This emerges in various ways throughout this book, including its title, borrowed from Sun Ra. I value those who came before me. I give respect. Finding and remembering their songs and music is one way, particularly as I come from a family of generations of musicians and artists. I learned respect from the elders to value what came before me and what exists beyond me. We can be dissimilar and interested and respectful. Why should anyone or anything or any place be the same? . . .

14 Introductory Essays

For me, musicians have always provided examples of ways of being an artist in the world, beginning in Cleveland with my mother, Gloria Simpson Green, a vocalist and pianist, student of modern music, experimentalist, teacher, and choir director; her friend Francis Cole, a relative of Nat King Cole who was a harpsichordist and versatile pianist, accompanying my mother’s singing as a youth; also known as Dr. Cole, professor of music at Queens College; my grandfather Steve Edward Simpson, a tenor and pianist with a vocal quartet; his brother, my uncle Jimmie, who was a pianist in Detroit; my brother Derrick, a vocalist and musician, lead singer of the Brazilian band Sepultura; as well as many other talented musicians in the family. But despite the search for models, finding a way to be a visual artist diverged from their paths, as well as the one I was on as a vocalist; I was always a combination being, a singer who also made visual art and wrote. My mother’s brother Steve E. Simpson Jr. is an artist and writer, but he didn’t play music, although I did find jazz magazines of his. He counts as an early model. I’ve searched for models who’ve worked as artists in any aesthetic and creative form and who have also used words. It’s been challenging to find combination artist models; thus my interest in artists from different times and places who seem to have these various inclinations continues. We exist. I’d wanted to write this introduction in a fresh and breezy manner, like Langston Hughes did in The Big Sea or like Duke Ellington did in Music Is My Mistress, but I found myself back to facing a burden. I remembered what Greg Tate, musician, writer, and editor of Everything but the Burden: What White People Take from Black Culture, told me once, which was to revisit Toni Morrison’s books. At the time I remember questioning his reasons for advising this. I can’t remember exactly what he said, beyond the fact that this was necessary as there’s something we need there. Eventually I took his advice; while living in California, in San Francisco, and feeling very distant from the warmth of conversations with New York friends, I began reading every novel. I had stopped reading her books after Beloved. I remember being in Berlin when Jazz came out. I didn’t feel like reading it. I wasn’t in the mood then. That was in 1993. But by 2006, in San Francisco, after nearly four years back, living in the United States, far from all that had previously been familiar, amid many changes in the world, I was ready to dive into Toni’s words. Greg was right. Paradise was deep . While in California I also gained sustenance reading George E. Lewis’s Other Planes, Different Phases 15

book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The aacm and American Experimental Music. I note what I learned and continue to learn rereading George Lewis and listening further to the music since 2008, but now with more awareness of the divergences and discoveries that occur differently for artists than for musicians, yet linked to related sentiments for agency regarding the art and its diffusion. This is some of what I write about in Other Planes of There. Unlike aacm (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), I thought about how an individual experimental artist who is a woman and of the black North American mixture can thrive. I mentioned inventing fam as a dream collective operation while in Berlin in 1994. Going it alone in the world can be pretty lonely, and the work requires more than one person, as an observant friend from a Swiss collective of the 1990s suggested. But beyond that, in 2008 I was curious to think further about artist formations and the making of an experimental artist in America (North, Central, and South). Yes, and all of the adjectives attached based on birth and historic designations, but I wanted to also focus more specifically on ways of becoming and being an artist in the world now, amid continual changes. My notion of “combination people” began to develop when thinking of what doesn’t fit any standard narrative for the development of an aesthetic experimentalist born in the United States and how there are actually no standard narratives, even if some formations have been shared. Reading A Power reinforced that observation. I’d like to convey that there remain things to know and to acknowledge that are still difficult to calmly discuss, as Jimmie Durham says; or difficult to more broadly recognize, such as a claim to multiple histories and a willingness to accept the range of participants in shaping these, despite the immensity of words circulating and despite the passages of time. Yet I take hope in words from aacm participants describing their journey with the Association, that I use as an analogy to suggest my broader motivations in collecting some of my words here. Muhal Richard Abrams: “I believe in something bigger than I am as a musician [artist].” Adding on to that thought, Shaku Gyo Joseph Jarman says, “Regardless of what we’ve gone through, we’re still a part of the power that’s stronger than itself. Even though all of the primary elements may shift, and even maybe one day the name changes, it’s still there forever, it’s plugged into history.” A compelling point Lewis asserts as one reason he wrote his book and which I echo: “to encourage younger African American artists [and combination people] to 16 Introductory Essays

Intro 1.2 Animation Activation: Reading Performance Workshop, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 17 April 2010.

see themselves as being able to claim multiple histories of experimentalism despite the histories of erasure, both willful and unwitting; and to reassure young black artists [and combination people] that if you find yourself written out of history, you can feel free to write yourself back in, to provide an antidote to the nervous pan-­European fictionalizations that populate so much scholarship on new music [on new art].” I’ve made bracketed additions to these quotes as a way to stretch the potential of ongoing becomings and a power stronger than itself, as I can imagine these. . . . Other Planes of There moves in the directions I’ve continued to move in, as the titles of my two retrospective exhibitions, Ongoing Becomings and Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams suggest. In this book are words describing different kinds of encounters and interactions. Encounters, in the most optimistic sense, take place between a perceiver and perceived works, events, and places. Ideas, sensations, and emotions may be stimulated, perhaps sparking others ideas, during these moments of encounter. Other Planes of There contains writings that provide intimations to my works, written works that include essays, fiction, Other Planes, Different Phases 17

film and audio scripts, and those that exceed a category, as well as writings that approach the works of others. I consider interactions to take place with people, differently than encounters. Some of these are also written about and included. This is not a memoir meant to describe a life, but is rather an attempt to suggest a scope of writings from a selection of primarily published writings, written in different parts of the world at different times during my life as an artist between the years 1981 and 2010, in relation to different works—considered in an expansive sense of the word—made by myself or made by others. This book is divided into five sections: Genealogies, Circuits of Exchange, Encounters, Positions, Operations. The subjects of the sections each contain writings that span stretches of time and locations, yet share a relation.

Notes 1. Steve Lacy, interview by Raymond Gervais and Yves Bouliane, “On Play and Process, and Musical Instincts,” in Steve Lacy, Conversations, ed. Jason Weiss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 71. 2. Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 227. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 218.

18 Introductory Essays

G l or i a Sutton

Remarks on the Writings of Renée Green Sometimes it is necessary to move outside the world one seems designated to inhabit in order to gain another perspective about what one is doing. A “second language,” or possibly even more, is needed to enable a rethinking of established notions.—Renée Green, “Introduction: Negotiations in the Contact Zone Symposium,” 2003

In 1994 Renée Green organized and moderated a watershed symposium entitled Negotiations in the Contact Zone, in which the artist expertly framed a set of issues that identified a burgeoning international phenomenon within the field of contemporary art. In the relatively intimate gallery space of The Drawing Center in Lower Manhattan, Green assembled what she intended to be a “provocative and fruitful dialogue” between “cultural producers (visual artists, video producers, filmmakers, writers)” and “cultural critics” and steadily asked, “What happens when art seems to be taking on the face of theoretical critique, in addition to traveling outside of the gallery?” Green pointed to the conditions that compelled her question by outlining the methodologies employed by these producers—which in her words “involves all manner of research, textual representations, analyses of textual and visual representations, an engagement with psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, semiotic, post-­structuralist and post-­colonialist theories,” creating a situation in which both cultural producers and critics may in fact use the same tools and methods. “And while what is produced by each group can contribute to perceptions of the world and our lives in ways we hadn’t imagined,” remarked Green, “the manner and intent in which these provocative tactics are conducted, as well as the audiences to whom they are addressed, can differ.”1 Green underscored the fact that she did not intend to reinforce a “binary opposition” between these two roles by insisting that “in some cases the producers and the critic are the same person.”2 By recog-

nizing how artists not only produce a work of art’s meaning but also simultaneously contribute to that work’s secondary analysis or discourse, Green had clearly identified a previously unexamined fissure that spread alongside the growth of theoretically engaged art practices in the early 1990s, which were loosely identified with the relatively unstable terms of institutional critique and Kontext Kunst as means of signaling the artist’s insistence on a work’s relationship to its historical, social, economic, and spatial conditions; these concerns were of course developed in the wake of aesthetic strategies deployed by artists since the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the self-­reflexive installation and event-­based operations associated with Conceptual art. The objectives for this symposium derived from the stakes established by Green’s own artistic practice, that is to say her conscious investment in examining relationships of power and systems of meaning production. More specifically, Green pointedly used the term contact zone, with its ambiguous and complex connotations of interaction and encounter, to frame the set of discussions and debates about cultural production and its critical reception.3 As she points out in the essays “‘Give Me Body’: Freaky Fun, Biopolitics, and Contact Zones,” and “Slippages,” included in this volume, contact zone refers not only to the direct forms of cultural exchange, suppression, and hybridization that occur within a colonial context but also to the more diffuse forms of influence that result and proliferate, including what Green identified as the “various moments when negotiations between different cultures have to be made . . . ranging from literal spatial instances to psychological ways of coping with what appears to be foreign, by using creative and enabling approaches,” adding the caveat that “dealing with the ‘contact zone’ is not only a political problem but also a problem for thinking and for creating.” Characteristically Green’s effort to generate a “contact zone” between producers and critics, historians, curators, and other so-­called experts in New York developed out of an earlier, multivalent project entitled Tracing Lusitania, which began in 1991 and involved Green traveling to and living in Lisbon, Portugal, for three months and then journeying by boat to Ceuta (“Portugal’s first conquest” in North Africa in 1415) in an attempt to consider the complex relationship between a colonial “past” and a contemporary culture. Green reminds us of the cultural and political backdrop in her account of the symposium’s planning between 1991 and 1994: “All of 20 Introductory Essays

the Columbus protests and celebrations were brewing, as well as numerous debates about ‘identity politics,’ ‘multiculturalism,’ and ‘political correctness,’” adding, “It was my intention to complicate the terms of some of these debates, and also focus my work on what specifically occurs in the cultural realm—knowing that it intersected political, economic and social sectors.”4 While Green was describing the specific conditions that contributed to her intellectual framing of Negotiations in the Contact Zone, her choice of language and methodological concerns are indicative of her practice more broadly speaking. In particular she noted her choice to actively avoid overarching themes like “colonialism, Eurocentrism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, imperialism,” opting instead to anchor the discussion “by examining an artifact, a text, a painting or group of paintings, a decorative object, an image, a novel, a poem, a garden, a palace, a house.” By focusing attention on not only these places and objects but also the “contexts in which they appeared,” Green maintained, “it was possible to read these objects or places in different ways, and to attempt to present or decipher the contradictory pleasure which might accompany them.”5 Of key significance is her declaration that she “wasn’t seeking a didactic mode, but rather a heuristic one which could provoke questions.”6 And while her remarks were given as an introduction to a set of specific debates and circumstances in 1994, the critical stakes of her efforts to continually “provoke questions” and “rethink established notions” have proven to be enduring and exceedingly resonant throughout the immediate field of contemporary art and within overlapping areas and discussions, especially those intersecting around music, film, literature, philosophy, and media studies. This book itself is another “contact zone,” a foundational way to “provoke questions” and “rethink established notions.” In this collection of her diverse writings—criticism, commentary, essays, film scripts, working-­ process documents and reflections, fiction, and polemics—into a distinct volume in 2014, Green’s expansive and continually expanding practice as a visual artist at the forefront of her generation’s more socially and politically engaged and project-­driven art production within contemporary art over the past two decades also becomes a subject for reconsideration. Bracketing a selection of her writing into this volume highlights the specific language she introduced as well as her ongoing probing investigations into durational media. Problems of language and media are long-­standing subjects of what can be loosely portrayed as a turn toward critical practice, which Green has Remarks on the Writings of Renée Green 21

rigorously framed in terms of translation, travel, and cultural transfer and their ensuing personal and political entanglements. Green has selected, edited, and organized the writings into five distinct parts that in turn illuminate and underscore key convictions and working methodologies: Genealogies, Circuits of Exchange, Encounters, Positions, and Operations. The texts that are included under each section are not ersatz works of conceptual art or a type of explication for the numerous videos, films, sound works, photographs and prints, sculptures, banners, and structures designed for lounging, listening, watching, reading, and absorbing that converge within the complex spatial installations that she produces and exhibits internationally. The writings exemplify how Green’s thinking and writing processes are inextricably intertwined with that ongoing and vital enterprise. Penned between 1981 and 2010, they tell the story of an artist’s formation as well as the rise of critical practice within the field of contemporary art history more broadly considered. Her underlying subject—the formation of the individual consciousness and the fluid nature of subjectivity—remains a consistent leitmotif throughout this diverse collection. The process of writing—as a subject, as a literary technique, and as an aesthetic form—has played and continues to play an integral role in all of her endeavors, including her current film-­based projects, exhibitions, screenings, lectures, and presentations that have taken place alongside her roles as a professor in a range of pedagogical contexts.7 The selected essays also chronicle her inclusion in and relationship to the formation of the discourse on contemporary art history at the very same moment this nascent specialty was focused on establishing its own ontological narratives, territorial boundaries, and institutional legitimacy during the 1990s. In doing so Green augments the art historical accounts established by critics, historians, and curators with the perspective of a differently situated practitioner and thinker, while recontextualizing as well as questioning the emergence and deployment of many of the key terms, such as site-­specificity, that have since solidified into art historical parlance (“Site-­Specificity Unbound,” 1996; “Notes from a User,” 1996; and “Slippages,” 1997). The tone and texture achieved in these texts also exemplify the diverse writing styles that Green employs: from her frank, on-­the-­ground reports of participating in signal academic debates of the early 1990s (“Sites of Criticism: A Symposium,” 1990) to genealogical interpretations of the incongruities between self-­identification and institutional demarcations of race and ethnicity 22 Introductory Essays

(“Discourse on Afro-­American Art: The Twenties,” 1981), as well as considered responses to the editorial and curatorial processes her work and writing have been subjected to, as outlined in the “Eighteen Aphoristic Statements” from 1994. In Other Planes of There we can see the clear and powerful convictions of its author, whose working life has been foregrounded by a contradictory social and geopolitical background that has registered the effects of several cycles of cultural contestation over biopolitics and representation (“Democracy in Question,” 1991) and the continued climb of a neoliberal economic order (“Notes on Humanist and Ecological Republic and Lac Mantasoa,” 2000; “Wavelinks Transmitted amidst ‘Dangerous Crossings,’” 2006). Though addressing unsettled accounts or, as is often the case, readdressing continued misreadings, Green’s writings never dissolve into cynicism but remain balanced and insistent on art’s potential—not for transcendence or autonomy but for agency of a complex variety, what she has referred to as “ongoing becomings” or, within this context, “other planes of there.” The publication of this book forces a much-­needed reappraisal of the conditions of artistic production and demands a reevaluation of the role or position of the artist writ large. This is not an effort to add to the list of artist occupations that have emerged since the 1990s—chief among them being artist-­as-­curator and artist-­as-­researcher. In contrast, her strategic use of the moniker fam (Free Agent Media) as an umbrella for her projects since 1994 is a means of addressing the distribution of contemporary art within a marketplace demonstrating her deep understanding of art’s complex relationship to the culture industry and complicates the tendency to read art as distinct from the broader media ecology it circulates within. Moreover her writings contour the broader transitions within contemporary art—away from creating unique objects to be meditated by an anonymous audience toward the invitation to the viewer to stay and engage. Like the spaces for encounter and contemplation, listening lounges and screening scenarios that she has crafted in museums, galleries, theaters, gardens, and other public spaces, Green’s writings and the manner in which she has organized this book encourage the reader to make connections and draw linkages to topics and discussions far afield. This recognition of her reader as someone who is not bound by disciplinary labels is also indicative of her larger commitment to illuminating circuits and systems of exchange that frequently lead one outside of typical art venues and the confines of the seminar room. In Remarks on the Writings of Renée Green 23

this manner Green’s writings mitigate the reductive dichotomy between the “art world” and “the academy” as the two designated spheres of aesthetic production. . . . While Green’s writings were being commissioned, published, read, and discussed in the European context, the nearly decade-­long gap between the time she organized the Negotiations in the Contact Zone symposium at The Drawing Center and the Portuguese publication in 2003 of a bilingual anthology of the papers and talks given by the participants is symptomatic of the particular type of delayed or protracted reception of the artist’s writings and criticism within the United States. The fact that Negotiations in the Contact Zone is currently available only in eight research library collections in the United States can be viewed within the framework of materiality, absence, and decay that Green uses to analyze the irrational processes and compunctions related to archives, databases, and other typologies of completeness that are often imbued with unchecked authority.8 Other Planes of There operates as an expansion of the methods and strategies used to rethink our relationships to the writing of history and access to information in the Internet age. In “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae” (2001), for example, Green asks, “How can a relationship with the past exist in which memory functions as an active process allowing continual reconsideration rather than as a form of entombment, to which archives and museums are sometimes compared?” Though Green is an American-­born artist, her work has been more frequently exhibited outside of the United States, and the resulting exhibition catalogues and publications that published reviews of her exhibitions, screenings, talks, and other public events are often in other languages, a polyglot point that Green usually insists on as the majority of the books and catalogues stemming from her exhibitions and projects are bilingual.9 It is also important to note that the issue of a delay in the discourse reception is not the same as obscurity. As a visual artist Green’s work has not lacked critical attention.10 On the contrary, she has had yearly major public exhibitions since 1989, when she mounted her first show of works produced while an artist-­in-­residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, up through Ongoing Becomings, a twenty-­year retrospective exhibition organized in 2009 by the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, Lausanne, which was followed a year later by Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams, 24 Introductory Essays

Intro 2.1 Sites of Genealogy, 1991. Installation detail, P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, Long Island City. Image: Tom Warren.

a survey of her time-­based work produced for San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2010. Green’s keen ability to formally and conceptually collage several disparate histories and taxonomies in order to reveal overlapping cultural and social complexities—a working method that would promptly be taken up by many others in the field—was established with her first publicly exhibited series of text and image works, including Permitted (1989) and Sites of Genealogy: Loophole of Retreat (1990); within the installation Sites of Genealogy: Loophole of Retreat, Green produced a silkscreen print pairing a found etching of a nineteenth-­century Parisian woman’s fashionable exaggerated bustle with a reprint of the figure of Sarah (Saartjie) Baartman, a woman of Khoikhoi ethnicity born in the Eastern Cape, former Dutch Empire, in current-­day South Africa whose body was put on display and sensationalized as the “Hottentot Venus.” Green’s use of a voluminous billowy muslin fabric curtain to create a veiled circular opening onto this juxtaposition implicated the contemporary viewer in the sordid museological history of Remarks on the Writings of Renée Green 25

looking and leering. The work’s potent ability to foreground the connections between contemporary museum display and the ideologies of race and power made its inclusion by the editors of Craig Owens’s landmark collection of postmodern criticism Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture in 1994 seem like a timely rejoinder to the critic’s essay “‘The Indignity of Speaking for Others’: An Imaginary Interview.”11 The inclusion of Green’s early work in this important volume the same year she organized Negotiations in the Contact Zone immediately positioned her alongside more established voices in the field, including Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Dara Birnbaum, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Derek Jarman, Martha Rosler, Marlon Riggs, and Isaac Julien. Green’s own analysis of the photographic and cinematic operations ushered in by many of these artists would be the subject of her 1990 essay “What’s Painting Got to Do With It? Representing Gender and Sexuality in the Age of Post-­Mechanical Reproduction.” Before international biennials defined how cultural activity became allied with economic growth, Green’s work and writing critically mapped the complex relationships between contemporary art and the ways globalization has shaped and refracted notions of location, identity, and history. And of paramount importance is the fact that the artist continues to do so, which makes a synoptic overview futile. There are signal moments, however, that outline the problematics of curatorial authorship and presage many of the discussions advanced by the more recent growth of curatorial training programs and museum studies. In the essay “Other Planes of There,” written in 2004, Green self-­reflexively articulates the process by which an artist can be complicit with and also critical of what she identifies as the “dynamics and curatorial aims of large-­scale international exhibitions,” which she notes “seem to get more media attention than any analysis of the process from which I didn’t want to disengage: thinking, composing, arranging, and making, i.e., the work. But, then again, this is another part of ‘the work.’” Throughout Other Planes of There, Green recounts her own experiences of positioning her individual projects within the frameworks overlaid by major international art venues and platforms, which include Documenta 11, the Johannesburg Biennial, Kwangju Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, the Aperto at the Venice Biennale, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), among other sites of large-­scale 26 Introductory Essays

international exhibitions in which many of her projects have been realized; through her writings, Green contributes to and complicates the discourse on curating beyond the simple recognition of a “biennial phenomenon” that ballooned in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In essays such as “Collecting Well Is the Best Revenge” (1995), she outlines what can be thought of the culture of collecting that undergirds curatorial authorship in the current age of globalization. Essays from the section Operations outline how the artist is advancing her own methodologies and critical tools. In “The Digital Import/Export Funk Office” (1995), for example, Green offers up a type of meta-­analysis of her installation Import/Export Funk Office (1992), itself representative of her discursive works that use personal memories and narrative to pry open monolithic histories. An archive-­like installation, Import/Export Funk Office traces the international dispersion of hip-­hop and its cultural and political significance through the presentation of books, magazines, photographs, and videos; some of the books were borrowed from the personal library of the German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen, who is featured prominently in the videos created by Green. Displayed in different locations and contexts, Import/Export Funk Office can occur in different media and formats and be expanded and updated with new material, as when Green created The Digital Import/Export Funk Office as a cd-­rom that now also exists as a website. In fact, as an art object it resides in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and has been shipped around the world and reinstalled in a variety of thematic exhibition contexts, including most recently in moca ’s Blues for Smoke (2012), while a reconfigured presentation including a fraction of its video materials, Early Videos (1991–96, 2010) was also present at the New Museum’s NYC 1993 (2013). Addressing the technical, legal, and conceptual ramifications of migrating and transferring Import/Export Funk Office from a unique built environment to a digital format, Green outlines operations endemic to global capital: built in obsolescence and the fallacy of universal access to networks of information—themes that she urgently expands upon in 2004 in “Why Systems?” “Secret, Part 1: Practiced Places” (1992–93) and “Secret, Part 2: Scenes from a Group Show: Project Unité” (1993), present two considerations of Secret (1993–2010), a photographic, sound, and video project, which was Green’s contribution to Project Unité, curated by Yves Aupetitallot in 1993.12 Green gives us a real-­time account of one of the first major international Remarks on the Writings of Renée Green 27

Intro 2.2 Secret (Black and White Photographs), 1993. Photograph, 6.5 × 9.5 inches.

group shows that sought to bring together artists working in a range of installation, performance, and conceptual practices to create projects within a particular setting. In this instance Le Corbusier’s block-­style “semi-­ deserted” housing project, Unité d’Habitation, located in Firminy, France, provided such a context. As an essay and a diffuse set of works,13 Secret enacts a critical examination of the exhibition itself, highlighting key issues that continue to shape current debates on visual art, including the institutional embrace of globalism over internationalism or even cosmopolitanism and the shifting definition of what constitutes a primary and a secondary audience for the reception of a work of art. Reconstituted for other exhibitions, Green’s work and analysis operate on multiple levels, each set off by a distinct mode of address in her writing. There is the first-­person account of her experience, a secondary analysis offered after some time and distance have passed, and then a sound work 28 Introductory Essays

Intro 2.3 Secret. Mixed media: black-­and-­white photographs, sound (Secret Soundtrack, English and French version), three videos. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2010. Image: Phocasso/J. W. White.

with a range of French and English voices performing the script she wrote while inhabiting an apartment at Le Corbusier’s building. Project Unité, the “originary” exhibition context for Secret, brought over a dozen artists to temporarily inhabit a space and produce a cultural interchange among each another and the other residents of the housing complex. Green’s essays point to a moment when artists and places no longer seem distant and discrete from each other but increasingly overlap through the movement of people and their cultural habitats. Conceived as a meditation on different stories—those of the architecture itself, its inhabitants, some of which were “immigrant,” the status of the artist/participants, and Le Corbusier— Secret is also an inquiry into the processes of travel, a recurrent theme of her oeuvre, journeys that result from a desire for “new” experiences and moveRemarks on the Writings of Renée Green 29

ment that is necessitated by political and economic conditions. Moreover Green shows us how, through a process of mass migration, the emergence of postcolonial subjects in the West has made it increasingly difficult and problematic to ignore non-­Western political, social, and cultural histories as well as the role that empire building and the resulting diaspora have played in the construction of Western economies and culture. In this sense Secret and her self-­reflexive essays outlining the role of the artist both as an agent of criticism and as a participant in the international contemporary art world stands, as she points out, in stark contrast to the lack of choice in travel for the majority of the world’s population. The work can be read as a representation of global political and economic realities but is also effectively aimed at revealing those disparities. Folded into the script of Secret are two of Green’s signature operations: “props,” in the theatrical sense, and “giving props,” as derived from hip-­hop lyrics, to give proper respect. Beyond titles or terms, these are methodologies—similar to the ways Green organizes and analyzes the inherent variability of time-­based media, the relative instability of its formats, and the selection of objects that function as both material and intellectual references. Giving props is a formal act of citation, an acknowledgment of her literary proclivities and how she credits the range of voices, texts, sounds, and sources that are animated by and within her works and writing. In no small measure the use of “props” and the “act of giving props” are tantamount to creating space for others and inviting new voices to join in on the conversation. Reading Other Planes of There is not about recovery or a revision of a historical moment. Instead it is an opportunity to consider how these pasts have never fully left us and indeed inform our current readings. Throughout these essays Green is tracing a contentious and polemical period within art history; in the face of the hyperbolic rhetoric of globalization she offers up a critical and generative method for analyzing cultural production in the current moment: ambiguity. By insisting on a position that is purposefully diffuse and intentionally variable, Green’s work is irreducible to a geopolitical designation, singular cultural context, or isolated discipline. Taken in the aggregate, Green’s highly sophisticated work enacts and embodies via its aesthetic forms and writings the claims made for interdisciplinarity and transmedialilty—expanding not just the capacity and conventions of visual art but also our expectations. 30 Introductory Essays

Notes 1. Renée Green, “Introduction: ‘Negotiations in the Contact Zone’ Symposium,” in Negotiations in the Contact Zone = Negociações na zona de contacto (Lisbon: Assíro and Alvim, 2003), 23–24. 2. Ibid., 24. 3. In “Introduction ‘Negotiations in the Contact Zone’ Symposium,” 24, Green states that the term contact zone is borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992) because of Pratt’s emphasis on “copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.” 4. Green, “Introduction ‘Negotiations in the Contact Zone’ Symposium,” 25. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. These would include the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna; University of California, Santa Barbara; the San Francisco Art Institute; as well as her ongoing role as guest faculty in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and now as a professor and director of the mit Program in Art, Culture and Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 8. WorldCat, the largest international bibliographic database, currently lists eight institutions whose libraries contain copies of Negotiations in the Contact Zone = Negociações na zona de contacto (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc /70166005). 9. Camino Road (1994), Spanish and English; After the Ten Thousand Things (1994), Dutch and English; Between and Including (2000), German and English; Shadows and Signals (2001), Spanish and English; Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings (2009), French and English. 10. Green’s work has been presented and covered in a range of popular and scholarly sources throughout the past twenty-­five years, from music magazines like Vibe and The Wire to the New York Times Magazine, as well as art history monographs and textbooks and scholarly journals. 11. Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 12. An abbreviated list of other artists and architects included in the exhibition: Fareed Armaly, Judith Barry, Cosima von Bonin, Tom Burr, Clegg & Guttmann, John Currin, Mark Dion, Peter Doig, Dominique Gonzalez-­Foerster, Michael Krebber, Thomas Locher, Enric Miralles, Christian Philipp Müller, Philippe Parreno, Raymond Pettibon, Martha Rosler, and Heimo Zobernig. 13. In its most complete form, Secret consists of seventy-­eight black-­and-­white photographs and three videos, all dated 1993; Secret Soundtrack (2006, 2010) exists in two versions: in French performed by a male voice, and in English, performed by a female voice. All time-­based components are played simultaneously.

Remarks on the Writings of Renée Green 31

1

1992

Sites of Criticism: A Symposium Practices: The Problem of Divisions of Cultural Labor. Statement

As I read the invitation letter from Joshua Decter, describing the thematic focus of the “Practices” panel, I noticed my blood pressure rising: my breathing became quicker, more shallow, and bells went off in my head. My body seemed to be experiencing flight-­or-­fight symptoms: sensations common to those I’d felt while sitting in the audience of previous panels at times when I’d wanted to pose a question yet wasn’t able to do so before the subject shifted or the panel concluded. This visceral reaction was not simply the result of being asked a question such as, “Is it tenable to consider art production and art critical/theoretical writing as fundamentally interchangeable instruments of cultural, political, aesthetic, and ideological analysis?” To which, upon first reading, I emphatically marked “no ” in the margin. But rather, I was responding even more to the chance to examine how, as was stated in the letter, “the disciplinary segregation of the functions of art production and art criticism have been traditionally utilized to preserve structures of cultural specialization, which may now require reevaluation”; or, to paraphrase this in the way I understood the statement: that the separation of art production and art criticism have been viewed as exclusive categories, implied in the maintenance of that division is a power struggle between the right to represent—this right traditionally going to the art critic, rather than to the art producer, or “cultural producer,” and how now (as well as in the past) both categories are up for questioning. This sentence made me flash back to my own struggles with academic divisions, when, as an undergraduate, I attempted to cross back and forth between being an art producer and creating a theoretical framework from which to examine my position in relation to historical and contemporary art debates.

I recently found an old notebook, which was begun in 1980. In it I charted the development of an undergraduate thesis, which was written in an attempt to piece together my thoughts about myself as a budding artist in relation to the artistic canon, as well as to examine my relationship to past and present debates in art concerning “Black artists”—a still contested designation. One which I wanted to deconstruct, with the help of Edward Said, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. The topic was “Discourse on Afro-­American Art.” I remember wavering between African-­American and Afro-­American, and somehow settling on Afro-­American, as it was still in common usage. In the thesis, I never accepted the implication that there is any unified form of a so-­called Afro-­American art, but instead attempted a textual analysis of criticisms, which were written by both Black and White critics from the 1920s and the 1960s. At the time, my own frustration to express my opinions was great. One art history professor had told me that artists could never represent themselves because they never really knew what they were doing and needed an art historian to interpret the work. It seemed as if artists had what appeared to be equivalent to a biological problem, which would keep them permanently deficient of this mysterious lucidity—which art historians somehow miraculously possessed. Luckily, these notions were thrown into question for me by reading the texts of artists like Robert Smithson and Adrian Piper, who made writing about the processes of art production a part of their practices. These examples gave me the impetus to make my own attempt. I want for a moment to read some excerpts from this notebook, to give some clues as to what my concerns were then: concerns which propelled me into the position of a speaking and writing artist, or cultural producer. As I recently read this notebook, I was surprised to find that my recent concerns are quite similar, and I was also saddened and irritated to find that some annoying patterns which I observed then continue to repeat themselves. October 26, 1980—In the bibliography of the Alain Locke book (this book is actually called The New Negro, and Locke was a “New Negro” cultural critic from the 1920s), his categories exclude Black (Negro) visual artists. He has the Negro in literature, Negro drama, Negro music, Negro folklore, Negro-­American, and African and Negro race problems. This topic is so oppressive I feel its heaviness when I walk through stacks of books on the Negro question: Race relations, etc.

36 Genealogies

Am I doing this to purge myself of any further obsessions in this area of Black artists’ positions? I feel compelled to do this thesis. It is a very compulsive thing. I’m definitely not being pressured to do it, but I need to straighten some things out for myself. November 3, 1980—Is the artist allowed to speak or must his or her works speak for themselves, which leaves open the possibility of all sorts of conjecture. How is this problem, interpretation, common to artists in general—different or more complex for Black artists? Why is it possible to sense in the criticism of Black artists tones of cultural domination by both Black, and for different reasons, White critics. This is a very tangled situation. November 7, 1980—Letters to faculty explaining the feasibility of my project. Listing artists and critics. Preliminary outline. Ask the art department what my standing is, and tell them to contact Honors College. Arrange appointment with Professor Lowe and discuss how to approach my reasons for not having taken math or science at Wesleyan. Work on that over the weekend. December 26, 1980—Writing: why do I feel it necessary to express my thoughts in a verbal medium as well as in a visual one. I no longer want to think of myself as being divided into a part which is to write, and a part that has to use visual symbols, yet the need to write raises questions of doubt for one who thinks of oneself as a visual artist. . . . Is this attitude which regards visual art as less important than a verbal form a kind of brainwashing? Is this attitude present in writings on Black artists? I already know that it is, but I have to specifically pin down this attitude. . . . In reading about art created by Blacks, I tried to let myself go, suspend my tendency to pounce on the author. So far, I have not read anything that has allowed me to remain in the suspended state for very long. . . . I am changing as I write this thesis. I cannot be as removed from it as I was in writing previous papers or in handling works of visual representation. My brother said, “Renée, maybe someday you will be in one of these books, ‘Renée Green, Black Artist.’” I don’t know about that. I want the books to change. Things are so much more complicated than the categorizations which are given. Unfortunately, these categorizations and representations seem to stick. I keep finding an impulse to say, “Not True.” Am I saying there is an ultimate

1. Sites of Criticism 37

1.1 Revue, 1990. Mixed media: rotating motor, 95 × 251 × 14 inches. Installation detail.

truth? Do I instead believe there is an individual truth? What do I mean? January 15, 1981—Irreverence is important. January 27, 1981—This day has been thoroughly upsetting. Presently, I am rewriting a letter to the Honors College defending my claim of “general education” at Wesleyan. I am so sick of the bureaucratic maze I’ve been going through today. Instead of organizing my information, I keep trying to state or defend my qualifications to write the thesis. Then, the bloody art department has to decide if I am in “good standing” (ha, ha), and my tutor has to comment on my progress. Undated Entry—I finally found an article by Elsa Honig Fine. The article, I suppose, is a microcosm of her book, Afro-­American Artists: A Search for Identity. It’s rough. I think I’ll just make a Xerox of it, and go to bed. This is depressing. I’m just so overwhelmed by the statements that are being made. What is overwhelming? I guess the fact that these statements seem to glide so smoothly and matter-­of-­factly from an actual person onto the page. Fine informs me in an article on art that the “Black militant no longer feels inadequate because of his peculiar speech patterns, hair texture or body structure.” I think the major issues were laid down in the twenties. Questions Fine asks: Why is there not a Black visual art tradition comparable to a Black music tradition? And what is the role of the Black visual artist? Where do his traditions lie—with the American culture, or with his African heritage? And what should be the unique contribution of the Black artist? Should he express his inner emotions in his art, or does his responsibility rest with his people? She views things in such—excuse the pun—black and white terms, simplistically. She and Alain Locke are asking the same questions. The question emerges: what power do they have to ask these questions? . . . I found a 1970 April issue of Time magazine, a special Black Issue. Undated Entry (near the completion of the thesis)—Irony of my reference to Western cultural discourse—what did it achieve? The realization that it is difficult to be a cultural commentator or critic at the same time as producing work as an artist—but that it appears necessary, at least to me. Yes. I know I am adding to the already crowded arena of representations, but this study was an effort to untangle some

1. Sites of Criticism 39

previously stated representations in order to analyze the authority they exert. So my impetus for writing came about from what I then, and still, perceive of as a critical lack. One which has been bemoaned by countless artists from varying backgrounds. As I said before, Piper and Smithson, to name just two, demonstrated that it was possible to participate in a discourse about art, and that it was actually possible to elucidate the connections between other aspects of life and what had been presented to me at first as an isolated practice. Of course, this desire, even in the Sixties and Seventies, wasn’t a new one for artists who attempted to locate an intersection between life and art. So it isn’t now possible to see this wish as a new development. But rather, as a continuation of practices, which are always being enacted in some form, but which periodically receive attention in the media and marketplace. The forms and names change, although the underlying impulses remain similar. For example, in the Seventies there was talk of crossing the boundaries between art and life with performance art; and today, Cornel West speaks of the “new cultural politics of difference,” and the “New World bricoleurs who will bring these politics into practice.” I’d like to conclude by noting and questioning the supposition stated in the invitation letter that “certain types of art production construct and enable modes of critical engagement which may go beyond the current disciplinary boundaries for art and art criticism.” I think that art can serve a heuristic purpose: it can spark people to think. But I don’t think it is interchangeable with a political and theoretical program which would first come into existence through verbal language and writing—writing which may be informed by practice. But I think the two can function together. As I’ve just recounted, I’ve asked myself why I’m compelled to write my thoughts if they could be completely conveyed by my art production. What about film or video, or work combining text and images, or narrative and images? Is it possible for these too to be interchanged with critical or theoretical writing? Still, my answer is no. I just want to explain this. I’m alluding to some of the questions that have been asked here, and I’m actually more fluid than my “no” might suggest. Different purposes can be served by both critical and artistic practices. That is not to say that these purposes never cross and cannot possibly function together. But if art production had to wield the entire weight of a theoretical treatise, what would be the point of that produc-

40 Genealogies

tion? It’s my opinion that there is a mysterious interaction that can occur between visual, oral and spatial stimuli and text that can’t be completely equated with theory. Of course, it can be argued that some theoretical writings aspire to be art. So the debate can go back and forth and becomes a matter of personal stakes and predilections.

Note Originally published in acme Journal 1, no. 2 (1992): 49–53. Edited transcript of Green’s participation in Sites of Criticism: A Symposium, The Drawing Center, New York, March 10, 1992. Other participants of this panel were Gregg Bordowitz, Coco Fusco, Félix González-­Torres, Peter Halley, Silvia Kolbowski, Calvin Reid, and Mary Ann Staniszewski. Organized and moderated by Joshua Decter. Cosponsored by The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Hosted by The Drawing Center.

1. Sites of Criticism 41

2

1981

Discourse on Afro-­American Art The Twenties

When discussing areas of discourse, such as African art and Afro-­American art, contextualizing the nuances and differences that different authors assert is crucial, as the interpretation of their words may differ radically from the authors’ intended effect. W. E. B. Du Bois advocated a “race art” that would diffuse his view of proper race propaganda. Alain Locke advocated a “racial art,” which would prove Afro-­Americans’ ability to make an innovative contribution to American culture, reflecting their racial characteristics and their modernity. But beauty was to be the goal of this art, not propaganda. Both Locke and Du Bois stated that their goals were for freedom of artistic expression, but that freedom had to be attained within the confines of each of their particular goals for the Negro artist. They encouraged Black artists to submit to their collectivist belief. Black artists were goaded to “uplift the race” and contribute to “civilization.” Both leaders believed in the “ultimate destiny” of the Negro first occurring in the realms of art. Locke and Du Bois believed, as Fullinwider notes, “that a true renaissance was in the making,” but it was the Black artists, and in particular the “Black bohemia,” who scoffed at Locke and Du Bois and their ideas.1 Locke and Du Bois represented an old guard to the young Black artist. While Du Bois’s identity may have been defined by race, and Locke’s by a fusion of race and beliefs in universal art, the Negro artist was himself searching for a viable identity. Fullinwider describes this group of artists: Its members were consciously breaking away from the old modes of thought—consciously striking out in search of new ways of understanding and expressing the Negro experience. If the expression

“Renaissance” wearied most of them it was because that term grew out of the old ways of thinking. They were not under the illusion that they were giving expression to the Negro “racial soul,” the Negro’s “peculiar genius,” and the like. They understood that their various talents belonged to them as individuals who had among their important experiences in life that of being Black in America.2 Though these Negro artists may have wanted to proclaim their individuality, the fact remained that they not only lived within a provincial America but that they were, as well, “a race, an issue.”3 Many Negro artists expressed in some way the tug they felt between the dual poles of race and art. The “hot item” status which the “primitivist vogue” conferred on some Black artists stimulated their responses. Aaron Douglas was one of the artists who heeded Locke’s plea to observe the “ancestral arts.” Recollecting the “Renaissance,” Douglas comments: Harlem was sifted. Neither streets, homes nor public institutions escaped. When unsuspecting Negroes were found with a brush in their hands they were immediately hauled away and held for interpretation. They were given places of honour and bowed to with much ceremony. Every effort to protest their innocence was drowned out with big-­ mouthed praise. A number escaped and returned to a more reasonable existence. Many fell in with the game and went along making hollow and meaningless gestures with brush and palette.4 Although Douglas’s sarcasm is amusing, the problem of critical attention became a much-­discussed issue. Discussions ranged from whether Negro artists should be considered Negro artists or American artists, to the images of Black life which the artists should portray. George S. Schuyler and Langston Hughes provide a notable example of opposing views on the question of allegiance. Should Negro artists acknowledge themselves to be primarily Negro artists, or should they view themselves as American artists? Their contrasting views were presented in two 1926 issues of The Nation. In “The Negro-­Art Hokum,” Schuyler expressed the opinion that the “Aframerican” was no different from his “white brother,” because Negroes always adopt the dominant national culture. He disagreed with the premise

2. Discourse on Afro-American Art 43

that the work of Black artists expresses a “Negro soul” and points out the background of several prominent artists and intellectuals to prove his point. W. E. B. Du Bois, a product of Harvard and German universities; the foremost Aframerican sculptor is Meta Warrick Fuller, a graduate of leading American art schools and former student of Rodin; while the most noted Aframerican painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, is dean of American painters in Paris and has been decorated by the French government.5 Schuyler then asks, why is the “Negro-­art hokum” so popular? He concludes that the supposition of a Negro art represents the “last stand of the old myth palmed off by Negrophobists for all these many years. . . . That there are negroes who will lend this myth a helping hand need occasion no surprise.”6 The “old myth” which Schuyler cites is that the “blackamoor” is inferior, fundamentally different and thus peculiar. The continuation of this myth lies in what I have referred to as the textual authority which occurs in discourse. But Schuyler dismisses the authority of the texts by “scientists” like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, whose influence can be observed in the members of the “Ku Klux Klan; and is believed, even today, by the majority of free, white citizens.”7 Schuyler naively advised intelligent people to reject these notions “with a loud guffaw.”8 In a following issue, under the title, “American Art or Negro Art?,” there appeared a letter to the editor by Langston Hughes. Hughes notes that people may all be fundamentally the same, but he argues that for Schuyler to say that “the Negro masses . . . are no different from the white masses in America seems to me obviously absurd.”9 Distinguishing between white and Black Americans, Hughes considers the Negro’s imitation of the dominant class to be important. He concludes: Until America has completely absorbed the Negro and until segregation and racial self-­consciousness have entirely disappeared, the true work of art from the Negro artist is bound, if it have any color and distinctiveness at all, to reflect his racial background and his racial environment.10 Other artists expressed a belief that the Negro art/American art issue was not only a psychological dilemma; it was, to a certain extent, also the 44 Genealogies

result of the kind of critical attention which the Black artists were or were not receiving. Wallace Thurman, in Infants of the Spring, a satirical novel about the Harlem Renaissance, set out to present a critical evaluation of that period.11 The protagonist of the novel, Raymond Taylor, is a writer and resident of “Niggerati Manor.” This residence supposedly houses Negro artists, but as Huggins notes, “there is not much art to speak of in Niggerati Manor”: There is a great deal of pretense and innocence of the hard work and talent that good art requires. . . . Through it all Raymond Taylor attempts to find solid ground, in terms of the Harlem Renaissance, for his own artistic integrity. He wanders through the maze: the Negro as artist or advocate, the writer as individual or race man, art as self-­ expression or exposition of ethnic culture. Explicit or not, these were the problems of Afro-­American artists then and now.12 There is a scene in the novel in which Harlem artists and intellectuals are gathered. Alain Locke is given the pseudonym Dr. Parkes. Huggins recounts the gathering: Dr. Parkes wants to discuss the primacy of beauty over truth: art should come before propaganda; the Negro should devote his energies to producing art rather than arguing about race relations. He also despairs of the post-­Victorian decadence that he detects in Negro as well as white writing. The Negro artist must avoid the “post-­Victorian license” at all costs. “You have too much at stake. You must have ideals. You should become . . . well let me suggest your going back to your racial roots, and cultivating a healthy paganism based on African traditions.”13 Huggins observes that Thurman expressed his dissatisfaction with some of the ideas advocated by Black intellectual leaders of the time. Thurman reveals the difficulty, both for himself and for the visual artists, of accepting “artificially imposed norms for art,” as suggested by Dr. Parkes’s odd blend of “Platonic idealism and paganism.” As Huggins notes, “Du Bois’s theory of uplift by the talented tenth, or any compelled obligation for ethnic art all share the same fault.”14 The problem with these theories is that they rest on a belief that the individual creativity of an artist should bend to the goals prescribed by the Black intellectual or race leader. The people delineating critical standards for the Black artists were not 2. Discourse on Afro-American Art 45

the artists themselves, but were the race leader intellectuals. The absence of artists in critical positions of power is not a particularly unusual occurrence; but the appearance of Black leaders, who may not even have been trained as art critics, requires examination. The Harmon Awards provide an excellent example of the way in which Negro art propagandists judged the work of Negro artists. In 1926 the William E. Harmon Award for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes was initiated. In an article discussing the Harmon Awards, Evelyn Brown notes that the origin of these awards was related to an incident that took place between a Black artist and Harmon. Harmon, a white patron who, Brown states, already had an interest in the “economic progress” of Negroes, is said to have wanted to establish awards in the fine arts, as well as other categories, to judge the work of Negro artists by “its merits rather than considering it as good work for a Negro.”15 Harmon is said by Brown to have asked an unnamed Black artist the cost of a portrait. The artist, according to Brown said: “Because I am a Negro I cannot command a price which is commensurate with the amount of training I have had, the time consumed or perhaps the actual ability which I have shown in my production.”16 After a response such as that, it would be difficult to imagine that Harmon, patron of the Negro, did not feel guilty. Was he doing enough? He and other patrons of the Negro tried to relieve the Negro artist of his insecurities by creating awards which would both bolster self-­esteem and increase competition. One of the problems with such awards was the basis used for criticism. What criteria did the juries use to judge the work? Porter notes this ­problem: In connection with these awards for “Negro Achievement in Fine Arts,” it is impossible to set forth a definite theory of the juries chosen by the Harmon Foundation. At times, members of these juries did counsel the Negro artist to exploit the “racial concept,” whatever that may be, and to strive for racial feeling. But the work offered was not technically or subjectively homogenous. Both the absence in the Foundation officials of a dogmatism on this question and the breadth of the Negro artist’s topical interest acted as a check on the preconceptions of the jury committees, so that in all the Harmon exhibits the compe-

46 Genealogies

tently mature was hung alongside the naïve and experimental, modernism was juxtaposed with sober traditionalism.17 The problem which Porter finds in the “too liberal taste” of the judges, with regard to the variety of subject matter and the work’s execution, can be related to the type of people who were picked as judges. Porter states that in the 1920s there was an absence of “critical interest” in the work of Black artists.18 By this Porter meant lack of art establishment art critics. Who, then, were the judges of these Black artists? Not once in her article on the Harmon Awards does Brown mention any of the judges by name. They are presented as anonymous authorities. Brown does mention when discussing the Foundation’s first exhibitions that “Neither the foundation nor the Commission on Race Relations of the Federal Council of Churches, which was administering the awards and cooperating in the exhibition, had had any experience in putting on an art showing.”19 Though Brown casually delivers this information, it illustrates another important facet of these awards: the close relationship between cultural affairs, politics and economics, and Government organizations, as well as between white philanthropists and Black leaders. The art criticism from these sources was effected by more than aesthetic intentions, although these may be the reasons stated for their union. The artist Romare Bearden, in “The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” notes the stifling effect the criticism of the Harmon Foundation had upon Black artists: Its attitude from the beginning has been of a coddling and patronizing nature. It has encouraged the artist to exhibit long before he has mastered the technical equipment of his medium. By its choice of the type of work it favors, it has allowed the Negro artist to accent standards that are both artificial and corrupt.20 Bearden’s lament is understandable when one notes that the critics for the Harmon Awards may have had little criteria, other than that the artists be Black. This may also explain Porter’s complaint that the judges had “a too liberal taste.” Both Porter and Bearden were artists; because of this they directly experienced the problems of the Harmon Awards. Although Bearden questioned the criteria, or limited criteria, of the

2. Discourse on Afro-American Art 47

judges of awards such as those sponsored by the Harmon Foundation, he was still unable to state the basis of the criticism he desired for Negro artists. Bearden notes some problems hindering the “development” of Negro artists: “First, we have no valid standard of criticism; secondly, foundations and societies which supposedly encourage Negro artists really hinder them; thirdly, the Negro artist has no definite ideology or social philosophy.”21 Bearden does not know how to remedy this situation or “what form this system of criticism [which he is advocating] will take.” But he is sure that the Negro artist must make revisions of his conception of art.22 Bearden expressed his opinion in the article that Black artists were imitating white artists and their work. Generally the Black artist’s work represented “a slow study of rules and formulas,” which for Bearden demonstrated that the “Negro artist is attempting to do something with his intellect which he has not felt emotionally.”23 To substantiate this point, Bearden refers to two exhibition reviews written by white critics. He states that “It is gratifying to note that many of the white critics have realized the deficiencies of Negro artists,” and he quotes an exhibition review by Malcolm Vaughan, of the New York American: Such racial aspects as may once have figured have virtually disappeared, so far as some of the work is concerned. Some of the artists, accomplished technicians, are seen to have slipped into grooves of one sort or another. There is the painter of the Cezannesque still life, there is the painter of the Gauginesque nudes and there are those who have learned “dated” modernist tricks.24 One may ask, why did Bearden, as a Black artist, find these reviews gratifying? By quoting the texts of these white critics to prove his point, Bearden attributes them importance. He relies on their criteria, which he deems proper. Although he laments the absence of such criteria for Negro artists, Bearden desires “some standard of criticism, then, not only to stimulate the artist, but also to raise the cultural level of the people.”25 But he acknowledges and relies on the criticism of the dominant group to do this. On the surface it could appear that Bearden and these white critics are expressing similar beliefs, and thus have similar aims. But it is crucial to note that the reasons motivating the two factions were different, though the

48 Genealogies

form of these statements is similar. The form of statements such as these repeats itself through discourse, even after the history and meaning which originally filled the statements have been left behind. What remains is myth; in the Barthesian sense. The statement is made: “Painting and sculpture are alien channels of expression for Black artists.” This representation of Black artists becomes what Barthes calls a “deformation.” The meaning in the myth is distorted by the mythical concept, which is “made of yielding, shapeless association.”26 The distortion of the meaning by the concept deprives the subject (the Black artist) of his/her history, changing the meaning into gestures. The differences which can be noted between statements made by Bearden and those made by white critics are similar to differences which I previously noted between the Black and white perception of “primitivism.” The terms used by Black intellectual-­race leaders and the white intellectuals and artists may have been similar, but their reasons for embracing “primitivism” were different and connected to their positions in American society. In the fervor of creative “exchange” which occurred during the 1920s it could have appeared that Blacks and whites were equally contributing creatively to American culture. This could be viewed by some of the Black intellectual advocates of such a phenomenon as a beginning step towards complete racial equality. As James Weldon Johnson noted: Harlem is more than a community; it is a large scale laboratory experiment in the race problem, and from it a good many facts have been found. . . . Through his artistic efforts the Negro is smashing (an) immemorial stereotype faster than he has ever done through any method he has been able to use. . . . He is impressing upon the national mind the conviction that he is an active and important force in American life; that he is a creator as well as a creature; that he has given as well as received; that his gifts have been not only obvious and material, but also spiritual and aesthetic; that he is a contributor to the nation’s common cultural store; in fine, he is helping to form American civilization.27 Johnson expresses the previously stated civilizationist tendency. But, as Cruse notes, Johnson does not say that Blacks are helping to form an

2. Discourse on Afro-American Art 49

“American nationality” or an “American Negro nationality within the American nation,” but that Blacks were assisting in the formation of an “American civilization.” Johnson’s view of Blacks and whites merging to form an “American civilization” could be viewed as one of the failures of Black intellectual middle-­class leadership to grasp the whole picture, as Locke’s focus also demonstrates. Cruse notes that Du Bois, in spite of his flaws, came closest to expressing the interrelatedness of culture to economic and political factors. The Harlem intellectuals failed to make these connections, viewing art as a means for salvation. The Harlem intellectuals and artists were dependent upon white patronage. One of the prices of that dependence was, as Cruse notes, that: the Negro’s “spiritual and aesthetic” materials were taken over by many white artists, who used them allegedly to advance the Negro artistically but actually more for their own glorification. In a result, a most intense (and unfair) competition was engendered between white and Negro writers; the whites, from their vantage point of superior social and economic advantages, naturally won out.28 Combined with this competition was the pressure put upon Negro artists by patrons, such as Carl Van Vechten, to maintain their “Negro-­ness.” The attraction for the patron in the Negro was that essential “otherness” which had to be maintained for the patron to continue his/her interest in the Negro artist. Through the Negro artist the patron could fulfill the needs of his/her “underground self.” White patronage disintegrated with the advent of the Depression and the “Harlem Renaissance” crumbled. While the arrival of the “New Negro” had been enthusiastically hailed as a “coming of Age” for the Afro-­American, it was the advocacy of these very terms which characterized the way in which the Black leadership viewed themselves. They defined themselves in relationship to the dominant culture. During the nineteenth century, Black nationalist leadership used the criteria of the Anglo-­American culture to evaluate itself. During the 1920s there was an artistic rebellion against this 19th century admiration of Anglo-­ American values that appeared to be in the form of a value reversal. What was not detected at the time was that many of the 19th-­century notions of “uplift,” racial obligation, authoritarianism, collectivism and racial destiny 50 Genealogies

were present in the 1920s, although the forms by which they were advocated altered. The New Negro movement was viewed by its promoters as an artistic rebellion which would change the Afro-­American’s perception of himself. With this new self-­perception it was believed by these Black intellectual-­ race leaders that the old demeaning image of “lazy,” “shiftless,” “unintelligent” and compromising Blacks would be replaced with a new positive image of responsible, intellectual and forceful Black people. It was believed by the Black intellectual-­race leader that once the white society was able to see Blacks in this new light, the Blacks would be respected and treated as equals. What occurred was not the dawn of a new age in which Blacks and whites would be on equal footing culturally, economically and socially, but rather the economic collapse of the patronage which had made the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals deem their notions of equality possible. White patronage disintegrated with the advent of the 1929 Depression and the Harlem Renaissance crumbled. Artists still existed, but the demise for some began when their economic support vanished. The Harmon Awards were disbanded in 1933. Harlem was no longer the exotic getaway it had been during the 1920s; tourists went instead to islands in the Caribbean. Harlem had symbolized a new freedom for both the Black and white, but after the Depression its purpose as a liberating territory had been outworn.29 At the end of the 1920s the needs of the Afro-­American artist still had not been met, even if the psychological needs of the white Harlem tourists had. Questions referring to the role of the Black artists in America, the criteria which should be used to judge Black artists’ works, and whether Black artists were to be viewed as Afro-­American artists or as universal artists, were all left hanging. These issues were again addressed in the 1960s during a time which was viewed by many as a second Afro-­American renaissance.

Notes Excerpt from an unpublished honors thesis submitted to the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, 1981. 1. S. P. Fullinwider, The Mind and Mood of Black America (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1969),133.

2. Discourse on Afro-American Art 51

2. Ibid. 3. Nathan Irving Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 198. 4. Cedric Dover, American Negro Art (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1972), 31. 5. George S. Schuyler, “The Negro-­Art Hokum,” Nation 122, no. 3180 (1926): 662. 6. Ibid., 663. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Langston Hughes. “American Art or Negro Art?,” Nation 123, no. 3189 (1926). 10. Ibid. 11. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 198. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 194. 14. Ibid. 15. Lindsay Patterson, ed., The Afro-­American in Music and Art (Cornwells Heights, PA: Publishers Agency, 1976), 247. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 252. 19. Patterson, Afro-­American, 248. 20. Ibid., 233. 21. Ibid., 222. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 220. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lessers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 119, 122. 27. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 34. 28. Ibid., 35. 29. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 305.

52 Genealogies

3

1990

I Won’t Play Other to Your Same Perhaps this is cynicism on my part, but lately it seems as if the “Other” has become a cultural industry. With the casual and even more frequent use of the term in art discussions, in art journals, and in other cultural contexts, I’m afraid an essentialist category is being created, one which is defined by the trait of absence from the “mainstream.” I suggest that a reexamination of this cultural and political construct is in order and that its unexamined use can in fact reinforce dominant ideology. With the repeated mention of the category of “Other,” another seldom-­ enunciated and rather hazy and well-­sheathed category comes to mind, that of non-­otherness, an insistent centralness that assumes itself to be primary and further assumes itself to constitute the norm. About this category we hear very little. The notion of the “Other” as a category separate from the “mainstream” (which mainstream?) is a division which may be useful, as neat mental separations are for funding agencies, but which is perplexing for someone who is designated as the “Other.” I’d like to turn to fiction to provide an example of this situation as it is encountered by Sarah Phillips, the main character and narrator in a novel by the same name written by Andrea Lee in 1984. A conversation develops between Gretchen and Sarah after they have both been assigned to the hockey team for “athletic pariahs” at the private school they attend, where Sarah is the only Black: Gretchen stretched out on the grass, propping herself on one round elbow, and peered at me thorough an oily fall of hair. “My father knows yours,” she said. “Your father is James Forrest Phillips, the civil-­rights minister. My father is very interested in civil rights, and so am I.” “Don’t do me any favors,” I said in a tough, snappish voice I had learned from Dragnet.

3.1 Neutral/Natural, 1990. Mixed media: wood, audio, tape loop, photostat, color photographs, jar, Plexiglas; 114 × 12 inches. Installation detail.

Gretchen looked at me admiringly. “Don’t you think it’s rather romantic to be a Negro?” she asked. “I do. A few years ago, when Mama and Daddy used to talk to us about the Freedom Riders in the South, my sister Sarabeth and I spent a whole night up crying because we weren’t Negroes. If I were a Negro, I’d be like a knight and skewer the Ku Klux Klan. My father says Negroes are the tragic figures of America. Isn’t it exciting to be a tragic figure? It’s a kind of destiny!”1 The next sentence describes the motley pair these two make as best friends, so there is no outraged response on Sarah’s part because outrage under these circumstances isn’t in order. But annoyance is, and that annoyance with the spoken designation of otherness is apparent in Sarah’s “snappish voice.” Even though Gretchen is well intentioned, and she is in fact the only girl at the Prescott School for Girls who befriends her and supports her “position,” her initial connection to Sarah is bound to her mythical world of Negroes. This passage underlines the point that “Other” is not a natural 54 Genealogies

3.2 Neutral/Natural, 1990. Mixed media: wood, audio, tape loop, photostat, color photographs, jar, Plexiglas; 114 × 12 inches. Installation detail.

state, but rather one which is constructed and which must be designated, and once it is designated it can either be accepted or refused. Sarah’s rankling at being designated as the “Other,” even though this position is regarded in a “positive” way, can hint at the problems with the term “Other” (and its implications of monolithic wholeness) and suggests the enabling possibilities of a self-­designation of difference. Unlike otherness difference implies the articulation of one’s own complex position in relationship to the matrix of cultural, political, and social relations suggested by class, ethnicity, and gender, rather than an imposed naming. I quote Trinh T. Minh-­ha on this point: To make things even more complex and more disposed to critical investigation, “western” and “non-­western” must be understood not merely in terms of oppositions and separations but rather in terms of differences. This implies a constant to-­and-­fro movement between the same and the other.2 3. I Won’t Play Other to Your Same 55

To that statement, I would add that the binarism of “same” and “other” is a frustrating one and in its place I have no new names to offer, but I have instead the desire that with dialogues in which we can discuss differences as well as overlapping concerns these inadequate terms will not acquire more rigidity.

Notes Originally published in Meaning, no. 7 (May 1990): 15–16. Also published in Meaning: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 220–22. Published in German as “Kalter Schweiss,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 76–79; reprinted in Erste Wahl: 20 Jahre Texte zur Kunst. I. Dekade, edited by Isabelle Graw, Helmut Draxler, and André Rottmann (Hamburg: Filo Fine Arts, 2011). 1. Andrea Lee, Sarah Phillips (New York: Random House, 1984), 55. 2. Trinh T. Minh-­ha, “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,” in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1, edited by Hal Foster (New York: dia Foundation, 1987), 138.

56 Genealogies

4

1990

What’s Painting Got to Do with It? Representing Gender and Sexuality in the Age of Post-­Mechanical Reproduction

The media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world, we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it.—Marshall McLuhan I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph. —Man Ray

It was February 1987. Stretching up Mercer Street from the door of the Dia Foundation, a long line of unmistakably arty-­looking people milled about, trying to keep warm while awaiting admittance to a program entitled “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” This was to be the second in an ambitious series of open discussions on contemporary culture, geared toward a visual art–oriented audience, which intended to traverse “artistic, critical, theoretical, philosophical, historical, political and anthropological” practices.1 Once the crowd had filed inside, its anticipation for what might be said seemed palpable. Animated conversations were breaking out in the audience even before the panelists had appeared onstage. While searching for a vacant seat, I spoke with a woman who, after a bit of hesitation, somewhat sheepishly confessed to being a painter. Sensing her ambivalence, I became curious to know what had prompted her to come. She was there, she said, “to see if it’s possible for me to continue to paint.” She, myself, and others felt a pressing need to “rethink representation.” Why did this need seem so particularly urgent at that time? After the passing of Neo-­Expressionism, the fizzling of the East Village art boom,

the New Museum’s publication of the influential book Art after Modernism, and the institution’s hosting of the groundbreaking Difference exhibition— to name a few of the unsettling events of the first half of the Eighties—­ confusion was in the air. For politically conscious artists, some old, nagging questions could be put off no longer. What public could one conceivably reach? What methods might be used most effectively to reach it? What media were most appropriate to one’s message? What messages should take priority? And most important, of what significance could anything one had to say be to one’s imagined audience? Since the mid-­Seventies, feminist artists had been formulating their own responses to such questions, mounting a critique of patriarchy that was aimed largely at visual representations and the ways they are used in discourses we encounter daily. Their practice arose in the context of a far-­ ranging critique of the social sciences, one which had been gaining momentum since 1968 and had been strongly influenced (in the English-­speaking countries) by the influx of translations of European theory during the Seventies. Some of the central elements of this large critique were the works of Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, the Frankfurt School, and assorted Continental feminists and British film theorists. As Brian Wallis describes it: “This extensive body of critical and theoretical work, responding to the breakdown of modernist discourse in literary theory, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences, shifted attention away from the master works toward the operations of modernism itself, and from the established divisions of traditional culture toward an interdisciplinary examination of the dynamics of representation. Specifically, this work studied the function of cultural myths and representation, the construction of representation in social systems, and the perpetuation and function of these systems through representation.”2 Use of these theories by artists and critics made it possible for them to examine the ideological implications of their own practices within the realm of representation. Attempts were made to “undercut the authority of certain dominant representations (especially as they emanated from the media through photography), and second, to begin to construct representations which would be less confining and oppressive (in part by providing a space for the viewer, in part through signifying a space for the viewer, in part through signifying its own position and affiliations).”3 58 Genealogies

For a growing number of visual artists—some feminists prominent among them—the media seemed ripe for dismantling. It seems significant that an escalation of feminist interventions occurred simultaneously with the induction of conservative regimes, Thatcher’s in Britain and Reagan’s in the United States. Both of these potentates astutely manipulated the media. Within this forest of signs was a barrage of images of women that served as a perpetual reminder of an ongoing struggle within a system of representations. Various artists took up the challenge to divest this system of its power, to become “speaking subjects.” But they did so with an understanding that the task at hand was not simply one of staging a reversal, as earlier tactics for equal access had been. Instead, a deeper critique was necessary, one that attempted to reach into the obscure layers of ideological formation. If human civilization was equivalent, as Freud said, to patriarchy, it was necessary to trace the origins of civilization and its discontents to the psychical formation of the sexes: “And it is with the aim of understanding the construction of sexed subjectivity so as to disarm the positioning of the phallocentric order that artists have turned to psychoanalysis.”4 The “construction of sexed subjectivity,” as was notably demonstrated in the work of Lacan, could be located in language as well as in visual representation. The mining of this vein (psychoanalytic/linguistic) provided a variety of investigations by artists who showed that our positions as subjects are constructed and variable. Most often these artists used photographic or cinematographic apparati, in order to critique these media or to critique an institution (the corporation, the museum) by simulating its authoritative voice. The artists Barbara Kruger, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Cindy Sherman, Victor Burgin, and Martha Rosler, to name a few, are all frequently cited as having posed a provocative challenge to patriarchal structures through their media-­related work. It is difficult to associate the term sexual difference, as it pertains to the visual art of the Eighties, with images other than those formed by smooth, reflective, photographic surfaces, sometimes overlaid with typeset text. The evidence of the hand is not generally apparent.5 These works seem to be the embodiment of a phenomenon described by Walter Benjamin: “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. . . . For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. . . . From a photographic negative, 4. What’s Painting Got to Do with It? 59

for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice— politics.”6 The project that Benjamin describes can be traced back to Dada. A dissatisfaction with the traditional art forms of painting and sculpture, combined with a desire to disrupt the established relationship of the bourgeoisie to these forms, are impulses associated with Dada. The fundamental notion of art was questioned, as was the role of the artist as author. (One needs only to think of the ready-­mades.) How would it be possible to puncture the viewer’s passive relation to a work of art? How could everyday life and art intersect? Benjamin compares the effect of the Dadaist work of art to “an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him.”7 He connects the impact of this tactile force upon the viewer, which was accomplished by pictorial and literal means, to the effects sought by the public in films. In this sense, as Benjamin attempts to show, the relationship of the viewer to a Dadaist artwork or to a film differed significantly from the interaction a viewer might have with a painting: “Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation: before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before a movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested.”8 Benjamin concludes his essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (from which the preceding quotes have been taken) with a warning against the specter of aestheticization. Benjamin’s caution is posed in light of the rise of fascism. He objects, for example, to the Nazis’ use of film for “the production of ritual values”—that is, to establish their Führer cult. “All efforts to render politics aesthetic,” he admonishes, “culminate in one thing: war.” Thus, although Benjamin heartily endorses technology as a boon to the arts in reaching and affecting a larger public, he realizes that its use can also result in an aesthetic of war, a “consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art.’”9 This brings us to consider the ambivalent position of painting. Where can painting position itself in an age of mechanical, or even post-­mechanical (i.e., electronic) reproduction? How can it respond to the theoretical and feminist reevaluations of the social sciences that so affect contemporary art discourse and practice? Specifically regarding the domain of sexual differ60 Genealogies

ence, can painting enter into a dialogue with art forms which have relied on the use of the media of photography, cinema, video, and print? What kind of critique can painting mount? Before addressing these questions, it may be helpful to prepare the terrain by referring to the exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, which opened in New York at the New Museum in December 1984 and traveled to London’s Institute of Contemporary Art in December 1985. This landmark show was a jumping-­off point for various debates whose reverberations can be felt in Post-­Boys and Girls: Nine Painters.10 As Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker recount of the Difference show: “The event registered and underscored the impact of feminism’s radical presence in the art world of the mid-­1980’s and was received in New York as one of the most important shows of the decade. It was a mixed exhibition dominated nonetheless by feminist work by women while demonstrating the necessity for both men and woman to confront the issues of sexuality and representation. This formulation means going beyond treating gender issues as a matter of content by understanding that sexual difference, or the regime of differentiation which positions us as masculine or feminine subjects, is a continual process. It structures and is structured by the activities of looking, knowing, desiring and finding pleasure which dominate in the domain of art as elsewhere, in the media for instance.”11 It is interesting to note these authors’ comments on the media that appeared in the show. The range of media used defied the pronounced revival of “born-­again painting” and sculpture. Thus what was displayed was not a range of objects advertising their medium and its manipulation by the expressive Artist but texts, combination of images and writings which produce what Mary Kelly has defined as “imaged discourse.” I quote Parker and Pollock at length because I believe they have outlined the terms of the debate between painting and media—which, if it is not directly cited, is at least lurking in the shadows of Post-­Boys and Girls. A key to establishing a truce between the poles of the binary opposition that seems to have been constructed, painting /media, may be found in the reference to “the range of media” mentioned above, which finds common structures linking the domains of art and the media. Paintings, like photographic and cinematographic reproductions, are part of a system of representations, all equally subject to manipulation by an “author” and by ideology, and equally available for a critique of the ways their mechanisms 4. What’s Painting Got to Do with It? 61

of representation work. Art about or employing media is not inherently more “real” than other art. Perhaps the confusion lies in the ease with which photographic representations appear to stand for “real life.” It is this apparent “reality” which accounts for the replacement of painting by photography as a documentary practice by the early 20th century: people were more willing to believe in photographs. Which brings us back to the issue of audience. Based on Benjamin’s conclusions, it would seem that artists interested in founding their project on politics would do well to use the media most prevalent and most accessible to the “masses” of their era. Writing in 1936, Benjamin recognized the mass appeal of film. Today, the equivalent audience could be found for television and advertising as well. But not every artist, of course, wants to work in these media, despite their broad appeal. With the knowledge that what they produce will primarily reach a gallery- and museum-­going audience (which, in fact, includes the power brokers of the media industry), the artists in Post-­Boys and Girls grapple with what remains of painting in the postmodern era. One can surmise that the Age of Painting, like the Age of Europe, has come to an end.12 Painting no longer reigns supreme in the arts; its position, like that of the colonial powers, has shifted. But this is not a cause for painters to despair. The current exhibition reflects a tug of war with both tradition and inevitable historical change. I began by describing a painter’s anxiety, which seemed to stem from a fear of being politically or theoretically “incorrect.” As an artist, I’d like to think that there is no doctrinaire way to proceed. From what I have observed, there are diverse routes we can take through areas which seem already to have been exhausted, like painting, or exhaustively treated, like sexual difference. We are still discovering ways to open up the discourse to a broader range of participants—those of any sexual orientation and every ethnic and class background.

Notes This is a revised and augmented version of a shorter essay published in Post-­Boys and Girls: Nine Painters (New York: Artists Space, 1990), 8–10. 1. Hal Foster, preface to Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, Dia Art Foundation, 1987), i.

62 Genealogies

2. Brian Wallis, “What’s Wrong with This Picture? An Introduction,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, mit Press, 1984), xiii–xiv. 3. Ibid. 4. Kate Linker. “Representation and Sexuality,” in Art after Modernism, 394. 5. Ibid., 391–415. 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221. 7. Ibid., 238. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 242. 10. The exhibition Post-­Boys and Girls: Nine Painters, organized by Ken Aptekar, took place at Artists Space in New York in 1990. The artists included Ken Aptekar, Greg Davidek, Nancy Davidson, Greg Drasler, Lee Gordon, Margo Machida, Holly Morse, Lillian Mulero, and Millie Wilson. The text quoted here was from the original one written, but differs from the abbreviated version in the catalogue. 11. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, “Fifteen Years of Feminist Action,” in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970–85, edited by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (New York: Pandora, 1987). 12. I’m referencing Cornel West’s usage, “the ambiguous legacy of the Age of Europe,” as used in “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There: Marginality and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-­ha, and Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, mit Press, 1990), 20.

4. What’s Painting Got to Do with It? 63

5

1994

From Camino Road Camino Road, set between the late seventies and early eighties, is the record of the mind of a young woman coming of age as an artist. A combination of genres are intertwined—the Bildungsroman, the road novel, the counterculture memoir, the travel journal, the epistolary novel, the diary, and the screenplay. The role of language in its relationship to how one can form a self, as well as how one can relate to different cultures, is demonstrated by the character Lyn’s reiterated attempts to learn to think and speak in Spanish. While the book is divided into a Spanish half and an English half, the attempt to cross the language boundary seeps into the English part of the book and the reader is challenged to comprehend. Through a narrative of fragmentary dream sequences, lists, and memories, meant to allude to a combination of other authors, including Michel Leiris, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Henry Rollins, as well as classic coming-­of-­age texts such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and On the Road, Lyn attempts to navigate her way in New York City, through media and stimuli as diverse as hardcore music and Virginia Woolf. As a project in Madrid, the book and the video functioned as indices to how “subcultures” are formed at different times and in different places and how they overlap and diverge. The video, which is mentioned in the book’s appendix, incorporates footage from Madrid, Sevilla, Cleveland, and Williamsburg (Brooklyn), piecing together the author’s “search for bohemia.” In Spain the author and the cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen discussed the attraction of Spain and Mexico for generations of artist pilgrims while tracing the representation of bohemia from the 19th century in Madrid to the movement known as la movida, which responded to the urges of the punk movement and emerged after Franco’s rule and after punk had peaked in England and in the U.S. Images from fanzines and recent events are col-

5.1 Camino Road, 1993. Page spread.

lected in the appendix, which also hints at the open-­endedness of this book. What follows is an excerpt from the novel. Camino Road is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

Vocabulario sangre—blood a sangre fría—in cold blood horripilante—bloodcurdling sabueso—bloodhound envenenamiento de la sangre—blood poisoning presión arterial—blood pressure crudeza—crudity crucificar—to crucify bisojo—cross-­eyed corneja—crow encarnizado—bloodshot sangriento—bloody 5. From Camino Road 65

regla—rule volarse—to blow up inspeccionar—to oversee sospechoso—suspicious bárbaro—barbarous bufonesco—clownish perplejo, desconcertador—baffling Nowadays punk bored his schoolmates. John stuck it out, but the taunts and cold shoulders were threatening to ruin his new confidence. One afternoon he hitchhiked home, grabbed a pencil and paper and wrote down his options. “Make enemies.” Trouble was, he’d always felt so indifferent toward people. “Therapy.” That might have meant he was hopeless. “Art.” On the strength of some doodles he’d done as a kid, and that his mother had raved about, he enrolled in a life drawing class.—Closer, Dennis Cooper

Scenario I Lyn has just moved into an apartment in New York with her boyfriend Voy. She plans to go to art school and find herself or at least really bust out. She’s had it with the small East Coast almost–Ivy League liberal arts university which she and Voy have been attending. Real life is what she’s after and for her New York always seemed about as real as you could get. Voy is from Manhattan, but attended prep school in Massachusetts, so he’s also planning to get a taste of the brutally real. Voy and Lyn are marooned in a studio apartment on the Upper East side, only a few streets away from his parents, but he wants to go to film school, downtown, where he hopes to really deal with “genres” and realize his Sam Shepard–“Angel City” visions, but he will first have to prove himself at the uptown Ivy League University and see what happens. The year before Voy had arrived on a Greyhound bus in Cleveland to pick Lyn up to begin their own On-­the-­Road adventure. Lyn couldn’t leave right away because her grandmother had a stroke and ended up moving into her parents’ house. Voy wound up staying with her family for three weeks. She taught him how to drive a stick, the one they thought they’d use for their getaway, but the car soon after died. After days of planning they de-

66 Genealogies

cided to hit the road the old-­fashioned way and hitchhike to Mexico, even though it was almost 1980 and the beatnik 50s and the love-­in 60s were long gone. They were floating in the we-­missed-­the-­boat-­is-­there-­anything-­else? late 70s. So one morning they said goodbye to the family and set out with their rucksacks and camping gear as if they were going to take a Greyhound bus to Mexico. They walked past tree-­lined suburban streets, past commercial parks and shopping centers, past Wendy’s and Cadillac dealerships straight to the entrance of the highway. When they saw Lyn’s dad driving by, they ducked and told themselves that that was a close call. Eventually some guy in a pickup truck gave them a lift straight into the cornfields. They were on their way. “Ah, man, what a dreamboat,” sighed Dean. “Think if you and I had a car like this what we could do. Do you know there’s a road that goes down Mexico and all the way to Panama?—and maybe all the way to the bottom of South America where the Indians are seven feet tall and eat cocaine on the mountainside? Yes! You and I, Sal, we’d dig the whole world with a car like this because, man the road must eventually lead to the whole world. Ain’t nowhere else it can go—right?” —On the Road, Jack Kerouac

Lyn now sometimes slips into half-­dreams about being on the road, or being in Mexico, the only other country she’s ever been to. She moves through the city awake and dreaming. At home she also sits awake and dreaming. She and Voy have student memberships at several cinemas and they go to the movies every day. They live on cheeseburger specials, oatmeal, and boxes of Entenmann’s soft chocolate chip cookies.

Things to Read Kurt Schwitters—Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt—Stephen Foster and Rudolf Cuenzil—Gurdjieff: Making a New World—Revolution of the Word—Rothenberg—(Whitehead, Buber, Illich on education), Marsden Hartley—Androscoggin—poetry by Gopi Krishna—The Riddle of Consciousness—William Blake, Collected Poems—Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil)—Mallarmé, The Poems (Bosley)

5. From Camino Road 67

Bands to Check Out Slits, Bush Tetras, Dangerous Birds, Raincoats, Au Pairs, Kleenex, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. . . . Lyn liked to dress up in a variety of kinds of clothing meant for both sexes, gender-­benders. This didn’t seem particularly radical to her, at least for a girl who looked like a girl, meaning one with visible breasts and hips. Once when she was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket several sizes too big she was verbally assaulted by a small group of latino men who called her “mariposa” while she mounted her bicycle. The confusion stimulated her. She found it laughable that “mariposa” was meant to be an insult since every butterfly she’d ever seen had appeared beautiful and intriguing. She mused—if you were a very tall, skinny, and hairy boy wearing dresses, that would be even more daring. She did decide to shave her head though. But that was after she’d been to Mexico with Voy. On that trip her hair had been parted in the middle and held back with a scarf. She was often mistaken for Cuban or else she was “Donna Summer(s).” Once when she passed a group of boys one yelled out in English, “She work hard for the money!” “Yeah,” she thought.

Scenario II “At home you feel like a tourist.”—Gang of Four

Lyn is now living in Hoboken. Before that she lived in Mexico for eight months and before that she lived in what was known as the International East Village, before the rents went up, which is why she moved to where she now lives. She continues to follow the trail of “bohemians” and other malcontents. She considers herself to be an artist, although she has a day job, as do most of the artists she knows. She’s been told that there’s an artists’ community in Hoboken. For some deep-­seated reason the notion of a community existing appeals to her and she seeks it, although she’s never before found it to exist. It becomes her El Dorado. Her undergraduate thesis was even about various people’s search for artistic communities, and their

68 Genealogies

subsequent disillusionment with that particular quest. Still she exists awake and dreaming. It was weird to return. Before leaving for Mexico she’d lived on St. Mark’s Place and gone regularly to hardcore concerts at cbgb ’s and other downtown venues. She’d worn plaid skirts and combat boots which accompanied her shaved head. She was still in the mood to rebel, but wasn’t exactly sure what form her rebellion might take. The music was close to her heart, but she’d been away. Only recently did she return to the United States. She and Voy had split up a few years before. After that she vowed she would protect herself from becoming overly emotionally attached in the future. She took an analytical look at her feelings and decided it would be an interesting experiment to observe how she might experience being in Mexico again, with someone else. In that way she hoped to put to rest the painful associations of the past with Voy. Like in a song she’d heard around then she’d “found a new rose,” his name was Bruce. With Bruce she was able to have long talks about anything at all. Bruce was a writer. Where Voy had been reckless and childlike Bruce was careful and paternal. She felt a new pleasure in feeling protected. She couldn’t remember having felt that way for a long time. She convinced Bruce that it would be a good idea to live in Mexico for as long as their saved money could last. With rents going up in the E.V. (East Village) it seemed like a good time to be gone. There they hoped to do research on sculptures they’d seen at an exhibition in New York. Not much information seemed to be available about these sculptures of copulating figures which were elements in religious tableaux, like the last supper. The one thing that was known was that these sculptures were from Ocumicho and they were only made by women. The figures were a combination of devils, maidens, and mermaids and were being called devil sculptures. All of that supplied a grant objective. Once there the idea was that they could both follow their individual artistic pursuits. Lyn wanted to draw and collect material for new work and Bruce wanted to write fiction and poetry. Bruce managed to win a prestigious grant for journalism about the hardcore music scene in New York. So, for a second time Lyn left for Mexico and for a second time she had to come back.

5. From Camino Road 69

Note This is an excerpt from Green’s novel Camino Road (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Free Agent Media, 1994). The book and a homonymous video constituted Road _______ , Part 1 (1994), Green’s contribution to the exhibition The Cooked and the Raw, curated by Dan Cameron and held at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía, December 1994–February 1995.

70 Genealogies

6

1992

Open Letter #1 On Influence

Indication of Spatial Fluctuation: Lisbon, Vienna, Salzburg Temporal Reference: August 29–31, 1992

Opening Address Dear Texte zur Kunst, You asked me to think about the notion of influence in relation to the development of my own work, and I can’t remember now whether you or I mentioned Marcel Broodthaers as being a spectral figure who looms in my self-­ designated ancestral past. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Broodthaers lately, especially since my work will soon be co-­existing with his traces.1 The epistolary format actually seems appropriate for this kind of meditation on one’s position, it is a form I feel comfortable with, and it is also one which Broodthaers frequently used. I find though, when I’m in the letter writing mode that I tend to combine the diaristic mode, which depending on the intimacy of the letter can often overlap with the epistolary genre, as well as other genres which might be detected by a thorough analysis of my letters, one similar in rigor to Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s “Open Letters, Industrial Poems” and Birgit Pelzer’s “Recourse to the Letter,” both to be found in the “commemorative project” Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs,2 a journal issue which was not meant to be canonical, but which can’t even now avoid seeming definitive. Is my mention of my own letters a hint to worthy art critics, a bid for immortality, a ploy to attain institutionalization while being critical of said process? A ten thousand francs reward for whoever can provide an answer which I deem acceptable.

Tackling the Topic Straight On One of the benefits of writing a letter is that the possibility of a dialogue is implied, which also means that the single letter need not be conclusive. My thoughts on the idea of influence in relationship to myself continue to fluctuate. Ambivalence continues to reign supreme for me, and has led me to various starts and stops in terms of this topic, which I do find interesting. Possible approaches have been embraced and discarded. Maybe the best I can do is trace my attempt at grappling with this idea.

Beginnings Admiration is the point at which influence begins, although originary moments are always difficult if not impossible to trace. Perhaps it’s not even a very interesting endeavor to trace them, or maybe they are only interesting if they are tantalizing fictions; attempts at earnestness must be avoided. Designating influences at the moment makes me a bit fearful, primarily because once this assertion is printed, then the likelihood of definite categorization is inevitable, although of course this is just as likely if one were to keep quiet as not. What I’ve found is that a chain of influences is beginning to emerge as I trace the agreed upon one. I have no French blood, but a French name, an interest in surrealism seemed inevitable. W. E. B. Du Bois admired Bismarck in his youth and later stated that the problem of the twentieth century would be that of the color line, Aimé Cesaire was born in Martinique and wrote poetry with invented words, Paul Robeson traveled the globe, Josephine Baker was an honorary française whose legs were still beautiful after the age of 60, my uncle was an artist, my mother trained to be a classical vocalist and sang in French, the excitement of Ohio is only paralleled by that of Belgium, I saw my first Magritte in poster form, maybe in a shopping mall frame shop, or was it in the Cleveland Museum of Art? I still remember the bluish color of the mussels on the cover of Artforum I saw in 1978, 1979, 1980?

74 Circuits of Exchange

“Positions and Position-­Takings” 8/8/92 When Broodthaers decided to become a visual artist rather than a poet, the art market still seemed to be a place where fortunes could be made, at that time as a pop visual artist. Now the more common aspiration is to become an actual pop star oneself, not merely a visual artist making references to popular culture. To borrow the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu, a desire to move from the field of restricted production to the field of large-­scale production can at times be detected. If you can get the backing it’s possible to become Laurie Anderson. But, actually this seems more an operating mode of the previous decade, because now it’s possible to find pathetic things scattered all around, but not be able to see them, in a neo-­installation format or at a neo-­happening. Recessions can be exciting times.

Terms Indebtedness, legitimacy, strategies of affiliation, relations of allegiance, dependence. All mentioned by Pierre Bourdieu.

Citations Up for Grabs Everything depends on a definition, and it is a fragile one; what becomes of it when, in the final analysis, we deck out the speaking or painting artist in ceremonial robes? To be invited means to partake in official life. Here in Berlin I feel like a diplomat.3

8/20/92 Notes made in a Lisbon archive: What is the role of culture in the international diplomacy arena (see Serge Guilbaut, Edward Said’s Orientalism, Sir Captain Richard Burton, and Camões’s Os Lusíadas). The culture houses, Fulbrights, Luce Fellowships, Art Internationals of the world, what purposes do they serve the nations represented? What are the histories of these programs? How is this linked to museums? What are their positions in the “aesthetic field”? (See essay in John Miller’s catalogue.4) What’s expected of me here in Lisbon and then in New York? 6. Open Letter #1: On Influence 75

What was wanted this time was that the renewal of a longstanding friendship and of fraternal feelings should be entrusted to the poets, the writers, the painters and the musicians, to the artists.5 Calm and silence. Here, a fundamental gesture has been made that sheds a brilliant light on culture and the aspirations of some to control it—on both sides—which means that culture is an obedient material. What is culture? I write. I have taken the floor. I am a negotiator for an hour or two. I say I. I reassume my personal attitude. I fear anonymity. (I would like to control the meaning [sens] of culture).—Marcel Broodthaers, Open Letter, Brussels, June 7, 1968

Concluding Remarks Lately I’ve been reading a book of essays called Debating p.c. 6 I thought I should read the American debate while in Europe so that I might benefit from a distant view and become better informed about this popular label which at times seems synonymous with some sort of plague. I was thinking about what’s termed ’68 Philosophy, which includes theories by Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Bourdieu, and in conjunction with them Broodthaers, since all of these thinkers are up for reevaluation now. The author, Paul Berman, seems to be attempting a hard-­boiled, yet liberal approach which might appeal to a general audience when he describes some of these theories: The theories were, in any case, something other than mild doctrines of social reform. They were extravaganzas of cynicism. They were angry theories (though coolly expressed), hard to read, tangled, more poetic than logical. . . . But if they had a single gist, it was this: Despite the claims of humanist thought, the individual is not free to make his own decisions, nor is the world what it appears to be. Instead, we and the world are permeated by giant, hidden, impersonal structures, the way that human forms in Invasion of the Body Snatchers are inhabited by extraterrestrial beings.7 Have you read this book yet? I’d love to discuss it with you sometime. Yours, Renée 76 Circuits of Exchange

Notes Originally published in Texte zur Kunst, no. 7 (Fall 1992): 187–89. 1. True Stories, an exhibition in which Green’s work was featured, took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, in 1992. The ica had on view at the same time the exhibition Marcel Broodthaers: The Complete Prints and Editions. 2. October, no. 42 (Fall 1987). 3. Marcel Broodthaers, as quoted in Birgit Pelzer, “Recourse to the Letter,” October, no. 42 (Fall 1987): 159. Pelzer is quoting from Broodthaers’s “Das Wort Film,” in Invitation pour une exposition bourgeoise (Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1975), 12. 4. Isabelle Graw, “No Gift Is for Free,” in John Miller: Rock Sucks, Disco Sucks (Berlin: DAAD Galerie, 1992), 53–54. 5. Luis Bernardo, Mozambique’s minister of culture, preface to Mozambique!, edited by Kerstin Danielson (Stockholm: Culture House, n.d.). 6. Debating p.c. : The Controversies over Political Correctness on College Campuses (New York: Laurel, 1992). 7. Ibid., 7.

6. Open Letter #1: On Influence 77

7

1993

Open Letter #2 Another Attempt

Dear TzK, Need I elaborate on the possibility which writing a letter allows? Does a letter escape critical judgment? Never. Sometimes its contents are privileged over its form. In the case of my last letter to you it would appear, based on a subsequent response, that the form itself was in question. The significance of my choice of form was made much of. Lately, these adjectives spin around my head: Muddy, muddy, muddy. Gooey, smeared, indistinct, foggy. From tactile to visual the adjectives jump back and forth as I shake my head back and forth. In Albania this gesture means yes. I am in Vienna. No, no, no. Think of the variety of letters written, the kinds of desires they’re meant to satisfy. The purloined letter, the letter to the editor, the letter home, the letter of resignation, the Dear John letter. Privacy is usually associated with part of the pleasure, as well as part of the dread, of receiving a letter. This message is sealed in a stamped envelope, and was in previous times sealed with wax, sent to a particular person who alone must break the seal and receive the envelope’s contents. The signature completes the utterance. Without a signature a certain bafflement would ensue, anyone could have sent the information, which would make its significance all the more confusing.

influence : (influere to flow in, fr. influentia, fr. L influent-­, influens, prp. of influre to flow in, fr. in + fluere to flow—more at fluid ) 1 a: an ethereal fluid held to flow from the stars and to affect the actions of men b: an emanation of occult power held to derive from the stars 2: an emanation of spiritual or moral force.

And then there is the open letter, which is akin to a “letter to the editor,” but which I believe varies in that its objectives can be more fluid. Does that make it art? Unlike an essay it needn’t state an intention which needs to be fulfilled, although it can be that as well. A topic can be stated and ensuing reflections can occur, yet standard rhetorical devices needn’t be enforced. These reflections become a chain of associations which the author links for her own stated or perhaps unconscious reasons. It can resemble a transcription of thinking aloud, a way of attempting to catch one’s thoughts. Can dreams be graded? Is this a disingenuous question? Was my previous question also disingenuous? Oops.

disingenuous : lacking in candor; also: giving a false appearance of simple frankness. Was I doing that? Certain keywords and phrases stood out as I read Michael Archer’s text entitled “Renée Green, Mark Dion and the ‘Influence’ of Marcel Broodthaers.”1 The first two out of four manuscript pages focused on my Open Letter #1: On Influence. Here are the words and phrases which I underlined: “coy missive,” “trying hard not to appear too pleased at offering significance by association ,” “by adopting the epistolary form, Green is able to close the text with her own name ,” “as a signature , it authenticates the list,” (the list being a group of names which he has taken out of context and made into a list), “validating ,” “letter-­as-­ artwork,” “disingenuousness,” “worthiness ,” “already a member.”

Realness In the film Paris Is Burning2 there is a discussion on realness. Realness is something which is judged by a jury, which includes the audience, at voguing events. If the person in costume is convincing in the role they are playing (from Wall St. broker to movie star) they are then lauded on how close to authenticity they’ve come. Realness has also been described as a state of mind, a sensation, as in Sylvester’s, “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real.” To feel real and to be real. Real in 1960s slang meant to be capable of telling the truth (or alerting a talker to a listener’s wariness with the reply “Get real!”). A real person

7. Open Letter #2: Another Attempt 79

was also capable of “having someone’s back,” which meant that they could be unswervingly loyal. But, real is a relative term. The question which can always follow is, “Compared to what?” This is real, but compared to what? Realness doesn’t stand alone. Neither do the definitions nor references, such as I mentioned in Open Letter #1. One of the crucial problems I’ve been able to detect in recent discussions about culture has been the lack of information, or lack of interest, in codes of reference with which critics are unfamiliar. It is not only ignorance but also a blindness which prevents the possibility of making richer and more interesting connections. Name-­dropping and mapping one’s own journey are quite different activities. In the “Beginnings” section of Open Letter #1 there is a typo.3 The word ordinary should have appeared as originary, thus the opening sentence should read, “Admiration is the point at which influence begins, although originary moments are always difficult if not impossible to trace.” When my letter was written it was a given for me that I’ve admired W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Aimé Cesaire, Josephine Baker, and Marcel Broodthaers. I also mention an interest in surrealism. My intention was never to provide an impressive list to which I could simply add my name, but was instead intended to suggest an idiosyncrasy in the selection, as well as to “give props,” that is, to give respect to who and what you esteem and have learned from. These names hardly need my signature beneath them to authenticate them. For me each of these names has a particular resonance which is the result of my engaged interest with them.

coy 1 a: shrinking from contact or familiarity b. marked by cute, coquettish, or artful playfulness 2: showing reluctance to make a definite commitment. If for a moment the discussion, or rather certain diatribes, against errors in the cultural field may be interrupted (for example, such circulating sentiments as “Why the 1993 Whitney Biennial curators fucked up?” “Why multiculturalism is a farce?” “Why p.c. is a media fad?”), if the din could be broken for long enough perhaps, but only perhaps, it might be possible to acknowledge that the attacks are largely misplaced. By that I don’t mean that the Whitney curators should not be taken to task, or that multiculturalism shouldn’t be critiqued, or that the term p.c. should be left as an all-­meaning and empty signifier. Some of the questions which seem to tell80 Circuits of Exchange

ingly and continually go unasked, and which by their absence seem to firmly place the various “critical” voices within safe and imaginary panoptic positions are: Can cultural forms have agency, and if so, agency for whom? Where is that agency to be found and what forms might it manifest? . . . A lot of “fronting” seems to be going on. By that I mean critical posturing. How often does the question of stakes arise in these discussions? What kind of looting is going on? Some would claim none, there isn’t really any riot going on in the cultural field. We live in a hierarchical system in which wealthy power brokers appear to be in total control ultimately, that’s why they couldn’t prevent the L.A. Rebellion of last year. Actually, I’m not sure how effective this response might be given that I’ve acknowledged how a hermeneutics is limited by an unfamiliarity with the key source materials, which have already had rich exegesis performed upon them to which certain writers may be ignorant, but who brazenly continue to write “critically.” Further elaboration on this dearth of intelligent activity makes me sad, nevertheless I’ll forge ahead. I’ve now read Michael Archer’s article several times. Archer’s undertaking involves a “critique” of Open Letter #1 combined with what I considered to be an anemic description of part two of the ica , London exhibition, True Stories, in which I participated along with Mark Dion. I found the conflation puzzling. Rather than respond to my letter with a letter, which as I stated, was supposed to imply the possibility of a dialogue, he opted instead to write a “review” of the letter which implied an assertion of critical authority. If the letter is “only” an art work, in fact a closed text, it is not really “real,” that is, its claims reflect trickery (see synonyms for art: skill, cunning, artifice, craft), rather than a desire to communicate serious or any other sort of ideas. The assumption still seems common that artists are authoritatively represented by others, despite the many essays and books written describing how representation is a construction and not a given. Then enter in the whole identity question, in which representation becomes a cultural battleground in which there are people who are also artists who inflect their art work with questions of or allusions to forms of identity. This is of course nothing new. Historically, identities of various kinds have been presented in diverse ways in art. From self-­portraits to royal portraits, from Dutch still 7. Open Letter #2: Another Attempt 81

lifes to historical tableaux, identity in its broadest sense has been examined. What is new is that some of these artists who may self-­consciously reference “identity” reflect historical changes which can be noted from at least the past fifty years. Often the histories they reflect are ones which have been suppressed. These artists are using the most prevalent agreed upon cultural codes, as well as codes which are less acknowledged. This is what W. E. B. Du Bois called double consciousness at least seventy years ago. This letter seems to be turning into an essay with footnotes. Why don’t I want to write a powerful essay? Because at this moment it isn’t possible to see clearly what the correct course to proceed might be, not that it ever is. I can feel my way along and maybe eventually I might glimpse a clearer view. But, while attention is riveted to institutional spectacles and national cultural awareness plans, it is difficult for an ambivalent voice to be heard. That’s why it’s necessary to be a trickster, and not merely a jester. A jester is linked to the royal court and must entertain those who rule, or if not, in extreme circumstances, die. A trickster, like Eshu in Yoruba and Bakonga cultures, is akin to Hermes, a master of the crossroads and an interpreter, a hermeneutician. A trickster is able to “slip the yoke and change the joke.” She-­he is skilled in the art of lying and in the art of “realness,” which means surpassing daily survival and ascending into the realm of possibility. Best regards, Renée Green

Notes “Open Letter #2” was submitted to the editors of the magazine Texte zur Kunst in response to Michael Archer’s review of Green’s “Open Letter #1.” The journal’s editors did not publish Green’s response. 1. Michael Archer, “Renée Green, Mark Dion und der Einfluss von Marcel Broodthaers,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 9 (March 1993): 118–19. 2. Paris Is Burning is a 1990 documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid- to late 1980s, it chronicles the New York City Drag Ball circuit and the economically poor and imaginatively rich African American and Latino gay and transgendered community involved in it. 3. The typo has been corrected in the version published in this volume.

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8

1994

Collectors, Creators, and Shoppers Since the arrival on Broadway of the Museum for African Art in 1993 I’d not once been inside. It now forms a unit of the new “SoHo Museum Row,” flanked by the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. Because of its large street-­level windows, through which it was possible to see internally lit inset wooden shelving and consumer-­ friendly gray and yellow walls, it blended in with the stores which are also its neighbors. This combination of shops interspersed with museums distinguishes the SoHo Museum Row from its uptown predecessor, the Fifth Avenue Museum Row, where the museums are situated in proximity to Central Park, opulent apartment buildings, and lushly appointed embassies; the majority of bag-­toting pedestrians in this area tend to carry museum store purchases, unlike their downtown counterparts, who, laden with an assortment of bags, are walking advertisements for any number of product labels. When in SoHo I tend to brace myself to rush by the usual glut of Saturday shoppers and make a beeline for wherever I have to be. Friends I’d mentioned this museum to had said that they’d thought it was yet another store which sold basketry and jewelry and had no inkling that it was a house of culture. The Museum only recently became a museum, in 1992 in fact, changing its name from the Center for African Art to its new name to reflect “the institution’s activities, its broad educational mission and mature identity.” The Museum is internationally recognized as a preeminent organizer of exhibitions of African art and is one of a mere two in the U.S. that specializes in historical and contemporary art. All of that said, I still felt apprehensive upon entering, perhaps because it seemed to suggest the possibility that I was going there to shop, when my intention was to look and not feel pressured to purchase. The exhibition I’d been designated to suss out was Western Artists, African Arts.1 The premise

of the exhibition was developed by guest curator Daniel Shapiro, who is a trustee of the Museum, an art lawyer, and a collector of African art. He went in search of what he presumed might be a broad spectrum of artists who collect and live with African objects, and in several months found “more artists with more African objects than could fit in one show.” Thus a select group was chosen. If you’d missed the key idea, the list of participating artists might seem exceptionally diverse if not absolutely perplexing: Francesco Clemente, Frank Stella, Philip Pearlstein, Mel Edwards, Helen Frankenthaler, Lorna Simpson, Richard Serra, Eric Fischl, Martin Puryear, Brice Marden, Arman, Fred Wilson, and Jasper Johns, just to name a few of the 28 artists who lent objects as well as their commentary. The lent objects are the main visual focus, along with a video of artists speaking about the objects, 14 large-­format photos showing the objects situated in the artists’ homes and studios, and signage which accompanies the vitrine-­encapsulated or wall-­ hung work with postage stamp–sized reproductions of the lenders’ works. While the perspectives of the artists differ, and while this seems to be one of the curatorial goals in selecting such a group the statements, all told, rehearse well-­worn descriptions which one might expect from a spectrum— or rainbow—of Western artists who encounter African art. In this current museum attempt to state the “affinities” between Western artists and African art/objects a conscientious effort has been made to present a balanced menu of Western gender and ethnic varieties, albeit somewhat restricted in the ethnic area to European-­Euro-­American and African-­American (and one African living in New York). This strategy shows utmost prudence when it is remembered that ten years ago “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art docked at the Museum of Modern Art, launching in its wake a decade of debates about the role of museums and “other” cultures, as well as challenges to the well-­rehearsed official story of modernism and its encounter with African objects. These discussions continued to reverberate around future exhibitions, ranging from the Centre Pompidou’s Les magiciens de la terre to the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1993 Biennial. Critical responses to the official view, which blended universalistic and humanistic sentiments, then included Hal Foster, James Clifford (responses to their responses), an essay in Third Text, edited by Rasheed Araeen, and in The Myth of Primitivism, edited by Susan Hiller, in addition to powerful and nuanced writings by Trinh T. Minh-­ha, to mention only a fraction of the voices introduced into a lively arena for debate. 84 Circuits of Exchange

But what of today? In what ways in the present moment is it possible to perceive this exhibition? Of what interest is it now, mid-­way through a time which has somewhat flippantly and reductively been denoted by some as the “multi-­culti nineties”? It has also been referred to as a grunge time, a waif time, a Generation x time, a hip-­hop nation time, an eco-­conscious time, a time of worldwide civil wars and an end of the Cold War time. Why should anyone, other than readers of House Beautiful, care to see displays of what these artists have in their houses or studios? Is the museum meant to be an oasis of calm and beauty in this rough and muddled world, reproducing images of bourgeois interiors which appear as a refuge from barbarism in which reside objects from African civilizations which were previously designated as barbarous and barbarously ravaged by Western civilization and later elevated to civilized objects within the West by Western artists? Are we supposed to be impressed by a lineage of Western artists as special people with special eyes which can discern the special beauty of these special objects? Are we also to understand that African-­American artists are now admitted to the Western family of artists, but as “different” members who have “special” access to an ancestral past by virtue perhaps of what anthropologist Melville Herskovits referred to in his book, The Myth of the Negro Past, as africanisms?2 One of the interesting links made in the show was that between artists and collectors. These artists to varying degrees are collectors of African art. This implies a bridging of the gap which ordinarily exists between artists and museum patrons, establishing some common ground and diluting the implication of artists’ stereotypical “wildness.” In a similar regard, artists who are usually assumed to be threatening, and this could apply to African-­ American artists (and the ones who imply a critique of the museum even), are brought into the Western artist/collector fold. They are allowed to assert their difference, but in terms of affiliations with the African objects. The exhibition authorizes, in fact encourages, these forms of identification. Difference in this context becomes acceptable. This is the appropriate place for artists to assert their difference and these are the appropriate differences for them to assert. The result is a poignant attempt on the part of the African-­ American artists—and I hate to reiterate this distinction, because ethnic identity is only an aspect of all of the artists identities, yet the distinction is implied in the thematic of the show and thus creates a strange bind which had to be acknowledged because these artists can’t escape their connection 8. Collectors, Creators, and Shoppers 85

to the African diaspora—to state the reasons why they feel drawn to these objects and how they use these objects in a way mindful of how the objects have arrived in the West. But as I listened to statements of all of the artists on the accompanying exhibition video I became acutely aware of how all of them projected their desires onto these objects. This is something that collectors often do, as well as viewers. For the most part, an acknowledgment of this unifying aspect was absent in the show. In a catalogue essay by Jack Flam “Africa” is referred to as a real place and as “a compelling imaginative construct in modern Western thought.” Even though what it means to be Western is also a powerful and complex “construct,” this definition is not really explored here. The point that these objects function now as mirrors for most people becomes all the more suggestive when this acknowledgment is taken into consideration. Lorna Simpson comes closest to stating this when she describes her activity with the masks she used: “So the idea of photographing the backs of the masks became a way of getting at the idea of how one constructs oneself, how one does or does not have access to a particular cultural past.” In some sense this acceptance of appropriate difference relates to a sentiment expressed in an article by Leonce Gaiter which appeared in the Guardian from the New York Times entitled “Revolt of the Black Bourgeoisie.”3 Gaiter suggests that the major media prefer to present images of a Black underclass and actually to equate Blacks with an underclass despite the complexity of positions which really exist. This of course is not a new observation, it actually echoes those of W. E. B. Du Bois from the early part of this soon to be finished century, but seen in the context of much current media coverage this point becomes prescient. Examples of prominent news items of the present are the massacres in Rwanda, the election of Nelson Mandela—usually always mentioned in reference to the difficulty he faces—the Haitian refugee dilemma, another coup in Nigeria, and the O. J. Simpson trial for murder. On the same front page of the Herald Tribune I saw at the top a headline reading, “In Africa, a Mood of Desperation,” while at the bottom of the page was O. J. Simpson’s official mug shot next to the headline “An American Hero’s Fall Has Admirers Wondering.” Amid the constant barrage of mixed messages emerged this exhibition. Somehow, there was a relation between the tension and ambivalence I’ve felt while absorbing the news and that which I’d felt while regarding this exhibition. The appropriate places were too limiting, despite the complexity of intentions. 86 Circuits of Exchange

Somehow the Africa hailed in the exhibition and the Africa and people of the African diaspora who I encountered in the media everyday, and then in Berlin streets or on the U-­Bahn, all seemed sadly disparate. As George Lipsitz said in a conversation we had last year, Black culture as a commodity is doing very well at a time when Black people are doing very poorly in terms of political power and resources, and so many times what we come up against is that people want to talk about the art and the culture or they want to own the art and the culture, they want that to circulate, but they don’t want to think about the people behind it and the conditions in which they’re living. And in a way we don’t want to reduce Black culture to a sociological phenomenon, as if there’s no art, because the whole affective power of it and majesty of it has to do with its ability to grab people who didn’t expect to be grabbed. All of the artists who participated agree on the power of African art and objects to grab. Many of the artists who participated in the exhibition admired the relationship between art and life, which they’d observed in some of the objects they possessed. One, Terry Adkins, collected instruments with forms he admired, but which he could also play. It was the sound of his adept playing of the thumb piano on a video of interviews with some of the artists which led me out of the shop—I did decide to buy some books and was taken with how beautiful the carpets were which I watched some Brazilians examine—and into the gallery. One of the points which arises from this show is the desire, as Richard Tuttle says in Flam’s essay, “to keep this material contemporary,” and he goes on to mention that this is possible in ways today that it wasn’t in the past via the link which can be recognized “between contemporary Afro-­American culture and African art as a symbol of cultural reform.” Whose cultural reform is he referring to and what does that mean? Flam uses Tuttle’s statement to segue into an illustration of how African-­American participants feel a strong cultural identification with Africa and how this identification is interpreted in the present. I would add that we need to intensify an awareness of how we relate to Africa as myth, as well as examine what we call Western attitudes, and not isolate present conditions from a glorious past, but rather examine the bitter, the sweet, and the in between so that an even more profound relationship to this continent and the objects produced from this vast and diverse place might be possible. 8. Collectors, Creators, and Shoppers 87

Notes Originally published in Frieze, no. 18 (September–October 1994). 1. The exhibition took place between May 6 and August 7, 1994. An exhibition catalogue by Daniel Shapiro and Jack Flam was published and distributed by The Museum for African Art, 1994. 2. Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990). 3. New York Times Magazine, June 26, 1994.

88 Circuits of Exchange

9

1995

Peripatetic at “Home” Travelers who do not go anywhere, apparently, do not need maps. —Mireille Rosello

New York. It’s the name of the city which is printed on my c.v. designating where I live. It is the East Coast city of dreams, which continues to be magnified by the West Coast city of dreams. Flickering images of neon-­ lit streets filled with red-­sirened cop cars, drug deals in abandoned tenements, as well as high-­rises, penthouses, and bird’s-­eye views of Central Park continue to be transmitted through the airwaves on tv s around the globe. Feared and emulated, from a distance seeming more a symbol than an actual place, this is where I always return. But, is it home? As is often the case when I work I am not there. It is v-­e Day. Planes are flying overhead in commemoration and I sit in a sunny backyard in the south of England. I’m trying to recall what “living” in New York entails for me. When I am there, as I have just been for months, it seems almost inescapably real. Prosaic activities such as paying bills, doing the laundry, taking the subway, returning phone calls tend to dominate the days and make me long for the fantasy New York so many come in search of. Maybe you find what you want to find. The memorable is that which can be dreamed about a place.—Michel de Certeau

Even when I was around New York more regularly I often thought about other places, and of past people, some of whom once lived in New York, and their travels. It’s the archetypal way in which one becomes a traveler, dreaming of others’ travels. Sitting here typing on v-­e Day and hearing the plane motors overhead I can recall Janet Flanner, a.k.a. Genet, in her Letter from Paris for the New Yorker, setting up her typewriter as soon as she’d arrive in whatever location she was meant to temporarily inhabit. She re-

9.1 World Tour T-­Shirt, 1992. Cotton T-­shirt, offset print.

ported on the state of politics and culture throughout Europe between, during, and after the war years. “What am I doing?” I ask myself. The image of the idle flaneur changes: by superimposing a form of writing over the map, the browser now composes, like the musician adding notes to the staff.1

All of This Travel: Is It about Site-­Specificity or Artists as Ethnographers or What? Someone remarked to me recently that there seem to be quite a number of young American artists working in Europe. Is this a phenomenon or simply a pattern which has occurred, with historical variations, since the end of the 90 Circuits of Exchange

nineteenth century? What invariably happens to all of the artists abroad is that they must at some point determine what place they’ll identify as home. This doesn’t mean that “home” must be just one place or that the place even be a tangible one. Home is also not necessarily idyllic but can contain that which is most scary, all that from which the traveler might have wanted to flee. Home is a slippery concept, whatever its discrete manifestation may be. The “exile’s return” is as much an archetype as is the traveler’s departure and subsequent return. The chronicles of the various artists and entourage members of, for example, the “Lost Generation,” often document how difficult returning home can be after the passage of time and events. But as different technologies separated, say, Henry James from F. Scott Fitzgerald, so too have new technologies affected this experience for contemporary returnees, in addition to an alteration of the concept of home. No objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analyzed so well.2 Much of the work I’ve done has in some way to do with charting relationships between what is imagined to be home and what is imagined to be away. Reflections on these locations continue by referencing how an organic body, with its particular markers, can exist in different locations to how a subject positions itself in virtual space. Imagining the “virtual subjects” or oneself as a virtual subject becomes easier and easier as modem communication in portable computers becomes a necessary tool for those artists who are as mobile as the fluctuations in international capital. Home almost becomes where your modem is. But, in what ways do we position ourselves and are we positioned within networks of exchange? In what places do these activities occur? These will continue to be questions from which massive implications will continue to unfold. Just think of the recent Oklahoma bombing3 and the networks via which it was organized. Questions of identity will be played out within these complex webs.

9. Peripatetic at “Home” 91

9.2 World Tour, 1993. Installation view. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Media Travels In Quest, which in part references a time in which I lived and worked in Lisbon, a fragmented course is charted in which memories of places and of histories are activated by associations to media. Ways of perceiving a self can become exaggerated as a traveler. How writing becomes an attempt to access memory, give body to experience, and track time and what this traveler collects and pieces together to allude to her sense of self—from an almanac printed in the year of her birth to an index of essays written by Greil Marcus between 1977 and 1985—all of these things become clues to the Quest. At the station I gathered Dutch-­language magazines and newspapers of all kinds and since I left the Hague I’ve been scouring them for images. While doing this I was reminded of Chance (Chauncey Gardiner), the 92 Circuits of Exchange

character in Being There. Often I feel as if I’m in my own bubble and that the main contact I have is with the media, these images are familiar and I see them around the world on tv and in magazines. This is the closest I get to stability. I seek these images out and they form another layer of contact, beyond walking through the cities, with life as it is now and with images remembered from childhood. The media is an incredibly huge repository.4

Back to New York When I get restless in this city and can’t take to the open road I go to one of the many bookstores here. Unlike in days past when book browsing was a fairly solitary activity, bookstores—or rather megabookstores—have become points of gathering. In a way going to a bookstore and becoming lost in someone else’s written world may appear terribly old-­fashioned at a time in which it is predicted that books on paper will be replaced by software. But these very contradictions describe the times. In these stores in which one can find gigantic reference sections for Internet and World Wide Web manuals one can also find simulations of nostalgic cozy living rooms with cushy chairs and plump sofas. You can read magazines without paying for them while you sip a cup of tea. Home and travel are where you can find them.

Notes Originally published in Renée Green, Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (Amsterdam: De Appel Foundation, daad , 1996), 31–36. 1. Mireille Rosello, “The Screener’s Maps,” in Hyper/Text/Theory, edited by George P. Landow (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 121–58. 2. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. 3. The Oklahoma City bombing was a terrorist attack on April 19, 1995, in which the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, a U.S. government office complex in downtown Oklahoma City, was destroyed, killing 168 people. 4. Renée Green, “Ethnography, Artists, Surrealism and Technoculture,” in After the Ten Thousand Things (The Hague: Stroom, 1994), xxiii.

9. Peripatetic at “Home” 93

10

1995

Free Agent Media / FAM What Is It? Free Agent Media (fam ) is a dream company and will fulfill the wishes of those it represents. We will revive the attitude of gift exchange between the company and those represented by the company. We operate in the interstices of late capitalism and are under no delusion that there ever exist free gifts. Those represented must sign an agreement acknowledging that crucial premise. While fam is a dream company it nonetheless is a producer of things. The things it produces are media products, such as our inaugural product, Camino Road. fam gives shape to dreams. It will publish books which may ordinarily have difficulty being placed but which we believe can be linked to a market waiting to be tapped. We do not believe in the dictum that to sell one must appeal to the lowest common denominator. Markets and audiences are made and there are a variety of them. The sizes of these markets are unknown and not possible to assess from market surveys. We gamble on the circulating moods of the times, while minimizing the possibility for losses. Thus we produce paperback books, books on computer disks, cd-­rom s, and videos.1 We will expand or contract when necessary. We are an internationally based company and when possible produce multiple language editions and when timely we produce tie-­in merchandise.

Why Do We Exist? Why questions are not necessarily possible for individuals to answer, stemming from motivations lying in the unconscious. We are a group of individual personas, yet at the same time we are a unit and can at least surmise

on a pragmatic level why our company exists. What about art? Why a company? These questions are familiar ones and may require a brief remembrance of recent histories. Artists do seem prone to manifestos and some of them like group activities. As members of society who see themselves as having been peripheralized by a lack of need by society for their functions, these manifestations are not surprising. In the past we have seen artists imitate museums and factories, as well as publishing endeavors. Artists have often mimicked official institutions and functions, sometimes as ironic yet metaphorical gestures and sometimes as functioning operations which allow artistic play and business sense. Just remember the Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes, Broodthaers’s Museum, Warhol’s Factory. Artists are always making up mirror institutions reflecting dominant society. How is this different, how is it the same? While stemming from a related desire to collect as well as function in a position of strength in relationship to society, to bring into the world things which we want to exist, fam seeks to maneuver between irony and sincerity. We must play all roles; these are the rules of the game. This notion resembles previous endeavors. But rather than establish a location like a museum (even a moving one) which collects and displays, or a factory which produces and sells and advertises, we are consciously in the “post-­ industrial phase,” which means there is no space to collect and that there is a backlog of products to get rid of with no place to store them, thus making advertising more and more necessary. The process of production itself and how to distribute our products, which in turn reflect that process and these times, is our material, as is the social arena in which all of the above exists. This activity differs from that of traditional collecting, preserving, and acquisitioning for display and nostalgia. Because of the changing economies and technologies we too have undergone an Umfunktionierung or functional transformation. So rather than a factory we are a floating company. We exist in the minds of our representatives and via electronic currents. Our collections exist in tiny electronic circuits. We’re not weaned of this acquisitive urge, but at times we try to curb it. We too play on people’s wishes and repressed fantasies. Acting director Sybil Chandeler says, “Having access to a media company is like having the world at your fingertips. We’re small, we’re not Disney

10. Free Agent Media / FAM 95

or Turner Broadcasting System, but we have an audience, it’s growing and so are we.” Chandeler asks, “How can we keep up with the big guys?” and answers, “We’re not looking to compete in that way. We’re not interested in mega–amusement park conglomerates. We’re interested in speaking to others who aren’t interested in mega–amusement park conglomerates. They’re out there and we’ll tap them, whether they’re those who can manage a little spending change before buying a lottery ticket to those who are disgruntled and bored and have higher incomes.”

Interzones Buffeted by the shifts of late capitalism, some galleries have become “agencies.” ok . fam realizes that it is necessary to work in the places in which we are active. For those whom we represent, these places are in the sites of art production and display, as well as in the writings of various professional journals and popular magazines. fam believes that our efforts needn’t end in irony and is willing to play hardball for the sake of keeping ideas alive; thus as there are no free gifts, there are no free agents and nothing is pure. But that doesn’t stop us from wishing it were otherwise. It’s not simply a case of moving from manifestos to ad copy, but what time is it? Where it is possible fam will work with major media and with commercial and non-­ profit institutions, if these meet with our economic and ethical standards. Contracts will be negotiated and additional tier-­based funding from private and public sources may be implemented, as well as additional buttressing by the sale of luxury goods. d.d.p . (Deeply Diasporic Productions, a subsidiary of fam ) produces articles of clothing, furniture, and posters for private and public display, ranging from inexpensive to luxurious.

Our Prospective List and the Author Function Authors function as names used for purposes of recognition, not as signs of genius, and are not mentioned until books are in print. We will publish a variety of books, including Fiction, Non-­Fiction Fictions, Travel, How-­To, Biographies, Cultural, Translations, and Reprints. Here is the prospective list, which is open to alteration and solicitation. 96 Circuits of Exchange

Impossible Options Viable Futures The City Outside and the Utopian Inside A Chamber of Transformation Studies in Megalomania My Way: Twenty Artists Remember Frankie and Themselves Wunderkammer, Mausoleum, Time Capsule: Refuge from History Backup Plan: Fifty Artists Anticipate the Millennium Experience and Structure Cut! Artists Make Movies Making the Remake: Insider’s Tips CyberHyper: An Anthology New Again: Five Thinkers Ponder Old Stuff Escaping the White Cube: Four Artists Discuss Pop Crossovers Berlin Script: Part I. On the Brink New York: Browsing and Being Lisbon: Partial Views Nantes Remembered Madrid Moments More Things Farther Agit with Aims: The Death of Guy Debord Tomorrow, Yesterday, and Nevermore: Girl and Boy Bands Remember the 1990s Abjection Today and Trauma Today (a boxed set with a gift subscription to Psychology Today) Republic of Dreams Hocus Pocus, Pseudo-­Science, and Social Plasticity

Notes Originally published in Renée Green, Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (Amsterdam: De Appel Foundation, daad , 1996), 92–99. 1. In 2013 Free Agent Media’s back catalogue includes (1) Books: Camino Road (1994; Spanish/English) and Negotiations in the Contact Zone (2003; Portuguese/English); (2) Films: Partially Buried (1996); Partially Buried Continued (1997); Some Chance Operations (1999); Wavelinks (2002; English; Spanish and

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French subtitles), a set of seven films on electronically produced music and sound; Elsewhere? (2002); Here until October 2004 (2004); Relay (2005), a series of six videos; Climates and Paradoxes (2005; English; French and Spanish Subtitles); Selected Life Indexes (2005; English; Spanish version); Come Closer (2008: Portuguese and English; English and French subtitles); Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009; English; French subtitles), Excess (2009; English; French subtitles); Stills (2009; English and French versions); Animating Matter (2010); (3) cd-­rom s and Websites: The Digital Import/Export Funk Office (1996) and Code: Survey (2006); (4) Audio Works: Soundtrack for Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems (2002), a set of seven cd s; Sound Forest Folly (2004), a set of three cd s; Secret Soundtrack (2006; French; English); and Endless Dreams and Water Between (Sound Panels), eight-­channel installation (2009); (5) Space Poems: Space Poem #1 (2007); Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words) (2009); Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho) (2012); and Space Poem #4 (2013).

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2001

Situationist Text Dear b-­books, I’m writing this letter-­essay to you now in an attempt to at least sketch out the directions of the thoughts your invitation prompted. When first asked to contribute to this book I was flattered that you were thinking of me in relation to the Situationists. Much of what I’ve done can be seen as an examination and consideration of cultural politics and everyday life. But I was equally quizzical as well as unsure about what approach to take in terms of a response, as my delay in writing demonstrates. How much might I even have in common with the Situationists? How might any convergences or related aspirations have been the result of having indirectly absorbed their ideas which have been transmitted into other areas of culture, such as those via music? Punk or hardcore, for example. Although I had first encountered some version of Situationist notions as a student and seen some détourned films and comics, it is probably more the case that these ideas filtered into my consciousness more viscerally via music rather than via a studied attempt to follow their lead. I always felt I had a fuzzy grasp of what they were about, and that what they were about seemed to be a conflicted terrain. I always associated them with expulsions and purges of members. I was wary of what I imagined to be a male club, growing out of previous models like the College of Sociology, for example. But I was superficially informed. Now nearly a year has passed since your invitation. What have I thought? What have I learned? I have attempted to inform myself further, with the realization that expertise is not a goal. At least I wanted to be able to investigate the discourse around the Situationists and also to check whether my presumptions had any basis. Here is a title for an essay I can imagine writing: “Doing Things with Words: Anti-­Readers and the Experiential Non-­Book/Life-­Book?” But in-

stead of this essay I have some initial thoughts and further ruminations. My gut reaction was to imagine a fictional female Situationist protagonist. I sensed an absence of these in the literature in contrast to a prevalence of images of female bodies as spectacle. Yes, there was Michèle Bernstein, and she did write texts displaying an ironic wit which include, “In Praise of Pinot-­Gallizio,” yet she was usually referred to also as the girlfriend of Guy Debord, which for a time seemed to be a privileged position. I wondered how she felt. Guy Debord wasn’t usually referred to as the boyfriend of Michèle Bernstein, or was I reading in too much? There was also Jacqueline de Jong. I didn’t find very much information about her (and this book will change that), except some references to her publication of the Situationist Times between 1962–67, a Flash Art ad from the Brinkman Gallery in Amsterdam in 1985 for a painting of hers entitled “Upstairs-­Downstairs,” and an interview with Dieter Schrage from January 1998, “Jacqueline de Jong: Eine Frau in der Situationistischen Internationale.” Could the protagonist I wanted to imagine have the spirit of a blueswomen perhaps? This at first seemed like a wild leap, yet why not? I scavenged through my wonderings about this blueswoman figure who I came to reconsider while reading the book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, by Angela Y. Davis. The idea of an irreverent wandering woman seemed relevant to imagining this figure, and when reviewing this book I began trying to perceive of this woman’s complexity and myriad meanings. This is what I wrote in 1998 for a Spex review:1 I was not able to stop pondering the meaning of the blues women— who had inspired Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, to name a few, to produce works which as Davis says, “piqued my curiosity about the figures that had inspired such marvelously irreverent characters and moving portraits”—and the lyrics in relation to Davis’s own history as an icon of resistance, political prisoner, professor of philosophy, activist, and lover. Ruminating on the different material circumstances she had survived and reading lyrics about release and independence, or about turning one’s face to the wall, or wanting to jump off of the mountaintop, or being a rolling stone, or how sixty days can feel like sixty years in a cell made me think of aspects of what have been Angela Davis’s, and in turn other

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black women’s, realities. After her various books about political struggle I found intriguing her decision to focus on an aesthetic form, the blues in particular, which offers a range for exploration of emotion and, as she demonstrates, transmutation into art of the quotidian and material circumstances of black working class female culture—which include sexuality, retribution and hope. These expressions, as she states, have often been overshadowed by written texts of black middle class foremothers, although the blues women through their lyrics and lifestyles demonstrated new modes for living which were at variance with the dominant views on chaste domestic-­bound womanhood. But then I needed to imagine this figure in Europe in the mid to late 1950s through 1968. Also, I mentioned the “transmutation into art of the quotidian” and that in itself would have probably been up for deep questioning as well as the use of the autobiographical first-­person narrative. What might have been her conditions? Thinking about James Baldwin in Paris and reading some of what he wrote about his impressions during that time also made me wonder what kind of character might be possible. I also thought about Frantz Fanon and pulled The Wretched of the Earth off of my shelves once again. The Algerian War was again in the news because of a French general’s revelations of torture condoned by the French government. Of course people are not slogans, nor are they specimens solely of socio-­ economic conditions, and history takes place as people are living while what is written comes later and becomes known as history—often a history of the victors—if experiences don’t just vanish into archives of undigested news or evaporate over time as hearsay. But imagine Billy Holiday on a dérive or maybe more likely Angela Davis. Would either of them have been interested in talking to others in different parts of the city on walkie-­talkies, describing the neighborhoods they traversed? Would they have been stopped by Parisian gendarmes for breaking curfew, misapprehended as colonial subjects in the midst of their wanderings? Everyone in Paris, in those years, who was not, resoundingly, from the north of Europe was suspected of being Algerian; and the police were on every street corner, sometimes armed with machine guns. Turks, Greeks, Spaniards, Jews, Italians, American blacks, and Frenchmen from Marseilles, or Nice, were all under constant harassment, and we will never know how many people having

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not the remotest connection with Algeria were thrown into prison, or murdered, as it were, by accident.—James Baldwin, from No Name in the Street

The year is 1952. The issue of what circumstances affect one’s affinities for certain forms of participation does arise. Both of these women themselves became icons circulating in “the society of the spectacle.” Through thinking about both I think it has been possible to raise diverse questions about consumption and created need and hope. Their impact can be felt in a different way than that of the Situationists. “New situations” were created by both Holiday and Davis. Some of these occurred in the media. But this is an observation, not a judgment. And did they play along the way? Sometimes. When I thought of the female I’d like to imagine in terms of some of the Situationist propositions I came up with a cross between what were formerly known as riot grrrl stances, various versions of so-­called female transgressive behavior which involved play and pleasure with the attention to the various shades of the everyday as expressed by blueswomen. I have yet to realize such a character, but hope to in some genre. She will be as incorrect as the Situationists were. By that I mean that her impure desires and contradictions will be expressed. She will not be perfect, but she will be hopeful and critical of the existing regimes. She will circulate in the spaces formerly known as public. Her references will not be militaristic. In a conversation with Kristin Ross Henri Lefebvre said: “Well, ‘new situations’ was never very clear. When we talked about it, I always gave as an example—and they [the Situationists] would have nothing to do with my example—love.” In contrast, the character I imagine will be able to recognize that love can create “new situations.” Unfortunately I won’t be able to write further as you need this text now and not some years from now. Thank you for your patience. All the best, Renée

Notes Originally published in English and German in J.U.P., Situationistinnen und andere . . . (Berlin: b_books, 2001), 66–77. 1. See “Compared to What?” in this volume.

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Introductory Notes of a Reader and “A Contemporary Moment”

Introductory Notes of a Reader (2001) In thinking about this symposium,1 I thought of it as an event involving various forms of relation, our relations to time, our relations to our work, and our relations with each other. By “our” I mean to include all of us who are gathered here. The purpose for having a symposium seems to be to stimulate an active form of thinking with others about a topic around which there is mutual interest, despite the fact that sitting alone and reading is probably a more profound way of gaining knowledge, the kind of knowledge which can be gained in a symposium setting is of a different order, and for me it usually functions as a stimulus to continue reading. Before coming, I was interested in reading more about the different people who were involved in the event. So I was reading, for example, some writings I had read before of Allan Sekula and of Alex Alberro, as well as by Julian Stallabrass. I read different collections of writings and books they’d edited, as well as other things, and over the past months I was thinking about different terms that seem to appear a lot when reading contemporary journals and magazines and other sources. I was trying to get some sort of impression of what it is we’re doing here (on this planet?) contemporaneously, in some sense, and so I suggested the title “Contemporary Moments” for the symposium. The question of “What’s going on now?,” a recurring one in media, came up previously in an invitation to contribute to the French journal Multitudes, and I’m going to read from that text. But before doing so I wanted to mention some terms. A lot of the terms, when lifted out of their context, or if you reflect upon them, can seem quite strange, or to me they did, so I made a list of a lot

of different terms that seem quite common right now. For example, “site specificity,” that’s one that’s batted around quite frequently; “global,” in various forms; “platform,” I’ve used that one myself, intentionally, thinking about it as something that’s been used a lot, it’s everywhere; “services” is another one. “Democracy” is another one. “Democracy Unrealized” (couldn’t democracy itself be viewed as a paradox?) was the title of the first “platform” for Documenta 11, which took place in Vienna in March 2001. A slide was shown to us, of an aspect of that event, by Heimo Zobernig; “testimony” is another one; “conceptual,” that’s another one that’s been coming back and circulating in different areas, including music fields as well; “nomads,” I’ve been described in this category; “community,” it’s another one; “identity,” this one’s been circulating for a while, with varying associations in different contexts; “pilgrimage”; “universalist feminism,” I believe Slavoj Žižek used that term at the “platform” on “democracy” unrealized; “electronic capitalism,” “international civil society,” “deskilled” and “skilled areas,” “methodological struggles,” “disciplinary areas,” “cultural studies,” and “visual culture.” In certain culturally designated areas, these terms are being used by quite a few people, so I wanted to make a list based on my findings as a reader. I note my position as a reader in particular since during the past two years I’ve been reading texts in English in countries where German or Spanish is the dominant language. The way in which it’s possible for me to encounter texts is affected by an acute desire to test the meaning of the words in different contexts—probably influenced by the fact that I teach in English in a German-­speaking academy—almost as if I am translating them to myself in other conditions. These conditions also include shifting life conditions which can make once familiar terms appear strange, and terms which had not been heard before suddenly common place. I have some notes that are based on my reading. I’ll read you some of them. Some of the thoughts I had had to do with the trope of rediscovery which has been occurring in relation to conceptual art for example, and “cycles of absent flows,” another phrase which I noted, because there also seems to be quite a lot of discussion around the notion of “forms of return” as well as that of obsolescence. I used “return” in the title for my exhibition here, at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Returns: Tracing Lusitania. More words: “rediscovery,” “ruins,” “re-­examination,” “rewriting.” Did I mention “generosity” and “transpar104 Circuits of Exchange

ency,” or “radicality”? Lets see, “continual production,” the “information industry.” I was thinking about Phaidon, the book publishers, in terms of “information industry,” especially with the output of their Themes and Movements series. So amid all of this information, what I’ve been observing are also reduced histories, which are most evident in the most expensively produced and popularized forms of “history,” the ones more people will have access to and of which a far greater volume are published than any academic publication, like the above-­mentioned eye-­catching Phaidon series. Anyway, I’ve been describing a tendency I’ve observed, not a new one. Here are some quotes I collected during my reading. This one was found in Allan Sekula’s book Dismal Science, in an essay entitled “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation).”2 After reading the following Brecht quote, which Sekula quotes, I realized that Robert Smithson wrote a nearly identical passage in his statement “Cultural Confinement” for the Harald Szeemann–curated Documenta 5 exhibition catalogue from 1972, and it was thus interesting to note yet another instance of a return: The muddled thinking which overtakes musicians, writers and critics as soon as they consider their own situation has tremendous consequences to which too little attention is paid. For by imagining that they have got hold of an apparatus which in fact got hold of them they are supporting an apparatus which is out of their control. Another quote which I found interesting came again from Allan Sekula’s Dismal Science. When referring to a statement made by critic Dave Hickey, in his book Air Guitar, that “art and money never touch,” not even in Hickey’s experience as an art dealer, Sekula responds by saying: This is a pastoral fantasy, since it reduces the complexity of art-­world interactions to barter exchange between connoisseurs. In this sort of intellectual environment, simply to insist that social or economic life can or should in any way be represented now seems like an ethical reproach, as welcome as dragging in a dead cat.3 I found this comment quite relevant for thinking about “contemporary moments” and it meshed well with Allan’s mention of critics he refers to as the “fun police.” 12. Introductory Notes of a Reader and “A Contemporary Moment” 105

In terms of Alex Alberro’s recent collection of interviews that he co-­ edited with Patricia Norvell,4 I found of interest a mention of the book’s reception as well. Arthur Danto recently reviewed this collection, in Bookforum, which I usually read if it’s given to me. He’s describing, or sort of summarizing, the 1960s, and conceptual work, and he writes: ”Where the art object is eliminated, some documentation of the art idea is usually substituted,” Norvell writes. The “documents” are certainly objects, but the consensus is they are merely documents, not artworks themselves. They are not candidates for appreciation, but it is through them that the non-­object is appreciated, however that works. The airy nothings of Conceptual enactment left behind the uninflected Polaroid, the Xeroxed map, the scrawled or typewritten text, the tapes through which ownership of artworks could be transferred and collections formed and art books illustrated, and it is these documents that play a familiar role in exhibitions of Conceptual art.5 The article is called “Holes for Sale.” Danto also writes of the rise of the independent curator, and Harald (“Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,” 1969, Philip Morris–funded) Szeemann, this year’s Venice Biennale curator, is a case in point. He writes: “The exhibition was merging with the installation as a form of artistic expression.” So perhaps that could be another reason for the, at times, competitive atmosphere between curators and artists, one mentioned by Smithson in his Documenta 5 statement, and also a kind of preview to the so-­called “service” expectations. I found the collection compelling. As I gathered from reading the introduction, the interviews, done by Norvell in 1969 as a Hunter College graduate student, were languishing in her archives until Alex Alberro encouraged their publication. Danto also seemed moved in some way by the interviews and wrote: “The book is delicious for its purity, like water taken from somewhere deep in the earth, untouched by the modern world. As of now, the definition of art is still underway.” I, as well as Danto, was particularly attracted by the interview with Douglas Huebler. Here is a quote from Huebler from July 25, 1969: So then back to the point when I put the work outside. Wham! You know, there was the rest of the world, and trees were more interesting

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than the sculpture, and the sky was—and so forth. Unless—and this was the thing that really hit me—unless you framed the environment in which the sculpture existed outside, or made it huge. Now at that time, I had heard . . . Well, I can name some artists who were thinking in terms of wanting to make monuments as large as the Empire State Building. Ah, I won’t name them—there are a number of them, and that really turned me off because it just seems to me that the world is full of junk, anyway. . . . I don’t feel that the art has to be assertive. That is like, for me, the gesturing in Abstract Expressionism, for instance, or any number of romantic postures where you’re going to get attention by hook or by crook. . . . That wasn’t the purpose of my work. It was not to be an attention-­getting object. It was sort of . . . to create this sort of ongoing thing.6 I really liked that. So, this is the end of the notes section.

A Contemporary Moment: Thinking Art Encounters (2000) At this moment, if one were to gauge by the usual media which represents art, the notion of thinking in relation to art encounters might seem like an anathema.7 It might seem absolutely irrelevant. Or perhaps the idea of thinking, or the cliché of what thinking is and how it might function in relation to what art is assumed to be, might seem tedious. Some of the operative clichés circulating are, for example: 1. Art is borderless. 2. Thinking causes overseriousness and the deflation of fun and beauty, which are equated with aesthetic pleasure. 3. To think means to think too much, and is in conflict with experiencing (which is thought of in binary terms and is thus associated with feeling, i.e., feeling/experiencing vs. thinking). The assertion that thought is absent from associations with art might be countered by drawing one’s attention to an increasing appearance of references to science in art spheres. Science stands in for thought. These appearances take the form of exhibitions ranging from those which deal with

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museological aspects of science, bringing a nineteenth-­century classificatory apparatus into the 21st century—along with gee-­whiz science experiments made large and expensive—to those digitally inspired low- to high-­ tech interpretations of the current state of science, linked with technology and the legibility of codes. These take on issues such as gene technology, bodily transformations, or some aspect of the environment, natural and artificial, often existing as curious byproducts of hard scientific research, meant to circulate in an art economy. Words or signs are also sometimes meant to stand in for thinking, or to trace its path. This is another aspect of now. Various systems and diagrams of data coalesce in visual fields. Questions such as “If we get equal pleasure from the visual and the verbal, is it really necessary to choose one over the other?” once again allude to the assumed desire to conflate art with pleasure. Is this insistence on a generalized “pleasure” as a dominant factor of the reception process particularly indicative of the current moment? Some of what can be observed at this moment are returns and references to these varying returns. This has been said of other times. Is history repeating itself as farce? This does not seem to always be the case. There are a number of repetitions, for example the renewed importance of painting after several previous periodic assertions of the “death of painting.” It seems evident now that many things continually return and coexist. Assertions of neo anything at this point seem inadequate. How to describe now? Each time I’m tempted to create a description of the current moment in contemporary art, which looms as a daunting and highly subjective task, rather than attempt to create a factual survey, I instead feel compelled to produce a fiction. This could take on the form of a novel, with the option of becoming a screenplay, with the possibility of various merchandising prospects. This thought arises often when walking through New York’s Chelsea or while attending various gala events, such as the opening of Tate Modern, and while engaging in conversation at smaller gatherings in numerous settings in their aftermath. Even this reflex seems particularly indicative of now. What does it mean to desire to shift the live scenario of an art event almost immediately upon encountering it into a fictionally represented one, as if in reflex to the encounter one has in the present? Why this desire to mediate it via a popular form such as a novel or a film? These are questions I repeatedly ask myself. The fictional scenario so far has remained in my head where I can embellish and alter it continually. Fixing it into a form with a 108 Circuits of Exchange

precise beginning and end leads to fears of creating a satire which might appear dated by the time it were published or produced. This fear is linked to the acknowledgment of the rapidity of change now and the limited attention which is given to any moment today. These circumstances in turn reflect the proximity of art and fashion at this time. Fashion, as in style or what is in style, or in fashion, and that which is presented as art have become interwoven in a shared consumerist frenzy, where obsolescence is necessary in order to keep the cycles of capital in motion. This aspect has taken on a pronounced relevance in recent years. This turn was noted in an article in a section of Artforum entitled “Critical Reflections,” by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh which appeared in January 1997. Since then this is not merely a melancholic reflection, but appears as an inescapable fact. The pages of Artforum, as Buchloh mentioned, and since then many exhibitions, demonstrate this phenomenon. Armani at the Guggenheim? But of course. What does the insistence on pleasure leave out? What other kinds of returns besides those to painting and an increasing production of luxury objects are in motion? What is the broader field of art now? Responses to questions of repetition seem particularly in order when thinking about this time as a moment following the moment(s) of declared post-­modernity, which in itself was another reframing of the contemporary. Questions of pleasure and thinking arise continuously when examining what has been designated historically as conceptual art practices. A historicization of this work has been gaining steam in the past years, leaving some to wonder whether it is being canonized. That would by definition allude to a calcification of an imagined radical potential. But it seems that the radical aspirations are being reexamined and different interpretations for the present are being made. How does all of this exist amid what appears to be a nexus of entertainment and art? What is popular, and that by extension means what is spectacular, seems to be the primary basis for determining value at present in the mainstream. This is not extraordinary. It does again beckon the question, how to think art and whether pleasure cancels out thinking? Visual pleasure was already batted about in discussions of film, feminism, and “the gaze” in the seventies and eighties. Issues of visuality were also discussed in reference to what was called conceptual art. Entertainment and corporate interests are at this moment predominant in terms of acknowledging and analyzing what it is we encounter when we enter a mu12. Introductory Notes of a Reader and “A Contemporary Moment” 109

seum or gallery now, as well as what directions exist beyond these spaces and the other ways in which attention is managed, to allude to Jonathan Crary’s analysis of how cultural forms function.8 All one need do is read the descriptions of art events in the listings of Time Out or flip through the pages of Artforum to see a cross section of the nexus between entertainment, art, and corporate interests. In this arena, is it possible or necessary to think? I would argue that it is. I would also argue that a difference which one can note between actual entertainment and art is that the pleasure quotient is often higher for forms such as movies or music based on their accessibility and desirability in everyday life in comparison to baroque attempts in the art arena to meet entertainment’s standards, some of which include spectacular effects in galleries or in museums meant to make one forget oneself and the surroundings. So what’s left? The other conversations which are not usually highlighted in major media, but which take place often in conferences, in academic settings, or in independent contemporary art spaces have been focusing on “new forms of production,” “money nations,” “culture clubs,” the circulation of capital, and notions of work and leisure. These mirror aspects of discussions related to recent attempts by activists at the disruption of the assumed smooth functioning of capitalist markets which have since been publicized, especially since the demonstration in November 1999 in Seattle against the World Trade Organization and the imf . These discussions have gained fuel via Internet use. The activist activities and their intersection in the cultural realm also cross into entertainment, yet the forms of this entertainment can be described as that of the prosumer variety, i.e., that the division between the audience and the producer is permeable and involves a back-­and-­forth relation. One example, which has been taken up in different locales and with varying motivations in recent years, are free public parties: This type of entertainment, encompassing a mobile sound system which produces amplified repetitive beats at a rate of 130 to 180 bpm for a crowd that dances oblivious of a sense of time, has become a common way of spending one’s leisure time in Britain 1997. Yet one needs the approval of the legislative authorities to be able to put this into practice.9 In terms of examining where the intersection of entertainment, pleasure, and thought could meet the challenge is to realize that productions 110 Circuits of Exchange

involving all of these elements exist in areas which are not necessarily the officially sanctioned ones for art activities. What is assumed to be art has been changing for some time (definitely through the entire twentieth century), although in the mainstream media it would be assumed that art still refers to painting and sculpture, with an acknowledgment of the effect of digital culture on both, but what is given value falls still into these divisions. Challenges to these areas come from other directions such as in the realm of sound and music, which has been taken up noticeably by various art institutions in different countries in exhibitions in the year 2000, such as Bed of Sound at P.S. 1/Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in shows in London and Vienna, in which sound was packaged for the art realm, but here is an alternate scenario: Soaring to popularity at the same time that immigrant populations in London and Paris faced increasing hostility and even attacks from anti-­foreign thugs, these recordings demonstrate the complicated connections and contradictions that characterize the links between popular music and social life. Audiences and artists in these cities carried the cultural collisions of every day life into music, at one and the same time calling attention to ethnic differences and demonstrating how they might be transcended. Sophisticated fusions of seemingly incompatible cultures in music made sense to artists and audiences in part because these fusions reflected their lived experiences in an inter-­ cultural society.10 Different forms of activity continue which involve combining thought and varieties of pleasure with creativity and which address some of the areas of interest one can observe in highly promoted art palaces, but in ways which provide the dimensions absent from situations so dependent on maximizing capital gain by promoting “feel good” projects for a presumed general audience to make a profit as well as to stave off the exorbitant rents of realtors, as is the case in New York and in London. One example of another form of activity is suggested by a group who produced the publication Made in Barcelona, which presents an attempt at expressing a critical view toward the expansion and “regeneration” of Barcelona in its move toward becoming yet another global city. The group, which had no name at the time of this writing but which consists of people working in various professions and areas and who work with existing groups 12. Introductory Notes of a Reader and “A Contemporary Moment” 111

in local communities, has managed to circulate its perspective in major circulating newspapers, for example El País, and in turn it has been active in attempting to affect public opinion. They state what is not emphasized in the boosteristic slogans which advocate “growth.” In response to an initiative to dismantle a working-­class neighborhood for international corporate expansion they wrote: Forum 2004 consists of the radical transformation of the Sant Adrià del Besós–La Mina area, and the celebration of an ambitious multi-­ cultural event which sanctions this transformation with the ethical and cultural stamp of approval of the fashionable global-­village concept. This is multiculturalism à la Benetton, a formal cosmopolitanism, a postcard-­style technological modernisation in which citizen participation is nothing more than mere fiction. The aim is to hide the specific economic, urban and real estate operations in the shadows of the protective umbrella of generic cultural legitimacy. Rather than acquiesce to tactics used to promote enforced privatization, the group takes issue with the rosy image of what is projected for Barcelona’s future and focuses specifically on the use of culture as a tool in the same media areas in which these projections circulate. Platform, a project I organized in New York at the Swiss Institute (from November 2000 to January 2001), is another attempt at locating a possibility for thought and creativity in a social space. Questions about the processes of producing work, what forms this work takes now, how work and leisure activities cross in the cultural domain, in addition to ways in which we can be in social relation, all fuel this project. From the description: One of the reasons for organizing Platform is to create a situation which demonstrates/allows the possibility of working on what one is really interested in in an enabling way and not merely as a reactive cog to an art system which seems to function as if it’s run by an invisible hand which determines tastes by bureaucratic corporatised interests. Platform is an attempt to move away from the constant malaise which people often complain about: “nothing really interesting is going on (in the art scene)”; or what interests some (that which has the maximum exchange value for a moment) is unbearable for others, who

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might see themselves as occupying a place on the spectrum of something like oppositionality, although that term itself may seem an inadequate way of describing the varied ways in which they perceive themselves. An examination of a larger field for working (“multiple frames” [Craig Owens] or “circuits” [Cildo Meireles]) and an investigation into the legacy of historic conceptualists combined with a current rethinking of endeavors involving activation have been stimuli for this project. The ways in which productions are now crossing and how forms of production which challenge disciplinary boundaries continue is another focus. There is also a crossing of locations and resources stimulated by where it’s possible to generate interest. The rules are not fixed. All of the invited producers—which include small publishers, architects, filmmakers, sound producers, engineers, web designers, philosophers, historians, geographers, and writers—produce works which resist being gulped mindlessly. They’re not afraid or embarrassed to strain their brains or limits. Tension is desired. Yet their audiences/ receivers are varied. Platform functions as a vehicle for idea transport and circulation, a way of encouraging movement through the ideas and desires of those stimulated by the above-­stated possibilities and the website (freeagentmedia.net) functions as a contact point for ongoing investigations. . . . Michel Claura: Why do you make art? Lawrence Weiner: Art continues to be a viable medium of presentation for certain conclusions (issues).11 Somehow the reflex to represent a contemporary moment in relation to art as a fiction continues. What might a synopsis of the novel-­to-­become-­ a-­screenplay include? It would focus on interlocking stories. Action would occur in New York’s Chelsea, Williamsburg, Long Island City, London’s East End and Bankside, Berlin, and various Biennale locations: Venice, São Paulo, Kwangju, Johannesburg, Havana, etc. More cultural capitals would pop up simultaneously in unassuming cities around the world. All of the following would be interwoven: Various emerging exhibitions in Eastern Europe. Award ceremonies, i.e.,

12. Introductory Notes of a Reader and “A Contemporary Moment” 113

Hugo Boss emceed by actors. Exhibitions involving car manufacturers and fashion designers. Scandinavian initiatives and cultural bridges. Political unrest amid cultural production. Massive demonstrations against the imf and World Bank, with situationist and conceptual art strategies comprising some of the repertoire of attacks. People from many nations attempting the miracle model, i.e., the Scandinavian miracle, the Swiss miracle, the Prague miracle, etc. Miracles designated by national or regional allegiances as marketing devices to move into more prominent international economic and cultural positions. Contradictory positions. Progressive projects sponsored by corporations with multiple and conflicting interests. The divisions between powerful commerce and liberal sentiments would be blurred. Contradictions would multiply throughout the book-­to-­be-­a-­movie. Alliances between people of widely divergent interests who shared the need for monetary survival and who meet on an international art-­academic-­media circuit of symposia and exhibitions would be common. Pop culture would be a main referent. Movies would be the main stimulant, in addition to new restaurants, fashion designers and real estate. Actors would be the most prized people. Tributes would be paid to film directors for giving people a way to fill their time and by extension a reason for being. This would have a special significance for those aspiring wannabe directors who were for the moment laboring in web design sweatshops.

Notes Originally published in From Work to Text: Dialogues on Practise and Criticism in Contemporary Art, edited by Jürgen Bock (Lisbon: Centro Cultural de Belém, 2002), 245–54. A Portuguese version, “Notas Introdutórias de um Leitor e ‘Um Momento Contemporâneo,’” appears in the same volume, 233–44. 1. Presentation for A Contemporary Moment, a symposium held in June 2001 at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon. Participants included Harun Farocki, Allan Sekula, Alexander Alberro, Heimo Zobernig, Sabeth Buchman, João Fernandes, Julian Stallabrass, and Diedrich Diederichsen, among others. 2. The essay was published in the Massachusetts Review, December 1978, and the quote appears in Allan Sekula, Dismal Science (Normal: University Galleries, Illinois State University, 1999), 127. The Bertolt Brecht quote used in Sekula’s essay is from “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre: (1930),” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, translated and edited by John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 34.

114 Circuits of Exchange

3. Sekula, Dismal Science, 237. 4. Patricia Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner, edited by Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 5. Arthur Danto, “Holes for Sale,” Bookforum, Summer 2001, 43. 6. Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 137. 7. The complete essay was published originally in French as “Un moment contemporain: Penser les rencontres artistiques,” Multitudes (Paris), 4 (March 2001): 65–73. A modified English version appeared as “Obsolescence = Mutation Unrealized?,” October, no. 100 (Spring 2002): 76–77. 8. Jonathan Crary, “Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Edison,” in Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945, edited by Kerry Brougher (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995). 9. Hillegonda Rietveld, “Repetitive Beats: Free Parties and the Politics of Contemporary DiY Dance Culture in Britain,” in DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain, edited by George McKay (London: Verso, 1998), 243. 10. George Lipsitz, “Immigration and Assimilation: Rai, Reggae, and Bhangramuffin,” in Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1997), 119. 11. Michel Claura, “Interview with Lawrence Weiner [1971],” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1999), 237.

12. Introductory Notes of a Reader and “A Contemporary Moment” 115

13

1991

Trading on the Margin If the time for the “other” has finally arrived, why can’t I just sit back and enjoy it? I’ve had friends (other black artists) say to me, “Now is our time, we’d better cash in.” This time is supposed to be signaled by increased media coverage of black artists (some large survey articles in the New York Times and forums in major art magazines have posed questions that are supposed to seem fresh, like “Is the art world racist?”). Shows in major art institutions are including artists of color—even if in some cases they’ve required that the artists of color show some visual evidence of their “cultural roots,” a passport of their difference (so that the periphery and the center can be easily distinguished, yet have a dialogue). Artists who’ve been active for the past twenty years, Adrian Piper and David Hammons, are now becoming widely known in the commercial art world, and of course Martin Puryear was the U.S. representative at the São Paulo Biennale. Somehow, though, I feel queasy about embracing what can at times seem to be a trend, even when there is genuine interest in the work. Since I never designated myself as “other,” it seems dishonest to attempt to fit into a rubbery mold of someone else’s making. This fervor over the “other” reminds me of previous black cultural boom times, like the 1920s and the 1960s, although now there is no specific movement around one self-­defined group—and even when there was, the media and the role of certain spokespeople were crucial to shaping these “movements.” There have been a few attempts by writers to insinuate that a resurgence of “cult-­nat” power is on the rise, but there is no New Negro, and Black power is just one more stratum of the Rainbow Coalition. In “Blackness Can: A Quest for Aesthetics,” James Emanuel, writing at the end of the 1960s, announced the death of the New Negro, forty years after Alain Locke’s announcement of “his” birth. As Emanuel writes, this is what had happened to “him” in the intervening years:

In the 1930’s the Depression emaciated him. In the 1940’s, global warfare drained the energies and diverted the attitudes vital to his recovery. In the 1950’s fitful surges toward racial integration deluded him into believing that the question of his death had become less relevant. When the 1960’s began, his grandchildren waved him a respectful but apprehensive farewell from their fiery buses and grim lunch counters in the South. On the verge of the 1970’s they threw away his clothes, his hair, and his name.1 I cite this bit of history to recall the emphatic claims that have been made in the recent past, so that we may better analyze what is happening in the present. During the 1920s and 1960s—both eras of prosperity— countercultural “white” America enjoyed heydays which were largely fed by their exposure to, and in some cases consumption of, art forms introduced by African Americans. The current celebration of the “other” began during the Reagan boom years, but it didn’t really hit the art market until recession was under way. Perhaps this “new” visibility is really the result of a gradual accumulation in the media of work by Black cultural producers, many of whom have taken an increasingly active role in shaping and disseminating their own images. During the 1980s we witnessed the rise to superstardom of Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Prince, Spike Lee, Robert Townsend, Bill Cosby, Jesse Jackson, Arsenio Hall, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Denzel Washington, Bryant Gumbel, Mr. T, Tracy Chapman, Quincy Jones, Lionel Ritchie, Whitney Houston, Living Colour (the band), and such rap artists as Run d.m.c. and Public Enemy. A recognizable fascination with those colorful people of color began seeping into the mainstream movies with a boho-­music edge, like Diva, The Blues Brothers, and a slew of Jonathan Demme flicks—Something Wild, Married to the Mob, and Stop Making Sense (the last being a Talking Heads movie made with the active “multiculturalist” David Byrne). This decade even witnessed several Black Miss Americas, albeit twenty years after the status of this symbol had been undercut by feminist protest. In 1990 we saw more Black filmmakers popping up on the mainstream movie and tv scene: the Hudlin brothers, Charles Burnett, and Keenen Ivory Wayans are the best-­known examples. Yet when I try to add up all the names from the various fields I don’t yet detect an avalanche in terms of serious power shifts.

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. . . It is dizzying how frequently the term “multicultural” is being batted about in so many institutional settings lately. Now when I hear the buzzword I find myself cringing in anticipation of what herculean task it will be put to next. Is the designation “multicultural” itself a “mixed blessing”? Is a new kind of confining categorization being inaugurated? While in the midst of my perpetual questioning of the motives of some art institutions’, art dealers’, and art writers’ piqued interest in “issues of multiculturalism,” I began to wonder if my resistance to “multiculturalism” was a manifestation of a Shelby Steele–like fear of art-­world affirmative action. But to my great relief, as I read Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures,2 I realized that I was not alone in the sense of ambivalence I’d been feeling. I was grateful to be able to read essays in which the complex contradictions of living, for those of us who don’t fit into the imaginary norm, are brought to the fore. Rather than limiting the scope of this book to well-­trodden territories, the editors—Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-­ha, and Cornel West—have chosen essays that risk traveling into areas where it is most effective to feel one’s way through and around many curves, more dense vegetation, and sudden cliffs rather than to forge blindly on. That is not to say that strong arguments aren’t presented. One of the most interesting aspects of Out There is its mixture of voices from around the globe and across lines of sexual preference, as well as class. It is rare that such a variety of perspectives, spanning different disciplines and addressing diverse audiences, is brought together in so successful a blend. As I read the book I felt that indeed I did have dialogues going beyond some of the usual boundaries. The possibility of this sort of camaraderie can easily be forgotten when one is “out there” participating in various kinds of rat races. While the book stresses critical perspectives—and these were a welcome contrast to the emotive responses which are sometimes encouraged in documentation of the “periphery”—the most theoretical work is balanced by the inclusion of essays describing personal experiences and observations. There are no correct lines to follow, and there are differences of opinion between authors in the book. A unified positive image of the creative “other” is not part of this book’s agenda. 13. Trading on the Margin 121

The book is divided into three sections. The first establishes a critical framework for dealing with “marginalization;” the second describes different approaches to identity; and the third provides examples of ways to resist, mess with, and move through and around the dominant culture. The three categories are fluid divisions. As Cornel West relates in the first essay, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” the title Out There is a reminder that the artists and critics of whom West speaks must “struggle and stay, as those brothers and sisters in the block say, ‘out there.’” The ivory tower isn’t a viable option, even if it might provide a temptation. West poses provocative questions that may make even the most down cultural producers—or, as he puts it, “talented (and usually privileged) contributors to culture who desire to align themselves with demoralized, demobilized, depoliticized, and disorganized people in order to empower and enable social action”—pause and reevaluate. He acknowledges the trickiness of the task which he has indicated for these pioneers. The points he raises provide a useful introduction to the maze of problems and strategies listed in later essays. For example, how does one work within the institutions one wants to change? West is adept at providing summaries of various historical trends and fond of outlining specific phases through which those who practice the new politics of difference might pass. First he describes some of the characteristics of this mode: Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing.3 When describing the “existential challenge,” he puts the question plainly: “How does one acquire the resources to survive and the cultural capital to thrive as a critic or artist?” That is the question of the hour. Resources include the self-­confidence, discipline, and perseverance necessary to continue to produce without relying on “mainstream” attention—or, I would add, in spite of it. He discerns four basic ways in which people of color can proceed as producers of representations in the “court of criticism and art,” some less attractive than others. I will simply list these categories and let

122 Encounters

you ponder them: there is the “Booker T. Temptation,” the “Talented Tenth Seduction,” the “Go-­It-­Alone Option,” and lastly there is the possibility of being a “Critical Organic Catalyst.” Read the book to find out the details. . . . Some of the essays in Out There are familiar from other collections or journals; some were published or revised especially for this book. It is a relief to find various essays gathered here which had previously required ferreting from hard-­to-­find journal issues. In addition to the collected essays, there is a valuable bibliography. As I eyed the table of contents it was difficult to decide what to read first, so great was my desire to receive what seemed like food for the hungry. The list is a stellar arrangement of authors who may have followings in their individual areas but might not be as well known to the broader public— although Toni Morrison provides a notable exception. Those of you who think of her as primarily a writer of fiction will be rewarded with a glimpse into her skills as an essayist. Before losing myself in descriptions of the essays, I want to mention— in case you might be wondering—that the reference in the title to “marginalization and contemporary cultures” does not refer only to people of color, gays, or women. Some “other” voices are also included. It is important to realize, as the essays in Out There stress, the uses to which the divisions “margin” and “center” are put. In some instances, as Trinh T. Minh-­ ha notes: The margins, our sites of survival, become our fighting grounds and their site for pilgrimage. Thus, while we turn around and reclaim them as our exclusive territory, they happily approve, for the divisions between margin and center should be preserved, and as clearly demarcated as possible, if the two positions are to remain intact in their power relations.4 So the confusion of margin and center is an especially frightening prospect to those for whom power is central. While I flipped through the book I became intrigued by the images which run throughout the text. Selected by Félix González-­Torres, they are themselves a visual text and can be viewed separately or as a counterpoint

13. Trading on the Margin 123

to the written texts. Especially affecting are the childhood photos of everyone involved in the making of the book. At first I thought, “This is a little bit sappy,” but as I looked more closely at their expressions and the settings in which they appeared I began to imagine these formidable intellects playing games, stamping their feet, or being intent children I might have liked to know. This diversion was a voyeuristic pleasure. The second section of Out There, “Wild Tongues: Affirming Identities,” was the one I found most readily accessible; it was the part I turned to for an instantaneous fix of reaffirmation, or what’s known as a “reality check.” These essays didn’t function simply as mirrors, though. Instead, I discovered the ways in which impressions I’d shared with the authors were filtered through their varying perceptions. Because of my interest in “color” and its genealogy, which I refer to in my work, I eagerly turned to “Complexion” by Richard Rodriguez and “Black Hair/Style Politics” by Kobena Mercer. Rodriguez’s discussion of the range of skin shades in his family, which, he says, reflects “Mexico’s confused colonial past,” reminded me of my own African-­American family’s varieties of tints and tones. Black hair is the second most charged sign of difference next to complexion. One is often expected to have a “position” on hair, and this is supposed to provide a gauge as to how politically correct (p.c .) one is. Kobena Mercer messes with the straightened/natural dichotomy and shows how both are cultural constructions. Straightened hair doesn’t necessarily connote whiteness, and dreadlocks (or Afros, for that matter) don’t indubitably mean blackness, but both do designate a desire for self-­styling. Also questioning the stability of p.c . notions, Martha Gever describes her ambivalence about the idea of a fixed lesbian identity: What attracts me to questions about how cultural identities are produced is the same as what repels me: ambivalence about being a member of a caste which is regularly ritualistically derided and denied. Having marched in various Gay Pride Days and felt exhilarated by those events, having enjoyed the camaraderie of friends and strangers in lesbian bars, at poetry readings and dinner parties, having stayed up all night reading maudlin lesbian romance novels, having watched innumerable lesbian-­produced films and videotapes, having written articles and lectured on lesbian culture, read lesbian schol-

124 Encounters

arly literature and followed lesbian political debates, I still find myself ambivalent.5 Gever’s essay raises numerous questions for which she doesn’t provide answers, because the questions she asks invite multiple opinions, some of which she opts to include in her discussion. She ends by inviting the reader to continue the questioning process. Her approach differs from that of Monique Wittig, whose essay “The Straight Mind” makes the adamant claim that “it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women.” I realized that Wittig is coming out of a perspective developed by French feminists, but I would be curious to get Gever’s opinion on that statement, as well as that of others Gever mentions, such as Jewelle Gomez. Is it possible that the “straight mind” is really as fixed a concept as the essay’s title suggests? I could continue by discussing each essay in this section, but I’ll reluctantly conclude by mentioning Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Anzaldúa is a poet as well as a prose writer: I always find myself reading her work aloud in order to feel the way the Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Chicano Spanish, Tex-­Mex, and pachuco (caló) words sound intertwined with standard English words into English, so you have to figure out the meaning based on the context presented in the sentence or paragraph. You enter her turf when you read her work, and if you can hang, fine; if you can’t, it’s your loss (although you could try to use a dictionary). Here’s an example: Yet the struggle of identities continues, the struggle of borders is our reality still. One day the inner struggle will cease and a true integration take place. In the meantime, tenémos que hacer la lucha. ¿Quién está protegiendo los ranchos de mi gente? ¿Quién está tratando de cerrar la fisura entre la india y el blanco en nuestra sangre? El Chicano, si, el Chicano que anda como un ladrón en su propia casa.6 The power of language to terrorize and to subvert becomes viscerally clear when you’re traveling through her writing. Imagine yourself in a place where you don’t know the language, where you’re constantly asked to speak their language and punished for speaking your own.

13. Trading on the Margin 125

. . . Before concluding I must mention the first and third sections of the book— “Other Questions: Critical Contexts” and “Marginalia: Displacement and Resistance.” Although I happened to be a bit more familiar with some of the essays in the first and third parts, rereading them was rewarding, similar to renewing a relationship with someone you’d known in Cleveland but who seemed changed because you were now in Rome. Seeing “What Is a Minor Literature?” by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the first section along with Simon Watney’s “Missionary Positions: aids , Africa, and Race,” as well as John Yau’s essay on the Museum of Modern Art’s interpretation of Wilfredo Lam’s “Please Wait by the Coatroom,” made it possible to perceive links between them that would not otherwise have been apparent. Regarding section three, I’ve found that Trinh T. Minh-­ha’s essay “Cotton and Iron” seems to encapsulate the ideas raised in that section, and thus will hint at what can be attained in more depth by reading neighboring pieces by Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Teshome H. Gabriel, and bell hooks, to name only some of the authors. Trinh manages to insert quotations of stories, novels, Zen tenets, and essays from a vast range of sources into her writing in a way that creates a dialogue between the texts within her text. Some of the places she wanders in her essay carry me back to questions I raised in the beginning of this review, about the viability of the term “multiculturalism.” I expressed a fear that new strictures for limited identities are being created with the circulation of this term. Perhaps a question she poses addresses my anxiety at the erection of yet one more box to be placed in: Trinh speaks of “the necessity of renaming in order to un-­name. The challenge is thus: how can one re-­ create without re-­circulating domination?” “Progressive” Western intellectuals, she elaborates, extol the concept of decolonization and continuously invite into their fold “the challenge of the Third World.” Yet, they do not seem to realize the difference when they find themselves face to face with it—a difference which does not announce itself, which they do not quite anticipate and cannot fit into any single varying compartment of their catalogued world; a difference they keep on measuring with inadequate sticks designed for their own morbid purpose. When they confront the

126 Encounters

challenge “in the flesh,” they naturally do not recognize it as a challenge. Do not hear, do not see. They promptly reject it as they assign it to their one-­place-­fits-­all “other” category and either warily explain that it is “not quite what we are looking for” and that they are not the right people for it; or they kindly refer it to other “more adequate” whereabouts such as the “counter-­culture,” “smaller independent,” “experimental” margins.7 . . . Out There indicates possible routes for those “New World bricoleurs” who take up the banner of the “new cultural politics of difference” of which Cornel West spoke. There is no clear map to follow, yet whether exile or nomad, one can be stimulated, comforted, and encouraged by the voices of fellow travelers. Perhaps this book will help you, as it did me, fuel up before going back “out there.”

Notes Originally published in Transition, no. 52 (1991): 124–32. 1. James Emanuel, “Blackness Can: A Quest for Aesthetics,” in The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle Jr. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 182. 2. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-­ha, and Cornel West, eds., Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, mit Press, 1990). 3. Ibid., 19. 4. Ibid., 330. 5. Ibid., 191. 6. Ibid., 210. 7. Ibid., 330.

13. Trading on the Margin 127

14

1991

Democracy in Question Every Sunday when I was a child I sat in church and listened to the pastor— my uncle—deliver his “text” for the day. He would begin by citing the key biblical passage, then pluck out one word from it, such as “salvation.” He would ask, “What is the meaning of salvation?” Everyone knew the question was rhetorical, yet the quiet vehemence with which he asked it, and the long, measured pause between the question and his response—which might be followed by yet another question—made you sweat and feel responsible for the weight of the word suspended above you. You had time to wonder what your answer might be if he suddenly snatched you out of your torpor and plopped you in the pulpit behind a waiting microphone to face a curious congregation. Even if you thought you knew the meaning of the isolated word, his method of interrogation, known in some circles as the Socratic method, could give even the cockiest savant pause. In retrospect, this well-­worn strategy still seems effective. At the beginning of a sermon, or in this case a discussion, it is necessary to understand which definition is being used, so that what follows will not degenerate into babel. Well, my text for today is Democracy: A Project by Group Material. Democracy. Before proceeding, I must ask, What is this thing called democracy? Let us turn to Raymond Williams’s useful Keywords to check out how this common term has been used culturally and historically. A description of democracy warrants six pages, not including cross-­references to Anarchism, Class, Common, Equality, Liberal, Masses, Popular, Representative, Revolution, Socialism, and Society. Williams’s first sentence warns that, “Democracy is a very old word, but its meanings have always been complex.” What I find most interesting and pertinent to the discussion on which I am about to embark is the distinction Williams makes between what he

calls the two modern meanings of democracy. Democracy was thought to be a radical term until the mid-­nineteenth century, one signifying “‘uncontrolled’ popular power.” The notion of a representative democracy was developed in part to quell this unbridled force. Worth quoting is Williams’s description of the divergence of meaning: In the socialist tradition democracy continued to mean popular power: a state in which the interests of the majority of the people were paramount and in which these interests were practically exercised and controlled by the majority. In the liberal tradition, democracy meant open election of representatives and certain conditions (democratic rights, such as free speech) which maintained the openness of election and political argument. These two conceptions, in their extreme forms, now confront each other as enemies.1 He goes on to say that these modern meanings are not seen as historical variations, but each is viewed as the “only true meaning” while the alternative use is seen as “propaganda or hypocrisy.” This brings me to Group Material’s Democracy project. What exactly was this project and what definitions of democracy were being invoked? The book Democracy is the record of a two-­year endeavor by the artists’ collective, whose members at the time were Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, and Félix Gónzalez-­Torres. The group was approached by the Dia Art Foundation in 1987 to do a project on their SoHo space on Wooster Street from September 1988 to January 1989, as part of a series of “town meetings.” The collective, which is known for its collaborative efforts with various communities, took up the challenge of determining how to function most effectively within a sequestered, economically privileged art space. The historical moment influenced the group’s choice of subject matter. It was an election year. Eight years under Reagan had frustrated and angered activists as well as disenfranchised citizens. The possibility of affecting the future by participating in the electoral process seemed a distant dream, yet abandoning the process seemed too bleak a gesture. Group Material was wary about embarking on the project in a rarefied art atmosphere, but under the circumstances, it looked like a useful opportunity: One of the first questions we asked was: Why are they asking us? To us, the Dia Art Foundation signified “exclusive,” “white,” “esoteric,” and

14. Democracy in Question 129

“male,” whereas we had always attempted to redefine culture around an opposing set of terms: “inclusive,” “multicultural,” “nonsexist,” and “socially relevant.” In general, we see ourselves as the outspoken distant relative at the annual reunion who can be counted on to bring up the one subject no one wants to talk about.2 Rather than dismissing the art context, Group Material decided to grapple with it. Crucial to their process is the questioning of every aspect of culture. They often return to a set of key questions: What politics inform accepted understandings of art and culture? Whose interests are served by such cultural conventions? How is culture made, and for whom is it made? The collective attempted to broaden art-­world discussions by focusing on four areas significantly affected by what is referred to throughout the book as the “crisis in democracy.” These areas were education, electoral politics, cultural participation, and aids . To deal with these issues, practitioners and activists familiar with these subjects—but representing different professions and varying viewpoints—were asked to participate in collaborative “roundtable” discussions. The information garnered in these discussions was used to organize exhibitions and develop agendas for the open town meetings. The structure of the book follows this format, with the addition of essays reprinted from various books and periodicals—including, for example, an interview between Bill Moyers and Noam Chomsky, an article by Erma Bombeck, and a speech delivered at an Act Up rally by Vito Russo. These are interspersed between the roundtable discussion that opens each section and the subsequent Town Meeting. There are also a smattering of visual aids scattered throughout the book, ranging from reproductions of some of the art in the exhibitions to comics, flyers, ads, and pertinent photos. A useful resource guide to organizations is provided at the back of Democracy, as well as an eclectic bibliography. What I most appreciate about this book are the conflicts and contradictions it contains, which are discussed frequently by the contributors and the project participants. The first section is composed of a series of introductions that comprise the first 43 of Democracy’s 313 pages, but that’s quite all right. Rather than being bored with this lengthy drumroll, I found it informative and amusing. I became intrigued with the various voices—those of Yvonne Rainer, Brian Wallis, David Deitcher, and the members of Group

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Material—all trying to discern the effectiveness of cultural activism—­ excellently defined by Deitcher—within an elite art-­world setting. Throughout the book, various participants express ambivalence about the usefulness of town meetings in SoHo. Filmmaker Yvonne Rainer mentions the dearth of people of color at the “Cultural Participation” meeting. The meeting’s “prevailing whiteness,” she asserts, “is indicative of the ongoing racial inequities in the art world.” Regarding the question of audience, Brian Wallis argues that “the principal audience for any exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation is going to be an art-­world one,” and that the purpose of the project was to create an atmosphere in which strategies could be devised to “involve those at present unaffected by the work artists do.” David Deitcher is the most critical in his description of the Democracy project. In his essay “Social Aesthetics” (a title he attributes to the late curator and cultural activist William Olander, to whom the book is dedicated), Deitcher provides a history of Group Material’s practices, describing the term “cultural activism” in relation to Althusserian Marxism. He reminds us, however, that it is the Jeffersonian definition of democracy that serves as a springboard for the ensuing discussions. I mentioned earlier the divergence between two modern definitions of democracy. The tenets of Jeffersonian democracy, to which Group Material refer, as reiterated by Deitcher in the following passage from Jefferson, which involves a conceptual combination of “popular power” democracy with representative democracy: Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. This indeed is not all that is necessary, though it be essentially necessary. An amendment of our constitution must here come in aid of the public education. The influence over government must be shared among all the people.3 The idea of “improving minds” is relative; it can lead one to ask whose minds will be improved and by what standards. This question, in turn, leads to the debate referred to in one of the reprinted essays, “Whose Canon Is It, Anyway?” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. So embracing “democracy” is no simple matter. It becomes even more complicated if we remember that the “all men are created equal” clause in the Constitution originally meant 14. Democracy in Question 131

franchised free white men. One of the causes for confusion throughout this whole series of discussions seems rooted in warring definitions of democracy. What is described as a “crisis in democracy” might be more accurately referred to as a serious glitch in the established democratic process. The need for a reevaluation and redefinition of the terms seems evident. This sort of necessity inspired the civil rights movement and still compels accountability to an ever-­changing public. Yet it seems inevitable, as it was stated in the aids and Democracy town meetings in particular, that smaller organizations within different communities are necessary to enable individuals to act rather than passively wait for the response of elected “representatives.” Deitcher’s summary ends on a plaintive note: Finally, the sense of participating in something token, in something staged and recorded, of partaking in a process that, for most of those present, plays little or no part in their daily lives, foregrounded that nostalgic and mythic aspect of the “town meeting’s” currency.4 I would agree with him that the section called “Education and Democracy” is the most effective. As an educator I found it useful, provocative, and in places (“A Conversation with Paulo Freire”) inspiring. Yet as I read the transcripts of the roundtable and town meeting exchanges, I became agitated—almost as if I were there—and began furiously to scribble my rejoinders in the margins. This occurred, for example, when artist and educator Tim Rollins took it upon himself to describe a syndrome known as “creaming.” Rollins identifies a process of which I have personal knowledge, as a former “gifted kid” who got a scholarship to a private academy. He insinuates that these kids leave the “community,” never to return, when in fact many students who have been in that situation do give of their talents to the place from which they came. At another point, when the usual question of why more people of color are not in attendance at these meetings arises, he says simply that SoHo is “not really their turf ” and proceeds to talk about his experiences with his students in the Bronx. Perhaps this response is linked to the fact that while I see many people of color in SoHo, they may be invisible to others who consider the area not to be their turf? . . . It amuses me to think that although I was in New York City when these discussions took place, I never saw a poster for them in Harlem. I was not 132 Encounters

hanging around downtown much that year. While reading the traces of these events I was struck by the urgent and continued need for dialogue among diverse groups of people. Future strategies cannot be administered from the top down, and as Deitcher says, “Group Material’s town meetings demonstrated the danger of staging such assemblies from above, as it were.” Even the best of intentions need to be batted about in public, and this is exactly what Group Material has enabled us to do while providing this information for our perusal. Let us learn from the experience and keep working.

Notes Originally published in: Transition, no. 53 (1991): 163–67. 1. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 96. 2. Group Material, “On Democracy,” in Democracy: A Project by Group Material, Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Art, no. 5, edited by Brian Wallis (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 1. 3. David Deitcher, “Social Aesthetics,” in Democracy, 28. 4. Ibid., 42.

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15

1996

Notes from a User L’informe

If one could remake the world what might happen? It is this question which spurs on many projects, from revolutions to scientific research. In the visual realm the notion of creating a location where individual imaginings exist has been a parameter of artistic production for ages. This intimation is now often readily associated with film as a place where literary and visual forms are interwoven to achieve an imagined site. With these thoughts in mind imagine a curator as akin to a film director. For a curator an art exhibition can provide yet another occasion to present a view of how it might be possible to perceive of an aspect of the visual realm. In the case of L’informe: Mode d’emploi,1 curated by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-­Alain Bois, that aspect is art, not to be confused with a hazy “field” which is becoming known as “visual culture.” This is one distinction to note. L’informe provides a fascinating example of the extent to which a premise can be expanded upon to create a world of thought. In this instance a notion borrowed from Georges Bataille became a catalyst for an attempt to rethink the well-­trod categories used to organize modern art. The term informe is described in the educational guide to the show as “an attack, an essentially polemical procedure.” Yve-­Alain Bois writes: “The informe is nothing itself, it exists only operationally; it is a performative, like an obscenity, whose violence resides not in what it refers to but in its very utterance.” At this point the question might be posed, Why Bataille in particular? Could there possibly be other models which refer to an active blurring of Western classificatory systems? How can a notion which was formulated in 1929, under certain circumstances, be interpreted today and in relation to an art exhibition?

Like nearly every question which is posed to these art historians/curators they have answers which have been thoughtfully considered. Since the informe can be viewed as being an operation it seems as if anyone who understands the operation may use it. This operation is said to consist of “confusing, or rather confounding, classification. Resolutely anti-­idealist, this attitude undermines and reverses every attempt at sublimation,” so says the guide text to us, the users. But does history matter at all in considering whether an operation can be used? How might this “operation” have been deployed when it was first articulated? “Articulated” nearly seems like an inappropriate word for something attempting to hedge definition. Does a desire for historic contextualization reduce the possibility of operation? Despite Krauss’s and Bois’s admonition that references are not being made to Bataille’s relationship to art nor to the way in which exhibitions are often organized, meaning by chronology, style, and theme, questions such as those just stated ran through my head while encountering the exhibition. While it seemed worthwhile to rethink how notions of modernism have been formulated another question arose: How might what seemed to be the curator’s resistance to certain histories affect how one might interpret the exhibition? It was clear that a polemical relationship to previous interpretations of works included in the exhibition was being posited, yet what “new” program was being suggested? Enticing contradictions were at work within the premise of the exhibition. It was as if instructions were being provided for ways in which to view the works, “A User’s Guide,” yet it was reiterated that categories were being transgressed, even while divisions were designated. Horizontality, pulse, base materialism, and entropy are the four terms or operations which the user is invited to test. Questions did arise: “Aren’t these merely new categories?” But the answer from Krauss and Bois is an adamant “No.” These terms are more porous than categories. What is intended is a “web of relations.” On the guide to the exhibition is the map of the museum galleries. They are numbered and the numbers correspond to the four sections so that there is no confusion about which section one is in. A French art historian described the show to me as seeming “very American” in its orderliness, compared to some other exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in which there had existed more of a sprawl. So the viewer encountered in each section a combination of works meant

15. Notes from a User: L’informe 135

to touch on the term of the designated section, yet which could be viewed as not necessarily being fixed to that section. For example, one moved from a Warhol Dance Diagram, placed on a pedestal on the floor and sealed beneath a case (in contrast to a 1965 photo of its installation in Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art in which the unsheathed structure appears directly on the floor) to photographs of Smithson’s Glue Pour. Also in that section one encountered floor works by Robert Morris (Untitled [Threadwaste]) and Mike Kelley (The Riddle of the Sphinx) as well as works on the wall, such as Ed Ruscha’s Desire and Cy Twombly’s Panorama, to mention only some of the works in this section. It was possible to perceive of the curators’ intentions and to ponder the works and their juxtapositions. At times these seemed rather strained, perhaps because primarily formal relationships seemed to be stressed and the works appeared separated from the historical resonance they might evoke. One example of this tension appeared in the juxtaposition of works by Mike Kelley and Cy Twombly. Based on looking back and forth between the works, one prone and the other vertically mounted, there existed some sense of why they were put together, primarily based on the instructions of use—a notion of horizontality in this case, perhaps in terms of both existing as versions of fields within which interruptions were made. Beyond that one wonders what else might the curators have had in mind. At this point one of the conundrums of the show can be avoided no longer. Which is that the catalogue for the exhibition functioned as a para-­ operation beyond the frame of the exhibition; thus in attempting to describe the show and think about it in retrospect it becomes apparent that it is quite difficult to distinguish this textual link from the spatial and temporal encounters within the exhibition and ponder the associations which were made, as these sometimes appeared flat without the layers of further associations and art historical erudition which oozed from the pages of the catalogue. Of course it was possible to have “direct encounters” with the works, but it seemed impossible not to very quickly thereafter wonder about the “web of relations” within which this work might be intermeshed. This is only hinted at in the exhibition, while in the catalogue it is expounded upon. Just as an interpretation of an aspect of Bataille’s thought hovers over this project, so too does the publication Documents (1930–31) with which he was associated. It functions as a shadow text for the current one. The catalogue is divided into the four above-­stated areas and these intersect 136 Encounters

an alphabet of keywords beginning with abattoir (which was used in Documents) and ending with zone. But each of these alphabetized sections is cross-­referenced to other sections, and each of the four exhibition sections is included within the alphabetized parts. This material is sandwiched between an introductory essay by Yve-­Alain Bois, “La Valeur d’usage de l’informe” and a concluding essay by Rosalind Krauss, “Le Destin de l’informe.” Designating the value for use and the destiny of l’informe seem in keeping with the notions of guidance, which although supposedly resisted, seem to permeate this project. That’s not a “bad” thing, but different from the fluidity which seems implied by the adoption of Bataille’s term. The alphabet does provide a more fluid organizing structure than previous chronological or thematic classifications. It resembles computer hypertextual structuring: associative links based on keywords. The meanings can multiply based on the links, yet an initial structure underlines the program. But there are missing links. Krauss and Bois state their parameters in the beginning of the catalogue and acknowledge that not everyone will agree with their selections and that they of course had to set some limits. But since they are imagining another way in which the history of modern art of the 20th century could be configured it might have been interesting to include more diverse examples of practices. It would seem by this selection that very few women contributed to art of this century or could be configured with relationship to l’informe. This is one aspect which could benefit from further analysis. It is as if the College of Sociology continues unabated. It is also interesting to contrast the perceptions of Bataille and his contemporaries evoked in this project with those presented in James Clifford’s “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” In Clifford’s account he describes mixtures which are dense. The notion of “transgression” and declassificatory practices seems intertwined with pursuits which explored non-­Western possibilities, even though these practices must be viewed in relation to political boundary shifts and imperialist practices, to begin to perceive the multivalent processes at work. Clifford describes uses of the word ethnography in relation to “the surrealist twenties”: In the subtitle of Documents—Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, Variétes—the wild card was “Ethnographie.” It denoted a radical questioning of norms and an appeal to the exotic, the paradoxical, the

15. Notes from a User: L’informe 137

15.1 Some Chance Operations, 1998. Exhibition invitation, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan.

insolite. It implied too a leveling and a reclassification of familiar categories.2 Another aspect which could use further examination is intimated in “Analysis Logical and Ideological” in which Craig Owens raised issues about Krauss’s work in The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and about the “avant-­ garde,” which in the context of this exhibition are worth noting. Owens’s main criticism is that Krauss overlooks “the ideological function of the modernist ‘myths’ she unmasks and, further, that her effort to detach criticism from evaluation constitutes a disavowal of the ideological process.”3 This criticism was primarily directed toward the “critical vanguard” Krauss claimed to represent. A resistance to refer to ideology is manifest in this exhibition by the lack of certain kinds of historical specificity. For example, it does matter that Gordon Matta-­Clark did Threshole–Bronx Floors in 1972–73, not simply to establish a chronology or for reasons of “realness” but because this work emerged within a particular ideological climate, which permeated all kinds of places and activities. Without these layered specific references the work loses the possibility to resonate more profoundly. These acknowledgments don’t preclude other possible associations with which the work was also engaged, such as entropy. During a time in which one could note what seems to be a pervasive hostility toward intellectual rigor, the possibility in this exhibition of just such an injection was seductive and in that sense bracing. Yet, observations made by Owens in the past regarding the necessity of a reevaluation of modernism on ideological grounds in order to discern whether it has entered into a “state of crisis” still seem relevant: “For until modernist myth has been not only deciphered, but evaluated, its hegemony will remain unchallenged.”4 Any tampering with categorical designations will seem to be, no matter how brilliant, a reshuffling.

Notes Originally published in German as “Beobachtungen einer Benutzerin,” Texte zur Kunst (Cologne), no. 24 (September 1996): 152. 1. The exhibition took place at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, May 22–August 26, 1996. The show did not travel to the United States, but an English

15. Notes from a User: L’informe 139

version of the book/catalogue was published: Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-­Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 2. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 129. 3. Craig Owens, “Analysis Logical and Ideological,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 269. 4. Ibid., 282.

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16

1996

Spike Lee’s Mix Calculated Risks and Assorted Reckonings

Spike Lee’s emergence as a director hit Hollywood like a left hook. The reception to his independently produced She’s Gotta Have It in 1986 surprised stalwarts who insisted that there was no audience willing to pay to see movies predominated by Black characters. Lee grabbed the golden ring and the moment by publishing an account of how he did it and in rapid and continuous succession has gone on to produce nine films, in addition to tie-­ in publications and merchandise. He has since not only carved out his own niche by creating the film production company Forty Acres and a Mule but has emerged as a vocal public figure. His production has been astounding, his impact phenomenal, but like all hot wunderkind he now faces no longer being one. His two more recent films, Clockers and Girl Six, didn’t pull in the crowds, as did some of his previous films, such as Do the Right Thing. Amid the decade-­long outpouring of words, which include debates about art and sociology, urban youth, who owns Malcolm X or the 70s, Spike’s invented women, his nose for controversy, his love of basketball and the New York Knicks, rarely is much space or time spent on analyzing his role as an artist and his complex mission. After ten years of verbiage in circulation on Spike Lee’s films and on the man himself, there is amazingly still more to say.

His Mission/The Work Spike Lee’s drive is indicated in an introduction he received in 1994 on the late-­night talk show Charlie Rose:

Filmmaking is just one of the hats he wears. He’s also an executive producer; he owns a music label; he has apparel shops in Brooklyn and Los Angeles; he’s writing a script for a cbs pilot; he’s starting an ad agency; he’s teaching at Harvard; and he has started his eighth film. Since then the list has lengthened. He’s working on his tenth film, a bio-­ pic about Jackie Robinson, among other projects. He doesn’t miss a Knicks game, and he’s part of a New York Times ad campaign which capitalizes on his outspokenness. Is he just a compulsive megalomaniacal workaholic or is there a method to what could appear to be production madness? It’s clear that he’s been a young man in a big hurry working with the urgency of someone who’s racing against the clock and trying to make up for lost time. The time lost being most of this century during which images of Blacks were marginal in Hollywood films. His mission is approached with the intensity of one who’s received a religious calling to do The Work. I seem to recall a fictional character somewhere in the annals of African American literature who practiced The Work. Maybe I’m imagining an amalgam of different characters who were moved by The Spirit to do The Work during slavery to Civil Rights times. The Work usually meant God’s work, which could be equated with saving souls and bodies, thereby saving The Race, meaning Black people. Throughout Spike Lee’s oeuvre can be detected traces of this desire to uplift. Some of the male characters, who stand in as his alter egos, deliver such exhortations. In School Daze (1988) there is Dap (Laurence Fishburne), the upstanding-­righteous-­down-­activist brother who tries to rally the pleasure-­“seeking” conventional Negroes to protest the university’s investment in South Africa—in the pre–Mandela governed times. The last shot is of Dap looking into the camera and yelling with all his might, wake up ! to us, the audience, who were supposed to be roused out of passivity to do something, the right thing, we were later told. Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington), the super focused and driven trumpet player in Mo’ Better Blues (1990), reflects an aspect of its director’s vision of serious artistic striving toward a Coltrane-­like perfection which taps into the creative possibilities of The Race. Bleek doesn’t make it to the artistic Promised Land, but he has produced a son, via his wife, who might make it. Malcolm X, Denzel Washington–style, is delivered up as another example of concentrated directedness and moral rectitude—after his conversion to Islam. You can’t

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but admire his wit, calm and spiritual rightness, especially after his Mecca pilgrimage. The way he’s positioned himself in relationship to Hollywood is part of The Work. I think of his choices as resembling not only those of a religious calling but a mission as presented in old tv detective programs like Mission Impossible, in which at the beginning of the episode a reel-­to-­reel tape recorder would be running and the detectives would hear the words: “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is . . .” Spike Lee undertook the hazardous journey into the heart of Hollywood and has managed not only to stay alive but to continue to work. He’s done that by creating an imaginary world which bears his signature and by being an entrepreneur.

Planet Spike: His Imaginary World A wish for community has inspired much of his work, yet he realizes this is not necessarily possible as he wishes. He notes that “never before in the history in cinema” have Black people had as much access to film as now, yet he also observes, “There was a time when we said as a people, once we get the opportunity to get in front of the camera and in back of the camera directing, producing and writing these shows, things would be different. But that’s not precisely the case because we’re writing a lot of this stuff we’re doing.” One of the challenges is that there can no longer be assumed any one “the people” or “Black community.” While Lee realizes various fissures and contradictions he tries to create in his filmic world a place where this hope can be imagined. But these are movies, and they reside within the history of fantasy and guile, which is part of filmic language, while filtering history and the present through Spike Lee’s lens. Nonetheless, some critics insist upon interpreting them as social documents. After having watched Lee’s films again, all of them in one week, I began to imagine what it might be like landing in a place called Planet Spike, which would evoke his ideal world. If movies were alternate universes and one could be beamed up into them this is what one might encounter: A clean drug-­free world, full of sensuality, sentimentality, nostalgia, family, nobility, humor and music, lushly colored and flooded in golden light. Music from all eras would be in the air. The inhabitants’ beauty and variety 16. Spike Lee’s Mix 143

would be apparent. The scenery would be full of tall green trees rising between solid brownstones. Everyone would live in brownstones. The interiors of these would have pianos and lush carpets, big windows and plants. Everyone would be wearing clothes from Spike’s Joint. The streets would be crime-­free and groups of people would sit on stoops telling jokes and stories into the night. Imagine this as a stopping point in a Star Trek episode. The breadth of his aspirations makes me imagine The Work eventually cohering into its own world. But what about Spike’s mission? It seems to be multiple. It can be seen in terms of his artistic and political aims to produce his films, the negotiations that entails, and figuring out how to maintain some kind of reception. While he still adheres to the 19th-­century notion of racial uplift he is also attempting to move into post-­modern identity fragmentation. His two most recent films, Girl 6 (screenplay by Suzan-­Lori Parks) and Clockers (screenplay co-­ written with Richard Price), demonstrate these urges. Using contemporary fictional material not generated from his own life signals changes which were palpable in both films. There is a tug of war between making a movie about something and making a movie about nothing, or rather something which appears to be light, yet heavy, vapid, yet profound. Sort of everyday, but more. And with crossover appeal. Pretty tricky. . . . So what about Clockers? Despite mixed sentiments the film reviews were generally favorable, yet they often referred to the lauded novel of the same title and the inevitable discrepancies. What’s interesting is the strange position making the film has put Spike Lee in. In interviews he seemed insistent on pointing out that this film was meant to be “the nail in the coffin,” in terms of hood films. He stressed its difference in focus. The protagonist, Strike (Mekhi Phifer), is portrayed not only as an insolent streetwise punk but as a frail human—he has a perforated ulcer which causes him to spit up blood throughout the film. The decision to make the movie was an ambivalent one. The project was originally one of Martin Scorsese’s. Spike Lee was asked to direct when Scorsese became caught up with Casino. So Scorsese is a producer of a project which Spike didn’t initiate, but which he made his own and to significant effect. Lee has been a longtime Scorsese fan, and while watching the credits I wondered if doing this film was in some way like a dream come 144 Encounters

true, working with a mentor but in your own right. It is a star cast (Harvey Keitel, Delroy Lindo, John Turturro), all veterans who confidently handle the turf, and newcomer Mekhi Phifer who performs admirably. The film focuses on Strike, a young “clocker,” who spends most of his time on benches of the Gowanus Housing Project, and Rocco Klein (Keitel), a world-­weary police officer who spends most of his time hammering Strike for the truth. A murder has been committed and Strike’s model citizen–two-­job-­working brother Vincent (Isaiah Washington) confesses to the crime. Rocco doesn’t believe he’s the real murderer and puts the heat on Strike, who he thinks Vincent is trying to protect. What will happen to Strike and to his brother are the questions which loom over the film. When described in outline form it sounds almost trite. But the intertwined Terence Blanchard music and visual richness create a moving combination. What’s odd, though, is that although Spike Lee is the proponent of telling stories about Black life in their great variety, he’s often criticized for presenting diluted stories and shallow characters. The decision to reimagine Strike’s character as the film’s protagonist adds a sensitivity to the film which is often excluded from other hood flicks, but Strike’s mind is still not accessible. Apprehensively entering the realm of the filmic “ghettocentric” increased Lee’s challenges. He tries to use his license as an auteur to stylize the film. Upon reading some criticism I thought that some critics were arguing for authenticity over artistic license, but upon closer inspection the issues which became apparent were: How to interpret material which refers to specific places? And when does the director’s direction overwhelm the subject? It seems to bother Spike Lee that some people are saying that this is his best movie. One reason for his irritation might be because, as he said, this film doesn’t point the finger at white America, and instead encourages responsibility on the part of Black people, in particular the “clockers” (who are low-­level drug dealers who sit on benches working around the clock). He feels people haven’t understood his range and haven’t been able to pick up on various characteristics which he’s used in alternate ways between films. He’s probably right. But the look of the film, with its actual scenes of violence and housing projects, is new territory for him—strangely enough, though, the timing of the film’s U.S. release was at a time when, as he repeatedly acknowledges, people are tired of gangster-­Black-­men-­dying-­in-­the-­ ghetto-­shoot-­’em-­up-­drug-­movies. The irony is that since this film breaks 16. Spike Lee’s Mix 145

from the usual dramatic flow of these dramas it didn’t necessarily attract the crowds who do like those movies. The film emerged in New York while O. J. was still on trial and the Million Man March hadn’t yet happened. The attendance wasn’t as high for this film as anticipated, and it left the theaters after a brief visit. . . . Girl 6 surreptitiously arrived in New York in the wake of Forest Whitaker’s Waiting to Exhale frenzy. Exhale was about the “trials and triumphs” of four Black career women and is described by Karen De Witt of the New York Times as offering “a loving portrait that has nothing to do with racism, interactions with whites, or ghetto life.” The film was number one at the box office in December, grossing more than $14.1 million in one week. The audience draw was estimated at 70 percent female and between the ages of 18 and 65, with 65 percent Black to 35 percent white audience ratios. It was discussed on radio, tv , in the newspaper, and among groups all over the country. One viewer described it as uplifting, refreshing, and not favoring extremes. She went on to say, “It was not Spike Lee, where it’s racism, racism, racism.” Interestingly enough some men polled compared it most often to Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. By contrast, several weeks after its release Girl 6 was playing at only one theater in Manhattan, near Times Square. Since this movie focuses on a phone sex operator this seemed especially ironic. Seeing it required going to the now quasi-­sanitized sex district, which “thanks” to urban renewal, will soon be history. So I went in the late afternoon and sat in the theater with four others. The next screening seemed equally empty although it was a Friday. Because the movie came out so soon after Clockers the inevitable comparisons between the two make them stand out in more relief than if Girl 6 had been released in the summer of 1996 in the U.S., and especially since it has a summer movie frothiness. Clockers’s super slick and high-­budget look made Girl 6, by comparison, appear skimpy and cobbled together yet retaining Lee’s usual visual excitement, aided by the cinematographer of both films, Malik Hassan Sayeed. While straining to “transgress” it enters the territory stripmined seven years ago by both Madonna (who appears as a sex club boss) and Prince, who provides the entire swoony and inescap-

146 Encounters

able soundtrack. Lee seems to want to break out of the heavy urban grit of Clockers and chill in more intimate territory. Even though the message aspect has often been strong in his works, the pleasure principle has always been present. In the case of Girl 6 the pleasure principle ruled. Some old questions reemerged, though, regarding Spike Lee’s females. What does this woman want, anyway? We know she’s gotta have something, the “it” in this case being an acting career which somehow gets sidetracked into phone sex, which becomes an addiction rather than a day job, to supplement her acting career. How serious an actress is the unnamed, until the end of the movie, Girl 6? How does she easily become a cipher? Yes, of course acting is a career based on role-­playing. And yes, identities at present are often described as fluid—especially since the arrival of cyberspace. And yes, people get addicted to different adopted personalities as a liberating kick in moo space too. But, what about the fun history in film of ambitious actresses. Remember All about Eve? Bette Davis and Anne Baxter. Why is Girl 6 so tame from the beginning? Spike seems to want to have his cake and eat it too—a nice girl who becomes a sex addict, yet completely in the fantasy realm so she doesn’t physically sully herself and by the movie’s end she still doesn’t want to take her top off, although she did at the beginning of the movie and throughout the movie she talks about all forms of physical revelation and penetration—so, what’s up? Sensual enjoyment is high on this film’s priority list, yet moral fiber can still be found. Lee doesn’t want to give us a traditional Star-­Is-­Born success story, but rather he wants to include a critique of the Hollywood star system and its cattle-­call aspects while addressing the history of Black images—­ including silly moments, i.e., The Jeffersons take-­off—in film and tv and the uneasy relationship which still exists, despite a slight increase in attractive Black females in films who get to play princess-­type roles. Angela Bassett is actually one of the few, and even she usually has to walk through fire. So fantasy itself and the Western beauty myth is part of the mix, although it gets blended into a lot of other Planet Spike atmospheric mist. In his planet he revisits his past. Theresa Randle, who plays Girl 6, is recognizable from Malcolm X. In that role she was the good churchgoing Negro nice girl who had to compete with a sultry blonde Caucasian bad girl who told the pre-­transformed Malcolm to walk the virgin home and come back for her goodies. He com-

16. Spike Lee’s Mix 147

plied. The good girlfriend knew something was up and tried to express her sexuality with him, but he refused it. She was too nice to mess up. But during the course of the movie, my, how she changed. Later we see that she’s moved to New York and become a hooker in Harlem! Again, taking up the good whore issue, Girl 6 harkens back to the above-­ mentioned role, as well as to Nola Darling, the heroine of She’s Gotta Have It, who enjoyed relations with three men on her terms. But Girl 6 falls short in terms of guiding her own ship and thus differs from Nola’s independence. Even though Nola is presented as having moments of self-­doubt and breakdown, these hardly compare to the breakdown experienced by Girl 6, who is only known by her phone name (Lovely) and work position (Girl 6) until the end of the film, when you hear her ex-­husband call her Judy. In the beginning we see Girl 6 at an audition. Spike gets in a few digs by casting Quentin Tarantino as Q.T., “the hottest director in New York,” says her agent. He is making a movie from the perspective of an African-­ American girl as he imagines her to think. The character he describes must “ooze sexuality,” so a breast check is pro forma to see if she rates in the ranks of Angela Bassett and Whitney Houston. She’s a bit of a prude and doesn’t throw herself into the spirit of strutting her privates for evaluation, as everyone she encounters (her agent, John Turturro, and her acting coach, Susan Batson) assumes she must. Because she fails this hurdle she is dumped by agent and then by coach for lack of payment, who admonishes her, “Respect your art!” She fails at being an extra and next attempts to break into a suitable aspect of the sex industry—an exercise for her craft, she insists. From this point on we see Girl 6 in a constantly changing array of costumes, developing a skill for talking dirty as a w-­h -­i -­t -­e playmate—­unless otherwise requested—being proud of her newly tapped talent, chastised by her baseball card fanatic neighbor (Spike Lee) for “phone boning,” avoiding her shoplifting ex-­husband (Isaiah Washington), and sitting in her room in front of a mirror where she slips into fantasies from movies with Black actresses—Foxy Brown (Pam Grier) and Carmen Jones (Dorothy Dandridge)—and plays them. The only relief from the fantasy world into which she sinks deeper by the phone call is the evening news, on which she sees a story about a little Harlem girl who has fallen down an elevator shaft. From that point on images of the elevator shaft reappear, seemingly at random, and the movie strangely changes from comedy to thriller in a wacky way when Girl 6 begins to enjoy taking verbal abuse from a psycho. But it ends 148 Encounters

in an audition, where it began, with her uttering the same lines as she had in the beginning, echoing the lines uttered by Nola. In short, she’s “trying to clear her name.” For some reason the female artists in Spike’s films are a sketchy bunch. They differ tremendously from Bleek the trumpeter, who had strict hours for practice and whom you observed exercising every aspect of his craft— from cleaning his trumpet parts, to sitting alone to compose, to performing and directing the band. Nola and Girl 6 seem like shadow figures by comparison. While we’re allowed to remember sexy Black women in Hollywood, so far on Planet Spike we haven’t yet seen a woman who can be a bitchy— if need be—tough, obsessed artist, someone with a personality strong enough to take the money and run with it to do what’s necessary. Instead we’re given someone who gets mushy over the evening news’ sentimentalized mediated snippets. It’s rather pathetic. Even though the movie is meant to critique the Hollywood system it seems as if Girl 6–Lovely-­Judy might find female role models in Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford, despite the racial divide, and take some strength. But then again, it’s his planet, not the entire cosmos.

“The Business of America Is Business” Spike Lee: American, Entrepreneur, Sports Fan, and Good Guy Even Forbes Magazine, “The Capitalist’s Tool,” described him, in reference to Malcolm X, as “the movie’s promotion-­obsessed director” when describing the nearly $2 million in profits earned during the 1992 period of “Malcolmania” in “X” caps alone. His entrepreneurial streak was evident in his comical trailer for his first movie in which he’s selling tube socks and appeals to viewers to come see his movie or else he’ll have to keep hustling on the street. His Mars Blackmon b-­boy persona (his role in She’s Gotta Have It) so impressed Nike that he wound up doing a Nike’s ad campaign as Mars with Michael Jordan. Part of his business skill has been to sell himself as much as his movies. He used to be compared to Woody Allen in this regard. Even though Spike Lee seemed sometimes to be making a point of being irascible and shocking he also exemplified aspects of the American male success myth—hard 16. Spike Lee’s Mix 149

work pays off if you’re clever enough; you’ve got to be a team player (Hey, how about those Knicks?); he has a social conscience which harkens back to Frank Capra; after establishing himself he became a family man; yet he enjoys sexy females and a good laugh. Nearly every film he produced up until the most recent ones had an accompanying book describing the trials of moviemaking and the script. No one can accuse him of slacking. Even his leisure moments seem action packed, for example his vocal courtside participation in the Knicks games is often profiled. Faced with the reality that is Hollywood, one of these aspects being that there are no Black studio executives, Lee wisely created his own production structure while encouraging monied Black celebrities to invest and advocate gaining leverage in Hollywood studios. This desire has been expressed by other Black filmmakers, who’ve stressed the need for supportive decision makers to ensure entrance and staying power. Lee’s success is an example of necessity and tenacity having stimulated invention. Amid all of these maneuvers, the celebrity fund-­raisers and the media appearances, all the surrounding structure he seems to need in order to ultimately make what he wants, I wonder what voices he hears calling him forward? What dialogues go on in his head? Martin Scorsese definitely figures in these conversations, as it seems does John Cassavetes, to name only two of the filmmakers he references. Then there are the ancestors— Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Oscar Micheaux, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson, his athletic heroes, the musicians he pays tribute to in his soundtracks—and contemporaries like Melvin and Mario Van Peebles, all Blacks in the entertainment industry, upcoming and gone, and distant voices from childhood. The meandering plots that he’s been criticized for at times seem to harken back to the ideal of personal independent cinema, yet he’s in Hollywood, which demands profits. But he doesn’t want to give up his auteurship. As he said to Charlie Rose, “I have to make what I want.” . . . Like everything which is subjected to media memory there is usually a quick time allotted before moving on to the next hot thing. Spike Lee has managed to hold the limelight longer than many. An irony which I’m sure wouldn’t be lost on him is that often work which is developing in interest150 Encounters

ing directions and maturing is often overlooked after the first rush of media enthusiasm. What survives? Only time and luck will tell, especially with the Hollywood imperative that the bottom line is the bottom line. Given all of this, maybe it’s possible to begin to understand how Spike Lee has had to create a force field of films, words, products, and personality—indie-­ style—while trying to work Hollywood, which he’ll probably continue to do despite any future favorite flavors of which in this fickled domain he could again become.

Note Originally published in Spex (Cologne), 1996.

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17

1998

Compared to What? Although the circulation of b.f.p. (Black Female Presence) may seem to be the way of the world now, while surfing the radio dial and catching snippets of Whitney, Brandy, or Missy, or while passing poster-­sized ads of these and other Black female vocalists of note in music retail palace lightboxes from Tower Records to wom , it wasn’t always like this. There was a time, still within this century, that when a single Black female sang of love it was an event of social and historical significance, as Angela Y. Davis tells us in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. The music which signaled the individual Black female vocalists’ rise was the blues, in the year 1920, when “Crazy Blues,” sung by Mamie Smith, sold 75,000 copies in a month, to be exact. Other books, such as Daphne Duval Harrison’s Black Pearls, may describe blues women’s history in depth, but Davis’s intention is to focus on “the ways in which hints of feminist attitudes emerge from their music through fissures of patriarchal discourses,” and how interpreting their performances today can “tell us about past and present forms of social consciousness.” If you have any familiarity with the idiom you may recall that some of the most acclaimed sources on blues, which, to name a few, include Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act, Leroi Jones’s (aka Amiri Baraka) Blues People, Walter Mosley’s novel RL’s Dream, and Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, focus on male protagonists. What I particularly appreciated in Davis’s book was the way in which she teased out meaning between the established biographical history of the three artists which are her focus—Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday—and demonstrated the proto-­feminist inclinations discernable by conducting a close listening to the nuances of recorded performances. In fact nearly half of the book consists of lyrics transcribed by Davis of a combined 252 songs by Rainey and Smith. Her interpretations of their musical interpretations, their art, and their lives are put within a

social-­historical matrix which enunciates aspects of their existences which have not been probed with such depth and tenacity until now. One of Davis’s objectives is to “make a specific intervention into current popular debates regarding the legitimacy of women of color feminisms, and of black feminisms in particular.” Indications of what blooms in Blues Legacies appear in the 1982 collection All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave.1 At a moment when words like “empowerment” and “liberation” are not usually said without air quotes in the U.S., and books are appearing with titles like Who’s Afraid of Feminism? Seeing through the Backlash,2 and in the wake of the “Riot Grrrl” moment it’s compelling to examine the direction Davis is moving in to reconsider the feminist and emancipatory potential in the work of Rainey and Smith, along with that of Holiday—who forms a bridge to modern jazz with blues roots—their works roughly spanning the 1920s to the 1950s. One theme which resounds through the book, reiterating a theme in other of Davis’s writings, is the position of the individual to the community. To understand the significance of this distinction—which is specified historically in Blues Legacies by the spirituals sung in slavery, which expressed a communal desire for freedom, and the post-­slavery blues sung by individuals, which explored the possibility of personal freedom in all its dimensions—tracing Angela Davis’s own position is revealing. Even in her autobiography, written at age 28 and described as a political autobiography, she related her actions to the social and historical circumstances in which she found herself. She continues to work toward creating the anti-­racist, anti-­sexist world which she and her peers were imprisoned for and is currently organizing a series of conferences around prison reform. While reading the book I was not able to stop pondering the meaning of the blues women—who had inspired Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, to name a few, to produce works which, as Davis says, “piqued my curiosity about the figures that had inspired such marvelously irreverent characters and moving portraits”—and the lyrics in relation to Davis’s own history as an icon of resistance, political prisoner, professor of philosophy, activist, and lover. Ruminating on the different material circumstances she had survived and reading lyrics about release and independence, or about turning one’s face to the wall, or wanting to jump off of the mountaintop, or being a rolling stone, or how sixty days can feel

17. Compared to What? (1998) 153

17.1 Import/Export Funk Office, 1992. Exhibition invitation, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne.

like sixty years in a cell made me think of aspects of what have been Angela Davis’s, and in turn other Black women’s, realities. After her various books about political struggle I found intriguing her decision to focus on an aesthetic form, the blues in particular, which offers a range for exploration of emotion and, as she demonstrates, transmutation into art of the quotidian and material circumstances of Black working-­class female culture—which include sexuality, retribution, and hope. These expressions, as she states, have often been overshadowed by written texts of Black middle-­class foremothers, although the blues women through their lyrics and lifestyles demonstrated new modes for living which were at variance with the dominant views on chaste domestic-­bound womanhood. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is part of a continuum of feminist thought which has global ramifications, in the way Davis’s actions have had. It is possible to gain stimulus from this book to listen to the music with the lyrics and to consider the distance traveled, between many thens to many nows, and to check how relative the distance may be. As Michele Russell mentions in “Slave Codes and Liner Notes” in reference to vocalist Esther Phillips’s endurance, “After the high tide of Black rebellion we all suffered in some measure from the system’s retaliation. . . . In the [19]70s, the strenu154 Encounters

17.2 Wavelinks: A Different Reality, 2002. Digital film, color, sound, 28 minutes. Film still.

ous nature of those battles burned many people out.”3 Lucky for us Angela Davis was able to weather those times, leave us evidence, and live to adjust our perspectives on history with the present. Taking the hand you’re dealt and transforming it into an aesthetic form which can also move people where they weren’t expecting to feel, that’s the blues in its most optimistic sense. Shades of that blue come through in this book, and for that Angela Davis deserves “heartbeat props.”

Notes This review of Angela Y. Davis’s book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon, 1998) first appeared in Spex (Cologne), November 1998. 1. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (New York: Feminist Press, 1982). 2. Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell, eds., Who’s Afraid of Feminism? (London: Penguin, 1998). 3. Michele Russell, “Slaves Codes and Liner Notes,” in All the Women Are White, 138. 17. Compared to What? 155

18

2000

Notes on Humanist and Ecological Republic and Lac Mantasoa

My work is very much about architecture (not sculpture or furniture). I’m not a missionary to anybody.—Florian Pumhösl For unless one presents an argument about how different alternative constructions matter to people’s experience in political society, analyses of social construction say little more than that human actors and social processes produce various patterns of technological change, something everybody knew anyway. —Langdon Winner, Political Ergonomics

In his 1996 exhibition at the Grazer Kunstverein, On or Off Earth: Design für die echten Bedürfnisse und die Rhetorik der Alternativebewegung, Florian Pumhösl referenced Henry Dreyfuss’s Designing for People (1951), Gert Selle’s Ideology and Utopia of Design (1971), Ernst Friedrich Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973), and Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World (1970). He deduced from the debate in which they all partake on ecological and social problems that these problems were analyzed primarily as general symptoms of industrialized societies, ignoring links to political systems and specific histories: “From the ideological scenarios of the Cold War results a method to avoid political practice by making use of ‘global’ concepts and the subjectivisation of social responsibility.” A goal in that show was to call attention to the “model character,” meaning work involved with offering models for use—particularly in the work of Victor Papanek, who was a unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) designer—and to imagine how to address some of these concerns in the present.

18.1 Florian Pumhösl, book cover for Ideologie und Utopie des Design: Zur gesellschaftlichen Theorie der industriellen Formgebung, by Gert Selle, 1997. Courtesy of Florian Pumhösl.

In his Secession exhibition, which included an installation in the main space and a video in the upper space, he developed these ideas further. By investigating the intersection of modernist initiatives in Madagascar, referencing the history of a late 18th-­century attempt at industrialization as well as a history of modernist design proposals for the “Third World”—collages and models in addition to the genealogy of modernist exhibition design itself—he continues interrogating the use of models and their transfer. He alludes to the location of Madagascar, yet he acknowledges the limits of any individual’s perception to fully represent it by relying on a minimal vocabulary of forms and thus refusing an attempt at any all-­encompassing narrative. Instead what he offers is a suggestive and fictive yet related republic, a full-­scale model with movable parts. Here location resonates in multiple ways which complicate a simple notion of site. By insisting on a

18. Notes on Humanist and Ecological Republic and Lac Mantasoa 157

system-­specific approach rather than privileging a site-­specific approach,1 it is possible to think of this work as a model/system which can exist in different locations. Of course, imagining this system in different locations other than in Vienna’s Secession would most likely raise different questions. I’d be curious as to what questions might arise in New York, Brazil, Lisbon, or Nantes, for example, based on differing perceptions of history, colonialism, and modernism. Context is a many-­layered and shifting thing which still affects a movable system of representation. The exhibition embodied Florian Pumhösl’s interpretations of several productions, including the exhibition design of Lilly Reich, the representation of three-­dimensionality in the photographic collage proposals of architect Lina Bo Bardi, and Robert Smithson’s slide and text construction of the Hotel Palenque. Pumhösl continued in this exhibition his interest in dissecting and presenting for closer examination the rhetoric of utopia via an investigation of the forms used to construct this ideal, the tasks to which these were put, as well as the contradictory occurrences which led to what traces we can now find of these aspirations. The title Humanist and Ecological Republic is an abbreviation. The full title, which can be read in the accompanying catalogue, designed by Pumhösl as an integral part of the show, is When he returned to power in 1998, the former Marxist president of Madagascar, Didier Ratsiraka—meanwhile converted to market economy—announced that he would turn Madagascar into the first “humanist and ecological republic in the world.” Configured in the main space of the Secession were forms which suggested an imaginary city. Echoing Lily Reich’s modernist use of only the essential elements of presentation in which the materials themselves, as in minimalism, act as the primary aspect of the design as well as the subject of the exhibition, here one encountered the basic elements which represent a sense of place—a low wall, an irregularly latticed wall, concrete structures resembling those seen on streets of places which are in a continual state of construction, a textured translucent green glass wall. These were built out of industrial and construction elements, concrete, wood, metal, and glass. The structures were rendered, for example a wooden armature was used beneath a surface of concrete. Just beyond these structures was an area which seemed to be the interior of the outdoor museum space, represented by open black metal cubes, possible modernist vitrines, one of which contained on a wooden shelf a small concrete hut. Rather than functioning as an intervention with the site of the 158 Encounters

Secession, what was presented were the elements of a contained reference system. It was a full-­scale prototype which, by including an oxidized Henry Moore sculpture, could be recognized as a speculative representation from the present of what could be imagined to be the remains of a unesco moment of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It had an eerie familiarity, which evoked, in my case, impressions of the un Plaza area in Manhattan. For some other viewers it reminded them of museum or public spaces in Brazil or Israel. Ways of representation were Pumhösl’s focus. As became apparent by reading his catalogue his questions included: What do representations of modernism in Africa as perceived by architects look like? as well as, Why is Madagascar usually represented as a natural geographic site despite its complex history? Political aspects can be thought in the instance of this exhibition as arising in the aporias and peripheral aspects of what grew out of people’s attempts to gain independence—the remains of built structures, their decay, their reuse or renovation. An interstitial reading of the traces of colonialism was conceivable—via the phenomenological encounter possible in the different parts of the exhibition—drawing attention to a history of the forms which are now present as ruins in this particular part of Madagascar, such as those beneath Lac Mantasoa, as well as the newer structures which have since been built for recreation. In the silent video projection Lac Mantasoa the viewer watched, while seated on a black felt-­covered platform in a darkened room, the underwater movements of a camera which captured in dreamy sensual tracking shots what appeared to be a search or a navigation of the floor of the lake. Cut to black. On the screen appeared a split-­screen image, on the left a 3-­d model of a building complex on the floor and on the right a brown pointing hand traced a diagram, seeming to explain what we couldn’t hear. The shots alternated between above-­ground views of the lake and underwater perspectives. In another split-­screen image the camera panned around the same empty decaying gray-­and-­white-­painted room simultaneously from different directions. The 13-­minute video loop ends with the camera panning underwater past mounds and scattered trunk-­like forms in murky green water which blurs all and suggests oblivion. Amid this concern with aporias and provocative associations what can a viewer deduce when there is no soundtrack on the video, no text in the show, and a resistance for an easily grasped aesthetic representation? This 18. Notes on Humanist and Ecological Republic and Lac Mantasoa 159

sort of question often arises, and has now for years, when work in which research plays a key role is presented. Perhaps a different and more challenging way of perceiving what the elements are of a work is required. In this case the work involved stimulating viewers to face its elements and the questions posed by the producer rather than pandering to viewers’ expectations to receive something comprehensible or entertaining in a short span of time. All of the elements—the title, the catalogue, the video, and the installation—function together as the work. If one is curious there are spurs present in the work allowing one to probe further. This manner of working can be traced to work designated, now historically, as institutional critique. The example of Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-­Time System as of May 1, 1971 looms as a foundational antecedent to this way of working, and this trace can be noted in Pumhösl’s own interest in referencing and creating systems and models. In the Haacke work a readable text was present in the display itself stating information available to all, but its positioning within the museum and especially the response of the director and board of the Guggenheim Museum to ban its exhibition is what made it notorious. In Pumhösl’s case notoriety is not sought, shock value is avoided, although he calls attention to little-­known available information and relies on the choices of his juxtapositions to stimulate new considerations. In this sense the work reflects a time very different from 1971. I find this distance and difference provocative. Finding out what is in between the cracks of what appears to be an obvious history rather than focusing on what is most visibly present is in my opinion compelling. For some this subtlety could be more provocative (a contradiction in terms perhaps?), but that would be another project. In my case I was intrigued enough to want to know more. Pumhösl’s focus on ways of representing were a main area of interest for me. In my view this approach opened interesting possibilities for thinking about how places, people, and time can be represented which exceed previous questions of identity. Thinking about reactions I observed to the exhibition, for example those of people desiring a more definitive exposition of the relations between the past colonialism and the present political situations in Madagascar now, led me to turn to writings referencing questions of representation, since these seemed to lie at the crux of the exhibition. I was also interested in examining a certain uncomfortableness I sensed with the presentation and its content for some. 160 Encounters

Representation implies that what is presented is a selection from what “we” recognize as reality. That said, it is possible to deduce that every time we encounter a presentation of work we are in turn encountering, by extension, someone’s frame of reference and, as the word frame denotes, its limits. I found that the desires I detected in certain responses to what the show “delivered” reflected expectations which may have been linked to what was perceived as a tension between what might have been projected onto the location of Madagascar (from whose perspective, it might be asked) and what one confronted in the minimal presentation in the exhibition. Was a desire for some form of authenticity, which could be read as substance, at issue? What could that mean in relation to Pumhösl’s claims, as stated in the epigraphs, “to be about architecture” and “not to be a missionary”? I found some of the questions raised by Wahneema Lubiano in her essay “But Compared to What? Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in ‘School Daze,’ ‘Do the Right Thing,’ and the Spike Lee Discourse,” to be pertinent to questions raised about this exhibition. It may seem an odd reference, but I found it to be relevant to issues concerning representation and the sticky area of identity. It also clarified my reasons for appreciating Pumhösl’s considerations of the politics of design decisions in comparison to questions of the supposed “counter-­hegemonic cultural resistance” supposedly afforded by a focus on vernacular culture and the assumption that its use implies authenticity as these questions are raised in reference to the “reality” of Lee’s vision. The analogy I’m drawing to a belief in vernacular as authentic and a belief in design decisions as inherently political can be thought in relation to the epigraph from Langdon Winner, in which the emphasis, as in Lubiano’s essay, is on “an argument about how alternative constructions matter to people’s experience in political society” and that without this argument what is apparent is simply “various patterns,” whether these be patterns of technological change, in Winner’s example, or of “vernacular culture” in Lubiano’s. As Lubiano states, “Reality, after all, is merely something that resounds in minds already trained to recognize it as such.”2 So what about speculation or speculative fiction and the fiction of Humanist and Ecological Republic? It can be argued that in the realm of fiction all forms of speculation are possible. The title Humanist and Ecological Republic provides a suggestive jumping-­off point for a variety of speculations. It seems that Pumhösl wants to respect the context from which he 18. Notes on Humanist and Ecological Republic and Lac Mantasoa 161

chose the exhibition title, that being Didier Ratsiraka’s pronouncement, and its surrounding factors, which include additional information about a time, a former Marxist designation, and a current market economy. So a form of selection—or a form of representation—was already at work, to which we can pay attention, in the full title of the exhibition. The question still remains after having encountered the “imaginary city” I previously described, What could be the further power of speculation beyond the juxtaposition of elements in which we as viewers were presented and beyond the provocative title? What could a humanist and ecological republic be? The power of speculation in terms of fiction leads me to think, for example, of Samuel Delany’s worlds, in which imagined details based on social relations we can recognize, as well as those which don’t currently exist, are provided and add “body” to suggestive forms and overlapped references. But that again is another project, reflecting my own frames of reference. In this case Pumhösl achieved what it seems he set out to do, which is to call attention to different areas which perhaps have not been thought together. Pumhösl poses, in a subtle yet provocative way, questions concerning architectural modernism and the “third world,” a history of display, and the historical modes of institutional critique. The importance of these histories to his frame of reference is evident in his careful considerations. Further elaborations on these histories evident in this work include the roles of utopian ideas, post-­colonial aspirations, and site-­specificity, each also subtly alluded to in this exhibition and each open still to ongoing critical interrogation.

Notes Originally published in German as “Marode moderne,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 39 (September 2000): 148–53. 1. See Renée Green, “Public Art Conundrum,” in After the Ten Thousand Things (The Hague: Stroom, 1994), xxxiii–xxxv. 2. Wahneema Lubiano, “But Compared to What?” in Valerie Smith, ed., Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 106.

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19

2004

Other Planes of There

Historical knowledge consists of transmissions in which the sender, the signal, and the receiver all are variable elements affecting the stability of the message. Each relay willingly or unwittingly deforms the signal according to his own historical position. Historical recall never can be complete nor can it be even entirely correct, because of the successive relays that deform the message.—George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), quoted in the film Elsewhere? by Renée Green, 2002

Two years ago, in response to a request for commentary on Documenta 11, I wrote notes of my impressions as an artist who’d participated in the process of “doing” Documenta.1 My recollections covered a period between March 2001 and July 2002. They began with thoughts on Platform 1, the first section of Documenta 11’s global program, which was launched in Vienna at the Academy of Fine Arts, where I was a professor. With two years of distance, and with all that has taken place since then, including the publication of assorted discussions and texts, it’s possible to think of this particular Documenta in relation to other large international group exhibitions, which have been proliferating at an accelerated rate since the mid-­nineties. The initial invitation from Yard suggested I write about the now oft-­mentioned curator/artist divide, or to paraphrase, “Art as curatorial prop or do artists matter anymore? And if so, how?” Rather than simply rehash the many discussions, presentations, and opinions which have circulated in regard to international group exhibitions, including the many biennials around the world, I’ve decided to focus on observations sparked by reading “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the

Large-­Scale Exhibition,” a discussion published in Artforum,2 to provide a kick-­start for considering the topic and for hopefully going beyond it. It wasn’t a topic I rose with enthusiasm to embrace. I’d hoped that in the interim between 2002 and the present, others more focused on these kinds of discussions might rise to the challenge I’d mentioned two years earlier. Where did my ambivalence lie? Perhaps my wish was to continue working on the intricacies and depths allowed in probing various registers of creative production, a process differing from, and I assumed more enriching than, attempting to plumb the dynamics and curatorial aims of large-­scale international exhibitions, which seem to get more media attention than any analysis of the process from which I didn’t want to disengage: thinking, composing, arranging, and making, i.e., the work. But, then again, this is another part of “the work.”

Conclusion of “Notes on Documenta 11” Recurring questions, probably also asked by the Documenta 11 team: Who chooses what? Who has the power to represent? How do people get information and which people have more of it? To whom does Documenta matter now? Is a massive relativization taking place in pushing aside an analysis of the selected works (if indeed that is being done, the end to this Documenta is not yet here)? Given the encyclopedic aims of this Documenta, how is it possible to discern anything differently from anything else? Where can “value” be located and how might this be determined? By each individual? But doesn’t this contradict the premises for dialogue? What might dialogue bring? Can we hear each other? Might becoming more “knowledgeable” mean redefining the boundaries of what that means, beyond the academic? Couldn’t analysis be risked, rather than primarily collecting and juxtaposing works even if there is no conclusive “evidence” of how they might be read? Although dialogue was espoused around Documenta 11, there was very little involving the process of selecting works; at least this was my experience. Perhaps it was primarily the curators and participants of specific platforms who were in discussion with each other. The context into which one’s work would be placed was not disclosed until near the opening of the exhibition. The decision-­making process for these choices was unknown. De164 Encounters

spite the aims to cross and overlap territories, the presentation of artists’ work was in traditional catalogue format, unchecked by contributors before printing. When one thinks back on what was encountered in the exhibition, if one had the opportunity to visit it, one might wonder why seriousness couldn’t be more serious. I found the exhibition to be an interesting attempt to overlap concerns from the different platforms with an attempt to introduce work not necessarily known by the broader audience, but in Platform 5, the exhibition, questions regarding artistic production today were oddly elided, yet rhetorically addressed as topics. Everything is “considered,” yet the possibilities of a close reading of the specific aspects of work as forces for contemplation, questioning, pleasure, and change seemed minimal. I didn’t think that this rich area was sufficiently “sounded,” and I look forward to evidence that I’m mistaken in upcoming publications.

2004: More Notes Fredric Jameson wrote “Periodizing the 60s” in 1984.3 Perhaps it will be possible to describe the 90s and early 21st century better in 24 years. Attempting to do so at this moment can allow for descriptions and attempts at analysis, but these can be compared in advance with the versions of “history in the making” of many previous times. It was very “now” then and often bears the time’s residue, for better or worse. Usually symptoms and internecine struggles are discerned rather than the profound longer historical perspective.

Before Reading “Global Tendencies,” Thoughts on the Topic, Biennials, and Such. Proposed Title: “Overload” Questions: What are the real underlying issues and grievances for artists? Which artists want what? Why should it matter? What matters? What to wish? How to engage? Could curatorial ascendancy be related to “commodifying dissent” or the “conquest of cool,” as indicated by Thomas Frank, also author of One Market under God? 19. Other Planes of There 165

Proposed Context amid More Questions The world we live in (Michael Winterbottom’s film In This Life), war crimes, (reading Arendt’s Men in Dark Times). List what the “big picture” contains along with biennials. The “so what” factor can loom large. Struggles for relevance on the part of artists are no new thing. The attempts seem more and more desperate, yet numbingly redundant. What are worthy examples though? Szeemann’s Documenta 5? A very different time. What makes these past accounts worthy beyond functioning as hagiographies? What “freedom dreams” to dream (Robin D. G. Kelley, Henry Giroux, etc.)? What does it matter where? Or why it matters where? (Mass Mediauras, Samuel Weber). Biennials, Barcelona’s Forum 2004, and cultural capitals as capital builders. World Mall. Art Fair Power (Miami Art Fair, anti-­globalization protest, and “balseros” all together). Brecht as an example of the unreliability of artists, yet with the ability to provide points of illumination in “dark times” (Arendt). What do I advocate? Communion, yet resistance of a mass mind? . . . Recently, a friend visiting New York from Paris asked me what newspapers I read. I told her that I rely more on news from Spain and international print and online news sources, even for news on the U.S., and that I weekly check out The Nation, as well as local weeklies. The situation is dire in terms of actually getting any information that you might need to know. Given this condition, there is little wonder that what some have described as a pervasive infantility has crept into many crevices of the U.S. cultural and political Juggernaut. It is quite obvious to people beyond these borders as well as to some within. One of many examples: “When Barack Obama was delivering the finest keynote address heard at a Democratic National Convention since Mario Cuomo’s 1984 speech in San Francisco, the nation’s broadcast television networks were airing their usual mix of police dramas, a program about a Disney cruise and a show that asked the question: ‘Who says pageant girls don’t eat?’”4

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Delay Effect (1) With the immense amount of production of written materials which have been generated via international exhibitions of late, including Documentas, biennials, and Manifestas, if one is actually interested in the words linked to such events, one needs quite a lot of time to read these in their aftermath. The delay can be a long one, especially if one is caught up in a production cycle and feels compelled to produce for or attend these events, or even if not, given all that life demands. Who is left to be their reader? Critics, art historians, journalists, art students?

A Place of One’s Own in a World of Inheritances: Dream? Folly? We are all born into preexisting networks of meanings and actions. How is it that some are viewed as reshaping what exists and others are viewed as caught within the web of the past? To what degree do these differences in perception have to do with what is granted acceptance by those able to position themselves as spokespeople for what passes as significant? What meanings can be discerned if these questions were deeply probed?

Litany Seventies Generation on and on . . . (Stuck with the seventies). What captures the imagination? What stimulates returns? What lack is addressed in the present? Is this ever filled? New power structures appear over and over again (think of Danilo Kiš). Shifting organizations of energies within the world. Motivations. Words that could have meaning: truth, witness, experiments, reconciliation, justice. An understanding for the wish to revitalize what can have meaning. Roles and positions: How can artists be thinkers (whatever they/one imagine/s thought to be) and how might this differ from academic thinkers’ forays into art (whatever they/one imagine/s that to be)? Be all that you can be: (in the army) You can be what you want to be: (on cloud nine)

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How decisions are taken Relational what? Post: again and again One place without another Services defunct Overkill Exhibitionism numbness Worldwide And, and, and . . .

Delay Effect (2) I have all of the Documenta 11 volumes from the university library. In the context of a university, the topics broached seem to circulate within separate departments, like Law and Society, Global Studies, or Art History and Architecture, with attempts at bridging via the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, which also co-­sponsored and hosted the 2003 visit by Okwui Enwezor, Documenta 11’s Artistic Director. While I am interested in the topics as an extension of previous discussions, I note a dearth of discussion about how a creative work is thought. Alfredo Jaar’s and Isaac Julien’s texts are the rare examples that allow an access to the processes and thoughts related to specific productions, as they were invited to attend and participate in platforms beside Platform 5, the exhibition. Other artists’ writings appear in the Platform 5 Exhibition Catalogue, beginning on page 544 after all of the pictures of previous works in the “Artists” section, which is preceded by the eleven essays. There is little way to access the content of the works in the exhibition beyond viewing the photos. Angelika Nollert was an exception among contributors in writing about “The Realities of the Artistic Imagination,” in which she mentioned some of the participating artists in brief. Otherwise, there was no written evidence of engagement by curators with the work except for passing references to artists involved with film or free-­associative forays. Beyond selection, where is the interest in what is made, other than a theoretical engagement with “the idea” of a work?

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“Global Tendencies”: Reading Notes Rather than providing a blow-­by-­blow analysis of what was said in the online conversation moderated by James Meyer between Okwui Enwezor, Francesco Bonami, Catherine David, Hans-­Ulrich Obrist, Martha Rosler, and Yinka Shonibare, again I’m opting for more provisional notes and reactions. I found the presentation in Artforum useful as a beginning attempt to address phenomena that seem ubiquitous, yet which function as symptoms of late capitalism, its inheritances, and discontents. In the course of reading the printed version of the online exchange (which I would have enjoyed witnessing live, if that could have happened, as the visceral quality of it all could have been entertaining and provocative for audience members), I did underline many areas of text and sprinkle commentary throughout the margins. I still think a careful analysis would be rewarding to read, but in the meantime some of what was printed instigated the following phrases, imagined headings, and paragraphs.

The Unsaid Things What curators have learned from artists (approaches to thinking about dispersed “platforms” and to processes which occur over time, as well as “slippages”/glissements; now Edouard Glissant is commonly quoted in this milieu). Certain ideas, like “the exhibition becomes a process of transformation on the local level” (Hans-­Ulrich Obrist) remind me of more poorly funded projects made in the early 90s.5 While I think that Obrist is involved in the continual process of engaging with artists, it wouldn’t hurt for more curators to acknowledge being indebted to artists’ ideas and productions as sources for some of their curatorial ideas, as this could allay some tension (this differs from inviting two artists to curate). Then references to curatorial “dictatorship” might not appear so frequently and reciprocity could be acknowledged. The limits of curatorial imagination can be recognized, despite global travels and discussions and diffusions of ideas beyond more recognized borders.

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Short Memories, Accelerated Time? Curators on the Move Pitfalls of Communal Models Based on Friendship under Late Capitalism (The debauched inheritors of the “old avant-­garde dream”/contemporary art progressives) Continual New/Old Now, Faster, Faster! Arbiters and Referees (critics and curators?)

A Game of Catch-­up: An Essentializing Overgeneralized Gut Reaction Every time those recognized primarily as “minorities” gain access to a certain level of power, the terms are shifted, making it seem as if they are destined to remain peripheral because the terms used to define their “entrance” often attempt to obstruct their grasp of anything of value, as it had previously been defined. This Oops-­it’s-­not-­worth-­anything-­anymore syndrome has been applied to beauty contests (yes, they were regressive anyway, but . . .), the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Documenta 11, worldwide biennials in Third World countries, authorship (“the death of ” coinciding with African independence struggles coming to voice, for example, Frantz Fanon as author of The Wretched of the Earth), distinguished professorships, real estate property, journalism (journalist Mumia Abu Jamal to be countered against the New York Times scandal of a young black journalist), political offices, etc.: all of this despite claims for a “post-­black”—I’m using “black” in the encompassing British sense—present. This tendency is reminiscent of a phenomenon noted by the writer Joe Wood: “Blackness made most whites see clichés and danger; when they applied ‘black’ to neutral words like “leader,” “area,” or “artist,” they scared themselves, they freaked, they insisted the black leaders follow, the black area be avoided, the black artist be shut up.”6 Despite the access which has been created by the extraordinary curatorial endeavors of Okwui Enwezor, it still needs to be proven how far beyond ingrained notions of “otherness” it can be possible to get in this lifetime. But, as a noted historian reminded me as a response to these kinds of frustrations, “It’s better than 1903.” Imagine Okwui Enwezor, director

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of Documenta, who, in 2003, is referred to as the “Nigerian-­born” curator, focusing in 1903 on the issue of “globalization” for the closest equivalent then to such an event: something between a World’s Fair and the original Armory Show. Think about this loose analogy in relation to discussions about mega international exhibitions and the omnipresent references to Guy Debord’s commentary on the “society of the spectacle.” Think about these things together: historical time and globalization in its varieties, with its multiply inflected trajectories. Documenta has shifted from what James Meyer points out as an exhibition of the “best” work of international artists to a show that illustrates a globalization thematic with invited global artists (Documenta X is cited as an instigator of this direction). What distinguishes global artists from international artists? Are they from each country on the globe? And by what criteria are these global artists evaluated? How were the “best” works previously evaluated and what are the links, divergences, benefits, and inadequacies in these modes of assessment for the present time? Are these global artists and their works merely the best portable products in a global market or is something else taking place? Why are they sometimes referred to as needy or sturdy cogs in search of venues? How is agency of the artists made manifest? The parameters once again seem to have become sociological, leaving aesthetic consideration as something for which occidental art historical standards still set the terms of debate. Or is this shifting? Enwezor asserts it is, and I’d like to believe him and to work toward continuing changes. Yet it is still a challenge to engage in ways of thinking beyond familiar power dynamics.

A Fraction of Underlined Points (from the Artforum Roundtable) Yinka Shonibare: “But we must return now to the work of the imagination and prioritize the aesthetic and political concerns of artists rather than their origins. Globalization has produced a fantastic opportunity for visibility; let’s take the next step.” Martha Rosler: “Withal, I am a bit perturbed by Okwui’s remarks that

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rather decisively elevate the curatorial metadiscourse above the contributions of the artists, which I can accept up to about 20 ­percent.” Okwui Enwezor: “I find it difficult to press myself into the false idolatry of the artwork as the only meaningful theory and speculative object in an exhibition.” But how to engage with what is meaningful and speculative about selected forms of art (film, video, installation, sculpture, painting, photography, literature, sound, performance, etc.)? What invitations (perceptual, sensual, intellectual, emotional, social, political) do these works provide? What about the work? What about its frames of reference, its circuits? What about humility, attention, and love as different states in which one can exist to approach a work? Can it be acknowledged that there are unknown, intangible aspects beyond the designator’s understanding that emerge when a work is encountered? Other planes of there? Martha Rosler: “The global exhibitions serve as grand collectors and translators of subjectivities under the latest phase of globalization. But as we move between disparate colonialist eras, what is plain about the present moment is that there is no dearth of images of the colonized Other in public view, despite only a little more insight—and that quite momentary—into the interior lives of others than in the previous colonial moment. The elite in question, especially in the North and in developed industrial and postindustrial nations (which includes, perhaps, the antipodean South), may have a taste for edification via these new Crystal Palace expositions. And why not?” Okwui Enwezor responds: “I also take your earlier point about the postcolonial and the art world’s relationship to some of its products as the visual Esperanto for a mediated Otherness. But your reading presumes that the center still calls the shots, in terms of what the political ruptures of the present suggest about contemporary culture. In looking at the scrambled epistemological landscape today, I give careful attention to some of the antinomies you have pointed to, because it leads to the question of why the political is such a taboo in art. There’s a kind of McCarthyism today, in which any exhibition of ideas with topicality is treated like an epi172 Encounters

thet: the monstrous, the untouchable. This turn is not only made by the market’s tastemakers; it is also operative in the discourse of defenders of the neo-­avant-­garde, who deliberately turn away from the subject of the post-­colonial, privileging instead a brand of ‘institutional critique’ drained completely of its politics in order to rescue it as a collectible object for the museum and market. Whenever I encounter the term ‘advanced art,’ I can only cringe, because I see an attempt at closure that leaves no room for the unsettled nature and variety of ‘critical’ practice today.” Martha Rosler: “But there is always the press of friendship, which cuts both ways in organizing shows.” Catherine David: “The question for me is not about who is leading or even less about who is the artist but about how to produce, discuss, debate, and circulate to various audiences a certain number of ideas and formal articulations proposed by author(s). At this level, I think that many people (in this case, too, I prefer to say ‘authors’) with whom I am working no longer correspond to the economic, social, and cultural figure of the ‘artist’ as it has been constituted in the modern age. And they don’t worry too much about it.” And what do these “authors” produce? Does this material exist primarily as forms of information? How do the “ideas and formal articulations” work? How are they shaped, arranged, transmitted? How can these move diverse audiences? Okwui Enwezor: “It’s too difficult for people to give up their memory, their past, their history.” As well as a sense of entitlement and power of varying kinds. This cuts both ways. There are things that people value and do not want to give up. Who’s going to hold on to what? How will this play out as we attempt to live together despite our differing memories, perceptions of history and conditions? . . . The plates accompanying this article are from a series of photographs, Other Planes of There (inspired by Sun Ra’s title), taken during the time I spent working in Korea and South Africa in 1997. Two photos depict images re-

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lating to the Kwangju Biennale and to the Johannesburg Biennale. For each of these, there is another photo taken relatively nearby. One photo was taken in Kwangju of the old cemetery where bodies were buried, amid confused conditions, in the wake of the Kwangju uprising in 1980. During 1997, a new cemetery was being made of a very different character: a more ostentatious and public cemetery. Corpses were being removed to the new cemetery to be reburied in response to the wishes of the families. This was to serve as a public monument, to attract visitors, and to serve as a form of reparation for the region, and as such was related to the Kwangju Biennale taking place for the second time nearby, even though this history wasn’t widely known or discussed and this link was not mentioned. The other photo was taken in Soweto, which was about an hour away from the Johannesburg Biennial location. One of the motivations to participate in the event was to be present, to witness the new long-­awaited post-­apartheid time. Even though the process of making the exhibition happen was fraught with difficulties, the incentive had been to do what was possible, even volunteer as much as possible, to share in acknowledging the end of an oppressive regime. What I encountered, from weird dynamics in the airport to the stories of the taxi drivers, students, and tv reports, were other perspectives and conditions which altered this initial enthusiasm and gave way to a more somber and reflective approach. In the photo can be seen memorials of students who had died in Soweto and containers where other presentations were made. Whenever I read or hear the many criticisms about international group exhibitions I’m also reminded of the many kinds of encounters which these allow, filtered primarily via print forms for those not interested or able to go; and the kinds of issues which continue to be pressing, whether they are in or out of art fashion, as well as the ways in which privileges, like “the right to laziness,” are viewed in a world of extreme inequality. What Enwezor and others interested in shifting the balance of resources and ideas take up is not an either/or position. Instead, a way is indicated to acknowledge that we are all—artists, authors, curators, new categories to come, viewers, and humans—implicated in and responsible for how the world is constructed and what is made and how things and people circulate within it, whether we want to do the work to seriously analyze our positions and relationality or not. Acknowledging our embeddedness and our transculturation may indeed make it possible to take the next step.

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Notes Originally published in Yard (Los Angeles), 1, no. 1 (2004): 54–61. 1. “Raum für Notizen: Ein Tagebuch zur Documenta 11,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 47 (September 2002): 70–77. French version: “Notes sur la Documenta 11,” Practiques (Rennes) 13 (Autumn 2002): 76–81. 2. Artforum International 42, no. 3 (November 2003): 152–63, 206, 212. 3. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in The Ideologies of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 4. John Nichols, “Networks Missed a Historic Speech,” Nation, The Online Beat, July 28, 2004, http://www.alternet.org/story/19391/the_networks_missed _something_special. 5. For example, early works of my own come to mind, like Sites of Genealogy (1990–91), and its use of the attic, cellar, corridors of P.S. 1 Museum for presentation, reflection, writing space, meeting space, with a record of the physical change of the space during a year; VistaVision (1991): exhibition, screening, sourcebook, local speakers presented over time at Pat Hearn Gallery, New York; Taste Venue (1994): ads placed in different New York newspapers with different constituencies, space offered to use for many kinds of encounters and events over time, the gallery also functioned as a work space and an economic market indicator, from which a video of the same title was produced. 6. Joe Wood, “It’s a Trick,” in Renée Green: World Tour (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993), c13–c14 .

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20

2008

Archives, Documents? Forms of Creation, Activation, and Use

This is a conversation with a collection of documents. They include a combination of video footage, still photos, books, and periodicals. I’ve decided to allow words spoken in the video documents to insinuate themselves in my activity of writing. History is always also about now. (Raqs Media Collective, Spheres of Interest seminar, February 2006, video documentation) This invitation to think about the differences between documents and archives allowed me to focus on an operation I’ve been engaged with for nearly three years: the development of a series, of which video and text documents have been amassed. A publication series growing out of a seminar and lecture series I began in 2005 is taking shape.1 Amid that process a collection of documents is growing. The contents are swelling and assessment, as well as some form of ordering, is necessary. The materials are now in that liminal zone between the document and the archive. In exploring distinctions between “having an interest,” “browsing,” and “research,” as well as editing—for text and for film—I’d like to relate instances that are waystations along the journey to creating something else, which is what both documents and archives can allow to those who are astute in extracting information and transmuting it into various forms of knowledge. This is an attempt to move away from a notion that seems prevalent of the archive or of documents as fetish, rather than being deeply and repeatedly examined. I will use two examples from the video documents to assist me in thinking about these topics, as well as to ponder relations to books and other sources of information, pleasure, and provocation that can lead to different kinds of knowledge and feeling.

20.1 Spheres of Interest: Experiments in Thinking and Action, 2010. Private document, Free Agent Media, 2010.

An ethics of dialogue rather than an ethics of expertise. (Kobena Mercer, Spheres of Interest seminar, February 2006, video docu­ mentation) The project is a stimulating and sustaining one, as it has both a private and public, or shared, dimension. It focuses on dialogues, on probing questions and processes involved in various forms of creation. The presenting participants who are invited to engage in this exchange respond positively to my curiosity, as well as to that of the other seminar participants. They are all willing to state their ideas and explicate them for a two-­hour period. Afterwards we have a nice meal together. All of the participants have been interested in forms of concentration and how to use that in varying ways. As a list, as well as individually, the participants demonstrate impressive bodies of work; at least they are stimulating in relation to my interests. A point I’d like to return to. They all journeyed to San Francisco, from nearby Berkeley or from further distant Los Angeles and also from New Delhi, São Paulo, Paris, Oslo, Berlin, London, Vienna, Lisbon, Durham, Providence, and New York. 20. Archives, Documents? 177

In my mind they form a network of very compelling thinkers and creators with whom I continue to be in contact. When not physically in their midst I have the documents of their expressions and our conversations. Upon rewatching the video footage, new information always emerges. This process attests to the difficulty of comprehending anything in one encounter. My encounters with the traces of these concentrated two-­hour visits allows me a profound intimation into little-­discussed aspects of our present. I witness evidence of life beyond the constraints encountered in most media, academic, or art world discussions. The way in which interests emerge in these particular discussions, officially described as seminars, is rare elsewhere; we discuss deep passions, complex ideas, and complex feelings. A certain intimacy is achieved. In watching different of these conversations in conjunction, new meanings and intersections of concern and thought emerge. Like the reason some writers give for having written their books, I too have the desire to experience something I haven’t known yet, but would like to encounter and I create what I recognize has been lacking. Words, sounds, spaces, structures, things, or films—works I’d like to encounter and explore. I have a similar feeling as I review these documents. The words uttered are like water for parched earth. This is the way I feel as I review these documents. Words used, places referenced, and names mentioned stimulate further digging and exploration. Material for creation. Forming renewed networks? Constellations? Configurations? This is one of the things that can take place in the construction of archives that are historical repositories, as well as tools for active engagement. It’s not only a statement of facts, but it’s also a statement of certain kinds of desires of seeing the world. That element of how one sees the world, how one actually frames a vision of the world, has something to do with the imagination. It has something to do with the terms on which one would see the world. Is your vision of the world going to be a commanding vision of the world, does seeing or knowing necessarily mean domination? Can it also mean something else? (Raqs Media Collective, Spheres of Interest seminar) These are questions of history and of the present, as well as questions of ethics and of the imagination. Discussions concerning documents and archives are compelling entry points for ruminating on these.

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I think history is really important, not simply as a chronology, or a record, or a document, the status of each of those terms is a contested one, but in terms of how it informs contemporary practices. We often think we know what happened in the past and we have selective versions of it that have been transmitted through the teaching and education we’ve been exposed to, through our own interests in terms of what we seek out. But the archive is full of surprises and even though we weren’t able to use all the material that was selected, it was a really rewarding experience. History is not fixed, it’s actually made from the point of view of the present, so that was a decisive influential experience in terms of seeking a more historical, genealogical approach. . . . The archive is full of surprises that can challenge your conceptual framework, that force you to rethink the presuppositions you had to start with. Annotations are footnotes, notes we make in the margins of books. It isn’t a counter-­history, but rather a rethinking of history and that’s manifested in the fact that the series unfolds over four titles. (Kobena Mercer, Spheres of Interest seminar) In all cases the participants produce something specific, whether it is a film, sound, writings, publications, artworks, or performances. There is always an object, or a non-­object, of knowledge or inquiry, usually saturated with emotion—even when restrained, that is a jumping-­off point for considering; the evidence experienced by the participants during the conversations and in the aftermath by viewers of these documents. What is evidenced are attempts at coming to some form of recognition not merely between the receiver/perceivers and the instigator/creator but in terms of what is being expressed. This recognition is not a simple knowing but rather an unfolding of possibilities to follow, an invitation. The object of inquiry is composed, even if it appears to be an open-­ended work. Its composition is a crucial aspect of investigation, which also includes a querying into what was meant in its creation, how that diverged during the process of making, whether others were considered as an audience or public and in what ways. How do others and oneself respond to this object/process? What was not anticipated? Or, what was astonishing? The subtitle of this project is Experiments in Thinking and Action and its umbrella title is Spheres of Interest. The seminars allow a space for knowl-

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edge and its sharing among creators. These kinds of generative spaces are quite rare. Fortunately they don’t depend upon an institution, but can exist between two or more people sitting at a table or on a park bench. The process of documentation is a basic one: a video camera, videotapes, a microphone, headphones, and a power source. These issues can’t be resolved all at once. . . . Producing knowledge takes time and money. . . . The idea that you can do a kind of instant address that takes the form of large-­scale anthologies—they’re incredibly valuable, and my own work has been included in many of them, but I know from a teaching point of view that they can be counterproductive. If you’ve got a book with thirty chapters there and each chapter is relatively small, that can be overwhelming because it’s difficult for students to process it. What is most relevant? What is useful? What is not so useful? What’s in the background or in the foreground? . . . The idea of unfolding history in a series of four volumes is to demonstrate that this process of rethinking and rewriting is one that unfolds over time, it doesn’t happen in an instant. . . . The key issue is to move from the kind of theoretical critique of Eurocentrism, parochialism, those world views that have limited our understanding of 20th-­century art and to move from a kind of theoretical critique to the challenge of how do you go about constructing that history from a multi-­perspectival approach? . . . The key word is recognition. . . . Where’s the vocabulary that’s going to be flexible enough to be able to be inclusive but to be precise enough to move beyond theory of the abstract and talk about diverse modernities, these diverse experiences of the contradictory, overlapping across the 21st century, or how far back do you want to go? You can go back to the Enlightenment to think about how that was experienced across the globe. . . . Who can claim complete competency of the ever-­expanding field and mass of information on, for example, “the global”? (Kobena Mercer, Spheres of Interest seminar) The participants/conversants I’ve chosen to focus on here have been selected because of their involvement with the issues this text is in part about: the document and the archive. Their attempts at producing documents for present and future reference and the ways they approach how archiving can take place are a part of what interests me about them. In both 180 Encounters

cases they are changing the sphere for discourse, thinking, and creating, but producing books that can be accessed, whether in a library, a bookstore, or online, via purchase or downloads. Allow me to introduce a version of Raqs Media Collective and of Kobena Mercer, based on documents of their production and of the video footage we’re discussing. Raqs has been involved in the production of a serial publication called Sarai Reader. Kobena Mercer is an art historian who has been the editor of a series entitled Annotating Art’s History. Both are, as I am, involved in editorial functions. Both are also involved in research.2 Research: n. 1. Diligent and systematic inquiry or investigation into a subject in order to discover or revise facts, theories, applications, etc. 2. A particular instance or piece of research. 3. to make researches; investigate carefully. 4. To make extensive investigation into. Syn. 1. Scrutiny, study. See investigation. 4. Study, inquire, examine, scrutinize.3 There is a pressure to feel and look with the moment. There can also be a pressure to look and feel with the moment in the manner that you’re supposed to given that you’re from Delhi. (Raqs Media Collective, Spheres of Interest seminar) When one focuses on discerning what can be found via in-­depth investigation into an object of knowledge, which I believe some works of art to be, possibilities are opened. But this requires time and awareness. Straddling the faultline of the artist and the intellectual. (Raqs Media Collective, Spheres of Interest seminar) In the case of the operation I’ve presented here, the process includes repeatedly reviewing the tapes, the tedious fastidiousness of accuracy, the immense time it takes to examine (i.e., watch) the documents, and the resources necessary (a space to gather, a place to store, electricity, tapes, cameras, microphones, duplication fees, paid transcription) would in addition include the process of archiving—establishing a system before the materials are even archived—thus ensuring that once archived they would be locatable by a public. The organization, knowledge, and resources necessary for such an en-

20. Archives, Documents? 181

deavor is reminiscent of two examples of previous projects of mine that include making films.4 Here I will focus on two projects: Import/Export Funk Office (1992–96), and Code: Survey (2003–6). In these instances art was conceived as an object/process capable of allowing deep knowledge. In particular, these works are attempts to replenish aspects of perception and experience that appeared lost and focused differently on what had been disregarded, highlighting the relativity of the word and concept “normal.”

The World Is Here Right Now: Simultaneity The above-­mentioned heading is a phrase stimulated by watching the Raqs Media Collective videotape documentation. An excerpt of their words combined: Asymmetry of ignorance, ignorance that is seen as something other than ignorance; by intervening in debates you produce this possibility of continuously keeping this tension alive for yourself, not to be swarmed by a discursive formation, not to fall into the linearity of what’s given to you as time—simultaneity; the network of history in the present, you don’t take the present as a separate given. Why should an intellectual consider being an artist? When you begin to ask a few questions about the received narratives of history you can’t just posit a counter-­narrative. The received narratives of history have a certain affective or even emotional register, a register of feeling, which has something to do with confidence; it may have something to do with entitlement. When you’re encountering these things you have to also consider other registers of feeling. How does one disturb the idea of enlightenment? Or disturb the idea of the entitlement that comes from that history? And in doing that . . . I think, there’s a line from Bertolt Brecht in Galileo which talks about the fact that the shortest distance between two points when there is an impediment is a crooked line. The willingness to enter a path navigated through the crooked line is what would make an intellectual consider the danger of being an artist. Of not having to qualify every statement, only in terms of veracity or only in terms of the codes of how knowledge is verified, but also occasionally insist on making imaginative leaps, that then can be provoca-

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tions for new pictures of the world. (Raqs Media Collective, Spheres of Interest seminar)

Another Encounter A traveling assembly of used books of one owner, on view and available for perusal and limited copying. A named assembly of books loosely ordered by subject in the physical encounter and by name and title for an online search, in the process of being catalogued but nonetheless temporarily public. What are its distinguishing features? What did I discover? What did I find curious? How did this oddness or curiousness lead to imagining a portrait of the lender of these books? Clues, indications; but of what? In this case, the knowledge formation of a college-­educated North American woman spanning the 50s, 60s, into the 1970s, with a strong interest in Marxism, Jewish history, documentary photography, New York City, the West of the U.S., Latin America, transportation, political economy and social-­historical information, feminism emergent in the 1960s and 1970s, etc. Ongoing interest in a Marxist, leftist, progressive perspective of the world via journals, such as Telos, New German Critique, nacla , The Nation can be observed. An interest in theoretical thinking via the Minnesota University Press series Theory and History of Literature, which translated into English works by Lyotard, Paul de Man, Deleuze and Guattari, among others. In contrast to unpacking a library, as described by Benjamin, this is a case of temporarily shedding much of a library. Choices made in creating a library or in collecting books inevitably become part of a portrait of the collector; otherwise, why spend any attention on the annotations in the books of a particular person? This assembly of printed matter made me wonder about other personal libraries. Many artists and writers I’ve known have had libraries in some form. I have manifested my curiosity regarding the books of others, as well 20. Archives, Documents? 183

as other objects of collection, such as of vinyl records and cd collections, in a work which, in part, focused on the library of writer, music critic, and cultural analyst Diedrich Diederichsen. The work became Import/Export Funk Office (1992). This project stemmed from my interest in another person’s collection, the collector’s intellectual, creative, and subjective processes; the initial stimulation was based very much on a resonance with things that I too found interesting and also had in my collection. Passionate interest, something like being a fan of particular authors and kinds of music, as well as different musicians and sound producers initiated the work. The focus was hip-­hop, but this linked to other cultural forms, including literary, filmic, and experimental sound ones. For this reason it was compelling as a process of exchange and dialogue between ourselves and others, who also shared these interests in Cologne, in NYC, and in Los Angeles. We met in New York with my friends who wrote for the Village Voice or were dj s, in Cologne with Diedrich’s friends and colleagues from Spex magazine, as well as with people I learned about and met in L.A.: mc s, a writer and photographer of the L.A. hip-­hop scene from Ireland. . . . Books from Diedrich’s and my library were gathered, as well as audiotapes; it was 1991 to 1993. I taped the music that D.D. identified as crucial to his development, and collected contemporary hip-­hop music from the U.S. and Germany, as well as antecedents to these. Forms of classification and my interest in these became apparent, as they indicate mental processes for designation and thus an articulation of perception, both mine and of others. These forms of classification were a part of the project. Some of the many points that I note when studying someone’s book collection/library include: 1. Periods during which the books were collected, as well as their publishing date. 2. Time of translation, and the effects upon readers of these in different locations. 3. Finding things I didn’t know about, or weird correspondences to things I’m interested in, unusual and odd findings, obscure things, things that were very popular at a particular time; or, in certain areas finding little I’m interested in.

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Regarding the active use of someone else’s library: It is interesting to note what each person detects differently; for example, how certain books and journals resonate for others in different times and places and also for people in the same city. NYC, for example, where Hélio Oiticica also lived for a time. How might he have perceived then the materials we find collected during the 1950s–1970s in North America, as mentioned above? What might have appeared interesting? What might he have yearned for, especially while in exile in New York when presented with such a collection? What might he have collected? He was interested in Jack Smith and worked at nights as a translator—from Portuguese to English and the reverse, I would imagine—in addition to making his works and filling his many notebooks with writings and proposals, his own forms of organization. Of course, this is a speculative leap. When I think of my own library, the references wouldn’t necessarily be analogous or easy to identify as linked with particular projects, as many seemingly unrelated sources are used for these; the sources span different languages and many countries and regions. They include other references from childhood, like Langston Hughes’s poetry; or literature of writers from the African Diaspora, that would also encompass books by Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Caetano Veloso, Ousmane Sembène, C. L. R. James, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Cedric Robinson, the novels and short stories of Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Aimé Cesaire’s and June Jordan’s poetry, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s writings, James Weldon Johnson’s collected writings, Brazilian film, Patrice Lumumba in Portuguese, a lot of Godard, monographs on Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Chantal Akerman, poetry and non-­ classifiable books by Muriel Rukeyser, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. . . . A vast array of explorations into subjectivity and experience, my formation. Some of the books and periodicals were collected while living in different countries. Some were gifts and others were acquired during my work in publishing. Others were acquired in the course of designing books and other projects. Forms of taking a sort of self-­inventory for an individual can also be deduced by observing reflections people may come to have about their books. This can resemble a form of memoir or sensation, one’s collection mapping the passage of time.

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What does this investigation bring or what has already been brought? One instance I’m thinking about: Orhan Pamuk reflecting on Istanbul.5 Another subjective encounter for the collector and for the reader? But when the inventory organizer (or recaller?) is an outside person and when the primary recaller/collector is still alive, how to think about that? . . . One thing is certain, I am a book person. This is not to be confused with what might be assumed of a bibliophile—a dubious moniker which can veer toward an idiotic mania for books—although there are intersections with my interest. Also there are links to being a bookworm. I like and note all aspects of books—everything tactile and sensual, from the paperweight, the bindings, the look and feel of the type, the spacing and fonts, the color and printing processes, different formats for different feelings, and of course the words or images and their intersection. There isn’t enough space or time now to describe the many ways I enjoy and engage with books to date, despite my interest in using digital technologies. To unpack this profound interest leads to a complex portrait, as each book, periodical, or piece of ephemera leads to mental trajectories and associations of varied kinds that can branch out into others. Different stories. Maybe this is why I am also fond of the ways in which books are arranged, as well as the various systems people have for putting their things, as well as their ideas, somewhere. Code: Survey, completed in 2006 as an online source “permanently” located on the Caltrans District 7 website and physically located in its headquarters in downtown Los Angeles,6 has been my most recent attempt at finding a place to put a directed collection of images, words, and voices in an order; an order with many permutations which, like browsing in a library, can lead to unexpected discoveries.

Interlude A few quotes to be thought of as entry points to describe case studies of a relation to books, and by inference, intelligence: Discovery is nothing. The difficulty is to acquire what we discover. (Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste7)

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It happens that someone has been asked whether there is a crisis in intelligence, whether the world is becoming stupid, whether there is a distaste for culture, whether the liberal professions are suffering, perhaps dying—their strength declining, their ranks thinning, their prestige gradually diminishing, their existence more and more thankless, precarious, and near its end. (Paul Valéry, Remarks on Intelligence8) That autumn (1954) On Growth and Form followed me to Majorca; back to Paris two years later; finally, two years after that, to Lans-­en-­ Vercours (a mountain village near Grenoble). I wrote and published a novel. My marriage ended. I published more novels. My children went away. For a while I lived in Venice, without my books. I returned to Lans to begin life with a new family. I began teaching in America. My father died, my best friend died, my mother died. We moved to Paris. In 1996 we began spending summers in Lans once again; and it was there, on July 29, 1997, that I began reading my last stolen book. My progress was interrupted between September 23 and February 11, 1998. On July 18, once again in Lans, I finished On Growth and Form. (Harry Mathews, The Pursuit of the Whole9)

A Stopping Point, as This Topic Could Be Endless Rethinking genealogies and earlier contexts, as well as how to gain substance and memory-­fuel from them rather than reject them, has been an objective in this examination of documents, that may in time become archived. Hopefully in accessible libraries, archives, and online sources. Ways of imagining intersections that exist and can be further thought, as I earlier mentioned, was a stimulus for beginning Spheres of Interest, which I consider to be an extension of previous work that I’ve been interested in examining and in producing, as well as a way to concurrently engage with others’ interests in both activities of examination and production. Looking back, I recall different instances of some of these possibilities and moments, many still yet to be reexamined. Some examples are from Nova Scotia School of Art and Design in their publication series that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. These include Yvonne Rainer’s Work 1961–73. That series also included Hollis Frampton and Carl Andre in conversation,

20. Archives, Documents? 187

Michael Asher, choreographer Simone Forti, and others. I remember also receiving stimulus from the Dia Art Foundation’s publication series during the late 1980s “Discussions in Contemporary Culture,” some of which I attended; the series of publications grew out of the discussions, and included the books Black Popular Culture, a project by Michele Wallace, edited by Gina Dent; Democracy, a project by Group Material; and Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, edited by Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckrey. The atmosphere of probing ideas and lively debates from these two publication series and from the Dia presentations and discussions provided an impetus for developing an attempt in the present to encounter partially buried knowledge that continues to be produced in different spheres. This dynamic process of thinking and dialogue regarding forms of creating is being continued in the present. Nostalgia isn’t the intention of the encounters I’ve described, participants of different generations are invited, but rather reflection on the past and a rethinking of the past from different creators’ perspectives in the present, creators who have different perceptions about the world informed by their experience of many countries, languages, and diverse forms of interest in and access to knowledge. One example that can provide a model of how this process can exist is that of the Projecto Hélio Oiticica,10 a private foundation organized by Oiticica’s family members in Brazil to manage his collection of papers, notebooks, and ephemera; these materials are now available for public research. Online access to these and other resources, in addition to a tactile encounter in the depths of an archive or library, can provide other ways to think about living, producing, creating, and diffusing what can matter.

Notes Originally published in English in Geschichten/n verwahren, edited by Julia Klär­ ing and Katharina Lampert (Vienna: ig Bildende Kunst, 2009). Also appeared in French as “Notes pour un essai: Archives, documents? Formes de création, activation, et usage,” Hors d’oeuvre (Dijon), no. 22 ( June–September 2008): 3. The Instant Archive, a curatorial project from Season 17, Ecole du Magasin, Grenoble, 2008, includes on their website a pdf of the English version. 1. Spheres of Interest: Experiments in Thinking and Action was the name of the Graduate Lecture Series directed by Green at the San Francisco Art Institute.

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Initiated in 2006 with a pilot season, 2008 marked the third consecutive year in which a roster of invited guests visited San Francisco to engage in private seminars and public lectures. The series continued until Spring 2010; at the time of writing, guests and events included Cindy Bernard, Chris Gilbert, Activating the Medium Festival 9, 10, and 11, Sabeth Buchmann, Rainer Bellenbaum, Helmut Draxler, Stephan Geene, Ashley Hunt, Taisha Paggett, Michael Eng, Kimberly Lamm, Diedrich Diederichsen, Noise Symposium: Florian Hecker, Curtis Roads, and Yasunao Tone, Kobena Mercer, Raqs Media Collec‑ tive, Trevor Paglen, Alfredo Jaar, Sarkis, Allan deSouza, Barbara Vanderlinden, Claire Daigle, Beth Coleman, Simin Farkhondeh, Avery F. Gordon, Fred Moten, Marko Peljhan, Judith Barry, John C. Welchman, Retort, a conversation with Trinh T. Minh-­ha, Elvan Zabunyan, and Renée Green, Anthony McCall, Eduardo Cadava, Judith Hopf, Jürgen Bock, Lovett/Codagnone, Lia Gangitano, Françoise Vergès, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Camille Norment, Acoustic Landscapes and Noise: Florian Hecker and Chris Watson, Dont Rhine/Ultra-­red, John Miller, Christian Philipp Müller, Tony Cokes, Phill Niblock, Florian Zeyfang, Laura Harris, Sowon Kwon, Karim Aïnouz, and Sharon Hayes. More information about the complete series can be found at http://spheresofinterest .blogspot.com. 2. Kobena Mercer is editor of the publication series Annotating Art’s Histo‑ ries: Cross-­Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts, published by mit Press and Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts). The series has four volumes: Cosmopolitan Modernisms; Discrepant Abstraction; Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers; and Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures. Raqs Media Collective coedit Sarai Reader, published by The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Seven volumes have appeared: The Public Domain; The Cities of Everyday Life; Shaping Technologies; Crisis/Media; Bare Acts; Turbulence; and Frontiers. The Readers circulate as books and can also be accessed online at http://sarai.net /category/publications/ 3. Adapted from Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Dilithium Press, 1989). 4. These would also include another project of mine, Wavelinks (1999–2002); seven films were produced on electronically produced sound: Mediations: The Wire; Electronic Music?; Into the Machine: Laptops; Activism and Sound; The Aural and The Visual; Spectrums of Sound; and A Different Reality. 5. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (New York: Knopf, 2005). 6. Code: Survey website, http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist07/code_survey/intro .htm. 7. Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste (New York: Knopf, 1947), 13. 8. Paul Valéry, “Remarks on Intelligence,” in The Outlook for Intelligence (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). Originally published in 1962 by Bollingen Foundation as part I of History and Politics, which is volume 10 of the Collected Works of Paul Valéry. 9. Harry Mathews, “The Pursuit of the Whole,” in The Case of the Persevering

20. Archives, Documents? 189

Maltese: Collected Essays (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003). Mathews is referencing D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form. 10. Hosted by the Itaú Cultural, a cultural institute located in São Paulo, Projecto Hélio Oiticica can be accessed at http://www.itaucultural.org.br/aplic externas/enciclopedia/ho/home/index.cfm.

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21

2010

On Kawara’s Solutions to Living Via recognizable processes such as I got up, I met, I went, I read and systems: counting, dating, days of the week named in Esperanto and various languages depending on where he spent the first day of a given month— On Kawara hit upon a perfect method for conveying the movements of a “global soul.” The time was around 1966. The chosen framework of what is perhaps his most recognizable body of work, his Today series or “date paintings,” denoting the month, date, and year, and produced continually for an indeterminate time, along with a newspaper clipping from whatever newspaper he read that day, and a box that fits both the newspaper clipping and the painting, appears to be a simple framework, yet it is open enough for myriad projections. We as viewers always encounter this work after the date has passed. In this case we’re looking at a small date painting, with a simple white sans serif type on a black ground. It is accompanied by a box with a newspaper clipping. The painting fits inside the box. The box is labeled by the date as well. There are other aspects to this process. I’ll come back to this. At whatever point in time one encounters one of On Kawara’s date paintings it is possible to imagine a form of relation or of distance. You can also imagine a day in the life of On Kawara—at least what he allows us to know—the time that elapsed during a designated 24-­hour period called a day and how he spent some hours of it, maybe eight, maybe twelve, making the painting you see. You may also recall the processes I mentioned earlier. He did meet people and kept notebooks listing who, where, and the date. He sent people postcards and telegrams that stated that he was still alive. He read the newspapers that we find clippings of in his boxes. The paintings and the processes surrounding them somehow resemble the process of keeping a journal that is both public and private—they rep-

resent the trace of On Kawara’s own form of paying attention, as well as call our attention as viewers to the date we read in the painting. Imagine painting a date painting with precision, preparing the box, reading the newspaper, making a selection from the mass of news, and cutting it to fit neatly into the box. On Kawara did keep journals that are related to the date paintings. In these he lists, via his own coding system, the size, color, and the date, as well as subtitles for the paintings, along with photos of his working locations. The subtitles continue, but their contents shifted after 1972. I’ll come back to this. One can think of On Kawara’s activities and the work he produces as a move back and forth from what can be imagined as solipsism (a private activity) to communality (meeting people, walking through cities, reading about news events to engage the public realm). I find it amusing to imagine receiving a postcard from him with his succinct message, “I got up at ____.” Indicating that he’s still making the effort. Still alive. Now it seems rare to receive postcards, especially from anyone you might actually know. Having something which has visibly passed from another person to you, from one place to another. Something to touch. Try to imagine the past before e-­mail and social networks. How do we value contact or being remembered by a single person? There is no notebook of processes labeled “I Said” or “I Wrote,” possibly because he is enacting these actions. There are references to these actions in his earlier subtitles until 1973. I like imaging On Kawara as a character in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Timequake. In the novel time reverses to be repeated. February 2001 becomes February 1991. All inhabitants of Earth must relive exactly what they lived through the first time they lived through the decade. I can imagine On Kawara as hardly being affected, in that his approach to living seems quite consistent. A soothing solution somehow. Knowing that when you get up in the morning you can paint figures on a monochrome ground of the date of the day that you’re living. It requires concentration and what seems like repetition, although it isn’t really repetition as each moment is different. What is life anyway? A series of repetitions, but not exactly? The traditional Art and Life divide is bridged by his decision to literally link what he makes with what he lives. In a photo that documents his working space, traces of living—a pack of cigarettes and acrylic paint tubes—are visible. 192 Encounters

The work here (March 16, 1993) is a gift by On Kawara and his wife Hiroko to the San Francisco Museum of Art in memory of John Caldwell. Upon closer viewing of the box you can note that the newspaper clipping comes from the obituary page. It includes, among others, the obituary of John Caldwell, who was a curator of painting and sculpture at SFM oMA from 1989 until 1993. The newspaper is cut to fit the box, so the obituaries of all that appear on this page are partly cut. The specific gift suggests a form of relation to Caldwell that shows respect and that can resuscitate the memory of those who knew Caldwell, as well as those who encounter a reference to him for a first time here. This in turn can set off a chain of thoughts. How much time has passed since this painting was made and since Caldwell died? Isn’t it interesting that Caldwell had an interest in collecting art that involved forms of appropriation, and now even his obituary is appropriated as a piece of art in the collection of the museum in which he worked? A trace remains, to be interpreted in various ways. And there is the date and our own relationship to it or our memory or lack of memory of it. Through time On Kawara’s work can take on a profound significance if we fully contemplate the various kinds of relations it suggests. Its continuous yet open forms, that are also specific, still allow space to speculate, wonder, and remember, solipsistically and communally, on the fact that while seeing this painting on this day we are still alive. . . . This brings me to my conclusion. I will read subtitles from On Kawara’s work until the time runs out. July, 1967 “New York” July 4, 1967 “Independence Day” July 5, 1967 “North Korean regulars killed a South Korean soldier and wounded 12 others south of the demilitarized zone today” July 8, 1967 “Hip-­Hippie-­Hurrah” July 10, 1967 “I have a dull pain in my eyes” July 12, 1967 “Negro taxi driver John W. Smith was stopped by 2 patrolmen at 9:45 tonight in Newark” July 13, 1967 “Newark” July 14, 1967 “Newark” July 15, 1967 “Newark”

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July 16, 1967 “Newark” July 17, 1967 “Newark” July 18, 1967 “Mostly fair and warm”

Note Text from a public presentation on January 16, 2010, for 75 Reasons to Live, a series of 7.5-­minute talks around works from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s collection. Green selected for her talk On Kawara’s Mar. 16, 1993 from the Today series.

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22

1995

“Give Me Body” Freaky Fun, Biopolitics, and Contact Zones

I’d like to begin by analyzing the title of this talk. I chose this title because it somehow seemed capable of alluding to the overlapping areas I’d like to discuss. I plan to make historical and contemporary references to ways in which particular bodies have been perceived, as well as how the articulation of these bodies have been attempted textually, orally/aurally, and visually. I chose to use a pop reference, “give me body,” a phrase from the song “Come into My House” by Queen Latifah, to refer to the affirmative ways in which the topic of the body has in recent times been approached. In the song, “give me body,” is a command used to invoke the listeners to come onto the dance floor. “Give me body” seemed to also encompass desires, which have appeared throughout time in searches for fulfillment and stimulation—sometimes sexual and sometimes immanent, corporeal, physical— which are sometimes overtly stated or unconsciously alluded to, and which have also been sheathed by literary and scientific discourses, as in some traveler’s accounts. A few years ago there was quite a spate of publications and conferences focusing on the topic of the body. Of late, in art practices, some attention (critical and artistic) has been privileged on work which refers in some way to the human body—the sexualized, usually youthful and imprinted body (and by imprinted I mean stylized, visibly sexualized, tattooed, pierced, cut, bruised, stripped or costumed, etc.), as appears in photographic work by Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, and Wolfgang Tillmans; in Matthew Barney’s bodily transformations, Elke Krystufek’s public masturbations, Cheryl Donegan’s videos of herself engaged in acts of swallowing, the embodiment and weight of Félix González-­Torres’s candy that can be

consumed by gallery visitors who are reminded that his boyfriend Ross died of aids and was once the weight of a pile of candies, Janine Antoni’s use of her hair as a mop and presentation of her sleeping body, Kiki Smith’s sculptures of bodies leaving their entrails behind them, the list can go on and on. There continues to be an interest in bodily transformations, explorations of the body inside and out, temporal endurance of activities, the diseased body, even the absent body, as well as “transgressive”—usually meant to refer to pushing the limits of sex or drug-­related or death-­risking activities—ways in which the body can be figured. The notion of what I’m referring to as “freaky fun,” to again use a colloquial way to describe situations which are historic and contemporary, has been in existence for a long time. In some sense the notion of the possibility of bodily transgressions is a stock trade in art practices. Shock potential has decreased, although amnesia—which I’ve noticed has been bemoaned more and more by some despairing cultural critics and historians as the century wanes—does seem to remain prevalent. Forgetting what was once surprising, and the historic circumstances which allowed it to be perceived as such, seems to make it possible to be surprised by a contemporary version of a similar thing. There seems to be a need for “bad girls” and “bad boys” and “bad gender-­benders.” Freakiness as amusement and fun. I’m using “freaky” linked to “fun” because the joining of these two words is related to the aspects of pleasure which are sometimes associated with the unknown, or the dangerous, or the dangerous unknown. In various travel narratives, spanning the past several centuries, one of the titillating aspects of the quest or travel was to encounter what was unknown, to risk delving into an area where one might not come back to tell the tale, although one of the main driving forces of leaving was to return to the home to relate what happened in strange lands, and to in turn receive validation for challenging the limits. Those limits in many cases involved testing physical limits, or testing what was previously believed to be the truth, or even providing unknown information on other beings, who might be perceived to be freaks (in older and contemporary parlance) and their habitat and habits. The idea of freaks or being freaky or experiencing freakiness as I’m using the terms incorporates older definitions of freaks, as undesirable strangers or as creatures radically different than the “norm” with more contemporary and vernacular notions of freaks as social outlaws—a 1960s transmutation 198 Positions

of the negative connotations of former times—to freaks in the sense of sexually active people, as the term is used in hip-­hop culture. This brings me to what I’m referring to as biopolitics. In an essay entitled “After the Love Has Gone: Bio-­politics and Ethno-­poetics in the Black Public Sphere,”1 sociologist Paul Gilroy suggests that biopolitics is increasingly taking the place of a public politics. I quote: The black body politic is now regularly represented internally and externally as an integral but “freaky” body. Racialised sex is an ephemeral residue of political rebellion. . . . I would like to examine the effects on the public political world of transposing that yearning for freedom into a different mode. This is signaled by the growing centrality of what might be called a racialised biopolitics of fucking: a means of bonding freedom and life. This move towards bio-­politics is best understood as an outgrowth of the pattern identified as “identity politics” in earlier periods by a number of writers (see June Jordan in “Waiting for a Taxi,” Technical Difficulties, Pantheon, 1992). It is a mood in which the person is defined as the body and in which certain exemplary bodies for example, those of Mike Tyson and Michael Jordan, Naomi Campbell and Veronica Webb become instantiations of community.2 The pitfalls of this “racialised bio-­politics” are described as designating a solely heterosexual racial community and privileging “gendered self-­ cultivation,” and he compares this practice as being on a par with working out with weights. The notion of biopolitics, according to Gilroy, doesn’t follow an earlier dictum of freeing one’s body, so that the mind will follow (a reference to the Funkadelics, a band which emerged in the seventies, and whose slogan, “free your ass and your mind will follow,” can also be further probed). Instead, biopolitics, as Gilroy describes it, relies upon the “visual representation of racial bodies—engaged in characteristic activities—usually sexual or sporting that ground and solicit identification if not solidarity,” and in turn bears a strange relation to previous attempts to define a racialized and sexualized body, not from within what’s being referred to by Gilroy as a “black public sphere” but from without. In particular, I’m thinking of writings by the founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, and those by natural scientist Georges Cuvier, each in reference to a South African woman. In both cases the woman became an object of scientific observation, and in 22. “Give Me Body” 199

their writings is demonstrated a tug-­of-­war between perverse fascination, attraction, and repulsion.

Can “Transgression” Be Equated with “Freedom”? Some Case Studies The g side of Snoop’s album begins with his best known track. Its title is formed by two foundational questions. They arise like siblings at the heart of the historic dialogue that demands completion of the special ontological inquiries in which newly-­freed slaves engaged as they strove to define and clarify the boundaries of their new status as free modern individuals: who am i? what’s my name ?3 Saartjie Baartman aka Sarah Bartman aka Hottentot Venus. Even her name can’t be agreed upon. She lived from 1790 to 1815 and was brought from South Africa to Europe to be displayed as a freak or curiosity. She was displayed at Piccadilly in London and in Paris. “In the fifth year of her exhibition, she died. Her body was then autopsied, her skeleton articulated and her genitals preserved in a jar of solution. Both her skeleton and her genitals were donated by her dissector to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where they even now remain.”4 . . . In Permitted (1989) the representation of Sarah Baartman’s body was made visible by reproducing and blowing up to lifesize an engraving.5 Unlike the original, which serves as a scientific reference, this image is altered by the textual overlay of the words of Galton, which were from a description he’d written of how he’d measured her buttocks with a land-­surveying device and is interspersed with outbursts of amazement at her form. The rubber-­ stamped words are represented in different alternating typefaces—one, in Times Roman with capital letters, which represents the “objective” description and the other, in script, which represents the lapses into “subjective” description. At the time in which I did this work the notions of subjectivity, the subject, and the reclamation of females who had previously been objectified had already become problematized. There was already a strain of work by

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feminist cultural producers (visual artists and filmmakers), many working in England, who were questioning the role of “visual pleasure” in relation to representing the female body.6 This work was done with a knowledge of those discussions but with a desire to address what I perceived as missing aspects from them. Questions like those raised by Susan Rubin Suleiman in “(Re)Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism” arose, in relation to thinking about how to work with historical narratives and contemporary discussions of the visual: What seemed, at first, an unproblematic desideratum—let woman speak her own body, assume her own subjecthood—has become problematized, complicated by increasingly difficult questions: what exactly do we mean when we speak of woman as subject, whether of speech or writing or of her own body? Is there such a thing as a—(or the)—­ subject: Is there such a thing as woman’s body, woman’s sexuality: Is there such a thing as woman, or for that matter, man? These questions—which become inevitable the moment one begins seriously to think about the body or about sexuality, whether male or female—did not originate in the contemporary women’s movement or in contemporary feminist thought; but the latter has evolved to encompass them and has infused them with a new urgency, whether in the form of analytic discourse or imaginative elaboration.7 What has followed since this was originally published in 1984 has been further investigations, which have been done in the area now designated as gender studies. In this series of work revolving around how to represent a female, racialized, and sexualized body it can be noted that the visual representation of the figure becomes gradually more and more transmuted. Questions of vision, in relationship to photography, also became more apparent. Yet, evidence of the body was still visible. The pleasurable aspects of these bodies were also alluded to, specifically in the repeated image of Josephine Baker, as well as the tensions and contradictions involved in that pleasure. The textual descriptions, comments by critics after her Paris debut in the Revue Negre in 1925, attempt to usurp “her” and her own remarks provide a critical reply. The language and the way the text (textual body) was represented in these works—rubber-­stamping for example requiring each letter to be 22. “Give Me Body” 201

physically and laboriously applied—were visual elements which functioned as memory devices, as well as records of time’s passage and markers of spatial locations. Tensions and dissatisfactions still lingered within the act of “giving body” to a visual presence, even when mediated by the text. The dissolution of the actual image of the body became not only textually but also visually represented as mediated, as can be observed in the gradually more and more blurry image of Josephine Baker, which is repeated and alphabetized, juxtaposed with a small image of Sarah Baartman, also included in the alphabetic designation. Testing ways of making visible references to how particular female bodies were represented reflected, in part, my reactions to previous work in which the female figure was not pictorially represented and which thus seemed to presume that what a female was, visibly and physically, was already agreed upon, yet based on my reading about how black females were described this was not so clear, not a universal given.8 The specificity of how this racialized and gendered body was scientifically described resembled other descriptions throughout history, as well as those which continued to appear when describing black female bodies. While consciously being aware of the “pitfalls” of privileging the visual above other means of perceiving, which the work around “visual pleasure” called into question by introducing the psychic structures at work in how one forms an idea of a self and of a body, in addition to the Lacanian references as to how one forms these physical references by becoming a subject through language,9 the desire to work through an image—that of the “Hottentot Venus”—and follow its ramifications was an endeavor which was necessary at a particular time in order to acknowledge histories (medical, scientific, cultural, sexual, etc.) which had been repressed. But this image was always used simultaneously with other registers of perception, for example, with contradictory texts or with sound and texts, so that the reading itself was always multiple and conflicted, so that “visible pleasure” was again in fact called into question. Making the spectators aware of a shifting spectatorial position and of their own bodies was part of how Seen (1990), which was the last work of this group, functioned. Descriptions of two entrances, one by Sarah Baartman from a cage into an arena in Piccadilly Circus and another by Josephine Baker onto the stage for the Revue Negre in Paris, are rubber-­ stamped as alternating texts across the surface of a platform.10 The sound of 202 Positions

Baker singing “Voulez Vous de la canne?” plays on a tape loop, while motorized moving spectacles with eyes behind them “wink” at the viewer from a lit hole in the platform up toward the viewer’s crotch. The viewer is additionally spotlit from across the room and must move across the platform and possibly squat in order to discern the text, in other words, perform. So the visible performing bodies have shifted from the women described to that of the viewer.

Writing, Re-­Membering, Narrative Twists, Spatial Predicaments, Embodying, Our Little “Contact Zone” In Loophole of Retreat (part of Sites of Genealogy, 1990–91) a reference is made to Harriet Jacobs/Linda Brent, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.11 This slave narrative is distinguished by its use of the conventions of romantic fiction and the tensions which exist in portraying the character, Linda Brent, in the role of chaste heroine and as a slave attempting to escape to freedom. Loophole of Retreat was another attempt to find a way to consider history, yet refer to the overlapping yearnings expressed in the present with the past. The act of writing becomes a channel of freedom, yet the conditions under which this act of liberation takes place are inflected with particular historic constraints. In the case of Linda Brent, she is confined to a small attic space for seven years, yet her confinement with access to writing tools is preferable to being completely subjugated to a slave master. The act of writing as a form of enablement, via “giving body” to previously unarticulated thoughts and desires, forms a recurrent theme in feminist discourse. Well-­known examples include the 19th-­century American poet Emily Dickinson, as well as Virginia Woolf in her room of her own, in addition to writers espousing the concept of écriture féminine, such as Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. In the work which took place in the attic of P.S.1 Museum, I/my persona returned again and again to the space for over a year to type a contemporary journal. In contrast to Incidents, this character, for example, could come and go. She describes walks from the subway and tries to decide whether to rush out and see a Hanne Darboven show at Leo Castelli Gallery. Yet she reflects on the past, as Jacobs’s words appear on stamped wooden markers forming a winding path on the floor leading to the window and list each phase, 22. “Give Me Body” 203

chapter by chapter, of the heroine Linda Brent’s attempts to gain freedom; typing her words charts a distance, which is still traceable, between then and today. A tall blank stack of paper is on the floor to the left of her desk, and a much smaller and slowly accumulating stack of type-­filled paper is to the right. The process of transmutation from potential to text is a slow one, in part marked by the string which the character wraps around her writing space as a spatial clock recording each visit. She wonders whether she is the madwoman in the attic in a room of her own, writing without an obvious purpose. From the ladder within the string triangle formed around her desk, she can see through the window across the water to Manhattan from her location in Queens. A local voyager, between history, memory, and places, she hears the sound of the sea on a tape loop. The last stop to freedom for Linda Brent was Manhattan. . . . Now, I will make a leap to a more recent moment in my own work by describing what I’m referring to as “contact zones” by discussing the work Quest (1994), which I presented at Galleria Emi Fontana in Milan in the spring of 1994. The notion of “contact zones” is one I borrowed and adapted from the comparative literature professor Mary Louise Pratt, as described in her book Imperial Eyes.12 I’m interpreting the term not only in reference to a past colonial contact but in relation to the results which have ensued from that contact, as well as to the various moments when negotiations between different cultures have to be made.13 The negotiations I refer to can be considered, in a broad sense, as ranging from literal spatial instances to psychological ways of coping with what appears to be foreign, by using creative and enabling approaches. Dealing with the “contact zone” is not only a political problem but also a problem for thinking and for creating. The topic seems especially pressing in the light of various boundary disputes and border clashes which occur in U.S. cities—Crown Heights and L.A. Rebellion being some of the more publicized examples—as well as in Germany, Eastern Europe, France, South Africa, the list goes on and on. Quest represented an attempt to recall my self-­conscious entrance into a negotiation in a contact zone as well as to acknowledge how media saturation affects these zones and in turn affects our composition of our selves, our biographies, and our histories. 204 Positions

Pop Culture as a Memory Channel In 1992, I spent three months in Lisbon, sponsored by Arts International. In short I proposed to trace Portugal’s seafaring past and make a journey by boat to Ceuta, the first Portuguese post in Africa. Quest refers in part to that journey. Traces of the myriad ways in which memory is activated and how media forms a part of our memories and ways of perceiving a self were referenced. This self can be very fluid in the course of traveling. Also the notion of how writing becomes an attempt to tap into memory and give body to experience is another aspect of that work. What happens when “Penelope voyages”? Is it possible to assume I could equate myself with Penelope from The Odyssey, rather than Ulysses? What other kinds of travel narratives can be written?14 In some ways this quest, which also crosses those of previously alluded to travel writers, also attempts to delve into the “unknown,” but from other perspectives. These other perspectives were affected by being visibly signified as foreign, black, and female. The work traces my attempts to give form to these experiences textually, visually, and aurally. The dilemma of representation, as I described it in the works relating to Sarah Baartman, in Loophole of Retreat and in Quest can be compared to a process attempted by, as surprising as it may seem, Catherine of Siena, to give just one example, and is described as follows: In reading her text, we are made conscious of synchronous perceptions of the word made flesh, the Book and the body, hers and ours. Her body, Christ’s body, now become the site of a struggle to avoid the limitations of language and the boundaries of material place and time, cannot but be inscribed (paradoxically) in a material text dependent on cultural particulars and the contingencies of textual transmission.15

Bow Wow Wow Yippy Yo Yippy Yay: Snoop Doggy Dogg ist die Hoffnung? Freedom—a word that has been steadily disappearing from the political language of Blacks in the West and which will be even more remote from their consciousness now that the liberation of South Africa has been formally accomplished.16 22. “Give Me Body” 205

As a practitioner, invested in the production—in part—of visual representation and new technologies, I can’t just, to paraphrase a familiar hip-­hop refrain, “throw my hands up in the air and act like I just don’t care,” but must test the notion which Gilroy posits. Thus while it is possible to read in despairing ways some uses of visuality and of the body in the visual schema he describes, and while it is sobering and important to consider the shifts which Gilroy notes in the “Black public sphere” as well as note the apparent trend which he describes as a biopolitics which stands in for more variegated political possibilities, I prefer to see the potential of continued uses of visual forms in fashioning a world which as yet can only be imagined and longed for, pieced together from the fragments we have, and from histories and fashions of even the 1970s. This statement is not meant to re-­iterate utopian post-­modern pronouncements, though, but rather to instigate other ways of interpreting some material situations. At various moments in his essay Gilroy mentions that “the independent power of music is waning while the authority of the image culture in which music has become increasingly parasitic grows steadily.”17 Or “The growing dominance of specularity over aurality contributes a special force to representations of the exemplary racial body arrested in the gaze of desiring and identifying subjects.”18 I too can agree with Gilroy when he states that “these images have become the storehouses of racial alterity now that the production of subjectivity operates through different sensory and technological mechanisms,” but it seems that it must be possible to do more than lament the passing of what he’s describing as a primacy of aurality, as if the two—vision and sound, as well as other senses—can’t function in productive ways together and/or function in creative ways within current technological changes. Gilroy cites Snoop Doggy Dogg as a hopeful sign amid the other syndromes he describes, yet he wonders whether the market will be able to bear any diversions from what seem to be the most obvious demands, meaning straightout “gangsta rap,” as opposed to representations of a variety of subjectivities. . . . Some young female mc s I spoke with in L.A., who go by the moniker sin , told me that they’re looking at role models of strong black women from the 206 Positions

1970s. Wearing an afro to recall those times wasn’t a hollow trend for them but rather a source of inspiration from a time that, they asserted, was one in which “the black woman was coming into her own.” Of course we can observe what’s been recognized as “Malcolmania” as a variation of this sort of iconization and observe how difficult it is to steer a course between commodification and political practice.19 This process of self-­fashioning and reworking visual and aural forms, with an informed awareness of previous histories, is one location in which the intersection between memory, pop culture, visuality, and politics can cross, without being reduced solely to biopolitics, but rather can be viewed as expressing a longing for strength, which could be associated with freedom. This would indicate that the biopolitical body is not the only available body, but that minds critically conscious of histories can shape bodies which call upon fashion and “visual pleasure,” in addition to varied social and political agendas, despite market trends.

Notes Originally published in Italian as “‘Give Me Body’: Divertimento Bizzarro, Biopolitica e Zona di Contatto,” in Arte, Identità, Confini, edited by Carolyn Christov-­Bakargiev and Ludovico Pratesi (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1995), 118–24. 1. Paul Gilroy, “After the Love Has Gone: Bio-­Politics and Ethno-­Poetics in the Black Public Sphere,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 46–76. 2. Ibid., 54–55. 3. Ibid., 72. 4. Elizabeth Dalton and Cynthia M. Smith, Expense/Account: Figuring the Damage. Works by Renée Green, Patricia Thornley, and Moyra Davey (New York: Hartnett Gallery, University of Rochester, 1990); Stephen Jay Gould, “The Hottentot Venus,” in The Flamingo’s Smile (New York: Norton, 1985); Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine and Literature,” in “Race,” Writing and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). In 2002, after pressure from Nelson Mandela and other organizations, Sarah (Saartjie) Baartman’s remains were brought back to South Africa to be buried on South Africa’s soil as part of the country’s Women’s Day celebrations. 5. In the original presentation of this paper Green used images of works from 1987 to 1990 and later referred to more recent works from 1993–95, in order to give examples of ways in which she attempted to perceive and think about rela-

22. “Give Me Body” 207

tions to bodies, as one aspect of her work, and also how these questions continued to arise and how her meditations on them were formulated and continued to change. 6. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, mit Press, 1984), 361–73. See also “What’s Painting Got to Do with It?” in this volume. 7. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “(Re)Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism,” in The Female Body in Western Perspectives, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 7–8. 8. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-­ American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 9. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 10. The text on the wooden panels reads as follows: On being ordered by her keeper, she came out . . . / like a strange creature from a distant world, she walked or rather waddled in her/ POSITIVE FACTS: Her nasal bones: “in this respect I have never seen a human head/ knees bent and spread apart her stomach was sucked in her body contorted. She looked/ so similar to that of monkeys.” Her upper bone proportions: embodied “characters of/ and shimmied constantly, moving like a snake instead of her moving to the music,/ animality.” Her small skull: was a sign of stupidity based on “that cruel law which/ the music seemed to come from her body. Finally, she left the stage on all fours,/ seems to have condemned to an eternal inferiority those races with small and/ legs higher than her head, stiff rear end in the air looking as awkward/ compressed skulls.” She had, above all, a way of pouting her lips, in the same/ as a young giraffe. Is it a woman? People wondered. Is it a man? Is she awful or/ manner as we have observed in orangutans.” The hottentot was produced like a/ marvelous? black or white? Is that real hair or has it been painted on? . . . The animal/ wild beast ordered to move backwards and forward and come out and go into her/ inside every human being wasn’t dark, tormented savage./ cage. When questioned in dutch in a law court, she insisted that she was not under/ restraint and understood perfectly well that she had been guaranteed half the profits.” 11. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). 12. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6–7. For a description of the term as used by Pratt, see “Slippages” in this volume. 13. See Renée Green, ed., Negotiations in the Contact Zone = Negociaçôes na zona de contacto (Lisbon: Assírio and Alvim, Belém, 2003). 14. See Karen Lawrence, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

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15. Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image and the Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2. 16. Gilroy, “After the Love Has Gone,” 55. 17. Ibid., 57. 18. Ibid., 61. 19. See Adolph Reed Jr., “The Allure of Malcolm X and the Changing Character of Black Politics,” in Malcolm X in Our Own Image, edited by Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 208.

22. “Give Me Body” 209

23

1995

Dropping Science Art and Technology Revisited 2.0

One would be hard-­pressed not to find upon opening any form of print media, or when switching on a tv or radio, some story or advertisement which refers in some way to the wonders of new technologies. Here is a typical week’s fare: In Time magazine is a cover story entitled “Onward Cyber Soldiers,” in the technology section can be found “Bullish on Netscape,” in addition to a “cyperspace” (sic) report which asks “How Good Is the Microsoft Network?”; Newsweek’s cover sports a bulging-­bellied cigar-­ toting Mickey Mouse and reads, “Disney’s World, a $19 Billion Deal to Create a New Global Media Empire,” while inside its “Cyberscope” section contains brief techno updates. The German Focus magazine featured the article “Traumwelten im Computer: Virtual Reality für jederman,” illustrated by an image of a family appearing to be in a virtual living room with a virtual pet, playing virtual games in the air, all facing a large floating video screen. And lastly in Interzone, an sf and fantasy magazine, a recent bbc 1 tv show called Bugs is described as “The Avengers transported from the space age to the cyberspace era” in which some stock ideas are trotted out, such as “the notion that machines are morally neutral, that it is people who design and use them for good and evil.” It then follows that amid this inescapable web of fascination which seems to extend further each day, the art industry, wishing to be in tandem with the times, also participates in the general enthusiasm. In both entertainment and art industries a recurring attitude can be detected which echoes that of the Bugs producers in their attempt to diffuse cybertechnophobia: “This stuff is fun ! and we have to learn to use it because the bad guys already have.” But in the words of typical cyberrhetoric, “How to navigate one’s way through it?”

Of course there are increasing numbers of magazines, books, and columns to assist one in sorting through the technosphere. Many of them embrace what the future may hold. A cartoon comes to mind of a bloodshot bug-­eyed driver suffering from highway hypnosis tightly gripping a steering wheel, a road zombie numbed by the rapid force of motion and scopic repetition. The most common metaphors used in describing these technologies are spatial and visual, usually implying speedy movement—driving, navigating, surfing—although browsing implies possible leisure. All present an image of being ensconced in a machine which exceeds human movement and computational capacity and from within which it is possible to watch. [Ernest] Mandel had proposed three economic revolutions governed by revolutions in power technology: the steam engine of 1848, the rise of electricity and the combustion engine in the late nineteenth century, and most recently (since the nineteen forties), the development of nuclear and electronic technologies.1 What exactly is meant by the term “new technologies”? A major distinguishing factor from “old technologies” is the increased potential for a larger number of people to have access to a means for accumulating, producing, and distributing what has become known as information. The possibility for this radical shift came about when technologies which had previously been the domain of specialists, like video and audio recording technologies, computer technologies, and the Internet, became available to the lay public. With relatively limited means a wider range of people became able to create versions of their reality using camcorders and a vast array of audio equipment, which they own and operate, as well as personal computers which enable them to use computer programs ranging from audio samplers to desktop publishing software. Individuals or small groups can now on their own make digital audio recordings or produce publications. Add to this Internet access, which technically means that these new producers could communicate with even more and more people and even build up an electronic distribution network. America Online advertisements appear on tv with the frequency and urgency reminiscent of ads for mail-­order kitchen technology of the past (“It slices, it dices, it’s Vegematic!”) to remind viewers that right in their own homes they can have access to the wonderful information world which can provide them with new friends and activities and possibly new intelligence. 23. Dropping Science 211

There’s been a mad rush to develop and exploit the Internet and digital technologies. The consequences are global, although it is estimated that only 20% of the world’s population has telephone access. We are told again and again that “the brave new world” is here. But to be fully operable within this exciting place, which is described with euphoria and anxiety as both the Wild West and an ideal democracy, you need some money or at least a credit card. The gold rush feeling—quick money for the adventurous in the frontier, get it while the getting’s good—seemed pretty apparent when Netscape’s stocks rapidly increased in value. The gains possible from that investment became jeopardized by recent reports of the Net’s lack of security, as was reported in the New York Times article “Discovery of Internet Flaws Is Setback for On-­line Trade.” The speedily expanding markets may have to go on hold and navigating may become more militaristic and paranoiac. It is stated: That such security flaws exist is not surprising in a system designed originally as a scientific experiment. But the recent rush to the Internet by companies seeking to exploit its commercial possibilities has obscured the fact that giving the system a new purpose has unearthed fundamental problems that could well put off sure commercial viability for years.2 Crimes on greater scales than before imaginable could be committed: “The crucial difference in the proposed Internet commerce systems was that for the first time it would be relatively simple for a criminal to collect hundreds or thousands of credit card numbers. Then a thief could use each credit card only one time, making detection much more difficult,” says Berkeley professor of computer science Eric Brewer. This on top of viruses to worry about. But on the same front page was an article about Bill (Microsoft) Gates’s purchase of the Bettmann Photo Archive. Similar to Ted Turner’s purchase of the rights to films of the past, Gates will now be in a position to digitize an encyclopedic range of photos taken throughout this century which can be resold on an even larger scale than Bettmann was ever able to achieve. The aims are idealistic, but the bottom line is the bottom line: The ideal of this electronic conversion is to democratize art and scholarship, enabling people who could never travel to the Library of

212 Positions

Congress or the Hermitage to sample their intellectual treasures, and to preserve aging pictures and documents for posterity.3 All well and good, but the attitude expressed by A. Lin Neumann during a trip to Asia is bound to emerge: “Well, fuck Bill Gates. We want the software and we want it now. The real stuff is overpriced.”4 One of the striking features of discussions about the “new technologies” is the urgency with which they are discussed from the political “left” to the “right,” from grassroots organizations to government think tanks. The notion of being “on the brink” of some phenomenal change is one impetus to these numerous discussions. But what might be the unconscious drives behind this idea? Is this desire affected by the coming millennium or is it a form of hubris which often proves to be the fatal attribute of knowledge seekers from Faust to Strangelove, in science lore and elsewhere, or is it spurred by the curiosity which compels one to open a Pandora’s box? Is it a compulsion to find the Holy Grail or the Key to All Knowledge? Or is it fueled by a lust for new markets, the war over constituencies, or a combination of all of the above? Despite the fact that the year 2000 is steadily approaching is it possible that the current techno craze is so historically unique? Perhaps a brief look at previous moments of 20th-­century technological fascination, specifically in relationship to art and the forms of its emergence in particular ideological climates, might be helpful.

Looking Backward While it is too vast an endeavor in this brief space to recount in detail this history, for which there is ample documentation, the listing which follows is meant to give an indication of the breadth of attempts made during this century to think about art and science together. As a way of beginning to imagine the ramifications science has had on every field, including art, it’s useful to remember that scientific thinking at the beginning of the twentieth century underwent a paradigmatic shift when classical physics was replaced by atomic theory, as well as the subsequent discoveries which made it necessary to reassess the concept of the “natural world.” The reassessment sparked by these shifts has continued and includes a questioning of

23. Dropping Science 213

the primacy of scientific authority, a point to which I’ll return. I’ve chosen to compare some of the ideas circulating in the sixties and seventies with some of the ideas which are circulating now as a way to examine what might be different about the current excitement with technology and what might resemble that earlier moment. Marga Bijvoet in “How Intimate Can Art and Technology Really Be?” provides a useful description of the shifts in artists’ thinking which occurred in response to scientific changes, although she doesn’t stress the historical context within which these designated movements occurred. So when she mentions the Futurists’ fascination with speed, the Surrealists’ eerie examinations of unconscious relations to machines, as well as the Constructivists’ attention to “new materials (such as steel, glass and plastics) but also, more importantly, to a consideration of the broader implications of industrial technologies for society and the future role and function of art,”5 it is left up to the reader to imagine under what broader circumstances (such as war, economic depression, and national affinities) these practices emerged. A statement dated 1930 from Georges Vantogerloo bears an uncanny resemblance to later and even current aspirations of some artists: Already we see art disengaging itself from a quasi-­philosophical artiness to become more and more a science and form at one with a new society. (Do not confuse this with utilitarian art.) But the field of action for the artist is not open yet. The artist is still condemned to exhibit art as an object: art is still part of the old organization. But since this organization cannot persist forever, it must one day cede its place to an organization better adapted to the present.6 Bijvoet goes on to describe what was called “Kineticism” and the Kinetic movement of the fifties and sixties from which Frank Popper discerned three strands: Op(tical) Art, Machines and Mobiles, and Lightcinetics. While a movement from the mechanical into the electronic age can be noted in these works the most advanced technology then available wasn’t used. Another shift could be detected during the sixties when what’s described as a “systems-­aesthetic” emerged. It is interesting to note how the discussions concerning art practices echo those suggested by theories relating to the then new electronic and computer technologies as espoused by Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and Norbert Wiener. The term “de214 Positions

materialized works” began to gain in usage and these represented materials which were not “precious” but instead suggested transience—­plastics, video, acrylics, and technologies employing synthesizers, computers, electronics. Bijvoet notes that these materials and techniques also represented “progress,” which is again echoed in current technology discussions. Rauschenberg’s statement exemplifies the urgency I previously mentioned, intertwined with an Enlightenment notion of progress: It is no longer possible to by-­pass the whole area of technology. . . . We can’t afford to wait. We must force a relationship on technology in order to continue and we must move quickly. The most positive thing I can say is that technology does not lead us back into history—but advances us into the unknown.7

Notes—Circulating Thoughts on Science and Technology of the ’60s and ’70s Today: Robert Smithson’s Timely Contemplations, Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema While the grandly utopian pronouncements of the New Frontier have ebbed to nothing, the scope of technological development that had been initiated in an era of Cold War expansionism continues unabated.8 Exhaustion in the wake of the Space Age echoes the entropy artist Robert Smithson describes in some of his writings. There now exist computer screens which are stared into, brought into beds if they are laptops, and gazed at until sleep comes to cause a break in the continual staring at fragments of information. These resemble the movie screens he imagined some future viewer staring into trance-­like while non-­narrative films ran continuously, the viewer’s body remaining inert before the screen, the movie continuing even while the viewer is sleeping.9 Smithson’s writings seem almost as prophetic as science fiction can be, with his descriptions of non-­sites and mappings of these territories which recall the used-­up land resources or tangles of reflective glass, metal, and plastic one might come across in a J. G. Ballard novel. The described monuments aren’t made to last. Entropy discussions of the past were on a par with the popularity of the current cyberspace discussions, time and space 23. Dropping Science 215

being prevalent features of both discussions. One of the main differences though between how spaces such as those Smithson describes and how cyberspace is described is in their ambulatory aspects. He stresses inertia, while often cyberspace is described, as I mentioned earlier, as a navigable space, albeit the operator is usually sitting still, moving only fingertips and otherwise appearing to be a zombie or a being in which boundaries between human and machine are blurred, in other words a cyborg. This prevalence of cyborgs, especially since Donna Haraway’s articulation in “The Cyborg Manifesto” is another one of the differences which distinguishes the early seventies from the present. The desire for this meshing is described by phenomenologist Don Ihde as pervasive: “I want the transformation that technology allows, but . . . I want it in a way that it becomes me,” but he further argues that “such a desire both secretly rejects what technologies are and overlooks the transformational effects which are necessarily tied to human-­ technological relations. This illusory desire belongs equally to pro- and antitechnology interpretations of technology.”10 Art as radar acts as “an early alarm system,” as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-­expression. If art is an “early warning system,” to use the phrase from World War II, when radar was new, art has the utmost relevance not only to media study but to the development of media controls.11 Despite some of the similarities in terms of aspiration, such as increased global communications, those, the sixties and the seventies, were very different times. The Cold War was still on and Sputnik’s orbit was in recent memory and provided a catalyst for nasa experimentation and various educational incentives. The U.S. wanted to maintain the cutting edge on technology and thus the embrace of Marshall McLuhan made sense as well as did the funding the arts then received. A prophet of the new electronic age was needed. In the U.S. the country was still reeling from the Vietnam War, student revolts, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Nationalism, the assassinations of charismatic leaders, and a Nixon administration. The recession hadn’t hit yet, but the “Summer of Love” had. Gene Youngblood outlines his notion of an expanded cinema as being the equivalent of an expanded consciousness. The year is 1970: 216 Positions

So I call it the Paleocybernetic Age: an image of a hairy, buckskinned, barefooted atomic physicist with a brain full of mescaline and logarithms, working out the heuristics of computer-­generated holograms of krypton laser interferometry. It’s the dawn of man: for the first time in history we’ll soon be free enough to discover who we are.12 At that time there was nothing yet being touted as the “information superhighway.” The infrastructure had yet to be realized. There was not yet a Wired magazine which would inform its readers of every aspect of how to be completely turned on and plugged in. The sentiments in Wired do echo Youngblood’s, their patron saint is Marshall McLuhan, but unlike some mescaline tripping logarithm freak’s “far out” communication creation this product is ultra organized, has targeted its market, and makes the combination of coolness and capital seem like a piece of cake.

Idioms of Science Technology, whether figured in the exaggerated modalities of the sublime or the cooler pragmatism of an elite technocracy, defines the American relation to manifest destiny and the commitment to an ideology of progress and modernity.13 Before continuing, it is worth analyzing some tenets of Western science which have so far been invoked and which deserve explication to better understand the critical reevaluations, as well as the “culture wars” which have occurred in the past years. Differing from Youngblood’s optimistic embrace of the “global intermedia network,” one detects in Smithson, given his beliefs in entropy, an ambivalence toward and a questioning of forms of scientific knowledge, which suggest that progress or solutions are: 1. Possible 2. Come about linearly or within closed systems Ways of questioning scientific paradigms have continued since the early seventies, and had existed before;14 my focus is specifically on the latter half of this century and on changes specific to this time which have taken on various forms, aided in part by thoughts coming from outside of scientific 23. Dropping Science 217

disciplines, such as deconstructionism, Foucauldian analysis of social systems, post-­colonial studies, feminist and gender studies, as well as studies from historians of science. It is more possible now than it was in the early seventies to find declarations such as “There are political consequences to scientific accounts of the world” and these are “specific historical and cultural productions”;15 one of the differences though between the present and the early seventies is that ideas which were believed to have been resolved then, especially since the Civil Rights struggles for equal representation, such as whether black people’s intelligence is genetically determined and lower than that of white people’s, have again become a topic for debate as was witnessed after the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve.16 In light of this phenomenon and the attitudes which are circulating in its wake, a reexamination of the genealogy of the professionalism of science and its rise to authority seems timely. Appeals to an impersonal “nature” are common in times of turmoil; what made the mid-­nineteenth century distinctive was the successful institutionalization of a particular view of that “nature.” In “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism” Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman analyze the authority contained in scientific language, as well as attempts to refute some of the claims made in the name of science, with a focus on the years 1870 to 1920.17 They assert that it was during this period that science acquired its “modern epistemological, institutional and cultural forms” and that during this time it became consolidated as the “dominant mode of cognition of industrial society.” They trace how science came to be regarded and “conceptualized as a sharply edged and value-­neutral domain of knowledge—as apolitical, nontheological, universal, empirical, and uniquely objective (in part because [of its] uniquely methodological) form of knowledge unlike any other.”18

The Scientific Text, the Scientific Lecture, a New Professionalism The rise of the scientific text, which was meant to be understood only by those inducted into a particular language, came about then. This was part of an attempt at forming boundaries around the field which would delegiti218 Positions

mize practices not conforming to the standards which were then being created. Between 1832 and 1870 this push was made by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (baas ): Practitioners in fields of inquiry ruled “unscientific” were excluded from the association and thereby from representation within “science.” Areas fraught with moral and/or political controversy kept a place within the boundaries of science only when purged of those concerns, as scientists adopted the value-­neutral, empirical language now seen as defining science itself. Science as a form of knowledge separated itself from other knowledge systems; in the process, the dichotomies between the pure and the impure (or the applied sciences), the rational and the irrational, the objective and the subjective, the hard and the soft, the male and the female, were given material form. Such polarities, and the institutional boundaries that created and maintained them, were not the inevitable results of a nature merely “discovered” and described; they were the products of active institution creation, demarcation setting and the successful use of political and cultural resources to achieve these ends.19 Part of how this new specialization was secured was through the texts, designated as scientific, which ensued. Previously texts had been closer to literary forms using a variety of expression and metaphors. Now the text was meant to be less porous, thus allowing less leeway for interpretation: It was in the late nineteenth century that the modern scientific text as we know it stabilized to become the standard, accepted form of writing in nearly all branches of the natural sciences. . . . The neutral style of the scientific paper, the absence of a strong, individualized authorial “I,” the emphasis on the factuality of nature, on a nature revealed by specific methods (experimental, technical)—all these features rendered the scientific text problematic for the nonscientific writer and reader and successfully circumscribed the process of contestation.20 Stepan and Gilman go on to state that the forms of contestation to scientific racism reflected a struggle of how one could argue within the parameters of what became established as scientific discourse. What is evident today is that the polemics toward this previously established notion of scientific primacy are circulating, as is proven by a compilation of writings 23. Dropping Science 219

which appeared in a variety of lay publications addressing The Bell Curve and which have been collected in The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions.21 It would seem that more people feel in a position to understand scientific arguments and scientific and technological “data,” and with the increase of Internet access this is appearing in more literary forms, leading to textual cybergenres. Amid all of this stepped-­up production of information, how then is it possible for conservative ideologies based in nineteenth-­ century conventions to still be able to captivate and mystify? The Bell Curve was a bestseller.

Notes—A Lecture in Copenhagen In an art school in Copenhagen I heard a “scientific lecture.” It was given by an artist who I was told is also “really” a biologist too and who is working on a dissertation. So a strange tension proceeded as I listened to what was said and watched the “documents” which were presented. The speaker had the look of a 19th-­century scientist. He had a beard and wire-­rimmed glasses. He spoke in level “reasonable” tones which were meant to convey an authority to what he said. He used visual “documents” to underline his points. Since the images shown were meant to cause a friction between what he said and the calm way in which he said it, I at first thought he was making a parody of a scientific lecture, except this wasn’t funny and lacked the mirroring which enables irony to succeed. There was a missing term and what was said seemed about as literal as what talk show host Rush Limbaugh presents on his tv show where he too shows “documents”—often decontextualized speeches—which he talks over.22 This talk was quite similar, as well as some of the audience’s responses, which were approving. I wondered whether it was possible to watch Rush Limbaugh in Copenhagen and I wondered who would be amused by it. Usually he bashes liberals and ethnic groups and feminists. Here in this lecture images of Marlboro men stood in for men and images of nude truncated torsos with legs cut off just below the pubic hair stood in for women. Images were shown of beauty, and beauty was described as being equivalent with “the norm.” The beauties shown bore a resemblance to the Greek ideals. There was no nod to reevaluations of evolutionist theories or toward the previously mentioned 220 Positions

23.1 Case III. Ways and Means, 1990. Vitrine. Mixed media, 48 × 83 × 12 inches. Installation detail.

theories which have questioned late 19th-­century scientific paradigms. We were suddenly in a strange time warp, a place where women’s duty was to be a man’s projection of his desires, where gays were not really taken seriously, and where Africans were “hysterical” people, literally children. The “lecture” ended with footage of children from Benin (why Benin?) laughing and playing with a camera on a tripod which was left near where the children were playing by the lecturer on his visit there. There was no translation of what these children were saying, and the footage reminded me of that taken by Osa and Martin Johnson, early 20th-­century American travelers, for their 1932 movie Congarilla, in which nothing the “natives” say is translated and the Johnsons’ comments provide the voiceover. In this case there was no voiceover, just an introduction to the footage in which the lecturer described the children as becoming “hysterical” over his placement of the camera on a tripod in their midst. Maybe they were saying, “Why is this fool leaving his camera here?,” but we weren’t given the option to find out. The lecturer kept addressing the audience as “we” in a way which re23. Dropping Science 221

minded me of Newt Gingrich and the tv journalist Peggy Noonan who around that time had broadcast a series of conversations called Peggy Noonan on Values. “We” was used to mean we sane rational clean good right people, in Gingrich and Noonan’s case. In this lecturer’s case I was not so sure what was meant, since we were in an art school and since art schools are known for producing “nonconformists.” But he had his followers. I was reminded that the Dartmouth Review, published by Dartmouth College students, was the breeding place for many of the current counter-­counter-­ culturalists or young neo-­conservatives who like to think of themselves as being cool and conservative. They form an opinion elite which has had considerable influence. One of various similarities I noticed between the lecturer and this group was both’s fascination with Greek concepts such as the norm, the ideal. In the case of Roger Kimball, a cultural critic and managing editor of Hilton Kramer’s The New Criterion, he majored in philosophy and classical Greek in college: “I read Marcuse and all that stuff—the ‘unholy trinity’ of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.” But he was more drawn to Aristotle and “The Federalist Papers,” and he found the academy uncongenial. “I had the feeling that high culture was being attacked.”23

Future Perfect Isn’t Present While the arts as radar feedback provide a dynamic and changing corporate image, their purpose may be not to enable us to change but rather to maintain an even course toward permanent goals, even amidst the most disrupting innovations. We have already discovered the futility of changing our goals as often as we change our tech­ nologies.24 Artforum’s September 1995 issue had a technology slant. It included a section called “The Art Screen Scene.” In it various art world–related people were asked their opinions of the Internet. Comments showed a lack of imagining the possibilities beyond dumping “art” onto the Net and not reconceiving what that process could mean, although English professor Gregory Ulmer was hopeful: “There are contradictory forces in the arts now. There’s that ivory-­tower gallery system, but there’s also a tendency to avoid being a commodity and to be a practice instead. The avant-­garde’s function is

222 Positions

to say: Here’s something everyone can do, and it doesn’t require training. That’s the part of this that interests me.” That is optimistic, but once again, as the above “lecture” demonstrated, forms and locations may change and time passes, but what kinds of ideologies are being invoked and how will these affect the forms which are used whether it be a “lecture,” which might even be considered in the art context as “avant-­garde” (whatever that can mean now), or a cd-­rom ? Changes in thinking come about much more slowly than one might imagine while being bombarded with various forms of technopromotion. Certain ideas which it seemed must be relegated to charlatanism or pseudoscience surface and persist at different times and in varying milieus25—as in the case of the “posture photo scandal” in which Ivy League schools during the thirties to the seventies allowed nude photos of incoming students to be taken which were used to study how somatypes can be equated with superiority.26

Notes Originally published in Flash Art (Milan) 28, no. 185 (1995): 55–57. Published in German as “Dropping Science: Art and Technology Revisited 2.01,” in Telenoia: Kritik der virtuellen Bilder, edited by Elisabeth von Samsonow and Éric Alliez (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1999). 1. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 3. 2. John Markoff, “Discovery of Internet Flaws Is Setback for On-­line Trade,” New York Times, October 11, 1995. 3. Steve Lohr, “Huge Photo Archive Bought by the Chairman of Microsoft,” New York Times, October 11, 1995. 4. A. Lin Neumann, “Information Wants to Be Free but This Is Ridiculous,” Wired 3, no. 10 (1995): 1088–93. 5. Marga Bijvoet, “How Intimate Can Art and Technology Really Be: A Survey of the Art and Technology Movement of the Sixties,” in Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century, edited by Philip Hayward (London: John Libbey, 1990), 16. 6. Bijvoet, “How Intimate Can Art and Technology Really Be,” 17. 7. Ibid., 25. 8. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 3. 9. See Robert Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia,” in The Writings of Robert

23. Dropping Science 223

Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 105–8. 10. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 5. 11. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: New American Library, 1966), x. 12. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970), 41. 13. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 4. 14. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 15. “Interview with Donna Haraway,” in Technoculture, edited by Andrew Ross and Constance Penley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 2. 16. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press, 1994). 17. Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism,” in The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, edited by Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 173. Stepan and Gilman are referencing Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Correspondence of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, University College London, 1984). 18. Stepan and Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science,” 173. 19. Ibid., 174. 20. Ibid. 21. Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, eds., The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Random House, 1995). 22. Rush Limbaugh is an American radio talk show host. He is known as America’s foremost conservative spokesman, discussing politics and current events on his show, The Rush Limbaugh Show. 23. James Atlas, “The Counter Counterculture,” New York Times Magazine, February 12, 1995. 24. McLuhan, Understanding Media, x. 25. See Renée Green, Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (Amsterdam: De Appel Foundation, daad , 1996), 67. 26. Ron Rosenbaum, “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal,” New York Times Magazine, January 15, 1995.

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24

1998

Site-­Specificity Unbound Considering “Participatory Mobility”

The topic site-­specificity seems to be running rampant lately. What exactly is the relevance of the theme and how are the terms of this discussion being articulated in the variety of places in which it appears? What stakes are involved in speaking about site and its specificities? How can those specificities be thought at present and how important are they? These are some of the questions I raised in a recent lecture given at a conference on site-­ specificity, “Out of Site,” which was sponsored by the Malmö Art Academy. I decided to approach thinking about the notion of sites and whatever specificities could be linked to them by mentioning my interest in some ideas which were raised by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in their book Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. In the opening chapter, entitled “Art and Authority,” some compelling points are raised. One has to do with questioning how art is perceived in Western culture by contrasting notions, such as the redemptive function of art, and in turn of artists, with attitudes which Bersani and Dutoit discerned in their juxtaposition of Samuel Beckett, Mark Rothko, and Alain Resnais. Failure is a strand followed through their works and an expanded definition of the idea of failure, which would include “such things as aesthetic impoverishment and, especially, the renunciation of art’s authority.” They characterize Beckett, Rothko, and Resnais as saying to the reader or spectator of their work: “I have very little (perhaps nothing) to say to you, I have very little (perhaps nothing) to show you. To put this another way: My work is without authority. You will learn nothing from it; you will gain no moral profit from it; it will not enhance your life with that delight or superior pleasure which, you have been led to believe, artists have the obligation to provide you.”1

What might this attitude imply? Bersani and Dutoit go on to note: This surly discourse is of course at odds with the reasons presumably behind recent, and much publicized, calls for the maintaining of the great classics of Western civilization in university curricula. Our culture, though paying little attention to art, is emphatic about its edifying value. Not only do great masterworks (especially those of Western culture) have much to teach us; they are also expected to make us better individuals and better citizens. They may, it is suggested, even save us—save us from our lives, which in some way are failed lives in need of repair or redemption. . . . Yet, however complex and shaded the argument may be, it is essentially reductive and dismissive about both life and art. On the one hand, art is reduced to a kind of superior patching function and is enslaved to those very materials to which it presumably imparts value; on the other, the catastrophes of individual experience and of social history matter much less (thereby making active reform and resistance less imperative) if they are somehow “understood” and compensated for in art.2 What interests me in particular about Bersani and Dutoit’s thesis is how they develop it to get to the question “How, then, can we ‘move’ at all?” I too share an interest in the ways in which the art under discussion trains the reader or viewer in “new modes of mobility (or modes to which we may have been blind).” The attempt to describe how this sort of “training” takes place leads Bersani and Dutoit to describe their critical endeavor as being engaged with “a problematics of space.” They are considering ways of “‘occupying’ space (of appropriating it or learning to circulate nonaggressively in it).” Another important question arises: “Is there a nonsadistic type of movement? Is there a mode of circulation—within the work of art and in our relation to it—different from the moves of an appropriating consciousness?” By linking these questions to psychoanalytic concerns they posit that it is possible to consider the “problematics of space” in relation to two other questions which are crucial to an examination of this terrain: “the questions of fantasmatic mastery over and identification with others.”3 They refer in particular to the films of Resnais, of which I am particularly fond, and describe them as being engaged in a “narcissistic concentration on themselves”:

226 Positions

Part of what makes them difficult to read (to get an interpretive hold on) is that they so seldom address us. They appear to “associate” not with the real or with their audience but only with themselves. Each work becomes a model of self-­contained (nonreferential) identity. Yet this self-­containment is also self-­explosive. For the activity of this narcissistic concentration is extraordinarily agitated. The work is continually finding itself in other parts of itself—although what it finds is also always different from itself.4 It is suggested that Resnais discourages the “authoritative and knowledge-­ hungry ego” of his viewers. That we as viewers have to circulate within his films and retrace the correspondences within the films. Bersani and Dutoit go on to make several more points to which I’d like to call attention. A point which is particularly relevant for describing what I attempt in my work is as follows: The work connects to the world outside by initiating within itself the uncertain tracing (the appearing and the disappearing) of boundaries. It provides a formal model of how human beings “find themselves” through a process of misrecognition.5 I think of the activity which was referred to in conjunction with a “narcissistic concentration” as being linked to the process that is stimulated by the activity of memory, which can be contrasted to a more passive process of remembrance. In terms of approaching history, they describe the political potential of “participatory mobility,” being the process by which the viewer works to piece together the various parts of the work, rather than attempting to absorb and master it. Bersani and Dutoit further state, in reference to the films Night and Fog and Muriel, “History can be neither remembered nor documented. Resnais forces us to “remember” images from our personal and collective past as part of a self-­discovery now.”6 . . . The approach just mentioned can be likened to a process of working in which the site or space (to which Bersani and Dutoit refer) is perceived not just as a literal site but as a network of operations, which can take place over time and in a number of places. This way of perceiving of place and time has been an aspect of my work.

24. Site-Specificity Unbound 227

24.1 Partially Buried, 1996. Digital film, color, sound, 20 minutes. Film still. 24.2 Partially Buried Continued, 1997. Digital film, color, sound, 36 minutes. Film still. 24.3 Partially Buried Continued, 1997. Digital film, color, sound, 36 minutes. Film still.

The project Partially Buried in Three Parts can be thought in tandem with the previously raised questions regarding site, as well as in relation to the sites of memory and the notion of participatory mobility.7 The film Partially Buried Continued is a meditation on ways in which one’s associations to history, location, and genealogy become tangled in a subjective web which makes it complicated to separate history from fiction. The ways in which photography and memories can become intertwined and the differences between memory as an active process and remembrance as a memorializing act are played out through the persona of the filmmaker, who moves between Korea, Berlin, Ohio, the 1950s, the 1970s, and the 1990s, while attempting to negotiate her present with that which preceded her.

Notes Originally published in German as “Site-­Specificity Unbound: Zum Begriff der teilnehmenden Mobilität,” in Springerin 1 (1998): 18–21. 1. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3. 2. Ibid., 3–4 3. Ibid., 6. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 7. 6. Ibid. 7. An elaborated description of this project can be found in “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae” in this volume.

24. Site-Specificity Unbound 229

25

1997

Slippages Every artistic excursion and theoretical venture requires that boundaries be ceaselessly called to question, undermined, modified, and reinscribed. By its politics of transformation, critical inquiry is ever compelled to look for different approaches to the aesthetic experience, different ways of relating to it without categorizing it.—Trinh T. Minh-­ha, “The Other Censorship,” in When the Moon Waxes Red

I would add that even if there is the will to categorize for the purposes of clarification or for the purpose of examining previous forms of categorization, the realization of how the constructed category can always slip is necessary. This brings me to my title.

Why Slippages? At the time in which I was invited to participate in this series I was embroiled in a variety of discussions which seemed to share as a theme shifts that are occurring and which are contested and debated.1 Some of the shifts I noted in my immediate surroundings, those having been the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, had to do with discussions about cultural studies, and visual culture as a sort of petulant offspring of the former, and the conflicts between these areas and the disciplines, in this instance that of art history. Questions of how money was being allotted to departments arose, and a mini territorial struggle seemed to be under way. In the larger political realm the continuing issue of diasporas and border guarding was and is prevalent. Economic downsizing, also related to the border tensions surrounding nafta as well as to the academic institutional fights between departments and by junior adjunct professors, continues to

affect where and how people can live. Amid these changes circulate questions such as “Is Europe’s Currency Coming Apart?,” which appears on the current cover of the The Economist ( June 7–13, 1997). Meanwhile a cultural show of force is staged at Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and the Münster Sculpture Project, as biennales in Kwangju, Korea, and Johannesburg, South Africa, emerge for the second time. Global/local emerges as a recurring theme related to a back-­and-­forth movement which I associate with what I’m calling slippages, and which thematizes both Kwangju and Johannesburg biennales as well as other events and discussions. Global/ Local is the title of a book of collected essays with the subtitle Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary.2 The book seems very timely and is described on its jacket this way: Positioned at the crossroads of an altered global terrain, this volume, the first of its kind, analyzes the evolving transnational imaginary—the full scope of contemporary cultural production by which national identities of political allegiance and economic regulation are being undone, and in which imagined communities are being reshaped at both the global and local levels of everyday existence. I intend to return to some of the issues raised when thinking about this “altered global terrain,” ways in which this can be interpreted and how this has affected practices I and my colleagues have been engaged with, as well as ways in which discussions which go across disciplines are being shaped and are necessary.

Genealogies and the Continued Relevance of the Term: Paul Bové’s Description of Genealogist as Conscientious Intellectual I’d like to begin by suggesting the continued relevance of the term genealogy for my thinking. In his book Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism,3 Paul Bové offers ways in which to perceive of the notion of genealogy as invoked by Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said. I will quote some of the key points which I found useful in his analysis of critical humanism and which are applicable to the discussion I am embarking on in this essay. 25. Slippages 231

By way of a definition this reference to Foucault provides a point of entry: As Foucault puts it, “Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival.” In other words, genealogy does not just produce “new knowledge”; rather it repositions the role of knowledge production in our culture, and it does this by casting doubt on the value and desirability of “knowledge” as it functions under the sign of “will to truth” within the humanistic project, that is, as it is presumed to “assure” liberty, progress, and human fulfillment.4 In terms of the following discussion the distinctions Bové makes between the practices of Said and Foucault are significant because these are recurring differences which, as Bové notes, “define the problem facing humanistic intellectuals today”: Said insists on the political necessity of critical consciousness as the ground for justice in the world; Foucault hopes to challenge the very priority of the subject precisely because its continuation as the ground of critical opposition inscribes too much of the genealogy of ascetic humanism and so, doubling back upon the critical intellectual, blunts his or her activity. As I see it, these two very strong positions bring critics to a difficult set of judgments: they both require not only that we see practice and theory as specific and situated—discursively and culturally—but also that we find precise and definite ways to evaluate the relative political efficacy of various forms of opposition as these exist in humanism and as they either signal the need to escape it or try, as in Foucault’s case, to destroy and go beyond it.5 The divisions that Bové goes on to describe are those of “ascetic” or “anthropological” humanism, particularly as they are configured in literary criticism. He points out how the “different configuration of political and cultural forces in the U.S.” make it necessary to avoid an uncritical adoption of Foucault’s “broad condemnation of all humanistic rhetorics and practices.” He suggests that “Some effort must be made to make more precise judgments that will permit us, as we must, to acknowledge and support those forms of skeptical, oppositional humanism directed toward political self-­determination.”6 Examining some of the genealogies from which my thinking has 232 Positions

emerged, which include those stated by Bové, brings me back to a project begun several years ago and which is ongoing.

Contact Zone Revisited: In the Interim between Then and Now When I was last in Vienna, giving a talk in this same location four years ago, I spoke a bit about a symposium I was then in the process of organizing called Negotiations in the Contact Zone,7 which occurred in April 1994 in New York. The symposium was divided into two parts, Spatial Predicaments and Narrative Twists. The participants of the Spatial Predicaments panel were Sowon Kwon, Miwon Kwon, Simon Leung, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Judith Barry. The participants of the Narrative Twists panel were Lynne Tillman, Joe Wood, Manthia Diawara, Karim Aïnouz, and James Clifford. I’d like to reexamine some of the ideas which were raised at that time and consider some of the shifts in thinking which have occurred between then and now. At the time of the symposium I suggested that it is sometimes necessary to move outside of the world one seems designated to inhabit in order to gain another perspective about what one is doing and that a “second language,” or possibly even more, would be needed to enable a rethinking of established notions. The art historian Yve-­Alain Bois provided an example, which I used, of such skewing in reference to a relationship between sculpture and architecture. The exchange he describes is between the sculptor Richard Serra and the architect Peter Eisenman: Serra, therefore, does not wish to be mistaken for an architect. Which does not keep his sculpture from being a lesson in architecture, or a criticism of architecture—something that he ended by admitting when an architect, to be exact, put him on the defensive: When sculpture . . . leaves the gallery or museum to occupy the same space and place as architecture, when it redefines the space and place in terms of sculptural necessities, architects become annoyed. Not only is their concept of space being changed, but for the most part it is being criticized. The criticism can come into effect only when architectural scale, methods, materials and procedures are being used. Comparisons are provoked. Every language 25. Slippages 233

has a structure about which nothing critical in that language can be said. To criticize a language, there must be a second language available dealing with the structure of the first but possessing a new structure.8 An example from another register, which I referred to, was that of fiction, in its written and filmic forms. I’ve often found that fiction provides a way to gain access to thinking about complex histories, and political, economic, and social dynamics, which might seem difficult to grasp when reading an academic history, which purports to state the facts, or a more straight economic or sociological analysis. These fictional forms allow other ways of thinking about events and how events are described. I’m recalling my study of the histories of Latin America, partly through the writings, for example, of Gabriel García Márquez or Carlos Fuentes; or of the Caribbean through the words of V. S. Naipaul or Jamaica Kincaid; Senegal and a diasporic trajectory to France, with the help of the films and books of Ousmane Sembène. In the U.S. reading Faulkner, Hurston, Ellison, Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, and scores of others has helped me move between historical representations, statistical data from sociological studies, words passed down to me orally, and experiences I’ve had or witnessed in different parts of the United States. I raised these examples to point out what I imagined could be the possibility for a provocative and fruitful dialogue which I hoped would ensue between the invited cultural producers and cultural critics, and which I think upon rereading the papers and the discussion did occur. At this moment though the designation “cultural critic” might possibly be challenged, and a grounding in a specific field of expertise might be asked for. This is where the designations get sticky. Why these designations might be called for now is one of the questions I’d like to pose in this essay. Thinking about the visual arts I reiterated questions which continue to circulate: What happens when art seems to be taking on the face of theoretical critique, in addition to traveling outside of the gallery? These questions are reminiscent of those asked in previous times of work which has become known as conceptual art, and even earlier of some dadaistic practices. From this example I think it’s possible to make comparisons to ways in which cultural products employing theoretical notions are questioned, and this occurs across the categories from which the panelists located their work.

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The cultural producers (visual artists, video producers, filmmakers, writers) I’d invited make work which involves critical thinking about the history and production of art (visual art, film, video, and literature) as well as history in its broader sense, and in turn they negotiate their relationships to the theories utilized and created by cultural critics, including the ones who were invited, while also developing their own theoretical frameworks. The methodology of the invited cultural producers—which involves all manner of research, textual representations, analyses of textual and visual representations, an engagement with psychoanalytic, feminist, semiotic, post-­structuralist, post-­colonialist, and gender theories—at times resembles that used by cultural critics, and while what is produced by each group can contribute to perceptions of the world and our lives in ways we hadn’t imagined, the manner and intent in which these provocative tactics are conducted, as well as the audiences to whom they are addressed, can differ. The way in which critical thought informs what these cultural producers and what these cultural critics do and the importance for dialogue between them was one of the frameworks for the symposium. Both are engaged in exploring ways of envisioning the world and attempting to change it through their practices, but I believed that the work of both groups could be strengthened by better grasping the ways in which each functioned. In some cases the producers and the critic were the same person. The distinction I was making wasn’t meant to rigidify any binary opposition but was presented as a historical distinction, as well as a prevalent current distinction. Each of the panelists in their own way resisted the historically rigid categorizations of their fields, yet their work involves distinctions which differentiate their practices.

Contact Zone Defined I borrowed the term “contact zone” from the comparative literature professor Mary Louise Pratt, who had borrowed it from linguistics. Viewing how she defines her use of the term “contact zone” added a historical resonance, which I hoped to recuperate for contemporary encounters as well and to use as a tool to focus a discussion about concerns which I’d observed to be prevalent.

25. Slippages 235

All of the invited panelists had done work which on various levels had addressed the notion of what I was interpreting as the “contact zone,” and the work of each moves between spatial and narrative references within this realm. As Pratt describes it in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, from which I’ll quote at length, the term contact zone refers to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. I borrow the term “contact” here from its use in linguistics, where the term contact language refers to improvised languages that develop among speakers of different native languages who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in the context of trade. Such languages begin as pidgins, and are called creoles when they come to have native speakers of their own. Like the societies of the contact zone, such languages are commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure. . . .”Contact zone” in my discussion is often synonymous with “colonial frontier.” But while the latter term is grounded within a European expansionist perspective (the frontier is a frontier only with respect to Europe), “contact zone” is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect. By using the term “contact,” I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination.9 I interpreted the term not only in reference to a past colonial contact but in relation to the manifestations which have ensued from that contact, as well as the various moments when negotiations between different cultures have to be made. The negotiations I referred to can be considered in a broad sense as ranging from literal spatial instances to psychological ways of coping with what appears to be foreign, by using creative and enabling approaches. I considered the work of each of the invited participants to be negotiations of that terrain. What John Rajchman said about identity as a topic also applies to ways in which to perceive of the “contact zone,” not solely as a political problem but also as a problem for thinking and for cre236 Positions

25.1 Code: Survey Website [Code: A092, Keyword: Obvious], 2006. Caltrans, California, Department of Transportation District VII website, http://www .dot.ca.gov/dist07/code_survey/intro.htm.

ating. The topic seemed especially pressing in the light of various boundary disputes and border clashes which continue to occur in U.S. cities—at that time Crown Heights and the L.A. Rebellion were some of the more publicized examples—as well as those which occur in Germany, Eastern Europe, France, South Africa, the list goes on and on. In relation to issues of genealogy it is important to remember what previous discussions and claims were being raised relationally. For example, it was my hope to follow up on certain discussions which intersected the proposed one and to address important discussions that had been begun but that were then and are now, as the recent writings on “critical race theory” attest,10 in no way finished. In a symposium held in November 1991 on “The Question of Identity” John Rajchman stated: “Our inherited procedures and ways of thinking seem to be unable to confront or address, or therefore deal with, the questions of identity that confront us today,” and “Critical thought thus has an important role to play in reexamining assumptions and in formulating what the questions are, what their implications and dangers are, and what it would mean to resolve them. Such critical thought is especially important in order that identity politics and multiculturalist discourse not themselves assume objectionable forms.”11 Pratt’s emphasis on “copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” is still important to keep in mind amid questions regarding what some describe as “paradigmatic shifts.”12 This is an idea to which I’ll return.

Difficulties in Denoting Paradigmatic Shifts: Recent Attempts and Questions. Artist as Ethnographer? Hal Foster in a chapter entitled “The Artist as Ethnographer” in his recent book The Return of the Real, which coincidentally had the same title as an Ice T cd which was released around the same time, suggests that “a new paradigm structurally similar to the old ‘Author as Producer’ model has emerged in advanced art on the left, the artist as ethnographer.”13 Foster outlines Walter Benjamin’s lecture “The Author as Producer,” which was given in April 1934 at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris. He refers to how Benjamin privileged “productivism” over proletkult. Productivism is described by Foster as an effort “to develop a new proletarian cul238 Positions

ture through an extension of constructivist formal experiments into actual industrial production” and which “in this way sought to overthrow bourgeois art and culture altogether.” This is contrasted with proletkult, which in Foster’s words “worked to develop a proletarian culture in the more traditional sense of the word; it sought to surpass bourgeois art and culture.” The problem which Foster describes with this formulation is that within the proletkult ideology the worker was positioned as a “passive other.” Foster emphasizes this point by stating, “However difficult, the solidarity with producers that counted for Benjamin was solidarity in material practice, not in artistic theme or political attitude alone.” He goes on to describe a continual opposition which still hovers over the reception of art, that being the divisions between “aesthetic quality versus political relevance, form versus content,” and he suggests that these divisions were as “familiar and unfruitful” for Benjamin way back in 1934 as they are now. The way out of this bind was suggested to be a third term, production, also mentioned by Foster, and meant to be resolved via representation, yet he acknowledges that these oppositions remain. Foster then indirectly refers to his own past by invoking some work of the early 1980s, although the work is not named and there is instead a footnoted mention of Benjamin Buchloh’s essay “Since Realism There Was . . . (On the Current Conditions of Factographic Art)” in which he mentions Allan Sekula and Fred Lonidier. A distinction is made between Benjamin’s reception in the late 1970s (I assume he means in the U.S., and what characterizes the difference isn’t specified). At this point a shift to the near present occurs in which Foster mentions (unnamed) artists and critics in analogy to Benjamin’s response “to the aestheticization of politics under fascism,” and he describes their “interventions”: So these artists and critics responded to the capitalization of culture and privatization of society under Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl, and company—even as these transformations made such intervention more difficult. Indeed, when this intervention was not restricted to the art apparatus alone, its strategies were more situationist than productivist—that is, more concerned with reinscriptions of given representations.14 Foster emphasizes that his focus is not whether “symbolic actions” were effective (he mentions Barbara Kruger and Krzysztof Wodiczko here), as these are not his topic. He then leaps into his main concern, at which point 25. Slippages 239

he designates that a “new paradigm structurally similar to the ‘Author as Producer’ model has emerged in advanced art on the left: the artist as ethnographer.”15 . . . Foster replaces the proletariat with the “cultural and/or ethnic other” as that for whom the “committed artist most often struggles.” This is where the thesis begins to crumble. Foster presumes quite a bit to hold it together. He presumes that the artists he situates in this imagined position are “committed” and “struggling” for something. He then proceeds to list a series of assumptions which he projects onto this fictional artist. The first is that “the site of political transformation is the site of artistic transformation as well, and that political vanguards locate artistic vanguards and, under some circumstances, substitute for them.”16 The second is that “the assumption [of this imaginary artist is] that this site is always elsewhere, in the field of the other”; he specifies the cultural other, whom he describes as the “oppressed postcolonial, subaltern, or subcultural” and that from this outside “dominant culture will be transformed or at least subverted.” The third assumption he makes for the fictional art being, which doubles back on the previous statement, is “that if the invoked artist is not perceived as socially and/or culturally other, he or she has but limited access to this transformative alterity, and that if he or she is perceived as other, he or she has automatic access to it.” Who exactly is he describing? Could this possibly be a projection? Then the alarms go off and danger is announced; the dreaded danger is that of “ideological patronage.” It is fascinating that at this point Foster invokes Craig Owens’s 1983 “imaginary interview,” “The Indignity of Speaking for Others.”17 Unlike Owens’s text, which positions a presumptuous self which can be questioned and critiqued, this position of self-­reflection is not posited here. It doesn’t seem from Foster’s description so far that anyone who might be designated as or who designates themselves as “other” is able to speak without falling into danger, and those who attempt to speak for these others are merely deluding themselves. No possibility seems to be allowed for a Levinasian awareness of otherness and the relativity and relationality of this concept. What is being advocated, or is anything being advocated in which slippage of power positions might occur? What if elsewhere is the space which one inhabits especially if elsewhere is defined as somewhere which is not 240 Positions

central, somewhere else? One can ask who is being disturbed and for whom exist the dangers of which Foster speaks? What perspective is being presumed of the reader on the part of the author? He goes on to note that “this danger (of ideological patronage)” could arise from the “assumed split in identity between the author and the worker or the artist and the other,” but then he immediately continues by stating that identification with the other may be a problem. It can even be a problem for “others.” The term other becomes very confusing here. He stresses that an identity and an identification must not be confused; this point is comprehensible, but what is left out of this formulation are the instances in which someone occupies multiple positions. This doesn’t deny the fact that someone designated or self-­designated as “other” can identify with a position of alterity which becomes mistaken for one’s self. This could lead to what Kobena Mercer has described, along with Stuart Hall, as a “burden of representation.” But it does have to be acknowledged that power relations are not equal and that legitimate claims regarding marginal positions must be realized rather than quickly elided. What appears to be occurring here though is a closing down of possibilities as well as a reduced view of genealogies and of potential for change. Fear of “danger” seems to be taking over. At this point I wondered how ethnography was being used and how this designation was being asked to perform.

Defining the Terms, Unstated Genealogies The construction of the Ethnographic, however, was always ambivalent, for the Ethnographic was not only viewed as Savage but also was seen as alternatively authentic, macho, pure, spiritual, and an antidote to the ills of modern, industrialized capitalism, a myth embodied in the image of the Noble Savage.18 In The Predicament of Culture James Clifford discusses surrealism in relation to ethnography in his essay “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” in which he views the two areas as having affected each other via particular writers. The ethnographic label suggests a characteristic attitude of participant observation among the artifacts of a defamiliarized cultural reality. The 25. Slippages 241

surrealists were intensely interested in exotic worlds, among which they included a certain Paris. Their attitude, while comparable to that of the fieldworker who strives to render the unfamiliar comprehensible, tended to work in the reverse sense, making the familiar strange.19 In particular Clifford examines his thesis through an investigation of the work of Michel Leiris, who was a poet, an anthropologist, and an art critic and who was for years a curator of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. The questions raised by Leiris continue to resonate especially in the context of rethinking a practice of ethnography in post-­colonial times, which is self-­ reflexive and in some cases references what Leiris called a practice of auto-­ ethnography: In L’Afrique fantôme (1934) Leiris sharply questioned certain scientific distinctions between “subjective” and “objective” practices. Why, he wondered, are my own reactions (my dreams, bodily responses, and so on) not important parts of the “data” produced by fieldwork? In the Collège de Sociologie he glimpsed the possibility of a kind of ethnography, analytically rigorous and poetic, focused not on the other but on the self, its peculiar system of symbols, rituals, and social topographies. The exception would be made to illuminate the rule without confirming it.20 It is crucial to note, as Clifford does, that “ethnographic surrealism and surrealist ethnography are utopian constructs; they mock and remix institutional definitions of art and science.”21 This utopian aspect is a crucial one to consider in this analysis of these artistic practices, and not acknowledging it creates a prudish and reduced impression of these, yet in “The Artist as Ethnographer” it is exactly this utopian impulse which is elided. Foster winds up reinforcing that which he criticizes—the aesthetic vs. political binary mentioned in reference to Benjamin’s observation. This is done in several ways. In part this is done by not actually engaging in any depth with the aesthetic concerns and the interrelationship between these and the conceptual aspects of the works he lists, thereby limiting their function to superficial illustrations of his thesis. If the work were engaged by acknowledging its different and intricate genealogies the complexities which would arise might confound the supposed paradigm being presented. Foster also posits a reading of art prac-

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tice along two axes, the vertical and the horizontal, and this mapping will be mentioned in more depth later. By trying to make such a close analogy to Benjamin’s “Author as Producer” lecture the genealogies which inform some of the practices he skims over are ignored and it becomes impossible to recover these based on this framework. Foster also makes a point of negatively figuring what’s referred to throughout his essay as “the ethnographer paradigm.” In his version of the conjunction of ethnography and surrealism, what is described as a “primitivist fantasy” (this being “that the other, usually assumed to be of color, has special access to primary psychic and social processes from which the white subject is somehow blocked”) is assigned to George Bataille and Michel Leiris and also to the “ethnic others” Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, who are said to employ this via the négritude movement. Foster’s problem with these authors employing surrealism and négritude combined with surrealism is that “both movements connected the transgressive potential of the unconscious with the radical alterity of the cultural other.”22 These alliances are never imagined in reference to terms of co-­presence and transculturation, which I noted earlier when describing the notion of “contact zone,” nor are the pleasurable and productive aspects of these configurations ever mentioned, as they are in Clifford’s work. The concepts of co-­presence, transculturation, and aspects of interactivity and improvisation are all elements mentioned in relation to the notion of the “contact zone” and are key terms for interpreting various encounters of the aforementioned authors. These are terms which refer to a relational perception of what is other and what is myself, of course keeping in mind the tensions extant in identifications and “eating the other.” Notions of mimicry, as were noted by Homi Bhabha, don’t enter into this discussion either. The lens used by which to examine this “paradigm”/ symptom is of limited magnification. The impression I had while reading “The Artist as Ethnographer” was of an author who is desperately trying to rein in his territory, while dropping tidbits of information so that the reader is aware that the author is familiar with all aspects. What is presented is an erasure of desire, which is also evident in the reference to Lacan, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, who are said to “idealize the other as the negation of the same—with deleterious effects on cultural politics. This work often assumes dominant definitions of the negative and/or the deviant even as it moves to revalue them.”23 25. Slippages 243

It seems significant that he ends this paragraph with this remark: “The result is a politics that may consume its historical subjects before they become historically effective.”24 This seemed an apt description of the process being performed in this essay. Of course it is possible to see the point of worrying about “rhetorical reversals of dominant definitions to stand for politics as such.” But is anything else being offered here? Might there be a possibility of critically probing our fascinations? It is possible to view the above-­stated authors within a discourse of French exoticism—this is not such a shocking revelation—but it might be more interesting to view this as a curious and contradictory phenomenon, yet this possibility isn’t entertained in the essay. It does seem though that too much gets collapsed amid the following such worries: “self-­othering can flip into self-­absorption”; “ethnographic refurbishing” can become “the practice of a narcissistic self-­ refurbishing.”25 Rather than seeing slippages what is seen are “misrecognitions.” Might the term misrecognition itself imply a truth claim? Slippages would probably now be figured negatively by Foster, who seems to be distancing himself from his own earlier endorsement of “recodings.” All the alarms are set off in the section of the essay entitled “Art and Theory in the Age of Anthropological Studies.” Is this meant to be the present? When did this so-­called “age” begin? Again the attempt to fix categories according to his rules emerges. In asking the question “What misrecognitions have passed between anthropology and art and other discourses?” Foster follows up by negatively describing this process, which could be interpreted quite differently depending on one’s position. As was demonstrated by previous references to the Contact Zone symposium, of which James Clifford was a participant, this occurrence could be described in ways other than as a virtual theater of projections and reflections over the last two decades at least. First some critics of anthropology developed a kind of artist envy (the enthusiasm of James Clifford for the intercultural collages of “ethnographic surrealism” is an influential instance). In this envy the artist became a paragon of formal reflexivity, a self-­aware reader of culture understood as text.26 Foster goes on to deride the projection process where artist and anthropologist are getting each other mixed up. He states:

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Might this artist envy be a self-­idealization in which the anthropologist is remade as an artistic interpreter of the cultural text? Rarely does this projection stop there in the new anthropology or, for that matter, in cultural studies or in new historicism. Often it extends to the object of these studies, the cultural other, who is also reconfigured to reflect an ideal image of the anthropologist, critic, or historian.27 He goes on to point out earlier examples in anthropology in which entire cultures were referred to as collective artists, but he thinks that at least that was honest and didn’t pretend to be critical or deconstructive. This tirade converges with an earlier description regarding “a vogue for pseudo-­ethnographic reports in art that are sometimes disguised travelogues from the world art market. Who in the academy or the art world has not witnessed these testimonies of the new empathetic intellectual or these flâneries of the new nomadic artist?”28 The issue of envy seems to loom large: Recently the old artist envy among anthropologists has turned the other way: a new ethnographer envy consumes many artists and critics. If anthropologists wanted to exploit the textual model in cultural interpretation, these artists and critics aspire to fieldwork in which theory and practice seem to be reconciled. . . . Yet these borrowings are only signs of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art and criticism.29 “What drives it?” he asks. By focusing so fixedly on what he’s designated to be a paradigm Foster has made answering his question quite difficult given the reduced framework within which he is operating. Distinctions are not made between practices, and one gets the impression of a blanket plague which has fallen upon the art world. But what about the rest of the world? What about the discipline he perpetually invokes? What about examining the genealogy of ethnography? What about imagining other discourses which rely on relational situations such as sociology or even fictional narratives? What about considering the influences of growing up during the rise of public tv on which there were many documentaries? Or what about previous art practices such as Fluxus even? Foster asks how the “present turn” is distinguished from art in the 1960s and 1970s, which alluded to “prehistoric art in some earthworks, the art

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world as anthropological site in some conceptual and institution-­critical art.”30 He mentions Anne and Patrick Poirer, Charles Simonds, Joseph Kosuth, and the unnamed many others. He notes five ways in which the “present turn” distinguishes itself, which I’ll paraphrase. In addition to its “self-­consciousness about ethnographic method” he lists the following distinctions: (1) anthropology is prized as a science of alterity; (2) it is the discipline that takes culture as its object; (3) ethnography is considered contextual; fieldwork in the everyday is possible; (4) anthropology is thought to arbitrate the interdisciplinary; (5) the self-­critique of anthropology makes it attractive; it promises a reflexivity of the ethnographer who is at the center while it preserves a romanticism of the other at the margins. He then compares “rogue investigations of anthropology” in what he calls its vanguard status to queer critiques of psychoanalysis.31 What amazed me while reading though this essay was the elision of political reasons for how cultural studies, traced from its British genealogy in which very significant stakes were at hand, has come into existence, rather than as a mere fashionable academic accessory. No other stakes seem to be imagined. He does throw an obligatory bone to post-­colonial theory and at different times he summarizes it, in a way which might be intended to stand in for a political reference, but then the reference is immediately disempowered. In a sweeping historical narrative segue to his discussion of “The Siting of Contemporary Art” Foster states, after describing a “minimalist genealogy of art over the last thirty-­five years”: Soon the institution of art could no longer be described only in spatial terms (studio, gallery, museum, and so on); it was also a discursive network of different practices and institutions, other subjectivities and communities. Nor could the observer of art be delimited only in phenomenological terms; he or she was also a social subject defined in language and marked by difference (economic, ethnic, sexual, and so on). Of course the breakdown of restrictive definitions of art and artist, identity and community, was also pressured by social movements (civil rights, various feminisms, queer politics, multiculturalism) as well as theoretical developments (the convergence of feminism, psychoanalysis, and film theory; the recovery of Antonio Gramsci and the development of cultural studies in Britain; the applications of Louis Althusser, Lacan, and Foucault, especially in the British journal Screen; the devel-

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opment of postcolonial discourse with Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and others; and so on). Thus did art pass into the expanded field of culture that anthropology is thought to survey.32 The work done by those who have been working through theoretical ideas within and across disciplines is referenced, as in a catechism, and then it seems is let go. The primary interpretation allowed for the current shifts is compromise. Foster states: “In our current state of artistic-­theoretical ambivalences and cultural-­political impasses, anthropology is the compromise discourse of choice.”33 Even though criticisms abound in this essay regarding “the dangers of site-­specific work inside the institution” and the dangers of “self-­fashioning” or of the “myth of the redemptive artist” no examples are offered in any depth to present what else could be possible, despite the mentions of “parallactic work that attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other.” Even this is not sufficient, the reader is told, and more dangers, “hermeticism, narcissism,” are announced as well as “a refusal of engagement altogether.” My question throughout the reading of this essay repeatedly was “Engagement for whom?,” but also, how might particular practices which use methods adopted from disciplines such as ethnography, sociology, history, or literature—especially in terms of the research component—be viewed in ways not defined along the lines of “redemptive” practices but in ways which would at least enable one to imagine or speculate upon conditions other than those we now face? How is it that envy becomes the key way of describing this process rather than relations which have a more complex history and more complex present? This reduced analysis dovetails with the essay by Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” in which some of the shifts noted in conceptually based art practice are described in relation to the artist’s cv as being a fifth “site.”34 A resistance exists in both essays to the notion that artists are also able to interpret situations critically and may have perhaps even informed these authors’ critical perspective. The conditions for practicing art, of the kind being described of the “relevant artists,” entails circuitous maneuvers which are not easily reduced to “envy” or “cv s” but relate more to what I previously referred to as “an altered global terrain.” A distinction which Foster makes in the last section of his essay, entitled “Disciplinary Memory and Critical Distance,” is between what he describes

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as work which is horizontally situated and that which is vertically situated. This horizontal axis is used to refer to “a synchronic movement from social issue to issue, from political debate to debate,” and the vertical axis is used to refer to “a diachronic engagement with the disciplinary forms of a given genre or medium.” Foster claims that a shift has occurred, which can perhaps be located around 1968, and perhaps earlier with the introduction of pop art, from the vertical to the horizontal.35 The horizontal axis is associated with “quasi-­anthropological art and culture studies alike.”36 The emphasis now, Foster asserts, is on this horizontal movement in the present moment, and a loss of what he calls the vertical lines seems to be bemoaned. This proposition seemed to be in some way relating to mourning at the end of the millennium. It was different, the reader is told, in the recent past. Then artists and critics didn’t merely do what those supposedly following the horizontal access are claimed to do: “One selects a site, enters its culture and learns its language, conceives and presents a project, only to move to the next site where the cycle is repeated. . . . [Also] one not only maps a site but also works in terms of topics, frames, and so on.”37 This differs from the “historical avant-­garde” who worked both horizontal and vertical axes: In order to extend aesthetic space, artists delved into historical time, and returned past models to the present in a way that opened new sites for work. The two axes were in tension, but it was a productive tension; ideally coordinated, the two moved forward together, with past and present in parallax. Today, as artists follow horizontal lines of working, the vertical lines sometimes appear to be lost.38 This claim regarding the past somehow seems utopian. This would have existed in a moment before “others” were producers and making claims which drew attention to the social conditions of working. Yet any aesthetic claims for work of this sort is denied. While I can understand and even share some of the criticisms put forth, since there are no in-­depth examples of work analyzed, the range for imagining what work is being referred to negatively is very open. Foster goes on to mention the extreme amount of work which would be necessary for artists working horizontally and the difficulties of such an engagement: “Thus if one wishes to work on aids , one must understand not only the discursive breadth but the historical depth of

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aids representation. To coordinate both axes of several such discourses is an enormous burden.”39 Never does Foster inquire into why some may have taken on this burden. Might it be for reasons beyond ethnography envy? Might other stakes be involved? He acknowledges the “traditionalist caution about the horizontal way of working—that new discursive connections may blur old disciplinary memories,” and he suggests that this argument must be considered even if it will later be dismissed. He suggests that the traditionalist charge that “contemporary art [is] dangerously political is one to address,” yet since he no longer claims a position really, his suggestion of countering these arguments rings hollow, and no examples of how things could be thought differently is posited. Thus the credibility he might have is threatened since he doesn’t seem engaged in any political stakes beyond the rhetorical. This is not to suggest that he physically be on the front lines of some sort of protest, but it does relate back to what John Rajchman referred to in his statement about identity, mentioned earlier, where it was stated that critical thought has an important role to play in not only “reexamining assumptions and in formulating what the questions are” or what implications and dangers lurk within these assumptions, but very importantly to examine “what it would mean to resolve them.” And he goes on to emphasize that “such critical thought is necessary in order that identity politics and multiculturalist discourse not themselves assume objectionable forms.”40 Unfortunately Foster’s essay comes up short in terms of these aspirations. One of the reasons to even measure his work in relation to what Rajchman advocates is because of the claims it seems to make.

Critical Distance? Foster concludes by raising a series of questions: “And what does critical distance guarantee? Has this notion become somewhat mythical, acritical, a form of magical protection, a purity ritual of its own? Is such distance still desirable, let alone possible?” He answers in the negative, but immediately mentions the danger of “over-­identification with the other” as not an option, while disidentification is “murderous.” What he describes is an impasse, and then quizzically opts for critical distance.

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Yet in the last chapter of the book, “Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?,” Foster returns to this sore point and resorts to a referencing of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals. In defining the role of the critic he calls upon the distinction made between the “noble” and the “base” and presents these in a stalemate with “the useful.” Etymologically, to criticize is to judge or to decide, and I doubt if any artist, critic, theorist, or historian can ever escape value judgments. We can, however, make value judgments that, in Nietzschean terms, are not only reactive but active—and, in non-­Nietzschean terms, not only distinctive but useful. Otherwise critical theory may come to deserve the bad name with which it is often branded today.41 The precarious balancing act as well as an awareness of weight in relation to the activity of criticality is what the reader is left with.

Critical Situatedness and the Necessity of Continual Reevaluation Case Study: Conversation with George Lipsitz, Prof. of Ethnic Studies, U.C. San Diego In 1993 I met with George Lipsitz at the Getty Center in Santa Monica. My interview with him was included in the work with which I was then engaged, Import/Export Funk Office (1992). L.A. was the last site for the physical making of the piece. George Lipsitz later agreed to participate in the Negotiations in the Contact Zone symposium, but was unfortunately unable to be present. I continued this work in the form of a cd-­rom, and there it is possible to read the transcript of our conversation. In this case I would consider the cd-­rom as a site (to hammer that word into the ground), as is a book, and a website.42 I’d like to present a portion of his response to my question about culture as a force because I think it differently inflects questions raised in Foster’s essay. Lipsitz addresses concerns which overlap with Foster’s yet posits a different view of Walter Benjamin’s concepts which are informed by tracing other genealogies. George Lipsitz: And so through music and through video, through dancing, through car customizing, through hightop fade haircuts,

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25.2 Partially Buried, 1996. Digital film, color, sound, 20 minutes. Film still.

through style leadership of wearing clothing, a whole variety of things constituting the body as a site of expression, many people who were erased or demonized by the mass media found a way to have their art go places where they couldn’t go. Yo mtv Raps is the most popular show on cable television. Cable is disproportionately skewered toward white middle-­class or upper middle-­class audiences. Yo mtv Raps obviously goes alot of places the rappers would not be welcomed if they showed up, but they got a part of their reality out, whether people understand what it is they’re saying or not, and obviously there’s a certain performance that goes on. It’s not as if you just set up a camera and get Dead Homiez, I mean you know it’s a construct. Somebody creates it and it’s a statement somebody wants to make, but it feels true, it rings true for people in part because the people making it know what they’re talking about, but also in part because the people who get the happy talk news on channel 2, 4 and 7 and in the little blurbs in the L.A. Times, know there’s another reality out there, know that

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the official picture they’re getting makes no sense. And when you hear Ice Cube or Ice T talking about South Central, or when you hear n.w.a ., there’s a way in which it rings true, the way in which some things at least are being addressed that aren’t talked about any place else. Renée Green: So what do you think that that force can do? I was actually thinking about the question that was raised after the Getty Center panel which had something to do with the aestheticization of politics and I liked your response. I wondered if you could elaborate on it. George Lipsitz: Well, you know there’s both a great hope and a great danger in cultural politics. The great hope is that you could create a coalition or mobilize around things that aren’t yet here politically, that aren’t yet possible politically, that could call out to people who are looking for something, that this could create a space for a pan-­ethnic anti-­racist coalition, that people of different races and classes and backgrounds might decide that power has got to be redistributed in this society. The great hope is that it creates a speaking space for the imagination that politics seems to have no room for. The great danger is that we live in a society that sells pictures and stories to us endlessly, gives us pictures of everything we can’t have and then keeps us coming back for more. So there’s a way in which this can be just one more diversion, one more consumer trip to keep us separated, but imagine we’re making contact. We’ll get pictures of interracial unity, but we won’t get the conditions and the material benefits that give people an equal chance at life. We’ll get stories about people working together, but we’ll get them in our videos in our segregated neighborhoods with their very different tax rates and very different schools and very different health conditions. The quote that you mentioned is the end of Walter Benjamin’s terrific essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He goes through a long discussion about all the great things that could be done with commercial culture and electronic media and you can blow things up and see them from different perspectives and you can make alot of copies and everybody can have them and there’s something very alluring

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about this, something very democratic about it, something emancipatory that might help us realize some things that we’d never have been able to achieve without them. But, the danger is—in the last sentence he seems to come full circle and he’s writing in the midst of the Nazi ascendancy in Europe, the popularity of Hitler, the way in which the nation-­state in its spectacles is able to mobilize citizens to die for interests that are not theirs—and he says that the final result of the aestheticization of politics is war. That war is always the big, the biggest show of all, that the nation-­state and the patriarchal figure on t.v. can always give you a better show if what you want is a show. So the question is how do we translate these images and signs and symbols into a better life, not just into better images of life. It’s hard for me to imagine how that would happen without some kind of political mobilization, some kind of alliance, some kind of direct talking about power. I’m more optimistic about culture as a site for that, than say my friend Mike Davis is, because I’ve seen movements that have changed people. In other words, if we were to go to the American south when John Brown was executed in 1859 and we’d say is this going to change?, and you’d say never because most slaves are on plantations of less than ten people, it’s illegal for them to read and write, it’s illegal for them to communicate with one another. John Brown, who told America that slavery was a violent system that needed to be over-­turned violently, is captured and executed by a great patriot named Robert E. Lee, who a few years later is a traitor, but when he gets caught he gets given his sword back and his horse and he gets an honorific position. But, John Brown was killed for being a traitor. So from that vantage point of October and November and December of 1859 you say it’s always been this way and it’s never going to change, but three years later in the summer of 1862 the Emancipation was proclaimed. In 1863 when it went into effect 200,000 slaves ran away to join the Union army, a million left behind staged a general strike in the fields. How did they do this? Well, they had been waiting, they had been waiting for an opportunity and what kept alive their willingness to act was reading the master’s Book

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and singing songs about meet-­me-­on-­the-­other-­side-­of-­the river-­ Jordan. . . . In conclusion I’d like to suggest the necessity of continued “negotiations in the ‘contact zone(s),’” amid entropy and dystopias. In terms of dialogic utopian imaginings I can imagine the science fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler “rapping” with Robert Smithson, Yvonne Rainer, Ornette Coleman, and LTJ Bukem about sites, motion, and time. This would be one of numerous follow-­ups to the writer James Baldwin and the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s 1971 dialogue, A Rap on Race.43

Notes Originally published in German as “Gleitende Verschiebungen,” in Agenda: Perspektiven kritischer Kunst, edited by Christian Kravagna (Vienna: Folio, 2000). Published in French in Radiotemporaire (Grenoble: Magasin, 2002), 143–55. A brief excerpt in German appeared as “Der Künstler als Ethnograph?,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 27 (September 1997): 152–61. The English version, “Slippages,” was first published in Radiotemporaire (Grenoble: Magasin, 2002). 1. This essay was delivered as a lecture in “Agenda: Perspektiven kritischer Kunst,” a lecture series organized by Christian Kravagna at the Vienna Secession, 1997. 2. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 3. Paul Bové, Intellectuals in Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 4. Ibid., 14. 5. Ibid., 36. 6. Ibid., 37. 7. A book including the symposium papers was published in Portugal, in English and Portuguese: Renée Green, ed., Negotiations in the Contact Zone = Negociaçôes na zona de contacto (Lisbon: Assírio and Alvim, Belém, 2003). 8. Yve-­Alain Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-­Clara,” in October: The First Decade (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1987), 342–72. 9. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6–7. 10. For example, see Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory (New York: New Press, 1995).

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11. John Rajchman, “The Question of Identity,” October, no. 61 (Summer 1992): 5–7. 12. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. 13. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1996), 172. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 173. 17. Craig Owens, “The Indignity of Speaking of Others: An Imaginary Interview,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 18. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 19. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 121. 20. Ibid., 142. 21. Ibid., 147. 22. Foster, Return of the Real, 175. 23. Ibid., 179. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 180. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 181. 30. Ibid., 182. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 184. 33. Ibid., 183. 34. Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October, no. 80 (Spring 1997): 104. 35. Foster, Return of the Real, 199. 36. Ibid., 202. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Rajchman, “The Question of Identity,” 6–7. 41. Foster, Return of the Real, 226. 42. The Digital Import/Export Funk Office, cd-­rom (Lüneburg: Kunstraum, University of Lüneburg, 1996); http://www.uni-­lueneburg.de/import_export /blacklabeled/about_frame.html. 43. James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971).

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26

1998

Affection Afflictions My Alien/My Self, or More “Reading at Work”

Utopia’s description of the social space provides an opportunity to “visualize” the relation between the experience of oppression and the vision of a transformed society, and to visualize the problematics of moving back and forth between them. . . . In examining the relation between the utopian and critical impulses, I have therefore also focused on this temporal pole by recognizing the fact that utopia is not finally a space, but rather the narration of a space. —Jennifer Burwell, Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation Again something is missing. That is to say, the lived experiences of women and men all around us are again and again in excess of the theory.—Samuel Delany, “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned On by Authority,” in Longer Views: Extended Essays

Introduction Stories Loving the Alien, a provocative phrase and also a conference held in Berlin in 1997, spurred the writing of this essay.1 At the time I let the words “Loving the Alien” slip around in my mind. A hodgepodge of associations began to multiply gaining memory fuel and associative momentum as I pondered what the possibilities of the combined terms Loving the Alien: Diaspora, Science Fiction, and Multikultur could mean. Music memory links made me think back to some seventies album covers, which included one of Herbie Hancock in a spaceship bubble flying over a purple spacescape on the album called Thrust. Other suggestive frag-

ments passed through my brain like Stanley Clarke’s staticky and digital-­ sounding electric guitar played solo or with the group Return to Forever and Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Theme for Eulipions, which I for some reason associated with Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, maybe because my friend Book had cracked my Sun Ra album and in his guilt gave me the Rahsaan as a kind of related compensation. At any rate my thoughts spun around to the seventies which also included first hearing George Clinton records in junior high school and being introduced to P-­Funk and the Mothership Connection in a public library record section in Cleveland, Kinsman Ave. to be exact. Strange. Why the seventies now? There were other thoughts and sensations piling up having to do with LTJ Bukem & friends’ ethereal drum and bass sounds with fragments of funk, images of silver clothes and nonstop techno beats, but. . . . It seemed as if these early impressions really stuck and melded with the present. I was curious about this phenomenon in myself and I also began to detect it elsewhere in varying permutations. During the mid-­nineties it was no news that the seventies had been back in the media and in fashion for a while then. We’re used to these cyclical returns or part of what was so frenetically hailed a while back as the bricolage of postmodernism. Predictably enough, in 2000 the eighties again reared its disco-­balled head. In the seventies it was the fifties, and so on. Maybe these seventies links were fresh in my mind because I too have been interested in the seventies, and most interested in the interest in the seventies—including my own. Might it be imagined as some post-­utopian moment, although things get sticky when one tries to periodize a decade and its many modes. I’d been collecting as many seventies albums as I could get my hands on to listen to and look at. These showed some of the eclecticism of the decade. I saw them as some sort of index to a childhood past. Nostalgia wasn’t what I was seeking, yet what was I searching for? I’d also been thinking a lot about art and technology and how these had been thought in the recent past, as well as the artist Robert Smithson’s interpretation of entropy. His writings from the seventies were reprinted in 1996. Apollo space missions fascinated me in the seventies also. I remember these seeming very personally important when I was around ten and I would watch with anticipation every move of the tv camera no matter how static the image on the screen appeared. In retrospect I don’t know why I cared so much, maybe it was one of those kid attachments, the idea of walking on the moon, which now seems very far away since the Chal26. Affection Afflictions 257

26.1 Renée Green watching Man on the Moon: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11, July 20, 1969, 20:18 utc . Image: Friendly Green Jr.

lenger, among other things, exploded. Many of the films which I recently watched on video in preparation for this essay I’d had a vague recollection of having watched on tv in the seventies. The names seemed familiar, like Soylent Green (1973), although I couldn’t remember the plots. These films had in common a kind of doom which seemed to be immanent and linked to technological “man.” I don’t remember having had any role models of women in space besides Uhura in Star Trek. It would not be until years later when I was in college that I would learn that Uhuru meant freedom in Swahili and that Gene Rodenberry had produced progressive sf parables. 258 Positions

The metaphoric expression which could flip to a literal expression intrigued me: “loving the alien.” Again the question nagged: What many things could that mean, especially when combined with thoughts about diaspora, science fiction, and multiculturalism? And behind that lurked another question: How was I to approach this combination and deal with the possible profundity of the tangle?

The Seventies as Primal-­Scene Fantasy and Utopian Impulse/Dystopian Romance, Repeating Returns, and Time-­Loop Paradox “It was twenty years ago today” is how the essay “Culture Is a Metaphor for ‘It’s Their Problem’” by Diedrich Diederichsen begins. That was written in 1994 for the Contact Zone symposium I had organized in New York. So the date referred to was 1974. “The German Left and Its Revolutionary Allies” is the title of the section heading and the moment described is that in which Portugal’s dictatorship was overthrown by the Movement of the Armed Forces. The text continues: It looked like your classical socialist revolution. The one you knew from textbooks you were studying in your after school Maoist high-­school groups and right about that time nearly ceased to believe in. But then it wouldn’t have been possible without the anticolonial fight in Angola and Mozambique. In 1974 Portugal also became the favorite holiday destination for the radical German left. The German New Left, the revolutionaries from the ’67 and ’68 student riots were always the most internationalist leftists in the world. They always felt closest to Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary fight of the oppressed of the Third World, especially in Africa and South America. And of course in South East Asia and the Middle East.2 In the mid-­nineties, especially in the media, the seventies were ripe for returns. But which returns exactly? The description just excerpted relies on historical markers to interweave some of the then popular counterculture sentiments. A jaundiced eye is cast on the enthusiasm involved in adopted revolutionary struggles of other countries. Yet, what has been offered in the cinema regarding these returns? 26. Affection Afflictions 259

The movies Crooklyn (1994), Dazed and Confused (1993), and most recently Boogie Nights (1997) immediately come to mind. All three rely on the experiential memoir form, yet this floats outside of any politically inflected historical context. While all are absorbing and draw viewers back in time, using the devices of period music, period slang, and fashion rehashes, they beg a question: What would a reading of past narratives or refashioned narratives of the past be like if they were more complexly and historically situated? Where do these and other narratives resist the apparent seamless reception of the return as one more product? What is repressed in the narratives and where do the clues to these more uneasy moments reside?3 The 1970s could be viewed for some, as a version of a primal-­scene fantasy as described by Constance Penley: the name Freud gave to the fantasy of overhearing or observing parental intercourse, of being on the scene, so to speak, of one’s own conception. The desire represented in the time travel story, of both witnessing one’s own conception and being one’s own mother and father, is similar to the primal scene fantasy, in which one can be both observer or one of the participants. . . . A patient can consciously fabricate such a scene only because it has been operative in his or her unconscious, and this construction has nothing to do with its actual occurence or nonoccurence. The idea of returning to the past to generate an event that has already made an impact on one’s identity lies at the core of the time-­loop paradox story.4 The repetition involved in revisiting the seventies, which for me represents childhood and its multiple associations, is something I probed in a work called Partially Buried in Three Parts. The work combines a fascination for a time before one was able to articulate the observations which have since been supplied in retrospect by reading histories of those times.5 The American New Left’s process of imagining others is a means to identify desired identities which they can attempt to claim for their own uses. This desire echoes the previous description of the German New Left’s enthrallment with other models of struggle and suggests the media’s role in the process: Images, illusions, and icons of revolution, packaged in film, voice, and videotape in Moscow, Peking, Algiers, Havana, Cairo, New Delhi, 260 Positions

Accra, Hanoi, Leopoldville, Djakarta, Nairobi, Belgrade, and Conakry, incessantly were broadcast and rebroadcast in the American mass media as a spectacle of global revolution. From these prepackaged metatexts of transformation, 1960s radical—black, white, brown, male, female, young, and old—borrowed the names, battle cries, and costumes of their revolutions. As a result, Marxism-­Leninism and Pan-­ Africanism, which had virtually no groundedness in the lived history of advanced industrial America, were adopted as schemas of “wholesale theoretical clarity” into the countercultures of the 1960s. . . . The New Left intended to create a revolution, but in the process, it unintentionally revolutionized the workings of corporate America.6 Cultural forms are always barometers in some way of the ideologies which are enacted in our societies. The repressed aspects and the ways to critically read these provide a repetitive interest, at least for those engaged with how cultural forms function and continue, and also provide a benefit which, ideally imagined, can be transmitted into how we live and into what we produce. With this incentive in mind, consider the questions Samuel Delany asks in his essay “Reading at Work”: What is this “work”? What is “reading”? What is “metaphor” and how do we “read” it? How does “metaphor” “work”? Frankly, I do not see how reading can be other than a violent process. The violence of the letter is the violence of the reader—a reader involved in an unclear, cloudy, struggling, masochistic relationship with a text that, at any moment it would produce joy, must do so violently. For without violence, all ideology—radical or conservative—is incomplete and blind to itself.7 And what about the metaphors: eating the other, loving the alien, and the violence of reading? Being ingested by the mothership? Again to quote Delany: Nevertheless and once again: metaphors are not radical in themselves, whether they are delivered by tv soap operas, science education programs, science fiction tales, or socialist feminist manifestoes. Cri26. Affection Afflictions 261

tique—critical work—is created and constituted by people, by individuals, by individuals speaking and writing to others, by people who are always in specific situations that are tensional as well as techno­ logical.8 The stories I’ve presented so far could be thought of in relation to the above-­mentioned primal scene fantasies which could inconclusively situate them in relationship to some unconscious operations. But as examples of “experience” they can be historicized and thus more questions are raised. As Joan W. Scott points out: And yet it is precisely the questions precluded—questions about discourse, difference, and subjectivity, as well as about what counts as experience and who gets to make that determination—that would enable us to historicize experience, to reflect critically on the history we write about it, rather than to premise our history upon it.9

Kindred and The Omega Man with Blade Runner Highlights An initial point of interest I had in the three titles I’d like to discuss is that they are all set in Los Angeles, which seems to be the capital of science fiction dystopias, a world overrun by technology and multifarious forms of transportation. Kindred, a novel by Octavia Butler,10 and the film The Omega Man (1971) both take place in the 1970s—a post-­Watts riot and pre–L.A. Rebellion/Rodney King time, while the film Blade Runner (1982) is set in a future in which other planets have become colonies of the earth’s military-­ technological-­corporate complex. Beyond these initial observations other aspects of these stories became of interest. The functions which the body plays in these narratives is one aspect. Questions in each story arise in differently inflected ways about what an acceptable body is and what the terms to judge this designation might be. Is there a link between humanness and what becomes societally deemed an acceptable body? How are “humanity” and “civilization” conflated? How are these distinctions between acceptable or appropriate bodies being made and how is the equation of such a body with qualities of the human configured once a deterritorialization sets in, which makes clear designations of these distinctions difficult? What happens when a body changes into a dis262 Positions

eased form? Does the person also change and become less human? Another question which arises in each of these narratives is what does civilization mean when those who are assigned the role of humanness (and by implication civility) act with barbarity? Lastly, how does memory function in relation to being human? What might it mean that memories might be retained by man-­made creations? How and by whom is subjectivity determined? Is it solely a human characteristic? What’s so great about human subjectivity or humans anyway? . . . In Kindred the protagonist, Dana, is pulled back in time. Rather than present an imaginary utopian, dystopian, or heterotopian future Kindred, set in 1976 (America’s bicentennial year), refers to a past time, nineteenth-­ century antebellum Maryland, i.e., the Old South, and to events which are recognizable from slave narratives. Kindred has been described by Burwell as a “grim fantasy” which “moves between the present and a dystopian period in American history.”11 Yet elements recognizable from the science fiction genre are still apparent. In particular the “time-­travel paradox” which while not technically explained occurs repeatedly. The novel encompasses a personal search, which begins involuntarily, as well as historical and social commentary encoded in fiction. Kindred provides an example of a way of imagining the contradictions involved in negotiating one’s relationship to history and the present, which extend to family relations. It also approaches the scariness of what a return could entail, as well as the traces which persist in the present which are shades of the past. Slavery exists in a way as a primal-­scene fantasy/fact for African diasporic peoples and always somehow never quite goes away.

Played Out in the Body The central paradox which Dana is forced to accept is that the ancestor who calls her back is a white male named Rufus. Six incidents of return occur within the space of the novel. Each one is progressively more lengthy and dangerous. Rufus calls Dana when he is in trouble during different times in his life. On each return Rufus is older, so she is a presence during Rufus’s boyhood, adolescence, and early manhood. It is her hope to influence him in some way not to be a typical slave master but to learn compassion and perhaps influence him to realize the horrific aspects of slavery so that he 26. Affection Afflictions 263

might act in another way. She doesn’t expect miracles but attempts to influence him at least in terms of daily encounters. She literally becomes his private tutor, to everyone’s amazement—how does a black woman know how to read, since knowledge of reading was illegal for slaves? And she also develops an affection for him, which is constantly thrown into conflict by his actions. Dana gradually discovers that she can only return to her home in contemporary Los Angeles when her life is threatened. To return she is forced to take greater risks, yet she must continue to live to protect Rufus, because she doesn’t want to test what would happen if she interfered with the birth of her great-­grandmother who is the daughter of Rufus and a slave woman named Alice. Other aspects of Dana’s learned negotiations with the past involve her encounters with slaves. Her knowledge of slavery is only from books she’s read, but living in the past forces her to acknowledge and feel through her body the force of that oppression. Nothing she had experienced in the 20th century had prepared her to survive slavery, and her tactics for survival extend to a suicide attempt, slashing her wrists to force a return to Los Angeles. As is stated in the prologue of the novel: “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Butler’s novel presents the tension felt by some contemporary people who are black and middle class and artists (for example) and who think (and wish) they can live their lives focusing on their interests as Dana tries to do, yet are called upon to consider social conditions and the past. Some Gil Scott Heron lyrics from Dana’s contemporary period come to mind and suggest the tension between a past and a present which Dana finds herself inadvertently grappling with: “Gotta move on I gotta see tomorrow, gotta move on gotta get ahead, can’t look back there’s nothing there but sorrow, gotta move on gotta get ahead.” The pull back is graphically depicted as an abduction by a relative that Dana didn’t even want to acknowledge, because of the so-­called impure mixing of the blood. The violence of the act and the associations with bastardy as a negatively configured event (defined in the o.e.d. as illegitimate by birth, unauthorized, counterfeit, hybrid, but also meaning a person of specified kind, like “you lucky bastard”). At any rate what Dana is forced to face is that the violence demonstrated by Rufus toward Alice is mixed with love. The impossibility of a reciprocal relationship due to the imbalance of power between them distorts any feelings they 264 Positions

have for each other. They were childhood friends, he fell in love with her, he was legally her master, he thought he could control her. She fell in love with another slave named Isaac. They tried to run away. Upon their capture her “master” ordered Isaac’s ears cut off and Alice devoured by dogs. Isaac was sent away and Alice remained in master Rufus’s bedroom as a patient nursed by Dana. So by playing his trump card as The Master he got her back and eliminated the competition physically, but not in her mind. When she was well she could either deal with his “love,” which meant to be his mistress, or she could die. Eventually, after she bore two babies, she hanged herself. One of the most interesting tensions set up in the novel is between parallel stories of Dana and Kevin, her white husband, who like Dana is a writer, and Rufus and Alice. This forces one to examine the tensions involved in the contemporary relationship, which is one of voluntary love and supposed equality, but which exists within a country with a past history of slavery, to which eventually both Kevin and Dana are transported. The way slavery could shape the kinds of relationships individuals could legally have is made manifest when it is assumed that Kevin is Dana’s master: they are forced to play the master-­slave roles to survive.

Home and Boundary Loss/Involuntary Flashbacks; The Call of The Family; Alien Within/Blood Relations/Germ Warfare/ Becoming Alien, Loss of Control; Inner-­City Dissolution as Metaphor and Fact In The Omega Man another view of family is presented: a lone male individual urban commando staves off possible invasion/absorption by The Family—diseased remains of the human population who have been infected by germ warfare. In this narrative the future is the 1970s, and military scientist Robert Neville, played by Charlton Heston, is the last man on earth. Before elaborating on The Omega Man I’d like to remind the reader of the title Affection Afflictions: My Alien/My Self, or More “Reading at Work.” The definition of affection, again from the o.e.d ., is “1. goodwill, fond feeling. 2. disease; diseased condition.” Affection is associated with love, yet in this definition encompasses disease, infection, invasion and implies a loss of boundaries, something beyond one’s control. In relation to The Omega Man and to Kindred, the notion of the loss of boundaries and of bodily as 26. Affection Afflictions 265

well as spatial invasion are recurrent references. Alien, when defined as an adjective, means “1. unfamiliar; unacceptable or repugnant; 2. foreign; 3. of beings from other worlds.” As a noun it is defined as “1. foreign-­born resident who is not naturalized. 2. a being from another world.” Dutch: “Everybody has it.” Neville: “Everybody, but me.” Neville is supposedly the last man on earth in the wake of germ warfare, which has invaded everyone’s body except his, because he possesses the test serum which worked. The Omega Man can be seen as a Hollywood parable for the times just survived, the sixties and early seventies. The ways in which gender, race, and youth are woven into this narrative raise questions concerning the humanity/civilization conflation as an aspiration. The infected “aliens” are humans. The physical change they’ve undergone is signaled by their hair becoming an albino white and their eyes an otherworldly green. The Family resembles a medieval Charles Manson cult that’s taken to the streets with wooden flamethrowers. As the lone survivor and upholder of the best of civilization Neville is still lonely. With no “people” around the city is by day his playground. Like vampires The Family can’t bear the daylight. By night Neville is hunted and taunted by them. During his daily jaunts jogging and searching for The Family’s lair he also scavenges from department stores. Instead of riots in which inner-­city stores were stormed for consumer goods, he does this alone and in a casual manner. It is in a department store that he first gets a glimpse of Lisa (Rosalind Cash) among the female shop dummies he’d tentatively appeared to be lusting after. When Neville is abducted by The Family and on the verge of being executed after an exchange about who the real barbarians are, technological man or the new Luddites, he is saved by Lisa and Dutch, who then kidnap him. It is revealed that there are two families existing—Mathias’s (former tv announcer turned cult patriarch) family, The Family—and another alternative family of not yet visibly infected youth and children. Their surrogate parents are Lisa, a young black, supposedly streetwise woman, and Dutch, a former med-­student-­hippie utopian whose studies were halted when “they scratched the world.” This family includes Lisa’s sick brother Richie, who is on the verge of albinoization (“the tertiary stage”). The assortment seems to represent the promise of a rainbow family of the future. 266 Positions

Neville discovers he was kidnapped by Lisa and Dutch’s family because they want the serum which has helped him remain healthy. He then immediately becomes a patriarch who makes decisions and carries out actions. Dutch is reduced to a desexualized dreamy boy and Lisa, who originally had threatened Neville at gunpoint, becomes his lover and helpmate as she’s meant to be the last woman on earth and he the last man. The Man. Lisa introduces him as such, also referring to the African-­American slang-­ inflected meaning, widely used by the counterculture and their Hollywood counterparts, to connote The Establishment and The System, terms which crop up repeatedly in films of that time that depict transgressive yet lovable black and/or youthful revolutionary elements. The lovable aspects usually have to do with these elements’ closeness to nature and their raw emotions—sometimes destructive but also naively hopeful and desirous of harmony and freedom. This impression is highlighted in the opening scenes of the movie when Neville watches Woodstock in an empty theater. After he’s mouthed the words of the movie he says, “They sure don’t make pictures like that anymore,” implying that Woodstock was only a piece of film left over from a past time which can’t be reclaimed, a memory stimulant, ephemeral as the light which allows us to see these moving projections— the media as the location of utopian revolution, as previously mentioned. As Richie, Lisa’s infected brother, responds to the serum made from Neville’s blood (“100% Anglo-­Saxon, baby,” he tells Lisa), he asks Neville why The Family, as fellow human beings, don’t also deserve a chance to be saved from their disease. By this time Neville imagines the future existing with his new-­found family and wants nothing but to escape to the hills upon Richie’s recovery. Despite Neville’s desire to maintain a disease-­free family, the two families merge after Richie’s attempt to convert Mathias fails and he is killed. Mathias echoes a sentiment expressed about those rioting ghetto dwellers of the recent past in saying that The Family didn’t want or need to be saved. Soon after Richie’s killing Lisa emerges from a store “actively infected” and somehow becomes a zombified devotee of Mathias’s. She’s been alienized. Everything is invaded, Neville’s house and his woman. Neville becomes an avenger. The death of the father seems to be required for the new contingent family to exist. Neville is ultimately “sacrificed” by Mathias and The Family amid symbolic crucifixion imagery. Lisa is feebly sorry and out of it, seeming about to nod off. Dutch comes with a van and the kids, scoops her up, 26. Affection Afflictions 267

leaving Neville in a pool of blood, but salvaging the serum, and off they drive into the sunset.

Who Made You? Who Owns You? / Who’s Human and Why Does It Matter after the End of Civilization? Vivian Sobchack refers to two different logics which have appeared in science fiction films of the last decades. One involves the embrace of the alien and the other suggests the erasure of alienation. In this distinction she references Foucault’s distinction between resemblance and similitude: The most postmodern sf does not “embrace the alien” in a celebration of resemblance, but “erases alienation” in a celebration of similitude. Thus, it is not critical of alienation. Indeed, the postmodern sf film maintains only enough signs of “alien-­ness” to dramatize it not as “the difference that makes a difference” but as the “difference that makes a sameness.” The “alien” posited by marginal and postmodern sf enables the representation of alienation as “human” and constitutes the reversible and nonhierarchical relations of similitude into a myth of homogenized heterogeneity. That is, nationalism no longer exists as a difference in the culture of multinational capital.12

Contingent New World? Families, Nations, Corporations / What Do Forms of Love Have to Do with the “New World Order”? What sorts of ethical responsibilities do we have to others? What could one’s relationship be to a replicant who is made and owned by a corporation but who has organic parts and whose body is linked to a mind which can interpret, analyze, and express emotion? Memory and the desire for it are key aspects of the struggle of the replicants in Blade Runner. Life and memory are connected. But the replicants have four-­year life spans, a built-­ in “fail-­safe.” The replicants are man-­made and partly organic. They look like perfect human specimens. What characteristics separate the replicants from a definition of humanness, beyond not having a long-­term memory which would accompany a life lived in stages from childhood over a longer duration of time? The question is asked by Rachel, a replicant, whether Decker, another lone survivalist, has ever accidentally “retired” (killed) a human? Who is the brute? The replicants were made to serve humans, in

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a way similar to how slaves were designated as nonhumans and made to serve. They become hunted on earth after they’ve mounted a rebellion in the colonial “off world.”

Postscript: Home. What Can We Do Here? Difficulty in Imagining Others / Sentiment vs. Constitutional Change: Emotional Knots and Irrational Loves What ethical responsibility do we have to others whether they be other animals or whether they be instruments for labor, war, and sex, made from flesh and blood (organic life forms) of interpretive mind, lived emotion and perception, having eyes which see and transmit images which are felt? Can humans be equated with aliens when becoming diseased? When becoming rebellious? Are these creatures discardable like barbarians and vermin (the conflation Neville makes), like replicants? To bring this rumination “home,” which I hope is a concept now thrown into question, I’d like to close by thinking about Elaine Scarry’s essay “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” which is excerpted from a longer essay of the same title which she gave as a lecture for a public meeting in Frankfurt about injuries to Turkish residents in Germany. One of the main points of Scarry’s essay is this: The problem with discussions of “the other” is that they characteristically emphasize generous imaginings, and thus allow the fate of another person to be contingent on the generosity and wisdom of the imaginer. But solutions ought not to give one group the power to regulate the welfare of another group in this way.13 What she calls for instead are legal and constitutional safeguards which can protect people’s rights rather than depend on the messy emotions involved in imagining others. She says: “The work accomplished by a structure of laws cannot be accomplished by a structure of sentiment. Constitutions are needed to uphold cosmopolitan values.”14

26. Affection Afflictions 269

Notes Originally published in German as “Leidige Liebe: My Alien/My Self— Readings at Work,” in Loving the Alien: Science Fiction, Diaspora and Multikultur, edited by Diedrich Diederichsen (Berlin: id Archiv, 1998). A shorter edited version appeared in Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, edited by Greg Tate (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 227–43. 1. I’d like to thank Diedrich Diederichsen for inviting me along with Greg Tate, John Szwed, Kodwo Eshun, Mark Dery, The Sun Ra Arkestra, and others to participate in the stimulating and unusual conference, Loving the Alien: Diaspora, Science Fiction and Multikultur, held at the Volkstheater in Berlin in November 1997. The book version was published in German under the same title by id-­Archiv, Berlin, 1998. 2. Renée Green, ed., Negotiations in the Contact Zone = Negociaçôes na zona de contacto (Lisbon: Assírio and Alvim, Bélem, 2003), 41. 3. This is not to say that style, as a representation of cultural moments, isn’t historically inflected. The Ice Storm (1997) provides an example of a film which shares the fascination with the modes of seventies “lifestyles” but which also situates the angst and silliness it presents within a context of political, social, and economic circumstances in an eerily thought-­provoking way, even though the focus is on families in a suburban American milieu. 4. Constance Penley, “Time Travel, Primal Scene and the Critical Dystopia,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1990), 120–21. 5. See my books Shadows and Signals (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000) and Between and Including (Cologne: DuMont, Secession, 2001). 6. Timothy W. Luke, “The Modern Service State: Public Power in America from the New Deal to the New Beginning,” in Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, edited by Adolph Reed (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 247. 7. Samuel Delany, Longer Views: Extended Essays (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996), 98. 8. Ibid., 114. 9. Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 33. 10. Octavia Butler, Kindred (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979). 11. Jennifer Burwell, Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 119. 12. Vivian Carol Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1987), 297. 13. Elaine Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Martha Craven Nussbaum with respondents; edited by Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 110. 14. Ibid.

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27

2001

Survival Ruminations on Archival Lacunae

Adaptations, Re-­readings, and New Readings: Introduction to the Following Ongoing Accretive Process 1. Everything/Nothing: Negation in Abundance Upon reading about archives the above subheading came to mind.1 Particular examples of attempts at collecting and the subsequent ordering of masses of material—including fictive attempts—led to a feeling not merely of bewonderment but also of fatigue, attention deficit. Negation in abundance can be read as the canceling-­out effect which is possible when confronted with more than is comprehensible, that which is mind-­numbing, more than one can bear. It can also be read as a multitude of negation, many minuses. What I’m referring to as a canceling-­out effect can also be thought in relation to absences, lacunae, holes which occur in the midst of densities of information, as well as amid their lack. The lacunae referenced in this text are those which allude to that which is beyond understanding, and understanding can be thought here in terms of how it might be possible to perceive, as well as the boundaries of such. It is exactly at these locations of limit and even fatigue where it may be necessary to search. What impossibility is faced beyond the more superficial fatigue? A recurring strain in my work has involved the probing of in-­between spaces, which can appear to be holes, aporias, absences. For example between what is said and what can be comprehended; between an event and its reinterpretation; that which takes place between the process of importing and exporting products, people, ideas; between organizing systems and their confoundation; between what is seen and what is believed; between what is heard and what is felt.

2. Impossibility/Holes Testimony, however, contains a lacuna. The survivors agree about this. “There is another lacuna in every testimony: witnesses are by definition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privilege. . . . No one has told the destiny of the common prisoner, since it was not materially possible for him to survive. . . . I have also described the common prisoner when I speak of “Muslims” but the Muslims did not speak.2 Those who have not lived through the experience will never know; those who have will never tell; not really, not completely. . . . The past belongs to the dead.3 Many deaths weren’t fully investigated so the records were not accurate. There are a lot of things about the May Uprising which are still unknown, still to be uncovered. The only people who really know what happened on May 18th are those who actually were there at the time. Those who survived tend to be emotionally subjective rather than objective about what happened. Documenting what happened will come after uncovering the truth about it.4 The above quotes refer to moments or circumstances in which despite the availability of some records of a past event there exist gaps or holes which in all instances it is assumed that only the dead are able to fill. The impossibility lies in the fact that this will never happen. Those who survived in order to tell or witness are not really capable of filling in these holes, because they have survived. They cannot know across the limit of death. I’ve juxtaposed references to Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive with texts from several works with which I’ve been engaged. I found focusing specifically on Agamben’s text and on corresponding aspects related to archives and their lacunae to be a productive exercise in probing further the impossibility of archives, which in my interpretation is analogous with what Agamben describes as an impossibility in language. These impossibilities indicate, however, what returns and must somehow be faced. What exactly does survive and what does survival entail?

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3. Arché, Archons, Accustomed Confusion, an Other Memory beyond Collecting: An Excerpt Michael Eng: What I found interesting in your last written response was your description of the way that memory systems function like a labyrinth;5 in other words, they become so dense that forgetting becomes internal to the system. It seems to me that this says something about the archive as a collection which collapses under its own weight. The arché of the archive creates and promotes a certain desire, rather than answers to one. Renée Green: The arché in terms of the relation to the oikos? The Greek reference? Michael Eng: The Greek reference would be first to the pre-­Socratic notion of the arché that is the ordering principle of the universe. According to Theophrastus, this appears first in Anaximander. In Heraclitus, for example, it is the logos that functions as the arché, and Heidegger, incidentally, reveals the gathering-­collective movement inherent in its operation. In the conversation with Joe (Wood) and Lynne (Tillman), you resisted the suggestion that you were archiving yourself, because an archive presupposes a certain order. But it seems to me that the installation in the Secession confronts the paradox of the archive instead of simply resisting it. We could discuss Benjamin’s claim that the drive to order and unify just creates more disruption and difference, just promotes the workings of chance rather than masters it. The collection, more generally is simply disorder tempered by habit. “Accustomed confusion” is what I think Benjamin calls it in the essay, “Unpacking My Library.”6 So instead of preserving memory, all the archive does is make forgetting possible. It does not satisfy the desire to remember; it guarantees that there will be forgetting. Even stronger, it’s not only that forgetting is a part of memory, but more that memory is forgetting, and the archive is the ultimate example of their identification. So if the question of (Elvira) Notari’s oeuvre demonstrates this double movement of the archive’s economy, then certainly your work does as well. Maybe we could talk about the issue of methodology in this respect, (Giuliana) Bruno’s and yours, because the methodology in Streetwalking seems to be a resistance to a simple collection and representation of Notari’s work.7 Renée Green: That’s one of the aspects that I felt, this form of identification with, the way that she (Bruno) was approaching thinking about historical material and that she wanted to question different issues about his27. Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae 273

toriography and also about feminist theory. It is an attempt to use another kind of model. She referenced Michel de Certeau when describing ways of approaching gaps or lacunae, as she faced in tracing Elvira Notari’s work: “As Michel de Certeau suggests, commenting on ‘production and/or archeology’ in The Writing of History: ‘Lacuna, a mark of the place within the text and the questioning of the place through the text, ultimately refers to what archeology designates without being able to put in words: the relation of the logos to an arché . . . An arché is nothing of what can be said. It is only insinuated into the text through the labor of division, or the evocation of death. Thus historians can write only by combining within their practice the “other” that moves and misleads them and the real that they can represent only through fiction.’”8 Michael Eng: You made reference earlier to the oikos, place, and I think it’s worthwhile to reflect on how it relates to the domus, the home, as it shows up in Lyotard’s essay, “Domus and the Megalopolis,” for example.9 As a question concerning the possibility of work (as archive or as an object in general) and inhabiting, this connection seems highly relevant. For Lyotard, the domus names a relation to nature as physis, a fluid and dynamic notion of nature as opposed to the more static natura. The maintenance associated with the domus is rhythmic, making possible both a dynamic culture and a memory in flux. So memory, as a form of domestication, falls under the regime of dwelling. Opposed to this regime of the domus is the megalopolis, a form of living that is not dwelling, and whose maintenance is one of stasis and sedition. If there is a form of memory that is proper to the megalopolis, then this is the archive, a purely economic relation to language and to the domus. The archive is something that Lyotard identifies as another memory, as a memory that’s economic to the extent that it’s collected for utility, to the extent that it orders by reducing. For Lyotard, the megalopolis gives dwelling over to tourism and vacation. It’s in this sense that I would want to speak of what travel and exile as forms of inhabiting could mean. I raise this not to discuss this text so strongly, but more to link it to some of the things that have been coming up in our conversations. We’ve discussed the possibility of a manner of engaging memory that would be other than collecting. Furthermore, as I understand it, there’s a memory other than the memory of collecting—an other

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memory, if you will—that’s at stake in your work, generally, and especially in the Secession installation. Renée Green: It’s interesting what you mentioned about the Lyotard text because it does make me think of the introduction to Archive Fever, in which Derrida traces the etymology of the term archive and talks about the guarding function of the archons, those who commanded and guarded the documents: They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law. To be guarded thus, in the jurisdiction of this speaking the law, they needed at once a guardian and a localization. Even in their guardianship or their hermeneutic tradition, the archives could do neither without substrate nor without residence. It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place.10 That guarding function has been transferred to the archivist. I guess the dematerialized aspect of what can happen . . . and in thinking about other ways of transmutation of what can occur to or with a location—these were things I was also thinking about.

4. Materiality, Absence, and Decay: Some Reflections

A. Partially Buried in Three Parts (Surplus in Locations of Absence— Finding What Isn’t Being Sought) a. Document: Partially Buried in Three Parts Description (1999) This work which consists of Partially Buried, Übertragen/Transfer, and Partially Buried Continued—each of which is also a video—began with a reflection upon a work by the artist Robert Smithson, primarily known as a photograph and believed to no longer physically exist. The three parts grew out of a consideration of the year 1970 and the associations became more dense in the process of working. Partially Buried in Three Parts involves a web of genealogical traces

27. Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae 275

which are probed through the notions of sites of memory as well as site-­ specific work. Each part is an overlapping exploration of ways in which we attempt to reinterpret the past as well as our contemporary relations to a natal patria. The artist asks what could the notion of “site” or “nonsite” mean today when the idea of location is affected for many by circuit relations, meaning that a sense of place and time can depend largely on where one’s computer screen is and when memory is heavily mediated for some by computer storage capacity. How are the “returns of what is repressed” mediated and how do they erupt? The concept of being an “American artist,” and the notion of national identities and cultural predilections being conflated; entropy, memory, and its contradictions, memorials, and monuments, nostalgia, and “radical” change repeated as style are all ideas which circulate in this work. The three parts have in common references to the 1970s, a time in which the artist was a child growing up in Ohio. In 1970 Robert Smithson produced his site-­specific work Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University in Ohio. In May 1970 four students were shot while attending a rally protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. “May 4, 1970” was painted on the Partially Buried Woodshed shortly afterward and the artwork took on another meaning. Part two, Übertragen/Transfer, explores the relationship between how the U.S. was imagined from afar as well as how the time around 1970 is imagined by several people of German descent who now live in the U.S. Since 1991 the artist lived and worked between the U.S. and Germany. In Übertragen/Transfer she attempts to imagine the possibility of a “cosmopolitan patriot” as suggested by Kwame Anthony Appiah: The favorite slander of the narrow nationalist against us cosmopolitans is that we are rootless: What my father believed in, however, was a rooted cosmopolitanism, or, if you like, a cosmopolitan patriotism. Like Gertrude Stein, he thought there was no point in roots if you couldn’t take them with you. “America is my country and Paris is my hometown,” Stein said.11 The musings over “natal patria” continue: “How does one return? To a country, to a place of birth? To a location which reeks of remembered sensations? But what are these sensations? Is it possible to trace how

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27.1 Partially Buried, 1996. Digital film, color, sound, 20 minutes. Film still. 27.2 Partially Buried, 1996. Digital film, color, sound, 20 minutes. Film still. 27.3 Partially Buried Continued, 1997. Digital film, color, sound, 36 minutes. Film still.

they are triggered and why they are accompanied with as much dread as anticipation?”12 Part three, Partially Buried Continued, focuses on the mingling of the past and present, what is near and what is far, what is other and what is one’s self through reflecting on the photographic medium via a reexamination of images taken during the Korean War viewed by the artist as a child and through photographs taken in Korea in Kwangju on May 18, 1980, and photographs taken by the artist in Kwangju and Seoul in 1997. Questions of genealogy are continued with the juxtaposition of artistic forebears, in this case Smithson and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and blood relations. The complexities of how we find ourselves entangled in relationships to countries, nationalities and people, to locations and to time, and to the ensuing identifications—these aspects continue to be questioned in this work. . . . The notion of surplus in the locations of assumed absence is a current which runs through the different parts of this work. This surplus is related to that which survives, whether this be in a material form, one which might change over time and appear as a ruin, as indicated by the Partially Buried Woodshed and also the perceptual changes which arise over time as all of those who were interviewed allude to. Emotional fullness connected to historically repressed or contested documentation can arise. What other possibilities for reflection emerge where what appears to be decay can be viewed as transmutating traces, shifting remains?

B. Some Chance Operations (Archival Form in Ruin: Film as a Convincing and Porous Container) a. Document: “Known Only from Photographs” (1998) Exploring presence in what appears to be absence is a crucial link between Some Chance Operations (1999) and the previous works comprising Partially Buried in Three Parts (1996–97). An intersection of references occurs between these works; Partially Buried refers to a work primarily known as a photograph and believed to no longer physically exist; in Partially Buried Continued these previous associations are combined with references to Dictée, the book of writing by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, which moves back and forth between languages and locations; the space between the Vietnam War 278 Positions

and the Korean War is also considered; and in Some Chance Operations the missing and remaining filmic corpus of Elvira Notari is explored. The exhibition project at the Secession in part involved tracing what Giuliana Bruno has described as paratexts, peritexts, and hypotexts (film stills, photographs, written synopses, reviews) of the filmmaker Elvira Notari’s oeuvre, which is predominantly lost, and thinking about the history of cinema, and in turn of film as an archival medium, from which many aspects of cinema history and recorded images have been lost. What happens when the archive disappears? How do we retain access to memory and history? What does an archive allow? How can archives, history, and memory be thought now in this time of designated endings: century’s end, decade’s end, millennium’s end? How are we affected by chance circumstances, such as being born in a certain place at a certain time to certain parents? What systems do we rely upon and methods do we develop for coping with uncertainty as well as for organizing our lives? In what ways are what we remember, memorialize, organize, and archive predicated on chance operations? The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them. The Iliad counts for more than Agamemnon’s war; the steles of the Chaldes for more than the armies of Nineveh. Trajan’s Column, La Chanson de Roland, the murals depicting the Armada, the Vendôme column—all the images of wars have been created after the battles themselves thanks to looting or the energy of artists, and left standing thanks to oversight on the part of rain or rebellion. But what survives is the evidence, rarely accurate but always stirring, vouchsafed to the future by the victors.13

A to Z, Twenty-­Six Locations to Put Everything, Presumably Between and Including Walltext In the installation and film Some Chance Operations two seemingly unrelated forms, cinema and the alphabet, are juxtaposed. The alphabet is a structuring device composed of units which are assembled together. It is one of the first things one learns in order to allow entrance into the world of language and into the social world. It becomes a form of ordering (to make words, for example) as well as a way to index and assign meaning for that

27. Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae 279

27.4 Some Chance Operations, 1999. Digital film, color, sound, 36 minutes. Film still.

which will be stored, as in an archive or in an encyclopedia or a warehouse. Film is also a memory receptacle: in its most literal sense as a recorder of the light upon emulsion, indexically tracing what was at one time present, to its function as a stimulator of memory associated with the images projected from it. Film has also been referred to as a language. The movement of each frame at a particular speed is one aspect of the structure of film which creates effects analogous to reality. Many people’s earliest recollections now include films and tv or films on tv or played by vcr s. Memories include social and private recollections—how old I was, who I was with, where I was—and films themselves now serve an indexing function to assist in gaining access to memory. The way in which we come to understand films is often taken for granted nowadays, but there was a time when the structure of this “language” was first being tested. From still image to moving image to moving image with sound; from black and white to handcoloring to color film to the current colorizations of black-­and-­white films. As the technology has shifted, the mourning of different film eras has ensued, as well as an increased amount of language produced about film. Rather than 280 Positions

solely life becoming an index of film, in many ways film has become an index of life, including dream and fantasy life. . . . In this work attempts to reflect on a combination of ways of coping with life, which is what usually appears in movies, exist by demonstrating forms of escape and an idiosyncratic ordering of fragments from what can be considered an unpredictable and even crazy world. The artist follows different chance circumstances diligently with operations which demonstrate bizarre forms of logic, ordering, and coping. From creating a cinephile’s lair to re-­ indexing film stills from film encyclopedias, the compulsive activities demonstrate the lack of definitiveness of all a to z accounts, yet allude to the fascinating possibilities for further searching which following these ordering systems can generate. The work also references artistic forebears. It is an homage and test of earlier conceptual strategies used in art and film. In continuing to think of the time in which these ideas emerged (1960s and 1970s) she reflects on the desire for system approaches and their variations (including back-­to-­ basics notions combined with a reverence for Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, as is found in the 1970 Whole Earth Catalogue) amid a time of immense change. Why did many conceptual artists seem so enamored with presenting orders to be followed by themselves and others? How can this rigor be historicized now when those times are fading further away in terms of living memories and while those then young now face aging or are already dead? What kinds of memorials begin to appear to prevent the past from being buried? What residue of these practices is apparent? How can a relationship with the past exist in which memory functions as an active process allowing continual reconsideration rather than as a form of entombment, to which archives and museums are sometimes compared?

5. Between Living Being and Language: The Space for Testimony Testimony takes place in the non-­place of articulation. In the non-­place of the Voice stands not writing, but the witness. And it is precisely because the relation (or, rather, nonrelation) between the living being and the speaking being has the form of shame, of being reciprocally consigned to something that cannot be assumed by a subject, that the ethos of this disjunction can only be testimony—that is, something that cannot be assigned to a subject but that nevertheless constitutes the subject’s only dwelling place, its only possible consistency.14 27. Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae 281

Testimony is thus always an act of an “author”: it always implies an essential duality in which an insufficiency or incapacity is completed or made valid.15 An author’s act that claims to be valid on its own is nonsense, just as the survivor’s testimony has truth and a reason for being only if it is completed by the one who cannot bear witness. The survivor and the Muselmann, like the tutor and the incapable person and the creator and his material, are inseparable; their unity-­difference alone constitutes testimony.16 Why testimony? It seemed significant to consider testimony in relation to archives, archives being the place where language produced by living and speaking beings is gathered, even in its inadequacy, in textual form, yet it is also the place of absence and perhaps even more so of inadequacy despite its role of an all-­encompassing housing, in terms of that which is not saved because it has not yet been articulated and recorded, or if it has been perhaps the words have not yet been animated because that which has been articulated and recorded has not yet been and may never be perceived. This lack of perception may even be related to a lack in what was articulated and recorded. But Agamben states that rather than writing standing in for the “non-­place of the Voice,” which I’m interpreting as an inadequacy of the voice, the witness stands in this non-­place. It is important to attempt to understand Agamben’s words in relation to the examples he gives of the Auschwitz survivors who attempt to testify, to act as witnesses, particularly in terms of describing the other prisoners who became designated as Muselmänner (Muslims) or Muselweiber (female Muslims)17 and who it is assumed did not survive—listless figures who are described as wandering around the camps aimlessly, those who have gone beyond the limits of being able to respond, beyond the limits of what is recognized as being human (the inhuman)—and the inadequacy of the survivor’s ability to describe what they have not lived, but have only been able to observe. But does living this experience enable one to ever accurately describe it? Isn’t this gap between the words and even the lived experience part of the disjuncture, this “non-­place of articulation” where the attempt is repeatedly made, yet where some form of failure is inevitable? But yet Agamben suggests that within this paradoxical situation a comprehension of the 282 Positions

“unity-­difference” of two divergent beings, in this case the survivor and the Muselmann, is necessary and that “their unity-­difference alone constitutes testimony.”

6. The Witness, the Interpreter, the Survivor: Testing the Limits of the Subject The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak solely in the name of an incapacity to speak—that is, in his or her being a subject. Testimony thus guarantees not the factual truth of the statement safeguarded in the archive, but rather its unarchivability, its exteriority with respect to the archive—that is, the necessity by which, as the existence of language, it escapes both memory and forgetting. It is because there is testimony only where there is an impossibility of speaking, because there is a witness only where there has been desubjectification, that the Muselmann is the complete witness and that the survivor and the Muselmann cannot be split apart.18 The above quotation is rich and a slow close reading of it provides much to ponder. The witness/survivor is still a subject, one who has not crossed the limit to desubjectification as has the Muselmann. Factual truth is not guaranteed, not merely by an inability on the part of the witness/survivor to convey what happened because of a lack of experience, but even more precisely because of the lack which occurs within language itself, the way in which language escapes memory and forgetting. The words “there is testimony only where there is an impossibility of speaking, because there is a witness only where there has been desubjectification” remind me of another passage of testimony from a different time and place. The words are those of Olaudah Equiano and they are reminiscent of words written in other slave narratives, narratives written by those who witnessed and survived desubjectification, in a sense different from the above-­described form, but in a way related. These narratives were also written to bear witness for those who were unable to do so. The authors of these narratives weren’t believed to have ever had any subjectivity and the narratives themselves were meant to signal their humanity and of those they described. Knowledge of writing was for most illegal, and survival a fluke. Equiano states: “I was left in a state of distraction not to be described.”19 What occurs is a complex mixture.

27. Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae 283

Yet to probe further the role of the subject it is necessary to mention Agamben’s reference to Michel Foucault’s writings on the topic, particularly in The Archaeology of Knowledge. It is here that Foucault refers to the author, as paraphrased by Agamben, “as a simple specification of the subject-­ function whose necessity is anything but given.” Part of what is unearthed in Agamben’s use of Foucault is the “ethical implication of his theory of statements.” Rather than focus on the question “Who is speaking?” it is suggested that a more prescient question might be “What happens in the living individual when he occupies the ‘vacant place’ of the subject, when he enters into a process of enunciation and discovers that ‘our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, ourselves the difference of masks’? That is, once again, what does it mean to be subject to desubjectification? How can a subject give an account of its own ruin?”20 It is the event of language, its taking place, which is being stressed, not the content of meaning of Foucault’s “statements,” which primarily circulate. The subject of enunciation exists as an event rather than as an object. Further it is the potentiality of speech which is a focus in this reference. Foucault refers to the archive, as he defines it, as “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.” What Agamben suggests is a shift of operations in relation to Foucault’s definition of the archive, which as Agamben notes doesn’t correspond to traditional notions of it as “the storehouse that catalogs the traces of what has been said, to consign them to future memory nor to the Babelic library that gathers the dust of statements and allows for their resurrection under the historian’s gaze.”21 To abbreviate the discussion I will draw attention to the points of contingency, and in turn possibility, which are key concepts in Agamben’s rethinking of Foucault’s propositions, but I refer the reader to the longer explanation in Agamben’s text. These aspects appear in the following quote: The archive’s constitution presupposed the bracketing of the subject, who was reduced to a simple function or an empty position; it was founded on the subject’s disappearance into the anonymous murmur of statements. In testimony, by contrast, the empty place of the subject becomes the decisive question. It is not a question, of course, of returning to the old problem that Foucault had sought to eliminate, namely, “How can a subject’s freedom be inserted into the rules of a language?” Rather, it is a matter of situating the subject in the disjunction between

284 Positions

a possibility and an impossibility of speech, asking, “How can something like a statement exist in the site of language? In what way can a possibility of speech realize itself as such?” Precisely because testimony is the relation between a possibility of speech and its taking place, it can exist only through a relation to an impossibility of speech—that is, only as contingency, as a capacity not to be. . . . The subject is thus the possibility that language does not exist, does not take place—or, better, that it takes place only through its possibility of not being there, its contingency.22

7. Remains, Residue, Remnant remains: n. pl. 1 what remains after other parts have been removed or used etc. 2 relics of antiquity, esp. of buildings. 3 dead body residue: n. 1 what is left over or remains; remainder. 2 what remains of an estate after the payment of charges, debts, and bequests. remnant: n. 1 small remaining quantity. 2 piece of cloth etc. left when the greater part has been used or sold. The fact that the subject of testimony—indeed, that all subjectivity, if to be a subject and to bear witness are in the final analysis one and the same—is a remnant. . . . They [“processes of subjectification and desubjectification, of the living being’s becoming speaking and the speaking being’s becoming living and, more generally, toward historical processes”] have not an end, but a remnant. There is no foundation in or beneath them; rather, at their center lies an irreducible disjunction in which each term, stepping forth in the place of a remnant, can bear witness.23 To be a subject and to bear witness are the same and that same is a remnant. Not an end, but a remnant. Yet each term (processes of subjectification and desubjectification) in the process of moving toward the place of a remnant—that “small remaining quantity” after so much has been used or sold—is engaged in an ongoing mobile process, whereby the subject can bear witness. This suggests a dynamism, something never settled, but continuous. As Remnants of Auschwitz leaves in place of a remnant the words of Musselmänner, the complete witnesses, in place of a remnant on this rumi-

27. Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae 285

nation, Agamben’s words are left here to bear witness to this ongoing accretive process: If we now return to testimony, we may say that to bear witness is to place oneself in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a dead language as if it were living—in any case, outside both the archive and the corpus of what has already been said. It is not surprising that the witness’ gesture is also that of the poet, the auctor par excellence. Hölderlin’s statement that “what remains is what the poets found” (Was bleibt, stiften die Dichter) is not to be understood in the trivial sense that poets’ works are things that last and remain throughout time. Rather, it means that the poetic word is the one that is always situated in the position of a remnant and that can, therefore, bear witness. Poets—witnesses—found language as what remains, as what actually survives the possibility, or impossibility, of speaking.24

Notes Originally published as “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae. Adaptations, Re-­readings, and New Readings. Introduction to the Following Accretive Process,” in Interarchive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck et al. (Lüneburg: Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg, Walther König, 2002). A brief excerpt appeared in The Archive, edited by Charles Merewether (London: Whitechapel Gallery, mit Press, 2006), 49–55. 1. The juxtaposed texts and quotations which are used in this essay are meant to function as stopping points for rumination. The text reflects the process of re-­reading in relation to encountering new readings and the ongoing process of raising questions which serve as indications for further thought. This text is not meant to explicate Agamben’s but is rather a provisional attempt to put some ideas and processes of thought and production in relation to each other. I refer the reader directly to Agamben’s text for specific elucidation. All references to Agamben are from Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2000). Quotes by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel used by Agamben will retain his reference. 2. Primo Levi, Conversazioni e interviste (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 215–16. 3. Elie Wiesel, “For Some Measure of Humanity,” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility 5 (October 31, 1975): 314. 4. Renée Green, “Partially Buried Continued Script, 1997,” an interview with

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Hae-­Sun Kim, in Shadows and Signals (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000), 83–84. 5. Renée Green, Between and Including (Vienna: Secession and Dumont, 2001). A letter exchange and then a conversation took place in Vienna between Eng and Green shortly after her exhibition Between and Including, Vienna Secession, 1999. “Conversation between Renée Green, Lynne Tillman, and Joe Wood” (127–43) took place the day after the opening and is also referred to in this exchange. In reference to the structure of a labyrinth in the exhibition Green writes: So the labyrinth functions multiply in that relation, as an architectural structure in which it was possible to enact in a physical way the placement of references—things to remember—but in the process it becomes so dense that it also reflects an inability to remember, or to hold on to everything at once, and in that sense we become lost. I’m suggesting that this loss is connected to the notion of oblivion, which reflects an incapacity to hold on to everything at once. Memories emerge and fade and are triggered, as has been well demonstrated in many canonized 20th century texts, as well as in Shakespeare—King Lear comes to mind. (184) 6. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 60. 7. Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 8. Ibid., 150. 9. Jean-­François Lyotard, “Domus and the Megalopolis,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 10. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2. 11. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998). 12. Renée Green, “Partially Buried (1999). Version B: Reading Script,” in Shadows and Signals, 65. 13. Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love, as quoted in Some Chance Operations; see Green, Shadows and Signals, 143. 14. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 130. 15. Ibid., 150. 16. Ibid. 17. “The most likely explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God. It is this meaning that lies at the origin of the legends concerning Islam’s supposed fatalism, legends which are found in European culture starting with the Middle Ages (this deprecatory sense of the term is present in European languages, particularly in Italian). But while the muslim’s resignation consists in the

27. Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae 287

conviction that the will of Allah is at work every moment and in even the smallest events, the Muselmann of Auschwitz is instead defined by a loss of all will and consciousness” (ibid., 45). 18. Ibid., 158. 19. Taken from a quotation by Toni Morrison in her essay “The Site of Memory” and quoted in “Partially Buried (1999), Version B, Reading Script”: “Whenever there was an unusually violent incident, or a scatological one, or something ‘excessive,’ one finds the writer taking refuge in the literary conventions of the day. ‘I was left in a state of distraction not to be described’” (Green, Shadows and Signals, 69). See also Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., The Classic Slave Narratives (New York: Mentor, 1987). 20. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 142. References to Foucault are all taken from The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 131. 21. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 143. 22. Ibid., 145–46. 23. Ibid., 159. 24. Ibid., 161.

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28

2006

Beyond Historical Niches: Institutional Critique/IC I speak a different idiom, but I think of these same things. (AG)1

When I was initially invited to participate in ic and After I balked: “I don’t necessarily see myself as a second-­generation ic representative, even though I may be included in this discussion, and see my work as having gone beyond some of these concerns into something else which isn’t yet defined, although this is something we can discuss. I would describe what I’ve been engaged with differently.” Why did I have that response? The recurrent fear of being constrained by too limiting a category? Would other categories or definitions be more appropriate? What might a different description entail? What did I perceive the category to be? What were my own presuppositions about ic ? What nagging issues did I have with ic as a designation? Shouldn’t I have been thrilled to be included in a historical niche—albeit in relation to the same three reproductions that are always used as visual designations—that afforded me some presence in future historical descriptions of a time or a generation? What more did I want? Perhaps my gut response emerged from the knowledge that often it doesn’t matter so much how we perceive ourselves or what we’ve been doing, but rather how another author with convincing credentials and access to channels of distribution is deemed worthy of authorization to represent, denote, laud, define, weigh, interpret, and basically complete whatever is being described as “the work.” At least, for a while.2 These descriptions are repeated and accrue weight, by way of what has been termed by Edward Said, referring to Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, the “anterior constraint,”3 a process that affects whatever else is thought, written, or said.

This statement, which can now almost appear as a truism, isn’t meant to denigrate the function of analysis, but is, rather, a reminder of some parameters that affect what can be encountered, especially as we turn our attention to examining ic as we might think we know it. What I attempted in my introduction to the panel I moderated at lacma was to present, as slight provocations, other trajectories that hadn’t really emerged as the topic was considered and debated and ask what else the central terms might indicate. Rather than shoring up a territory called “Institutional Critique” and positing an ongoing link to the wide expanse of practices it subtended (the definitions of which still seem to be in process), I wanted to point to approaches and ways of thinking that exceed what are usually considered the driving impetuses for practices that may pass as Institutional Critique. Why did I feel the need to make this distinction? In part, because there are other names that can be used to describe some of what I’ve been interested in investigating, the use of which leads to different histories and opens other possibilities for perceiving and thinking than might be available under the designation “Institutional Critique.” “Abolitionism” is one, for example.4 “Relational possibilities,” “anthropophágia,” “diaspora,” “contact zones,” the “histories of radical thought, imagination, and creative production,” and the “intrasensorial” are other terms and words. If we examine the ramifications of these and related ideas, they might change the ways we think about and construct our relations to institutions and allow us to venture beyond representations of the voice of administrative power linked to the founding notions of Western thought. It might be possible, instead, to investigate in the interstices, where these structures of authority unravel, and locate other subjectivities.5 In addition, I’d like to propose engagement with specific works, which can include films, audio productions, installations, documentation, writings, and ongoing operations. For it is in the particularities of their composition, in the matter of which they consist, that thought accepts the invitation to imagine other forms of relation. These may refer to aspects of what is under discussion here, but at the same time they open up horizons beyond the purview of even an expanded notion of ic , as the references to these specific acts and gestures have precise, often unacknowledged, histories. Official knowledge has disregarded almost everything of significance that’s happened in the history of the world. (AG)

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Creating a basis to recover and interpret subjugated histories is a massive project with which thinkers and artists in different disciplines in different countries have been engaged for decades, and which continues.6 It is easy to forget this, perhaps, living in a context like the U.S., or in similar Western-­inflected locales. These processes were taking place simultaneous, as well as prior, to the initial moments of what has been officially designated ic . When these histories are viewed together other kinds of interpretations are possible. Some more complex trajectories are suggested in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, for example, and in the discussion by Alex Alberro during the symposium of developments in Brazil and Latin America. If we consider the expanded possibilities of assessing what ic might mean when deployed in Brazil by Cildo Meireles, for example, what difference does this make to our definitions? And what other effects and revisions should we aim for, beyond calling attention to social and geographical frames? In what ways has it been possible to contain and exceed the historically designated tenets proposed for ic ? What can an ethical relationship mean when actually enacted in the world, which might include paying attention to discomforting and unfashionable facts and acknowledging the inequalities we often perpetuate? Since the panel, I’ve been in situations that have made me think again about ic and what it seems to offer, as well as what it seems to lack. I have also been in ongoing discussions with myself and others about notions such as “critique.” Perhaps these questions grow out of more historical and temporal shifts. They make me curious to re-­examine earlier claims, not only of what has been conventionally attributed to, or deemed representative of, Institutional Critique but also claims made for those defined as a younger generation—who have existed simultaneously with the “originators” during ic ’s supposed aftermath, and who have also taken up some of its tenets and supposedly altered or expanded them. I include myself here, as I have been so designated. But it seems crucial, from my perspective, to probe further, given the unequal distribution of concern, resources, and access that condition the world and the apparent hollowness of many people’s lives. How can we shift perception from the recognition and analysis of existing, seemingly all-­encompassing systems, to perceiving, imagining, and enacting other ways of being? This is a task I feel compelled to attempt: it shifts the focus from giving primary importance to a historical designation tem-

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poralized as an earlier fashion of art production/non-­production to a continuous life operation.

Some Tenets and Why These Might Be Appealing Why are people more comfortable with critique rather than the articulation of what they want instead? (AG)

A brief summation of some of the tenets of ic from a relatively recent perspective, that attempts to position this history in relation to Conceptual Art in a global context, indicates some basic ways in which ic is currently perceived: Another definitive aspect of conceptualism is that of institutional critique which, generally speaking, arose out of a concern about the hidden yet determining structures of power and ideology with the art system. As deployed by mainstream Western artists, institutional critique was derived from an analysis of the conditions of late capitalism and the problematic status of material goods. . . . Conceptual artists found further targets for attack in galleries, formalist art criticism, the collection, the market, and the tangible product. (These attacks were often seriously weakened by the fact that the artists, in spite of their ideological stance, still defined themselves within the gallery landscape.) This critique, however, was far from homogenous, since the institutional landscape in different settings was diverse, mirroring the development of local economic and administrative structures.7 As this outline suggests, although ic provided ways of shifting the focus of art away from discrete objects and onto the web of operations involved in creating its aura (and in turn its commodity status), there are a number of provisos and limits to its operations, most obviously the fact that it could be absorbed and, by default, tamed by hegemonic forces. In his catalogue essay for the exhibition What Happened to the Institutional Critique?,8 art historian James Meyer presented a grouping of practices he viewed as retaining some of the intellectual challenge and critical assertions of an earlier phase of ic —which at that time could be denigrated in comparison to what seemed to be a turn toward more activist and im-

292 Positions

mediately compelling political work. A certain disillusionment with the political claims of previous forms of ic resonates throughout his text, as these earlier forms were felt to be inadequate in their address to such challenges as the spread of the aids virus—and contrasted with more visceral forms of contestation, then prevalent, carried out in a social domain that included, but also ventured well beyond, the art context. A dozen years later, it may be thought that the generation of artists foregrounded in What Happened to the Institutional Critique? submitted to similar market- and career-­related pressures, as Meyer argued in relation to Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and others at the beginning of the 1990s. Did they, or didn’t they? Once again, there are calls for increased political engagement, although nothing seems to have galvanized the art community as passionately as the social emergency that existed during the heyday of act up . It seems that while many people are enduring life-­threatening situations, the urgency of answering a call to “fight back” is confusing as there are so many fronts one could chose and no driving force claiming centralization of energies. These days, resistant efforts often seem socially dispersed and individually directed, and even those mediated by Internet activism and forms of digital diffusion are in a precarious state given current governmental sanctions. . . . To give a name to a practice of thinking and being, not just critical, but that instantiates the process of living better. (AG)

So, Institutional Critique. How can we now think beyond some of the canonical notions, yet retain what is rigorous about this area of work? How can we think today of a critically reflexive practice? These questions arose during the panel discussion. Amid the complexities with which we live, it seems clear that former Marxist claims of all-­encompassing systems are inadequate. Yet, we still have to think from where we live (or inhabit), wherever that may be, and there is no outside. It’s necessary to look beyond Western histories of utopia, to locate enactments within life—which exceed those comprehended by institutional processes—that have long been in existence and still endure. This diverges from what has been commonly thought to represent ic , as there is another consciousness that emerges from realizing that “those systems of

28. Beyond 293

power do not become us.” Other instances of living differently are models. They allow the possibility of understanding the meaning, the necessity, and the magnitude of “refusing to be available for servitude.”9 Freedom remains the goal. Ways of enacting it are the challenge.

Notes Originally published in Institutional Critique and After (Zürich: jrp |Ringier Kunstverlag, 2006), 158–69. 1. Quotes initialed AG are taken from a conversation with writer and sociologist Avery F. Gordon, which was the basis for my film Something More Powerful than Skepticism (2005). An excerpt was presented at the beginning of the panel to which I contributed at the live event at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, May 21, 2005. My thinking had been enriched by ongoing discussions with Gordon; with Christopher Williams, whose presence I attempted to invoke in a video excerpt of The Art of Critical Thinking: act Visits Christopher Williams (2005); and also with Christopher Newfield. All informed my film University, Inc., which, along with the others mentioned here, forms part of a series of six films entitled Relay, completed in 2005 and presented in March 2005 at the Kunstraum Innsbruck. “I speak a different idiom . . .” is a paraphrase of Raymond Williams’s reference to the struggles of previous generations, as described by Gordon. 2. In my case Free Agent Media (fam ), begun in 1994, exists as a shifting transnational production company, publisher, label, and repository for “difficult” and not easily categorizable work, as well as unofficial knowledge. My work is included in fam ’s backlist. See “Free Agent Media” in this volume. 3. “Nevertheless—and this cannot be overemphasized—the writer is not at liberty to make statements, or merely to add to the text at will: statements are rare, and they are difficult, so strong is the text’s anterior constraint upon him [sic].” Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 258. 4. In the film Something More Powerful than Skepticism, Avery F. Gordon discusses “abolitionism” as a way of thinking about historical and contemporary attempts to abolish injustices, which range from marronage and the abolition of slavery to the current prison abolition movement. These forms involve the imagination of freedom while still enslaved. Avery Gordon offers another understanding of abolitionism in “Exercised,” where she describes the multiple worlds within which people co-­exist while living out globalization in its incompleteness: “They are living alongside such a Regime, but not in it. It is powerful but its power doesn’t become them. It is neither the sum total of who they are nor who they can become. To mistake the conceits of authority and the ambitions of the powerful for the realities of people’s worldly existence is a grave error. It is an

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error contradicted by the history of slave abolitionists who conceived an exquisite and enduring theory and practice of freedom while enslaved.” Avery Gordon, Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), 210. See also Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003) and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories, 2005); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-­Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism (New York: Penguin, 2004); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997) and Black Marxism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 5. What I’m suggesting here is not what is usually considered “utopian.” What interests me are the attempts of artists worldwide who have creatively wrestled with situations beyond their control and found ways, as Arthur Jafa puts it, of “navigating gracefully,” even when there is no sign of any improvement on the horizon. In some cases, I’m alluding to privileged, educated individuals, such as Hélio Oiticica or Lygia Clark, who absorbed modernist modes and created other forms of relation with forms and operations in social settings in Brazil and elsewhere. I’m also thinking of instances when institutions themselves are in decay or flux, so that there is no single, recognizable target to critique. AbdouMaliq Simone provides an example from his essay “Globalization and the Identity of African Urban Practices”: “The apparatuses of administration neither go away nor exert an order, but rather constitute a site of ‘undetermined interpretation.’ Here there are no institutionalized sets of pragmatics, guidelines or interpretations which enable people to confidently predict the outcomes of their interactions with a so-­called ‘public power.’ What will happen in the space between what is supposed to happen and a constantly changing reality can only be determined through often lengthy processes of bargaining, in which having to pay for not receiving anything—services, justice, predictability, security, goods—has become routine.” In Blank: Architecture, Apartheid and After, edited by Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavić (Rotterdam: NAi, 1999), 184–85. 6. The list of contributors to what I’m calling a massive project of excavation, articulation, and imagination is much longer than I can even allude to here. To allow all of these contributors to be “treated as theorists,” which is what I advocate, would mean, as Gordon says, “to be presumed to be capable of producing generalizable and authoritative knowledge, knowledge that is considered essential to understanding, knowledge that commands respect, knowledge that has power” (“Something More Powerful than Skepticism,” in Keeping Good Time, 209). Let me begin an inadequate list: Aimé Cesaire, Paul Robeson, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Oswald de Andrade; and also include Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Cedric Robinson, George Lipsitz, Eduardo Cadava, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hazel Carby, Angela Y. Davis, Guy

28. Beyond 295

Brett, Robert Farris Thompson, John Szwed, Vandana Shiva, David Hammons, Stuart Hall, Muriel Rukeyser, Homi K. Bhabha, Toni Morrison, Gilane Tawadros, Raoul Peck, Kodwo Eshun, Manthia Diawara, Kobena Mercer, John Akomfrah, Iniva, Julie Dash, George Lewis, Lina Bo Bardi, Robert Stam, Toni Cade Bambara, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Caetano Veloso, Glauber Rocha, Archie Shepp, Amiri Baraka, Okwui Enwezor, Marion Brown, Leo Wadada Smith, Anthony Braxton, Charles Mingus, Eric Porter, Sun Ra, Brent Hayes Edwards, Fred Moten, Diedrich Diederichsen, Hubert Fichte, Greg Tate, Karim Aïnouz, Farah Jasmine Griffin . . . as well as numerous others. 7. Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, “Foreword: Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), viii. 8. The exhibition What Happened to the Institutional Critique? was organized by James Meyer at American Fine Arts, New York, September 11 to October 2, 1993. Artists included were Gregg Bordowitz, Tom Burr, Mark Dion and the Chicago Urban Ecology Action Group, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Zoe Leonard, and Christian Philipp Müller. The table of contents of the catalogue included “Prologue: The Whitney Biennial: Generalization of the Political,” “What Happened to the Institutional Critique?,” “The Expanded Site (Beyond Reflexivity),” “Critical Practice,” “Pedagogy,” “The Artist-­Researcher,” “Identity,” “Nomadism,” and “Situation.” 9. Both the phrase “something more powerful than skepticism” (Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters [New York: Random House, 1980], 86) and “refusing to be available for servitude” (Bambara, “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” in The Writer on Her Work, edited by Janet Sternburg [New York: Norton, 1980], 157) are borrowed from the writings of Toni Cade Bambara, to whom Gordon devotes a chapter, “Something More Powerful than Skepticism,” in Keeping Good Time, 187–205.

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29

2006

Place While thinking about the invitation to contribute to an issue of the Sarai Reader on turbulence I accumulated the following writings. These writings grew out of reflections on recent daily encounters, as well as out of encounters with texts I’ve been engaging. This text includes journal-­style entries and a listing of reflections on textual references.

1. April 2006 Unité d’Habitation? is the title of the exhibition I’m developing to present in Paris in June 2006. Literally in English, it can be thought of as Unity of Habitation? or obliquely as United (In)habitation? It refers to the name of Le Corbusier’s building project, Unité d’Habitation, his proposal for collective living. These were built in and imagined for different locations, including Marseilles (1946–52), Nantes-­Rezé (1953), Berlin (1956), Briey-­en-­Forêt (1957), Strasbourg (projected 1951), Marseilles-­Sud (projected 1951), and Meaux (projected 1956). I inhabited one of these structures, Firminy-­Vert (1968), in 1993, but the title more broadly refers to the possibility of inhabiting, as a material condition, in addition to inhabiting as a state of being. The title is also meant to raise questions concerning the profundity of how to inhabit places with others—living and dead, what form of social and historical circumstance is related to who can inhabit, where and how. . . . This morning I’ve been reading Czesław Miłosz’s The Land of Ulro, and I find it describes different states I feel, especially while here, in this region of the U.S., the Bay Area of northern California, as well as in relation to being an artist and working as an academic, somehow.

29.1 Secret (Black and White Photographs), 1993. Photograph, 6.5 × 9.5 inches.

2. April 2006 Questions about the privileging of pain. Why should histories of suffering from any region be viewed as exemplary when all suffering in its many dimensions is horrible? Even the dominance of media diffusion and saturation that the U.S. and Western Europe have achieved can still be acknowledged as presenting only very partial views of any form of claimed or described suffering. Beyond that, why can’t it be understood that no form of suffering is exemplary, as the human condition is suffering? Why perpetuate suffering? . . . These questions grew out of a dinner conversation. A disturbing incident was described by friends. The location of this incident was a dinner they’d attended in the Bay Area. They were requested to verbally prove their ownership of, or allegiance to, identity-­based culturally designated territories within the international art terrain. Who’s the exemplary suffering representative of suffering peoples? Rights for legitimacy were claimed by others present. Who most authentically could represent the projected disenfranchised sector from an artist’s sector? It seemed like an absurd prem298 Positions

ise. As if that were a goal anyone would want to achieve, rather than one of freedom from even those classificatory restraints. During the described occasion these friends were put on the spot to represent their legitimacy, as they were being perceived to be responsible for representing oppression, as they hailed from New Delhi, but the terms for evaluation were inadequate and inappropriate. Yet another gap among those espousing progressive stances, willfully ignorant of more complex phenomena and history, undermining the possibility of coming to terms with a more profound understanding of the contemporary world, because of a narrow territorialism. Why perpetuate suffering?

3. April 2006 Back in New York. . . . Now I’m thinking about the Sarai Reader theme of turbulence. I may write about the turbulence involved in the struggle to represent history, all that is “partially buried,” the intentional deletions, “some chance operations,” my Sisyphean attempts at creating an “index of oblivion,” the fights while one still lives to write dismissed histories back into what will be recognized as History. Many people’s annotations. Many people’s sense of ownership. The difficulty in accepting complexity and the emphasis on superficial responses, especially popular in the U.S. but not only here.

4. April 2006 Strangely, “identity” is the space sometimes allotted to “her,” here in the U.S. The inadequacy of this category propelled “her” to leave many years before. Even with the passage of years and so many works of “hers” made about “import/export” and translation and transnational existence, writings about “negotiations in contact zones,” the prevalence in the U.S. for this category, as a means for labeling, then mistaking that labeling as knowledge, and then dismissing any further obligation for more profound investigation is not uncommon. Identity. It is an odd designation. An empty signifier. In the U.S. “she” feels compelled to read more Octavia E. Butler, who in her Xenogenesis series (xenogenesis defined as “the birth of some29. Place 299

thing new—and foreign”) far exceeds anything known as “identity,” or even human categories. . . . “She” left the country to find a space to create beyond rigid identity definitions. When the historicization of one of the contexts to which “she” steadily contributed, in another country, came to the U.S., once again “her” contribution, beyond being a marker of identity, was erased. “She’d” heard the composer and musician George Lewis make a similar claim. No space seems possible for “her” to be assigned beyond that one, in the current rush to write histories of the past decade, the fin de siècle. Many of the valiant witnesses from those times are dead. “She” is left to make her own claims. This is why “she” continues to endorse and rely on archives and the many documents they house. And indices of oblivion.

5. April 2006 The challenges encountered when attempting to both inhabit and to shift representation. I’d like to write about the above. This creates forms of turbulence for the author, for example, in terms of where the words can be encountered, read, or heard, and the force with which territories are protected and words censored. . . . Describe why it’s necessary, in her case, to live in several places, even if she once thought she’d like only to remain living in New York. That the attempt and effort to continue working and being connected to sources that provide intellectual, spiritual, and emotional sustenance, as well as which relate to her deep history and genealogy, are all a part of these movements and relocations, as well as attempted inhabitations. The wish to inhabit in a way one chooses. That which can encompass the breadth of living, rather than a flattened stereotype or shallow half-­life.

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6. April 2006 But what is the relationship between these wishes and efforts to what can be described as turbulence? turbulence: n. the quality or state of being turbulent. turbulent: adj. 1. Causing violence or disturbance. 2. Marked by agitation or tumult: tempestuous. Below the surface: tensions and tempests. The struggle to claim limited access (not only limited resources). Why is the access limited? Based on what criteria and decided upon by whom? The contestation for representation and rights continues to be turbulent. Again, this relates to who is narrating history and how it is being done. Who is narrating the present and how is it being described? Again and again the question arises, why is this included and that excluded? The continual and driving question for me is what else could be possible? Think about forms of dispossession and violence—physical, intellectual, historical. Think about the relativity of privilege. There are serious reckonings yet to be made in cultures of avoidance, such as the U.S. Where to begin in describing the gross limitations of what I’ve encountered in the public and private cultural spheres? The attempts to exorcise critical, political, and historical perspectives and what is presented as critical, political, and historical to a broader public instead. What could it mean to seriously engage with living in the world amid the varieties of turbulence? Or amid the varieties of experience possible, but without threatening or killing anyone? Examine the energy that turbulence requires. How to shift to a different way of being? The desire to shift would be necessary; I’m not convinced that many share this desire, as there are so many conflicting desires. A drop of water in an ocean. In Paris I’ll present films I’ve made that refer to turbulence, Elsewhere? Here and Climates and Paradoxes.1 The question remains: What can each of us do?

29. Place 301

7. April 2006 I’m glad the “art world” is not the only subculture in which I’ve been interested. It’s odd, but gradually in New York I’ve found less and less that interests me. New York is a magnet for many people from around the world, yet the conditions for living seem to dominate people’s lives to such a great extent that other modes of engagement that could be more interesting than drinking and going to art openings seem less possible. Or maybe it is because I’ve experienced other ways of living and being in which time wasn’t primarily devoted to working, fighting bad housing conditions, struggling for funding, etc., that allows me to think of better ways to live. . . . Humans. I saw the movie 4 last night. A view from contemporary Russia.

8. April 2006 Thinking and producing in turbulent times. FAM , artist, media practitioner, writer, filmmaker, educator, space creator and enabler, activist, citizen. How to apply these terms now? Waking words. Sunrise in San Francisco. Thinking and producing and living amid many dislocations and forms of violence in economically privileged places, where tenuous relations to wealth and access exist. The components of that create the semblance of “the good life.” The surface view. The supporting structures and genealogies differ. An immigrant protest and school boycott are scheduled for May 1st. Urban mirages: California and New York provide case studies.

9. April 2006 To create a place to return, again and again, not only as a refuge, but as a place to receive sustenance that can renew one’s motivation to continue to engage with life and the world, both internal and external worlds, both inner and public life. It continues to amaze me that Cornel West’s work is not cited more often in broader contexts of intellectual discourse, beyond

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topical media discourse. He definitely provides an interesting model of how to cope and thrive amid the complexities of life today. Part of the reading I’m doing today relates to my thinking about what I’d like to write for the Sarai Reader. West’s writings have been helping me to think about “home” and its complexities, as well as what I’ve sought beyond.

10. April 2006 Mobility? What informs my point of view? List different contexts and experiences that have had an effect. I’m thinking again of how to describe the position from which I speak about turbulence. Having choices? This is a big question. A student at the isp (Whitney Museum Independent Study Program) asked me whether the movements I’ve made to inhabit different places came from privilege or necessity or both. I answered that necessity loomed large, if one considers a quest for freedom of thought and for freedom to create, as important possibilities that everyone should have, and as these were also linked to my livelihood, it seemed necessary to move to fulfill these quests. Everyone can ask themselves these questions in relation to their own lives: Have you remained in the place you were born? Could you have stayed? Why did you leave? How were you able to leave? Will you return? What enables you to live, wherever you are? . . . Contested Claims: Land claims? Language claims? Citizenship claims? Saskia Sassen writes of new claims: If place, that is, a certain type of place, is central in the global economy, we can posit a transnational economic and political opening in the formation of new claims and hence in the constitution of entitlements, notably rights to place, and more radically, in the constitution of “citizenship.” The city has indeed emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital which uses the city as an “organizational commodity,”

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but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban population, which in large cities are frequently as internationalized a presence as is capital. The denationalizing of urban space and the formation of new claims by transnational actors and involving contestation, raise the question— whose city is it? And also: The space constituted by the global grid of cities, a space with new economic and political potentialities, is perhaps one of the most strategic spaces for the formation of transnational identities and communities. This is a space that is both place-­centered in that it is embedded in particular and strategic locations; and it is transterritorial because it connects sites that are not geographically proximate yet are intensely connected to each other. . . . It is not only the transmigration of capital that takes place in this global grid, but also that of people, both rich (i.e. the new transnational professional workforce) and poor (i.e. most migrant workers) and it is a space for the transmigration of cultural forms, for the reterritorialization of “local” subcultures. An important question is whether it is also a space for a new politics, one going beyond the politics of culture and identity, though at least partly likely to be embedded in it.2

Place and Turbulence: Notes for Further Investigation and Rumination from A to T A. Place: What places can we inhabit and act in? B. Tenuous Residency, Stranger Status Worldwide C. Place, Claims, Contentions, Networks D. Where do you belong? E. “I am here.” F. Revisiting Globalization and Its Discontents G. Encountering Cities without Citizens H. Musing over The Manifesta Decade I. Since Negotiations in the Contact Zone J. “Between and Including” as a Description of Ongoing Conditions

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K. The dream of unity in modern urbanism and the blindness to complicity in the obliteration of specific histories or other desires via a totalizing view or Le Corbusier’s Stake L. Learning via buildings (when they’re proposed, when they’re built, after they’ve been built, as they’ve been abandoned, as they decay, as they’re refurbished) Case Study: Unité d’Habitation Case Study: Einstein’s summer house in Caputh M. Practiced Places and Buried Histories N. Temporal Dimensions Inhabitation Removal and Loss Selected Life Indexes: Time Streams and Layered Remnants (How are the indices composed?) O. Respecting Ghosts, Memorial as a Portable and Intangible State of Recognition: Memorial as a consciousness carried within us that reminds us of an ethical dimension of our existence P. Strategic and Involuntary Absences Q. The Continual Returns of What’s Repressed or Acknowledging Contiguity R. In the rough-­and-­tumble world of global cultural production . . . S. From the frontlines (A Survivor of the “Culture Wars”) T. To linger and to tell.3

Notes Originally published in Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence (New Delhi: Sarai Programme, csds , 2006). 1. Elsewhere? Here is a video installation comprised of two films: Elsewhere? (2002) and Here Until October 2004 (2004). 2. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998), xx, xxxii. 3. After having written these “Notes” I read “The Guano of History,” which resonated with much of what I’d been thinking. It appears in Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy, eds., Cities without Citizens (Philadelphia: Slought Foundation, 2003), 137–65. I will quote from a passage written by George Jackson that begins

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Cadava’s explications, which become intertwined with an analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Fate” and also the circuitous history of Peruvian guano that the U.S. was desperate for in the nineteenth century, as it is now desperate for oil. The different strands of Cadava’s documentation and analysis are woven into a powerful reminder that “in order to speak in the name of freedom, in the name of justice, we must speak of the past we inherit and for which we remain answerable, we must speak of ghosts, of generations of ghosts—of those who are not presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born.” He opens his essay with this quote that I wish to borrow as an ending, as it has many reverberations for our ongoing turbulent times: “My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded nothing. I recall the very first kidnap. I’ve lived through the passage, died on the passage, lain in the unmarked, shallow graves of the millions who fertilized the Amerikan soil with their corpses; cotton and corn growing out of my chest, ‘unto the third and fourth generation,’ the tenth, the hundredth.” The letter is dated April 4, 1970. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 233–34.

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30

1990

Sites of Genealogy A work-­in-­progress, for example, is not a work whose step precedes other steps in a trajectory that leads to the final work. It is not a work awaiting a better, more perfect stage of realization. Inevitably, a work is always a form of tangible closure. But closures need not close off; they can be doors opening onto other closures and functioning as ongoing passages to an elsewhere (-­within-­here). Like a throw of the dice, each opening is also a closing, for each work generates its own laws and limits, each has its specific condition and deals with a specific context. —Trinh T. Minh-­ha, “Cotton and Iron,” in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics

Sites of Genealogy is a work-­in-­progress which will change in form over the period of ten months.1 The sites in which this process will be enacted are the boiler room, the stairwells, and the attic. The sites used function as spurs for my own literary and mnemonic associations of these building locations. Literal references to hierarchical movement (higher/lower, heaven/hell) also determined my choices of architectural space. The stairwell can be viewed as a liminal passage between the two realms, with indications of closeness to or distance from the other regions. Several kinds of genealogies are being traced in this installation. One is that of the terms blackness and whiteness. The way these terms have historically been used has usually been to denote some kind of hierarchy, a binary division, one in which the white term is placed at the top with the black term being positioned at the bottom, or in which black is meant to connote evil-­filth and white, good-­pure. These associations have been crucial for deciphering the Bible, Shakespeare and a slew of Western authors, commonplace expressions still in current use, color theories, and “racial” theories and attitudes. Another genealogy which is being alluded to is a literary one. The attic (tower) and the boiler room (cellar, dungeon, cata-

comb, prison) are ripe with literary associations as well as mythical, archetypal, and psychoanalytic ones. Because literature is such a strong referent for me, my immediate inclination was to do a site-­specific work influenced by literary works, in which the characters’ psychological states and physical predicaments were intertwined and intensified by the architectural space they inhabited. The texts I’ve chosen to initiate this installation are texts by African American writers. They are canonical works; in that they are of constant use as an index of predicaments which have been designated as the classic ones faced by African Americans and other travelers of the African diaspora in the U.S.A., as well as predicaments which repeat themselves in various forms over time. Upon seeing the boiler room I thought of Richard Wright’s Native Son; when I saw the attic I thought of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Both of these narratives have in common the main character’s need to make a crucial journey, one which will affect their life or death. Each has specific melodramatic episodes (turning points) which relate to the boiler room and the attic. Both characters are in need of hiding places, and in the case of Bigger Thomas in Native Son, a place for disposal. Rather than spelling out exactly what happens in each of the books I have chosen to call attention to the spaces I’ve used. I’ve left clues throughout which were triggered by the texts and in some cases I’ve used fragments of the texts, or other texts which comment on the initial texts. Sound and light effects are included. Another genealogy being referred to is that of the history of artists’ installations, with Marcel Duchamp’s 1,200 Bags of Coal (1938) and Mile of String (1942) serving as referents. Coal and strings are used in bulk in the boiler room and the attic, respectively. Of course, other associations connected with these materials are also implied. Other substances also serve as associative mechanisms. Much of the process of this installation is a documentation (through the objects and traces left behind and layered in the course of this process) of my traverses through histories of art, culture, “race,” “gender,” and literature. There is a performative element to this project which began with the search for coal and the various elements used and will be continued throughout the year with me returning to the attic several times a week to wrap with string the area which surrounds a desk, a ladder with an attached 310 Operations

telescope, a chair, a lamp, and a typewriter; this activity will take place for a daily designated period of time, which will be logged. While traveling around and around in the attic (like the oft-­mentioned “madwoman” thereof) I will try to catch hold of my thoughts, which will begin my hour or more of writing designated to be done at the desk in the “strung” space (“a room of my own”). This “room” will be stocked with a perpetual supply of paper, typewriter ribbons, and other necessary writing materials. The traces of my movements and thoughts will accumulate in this space during the course of the year inside and outside the “room.” The string will get thicker and the blank pages will become filled. In the boiler room the Sourcebook will steadily be amended and another layer of installation referring to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man will begin to appear. For the moment Sites of Genealogy has these subheadings: Attic: Loophole of Retreat Boiler Room: Fear, Flight, Fate Stairwells: Matrix The changing elements to watch for will be: Attic: Accumulation of string and text Boiler Room: Sourcebook, addition of lights, plaques Stairwells: Plaques

Note 1. The work described in this text, Sites of Genealogy, was presented at P.S. 1 Museum, Long Island City, New York during 1991.

30. Sites of Genealogy 311

31

1991

VistaVision Landscape of Desire

Projects are begun with multiple purposes in the mind of the originator. What the result is after the ideas are released in public are another matter. In the case of VistaVision a number of concerns affected my choice to use the material I did.1 One of my strongest wishes was to continue to probe ideas I’ve been working with regarding travel and its implications in terms of power relations. This is a very general way of describing a topic with which I’ve been engaged since the work I did at the Studio Museum,2 that at the time focused on aspects of collection—Westerners collecting the world. This time I wanted to extend my use of material referring to Osa and Martin Johnson that I’d used in Anatomies of Escape.3 Previously I had concentrated on demonstrating how textual sources accrue power through their repeated use, creating what Foucault called an anterior constraint. This is also a continued concern, one which dates back over ten years. In the instance of VistaVision I wanted to show how the discursive formation forms the basis for filmic representations. The narratives used in the textual sources regarding travel were adopted to use for films. Since films are such a prevalent and popular text, people in the U.S. watch movies more than they read. I wanted to trace the way certain modes of perceiving “new” places and “new” people have been and are constructed. By showing films from the early 20th century (footage in From the Pole to the Equator dates from 19104) to Pasolini’s 1970 film, Notes on an African Orestes, I wanted to examine how the combination of the visual and textual conventions used to describe foreign places, specifically Africa, have formed. This was one aspect. I also wanted to deal with my own relationship to Africa. This is something that I’ve been probing for years and which I focused on at the Studio

31.1 Pigskin Library, 1990. Installation detail, VistaVision: Landscape of Desire, Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, 1991.

Museum, specifically in an installation called Acknowledge Your Sources (They May Haunt You) in which I used an image of a Yoruba divination tray and an image of Giacometti’s No More Play (1932), in addition to rubber-­ stamped quotations of “authoritative” texts which accompanied a catalogue called African Masterpieces and a non-­narrative, non-­linear Sourcebook.5 In the central panel the divination tray was surrounded by a simulation of palm nuts, which I’d read are used to do the reading. I labeled this part of the panel “Enactment 1,” acknowledging that I wasn’t qualified to perform this divination ritual. No More Play was labeled “Plate 1,” alluding to previous textual references like those in science textbooks where an illustration is purported to supply evidence to reinforce a statement. 31. VistaVision: Landscape of Desire 313

It was important for me to demonstrate that my understanding of Africa is as much a construction as anyone else’s. I specifically chose the film Song of Freedom,6 which stars Paul Robeson, to demonstrate the many contradictions which can occur when it is assumed that there is an authentic Africa and that it is embraceable. I considered the choice of films crucial to my whole project, because I wanted to enable VistaVision to reflect a temporal element. It wasn’t only about having objects in a space, but about making the space into a place in which people had to interact—with the structures (tent/den), the written and audio texts, or with me, with the films, the speakers, or with each other. I wanted to invite people to enter my questioning process. This is something which runs throughout my work. My intention was not to state that I had a stable position or identity but rather to explore ambivalence and multiple ways of perceiving. Ideally I hoped that some dialogue might result. In terms of audience, it was made of people who were interested in these issues. I tried to diversify the programming so as to bring people in who wouldn’t normally come to an art gallery in SoHo. I wanted to host an event which demonstrated a performative element to acknowledge the possibility of pleasure. It was free, except the West African drumming concert let by Ibrahim Adzenya, and open to the public. Advertisements were announced on the radio and in the Village Voice. I wanted to advertise in the City Sun as well. This brings me to an aspect which discouraged me: my inability to advertise to the extent that I’d have liked in the City Sun, the Amsterdam News, or on more radio stations, because of financial limitations. I was attempting to do something which was outside of the usual Dia Foundation parameters, yet Dia has money and prestige and leftists seem to respond to that. They have an established track record and it’s easier to induce scholars to participate. They are backed by the de Menils. It was a challenge in some cases to convince academics that it was possible for an academic and an artist to have a public discussion. I would have liked more people to have come, and more people outside of the art world. But that also leads me to another conundrum. Why do I want people from outside of the art world to come? That question seems almost inane even as I type it. I think that life exists beyond the debates of the art world, even though I am functioning as a participant in this cultural realm. I raise the question because in the course of preparing this project I realized that

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I didn’t want it to be totally open. This realization dawned on me when I went to the Liberation Books bookstore. I had intended to poster there, but while I was there I was bombarded by pc (politically correct) sparticists, with a leaning toward circa 1967, and African cultural nationalism, and I thought: “Do I really want to attempt a discussion with these people? They have their own agenda and I’m trying to develop mine. A repeat of previous kinds of discussions could ensue and my efforts would be wasted. I’m not postering here.” This encounter led me to think very seriously about what I wanted and why. I deduced that I don’t believe in a simplistic idea of audience. Audiences are to some extent created, not merely preexisting. I have questions about the term “community” as well, as in “the black community” or “the latino community.” What do these terms really mean? Well, you can’t please everybody. I’ve decided that I have specific concerns which I’m trying to deal with and sometimes a broader group of people responds to them and sometimes a smaller number do. This is the field of cultural production, not law. In my work I think that I show folly more than anything else. Contradictions between correct behavior and repressed desires. How power functions in the realm of knowledge and language. The horror of what can happen when unbridled power infects all aspects of living yet appears masked as civilization. I think of my work as being serious and funny—an observation of our shared comedy of errors. Maybe it employs the humor of a survivor. On the up side, though, I think that the project was successful as a first step in opening up discussions about constructed identities. The people who did come engaged in stimulating discussions, and because of the framing of the films within the context of this installation a different reading of the films was possible. I learned a lot during the course of doing the show and it never seemed like a static experience. Representing ways of thinking, feeling, and producing is hard and never-­ceasing work.

Notes 1. VistaVision: Landscape of Desire, Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, 1991. Films screened: Dal Polo all’Equatore (Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucci, 1987); Apunti per una Oriestiade africana (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1970); La noire de . . . (Ousmane Sembène, 1965); Song of Freedom ( J. Elder Wills, starring Paul

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Robeson, 1936); films by Osa and Martin Johnson: Across the World with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson (1930), Congorilla (1932), Baboona (1935), I Married Adventure (1940), discussion by Linda Earle and Jewelle Gomez. 2. The exhibition From the Studio: Artists in Residence, 1988–89 (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1989). Artists included were Willie Cole, Renée Green, and John Rozelle. A brochure was published. 3. Anatomies of Escape, Institute of Contemporary Art, The Clocktower Gallery, New York, 1990. 4. Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Dal polo all’Equatore, 1987. 5. Susan Vogel and Francine N’Diaye, African Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Homme (New York: Center for African Art, Abrams, 1985). The Studio Museum’s exhibition was entitled From the Studio, see note 2. 6. J. Elder Wills, Song of Freedom, 1936.

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32

1995

Tracing Lusitania Excerpts from an Imagined Prototype

The idea for Tracing Lusitania emerged in 1991 on the eve of 1992 when an assortment of Columbus protests and celebrations were brewing, as well as numerous debates about “identity politics,” “multiculturalism,” and “political correctness.” It was the artist’s intention to complicate the terms of some of these debates. Rather than begin with broad themes such as “colonialism,” “Eurocentrism,” “racism,” “sexism,” “heterosexism,” “imperialism” she chose to begin by examining in Lisbon specific artifacts: maps, decorative objects, botanical gardens, museums, architecture, and literary and classificatory texts. By beginning with these objects or places and by tracing their emergence she believed it might be possible to detect the intricate workings of certain ideologies which had previously been, and were still, in effect. Some hopes were to interpret these objects or places in ways which would challenge the established perceptions and to probe the complicated pleasure and discomfort which might accompany them as well as question easy assumptions about the past and present. Since then Tracing Lusitania has become an ongoing floating proposition as its different parts have never been configured together spatially, as it is composed of so many growing fragments.1 The original proposal suggested the broad aim of “tracing the magnitude of Portugal’s past as a seafaring power” by observing the present-­day residue in contemporary Portugal, which is present in cultural forms and in the heterogeneous population. Part of that project involved traveling by boat to Ceuta, Portugal’s first conquest in Africa, 1415. Visually the fantastic projections of earlier voyages were to be represented by maps borrowed from the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon and from the New York Public Library. The artist was to function

in multiple roles: exhibition designer, curator, artist, writer, and conversationalist. History, space, language, and narration played roles in that projected endeavor. The “Age of Discoveries” (1415 to mid-­1500s) provides a recurring, near-­mythic source for Portugal’s formulation of a national identity. This history appears in travel books, art catalogues, literature, and films. Part of this legacy includes the 200 million people around the world who speak Portuguese. It was proposed that “an examination of the past enables us to grapple with the complexity of the present, and this seems especially necessary now as borders change and effects of diasporic movements are unavoidable.” A series of films from Portuguese-­speaking countries was proposed as one way of making palpable the contemporary remains of this history and the creative ways in which people are still grappling with it. What appears here are samples from four parts of the projected endeavor. These samples in video represent excerpts from the film series, from the symposium Negotiations in the Contact Zone, which occurred in New York after the journey, from footage of conversations and the artist’s inhabitation in Lisbon in 1992, and from her journey to Ceuta. Some sentences which trail through the installation are part of the ongoing work.

From the Symposium The videos Negotiations in the Contact Zone include the participants in the symposium: Judith Barry, Diedrich Diederichsen, Sowon Kwon, Miwon Kwon, Simon Leung, Karim Aïnouz, James Clifford, Lynne Tillman, Manthia Diawara, and Joe Wood; camera: Simin Farkhondeh. The symposium took place on April 9, 1994, at the Drawing Center in New York City and was co-­funded by Arts International.

From the Film Series Paixão Nacional, by Karim Aïnouz, 1994

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From the Journey The videos Walking in Lisbon, in which Green traverses the city on foot, and Journey to Ceuta, which charts Green’s journey to Ceuta, continuing to Tetouan and the Rif Mountains. Both videos produced in 1992.

From a Conversation The video Conversation with Diana Andringa (1992) is a conversation in Lisbon with the television producer and director of the television series Geração de 60 (The Sixties Generation, 1989), Diana Andringa.

Projection The video Slow Walking in Lisbon, by Renée Green, 1995

Note 1. Different components of the work have been shown in the Johannesburg Biennale (1997) and Green’s exhibitions Between and Including (Vienna, 1999) Returns: Tracing Lusitania (Lisbon, 2000), and Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams (San Francisco, 2010). A symposium, Negotiations in the Contact Zone, was organized at the Drawing Center, New York, in 1994. A book with the same title, including the papers and presentations in English and Portuguese, was published in Lisbon in 2003.

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33

1992–1993

Secret, Part 1. Practiced Places The process of thinking about how to approach working in Firminy at the Unité has now been going on for over a year for me. My solution to this invitation to participate in this project reflects the continuation of that thinking process. One of the most pressing questions which I had was what does it mean to do a site-­specific work, and how is it possible to do or make something which has any effect on an environment unfamiliar to one, or has a significant effect upon oneself. Ultimately I think the latter half of the question is the recurring beginning for me because whatever is done or made reflects oneself, even when another environment is meant to be a focus. How literally one brings this subjective perspective to the forefront of course varies. I decided to begin with my discomfort with the Unité surroundings. I tried to imagine the ideal way it could function based on Le Corbusier’s intentions. I also tried to think of what would have happened if my family were to inhabit an apartment or if I were to inhabit an apartment. I was thinking about Michel de Certeau’s statement about space (espace) and place (lieu). Place implies a fixed location—“the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location”—whereas space is defined as a “practiced place.” “Space,” de Certeau elaborates, “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.”1 The Unité structure therefore provided the place, and I saw my contact with that place as forming the space in which to work. After mulling over a number of possible approaches I decided that I would inhabit one of these apartments to the maximum extent possible in the closed area, knowing that it is a temporary act, but an act intended as a meditation on different histories and trajectories, that of the architecture itself, Le Corbusier, my

33.1 Secret (Black and White Photographs), 1993. Photograph, 6.5 × 9.5 inches.

family, others’ families, my self, and the surrounding landscape. A preoccupation of mine in this work, as well as in some previous ones, returns to the question: How does one designate a private space for reflection in a public space? This was one of my first thoughts as I walked through the various apartments last year. I imagined someone reaching adolescence searching for a location in the apartment in which she could live out certain activities typical of that time of life, like playing loud music and collecting things, like posters or stickers for example. The pristine aspects of the rooms, as is evident by the remains of some previous tenants, would have to be sacrificed for the traces of living. My plan is to live out a monk-­like aspect of an ideal artist’s existence in the cellular structure I’ve been assigned. A vow of silence may or may not be maintained. This will consist of creating a small private tent space in which to read books related in some way to Le Corbusier and ideas of space (a currently very popular topic) and to reflect and write continual impressions. The surrounding landscape will be observed and sketched and/or photographed. Encounters with the current inhabitants will be recorded. The results of each day’s production will fill the apartment and will be open to the public when I’m not there, and selections will be translated and posted in public spaces. Reflections on how my family has inhabited domestic space will be available in video and audio forms which can be played in the apartment, if electricity and video and audio equipment are available.

Note 1. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.

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34

1993

Secret, Part 2. Scenes from a Group Show Project Unité

Site: Firminy, France. A semi-­deserted housing project which was designed by Le Corbusier, one of his Unité d’Habitations. Artists and architects from the U.S. and Europe were invited to participate in an exhibition in the deserted half of this structure. This scene: Secret Producer and Director: Renée Green Co-­Producer: Yves Aupetitallot Synopsis: Project Unité was organized by Yves Aupetitallot with the intention of “going beyond the confines of art and culture.”1 Props: Four copies of Germinal, Secret (figure drawings by Le Corbusier), Firminy files, videotapes, monitor and vcr , box for James, book layout, photos, journal pages, typing paper. Giving Props to: Le Corbusier (“Corbu”) without whom none of this would have been possible, the tenants of the Unité for enduring what was made possible, Émile Zola for writing Germinal which provided a reference point for the view beyond the Unité balconies, as well as historical background of previous socio-­economic conditions of the region, however fictional. Character Profile: The character is visibly a female with brown skin and dreadlocks. She was born in the U.S. and speaks English as her native tongue, but she studied French and in brief exchanges can seem to be from some French-­speaking place. Where she might be from is very dependent upon the language she speaks. She’s been asked at various times and in various places whether she’s from Martinique, Puerto Rico, Guyana, Jamaica, some island near Venezuela, Paris, and New York. She’s been told by a Senegalese that she resembles a girl he knew in Senegal, and by a Mexican that

she looks just like his cousin. She is from the metropolis, in her case New York. She has decided to visit a “modernist utopia” because she was curious about what this could possibly be. She pitched her tent inside of what is now a modernist ruin. Because it was designed by Le Corbusier it is valued by some, who never lived there, like a shrine, a monument. It became part of the Corbu mythology and is kept alive by those who want to keep alive his precepts as they have interpreted them. But this place was also inhabited. To some degree by people who weren’t born in France but are from places where people speak French in Africa and in the Caribbean, or who were children of people from these places. In addition, there are people who were born in France. The rent is cheap and appeals to people who might be unemployed, have part-­time jobs, or simply can’t afford to own their own homes. The character has decided to do fieldwork on herself in this place which was unfamiliar to her but familiar to its remaining inhabitants. She considered it fieldwork because she was on an unfamiliar terrain, outside of the city, attempting to inhabit an uninhabited area of a monumental ruin where she was meant to stay alone. This fieldwork is on “the society (she) is condemned never to leave”: herself. She will execute a self-­styled auto-­ ethnography. If others enter her narrative space they too will be described. She didn’t think she would change the lives of the inhabitants during her short stay, nor did she imagine she could document their existence in anything more than a journalistic way. She’d already attempted to do social service–related work in her own metropolis and realized how much time and devotion are necessary to make any meaningful connections, and that even then the effects can be other than hoped for, especially if one’s hopes are projected onto others rather than created through a mutually ignited dialogue. She recalled a quote by Albert Camus she’d read in Motion Sickness, by Lynne Tillman: “I realized that modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer and virtue to oppress.” Her mission is a hermetic one, meaning one to decipher and one in which to inhabit an interior, like a monk or hermit, of a cell and of a mind. She thought it possible to learn from a ruin. Because she doesn’t want to appear hostile to social contact she will wear a uniform which alludes to her transient status, which she hopes will

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be read as a peace offering or as a joke for other Unité inhabitants. Some would understand. Everyday she would wear a quilted vest with the word immigration sewn to the back in big glow-­in-­the-­dark letters. In French the word is the same and so is the meaning. One thing the character anticipated was that she might encounter others who, like herself, were products of the African diaspora. They would have in common skin which ranged the various shades of brown. Even if culturally they were different, at borders they were usually viewed with suspicion. The character left these traces: a journal, files, some photos, videos, and books in a box inscribed, “For James, good luck with your group show.”2 She also left instructions for the production of a book, which, like most of her projects, is still in progress. Where is she?

Firminy: The First 24 Hours I arrived in Firminy on Monday night. The night before I’d flown from Vienna to Paris. I spent the night in Paris in a very comfortable bed, with big fluffy pillows. During Monday day I walked all around Paris. In a bookstore, which I’d visited before, I found a copy of Germinal, by Émile Zola. I bought this copy to supplement the English copy I already had with me. During the afternoon in Paris I went to the Gare de Lyon and purchased my train ticket. Somehow, before buying my ticket I got trapped in the banlieu section of the station and had to beg to be let out. I’d bought some food from a boulangerie with which I was familiar, and because I was pressed for time I ate it standing up at a food stand in the station. After that I took a train to Odeon and walked around St. Germain, which is where I bought the book. From there I walked down Rue Bonaparte and crossed the Seine at Pont Neuf, which is under construction. My feet ached from walking and I arrived early for an appointment at Café Beaubourg. Getting all the luggage onto the train was a bit of an ordeal, and I kept having flashbacks of trying to move tons of luggage in the pouring rain from a train station in Nantes two years ago. That time I missed the train because it wasn’t possible to get a cart in time.

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When I arrived in St. Etienne I somehow managed to unload all of the luggage and slowly move it to the door nearest the parking lot. Eventually, I was picked up and assisted with the luggage. We brought the luggage directly to the 7th floor to this space which I’m now inhabiting. It seemed too jarring to immediately begin unpacking, so I went to visit the model apartment. There I was offered dinner. Since I’m allergic to tomatoes I made my own sauce for the spaghetti, which was probably my undoing. I used blue cheese, butter, and milk. As I ate it, it seemed all right. Perhaps it was the sandwich which I’d been carrying around all day and finished eating on the train which later made me feel so ill. I don’t know exactly what the cause was, but by 6 a.m. I’d begun to feel extremely nauseous. I returned to my quarters in the deserted part of the 7th floor and noted what a strange situation I was in. I was and am the only inhabitant of these formerly deserted apartments. The hallway is now filled with tools for construction, to make an exhibition in the apartments. For me the apartment is one more temporary place to live and work. I’ve been transient for at least the last year, staying for temporary periods of time in different countries to work. In this case the work space, living space, and exhibition space are one. Last night I was questioning the staunchness of my empirical approach to this exhibition. For me it seemed important to actually use the apartment as an apartment, to the extent that is possible. Unfortunately the toilets and water do not function, which reflects a kind of camping or squatter situation. Thus, I brought camping gear to manage with. Unexpectedly, there is electricity, so I’m able to work late into the night, as I did last night, and as it seems I’ll be doing again tonight. It is 1:30 a.m. A very quiet time here. Now it is possible to imagine this place as a monk’s cell, although I have more things than a monk would. Last night I set up the tent to sleep in and began making a videotape documenting my stay here. The tent seemed to provide some shelter for my first night here; its interior was a familiar one. The apartment itself seemed too alien to shelter me. This day has been spent in a weird sort of stupor, largely the result of feeling so ill. I woke up at 6 a.m. and began videotaping. Then I tried to go back to sleep before the workers came in the morning at 8 a.m. to continue working on the exhibition. How artificial, I thought, that because this is an 326 Operations

exhibition workers will come and wake me up when I’m trying to live in this place. The birds began chirping very early and I heard the first motor in the parking lot rev up. It was very important to me to be able to be aware of the passing of time during the day and to document different moments. I kept trying to do the different activities I’d planned, but with little success, because of this illness. At some point I managed to get to the model apartment to take a bath. Workers had already been singing at the top of their lungs and had already entered this apartment just seconds after I’d gotten dressed. They didn’t know I was trying to live here. It was strange going past them and all sorts of materials first thing in the morning. After bathing I returned to this cell to attempt to read, but the spasms I was having in my stomach prevented that. I did manage to assemble a mirror. I tried to take some polaroids, but they came out quite strange, with parts of the emulsion ripped off of them. I showed them to Oliver, who said there is a rumor that Le Corbusier’s ghost inhabits this place. Later, Uli saw the photos and said that she’d gotten similar results trying to take polaroids here and that it was uncanny. I’m locked in here, but I just heard a sound. I have the keys. Maybe I’ll lock the apartment door. I’ve locked the door, and I definitely heard a noise outside resembling banging. In the distance I hear dogs and crickets. Maybe tomorrow I’ll begin to enter some kind of delusional state, because I haven’t eaten in over 24 hours. I was repulsed by food today. I just heard the banging again. This place has an eerie quality, this unlived-­in area. It reminds me of the big hotel that Jack Nicholson is supposed to be the caretaker of in The Shining. There are traces of previous inhabitants there, as there are here. In the movie the rooms appeared emptied of all previous traces, yet the psychic traces remained. The Jack character, like myself, is trying to type his way out of or into something. Tonight I have one more piece of furniture, a mattress. Maybe I’ll be able to sleep.

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Wednesday Morning: Firminy The workers are in the hallway in full effect. There are sounds of motors buzzing outside in the distance. The morning began sunny, at around 8 a.m., but now at 9:30 it has become overcast. I’ve begun videotaping today’s activities, including the typing I’m doing at this moment. . . . I feel much better. A mattress made all the difference. I slept until the alarm went off at 8 a.m. The sun was streaming in through the two-­storey windows. I was facing the windows and all I can see from them is the sky, when sitting or lying on the mattress. I hope the bread truck comes today. I saw it yesterday from the terrace of the model apartment. At that time I didn’t have the strength to go downstairs, nor could I really have eaten anything. But, today my stomach is growling from hunger. This apartment is gradually beginning to look like the cover of the book The Real Bohemia, on which there is a mattress on the floor and probably a typewriter similar to this, and some bongos. This set-­up is very similar to the housing I lived in during my second year in college. The college housing was called “the low-­rises” as opposed to the nearby “high-­rises.” I lived in a ten-­person low-­rise. These buildings were next to some housing projects in Middletown, Connecticut, where those people, the “townies,” lived all the time, not just for a year like us. I always find it strange to return home to no answering machine, even though I’ve gone for months during the past year without one. The days seem very long here. The sun is shining brightly at 8:15 p.m. I realized, upon stepping outside, that I hadn’t been out of this building since Monday. I’ve been on the terrace a lot. This morning I painted a watercolor of the view. Yesterday Stephan showed me a video he’d made of some guys who are musicians who live in the building. He asks one of them how often he goes out, and his reply was “Oh, once or twice a month.” When one musician is asked if he misses having any bars or social gathering places to go to he says no, because he meets people in the hallway, or maybe he meets

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someone in town and discovers that they too inhabit the Unité, and they can simply ring each other up and visit. I have noticed people are pretty friendly here. Of course it helps if you can speak French, which I luckily do, enough to get by. The atmosphere here is pretty calm compared to housing projects in New York. As I was on the terrace today listening to krs 1 rap about the “South Bronx, the South South Bronx,” I imagined being in Co-­op City, but without a Bronx nearby. Co-­op City, like here, is pretty self-­contained. This is even more so because it doesn’t contain a shopping mall. I went for my first excursion in search of food this evening. Not having eaten since Monday I was ravenous. Tonight there is no electricity, so I am prepared with my American Camper fluorescent lantern. Lightning is flashing through the sky. Concrete and sky are my view. Tomorrow, when I am doing these activities of which there will be visible traces, I can interrupt these activities with digressions into lucid thought, if such thoughts might occur. This is Wednesday night. I will have two or maybe three more nights here. Two British architects asked me what it was like to actually spend the night here. One assumed it was in the nightmare variety of experiences. Tonight the wind has been howling. Doors kept slamming shut in the model apartment because of sudden gusts of air. Living, working, and sleeping all blend together for me here. There are few distractions. I wonder where people do their laundry here. Today my major discovery was how to take the path through the woods onto a semi-­highway to the supermarket. Maybe tomorrow I’ll learn to do my laundry. How does childhood figure in this work? Lord of the Flies, Alice in Wonderland, Babes in Toyland, The Wizard of Oz, Huckleberry Finn? Is there some connection to what I’m doing in an abandoned half of a building in Firminy? A desire for some kind of strange exhilaration which comes from being lost?

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Night Four: Firminy It’s funny how I’m actually getting adjusted to this place. I’m extremely tired right now. I waver between feeling like I’ve been in this apartment too long and that I’m drifting off into a calm stupor. What will it be like when I get the video monitor? Part of what is so easy to deal with here is the lack of outside conflict. People in the elevators normally greet each other, and the attitude is calm. Of course I’m comparing it to New York, where tension is constant. I am cut off from many things, similar to being in a monastery cell. Today was strange because I began the first six hours in a very productive way, from 6 a.m. to noon, but after that I had a lot of distractions. Again I didn’t get done a fraction of what I set out to do. Last night I had difficulty sleeping because there was a powerful storm. I slid deeper and deeper into my sleeping bag because the lightning was flashing so brightly. I always have a fear that it will get inside and electrocute me. I kept waking up and checking to make sure that no electrical attractors were near me. I think no one who knows I have this much paper believes I’ll really use it all. They probably imagine it’s just an artistic prop, more rubbish. I’m so happy that my load will literally be lighter when I leave. This project isn’t really solipsistic. Would I be committing a crime if it were? The whole notion of solitary contemplation, or meditating on the place in which a group show occurs or on why a group show is made goes against the usual concept of group shows. This week I did manage to attain a state of deep reflection, which was a goal. The wallpaper is like some trance-­ inducing device.

Friday Morning, Day 5: Firminy 5:40 a.m. As I was walking down the hall with the keys I needed to open the various doors to get to the toilet, I had a flashback to when I was a security guard in college. I worked the night shift, midnight to 8 a.m. On the hour I’d have to make my rounds through various campus buildings to check that doors had been locked. For a moment I couldn’t remember whether I’d had to wear an item of clothing with the word security written in bold letters 330 Operations

across my back, similar to the vest I’ve been wearing all week which says immigration . At first no one said anything about this vest. Then one day one of the students pointed to the word on my vest and chuckled knowingly. She looks as if she might be part North African. After that I noticed a group of North African men, I’m guessing, their complexions ranged from deep brown to swarthy, they could have been from Martinique, I could have been from Martinique, at any rate they were looking at me curiously, but I didn’t get a chance to exchange more than glances with them because I was talking to Oliver. People normally speak to me as if I’m from some French-­speaking place. The airline stewardess on the plane from Vienna to Paris chatted with me throughout the flight in French. Often I think of Frantz Fanon. This place would be confining if used as intended. Maybe it is best for a visitor. Maybe I can stand all the dirt and dust because I lived in a loft for a long time, which was like a squat, in a factory and which could never be cleaned.

Saturday Morning, Day 6: Firminy Every morning the sun comes in so harshly. An unrelenting wall of glass. You don’t necessarily want to see that much of the outside every morning. Sleeping in the tent in the morning at least eliminated some of the aggressiveness of the sun. It’s like being forced to wake up no later than 8 a.m. every morning. Workers are supposed to get up early every morning, was that the idea? What about people with irregular hours, irregular jobs? I feel cranky right now, having been up late and now having to wake up to this sun. The sun usually comes piercing in every morning and then in several hours the sky is gray. The thought of the art world converging on this place is also irritating. I know I’m part of it. But, I haven’t been pretending to live here during the last week, I have been living here and that puts you in a state of mind peculiar to this place. It goes beyond the first initial days of complaining about the conditions, the dullness of the town, the distance of the supermarket by foot. You begin to focus more and more on what you need to get done and how to live despite these circumstances. People live here, but in a sense this building is like a way station. Most of the inhabitants are relatively young. I say it is like a way station, and for me like a hotel, because it isn’t the kind of apartment you would pass down to 34. Secret, Part 2. Scenes from a Group Show 331

your next generation. It was meant from its inception to last one hundred years. A very modern idea. How many buildings actually do last more than one hundred years? It isn’t so much a question of whether structures are still standing but rather the rate at which they deteriorate while people are still inhabiting them, and whether the maintenance of a continually decaying structure is beyond the tenant’s means. This place is continually crumbling. The ceilings are cracked and seem to be sloping down. Big slabs of concrete resemble the continual road construction in Brooklyn under the bqe (Brooklyn Queens Expressway). I got a lecture from a taxi driver about the construction of the highways as we slowly wheeled toward JFK airport almost three weeks ago. He’d been in construction work before retiring to drive a taxi. He kept pointing overhead and around and kept saying, “Why? Why this structure here? It won’t alter the flow of the traffic.” One can wonder the same thing about this Unité. Half of it is shut. This area doesn’t have an excess population. There aren’t jobs here. But, this is an architectural monument. I keep thinking, what kind of people were imagined by Le Corbusier to live here? People with disciplinary standards similar to his own and who didn’t require much in the way of comfort? He never wanted children himself. They would interfere with his professional life, he imagined. A compartmentalized life, each part with its purpose. Some of it secret, exposed partially in his private drawings. There is no room for idleness here. The bathtub is small and the lighting, the original fixtures anyway, are too dim to be able to see your reflection well or to read while bathing. The toilet is utilitarian with no ventilating fan and no compensation for an obese person. Funny that the figures he drew, who were mostly women, were all huge. It seems hard to imagine them fitting into one of his toilets or bathtubs. The morning is ticking away, my last morning here. More and more people will be arriving to adjust things and see things. Any peace I might have gained will soon be finished. I’ll be traveling again, for weeks. Yesterday I had an especially nerve-­wracking hour, during which I couldn’t locate my keys. Actually, the way that locating process was handled makes me bristle even now. I hadn’t wanted to leave the apartment, but because this is an art exhibition and not simply a free living arrangement I had to try to get reimbursed for my expenses before it was too late. In the hall-

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way there was a flurry of activity. Stephan mentioned that he’d seen Yves in the hallway and that I should approach him directly. That’s when I shut the door with the keys inside, and for the first time all week it locked, but I didn’t know that. I began meeting other artists and people I hadn’t seen in a while. I went to the office to try to get paid, but no one was there who could help me, just more artists hanging out. Then I realized that I didn’t have my key. For me this was a complete trauma, especially given the timing. To be wandering around in these hallways with no access to a private place amid pre-­opening frenzy was completely anathema to my reason for even being here. Eventually, some workMEN helped me, but not without trying to make me feel like a stupid female. “Stupid, silly little woman, you’re in the way while we’re trying to work on big important artworks made out of materials which are heavy or difficult, or . . .” At least this was the way I felt, and at that moment I thought, “Just fucking pay me.” At the moment until I get paid, this will have been a very costly week of everyday life.

Afterword Many people came to the exhibition at the Unité in Firminy. Many words were shed there and later in the media. At the opening the inhabitants of the Unité and the artists exhibiting in the former habitations were all invited to a party in the social space on the top floor of the building. The food seemed to have been imported from any number of delis you might pass or enter in New York’s garment district. Huge vats of mayonnaise covered salads and cold cuts were brought forth. This evening it was not the France of the baguette and brie. There was a palpable tension in the air. The artists stayed in groups with other artists and art world infrastructural personnel; the tenants stayed in groups with their friends and neighbors. No speech was made. What would have been said? Maybe a speech had been made. A fight began. An inebriated male tenant began throwing punches in all directions. All were forbidden to leave the floor until the man could be stilled. Eventually, bruised and bloody, he left. Everyone else was also free to leave.

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When the typewriter was invented, typing paper was standardized; this standardization had a considerable repercussion on furniture, it established a module, that of the commercial format. . . . This format was not an arbitrary measure. Later, one appreciated its wisdom (the anthropocentric measure) which it established. In all objects of universal usage, individual fantasy recedes in front of the human fact.—Le Corbusier

Notes Originally published as “Scenes from a Group Show: Project Unité,” in Site-­ Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, edited by Alex Coles (London: Black Dog, 2000). A brief excerpt appeared as “Secret (Project Unité, Firminy),” in Situation, edited by Claire Doherty (London: Whitechapel Gallery, mit Press, 2009), 78–79. 1. Yves Aupetitallot, “Unité: Exposition/Exhibition,” Art, Architecture, Design (November 1992). 2. In 1993, art historian James Meyer curated the exhibition What Happened to the Institutional Critique? in Colin de Land’s gallery American Fine Arts, New York. The box referred to contained the materials that constituted Secret (1993), Green’s installation for the exhibition. For further information, see note 8 in “Beyond,” this volume.

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35

1993

Inventory of Clues Suddenly, and with compelling force, I was struck by the idea of drawing a diagram of my life, and knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. With a very simple question I interrogated my past life, and the answers were inscribed, as if of their own accord on a sheet of paper that I had with me. A year or two later, when I lost this sheet, I was inconsolable.—Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

Beginnings are always overdetermined. Bearing this in mind I approach the process of beginning to work in a city to which I have never traveled, yet I must assess the possibilities of working in it prior to my visit. This is not necessarily a problem, because often our perceptions of foreign cities, as well as the one(s) we inhabit, are determined by a complex mixture of media and textual encounters which function in a reciprocal relationship between face-­to-­face dealings with the streets, systems of transportation, architecture, and the people. Understanding how history is made has been the primary source of emancipatory insight and practical political consciousness, the great variable container for a critical interpretation of social life and practice. Today, however, it may be space more than time that hides consequences from us, the “making of geography” more than the “making of history” that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world.—Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies

Being invited to work in Antwerp reminds me of being invited to work in Lisbon, which reminds me of being invited to work in Nantes. Each one was a major port, Antwerp and Lisbon to a more renowned degree and of an earlier time than Nantes. The magnitude of Portugal’s past as a seafaring power provides a recurring, near-­mythic source for Portugal’s formation of a national identity. Antwerp’s past as well invites legendary claims: “During

35.1 Inventory of Clues, 1993. Dutch diagram.

the XV c. and XVI c. Antwerp experienced her greatest splendour. Her citizens, enriched by both trade and industry, favoured both arts and letters. The great thirst for knowledge that characterized these times brought to the fore many brilliant lights in the world of arts and letters.”1 Thinking about these cities isn’t merely an academic activity but rather provides a chance to prove hypotheses and to hopefully challenge my own preconceptions. Official history and renewed examinations of this history, in combination with the unearthing of less discussed histories intermingle with autobiographical meditations. Ideas such as humanism and universalism, which are intertwined with the history of these locations and which bolster the link between national identity and an esteemed intellectual heritage, are proven upon continued examination of the empirical sort to be inadequate. The notion of all-­encompassing world views of any kind seems inadequate. This is no revelation, but rather the force of this realization gains potency when one is physically confronted with the historical traces on which these notions were founded, as well as with the contemporary predicaments which are the outgrowths of the past. Two years ago in Brussels I saw an exhibition of royal Portuguese treasures crafted from gold, which was part of Europalia ’91. This year in Antwerp it’s possible to see exhibitions such as Diamond Inspired Art and Diamond Jewellery from Antwerp’s Golden Age. Next year Lisbon will be the cultural capital of Europe. As I sifted again and again through the Ant336 Operations

werpen 93 publicity materials in search of clues which might indicate how to proceed I came upon some clues which were not directly delivered from this material, but which I will use in combination while traversing the various coordinates with which I’m working.

Inventory of Clues 1. A recipe for “Belgium Style Eggs” in the 1993 Dairy Diary and a tip that the first newspaper was published in Antwerp. 2. A book entitled Guide to the Belgian Museums which I found several years ago in a garage sale. It refers to the Great War and to the year 1927, so I presume it was written sometime between 1928 and 1939. 3. A chapter named “The Indomitable Plantin,” from a book entitled The Book by Douglas C. McMurtire, which first appeared under the title The Golden Book and was published in 1927. In it I read that Plantin’s youngest daughters were proofreading foreign languages at the age of twelve. I too have been a proofreader. 4. A chapter named “From the Hut to the Temple: Quatremère de Quincy and the Idea of Type” from The Writing of the Walls by Anthony Vidler, 1987. “Type, from the Greek τπος (or τύπος), a word that by general acceptance (and thus applicable to many nuances or varieties of the same idea) expresses what is meant by model, matrix, imprint, mold, figure in relief, or bas-­relief ” (de Quincy). 5. A movie about Zaire, La Vie est belle (Life is rosy, by Mwezé Ngangura and Benoît Lamy, 1986) which I taped while watching it on public tv in New York and which I’ve watched many times since. 6. A book, Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice by Michel Foucault. I began re-­reading these chapters: “Language to Infinity,” “Fantasia of the Library,” and “History of Systems of Thought.” 7. Another book by Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny. I first observed Vidler on videotape at the Getty Center in Santa Monica, participating in a panel having to do with urban space. The subtitle of the book is Essays in the Modern Unhomely, a subject to which I seem to obsessively return. From the Belgian museum guide I’d 35. Inventory of Clues 337

assessed that the Plantin-­Moretus Museum was once a house and decided to use that information (true or false) as a basis for further work.

Coordinates with Which I’m Working Some of the factors to consider for this project are standard formal ones regarding location, how to cope with a “generic” white space with few right angles and a white resin floor. How to engage in a meditation on a past of which there are still visible remnants and with a contemporary life, both of which are evident from the windows and encountered upon stepping outside of the door of the museum. Another factor to consider, which seems especially pressing in the wake of various group exhibitions with themes seeming to refer to social issues, is whether cultural forms can have agency, and by this I mean the ability to enable people to act or live, and if so, agency for whom? Where is that agency to be found and what forms might it manifest? In my notebook I have a note scribbled referring to a catchphrase which appears in the publicity materials “Opting for Art.”—What does that mean? Next to it I have a quote by Eric Antonis, Director of Antwerp 93, in a clipping from a magazine meant to elucidate my question. It reads: “Artists, in particular, are concerned with non-­conditioned thinking, with nuance. They question over again certitudes which we have acquired and invite people to stop and think about them. That is why Antwerp 93 draws the public’s attention to artists who, because of their profession and their metaphors, are involved with society, are concerned about it and want to express that concern. In opting for art, Antwerp 93 lost its freedom from obligation.” This statement, as is all of the publicity material, is very optimistic and invites further questioning about the function of culture. What was wanted this time was that the renewal of a longstanding friendship and of fraternal feelings should be entrusted to the poets, the writers, the painters and the musicians, to the artists.2 How similar these sentiments seem, a desire for freedom and fraternity which is equated with what these artists can let loose. But, I keep returning to the phrases “non-­conditioned thinking” and “freedom from obligation.” 338 Operations

Don’t these also imply a lack of power, an inability to effect the course of the world, which runs on thinking which has been “conditioned” (no thinking is exempt from some kind of conditioning) and on rules and laws and obligations? But, because the questions exceed the contradictions, and because they both at times overlap, I feel challenged to participate. I’m fixated on the Plantin-­Moretus Museum, a seedbed of humanism and botany; ideas of type, specimens, and physiologies—analogies between printing and bodily classifications; the power of the printed word, its dissemination; the feelings of unease I might detect, which according to Vidler are “aesthetically an outgrowth of the Burkean sublime, a domesticated version of absolute terror, to be experienced in the comfort of home” and . . . ? Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-­new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-­deeper layers.3

Notes Originally published as a bilingual (English and Dutch) brochure in On Taking a Normal Situation . . . (Antwerp: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, 1993). 1. Guide to the Belgian Museums (London: Methuen, 1927), 98. 2. Luis Bernardo, Mozambique’s minister of culture, printed in the preface of Kerstin Danielson, ed., Mozambique! (Stockholm: Culture House, 1988). Copied while in an archive in Lisbon. 3. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott; edited by Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 26.

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36

1994

Eighteen Aphoristic Statements We talk, a tape recording is made, diligent secretaries listen to our words to refine, transcribe, and punctuate them, producing a first draft that we can tidy up afresh before it goes on to publication, the book, eternity. Haven’t we just gone through the “toilette of the dead”? We have embalmed our speech like a mummy, to preserve it forever. Because we really must last a bit longer than our voices: we must, through the comedy of writing, inscribe ourselves somewhere. This inscription, what does it cost us? What do we lose? What do we win? —Roland Barthes, “From Speech to Writing,” in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews, 1962–1980

Here are statements doubly taken out of context; first they were transcribed and edited and then rewritten after transcription. There were my “corrections” for a “Site Specificity Roundtable Discussion.”1 I numbered all of my statements in the original text and provided numbered “corrections” to correspond with these. The statements which then seemed so urgent to make are presented here as aphorisms. . . . 1. It’s important to examine the institutional as well as curatorial aims, which may work in concert, despite a curator’s perhaps idealistic intentions, when an overriding theme is proposed. In some instances invited artists might witness a sort of “curatorial domination” to be in effect. But, I think it’s necessary to actually analyze the group shows individually; differentiations need to be made between those which occur locally, nationally, and internationally. What are the stated intentions of the curators and the institution? What intentions are left unspoken? What kinds of institutions are the exhibitions held in? Museums, housing projects, city streets? What sorts of

sponsorship do they receive, private or public funds? These are some of the basic questions which need to be asked. 2. I mean it to relate to what Mitchell mentioned regarding the rhetoric of the institution, and how the curator who works in conjunction with it, perhaps even with the intention of being subversive, can still be perceived as being aligned with the institution. I realize the phrase curatorial domination may seem extreme, but I was thinking about Robert Smithson’s essay “Cultural Confinement” when I said that,2 and some of the similar issues raised in it having to do with the constraint of themes proposed by curators, which artists are expected to fit in. 3. Yes, a theme, perhaps proposed as a problem. Part of what I see happening is that the idea of site-­specificity has become thematic. Of course, this is not to say that that is all that’s possible. 4. These kinds of ideas might come from the curator. In some instances the curator may attempt to anticipate the possible works the artist might make, based on whatever historical or social background they have on a location, and on the invited artist. Often upon making the visit to the site the curator, depending on who he or she thinks you are and based on what he or she imagines you do, will suggest things having to do with communities: “I think maybe you would like to do something on this neighborhood? In Fort Greene, on Chicago’s Southside for example, with a black ‘community’ or with some site associated with slavery.” But, this is not always the case. 5. In some cases the curators are well aware of their role as cogs in a tourist industry and attempt to self-­consciously refer to this in their formulation of exhibition goals as well as in the texts surrounding an exhibition, which may include a justification for inviting international artists. A case in point is the exhibition On taking a normal situation and retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present, and yes that is the show’s title, which took place in Antwerp at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (muhka ). Antwerp is the 1993 cultural capital of Europe, and this exhibition was part of a series of cultural events which took place during the year. I like the double entendre which is contained in the expression “cultural capital.” 6. Speaking for my own practice I don’t see that being invited to do or exhibit work in a location that you weren’t born in or live in means that the

36. Eighteen Aphoristic Statements 341

content is preestablished. There is an aspect of the work which is coming from a dialectic which is in dialogue with previous work I’ve done and that others have done, which also takes into consideration the situations in which that work came into being. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a signature need be invoked. The situations are inflected by a conglomeration of conditions—physical, mental, emotional, historic, contemporary, and spatial—as they always are. The invitation and the assumptions which might go along with that invitation to work in a foreign place, assumptions of the curator and assumptions of the artist, also become material. In more recent work I’ve been more consciously incorporating this material, like in Inventory of Clues (muhka ) and in Secret, Parts 1 & 2 (Unité d’Habitation, Firminy and American Fine Arts, New York). It’s at this juncture that artists can attempt to break away from an imposed thematization and can attempt their own reshaping of the stakes. How this is received is another discussion. 7. I think it is usually assumed that the artist will be the first to identify with the curator’s goals, but as we’ve established these identificatory dynamics are riddled with ambivalence. 8. I’m not interested in setting up a “get the curator” situation, but rather I’d like to analyze the ways all of the actors (curators, artists, institution representatives) are implicated, and I’m also questioning what approaches to take, given the knowledge of the possible complications. 9. I don’t see that as the main point. I think a more binding contractual agreement exists between the institution and the curator, which reflects a scale of monetary dispersal quite different form what the artists can usually expect. Of course the stakes rise depending on the artists and the situation. An invitation is issued to the artist, who can choose whether to accept or refuse it. A contract might be established following an acceptance, but the terms may remain very general, such as production costs are paid for the delivery of some work on a certain date. Often nothing is signed, unless one is doing a commission. Perhaps there is a desire on the part of an institution and some curators to establish some type of social contract with what they imagine to be “other” communities. Obviously, it is very important to encourage multiple histories to emerge, but I think that curatorial goals are certainly open to critique, within a broader critique of institutions. What is the “mission” of the museum, for example, which wants to reach out to

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“other” audiences and how informed are they of the possible diversity of the existing audiences? 10. I agree with the possibility of intervening in some way, which might necessitate participating in a project, although waging an incisive critique from within is very difficult, and prone to a kind of failure, but I think it’s possible to work with and acknowledge this likelihood of what I’m calling failure, which in itself can be interesting. It’s necessary to have access to some kind of audience to be able to work through these problems. 11. But I’d like to follow up on this idea of whether an artist accepts or rejects an invitation. This decision-­making process isn’t often publicly examined. 12. I think it’s very important to question the premises of an exhibition and also to try to make work that is not reductive. I don’t want to make art do the task of social work, when people who are trained in those fields are obviously better equipped to do the job. 13. It’s true that there can be difficulties involved in the traveling of work which might make a narrow reference to a particular location, yet I don’t have a problem with the idea of work made in one place moving to another place where it might resonate differently, and which includes an acknowledgment of the tensions between locations and the tensions of movement. Maybe the idea of site specificity should be thought of as site consciousness, because, speaking for myself, the work is always a continuation of other work and all locations are places for thinking. 14. My work in that show was for American Fine Arts.3 15. The work at afa was the second part of a work called Secret, which was begun in Firminy. I wanted to use the afa show as a venue for presenting what wasn’t apparent in Firminy, the video of my “character’s” stay there and the time leading up to and the time during the opening, as well as photos and text begun in Firminy, elaborated upon and presented as layout pages for a possible book. It was entitled Scenes from a Group Show, and that was meant to allude to a self-­conscious questioning of the Unité show,4 as well as other group shows, including the afa show. Both curators are referred to in the text, as well as “actors” who are in or witnessed both shows. 16. It doesn’t need to be one or the other; if the work operates on various levels it will probably be more interesting work. 17. In Vienna, the Museum for Applied Arts (mak -­Österreichisches Mu-

36. Eighteen Aphoristic Statements 343

36.1 Secret (Black and White Photographs), 1993. Photograph, 6.5 × 9.5 inches.

seum für Angewandte Kunst) subsidized a permanent exhibition of “institutional critique,” along with ikea , to name one of the additional sponsors. I found this to be an interesting example of the absorption, popularization, and taming of previous notions of institutional critique. I suppose they conceived of it as a means to bring the contemporary and the historic together. New marketing methods. 18. I don’t know what the attendance was because I didn’t see the show, but I think that people come to a museum located in an area perceived by many outside of it as “other.” When I worked on my VistaVision show at Pat Hearn Gallery many kinds of people came to the programming which I scheduled for free, with the exception of a concert, in conjunction with the show. After one of the movies, Black Girl, by Ousmane Sembène, one of the people in the audience said, “Who are you and what is this place?” He didn’t know it was a gallery. Advertisements for the entire event had been on posters in different parts of the city, on the radio, and in newspapers.

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Notes An incomplete version of this essay was previously published in Vor den Information, nos. 1–2 (1994): 2–4. 1. “On Site Specificity: A Discussion with Hal Foster, Renée Green, Mitchell Kane, Miwon Kwon, John Lindell, Helen Molesworth,” Documents, nos. 4–5 (1994): 11–22. 2. Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement,” in The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 132–33. 3. What Happened to the Institutional Critique?, exhibition curated by James Meyer, American Fine Arts, New York, 1993. 4. For more information about the exhibition Project Unité, see chapters 33 and 34 in this volume.

36. Eighteen Aphoristic Statements 345

37

1995

Collecting Well Is the Best Revenge The Narrative The story begins in a ramshackle antiques shack in upstate New York. Or perhaps it goes back even farther, to childhood and memories of French provincial furniture displays in department stores. At any rate I found a bolt of toile fabric with depictions of pastoral scenes from a past Europe, which I took with me to France as a kind of talisman.1 From a Frenchman I’d heard that the city of Nantes had some connection with the triangular trade. I went to the city to see what I might find. I walked around the Jardin des Plantes, where plant species from around the world were gathered, and along the port to the Jules Verne Museum. I began to notice details here and there, an African head over a doorway, a restaurant called L’Esclave, an Afro-­Antilles hairdresser. I began asking local people to tell me what they knew of the city’s history. I also mentioned the fabric, which was referred to as indienne and which was produced during the 18th century in that region. In the bedroom of the château in which I was housed, in the nearby town of Clisson, was a sofa upholstered in a similar fabric. The scene depicted Pocahontas, Columbus, and George Washington in the New World. What was the history of this pervasive fabric—which in the U.S. could symbolize a mark of distinction and which in France could represent a prosaic simulation of the past—on which situations open to narration appeared? A fabric you could stare at and make conjectures about while falling asleep. A storybook fabric. Or was it more? I began frequenting the streets of Nantes and its cultural haunts, its agencies of collection and classification. This is some of what I found.

From the Documents From La Toile imprimée et la traite des Nègres: In 1565 in negotiations in Rouen and in Dieppe it is imagined that Africans can be transported from the coast of Africa to the Americas for the exploitation of land. This trade possibility is publically presented in 1592. The ministry wishes the French navy and French commerce, in rivalry with Holland, to develop colonies and the Africans are in their eyes excellent instruments for work, the traffic in human merchandise being a possible source for serious benefits. They are in favor of this, thus in 1666 an action is passed by Parliament to buy and trade the Africans. In 1684 the Company of the West Indies, Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, was formed to conduct all of the commerce in the islands and in the Americas.2 The most beautiful of these fabrics, which the Indians termed chittes and the French merchants described as perses, were produced at Patna, at Seronge, at Tuticorin, at Madras, Negapatam, Palkot, and Sadraspatman. From here they were shipped on the vessels of the Compagnie des Indes or sent by the Persian Gulf and carried over the caravan routes of Isfahab, Bagdad, and Asiatic Turkey. The gay colors, the striking decorative quality, and the exotic character of these delicate cotton prints created a furore. It was about the year 1658 when they first appeared at the Fair of Saint-­Germain; here they were noticed by the journalist Loet among the merchandise and the gay wares displayed in the little wooden booths: Antiques, trifles; Bonbons, silks and laces; Indiennes and screens. From this time on they were used as furniture covering and drap‑ eries; rooms were hung with them and they were fashioned also into dressing gowns. On every side there was such a demand for Surates, Patnas, and Calancas that the material became scarce and expensive.

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Some artisans, therefore, conceived the idea of copying the imported fabrics according to the process brought back by travelers in the Orient, and thus the native industry of French indiennes was created.3

Edict of October 26, 1686 An attempt to control Parisians and provincials was made by the issuance of more than thirty decrees from 1686 to 1750. Guards at the gates of the city disrobed delinquents; in a single day eight or nine hundred dresses were seized and burned in the streets, while women merely appearing at their windows dressed in contraband material were sentenced. Jurés of the weavers and silk manufacturers entered houses to seize the furniture. An edict of 1717 even threatened with the galleys persons found to have introduced contraband goods or to have given refuge to smugglers. . . . Forbidden to display their costumes at the play or at the Tuileries, the élégantes wore them at their country houses. Madame de Pompadour furnished with indiennes an entire apartment at Bellevue, and the wives of the commissioners entrusted with the execution of the edicts were the first to parade their printed cottons. The total value of printed fabrics produced illegally or smuggled from abroad amounted in a single year to the incredible sum of sixteen million francs! The question became a national one. The ministers, who in apartments furnished with imported prints deliberated on the wisdom of continuing prohibitive measures, at length decided to yield. November 9, 1759, all restrictions were officially removed. Factories opened everywhere in France. The passion for indiennes, developed under the prohibitive edicts, was so deeply rooted that, strange as it may seem, they retained their popularity despite the ease with which they could be obtained.4 Enfin Jean Baulon, qui commandait en 1791 le Bon Père, quittait Nantes, le 14 mai 1793, sur la Cères, toujours à destination du Calabar, avec cet assortiment: 300 pièces de guinées bleues premiere 40 pièces guinées blanche 385 pièces chasselas de l’Inde 400 pièces indiennes 348 Operations

202 pièces liménéas 310 pièces photes coton 400 pièces nickanais d’Inde 570 pièces romal d’Inde Between 1511 to 1789 forty to fifty million Africans would be traded. The trade would officially end for France in 1848. Renée Green: So it [Nantes] was never a major port? But it had one particular aspect. I mean, in terms of the slave trade they were just dealing with the Antilles, so it was just a small thing? And it only affected Nantes? Jerome Dyôn: Bordeaux had a certain importance, but not the others. In Bordeaux there were problems with the slave trade—actually a certain level of wrongdoing. The wealth of the bourgeoisie was likewise founded in the slave trade. At the time it didn’t matter; it was normal. But the bourgeoisie in Nantes did not want to sweep it under the rug—not at all. Because all the names of those who are important in Nantes—that is, who have some economic power— are the names one finds associated with the slave trade. Their ancestors were all at least ship owners, planters, or large-­scale colonial administrators. They were all linked to the slave trade. They can belittle this—after all, it was like that for two centuries, and then it was no more—but still . . . RG: This distancing from history is an intriguing phenomenon. JD: I think that if the Île Feydeau, with all its fortifications, has remained in ruins, it is partly because of this. That is the trace, the witness. I heard a conversation that was rather interesting on this note. During the war the Americans went to bomb the port and the station. As was generally the case, they had their crucial targets. But in this case they made a mistake; instead of hitting the port, the shipyards, the stations, their bombs exploded in the center of the town. I know that there are a lot of people who regret that the bombs didn’t hit the island. That would have been practical. If the bombs had fallen on the island, it would have destroyed the historical traces of the slave trade. —From an interview with Jerome Dyôn, urban planner, Nantes 1991 37. Collecting Well Is the Best Revenge 349

Nantes Journal: “Unhappily, a Port Confronts Its Past: Slave Trade” By Marlise Simons, special to The New York Times Nantes, France—Along the quays of the Loire, fine mansions speak of the time when Nantes was a great port that loomed large in France’s colonial history. Behind the pilasters and wrought-­iron balconies lived the shipbuilders and sea captains who, local lore has it, bravely crossed the Atlantic and returned with precious produce from French possessions in the Americas. But few people here knew—or chose to remember—why exactly Nantes became so rich. Breaking a taboo, the city has mounted an exhibition showing that its past wealth came largely from running slaves from Africa to the New World. So proficient was its fleet that Nantes became France’s largest port and chief slave trader. . . . In Nantes and elsewhere in Europe the slave trade spawned its own economy. From 1707 to 1847, records show, 3,829 slaving “expeditions” left from France alone. They generated vast business for shipyards, timber merchants, rope and sail makers. Glassmakers in Bohemia and Venice sold masses of beads and other trinkets destined for barter. Smiths made chains, shackles, spiked collars and other instruments to control the slaves. Manufacturers produced guns and ammunition for the traders and for barter in Africa. Textiles to pay for slaves became so important, the exhibit notes, that in 1780 Nantes had more than 10 textile mills, employing 4,500 workers. One ship of slaves could yield up to three or four shiploads of coffee, sugar, indigo, cacao, cotton—produced by slave labor. Back in Nantes, as elsewhere in Europe, this cargo spawned sugar, chocolate, textile mills. Because of this economic web, Nantes kept trading slaves clandestinely for almost 20 years after France banned it in 1817. Yet a 12-­volume history of Nantes published in 1843 devotes just one page to slavery. A number of African officials have visited the Nantes show and asked for it to travel to West Africa. But when Nantes asked if it would interest Bordeaux, another important slave-­trading city, it was given short shrift. More interested in its links with wine, Bordeaux said: no thanks.5 . . .

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She is in the toile. Another scene in the floating narrative. She wears a nun’s dark habit and her skin is dark as well. She sits on a stone bench in a garden. A young Frenchman stands nearby looking cultivated and distressed. In the background appears a slightly sinister-­looking old woman and further in the distance is a monastery. This loss of the till-­then-­unshaken sense of my own worth effected a profound change in my life. There are illusions like daylight. When they go, all becomes night. In the turmoil of new ideas that besieged me, I lost sight of everything that had engaged my mind in the past. It was a yawning gulf of horrors. I saw myself hounded by contempt, misplaced in society, destined to be the bride of some venal “fellow” who might condescend to get half-­breed children on me. Such thoughts rose up one after the other like phantoms and fastened on me like furies. Above all, it was the isolation. These are the words of the character Ourika at her realization of others’ perception of her difference, as depicted by Clara de Duras. Ourika at the end of the novel dies in the monastery to which she’s banished herself because she can’t fit into aristocratic 18th-­century society. There was a “true” story of a black child brought from Senegal just before the Revolution by the chevalier of Boufflers and who’d been raised by his aunt, the princess of Beauvau, along with her two orphaned grandsons. That formed the seed for what became in 1824 a bestseller. But for those who don’t know that story they can still enjoy a familiarly styled toile surface of entwining floral vines on their upholstery, but which on closer viewing reveals in its gaps a “strange fruit.”

Appendix Edict of October 26, 1686 Manufacturers of silk, velvet, drapery, tapestry, haberdashery, trimming, etc., declared themselves ruined, because of the popularity of the indiennes. Because of their reiterated protests the comptroller-­general of finance, “not only prohibited the importation of Indian fabrics but by a stroke of the pen suppressed

37. Collecting Well Is the Best Revenge 351

all the workshops which had been established in the realm for the production of printed cottons.” The Edict ordered the destruction of all blocks used in printing, prohibited the sale after December 1, 1687, of all printed cottons, whether Indian importations or French copies, and ordained that any such found in the shops be burned and the merchants fined 3,000 livres. Code Noir: 1685. Signed into effect by Louis XIV in Versailles. Increased restrictions of various kinds placed on slaves. Reimposed in 1802 and reaffirmed in 1805. French Revolution: 1789 Haitian Revolution: 1791: Toussaint L’Ouverture Bois d’ébène / pièce de traite: African bodies Fleur-­de-­Lis: 1. Used as a brand into the flesh of newly arrived Africans to identify them as property in the “West Indies.” 2. “The fleur-­ de-­lis, which you find if you cut the stalk of a fern, was apparently also the only thing that remained impressed on the softening pulp inside these ancient skulls.” (Des Esseintes reflecting on the elders of his aristocratic family in Against Nature, J.-K. Huysmans) Marquis de Sade: Born 1740. Died 1814. Ourika by Claire de Duras, published 1823. Commemorative Toile by Renée Green, produced in Philadelphia at the Fabric Workshop, 1992. Displayed in: London, Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992 Vienna, Galerie Metropole, 1993 Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993 Venice, Aperto, Venice Biennale, 1993 Dallas, Dallas Museum, 1993 New York, Pat Hearn Gallery, 1994 Houston, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995

Notes Originally published in Renée Green, Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (Amsterdam: De Appel Foundation, daad , 1996), 131–39. An excerpt appeared

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as “Collecting Well Is the Best Revenge: Commemorative Toile Fabric,” in Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, edited by Joel Sanders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 98–103. 1. In 1991 Renée Green traveled to France invited by f.r.a.c ., Pays de la Loire to develop a project, which became Mise-­en-­Scène (1991), and was presented at the Huitièmes Ateliers Internationaux des Pays de la Loire, f.r.a.c ., Clisson; Green used in this installation original toile; in 1992 the artist designed and produced her own Commemorative Toile (1992) at the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; since then and to date, the Commemorative Toile has been used in all the iterations of the installation. 2. Henry-­René Allemagne, La Toile imprimée et les Indiennes de traite (Paris: Gründ, 1942). 3. Henri Clouzot, Painted and Printed Fabrics: History of the Manufactory at Jouy and Other Ateliers in France, 1760–1815 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1927). 4. Ibid. 5. New York Times, International section, December 17, 1993.

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38

1995

The Digital Import/Export Funk Office It’s been over a year now since the idea was broached of digitally transforming a work which physically existed in 3-­dimensional space yet referenced spaces beyond one room. I decided to focus on reconfiguring the material which was gathered for Import/Export Funk Office, which in some ways is still a work-­in-­progress. The elements of the material I’d been working with and which has been in the process of being transformed digitally so far consists of: Data: video, audio recordings, photos, text, books and magazines. The videos comprise approximately 26 hours of conversations, which are either between myself and someone knowledgeable about or who has an opinion about hip-­hop culture; conversations between me and Diedrich Diederichsen, the German cultural critic who was my primary subject; conversations between Diedrich and the following participants: Greg Tate, Joe Wood, B+ (Brian Cross), Medusa, Andrea Clarke, and Arthur Jafa. Recorded conversations also took place between myself and others, some of whom included George Lipsitz, Ingo, Black Madrid, and John Outerbridge. The location for these conversations spanned Cologne, New York, and Los Angeles. Other footage is shot in clubs, bars, in the street, in other people’s or Diedrich’s residence, or in my residence, or anywhere Diedrich might go or I might go. Specific elements of the work included a Sourcebook in which there is a list of all of the audiotapes which were recorded from D.D.’s collection, ranging from what he listened to at the age of twelve to present. These are listed under the heading “Diedrich Diederichsen Developmental Tapes.” There are the audiotapes themselves. These include the above and also a conversation between Isabelle Graw, art critic and publisher of Texte zur Kunst, and myself about Ulrike Meinhof and Angela Davis as role models;

selections from my collection of tapes and D.D.’s collection of tapes, with a focus on hip-­hop; excerpts from radio programs in New York and Los Angeles, and excerpts from the Black Popular Culture conference held in New York in 1991. In the original version of the work, shown in 1992 at Christian Nagel Gallery in Cologne, part of the collected material, entitled Collectanea, were books I borrowed from D.D.’s library, most relating to African diasporic culture or to “bohemia” and “subculture” as well as those relating to a mixture of these categories. I also included some books from my library, which overlapped with the kinds of books D.D. had, in addition to magazines and newspapers in German and English from different periods. Another element of the work is the Lexicon, the long version of which was recorded by a native German speaker reading American slang terms, which span the beatnik years of the 50s to the early 60s, the 60s to the 70s hippie and counterculture slang—which intersects, as does beatnik slang, Black slang—to hip-­hop slang of the late 70s, 80s, and 90s. In the short version, which is presented as sixteen rubber-­stamped plaques and sixteen typed translations, the overlaps of meaning between the different time periods are noted by colored dots which designate the definitions in current usage during these times. I wrote definitions which combine references to the various eras which were in turn translated into German. A long version of the English terms is provided in text form as a list. Since the work in part refers to the process of information gathering and the international, national, and local transfer of cultural products— specifically hip-­hop music and various materials produced as a result of the African diaspora in this case, although it alludes to other forms of cultural commerce as well—it lent itself very well to a digital transformation which makes the information which was gathered accessible, but in a playful and hopefully compelling form which links sounds, texts, video, photos, magazines, and books. Thus the disk is a new work. The possibility of actually having a form (location) which is compact, yet can store quite a lot, allowed me to move into another level of thinking about the work and how it can exist beyond its spatial presentation in a gallery or in a museum. The way the 3-­d version of the work is presented in an exhibition setting and how the cd-­rom version of the work is presented in an exhibition setting and how the cd-­rom version might work as an actual resource are very different. Up until now the presentational aspects of the work have been the ones most 38. The Digital Import/Export Funk Office 355

38.1 The Digital Import/Export Funk Office, 1996. Book list keywords, 1994. Page spread from Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents, 1996.

present and its other levels of meaning haven’t been fully explored; there has in fact been some confusion about how I intended it to function. I knew that it wouldn’t be possible to absorb all of the information which coexists in the installation, yet the sensation of these various forms coexisting, some forms being more discernable than others at varying times, was intended to allude to the mesh of impressions possible and how people consume cultural products and information in a fragmentary way. The cd-­rom format became appealing as a way of developing these ideas and forms in a more probing way than previously possible, in a form which relates to a book yet differs from a book. Of course the question can be asked, Will anyone actually use it? The answer is still unknowable, yet there is an interest in this material. In the book Technoculture, the editors describe their intent, which echoed my desire to work on this project. They present examples of existing techno-

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38.2 The Digital Import/Export Funk Office, 1996. Diagram.

culture and demonstrate how it may be possible to work as a practitioner and as a theorist: Wary, on the one hand, of the disempowering habit of demonizing technology as a satanic mill of domination, and weary, on the other, of postmodernist celebration of the technological sublime, we selected contributors whose critical knowledge might help to provide a realistic assessment of the politics—the dangers and the possibilities—that are currently at stake in those cultural practices touched by advanced technology. . . . We consider it naïve to think that the simply “nonpassive” use of a videocam, a vcr , a cassette recorder, or a personal computer constitutes a heroic act of resistance, or that it represents an achievement of political autonomy in itself.1 This project was undertaken with the University of Lüneburg in the hope of benefiting the students as well as myself. The students came from differ-

38. The Digital Import/Export Funk Office 357

ent backgrounds, some working more with computer science and others coming from art history and sociology backgrounds, both of these areas being embedded within the developing discourse of cultural studies. As an artist I hoped to bring other perspectives to these ideas. . . . Between then and now many discussions have occurred and many faxes and much material has circulated back and forth between me and those working in Lüneburg. Now the digital version of Import/Export Funk Office exists as a work-­in-­progress. The continual accretion to this version, as well as ways in which to conceptualize this unending process, are among the points I’d like to discuss here. What now exists is a new work, different in a variety of ways from the physical version. The differences and overlapping aspects of these works continue to inform my thinking and raise questions. What follows is an outline of concerns which emerged as I tried to imagine how I might describe what’s taken place since the beginning of this project to the present. It was my wish to thoroughly analyze step by step what occurred, but this was not possible for several reasons: because of the kind of project this is—one in which more and more information could be added daily from global resources; also because of conceptual and market shifts which have occurred in the field of hip-­hop culture through the course of time, as well as how my perceptions shift while in the process of continually learning about developing technologies and changing cultural forms. For these reasons a fragmented approach seems suitable. This outline and the commentary within its categories are open to elaboration. Quantity removes mastery and authority, for one can only sample, not master, a text.2

Preliminary Frustration with Form via Installation Sensorially Import/Export functioned effectively. It had been described by someone from the music press as displaying how much there is to know. In terms of viewers having access to more in-­depth possibilities of probing the connections which were being made, depending on the institution in which

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the work was installed and whether the viewer had time to investigate the materials and to return, the contact with the materials tended to be stimulating but limited by time and spatial constraints.

Entering the Digital Universe: Another Way of Conceptualizing Fragmented Knowledge Unlike the adaptations of print media to digital formats, described by George P. Landow in Hyper/Text/Theory, Import/Export consisted of material which existed in a room within which it was possible to spatially move back and forth between collected books, video tapes, audio tapes, and photos all organized spatially by shelving, or in Funk Stations or in Data boxes. Multiple sounds could be heard simultaneously and cross-­references occurred between the materials. That particular organization of material seemed suited to an adaptation in a digital format which could be arranged by using hypertext. Locating keywords as links began the process of reconceptualizing how the material could be rearranged digitally.

Thinking Process While attempting to give digital form to this material I encountered some contradictions which seem to comprise decisions which are often made when one decides to translate perception into form. Describing an ecstatic experience, for example, causes one to step back from the euphoria of the moment to notate. Similarly putting the material I amassed in interviews, from video and in audio tapes, print media collected from clubs, shops, newspapers, magazines, and conferences—everything had to be tagged in some way and given a category so that it might be linked and retrieved. The question of what kind of categories to make loomed large, as it still does. The possibility of creating yet another museumification of material which is constantly changing was frightening, yet some categories had to be established for initial entrance into the material. I decided to use the basic categories which had existed in the 3-­d version, such as Collectanea and Lexicon as openers, while I continue to elaborate on subcategories.

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Significance: Always Yet to Be Determined

cd-­rom technology, which tantalizes art historians and other students of culture by its promise of near-­instant access to large bodies of visual information, nonetheless represents only a crude and costly hint of things to come, because it brings with it some of the basic problems of book technology.3

Reception A Public Response The prototype of the Import/Export cd-­rom premiered in Berlin at the Neuger/Riemschneider Gallery. This provided a chance to present the material to people who had some knowledge of the 3-­d version yet may have only read about it. The audience consisted of artists and those interested in art, as well as some people who are critical of most art and who are more interested in communication technologies. The techno people (who in some cases do overlap with the art people— as well as exist within other categories which I won’t attempt to define) seemed pleasantly surprised that the prototype actually functioned as an information as well as entertainment source, yet that couldn’t be described as infotainment because the material was too complexly layered to be perceived as witty information bites. The links were perceived as idiosyncratic. Some Critical Response Through word of mouth a few critics who now cover cd-­rom reviews were interested in checking it out. One critic compared it with the World Wide Web in terms of the way one browses through. When thinking of how I’d like it approached I’m reminded of this quote: After a lecture on the general subject of non-­linearity by Aarseth at the Brown University Computer Humanities User Group in 1991, discussion moved to the role of criticism and theory in relation to hypertext and cybertext. Several of those attending agreed with Robert Coover’s call for a participatory criticism, one that must take place within hypertext and not in print form, which provides inadequate

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translation from one medium to the other. Aarseth himself offered the model from anthropology of the participant observer who admits that he or she influences the narrative and thus inevitably colors all results.4

Distribution: www ? “The great and defining power of digital technology lies in its capacity to store information and then provide countless virtual versions of it to readers, who then can manipulate, copy, and comment upon it without changing the material seen by others.”5 Since the time in which I began the physical version of Import/Export back in 1991 many changes have occurred culturally and in terms of information transfer. From questioning the reception of hip-­hop in Germany to currently being able to locate hip-­hop sources around the world on the World Wide Web, much has been in transition. If Import/Export functions as an information source, albeit an idiosyncratic one, how might it best be distributed and continually amended?6 It does function at present as a trace of some of my thinking processes and subjective choices, not as an authoritative guide, i.e., “Here are some ways to think about the circulation of cultural products, trends and ideas.” In terms of legal issues regarding permission of music, these are in the process of being sought by presenting the material as a valuable archive which contains examples of approaching hip-­hop culture in ways more varied and complex than those usually used. Responses are still pending. The music in this version of the cd-­rom is used as a demonstration reference, not as an all-­encompassing or definitive source.

Not Quite Utopia Where to go from here? Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to

38. The Digital Import/Export Funk Office 361

instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.7 Translation and the extent to which anything can be translated, from one place to another, or between people of varying backgrounds, in addition to that which occurs between those who speak different languages, was an initial impetus for this work, in both versions. The way transformations come about in forms—as has happened with the globalization of hip-­hop or even within languages, with creoles or with the use of English words in German sentences, for example—as a result of the attempt to communicate beyond what might be presumed to be one’s own turf has, since this project began, become much more possible and prevalent, at least in virtual reality. Meanwhile, in concrete reality it seems as if nationalisms are being exerted even more fervently than ever and that civil wars between those inhabiting the same country but of different “tribes” are erupting globally. This project will hopefully avoid being consumed by the “culture wars,” which have also become prevalent and in which decisions over preservation of canonical vs. so-­called “multicultural” material, among other topics, have been debated. Perhaps an examination of what Donna Haraway has described as the “informatics of domination” could be useful in helping to navigate through these conflicts: The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrangements in world-­wide social relations tied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system— from all work to all play, a deadly game.8 It’s my hope that this digitized material from Import/Export Funk Office, which functions in many ways as a mirror of the times, or could function perhaps as a fertilizing time capsule—depending on how long this technology can survive obsolescence and whether enough capital will be available for continued digitization and upgrading—will be able to survive, circulate, and grow.

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Notes Originally published as a booklet included in Renée Green, The Digital Import/ Export Funk Office, cd-­rom (Lüneburg: Kunstraum, University of Lüneburg, 1996). English and German versions also appeared in Games, Fights, Collaborations: Das Spiel von Grenze und Überschreitung, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller, and Ulf Wuggenig (Lüneburg: Kunstraum, University of Lüneburg, Cantz, 1996), 57–60 (German), 187–90 (English). 1. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, eds., Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xii–xiii. 2. George P. Landow, “What’s a Critic to Do?,” in Hyper/Text/Theory, edited by George P. Landow (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 35. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. The Digital Import/Export Funk Office can now be found online at http:// www.uni-­lueneburg.de/import_export/blacklabeled/about_frame.html 7. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 164. 8. Ibid.

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39

2000, 2006

Wavelinks Transmitted amidst “Dangerous Crossings” Reflections in 2006

I will attempt to indicate some of the complexity involved in the movement of cultural forms in a transnational arena via a discussion of the film series Wavelinks,1 which exists in variable forms as an installation and as a single and multi-­channel work; the series, produced between 1999 and 2002, consists of seven films addressing the circulation of both aural and visual dimensions of culture and the ways in which these are transmitted and received in different locations by various receivers and transmitters. Further ruminations about questions concerning translation, as well as the mutable state of value designation in the shifting international cultural sphere will be examined. In this work I address a focus on the specificities of working with the tensions of using filmic and video means to probe an exploration of philosophical thought and the production of sound and image, in a serial and spatial form, for single-­channel and installation forms. Issues of sampling and mutating, translocations, field recording, border crossings, immaterial labor, transmittable immaterial forms, leisure and labor, older technologies like radio combined with the variations of virtual lives and information manifest via Internet transmittal—all play a part in this rumination. Writing this text has been a means to goad myself into articulating some of these ruminations, which have been affected by the process of producing the work in different locations, as well as by the changing conditions in the world since I began working on it. 1999 to 2002 marks the first phase of Wavelinks, which I consider to be an ongoing project. During that time many events occurred, some of which

are alluded to in the films. Daily life increasingly included proximity and in some cases involvement with the actions and effects of wars, attacks, and protests. My interest in sound and its effects is a long-­term one that grew out of ways developed in childhood of recording, listening, and producing sounds and music. This awareness of the sonic dimension of experience became even more manifest while probing the questions I began to raise during the early phases of forming Wavelinks. Raising these questions became a way to further probe the different conditions in which we live and an examination of how different approaches to feeling and thinking can be made manifest by our relations to sound. What reaches us when it isn’t possible to rationalize what occurs? What also revives us amid conditions which might seem unbearable? What can create a sense of relation and momentary interconnectedness? When I thought of these things sound and music seemed to be the most consistent way in which more complex feelings could be touched, even without words. From drones to raves. The conditions under which Wavelinks was produced reflect shifting conditions in the world, as well as shifting life circumstances. From 1997 to 2002 I was a civil servant in Austria and the bulk of my earnings came from European sources and venues. From 2003 to the present I have lived in the U.S., where I’ve worked as an employee of the state of California and for a private nonprofit institution and as a private individual. These distinctions have significance in that the conditions and perceptions induced by these various states of being have affected the content of and approach to producing my work. As my work has ranged from empirical investigations in diverse locations to reflections upon conditions based on data and speculative thought, this form, involving a combination of the sonic and visual modes, as well as forms of translation, resonated with my concerns and interests. In 2000 I wrote “Wavelinks Transmitted amidst ‘Dangerous Crossings,’” which I presented in a conference in Graz, while still in an early phase of production on Wavelinks. The title alludes to the effort involved in transmitting signals across restrictive borders as well as between people living in different locations or even within the same city. At that time I was living and working in Vienna and commuting to New York and other locations to continue working and living, continually experiencing the tensions in-

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volved in border crossing as a mobile worker with recording equipment, so the act of transmission and attempts at communication were very present in my daily existence. In the title I was also alluding to a book by George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place, to which I will return later. Since then Wavelinks has been presented in a variety of combinations in different locations, from complete installation settings with designated units within which to engage with the work, to screenings. It has appeared in exhibitions with the titles Sonic Process, Social Capital, and Sound Politics,2 in places including Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, London, Vienna, New York, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. Financial and production assistance came from Barcelona, Paris, and Vienna to produce the films and from Cincinnati to produce the viewing units. The locations within which it appears are also significant in terms of how the work is interpreted, as well as the time during which it is encountered. Those with a memory of what kinds of possibilities seemed to be brewing in 1999, as well as those sensitive to the complexity of conditions now being faced, have been most receptive.

Indications Some of the contexts to which I refer are indicated in the following quotations: To hear past the historical insignificance assigned to sounds, we need to hear more than their sonic or phonic content. We need to know where they might touch the ground, momentarily perhaps, even as they dissipate in air. . . . By mid-­century, two decades after the first large onslaught of auditive mass media in the late 1920s, radio, phonography, and sound film had consolidated in the United States and expanded their overlapping positions. These media introduced on a social scale a newly pervasive, detailed, and atomistic encoding of sounds, gathering up all the visual, literary, environmental, gestural, and affective elements they brushed up against. Sounds proliferated by incorporating a greater variety through internal means; the sheer number of sounds increased as they became freighted with multiple, shifting allusions and mean-

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ings. Sounds themselves took on multiple personalities, and the nature of sound became less natural.3 The human organism is flying apart. The Song is in ruins. Sampling has cracked the language into phonemes. It breaks the morpheme into rhythmolecules. Only science can ride the shockwaves it has instigated. On Braniac, the Ultramagnetic producer becomes the Breakbeat Scientist, building molecules on my sp 12.4 What I am suggesting, however, is that the pursuit of leisure, pleasure, and creative expression is labor, and that some African American urban youth have tried to turn that labor into cold hard cash.5 This type of entertainment, encompassing a mobile sound system which produces amplified repetitive beats at a rate of 130 to 180 bpm for a crowd that dances oblivious of a sense of time, has become a common way of spending one’s leisure time in Britain 1997. Yet one needs the approval of the legislative authorities to be able to put this into practice.6 Soaring to popularity at the same time that immigrant populations in London and Paris faced increasing hostility and even attacks from anti-­foreign thugs, these recordings demonstrate the complicated connections and contradictions that characterize the links between popular music and social life. Audiences and artists in these cities carried the cultural collisions of everyday life into music, at one and the same time calling attention to ethnic differences and demonstrating how they might be transcended. Sophisticated fusions of seemingly incompatible cultures in music made sense to artists and audiences in part because these fusions reflected their lived experiences in an inter-­ cultural society.7

Made in Barcelona: Anticipating 2004 For an international audience of onlookers Barcelona seems the model of successful urban restructuring, in the wake of transformations sparked by the 1992 World Olympics Games and by European Union economic incen-

39. Wavelinks Transmitted amidst “Dangerous Crossings” 367

tives. But upon further investigating this image yet another dimension to consider arises. What interrelations, as well as tensions, does this restructuring bring between the various inhabitants who dream the city and who live in it? Who is able to realize their dreams and who is able to live? Additionally, how do global circuits of exchange affect these relations in particular localities? Barcelona provided a rich ground in which to consider themes which are prevalent in my work—relations to sound and music, language and translation, urban existence, projections onto and dreams of places, intersections and tensions of the local within global circuits. While in Barcelona I was able to have discussions over time with members of a group who published Made in Barcelona, a publication which presents a critical view of the expansion and “regeneration” of Barcelona in its move toward becoming yet another global city. In 1999 Barcelona was awarded the Royal Gold Medal by the Queen of England in accordance with the advice of the Royal Institute of British Architects (riba ). It was the first time in which a city was granted this award. As was stated in the press release, referring to Barcelona and the region of Catalonia, “Probably nowhere else in the world are there so many recent examples, in large cities and small towns, of a benign and appropriate attitude towards creating a civic setting for the next century.” Barcelona will host Forum 2004, which is promoted as the first Universal Forum of Cultures. Despite the seemingly benign references to the advantages of what will exist in this rezoned area—eco-­park by the sea “as a model of urban sustainability” and the Festival of the Arts and the Cultural exhibitions in an atmosphere in which “all voices, languages, religions, all the cultures of the world will come together to talk about cultural diversity, the conditions of peace and the sustainable city”—the group behind Made in Barcelona takes issue with this rosy image. They comment on what is not emphasized: Forum 2004 consists of the radical transformation of the Sant Adrià del Besòs–La Mina area, and the celebration of an ambitious multi-­ cultural event which sanctions this transformation with the ethical and cultural stamp of approval of the fashionable global-­village concept. This is multiculturalism à la Benetton, a formal cosmopolitanism, a postcard-­style technological modernisation in which citizen participation is nothing more than mere fiction. The aim is to hide the specific

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economic, urban and real estate operations in the shadows of the protective umbrella of generic cultural legitimacy. The actual specificity and diversity of those who live there will be bulldozed to provide a cleaned-­up and palatable version of generic multiplicity which can be more easily digested. Giuliani’s New York comes to mind. During the course of visits to Barcelona during 1999 I began a work which is at this time called Wavelinks, and in the process of working I became aware of the previous discussions, which affected my working process. As of this writing Wavelinks is still in progress. What follows are further musings on this project since production began. Some of my initial questions were these: How does sound circulate amid other forms of circulation? How is aural attention managed and how is this process disrupted? What is beyond the manageable in terms of how we hear and how we are affected by sound outside of us and in our heads and bodies? How are relations to sound and images now being thought? How does sound touch from a distance beyond time? These are some of the questions which are raised in Wavelinks, a video-­film and a cd , which samples relations to sound in glo(balo)cal urban environments. References to physical locations include Barcelona, Geneva, Vienna, Rio de Janeiro, Detroit, and New York. Continuing the unititled multiform method used in the Digital Import/Export Funk Office (1992, installation and cd-­rom ), Partially Buried (1996, video and cd track), Some Chance Operations (1999, video and cd ), circuit relations continue to be investigated and thought in temporal, spatial, linguistic, and sonic terms. Relations to presence/absence (or a state referred to by Emmanuel Lévinas as beyond being) will be probed, while fissures amid “globalization and its discontents” within rapidly changing networks of connection will be traced. The power of voices (individual and multiple), remembered voices, what’s lost in translations, inhuman sounds, what sounds connect beyond words, transmutations of sound, sounds associated with varieties of experience—fear, love, resistance, how sounds can caress and save one’s life, the possibilities opened when transmitting to unknown receivers. These are frequencies to tune into in this work.

39. Wavelinks Transmitted amidst “Dangerous Crossings” 369

What’s Happened Since the Initial Questioning? Elections in Austria, Demonstrations against the imf and World Bank, and Audio Widerstand Events (2000) In 2000 I wrote the following text: Since beginning work on this project various events in the world and in the places I inhabit have influenced my thinking and perception. One was the inclusion in the Austrian government of the far right Freedom People’s Party and the subsequent and ongoing protests, some of which include mobile sound events taking place in the street and in clubs. The other influential events have been the demonstrations against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Seattle, London and Washington DC. A year before in a published conversation the question of neutrality was raised in terms of Austria’s stance on the war in Kosovo. Once again engagement is an issue, and for me a requirement, as the positions taken up, in the case of Austria, are much more charged because it is a time of reckoning with a repressed but reemerging Nazi past, as well as a time to recognize a burgeoning diversified population and to consider how Austria’s inclusion in the European Union can jibe with the democratic ideals which the EU espouses. These tensions of the past and present must finally be acknowledged and come to terms with before Austria can emerge as a society in which all inhabitants are respectfully understood as participants in its making. In addition the fears expressed by other countries in the EU toward the political turn in Austria reflect an awareness of the emergence of the radical right in their own regions. Immigrant and poor populations become the scapegoat to rally plans for urban renewal as well as conservative populist sentiments. The ways in which we can now think of what “global artists” might do is affected, I believe, by these, among other, major political actions. The heightened awareness of the processes of the imf and the World Bank and the affects they have on vast numbers of people in different parts of the world is one more indicator of how we are linked. The effect on artists is significant considering that most institutions are sponsored by corporations. This cultural trimming is usually desired to deflect public attention

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from more insidious dealings. The interrelation of global artists to these tendencies amid redefinitions of what globalization means are issues raised by Saskia Sassen in Globalization and Its Discontents: There has been growing recognition of the formation of an international professional class of workers and of highly internationalized environments due to the presence of foreign firms and personnel, the formation of global markets in the arts, and the international circulation of high culture. What has not been recognized is the possibility that we are seeing an international labor market for low-­wage manual and service workers. This process continues to be couched in terms of the “immigration story,” a narrative rooted in an earlier historical period.8

AlterNatives, Crossings, Democratic Forms: All Up for Further Questioning The democratic possibility of electronic forms is one of the beliefs expressed in the first Wavelinks video—in its germinal sample stage—by both of the producers interviewed in Barcelona. Each refers to the democratic possibility of electronic forms, particularly affected by Internet accessibility, and to the possibility of creating a home studio with computers and additional accoutrements to enable digitization of sound. Democracy is a pretty tricky concept. This became quite apparent during the Austrian elections. What kind of democracy, one might ask? When there are still peripheries, alluded to by one of the producers, where the established global cities (London, New York, Tokyo) still rule distribution and image making in a significant way, how is democracy functioning, especially under capitalism? By way of a temporary stopping, at least of these current musings about an ongoing production, I’d like to refer to the earlier mentioned George Lipsitz book Dangerous Crossroads, in which he raises compelling ways of realizing the connections between people’s lived circumstances and what they produce. The focus is on what becomes created amid globalization, how localities are remade. His opening sentences, with which I’ll end for now, remind me of our current moment and the shifts, at least in perception and arguably in terms of physical engagement, which are occurring:

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We live in an age where dangerous crossroads are not difficult to find. Inequality and injustice all around the globe promote the disintegration of social ties and provoke violent outbursts and insurrections. Concentrated political, economic, and military power leave most people unable to determine their own destinies or to advance their own interests. Yet, as one of the characters in Jack Conroy’s novel about Depression Era America argues, “Things that seem solid as a rock may be fragile enough to collapse at a pinch. But you’ve got to pinch first.”9

2006 Conclusion Wavelinks was begun in the midst of a moment of optimism and what seemed like energizing possibilities, yet during the process of production concerns shifted. The desire to be safe, in the U.S. and in the UK, became paramount. Fear of invasions of all kinds, from within and without, have affected civil liberties. The idea of Europe as well as conditions for living there have been shifting. A utopian idea of Europe, as described by the activists and sound producers Ultra-­red, is shifting to what they describe as the exported Americanization that many experience. International travel, which was already more difficult for some than for others, as one of the Wavelinks participants noted, had previously been affected by the Schengen Treaty and is now being affected also by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In Barcelona, the Forum 2004 has come and gone. I encountered some of the remains in the form of a convention center created by the architects Herzog & de Meuron and a well-­populated shopping complex. My niece and nephew, Barcelona residents, thought the convention complex was cool. Amid all of these dangerous crossings work of different producers continues to index the potential as well as the realization of continuous transmissions and links.

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39.1 Wavelinks, 2002–4. Mixed media: seven digital films, seven octagonal units for viewing. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, 2004. Image: Mário Valente.

Notes 1. Wavelinks is an ongoing work begun in 1999 which explores and examines the many relations people have to sound. The first version’s focus is on electronically produced sound and music. The seven videos that form this series combine thematic narratives with a subjective circuitous story. Their titles are Mediations: The Wire; Into the Machine: Laptops; The Aural and the Visual; Activism + Sound; Electronic Music?; Spectrums of Sound; and A Different Reality. 2. Sonic Process was organized in 2002 by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and traveled to Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art; Social Capital was a 2004 Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program Exhibition, taking place at the Gallery of the cuny Graduate Center, New York; Sound Politics was organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2005. 3. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1999), 4, 162. 4. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun (London: Quartet Books, 1998), 25. 5. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 45. 6. Hillegonda Rietveld, “Repetitive Beats: Free Parties and the Politics of Contemporary DiY Dance Culture in Britain,” in DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain, edited by George McKay (London: Verso, 1998), 243. 7. George Lipsitz, “Immigration and Assimilation: Rai, Reggae, and Bhangramuffin,” in Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1994), 119. 8. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998), xxxvi. 9. Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads, vii.

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40

2002

Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems

The proposed octagonal units act as meta-­references to the conditions in which they are placed. A meta-­reference attempts to go beyond the denoted conditions of an event. They can exist indoors and outdoors, separately and in combination, dispersed or in tessellation. Their size and materials can vary. The contents can vary. The units can exist as armatures, partial or completed, or as cladded. The primary standard is the octagon. The units exists as quasi-­autonomous zones, affected by existing in the environment into which they are placed, yet they offer separate frames for perception, actual and metaphorical. Why system? system: 1 complex whole; set of connected things or parts; organized body of things. 2a set of organs in the body with a common structure or function. b human or animal body as a whole. 3 method; scheme of action, procedure, or classification. 4 orderliness. 5 (pre. by the) prevailing political or social order, esp. regarded as oppressive* get a thing out of one’s system colloq. get rid of a preoccupation or anxiety. The notion of imagined systems in connection with existing systems is an extension of the thinking which stimulated fam (Free Agent Media), as proposed seven years ago. An excerpt from fam proposal: In the past we have seen artists imitate museums and factories, as well as publishing endeavors. Artists have often mimicked official institutions and functions, sometimes as ironic yet metaphorical gestures and sometimes as functioning operations which allow artistic play and business sense. Just remember the Bureau de recherches surréalistes,

Broodthaers’s Museum, Warhol’s Factory. Artists are always making up mirror institutions reflecting dominant society. How is this different, how is it the same? While stemming from a related desire to collect as well as function in a position of strength in relationship to society, to bring into the world things which we want to exist, fam seeks to manoeuver between irony and sincerity. We must play all roles, these are the rules of the game. This notion resembles previous endeavors. But rather than establish a location like a museum (even a moving one) which collects and displays, or a factory which produces and sells and advertises, we are consciously in the “post-­industrial phase,” which means there is no space to collect and that there is a backlog of products to get rid of with no place to store them, thus making advertising more and more necessary. The process of production itself and how to distribute our products which in turn reflect that process and these times is our material, as well as is the social arena in which all of the above exists. This activity differs from that of traditional collecting, preserving and acquisitioning for display and nostalgia. Because of the changing economies and technologies we too have undergone an Umfunktionierung or functional transformation. So rather than a factory we are a floating company. We exist in the minds of our representatives and via electronic currents. Our collections exist in tiny electronic circuits. We’re not weaned of this acquisitive urge, but at times we try to curb it. We too play on peoples wishes and repressed fantasies.1 In the interim between then and now, and after having witnessed and experienced the results of many travels, fam felt it constraining to seek primarily empirical knowledge amid the continued craziness manifested around the existing globe and decided to delve deeper into the vast storehouse of existing imaginary lands and cultures. These provided examples of other imagined systems. It was an idiosyncratic endeavor of a circuitous cast. This direction was an extension of a previously touched upon notion:

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The Living Circuit Unit Unlike “a journey around an accustomed territory,” one definition of circuit, the definition of “a roundabout journey or course” is more appropriate to the suggestion of a living circuit. Material which is being currently produced or has been produced in the recent past and which deals in a variety of ways with developing reassessments of the function of ethnography will be included in this collection. An example of the directions I’m referencing is cited by Catherine Russell in Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video: Ethnography in its most expansive sense refers not to the representation of other cultures but to the discourse of culture in representation. . . . Especially in cross-­cultural viewing situations, many films take on ethnographic aspects, as “ethnography” becomes less of a scientific practice and more like a critical method, a means of “reading” culture and not transparently representing it.2 Now this reading or re-­reading is also being applied in the Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems, or s.o.u. Project, to imaginary places and imagined systems, the empirical “evidence” and that which can be and has been imagined forming a circuit. The structure proposed grew out of an interest in the hut as a basic unit which has been used historically for diverse purposes. Garden settings are one of its common locations. It has been used as a place of rest, of shelter in urban settings, as well as a place of fantastic imaginings. The historical association to the cabinet of curiosities as well as to a subjective project like Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau were other links. From these associations grew others which are linked to the notion of “architectural entertainments” and forms of architecture which have existed in garden settings, historical, commemorative, and fantastic. Variations, recombinations, mutant versions of previous dream places reconceived for the pleasure and stimulation of now. Places of rest amid input. Places to focus on the sky and vegetation. The proposed unit for the Standardized Octagonal Unit for Imagined and Existing Systems is an octagonal form made of material including wood, metal, glass, etc., to be determined based on cost and availability.

40. Standardized Octagonal Units 377

Architect proposed: Stefan Rabeck, Vienna Elements: 8 units creating a dispersed circuit in a garden or park. Roofed and enclosed as well as open structures. Seating units. Video monitors, dvd players, amplifier, speakers (number and type to be specified—4 minimum). These elements are to be built into the walls of the specified units and can be triggered with a motion detector. Size: Internal space 300 cm in diameter and 260cm high. Contents: Variable. Audio, video, slides collections. Stimulations for the s.o.u. Project include reconsiderations of the varieties of work produced by Charles and Ray Eames, Lina Bo Bardi, in addition to Sir Patrick Geddes’s Outlook Tower which included a “cell of meditation,” a slide series of dissolving views of Edinburgh and the Index Museum. Subject categories for imaginary places indexed include: alphabets, colors, Africa, islands, food, vegetables, fruit, words, numbers, work, women, men, sex, intoxication, senses, synesthesia, landscapes, flora, fauna, machines, music, and sound. These will be presented in the closed units in audio, video and slide formats.

Notes Originally published in Documenta 11, Platform 5: Exhibition, Catalogue, edited by Okwui Enwezor (Ostfildern-­Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 563. 1. Renée Green, Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (Amsterdam: De Appel Foundation, daad , 1996), 92–94. See also “Free Agent Media / fam ” in this volume. 2. Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), xvii.

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2004

Sound Forest Folly Intermediary Units of a Variable Number

Description: A variable number of octagonal or circular units with a seating space attached to the structure and cloth attached around the upper perimeter to create an enclosed or partially enclosed space. The material may be translucent or opaque and can vary for each unit. It should be possible to see the tree branches and sky through the top. There is a sound source for each unit, but this will be above the unit, out of reach, attached to a tree, if possible. Intermediary Units ideally act as a medium between perceivers who can experience: What is not there What is visible What is heard What is physically encountered What one does in relation to objects, elements, or people What is felt What can occur when one pauses What occurs when one moves Impermanence, imagined locations, vanished gardens, fragmented scenarios, nature signifiers, tedium, repetition, shifting combinations of sound created by overlays of different tracks of sound, which change based on the slipping measure of time produced by the programmed sound apparatus, coexist in the Sound Forest Folly. The sounds are meant to be haunting, echo-­like, whispers like woodland shadows, accumulative shatterings, gurgles of the lower depths, incantatory recitations, laments and exquisite tones. Sound changes and makes spaces.

They create an ambient effect mixing identifiable and unidentifiable sounds which have been altered. Forests and follies are places which can suggest feelings of foreboding as well as a strange sensation of being lost and out of time. Within that atmosphere the sounds not usually found in a forest in the Netherlands or elsewhere are combined with the existing sounds. Follies can be cheerful and morbid; “pleasure is personal and difficult to define” (Barbara Jones). “What seems paradoxical about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears” (Walter Benjamin). Or is heard.

Note This is a proposal submitted for the exhibition Lustwarande 04: Disorientation by Beauty, which took place in Tilburg’s Park de Oude Warande, Netherlands, in 2004. The exhibition was organized by the Fundament Foundation.

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42

2004

Why Systems? Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language definition: system (noun): 1. an assemblage or combination of things or parts forming a complex or unitary whole: a mountain system; a railroad system. 2. any assemblage or set or correlated members: a system of currency; a system of shorthand characters. 3. an ordered and comprehensive assemblage of facts, principles, doctrines, or the like, in a particular field of knowledge or thought: a system of philosophy. 4. a coordinated body of methods or a complex scheme or plan of procedure: a system of government; a winning system at bridge. 5. any formulated, regular, or special method or plan of procedure: a system of marking, numbering, measuring. 6. due method or orderly manner of arrangement or procedure: There is no system in his work. 7. a number of heavenly bodies associated and acting together according to certain natural laws: the solar system. 8. the world or universe. 9. Astron. a hypothesis or theory of the disposition and arrangements of the heavenly bodies by which their phenomena, motions, changes, etc. are explained: the Ptolemaic system; the Copernican system. 10. Biol. a. an assemblage of parts of organs of the same or similar tissues, or concerned with the same function: the nervous system; the digestive system. b. the entire human or animal body: an ingredient toxic to the system. 11. one’s personality, character, etc.: to get the meanness out of one’s system. 12. a method or scheme of classification: the Linnaean system of plants. 13. Geol. a major division of rocks comprising sedimentary deposits and igneous masses formed during a geological period. 14. Physical Chem. a combination of two or more phases, as a binary system, each of which consists of one or more substances, that is attaining or is in equilibrium. 15. Checkers. either of

42.1 Author’s notebook, 2002.

the two groups of 16 playing squares on four alternate columns. 16. the structure or organization of society, business, or politics or of society in general: She could never adapt herself to the system.—Syn. 1. organization. 6. articulation. 8. cosmos. 10b. organism. My work has for some time included multiple parts, created to coexist and thus create a density of layers, spatially, geometrically, sonically, visually, and textually. The accretive process has been one that runs through all of my production, and the intersecting forms of these different elements affect how it is possible for a perceiver to engage. The transmittal is not linear, nor is it monodimensional. In several projects since 2002 I have created structures which I term units, not pavilions, but units. The reason for assigning these structures this name is a specific one. Units imply a segment, a part of something else which belongs to a system. Wavelinks (2002) is one such system. In it the spatial and structural elements intersect with the aural,

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visual, and time-­based elements in order to create a specific environment for viewing, for moving between, and for pausing in. As I’m concerned with the multiple ways in which perception can take place, and as I’m engaged in testing how this intersects with what a perceiver can experience in particular environments, I create the structures which I want the perceiver to encounter and within which I’d like him or her to pause. In approaching the combination of film or video presented with architecture (a built or assembled space), I’ve considered the various ways in which attempts have been made historically to focus the attention of the perceiver, who in filmic parlance might be referred to as the spectator. To call attention to the difference between a traditional cinematic encounter in a movie theater I prefer to use the term perceiver rather than spectator, as the notion of one who perceives involves a more active and diversified process than does the notion of a spectator, which implies a more static position, a vessel waiting to be filled. I have elaborated on these differences in different works and essays, in which I’ve examined such ideas as that of “expanded cinema,” the “invisible cinema,” and “velvet light trap,” as well as modes of circulation within the films themselves, such as in those of Alain Resnais, for example. What interests me is a combination of processes and questions. The unit as a form of mediation between whatever environment into which it is placed, outdoor or indoor, baroque museum or warehouse, is a consideration. The size of the unit in relationship to body proportions which allow individual or relational encounters between perceivers while in the space. Part of what occurs is that the perceiver’s attention is used as a medium, by creating a space in which perceivers can focus on sound attached to their ears via headphones and image on the monitor screen and sink into their own reveries more easily because the number of external distractions is reduced while the translucence and spaces between the panels allow a view of other units in a system, and an indication of their interconnection, in the case of Wavelinks, or where there is an intersection of sounds of the environment with recorded sounds, as in Elsewhere?/Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems (2002). A system of color coding or panel coding is used in each of the serial works, which indicate each unit’s difference. The structures, in the case of Wavelinks, Elsewhere?/s.o.u .s and Sound

42. Why Systems? 383

Forest Folly (2004), are octagonal and initially grew out of an interest in the hut as a basic unit, which has been used historically for diverse purposes. It has been used as a place of rest, of shelter in urban settings, and as a place of fantastic imaginings. In thinking about the units as intermediary structures I’ve been interested in the approaches of Hélio Oiticica (Parangolés) and Lygia Clark in creating human-­scale forms, which point to the role of an object used as a device for mediation, and the ensuing social dimension possible in testing the form. This differs, as art historian James Meyer observed about the units, for example, from Dan Graham’s video-­viewing pavilions, in which the reflective mirrored surfaces of their containers are of signal importance. The intimate cocoon-­like space created within the unit, which is portable and can exist in variable spaces, is analogous to a wearable object, as it is made of industrial fabric, yet which is also a shelter made of standardized parts. The Wavelinks units relate to what Frank Popper, in describing Clark’s work, calls “the multi-­sensorial participation and a type of aesthetic behavior which reconciles the problem of individual and group activity” growing out of research into the optical and plastic. In the case of Wavelinks I would add that time-­based visual and aural media become an additional component to the social component which can be viewed in the videos and experienced in the units. From these associations grew others which are linked to the notion of “architectural entertainments” and forms of architecture which have existed in garden settings, historical, commemorative, and fantastic, as well as ritualistic and contemplative settings in which interlinking shapes, often octagonal, are in tessellation—from Persian miniatures to the Alhambra. The units allow variations, recombinations, mutant versions of previous dream places reconceived for the pleasure and stimulation of the moment of interaction. Places of rest amid external input.

Geometry The use of geometry can be viewed as a way of providing imaginary stability and the perception of calm amid chaotic circumstances. Historically, octagons have been used in different spaces for contemplation and concentration. 384 Operations

42.2 Wavelinks, 2002–4. Diagram, exhibition handout. Galeria Filomena Soares, 2004.

In the 19th century Orson Fowler, as is noted in The Octagon Fad,1 published in 1848 a book entitled A Home for All, or, The Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building. In it he praises the benefits of spaciousness the octagonal-­ shaped building provides in contrast to the constraints and additional economic expense of rectagonal buildings. Many octagonal buildings were constructed in response. This is but one example of the use of this form. For Wavelinks the combination of spatial sites for listening and viewing can also be perceived genealogically with the ways that music has been associated with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, forming what Boethius (ca. ad 480–524) termed a quadrivium, because of the possibility of reducing music to mathematical proportions. In Wavelinks the transfer and travel of sound and light waves occur within the units in which the process can be discerned in the flickers of light and ambient sound encountered while moving between them.

A Historical Reference: The Percipient and the Subject Excerpt from Elsewhere? (2002) Script Intertitle: existing systems 2 Structural Behaviour (1978), Documenta 6 (1977) Footage: images of outdoor works in Documenta 6 Intertitle: Increasingly the experience of the new sculptures has become centered in the body of the perceiver, who for extended time undergoes the sensation of being suspended in the act of perceiving and transparent to its process and texture. He is usually allowed no culminating moment when the flow of his perceptions can be condensed into a holistic structured overview. Instead the means of the sculptural experience remain the end of the experience. To a considerable extent the interacting perceiver–work unit is not in kind different from other activity of ordinary life. It is living, however, kept before one in the present, not allowed to sink into the past or to become fixed as knowledge or habit.2 Footage: images of outdoor works in Documenta 6

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Intertitle: 1970 The subject of art is the percipient engaged in a self-­producing activity that, itself, replaces appearance and becomes the virtual image of the work. The language organizes a system, logical or random in form, that appropriates undifferentiated phenomena into a continuum that makes empirical verification meaningless thereby shifting all information within the system beyond perceptual experience.—Douglas Huebler, Statement, 1970

Commentary But let us not forget that looking at Green’s videotapes as isolated audiovisual projections can only capture one component of these works. As important as their actual content may be, a comparable impact lies in the context in which they are viewed, or to put it more precisely, in their setting as well as their institutional and cultural framework.3

Notes 1. Carl Frederick Schmidt, The Octagon Fad (New York: Dover, 1958). 2. Roald Nasgaard, Structures for Behaviour: New Sculptures by Robert Morris, David Rabinowitch, Richard Serra and George Trakas (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978). 3. Nora Alter, “Beyond the Frame: Renée Green’s Video Practice,” in Shadows and Signals (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000), 169.

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43

2005

Relay Relay, a definition: 1. a series of persons relieving one another or taking turns; shift. 2. a fresh set of dogs or horses posted in readiness for use in a hunt, on a journey, etc. 3. Sports. a. See relay race. b. a length or leg in a relay race. 4. Mach. an automatic control device in which the settings of valves, switches, etc., are regulated by a powered element, as a motor, solenoid, or pneumatic mechanism actuated by a smaller, sensitive element. 5. Elect. a device, usually consisting of an electromagnet and an armature, by which a change of current or voltage in one circuit can be made to produce a change in the electric condition of another circuit or to affect the operation of other devices in the same or another electric circuit. 6. (cap.) U.S. one of a series of low-­altitude, active communications satellites for receiving and transmitting radio and television signals. 7. to carry forward by or as by relays: to relay a message. 8. to provide with or replace by fresh relays. 9. Elect. to retransmit (a signal, message, etc.) by or as by means of a telegraphic relay. 10. Elect. to relay a message. [me relai (n.), relai(en) (v.) < mf relais (n.), relai(er) (v.), or : to leave behind, equiv. to re- re - + laier to leave, laxare; see relax ] The work of Renée Green continues to explore and examine the complex webs and circuits within which we live and our ways of imagining existence amid and beyond these. As the work investigates relations to a number of processes and conditions, it is understandable that dynamic models encompassing multiple effects provide entry points. Relay, the term and the exhibition, suggest ways of thinking about the recent work. This work occurs in different and overlapping forms and takes place over time and in multiple locations. It includes physical objects, projected films, videos, a website, a

preliminary database, and processes of interaction and labor, which can be understood as different kinds of relay effects. Relay (2005) consists of two projects, Code: Survey (2006) and Elsewhere? Here (2004), presented with new work, all of which focuses on the relationality and tensions arising in and between locations, movement, and passages of time. Historical knowledge consists of transmissions in which the sender, the signal, and the receiver all are variable elements affecting the stability of the message. Each relay willingly or unwittingly deforms the signal according to his own historical position. Historical recall never can be complete nor can it be even entirely correct, because of the successive relays that deform the message.—George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962)

We live in a time very different from 1999, when Green last exhibited solo work in Austria. Historical recall involves a relay process, suggested by the above quotes included in the video Elsewhere? (2002). The Elsewhere? Here project emerges from an ongoing interest in imagining what kinds of existences can be possible to effect “the dream of better living” in the present. Does this only lead to delusion and calamity or is something else possible? The project encompasses the Elsewhere? Matrix, now transmuted from its original proposal (to attempt the creation of a “dream library” conceived of as an imaginary system inserted into an actual location for the Rem Koolhaas–designed Seattle Public Library) into the current prototype for a Movable Contemplation Unit (mcu ) (2004) and print version. The proposition to insert new links to imaginary places within an existing library catalogue still stands. A simultaneous video projection of the video Elsewhere?, first presented in Documenta 11, and Here Until October 2004, (2004) finished just before the U.S. 2004 election results were in, will be continuously screened. The juxtaposed videos provide an unusual meditation on current conditions of living, in the U.S. and elsewhere, combining lyricism, beauty, history, silence, anger, violence, and hope. Reflections on these themes intersect the other components in the exhibition. Code: Survey is a work which exists as a physical structure of glass, film, and steel in the Caltrans Headquarters of the California Department of Transportation in downtown Los Angeles. The work was commissioned by Caltrans and the architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis and opened to the 43. Relay 389

public in February 2005. The work also exists as a website and is thus accessible internationally. Green was interested in testing what ways a public artwork can now exist and how it might be possible to experience a work beyond a fixed location by constructing a dense information network, which exists as another dimension of the work, in which a variety of historical, structural, and subjective materials, in the forms of audio, video, still images, and texts can be excavated for examination, via links, and thus allow one’s perception of a physical encounter with a place to alter or to imagine locations and relations to movement even if a physical encounter doesn’t occur. What emerges from this engagement with data, space, and time allows one to explore and question utopian claims of freedom associated with mobility. To allow for the possibility to probe deeper and embedded meanings of the relationship between what is produced to transport people and cargo within the context of culture and history based on data obtained by surveying the notion of transportation. To create a more intimate possibility for experiencing the space and structure of the building, which refers to the circuitous, engineered, constructed, and physical aspects of how movement and transportation take place and how they are imagined in a specific sense, which refers to Caltrans, District 7, and California, as well as in relation to the world and beyond. To allow individuals a chance to search at their own leisure material related to what they produce, as well as to provide a space which others can access to explore these dimensions. Relay refers to signals, attempts to make contact beyond a physical place through time and distance, and the videos in the exhibition serve that role. Relay also includes references to how thought processes are developed and how that can matter to what kind of world we can inhabit. Education, as a field of institutionalized knowledge production, is a contested, possibly damaging and potentially potent activity to effect being in the world. The ways in which it can be perceived are affected by the locations and political climate in which it takes place. An aspect of the exhibition contains intersections or relays between the Innsbruck Kunstraum Project Room, in which students’ and recent graduates’ work is presented, as the role of education and what is passed on from one person to the next is put into question. To examine the process of how knowledge is created, the effects of the conditions under which this takes place and what this can mean, Green invited current and former students, Jürgen Bock, the director of the 390 Operations

Maumaus—Escola de Artes Visuais in Lisbon, and two professors, Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, from the departments of sociology and English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to participate in the “relay” attempted between Lisbon, Santa Barbara, Vienna, and Innsbruck.

Note Originally published as a brochure for Green’s exhibition Relay, Kunstraum Innsbruck, 2005. Reprinted in The Sociological View (Innsbruck: Kunstraum Innsbruck, 2006), 230–32.

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Index (From Oblivion): Paradoxes and Climates Thought Experiments: Warm-­up Notes

A Rare Thing: A Thinking Space in a Living Space: Kurfürstenstr. 123, Berlin What better way to conduct a reflection on a place than to think about it in relation to one’s current location and time, as well as in relation to multiple locations and times? The physical space becomes a catalyst and a frame for musings and speculation. Contemplating Einstein. What can that mean? The remnants of that process will be on display during the designated exhibition period and circulate beyond that proscribed time and location. “Thought experiments” will be conducted in the flat. What form will they take: a movie, a script, a story, a book, an installation, an event, a video or sound work, all or none of the above? That will be determined by the valuable and rare opportunity to devote time and space to this contemplation. What forms will occur within the designated time period and which will extend beyond it? That will depend on the possibility to reflect daily and on factors beyond control. The space will nonetheless be open to the public on the scheduled opening date.

Anti-­museification “He stated in his will that he didn’t want any of his residences to become museums. . . . He was allergic to the idea of setting up shrines to his ­memory.”1

Early Project Brainstorming: May 23, 2004 Playtime and Einstein in Berlin Einstein and Playtime in Berlin Playtime in Berlin Playtime/Einstein/Berlin Einstein in Playtime Playtime Einstein Playtime Berlin Kurfürstenstr. 123 Potsdamer Platz heavy tourism and buses eclectic new buildings what was there before? vanished buildings new city bankrupt city post-­WWII Paris American push American shelter American escape Escaping America Relativity Time Relativity Time Relativity Time/Playtime

More Brainstorming: May 26, 2004 Places which no longer exist. The address exists but the buildings have changed, or the street name has changed, or the street is gone. Rethinking and revisiting different projects. Probing aspects which weren’t previously engaged, or going more profoundly into them. For example, Secret (1993), l’Unité; or Certain Miscellanies (1996), Berlin. Photographic work. Earlier drawings, collages and paintings. Posters.

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Making everything made into pictures, sound, and film—digitally. Focusing on the details of works presented in group contexts or on details of videos content, or on an installation’s content and components. Bigness, smallness, mobility, parasites, and other clichés of the moment or past. Perpetual returns: Utopias, imaginary places, rococo and baroque and mannerism simultaneously. The idea of a city, of America, of Europe, of L.A., of Berlin, of NY, of glamour, of bodies, of fun, of sex, of music, of cool. Searchin’: What exists, what’s missing. The repeating attraction of geometry, slightly skewed or “eccentric,” as in “eccentric abstraction” and Eva Hesse. Breakdown amid standardization, rupture, “outside,” “out there.” Vanished gardens. Lost places. That which is speedily relegated to the past or to the archaic in order to propel another development of capital: France’s denial of the ways in which it was and is formed by colonialism, its insistence on separating itself off from what it views as an extraneous period irrelevant to its true national heritage, forms the basis of the neoracist consensus of today: the logic of segregation and expulsion that governs questions of immigration, and attitudes toward immigrants, in France. The logic of exclusion has its origins in the ideology of capitalist modernization, an ideology that presents the West as a model of completion, thus relegating the contingent and the accidental—the historical, in a word—to the exterior.2

Index Prelude Albert Einstein reference in the index of The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret War against the World’s Most Famous Scientist by Fred Jerome: Einstein, Albert affiliations with organizations cited as subversive, 173–1743 antiracist statements, 285–286 death of, 264 first impressions of America, 23 in Germany, 3–5, 14, 17–20, 24, 39, 266–271 394 Operations

political joining of, 121–126 sources on, 331–333 speaking English, 8n under surveillance, 93 in Switzerland, 14–16 videotapes on, 333–334 Einstein Contemplated in Relation to People (and Pacifists) Occupying the Same Timeframe. Muriel Rukeyser, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Lou Harrison, Eric Hobsbawn.

Notes Originally published in German as “Index (Aus dem Vergessen): Paradoxe und Klimata,” in Einstein Spaces, edited by Yvonne Leonard (Berlin: Einstein Forum, 2005), 90–94. 1. Erika Britzke, former art teacher and researcher of Einstein’s Caputh house, quoted in Jan Otakar Fischer, “Einstein’s Haven: Before He Fled Nazism, the Scientist Built a Lakeside Retreat in Germany,” International Herald Tribune, June 30, 2005. 2. Kristin Ross. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1995), 196. 3. “Besides these 33 [organizations], some 50 other groups are not listed (most are included in later fbi reports) but simply described as ‘either scientific, cultural, pacifist, anti-­discrimination or Russian [World War II] relief.”

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Climates and Paradoxes Climates and Paradoxes The tendency of nature to incline or drift away from understanding can be read in the word climate. Derived from the ancient Greek word klima, it refers not only to the latitudinal zone of the earth but also to an inclination to slope. Climate therefore refers both to what falls from the sky and what falls away from understanding. Climate also describes the changing atmospheres in which we live.

A Story Once upon a time there was a country. A newly formed country. Think of this country as you might imagine a last-­born child to a family in which its siblings were much older and had gained much experience in the ways of the world. But this baby-­becoming-­a-­country didn’t have a simple birth. Imagine a very old self-­consciously magical baby, formed during a gestation of centuries and composed of different regions and customs. When it was born it felt very old and complex. Even when it was born it had a wild imagination. It was a mystic. It was named D. The aggregate baby country grew swiftly. The twentieth century began. D grew restless and belligerent very rapidly. As D was a country and not an actual baby, it had inhabitants. Who were these people? How did they form D? Were the people and D one? What were their beliefs? Among the many inhabitants there lived one very curious and dissatisfied boy named E. He was quite happy in nature and enjoyed contemplating its varied effects. What disturbed him most was any suggestion that these

pursuits might be upset by the militaristic order D wanted to impose on the population. E planned an escape from D. He managed to insulate himself in the mountainous country of S. There he studied, hiked, enjoyed life. E became a citizen of S. He married M. His thoughts were occupied with images of time, demonstrated by trains and lightning. Eventually E was hired to teach in S and then in P. He continued thinking and formulating his theories. Although he didn’t plan to return to D, he was lured there by an offer of esteem from respected university colleagues, freedom to continue his thought experiments without teaching, financial independence, and the vibrant city of B. Little did E know that soon after his return, war would be declared by D. E was surprised to find that most of his colleagues enthusiastically wanted war. E was isolated by his pacifism.

Another Story: The BNV Like most buildings in Berlin from the first half of the Twentieth Century the building that housed the Bund Neues Vaterland (bnv ) is no longer in existence. Its address was 125 Kürfurstenstrasse. Now a high-­rise apartment building built in the 1970s has the addresses 123 and 125 Kürfurstenstrasse. The bnv was formed on 11 November 1914 by a heterogeneous group of people whose opposition to the war politics of the German imperial establishment bound them together. It comprised conservatives, liberals, democrats, socialists, pacifists, internationalists, and philanthropists from all sectors of the middle class and from the nobility. The strategy of the bnv was twofold. On the one hand, it tried to influence the decisive circles in government by presenting petitions and memorandum to the Reichskanzler and to the members of the Reichstag. On the other hand, through its own publishing house, it distributed pamphlets and brochures aimed at winning over the opinion of leaders in the population. After having been severely restricted in its communication with the public and in its internal circulars, all activity of the bnv was finally forbidden by the military authorities on 7 February 1916. Just

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before the revolution of 9 November 1918, on 14 October, the bnv was reestablished and backed the revolution. Albert Einstein is listed as number 29 on a membership list, dating June 1915. His one public statement against war during 1914–18, “My Opinion on the War,” was included in a book entitled Goethe’s Country 1914–1916. In his last sentence he says: “Why make so many words when I can say everything in one sentence, moreover, in a sentence fitting to me as a Jew: Honor your master Jesus Christ not only with words and songs but, above all, by your deeds.”

Ruins What happens when ruins are eliminated? What new beginnings are possible? What is the difference between aestheticizing gradual decay and aestheticizing the effects of disaster? The breaking up of a city or monument certainly implies a loss of meaning and its replacement by another, new meaning (“the end of paganism”), but in order for this new meaning to manifest itself distinctly, the grandeur—or claritas—of the original meaning must somehow be perceived.

Newness The desire for a new way of living since the unification of Germany in 1990 is described most visibly in the rebuilding which has been in process since that time. Volume 1999/2000 Bauwelt Berlin Annual. The fourth and last year. Not that construction in the newborn capital is truly finished. But Berlin-­Mitte is going strong. Let’s go and see. You can follow these crisscrossing paths of city exploration, some which discover the world of banks, others follow Brecht’s last trails . . . a reliable guide to brand-­ new architectures still fresh with the early tinge of birth: out of town,

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in the town, and back to the always beloved quarters where life is returning in full force, and to those places where the bristly and the sleek put up with each other in incompatible proximity, and where Berlin is probably more like itself than anywhere else. The question arises, what ways is it possible to embrace what is difficult to grasp without eliminating it? The new can only be new, really new, if it is produced through memory and repetition—but a memory and repetition which at the same time introduce a new element.

Haunting We are haunted by some things we have been involved in, even if they appear foreign, alien, far away, doubly other.

Paradoxes It does seem paradoxical to find so many indications of Einstein all over Berlin and its surrounding parts, as he never physically returned to Germany after 1932. This is memory’s remarkable feat: To bring back the dislocated and the dead. But how? The question remains. Einstein inhabited the place he felt most at home, in Caputh, for only three years. How might we ponder the paradox: To exorcise not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right . . . to . . . a hospitable memory . . . out of a concern for justice.

Strangers Einstein in many instances during his life would be cast as the stranger. The stranger is described as someone “who comes today and stays tomorrow.” Some of the difficulties involving strangerhood are that the stranger is

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unclassifiable; it is not clear whether the stranger is a friend or a foe; the stranger’s arrival points to “an event in history, rather than a fact in nature.” The stranger is separate from time immemorial. The strange is “multiply incongruous.” An anomaly.

Beyond Isolation Our life is consentaneous and far-­related. This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends. Nature is intricate, overlapped, interweaved and endless. It has become commonplace to focus primarily on Einstein’s scientific achievements to the exclusion of his convictions, not only for peace, but for justice and self-­determination. Iconization and idealization can diminish subjects of affection. They become screens or mirrors. In the general cosmos of Einsteinia, his political associations have been neutralized. To respect his memory it is important to remember him in the context of others, who supported causes upholding civil liberties and peace worldwide. These others were also cast as strangers. These others, some of whom he knew and others whom he did not, but who lived during some time during which he lived, were also cast as strangers. They are remembered here together. All were pacifists: Muriel Rukeyser, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Lou Harrison. All were internationalists. Esperanto, the dream universal language, expressed a hope they shared: Peaceful exchange. All of them lived simultaneously in the United States after World War II. The times they spanned are 1868 to 2003. In 1949, as McCarthyism and suppression of civil liberties were rapidly subverting America’s freedom, Einstein in a little-­known statement, de‑ clared: “The flag is a symbol of the fact that man is still a herd animal.” Each of these people fought the herd instinct. Remembering their work and deeds can lessen feelings of isolation and even inspire amid deep cynicism. Poet, activist, vocalist, actor, lawyer, linguist, social scientist, scholar, novelist, scientist, composer, musician, athlete, film editor, aviator. They together claimed these titles.

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Bonvenon! Bonvenon means welcome in Esperanto. You are welcome here. Might it be possible “this time to grant ghosts the right . . . to . . . a hospitable memory . . . out of a concern for justice”? The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow. Ensemble vivre, vivre ensemble.

Credits A film by Renée Green Research: Javier Anguera Climates: Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Eduardo Cadava, Emerson and the Climates of History. Another Story: The bnv : Hubert Goenner and Giuseppe Castagnetti, “Albert Einstein as Pacifist and Democrat during World War I,” Science in Context 9, no. 4 (1996). Ruins: Salvatore Settis, “Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed,” in Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, edited by Michael S. Roth, Claire Lyons, and Charles Merewether. Newness: Bauwelt Berlin Annual: Chronology of Building Events, 1996 to 2001, edited by Martina Düttmann and Felix Zwoch; Eduardo Cadava, Emerson and the Climates of History. Haunting: Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters. Paradoxes: Jacques Derrida, quoted in Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters. Strangers: Georg Simmel quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence. Beyond Isolation: Fred Jerome, The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret War against the World’s Most Famous Scientist. Bonvenon!: Jacques Derrida, quoted from a lecture, November 2003, University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Note This text is a literal transcription of the intertitles and voices that constitute the film Climates and Paradoxes (2005); sources are identified as they appear in the film credits.

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2007

Why Reply? The title of my presentation refers to participation of any kind in relation to international cultural events (ice s), as well as more generally to the question of why engage, discuss, respond, or question. What kind of labor is now implied by an acceptance of an invitation? What are its rewards? What can now be expressed or created and in what ways and to whom, in ways that can matter—matter meaning having the possibility to affect mental and perceptual shifts? What misunderstandings occur, especially as the terrain now designated is globalized, meaning “(unified around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition, and resistance).”1 Questions were raised yesterday by Multitudes during the presentation of their website concerning the Documenta 12 magazine project and Multitudes’ decision to reframe their invitation and the kind of relationship that might be possible to Documenta 12. The decision by the d 12 artistic directors to include a global magazine component that can contribute content to the event can be read as an extension of the above-­mentioned capitalogic, creating another phase in the expansion of cultural industry absorption that attempts to circumscribe an ideally autonomous sector, in contrast to contending in the space for debate that previously allowed critical stances to exist. In addition, a shift of labor is created, that presents the possibility of becoming an assumedly manageable content provider chosen from a wide variety of possible global content, thus mirroring shifts of the kind of labor and participation increasingly requested of artists in relation to these kinds of events. Despite the claims of inclusion—and this inclusion can also be thought in relation to the notion of a global mixing, about which many questions can still be raised—what can be examined are the ramifications of an inclusion of magazines and journals that have previously existed as forms of mediation between an event and an audience or public. Editorial offices

and publications are not a naturalized agora but represent particular positions that also don’t necessarily reflect the range of thought and actions that currently exist. Nevertheless, what does this blending of all forms of supposed creative and intellectual power from all around the world produce, if it isn’t critically mediated, or rather, what happens when the previously assigned mediators obediently become participants in the blending? Is this akin to embedded journalists? What about the intersection reiterated in the 1960s between art, theory, and politics? (I say reiterated because other examples, too numerous to mention here, had occurred in different locations under specific conditions, such as in the early 20th century in Russia in relation to the Russian Revolution or during the late 19th century of William Morris, just to name two trajectories.) How to acknowledge the beauty and power of intellect, details, specificity, and precision in the aesthetic process rather than consider these aspects as extraneous? What wars are being fought in the cultural sphere, as this is intertwined with what is being fought in the world politically, economically, and culturally? Why am I using a bellicostic analogy to describe an ice (International Cultural Event)? Or are we to believe that in the cultural sphere everything is allowed and acceptance is easy, as well as insignificant? Is struggle archaic? Perhaps Multitudes’ disobedient reaction to the leitmotifs (Modernity?, Life?, Education) posed by d 12 is exactly what was desired,2 as there never were any desires definitively stated. What ensues whether the magazines participate or counter-­participate, becomes a way of providing content and a way to provide positions, as these questions are so open that they could be approached by any perspective. To combine these broad leitmotifs with art from around the world, with particular emphases of apparent inclusion creates a very vague and supposedly open and supposedly inclusive surface. But questions remain or even increase while moving through the exhibition. Side-­stepping the claim of a conscious position or analysis that engages with contemporary thought and production in a way that can matter in the world does create an odd lacuna, leading to a sensation for some viewers that a screen was erected for projections of any kind. The question can be asked, What kind of engagement is actually possible? Despite not having a comprehensive answer, it still seems, even on an intuitive level in relation to being alive,3 that engagement does still matter, despite the articulations of disappointment or depression that may circulate amid some who claim an affinity with leftist tendencies or democratic pro404 Operations

cesses, as a result of all kinds of events, elections, losses, market dynamics, neoliberal approaches, and increasingly pervasive attempts at consumeristic or millenarian escape. Of course the question arises, What forms of engagement, forms that can also encompass potential, are available now? This is a question we each face and must address for ourselves, as well as with others, and hopefully informed by history in its most profound sense, as we continue to live out and counter history’s effects. There is one reference I’d like to mention before presenting material, that does oddly have an intersection with the exhibition and the way I chose to interpret the magazine project and provides a contrast to a phrase from the press material that describes enthusiasm as superseding expertise when engaging with art. It is Walter Benjamin’s proposal written in 1922 for an unrealized journal titled Angelus Novus, named after the watercolor by Paul Klee, once in Benjamin’s collection, that you may see in the form of a reproduction as you ascend the stairs of the Fridericianum. I quote: The vocation of a journal is to proclaim the spirit of its age. Relevance to the present is more important even than unity or clarity, and a journal would be doomed—like newspapers—to insubstantiality if it did not give voice to a vitality powerful enough to salvage even its more dubious components by validating them. In fact, a journal whose relevance for the present has no historical justification should not exist at all. The Romantic Athenäum is still a model today precisely because its claim to historical relevance was unique.4 At the same time it proves— if proof were needed—that we should not look to the public to supply the yardstick by which true relevance to the present is to be measured. Every journal ought to follow the example of the Athenäum. It should be rigorous in its thought and unwavering in its readiness to say what it believes, without any concessions to its public, particularly where it is a matter of distilling what is truly relevant from the sterile pageant of new and fashionable events, the exploitation of which can be left to the newspapers. He continues: Moreover, for any journal that conceives itself in this way, criticism remains the guardian of the house. . . . Both critical discourse and the habit of judgment stand in need of renewal . . . ; the task of positive

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criticism, even more than before and even more than for the Romantics, must be to concentrate on the individual work of art. For the function of great criticism is not, as is often thought, to instruct by means of historical descriptions or to educate through comparisons, but to cognize by immersing itself in the object.5 I would interpret this now to also mean that attention can be extended to becoming immersed in the practice (which includes conceptual, performative, and time-­based dimensions) and immaterial aspects of a work of art or even anti-­art. . . . When I participated in Documenta 11 in 2002 I was living in Vienna, where I’d been living and working since 1997. In January 2003 I moved to Santa Barbara, California, where I was hired as a professor at the University of California. This move coincided with the beginning of the war in Iraq that has continued. I mention these factors as they are important in terms of contextualizing the productions I’d been able to make in Europe and in the U.S., under particular conditions which did affect the content of the work. Possibilities for circulation were reduced, forms of surveillance and restriction of civil liberties increased, and it was possible to encounter these forms while working in the corporate educational setting of the university. I’d like to begin by showing excerpts from Elsewhere? (2002) which I presented here in the Kassel Auepark, as part of my work Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems (2002), an excerpt from Wavelinks: Activism and Sound (2002), and continue with excerpts from the project entitled Relay, produced in 2005, that reflect the changed conditions for living and producing that I encountered in the United States and in the university. I’ll conclude with showing Here until October 2004 (2004) in its entirety, approximately 35 minutes. Here until October 2004 was completed in October 2004 on the eve of the U.S. elections that took place in November when George W. Bush was re-­elected and can be thought in relation to Elsewhere?,6 as well as in relation to some of the sentiments expressed in France in the wake of Nicolas Sarkozy’s election.

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Notes From a presentation delivered during the French journal Multitudes’ workshop at Documenta 12’s Magazine Project, Kasel, Germany, June 26–28, 2007. An excerpt appeared on the Multitudes website. 1. “Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, edited by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 1. 2. Documenta 12 leitmotifs were phrased as follows: “Is Modernity Our Antiquity?,” “What Is Bare Life?,” and “What Is to Be Done?” The publications resulting from the Magazine Project have been named Modernity?, Life!, and Education and have been published by Taschen, 2007. 3. I am using “being alive” in relation to what Agamben refers to in the term “form-­of-­life,” meaning “a life that can never by separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.” Giorgio Agamben, “Form-­of-­Life,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 151. 4. “The Athenäum, which appeared twice a year between 1798 and 1800, was the theoretical organ of the early Romantic movement in Germany. It was edited by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and included contributions by Novalis, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the editors.—Trans.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Vol. 1, 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 296. 5. Walter Benjamin. “Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus,” in Selected Writings, 293. 6. Both Elsewhere? and Here until October 2004 function as single-­channel films, but in installation form they are shown together, either in two monitors or a double projection. See Jürgen Bock’s analysis of the films and their juxtaposition in “The Beauty of Discourse, or How to Stand Pyramids on Their Heads: A Fictitious Conversation between Jürgen Bock and Joaquim Beck on the Renée Green Exhibition Relay at the Kunstraum Innsbruck,” in The Sociological View (Innsbruck: Kunstraum Innsbruck, 2006), 245–55.

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2007

Now It Seems Like a Dream Now it seems like a dream. You try to recall it. Amid torrential rain you arrive at a train station. First you arrive in the airport in Frankfurt. Many hours before that you were in the Newark Airport. The day before that you were leaving from San Francisco Airport. You are there. In the train station you purchase an umbrella and wait inside the station until the rain subsides before getting a taxi. While getting into the taxi you notice a banner overhead. There is an image of a tan-­complexioned man with strangely spaced multi-­colored typography next to him. You think, “Here we go, this must be a part of the show.” You see the streets pass and begin to recall where you are. The taxi arrives at the documenta-­Halle. Rain is still pouring. You wait under an eave while your partner contacts the staff person to get your lodging materials, registration packet, and travel reimbursement. Inside you can see tables covered with magazines. There will be plenty of time to look at that, you tell yourself. You know you’ll be in Kassel for a week. You’ve been invited to serve a critical function.1 You wonder why you perceive many situations as dully repetitive. You associate this condition with waking life among humans. The encounters you have in myriad locations now seem to blend, as do the functions of these places: museums, shopping malls, fnac , worldwide temporarily used spaces for global exhibitions and cultural events, auto shows, conventions, shopping streets in European cities, airport terminals with museum-­ affiliated display cases, converted factory buildings that are now museums or art and architecture institutes, old school buildings that are now contemporary art museums, churches that are now clubs or artists’ studios, high-­rise luxury buildings that are also museums and gourmet supermarkets, houses with collections that are becoming museums, and art fairs with

lectures and conferences like universities. Mart is the word you imagine. Mart = mass merchandise + art distribution circuits. What informs you and causes you to long for something beyond these encounters? While moving through these multiple terrains you examine your sensations, feelings, and thoughts. You wonder what gives you pleasure. Is pleasure an important factor in life? It’s difficult to remember whether this matters when you are in the above-­mentioned places. Are there new pleasures? Must one learn these? You wonder about the meaning of distinction. Can this have a meaning beyond referencing a market index? Does it relate to pleasure? Your dream continues. As you move through the different buildings designated for display, questions come into your mind as you look and listen. An overall sensation of dimness and humidity is present. Lights are low; there are walls the color of melon. The primary impressions are that light, color, paper, textiles, and shapes exist. You are primarily sensitized to moving images, yet the systems of arrangement and interconnection between screens and space are what hold your attention. What you notice is a curved room with multiple screens displaying different intensities of green, people, details, and strategies that in concert form a broadcast sporting event. The other configuration you recall also involved multiple screens placed in a series of desks in the thoroughfare of the Halle. Your attention was caught by a performed monologue spoken with urgency about illegal confinement. Questions form as you traverse the spaces: What can reach/touch us? Can we feel and think? Must we be bound and roped to feel? What is “we,” “us,” “I,” or “you” any longer? What is the significance of any of these observations? How do these processes, conditions, or things in these spaces matter? Beyond what is to be done, what can matter? What basis is there for understanding beyond the lowest common denominator, i.e., we are alive? Upon awakening you finger the documents confirming that you were in Kassel. You notice a creepy tinge of mild irritation as you see images on the pages you flip through. Why that sensation? What did you desire? Your mind wanders back to the word “distinction,” and while wondering how anything can endure beyond a moment you think of these words: Everything new is lost in something else new. Every illusion of being original disappears. The soul is cast down and turns its thoughts, with pain, albeit mixed with irony and a profound compassion, to those mil-

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lions of feathered creatures, those innumerable agents of the mind, each of whom appears to himself to be the man [sic] of the moment, a free creator, the first mover, the possessor of an irrefragable certainty, a unique, distinctive source; and he who has spent his days in toil and who has used up his best moments in preserving his distinctiveness finds himself annihilated by the multitudes and swallowed up in the ever-­growing swarms of those like himself.2 When returning to your embeddedly militarized metropolis you find in a museum library a magazine from another place and time. This description catches your attention and you feel a mildly pleasurable sensation of recognition but remind yourself that these sentiments are limited and considered obsolete. “There is no telling what the next Kassel Documenta would be. The thought is much too grim, and if we are to go by this year’s ­Documenta. . . .”3

Notes Originally published in German in Texte zur Kunst (Berlin), no. 67 (September 2007): 197–99. 1. Why Reply? is the title of a presentation delivered during the French journal Multitudes’ workshop at Documenta 12’s Magazine Project. The workshop took place in Kassel, June 26–28, 2007. Other presenters were Maurizio Lazzarato, Yann Moulier-­Boutang, Éric Alliez, Giovanna Zapperi, Brian Holmes, and Société Réaliste. A “counter-­documenta” website was launched. 2. Paul Valéry, “Remerciement à l’Académie française,” in Oeuvres, edited by Jean Hytier (Paris: Pléadie, 1971), vol. 1, 731; note from Walter Benjamin, “Paul Valéry,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1931–1934, translated by Rodney Livingston et al., edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999–2005), vol. 2, part 2, 532. 3. Serge Durant, “The Third Kassel Documenta,” Signals 1, no. 2 (1964): 7.

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plates 1–2, intro 1

plates 3–5, intro 1

plates 6–7, intro 1

plates 8–12, intros 1–2

plates 13–15, intro 2

plates 16–17, intro 2

plates 18–19, chapter 1

plates 20–23, chapter 2

plates 24–25, chapters 2–3

plates 26–27, chapter 4

plates 28–29, chapter 5

plate 30, chapter 6

plates 31–32, chapter 7

plate 33, chapter 8

plate 34, chapter 8

plates 35–37, chapter 9

plates 38–41, chapter 10

plates 42–44, chapter 11

plate 45, chapter 12

plates 46–49, chapters 13–15

plate 50, chapter 16

plates 51, chapter 17

plates 52–53, chapter 19

plates 54–55, chapter 19

plates 56–57, chapter 21

plate 58, chapter 22

plates 59–60, chapter 22

plate 61, chapter 23

plate 62, chapter 23

plates 63–64, chapter 24

plate 65, chapter 25

plate 66, chapter 25

plates 67–68, Chapter 26

plates 69–70, chapter 26

plates 71–72, chapter 26

plates 73–77, chapter 27

plates 78–79, chapter 28

plate 80, chapter 28

plate 81, chapter 28

plates 82–85, chapter 29

plates 86, chapter 30

plates 87–93, chapters 30–31

plates 94–95, chapter 32

plates 96-98, chapters 33–34

plates 99–103, chapter 34

plate 104, chapter 34

plates 105–110, chapter 35

plates 111–116, chapter 37

plates 117-119, chapters 38–39

plate 120, chapter 39

plate 121, chapter 40

plates 122–123, chapter 40

plates 124–126, chapters 41–42

plates 127–128, chapter 42

plates 129–130, chapter 43

plates 131–132, chapter 44

plate 133, chapter 45

plate 134–135, chapter 46

plate 136-138, chapter 47

plates 139–140, chapter 48

plate 141, chapter 50

plate 142, chapter 51

48

2008

Imagine This Wherever and Whoever You Are Readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else.” —Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

I too came to California from Vienna. I’d been a civil servant in Vienna and I was going to become a civil servant in California. c-­a -­l -­i -­f -­o -­r -­n -­i -a. A dream place. A place to begin again. I was also an artist. In both places and in all places, before I’d ever come to Vienna or to California, I was an a-­r -­t -­i -­s -t . I was born into being an artist. My mother was an artist, her brother was an artist, their father was an artist, his brother was an artist, my brother became an artist. Now I’m not a civil servant. I am still an artist.

ideal, utopia, open work, open network, open source Why are people artists? How are people artists? What is special about being an artist? Is there anything special about being an artist? Why don’t people usually like what is special? Why do some people want to be special? What does being special have to do with being an artist? Maybe the idea of specialness is a delusion, a misperception, perhaps the way that ideals and utopias can be both delusions or misperceptions. What about imagining the ideal with the everyday? How might that be configured and how might that be experienced or read?

why is freedom a good thing ? Freedom is associated with utopia and also with notions of what could be ideal, but what does an investigation of all three words reveal?

48.1 Imagine This Wherever and Whoever You Are, 2008. Text, voices, sound panels. Installation view, La Fortezza, Bolzano, Manifesta 7.

f-­r -­e -­e -­d -­o -­m u-­t -­o -­p -­i -­a i-­d -­e -­a -­L Think about these three words in relation to who and when. For the moment I have to travel as a reader. At least I can do that. I can also travel via watching films and via listening to music. I can also walk. In the city I can walk in parks that have mountainous peaks and I can imagine another place, while I see this place. I’ve been trying to imagine The Fortress/La Fortezza/Die Franzensfeste via a reconstruction of images that I rearrange while reading and while writing. A back-­and-­forth process. In between I watched Nicolas Roeg’s Two Deaths.

Fortress: Europe (2008)—Continuing Thoughts on Place May 2005, the date of divestment of The Fortress. May 2005, the month during which Einstein’s summer house in Caputh opened to the public. 412 Operations

A fortress provides impossible protection from spreading ideas and sentiments. Is there such an entity as a “multitude”? Old battles (in spreading Europe) spread into the present. The whole world is moving or in motion; what can stop that momentum? A global natural disaster? The emergence of another Age, affected by global warming? Sounds of where I am, San Francisco, the Pacific Northwest: Sirens, motors and wind. Where I drifted as I read about La Fortezza/Die Frankensfeste/The Fortress: Falling into sleep and dream, pictures become animated stimulating thoughts of Modest Mussorgsky’s music, meant to suggest pictures, Kartinki s vïstavski, or a night on a bald or bare mountain, the dates of his life: 1874–1922. Sounds and echoes of the designated location are imagined. I download a sound file and listen, while looking at pictures on the wall of stone passages, brick vaulting, gold of the Bank of Italy, weapons, Francis I, stairway passages, valley views, aerial and horizontal views in pictures. With closed eyes I remember train rides through Tyrol from Vienna or from Munich, many times, on the way to Milan. Sounds blend, octaval repetitious staccato winding through various registers, rhythmically pounded on piano keys, of wind, rattling windows and doors, the train’s rhythm, scenes framed and blurred by its windows. The Struggle for Happiness—C. R. L. James (1950) Felix Austria (1660–1790) Imagined paintings of royalty in the Gemäldegalerie or the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien. I’m thinking of the words that I’m writing at this moment, as ones to be performed by an unknown person, as music or poetry—words to make sound and be spoken. I open John Cage’s Silence. And visit George Lewis’s A Power Stronger than Itself: The aacm and American Experimental Music. As I’m imagining that someone listening to what you are now hearing might be pausing from walking, instead of thinking of a tourist city, as described, for example, in a book entitled The Tourist City, consider tourist regions or islands or Tyrol, for example. But no audio tours, please. Let’s try something else. 48. Imagine This Wherever and Whoever You Are 413

My words are allowed to be present here in someone else’s voice, in a printed text of someone else’s design. It’s an experiment. Now a “Manifesta decade” is over and post-­wall Europe doesn’t mean what it once did. How telling. How quizzical. What did it mean and to whom? Does it still? Did it ever? Mean? Anything? Or was it a “geographical expression” combined with strong emotional effects? My words are now allowed to be present in a place that I lived, “post-­ wall Europe,” in a location that was once a train ride away, but that is now an ocean away. While corporeally out of reach, unseen words can circulate as sounds within this territory. Throughout this place where I worked, lived, and loved. Other voices can carry my words.

photography not allowed In this instance time is traveled via images and words. Watercolors, oil paintings, drawings, maps, diagrams, and eventually photographs. Visceral impressions of this place are distant and unattainable, yet some are remembered. In the present location wind at night is most apparent, although invisible. From reading I drift into dreaming, again. The words and images blur, and images of past times and the many people who arrived in this location to build a fortress next to a mountain, by a river, become visible. I look at the giant atlas, Andrees Handatlas, Achte Auflage; the words are embossed in gold on its worn navy blue cover; a symbol resembling a horizontal parenthetical bracket hovers above two touching circles that are meant to represent two parts of the globe. It was published in Bielefeld and Leipzig by Verlag von Velhagen & Klasing in 1924. How it came to California I don’t know. It was given to me, for free. As I gazed at the gigantic pages meant to contain all aspects of the globe, a woman at a Unitarian book sale said, “Take it. It’s old.” Südbayern und Österreich, westlicher Teil: Voralberg, Tirol und Salzburg. m. 1:750 t . . . 71,72 Donau- und Karpatenländer, Übersicht: Österreich, Tschechoslowakien, Ungarn, Südslawien, Rumänien. . . . 73,74 I look closely at the intricate markings, microscopic place names, and ridged areas designating mountains to find this location. At the bottom

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of the lower left page are tiny rectangular boxes barely able to contain unevenly applied pastel colors. Next to each is a location name: Bayern: pink, Salzberg: yellow, Tirol: orange, and Voralberg: lavender. The colored place borders don’t seem to correspond to the color key. There is an excess of colors and the borders appear blurry, confusing, as well as subtle and unobtrusive. Cheerful, welcoming. What does the excessive green color signify? Italy? But why is green also used in Würtemburg? And orange again above that? I need a magnifying glass. There is no place name index. I look at the page for Wien und Umgebung expecting to recognize more. Wald: green, Wiese: pale green, Weinberg: green and red combined. These are the words next to the colors inside the boxes. Even here, many locations are unrecognizable despite larger type and late 20th-­century familiarity. . . . But, can we really talk of calibers? The weaponry and loading procedures were the same as those of the previous century. Another step forward into modernity was made thanks to the invention of “prefabricated” bullets with their metal case already containing mercury fulminate. Only at the end of the century, repeating rifles would turn up. It was 1884 when an American man, named Maxim, invented the first machine-­gun thanks to which all movements were automated. Being so bulky and easily noticed, the fortress visibly provided “active defense.” The fortress was never engaged in war actions; however, its functionality and soundness were sorely tried twice. In 1862 and in 1896. But its structural complexity, its potentiality of defense, the feeling of security inspired by its granite structures made it a privileged, safe place to store anything that should have been defended at all costs.1 Serial movement, serial destruction. Camouflage. Photographic or cinematic images are the most stable form of information. On the one hand, the secret victory is written in the air by the ballistics of projectiles and the hyper-­ballistics of aeronautics; on the other, it is negated by speed since only the speed of film exposure is capable of recording that military secret which each protagonist tries to keep

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by camouflaging ever larger objects (artillery batteries, railways, marshalling yards, and eventually whole towns as the black-­out belatedly responded to the lighting war of 1940). Just as weapons and armour developed in unison throughout history, so visibility and invisibility now began to evolve together, eventually producing invisible weapons that make things visible—radar, sonar, and the high-­definition camera of spy satellites. . . . Thus, the theatre of operations of the Napoleonic Wars, where actors in the bloodbath moved in rhythm and hand-­to-­hand fighting was conducted by the naked eye and with bare weapons, gave way at the beginning of this century to a camera obscura in which face-­to-­face confrontation was supplanted by instant interface, and geographical distance by the notion of real time.2

La Fortezza—A Humorous Conundrum Security through the ages. Security for whom? The idea of creating a safe and secure place—a utopian wish. Humans are never safe, nature is more powerful: tsunamis, mudslides, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes. All a part of daily existence, depending on your location. The location that is currently mine. Earth. Lock Down. The Splendor of Empire. The Splendor of Empire and Lock Down. The two notions seem linked. . . . Walking up and down this hilly city and watching Alcatraz in the distance. Walking down steep inclines, past blossoming trees, residential buildings, and traffic toward it. Bright sunlight, shimmering water, the distant yet close island fortress, a defunct prison, a tourist site with audio tours dramatizing one of its pasts, an indigenous place that was recaptured and lost. I’m reminded of La Fortezza. . . .

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Something to defend and protect. You must have something in order to protect it. Beyond money and property, what can be protected? Dignity, a body, virginity, one’s good name, self-­respect, belief systems, religion, language, family? Old concepts, still prevalent and circulating in new and old permutations in most locations around the globe.

Begin Again A mysterious time-­traveler, a forgotten amateur historian who’d been a civil servant buried deep in the recesses of a formerly royal Habsburgian building in Vienna. Born in the U.S. she migrated and navigated through channels of fashion, art, and bureaucracy. From the belle époque of the last century into the new century. She is now writing memoirs in California, a favorite Austrian perch. An imagined possible place. Schindler and Neutra created dwellings there. These continue to be popular. Not fortresses, but open, not confining, but blending with natural surroundings. Hearing a fierce howling wind, the windows and rafters shaking, she ponders safety and who feels safe and when. Sirens, motors, and wind. These are surrounding sounds in this place. Pause where you are. Close your eyes. Listen.

Lock Down, Some Meanings of the Term (1) Literally to lock down items considered valuable to prevent bandits, thieves, and suspicious elements from stealing these treasures. (2) In prison; imprisoned without the possibility to move. Confinement. Special confinement. Solitary confinement. (3) A location is quarantined, locked by an authority of power. No one can enter or leave.

treasure, protect, defend, poverty, border issues, wealth, nowhere at ease, peasants, many foreclosures, soldiers, civilians, increased security, massive construction, total surveillance, place,

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where to be? adults, how to live? wealth, power, oil, fossil fuels, vegetal petrol, guano, gold, famine, super-­m achines-­better-­t han-­e ver-­a ll-­t he-­t ime-­2 4–7, questions of travel?, tv police dramas from the u.s., westerns, mountain stories, fantasy places, the all too real, constant potentiality of defense, living with war. This is what for the moment I’d like to say to those able to comprehend the meaning of these words, even in translation. Comprehension. It is probably an impossible wish. An impossible correspondence would be necessary. Something like what is described in the story about the map that is analogous to the earth’s surface and that covers it, but disintegrates, or the way that radar and a target are meant to be in synch. Perhaps there are other ways to understand or to hear and feel. Compassion? . . . Words instead of images? Words evoking images in the place that you are standing? You are surrounded by what I can’t see. Walk and listen very c­ arefully. . . . Arrivederci, Tschüss, Servus, Adiós, Goodbye.

Notes This text was commissioned by the European Biennial of Contemporary Art Manifesta 7 as an audio piece to be recorded by actors in English, Italian, and German. The recordings emanated from hanging sound panels located in the underground vaults of the Franzensfeste Fortress, in South Tyrol, Italy. Originally published in English, Italian, and German in Manifesta 7: Scenarios, edited by Adam Budak, Anselm Franke / Hila Peleg, and Raqs Media Collective (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2008), 48–64. 1. Adapted from Dario Massimo, The Fortress, translated by Simonetta Da Ronch (Brixen: A. Weger, 2007). 2. Paul Virilio, “A Traveling Shot over Eighty Years,” in The Virilio Reader, edited by James Der Derian (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 98–99.

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49

2008

Come Closer Prelude to Endless Dreams and Water Between

For over a year I’ve been searching for points of entry into an oceanic mass of material I’ve collected over time. It has as its basis my repeatedly evidenced interest in, and attraction to, large bodies of water. It isn’t only my interest but also the force or forces of movement as well as the desire to move through water of many others, generations before me, that has been a stimulus for a project about ceaseless desires and attempts to fulfill these— no matter how futile the attempts might be—and the diverse impetuses leading to the traversal of water and what is or isn’t found. Islands seemed to resonate powerfully in this configuration. It became apparent that islands, despite their limited size in relation to continents, had produced particularly compelling thinkers, as well as had become curious mirrors for a panoply of wishes over time. I wondered more and more about the ways in which perception is shaped by longing, from different directions and through time. I thought about locations that have been perceived as new, such as the “new world,” as well as many islands, by those who arrived upon them. I wondered about all that supposedly emanates from these places materially and imaginatively and how links have occurred between physical and mental associations. From these questions a film project began to develop, Endless Dreams and Water Between, which I’m in the midst of realizing. The directions of my investigation and analysis have several components. There are filmic, literary, historic, and sonic references in this investigation, in addition to references throughout that focus on nature, its humbling power, and on the vocation of artists, emblematic seekers, and articulators of yearning.

49.1 Multitudes, no. 34, 2008. Journal cover. Courtesy of Multitudes.

The literary, historic, and sonic are also related to languages that evidence migrations of different kinds. The history of languages and their movement is an important component, as it involves the spread and struggles over territories and between different systems of belief. What will conquer? What will survive? For how long? How will the encounters change what can be spoken or said and in what language? And where? And on islands, these small places? What does it matter? It was imagined that a new life, an imagined tabula rasa, an imagined purity, and an imagined beauty, leading to an imagined fulfillment, could occur in these places. Some places of fabled beauty were believed to be islands, like what is now known as Brazil or what is now known as California. Islands signified and existed as points of connection between continents, oases or deserts in the ocean, providing salvation from varied material and imagined factors. Varieties of islands exist in the repertoire of Western thought as varied or repetitive mental projections. 420 Operations

To limit my scope I’ve focused on the locations that have had a significant pull, as well as affect, upon my life. All of these places involve bodies of water; some are literally islands and others are metaphorical islands. These include Mallorca, Manhattan, and San Francisco. A recurring location that has exerted its force on my imagination, and in a circuitous way on my life, has been Portugal—from its historical acts to the contemporary ramifications of what came from the past. Encountering Portugal provided a visceral reminder of the complexity of intertwined relations and how history resides in the present. The short film Come Closer (2008) is a prelude to this larger ongoing endeavor.

Note Originally published in French in Multitudes, no. 34 (Fall 2008): 137–38.

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50

2008

Come Closer Footage from different encounters and existing Green films and videos shot and produced in Lisbon: Walking in Lisbon (1992) and Walking in Lisbon (2000); Trip to Ceuta (1992)

Male Voice-­over in Portuguese Tracing Lusitania continues, after many returns, in various ways. It re-­ emerges and alters continually in different places and times.

Excerpt from Conversation with Diana Andringa (1992): Diana Andringa: The Sixties, France, in the Sixties . . . In Portugal, we didn’t speak about the Sixties, people still thought that in Portugal they were very influenced by the Beatles or something like that, and it is not true because even in that time [the] Beatles were not allowed to be played on our radios . . . Renée Green: Really? Diana Andringa: Yes, because they said that they were more popular than Jesus Christ . . . Diana Andringa and Renée Green: [laughter].

Excerpt from Conversation with Paulo and Diana Andringa (2000): Paulo Andringa: We talked about that yesterday, people from the left, and people from an anarchist point of view, and they don’t get along. . . ; it is still in the same thing; it was like this for 50 years, and still the same discussions. . . . It’s a little bit . . . boring, it’s all so boring. Diana and Paulo Andringa, Renée Green: [laughter]. Diana Andringa: [laughing] It seems that things don’t change so much.

Excerpt from Megahertz, Megastar, Brother, Brazil (2000): Derrick Green: [laughing] Pretty good. It’s been crazy, nice tight shows; a lot of people are really excited to see everything going on.

Male Voice-­over in Portuguese To trace, to touch. A finger moving over a page, following contours, locating place names, pointing out words, underlining them in pencil, testing their sound with a voice. Returning again and again to the books and to places, to find something previously missed. Something that has a different meaning after different encounters, different inhabitations, and different journeys over the passage of time.

Female Voice-­over in English And here’s Nuno. He’s another link in the present to many pasts. . . . Footage from web-­streaming event Economie 0, Upgrade! at Spheres of Interest Seminar at the San Francisco Art Institute

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Renée Green: Nuno, move over there [laughter]. Nuno Ramalho: [speaks into microphone] Hi!

Male Voice-­over in Portuguese He came to San Francisco to study and has been a part of my daily life during the past two years. He’s soon returning to Portugal. But he’s agreed to lend his voice and image. . . . Footage of photographs of Derrick Green in New York with Renée Green, family; Sepultura book, Sepultura’s Dante XXI cd . . . . For some reason I haven’t yet been able to get to Brazil, despite the fact that Derrick, my baby brother, lives there. I was conscious and curious about Brazil since childhood. I’d made a class presentation and drew pictures on posters, based on articles I’d read in encyclopedias, that described Brazil as a sleeping giant. I’ve been able to travel to many places, often via invitation, yet despite my wishes over the years, I haven’t been able, so far, to arrange this journey. Why? . . . Footage and still images of Karim Aïnouz from the Negotiations in the Contact Zone symposium (New York, 1994), from his film Seams (1993) . . . For years I’ve had an open invitation to visit. Karim, a cherished friend, also lives there and was born there. He too has had to travel to be able to work. All of us have. This may be one of the reasons it’s been difficult to organize the trip to Brazil to visit Derrick and Karim. None of us could stay in the places where we were born, even though at different times it’s been possible to return, at least for some moments. I met my friend years ago in New York when he couldn’t return for a time to Brazil. Soon he’ll be moving again, from Brazil to Berlin.

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Excerpt from Karim Aïnouz’s presentation at Spheres of Interest Seminar at the San Francisco Art Institute (2008), talking about his film Seams (1993) Karim Aïnouz: It was an amazing process of collage; it’s a film which is really a collage film in the sense that you have the images that I shot, and you have a lot of images that I actually appropriated from the National Archives. It was a time that I could not leave the country to go back to Brazil and I did not have any moving images of my family. So what I did, I went to the Library of Congress and actually I found some footage shot in Brazil during the 1940s by the Ford Foundation; they were installing a sort of colony in the Amazon to exploit rubber, and there was all this footage.

Varied footage: landscapes, aerial views, tv monitors in megastores, dvd covers, cd covers, books, varied footage from San Francisco, New York, Lisbon. . . ; excerpts from Trip to Ceuta (1992), Walking in Lisbon (1992), and Walking in Lisbon (2000) Timing is everything. Isn’t it always? Combined with mysterious luck. It seems we’re usually pressed for time, me, my brother Derrick and my friend Karim. I revisit what it’s possible to touch and hold, to hear and see, traces of the people I miss. We have sporadic e-­mail contact. We have concentrated visits with years in between. We meet in places that are not Brazil, like San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, and Berlin. We haven’t met in Portugal yet, even though we’ve all worked there. Always so much to catch up on. Promises to be in contact again sooner. Always deeply enjoying the contact, until the next time. Hoping there will be a next time. There’s all of this and there are our daily lives. And there’s history and its press upon the present. Because of the histories we are where we are and linked as we are. Still, we try to move. Despite everything. Not to get stuck in cycles or patterns that seem exhausted. These are daily efforts. Questions of where and how to live in these times, in this present. This is what each of

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us continues to face. How do we do it? How do we continue? How will we create the next endeavor? How will we create our lives?

Female Voice-­over in English While asking these questions regularly we are actively working and trying to enjoy life. I don’t think that any resolution is anticipated while being alive. Things continue to change while we change. The questions continue. We reflect, imagine, dream, and do what we can. We create. Shift your consciousness for some moments, we each hope. Introduce or reacquaint you with ways of feeling. We imagine connecting with you, even though we don’t know you. Maybe we do this because we imagine it’s possible for each of us to feel and be better than we are. At least, that’s a wish, a dream and a hope. Until we meet again.

Male Voice-­over in Portuguese Until we meet again.

Come Closer Credits By Renée Green fam Archivist: Javier Anguera Voice-­over and Portuguese Translation: Nuno Ramalho English Voice-­over: Renée Green Sources: Renée Green Trip to Ceuta (1992) Walking in Lisbon (1992) Conversation with Diana Andringa (1992) Conversation with Diana and Paulo Andringa (2000) Walking in Lisbon (2000) Football Feast Celebration (2000) Megahertz, Megastar, Brother, Brazil (2000) Sources: Karim Aïnouz 426 Operations

Seams (1994) Sources: Spheres of Interest Seminar, San Francisco Art Institute, Karim Aïnouz (2008) Acknowledgments Municipio de Lagos Exposiçâo Mundos Locais

Note Originally published in English and French in Multitudes, no. 34 (Fall 2008): 137–38, 144–63.

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2009

Endless Dreams and Water Between Dreams Aria: If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I’d like to spend them, I’d reply: Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-­two in dreams . . . provided I can remember them. The mind is bombarded by a veritable barrage of dreams that seem to burst upon it like waves. Billions of images surge up each night, then dissolve almost immediately, enveloping the earth in a blanket of lost dreams. Absolutely everything has been imagined during one night or another by one mind or another, and then forgotten. (Luis Buñuel)

Dreams and Islands Aria: “This is to state once again that the essence of the deserted island is imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical. . . . We have to get back to the movement of the imagination that makes the deserted island a model, a prototype of the collective soul. First, it is true that from the deserted island it is not creation but re-­creation, not the beginning but a re-­beginning that takes place. . . . It is not enough that everything begin, everything must begin again once the cycle of possible combinations has come to completion.” (Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands) Raya: “Islands may no longer be the material prizes they once were, but islands of the mind continue to be extraordinarily valuable symbolic resources, a treasure trove of images through which the

West understands itself and its relations with the larger world. Like all master metaphors, the island is capable of representing a multitude of things.” ( John R. Gillis, Islands of the Mind) Aria: What is this need to travel? Why are we haunted by it? According to George Sand, “The fact is that nowhere, these days, is anyone genuinely happy, and that of the countless faces assumed by the Ideal—or, if you dislike the word, the concept of something better—travel is one of the most engaging and most deceitful. All is rotten in public affairs: those who deny this truth feel it even more deeply and bitterly than those who assert it. Nevertheless, divine Hope still pursues her way, assuaging our tormented hearts with the constant whisper: ‘There is something better—namely, your ideal!’” (George Sand, Winter in Majorca) Mar: In Randa at approximately thirty years of age in 1263, after a dissolute life up until that point, Ramon Llull had a vision of crucified Christ that he took as a sign to dedicate his life to his service. The form of service took three forms: To missionize at the cost of martyrdom. To write a book, the best in the world against the errors of the unbelievers. And to go to the Pope, to kings, and to Christian princes to incite them to create language monasteries for missionaries. Thus he had to travel. Lyn: “On a late summer’s day in the year 1608, a gentleman of London made his way across that city. He was a man of ambition, intellect, arrogance, and drive—in short, a man of his age. Like our own, his was an era of expanding horizons and a rapidly shrinking world, in which the pursuit of individual dreams led to new discoveries, which in turn led to newer and bigger dreams.” This man, a ship’s captain, was named Henry Hudson. Aria: From the Convent of Palma in Mallorca Fray Junípero Serra struggled with his dreams: “I have had no other motive but to revive in my soul those intense longings which I have had since my novitiate when I read the lives of saints. These longings have become somewhat deadened because of the preoccupation I had with studies.” To recapture the intensity he ventured to the New World to perform an act of self-­sacrifice, emulating his predecessors. In 1749 he left Mallorca never to return. Long before his decision to venture out, there were others 51. Endless Dreams and Water Between 429

familiar with legends of gold. In one romance with the theme of attacks by “pagan forces on the medieval Christians occupying Constantinople. During the battle, the pagans were aided by Calafia, a warrior queen who came from a place ‘at the right hand of the Indies, an island named California, very close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise which is inhabited by black women, without a single man among them, who live in the manner of Amazons. . . . There weapons were all made of gold. The island abounds with gold and precious stones, and upon it no other metal is found.’ Also, upon this island, ‘there are many griffins. In no other part of the world can they be found.’ From Biscay to Cádiz, ‘California,’ the lilting name for Queen Calafia’s land, was on everyone’s mind.”

Aria’s Dream and First Letter Dear Friends, Raya (Raya L. Carlton), Lyn (Sandlyn Ryder Hoving), Mar (Maryse-­Françoise d’Île), It was a dream that stirred me to action. I dreamt that I lived on a precipice by the sea. The house was made of stone and had spacious terraces surrounding it. Beyond that a garden and beyond that, rows of olive trees in red earth. In my dream I had awakened to find that everything that had previously been troubling me was a dream and that I was free to create and use my time as I wished. I had no financial worries and I could sponsor events to invite esteemed thinkers and creators for one month each year. During these days we would meet for a few hours of conversation, go for a swim, and have wonderful dinners on the terrace at night. Only guests who really wanted to be there would attend. They would be few in number. The rest of the year would be devoted to making beautiful, precise publications and productions. There would be enough time to realize them without stress. This dream affected me so viscerally that I perceived it as a signal and began writing this letter to you. Please excuse the group message, but this is a way to begin a conversation by writing to each other. I thought about myself and others I knew. Very skilled and intelligent people, yet not really 430 Operations

creating as they could be for various reasons. It was around then that I was reading an odd little book called A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, in which I read her words: “Anything you create you want to exist, and its means of existence is in being printed.” I adapted that sentence to the present, as also meaning diffused via an interface, and I read on: “After all, my only thought is a complicated simplicity. I like a thing simple, but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme: otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.” I wondered, “Was Gertrude Stein a Buddhist?” I continued to read: “A great deal of this I owe to a great teacher, William James. He said, ‘Never reject anything. Nothing has been proved. If you reject anything, that is the beginning of the end as an intellectual.’ He was my big influence when I was at college. He was a man who always said, ‘Complicate your life as much as you please, it has got to simplify.’” Ideally I would like us to explore writing letters. This is something that has become nearly extinct and I’d like to attempt reviving the art of writing actual letters, as I’ve been reading examples of correspondence from the past. In these letters we can tell each other our thoughts and feelings in more that a few choppy words. These letters can be sent via e-­mail, although I’d like to experiment with sending them by post, so that it is possible to have something tangible we have touched. Actual matter. Let’s see if that has any altering effect on our approach to being in contact. One thing is certain, it will require slowing down occasionally to reflect. I wanted to remind you that each of us lives in island locations. Much water is between us, but we can remain close, as I feel we are. Mar and I live on the same island, but in different parts and rarely see each other. I think there is something affecting about this island-­dwelling condition and I’d like to think more with each of you about it. My suggestion is to focus more specifically on where we are. I think we are each trying to do this in our own ways. Yet, perhaps we can also be conscious of how the physical location and history of the places we inhabit affect how we currently perceive and engage living in the world, in conjunction with how we can have an exchange between each other. We’re not going to live forever. To be blunt, I’d like to think about our lives and I’d like to do this together. We are each unmistakably independent, but now I think it’s a good time to use our energies in conjunction for our benefit. Why not? This may sound old-­fashioned, but I thought it might be interesting to write about what we read. Remember, 51. Endless Dreams and Water Between 431

reading? As I know you are each readers as well as writers, perhaps this can be fun? Do you ever feel as if you haven’t anyone to discuss much with? This is a way to alleviate that feeling. I’ve been reading George Sand. Does that seem odd? Check out her Winter in Majorca, edited by Robert Graves, when you get a chance. I’d be interested in getting your feedback. Although I’d never previously read George Sand, as I follow her trail I find many fascinating constellations to ponder. “Constellations” is my current keyword. I’m curious to know what you think about these suggestions. I’d also like your agreement that we will continue to keep up a regular correspondence. You must pledge like in the Three Musketeers: “All for one and one for all.” In addition, I invite you to convene in September with me in Mallorca. Please save up and clear some time. We always plan to get together, but life’s many accidents seem to usually get in the way, so let’s really make an effort. Perhaps we can develop interesting ways to think and create together. I have in mind a form of gathering and publishing that differs from what I’ve previously been involved with, and I’d like your help to think with me, as well as to enjoy being together. That’s all for now. I hope you are each very well and I look forward to our being in ongoing contact. Yours, Aria Aria Phoenix, in case you’ve forgotten which Aria, as we’ve been so out of touch! P.S. Lyn you are an Oulipian, Mar, you are an Eulipion. And Raya, you flow like the tides. Take care!

Aria Phoenix (Aria) Aria is again an editor and now a publisher. She thinks in terms of all that literature has been and can be. She grew up reading continually and often saw herself in relation to both the characters she read about and the authors she read. Identification of this sort became a concern for her after she’d learned in college that it indicated a naïve relationship to the text and its production. After that she resolved to

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thoroughly understand this process. She attended Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, then still in Cambridge, and immediately began working for a respected publishing house that had been founded, as their colophon depicting a flaming torch noted, in 1817. Thus began her years in book and magazine publishing. She also wrote. For a time she worked in academia, where she’d landed by chance, via her abilities as an adept editor and manager, with insight regarding intellectual trends. As a creative contributor she wanted to avoid becoming embedded in the drudgery of administrating. She didn’t want her life to be perceived by herself or by others as a path to avoid—the way she’d sometimes thought about her predecessors whom she’d studied and tried to use as models or guides. Often, there were aspects of their lives she’d like to avoid experiencing. She didn’t want the same to be observed about herself, so she shifted. She experienced a moment of conversion and revelation, realizing what she did want to do. That was the beginning of the September Institute. In her travels she met many people, some of whom became friends with whom she has overlapping interests. She decided to write to these three friends and to suggest they begin a project that involved an examination of what they most enjoyed, as well as things they’ve been curious about. They would write actual letters to each other from their various locations to describe their interests. Aria reads many languages and is fluent in a few. She prefers to be based in one location, yet she likes to spend time in places to which she feels connected for reasons of friendship, links to her life, and because she enjoys the ways she can feel in these environments. She has an encyclopedic relation to life. It is important to her that she participate in the relay between what has passed and what is present.

Sandlyn Ryder Hoving (Lyn) Lyn’s been a wanderer. What she enjoys increasingly is gaining deep understanding about where she is and where she’s been. She returns to places. For her watching films is also a return to sensations she enjoys. Mental links can be made to other experiences. She imagines these moments of

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fixed concentration as something akin to pausing at the stations of a pilgrimage to remember. The notion of a pilgrimage appeals to her, and she’s become curious about the enactments and motivations behind such endeavors. Her own travels mirror these. She is very linked to her island and its many quirks. More than one lifetime would be needed to begin to sound all that resides there. Even though she’d been away many years, she decided that this location is her home, even though so much had changed and so many people she’d known no longer lived there or were alive. There she felt closer to the fullness of her life, which now interested her much differently than when she’d lived on this island as a youth. She felt as if she now could discover where she could be and where she enjoyed being, without pretense or shame. With so many people gone she felt able to have a different relation to her life and to the island. Her focus includes the long past and the nature of the island. She continues to work independently, sometimes as a designer. Occasionally, if a book of interest is proposed, she will index it, as this way of creating links is akin to the ways she enjoys probing and thinking about material. Now she lives near the Cloisters, which seems somehow appropriate for this phase in her life. Her interest regarding the Middle Ages has grown. Yet she thinks about that time in relation to different bodies of water, such as the Indian Ocean. For years she’d been interested in the life and writings of Ramon Llull. She felt she could now go further into her interests.

Maryse-­Françoise d’Île (Mar) Mar adapts easily to different environments. She likes to appear to blend into local settings, even places where she isn’t fluent with the language. She doesn’t like to be a foreigner; even though she can admit her lack of knowledge about the specificity of a place, she compensates by being very curious and receptive to local habits and idioms, as her sense of observation is acute. She learns rapidly, has the humility to accept correction, and others sense her respect for their customs. She is engaged in a lifelong study of herbs and of plants. As these represent knowledge that has been culled over centuries from around the world, her gift of grasping languages and

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her interest in etymology are put to use in relation to exploring the plant world past and present. She is independent and used to being on her own since an early age. Travel is common for her, a way of life. Migration of plants is of particular interest to her, as well as the movement of people. Her parents were agronomists. In a way, she continues some of what they did. That recognition accompanies her and comforts her as they are gone. Her focus is on plant life, their properties and their beauty, that can be observed as well as represented. She’s comfortable in crowds, in markets, in rural and urban settings, and especially by the sea. Her preference is for a base near the water in a modest house in nature. For this reason she’s deeply inspired by Lester Rowntree’s way of life, based on what she’s read about her in her book, Hardy Californians. In particular, she often thinks of this phrase of Rowntree’s self-­ description in relation to how she sees herself: “A wayfarer urged by conjectural curiosity.”

Raya L. Carlton (Raya) Raya is extremely intelligent yet often perplexed by what people say and mean. The differences between what people say and what they mean confuse her, as she imagines these to be synchronous acts, yet via experience she’s learned otherwise. She is attracted to organisms in nature, particularly water varieties of fauna and flora. They can have surprising traits. Appearance and encounter can contradict. This contact allows her to form analogies to life situations, growing out of her increasing knowledge of underwater habitats and creatures. Born inland near a Great Lake, she had an early desire to be near water. She won a scholarship to study at an institute for oceanography on the Pacific Coast. Many years have passed and she continues to observe and investigate the waters and the shores. She prefers being with one person she feels close to. She avoids crowds. She also feels good in small gatherings of people she knows she can trust and whom she feels close to in some way. Sometimes a person will make a statement that she will ponder for years. Her mind works to attempt to

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search in the world for evidence of what was mentioned, so that she can mull over and decide what she thinks about what was posited. The statement is usually a casual one, yet for Raya it may loom large with potential content, a sort of key that may open an aspect to living that seems distant to her. She is quite at ease on her own, walking along the shore or wading in tide pools.

Water, Time, and Islands Aria: “In every country the Moon keeps ever the rule of alliance with the Sea which it once for all has agreed upon.” (The Venerable Bede) Aria: “Continental islands are accidental, derived islands. They are separated from a continent, born of disarticulation, erosion, fracture; they survive the absorption of what once contained them. Oceanic islands are originary, essential islands. Some are formed from coral reefs and display a genuine organism. Others emerge from underwater eruptions, bringing to the light of day a movement from the lowest depths. . . . Continental islands serve as a reminder that the sea is on top of the earth, taking advantage of the slightest sagging in the highest structures; oceanic islands, that the earth is still there, under the sea, gathering its strength to punch through to the surface. We can assume that these elements are in constant strife, displaying a repulsion for one another. In this we find nothing to reassure us. . . . In one way or another, the very existence of islands is the negation of this point of view, of this effort, this conviction.” (Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands) . . . Dear All, This is an immediate follow-­up. I realize you haven’t had a chance to respond yet, but I wanted to send this off to you as I’m eager to read your initial thoughts. The basis for the ideas of what I’m calling the September Institute is in

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a separate description that you’ll soon receive. I’m thinking about a project that can rely on our various strengths, or as I’ve heard stated recently, “skill sets.” The focus continues to be on locations we inhabit yet that seem exotic for those who aren’t familiar. As a future long-­term project, I propose creating an Island Encyclopedia. This is an impetus to shift our thought into different kinds of associations, for example, beyond the assumed acceptance of continents or nations. These concepts are up for questioning in any case. We’ve talked about some of these things before, so why not enact them? First, of course, we have to get the letter exchange going. Please excuse my enthusiasm, but I feel as if a weight has been lifted from me since I had a kind of “conversion” experience. I promise not to attempt to convert any of you. I already like you. But we are all seekers. To follow up an earlier wish, has anyone yet read George Sand? Winter in Majorca? Please do! I’m beginning to read her Story of My Life (Histoire de ma vie), a very unusual approach, as she begins the story at least forty years before she’s born, which I like. There are many biographies; most of them are annoying, but some are interesting. I come across all sorts of curious descriptions of writing women when I read Sand-­related books. It’s still fascinating to me that Sand was penalized for what were considered her excesses. Here’s one instance, from Belinda Jack’s A Woman’s Life Writ Large: “For Nietzsche, Sand was a prolific, ink-­yielding cow, an example of ‘lactea ubertas.’ Her overflowing, undisciplined writing was evidence of her incapacity to reason logically. . . . He likened her to Wagner. What disconcerted both Baudelaire and Nietzsche above all, beyond or beneath their more rational objections, was Sand’s passion, her energy, and her capacity to respond with enormous courage to conviction. These same attributes account for her enormous popularity.” I’m also reading her Lettres d’un voyageur, which provide another perspective. Sand’s correspondence is impressive. It is still being edited. There are twenty volumes to date. She was a precursor to the open letter, in writing letters to be read publicly. As she said, “I felt I had many things to say and that I wanted to say them to myself and others.” Take this as an encouragement. As Henry James put it, interesting how this is the second mention of one of the James family: George Sand “‘is open to everything’: her discourse might be ‘amatory, religious, political, aesthetic, pictorial, musical, theatrical, historical.’ It might also be, as we see in Lettres d’un voyageur,

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botanical, astronomical, mythological. In fact, about almost anything that seized her interest and imagination she was remarkably knowledgeable.” All right friends, I’ll leave it there. As always, looking forward to hearing from you. Yours, Aria

Humans and Islands Humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an island represents. Islands are either from before or for after humankind.—Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands The meaning of a name is more than the meaning of words composing it. —George R. Stewart, Names of the Land

Manatay, Manhattan, Lyn Dear Aria, cc: Raya, Mar I like your idea very much. Count me in. I pledge allegiance to the experiment. Shall I begin now? I do feel as if I have been saving many words. I don’t really talk with many people, beyond those I encounter while doing errands or in a professional capacity. Not speaking hasn’t bothered me, as I write, but since you mentioned it, yes, there are few people now here to speak with about what means something to me, beyond politics and the economy. Is it generational? So many people are gone even though we’re not what I used to imagine as old? We were described by the media as Generation X, remember? It figures; no name, just a letter. In the 1920s some advertising type coined the phrase “lost generation” and later during 1970s punk times, “blank generation.” Its kind of ridiculous to even consider being branded by a time period, don’t you think? Now there is a “Gen X” President elected

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in the U.S. and youth have hope. Really? Yes, let’s write about our lives and about where we are. To begin, here’s a dream I’d written down many years ago before I’d been anywhere farther from this island and this country than Mexico: This is the second time in a row that I have dreamt about water. Two nights ago I dreamt about the Mediterranean Sea and a Greek island named Pesta. The dream was related to Atlantis, the city that sank into the ocean. Last night I dreamt about traveling outside of one’s body. I dreamt of the Brontë children dying, but not really being dead. A small boy suddenly died, but his corpse was not buried. Within a few days it did not rot. I saw him breathing as if asleep. He opened his eyes and sat up. Said he had been on a voyage beneath the sea. Many of my friends were disappearing and I could not find them. They returned, telling me that they were in another dimension, beneath the sea. Several of them said that suddenly they were able to go to a place in the depths of the ocean. They were going to have a party there and asked if I would come. I wanted to know the secret of how they were able to go to this deep place. One gave me a very tiny submarine, smaller than my smallest finger, and told me to climb in. I just held it, not knowing how to use this submarine. I looked out of a window, which came to the water’s edge. I wondered what would happen if I were to jump in. Would I develop fins on my neck for breathing the farther I sank? Would I find this secret buried place? When I had been on the road the first time, years ago, I’d gotten physically familiar with different places. By foot I walked in Oklahoma, past an Indian reservation, along with an occasional lone Indian, who didn’t even try to hitch a ride. For three days I waited at a truck stop for a lift east. I never got it. Walking became a mode of transportation then. Although my friend Voy’s scam got me on a plane and out of there. Since then I’ve become familiar with places by walking in them, learning them by foot. Figuring out routes I prefer based on invented reasons of taste. Not enough trees on this street. Depressing buildings on that street. The grade of this hill is more gradual. In many cities, towns, and villages, in different countries, I’ve walked. Walked and worked. And also just walked, watched, listened. 51. Endless Dreams and Water Between 439

Eventually I lived in a place by the water. It had seven hills and I walked each of them and stared at the water when I’d reach the top. I took ferries across the water and continued to walk. Sometimes I rode buses to the beach and walked the long shore. Now islands. I never really thought of myself as being particularly fond of islands. But you’re right, I do live on one. It had even been called, as well as thought of itself as, “the island in the center of the world.” How about that for megalomania? It does seem to be a tendency that has affected different locations at various times in history. Since I’ve been back I’ve become quite interested in finding out more about this island and its past. I’ve also become very interested in studying the Middle Ages. Maybe these interests are strangely related. In part they derive from the fact that I now live on the only part of the island that has areas with its earlier vegetation and rock formations, and this location is near that odd importation of the European past, the Cloisters. In addition, I’ve been trying to enter the thoughts of a medieval mystic and philosopher from Mallorca, Ramon Llull. Perhaps you can help me from your location? The island I inhabit is indeed a mysterious island, but all of our locations involve combinations. I’ve been thinking about Llull’s Ars combinatoria in relation to living. Perhaps it gives some indications of value in the present, even if it’s challenging to decipher thoughts from a medieval Christian mindset. But certain ways of working with permutations are related to computer science. He is also considered by Oulipians as what they call an anticipatory plagiarist. I think one of the attractions to me of the Middle Ages is that it was necessary for some to keep ancient knowledge alive. The primary protectors of received knowledge at that time were Islamic. This I’m sure resonates with your own interests in your Mallorcan island, as there are many traces in place names and in surviving structures of an Islamic past. Al-­Mayurka, is this the correct name? What was Mallorca before? And what was Manhattan before, during those earlier times? Before maps and fixed boundaries? Before passports? This island region had a confederacy called Iroquois that dated back at least nine thousand years. It was a complex of islands. Algonquins were called “The First Peoples” of North America and had at one time covered a third of the continent. Most of the peoples that passed through the area were related to the Lenape, described as “an ancient riverine people of

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Algonquin stock.” They can be perceived as comprising hoops or circles within circles of other related peoples. Munsee people were the last to predominate. The Mohican descendents of Algonquins are more well known, but they were also called “People of the River.” I read that there are 18,000 skeletons of Native Americans hidden in museum storage, of different museums like the Peabody Museum, for example. Menatay means island to the Unami Delaware. Mahatuouh, “place for gathering bow wood,” by the Munsee. Manhattan or Manahatta, “rocky island,” add the “ten” and that means habitation in Munsee. So Manhattan is the Munsee name. I’ll stop now and see if I have any messages or post from any of you. I picture messages in bottles moving through the sea. We could start a blog, but that would defeat the purpose of intimacy and depth, I think, at least at this phase. Looking forward to continuing. Yours, Lyn

Al-­Mayurka, Mallorca, Mar Dear Aria, cc: Lyn, Raya Thank you for your letter and invitation. Maybe we’ll be in touch differently. Yes, I will participate in a correspondence. It has been a long time since I’ve written the kind of letter you describe. While thinking about your proposition I came across a letter in a novel I’m reading. The letter is meant to have been written by a priest and it launches the novel The Dolls’ Room, by Llorenç Villalonga. It is set in a fictional Mallorcan town called Bearn, which is also the name of the founding family that is dying out. The letter is dated 1890, but the book was published in 1956. I’m reading the English translation, which didn’t appear until 1988, after the author’s death. He was born in Palma. This may interest you. In a way it relates to the issue of generations that Lyn mentioned and change to which you allude. I quote:

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The question is not a simple one, and I feel the need to start from the very beginning. Giving you all the details of that life I loved so deeply, despite its grave errors, has provided a solace for me in my solitude. I must admit that the motive of my story, written in the course of these endless nights, may not be solely the scruples of my conscience, but rather the pleasure of reviving the familiar venerated figure I have just lost. With him an entire world has disappeared, beginning with these lands that have seen my birth and that will have to be auctioned off because the creditors have already notified us that they do not wish to wait any longer. The Senyor’s nephews and niece neither have enough money to pay off the mortgages nor feel any love for Bearn, being used to city life as they are. There might be one last source of hope: they say a relative of the Senyors has arrived from America after having become a millionaire selling cardboard boxes. It seems unbelievable that anyone should become an important personality selling little boxes, but he has introduced himself with much pomp, laden with gold and determined to dazzle all of Mallorca with an electric automobile that has already killed two sheep. On his calling card, below his name, are the words Cardboard Containers, which no one quite understood until they realized it referred to those famous boxes. I’ll skip ahead, the quote continues: To me, halfway down the path of my life, this Cardboard Container Bearn would be nothing but an intruder. Yet there is no question but that a new generation is emerging, which is willing to associate these old lands with the personality of an outsider and will experience the same feelings towards the union of senyor and lands, which it will believe to be deeply rooted, that I felt towards Don Toni as a child. For some reason after reading this I thought about Robert Graves and Deià, all the changes in that area. I have also been reading George Sand’s Winter in Majorca and I took notice of the many footnotes, written by Graves, contesting nearly everything she wrote. It was quite remarkable. I was somehow reminded of Kinbote’s role in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. We’ve had some laughs over that. Some of these notes extend for pages on their own, as if he’s taking over her book. It’s quite weird. I realize I wasn’t born on this island, although now I feel as if I had been, since I’ve been “adopted” by a

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very kind family. I have become familiar with the vegetation and landscape over these years, and I must say that Graves seemed rather harsh on Sand. That made me wonder what had been his experiences? He gives the appearance of being omniscient regarding anything Mallorcan and it seemed as if he’d perhaps had his own story with another woman who was also a writer. Through reading, I found this was the case. Two poets together. He lived in Deià with the writer Laura Riding. They even had founded a press together. Isn’t that interesting? Of course you probably know all about this. There are even books in English on their years together, which were 1926 to 1940. Strange, isn’t it, what become the remnants of a life and what people who have the possibility to publish choose to remember? Concerning both Robert Graves and Frédéric Chopin in Mallorca, we didn’t yet discuss how Graves seems to identify with the male artist, composer, and pianist Frédéric Chopin, who spent the winter in Mallorca with Sand, according to her in a sickly state. Graves and Chopin are considered cultural monuments, whereas Riding and Sand are not. I haven’t yet found statues of either of them. They’re seen more as extreme, crazy, and witchlike, from what I’ve gathered in conversation and through books. The photos of Laura in Deià are particularly unflattering. In the early days she was considered to be as beautiful as a movie star. Of course, I prefer to read what she wrote rather than focus on the personal drama. But yes, thanks also for the Polti suggestion. I’ll check out the 36 dramatic situations. I have been enjoying reading Winter in Majorca. It’s pretty easy to find here in many languages. As it’s such a tourism product I’d never felt compelled to read it until you suggested it. Sand describes a challenging situation in an unfamiliar place known prior to her journey only through painted images and travelogues. In some cases I disagree with Sand and Graves. But it is an interesting read. It makes me more curious about aspects I’ve been investigating concerning the Islamic past, via botany, gardens, and architecture. It’s been an extreme pleasure to encounter the small painted illustrations in the old herbal botanicals. Even though the classification systems have been contested, there is much to be found there. That’s a possible direction I’d be interested in developing. In terms of my research I have found sources focusing on the Balearic Islands. This has something to do with your request that we think more about where we are. One of the particular aspects we face as islanders con-

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cerns scale. There are rare species of flowers here, but they may grow only in a small area. They may be the only examples of their sort in the world. There is no elsewhere beyond these island locations for certain plants. They are not endlessly replenished. I’ve read that “the near-­disappearance of Minorca’s Vica bifoliolata can be blamed on collectors of rare plants.” Luckily with photography plants can be “collected” in photos rather than killed. So I’ve been busily engaged. I’m curious to read more from each of us. The letter exchange is a good idea. Aria, it would be wonderful to see you sometime, even before September. Let’s visit? To Lyn and Raya, I look forward to being in contact via post and hope to see you soon. That’s it for now. Yours, Mar

Yerba Buena, San Francisco Bay, Raya Dear Aria, cc: Lyn and Mar It’s great to receive a letter from you. I’m glad to resume contact and I look forward to participating in the correspondence with you, Lyn, and Mar. Thinking from the islands we inhabit is an interesting way to begin locating our various intersections, and yes, thinking of constellations can be a stimulus. It’s been ages since I’ve written an actual letter to anyone, especially as nearly everyone I know communicates very succinctly via e-­mail and in code. To begin, I want to use words that I like. They remind me of your invitation: I want you to hear these words. Now I am speaking to you about our lives. That is the way we begin speeches in Cherokee, and then we say what we would like to see happen, with a simple statement that begins with “I want,” as in “I want us to go to Washington and tell them just what’s going on down here.” The way white people exhort in their speeches—such as “we should . . .” or “we must . . .”—sounds to us not

444 Operations

only arrogant but devious. Is this guy trying to hide from us his own thoughts? Then why speak? (They often do speak only for the purpose of hiding their thoughts.) This was from Those Dead Guys for a Hundred Years by Jimmie Durham. I’ve liked those words for a long time and it’s great to be able to share them. I’m surrounded by water, which I enjoy, and I spend most of my time moving through or around water and shores checking the habitats and studying different aspects of what supports life. As I drive to work I see water and other islands, as San Francisco is technically a peninsula, although it feels like an island as it is an archipelagic region and there are, I believe, 41 islands in the vicinity of the San Francisco Bay, leading out to the Pacific Ocean. I, like Lyn, imagine what existed before. I think about long spans of time, millions of years, and what was here before and before and before, as I keep finding traces of the past when I walk along the shore. The life forms are also ancient. They survived all kinds of turbulence and adapted to the changes. In this region there is much awareness of the intensity of the earth, as we’re on an earthquake fault. The San Andreas Fault, which is actually a network of faults, that converge near where I spend a lot of time, around Bolinas Lagoon. All of the faults have shown tectonic activity, meaning that the North American and the Pacific Plates shift. One of the things I find so fascinating about the area is that two distinct provinces from different geological time periods are now juxtaposed because of the movement of earth. One observer described the aerial view: “Looked at from the air, the Point Reyes Peninsula seems about as disjunct from the rest of California as Saudi Arabia is from Africa, and for the same reason: a boundary of lithospheric plates.” Witnessing the strength of the sea and the changing climates is unavoidable here. Watching the waves I often think of the distances they travel. For example, seismic waves, called tsunamis. It’s impossible not to think of islands in relation to these. Unlike larger landmasses islands, as Rachel Carson tells us, “are the result of the violent, explosive, earth-­shaking eruptions of submarine volcanoes, working perhaps for millions of years to achieve their end.” As she notes, “It is one of the paradoxes in the ways of earth and sea that a process seemingly so destructive, so catastrophic in nature, can result in an act of creation.” Forces that occur in the depths of

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the ocean are fascinating, and these processes continue, as they have for millennia. Yet there are moments of human intervention. One island I see often is Alcatraz. I found a book called Alcatraz Is Not an Island, published in 1972. I quote: “Alcatraz was born a mountain, surrounded by the waters of a great salt sea. . . . We send out our voices to that desolate rock, and are gifted with echoes which resound our strength.” It was reclaimed by Indians of All Tribes in 1971, but it was taken away again by the invaders, yet it’s a strong symbol for me. I remember every day. The Spanish named it Alcatraz as it was once inhabited by many pelicans. It remains a wish to see the prison concrete and steel removed and a regeneration of long-­gone pelicans, vegetation, and wildflowers. From this island area in this state that was once perceived to be an island, how do I inhabit this place? It’s been interesting to begin reading George Sand and to attempt understanding her context. Wars were quite constant in Europe before her birth and through her life. I think about that here, as this nation is still at war. The rift between the rich and the poor is wider than it was before 1981. Prison expansion as a private industry has been growing, and California is notorious for its number of prisons and number of incarcerated people. I think about these things here, as there continue to be reminders, like Alcatraz. To balance that, there is the sea and the long histories. I do experience more dreamy states of mind while reading and drifting. Wet sounds of steadily falling rain and of spinning car wheels. These are common during winter in northern California. This was what I heard as I began reading letters written by George Sand to someone named Marcie. Writing is a bit like dreaming. Thoughts and memories swirl in and out of my mind, like a fog that I can see from a distance and watch gradually swirl in, engulf me and my surroundings, then shift again and go elsewhere. What one tries to put into words can seem dense and difficult to grasp, and like fog it’s full of tiny drops of water-­like thought, sometimes feeling colder depending on its density, yet it reflects many degrees of light. Looking forward to continuing. I’m sure more words will come. Yours, Raya

446 Operations

Cycles: Another Letter from Aria Dear Lyn, Mar, and Raya, Thank you so much for your positive responses to my wish. It makes me very glad that we are all in this new form of contact. Did I mention to you when I was last at the Big Book Sale in San Francisco I found books by women on writing from the early 1980s and early 1990s? It was like discovering items from a time capsule, as they seemed to exist in a very distant past. Now that we’ve begun our correspondence I have many things I’d like to respond to regarding what you’ve already written and, in turn, write more ideas that your words have stimulated. There never seems to be enough time. So let’s begin planning to convene. I’d like to mention more on Georges Polti, regarding the Middle Ages, as well as think through William Morris with you. There are interesting possibilities brewing for developing the Island Encyclopedia. Also there’s more to follow up concerning Laura Riding and her renunciation of poetry, and her quest for linguistic truth. It will take years for us to read George Sand’s oeuvre, which I continue to do. I’m reminded of a story by Hollis Frampton. It described a person who’d been filmed from birth and had to watch all of the films until death. I know I’ve misdescribed this, but the point is that to read what Sand wrote could take a lifetime. Could that be a reason why her works have been dismissed? A resentment at its sheer enormity, that can be presented as excess? Anyway, there are pearls there. Here are some initial thoughts I’ve written regarding the September Institute. These are up for discussion, so I look forward to your feedback. I listed four mottos: 1. We still own our words and can produce them. 2. Anything you create you want to exist, and its means of existence is in being printed. 3. Sending transmissions from dispersed islands, linking worlds, time, and space. 4. We continue the ongoing movement of combination people. September Institute compiles and regenerates material from abandoned collections and publications, providing indexical access and linked research

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tools, that enable circulation within the depths of significant ideas, operations, and productions of those who may have been forcefully forgotten. s.i. publishes out-­of-­print books to give them new life. September Institute is not a utopian community but rather a momentary nexus. It exists in contrast to previous idealist attempts to address shifting contemporary moments. Acknowledging the predilections of the past (idealist, romantic, utopian, and modernist aims), s.i. embraces the present, however it is calibrated, in relation to time, with a consciousness of time’s expanse. Beautiful and odd remnants from the expanse of time are excavated, represented, and re-­thought. These include books, ephemera, notebooks, photos, and out-­of-­date time-­based formats, i.e., pre-­digital. They are evidence of encounters, a trace of experience. s.i. produces books of collected data. Online versions also exist. Please let’s continue thinking and exchanging. I love words. Etymologically, texturally. It’s possible to enter words on one’s own. As each of us can enter the letters we’ve exchanged on our own. Examining each other’s thoughts separately. This process of exchanging and learning about each other’s thoughts through letters is a bit like learning about words. Becoming familiar with the vast range of nuances possible, of words and thoughts, is like entering a secret or monastic order. Very few people care about words or thoughts in this way. It’s the way things are. I find comfort in this exploration, though perhaps because it’s specialized rather than standardized knowledge, which is so abundant. Writing letters to each of you is different than writing for a blog, in the sense that this is a specific activity between four people, even though I do like the Disgrasian™ blog, but this is different. How to translate past feelings, times, and histories into meaningful comprehension that can provide fuel amid present feelings of lack and absence? Was it always this way? I wonder about life before our presumed extreme technological connectivity and presumed availability. I wonder how you feel and how others have felt. Probing these things has motivated this correspondence. The wish for something else that might be possible. More profound understanding, for example. Other kinds of meaning. I do care about depth and varieties of meanings, as I care about combinations and permutations, as we’ve discussed. Autodidacticism can be extremely fulfilling, especially when so much can appear to be a wasteland. This doesn’t mean that I’m interested in re448 Operations

51.1 September Institute Preliminary Proposal, 2011. Letterpress, 18 × 22 inches.

51.2 Endless Dreams and Water Between: Cast of Characters, 2011. Letterpress, 18 × 22 inches.

treating, but rather I feel my senses available to engage are sharpened as I can choose a more exact way of articulating or conveying them, in words, images, sounds, etc. I respect and admire each of you for also sharing these interests. Since so many specialized skills, things, and people are slipping into oblivion, my interest is more and more in what is specific and perhaps thought of as esoteric. What is determinedly unfashionable. This interests me. Maybe some things are too difficult to reproduce, because there is no facility, concentration, or interest that enables easy reproduction. I’m not endorsing “craft,” as it’s recently been labeled. This is not my interest. I’m also not suggesting difficulty for the sake of difficulty, nor am I assuming that specialty can be equated with superiority, yet still, I wish to probe life’s complexity. And I’m glad that each of you is also willing to do this. I’ll conclude my letter with something to ponder, as it relates to what I’ve written. We can wonder with Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze: Why something rather than nothing, but why this rather than something else? Why this tension of duration? Why this speed rather than another? Why this proportion? And why will a perception evoke a given memory, or pick up certain frequencies rather than others? In other words, being is difference and not the immovable or the undifferentiated, nor is it contradiction, which is merely false movement. Being is the difference itself of the thing, what Bergson often calls the nuance. I’ll leave you with those words until the next time. From each of our islands let’s stare at the moon. Yours, Aria

Note Originally published in Collapse 6 (2010): 480–523. Reprinted in Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2010), 44–58.

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P L AT E C A P T I O N S

Intro 1. Other Planes Plate 1 Author’s notebook, 2006. Plate 2 Author’s notebook, 2013. Plate 3 Gloria Simpson Green, 1950s. Plate 4 Derrick Green, Sepultura postcard, 1990s. Plate 5 Renée Green, Some Chance Operations, Vienna Secession, 1999. Plate 6 Relations: Brasil + (a), 2009. Banner, 39.25 × 118 inches. Plate 7 Relations: Brasil + (b), 2009. Banner, 39.25 × 118 inches. Plate 8 Animation Activation (Sigetics Vortex), Other Planes of There manuscript, 2010. Plate 9 A Power Stronger Than Itself, from Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho), 2012. Banner, 17.5 × 22 inches. Intro 2. Remarks on the Writings of Renée Green Plate 10 Negotiations in the Contact Zone Symposium, 1994. Ephemera. Plates 11–12 Negotiations in the Contact Zone Symposium, 1994. Video stills. Plate 13 Sites of Genealogy, 1991. Installation detail, P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, Long Island City. Plate 14 A-­B, 1989. Silkscreen, ink, vellum, collage on paper, 18 × 24 inches. Plate 15 Early Videos, 2010. Mixed media: six dvds , six portable dvd players, one shelf, six stools, wall treatment. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2010. Image: Phocasso/J. W. White. Plate 16 The Digital Import/Export Funk Office, 1996. cd-­rom , back cover. Plate 17 Import/Export Funk Office, 1996. Mixed media. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Kunstraum / Kulturinformatik der Universität Lüneburg, Germany.

1. Sites of Criticism Plate s 18–19 Revue, 1990. Mixed media, rotating motor, 95 × 251 × 14 inches. Installation view, The Clocktower Gallery, New York. 2. Discourse on Afro-­American Art Plate 20 Case II. Lost, 1990. Vitrine, mixed media, 48 × 83 × 12 inches. Installation view, The Clocktower Gallery, New York. Image: Tom Warren. Plates 21–23 Case II. Lost. 1990. Installation detail, The Clocktower Gallery, New York. Image: Tom Warren. Plate 24 Selected Life Indexes, 2005. Digital film, color, 119 minutes. Film still. 3. I Won’t Play Other to Your Same Plate 25 Neutral/Natural, 1990. Mixed media: wood, audio, tape loop, photostat, color photographs, jar, Plexiglas; 114 × 12 inches. Installation view, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, Lausanne, 2009. 4. What’s Painting Got to Do with It? Plate 26 Times Square, New York City, December 15, 2012, 8:40 pm . Plate 27 Some Chance Operations: Between and Including, Photo set g , 1999. Mixed media: framed photographs, printed alphabets, wall treatment. Installation detail, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, Lausanne, 2009. 5. From Camino Road Plates 28–29 Camino Road, 1994. Book cover. 6. Open Letter #1 Plate 30 From Dreamer to Dreamer, 2009. Published in Flash Art (Milan) 42,

no. 269 (2009): 64.

7. Open Letter #2 Plate 31 Commemorative Toile, 1991. Mixed media: textile, suit, print, furniture, wallpaper, sound and video materials. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Certain Miscellanies, Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam, 1995. Image: De Appel. Plate 32 Neutral/Natural, 1990. Mixed media: wood, audio, tape loop, photostat, color photographs, jar, Plexiglas. Dimensions variable. Installation detail, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, Lausanne, 2009.

454 plates to chapters 1–7

8. Collectors, Creators, and Shoppers Plate 33 Case IV. Found, 1990. Vitrine, mixed media, 48 × 83 × 12 inches. Installation view, The Clocktower Gallery, New York. Image: Tom Warren. Plate 34 No Niche in the Megastore, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. 9. Peripatetic at “Home” Plates 35–36 Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents. Book cover, 1995. Plate 37a–f Walking in Lisbon, 1992. Video, color, sound, 53 minutes. Video

stills sequence.

10. Free Agent Media / FAM Plate 38 Small Units of Imaginative Concentration Exist Variably fam , from

Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. Plate 39 Small Units Move + Flourish fam , from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. Plate 40 Small Units Stay + Flourish fam , from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­ sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. Plate 41 fam Vitrine, 2007. Vitrine with Free Agent Media ephemera. Dimensions and contents variable. Installation detail, United Space of Conditioned Becoming (2), Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin. Image: Natalie Czech. 11. Situationist Text Plate 42 Partially Buried Triptych (1970 At Large), 1996. Lithograph, 22 × 30 inches. Plate 43 d.d.p . Continues as fam , from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. Plate 44 Situationistinnen und andere . . . , 2001. Book cover, 2001. Courtesy of b_books, Berlin. 12. Introductory Notes of a Reader and “A Contemporary Moment” Plate 45 Ongoing Stuff, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. 13. Trading on the Margin Plate 46 Native Stranger Hosting, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches.

Plates to Chapters 8–13 455

14. Democracy in Question Plate 47 A Chronicle of Social Experiments, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. Plate 48 Moral Geometry?, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. 15. Notes from a User Plate 49 Living as Production in Variable Spaces, from Space Poem #1, 2007.

Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches.

16. Spike Lee’s Mix Plate 50a–L Import/Export Funk Office, 1991–93. Video, color, sound. Video stills sequence. 17. Compared to What? Plate 51 Blutopia, from Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho), 2012. Banner,

17.5 × 22 inches.

19. Other Planes of There Plate 52 Other Planes of There (Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, South Korea, 1997), 2000. Color photograph. Plate 53 Other Planes of There (Old Cemetery, Kwangju, South Korea, 1997), 2000. Color photograph. Plate 54 Other Planes of There (Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa, 1997), 2000. Color photograph. Plate 55 Other Planes of There (Students Memorial, Soweto, South Africa, 1997), 2000. Color photograph. 21. On Kawara’s Solutions to Living Plates 56–57 I Am Still Alive and “I” Am Still Alive, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banners, 32 × 42 inches. 22. “Give Me Body” Plate 58 Permitted, 1989. Painting, mixed media, 48 × 48 inches. Plate 59 Seen, 1990. Installation. Mixed media: wooden platform, rubber-­

stamped ink, screen, motorized winking glasses, magnifying glass, spotlight, sound, 81.5 × 81.5 × 53.5 inches. Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan. Plate 60 Seen, 1990. Installation detail.

456 plates to chapters 14–22

23. Dropping Science Plate 61 Page spread, Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents, 1995. Plate 62 Case III. Ways and Means, 1990. Vitrine. Mixed media, 48 × 83 × 12 inches. 24. Site-­Specificity Unbound Plate 63 Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996–97. Mixed Media: Partially Buried (film), Partially Buried Continued (film), Korea Slides (video slideshow), furniture, 26 cibachromes (11 × 14 inches), 21 black-­ and-­white photographs (10 × 8 inches), books, Simulated Vinyl Diary (records, sound system, colored walls), Partially Buried Triptych (three lithographs, 22 × 30 inches), films, crocheted afghan, one Plexiglas box containing 23 paperback books by James A. Michener; one glass box containing remains of Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed, one photographic panel, aerial view of Kent State University Campus. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Vienna Secession, 1999. Image: Pez Hejduk. Plate 64 Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996–97. One Plexiglas box containing 23 paperback books by James A. Michener; one glass box containing remains of Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed. Dimensions variable. Installation detail, Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, 1996. Image: Tom Warren. 25. Slippages Plate 65 World Tour, 1993. Book cover. Plate 66 Negotiations in the Contact Zone, 2003. Book cover. 26. Affection Afflictions Plate 67 Octavia E. Butler, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. Plate 68 Alice Coltrane, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. Plate 69 Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996–97. Installation view. Vienna Secession, 1999. Image: Pez Hejduk. Plate 70 Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996–97. Installation detail. Simulated Vinyl Diary, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, Lausanne, 2009. Plates 71–72 Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996–97. Installation details. Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, Lausanne, 2009.

Plates to Chapters 23–26 457

27. Survival Plates 73–75 Between and Including, Vienna Secession. Installation views.

Vienna Secession, 1999. Image: Matthias Herrmann. Plates 76–77 Korea Slides, 1997. Digital film, color, sound, 72 minutes. Slide images: Friendly Green Jr. 28. Beyond Plate 78 From My Institution . . . , from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. Plate 79 Alleviating Suffering, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches. Plates 80–81 Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Dreams. Installation views. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco 2010. Image: Phocasso/J. W. White. 29. Place Plate 82 Here until October 2004, 2004. Digital film, color, sound, 36 minutes. Film still. Plates 83–84 São Paulo, Brazil, 2010. Plate 85 Renée Green, Pacific Palisades, California, 2004. 30. Sites of Genealogy Plates 86–90 Sites of Genealogy, 1991. Installation views. P.S.1 Contemporary

Arts Center, Long Island City. Image: Tom Warren.

31. VistaVision Plate 91 VistaVision: Landscape of Desire, 1991. Exhibition view. Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, 1991. Plate 92 Pigskin Library, 1990. Mixed media, 71 × 86.5 × 138 inches. Installation view, VistaVision: Landscape of Desire, Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, 1991. Plate 93 Pigskin Library, 1990. Installation detail. VistaVision: Landscape of Desire, Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, 1991. 32. Tracing Lusitania Plate 94 Returns: Tracing Lusitania, 2000. Mixed media: wall treatment,

vinyl type, furniture, videos (1992: Walking in Lisbon; Walking in Lisbon (Slow Motion)); 1994: Negotiations in the Contact Zone Symposium; 2000: Walking in Lisbon, Megahertz, Megastar, Brother, Brazil; Conversation with Diana and Paulo Andringa, Football, Feast,

458 plates to chapters 27–32

Celebration), 14 black-­and-­white photographs, four framed maps. Installation view, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon. Image: Mário Valente. Plate 95 Returns: Tracing Lusitania, 2000. Installation view. Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon. Image: Mário Valente. 33. Secret, Part 1 Plate 96 Secret. Part 1, 1993–2006. Video, color, sound. Video still. Plate 97 Secret (Black and White Photographs), 1993. Photograph, 6.5 × 9.5 inches. 34. Secret, Part 2 Plate 98 Secret (Case), 1993. Suitcase, books, script, photos, video tapes. Plates 99–102 Secret (Black and White Photographs), 1993. Photographs, 6.5 × 9.5 inches. Plate 103 Secret. Mixed media: black-­and-­white photographs, sound (Secret Soundtrack, English and French versions), 3 videos. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2010. Image: Phocasso/J. W. White. Plate 104a–r Secret. Part 1–3, 1993–2006. Video, color, sound. Video stills sequence. 35. Inventory of Clues Plate 105 Inventory of Clues, 1993. English diagram. Plate 106 Inventory of Clues, 1993. Mixed media: sound, type, photography, stage lights, curtain and structures. Dimensions variable. Installation view, On Taking a Normal Situation . . . Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp. Plates 107–110 Inventory of Clues, 1993. Installation views. Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp. 37. Collecting Well Is the Best Revenge Plate 111 Bequest, 1991. Mixed media: panels of wooden clapboard, rubberstamped ink, wood, muslin, velvet, padlocks, red rotating light, sound of burning fire. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts. Plate 112 Bequest, 1991. Installation detail. Worcester Art Museum. Plate 113 Bequest. Exhibition brochure, Worcester Art Museum, 1991. Plate 114 Commemorative Toile, 1991. Mixed media: textile, suit, print, furniture, wallpaper, sound (Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Happy

Plates to Chapters 32–37 459

House;” Mozart) and video. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Galerie Metropole, Vienna, 1993. Plate 115 Commemorative Toile, 1991. Furniture, wallpaper, sound and video. Installation view, Movables, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 2004. Image: Rainer Iglar Plate 116 Commemorative Toile, 1991. Suit. Installation view, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, Lausanne. 38. The Digital Import/Export Funk Office Plate 117 Import/Export Funk Office, 1992. Audio, video, Lexicon panels, print documents (books, newspapers, magazines, ephemera), photos. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, 1992. Plate 118 The Digital Import/Export Funk Office, 1996. cd-­rom , cover. 39. Wavelinks Transmitted amidst “Dangerous Crossings” Plate 119 Wavelinks, 2002–4. Mixed media: seven videos, seven octagonal units for viewing. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, 2004. Image: Mário Valente. Plate 120a–o Wavelinks: Activism + Sound, 2002. Digital film, color, sound, 48 minutes. Film stills sequence. 40. Standardized Octagonal Units Plate 121 Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems (s.o.u. s), 2002. Mixed media: eight octagonal units, seven with sound (Imaginary Places A to Z), one with monitor and looped film with sound (Elsewhere?). Installation view, Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002. Image: Werner Maschmann. Plate 122 Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems (s.o.u. s), 2002. Installation view. Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002. Image: Werner Maschmann. Plate 123a–f Elsewhere?, 2002. Digital film, color, sound, 53 min., dvd . Film stills sequence. First film still from the film Dream’s Labor, 2005. 41. Sound Forest Folly Plate 124 Sound Forest Folly, 2004. Mixed media: three steel octagonal units, wooden bench, textile; each unit with its own sound source, placed on the park trees. Installation view, Lustwarande 04: Disorientation by Beauty, Tilburg. Image: Peter Cox.

460 plates to chapters 37–41

42. Why Systems? Plate 125 Movable Contemplation Unit, 2004. Hexagonal structure, iron, glass, type, wood bench, books. Installation view, Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, 2004. Image: Mário Valente. Plate 126 Movable Contemplation Unit, 2004. Detail. Image: Mário Valente. Plate 127 Author’s notebook, 2003. Plate 128a–c Elsewhere?, 2002. Digital film, color, sound, 53 min., dvd . Film stills sequence. 43. Relay Plate 129a–L Knitting, 2005. Video, color, sound, 35 minutes. Video stills

sequence. Plate 130 Relay, 2005. Mixed media: six yoga mats, six chairs, six monitors (with University, Inc.; The Postman Only Rings Twice; Dream’s Labor; Something More Powerful Than Skepticism; Knitting; The Art of Critical Thinking: act Visits Christopher Williams), prints, two video projections (Elsewhere? + Here until October 2004). Installation view, Kunstraum Innsbruck. Image: Kunstraum Innsbruck, 2005. 44. Index (From Oblivion) Plate 131 Bonvenon!, 2005. Exhibition ephemera, postcard, 6 × 4 inches. Plate 132a–d Selected Life Indexes, 2005. Digital film, color, 119 minutes. Film stills sequence. 45. Climates and Paradoxes Plate 133a–L Climates and Paradoxes, 2005. Digital film, color, sound, 41 minutes. Film stills sequence. 46. Why Reply? Plate 134a–d Here Until October 2004, 2004. Digital film, color, sound, 36 minutes. Film stills sequence. Plate 135 Here Until October 2004, 2005. Print, 37 × 25.5 inches. 47. Now It Seems Like a Dream Plate 136 Shopping mall, Montréal, 2012. Plate 137 Art museum, New York, 2012. Plate 138 Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007.

Plates to Chapters 42–47 461

48. Imagine This Wherever and Whoever You Are Plates 139–140 Imagine This Wherever and Whoever You Are, 2008. Text, voices, sound panels. Installation views, La Fortezza, Bolzano, Manifesta 7. 50. Come Closer Plate 141a–r Come Closer, 2008. Digital film, color, sound, 13 minutes. Film stills sequence. 51. Endless Dreams and Water Between Plate 142a–L Stills, 2009. Digital film, color, 69 minutes. Film stills sequence.

Part of a film installation triptych with Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009), and Excess (2009).

462 plates to chapters 48–51

P U B L I S H I N G H I S T O RY

Genealogies 1. “Sites of Criticism: A Symposium. Practices.” Originally published in acme Journal 1, no. 2 (1992): 49–53. Edited transcript of Green’s participation in Panel II, “Practices: The Problem of Divisions of Cultural Labor,” at Sites of Criticism: A Symposium, The Drawing Center, New York, March 10, 1992. Other panel participants were Gregg Bordowitz, Coco Fusco, Félix González-­ Torres, Peter Halley, Silvia Kolbowski, Calvin Reid, and Mary Ann Staniszewski. Organized and moderated by Joshua Decter and co-­moderated by Andrea Fraser. Co-­sponsored by The New Museum of Contemporary Art, hosted by The Drawing Center. 2. “Discourse on Afro-­American Art: The Twenties.” Excerpt from an unpublished honors thesis submitted to the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, 1981. 3. “I Won’t Play Other to Your Same.” Originally published in Meaning, no. 7 (May 1990): 15–16; reprinted in Meaning: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 220–22. Published in German as “Kalter Schweiss,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 76–79; reprinted in Erste Wahl: 20 Jahre Texte zur Kunst. I. Dekade, edited by Isabelle Graw, Helmut Draxler, and André Rottmann (Hamburg: Filo Fine Arts, 2011). 4. “What’s Painting Got to Do with It? Representing Gender and Sexuality in the Age of Post-­Mechanical Production.” Revised and augmented version of a shorter essay published in Post-­Boys and Girls: Nine Painters (New York: Artists Space, 1990), 8–10. 5. “From Camino Road.” Excerpt from Green’s novel Camino Road (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Free Agent Media, 1994), in English and Spanish. The novel and a homonymous video constituted Road _______ , Part 1 (1994), Green’s contribution to the exhibition The Cooked

and the Raw, curated by Dan Cameron and held at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía, December 1994–February 1995.

Circuits of Exchange 6. “Open Letter #1: On Influence.” Originally published in English in Texte zur Kunst (Cologne), no. 7 (Fall 1992): 187–89. 7. “Open Letter #2: Another Attempt.” Text submitted to the editors of the magazine Texte zur Kunst in response to Michael Archer’s review of Green’s “Open Letter #1.” Unpublished, 1993. 8. “Collectors, Creators, Shoppers.” Originally published in Frieze, no. 18 (September–October 1994). 9. “Peripatetic at ‘Home.’” Originally published in Renée Green, Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (Amsterdam: De Appel Foundation, daad , 1996), 31–36. 10. “Free Agent Media / FAM.” Originally published in Renée Green, Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (Amsterdam: De Appel Foundation, daad , 1996), 92–99. 11. “Situationist Text.” Originally published in English and German in J.U.P., Situationistinnen und andere . . . (Berlin: b_books, 2001), 66–77. 12. “Introductory Notes of a Reader and ‘A Contemporary Moment.’” Originally published in From Work to Text: Dialogues on Practise and Criticism in Contemporary Art, edited by Jürgen Bock (Lisbon: Centro Cultural de Belém, 2002), 245–54. A Portuguese version, “Notas Introdutórias de um Leitor e ‘Um Momento Contemporâneo,’” appears in the same volume, 233–44.

Encounters 13. “Trading on the Margin.” Originally published in Transition, no. 52 (1991): 124–32. 14. “Democracy in Question.” Originally published in Transition, no. 53 (1991): 163–67. 15. “Notes from a User: L’informe.” Originally published in German as “Beo‑ bachtungen einer Benutzerin,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 24 (September 1996): 152. 16. “Spike Lee’s Mix: Calculated Risks and Assorted Reckonings.” Originally published in Spex, 1996. 17. “Compared to What?” Originally published in Spex, November 1998.

464 Publishing History

18. “Notes on Humanist and Ecological Republic and Lac Mantasoa.” Originally published in German as “Marode moderne,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 39 (September 2000): 148–53. 19. “Other Planes of There.” Originally published in Yard 1, no. 1 (2004): 54–61. 20. “Archives, Documents? Forms of Creation, Activation, and Use.” Originally published in English in Geschichten/n verwahren, edited by Julia Kläring and Katharina Lampert (Vienna: ig Bildende Kunst, 2009). Also appeared in French as “Notes pour un essai: Archives, documents? Formes de création, activation, et usage,” Hors d’oeuvre (Dijon), no. 22 (June–September 2008): 3. The Instant Archive, a curatorial project from Season 17, Ecole du Magasin, Grenoble, 2008, includes on their website a pdf of the English version. 21. “On Kawara’s Solutions to Living.” Text from a public presentation on January 16, 2010, for 75 Reasons to Live, a series of 7.5-­minute talks around works from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s collection. Green selected for her talk On Kawara’s Mar. 16, 1993 from the Today series. Unpublished manuscript, 2010.

Positions 22. “‘Give Me Body’: Freaky Fun, Biopolitics, and Contact Zones.” Originally published in Italian as “‘Give Me Body’: Divertimento Bizzarro, Biopolitica e Zona di Contatto,” in Arte, Identità, Confini, edited by Carolyn Christov-­ Bakargiev and Ludovico Pratesi (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1995), 118–24. 23. “Dropping Science: Art and Technology Revisited 2.0.” Originally published in Flash Art 28, no. 185 (November–December 1995): 55–57. Published in German as “Dropping Science: Art and Technology Revisited 2.01,” in Telenoia: Kritik der virtuellen Bilder, edited by Elisabeth von Samsonow and Éric Alliez (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1999). 24. “Site-­Specificity Unbound: Considering ‘Participatory Mobility.’” Originally published in German as “Site-­Specificity Unbound: Zum Begriff der teilnehmenden Mobilität,” Springerin 1 (1998): 18–21. 25. “Slippages.” Originally published in German as “Gleitende Verschiebungen,” in Agenda: Perspektiven kritischer Kunst, edited by Christian Kravagna (Vienna: Folio, 2000), 133–59. Published in French in Radiotemporaire (Grenoble: Magasin, 2002), 143–55. A brief excerpt in German appeared as “Der Künstler als Ethnograph?,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 27 (September 1997): 152–61.

Publishing History 465

26. “Affection Afflictions: My Alien/My Self, or More ‘Reading at Work.’” Originally published in German as “Leidige Liebe: My Alien/My Self— Readings at Work,” in Loving the Alien: Science Fiction, Diaspora and Multikultur, edited by Diedrich Diederichsen (Berlin: id Archiv, 1998), 135–51. A shorter edited version appeared in Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, edited by Greg Tate (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 227–43. 27. “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae.” Originally published in Interarchive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck (Lüneburg: Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg, Walther König, 2002), 147–52. A brief excerpt appeared in The Archive, edited by Charles Merewether (London: Whitechapel Gallery, mit Press, 2006), 49–55. 28. “Beyond.” Originally published in Institutional Critique and After (Zürich: jrp |Ringier Kunstverlag, 2006), 158–69. 29. “Place.” Originally published in Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence (New Delhi: Sarai Programme, csds , 2006), 19–27.

Operations 30. “Sites of Genealogy.” Unpublished manuscript, 1990. 31. “VistaVision: Landscape of Desire.” Unpublished manuscript, 1991. 32. “Tracing Lusitania: Excerpts from an Imagined Prototype.” Unpublished manuscript, 1992–95. 33. “Secret, Part 1. Practiced Places.” Unpublished manuscript, 1992–93. 34. “Secret, Part 2. Scenes from a Group Show: Project Unité.” Originally published as “Scenes from a Group Show: Project Unité,” in Site-­Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, edited by Alex Coles (London: Black Dog, 2000), 114–35. A brief excerpt appeared as “Secret (Project Unité, Firminy),” in Situation, edited by Claire Doherty (London: Whitechapel Gallery, mit Press, 2009), 78–79. 35. “Inventory of Clues.” Originally published as a bilingual (English and Dutch) brochure in On Taking a Normal Situation . . . (Antwerp: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, 1993). 36. “Eighteen Aphoristic Statements.” An incomplete version was previously published in Vor den Information, nos. 1–2 (1994): 2–4. Unpublished manuscript, 1994.

466 Publishing History

37. “Collecting Well Is the Best Revenge.” Originally published in Renée Green, Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (Amsterdam: De Appel Foundation, daad , 1996), 131–39. An excerpt appeared as “Collecting Well Is the Best Revenge: Commemorative Toile Fabric,” in Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, edited by Joel Sanders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 98–103. 38. “The Digital Import/Export Funk Office.” Originally published as a booklet included in Renée Green, The Digital Import/Export Funk Office, cd-­rom (Lüneburg: Kunstraum, University of Lüneburg, 1996). English and German versions also appeared in Games, Fights, Collaborations: Das Spiel von Grenze und Überschreitung, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller, and Ulf Wuggenig (Lüneburg: Kunstraum, University of Lüneburg, Cantz, 1996), 57–60 (German), 187–90 (English). 39. “Wavelinks Transmitted amidst ‘Dangerous Crossings’: Reflections in 2006.” Unpublished manuscript, 2000, 2006. 40. “Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems.” Originally published in Documenta 11, Platform 5: Exhibition, Catalogue, edited by Okwui Enwezor (Ostfildern-­Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 563. 41. “Sound Forest Folly: Intermediary Units of a Variable Number.” Unpublished manuscript, 2004. 42. “Why Systems?” Unpublished manuscript, 2004. 43. “Relay.” Originally published as a brochure for Green’s exhibition Relay, Kunstraum Innsbruck, 2005. Reprinted in The Sociological View (Innsbruck: Kunstraum Innsbruck, 2006), 230–32. 44. “Index (From Oblivion): Paradoxes and Climates. Thought Experiments: Warm-­up Notes.” Originally published in German as “Index (Aus dem Vergessen): Paradoxe und Klimata,” in Einstein Spaces, edited by Yvonne Leonard (Berlin: Einstein Forum, 2005), 90–94. 45. “Climates and Paradoxes.” Unpublished script of Green’s film, Climates and Paradoxes, 2005. 46. “Why Reply?” Text from a presentation delivered during the French journal Multitudes’ workshop at Documenta 12’s Magazines Project, Kassel, Germany, June 26–28, 2007. An excerpt appeared on the Multitudes website. Unpublished manuscript, 2007. 47. “Now It Seems Like a Dream.” Originally published in German in Texte zur Kunst (Berlin), no. 67 (September 2007): 197–99.

Publishing History 467

48. “Imagine This Wherever and Whoever You Are.” Originally published in English, German, and Italian in Manifesta 7: Scenarios, edited by Adam Budak, Anselm Franke / Hila Peleg, and Raqs Media Collective (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2008), 48–64. 49. “Come Closer: Prelude to Endless Dreams and Water Between.” Originally published in French in Multitudes, no. 34 (Fall 2008): 137–38. 50. “Come Closer.” Originally published in English and French in Multitudes, no. 34 (Fall 2008): 144–63. 51. “Endless Dreams and Water Between.” Originally published in Collapse 6 (2010): 480–523. Reprinted in Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2010), 44–58.

468 Publishing History

C U R R I C U L U M V I TA E

Born 1959, Cleveland, Ohio Education Whitney Independent Study Program, 1989–90 Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, Harvard University, 1981 Wesleyan University, ba , 1981 Parsons School of Design, 1982 and 1984 School of Visual Arts, New York City, 1979–80 Selected Solo Exhibitions 2012–13 Media Bichos & Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho) for MoMA Media Lounge, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Commission. 2011

Sigetics 2. Espai Visor, Valencia, Spain Sigetics. Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York

2010

Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

2009

Ongoing Becomings: Retrospective 1989–2009. Musée cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland Endless Dreams and Water Between. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

2008

Le rêve de l’artiste et du spectateur: Renée Green. Jeu de Paume, Paris. Film series

2007

United Space of Conditioned Becoming (1). Participant Inc., New York United Space of Conditioned Becoming (2). Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin

2006

Wavelinks. Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York Unité d’habitation. Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris

2005

Index (From Oblivion): Paradoxes and Climates, in Einstein Spaces, Berlin Index (From Oblivion). Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan Relay. Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria Sound Politics. Baltimore Museum of Art. With Mayo Thompson and Ultra-­Red

2004

Elsewhere? Here. Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon Wavelinks. Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

2002

Phases + Versions. Portikus, Frankfurt

2000

Shadows and Signals. Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona Other Planes of There. Pat Hearn Gallery, New York Platform: Ongoing Conversations and Work. The Swiss Institute, New York Returns: Tracing Lusitania. Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon

1999

Between and Including. Vienna Secession Making History: Renée Green and Sam Durant. Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies Project Wall. Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles

1998

Some Chance Operations. Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan

1997

The Digital Import/Export Funk Office. Kunstverein Kreis ­Gütersloh, Germany

1996

Certain Miscellanies. Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam Flow. fri-­a rt Centre d’Art Contemporain Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland Partially Buried. Pat Hearn Gallery, New York Übertragen/Transfer. Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne The Digital Import/Export Funk Office. Kunstraum, Universität Lüneburg

1995

miscellaneous. daad Gallery, Berlin miscellaneous continued. Neuger/Riemschneider Gallery, Berlin

1994

Taste Venue. Pat Hearn Gallery, New York Quest. Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan

1993

World Tour. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas

1992

Import/Export Funk Office. Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne

470 Curriculum Vitae

1991

VistaVision: Landscape of Desire. Pat Hearn Gallery, New York Bequest. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts Sites of Genealogy. P.S.1 Museum, Long Island City, New York

1990

Anatomies of Escape. Institute of Contemporary Art, The Clocktower Gallery, New York

Selected Group Exhibitions, Festivals, and Screenings 2014 Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology. The Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles Words as Doors in Language, Art, Film. Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz, Austria 2013 2012 2011

New Humans. Bureau, New York Some Issues of History. Agathenburg Castle, Agathenburg, Germany The Alumni Show II. Wesleyan University’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Middletown, Connecticut 1993. Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain Make an Effort to Remember. Or, If Failing That, Invent. Bétonsalon—Centre for Art and Research, Paris Empire State. Pallazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris NYC 1993. New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Blues for Smoke. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Zoo. Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Canada Blues for Smoke. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Liam Gillick, Renée Green, Heimo Zobernig—Screens. Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna Global Flows. Tufts University Art Gallery, Aidekman Arts Center Endless Dreams and Water Between. Participant Inc., New York. Screening Endless Dreams and Water Between. mit List Visual Arts Center. Screening The Smithson Effect. Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City I Don’t Know If It Makes Any Sense—I Feel Quite Dizzy and a Little Drunk Due to the Blow. I Will Return with More Info Shortly. imo , Copenhagen The Avant-­garde: Specters of the Nineties. Marres, Center for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht Contemporary Art Archipelago. Turku, Finland

Curriculum Vitae 471

2010 2009 2008 2007 2006

Fakt & Fiktion: Das Interview als künstlerische Praxis. Universität zu Köln, Filmclub 813, Cologne 30 Americans. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC How Many Billboards? Screenings. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Screening How Many Billboards? Art in Stead. mak Center for Art + Architecture, Los Angeles Moving Images: Artists & Video/Film. Museum Ludwig, Cologne Endless Dreams and Water Between. Urbanomic Studio, Falmouth, England. Screening Art Basel 40. Premiere. Renée Green’s Partially Buried & Adrian Piper’s Hypothesis: Situation. Parallel Grid Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds Headquarters Azminda. Goethe Institut, Lisbon Geschichten/n verwahren. Galerie der ig Bildende Kunst, Vienna Rock, Paper, Scissors. Kunsthaus Graz, Austria Regift. Swiss Institute, New York 30 Americans. Rubell Family Collection, Miami Scenarios. Manifesta 7, Fortezza, Trentino, Italy Mundos Locais/Local Worlds. Centro Cultural de Lagos, Portugal Cinema Remixed and Reloaded. Museum of Fine Art, Spelman College e-­flux video rental. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon La parola nell’arte. Ricerche d’avanguardia nel ’900. Dal Futurismo ad oggi attraverso le Collezioni del Mart. Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto Not Only Possible, but Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of War. 10th International Istanbul Biennial Cinema Cavern. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York Unter dem Vesuv: Neapel im Film/Under Vesuvius: Naples in Film. Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna. Screening Elsewhere? Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan Shooting Back. Thyssen-­Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. Screening Work, Rest & Play. National Gallery, London. Traveling exhibition 10 ans d’acquisitions de dons et de legs, 1996–2006. Musée cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society. 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, Spain

472 Curriculum Vitae

2005 2004 2003 2002 2001

Artist’s Books, Revisited. Art Metropole, Toronto; Printed Matter, New York Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970. Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston Transformer 1. Fluc im Exile, Vienna Renée Green: Wavelinks. Arsenal, Berlin. Screening Social Capital. Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program Exhibition. Art Gallery of the cuny Graduate Center I-­Peg: Image. Sound. Machine. Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin “Sound Forest Folly,” Lustwarande 04: Disorientation by Beauty. Tilburg, Netherlands Mobilien/Movables. Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria Born to Be a Star. Kunstlerhaus Vienna On the Wall: Contemporary Wallpaper. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design La fin du XVIIIe siècle et aujourd´hui. Ancien Musée de Peinture, Grenoble What Lies Between: The Autobiographical Impulse in Film and Video. ucla Hammer Museum. Screening Conceptualism in Musik, Kunst und Film. Akademie der Künste, Berlin Strangers: The First icp Triennial of Photography and Video. International Center of Photography, New York Attack!: Kunst und Krieg in den Zeiten der Medien. Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna Tuscia Electa: Arte Contemporanea nel Chianti. Turin Imperfect Marriages. Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany. Commission Stories. Haus der Kunst, Munich Global Complex. ok Centrum für Gegenwartkunst Oberösterreich, Linz, Austria Museum unserer Wünsche/Museum of our Wishes. Museum Ludwig, Cologne Sonic Process. macba , Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Take Two. Ottawa Art Gallery Ausgeträumt . . . Vienna Secession Love Supreme. La Criée, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Rennes Berlin Biennale. Kunstwerke, Berlin Public Offerings. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Curriculum Vitae 473



Memorial Exhibition. Pat Hearn Gallery, New York One Planet. Bronx Museum of Art, New York

2000

Voilà! Le monde dans la tête. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Das Gedächtnis der Kunst/History and Memory. Historisches Museum and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

1999 1998 1997

Ruins in Reverse. cepa Gallery, Buffalo, New York The Comfort Zone. Public Art Fund, New York Graf, Green, Kogler, Schlegel, Schmalix, Williams. Museum of Contemporary Art, Brno, Czech Republic Studio One. Clocktower Gallery, New York. Screening The Stockholm Syndrome. cd-­rom exhibition, Stockholm— Cultural Capital of Europe Architecture of Resistance. International Center for Urban Ecology, Detroit. Screening Persuasion. Lombard/Freid Fine Arts, New York Pat Hearn Gallery Summer Show. New York Elsewhere 3. Glassbox, Paris. Screening Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, Florida. Screening Art-­Worlds in Dialogue. Museum Ludwig, Cologne The Cultured Tourist. Leslie Tonkonow Artworks & Projects, New York Anticipation, Version 4. Centre pour l’image contemporaine, Geneva Sharawadgi. Felsenvilla, Baden, Austria All Over the Map. L.A. Freewaves 6th Celebration of Independent Video & New Media, Los Angeles 44th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen. Screening The Style Engine. Pitti Immagine, Florence Graf, Green, Kogler, Schlegel, Schmalix, Williams. Kunsthalle Krems, Austria Artist/Author: Contemporary Artist’s Books. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Traveling exhibition Performance Anxiety. La Jolla Museum, California and Site Sante Fe, New Mexico Changing Spaces. The Power Plant, Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, Ithaca, New York Performance Anxiety. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Letter & Event. Apex Art, c.p ., New York Critical Images: Conceptual Works from the 1960s to the Present. Leslie Tonkonow Artworks & Projects, New York

474 Curriculum Vitae



Home Sweet Home: Einrichtungen/Interieurs. Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany Changing Spaces: Projects from the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; City Gallery at Chastain, Atlanta Partially Buried (in Three Parts), in Unmapping the Earth, 2nd Gwangju Biennale, Korea Tracing Lusitania: Excerpts from an Imagined Prototype, in Trade Routes: History and Geography, 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa Translocations. Organized by Displaced Data, London and The Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, City University of New York Résonances. Galerie Art’o, angi , Paris 1996 1995 1994

Now/Here. Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen Nach Weimar. Neues Museum, Weimar Embedded Metaphor. 1996–99. Traveling exhibition organized by Independent Curators International A/Drift. Bard College Handmade Readymades. Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire. Institute of Contemporary Art, London Architectures of Display. Architectural League of New York and Minetta Brook, New York Das Ende der Avantgarde: Kunst als Dienstleistung. Kunsthalle der Hypo-­Kulturstiftung, Munich It’s Not a Picture. Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan Video: L’immagine e l’ogetto. Artisti degli Stati Uniti/Video: The Image and the Object. Artists from the U.S. Museo Laboratorio de Arte Contemporanea, Rome Wallpaper Works. Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston Installation: Selections from the Permanent Collection. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Don’t Look Now. The Thread-­Waxing Space, New York Services. Universität Lüneburg, Germany Sogetto Sogetto. Castelo di Rivoli, Rivoli, Italy The Seventh Museum. Stroom, The Hague The Ideal Place. Haags Centrum voor Actuele Kunst, hcak , The Hague The Body as Measure. Davis Art Museum, Wellesley College Temporary Translations. Deichtorhallen, Hamburg

Curriculum Vitae 475

1993 1992 1991

Cocido y crudo/The Cooked and the Raw. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Sommerakademie München: Eine freie Akademie auf Zeit. Kunstverein München, Munich Kontext Kunst/Context Art. Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz Mapping. American Fine Arts, New York Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York Venice Biennale. Aperto. Project Unité. Firminy, France Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? Gallerie Jennifer Flay, Paris Fontanelle: Kunst in (x) Zwischenfällen. Potsdam, Germany On Taking a Normal Situation . . . muhka , Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism. Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine What Happened to the Institutional Critique? American Fine Arts, New York Peccato di Novità. Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan Die Arena des Privaten. Kunstverein München, Munich True Stories. Institute of Contemporary Art, London Dirty Data: Sammlung Schurmann 1992. Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, Germany Multiple Cultures. Convent of Sant’Egidio, Rome Inheritance. lace , Los Angeles Wohnzimmer/Buro. Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne Mary Kelly, Renée Green. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University Speak. Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago Transgressions in the White Cube: Territorial Mappings. Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College Travel Documents. San Francisco Camerawork Informationsdienst. Kubinski Galerie, Cologne More Books as Art. Hecksher Museum, Huntington, New York Lost Illusions: Recent Landscape Art. Vancouver Art Gallery Arte joven en Nueva York. Sala Mendoza, Caracas, Venezuela Huitièmes Ateliers Internationaux des Pays de la Loire, f.r.a.c ., Clisson, France Natural History. Barbara Farber Gallery, Amsterdam

476 Curriculum Vitae

1990 1989

New Generations: New York. Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery, Pittsburgh SiteSeeing: Travel & Tourism in Contemporary Art. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Color Theory. Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, suny at Old Westbury Out of Site. P.S.1 Museum/Institute of Contemporary Art, Long Island City, New York The Construction of Knowledge. Diane Brown Gallery, New York Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York Social Studies: 4 + 4 Young Americans. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College Selections: Aljira & Artists Space. Artists Space, New York Expense Account: Figuring the Damage. University of Rochester From the Studio: Artists in Residence, 1988–1989. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

Books Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams. San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2010. Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings. Retrospective, 1989–2009. Zurich: jrp / Ringier; Lausanne: Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, 2009. Negotiations in the Contact Zone = Negociaçôes na zona de contacto, edited by Renée Green. Lisbon: Assírio and Alvim, 2003. Between and Including. Vienna: Secession, Dumont, 2001. Shadows and Signals = Sombras y señales. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000. Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents. Amsterdam: De Appel Foundation, daad , 1996. The Digital Import/Export Funk Office. cd-­rom . Lüneburg: Kunstraum, University of Lüneburg, 1996. After the Ten Thousand Things = Na de tien duizend dingen. The Hague: Stroom, 1994. Camino Road. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Free Agent Media, 1994. World Tour. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993. Selected Writings (Not Included in This Volume) “Close Up, in Your Ear, and from a Distance: Musings on ‘Our’ Music via ecm .” In ecm : A Cultural Archaeology. Munich: Prestel, 2012.

Curriculum Vitae 477

“Loss and Transmutation.” ccc Newsletter (Geneva), Fall 2012. “Paradoxes Experienced by Artist-­Thinkers.” In Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research, edited by Florian Dumbois et al. London: Koenig Books, 2012. “Reflections: Seven Years Plus.” e-­flux journal (New York), no. 22 (January– February 2011). “Serving Institutions.” In Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, edited by Doro Globus. London: Ridinghouse, 2011. “Hail the Invisible College: Reason’s Sense of Humor.” MaHKUzine: Journal of Artistic Research (Utrecht), no. 9 (Summer 2010): 16–24. “From Dreamer to Dreamer.” Flash Art (Milan) 42, no. 269 (2009): 64. (Artist’s page in homage to Marcel Broodthaers) “Bonvenon! (Kurfustenstrasse 123 #13 Green, Berlin, 10787).” October (New York), no. 119 (Winter 2007): vi–vii. (Reproduction of Green’s contribution to October Portfolio #3) “States of Exception.” In mfa Graduate Exhibition Catalogue 2006. San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute, 2006. “Free Agent Media Celebrates Year 12.” Lab Mag (New York), no. 1 (Color Lulu Version, 2006): 108–9. (It also appears in black and white in B/W Lulu Version) “Free Agent Media Celebrates Year 12 @ Memphis.” Memphis (Vienna), no. 12 (December 2006): 32–33. “Code: Survey.” http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist07/code_survey/intro.htm. Commissioned by the State of California, 2006. “Roundtable Discussion.” In Cram Sessions at the bma : 03. Sound Politics. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005. Discussion between Chris Gilbert, Renée Green, Dont Rhine, and Mayo Thompson. “No Guru, No Method, No Master: Zur Methode und Zukunft der Lehre.” Texte zur Kunst (Cologne), no. 53 (March 2004): 140–43. “Kunstlerische Praxis als Dispositive: Katharina Schlieben und Sønke Gau im Gespräch mit Renée Green.” ith : Das Magazine des Instituts für Theorie des Gestaltung und Kunst (Zurich), no. 31 (June 2004): 61–69. “Introduction: ‘Negotiations in the Contact Zone’ Symposium” and “Conversation between Diana Andringa and Renée Green. Lisbon, September 1992, at rtp .” In Negotiations in the Contact Zone = Negociaçôes na zona de contacto, edited by Renée Green. Lisbon: Assírio and Alvim, 2003. “Obsolescence = Mutation Unrealized?” October (New York), no. 100 (Spring 2002): 76–77. “Returns: Tracing Lusitania. Questions from Elvan Zabunyan which Stimulated Responses from Renée Green.” In From Work to Text: Dialogues on Practise and Criticism in Contemporary Art, edited by Jürgen Bock. Lisbon: Centro Cultural de Belém, 2002. “Raum für Notizen: Ein Tagebuch zur Documenta 11.” Texte zur Kunst

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(Cologne), no. 47 (September 2002): 70–77; French version: “Notes sur la Documenta 11,” Practiques (Rennes), no. 13 (Autumn 2002): 76–81. “Un moment contemporain: Penser les recontres artistiques.” Multitudes (Paris), no. 4 (March 2001): 65–73. “Some Conditions for Independent Study: The Whitney Program as a Thought Oasis or Weathered Bastion.” In Education, Information, Entertainment, edited by Ute Meta Bauer. Vienna: Selene, Institut für Gegenwartskunst, 2001. “Renée Green in Conversation with Lynne Tillman and Joe Wood.” In Between and Including. Vienna: Secession, Dumont, 2001. “Zwischen Zeiten und Orten.” Springerin (Vienna), no. 1 (1999). “In Is Out, Out Is In, Get It? Glamorama.” Spex (Cologne), 1999. Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists’ Books. Edited by Cornelia Lauf and Clive Phillpot. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1998. Book designed as artist’s book by Renée Green. “Perplexed.” In Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists’ Books, edited by Cornelia Lauf and Clive Phillpot. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1998. “Interview mit Renée Green: New York, Oktober 1997.” In Make It Funky: Crossover zwischen Musik, Pop, Avantgarde und Kunst. Cologne: Oktagon, 1998. (Jahresring 45); Conversation with Ulrike Groos and Markus Müller “Partially Buried.” October (New York), no. 80 (Spring 1997): 39–56. “Partially Buried.” In Performance Anxiety. cd . Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997. (Sound recording, cd track) Flow. Website made for White Room Productions, New York and Fri-­Art, Fribourg, Switzerland. “Artists’ Dialogue.” In The Fact of Blackness, edited by Alan Read. London: Institute of Contemporary Art, Bay Press, 1996. “To Serve: A Conversation with Stephan Dillemuth.” In Games, Fights, Collaborations: Das Spiel von Grenze und Überschreitung, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller, and Ulf Wuggenig. Lüneburg: Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg, Cantz, 1996. “Questions of Feminism: 25 Responses.” October (New York), no. 71 (Winter 1995): 5–47. Page Project, Blocnotes (Paris), no. 8 (Winter 1995): 26–27. “On Site Specificity: A Discussion with Hal Foster, Renée Green, Mitchell Kane, Miwon Kwon, John Lindell, Helen Molesworth.” Documents (New York), nos. 4–5 (1994): 11–22. “Konversationen.” In Yo! Hermeneutics, edited by Diedrich Diederichsen. Berlin: id -­Archiv, 1993. (Conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen) Page Project, Metropolis m (Amsterdam), October 1994. Artist pages. In Der offentliche Blick, edited by Kasper König and Hans-­Ulrich Obrist. Munich: Silke Schreiber, 1991. (Jahresring; 38) Curriculum Vitae 479

“Black Popular Culture?” Texte zur Kunst (Cologne), no. 5 (Winter 1992): 187–89; English edition: “Black Popular Culture,” Art and Text (Paddington), no. 42 (May 1992): 94–95. “Lawrence Weiner” and “Adrian Piper.” In No Title: The Collection of Sol LeWitt, edited by John Paoletti. Hartford, CT: Wesleyan University, Wadsworth Atheneum, 1981. Selected Writings on Renée Green Adler, Dan. “Committed to Memory.” Artforum International (New York) 48, no. 9 (2010): 109–10. Alberro, Alexander. “The Fragment and the Flow: Sampling the Work of Renée Green.” In Shadows and Signals = Sombras y señales. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000. Allen, Jennifer. “Renée Green: Galerie Christian Nagel.” Artforum International (New York) 45, no. 9 (2007): 384. Alter, Nora. “Akustische Dimensionen: Sound in Skulptur und Film.” Die Bildende: Die Zeitung der Akademie (Vienna), no. 1 (November 2006): 14–18. ———. “Beyond the Frame: Renée Green’s Video Practice.” In Shadows and Signals = Sombras y señales. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000. ———.“View While Listening.” In Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings. Retrospective, 1989–2009. Zurich: jrp /Ringier, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, 2009. Amado, Miguel. “Transmitting California.” Rhizome.org, October 17, 2007. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2007/oct/17/transmitting-­california. Apter, Emily. Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. (Book cover designed by Renée Green) Avgikos, Jan. “Renée Green: Pat Hearn Gallery.” Artforum International (New York) 30, no. 10 (1992). ———. “Previews: Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams.” Artforum International (New York) 48, no. 5 (2010): 92. Baker, George. “Renée Green: Pat Hearn Gallery.” Artforum International (New York) 36, no. 6 (1997): 89–90. Baker, Kenneth. “Renée Green’s Intense Show at Yerba Buena.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 25, 2010. Becker, Jochen. “Renée Green: Between and Including.” Kunstforum International (Mainz), no. 145 (May–June 1999). Bell, Kirsty. “Landschaften = Landscapes.” In Turbulenz: Portikus Projekte 2001–2004. Frankfurt: Portikus, 2004. Berger, Doris. “Doris Berger spricht mit Renée Green.” In Künstlerbücher = Artist’s Books, edited by Gabriele Koller and Martin Zeiller. Vienna: Universität für angewandte Kunst, 2001.

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———. “Renée Green in der Wiener Secession.” Kunstbulletin, April 1999. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bishop, Kathy. “Fanfare.” Vanity Fair (New York), June 1990. Bock, Jürgen. “The Beauty of Discourse, or How to Stand Pyramids on Their Heads: A Fictitious Conversation between Jürgen Bock and Joaquim Beck on the Renée Green Exhibition Relay at the Kunstraum Innsbruck.” In The Sociological View. Innsbruck: Kunstraum Innsbruck, 2006. (English and German versions) Breitwieser, Sabine. “Taking Part in the Museum,” Afterall (London), no. 34 (Autumn/Winter 2013): 5–16. Brenson, Michael. “Renée Green: Anatomies of Escape.” New York Times, May 25, 1990. ———. “Show at the Studio Museum of Its Artists in Residence.” New York Times, December 15, 1989. Brown, Elizabeth. Social Studies: 4 + 4 Young Americans. Oberlin: Oberlin College, Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1990. (Art Museum Bulletin; vol. 44, no. 1) Bruno, Giuliana. “Anatomy of an Analysis: The Authorial Noir . . .” In Between and Including. Vienna: Secession, Dumont, 2001. ———. Atlas of Emotion. New York: Verso, 2007. Buhr, Elke. “Träume mit System.” Frankfurter Rundschau (Frankfurt), December 14, 2002. Butler, Cornelia. “A Lurid Presence: Smithson’s Legacy and Post-­Studio Art.” In Robert Smithson. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004. Cameron, Dan. “Critical Edge.” Arts, January 1992. Carr, Cynthia. “Only Connect: Renée Green Sparks the New Global Conversation.” Village Voice (New York), January 16, 2001. Casadio, Mariuccia. “Giovani in transito.” Casa Vogue (Paris), September 1994. “Changing Spaces: Artists’ Projects from the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia.” Toronto Life, August 1998. Chen, Howie. “Instrumental Spaces.” In Social Capital: Forms of Interaction. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program Exhibition, 2004. ———. “Renée Green.” In Empire State: New York Art Now! Milan: Skira, 2013: 96–101. Coles, Alex. “Revisiting Robert Smithson in Ohio: Tacita Dean, Sam Durant and Renée Green.” Parachute (Montréal) (2001): 128–38. Conrad, Martin. Zitty (Berlin), February 1995. Copeland, Huey. “Renée Green’s Diasporic Imagination.” In Bound to Appear. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013. Corey, Molly. What Lies Between: The Autobiographical Impulse in Film and Video. Los Angeles: ucla Hammer Museum, 2003. Curriculum Vitae 481

Coxhead, Gabriel. “Renée Green: National Maritime Museum.” Time Out (London), February 5–11, 2009, 47. Cummings, Neil. “Curating the Contemporary Art Museum.” Art & Design (London) 12, nos. 1–2 (1997). Dailey, Meghan. “Preview. Renée Green: Between and Including.” Artforum International (New York) 37, no. 5 (1999): 63. Dalton, Elizabeth, and Cynthia Smith. Expense/Account: Figuring the Damage. New York: Hartnett Gallery, University of Rochester, 1990. D’Arcy, David. “The Art Frontier.” Vanity Fair (New York), no. 462 (February 1999): 100–102. Decter, Joshua. “Renée Green: Pat Hearn Gallery.” Artforum International (New York) 33, no. 1 (1994): 105–6. ———. “Renée Green: Remapping Narratives of History and Identity.” Forum International (Antwerp), (January–February 1993). Denson, Roger G. “A Genealogy of Desire: Renée Green Explores the Continent of Power.” Flash Art (Milan), no. 160 (October 1991): 125–27. Díaz, Eva. “Renée Green: Participant Inc.” Modern Painters (New York), (May 2007), 96. Diederichsen, Diedrich. “Konversationen.” In Yo! Hermeneutics, edited by Diedrich Diederichsen. Berlin: id -­Archiv, 1993. ———. “The Politics of Tourism: Renée Green, Bernward Vesper, Hubert Fichte.” In Tour-­Isms: The Defeat of Dissent. Critical Itineraries. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2005. ———. “Traveling Light: Artists’ Journeys.” In Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings. Retrospective, 1989–2009. Zurich: jrp /Ringier, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, 2009. Drissen, Chris. “Sound Forest Folly.” In Lustwarande 04: Disorientation by Beauty. Tilburg: Fundament Foundation, 2004. Dumont, Fabienne. “Portrait: Renée Green.” In Critique d’art (Châteugiron), no. 35 (Spring 2010): 121. Eng, Michael. “Exchange between Michael Eng and Renée Green.” In Between and Including. Vienna: Secession, Dumont, 2001. Eng, Michael, and Renée Green. “No Easy Places: At This Moment in Vienna . . .” Public Culture (Chicago) 13, no. 1 (2001): 139–53. Enwezor, Okwui. “Renée Green: Partially Buried in Three Parts.” In Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks. London: Phaidon, 2011. Farrelly, Liz. “When the Client Is an Artist.” Print (New Haven) 52, no. 2 (1998). “A Fashion Gallery.” New York Times Magazine, September 18, 1994. “Fast Forward.” Canadian Art (Toronto), (Summer 1998), 16. Föll, Heike. “Renée Green: Galerie Christian Nagel.” Artforum International (New York) 45, no. 9 (2007): 384.

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Foster, Hal. “Convulsive Identity.” October (New York), no. 57 (Summer 1991): 18–54. ———. Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1996. Fricke, Harold. Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin), February 1995. Gangitano, Lia. “. . . The Road Must Eventually Lead to the World.” In Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams. San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2010. Gau, Sønke. “Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings, Rétrospective 1989–2009.” Springerin (Vienna), no. 1 (2010). Das Gedächtnis der Kunst = History and Memory. Frankfurt: Historisches Museum and Schirn Kunsthalle, 2000. (Book cover) Gilbert, Chris. “Renée Green’s Wavelinks.” In Cram Sessions at the bma : 03. Sound Politics. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005. ———. “Roundtable Discussion.” In Cram Sessions at the bma : 03. Sound Politics. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005. Discussion between Gilbert, Renée Green, Dont Rhine, and Mayo Thompson. Gill, Brendan. “Manhattan’s Arena for Aesthetic Melodrama.” Architectural Digest (Los Angeles), no. 47 (November 1990). González, Jennifer A. “Genealogies of Contact.” In Subject to Display. Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2008. Graw, Isabelle. “Im Labyrinth der Alphabete.” Die Tageszeitung (Berlin), March 24, 1999. ———. “Enteignung aneignen: Renée Green.” In Die bessere Hälfte: Künstlerinnen der 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. Cologne: DuMont, 2003. ———. “Renée Green Kontrollräume.” Artis (Bern), (February–March 1995). Gray, Ros. “Dreaming of Islands.” In Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-­ Based Streams. San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2010. Groos, Ulrike, and Markus Müller. “Interview mit Renée Green: New York, Oktober 1997.” In Make It Funky: Crossover zwischen Musik, Pop, Avantgarde und Kunst. Cologne: Oktagon, 1998. (Jahresring 45) Harkavy, Donna. “Renée Green.” In Bequest. Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 1991. (Insights) Hegenwisch, Katherina. After the Avant-­Garde. Munich: Kunsthalle Hypo-­ Bank, 1995. Hermes, Manfred. “Renée Green: German Outstation of Funk.” Flash Art (Milan), no. 166 (October 1992): 94. Hertz, Betti-­Sue. “Seeing Text.” In Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-­ Based Streams. San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2010. Higa, Karin. SiteSeeing: Travel and Tourism in Contemporary Art. New York: Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, 1991. Höller, Christian. “Wavelinks: Resonance Levels of ‘Globalization.’” In Global Complex. Linz: ok Centrum für Gegenwartkunst Oberösterreich, 2002. Curriculum Vitae 483

Horst, Christoph. “Crossover.” Profil (Vienna), no. 9 (March 1999). Jones, Lisa. “Venus Envy.” Village Voice (New York), July 9, 1991. Kellerman, Kerstin. “Flowerpower Buried.” an.schläge (Vienna), April 1999. Kempkes, Anke. “Der Ärger mit dem Narzißmus von Künstlerinnen: Renée Greens ‘She’ auf Exkursion.” Texte zur Kunst (Cologne), no. 28 (November 1997): 95. King, Elaine. New Generations: New York. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery, 1991. Kontova, Helena. “Robert Nickas: I’ve Always Preferred Artists to Works of Art.” Flash Art (Milan) 24, no. 155 (1991): 165, 176. Krause-­Wahl, Antje. “Renée Green: Forscherin, (Ver)Mittlerin und Intellektuelle.” In Konstruktionen von Identität: Renée Green, Tracey Emin, Rirkrit Tiravanija. Munich: Silke Schreiber, 2006. Krumpl, Doris. “Im Labyrinth der kollektiven Erinnerung: US-­Künstlerin Renée Green in der Wiener Secession: Between and Including.” Der Standard (Vienna), February 9, 1999. Laird, Michele. “Cult American Artist, Renée Green, Gets Major Retrospective in Lausanne.” New Switzerland, September 25, 2009. Accessed January 16, 2010. http://michelelaird.blogspot.com/2009/09/cult-­american-­artist -­renee-­green-­gets.html. Larsen, Lars Bang. “The Long Nineties.” Frieze (London), no. 144 (February 2012): 92–95. Ledo, Agar. “Renée Green: Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisboa.” Lápiz (Madrid), no. 209 (February 2005): 89. Le Feuvre, Lisa. “From Island Thought to Water Thought.” In Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams. San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2010. Lemmon, Danielle B. “Moving Sight: The Artist as Beholder in the Art of Renée Green.” In Responses to Michael Fried’s Theories of Theatricality in the Visual Arts: From Modern to Postmodern Criticism. Ann Arbor: umi Dissertation Services, 1997. Lerichomme, Lise. “Renée Green: Commemorative Toile ou la falsification du bucolique.” In Copie et imitation dans la production textile, entre usage et repression, edited by Florence Charpigny et al. Lyon: Musée des Tissus, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 2010. Leturque, Armelle. “Renée Green, Decoding Cultures.” Blocnotes (Paris), no. 12 (April–May 1996). Leung, Simon. “Contemporary Returns to Conceptual Art: Renée Green, Silvia Kolbowski and Stephen Prina.” Art Journal (New York) 60, no. 2 (2001): 54–71. Levin, Kim. “Choices.” Village Voice (New York), April 5, 1994. ———. “Turning the Tables, and Choices.” Village Voice (New York), June 19 1990.

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Lippard, Lucy. On the Beaten Track. New York: New Press, 1999. Masterworks for Learning: A College Collection Catalogue. cd-­rom . Oberlin: Oberlin College, Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1998. Matos, Sara. “Negociaçôes na zona da contacto.” Pangloss (Lisbon), no. 3 (July 2003): 29. McFadden, Sarah. “Report from Cologne: Changing of the Guard.” Art in America (New York) 83, no. 2 (1995): 50–57. McTighe, Monica. “The Family Slide Show as Critical History in Renée Green’s Video Partially Buried Continued.” Third Text (London) 21, no. 4 (2007): 441–50. Mercer, Kobena. “Archive and Dépaysement in the Art of Renée Green.” In Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings. Retrospective, 1989–2009. Zurich: jrp / Ringier, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, 2009. ———. Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire. London: Institute of Contemporary Art, Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995. Mercer, Kobena, and Joshua Decter. Inheritance. Los Angeles: lace , 1992. Meyer, Christian, and Mathias Poledna. Sharawadgi. Cologne: Walther König, 1999. Meyer, James. “Nomads.” Parkett (Zurich), no. 49 (Summer 1997): 205–9. Meyer, James. “Nostalgia and Memory: Legacies of the 1960s on Recent Work.” In Painting, Object, Film, Object: Works from the Herbig Collection. New York: Christie’s, 1998. ———. “Preview. Renée Green: Contemporary Arts Center.” Artforum International (New York) 42, no. 5 (2004): 60. ———. “The Return of the Sixties in Contemporary Art and Criticism.” In Antinomies of Art and Culture, edited by Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Milliard, Coline. “Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Water Between.” Art Monthly (London), no. 325 (April 2009): 32. Möntmann, Nina. “Kultureller Raum Topographie der Kulturen: Renée Green ‘Import/Export Funk Office,’ 1992–1994.” In Kunst als sozialer Raum: Andrea Fraser, Martha Rosler, Rikrit Tiravanija, Renée Green. Cologne: Walther König, 2002. Morgan, Margaret. “From Dada to Mama: Feminism, the Ready-­made and Contemporary Practice.” In Binocular, edited by Ewen McDonald and Juliana Engberg. Sydney: Moët and Chandon, 1994. Morgenthaler, Daniel. “Renée Green: Im Interieur der Zeitgeschichte.” Kunstbulletin (Zurich), December 2009, 24–31. Nathan, Jean. “Art: Renée Green.” Vibe (New York), October 1994. Nickas, Robert. Natural History. Amsterdam: Barbara Farber Gallery, 1991. Nieswandt, Hans. “Green ist die Hoffnung.” Spex (Cologne), August 1992. “Obrazy stvárnujúce vyznamy.” Slovenská Republika, March 9, 1999, 6.

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Obrist, Hans-­Ulrich. “The Installation Is Coming through the Back Door.” Meta (Stuttgart), no. 1 (1992): 62–73. Oleksijczuk, Denise. Lost Illusions: Recent Landscape Art. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1991. Ottmann, Klaus. “Renée Green, Pat Hearn, New York.” c Magazine (Toronto), (February–May 2000). Reprinted in Klaus Ottmann. Thought through My Eyes: Writings on Art, 1977–2005. Putman, CT: Spring, 2006. Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992: 261. Reprinted as “‘The Indignity of Speaking for Others’: an Imaginary Interview,” The Happy Hypocrite (London), no. 6 (2013): 23–25. Perucic, Nadia. “Navigating the Social Order: Alternative Currents in Relations of Power.” In Social Capital: Forms of Interaction. New York: Whit‑ ney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program Exhibition, 2004. Ploebst, Helmut. “Sechs Tage Seinfeld.” Wiener Journal (Vienna), March 1999. Pluot, Sébastien. “‘Living Archives’: L’histoire de l’art comme archive disponible.” L’art même (Brussels), no. 38 (2008): 8–11. “Preview. Exhibitions: Mirage.” Guardian (London), May 12, 1995. Prinzhorn, Martin. “Dauerhaftes Provisorium.” Texte zur Kunst (Cologne), no. 34 (June 1999): 193. Projekt Fassade. Vienna: Secession, 2001. Puvogel, Renate. “Frauen in New York: Ein Blick über den eigenen Tellerrand.” Artis (Bern), February 1993. Quéloz, Catherine. “Some Thoughts Regarding Renée Green’s Research Methods.” In Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings. Retrospective, 1989–2009. Zurich: jrp /Ringier, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, 2009. Ramirez, Yasmin. “Renée Green at Pat Hearn.” Art in America (New York) 79, no. 10 (1991): 148–49. Rebentisch, Julianne. “From One Island to Another: Conversation between Julianne Rebentisch and Renée Green.” In Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings. Retrospective, 1989–2009. Zurich: jrp /Ringier, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, 2009. “Renée Green: Between and Including.” Portfolio, January 1999. Riemschneider, Burkhard, and Uta Grosenick. Art at the Turn of the Millennium. Cologne: Taschen, 1999. Ruins in Reverse: Time and Progress in Contemporary Art. Edited by Grant H. Kester. Contributors: Susan Buck-­Morss, Eduardo Cadava, Peter Osborne. cepa Gallery. http://www.cepagallery.org/exhibitions /ruinsinreverse/RIR.02.essays.html. Saunders, Gill and Zoe Whitley. In Black and White: Prints from Africa and the Diaspora. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2013: 27, 52.

486 Curriculum Vitae

Schöllhammer, Georg. “Spiel ohne Grenzen.” Profil (Vienna), no. 8 (February 1999). Schurmann, Wilhelm. Dirty Data. Aachen: Ludwig Forum for International Art, 1992. Schwendener, Martha. “Renée Green: United Space of Conditioned Becoming, Participant Inc.” New York Times, March 30, 2007. Shohat, Ella. “Post-­Third Worldlist Culture.” In Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Reprinted in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty. New York: Routledge, 1996. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge, 1994. Simpson, Bennett. “Renée Green.” In This Is Not to Be Looked At: Highlights from the Permanent Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Los Angeles: moca , 2008. Singerman, Howard. “In Theory and Practice: A History of the Whitney Independent Study Program.” Artforum International (New York) 42, no. 6 (2004): 112–17, 170–71. Smith, Roberta. “Other Planes of There: Renée Green.” New York Times, March 31, 2000. ———. “Renée Green: Pat Hearn Gallery.” New York Times, May 1, 1992. Smyth, Cherry. “Renée Green: National Maritime Museum.” Modern Painters (New York) 21, no. 3 (2009): 72. Soares de Oliveira, Luísa. “Interferências.” Público: Mil folhas (Lisbon), November 20, 2004, 15. Soong, C. S., and Renée Green. “Renée Green.” Against the Grain, kpfa , June 1, 2010. Radio interview. Sotriffer, Kristian. “Bild, Text, Ton und Film im Shaker.” Die Presse (Vienna), February 17, 1999. Spiegl, Andreas. “Renée Green: Secession, Vienna.” Frieze (London), no. 47 (July–August 1999): 109. Stories. Munich: Haus der Kunst, Dumont, 2002. Stroud, Marion Boulton. New Materials as New Media: The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2002. Sutton, Gloria. “Renée Green.” In How Many Billboards: Art in Stead, edited by Peter Noever and Kimberli Meyer. Los Angeles: mak Center for Art and Architecture, 2010. ———. “Renée Green: Some Formal Operations.” In Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings. Retrospective, 1989–2009. Zurich: jrp /Ringier, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, 2009. Tattenbaum, Judith. “On the Wall: Wallpaper by Contemporary Artists.” In On the Wall: Contemporary Wallpaper. Providence: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 2004. Curriculum Vitae 487

Tillman, Lynne, and Joe Wood. “Renée Green in Conversation with Lynne Tillman and Joe Wood.” In Between and Including. Vienna: Secession, Dumont, 2001. Turbulenz: Portikus Projekte 2001–2004. Frankfurt: Portikus, 2004. Urbach, Henry. “Just Looking: Architectures of Display.” Village Voice (New York), June 6, 1995. Viewing, Pia. “Renée Green, Rirkrit Tiravanija.” Blocnotes (Paris), no. 12 (April–May 1996). Vogel, Sabine. “Siebziger verweht.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Frankfurt), 1999. Volk, Gregory. “Renée Green.” In Strangers: The First icp Triennial of Photography and Video. New York: International Center of Photography, Steidl, 2003. Wailand, Markus. “Stil ist kein Schicksal.” Falter (Vienna), no. 7 (February 1999). Wallace, Michele. “High Mass, vls Symposium, Are We There Yet?” Village Voice Literary Supplement (New York), October 1991. Wallis, Brian. “Excavating the 1970s.” Art in America (New York) 85, no. 9 (1997): 96–99, 122. Wanderlust: Excursions in Contemporary Sculpture. Edited by Chris Driessen and Heidi van Mierlo. Tillburg: Fundament Foundation, 2008. Wettengl, Kurt. “Poetische Räume.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Frankfurt), December 15, 2002. Wiensowski, Ingeborg. “Renée Green.” Kulturspiegel (Vienna), February 1999. Williams, Gregory. “Renée Green, Marion von Osten, and Peter Spillmann.” Artforum International (New York) 39, no. 6 (2001): 154. Wilmes, Ulrich. “Museum of Our Wishes.” In Museum unserer Wünsche/ Museum of our Wishes. Cologne: Museum Ludwig, 2002. ———, ed. “Renée Green.” In Moderne Kunst: Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhundert und der Gegenwart im Überblick. Cologne: Museum Ludwig; DuMont, 2006. Winkel, Camiel van, and Mark Kremer. “On Top of the World: Renée Green.” Archis (Amsterdam), March 1994. Wood, Joe. “It’s a Trick.” In World Tour. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993. Zabunyan, Elvan. “Archives et généalogie.” In Black Is a Color: Une histoire de l’art africain-­américain contemporain. Paris: Dis Voir, 2004; English edition: Black Is a Color: Paris: Dis Voir, 2005. ———. “Renée Green: (Des)orientations.” Le Journal du Centre National de la Photographie (Paris), no. 14 (August 2001): 14. ———. “Stratum and Resonance: Displacement in the Work of Renée Green.” In Art and the Performance of Memory, edited by Richard Cándida Smith. London: Routledge, 2002.

488 Curriculum Vitae

———. “We Are Here.” In Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings. Retrospective, 1989–2009. Zurich: jrp /Ringier; Lausanne: Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­ Arts, 2009. Zahm, Olivier. “Romances Indigènes.” In Huitièmes Ateliers Internationaux des Pays de la Loire. Clisson: f.r.a.c., 1991. ———. “Nantes und die Geschichte des Sklavenhandels.” Texte zur Kunst (Cologne), no. 5 (Winter 1992): 184–86. Zapperi, Giovanna. “Women’s Reappearance: Rethinking the Archive in Contemporary Art. Feminist Perspectives,” Feminist Review (London), no. 105 (November 2013): 21–47. ———. “Ici, ailleurs: Rêver et voyager avec Renée Green.” Pétunia (Marseille), 2010: 18–22. ———. “Renée Green: Tactiques de l’histoire.” Multitudes (Paris), no. 34 (Fall 2008): 139–43. Ziegler, Philipp. “Renée Green, Secession, Wien.” noëma (Salzburg), no. 51 (May–June 1999). Film Series VistaVision: Landscape of Desire. Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, 1991. Films screened: Dal Polo all’equatore (Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucci, 1987); Apunti per una Oriestiade africana (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1970); La noire de . . . (Ousmane Sembène, 1965); Song of Freedom (J. Elder Wills, starring Paul Robeson, 1936); films by Osa and Martin Johnson: Across the World with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson (1930); Congorilla (1932); Baboona (1935); I Married Adventure (1940), discussion by Linda Earle and Jewelle Gomez Tracing Lusitania: A Prototype. Johannesburg, Libon, Vienna, 1991–2001. Film screened: Paixão Nacional (Karim Aïnouz, 1994) Flow. fri-­a rt Centre d’Art Contemporain Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland, 1996. Films screened: Der sechste Kontinent (Benno Maggi, 1992); Alpen-­Internat (Hans Liechti, 1991); Füürland 2 (Clemens Klopfenstein and Remo Legnazzi, 1992); Last Supper (Robert Frank, 1992); I Was on Mars (Dani Levy, 1991); Lumumba, la mort du prophète (Raoul Peck, 1992); Hors saison (Daniel Schmid, 1992); James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (Karen L. Thorsen, 1990) Some Chance Operations. Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, 1998. Between and Including. Filmhaus Spittelberggasse, Vienna, 1999. Films screened: Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959); Zorns Lemma (Hollis Frampton, 1970); Nostalgia (Hollis Frampton, 1971); Sink or Swim (Su Friedrich, 1990); James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (Karen L. Thorsen, 1990); Lumumba, la mort du prophète (Raoul Peck, 1992); Last Supper (Robert Frank, 1992); Der sechste Kontinent (Benno Maggi, 1992); E’PicCurriculum Vitae 489

cerella (Elvira Notari, 1922); Midnight Ramble (Bestor Cram and Pearl Bowser, 1994); Some Chance Operations (Renée Green, 1999) Shadows and Signals. Cine Ambigú-­Apolo, Barcelona, 2000. Films screened: Program 1: Vida en sombras (Lorenzo Llobet Gracia, 1948) and Bajo el signo de las sombras (Ferran Alberich, 1984); program 2: Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1976) and Underground (Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson, and Haskell Wexler, 1976); program 3: Dante no es únicamente severo (Jacinto Esteva and Joaquim Jordà, 1967) and Film about a Woman Who . . . (Yvonne Rainer, 1974); program 4: Journeys from Berlin/1971 (Yvonne Rainer, 1980) and De cierta manera (Sara Gómez, 1974); program 5: Zorns Lemma (Hollis Frampton, 1970) and Nostalgia (Hollis Frampton, 1971); program 6: Vida en sombras (Lorenzo Llobet Gracia, 1948) and Some Chance Operations (Renée Green, 1999) Forces of Circumstance. Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2002. Films screened: Berlin-­Jerusalem (Amos Gitai, 1989); Who Killed Vincent Chin? (Christine Choy and Renee Tajima, 1988); La noire de . . . (Ousmane Sembène, 1965); The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940); I Am British But . . . (Gurinder Chadha, 1989); Dreaming Rivers (Martine Attile, 1988); Pressure (Horace Ovè, 1975)

490 Curriculum Vitae

I NDEX

A-­B (Green), plate 14 Abbott, Berenice, 8 abolitionism, 290, 294n3 Abrams, Muhal Richard, 16 Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 163 accretion, 382 act up , 130, 293 activist art, 110 Adzenya, Ibrahim, 314 Adkins, Terry, 87 Adorno, Theodor W., 154 fig. 17.1 Advertisements for Myself (Mailer), 9 aesthetics, politics of, 60–61, 239, 252 Africa, as myth, 87 African American aesthetics: discourse on, 42–44, 51; lack of African American criticism on, 47–48; music and, 154 African American artists: attitudes toward categories, 43–44; as collectors of African art, 85; dependence on white patronage, 50; internationalism of, 44; patronage of, 46–47, 50–51; role in American culture, 43–44, 120; and social responsibility, 42–43, 142. See also American artists African American intellectuals: relationship with white philanthropists, 47; role of, 45–46, 50 African American literature, 310 African Americans: social conditions during the 20th century, 120; racist myths about, 44 African art: museums, 83 African diaspora: culture of the, 355; in France, 325; music of the, plate 7 Agamben, Giorgio, 272, 281–86, 407n3 agency of artists, 10, 16–17; as cultural pro-

ducers, 20, 95; in international art exhibitions, 171 aids , 293 Aïnouz, Karim, 233, 318, 424–25 Alberro, Alexander, 103, 106, 291 Alcatraz, 416, 446 Alcatraz Is Not an Island, 446 Algerian war, 101–2 Algonquians, 440–41 All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, 153 alphabets, 137, 138 fig. 15.1, 279 Alter, Nora, 387 Althusser, Louis, 58, 246 ambiguity and ambivalence, 30, 74, 82, 86, 124, 164, 314, 342; in Free Agent Media, 95 American artists: in Europe, 90; formation of, 16, 66; reception in Europe, 24; reception in the United States, 9; and self-­ promotion, 9; and society, 4, 42–43. See also African American artists American art critics, on African American art, 47–48 American Fine Arts, New York, 296n8, 334n2 Andrees Handatlas, 414–15 Anderson, Laurie, 75 Andre, Carl, 187 Andringa, Diana, 319, 422–23 Andringa, Paulo, 423 Angelus Novus, 405 Animation Activation (Green), 17 fig. 2.2 Annotating Art’s Histories (Mercer), 179–81, 189n2 annotations, 341 Anthropocene, 7, 9

Antoni, Janine, 198 Antwerp, 335–36 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 64, 125 Apollo 11, 258 fig. 26.1 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 276 appropriation, 193 Archer, Michael, 79, 81 architectural entertainments, 377, 384 architecture, attitudes toward, 2, 305, 324 Archive Fever (Derrida), 275 archives and documents, 187, 300; as counter-­history, 179; Derrida on, 275; disappearance of, 279; Greek etymology, 273; philosophical aspects, 272; potentiality of, 176; and space, 274 Araeen, Rasheed, 84 Arendt, Hannah, 166 Arman, 84 Art after Modernism (Wallis), 58 Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin), 59–60, 252 Art as Experience (Dewey), fig 2.1, plate 1 art: and anthropology, 244, 248; authority of, 226; clichés about, 107; economic aspects of, 96, 105; as entertainment industry, 108–9; and ideology, 139; and life, 60, 87, 101, 226, 386, 425; after the 1960s, 2; and pleasure, 108, 380, 409; political aspects of, 62, 130, 239; returns in, 108; role of, 226; and science, 107–8, 213–14; and society, 114; and technology, 210–11, 214–16, 222; and thought, 107 art, culture, and technology, 7–9 art, theory, and politics, 404 art awards, 46–47 art collectives, 129 art discourse: contributions by artists, 19, 169, 175n5, 247; delayed reception of, 24; Foster on, 246; and “otherness,” 171 art exhibitions, 323, 330, 332, 340–42; conceptualization, 135; contractual agreements, 342; design, 157 art fairs, and globalization, 166 art historiography, 137, 180 art market, 75, 105 art museums: New York, 83; Vienna, 413 art venues as consumption spaces, 83, plates 136–38, 408–9 Artforum, 74, 164, 169–73, 222

492 Index

artworks, significance of, 3, 172, 290, 406 “Artist as Ethnographer” (Foster), 238–50 artists as ethnographers, 238–41, 248 artists: as collectors, 84–87; desires of, 165; influences, 73–74, 79; ironic mimicry of capitalist institutions, 96; and new technologies, 214; political engagement of, 130, 370; relationships with curators, 106, 169, 341, 342; role of, 23, 173, 411–12, 419, 426; “scientific” lectures by, 220–22 artists and art critics, 19, 81, 247 artists’ writings, 1, 13 artists-­thinkers, 15, 19, 167, 247 Arts International, 205 Arts of Impoverishment (Bersani, Dutoit), 225–27 Asher, Michael, 188 Ashford, Doug, 129 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, 16–17 Athenaüm, 405, 407n4 attention, as a medium, 383 audiences, 94, 131, 314, 343, 360 Ault, Julie, 129 Aupetitallot, Yves, 27, 323 authenticity and realness, 79–80 autodidacticism, 448 auto-­ethnography, 242, 324 aura (concept), and mass media, 59–60 Auschwitz, survivors, 282–83 Austria, 365, 370 Austrians, emigration to California, 417 Baartman, Sarah “Saartjie,” 25, 200, 202, 207n4, plates 13–14, plates 58–60 Baker, Josephine, 74, 80, 201–3 Bakonga, 82 Baldwin, James, 101, 254 Ballard, J. G., 215 Bambara, Toni Cade, 8, 100, 153, 296n9, plate 2 Barcelona, 111–12, 367–68 Bardi, Lina Bo, 158, 378 Barney, Matthew, 197 Barry, Judith, 233 Barthes, Roland, 58, 49, 341 Bataille, George, 134, 243 Baudelaire, Charles, 67 Baudrillard, Jean, 58

Bauman, Zygmunt, 401 Bear, Greg, 7 Bearden, Romare, 47–48 Bearn, 442 beauty, 380 Beckett, Samuel, 225 Bed of Sound (exhibition), 111 Bell Curve debate, 218, 220 Bender, Gretchen, 188 Benjamin, Walter, 380, 405; Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 59–60, 252; “Author as Producer,” 238–39; on film, 62 Bergson, Henri, 451 Bernstein, Michèle, 100 Bequest (Green), plates 111–13 Berlin, reconstruction of, 398–99 Berman, Paul, The Controversies over Political Correctness on College Campuses, 76 Bersani, Leo, 225–27 Between and Including (Green), 287n5, plates 73–77 Bettmann Photo Archive, 212 Beyond Recognition (Owens), 26 Bhabha, Homi, 243, 247 Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, 317 biennials, 26. See also international art exhibitions and group exhibitions Bijvoet, Marga, 214–15 Bildungsroman, 64 biopolitics, 199, 206–7 Birnbaum, Dara, 26 Black actresses, 147, 148 Black culture, affective power of, 87, 153 Black music, social significance of, 153 Black filmmakers, 120, 143, 150 Black Pearls (Harrison), 152 Black Popular Culture conference, 188, 355 Black women: bodies of, 202, 207; and feminism, 152–53; in film, 146–49; in mass media, 152; working class, 101, 154 blackness, genealogy of the concept, 309 Blacks: diversity among, 143; in mass media, 86; visual representation of, 142 Blade Runner, 262, 268 Blake, William, 67 Blanchard, Terence, 145 Blues for Smoke (exhibition), 27 Blues Legacies and Black Women (Davis), 100–101

blues music, 100–101, 152 Blues People (Jones), 152 Bock, Jürgen, 391, 407n6 Boethius, 386 bohemia, 64, 66, 68, 328 Bois, Yve-­Alain, 134–39, 233 Bombeck, Erma, 130 Bonami, Francesco, 169 books and book series, 105, 183, 186, 187–88 bookstores, 93, 315 botany, 435, 443–44 Bourdieu, Pierre, 75, 76 Bové, Paul, 231–32 Bowles, Paul, 9 Brazil, 159, 188, 291, 295n5, 420, 424–25 Brecht, Bertolt, 105, 166, 182 Brinkman Gallery, Amsterdam, 100 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 218 Broodthaers, Marcel, 73, 75–76, 79, 80, 95, 376; Green’s homage to, plate 30 Brown, John, 253 Bruno, Giuliana, 273, 279 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 73, 239 Bund Neues Vaterland (organization), 397, 401 Buñuel, Luis, 428 Bush, George W., 406 Burgin, Victor, 59 Burnett, Charles, 120 Burton, Sir Richard, 75 Burwell, Jennifer, 256 Butler, Octavia E., 254, 262, 263–65, 299, plate 67 Cadava, Eduardo, 305n3, 401 Cage, John, 413 Caldwell, John, 193 California: as an island, 430; Green’s years in, 6, 15–16, 297, 365, 406, 411, 417; prison industry, 446; transportation system, 390 Caltrans, 389 Calvino, Italo, 7 Camino Road (Green), 64–69, 65 fig.5.1, 94, 439, plates 28–29 Camões, Luís de, 75 Camus, Albert, 324 Campbell, Naomi, 199 Capra, Frank, 150

Index 493

Case, Brian, interview with Lacy, 3 Case II. Lost (Green), plates 20–23 Case III. Ways and Means (Green), 221 fig. 23.1, plate 62 Case IV. Found (Green), plate 33 Cassavetes, John, 150, 138 fig. 15.1 categories: critique of, 134, 139, 273; Green’s attitude toward, 74, 232, 289, 359 Catherine of Siena, 205 cbgb , 69 cd-­rom technology, 360 Cedar Tavern, New York, 10 cell phones (smart phones), lacks of, 4 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 26, 84, 135 Certain Lack of Coherence, A (Durham), 11– 12 Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (Green), 393, plates 35–36, plate 61 Certeau, Michel de, 274, 320 Césaire, Aimé, 74, 80, 243 Ceuta: as first European colony, 20, 205; Green trip to, 319, 422 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 278 chance, 279 Chandeler, Sybil, 95 Charlie Rose talk show, 141–42, 150 Carlton, Raya L. (fictitious character), 435–36, 444–46 Cherokees, 444 Chomsky, Noam, 130 Chopin, Frédéric, and Sand, 443 cinema, 134, 149, 312 cities, effects of globalization on, 303–4 City Sun, 314 Cixous, Hélène, 203 Clark, Lygia, 295n5, 384 Clarke, Andrea, 354 Clarke, Stanley, 257 classification systems, 184, 359 Clément, Catherine, 203 Clemente, Francesco, 84 Cleveland, 66–67 Cleveland Museum of Art, 74 Clifford, James, 84, 137–38, 233, 241–42, 244–45 climate, 396 Climates and Paradoxes (Green), 301; exhibition ephemera, plate 131; film, plate 133A–L; film script, 396–401

494 Index

Clinton, George, 257 Clisson, 346, 353 Cloisters, The, 434 Code Noir, 352 Code: Survey (Green), 182, 186, 237 fig. 25.1, 389 Cole, Frances, 15 Coleman, Ornette, 254 collectors and collecting, 271; of African art, 84–87; Benjamin on, 273; of books, 183, 185 College of Sociology, 99, 137, 242 Cologne, cultural scene in the 1990s, 10, 354 colonialism: French, 349; in Madagascar, 159; Portuguese, 20–21 color codes, 383 Coltrane, Alice, plate 68 combination people, concept of, 10, 16 Come Closer (Green), 419–21, plate 141A–R; film script, 422–27 Commemorative Toile, 350–51, plates 30–31 Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, 347 comprehension, 418 conceptual art, 20, 281; Danto on, 106; historicization of, 109; and institutional critique, 292; “rediscovery” of, 104 conceptual associations, 80, 92, 137 Congarilla (Johnson), 221 consciousness, formation of, 22 conservatism: in Austria, 370; in the United States, 220, 222 contact zone, concept of, 20, 204, 235, 236, 243 contemporary art: distribution of, 23, 95; Green on, 108, 113; in mass media, 104, 107; parodies, 113; relationship with entertainment, 110, 408–9 contemporary art discourse, 21, 22 Contemporary Moment, A (symposium), 103, 114n1 continental philosophy, criticism, 76 Controversies over Political Correctness on College Campuses, The (Berman), 76 Co-­op City, New York, 329 Cooper, Dennis, 66 cosmopolitanism, 276 Crary, Jonathan, 110 Crawford, Joan, 149 crime films, 145–46

critical reception of art, social context and, 20 criticism, 291; Benjamin on, 405–6; effect of technology on, 360; Foster on, 249–48 Cross, Brian, 354, plate 50A–L Cruse, Harold, 49–50 cultural activism, paradoxes of, 130–31 cultural capitals, European, 335–36, 341, 367–68 cultural critics, 80–81, 234 cultural forms, circulation of, 354, 364 cultural designations, relativity of, 5–6, 85 cultural landscapes, American, 58, 166, 298–99, 301 cultural politics, 122, 130, 252 cultural producers, as thinkers, 235 cultural studies, 230, 246 culture: nationalist uses of, 75; political uses of, 112, 368; power of, 253; and society, 130, 365–66 culture industries, 108 culture wars, 80–81, 362 curators, 134, 165, 169, 341–42 Cuvier, Georges, 199 cyborgs, 216 Dadaism, 60 Dandridge, Dorothy, 148 Dangerous Crossroads (Lipsitz), 366 Danto, Arthur, 106 Dao de jing (Lao zi), 3 Darboven, Hanne, 203 Dartmouth Review, 222 David, Catherine, 169, 173 Davis, Angela, 54 fig. 3.1, 102, 154 fig. 17.1, plate 25, plate 42; Blues Legacies and Black Women, 100–101, 152–55; political activity, 153; varied roles of, 100 Davis, Bette, 149 De Land, Colin, 334n2 De Man, Paul, 183 Debord, Guy, 100, 171 Deeply Diasporic Productions (company), 96, plate 43 Deitcher, David, 130–31 Delany, Samuel, 3, 162, 254, 256, 261 Deleuze, Gilles, 126, 243; Desert Islands, 428, 436; on difference, 451; on islands, 428, 436; mentioned, 7, 183

Demme, Jonathan, 120 Democracy (Group Material), 128–33, 189 democracy, concept of, 371; contentious understanding of, 132; definition by Williams, 128–29 Depression, 1929, effects on art patronage, 51 Derrida, Jacques, 58, 76, 275, 401 Desert Islands (Deleuze), 428, 436 design, in relation to vernacular culture, 161 design and society, 156 Design for the Real World (Papanek), 156 Designing for People (Dreyfuss), 156 desire, erasure of, 243 Dewey, John, 4 fig. 2.1; plate 1 Dia Art Foundation, 57, 128–29, 131; Discussions in Contemporary Culture series, 188 diagrams, by Green, 228 fig. 24.2, 336 fig. 35.1, 356 fig. 38.1, 357 fig. 38.2, 382 fig. 42.1, 385 fig. 42.2, plate 1, plate 49, plate 105, plate 127 Diawara, Manthia, 233 Dickinson, Emily, 203 Dictée (Cha), 278 Didion, Joan, 3 Diederichsen, Diedrich, 27, 233, 354–55, plate 17, plate 50A–L; in Camino Road, 64; library, 184 Digital Import/Export Funk Office, The (Green), 27, 354–58, 356 fig. 38.1, 369; cd -­ rom , plate 16, plate 118; installation, plate 17; website, 363n6. See also Import/Export Funk Office difference, concept of: Deleuze on, 451; as opposed to “otherness,” 55, 126; in science fiction, 268 Difference (exhibition), 61 digital technologies, in mass media, 211–12 Dion, Mark, 81 Dismal Science (Sekula), 105 distinctions, in the cultural field, 409 Do the Right Thing (Lee), 141 Documenta 5, 105, 166 Documenta 6, 386 Documenta 11, 26, 104, 163, 164–65, 168, 171, 389, 406 Documenta 12, 403, 404–5, 407n2, 408–10 Documents, 136–37 Doll’s Room, The (Villalonga), 441–42 Donegan, Cheryl, 197 double consciousness, concept of, 82

Index 495

Douglas, Aaron, 43 Dorris, Michael, 5 Drag Ball culture, 79, 82n2 Drawing Center, New York, 24, 318 dreams and dreaming, 408, 428, 439 Dreyfuss, Henry, 156 Druckrey, Timothy, 188 Du Bois, W. E. B., 74, 80, 82, 86, 395, 400, plate 24; education and training, 44; mentioned, 150; on art, 42, 50 Duchamp, Marcel, 310 Duras, Clara de, 351 Durham, Jimmie, 3, 5, 11–12, 13, 444 Dutoit, Ulysse, 225–27 Dyôn, Jerome, interview with Green, 349 dystopia, 262, 266

entropy, 215 Enwezor, Okwui, 168, 169, 170–71, 172–73 Equiano, Olaudah, 283, 288n19 Esperanto, 191, 400 ethnography, and Surrealism, 137, 241–42 epistolary exchanges, 73–74, 78, 99–102, 428–51 Eshu, 82 essentialism, issues with, 53, 56 eugenics, 199 Europe, 414 Everything but the Burden (Tate), 15 exhibition catalogues, function of, 136 expanded cinema, 216, 383 experience, 262 Experimental Ethnography (Russell), 377

Eames, Charles and Ray, 378 Eames House, plate 85 Early Videos (Green), 27, plate 17 earthquakes, 445 East Village, New York, 68 ecological design, 156 education, 390 Edwards, Mel, 84 Economist, The, 231 Einstein, Albert, 305, 392–95, plate 132B; affiliations with organizations cited as subversive, 395n3; Caputh summer house, 305, 399, 412; fiction about, 396–97; as political activist and pacifist, 398, 400 Einstein File, The (Jerome), 394, 401 Eisenman, Peter, 233 electronic communications, 4, 91, 211 Ellington, Duke, 15 Ellison, Ralph, 5, 152, 233, 311 Elsewhere? (Green), 163, 383, 386, 389, 406, 407n6, plate 123B–F, plate 128A–C Elsewhere? Here (Green), 301, 389 Emancipation, 1863, 253 Emanuel, James, 120–21 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 305n3, 401 Endless Dreams and Water Between (Green), 11, 419; cast of characters, 450 fig. 51.2; film script, 428–51. See also Stills (Green) Endless Dreams and Time-­Based Streams (Green), plates 80–81 Eng, Michael, 273–75 entertainment industry, art as, 108–9, 408–9

Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, 353n1 Factory, The, 95, 376 fam . See Free Agent Media fam Vitrine (Green), plate 41 failure, as aesthetic device, 225 Fanon, Frantz, 101, 170, 331 Faulkner, William, 234 Federal Council of Churches. Commission on Race Relations, 47 female transgression, 102 feminism: and art, 58–59, 201; Black women and, 152–53 feminist art, 58–59, 201 Ferguson, Russell, 121–27 fieldwork, by artist, 245 film, as an archival medium, 279 film, as memory receptacle, 280 film series, organized by Green, 314, 315n1, 318 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 91 Fischl, Eric, 84 Flam, Jack, 86 flâneuse, 90–91, 100–101 Flanner, Janet, 89 Flash Art, 100 Fluxus, 245 formalism, 136 La Fortezza, 412–13, 415, 416 fortresses, 413 Forti, Simone, 188 Foster, Hal, 84, 238–50 Foucault, Michel, 243, 246, 268, 289, 337;

496 Index

Agamben on, 284; concept of genealogy, 232; mentioned, 7, 58, 76 Fowler, Orson, 386 F.R.A.C., Pays de la Loire, Clisson, 353n1 Frampton, Hollis, 187, 447 Frank, Thomas, 165 Frankenthaler, Helen, 84 Frankfurt school of sociology, 58 freaks and freakiness, 198 Free Agent Media, 12, 94–97, 294n2, 375, plate 30, plates 38–41, plate 43; back catalog, 97n1 freedom, 411–12 friendship, 425 From the Pole to the Equator (Gianikian, Ricci Lucci), 314, 315n1 Fuentes, Carlos, 234 Fuller, Buckminster, 7, 214, 281 Fuller, Meta Warrick, 44 Funkadelics, 199 Gabriel, Teshome H., 126 Gaddis, William, 4 Gaitier, Leonce, 86 Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, 13, 355 Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, 204 Galton, Sir Francis, 199–200 García Márquez, Gabriel, 234 gardens, 377, 384 Garvey, Marcus, 150, 152 Gates, Bill, 212–13 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 131 Geddes, Sir Patrick, 378 genealogy, concept of, 231–32 Generation X, 438 generational shifts, 442 gender identity and ambiguity, 68 gender identity as a construct, 201 geometry, 384, 394 Getty Center, Santa Monica, 250, 337 Germany, 10, 396 ghetto films, 145–46 Gever, Martha, 121–27 Giacometti, Alberto, 313 Gianikian, Yervant, 314, 315n1 Gillis, John R., 429 Gilman, Sander L., 218–19 Gilroy, Paul, 199, 206 Gingrich, Newt, 222

Giroux, Henry, 166 Global Conceptualism (exhibition), 291 globalization: effects on art circulation, 171; effects on cities, 303–4; effects on cultural production, 26, 91, 371 Globalization and Its Discontents (Sassen), 371 Goldin, Nan, 197 Gomez, Jewelle, 125 Gónzalez-­Torres, Félix, 7, 123–24, 129, 197–98 Gordon, Avery, 294n1, 294n3, 401 Gowanus Housing Project, 145–46 Gopi Krishna, 67 Gramsci, Antonio, 246 Graves, Robert, 432, 442–43 Graw, Isabelle, 354 Grazer Kunstverein, 156 Green, Derrick, 423, 424, plate 4, plate 30 Green, Friendly, Jr., plate 76 Green, Gloria Simpson, 15, plate 3 Green, Renée: background of, 14–15; family of, 74, 411; formation of, 6, 13, 80, 99; notebooks and journals, 1–2, 382 fig. 42.1, plate 1–2, plate 127; portraits, 228 fig. 24.1, 258 fig. 26.1, plate 5, plate 85 Grier, Pam, 148 Group Material, 128–33, 188 group exhibitions, 323, 330, 332, 340–42. See also international art exhibitions Grüne Ecke, Cologne, 10 guano, 305n3 Guardian, 86 Guattari, Félix, 7, 126, 183, 243 Guggenheim Museum, New York, 83, 160 Haacke, Hans, 160 Hall, Stuart, 241 Hardcore music, 69 Harlem Renaissance, 43–47, 51 Hammons, David, 120 Hancock, Herbie, 256 Haraway, Donna, 216, 362 Harmon, William E., 46 Harmon Awards, 46–47, 51 Harrison, Daphne Duval, 152 Harrison, Lou, 395, 400, plate 132C haunting, 399 Hearn, Pat, plate 30. See also Pat Hearn Gallery

Index 497

Hepburn, Katherine, 149 Here Until October 2004 (Green): film, 389, 406, 407n6, plate 82, plate 134A–D; print, plate 135 Hermes (deity), 82 Herskovits, Melville, 85 Hesse, Eva, 394 Heston, Charlton, 265 Herzog & De Meuron, 372 Hickey, Dave, 105 Hiller, Susan, 84 hip-­hop culture and music, 184, 354, 361 historical method: Green on, 165, 289–90, 291, 300; Kubler on, 163, 389; lacks of, 24 historical processes, 6, 179 history, struggles over, 301 Hobsbawn, Eric, 395 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 286 Holiday, Billie, 9, 101, 102, 152 Holzer, Jenny, 26 home, concept of, 91, 269 hooks, bell, 126 Hoving, Sandlyn Ryder (fictitious character), 64, 66–69, 433–34, 438–41 housing projects, 145–46, 328 Hudlin Brothers, 120 Hudson, Henry, 429 Huebler, Douglas, 106–7 Hughes, Langston, 15, 43–44 human body, 262–63,197 humanness, 269 Hurston, Zora Neale, 234 huts, 384 Hyde, Lewis, 5 Ice Cube, 252 Ice-­T, 252 identity: burden of, 167, 241; fluidity of, 147; Green on, 85–86, 161, 299, 331; as inadequate designation, 10, 13, 68, 298; skin color, hair style and, 124; transnational, 304 identity politics: and art, 53, 81–82, 120; Foster on, 244; Green’s relationship to, 21–22, 53, 120–21; Rajchman on, 238 Ideology and Utopia of Design (Selle), 156, 157 fig. 18.1 Idhe, Don, 216 Île, Maryse-­Françoise d’ (fictitious character), 434–35, 441–44

498 Index

Île Feydeau, 349 imaginary places, 377 imagination, 178, 377 Imagine This Wherever and Whoever You Are (Green), 412 fig. 48.1, plates 139–140; script, 411–18 Imperial Eyes (Pratt), 236 Import/Export Funk Office (Green), 13, 182, 184, 250, 358–59, plate 50A–L, plate 117; installation components, 354–56; transformations of, 27. See also Digital Import/Export Funk Office Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs), 203, 310 Infants of the Spring (Thurman), 45 information, absence or overload of, 105, 211, 271 information technologies, 211 informe, concept of, 134, 137 L’informe (exhibition), 134–39, 140n1 inhabitation, 297, 300, 305, 318 Iniva. See Institute of International Visual Arts installations, 310 Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, 238 Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 61, 77n1, 81 Institute of International Visual Arts, London, 11–12 institutional critique, 20, 160, 173, 289, 292, 344 institutions by artists, 95 intellectuals, 182, 232 Intellectuals in Power (Bové), 231 intelligence, 186–87 interdisciplinary, 8, 30 international art exhibitions, 163, 172, 323, 330, 332, 341; audiences, 167; Green’s inclusion in, 26; Green on, 28, 174, 403, 408–10; lack of reflection on art works amid, 168; proliferation of, 26; social and political context, 174, 231. See also group exhibitions international art scene, in the 1990s, 10 Internet, 93, 211, 212, 361 Inventory of Clues (Green), 12, 335–39, 336 fig. 35.1, plates 105–10 Invisible Man (Ellison), 311 Iraq War, 406

Iroquois, 440 islands, 431, 440; Deleuze on, 428, 436; geological formation, 445–46; and humans, 438; as projection screens, 419–20, 428–29 J.U.P., Situationistinnen und andere . . . , plate 44 Jaar, Alfredo, 168 Jack, Belinda, 437 Jackson, George, 305n3 Jacobs, Harriet, 203, 310 Jafa, Arthur, 295n5, 354 Jamal, Mumia Abu, 170 James, C. R. L., 413 James, Henry, 8, 91, 437–38 James, William, 431 Jameson, Fredric, 165 Jardin des Plantes, Nantes, 346 Jarman, Derek, 26 Jarman, Joseph, 16 Jerome, Fred, 394, 401 Jones, Gayle, 153 Jones, Leroi, 152 Jong, Jacqueline de, 100 Johannesburg Biennial, 26, 174, 231, plate 54 Johns, Jasper, 84 Johnson, James Weldon, 49–50 Johnson, Osa and Martin, 221, 221 fig. 23.1, 312, plates 20–23, plate 33, plate 62 Jones, Gayl, 100 Jordan, June, 8, 199, plate 2 Jordan, Michael, 199 journals and magazines, 403–5 Joyce, James, 64 Julien, Isaac, 26, 168 Jules Verne Museum, Nantes, 346 Kawara, On, 191–94; active remembering by Green, plates 56–57 Keitel, Harvey, 145 Kelley, Mike, 136 Kelley, Robin D. G., 166 Kelly, Mary, 59, 61 Kent State shootings, 276, plates 71–72 Kerouac, Jack, 64, 66–67 Keywords (Williams), 128–29 Kim, Hae-­Sun, 228 fig. 24.3 Kimball, Roger, 222

Kincaid, Jamaica, 234 Kindred (Butler), 262, 263–65 kinetic art, 214 King, Martin Luther, 150 Kiš, Danilo, 167 knowledge: forms of gaining, 103; Green on, 176; in the Middle Ages, 440, 447; as a slow-­process, 180 Kohl, Helmut, 239 Kolbowski, Silvia, 59 Koolhaas, Rem, 389 Korea Slides (Green), plates 76–77 Kosuth, Joseph, 246 Kramer, Hilton, 222 Krauss, Rosalind, 134–39 Kristeva, Julia, 58 krs 1, 329 Kruger, Barbara, 26, 59, 239, 293 Krystufek, Elke, 197 Kubler, George, 163, 389 Kunstraum Innsbruck, 294n1, 390 Kwangju Biennial, 26, 174, 231, plate 52 Kwangju uprising, 174, 272; massacre victims’ cemetery, 277 fig. 27.3, plate 53 Kwon, Miwon, 233, 247, plate 11 Kwon, Sowon, 233, plate 30 L.A. Rebellion, 81, 204, 237 fig. 25.1, 262 L.A. Times, 251 Lacan, Jacques, 59, 58, 76, 243, 246 lacunae, 271, 272–73 Lacy, Steve, 3, 4 Lady Sings the Blues (Holiday), 10 Lam, Wilfredo, 126 Lamy, Benoît, 337 Landow, George P., 359 language and languages, 125–26, 420, 448; philosophy, 284; slang, 79, 355 Lao zi (Lao Tzu), 3 Latifah, Queen, 197 law, as opposed to sentiment, 269 Lawler, Louise, 26 lectures, “scientific,” by artists, 220–22 Lee, Andrea, 53–55 Lee, Robert E., 253 Lee, Spike, Clockers, 141, 144–46; Do the Right Thing, 141; as entrepreneur, 149– 50; female characters, 147–49; Girl 6, 141, 144, 146–49; Malcolm X, 142, 147, 149;

Index 499

Lee, Spike (continued) Mo’ Better Blues, 142; and the New York Knicks, 141, 150; School Daze, 142; search of Black community, 143; She’s Gotta Have It, 141, 148, 149; varied roles, 141–42; worldview, 143–44 Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 203 Letter from Paris (Flanner), 89 letter writing, 73–74, 78, 192, 431 Leung, Simon, 233 Levine, Sherri, 293 lists, by Green, 8, 55 fig. 3.2, 67, 68, 104,120, 185, 295n6, 329 literary fictions, 64, 100, 108, 113, 234. See also speculative fiction literary references, 309–10 Le Corbusier: on standardization, 334; Unité d’Habitation, Firminy, 28, 297, 320, 323, 332; Green’s stay in Firminy’s Unité, 325–33 Lefebvre, Henri, 102 Leiris, Michel, 64, 242, 243 lesbian identity, ambivalence toward, 124 Lewis, George, 15–17, 300, 413, plate 9 Lewitt, Sol, 2, 8 Liberation Books, New York, 315 libraries of artists, 183–85, 355 Life magazine, plate 43 Limbaugh, Rush, 220, 224n22 Lindo, Delroy, 144 Lipsitz, George, 87, 250–54, 354, 366, 371–72 Livingston, Jennie, 79, 82n2 Llull, Ramon, 429, 434, 440 Locke, Alain, 42–43, 120 Lonidier, Fred, 239 Lopate, Phillip, 3 Los Angeles, 354; as dystopia, 262 Los Angeles County Museum, 290, 294n1 love, 102 Loving the Alien, 256, 270n1 LTJ Bukem, 254, 257 Lubiano, Wahneema, 161 Lyotard, Jean-­François, 183, 274 Madagascar, 157, 159 Made in Barcelona (group), 111–12, 368 Madonna, 146 Magiciens de la terre (exhibition), 84 Magritte, René, 74

500 Index

Mailer, Norman, 9 Making of the Americans, The (Stein), 4 Malcolm X, 142–43, 147, 149, 150, plate 10 Malcolm X (Lee), 142–43, 147 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 67 Mallorca, 421, 440, 441–44; botany, 443–44; Islamic past, 440, 443; Llull in, 429; Serra’s departure from, 429–30 Malmö Art Academy, 225 Mandela, Nelson, 86 Manhattan, 421; etymology of the word, 441; as an island, 438; native inhabitants, 440–41. See also New York City Manifesta 7, 414, 418n, plates 139–40 maps and atlases, 414–15 March 16, 1993 (Kawara), 193 Marcus, Greil, 92 Marden, Brice, 84 Margulis, Lynn, 7 Marker, Chris, 3, 7 mass media, 59, 92–93 Matta-­Clark, Gordon, 139 Matthews, Harry, 187 Maumaus, Escola de Artes Visuais, Lisbon, 391 Mayne, Thom, 389 Mayfield, Curtis, 14 McLuhan, Marshall, 214, 281 McMurtire, Douglas C., 337 Mead, Margaret, 254 Medusa, 354 Megahertz, Megastar, Brother, Brazil (Green), 423 megalopolis, 274 Meireles, Cildo, 113, 291 memory, 274, 278; as an active process, 281, 285–86, 400; as differing from remembrance, 227; lacks of, 272; and mass media, 280; in science fiction, 268; and space, 274 monuments and memorials, 279, 305 Mercer, Kobena, 124, 179–80, 241 metaphors, 261 Meyer, James, 169, 384; on Documenta, 171; What Happened to Institutional Critique?, 292–93, 296n8, 334n2 Michener, James, books of, plate 64 Middletown, Connecticut, 328 Miłosz, Czesław, 297

Miller, John, 75 Million Man March, 146 Minh-­ha, Trinh T., 55, 84; on the margin/ center dichotomy, 123; Out There, 121–27; on works-­in-­progress, 309 Minnesota University Press, Theory and History of Literature series, 183 minorities, mainstream treatment of, 170 Mirages: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, 12 Mise-­en-­Scène (Green), 353n1 Mo’ Better Blues (Lee), 142 mobility, 390 models, 160 modern architecture, 159, 324, 332, 417 modernism: in Africa, 159; critique of, 135, 139, 157; divergent, 180 modernity, weapons and, 415–16 Mohicans, 441 Moore, Henry, 159 Morphosis, 389 Morris, Robert, 136 Morris, William, 404, 447 Morrison, Toni, 288n19; complete oeuvre, 15; as essayist, 123; mentioned, 8, 100, 153, 233 Morrisroe, Mark, 197 Mosley, Walter, 152 Movable Contemplation Unit, plates 125–26 Moyers, Bill, 130 la movida, 64 multiculturalism, 112; Green on, 121, 126; issues with, 368–69 Multitudes, 103, 403, 410, 420 Munsees, 441 Musée Cantonal des Beaux-­Arts, Lausanne, 24 Musée de l’Homme, Paris, 200, 242 Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 12 Museum for African Art, New York, 83 Museum for Applied Arts, Vienna, 343–42 Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 26 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 26 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 84 Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, 341 music and musicians, significance of, 14–15, 365

Muselmänner, 282–83, 287n17 Mussorgsky, Modest, 413 Myth of the Negro Past, The (Herskovits), 85 Myth of Primitivism, The (Hiller), 84 myths, creation of, 49 Nabokov, Vladimir, 442 Naipaul, V. S., 234 Nantes, and slave trade, 346, 349 Nation, 43–44, 166 nations, formation of, 336 nationalism, and culture, 75 Native Son (Wright), 310 nature, humbling power of, 416, 419 Negotiations in the Contact Zone (symposium), 19–20, 24, 318; audience, plate 12; ephemera, plate 10; participants, 233; publication, 24, plate 66 Négritude, 243 Neuger/Riemschneider Gallery, Berlin, 360 Neumann, A. Lin, 213 Neutra, Richard, 417 Neutral/Natural (Green), 54 fig. 3.1, 55 fig. 3.2, plate 25, plate 32 New Criterion, 222 New Left: American, 260–261; German, 259 New Museum, New York, 27, 61, 83 New Negro, concept of, 120–21 New York City, 204, 354; bookstores, 93, 315; cultural landscape in the 1980s, 58; Green on, 89, 299, 302; in mass media, 89. See also Manhattan New York Knicks, 141, 150 New York Public Library, 317 New York Times, 86, 120, 142, 212, 350 New Yorker, 89 Newfield, Christopher, 294n1 newness, 398–99, 409–10 news sources, 166 Ngangura, Mwezé, 337 Nicholson, Jack, 327 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 250, 437 1970s, 257, 260, 270n2 1993, interest in the year, 11–13, 80 Noonan, Peggy, 222 Norvell, Patricia, 106 Notari, Elvira, 138 fig. 15.1, 273–74, 280 fig. 27.4 Notes on an African Orestes (Pasolini), 314, 315n1

Index 501

Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, publication series, 187 nuances, 451 NYC 1993 (exhibition), 27 N.W.A., 252 Obama, Barack, 166 objects of knowledge, art as, 179, 182 Obrist, Hans-­Ulrich, 169 oceans and seas, 419 O’Connor, Flannery, 234 octagonal buildings, 386 octagons, 375, 377, 379, 384 Ocumicho, 69 Oiticia, Hélio, 185, 188, 295n5, 384 Oklahoma Bombing, 91 Olander, William, 131 Omega Man, The, 262, 265–68 “On Ethnographic Surrealism” (Clifford), 137–38 On Taking a Normal Situation . . . (exhibition), 341 On the Road (Kerouac), 64, 66–67 “One Place after Another” (Kwon), 247 Ongoing Becomings (Green), 24, plate 30 Other Planes of There book (Green): contents of, 17–18; manuscript, 1, 14, plate 8; scope of, 21–23 Other Planes of There exhibition (Green), 8; series of photographs, 173–74, plates 52–55 “otherness,” 269; in art, 84, 120; as a construct, 53–54; Foster on, 240 Ourika (Dumas), 351 Outerbridge, John, 354 Out There (Ferguson et al.), 121–27 Owens, Craig, 26, 113, 139, 240 painting, 57–58, 60–61 Palais des Beaux-­Arts, Brussels, 12 Pale Fire (Nabokov), 442 Papanek, Victor, 156 paradigms, scientific, critique of, 218 Paris, conditions during the Algerian war, 101–2 Paris Is Burning (Livingston), 79, 82n2 Parker, Rozsika, 61 Parks, Suzan-­Lori, 144 Partially Buried (Green), 228 fig. 24.1, 229, 251 fig. 25.2, 277 fig. 27.1, 277 fig. 27.2, 369

502 Index

Partially Buried Continued (Green), 228 fig. 24.2, 228 fig. 24.3, 229, 277 fig. 27.3, 278 Partially Buried in Three Parts (Green), 229, 260; description, 275–78; installation, plates 63–64, plates 69–72 Partially Buried Triptych (Green), plate 42, plate 63 Partially Buried Woodshed (Smithson), 276, 277 fig. 27.1; remains of the, 277 fig. 27.2, 278, plate 64 “participary mobility,” 227–28 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 312 Pat Hearn Art Gallery, New York, 8, 315n1, 344. See also Hearn, Pat Pearlstein, Philip, 84 Penelope (fictitious character), 205 Penley, Constance, 260 perception and perceivers, 383, 386 Perec, George, 7 Permitted (Green), 25, 200–202, plate 58 personal memories, Green’s use of, 27, 276 Phaidon Themes and Movements series, 105 Phillips, Esther, 154–55 Phoenix, Aria (fictitious character), 430–33, 436–38, 447–51 photography, as a documentary tool, 62 Pigskin Library (Green), 313 fig. 31.1, plates 92–93 Piper, Adrian, 13, 120 Phifer, Mekhi, 144–45 phone sex, 146–49 Pierson, Jack, 197 place, 304, 320 Plantin-­Moretus Museum, Antwerp, 339 Platform (Green), 112–13 poetry, 7, 185, 286, 413, 447 Poirer, Patrick and Anne, 246 political art, 239, 249, 293 political correctness, debates surrounding, 76, 80–81, 124 political protests, 110, 370 Pollock, Griselda, 61 popular culture, 250–51 popular music, 68, 111, 256 Popper, Frank, 214 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), 64 Portugal: colonial past, 317; Green’s projects on, 20, 205, 421; 1974 Revolution, 259

postmodernism, 59 potential of art, 23 power relations, 123 Power Stronger Than Itself, A (Lewis), 15–17, 413, plate 9 Pratt, Mary Louise, 204, 235–36 primal-­scene fantasy, 260 Prince, 146 Prince, Richard, 144 proletarian culture, 238–39 proofreaders, 337 P.S.1 Museum, Queens, 203, 311n1 P.S.1. Museum of Modern Art, Queens, 111 psychoanalysis and art, 59 “primitivism,” 49, 84, 243 printed fabrics, 347, 351 Project Unité (exhibition), 27–29, 323 progressives, American, attitudes, 299 props, nature of, 30, 80 public art, 390 public space, 322 Pumhösl, Florian, 156–62; 157 fig. 18.1 punk culture, in Spain, 64 pursuit of leisure, as labor, 367 Puryear, Martin, 84, 120 Quest (Green), 92, 204 Quincy, Quatremère de, 337 Rabeck, Stefan, 378 Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, 433 Rainer, Yvonne, 26, 130, 131, 187, 254 Rainey, Ma, 152 Rajchman, John, 238, 249 Ramalho, Nuno, 423–24 Randle, Theresa, 147 Raqs Media Collective, 178, 181 Raskin, Jimmy, plate 30 Rauschenberg, Robert, 215 raves, 110, 367 readers and reading, 411, 431–32; Delany on, 261; Green on, 93, 104, 176, 186 reading lists, Green and, 7, 67 Reading Performance Workshop, 17 fig. 2.2 Reagan, Ronald, 59, 239 Recognitions, The (Gaddis), 4 refugees, Haitian, 86 Reich, Lily, 158 Relations: Brasil + (Green), plates 6–7

Relay (Green), 294n1, 388–91, 406; Dream’s Labor, plate123A; installation, plates 80–81, plate 130; Knitting, plate 129A–I Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben), 272, 281–86, 286n1 research in art, 161, 181 Resnais, Alain, 225, 226–27, 383 resources, access to, 301, 302 Return of the Real (Foster), 238 returning, act of, 423 Returns: Tracing Lusitania (Green), 104, plates 94–95, plate 141A–R Revue (Green), plates 18–19 Revue Noire (Baker), 201–3 rhetorical addresses, as used in church, 128 Ricci Lucci, Angela, 314, 315n1 Riding, Laura, 443, 447 Riggs, Marlon, 26 RL’s Dream (Mosley), 152 Robeson, Paul, 74, 80, 314, 395, 400, plate 132A Robinson, Jackie, 150 Rodriguez, Richard, 124 Roeg, Nicholas, 412 Rollins, Henry, 64, 132 Rosler, Martha, 26, 59, 169, 171, 172 Ross, Kristin, interview with Lefebvre, 102 Rothko, Mark, 225 Rowntree, Lester, 435 ruins, 278, 324, 398; Unité d’Habitation as, 332 Rukeyser, Muriel, 3, 7–8, 395, 400, plate 132D Rusha, Ed, 136 Russ, Joanna, 7 Russell, Catherine, 377 Russell, Michele, 154–55 Russo, Vito, 130 Rwanda Genocide, 86 Said, Edward, 75, 126, 247, 289 sampling, 367 San Francisco Bay Area, 421, 444–46 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 193, 194n Sand, George, 429, 446, 447; Winter in Majorca, 432, 442–43 Sant Adrià del Besós-­La Mina, 112 São Paulo, plates 83–84 São Paulo Biennale, 120 Sarah Phillips (Lee), 53–55

Index 503

Sarai Reader, 181, 189n2, 297, 299, 303 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 406 Sassen, Saskia, 303–4, 371 Sayeed, Malik Hassan, 146 Scarry, Elaine, 269 Schindler, Rudolf M., 417 School Daze (Lee), 142 Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich, 156 Schuyler, George S., 43–44 Schwitters, Kurt, 67, 377 science, critique of, 218–19 science fiction, 256, 258, 265–68 scores and plans, function of, 2 Scorsese, Martin, 144, 150 Scott, Joan W., 262 Screen, 246 Seams (Aïnouz), 424–25 Seattle Public Library, 389 Seattle wto Protests, 110, 370 Secession, Vienna, 156–62, 273, 275, 279 Secret (Green), 27–29, 29 fig. 3.2, 30 fig. 3.3, 298 fig. 29.1, 320, 321 fig. 33.1, 344 fig. 36.1, 393, plate 96, plate 103, plate 104A–R; character profile, 323–24; description of the work, 322 security, fallacy of the idea of, 416, 417–18 Seen (Green), 202–3, 208n10, plate 59–60 Sekula, Allan, 103, 105, 239 Selected Life Indexes (Green), plate 24 Selle, Gert, 156, 157 fig. 18.1 Sembène, Ousmane, 234, 344 Senghor, Léopold, 243 September Institute, 433, 436–37; as a dream, 430; proposal, 447–48 Sepultura, 15, 424, plate 4 Serra, Fray Junípero, 429–30 Serra, Richard, 84, 233 sexual difference, 59, 61 sexual identity, 124 Shadow and Act (Ellison), 152 Shadows (Cassavetes), 138 fig. 15.1 Shape of Time, The (Kubler), 163, 389 Shapolsky et al. (Haacke), 160 She’s Gotta Have It (Lee), 141, 148 Sherman, Cindy, 26, 59 Shining, The, 327 Shonibare, Yinka, 169, 171 Sigetics Vortex (Green), plate 8 Simmel, Georg, 401

504 Index

Simonds, Charles, 246 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 295n5 Simpson, Lorna, 84, 86 Simpson, O. J., trial, 86, 146 Simpson, Steve Edward, 15 Simpson, Steve E., Jr., 15 Simons, Marlise, 350 Simulated Vinyl Diary (Green), plate 70 simultaneity, 182 site-­specificity, 28, 158, 225, 276, 310, 340–42 Sites of Genealogy (Green), 25 fig. 3.1, 203–4, 309–11, plate 13, plates 86–90; formal aspects of, 25–26; installation components, 310–11 Situationist International, 99–102 Situationistinnen und andere . . . (J.U.P.), plate 44 Situationists Times, 100 slang, American, 79, 355 slave narratives, 203, 283 slave trade, French, 346, 347–350 slavery: Emancipation, 1863, 253; France and, 352; weight upon the present, 263–65 Small Is Beautiful (Schumacher), 156 Smith, Bessie, 152 Smith, Jack, 185 Smith, Kiki, 198 Smith, Mamie, 152 Smithson, Robert, 105, 158, 254, 275, 341; mentioned, 136; Partially Buried Woodshed, 276, 277 fig. 27.1, 277 fig. 27.2, 278, plate 64; on technology, 215, 217 Snoop Dogg, 200, 206 Sobchack, Vivian, 268 Some Chance Operations (Green), 278, 280 fig. 27.4, 369, plate 5; ephemera, 138 fig. 15.1 Some Chance Operations: Between and Including (Green), plate 3 sound and music, 369, 371, 386; Green’s use of, 365, 379; political uses of, 370; recording and reproduction, 366; social context, 365, 367 sound art, institutional embrace of, 111 Sound Forest Folly (Green), 379–80, 383–84, plate 124 Soweto uprising, 174, plate 64 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 126, 247 Studio Museum, Harlem, 24, 312, 316n2 space, 320

Space Poem #1 (Green), 4 fig. 2.1, plate 34, plates 38–40, plate 43, plate 45, plates 46–49, plates 56–57, plates 78–79 Space Poem # 3 (Media Bicho) (Green), plate 9, plate 51 speculative fiction, 161, 162, 263 speech, 284–85 Spex, 184 Spheres of Interest (Green), 176, 179–80, 187, 423–24; description, 177, 188; participants, 177 fig. 20.1, 189n1 Stallabrass, Julian, 103 Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems (S.O.U.s), 375–78, 383, 406, plates 121–22; installation components, 378 Stein, Gertrude, 4, 276, 431 Stella, Frank, 84 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 218–19 Stewart, George R., 438 Stills (Green), plate 142A–L strangers, 399–400 Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Bruno), 273, 279 Structures of Behaviour (exhibition), 386 subculture, 64 subjectivity, as a construct, 59, 201, 202 suffering, 298 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 201 Sun Ra, 257 Surrealism, 74, 80; and ethnography, 137, 241–42 Swiss Institute, New York, 112 Szeemann, Harald, 105, 106, 166 Sylvester, 79 symposiums, as a knowledge form, 103 systems in art, 214; Green and, 281, 375, 382– 87; Kawara and, 190; Pumhösl and, 160 system-­specificity, in contrast to site-­ specificity, 158 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 44 Tarantino, Quentin, 148 Tate, Greg, 15 technology, 357, 364; and ideology, 224; social context of, 216 Techno music, 110, 367, plate 61 tectonic plates, 445–46 testimony, 272, 281–85

Texte zur Kuns, letters to, 73–76, 78–82 texts, scientific, 219 Thatcher, Margaret, 59, 239 theory and art, 234, 235 thinking and creation, 11, 178 Third Text, 84 Thomposon, D’Arcy Wentworth, 187 Thurman, Wallace, 45 Tillman, Lynne, 3, 233, 324 Tillmans, Wolfgang, 197 Timequake (Vonnegut), 192 time-­based media, 12 Times Square, New York, 146, plate 26 toile fabric, 346, 347–48, 351–52 town meetings, in art contexts, 129, 132 Tracing Lusitania (Green), 20, 317–19, 319n1, 422, plate 141A–R trade routes, 347 transculturation, 174, 243 translations and translating, 125, 362, 364 transportation, 390 travel: artists and, 29–30, 60, 89–91, 319, 325, 372; impetus for, 198, 303, 408, 429; and power relations, 312 tricksters, role of, 82 True Stories (exhibition), 77n1, 81 turbulence, 297, 299, 301 Turturro, John, 145 Tuttle, Richard, 87 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures, Barcelona, 111–12, 166, 368, 372 Twombly, Cy, 136 Tyson, Mike, 199 Übertragen/Transfer (Green), 276 Ulmer, Gregory, 222–223 unesco , 156 Unité d’Habitation, Firminy (Le Corbusier), 28, 297, 320, 323, 325–33, 344 fig. 36.1 Ultra-­red, 372 University of California, Santa Barbara, 391, 406 University of Lüneburg, 357 Updike, John, 9 urban renewal: Barcelona, 111–12, 367–68; Berlin, 398–99 utopia, 411–12; Burwell on, 256; Green on, 293–94, 294n5; in films, 267; rhetoric of, 158

Index 505

Valéry, Pau1, 186–87, 409–10 Van Peebles, Mario and Melvin, 150 Vantogerloo, Georges, 214 Vaughan, Malcolm, 48 Van Vechten, Carl, 50 Venerable Bede, The, 436 Venice Biennale, 26 Veloso, Caetano, plate 6 Vidler, Anthony, 337 Village Voice, 184 Villalonga, Llorenç, 441–42 VistaVision: Landscape of Desire (Green), 312–15, 344, plates 91–93 visual representation: of female bodies, 201; feminist critique of, 58, 109, 201; Green on, 161, 205; ideology and, 58–58; Pumhösl and, 159–60; racialized, 199; Russell on, 377; social context and, 158 voguing, 79, 82n2 Vonnegut, Kurt, 192 Waiting to Exhale (Whitaker), 146 Walker, Alice, 100, 153 Walking in Lisbon (Green), 319, 422, plate 37A–F Wallace, Michele, 188 Wallis, Brian, 58, 130 wars, 418, 446 Warhol, Andy, 95, 136, 376 Washington, Booker T., 150 Washington, Isaiah, 145 water, large bodies of, 419 Watney, Simon, 126 Wavelinks (Green), 372, 374n2, 382, 383; Activism + Sound, 406, plate 120A–O; A Different Reality, 155 fig. 17.2; installation, 372 fig. 39.1, 385 fig. 42.2, 386, plate 119 Wayans, Keenen Ivory, 120 weapons, and modernity, 415–16 Webb, Veronica, 199 Weber, Samuel, 166 West, Cornel, 63n12, 127, 302; Out There, 121– 27; and the politics of difference, 122 Western Artists, African Art (exhibition), 83–87, 88n1 Western classificatory systems, critique of, 134, 139 What Happened to Institutional Critique? (exhibition), 292–93, 296n8, 334n2

506 Index

Whitaker, Forest, 146 whiteness, genealogy of the concept, 309 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: Independent Study Program, 230, 303; 1993 Biennial, 26, 80, 84, 170 Whole Earth Catalog, 281 Wiener, Norbert, 214 Williams, Christopher, 294n1 Williams, Raymond, 128–29, 294n1 Wilson, Fred, 84 Winter in Majorca (Sand), 432, 437–38 Winterbottom, Michael, 166 Wired, 217 Without Stopping (Bowles), 9 witnesses, 272, 281–83 Wittig, Monique, 125 Woman’s Life Writ Large, A (Jack), 437 women: books on, 447; in film, 147; and travel, 205 Wood, Joe, 233, 354, plate 17, plate 50A–L; mentioned, 3; on Blackness, 170 World Wide Web, 93, 361 working-­class neighborhoods, 112 working methodology: Green on her, 12–13, 91, 99, 227, 271, 281, 315, 317, 337, 342, 359, 368, 369, 382, 388–89, 392; Sutton on Green’s, 20–22, 25, 27–28, 30; Huebler on his, 106–7 works-­in-­progress, 309, 358 World Tour (Green): exhibition, 12, 90 fig. 9.1; book, plate 65 Wright, Richard, 310 writing, 446; books on, 447; Green on, 14, 92; in Green’s practice, 22, 201–2; slaves and, 283 Writing New York (Lopate), 3 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 239 Woolf, Virginia, 203, 64 Yard, 163 Yardbird Reader, 5 Yau, John, 126 Yo MTV Raps, 251 Yoruba divination trays, 313 Youngblood, Gene, 216 Zobernig, Heimo, 104 Zola, Émile, 323, 325