Encounters Beyond the Gallery: Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Difference 9781350986237, 9781786730251

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Renate Dohmen is a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Open University. She was previously Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her prior teaching experience includes Goldsmiths (University of London) and the World Art and Artefacts Programme (a joint venture between Birkbeck College, University of London and The British Museum). Her research focuses on questions of art, visual culture and the global in contemporary and colonial contexts.



‘By expanding the concept of the relational into the sphere of culture, Dohmen’s ground-breaking and fertile thought experiment enacts a critical model discourse that has the potential to mediate between concurrent aesthetics and diverse cultural actors – including those omitted from the current “global” ’. Annette Bhagwati, Project Director ‘100 Years of Now’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin ‘Encounters beyond the Gallery is a bold and imaginative exercise in bringing together domains of artistic practice traditionally kept apart by art history’s classificatory boundaries. It points to a new methodological direction for a non-convivial dialogue with radical difference. By creatively drawing upon the resources of aesthetic theory and anthropology, Dohmen deploys a redeemed, extended version of relational aesthetics – alter-relationality – to offer a framework for studying contemporary art that unsettles its hegemonic metalanguage. In order to reach out to those art practices that were modernism’s backwater utopias and which continue to fall through the net of contemporary art, the book proposes an experimental, performative approach to querying art’s new globality and to re-envisaging the relationship between aesthetics, ethnography and art historical practice.’ Monica Juneja, Professor of Global Art History, University of Heidelberg

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Difference

RENATE DOHMEN

Published in 2016 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2016 Renate Dohmen The right of Renate Dohmen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art 8 References to websites were correct at the time of writing. ISBN:  978 1 78076 371 2  eISBN:  978 1 78672 025 2  ePDF:  978 1 78673 025 1 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by Newgen Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Prologue

vi viii xi

Introduction

1



1 Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

24



2 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Alterity

40

FACTION 1 ‘THE RAW AND THE COOKED IN COMMON PLACES’ – ‘RIKKI T’ AT THE SERPENTINE GALLERY, REVIEW BY ‘JOHNNY ZUCKER’

61

FACTION 2  RIKKI T AND CURATOR C EN ROUTE

67



3 Voices: Dossier of Texts on Shipibo-Conibo Designs

79



4 Making Sense of Shipibo-Conibo Designs

96

FACTION 3 ITINERANT THOUGHTS – LONDON, PARIS, PERU AND ELSEWHERE

127



5 Voices: Dossier of Texts on Tamil Threshold Designs

152



6 Making Sense of Tamil Threshold Designs

163

FACTION 4 ITINERANT THOUGHTS – PARIS, LONDON, TAMIL NADU AND ELSEWHERE

195

Epilogue

211

Notes 219 Bibliography 256 Index 267 v

List of Illustrations 2.1 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Just Smile and Don’t Talk, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 11 July–10 October 2010 in Kunsthalle Bielefeld. Photograph by Andreas Zobe. Courtesy of Andreas Zobe.

41

2.2 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 1992 (Free), 1992/2007. Here is the 2007 re-creation (David Zwirner Gallery, New York) of his original 1992 piece Untitled 1992 (Free) at 303 Gallery in Soho. Courtesy of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gavin Brown.

41

2.3 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (1271), New Museum. In situ in the New Museum exhibition NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star, 13 February–26 May 2013. Photograph by Benôit Pailley. Courtesy of Benôit Pailley.

53

4.1 Shipibo-Conibo Indians in front of a hut with a large chomo. Photograph by Bruno Illius. Courtesy of Übersee-Museum Bremen, inventory number 33489.

97

4.2 Chomo with three-partite design areas. Photograph by Angelika Gebhart-Sayer. Courtesy of Angelika Gebhart-Sayer.

100

4.3 Shipibo-Conibo woman in the process of drawing a so-called ‘filler line’. Photo by Bruno Illius. Courtesy of Übersee-Museum Bremen, inventory number 33839. 101 4.4 Comparative chart that compares Knoll’s phosphene shapes with Tukano design elements. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo (1978) ‘Drug-Induced Optical Sensations and Their Relationship to Applied Arts among Some Colombian Indian’, in Greenhalgh, Michael and Vincent Megaw, eds., Art in Society. Studies in Style, Culture and Aesthetics (London: Duckworth), 289–304: 300. Courtesy of Duckworth Overlook.  106 4.5 Cashinahua design. Photograph by Barbara Keifenheim. Courtesy of Barbara Keifenheim. vi

117

List of Illustrations

6.1 A freshly drawn kolam. Photograph by author. Courtesy of author.

165

6.2 Tamil threshold design and bicycle. Photograph by author. Courtesy of author.

166

6.3 Threshold design on verandah. Photograph by author. Courtesy of author.

167

6.4 Designs drawn for a kolam competition. Photograph by author. Courtesy of author.

167

vii

Acknowledgements This volume started out as a doctoral dissertation and has been a long time in the making. Progressing in fits and starts, it endured extended periods of dormancy interspersed with intense periods of activity and is the product of an extensive journey that took me through libraries, universities, jobs, academic contexts and countries. I have incurred a great number of debts of gratitude in its many stages of inception, research, writing and revision, and would in the first instance like to thank Sarat Maharaj for being an inspiring teacher and thinker, and the students I taught at Goldsmiths College when the ideas for this project were taking shape. Their voracious intellectual appetite and excited discussions of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ carried over into this project. I  am also immensely grateful to Howard Caygill who most generously commented on drafts of this project in its PhD stages, who oversaw the birth of Rikki T, never wavered in his encouragement and patiently discussed ideas over many cups of coffee at the Russell Square Café. But I  owe profound thanks and gratitude to many more individuals. To Dr Francoise Barbara Freedman for initially drawing my attention to Shipibo-Conibo art, to Angelika Gebhart-Sayer for her encouragement and generous access to private notes and photographs of the Shipibo-Conibo Indians, and immensely so to Bruno Illius. He most generously shared knowledge, photos and advice, carefully read and commented on the doctoral incarnation of this book, was unfailingly supportive of my ­unorthodox approach to the question of how to interpret Shipibo-Conibo designs and took the words that I put in his mouth in Faction 3 in good humour. I  wish to thank him for wonderfully animated discussions and his friendship. I furthermore owe thanks to Michael O’Hanlon for bringing the article ‘Could Sangama Read?’ to my attention, and to Arnd Schneider for his expertise and inspiration. I am also indebted to Susanne Hermann and Britta Busch who unwittingly introduced me to Indian threshold designs when they showed viii

Acknowledgements

photos from their research trip to South India to a group of family and friends. The images of their exploits had most unusual drawings in the margins that caught my attention but to which, as social scientists, they had paid little attention. Curious about these designs, I ventured to the library only to realize that references to the practice were few and far between and constituted snippets of information at best. My solution to this perceived lack seemed obvious at the time – I had to go to India and see for myself. A lively research trip followed that took me to Chennai and then further inland to the small town of Tiruvannamalai where a friend had established links with a local primary school that served as my point of contact with the local community. I owe immense gratitude to the women of Tiruvannamalai who were eager to tell me all they knew about their tradition. But they also chided me for coming at the wrong time of the year when only everyday kolam (Tamil for threshold designs) could be seen on the streets. To alleviate this careless timing, a kolam competition was held so that I could sample the more sumptuous festival designs reserved for special occasions. I was also given the role of judge of the best kolam and to my great embarrassment I fell, in hindsight rather predictably so, short of expectations: my choice of winners did not meet with approval and the community saw undeserving winners venture home clutching the much-coveted kitchen implements given as prizes. This first lesson in the difficulties and failures of intercultural aesthetic encounters launched a long process of thinking about the designs that soon turned into a search for modes of intellectual address able to approach and positively navigate the processes of cultural translation and the post-colonial predicament this aesthetic enquiry, as I began to realize, entails. I am grateful for the invitation to participate in the AHRB Research Project ‘Art and National Identity:  Mexico, Japan, India, 1860s–1940s’, University of the Arts, London, and a research fellowship at the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at the Open University that greatly expanded my horizon. Among the many scholars, writers and colleagues from whom I have benefited in this period and whose insights, ­conversations and support I have valued, I owe particular gratitude to Debashish Banerji, Alison Blunt, Partha Mitter, Emma Tarlo and Toshio Watanabe for their interest and encouragement. I  also wish to thank my students at the ix

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World Arts and Artefacts Programme of Birkbeck College and the British Museum for the lively class discussions on the thorny issues of art and anthropology as well as Ben Burt with whom I co-taught. I also want to thank Fiona Candlin for giving me the opportunity to participate in the shaping of this curriculum and to benefit from the extensive debates this entailed. I am also indebted to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for granting me a period of research leave. This much-needed time off launched the long process of transforming my doctoral thesis into the present volume. I also owe thanks to the Open University which gave financial support in the final stages of the book’s production. For granting image reproduction rights I want to express my gratitude to Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, Bruno Illius, Barbara Keifenheim, Benoit Pailley, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, as well as to Andreas Zobe. I am also grateful to the following individuals and institutions for permitting the inclusion of text excerpts in the dossier sections of this volume: Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, Bruno Illius, Peter Roe and the American Anthropological Association, Journal of Latin American Lore, Steve Stiles (Matteson Estate), Bernd Brabec de Mori and Viennese Ethnomedicine Newsletter, Franz Steiner Verlag/Deutscher Apotheker Verlag, Anna Laine, Sage Publications and The Hindu. I also want to thank Liza Thompson from I.B.Tauris for convincing me that my doctoral thesis was perfectly publishable and for ­enthusiastically supporting the long process of rewriting the original text. I  am also indebted to Anna Coatman who took over as editor and patiently helped with remaining hurdles and the tying up of loose ends. Her guidance made the book a better project. And last but not least to Bailie Card who saw the book through its final stages. I also thank Ignacio Acosta for his help with the book cover. I also wish to extend sincere thanks to Matthias Schwabe for his support, Natasha Eaton for her encouragement and sustained interest in the project, and Rosemary and David Seton for their friendship and generous assistance throughout. I  also wish to thank my parents for believing in me.

x

Prologue 1 The artist Rikki T steps onto the terrace of the Lido Café at the Serpentine in Hyde Park balancing a tray with an espresso and a slice of cake. She is early. Curator C will not be there for a good 15 minutes. Just as well, she thinks. She settles at a table close to the lake, enjoying the sun and the view. It is going to be a working meeting to discuss the catalogue for her upcoming show at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Rikki T is pleased the curator was open to suggestions and enthusiastically ran with her ideas. They have decided on an experimental approach to the exhibition catalogue. It will be a key, stand-alone text that is creative in its own right. Rikki takes the draft of the curator’s prologue from her bag. She begins to read.

2 This is a catalogue, or rather a book, about a fictitious exhibition by a fictitious artist. It is also about many other things, such as relational aesthetics, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Amazon designs, women’s street art in India, globalization, anthropology, Guattari’s ecosophy and Guattarean aesthetics. More fundamentally, however, it presents a questioning of, reflecting on and experimenting with what it may mean to engage with art at this present moment. Views differ about the (w)here and now in relation to art. There is consensus, however, that art has entered a new, global phase. For some this means that art has entered a cultural world where differences and geographies have been liberated into a smooth, inclusive global world of art. Others point to a worrying trend of cultural homogenization and marketization. Rikki T’s project sets out from a place in-between. It recognizes the potential as well as the pitfalls of art’s global turn and acknowledges that its current articulation leaves the project of decolonization xi

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incomplete. However, it also takes the view that while undoubtedly market-driven and only superficially generous, the global in art could yet be an initiatory rumble of a seismic shift to come. For the artist the challenge is to work towards unfolding the potential of the global and to address the renegotiations of art, culture and modes of artistic address it may entail. Current art criticism often foregrounds travel and displacement in response to art’s shift towards the global. Rikki T’s work opts for a different tack. It focuses on intercultural encounters, probes relational aesthetics in view of cultural difference and explores issues of cultural translation with an emphasis on minoritarian cultures. Art writing is a further, central concern. For the artist, art’s textual arena needs to actively participate in the global turn if its potentiality is to unfold. This project, then, comes along in a different guise. It performatively engages with modes of criticality, notions of art and cultural encounter, and approaches art writing co-constitutively, creatively and with artistic licence. It stages encounters between cultures, art worlds and academic disciplines that involve a cast of real and imagined characters to test the inclusivity of art’s global turn, and challenges the global contemporary to encompass visual practices that do not readily fit the invariably Eurocentric ‘bill’ of internationally recognized art.1

3 Rikki T’s phone beeps, a text message. The curator is running late. Rikki does not mind. It gives her time to gather more thoughts. Should she maybe add a list of the ‘cast’ to let readers know what they are in for? A dramatis personae of sorts? Who would need to be featured? She starts making a list, scribbling away.

4 Amélie – central character in the 2001 film of the same name directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and played by Audrey Tatou. She works as a waitress in the Café des Deux Moulins in Paris. In this volume her claim to fame is that she transforms her father’s garden gnome into a xii

Prologue

traveller-cum-anthropologist-cum-activist and is invited to cook Pad Thai for Rirkrit Tiravanija (which sends her into a panic). Nicolas Bourriaud – French curator and art critic, author of Relational Aesthetics. This volume challenges Bourriaud’s conception of relational aesthetics to pay more heed to the cultural other in contemporary art. It also takes liberties with his culinary preferences and has him frequent the Café des Deux Moulins. Brown Stagemaker – a bird brought to international attention in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. It is, however, not just any old bird but hails from Australia, a circumstance held to be of significance. But who would have thought its simple turning of leaves had implications for Tamil ­threshold designs and the global contemporary? It is not known what it makes of noodles. Would it turn them upside down? Perhaps. James Clifford – anthropologist and author of many seminal books, among them Predicament of Culture (1988) and, together with George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). This discussion suggests he is rather partial to Pad Thai, especially if cooked by Rirkrit Tiravanija, and that he challenged Rikki T to read anthropological material and thus go beyond art’s ethnography-light ethnographic turn. Gilles Deleuze – philosopher who wrote a great number of influential books taken up widely in the arts. Key volumes for this project are Bergsonism (1988), What Is Philosophy? (1994) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). The last two are co-authored with Félix Guattari and introduce the brown stagemaker, an Australian bird that engages in acts of territoryproducing expressiveness by turning leaves upside down. For the purposes of this project, Deleuze also had a ‘noodle moment’ and not just anywhere, but in Venice! Renate Dohmen – art historian, author of texts on Tamil threshold designs,2 the present volume and creator of Rikki T.  She proposes the alter-relational as a post-productively3 remixed and reinscribed notion of Bourriaudean relational aesthetics expanded into culture and is indebted to Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics, the Antipodean bird and to noodles, of course. Garden Gnome – a character from Amélie who likes to travel. But who knew he had a liking for Shipibo-Conibo ceramic art, was a connoisseur of xiii

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Tamil threshold drawings and took issue with the Musée du Quai Branly? But did he share Pad Thai with art-world aficionados? Angelika Gebhart-Sayer – anthropologist who worked extensively on Shipibo-Conibo ceramics. She unwittingly changed Shipibo-Conibo culture with her proposition of an aesthetic-curative paradigm that was lapped up as eagerly by anthropologists, drug tourists and art collectors as by the Indians themselves. It is not known what she makes of noodles. Félix Guattari – psychotherapist and philosopher who co-authored several books with Gilles Deleuze, most notably What Is Philosophy? (1994) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). His single-authored texts include Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1995) and The Three Ecologies (2000), which are key to this discussion. He shared in Deleuze’s Venetian noodle extravaganza, naturally. Bruno Illius – anthropologist who worked extensively on ShipiboConibo shamanism and culture. He takes the contingencies of authorship in the anthropological field seriously and had his two books on Shipibo language and culture approved by Shipibo-Conibo representatives. He mixes an excellent mojito, was surprised to find out about his Venetian noodle encounter and says it was not just noodles that were put in his mouth. Marco Polo – famous thirteenth-century – Venetian traveller whose claim to fame is his encounter with the Chinese-Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. Yet he most likely never travelled to China, but spins a good yarn.4 It is also rumoured that he introduced noodles to Venice and that the famous Italian pasta might really be Chinese. He teaches us a thing or two about Venice in Italo Calvino’s incarnation cited in this volume. Rikki T – a fictitious artist created for this discussion as a partial foil to Rirkrit Tiravanija. Rikki is female, and neither from an exotic nor privileged or international background. In this volume she had a formative encounter with the anthropologist James Clifford (Jim) over a bowl of Pad Thai. It changed her attitude to traditional visual practices as presented in her show ‘The Raw and the Cooked in Common Places’ held at the Serpentine Gallery in London. She likes to travel by Eurostar and prefers cake to noodles. Rirkrit Tiravanija – global art-nomad of Thai extraction, also referred to as the ‘poster boy of relational aesthetics’. His claim to fame is his xiv

Prologue

trade-mark cooking of Pad Thai in gallery spaces around the globe. His work was instrumental for Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics. Yet the latter never mentioned Tiravanija’s Thai Buddhist background and its connection to relational aesthetics, an omission the proposed alter-relational reconception of Bourriaud’s framework seeks to put right. Does Tiravanija still like noodles? One wonders. Sangama – a Piro Indian5 who impressed on his cousin Moran Zumaeta, one of the first assuredly literate Piro, that he too could read newspapers ‘like the white man’ (in the outhouse), using shamanic metaphors for his description of how to read. The story was recorded by a missionary and acquired anthropological significance for the interpretation of Amazon designs. There is no known connection to noodles. José Santos – a powerful Shipibo-Conibo shaman and one of the main native associates of Illius. He entered history not just in Illius’s books but also because, as Gebhart-Sayer reports, he moved his hand horizontally across designs anthropologists were enquiring about. This simple gesture became a weighty argument that has haunted anthropological literature since. In this volume he acquired, incongruously perhaps, a taste for noodles. And not just anywhere but – you guessed it – in Venice. Tamil women – they collectively challenge European notions of visual practice, avant-gardism and originality with their twice-daily routine of drawing threshold designs. They also take Deleuze–Guattari6 to task for their gendered predilection for famous, modern, male, white European artists. They were found to be in league with the Australian bird. And yes, there is a natural connection with noodles: their looping lines7 were traditionally made with rice powder to feed the ants and add a distinctive spin to Tiravanija’s dispensing of food in the gallery.

5 Another text message. This time from Jim.8 He wants to know how the ­project at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris is coming along. Rikki sighs. It is a rather tight schedule, first the show in Paris and then this much larger one in London more or less immediately afterwards. How is she going to manage it all? Jim wants visuals of the show for his upcoming keynote speech about contemporary art and anthropology and wonders whether xv

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it will be up in time for his talk. He intends to present Rikki T as an artist who has taken an informed ethnographic turn. Rikki replies it may just work but will be tight. With the curator still at large, Rikki T is beginning to get restless. She has been waiting for nearly an hour now. Productively so, yes, but still waiting. She checks her email. Scrolling through her inbox, she finds, to her surprise, an email from Okwui Enwezor, the director of the next Venice Biennale. He wants to meet. He will be in Paris on the day of the opening at the Musée du Quai Branly, and wonders whether she will have time for lunch at the Café des Deux Moulins. Before Rikki can respond, Curator C approaches in energetic strides. Apologetic but full of enthusiasm, she takes a draft of the proposed catalogue from her leather tote. They get to work.

xvi

Introduction

The face of contemporary art has substantively changed since the momentous rise of biennials and triennials in the last decades of the twentieth century that ushered in a new globalism in art. In the wake of the 1984 ‘Primitivism’ show at MoMA and ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ in 1989 at the Centre Pompidou,1 which galvanized critical opinion,2 peripheral biennials in particular were instrumental in bringing about this shift. Hailed as the long-awaited pluralization of the art world, opportunities for artists from so-called ‘peripheries’3 have certainly improved and new players, geographical locations and artists have burst on the international art scene. But where does this transformation stand? Euphoric claims state that a fundamental, post-colonial rearrangement of the structures of the art world is underway, and that centres and peripheries and the Euro-American domination of the field are soon going to be a thing of the past. But do developments in the art world support this exuberant perspective and is this scenario really as certain and imminent as this view suggests? When Documenta 11 in 2002 and the Venice Biennale in 2003 – art institutions that are considered ‘the foremost venues at which current cultural politics of the art world is laid out’4 – endorsed global perspectives, this was seen as proof that a true sea change was underway in the world of art, that one was in fact witnessing the beginnings of an all-out 1

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global turn and a radical decentring of the art world. These two large-scale exhibitions undoubtedly marked a significant diversifying moment in the Euro-American art world. Yet while the happy image of a global turn continued to be propagated, ensuing major shows evidenced a ‘post-colonial’ fatigue syndrome5 as subsequent documentas and Venice biennales showed little appetite to build on this achievement. The expectation, however, is that the appointment of Okwui Enwezor, a trailblazer for greater inclusivity in contemporary art, to direct the 2015 Venice Biennale ­reinvigorated these debates. As of yet, however, Enwezor is giving nothing away.6 In this moment of suspense, taking stock of the global contemporary and its post-2003 condition suggests itself and will be presented in the ensuing pages in anticipation of the biennale’s likely global turn.

The Global Contemporary The curator, critic and scholar Thomas McEvilley, for example, thinks that the global turn, much like a fashionable style, has run its course, even though the much-proclaimed rearrangement of the art world’s geopolitical structure has barely begun.7 For art critic Claire Bishop, the post-2003 era is preoccupied with ‘local’ Eurocentric consolidations of the familiar that suspend the global and rekindle conceptions of art as ‘individualized, self-referential practice’. She sees this development as part of a retreat from discursivity in the Euro-American centres of the art world.8 For her the biennial movement has split with venues outside Euro-America persisting with critical, innovative and political engagements and pushing a global agenda, while European biennials leave the work of criticality to institutions such as museums, which are constitutionally ill-suited to take on radical agendas.9 Contemporary art’s global condition, however, is also linked to changes in the art market that arguably largely drove its geographical diversification. Contemporary Chinese art, for example, gained a massive share of the global market as part of these shifts, and Hong Kong emerged as a major centre of the art trade, in part stealing New York’s and London’s thunder.10 Yet the globalization of contemporary art has brought more than an expansion of the art market and a degree of pluralization. The reach of the global art market now extends beyond the art fair and the auction houses, 2

Introduction

creating what Okwui Enwezor critiqued as ‘a crisis of large-scale exhibitions’ caused by a blurring of boundaries between art fairs and large-scale art exhibitions.11 For Enwezor the mimicking of large-scale art exhibitions by mammoth art fairs such as Art Basel is exerting a major transformative pressure in the direction of a market takeover of artistic and curatorial agendas and it was interesting to see how he responded to those trends.12 As he explains, commercial art events now cross the divide between commerce and critical inquiry. They lay claim to intellectual fields by convening panels, symposia and so forth and invite high-calibre artists and curators to add kudos to their commercial operations. Bishop agrees with this observation. She notes that ‘mainstream Euro-biennials become showcases rather than proposals or investigations’ and concedes that ‘the criticism that the biennial has grown closer and closer to the art fair gains credence’.13 It is thus not surprising that the recent show ‘The Global Contem­porary. Art Worlds After 1989’,14 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, which ambitiously attempted a survey of the current state of the global in contemporary art and declared self-reflexivity its modus operandi, devoted a whole section of the exhibition to the influence of the art market. It also committed a further room in the ‘Histories’ section to market forces that introduced the audience to branding under the heading ‘New Art Markets and Their Strategies’. A room devoted to the biennialization of the art world drew attention yet again to overlaps between financial and art markets and demonstrated that art has been ‘transformed into a speculative commodity for the luxury goods industry’.15 The show thus suggested that the increased public presence of ‘artists from cultures remote from the art world’ is not due to an ideological rearticulation but to the forces of marketization of contemporary art in the wake of a globalizing economy.16 But whether we consider this new interest in cultural diversity to be just another marketing ploy, a furnishing of the art market with new and exotic products or a neo-nineteenth-century tendency to discover new foreign artists, as Yinka Shonibare has proposed,17 fundamental changes in the system of global art have undoubtedly occurred. Artists of non-Western backgrounds have undeniably gained greater visibility in the contemporary art world, and a degree of power-sharing is underway as some non-European cities now form part of the circuit of artistic and economic influence. 3

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

But how have these changes affected the practice of contemporary art in response to these global shifts? The curator and critic Gerardo Mosquera is concerned with what he sees as the development of a new lingua franca, a new ‘English of Art’, that is an evolving, hegemonically constructed language of contemporary art. He concedes the need for such a language, as artists from different countries step onto the global platform and require shared codes to communicate with one another and their audiences. He acknowledges that the fast-evolving language of contemporary art is based on existing visual languages and thus ‘consolidates established structures, while the authority of the histories, values, poetics, methodologies and codes that constituted the language are incorporated’.18 For him, contemporary art has been hijacked by the centre and rejects aesthetic languages that do not operate on the basis of its centric codes, dismissing them as traditional, not current or substandard. Yet Mosquera remains optimistic that the new language of contemporary art will eventually be transformed from within, as artists from around the world join the global platform. In aid of this process, he advocates ­‘horizontalization’ – the creation of networks that subvert the control axes of the ‘radial circulation schemes traced from power centres’.19 He argues that this will facilitate the generation of new, smaller-scale centres that bring a minor mode into the hegemonic regime of globalized contemporary art, transforming it from within. For Mosquera, such a transformation entails the transmutation of what are considered the primary, secondary and tertiary domains of art in the current system, that is, ‘the cliché of ­“universal” art in the centres, derivative expressions in the peripheries, and the multiple, “authentic” realm of “otherness” in traditional culture’.20 The essayist and sociology professor Laymert Garcia dos Santos makes a similar point but lays claim to a specifically Brazilian vantage point. He reckons that the greater presence of non-Western artists in the sphere of global art will subvert the supremacy of the Western model. But his ‘Brazilian’ eye, which he describes as ‘post-underdeveloped, post-peripheral, and tropical’,21 also zooms in on a visual field dismissed by the contemporary art world: the traditional cultures of indigenous peoples. He stresses that both modern and contemporary art in Brazil have a ‘non-relationship with ethnic art that was, and still is, being produced’.22 As he points out, this is 4

Introduction

not just a Brazilian omission, but is symptomatic of the global field of art where such artistic productions are relegated to the realm of ­anthropology. He thinks the current celebration of an expanded sense of globality in contemporary art is misleading as the new art language which is fast becoming institutionalized only encompasses some minor adjustments to Euro-American parameters yet claims to be representative of global artistic production. For him this misconception raises the bar yet higher for artistic modes that do not fit this mould and he wonders what the consequences will be for art in Latin America where ‘indigenous societies are becoming strictly contemporaries of civilized people’.23 Yet despite these concerns, both Mosquera and Garcia dos Santos see the art market’s global turn and the greater visibility that it initiated of artists from non-centric locations as a positive development. They, however, also consider the success in numbers as an initial phase set to usher in deeper transformations. On closer inspection, however, the much-vaunted greater plurality of the global contemporary art market proves to be on shaky ground. In 2002 Ulf Wuggenig analysed the annual worldwide ranking of artists published in the highly reputable Art Compass of the German investment magazine Capital, which assists art investors with their investment choices. The ranking lists the most successful 100 artists worldwide and is based on the number and quality of exhibitions artists have participated in. According to the Art Compass website, the data is computed on the basis of the cultural importance of the institutions that show the work, as well as the artists’ reputation in the art world. Wuggenig’s analysis of the Art Compass demonstrates that the myth of globalization obscures the fact that 90 per cent of the top artists worldwide are born in North America or Europe (Euro-America). His analysis also reveals that the global elites from other parts of the globe that feature in the top 100 have mostly moved to a Euro-American. metropolis and became successful after they made the move. For him this cultural flow demonstrates the continued dominance of Europe and North America as the centres of power in the art world.24 The cultural critic Chin-Tao Wu found similar trends in a more recent statistical exercise in which she correlated the birthplaces of a­ rtists showing in the nine documentas between 1968 and 2007 with their places of residence when they exhibited in Kassel. This analysis revealed that with Enwezor’s Documenta 11, the participation rate of artists born 5

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

outside Euro-America increased from 10 to 40 per cent and remained at that level for the time period examined, but that between 2002 and 2007 some 60 per cent of these artists lived in North America or Europe. On the basis of this data, Wu challenges the claim that the 2002 documenta represents the ‘full emergence of the margin’.25 She argues that the concentric and hierarchical structure of the art world remains fully intact and has only expanded into further global markets. Overall she concludes that all that has changed is that ‘ “Western” has quietly been replaced by a new buzzword, “global”.’26

Alterglobalization For a truer global condition of art to emerge, the increased visibility of artists of non-Western backgrounds needs to be accompanied by deeper structural as well as conceptual changes. In The Radicant, the influential French curator Nicolas Bourriaud proposes a fundamental reconceptualization of the global in contemporary art, taking issue with what he calls the ‘flawed model of multiculturalism’. He declares all cultures to be contaminated rather than ‘pure’,27 and calls for an all-out appropriation and deterritorialization of signs across boundaries of culture. He accepts that the ‘quality of an artist’s work depends on the richness of his or her relations to the world’, which he sees as determined by ‘economic structure’.28 And he argues that artists’ chances of evading or escaping these structures are a ‘theoretical’ option only.29 However, he also proposes art as interstitial territory that carves out spaces outside ‘the dominant law’30 and advocates the subversive insertion of reappropriated collective images of global production into contemporary pictorial flows. For him, the democratic and global possibility of such practices is due to the levelling power of the internet and the digital, which in his view will transform the global imaginary. Integral to this approach is the ‘art of wandering’, an art that evades locality and creates a culture of portability, a common and shared world, a global sphere of exchange, a ‘space of horizontal negotiations without an arbiter’  – in short the world of ‘alterglobalization’.31 He frames this ‘art of wandering’ as an exodus from the ‘bed of original culture’ in search of connections32 and never returns to the issue of the art market or the centricities of global art circuits and their conditions. Thus despite his original acknowledgement 6

Introduction

of the role economic structures play in the world of art, his subsequent theorizing skirts such issues. For Mosquera, this omission is endemic to the world of contemporary art and obscures relations of power.33 Wuggenig sees a similar trend and argues that the emphasis on deterritorialization prevalent in globalization theory plainly ignores spatialities of power. He points out that a ‘precondition for recognition in the field is still the real integration in these territorially delimitable centres of artistic production and communication’.34 But current structures of power in the spheres of art are rooted in histories of exploitation and violence as context for cultural mixing around the globe. As the cultural critic Françoise Vergès reminds us, the slave trade constituted a relatively recent system of globalization that was based on a brutal and predatory economy of power that tore people from native tongues and cultures. This displacement gave rise to ‘creolization’, the mixing of cultures fashioned by ‘cannibalizing the world of the masters, imitating, borrowing, absorbing’.35 Vergès struggles with the term’s recent popularity in cultural debate, which proposes creolization as a model for translocal creations that evades national and other sedentary identities, encapsulates ‘strategies of resistance, of inventiveness, of creativity in the arts’36 and stands for a global ‘exchange rather than a hegemonization’.37 She counters this re-envisaged understanding of the term by emphasizing that creolization references ‘a creative practice in a world dominated by ­brutality, domination, violence’.38 She points out that its current extension to all situations of exchange risks losing sight of power differentials as well as the brutality of these cultural encounters. Bourriaud’s use of the term is a case in point. He brackets out the deeply felt creole pain of the irrecoverability of origins and defines creolization as a ‘joyous practice’,39 a celebration of ‘a game of differences’, ‘a formula of blending’, an ‘acclimatisation on neutral soil’ as well as the forming of ‘an artificial, purely circumstantial mix’.40 In Bourriaud’s refashioned use of the term, all dimensions of struggle and domination have been removed, along with the difficulties of encounters and translations. His ‘radicant’ musings, which proclaim a deep engagement with translation and p ­ ropose 41 an ‘ethics of recognition of the other’, rather invoke an image of the nomad-artist who descends on cultures in over-flight fashion, departing with cultural booty hastily gathered before the affectivity of any encounter 7

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

can set in. The ‘thinness’ of these cultural immersions, however, keeps the artist-nomads tethered to the spaces of international cultural ­institutions and associated hubs of transport such as ‘airports, cars, and railroad ­stations’,42 that is, Augé’s ‘non-places’. Furthermore, Bourriaud’s advocacy of an aesthetic dwelling ‘in a movement of round trips between v­ arious spaces’43 celebrates the very mobility denied to slaves, whose forced ­encounters with one another and the culture of their masters generated the very processes of creolization, which ironically are now hailed as ­connoting an era of easy global co-mingling. In contrast to these deeply painful historic conditions of ‘enforced enrootments’, ‘radicant artists’, by means of their peripatetic ‘round-trip’ existence, retain the stance of the distanced observer, avoiding cultural contamination, culture shock, the often deep frustration of communicating across linguistic and cultural boundaries, as well as subjection to the power structures in situ. They perform a replay of the masterful eye of the all-powerful colonial official free to roam, define and appropriate, ­proclaiming a civilizing mission while out for himself and the powers he represents. Furthermore, Bourriaud’s figure of the art-nomad, who as privileged homo viator bounces from culture to culture, envisages the cultures that are sampled as static, that is, a passive foil to his cultural interpolations. Thus despite Bourriaud’s claims that this new mode of the ‘altermodern’ creates a ‘truly worldwide culture’ that is ‘directly informed by Africa, Latin America, or Asia’,44 the proposed modus operandi remains uncomfortably close to a colonial model of superiority and exploitation. Moreover, Bourriaud’s approach glosses over the radicant artist’s transition from his or her cultural grounding to a space of the inter-local assumed to be culturally neutral. Bourriaud acknowledges this issue rhetorically by posing the question ‘can we really free ourselves from our roots?’ and can we escape ‘the forms and ways of life that are etched in our memories’?45 He concedes that this is far from certain as ‘cultural determinisms leave a powerful stamp on us’.46 Yet, despite this admission, Bourriaud is confident about the effectiveness and ethics of the cultural sampling carried out by the proposed figure of the ‘radicant artist’. His radicant propositions therefore constitute but a rhetoric of inclusiveness. They remain riddled with problems and perpetuate the hegemonic lingua franca of the global art world that Mosquera has identified. 8

Introduction

Horizontalization But where do these thoughts and recognitions leave the global turn in contemporary art? Do we have to declare defeat at the hands of the market and hope that a jostling of visual codes in this global-cum-Eurocentric playing field of contemporary art will eventually bring about the desired changes? Do we have to concede the terrain to the global flâneur who now botanizes not just the Parisian asphalt but the cultures of the world? Or are there further approaches to be probed, other perspectives to be endorsed and/ or developed? Like Mosquera, this book adopts an optimistic stance and proposes to engage deeply with the conditions of cultural encounter in the sphere of art. It seeks to offer a counterpoint to accounts of globalization which obfuscate the difficulties and affectivities of cultural encounter and assert models of ‘clean’ and unaffected semiotic extraction, as if cultures inhabited test tubes and new visual codes grew in culturally sterile petri dishes. It proposes to take a step back and poses the question: What happened to Bourriaud’s earlier championing of conviviality and human interrelations in relational aesthetics? It also asks whether this earlier declared interest in interrelationality can be extended into the domain of culture, that is, whether the relational aesthetics of old can be expanded to provide answers for the present global challenges of contemporary art. It responds to these questions by proposing a thought experiment that explores these issues with an emphasis on cultural encounter and ­indigenous arts, that is visual languages at a remove from dominant ­contemporary art languages. Echoing Garcia dos Santos’s concerns, the objective is to generate a horizontalization of the languages of art that recognizes the contemporaneity of indigenous art and disrupts the still dominant p ­ erception that these cultures constitute a ‘treasure of universal culture’, or a ‘legacy from bygone times’.47 But how can such a horizontalization be achieved? What are the necessary steps and processes? Mosquera, for example, notes a promising change in attitude towards difference in the contemporary sphere of art. He characterizes this approach as ‘increasingly constructed through specific plural modes of creating artistic texts within a set of international idioms and practices’,48 which he highlights are ‘transformed in the process’.49 For 9

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

him, this new approach amounts to a reconstitution of the codes and methodologies of a global meta-language of art. It entails a move away from the representation of specific cultural contexts, and invokes a transformative mobilization of cultural codes in creative encounters thought to ­transfigure the new global meta-language of art. But how is this to be envisaged ­concretely? How is this different from the sampling of the homo viator, and what are we to understand by creative cultural encounters? Is this not what is happening anyhow, one would assume, in a globalized art world? After all, artists from all over the world are exhibiting together around the globe, and international audiences engage with those artists and their work. Mosquera seems to anticipate a quasi-automatic process of recodification through such exhibitionary encounters. He expects them to transform this new ‘English of art’ since its codes are ‘forced, knocked about as a diversity of new subjects’50 step onto the global platform. But will this reactivity be sufficient? Will this process enable a reaching out to encompass conceptual zones of silence, such as, for example, folk art and the art of indigenous peoples? And if so, how will these encounters be framed, what models of inclusivity will be employed and how will they be received by respective audiences? The Aboriginal art presented at the 2006 Biennale of Sydney themed ‘Zones of Contact’, for instance, led to critiques that this kind of art was ‘folkloric’ and should not be exhibited at the Biennale.51 Such a complaint is particularly surprising, since the art of Australian Aboriginals has gone through a marked process of adapting to Western markets and has enjoyed exceptional visibility and popularity. This objection raises issues ranging from curatorial conception to audience reception and the haunting spectre of ‘Magiciens de la Terre’. Thus even though art theory has decidedly moved on since the ‘Magiciens’, and discourses of post-coloniality have raised critical awareness,52 the very fact that the issue of indigeneity and contemporary art continues to be sidelined, and that an essentially Western artistic lingua franca reigns supreme, underscores the limitation of the professed new aesthetic globality. And what if the expectation that the jostling of art from around the globe in global market-cum-exhibition spaces will automatically and inevitably effect this transformation turned out to be heavily laced with wishful thinking? What if the artists simply settled for the lingua franca, the common art language that has evolved? What if their encounter was simply 10

Introduction

consensual and accepting of the status quo, with a sprinkling of ethnicity to add an exotic edge? And will the most powerful players not create most elbow room and be most successful in imposing their own inclinations? Where can we turn to engage in a critical debate that examines these issues, that looks beyond the relative successes and failures of particular shows to address these larger concerns of the global contemporaneity in art? The search for answers to these questions reveals a shift in the ­critical landscape of contemporary art towards curatorial agency. It has, for ­ example, been noted that ‘large-scale international exhibitions of ­contemporary art continually present an excess of art’ that as a result ‘resist scholarly analysis’.53 This trend is further fuelled by the fast-paced, wide geographical spread and the temporal nature of artistic mega-shows. Artists, curators and the market have powered ahead, creating a new dynamic field of meta-cultural globality that is outpacing critical analysis as an ever-greater number of shows are curated around the globe. And as, for the most part, only curators command the travel budget needed to stay informed, the ‘vitality of critical debate appears to have shifted, at least for now, from discourse to curation’.54 This raises, yet again, questions of access and privilege, along with the spectre of an exclusivist meta-discourse of global criticality dominated by a relatively small number of global super-curators-in-the-know who scour the globe. It also begs the question of how much time nomad-curators have for sustained critical reflection as they zigzag across the globe ‘collecting’ new artists while zooming in and out of time zones. Enwezor thus notes a weakening of curatorial discourse as, ‘unlike academics, curators have very little time to engage in substantive research that requires a long period of gestation’.55 He laments that ‘there are few structures capable of giving this to curators who work outside the museum’.56 He also confessed to weariness of curatorial peripatetics, acknowledging a desire to ‘step back’ in order to develop ‘an evaluative criteria that is not dependent on the continuous expansion of areas needing to be covered, or artists to discover’.57 Catherine David raises a further concern. She argues that ‘there are necessary alternatives to globalized, transnational rendezvous – and a lot of work to be done in terms of consolidating local critical platforms’.58 Her comment raises an issue glossed over by the global euphoria:  the interactions between heterogeneous, context-specific and context-generative 11

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

notions of locality, regionality, nationhood and the hegemonic global. Biennials are not just global events; they also signify locally. In fact they are often strategically developed as prestige-enhancing activity to re-image the hosting community. Hou Hanru, for example, refers to the biennial as a site of intense negotiation between the global and the local where locales are struggling to reconfigure themselves to garner a place on the map of the new world of cultural and economic globality.59 According to Hanru, globalized culture has penetrated almost every corner of the globe. It has profoundly changed and displaced local c­ultures, forcing them to transform ‘for the sake of survival’.60 In his view, biennials represent a proactive strategy by locations to ­demonstrate their ‘capacity to master international cultural exchanges and thereby better defend local characteristics’.61 He draws attention to globalization’s relentless commodification of all aspects of life, i­ ncluding critical discourse, and points to the increasing division between rich and poor in its wake. Yet he nonetheless accords contemporary art positively interruptive credentials. He advocates for artists to ‘detour’ ­commodified images through appropriation and reinsertion in global streams of popular culture with the aim to transform the collective consciousness and the fantasies governing an increasingly global p ­ opular culture.62 For him art thus creates alternative projects, and reinvents meanings ‘through endless negotiations between different ­individuals and collective experiences and aspirations on their equally endless journeys between the global and the local’.63 The global contemporary art world can hence be characterized as a diverse set of global encounters between artists, curators, audiences, ­critics, scholars, aesthetic languages, artistic cultures, art institutions and cultures of reception. And while a global art speak is undoubtedly evolving, propelled by a general euphoria about a new globality that promises ever-greater inclusivity and an ever-better world of ever bigger, what is generally omitted from such accounts are the numerous acts of translation required between respective local, regional, national and global art circuits and cultures. The focus on the global thus blankets the fact that, as Mosquera observed, most artists are plugged into art scenes on many of these levels, and are negotiating between them as they exhibit in a range of exhibitions catering for different audiences. 12

Introduction

But this cultural multi-linguistics is not limited to artists negotiating their respective cultural situatednesses. It also poses a challenge for c­ urators, critics, art theorists and general audiences as they encounter works of art that refer to unfamiliar cultural contexts. For Mosquera, the challenge at present is how to keep track of developments across the globe and to have the necessary receptiveness to move around with ‘open eyes, ear and minds’. He acknowledges that this poses a problem as ‘our minds, ears and eyes have been programmed by specific canons and positions’.64 So how can viewers, curators, critics and artists be truly open to the unfamiliar? And can preconceptions, which inevitably blinker the engagement with alien aesthetic codes, be suspended? In other words what are the conditions of visuality in global scenarios and how can productive evaluative criteria be developed that are able to cater for this new and complex global scenario?

Relational Aesthetics This volume proposes that engaging with these concerns requires a paradigm shift and acknowledges that such far-reaching questions necessarily solicit a range of reflections, approaches and perspectives informed by the situatednesses of respective responses. The expectation that these issues could be fully resolved once and for all is therefore misguided and propositions put forward can be but a possible response to these issues. Approaches developed by the present discussion will also be inflected by an anchoring concern with the disavowal of ethnic or ‘primitive’ art in the global world of contemporary art. As part of this investment, it raises the question of coevalness articulated by the anthropologist Johannes Fabian who, like Garcia dos Santos, argues for greater acknowledgement of the contemporaneity of the so-called ‘primitive’ in the contemporary world.65 A  further fundamental premise of this discussion is that the force and transformative potential of ‘encounter’ needs to be reckoned with, and that an experimental approach to the re-examination of the theoretical framework of ‘relational aesthetics’ is best suited to tackle these concerns. Overall the project is conceived in terms of a creative laboratory of thought. It probes whether relational aesthetics can be stretched beyond its current Eurocentric inflection that posits the experience of the post-industrial West as benchmark for the whole world. Bourriaud himself 13

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

acknowledged that this is problematic when he noted that the experience of the information superhighway and a heightened spectacularization of the social do not capture everybody’s contemporary reality.66 However, he failed to act on this realization and continued to proclaim First World post-industrial perspectives as defining general experience. In contradistinction, this book’s aim is to explore what an expanded notion of relational aesthetics that seeks to go beyond a normative Western perspective could deliver for encounters with radical aesthetic difference such as indigenous and folk art, the very practices global aesthetic contemporaneity excludes, and whether indeed it can rise to this challenge. But before relational aesthetics can be taken on an experimental foray into the realm of culture, some framing of its main tenets and current state of affairs is required. The French curator Nicolas Bourriaud formulated the framework of relational aesthetics in the late 1990s in response to the new kind of art he saw emerging at the time, which he deemed unreadable by existing critical paradigms. In his just over 100-page exposé of the same title, the curator draws on an eclectic mix of theorists, philosophers and artists. His tone is often polemic and at times messianic, and he takes pot shots at an array of ‘enemies’ ranging from ‘contemporary supplier/client’ relations to ‘feminism, anti-racism and environmentalism’67 that are presented as in league with a disguised corporate conservatism. He proposes to rewrite art history along the lines of relationality,68 invokes user-friendly, interactive technologies as ideological frameworks for the new spaces of relationality created in the gallery69 and draws on, or, as Alliez would say, ‘nastily co-opts’,70 notions of an interconnected subjectivity developed by Guattari. His ideas have been influential but have also received fierce critical attention. In what follows, key themes of relational aesthetics and its critical responses will be presented. According to Bourriaud, the new type of art he was witnessing in the 1990s was interested in creating a social environment in which ­people could come together and participate in a shared activity. He referred to this trend as the ‘birth of the viewer’. For him this work foregrounded artist–audience collaborations as artists set up scenarios for the audience to ‘use’ and participate in. Rirkrit Tiravanija and his signature-style ­cooking and serving of Pad Thai in galleries around the globe is presented as a case in point and he serves as an exemplary relational artist in Bourriaud’s 14

Introduction

delineation of relational aesthetics. Citing Guattari, Bourriaud claims a ­transformative potential for relational art. He bases his argument for ­relational  art’s positive convivial potential and its transformative societal effect on Guattari’s emphasis on the connection between the ­transformation of subjectivity and societal change, a cornerstone of the latter’s ecosophy. Bourriaud furthermore contrasts this new convivial mode of art and its emphasis on ‘ways of living and models of action within the existing real’71 with ‘a passé avant-garde utopianism’.72 For him the utopian radicalism and revolutionary hopes of the old avant-garde have now given way to everyday micro-utopias of the ‘community or neighbourhood committee type’73 that allow for ‘alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of ­constructed conviviality’74 to be developed. Bourriaud’s proposition of relational aesthetics has been of profound influence in the sphere of art. Jerry Saltz of New  York Magazine, for instance, considers relational art’s ‘public-oriented mix of ­performance, social sculpture, architecture, design, theory, theatre, and fun and games’75 to be ‘the most influential art strain to emerge in art since the early ­seventies’. He also states that relational aesthetics ‘re-engineered art over the past fifteen years or so’ and that its impact ‘can be seen in countless exhibitions’.76 This assessment is underscored by the fact that artists associated with relational art have achieved and sustained glittering artistic careers, remain highly visible in gallery and biennial circuits, and are equally present in major international art shows held at museums. In 2008, for example, the Guggenheim showed a group retrospective of many of the artists associated with relational aesthetics called ‘theanyspacewhatever’ that was considered a landmark as it was the ‘first big exhibition devoted exclusively to the group in an American museum’.77 And in 2011 there were three significant shows of core artists associated with relational aesthetics just in New York. This show of force of relational art was kicked off by the artist Tiravanija, frequently referred to as the ‘poster boy of relational aesthetics’78 at Gavin Brown’s ‘Fear Eats the Soul’ (5 March to 23 April 2011), followed by Carsten Höller showing in the New Museum (26 October 2011 to 15 January 2012)  and a major exhibition of Maurizio Cattelan’s work at the Guggenheim (4 November 2011 to 22 January 2012). Moreover the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently acquired and displayed Tiravanija’s piece Untitled 1992/1995/2007 (Free/Still).79 15

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

But while relational aesthetics continues to be of influence in the contemporary art world, it has also attracted fierce criticism. The recent concentration of relational art in New  York rekindled fiery exchanges about relational aesthetics first unleashed by Claire Bishop’s 2004 article Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. Cardinal critiques of relational art revolve around its lack of self-reflexivity and acknowledgement of larger contexts that impact on art. Relational art’s assumption of art’s autonomy and its claim that social spaces created by encounters in the gallery qualify as zones of exemption from capitalism and hence are asserted as emancipatory sites have also drawn heavy criticism.80 In a similar vein, the immediacy of the ‘real’ posited by relational art is proposed as an unconstructed space that allows for the dissolution of art into life has also attracted critical attention. As critics point out, what actually occurs is a dissolution of art into the very capitalist life that relational art is claiming to overcome. The quality of the interactivity solicited by many relational art works is a further bone of contention and is challenged on the grounds that interactivity per se without raised awareness or critical consciousness amounts to nothing but self-congratulatory entertainment.81 In addition the notion of the gift, invoked in particular in r­ elation to Tiravanija’s repeated acts of cooking and serving of free food in e­ xhibition spaces, has also been mobilized. Drawing on Maussian discussions of the gift economy, critics point out that the gift is never truly free but trades social status and indebtednesses for what is seemingly given away. In other words while the gift economy is not a capitalist form of m ­ arketization, it is nonetheless a veritable economy, with acts of gifting representing an exchange of social capital rather than true acts of generosity, as Tiravanija’s offerings of food tend to be framed.82 For some critics, this lack of self-reflexivity by relational artists and their star curators place their gallery events in the proximity to free events at the mall laid on for consumers as part of a public relations event; a development that merges the museum with the entertainment industry and highlights the fact that museums, now reliant on corporate sponsorship for economic survival, have undergone profound reconceptualizations.83 Relational aesthetics has hence been labelled a ‘contemporary populism’ ‘characterized by the selective, participatory interactive governmentality of infotainment’84 and a ‘new consumerist model for counter-culture’.85 16

Introduction

Claire Bishop raised further concerns about the political model that underpins relational aesthetics and critiques the granting of democratic credentials to the most trivial intersubjective encounters in the gallery. For her, democracy involves a negotiated resolution of conflict rather than the forced grin of a happy consensus.86 The artist and critic Joe Scanlan takes this objection one step further. He argues that the relational bonhomie in the gallery smacks of repressive peer pressure premised on the threat of public humiliation as an in-built control mechanism and is closer to anaesthesia than a fulfilled (micro-)utopia as claimed.87 Yet there is a further neglected issue regarding the conviviality of relational gallery events that needs to be mentioned here: the mental bracketing out of the larger cultural and economic contexts of artists, galleries, museum spaces, biennials, host cities and countries, and respective audiences that frame the work, engage with its scenarios and inflect its meaning. Questions that are on the whole not addressed in the critical literature are how the cooking and sharing of Pad Thai reads in New York and Korea, Venice and Sydney, Havana and Johannesburg and so forth – that is, how the cultural contexts of articulation and display impact on the meaning of the work.88 While Bourriaud does not address issues of culture in Relational Aesthetics, he does so in his later articulation of ‘alter-modernity’ through the figure of the ‘radicant’ that will be discussed in what follows for the sake of completeness, even though he loses sight of the relational in these propositions. According to Bourriaud the figure of the ‘radicant’ ­constitutes a new type of global super-flâneur who sets roots while in motion and engages in an ethical translation of cultural codes as he passes through the world. The aim of radicant perambulations is to arrive at a truly worldwide culture of the ‘altermodern’.89 Bourriaud offers this new type of global artist as a panacea for what he sees as the post-modern reification of difference that has generated a multiculturalist apartheid. He claims to have created a new system of thought that is capable of ‘making connections between disparate cultures without denying each one’s singularity’;90 that is the invention of a world culture by itinerant artist-semionauts or nomadic sign gatherers91 uniquely able to engage in acts of cultural translation that do not impose but transpose and transplant to create new worlds.92 17

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

But how this ethical and happy translation is to be achieved in different and maybe also difficult cultural terrains is left to individual radicant artists operating alone ‘in the field’. Their magic wand is the knowledge of the digital binary code as the new modality of reading and transmitting images. For Bourriaud, this allows for information to flow easily from one code to another in a manner that erases notions of origin and of originality. Based on this model, Bourriaud declares translatability a key criterion for global contemporary art and his construct of the ‘altermodern’ lays claim to an ethics of ‘recognition of the other’.93 Bourriaud contrasts this contemporary ‘transferism’ to what he sees as the traditional, multiculturalist model where artists ‘merely import the signs of their visual culture and give them a vague face-lift, and thus help to reify them and reify themselves in an act of self-exploitation’, engaging in what he refers to as ‘a little cottage industry of signs’.94 For Bourriaud there is thus only one possible retort to the problems of the multiculturalist: to ‘surf on forms without penetrating them’, ‘to move in cultures without identifying with them’, to accept the ‘destiny of man without aura’95 and without origin. He enlists the internet as an ‘ideal metaphor for the state of global culture’ as it constitutes ‘a liquid ribbon on whose surface we are learning to pilot thought’96 and posits the capacity to navigate information as central for the intellectual or artist. According to Bourriaud, this future mobilized world is to be ushered in by the efforts of a nomadic tribe of artists who, cut loose from their origins, glide across the globe propelled by digital binarity. Curiously though, as Bourriaud posits, these lone-star radicant artists are all headed in the same direction – the future world of the ‘altermodern’ epitomized by the ‘immigrant, the exile, the tourist, and the urban wanderer’.97 For Bourriaud the ‘diasporic mobilization of signs’ generated by the interventions of these art-nomads goes beyond a mere multiculturalist recognition of the other as viatorized signs are transformed and displaced as the artists pass through heterogeneous territories. For Bourriaud this constitutes an ­ethical response to alterity.98 He counters ‘the problem of multiculturalism’ and its quantifying and reifying approach to cultures with ‘interculturalism’ or the ‘double dialogue of artists’99 who mediate between their artistic cultures of origin and the aesthetic values derived from the modern. Echoing Deleuze and Guattari, he furthermore offers a vegetal i­ maginary for this new globality, invoking couch grass and suckers on strawberry 18

Introduction

plants, that is, botanicals that develop secondary roots in addition to their primary ones, to underpin his theorizations. According to Bourriaud, this new figure of the artist, the ‘radicant’, has successfully adapted to the new global environment of economic and cultural flows. He characterizes the new global art world epitomized by the ‘radicant’ as a place where all forms co-exist peacefully in a happy new world of jolly ‘altermodernity’100 even if this sphere remains, for unexplained reasons, rooted in Euro-American notions of the modern. Bourriaud admittedly mentions, if only briefly, the existence of a continued differential between the centre and the p ­ eriphery which he sees as economically rather than culturally grounded and accepts as a given that is not further reflected upon. His propositions on artistic mobilization and transcoding thus remain highly abstract and avoid any concrete reference to cultural specificity and locality. Reading these hypotheses, one can but wonder how Bourriaud’s earlier emphasis on encounter could be so thoroughly displaced by a notion of translation that slides and slithers along cultural surfaces without taking time to stop and meet, be with, or engage. But can relational aesthetics be redeemed and rearticulated to negotiate the kind of cultural encounters central to the global condition of contemporary art, or should it be considered a lost cause? Despite the fierce criticism that relational aesthetics has attracted, surprisingly the philosopher Stewart Martin argues that relational aesthetics can be salvaged. While critical of what he sees as Bourriaud’s limited conception of relational ­aesthetics, he lauds relational art for tackling the issue of social exchange in a capitalist society which, in his view, any critical art practice or t­ heory needs to address.101 He furthermore credits relational art (along with art photography) for setting ‘the terms of debate over what form a critical art of the social can take today’.102 Yet Martin goes one step further still with the redemption of relational aesthetics. He argues that once the aspect of commodification disavowed by Bourriaud is taken into account, relational aesthetics has the potential to constitute a truly critical theory of contemporary art that offers a dialectic of commodification and art. For Martin, this opens up a different reading of the practice, a ‘third way’ that interpolates the entrenched stand-off between notions of pure art and anti-art. According to Martin, relational aesthetics thus potentially achieves an immanent critique of 19

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

capitalist exchange relations and overcomes the reification of art without destroying it, offering an ambivalent presentation of the contradictions of an art of social exchange that no longer runs the danger of slipping into an aestheticization of capitalist exchange. He thus lays the blame for the perceived limitations of relational aesthetics squarely at Bourriaud’s feet but inadvertently also implicates its critical receptors who ran with the models laid out by Bourriaud rather than drawing out aspects of relational art not developed by its author. This book adopts a different but not unrelated perspective and seeks to critically experiment with the emphasis on encounter that relational ­aesthetics has brought to the fore. It aims to tease out neglected aspects and potentialities of this immensely successful yet problematic framework that now constitutes if not the, then certainly an ‘academy’, by extending ­relational art beyond its habitual framework into the realm of cultural alterity. This discussion thus suggests that the potential of engaging with cultural alterity opened up by the platform of relational aesthetics has been underexplored, a critical omission it seeks to address. The project is furthermore concerned with the new hegemonic metalanguage of contemporary art, and responds to the challenge of how Laymert Garcia dos Santos’s ‘post-underdeveloped, post-peripheral, and tropical Brazilian eye’ can be situated in view of the global contemporary. The discussion thus revolves around a specific kind of cultural alterity and its encounter with an increasingly globalized contemporary art practice: the visual cultures of indigenous peoples and other traditions classed as ‘tribal art’ or ‘folk art’ which were disavowed as art, relegated to the sphere of anthropology, and yet appropriated for art. The concern is to experimentally challenge the new globality of art in view of the contemporaneity of such alterior visual cultures. The book approaches this challenge not in the form of an abstract treatise but makes the case that a different approach is needed for this inquiry. It revolves around the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, a prime relational ­artist ­instrumental to Bourriaud’s conception of relational aesthetics (see Figures  2.1–2.3), and discusses his work in relation to two specific examples of ­minority art:  the visual practices of the Shipibo-Conibo design culture of the Amazon region (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2) and Tamil domestic drawings (see Figures 6.1–6.4). 20

Introduction

Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires to Thai parents and was raised in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada. He subscribes to a Buddhist outlook on art and life, lives and works in Chiang Mai (Thailand), New York and Berlin, and epitomizes the global art-nomad. His work is not related to Amazon or Tamil visual cultures which constitute radically alterior aesthetic practices that do not fit the remit of international art. So why bring these practices together in this discussion? The argument is that all three practices share an element of incommensurability with regard to traditional languages of art and are concerned with life, neighbourliness and communal relations that will serve as points of connection. The abstract geometric design language of Shipibo-Conibo art (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2) has appealed to audiences with a predilection for modernist aesthetics for decades and Shipibo-Conibo art objects have enthralled collectors and anthropologists alike. Anthropological museums around the world have stocked up on their ceramics,103 yet despite best efforts, attempts to decode these designs have largely failed. The designs, furthermore, are premised on a traditional notion of conviviality deeply rooted in Amazon culture that provides an interesting counterpoint to r­ elational aesthetics. Southern Indian threshold designs (see Figures  6.1–6.4) have also fallen foul of Western-centric aesthetic conventions. Found in front of homes, shops and municipal buildings, the designs are a constant, ever-changing presence on streets across the Indian subcontinent and are thought to have been handed down from mother to daughter since time immemorial.104 Yet for the women, the question of art does not arise: they see the designs as part of their domestic duties. The patterns are drawn as an offering to their families and local community, are created in order to be erased by everyday life and therefore speak to relational art. The question posed in this discussion, therefore, is whether relational aesthetics – which foregrounds the everyday and emphasizes inter-human relationality – can offer a conceptual framework able to register these ­alterior cultural practices in a non-pejorative manner. It explores whether the aesthetics proposed by relational art can be expanded into the sphere of culture and if it can offer productive modes of engagement with these radically alterior aesthetic practices. This discussion thus presents a radical test case. It furthermore proposes that the task at hand requires the articulation of a method that reflects this remit and seeks to engage with this question 21

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in an experimental and performative manner. As part of this quest, and taking its cue from artistic practices of Tiravanija and the group of artists he associated with, this volume introduces the figure of Rikki T, a fictitious character who acts as a counter of sorts to Tiravanija, and performatively adds an oblique critique and creativity to the process of art writing. The discussion thus stages, with a little help from Rikki T, a fictitious e­ ncounter between the art of Rirkrit Tiravanija (Chapter  2) and Shipibo-Conibo (Chapter 4) and Tamil designs (Chapter 6), that is, visual practices that not only hail from different parts of the world but also from different places in the hierarchies of the art world. The experiment deliberately adopts a triadic approach as the probing of potential relations between only one minority  practice and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work would invariably invoke traditional ‘West–Rest’ binaries. The project thus inserts relational aesthetics into the realm of culture and folds its claimed transformative effect back in on itself. This allows the framework to be ‘knocked around’ by the forces generated by these staged encounters while its scope for engaging with cultural difference is probed. The discussion, furthermore, adopts Félix Guattari’s notion of transversality claimed for Bourriaud’s articulation of relational aesthetics as methodological model (Chapter  1). It, however, also exceeds this framework as it engages with a fuller range of Guattarean notions and Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics than Bourriaud envisaged. The project draws in particular on Deleuze and Guattari’s a­ rticulation of the non-human grounding of perception (Faction 3) and ­aesthetics ­epitomized by the Brown Stagemaker (Chapter 6), as well as the Janus-faced connectivity of discursive and non-discursive registers of Deleuze–Guattarean ­machinism and its inherent relation to the other (Chapter 1). The proposed ‘othering’ of relational aesthetics furthermore reunites the social aspect of Guattari’s ecosophy Bourriaud adopts for his articulation of relational ­aesthetics with ecosophy’s other three aspects which he disavowed:  the animal, vegetable and the cosmic (Chapter 6). But these staged encounters are not a one-way street. The alterior perspectives introduced to relational aesthetics draw out different aspects of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work, such as the reception of his work in Thailand (Chapter 2). They also spotlight the disavowal of relational aesthetics’ roots in Buddhist and Thai cultural values as delineated by Tiravanija (Chapter 2) and draw out the implications of negotiating cultural difference in view of 22

Introduction

multiculturalist agendas in the 1990s (Chapter 4). Furthermore, Amazon notions of conviviality are discussed in relation to Bourriaud’s propositions and are argued to offer a corrective to the latter (Chapter 4), just as Tamil notions of territoriality, matter and force put Deleuze and Guattari on the spot for the highly gendered and Eurocentric examples of art on which they draw (Chapter 6). Pointing to the potential of their non-human grounding of art and aesthetics, the encounter with Tamil threshold drawings thus carries on where Deleuze and Guattari left off, actualizing latent ­implications of their aesthetic propositions. Rikki T’s show discussed in this volume (Faction 1), her reflections (Factions 2, 3 and 4), as well as dossiers of short excerpts from anthropological texts relative to Shipibo-Conibo designs and Tamil threshold drawings (Chapters 3 and 5), also feature and are integral to the premise that the delivery of new content also requires a revision of the methods and tools of delivery (Chapter 1). Ultimately, however, the expanded notion of relational aesthetics put forward in this volume aims to offer a framework with the potentiality to square the global circle in contemporary art in a way that acknowledges cultural situatedness as well as transcultural translative movements, ­disposes of false assumptions of transparency in cultural encounter and alters the normativity of Eurocentric hegemony in the arts while ­invariably, albeit self-reflexively employing the Europe-derived conceptual tools at the world’s disposal.105 The project thus is envisaged as a transformative and connective intervention in the spheres of contemporary art, aesthetic theory and anthropology that expands relational aesthetics beyond the gallery, and re-envisages relations between contemporary art, aesthetics, anthropology and cultural translation.

23

1 Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

This project is committed to experimentally expand relational aesthetics into the sphere of culture and revolves around transformative encounters between the art of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Shipibo-Conibo and Tamil designs, and the fictitious artist Rikki T. A further key issue this chapter explores is the question, What might constitute an appropriate mode of writerly address for this project? Methodologically it takes inspiration from Guattari’s conception of the transversal, and experiments with how this notion can be engaged and translated into a method that reflects the project’s intellectual horizons and concerns. It thus seeks to conjunctively explore Guattari’s notion of transversality and subjectivity, Bourriaud’s interpretation of Guattari’s ideas in relational aesthetics, anthropology’s self-reflexive engagement with writing, issues of ‘speaking for’, questions of criticality in art as well as Fabian’s notion of the coeval as fundamental conditions of the global contemporary.1

Transversality as Method Guattari’s conception of transversality is intimately linked to the reenvisaged, productive notion of subjectivity he proposed as part of his critique of psychoanalysis. He sought to develop a creative, therapeutic 24

Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

model that expands psychoanalysis beyond the analyst–analysand coupling epitomized by the couch. Guattari initially focused his critique on the role played by psychoanalytic contexts such as the psychiatric ­institution and its inhabitants. But he soon broadened this focus and declared the interconnectivity of the three ecological registers of environment, social relations and human subjectivity2 central to his reoriented understanding of subjectivity, on which Bourriaud’s articulation of relational aesthetics draws. Guattari takes issue with the scientific orientation of psychoanalysis and sees the established therapeutic method as participating in a symbolic order that ‘weighs down like a deterministic lead cape, like a deathly fate’ on human existentiality.3 For him a constructive therapeutic framework needs to be based on an integrated and transformative strategy, which takes personal and collective aspects into account. His revised processual notion of subjectivity, characterized by flux and creative leaps, is therefore also characterized by exchanges with c­ ontextual collectivities. For Guattari, the individual can no longer be seen as the ‘other’ of society.4 Furthermore, his collective repositioning of subjectivity abandons the notion of the bounded and centric subject as ‘a nucleus of sensibility, of expressivity – the unifier of states of consciousness’.5 It rather stresses the porousness of an individual now seen to fundamentally participate in a whole range of environments as part of dispersed actualities or vectors of subjectification that as partial subjectivities are located beyond the order of signification.6 For him, these breakaway or dissident subjectivities are the prime means of liberation from semiotic fixity.7 The subject for Guattari is thus no longer a straightforward matter. It is linked to ‘all sorts of other ways of existing’8 outside consciousness. It consists of ‘components of subjectification’9 that have their own autonomous existence and meet in the interiority of the subject conceived as a place of encounter for diverse trajectories that pass through it and harbour a productive potential. Guattari refers to these generative forces as ‘machinic’, a term not to be confused with mechanistic.10 Rather, Guattarean machinism is defined as a multiplicity-generating operative mode with a ‘collective character’11 situated ‘before’ or ‘alongside’ ‘discursive subject–object relations’.12 It brings together various modes of existence in a contact zone or machinic interface where multiple exchanges can occur.13 For Guattari, machines are as diverse as the territories they traverse and link in the 25

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

process, reshaping them by a ‘sort of dynamism’.14 The creation of machinic assemblages is central to Guattari’s notion of the transversal. It, however, does not create bonded parts or new fusions, but generates an ‘assemblage of possible fields, of virtual as much as constituted elements, without any notion of generic or species’ relation’.15 Machinism’s transversal movements are thus characterized by an enormous variety and variability of ­connectivity and influence. They underpin the constitutive heterogeneity Guattari posits at the heart of subjectivation and generate processual openings for new, future productions of subjectivity.16 For Guattari, this is central as it allows for a therapeutic optimism lacked by traditional approaches to human individuation. Psychoanalysis is now no longer based on a transferential interpretation of symptoms understood as a function of a pre-existing, latent content. It rather is ‘the invention of new catalytic nuclei capable of bifurcating existence’17 engendered by machinic interactions that are key for the transversalism of the processes of subjectivation. Guattari supports these statements with evidence from his clinical practice at the psychiatric hospital La Borde, and presents the idea that the event can act as ‘the potential bearer of new constellations of Universes of reference’.18 Take a simple example:  a patient in the course of treatment remains stuck on a problem, going round in circles, and ­coming up against a wall. One day he says, without giving it much thought:  ‘I have been thinking of taking up driving lessons again, I haven’t driven for years’; or, ‘I feel like learning word processing.’ A remark of this kind may remain unnoticed in a traditional conception of analysis. However, this kind […] can become a key […] which will not only modify the immediate behaviour of the patient, but open up new fields of virtuality for him: the renewal of contact with long lost acquaintances, revisiting old haunts, regaining self-confidence […]19

This passage demonstrates an instance of transversality that underscores a productive notion of subjectivity. As new existential territories are claimed, the subject takes off, and moves into a terrain beyond itself. Guattari refers to this phenomenon as ‘auto-production’ or ‘auto-poiesis’ and sees it as constitutive of a processual ethico-aesthetic paradigm modelled on artistic 26

Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

creativity, which he proposes as an alternative to traditional psychoanalytic approaches. He holds that psychoanalysis has everything to gain from art’s ability to generate the unprecedented and unexpected. In his view, art is the perfect antidote to what he considers the shackles of science. But he also warns that art ‘does not have a monopoly on creation’.20 He champions art as the much-needed dissensual creator of productive ruptures in the textures of meaning, yet qualifies this by stating that he does not mean the kind of work that circulates in the institutions of the art world but refers to ‘a proto-aesthetic paradigm’ that represents ‘a dimension of creation in a nascent state’.21 Therefore, for him art is the activity of a ‘subjective creativity, which traverses the generations and oppressed peoples, ghettoes and minorities’, and he sees ‘the aesthetic paradigm’22 as foundational ‘for every possible form of liberation’.23 These repositionings of subjectivity and aesthetics are central to Guattari’s philosophy of immanence that revolves around the notion of non-identical being-as-becoming understood as representative of a world of potentials qualified by partiality rather than totality. This understanding is offered as an epistemological alternative to the transcendental in Western philosophy characterized by universals and fixity.24 Guattari emphasizes a manner of being and a condition of self-identity that is no longer tied to transcendental points of reference,25 but is based on ‘generative praxes of heterogeneity and complexity’.26 For Guattari, this ‘should lead to the fall of the “ontological Iron Curtain” […], the philosophical tradition erected between mind and matter’,27 and constitutes a conception that is potent for this discussion, as neither Shipibo-Conibo nor Tamil worldviews subscribe to a mind–matter dualism. A transversal methodology based on the collective ­reconceptualization of subjectivity therefore not only resonates with conceptions of human interconnectedness claimed for relational aesthetics but also with the ‘indigenous’ epistemologies with which this exploration is concerned. Furthermore, Guattari’s notion of transversality and the machine offers new departures for thinking that the ‘other’ as the machine ‘always depends on exterior elements in order to be able to exist’28 and is permanently installed in ‘a relation of alterity’.29 Guattari thus sees the machinic as guarantor of a transgressive connectedness of mind and matter, that is, the non-discursive infinitude and discursive finitudes of ‘energetico-spatio-temporal fluxes’30 27

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

fundamentally linked to potentialities and to becomings, which he sees as characteristic of a forward-looking, future-oriented stance. Guattari translated these ideas into therapeutic practice through a regular displacement of institutional hierarchies or a ‘peripatetic psychiatry that is not stuck behind a desk’.31 His method for creating transversal moments in a regularized institutional scenario was to introduce La Grille or the Grid, a schedule of rotating tasks undertaken by the staff of La Borde. This was not easy to implement, as it involved a doctor’s acceptance of a periodic suspension of his or her authority. It also proved difficult to find compatible, rotatable duties: while medical staff could quite easily be persuaded to ‘take up tasks such as dishwashing’,32 it was much more ­difficult to get non-medical staff to perform functions relating to patient care. As Guattari relates, the ‘compromises were many, the fears were great’.33 For Guattari this transformation and diversification of institutional routines represented a transversalization of hierarchy that demonstrated the mutability of inherited models and provided the opportunity for an active ­participation in social affairs, which Guattari refers to as ‘initiatic’ moments.34 For him they created a space where transformation could take place, where a group of people could overcome their separateness and ‘come together in the “flash of a common praxis”, in mutual reciprocity rather than mutual Otherness’.35 And even though transformations characterized by a transversal flash can only be momentarily achieved, the transformative effect can be considerable. He saw this ‘mobile analysis’ as an antidote to the rigidity of the power relationship between the analysand and the analyst that displaced traditional, limited transference scenarios, which, according to Guattari, obstruct transversal relations, only allow for a vertical hierarchy and create negative societal structures in the form of fixations on the super-ego ‘indelibly stamped by daddy’s authority’.36 Bourriaud picks up on these ideas and reinterprets them for scenarios in contemporary art that for him epitomize scenarios similar to Guattari’s institutional therapeutic mobilizations. He adopts Guattari’s p ­ roductive reframing of subjectivity and the centrality of an aesthetic paradigm for emancipatory processes but repositions Guattari’s understanding of the ‘proto-aesthetic’ which did not refer to professional art practice by ­associating it with the field of fine art. Bourriaud defends this move with the argument that ‘artistic practice forms a special terrain for this individuation, 28

Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

providing potential models for human existence in general’.37 He sees contemporary art as a privileged generator of a liberating transversality and endorses Guattari’s assessment that the solution to the current political and ecological crisis lies in the reinvention of ‘the ways in which we live as couples or in the family, in an urban context or at work, etc.’.38 He e­ mphasizes that ‘social utopias and revolutionary hopes have given way to everyday micro-utopias’39 and states that the ‘subversive and critical function of contemporary art is achieved by the invention of individual and collective vanishing lines’.40 For him the ‘friendship culture’41 in contemporary art inadvertently expresses Guattari’s ideas, and artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija who have ‘no preordained idea about what would happen’42 in the ­gallery scenarios they set up and who depend on audience participation to complete the work exemplify this correlation. For Bourriaud, this transposition of Guattarean notions of aesthetics into the field of art is not counter to Guattari’s thought even though his aesthetic paradigms did not encompass gallery art. Bourriaud holds that contemporary art qualifies to be included in Guattari’s ethico-aesthetics as these ‘works are no longer paintings, sculptures, or installations, all terms corresponding with categories of mastery and types of products, but simple surfaces, volumes and devices, which are dovetailed within strategies of existence’.43 For Bourriard, contemporary art practice characterized by ‘sampling’ and the ‘recycling of socialized and historicized forms’44 produces partial objects ‘whose assumption of autonomy makes it possible to “foster new fields of reference” ’45 and hence introduces the gallery as venue for the creation of new subjectivities.46 The contemporary artist is thus accorded a place of special importance in Bourriaud’s relational scenario and is now defined as ‘a world of subjectivization on the move’.47 Bourriaud thus equates Guattari’s machinic production of subjectivity that generates new forms of existence through an affective ­contamination by the territories it passes through with an artist’s movement through physical space. This literalization of Guattari’s processual notion of subjectivity characterized by the flux of partial subjectivities and contextual collectivities lies at the heart of Bourriaud’s claim to the transversal for relational aesthetics. However, he leaves experimentation to the artists. For him, the question of transversality as a mode of critical textual and theoretical address does not arise. My project proposes that this omission 29

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

turns his adoption of Guattarean concepts into a signifying regime and constitutes a mere switching out of concepts. It demonstrates a ‘business as usual’ approach to criticality that separates thinking about art from the transformative processes claimed for relational art. Bourriaud continues to write from a stance of authority and uses Guattarean notions to adopt the very ‘mode of science’ that Guattari was so passionately seeking to disrupt. This project sees this approach as inconsistent and argues that Bourriaud’s claiming of the Guattarean toolbox only references the tools rather than experiments with them. This project’s challenge is to develop a critical mode that disrupts the voice of authority and is immersed in and moves through and with the terrain discussed. But how could such a transversal mode of writerly address be envisaged? How can a discursive project operate in a transversalist chaosophic mode and provide a framework for conceptual and artistic coordinates and points of reference to rebound on each other? These are difficult questions, especially as transversality defies cut and dried standards applicable across the board. It rather remains a ‘creature of the middle, a non-localizable space’,48 a potentiality of the ‘in-between’ that can only be approached indirectly. Its operations are always particular and specific and can only be defined by singling out pertinent traits. They include high levels of experimentation, an emphasis on non-hierarchical systems, and link discursive and non-discursive, signifying and a-signifying elements. Transversality is also associated with a preference for the fragment, an orientation towards potentialities and the future, and the interrelation and connectivity between heterogeneous materials. The outcome of a methodology based on such elements furthermore will always remain uncertain. And while Guattari underscores that the ‘primary purpose of ecosophic cartography is thus not to signify and communicate but to produce assemblages of enunciation’,49 he also acknowledges that we live in a world of co-implication and that his ethico-aesthetic meta-modelizations are characterized by double-articulation. He thus warns that any s­ ubstitution of one mode for another simply engenders yet another, if d ­ifferent, one-dimensionality, and only replaces one set of values with another.50 Machinic crossings and couplings, by contrast, link actualized and incorporeal universes, discursive and non-discursive states. They participate in chaosmotic foldings that superpose ‘the immanence of infinity and 30

Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

finitude onto the immanence of complexity and chaos’,51 which exist in related, parallel worlds, rather than as consummate oppositionalities. The transformative potential of the transversal thus needs to be seen against the foil of cultural and historical givens and any one-sided unleashing of processualities constitutes a misinterpretation of ecosophic cartography.52 The challenge is to transpose these perspectives into a flexible structure that offers discursivity and potentiality and allows for the examination of cultural contexts without perpetuating certainties. Thus, the objective is to generate themed traversals of selected topographies which, mindful of the specificity of respective cultural contexts, encompass signification yet ­generate creative openings between these fields. The aim, furthermore, is to develop a writerly mode of address that sets up the conditions for a transformative encounter and takes the reader through the conceptual terrain in a processual and affective manner. This ambition poses no small challenge and in what follows, critical reflections in the field of anthropology on the incongruities of ‘writing culture’, especially in view of how non-discursive anthropological fieldwork experiences are transformed into academic treatises, will be examined for clues.

Anthropology and the Textual The anthropologists Clifford Geertz, James Clifford and George Marcus question the possibility of unconditioned description.53 They draw attention to the literary and rhetorical constitutedness of anthropological texts and the uneven acts of cross-cultural translation that inform them. They have also queried how intense, intersubjective engagements, arduous ­bodily experiences and the phenomenon of cultural shock characteristic of fieldwork situations are transformed into smooth, univocal, authoritative academic accounts. For example, Clifford asks, How ‘is a garrulous, over determined, cross cultural encounter shot through with power relations and personal cross purposes circumscribed as an adequate version of a more-or-less discrete “other world”, composed by an individual author?’54 But the issue is not just how experience is translated into text. A further concern is how the conditionalities of cross-cultural representations and genres of writing that are deeply engrained in the anthropological field impact on the writing of fieldwork accounts. Ethnographic realism, 31

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

that is, the ‘pretence of looking at the world directly, as though through a one-way screen’,55 is a fundamental anthropological trope that has drawn intense criticism for its assumption of scientific objectivity in the context of participant-observation as research model. Ethnographic writing has thus been proposed as ‘cultural fiction’ rather than fact, pointing to the ‘constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts’.56 Where previously ‘literary influences’ were held at a distance from the ‘rigorous’ core of the discipline,57 the literariness of ‘writing culture’ was now established, and the separation of artistic and scientific modes of representation unmasked as a historical, culturally construed event. Clifford thus sees the separation of spheres that developed in the seventeenth century as constitutive of European culture. He notes that ‘Western science has excluded certain expressive modes from its legitimate repertoire: rhetoric (in the name of “plain”, transparent signification), fiction (in the name of fact), and subjectivity (in the name of objectivity).’58 He also points out that the ‘qualities eliminated from science were localized in the category of “literature” ’.59 Once this splitting of science and art, objectivity and subjectivity, was acknowledged the ‘easy realism’ of ethnographic prose could be exposed as a one-sided, ‘inappropriate mode of scientific rhetoric’.60 Now ‘ “objects”, “facts”, “descriptions”, “inductions”, “generalizations”, “verification”, “experiment”, “truth” ’61 – the constitutive elements of the canon of scientific rhetoric – were recognized to index a cultural convention, which, even if persuasive, was revealed to be no less constructed than more imaginative modes of writing. Geertz hence speaks of the need to give up ‘the strange idea that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described’.62 Interpretive anthropology63 therefore sees as problematic the e­ ndeavour to describe cultures ‘as if they were fully observable’64. It considers the ­burden of authorship weighty, and the trope of a generalized academic persona reporting on an equally generalized ‘absolute subject’ such as ‘the Nuer’, ‘the Trobriand Islander’, or ‘the Balinese’ as no longer feasible.65 These insights generated a spate of textual experiments that sought to make the subjective basis of accumulating ‘knowledge’ in the field transparent. The new consensus was that the world is not directly apprehendable but can only be isolated in sections that are ‘perceptually cut out of the flux of experience’.66 This new style of anthropology exposed the rhetorical construction of ethnographic authority and foregrounded the inventedness of 32

Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

culture. According to Clifford, interpretive anthropology thus ‘demystifies much of what had previously passed unexamined in the construction of ethnographic narratives, types, observations, and descriptions’.67 He also points to the ‘increasing visibility of the creative (and in a broad sense, poetic) processes by which “cultural” objects are invented and treated as meaningful’.68 For Clifford and Marcus, literary procedures therefore ­pervade ethnographic texts as much as any other forms of cultural representation,69 and they refer to ethnographic texts as ‘serious fictions’.70 Clifford furthermore endorses a perspective of ‘partiality of cultural and historical truths’71 and sees the selective constructedness of cultural ­representations as inevitably given. For him, even the best ethnographic texts ‘are systems, or economics, of truth’72 and he acknowledges that ‘power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully ­control’.73 The awareness of the limitations of representation is crucial here. Acts of ‘writing culture’ were now recognized to require a rigorous, committed partiality as ‘a source of representational tact’74 rather than ethnographic self-absorption or the conclusion that it is impossible to know anything about other cultures. And as the genre of ‘ethnographic realism’ unravelled, self-reflexive fieldwork accounts emerged, where the author, often adopting a confessional mode, reflected on contextual and epistemological issues that impinged on his or her fieldwork account. The first-person singular thus became popular and was employed in autobiographical essays and ironic self-portraits as the individual ethnographer, previously obscured, took centre stage as a character in ethnographic fictions. The issue of ‘speaking for’ also emerged as part of these critical reflections, and ‘ethnographic ventriloquism’, that is, ‘the claim to speak not just about another form of life but to speak from within it’,75 became problematic. Ethnographic texts subsequently were orchestrated as ­multivocal exchanges and were situated in politically charged situations. Dialogic constructions also became popular, which gave a voice to informants and positioned the ethnographer and the informant in a visible, if staged, intersubjective relation. In his reflections on ethnographic writing, Clifford thus wonders whether the ethnographic author should ‘portray what natives think by means of a Flaubertian “free indirect style” ’,76 or whether a less homogenous style ‘filled with Dickens’ “different voices” ’77 is best suited for the ‘portrayal of other subjectivities’.78 33

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Yet even ‘alternative’ formats that give prominence to circumstantial elements, performatively present the give-and-take of fieldwork situations and introduce a counterpoint to monologic constructions of ethnographic authority are recognized to remain cultural representations that present a ‘displacement, but not elimination of, monological authority’.79 As Clifford points out, any fictional dialogue is inevitably a ‘condensation, a simplified representation of complex, multi-vocal processes’.80 And even a dialogic framing does not necessarily forestall the danger of staging the cultural counterparts as representative of their cultures in absolutist terms. Direct citations of informants’ contributions, and scenarios where native ­informers ‘dictate’ what is to be recorded also do not altogether solve the problem. These strategies only partially displace ethnographic authority, as the final product still relies on the ‘virtuoso orchestration by a single author of all the discourses in his or her text’.81 Yet despite these limitations, compelling experiments with multi-authored strategies were carried out where discursive ethnographies succeed in presenting the ‘other’ as a speaking subject ‘who sees as well as is seen, who evades, argues back, probes back’.82 Anthropological self-reflexivity therefore acknowledges that ‘ethnography encounters others in relation to itself ’83 and rehearses a ‘constant ­reconstitution of selves and others through specific exclusions, c­ onventions, and discursive practices’.84 Anthropology’s grappling with issues of representation hence is closely related to the realization that the very ‘assumption that self and other can be gathered in a stable narrative coherence’85 and that the ‘other’ can be understood is problematic. Lévi-Strauss for example describes the following situation in Tristes Tropiques: They were as close to me as a reflection in a mirror; I  could touch them, but I could not understand them. I had been given, at one and the same time, my reward and my punishment. […] I had only to succeed in guessing what they were like for them to be deprived of their strangeness […] Or if […] they retained their strangeness, I could make no use of it, since I was incapable of even grasping what it consisted of.86

Anthropological texts that experiment with textual strategies and seek to undercut monologic authorial conceptions therefore offer a relational approach to culture where interpretation emerges from diverse, reciprocal 34

Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

situations, and cultural realities are recognized to be multi-subjective, power-laden, incongruent and processual. They also resist final s­ ummations and the ‘anthropological other’, traditionally construed as ‘primitive’, ‘tribal’, ‘pre-literate’ and ‘ahistorical’, now appears as an articulate cultural broker who not only partakes in historical time, but also participates in a contemporary, collaborative scenario. These insights are central for this discussion and the question of what approach might be appropriate for this project. But where do they leave the question of what constitutes a mode of critical address appropriate for this project, given that a residual authorial authority can never be wholly suspended? What textual model can be singled out as most fitting? Clifford holds that apart from ‘scientific realism,’ all styles are equally appropriate for ethnographic writing, as there is ‘room for invention within each paradigm’.87 He acknowledges that the author, as ‘coherent presentation presupposes a controlling mode of authority’ but also points out ‘that this imposition of coherence on an unruly textual process is now, inescapably, a matter of strategic choice’.88 For Clifford, ‘writing culture’ thus becomes an exercise in selective, creative enactments of textual strategies that maintain a stance of innovation and rupture, while acknowledging the inevitability of authorial predispositions and centricities. This stance echoes Guattari’s caution that the transversal always operates on the basis of co-implication, that signification and non-discursivity go hand-in-hand. But a further issue needs to be examined here: the force of encounter, the effect of its ‘eventness’, and the creative rupture this may engender. In other words, how can the affectivity of any such meetings be imparted in writing? The anthropologist Stephen Tyler proposes the fragment as ‘weapon’ against the ‘crime of natural history in the mind’,89 which seeks to arrest cultural givens in representational fixtures. For him this can take the form of classifications, generalizations, structuralist significations, dialogic representations of native discourse, or unconscious patterns. He holds that an ethnography of co-written narratives requires a fractious approach to writing which echoes the disjointedness of the present-day societal ‘real’ and of the fieldwork experience which is not ‘organized around familiar ethnological categories such as kinship, economy, and religion’.90 He also adds a therapeutic dimension to cultural poiesis, which comes surprisingly close to aspects of Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm. He states that a 35

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‘post-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible word of common sense reality, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic effect’.91 Like Clifford, Tyler advocates polyphony and cooperative approaches to cultural narration, but adds paratactic and contrapuntal textual juxtapositions as further elements to allow for emergent textualiza­ tions. But for him the crucial ingredient is a participatory perspective, as ‘non-participatory textualisation is alienation’.92 He declares that a ‘participatory and emergent post-modern ethnography cannot have a predetermined form’93 as any genuine participatory approach needs to allow formats to evolve. For him evocation is key and he argues that ‘if a discourse can be said to “evoke”, then it need not represent what it evokes, though it may be a means to representation’.94 He thus sees evocation as a liberating factor for anthropology that ‘frees ethnography from mimesis and the inappropriate mode of scientific rhetoric’95 in which academic writing is embroiled. But for him, evocation does not seek to conjure up absent presences; rather it is ‘a unity, a single event or process’;96 a description therefore reminiscent of the transversal flash which agglomerates self and other, subject and object.97 Tyler thus conceives this ‘post-scientific world’ as an ‘enigmatic and paradoxical […] conjunction of reality and fantasy’.98 And, again in surprising concordance with Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm, for Tyler the aim is not ‘to foster the growth of knowledge but to restructure experience; […] to restructure the conduct of everyday life’,99 a concern that also resonates with relational aesthetics’ stated aim of reinventing possibilities for living. And for Tyler it is important to recognize that ethnographic writing ‘might take any form but never be completely realized. Every attempt will always be incomplete.’100

Art History and the Practice of Writing The discussions around anthropological self-reflexivity and writing had considerable appeal in the humanities. The ensuing crisis of representation whittled away certainties in the humanities and threw modes of ­describing variously constituted ‘reals’ into relief. The questioning of epistemology 36

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and interpretation in the humanities brought about a recognition that acts of comprehending the world need to take account of contradictions, paradoxes and uncertainties. Interpretation now was acknowledged as a multiple, open-ended and situated set of perspectives impacted by cultural givens reflective of difference rather than universals. Yet these reflections were not taken up as avidly in the arts. Art history and art criticism, unlike anthropology, which revolves around fieldwork and was taken by surprise by the textual turn, were always associated with writerly acts. Moreover different styles of writing have historically been associated with respective paradigms of art theory. Art writing also did not have to struggle with science as it traditionally looked to aesthetic contemplation and philosophy for epistemological orientation. The critique of representation therefore did not usher in a wave of experimental writing or creative innovation in the ‘how to’ of art criticism. More recently, however, voices have emerged that critique the notion of the critic as ‘authority on matters of art and culture’ and as a figure characterized by critical distance.101 They propose that ‘the theorist, rather than being remote from that which he or she surveys’,102 needs to be ‘enmeshed in the very, perhaps even “creative”, production of the cultural fabric itself ’.103 But for the cultural theorist Butt this critical unease does not c­ onstitute a rerun of deconstruction which took issue with traditional forms of criticism in the 1980s. It rather is of a different order:  it is ‘post-criticism’.104 He holds that criticism needs to operate paradoxically as in ‘para – against and/or beside – the doxa of received wisdom’.105 He proposes the ‘eventness’ of the critical encounter as the guiding principle, and sees it as indebted to performance studies where writing had to occur after the event, that is, in its absence, while seeking to conjure up its ‘full presence’. For Butt, a performative approach to writing does not ‘reproduce the object or event it addresses, but instead enacts it through the very practice of writing’.106 According to Butt, this reflects how contemporary writers on art have ‘increasingly come to rethink the relation between art and writing’,107 and have sought to shift from writing ‘about’ art to writing ‘with’, which ‘enfolds its subject into the very mode of writerly address itself ’.108 But in contradistinction to anthropology’s textual experiments, art writing’s creative innovations revolve around the critic’s personal experience. John Seth’s kaleidoscopic narration of his thoughts while searching for a gallery in 37

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Manhattan conjoins seemingly haphazard elements, frequently drawn from contexts at a considerable remove from the art world, to perform an oblique critical commentary of the work of Gabriel Orozco.109 This indirect criticality unfolds in the act of reading. It operates by way of evocation rather than unequivocal representation and echoes Stephen Tyler’s emphasis on a paradoxical conjunction of reality and fantasy, which evokes ‘an understanding’, rather than a rehearsing, of knowledge. These approaches thus contrast sharply with Bourriaud’s mode of writing about c­ ontemporary art as he adopts Guattari’s framework to articulate relational aesthetics but falls short of enacting Guattarean concerns through e­ xperimentation. This omission arguably reduces relational aesthetics as a critical framework to the kind of theory Guattari was writing against, a fact that is further heightened by the experimental approach to writing performed in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative project, A Thousand Plateaus. What can be taken away therefore from these reflections and anthropology’s investigation of writerly modes is the importance of textual experimentation and an informed weariness of any semblance of a monologic (ethnographic) authorial stance.

Coevalness and Contemporaneity A further issue to be negotiated, however, is the question of coevalness raised by the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who argues for a more perceptive understanding of contemporaneity in the sense of a ‘shared time’.110 In his view, anthropological texts are constructed on the very denial of this temporal communality as they have a ‘persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’.111 For Fabian, anthropology uses time in a ‘schizogenic’ manner since the coevalness experienced during the fieldwork is denied when the ethnographer has returned home and engages in academic writing.112 The tendency to position the indigenous other in a disparate time is also prevalent in the art world and informs contemporary aesthetic discourses that engage with ethnic arts. It constitutes a key issue this book is seeking to address, as ‘it is increasingly ­difficult to get out of each other’s ways’.113 Thus even though globalization is on ­everybody’s lips and so-called ‘primitives’ watch television, speak English, 38

Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

Spanish or French, and participate in the contemporary world in ­numerous ways, the tropes of temporal separation still have traction and need to be addressed.114 But which writerly mode can best serve the plethora of issues this discussion seeks to engage? Should it be Flaubert or Dickens, experiential or interpretive, fragmentary, dialogic or evocative, paratactic or ­contrapuntal? Since, as Clifford points out, there is room for inventive rupture in every paradigm115, it is not only the chosen format but also the mode of its utilization that makes the difference; and every style offers different possibilities. The project hence adopts a combination of writerly modes that are seen to allow for instances of creative transversal connectivities through their juxtaposition. It combines contextual readings of Rirkrit Tiravanija, a ‘thickening’116 of the conditions of Shipibo-Conibo and Tamil visual practices and their ‘tracing’117 in Geertzian ‘factions’,118 with d ­ ialogues and reflections by and between fictitious persons. The transversal premise thus has inspired a cartographic interweaving of textual and (virtual) visual strata comprising authorial analysis, anthropological contextual voices, and meditations by the fictitious female artist ‘Rikki T’ from Romford, a counter of sorts to Rirkrit Tiravanija the ‘exotic Thai guy’. It furthermore encompasses her i­ magined exhibition and exchanges with the fictitious ‘Curator C’. It seeks to ­engender an evocative experimental ­engagement between an expanded notion of relational aesthetics that is taken for a cultural spin and draws more extensively on Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics than Bourriaud, and the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Shipbo-Conibo and Tamil designs in p ­ ursuit of questions of the global and the other in contemporary art.

39

2 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Alterity

The artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is an international superstar and a key representative of relational art. He is also of Thai extraction and draws on this cultural background in his work, yet neither Bourriaud nor the contemporary art world engage with the Thai aspect of his work or acknowledge its influence on relational art and aesthetics. The chapter explores how the perception of his work changes when relational aesthetics is expanded into culture. Rirkrit Tiravanija is a New York-Berlin-Chiang Mai-based ­contemporary artist. He was born in Buenos Aires to Thai parents, was raised in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada, and made the cooking and serving of Pad Thai to visitors in galleries around the globe his signature piece (see Figure 2.1). His cook-ins were inaugurated in 1992 at the 303 Gallery in Soho, New York, where he moved the back office to the main gallery and installed a temporary kitchen in the now emptied office, cooking Thai curry which he served to visitors for free. He created a similar piece in 1995 at the Carnegie International exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh,1 and restaged the piece once more in its original 1992 format as Untitled (Free/ Still) in 2007 at David Zwirner’s West 19th Street Gallery in New York (see Figure 2.2). In 2011 the piece, now acquired by MoMA, was recreated again and went on display in the contemporary gallery where a free vegetarian curry lunch was served every day.2 40

Figure  2.1  Rirkrit Tiravanija, Just Smile and Don’t Talk, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 11 July–10 October 2010 in Kunsthalle Bielefeld. The artist poses in the exhibition space with pots and 800 bowls ready for the opening when he himself will be cooking.

Figure  2.2  Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 1992 (Free), 1992/2007. Here is the 2007 re-creation (David Zwirner Gallery, New York) of his original 1992 piece Untitled 1992 (Free) at 303 Gallery in Soho. There he emptied out the office of the gallery, installing a makeshift kitchen, where he cooked and served Thai curry free to anyone who dropped by.

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

For Tiravanija, the preparation and sharing of food constitutes the artwork and transforms impersonal galleries into spaces of sustenance and sociability. His enactment of commonsalinity within the arenas of the art world is offered to counter the alienation in present-day society and is aimed at the transfiguration of the everyday. Tiravanija’s work, like the art of his peers that emerged in the 1990s, employs performative and interactive techniques that rely on responses of pedestrians, shoppers, browsers and, importantly, gallery goers.3 For Bourriaud, the impossibility of reading such work using established aesthetic frameworks became apparent with the group show ‘Traffic’ that he curated at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux in 1996 where Tiravanija featured prominently. Bourriaud formulated relational aesthetics in response to this difficulty of discussing this new style of artwork. The framework has since become a mainstay in the international art world and Tiravanija has emerged as a central ­figure of relational art. The art critic Claire Bishop thus comments that ‘his work has been crucial to both the emergence of relational aesthetics as theory, and to the curatorial desire for “open-ended”, “laboratory” ­exhibitions of ­relational art’.4 She describes Rirkrit Tiravanija as ‘one of the most established, influential, and omnipresent figures on the international art c­ ircuit’.5 This view is supported by his 2005 retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2005), staged ‘to explore, review and celebrate the work of an artist who has had widespread impact by assembling and presenting seminal works that demonstrate the scope or breadth of the practice historically, conceptually and/or formally’.6 The present discussion takes its cue from the task performed by retrospectivity, but seeks to draw out a ‘different’ Rirkrit Tiravanija. It is interested in questions of cultural alterity with regard to his work. Tiravanija’s cultural background informs his choice of serving Thai food as a gallery staple. But apart from his trademark Thai cooking, he also sees his work rooted in his Buddhist inheritance, a context that has been little reflected upon so far. In an interview with Gavin Brown, for example, Tiravanija describes himself as ‘a Buddhist alongside a so-called progressive/modern world that seems to recognize only a particular, Western kind of future’.7 This statement represents a critique of Eurocentricity and offers a conceptual reorientation by positing a world ‘alongside’ the normativity of Western conceptions. It is thus surprising that relational aesthetics, the 42

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Alterity

theoretical framework Rirkrit Tiravanija helped shape, which declares the intersubjective encounter with the other as its chosen terrain, has not paid any attention to the implications of his prominently staged culinary ­preference, nor his self-professed Buddhist stance. A question which underpins this discussion is to what extent such diverse practices as Tiravanija’s work, Shipibo-Conibo designs and Tamil threshold drawings can be seen to share a condition of incommensurability since all three practices resist the grasp of traditional aesthetics; and whether relational aesthetics can provide a productive framework for discussing Tamil and Shipibo-Conibo designs.8 This discussion, however, also asks whether Tiravanija shares more with Tamil and Shipibo-Conibo designs than being unreadable by traditional aesthetic conceptions. It asks whether relational aesthetics, the ­theoretical framework Bourriaud developed in order to articulate work such as Tiravanija’s, fails the ‘poster boy of relational aesthetics’9 on the front of cultural alterity, since, as we have seen, even though he is a key figure in relational art, the import of his non-Western background has so far been neglected. In other words does the artist and his work exceed the limits and resources of relational aesthetics?

Rirkrit Tiravanija and Relational Art Tiravanija’s art transforms the gallery into a site for reinventions of sociality and creates scenarios where audiences become participants and co-creators. In his piece for the Kölnische Kunstverein in 1996, for example, he reproduced his private New  York apartment and made it available to the public around the clock. People could make food in the kitchen, use the bathroom, sleep in the bedroom and chat in the living room. In his piece Untitled 2002 (He Promised), staged at the Vienna Secession in 2002 and at the Guggenheim in New York in 2004, he created a chrome and stainless steel structure that served as an arena for artistic, public and private activities. Blurring the boundaries between art and life, he staged a barbecue on the opening night and turned the gallery into a space for cultural exploration. Participants could avail themselves of Thai massages and film screenings, participate in panel discussions and enjoy DJ sessions. For Tiravanija, these events cannot be fully realized without the active participation of the viewer. He sees 43

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

himself as the catalyst for the work, but contests that he determines the outcome, stating that he doesn’t know ‘what is going to happen’.10 For Tiravanija, his work creates new possibilities for life by providing different experiences. The scenarios he creates work in two directions: on the one hand they aim at inter-human relations, on the other they are oriented towards the art world and its institutions in an effort to reposition conceptions about art and aesthetic experience.11 But how does the audience react to the scenarios presented? Do they perceive themselves as empowered participants? What is the response to the eat-ins, sleep-ins and chat-ins that are offered as potentiality? Surprisingly, the critical literature is fairly nondescript when it comes to the discussion of audience participation and responses. Apart from reports about ‘who met whom’ at Tiravanija’s dinners, there is little reflection on the declared aim of the relational effort or the experiences of the ­audience. The few r­ eferences there are seem to indicate that gallery goers not only ­participate in the workshops and special events laid on, but also feel inspired to ­spontaneous and individual creative actions. In conversation with Tiravanija, fellow artist Matthias Herrmann highlights this aspect of the work. He comments on how Tiravanija left ‘the walls of the main hall completely unused and blank’, noting that visitors took the initiative ‘to make lots of sometimes very elaborate drawings on the white walls’, a spontaneous, participatory act that occurred ‘without any hint from you or the institution that this was an ok thing to do’.12 For Tiravanija, this spontaneous engagement by the audience ‘within a certain kind of setting’ is welcome and he reflects that while ‘there could be chaos’, people instead tend to refrain from anarchy, that is, ‘people move the cushions around and form them into sculptures, but they don’t burn them’13 – a point that art critic, poet, and professor Bruce Hainley also noted. He makes reference to the potentiality of interruptions and complications that ‘lots of people’ entail, and reflects that ‘something could go wrong’, mentioning ‘allergic reaction, food poisoning’ or the crowd ‘turning mob’14 as possibilities. Indeed, what would happen to the work if members of the audience did not like Thai curry? What if they wanted to eat something else? Or were not interested in the cushions provided? Herrmann raises a further critical issue by asking how the participation of the audience relates to life outside the gallery. He asks Tiravanija whether 44

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Alterity

he is not giving ‘the fake illusion of being a real participant or of changing something in real life, whereas we’re still in an institution for contemporary art’.15 Tiravanija responds by rejecting the splitting of life and gallery that he sees inherent in Hermann’s question. He points to the realm of subjective experience and states that ‘for me it’s important how people come away from it with their own feelings and their own judgement and experience’.16 He declares that it is not the role of the artist to ‘make a survey of what they get out of it’17 and that the work is ‘more about possibilities, not solutions’.18 Tiravanija also explains that he does not think in terms of success or failure of his work. For him a small turnout would not make much of a difference, even if, as he admits, the number of people participating represents ‘some kind of a measure’.19 On reflection he settles for a minimum requirement of at least one participant ‘who works or is in the place and deals with the situation’20 for the scenario to be a success. But if the work is geared towards an audience, should audience numbers not play a crucial role? And how do ‘people’ ‘come away’ from the work, who are the ‘lots of people’ that are a frequently listed prerequisite for Tiravanija’s pieces21 and who takes Tiravanija up on his invitation to have a Thai meal? For the art historian, curator and critic Katy Siegel, there is an obvious answer. Referring to Tiravanija’s replica of his East Village apartment inside Gavin Brown’s gallery in New York (1999), she comments on how it tends to be famous artists and critics who ‘leave their nice, air conditioned lofts to hang out in the dirty plywood playpen’.22 In a similar vein, art critic and historian Jerry Saltz refers to the installation as an ideal place to catch up on art world gossip and reports how he ate ‘at Tiravanija’s’23 with the prominent New  York gallerists Paula Cooper,24 Lisa Spellman25 and David Zwirner26 among other celebrities. It thus seems that apart from creative displacements of cushions and spontaneous eruptions of graffiti on the gallery walls, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s scenarios also fulfil a connective function in the art world. The art critic and historian Claire Bishop raises yet different concerns. She questions whether the interaction between artist and audience is based on a democratic, egalitarian model as Bourriaud claims. She draws attention to the nature of the interactions created by the scenarios of ­relational aesthetics and points out that democratic engagements encompass ­conflictual encounters as ‘a democratic society is one in which relations of 45

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

conflict are sustained, not erased’.27 She sees debate and discussion as the ‘other’ of an ‘imposed consensus of authoritarian order’28 and suggests that ‘the relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic, as Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too comfortably within an idea of subjectivity as a whole and of community as immanent togetherness’.29 She furthermore sees the work as ‘cosy’ and self-congratulatory entertainment characterized by a feel-good factor,30 based on the uncritical assumption of a unified self, rather than ‘the divided and incomplete subject of today’.31 This is a serious charge since relational aesthetics lays claim to Guattari’s ethico-aesthetics, which champions the generation of polyphonic, partial subjectivities that decentre the subject.32 Bourriaud is aware of the accusation. He defends the democratic claims of relational art based on its effort to ‘give everyone their chance’ and emphasizes that for him relational art operates through forms, which ‘are not resolved beforehand’.33 For Bourriaud, this indeterminacy allows for the emancipatory effect of relational art. Tiravanija underscores this point when he states that he knows as little or as much about what is going to happen in his scenarios as anybody else.34 Claire Bishop, however, sees a lack of reflexivity in the claim that viewers are totally ‘free’ to interact in any way they like with the gallery situations he creates. For her it ‘is no longer enough to say that activating the viewer tout court is a democratic art, for every work of art – even the most “open-ended” – determines in advance the depth of participation that viewers may have within it’.35 The issue of predetermination and the limitations imposed on the audience’s response, however, are not of concern to Bourriaud, nor does he reflect on whether they are reactive or creative. But he is clear about the nature of the political engagement relational aesthetics represents. He argues that the present day is no longer about ‘social utopias and revolutionary hopes’36 but about micro-utopias, that is, step-by-step transformations of society of the ‘neighbourhood committee type’.37 And relational art is about living this utopia on a subjective, everyday basis.38 For Bourriaud this represents a politics of the present rather than what he posits as a deferred ‘happiness of tomorrow’.39 He takes issue with a conflictual approach to societal change, and argues that while modernism ‘was based on conflicts’, the present, that is, ‘the imaginary of our day and age, is concerned with negotiations, bonds and co-existences’.40 Bourriaud furthermore argues 46

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Alterity

that making a judgement about relational art in view of its political effectiveness alone represents a mental discarding of the aesthetic dimensions of the work, which in his view gives a false account of the art and its politics that expressly operates via the aesthetic.41 But Bourriaud also concedes that Tiravanija’s work, if seen from a ‘conventional’ perspective, could appear superficial and could lead the viewer to ‘lament the slightness and artificiality of the moment of conviviality on offer’.42 But for Bourriaud this critique misunderstands the work, as artists can only be held responsible for the conditions they set up, not for the effects these exert on an audience free to choose how to respond. For him what matters about the work is the moment of togetherness that is produced, that is, ‘the product of this conviviality’ which ‘combines a formal structure, objects made available to visitors, and the fleeting image issuing from collective behaviour’.43 Yet the nature of this product is not critically examined, that is, it is not discussed what it means if cushions are moved in the zone of encounter, if strangers sit side by side eating noodles, or if a Thai massage is received in a gallery setting rather than the privacy of a treatment room. Furthermore, the frequent collaborative exchanges between artists associated with relational aesthetics that are posited as models of positively re-envisaged social relations, that is, ‘the kind of complex interaction that is possible between friends’,44 also need to be considered in the context of convivial scenarios created in exhibition spaces. In such collaborations one finds the boundaries between artistic personalities deliberately blurred, such as in the film Vicinato (1995) (‘Neighbourhood’) co-produced by Carsten Höller, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija. In the introduction to the script we are told that ‘separate identities merge into one and divide again’45 through the writing process and that there ‘is no clear correlation between an author and character’.46 Such artistic collaborations take the concept of relational aesthetics a significant stage further. Whereas the audience-participants in the gallery can choose to respond in a number of ways to the situations they encounter, artistic collaborations operate on a much more fundamental level as they participate in and shape the very articulation of these scenarios. This raises the question whether we are dealing with a two-tier creative system where artistic collaborations are celebrated as creative utopia at the peak of relational experience, while ‘regular’ audience interactions by gallery goers constitute secondary, if not 47

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second-rate interventions in predetermined situations that only enable choices within the frameworks preconceived by the artist(s). These questions draw attention to the power relationship between the scenario-setting artists and their audience-participants that are reminiscent of debates in anthropology about how to negotiate the problem of ‘speaking for’. Is relational aesthetics’ assumption that viewers cannot overcome their alienation and create meaningful inter-human relations without the intervention of the artist comparable to the anthropologist’s speaking on behalf of an inarticulate, ‘primitive’ other? Are Tiravanija’s pieces ultimately one-way directives, as the participant, put in the position of a silent ‘other’, fulfils an expectation, a role within a preconceived artistic scenario? What if the ‘other’ talked back, took over the kitchen and taught the artist to cook a different dish? In other words, what if the participants brought their realities to the site of encounter, beginning to relate back on their own terms?

Art, Anthropology and the Ethnographic Turn There is a considerable amount of ‘traffic’ between the fields of art and anthropology. Artists associated with the ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art which emerged in the 1990s have adopted an ‘anthropological gaze’ on selected cultural contexts, employed quasi-fieldwork methodologies and honed in on collaborative and participatory modes of art-making inspired by ethnographic fieldwork interactions. Furthermore, there are anthropologists who have recently taken an interest in contemporary art, often in view of developing visual research methodologies, for example in the subfield of visual anthropology.47 But for the anthropologist James Clifford, the art world’s interest in anthropology is not notably based on intellectual curiosity and a concern with how to ethically negotiate the culturally distanced ‘other’, but rather on acts of making the familiar strange, that is, on anthropology as ‘defamiliariser and juxtaposer’.48 Yet the attraction is great, in fact so much so that it prompted Hal Foster to famously coin the term ‘ethnographer envy’, a condition that in his view ‘consumes many contemporary artists’.49 Yet while Clifford and Foster offer 48

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rather different perspectives on the phenomenon of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art practice, both critics agree on the relevance and reality of the phenomenon and on its subversive potential. They see the interest in the representation of marginal, populist modes of life and the readiness to engage in everyday practices – characteristic of the work of artists associated with the ethnographic turn – as a form of cultural critique. The practising artist becomes a quasi-ethnographer: a self-aware reader of culture ‘sensitive to difference and open to chance’.50 The work of Sophie Calle, who is claimed by both ‘movements’, is a case in point. She has been described as a ‘self-styled ethnographer of the everyday’51 and is interested in interpersonal encounters, the social spaces that frame people and the ‘small worlds of personal relationships’.52 The sites she explores are random encounters with strangers in the city such as in Suite Venetienne (1980), which documents her following a stranger from Paris to Venice, photographing him over a period of two weeks until he confronted her, or Homme au Carnet (1983), where she enlisted the help of individuals listed in an address book she found to build a profile of its owner. She also staged a role reversal and subjected herself to a similar, albeit deliberate, scrutiny by asking her mother to hire a private detective to follow her around and document her movements (The Detective, 1981). This role-reversal articulates an awareness of the power relationship at play in the acts of surveillance that constitute her work, and demonstrates a reflexivity Tiravanija’s work arguably does not offer. Calle’s interest in detailed documentations of intimate, everyday encounters with ‘others’ qualifies her work as representative of the ‘ethnographic turn’, yet Bourriaud sees her work as ‘a relational device’ characterized by randomness which establishes convivial relations.53 Both frameworks thus overlap and share an interest in the ‘everyday’ and the intersubjective, yet curiously, neither of them foregrounds cultural alterity in their creative explorations. This recognition tallies with Foster’s critique of anthropology’s popularity in contemporary art, which he sees informed by the West’s long-standing, problematic and persistent primitivist fantasy. For him contemporary art’s romance with anthropology is premised on an ­uncritical positing of the ‘other’ as ‘truth’, as having access to primal ­psychic and social processes from which ‘the white (petit) bourgeois subject is blocked’.54 Thus while Foster agrees on the subversive potential of the 49

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quasi-anthropological methods applied by artists, he also diagnoses misrecognitions between art and anthropology, in fact sees ‘a whole circuit of projections and reflections’.55 For him Clifford’s enthusiastic embrace of the artist as model ethnographer is problematic, and he wonders whether ‘artist-envy’ is not in actual fact a projected self-idealization, which fails the ‘other’.56

Tiravanija, Thainess and Thai Art Given the tout court neglect of questions of cultural alterity by artists associated both with relational aesthetics and the ‘ethnographic turn’, it is not surprising that Tiravanija’s Thai cultural background has only been marginally registered, even though it manifestly informs his choice of serving Thai food as a gallery staple and he states that it is rooted in a Thai-Buddhist inheritance. As has already been mentioned, Tiravanija describes himself as a Buddhist and critiques the Western world as Eurocentric. For him a Buddhist outlook offers an alternative to the normativity of Western conceptions that however is not conceived in terms of an opposition but an ‘alongside’.57 This critique also applies to relational art which Tiravanija helped shape, and which declares the intersubjective encounter with the ‘other’ as its chosen ­terrain, yet paradoxically does not acknowledge the Buddhist influence Tiravanija has brought ‘along-side’. Tiravanija, when asked, freely states that the emphasis on the everyday in his work, a core ­concern of ­relational aesthetics, is derived from the Buddhist influences of his childhood. And he comments that his preoccupation with human ­relations is a ‘Thai thing’: Thai society […] is very communal. Everybody is brother and sister, everybody is mother and father, everyone is family. Your attitude toward life is that you exist in a kind of family. The lady who sells you groceries is like your aunt, the man who sweeps the floor is your uncle, the attitude is one of respect as the other is always somebody who’s in your world.58

It would seem, then, that relational aesthetics is more deeply enmeshed with cultural alterity – and more specifically, with what Tiravanija proposes 50

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as Thai cultural values  – than previously acknowledged, especially since Tiravanija’s work has been ‘crucial to […] the emergence of relational aesthetics as a theory’.59 Might Tiravanija’s prominence in the movement thus be read as evidence that a degree of cultural transfer from ‘East to West’ has occurred, that art has gone ‘other’ on the quiet? Or is this instance representative of a cultural ‘borrowing’ by stealth that is claimed as an original invention by the ‘West’? Except that in this case the artist who has shot to fame due to this appropriation of the ‘East’ has an off-centric international background that adds an exotic pinch of alterity for additional appeal, yet remains sufficiently associated with the centre to avoid being confined by an ethnic label. But what if there was a middle ground that could a­ cknowledge the influence of relational art’s Thainess without ­invoking prejudicial perceptions? Tiravanija certainly embraces his role as ‘art-nomad’, the new figure of the artist that James Meyer identifies as a breed of ‘artist-travellers’ or ‘archetypal travellers of cultural memory’.60 Yet Tiravanija presents this itinerancy along Buddhist lines of non-determination. Tiravanija thus holds that he is not interested in destinations, and is happy to ‘just land wherever’.61 But, as Meyer points out, the sites claimed by contemporary artists as travelling ‘wherever’ remain securely tethered within the fold of the art world. Tiravanija’s destinations are not ‘anywhere’; the ‘nomad artist does not “land wherever”. Moving from one commission to the next, he has a specific destination – a commercial or non-profit space, a Kunsthalle or a contemporary museum.’62 Tiravanija, however, insists that his peripatetic existence reflects a stance of ‘being outside’.63 For him ‘there is always another place, another condition, another situation’,64 and he sees it as the task of art to articulate this relationship to this perpetual ‘otherness’.65 Yet for Meyer, Tiravanija’s dispensing of food in art spaces around the world does not reference a condition of alterity, but rather encapsulates the ‘mechanisms of exchange of the global art market in which the artist operates’.66 In other words, Meyer sees Tiravanija’s itinerancy as performing the conditions of the global market without critical address, whereas in Tiravanija’s view this is a Eurocentric perspective: for him, direct and conflictual engagements counter his Buddhist credo. ‘There is no conflict between capitalism and Buddhism’, Tiravanija asserts. ‘Being a Buddhist you just let go, you can see destruction in front of you and just accept it.’67 And in contradistinction to 51

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Western models, he argues that Thai activism ‘takes a largely passive role’ and is premised on the monk whose word ‘carries a lot of weight’ and is ‘one of the best ways of being an activist in Thailand’.68 But while Tiravanija these days largely limits articulations of his cultural alterity and politics to the cooking of Pad Thai and to allusions to his Buddhist inheritance that, however, are not foregrounded in how his work is conceived, he has in the past been prone to more straightforwardly political gestures. At the Venice Biennale of 1993, for example, he installed Untitled (1271), which saw him serving Thai noodles from a boat (see Figure 2.3). The piece evoked the trajectory of Marco Polo’s travel route and, as Pandit Chanrochanakit explains, since ‘Bangkok is already well known as the Venice of the Orient, his installation symbolized an interconnection between East and the West vis-à-vis Bangkok and Venice’.69 Similarly in 1999, while showing at the 48th Venice Biennale as part of the exhibition ‘dAPERTutto’, he planted a small teak tree near the American pavilion ‘just round the corner from the three “great powers” of England, Germany and France’70 to draw attention to the fact that Thailand was not represented at the event. He built a wooden platform around the sapling and christened it the ‘First Royal Thai Pavilion’.71 Yet while, in these instances, he took up the Thai cause, Tiravanija rose to stardom as a global art-nomad. Discussions about him and his work thus foreground his itinerancy and international schooling, and reference his Thainess only in passing.72 As ‘hybrid insider-outsider,’73 he thus escapes the limitations of an ethnic label, but retains just enough of an exotic appeal to make him distinct. What is telling, however, is how the few critics in the Euro-American centres of art that reference Tiravanija’s alterity respond to his cultural background. The curators Flood and Steiner, for instance, cite Hermann Hesse’s ‘Eastern’ cult novel Siddhartha and note that the experience of staging a show with Tiravanija is like being taught a lesson in spiritual ­understanding. ‘Hermann Hesse could have saved himself an enormous amount of soul searching’, they suggest, ‘if he had simply had the opportunity of working on an exhibition with Rirkrit Tiravanija. The struggles endured by Hesse’s protagonist to achieve an understanding that “life is a river” could have, under Rirkrit’s tutelage, resulted in a gentle, occasionally soulful comedy of manners.’74 Should we understand this as an embarrassing Orientalist lapse, picturing Tiravanija as the exotic representative of a mysterious East, as 52

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Figure 2.3  Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (1271), New Museum. This piece by Rirkrit Tiravanija was first exhibited at the 1993 Venice Biennale. It refers to the myth of Marco Polo who is thought to have travelled to China and to have introduced Chinese noodles to Italy which are thought to have morphed into Italian pasta since. The piece consists of instant noodles and a pot of hot water in an aluminium canoe. The instant noodles are boiled in the pot and offered to visitors. In situ in the New Museum exhibition NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star, 13 February–26 May 2013.

dispensing spiritual wisdom along with portions of Pad Thai? The art critic Carol Lutfy seems to think so: ‘In an age of multicultural star searching he combines a Western education and the exotic ambiguity of the East.’75 In a similar vein, Saltz stresses Tiravanija’s hybrid insider-outsider status. But rather than invoking Eastern mystique, Saltz references the Native American ceremonial feast of potlatch, which is characterized by the exchange of gifts, describing Tiravanija as ‘Potlatch-Conceptualist’ of the ‘art world tribe’.76 What Saltz, fails to mention, however, is that potlatch exchanges serve to reinforce hierarchical societal relations. He thus follows the trend of ‘Tiravanija-writing’, which overlooks the power relations entailed in intersubjective encounters as well as the plethora of writing on the gift.77 In addition, Saltz suggests that there is a ‘shamanistic side to Tiravanija’ that ties him to Joseph Beuys, whom he resembles in that he also 53

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‘gives of himself ’ and ‘is a kind of one-man travelling circus, a magician who carries his tools with him’.78 He also portrays him as a ‘medicine man who literalized art’s primitive functions: sustenance, healing, and communion’.79 Tiravanija clearly invites an array of ‘other-cultural’ associations, ranging from the East to the North American indigenous West, none of which, however, is pursued in any depth. Nor is the specificity of his Thainess examined in detail, or put in relation to the Thai contemporary art scene by Western curators and critics. His at least in part Thai-derived outlook on art making which underpins relational aesthetics is thus not discussed with any reference to this cultural background or Buddhist perspective, but is subsumed under Bourriaud’s reorientation of Western aesthetics. Is this, then, yet another example of the Eurocentricity of the international art world at play? Beatrix Ruf, the Director of the Kunsthalle in Zürich, does not think so. For her, Tiravanija offers an important critique of ‘traditional’ political art as well as Western modes of negotiating the ‘cultural other’, as for her, even exhibitions that include the other in a politically correct way ‘still always think in terms of “us” and “them” ’.80 As far as Ruf is concerned, the convivial situations created by Tiravanija reach far above and beyond multiculturalism’s limited binarisms. She states that there is ‘a more politically relevant cultural transfer – or cultural integration that doesn’t create hierarchies – taking place here than in most “politically correct” attempts to integrate supposedly marginalized artists from supposedly marginalized cultural circles’.81 Ruf criticizes multiculturalism for framing cultural others as stable and essentialized identities fixed in the image of a differenced ‘authenticity’ and argues that the cultures in question end up positioned in a negative relation to the West, that is, they are placed outside contemporary interactive relations of art and culture. For her, this perpetuates existing power relations where the ‘West’ borrows from the ‘Rest’ while Western influences taken up by the ‘Rest’ are seen as derivative.82 For Ruf, in 2003 at least, cultural integration seemed the better option. Yet does this perspective not also preserve the culture of Western appropriations as it obscures Thai contributions to relational aesthetics? And have things now moved on sufficiently in the contemporary art world to make the kind of self-fashioning that may have been a successful strategy in the 1990s ­obsolete and allow for a recasting of Tiravanija’s image that embraces his alterity and acknowledges the Thainess at the heart of relational aesthetics? 54

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Furthermore, these thoughts raise the question of how Tiravanija’s work is perceived from a Thai perspective. Notably, despite the global art world’s disavowal of Tiravanija’s ‘Thainess’ and his own muted references to his ­cultural background, he is claimed as a Thai artist from within Thailand itself. In fact, as Pandit Chanrochanakit remarks, he has become a role model for young Thai artists who seek independence from the constraints of Thai art tied to a national imaginary via the triad ‘nation–religion–monarch’. In Thailand, the concept of ‘art’ in the Western sense developed only in the early twentieth century. It was initiated by the Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci83 who taught art in Thailand and encouraged his students to combine Thai and Western styles. More recently, contemporary Thai artists have started to challenge this ‘ethno-realist’ or ‘ethno-modern’ politically sanctioned representation of Thai culture. They see Tiravanija’s ‘outsider-insider’ status as an inspiration and a genuine alternative as Tiravanija is seen to successfully negotiate ‘both the Western and the Thai gaze’.84 But Chanrochanakit also reports how Thai critics are baffled by Tiravanija’s indifference to the authenticity of Pad Thai since the artist adapts to local food markets and substitutes core ingredients that prove unavailable. According to critics Carol Lutfy and Lynn Gumpert, Tiravanija does not excel in cooking, which ‘puts an unexpected spin on why he has chosen cooking as the hallmark of his work  – and why the art world has eaten it up’.85 Furthermore, Tiravanija frequently hands over the cooking to ‘docents and volunteers’, resulting in ‘a curious American-Thai hybrid’.86 For Chanrochanakit, however, this apparent lack of authenticity potently ­conveys the ‘fluidity of Thainess rather than the fixity of official Thainess’.87 The ­seemingly innocuous act of cooking Pad Thai can therefore be argued to have a critical dimension in the contexts of Thai culture. But whereas the concern with the s­ ignature ingredient of Tiravanija’s art dominates in Thai discussion forums, on the international scene it is largely ignored as issues of cultural alterity are ­subsumed in the overall ‘goodness’ of relational art’s conviviality.

Contemporary Art and Fieldwork Alterity also features in Tiravanija’s work on a further level. The encounters between strangers in the gallery generated through artistic scenarios; ­meetings ­therefore which are premised on negotiating alterity and the challenges 55

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such encounters entail. Yet while the nature and effect of these encounters, as we have seen, have not solicited much interest in the arts, they prove to be rather absorbing of late in the field of anthropology. The anthropologist George Marcus, who has been at the forefront of conceptual shifts in anthropology since the 1980s, has taken a keen interest in Rirkrit Tiravanija and relational aesthetics. Marcus argues that Writing Culture failed to critically address anthropology’s essential reliance on a traditional conception of fieldwork as a ‘mise en scène of the lone fieldworker crossing a marked boundary of cultural difference’.88 For him the ‘persistence and regulative power’89 of this ‘Malinowskian scene of encounter’ is surprising as the model no longer fits ‘the radically changed present circumstances of anthropological fieldwork’.90 For Marcus the task, rather, is to connect ‘the “here and now” of the traditional mise en scène of fieldwork to the “elsewheres” in which they are enmeshed’91 in the contemporary world and he asserts that contemporary fieldwork scenarios are multi-sited and connective. But for him this not only requires a shift in practice but also a reworking of the authenticating Malinowskian imaginary of the lone fieldworker working as an outsider in a remote, often exotic location. In his view this entails a disciplinary reimagining of ‘the scene of encounter of fieldwork in anthropology’92 that caters for ‘worlds in change’93 and endorses Fabian’s positing of coevalness.94 He presents the arts as inspiration for anthropology’s efforts to ‘re-configure scenes of encounter’95 in response to the contemporary world and the challenge of the ‘clash of cultures’96 it presents, and cites Tiravanija’s work as exemplary for ‘what it is to do anthropological research now in the contemporary world’.97 Marcus sees the work as descended from ‘the modernist line of installation, performance, event-based conceptual art movements with roots in Dada, Surrealism but also the Situationists and Fluxus, among others’ and advocates Tiravanija’s scenarios as relevant ‘parallel worlds of endeavor’.98 He sees ‘scenes of spectacle in such works of art, created in the context of real-life situations’99 as inspirational correctives to scenes of encounter imagined in an anthropological context. He singles out relational aesthetics as ‘the orchestration of sites, settings, and social actors, and processes for certain effects that have complex social topologies’, are ‘investigated through background research (like fieldwork)’ and ‘are realized in a scene of spectacle’.100 Moreover, he refers to the work of Tiravanija as a spectacle ‘conceived as symbolic art, 56

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stimulating a critical reflexivity on the part of participants and observers’ and a socially conscious art ‘in the installation-performance-happenings mode’.101 He furthermore thinks that Foster’s critique of artists ­adopting a quasi-ethnographic stance was written with the conditionalities of pre-1980s anthropology in mind, arguing that the present circumstances of the discipline are very different and require ‘the sort of play with its practices that artists have been doing, and about which Foster was sceptical’.102 He thus praises the ‘openness and experimental nature’ of how these artists ‘are doing fieldwork, so to speak, to occupy the scene of spectacle that art produces’, calling them ‘valuable exemplars for articulating systematically changes in the mythic scene of encounter in contemporary a­ nthropological research’.103 This anthropological enthusiasm for relational art, however, must not curb critical analysis of the conditionalities of contemporary art’s relational encounters. While they undoubtedly throw into relief for anthropology aspects that need attention, contemporary art has not taken on board debates within anthropology that are relevant to its practice. Critical discussions of the structural privileging of the ‘view of the centre’, the assumption of ethnographic authority and the problem of ‘speaking for’ that arise from participant-observation as a fieldwork method have therefore been largely left behind when aspects of anthropological practice were adopted in the visual arts. The work of French artist Valéry Grancher is a case in point. In collaboration with the Palais de Tokyo, the prestigious experimental art space then co-directed by Bourriaud, Grancher created the Shiwiars Project which entailed a stay with the Shiwiar Indians, a Jivaro tribe living along the border of Ecuador and Peru in the Amazon area (7–20 October 2005). Grancher was previously known as an ‘internet’ artist who explored the space of virtuality. The aim of the Shiwiars Project, as Grancher declared in his e-communications, was to switch his aesthetic parameters. Whereas before he worked in a virtual space seeking to examine the ‘real’, he now decided to work on the basis of an experienced ‘real’ and to represent it in virtuality. His choice of opting for a sojourn in the Amazon jungle to encounter an experiential ‘real’ underscores the continuing relevance of Hal Foster’s critique of contemporary art’s appropriation of anthropology and its blindness to its lingering primitivism. It also underscores Foster’s highlighting of a problematic realist assumption in the art world, which 57

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holds that the other ‘is in the real, not in the ideological’.104 For Foster, quasi-ethnographic encounters in the arts constitute a narcissistic othering of the self rather than a genuine recognition of alterity. Grancher’s encounter with the Shiwiars supports this verdict as the Indians only figure as an exotic foil to Grancher artistic agenda.105 For Foster, the practice of ethnographically mapping institutions or social communities – another prominent activity by artists associated with the ethnographic turn – also harbours difficulties. For example he raises concerns about the following frequently encountered scenario and ­critiques the superficiality of the encounter: An artist is contacted by a curator about a site-specific work. He or she is flown into town in order to engage the c­ ommunity ­targeted by the institution. However, there is little time or money for much interaction with the group […] Nevertheless, a project is designed […] Few of the principles of the ethnographic participant-observer are observed […] And despite the best intentions of the artist only limited engagements of the sited other are affected. Almost naturally the focus wanders from collaborative investigation to ethnographic self-fashioning, in which the artist is not decentred so much as the other is refashioned in artistic guise.106

Tiravanija’s work on the whole avoids such problems, as he is less interested in mapping existing groups or sites than in creating and offering spaces of interaction and of interpersonal encounter. He also seems to have learnt from the self-reflexivity of anthropology, as he is blurring the boundaries between the objective and subjective, and is not laying any claims to an objectifying distancing stance. But he opts for a direct engagement that is claimed as an authentic, unmediated experience and invokes an immediacy of encounter that is seen to disavow the need for translation and exemplifies the much-critiqued ‘ethnographic real’. A further question to be raised is whether his gallery scenarios rehearse an outmoded model of anthropology where participants remain silent or have at best a marginal voice even though they are central to the completion of the work. This parallels the traditional fieldwork scenario where the informants play a crucial yet hardly acknowledged role and are subsumed 58

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under the authorial voice of the ethnographer who representationally stages the encounters in his or her fieldwork account. These reflections raise the question of how awareness of the difficulties and ‘socially and politically fraught nature of cross-cultural representations’107 gleaned from anthropology’s exercise in self-awareness could be translated for contemporary art’s scenarios. And what might their potentiality be for the project of decentring Western art? In other words what sounds has the ‘ear out for non-Western, and partially Western, voices’108 brought into the aesthetic equation? As we have seen, in contrast to Foster’s more critical stance that warns of pseudo-ethnographic encounters,109 Clifford strikes an idealistic note about ethnographic self-reflexivity and its translations into the realm of contemporary art. Clifford, however, also laments that despite the enthusiastic uptake of his ideas and his notion of anthropology as cultural critique, very little actual ethnography is known in the academy and in the art world at large. For him this is striking as it concerns an informed audience of sophisticated scholars, artists and intellectuals who, despite their enthusiastic embrace of expanded notions of ethnography as critical procedure and enthusiasm about contemporary art’s global turn, seem to remain largely Eurocentric in their outlook.110 The cultural critics Ella Shohat and Robert Stam voiced a similar concern. They bemoaned the ongoing ‘oversight’ of the aesthetic, non-Western margins, despite a plethora of critical writing on the subject of decentring the art world, and point out that despite a noted effort in exposing ‘the exclusions and blindnesses of Eurocentric representations and discourses, the actual cultural productions of non-Europeans have been ignored’.111 For them this constitutes a ‘neglect which reinscribes the exclusions even while denouncing it, shifting it to another register’.112 And while the present globalized situation of the art world has brought some positive changes, the condition of invisibility of Tiravanija’s Thainess, the disavowal of the Thai cultural perspective which informs his work and potentially inheres relational aesthetics – not to mention the continuing exclusion of forms of art that do not fit the visual idioms of Western-style contemporary art – are all indicative of the continued presence of the predicament. It therefore seems that Tiravanija shares more with Shipibo-Conibo and Tamil designs than has previously been assumed. His work is not 59

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only ‘unreadable’ from a traditional aesthetic point of view, but important aspects of it are invisible due to the art world’s unacknowledged Eurocentricity. And as artistic practices, despite their adoption of anthropological methodologies, often overlook debates in anthropology regarding the difficulties of negotiating and representing marginalized cultural ‘others’, the question of whether relational aesthetics’ emphasis on encounter can be expanded to sensitively encompass cultural a­ lterity and to take on board the lessons that can be learnt from the field of anthropology is even more pertinent.

60

Faction 1

‘The Raw and the Cooked in Common Places’ – ‘Rikki T’ at the Serpentine Gallery, Review by ‘Johnny Zucker’ Rikki T’s exhibition ‘The Raw and the Cooked in Common Places’ at the Serpentine Gallery in London makes a timely appearance as debates about relational art have been reignited by a recent cluster of shows in New York; notably ‘theanyspacewhatever’ at the Guggenheim; a show admitted a ­failure, if curiously a ‘beautiful’ one, by its curator Nancy Spector no less.1 She attributes this flop to the gulf between the theory of relational aesthetics and the art in question, and the failed promises of the French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, its author. For her the art that gained prominence through its association with relational aesthetics is more sophisticated than its theory; it is just, ahem, that much of it falls rather short on the relational front. And now, after 15 years of stardom, the artists understandably are no longer so keen, she tells us, on this association.2 But the temperature of debates has also risen in London as Nicolas Bourriaud was Gulbenkian curator of contemporary art from 2008 to 2010 at Tate Britain and curated the fourth Tate Triennial ‘Altermodern’. The show and the accompanying catalogue presented Bourriaud’s ‘altermodern manifesto’. It provocatively declared we are no longer modern but, in case you had not realized, Creole now. This unleashed a critical firestorm reminiscent of the fierce lashings Bourriaud received when Relational Aesthetics was first published. Claire Bishop, his earliest and most sustained critic, 61

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had dismissed his proposition of conviviality in the gallery tout court as ‘feel-good’ schmoozing with the art establishment.3 Sleep-overs and ­noodles to instil a new ‘loviness’ in the masses? She did not think so. Anna Dezeuze was not convinced either. But she showed more understanding. After all Bourriaud is a critic and not a philosopher, so rigour is not de rigueur, and one should not expect philosophy, even if Bourriaud says that’s what it is.4 And when philosopher Eric Alliez takes aim at the ‘altermodern’ the gloves come off. He scoffs at Bourriaud’s Guattarean borrowings, calls them a ‘nasty co-option’5 and declares Bourriaud’s ‘altermodern’ propositions a slick rearticulation of relational aesthetics for a now fashionable global setting.6 Yet relational aesthetics, which swept through the art world like wildfire, is now beginning to run out of steam. But don’t get me wrong; it has been a huge game changer, bringing fresh ideas that shook up the art establishment. It is just that it has now become, well, the new orthodoxy, and the next generation of artists are beginning to challenge the powers that be, and are engaging critically with its legacy. The work of Rikki T, a young artist from Romford, is a case in point, and seems to have taken the art world by storm. Curator C detects a new departure in Rikki T’s work, a creative engagement with, what shall I call it – the alter-relational? The curator tells us that Rikki T has taken James Clifford’s complaint to heart that the oh-so-switched-on art crowd pays only lip service to the ‘real’ marginal other in the arts: the indigenous folks who have not been to art school but still paint, draw and potter. It is about time they were invited for dinner too. So Rikki T has. As you enter the exhibition, the first room shows a scratchy blackand-white video loop of sari-clad Tamil women perpetually emerging from their abodes. Armed with small containers of white powder, they deftly trickle exquisite, abstract, linear shapes in front of their homes. The women appear in quick and repeated succession, drawing again and again, perfunctorily performing their daily task. As the women surge back and forth, a plethora of intricate designs unfolds, only to be erased again: as the everyday claims the streets, and cars, cows and carts speed, trot and totter, the designs fade away, only to reappear as the women emerge yet again and perform their Sisyphean task. What are we to make of these d ­ elicate scrolls, this phantasmagorical presence and the weaving movements of the women continuously in motion? An audio broadcast in the gallery 62

‘The Raw and the Cooked in Common Places’

spouts background information: there is the anthropologist who sees decadence unfold before his eyes, and the local magazine editor on a mission to save this national treasure who wonders how to transform a bunch of powder-curling housewives into real artistes. We hear that art historians, with an eye out for temples and palaces, have never noticed the designs, and that the women draw them to make their children happy. A laudable aim, but is it art? One would imagine Bourriaud would think so and defend this view against those unenlightened stuckists he so frequently caricatures in his book, even if the designs commune in a peculiar fashion, make use of the ‘erase’ rather than the ‘fast-forward’ function and do not involve massages or, indeed, pots and pans. The next room quite literally leaves the visitor in the dark. Only dim, fuzzy miniature searchlights scan the walls and reveal vague glimpses of what there is to see: man-and-woman-size photographs of – yes – ceramic pots with intricate abstract designs made not by Turner Prize-winning transvestites, but tribal women from northern Peru. As the catalogue informs us, they are revered as artists in their communities. Interspersed between the large photos of the pots are small portraits of their creators. They remain, either pointlessly or poignantly, mostly invisible. While we are straining to see, audio broadcasts tell us about what remains in the dark. Anthropologists talk about fish, agriculture and boring stuff, like how long a canoe takes to get to the next market town. OK, we now know they are out in the sticks. We learn about a peculiar Indian way of reading the newspaper, that is, before they had learnt how to read like us, and that the designs are part of a great sing-a-long between the shaman and his – invisible – spirit mates. There are weird and wonderful accounts of shamans, singing trees, wicked butterflies and evil snakes. All a bit Harry Potter for me. We also hear how anthropologists were lured to the jungle in their droves, entranced by the beauty of the designs. Their sights firmly set on unlocking their mysteries, these Indiana Joneses, it seems, summarily failed to solve the riddle  – returning empty-handed to the shores of Western ­academe:  the impenetrable designs bewitch and haunt, but, so the story goes, do not yield. Had Rikki T allowed us to see the photos in better-lit conditions, the London audience might just have offered to help, even more so since, as it turns out, the natives rather enjoy reading what academics 63

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and other clever people who traipse around their villages write about their lives and the designs. The natives also happily make up stuff that is eagerly lapped up by gullible researchers, who, so it seems, suggested some of these connections in the first place. So a bit of input by a motley crew of multi­ cultural Londoners might well have tickled the fancy of the tribals who probably are surfing the net right now, checking up on the show. Don’t be surprised; apparently we are all coeval now (no, this is not a weird way of saying both us and them are joined in a conspiracy of the wicked – coeval means we are all contemporaries, even if they paint pots in the jungle and we are strutting our stuff in places like the Serpentine). The next room offers more familiar terrain. The artist has taken Jeunet’s blockbuster movie Amélie and added a light-hearted yet poignant story­ line. While Amélie lives in a sanitized version of Paris without politics and nasty things apart from suicidal tourists and princesses who die in car accidents, in Rikki T’s version a welcome helping of difference is introduced to do-gooder Montmartre. The whimsical waitress determined to help others find love and happiness becomes a metaphor for relational aesthetics’ mission to create merry togetherness  – but with a twist. The story of ‘boy meets girl’ and ‘what can I do for you to make you happy?’ is overlaid with the themes of cultural encounter, anthropology and art as new scenes are spliced in-between selected passages from Amélie. Jeunet’s emphasis on the everyday and the listing of the quirky likes and dislikes of the film’s characters are mingled with similar stories of the Peruvian natives’ foibles and Tamil women’s eccentricities. And the painting lesson given by the reclusive, know-it-all painter to one-armed North African simpleton Julien takes an ethnographic turn when the film flips between the artist’s and Julien’s copying of Renoir’s women and the drawings by the ethnic ladies. And then the former abandon the copying of Renoir and find themselves labouring over, yes, rosy-cheeked gnomes in e­ thnic garb:  the travelling garden gnome of Amélie’s father has gone native, offering a tongue-in-cheek impersonation of the anthropologist-Western explorer-traveller-artist-anthropologist-cum-tourist. We see shots of him posing in front of a Shipibo hut, and a Tamil house, or sharing a Pad Thai in a gallery, wearing an artfully draped sari or intricately embroidered Shipibo skirt; and we find him gleefully peering out of Shipibo bowls p ­ ositioned on a Tamil kolam. 64

‘The Raw and the Cooked in Common Places’

But there is yet a further twist to the story. The gnome returns to haunt Paris with Amélie’s do-gooder ambitions of a different ilk. As the f­ragile artist-neighbour of Amélie peers through his binoculars, he sees the gnome posting invitations to Parisian immigrants on the internet, advertising free ‘eat-ins’ in the Musée du Quai Branly, infamous for the unapologetic primitivism of their displays.7 The web posting announces that the museum curators have offered to cook for their local ethnic audience, a poignant take on the kind of ‘correction’ administered by Amélie to the mean vegetable seller. And sure enough, the next scene shows the masses streaming to the Musée du Quai Branly in flash-mob fashion, catching the museum’s movers and shakers unawares, who, flabbergasted, flee the scene and abandon the museum to the Parisian ‘other’ ordinarily relegated to the ‘banlieue’ (or neatly kept in air-conditioned glass cases). But the gnome also takes issue with the Palais de Tokyo, the Parisian showcase for contemporary art, it seems. The magic binocular reveals yet another astonishing scene: the internet-savvy gnome as avid ­blogger on the Palais de Tokyo forum of the Shiwiars Project developed by ­internet artist-cum-anthropologist-traveller-tourist Valéry Grancher8 who, donning his explorer cap, ventured to the Amazon to, well, film how Shiwiar Indians go about their daily lives. It is only that his daily blogs are all about him roughing it in the jungle. He must have decided to skip the ethnographic bit once he got there, thinking the better story to be how Grancher is doing in the sticks. And he made art of course while he was there. No, not pots or cooking, but films of lush vegetation and river fronts, now shown at the Palais de Tokyo. A  round-table discussion with a lot of important people9 and, notably, a real Shiwiar Indian, was also staged. Obviously the gnome should have been invited; the anachronistic presence of the colourful, kitschy figure would certainly have spiced things up. In a series of web blogs signed ‘From Gnome with Love,’ he politely congratulates the artist for his achievement, before he asks him tongue-in-cheek why Grancher has not noticed the art of the Shiwiars, making a point about voyeuristic, self-glorifying and patronizing tourism by self-professed art-nomads. He also takes Marc Sanchez, the curator of the show, at his word, and demands openness for a ‘real’ encounter. I  imagine he has a shared dinner in mind. But before we know it, the surveilling gaze of the sickly artist shifts to fix on Amélie 65

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in her flat: Nino has just knocked on the door; she is too afraid to open it. He knocks again, she hesitates. And then the incredible happens: no encounter, nothing, just The End, or nearly. The artist puts the b ­ inoculars down and returns to work. Is he painting à la Renoir again? Was it all a fantasy? Go and find out.

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Faction 2

Rikki T and Curator C En Route

Rikki T and Curator C are in the car discussing her show ‘The Raw and the Cooked in Common Places’. Curator C: How did you conceive the idea for the show? Rikki T: There were a number of factors. An important trigger was my lunch at Rirkrit’s ‘Fear Eats the Soul’ at Gavin Brown’s.1 I had dropped in to see the show and bumped into Jim Clifford … Curator C: The anthropologist? Rikki T: Yes. We met waiting for our servings of Pad Thai and started talking. We had fun trying to settle the question of whether ­artists have more ‘anthropologist-envy’ or anthropologists more ‘artist-envy’.2 But what stuck with me was Jim’s comment about how blinkered contemporary art’s adoption of anthropology remains. He finds that the art world took up ethnographic methodologies, reoriented art in terms of everyday culture, but never read any ‘real’ ethnography.3 He was pleased though to find a copy of Predicament of Culture on the gallery’s back office shelves … Curator C: Was he also commenting on the ethnographic turn in contem­ porary art? Rikki T: I think he wanted to make a broader point about the lingering Eurocentricity in the arts and the lack of engagement with 67

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indigenous arts. It stuck with me. I had to admit I had never much thought about this too. It was an eye-opener. Curator C: How did you respond to this insight? Rikki T: I started reading about these issues, talked to anthropologists and made a point of seeing ethnographic displays. I realized that ‘culture’ is inherently problematic4 and took note of the division between art and aesthetic practices considered the realm of anthropology. Curator C: But wouldn’t you agree that the base of contemporary art is much more global now? Have attitudes not also changed towards these issues? Rikki T: Yes, there has been a shift and artists from outside G7 are beginning to be more visible. But the concept of ‘art’ is still premised on work that engages with Western discourses. Work that refers to different frameworks such as visual practices considered the realm of anthropology remain beyond the pale, even if there are notable exceptions, such as the art of the Australian Aborigines, in some respects. Curator C: How do you see Tiravanija’s work in this context? Rikki T: He questions the concept of art, blurring boundaries in all kinds of directions, certainly in the gallery scenarios he is best known for. But in contrast to some of his earlier work, these scenarios are underpinned by a quasi-universalizing stance that takes the viewer in the gallery as a generic given. This is a problematic levelling of differences. Curator C: What early work are you referring to? Rikki T: In 1999, for example, he planted a small teak tree in Venice outside the American pavilion and called it the First Royal Thai Pavilion;5 it made a statement about the cultural politics of exhibiting at Venice and the centre-periphery dynamic of the art world. Curator C: But did he not recently again take up issues of culture and ­cultural interaction more explicitly? Rikki T: Yes, his show in San Francisco about the cultural migration of food. This of course is also about the movement of people across cultural and national boundaries and the negotiations this entails.6 68

Rikki T and Curator C En Route

Curator C: Do you see this as a contribution to discussions of the global in contemporary art? Rikki T: Narrating migration from the point of view of food is a good angle on cultural encounter and interaction which I see as the key challenge for the global contemporary. Curator C: So relational aesthetics and the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija are contributing to this debate? Rikki T: There are aspects of his oeuvre that I  hope to unpack that will certainly add to the discussion around the global in contemporary art. Curator C: Is this another facet of your show  – unpacking Tiravanija’s work? Rikki T: There is a reckoning of sorts with relational aesthetics. I want to take it further, expand it into the realm of culture and visual engagements across cultures. Engagement is key here. Casual conversations are one thing and can be important, fun, ­boring, meaningless, you name it, and sometimes, as in my case, eye-opening. But they are different from the long-term relationships that shape our lives. My question is, when do you really meet when you encounter one another? When does communication work and when does it fail? What does this mean for art? Curator C: Are you saying relational aesthetics neglects the work of relating? Rikki T: I think it is time to expand relational aesthetics. Rirkrit’s and Bourriaud’s work surfaced in the nineties and debates have since moved on. Curator C: And what about the ethnographic turn? Rikki T: I think Jim is right. Artists who adopt ethnographic methods on the whole have not taken the lessons of anthropology’s self-reflexivity on board. I  think a ‘thicker’ ‘ethnographic’ outlook is needed. When Fred Wilson ‘mines the archive,’ he engages with a specific museum, a specific history and creates new relations between objects and histories. He problematizes the museum as an institution and the power of the ‘institutional voice’. Rirkrit often transforms the gallery as venue, 69

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changing its presentation and function, yet the deeper politics of the gallery and the art world remain unexplored. Curator C: Are you saying that he is an art-nomad who circulates in a ­universalizing ‘art bubble’? Rikki T: He certainly does not engage with the cultural specificity of his audiences, apart from adapting his recipes, or rather the ingredients, to the local contexts he finds himself in. My question is, where is the reciprocity in the encounters he stages in the gallery? I find his work that engages with an environment more rewarding, for example Untitled (From Madrid Airport to Reina Sofia), in 1994. Curator C: The piece where he walked his bicycle from the Madrid Airport to the museum with a video camera strapped to the handle bar? Rikki T: Yes. He brought the outside world into the gallery and documented his encounters along the way. The piece reflects a willingness to engage with a particular locale and its people. The slow pace of walking is also important here; this allows for time to experience and to connect. The interactions with the people encountered were also more equal than in his pre-arranged gallery scenarios. Curator C: The piece was for an exhibition entitled ‘The Raw and the Cooked,’ curated by Dan Cameron. Does the title of your show make reference to this piece and its more ‘ethnographic’ perspective? Rikki T: Yes, absolutely. But it of course also refers to Lévi-Strauss. Curator C: What was your response to Rirkrit’s Demo Station 4 at the Ikon Gallery and its inclusion of local craft demonstrations?7 Rikki T: I thought it an apt critique of the hierarchies in the arts. Some reviewers commented in terms of ‘slumming it with the craft folk’.8 This demonstrates just how prevalent this divide still is. Curator C: Are you taking a similar approach with the ethnic decorations in your show? Rikki T: I am focusing on a different aspect: I am concerned with the art – craft divide in the global arena. Curator C: Can you say more about why you decided to focus on Latin American and Indian designs? It is a far-flung combination. 70

Rikki T and Curator C En Route

Rikki T:

This is just how things developed and fell into place. An anthro­ pologist friend had mentioned Shipibo ceramics and the short-lived fad for these pots as ‘authentic’ tourist art in the seventies in Europe. They appealed because the abstract decorations spoke to the modernist eye, yet anthropologists struggled to decode the designs. This breakdown of i­nterpretation drew my attention. I  was intrigued by their resistance to interpretation. Curator C: So the failure to translate or make sense of the designs drew your attention? Rikki T: Yes, very much so. The story conjured up the lure of the Lorelei in my mind … Curator C: The mythic German maiden who combs her golden locks on a rock above the Rhine? Rikki T: Yes. She enthralled the seafarers on the river below, so the story goes, and they became shipwrecked, because they could not avert their eyes from the beautiful apparition. For me the story captures the allure of the exotic, the fascination and the subsequent failure of what is considered a straightforward affair – steering a boat in a well-known, f­ requently navigated river, and yet sinking it because of a fixation. And also the unheroic demise in the face of something ­intangible and phantasmagoric. It shows what a fragile space the contact zone can be, how charged it is with fantasies and preconceptions. Curator C: How does this relate to Tamil threshold designs? Rikki T: For me this is a different, but equally intriguing scenario. In a sense, it is the reverse of the Peruvian situation where anthropologists flock to the jungle to decode ceramic designs that have made an impact on the art market but resist ­interpretation. Here we have a truly public art that is performed in the street. Yet in another sense, the designs are not visible, as neither anthropologists nor artists or art theorists take much of an interest. Curator C: Are you saying that there is no scholarly curiosity about the designs? 71

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Rikki T:

This is just the symptom that points to underlying issues of post-coloniality. But what intrigued me is that the designs are well and truly everyday and revolve around conviviality, just the sort of thing relational art is seeking to achieve. So what if one subsumed them under this bracket and accorded them a place in the contemporary art world? Yet asking this question, tellingly, seems far-fetched if not absurd. This intrigued me. Curator C: But the designs have garnered more attention as of late … Rikki T: Yes, things are beginning to shift. They are quite popular in India now and a few more scholarly discussions have appeared. But for me the question remains of how the designs are perceived. What caught my attention is the persistence of overlooking. We are talking about a very visible practice that is not hidden in the hinterland of Tamil Nadu, but is performed in the streets of Chennai. Curator C: And because it does not fit into established aesthetic c­ ategories, it remains unseen? Rikki T: Yes, despite its existence in the most public of all spaces – the street – and even though the practice clearly is of value to the women who draw the designs every day and to their ­communities. I became interested in this condition of invisibility and the cultural hierarchies that perpetuate this condition. So it is ultimately a question about power and whose perspective counts. Curator C: But why did you decide to work with both these cultural ­scenarios? They could hardly be more disparate. Rikki T: On the one hand, they both intrigued me. And then I wanted to avoid the anthropological trap of laying claim to a special relationship with one particular culture and to end up in a position of authority or something of this sort, even if assumed or projected inadvertently. I also thought it important to have more than one scenario, as this is not about a specific instance of overlooking, or of misinterpretation. I  wanted to address larger global conditions, connectivities and power relations in the art world. And I wanted to avoid a West–Rest binary. Curator C: Is this the point the gnome is trying to make in the last part of your trilogy? 72

Rikki T and Curator C En Route

Rikki T:

Yes, he makes a point in a funny way, I hope, of how absurd but also how prevalent and potent all these distinctions are. And he raises issues of power, cultural representation and modern art’s legacy of appropriating indigenous visual idioms. Curator C: In other words the kinds of issues you feel Grancher’s Shiwiars Project turns a blind eye to? Rikki T: Yes, you could say that. Curator C: But his project goes beyond the ethnographic encounter. It involves a round-table discussion, radio transmissions, screenings of his documentary footage in the Palais de Tokyo and a host of website links to other projects such as the tourist initiative launched by the Shiwiar Indians to gain a platform on the international tourist market. Rikki T: Yes, the Shiwiar leader of this organization invited Grancher to the Amazon. The charges of instrumentalization that have been levied against Grancher can therefore also be reversed and one can equally argue that the Shiwiar are using Grancher. Or rather one can definitely settle for a mutually beneficial arrangement. Curator C: Do you see this as a rather cosy arrangement of mutual ­promotion and marketing then? Rikki T: My difficulty with the project has mainly to do with the ‘thinness’ of Grancher’s engagement with the Shiwiar and what comes across as a lack of awareness of debates about the representation of the other that have come a long way in anthropology. In this context it is also rather surprising that a new anthropological museum such as the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris unapologetically adheres to a modernist display of anthropological artefacts.9 But it seems the Palais de Tokyo is not far behind judging by the lack of critical awareness demonstrated by its press release and presentation of the Shiwiars Project. Curator C: Do you see evidence of primitivism in his piece? Rikki T: Yes, the project spectacularizes the other and claims the Indians’ lives for contemporary art in a way that smacks of the kind of attitudes that underpinned primitivism. The project 73

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also presents the jungle and the tribal other as ­commensurate with authentic experience, which of course is part of this outlook. Curator C: So in your view, the fact that he is also setting up round tables and giving the Indians a voice does not redeem his piece? Rikki T: They are two separate issues. What is important here is that the work does not signal an awareness of the long-standing and fundamental debates around primitivism and Western art’s encounter with the tribal other. Grancher does not reflect on power relations and demonstrates a questionable romanticization of Shiwiar backwardness. But how come these Indians who supposedly live in a genuinely unspoilt and untouched jungle idyll have a sophisticated website advertising eco-tourism and a marketing manager who pops over to Paris for a round-table discussion? This is not reflected in the presentation of their culture. Grancher perpetuates the illusion of an unspoilt Indian ‘real’. Curator C: You mean to say that Grancher is invoking the ethnographic present in his blogs from the depth of the jungle? Rikki T: His blogs represent an interesting phenomenon. The project brought a lot of welcome publicity for the Indians, but it could also have been an opportunity for a more informed ­encounter. For example, the Shiwiar, similar to the Shipibo-Conibo Indians, have an indigenous ceramic tradition. Their decorations are not as sophisticated as Shipibo-Conibo designs, but they have an aesthetic tradition that can actually be seen in some of the photos on the website. Yet other than this incidental visual reference, there is no mention of their artistic production, which really spells out existing hierarchies. Their work is not seen to be of importance. Curator C: So only Grancher is the artist … Rikki T: Yes. An encounter interested in communication and a b ­ ridging of worlds would raise questions, would like to find out more about the people, would seek to converse with their culture. Ironically Marc Sanchez, the curator of the show, praises Grancher as a traveller into the unknown, as someone who 74

Rikki T and Curator C En Route

puts into practice ‘how to live together’ and who abandons all certainties in his quest for art. Curator C: What does Grancher himself have to say? Does he comment on this in his blogs? Rikki T: He does receive a lot of flak in various web postings and is accused of self-aggrandization at the expense of an exploited people. He tends to return the compliment and accuse the ­blogger of egotism. The venom in these exchanges is really quite astounding. He also points out that the Indians consented to the presence of the camera and gained a solar-powered school building, restocked medical supplies and a high-profile international presence. Also, at their request, a CD and a DVD about their culture has been distributed. Curator C: How do you see your show in relation to the Shiwiars Project? Rikki T: I make no claim for roughing it in the jungle or any primordial authenticity. My project is firmly situated in the art world. But mostly my concerns are different from Grancher’s. The work represents an intervention in the sphere of art and asks questions about art-world exclusions. Curator C: Would you say that there is an element of instrumentalization on your part at play as well, as you are making a point via these practices? Rikki T: I am seeking to set up a dialogue between several spheres of aesthetic practice and am staging a multifaceted aesthetic encounter. I intend to stage a questioning. This is why I have not displayed the ‘real’ thing, but problematized the act of drawing of Tamil threshold designs and the difficulties of s­ eeing and reading the Shipibo-Conibo designs. The large-scale photos of Shipibo-Conibo ceramics, apart from being presented in darkened conditions, are manipulated to look faded and out of focus, giving them an unreal look. Curator C: How does the anthropological information presented as ‘voices’ fit into this? Rikki T: I wanted to offer anthropological background and present different approaches and interpretations to reveal the myth of culture as uncontested and objectively readable as flawed. 75

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Curator C: Is this is why you articulate issues of visibility and invisibility in your show? Rikki T: I wanted to make people think about what it is that we see when we are looking at something, how fraught the seemingly simple and straightforward act of seeing is, and how often we see and yet don’t see as we don’t recognize what it is that we are looking at. But I am interested in this question in ­relation to cultural interaction and encounter, which gives it a particular spin. Curator C: I have noticed the exhibition catalogue adopts a rather unusual format. Can you comment on this? Rikki T: I was looking for a framework that would present an ­experimental approach to thinking about art and the visual. Having read my anthropology (thanks, Jim) I wanted to make ­authorial situatedness transparent, provide anthropological background information, but also offer in-depth and creative theoretical engagements to see where these issues might lead. I thought the serious business of an exhibition catalogue could do with some creative re-envisioning and could be brought in line with conceptual shifts in the field of criticism. I see the catalogue as an extension of the show. Tiravanija’s catalogue for his show at the Serpentine in 2005 was an inspiration here. He completely abandoned any concept of what a traditional catalogue entails.10 Apart from the short introductory essay by the curator, it does not have any of the usual contextualizations of the work or the artist. It is simply a transcript of the radio play that was broadcast in the gallery. Curator C: Are the ‘voices’ that are being broadcast in the gallery reproduced in the catalogue? Rikki T: Yes, they are. But the catalogue also contains more analytical essays. It is envisaged as an extension of the questions asked in the gallery, but in a different format. Curator C: How do you see the relationship between anthropology and the work of contemporary artists? Rikki T: There are interesting parallels and shared perspectives. Artists whose work is informed by relational aesthetics tend 76

Rikki T and Curator C En Route

to foreground ‘participant-creation’; they see their audiences as completing the work. This can be paralleled, to an extent, with the acknowledgement of the contributions of the ethnographer’s informants in anthropology, which has led to a great deal of experimentation in the writing of ­anthropological accounts. The element that I  am missing in relational aesthetics is a parallel reflection on the situatedness of the artist, of the s­ pecific positions that meet in the gallery, a making transparent of the artist’s authorship and its ideological inscriptions. Curator C: How do you see your reinscription of Jeunet’s film Amélie in this context? How does it relate to the more overtly anthropological aspects of the show? Rikki T: My intention was to bring these different aesthetic practices into the here and now, and to problematize their alterior status. Amélie had all the right ingredients. It was a popular success, which means my reinscriptions can be understood by a large number of people. And the film’s location in Paris was important to me, as Paris of course was the epicentre of modern art and therefore of primitivism in art. I also wanted to address the quaint and nostalgic image of Paris the film presents. Amélie shows a Paris that is mostly untouched by immigration and globalization except for the figure of Julien, who is of North African origin and is bullied by the vegetable seller. Then you have the absurd figure of the painter, who never leaves his flat and only participates in the world through voyeuristic devices such as binoculars and the TV. Curator: But why focus on the gnome? He is quite prominent in the show. Rikki T: For me the artist’s peephole view of the gnome’s subversive actions represents a commentary on a complicated ­relationship  between the power of the gaze, art and popular culture, and art and anthropology. When the artist exchanges his copying of Renoir for painting garden gnomes it speaks to the everyday and the vernacular, and comments on the lack of rationality in Western culture even though our ­cultural identity is built around scientific rationalism. I like to 77

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imagine a case of reverse-ethnography:  a native Peruvian anthropologist knocking on the door of Amélie’s father asking why he has a gnome in his garden and the latter shrug­ ging his shoulders and saying that he does not know. As the Peruvian anthropologist walks away, deeply frustrated at the ‘not-knowing’ he encounters, he wonders if this is a ritual relic from the past that has become a merely decorative practice without meaning … Curator C: And what about the gnome? Do you see him as cipher for the quotidian or as a somewhat comical figure of an anthropologist? Rikki T: For me the gnome evokes the figure of the jester who can speak the truth because of his outsider status. There are also tourist associations – tacky souvenirs, holiday snaps and so on – the marketable side of the hankering after the authentic. In this sense, the figure of the gnome hauls anthropology into the twenty-first century, invokes mass tourism, its c­ onsumption of the other and the touristification of experience. I  like Francesco Bonami’s statement that we are all tourists now because we have lost the taste for the unknown, the raw, the unpackaged and the unpredictable. Bonami talks about how experience nowadays is ‘pre-cooked’.11 Curator C: Were you not tempted then to call your exhibition ‘The Raw, the Cooked and the Pre-Cooked’? Rikki T: No, it had not occurred to me. But I might well consider it for future reference.

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3 Voices: Dossier of Texts on Shipibo-Conibo Designs

The following section presents a collection of short texts to provide background information on Shipibo-Conibo culture. It includes an exhibition review, shamanic songs and edited excerpts from anthropological texts. 1  Shipibo-Conibo Design Culture – Some Background Edited excerpts from the catalogue of the exhibition ‘The Cosmos Encoiled: Indian Art of the Peruvian Amazon’.1 2  A Shipibo-Conibo Dance Song – Sung by Julian Fernandez The song was recorded in Caimito, Peru by Bruno Illius on 25 October 1985. It was recorded, translated into German and annotated by Bruno Illius, and translated into English by Renate Dohmen.2 3  The Shipibo-Conibo Art Style, A Microtradition That is Passed Down from Mother to Daughter Excerpts from the article ‘Art and Residence among the Shipibo Indians of Peru: A Study in Microacculturation’ by anthropologist Peter Roe.3

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4  The Shipibo-Conibo Art Style – A Nineteenth-Century Invention? Excerpts from the article ‘Roots Revisited: The Origin of the Shipibo Art Style’ by anthropologists Deboer and Raymond.4 5  Shipibo-Conibo Design Therapy – Shamans and Designs More edited excerpts from the catalogue of the exhibition ‘The Cosmos Encoiled: Indian Art of the Peruvian Amazon’.5 6  The Story of Sankama – Could He Read or Could He Not?6 Edited excerpts from a story recorded by the linguist and missionary Esther Matteson. The story was told by her student Morán Zumaeta Bastín, a Piro Indian, about a fellow called Piro Sankama who claimed to know how to read well before the time when the Piro were taught how to read and write.7 7  Shipibo-Conibo Aesthetic Therapy – Fact or Fiction? Edited excerpts from the article ‘Shipibo-Konibo8 Art and Healing Concepts: A Critical View on the “Aesthetic Therapy” ’ by ethnomusicologist Bernd Brabec de Mori and his wife and indigenous interpreter Laida Mori Silvano de Brabec.9

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1 Shipibo-Conibo Design Culture – Some Background According to accounts of the Shipibo-Conibo people, at one time their entire living compounds were covered reticulately with carved, plaited, painted, embroidered or appliquéd geometric designs. […] The artistic and religious preoccupation to veil all objects with designs included all media: the house posts and beams, the plaited interior of the thatched roof, the box-shaped woven mosquito tents, boats, paddles, kitchen utensils and hunting equipment as well as pottery and the finely woven cotton garments of men and women and their beaded adornments. Even faces, hands and legs bore the delicate geometric painting. […] Thus, the horror vacui principle which characterizes the Shipibo-Conibo art style was formerly not limited to individual design fields on certain objects of everyday or festive use, but embraced the entire visible village world and  – as we shall see – even the invisible spiritual world of their religion. Despite the three hundred years of missionization and cultural tutelage, the connection of the modern Shipibo-Conibo Indians with the traditional meanings, the semantic content of the designs, has not been entirely broken. Today the design tradition is continued principally in their textiles, beadwork and ceramic ware, yet the Shipibo-Conibo artists ‘retain, and are continuing to elaborate, one of the most complex functioning art styles in the aboriginal New World’.10 The innovative and experimental aspect of this art is to be found in design composition. Potters consider the creation of vessel shape – which is conservative, stylized and unconscious – to be an auxiliary skill. In like manner, the woven or bought cloth is essentially ­considered as plain canvas waiting to receive designs. As the Shipibo-Conibo women say, neither within the life of an individual artist nor among the tradition as a whole, does compositional repetition occur. The possibilities to manipulate and combine design elements are almost inexhaustible. As in other artistic traditions, the most respected artists are those who, in addition to their perfect technical control of the medium, possess an ability to come close to the culturally defined limits of innovative liberty or even to expand them – who interpret the style in its highest complexity. […] All designs are based on the principles of horror vacui, symmetry and evasive direction of line. The lines are uniformly spaced and interlock loosely, thus creating the impression that they could be compressed onto a much smaller area. 81

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The symmetrical repetitions could be continued endlessly, were they not trimmed and anchored at the edge of the design field. This anchoring in border lines accounts for the static quality of the designs. Secondary lines parallel or accompany the form lines (primary lines), and tertiary filler work is inserted into the spaces between the parallel lines of quene layouts. […] The development of such ‘fashions’ indicates that Shipibo-Conibo design art is a ‘living’, and by no means artificially revived or nostalgic, art.

Environment From excavated pottery vessels and shards, archaeologists have been able to infer cultural continuity on the Ucayali River for more than 1,200 years.11 Thus the Shipibo-Conibo and their ancestors have long inhabited this area, have created similar art, and have hunted, fished and tilled the fertile alluvial soil of the river banks. The abundance of fish and game and the favorable conditions for tropical forest horticulture have supported this dominant, river-oriented tribe of great societal complexity.

References Lathrap, Donald W. (1970) The Upper Amazon (New York: Praeger). ___ (1976) ‘Shipibo-Tourist Art’, in Graburn, Nelson H. H., ed., Ethnic and Tourist Arts:  Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World (Berkeley:  University of California Press), 197–207. Roe, Peter (1979) ‘Marginal Men: Male Artists among the Shipibo Indians of Peru’, Anthropologica, 21(2), 189–221.

2 A Shipibo-Conibo Dance Song – Sung by Julian Fernandez Recorded in Caimito, 25 October 1985, length 6 minutes 40 seconds. Under the vault of the sky The divine towers12 stretch to the horizon The Inca’s parrots13 are standing in a row 82

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My voice is tuneful It all became just like the gods14 wished We have preserved it15 I have preserved it I have raised my wind banner16 In all four directions And in all four directions they have lined up The parrots of the Incas have lined up They are forming an arch And we are singing. The whole world is spinning It is spinning at the horizon17 The parrot that has joined us down here18 Is approaching us19 There are more and more swallows of the Incas20 Even though I don’t know anything[…]21 The large boa towers all stand in a row22 Where the row ends Exactly where the row ends More and more join there23 More and more Inca parrots At its end there are more and more We are dancing and dancing In accordance with the word of our God.24 My banner Is glittering in all four directions We always want to keep it like this: One sings And all repeat25 As the gods wished The cooing of the Pira-Pira bird of the Incas26 reaches me from all directions The divine swallows line up in a row27 We heal their bodies28 83

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Where the line ends We are singing Us, the divine healers29 In the vault of the divine tower The Inca parrots have lined up They are dancing steadily at the top of the tower We want to be jubilant You singing ones You royal ones They have come down to us30 The same number has come down to us As we are here We are talking to the divine healers31 Our words touch them32 They even touch God!33 We will drink Until the end of its hour.34

3 The Shipibo-Conibo Art Style – a Micro-Tradition Passed down from Mother to Daughter […] However, my insistence in viewing Shipibo artists as different from modern artists in degree, and not in kind, does not mean that I believe there is free variation in Shipibo art. General conceptions of style  –  whether a preference for busy, complex designs, or simple, bold layouts, as well as specific aspects of technique such as the modal width of line or size and shape of filler elements  –  are passed down from mother to daughter (or from grandmother to granddaughter, as when an old woman is ‘given’ one of her daughter’s or son’s daughters to act as a general helper in her old age), thus establishing the micro-traditions that Deetz and Longacre assumed to exist. There is no formal verbal instruction; a young girl of 12 or so just sits on the raised slat floor next to her mother and watches her paint a textile with a native plant dye such as astoro. This pigment requires three applications to achieve the desired color, so the mother gives her daughter the job of retracing the main form lines of the design for the 84

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second and third coats. As she follows the original lines, the young girl’s motor movements are guided and she begins to perceive the structure implicit in the design. Shipibo design does have structure. There is a general term for design, quënëa, which also stands for the heavy, thick lines that define the design; there are also specific terms for each of the component parts, such as the small enclosed square, toro, or the ‘x’ and ‘+’ element, ashta, and the zigzag, tsitson. The major compounds constructed from those elements, such as the seminal cross, caros, which forms the basic building block of the style, are also named. Similarly, designs are classified as whole configurations into two primary categories: pontëquënëa, or rectilinear, and mayaquënëa, or curvilinear, designs. The order in the generation of designs also serves to classify the major parts of a design layout. The artist does not draw or sketch ahead of time but carefully composes the main outlines of the symmetrical designs in her head before execution. Then, when the moment of creation has arrived, she takes the characteristic small flat bamboo lath in hand, dips it in the thin pigment, and traces the main form lines, usually starting with a key motif in the centre of the field and then working in from each corner in turn. After the quënëa are done, the artist outlines them with two fine parallel lines. This secondary work is called quëtana. The two stages just described adhere to strict principles of symmetry and pertain to the formal rules of the style. The last stage of execution, the semi-random placement of filler motifs, bëshëcan quënëa, within the quëtana as tertiary elements, belongs to the ad hoc aspect of the style […].

4 The Shipibo-Conibo Art Style – A NineteenthCentury Invention? At least until the mid-nineteenth century, European observers of the Shipibo and of their linguistic and cultural brethren, the Conibo, are remarkably consistent in failing to mention any fancy or otherwise ­notable art work. In the late seventeenth century, the Conibo were claimed to be indolent artisans, preferring to obtain their fancy textiles and other goods by pillaging backwater neighbors (Varese 1968:  55). In terms of vessel shapes, ‘arabesque’ decoration, and manufacturing techniques, the Conibo ceramics observed by Marcoy (1875, II:28–9) 85

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in the late 1840s display only faint similarity to current Shipibo-Conibo products. Our literature search suggests that it is only in the 1850s that ­vessels decorated in clear Shipibo style first appear (see Dellenbach 1932). We can find no independent support of the following assertion recently made by Gebhart-Sayer (1985:143): Until about two hundred years ago, Shipibo and Conibo households were densely covered with geometric designs. It is said that the house posts and beams, the plaited interior of the thatched roof, the box-shaped woven mosquito tents, boats, paddles, kitchen and hunting equipment, finely woven cotton garments of men and women, as well as the heavy beadwork attire, were lavishly decorated designs.

In our experience, this description could apply, at least in part, to the Shipibo of the 1960s or early 1970s. It fully conforms to the range of decorated material culture recorded by Tessmann (1928) earlier in this century. We doubt, however, that Gebhart-Sayer’s Shipibo informants are accurately portraying the world of AD 1785. More likely, they are retelling wistfully the past of parent and grandparent. We believe that it is entirely possible that the Shipibo style […] first crystallized as recently as the last century. One ingredient in this crystallization is the ancient pedigree of Cumancaya geometry. More immediate inspirations are the modular width and colour conventions favored by the Cocama, a point made long ago by Lathrap (1970: 184) […]. Early nineteenth-century Spanish missions, such as Sarayacu, in which Omagua, Cocama, Pano, and Shipibo-Conibo co-resided, provide suitable caldrons for such stylistic amalgamation and innovation. It is interesting in this respect that in his preliminary report on Sarayacu products, Myers […] illustrates a good Cocama style piece but only alludes to one incised design that resembles modern Shipibo-Conibo products. It could be that the ‘Shipibo style’ was not yet born.

References Dellenbach, M. (1932) ‘Céramique des Xeberos (Pérou)’, Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 24, 221–23. Gebhart-Sayer, A. (1985) ‘The Geometric Designs of the Shipibo-Conibo in Ritual Context’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 11(2), 143–75.

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Voices: Dossier of Texts on Shipibo-Conibo Designs Lathrap, D. W. (1970) The Upper Amazon (New York: Praeger). Marcoy, P. (1875) Travels in South America from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean (New York: Scribner Armstrong and Co.) Myers, T. P. (1972) ‘Sarayacu: Archaeological Investigations at a Nineteenth Century Mission Site in the Peruvian Montana’, Proceedings of the 39th International Congress of Americanists, 4, 25–37. Tessmann, G. (1928) Menschen ohne Gott. Ein Besuch bei den Indianers des Ucayali (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schroeder). Varese, S. (1968) La Sal de los Cerros (Lima: Universidad Peruana de Ciencias y Tecnologia).

5 Shipibo-Conibo Design Therapy – Shamans and Designs The geometric designs were, and to some extent are, believed to be units of information received from the incomprehensible spirit world and transformed by the shaman into sensible and useful units of information for his group. For outsiders, it is a deeply impressive experience to watch a ShipiboConibo shamanic healing session. Yet even though they will see many things happening, they will not generally have access to the cognitive ­processes involved, to the ‘things that happen in the minds’ of the ­shamans and the attending villagers, to their background knowledge, their a­ ssociations and connotations. He will find himself in the same situation as the Shipibo-Conibo Indian visiting town to watch a modern Peruvian doctor practice in his clinic. He will see a number of strange objects, he will see the doctor perform his more or less ritualized transactions, he will hear the doctor speak of the invisible originators of disease which only the learned medical specialist is able to perceive, to classify and to manipulate. But he will not, in general, understand the doctor’s thought, his accumulated knowledge and experience or the motivation for his decision making. A brief description of the external events may enhance the reader’s visualization of the healing session. On clear nights, the shaman puts on his tari, the traditional man’s ­garment painted with designs, and takes a seat in the patio of his compound together with some other men who might wish to join him. He waits until the neighbourhood cooking fires and the kerosene lamps are all extinguished, 87

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since the light will hurt his eyes during his ayahuasca35 experience. He ­empties a small cup of the aromatic potion and leans back to receive his vision. Approximately two hours later, the patient is brought to him. The s­ haman makes him comfortable on the raised floor of his house and settles down next to him, together with the relatives of the patient. The shaman starts to smoke and to bring up his quenyon, a powerful gruel-like substance which he carries in his chest and which he brings up into his mouth to suck with it the afflicted body parts. Eventually he starts singing. Clouds of tobacco smoke spiral over the patient, and the shaman beats a fragrant rhythm with his herbal bundle. The song can be heard in most parts of the village, and the people know that the muraya’s song is taking a meandering path through the air to cover the entire neighbourhood, and above all the patient, with exquisite, healthful designs. The setting of the healing séance is expressly aesthetic, involving sight, hearing and smell. The mood is soft and soothing. Both visible and invisible designs are involved in the therapy. Their efficacy depends on their aesthetic propriety, that is, they have to be kikin. This indigenous concept of aesthetics refers to a number of notions of ‘correctness’ and ‘beauty’. Primarily, kikin implies a visual, acoustic or olfactory experience evoked by harmony, symmetry, accurate performance or cultivated refinement and marks a sharp ­contrast to the untamed, unorganized wilderness which surrounds the ­village. But the term is not limited to sensuous experience:  it includes ideational values like subtlety, relevance, appropriateness and cultural correctness. A harmoniously formed and well-painted vessel is kikin, just as is a village kept free from plant growth. […] Finally, kikin refers to the treatment of a sick person by the shaman, if he works in an appropriate, traditional, cultivated and aesthetic Shipibo-Conibo manner, that is, employing songs, designs, fragrance and ritual purity. […] Each case of sickness requires the attendance and assistance of a different set of plant and animal sprits. However, nishi ibo (the master spirit of the ayahuasca vine) is necessarily present in all sessions, since ‘it is his power which is called for’. Nishi ibo projects luminescent geometric figures before the eyes of the shaman shortly before he visits the session ­personally: visions of shining ornamentation which cover everything within the shaman’s sight. With the assistance of his helper spirits, the shaman now begins to read kikin designs from his vision. As soon as the floating network touches his lips and crown, the shaman issues melodies which correspond to the 88

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shiny vision. His song is a result of the design vision, a direct transformation from the visual to the acoustic. The songs are simultaneously seen, heard and sung by nishi ibo, the other attending spirits and the shaman. The shaman thus blends into a choir of spirits, while the villagers listen to his solitary voice. If the patient’s relatives now join into the shaman’s ­singing (whereby their singing necessarily lags slightly behind since most of the songs are not familiar to them), a two-sided choir builds up in which the shaman plays the role of an acoustic hinge. The compelling force of this chorus is directed against the spirits held responsible for the patient’s disease. As voices meander through the air, a second transformation takes place, visible only for the shaman. The song now assumes the form of a geometric pattern, a kikin quene, penetrating the patient’s body and ­settling down permanently. The number of treatments required to complete a healing design depends on the tenacity with which the disease-inflicting spirit is able to fight the design. Generally, a shaman needs three to five treatments of approximately four hours each, during which the spirit incessantly tries to stain or smudge the gradually emerging design with its evil counter-songs and harmful aura. […] The shaman counters these attacks with more singing and helper spirit intervention, and with a number of therapeutic measures applied directly to the patient. During the daytime, the shaman dispenses herbal remedies (of which the Shipibo-Conibo doctors know a great number), steam baths, ablutions, inner purifications (vomiting), blood-circulating lashings with nettles as well as facial and body paintings. […] In its essential parts, this aspect of the Shipibo-Conibo therapeutic belief system may be defined as the application of a spiritual message that is perceived both visually and rhythmically-melodically and is transformed into culturally relevant information. Visual, acoustic and olfactory perceptions are therein bound together and form a synaesthetic body of shamanic cognition.

6 The Story of Sankama – Could He Read or Could He Not? 1. Now I  am going to tell you about some of the old-timers. 2.  In the old days reading (paper) was unknown; not a Piro knew yet how to read. 89

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3. Then there was one who made a beginning, one who was said to be a reader. 4. He was said to know how to read. 5. He said it talked, 6. and he would open a book and read it. 7. I saw him long ago, in my childhood. [...] 22. He was known by that, called Sankama. 23. He was the one who knew how to read. 24. He read the papers 25. that were brought to him. [...] 133. Then some of his […] cousins asked him, ‘What does it say, cousin?’ […] 141. ‘It says that in Pará there is an airplane (a steamer that goes in the sky), 142. and that it is coming here.’ […] 206. ‘[…] some day, the plane will come.’ […] 210. ‘We will see it. Maybe it will come right here.’ 212. We really listened, 213. and believed him. 214. We said, ‘He says there is an airplane. 215. No white has ever told us that, 216. not ever. 217. He’s the only one who has told about the airplane.’ 218. We believed what he said, 219. and paid attention to him. 220. ‘Maybe it will be like that. Maybe we will see it.’ 222. ‘It is ­coming soon’, he said. 223. ‘The airplane. 224. And there will be people in it.’ 225. He didn’t have any way to know that. [...] 228. None of the other old folks knew that a plane was coming. 229. Yes. 230. He’s the one that told about the airplane. 231. So in my childhood I used to wonder, ‘What is an airplane like now?’ 232. I asked him. 233. He was a cousin of mine. 234. ‘Cousin, what is the airplane like?’ 235. ‘It’s like a winged thing’, he said, 236. ‘and it travels 237. in empty air, 238. making a noise like the one that travels on the water’, he said. [...] 275. ‘You folks listen to me, 276. but others belittle me. 277. They say, “Sankama, the ignorant, the liar. 278. He does his lying by reading dirty paper from the outhouse.” 279. They laugh at me, 280. and distort my words all the time. 281. Why should my eyes be like theirs? 282. My eyes are not like theirs. 283. I know how to read the paper. 284. It speaks to me.’ 285. ‘Look at this one now.’ 286. He turned its leaves. 287. ‘See. 288. She speaks to me. 289. The paper has a body; 290. I always see her, cousin’, he said to me. 291. ‘I always see this paper. 292. She has red lips with which she speaks. 293. She has a body with a red mouth, a painted mouth. 294. She has a red mouth.’ [...] 301. He pointed it out to me. 302. ‘Now this’, he said. 303. ‘Look at her. 304. She speaks to me. 305. She speaks. 306. She has a red mouth.’ 307. I stared at it in vain. [...] 90

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314. I  said, ‘Does she, cousin? 315. Does she do that?’, I  said. 316. ‘Yes. 317. Paper does that. 318. That’s why white converses with her every day. 319. Haven’t you seen him? 320. Watch him do that. 321. When the white, our patron, sees a paper, he holds it up all day long, 322. And she talks to him. 323. She converses with him all day. 324. The white does that every day.’ 325. ‘Therefore I also, just a little bit, when I went downriver a long time ago to Pará – I used to go there all the time – I was taught there. 326. I entered a what-do-you-call-it – school.’ [...] 357. ‘Say, I’d like to be able to read this paper too. 358. Please teach me, cousin.’ [...] 360. He said, ‘Yes. 361. I’ll teach you if you want it. 362. You must strictly observe taboos, 363. and not get drunk. 364. Then the paper will enter you’, he said. [...] 423. Again, on another day, I asked him, ‘Cousin, when are you going to teach me?’ 424. He must have been rather drunk. 425. While he was in that condition I coaxed him, ‘Cousin, teach me to read.’ 426. ‘O.K. As you wish. 427. If you want it, you can receive the paper’, he said. 428. Then he said, ‘Come here. 429. I’m going to teach you.’ 430. I went to his side. 431. ‘Come on, cousin’, he said then. ‘Now bow your head. 433. Prepare the crown of your head.’ 434. He blew into his cupped hand and transferred the breath to the crown of my head, 435. clearing his throat. ‘Haxxxx. 435. Haxxx.’ 437. Again he endowed the crown of my head with his breath, 438. and then my back. 439. He gave it to me all over my back. [...] 440. ‘Hxxx. 441. See that. 442. It will enable you to read’, he said to me solemnly. 443. I thought he would teach me to read by means of my eyes, but he drew out his breath and endowed me with it, 444. transferring it to the crown of my head, and to my throat and back. [...] 451. ‘From now on you too observe taboos. 458. Don’t drink masato all the time’, he ordered me severely. [...] 541. That’s why to this day I don’t forget what he said. ‘Some day you also will know how to read’, he said to me. 542. I think of him now. 543. What he said has been exactly fulfilled. 544. His exact words I have carried out. 545. And I have gained it all. [...] 548. He was the first of us to know how to read – maybe. 549. We don’t know. 550. We don’t know what went on in his mind. 551. He was older. 552. He was the first person to explain reading to us. 553. He made us very 91

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happy. 554. And everyone knew his name as the one who knew how to read. 555. How on earth did he know? No one ever saw him being taught. 556. Maybe he was just lying; 557. maybe not.

7 Shipibo-Conibo Aesthetic Therapy – Fact or Fiction? The Shipibo-Conibo36 are a Pano-speaking indigenous group of about 45,000 individuals who dwell on the shores of the Ucayali river and major affluents in the Eastern Peruvian rainforests (Amazon basin). […] Today, most communities are organized in villages of about 100–2,000 inhabitants and beside the previously mentioned subsistence economics, many people work in the extraction industry (wood, koka, oil), artwork p ­ roduction and tourism. The area they live in is easily accessed by airplane, bus, or boat, which provides a good supply of tourists and other visitors compared to any other region of the Amazon lowlands. This is one reason why ‘ethnic identity’ and ‘indigenous traditions’ are very important to many of them. […] The traditional geometric pattern style is often viewed as representation of ayawaska visions. Illius (1987:  168–9) recounts a Shipibo informant’s comparison of a pattern-covered ceramic vessel with the world’s structure as perceived by many ayawaska-drinkers […]. Gebhart-Sayer dedicated a large section of her book on Shipibo-Conibo cosmologies (1987: 170–298) on the relations of these design patterns with ayawaska-related curing, with curing songs and presumed ancient pattern books possessed by this indigenous group. Martin (2005) reports about ‘singing patterns’, ‘woven songs’, ‘healing songs’ and ‘healing patterns’, as presented by his main informant Herlinda Agustín, a Shipibo female traditional healer. The healer related that during nightly curing sessions, ill people were covered with textiles bearing the appropriate ‘healing design’, while she would sing the corresponding ‘pattern song’. Under the influence of ayawaska, she could ‘sing the designs’ and learn new songs through the visualization of certain patterns.37 [… E]thnohistorical research indicates that the use of the hallucinogenic ayawaska brew is not anchored in Shipibo history for a long time.38 Gow (1994:  93)  proposes that ‘ayahuasca shamanism’ (to 92

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use ayawaska in healing and sorcery) has spread from the northern Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Columbian rainforests via Jesuit missions and urban areas and as such has been introduced to the Ucayali region fairly recently. […] Brabec de Mori (n.d.) suggests that the use of ayawaska as a hallucinogenic brew in the Ucayali valley probably dates back to the ‘rubber boom’ migrations between ca. 1865 and 1925. Since around that time, ayawaska has been in use by Shipibo shamans (yobé). However, only the yobé drank it, and the society of ‘ordinary’ Shipibo people refrained from it because they would not want to have anything in common with the feared yobé. Mori Silvano de Brabec confirms that in Shipibo villages, children are not allowed to go close to the yobé’s homes because of their ‘dangerous nature’. This changed when Western scholars (among them Michael Harner and Terence and Dennis McKenna who ventured into Shipibo society and wrote highly popular books) started to do research explicitly dedicated to ‘ayahuasca shamanism’. When Shipibo people noticed that the ayawaska-drinking yobé earned the most attention, and also the ­‘gringos’ drank the brew, ayawaska use was quickly restructured. Many people trained in drinking and administering the brew in order to attract the many drug tourists and young researchers who followed in their footsteps. They adopted a new practice of drinking ayawaska collectively, say; also the patients (tourists) would drink the brew.39 […] It can be concluded that the importance attributed to ayawaska emerged mainly through research on the topic and the following drug tourism. The young researchers and drug tourists (two groups not easily distinguishable) sought ‘ayahuasca shamanism’, and of course found it. When Gebhart-Sayer presented her hypothesis of an ‘aesthetic therapy’ (Gebhart-Sayer 1986) involving patterns, songs, and ayawaska, her book (1987) was not only reflected by Western scholars. There were also many young Shipibo women and men who heard of the hypothesis through the author herself (for example Herlinda Agustín worked with Gebhart-Sayer in the late 1980s)40 or through questions from the following researchers and tourists who had read Gebhart-Sayer’s book. That is why Shipibo women started to tell tourists that their patterns were ayawaska visions and could be ‘sung’. The interconnectedness of pattern art and indigenous medicine – including ayawaska ingestion and curing songs – is a relatively 93

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recent phenomenon. Most Shipibo artesana women and ayahuasquero men are conscious about this. They do not have a moral problem when ‘lying’ to tourists (and researchers) about this fabulous aesthetic therapy. They use it for advertising their art, which actually has different cultural origins, as was shown before. What was said above, however, is the ‘inofficial’ version on history and practice from the Shipibo point of view. The ‘official’ version, as being told to tourists (and researchers) insists on a ‘millennial indigenous tradition’, ‘ancient legacy of the jungle tribes’ and whatsoever sounds good in a buying tourist’s ear. So to say – ever since, the Shipibo have been working with singable healing patterns in a shamanic setting of collective ayawaska ingestion. When looking for ‘Shipibo’ and ‘Ayahuasca’ on the internet, one may end up watching various movies taken by ‘gringos’ and published via YouTube which show evidence of the existing practice  – of drinking a­yawaska ­collectively in order to heal, covering patients with patterned textiles and suggestions of ‘singing the healing patterns’.

Outlook The connection of Shipibo-Konibo arts with medical concepts is very ­subtle. It doubtlessly exists in what we called above the ‘official’ version from a Shipibo perspective. In order to obtain a good market for both selling artwork and attracting drug tourists, many Shipibo ayahuasqueros actually do cover their patients with patterned textiles and several Shipibo women actually do sing ‘pattern songs’ when convincing tourists to buy their art. They also commonly insist that this is the ‘real indigenous tradition of their people’.41 On the other hand, ethnohistorical data shows that the connection of textile art, pattern designs and healing songs caresses historical evidence. Until today, many Shipibo people declare ‘unofficially’ that they are aware of the recent construction of this ‘aesthetic therapy’ and they do not consider it ‘effective’ in medical contexts. They know that this is used as a collective advertisement for Shipibo-Konibo art and ayawaska drinking events. However, this construction slowly but steadily ­transforms into ­reality, because corresponding ‘healing sessions’ or ‘shamanic ­ceremonies’ are held with growing frequency and social impact. As many young Shipibo 94

Voices: Dossier of Texts on Shipibo-Conibo Designs

men (and some women) train in this kind of ‘ayahuasca ­shamanism’ ­without studying other medical techniques, some c­ ulturally less educated (mostly urban) Shipibo today already adopted these a­ dvertisement methods as a ‘historical truth’. History – permanently – is in the making.

References Arevalo, V. (1994) Las plantas medicinales y su beneficio en la salud. Shipibo-Conibo (Medicina Indigena. Lima: AIDESEP). Brabec de Mori, Bernd (n.d.) Tracing Hallucinations. Contributing to an Ethnohistory of Ayawaska Usage in the Peruvian Amazon. In review for publication. [This text has been published since. In (2011) Labate, Beatriz Caiuby, and Henrik Jungaberle, eds, Tracing Hallucinations. Contributing to a Critical Ethnohistory of Ayawaska Usage in the Peruvian Amazon. The Internationalization of Ayahuasca (Zurich: LIT-Verlag), 23–47.] Gebhart-Sayer, A. (1986) ‘Una terápia estética. Los diseños visionarios del ­ayahuasca entre los Shipibo-Conibo’, América Indígena, 46(1), 189–218. ___ (1987) Die Spitze des Bewusstseins. Untersuchungen zu Weltbild und Kunst der Shipibo-Conibo (Münchener Beiträge zur Amerikanistik. Hohenschäft­ larn: Klaus Renner Verlag). Gow, P. (1994) ‘River People:  Shamanism and History in Western Amazonia’, in Thomas, N., and C. Humphrey, eds, Shamanism, History and the State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 90–113. Illius, B. (1987 [1991]) Ani-Shinan:  Schamanismus bei den Shipibo-Conibo (Ost-Peru) (Ethnologische Studien 12. Muenster: Wien. Lit Verlag). LeClerc, F. R. (2003) ‘Des modes de socialisation par les plantes chez les Shipibo-Conibo d’amazonie peruvienne. Une étude des relations entre humains et non-humains dans la construction sociale’ (PhD thesis, Laboratoire d’ethnologie et sociologie comparative, Nanterre, Université Paris). Martin, B. H. (2005) ‘Woven songs of the Amazon (Icaros and Weavings of the Shipibo Shamans)’, conference paper presented at the 50th Annual Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Atlanta, USA, 16–20 November. Tournon, J. (2002) La merma magica. Vida e historia de los Shipibo-Conibo del Ucayali (Lima: CAAAP).

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4 Making Sense of Shipibo-Conibo Designs

This chapter explores the question of how to make sense of the art of the Shipibo-Conibo Indians of the Peruvian Amazon (see Figures 4.1–4.3), a vexed issue that has foxed anthropologists for decades. The discussion will situate the designs in the context of the art of the Amazon region and the interpretive approaches that have historically been applied to these visual traditions. But while related and stylistically similar to much of the art of the region, Shipibo-Conibo designs stand out because of their sophistication, which has brought them to worldwide attention. This chapter reflects on the difficulty of ‘reading’ the designs in relation to larger issues of cultural translation in the field of anthropology, art and the global arena of contemporary visual culture. It examines the extent to which a reconfigured relational aesthetics that has been expanded into culture and encompasses a fuller range of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics can offer a bridging moment between the cultural worlds of the Amazon and the West. The art of the Shipibo-Conibo Indians is considered ‘one of the most complex functioning art styles in the aboriginal New World’.1 It consists of intricate geometric designs applied to ceramic vessels and textiles, and is highly esteemed by art collectors around the globe. The indigenous peoples of the eastern foothills of the Andes and the western Amazon river basin, 96

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Figure 4.1  Shipibo-Conibo Indians in front of a hut with a large chomo which has sectioned areas showing quene and canoa design styles. The Shipibo-Conibo woman on the left is wearing a skirt embroidered with traditional designs. Courtesy of Übersee-Museum Bremen, inventory number 33489.

such as the Piro and Cashinahua, think highly of Shipibo-Conibo art and consider it the most evolved art in the region.2 The Shipibo-Conibo furthermore have successfully adapted their art to the interests of art institutions and collectors worldwide as well as to the tourism in the area.3 Women are the main producers of the art and benefit most from these developments, as the sale of the work, often through indigenous cooperatives, allows them to generate much-needed cash income. There are even some instances of individual fame to report, such as Anastasia Fernandez Maynas, a Shipibo-Conibo artist from San Francisco – from a small community near the eastern Peruvian market city Pucallpa – who established a worldwide reputation for the quality of her ceramics.4 Apart from institutional ­collections in the United States5 and in Germany,6 private collectors have also taken an interest in Shipibo-Conibo artefacts, and Shipibo-Conibo art is exhibited on a regular basis around the globe. A brief search on Google reveals many sites offering Shipibo ceramics for sale.7 Yet while in-depth research into Shipibo-Conibo art has been carried out, the meaning of the designs continues to puzzle researchers. 97

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The debate about the meaning of the designs occurred within the field of anthropology, which historically deferred to art history’s ­expertise when discussing visual objects in the field, borrowing its terminology and approaches. Western conceptions of art have therefore set the tone for anthropology’s dealings with indigenous visual production,8 but these approaches no longer reflect current modalities in Western art theory. For the most part, anthropology has not kept abreast of the changes in art history and visual culture that have occurred since the initial incorporation of art historical conceptions into anthropology. The ­anthropologist Barbara Keifenheim who has taken a keen interest in the pattern art of the Cashinahua Indians and has also conducted fieldwork among the Shipibo-Conibo, is deeply critical of the iconographic-semantic approach derived from Western art that continues to be most commonly used in Amazonian art ethnology.9 The anthropologist Peter Gow, who ­studies the Piro people of the River Bajo Urubamba in eastern Peru, shares Keifenheim’s concern. He characterizes the iconographic-semantic approach as a method that treats designs as embodiments of ‘representational meaning, in the manner of writing systems’.10 For him this approach is inappropriate in the Amazon context and he is not surprised that it has not delivered a framework for making sense of the designs. Despite the lack of success overall, there has been little rethinking of method. This is even more surprising because the discipline of anthropology has dramatically improved its visual acuity on other fronts. For instance, its sub-discipline, visual anthropology, explores the cultural and historical specificity of human vision.11 It has developed from a marginal pursuit within the discipline in the 1990s to a vibrant research area,12 and has pioneered the use of visual media such as film, video and p ­ hotography as modes of ethnographic research, challenging anthropology’s reliance on the textual. The anthropology of the senses, another sub-discipline that emerged around this time, studies cultural difference in sensory p ­ erception. It emphasizes that sensual orders are deeply informed by, and need to be examined in relation to, the culturally specific perceptual worlds with which they are connected.13 Increasingly interdisciplinary, this anthropological sub-field draws on discussions in the fields of phenomenology, ­psychology, sociology, geography and so forth, and offers ‘renewed ways of 98

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thinking about the relationship between sensory categories and sensory perception’.14 But despite these lively discussions and innovations, anthropology’s concern with the visual stays focused on the exploration of human behaviour and perception within specific cultural contexts and does not consider art as central to its remit. Anthropology’s visual turn, therefore, so far has not considered indigenous visual cultures in relation to the larger spheres of art. The questions asked of the visual material encountered in the field remain largely within the bounds of the cultural specificity of fieldwork scenarios. Yet visual anthropology has instigated fascinating new departures that blur the boundaries between ethnography and contemporary art practice and has generated groundbreaking and compelling work in this area.15 The disciplinary lack of interest in the question of indigenous visual culture in relation to art per se reflects issues that the anthropologist George Marcus has raised. He points out that anthropology as a discipline has not yet acknowledged that the Malinowskian fieldwork model of the lone ethnographer working in bounded communities situated in a temporal and spatial ‘over-there’ no longer represents the contemporary, coeval fieldwork situation. Indigenous art thus no longer exists in an isolated ­bubble of pre-contact culture but is marked by histories of contact through conquest, colonialism and missionization. It furthermore participates in an increasingly pro-active way in the contemporary world. And as the world continues to globalize, so will its arts. The question of how to approach these forms of art making in a way that bypasses dominant Eurocentric preconceptions is therefore ever more urgent. It will be explored in what follows with a primary focus on Shipibo-Conibo designs but discussions of the art of the neighbouring Piro and Cashinahua with related art styles will also be drawn upon.

The Shipibo-Conibo Design Language The discussion of Shipibo-Conibo designs is largely based on the work of Angelika Gebhart-Sayer who informs us that the designs belong to the realm of female activity and consist of abstract, loosely geometric, 99

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Figure  4.2  Chomo with three-partite design areas that represent a cosmological scheme: the undecorated base represents the underworld, the middle section with the bold canoa designs the everyday world humans inhabit, and the upper section with the fine quene designs the realm of the spirits and the divine.

regularly spaced patterns applied to ceramic vessels and textiles. The design language consists of two basic elements:  fine linear compositions, or quene and block-like compositions in bold lattices, or canoa (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). Both types of designs are developed in symmetrical repetitions organized in distinct areas marked by ‘boundary’ lines. Vessels carry several design motifs and types16 that are developed in one of these areas. The designs are always uniformly spaced and would extend in all directions if not brought to a halt by demarcation lines. The designs, according to Gebhart-Sayer, are composed of ‘form lines’, and secondary and ‘filler lines’ (see Figure 4.3). She points out that this is her own terminology based on her observation of how the designs are applied17 and that the form line is the decisive element that is established first. Then parallel or secondary lines are drawn on either side of the form line, and the remaining space is filled with ‘filler lines’. She also relates that design complexity, a long form line as well as symmetry and uniformity of spacing, are highly valued and that the Shipibo-Conibo differentiate between menin, the craft side of their 100

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Figure 4.3  Shipibo-Conibo woman in the process of drawing a so-called ‘filler line’ that follows the thicker ‘form line’ on a ceramic food bowl. Photo by Bruno Illius. Courtesy of Übersee-Museum Bremen, inventory number 33839.

art work, and shinan, its creative aspect, and expect an accomplished artist to master both. Gebhart-Sayer’s central research interest is the question of how to interpret the designs. She reports that many of the designs are named, but that these designations are purely descriptive. She sees the naming of the designs as a terminological imposition on designs that enable everyday discussions of design issues but do not reference symbolic meaning.18 She stresses the purely formal-aesthetic character of the indigenous design t­ erminology and argues that the design tradition thrives on the invention of new forms within general stylistic parameters and is expressive of a joy in creation. She also points out that this formal-aesthetic dimension tends to get overlooked in anthropological discussions due to the discipline’s symbolic over-eagerness. Yet despite this observation and her view that Western approaches to the discussion of indigenous art are symbolically overbearing, GebhartSayer also hypothesizes that ‘the intricate design art of the ShipiboConibo Indians of eastern Peru may once have been a codified s­ ystem of meanings’.19 She further speculates that the latter, even if ‘not a veritable writing system’, may well have ‘constituted a graphic device 101

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comprising symbolic, semantic units, in perhaps a m ­ nemotechnical 20 arrangement employed in ritual context’. Gebhart-Sayer supports this assumption with indigenous assertions that Shipibo-Conibo ­‘grandparents used to know’21 about the designs. She further cites as ­evidence late eighteenth-century reports of indigenous design books said to have contained ciphers with graphic elements as further evidence based on the account of the Franciscan missionary Father Girbal who claimed to have seen designs with hieroglyph-like filler work assumed to operate like decipherable signs.22 She also highlights a ‘Pleiades motif ’ which consists of seven crosses in evidence of an assumed formerly existing extensive astronomic complex of meaning,23 and refers to genealogic,24 cartographic25 and sexual references formerly embedded in the designs, which older women reportedly still have an inkling of.26 In further support of her semantic supposition, she refers to the work of Bruno Illius who points to the close link between song and patterned designs as part of shamanic practice.27 The assumption is that the designs could represent a musical score and hence could be part of a notation system. Musical analysis supports the assumed link of designs and song, and confirms a direct structural correlation between the patterns and the songs.28 But Gebhart-Sayer also proposes an earlier, linear mode of reading the designs in a shamanic context. The evidence she cites emerged in an interview with the shaman José Santos who, during the session, followed the meandering configurations of a design with his finger. This gesture was seen to suggest an earlier sequential, motif-by-motif reading of the designs.29 She backs up her argument about the existence of a former semantic code with pottery shards that attest that Shipibo-Conibo art goes back for more than 1,200 years.30 This view has, however, been challenged by anthropologists Deboer and Raymond. Based on close analyses of pottery shards, they argue that the Shipibo-Conibo art style emerged as late as the mid-nineteenth ­century around Spanish missionary stations which provided ‘suitable ­caldrons for […] stylistic amalgamation and innovation’31 as Indians of different ­cultures lived there together. This perspective poses a serious challenge to Gebhart-Sayer’s hypothesis that a semantic code once existed, because if it were of a later date, it is unlikely to have been completely forgotten in 102

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the relatively short time of a century. This begs the question how we are to understand Gebhart-Sayer’s confidence that such a semantic code once existed and whether her assumption of the existence of such a code constitutes an imposition of ‘traditional’ Western epistemologies to the Peruvian field.32 Gebhart-Sayer, as we have seen, critically reflects on what she refers to as the Western tendency of symbolic determinism. She makes a point of using the indigenous language to conduct her research in order to be closer to native modes of thought and expression, and categorically states that she is not interested in Western aesthetic analysis. She further argues that the formal-aesthetic dimension of the designs is an overlooked area of study. Yet she also states that it is a misconception to see the designs as merely decorative. For her, this is a Western misreading which she counters by emphasizing that the designs have meaning, insisting on their cultural value and significance within an indigenous cultural context. Should her insistence on the former existence of such a code hence be seen as a reaction to a Eurocentric decorative premise which devalues the designs as inferior since they do not carry meaning? In other words should we understand her semantic preoccupation as a response to the limitations of academic paradigms and Western aesthetics? Gebhart-Sayer certainly is invested in the defence of the designs’ meaning. She is at pains to argue for an Indian-centric approach to the study of Shipibo-Conibo culture and presents the famous Shipibo-Conibo ­chomos, large decorated ceramic vessels, in support of the symbolic fullness of the design language (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The average chomo has a diameter of 70 centimetres in its widest area. Its average height is 60 centimetres, but records show unique specimens with a height of 1.50 metres. The chomo is an emotionally charged object in Shipibo-Conibo culture and many songs speak of its cultural significance. As both Gebhart-Sayer and Illius point out, the three-tiered decoration of the chomo is said to reflect the basic make-up of the Shipibo-Conibo worldview.33 The undecorated base, which is dug into the ground to give the pot stability, represents the watery underworld where dangerous spirits roam. The middle section of the chomo shows a bold lattice design and represents the terrestrial sphere of everyday life. The third section is covered in finely drawn, intricate designs that reflect the delicate patterning of higher heavenly spheres (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2).34 103

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Gebhart-Sayer, however, warns that this cosmological scheme should be considered a basic model only. She explains that informants offer a plurality of views of how the heavenly spheres and the middle regions of everyday activity are constituted.35 She also highlights the flexibility and tolerance of Shipibo-Conibo conceptions and explains that the Shipibo-Conibo do not have a standardized system of knowledge acquisition, but that worldviews are assimilated in an informal, non-verbal, manner that is never directly instructive manner and is based on personal experience. Individuals therefore collage their own beliefs based on references picked up from conversations, songs and mythic stories. Differences in cosmic interpretations are also never explicitly discussed or investigated on a meta-level and the Shipibo-Conibo acknowledge that interpretations necessarily vary because of differing individual levels of insight. According to Gebhart-Sayer, Shipibo-Conibo culture thus acknowledges the personal nature of ‘truth’ as a matter of course.36 In the anthropological literature, this multivalence is, however, often seen as an indication of the inferiority of the cultures in question. Gebhart-Sayer critiques this view. She defends the value of Shipibo-Conibo culture and argues for an Indian-centric perspective. She holds that these differences should not be seen as a cultural lack of coherence, but should be accepted as part of Shipibo-Conibo culture. She also rejects c­ omparative analysis of cosmologies as verificatory procedure:  this for her does not do justice to an indigenous perspective. And she points out that the very ­fluidity and multivalence of Shipibo-Conibo conceptions has allowed for their cultural survival and enables an easy integration of ‘foreign’ elements into existing cultural frameworks.37 She further stresses that Shipibo Indians avoid simplistic explanations and consider them as indicative of a lack of mental sophistication, which they call as shina. This key term in Shipibo-Conibo culture references a whole cluster of associations linked to mind and mental activity such as ‘thinking’, ‘consciousness’, ‘creativity’ and ‘imagination’, but also signifies ‘awakeness’, a ‘good memory’ and general smartness. Further approximate translations suggested in the literature are ‘mental alertness’, ‘creative imaginative perception’ and ‘perceptive thinking’. But according to Illius, none of these translations quite captures the complexity of shina, which in Shipibo-Conibo culture subsumes ‘visionary thinking’ related to shamanic 104

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cognition and constitutes a perceptual dimension not integral to Western conceptions of mind and thought. But shina is linked to artistic activity as well as shamanic journeying because creative achievement, that is, the generation of new designs, is seen to require high levels of imagination.38 According to Gebhart-Sayer, shina enhancement needs to be recognized as the most central concern of Shipibo-Conibo life and must be taken into consideration when discussing the multivalence of Shipibo-Conibo worldviews.

Patterned Perceptions In defence of her semantic hypothesis, Gebhart-Sayer draws on a further context: the geometric shapes reportedly perceived during ayahuasca hallucinations. These patterns are referred to as phosphenes or entoptic phenomena in the scientific literature and are thought to be related to the design tradition. The Brooklyn chemistry professor Dr Gerald Oster explored these and declared them a physiological phenomenon of the human body that can occur spontaneously, especially when individuals are deprived of visual stimulation for a length of time. According to Oster, inner perceptions of geometric patterns can be induced by rubbing one’s eyeballs, through the ingestion of drugs or through electrical stimulation in a lab setting. These ‘subjective images, independent of an external light source’39 were thought to ‘reflect the neural organization of the visual pathway’ and seen to ‘provide a means of studying the exquisite functional organization of the brain’.40 And as these shapes are thought to ‘originate within the eye and brain’ they were declared ‘a perceptual phenomenon common to all mankind’.41 Based on this scientific theory, the anthropologist Reichel-Dolmatoff argued a close correlation between phosphenes identified in lab settings and indigenous design motifs of the Tukano and Desana Indians of the Amazon lowlands (see Figure  4.4).42 For him these entoptic perceptions constitute elementary forms that have provided artistic inspiration across time, and explain the widespread use of similar motifs in ‘petroglyphs and pictographs of the region and areas far beyond it’.43 His linking of phosphene theory to Amazon design languages launched a new departure in discussions of Amazon art. Gebhart-Sayer, for example, declared that the designs perceived during shamanic visions of the Desana Indians, as 105

Figure  4.4 The Princeton scientist Max Knoll carried out extensive research on the electrical and chemical (mescaline, psilocybin and LSD) stimulation of ­phosphene phenomena. Knoll and his team isolated fundamental shapes found in phosphene patterns argued by some to underpin the world’s design languages. This chart compares Knoll’s phosphene shapes with the design elements of the Tukano Indians.

Making Sense of Shipibo-Conibo Designs

described by Reichel-Dolmatoff,44 ‘coincide in all aspects with descriptions of Shipibo-Conibo visionary experience. Hence we may assume that the graphic perceptions are a phosphenic retina function triggered by the alkaloids of the drug.’45 The phosphene hypothesis had far-reaching implications. As these shapes were considered to be reflective of human physiology rather than true visual experiences, researchers concluded that the reported shamanic perceptions of geometric shapes by Amazon Indians constitute a cultural overlay over a biological phenomenon. Indigenous descriptions of these experiences as communications with the spirit world were subsequently considered cultural (mis)interpretation of organic occurrences and seen as proof of Indian naiveté.46 This view generated a paradoxical situation. Anthropologists on the one hand gathered detailed considerations of all aspects of Amazon design culture, from the preparation of clays and glazes to various ­hypotheses on the meaning of the designs, and diligently recorded ­shamanic beliefs, detailing descriptions of shamanic sessions, visions, cosmologies, ­conceptualizations of nature spirits and trance experiences. Yet, due to the consensus that the origin of the design cultures lay in p ­ atterned ­retinal reactions to hallucinogenic drugs, the perceptual worlds of Amazon ­indigenous cultures were on the whole not considered as subjects of anthropological exploration. Phosphene theory also shifted the issue of the lost semantic code. As indigenous visual culture was now seen to be rooted in misguided cultural interpretations of phosphene phenomena, their visual worlds were thought to signal an image-based rather than abstract mode of cognition considered a lower level of cultural development. For example Gebhart-Sayer frames indigenous figurative thinking such as shamanic interpretations of ‘retinal experiences’ as metaphorical cognitive modes, which relate images to experiences by analogic processes representative of non-discursive modes of thought. This pictorial modus operandi was declared a typically Indian way of reducing sensual overload by creating coherence and hence meaning, and seen as fundamentally different from causal Western cognitive modes.47 The reported experiences and visions during shamanic trances were subsequently framed as visualization processes that integrate religious and medical ideas and are translated via psychoactive stimulation into sensory 107

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and emotionally available forms.48 This understanding also explained the central place of pattern art in Amazon culture. Designs were agreed to suffer from ‘semantic depletion’ but were also acknowledged to signify tribal identity in a non-specific, overall manner. Further concepts seen to inhere in Shipibo-Conibo designs, much like the art of the neighbouring peoples, were the contrast between the wild and the cultivated and the difference between one’s own ethnicity and the identity of other Indians. The designs were thus seen to play a central integrative and emotional role in the symbolization of core cultural values. They were argued to provide transformational, associative channels of meaning able to bridge the underlying dualism of the often threatening visible and invisible realms of force that Shipibo-Conibo Indians are required to negotiate in their daily lives. The Shipibo-Conibo world was thus framed as categorically ­different from Western culture and the Indians were seen to live in a dangerous world of chaotic force they can only master through the illusion of order and control that the designs offer. Unlike Western culture, Amazon Indians were thought to have no real control over nature and this ‘vulnerability’ was seen to signal their civilizational inferiority. Phosphene theory therefore led to Gebhart-Sayer’s positing of an indigenous pictorial mode of thinking that works in an analogue rather than a semiotic manner. However, when thought through, this hypothesis constitutes a counter argument to her proposition of the former existence of a semantic way of reading the designs: if there was an earlier sequential reading of the designs that now has been replaced by a pictorial mode of cognition, would this not indicate a fundamental shift in the indigenous mode of existence (which seems unlikely)? Or did both modes exist in parallel and only one has survived to the present?

Design Therapy Gebhart-Sayer’s conviction that the designs can be read in a semantic manner hinge on a further context that she presents: an aesthetic-therapeutic application of patterns rooted in the shamanic practice of ayahuasca trance. According to her informants, the presence of disease is revealed to the shaman by ‘bad’ or partially erased designs in the patient’s body that are visible to the shaman with his ‘ayahuasca eyes’. Replacing the harmful 108

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or broken design pattern in the patient’s body with ‘good’ designs is key to the healing process. If the procedure is successful, the patient will recover from the illness. But if the new designs do not hold even after repeated treatments, the shaman will not be able to help the patient.49 According to the anthropological literature, the shaman receives the invisible designs he uses in the healing sessions from his spirit helpers who ‘project luminescent geometric figures’ visible only to the shaman. It is the task of the shaman to interpret the designs as they flash up against the night sky. The shapes are described as pulsing, floating, undulating, shining and fragrant patterns that are said to cover ‘everything within the shaman’s sight’.50 According to Gebhart-Sayer, the shaman also translates the designs into song and the ‘songs are simultaneously seen, heard and sung by the ayahuasca master spirit, the other attending spirits and the shaman’,51 while for the villagers only the voice of the shaman is audible. Songs are sung in quick succession during the entire length of the session and the ­shaman must follow the songs of the spirits he hears (or sees)52 as closely as ­possible not to lose their therapeutic power. Gebhart-Sayer also informs us that when the shaman moves from diagnosis to treatment, a further transformation occurs. Now the shaman’s design song ‘assumes the form of a geometric pattern’ with the designs ‘penetrating the patient’s body and settling down permanently’53 if the session is successful. It is this reported shamanic design therapy that lies at the heart of Gebhart-Sayer’s conviction that the designs can be ‘read’. She, like most of the anthropological community at the time, interpreted this reference to readability in terms of an iconographic mode of reading the designs. The news of the design therapy electrified the scholarly community who redoubled their efforts to ‘crack the code’ which clearly seemed to exist, as shamans were able to read the messages inherent in visionary designs. The mystique at the root of the Shipibo-Conibo art style further grabbed the popular imagination and fuelled a wave of tourism to the Amazon. Yet despite these concerted efforts, no further details about a semantic reading of the designs could be ascertained and, over time, anthropological interest in Shipibo-Conibo designs waned. More recently, however, the anthropologist Bernd Brabec de Mori – who married a Shipibo woman he met in the field – took up the issue again. His insider status gave him access to information not otherwise available. 109

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He revealed Shipibo-Conibo aesthetic therapy as a story invented by the Indians to ‘present a “more interesting” medicine to the visitors by ­merging art, music and plant drugs’54 that was eagerly taken up by the ­researchers passing through their villages. He furthermore argues that ayahuasca appeared only relatively recently in the Shipibo-Conibo community, probably some time between 1865 and 1925, which discredits the hypothesis of a long-standing Shipibo-Conibo design tradition and the existence of a long-forgotten semantic code rooted in ayahuasca visions. He also reports that taking ayahuasca was initially a marginal pursuit by shamans, kept at arm’s length by the Shipibo-Conibo community. However, this changed with the arrival of Western scholars, ‘among them Michael Harner and Terence and Dennis McKenna’,55 keen to explore ‘ayahuasca shamanism’. This gringo enthusiasm gave shamans a great deal of prestige in their communities and spurred a wave of interest in ‘training and administering the brew in order to attract the many drug tourists and young researchers who followed’.56 He also relates that Gebhart-Sayer’s hypothesis of an aesthetic design therapy was absorbed with great interest, not just by Western scholars and drug tourists but also by ‘young Shipibo women and men who heard of the hypothesis through the author herself ’57 or deduced it through the questions asked by the next wave of ‘researchers and tourists who had read Gebhart-Sayer’s book’.58 According to Brabec, the Shipibo-Conibo continue to perpetuate this theory as advertisement for their art even though they know and readily admit within their own circles that it is fabricated. Brabec also reports that in keeping with the theory, many shamans now ­literally cover their patients with designs by placing patterned indigenous textiles over them during shamanic sessions. Yet, according to him, they concede in private that the medical efficacy of this design therapy is dubious. He also reports that this theory, which emerged through the anthropological encounter of Western researchers and the indigenous population, is now shaping a new tradition. As Brabec informs us it ‘slowly but steadily transforms into reality, because corresponding “healing sessions” or “shamanic ceremonies” are held with growing frequency and social impact’ and are adopted especially by ‘culturally less educated (mostly urban) Shipibo today’59 as historical truth. But if ‘aesthetic therapy’ is fallacious, along with the associated claim that the designs can be read by the shaman and hence be understood and decoded, where does this leave the question of how to 110

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read the designs? Can the link between the designs and shamanic practice be sustained even if the pattern-based therapeutic theory is not feasible?

The Woman with Painted Lips Discussions of the pattern art of neighbouring tribes with related ­shamanic practices and design traditions will be explored in what follows to address these questions. The literature reveals that anthropologists working on related material cultures equally link the pattern art they encounter to shamanic perceptions but stop short of arguing for a medicinal ­connection. The anthropologist Peter Gow, for instance, writes about the neighbouring Piro Indians and points out that the Piro design system has clear ‘affinities with those of the Shipibo-Conibo people’.60 He reports that the Indians in the region agree that the Piro make beautiful designs but that they think the work of the Shipibo-Conibo to be superior to Piro art due to the greater complexity and sophistication of the designs.61 Gow also links Piro designs to hallucinogenic trance visions but makes a case for an indigenous, image-based way of making sense of the world that differs from Gebhart-Sayer’s propositions. In his article ‘Could Sangama Read?’62 Gow interprets a story about Sangama, the first Piro who reportedly could read, which for Gow offers a key to the question of how to read indigenous designs. The story was recorded by the missionary Esther Matteson and was recounted around 1948 by the Piro Moran Zumaeta, one of the first literate Piro and bilingual school teachers. The events of this story occurred between 1912 and 1920. It relates how a Piro called Sangama taught Zumaeta to read. Sangama claimed to have ‘learnt to read in school’, an unlikely claim since it was not common at that time to educate Indians. According to Zumaeta, Sangama demonstrated his reading skills by holding a newspaper in the manner of a ‘white man’ but described it as a woman with red lips speaking to him. When Zumaeta protested that he could not see a woman but only a newspaper, Sangama insisted that she was there, that speaking to her is the way to read a newspaper. He explained: When the white, our patron, sees a paper, he holds it up all day long, and she talks to him. She converses with him all day long. The white does that every day. Therefore I also, just a little bit,

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Encounters Beyond the Gallery when I went downriver a long time ago to Para […] I was taught there. I entered a […] school. […] A teacher sent for me. That’s how I know.63

Highlighting the unlikelihood of anyone teaching Peruvian Indians to read at this time, Gow draws attention to Sangama’s description of how he read: talking to a woman with painted lips. He comments that ‘the most remarkable features of Sangama’s account of reading, at least for a Western person, is that he does not treat the graphic components of writing as “representations” or “symbols” of words’.64 The story rather spells out that Sangama experiences the newspaper ‘directly as a person who speaks’.65 For Gow this non-representational approach can be explained by Sangama’s transference of metaphors drawn from shamanic practice. He points out that ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic drug that induces shamanic visions, is frequently referred to as the body of ‘ayahuasca mama’, and that Sangama’s claim that his eyes are ‘not like theirs’ are a reference to seeing ‘through the eyes of ayahuasca’66 Gow further explains that the ‘onset of ayahuasca hallucinations is marked by the appearance of rapidly shifting fields of brightly coloured designs’,67 whereas when the trance is at its height, figurative visions prevail.68 For Gow, this transformation of geometric designs to full-bodied visions provides the framework for the indigenous approach to ­‘writing’. He argues that from a Piro perspective, the covering of surfaces with motifs is invariably understood as a mere preliminary stage to an e­ mbodied spirit who directly addresses the trancing drinker.69 Gow therefore interprets the story of Sangama as a shamanic approach to reading envisioned as ‘a transformation of paper, from a surface covered with “design” into a corporeal woman who speaks to him and reveals information’.70 He points to a fundamental difference between Western and Amazon Indian modes of referencing knowledge: whereas in the West, writing encodes speech represented by an alphabetical code which composes words and meanings in an additive mode, in the Indian context, those who know how to ‘read’ have the ‘eyes’ which allow them to see the printed page as the woman with the painted mouth and are able to converse with her. Or, as Gow puts it, ‘the paper is the manifestation of a woman who bears messages’.71 112

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Based on this understanding of the fundamental difference between approaches to modes of ‘reading’, Gow is not surprised that a semanticiconographic approach to Shipibo-Conibo, Piro and other indigenous design languages in the region has not delivered results. For Gow, the designs are not concerned with representational or semantic content but with the ­visual ­control of surfaces. The surface for him is thus not merely a substrate for graphic elements that are the main signifiers, but constitutes an important design element in its own right. He argues that the successful adaptation of a design to a complex surface is considered the source of its beauty, while failing to integrate the design and surface is considered ‘ugly’. For him the designs therefore signify the power to transform, which in his view explains why individual design elements hold no interest for the Piro. And as Ucayali art,72 according to Gow, emphasizes the status of the painted surface, the Indians locate the power of writing not in the individual characters, but in the material they are inscribed on: the book or the paper. Ultimately therefore for Gow a mutual misunderstanding is playing out with regard to how designs or graphic elements placed on surfaces signify. He states that while Westerners have searched the graphic component of Ucayali art in the vain pursuit of a semantic key, the Ucayali people chose the other pole of the relationship […] and searched the plastic component of European writing for an explanation of its power […]73

For Gow, the question of the semantic code therefore represents a projection of Western cultural assumptions onto Ucayali art, while the Indians in turn transpose their transformative approach to designs to the act of reading the newspaper. This observation introduces a new perspective to the discussion of the designs. It highlights the anthropological premise of cultural translatability and brings the issue of cultural mistranslation into view, which for Gow explains a key aspect of the difficulty of making sense of Ucayali art. His interpretation thus draws attention to the fact that translative encounters are fraught with difficulties and generate misunderstandings. Areas that culturally do not signify are also frequently glossed over in such ­encounters and reflect the limitations of prevalent preconceptions, circumstances that need to be reckoned with in informed intercultural encounters. 113

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Cultural Translation’s Double-Coded Third Gow, despite raising this important issue, limits this observation to his work on Piro designs and does not reflect on the conditions of ­cultural translation for anthropological enquiry. The cultural theorist Sarat Maharaj, however, has examined the conditions of cultural translation in great detail. He asks us to recognize the existence of the ‘untranslatable’ or inevitable residue of translation and wonders whether it can be voiced at all, and if so how ‘the leftover inexpressibles of translation’74 can be articulated. Yet for Maharaj the recognition of translation’s predicaments and limitations does not absolve us from the arduous work of translation. He points out that South Africa’s apartheid regime adopted a perspective of ‘untranslatability’ and ‘projected the impossibility of translation, of transparency, to argue that self and other could never translate into or know each other’.75 This in turn led to the institutionalization of ‘a radical sense of ethnic and cultural difference and separateness’.76 But while apartheid with its insistence on separate ‘pure’ spaces constitutes an extreme manifestation of cultural difference as untranslatability, for the artist and cultural critic Rasheed Araeen, multiculturalism harbours similar dangers as it also emphasizes separateness and difference at the expense of a cultural rapprochement. As Araeen explains, the ‘creation of a separate ethnic minority arts category has created cultural bantustans, a cultural apartheid, and has harmful effects as it does not integrate these c­ ultures’.77 Araeen thus holds this limiting understanding of multiculturalism responsible for the marginalization of debates around cultural difference, which disavows the relevance of marginal cultures for the mainstream. He is also highly critical of the creation of separate and special realms for ‘alterity’ in the art world, which in his view need to be plunged into translation. These reflections on the conditions of cultural encounter, difference and translation offer a new perspective on Gebhart-Sayer’s insistence on a semantic reading of the designs. The question now arises whether this hypothesis needs to be recognized as an effort in cultural translation rather than a projection of Eurocentric perceptions, however problematic her hypothesis of a semantic way to read the designs may be. In other words, should we credit Gebhart-Sayer’s semantic proposition presented in the 114

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face of the claimed fundamental difference of Indian modes of cognition as a limited but nonetheless venerable effort to engage in translation and hence make a relational effort rather than posit the designs as indicative of untranslatable difference? Maharaj offers further insights here as for him acts of cultural translation not only leave ‘residues’ but also carve out double-coded space in-between cultures. He emphasizes that there is creativity at play when different languages, systems of thought, and manners of meaning meet in translation. For him the translative encounter ‘cooks up’ a third, a hybrid in-between, as ‘the construction of meaning in one does not square with that of another’.78 But according to Maharaj, this newly created ‘in-between’ not only constitutes a creative fashioning in response to the differences to be bridged, but also represents translation’s failure, ‘something that falls short of the dream-ideal of translation as a “transparent” passage from one idiom to another, from self to other’.79 For Maharaj it is translation’s tension, its double-coding, which needs to be conceptually acknowledged and maintained, a process that requires ‘safe-guarding its volatile tension, its force as a double-voicing concept’.80 Seen from this perspective, Gebhart-Sayer’s report of a Shipibo-Conibo ‘aesthetic therapy’ that emerged from the encounter between Western researchers and Shipibo-Conibo Indians no longer registers as a cultural fabrication or make-belief, but can now be seen to demonstrate the creative potential and failure of cultural encounters representative of cultural translation’s double-coded ‘third’. The invention of ‘aesthetic therapy,’ ­furthermore, needs to be recognized as an act of empowerment on the part of the indigenous peoples who actively participated in fashioning these stories and thus turned the curiosity of the anthropologists and other ‘gringos’ who traipsed through the jungle to their advantage. Such participatory cultural fashionings and the empowerment they represent constitute an important, frequently encountered aspect of translative encounters. There are, for example, many reports of how eagerly and actively Indians absorbed the anthropological material penned on the basis of the information they themselves had provided. Antonio Guzman, the informant of the prominent anthropologist Reichel-Dolmatoff, thus not only attentively studied the anthropological literature on Amazon cultures, but is also reported to have given seminars in anthropology.81 In a similar vein 115

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Bruno Illius reports that the Shipibo-Conibo community he worked with took a keen interest in his texts and that he had his publications translated into Spanish for the Indians to read and approve, thus acknowledging their role as co-producers. He also relates how eagerly they embraced his framing of their worldview on the basis of the chomo which they in turn used to explain their art in the 2002 exhibition in Lima Una Ventana hacia el Infinito. Arte Shipibo-Conibo (A Window to Infinity. The Art of the Shipibo-Conibo).82 The question of how to read Shipibo-Conibo designs therefore needs to take the phenomenon of cultural translation into account and reflect on how the fieldwork situation and the conceptual frameworks that engage in such encounters interact and inflect the knowledges that are created. It must also be noted that the recognition of translation’s misadventures does not absolve culture-crossing travellers and researchers from continuing with translative efforts as they may yet yield more appropriate results. If one were, for example, to acknowledge Gebhart-Sayer’s insistence on a semantic reading of Shipibo-Conibo designs as an effort in translation that demonstrates the limitations of the conceptual frameworks engaged and hence speaks to the thorniness of such translative endeavours, this recognition does not limit the field. Quite the contrary: it invites further translative perspectives as such accounts are now no longer understood as veridic statements that resolve questions or represent cultures ‘once and for all’, but as translative approximations that will inevitably be partial and flawed, even if high levels of translative rapprochement have been achieved. Anthropologist Barbara Keifenheim, whose work adds an ­ important further dimension to the discussion of how to read Shipibo-Conibo ­ designs, is a case in point. Based on her work on the Cashinahua Indians in Eastern Peru, she developed an alternative perspective on Amazon Indian pattern art that foregrounds affectivity and performativity, a perspective obscured by the prevalent iconographic approach. The Cashinahua have a distinctive design tradition that, similar to the Shipibo-Conibo, is an exclusively female affair. Women are held in high esteem for their patterns but the designs are less complex than those of Shipibo-Conibo art. They mainly consist of a small number of basic motifs composed according to a limited number of rules. She cites meandering hooks (or geometric curls), rhombi, triangles, squares, wavy lines and 116

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Figure 4.5  Cashinahua design, example of a seamless transition of one design to another.

zigzags as core motifs, and underscores the negative–positive principle as a fundamental compositional principle (see Figure 4.5).83 A further characteristic of Cashinahua designs is that they often show a seamless transition between patterns. Keifenheim disagrees with Gow’s proposition that Piro designs and, by implication, Amazon pattern art are concerned with the visual control of surfaces. She holds that they rather are ‘surface-surpassing’ in a manner which ‘opens perception to a larger space’ suggestive of a ‘continuity beyond the limits of the decorated material’.84 She also emphasizes visual transformation as key to the ‘shifting pictorial continuum’ of Cashinahua art, and sees ‘visual ambiguity’ as characteristic of Amazon designs in general. For her, this reflects the indigenous sense that exterior and interior states are interlinked.85 She also refers to David Guss’s description of the pattern art of the Yekuana Indians of Venezuela as ‘kinetic visual process’,86 and argues that Amazon pattern art not only makes statements about the multi-modal nature of perception, but importantly also performs this reality. According to Keifenheim, the patterns induce a border-transgressing experience in the perceiver through bodily-sensual perceptions87 that echo 117

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drug-induced visions. For her any attempt to unravel the designs’ meaning by seeking to decode the motifs is therefore misguided. She argues that the meaning of the designs ‘becomes manifest in the experience of visual transformation connected with the viewing of the ornamental pattern’, and declares that ‘in ornamental visual experience viewer and image are equally subject to the same transformation principle’.88 Keifenheim therefore sees Cashinahua pattern art as expressive of a perceptual world that encompasses shamanic vision and generates meaning through a transformative visual experience produced by an attentive viewing of shifting ornamental designs. She argues that ‘culturally specific concepts such as transformation’ are ‘not semantically revealed’ but are experienced ‘in transformative sensorial experience’,89 which she sees as a key element of ornamental pattern art that has so far been overlooked. She stresses that when viewing Amazon ornamental art, ‘significance must be understood as something which always emerges new and not as a corpus of fixed symbols’.90 The meaning of the designs is therefore dependent on and develops in relation to the ‘context, expectation, personal conditioning, sex, age’91 and so forth of the perceiving subject. She points out that in Cashinahua art, perceiving and granting meaning are closely intertwined and that the designs should be recognized as a ‘processual play of cognitive and imaginative capabilities’ that unite the ‘sensual and the intelligible’92 in a manner that allows each viewer to reconstruct and re-enact this understanding according to his or her level of cognizance.

Amazon Aesthetics of Living Keifenheim proposes a switch to a performative perspective, which places the body at the centre of a sensate negotiation of the world. She argues that this line of enquiry is more productive than the ‘iconographic search for traces for semantic meaning’93 which has characterized the investigation of Amazon art. She proposes to adopt a performative approach based on ‘native vision theorems’ to make sense of the designs, and argues that this allows for the articulation of a new paradigm of ‘ornamental visual experience,’94 which she refers to as a ‘theory of ornamentalistics’.95 She declares that when such a performative perspective is adopted, the image and its beholder are, ‘even if only for a fleeting moment’,96 in a co-constitutive and 118

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transformative relationship characterized by affectivity. She also points out that if such a process is repeatable, it can be shared communally and generate a sense of connectedness or conviviality.97 Keifenheim therefore links the performativity and affectivity of the art language to a sense of community created by the shared perceptual experience of the designs that reinforces central cultural concerns. Keifenheim’s interpretation furthermore acknowledges that indigenous notions of perception based on trance experiences do not separate the worlds that are ordinarily visible to the human eye from the ones that are invisible to everyday vision. She therefore does not reject the idea of shamanic visions on the grounds of phosphene theory but rather leaves the question of veracity aside and engages with shamanic vision as a cultural phenomenon. She explains that for the Cashinahua, the visible and the invisible are not opposed but are considered ‘shifting transformational appearances of one and the same reality’.98 She furthermore reports that the Cashinahua consider the perceiver to be energetically permeable and ‘subjected to the perceiving non-perceivable’, that is, the viewer’s ‘human sensory instrumentarium not only opens the world to him but also allows the perceived world to penetrate him’.99 As the anthropologist Els Lagrou reports, the Cashinahua focus ideas of similarity and difference on the body. The body is, however, not seen as a bounded entity that develops along its genetically preprogrammed path, but rather is ‘modelled by others through conviviality and the sharing of thoughts and substances with those one lives with or encounters when travelling’.100 In a similar vein the communal is thought of in terms of a collectively shaped body that people belong to ‘as a result of the experiences, memories, food and bodily substances that have been exchanged and shared among them’.101 This interlinking of consumption and the convivial introduces an interesting parallel to Tiravanija’s trademark sharing of food with gallery goers, especially as cooking plays a key role in the Cashinahua act of communal ‘body-shaping’ where rites of passage are conceptualized in terms of bodily transformation.102 The permeability of Cashinahua subjects and environments, furthermore, corresponds to Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic conception of subjectivity that stresses the porousness of an individual’s boundaries seen to enable human participation in environments and collectivities. These connectivities range from ‘pre-personal, polyphonic, collective and machinic’103 elements representative of non-discursive 119

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intensities that exist in parallel to the logic of discursive sets to larger social and environmental territories. Indigenous notions of permeability and affective assimilation linked to conviviality and consumption, however, are not limited to the Cashinahua but constitute a common conception in Amazon culture and underscore the relevance of this observation and linking of pattern art, Amazon sociality and the communal consumption of food. Keifenheim’s proposition of an indigenous ornamental perceptual experience that operates via the affective introduces a crucial further element to the question of how to read Shipibo-Conibo and, by i­mplication, Amazon pattern art: the designs’ community-building potential due to their transformative, affective charge. This approach shifts the discussion from the search for a semantic code to the designs’ perceptual affectivity. And while Shipibo-Conibo patterns on the whole do not show seamless transitions between patterns like Cashinahua art, they do consist of positive–negative shapes, and can therefore be said to encompass related performative and affective dimensions that signal the fluidity and co-existence of visible and invisible worlds and make this reality perceptually available. Keifenheim, who uniquely draws out the link between Amazon pattern art and notions of conviviality, is not the only scholar to posit communal values and affectivity as integral to Amazon cultural worlds. The anthropologists Joanna Overing and Alan Passes argue that life in the Amazon region revolves around an ‘aesthetics of community’104 linked to the affective which the authors explore in great depth and are at pains to defend against the charges of primitivity levelled in the past. Their findings offer important insights into indigenous conceptions of the convivial relevant to the proposed translative exercise of expanding a post-Bourriaudean relational aesthetics into the realm of Amazon culture, and will be summarized in what follows. Overing and Passes point out that the conviviality at the heart of indigenous life in the Amazon has long been overlooked because paradigms of Western social thought are projected onto the cultures studied. They highlight that such Western ‘notions as society, culture, community and the individual’105 inhere in ‘Western distinctions of judgement and worth’106 which in turn inform ‘the very analytic constructs through 120

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which they [Western scholars] then gazed at, assessed and recorded all other types of socialities’.107 Overing and Passes also report that Amazon social life, like indigenous design languages, has for a long time remained obscure since ‘the nature of indigenous sociality in Amazonia has always been resistant, rebellious even, to most anthropological ­categorisation’.108 The authors delineate how Western notions of the social – premised on a separation of public and private – the rational space of societal relations and the domestic space of the personal, along with conceptions of a hierarchically structured public space ruled through political coercion – failed to see any sociality in indigenous cultures of the Amazon region and condemned them as ‘primitive’. Only when ­challenges to this theoretical construct were mounted from within Western academia, often from feminist quarters, and a new, positive emphasis on the everyday, the domestic and a sociality of affectivity was theorized did the contours of Amazon sociality become visible. The authors thus argue that if ‘intellectual decolonization’ is the aim, we cannot limit our understanding of the social to kinship relations, ‘or to such equally reductive principles as exchange, reciprocity and hierarchy’.109 What needs to be acknowledged and explored instead is the indigenous ‘aesthetics of living’, their stress on and need for beauty in the everyday and ‘their strong sense of the follies of existence, its myriad of interconnections with an animated universe, its ambiguities and dangers and its possibilities for beauty’.110 Overing and Passes explain that they consider the term ­‘conviviality’ best suited to express indigenous conceptions of the social because it ‘seems best to fit the Amazonian stress upon the affective side of ­sociality’.111 But they also warn that the ‘rich language of affect and ­intimacy that is linked to Amazonian sociality is not to be mistaken for evidence of a prioritising of emotions over reason’.112 They hold that this would not only be erroneous but also that it plays into well-rehearsed notions about the pre-logical nature of so-called primitive societies. Overing and Passes rather point out that Amerindians ‘consider not only that both cognitive and affective capacities are embodied, but also that, for them, the capability to live a moral, social existence requires that there be no split between thoughts and feelings, mind and body’.113 The 121

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authors therefore emphasize that in Amazon culture ‘there is an aesthetics involved in belonging to a community of relations that conjoins body, thought and affect’.114 This Amazon version of an aesthetics of relation conjures up Bourriaud’s articulation of relational aesthetics and returns us to our question of whether an expanded notion of relational aesthetics can be helpful in the present effort of cultural translation focused on the question of how to read Shipibo-Conibo designs. But is it an all too easy and quick assumption that Amazon notions of the convivial can be related to the conviviality g­ enerated in the gallery spaces of the post-industrialized world? Bourriaud, for example, neither emphasizes the body nor reflects on affectivity and thought in relation to community. This concern, while perfectly justified, nonetheless overlooks the transformative effect of encounter which also applies to the conceptual realm. The argument presented here, rather, is that the proposed expanded notion of relational aesthetics can tease out the affectivity inherent in Bourriaud’s Guattarean borrowings, which the former did not acknowledge, and that the transposition of relational aesthetics into the worlds of Amazon art constitutes an opportunity to probe and to re-envision Bourriaud’s aesthetic framework.

Relational Aesthetics the Amazon Way Unlike relational aesthetics in its Bourriaudean form, the indigenous worldview stresses the need to transform the destructive and dangerous inner-personal and cosmic forces that continually threaten the fragile state of the convivial. It emphasizes that effort is required to maintain the delicate state of harmonious, affective social relations since ‘matters of affect require constant work, vigilance, and even suffering to maintain’.115 Unlike relational aesthetics’ assumption of an easy attainment of convivial states as bodies co-mingle in a gallery space – which, as we have seen, has drawn fierce criticism and has been deemed naive – in the Amazon the maintenance of the convivial requires sustained application. It constitutes a form of social art that hence offers a corrective to Bourriaud’s notion of relationality ‘light’. 122

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Overing and Passes furthermore relate that ‘Amazonian sociality ­cannot be understood without the backdrop of the wider cosmic and intercommunity and intertribal relationships’116 and remind us that the ‘forces of conflict, violence, danger, cannibalism, warfare, and predation’117 are the paradoxical ‘other’ that need to be tamed and transformed. The Amazon understanding of the convivial, therefore, can ‘only be achieved through the suffering and hardship of enduring a multiplicity of difficult, ­treacherous paths that eventually enable a person to transform the violent, angry, ugly, capricious forces of the universe into constructive, beautiful knowledge and capacities’.118 Living harmoniously in the Amazon region thus is an ‘artful skill’119 and the creation of a beautiful, good life and ‘intimate, informal relationships of the everyday’120 are ‘the primary concern of most Amazonian peoples’.121 Overing and Passes also report that in indigenous communities, such balancing acts ‘seem to take up most of their time and energy’.122 This observation returns us yet again to Amazon designs and their positive–negative shapes. As we have seen, Keifenheim argues that the transformative perceptual experiences generated by Cashinahua designs provide a sensate, embodied understanding of the ambivalence of life, the delicate balance between positive and negative forces that needs to be continually maintained, and of the beauty that results if such an equilibrium is achieved. For her this constitutes the meaning of the designs. This, however, only becomes apparent when the art style is examined from within an indigenous context of cosmology and sociality, that is, when Western conceptions of the visual and the social are suspended. But leaving Western perspectives aside is not an easy affair as the very conceptions used to discuss such cultural contexts are informed by Western constructs which often negate the validity of the cultural worlds under discussion or simply cannot register them. So where do these insights leave our question of how to read ShipiboConibo designs, and what role could an expanded notion of relational aesthetics play to bridge the worlds of art, anthropology and of the Amazon region? As we have seen, a key issue to be negotiated is the translation of the dualism of Amazon worldviews and their inherent non-discursivity into traditional Western paradigms that are based on a mind–body 123

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split and consider indigenous notions of a mind–body continuum as naive and inferior. Encounters governed by this Western p ­ remise therefore are not conceptually neutral, curious and open to translation, and furthermore are governed by power relations skewed in favour of the West. A switch to conceptual paradigms more conducive to this translative encounter consequently cannot altogether undo existing power differentials, but can open the way to more equitable meetings that dispense with charges of primitivity and inferiority. The suggestion is that the double-codedness of Deleuze–Guattarean machinism, its Janus-faced connectivity of discursive and non-discursive registers and the ‘relation of alterity’123 inherent in the proposed expanded version of relational aesthetics, offers a productive conceptual terrain for the intercultural encounter with Amazon cultures. It brings the hand of the shaman José Santos to mind as it moves horizontally across the designs anthropologists inquire about. This simple gesture is laden with meaning, certainly in the minds of the anthropologists, who saw it as indicative of a linear reading of the designs similar to the act of reading a text. Arguably the anthropologist as representative of an academic, institutionalized mode of knowing is used to the homogenizing ways of the signifier, which his or her discipline demands, and is seeking for the familiar in Shipibo aesthetic culture. Furthermore, the possibility of a-signifying modes of ‘reading’ the designs are difficult to grasp, especially without a framework that can register such perspectives. Deleuze–Guattarean conceptions, however, cater to such conceptual possibilities as they harbour the potential to encompasses a-discursivity. As we have seen, the designs’ persistent rebuttal of semiotic advances is interpreted as refusal to reveal their secrets or as contemporaneously defunct symbolism in the anthropological literature. But from a machinic perspective the lamented muteness of the designs can now be read as reference to machinism as ‘other’ mode. This shift in perspective allows the quest for a semantic code to be interpreted as a battle over modes of being, that is, a struggle between signifier and machine. Anthropologists like Gebhart-Sayer thus no longer need to tie themselves into translative knots to defend Amazon pattern art against pejorative classifications of 124

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mere decorativeness by embarking on an obsessive search for semantic content to prove their inherent cultural value as thought along Western lines. Non-discursivity as alterior mode of cognizance now no longer invariably computes as the lesser world of analogue pictorialism, nor are indigenous references to negotiations of force and to notions of dualism inevitably reduced to markers of primitive naiveté. Moreover, machinism, or to be more precise, aesthetic machinism, encompasses an emphasis on affectivity and sensation. It thus harbours the potential to mediate Amazon cultures and to register non-discursivity and affectivity as a differenced perspective that operates ‘not through representation but through affective contamination’.124 But this translative encounter also launches aesthetic machinism, conceived as an antidote to the ‘steam-roller of capitalistic subjectivity’,125 into a new adventure. For Guattari, its differenced generation of alterity constitutes a mode of liberation, which expropriates scientific paradigms, a battle Amazon cultures are not concerned with unless they engage with researchers that seek to interpret their art and culture. Aesthetic machinism which draws out ‘intensive, a-temporal, a-spatial, a-signifying dimensions from the semiotic net of quotidianity’126 representative of a ‘chaosmotic plunge into the materials of sensation’127 will hence be challenged to engage with Amazon conceptions. The proposed expanded notion of relational aesthetics which encompasses Deleuze–Guattarean machinism therefore arguably can offer a bridging moment between Western systems of thought, c­ ontemporary art and the cultural worlds of the Amazon as it allows key cultural constructs, such as transformative visions, affectivity and the convivial, to register. The adoption of a relational Deleuze–Guattarean framework for a translative rapprochement between indigenous art, anthropologists and the world of contemporary art thus potentially allows for translative acts that leave a smaller untranslatable residue and ‘cook up a third’ that, while inevitably double-coded and shot through with creativity and failure, may situate these poles at a lesser distance. The proposed ‘post-Bourriaudean’ notion of relational aesthetics also engages the original Guattarean notion of the transformative potential of the ‘proto-aesthetic’ and thus comfortably transgresses the spaces 125

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of the gallery. It unearths and develops untapped potentialities of Bourriaudean relational aesthetics as it teases out Guattarean notions of performativity and affectivity through the encounter with Amazon culture, and thus offers a yet unbroached potential to mediate the worlds of art and Amazon designs.

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Faction 3

Itinerant Thoughts – London, Paris, Peru and Elsewhere

(Rikki T is travelling from London to Paris by Eurostar) London St Pancras International, Eurostar terminal. I have just clambered onto the train and found my seat. I am beginning to relax, waiting for the train to pull out of the station. Paris is beckoning and a much anticipated break. I will be visiting a friend and seeing Valéry Grancher’s exhibition The Shiwiars Project at the Palais de Tokyo. Grancher’s visit to the Amazon jungle is the subject of his exhibition. A  project too close to mine to be missed, and a perfect excuse for a trip to Paris. The train is pulling out of the station; we are on the move. I enjoy this space of limbo, of in-betweenness. Being in transit, between one place and another, leaving one world behind and not yet immersed in another. It is always a good time to think. The suspense between places frees up the mind. While I am hurtling through space, my mind is free to roam, think, daydream or just switch off, sink into travel drowsiness. I lean back, begin to unwind, sip my cappuccino. The coffee is good. The train is ­gliding through the outskirts of London. I wonder what my friend’s place is going to be like. She has just moved from London to Paris and has been given s­ tudent housing. She had been concerned about where she would end up, and mentioned that the refurbishment of some of the units was long overdue. 127

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My mind wanders. I  find myself thinking about Renée Green’s autoethnographic account of the Unité Project.1 Has the thought of staying in a crumbling student accommodation triggered the connection? I  imagine Renée Green’s incongruous appearance amongst the remaining inhabitants of the mostly derelict housing estate. I can well picture the awkwardness of the final party she describes in her field journal: residents solidly clinging to one another, just like the artists who have descended on the building for the duration of the project. I ask myself what kind of ethnography this constitutes. Or, is this not an ethnographic project at all? Renée Green certainly talks about her part of the project as fieldwork.2 Curator Yves Aupetitallot is ambitious in his aims. He wants social-political transformation and deliberately shuns art institutions, situating the project in Corbusier’s social architecture, or what is left of it, instead.3 But as has been pointed out, the failure of Corbusier’s utopianism of social living is mirrored in the notable divide and sense of alienation between the artists and the inhabitants. Escaping the clutches of the art world proves a difficult affair, even if spatially removed from the spaces of art. This project does not appear to make sense to the local inhabitants, yet it figures in the art world. I wonder what the local residents would have made of Green’s choice collection of books on the improvised bookshelf in her Unité apartment. She has photographed the bookshelf for the auto-ethnographic account of her residence at Unité.4 I had a good look at the titles. All art and cultural studies. In her essay she mentions a text by Zola. She explains that she already owns an English copy and has bought a French edition en route to Firminy.5 But it is not on the shelf. I wonder why. Is the photo carefully edited for the art world aficionados and intellectuals she anticipates will be engaging with the project? I admit I was hoping to find a trashy novel, something that would locate her in this bizarre place, or at least in France. Something personal. Or maybe even some real ethnography? Books. I have taken light reading for the trip. A fictionalized memoir by an Australian journalist of her life amongst the French.6 Just the sort of thing Deleuze–Guattari would hate – a ‘journalist’s novel’! A book naively, or maybe even cynically, masquerading as literature. I admit I simply figured it a fitting read for the trip to Paris. Not too taxing and hopefully entertaining. I open the book and immerse myself in Sarah’s life amongst 128

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the French, Paris seen with the eyes of an outsider. A  female Australian outsider I should add. It was a city and culture I was familiar with – at least that’s what I thought back then. When I was a child my family had toured France in a tiny campervan and my eyes had popped at the chocolates and the cheeses. At secondary school I studied French and saw the films by Truffaut and Resnais which had struck me as enigmatic and European, although I couldn’t have said why. When I was sixteen I lived in England for a year and I came to Paris several times. In my mind, these experiences added up to knowledge of France and some understanding of its people. Then, a little over ten years later, […] when the time came to a­ ctually live in Paris, I  figured belonging and integrating would take merely a matter of months. Now, remembering my early naiveté draws a smile. The truth is that nearly all preconceptions of France turned out to be false. It hardly needs to be said that living in a place is totally different from visiting it. And yet this blatantly obvious statement does need to be said, particularly about Paris, the most visited city in the world.7

I look up. The service trolley is approaching. It is slowly making its way along the narrow aisle, its approach signalled by the sound of crisp packets opening, coke or beer cans being popped, and repeated, detailed exchanges as to the required sugars. It slowly cranks past me in its servile pace. I return to the book. I  have lost my place. Searching for it, I  ponder what I have just read. Cultures are complex and complicated things. When do you really understand, when are you really an insider? Insider of what? Or is it better to be an outsider looking in? My thoughts return to Renée Green. The reviewers of the Unité project see Green as cultural tourist, masquerader and infiltrating critic.8 She, however, describes herself as a ‘character’ from the metropolis, New  York to be precise, but also as a ­product of the African diaspora, like some of the local residents. Green notes her surprise about the friendliness of the encounters in Unité’s lift and corridors. She tells us that in New York, tension is constant.9 We always make sense of our world based on our past experiences and background, 129

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whether international artists or Unité residents of North African descent who think, as she tells us, Green must be North African, at least in part.10 Italo Calvino’s famous fictional conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo springs to mind. The Khan seeks greater knowledge of his empire. He turns to Marco because he is from the outside. Does he think Marco can see more clearly because he is external to the empire? Or is it a matter of inside and outside, Khan and Marco, joining forces and seeing together, maybe a truer or larger picture? Could Green be seen as a contemporary, art-nomad equivalent of Marco Polo, I wonder? Both produce accounts of their travels for a wider audience; both record their experiences. On reflection, probably a far-fetched comparison. Green’s self-identity is also rather different from Marco Polo’s. She states that she is curious about the site, and sees her ­presence as a ‘peace offering’ or ‘as a joke’.11 She makes it clear that the project is about her. Others will only appear if they enter her narrative space.12 Her auto-ethnographic documentary fiction reflects on the distance between the artists on-site, the inhabitants in situ and the unfamiliar environment. Marco reveals little about himself in his Travels. But Calvino has him report to the emperor with gestures and objects until he has learned the Khan’s language. Then they reverse roles. Now the Khan reports on cities, the cities he thinks and imagines, and asks Marco to check his dreams against the real of his empire. Yet the cities visited by Marco always ­differ.13 But then neither of them is certain they ever went anywhere, ever left the space of wordless contemplation where they meet in silence, pondering the world. What goes on in the empire’s cities turns out to be a very complex affair. What do you see? How can you describe what you see? Words? Gestures? Silences? And the ear that shapes the story to be told?14 Memory? The Khan is suspicious, accuses him of withholding the full story, to only report irrelevant appearances. Where are the ‘moods, states of grace, elegies’15 the cities harbour?, he queries. Why no mention of the surge of ­elements, of molecules arranged in patterns, diamonds taking shape?16 When the Khan asks Marco why he keeps quiet about Venice, Marco replies, Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice […] To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice.17

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Venice is everywhere. When keen anthropologists flounder in the Amazon lowlands, delirious with the desire to decipher Shipibo designs, they do not hear what the Shipibo are saying, because  – Venice is ­everywhere. Their Venice is phosphene theory, which holds that drug-induced retinal experiences of ‘seeing stars’ are but subjective images generated within the eye and brain that ‘reflect the neural organization of the visual pathway’.18 They cannot mean, they cannot have anything to say about the world, are just neural sparks that are cultural only to the extent that meaning is imposed. It is perplexing. Is this the predicament of intercultural communication? The inevitable misapprehension, mis- or non-translation across paradigms? Or maybe not? There is the anthropologist, ethno-botanist and art historian Claudia Müller-Ebeling who somehow ended up with Shipibo-Conibo designs in Nepal, showing the patterns to a Nepalese s­haman to see what he made of it. She writes, Driven by scholarly curiosity I had made a habit of showing male and female shamans I encountered in my field trips in Asia and South America photos and artefacts of alien shamanic cultures and to ask them about their symbolic meaning. I  would never have imagined that Nepalese shamans would be able to make any sense of the abstract linear patterns of their South American colleagues. I expected the Sherpa shaman to only cast a brief glance at the designs and then to lay the photos and embroideries aside. Far from it! To my great astonishment he studied them with great interest and gave detailed explanations that absolutely hit the nail on the head.19

Tantalizingly, however, Müller-Ebeling fails to tell us what the Nepalese shaman made of the designs: this might have put an end to the speculation about how and what they mean. To be fair, she does report that the reverse exercise also yielded results, that is, when she showed Nepalese thangkas to Shipibo-Conibo shamans, the latter read it ­without hesitation as the journey of a shaman to the spirit world. So if the ­shamans can interpret images across cultural boundaries, it is not so much a question of culture, but of what cultures and what modes of seeing are involved. For the cognitive psychologist Benny Shanon who studies ayahuasca hallucinations from a phenomenological perspective, the design 131

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visions are beyond culture. He states that ‘many facets of the Ayahuasca experience are actually independent of personal and socio-cultural background’.20 But this is not an endorsement of retinal theory. In fact he disagrees with the prominent view that the figurative elements seen during ayahuasca visions are but projections of ‘cultural memory on the wavering screen of colors and shapes’ interpreted as ‘motifs and personages’.21 Shanon also takes issue with phosphene theory. For him anthropology confuses phosphenes – that is, the bursts, puffs and splashes of light perceived during hallucinations – with what he tells us are ‘proper’ geometric vision. He should know as he has had more than 140 personal experiences with the hallucinogen. He has taken detailed notes about his experiences and has also conducted about 300 interviews with drug users from mixed backgrounds, cultural and otherwise.22 He compares the puffs and burst stage to beads strung on a chain, and says they form a pattern but retain their singularity. Geometric design visions proper, however, create pulsating, two- and at times three-dimensional interlocking structures and ‘compose tapestries that entirely cover the inner visual field’.23 For him this is the experience indigenous art styles ­emulate, not the shapes of the phosphene stage. He agrees with Gow and Keifenheim that the designs are about transformation, and states that during ayahuasca visions they are markers of transitions, of beginnings and ends. He calls them metaphoric fences:24 Several times I noted that while in a high state of visioning a geometric pattern would appear. This could close the visioning experience, or, if I dared, lead to new, and most often stronger visions. [… T]hese designs and patterns are encountered when one stage of the inebriation ends and another may or may not begin. […] Seeing them, one may conclude that the visions have ended and withdraw; or else one may forge ahead, and – like Alice stepping through the looking glass  – get to new realms with even more powerful, more fantastic figurative visions.25

He says that while initially ‘visualizations may be triggered by simple brain stimulation, as with phosphenes’, the more complex visual experiences ‘cannot be accounted for in such a simplistic, reductionist m ­ anner’.26 From his phenomenological point of view, the distinction between 132

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‘that which is interpreted and that which is interpretation-free’27 does not make sense. To my mind the story should be recounted in terms of the pas de deux […] In this pas de deux, the mind dances, so to speak, with the products of both brain and mind. […] All that happens under the intoxication is the product of brain activity, just as all that happens is the product of the dance of the mind. Likewise, all is real and all is the product of the imagination.28

It seems that it all boils down to perception in the end, which in Western culture is corralled by science. Science as unassailable truth. Cultures are allowed to differ, but nature remains hors champ, beyond culture, is ­allocated a place of purity, of universal truth. The anthropologist Latour calls it an arrogant universalism or the ‘Internal Great Divide’,29 that is, the conception of nature as outside of culture, as universal and knowable by means of Western science alone. One society – and it is always the Western one – defines the general framework of Nature with respect to which the others are situated.30

He holds that it should be natures-cultures instead. Latour has put it well. Science sets the West apart, is the basis for claims of superior ­knowledge, the arrogant assumption that there is only one way of looking.31 In Shipibo-Conibo culture thinking and seeing are linked. Seeing is characterized by a double regime of inner and outer.32 But perception touches on nature, or, in this instance, the retina and neural pathways. And we are stuck with Venice. Not the real Venice of course, the watery Serenissima of the Adriatic, but science’s Eurocentricity. Superior knowledge is claimed and researchers turn the other way – for the most part that is. Gow does think about the story of how Sangama reads the newspaper and how he could have ‘learnt to read in school’ at a time when nobody educated Indians.33 You folks listen to me, but others belittle me. They say ‘Sangama the ignorant, the liar. He does his lying by reading dirty paper from the outhouse.’ They laugh at me, and distort my words all the time. Why should my eyes be like theirs? My eyes are not like theirs.34

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Gow is trying to mediate the two worlds that meet when a­ nthropologists turn up in remote villages in the Amazon and go native for a bit, yet need to cater to the academic world and the demand for results and academic narratives. My mind wanders. I look out of the window, see the landscape gliding past. The steady movement of the train is comforting. I feel sleepy. Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of your eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape.35

Bergson and his penchant for movement. In one way Bergson should be seen as the predecessor of today’s neo-nomads flitting around the world. But only in one way, the outside way. Actually not at all. He thought of the succession of positions taken by objects moving through space, like the train shuttling through Kent right now, as a view from the outside of ‘things’. For him this is not really movement, or not the movement that matters. Quite literally so, as it is really about matter, what we think matter to be. Rather than seeing it as dead and inert, Bergson declares matter and movement to be identical. Our world is not composed of things, but of images in constant movement, our bodies among them. We know the present as the plane where these images – be they smells, colours, sounds and so forth  – concur and marry with a reservoir of memories, simultaneously confirming and augmenting our picture of the world. Memory, perception, and the ‘real’ – again. Venice, the Khan and Marco, travelling and yet sitting still in their garden of contemplation, dressed in silk kimonos.36 I do not know when you have had the time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems you have never moved from this garden. Polo: […] At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your Kublai:

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Kublai:

Polo:

august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold. I, too, am not sure I am here, strolling among the porphyry fountains, […] and not riding, caked with sweat and blood, at the head of my army. […] Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped:  you, from raising dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of peppers in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and the throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living.37

Calvino’s image is suggestive: Kublai’s garden as an in-between, a space apart that allows thoughts to silently emerge – like my journey, on the train, shuttling between departure and destination. I have to think of Bergson’s reactive gap which for him defines human-centric perception. For Bergson, matter is always on the move; it is only our thoughts that think in static modes. He reasons that we need to think in terms of life, think mobile thoughts,38 not the static ideas Platonism considers to be the essence of reality. For Bergson, they are but ‘snapshots of becoming mistaken for the real’,39 singled out moments of an ever-changing reality. His is a dynamic and creative philosophy of immanence. It is based on an effort of sympathy, an intuiting of the flux of the ‘real’ and a radical shift in thinking perception. The experiencing human subject is no longer central to perception; it does not need a witnessing consciousness to occur. Human-centric perception is but a special scenario of the constant, perceptual exchanges in matter. It all starts with matter-image: Bergson posits an inner luminosity of matter. In my mind, this evokes the lucent designs that appear in shamanic visions, or how I imagine them from the literature, incessantly shifting and ­changing forms, unless firmed up by song. Are the designs pointing to Bergson’s sub-atomic world of variation, the divergent and creative processes of nature, Deleuze’s world of the simulacra, I wonder? Bergson attributes a quality of ‘imageness’ to matter on the level of sub-atomic streamings. Matter, according to Bergson, is simultaneously 135

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movement and a set of images in flux, acting and reacting to one another. Or, to be more precise, these active-reactive movement-images c­ onstitute an undulating, co-implicated world of molecular flux. This perception of ripplings between movement-images unseats the brain as the privileged seat of consciousness. It rather is but an ‘image’ among ‘images’, participating equally in this ‘universal variation’, receiving and transmitting movement.40 The train glides smoothly along the tracks as I  contemplate matter’s incessant motion. I  try Bergson’s suggestion of how to imagine matter’s inner motion. His proposition seems simple and straightforward: Abolish your consciousness, and matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers.41

As this is difficult to imagine, he adds a step-by-step guide: [F]irst […] connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience; then, resolve the motionless continuity of these qualities into vibrations on the spot, finally fix your attention on these movements, by abstracting from the divisible space which underlies them and considering only their mobility. […] You will obtain a vision of matter, fatiguing perhaps for your imagination, but pure and freed from all that the exigencies of life compel you to add to it in external perception.42

Bergson is right. It is exhausting. I give up and puzzle over Bergson’s notion of subjective and objective perception instead; particularly ­objective perception, which, he declares, is foundational. The image reflected by a living image is precisely what will be called perception.43

‘Image framing image’ is the objective pole of perception, or perception in matter. It is unlimited, completely open and vastly more extensive and encompassing than subjective perception. An atom, for example, perceives infinitely more than we do and, at the limit, perceives the whole universe […]44

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Objective perception, the perceptual flux of variation, sub-atomic ­quivers that emanate in all directions, immediately reactive to all other images. This is the non-human dimension reunited with culture. Matter is no longer on the other side of Latour’s Internal Great Divide45 but is part of life, has perception. It is true that an image may be without being perceived – it may be present without being represented […]46

Whether seen, discovered, chanced upon or not, the images are always already there. What about the retinal sparks, I wonder? How do they fit into this picture? For science perception is what human consciousness engages with – bodily processes do not qualify. But for Bergson matter perceives, and for him non-human and human perception co-exist  – human perception is but a limited instance of the all-pervasive perception in matter. The whole difficulty of the problem that occupies us comes from the fact that we imagine perception to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception – a photograph would then be developed in the brain-matter by some unknown chemical and psychical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the ­photograph […] is already taken, already developed in the heart of things and at all the points of space?47

The photograph is already taken – perception occurs with or without human intervention. Bodily sensation participates in the exchanges that are part of objective perception, the reactive gap allows for memory and consciousness. Bergson’s human perception is premised on participation in movement-matter and a stepping outside of these reactive exchanges. In true armchair anthropologist fashion I imagine the shamans listening to the songs of the spirits at night, adding their voice to these musical exchanges. Reading Bergson’s model of perception through Shipibo-Conibo shamanic trances as described by anthropologists and – equally – reading the trance visions through Bergson’s propositions is thought provoking. Could it change the story of the Shipibo-Conibo designs? For Bergson human perception, or subjective perception as he calls it, evolves from the perceptual substratum of universal variation by an act of limitation and 137

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centring. It involves a filtering, a selection, a discarding of surplus perceptions, a subtractive act. The thing is the image as it is in itself, as it is related to all the other images to whose action it completely submits and in which it reacts immediately. But the [subjective] perception of the thing is the same image related to another special image which frames it, and which only retains a partial action from it, and only reacts to it mediately. In [subjective] perception thus defined, there is never anything else or anything more than there is in the thing: on the contrary, there is ‘less’. We perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us as a function of our needs.48

Subjective perception is premised on a reactive gap between received and executed motion. A non-automatic response is introduced, a ­delaying of reaction.49 The interval allows for choice and variance. It defines the consciously perceiving image as a ‘centre of indetermination’. What a radical repositioning of received opinion! The brain is no longer the ‘centre’ where images are ‘manufactured’ on the basis of sensual data received. It is only ‘an interval, a gap between an action and a reaction’50 in the ‘acentred universe of images’.51 The photograph is always already taken! I note Bergson uses the term perception in a somewhat blanket f­ ashion. He locates perception’s fundamental exchanges in the substratum of matter. Yet a lot of the time, when writing about perception, he clearly has human-centric, subjective processes in mind. Even if there is only a difference of degree rather than of kind52 between the two aspects of perception, should he not be more specific as to which aspect of perception he is talking about? Should he not be saying objective or subjective perception? Is he not reintroducing a human-centric perspective if he assumes ‘perception’ as a matter of course to stand for subjective perception? Then there is memory. That is, there is more to subjective perception than the subtractive act. Perception is replete with things, people and situations remembered which overlay the sense data received in the perceptive act. In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as ‘signs’ that recall to us former images.53

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Perception, as we erroneously call it (it should be subjective perception), is therefore mostly memory, and not perception, at all, as defined by Bergson. Hence the power of Venice! If we want to understand ­(subjective) perception, we need to imaginatively remove the ‘cloak of recollections’ that memory casts over our sense perceptions. If we could live in the present only, our (subjective) perceptions would be immediate and instantaneous. They would not be subject to duration, that brief prolongation of the perceptual act by memory’s work. But this purity of (subjective) perception can only be thought, can only exist in theory. At least according to Bergson. I wonder how shamanic trance perception fits into Bergson’s scheme. If matter is the substratum of all perception, retinal sparks are part of ­perception. It turns out Bergson agrees with this proposition. In fact, he has explicitly addressed this issue reflecting on experiments with electric stimulation of the optical nerve and the resulting visions. For him these experiments highlight the fundamental misunderstanding of how human-centric perception, seen as exteriorization of internal states, is conceived. He thinks this is erroneous and the reverse is the case. The material universe has not ‘emerged from us’ but we have ‘emerged from it’.54 This understanding has implications for phosphene theory. For Bergson, stimulation with electricity constitutes a bodily interaction with electro-magnetic energy, that is, light. [… W]hat he [the physicist] calls here an electromagnetic disturbance is light, so that it is really light that the optic nerve perceives objectively when subject to electric stimulus.55

For Bergson, the experiment and the resulting sensual reactions therefore fall under the ambit of ‘common’ perceptive exchanges in the flux of matter. Yet as these sensations arise within rather than outside the body, they constitute affections ‘localized within the body’56 rather than ­perception. But for Bergson affections are part of subjective perception – Bergson states that there is only a ‘difference of degree and not of nature between affection and perception’.57 For a Bergsonian, therefore, subjective perception of so-called ‘phosphenes’, that is, visual phenomena resulting from electrical or chemical stimulation, constitute ‘real’ perception rather than a cultural misinterpretation of natural facts. 139

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I look out of the window, casting my eyes over the naturescapes passing by at a reassuringly steady pace. It all seems so natural, gliding through space to the sound of the train’s steady rumble – participating in the movement yet observing the surrounds from my mobile vantage point. My thoughts return to Bergson, perception and the sub-atomic world of variation. How relevant is Bergson’s material redefinition of perception to the interpretation of ayahuasca visions, I  wonder? I  think about science and the nature – culture divide. The West claims that science is above c­ ulture. But Latour argues that anthropologists studying a ‘tribe of scientific researchers’ would soon come to the conclusion that there is no difference between ‘natives’ and ‘moderns’ after all. Both interpret nature through the filter of culture, yet science thinks it is not culture but fact and claims superior knowledge based on denial. Her [the anthropologist’s]58 informers [the tribe of scientific researchers] claim that they have access to Nature, but the ethnographer sees perfectly well that they have access only to a vision, a representation of Nature that she […] cannot distinguish neatly from politics and social interests […] This tribe, like the earlier [indigenous] one, projects its own social categories on to Nature; what is new is that it pretends it has not done so.59

This is an important point. Different cultural views of nature seriously skew field reports, as the Shipibo-Conibo example demonstrates. And anthropology’s proud history of self-critical examination skirts this issue; for all their critical acuity, neither Geertz nor Clifford, foreground this point. Only Latour champions this cause and argues that we should move from cultural relativism to ‘natural’ relativism.60 Natural relativism highlights the idea that nature is not a universal given but is conceived in disparate ways in different societies. But are we reinscribing difference in an essentializing fashion when we focus on this ‘natural’ divergence? How can we avoid relativized concepts of nature to be subsumed under multiculturalism’s neo-essentializing tendencies? Could Bergson bridge the gap? Has Bergson’s conception of nature, released from the grip of law and universality, become part of culture? Or vice-versa? Have we arrived at Latour’s natures-cultures? I return to my earlier mental exercise. 140

Itinerant Thoughts – London, Paris, Peru and Elsewhere [… F]irst […] connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience; then, resolve the motionless continuity of these ­qualities into vibrations on the spot, finally fix your attention on these movements, by abstracting from the divisible space which underlies them and considering only their mobility […]61

Straining to grasp this vision of movement in matter, this time I persevere with the experiment. Now bring back your consciousness, and with it the exigencies of life: at long, very long, intervals, and by as many leaps over enormous periods of the inner history of things, quasi-instantaneous views will be taken, views which this time are bound to be ­pictorial, and of which the more vivid colors will condense an infinity of elementary repetitions and changes.62

As I  am trying to immerse myself in this thought experiment, the ­following passage from an article of Gebhart-Sayer comes to mind: [… T]he design visions are described as being overall, nonanalytical impressions of entire patterned ‘pages’ or ‘sheets’ flashed rapidly in front of the shaman’s inner eye and vanishing as soon as he tries to have a closer look.63

Quite right, despite Bergson’s detailed instructions I could not c­ onjure up a stable picture. But the unexpected rapport between a Western ­philosopher and Indians from the Amazon region is striking. Where to go from here, I wonder? Can these ideas be developed and made relevant to the discussion of Shipibo-Conibo designs? I turn to Deleuze, who has adopted Bergson’s conception of perception and made it central to his aesthetics. He shares Bergson’s desire to overturn Platonism and, like him, has elaborated a philosophy of immanence, which declares the immutable, universal sphere behind the world of appearances an illusion. The real ‘real’ is the world of flux, of becoming. If anyone can help me in thinking through these questions, it would be Deleuze. So what is Deleuze’s take on Bergson’s two-tiered model of perception? And how can this be related to the designs? Deleuze, of course, is not interested in cultures. He is not an ­anthropologist, nor does he suffer from ‘ethnographer envy’. He is thinking 141

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difference, but not in view of cultures. This does not mean, of course, that his concepts cannot be given a cultural turn, that ethnography cannot adopt them, that it has nothing to say about Shipibo-Conibo visions. For one thing, his undoing of the Idea means there is ‘no longer any privileged point of view except that of the object common to all points of view’.64 This statement resonates with Shohat’s and Stam’s propositions of a polycentric aesthetic,65 where Europe as normative centre of r­ eference is  differenced and a plethora of ‘dynamic locations’ are mobilized. The ‘subterranean rebelliousness of becoming’ previously held at bay by Platonic ideality, the repressed ‘other’ of the Platonic order of identity, reintroduces difference into the Platonic word ruled by the authentic original. Sanctioned copies, justified by internal resemblance to the ideal, are replaced by variance, by bad images cut loose from the model, proliferating profusely. For Deleuze the sub-atomic world of variation, or Bergson’s objective perception, is representative of these divergent and creative processes of nature, the world of the simulacra. Like Bergson, Deleuze expands perception from the horizon of human experience to the flux of matter. But he also takes a further step. For Bergson, objective perception remains an abstract idea, a thought experiment, as we can never step away from memory, can never extract pure perception from memory’s images.66 But for Deleuze, objective perception is an experiential possibility. He sees the cinematic image as expressive of both aspects of perception, the diffused perception of the object, as well as the subtractive mode of the subjective. He argues that because of the ‘mobility of its centres and the variability of its framings’,67 cinema has the potential to exemplify the world of objective perception. Deleuze explores these two poles of perception by discussing how they play out in film. He also introduces liquidity as an interim state between subjective and objective vision, also referred to as molar and molecular perception. [… I]f we start from a solid state, where molecules are not free to move about (molar of human perception), we move next to a liquid state, where the molecules move about and merge into one another, but we finally reach a gaseous state, defined by the free movement of each molecule.68

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For Deleuze, the condition of liquidity references a qualitative shift, which occurs in the transition from land to water to air. For him the c­ amera is ‘naturally’ able to capture these de-solidifying perceptual shifts. [… O]n land, movement always takes place from one point to another, always between two points, while on water the point is always between two movements: it thus marks the conversion or the inversion of movement, as in the hydraulic relationship of a dive and a counter-dive, which is found in the movement of the camera itself.69

According to Deleuze, liquidity reaches beyond human perception, but without quite attaining the fully molecular state of gaseousness. It represents an opening of the doors of perception to a wildly different world of experience and finds expression in the fascination of French film with the element of water. Finally, what the French School found in water was the promise or implication of another state of perception: a more than human perception, a perception not tailored to solids, which no longer had the solid as object, as condition, as milieu. A more delicate and vaster perception, a molecular perception, peculiar to the ‘cine-eye’.70

Maybe also the ayahuasca eye? Is there an affinity between shamanic trance perception and cinematic perception? What else has Deleuze to say about perception? For one he argues that the French School is pointing ‘towards […] this other perception, this clairvoyant function’71 but does not altogether succeed in creating the ‘new image’. It rather brings the ‘old’ image to its limit while remaining tied to ­‘solidity’. For Deleuze, it is Vertov who achieves a successful articulation of ‘camera-consciousness’ representative of the ‘eye in matter’. Or, to be more precise, the combination of Vertov’s camera work and the ­subsequent manipulation of his shots through montage succeed in ‘carrying perception into things’.72 They achieve an articulation of a mode of seeing representative of the world of flux at the heart of matter unavailable to the human eye which the camera, even if mobile, cannot reach. And if from a human point of view montage is a construction, from the point of 143

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view of matter, it is the pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye, which would be in things.73 It is not surprising that we have to construct it [the eye in matter] since it is given only to the eye which we do not have […] what montage does, according to Vertov, is to carry perception into things, to put perception into matter, so that any point whatsoever in space itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however far these actions and reactions extend. This is the definition of objectivity, ‘to see without boundaries and distances’. Thus in this respect all procedures are legitimate, they are no longer trick shots.74

But does this not constitute a subjective perception still? A ‘being perceived’ rather than ‘being’, even if close to ‘objective perception’? Deleuze disagrees. For him, this questioning represents an obsession with purity. He argues that it does not matter whether we trace a perception back to its original components, or rather declare it an impossibility to do so. We no longer distinguish the two pure presences of matter and memory in representation, and we no longer see anything but differences in degree between perception-recollections and recollection-perceptions. In short, we measure the mixtures with a unit that is itself impure and already mixed.75

Deleuze has a point. The notion of purity is merely hypothetical, as all our perceptions are already mixed; there is little sense in seeking to think in terms of origins. The world of the bad copy, of simulacra, does not look back to its roots; it thrives on difference. It is characterized by ‘lines of differentiation that are […] truly creative’.76 Where does this leave Shipibo-Conibo visions, I wonder? Are they representative of the ‘eye in matter’? What would Deleuze make of the worlds they reference? As it turns out Deleuze, or rather Deleuze–Guattari have thought about the visual worlds experienced in trance perceptions; they did stray into anthropology on occasion. For one, they engage with the work of Lévi-Strauss. But would James Clifford have reason to be pleased? Did they read Lévi-Strauss because it is Lévi-Strauss, international celebrity, grand maître of French anthropology, and firmly part of the French cultural set? I wonder, especially as Deleuze and Guattari do not appear to be thinking 144

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‘with’ the cultural contexts Lévi-Strauss explores. There is no mention of Guaycuru and Bororo Indians, or Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib ­societies, no examples. Just reflections on myths and structures. And yet Deleuze–Guattari’s hallmark is to think ‘with’ film, painting, music and so forth or, rather, the work of white, male, Western, modern artists. But what do Deleuze–Guattari say about Lévi-Strauss? They emphatically disapprove of structuralism; they see it as reductive and premised on a closed dualist system. They make the point that structuralist analyses of cultures do not allow for ‘becomings between things’,77 and hold that structuralism moves classification from outer semblance to inner homology, displacing ‘imagination with conceptual metaphors’.78 For them, structuralism succeeds in making the world more rational, replacing imagination with an abstract system of relations.79 For Deleuze–Guattari this is not up to par. We believe in the existence of very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the ­animal no less than the human. […] Structuralism clearly does not account for these becomings, since it is designed precisely to deny or at least denigrate their existence:  a correspondence of relations does not add up to a becoming.80

They also point out that structuralism’s disavowal of non-human becomings automatically denigrates cultural expressions of such phenomena ­delineated, for example, in the tales Lévi-Strauss gathered in the Amazon jungle. Yet Deleuze–Guattari only mention the tales, and don’t give examples of their content. They critique the structuralist system and its use of myth and see it as hooked on the regime of the signifier. [… I]n his study of myths Lévi-Strauss is always encountering these rapid acts by which a human becomes animal. […] It is always possible to try to explain these blocs of becoming by a ­correspondence between two relations, but to do so most ­certainly impoverishes the phenomenon under study. Must it not be ­admitted that myth as a frame of classification is quite incapable of registering these becomings, which are more like fragments of tales?81

But becomings must not be understood as imaginary events. 145

Encounters Beyond the Gallery [… B]ecoming does not occur in the imagination, even when the imagination reaches the highest level, as in Jung and Bachelard. Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real.82

For Deleuze–Guattari anthropology, structuralism and imagination fail the reality of becoming; only art is able to capture its reality. Where is Moby Dick leading Ahab so silently, ask Deleuze–Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus? Through a progression of becomings, culminating in the ultimate zone of becoming the zone of imperceptibility: Lovecraft’s hero encounters strange animals, but he finally reaches the ultimate regions of a Continuum inhabited by unnameable waves and unfindable particles?83

Deleuze–Guattari offer becomings as alternative to myth, structuralism and imagination and link them to creative acts. They also invoke the well-established trope of the artist as seer, which inheres modernist a­ esthetics and is closely linked to primitivism and the fascination with ethnographic artefacts. This evokes the notion of the artist as shaman, which clearly still has purchase since the New York art critic Jerry Saltz quite recently referred to Tiravanija’s work as ‘shamanistic’. Deleuze–Guattari also draw on the work of the maverick anthropologist and bestseller author Carlos Castaneda. They are not troubled by the controversy about the veracity of his writing.84 They rather welcome the ambiguity that surrounds his work and unreservedly base their discussion of trance perceptions on his observations. So much the better if the books are a syncretism rather than an ethnographical study, and the protocol of an experiment rather than an account of an initiation.85

Deleuze–Guattari draw attention to the advice the Yaqui shaman Don Juan gives to his pupil Castaneda. Stop! You are making me tired! Experiment, don’t signify and interpret!86

I guess this also applies to the efforts of anthropologists in the Amazon region. Is the ingenious indigenous creation of aesthetic design therapy such an experiment? As Deleuze–Guattari remind us, Don Juan resists ‘the 146

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mechanisms of interpretation’.87 He is adamant that in order to see, one first needs to stop the world. Stopping the world was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to the flow.88

For Don Juan, the emphasis on meaning misses the point and Deleuze– Guattari argue that drug-induced experiences represent a leap into the peak of becomings: the sphere of the imperceptible. If the experimentation with drugs has left its mark on everyone, even nonusers, it is because it changed the perceptive coordinates of space-time and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off.89

But Deleuze–Guattari caution that we must not limit ourselves to ‘drugs’. There are other ways of becoming, of seeing differently. Castaneda illustrates, for example, the existence of a molecular perception to which drugs give us access (but so many things can be drugs): we attain a visual and sonorous microperception revealing spaces and voids, like holes in the molar structure.90

What is relevant to Deleuze and Guattari is that altered perceptions escape the interpretative grip of everyday consciousness. This is what the Shipibo-Conibo shaman José Santos must be thinking when anthropologists arrive with their tape recorder and questions. Stop interpreting! Stop! Have we returned to Gow’s rebuttal of meaning for Piro designs and their link to shamanic perception? Whatever else it involves, the use of ayahuasca is a technique of visual transformation. Ayahuasca is always taken at night, and as the drug takes effect, the darkness fills up with dense patterns of coloured light, which wind and shift until they are replaced with images of people, plants, animals and places.91

For Deleuze–Guattari these shamanic perceptions are representative of the peak of becoming, that is, the zone of imperceptibility. 147

Encounters Beyond the Gallery [… T]he imperceptible itself becomes necessarily perceived at the same time as perception becomes necessarily molecular:  arrive at holes, microintervals between matters, colors and sounds engulfing lines of flight, world lines, lines of transparency and intersection.92

Should we conclude that Shipibo-Conibo designs are r­ epresentative of Deleuze–Guattari’s zone of imperceptibility? Is this the message they bear? My mind wanders. Gebhart-Sayer, Illius, Gow, Keifenheim, Castaneda, Deleuze–Guattari – what a diversity of people, professions and views. Each seeking to understand perception in its ‘other’ mode, bringing their conceptual backgrounds to bear. What about Rirkrit Tiravanija? I have to think of his piece for the 1993 Venice Biennale, the aluminium canoe bearing pots of boiling water for instant noodles to be handed out to v­ isitors.93 Venice, historically the place of luxury goods and spices pouring in from all over the world, is now a place of contemporary art and tourism, which makes it yet again a place of global encounter. I can hear the echoes of the languages of the world, mingling Babel-like in Venice’s narrow lanes. Venice holds a special place in the world’s imaginary. Its watery canals and crumbling architecture are laced with romance, a place for fantasies, dreams and imaginings. A place of most unlikely encounters. Train-dreaming I imagine Shipibo-Conibo shamans, anthropologists and philosophers mingling in the streets of Venice. They have been to see the Biennale, and now hurry to Tiravanija’s for lunch. This is where they meet, sharing their meal as strangers.

Deleuze–Guattari Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous.94

Bruno Illius Most of my informants articulated their conceptions of ‘spirits’ and ‘other realities’ for the first time when I questioned them, even though as experienced shamans they have trained more than a

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Itinerant Thoughts – London, Paris, Peru and Elsewhere dozen apprentices. They were for the first time confronted with the difficulty of communicating verbally what to them is general and basic knowledge 95

Luis The songs pass from the beak of the chishca bird, from its tip of the tongue to my tip of the tongue. My tip of the tongue is vibrating. The songs pass backwards and forwards between us. This is how they become strong. The chishca has a tongue like a snake: with two tips. But in the middle it has a third, smaller tip. This is where the song is created.’96

What are they sharing with each other while they partake of Tiravanija’s hospitality?

Deleuze–Guattari A fibre stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fibre. A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization.97

Rafael You must listen attentively – and you must sing. When you are well intoxicated, you can hear and sing. You drink – and then you sing! Lie down and wait. They will come. Everything is coloured, has its own sound. When the spirits sing, you will sing along. They come really close and sing; then you will sing as well. That’s how it is.98

Are they listening to each other? And if they are, what are they hearing?

Deleuze–Guattari Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits.99

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Bruno Illius Everyday language is not the medium normally used to transmit spiritual ideas. The shamans use the rich language of songs. It is full of images, comparisons, subtle hints. It is learning by doing. There are hardly any explanations.100

José Santos The Great Boa is hissing and thundering Her tongue is moving like a machine In the centre of your eyes I will dissolve it I will teach you how to see101

They have finished their noodles and now go their separate ways. They exchanged words, but have their worlds touched? What have they shared? What has been engendered by this instance of togetherness? For Sarat Maharaj, the international space is a ‘meeting ground for a multiplicity of tongues, visual grammars and styles’.102 He reminds us how each language and culture has ‘its own system of manner of meaning’103 and how constructions of meaning often do not add up. [… T]ranslations do not square, each overshoots the other and is opaque to it. An excess silently dribbles out. Between the ­constructions we are left with the remainder of the untranslatable.104

The quest to read Shipibo-Conibo designs is a perfect example. Much more is at stake than a missing code. It is about a manner of meaning, of being in the world. Cultural translation as transmutation and transformation rather than transfer.105 Encounters have the capacity to change, to transform, and to create new ways of seeing the world. But translation thought of as a process of simply ‘carrying on’ and ‘carrying over’ occludes this possibility. It flattens difference, generates a ‘translatese’106 of sameness in which the ‘other’ vanishes, becomes but the foil for the fashioning of the self who encounters itself only. The train’s loudspeaker comes on with a crackle. The train is a­ pproaching the Gare du Nord. Passengers are reminded to take all belongings. 150

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I hastily gather my things. Have I come to a conclusion, I wonder? As I get ready to disembark, I think of Renée Green’s incongruent presence at the Unité Party, and the lack of encounter it represents, despite best intentions. I  reflect on the difficulties of encountering the other in the face of one’s preconceptions, memories and cultural situatednesses as conjured up by Calvino’s Venice. One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see. – Giorgio Morandi107

Clifford Geertz would like Morandi’s statement, I  imagine. It is thin or thick description again, the sorting of the winks from the twitches and interpreting what they mean. It is all about context. The structuralist dream of hard and fast codes has become unstuck. Looking but not seeing. It is Marco Polo and the Khan again. You only perceive what you know already, what makes sense to you. The Shipibo-Conibo designs, while greatly admired, are not seen, or only thinly so. And in Tamil Nadu, there is a ­different kind of oversight. Researchers there do not seem to look where they tread, eyes firmly fixed on mighty gopuras108 and similar lofty cultural feats. Here even thin perception seems to fail. Seeing per se is difficult enough. Engaged in acts of cultural translation it is an even more complex affair, haunted by a plethora of spectres casting cloaks of invisibility. But is looking hard really what it takes? Should it be looking smart instead? How are we to negotiate Venice?

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5 Voices: Dossier of Texts on Tamil Threshold Designs

The following section presents a collection of short texts to provide background information on the Tamil practice of drawing threshold designs. It comprises excerpts from anthropological and art historical texts as well as a newspaper article. The spelling of kolam in this section reflects the spelling in the original texts that I consulted. 1  Kolam. A Changing Ritual Folk Art of Tamil Nadu Edited excerpts from Swiss Indologist Ralph Steinmann’s article ‘Kolam: Form, Technique, and Application of a Changing Ritual Folk Art of Tamil Nadu’ on kolams.1 2  Priya Performs Her Morning Duties Excerpts from the PhD thesis ‘In Conversation with the Kolam Practice’ in social anthropology by Anna Laine.2 3  Kolams. A Female Art of the Street Excerpts from art historian Renate Dohmen’s article ‘The Home and the World’ on traditional Tamil threshold designs.3 152

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4  Kolams in Everyday and in Ritual Contexts Excerpts from ‘To Keep the Tali Strong’ by anthropologist Holly Baker Reynolds.4 5  Kolams make the Guinness Book of Records Excerpts from a newspaper article about Vijayalakshmi Mohan, who holds the world record for creating the largest rangoli pattern.5

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1  Kōlam. A Changing Ritual Folk Art of Tamil Nadu The cultural heritage of a people often survives in its folk arts. On the Indian subcontinent, it is the people of Tamil Nadu who have preserved many ancient elements of Hindu tradition in their purest form. […] Kōlam design is one of the folk arts of Tamil Nadu. Today, especially in the rural areas, the drawing of a kōlam still forms an essential part of the daily work routine of women. […] The kōlam art as well as related arts […] are not well known in the Western world. […] Let us note […] that the term kōlam in its meaning as ‘floor design’ can be documented only from the sixteenth century onwards, and that the kōlam as an art form cannot be identified reliably with any of the ­classical Indian arts [… T]he above fact leads one to look for the origins of the kōlam art in pre- or non-Aryan cultures with matriarchal traits6 […] Traditional art forms related to the kōlam are also known in other parts of India:  the ālpāna in Bengal, the jhetti in Orissa, the aripanā in Bihar (including the murals and floor designs in Mithila villages), the sañjhi in Uttar Pradesh, the mandana in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, the sathiya in Gujarat, the rangoli or rangavalli in the Deccan, the aniyal in Kerala, and especially the muggu(lu) in Andra Pradesh. This diffusion ­throughout India and the fact that these arts share certain motifs and symbols point to a common origin. Furthermore, all these regional variations are related by the following factors: they are (almost) exclusively practised by women; they are intimately linked with agricultural life and village t­radition; they are connected with folk rituals and archaic beliefs in magic;7 the material used for the designs was originally in most regions rice or rather rice flour. […] With regard to the nature of its design, the kōlam in its most typical and most frequent ‘loop form’ […] can be defined as a pattern consisting of one continuous line or of artistically interlaced or combined forms which most often are enclosed by a frame. [… A]lmost all the motifs are symbols of fertility and procreation or of the cosmic life force and regeneration and all of them […] are ­‘symbols of life’ and therefore highly auspicious. This life-affirming trait of the kōlam also finds its expression in the choice of purely decorative forms, 154

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which, combined with symbol motifs, allow for an infinite variety of new designs. […] When we speak of the kōlam technique, we have to stress again that kōlam art is mainly practised by women, that is, by women from all ­levels of the society and of every age group.8 Let us not forget, however, that the whole society takes part in this art, inasmuch as the kōlam is the most conspicuous artistic expression of the people and for many the only opportunity to give their houses and dwellings a decorative and appealing look. The dexterity and agility which the women and adolescent girls display in the placing of even very large and complex kōlam can be explained in terms of its being a daily work, a duty deeply rooted in the life rhythm of the people, initiated before going to bed and performed in the early morning. As a rule, the preparations begin the previous evening when the entrance and the square in front of the house are cleaned with water. Early next morning, often before dawn, this area is then sprinkled with a solution of cow dung and water […]. This treatment of the floor or ground enhances the effect of the kōlam and causes the design to adhere better than it would on a dry and dusty surface. The material with which the kōlam is drawn is either a white (in rare cases coloured) stone powder or rice flour […]. With the rising cost of rice, rice flour is rarely used today9 or only for small kōlams inside the house. For the larger designs in front of the house, white quartz stone powder […] is used […]. In the modern, multi-storey houses of urban areas, white chalk has become a convenient substitute.

2  Priya Performs Her Morning Duties The chilly village streets lay embedded in dark silence. In the vague light of a distant lamp post, Priya prepares the ground outside her house for the drawing of the morning kolam. Although she has just splashed cold water on her face and brushed her teeth, the darkness makes awakening slow. Priya walks across the street and collects fresh cow dung at the back of the house where her neighbour keeps a few cattle. The dung is mixed with water in a large aluminium bowl. With one hand Priya holds the bowl 155

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steady against her hip. With the other, she sprinkles the liquid over the ground from the front wall of the house up to the middle of the street. The liquid is left to sink in for a while, until the dust becomes one with the ground. After sweeping this damp area thoroughly, Priya brings a half coconut shell filled with white powder which she keeps at hand just inside the door. With this powder she will draw an image on the street, the kolam. Facing the entrance of the house, she bends her back and takes a handful of powder. This is made to trickle down between her thumb and index finger into a grid of dots. With swift rhythmical hand movements, she draws a thin line which twists and turns around the dots. When the dots are joined properly, the end of the line meets its beginning. The symmetrical image shines brightly on the damp soil in front of the door. By drawing vertical lines and a couple of small geometrical forms on the step and threshold, Priya completes the act. As she stretches her back, she exchanges a few words with the neighbouring women who are still working on their morning kolam. They are in a hurry to finish before the other daily responsibilities have to be attended to. Priya longs for the coming temple festival when time is given to create large, elaborate kolams in which she can experiment with new ideas and combine the white powder with colours. Still, she is confident that the gods and goddesses will accept today’s small kolam as her offering and invitation to them. They will appreciate her effort to beautifying and completing the appearance of the house. Priya believes that at the break of dawn, the goddess Mariyamman will walk the village streets. Satisfied with Priya’s invitation, the goddess enters the house and gives divine blessings. Mariyamman thus increases the prosperity of Priya’s ­family members and their home. Before sunrise and sunset every day, the majority of women in Tamil Nadu , South India, perform the kolam practice outside their homes in a similar way to Priya. The invitation to the deities through the kolam is part of women’s work for the well-being of their family members and surrounding community, and it also provides space for individual creativity. In addition to the daily street performances, kolam are drawn regularly in front of deities and temples. It is mainly an act of Hindu worship, but many Catholic women have incorporated the practice into their religious devotion. Few Protestants and very rarely Muslims are involved. Social and religious ideas and meanings are embodied in the practice, and importantly, 156

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it is also constitutive of ideas and meanings in a continuous process of change. Throughout most of India, women enact related practices of drawing images on the ground or on walls. […] They vary regionally and are named differently in the particular local language.10 But it is only in Tamil Nadu, and the bordering states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka11 that the practice is done on a daily basis.

References Jayakar, Pupul (1980) The Earthen Drum: An Introduction to the Ritual Arts of Rural India (New Delhi: National Museum). Rossi, Barbara (1998) From the Ocean of Painting: India’s Popular Paintings 1589 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Stein, Burton (1998) A History of India (Oxford and Massachusetts: Blackwell).

3  Kolams. A Female Art of the Street Whether one is walking the main streets of Tiruvannamalai – that is ­weaving one’s way through the bustling crowds, honking motorcycles, throngs of cyclists and cows calmly negotiating the traffic – or making one’s way along the meandering paths linking rows of huts and the occasional shrine, white powdery hand-drawn designs of various sizes will appear and disappear from view as buildings are approached and passed. Placed in front of entrances of private dwellings, shops and municipal buildings alike, these designs form a constant presence on the streets of this small town. And if on the road around sunrise or tea time, one can observe women b ­ usily bending over, drawing fresh designs by first erasing the remainders of earlier designs. These well-practised movements only take a few minutes and are carried out twice daily as part of everyday household routines. The designs are determined by a grid of dots laid down on the ground and are generally classified as either ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’. While both types of designs are based on a grid system, the traditional designs are created by circling what is ideally one continuous loop around these dots, creating abstract knot designs. In contrast, modern designs link rather than circle these dots and frequently also aim to create a recognizable image such as, for example, a bunch of flowers.12 These everyday designs are created by trickling13 finely ground white stone or chalk powder14 157

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through the fingers, guiding the flow with the thumb and index finger.15 When making designs, the executing woman will hold a small bowl, tin or coconut shell vessel with the required supply of powder in one hand, from where handfuls of powder will be taken in quick succession, Following by dotting and drawing the designs in fluid motion, without showing any sign of interruption, if skilfully done. As can be imagined, the drawing, especially of larger designs such as those executed on festival days, requires considerable skill. The woman needs to twist and turn, often 180 degrees, while drawing, without producing even the slightest wobble in the flow of the white powder. She also must not smudge the emerging pattern with her feet as she is moving between the dots and lines of the design. Once drawn, however, the designs are immediately claimed by the street:  people can be seen walking across freshly drawn patterns, and ­bicycles and other modes of transport are propelled over the designs as a matter of course. This is somewhat unsettling conduct for the Western ­visitor who, accustomed to different cultural routines, seeks to avoid ­stepping on the designs when entering buildings, at least when visitors are newly arrived and not yet accustomed to local mores. However, upon probing deeper, this apparent ‘overlooking’ and lack of interest proves to be a misconception. When, for example, local women are approached about their designs, they take great pride in their drawings.

4  Kōlams in Everyday and in Ritual Contexts There are two contexts for drawing threshold designs or kōlam. One is the everyday context of creating kōlams drawn in front of a building, referred to as entrance kōlams in this text. Second, there are the kōlams drawn in the context of rites performed by women throughout the year, referred to as nonpu kōlams. These rites are related to women’s life cycles and invoke the power of goddesses to achieve and sustain fertility, prosperity and other desired outcomes. The drawing of kōlams of whatever variety belongs to the province of women, and it is their prerogative, and even duty, to draw them. It is true that males draw kōlams when there are kōlam drawing contests, and sometimes win the competition, but the contest kōlams divorced from their ritual context, secularized into an interesting series of designs, belong only to 158

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the realm of the decorative arts, whereas the kōlams women draw on ritual occasions belong to that of the magical arts. The most commonly encountered kōlams are those drawn at the gateway, entranceway, or threshold of the home. Women draw such kōlams every day, except for those days when the household operates under the structures of death pollution. The drawing of gateway kōlams is a discrete activity, one that takes place independently of any other ritual activities. There is, however, one exception to this rule. On the main ritual day of Varalaksmi Nōnpu, the act of drawing the entranceway kōlam is an act of the nōnpu. This appropriation is unusual for nōnpus. Generally, nōnpu kōlams are drawn inside the home at the pace designated for ritual performance and bear no relationship to the gateway kōlam. Regardless of where the kōlam is to be drawn, the surface upon which the woman draws the kōlam must first be prepared. This preparation is not comparable to preparing a canvas, for unlike the application of oil paint to canvas, the preparation of the kōlam surface is not a matter of technique imposed by the nature of the materials, but rather one of ritual necessity, purpose, and efficacy. Preparation involves levelling, smoothing, and sweeping so that not a pebble, not a mark, interrupts the surface of the plane. The area is then purified by sprinkling a mixture of cow dung and water over it. In preparing the ground or floor of the home in this way, the woman transforms the area into a qualitatively different ground, a sacred space. All traces of ordinary space are swept and washed away. [...] The variety of kōlam designs is as extensive as the imaginations of the many women who draw them, but within the variety, there remain two configurational constants: a) the designs are made out of either a continuous unbroken line or superimposed twisting, curving lines; and b) the designs are made with reference to geometrical shapes, either explicitly in cases in which the total design is made up out of ­triangles, squares, rectangles, or circles; or implicitly in the cases of designs which are formed with a suppressed linear or circular framework, such as lotuses.16 Some nōnpus allow no latitude in the kōlam design, but require instead a specific image. Varalaksmi Nōnpu, for example, requires an eight-petalled lotus. Within this prescription, there is, however, great variety in the 159

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execution of such a lotus. The lotus is not exclusive to Lakshmi, but it is pre-eminently one of her symbols. When used in Varalaksmi Nōnpu, the lotus attracts to itself the mythology of Lakshmi; in other contexts, the lotus assumes a more diffused, generalized meaning. At this point we must refine our definition of kōlam. Besides being a diagram made of white rice flour, what is a kōlam? Two kōlam drawing manuals provide answers. A kōlam is a yantra,17 an ‘instrument for holding or restraining or fastening, a prop, support, or barrier’.18 A kōlam is also a mandala,19 a circle, a ‘map of he cosmos’.20 ‘Except in its greater linear simplicity the yantra, indeed, does not differ from the mandala.21 The three terms – kōlam, yantra, and mandala – are used synonymously. We have stated that it is by means of kōlams that sacred space is demarcated. This is the first ritual function kōlams perform. Tucci rightly notes, however, that ‘a mandala [read kōlam] is much more than just a consecrated area […]. It is the whole universe in its essential plan, in its process of emanation and or reabsorption.’22 Thus, the drawing of a kōlam is homologous to establishing the world, a centre, a cosmos. In drawing a kōlam the woman becomes a fashioner, an artificer of the cosmos, for she calls into being the spatial and temporal dimensions of the world. The kōlam is not only a cosmos; it is or can be also the aniconic form of divinity. In its most diffused meaning, for example, the lotus is the eight-directional unfolding cosmos. Less diffuse, the lotus is Devī, the goddess; and more concretely, the lotus is Lakshmi, who is lotus-born, lotus-eyed, and seated on the lotus. Thus, the woman fashions not simply the cosmos, but the cosmos in the form of deity. The kōlam is, then, the cosmos and the deity. There is yet another dimension to the meaning of the kōlam. As a yantra, the kōlam is a support and a receptacle for divine power. One kōlam manual states that kōlams are to be drawn ‘to invoke the deity’.23 Sacred presence, sacred power, is drawn into the diagram. The kōlam is then the cosmos, the deity, and a receptacle for the deity, and the periphery of the kōlam delineates the outermost limits of the c­ osmos and the area to the deity, the two being co-extensive. The outer lines form also a barrier which serves both to protect movement inwards toward the centre made by untoward forces and outwards on the part of the deity who is confined within the demarcated space. It is then not only an apotropaic device; it is also a restraining device. Once the deity is brought into existence, there is to be 160

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no dissipation of the deity’s power. The concatenation of interlocking, unbroken lines makes entry to the centre difficult while it simultaneously binds and harnesses the power of the deity at the centre from which it cannot escape. The centre of the kōlam is a power centre, and in nōnpus, the task of the performer is to appropriate that power to herself. […] By drawing a kōlam, a woman ‘knows’ the name and/or form of the deity. To know the name of form is to gain power to manipulate and control that deity at will. The woman who knows how to draw the kōlam knows the origins of the world, the origins of the deity. The deity, ordinarily beyond human access, is made accessible to humans, and due to her knowledge of origins, the woman can appropriate the power of the deity or make the deity respond to her wishes, which is simply another form of ­appropriation, manipulation, and control. […] The kōlams of nōnpus perform several interrelated functions. They, first of all, consecrate the space where the ritual is to be performed. This consecrated space is cosmic in structure and dimension, and hence the kōlam orients ritual activities not only towards the sacred but towards the cosmos as well. Because their creation is homologous to the creation of the world, in its temporal and spatial dimensions, kōlams propel woman into the strong times of the beginnings. And kōlams make effective in a ­delimited space the power of the deity. Without the orientation and power centre kōlams provide, succeeding ritual acts are at best futile gestures, ­barren movements, nugatory deeds.

5  Kolams make the Guinness Book of Records Vijayalakshmi Mohan holds the world record for creating the largest rangoli pattern. The little girl walked about the streets of Srirangam at dawn to admire the kolams that glowed in front of the houses. In the dim early morning light, women unleashed their creativity on a small area with rice flour. Some of them were masterpieces that went unnoticed. The patterns amazed her; they stuck on in her mind, and years later, she went on to create a Guinness record for the world’s largest rangoli pattern. And Vijayalakshmi Mohan’s love for kolams started at the veranda of her home. ‘My mother Jayalakshmi Ammal drew kolams in front of our house at around 5.30 a.m. every day. I sat by and watched her fingers work.’ 161

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From Ritual to Art The morning ritual trained her in the art of kolams, so much so that Vijayalakshmi could draw her own kolam by the age of five. When in ­college, she did kolams with 1,000 dots! Kolams were a part of Vijayalakshmi’s life wherever she went. When she settled in Singapore after getting married, her art made her popular in the country. ‘I was invited to schools, colleges, museums, libraries and women’s organizations to demonstrate kolams’, she says. In 2003, Vijayalakshmi set a Guinness Record with her freehand kolam that measured 2,756 square feet. – the size of three badminton courts. ‘I worked nonstop from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. to finish it’, she says. The previous record was for a 30 foot by 30 foot kolam done by three women in London over three days. Kolams have taken Vijayalakshmi to several countries, including the US, Australia and Dubai. Patterns out of gem stones on acrylic sheets, weather-proof designs […] she has come up with modern variations to the kolam. ‘The materials I use are new, while the designs are traditional.’ With over 5,000 designs in her repetoire, Vijayalakshmi’s kolams will decorate the Serangoon Road in Singapore this Deepavali. Vijayalakshmi believes that art can soothe the mind. She volunteers in homes for senior citizens, differently abled and the mentally challenged to teach her art. ‘It works. Art changes people. It gives them emotional release and makes them happy’, she says. ‘If I create a colour kolam when I have fever, I immediately feel better. Kolam gives me energy. It’s also good exercise.’

It’s Science! There is a science behind kolam. Every dot and curve is calculated; there is technique involved in drizzling the right amount of flour on the floor. ‘Traditionally, they were drawn using rice flour at dawn, when the air is pure and oxygen content is high. The flour attracts sparrows, ants and also earthworms’, she says. There is no limit to the number of ways one can improvise a design. Some women maintain books with their own intricate designs. Passed on from mother to daughter, these books carry a bit of ­history. Vijayalakshmi, for instance, has 300 of her mother’s designs, some of which she refers to even now. 162

6 Making Sense of Tamil Threshold Designs

This chapter explores the question of how to interpret the Indian tradition of drawing threshold designs that has long been considered a folk art hovering on the brink of cultural extinction. The tradition constitutes a pan-Indian affair with disparate and often representational regional design styles. The practice is called alpana in Bengal, aripana in Bihar, madana in Rajasthan, jhoti or chita in Orissa, chowkpurana in Uttar Pradesh, kolam in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, muggu in Andhra Pradesh, and is referred to as rangoli in Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra. The present discussion will focus on the specificities of the Tamil version of this tradition and its everyday execution on the streets and thoroughfares of Tamil Nadu (see Figures 6.1–6.4). The practice has not attracted a great deal of interest in the art world, nor among anthropologists and other scholars who make the study of India their raison d’être. Recently, however, the designs have acquired a new degree of cultural traction in India and abroad, and enjoy a newfound ­popularity among Indian communities. A few more scholarly articles on the subject have also appeared. The designs have in the last few decades also acquired an internet presence and a plethora of design suggestions now is readily available at the click of a mouse.1 Their wide appeal is also manifest in the decorative display of threshold designs on greetings cards on sale 163

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online,2 as well as handbags, other leatherware3 and T-shirts.4 Furthermore the internet bristles with step-by-step guides on how to draw the designs5 and workshops to practise the designs are laid on worldwide.6 In addition, the laboriousness of drawing the designs is alleviated by the ready availability of stencils,7 designs on plastic stickers that can be permanently affixed,8 perforated tin templates and even robots.9 This revival, however, does not mitigate the quandary posed by the practice’s failure to register in cultural debate and the post-colonial ­predicament this signals. It rather adds a level of urgency to understanding the conditions of the designs’ oversight and to identify the prevalent modes of thought that led to its neglect. To grasp these histories, it is paramount to be able to non-pejoratively situate the practice in the visual world that constitutes the global contemporary. This, however, raises the central question of what might be an appropriate language in which to speak about the designs, one able to positively frame the practice in a manner that does justice to its cultural moorings while also allowing it to register in a global visual arena. As part of this enquiry, this chapter considers what an expanded conception of relational aesthetics could offer that engages with cultural difference and draws on a more encompassing spectrum of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics than Bourriaud’s original framing.

Invisible Design Kolams are an affair of the street, a permanence in flux, an ever-changing presence on the streets of Tamil Nadu. They constitute a daily, domestic, female routine in which the whole community participates. The women draw the designs twice daily and the community witnesses their presence, but also erases the drawings as part of the ebb and flow of everyday a­ ctivities (see  Figures  6.1–6.3). The designs’ creation and deletion are everyday motions that are perfunctorily performed. Traditional kolams are abstract compositions created by looping continuous lines around a structure of grids that determine the design (see Figure 6.4). The nature of the practice’s visual presence in India and beyond has changed immensely in the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.10 The designs’ current popularity, however, is a far cry from the days of rangoli enthusiast and art teacher B. P. Bayiri 164

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Figure 6.1  A new design has just been drawn to replace the kolam drawn at sunrise. The morning’s design is only partially erased and the ground is still wet from being washed before the new design is drawn.

(1912–96) who was so concerned about the rapid decline of the tradition he witnessed in the late 1960s that he initiated the publication of a small magazine called Rangavalli, now referred to as the ‘bible’ of all rangoli lovers, with the explicit aim to revive the practice. His small publication circulated designs he collected travelling from village to village as well as patterns sent in by his readers. It also presented ‘how-to-guides’ and information about the history and meaning of the practice. The designs’ internet presence demonstrates that his efforts have paid off. Scholarly attention has also increased on this previously under-researched subject, even if more engaged discussions remain few and far between. In 1994 the cultural anthropologist Stephen Huyler noted that ‘Indian women’s decorative art has received almost no recognition’11 and attested a peculiar kind of invisibility to women’s art, pointing out that often ‘the paintings adorn houses on primary routes to major tourist sites; yet, when asked, few travellers appear to have seen them’,12 adding that no ‘specific books and very few articles have been written about them’.13 Huyler is perplexed by this state of affairs, especially since women’s decorative 165

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Figure  6.2 Tamil threshold designs are not considered precious and everyday activities are carried out without concern for preserving the designs. In fact they are drawn to be erased by the community’s everyday activities. The photo shows a bicycle parked on a traditional Tamil loop design drawn around a grid of dots in front of a residential dwelling.

designs are not just a regional, but also a pan-Indian phenomenon. He declares that ‘considering India in its entirety, the breadth of this art is overwhelming’.14 Thus even though India’s temples and palaces have been documented and described in minute detail, and anthropologists have explored India’s remote societies and traditional customs with determined dedication, threshold designs and their rich regional variations have largely slipped through the net. The information available on the subject is thus scarce, scattered and disparate. In 1919 the tradition was the subject of a small publication by Abanindranath Tagore as part of the effort by the Bengali Renaissance15 to claim Indian artistic and folk traditions for a national Indian art ­language.16 Tagore presented the designs as a decorative practice born of a feminine imagination representative of Hindu art. Then there are brief references in the journal Man17 in the 1930s18 that lament the dearth of information on the subject and invite its readership to take the matter in hand. The idiosyncratic anthropologist John Layard,19 who comments 166

Figure 6.3  Threshold designs are drawn in front of house entrances and are erased as people go about their daily business. Here a Tamil woman is resting on the front steps of her home with her feet on a kolam.

Figure 6.4  Kolams for special occasions are larger than the ordinary everyday threshold designs. This image shows a large traditional loop design normally executed for festive occasions, drawn for a kolam competition.

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on the practice in the 1940s, by contrast is mostly interested in theories of labyrinthine rituals and proposes the tradition as an off-shoot of such ancient rites. In 1968 the Bengali practitioner Mrs Bardhan published a small booklet on the practice presenting it as a female decorative art based on long-since-abandoned ancient primitive roots.20 A book-length study by E. M. Gupta based on fieldwork in 1976–77 and 1979–80 in Bengal gives some background to the Bengali history of the designs and refers to its roots in women’s rites. The author reproduces a number of designs, provides an explanation of the symbolism of the alpana designs21 and invokes the stereotype of Bengali women as compelled by an irrepressible, innate ‘urge to decorate’. A study by the Crafts Council of India in 198922 is focused on collecting designs and associated rituals. And the scholarly discussion of kolams by the Swiss Indologist Ralph Steinmann of the same year23 gathered valuable information and discussed the then current state of the tradition in terms of a symbolic decline. Furthermore V. R. Nagarajan explored the kolam tradition in 1993 and kolam competitions in 2001.24 Huyler published a mainly photographic homage to the tradition in 1994 and I have analysed the framing of the tradition in view of constructions of art, craft, women and the national in 2001, and developed its performative dimensions in 2004.25 Moreover the anthropologist Anna Laine examined the kolam tradition in her PhD thesis in 2009,26 and the artist and writer Aurogeeta Das explored the tradition in relation to the dichotomy between metropolitan and traditional arts in India for her PhD in 2011.27 And more recently, in 2012 June McDaniel has explored the ritual aspects of the Bengali version of the tradition.28 But there is also a mathematical strand to the discussion. In 2002 Ascher, building on the work of Gift Siromoney from Madras, explored kolams from the point of view of ethno-mathematics and computer science.29 While this is only a cursory review of the literature and does not reference newspaper articles in the Indian press or publications in local vernaculars, it does demonstrate that discussions on the subject are far from plentiful. I have argued elsewhere that this oversight is indicative of the lack of a suitable conceptual framework for the tradition and explored the chameleonesque shifts in the tradition’s framings offered in 12 editions of the small, popular magazine Rangavalli published between 1967 and 1988,30 in view of the paradigms available to frame the practice.31 I discuss 168

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how its editor Bayiri drew on an eclectic mix of information ranging from anecdotal evidence of the auspicious effects of daily engagement in the practice, to snippets of folklore, mythology and local customs in his ­magazine. He also offered symbolic references for the designs and highlighted religious and ritual elements. He explained that during religious festivals respective deities are indicated with the help of special weapons or vehicles, which act as symbols and may well appear in threshold designs drawn on this day. He, not only collected information about the designs, but also sought to reason why the tradition is important. Over the years, adopting a ‘kitchen sink’ approach, he explored different registers to shore up their cultural credentials. He presented the tradition as art based on ‘symbols and dots’, and argued that in spite of the dots ‘the artist has the ­opportunity to express himself to maintain and develop his freedom, ­creativity and individuality’,32 thus disavowing that the practice is an exclusively female domestic affair. He highlighted abstraction as another qualifying element, and, drawing on a modernist aesthetic, presents rangoli’s decorative aspects and use of colour as expressive of emotion. He also invoked an Indus Valley connection for the designs and declared the practice as a form of Tantric design, that is, ‘symbols of secret philosophical religious meanings’,33 as well as a ‘highly communicative’34 folk art. And he referred to the Divine, stating, in summary, that the tradition ‘is capable of encompassing abstraction, symbolism, and all other isms, visually pleasant and ritually auspicious’.35 One might be forgiven for dismissing Bayiri’s rather too all-encompassing claims as misguided. But rather than interpreting this seeming medley of paradigms as indicative of a muddled mind, I would argue that Bayiri performs the difficulty of framing the designs, and in the end comes up with an ‘all-in’ definition that is as broad as it is ambiguous. He probes every aesthetic register available to him, and when he realizes none of them is quite right, he adopts a DIY mode and crowds traditionally contradictory qualifications into the same conceptual arena, creating a ‘both-fine-and-folk-art’ category that is also decorative and ritualistic.36 The latter, however, tellingly excludes the crucial domestic, female context, which he obviously deemed irreconcilably beyond the pale of a successful claim for the practice’s fine-art status. 169

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I have furthermore argued that Bayiri’s struggle with the ­available conceptual terrain is marked by the colonial experience, and have interpreted his veering between anthropology and art history, the modern–traditional binary, the divisions between art, craft and folk art as indicative of ill-suited aesthetic concepts derived from Western ­cultural contexts. This conclusion, however, begs the question whether more constructive approaches can be envisaged, and what role an expanded notion of relational aesthetics could play in allowing the practice to figure co-equally and coevally in the contemporary visual field. This necessarily entails the sidestepping of established frameworks that associate the practice with ‘time immemorial’, mourn its decline and nostalgically celebrate its idealized past of imaginary wholeness; perceptions therefore that exile the tradition from the present and designate it as creatively inferior. Bayiri’s overall sentiment about the tradition remained one of loss and decline. He stated that this ‘precious heritage is now being gradually lost’,37 and that in ‘the countryside of today only a few old women have still some knowledge of and skill in the art of Rangavalli or Rangoli. But the younger generation are almost totally ignorant of it.’38 The Indologist Steinmann echoes Bayiri’s view. He reports on the designs’ link to auspiciousness and presents Tamil notions of beauty as order. He highlights the designs’ rootedness in the domestic and relates that a house without a drawing is seen to be an unhappy affair. He also holds that ‘as so many other customs, kolam art has become a convention detached from its original meaning and function’.39 For him the practice, certainly in the 1980s when he wrote his article, had become ‘decadent’, even if the tradition was still widely practised. It is assumed to be an empty form without meaning, as the women who create the designs can only explain their practice in generic terms such as ‘it is our tradition’. Similar to the Shipibo-Conibo scenario, we therefore encounter a presumption that the designs had a meaning that can no longer be communicated, and that they once possessed a ritual fullness that is now lost. And as the tradition, in this case, assuredly is ancient, and may even date as far back as the Indus Valley civilization, it is surmised that such a meaning, which may well have formed a language of symbols that could be iconically decoded, once existed, but has since been lost. The question this 170

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discussion poses, however, is whether this judgement represents a ­cultural mistranslation based on dominant Eurocentric expectations about how a visual practice is to signify, and whether it overlooks other dimensions that give meaning to the practice. A further point to consider is the colonial construction of Indian culture as eternally set in the past, and the prevalence of narratives of decline which justify the colonial presence as civilizing influence that salvages the historic monuments to the former greatness of Indian civilization. Such an outlook is necessarily blind to the notion that rituals do evolve and adapt to changing times, and may well have ritual affectivity even if they come along on a different and more modern guise. The anthropologist Edward Schieffelin for example, critiques what he sees as an over-emphasis on the symbolic mode and advocates a move away from studying cultural performances as systems of representation. He points out that discussions of rituals ‘seem to be curiously robbed of life and power when distanced in discussions concerned largely with meaning’.40 He argues that a processual approach to cultural performance is needed which places greater emphasis on the bodily rather ‘than structures of symbols’ and allows for a ‘social construction of reality rather than its representation’.41 The anthropologist Victor Turner likewise advocates a notion of society as ‘process rather than an abstract system, whether of social structural relations or of symbols or meanings’.42 He emphasizes the role of ­liminal spaces in culture ‘to live, to breathe, and to generate novelty’,43 ­arguing that ritual should be understood primarily as performed processual and ­transformative activity. In other words, for Turner the study of ritual ­activity means exploring what ritual does, and how symbols are handled during such enactments. Turner also observes that multivalent meanings accorded to ritual objects are located in the objects themselves, rather than in their relations, as structuralists would argue, and emphasizes that the affective potential of ritual needs to be added to the dimension of meaning. For him it is the ‘in-betweenness’ of performed actions, that is, their negotiation of differing states of more or less settled cultural activity as part of everyday life, that needs to be acknowledged.44 Turner advocates that creativity be introduced to anthropology, arguing that ‘play is more serious than we, the inheritors of Western Puritanism, have thought’.45 171

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Qualities of Space A performative perspective thus enables a shift in focus. Now the act of drawing, rather than the designs produced, is taking pride of place. This change in emphasis from final product to process allows for different questions to be asked. Rather than aiming to ‘decipher’ the designs, the objective now is to establish how the acts of drawing feature in the wider cultural context of Tamil Nadu, and what they ‘do’. This shift also brings the local community and their essential participation into view, a factor that is overlooked by iconographic approaches. It now becomes evident that the local residents are integral to the practice and act as witness to the designs’ appearance and erasure on the streets. Their observance is based on the anticipated presence of designs and translates into a sense of disquiet if they fail to appear, as the absence of designs signals that all is not well in the home. But the community at large also contributes to the progressive effacing of the designs as they walk or drive over them as part of their everyday routines (see Figures  6.2 and 6.3). A  performative perspective thus reveals acts of erasure as integral to the practice. But apart from bringing the local community into view, a performative approach also engages with the specificity of the sociocultural r­ eality and spatiality these acts generate. Tamil culture, for example, is deeply concerned with the perceived quality of a space, and ritual acts are part of a range of balancing measures required to change or maintain a space’s flavour. The anthropologist Daniel informs us that in Tamil culture, spatial relations are characterized by fluidity and variance. At the heart of this view lies what he calls a preoccupation with ‘substance’,46 and the belief that substance needs to be kept in equilibrium if a sense of well-being, and, ultimately, the continuity of life is to be secured. This understanding is expressed in a concern with perceived ‘substantial’ compatibilities on an everyday level, and asks questions such as ‘will this food be compatible with my body?’47 It also generates an engagement with notions of temporal compatibility between a specific moment in time and the quality it expresses in view of planned activities such as a new business venture.48 In a traditional Tamil context, the underlying tenet of an inherent ­substantial fluidity at the heart of manifest creation suffuses everyday life. The possibility of life slipping into chaos is considered a constant risk that needs 172

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to be mediated. Unceasing vigilance and the safeguarding of boundaries by regular equilibrating actions are thus needed to maintain the everyday, as daily routines of establishing inter-substantial compatibility can only be momentarily successful and need to be regularly and repeatedly ­performed.49 This notion of flux also applies to spatial relations and translates as a perceived necessity to create congenial relationships between people, geographical locations and places of residence, with the threshold as a crucial marker of substantial exchanges. A house from a traditional Tamil point of view therefore is ‘more than just a structure built to the specification of the owner. It is, like all other forms of substance, in constant flux, mixing with and changing according to the substances that come into contact with it’.50 And he adds that ‘people are as concerned with controlling the substances that combine with their bodily substance’51 as they are with the substances that cross the ‘vulnerable threshold of their houses and combine not only with their bodily substance but with the substance of their houses’.52 Houses are thus seen to be affected by the substantial ­fluidity of their geographical environment as well as the substantial make-up of the human traffic that mixes with its elements by entering its domain. This ‘substantial’ preoccupation is, however, also linked to the temporal. In Tamil culture ‘the gazes of the planets’53 are to be reckoned with. They not only mark the individual character at birth, but also impact events in daily life, such as lucky or unlucky times to start a journey. Furthermore, ritual control of potentially dangerous forces is required for interstitial temporal moments such as solstices or equinoxes, and the beginnings and ends of the month and the year. But while such transitional points in time harbour the danger of destabilization and chaos, they are also believed to be exceptionally potent, as the divine is thought to be more accessible at such junctures. In Tamil culture, points of transition are thus marked by ambivalence, and it is the task of ritual to draw out their potential positivity. In Tamil culture, women are traditionally considered best suited  to negotiate these dangerous points of transition, because of the special power they share through their biological link with creative and destructive forces evident in childbirth and menstruation. Historically, special and exclusively female rites or vratas were performed widely at the time of major temporal transitions, and it is considered the task of women to harness the forces they harbour to ensure they manifest in a benign 173

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rather than destructive fashion. The ambivalent powers of the cosmos are therefore seen to be intimately linked to the conflicting powers h ­ arboured by women. By performing female rites, the women are believed to shape not just the cosmic forces at large but also their own powers. Women are thus considered prime mediators between states of danger, chaos and death, as well as states of well-being, order and life. They are seen to be privileged to walk the fine line between these modes, and ensure the overall continuity and well-being of the community by keeping the forces of chaos at bay. Female rites also reveal ritual aspects to threshold designs. The anthropologist Holly Baker Reynolds reports that such rites involve the drawing of ritual designs formally similar and at times identical to the everyday kolams encountered on the street.54 The designs are employed in the initial stages of such rites to mark and prepare the space for the ensuing invocation and transform a previously profane location into a ritual space. This power, however, does not reside in the designs per se. It is their ritual embeddedness that allows for this transformative power to unfold and the same design used every day on the street would not effect this transformation. Yet everyday kolams also participate in this world of flux, and n ­ egotiate spatial and temporal ambiguity. On important festival days, particularly those marking the transition of the old to the new year, the everyday designs on the streets are, for example, required to be more elaborate. But contrary to their use in vratas executed in a secluded space by a select group of women, the everyday designs are drawn in the street and constitute a public and collective affair. But since everyday designs are drawn at the thresholds of dwellings and other architectural structures  – shrines, schools, shops and municipal buildings – they also engage with points of transition, albeit primarily spatial ones. The drawing of the designs, however, is predominantly associated with residential dwellings, and the women perceive their creative acts as a domestic duty and reference the quality of the work in terms of housewifely excellence and good womanhood. The presence of the designs furthermore signals ‘home’, ‘woman’ and ‘well-being’ to the wider community. Notions of ‘homeliness’ and eudaemonia are therefore linked to a larger context of collectivity, which comprises the local community, but also a larger world of force. This suggests that everyday designs also harbour a ritual connection. 174

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As I  have argued elsewhere, the drawing of threshold designs transforms a house into a ‘home’ by performatively situating it in a ‘world at large’ or ‘cosmos’ that is constituted by astronomical markers and d ­ angerous events such as the transition of the old to the new year. Seen from this perspective, the drawing of kolams can be understood as an act of qualitative space making, which in the Tamil imagination involves temporal aspects, and declares Tamil women to be powerful ‘space-time interventionists’.55 This is a far cry from the interpretations encountered earlier in this discussion which revolved around notions of decline and loss. Seen from a performative perspective, the designs are now no longer seen to be devoid of meaning. Rather they are argued to fashion a space of belonging for the community in accordance with notions of ‘at-homeness’ specific to the traditional cultural context mapped. The performed daily acts of drawing and erasing threshold designs thus involve the community in a daily exercise of creating a place in the world articulated via the ‘home’.

Queer Primitive Practices The framework of Indian folk art was, however, not able to make these aspects available. This reflects, as I  have argued, the historic and cultural conditions of post-independence India, where folk art entailed an ­ambivalent stance towards ritual performances since the colonial charge of the irrationality of Indian culture still touched a nerve. Traditional rituals were hence ‘tamed’ and artistic frameworks displaced ritual elements, resulting in a cultural flattening and ‘sanitizing’ of ritual practices. In India the very concept of folk art was therefore premised on the disavowal of ritual, and suppressed associated aspects of, for example, the tradition of ­drawing threshold designs. And as art history was mainly interested in temples, sculpture and paintings, it relegated the designs to the realm of anthropology. Anthropology in turn largely saw the designs as art and engaged with them only peripherally. And when it did, it relied on paradigms borrowed from Western art history, laden with limiting preconceptions about non-Western aesthetic traditions and ‘primitive’ visual cultures. The design tradition thus fell through the disciplinary net and became quasi invisible. As film critic Robert Stam, cultural theorist Ella Shohat, sociologist Laymert Garcia dos Santos and others point out, this mix of prevalent 175

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attitudes and approaches perpetuates the marginalization and continued misrepresentation of such practices around the globe.56 Another question one may want to ask is why did Bayiri revert to Eurocentric conceptions in the first place, especially as they were clearly failing the practice? Were there no better-suited Indian aesthetic concepts he might have used? This question brings the colonial period to the fore and the era of nationalist struggle, when concepts of Indianicity were formed. As I have argued elsewhere, notions of Indian art and national culture that developed in the formative phase of Indian ­nationalism57 were fundamentally informed by gendered Europe-derived notions of art and creativity58 and sought to distance themselves from ‘traditions’ which invited charges of superstition and primitivity.59 This issue bears directly on the tradition of drawing threshold designs, as female domestic rites were open to such incriminations.60 The following presentation of the tradition by Mrs Bardhan, a Bengali practitioner of the craft (published in 1968) illustrates the point. She explains the drawing of threshold designs as a specifically female decorative art form distilled from earlier and, importantly, long-since-abandoned primitive roots that invokes a dichotomy between modernity and sophistication, and the primitive and magic. She states that ‘modern researches have shown that alpana-painting61 is related to those queer magic practices of the primitives that have left traces even in our present sophisticated life’.62 She also links the practice to the ‘religious acts of devotion and austerity observed in different seasons by the women of India’,63 and goes on to describe these ‘popular rites’ as ‘reflections of the old socio-magical practices of the primitive rites’.64 But while acknowledging the ‘primitive’ link, she also re-images the tradition by pointing out that the designs, even though originally associated with this sphere, have in the meantime moved on. According to her, they now are no longer rooted in ­ritual but exist solely in the realm of art. She thus argues that the designs’ ‘main purpose is decorative’65 and proposes that they represent a unique expression of ‘the artistic mind of the women community’66 and the ‘Bengali genius’.67 In this instance, however, the decorative, rather than denoting symbolic lack as proposed by Steinmann, becomes a positive category and translates ‘primitive ritual’ into aesthetic value, positioning the practice within a civilized modernity. The manoeuvre, however, has 176

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its price: the associated female ritual context is left at the ‘other’, primitive side of the disciplinary divide. Indian visual traditions or aspects thereof considered too close to ‘uncivilized magic practices’ were thus frequently edited out, not only by Western researchers who were likely to romanticize such practices as primordial traditions along Orientalist and primitivist lines, but by Indian players as well who were eager to position themselves in the international and inevitably European sphere of art. A further point to be considered here is the splitting of the ritual field along a high–low axis. Ritual invocations of the Divine, for example, ­figure positively in established high-cultural contexts such as Sanskrit philosophy, proclamations on art, or Tantric practices, and it is therefore not surprising that Bayiri drew on them in his efforts to talk up the tradition of drawing threshold designs. In contrast, the rangoli enthusiast ­scrupulously avoids ‘primitive’ religious contexts not sanctioned by scriptural traditions. The examination of the history and prevalent framings of the kolam tradition thus reveals categorical predicaments on multiple fronts that are conditioned by the gendered legacies of colonial discourse and the specificity of their articulation in India. Notions of the primitive had a particularly complex legacy in India as charges of primitivity levied by the colonial power skewed, as we have seen, the perception of traditional practices that were subsumed under the folklore bracket. Another aspect here is the adoption of modern modes of painting by Indian artists which entailed an endorsement of its primitivist strand. As Partha Mitter ­delineates, modern art represented a visual language of revolt against the colonial order in early twentieth-century British India, where the colonial regime had pushed academic art as the dominant aesthetic mode.68 Indian artists therefore adopted the modern idiom as a visual referent for their struggle for independence. With this adoption came indigenous primitivist appropriations largely from traditional Indian arts, including threshold designs. For example, Abanindranath Tagore, the leader of the Bengal School of Art considered a key stepping stone to the development of modern Indian art, wrote in 1919 a richly illustrated book about the practice. And Nandalal Bose, a pupil of Tagore who in 1922 became the principal of Kala Bhavan (Institute of Fine Arts), in Santiniketan, had students draw threshold designs as part of their art school training.69 Bose also sought 177

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to develop a specifically Oriental mode of abstraction which, laced with Orientalist assumptions about the East, was based in part on the linear rhythmicality and dynamism of threshold drawings. Indian internal indigenous appropriations were modelled on European primitivism and relegated the practices that were sampled to the ­primitive, and hence minor, league even if they were re-valorized to an extent as ‘authentic’ modes of Indian expression that gave rise to modern Indian art. Moreover, none of these attempts at aesthetic self-definition and at forging a syncretic modern Indian visual practice entered the canons of modern art or registered on an international level until recently, as all questions of art were, and largely continue to be, adjudicated in the centres of cultural power in the West. Indian art thus shared the condition of invisibility with works of modern art developed in other non-Western centres and thus, inadvertently, also of the indigenous visual traditions they in part drew on. A marked West–Rest divide thus characterizes the global condition of modern art that has only relatively recently begun to be challenged, and the history of modern art continues to be considered a Western phenomenon. There is also an inequity of appropriation to be noted. Whereas the ‘borrowing’ of ‘foreign’ cultural codes by Western artists such as in Picasso’s Demoiselles is not considered derivative or a sign of aesthetic weakness but is celebrated as a stroke of genius, the adoption of modern aesthetic ­idioms by artists with, for example, an Indian background was considered inauthentic, and was thought to result in a loss of cultural identity and inferior art. This double standard continues to haunt Indian and other non-Western artists who adopt modern and other visual languages that originate in the West and pushes these artists towards visual references to indigeneity. Citations of traditional Indian idioms in the work of modern Indian artists were thus considered and continue to be seen as markers of authenticity that alleviate charges of derivativeness. In a global arena, references to Indian folk traditions in the work of Indian artists thus invite complex and overdetermined associations that tie, legitimate and limit the art to assumed authentic cultural origins. Primitivist appropriations by modern Indian artists who drew on Indian traditions therefore need to be recognized as a special chapter of the problematic legacy of primitivism in modern art. Such questions are gradually being addressed as part of efforts to decentre modern art.70 Mitter, for 178

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example, has offered a revisionist reading of primitivism as an empowering anti-colonial strategy in India.71 He cites the work of Jamini Roy and his adoption of Indian folk idioms as an example of a ‘politicized ­“ruralism” that emerged in the 1920s in India’.72 Mitter thus argues in favour of ­differentiating two kinds of primitivisms. He writes that ‘one must recognize the important differences between the primitivism of the centre and the periphery’ and that ‘Western primitivists were chiefly concerned with the predicament of urban existence, whereas Indian artists used ­primitivism as an effective weapon against colonial culture’.73 This view, however, does not address the compounded complexities of indigenous primitivist appropriations in India. As the example of kolam designs demonstrates, the links of primitivism to colonial discourse which, as Araeen points out,74 continue to have purchase in their neo-colonial guise of ‘ethnic arts’, need to be closely scrutinized with regard to ­hierarchies of power and issues of gender. The fact that the artist Jamini Roy’s appropriation of Indian folk art harboured an anti-colonial, nationalist message does not absolve art historians from questioning the power differentials at play in such appropriations. Much like Western primitivists who adopted idioms from European folk art and non-Western visual traditions, these ‘inspirations’ more often than not were appropriations rather than any recognition of the artistic significance of the work and its makers. An art history that declares the global a central and serious concern needs to redress the disavowal of the ‘other visual traditions’ that inhere modern art’s ‘primitive’ visual idiom, regardless of whether Western or native artists raided indigenous visual archives. Simon Gikandi refers to this neglect as an ‘anxiety of influence’ and wonders, what threat does ‘the acknowledgement of correlativity between the modern and its Others pose’?75 For him this constitutes ‘a hauntology that has come to define the moment of modernism’, which he sees as characterized by ‘a dialectic of love and loathing’.76 Key here is the denigration of such visual modes as artistic practices of little value in their own right. The continuing pertinence of such questions is evident in what Araeen has called multiculturalism’s primitivist inheritance and what he sees as a continued primitivization and ‘ethnicization of non-European cultures globally as well as within Western societies’.77 The import of these concerns is also brought home by the conception of the Musée du Quai Branly, 179

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France’s new showcase ethnographic museum that opened in 2006 and has been characterized as a neo-primitivist, commodified multiculturalist and touristic conception.78 In the year 2000 Stéphane Martin, the chairman and manager of the museum, blatantly asserted that the most interesting aspects of the objects held in the museum were the stimulation of the history of Western art, and the fact that these objects ‘speak to us very directly’ as they are ‘universal in nature’.79 This statement denies the rich and culturally specific history of the objects displayed. The mode of display adopted by the museum exemplifies this outlook: the arrangement of the exhibits lacks demarcation between geographical areas, there are hardly any labels or information panels in evidence, and the few that exist are hard to find. Critics have condemned this curatorial conception as ‘jungle fever’ characterized by ‘Tarzan décor’ and as ‘dangerously close to a fantasy of pre-contact worlds’.80 The very fact that such statements and modes of display are still possible in the twenty-first century demonstrates the continuing difficulty with framing non-Western art within an international, if not global setting. It yet again highlights the problematic and unresolved legacy of modern art and the nature of its ‘interest’ in ethnic arts. And it brings us back to the importance and impact of interpretative frameworks and the need to develop conceptual arenas that can bridge such worlds, can extricate overdetermined ethnic arts from the limiting paradigms they are entangled in, and can diversify and change the direction of artistic and intellectual flows. But could the proposed expanded version of relational aesthetics offer such a bridging moment and extract the practice of drawing threshold designs from art world marginality? And how could this ‘bastardization’ of Bourriaudean thought be justified?

Harnessing Forces Relational aesthetics ironically is a product of just such a seemingly incongruous transfer of ideas. Bourriaud stretched Guattari’s notions of ­aesthetics, which emphatically excluded professional art and inserted them into the realm of contemporary art anyway. He defended this grafting of Guattari’s thinking onto the domain of present-day art in terms of ‘thinking about art with Guattari, and with the toolbox he has bequeathed us’.81 O’Sullivan 180

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and Zepke also extended Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics by transposing it into the realm of contemporary art. They readily concede that Deleuze and Guattari do not go beyond modern art in their writing and like Bourriaud feel the need to defend their move. Their main justification is a statement by Guattari to the effect that his conception of aesthetics includes all forms of artistic activity, which they argue, by implication, includes ­contemporary art.82 The present proposed expansion of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetic frameworks that has been given a cultural turn, however, constitutes an even more radical departure since Deleuze–Guattarean notions of art draw exclusively on ‘painters, writers, musicians and filmmakers who lie squarely within the Western canon’,83 in other words white, Western males.84 The rationale here is that this expansion into radically alterior cultural terrains represents an experiment in the spirit of their work: it picks up a line of flight and creates new assemblages in response to contemporary challenges, thereby countering the risk of ossification of Deleuze–Guattarean thought and of creating a new academy. Moreover, this experiment, as I hope to demonstrate, harbours more than a potential framework for redeeming threshold designs. It offers an important corrective and conceptual expansion of relational aesthetics, as articulated by Bourriaud, that foregrounds the non-human aspects of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics seen as key to opening up new terrains of aesthetic encounter and extending the relational beyond the gallery. Arguably there are significant resonances between Tamil modes of establishing ‘the home in the world’, the concern of relational ­aesthetics with collectivity and the convivial, and Deleuze–Guattarean a­ esthetics that warrant the validity of the experiment. For example, Tiravanija’s recreation of his private apartment in a gallery in New  York – that is, the translocation of his domestic space to a public arena – offers suggestive correlations with the public–private dimensions of the drawing of threshold designs in Tamil Nadu. Relational aesthetics, furthermore, emphasizes the invention of new life possibilities, and declares aesthetic practice a privileged terrain for ‘providing potential models for human existence in general’.85 According to Bourriaud, the gallery goers that share a meal at Tiravanija’s or have a sleep-over at his re-created apartment momentarily suspend their established identities, enter a space of self-experimentation and open themselves to the possibility of becoming ‘other’. This outlook 181

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can be said to resonate with the performance of rites by Tamil women who step outside the everyday and reorient their identities towards a larger realm of cosmic force they reference as ‘Divine’ in the process. They chant and perform ritual observances, become ‘other’, harness the forces of chaos and return to the everyday recharged and empowered.86 There are also resonances with regard to Deleuze–Guattarean ­aesthetics and kolams. As stated the Tamil world of energetic flux requires participation, and the drawing of the designs constitutes a re-establishing of order, of holding the forces of chaos at bay – an act which, given the changeable nature of the cosmos, needs to be repeated time and time again, and entails a constant interaction between order and flux and the continual rebalancing of relations. In a similar vein, the Deleuze–Guattarean notion of ‘bending the line’ that establishes an ‘endurable zone in which to install ourselves’87 also needs to be perpetually redone, since the line is constantly ‘unfolding at crazy speeds’.88 But ‘folding the line’ also implies a ‘living on the edge’, and for Deleuze this line is ‘deadly, too violent and fast, carrying us into breathless regions. It destroys all thinking […] It’s nothing but délire and madness.’89 This is again reminiscent of Tamil women who encounter the forces of chaos in their ritual activity. According to Baker Reynolds, it is woman who ‘steps into the chaotic, dark world of death and learns its secrets’90 and who declares ‘We eat death’91 and considers it woman’s work. Furthermore there is the notion of the refrain as part of the interplay of territorialization and deterritorialization, which Deleuze–Guattari ­delineate and link in their aesthetics. It foregrounds the sonorous, and represents a territory that is unmade in order to be remade creatively, to be traversed by becomings. This conception again evokes the ritual invocations of vratas and the associated drawing of kolams, as well as the repeated acts of creation and erasure of everyday threshold designs. Deleuze–Guattari also link their concept of the refrain to territoriality and the home, a further Tamil resonance. They hold that ‘home does not pre-exist’92 and that ‘it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile centre, to organize a limited space’.93 This creates an interiority and an ­exteriority where the ‘forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible’.94 For Deleuze–Guattari, this prevents the interior forces of the earth ‘from being submerged’, and enables them to ‘resist, or even to take something from chaos across the filter or sieve of space that has been drawn’.95 They also 182

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suggest that ‘sonorous or vocal components are very important’96 and refer to ‘a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks’97 such as when a ‘housewife sings to herself […] as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work’.98 These propositions conjure up Baker Reynolds who states that ‘in drawing a kolam woman becomes fashioner of the cosmos, for she calls into being the spatial and temporal dimensions of the world’.99 And while Tamil housewives do not sing when they draw everyday kolams, the performance of vratas involves repeated and prolonged incantations. Furthermore, kolams are inwardly and outwardly protective as the ‘outer lines form also a barrier which serves both to protect movement inward toward the centre made by untoward forces and outwards on the part of the deity’.100 Tamil women who perform vratas and draw kolams as part of their rites furthermore abandon their subjectivity and participate in a larger world of divine power, as the ‘drawing of kolams proceeds from a dissolution and assimilation of all forms back into the formless’.101 This understanding resonates with the Deleuzian delineation of the territory or the ‘house’ conceived as a passage or an in-between, which mediates the wider frame of the cosmos. Deleuze thus states that the ‘figure, is no longer the inhabitant of the place, of the house, but of the universe that supports the house (becoming). It is like a passage from the finite to the infinite, but also from territory to deterritorialization.’102 So far we have explored resonances between the cultural terrains of relational aesthetics, Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics and the traditional ritual and visual practices of Tamil housewives to avoid an imposition of inappropriate conceptions on the design tradition. The synergies have proven to be numerous and compelling. Yet these practices also differ most markedly in terms of their cultural situatedness and the concerns they address:  while Tiravanija’s work takes a stance against the alienation ­experienced in post-industrialized society, where individuals struggle against the ‘despotic regime of the signifier’, the traditional world of Tamil Nadu battles with flux, and seeks to establish a place of stability in its dynamic energetics. The challenge of the proposed conceptual encounter therefore is the bridging of these worlds in a meaningful way. The ensuing discussion will explore key aspects of these frameworks which are seen to offer a crucial connective potential for a transformative and co-equal bridging of worlds. 183

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Social, Animal, Vegetable and Cosmic The first concept to be explored in greater depth is the non-human aspect of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics that was skirted by Bourriaud but is central to the proposed expanded notion of relational aesthetics. According to Guattari, what is at stake in the current world and its struggle for ecological disequilibrium is the relationship between ‘subjectivity and its exteriority – be it social, animal, vegetable or Cosmic’.103 When Bourriaud drew on Guattari’s concepts in his framing of relational aesthetics, he honed in on the social aspect of this relationship, leaving the ‘animal, vegetable or Cosmic’ aside. We are encountering Latour’s ‘Internal Great Divide’104 again and the conception of nature as outside culture, and as universal and knowable by means of Western science alone. It is all the more important, therefore, to reflect on the inclusion of these realms in Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics as well as the potentiality these worlds hold for the envisaged translative encounter at he heart of this experiment. For Deleuze–Guattari, the ­aesthetic repositioning of the subject crucially goes beyond intersubjectivity and is grounded in the encounter with a collectivity which encompasses ‘elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all these’.105 They propose that flows of intensity, ‘their fluids, their fibres, their continuums and conjunction of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject’,106 that is, ‘becomings-animal, becoming molecular, have replaced history, ­individual or general’.107 Similar to the Bergson–Deleuze–Guattarean notion of s­ubjective perception as a special instance of a larger, diffuse objective perception of molecularity, they thus redefine subjectivity by relating it to the wider field of force beyond the human domain. For them ‘subjectification has little to do with any subject. It’s to do, rather, with an electric or magnetic field, an individuation taking place through intensities […] it’s to do with individuated fields, not persons or identities’.108 But Deleuze–Guattari develop the non-human spectrum not only in relation to subjectivity, but also make it part of their conception of art, and, furthermore, see the two realms as interlinked. They link aesthetic practice with invisible forces and argue a ‘fold of force’ as representative of an a­ rtistic mode of living. They write about ‘establishing different ways of existing, depending on how you fold the line of forces’109 and refer to ‘existing not as 184

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a subject but as a work of art’.110 For Deleuze–Guattari the world of force, furthermore, is negotiated via the ‘house’.111 It is integral to the non-human aspects of art defined as ‘a being of sensation’112 and ‘the compound of nonhuman forces of the cosmos’113 also referred to as ‘man’s nonhuman becomings’.114 They link expression to territory and the non-human sphere, and report how the ‘brown stagemaker […] lays down landmarks each morning by dropping leaves it picks from its tree, and then turning them upside down so the paler underside stands out against the dirt’,115 pointing out that this ‘inversion produces a matter of expression’.116 Expressiveness is thus redefined in terms of taking possession and of environmentality rather than human articulation. It constitutes a specific response to a ­terrain or geographical location that ‘is not reducible to the immediate effects of an impulse triggering an action’.117 Deleuze and Guattari furthermore refer to the territorial markings of the stagemaker as ‘readymades’ and as art brut. They pronounce that ‘what is called art brut is not at all pathological or primitive’,118 but constitutes a ‘matter of expression in the movement of territoriality’ which they declare ‘the base or ground of art’.119 Territory, furthermore, is linked to the terrestrial and transmutes the forces of chaos to the forces of the earth.120 Yet through the very regrouping of the forces of chaos territoriality entails, it ‘unleashes something that will surpass it’.121 For Deleuze–Guattari, territory is always a place of passage.122 The forces of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization are interconnected123 since ‘the territory is constantly traversed by movements of deterritorialization’124 and the Cosmos is but an intense deterritorializing refrain125 which liberates forces previously ‘bundled together as forces of the earth’ that become ‘regained forces of a deterritorialized Cosmos’.126 Expression for Deleuze–Guattari is therefore not linked to an inner subjective core of experience; it is not an inside-out trajectory, or based on a consciousness model. It is rather defined as relational to an outside, an environs. This, however, has implications for the conception of the artist who is redefined as ‘the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark’.127 They further declare that ‘artists are stagemakers’.128 But for Deleuze–Guattari the bird holds pride of place as they decidedly foreground the non-human base of art and declare that ‘art is not the privilege of human beings’.129 They write, ‘Not only does art not wait for human beings to begin, but we may ask if 185

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art ever appears among human beings, except under artificial and belated conditions.’130 The notions of territory and force are hence foundational for Deleuze–Guattarean conceptions of art and equally apply to non-human and human aesthetics actors. They further focus on the central role of the ‘house or framework’131 in the creation of art. For them, art ‘begins with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house’,132 and it is through the ‘territory-house system’133 that pure sensory qualities of art emerge.134 They elaborate that ‘all that is needed to produce art is here: a house, some postures, colours, and songs  – on condition that it all opens onto and launches itself on a mad vector as on a witch’s broom, a line of the universe, or of deterritorialization’.135 For them the ‘house takes part in an entire becoming. It is life, the “non-organic life of things”.’136 Key here is the movement ‘from House to universe. From endosensation to exosensation’,137 because the house not only isolates but ‘opens onto cosmic forces’.138 And they repeat that ‘if nature is like art, this is always because it combines these two living elements in every way: House and Universe, Heimlich and Unheimlich, ­territory and deterritorialization’.139 Art is therefore characterized as a movement between the finite and infinite, and is grounded in the world of force and non-human becomings. It negotiates order and chaos and territory and cosmos, just like kolams. In fact Deleuze–Guattari refer to art as ‘chaosmos’, that is, a ‘composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation’.140 But for Deleuze–Guattari, the greater struggle of the artist is with opinion rather than chaos. Deleuze–Guattari conceive of opinion as an umbrella that shelters people from chaos ‘on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions’.141 They hold that it is the role of the artists to ‘make a slit in the umbrella’, in order to let in ‘a bit of free and windy chaos’.142 And they propose that the first action an artist has to engage in is erasure; since ‘the page or canvas is already so covered with pre-existing, pre-established clichés, the painter must c­ onfront the chaos and hasten the destruction so as to produce a sensation that defies every opinion’.143 This statement again resonates powerfully with the practice of drawing threshold designs, as erasure is integral to the designs. Kolams furthermore are not drawn to be admired, to become part of an aesthetic canon, or point to the genius of their creators. They are erased 186

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to be redrawn. They are seen to performatively harmonize material substance, cosmic forces and the local community and aim to be affective rather than present conceptual certainties. The next point to be considered is how the non-human aspects of Deleuze–Guattarean notions of art are envisaged in view of gallery art and territoriality, that is, how are ‘force’ and the stagemaker reconciled? Deleuze–Guattari group art into three major movements:  classicism, romanticism and the modern differentiated by their attitudes to the forces of the earth, to matter and the cosmos. For Deleuze–Guattari, modern art is ‘the age of the cosmic’144 and is characterized by ‘material forces’ since now a ‘material is a molecularized matter, which must accordingly “harness” forces’.145 They endorse Klee who stated that art is to render visible rather than reproduce the visible,146 and hold that Cézanne’s rocks ‘exist uniquely through the forces of folding they harness’.147 Modern art for Deleuze–Guattari captures ‘nonvisual forces that nevertheless have been rendered visible’.148 They also cite Klee who argues that ‘what is needed in order to “render visible” or harness the Cosmos is a pure and simple line accompanied by the idea of an object’.149 The implication here is that art needs to reference the world of visible objects, at least to some extent. But where does this leave abstract art and visual practices such as Tamil threshold designs that employ geometric shapes? And what about the art of the stagemaker that certainly does not engage with the world of objects? Abstract art evidently occupies an ambivalent position in Deleuze–Guattarean thought. For example, a downright negative ­conception of the abstract in art can be found in Deleuze’s single authored book on Francis Bacon, where abstraction is associated with cliché,150 the ­cerebral and optical form.151 It is said to pass through the brain rather than act directly on the nervous system and hence does not attain sensation,152 and represents a digital rather than an expressive, analogue code.153 In What is Philosophy?, however, co-authored with Guattari and published ten years later, a shift in conception can be noted. Now abstract painting ‘like all painting’ is considered ‘sensation, nothing but sensation’.154 Yet when ­painting comes along in abstract form it is judged to lack the terrestrial and is considered ‘but a sensation of the concept of sea or concept of tree’155 and seen to dematerialize sensation.156 For Deleuze–Guattari, who uphold that philosophy is the realm of concepts and art the realm of sensation, this is 187

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an alarming assessment. The question, however, is, would kolams, despite their nonconcrete form, be classed as ‘abstract’ by Deleuze–Guattari? The designs, even though based on geometric shapes, are also constituted by a hand-drawn line that adds a tactile element to what Deleuze described as the optical space of abstract art.157 In Francis Bacon, Deleuze championed Bacon’s work as a third way between the purely optical abstraction of a Kandinsky or Mondrian, and the purely albeit excessively tactile nature of Abstract Expressionism. So how would Deleuze–Guattari have responded to kolam designs and their combination of abstract shapes with tactile, haptic elements? Would they have argued them as a fourth way that combines abstract shapes with tactility, creating a new assemblage engendered through the influence of a specific geographical and cultural terrain? After all Deleuze–Guattari do acknowledge the impact of territorial difference with regard to Romanticism. For them German Romanticism experiences territory as solitary ‘regardless of population density’,158 whereas in the Romanticism of Latin and Slavic countries the earth is never solitary even if ‘deserted or arid’.159 The issue of abstraction furthermore hinges on the question of ­sensation and affectivity. For Deleuze and Guattari, art is a block of ­sensation defined as a compound of ‘blocs of percepts and affects’160 created by the artist. The latter wrests ‘the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject’ and frees ‘the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another’.161 This process of extraction creates ‘a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations’,162 in other words, art. They quote Artaud who praises art works that render ‘not the resemblance but the pure sensation “of a tortured flower, of a landscape slashed, pressed, and plowed” ’.163 Yet they also declare that the ‘area of plain uniform colour’ of ‘the great monochrome of modern painting’ is ‘the bearer of glimpsed forces’.164 For them this is what makes these paintings abstract:  ‘making the invisible forces visible’165 and ‘drawing up figures with a geometrical appearance but that are no more than forces’.166 But for Deleuze–Guattari, rendering invisible forces visible defines modern art per se, not just monochromes, which they see exemplified in the work of Klee, Cézanne, van Gogh and so forth. They further say that ‘art begins not with the flesh but with the house’,167 and that the objective 188

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world, however rendered, is but ‘the compound of nonhuman forces of the cosmos’, that is, ‘man’s nonhuman becomings’.168 We are back with the stagemaker, the territory and the house, the foundational ground for Deleuze–Guattarean conceptions of art that ultimately, so it seems, also encompasses abstract art, even if ambiguously so. For Deleuze–Guattari, therefore, the notion of forces is more central to the modern artist’s aesthetic production than the question in what form it comes along. Approached from this perspective, the art of drawing threshold designs could therefore comfortably claim a space among the visual practices that qualify as ‘art’ in the global arena of the visual. But for Deleuze–Guattari, the notion of force is not only paramount for the work of art but also for its reception. According to Deleuze–Guattari, ‘It is Mrs. Dalloway who perceives the town – but because she has passed into the town like “a knife through everything” and becomes ­imperceptible herself. Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man.’169 For Deleuze–Guattari, the perceiving subject becomes the affect, that is, enters the world of non-human becomings, exceeding human p ­ erceptions. This brings the issue of audience participation championed by relational art to mind, as well as – if not more so – the communal aspect of the ­tradition of threshold designs and the affectivity associated with drawing the designs. As has been developed, kolams function not through the perceptual – that is, the act of being seen – but through bodily, deterritorializing interaction with the designs. The act of traversing the designs creates a passage of force that references non-human becomings: in Tamil culture the person or animal that steps on the design and thereby erases it, at least in part, absorbs the cosmic forces captured in the designs, that is, the territory created through the act of drawing. Viewed from the point of view of an expanded Deleuze–Guattarean perspective, this returns us to the issue of art’s non-human dimension. For Deleuze–Guattari, the brown stagemaker creates art brut, and the hallmark of a true artist is that he has entered a ‘zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility’,170 in other words, a zone ‘in which we no longer know which is animal and which human’.171 But Deleuze–Guattari also warn us that this must not be seen as a ‘return to origins’ or as the uncovering of a ‘bestial or primitive humanity’172 beneath civilization. It is rather a question of the differences between ‘animal, vegetable, mineral or human’173 becoming indistinct. 189

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When we apply this framework to Tamil designs and their ­affective dimension epitomized by the dual movements of erasure and of absorption, the aesthetic focus pivots to the everyday Tamil audience of threshold designs who complete the work of art and, arguably, become, for a brief moment, the artist as defined by Deleuze–Guattari, by e­ntering the world of territory and force, of the house and the cosmos and of non-human becomings. Yet even though the perceiving subject, according to Deleuze–Guattari, potentially enters the zone of imperceptibility and therefore enters a zone attributed to the artist and the brown stagemaker, in their framework it remains foremost the artist who ‘goes beyond the perceptual states and affective transitions of the lived’,174 who is ‘a seer, a becomer’,175 and leads the way. It is thus unquestioningly the artists who present us with the affects they have created and invented: ‘they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound. Van Gogh’s sunflowers are becomings, like Dürer’s thistles, or Bonnard’s mimosas.’176 There is therefore an ambiguity at play between their ­declaration of the insignificance of the human creative factor, the notion of the brown stagemaker as artist, and the central role accorded to the artist as visionary leader, who, as the encounter with Tamil women’s art draws out, is exclusively drawn from the ranks of the privileged, male aesthetic arbiters of a genial persuasion who always trump nature and the bird. In contrast the tradition of drawing threshold designs is underwritten by a more co-equal paradigm. But there is yet a further question to be considered. While Deleuze– Guattari’s framework comfortably connects with the aspect of force inherent in kolams, the practice of drawing threshold designs is ­performative and not primarily invested in formal aspects, nor in the designs’ ­preservation. So how do Deleuze–Guattari envisage duration in relation to the physicality of a work of art, that is, ‘How could the sensation be preserved without a material capable of lasting?’177 Their response is that ‘sensation is not realized in the material without the material passing completely into the sensation, into the percept or affect’.178 They explain that even ‘if the material lasts for only a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this short duration’.179 In other words, for Deleuze–Guattari the length of the ­material existence of a work of art is not relevant. As long as it has existed 190

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for however short a period of time it constitutes a fully fledged work of art. The erasure that is integral to kolams therefore poses no hurdle for the tradition’s claim to artistic value in this aesthetic framework and the practice presumably would have been accepted as a veritable art form by Deleuze–Guattari had they seen it, despite its abstract form. This recognition, however, returns us to the question of how the proposed expanded concept of relational aesthetics resituates the t­radition of drawing threshold designs and what it can make available to the practice in view of the global contemporary. The proposition is that the post-Bourriaudean relational framework allows for a rearticulation of the practice from a folk art considered to be in decline, or a popular ­visual practice that engages with quaint if not superstitious notions of the cosmos, deities and temporalities defined by astronomical markers, to a practice that can co-equally take its place in the sphere of contemporary visual practice. Approached from a revised relational perspective it now registers as an aesthetic mode of living that aims to generate ­conviviality in an inclusive, environmental manner, and connects subjectivity with an exteriority comprising the social, the animal, vegetal and cosmic. This reconceptualization importantly encompasses matter-force and the forces of the cosmos, that is, the non-human aspects of Deleuze–Guattarean ­aesthetics. It furthermore takes the relational beyond the gallery and situates the convivial in the local community while also expanding it beyond the sphere of human sociability. The proposed expanded conception of relational aesthetics therefore harbours the potential to liberate kolams from the expectations of readability exemplified by the notion that without a de-codable meaning the tradition must be in decline. And, importantly, it is Deleuze–Guattari’s grounding of art in the sphere of the non-human that offers crucial connectivities for encompassing the daily actions of Tamil housewives in the global contemporary. The Deleuze–Guattarean emphasis on the interplay of territorialization and deterritorialization and the notion of matter as continuous variation,180 furthermore, removes the stigma of superstition and primitivity from Tamil conceptions of fluidity at the heart of matter and hence the tradition of drawing threshold designs. It thus offers a conceptual connectivity that constitutes a meeting on neutral terrain and demands a rethinking of relations of the so-called ‘primitive’ to fine art. 191

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The proposed expanded framing of relational aesthetics therefore unearths a potentiality that Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics neglected. By drawing out non-human becomings, it brings the full range of Guattari’s conception of subjectivity to the fore. It mitigates the disjuncture between Deleuze–Guattarean articulations of aesthetics and the ­circumscribed examples of visual art they draw on produced by male, white, middle-class masters, extending the Deleuze–Guattarean reach into the cultural terrain of Tamil housewives and threshold drawings. It allows the Tamil cultural context of the designs, their ritual performativity and the need to balance substances and forces to register, and paves the way to bringing the design practice and its cultural contexts into a global conversation in the fields of contemporary art and art theory. This encounter, however, also constitutes the crossing of ‘a threshold enabling a conjunction’ that generates ‘a shared acceleration’.181 Tamil matrons thus offer a corrective to Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics as Deleuze–Guattari solely draw their aesthetic examples from the realm of painting, classical music and the cinema, neglecting the implications of their own propositions about the brown stagemaker. The kolams side with the bird, difference the map, create new intensities and produce new connections. These implications of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics have, however, so far not been developed in the visual field. Despite the art world’s ethnographic and relational turn, despite post-modernism’s and post-colonialism’s momentous emphasis on alterity, despite the engaged interest in Deleuze–Guattari’s work, the reception of their aesthetic thought has largely remained within the cultural terrain of Euro-American conceptions of art. It is high time, therefore, for a vector of deterritorialization to form new assemblages. Moreover, the encounter engendered operates in a specific, focused and intimate manner that avoids sweeping generalizations of the kind Bourriaud proposes in Altermodern, where he offers the figure of the artist as global flâneur in response to the challenges of the global. Bourriaud’s a­ ltermodern artist is conceived as a heroic cultural nomad who single-handedly samples and appropriates the world’s cultural codes in an overflight fashion to be reconstituted for his art intended for the gallery system. Agency hence remains with the itinerant artist who departs from and returns to the hegemonic centres of the world from a multiple destination trip around the 192

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globe. The present discussion proposes a different kind of encounter: one that is more patient, slower, more reflexive and, it is hoped, less arrogant. It envisages a meeting of worlds and regards the nomad artist’s ­semionautic global code surfing as just as appropriative as modern art’s primitivist ‘inspirations’ the altermodern claims it has reckoned with. It considers such voracious movements through geographical and cultural spaces as lacking in the openness and patience required for transformative encounters between equals. The discussion rather sides with Jonathan Harris who acknowledges that ‘including new voices from places other than those within the global art world’s European and North American heartlands is harder to do than it may initially sound’.182 It holds that a conceptual repositioning is crucial for such an inclusivity to be achieved, as mere physical additions of non-Western art work in the spaces of the global art ­market simply add exotic spice to existing modes of art practice without truly making a difference. This exploration therefore is critical of Bourriaud’s altermodern homo viator’s mode of cultural translation that operates through the ­viatorization of objects and signs. It holds that this extractive procedure exonerates the nomadic artist who metaphorically owns the world, has the power to speak, the money to travel and the arrogance to impose his visions on the world from having his preconceptions challenged.183 A viatorized aesthetic procedure thus would not question the framing of threshold designs as a folk art, a conception that is premised on an inherent distance to contemporaneity, and would most likely continue to consider the practice to be in decline, to have lost its meaning and to be oriented towards the past. Furthermore, it would not be interested in liberating the tradition from charges of primitivity, or in disentangling it from the ambivalent, prejudiced and convoluted histories of primitivism in the spheres of art, while not being averse to appropriating aspects of its visual language in the name of international art. In contrast, the proposed post-Bourriaudean relational aesthetics, much like Guattari’s patient who decided to take up driving lessons which allowed for ‘new fields of virtuality’184 to open up, potentially sets the ­practice free and allows it to figure in the contexts of art and philosophy. It entails a creative diagrammatic operation or abstract machine that ‘does not function to represent, […] but rather constructs a real that is yet to 193

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come, a new type of reality’.185 It develops a map which does not reproduce but constructs,186 that is ‘open and connectable’,187 has ‘multiple entrance ways’188 and ‘has to do with performance’.189 Post-Bourriaudean relational aesthetics thus is about ‘what functions with, in conjunction with what other things’,190 and links the Thai meal and the house and Bourriaud and Tamil women and Deleuze–Guattari and ‘Rangoli brahma’191 and London and garden gnomes and, and, and. This experimental exploration, however, should not be deemed more or less successful if more or less accurate shared concerns can be proven. It is rather about a productive mobilization based on proximities and ­resonances, a reading with and through which leads to new questions and departures. The issue at stake, furthermore, is not only what a relational Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics can do for the tradition of drawing threshold designs, but also how the former will be transformed as the world of the male, white, middle-class European artists that Deleuze–Guattari draw on is transposed to the domestic sphere of unnamed females of ­colour from Tamil Nadu. This conceptual encounter constitutes an effort in cultural translation, with all the pitfalls and limitations such endeavours entail, including the recognition that there can never be a transparent ­passage from one culture to the other. As Maharaj reminds us, translation is a double-voicing concept’192 that cooks up a ‘third’, a hybrid in-between, as ‘the construction of meaning in one does not square with that of another’.193 Acts of cultural translation, including the present discussion, hence must be recognized as a creative fashioning that inevitably exemplifies t­ ranslation’s successes as well as its failures.

194

Faction 4

Itinerant Thoughts – Paris, London, Tamil Nadu and Elsewhere

(Rikki T is travelling from Paris to London by Eurostar) Gare du Nord. Up the escalators to the Eurostar Terminal. Security, the inevitable queue. A family in front of me is in a panic; they are late and squeeze through the crowd to catch their train. I  hope they get it. I  hate the rush; I prefer to take time to enjoy the reprieve offered by airports, ­stations and so forth. The ‘non-places’, as Marc Augé would call them, where identity is suspended. Anonymous transit points, the world of solitary individuality, the spaces of Augé’s ‘anthropology of super-modernity’.1 I am through security now and queue at Paul’s to get a baguette for the journey. Escaping ‘place’  – the known, the everyday, historically inscribed, relationally constructed. Losing oneself in ‘non-place’, the sense of ­disorientation, the passivity of waiting, being in limbo. The travellers’ space. Like the aristocratic Duc des Esseintes in Huysman’s novel Á Rebours Botton mentions in his Art of Travel.2 But Huysman’s protagonist never makes it beyond the station. He abandons the trip, put off by the anticipated discomforts of travel. What is my attitude to travel, I wonder? Is it more like Botton’s Baudelaire, I wonder? Forever drawn to ‘harbours, docks, railway stations, ships and hotel rooms’?3 Feeling perfectly at home in the transient 195

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places of travel? No, for me it is about the momentary suspension of the everyday, the stepping into a parallel world where routine coordinates are suspended. Is the transit lounge, then, the modern equivalent of the ritual ‘stepping out of time’ performed by Tamil women? Is the shared meal at Tiravanija’s in the hallowed spaces of art equivalent to their ritual ­suspension of the everyday? Galleries have been likened to temples, but is this the appeal of Tiravanija’s scenarios? Yet relational aesthetics aims at the everyday. Does it then actually require the quotidian to be suspended? And what exactly is the ‘everyday’? The critic Anna Dezeuze finds the use of the term in relational aesthetics vague. She points out that the ‘everyday’ is not a straightforward conception, but is highly constructed – ‘life is at least as complex as art’.4 And the ‘everyday’ in Tamil Nadu is definitely ­different from the post-industrial day-to-day Bourriaud references in relational aesthetics. And arguably Bourriaud’s version of the quotidian has not only French but decidedly Parisian inflections. I have to think of Grancher’s installation at the Palais de Tokyo that I have just seen and am mulling over in my mind as I am waiting for my train. His 26-minute video projection of the ‘everyday’ in the Amazon jungle shows takes of the Shiwiar village Tanguntsa between 6 a.m. and midnight. On the website, the piece is explained as a window to a radically different world to be sampled at the Palais de Tokyo, a world said to contrast sharply with the gallery, the restaurant and the other exhibits. The Shiwiar in the gallery are referenced as an incongruous presence, an epiphany that shows ‘­everything without showing anything at all’.5 Is this a recognition of the impossibility of the ethnographic ‘real’? Or does it evade an engagement with this ‘other’ world captured on film by making it ­mysterious? Marc Sanchez is the curator of the show. On the Palais de Tokyo’s w ­ ebsite, he describes the piece as a ready-made ‘found’ in the Amazon and transposed to Paris. He talks about bridging the worlds by an exchange of silent glances that speak volumes. What kinds of ‘volumes’ would that be, I wonder? And what is being understood? Even when anthropologists, that is, specialists in the field of cross-cultural communication, stay in the field for months and apply themselves to bridging the cultural gap, difficulties abound. It is obvious Sanchez has not engaged with anthropology. Clifford would not be pleased. I  am not enthused either. The artist as spiritual ­communicator, as ‘savage’ who communes directly with the world. The naiveté 196

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of this statement is troubling, especially as it comes from an institution which rails against France’s modernist legacy. Unspoken exchanges. I  imagine a silent dinner at Tiravanija’s  – this would be something quite different. More like my current departure hall experience and the quiet exchange of glances with strangers and distant observations of random comings and goings. But I  also have to think of the daily, unspoken witnessing of threshold designs on the streets of Tamil Nadu and the random observations of Grancher’s fixed camera simply left to roll, recording everyday movements against a rich backdrop of ­vegetation. The question is, What is being witnessed? Augé thinks ‘non-place’ increasingly characterizes our daily lives. The spaces of daily transport, anonymous supermarkets, shopping malls, leisure parks and so forth all engender the solitary individual, the alienated soul at the heart of relational aesthetics’ convivial efforts in the gallery. But, ironically, the prime movers and shakers of relational aesthetics populate these very spaces. They inhabit airport lounges, railway stations and hotel rooms, are traveller-nomads par excellence, forever on the move. Is this, the global art world-trotting artists’ experience of ‘non-place’, at the root of relational aesthetics? The solitary habitués of Augé’s spaces of super-modernity reaching out to other lonesome rangers to engender a moment of ­togetherness? Should the gallery be added to Augé’s list of spaces of non-identity, of anonymous passage? But Augé also points out that ‘non-place’ must be seen in relation to place, that is, to inhabited, homely spaces. Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten.6

For Augé ‘non-places’ ‘are the real measure of our time’.7 He identifies silent interactions as their privileged mode of communication, as it is a world ‘where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures’.8 Should Grancher’s silent exchange of glances with the natives in the jungle be recognized as an infusion of super-modernity to the Shiwiar village, as a post-industrialized mode of communication ‘naturally’ adopted when meeting strangers in strange places? Tamil threshold designs, in contrast, 197

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perform a relation to the world, transform a space into a zone of ­inhabitance and belonging communicated to the community through the daily appearance of the designs. What would happen if Tamil ladies were let loose in the transit lounges of the world, I  wonder? I chuckle at the thought, imagine the plethora of suitcases that transit this space wheeled across plentiful kolams. Would the Gare du Nord’s ‘non-placeness’ be transformed? This is where the vicissitude of culture enters the fray: culture and its products are never self-evident. Only the right audience gets the message, the ones in the know, the ones who are part of its remit. I think I am safe to assume that the non-placeness that I am admittedly enjoying would be preserved. Cultures don’t travel so well, or not in all directions. And acts of interpretation entail a mediation of worlds. Augé juxtaposes what he calls an ‘indigenous fantasy of a society anchored since time immemorial’ with ‘the ethnologist’s illusion of a society so transparent to itself, that it is fully expressed in the most trivial of its usages’.9 Both perspectives are constructions. The indigenous conception of primordial time obscures historical dimensions, while the ­modern assumption of cultural transparency and consistency confuses an ideal with cultural actuality. Take, for example, the garden gnome of Amélie’s father. If an anthropologist knocked on his door to gather evidence about this peculiar Western phenomenon, most likely only vague answers would be given. Life worlds are complex and deeply inscribed. They are not necessarily transparent to its ‘indigenous’ inhabitants, even if they are denizens of the so-called civilized world. What about relational aesthetics and its protagonists? Is their peripatetic existence a continuous search for a home in the world, or avoidance thereof? Or are they perpetually at home in the global art world, merely shifting between its international spaces? What is Tiravanija’s relation to the transit lounge and its random encounters? Tiravanija famously reconstructed his New York apartment in the gallery and invited an audience of strangers for dinner. How are we to understand home and the other in such gallery scenarios? Is Tiravanija seeking to create a community through the shared experience of not being fully at home, of jointly inhabiting another space for the period of the encounter? A meeting as strangers in the g­ allery, where at-homeness is proffered via the suggested but ultimately fake ­homeliness of Tiravanija’s reproduced flat? 198

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Home is conceived as space of familiarity and comfort, where the self is present to itself. This seems to be self-evident, but for cultural theorist Sara Ahmed this represents a reduction of home to being.10 She explains that this perspective assumes the purity of the space called home and conceives it as a place ‘with boundaries that are fixed, such that the home becomes pure, safe and comfortable’.11 This projects ‘strangerness’ beyond the walls of the home and defines the stranger as the one on the ‘outside’, the one that has left home. For Ahmed, notions of home rather ‘always involve encounters between those who stay, those who arrive, and those who leave’,12 an insight that resonates with Tamil conceptions of the spatiality of home and the perceived need for equilibrating actions to ensure that the substantial exchanges that occur as people come and go, enter and leave buildings, and cross the thresholds of residences remain balanced and congenial. But homeliness and ‘strangerness’ are not only related to movements that negotiate the physical spaces of home. Notions of cultural ­proximity and distance also come into the equation. Defining spheres of cultural familiarity and difference are, for example, a central concern for multicultural societies that conceive of cultural identities as stable and given. This, however, brackets the affectivity and transformative potential of ­encounter and cultural mixing. Life in a multicultural society thus tends to be framed as a mingling of self-identical units defined by a differential of cultural proximity and difference in relation to zones of familiarity such as, for example, a nation state. Their inhabitants are conceived as separate and divergent since their fusing would disrupt the differential of difference that organizes this space. But this notion of culture, much like the emphasis on a notional universality in the spheres of art, camouflages the ‘real’ of power. As Ahmed has pointed out, the ‘emphasis on culture over and above issues of political economy  – or at least the refusal to understand culture as site of a struggle that is also political and economic – means that multiculturalism ­neutralises the differences that it apparently celebrates’.13 She also stresses the role of consumption in the management of these issues, that is, their negotiation through lifestyles and commodification. For her, racial difference in a multicultural society is constructed as ethnicity and is reduced to a lifestyle choice to be consumed.14 She therefore sees the consumption of ethnic food as key to managing cultural difference. 199

Encounters Beyond the Gallery One of the benefits of multiculturalism is often cited as the range of restaurants that the consumer can visit: the range of flavours and spices that can be tasted. Ethnicity becomes a spice or taste that can be consumed, that can be incorporated in the life world of the one who moves between (eating) places.15

But not all aspects of cultural diversity can be incorporated into the social fabric. Ahmed argues that only differences that can be consumed and assimilated are given value in the context of multiculturalism. Differences that can be consumed are the ones that are valued: difference is valued insofar as it can be incorporated into, not only the nation space, but also the individual body, the body-at-home 16

Ethnic consumption also cloaks histories of contact, conquest and colonialism. Ethnic food, such as Pad Thai, is brought ‘home’ from ­‘elsewhere’ and is transformed into a commodity, a metamorphosis that erases the conditionalities of the cuisine’s itinerancy. For Ahmed, this represents a ‘fixing of difference onto strangers’17 which contrasts with the becoming ‘other’ of the consuming self who becomes different rather than being different, as the ‘ethnic’ other is argued to be. He or she is ‘fixed into the beyond of the commodity form’18 and is thus not required as presence.19 The consuming self solely occupies the space of agency, yet this agency is also a make-belief, and based on a pseudo encounter:  the food is ingested, an act that is gratifying yet inconsequential. It does not alter the totality of cultural differentials that make up the larger zone of familiarity in question; relative positions of culture and difference are maintained, no meeting has occurred, the status quo is ensured. I wonder how this relates to the scenarios Tiravanija sets up in the gallery. Is he rehearsing the performativity of consuming difference characteristic of multiculturalist society, momentarily transforming the gallery goers into the section of society that ‘has’ difference, that is, is in a position of normativity and can consume difference by the very fact that it is not defined as ‘being’ different? In other words, is Tiravanija an agent of multiculturalism in the guise of an artist-nomad, who offers the gallery goer exactly what society tends to dish out – a ready-made encounter that can be safely consumed, as it will be of no consequence? Is this the recipe for Tiravanija’s success? 200

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But what about Tiravanija’s lack of concern with the authentic taste of Pad Thai?20 And the dish’s history of hybrid Chinese–Thai derivation?21 It is of course now a marker for Thainess, but its history still resonates. Is this why Tiravanija chose it? Chanrochanakit seems to think so. He sees the choice of Pad Thai as a critique of the constructedness of Thai national identity.22 But these subtleties are lost in the dominant Western reception of his work where Thainess is not an issue and the work is consumed as art. It is time to board. I gather my belongings and scramble through the throng of people in the departure hall to get to the departure gate. A large crowd has already gathered in anticipation. At long last we are let through. It turns out my seat is at the far end of the train and I have to schlepp the full length of the platform. Luckily the platform is still quite empty. It is easy to make my way. I find a space for my suitcase and sit down. It can’t be too long now before I will be on my way. The compartment is filling with fellow passengers jostling through the narrow corridors to get to their seats, laden with bags, food, magazines, scrambling to store their ­belongings in the overhead rack. A diffuse mix of mostly French and English conversations soon saturate the space and eventually calm down as people find their seats and stow their belongings. I reach for my baguette and munch away absent-mindedly, waiting for the train to jerk into motion. I am glad to be headed home. Home. Not long ago this seemed a straightforward concept. Not any more. How is ‘home’ to be understood? There are Tamil notions of homeliness, Tiravanija’s negotiations of hospitality and the convivial, which I see as related to the homely. But this perspective is not mainstream; in fact it is counter to the trend of ‘Tiravanija writing’. It was looking at threshold designs that brought this home to me. Tiravanija’s art is so overly determined by the discourse of its reception that it is an unavoidable sieve through which the work is encountered and experienced […] its unique status in the ­public imagination derives in part from a certain naturalizing of the critical readings which have accompanied and, to an extent, constructed it.23

Yes, and Thainess as source of his work or inspiration for relational art does not figure in this context. Or rather Tiravanija’s exotic difference is fixed in terms of the ‘happy Thai guy’.24 And his serving of Pad Thai sits 201

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comfortably with multicultural negotiations of alterity where the ‘other’ has become a theme, a pre-cooked dish to be consumed, as the curator Bonami would say.25 Journalists want to know as much as possible in advance before they will enter a show. They do not want to be surprised. They, like the rest of us, are tourists. They want to feel they are moving into a known territory. They do not like to be taken off guard or leave a show with questions […] Understanding is no longer an achievement but a demand to be met. Again, facing fear and doubt has been removed from contemporary experience. Why? The experiences and the risks we undertake today are pre-cooked.26

But is Tiravanija complicit in his own consumption by art audiences and critics alike? Or are we encountering a ‘subversive, unsettling h ­ ospitality’27 as the critic Saltz suggests, which seeks to avoid the very fixity which would turn the shared meal into a theme park experience? Tiravanija also farms out the cooking to museum and gallery employees. And he is often not there to meet his guest; so the visitors, the strangers in his house, are not welcomed, but find themselves in a non-space declared a space of ­hospitality where they anonymously help themselves to food from a stock pot and exchange brief words, gestures and glances; just as in the other non-spaces they frequent, the supermarket, the departure hall, the train compartment. Here, eating with those whom one has welcomed into one’s home, those who are, in that moment, homeless, and yet who speak, is the condition of hospitality, a way of being together with strangers, without assimilating them fully into the home (eating with them, rather than, […] as in […] multiculturalism, eating them).28

So what, or rather how, are Tiravanija’s guests eating, I wonder, as I tuck into my baguette? They are eating Pad Thai of course, an ethnic dish that is part of the multicultural mix. They are thus consuming difference. It puts them in the normative position of the ones that have difference and thus agency rather than constitute difference, irrespective of their ­ethnicity. Tiravanija ‘passes as white’ in the art world. He is the global art-nomad whose Thainess is bracketed out even though he serves Pad Thai. But isn’t the act of devouring difference at the same time denied, as the dish is not 202

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authentic? It is not just Thai-Chinese, but also Thai-English, Thai-American and so forth, depending on the ingredients he sources locally and the nationality and cooking styles of the gallery or museum workers that are roped in to do the cooking. Is he rehearsing the ridiculousness of the ­multicultural set-up, I  wonder, where anything that smells of curry is declared authentic Indian, even if it is blatantly everything but? Is the intention a make-belief or a critique? And what of the differences between the gallery goers, their histories, provenances, racial, national, economic and gender, and so forth? Their stories are blanked out as they enter the gallery. They become neutralized as they enter the zone of gallery communality and become Pad Thai consumer and audience participant. So what are they partaking of when they have their meal in the gallery, I wonder as I brush the crumbs off my coat and dispose of the empty paper bag? The gestures and modes Tiravanija serves up certainly are of the multicultural arena. Does he therefore highlight or even critique voraciousness as the normative mode of art appreciation the global market has produced? Is this the point Tiravanija is making, that art is consumed like an ethnic dish? That the global turn in contemporary art essentially functions like a multicultural society? That in the world of art differences are fixed and consumed, and strangers are assimilated according to gradients of ­proximity and distance, which keeps the normative centre firmly in place? Eating, as it turns out, is a complex affair. The communal meal with strangers at Tiravanija’s is clearly not as open and free as he and the critical literature suggest, even if he does not determine how the encounters in the gallery are to take place and what conversations are to be had as gallery goers munch away. Tiravanija’s serving of Pad Thai figures within the contexts of multiculturalism and aesthetic globalization. His place within the art world is heavily inscribed. We expect him to serve Thai food in the gallery and anticipate rubbing shoulders with art world aficionados in his spaces. What has become of the encounter, I wonder, the key concern of relational aesthetics? Can it be redeemed, extracted from these inscriptions? But what kind of encounter is to be envisaged? Ahmed proposes a practice of ‘generous encounters’. For her such generosity in togetherness would ‘recognise how the encounter itself is implicated in broader relations and circuits of production and exchange (How did we get here? How did you arrive?)’.29 An important point. Gallery 203

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goers at Tiravanija’s would be allowed a history if the serving of Pad Thai was generous along these lines. And for her, the homeliness–strangerness binary is not set in stone, as in a generous encounter ‘the one who is already assimilated can still surprise, can still move beyond the encounter which names […] and holds […] in place’.30 Presumably the same condition also applies to the one that is not assimilated and is on the ‘outside’. Her proposition reminds me of Guattari’s partial subjectivities, of his patient who suddenly decides to take driving lessons and opens up u ­ nexpected new fields of virtuality for himself,31 and of Guattari’s ­transversal approach to psychoanalysis epitomized in the ‘Grid’. The rotation of tasks in the psychiatric institution ensures an avoidance of fixity, a ­mobilization of positions and power relations and, above all, an undermining of the dominance of the ‘white coat’, the all-powerful analyst. Guattari’s ­repositioned notion of the self has conceptually undone the bounded and centric self and immersed it in a heterogeneous collectivity of ‘difference’ and ­connectivity. The former identity of being has become processual existence and participation in a world of potentialities and partiality rather than unified fullness.32 But what are the implications of these thoughts for Tiravanija’s hosting of strangers in the gallery? Is it here that an ethics of welcoming that which is other than the stranger might begin?33

A crucial question. Ahmed, similar to Guattari, suggests a p ­ rocessual approach to self–other relations. She argues in favour of a conceptual model where selves and others are co-implicated and co-created. If we think of the encounter as sociality – that ‘being’ only emerges through and with others – then we can think about how meetings between particular others do not necessarily presuppose a meeting between two already constituted beings […]34

An important reorientation which suggests a blurring of boundaries between self and other that reminds me of the porousness of Amazon subjects. Is this why the critical literature on Tiravanija is remarkably silent on the issue of alterity? Does it sit too uncomfortably with multiculturalism that depends on the fixity of the selves that meet? Is this the implication of relational aesthetics that is swept under the carpet despite plenty of rhetoric 204

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to the contrary? Bourriaud writes that ‘subjectivity can only be defined by the presence of a second subjectivity’, and affirms that the self is based on the ‘principle of otherness’ and ‘cannot exist in an independent way’.35 For Bourriaud this ‘naturally’ social conception of subjectivity has been eroded by capitalism, which turns ‘existential territories into goods’.36 It produces the ‘immense void in subjectivity’37 that is expressed in the figure of the lone ranger who roams the anonymous spaces of super-modernity. For Bourriaud, it is art with its privileged access to an aesthetics characterized by pathicity and non-discursivity38 that can reconnect the subject to the ‘other’. According to Bourriaud, the reinsertion of the self into the world, its reconnection to a sociality, is not achieved via aesthetic c­ ontemplation, but by ‘providing potential models for human existence’.39 He sees Tiravanija’s bringing together of a group of strangers in the gallery as having a transformative effect. By allowing for new experiences of sociality, so the argument goes, the polyphony which capitalism suppressed is restored to the individual.40 But if this is so central to relational aesthetics, why the silence on the subject of the other? Why the repetition ad nauseum of unreconstructed or at best subtly subversive gestures of multiculturalism? The train jerks into motion and slowly gathers speed as it glides out of the Gare du Nord. Finally on the move. I will be home, that is, at my place, soon. I have to be careful now what I mean to think or say. ‘Home’ is no longer a straightforward affair. And as an aspiring art-nomad I am bound to be on the move and to call the (art) world my home. But right now I am thinking of my space, my cat, my bed. I am definitely not headed ‘anywhere’. And I  will get there sooner still if I  make the early connection. Fingers crossed. But there is still plenty of time to luxuriate in the non-space of the railway compartment and to train dream, as Alain de Botton would say. Tamil threshold designs are drawn to establish a place in the world, to situate the self in relation to larger collectivities and forces. So should they not be accorded a place in the ‘A-list’ of relational aesthetics? What if Bourriaud invited Tamil women into the Palais de Tokyo to perform their daily routines? Would Parisian art audiences understand the ­message? Would they know how to participate in this ‘show’? Would the art lovers in the City of Light realize that their task is to be silent witnesses and to erase the designs with their feet as they make their way through the exhibit? In all likelihood it would be difficult to ‘educate’ a Euro-American 205

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gallery-going public to destroy the very work they came to see. Any such incitement would most likely not be understood and be considered a ‘gimmick’ at best. And how to get away from ethnic preconceptions that are still so firmly entrenched in the minds of art makers and audiences? The transfer of Tamil threshold designs to the international spaces of art ­certainly raises issues. For kolams to be read not in terms of their aesthetic appeal or primitive otherness but as contemporary expressions of a culturally d ­ ifferenced alter-relational aesthetics would definitely require c­ onsiderable powers of persuasion. But can relational aesthetics move beyond the ­centre? Can it effect a generous encounter between disparate spheres of art making that affectively reconfigures their relations? [… T]o discuss the particular modes of encounter (rather than particular others), is to open the encounter up, to fail to grasp it. We have a temporal movement from the now to the not yet. We could ask, not only what made the encounter possible (its historicity), but also what does it make possible, what futures might it open up?41

I am reminded of the departure hall at the Gare du Nord that I have just left behind, filled with passengers linked to distant destinations, already connected to a specified ‘elsewhere’. While still waiting for their imminent departure, they are also connected to future journeys not yet decided but maybe determined by today’s events, or by encounters yet to take shape. But what about the art world? How would Tamil women meet the world of the Palais de Tokyo? And vice versa? How different would this meeting be if it took place in London, New  York or Tokyo? Context matters and informs viewing positions. The challenge posed by the global turn in contemporary art is to acknowledge the situatednesses of art making and viewing, and the politics this entails.42 The artist Jay Koh is from Singapore but now lives and works in Germany. He is critical of Tiravanija’s work and takes issue with what he sees as relational aesthetics’ skirting of politics and alterity. He addresses these concerns by generating collaborative artistic projects that engage specific communities. In Thailand, for example, he proposed educational programmes ‘that would use art-making strategies to help teach students about

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the impact of cultural imperialism on Thai society’.43 This is a very different perspective from Tiravanija’s who claims a Buddhist stance of acceptance and non-interference ‘even in the face of destruction’.44 The mission statement of Koh’s Bureau for Cultural Interconnectivity ­emphasizes a commitment to extending cultural connections and to working with specific cultural and local contexts. His projects frequently take place in Asia,45 and entail a networking of artists and the creation of intercultural platforms and collaborative initiatives that involve local groups. The art critic and curator Grant Kester identifies an ‘aesthetic of listening’ as part of Koh’s modus operandi. […] Koh’s ‘Network Project’ is premised on what might be termed an ‘aesthetics of listening’, in which the very act of establishing networks among Asian artists, writers and activists across boundaries of nationality and culture is an integral part of his own ­practice as an artist.46

For Kester, this represents a ‘discursive aesthetic’ which no longer foregrounds the artist’s self-perceptions.47 Grancher’s blogs about his experience in the Amazonian ‘real’ clearly would not qualify. It is rather about the differencing of the dominant, one-sided, logo-centric ­conception of the discursive. Kester cites the Italian philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara who ‘notes the etymological origins of the Greek term “logos” or language in “legein”; to lie with, to gather in, or to receive’,48 and who ‘argues that we must begin to acknowledge and bring into being the long-suppressed role of listening as an integral component of discursive knowledge’.49 Kester explicitly distinguishes Koh’s dialogic approach to art making from Tiravanija’s work. He states that Koh’s art is not ‘based on the serial imposition of a fixed formal and spatial motif (as in Tiravanija’s cafés and “lounges”)’,50 but focuses instead on a deep engagement with the cultural specificity and the local concerns of a site or community before an ‘appropriate or strategically effective formal manifestation’51 is devised. Kester points out that the ‘enunciative act of art-making, the manipulation and occupation of space and material’ representative of an aesthetic of listening, is necessarily preceded by ‘a period of openness, of non-action, of learning and of listening’.52 207

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And according to Kester, Koh’s emphasis on listening conceives the subject as ‘produced in and through discursive experience’.53 Togetherness without communication and working at understanding is therefore ­missing the point, or the encounter, for Koh. And acknowledging the power relations that structure cultural exchanges between first and ‘other’ worlds is part of this process. For Koh, the ‘very real differences in terms of access to economic and cultural resources’54 matter. The notion of art as ‘universal language’55 suppresses these contexts, even if it also ‘allows people from radically different cultures and backgrounds […] to identify some common ground for interaction’.56 This is an interesting point I think to myself as a rather nondescript landscape glides past the window. But the ­common ground is actually not so common. It rather revolves around art world Eurocentricity. We are back to Mosquera’s hegemonically constructed ‘New English of Art’ as the lingua franca of art. No wonder Koh advocates cultural specificity and emphasizes the politics of power. The difference in attitudes between Koh’s and Tiravanija’s approach to art making came into particular focus in 1996 in Cologne when Tiravanija transformed the Kölnische Kunstverein into a scenario for eat-ins, sleep-ins and communal celebrations while Cologne’s police evicted homeless people from the vicinity of the gallery. Stefan Römer, a local artist and co-founder with Koh of the Cologne-based activist group Frischmacherinnen, offered the following critique of the show: They act as if they are being so generous in making this room available when they are really doing nothing at all. It is a meaningless statement. At the same time they are making this grand gesture fifty homeless people are being ordered to clear out their camp and go […]57

Koh articulated his protest by writing the following message in Thai on the front door of Tiravanija’s utopian apartment in the gallery. Sawasdee Khrap [Greetings young brother]. Your process art sounds good, but what about the process in your [Thai] society? The women and poverty?58

Dusk is falling rapidly now. I  can’t make out much any more of the world rushing by as the train makes its way towards London. Outside, 208

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inside – the home, homeliness and strangerness again. I close my eyes, and relax into my seat. As I am drifting off I am half-listening to the conversation that is unfolding behind me. Two strangers have just met and are exchanging their stories, their whereabouts in Paris and the great meals they have had. It sounds like they had a good time. I try to doze. Lulled by the gentle, regular rumble of the train I nod off, and – train dreaming – find myself imagining an encounter between Koh and Tiravanija. What if Koh had come to the gallery, and had a meal with Tiravanija during the opening when Tiravanija was present? What if their meeting had been an encounter, if something had passed between them, if Tiravanija had listened, had been moved by Koh’s utterances? To hear, or to give the other a hearing, is to be moved by the other, such that one ceases to inhabit the same place.59

For Ahmed, hearing is more than ‘listening to the other’s voice’,60 it is about ‘what moves (between) subjects, and hence what fails to move, might be precisely that which cannot be presented in the register of speech or voicing’.61 She proposes that we need to examine the conditions of the possibilities of hearing62 and to acknowledge that communication exceeds what is being said. In my notion of ethical encounters, hearing does not take place in my ear, or in yours, but in between mouths and our ears, in the very proximity and multiplicity of this encounter. What allows us to face each other […] is also what allows us to move beyond the face, to hear and be touched by what one cannot grasp, as that which cannot be assimilated in a moment of recognition of either ‘the Other’ or the stranger.63

Yet just as Tiravanija does not problematize the complexities of ­eating and of sharing a meal, Koh does not problematize the difficulties of ­listening or of hearing in his intercultural encounters. On his BCI website64 he states that inherited models of cultural knowledge need to be adapted to local conditions and changing times. He foregrounds the exploration of cultural specificity, of ‘enlarging the local’ and moving to a space of the ‘inter-local’. He also proposes the use of creative, artistic perspectives to generate collaborative projects that produce new forms of connectivity and 209

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cultural production. But will this also make room for a ‘moving between’, for a ‘hearing between ears’? As Deleuze–Guattari remind us, taking a ­middling view is not an easy option. It’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left […]65

For Deleuze–Guattari, this mode constitutes a ‘coming and going rather than a starting and finishing’.66 It represents a ‘moving between things’ that overthrows ontology, abandons foundations.67 They liken such a ‘going between’ to ‘a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle’.68 Intermezzo, interbeing, connectivities. Something passing between, the ‘possibility of something giving – not me or you – but something giving in the very encounter between a “me” and a “you” ’.69 I think of the strangers in the transit lounge and the strangers in the gallery, the figure of the solitary habitué of super-modernity, the women in Tamil Nadu, threshold designs on the streets, and generous helpings of Pad Thai, and wonder what place my thoughts have brought me to. I stir, and slowly come to, look out of the window, lost in thought. It is too dark now to see anything other than street lights whizzing past. Soon we will arrive in London. It seems to me there is something to Tamil ­conceptions of substantial intermingling. Paul’s patisseries in London never taste like the ones bought in Paris. It has been a long weekend, lots of traipsing around and late nights staying up talking. I doze off again while the train hurries along, carrying me from a place of hospitality to a place called home, where I am, however, yet to arrive.

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Epilogue

1 It has been a busy lunchtime in the Café des Deux Moulins, but most meals have now been served and customers are beginning to leave. Amélie is glad things are slowing down. Two guests have just come in for a late lunch. She makes her way to their table and is drawn into a conversation as she takes their orders. The woman is an artist from England; she is installing a show at the Musée du Quai Branly, something to do with Indian women drawing on the floor every day. It sounds quite amazing to Amélie, but also strange. She has not had much interest in the arts even though she lives and works in Paris. But this strikes a note. The artist shows her some images on the iPad. Amélie thinks the designs are like large doilies and fondly remembers her maternal grandmother who had white crochet doilies with different patterns on almost every surface in the house. She is intrigued. The artist, her name is Rikki, gives her an invitation to the opening. Amélie promises to come. The artist is having lunch with a curator. He is from Nigeria he tells her, but works in Munich. But right now he is busy with an exhibition in Venice. Amélie is impressed. Venice! It sounds so romantic. She has always wanted to go but never had the courage, or the right company. She thinks of Nino and sighs. Rikki and her friend have finished 211

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eating. Amélie brings them their coffees and the addition. When she returns to clear their table she notices a book on one of the chairs. She picks it up. It is in English. The title is The Raw, the Cooked and the Common Places. It has a picture of the artist Rikki. It must be an exhibition catalogue! Amélie is intrigued and thinks she must go to the opening at the museum and return it. During her break later in the afternoon, she sits at the staff table in the corner and she takes a closer look at the book, examining the images. More pictures of the floor doilies! Rikki has told her that there will be Indian women at the museum on the day who will be drawing designs. She definitely must go! Her break is over. It is Gina’s turn. Amélie leaves the book for Gina who notices a bookmark as she leafs through it. Curious, she opens it at the marked place. The heading reads ‘Epilogue – The Birth of the Alter-Relational’. Ah, it is in English. Gina’s grasp of English allows her to communicate about menus, coffees and deserts, make comments about the weather and give directions. She sighs and steps outside to have a cigarette, leaving the book on the table, still open on the marked page.

2 Epilogue - The Birth of the Alter-Relational This volume and the exhibition by the artist Rikki T it refers to constitute a response to the geographic adjustments initiated by the global turn in contemporary art. It takes up the issue of how the visual practices considered the realm of anthropology can be positively positioned in relation to the increasingly global conditions of contemporary art. Challenging Bourriaud’s articulation of relational aesthetics to live up to its potential and pay more heed to the other, Rikki T proposes the alter-relational as new framework and probes whether it can rise to this challenge. The exhibition’s two-pronged approach encompasses an installation and an exhibition catalogue that exceeds the habitual remit for such tomes and allows Rikki T to play to the strengths of each arena and to develop the complex conceptual issues that inform her show. The catalogue is integral to the visual project and is conceived as a creative experiment in its own right. For Rikki T issues of intercultural encounter and cultural ­translation continue to be neglected in the art world. She noted the lack of an appropriate 212

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framework that could cater for the conceptual challenges posed by the current geographic pluralization of art. She finds relational a­ esthetics, the only aesthetic framework that foregrounds encounter, too narrowly defined to address the issues and asked herself whether it could be re-envisaged and given a cultural turn? Could it be taken beyond the gallery to generously meet the aesthetic worlds, for example, of Amazon Indians and Tamil housewives? Could it form the basis for an intercultural aesthetics of encounter able to transcend Eurocentric conceptions and to do justice to the complexities of the translative acts entailed in such meetings? To answer these questions, she mines underexplored aspects of relational aesthetics’ Guattarean base in this show, and experiments with an expansion of the Bourriaudean framework to encompass a fuller range of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetic conceptions. Rikki T’s excursion into anthropology also takes the lessons of its disciplinary self-reflexivity on board: reflections on modalities of writing and the complexities of speaking for are integral to the project and are underpinned by experimenation and ­transversality as method. The non-human grounding of perception and aesthetics, the double-coded Deleuze–Guattarean machinism and the Janus-faced connectivity of discursive and non-discursive registers with its natural ‘relation of alterity’ are further key aspects here. The project suggests that this responds to the dualism and mind–body continuum of Amazon and Tamil worldviews in a non-pejorative and more appropriate manner than Western paradigms that are based on a mind–body split. The staged encounter of the expanded, post-Bourriaudean framework of alter-relational aesthetics with Amazon art and kolams, however, goes beyond the opening up of new pathways for framing indigenous designs: it teases out Guattarean notions of performativity and affectivity previously underdeveloped in relational aesthetics but central to Amazon culture and the tradition of Tamil threshold designs, and adds affective reciprocity. This encounter with Amazonian art offers a critique of conceptions of conviviality at the heart of relational ­aesthetics:  as Amazon Indians stress, conviviality is a fragile state that depends on continuous balancing efforts and the need to transform destructive and dangerous inner- and extra-personal forces. For Amazon Indians the maintenance of harmonious and affective social relations requires constant 213

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work as well as suffering,1 and is a far cry from Tiravanija’s consumptive co-mingling of bodies in gallery spaces. The staged encounter with Tamil threshold designs likewise sheds a novel, critical light on the issue of audience participation and agency in relation to art. These encounters also throw a critical light on the range of visual practices Deleuze–Guattari draw on in their discussions of art – namely male, white and mostly modern middle–class masters – while also drawing out the potential of their aesthetics to connect with radically alterior ­visual practices beyond the spaces of gallery art. The project also brings different dimensions of Tiravanija’s work to light, such as the reception of his art in Thailand and the unacknowledged Thai influences on relational aesthetics. It raises questions about the aesthetics of listening, hospitality, the consumption of food and how comfortably the serving of Pad Thai sits with multicultural, culinary negotiations of alterity. Rikki T seeks to inspire a focus on questions of encounter and alterity in contemporary art and proposes that the alter-relational can make important contributions to this endeavour. Her project contributes to the horizontalization of art and the transformation of the so-called primary, secondary and tertiary domains of art and introduces Garcia dos Santos’s ‘post-underdeveloped, post-peripheral, and tropical’2 ‘Brazilian’ eye into the debates around global visualities.

3 (The Huffingford News reports on Rikki T’s show) Rikki T’s evolving talent came to public attention with her show at the Serpentine Gallery, London, that proposed the alter-relational as a new aesthetic paradigm. She has taken her cue from Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and expands it into culture while giving it a more extensive Deleuze–Guattarean turn. She has most recently been invited to create an installation at the Musée du Quai Branly to comment on the collections. She has chosen the topic of Tamil threshold designs or kolams, an ancient indigenous tradition exclusively practised by women. At the musée, Rikki T put objects on display that are usually hidden away in the museum’s repository such as kolam instruction books and tin templates for 214

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the quick-fix drawing of kolams. She has combined them with video loops of Tamil women drawing kolam designs and screens that show live blogs about the practice. The installation’s emphasis is on the contemporaneity of the tradition and kolam designs will be drawn twice daily, just as in India, during the show. It is rumoured that Rikki T has been invited to participate in the 2015 Venice Biennale that is expected to emphasize questions of inclusivity. But at present the director of the Biennale, Okwui Enwezor, is keeping his concept under wraps. A source close to his inner circle, ­however, has confirmed that Rikki T has received an invitation and is thinking about building a floating island either in the Arsenale or near the Giardini.

4 Amélie is perplexed. It has been an unusual week. The other day she was invited to an opening at the Musée du Quai Branly and was impressed by the designs Tamil women drew with amazing skill and speed. She even, after some hesitation, walked over the patterns along with the rest of the audience, although it did feel sacrilegious, but it was obviously the thing to do. And now this! Nicolas Bourriaud, one of her regulars, had come to the Café with an artist called Rirkrit. Rather a similar name to Rikki, she had thought to herself. The pair were planning a show of Rirkrit’s work at the Pompidou Centre and the artist had smiled at her when she brought their coffees and asked if she would like to help him out. Of course she said yes. It turned out he wanted her to shop for a list of ingredients and then cook a Thai dish at the Pompidou. She had been petrified. Doing the shopping would be fine, but Thai cooking? She is not even an assured cook when it comes to French cuisine! But Nicolas had encouraged her, said it would be just fine, that she would be given a recipe and that there would be others as well to help out. So she had smiled back bravely and had scribbled her contact details in the artist’s notebook. But she is still shaken up at the prospect and is desperate to find a class on how to cook Thai food.

5 James Clifford has settled into a comfortable armchair in the lobby of the Mission Inn Hotel in Riverside, California, and is checking his email. He is the 215

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keynote speaker at the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association and will speak about anthropology and the visual. He is pleased to find an email from Rikki T in his inbox. They have remained in touch since their chance encounter at Tiravanija’s, and Clifford has followed her work. He is in fact going to present Rikki as an example in his keynote about how contemporary art has taken a ‘thicker’ ethnographic turn, and that artists are beginning to read anthropological case studies and run with anthropological reflections on writerly modes. He was waiting for some images of her show at the Musée du Quai Branly and is pleased that they have come through just in time to be included in his talk. Clifford is interested in Rikki’s proposition of the alter-relational. He thinks that a new departure can shake things up. He is working on a new book project, at long last another collaboration with George Marcus. He is hoping it will be another game-changer like their 1986 collaboration Writing Culture. It will be about art, ­ethnography and the contemporary, and Rikki will be contributing a chapter. The images thankfully download without difficulty and are soon added to his PowerPoint presentation. Just in time, as a glance at his watch reveals. It is time to go to the Galleria where the conference attendees are beginning to gather.

6 Cristina Rojas Soria,3 a young Shipibo-Conibo woman from Peru, has just arrived in London. She has won a scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art and pursue a master’s degree in painting. She is the first of her community to study art, first in Lima and now in London. Her mother was part of Maroti Shobo,4 a collective of Shipibo women ­artists who sold their work in Yarinacocha, Peru. She was regularly sent as a representative to the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market to sell Shipibo-Conibo traditional design work. The contacts her mother made in Santa Fe and the outstanding quality of her art made it p ­ ossible for Cristina to receive an education and ultimately to embark on a professional career as an artist. Without the role models of her mother’s co-artists and the support of the Girls for the World programme of the NGO Shipibo Joi (I am Shipibo),5 she would never have had the courage to do so. While going to high school, she lived with relatives in the Cantagallo slum in Lima,6 one of the largest urban Shipibo-Conibo ­communities in Peru that has managed to maintain a sense of community 216

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and Shipibo-Conibo culture. Cantagallo is full of murals by well-known Peruvian and international street artists. This is where Cristina c­ onnected with the larger world of art. She made it to art school and now to London with the help of one of the international artists who repeatedly visited and participated in the popular annual festival Shipibo Soy held in Lima. It is now the capital’s most significant stage for indigenous culture and attracts visitors from all over the area. The whole community is very proud of her and she is glad she has their support; she finds London grey and very different from anything she is familiar with. She had barely arrived when her tutor mentioned an exhibition at the nearby Serpentine Gallery that showed Shipibo-Conibo art in the c­ ontext of contemporary art. She went to see it and bought the catalogue. It is lying on her desk. It was both strange and exciting to read the anthropological excerpts in the catalogue. She has never read much about her culture, has simply been surrounded by it so far. But coming to London has changed things. She now is a different kind of outsider from the one she had been in Peru where her community had carved out a place, even if tenuous, in Peruvian society. And in art school here they are pushing her to make art about her Shipibo roots. She is not sure what to make of it. She has come to London to learn about art in a global setting and learn new things, not to talk about what she already knows. Some of the passages in the catalogue made her think though about what it means to be from somewhere else and be an artist, not that she understood it all though, far from it. But she has decided to get in touch with Rikki T, hoping the artist will be open to communicate with her and maybe even to meet.

7 (Rikki T is on the train from Paris to London after the opening of her show in the Musée du Quai Branly) It has been a madly busy week, so much to do and so many new people to meet. Things have been hectic since the Serpentine show. It has all been go, go, go. Finally a moment of respite and nothing urgent to attend to, or not immediately so at least. She leans back into her seat waiting for the train to pull out of the station. She is relieved she managed to send Jim the promised photos of the show. Thankfully she had remembered to take some pictures as soon as the show had been up. So all done! Finally time 217

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to think about London, Paris and yes, Venice! Her thoughts return to the Serpentine show and the catalogue. The exhibition was well received, but how successful would it ultimately be? What worked and what maybe did not work so well? She had wanted to combine the exhibition with an experimental catalogue that presents the work and the concept of the alter-relational in an interconnected way. The Serpentine had been great to work with and had fully supported the idea. But had it really created something new? Did viewers and critics review and maybe even alter their relationship to minority art? Working with the Musée du Quai Branly could not have been more different. It had been a battle to have information panels produced and put up in the installation space, and a small leaflet printed with an overview of kolams, her art and proposition of the alter-relational. It had been well worth it, though. The opening was well attended and everything had gone to plan. The train is still filling with passengers, but it cannot be long now before it will be on the move. She reaches for her baguette. From Paul’s of course. It has become a ritual on her recent rather frequent trips between London and Paris. She starts munching, thinking of Venice. Yes, not much time to pull things together as Okwui himself commented over lunch the other day; it is also one of the challenges he faces with organizing the Biennale.7 But the invitation is of course a great opportunity to develop ideas and to have a much larger audience. Venice! Her ideas are still sketchy though, and her thoughts return to the Serpentine show. Did it work, ultimately, and achieve its goals? To make the right decisions for Venice, these are important questions to settle. But she has to concede that only time will tell. There is no way to know right now. Her thoughts return to Amélie who had kept her promise to come to the opening and had shyly returned the exhibition catalogue that they had left behind at the café. She seemed to have enjoyed the exhibition and especially the designs that were drawn by Tamil women on the museum floor during the evening. She also confided that she was to cook Thai food for an artist with a similar name and had asked for advice on Thai cuisine. The train begins to pull out of the station. As she is settling into her seat an email pings into her inbox. It is from a young Shipibo artist in London who has seen the show at the Serpentine and wants to meet. The train is steadily picking up speed now and Rikki absent-mindedly watches Paris gliding past her window. She is beginning to doze off. Train-dreaming, she finds herself in Venice, and is inviting the young artist over for a bowl of Pad Thai. 218

Notes

Prologue 1 See for example Matthew Rampley, ‘From Big Art Challenge to a Spiritual Vision: What “Global Art History” Might Really Mean’, in James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (2007), especially 199–202. 2 She also works on questions of empire and British India. 3 Post-Production is a follow-on to Relational Aesthetics where Bourriaud highlights a different aspect of the contemporary art scene from the interest in the relational. Bourriaud isolates a trend he observed where artists no longer buy into notions of originality but work with pre-existing cultural material which they remix and recombine to create new meaning. The adaptation and remixing of the film Amélie that features in Rikki T’s show is an example of post-production as artistic strategy. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Post-Production (2002). 4 See Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China? (1995). 5 The Piro are indigenous peoples of the Bajo Urubamba River in eastern Peru. They are neighbours of the Shipibo-Conibo Indians and their design languages are thought to be related. 6 When Deleuze engages with the thought of another philosopher, he enters into what he refers to as a ‘zone of indiscernability’ with this thinker. Writing about Bergson, he frequently drops the differentiation of ‘this is what Bergson says and this is what I think about it’, but instead thinks ‘through’ and ‘with’ Bergson’s ideas. Deleuze refers to this authorial blending as ‘indirect discourse’. He also and importantly takes respective thoughts further along what he sees as their lines of thought. Deleuze, however, collaborated and co-authored books with Guattari, and both conceived of this mode of collaboration as a blended voice. Taking account of this Deleuzian notion of ‘writing with and speaking through’, my reference to Deleuze throughout this discussion will range from ‘Deleuze’, to ‘Deleuze–Guattari’ and ‘Deleuze–Bergson’ etc. See for example Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (1988), 7–8; but also Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 80. 7 Traditional Tamil threshold designs are created with sinuous, continuous lines that loop around a grid of pre-placed dots that determine the design. 8 James Clifford.

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Notes to Pages 1–6

Introduction 1 Thomas McEvilley, ‘D11’, Frieze: Contemporary Art and Culture, 69 (2002), 81–5: 81. 2 Okwui Enwezor in James Meyer, ‘Global Tendencies. Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition’, Artforum, 42(3) (2003), 152–63, 206, 212: 154. 3 See for example Meyer, ‘Global Tendencies’, 162. 4 McEvilley, ‘D11’, 81. 5 Ibid., 82. 6 Charl Blignaut, ‘The Interview  – Okwui Enwezor:  Cruelty of the Ordinary’, Citypress (2 Feb 2014). 7 McEvilley, ‘D11’, 82. 8 Claire Bishop, ‘Safety in Numbers’, Artforum, 50(1) (2011), 276–81: 281. 9 Ibid. 10 Gerardo Mosquera, ‘The Global Sphere. Art, Cultural Contexts and Inter­ nationalization’, www.globalmuseum.de (2011). 11 Okwui Enwezor, ‘History Lessons’, Artforum (September 2007), 382–85: 382. 12 Ibid., 384. 13 Bishop, ‘Safety in Numbers’, 281. 14 The exhibition ran from 17 September 2011 to 5 February 2012. 15 ‘The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989’, www.globalartmuseum.de (2011). 16 Ibid. 17 See Meyer, ‘Global Tendencies’, 162. 18 Mosquera, ‘The Global Sphere’,. n.p. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Laymert Garcia dos Santos, ‘How Global Art Transforms Ethnic Art’, in Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, eds., The Global Art World. Audiences, Markets, and Museums (2009), 164–76: 165. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 167. 24 Ulf Wuggenig, ‘The Empire, the NorthWest and the Rest of the World. “International Contemporary Art” in the Age of Globalization’, Transversal  – eipcp multilingual webjournal, 9 (2002). 25 Chin-Tao Wu, ‘Biennials without Borders’, Tate Online Research Journal, 12 (2009), 6. 26 Ibid., 7. 27 Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (2009), 165. 28 Ibid., 166. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 167.

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Notes to Pages 6–13 31 Ibid., 188. 32 Ibid., 102. 33 See Okwui Enwezor et al., eds., Creolite and Creolization. Documenta 11_Platform 3 (2003), 99. 34 Wuggenig, ‘Empire, North West and Rest’, 5. 35 Françoise Vergès, ‘Kiltir Kreol. Processes and Practices of Creolite and Creolization’, in Enwezor et al., eds., Creolite and Creolization, 179–84: 181. 36 Enwezor et al., eds., Creolite and Creolization, 209. 37 Ibid. 38 Vergès, ‘Kiltir Kreol’, 180. 39 Bourriaud, The Radicant, 76. 40 Ibid., 73. 41 Ibid., 132. 42 Ibid., 57. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 17. 45 Ibid., 56. 46 Ibid. 47 Garcia dos Santos, ‘How Global Art’, 174. 48 Mosquera, ‘The Global Sphere’, n.p. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 See Justin Clemens, ‘We’re All Globile Now: The 2006 Biennale of Sydney: “Zones of Contact”’, The Monthly, 14 (July 2006), 4. 52 Meyer, ‘Global Tendencies’, 156. 53 Jodie Dalgleish, ‘The Biennial as a Form of Contradiction: The 16th Biennale of Sydney, “Revolutions – Forms that Turn”’, Electronic Melbourne Art Journal, 4 (2009), 1. 54 Quoted in Meyer, ‘Global Tendencies’, 212. 55 Quoted in ibid. 56 Quoted in ibid. 57 Quoted in ibid. 58 Quoted in ibid. 59 See Hou Hanru, ‘Towards a New Locality:  Biennials and Global Art’, in Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic, eds., The Manifesta Decade (2005), 57–62: 57. 60 Hou, Hanru ‘Towards a New Locality’, 58. 61 Ibid., 59. 62 See ibid., 59–60. 63 Ibid., 62. 64 Gerardo Mosquera, ‘Beyond Anthropophagy:  Art, Internationalization and Cultural Dynamics’, Global Art Symposium 2011 (17 June 2012), 3.

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Notes to Pages 13–17 65 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), especially 25–70. 66 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (2002), 65. 67 Ibid., 61. 68 See ibid., 27–8 and 79. 69 See ibid., 69ff. 70 See Eric Alliez, ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Consensus: Of Relational Aesthetics’, in Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke, eds., Deleuze and Contemporary Art (2010), 85–99: 89. 71 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 13. 72 Ibid., 44. 73 Ibid., 31. 74 Ibid., 44. 75 Jerry Saltz, ‘Night at the Museum’, New  York Magazine (9 Nov. 2008), http:// nymag.com/arts/art/features/51998. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., n.p. The overall critical response to the exhibition, however, was ­negative. See Nancy Spector, ‘THEANYSPACEWHATEVER:  After the Fact’, The Exhibitionist: Journal on Exhibition Making, 1 (Jan. 2010), 49, 51, 53, 55. 78 John Perreault, Rirkrit Tiravanija:  Fear Eats the Soul, www.ArtsJournal.com (2011). 79 The piece was on display from November 2011 to February 2012. 80 See for example Janet Kraynak, ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Liability’, in Anna Dezeuze, ed., The ‘Do-It-Yourself ’ Artwork. Participation from Fluxus to New Media (2010 [1998]), 165–84: 271. 81 See Jessica Morgan, Common Wealth (2003), 25. Also Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 110 (Fall 2004), 51–79: 79. 82 See Stewart Martin, ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, Third Text, 21(4) (2007), 369–86; Janet Kraynak, ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Liability’, Documents, 13 (Fall 1998), 26–40; Miwon Kwon, ‘Exchange Rate: On Obligation and Reciprocity in Some Art of the 1960s and After’, in H. Molesworth, ed., Work Ethic (2003), 83–97. 83 See for example Beshty Walead, ‘Neo-Avantgarde und Service Industrie’, Texte zur Kunst, 59 (Sept. 2005), 150–57. 84 Alliez, ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Consensus’, 86–7. 85 Ibid., 94. 86 See Bishop, ‘Antagonism’. 87 See Joe Scanlan, ‘Traffic Control. Joe Scanlan on Social Space and Relational Aesthetics’, Artforum (Summer 2005), 123. 88 For a more in-depth discussion of these issues see Renate Dohmen, ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Criticality? Relational Aesthetics, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Transnational Encounters with Pad Thai’, Open Arts Journal, 1(1) (2013), 35–46.

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Notes to Pages 17–25 89 Bourriaud, The Radicant, 22 and 39. Bourriaud proclaims the end of post-modernism and the beginning of a new era of altermodernity declared to be a synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism in response to a global dialogue. 90 Ibid., 40. 91 Ibid., 39. 92 Ibid., 22. 93 Ibid., 132. 94 Ibid., 139. 95 Ibid., 42. 96 Ibid., 160. 97 Ibid., 51. 98 Ibid., 131–32. 99 Ibid., 165–66. 100 Ibid., 82. 101 Martin, ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, 386. 102 Ibid., 385. 103 The National Museum of the American Indian in the USA, for example, has a representative collection of Shipibo-Conibo artefacts. The Museum der Weltkulturen in Frankfurt owns a sizeable collection of Shipibo-Conibo ­ceramics, and the anthropology department of the University of Tübingen has probably the largest collection in Europe of Shipibo-Conibo artefacts. 104 Threshold designs constitute an ancient, pan-Indian tradition which ­encompasses radically different design languages that have evolved across the subcontinent. The tradition is no longer as widespread as it used to be and has declined, especially in urban centres, with Tamil Nadu a notable exception: everyday applications of the designs are still found in villages and small towns but also in cities such as Chennai. 105 See for example Elkins, ‘Art History as a Global Discipline’, in Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global?, particularly 19–20.

1 Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing 1 See Fabian, Time and the Other. 2 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (2000), 28. 3 Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1995), 74. 4 Ibid., 1. 5 Ibid., 22. 6 Guattari, Three Ecologies, 56. 7 Ibid., 36.

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Notes to Pages 25–29 8 Ibid., 35. 9 Ibid., 36. 10 Guattari stresses that we ‘need to free ourselves from a solitary reference to technological machines and expand the concept of machine’. See Guattari, Chaosmosis, 31. 11 Ibid., 24. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 25. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 35. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 18. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 17–18. 20 Ibid., 106. 21 Ibid., 101–02. 22 Ibid., 91. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 109. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 108. 28 Ibid., 37. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 110. 31 Guattari, Three Ecologies, 117. 32 Ibid., 136. 33 Ibid. 34 See ibid., p. 142 for a further discussion of the term. 35 Ibid., 128. 36 Ibid., 132. 37 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 87. 38 Guattari, Three Ecologies, 34. 39 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 31. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 32. 42 Ibid., 40. 43 Ibid., 100. 44 Ibid. 45 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 100 (emphasis in the original). 46 See ibid., 37.

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Notes to Pages 29–33 47 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 103. 48 Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari. An Aberrant Introduction (2002), 75. 49 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 128. 50 Although Guattari spends a considerable amount of time railing against the fixities of signifying orders, he also acknowledges the value of their ­contributions to psychoanalysis and by implication to culture. The issue is, however, how to keep signification ‘fresh’, how to avoid ossification and a dogmatic turn. See Guattari, Chaosmosis, 10. 51 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 112. 52 For a discussion of ecosophic cartography see Guattari, Chaosmosis, 125. 53 Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988), 144. 54 James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, Representations, 2, 118–46: 120. 55 Geertz, Work and Lives, 141. 56 James Clifford, ‘Introduction:  Partial Truths’, in James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), 1–26: 2. 57 Ibid., 4. 58 Ibid., 5. 59 Ibid. 60 Stephen Tyler, ‘Post-modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document’, in Clifford and Marcus, eds., Writing Culture, 122–41: 130. 61 Tyler, ‘Post-modern Ethnography’, 130. 62 Geertz, Works and Lives, 140. 63 Interpretive anthropology sees cultural analysis as intrinsically incomplete. It views cultures as loosely and frequently contradictory assembled texts and emphasizes inventive poiesis as part of all cultural representations. It stresses that the experiences and interpretations of the scientific researcher can n ­ ever be innocent and that cultural accounts are necessarily constructive negotiations between various parties. For further reference see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), especially ­chapter 1. 64 Tyler, ‘Post-modern Ethnography’, 136. 65 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (1988), 40. 66 Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, 131. 67 Ibid., 130. 68 Ibid. 69 Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, 4. 70 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 10. 71 Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, 6 72 Ibid., 7. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 33–38 75 Geertz, Works and Lives, 145. 76 Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, 137. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 135. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid.,139. 82 Ibid., 141. 83 Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, 23. 84 Ibid., 24. 85 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 173. 86 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1973), 333. 87 Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, 142. 88 Ibid. 89 Tyler, ‘Post-modern Ethnography’, 131. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., 126. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 129. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 130. 96 Ibid. 97 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 93. 98 Tyler, ‘Post-modern Ethnography’, 134. 99 Ibid., 135. 100 Ibid., 136. 101 See Gavin Butt, ed., After Criticism. New Responses to Art and Performance (2005), 2. 102 Ibid., 6. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 3–4. 105 Ibid., 5. 106 Ibid., 10. 107 Ibid., 15. 108 Ibid. 109 John Seth, ‘Itinerant Improvisations:  From “My Favourite Things” to an “Agency of Night” ’, in Butt, ed., After Criticism, 137–55. 110 Fabian, Time and the Other, especially 25–70. 111 Ibid., 31 (emphasis in the original). 112 Ibid., 35. 113 Geertz, Works and Lives, 147.

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Notes to Pages 39–44 114 For example, the Shiwiar tribe of the Amazon jungle who figure in this ­discussion in the context of the work of artist Valéry Grancher actively promote ecotourism in their villages on the internet. 115 Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, 142. 116 This is a reference to Geertz’s notion of ‘thick description’ which situates a phenomenon in larger cultural contexts. See Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 3–30. 117 Deleuze and Guattari contrast the rhizomatic map and the logic of tracing and reproduction. For further details see, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1999), 12–15. 118 Clifford Geertz coined the term ‘faction’ to highlight that any writing about culture to some degree also invents it. See Geertz, Works and Lives, 141 for further details.

2 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Alterity 1 In the Pittsburgh version of Untitled (Free) the artist added a slight variation to his 1992 piece by including a wall text of instructions for cooking Southeast Asian green curry. 2 Because of fire regulations, the curry – with the artist’s blessing – was prepared in one of the museum’s kitchens and taken to the galleries. The piece was on display until February 2012. 3 Sophie Calle works with random encounters and Christine Hill chose the supermarket check-outs as a relational site. Bourriaud offers a typology of ­different approaches to creating relational scenarios. See Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 29–40. 4 Bishop, ‘Antagonism’, 58. 5 Ibid. 6 Quoted in Elizabeth Linden, Matt Sheridan Smith and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rirkrit Tiravanija. A Retrospective (Tomorrow is Another Fine Day) (2005), iv. 7 Gavin Brown, ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija. Other Things, Elsewhere’, Flash Art, 27 (177) (1994), 103–04: 104. 8 For Bourriaud ‘traditional’ aesthetics stands for a host of ‘past’ approaches to art. For example he describes art theory in France as ‘depressive, a­ uthoritarian and reactionary’ (Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 45), critiques approaches that focus on ‘sense’ and ‘meaning’ in art (53), is suspicious of interpretations which see the artist as ‘expressive genius’ (60) and declares that seeking art in the ‘hinter-world of form’ is completely passé (61) 9 Perreault, Rirkrit Tiravanija: Fear Eats the Soul, n.p. 10 Matthias Herrmann, ‘Interview’, in R. Tiravanija, ed., Secession (2003), 25–9: 25.

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Notes to Pages 44–46 11 Ibid., 27. 12 Ibid., 26. 13 Ibid., 27. 14 Bruce Hainley, ‘Where are we going? And what are we doing? Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Art of Living’, Artforum, 34 (Feb. 1996), 54–9, 98: 59. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Herrmann, ‘Interview’, 27. 20 Ibid. 21 Bruce Hainley, for example, refers to how Tiravanija sees ‘lots of people’ as a material ingredient to his installations. He writes, ‘In many of his installations, a fairly common material is “lots of people” – in his Untitled (Meet Tim & Burkhard), 1994, he lists as materials “furniture, refrigerator, TV-set, ­video-tape, music, drinks, lots of people”.’ See Hainley, ‘Where Are We Going?’, 59. 22 Katy Siegel, ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija. Gavin Brown Enterprise’, Artforum, 38 (Oct. 1999), 146. 23 See Jerry Saltz, ‘A Short History of Rirkrit Tiravanija’, Art in America, (Feb. 1996), 83–5, 107; but also Jerry Saltz, ‘Conspicuous Consumption’, New York Magazine – Art Review (23 Oct. 2007). 24 Paula Cooper is a gallerist in downtown New York and an art dealer of repute. She owns the Paula Cooper Gallery. 25 She founded the 303 Gallery in Soho in 1984 that first showed Tiravanija’s piece Untitled (Free). 26 David Zwirner is a gallerist, art dealer and owner of the David Zwirner Gallery in New York where Tiravanija restaged his 1992 piece Untitled (Free) in 2007. 27 Bishop, ‘Antagonism’, 66 (emphasis in the original). 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 67. 30 Ibid., 79. 31 Ibid. For more detail on Bishop’s argument about the fragmented contemporary self, see pp. 65–70. 32 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 21–2. 33 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 58. 34 Herrmann, ‘Interview’, 25. 35 Bishop, ‘Antagonism’, 78. 36 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 31. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 45. 39 Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 46–52 40 Ibid. 41 Bourriaud calls this separation of the political and aesthetics ‘absurd’. See ibid., 82. 42 Ibid., 83. 43 Ibid (emphasis in the original). 44 Carsten Höller, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Vicinato. The Transcription of a Film by Carsten Höller, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija (1996), 6. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 See Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, eds., Contemporary Art and Anthropology (2006); Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, eds., Between Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic Practice (2010); Sarah Pink, Advances in Visual Anthropology (2012). 48 James Clifford, ‘An Ethnographer in the Field. James Clifford Interview’, in Alex Coles, ed., Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn (2000), 52–71: 55. 49 Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in Jean Fisher, ed., Global Visions. Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (1994), 12–9: 15. 50 Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, 14. 51 Susanne Küchler, ‘The Art of Ethnography: The Case of Sophie Calle’, in Coles, ed., Site-Specificity, 94–113: 97. 52 Ibid., 103. 53 See Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 30. 54 Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, 13. 55 Ibid., 14. 56 See ibid., 14ff. for further details. 57 Brown, ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija’, 104. 58 Herrmann, ‘Interview’, 28. 59 Bishop, ‘Antagonism’, 58. 60 James Meyer, ‘Nomads: Figures of Travel in Contemporary Art.’, in Coles, ed., Site-Specificity, 10–26: 12. 61 Richard Flood and Rochelle Steiner, ‘En Route’, Parkett, 44 (1995), 124–29: 119. 62 Meyer, ‘Nomads’, 17. 63 Flood and Steiner, ‘En Route’, 119. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 See Meyer, ‘Nomads’, 15. 67 Brown, ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija’, 104. 68 Ibid. 69 Pandit Chanrochanakit, ‘Feeling Contemporary: The Politics of Aesthetics in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Art’, Department of Political Science (2005), www2.hawaii. edu/~pandit/feel2.pdf, 13.

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Notes to Pages 52–56 70 See Jerry Saltz, ‘Resident Alien’, Village Voice (1999), http://www.villagevoice. com/1999-07-06/art/resident-alien. 71 See Saltz, ‘Resident Alien’. According to Chanrochanakit, the tree was removed shortly after the 48th Venice Biennale was finished. See Chanrochanakit, ‘Feeling Contemporary’. 72 Tiravanija grew up in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada. He was educated in Chicago and New York and lives in Berlin, New York and Thailand. 73 Saltz, ‘Short History’, 84. 74 Flood and Steiner, ‘En Route’, 115. 75 Carol Lutfy and Lynn Gumpert, ‘A Lot to Digest’, Art News (May 1997), 151–53: 153. 76 Saltz, ‘Short History’, 84. 77 See, for example, Kraynak, ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Liability’, Morgan, Common Wealth, and Kwon, ‘Exchange Rate’. 78 Saltz, ‘Short History’, 85. 79 Saltz, ‘Conspicuous Consumption’, n.p. 80 Beatrix Ruf, ‘Ruf, Beatrix’, in Cream 3. 100 Artists, 10 Curators, 10 Source Artists (2003), 10. 81 Ruf, ‘Ruf, Beatrix’. 82 The artist Rashid Araeen is a prominent critic of claims that the contemporary art world is now more inclusive. For him, the so-called inclusion is based on a ‘strategy of cultural difference’ that gives non-Western artists credence as long as they are or create art that is ‘other’. See also Khaled D. Ramadan, ‘The Edge of the WC’, in Khaled D. Ramadan, ed., Peripheral Insider. Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism in Visual Culture (2007), 22–38: 27. 83 The Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci (1892–1962) is considered the ‘Father of modern Thai art’. He arrived in Thailand in 1923 in response to the Thai king’s request to the Italian government for a sculptor to train Thai artists and craftsmen. He became the director of Thailand’s first School of Fine Arts set up in 1937 and he remained in Thailand throughout his life. 84 Chanrochanakit, ‘Feeling Contemporary’, 2. 85 Lutfy and Gumpert, ‘A Lot to Digest’, 152. 86 Ibid., 153. 87 See Chanrochanakit, ‘Feeling Contemporary’, 5. 88 George E. Marcus, ‘Contemporary Fieldwork Aesthetics in Art and Anthropology: Experiments in Collaboration and Intervention’, Visual Anthropology, 23 (2010), 263–77: 264. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 265. 91 Ibid., 268. 92 Ibid., 266. 93 Ibid., 268.

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Notes to Pages 56–65 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 George E. Marcus, ‘The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthro­ pology’s Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition’, Cultural Anthropology, 23(1) (2008), 1–14: 4. 97 Marcus, ‘Contemporary Fieldwork Aesthetics’, 266. 98 Ibid., 269. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 270. 103 Ibid. 104 Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, 13. 105 Anne Kawala, ‘Valéry Grancher, The Shiwiars Project’, http://www.paris-art.com/ art-numerique/valery-grancher-the-shiwiars-project/grancher-valery/41.html. 106 Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, 17. 107 Clifford, ‘An Ethnographer in the Field’, 55. 108 Ibid., 58. 109 For a more detailed argument, please refer to Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnog­ rapher’, 17ff. 110 See Clifford, ‘An Ethnographer in the Field’, 62. 111 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Narrativizing Visual Culture:  Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics (1998), 31. 112 Ibid.

Faction 1  ‘The Raw and the Cooked in Common Places’ – ‘Rikki T’ at the Serpentine Gallery, Review by ‘Johnny Zucker’ 1 Spector, ‘THEANYSPACEWHATEVER: After the Fact’, 49. 2 Ibid., 53. 3 Bishop, ‘Antagonism’. 4 Anna Dezeuze, ‘Transfiguration of the Commonplace’, Variant, 2(22) (2005), 17–19: 18. 5 Alliez, ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Consensus’, 89. 6 Ibid., 94–5. 7 For further details see, for example, Herman Lebovics, ‘Post-Colonial Museums … How the French and American Models Differ’, http://hnn.us/article/6939; Michael Kimmelman, ‘A Heart of Darkness in the City of Light’, New York Times (2 July 2006); Jeremy Harding, ‘At Quai Branly’, London Review of Books, 29(1) (2007); Sally Price, Paris Primitive. Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly

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Notes to Pages 65–79 (2007); Sally Price, ‘Return to the Quai Branly’, Museum Anthropology, 33(1) (2010), 11–21; Anthony Alan Shelton, ‘The Public Sphere as Wilderness:  Le Musee du Quai Branly’, Museum Anthropology, 32(1) (2009), 1–16. 8 Kawala, ‘Valéry Grancher’. 9 The round of speakers in the colloquium (November 2005)  included the artist; the philosopher Jean-Claude Monod; Jean-Patrick Razon of Survival International France; Anne-Christine Taylor, Director of Research and Instruction, Musée du Quai Branly; Marc Sanchez, Programme Director of the Palais de Tokyo and Pascal Languillon, a representative for eco-tourism and Pascual Kunchicuy Carrasco, a Shiwiar political leader.

Faction 2  Rikki T and Curator C En Route 1 5 March –23 April 2011. 2 See Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’. 3 See Clifford, ‘An Ethnographer in the Field’, 62. 4 For a discussion of the dilemmas inherent in the concept of culture please refer to Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; and also James Clifford, On the Edges of Anthropology (Interviews) (2003), 44–50. 5 See Saltz, ‘Resident Alien’. 6 See ‘The Way Things Go’, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 13 February - 24 May 2015. 7 Demo Station No. 4 was on show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham ­between November 2003 and January 2004 where Tiravanija created three major ­projects: a bar complete with a juke box and pool tables, an exhibition of drawings and a programme of practical demonstrations by local organizations. These included a model railway and golf putting, calligraphy, flower arranging, chess, bonsai trimming, circus tricks, woodcarving and origami. 8 Mark Wilsher, ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija’, Art Monthly, 273 (2004), 24: 24. 9 See Lebovics, ‘Post-Colonial Museums’. 10 See, for example, the exhibition catalogue for this 2005 retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Linden, Smith and Tiravanija, Rirkrit Tiravanija. A Retrospective. 11 See Francesco Bonami, Universal Experience. Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye (2005), 20.

3 Voices: Dossier of Texts on Shipibo-Conibo Designs 1 See Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, The Cosmos Encoiled, Indian Art of the Peruvian Amazon (1984), 4. 2 See Bruno Illius, Ani-Shinan: Schamanismus bei den Shipibo-Conibo (Ost-Peru) (1991 [1987]), 383–90.

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Notes to Pages 79–83 3 Peter Roe, ‘Art and Residence among the Shipibo Indians of Peru: A Study in Microacculturation’, American Anthropologist, New Series, 82(1) (1980), 42–71: 52–3. 4 Warren R. Deboer and J. Scott Raymond, ‘Roots Revisited: The Origin of the Shipibo Art Style’, Journal of Latin American Lore, 13(1) (1987), 115–32: 128–29. 5 See Gebhart-Sayer, The Cosmos Encoiled, 12–13. 6 The story was originally recorded by ethno-linguist and missionary Matteson who transliterated the name as Sankama. When the anthropologist Gow ­discusses the story, he spells the name Sangama. When I am referring to Gow’s text, his spelling will be adopted; when I am referencing Matteson’s text, the spelling follows her transliteration. 7 See Esther Matteson, The Piro (Arawakan) Language (1965). The excerpts are taken from 217, 221, 223, 225, 227, 229, 231 and 233. 8 Throughout this book, I have followed the transliteration for Shipibo-Conibo (with a capital C) commonly used in the English-speaking world. This excerpt, however, is from the pen of Bernd Brabec de Mori who adopts the German transliteration of Shipibo-Konibo (with a capital K). 9 Bernd Brabec de Mori and Laida Mori Silvano de Brabec, ‘Shipibo-Konibo Art and Healing Concepts: A Critical View on the “Aesthetic Therapy” ’, Viennese Ethnomedicine Newsletter, 11(2–3) (2009), 18–26. The excerpts are taken from 18–19 and 22–3. 10 Peter Roe, ‘Marginal Men:  Male Artists among the Shipibo Indians of Peru’, Anthropologica, 21(2) (1979), 189–221: 190. 11 See Donald W.  Lathrap, The Upper Amazon (1970); as well as Donald W. Lathrap, ‘Shipibo-Tourist Art’, in Nelson H. H. Graburn, ed., Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World (1976), 197–207. 12 ‘Towers’:  Buried ‘chomos’. Chomos are Shipibo-Conibo ceramic pots used to ferment masato beer made from the manioc plant. They are often partially ­buried in the ground to keep the masato beer cool during the fermentation process, and the lower section of the vessel is therefore often without decoration. 13 ‘Parrots’: male revellers. 14 ‘gods’: Incas. 15 ‘It’: the traditions of song and dance. 16 ‘Banner’: the macana [wooden club] the dancer is carrying on his shoulder. 17 The horizon seems to be moving. That’s how drunk the singers are. 18 ‘Parrot’: host. 19 The host is offering a cup of masato. 20 More and more women are participating in the dance. 21 Even though I am a terrible lead singer, I am leading this dance – a self-effacing idiomatic expression of the excellent singer Julián. 22 ‘Large boa-towers’: chomos. 23 The guests are crowding around the next chomo to be unsealed.

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Notes to Pages 83–94 24 ‘God’: Inca. 25 Description of the dancing songs, where the lead singer improvises a line and the other dancers repeat it several times. 26 ‘Coo’: the satisfied mutter of the drinkers. 27 ‘Swallows’: the female guests. 28 ‘Heal’: a term taken from the shamanic register, but used ironically here as it refers to serving them with masato. 29 I [Illius] cannot determine whether this terminology that is taken from ­shamanic songs is meant ironically, such as in line 40 (‘we are healing their ­bodies’), or whether it refers to the fact that by chance the lead singer and the most energetic dancers were all ayahuasca drinkers. 30 ‘They’: chai-coni (legendary descendants of Shipibos who are supposed to have had direct contact with Incas). 31 ‘Divine healers’: the chai coni. 32 ‘Touch’: enter in their ears. 33 ‘God’: the Inca, the master of the chai coni. 34 Until the chomo is empty. 35 Günter Tessmann, Menschen ohne Gott. Ein Besuch bei den Indianers des Ucayali (1928), 177. 36 The official name ‘Shipibo-Konibo’ is often substituted by the shorter ‘Shipibo’, referring to the same population. This text uses the German transliteration for the tribe (spelled Konibo with a Capital K) and for ayahuasca spelled (spelled ayawaska). 37 Such performances by Herlinda Agustín can be observed on the internet: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=9frbbFFSCts, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 8AwFTMTfwuk or http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc23V819Btk (May 2016). 38 For extensive descriptions of Shipibo indigenous medical concepts without focusing on ayawaska, see Arévalo Valera (1994), Tournon (2002) or LeClerc (2003), among others. 39 A more profound discussion of these effects of pioneer anthropological research was presented by Brabec de Mori at the 2008 EASA meeting (Brabec de Mori 2008). It appears that almost the entire complex of Shipibo-Conibo traditional medicine as presented today is based upon ideas from Western ­researchers that have been reinterpreted by indigenous agents in order to benefit from the development. 40 Personal communication with Herlinda Agustín, 2001. 41 See, for example, the movie Woven Songs of the Amazon by Anne Stevens (2005, cf. http://www.greenspiderfilms.com/products.html; a trailer is available at http:// www.arte-amazonia.com/films/film-woven-songs-of-the-amazon/ (May 2015). In this movie, Herlinda Agustín recounts this ‘tradition’ and says that Shipibo people who do not take part in it (say, who do not ‘sing pattern songs’) are regarded as ignorant. The fact that many Shipibo decline ‘singing pattern songs’ is explained as a loss of cultural tradition.

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Notes to Pages 96–98

4 Making Sense of Shipibo-Conibo Designs 1 Roe, ‘Marginal Men’, 190. 2 See Peter Gow, ‘Visual Compulsion: Design and Image in Western Amazonian Cultures’, Revindi: Revista Indigenista Latinoamericana, 2 (1988), 19–32: 20. 3 For more information on the developing art market in ethnic art and its impact on Shipibo-Conibo art and the work of other Amazonian Indians see Elke Mader, ‘Chomos and Molas, Indianische Künstlerinnen und ihr Handwerk in Zeiten der Globalisierung’, in Vienna Institute for Development, ed., Blickwechsel:  Lateinamerika in der zeitgenössischen Kunst (2007), 107–30: 115–18. 4 See Mona Suhrbier, ‘Leben als Töpferin. Biografien von drei ShipiboKünstlerinnen’, in Mona Suhrbier and Gerda Kröber-Wolf, eds., Augenblicke. Keramik der Moche und Shipibo, Peru (2005), A47–54: A48–9. 5 The National Museum of the American Indian has a representative collection of Shipibo-Conibo artefacts. 6 The anthropology department of the University of Tübingen probably has the best collection in Europe. The Museum der Weltkulturen in Frankfurt owns a sizeable collection of Shipibo-Conibo ceramics and staged an exhibition that compared Moche and Shipibo-Conibo ceramics in 2005 (18 June 2005–29 May 2006). 7 See for example www.amazonhandicrafts.com, www.ebay.com, www.novica.com, www.southamericanaccents.com, www.ccimports.com. 8 As Thomas points out, a noteworthy exception here is Alfred Gell’s ‘Art and Agency’ which he describes as a radical reformulation of the anthropology of art and the study of cross-cultural aesthetics based on indigenous visual practice but not limited to it. See Nicholas Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Chris Pinney and Nicholas Thomas, eds., Beyond Aesthetics. Art and the Technologies of Enchantment (2001), 1–12. 9 See Barbara Keifenheim, ‘Concepts of Perception, Visual Practice, and Pattern Art among the Cashinahua Indians (Peruvian Amazon Area)’, Visual Anthropology, 12(1) (1999), 27–48: 43. 10 Gow, ‘Visual Compulsion’, 23. 11 See Keifenheim, ‘Concepts of Perception’, 27. 12 See for example Lucien Taylor, ed., Visualizing Theory:  Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994 (1994); Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy, Rethinking Visual Anthropology (1997); Gareth Davey, ‘Twenty Years of Visual Anthropology’, Visual Anthropology, 21 (2008), 189–201; and Gareth Davey, ‘Visual Anthropology:  Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats’, Visual Anthropology, 23 (2010), 344–52. 13 See David Howes, The Varieties of Sensory Experience. A  Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (1991); David Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (2004); Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense. Exploring

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Notes to Pages 98–102 the Senses in History and across Cultures (1993); Paul Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (1997); Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography (2006); Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009); Schneider and Wright, eds., Between Art and Anthropology (2010). 14 Sarah Pink, ‘The Future of Sensory Anthropology/the Anthropology of the Senses’, Social Anthropology, 18(3) (2010), 331–33: 333. 15 See, for example, the work of the curatorial collective ‘Ethnographic Terminalia’ (http://ethnographicterminalia.org). 16 In pottery, one frequently finds not only juxtapositions of different design ­motifs, but also of canoa and quene patterns, thus of different design types. By contrast textile decoration only employs quene designs. 17 Even though this is the most common formal description, it only applies to the quene designs, i.e. the designs based on finer line thicknesses rather than bold positive–negative inversions. Also, as has already been stated, the ­differentiation of form and filler lines is of anthropological rather than ShipiboConibo origin. 18 Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, Die Spitze des Bewußtseins  – Untersuchungen zu Weltbild und Kunst der Shipibo-Conibo (1987), 278. 19 Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, ‘The Geometric Designs of the Shipibo-Conibo in Ritual Context’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 11(2) (1985), 143–75: 143. 20 Ibid. 21 Gebhart-Sayer, The Cosmos Encoiled, 7. 22 The missionary had no real interest in the designs and no further information is available on these hieroglyphic fillers. See Gebhart-Sayer, ‘Geometric Designs’, 153–56 for further details. 23 Gebhart-Sayer, Die Spitze des Bewußtseins, 282. 24 The anthropologist Tessmann, for example, proposed that all designs are ­abstractions of the human figure. This argument is supported by the many references to human body parts and positions encountered in the indigenous design terminology. He also sees the frequent employment of cross-motifs as references to the human body. See Tessmann, Menschen ohne Gott, 177, and Gebhart-Sayer, ‘Geometric Designs’, 161. 25 Gebhart-Sayer, Die Spitze des Bewußtseins, 75. 26 See also Bruno Illius, ‘Körper, Keramik und Gesellschaft’, in Mona Suhrbier and Gerda Kröber-Wolf, eds., Augenblicke. Keramik der Moche und Shipibo, Peru (2005), A23–43: A34. 27 Gebhart-Sayer, ‘Geometric Designs’, 161. 28 Ibid., and Illius, Ani-Shinan, 178. 29 See Gebhart-Sayer, ‘Geometric Designs’, 168. 30 Her view is shared by others. See Lathrap, The Upper Amazon (1970); Lathrap, ‘Shipibo-Tourist Art’, and Illius, ‘Körper, Keramik und Gesellschaft’. 31 Deboer and Raymond, ‘Roots Revisited’, 128.

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Notes to Pages 103–107 32 For further background on the art-historical basis of anthropological ­approaches to indigenous visual artefacts see J. Coote and Anthony A. Shelton, eds., Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics (1992), 3–4. 33 See for example Illius, Ani-Shinan, 170. 34 However, it should be noted that not every chomo adheres to this three-partite decorative scheme. 35 For more detail on cosmological models and their interpretive and experiential differences see Gebhart-Sayer, Die Spitze des Bewußtseins, 24–55. 36 This is typically expressed by the shaman Rafael: ‘Quada uno tiene su verdad’ (‘Everyone has his/her own truth’), see Illius, Ani-Shinan, 155. 37 An example is the addition of a Christian creator god to the traditional divine beings residing in the highest heavenly spheres who performs similar functions to the mythic shaman ani muraya. 38 Not all designs are considered ‘rich in shina quality’. Designs lacking in complexity and innovation are not highly regarded and are seen to be lacking in shina. Similarly painters are considered to be of high or low shina capacity. 39 G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, ‘Drug-Induced Optical Sensations and Their Relationship to Applied Arts among Some Colombian Indians’, in Michael Greenhalgh and Vincet Megaw, eds., Art in Society. Studies in Style, Culture and Aesthetics (1978), 289–304: 295. 40 Gerald Oster, ‘Phosphenes’, Scientific American, 222(2) (1970), 83–7: 83. 41 Oster, ‘Phosphenes’, 83. 42 Reichel-Dolmatoff studied the Desana Indians of the far central eastern Amazonian lowlands of Colombia. They are also considered a subgroup of the Tukano Indians. 43 Reichel-Dolmatoff, ‘The Cultural Context of an Aboriginal Hallucinogen: Banisteriopis Caapi’, in Peter T. Furst, ed., Flesh of the Gods (1972), 84–113: 111. Lewis-Williams and Dowson also take up this hypothesis and apply it to South African rock art. See J. D. Lewis-Williams and T. A. Dowson, ‘The Sign of All Times. Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Paleolithic Art’, Current Anthropology, 29(2) (1988), 201–45. 44 See Reichel-Dolmatoff, Beyond the Milky Way:  Hallucinatory Images of the Tukano Indians (1978). 45 Gebhart-Sayer, ‘Geometric Designs’, 161 n.  167; see also Gebhart-Sayer, Die Spitze des Bewußtseins, 315. 46 The perceptual and experiential dimensions of ayahuasca visions are explored in great depth by the psychologist Benny Shanon. See Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind. Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (2002); Benny Shanon, ‘Altered States and the Study of Consciousness – Ayahuasca’, The Journal of Mind and Behaviour, 24(2) (2003), 125–54; Benny Shanon, ‘The Epistemics of Ayahuasca Visions’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9(2) (2010), 263–80. 47 Gebhart-Sayer, Die Spitze des Bewußtseins, 312.

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Notes to Pages 108–112 48 Ibid., 315. 49 Gebhart-Sayer, The Cosmos Encoiled, 13. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Illius calls them acoustic hallucinations. See Illius, Ani-Shinan, 175 n. 529. 53 Gebhart-Sayer, Die Spitze des Bewußtseins, 13. 54 See Brabec de Mori and Mori Silvano de Brabec, ‘Shipibo-Konibo Art and Healing Concepts’, 18; and Bernd Brabec de Mori and Mori Silvano de Brabec, ‘La corona de la inspiración. Los diseños geométricos de los Shipibo-Konibo y sus relaciónes con cosmovisión y música’, Indiana, 26 (2009), 105–34. 55 Brabec de Mori and Mori Silvano de Brabec, ‘Shipibo-Konibo Art and Healing Concepts’, 22. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 22–3. 58 Ibid., 23. 59 Ibid. 60 The Shipibo-Conibo accept Piro designs as good or proper because they trace them back to their own culture, claiming they taught the Piro the designs. See Gow, ‘Visual Compulsion’, 21. 61 According to Gow the reason for design accomplishment or lack thereof in the region remains a mystery as neither geographic proximity, the regularity and frequency of contact or even linguistic relatedness determine the artistic accomplishment of the indigenous people of western Amazonia. The Piro, for example, speak Arawakan while the Shipibo-Conibo belong to the Panoan-speaking tribes. They are thus not part of the same linguistic family which might have explained their aesthetic affinity and prominence. And while the Shipibo-Conibo and the Piro live in roughly the same region, there are a number of tribes in much closer physical proximity that do not have an evolved or related design style, yet readily acknowledge the superiority of Shipibo-Conibo art. See Gow, ‘Visual Compulsion’, 19–20 for further details. 62 I thank Michael O’Hanlon for directing my attention to this article. 63 Peter Gow, ‘Could Sangama Read?’, History and Anthropology, 5 (1990), 87–103: 93. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 98. 67 Peter Gow, ‘Piro Designs:  Painting as Meaningful Action in an Amazonian Lived World’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5(2) (1999), 229–46: 236. 68 Benny Shanon disagrees with this view. 69 This refers to hallucinations during ayahuasca sessions. 70 Gow, ‘Sangama’, 98.

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Notes to Pages 112–119 71 Ibid. 72 Gow talks of an ‘Ucayali design system’ that encompasses Piro, Shipibo-Conibo and Cashinahua art among others. See Gow, ‘Visual Compulsion’, 21. The Ucayali region is an inland area in Peru located in the Amazon rainforest. It derives its name from the River Ucayali, a major tributary of the Amazon. The Shipibo-Conibo communities are located in the area around the city of Pucallpa on the banks of the Ucayali. The Piro live in the Bajo Urubamba area, named after the River Urubamba that joins the River Ucayali in eastern Peru. The Cashinahua live in Brazil and Peru and are found in Peru along the Curanja river in the Ucayali region. 73 Gow, ‘Sangama’, 96. 74 Sarat Maharaj, ‘ “Perfidious Fidelity”:  The Untranslatability of the Other’, in Fisher, ed., Global Visions, 28–35: 34. 75 Ibid., 29. 76 Ibid. 77 Rasheed Araeen, ‘New Internationalism or the Multiculturalism of Global Bantustans’, in Fisher, ed., Global Visions, 3–11: 9. 78 Maharaj, ‘Perfidious Fidelity’, 29. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Florian Deltgen, Gelenkte Ekstase (1993), 131 n. 7. 82 Personal communication. 83 Keifenheim, ‘Concepts of Perception’, 34. 84 Ibid., 35. 85 Ibid., 39. 86 Ibid., 41. 87 Ibid., 44. 88 Ibid. (emphasis in original). 89 Ibid., 45. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 28. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 44. 96 Ibid., 28. 97 Ibid. See also Joanna Overing and Alan Passes, eds., The Anthropology of Love and Anger (2000). 98 Keifenheim, ‘Concepts of Perception’, 29. 99 Ibid. 100 Els Lagrou, ‘Homesickness and the Cashinahua Self:  A  Reflection on the Embodied Condition of Relatedness’, in Overing and Passes, eds., Love and Anger, 152–69: 163.

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Notes to Pages 119–128 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 165. 103 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 21. 104 Overing and Passes, eds., Love and Anger, XII. 105 Ibid., 1. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid., 12 (emphasis in the original). 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid., 14 (emphasis in the original). 112 Ibid., 19. 113 Ibid., (emphasis in the original). 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid., 24. 116 Ibid., 6. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. (emphasis in the original). 119 Ibid., 7. 120 Ibid., 9. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 37. 124 Ibid., 92–3. 125 Ibid., 91. 126 Ibid., 90. 127 Ibid.

Faction 3  Itinerant Thoughts – London, Paris, Peru and Elsewhere 1 French curator Yves Aupetitallot selected Corbusier’s ‘Unité d’Habitation’, a monumental block of low-income apartments built in the 1960s near the small town of Firminy in Central France, as a site for an art project. The building had been envisaged as a social experiment in communal housing, but stood half empty when the project was proposed. The artists were asked to assume the role of inhabitants and to reflect upon collective living within the ­machinery of Corbusier’s social architecture. See Joshua Decter and Olivier Zahm, ‘Back to Babel’, Artforum, 91–2 (Nov. 1993), 131, 138. 2 Renée Green, ‘Scenes from a Group Show:  Project Unité’, in Coles, ed., SiteSpecificity, 114–37: 116.

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Notes to Pages 128–135 3 Decter and Zahm, ‘Back to Babel’. 4 Green, ‘Project Unité’, 128. 5 Ibid., 117. 6 Sarah Turnbull, Almost French. A New Life in Paris (2003). 7 Turnbull, Almost French, vii–viii. 8 Decter and Zahm, ‘Back to Babel’, 131. 9 Green, ‘Project Unité’, 124–25. 10 Ibid., 127. 11 Ibid., 116. 12 Ibid. 13 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1974), 69. 14 Ibid., 135. 15 Ibid., 98. 16 Ibid., 60. 17 Ibid., 86. 18 Oster, ‘Phosphenes’, 83. 19 Claudia Müller-Ebeling, ‘Ayahuasca-Visionen und Kunstreflexionen’, in Arno Adelaars, Christian Rätsch and Claudia Müller-Ebeling, eds., Ayahuasca. Rituale, Zaubertraenke und visionaere Kunst aus Amazonien (2010), 83–166: 116. Translation by R. Dohmen. 20 Shanon, Antipodes of the Mind, 304. 21 Reichel-Dolmatoff, ‘Banisteriopis Caapi’, 110. 22 Shanon, ‘Altered States’, 129. 23 Shanon, Antipodes of the Mind, 88. 24 See Ibid., 278. 25 Ibid., 277–78. 26 Ibid., 350. 27 Ibid., 351. 28 Ibid., 376. 29 Latour refers to the conceptual separation between culture and nature, that is human and non-human spheres as the Internal Great Divide which for him also represents the fault line between Western and non-Western cultures. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991), 97ff. and 104ff. 30 Ibid., 105. 31 Ibid. 32 Gebhart-Sayer, Die Spitze des Bewußtseins, 188. 33 Gow thinks that the events described in the story took place around 1912. 34 Gow, ‘Sangama’, 92. 35 Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel (2002), 57. 36 Calvino, Invisible Cities, 103. 37 Ibid., 103–04. 38 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911), 46.

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Notes to Pages 135–142 39 Ibid., 318. 40 Ibid., 58. 41 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1913), 276. 42 Ibid., 276–77. 43 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 62. 44 Ibid., 63–4. 45 See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 97ff. and 104ff. 46 Bergson, Matter and Memory, quoted in Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, eds., Henri Bergson. Key Writings (2002), 97. 47 Ibid., 99. 48 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 63. 49 The ‘brain gives us the means of “choosing” that which corresponds to our needs in the object; introducing an interval between received and executed movement, […] it leaves us to choose between several possible reactions’. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 52–3. 50 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 62. 51 Ibid., 63. 52 For Bergson this is a crucial point. Whereas in prevalent human-centric ­conceptions, human perception is singled out as unique and separate from ­nature’s processes, and would always fall under the rubric of difference in kind, for Bergson the notion of difference of degree allows for a ‘natures-cultures’ stance, for the body’s insertion and participation in the processes of nature. There ‘is for images merely a difference of degree, and not of kind, between being and being consciously perceived’. Bergson, Matter and Memory, quoted from Pearson and Mullarkey, eds., Henri Bergson, 99; see also 120. 53 Quoted in Pearson and Mullarkey, eds., Henri Bergson, 96. 54 Pearson and Mullarkey, eds., Henri Bergson, 109. 55 Ibid., 108. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 109. 58 Latour curiously posits the anthropologist as a female figure. 59 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 102. 60 Ibid., 106. 61 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 208–09. 62 Ibid. 63 Gebhart-Sayer, ‘Geometric Designs’, 161. 64 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1990), 262. 65 Shohat and Stam, Narrativizing Visual Culture. 66 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, (1991), 69. 67 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 (1992), 64. 68 Ibid., 184.

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Notes to Pages 143–149 69 Ibid., 79. 70 Ibid., 80. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 81. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Deleuze, Bergsonism, 22. 76 Ibid., 101. 77 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 294. 78 Ibid., 236. 79 Ibid., 237. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 238. 83 Ibid., 248. 84 Castaneda claimed to have met a Yaqui shaman named Don Juan Matus in 1960 who trained him in the traditional shamanism of the Yaqui Indians indigenous to parts of Central Mexico. His alleged experiences with Don Juan inspired 12 books. He also authored several academic articles detailing his experiences. His first three books, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan, were written while Castaneda was an anthropology student at UCLA. He was awarded his ­bachelors and doctoral degrees for this work. His work is critiqued by academics who argue it does not constitute genuine anthropological fieldwork. 85 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 162. 86 Ibid., 139. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 248–49. 90 Ibid., 227. 91 Gow, ‘Sangama’, 98. 92 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 282. 93 Marcia E. Verocq, ‘Identity Crisis – 1993 Venice Biennale’, Art in America, 81(9) (1993), 100. 94 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1994), 28. 95 The quoted passages are slightly edited versions of Bruno Illius’s fieldwork ­account translated into English by R. Dohmen. See Illius, Ani-Shinan. 96 Illius, Ani-Shinan, 173. Luis is one of Illius’ informants. 97 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 249. 98 Illius, Ani-Shinan, 173. Translated into English by R. Dohmen. Rafael is one of Illius’s informants.

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Notes to Pages 149–154 99 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 76. 100 Illius, Ani-Shinan, 32. Translated into English by R. Dohmen. 101 José Santos is a powerful shaman and one of the main informants of Illius. His song was recorded by Illius in 1985. This is an excerpt from Illius’ German translation of the lyrics. See Illius, Ani-Shinan, 328–29. Translated into English by R. Dohmen. 102 Maharaj, ‘Perfidious Fidelity’, 28. 103 Ibid., 29. 104 Ibid., 31. 105 Ibid., 32. 106 Maharaj borrows the term from Gayatri Spivak. See Maharaj, ‘Perfidious Fidelity’, 29. 107 Quoted in R. Fitzpatrick, ed., Universal Experience. Art, Life and the Tourist Eye (2005), 23. 108 A gopura is a monumental, highly ornate tower that tops the gateways of South Indian temples.

5 Voices: Dossier of Texts on Tamil Threshold Designs 1 Ralph M. Steinmann, ‘Kōlam: Form, Technique, and Application of a Changing Ritual Folk Art of Tamil Nadu’, in Anna Libera Dallapiccola, ed., Shastric Traditions in Indian Arts (1989), 475–91: 475–80. 2 Anna Laine, ‘In Conversation with the Kolam Practice. Auspiciousness and Artistic Experiences among Women in Tamil Nadu, South India’ (PhD thesis, University of Gothenburg, 2009), 1–2. 3 Renate Dohmen, ‘The Home and the World: Women, Designs and Performative Relations in Contemporary Tamil Nadu, S. India’, Ecumene, A Journal of Cultural Geographies, 11(1) (2004), 7–25: 8–10. 4 Holly Baker Reynolds, ‘To keep the Tali strong: Women’s Rituals in Tamil Nadu, India’ (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1978), 246–47, 249–51, 251–53. 5 Akila Kannadasan, ‘Connect the Lines’, The Hindu (Friday Review ‘Art’, 2 July 2013). 6 See Shastri Archana’s The Language of Symbols. A  Project on South Indian Ritual Decorations of a Semi-Permanent Nature (1989), 7, 84ff., namely her propositions regarding the origins of the kōlam. Archana relates the (puļļi-k-) kōlam to the dot (Skt. bindu) and the serpent, i.e. to fertility, death, and ­rebirth, phenomena that have been intrinsically linked to the role of women since primordial times. 7 H. Mode, ‘Zu den Alpanas’, in Indische Spruchweisheit (1973), 221–26: 223.

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Notes to Pages 155–160  8 An exception to this rule are the Pēțiyar. They form a small group of hermaphrodites who wear saris and long hair and who are largely regarded by society as psychically abnormal people and therefore ostracized. Nevertheless, they fulfil necessary social functions as astrologers, ­magicians, sex therapists, reciters of funeral hymns and also masters of the kōlam art. Moving from one village to another, they instruct young maidens in this art and in other things and are in return tolerated in the village for a few days (oral information by A. Dhamotharan) [A. Dhamotharan is the author’s Tamil teacher, introduced to the reader as ‘A. Dhamotharan, PhD Heidelberg University’]. 9 A. Dhamotharan, however, attests to the regular use of rice powder in the ­coastal regions of Chidambaram even today as the kōlam stone is not easily available in nature. 10 For example, in Andhra Pradesh they are known as muggu, in Karnataka as rangavalli, in Rajasthan as mandana, in Gujarat as rangoli, in Bengal as alpana (Jayakar 1980, Rossi 1998). 11 The border between these states was drawn as recently as 1956 (Stein 1998) and consequently many local practices transgress it. 12 In other parts of India, there is no continuous loop tradition and designs representing conch shells, for example, are part of the traditional repertoire. This differentiation between traditional abstract loop designs and modern representational design is specific to Tamil Nadu. 13 There is also a wet technique in use, which produces more permanent designs and is generally used for festivities which stretch over a longer period of time. Designs executed in the wet technique are, however, preferred when kōlams are drawn inside the house. 14 The traditional medium of execution is rice flour, which is deemed too ­expensive for everyday use, however. 15 If a doubleline is to be achieved, the middle finger is also involved in the process. 16 For examples of such Indian kolams, see J. Layard, ‘Labyrinth Ritual in South India. Threshold and Tattoo Designs’, Folklore Americas, 48(2) (1937), 116–82. 17 Stottira Malai (Madras: The Little Flower Company, 1960), 100. 18 M. Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit–English Dictionary (1st edn, 1899, Delhi:  Motilal Banarsidass, 1970), 845. 19 E. Parvati Ammal, Nitya Navakraha (Mandavelippakkam, Tamil Nadu, 1972), 66. 20 Guiseppe Tucci, The Theory and Practice of the Mandala (1st English edn, 1961, New York: Samuel Weiser, 1973), 23. 21 Ibid., 47–8. 22 Ibid., 23. 23 Stottira Malai, 100.

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Notes to Pages 163–166

6 Making Sense of Tamil Threshold Designs 1 See for example http://www.saigan.com/heritage/alangaram/kolams/kolams. htm, http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/rangoli, http://www.ikolam.com as well as several YouTube sites, such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pexq8v3aDH0, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJXD7pxGIPA, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Z_oVQBhlJ3I. 2 See for example http://www.zazzle.com/rangoli+cards, http://fineartamerica. com/art/all/rangoli/greeting+cards. 3 See for example http://www.delhigifthouse.com/handicrafts/bags/index.shtml and search for Shantiniketan bag. 4 See for example http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+kolam+t-shirts. 5 See for example http://kolangal.kamalascorner.com/2009/04/kolam-no164.html. 6 See for example https://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/kolam/ and https://www.soas. ac.uk/nightsatthebrunei/17may2012-nights-at-the-brunei----kolam-and-rang oli-workshop-and-live-music.html. 7 See for example http://www.amazon.com/Roylco-Rangoli-Mega-Stencils-Set/ dp/B0044S8MBI. 8 See for example http://www.dollsofindia.com/puja-items/stickers/rangoli/ 9 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEMtretcyBE. 10 See also Anna Laine, ‘Intervention or Inspiration’, Anthropology Today, 28(2) (2012). 11 Stephen P. Huyler, Painted Prayers. Women’s Art in Village India (1994), 10. Huyler studies the decorative designs with which women across the Indian subcontinent adorn their walls and floors. The present discussion is limited to threshold drawings and does not explore women’s wall decorations. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 The Bengali Renaissance was a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian social and cultural movement in Bengal. It was initiated by cultural elites in response to their exposure to European ideas through the English education they received under colonial rule. Members of the Tagore family were centrally involved and spearheaded modern cultural forms of Indian art and literature that served as rallying points for national Indian identity and, by default, for India’s anti-colonial struggle. The movement has been compared to the sixteenth-century European Renaissance and instigated a creative surge in literature and in the arts. The Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore for example was affiliated with the movement, as was his nephew Abanindranath Tagore who forged an art style that marked the beginning of modern art in India that became a rallying point for India’s struggle for independence from British rule.

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Notes to Pages 166–169 16 The original version was written in the Bengali vernacular in 1916. It was translated into French in 1921. See Abanindranath Tagore, L’Alpona ou les Decorations Rituelles au Bengale (1921). 17 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI). 18 H. G. Durai, ‘Preliminary Note on Geometrical Diagrams (Kolams) from the Madras Presidency’, Man (May 1929), 77; B. Bonnerjea, ‘Note on Geometrical Ritual Design in India’, Man (October 1933), 163–64. 19 Layard, ‘Labyrinth Ritual’. 20 Prativa Bala Bardhan, Alimpan (1968). 21 E. M. Gupta, Brata und Alpana in Bengalen (1983). In contrast to traditional Tamil loop designs, alpanas often have figurative elements that can be read motif-by-motif. 22 Archana, The Language of Symbols. 23 Steinmann, ‘Kolam’. 24 Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan, ‘Hosting the Divine:  the Kolam in Tamil Nadu’, in Nora Fisher, ed., Mud, Mirror and Thread:  Folk Traditions of Rural India (1993), 192–203, and Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan, ‘(In)corporating Threshold Art: Kolam Competitions, Patronage, and Colgate’, in Dwight Hopkins, et al., eds., Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases (2001), 161–86. 25 Renate Dohmen, ‘Happy Homes and the Indian Nation’, Journal of Design History, 14 (2) (2001), 129–39, and Dohmen, ‘The Home and the World’. 26 Laine, ‘In Conversation’. 27 Aurogeeta Das, ‘Exploring Traditional and Metropolitan Indian Arts Using the Muggu Tradition as a Case Study’ (PhD thesis, Westminster University, UK, 2011). 28 June McDaniel, Making Virtuous Daughters and Wives:  An Introduction to Women’s Brata Rituals in Bengali Folk Religion (2012). 29 Marcia Ascher, ‘The Kolam Tradition:  A  Tradition of Figure-drawing in Southern India Expresses Mathematical Ideas and Has Attracted the Attention of Computer Science’, American Scientist, 90(1) (2002), 56–61, and G. Siromoney, ‘South Indian Kolam Patterns’, Kalakshetra Quarterly, 1 (1978), 9–15. 30 The journal has around 50 pages on average and presents images of threshold designs of various styles, regional provenance and complexity, with one to three pages of editorial introductions which adopt a cross-regional perspective. 31 Dohmen, ‘Happy Homes’. 32 B. P. Bayiri, ‘Preface’, Rangavalli, 8, 1–5: 3. 33 Ibid., 9, 3. 34 Ibid., 11, 3. 35 Ibid. 36 Modern Indian art did appropriate folk art as part of its ‘indigenous’ p ­ rimitivism, but this is another story and not what Bayiri is implying. The work of Jamini Roy is a prominent example for primitive appropriations in modern Indian art.

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Notes to Pages 170–176 37 Bayiri, ‘Preface’, Rangavalli, 8, 5. 38 Ibid., 8, 3. 39 Steinmann, Kolam, 484. 40 E. L. Schieffelin, ‘Problematizing Performance’, in F. Hughes-Freeland, ed., Ritual, Performance, Media (1998), 194–207: 194. 41 Ibid. 42 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure (1977), vii. 43 Ibid. 44 Schieffelin, ‘Problematizing Performance’, 194–207, but also Edith Turner, ‘The Anthropology of Experience: The Way to Teach Religion and Healing’, in Linda Barnes and Ines Talamantez, eds., Teaching a Course on Religion and Healing (2006), 193–206. 45 Turner, The Ritual Process, viii. 46 E. V. Daniel, Fluid Signs. Being a Person the Tamil Way (1984). A core b ­ elief of Hinduism is that all differentiated and manifest substantial forms are evolved from a single non-manifested substance and that manifest creation is ­characterized by different substantial qualities, which are ranked. 47 Ibid., 8. 48 Ibid. 49 This daily flux is, in turn, contrasted with the ultimate state of equilibrium to be achieved by pilgrimage and religious practice, where a union, or rather a reunion with the one primordial ‘substance’, can be achieved. The divine is thus associated with substantial permanence, whereas the everyday, characterized by mutability and change, is the domain of equilibrating actions. 50 Daniel, Fluid Signs, 109. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 109–10. 53 Ibid., 10. 54 For a more detailed discussion of these rites and their meanings, see Baker Reynolds, ‘To Keep the Tali strong’. 55 Dohmen, ‘The Home and the World’. 56 See Shohat and Stam, Narrativizing Visual Culture, 31 and also Garcia dos Santos, ‘How Global Art’. 57 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 58 See for example Geeta Kapur, ‘Contemporary Visual Practice: Some Polemical Categories’, Third Text, 90(11) (1990), 109–17: 115 and Dohmen, ‘Happy Homes’. 59 For an in-depth discussion of the forming of a national conception of Indian art please refer to Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922:  Occidental Orientations (1994); Tapati Guha Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art. Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850–1920 (1992), as well as Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘Orientalism,

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Notes to Pages 176–181 Nationalism and the Reconstruction of “Indian” Art in Calcutta’, in Catherine B. Asher and Thomas Metcalf, eds., Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past (1994), 47–65. For an analysis of the constitutedness of Indian art from the point of view of gender, please refer to Annapurna Garimella, ‘Engendering Indian Art’, in Vidya Dehejia, ed., Representing the Body. Gender Issues in Indian Art (1997), 22–41. 60 For a more in-depth discussion of the continuities, complexities and ambivalences of ‘native’ notions of Indian art forged during the nationalist period and the perception of the tradition of drawing threshold designs see Dohmen, ‘Happy Homes’. 61 In Bengal threshold designs are referred to as alpana. 62 Bardhan, Alimpan, 5. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 6. 67 Ibid., 2. 68 See Partha Mitter, ‘Decentring Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery’, The Art Bulletin, 90(4) (2008), 531–48. 69 Dinkar Kowshik, Nandalal Bose (2001), 37. 70 See for example Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005). 71 Mitter, ‘Decentring Modernism’, 542. 72 Ibid., 543. 73 Ibid. 74 Rasheed Araeen, ‘From Primitivism to Ethnic Art’, Third Text, 1(1) (1987), 6–25. 75 Simon Gikandi, ‘Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference’, Modernism/ modernity, 10(3) (2003), 455–80: 458. 76 Ibid. 77 Araeen, ‘From Primitivism to Ethnic Art’, 13. 78 James Clifford, ‘Quai Branly in Process’, October, 120 (Spring 2007), 3–23. 79 Stephane Martin, ‘France’s Tribute to Primitive Arts:  An Interview with Stephane Martin’ (2000). 80 Harding, ‘At Quai Branly’. 81 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 87. 82 O’Sullivan and Zepke, eds., Deleuze and Contemporary Art, 2. 83 Ibid., 5. 84 O’Sullivan and Zepke also mention further predicaments such as Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of conceptual art (see O’Sullivan and Zepke, eds., Deleuze and Contemporary Art, 5) as well as what they see as contemporary art’s elusion of ‘the line Deleuze and Guattari draw between concepts and sensations’ (1). In their view these difficulties do not cause issues that cannot be overcome (5).

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Notes to Pages 181–185 85 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 88. 86 This refers to the female rites described by Holly Baker Reynolds in ‘Kōlams in Everyday and Ritual Contexts’ (Text 4 in Chapter 5 ‘Voices’). 87 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (Pourparlers) (1995), 111. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Baker Reynolds, ‘To keep the Tali strong’, 310. 91 Ibid. 92 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 311. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Baker Reynolds, ‘To Keep the Tali strong’, 250. 100 Ibid., 251. 101 Ibid., 252. 102 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 180–81 (emphasis in the original). 103 Guattari, Three Ecologies, 27. 104 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 97ff. and 10ff. 105 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 161. 106 Ibid., 162. 107 Ibid. 108 Deleuze, Negotiations, 93. 109 Ibid., 92. 110 Ibid. 111 The notion of the ‘house’ must not be understood literally because even if in the context of discussing threshold designs a ‘real’ building is part of the equation, the house–home trajectory refers to a context of cosmic force(s) and qualitative differences of space. 112 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 164. 113 Ibid., 183. 114 Ibid. 115 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 315. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid., 317. 118 Ibid., 349. 119 Ibid. 120 See ibid., 354–55. 121 Ibid., 355.

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Notes to Pages 185–188 122 See ibid., 356. 123 See ibid., 360. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid., 361. 126 Ibid., 359. 127 Ibid., 316. 128 Ibid., 349. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid., 353. 131 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 179. 132 Ibid., 183. 133 Ibid. 134 See ibid., 184. 135 Ibid., 184–85. 136 Ibid., 180. 137 Ibid., 185. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid., 186. 140 Ibid., 204. 141 Ibid., 203. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid., 204. 144 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 377. 145 Ibid. 146 See ibid. 147 Ibid., 378. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid., 379. 150 See Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation (2003), 87. 151 See ibid., 109. 152 See ibid., 36. 153 See ibid., 113 and 117. 154 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 183. 155 Ibid., 198. 156 Ibid. 157 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 103. 158 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 375. 159 Ibid. 160 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 164. 161 Ibid., 167. 162 Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 188–195 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid., 181. 165 Ibid., 182. 166 Ibid. 167 Ibid., 186. 168 Ibid., 183. 169 Ibid., 169 (emphasis in the original). 170 Ibid., 173. 171 Ibid. 172 Ibid., 174. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid., 171. 175 Ibid. 176 Ibid., 175. 177 Ibid., 166. 178 Ibid., 166–67. 179 Ibid (emphasis in the original). 180 See Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 377. 181 Ibid., 142. 182 Jonathan Harris, ‘Introduction: The ABC of Globalization and Contemporary Art’, Third Text, 27(4) (2013), 439–41: 440. 183 I am using ‘he’ here, even though Bourriaud does not specify that the homo viator is exclusively male. I am responding to Bourriaud’s masculine conception of the artist-nomad who is cast in the figure of the Baudelairean flâneur who has now been given an extended, global terrain to roam. 184 Guattari, Three Ecologies, 10. 185 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 142. 186 Ibid., 12. 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid. 189 Ibid. 190 Ibid., 4. 191 The late B. P. Bayiri, editor of the popular magazine Rangavalli, published ­between 1967 and 1988, was fondly known as ‘Rangoli brahma’. 192 Maharaj, ‘Perfidious Fidelity’, 29. 193 Ibid.

Faction 4  Itinerant Thoughts – Paris, London, Tamil Nadu and Elsewhere 1 Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995), especially 77–8.

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Notes to Pages 195–206 2 Botton, The Art of Travel, 9–11. 3 Ibid., 35. 4 Dezeuze, ‘Transfiguration of the Commonplace’, 19. 5 Author’s translation from French of the following website: http://www.palaisdetokyo.com/index.php?npage=fr/prog/expo/grancher.html. 6 Augé, Non-Places, 79. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 78. 9 Ibid., 44. 10 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000), 87. 11 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 88. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 105. 14 Ibid., 95–6. 15 Ibid., 117. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 118. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Chanrochanakit, ‘Feeling Contemporary’, 4. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 2–3. 23 Kraynak, ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Liability’, 28. 24 Saltz, ‘Resident Alien’. 25 Bonami, Universal Experience, 20. 26 Ibid. 27 Saltz, ‘Short History’, 85. 28 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 150. 29 Ibid., 152. 30 Ibid. (emphasis in the original). 31 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 17–18. 32 See for example ibid., 109. 33 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 152. 34 Ibid., 143. 35 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 91. 36 Ibid., 98. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 99. 39 Ibid., 88. 40 Ibid., 93–5. 41 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 145 (emphasis in the original).

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Notes to Pages 206–216 42 For a further discussion of issues of art criticism and situatedness in ­contemporary art see Dohmen, ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Criticality?’ 43 Grant Kester, ‘The Art of Listening (and of Being Heard)’, Third Text, 47 (1999), 19–26: 23. 44 Brown, ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija’. 45 Koh’s International Forum for InterMedia Art engaged in projects in Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, Cambodia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Singapore. See http://www.spaced.org.au/projects/jay-koh/ about-the-artist/ for more information. 46 Kester, ‘The Art of Listening’, 26. 47 Ibid., 19–23. 48 Ibid., 26. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 22. 54 Ibid., 24. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 25. 58 Ibid. 59 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 155–56. 60 Ibid., 156. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 157. 63 Ibid., 158. 64 Bureau for Cultural Interconnectivity, www.artstreammyanmar.net/cultural/ nica/BCI.html. 65 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 23. 66 Ibid., 25. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid (emphasis in the original). 69 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 154.

Epilogue 1 2 3 4

Overing and Passes, eds., Love and Anger, 24. Garcia dos Santos, ‘How Global Art’, 165. This is a fictitious character. For further information see http://shipibojoi.wordpress.com.

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Notes to Pages 216–218 5 Ibid. 6 For further information see http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/24/ the-shipibo-koniboofcantagallo.html. 7 Chika Okeke-Agulu, ‘Interview with Okwui Enwezor, Director of the 56th Venice Biennale’, Huffington Post (12 June 2013).

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Encounters Beyond the Gallery Guattari, Félix (1995) Chaosmosis:  An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). ___ (2000 [1989]) The Three Ecologies (London: New Athlone Press). Guha Thakurta, Tapati (1992) The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art. Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ___ (1994) ‘Orientalism, Nationalism and the Reconstruction of “Indian” Art in Calcutta’, in Asher, Catherine B., and Thomas Metcalf, eds., Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies), 47–65. Gupta, E. M. (1983) Brata und Alpana in Bengalen (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag). Hainley, Bruce (1996) ‘Where are we going? And what are we doing? Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Art of Living’, Artforum, 34 (Feb.), 54–9, 98. Harding, Jeremy (2007) ‘At Quai Branly’, London Review of Books, 29(1), 32–3, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/jeremy-harding/at-quai-branly. Harris, Jonathan (2013) ‘Introduction: The ABC of Globalization and Contemporary Art’, Third Text, 27(4), 439–41. Herrmann, Matthias (2003) ‘Interview’, in Tiravanija, R., ed., Secession (Köln: Walter König), 25–9. Hiller, Susan (1991) The Myth of Primitivism (London: Routledge). Höller, Carsten, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija (1996) Vicinato. The Transcription of a Film by Carsten Höller, Phillipe Parreno. Rirkrit Tiravanija (London: G-W Press Ltd). Hou, Hanru (2005) ‘Towards a New Locality:  Biennials and Global Art’, in Vanderlinden, Barbara, and Elena Filipovic, eds., The Manifesta Decade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Howes, David (1991) The Varieties of Sensory Experience. A  Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). ___ (2004) Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg). Huyler, Stephen P. (1994) Painted Prayers. Women’s Art in Village India (London: Thames and Hudson). Illius, Bruno (1991 [1987]) Ani-Shinan:  Schamanismus bei den Shipibo-Conibo (Ost-Peru) (Münster/Hamburg: Lit Verlag). ___ (2005) ‘Körper, Keramik und Gesellschaft’, in Suhrbier, Mona, and Gerda Kröber-Wolf, eds., Augenblicke. Keramik der Moche und Shipibo, Peru (Frankfurt: Weltkulturen Museum), A23–A43. Kannadasan, Akila (2013) ‘Connect the Lines’, The Hindu (Friday Review ‘Art’, 2 July 2013), http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/ connect-the-lines/article4878867.ece. Kapur, Geeta (1990) ‘Contemporary Visual Practice: Some Polemical Categories’, Third Text, 90(11), 109–17. Kawala, Anne (2005) ‘Valéry Grancher, The Shiwiars Project’, http://www. paris-art.com/art-numerique/valery-grancher-the-shiwiars-project/granchervalery/41.html.

260

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261

Encounters Beyond the Gallery Lutfy, Carol, and Lynn Gumpert (1997) ‘A Lot to Digest’, Art News (May), 151–53. Mader, Elke (2007) ‘Chomos and Molas, Indianische Künstlerinnen und ihr Handwerk in Zeiten der Globalisierung’, in VIDC – Wiener Institut für Entwicklungsfragen und Zusammenarbeit – Kulturen in Bewegung, ed., Blickwechsel: Lateinamerika in der zeitgenössischen Kunst (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag), 107–30. Maharaj, Sarat (1994) ‘ “Perfidious Fidelity”: The Untranslatability of the Other’, in Fisher, Jean, ed., Global Visions. Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press). Marcus, George E. (2008) ‘The End(s) of Ethnography:  Social/Cultural Anthropology’s Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition’, Cultural Anthropology, 23(1), 1–14. ___ (2010) ‘Contemporary Fieldwork Aesthetics in Art and Anthropology: Experiments in Collaboration and Intervention’, Visual Anthropology, 23, 263–77. Martin, Stephane (2000) ‘France’s Tribute to Primitive Arts:  An Interview with Stephane Martin’, http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/france_159/labelfrance_2554/themes_3713/culture_3922/exchanges_3923/france-tribute-toprimitive-arts.-interview-with-stephane-martin_7012.html. Martin, Stewart (2007) ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, Third Text, 21(4), 369–86. Matteson, Esther (1965) The Piro (Arawakan) Language (Berkeley:  University of California Press). McDaniel, June (2012) Making Virtuous Daughters and Wives: An Introduction to Women’s Brata Rituals in Bengali Folk Religion (New York: State University of New York Press). McEvilley, Thomas (2002) ‘D11’, Frieze: Contemporary Art and Culture, 69, 81–5. Mercer, Kobena, ed. (2005) Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London: Iniva). Meyer, James (2000) ‘Nomads: Figures of Travel in Contemporary Art’, in Coles, Alex, ed., Site-Specificity: The Ethnnographic Turn (London: Black Dog), 10–26. ___ (2003) ‘Global Tendencies. Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition’, Artforum, 42(3), 152–63, 206, 212. Mitter, Partha (1994) Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ___ (2008) ‘Decentring Modernism:  Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery’, The Art Bulletin, 90(4), 531–48. Mode, H. (1973) ‘Zu den Alpanas’, in Indische Spruchweisheit, transl. and comm. by R. Beer (Leipzig: 1973). Morgan, Jessica (2003) Common Wealth (London: Tate). Mosquera, Gerardo (2011) ‘The Global Sphere. Art, Cultural Contexts and Internationalization’, http://www.globalartmuseum.de/site/guest_author. ___ (2012) ‘Beyond Anthropophagy:  Art, Internationalization and Cultural Dynamics’, Global Art Symposium, Salzburg International Summer Academy 2011, http://www.summeracademy.at/media/pdf/pdf776.pdf.

262

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Encounters Beyond the Gallery ___ (1978) ‘Drug-Induced Optical Sensations and Their Relationship to Applied Arts among Some Colombian Indians’, in Greenhalgh, Michael, and Vincent Megaw, eds., Art in Society. Studies in Style, Culture and Aesthetics (London: Duckworth). Roe, Peter (1979) ‘Marginal Men: Male Artists among the Shipibo Indians of Peru’, Anthropologica, 21(2), 189–221. ___ (1980) ‘Art and Residence among the Shipibo Indians of Peru:  A  Study in Microacculturation’, American Anthropologist, New Series, 82(1), 42–71. Ruf, Beatrix (2003) ‘Ruf, Beatrix’, in Cream 3. 100 Artists, 10 Curators, 10 Source Artists (London: Phaidon). Saltz, Jerry (1996) ‘A Short History of Rirkrit Tiravanija’, Art in America (Feb.), 83–5, 107. ___ (1999) ‘Resident Alien’, Village Voice, http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-07-06/ art/resident-alien. ___ (2007) ‘Conspicuous Consumption’, New York Magazine (23 October), http:// nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/31511. ___ (2008) ‘Night at the Museum’, New York Magazine (9 November), http://nymag. com/arts/art/features/51998. Scanlan, Joe (2005) ‘Traffic Control. Joe Scanlan on Social Space and Relational Aesthetics’, Artforum (Summer), 123. Schieffelin, E. L. (1998) ‘Problematizing Performance’, in Hughes-Freeland, F., ed., Ritual, Performance, Media (London and New York: Routledge). Schneider, Arnd, and Christopher Wright, eds. (2006) Contemporary Art and Anthropology (Oxford: Berg). ___ (2010) Between Art and Anthropology:  Contemporary Ethnographic Practice (Oxford: Berg). Seth, John (2005) ‘Itinerant Improvisations:  From “My Favourite Things” to an “Agency of Night”’, in Butt, Gavin, ed., After Criticism. New Responses to Art and Performance (Oxford: Blackwell). Shanon, Benny (2002) The Antipodes of the Mind. Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ___ (2003) ‘Altered States and the Study of Consciousness – Ayahuasca’, The Journal of Mind and Behaviour, 24(2), 125–54. ___ (2010) ‘The Epistemics of Ayahuasca Visions’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9(2), 263–80. Shelton, Anthony Alan (2009) ‘The Public Sphere as Wilderness: Le Musee du Quai Branly’, Museum Anthropology, 32(1), 1–16. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam (1998) Narrativizing Visual Culture:  Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge). Siegel, Katy (1999) ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija. Gavin Brown Enterprise’, Artforum, 38 (Oct.), 146. Siromoney, G (1978) ‘South Indian Kolam Patterns’, Kalakshetra Quarterly, 1, 9–15.

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Index Illustrations are denoted by the use of italics. Aboriginal art 10 abstract art 187–​88 aesthetic therapy 88–​99, 92–​5, 108–​11, 115, 146, 162 affectivity Amazon culture 116, 119–​20, 213 anthropology 35 Bergson 139 and cultural encounter 9 Deleuze and Guattarean aesthetics 125, 145, 184, 188–​90 and multiculturalism 199 and perception 120, 139 and performativity 116, 119, 126, 200 and sociality 120–​22, 206 Tamil culture 171, 173, 187, 190 Ahmed, Sara 199–​200, 203–​04, 209 Alliez, Eric 14, 62 alterglobalization 6–​8 Altermodern 192 altermodern 8, 17, 18, 193 altermodernity 17, 19 alter-​relational aesthetics 212–​14, 216, 218 Amazon art 118–​19, 120 Amazon culture 57–​8, 105, 108, 121, 122–​26, 213–​14 ‘Amélie’ xii, 64–​6, 211–​12, 215, 218 Amélie (film) 64–​6, 77–​8, 198 anthropology and art 48–​50, 56–​60, 96, 171, 175 interpretive 32–​3

and the textual 31–​8 visual 98–​9 Araeen, Rasheed 114, 179 art history, and practice of writing 36–​8, 39 art-​nomads 8, 18, 51, 192–​93, 198, 200 artist-​audience collaborations 14, 29, 49 audience participation 42–​8, 55–​6, 77, 189, 214–​15, 218 Augé, Marc 8, 195, 197–​98 Ayahuasca/​ayawaska hallucinations 92–​5, 105, 108–​10, 131–​33 plant drink 92–​3, 110 Baker Reynolds, Holly 153, 158–​61, 174, 182, 183 Bardhan, Prativa Bala 168, 176 Bayiri, B. P. 164–​65, 169–​70, 176, 177 Bergson, Henri 134–​42 biennialism 1–​3, 11–​12 Bishop, Claire 2, 3, 17, 42, 45–​6, 61–​2 Bonami, Francesco 202 Bose, Nandalal 177–​78 Botton, Alain de 195, 205 Bourriaud, Nicolas altermodernity 61–​2, 192–​93 background xiii creolization 7, 61 ecosophy vi, 15, 22 political effectiveness 46–​7

267

268

Encounters Beyond the Gallery Bourriaud, Nicolas (cont.) radicant 6–​7, 8, 17, 18–​19 relational aesthetics 13–​15, 122, 180, 184, 196 and Rirkrit Tiravanija 42, 47, 181, 205 Brabec de Mori, Bernd 93, 109–​10 Brown Stagemaker xiii, 185, 189, 190, 192 Buddhism 42–​3, 50, 51–​2 Butt, Gavin 38 Calle, Sophie 49 Calvino, Italo 130 canoa designs 97, 100, 100 capitalism 16, 20, 51 Cashinahua designs 116–​18, 117, 123 Cashinahua Indians 97, 98, 116, 118–​20 Castaneda, Carlos 146, 147 Cattelan, Maurizio 15 Chanrochanakit, Pandit 52, 55, 201 Chinese art, contemporary 2 chomo (pot) 97, 100–​01, 103 Clifford, James anthropology and art 48–​9, 59, 62, 67–​8, 144 anthropology and the textual 31–​3 background xiii and ‘Rikki T’ 62,  215–​16 coevalness 13, 38–​9, 64 contemporary art, global condition 2–​6 conviviality Amazon 21, 23, 119–​23, 213 kolams 72, 201 relational aesthetics (Bourriaud) 9, 15, 17, 49, 55, 181, 197 relational aesthetics (expanded) 21–3, 122–26, 181, 184, 191–94 Tiravanija 47, 54 Corradi Fiumara, Gemma 207

cosmos Deleuze-​Guattarean aesthetics 185–​88, 189, 190–​91 and kolams 160–​61, 174–​75, 183 symbolism (Shipibo) 100 creolization 7–​8, 61 cultural translation 114–​18, 150, 193, 194 ‘Curator C’ 62, 67–​78 Daniel, E.V. 172 David, Catherine 11 Deboer, Warren R. 85–​6, 102 Deleuze, Gilles xiii, 22, 141–​44, 188 Deleuze-​Guattarean aesthetics abstract art 187–​88 communication 148, 149 and the ‘house’ 185–​86, 188–​89 and kolams 182–​83, 185–​88, 190–​91 ‘moving between’ 210 non-​human grounding of perception 22, 23, 144–​47, 181, 184–​92, 213 democracy 17, 45–​6 Dezeuze, Anna 62, 196 Dohmen, Renate xiii, 152, 157–​58 Don Juan (Yaqui shaman) 146–​47 ecosophy xi, 15, 22 ‘English of Art’ 4, 10 Enwezor, Okwui E 2, 3, 11, 215 ethico-​aesthetics 29, 35, 46 ‘ethnographer envy’ 48, 50 ethnographic realism 32–​3, 55 turn 48–​50, 58, 69–​70, 216 ventriloquism 33 ethnography 36, 128, 140 Eurocentricity 2, 9, 13, 42–​3, 51, 176 Fabian, Johannes 13, 38 Fernandez, Julian (Shipibo Indian) 82

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Index Fernandez Maynas, Anastasia (Shipibo Indian) 97 Feroci, Corrado 55 Flood, Richard 52 folk art 14, 154–​61, 175 Foster, Hal 48–​9, 49–​50, 57–​8

Hesse, Hermann 52 Hinduism 154, 156, 160–​61 Höller, Carsten 15 horizontalization 4, 9–​13, 214 Hou, Hanru 12 Huyler, Stephen 165–​66, 168

Garcia dos Santos, Laymert 4–​5, 9, 20, 214 ‘Garden Gnome’ xiii, 64–​5, 72–​3, 77–​8, 198 Gebhart-​Sayer, Angelika aesthetic therapy 93, 108–​10 background xiv iconographic-​semantic approach 102–​03, 112, 114–​15 Shipibo-​Conibo Designs 86, 92, 99–​105, 141 Geertz, Clifford 31, 39 Gikandi, Simon 179 globalization 1–​6, 212 Gow, Peter 98, 111–​13, 133–​34 Grancher, Valéry 57, 58, 65, 73–​5, 196 Green, Renée 128–​30 Guattari, Félix background xiv conception of aesthetics 38, 180–​81 ecosophy 15 machinism 25–​6, 30–​31, 124–​25 psychoanalysis critique 24–​7 subjectivity 119–​20, 192, 204 transversality 22, 24–​31, 35, 204 See also Deleuze-​Guattarean aesthetics Gumpert, Lynn 55 Gupta, E. M. 168 Guss, David 117 Guzman, Antonio 115

iconographic-​semantic approach 98, 112–​16 Illius, Bruno xiv, 102, 103, 116, 148–​50 India 154, 166, 177–​79 ‘Internal Great Divide’ 22, 133, 178, 184

Hainley, Bruce 44 Harris, Jonathan 193 Herrmann, Matthias 44, 45

languages art 9–​10, 178 design 99–​105, 121

Keifenheim, Barbara 98, 116, 117–​18, 120 Kester, Grant 207–​08 kikin (aesthetic therapy) 88, 89 Knoll, Max 106 Koh, Jay 206–​08, 209 kolams (threshold designs) background 21 daily ritual 154–​58, 168, 182, 186–​87, 190, 192 definition and functions 160, 161, 198, 205–​06 nonpus 158, 159–​60, 161 patterns 154–​55, 157–​58, 159–​60, 164–​65, 165–​67 resonance with Rirkrit Tiravanija 43, 182, 183 revival 163–​64, 165 in ‘Rikki T’’s exhibition 62–​3 studies of 162, 168 techniques 155–​58, 159 Kublai Khan 130, 134–​35 Lagrou, Els 119 Laine, Anna 152, 155–​57

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Encounters Beyond the Gallery Latour, Bruno 133, 140, 184 Layard, John 166, 168 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude 34, 145 ‘listening and hearing’ 149–​50, 207–​08, 209, 214 Luis (Shipibo Indian, Bruno Illius’s informant) 149 Lutfy, Carol 53, 55 machinism, Guattarean 25–​6, 30–​31, 124–​25, 213 ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ 10 Maharaj, Sarat 114, 115, 150 Malinowskian anthropology 56 Marco Polo xiv, 52, 130, 134–​35 Marcus, George 31, 33, 56–​7, 99, 216 Martin, Stéphane 180 Martin, Stewart 19–​20 McEvilley, Thomas 2 menin (skill) 100–​01 Meyer, James 51 Mitter, Partha 177, 178–​79 Mohan, Vijayalakshmi 153, 161–​62 Morandi, Giorgio 151 Mosquera, Gerardo 4, 5, 7, 9–​10, 13, 208 Müller-​Ebeling, Claudia 131 multiculturalism 6, 17–​18, 54, 114, 199–​200, 202–​03 Musée du Quai Branly xv–​xvi, 65, 73, 179, 211, 214–​18 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 15, 40 musical analysis 102 Nepal 131 nishi ibo (master spirit) 88–​9 ‘non-​places’ 8, 195, 197–​98 non-​Western artists 4–​5, 6, 59, 178, 180 Orozco, Gabriel 38

Oster, Gerald 105 O’Sullivan, Simon 180–​81 Overing, Joanna 120–​22, 123 Palais de Tokyo 57, 65, 73, 127, 196, 205–​06 Passes, Alan 120–​22, 123 perception and anthropology 99 Bergson 135–​42 Deleuze 140–​48, 184, 188–​89, 213 and pattern 117, 119 phosphenes 105, 107, 131, 139 shamanic 143, 144, 147 Shipibo 104–​05, 111 Western 133–​34 see also phosphene phenomena performativity and affectivity 116, 119, 126, 200 phosphene phenomena 105, 106, 107–​08, 131, 139 see also perception Piro Indians 97, 98, 111 ‘post-​Bourriaudean’ relational aesthetics 125–​26, 191, 193–​94, 213. See also alter-​relational aesthetics primitivism 38–​9, 57–​8, 82, 175–​83, 189 ‘proto-​aesthetics’ 27, 28, 125 quasi-​ethnography 49, 57–​8 quene designs 85, 97, 100, 100 Rafael (Shipibo Indian, Bruno Illius’s informant) 149 rangoli (threshold designs) See kolams (threshold designs) Raymond, J. Scott 85–​6, 102 Reichel-​Dolmatoff, Gerardo 105 relational aesthetics 

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Index alter-​relational xiii, xv, 62, 206, 212–​16, 218 art world 15, 29, 61, 198 artistic collaboration 47 Bourriaud 14–​5, 28–​30, 38, 46–​7, 184, 205 convivial 15, 47, 55, 120–​2 criticism 14, 16–​7, 20, 42, 44–​6, 61, 197 culture 21–​2, 183 ecosophy 22, 30, 184 encounter 13, 16–​7, 55–​9, 200–​06, 213 and Eurocentricity 13–​14, 122, 183, 196, 206 expanded notion of 21–​3, 122–​26, 181, 184, 191–​94 George Marcus 56 and the global 9, 13, 20 and Guattari 15, 27, 29–​30, 38, 180, 184–​85 non-​human 181, 184, 192 politics 6, 45–​7, 206 self-​reflexivity 77 social transformation 15, 30, 42, 46, 205 subjectivity 25, 27, 29, 46, 204 and Tamil culture 181, 205 and Thainess xvi, 22, 50–​1, 54, 59, 201, 214 Tiravanija xiv–xv, 14, 20, 40–​2, 69 viewer 44, 48, 189 ‘Rikki T’ background xi–​xvi, xiv, 22, 39 Itinerant Thoughts 127–​51, 195–​210 ‘The Raw and the Cooked in Common Places’ (exhibition) 61–​6, 67–​78, 212–​15 Roe, Peter 84–​5 ‘Rojas Soria, Cristina’  216–​17

Romanticism 188 Römer, Stefan 208 Roy, Jamini 179 Ruf, Beatrix 54 Saltz, Jerry 15, 45, 53–​4, 146, 202 Sanchez, Marc 65, 74–​5, 196 Sankama/​Sangama (Piro Indian) xv, 89–​92, 102, 111–​12, 133 Santos, José (Shipibo Indian) xv, 102, 124, 147, 150 Scanlan, Joe 17 Schieffelin, Edward 171 Seth, John 37–​8 shamans Nepalese 131 Sankama/​Sangama (Piro Indian) xv, 89–​92, 102, 111–​12, 133 and Shipibo-​Conibo Designs 87–​9, 102, 108–​09, 131, 147 Yaqui 146–​47 Shanon, Benny 131–​33 shina (mindfulness) 100–​01, 104–​05 Shipibo-​Conibo culture 92, 133, 136–​37, 216–​17 Shipibo-​Conibo Designs art styles 105–​11 background 81–​2, 85–​6, 102–​03 chomo (pot) 97, 100–0​1, 103 comparisons to Cashinahua art 120 resonance with Rirkrit Tiravanija 43 in ‘Rikki T’’s exhibition 63–​4 and shamans 87–​9, 102, 131, 147 Shipibo-​Conibo Indians aesthetic therapy 88, 92–​5, 108–​11, 115 art styles 21, 84–​5, 96–​7, 97 songs 82–​4, 88–​9, 109 women 9, 84, 93–​5, 216–​17 Shiwiar Indians 57, 58, 65

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Encounters Beyond the Gallery Shiwiars Project, The (Grancher) 57, 65, 75, 196, 197 Shohat, Ella 59 Siegel, Katy 45 South Africa 114 Stam, Robert 59 Steiner, Rochelle 52 Steinmann, Ralph 152, 154–​55, 170 subjectivity 25–​30, 45, 119–​20, 192, 204, 205 substantial fluidity 172–​75 symbolism 100, 103–​04, 154, 169, 170–​71 Tagore, Abanindranath 166, 177 Tamil culture 151, 154–​56, 160–​61, 172–​75, 182, 199 Tamil threshold designs See kolams (threshold designs) Tamil women background xv daily ritual of kolams 21, 62, 154–​58, 161, 182 vratas (female rites) 173–​74, 176, 183 textiles 81, 84, 92, 94, 97, 117 Tiravanija, Rirkrit 40–​60 background xiv–​xv, 21, 40 Buddhism 42–​3, 50, 51–​2 different aspects of work 22–​3 and Jay Koh 206–0​8, 209 Just Smile and Don’t Talk 41 Kölnische Kunstverein scenario 43, 208 New York apartment reproduction 43, 45, 181, 198

Pad Thai 15–​16, 40–​42, 55, 200–0​1 and relational art 43–​8 Thainess 50–​55, 59, 201–​03 Untitled (1271) 52, 53 Untitled 1992/​1995/​2007 (Free/​ Still) 15, 40 Untitled 2002 (He Promised) 43 Untitled (From Madrid Airport to Reina Sofia) 70 Venice Biennale 52, 68, 148 transversality 22, 24–​31, 35, 204, 210 Tukano Indians 106 Turner, Victor 171 Tyler, Stephen 35–​6, 38 Ucayali art 113 Venice xiii–​xv, 1, 49, 52, 130–​34, 139, 148, 151, 218 Venice Biennale 2, 52, 68, 148, 211, 215, 218 Vergès, Françoise 7 Vicinato (film, 1995) 47 visual anthropology 98–​9, 192 West-​Rest divide 22, 133, 178, 184 Wu, Chin-​Tao 5–​6 Wuggenig, Ulf 5, 7 Yekuana Indians (Venezuela) 117 Zepke, Stephen 180–​81 ‘Zucker, Johnny’ 61–​6 Zumaeta, Moran (Piro Indian) 111

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