Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World 9780773550810

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narratives unfolding

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History

Martha Langford and Sandra Paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered.

The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin

Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips

Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall

The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy

Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay

Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson

The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet

The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin

Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena Howard Shubert

For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in TwentiethCentury Nova Scotia Erin Morton Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 Anne Whitelaw Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World Edited by Martha Langford

N A R R AT I V E S UNFOLDING National Art Histories in an Unfinished World E D I TE D BY

MA RT H A L A NGFO RD

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017

ISBN 978-0-7735-4978-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-4979-1 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-5081-0 (ePDF) Legal deposit third quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Aid to Research Related Events (ARRE ) Program. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

L ibr a ry and A rch iv es C ana da C ata lo guing in Pub li c at io n Narratives unfolding : national art histories in an unfinished world / edited by Martha Langford. (McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4978-4 (cloth). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4979-1 (paper). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5081-0 (ePDF) 1. Art--Historiography.  I. Langford, Martha, author, editor  II. Title: National art histories in an unfinished world.  III. Series: McGillQueen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history

N7480.N37 2017  701’.18



C2017-900771-8 C2017-900772-6

Set in 10.5/14 Sina Nova with Gill Sans Nova and Caecilia LT Std Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

co nte nt s

Illustrations | ix Acknowledgments | xiii Preface | xv 1 Introduction | 3 Martha L angford

2

Playing Out the “Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives | 42 Ceren Özpinar

3

Race, Irishness, and Art History: Margaret Clarke’s Bath Time at the Crèche (1925), Motherhood, and the Matter of Whiteness | 62 Fionna B arber

4

Problems of Translation: Lyonel Feininger and Gaganendranath Tagore at the Fourteenth Annual Indian Society of Oriental Art Exhibition, Kolkata, India | 81 Martin Beattie

5

Some Notes on Applying Postcolonial Methodologies to Architectural History Research in Israel/Palestine | 100 Inbal Ben -A sher Gitler

6

“Draw Me a Sheep!” Contemporary Responses to the Histories of Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt | 123 Tammer El-Sheikh

7

Historical Archives and Contemporary Art: The Case of the Umm el-Fahem Gallery in Palestine/Israel | 147 Merav Yerushalmy

8

Dalriada, the Lordship of the Isles, and the Northern Rim: Decentralizing the Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland | 167 Lindsay Blair

9

New Maps for Networks: Reykjavík Fluxus – A Case of Connections | 189 ÆSA SIGURJÓNSDÓT TIR

10 Hitching a Ride: American Know-How in the Engineering of Canadian Photographic Institutions | 209 Martha L angford

11

Migratory Affiliations: Contemporary Romanian Art | 231 Corina Ilea

12 Maraya’s Sisyphean Cart: Twinned Visions of Vancouver and Dubai | 249 Alice Ming Wai Jim

13 Urban Art Histories (in Canada) | 271 Johanne Sloan

14 A Stranger in New York | 288 Ste ve Lyons

15 Mending Walls: Imagining the Sovereign Subject in Contemporary Exhibition Practices | 305 Erin Silver

16 Embodying Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada | 325 C arla Taunton

Notes | 355

content s

Bibliography | 393

viii

Contributors | 417 Index | 423

illustratio ns

Every effort has been made to identify, credit appropriately, and obtain publication rights from copyright holders of illustrations in this book; these credits appear as captions below the images on their respective pages. Notice of any errors or omissions in this regard will be gratefully received and corrections made in any subsequent editions. 1.1

Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1963–65 | 33

2.1

Sarkis Zabunyan, My Room on Krutenau Street, l’Ancienne Douane de Strasbourg, 1989 | 46 Sarkis Zabunyan, kriegsschatz Boots, 1983 | 50 Halil Altındere, Dance with Taboos ii , 1997 | 52–3 Şener Özmen (with Erkan Özgen), Road to Tate Modern, 2003 | 54 View of Füsun Onur’s retrospective exhibition Through the Looking Glass, 2014 | 57 Hale Tenger, Being a Turk (Between 26˚ West–45˚ East Meridians and 36˚ South–42˚ North Parallels), 2002 | 59 Gülsün Karamustafa, An Ordinary Love, 1984 | 60

2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8

Margaret Clarke, Bath Time at the Crèche, c. 1925 | 63 Beatrice Elvery, Eire [or Virgin and Child], 1907 | 71 Margaret Clarke, Mary and Brigid, 1917 | 71 Margaret Clarke, rha , The Foundling, c. 1925 | 73 Jack B. Yeats, Would You Sooner Arrive at 4pm? 1912 | 75 Joshua Reynolds, The Temple Family, 1780–82 | 77 William Mulready, The Toy-seller, 1857–63 | 78 Thomas Augustus O’Shaughnessy, book cover design for Seumas MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race, 1921 | 78

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

Lyonel Feininger, Gelmeroda, 1920 | 89 Lyonel Feininger, Houses in Old Paris, 1919 | 90 Lyonel Feininger, Cruising Sailing Ships, 2, 1919 | 91 Gaganendranath Tagore, Untitled, 1925 | 93 Gaganendranath Tagore, Reverie (date unknown) | 95

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

Austen St Barbe Harrison, Government House, Jerusalem, 1928–31 | 106 Austen St Barbe Harrison, Central Post Office, Jerusalem, 1934–39 | 108 Austen St Barbe Harrison, Government Printer Building, Jerusalem, 1934–35 | 109 Al Mansfeld and Dora Gad, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1959–65 | 112 Ada Karmi-Melamede, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, 1999 | 117 Avi Tzarfati, Tomb of Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, Netivot, 1987 | 120

6.1 Hassan Khan, 17 and in auc , performance shot, 2003 | 127 6.2 Hassan Khan, this is a dream (drawing based on a gesture seen in a dream and commissioned from Mohamed Nour, a commercial artist based in Midan El Abbassia), 2013 | 131 6.3 Hassan Khan, A glass object photographed as a way of collecting the world around it, 2013 | 133 6.4 Hassan Khan, My Mother (a photograph of my mother shot on my cell phone on August 4, 2013, after six years of thinking about it and hesitating), 2013 | 135 6.5 Mahmoud Khaled, Proposal for a Romantic Sculpture, 2012 | 138 6.6 Mahmoud Khaled, A Memorial to Failure, 2013 | 140 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7

ill u s tration s

7.8

x

8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

General view of the exhibition Photography in Palestine in 1930s & 1940s, 2000 | 156 Photographer unknown, A camel caravan at Wadi A’ra Road (Musmus Crossing), 1925 | 159 Photographer unknown, The Wadi A’ra route before the road was paved, 1935 | 159 Azaria Alon, Wadi A’ra Road, Musmus Crossings, 1962 | 160 Fritz Cohn, Widening the Wadi A’ra Road, east of Musmus, 1963 | 160 Asrar al-Wad, Wadi A’ra Road, Musmus Crossing, 2008 | 161 Amiran Arev, The Shikun (housing project) neighbourhood, Umm el‑Fahem west, 1967 | 162 Khader Oshah, Yassin, 2007 | 165 Calum Colvin, Vestiarium Scoticum ii , 2005 | 174 Jon Schueler, Snow Cloud over the Sound of Sleat, 1959 | 178 Marian Leven, Flux, 2012 | 179 Richard Demarco, Joseph Beuys exploring the shoreline of Loch Awe in the act of making his first art work in Scotland – entitled “The Loch Awe Piece” – as a gift to Richard Demarco, 1970 | 181

8.5 Helen MacAlister, A Participant Observer, 2011 | 182 8.6 Daniel Reeves, I Have This One Afternoon, 1999 | 184 8.7 Will Maclean and Marian Leven, An Sùileachan, 2013 | 186 Dieter Roth, Postkarte an Emmet Williams, after 1975 | 196 Dieter Roth, Wind-Harp. Front page of the daily Tíminn, 1961 | 198 Dieter Roth, poster for the súm i exhibition in Reykjavík, 1965 | 199 Róska (Ragnhildur Óskarsdóttir), poster for her first solo show in Reykjavík, 1967 | 201 9.5 Robert Filliou with students from the College of Arts and Crafts, Reykjavík, 1978 | 205

9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4

10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4

Cover of Camerart. Montreal: Galerie Optica, 1974 | 210 Hubert Hohn, Untitled, 1973 | 214 Karen Wilkin, ed., Summer ’74 at the Edmonton Art Gallery | 214 John Phillips, Laura Jones, and Morgan Jones Phillips, Baldwin Street Gallery of Photography, Toronto, 1973 | 218 10.5 Laura Jones, Rita’s Mom in her favourite spot, c. 1972 | 219 10.6 Fletcher Starbuck, ed., image nation 9 (n.d.) | 221 10.7 “A Photography Show at Nightingale Galleries, June–July 1970” | 222 10.8 Fletcher Starbuck, Untitled, n.d. | 223 10.9 Alvin Comiter, Untitled, n.d. | 226 10.10 Cover of Photo Communiqué 1, 6 (January/February 1980) | 230 11.1 Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, 2007 | 240 11.2 Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, detail, 2007 | 242 11.3 Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, kuba Exhibition, installation, 2006 | 244 11.4 Matei Bejenaru, Impreuna / Together, London, 2007 | 245

13.1 Posters for La Biennale de Montréal, 2014–15  | | 276 13.2 The artist-run centre Dare-Dare’s caravan in downtown Montreal, 2014 | 278

ill u s tration s

12.1 Maraya, Maraya Sisyphean Cart (False Creek), 2014 | 250 12.2 Maraya, Untitled (Diptych), 2011 | 255 12.3 Maraya, Portal (Dubai Marina), 2010 | 258 12.4 Maraya, Portal (False Creek), 2010 | 259 12.5 Maraya, Maraya Halliburton Case, 2011 | 260 12.6 Maraya, Maraya Sisyphean Cart (Dubai), 2014 | 265 12.7 Maraya, Maraya online platform (screenshot), 2012 | 268 12.8 Maraya,  Maraya Sisyphean Cart (still), 2015 | 269

xi

13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6

Cover of My Winnipeg exhibition catalogue, 2011 | 279 Eleanor Bond, The Spectre of Detroit Hangs over Winnipeg, 2007 | 282 Ken Lum, Felicia Maguire Moves Again, 1991 | 283 Announcement for the exhibition Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists in Antwerp, 2006 | 284

14.1 Steve Lyons, Approximate floor plan of Sixteen Beaver on 11 October 2013 | 295 14.2 Steve Lyons, Approximate floor plan of e-flux headquarters on 22 September 2013 | 295 14.3 Garments from the series Marx 4 Kids, modelled by children in Rainer Ganahl’s COMME des MARXISTS , 2013 | 297 14.4 Rainer Ganahl, COMME des MARXISTS , installation view, 2013 | 298 15.1 Maggie Groat, Fences Will Turn Into Tables, 2010–13 | 306 15.2 Adrian Blackwell, Circles Describing Spheres in Getting Rid of Ourselves, 2014 | 313 15.3 Tiziana La Melia, Dust selves, reflect and flex, 2012. Installation view of A Problem So Big It Needs Other People | 316 15.4 Maggie Groat, Fences Will Turn Into Tables, 2010–13; Basil AlZeri, Pull, Sort, Hang, Dry, and Crush; Tanya Lukin Linklater, Slow Scrape – So it goes like this – map of syllabics – we spark the spongy wood, 2013; A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, sbc Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, 2014 | 318 15.5 The stag Library (Aja Rose Bond and Gabriel Saloman) and Gina Badger, with cheyanne turions and Eric Emery, Brew Pub 3: “Relanding with Mugwort,” 2014 | 321 15.6 The stag Library (Aja Rose Bond and Gabriel Saloman) and Gina Badger, with cheyanne turions and Eric Emery, Brew Pub 3: “Relanding with Mugwort,” 2014 | 321

ill u s tration s

16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4

xii

16.5 16.6 16.7 16.8

Rebecca Belmore, Vigil, video still, 2002 | 330 Rebecca Belmore, Fountain, performance still, 2005 | 331 Lori Blondeau, CosmoSquaw , 1996 | 333 Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Cistemaw Iyiniw Ohci, photographic document of the performance, 2001 | 338–9 Lori Blondeau, Asiniy Iskwew, performance stills, 2009 | 343 Rebecca Belmore, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother, performance still, 1991 | 345 Shelley Niro, The Shirt, video still, 2003 | 348 Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Treaty Card, web-based installation, 2004 | 350

a ckno wle d gme nt s

My research on Canadian photographic history and the historiography of national art histories has been funded by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. Three contributors to this volume have been collaborating as part of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the Insight-funded team research project Networked Art Histories: Assembling Contemporary Art in Canada, 1960s to the Present (Johanne Sloan, principal investigator; Alice Ming Wai Jim and Martha Langford, co-applicants). Contributor Steve Lyons is completing doctoral work that has been funded by a Canada Graduate Scholarship, and his research in New York, which is the basis of his chapter, was funded by a Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement. Alice Jim’s chapter in this volume is an updated and expanded version of an earlier article, “The Maraya Project: Research-Creation, Interreference and the Worlding of Asian Cities.” Her research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture. The 2014 Association of Art Historians conference at the Royal College of Art in London hosted the all-day session that was the genesis of this volume, for which I thank conference convenor Jane Pavitt and coordinator Cheryl Platt. Among the participants, I particularly want to thank Maria Brown, University of Western Australia, and Fintan Cullen, University of Nottingham, for their valuable contributions. The discussions at the conference were inspirational and foundational to the collection as a whole. Even if not all the conference participants may be present in this volume, this book is better because of them. The contributors to Narratives Unfolding have generously put up with the attentions of their editor. I am so grateful to have had the chance to work with these remarkable scholars who have taught me so much. As for the images in this book, credit lines and copyright notices simply do not cover the debt that we owe workers in our custodial institutions and, especially, the artists who responded to our direct requests with interest and alacrity. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, I am most fortunate to work with Jonathan Crago, editor in chief, whose stewardship miraculously combines intellectual breadth, critical rigour, and unabated enthusiasm for scholarly work.

ac k nowledgment s

His management of the peer review process produced two excellent reports, whose implementation has greatly strengthened the volume overall. We are greatly indebted to those anonymous readers. My history with the press goes back to the last century! I particularly want to thank Philip Cercone, executive director of MQUP , for leading an academic press whose commitment to scholarship and beautiful books is unparalleled. The McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History exemplifies those standards, and I am very grateful to Sandra Paikowsky, co-editor of the series for her acceptance of the volume and her sound suggestions. Jane McWhinney copy-edited the book, and so sensitively that every writer sent her a personal message of thanks. On the MQUP team, I thank Elena Goranescu and Ryan Van Huijstee, and for the exquisite design of this volume, I again thank Garet Markvoort. The production of Narratives Unfolding has been supported by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Awards to Scholarly Publications Program – a very precious source of support for academic work for which all Canadians should be grateful. The Office of the Vice-President, Research and Graduate Studies, and the Faculty of Fine Arts of Concordia University generously contributed to this project through the Aid to Research-Related Events program, and for this I want to thank Vice-President Graham Carr; Dean of Fine Arts Rebecca Duclos; Associate Dean of Research, Fine Arts, Anne Whitelaw; Research Facilitator, Fine Arts, Lyse Larose; and Jarislowsky Institute Administrator Brenda Dionne. Within the Department of Art History, this project has developed under two Chairs, Cynthia Hammond and Elaine Cheasley Paterson, who champion both research and teaching. By dedicating this volume to my husband, Donigan Cumming, I mean to acknowledge the loved ones of every contributor to this volume, those humans and non-humans who make it all worthwhile.

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Preface M a rtha L an g f o r d

T

his collection of essays is a contribution to the ongoing intra- and interdisciplinary debate over the legitimacy and function of national art histories. The challenge has been posed before. It arises fitfully in the first quarter of the twenty-first century in relation to three nested factors: globalization, disciplinary redefinition, and methodological restlessness. Art historians in general, and national specialists in particular, are sensitive to arguments that the game has changed. New networks of ideation and exchange have developed different senses of belonging, or imagining community, within and without national borders. Notions of hybridity and fluidity, developed in terms of individual and collective subject-formation, turn borders into interstitial spaces that are much larger, conceptually, than the zones they imperfectly divide. Institutional boundaries, organizing the academy, the museum, the archives, the art market, and both corporate and state funding, have been redrawn accordingly. At conferences and in the classroom, a kind of deprogramming is taking place: the national frame, once amorphous and available to the grassroots, has been outed as an instrument of state control, another form of bread and circuses. Nationalism being tainted, ideas form around periodization: national art history is a late-modern construct that has outlived its usefulness – an evolutionary approach sometimes stopped cold by the realization that all societies are not on the same clock. The development of this collection began with a one-day workshop organized as a session of the 2014 Association of Art Historians conference in London, England. Its original pretext was an intentionally saucy call for papers: “Networking National Art Histories, or, [insert nationality] specialist seeks relationships with like-minded persons.” A bitter joke, much repeated by second-wave Feminists, was that the recognition of women as cultural producers seemed strangely to coincide with the “death of the author.” Something similar is occurring with

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the writing of national art histories in the postcolonial/post-Cold-War period: their relevance is being questioned, even deemed parochial, as part of the disciplinary turn toward global and world art histories. Both hegemonic history and counterhistory are in trouble, as Terry Smith reported in Art Bulletin (December 2010), adding that: “Globalization has recently reached the limits of its hegemonic ambitions yet remains powerful in many domains. The decolonized have yet to transform the world in their image.”1 In the current economic crisis, with severe cultural and educational shrinkage, gains for counterhistories and other budding histories might seem unlikely, if not impossible. At this moment, Stuart Hall’s Thatcher-era call for coalition-building (extended in Homi K. Bhabha’s “act of negotiation”)2 rebounds within a discipline extended by the digital humanities, but also defined by the digital economy – its creation of have- and have-not institutions.

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A very rich session coalesced to examine current approaches to local, regional, and national projects of researching, writing, and mobilizing art historical knowledge. Unifying themes, or what pessimists call “problems,” developed during our discussions, the most interesting, or vexatious, coming down to “who cares?”: To whom are we speaking? Is the history of [insert nationality] art of any real interest or concern to people of other nations? It quickly became obvious that it was when certain kinds of conditions were recognized and theoretical parallels were drawn: coalitions might form among art historians interpreting art in the aftermath of revolutionary moments, or exchanging observations about the manifestation of difficult knowledge; affiliations might form among re-examiners of mobilization, with episodes of transnational exchange compared to movements between “centre” and “periphery”; tellers of diasporic histories found common cause with researchers of internally fragmented or persecuted communities; and there were many other bonds besides. As interpretations veered into matters of identity, language, and sociopolitical formations, issues that mattered in one case (or place) were tested in the imaginary of another. These were not all tragic stories – not by any means – but even the triumphs of canonical national histories seemed more open to interrogation within an ad-hoc network of specialists interested in systems of validation behind international recognition; the import-export of cultural movements; and the rootedness of certain forms and philosophies within imagined communities, traditional territories, or cartographic designations. Thinking together about art produced under, or construed as having implications for, a national art-historical framework was most productive, leading to a plan to consolidate our findings in an edited collection and providing

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sufficient structure and strands to interest other scholars working on the backstories and missing pieces of national puzzles. While spanning the globe was never our intent, we find that our collection is contributing to the histories of Canada, Egypt, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel/ Palestine, Romania, Scotland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Global exchanges are differencing and decentring the old metropolises – London, Paris, and New York – while performing the same operations on the new global art centres and the “art cities of the future.”3 Entering this traffic stream, we are retracing cultural trade routes and networks of circulation. In-country geopolitical conditions of conquest, colonization, decolonization, and decommunization complicate the identities of works that can be seen as doubly or multiply circumscribed, as expressions of hybridity that exceed hyphenation, as signs of assimilation now insufficiently “authentic.” Mindful of border crossings and digital technologies, we have attended to the charisma of strangers and the seduction of novelty. For our parts, as national specialists in a world of transnational and global writings, our aim was never to assert the values of traditional disciplinary boundaries, but to develop innovatory methodologies and participatory structures for an expanded field – a “national art history” grounded in global history’s complementary models of “connection” and “comparison,” while duly cautioned against the perils of universality and translation without comment. The first pitfall, we knew, would be terminology, as terms were already being trademarked, and everything we had learned to that point militated against ideational slogans and enclosure. Our processes seemed as yet delicate; our redefinition of national history as a multifocal lens rather than a monument was just beginning to take shape. It is a commonplace that nationalism as a suitable companion or container for art has been under review since the relationship first developed, neither “nation” nor “art” being particularly precise, transparent, or stable, concepts and both, as rallying points, being highly susceptible to, and productive of, propaganda and economic opportunity. Any drift in global politics, economics, or technology causes ripples in cultural activity; the seismic shifts since 1989 have had their effects as artists and art historians – citizens after all – have been struggling to redefine their fields of operation. But if national art history is headed for the junkyard, its replacement has not yet arrived. A productive uncertainty prevails. The global project is periodically announced and maintained by interim solutions of reorientation and classification that never quite pan out. Certain definitions are predicated on twenty-first-century conditions that can seem very precarious – even for the rich, when the electric power fails. Others seem to perpetuate prejudicial divisions between Western and non-Western societies, even as they open rich cultural veins to national art-historical investigation. Art history’s historiographical literature is shot

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through with speculation and paradox, which keeps the discussion lively, if sometimes disconnected. The big thinking that should be compatible with world-making sometimes falters before the scariness of the endgame – the prospect that real change, affecting more than curriculum and administrative units, is taking place. Establishing the differences between global art history and world history sometimes seems less about concepts than about academic and museological turf. What is fascinating and sometimes repulsive about such all-too-human behaviour is the retrenching of art history as a discipline by the elimination of extraneous ideas and objects – interdisciplinarity and all that visual culture – and not the quashing of national art history as a project, which interdisciplinary approaches to visual culture have already cleared from the field as retardataire. So the “unfinished world” figured in the title of this book is a plural concept: it captures the microscopic unit that is the field of art history today, as well as the macrocosm, a set of supranational conditions that are not only reflected in specific events of cultural practice, but are arrogated by thought-leaders and abstracted over space and time to demarcate the new virtual commons. The humanities are “unfinished” economically and ideologically: that the digital commons is not universally accessible is merely a fact of life – the unwired will always be with us. “Unfinished” also describes art-historical research and its performative narrativization – “ways of describing whatever is described,”4 as Nelson Goodman puts it – descriptions here pegged to the criss-crossing lines between local and global, between the centre (as sensed) and all points imaginable.

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narratives unfolding

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Introduction M a rtha L an g f o r d

T

he word “global” appears nowhere in the title of this book, yet it strides like an éminence grise through its chapters. Globalization of all human endeavours has overtaken technological societies; as we shop, so shall we experience visual culture. Access and acceleration rule. The selfie before the masterpiece is the new aura. The virtual museum without walls offers new or as yet inexperienced forms of aesthetic and sensual pleasure. Into this radiant surface, consumers of culture drill down for self-affirming and/or difficult knowledge. All art experience is by definition “local,” as affect theory might help us to understand, but in tune with the “leitmotif of our times,” we sense and make sense of events as occurring on a much larger stage.1 Ten of the fifteen participants in this project met in 2014 at the “Networked Nationalisms” session of the Association of Art Historians (aah) conference in London. Five other art historians subsequently came on board, scholars focused on nationally bounded research and operating within the boundaries of the discipline as a modern institution worth saving, though in need of renovation from within. At the aah conference we were acutely conscious of five conditioning factors. The first was that affirming interest in national art history might appear to be swimming against the tide of globalization. Second, that any announcement of the death of national art history was premature; it was in fact being expanded by theory and methodology that are deployed by global and world history but are directly applicable to the construction of national narratives. A third factor was that the resultant histories were revisionist and in many ways disturbing to national accounts that dominated both global and national imaginations; as in any family quarrel, the reasons for domestic discomfiture needed to be rehearsed and put in perspective. Fourth, that transnational encounters loomed large among national secrets, tucked into art-historical accounts under the heading of influence or multiculturalism but to that point improperly measured, whether exaggerated by claims to cosmopolitan modernism or staunched as belonging to a developmental phase no longer worth

1

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mentioning. Issues of identity – nations within states – we all found very much alive and still closely entwined with other unifiers such as ethnicity, race, class, and gender. And finally, we all spoke English, the idiomatic English of art history; our burgeoning network was representative not of world history, but of its efforts and limitations as a set of methodologies developed and transmitted in the language of colonization, past and present. Our meeting point was London; the currency of our exchange was a body of literature sustained by global economic engines – the language of empire and business. Translation, broadly defined, was the explicit framework of some presentations and an overarching reality for our affiliative project as a whole.2 In this introduction I attempt to sketch this vast panorama as it relates to the ambitions of this volume and its individual chapters. Drawing on an everexpanding body of literature, I begin by outlining a global historiographical template, and then move to its manifestations in the art world which both infill and expand global history’s spaces of inquiry. I stress this point as an article of faith: that cultural production is more than the reflection or illustration of socio-political formations; it is a highly performative agent with both privileges and responsibilities. Here subjectivity comes into play. A close colleague recently wondered aloud whether we don’t sometimes ask too much of art and artists in terms of social and political engagement. My feeling is that we don’t ask enough, and therefore don’t ask enough of ourselves as spectators and interpreters. My recourse to the literature is no doubt guided by this attitude, whose development I will also briefly trace. National art histories, however internationalist their thrust, come from somewhere and are harboured somewhere. This point is repeatedly affirmed by Michela Passini in La fabrique de l’art national, a study that illuminates the formation of the discipline as it occurred in France and Germany between 1870 and 1933 – the creation of a set of ideas about the history of art, many of which survived the catastrophic nationalisms to follow, flourishing in the academies, museums, and archives of Britain and the United States.3 It is sometimes useful to consider the intellectual biographies of national historians, as the motives behind their vocation are not always clear. Passini surveys ferocious arguments over authenticity of style and sources of motifs, both of which she sees as expressed from racial and/or religious roots, as European art historians battled over the origins of the Renaissance. These quests are far from irrelevant to contemporary theory. As this introduction shows, global art history is currently devoted to exposing and loosening the stranglehold of Western thought and its institutions, moving toward an understanding and, it must be said, a validation of practices that Western art-historical training has encouraged us to overlook. What today’s actors might learn from Passini’s research is to scrutinize their motives and the aspirational language they deploy. At the inception of the field, when the Italian Renaissance reigned as the ne plus ultra

Introduction

of cultural expression, a career in art history might be built on the righting of a historical injustice by bringing one’s own national school out of the shadows.4 Invidious comparison was the weapon of choice, contrasting the vitality and humbleness of native, sometimes called “indigenous” arts with the stagnating imitations foisted off on gullible Western European patrons by Italy’s second string. Suspicion of the émigré artist began then and there, along with difficulties over national designation – what was Vincent van Gogh really? – which persist to this day, inconvenient truths sometimes handled by institutional obfuscation.5 In other, more open discussions, the émigré artist may be esteemed for recognizing and refreshing the distinctiveness of the host culture.6 Opposing calcifying dualities and expanding the well of knowledge, we find other historiographical models, most notably in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29), which continues to inspire scholarly consideration, despite its Eurocentric failings, and possibly because of its unfinished state. No longer extant, the Atlas is an ideational ruin, a study of motion as yet unstilled, and not despite, but because of its photomechanical apparatus.7 Its staging of infinite possibility is not based simply on the gestural content within a picture; it results from “the picture as a whole [being] treated as an element in a wider chain of works,” including other paintings and text. Michael Podro calls Warburg’s system “a network,” which is precisely its enduring performative appeal and the reason I mention it here.8 This book comes from Canada, and many of my reference points are Canadian; for that I make no stereotypically polite apology. As part of this introduction, it seems important to discuss the shapes of national projects of consolidation, celebration, and contestation – the Canadian repertoire is the one I know best, and can therefore convincingly perform in all its combative and sometimes claustrophobic character. I mention Canada here as an example of how transnational approaches transform national programs of art-historical research. Attention to cultural transfers is not limited to “crossing nation-state borders,” as conceptual historian Jani Marjanen explains. It may be sparked by “transfers between cultures, linguistic communities, political cultures, nation-states, different political languages, scholarly disciplines, associations, and so on.” Marjanen proposes that we think in terms of “different communicative spaces,” an approach that Canadian cultural theory has recognized since the 1960s, if sometimes imperfectly applied.9 One new direction I have in mind is settler-colonial art history, which has launched an international network of inquiry and encounters pockets of resistance across the spectrum of political opinion wherever the ship lands.10 Despite such controversies, or perhaps because of them, the questions raised by settler-colonial art history have begun to stick, in part thanks to its international momentum. Each of the settler nations is singular, but not alone, in developing the tools to conduct its inquiry.11 This statement applies to each of the nations addressed

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by this volume – or perhaps I should say that making that statement true is the project’s fundamental goal.

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For contemporary historians, theorists, educators, and public intellectuals, a global perspective is both pleasure and prescription, though the concept remains notional and somewhat exaggerated, as historiographers of global history, the global history of art, and global art history tend to agree. This is where agreement ends, however, because global history, the global history of art, and global art history are not precisely in tune. Global history is a disciplinary concentration on patterns and forces that transcend and transform national boundaries. As historiographer Patrick O’Brien effuses, “historians who have committed (albeit as conscripts or collaborators) to this cosmopolitan enterprise in teaching and writing, as well as professional volunteers, find themselves at an intellectual frontier unbounded by geographies, hemispheres and continents, let alone national borders and parish boundaries.”12 O’Brien insists that what we now call “global history” is not a new approach, but the restoration of a historiographical tradition that dates back to Herodotus (495–425 bce ). “Connection” and “comparison” are O’Brien’s key words.13 Cosmopolitanism, imperialism, migration, technology, trade, and visual culture are topics of interest, but so is nationalism, understood as a set of ideas that have bubbled up under comparable conditions in different societies at different times.14 Jürgen Kocka deftly explains how comparative history, as practised by French social historian Marc Bloch among others, and sometimes marginalized within the field for its recourse to secondary sources, fragmentation, selectivity, and decontextualization, can now be discerned in research that is “less interested in similarities and differences between, let us say, Europe and the Arab World, [than] in the processes of mutual influencing, in reciprocal or asymmetric perceptions, in entangled processes of constituting one another … the history of both sides is taken as one instead of being considered as two units for comparison.”15 Internal comparisons are nevertheless inevitable. Nations exist – indeed they reassert themselves daily. Global history is literally “transnational” – it attends to “sustained cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations, and social formations”16 – but other means of connection are also possible, as reference to Marjanen has already suggested, and as Merry E. Weisner-Hanks explains in her survey of transnational gender history. From Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, she takes the concept of “histoire croisée” and then introduces a family of ideas, such as “connected histories” (Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Victor Lieberman), “shared histories” (Frederic Cooper), “comparative connections” (Ann Stoler), and “entangled histories” (Shalini Randeria). The logical

Introduction

next step, Weisner-Hanks explains, is “history that emphasizes mixture and hybridity,” and she credits historiographer Peter Burke’s insight that the terminology has been borrowed from “botany, physics, and metallurgy, as well as … anthropology and linguistics,” capping his observation with her own: “Thus in thinking about borrowing, hybridity, or whatever one chooses to call this process, historians have engaged in it as well, crossing disciplinary borders.”17 This statement echoes Werner and Zimmerman’s emphasis on reflexivity – a system of undisguised interest in points of interaction.18 Their approach is “relational”; the recuperation of “buried reality” is but the first step to reinserting it in “a multiplicity of possible viewpoints and divergences” that generate a different set of questions. All this coming from “a particular angle”19 – and here I am reminded of Karen Stanworth’s recourse to Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge,” exposed in her introduction to Visibly Canadian: “the idea that knowledge is not composed of a singular truth but that various ways of knowing can be simultaneously present, yet not equally authoritative.” Why? Because, as Stanworth explains, not all factors are weighted equally. She frankly admits that the desire to bring under-considered visual expressions of Canadian identity to light is what drives her project. Any student of visual culture, she writes, situates meaning “in the local, the discursive, and in subject positions,” her own ethics figuring importantly: “methodology as a negotiated process … research process as a negotiated space.”20 One of these spaces is a Portrait of Three Friends, painted around 1773 by British artist William Pars, a “conversation piece” that Stanworth first encountered in 1996, hanging in the meeting room of the president of the University of Toronto. The painting includes a portrait of John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant governor of Ontario, as a young man. As Stanford discovered, the choice of this painting for this space hinged on the president’s understanding that Simcoe “started the university system in Ontario.”21 Claiming this British painting for Canadian art history involves a recalculation of its meaning or, more precisely, meanings accrued over transfers of ownership and evolving attitudes about colonization, masculinities, and patronage.22 The work is claimed for the history of Canada through the application of the methodologies of global history; the same investigation writes new chapters in the unfinished history of British prestige in Canada. Nationhood is a recurrent theme of global history, both as a cartographic fact and as a generator of spatial metaphors that bind its narratives, though with a stress on interstitial spaces, within and without the state. The old maps, sharply outlined and colour-coded, no longer meet our needs, for they fail to account for the aggregation and imbrication of “nations” within sovereign states: nations within nations whose histories are not, technically speaking, transnational but entangled – an internal approach incorporating “elements of histoire croisée,” as Magda Fahrni observes about the curious case of Quebec in Canadian historical writing.23 For,

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as Fahrni points out, Quebec offers new imperial historians a rare opportunity: “a double European colonisation and succeeding European metropoles.”24 Complicating the Quebec/Canada story, and differentiating it from other colonial histories, is the question of language – “the politics of knowledge articulated around language, and the main colonial languages of the modern world system,” English, French, and German, which the geopolitics of the early twentieth century put “on a par in terms of prestige and influence.”25 Hence the pull between metropoles and their epistemologies, which sometimes isolates Quebec from the rest of Canada, sometimes increases the distinctiveness and status of its ambidextrous scholarship. “Bilanguaging,” which Latin American specialist Walter Mignolo applies to his “border thinking,” is duality in another key, speaking back to the power of language as a colonizing instrument that combines epistemology with ideology and crushes the vernacular. “Thinking beyond language,” he focuses on “signs and memories inscribed in the body rather than signs inscribed on paper.”26 As he writes, “language is not an object, something that human beings have, but an ongoing process that exists only in languaging.”27 Here, supported by most of the contributors to this volume, I would have to insist on broadening the definition of this “ongoing process” to include the language, or languaging, of form, whether it be pattern, gesture, unrepeatable mark, or cloned waterfront development.28 The carving out of those liminal spaces – the creation of a laboratory for thinking through the various constructions of global history – is deeply indebted to cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of a Third Space, a space of “translation and negotiation” – and sometimes of productive misunderstanding, given his appetite for multiplicity and dissonance.29 A return to Bhabha’s “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation” underscores the need to atomize the various contributions to the theorization of global history, compiling them in a way that respects their rough edges (a fragmentary solidarity), as opposed to smoothing them out or melting them into a system. Bhabha’s rejection of binarism is incomprehensible without a knowledge of colonialism’s sharp distinctions between “victims … and victimizers.”30 Entering his commodious Third Space means running the gauntlet of his precursors, a portal carved in struggle and irresolution. Background reading plunges us into Mexican political philosopher José Vasconcelos’s futuristic Cosmic Race, empowered by racial blending;31 we must find a way to digest the transculturalist triumphalism of Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de An­ drade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto” of 1921;32 and we must also consider Mikhail Bakhtin’s linguistics, which forms not a mixture but a dialogical structure of encounter – “only one language is actually present in the utterance, but it is rendered in the light of another language.”33 These concepts were never bounded but were volleyed back and forth between activists and intellectuals, often in translation. The refraction of postcolonial nationhood through the medium

Introduction

of culture is described by Frantz Fanon: “The forms of thought and what it feeds on, together with modern techniques of information, language and dress have dialectically reorganised the people’s intelligences … the constant principles which acted as safeguards during the colonial period are now undergoing extremely radical changes.”34 Abjuring racial universalisms (we might say “globalisms”) and their nurturing of a “timeless black cultural imaginary,”35 Fanon is prescriptive: “the native intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art must realise that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities.”36 The would-be nation must be present-based and forward-looking, in a stance that does not imply amnesia, but is purposeful in searching and deploying the collective memory. Bhabha likewise raises the conceptual bar, proposing that we think “space” in terms of “time.” He reminds us that the occurrence of nationhood has already been explained as synchronized mental effort. This effort is continuous, as French theorist Ernst Renan insisted: “a daily plebiscite.”37 Selective remembering sloughs off the difficult passages that impede cohesiveness. Modern nationhood is imagined through a variety of channels – technologies of connectedness – whose succeeding technologies continue to operate in the present, though with different sets of tensions.38 But as Bhabha, Edward Said, and others have argued, this plotting of national history ignores the fact that history is written as it is felt to unfold, in medias res – it is not just a matter of looking backward for the events that lead to this moment and forward for what is needed to shape an enduring account, but of attending to those supplementary questions that made the past somewhat less than monolithic and make the present tense of writing so unruly, so uncontrollable in its effects.39 As Bhabha writes: “We then have a contested conceptual territory where the nation’s people must be thought in double-time; the people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted origin in the past; the people are also the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principles of the people as contemporaneity: as that sign of the present through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive process.”40 That repeated word – “process,” a set of actions toward an objective – prompts its own set of methodological questions that are never completely answered by postcolonial and post-structural theory. How to interlace these times, which are multiple in individual consciousness, and continue to multiply in the mind of a researcher who looks at individual experience?41 The supplementary question is proffered as a tool that one can learn to use. Here we encounter Bhabha’s rich sense of irony, itself a thickening of meaning. To illustrate what he means by “supplementary” he goes to the British Parliament, where a supplementary question is defined (and allowed) as additional

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to the original question because already contained within it. He cites philosopher Rodolphe Gasché’s elegant definition of supplements as “pluses that compensate for a minus in the origin.”42 They are immanent or embedded factors. In 1985 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s supplementary question about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre brought forth Bertha Mason: the woman in the attic, co-present with her unwitting successor and beneficiary, a figure of repression and presence, of economic gain and affective debt, of madness within the logic of empire.43 Through Spivak’s attention to the “operation of the ‘worlding’ of what is today ‘the Third World,’” second-wave feminist criticism was called out for its reproduction of “the axioms of imperialism.”44 As Bhabha writes: “The supplementary strategy interrupts the successive seriality of the narrative of plurals and pluralism by radically changing their mode of articulation.”45 A theorist will pose these questions; a historian will listen for them in the historical record; a cultural theorist and historiographer will read for them in “presences” and “processes” – Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling.”46 Just as a performative utterance recasts a promise as an actuality, the recovery of past circumstances in their full potentiality alters our understanding of agency, revising our judgments of actors and events, past and present. This has been the task of cultural studies, with its attention to colonial and postcolonial histories, to the effects of nation-building through various and mutually supportive forms of invasion: military, economic, ideological, religious, and educational. Postcolonial and decolonization theory subtends these histories: the elimination or subjugation of the peoples discovered; the repopulation of conquered territories through migration, slavery, and indenture; administrative and cultural impositions of assimilation that drive cultural performance from the public to the private sphere; the preservation, and sometimes calcification, of cultural formations within exilic and diasporic communities; and the rebound of these formations in unexpected places and hybridized forms. These patterns of human behaviour, which political philosophers, economists, psychologists, and ethicists have been at pains to explain, are manifest in objects, events, and institutions that anthropology, ethnography, geography, his­ tory, and sociology have helped art history to interpret. Celina Jeffery and Gregory Minissale’s Global and Local Art Histories applies postcolonial theory to the analysis of “visuality, art, and art history outside of hegemonic Euro-American themes and concerns.” This collection had its genesis at an earlier aah conference; its theoretical framework and scope are somewhat similar to those of this collection. It is strikingly different, however, on a most important score: the concept of “the nation” seems almost to have been expunged.47 There are euphemisms, of course – references to societies and communities are unavoidable – and some nations and nationalities must be named as Minissale introduces the various chapters, some of which deal explicitly with national questions. But he avoids the “n”-word, nimbly

Introduction

leaping between global and local perspectives. In some ways, Minissale appears to be revisiting the phenomenon that Eric Hobsbawm not so long ago identified as the “making of nations”: ideational constructions “from above … which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalistic.”48 These forces have been intersecting and colliding since 1780 (Hobsbawm’s start-date) and, while Hobsbawm himself suggested (in 1990) that the “new supranational restructuring of the globe” was changing this dynamic, his basic argument that we need to understand “nation” and “nationhood” to understand modernity seems irrefutable.49 Minissale’s decision – it must have been one – complicates his task when, for instance, he comes to Jonathan Blackwood’s chapter on Estonian modernism, which develops tensions between the young Republic of Estonia’s struggle for independence and modernism’s “borderless, globally comprehensible visual idiom.”50 Blackwood describes this “creative milieu” as “culturally subnationalist,” borrowing this framework from Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn.51 The volume co-editor phrases things differently: if modernism was “out of step” with the young Republic’s political ambitions, Estonia’s “artistic identity” was destined to be snuffed out by Soviet invasion during the Cold War – a “globalising force.”52 This history is presented by Minissale as “the obliteration of local difference.”53 To repeat: Estonia, once a nation and a nation once again, is captured by this introduction under the heading of “local” – this is paradoxical, to say the least, and perfectly exemplifies the rush to terminological rebranding that propagates both categorical confusion and misunderstanding of historical conditions. More nuanced translations of postcolonial theory’s “spaces of encounter” to the writing of art history can be found in studies of transculturation. Julie F. Codell introduces the term in relation to British art, 1770–1930, but with considerable application to a number of studies in this collection – transculturation at work. Codell herself considers transculturation a “travelling concept,” an interdisciplinary approach attributed to Mieke Bal, who distinguishes it from a “method,” preferring the term “practice” as a more dynamic mode of encounter through close, sometimes collective readings.54 Transculturation might be understood as the trading of cultural models between nations, but this interpretation supposes a monolithic or essentialist definition of nation that generally applies only by force of law. The condition that interests Codell and her contributors exists both between and within pluralistic societies, activated by cultural contact – the human factor – and, one might add, by an acknowledgement of the flow of wealth toward the centre and the flow of power toward the source of wealth in the so-called periphery.55 These flows are both international and local, as between the metropolis and its suburbs,

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and are driven by unpredictably changing tides. When this introduction was being drafted, a prominent example of local transculturation was the coming together of Paris (henceforth to be known and administered as the Métropole du Grand Paris), in an effort to redistribute resources and decrease the sense of outsider-ness in largely migrant communities.56 It remains to be seen whether recent acts of terrorism in Paris and elsewhere will derail this program, change daily life in the French capital, or affect France’s position within the European Union.57 Transculturalism should not, however, be schematized simply as currents of exchange alternating between cultures. Artistic currents are intertwined, as are the actual objects and performances of cultural production.58 As Codell introduces her project: “Close transcultural readings of works of art offer a virtual space that ‘reopens and dissimilates the givens,’ that is, the cultural assumptions that Europeans brought to places and cultures and those they took away from those places, they themselves being transformed and reshaped by their colonial encounters.”59 Reciprocity and growth might strike the reader as warm and fuzzy concepts, but Codell traces transculturation to its roots in Latin American anthropological studies, specifically to the work of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who coined the term in 1940, correcting the notion of “acculturation,” as understood by his American colleagues. For Ortiz, transculturation sprang from an awareness of “loss and recovery in new forms of cultural expression.”60 There are phases in the process: “partial disculturation … neoculturation.”61 In other words, in contrast to the positivist notion of “acculturation,” all is not smooth sailing in this creative space. Related terms in more recent usage are “fluidity,” “hybridity,” and “spatiality”; transculturation likewise acknowledges the complexity and dynamism of a border-crossing cultural event, but emplaces it. As Codell insists, the dialectical process of transculturation occurs “somewhere and at a historical time. Transcultural art takes a snapshot of an encounter in which time and place remain fundamental elements of cultural production, reproduction and reception.”62 The global history of art and global art history are also interested in processes that operate in-between: both focus on the production and circulation of art in a global context. Arguing for a “balanced materialist treatment of artifacts and unified approach that emphasizes questions of transcultural encounters and exchanges as circulations,” Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel are bent on verifiable facts – objective data about the object, one might say. At the same time, they insist that a historiographical system attuned to the object in all its modes and means of reception is also open to the ways that “cultures” are formed, which, they say, is by “ceaseless transformation and adaptation of ideas, including the reception of objects or images originating elsewhere.”63 Their approach breaks down the binary of Western and non-Western, as well as the hierarchical structure of centre-periphery

Introduction

relations. Other approaches promise the same, but key differences, or emphases, are breadth and duration: antecedents to the global history of art are “total history,” which flourished in the post–First World War years of antinationalism and European reconciliation, and a World History movement that arose as an antidote to Cold War containment.64 For Kaufmann, and this is crucial, scholarly attention to “circulations” is part of a long historical tradition – Universalgeschicht (universal or cosmopolitan history), or the history of oikumene, the inhabited world, which could be mapped and inventoried. As he explains, a truly global history of art begins with commerce, with trade in raw materials and finished goods, which becomes truly global around 1500.65 Globalization descends and inherits from systems of economic exploitation and cultural exchange that transformed the earth and redefined the very nature of knowledge – its composition and location – in terms of values and the power to impose them. Benedict Anderson’s influential concept of nationhood as “imagined community” – contiguity in both its physical and psychological states – has been expanded into a global consciousness that has been theorized by Arjun Appadurai in terms of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes.66 Such neologisms are at home in the global art history system, which, at this writing, is less than thirty years old. Born in Paris with the launch of the 1989 exhibition Les Magiciens de la terre, global art history is the conceptualization of contemporary art as constituting separate and distinct “art worlds.” The first chapters of a global art history coincided with the end of the Cold War; it is therefore closely associated with the political and economic transformations symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the worldreshaping events of 2001.67 At a pace and tone sometimes indistinguishable from those of criticism, global art history has taken charge of the documentation and interpretation of globally disseminated contemporary art. The study of global art history can be taxed for its lack of historical distance. The same complaint could be launched against contemporary art history as a whole, a relatively recent addition to the field whose historiography and methodology are explicated by Terry Smith in both its Western wellspring and global manifestations.68 But before handing over to Smith, it seems important in this context, to say something about historical distance as a guiding principle that has much evolved. Endearingly to this reader, historiographer Mark Salber Phillips draws a picture to establish his starting point: “Much like the discipline of art history, historical scholarship has made mastery of perspective an index of progress and sophistication.”69 His analysis explodes this schematic. Defining historicization as mediation, Phillips introduces “four fundamental dimensions of distance that shape our experience of historical time … form, affect, summoning, and understanding.”70 A familiar art-historical example, cited by Phillips, is

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Edgar Wind’s classic essay on Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe (1770), in which the painter’s breaching of decorum by presenting an event from the recent past in contemporary rather than classical dress, is shown to mark a milestone in history painting: “in the depiction of a modern hero, remoteness in space could stand in for distance in time.” Phillips’s rehearsal of Wind’s argument introduces corollary changes to the function of history painting, which henceforth would be “carried along by a current of national feeling that altered both its affective and ideological coloration … in an increasingly close engagement with the national histories of Europe” and its representation in secular narratives.71 Foreshortening Phillips’s discussion – spoiling the plot – I want to underscore and build on his point that history is already taking form as “the texture of experience … history as it is experienced in common life,”72 in realist formulations of private life that are closer to snapshot memories, those vivid memories of the circumstances in which one learns of momentous events. In novels and paintings, the grand narratives of nation-building are staged in parlours and villages. To restate in historiographical terms, microhistory horns in on macrohistory. The training of Western audiences to participate imaginatively in world events was greatly advanced with this shift in attention, and its curriculum of performative engagement is only writ larger in this new field of contemporary art history. For, as Keith Moxey explains, contemporary art historians must come to terms with different notions of time – he speaks of “heterochronicity, the notion that there are multiple forms of time” and rejects concepts that subtend theories of provincialism or explain influence in terms of “belatedness.”73 He focuses on the “anachronic power” of the work of art whose “presence” is truly present.74 Whereas contextual art histories achieved plenitude by assembling the factors of a work’s creation in the past, Moxey wants us to consider the conditions of interaction with the work in the moment. He develops “the concept of anachronism as a means of describing the process of mediation that goes on between artifacts that both solicit an affective response and invite the desire of the contemporary historian or critic to make meaning.”75 Spaces of translation, the mental alcoves to which we retire to think and write about art, are also being transformed by more acute senses of alternative temporalities – or perhaps ought to be. Seizing the past as though vividly present can be risky, however, as reality sometimes exceeds imagination’s grasp. South Asian art specialist Sonal Khullar offers a dual model. Time-travelling on the wings of contemporary Indian art exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 2011, she describes her fascination with postmodern art’s critical engagement with modernism and colonialism – a phenomenon that Kenyan literary theorist Simon Gikandi has characterized as “perhaps the most intense and unprecedented site of encounter between the institutions of European cultural production and the cultural practices of colonized people.”76 Transnational and interdisciplinary affiliations in the

Introduction

present strengthen Khullar’s desire to uncover the tangled roots of Indian modernism, to pose and answer certain supplementary questions. Periodization is one: her study of Indian modernism from the 1930s to the 1980s puts right the erroneous assumption that everything cultural shifted in 1947, but also dismantles the argument that the mechanical advantage of the global north – Terry Smith calls it “iconogeographic twisting”77 – remained all-powerful until the 1970s. Khullar effects this double correction not just by force of argument but by showing her readers where she learned to look for the evidence, leading them to “the file room of modernism in India”: information about the art of the 1930s still circulating “through social networks and oral tradition.”78 There is every reason to believe that much of this “iconogeographic twisting” was tightening the screws on other non-Western modernisms as well, although the particulars are “where” and “when.” And the particulars are just that: as If­tik­har Dadi shows about modernism and Muslim South Asia; as Elaine O’Brien and five co-editors canvas the multiple locations of modernism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; as Esther Gabara elucidates the ethos of modernism in Mexico and Brazil, and so forth.79 Different sites, different file rooms, and different forms proliferate under the sign of modernism. On to Smith, then, who traces the emergence of contemporary art history to its first conscious manifestation in the conceptual artists’ collective Art & Language, founded in 1968 and active internationally in the manner that interests Smith by the early 1970s.80 Under the heading of “Contemporary Artists Do Art History as Art,” Smith explores artists’ engagement with debates surrounding the origins of modernism – his illustrations are works explicitly referential to this discourse by Jeff Wall (b. 1946), Josephine Meckseper (b. 1964), Tacita Dean (b. 1965), and Josiah McElheny (b. 1966). Obliquely citing some of the criticism aroused by these works, Smith dismisses postmodernism’s labels of “appropriation,” or less positively, “pastiche,” to argue for the importance of artistic practices that are taking the “art historical definition of what is, and has been, at stake in modernist art to be an important component within what is most at stake in making art now.”81 A prehistory of contemporary art history provides the backstory of these intellectual struggles. Smith moves through the art capitals of Europe, then shifts to New York, paying particular attention to major institutions that first collected contemporary art. Institutions’ writing of contemporary art history through acquisition is not a speculative history, but a history of speculation. As he traces the variant definitions of “contemporaneity,” Smith is led away from the centre – the metropolises of modernism – to the periphery, where he encounters wide-ranging sets of values and aspirations: from artists’ desires to be recognized as engaged in and equal to internationally recognized movements and the utter rejection of such aspirations as slavish and colonial; to the desire to be or not to be international, national, regional, or local; and above all, to the desire not to be seen as provincial, a

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condition that Smith himself had diagnosed in excruciating detail in his international debut article of 1974.82 As an older and wiser Smith catalogues the diversity of contemporary art movements around the globe, he is convinced that “there will be no single story (and thus no style change in art as such) but rather many parallel, contingent but identifiably specific histories.”83 But this level of pluralism is difficult for historians to consolidate, and as Smith continues his historiographical survey, he fleetingly adopts the perspective of cultural theorist Peter Osborne, who advances the cause of “the deeply reflexive work of Art & Language during the 1980s and 1990s,” making it the reference point for contemporary practice: a “post-conceptual art” establishes “the historical-ontological condition for the production of contemporary art in general,” writes Osborne.84 This centre will not hold, however, as Smith fully recognizes. A reinvigorated attack on modernism “does not, I believe, fully meet what contemporaneity now requires of art and its articulators: demands that are broader in geopolitical scope, more lateral in their experiential character, and deeper in their theoretical challenge than modernism of whatever stamp can allow.”85 And so say all of us, the contributors to this volume. Smith, however, was saying it in Art Bulletin, where only a small percentage of the readership would consider modernism an exhausted topic; or, to put it more gently, one that has been well served by late twentieth-century scholarship and art practice; or less gently, a subject that seems increasingly irrelevant outside elite cultural circles; or in more practical terms, one whose limited stock offers diminishing returns in a bullish global art world. In 2008 Okwui Enwezor was already advising those who would seek to understand contemporary art “to provincialize modernism,” casting Pop as just one among many other progressive art movements, one that is utterly senseless outside its “consumer society” and “capitalist structure” – in China, for instance.86 Enwezor’s division of modernity into four concurrent temporal thought-categories follows Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attack on unitary historical time as it shores up European hegemony; his exhortation echoes Chakrabarty’s title, Provincializing Europe, thereby participating in its program to decentre both perspectives and power.87 Perhaps sensing the magnitude of this historiographical sea-change, Smith, in a later essay, makes the somewhat counter-intuitive argument that globalization is just one set of forces in the contemporary art world and furthermore that undue attention to “top-down globalisation,” as he calls it, misses a great deal about what is coming from the other direction.88 Understanding the art world as circumscribed – and many of its inmates do – one might begin to see the global as a complex construction of the local, a single-point perspective relationally composed from multiple points of view; that is the paradox that rises like a mist from his work. As Smith puts it, “From the multiscalar perspective

Introduction

of worlds-within-the world, we can see that each is, at the same time but in distinctive ways and to specific degrees, local, regional and international – that is to say, worldly, in character.”89 And intentionally so, as its cosmopolitan artists and curators assert. Australian-born, American-based Smith draws on Indian cultural theorist and curator Nancy Adajania’s citation of Nigerian-born, New York- and Munich-based curator Enwezor’s “identification of a widespread ‘will to globality’” that conditions her practice and has also informed the national art histories in this book.90 German art historian Hans Belting has been a driving force in establishing the global art history movement, maintaining his focus on the kind of art that is produced in a global context, especially as it escapes Western “guidance” and “institutions.”91 His mise au point for The Global Art World captures the flailing of Western institutions as they attempt to adapt a framework “for studying art via a history of form,” which only functioned properly in relation to Western art since the Renaissance to non-Western practices.92 Contemporary art museums appear to be the most disoriented, having been displaced by the biennales as purveyors of the avant-garde, and in some non-Western capitals, enervation equals inflation. In Shanghai, as Oscar Ho Hing-kay reports in the same 2009 volume, a hundred new museums were slated to open by 2010 – the comparison is to Starbucks.93 If such decentralization seems very remote from Western museum development, it is worth noting that in Canada, plans to create a new building for the Vancouver Art Gallery have been hassled by local developers’ counter-proposals to handle the vag ’s need for expansion by creating a network of “themed satellite galleries” around the downtown.94 While the Western modern art museum “was context or provided a context” for contemporary art – a model much imitated by modernizing countries – “museums have lost their former authority as a given context, and the art market does not offer an alternative context,” says Belting.95 The major art institutions, it might be observed, are undergoing a dual repositioning: mission-wise, from validating authority to tourist destination; location-wise, from the old metropolises to the new art cities. Whether they can maintain their leadership roles in the narration of art history remains to be seen. Belting reviews the modern museum’s record of “double exclusion”: ignoring practitioners of modernism outside the metropolitan centres; relegating non-Western practices to ethnographic museums, though, as he allows, the latter division is beginning to break down as contemporary art enters ethnographic museums and art museums begin to embrace global art.96 The division is not erased, however, by special exhibitions and rehangs of a museum’s collection; it is, in a sense, perpetuated in the academy and its production of scholarly studies. Distinctions continue to be made between global art history and world art history, which deals with the visual culture of societies that, as Belting puts it, “had no

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previous share in modernism”97 but is now being displayed and interpreted in institutional settings – the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris is the now classic example – whose creation and operations have been atomized by Sally Price.98 While the stink of imperialism, Orientalism, and primitivism is impossible to eradicate from these rooms, there are arguments for keeping them dusted and open to reinterpretation, as long as modernism continues to be studied. “Universal museums, as an idea, are a legacy from modernity’s claim to offer universal models.”99 Globalization in general and global art history in particular reawaken other ideational legacies, notably avant-gardism, metropolitanism, and cosmopolitanism, forces dynamically at play in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions of nationhood and, like historical distance, reconfigured for the twenty-first in national and transnational studies.100 There is more afoot than intellectual restlessness, though the human factor, both individual and collective, is obviously at root. People leave of their own volition; some breathe easier elsewhere; an expatriate may be a creature of two-way curiosity, a “stranger” in Georg Simmel’s proto-relational theory, and immutably so, according to Jean-Luc Nancy.101 Persons who live out of their suitcases form communities of non-belonging – here we might think, perhaps romantically, of interwar Paris.102 Both émigrés and migrants are also pushed out by a range of factors, from ostracization to catastrophe – here the images represent non-conformity, religious persecution, racial prejudice, and territorial seizure. From the departure (pun intended), scholars find many modes of transnational identity, which they link back to the reasons for leaving home and the sense of community formed elsewhere. Still they grapple with the conceptual differences between transnational and diasporic identities, which, as Caroline B. Brettell explains, are far from settled, though they might yearn to be.103 She cites Peggy Levitt, who suggests that the first are sometimes succeeded by the second: “Diasporas form out of the transnational communities spanning sending and receiving countries and out of the real and imagined connections between migrants from a particular homeland who are scattered throughout the world. If a fiction of congregation takes hold, then a diaspora emerges.”104 A diaspora is a function of collective self-recognition. A diasporic consciousness, one might observe, also forms transcultural alliances between persons and peoples who have experienced displacement; they live together in places of transition, and the verbal and visual images about their conditions are often quite similar. As Donald E. Pease puts it, “When used as a noun, the transnational refers to a condition of in-betweenness (the ‘trans’), and to a behavioral category that imputes the traits of flexibility, non-identification, hybridity, and mobility to agents of conduct.”105 These transnational behaviours are imagined within a vast array of possibilities and reconstructed from the particularities of place

Introduction

and moments in time. As Pease continues, “The transnational is not a discourse so much as it is itself a volatile transfer point that inhabits things, people, and places with surplus connectivities that dismantle their sense of a coherent, bounded identity.”106 The dismantling can be traumatic or liberating, and every shade in-between, for those who directly experience displacement and for the next generation as it forms a diaspora. Theories of collective memory, cultural memory, and postmemory are useful in such instances.107 In terms of methodology, something akin to dismantling is enacted in the softening of disciplinary boundaries, whether in academic or museological research. For example, tracing the movement of art objects from the colony or the field to the metropolis and the museum – the in-depth study of provenance – currently may involve transnational, transcultural, and transdisciplinary networks of art historians, curators, archivists, scientists, and ethicists in discourse analysis, forensic studies, and production of oral histories. Deeply affected by postcolonial theory, art history has absorbed concepts of hybridity and interstitiality that redefine the idea of nation. In studies of circulation, the interpretational outcomes are important, as are the direct impacts on the lives of objects that may benefit from new protocols of preservation and display, or may be repatriated to their original nations. But Renan’s frequently cited question, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” keeps oiling the engine of national redefinition. A sampling of current transnational studies draws out a general impatience with traditional research models that ignore “the heterogeneity and heteronomy”108 of subject practices and populations. Within the history of European modernism, David Cottingham argues that perspectives on the avant-garde in England have been clouded by essentialism and isolationism, making his case for the closer comparison of London and Paris.109 Mark Cheetham, for his part, “draws out the Englishness of English art theory” in relation to Empire and a cosmopolitan framework that “structured both the importation of theory from the Continent – especially for [William] Hogarth, [Wyndham] Lewis, and [Herbert] Read – and in turn shaped the exportation of English art theory.”110 Examining the resurgence of cosmopolitan conceits in the current “postnational” moment, Cheetham begins to wonder whether the redeployment of these exhausted arguments might not be a persistent strain of nationalism and regionalism, unconscious perhaps, but no less effective. Such subtle re-reasoning of modernism and modernity belongs to the current moment, in which we are trying to make sense of cultural transactions and their imbalances. But it is also of a moment just past: the crisis of modernism as performed by postmodernism’s polyvalent skepticism, which attacked political philosophies, systems of knowledge, and cultural practices, with particular scorn for the false idol of universality. This is not the place to rehearse those arguments, but possibly to remember Hal Foster’s more forward-looking

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notion of a “postmodernism of resistance” as one lens through which we read the politics of national and transnational culture today.111 Foster’s still-useful edited collection, The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), includes a chapter by Edward Said, who taxes the Left for its “shrill withdrawal” from the project of universal literacy, which he still values as a tool for “healthy oppositional participation in modern industrial society.”112 Said urges renewed political engagement through media, considering “alternative uses of photography” that attempt to represent the histories and intimate experiences of others in ways that ultimately can be connected to “ongoing political and social praxis.”113 His program is exemplified by Le Harem colonial (1981), an archival project of photographic recuperation and textual re-enactment by Algerian poet and critic Marek Alloula, which Said recognizes as an important bridge between Algerian experience and Western readership. Also in Foster’s collection, architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton develops his six-part theory of “critical regionalism” – he “appropriates” the term from Alex Tzonis and Liliane Lefaivre – shaping it into an “arrière-garde position” that “distances itself equally from the Enlightenment myth of progress and from a reactionary, unrealistic impulse to return to the architectonic forms of the preindustrial past.”114 In conceptualizing an “architecture of resistance,” Frampton pays particular attention to urban gathering places – to the importance of the polis – which he relates to Martin Heidegger’s “bounded place-form” and Hannah Arendt’s “space of human appearance.”115 This “place-form,” argues Frampton, is the people’s stronghold against an urban design of placelessness – the proliferation of the megalopolis that is imposed on a site with little regard for nature or culture – the “topography, context, climate, and light” – and with utter disregard for the experience of architecture, which should be tactile as much as visual. The sensorial poverty of Western design – a focus on visual experience – is being exported through “the relentless onslaught of global modernization.”116 In Frampton’s architecture of regional resistance, “the tactile opposes itself to the scenographic and the drawing of veils over the surface of reality”; he too offers counter-examples, notably the Säynatsalo Town Hall (1951), designed by Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto (1898–1976).117 As will be evident in this book, postcolonialism and postmodernism continue to support both theory and methodology, though with increasing reflexivity and more attention to positive models, as Said and Frampton, among others, were already advocating in the early 1980s. The notion that cosmopolitanism “requires and involves the very roots it claims to transcend” has been part of the discourse since the late 1990s, a set of ideas under the heading of “rooted cosmopolitanism.”118 Its chief explicator has been political philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who argues that “you can be cosmopolitan – celebrating the variety of human cultures; rooted – loyal to one local society (or a few) that you count as home; liberal – convinced

Introduction

of the value of the individual; and patriotic – celebrating the institutions of the state (or states) within which you live.”119 In somewhat less celebratory language, Will Kymlicka and Kathryn Walker rehearse the history of cosmopolitanism, tracing its utopic construction in moral, political, and cultural terms, arriving at the source of its current dystopic form: “The core idea of cosmopolitanism may be to recognize the moral worth of people beyond our borders, particularly the poor and the needy, but its historical practice has often been to extend the power and influence of the privileged elites in the West while doing little if anything to benefit the truly disadvantaged.” They cite Craig Calhoun’s wry definition of cosmopolitanism as the “class consciousness of the frequent flyer.”120 As a political philosophy, rooted cosmopolitanism maintains the moral altitude of responsibility to others, while “revising earlier commitments to a world state or a common global culture, and affirming instead the enduring reality and value of cultural diversity and local or national selfgovernment.”121 In short, cosmopolitanism begins at home – in this case, Canada – as a term that can be applied to the languishing populations of nations within nation-states, lonely alien workers hidden in the barns of agro-business and family farms, families hidden in plain sight in the suburbs of the new citystates, where political and economic refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants gain precarious footholds. The four co-editors of Cosmopolitanism, Sheldon I. Pollock, Bhabha, Carol Appadurai Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, also cited by Kymlicka and Walker, take the concept of “world citizen” into these new realities by recasting the cosmopolitan as a figure of displacement and dispossession: “The cosmopolitanism of our times does not spring from the capitalized ‘virtues’ of Rationality, Universality, and Progress; nor is it embodied in the myth of the nation writ large in the figure of citizen of the world. Cosmopolitans today are often the victims of modernity, failed by capitalism’s upward mobility, and bereft of those comforts and customs of national belonging.”122 This cosmopolitanism – a “minoritarian modernity” – draws on transdisciplinary knowledge to form different alliances that denaturalize systems of power: “a vernacularization of a great tradition and the amplification of a petit récit.”123 Thierry de Duve brings yet another meaning to cosmopolitanism in his consideration of the global proliferation of biennales, which his use of language aligns with a business world that practices “glocalization,” the development of local markets through slight but meaningful customization of products.124 Participation in this cultural economy earns “glocal citizenship [which] can be construed as the present-day version of cosmopolitanism.”125 The new art cities of the world are products of a reinvigorated capitalism, which continues to excite different opinions, as de Duve observes: “Interpretation of the phenomenon also oscillates between the optimistic embracing of a democratic

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redistribution of cultural power among established and ‘emergent’ regions of the world, and the pessimistic recognition of a new form of cultural hegemony and re-colonisation on the part of the West.”126 De Duve cuts a fresh path by coining his own neologism, “singuniversal,” the combination of “singular” and “universal,” which brands his desire for the reawakening of Kant’s sensus communis: “A communality or communicability of sentiment, implying a definition of humankind as a community united by a universally shared ability for sharing feelings.”127 As De Duve imagines it, sentiments that might under the right circumstances be shared cross-culturally would be aesthetic judgments about art. Political philosopher Thomas Nail also summons Kant, but drawing different conclusions about his cosmopolitan legacy: “For Kant, migrants, nomads, and other non-citizens are only allowed temporary access to the territory of a state: visitation (Besuchrecht), not residence (Gastrecht) … History and the culture it has built is off-limits to the migrant.”128 The state of statelessness that Nail calls “migrant cosmopolitanism” forms its own organizations with traditions of openness and movement: “The created universalist and often egalitarian underground societies that dug up enclosure fences in the night; lived in the forests, wastelands, and commons; and preached the cosmopolitan right of the poor to the land.”129 One might be tempted to say that De Duve’s cosmopolitanism belongs to an earlier age, but Nail’s historical survey suggests that this was a Neverland. In the twenty-first century – “the century of the migrant”130 – De Duve’s quixotic search for meeting points between cultures puts him into an elite “papered” cosmopolitan community whose art experience is writing global art history, but whose connection to the migrant cosmopolitan is, for the most part, remote.131 The category of World Art made its first appearance as a colonial construct. Belting traces it to the Viennese school of art history, the term being Weltkunst.132 It re-emerged in the late 1990s, developed by British art historian John Onians in an article, “World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural History of Art,” which appeared in Art Bulletin in 1996.133 Onians was addressing a field that had been engaged in reform for over a decade. The “New Art History” was shaking off modernism’s obsession with form, originality, and almost exclusively male genius, inviting contamination from other disciplines, both the sciences and the humanities, in a concerted effort to broaden thinking. Onians’s exposition belongs to a special section of the journal, “A Range of Critical Perspectives: Rethinking the Canon,” which begins with medievalist Michael Camille’s confession of embarrassment over his involvement with a museum collection predicated on “triumphant nationalism, a purely stylistic taxonomy of objects, and a rigidly chronological system of classification,” and ends with Africanist Christopher B. Steiner’s modest proposal that art history’s efforts to dismantle the canon might better be put to understanding the

Introduction

structures that have established hierarchies that remain relevant within other societies.134 In between, architectural historian of the Ottoman period Zeynep Çelik pushes beyond the Western consciousness-raising of Edward Said’s Orientalism to explore the devastating “modernization” of Algiers from Algerian perspectives and to examine the work of painter Osman Hamdi (1842–1910) as a critical response to Orientalist thinking. I cite this provocative set of essays to broaden the context of Onians’s intervention, which was made in a field undergoing significant renovation into which he introduced a new take on an old paradigm that he had developed from working with a collection donated to the University of East Anglia in 1975 by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury (now known as the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts). The collection as currently described includes works from Oceania, Africa, the Americas, Asia, the ancient Mediterranean cultures of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and Medieval Europe, as well as examples of European modern art.135 In 1996 Onians’s approach followed the original intentions behind the gift, which were not to explode the category of art history but to “stimulate sensual awareness.” The donors’ aim is honoured in an approach that stresses the human relation to material through sight and touch, Onians’s call for a “natural history of art” based in human physiology, psychology, and “the human relationship to the natural environment,” rather than focusing on “the cultural context of art making, the way that it is influenced by educational, social, political economic, religious, philosophical, technical, and other factors, [which] is comparatively well understood.”136 The imbalance within the system he was describing is undeniable, and since that time, study of the senses led by anthropologists and research-creators has increasingly informed art-historical research, though with decreasing confidence in essential qualities and universal structures, and increasing reliance on continental philosophy, notably the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.137 The category of world art and its institutions can be critiqued as the preserve of otherness, “respecting” the fact that art, as “we” define it, is a Eurocentric concept and that the material culture of other societies needs to be thought about differently. This disciplinary distinction can be hard to grasp for several reasons, one being its dependence on knowing and rehearsing a structure of prejudicial understanding – modernism’s link between primitivism and pastness, for example, which has been weakened by anthropology, ethnography, and world history’s own investigations, and further complicated by the redefinition of historical distance that, as Phillips notes, results in “a pattern of affective engagement that we recognize as characteristic of these times,” by which he means the present.138 Under the rubric of global art, contemporary artists concerned with the legacies of transnational processes such as slavery or colonization appropriate,

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or in some cases reappropriate, the processes and objects preserved by world art history, as a way of speaking back to power within the constructs of nation that still have a negative impact on their communities. The same motive force brings out representations of traumatic histories whose “singuniversalization” threatens to strip them of meaningful context. A further complication is introduced by the exploded definition of visual art, whose edgiest forms are no longer provided by the emulative behaviours of the avant-garde, but by productive transcultural exchange that has trickled down through documentaries, biopics, and the online presence of world art museums and global art fairs into Western art education. To put this rather crudely, if the West once missionized the East, that learning process (a euphemism) has been reversed, at least in the academy, making certain kinds of distinctions – object versus event, for example – incomprehensible to students of art history and visitors to museums. This is not a loss of reference points but a gain through broader exposure. In her introduction to Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics, Susan L. Feagin underscores her collection’s attention to the arts as “constituent of everyday life, including important events, transitions, and religious attitudes and observances”; she further notes the “integration” of practices and forms that the West has tended to distinguish.139 Emerging researchers of national art histories are interested in the material culture and archives of art actions, however obscure or ephemeral, which have tested the equilibrium of the nation-state, whenever and wherever they have occurred, and they commonly anchor that interest in relational art-historical practices that form fluid socio-political formations. Further informed by global history, they bring these insights to bear on their histories of global art, passions frequently ignited by contemporary artists’ and curators’ archival interventions – “anachronistic inspiration” is an oxymoron. Students of art history are tutored by trans-practices of all kinds, which makes connection and comparison part of their basic toolkit. As to sensitizing these same students to social justice and the wider ramifications of local actions, there is very little we can teach them. Many want to do and/ or bring justice to the cultural production of the place they know – their ancestors’ constructions of nationalism, however these might be judged. Caught in the flood of world history and global art history, they see certain nuances of their own subject-formations, positive and negative, being lost. And so they ask: Who will write these stories if I do not?140 This fundamental question concludes the backstory of this project, a collection of national histories gathered from different places on the globe, each carrying a singular set of challenges. To locate other theoretical turns and themes of global history – their unfinished business – within an emplaced history; to think comparatively without falling prey to “metaphor,” stereotyping, or essentializing; to narrate episodes of cultural exchange without blindness

to other agendas and the rarity of a two-way street: these are only the first hurdles.141 An interest in transition – its first iterations and promissory notes – is the mortar of this collection. It is no accident, I think, that topics have arisen from Mandatory Palestine (1920–48), the Irish Free State (1922–37), and current events in Egypt – chapters of mobilizing national self-consciousness – or that are shaped in terms of diaspora, decolonization, and decommunization. Nations and nationalisms are writ large at these moments; they help us to map current conditions, and vice versa. In the cultural sphere, as recourse to other scholars has shown, many questions are left in globalization’s wake. It is not the ambition of this book to raise and answer all of them, but rather to focus on issues arising from attempts to write histories of the visual arts in relation to nationhood and its foils. Produced by natives of somewhere or by alien researchers with a stake in the subject-culture, these are reflexive projects, or they are nothing, and so it behooves me, I think, to say something about my own history in the field, before introducing the chapters. Uh-oh, Canada

Introduction

At this point in my career, and with regular time off for good behaviour, I identify myself as a “Canadianist,” a word that my Canadian English spell checker has accepted with reluctance. Writing the histories of Canadian photography (1839–present) and contemporary art (1960–present) has necessitated knowledge of international movements, both parallels and intersections, as Canada has grown, often kicking and screaming, from a “young” nation, the offspring of two founding nations, British and French, into a nation-state more truthfully described as a multicultural settler-colonial nation occupying lands taken from its Indigenous populations, Canada’s First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. Official bilingualism and multiculturalism have been pillars of Canadian national identity since the late 1960s. Neither has been even partially achieved without a struggle. In 1990 Canada was singled out in Hobsbawm’s influential study for the ardour of Quebec nationalism – an example of late-twentieth-century divisiveness in nationalist movements.142 The adoption of multiculturalism as a political philosophy has often been cited as an antidote to Quebec’s desire to be recognized as a distinct society, within and beyond Canadian borders. It was a multi-purpose panacea and very much a product of the Cold War.143 My chapter in this collection looks at one immigrant community and its construction of photographic infrastructure in the late 1960s and 1970s – that this population came from the United States, importing both its values and confidence, to define Canadian photography is shot through with irony, but is unlikely to surprise cultural historians who have attended to the conditions of co-existence in the Americas.

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My turn to the Canadian situation is intended less as a history of Canadian art-historical writing – for the twentieth century, this attempt has already been made144 – than as an exercise that illustrates some of the ways in which one national art history has been set against a global backdrop in the past. The Canadian case is particular, but it may be exemplary – which is a typical Canadian conceit. What Canada wants is to be seen and understood – a very tall order, and one that is hardly unique. Every contributor to this book has struggled with the question of its readership and how much common knowledge could be assumed. We shared the dread of commonplaces that would bore our compatriots to tears, as well as the fear of unfounded assumptions that would leave most readers detached. The challenge of integrating the global with the local has sometimes been met creatively – Lucy Lippard solved it by writing The Lure of the Local in three parallel registers: art theory, case history, and personal experience of place.145 That graphic presentation is not in use in this book, but its polyphonic structure, including the reflexivity of the author, presents in every chapter. Four episodes of Canadian art-historical writing played on my mind in the course of this project. I want to hover over them briefly. The first was a thematic issue of artscanada published in December 1979: “Art and Nationalism,” edited by Anne Trueblood Brodsky. artscanada (1968–83) was the continuation of Canadian Art (1943–68; 1984–present), which was itself the continuation and expansion of Maritime Art (1940–43). Throughout its existence, and despite (or, given the times, is it because of?) its upstart, e e cummings–style orthography, artscanada was for English readers the journal of record for the visual arts in Canada. The Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien was founded in 1974, and was only just finding its feet. The rebranding and reorientation of 1968 effectively interrupted Canadian Art at the very moment when Canadian nationalism was hydroplaning on the official celebrations of the nation’s centennial (1967). But the coast-to-coast cohesion sought by federal optimists since the nineteenth-century building of the railroad was not to be obtained. French president Charles de Gaulle caused an international incident when he capped a speech delivered during his official visit to Expo 67 in Montreal with a popular appeal to Quebec nationalism: “Vive le Québec libre!” For both federalists and cosmopolitans, this was all the more galling as the world’s fair had been conceptualized and trumpeted as the actualization of Canadian communications guru Marshall McLuhan’s “global village.”146 Changes to Canadian immigration policy that took place at that time were also significant, reversing the pattern of immigration from Europe to Asia, empowering existing communities, and infusing Canadian culture with a diversity of practices. Also being revamped, though less successfully, was Canadian federal policy on the Indigenous peoples, leading to the misbegotten White

Introduction

Paper of 1969, whose tabling only increased demands for restitution of treaty rights and territorial sovereignty. These problems and opportunities are not raised by the “Art and Nationalism” issue, which is concerned with the idea of nationalism as it persisted in the universalisms of modernism. As Michael Greenwood writes: “Paradoxically, we may still discover a legitimate sense of pride in the unique nature of the Canadian experiment which does not seek to impose any rigid conformity, political, religious or cultural, upon its citizens, but rather makes a positive virtue of diversity and provides an example of true liberal humanitarianism.”147 This dream still persists, as does its remoteness from Canadian realities. In 1979 Canada was looking inward and outward at the same time, a process that continues – Canada’s location on the globe makes isolationism impossible, though pockets continue to thrive. Brodsky’s compilation surveys not just Canadian but other national narratives, including those of places addressed in this volume, Palestine/Israel and Scotland, and those reliable beacons, New York and Paris. The legitimacy of attaching the Quebec question to a key moment of cultural redefinition, the manifesto Refus global (1948), is demolished in an article by François-Marc Gagnon, who correlates the author’s anarchism with surrealism and earlier French radical philosophy: “Paul-Émile Borduas and modernism: ‘I hate all nationalisms.’”148 The categorical confusion of nation and nationalism is more easily dispelled than the habit of reading every object in a national canon as an expression of nationalist sentiment or for its essential national characteristics. But some bodies of work have invited that reading or, more recently, staged its critical counter-reading. The fastening of Canadian cultural identity to a particular genre, landscape, or trope of wilderness (terra nullius, “the idea of North,” “the garrison mentality,” spirituality, and possession, to name just a few) is thoroughly examined in an anthology of commissioned and collected articles, edited by John O’Brian and Peter White, Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (2007). White’s lifelong interests in the formation of collective memory and institutional histories are complemented by O’Brian’s history of the “Canadian fixation on wilderness,” in which he traces the bedding of the wilderness by modernism and canvases alternative representations, the paths not chosen, such as urbanism and technology, whose concentration of strangers and mediation of experience nevertheless aided and abetted the creation of the mythic Canadian landscape. Of particular relevance to this volume is O’Brian’s discussion of the wilderness trope as a transnational phenomenon, a cycle of “first contact” through exhibitions and publications, identification, and claiming for the nation.149 The process is rather like territorial conquest, or so it operated at the time, suppressing any notice of cultural borrowings in favour of unmediated experience. Postmodernist and postcolonial critiques of the Canadian landscape tradition

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give rise to O’Brian’s category of “mongrel landscapes,” a contamination of the Group of Seven’s “white and unsullied” vision, which is less about winter than race.150 The reinvention of landscape undertaken by contemporary artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s demonstrated interest in “the rapidly globalizing world and in the changing social spaces of Canada as the country moved from industrial capitalism to an information-based economy.”151 An extension of this economic trajectory leads to more radical proposals. The writing of national art histories is due for a complete overhaul, according to a number of prominent Canadian scholars, who have founded their approach in the writings of leftist Canadian cultural historian Ian McKay. As co-editors of Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada, Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson argue that Canadian art history has benefited from and extends “the historical success of liberalism” in “northern North America.” Their periodization covers the rise of art history as an institutionalized discipline, as it is normally associated with nineteenthcentury nation-building and cultural academization: “At that time, the modern, European nation-state emerged as a means of articulating the geopolitical landscape across which liberalism, and its attendant expression in capitalism and modernity, would be advanced.”152 Making the indisputable point that visual art production reflects the social and political conditions of its place of origin, though somewhat neglecting the vagaries of human psychology, Jessup, Morton, and Robertson state that “both the project-of-Canada and the project-of-Canadian-art-history are interrelated yet distinct exercises in liberal hegemony making.”153 Into this framework can be fitted the settlercolonial perspective, the narratives of individual genius, and the suppression of non-conformist (Indigenous, cultural/linguistic) notions of national identity, and it is this determinant that needs to be recognized if any real progress is to be made in writing the history of art in Canada: “Turning to the nation-state as a project of liberalism allows for thinking through the history of art in terms of nation-states as economies rather than as national collectivities.”154 Also in the authors’ sights are institutional gestures toward inclusivity that fall short of destabilizing the underlying structure of national narratives; that is, runaway capitalism as manifest in the study of visual culture, whether bounded by phrases such as “in Canada” or globally unleashed by proprietary software. Non-Canadian readers find much to interest them in Jessup, Morton, and Robertson’s volume; the co-editors signal their affiliations with thought-leaders such as “Arjun Appadurai, Michael Hardt, David Harvey, Antonio Negri, Saskia Sassen, and Yasemin Soyal.”155 At the same time, they are domestic reformers; their work and, for the most part, their contributors’, describes and decries the unwillingness of Canada, the nation-state, to participate in its own “denationalization” as its institutions, businesses, and citizens take the global

Introduction

turn.156 So while the collection debunks the myth of Canadian exceptionalism, a singularly fragmented sovereignty emerges as a unifying aspiration. Heather Igloliorte reviews the history of Canada’s appropriation of Inuit culture as a way of asserting its territorial sovereignty and cultural identity in contradistinction to the United States and Britain, explaining the resultant distortions of Inuit “ideas about property, politics, and the individual,” ideas rebounding in contemporary art and cinema as the Inuit have “resisted the project of Canada” to reclaim their territory and export their cultural production around the globe.157 Alice Ming Wai Jim lays claim to her classroom as a laboratory for developing a curriculum of “ethnocultural art history” that “shifts the classification of art according to particular geographic areas to consider a myriad of issues in the visual field predicated on local senses of belonging shaped by ‘migration’ histories and ‘first’ contacts.”158 Richard Williams Hill, who ruefully self-identifies as an Indigenous professional, reclaims the territory of the mind as a cultural worker who recognizes the importance of burrowing into institutions, while resisting their ideologies and maintaining his connection to “the local, the specific, the out of the way and impractical.”159 In sympathy with these ideas, and remembering his youthful attachment to Canadian poet Leonard Cohen’s idea of Canada as “a loophole nation,” Peter Conlin faces up to neo-liberalism’s appropriation of alternative culture’s “zones of ambiguity” as demonstrations of the entrepreneurial spirit, and he calls for a rethinking of those “gaps” and “lee spaces” as sites for “an oppositional and defiant mode of self-determination.”160 These are unlikely to become the imposing new spaces of global art’s “museumification”; the irresolvable tension between social justice and global ambition is palpable throughout this book. The fourth episode in fact takes place outside Canada, stirring a strong cocktail of mixed feelings: the exhibition Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America, organized by Mass M oCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, a team led by curator Denise Markonish, who also edited the catalogue. “M oCA s,” those museums of contemporary art cropping up everywhere, constitute a new brand, according to Belting: “The M oCA is by implication global, as it celebrates contemporary production as an art without geographic borders, and without history in terms of Western modernism.”161 A Canadian exhibition in such a place is a curiously unclassifiable event in the global-art context, and for Canadians who were active on the cultural scene in the early 1970s, very much a throwback to the kinds of exhibitions that used to be subsidized by the federal government through the Canada Council for the Arts and the cultural division of the Department of External Affairs. The one that comes immediately to mind is O Kanada, or more specifically, the visual art exhibition presented at the Academie der Künste in Berlin in 1982–83, as part of a much larger cultural manifestation.162 Mass M oCA ’s four-hundred-page publication

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is truly remarkable on a number of levels, not least because the curator characterizes herself as being in a relationship with Canada – the word “love” appears in the titles of her preface and introductory essay – and she makes a display of her process of discovery, or falling in love, which has nevertheless left Canada as an abstraction. It is “nebulous.” It is ambiguous. The land is vast and unexplored, the latter observation borrowed from Public Radio International’s This American Life, in which writer Ian Brown makes the comparison between the wilderness of the United States, “where so many people have gone before,” and his sense of the Canadian wilderness: “I’m the first person.”163 However scandalous the parroting of this offensive statement, there are many aspects of Markonish’s project that ring true and help to communicate the singularity of Canadian practice within the universe that the M oCA movement presupposes. While she herself takes on the job of synthesizing Canada’s political philosophies, social systems, and cultural identities, she assigns much of the interpretive function of the catalogue to artists: they interview each other, which is an accurate reflection of the important role that artists have played in the founding of major institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada, and the creation of a national network of artist-run centres.164 In this instance of global art history, the artist’s voice supplements curatorial judgment – the case of Canada is best served by such horizontal exchange, which in the global art-history world might be taken as history from below. As a Canadian art historian, localized in a research institute dedicated to the visual arts in Canada, I take an approach to the nationalism theme that is informed by the four models I have just described, though it underscores different aspects, as I hope this introduction has shown. First – and this from the starting gate – I feel the need to look outside the disciplinary village, considering wider movements toward global history, world history, and transnational history as important influences on art history. At the same time, I take from anthropologist Clifford Geertz the reflexive principle that research is not conducted on villages, but in villages – the elitist international art world or the network of M oCA s can be considered such a village, as well as what sociologist Erving Goffman called a “total institution,” in which interaction between role-players is fluid, but bounded – his best example was the asylum.165 Another good example of institutional boundedness can be found in James Elkins’s introduction to Is Art History Global? By tightly narrowing his focus to art history as practised by and within the North American and Western European academies, Elkins is able to determine “scientifically” that art history as it counts for those other villagers, who may be critics, journalists, or artists, is not (yet) practised in a coherent manner on a global scale. At the same time, he finds reasons to hope that local histories of art, even those that do not qualify as Art History, will continue to be produced and that art historians will read

Introduction

them, and not just for subject matter, but for methodology – the spread and application of “new interpretive methods and senses of history.”166 Such an adventurous researcher might read the artists’ conversations in Oh, Canada, setting aside fears of the intentional fallacy; he or she might consider that digital exchanges on the blogosphere are rapidly becoming primary documents in art-historical research. Elkins’s contributors provide solid indications that attention to globalization is a unifying force across the humanities, and its vehicles are important ports of call for art historians who have taken the interdisciplinary turn in their research and teaching; those, for instance, who are already talking to the visual anthropologists and historical geographers to inform their studies of material culture. The Journal of Global History is well established, having been launched in 2006, with a prolegomenon “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History,” which I have already cited. Historiographers who contribute to this journal are remapping territories that the new art history – no longer so new – ignores at its peril: gender history, as it informs both practice and subject matter, and environmental history, in relation to landscape, to cite just two examples. The same journal urges us to consider that scholars who hang their hats in other university departments may write major contributions to the history of art. In an omnibus review of new titles on the emergence of modernism in various Asian cultures, Ralph Croizier, emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Victoria, makes the point that “Art is part of all history, of course.”167 If there are any disciplinary sandbaggers still reading this introduction, Croizier’s homily is meant for you. The editorial board of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, a journal launched in 2015, has adopted a multidisciplinary approach “to encourage the hemispheric study of ‘multiple Americas’ replete with deeply layered and implicated historical to present-day specificities of diverse Indigenous and diasporic populations and identifications.”168 In other words, the project is rethinking the national boundaries of art history in the decolonizing and globalizing theatre of the Americas. I am drawn to scholars who examine art-historical events and conditions by casting a wide net that captures other, sometimes unorthodox factors that situate the globalizing tendencies of the present in longer and broader historiographical narratives. One such scholar is American philosopher Noël Carroll, who, in his contribution to Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics, asserts that he is examining global art history as a “dubious” phenomenon, because it is “incomplete” and, in some aspects, ingenuous; much of this “new phase of world history” looks to him like capitalism in a new suit. If globalization means exchange, the trading floor is “uneven.” Transactions between cultures predate capitalism, and new delivery systems simply offer “a difference in degree from the past rather than a difference in kind.” Writing in 2007,

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Carroll nevertheless refuses to succumb to “skeptical misgivings; he sees signs that “something new is evolving – an integrated, interconnected, transnational artworld.”169 He describes this “artworld” and “its own preferred idioms,” which are “some of the very technologies that are transforming the wide world into a small world,” and adds: “Thus the popularity of photography, film, video, and, increasingly, computer, digital, and Internet art is itself emblematic of the emerging cosmopolitan art world insofar as these media are themselves cosmopolitan.”170 But we are also reminded that this internally coherent concatenated “artworld” coexists with other art worlds – national, regional, or global – but in parallel; that is, with no meaningful traffic between them.171 Particularly intriguing about Carroll, as he summarizes the precedents to current perspectives, is his wry comment on Western vanity: how “the dawning of a new age” has been hailed twice in his lifetime, “first with the Age of Aquarius and then with postmodernism.”172 Carroll, according to Wikipedia, was born in 1947, at the dawning of an arguably more momentous and truly global “new age,” the Cold War. Preoccupation with Cold War–era culture has created an international community of scholars increasingly benefitting from historical distance and the opening of archives on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Critical readings of internationalism had certainly predated the fall of the Berlin Wall – Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War entered the fray in 1983 – and unapologetic guides to the deployment of modern art in Cold War propaganda were there all along; William E. Daugherty’s A Psychological Warfare Casebook first appeared in 1958.173 So, in addition to illuminating opportunities for transnational exchange, scholars are often faced with difficult “local” knowledge that “flashes up,” not from memory necessarily, as Walter Benjamin suggested, but from its hiding places in plain view.174 For me, such flashes of knowledge have ranged from the darker implications of touristic snapshots taken by my father, a Cold Warrior-in-training, to the more accomplished photographs of the Arctic made by Canadian photojournalist and documentarian Richard Harrington, images that circulated globally in the service of US Cold War propaganda (internationalism) and Roman Catholic propagation of the faith (universalism), fellow travellers in the fight against Communism.175 As I conducted research on the Cold War, my attention was caught by a transnational collection of case studies edited by Jeffrey A. Engel under the title, Local Consequences of the Global Cold War. The ambitions of this book were simple and provocative: “linking local events with international narratives.”176 This was more than the psychological damage inflicted on American children by US Civil Defense films, such as Duck and Cover (1951), but a comparative account of urban, industrial, and environmental impacts, the real costs paid by certain populations, whether in

1.1  Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1963–65. Clear acrylic, distilled water, climate in area of display, 76.2 × 76.2 × 76.2 cm. © Hans Christoph Carl Haacke / sodrac (2016). Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Introduction

North Dakota, Novosibirsk, or East Timor. Students of the Cold War quickly come to understand that the entire globe was affected, some groups benefitting, others picking up the tab, and – to varying degrees – some people and places were a great deal more damaged than others. The insinuation of Cold War politics and mentalities into all aspects of public and private life will be studied for some time, and the period’s production of binaries, affiliations, and everyday performances shade into this book as ways of thinking about cultural discourse, transnational networks, and hybridity. Ways of thinking, I must stress, because theory, trial-and-error, and temperament place different accents on historical analysis, coalescing in what we call “methodology” – what we make public of our habits of attention. My own tend to triangulate artistic process (how the object or event comes into being, including context, conception, creation, and performative utterances), institutional encounters (how the artwork functions or has been made to function materially and symbolically in the public sphere), and critical reception

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(reports and interpretations, fair or foul, including appeals to levels of historical importance and theoretical amplitude that have drawn it to my attention). These are both psychological and socio-political factors, states of consciousness and the articles of faith governing their recognition, intertwined in the mesh of possibility that brings the various actants into view or makes their experience imaginable. I have written a great deal about photographic experience as a state of oscillation between memory and imagination. This interstitial zone – phenomenologist Edward Casey calls it a “memory-frame” – is not easy to describe, but it has influenced my understanding of the nation as a container of memory that is “pure process.”177 The image that comes to mind is German conceptual artist Hans Haacke’s minimalist sculpture Condensation Cube (1963–65), a sealed ecosystem in continuous transformation from within and from its situation without (Fig. 1.1).178

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In 1965 American protest singer Bob Dylan proclaimed that “You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.”179 Meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz fortunately saw no application to his work. His “butterfly effect,” an image released in 1972 and directed toward forecasting, not historiography, seeped into cultural consciousness, and is still reflected in our thinking about local phenomena and their far-reaching effects. Speaking of the weather, Lorenz noted: “One hypothesis, unconfirmed, is that the influence of a butterfly’s wings will spread in turbulent air, but not in calm air.”180 Then as now, internationally and locally, calm air was an increasingly precious commodity. And it was not all about the instrumentality of butterflies, of course. Lorenz’s opening propositions made it abundantly clear that the activities of “innu­ merable more powerful creatures, including our own species,” had even greater ramifications.181 This was ten years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring (1962), a denunciation of the chemical industry, and three days before the use of the pesticide ddt was banned across the United States, though not elsewhere. The Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment of June 1972 had placed the burden of planetary health on local and national governments – sentiments saturated with the philosophy of Scottish town planner Edward Geddes (1854–1932) who inspired his followers with “Think global, act local.” An agent of Empire, Geddes acted on his own advice, translating his ideals to India. He crops up in this book for his service under the British Mandate for Palestine, where he laid out Tel Aviv.182 The perversion of Geddes’s philosophy can be seen today in the community action of the rich and powerful to protect their neighbourhoods and property values against invasion by rent-controlled housing or drop-in centres for the

addicted or the abused: a mindset disapprovingly identified by the acronym nimby (not in my backyard).183 Modernism and cosmopolitanism are easy fits in the global/local structure, even as the planet is unified and solidified by its grassroots. In the United States, where Lorenz let fly his meteorological figure, environmental consciousness had already been growing through the Earth Day movement (founded in 1970), the massive and increasingly mediated demonstrations of citizens wanting cleaner air and water for themselves and their children. “Writing the local” can be seen as the greening of art history – it belongs to that history of mentalities. “Writing the local” is therefore something more than taking account of the collateral effects of global phenomena on individuals or out-of-the-way communities. It is also the opposite: fine-grained analysis of local perturbations – barely noticeable tendencies or occurrences that can now be seen to have sown significant change. This investigation has a double orientation. It is suitably retrospective, as a sifting of documents (microhistory) and testimonies (history from below) that shifts the focus of historical narrative to its undercurrents. And it is prospective, in its attachment to actants observed and recorded, but possibly misread by the yardsticks of the day, in terms of their impacts or potential impacts on cultural and social formations. A wild, sometimes anachronic, desire to see from multiple “peripheral” vantage points – the fervent expression of this set of values – unifies the writing in this book. Histories, Counter-Histories, and What Counts as History

Introduction

Historians in this collection are writing into a global consciousness that has become attuned to kernel stories that could never take hold in national arthistorical accounts, but really belong nowhere else. Some listen for echoes in the near present of a foreshortened historical distance; others scan the horizon we call the past. Their work illuminates those local, regional, or national perturbations that manifest in cultural practices and ideational exchange. What makes this traffic possible? What makes a society’s art practices vulnerable, susceptible, or receptive to new directions? How does chance exposure translate into hybrid form? These questions and many others are addressed in the fifteen chapters that follow. Their organization reflects, speaks back to, and expands the ideas about national art history that have been canvassed in this introduction by identifying spaces of encounter and cultural translation: the exhibition, the classroom, the festival, the community, the retreat, and above all, the art historian’s office. The order of the chapters is designed to facilitate comparison between sets of conditions that favour the construction of national art histories – the institutional thrust of those moments – and the kinds of supplementary

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questions that upend their authority. My introductory comments underscore those connections, but what the reader will discover are entangled themes and a volleying back and forth between chapters that feels almost conversational. Questions bubble up under all kinds of circumstances. Their formulation may, in hindsight, constitute a cultural milestone, but the purpose of this book is not to replace one teleology with another.184 This is not a history of Progress, but a collection of studies that proffer different answers to two persistent questions. How does the writing of art history contribute to the national imaginary? How might its rewriting help us to imagine community in more salutary formations? We begin with language, with the metallurgy of our disciplinary coin. Ceren Özpinar taxes contemporary Turkish art-historical texts for their accommodation of ethnic and gendered prejudices, whether expressed in ignorance or silence. Her chapter, “Playing Out the ‘Differences’ in Turkish Art-Historical Narratives,” offers close readings of foundational surveys and art criticism written in Turkish for a Turkish readership – she translates their embedded biases. Elkins speaks of a certain “obligation” in the increasingly “global enterprise” of art history, which is the sharing of methods.185 In this case of careful discourse analysis, Özpinar acknowledges the direct input of Griselda Pollock, and her chapter shows that feminist art history – with its supplementary questions, such as Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” – is now entangled in myriad inquiries. In the matter of race, for instance: Fionna Barber’s “Race, Irishness, and Art History: Margaret Clarke’s Bath Time at the Crèche (1925), Motherhood, and the Matter of Whiteness” locates its subject in the domestic sphere, in the figure of a black infant surrounded by white women and children. Barber’s account of Clarke’s career is recuperative feminist history, explaining the overshadowing of that career by her husband’s and the subordination of artistic promise to familial duty. But the representation of this infant remains a case of unexplained visibility, a symbolic interjection in an art practice whose iconography linked motherhood with the modernist project of nation-building – the birth of the Irish Free State. Barber’s analysis builds another set of linkages (and tensions) into the modern histories of race and gender relations. When words fail, the power of language is asserted. The writing of Western art history is replete with instances of naming as a means of claiming for the dominant culture art practices that may more usefully be located in realms of “border thinking.”186 In “Problems of Translation: Lyonel Feininger and Ga­ga­nen­dra­nath Tagore at the Fourteenth Annual Indian Society of Oriental Art Exhibition, Kolkata, India,” Martin Beattie reopens the categories of European and Asian art, arguing that the “cubisms” presented in 1922 by these two prominent artists were hybrid forms of transcultural interaction between the

Introduction

Bauhaus and the Bengal School, both centres already touched by French and Japanese influences, respectively. With reference to postcolonial and linguistic theory, Beattie advances a different mode of reciprocity, showing how each of these artists used cubism to disrupt their own styles. In the chapter that follows, two equally intense episodes of nation-building – then and now – are examined in parallel through their architectural vocabularies of iconography and design. In “Some Notes on Applying Postcolonial Methodologies to Architectural History Research in Israel/Palestine,” Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler demonstrates certain failures of interdisciplinary architectural history, arguing that current studies fired up by “new” nationhood and ideologically driven methodologies are blurring the picture of urban development during the British Mandate and, in modern design, sidestepping the meaning of appropriations such as the “Arab Village” building-type, as well as the cultural impacts of “other Others.” These first four chapters are cautionary tales that draw our attention to the overlooked, the unsaid, the misapplied, and the mistranslated – to gaps in the national narrative. These are revealed to be old stories, discovered in the folds of cultural histories of societies transitioning from empire to independence. Some have been naturalized by repetition, other continuously projected along the axes of cosmopolitanism. If certain accounts and their structuring methodologies are found to be wanting, there is no loss of faith in territorially bounded accounts; on the contrary, these writers urge their fellow national historians and, by extension, their readers to keep going, by digging deeper into evidence that surrounds them, by exposing their nation’s partial blindness to a radical cure. Key sites for such archaeological histories are cultural institutions – those spaces, real and imagined, that Tammer El-Sheikh, in this volume, figures as “livable homes for the things we create.” This is a suggestive idea, resonating with the expanded definition of Sara Ahmed, whose idea of home is not a spatial figure of boundedness, stasis, and stultifying familiarity, but “a place where we could recognize that there are always encounters with others already recognized as strangers within, rather than just between, nation spaces.”187 The excavation and measurement of such livable homes are unifying themes in this book: the buffeting of their inhabitants figured by the work of Hale Tenger, Being a Turk (Between 26˚ West–45˚ East Meridians and 36˚ South–42˚ North Parallels), 2002; their architects enlarged by Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir in Iceland and myself in Canada; and the idea of home literally brought home by Corina Ilea, who reviews the importance of domestic space as a protectorate for Romanian art practice during the Cold War. The “things” housed in these homes are not just works of art, but myths, legends, and aspirations that form the basis of national identity and the infrastructure of art-historical interpretation.

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In “‘Draw Me a Sheep!’ Contemporary Responses to the Histories of Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt,” El-Sheikh traces the history of visual art education in Cairo and Alexandria as programs that have evolved through various stages of “Egyptianization,” including episodic reactions to “European” streams of thought – psychoanalysis and surrealism. Transnational research has drained the Orientalism from these episodes by rooting them in medieval and modern Egyptian intellectual history. These cultural histories form the backdrop to El-Sheikh’s analysis of performance and conceptual works by two contemporary Egyptian artists, one based in Cairo, the other in Alexandria, whose practices vigorously reject Western projections – the new Orientalisms – that have rebounded in the wake of 11 September 2001 and the much-mediated events of the Arab Spring. Such geopolitical constructs of statehood – its boundaries and regulations – are manifest in cultural practices and preserved in visual art collections and archives. These are constructions; in some cultures, they are stories which, as J. Edward Chamberlin argues, have the potential to transform places of contestation into common ground where histories of displacement can be heard and enacted, where decolonization or deoccupation can be activated in participant imaginations.188 In “Historical Archives and Contemporary Art – The Case of the Umm el-Fahem Gallery in Palestine/Israel,” Merav Yerushalmy explores the history and function of a doubly bifurcated institution: the uef Gallery is one of a very small number of Arab art galleries in the state of Israel; its mandate includes both the exhibition of contemporary art and the development of a regional photographic archive. Yerushalmy focuses mainly on the archive and its place in Palestinian collective memory. The uef Gallery is located in the Arab, almost entirely Muslim, city of Umm el-Fahem. Once part of the Jenin district of Palestine, the region was awarded to Israel in 1948 under the terms of the Lausanne Conference, following the Arab-Israeli War. The photographs represent the local community of Arab Israeli citizens, documenting their experiences and attachment to place – a collection that includes domestic and official photography, oral histories, and their reworking by artists. People build institutions: national histories of modernism – their collective bildungsromans – are filled with episodes of personal exchange (local, by definition) that initiate cultural transfer. The writing of ethnographer James Clifford encourages attention to the traveller’s “complex encounters” in which “culture and identity are inventive and mobile. They need not take roots in ancestral plots; they live by pollination, by (historical) transplanting.”189 Transformation is reciprocal. The actors come and go: the passeur (the boatman or the smuggler) also figures. National art histories struggle to find the juste milieu between continuity and rupture, between honouring native talent and exalting the power of the newcomer. The next three chapters tell such transitional tales through cultural and institutional lenses.

Introduction

Lindsay Blair examines the visual history of the Scottish Highlands, as it has been researched, written, and curated to this point, and most successfully, as she argues, in the form of counter-narratives that abjure the essentialisms of many nationalisms. In Blair’s account, national formations are revealed not as immutable and timeless but as sites and language rooted in the longue durée of northern experience and reinvigorated by outsiders. Her “Dalriada, the Lordship of the Isles, and the Northern Rim: Decentralizing the Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland” argues that works created in Scotland by visiting artists or long-term residents such as Joseph Beuys, Daniel Reeves, and Jon Schueler have helped to awaken and decolonize Scottish Highland culture. The presence of these artists and their adaptions to place and collaborative actions redefine authenticity. Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir turns to the local and international contexts of Fluxus and Dutch conceptualism to consider their impact on Icelandic art. Her “New Maps for Networks: Reykjavík Fluxus – A Case of Connections” looks at experiments in art making and teaching that metropolis-centred Western accounts have sometimes traded as anecdotes but can now be seen from a global arthistory perspective as foundational two-way mirrors of cultural reflection. Sigurjónsdóttir extends Blair’s attention to key figures and anticipates my own institutional angle as an unblinkered study of national identity that fully embraces what nomads and exiles have found or made of their host countries. Her demonstration of Fluxus’s rejection of art-city hierarchies also connects to Johanne Sloan’s mapping of a Canadian network, which comes a bit later in this volume. My own contribution to this discussion, “Hitching a Ride: American KnowHow in the Engineering of Canadian Photographic Institutions,” measures the considerable impact of American knowledge, values, and derring-do on the foundation of Canadian photographic institutions at a moment of intense nation-building across the cultural sphere. This exchange of skills and values took place during the Vietnam War, or as it is known in Vietnam, the American War, when Canada became home to a population of war resisters and deserters – exiles and settlers who were both political activists and cultural entrepreneurs. So this is a Cold War story – a factor also noted by Sigurjónsdóttir in terms of countervailing cultural transfers. This mid-twentieth-century moment of restlessness and dynamic encounters is haunted by our knowledge of art and artists who were contained within borders, until, by some Machiavellian flip of a coin, they were not. Sudden visibility in the post–Cold War era creates both opportunity and crisis in Corina Ilea’s “Migratory Affiliations: Contemporary Romanian Art,” in which she analyzes the emergence of art and artists from a decommunizing state that is still negotiating its identity in the narrow space between the traumatic history of a closed society and the beckoning European future.

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Migration is the underlying theme of Ilea’s chapter, its promise and precariousness figured in the work and written from the standpoint of an émigré author who translates the codes of stigma and survival that mark the work of her own generation. Vitality/stagnation; macro/micro; cosmopolitanism/provincialism: the sets of oppositions used to structure and hierarchize both art experience and the writing of its history have not disappeared, but the multiplying factor of global art networks has significantly modified the working definitions of art worlds and art cities.190 We are plunged into what Russell Ferguson insightfully calls the “phantom center [that], elusive as it is, exerts a real, undeniable power over the whole social framework of our culture, and over the ways we think about it.” As Ferguson explains, in relation to the struggle between the marginal and the centre, “When we try to pin it down, the center always seems to be somewhere else.”191 This observation binds the three chapters that follow. A tale of two global art cities is told by Alice Ming Wai Jim in “Maraya’s Sisyphean Cart: Twinned Visions of Vancouver and Dubai.” Her point of departure is the exportation of a design model from Canada to the Middle East: the replication of a Vancouver waterfront development in Dubai. The uncanniness and incongruity of this transcontinental cultural translation have inspired three Vancouver media artists to tool up, creating a variety of emulative and connecting devices to perform multi-media, relational critique. Jim follows their project through its various iterations, interpreting this hybrid postcolonial urbanism through a transnational lens. Value-added to this historically grounded cultural and economic analysis is Jim’s attention to indentured foreign workers, a large segment of the population in Dubai, who form bachelor societies in this “City of Gold.” This is another mirroring of Vancouver, the late-nineteenth-century “Gold Mountain” for Chinese workers grossly exploited in the building of the transcontinental railroad – Canadian nationhood given birth by their labours. Johanne Sloan’s “Urban Art Histories (in Canada)” might be an impertinent contribution to a study of national art histories for it seems, at the outset, to abandon this historiographical structure as exhausted. She examines the contemporary art histories of three Canadian cities, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, as they demonstrate the need to think about multiple, coexisting art worlds, and she redefines those worlds as exhibiting on an urban scale all of the complexity and dynamism of the global configuration. But this is a rooted cosmopolitanism, if ever there was one, and is subtended by local conditions and “the Mcluhanesque policy-making of the Canadian government” that created a networked infrastructure – not an art world, per se, but an artists’ world that AA Bronson both celebrates and castigates in “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat.”192

Introduction

The central zone, as sociologist Edward Shils long ago explained, “has nothing to do with geometry and little with geography. The center, or central zone, is a phenomenon of the realm of values and beliefs.”193 And here we might add: beliefs that there are values somewhere at the core. Steve Lyons leads us into the cosmopolitan labyrinth when he adopts the role of “A Stranger in New York.” Mindful of the Minotaurs, and inoculated by Terry Smith against provincialism, Lyons conducts a quasi-ethnographic investigation of the City’s cultural bishoprics, mapping these precincts and their interior plans. His selfguided tour takes him to the threshold of insider-knowledge and power relations, where he teeters on the brink of belonging. “The state is the political institution in which sovereignty is embodied.” The general definition of “sovereignty’ is “supreme authority within a territory.”194 For artists and their institutions, operating in an unfinished world of ceaseless conflict, walls up/walls down, and unsustainability, it is perhaps the definition of ‘the state’ that has come to matter. For art historians, it might be the constitution of authority, or its reconstitution in different processes. These possibilities emerge from the two last chapters of this volume. In “Mending Walls: Imagining the Sovereign Subject in Contemporary Exhibition Practices,” Erin Silver introduces art practices that address the complexities and contradictions of self-identification as a sovereign subject. The exhibition space – the home of art and art experience – is defined as a place of productive internal and external negotiation between multiple selves and others. Situating her study in both conventional and colonized art territories, Silver looks at three moveable feasts of intersectionality between racial, ethnic, gendered and/or queer selves who come together and talk. Carla Taunton’s “Embodying Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada” starts from the premise that performance is the “living archive” of Indigeneity, and has always functioned as such, even in times of its apparent corruption in World’s Fairs and Wild West Shows. Focusing on four contemporary Indigenous artists, Taunton traces contemporary art performances of counter-mimicry, commemoration, and protest as they are added to the “living archive.” Crucial to Taunton’s methodology is the voice of the Indigenous artist, curator, critic, or historian. As a settler-colonial art historian, she is poised to listen. Her chapter is the fruit of compilation, observation, and engagement – tangled methodologies are embodied in her account. This is not oral history, but an art history written in a time of “shared authority” and experimentally surrendered authorities that are recasting our national art histories.195 This is where the conversation begins.

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2

Playing Out the “Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives C e re n Öz p ı nar

T

he construction and dissolution of “difference” is an undercurrent of modern and contemporary art-historical narratives in Turkey. In this chapter I apply discourse analysis to reveal hidden meanings or subtle nuances in these writings, discussing how and why the identity of the “other” is sometimes downplayed or overemphasized in the narratives. My entry points for this analysis are texts dealing with the specific case of Armenian artist Sarkis Zabunyan, as well as a number of Kurdish artists and some women artists, who emerge in art-historical narratives as “others” produced within and sometimes in opposition to the nation, creating tensions between the West and the East, men and women, straight and gay, the self and the other, centre and periphery. The Dominance of the Ottoman Identity

After the gradual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923 on an approximate but smaller territory, connecting lands called Eastern Thrace and Anatolia, as well as the continents of Europe and Asia. The founding document was the Treaty of Lausanne, which drew the borders of the Republic of Turkey and established its sovereignty.1 The constitution of modern Turkey was already in progress. In the early nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire had begun to evolve from a theocracy that was basically concerned with systems of army, education, law, and administration into a state based on modern principles. The Ottoman Reform Movement, called Tanzimat, was initiated in 1839. But despite attempts to dissolve the absolute monarchy, both the abolishment of that power and the reform of the government had to wait until the foundation of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, or the Parliament, in 1920.

“Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives

The Parliament signified the representation of all the people of the newly founded Republic – the nation – through elected members. Interestingly, the concept of the nation had existed also during the Ottoman Empire. The term Millet, deriving from Arabic and literally meaning “nation,” was used in Ottoman state terminology to designate different religious groups that had been living under the Empire since the eighteenth century. Besides the Muslim millet, Rum2 (Greek-Orthodox), Jewish, and Armenian (Gregorian) Millets were the main groups. The Empire inscribed the term into official policy as part of the Reform Movement in 1839, issuing laws to protect the rights of each non-Muslim millet. As Dimitrios Stamatopoulos puts it, in the Ottoman legal system the term means “the construction of an internal hierarchy of ethniclinguistic groupings,”3 providing some privileges to each group. However, neither privileges and recognition nor the political and social power that the millets had acquired, meant the imminent emergence of a “nation” in the way we understand this word today. Every person living under Ottoman rule was considered a subject of the Empire; thus, they were identified as Ottoman in general, and particularized as “Ottoman Turkish” or “Ottoman Armenian,” to give just two examples. However, in the majority of history books published in Turkish or Ottoman Turkish since the turn of the twentieth century, all the people living during the Ottoman Empire have been categorized as “Ottomans,” and the term – intentionally or unintentionally – usually refers to Ottoman Turks, ignoring the differences of identity. In my opinion, especially today, authors’ preference for using this term solely arises in part from the tendency to see the Ottoman Empire as a unified body of millets, and in part from a desire for convenience, to avoid the trouble of looking into the origins of the people in question. Depending on the identity of the author, this avoidance strategy may also relate to a hegemonic positioning of self-identity. In the field of art history, the same negligence generally reigns. Academic or survey books rely on the term “Ottoman” as an umbrella to describe all the artists who lived during the Ottoman period. I would say that the strategy persists in regard to the use of the term “Turkish,” and even today hundreds of art history books that speak about works that are not necessarily all by Turkish artists continue to line bookshelves. A recent example of such a sweeping use of the term “Turkish” sheds light on this controversy: a book by Mehmet Zeki Kuşoğlu entitled Silver in Turkish Art (Türk Sanatı’nda Gümüş), published in Turkish language in 2014 by the Department of Cultural and Social Affairs of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. This book recounts the history of the silverworks craft practised in Anatolia throughout the centuries. The journalist Lora Sarı of the Armenian daily paper Agos interviewed Kuşoğlu, a professor

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of fine arts at Marmara University in Istanbul, and asked him why he had excluded the names of all the Armenian master craftsmen from his book. He responded that he had not meant to point at any ethnicity and asserted that all artworks created within the territory of Anatolia must be called “Turkish.” When Sarı insisted on the fact that Armenian master craftsmen had existed in Anatolia long before the Turkish people arrived there, Kuşoğlu angrily replied: “We cannot possibly know who was who at that time; they could be Armenian to you, Kurdish to Kurdish brothers, Turkish to me!”4

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The Nation-state Discourse and “Turkishness”

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The transformation from being a subject to being a citizen came along with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey and the simultaneous attempts to establish the modern nation-state. As Immanuel Wallerstein stresses: “nation-states have played a double role to create national cultures. Advocating for cultural diversity worldwide and enforcing cultural uniformity within the nation made them the most powerful and the most schizophrenic cultural force in the modern world.”5 As if to illustrate Wallerstein’s argument, Turkey has followed these principles of being a modern nation-state. In addition to cultural uniformity, the aim of becoming ethnically united and uniform has played an important role in the process. In 1923 Turkey had to formally recognize the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish people as “minorities” under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, but refused to include “non-Turkish” Muslims such as Kurds and Arabs. However, as the 2011 report of the Minority Rights Group International states: “Turkey evolved a new state ideology to create a modern state on European lines, based on a single secular national identity. It insisted that all Muslims in the republic were Turkish regardless of ethnic origin.”6 The same report further asserts that the main minority groups in Turkey can be categorized under three headings: ethnicity (Caucasians, Yezidis, Laz, Roma, Kurds, Turks); language (Arabic, Kurdish, Laz, Turkish); and religion (Armenian, Assyrian, or Rûm Christianity, Alevism, Islam, and Judaism). Thus, only the groups described as religious minorities were formally acknowledged in the treaty. Whether formally recognized or not, the “minorities” in the Republic of Turkey have suffered greatly as a consequence of numerous bitter events in the country’s history. The concept of “Turkishness” can thus be seen to derive from a nationalist discourse imposed on the society over the years. The disciplines of history and art history have perpetuated this discourse throughout the twentieth century, constructing the dominant narratives around it. As Eric Hobsbawm observes, “the nationalist version of national histories consists of anachronism, omission, decontextualization, and in extreme cases, lies.”7 Hence, while the

nation-state of Turkey makes use of history as a means to construct its national identity, omission becomes a primary and conventional tool for both historians and art historians. The Excusable Identity: Armenian8

“Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives

A case in point from the field of the modern art history of Turkey dates back to the early 1980s. In an article published in 1982, the eminent art critic of the day Sezer Tansuğ tells the history of “Turkish” painting from 1820 to 1920. Tansuğ states that, in that era, “in addition to Turkish artists, who graduated from the military school, foreign artists and minority artists (such as Çıracıyan) were also active.”9 The author seemingly breaks with the nationalist discourse of overlooking difference. He does not group the minority artists under “Turkish,” but sets them all apart: as “foreign and minority artists.” He fails, however, to acknowledge the true identity of the specific minority artist he mentions, who is Armenian painter David Çıraciyan (1839–1907). Even today, the term “minority” carries pejorative connotations in everyday Turkish, as it refers to someone who has a different identity than the dominant Turkish one – the “Other.” In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha argues for a constant negotiation of identities, which in his view are produced performatively. Instead of emphasizing binary oppositions, such as those between Western and Eastern countries, men and women, or the self and the other, he suggests that we should “focus more on the faultlines themselves, on border situations and thresholds as the sites where identities are performed and contested.”10 As Bhabha puts it: “The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.”11 By emphasizing difference from the perspective of the dominant narrative and presenting it as an opposition between the majority and the minority, or by viewing “minorities” as a homogenous and holistic group, key narrators of art history in Turkey see the nationalist totalities only, rather than singularities. Not surprisingly, in 1991 the same author, Sezer Tansuğ, published a short essay constituting clear defamation of the works and the personality of the Armenian artist Sarkis Zabunyan (b. 1938), known as “Sarkis.” The previous year, one of Sarkis’s works had been exhibited at the 44th Venice Biennale, in the Armenian Catholic monastery on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni near Venice, where the artist also had his studio. As an installation that interpretively illustrates Sarkis’s studio on the Krutenau Street in Strasbourg that he used between 1982 and 1990, this work has been recreated in many other

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2.1  Sarkis Zabunyan, My Room on Krutenau Street, l’Ancienne Douane de Strasbourg, 1989. Courtesy

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of the artist.

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exhibitions, including in Strasbourg in 1989 and in Bonn in 1995. It gives the audience an imaginary glimpse into the tiny “den” of the artist (Fig. 2.1) – imaginary because it does not actually reconstruct the studio but represents the foundations of the artist’s oeuvre. In this work, the recurrent elements in Sarkis’s work, such as frames and canvases, piles of audiotape, and metal bars in different sizes and shapes, are arranged inside a real or a constructed small room. Understood as a small window opened to the mind of the artist, this work could be interpreted in many ways. What the audiotapes contain is unknown and the frames are blank, and in every installation the relationship of the room with the outside world changes. Sometimes, as a reconstructed space in the middle of a gallery, the room is totally cut off from it, but sometimes the room is closely related to its surroundings, being recreated in an actual room and exposed to daylight. The sculpturesque piles of audiotape are placed in an orderly fashion and the frames lean or hang on the walls surround the room. Given that they are shiny thin plastic pieces, the piles might look like anything, depending on one’s point of view: trash, wires, or pieces of fabric, with each leading to a different interpretation. Leaving aside any formal resemblances, I believe that just the thought of the unknown information that these audiotapes might contain and the possibility of images that may appear in the future on the blank canvases are enough for the viewer to get the gist. These audio and visual spaces created inside the room, which is another space, provide endless possibilities for cultural, industrial, or historical links and open the work up to deeper layers of interpretation. The version that was exhibited in 1990 in Venice had a direct relationship with the outside world, as it was placed in a light room in the Armenian monastery. The location of the work allows me to reflect on the relation of art and

“Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives

religion throughout history, or what is imaginary or real, considering that it is basically a work of art representing a studio recreated in a real but symbolic space. However, the fact that the work was displayed in an Armenian monastery disturbed the art critic Tansuğ. In his essay, he accused Sarkis of working against the national interests of Turkey by saying that he did “Armenian pro­ paganda” and was “the secret enemy of Turkish artists,” because he “block[ed] off their way to success.”12 Moreover, Tansuğ argued that Sarkis’s installation referred to the events that happened in 1915 during “the Great Crime,”13 and was “a call for attention to get support from the Jewish diaspora, by reminding them of fascist German militarism, making the delusional claim that Turks did the same to Armenians.”14 Sarkis was born and raised in Istanbul and left Turkey in 1964. He moved to Paris, France, with his wife, where he still lives and works. Sarkis’s daughter, the art historian Elvan Zabunyan, has written a comprehensive book on the artist in which she states: “the decision to leave for Paris was taken by my parents in accord with the logic of their education in French schools and the artistic and intellectual place occupied by the French capital in those days.”15 In 1963, before he went to Paris, Sarkis had his gouaches exhibited at the Germano-Turkish Cultural Center in Ankara, Turkey. Beginning in 1970, he was exhibiting his works in major galleries and museums such as the Centre Pompidou and Galerie Sonnabend in Paris, the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, Galleria la Salita in Rome, Musée Antoine Wiertz in Brussels, Nordjyallands Kunst­museum in Aalborg, the Russian Museum in Leningrad, and at important art events such as the Biennale of Sydney (1982), Documenta (1982), Les Magiciens de la Terre (Paris, 1989), and the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (1991), leading up to the Venice Biennale installation of 1990. Sarkis had also taken part in exhibitions in Istanbul since the 1980s. I believe that, because of the artist’s success, the art community in Istanbul considered him one of the important figures of the European scene. In a 1999 article in which he describes contemporary art in Turkey of the 1980s and 1990s, art historian Aykut Köksal stresses Sarkis’s importance as a widely recognized artist in contemporary art circles in Paris. Köksal also describes the artist as “one of the major actors in the contemporary Turkish art scene.”16 Interestingly, Köksal marks Sarkis as, pace Bhabha, one of “the many as one,”17 even though the artist had not really been a part of the art scene in Turkey during the period in question. Sarkis seems to have approved this idea, as later reported in an interview: “even though [he has] lived for 40 years in France, [he] still feels [he’s] from here [Turkey].”18 Tansuğ’s irrational reaction towards Sarkis emerged under such conditions, even as the art community in Istanbul was trying to conform to the standards of art produced in Western Europe and North America. A collective reaction came

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from eighty-nine Turkish artists and intellectuals of the time, condemning the critic’s racist and nationalist discourse in an open letter that they published in various local art journals of the time. A couple of days later, Sarkis was interviewed by the journalist Celal Üster of the Turkish daily paper Cumhuriyet. At that point, the artist stated that the installation “did not have any political implications at all,” and “no one visiting the exhibition had such ideas.”19 Tansuğ’s racist reaction could be the reason why art critics, scholars, and historians commenting on Sarkis’s oeuvre since, do not tend much to discuss its possible political implications in relation to issues of identity or history. Zabunyan underscores the fact that Sarkis’s oeuvre does not stress his Armenian identity but, “while leaving a very large part to genealogy and identities, Turkish, Armenian and European, to the political history of those identities and the memory that was born from it, has rarely favoured a personal narrative.”20 Similarly, art historian Erden Kosova says that, “although Sar­kis intensively employed motives related to the traumatic effects of war and violence perpetrated on masses, he never specified them by naming geographies or ethnicities.”21 Zabunyan confirms this view by pointing out that the Vietnam War/Resistance War against America (1955–75) and the massive civil unrest of May 1968 in France were among the events that had an impact on his works. Hence, I believe his works create a space between identities, nations, and places – an “interstitial perspective” in line with Bhabha’s concept, within which he opposes the linear narrative of the nation and “holism for culture and community.”22 However, most art historians have clearly failed or chosen not to acknowledge this hybridity in their narratives, which tend to conceal Sarkis’s ethnicreligious Armenian identity, dissolving it into the dominant Turkish identity. Acknowledging this hybridity or the political implications in his work might have led them to inform the readers about his identity, and to eventually exclude him from “Turkish” art history. In 2007 a large-scale exhibition, Modern and Beyond: 1950–2000, held at Santral Museum in Istanbul, showcased fifty years of modern and contemporary art in Turkey. Curator Fulya Erdemci’s catalogue essay, “Breaking the Spell, Re-Routing,” describes Sarkis as “one of the pioneers of contemporary art in Turkey [who] was living in Paris, [yet] paved the way for the expansion [of art in Turkey] in the 1980s, and the following leap in the 1990s.”23 Before tackling the way in which Erdemci speaks of Sarkis and his work, I would like to draw attention to her specific, preferential use of one term, which becomes critically significant in this context. It is fascinating to see how Erdemci adjusts her language and discourse according to the dominant modern and contemporary art history narratives respectively. After summing up the history of high modernism in art in Turkey

“Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives

(1950–70), she introduces a whole new vocabulary into the text when she moves on to the history of the contemporary art in Turkey (1970–2000s). At this point, Erdemci changes her discourse, from that of the modern, following mostly the French art-historical tradition, to that of the contemporary, as it has emerged from post-structuralist theory and aligned itself with Anglo-American art history practice. A very important linguistic shift occurs when the author calls the art produced between 1950 and 1970 “modern Turkish art,” whereas she calls art produced after 1970 the “contemporary art of Turkey.” While this may at first sounds like an arbitrary choice and ordering of words, I would argue that Erdemci makes these moves deliberately. In this way, Erdemci stops defining the later art production in terms of Turkish identity, and she enables the narrative to take a different turn, marking the territory (Turkey) as the constitutive indicator. Thus, any artist who happens to be from Turkey fits into Erdemci’s contemporary art narrative, regardless of ethnic or religious identity. Even though it seems to be an inclusive approach, we should examine the results in the case of one specific artist, Sarkis, before drawing any conclusions. In the essay Erdemci writes: “[The] critique of dominant cultures and civi­ lisations and their imperialist politics, appears as the leitmotif in [Sarkis’s] various exhibitions. In his 1986 Çaylak Street work he includes his father’s shoes in the installation, writing Kriegsschatz [spoils of war] on them. The materialisation of history and its turning into narrative through the sifting of individual memory holds a significant place in his work. In this autobiographical work, he refers to his vision of the future as much as his personal history.”24 With these words, Erdemci implicitly refers to events such as the “Great Crime” and the pogrom of 6–7 September 1955 in Istanbul, which left indelible marks on the memories and individual histories of Armenian and Greek people living in Turkey. The Istanbul Pogrom was an organized mob attack and looting, primarily targeting Greek people (but also affecting other minorities such as Georgians and Armenians) living in Istanbul. The attacks were later proved to have been planned by the Turkish government. The events were triggered by the false news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, Greece, had been bombed. After the pogrom, many Greek, Georgian, Jewish, and Armenian families left Istanbul for good. While Erdemci refers to “personal history,” the connection between Sarkis and the Istanbul Pogrom remains vague. Readers have to conduct their own research on the artist or simply guess, since Sarkis’s Armenian identity goes unmentioned. The curator’s seemingly inclusive approach of using territory as an indicator fails at this point, because the narrative still overlooks difference, allowing readers to miss the point about which “dominant cultures and civilizations” Sarkis is referring to when he writes “spoils of war”25 on his father’s shoes, and leaving them more likely to be unaffected by the specific histories

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2.2  Sarkis Zabunyan, kriegsschatz Boots, 1983. Courtesy of the artist.

and memories the artist draws on in his oeuvre (Fig. 2.2). As Ottoman art history is (and was) being Turkified, the ethnic-religious identities in the art histories of Turkey go through the same process, apparently for the benefit of the nation, “Turkishness,” and “Turkish art history.”

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The 1990s and Kurdish Identity

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The problem of omitting or failing to name the ethnic-religious identities in the dominant art history narratives takes a different turn during the 1990s and 2000s. Armenian identity still goes mostly unmentioned in the literature, but at this point another ethnic-linguistic identity, the Kurdish one, gradually surfaces. In a 2008 article, the sociologist and curator Ali Akay describes the situation in the 1990s: “Turkish artists started to manifest their singularities. Becoming neither universal nor local these artists attempted to insert themselves and their own problems into art. This was because of political issues that were associated with the politics of Kurdish identity. Kurdish artists began to be recognized in an art scene that formed after 1995 and dissolved later in the 2000s.”26 Later in the article, Akay stresses the importance of Kurdish artists in the Istanbul art scene. This approach stands in sharp contrast to an article he wrote earlier, in 1999, which is noteworthy for his having failed to do so when analyzing the character of the “Genç Etkinlik” (“Youth Action”) exhibitions held in Istanbul in three consecutive years starting in 1995.

“Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives

In this earlier article, Akay pays particular attention to the then emerging Kurdish artist, Halil Altındere (b. 1971), whose work was displayed in the 1995 show: “[Altındere] discusses de-identification in his work (Fig. 2.3). While do­ ing so, the artist does not deny his own culture and identity, but attempts to engage them with the id issued by the State.” The author adds that the place of birth on the id of the artist is “Sürgücü, a village in the city of Mardin, which was evacuated by the State in the 1990s.”27 Akay does not explain this controversial piece of history at length, nor does he reveal the ethnic-linguistic Kurdish identity of the artist Altındere. Silence on these matters means that the Kurdish “culture and identity” that Altındere himself refers to in his work and the “singularity” of the artist that the critic praises remain essentially unknown. In the mid-1990s, more than fifteen hundred rural settlements in southeast Turkey, including the village of Sürgücü, were evacuated as a part of the military campaign against guerrilla forces, leading to a displacement of Kurdish peasants.28 Even though Turkey agreed to Article 39 of the Treaty of Lausanne, which stated: “no restrictions shall be imposed on the free use by any Turkish national of any language in private intercourse, in commerce, religion, in the press, or in publications of any kind or at public meetings,”29 it had ignored this commitment, especially with regard to the Kurdish language. The historian Çağlar Keyder describes what the Turkish have done to the Kurdish people as a “brutal cultural suppression combined with economic underdevelopment,” and states that “martial law was continued in the Kurdish provinces after 1983, accompanied by mass arrests, torture and forcible relocation of villagers.”30 By the end of the 1990s this war seemed to be coming to an end with new democracy policies issued by the government. It was no doubt helpful that in 1999 the European Union decided to extend candidate status to Turkey, demanding reforms such as the recognition of the cultural rights of the Kurdish people. In 2004 the government enacted a series of constitutional and legislative reforms granting ethnic and linguistic minorities certain language rights, but avoiding any explicit reference that could suggest an official recognition of minority identities.31 Despite this omission, beginning in the 1990s and strengthening through the 2000s, Turkey saw Kurdish and Armenian identities bursting into the public domain.32 Reflections of these political developments could be seen in art production almost immediately, and some scholars recognized the trend. Art historian Zeynep Yasa-Yaman stresses that the “1990s was a period of radical change and transformation in culture and art … During this period Turkey adapted to the globalization of art with demands for museums and the process of biennials.”33 Other authors, such as Akay, were reluctant to acknowledge these new differences in art history discourse right away. I would argue that their hesitation was a consequence partly of the political suppression and a related fear that had been felt by each and every member of the

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2.3  Halil Altındere, Dance with Taboos ii , 1997.

c-prints. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and pilot Gallery (Istanbul).

country, and partly of their reluctance to oppose the dominant nationalist art history narrative, thereby risking not being published. Both censorship and self-censorship came into play. As recently as 2008, art historian Levent Çalıkoğlu described the 1990s and the art production of that period, keeping to the “tradition” of overlooking specific ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities. He speaks of the decade in the following terms:

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[It underwent] a process of testing identity and difference in spaces where power makes itself visible. Sub-identity, ethnical origin, and corporeal differences were questioned within the practice of democracy in terms of place and meaning. Doubts about self-identity, the grounds on which identities could define themselves, demands of existence and formation of the “other” were expressed. Ways in which politics of identity/difference had been perceived and kept under control by the state were discussed. Works produced during this period often attempted to expose the relationship between subject and power, and reactions of the subject to power.34

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Other authors, such as Erdemci, immediately began to highlight Kurdish identity in their narratives. Returning to Erdemci’s catalogue essay on Al­tın­ dere, in which she speaks of the same work as described by Akay, we see that, in contrast to Akay, Erdemci states the facts about Sürgücü as they relate to the

“Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives

artist’s work: “Altındere plays with the id photos which are required to be in a certain format, and breaks the rigid rules of the id card: thus he both de-identifies identity, and critiques the state politics towards Kurdish people living under Turkish identity. Furthermore, the Sürgücü village, which is recorded as the artist’s place of birth in his id , is one of the 3000 Kurdish villages evacuated by the state.”35 It is worth considering that the same author, Erdemci, in the same narrative, places specific emphasis on Kurdish identity, whereas she does not mention Sarkis’s Armenian identity at all. Although Turkey was entering a more democratic chapter during the 2000s, especially concerning minority rights, Altındere’s criticism of Turkish nationalism was seen by a nationalist faction of the Turkish art community as a betrayal. Altındere has also been charged many times in court in connection with his own works or exhibitions he curated, which allegedly insulted the Turkish army, the Turkish nation, or the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. As Kosova states: “This sort of reaction was considered to be manifestations of an anti-cosmopolitanism that would evaporate in time, but after 2005 they emerged as a major challenge. The nationalist paranoia triggered in the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq started to target intellectuals who criticised official politics related to Kurdish ethnicity and Armenian genocide.”36 Kosova here refers to the specific case of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who in 2005 faced charges after commenting in the Swiss daily paper Tages Anzeiger on the deaths of Kurdish and Armenian people at the hands of Ottoman Empire forces, charges that were later dropped.

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2.4  S¸ener Özmen (with Erkan Özgen), Road to Tate Modern, 2003. Video, 7’13” (still). Courtesy of the artists and pilot Gallery

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(Istanbul).

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In her essay for Modern and Beyond, Erdemci discusses the Kurdish artist Şener Özmen’s (b. 1971) collaborative video with another Kurdish artist Erkan Özgen (b. 1971), The Road to Tate Modern (Fig. 2.4). The video tells the ironic story of the two artists going on horseback and donkey from the mountains of Diyarbakır, which is a city in the southeast of Turkey, to Tate Modern in London. This short film features the two artists riding in formal attire, sometimes breaking the journey and washing up in a creek, and sometimes asking for directions to Tate Modern, to random people they come across in the middle of the rocky mountains. Since the film is in Kurdish with English subtitles, Erdemci aligns it with multiculturalism discourse. She furthermore points out that the work criticizes the fact that the global-local relation in the art world is still a “periphery-periphery one.”37 I interpret this to mean that Kurdish artists not only discuss local political matters, but they also analyze the global issues of the art world in their works. Besides the fact that they create powerful socially and politically engaged works, the conjunction of political and cultural forces also places them right at the centre of both contemporary art practice and art history writing in Turkey. I would therefore claim that, unlike the neglect of Armenian identity, political conjunction might be one of the reasons for an overemphasis on Kurdish identities in art historiography since 2000. The art-historical discourse appears to benefit from the political conjuncture, the international recognition, the emergence of Kurdish artists as a group that is

“Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives

properly acknowledged, and most likely by their religion, Islam, which is the religion of the putative “majority” of people who bear “Turkish” identity. “The Western world expects Turkish artists to think about their own locality and local political issues,” observes the sociologist Akay. “Turkish artists are expected to produce works that tackle paradigms such as Kurdish identity, Islam, anti-West, Westernisation, and nationalism, instead of international issues such as the Israel-Palestine debate.”38 I would claim that this observation also fits what Istanbul, the art centre of Turkey, expects to see in the works of Kurdish artists. The first works by Özmen, Altındere, and Özgen to gain recognition in Istanbul’s art scene focused on problems emerging from their own locality or the controversial political history that touched them because of their own ethnic-linguistic identity. Their focus helped to raise the voices of the “Others” who were in comparable situations. Similarly, the art world tends to pay more attention to the works that speak of the local issues of the “Others.” A recent example is the Museum of Modern Art (M oMA ) in New York’s purchase of a work of Altındere entitled Wonderland (2013). The work, which looks like a music video, features a Romani hip-hop band called Tahribad-ı İsyan from Istanbul’s Sulukule neighbourhood, where mostly the Roma people, another ethnic minority in Turkey, tend to live. The band’s song is a criticism of the gentrification process that was going on in this neighbourhood. The way Altındere touches upon the local urban problems makes me think that art production is still governed by the “Western world,” in this case by M oMA , as Akay suggests. However, the fact that he makes the Roma people and their problems visible through this work indicates a new direction. As an ethnic minority in Turkey, the Roma people are documented as the minority group most discriminated against and oppressed in Turkey.39 The Sulukule neighbourhood was one of the places where great numbers of Roma lived for a long time until they were displaced for the purpose of regeneration from 2009 onward. With his ethniclinguistic Kurdish identity, Altındere represents the “Others” of the dominant Turkish identity, even though his work tackles questions that other ethnic minorities, such as Romani, face in Turkey. I argue that in this particular work the Roma people become Altındere’s Others; that is, Others of the Others, in a sense. The concept of the modern nation-state that was established by the foundation of the Republic of Turkey resulted in a nationalist perspective within art-historical scholarship. Modern principles and nationalism were also the basis for the structure of the “Western” model of art history writing; that is, “Modernist Art History” defined as a Eurocentric model that privileges artists who are Western, male, white, and Christian.40 Early art historiography in Turkey was under the influence of this art-historical model, as many other geographies were. Even though, from the 1970s on, art history in Turkey had

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O PPO SI TE

2.5  View of Füsun Onur’s retrospective exhibition Through the Looking Glass, 2014. Courtesy of Arter,

begun to depart from the influence of this dominant model and its affiliated discourse, some aspects appear to have remained unchanged and continued to replicate this model. I believe that is also why, in the art histories of Turkey, whereas the Christian Armenian identity is downplayed, the Muslim Kurdish one is stressed, leading to a narrative that is “Turkish,” Muslim, and, as I discuss in the next section, patriarchal.

Istanbul. Photo by Murat

C eren Ö z p ınar

Germen.

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Extraordinary Women Artists

Constructions of the identities of women artists in art-historical narratives of Turkey present another troubled subject. While women artists are included in modern and contemporary art history survey books, the founders, the pioneers, or the most successful artists usually tend to be men. Between 1976 and 1980, the artist and art historian Nurullah Berk wrote a series of eleven articles for the then emergent national art journal called Sanat Dünyamız. Entitled “The Representatives of Our Contemporary Art” (“Çağdaş Sanatımızın Temsilcileri”), the series describes the works and lives of eleven modern artists, starting from the turn of twentieth century. As an early attempt to define “the representatives” of modern or contemporary art in Turkey, the series, unsurprisingly, nominates only male artists. In 1982 the cultural historian Taha Toros started another series in the same journal, which she called “Our First Women Artists” (“İlk Kadın Ressamlarımız”). Grouping ten women artists in five articles, Toros accords them the privilege of being “the firsts” of art in Turkey. However, since the earlier series included no women artists, Toros’s ten were roped off from the representatives of contemporary art in Turkey, and hence from becoming part of the modern art canon. The exclusion of women artists from the modern art canon continued for some time, and as late as 2011, when art historians attempted to write a modern art narrative exclusively about women artists, they followed the pattern of Modernist Art History, in which progress is demonstrated through a sequence of stories that moves forward according to stylistic changes, and heroes – in this case, heroines – emerge one after another.41 The art historian Ayla Ödekan constructs such a narrative in an essay written for the catalogue of Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey, an exhibition held in 2011 at the Istanbul Modern Museum of Art (Istanbul Modern). Displaying works from the late nineteenth century up to the present day, the show was the first large-scale exhibition at Istanbul Modern dedicated to women artists. Until İnci Eviner’s exhibition in 2016, Istanbul Modern had included women artists in thematic group exhibitions, but had reserved retrospective exhibitions for male artists only.42 Considering these circumstances, Dream and Reality was a very important show, which was awaited by the Istanbul art community with great anticipation.

O PPO SI TE

2.6  Hale Tenger, Being a Turk (Between 26˚ West–45˚ East Meridians and 36˚ South–42˚ North Parallels), 2002. Fabric dolls, audio by Serdar Ates¸er. Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem collection. Courtesy of Galeri Nev

C eren Ö z p ınar

Istanbul and the artist.

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Unfortunately, the catalogue essays for the exhibition fell short of expectations, specifically in terms of constructing the identity of the woman artist. I would like to draw particular attention to one aspect of Ödekan’s essay, which is the way in which the author, consciously or unconsciously, arranges the women artists in a hierarchical order according to their lifestyles. The women artists Mihri Müşfik (1886–1954) and Hale Asaf (1905–1938) especially are cast as heroines for their extraordinary lives.43 As Ödekan explains, during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, these two women travelled to Europe to get an education, did not marry, and continued their professions. Their similar life experiences, considered unorthodox for their time, overshadow their oeuvres in Ödekan’s narrative. Neither artistic achievement nor professional success defines the status of heroine. Lifestyle dominates this narrative; the more women artists rebel and lead “unconventional” lives, the more they become heroines. Hence Ödekan presents them as protagonists in the story of Westernized, elite, creative Ottoman women. On one hand, what Öde­kan does in this essay might be read as a clear challenge to patriarchal art history – the way in which it challenges its moral values and suggests a novel gender construction. On the other hand, the way Ödekan canonizes these women artists only replicates the model of patriarchal hegemonic art history. As a “counter-canon,” this sequence of “best women artists” works for women against women, marginalizing them according to the standards of the author and of Modernist art history for being or living as an artist. In contemporary art narratives of Turkey, however, art historians have chosen to follow a different path in relation to the place of women artists. In 2007 the art historian Erden Kosova and the curator Vasıf Kortun published online a conversation they had recorded a few years earlier. As they discuss the issues, the origins, and the works of contemporary art in Turkey, in a conversation entitled “Ofsayt Ama Gol” (“Offside but Goal”), they agree that “women artists essentially form the backbone of contemporary Turkish art.”44 They also reveal that they have been working on a genealogy of artists, in which Füsun Onur (b. 1938) (Fig. 2.5) and Sarkis appear as the grandmother and the grandfather of contemporary art in Turkey, and three prominent women artists of the 1980s and 1990s, Gülsün Karamustafa (b. 1946), Ayşe Erkmen (b. 1949), and Hale Tenger (b. 1960) (Fig. 2.6), follow them as “the mothers.” Even though this pattern does not exactly refer to a father figure, and two parties in conversation explicitly say that they have grouped the artists in a context where the father does not exist, they implicitly refer to its inexistence as an existence. In 2011 art historian Ahu Antmen, in her essay for Dream and Reality, also adopted a genealogical structure for contemporary art in Turkey. Antmen attempts to define the founders of contemporary art and marks the women artists Füsun Onur, Gülsün Karamustafa (Fig. 2.7), and Ayşe Erkmen as the

pioneers of contemporary art in Turkey. Yet, above those three women artists, Antmen places a male artist, Altan Gürman (1935–1976), as the founding figure of contemporary art in Turkey. Based on interviews that Antmen did with these women artists, she describes the 1970s and 1980s as an era when 59

2.7  Gülsün Karamustafa, An Ordinary Love, 1984. Textile collage, 190 × 245 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Rampa Istanbul. Photo credit:

chroma (André Carvalho and Tug˘ba C eren Ö z p ınar

Karatop).

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they looked for inspiration, and they found it in Gürman’s politically loaded unorthodox works.45 However, as the author claims to construct a feminist narrative for contemporary art in Turkey, I believe she fails to escape from conforming to the masculine “extraordinary” creativity of the dominant narrative, as do others. The artist Halil Altındere and the writer Süreyyya Evren present both Altan Gürman and Sarkis as “the two fathers of contemporary art in Turkey,”46 in the book they co-edited, User’s Manual: Contemporary Art in Turkey 1986–2006, failing to mention any women artists as founding figures. Nevertheless, suggesting Sarkis as one of the “fathers,” or “founding figures,” or even as an inspirational/important artist for contemporary art in Turkey, has its positive effect, as it also means emancipating the narrative from “Turkishness.” The major debate in the art historiography in Turkey has followed the lines of whether art produced in Turkey, the “East,” has been in delay, compared

to the products of Western Europe and North America, the “West.” Most art historians have answered that question with a strong “yes” in their narratives. The minority, on the other hand, have defended a modernism unique to Turkey. In the age of contemporary art, art historians are inclined to claim that “Turkish” art has reached the same “level” of production as the rest of the global art world, given that the same concepts, concerns, materials, and media have been used by artists from Turkey, who have also started to get more international recognition. Though I see these views as highly debatable, particularly for the way they present works of art in a hierarchical order and always construct a binary opposition between the East and the West, enforcing the idea of progress, I still believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel. In the ways that the images of Sarkis, Kurdish artists, and women artists have been reflected in more recent narratives, I see my own concerns about the representation of art from Turkey. Art historians speak to an international audience, as do artists. As art from Turkey becomes more visible on global circuits, the question of how the “world” sees this art becomes more important. While the narrative of art history in Turkey bears certain similarities to Modernist Art History, certain differences are also at play: the selective Turkification of Armenian identity; heightened attention to Kurdish artists for political reasons; the canonization of women artists through association with their male counterparts. The concerns that I have raised in this chapter about the representation of “Otherness” will not be resolved by the transformation of Sarkis, Kurdish artists, and women artists into idealized, heroic exemplars. A more representative writing of art history in Turkey would challenge structures of “Otherness,” while seeking hybridities. By refusing to be about an uncontaminated, pure “Turkish” art, as the nationalist discourse imposes, art history in Turkey can and will find a way out of this dilemma.

I would like to thank Professor Griselda Pollock of the University of Leeds for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper, which I wrote during my research fellowship in 2014 at Leeds, thanks to the grant I received from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (tübitak ). This chapter derives from conference presentations given at New Voices: Art and Decolonisation, Leeds, 2013; On Likeness and Difference (amca ), New York, 2013; Writing, Curating, Making Feminist Art Histories, Edinburgh, 2014, as well as the aah , London, 2014. I am grateful to the audiences at these conferences for their comments. Last but not least, I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Martha Langford, who provided me with extensive notes and wonderful suggestions.

“Differences” in “Turkish” Art-Historical Narratives

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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3

Race, Irishness, and Art History Margaret Clarke’s Bath Time at the Crèche (1925), Motherhood, and the Matter of Whiteness Fio nn a B arb e r

A

rt in the Irish Free State of the 1920s was a varied affair. In the work of Paul Henry (1877–1958), Charles Lamb (1893–1964) or Seán Keating (1889–1977), peasants and fishermen populated a rural idyll somewhere to the west of the River Shannon, their paintings helping to articulate in visual form the ideologies of the newly independent state that rejected its British past in favour of the search for an authentic Irishness. There were also artists whose work was closer to the interests of European avant-gardes. Jack Yeats’s (1871– 1957) depictions of the experience of modernity in 1920s Dublin have often been compared to the work of expressionist painters such as Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), while Mainie Jellett (1897–1944) and Evie Hone’s (1894–1955) encounters with cubism in the studio of Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) early in the decade forged a link between Irish art practice and the development of Parisian modernism. Yet despite their very evident differences, one significant feature that characterizes the work of all these artists, including Jellett’s before she discovered abstraction, is the whiteness of the figures that appear within them. Whether peasantry, urban Dubliners, or studio nudes, pale-pigmented men and women populate all these works by Irish artists. This is not dissimilar to the situation until recently perceived to exist in Britain in the 1920s.1 Irish art of the same period would appear to represent yet another situation where the whiteness of its human subjects is so self-evident as to become invisible. Which is why it comes as a surprise to discover a painting by a woman artist from 1920s Ireland that, intentionally or otherwise, calls the pervasiveness of whiteness into question, just as it also destabilizes readings of gendered identity. Margaret Clarke’s (1888–1961) Bath Time at the Crèche (1925) depicts a group of young children accompanied by two women, one of whom, in the

3.1  Margaret Clarke (Irish, 1888–1961), Bath Time at the Crèche, c. 1925. Oil on canvas, 127 × 101 cm unframed. National Gallery of Ireland © The Artist’s Estate. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.

Race, Irishness, and Art History

foreground, cradles a black baby on her knee (Fig. 3.1). All the other figures depicted in this work are white. The meanings of Clarke’s painting remain elusive, and it is regarded as a curious anomaly insofar as it even registers within accounts of art of the period. The small amount of published writing on the picture, in the catalogue of the National Gallery of Ireland, does not satisfactorily explain the presence of the black infant much beyond noting that, “intriguingly,” the seated figure is “depicted bathing a small black-skinned child.”2 This was apparently due to Clarke’s possession of a carved head of a black infant, which she “chose to include … to vary the composition.” And while the text of the catalogue discusses the tension between the painting’s spatial

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indeterminacy due to its “lack of background detail” and the perspectival rendering of its figures, this analysis seems to be missing the point in a fairly fundamental way. There is a much more obvious tension in this painting beyond its compositional inconsistencies; the fact of the child’s blackness among an otherwise white group makes this inescapable. The story of the artist’s possession of an exotic studio prop usefully describes the process whereby the motif of the black infant emerged in this painting, but it fails to explain the disturbing effects of this inclusion and instead forecloses further enquiry. However, rather than relegate this work to the status of an interesting exception to the norm of Irish painting at the time, I suggest that there may be alternative readings that could affect our understanding of how art could function as a means of visualizing both race and gender in the early Irish Free State.

F ionna B arber

Interrogating Awkward Paintings: Some Suggestions

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The ability to ask pertinent questions of “awkward” paintings rather than uneasily turning the page in the catalogue comes about at least in part through our receptiveness to a range of changed circumstances and the ways in which we are prepared to engage with these. One of the most relevant factors for this project of re-reading Clarke’s painting is that Ireland is no longer a white monoculture. A significant effect of the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger years, mid-1990s onward, was large-scale immigration into Ireland. Race and ethnicity have become particularly visible, if still in a highly contested manner. The problematization of issues such as immigration, asylum, and citizenship has figured in the work of contemporary artists such as Mick O’Kelly (b. 1954) or the photographer Anthony Haughey (b. 1963). The contemporary political visibility of a non-white or other immigrant Irish population beginning to register in aspects of a critically engaged art practice only serves to highlight an earlier history of reductive ethnicities, the still pervasive hangover from the formation of the independent Irish state. History is what we make of it; the past can – and needs to be – re-envisaged so that other narratives can emerge to challenge the dominant account. Lorraine Ryan argues for example, that the advent of multiculturalism and challenges to the state’s authority in the 1990s have begun to undermine a sense of national memory as focused around specifically “Irish” experience, to the extent that this has become a “calcified memory narrative.” As Ryan continues, the Irish memory narrative is an outmoded form, on the verge of being replaced by a “new cultural memory paradigm, which will reconstrue past experiences with present meaning and incorporate changes into the pre-existing memory framework.”3 I am suggesting something similar in relation to histories of Irish art, a shift in focus so that other subjects, previously overlooked or

Race, Irishness, and Art History

considered marginal, might acquire a significance that in turn changes how we think of the wider historical context. In many other locations beyond Ireland, multiculturalism has become more firmly established over a longer period of time; the acknowledgment of this phenomenon in art practice is in turn reiterated by the efforts of curators and theorists with a critical focus on the art of black and non-Western artists. Yet, as Kobena Mercer asks, why is it that “‘the contemporary’ so often take[s] precedence over ‘the historical’ as the privileged focus for examining matters of difference and identity?”4 Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Mercer’s edited collection, undermines diffusionist models of art innovation and influence. Rather than privileging a view of modernist ideas as originating solely in Paris and other metropolitan centres and then trickling outward to cultural and (frequently) colonial peripheries, these essays have a common concern with modernist art in specific locations as generated through dynamic cultural engagement. That these were themselves the products of cross-fertilization and migration is a theme also developed by Martin Beattie’s account elsewhere in this current volume in his critical analysis of the relationship between the formation of modernism in both India and Germany during the 1920s.5 Cosmopolitan Modernisms, in turn, suggests innovative readings of cultural difference, mobility, and art practice that also enable a reconsideration of the relationships between modernism and modernity in India, Cuba, or New York of the 1950s, for example. How, then, might a similar approach be applicable to the relationship between art and wider social and cultural formations in Ireland during the 1920s – the period immediately after decolonization? The answer to this is not readily apparent; Mercer’s collection focuses on the engagement with factors of mobility and influence by modernist artists rather than those whose work does not necessarily engage with languages of formal experimentation and innovation. There are aspects of Margaret Clarke’s Bath Time at the Crèche that sit uncomfortably within the modernist model, specifically in her use of codes of naturalism – the painting’s use of modelling and gesture in the depiction of its figures being the most obvious. Nevertheless, reading the representation of race within this painting as a productive cultural encounter (rather than an awkward anomaly) can open up important questions about the history of Irish art of this period, enabling us to begin to construct a reading of the relationships between art practice and lived experience in the Free State as having been more complex and diverse than might be otherwise considered. This concern with what it might mean to be modern in Ireland during the 1920s is also found in Nicholas Allen’s groundbreaking study Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (2009).6 In this book Allen reconfigures the situation after the Irish Civil War (1922–23) that followed independence as having initially

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been fluid and indeterminate.7 This interpretation in turn supports his reading of the modernism of key figures of the period – James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats – as having emerged in relation to conditions of cultural and political instability. With this reconfiguration, Allen also reconstructs a sense of Dublin’s cultural heterogeneity and hybridity, depicting it as a place where small magazines and cabaret could flourish, a place very different from the restrictive and repressive conditions that followed the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act.8 He notes, for example, a degree of similarity between the cultural conditions in Dublin and Berlin, within which cabaret could emerge “as an art form representative of the upset energies of a society.”9 Exciting though this is, Allen’s study still focuses on the work of the four male canonical figures of Irish modernism. Although women artists, writers, and activists are part of the interwoven complexities of his reconstruction of this period they still remain marginal, and, unsurprisingly, race also remains absent as a factor in the formation of the dominant discourses of the Free State. In beginning to ask questions about race in relation to Clarke’s painting, it is not just a matter of thinking about the black baby alone – where a child like this might have come from in mid-1920s Dublin, or how it arrived in this situation, being cared for by a young white woman. His or her presence in a picture otherwise full of white children and their guardians, and the relationship between them, is what generates the unease that adheres to this painting. Although she holds the infant on her knee, the nursemaid does not connect with the child’s rapt gaze, looking instead beyond toward an older boy sitting on the floor beside them. One effect of this is to disrupt any impression of a maternal (or quasi-maternal) relationship between the two; yet it also foregrounds racial difference, not just with regard to blackness but with whiteness as well. This problematic relationship between race and gender is one to which I will return. As Richard Dyer has observed, in writing about this often overlooked aspect of the construction of cultural identity, “the invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white (which is to say dominant) discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity.”10 Whiteness is regarded as the cultural norm, rather than its meanings being socially constructed, just as blackness is perceived. Yet these meanings are far from equal, but are bound up with wider networks of political, economic, and social power. The signification of blackness is produced in relation to the dominance of whiteness as secured by a history of slavery and colonialism, just as Edward Said argued that the meanings of “the Orient” were a function of European fantasies as a means of ensuring the continuance of political domination.11 So the situation becomes a dichotomy: the meanings articulated for blackness imply the tacit assumption that whiteness will comprise whatever blackness is not. In common with Dyer, however, this chapter is engaged in a process of “making whiteness strange,”12 a significant

part of which is to move beyond any apparently universal attributes of racial difference to ask how these meanings are secured and maintained in specific situations. The question then becomes: what is it that blackness suggests in Clarke’s Bath Time at the Crèche in relation to the wider formation of interlocking discourses of race, ethnicity, and nation in the early years of the Irish Free State – and what does this also say about the role of whiteness in this process? Yet we also need to consider the context in which this raced encounter is staged within the painting. The central dyad of white woman and black baby is placed within a more extensive scene of childcare – of women’s paid labour in looking after small children daily. This in itself is a highly unusual subject in Western art. Although innumerable depictions of mothers and their children abound, from the Christian iconography of the Virgin and Child onward, other representations of childcare are less common. They also tend to be by women artists, as in Berthe Morisot’s (1841–1895) painting of her young daughter, Julie and Her Nurse (1880). Outside the domestic sphere, and at least equally uncommon, there are also paintings that show a schoolmistress with a group of children, such as Elizabeth Adela Forbes’s (1859–1912) School Is Out (1889). In her depiction of socialized pre-school childcare, Clarke appears to be experimenting with a new iconography, one that both expands and challenges the range of existing representations of women. Yet this painting also situates her practice in relation to other women artists who have challenged existing iconographies with the production of images that correspond more accurately to lived female experience. Margaret Clarke: Painting, Motherhood, and Citizenship

Race, Irishness, and Art History

Margaret Crilly, as she was before her marriage to the renowned stained glass artist Harry Clarke, was born in Newry in County Down, one of six children. Her father was a hackler in the flax trade, which, although a highly skilled part of the process of turning the raw material into linen, was still a working-class occupation. Margaret Crilly initially studied art at night school at Newry Municipal Technical School, where she passed the South Kensington Board of Art Education exam with first class results. In 1907 she won the first of several scholarships to the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (dmsa ) that enabled her to continue her studies full time while also working toward the Art Teacher’s Certificate. As a talented, ambitious student, Crilly was part of a group that also included Seán Keating, Beatrice Elvery (later Lady Beatrice Glenavy) (1881–1930) and Harry Clarke (1889–1931), whom she later married in 1914. All members of this group were to play a significant role in the development of Irish art both before and after independence. They were also taught by William Orpen

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(1878–1931), who, although born in Dublin, had an established reputation as a portraitist of British society. He returned to Dublin regularly to teach at the School of Art, travelling there from his home in London between 1902 and 1914. Orpen was responsible for introducing an emphasis on the naturalistic depiction of the human figure, based on the observation of the life model in the studio; prior to his arrival in Dublin, teaching at the School of Art had been based mainly on the use of classical casts. After winning both bronze and silver medals in British Board of Education art competitions, Crilly became Orpen’s studio assistant in 1911. Her responsibilities included running the life classes in Orpen’s absence; her rigorous training and commitment to life study underpinned her practice throughout her career. The staged naturalism of Bath Time at the Crèche, similar to the work of Keating, clearly identifies the artist as a former student of Orpen. As is the case with so many women artists, Margaret Clarke’s reputation has been overshadowed historically by the recognition given to her husband’s stained glass designs and book illustrations, including an acclaimed edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1923). Despite the restrictions arising from the perception of her role as a wife and mother, Clarke was independently ambitious. In 1927, after a ten-year campaign on her part, she was finally admitted to the Royal Hibernian Academy (rha ) as a full academician, only the second woman to achieve this in just over a century of the rha’s existence. Despite this degree of prejudice and discrimination within Ireland’s most prestigious art institution, Clarke was widely recognized by her contemporaries for her abilities and insights as a portrait painter. In 1928 she was commissioned to paint a portrait of Éamon de Valera, whose star was once more in ascendancy after the 1927 election successes of the political party he had co-founded, Fianna Fáil. De Valera had been the first president of the Irish Republic between 1921 and 1922, and would ultimately become president again in 1959. Clarke’s sitters also included Molly, the nanny at the vicarage next door to the Clarke’s family home in Dublin’s North Circular Road, where they moved in 1922. Portraits were an important source of her income, becoming particularly necessary after her husband’s early death from tuberculosis in 1931, when she also became director of the Harry Clarke Studio. In 1924, in his enthusiastic review of Margaret Clarke’s first solo exhibition at the Dublin Painters Society, Thomas Bodkin observed that, although “before her marriage Mrs Clarke was well known in Ireland as one of the most brilliant of that remarkable group of students which Sir William Orpen fostered … since her marriage the cares of a growing household restricted Mrs Clarke’s artistic production, but she has lately found leisure to return again to her studio.”13 By this time Clarke was also the mother of three young children, Ann, Michael, and David, all of whom appear in Bath Time at the Crèche as part of the larger

Race, Irishness, and Art History

group; Clarke’s nephew Terry was also the model for the small boy seated on the floor in the right foreground. What Bodkin seems to have considered as a middle-class woman’s “leisure to return again to the studio,” and which we might see instead as the work of making art, was itself assisted by domestic arrangements that greatly supported her ability to paint. As with Morisot’s practice some forty years previously, the children’s nursemaid, Julia O’Brien (who also managed the household), was additionally Clarke’s main model. During the early 1920s, Margaret Clarke and the children, accompanied by Julia, spent part of the summer at the coast near Dublin. According to Carla Briggs, Bath Time at the Crèche was “inspired by a holiday at Laytown,” a small seaside village north of the city.14 Both of the adult figures were posed by Julia; in the background, chivvying along the children, she is informally dressed in contemporary clothes, including a pair of bedroom slippers. In the foreground, by comparison, seated with the black baby on her knee, she wears a long red gown, a feature that also helps to separate her from the rest of the figures. It looks as if this dress was part of Clarke’s studio wardrobe; both it and Julia reappear in another painting from two years later, Ascension (1927). Her employment of Julia, whose work included both childcare and modelling, enabled Margaret Clarke to produce a group of paintings in the mid- to late 1920s that were very different from the portraits that provided her income. Bath Time at the Crèche is one of a group of “subject” pictures that question normative expectations of women. Others include two paintings that engage with female religious experience, Ascension (also known as Mary Magdalen) (1927) and The Nuns’ Hour (c. 1929) depicting a group of religious women huddled together on a Wicklow beach. Still others of her “subject” pictures reinterpret literary and dramatic themes, as in Ophelia (1926) or Strindbergian (1927), a response to August Strindberg’s play The Ghost Sonata, a version of which had been staged in Dublin in 1925.15 In the difficult financial circumstances of the years following the Civil War of 1922–23, the art market in Dublin was very conservative; the challenging nature of Clarke’s “subject” paintings made it difficult for her to find buyers. In any case the premature death of Harry Clarke meant that financial concerns and the maintenance of the stained glass studios became paramount for Margaret in the subsequent decade. In a discussion of Clarke’s Strindbergian, Briggs has noted a concern with themes of “sadness, suffering and isolation” in her work.16 The surprisingly self-absorbed parade of children in Bath Time at the Crèche reinforces the uneasy relationship between woman and child in the foreground, framed in an otherwise blank pictorial space. The lack of “reference to the specific location from which the painting is derived or to a particular event that might have inspired it” leads Briggs to suggest that this is a work concerned more with “different memories, of different times and events all simultaneously recalled

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and translated into a somewhat enigmatic image which has no sense of a given time or place.”17 This may well be the case, but there are other readings of the relationship between women and children with significance in terms of Ireland’s recent political developments. The personification of Ireland as female, and as a mother in particular, played an important role in the cultural nationalism that accompanied the struggle for political independence from the early years of the century. In 1902, W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s co-authored play Cathleen ni Houlihan, a crone in a long enveloping cloak transforms herself into a young and beautiful queen once a young man accepts her challenge to make a “blood sacrifice” for the love of his country. Five years later, Beatrice Elvery’s painting Éire (1907), although based on medieval imagery of the Madonna Enthroned, also drew heavily on the iconography of Cathleen ni Houlihan. Shrouded in a green cloak, this is a stern and forbidding representation of motherhood in which the Christ Child’s outstretched arm invites a further sacrificial devotion18 (Fig. 3.2). The iconography of the Madonna and Child as symbolizing Ireland had significant currency in the visual culture of early twentieth-century Irish revolutionary politics; there is, for instance, a version painted on a cell wall in Kilmainham Gaol by the artist and activist Grace Gifford (1888–1955), imprisoned in 1921–22. As a nationalist, Margaret Clarke would have been well aware of the prevalence of this imagery. However, when she painted a version of this theme it was with a significant difference. Mary and Brigid (1917) was posed by her sister and niece in peasant costume in front of a barren landscape suggestive of the Aran Islands off the western coast – the region most strongly associated with resistance to British rule (Fig. 3.3). Mary and Brigid was exhibited at the rha the year after the Easter Rising, a “charged ideological context” that would have helped determine its meaning.19 In this allegorical portrait the strength and determination in Mary’s assertive pose is echoed by her baby daughter whose gaze, like that of her mother, directly confronts the viewer, a dynamic engagement poles apart from the sinister morbidity in Elvery’s imagery. If, as Ingrid Jenkner suggests, Mary and Brigid is also “a prophecy of the emergence of the Irish Republic,”20 this is one in which actual women will play a significant and active role. So we can begin to get a sense of Margaret Clarke as an artist willing to subvert and challenge existing representational conventions of femininity, especially those that might have contemporary significance. And indeed, the state’s redefinition of the role of women during the 1920s and 1930s was a priority. During the struggle for independence, women had played active parts, whether as fighters or in other roles; the artist Estella Solomons (1882– 1968), for example, was a member of Cumann na mBan (the women’s brigade of the ira ) and also used her studio to shelter men on the run. With the

3.2  Beatrice Elvery, Eire [or Virgin and Child], 1907. Oil on canvas, 91 × 71 cm. Private collection. Photo: David Davison.

3.3  Margaret Clarke, Mary and Brigid, 1917. Oil on canvas, 107 × 83 cm. Collection of Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Canada; Gift of John J.C. Shelly, 1966 © The Artist’s Estate. Photo:

msvu Art Gallery.

Race, Irishness, and Art History

formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, however, the strong, assertive identity for women envisaged in Clarke’s Mary and Brigid was increasingly eroded as the state began explicitly aligning itself with the Catholic Church. Women were expected to play their part in the new state as wives and mothers; this became the justification for legislation that increasingly confined them to the domestic sphere. As Maryann Gialanella Valiulis observes, women’s “citizenship, their participation in the State, would be directly related to the home.”21 This prescription extended also to the expectation that it was a mother’s social responsibility to look after her children within the home, effectively removing

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herself from participation in the workforce.22 The restrictions on women included the control of sexuality; mothers of illegitimate children – and their offspring – were perceived as symbolizing “the perceived moral degeneration of the nation.”23 And since this was the case, how much more moral opprobrium might there be for the threat of miscegenation? I think this context may be taking us a bit closer to understanding the complexity of meanings that Clarke’s painting opens onto. At a point early in the life of the Irish Free State, when women’s roles were increasingly restricted once more to the nuclear family, part of the radicalism of Bath Time at the Crèche is that it suggests a view of more socialized childcare – the relationships between women and children beyond the immediate family unit. There is little in the painting that suggests a maternal role; the blankness of both women’s facial expressions also suggests a disturbing lack of emotional involvement with the children in their care. The suggestion that this painting represents a scenario beyond the confines of the nuclear family is reinforced by another smaller work by Clarke that looks like a study for the foreground pair in Bath Time at the Crèche; tellingly entitled The Foundling (c. 1925), this study depicts Julia once more holding the black child (Fig. 3.4). Here however, rather than looking distracted, she is staring intently (hostilely?) at the baby who, in this painting, appears more doll-like than in the larger version. And if, in turn, the baby in Bath Time at the Crèche is indeed a foundling, this would also help to explain another area of disjuncture within the paintings – the evident age gap between the infant and the other children. Life was precarious for illegitimate children in Ireland during the 1920s. As is becoming increasingly apparent, unmarried mothers with their babies were hidden from view within the institutional confines of the Magdalene Laundries.24 Meanwhile, virtually the only hope for abandoned children would have been to be raised in other religious-run institutions; as Maria Luddy, points out, they ran a much greater chance of dying in infancy.25 And although we have no information about this, the chances of this happening to an abandoned black child – a foundling – in the uniform whiteness of 1920s Ireland must have been so much greater.

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Blackness in a White State

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In unpicking the meanings that surround Margaret Clarke’s painting Bath Time at the Crèche, I want to suggest that art practice could be capable of imagining a different set of social relations from the more familiar role of the visual in constructing specific identities – gendered and ethnicized – during the early years of the Free State. The earlier discussion of cosmopolitanism has foregrounded a sense of culture as hybrid, as created through the relationships of different communities in an urban environment; this is an integral part of the modern.

3.4 Margaret Clarke, rha, The Foundling, c. 1925. Oil on board, 37.5 × 30.0 cm. Presented by Lennox Robinson Collection: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork © The Artist’s Estate.

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However Ireland’s modernity is generally acknowledged to be constituted by a movement out of Ireland, rather than being shaped by cultural movements inward, other than the British colonial presence. The Irish diaspora to England, the United States, and Canada or Australia has been a fundamental feature of Irish historical experience from the mass exoduses of the Famine in the 1840s onward. And, as is evident from the work of Fintan Cullen, issues of diaspora have also registered in art practice both from this time and earlier, often by artists who themselves had had to leave Ireland.26 This focus on the experience of diaspora and exile is a highly emotive agent in the formation of Irish nationhood – but it also has the effect of obscuring any sense of the role that might also have been played by, for example, black or Jewish immigration into Ireland during the same period. The trade routes of colonialism may also have enabled the arrival of African, West Indian, or black British seamen or labourers, although the numbers were always extremely small in comparison to the rest of the population. It is very difficult to ascertain how many black people were living in Ireland in the early twentieth century, as the census recorded place of birth rather than race. By the time of the 1911 census, however, out of a total population of over three million, 3,805 Jews were recorded as living in Ireland, mainly as a result of Russian pogroms in the previous century.27 It is reasonable to assume that the black population of Ireland at this point was much smaller. Yet as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White observed, “what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central.”28 Joyce’s Ulysses would have been unimaginable without the central presence of Leopold Bloom, and in turn the complex relationships between Irishness and Jewishness played out within the book’s narrative. And although blackness appeared to be peripheral to the formation of Irish ethnicity post-independence, this figure of the black child is not only compositionally central to Clarke’s painting, but symbolically central also. As Mercer has suggested, a re-examination of the past can lead to a “rather different story” where “identities are constantly modifying one another in the very moment of their mutual encounter.”29 Certainly this was the case in early twentieth-century Paris, where the vast number of artists from all over the world provided the conditions for a cosmopolitan consciousness enmeshed with the development of modernism. The situation is somewhat different in Ireland, where Clarke’s Bath Time at the Crèche stands out as an isolated instance in art practice where issues of race flicker briefly into view as anything other than an assertion of specifically (white) Irish identity. Although there is a history of black or mixed race people in Ireland earlier than the late twentieth century, it is difficult to trace and at best partial. Stories of Protestant Irish missionaries returning from Africa with black children remain anecdotal, locked within family memory rather than written into

history. However, one area where black people are visible in early twentiethcentury Ireland is in reports of vaudeville entertainers. The Irish Times of 3 January 1922 reported the beginning of a second week of Mr Alf E. Dodd’s Dixie Players’ run at Dublin’s Tivoli Theatre, noting that “there were crowded ‘houses’ at both performances, and the ‘darkies’ provided the greatest amusement and enjoyment.”30 It is not clear from this notice, however, whether it refers to black entertainers or white performers in blackface. Either would have been possible, but what does emerge clearly is the visibility of blackness in a specific context within the public sphere of early 1920s Dublin. The presence of the black entertainer also emerges in an early twentiethcentury cartoon by Jack Yeats. Would You Sooner Arrive at 4.00pm? (Fig. 3.5), originally published with its companion piece, Or Arrive at 10.00am? in Punch on 3 January 1912, depicts the dilemma faced by a hapless theatregoer hoping to secure an unreserved seat in the pit at the front of the auditorium: whether to join an already large, static queue in the pouring rain shortly before the doors open, or to wait shivering in the building’s doorway for hours on end, but in the certain knowledge of success. In the first cartoon the queue is being worked by a pair of buskers, whether together or separately. In the distance a white musician plays a xylophone to the unresponsive rain-sodden crowd, while in the foreground a black entertainer dressed in striped blazer and panama, his banjo under his arm, importunes the latest arrival for money. His minstrel clothes, comically inappropriate for the dreadful weather, help to reinforce the pictorial distance between this figure and the crowd; in white

3.5  Jack B. Yeats (Irish, 1871–1957), Would You Sooner Arrive at 4pm? 1912. Published 3 January 1912. Ink on board, 19.7 × 27.9 cm unframed. National Gallery of Ireland © Estate of Jack B. Yeats. All rights reserved, dacs , 2016. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.

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Ireland blackness becomes an oddity – and more than this, the embodiment of a mild threat, as the banjo player’s “victim” shrinks from his outstretched hand. This depiction is very different from the situation at an earlier moment when blackness becomes visible in Ireland. In his important essay “Africans in Eighteenth-Century Ireland” (2002), W.A. Hart argues on the basis of newspaper reports and parish records that black people were regarded as “common to meet with.”31 He also suggests that in the latter half of the eighteenth century a conservative estimate would be approximately one thousand black people living right across Ireland,32 their presence being recorded from Malin Head in the North to Kinsale in the South, with the majority concentrated in Dublin. Most would have been domestic servants, many of them slaves. One place where this registers is in group portraits of aristocratic families in both Britain and Ireland. Angelica Kauffman’s (1741–1807) portrait of the Ely family (1771), for example, painted during her stay at their home in Rathfarnham Castle outside Dublin, includes the figure of a small black pageboy in Oriental dress.33 During the first part of the nineteenth century even these small traces of racial difference seem to disappear from the painting of Irish subjects. The presence of black people themselves, however, continued to register in other areas, particularly those of entertainment and theatre. The African-American Ira Aldridge, the first black actor to play Othello, performed at the Theatre Royal in Dublin between 1829 and 1831;34 a few years later, in 1836, the first blackface minstrel act was also recorded at the same venue.35 The role of the black entertainer within the public sphere in Ireland undoubtedly helped to pave the way for the visit of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was himself a former slave. Between August 1845 and the end of the following year, Douglass spoke to meetings of both abolitionists and supporters of temperance; the abolition movement was at this time gaining some success in Ireland, and Douglass was generally well received.36 Within visual art, however, the representation of blackness was more pro­ blematic on the rare occasions when it did actually surface. Unsurprisingly, depictions of black figures in works by Irish artists before Clarke’s painting were very rare, beyond their appearance in Orientalist pictures such as those by Aloysius O’Kelly (1853–1936), dating from his visit to North Africa in the early 1880s. However there are a couple of examples that can help to establish a context for Clarke’s painting: significantly, both were important features of the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland by 1907 when she arrived in Dublin. In Joshua Reynolds’s (1723–1792) intimate portrait of the Temple Family (1780–82), a black pageboy – literally – supports the composition, steadying the legs of the young son as he stands on a table to be painted by his artist mother (Fig. 3.6). The family residence of George and Mary Grenville, the Earl and Countess Temple, was at Stowe in Buckinghamshire rather

3.6  Joshua Reynolds (English, 1723–1792), The Temple Family, 1780–82. Oil on canvas, 241 × 183 cm unframed. National Gallery of Ireland; Milltown Gift, 1902. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.

Race, Irishness, and Art History

than Ireland; the painting was sold in 1849 and eventually acquired by the Anglo-Irish Countess of Milltown. In 1901 the portrait was part of the Milltown Gift left to the National Gallery of Ireland, a huge bequest that included over two hundred paintings in addition to numerous other artifacts, and so large that a new extension of the gallery had to be constructed to display it. The Milltown Wing was completed in 1903, four years before Clarke arrived in Dublin to take up her scholarship at the School of Art. Here, however, we need to introduce a degree of speculation. For a young ambitious art student visiting the National Gallery, the visibility of another woman in Reynolds’s

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3.7  William Mulready (Irish, 1786–1863), The Toy-seller, 1857–63. Oil on canvas, 112 × 142 cm unframed. National Gallery of Ireland. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.

3.8  Thomas Augustus O’Shaughnessy, book cover design for Seumas MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race, New York: Devin-Adair / The Irish Publishing Co., 1921.

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Photo: John Brannigan.

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group portrait who is herself depicted as an artist would have stood out over the relatively subsidiary figure of the black page. Bath Time at the Crèche does not itself make overt reference to the role of women as artists, yet that role is extrapolated from Clarke’s own domestic relationships in the inclusion of her own children and nephew, in addition to the double role of Julia. And significantly, the presence of a black child, marginal in The Temple Family, has now become central in the later composition. There is a further painting in the gallery’s collection that offers more troubling readings of race. The Toy-seller (1857–62), the second version on this theme by the Irish-born painter William Mulready (1786–1863), was purchased by the gallery in 1891 (Fig. 3.7). In a rural English setting, the painting depicts a black pedlar offering a rattle to a small white child held by his mother. This is a picture full of psychological tension – what Kathryn Moore Heleniak has termed the “elemental fear” of the child recoiling from the pedlar’s gesture and his steady gaze.37 The black figure as represented by Mulready implies “something more specific about growing prejudice and reviving racist fears in nineteenth-century England, fear which accompanied society’s nobler humanitarian instincts.”38 The Toy-seller thus becomes firmly identifiable with British xenophobia and the anxieties of Empire mid-century. And, as Lynda Nead points out in her incisive analysis of the painting, Mulready was working

at a time when “categories of class, gender and race were changing and being contested.”39 The meanings of such works identified with the politics of colonialism were already problematic to a degree as a result of Mulready’s Irish origins. This would have become even more complex when viewed in Dublin during the process of Ireland’s decolonization in the early years of the twentieth century. There are clear differences between the paintings, yet one area of correspondence between the composition of both The Toy-seller and Bath Time at the Crèche is the centrality of the steady gaze emanating from both black figures, the adult pedlar in Mulready’s painting and small child in Clarke’s – and, moreover, its lack of reciprocity, which in both instances stages the knowledge of racial difference as uneasy and troublesome. So what did race mean in Ireland at the time that Clarke was working on this picture, if blackness was marginalized? Although generally invoked as a means of distinguishing Irishness from Englishness, the discourse of race in the formation of the Irish Free State could also be contradictory. As John Brannigan points out, Michael Collins, for instance, regarded ancient Irish civilization as a means of legitimizing the existence of the Free State, in addition to believing that its future maintenance would be dependent on a notion of racial purity.40 Collins, however, was also involved in fighting for the establishment of a democracy that would, theoretically at least, allow some degree of difference. The visual expression of this view of continuity was epitomized by the cover of Seumas MacManus’s anthology of popular history, The Story of the Irish Race (1921), designed by the stained glass artist Thomas O’Shaughnessy (Fig. 3.8).41 This image depicts an ancient Celt and contemporary scholar gazing into each other’s eyes as the sun rises over a distant dolmen; aimed primarily at Irish Americans, the cover’s stirring vision of the megalithic homosocial makes it clear that Irishness is firmly identified with white masculinity. In this context, and with a history of representations that did not suggest otherwise, it is difficult to see how blackness could be represented as anything other than a problem. Conclusion Race, Irishness, and Art History

I stated earlier that there is little in Bath Time at the Crèche that suggests a maternal role; however, this is not quite accurate. There is another possibility, one that would have been even more subversive for the Irish Free State than the imagined space of socialized childcare. As Lynda Nead also suggests in her reading of Mulready’s The Toy-seller, “visual imagination,” the role of speculation, “may be a tool of historical analysis that opens out possible meanings that would otherwise escape the context of scrutiny and historical reconstruction.”42 Toward the end of her essay, Nead posits different scenarios

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for the relationships between the three figures in Mulready’s composition; a different choice of pigmentation for the white child, for example, could actually be the basis for a painting that depicted a mixed race family, with a black father and white mother.43 However, not only does this alternative scenario involve a subversion of a recognized typology within Victorian genre painting but it goes much further. It involves an unthinkable visualization of what Nead earlier identified as the deepest fear in white Victorian society – that of miscegenation.44 In common with Nead, I want to end by stressing the importance of visual imagination as a methodological practice, specifically in its application to a constructive re-imagining of the constellation of meanings that a painting such as Margaret Clarke’s Bathtime at the Crèche could inhabit at the time of its production. Could it be that the figure in the foreground posed by Julia, the woman in the red dress, is in fact the mother of the black child she cradles? In actuality the darkness of the infant’s skin tone makes it unlikely, but the point is that this picture asks us to imagine that such a maternal relationship might be possible. With no wedding ring, and costumed as a scarlet woman, she then becomes the very embodiment of moral degeneration. We are on uncharted territory, hampered by one of the many silences that have surrounded issues of women’s sexuality in Ireland throughout the twentieth century and on into the present. The spectre of illegitimacy, compounded here by miscegenation represented a profound threat to the moral values at the heart of the Irish Free State; the attempts to maintain these values have had profound consequences for subsequent generations of Irish women. Yet what cannot be said can sometimes be painted. In its radical positioning of both race and femininity, Bath Time at the Crèche in turn opens up troubling questions about our understanding of this period of Irish history that have yet to be fully addressed, but whose significance can still be felt today.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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An earlier version of this essay was presented as a paper for the sofeir conference “Unheard Voices: Telling Stories of Empowerment,” Paris, 19–21 March 2015, and I am grateful to everyone who responded with such valuable suggestions on this occasion. Thanks also to Elaine Sissons, Nini Rodgers, Shirley MacWilliam, Anne Hodge at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dawn Williams at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, and Mary O’Doherty, librarian at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, for all their help, and to Martha Langford for her perseverance.

Problems of Translation Lyonel Feininger and Gaganendranath Tagore at the Fourteenth Annual Indian Society of Oriental Art Exhibition, Kolkata, India M arti n B e at t ie

M

any features of the art-historical landscape of the early twentieth century are undergoing change. Perhaps foremost among such change is the recognition that the paradigm of Paris – both as birthplace of modernism and as headquarters of the artistic avant-garde – has yielded to an awareness of differences among artistic groupings across Europe and, as I argue, throughout the rest of the world.1 More broadly and fundamentally, the very concept of “influence” on which the acceptance of this Parisian paradigm traded has been contested, perhaps overturned, by the recognition that it fundamentally misrepresents the dissemination of cultural initiatives and energies.2 In short, the place of European art as the originator of all critical innovations in modernity is no longer tenable. Cubism, Modernity, and Asian Art

European cubism provided a language for artists to describe and demonstrate the profound aesthetic, philosophical, and societal changes that took place in the early twentieth century. It emerged during an era of widespread dissatisfaction with positivism, materialism, and determinism. Scientific models were increasingly seen to be insufficient to explain the complexity of the human condition, and the writings and theories of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche challenged notions of absolutist truth, emphasizing the relativity of knowledge.3 Through visual abstraction and spatial disorientation, cubists grappled in their art with contemporary ideas about modernity, society, and the nature of reality.

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European cubism had a contested relationship with primitivism, against which the characteristics of modernity were formed and clarified.4 Although many Western artists around the end of the nineteenth century saw primitive cultures as rich sources of aesthetic ideas, these ideas were often considered in terms of their supposed opposition to an apparently sophisticated, industrializing West. In particular, cubists embraced a deeply romanticized view of Africa as the embodiment of a pre-civilized state, representing “authentic” primitive expressions of thought and feeling. It is important to highlight that the concept of the primitive in this period was largely the product of the historical experience of the West and more specifically an ideological construct of French colonial conquest, rather than any meaningful attempt to engage with other cultures. If the period between 1906 and 1914 is seen as the key moment for the development of cubism in Europe, it is not possible to date cubism in Asia in the same manner. As Ahmad Mashadi argues, “its presence in Asia was spread across different geographical locations concomitant to the diffusion of ideas through varying points of access, education and evolving national histories.”5 Mashadi claims that Asian artists “recoded” cubism in the local context, and he details the ways in which cubism in Asia was often narrative-driven, making direct reference to religion, myth, and folklore, as compared with the more abstract and anti-representational strain dominating European cubism in the early twentieth century.6 Recently scholars have built on discussions of the representation of non-Western arts, subjects that have achieved a certain prominence in postcolonial art history and anthropology.7 Given the development of cubism in relation to a number of discourses, David Cottington’s revisionist historiography of European cubism, Cubism and Its Histories (2004), advocates a heteronomous approach to history that emphasizes the development of an independent set of origins and purposes that are interconnected. Mashadi has extended this notion, arguing that cubism must be re-seen as a world movement, with each artwork making a unique negotiation between the syntax of cubism and individual artists’ political, social, and intellectual contexts. This approach opens up a more critical view of history as disjointed, discontinuous, partial, and unequal, allowing for contradiction and biases that may still be present today.

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A Space of Translation

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I argue that these ideas coincide with Mikhail Bakhtin’s and, more recently, Homi K. Bhabha’s notions on hybridity, and it is within this structure of thought that I develop this chapter.8 The concept of hybridity offers a framework that emphasizes an open-ended analysis of cultural interactions and also

Problems of Translation

develops a theory of translation. Bhabha’s work encourages us to hold a set of ideas diverse in character, created through incommensurable, not simply multiple positions, remaining contested, challenged, and divided. I press the case of hybridity because the process of translation is, in Bhabha’s view, one of the most compelling tasks for the cultural critic in the modern world today. Bhabha’s hybridity theory points to a double process – first a fusing or merging of cultures, and second but more important, a dialogic dynamic interaction in which certain elements of dominant cultures are appropriated by the colonized, and re-articulated in subversive ways. Bhabha defines his notion of hybridity as “a problematic of colonial representation … that reverses the effects of the colonial disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority.”9 The interaction between two cultures proceeds with the illusion of transferable forms and transparent knowledge, but leads increasingly into resistant, opaque, and dissonant exchanges. It is in this tension that a “third space” emerges, a position that, Bhabha believes, “overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity.”10 Bhabha’s concept of “translation” is instrumental in developing a deconstructive critique of colonialism, and draws largely on the work of Walter Benjamin.11 For Benjamin, the language of the original is always changing, but so is that of the translation; any translation is therefore only provisional. Translations are independent although inseparable from the original, issuing, according to Benjamin, “not so much from its life as from its afterlife.”12 Meaning seldom translates with pristine integrity, and often requires a degree of improvisation. “The task of the translator,” Benjamin adds, “consists in finding that intended effect [intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.’13 For Bhabha, in the words of Paul de Man, translation “puts the original in motion to decanonise it, giving it the movement of fragmentation, a wandering of errance, a kind of permanent exile.”14 Although Bhabha and Benjamin were writing about literary translations, their work raises many questions that lie at the core of translation in art; for example, what effects do the transfer and translation of an art movement like cubism from one part of the world to another have on the “original” idea? By revealing alternative possibilities for cubism, does a work, through its own act of translation, subvert the “original”? Indeed, at what point does the language of cubism become something different? More fundamentally, is there anything that could be called “original cubism,” given its often-contested roots in other conceptual and geographical spaces? A common criticism of many studies in hybridity theory is their failure to ground themselves in the contexts of everyday practices. Neil Smith and Anne

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Godlewska suggest that many of the literary-based re-evaluations of colonialism are ambivalent about geographies – “more physical than imagined.”15 Aijaz Ahmad argues that hybridity fails to move beyond the ephemeral and the contingent, masking long-term social and political continuities and transformations.16 Such insights are a reminder that Bhabha’s notion of hybridity is at best problematic. Perhaps, as Doreen Massey intimates in what she refers to as a “progressive sense of place,” such a vision of hybridity would flourish only within a more evenly democratic terrain of power than that characterized at present.17

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The Fourteenth Annual Indian Society of Oriental Art (isoa ) Exhibition

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This chapter, then, aims to use Bhabha’s notions of hybridity and translation as a tool of cultural analysis for the cubist work of the Indian artist Ga­ga­nen­dra­ nath Tagore (1867–1938) and the German-American painter Lyonel Fein­ing­er (1871–1956), produced for the fourteenth annual Indian Society of Oriental Art exhibition, which opened in Kolkata, India, in December 1922. What is important to emphasize at this stage, and what I argue later in this chapter, is that the work of both artists emerged from this “space of translation,” separately, uniquely, and independently, albeit entangled and connectively, rather than Gaganendranath’s work being derived from Feininger’s or from some other form of European cubism, as has been so commonly claimed in the past. As Mitter states: “The widely held view that modern art beyond Europe and the United States is at best a derivative exercise reflects the implicit assertion of the ‘intellectual property rights’ of the West.”18 The exhibition’s position “in-between” early Bauhaus and Indian art histories has left it largely undocumented until recently.19 Partha Mitter sets it within the context of a global modernism that was “an active dialogic process of interaction between the original source and the recipient.”20 Kris Marjapra focuses on the Austrian art critic and teacher Stella Kramrisch’s pivotal role in the organization of the exhibition, claiming that it “exemplifies the central role of artistic internationalism … of the 1920s.”21 A recent exhibition at the Bauhaus Foundation, in Dessau, Germany, presented it as a “Laboratory of Transcultural Modernism.”22 I believe that the exhibition offers the possibility of interrogating other non-Western sites of modernity which emphasize its plurality.23 In 1921 Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the Bengali poet, visited Germany on a highly popular nationwide tour. He had become well known in Germany after winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, and the subsequent publication of his book of poems Gitangali. It seems that Rabindranath visited Weimar in May 1921. According to the local papers, a sixtieth-birthday

Problems of Translation

celebration for Rabindranath was held in the National Theatre on Sunday 27 May, although he was not present.24 It is assumed to have been his meeting with Johannes Itten (1888–1967) and Georg Muche (1895–1987), and their obvious interests in India, that initiated the idea for an exhibition. The only evidence of this possible encounter is an expressionist sketch that Itten made of Ra­bin­dra­nath in May 1921.25 The trip to Germany was also an opportunity for Rabindranath to fundraise for his own university, Visva Bharati (literally meaning “universal learning”) in Santiniketan.26 He invited scholars, professionals, and artists from the West to teach, research, and exchange ideas with Indian scholars from in and around Santini­ketan. Among the group of Western academics who taught at Santini­ ketan was Stella Kramrisch (1898–1993), who joined as a professor in early 1922, to lecture on Indian and Western art history. Kramrisch was at the University of Vienna between 1916 and 1919 at the same time that Itten was teaching in the city, and subsequently claimed to have met him there.27 Indeed it was Kramrisch who from Kolkata made the initial contact with Itten at the Bauhaus, in May 1922.28 Itten must have responded positively, and in a letter of 12 July 1922 from Kramrisch to Itten, she outlines the intention to open the exhibition on 1 October 1922. In late August, artworks from all the teachers at the Bauhaus were sent to Kolkata.29 However, negotiations over the level of customs duty to be paid on the artworks delayed their arrival in Kolkata until early December.30 The exhibition eventually opened on 23 December 1922. Little material evidence of the exhibition remains today. Samvaya Mansions, the building in which the exhibition was held, was demolished in the 1940s.31 Photographs of the exhibition are nowhere to be found. There were just two brief newspaper reviews, published in The Englishman and The Statesman on 15 December 1922, both of which offered little critique or reaction to the art on show.32 The isoa’ s own journal, Rupam, published a lengthy review of the exhibition.33 The City Archives in Weimar contain documents itemizing the artwork sent from the Bauhaus. Possibly the only remaining original exhibition catalogue is now in the Chughtai Museum in Lahore, Pakistan. From its contents we have a possibility of reformulating the exhibition. The exhibition catalogue was divided into two main sections that simply itemized the paintings.34 The first section, titled “Modern School of Painting – Bengal,” listed the artworks of over sixty Indian artists, who exhibited a total of 241 artworks. The artists included, among others: Gaganendranath Tagore, Aba­nin­dra­nath Tagore (1871–1951), Nandalal Bose (1882–1966), Sailen­dra­ nath Dey (1885–1971), Asit Haldar (1890–1964), Surendranath Kar (1892– 1970), Kshitindranath Mazumdar (1891–1975), Promode Kumar Chatterjee (1885–1979), Manindra Bhushan Gupta (1898–1968), Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1897–1975), and Sunayani Devi (1875–1962). The second section, with a

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total of 177 artworks, contained works by all but one of the artists from the Bauhaus; namely: Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Gerhard Marcks (1889– 1981), Georg Muche, Paul Klee (1879–1940), Lothar Schreyer (1886–1966), and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944).35 Two Bauhaus students, Margit Téry-Adler (1892–1977) and Sophie Körner (1886–c. 1942), also contributed work. The Indian artists are set down in the exhibition catalogue all together as a group, which was probably the way they appeared in the exhibition itself. Their work was organized in ones and twos but there was also some loose groupings of larger numbers of works by individual artists. It is difficult to see any rationale for the arrangement of paintings. They were not assembled in styles, or genres; nor were they from any particular art schools. Perhaps this was because the range and quantity of artworks was so diverse that it was impossible to identify key themes. Indeed approximately two-thirds of the Indian section is work by largely unknown and unpublished amateur painters, with paintings valued at a hundred Indian rupees or less. Probably for reasons of uniqueness, or for their significance as artists, some Indian artists, both well- and less-wellknown, had their work arranged in larger groupings. What is clear from the catalogue is the privileged place accorded the Bauhaus artists, all of whom were listed as individual artists in their own right. It is difficult to be conclusive about the curation of the exhibition. Was this arrangement of the show simply an artistic courtesy offered to the Bauhaus guests by the Indian artists at their annual art exhibition, or does it highlight the asymmetries in world art, where works rarely cross boundaries on the basis of full equality? Alternatively, could the dividing lines between the two groups of artists have been consciously cultivated to sustain the “nationalist” identity of the Bengal School? If Kramrisch played the major role in the organization of the exhibition, was she, in highlighting the individual Bau­haus artists, trying to show a new way forward for the Bengal School, which she herself said “had grown thin with sentiment and timid with lack of decision”?36 Although she was interested at the time in highlighting the common ground shared by these two groups of artists, and keen to promote European modernism in India, the set-up of the exhibition seemingly only served to reinforce the differences between the Bauhaus and Bengali art.

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Lyonel Feininger

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Lyonel Feininger was born in America and largely brought up in New York. In 1887 he left America to study, and in 1888, after a short period at the Hamburg Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts), became a student at the Berlin Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Between 1893 and 1907, Feininger worked as a cartoonist for the magazines Ulk (Fun), Lustige Blätter (The Funny Pages),

Problems of Translation

Le Témoin (The Witness), and the Chicago Sunday Tribune. Commenting on these early magazine works, Barr states that “their crisp, angular drawing, their sensitive ‘spotting’ and at times their subject matter anticipate his mature painting to a remarkable degree.”37 Feininger was listed first among the Bauhaus artists in the exhibition catalogue and is likely to have appeared first in the Bauhaus section of the exhibition. He submitted thirty-five artworks, and seems to have selected a broad cross-section of his work, including some seminal pieces. From his earlier work, he submitted six artworks from 1911, mostly pen and ink drawings of seascapes and ships, and also The Disparagers (1911). From 1915–22 Feininger submitted eleven watercolours, including seascapes and ships, and villages on the Baltic coast like Ehringsdorf (1918) and Gaberndorf (1918), where he spent summer holidays with his family. Feininger was first exposed to cubism in Paris in the spring of 1911. He found it revelatory, although it was not until 1912, that he began to selectively incorporate it into his own work. Describing it in 1913, he wrote, “In the Spring [of 1911] I had gone to Paris for 2 weeks and found the world agog with Cubism – a thing I had never heard even mentioned before but which I had already entirely intuitively, striven after for years.”38 Feininger submitted sixteen woodcuts made between 1918 and 1921, which most strongly represent his “cubist” work. While inherently opposed to the French cubists’ “chaotic dispersal of form,” which he felt deteriorated into a “sort of neo-neo-impressionism,” he understood immediately that their treatment of space and mass as virtually synonymous created the impression of volume without resorting to modelling.39 Feininger wrote in a letter to Alfred Churchill, “My ‘cubism,’ so to miscall it, for it is the reverse of the French cubists’ aims, is based upon the principle of monumentality, concentration to the absolutest extreme possible, of my visions.” He then proceeded to name his own art form “prism-ism.”40 The art of the woodcut drew on early German gothic traditions and had been rediscovered by the expressionists of Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) – movements of which Feininger was a member. Both groups drew on ideas from German folk art and children’s drawings, as well as African and Oceanic sculpture from the Dresden and Munich Ethnographic Museums. Feininger chose the technique partly because of his difficulty buying paint during the war, and produced about 240 woodcuts between 1918 and 1920.41 After 1921 the production of his woodcuts became increasingly intermittent. Whereas in painting he created shape and volume through transparent layers, in woodcut he was limited to a flat black and white surface, placing the emphasis on form. To grasp order, or “to get our bearings,” as Feininger

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4.1  Lyonel Feininger, Gelmeroda, 1920. Woodcut, 33.1 × 24.5 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Print Club of Cleveland

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put it – should not involve fixing one’s sights exclusively on surface appearance, since its beauty was ephemeral and its truths only partial.42 For Hans Hess, Feininger’s work in woodcuts was of great importance as “it helped him to simplify the issues of spatial organisation … He used multiple perspectives in the same composition and embraced the flattening and planar tendencies of the woodcut.”43 The woodcuts for the Kolkata exhibition can be roughly divided into a group of more planar architectural works and others of a more improvisational nature. The planar works included Gelmeroda (1920), an eponymous representation of the church in the village near Weimar, which was taken from the Bauhaus Master Portfolio of Works (Fig. 4.1).44 Between 1913 and 1917, Feininger made frequent journeys to Weimar and the many villages around, turning increasingly to architecture and mostly to churches in his search for subjects. He wrote that since childhood, churches, mills, bridges, and houses had evoked in him deep feelings of contentment, confirming his faith that everything in the universe was rational and infused with Divinity.45 His more mature work demonstrates an almost mystical search for harmony and order. For Alfred Barr, Feininger’s work has close parallels with that of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), “the great romantic painter of gothic ruins and Baltic horizons.”46 Eberhard Roters argues that Feininger’s aim was “to make manifest the reflection of the human spirit of an object seen in meditation.”47 As Barbara Haskel put it: “the mysticism of objects, Feininger maintained, lay in the insights they offered into the universe’s inherent order and beauty. These ideas formed a cornerstone of German Catholicism and Jesuit theology, but they appeared in Asian philosophy as well.”48 As early as 1914, his wife Julia Berg, conscious of the parallels between her husband’s and the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu’s views, sent Feininger an excerpt of his writings on the symbiosis of the material and the immaterial.49 Echoing Gelmeroda (1920) in their planar treatment of churches were Mellingen (1919), from another village near Weimar, and Zirchow (1920), from a town on the Baltic coast, as well as Church (1921). Like other cubists, the question of space became fundamental, and voids as important as solid forms. The structure of space in these pictures became “a continuity of interlacing relationships,” that replaced a conventional system of perspective.50 More raw and improvisational paintings of architectural subjects included Vollersroda (1919), Windmill, (1919), and Houses in Old Paris (1920) (Fig. 4.2). In contrast to his laborious painting process, Feininger made woodcuts relatively quickly. Many of his woodcuts have a primitive, childlike, and improvisational quality in comparison to his paintings. Village (1920) is almost a doodle, and reflects some of the unease of his earlier work such as The Disparagers.

4.2  Lyonel Feininger, Houses in Old Paris, 1919. Woodcut, 37.3 × 27.1 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Print Club of Cleveland 1952.27.

4.3  Lyonel Feininger, Cruising Sailing Ships, 2, 1919. Woodcut, 17.1 × 22.5 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Print Club of Cleveland 1952.26.

Problems of Translation

According to Feininger, in his painting, he often followed “a devout, deeply religious work” with a more improvisational composition and this same variety is mirrored in the woodcuts at the Kolkata exhibition.51 Finally the Kolkata exhibition included six of Feininger’s woodcuts of seascapes and ships, most of which are more improvisational, such as The Departure (1919) and Ships (1919). More planar woodcuts include Seascape with Warships (1918) and Cruising Sailing Ships (1919) (Fig. 4.3). Alois Schardt comments: “The sailboat is the favourite motive. With its swimming body it belongs to the deep; its flying sails catching the wind belong to the heights. The conflict of height and depth resolved, it moves towards a remote destination, and thus becomes one of the most beautiful symbols of man’s ability to unite opposing forces.”52

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Gaganendranath Tagore

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Gaganendranath Tagore was the most independent artist associated with the Bengal School, a group of painters who emerged at the start of the twentieth century in Kolkata under the leadership of his brother Abanindranath.53 More than any artists of the time, Gaganendranath was someone who constantly experimented with painting techniques drawn from outside of India. The visit of the Japanese artist Kakuzo Okakura (1863–1913) in 1902, followed by those of his students Yokoyama Taikan (b. Sakai Hidemaro, 1868–1958) and Hishida Shunso (b. Hishida Miyoji, 1874–1911), had a profound impact on the development of his style. He became interested not only in Japanese brush technique but also in the ideas behind this art. Around 1915 Gaganendranath began to draw caricatures that satirized the hypocrisies of his own society, highlighting the erosion of social values under the impact of the West.54 The brunt of his satire was borne by westernized Bengalis, whom he mocked for trying to be more English than the English. According to Mitter: “His cartoons with their bloated figures have a savage intensity, dwelling on what he saw as the hypocrisy, cant and double standards in Bengali society: the Brahmin paying lip service to the Vedas whilst taking graft for keeping whores; Bengalis masquerading as black sahibs; the suffering wife waiting for the babu who visits the demi-monde.”55 Described by Rathindranath Tagore as a “born actor,” he was equally busy designing stage sets and costumes for the plays of their uncle, Rabindranath Tagore, staged in their home during this period.56 Gaganendranath Tagore entered twenty-five items in the exhibition, the largest quantity of works of any Indian artist in the show. The first and most expensive painting in the catalogue was his House of Mystery, of which there are several versions, and which may have been the first painting in the exhibition itself. These paintings were inspired by his involvement with his uncle’s plays, and the works make reference to stage props and lighting. Figures seem to be arranged on a stage lit by focused beams of light, viewed from the stalls, or through a window. As Mitter asserts, “The painter conjures up a magic world of dazzling patterns, crisscrossing lights and shadows and light-refracting many faceted forms.”57 He also showed a number of impressionistic twilight and night-time sketches of Kolkata, described by Rupam as having “a quality all their own [which] cannot be traced to any models in the East or the West.”58 These socalled nocturnes reminded some reviewers of Turner’s and Whistler’s sunsets and the latter’s nightscapes, and were done entirely from memory and imagination.59 According to Ratan Parimoo, “[Gaganendranath] is no longer concerned, like in the earlier works, with representing the visual impressions of

outer reality. But what now concerns him are his own feelings about the outer world and finding suitable and appropriate pictorial equivalents to them.”60 In these works we find greater use of ink and larger portions of picture surface covered with it (Fig. 4.4). For Parimoo, “the relationship of blacks (or its variations) and whites is very specific, not only representing light and shadow but also denoting and defining space and volume.”61 His compositions from this period tend to take on centripetal characteristics that lead on and link up with the cubistic works of the 1920s.62 Among the entries were paintings from Puri and Benares, and an Indian ink drawing of Kanchenjunga, completed somewhere between 1915 and 1919. According to Parimoo, “the celestial grandeur of the sacred mountains to which also contributes the way light is handled, ties up with his late post-cubist paintings.”63 Benode Behari Mukherjee has stated that “in his landscapes Gaganendranath’s attitude was more Romantic … to him it was just a vision and the memory of a beautiful thing … his pictures of low flat fields, river banks, and mountain peaks, are all far away from us … never depicted in too strong a line or too vivid a colour, they are always soft and mild. They are

4.4 Gaganendranath Tagore, Untitled, 1925. Ink and wash on cardboard, 13 × 9 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

is 127-1984.

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refreshing, if not vitalizing.”64 Finally, Rupam relates “a charming phantasy of ‘Puppets at Play’ seen through the vision of the child realised through the atmosphere of fairy-tales.”65 In this picture, the Japanese influence can be seen in the gold treatment of the roofs. Asok Mitra believed that Gaganendranath was “the most skilful and perhaps successful among Indian artists in learning how to analyse pictorial space in the European manner.”66 Allowing his objects and figures to cast their own shadows on the picture itself was quite novel in Indian painting. However, according to Mitra, what marked him apart was “the way he mathematically divided up his ground according to the pattern of his subject and placed his objects in each compartment … which is worlds apart from what one gets in West Indian illuminated manuscripts or Indian miniatures.”67 As of 1920 Gaganendranath began his cubist work, which was unique in the Indian art milieu of the time. Stella Kramrisch first publicized his cubist work in July 1922,68 and a series of English newspaper reviews were published in India between 1924 and 1928.69 It is difficult to be fully clear on his sources and motivations for taking up Cubism, which was unique in the Indian art milieu of the time. Undoubtedly he was trying to escape the self-imposed “Indian-ness” of the Bengal School to produce something altogether different. Perhaps cubism’s anti-establishment stance appealed to him in the colonial setting of Kolkata, and was, in part at least, a continuation of his earlier career as a political and satirical cartoonist. Gaganendranath may have read Du “Cubisme,” written jointly by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger in 1912 and translated into English in the following year, or Guillaume Apollinaire’s widely known Les Peintres Cubistes of 1913. He may well have found out about these developments from his friend the Kolkata-based French painter Andrée Karpelès (1885–1956). Cubism is first mentioned in India in the Bengali journal Prabasi in 1914 by Sukumar Roy, who acknowledged its revolutionary objective of challenging academic naturalism, but rejected its extreme distortions of reality.70 In 1917 the widely read Kolkata-based Modern Review carried an anonymous piece on “automatic drawing,” which dealt with Freud’s impact on avant-garde art.71 Parimoo considered whether Gaganendranath became first acquainted with cubism through his set design.72 Gaganendranath was characteristically reticent about his motives, claiming only that his explorations had enabled him to discover new paths: “I am now expressing them better with my new technique developed out of my experiment in Cubism than I used to do with my old methods. The new technique is really wonderful as a stimulant.”73 Speaking about Gaganendranath’s early cubist work, Mukherjee asserts: “What he tried to produce was not a formal pattern but a chequered play of light and shadow, of heavy black with the sharp contrast of light. His cubism

4.5 Gaganendranath Tagore, Reverie (date unknown). In Stella Kramrisch, “An Indian Cubist,” Rupam: A Journal of Oriental Art 11 (July 1922), 106, British Library Board, London, pp.1803.kh.

Problems of Translation

was more arabesque than dimensional object-drawing.”74 Mitter has suggested that it was part of a move toward the poetic introverted side of his character and drew on more traditional myths and legends from Indian life: “The multiple viewpoints and jagged edges of cubism offered him the means to create compositions with many faceted shapes evoking a remote mysterious world.”75 For Mukherjee, Gaganendranath’s cubism was unique: “The natural and the super-natural joined hands. This fusion was of his own doing and not borrowed from cubism.”76

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Gaganendranath produced a set of nine black and white “cubist” abstract compositions for the exhibition, three of which were untitled; but the rest were variously and mysteriously titled The Victory of Light, Distracted, The Opium Eater, A City, Inside a Magic Mirror, and Reverie. Although reproductions are mostly impossible to find, writing in 1922, Stella Kramrisch enthusiastically described at some length the “inner experience” contained in Reverie (Fig. 4.5): These lovers are nameless, bodyless, impersonal and almost non-existent. In the moment of fascination, fascination itself is the only reality and man becomes its tool, radiant with its force. The turbulent agitation of pointed shapes which whirl through the picture until they get curbed along the borders forms the atmosphere of a pictorial world, expressive of that significant moment, when emotions radiate from two sources and tend to become one. These two lovers therefore do not sit under a tree in the midst of spring, sunshine and flowers. Association and illustration are driven out of the picture, which is saturated with the emanation of the emotion itself.77 Writing shortly after the Kolkata exhibition, Kramrisch claimed that Gaga­nen­ dranath’s contribution to Indian art and cubism alike was “the transformation of cubism, as a principle of composition from a static order into an expressive motive.”78 His form of cubism was “animate and dynamic,” expressing “the radiating, turbulent, hovering or pacified forces of inner experience.” Kram­ risch believed that Indian cubism was a paradox, “for the ever moved, flowing life of an Indian work of art is opposite to cubism which essentially is crystallised static.”79 She maintained that the important part of cubism was not “the features of the formulae” but “the newly awakened consciousness of spiritual reality which knocks at the door of Indian art, disguised in a strange form.”80

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Since the 1920s Gaganendranath’s cubist work has been likened to European cubism without much thought for the effects of such comparisons.81 A year after the Kolkata exhibition, the German art critic Max Osborn, reviewing an exhibition of Bengali art in Berlin, believed he could “recognize traces of the German usage of the cubistic doctrine,” in the work of Gaganendranath, claiming that “his black and white drawing of a ‘Temple’ melts Asiatic style with the crystal-like forms as handled by Lyonel Feininger of Weimar.”82 Whether he knew that the two artists had exhibited together in Kolkata when he wrote these comments is impossible to say.

Problems of Translation

Osborn was writing at a time when interest in India had already been kindled by German expressionists before the First World War and then later fuelled by the collective soul-searching that took place in Germany in the immediate aftermath of defeat in the war. He was also keen to highlight the political similarities, as he saw them, between the struggles of the postwar German Republic and those of colonial India, claiming: Germans understood “the ardent aspirations animating the hearts of the Indian patriots and we feel how also from those paintings an invisible fluid of kindred mind and thought moves towards us from afar.”83 Osborn went on to draw parallels between other Indian artists at the exhibition and various European artists, comparing Abanindranath Tagore’s Head of a Peasant Girl to “the magic art of Edward Munch”; On the Jamuna by Devi­prasad Roy to Reynolds and Gainsborough; The Bee Comes by Sara­ dacharan Ukil to the “somewhat sugar coated, sentimental manner of the PreRaphaelites”; Roopkrishna’s Winter to the “amiable naiveté of our Moritz von Schwind.” And he described Sunayani Devi as “the Indian counterpart of the German Emil Nolde.”84 Although he claimed to be particularly interested in drawing out “the manifold crossings” of the Indian works, it is easy to read his brief comparisons as arbitrary juxtapositions of Western and Indian art traditions which lack any understanding of their unique social and historical contexts.85 Equally he describes the Indian works as illustrating “the worldwide yearning for a grand expression.”86 Linking the Indian artists to major canonical European artists not only reduces cultural differences but also serves to co-opt such work into European art traditions. Writing in 1959, the colonial art historian W.G. Archer criticized Ga­ga­­nen­ dra­nath’s work for a “lack of power – a power which in some mysterious way was present in the work of Braque and Picasso – Ga­ga­nen­dra­nath’s pictures were actually no more than stylized illustrations.”87 Concerning Ga­ga­nen­dra­ nath’s picture Light and Shadow, Archer accused the artist of a failed attempt at cubism: “There is no attempt to break the shapes into their fundamental structure or to link them into a single cohering rhythm. The artist merely selected a scene that looked Cubistic and set it down with academic care.”88 Archer’s final objection to Gaganendranath’s works was that they were “frigidly indifferent to Indian feelings, interests or sensibility,” and had “an air of trivial irrelevance.”89 For Archer, the artist was effectively caught in no-man’s land – neither producing good cubist, nor good Indian work. As Mitter states, “Gaganendranath suffered a loss of self in becoming a colonial hybrid.”90 Ar­cher’s assessment of Gaganendranath’s paintings tells us a great deal about his art historical discourse and what he thought should legitimately be called cubist. Arguably his translations of Gaganendranath’s work only served to strengthen the colonial project in India, inscribing the colonized with an

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ethnic or racial stereotype that rationalized domination. “Archer had the whole weight of art history behind him in his evaluation of Gaganendranath’s paintings,” states Mitter. “The modernist canon encompasses a great deal more than a simple matter of influence, as its powerful teleology constructs a whole world of belongings and exclusions, the epicentre and its outlying regions.”91 Critics like Archer were ambivalent about Gaganendranath’s work because it undermined their own understanding of “European” and “Indian” art, which on their terms were to remain separate and distinctive. Of course the dividing line between such categories was often more ideological than actual. Gaganendranath was a unique artist within Bengal who drew from sources outside it. Feininger’s version of cubism drew from medieval Germany, but he was aware that his ideas had parallels from outside Europe too. Despite this, Feininger was viewed as a modern European artist, whereas Gaganendranath was viewed more negatively. Notwithstanding the Kolkata exhibition, the transmission of ideas from West to East and East to West remained uneven and unequal. Kramrisch argued that there were common roots in cubism and Indian thought, stating that, “‘Backgrounds’ in Ajanta, many objects represented in Bar­hut and Sanchi, the architecture in Raiput paintings are visualised in a cubist way.”92 In the Kolkata exhibition catalogue, she concluded by saying, “European Art does not mean ‘naturalism’ and … the transformation of the forms of nature in the work of an artist is common to ancient and modern India and Europe as an unconscious and therefore inevitable expression of the life and soul of artistic genius.”93 Her comments highlight the fact that, while the objectives of the Bauhaus and Indian artists were different, they were making a common front against academic art. While Kramrisch saw a unique form of cubism in Gaganendranath’s work, which blurred the boundaries of “Indian” and “European” art, she still thought that the different cultural contexts of cubism in Europe and India were “incompatible.”94 Both artists seemingly drew on similar concepts that were mediated through complex and differing routes of cultural dissemination. Feininger and Gaganendranath came from different cultural contexts, with very distinctive intellectual agendas. While there were clearly differences in their motivations, both artists saw the language of cubism as a disruptive strategy, using it to define their own individual paths. It was, and remains, problematic to make comparisons between them without resorting to the superficial stylistic comparisons that have been made in the past. It is this difference between cultures that Bhabha and Benjamin argue reveals untranslatable elements of language. For Bhabha, such foreign elements “reveal the interstitial … and become the ‘unstable element of linkage,’ the indeterminate temporality of the in-between.”95 It is from this position of

“in-betweenness” that Bhabha has suggested that most interrogative forms of culture are produced. In so doing, Bhabha locates the production of cultural meaning in the realm of the untranslatable, the interstices between language and cultures. He encourages us to perceive this irresolvable, borderline culture, which is at once “the time of cultural displacement, and the space of the “untranslatable.”96 It is from this space that Gaganendranath’s art work emerges as one of the most enquiring and questioning forms of Bengali art of the time. The unbridgeable gap between cultures is the space where meaning is constantly negotiated and reconstructed. Benjamin believes that through cultural negotiation, the translator must not act to preserve his own tongue, but “must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language.”97 He defines this process of translation as, “the performative nature of cultural communication.”98 By revealing alternative possibilities for cubism, both Ga­ga­nen­dra­nath’s and Feininger’s works subvert the idea of an original European cubism through their own act of translation; or, in Bhabha’s interpretation, they desacralize the “transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy.”99 Through translation, Feininger’s artworks became one of the multiple versions of European cubism. For Benjamin, “translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages,”100 which Bhabha maintains creates the conditions through which “newness comes into the world.”101 This process enables movements like cubism to be translated from one part of the world to another. It is on these terms that both Gaganendranath and Feininger, who consciously used and extended the language of European cubism, became its “translators.”

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5

Some Notes on Applying Postcolonial Methodologies to Architectural History Research in Israel/Palestine I n b a l B e n - A s he r Gi t le r

Nation-watching would be simple if it could be like bird-watching.

Eric J. Hobsbawm1

T

he writing of national histories of art and architecture is closely linked to the historiography of nations, nationality, and their narratives. The recent historiography of the architecture of Israel/Palestine has had an intense engagement with national narratives, as well as with political and critical perspectives. By looking at several buildings and analyzing examples from the research and critique of Israel/Palestine’s built environment, I investigate the application of postcolonial methodologies, attempting to reveal their role in structuring, recounting, and interpreting architectural history. Through a discussion of both the benefits and the disadvantages of postcolonial theory as a methodological tool, I argue that the architectural historiography of Israel/ Palestine calls for a thorough documentation of the built environment, in addition to nuanced research approaches capable of revealing national, cultural, and artistic complexities. I open my discussion by touching upon research dilemmas pertaining to the relationship between nations and their art and architecture.

Postcolonial Theory and the Built Environment of Israel/Palestine

Historians who have dealt with the concepts of nation and nationality have underscored the importance of art as a tool for representing these concepts locally and internationally.2 Writing the art history of nations does not necessarily mean presenting their artistic production as the outcome of national ideals or the development of social and political issues. Rather, it allows for the nation to be the historical, geographical, and cultural framework for dealing with a certain body of works. Writing art history within these national limits

Architectural History Research in Israel/Palestine

entails the construction of a canon that highlights certain artists, architects, movements, or phenomena. This process, in effect, creates national art histories. Once national art histories are canonized, their unravelling and the creation of counter-histories becomes an important and necessary process.3 While this can be said of art in the broader sense, including painting, sculpture, architecture, and new media, there are some important differences between writing art history and writing architectural history. Twentieth-century architecture, more so than art, is an expression not only of its maker but also of its patron, and in the case of nation-states, this patron is often the state. Architectural history, written as a national history, is therefore more prone to being viewed as largely subservient to nationhood and politics. However, aside from its proximity to state and society, architecture is also an autonomous and personal artistic medium. In considering these aspects, American-born historiographer Mark Jarzombek’s epistemological inquiry in his paper “A Prolegomena to Critical Historiography” can be useful: Jarzombek perceives architectural history as existing “in an indeterminate zone … between object and subject.” He discusses the possible methodological contradictions that arise between tracing the production of architecture and analyzing its meaning.4 Jar­zom­bek confronts the impossibility of any of the actors’ – artist/architect, art historian, or architectural historian – positioning themselves outside the mutual relationship between “self, history and historiography,”5 and points to the difficulty of detecting historiographical constructs in both the creative and academic processes. Jarzombek’s proposal for unravelling these interrelations is what he terms “critical historiography,” which works toward identifying the location of self and artistic merit in relation to society and history, while constantly remaining aware of the field’s epistemological limitations.6 Jarzombek’s discussion provides an important perspective on the intersection of personal or artistic autonomy with collective identity or purpose. Identifying these intersections, which are often contradictory, becomes a crucial aspect of the documentation and research that create an architectural history. Israeli architectural historiography has been approached from both these perspectives: through the artistic-autonomous approach of researching the creative force of a specific architect, trend, or movement and, simultaneously, treating the country’s architecture as an embodiment of national ideologies.7 The understanding of Israel as a “young nation” struggling for definition, identity, and territory has led, in recent years, to a flourishing of research that investigates the latter approach; that is, architecture as national ideology. Thus, an intensive inquiry of the national and political role of the architecture of Israel/Palestine has been taking place. While this is important, it often seems to have come at the expense of thoroughly documented research, the result being that historiography has come at the expense of historicity, so to speak. In

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the following sections I discuss the fragile balance between these two aspects of research, by examining the application of postcolonial theory to the study of the built environment of Israel/Palestine, arguing that this methodology is capable of significantly contributing to the achievement of such a balance. The term “postcolonialism” has been explained in various modes and interpretations. It supposes a time frame addressing the aftermath of the dismantling of former empires, in which colonies, once relinquished by their colonizers, proclaimed themselves as independent national entities. Elements of colonialism persist, however, in multiple facets of politics, culture, and economics, and these have acquired the terms “neo-colonialism,” or “neo-imperialism.”8 Beyond historical chronology, postcolonialism as a theoretical field critically investigates the history and cultural phenomena of the colonial and postcolonial eras, through an analysis of “first-world/third-world” relations.9 Architectural historians have been applying postcolonial theory to their field since the 1980s. Groundbreaking studies of urban history, such as Gwendolyn Wright’s work on Rabat, and Zeynep Çelik’s research on Algiers seem to fit perfectly into Edward Said’s concepts of “Self ” and “Other,” and their definitions of power relations between colonizer and colonized.10 Theories that problematize the latter, such as Homi Bhabha’s, have been recruited for architectural history as well, albeit in a somewhat generalizing manner.11 Still, more often than not, case studies of built phenomena leave architectural historians struggling in their attempt to introduce postcolonial discourse into their expertise. The result is often a theory left unexploited, or one that forces itself upon the object of research, as critically observed by Arindam Dutta, in his review of Mark Crinson’s Modern Architecture and the End of Empire, and by Volker Welter, commenting on Haim Yacobi’s Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse.12 In the case of the architectural history of Israel/Palestine, postcolonial theory appears at times to come at the expense of the basic tools of the architecturalhistorical trade, etiolating inquiries into building processes, the evolvement of architects as individuals, as well as the unearthing of the specific circumstances in which buildings come into being. Part of the reason for this eclipsing is, perhaps, the historian’s difficulty in doing what Jarzombek calls for: addressing one’s own position within his or her historiographical project in order to critically investigate its methodology.13 The authors discussed here are leading architectural historians, whose contribution to Israeli architectural history has been significant and groundbreaking. My critical analysis is not an attempt to undermine the importance of their work and contribution to the field; rather, it is a reflection upon their methodology and how it is structured, and upon their positioning of themselves vis-à-vis their object of research. I want to suggest that in the case of Israel,

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positioning one’s self within historiography is especially complex, on account of the fragile and charged political situation in Israel and Palestine and their contested historiographies. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it would seem, makes the historian’s position all the more challenging. This complexity is not an isolated phenomenon; it surfaces in research on Israel/Palestine in general, in profound academic disputes that to a large part address the application of postcolonial theory, as it has been instrumental in proposing new perspectives on the Zionist Movement and has been recruited for critical readings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.14 Given the immense importance of the built environment in a dispute where place plays such a central role, the implementation of postcolonial theory to Israeli architectural research and historiography has been significant, although its workings are often concealed in the research process and its products. I do not see myself as exempt or liberated from the same problem: similar to what Eric Hobsbawm says in the quotation with which I opened this essay, I find that “nation watching” – and more so “conflict watching” – is not easy, to say the least. As an architectural historian, I hope, nevertheless, that reflecting upon our work and discipline in light of these difficulties will advance the research and historiography that we practice in an ethical manner. A note on terminology: as Merav Yerushalmy points out in her contribution to this volume, “Historical Archives and Contemporary Art,” the use of the terms Israel/Palestine, Palestine/Israel, or Falastin/Eretz Yisrael is significant in the way these relate to the construction of culture, identity, and nationality. I have chosen to use the contemporary terminology “Palestine-Eretz Yisrael” when referring to the architecture of the British Mandate, as this was the official name during that period.15 With regard to Jewish and Zionist architecture, I use the terms “Zionist” and “Jewish-Zionist” interchangeably, since not all Jewish architecture was Zionist, and not all Zionist architecture was planned by Jews. Since my critique of architecture and historiography after the establishment of the state of Israel concentrates on Israeli architecture, I use the term Israel/Palestine when discussing this period. As Yerushalmy notes in relation to her study, in places where the discussion addresses Israeli or Palestinian architecture specifically, the singular adjective is used. In discussing the application of postcolonial studies to researching the built environment of Israel/Palestine, I examine two subjects that embody the architectural object, as well as the urban one, through the postcolonial lens. The first is the architecture and urban planning of Jerusalem during British military rule (1918–22) and the succeeding British Mandate for Palestine (1922–48);16 the second is the appropriation of vernacular Palestinian architecture into the vocabulary of the Israeli built environment. These aspects are intertwined, since the appropriation of the local vernacular was of major interest and had

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a central place in Mandate-era architecture, which in turn had a crucial impact upon Israeli architecture. In addition, in the course of this essay, I open up alternative and additional possibilities for applying postcolonial theory by addressing more recent architecture, by proposing an investigation of architecture’s discourse with other minority groups within Israel/Palestine’s social sphere, and by identifying global exchange. Moreover, I demonstrate that current architectural history research poses significant challenges to postcolonial theory, and that Israel/Palestine can serve as a case in point, as its built environment reflects complex socio-historical processes.

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I begin with the implementation of postcolonial theories in the study of the architecture and urbanism of Jerusalem during military rule and the British Mandate. This was a period that, as mentioned above, had a critical influence on Israel as a nation, in all ways. Following Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, many of the British design schemes for the built environment were either continued or only slightly altered. The period of the Mandate, which saw a thriving architecture produced by British, Jewish-Zionist, and Palestinian architects, made a significant mark upon subsequent architecture: formally, stylistically, and conceptually. To date, this period has received the most scholarly attention, thanks both to its enduring influence and to its international importance in relation to modern architecture between the two twentiethcentury world wars.17 As a multicultural city that over centuries witnessed myriad urban and architectural transformations, Jerusalem is an excellent example of foreign intervention in the construction of physical space, and its researchers must query not only what has been planned or built and by whom; they must reassess their terminology: what does “foreign” mean in the context of this city? How is “multicultural” different from “multi-religious”? What were the unique circumstances of foreign rule in this contested locale? In the period covered by the British Mandate, one of the important tasks is to define and understand what sets the planning and architecture of Jerusalem apart from the colonial enterprise elsewhere. While similarities exist, I argue that the British themselves devised an approach for building the Holy City that was markedly different from their projects in, for example, India or Africa, and its analysis thus requires a different set of theoretical constructs. An excellent demonstration of this difference is offered by Ron Fuchs and Gilbert Herbert in their essay “A Colonial Portrait of Jerusalem: British Architecture in Mandate-Era Palestine,” published in Nezar Alsayyad’s 2001 compilation, Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment.18

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Alsayyad’s book was one of the first to tackle the challenges of implementing postcolonial theory in the field of architectural history and urbanism. Inspired by Bhabha’s theories, Alsayyad produced a collection of essays that, through detailed case studies, provided analyses of cities and architectures characterized by significant multiculturalism, thereby being examples of physical spaces that embodied Bhabha’s notion of the “third space,” the space created by the convergence and at times friction of diverse cultures.19 Fuchs and Herbert’s contribution to Hybrid Urbanism discusses the British approach to building in Jerusalem in comparison to their policies and construction in other locations colonized by the British Empire. The co-authors research the circumstances of the erection, as well as the stylistic inspiration, of two of the most important buildings built by the British in Jerusalem: the High Commissioner’s Residence and the Archaeological Museum. The opening words of their chapter title, “A Colonial Portrait,” immediately expose a major stumbling block to interpreting this formative epoch in Israel/ Palestine’s architectural history: the basic assumption that British mandatory rule was sufficiently identical to British colonialism as to deduce a colonial reading of British architecture and urbanism in Palestine-Eretz Yisrael.20 I have shown elsewhere that even in Britain the mandates were regarded differently from the colonies, and senior ministers acknowledged their temporariness and political hybridity.21 The mandate system, developed following the First World War, was a hybrid form of foreign rule, historically parallel to emerging processes of decolonization. British reception of the Palestine mandate meant that the Empire would now be a trustee, accountable to the League of Nations.22 While admitting that British architecture in Jerusalem was “not entirely colonial,”23 Fuchs and Herbert make a case for placing Jerusalem entirely within the colonial framework, rather than interrogating and explaining differences from it. They underscore the colonial device of urban conservation and appropriation of regional architecture, suggesting that the British intended it for the preservation of the indigenous environment.24 “Colonial paternalism,” they claim, was the supposed motive behind mandatory architecture’s assimilation of regional architectural characteristics such as the use of stone or the incorporation of arches and domes.25 These characteristics were perceived as traditional, and to British (and European) eyes evoked religious sentiment, as representing a style that had persisted since Biblical times, and as such, strengthened Christian claims to Jerusalem. Jerusalem was sacred not only for Christianity, however, but also for Judaism and Islam. This tri-religious holiness had an impact on British discourse about urban development and dictated the methods and characteristics of the transformations brought about by mandatory rule. When considering these cultural factors and examining governance, “colonial paternalism” seems like

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5.1  Austen St Barbe Harrison, Government House, Jerusalem, 1928–31. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division:

lc-dig-matpc-04280 (digital file from

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original photo).

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an oversimplification of the actions of foreign mandatory rule. Referring only to paternalism implies a stance that does not sufficiently stress the use of urban space and architecture as a tool for controlling the city and making claims on it. Moreover, it is a starting point that neglects to address the significant changes in the imperialism of European powers following the First World War, of which the mandates were an important part.26 The buildings discussed by Fuchs and Gilbert are two of the most representative edifices erected by the British: Government House (or High Commissioner’s Residence, 1928–31) (Fig. 5.1) and the Archaeological Museum (now the Rockefeller Museum, 1928–35). Both were planned by British-born architect Austen St Barbe Harrison (1891–1976). The authors enlist several possible regional sources that inspired this representative mandatory architecture. Their discussion reveals how notions of a Eurocentric perspective persist in contemporary research: the buildings mentioned as sources of inspiration are well-known examples of Islamic architecture from Iran, Turkey, and Egypt; yet they are cited without mention of their dating or any reference to their stylistic

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or socio-historical context. They are simply examples of “oriental” architecture absorbed by the architects employed by the dominant British rulers. The authors do not explain why Harrison used mausolea or madrasas from across the Islamic world as sources of inspiration. Cultural theorists Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have argued that a generalizing approach such as this “prolongs the colonial trope which projected colonized people as … a source of raw material rather than of mental activity or manufacture.”27 Fuchs and Herbert do address the function and symbolic meaning of Harrison’s adoption of the four-iwan plan from models of Islamic architecture, such as the fifteenth-century Tiled Pavilion (Çinili Köşk) at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul: “Providing a British representative with such a hall implicitly presented him as an Oriental ruler,” claim the authors.28 Using the term “Oriental ruler” fails to avoid the pitfalls warned against by postcolonial critics (as early as Edward Said in his Orientalism of 1978), of generalizing diverse peoples and in this case, different forms of governance. Their interpretation of the architecture thus becomes problematic, as its sources are ahistorical when no specific sovereignty is mentioned. Accordingly, in the analysis of architecture, the diverse edifices chosen as sources speak to profound cultural differences, and their appropriation by the British attests to the differences between colonization and the beginning of decolonization. Therefore, while similarities between British approaches to architecture in Jerusalem and, for example, New Delhi, certainly exist,29 the differences not only in scope and function, but also in the use of sources of inspiration, are significant. The same problem arises when Fuchs and Herbert point to local architecture as a source of inspiration, generally referring to “Palestinian vernacular” and “indigenous methods.”30 Such references are limited by the as yet insufficient research into late Ottoman architecture in Israel/Palestine. The architecture of the last century of Ottoman rule has been documented, but research into processes of change, modernization, and relations between centre and periphery has only recently begun.31 Fuchs’s own important contribution to the research of Palestinian dwellings is mentioned, but is not used to illuminate the rich vocabulary from which British architects selected their models.32 Thus, the diversity of local private dwellings is reduced to a “Judaean vernacular” and, similarly, the role of official Ottoman architecture as an object of both rejec­ tion and emulation by mandatory architecture is insufficiently addressed.33 Continuing this discussion of the appropriation of regional architecture, the authors contrast Zionist modernist architecture with the British “colonial” preservation of traditional architecture.34 Such a contrast fails to introduce into the discussion the vast majority of British construction in Palestine that was indeed modern, utilitarian, and geared toward technological advancement. Outstanding examples are the General Post Office (1934–39, now Central Post

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5.2  Austen St Barbe Harrison, Central Post Office, Jerusalem, 1934–39. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division: lc -dig matpc-09518 (digital file from original photo).

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Office) (Fig. 5.2) and the Government Printer (1934–35) (Fig. 5.3), both designed by Harrison in Jerusalem,35 as well as British projects in Haifa such as the Kings­way commercial zone, planned by Clifford Holliday (1897–1960).36 The Central Post Office, while faced with stone according to British city preservationist construction regulations in Jerusalem, is a modern symmetrical structure of rectangular masses with straight rows of square windows on each floor. One facade presents a row of tall arches, more of a neo-Renaissance appropriation than a Middle-Eastern one. There are no domes or decorative forms that resemble the geometrical lattices of Muslim architecture. A strip of darker-coloured stone runs across the building, yet this too seems a formal element, emphasizing the mass of the building, and devoid of any regional or historicist reference. With the utilitarian, industrial Government Printer building, 1930s modernism is completely dominant. The building was composed of three rectangular wings and one in the shape of an irregular square, constructed of concrete and faced with a smooth, light-coloured plaster.37 It had

5.3  Austen St Barbe Harrison, Government Printer Building, Jerusalem, 1934–35. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division:

lc-dig-matpc-09518 (digital file from original photo, detail).

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narrow, horizontal strip fenestration and a main entrance located in a corner of the building, rather than in the centre of one of the wings. These fenestration and entrance placements are both elements typical of the 1930s modernism that was implemented in Palestine-Eretz Yisrael by British, Jewish, and Palestinian architects.38 Fuchs and Herbert discuss other examples of British colonial architecture, designs for the Hebrew University by Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). They interpret these designs as “colonial regionalism … applied to the Yishuv” (the Jewish settlers of Palestine-Eretz Yisrael).39 This assertion probably stems from Geddes’s long and significant service as a colonial planner in India. Nevertheless, here is a project commissioned by the Zionist Organization and not by the British administration. The co-authors intentionally did not enter into a lengthy discussion of the involvement of Geddes’s Zionist patrons in planning the university, and concentrate upon a scholarly, well-informed analysis of his use of the dome and other sources considered “oriental.” However, to separate the Scottish planner’s interpretation of Islamic sources from his Zionist patrons’ perspective is to downplay the vision of the important role that Islamic sources had in creating a new visual culture for the region, which was shared by both Geddes and contemporary Zionist architects and designers. In the Zionist case, “oriental” inspiration was central to the re-creation of a Jewish visual culture in the land of Israel.40 In choosing not to discuss this complex interplay of approaches toward Islamic sources, the

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authors provide a portrait that is, perhaps, more comprehensible; yet it misses the opportunity of exposing and interpreting the cultural intricacies and tensions of the mandatory condition. In this “portrait,” colonialism in architecture is understood as a constant set of characteristics creating a “hybrid urbanism” dictated by a unified enunciation that can be transposed across the globe. Ella Shohat has warned, in contrast, that “‘hybridity’ … is susceptible to a blurring of perspectives [and] must be examined in a non-universalizing, differential manner.”41 Thus, while Fuchs and Herbert initially mention the concept of “hybrid urbanism,” it seems that rather than expose the ambiguities of British urban planning and architecture, their use of this theoretical concept generalizes their object of research, rather than differentiating it. When attempting to explain the relationship between architecture and the fragile politics of the Mandate, Bhabha’s concept of the “third space of enunciation” is most relevant. This is the space where meanings produced by different cultures meet, an ambiguous space created by the discourse of what Bhabha terms “cultural authority.”42 The strength of his articulation of this term is in his identification of the ambivalent content of the colonizing authority’s representation of itself – his recognition of an ambivalence that emerges in large part because this is a representation constructed vis-à-vis an Other, an image intended to be mediated to colonial subjects. The ambivalence Bhabha sees in the colonial situation becomes even more prevalent in Mandatory rule. The intricacies observed by him work to underscore the point that in Palestine-Eretz Yisrael, British cultural authority was negotiated differently, as a form of political authority that diverged from the colonial model and was intended for cultural and political Others that were not considered typical colonial “subjects”; namely Jews, Muslim Palestinians, and Christian Palestinians, as well as other minorities. Telling examples of the differences between the Mandatory and the colonial situations are the British urban plans, which were directly linked to architecture. These expressed the dissolution of earlier colonial formulations, such as segregation and military zones. As with colonial cities, Jerusalem’s Old City was framed by a greenbelt; yet it is significant that this was not a cordon sanitaire or esplanade intended for segregation of “indigenous” populations from the “European” one.43 Moreover, the presence of the ruling power was virtually non-existent in these schemes: no quarters were allocated for it and ruling institutions were scarcely charted. A persisting atmosphere of temporality and political instability was expressed in the plans by the blurring of Jerusalem’s sociocultural realities so as to camouflage the conflict between religions and the emerging nationalities of Israelis and Palestinians, all in an effort to maintain the image of successful custodianship. These British Mandatory plans

were characterized by ambiguity and unresolved dilemmas of power, how it was to be exercised, and what discourse it established with local populations. As such, the plans adhere to Bhabha’s definitions, creating a third space of interpretation of the Mandatory situation. An exceedingly important point for our discussion is that this third space, created by the plans, does not reiterate official Mandatory texts, which were consistent with forms of colonial discourse in their enlisting of rhetoric devices typical of colonial alterity.44 This dichotomy between text and plan or image illustrates Katharyne Mitchell’s observation that “theories that discuss space only in terms of linguistic or cultural metaphors will inevitably provide only empty theoretical ‘frameworks’ [my emphases].”45 The majority of postcolonial theorists, Bhabha among them, indeed examine texts, while architectural historians examine visual and spatial phenomena. Jerusalem’s architecture and plans demonstrate that architectural history makes a significant contribution to a complete view of historical processes or, as Dianne Harris puts it, “histories of the built environment … tell us things about past societies, lives and cultures that we can’t glean from any other source.”46 Thus, implementing postcolonial theory in a comparative methodology that addresses the differences between textual and spatial or architectural cultural production reveals the underlying dichotomies and internal contradictions of the Mandatory condition. Cogitating the “Arab Village”

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A contrasting example is the appropriation of the “Arab Village” into Israeli architecture (my references to the term “Arab Village” are in quotation marks, in accordance with postcolonial readings). Shifting our discussion to Israel/ Palestine after 1948, I would first like to look at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Fig. 5.4). The museum, the central building of which was planned by Alfred Mansfeld (1912–2004) and Dora Gad (1912–2003), is considered a masterpiece of Israeli architecture (1959–65). For all its seminal importance, little scholarly research has been published that discusses this complex. Architectural historian Zvi Efrat devoted a chapter to it in the exhibition catalogue The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture 1948–1973, and the museum is briefly treated in other essays and books. Most recently, Eran Neuman has published a paper that discusses Mansfeld’s sources of inspiration, which is an important addition to extant research.47 In this discussion, I concentrate upon Efrat’s chapter, as this Hebrew-language text has been “canonized” in Israel as the authoritative discussion of the Israel Museum. Efrat focuses on the main building’s silhouette and its role as mediator between Palestinian village vernacular and subsequent Israeli architecture, interpreting it as “a passing appropriation of the signifiers of the Other, a borrowed

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5.4  Al Mansfeld and Dora Gad, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1959–65. Detail of photo by David Harris, Jerusalem. Courtesy of the

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Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

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nativeness on a temporary basis, exorcism and reincarnation in a package deal.”48 He recruits postcolonial vocabulary when using “signifiers,” “Other,” and “nativeness,” yet does not suggest a methodological postcolonial reading of his subject. Efrat included a drawing by Mansfeld and Gad that represented a preliminary sketch of the museum along with a “village near Jerusalem,” as well as a 1979 photomontage attributed to Dutch curator and typographer Willem Sandberg (1897–1984), then the museum’s curatorial advisor, which presents the built museum as growing out of a traditional village with domed cubicle dwellings.49 Both images provide powerful visual testimony of the “Arab Village” as a source of inspiration, supported by citations to that end. These images, however, are not discussed and the sources for the citations are not mentioned, omissions that hinder a critical reading. Mansfeld and Gad’s sources of inspiration certainly merit investigation, as documents neglected by Efrat trace Mansfeld’s source to “ancient oriental terraced town housing [my emphases]”50 rather than to the “Arab Village.” Teddy

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Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem and the active patron of the museum in its planning and construction, likewise reminisced about a “Mediterranean village.”51 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, in an essay entitled “Seizing Locality in Jerusalem,” has identified Mediterraneanism as participation in a wider culture that divests Palestinian architecture of its authority over local architecture through affiliation with a broader geography.52 Such a reading suggests that views provided by architect and patron problematize the cultural, historical, and political issue at hand. This reading is also supported by Anna Minta’s analysis, which briefly speaks of contemporary accounts of how the museum was perceived by its publics.53 Neuman, who demonstrated Mansfeld’s reliance upon German expressionist architecture when conceiving and planning the museum, also discussed the complexity of the architect’s sources of inspiration.54 Efrat credits the structuralism of Dutch architect Aldo Van Eyck (1918–1999) and the international group of architects Team X (founded 1953) as having inspired Mansfeld’s structuralism and sensitivity to local traditional architecture.55 In his interpretation of Mansfeld and Gad’s turn to the visuality of the “Arab Village,” Efrat also appropriates the concept of “critical regionalism,” which was applied to architecture and architectural history by British architect and theorist Kenneth Frampton (b. 1930) in the 1980s.56 Thus, the Israel Museum’s discourse with Palestinian vernacular architecture is set within what is chronologically a postcolonial perspective. While Efrat problematizes Frampton’s “universalizing” of the vernacular, he does not attempt to deconstruct the blurring of geographic and socio-cultural distinctions with regard to the architectural history of his own subject of inquiry.57 Gil Eyal has given a scrutinizing postcolonial account of this approach toward the “Arab Village” in Israeli research. Following Michel Foucault and Edward Said, Eyal argues that the construction of a generalizing cultural entity entitled the “Arab Village” functions as an “orient” against which Israeli identity is defined.58 In the essay just quoted, Nitzan-Shiftan adopts this reading to post-1967 architecture in Jerusalem, where appropriation of the “Arab Village” is shown to express “the Israeli desire to achieve the Arab’s nativeness – which was seen as the ultimate expression of locality.”59 Once we realize that the “Arab Village” in the architects’ eyes is a third space that has undergone at least one level of interpretation, it is up to the historian, as Bhabha says, to “ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, re-historicized and read anew.”60 Nitzan-Shiftan works in this direction, as she discusses the role of verna­ cular architecture in the work of Israeli architect Ram Karmi (1931–2013) and Israeli-born, Canadian architect Moshe Safdie (b. 1938). She identifies three recursive underlying motives for adopting the “Arab Village”: first, an attempt to reify a biblical past; second, a return to the primitive (universal)

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origins of architecture; and third, a re-establishment of regional sensibilities through Mediterraneanism. However, even with Nitzan-Shiftan’s application of postcolonial theory, we are left with the task of uncovering the diversity of the architects’ sources. The next step, it seems to me, should be to more accurately identify these sources, and ask: what does the third space look like? An attempt to answer this question requires further documentation and analysis, and exposes the clear and present lack of architectural-historical studies in Israel’s historiography. One example, which provides more accurate information and can perhaps assist in a visual reconstruction of the third space, deals with the development of the inner courtyard as an architectural element in Israeli architecture, as researched by Hadas Shadar.61 The use of inner courtyards is directly related to the issue of appropriating the “Arab Village,” as they were widely used in local vernacular architecture, but also widespread throughout the Mediterranean basin. Basing her analysis on interviews with architects, Shadar claims that, while it seems obvious that the use of the inner courtyard in Israeli architecture was inspired by local architecture, either Arab or Ottoman, different sources were actually evident. In the peripheral desert town of Be’er-Sheva, for example, the courtyards were inspired by modernist housing units in Casablanca, planned in 1952–53 by Candilis, Woods, Ecochard, and others.62 Candilis and his associates shared the ideas of Team X, which comprised a group of young, avantgarde, Western architects. During the 1950s they advocated the concept of “habitat,”63 which embodied the conviction that architecture must envelope the complete human environment in order to provide adequate living conditions. The “habitat” would manifest itself practically via a modern urbanism and advanced dwelling systems. Ideas such as these played a pivotal role in the introduction of modernist architecture into third-world countries still under European domination, as novel concepts were experimented upon in the colonies, transforming the latter into veritable laboratories of architecture.64 Israel, as a new nation-state, strove to construct its spatial image as modernist, and therefore many of these ideas were implemented in its newly constructed towns as well, being imported not only directly from Europe, but also from the experiments of European architects in locales such as North Africa, considered similar in climate and geography. In her discussion, Shadar characterizes these “remote, North African model[s]” as providing a “slightly more Western perspective.”65 Shadar’s research shows the intrinsic connectedness of Israeli architecture to European and American modernism, and proposes that although an interest in the local vernacular may have sparked enthusiasm for the inner courtyard, it was not its direct source. What transpired, rather, was an Israeli articulation of French

Architectural History Research in Israel/Palestine

Protectorate modernist architecture, the latter embodying the complexities of the heyday of French colonial rule in North Africa.66 Having similar Mediterranean and Islamic origins, this appropriation accommodated the Israeli search for place, roots, and locality. Additional sources that Shadar reveals are temporary shacks that were arranged in a courtyard formation; with respect to communal (rather than private) courtyards, she shows that the model of Radburn, New Jersey, was used.67 These hybrid sources create a multiplicity of meanings: of modernist architecture as an expression of nation-building in Israel; of “enlightened” colonial rule in the Moroccan case; and of constructing identity through the search for an architectural vocabulary that is local, regional, and international. In the case of Israel/Palestine, these are the components of an architectural third space of enunciation, which opens up divergent, yet also overlapping notions of political and social forces that are at work in cultural production. While Nitzan-Shiftan indeed addresses this ambivalence as well as its negotiation in Israeli architectural discourse of the 1960s and 1970s, her characterization of all indigenous sources as derived from the “Arab Village” fails to distinguish periods, styles, and distinct historical circumstances within Palestinian production itself. 68 Moreover, in this framework, neglecting the issue of appropriation by other modernisms (such as the French or Italian) leaves such a discussion wanting, especially as she terms the Israelis as “colonizers” and the Palestinians as “colonized” – terms that underserve the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by leaving it, once again, completely within a colonial framework that is both anachronistic and unhelpful in explaining the ambivalence to which she points.69 In a later essay entitled “On Concrete and Stone: Shifts and Conflicts in Israeli Architecture,” Nitzan-Shiftan proposes a reading of Israeli architecture that is inexorably attached to a view of Israel as colonialist, the Palestinians being its colonial subjects. She proposes a dichotomy whereby architecture of concrete is associated with the “Zionist state” while architecture of stone belongs to a “Jewish nation.”70 Such a differentiation between nation and state is problematic, especially as no theoretical basis is supplied for these definitions, which are constantly debated by historians and sociologists.71 This is especially true in the case of Israel, where the inherent contradictions between Judaism and the modern state have been central to social, political, and historical discourse since the advent of Zionism and certainly in current research.72 Furthermore, in the volume Jewish Topographies, the editors discuss how this debate has been carried over to research pertaining to Israeli space and place, and they too underscore that “the diversity and intellectual elaborateness with which the relationship between Jewish sovereignty and religious sanctity is interpreted is indeed impressive.”73 While the discussion of Israeli architecture goes beyond religious

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aspects, these indeed add an inherent and central basis for complicity, and the authors’ observation attests to the complexity of the discourse among architecture, nation, and state. Nitzan-Shiftan claims that there is an “official historiography” of Israeli architecture,74 but I ask: what is official historiography? Written by whom? Is such an account taken as a “national” historiography? In the separation made between nation and state, stone and concrete, architecture is interpreted mostly as a political tool intended for the purposes of control and oppression. In her closing arguments Nitzan-Shiftan calls for a more nuanced history “that explores the space in between these poles,”75 yet I question to what extent these predefined poles of concrete/state and stone/nation exist to begin with. Underscoring them seems part of a widespread tendency among architectural historians to over-politicize the field. Welter has criticized this tendency in his review of Yacobi’s compilation, Constructing a Sense of Place. He argues that most of the contributors to Yacobi’s book “conceive … Zionist and Israeli architecture as nothing more than the authoritarian tools of an oppressive state pursuing a hegemonic agenda,”76 and explains that, regardless of one’s political standing with relation to national issues, this approach is methodologically and scholarly problematic. The issues of stone and concrete, and of Mediterraneanism, which are discussed here, are both excellent examples of the difficulty of tying Israeli architecture to a specific political or ideological stance. Concrete and stone, for instance, were used in conjunction in several buildings, beginning in the 1950s with Arieh Sharon (1900–1984) and Benjamin Idelson’s (1911–1972) neighbourhood for the town of Upper Nazareth (c. 1952–53), or the work of Ada Karmi-Melamede (b. 1936), one of the country’s leading contemporary architects, who has worked in the past few decades with both stone and concrete, often in the same location. Karmi-Melamede’s buildings in the BenGurion University Marcus campus in Be’er-Sheva (Fig. 5.5) are excellent examples. Her reasons for using both materials relate to a search for place and identity, and her architecture forms a reworking of the diverse trends and traditions already mentioned in this discussion, and more. Karmi-Melamede’s work is an example of hybridity and a merging of sources that continues the inspirational diversity used in creating the local, national, Israeli built environment. She uses traditional exterior limestone facing (called “Jerusalem Stone” in Israel, since it is most closely identified with that city); she continues the ancient, as well as modernist, tradition of integrating inner or semi-closed courtyards into her buildings. Karmi-Melamede is also inspired by the modernism implemented by British and Jewish architects such as Harrison and Erich Mendelsohn (1887–1953), who worked in Palestine-Eretz Yisrael during the Mandate. She echoes various aspects of their work – fenestration, proportions, and more – yet these elements are executed in exposed concrete. The

use of that material evokes brutalist architecture, which defined the Marcus Campus during its initial construction in the 1960s–1970s and was inspired by European and American architecture.77 These sources of inspiration, as well as Karmi-Melamede’s approach to them, reveal how architecture can in itself become historiography, critically canonizing and reworking select models.78 Karmi-Melamede’s appreciation of the local modern tradition also emanates from her book Architecture in Palestine During the British Mandate (written in collaboration with Dan Price).79 Here she refers to the modernist JewishZionist architecture of the Mandate period as one that “dramatically transformed the tenets of the modernist movement,” and her description of British architecture emphasizes its many qualities, clearly displaying her appreciation of it.80 Curiously enough, this book did not include modern Palestinian

5.5  Ada KarmiMelamede, Faculty of Health Sciences, BenGurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, 1999. Photo: Dani Machlis. Courtesy of Dani Machlis © Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

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architecture, and only a couple of Mamluk and Ottoman “precedents” are discussed.81 No less important to understanding Karmi-Melamede’s approach as an architect is the following statement:

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The architect’s imagination seeks an expression inspired by culture and history, which are both universal and personal. At its best, architecture does not ignore such influences (conflicting as they often are), nor does it aspire to mask their contradictions. It seeks a balance that facilitates adaptation to a changing reality and allows order and freedom to coexist.82

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Here, Karmi-Melamede succinctly touches upon the issues raised at the outset of this discussion – the contradiction between the Self and public ideology or policy, as well as the demands of the work process while diverse sources of inspiration are considered. Her call for a balance of all these clearly reflects her own architecture, even though she does not position herself in relation to her literary subject: Mandate-era architecture. Karmi-Melamede’s architecture in the Marcus Campus was executed in the 1990s.83 Despite its relative contemporaneity, an investigation into it can foster enhancements or alternatives to the research practices evaluated here. While a detailed discussion of her university complexes is beyond the scope of this essay, a methodology for their research and historiography can certainly be proposed: this methodology entails documentation of the planning process, materials, and sources of inspiration; the basic documentation of a building and its architects resides at the heart of our trade just as field observation is for the biologist. As the architectural historiography of Israel/Palestine is about as new as these two nations, much documentation and field research has yet to be done, and many buildings are as yet unexplored. In such new national entities, and in our theoretical and critical era, special care must be taken to adhere to a thorough documentation of the built environment prior to an analysis that explores diverse avenues of socio-historical interpretation. I am not implying that documentation is consistently missing from Israeli historiography, but rather that it is not sufficiently discussed and is at times neglected in the process of theorizing the researcher’s object. Furthermore, scholars today are faced with great challenges in providing the socio-historical and/or theoretical interpretation for their object (or objects) of research and this is an important aspect of historiography. I agree with Jar­zom­ bek’s claim, discussed at the beginning of this paper, that the social or political theoretical premise, in our case nation, state, or postcolonial point-of-view, should be well defined prior to its implementation in the study of the built environment. In the case of Karmi-Melamede’s buildings at the Ben-Gurion Uni-

versity of the Negev in Be’er-Sheva, two theoretical constructs arise: the first is the issue of the state and the city as a patron of a public university; the second, if one wishes to propose a postcolonial reading of it, is the issue of urban politics and gentrification; that is, the spatial, economical, and cultural relationship between the campus and its adjacent low-income neighbourhoods. This is a relationship that calls for postcolonial interpretation on account of the complex ethnic makeup of Be’er-Sheva, which consists of communities that are regarded as subaltern, such as Mizrahi Jews (discussed below), Russian-Jewish immigrants, and Bedouins.84 Such an analysis can be informed in part by the implementation of postcolonialism in the field of urban geography.85 Both these issues, as relating to Karmi-Melamede’s architecture, reveal the capacity of postcolonial theory to promote our understanding of architecture’s role in society not only with regard to Israeli-Palestinian relations but also as it applies to Israel’s “other” Other, which I address below. Another Other

Architectural History Research in Israel/Palestine

Within Israel/Palestine’s national architectural historiography, several major themes are still largely missing. The first is a history of Palestinian architecture, which is nearly nonexistent, and in this I refer both to the built environment that is developed by the Palestinians living in the recognized international borders of Israel and to that of the Palestinian Authority domain.86 Second, other ethnicities and cultures must be taken into consideration for, in addition to the Palestinians and the Arabic-speaking minorities, Israel has another Other: Israeli society is shaped by diasporic identity, as its Jewish population was formed by both European Jewish immigrants, which comprised the ruling elite, and Mizrahi Jewish immigrants, most of whom emigrated after 1948 and have been termed by Joseph Massad “Israel’s internal Others.”87 All had a formative role in the construction of the built environment. Thus, Israeli architecture created following the establishment of the state was also a product of notions and ideologies that negotiated immigrant culture. The development of immigrant cultures vis-à-vis the state policy of national unification (termed “the Melting Pot”) was therefore influential in the process of architectural creation, both affecting it and being transformed by it. Haim Yacobi and Erez Tzfadia have discussed these issues with regard to urban geography and political science. In the case of the town of Netivot, for example, they show how urban spatial practices have been inspired by Jewish Moroccan urban heritage, claiming that “an alternative sense of place linked to a Mizrahi identity forged in the diaspora functions to undermine the production of sovereign space in Israel.”88 In architecture, this is expressed in several religious institutions in the town that are identified with Moroccan Jewry.

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5.6  Avi Tzarfati, Tomb of Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, Netivot, 1987. Photographed by the

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author, 16 August 2016.

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Especially well known is the building constructed upon the grave of one of this diaspora’s most important religious leaders, Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira (1889– 1984), which has become a pilgrimage site (Fig. 5.6). This is a stone-clad building, constructed in 1987 and planned by Israeli architect Avi Tzarfati (b. 1952), that has a dome, arched windows, “oriental-style” parapets, and other elements appropriated from Islamic sources. Zarfati, who emigrated from Morocco in his early twenties, described the grave’s “neo-oriental” style as being gleaned from personal memories of his homeland and a belief that Moroccan-inspired architecture would best suit the building, despite the many limitations that existed in the 1980s regarding building expertise and materials.89 The building process was carried out in cooperation with its patrons: the Jewish-Moroccan community and Baruch Abuhazeira, the distinguished rabbi’s son. Thus, the motives for choosing this style and the architect’s agency in appropriating it are clear, and his description emphasizes the aspiration to define ethnic, rather than national identity.

The third aspect missing from Israeli architectural historiography, which in many ways has already been addressed, is that of the junctions between local and global. The impact of main movements and ideas in architecture needs to be examined more profoundly and through case studies of both architects and architectures. In the case of a new entity such as Israel/Palestine, this study would include, for the larger part, an examination of local architecture vis-àvis twentieth- and twenty-first-century architecture internationally as well as globally. I use both these terms since I see “international” as the architects’ view, outside their local realm, of specific buildings (with or without their broader cultural meanings) in specific localities. The term “global” refers to trends and developments that have spread around the globe and that are conceived as such or, as recently defined by Ching et al., as “the manner in which local histories imagine the world.”90 Conclusion

Architectural History Research in Israel/Palestine

In Postcolonial Contraventions, Laura Chrisman raises the complexity of the agency of the postcolonial critic with regard to South Africa. Elaborating upon several of the points raised here, she underscores the importance of the knowledge-production of a nation.91 In this paper, I have raised the problems of this production, outlining some of the major challenges that the historian of the architecture of Israel/Palestine faces. Not every built phenomenon can be interpreted by postcolonial theory. As Welter comments, ideology is not necessarily the moving force behind every architectural creation.92 I therefore propose that acknowledging the multiple elements that contribute to knowledge-production and their many facets, is pivotal: in producing architectural history, aspects of economic history, labour management, production, and architectural expertise should be addressed, in addition to artistic merit, aesthetic choices, and global trends, which have already been touched upon here. All these aspects need to be tackled, along with addressing the enormous gaps in the documentation of key monuments and the research of individual architects and firms. This is by no means to say that postcolonial theorizing of architecture needs to “wait it out,” so to speak. It should not, however, be applied at the expense of a thorough investigation of the object of research. Moreover, researchers’ turn toward well-established postcolonial criticism of twentieth-century colonialism and imperialism, the “Arab village,” “hybridity” and other issues should constantly be re-examined. Local as well as international politics are continuously at work within the academic world, and these demand a consideration of Israeli and Palestinian academic currents and their place in relation to international ones. As competing historiographies are hotly debated and questions of discrimination,

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sovereignty, and entitlement remain urgent and charged, expert study of place and the built environment is endowed with a responsibility to locate architecture and urbanism in their reciprocity as both producers and products of cultural spheres. This entails not only supplying answers but also posing new questions, both within the postcolonial perspective and beyond. It calls for exposing competing or conflicting ideologies within Israeli and/or Palestinian society, and applying a broader lens when investigating their architectural production. For this purpose, elements of architecture or ideology that serve to oppress or discriminate need not be ignored, let alone justified; but neither should they be discussed in generalizing and assumptive terms such as “colonizer” and “colonized,” “traditional” versus “modern,” or “national” and “official.” Terms such as these, some of which describe entire historical processes and carry different meanings in different locales and temporalities, need to be critically examined rather than reiterated. It is noteworthy that at the time this essay is being written, Israel/Palestine is experiencing the profound impact of global immigration, swiftly changing international politics, and internal social transformations, all of which will surely be significant to the future development of architecture and dwelling environments. Architecture and urban planning allot nations their physical shape. They are central to the creation of national identities and, in the case of Israel/Palestine, postcolonial theory can be significant in understanding them. Nonetheless, in my closing remarks I suggest that the complexity of architecture and urbanism in the case of Israel/Palestine should be harnessed not solely for discussing the conflict and its spatial dichotomies but also for investigating the production of a third space that embodies the development of shared traditions and innovations. This complexity also reveals that it is necessary to research the making of spaces that do not necessarily create identity vis-à-vis Israel, Palestine, and their dispute, but relate either to different subversive Others or to social entities that are less clearly defined. Such a proposal is sure to attract criticism for its possible lack of criticality; yet if considered as a participatory approach and not one that subsumes other analyses, it can provide a deeper and more complete knowledge of history and society. The multiple narratives of Israel/ Palestine certainly require exactly that.

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“Draw Me a Sheep!” Contemporary Responses to the Histories of Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt Tamme r El- She i k h

“D

raw me a sheep,” asks the little prince of a pilot who has just awakened after a crash in the Sahara Desert, in the opening episode of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943). Never having drawn a sheep, the pilot first offers the prince a picture of an “elephant in a boa constrictor.” As a child, he had often drawn this picture for adults, who consistently misrecognized it as a hat. The pilot is pleased that the little prince interprets the inner content of the picture perfectly. Nevertheless, the little prince continues to request a sheep. Three drawings follow which, although closer to the desired likeness, are rejected as well. The first looks too “sickly” for the little prince, the second looks more like a ram than a sheep on account of its horns, and the third is “too old”; the prince wants a sheep that will live a long time. Finally, the pilot draws a small box with ventilation holes on the side. The sheep, he says, is inside. To the pilot’s surprise, this drawing delights his young companion. It is, in fact, “exactly the way [he] wanted it!”1 Saint-Exupéry is not direct, but the moral of this part of the story could be that we ought to take responsibility for the things we create – that we make livable homes for the things we bring into the world. This lesson might be adapted to describe some contemporary critical responses to the history and culture of art education in Egypt. What are the livable homes in which Egyptian artists are placing their work, and how are these homes built out of the materials of art, institutional, and intellectual history in Egypt? In what follows I begin to answer these questions, focusing on recent works by two contemporary Egyptian artists, Cairo-based Hassan Khan (b. 1975) and Alexandria-based Mahmoud Khaled (b. 1982). Their work may be viewed as a critique of the culture of formal art education in Egypt, and as a refusal of essentialist and reductive approaches to the representation of

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Egyptian art and artists in a globalized art world, especially in the wake of 11 September 2001 and the Arab Spring of 2010. 2 Presentations of artists from the region all too often reinforce national and ethnic artistic identities at the expense of nuanced accounts of artworks. Resisting these trends, Khan and Khaled can be said to take responsibility for the interpretation of their work, even to lead the interpretation of their work into the Cairene and Alexandrian contexts and histories from which it emerged. I aim to show how their work opens up access to moments of exchange in the art, institutional, and intellectual histories of these cities, including an engagement with surrealism and psychoanalysis. Local histories are retained in their work even as it passes through the channels of a globalized art world. In shuttling between their particular experiences of art education in Cairo and Alexandria and international forums for contemporary global art, Khan and Khaled challenge binary (that is, Western/contemporary and non-Western/ traditional) descriptions of art practices. The binary distinction between the West and the non-West that, for Edward Said, structured scholarship, art, and literature dealing with the Arab-Islamic world in the long nineteenth century have resurfaced in contemporary discourse and exhibitions.3 A possible cause for this, according to historian Dina Ramadan, is the ongoing disconnection between the “West” as a site of art theory and the “non-West” as a site of art production to be interpreted through Western art theory.4 A perception of this division of labour has been sustained both within the Middle East and in the so-called West. Khan and Khaled refuse this fixed binary in their work and, notably, in ways that are contiguous with similar refusals in the art and intellectual histories of their respective cities. Aspects of their work can be related to three particular moments of exchange in Egyptian art, institutional, and intellectual histories. The first was the founding of the Beaux-Arts–style Egyptian School of Fine Arts by Prince Yusuf Kamal in 1908. The second was the emergence in 1939 of an Egyptian surrealist group under the umbrella of the International Federation of Revolutionary Art (fiari ), which established precedents for artists in Egypt to work straddling both European and non-European traditions. The third, which belongs to post–Second World War Egyptian intellectual history, was Cairo University professor Yusuf Murad’s development of an “integrative curriculum” for psychoanalysis based in Freudian, non-Freudian, and pre-Freudian Arab-Islamic sources. These moments of encounter anticipate the receptivity of Khan and Khaled to international ideas, in terms of positive and negative inspiration. For these moments of exchange were not friction-free. The Beaux-Arts curriculum of the Egyptian School of Fine Arts was fiercely debated. Ramadan has analyzed a mission statement written by the school’s director, Guillaume

Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt

Laplange, showing that the institution was conceived to promote the advancement of Egyptian artists along French neo-classical lines. Laplange had a two-part mission: first, to train students in basic skills (painting, sculpture, architecture, decoration and ornament, and calligraphy); then to develop in them a “taste for authentic Egyptian national art.”5 This peculiarly French mission for the school was a target of criticism in 1911. Ramadan follows her analysis of Laplange’s mission statement with an equally close reading of a 1911 report filed by the council of the Egyptian University on the perceived progress and failures of the School of Fine Arts in its first years of operation. The report recommended an “Egyptianization” of the curriculum through a replacement of the Beaux Arts disciplines with glass, carpentry, mosaics, forging and bookbinding. This more “authentic” mission was also to be reflected in a name change from “The School of Fine Arts” to “The Egyptian School of Decorative Arts.”6 Such debates are reductive insofar as they fix the distinction between European and Egyptian cultural traditions. But this fixity is discursive – the binary was maintained at the level of language and complicated at the level of art production. The debates attest to the rich exchange of styles of art education and production between Egypt and, in this case, France. Khan’s and Khaled’s works can be read in relation to this history. They offer views of the culture of university art education insofar as their biographies are crossed with it. But their works are resolutely personal, reflecting an engagement with both formal educational experiences, and informal ones well beyond the university. The second art historical moment was equally controversial. As art historian Don LaCoss notes, members of the Cairo-based surrealist “Art and Liberty Group” were accused by liberal and reform-minded Egyptian intellectuals of a deleterious importation of Western theories – of the “purely French ideology” of surrealism and the theories of Sigmund Freud. Such perceived dependencies on French culture and on the theories of an “Austrian Jew” induced a “moral panic with nationalist underpinnings” in the pages of mid-century Egyptian cultural journals such as al-Risala.7 Founded by the painter Ramses Younan and the poet Georges Henein in 1939 and active until 1945, the Art and Liberty Group was, in spite of these debates, regarded as fiari ’s “most fully realized undertaking worldwide.”8 The international and educational aims of the Egyptian group were explicitly stated in its charter: “to maintain a close contact between the youth of Egypt and the current literary, artistic and social developments in the world.”9 Here also we find an important precedent for the work of Khan and Khaled. Their work carries on a tradition of specifically surrealist reflections within Egypt on the role of dreams, the unconscious, and drives in art practices. Finally, in post–Second World War academic circles, the same kind of productive East/West exchange, viewed by some as a dependence, is apparent. As

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historian Omnia El-Shakry shows, the study of psychoanalysis in mid-century Cairo was part of an “integrative curriculum” with powerful anti-colonial, spiritual, and artistic implications.10 El-Shakry argues that psychoanalysis within Egypt was not a Western production imposed on intellectuals and artists but rather a “co-production … across European and Egyptian knowledge formations.”11 Specifically she shows how Cairo University professor Yusuf Murad and his colleagues developed an approach to psychoanalysis that integrated ideas from European writers (including some who were opposed to the theories of Freud) and from pre-psychoanalytic Egyptian and Islamic sources dating back to the Middle Ages. In addition to this integration of cultural traditions, Murad’s theoretical and practical approach to psychoanalysis aimed at an integration of psychic, social, and bodily elements of the subject.12 Long before the notion of the “unconscious” entered popular Egyptian discourse in the late 1930s, the medieval Sufi philosopher Ibn ’Arabi had written about it as an aspect of his mystical worldview. El-Shakry notes that when Murad formally introduced the notion to his fellow academics in the Dictionary of Psychological Terms it was ’Arabi’s rendering, “la shu’ur,” that seemed most appropriate.13 By uncovering Islamic and pre-psychoanalytic concepts in both medieval and modern Egyptian intellectual history, El-Shakry’s research contributes to a growing body of literature on the “worlding” of psychoanalysis or its modification outside the European and North American context.14 In the postwar Egyptian context, Murad’s elaboration of an “integrative curriculum” of psychoanalysis is described by El-Shakry as an element of a broader political and social project of decolonization. Murad’s hybridized Islamic and secular science of the “integrative, adaptive and synthetic” self (nafs) thus responds critically to the “unsayable” of European psychoanalysis – the belief that selfhood for the colonized remains an impossible achievement.15 El-Shakry’s account of psychoanalysis within Egypt offers a way of interpreting art from that country – that of the mid-century surrealists, and more recently Khan’s and Khaled’s, as I will argue – without recourse to theories attributed exclusively to a monolithic West. Khan and Khaled respond to their experiences of art education in Cairo (for Khan), and in Alexandria and Beirut (for Khaled) in a manner that recalls the early twentieth-century conditions that Ramadan describes. They contribute to a national tradition of institution building and critique – these are some of the homes their work might be said to build, or perhaps to renovate. But Khan and Khaled seem intent as well on exceeding such national frameworks for art interpretation and production. Features of their work express a will to dream and think well beyond their immediate and distant institutional contexts, and beyond national and ethnic markers of identity. In this respect Khan and Khaled carry on a tradition of cosmopolitan surrealist and psychoanalytic re-

flection that can be traced to, but not contained within Egypt’s art and intellectual history. Hassan Khan: Through a Looking Glass, Trustingly

Hassan Khan’s 17 and in auc (2003) can be approached as a performance aimed at a specifically psychoanalytic and integrated self-knowledge (Fig. 6.1). 17 and in auc also carries on the early-twentieth-century tradition, described in Ramadan’s work on the School of Fine Arts, of institutional criticism. Khan’s choice of target for critique, the American University in Cairo (AUC ), indicates that the landscape of university art education within Egypt and beyond has changed considerably since the early twentieth-century Beaux Arts debates, and since the time of the Egyptian Art and Liberty Group. Corresponding with the country’s passage out of a French and British colonial era into a period of open markets and American military and economic influence in the region, there has been a shift of focus in critical commentaries on art education. Whereas the curricular debates at the School of Fine Arts and the criticism of the Art and Liberty Group were trained on the problem of French cultural influence within Egypt, Khan’s critique is aimed at the auc as an expression

6.1  Hassan Khan, 17 and in auc , performance shot, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

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of American cultural imperialism. His painstaking self-observation within the almost clinical setting of the performance space may be described as an effort to integrate and process his experience of the auc at a distance from it. Khan’s work can thus be viewed as continuous with the three moments in Egyptian art and intellectual history outlined above. In 17 and in auc , Khan records and examines alternately hazy, humorous, frightening, and banal memories of his five undergraduate years at the school between 1990 and 1995. The performance was conducted in a Cairo apartment over a period of fourteen nights, between 7:00 and 11:00 in the evening. Commissioned by the auc , it was supposed to be held at the Performing and Visual Arts Department’s Falaki Gallery. To ease the burden of the endurance piece, Khan, quite understandably planned to keep a drink at his desk during the performance. Since alcohol was banned on campus, the performance had to be relocated to an apartment. While “smoking cigarettes and drinking beer” off-campus in a sound-proofed, one-way mirrored glass box – a kind of parody of undergraduate life – Khan recounts details of his auc experience that expose, among other things, the university’s relationship to its context and particularly its complicity in Anglo-American cultural imperialism within the region.16 In the performance Khan distances himself from conventional Arabist and student-run politics and focuses instead on his artistic subject-formation within a Comparative Literature program. His various identifications with artists and artworks, discovered independently, or introduced to him by auc faculty – but more often by friends – reveal an attitude of irreverence and anti-authoritarianism. While Khan is apathetic with respect to conventional politics, his cultural politics speak loudly through the writers, musicians, and filmmakers he mentions in the course of the performance. The transcription of the performance reads at times like a serial homage to: American filmmakers such as David Lynch and John Waters; European filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, and Ingmar Bergman; writers such as the American William Burroughs and the Sudanese Tayeb Salih; and musicians from Jimi Hendrix and Iggy Pop and The Stooges to the Sufi singers Yassin Al Tohamy and Ahmed Al Tuni.17 It is difficult to discern a specifically Egyptian national identity in this list of influences or sources for Khan’s art. And efforts to organize the list into broadly Euro-American (Lynch, Waters, Bergman, and the like) and Arab-Islamic (Al Tohamy, Salih, and others) categories falter on some of the more obscure and deeply hybridized cultural texts Khan mentions. Where would one place, for example, “Arabic Kung-Fu movies”?18 The list testifies to the cosmopolitan and transnational nature of Khan’s art practice, and to his admittedly privileged means of access (through the auc in part) to such a range of films, musicians, and writers.19

Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt

Khan’s work, like that of the Egyptian surrealists, engages with a wide range of cultural sources. Indeed Arab-Islamic/European cultural hybridity is encoded in the oldest film mentioned in his transcript: Dali and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). This surrealist masterpiece refers, at least nominally by way of Andalusia, to a moment and region in which Christian, Islamic, and Judaic intellectual and cultural products were forged in dialogue.20 But something more than a run through Khan’s influences seems to be at stake in the performance. It is, as he notes in the description of the project, the record of a “consciousness on the brink.”21 The psychic and emotional labour of the performance is registered in its transcription. The transcript is only “lightly edited” to preserve slips, repetitions, and ellipses. And crucially, its total lack of punctuation conveys the energy of Khan’s stream of consciousness. Across 218 pages broken into sections indicating the days and hours of the performance, Khan’s transcript contains a very raw spoken record of his experience. It is an overwhelming amount of psychic data that the artist makes no effort to organize thematically or otherwise. Nevertheless, the performance aims at a kind of knowledge production – especially in Khan’s numerous attempts to “decipher and analyze the period (1990–95) as well as the situation itself.”22 These reflexive moments produce the effect of a splitting of the self into a measured observer of thoughts and memories, and a more impulsive producer of them. The performance thereby introduces a further division in Khan’s staged subject-formation. Since it was carried out in a one-way mirrored glass box, the artist was unable to see his audience. This separation between Khan’s enclosed speaking position and the voyeuristic observing position of his listeners is maintained within the performance. Khan’s project then, is integrative in several respects. Not only does he integrate through commentary his sources of artistic inspiration – sources drawn from diverse cultural traditions (Euro-American and Arab-Islamic) and disciplines (film, literature, music) – but he also integrates his memories within the dialogic space of the performance. The split between observing and speaking positions here recalls Murad’s account of the psychoanalytic relation. One is reminded here as well of Art and Liberty Group member Kamil el-Telmissany’s defence of surrealist strategies – of acquiring knowledge concerning “psychological facts … that shed light on the state of the individual … his desires, needs, hopes for the future … without flattery or dissimulation.”23 Khan assumes a deliberately unpolished and vulnerable speaking/observing position that is structured by a “relation to an audience” (outside the performance space and in the wider art world), and worked through by his powers of interpreting, observing, and analyzing memories. Khan’s 2013 project for Artforum titled Trusted Sources might well be regarded as a follow up to 17 and in auc . Indeed, he conceived of the commissioned

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artist project for the well-known New York–based magazine as a kind of “installation or exhibition” rather than an “insertion.”24 Broadening the inventory of films, books, and other cultural texts mentioned in 17 and in auc , Khan reflects upon and integrates a wide range of “sources” in his Artforum project. As he notes in a preface to the project, the “sources” are “several things at once.” They are emotionally charged sources of artwork such as “a moment of embarrassment,” “a fantasy of victory,” “a burning ambition,” “a deep sadness,” “a half smile” or a “simple song.” But they are also sources of what Khan imagines as a kind of social contract or “hidden agreement” that allows “transactions between individuals to take place” including “names … love, friendship and family.”25 The nine, mostly photographic, works in the project allude to these two classes of sources – the personal and the social. Images of found and fabricated objects – a wooden beam “sprayed with water and placed in a public garden,” tiles “arranged on top of each other,” and a glass sculpture hovering in front of a blurred suburban Cairo city-scape – function as records of quiet and personal moments of artistic inspiration, or as visual metaphors for Khan’s sense of collective social experience. More direct references to the second class of sources (of social cohesion) are made in a portrait of Khan’s mother, “shot on a cell phone … after six years of thinking about it and hesitating,” and a picture of Khan’s friend and fellow-artist Mahmoud Khaled.26 A classification of the sources (personal and social) in Khan’s project is possible on the basis of his statement. But as he notes, sources of his artwork “could be almost anything.”27 With this assertion Khan makes a claim to total artistic freedom that recalls the mid-century Egyptian surrealist arguments for a “free-art.”28 The question of sources in Khan’s work is different, though, in one important respect. There is no longer a need in Khan’s time, perhaps as a result of the boundary-breaking efforts and international orientation of the Art and Liberty Group and their peers, to nominate sources as either authentically Egyptian or imported. Khan’s list of sources of inspiration, from European and American filmmakers, a Sudanese writer, a beat poet, Sufi singers, and more in 17 and in auc, may be described as a kind of canon that, although hybridized in the artist’s act of appropriation and commentary, retains some traces of national and ethnic character. In Trusted Sources this is not the case. In this project Khan shows a greater liberty in his choice of materials. In spite of the rigorous and almost legalistic tone of the project title, and the forensic look of some of the images, Trusted Sources marks out considerable space in Khan’s practice for surprise and spontaneity. Besides this claim to an opening of the range of sources for his practice, Khan’s Artforum project takes up some specifically psychoanalytic themes. Dreams, the psychosocial bonding action of the gaze, and a desire for unity

6.2  Hassan Khan, this is a dream (drawing based on a gesture seen in a dream and commissioned from Mohamed Nour, a commercial artist based in Midan El Abbassia), 2013. Colour photograph, 40 × 40 cm. © Hassan Khan. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt

or psychic and social integration are important themes in three of the nine images in the project especially. I deal with them here in turn. The cover illustration for the Artforum project is a portrait commissioned by Khan from a commercial artist in Cairo. The complexity of the issue of sources is apparent in the image’s excessive mediation. It is a likeness of the artist Mahmoud Khaled, drawn by a commercial artist from a photograph that Khan took. The photograph was in turn based on a dream of Khan’s, and the final drawing was scanned and printed before being sent to Artforum. Khan makes a point of sharing his authorship of the work in its title: this is a dream (drawing based on a gesture seen in a dream and commissioned from Mohamed Nour, a commercial artist based in Midan El Abbassia) (2013) (Fig. 6.2). In this process, according to both Khan and Khaled, the subject of the portrait falls out of view.29 For Khan and Khaled the drawing presents as kitsch – in spite of its distinguished place on the cover of Artforum, and in spite of the proclamation

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“this is a dream ” hovering in a speech bubble in front of Khaled’s closed mouth. Neither an honorific portrait nor a particularly accurate image of Khaled (who is not named for Artforum’s readership in the work’s credits), we focus either on the drawing’s hasty technique or on the physiognomy of the sitter. The picture becomes generic in spite of the highly personal circumstances of its production and reproduction – in a dream, in photographs, and finally in Khan’s occasionally strained dialogue with Artforum’s editors about the layout and design of the project.30 One is inclined to ask some questions: What constitutes a source in this project? And how, to whom and for what purpose is it entrusted? Historical debates about the role of sources (Pharaonic, Coptic, or Islamic, for instance) in Egyptian art education are complicated in Khan’s project and plunged into the more uncertain context of an important forum for global contemporary art. The original source of the work, Khan’s dream of a gesture, recalls the tradition of surrealism within Egypt and elsewhere, and the psychoanalytic curriculum of Murad and his peers. The speech bubble, which reads “this is a dream, ” was filled in by Khan during the last stage of the image’s production, as if to return it from its excessive cycle of technological and interpersonal mediation to the fullness and simplicity of its source. This is Khan’s first integrative gesture in the work. The dream passes from the unconscious, through the conscious and collaborative design and production process of the image, to integrate personal and social aspects of the work, or, in the language of the surrealists, to attend to the “spreading of surrealism in life.”31 This mobilization of a dream in a collaborative process between Khan, his designer, Khaled, and Mohamed Nour places the image in a social nexus. It is a work of the dream outside of the bounds of the unconscious that reflects the specifically social character of Murad’s psychoanalytic curriculum – its resistance to European and American varieties of instrumental ego-psychology.32 That Khan and Khaled both insist on the disappearance from view of the nominal subject of the portrait – this disappearance is reinforced by Khan through his decision to leave Khaled’s name out of the credits – suggests the work’s aim of moving from a single person’s psychic content onto a more broadly social formation. This displacement, significantly, proceeds in stages from the dream of the artist, through a collaborative photo-shoot between two artists (Khan and Kha­ led) to render the dream as a source for a drawing, and finally to what Khan calls an impersonal “transaction” with Mohamed Nour, a commercial artist positioned well outside the international contemporary arts network that Artforum represents.33 Khan’s work records the labour of a member of a class of artists within Egypt who make their living outside the global contemporary art market. The gesture betrays a will on Khan’s part to involve a sector of the arts community within Egypt in a milieu from which it is normally alienated.

In A glass object photographed as a way of collecting the world around it (2013), Khan involves Egyptian commercial artists as well (Fig. 6.3). And once again, he is forthright about the collaborative nature of the work. On the first page of the project credit is shared with Zeinab Khalifa Workshops in Cairo, the producers of the glass object.34 One is reminded of the debates around the Beaux Arts curriculum after the School of Fine Arts’ first years of operation. The spirit behind the curriculum proposal to include traditional Egyptian arts,

6.3  Hassan Khan, A glass object photographed as a way of collecting the world around it, 2013. Colour photograph, 40 × 40 cm. © Hassan Khan. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

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such as glasswork, is perhaps carried on here in Khan’s image. But the image is not a simple homage to the ranks of Egyptian craftspeople or an updating of the traditional place of glasswork in Egyptian material culture. As the title indicates, it imaginatively proposes a “way of collecting the world around it.” The location that appears behind the object in blurred Cairene earth tones is near Ain Shams University, close to the suburb of Heliopolis. For Khan the location was to represent a kind of average Cairo cityscape. He was not interested in showing “abject poverty” on the one hand, or “skyscrapers” and the new Egyptian wealth on the other.35 In this work he aims rather at an anonymous representation of Cairo, one that can be easily gathered or “collected” within what he describes, tellingly, as a “cruel and beautiful” glass object.36 The tension in Khan’s description here is revealing. He seems to be concerned to show the potential violence that the imagined collection of the world around the object involves. This note of trepidation in the wake of the 2011 revolution and subsequent efforts within Egypt to organize collective life – not always democratically – has great social and political resonance.37 Alas, the object is beautiful – delicate, generous, and inviting. His gesture of imagining the collection of the world in a fragile glass sculpture is ultimately a touching and optimistic one. It is worth imagining, Khan seems to suggest, in spite of the risk of slippage in the work’s connotation from a beautiful effort of collection to a cruel political reality of control. Khan’s gesture here is consistent with what El-Shakry calls the “pastoral optimism” of Murad’s integrative psychoanalytic curriculum – its basis in a monistic Sufi concept of unity (wih­ da) and its emphasis, in contrast with Freudian psychoanalysis, on the primacy of love in social relations.38 Khan’s image and its title together echo Murad’s informed belief in integration and self-organization (at the personal and social level) by means of synthetic, adaptive, and always future-oriented action. The optimistic tone of Khan’s project is perhaps best captured in the portrait of his mother, Zeinab Khalifa (of Zeinab Khalifa Workshops), titled My Mother (a photograph of my mother shot on my cell phone on August 4, 2013, after six years of thinking about it and hesitating) (2013) (Fig. 6.4). In this image Khan’s mother confronts the artist’s gaze as it appears to her from just behind the cellphone mentioned in the work’s title. Unlike the highly mediated image of Mahmoud Khaled, this piece describes a frank meeting between the artist and his subject. Their gazes are merged in spite of the recording technology used to produce the image. Looking directly at her son, with an expression that lies somewhere between concern and defiance, Khan’s mother dodges the mechanical vision of the cellphone. She insists on an exchange of interpersonal gazes and refuses the intervention of Khan’s primary tool, in this project at least, of recording. One is again reminded of Murad’s and his colleagues’ interests, here specifically in the work of Henri Wallon on the social constitution of the

ego – on the ego’s emergence out of a prior social relation given through the child’s encounter with his or her own mirror image or through the child’s interaction with the mother.39 Murad’s reflections on the Sufi philosopher ’Arabi’s concept of love are also well illustrated here. Indeed the reflected image of Khan is vaguely discernible in his mother’s eye. The bonding and profoundly social role of the gaze in Murad’s curriculum, and in the Sufi concept of love out of which it is partly developed, is staged dramatically in Khan’s work: “[an] economy of the gaze [in which] the beloved’s form may be imprinted on the very existence of the lover.”40 Khan’s project in Artforum as I have described it here has a kind of epistolary quality – it is an illustrated love letter from Khan to his collaborators,

6.4  Hassan Khan, My Mother (a photograph of my mother shot on my cell phone on August 4, 2013, after six years of thinking about it and hesitating), 2013. Colour photograph, 40 × 40 cm. © Hassan Khan. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

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including his mother, and to his city. But it was not without some friction that the editorial process of the project was realized. For all its modest and personal charms, Khan’s work was commissioned by one of the world’s most highly regarded and widely read contemporary art publications. The cultural politics of this “transaction” – one that contrasts sharply with Khan’s commissioning of the drawing of Khaled for example, are not lost on the artist. While Khan remains enthusiastic about the project and its publication in Artforum, his dealings with the magazine editors suggest that difficulties are involved in presenting art from a postcolonial (and post-revolutionary) context to an international audience for global art. Artforum first contacted Khan in September 2011, just months after the Egyptian revolution. The editors asked him to choose a most meaningful work or exhibition of the year for a special feature, to be published in the December 2011 issue, along with the responses of several artists to the same request.41 Khan’s choice was “Anonymous pop propagandists (state radio, Cairo, 2011) – a radio broadcast heard by the artist but not recorded, and never exhibited as an artwork.42 The response at first frustrated the editors’ expectations, but it then seemed to provide an opportunity for them to foreground Khan’s role in an unfolding revolutionary moment within Egypt. Khan notes that there was some debate about the language around the presentation of the work in the magazine. While the editors wished to emphasize the relationship between the work and “the occupation of Tahrir” or the “Egyptian defeat of a fascist state,” Khan preferred less framing, and certainly not this kind of resolved political framing which would connect his art practice with the results of a revolution.43 Khan’s second exchange with the magazine occurred in December 2011. This time he was asked to contribute a special project to be included in the October 2013 issue. The details were “open to discussion” but the editors, aware of Khan’s interdisciplinary work as a writer and visual artist, requested that a text element be included. After sending some sample work, including the transcript of 17 and in auc for the editors’ perusal, Khan suggested a ten-page insert for the special project. The project was to be titled Trusted Sources and would include works in “different formats.” Along with this suggestion Khan sent a press release from an exhibition of his work in Japan. The Japanese exhibition, which followed Khan’s residency at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, was also entitled Trusted Sources, but the work he proposed to Artforum would be entirely new.44 In February and March of 2012 Khan’s negotiations with the editors took a comic and provocative turn. After his earlier experience with Artforum, in which the magazine had sought to frame Khan’s humorous choice of a “bestwork” of 2011 in rather solemn and political terms, the artist decided to test the magazine’s boundaries. Khan requested that the magazine’s editor write “Read

Mahmoud Khaled: Love Songs, Cable Cars, and Cosmopolitans

Like Khan, Alexandria-based artist Mahmoud Khaled reveals a wide range of sources in his practice that do not fit neatly within a contemporary/traditional (Western/non-Western) scheme; nor do they fit within the materials and skillsfocused framework of university art education in Egypt. He too takes possession of his university experience and processes it in a highly personal and critical manner, but not in the interest of contributing to a national art.

Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt

Fanon You Fucking Bastards” on a piece of paper, which was to be scanned by the artist and then included in the special project’s sequence of images.45 Far from being a random act of mischief making, this suggestion was in fact a work from the artist’s oeuvre. Since 2003 Khan had on several occasions made the same request with curators and gallery owners who expressed an interest in marketing Egyptian or Arab ethnicity or national identity – in pressing his work into the service of identity politics.46 Not surprisingly, Artforum’s editors denied Khan’s request. In refusing the “Read Fanon” piece, the magazine exposed its limits, but Khan’s attempt to test these limits can also be regarded as an important aspect of the published project.47 The precision and care that he and his collaborator, the designer Engy Aly, took in the layout of the works suggests a preoccupation with boundaries. The works are meticulously adjusted to the physical and visual boundaries introduced by the magazine. In light of Khan’s aborted negotiation with Artforum about the Fanon project, these boundaries take on a metaphorical power. They become design elements that point critically to conventions of framing, and to decorum within the culture of global contemporary art. Khan’s Artforum project, then, can be related productively to important if remote moments in Cairo’s art, intellectual, and institutional history. The Artforum project might be said to mark the arrival on the international stage of Hassan Khan, and by implication, of the contemporary Egyptian art scene. I have focused above on the art and intellectual history within Cairo against which Khan’s work might be read. That is, I am less interested in the historic appearance of Khan in the international art press than I am in the appearance of Cairo’s history (of art, art institutions, and ideas) in his work, whether he intends these references or not. His work is partially a response to elements of Cairo’s art and intellectual history, and it also provides an occasion to learn about that history – it is at once a response and an invitation to Cairo’s history of art and ideas. This choice between the historic appearance of Khan’s work in Artforum and the appearance of Cairene history in his work, as I see it, is a choice between fetishization or novelty and a worldly, informed encounter with a contemporary artist, his milieu, and his ideas.

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6.5  Mahmoud Khaled, Proposal for a Romantic Sculpture, 2012. Video embedded in sculptural form. Video: 5 min. loop on iPod, specially commissioned tattoo of song title “Ne me quitte

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pas” by Jacques Brel. Sculptural form: marble and wood, 29 × 29 × 100 cm.

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Khaled’s Proposal for a Romantic Sculpture (2012) challenges a binary West/ non-West framework for analyzing art from the region (Fig. 6.5). His concerns in this work are formal, emotional, and unabashedly “romantic.” The work is a carefully constructed marble and wood plinth in which the artist has embedded an iPod showing a video of a tattooing process. The video shows the

Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt

entire process complete with blood leaks and pauses to wipe clean the vulnerable surface of Khaled’s back. The tattoo, which reads “ne me quitte pas” (“don’t leave me”) is taken from the 1959 song by Jacques Brel and applied to Khaled’s back in a suitably cursive style.48 The Brel song is played from the device, generating what the artist rightly calls a highly “romantic atmosphere” – an atmosphere one does not associate with such a slickly minimal object.49 Another collision occurs between the work’s industrial aesthetic and the classical sculptural materials (wood and marble) used in its construction. The minimalist form of the sculpture signifies “contemporary art” (mu’asira) and certain expectations within Egypt about what such art should look and feel like.50 For Khaled the sculpture works against an expectation that new art be “cool, not dramatic and not emotional.”51 The classical materials of the work frustrate these expectations as well. His choice of materials suggests the lure of a Mediterranean heritage. Since he had received his initial training at the Alexandria Academy of Fine Arts and had grown up in Alexandria – a beacon in the Mediterranean imaginary – the attraction is understandable. But rather than simply honouring this heritage, Khaled works through it in the sculpture. The piece originates in a powerful feeling, articulated by Brel in his song but more significantly felt by Khaled in his conception for the work and in the experience of sitting for the tattoo. This kernel of emotional and physical experience – of pain, of loss, and of romantic desperation – is at the core of the work. Indeed, it is embedded in the work and tattooed on the artist’s body. In contrast with this strong sentiment, the sculpture’s classical materials and its minimal aesthetic seem almost academic – impersonal historical footnotes in what is primarily a personal and autobiographical text. Proposal for a Romantic Sculpture illustrates the psychic, bodily, and social elements of an integrative subject-formation in Murad’s psychoanalytic sense. The priority of Khaled’s emotional life – or of desire – within his work is clearly indicated. The desire in question is at least interpersonal, involving Khaled and the absent beloved to whom he appeals through a line from Brel: Ne me quitte pas! Khaled’s imperative draws the beloved into the emotional centre of the work, and inscribes an image of the beloved upon the lover in the form of a tattoo. One is reminded of the irreducible social relation in Murad’s psychoanalytic curriculum. Reflections, via ’Arabi, on the material and spiritual bonds within a loving relationship, on the imprint of the beloved upon the body and spirit of the lover, are powerfully echoed in Khaled’s work.52 This education of the heart is mingled with a political education. The artist produced the work following a residency at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut.53 Khaled recalls that he left for the residency in Beirut amid post-revolutionary disappointments in Egypt. His purpose for the residency was to address a “creative block” caused in his view by the “intensity” of the 2011 revolution and

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6.6  Mahmoud Khaled, A Memorial to Failure, 2013. Engraved crystal plaque and hd video; 19:55 min, colour, sound.

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its “all-consuming energy,” which seemed to move “in the wrong direction.”54 Proposal was included along with two other works by Khaled in an exhibition at Ashkal Alwan at the end of his stay. These artworks were the first that he produced after he had broken through his “creative block” by his own efforts and through his interactions with fellow-artists and professors at the residency. They represent a re-activation of Khaled’s practice in the wake of a historical and personal disappointment. The timing of the works, and the recovery they represent suggests the at-once personal, artistic, and political goal of Khaled’s integrative gesture. This breakthrough in Khaled’s work was occasioned partly by his meeting at Ashkal Alwan with the Italian political philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi. In his attempt to recover from his creative block, Khaled asked the philosopher about the relationship between art and politics, and specifically about “how one can fail beautifully?”55 The philosopher’s responses are included as the audio element in A Memorial to Failure (2013), Khaled’s digital video recording of precarious cable-car rides over Rio and Beirut (Fig. 6.6). Berardi’s responses to Khaled’s questions are heard but the questions themselves are not. Rather, Khaled’s presence is suggested by the view from the cable car – a view that responds subtly to Berardi’s reflections. Khaled’s editing is careful and poignant. Corresponding with Berardi’s move from a conventional definition of politics (that is, electoral, representational, and so on) to a more complex description

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of the bio-political sphere (thought through in terms of “viral proliferation,” “morphogenesis,” and “dna ”), Khaled’s video presents a view of an ordered concrete plaza, then an overgrown park, and finally cars passing quickly on the highway below.56 Khaled’s digital view is aligned in these moments with Berardi’s political insight. The artist absorbs himself in the opinions of the philosopher (one gets the sense that they occupy the same space in the cable car) but without thereby sacrificing his agency or his perspective. Berardi’s reflections are energetic and politically optimistic. In the last line of the recording, the philosopher describes a revolutionary “contagion of happiness”!57 But the overall tone of Khaled’s video is solitary, pensive. The artist’s views of Rio and Beirut through the window of a cable car are isolated and distant. This spatial tension matches or maintains the tension between the language of Berardi’s political philosophy and the rightful field of its application. The tone of loneliness or political isolation created in the work by this disjuncture suggests Khaled’s frustrated interactions with Lebanese activists during his residency at Ashkal Alwan. The artist recalls that they seemed “uncomfortable” when he shared the recording of the Berardi interview with them. A Memorial to Failure was conceived later, when Khaled decided to “sit alone” with the Berardi material.58 The lonely tone of the work might be viewed, along with Khaled’s anxiety about post-revolutionary disappointments, as another of the “failures” referred to in the title. However, Khaled’s interest was in exploring the possibility of “failing beautifully.” And Berardi’s view of failure is that it is inevitable and ought not to be negatively valued.59 One might reinterpret expressions of political isolation in Khaled’s work optimistically in light of Murad’s psychoanalytic theories. Given the premise of an integrative curriculum (that the self is constituted in an irreducible social relation), total isolation – political or otherwise – is impossible. Khaled’s merging of his observing position with Ber­ar­di’s speaking position recalls a key feature of Murad’s psychoanalytic theories. In particular, Murad’s view of the triadic relation of the (bodily/psychic/social) self – and its emergence out of a social relation, structured by (first-, secondand third-person) speaking and observing positions – is reflected in the pairing of Berardi’s voice and Khaled’s view.60 Khaled’s work mediates between a removed perspective on Beirut and Rio (or, in Murad’s terms, a “positivistic” or “third-person” view) and Berardi’s “introspective” or “first-person” address. The merging of these positions in the work is given a specifically psychoanalytic sense in Khaled’s description of Berardi as a sort of “life-coach.”61 In this respect the cable-car takes on the feel of a quasi-clinical setting in which Khaled “works through” a creative and emotional block with a philosophical mentor or functional equivalent of the analyst. This is not a confusion of the philosopher’s and the clinician’s role in Khaled’s work. Rather, it recalls the

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questions with which Murad opened his psychoanalytic study group: “How can the scholar be a philosopher?; How can the teacher be a mentor?”62 In the midst of his post-revolutionary disappointment, then, and after an experience of political isolation among Lebanese activists, Khaled’s work reflects a steadfast belief, articulated by Murad and his peers as well, in the irreducibility of a social or interpersonal bond. Khaled integrates a range of cultural sources in the video: an Italian political philosopher and an Egyptian artist are brought into a virtual dialogue in cable-car rides over Beirut and Rio. The work’s projection of Berardi’s nominally Italian political vision onto a range of non-European national terrains recalls the transnational orientation of the Egyptian surrealists and their membership in fiari . To be sure, Berardi’s neo-Marxist reflections generate in Khaled’s work some continuity with the specifically Trotskyist program of fiari. The immediate context of Khaled’s interview with Berardi at Askhal Alwan is also a strictly international one. The centre is patronized by a number of international cultural organizations and it is located in a city that has been described as a cosmopolitan hub in the region’s art and intellectual history.63 Indeed, the line between cosmopolitanism and “Westernization” or globalization is a fine one, especially in the Lebanese context. Hanan Toukan’s work on the cultural politics of art centres such as Ashkal Alwan tracks the emergence of global art in the region in the twenty-first century.64 Specifically her research focuses on the impact of cultural non-governmental organizations (cngo s) and post-9/11 cultural development initiatives within the region. Of particular interest here is her analysis of the influence or currency of philosophers of “radical democracy” within Ashkal Alwan, such as Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe.65 Berardi’s visit to Ashkal Alwan in 2012, his impact on Khaled, and his presence in A Memorial to Failure might be regarded, in line with Toukan’s argument, as a kind of appropriation of available Western philosophies that overlook the particular context of post-9/11 global art in Beirut.66 Khaled’s work, in other words, might be read dismissively as an effect of the culture of Euro-American approaches to alternative art education within the region. And his use of Berardi might be seen as a capitulation to European political theorists or, less damningly, to demonstrate a will to be interpreted by such theorists. Khaled’s position on his experience of art education at Ashkal Alwan in particular, and within Egypt prior to the residency, suggests a different view, however. He describes his residency in Beirut as a response to a specific emotional and artistic need for distance from the post-revolutionary situation in Egypt. He addressed this need with Berardi, guiding the philosopher with questions that pertained to his post-revolutionary block and disappointment. Furthermore Khaled notes that while Berardi was familiar with radical politics through

his participation in the Italian students’ movement in the 1970s, he was not so familiar with the situation in post-revolutionary Egypt, and “asked questions constantly” about it.67 Khaled’s encounter with Berardi can be viewed in relation to the intellectual history of which Murad and the Egyptian surrealists are a part. His work attests to an ongoing history of intellectual and artistic exchanges across the Mediterranean. The visiting lecturer’s program at Ashkal Alwan certainly corresponds with an approach to art education in the era of globalization. Although this approach is aimed at relating contemporary practices to current theoretical debates, it need not be viewed as an imposition of Western art pedagogy upon Middle Eastern artists. Rather, Khaled’s work and his experience with Berardi describe what El-Shakry calls a “co-production” of intellectual and art history within the region “across European and Egyptian knowledge formations.”68 A Lighthouse and Some Livable Homes

Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt

In her history of art education in Egypt, Dina Ramadan examines an important fatwa on the visual arts written and published by the Islamic scholar Muhammad ’Abduh (1849–1905).69 The fatwa, published in 1903 in the journal al-Manar (The Lighthouse) under the title “al-Suwwar wa-l-Tamathil wa Fawa ‘iduha wa Hukmuha” (“Images and Statues, their Benefits and Legality”), was written in Sicily at the end of an information-gathering journey to wellknown European monuments, museums, churches, cemeteries, botanical gardens, libraries, and archives. In it ’Abduh responded critically to a widespread belief among Egyptian Muslims that representational art is forbidden by the Qu’ran. His arguments concern the civilizational benefits of the visual arts, and the need for institutions of cultural preservation in Egypt. In her work Ramadan avoids a mythologized account of the fatwa and instead describes its cultural and institutional context and the technological conditions that made it possible. The author ’Abduh is for Ramadan a “man of the print medium.”70 As ’Abduh did in the early twentieth century in the pages of al-Manar, Khan makes decisive and knowing use of the (art)forum in which his ideas will circulate. A comparison might also be made with Murad’s activities in the same print medium – in Majallat ’Ilm al-Nafs (Journal of Psychology). Khan’s manner of intervening in the magazine describes the changed and arguably neoimperial stakes of Arab representation in global contemporary art in the wake of 11 September 2001 and the Egyptian revolution. In Trusted Sources, and in his other work, Khan has refused any easy ethnic or national categorization; that is, his work refuses fetishization and novelty. My attempt to interpret his work in the light of a century-old tradition of institutional critique and intellectual history within Egypt is not intended to fix an ethnic or national categorization.

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Rather, it has been seen that Khan, like ’Abduh, Younan, el-Telmissany, and Murad and his peers, is engaged in the co-production and circulation of ideas with various international “sources” – European and American as well as Egyptian. But crucially these ideas are brought to bear on the artist’s local and immediate social and psychological experience in Cairo. In Proposal for a Romantic Sculpture and Memorial to Failure, Khaled reflects on his art education – both at the Alexandria Academy of Fine Arts and at Ashkal Alwan. Khaled’s work in this respect is continuous with the nineteenthand twentieth-century tradition of institutional critique traced in Ramadan’s research from the time of ’Abduh’s fatwa to the founding of the School of Fine Arts and afterward. Khaled’s and ’Abduh’s respective study trips, when taken together, mark two very different but continuous points in a history of art education in Egypt. While ’Abduh’s study trip was an inaugural and celebrated one in this history, Khaled’s is much more uncertain. Their views on institutions for art education differ, and the institutions themselves have in the intervening years changed a great deal. As mentioned above, early twentieth-century debates in Egypt about university art education began when a Beaux Arts model was introduced to build basic skills and foster a taste among students for a national art. To this end students were to take classes in painting, sculpture, architecture, decoration, and ornament. In the Egyptian University’s 1911 report, these key terms were contested. The goal of cultivating a taste for national Egyptian art, the report concluded, was undermined by Laplange’s Beaux Arts (French) curriculum. New key terms were proposed for an authentically Egyptian art education, based in the country’s Pharaonic, Coptic, and Islamic traditions. At the envisioned “Egyptian School of Decorative Arts,” students were to take classes in glass, carpentry, mosaics, forging, and bookbinding. Khan’s and Khaled’s works can be inscribed in this history of debates within Egypt about the proper goals of university art education, specifically in regard to curriculum. Their sources, materials, and modes of representation describe a framework for art-historical analysis and art education in the twenty-first century globally. Their practices offer local and contemporary reflections on a global cultural history that includes both Egyptians and Europeans. They enable us to see a considerable shift in protocols for art education over the last century within and beyond Egypt. In this movement of convergence between the early twentieth-century curriculum at the School of Fine Arts and the key terms of global art pedagogy and analysis, the divisions of the 1911 proposal for an authentic Egyptian art (glass, forging, bookbinding, carpentry, and mosaics) do not appear. Rather, the spirit of those historical debates – the critical and philosophical probing by Europeans and Egyptians into the purpose of art education is powerfully

At the age of six, after learning about the habits of “primeval forest” animals, but years before his encounter with the little prince in the Sahara, SaintExupéry’s narrator attempts two drawings of an elephant inside a boa constrictor.71 The first drawing, “Drawing Number One,” is misrecognized by “grown-ups” as a picture of a hat. In it the animals are suggested simply, and too abstractly for adult viewers, by a change in the thickness of a dark line. As the narrator notes, disappointedly, “grown-ups … need to have things explained.”72 The young narrator relents and makes a second, less ambiguous drawing. His “Drawing Number Two” offers an x -ray view of the elephant standing inside the boa constrictor. On the advice of the grown-ups who had trouble identifying the animals in “Drawing Number One,” the narrator abandons drawing

Art Education, Surrealism, and Psychoanalysis in Egypt

taken up in Khan’s and Khaled’s work. In place of a Beaux Arts curriculum or an authentically Egyptian curriculum, these artists offer reflections on the personal, psychological, political, and cultural stakes of their art education. That is, their work reflects an integrative curriculum with both cultural and personal resonances. Khan and Khaled create and inhabit spaces in their work. They create physical spaces in glass, in print, in wood and marble, on screens, and in a cable car. They inhabit these spaces and communicate through them. Their art testifies to a full range of emotional experiences, from admiration for fellow artists and colleagues, to love for family, to romantic pain and political disappointment. The work discussed above is sincere, open, and, as Khan puts it in the title of his Artforum project, trusting. These artists have built their homes well, with faith in their materials and care for their guests. In a sense I have tried to build a home for these homes – a livable interpretive home for work that is already well built. I have argued that Khan and Khaled respond to their experiences of art education in a manner that is continuous with a rich history of cultural exchanges between Egypt and Europe. However, their work does not aim to bring fixed national or ethnic identities into a dialogue. This kind of consensus-building is the business of institutions, not artists. Their gestures of integration are not as conventional and the materials they gather are not as straightforward as statements of interest or claims to national heri­tage. Khan and Khaled are intuitive, complex, and vulnerable artists. But they are also keenly aware of the histories and contexts in which – and sometimes against which – they work. To set a context for this spirit of criticality and attention to the life of the emotions I have referred details of Khan’s and Khaled’s work to moments in the history of surrealism and psychoanalysis in Egypt. My aim in this has been to relate Khan and Khaled’s work to an ongoing task of post­ colonial subject-formation in Egypt – the ever-changing and difficult, but livable place they still call home.

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and turns to more serious pursuits such as “geography, history, arithmetic and grammar.” In the course of his adult adventures as an airplane pilot, the narrator’s longstanding suspicion is confirmed: “grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiring for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” He learns to avoid the enchanted subjects of “boa constrictors and primeval forests” with adults, and talk instead about “sensible” things like “bridge, golf and politics.” When the little prince properly identifies “Drawing Number One” after a crash in the Sahara, the narrator’s enchantment with the world is restored. The histories I have related through Khan and Khaled’s work are also containers, or interpretive frames. They serve to describe a spirit and shape, a local context, and a global reach for their creators’ work. The artworks discussed evoke several histories: of debates about art education within Egypt and beyond; of the international orientation of Egyptian surrealists; and of Yusuf Murad’s particular brand of psychoanalysis. But these histories are not intended to explain Khan’s and Khaled’s art. I share the impatience of Saint-Exupéry’s narrator in this respect. Explanations of creative works are untenable at best and disenchanting at worst. They are perhaps most troubling when deterministic, reducing artists to mere consequences of social and political forces. Since 11 September 2001, and with renewed vigour after the Arab Spring of 2011, international audiences for contemporary art from and about the Middle East seek explanations of this sort. I have tried to avoid too “grown-up” an account of Khan’s and Khaled’s artworks. Their art is well researched and reveals an awareness of complex and rather grown-up geopolitical forces. But it is playful too. It attests to the crucial role of spontaneity, dreams, and partly understood but powerful feelings in creative, psychic, and political processes.

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Historical Archives and Contemporary Art The Case of the Umm el-Fahem Gallery in Palestine/Israel M e r av Y e rus halmy

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uch has been written about museums – their exhibitions, their curatorial practices, and their institutional frictions – but far less attention is given to public art galleries and their work.1 Yet galleries, those with public missions, neither serving private ambitions nor compliant with government agendas, make up some of the most interesting institutions in the art world. Like museums, public galleries have exhibition programs, and work in various capacities to engage, critique, and support the public sphere. But the smaller scale of these galleries, their lack of an existing art collection, which affects the agendas and finances of larger institutions, and an ability to operate productively with limited funding and existing power relations allow them to fashion programs and projects that would be hard to find in larger scale or better-funded spaces. This is especially true in areas of conflict, such as Palestine/Israel where both museums and commercial galleries are often wary of straying from mainstream agendas and attending to the more pressing issues at hand.2

The Umm el-Fahem Gallery

There is one such gallery that I would like to address in this chapter – the Umm el-Fahem Gallery (uef Gallery), and especially its extensive historical photographic archive that focuses on the town’s history and its environs. The gallery is situated in the Arab, almost entirely Muslim, city of Umm el-Fahem, located within Israel’s borders and formerly a part of the Jenin district of Palestine. It

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has been working since 1996 in various capacities in the city, and is one of only a handful of art galleries in Arab towns and cities in the state of Israel. A large part of the gallery’s exhibition program focuses on contemporary and modern art either produced by Palestinians or relevant to Palestinian culture. Many of the works exhibited explore Palestinian historical narratives and events such as the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948), the connection to the land, and the ongoing sense of loss and homelessness – articulating these issues in personal terms, as well as on regional and national levels.3 The terminology used by the uef Gallery to describe its national and cultural contexts of operation is both implicit and explicit, varying across the gallery’s texts and exhibitions. For example, the gallery describes itself on its Hebrew homepage as “exhibiting original Arab and Palestinian art” (author’s translation), while on its homepages in English and Arabic it declares itself as “a home for Arab artists and art” which seeks to create a “meeting point for a meaningful dialogue between cultures.”4 Such definitions, and many others, including references not only to Arab and Palestinian identities and cultural practices, but also to Israeli, Muslim, hybrid, Eastern, Western, modernist, contemporary, and other definitions, abound in the texts produced by the gallery and the artists it exhibits, echoing the wider discourse of Palestinian and Israeli art in which all these terms are used interchangeably. This terminological complexity intensifies in discussions of Palestinian artists and art institutions, such as the uef Gallery, which operate within the state of Israel and in relation to the Israeli field of art. Each of these terms carries a significant political and cultural weight, producing differing and often conflicting definitions of identity and nationality, and over the last two decades an extensive discourse aiming to untangle them and point to the most relevant (and often politically correct) terminology in each case has developed. Such analyses have been productive in exposing the ideological structures of the various terms, but like other discourses of identity politics, they often reach a theoretical and political impasse, delineating ever more minute slivers of identity, which, despite all efforts, remain both fractured and overdetermined. Taking my cue from the gallery’s own texts, as well as from the extensive literature on the dynamic and imaginary nature of nationality, I have chosen to use the terms Israel/ Palestine and Palestine/Israel interchangeably (without a predetermined emphasis on either national narrative) to describe the theoretical and geo-political space(s) occupied and produced by the uef Gallery. These terms, I hope, carry both the inextricable and divisive national contexts that are relevant to the gallery’s work and point to the ways in which the gallery addresses both the separate Palestinian and Israeli nationalities and the common ones – a conceptual framework suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell that I find especially pertinent to this study.5

Despite careful consideration of the Israel/Palestine–Palestine/Israel terminology, it does not always fit the purposes of this essay, or the work of the uef Gallery. Thus, in some cases, when the discussion focuses specifically on the Israeli or Palestinian fields of art, on their respective histories, or on their distinct national and cultural identities, I have underlined these differences by using a singular national adjective. As with all terminology used in this region, the distinctions between the various terms employed are difficult to pinpoint and volatile. I hope my attempts to clarify them here (and throughout the essay), and to use them flexibly, allow the reader to better understand the complexity of nationality in the region, and to engage with the dynamic and differing conceptualizations of it developed here. The First Phase of the uef Archive

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Since 2007 the uef Gallery has been developing a large-scale historical archive of the local Wadi A’ra region, sourcing, collecting, and actively documenting the region and its people throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The archive collates thousands of images from various sources, including the British Imperial archive, the Zionist archive, archives of local Kibbutzim in the region, local personal albums, and even contemporary works of art. In the second phase, currently underway, a dedicated team has been actively documenting lives of the elders of the region – interviewing and recording them. As part of this phase, the gallery has also commissioned four photographers – Shay Aloni (b. 1954), A’mmar Younes (b. 1970), Wijdan Younes (b. 1979), and Khaled Fa’our (b. 1969) – to produce a series of photographic stills documenting the elders in their homes. Most of the archive’s images are still inaccessible to the public online, and can only be accessed at the gallery by prior request. Its two phases, however, have been on extended exhibition in the gallery, comprising two major shows, and are accompanied by equally extensive catalogues: Memories of a Place: The Photographic History of Wadi A’ra 1903–2008 and Shadows of Time: Photographic Documentation of the Elders of Wadi A’ra 2007–2012.6 In this chapter I focus on the archive’s first phase and its collection of historical photographs of the region. An extensive archive, based in photography as well as oral history, is rarely a central feature in the work of art galleries in Palestine/Israel or elsewhere. No other gallery in the region has such an archive; similar projects are more often the domain of large-scale national institutions and museums, community initiatives (unrelated to the art field), or more recently, online collaborative websites.7 Indeed, the gallery’s staff have mentioned that the museal archive in the region most relevant for their project is that of Yad Vashem – Israel’s national museum of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, which both collates historical

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artifacts (including photographs) and actively sources documentation of Holocaust survivors.8 Unlike Yad Vashem, the uef Gallery does not aspire to become a national Palestinian museum, at least not explicitly so, but calls itself an “Arab Museum of Contemporary Art,” as its website declares.9 Plans for the museum have been drawn and redrawn, the collection of monies has been ongoing for several years, and land has been allocated by the local municipality, but on account of insufficient funding the work itself has not yet begun. The gallery also needs to acquire and preserve a substantial collection of artworks and objects, if it wishes to qualify as a museum. On its website, the gallery states the following in regard to the future museum and the archive’s place within it:

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The museum will present groundbreaking art that reflects the richness and complexity of the region, and as such will serve as a mirror of the area’s culture. The museum will be a repository for the cultural legacy of Arab artists in Israel. An essential part of the museum will be a photographic and oral history archive that will document the Wadi A’ra area. The archive will serve as a conduit that will guide researchers through the area’s history, and will be available as a resource to scholars of Israeli art, Arab art, and regional history.10

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It is fairly easy to see how the archive will serve scholars of the region’s history, especially as no other archive addressing Wadi A’ra exists; but the suggestion that the historical archive will be an essential part of the future contemporary art museum and serve as a source for scholars of Israeli and Arab art is less obvious. That no comprehensive archive of Palestinian art is available anywhere in Israel/Palestine is noteworthy. The gallery’s decision to focus on a historical archive rather than one based in art attests to the important role of local history and its documentation in its work. Very little has been written on the uef Gallery, the only extensive essay appearing in a book dedicated to ethnic museums in Israel, where the uef Gallery is the only art institution discussed. The essay, written by Miri Gal-Ezer, offers a sociological reading of the gallery’s work in relation to its local and national contexts, underlining the tensions between the gallery’s modernity and the more religious “urban village” of Umm el-Fahem. The gallery itself, Gal-Ezer emphasizes, “operates along state rules [but] at the same time is intended for its own trajectory.” A good example of this tension, she suggests, is the uef historical archive, in which, “while the state is trying to erase the memory and history of its Arab citizens, the archives are collecting oral histories from individuals, and in the testimonies of the people,

the history stays present.” In thus describing the gallery, Gal-Ezer provides us with useful insights into the frictions inherent in its work and reception within Israel, where the very collection of historical photography of the Wadi A’ra region may be seen as somehow in breach of the state’s rules, calling for a reinforcement of the gallery’s legitimacy.11 Some of the complexities of the uef Gallery’s work underlined in Gal Ezer’s text can also be sensed in statements written by the archive’s three main founders: Sa’id Abu Shakra, the head of the gallery; Mustafa Kabha, the academic head of the archival project; and Guy Raz, the archive’s curator. Kabha, a researcher of Palestinian media and history, for instance, sees the archive as a basis for a future national Palestinian archive, not just a regional endeavour, and regards its visual aspects as born out of necessity in a culture where many documents and historical artefacts have been lost or confiscated by Israel. In the introduction to the archive’s first exhibition he writes: The choice of Wadi A’ra was not due to considerations of local fanaticism, but due to the assumption that such historical documentation would require the extensive gathering of documents, photographs and personal testimony … It is our aspiration that this start will spur different groups to follow, as part of an overall effort to write and consolidate a collective historical narrative.12

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In a conversation about the archival project, Kabha commented on the rather inadvertent links initially set up between the gallery and the archive, based more on Abu Shakra’s organizational powers and cultural persona than on an affinity between the gallery’s aesthetic practices and the historical visual culture of the archive.13 Indeed Kabha initially appealed to another Palestinian organization located in Nazareth to take up the archival project, and although he was born and raised in the region, he only approached Abu Shakra and the uef Gallery at a later stage. Abu Shakra, the gallery head, tells a somewhat different story about the relations of the gallery and the archive. For him, both serve a similar historical and cultural purpose – to promote a sense of local and national identity, and preserve the historical practices of the area, whether aesthetic, social, economic, or agricultural. His writings on the archive are highly personal, recounting his familial biography, the Palestinian Nakba, and the ongoing fragmentation of regional identity as his key motives for collecting and exhibiting the archive. Although more firmly grounded in art historical traditions, Abu Shakra’s account of the archive is a highly narrative one and, in his writing, the photographic archive is often depicted as an aid to local storytelling, preserving in images the dying oral traditions of Palestinian society.14

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Raz, a visual culture curator whose work focuses on historical photography in Palestine/Israel, tells yet another story of the project. Like Abu Shakra, he sees the archive as a central tenet of the future museum of contemporary art, but in his writings and thought, the project is couched within his own endeavours – the collection and archivization of historical photography in the region. Raz also reflects on the national aspects of the archive, many of the photographs having been taken by Jewish Zionist or earlier colonialist photographers, and he emphasizes the complexities and power relations inherent in these practices. This emphasis perhaps reflects his own complex position as a Jewish Israeli curator helping to establish an archive in an Arab Palestinian city, a complexity that is not explicitly discussed in other accounts of the project.15 One of the most immediate contexts for the uef archive is that of the Palestinian memory culture, a wide-ranging and fast-growing web of practices, sites, and discourses, shaped not only by the inherent complexity of collective memory, but also by the extreme political situations within which it is produced and engaged with. Following the Nakba and the dispersal of individuals and communities, as well as their documents and images, much effort has been made to collect and record Palestinian histories, using documents, objects, and oral testimonies, as well as photographic and archival practices. Palestinian historiography and memory culture is far too vast to elaborate upon here, rang­ing from the late nineteenth-century writings of travellers under the Ottoman Empire, through the writings of Palestinian intellectuals in exile in the 1950s and on to the academic teaching and research of the post-Oslo accords (1993).16 A few of its forms, however, seem particularly relevant for the uef archive. Memory books, for example, which employ oral and photographic resources to recall Palestinian villages and everyday life prior to 1948, seek, not unlike the uef archive, to preserve and promote the collective memory of Palestinian culture.17 Collaborative online websites such as the “Palestine Remembered” oral history project collate materials both oral and visual from Palestinians dispersed throughout the world,18 while community archives such as the Tarshiha photographic collection (initiated in 2011) highlight local Palestinian history.19 A large-scale museum focusing on Palestinian culture opened in Birzeit in 2015, while many smaller museums and monuments such as the Land Day Monument in Sakhnin (1977), and the Kafr Qasim Massacre Museum opened in 2006, address particular events in Palestinian history.20 This burgeoning culture of memory must be understood not only within the destructive contexts of the Israel/Palestine conflict and the obliteration of Palestinian villages and lives within Israel and the occupied territories, but also within the specific assaults launched on the major Palestinian archives by Israel. In 2001 Israel confiscated the large archive established at the Orient

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House by Faisal Husseine and associated with the plo . The formal plo archive located in Beirut was confiscated by Israel in the 1982 invasion of the city. The archive was later returned to the organization and transferred by it to Tunis, but it has since gone missing en route to Ramallah and its current location is unknown. The confiscations and loss of these archives, which have remained unavailable to public scrutiny, have left a huge void in the official recording of Palestinian history – a void explicitly addressed by the founders of the uef archive.21 The siting of Palestinian visual history within contemporary art institutions in Palestine/Israel, which concerns me in this chapter, has been less prominent in the Palestinian memory culture, and many of the historical and archival projects mentioned here have been exhibited within national, transnational, and local frameworks grounded in historical, political, or ethnic narratives. Despite their relative scarcity, some interesting juxtapositions of contemporary art and visual Palestinian history do provide a relevant context in which to reflect on the uef archive. One such case is the exhibition of the extensive unrwa photographic archive of Palestine and Palestinians in the Al-Ma’mal Contemporary Art Gallery in Jerusalem in 2014.22 Exhibitions of Palestinian photographic documentation and historical visual culture can also be found in the Zochrot Gallery, located within an Israeli ngo working to document the Nakba and its ongoing impact and erasure from Israel’s memory culture.23 Palestinian visual history has also been shown in several Israeli art museums such as the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art and the Gutman Museum of Art in Tel Aviv, both of which have exhibited shows curated by Rona Sela.24 Relations between contemporary art and the archive outside the immediate sphere of Palestine/Israel have also expanded in recent years, and although the existence of a large- scale historical archive such as the uef archive within a small public gallery is quite unique, the multi-layered links between today’s art field and the archive are well established. Exhibitions such as Okwui Enwezor’s well-received Archive Fever: The Use of the Document in Contemporary Art held in 2008, for example, have helped to consolidate a fully fledged archival turn – a shift that has been present in contemporary art for at least a decade.25 Extensive essays such as Hal Foster’s “Archival Impulse,” published in 2004, and Mark Godfrey’s “The Artist as an Historian,” published in 2006, have provided the necessary theoretical frameworks for art’s growing interest in the archive, while the Journal of Visual Resources dedicated an entire issue to this topic as early as 2002.26 These publications and exhibitions have all been grounded, to a large extent, in the post-structural understandings of the archive, elaborated most notably by Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever and by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge.27 Taking their cue from these writers, contemporary

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readings often frame the archive (as well as more loosely defined collections of images, texts, and objects) as a site of power that actively works to regulate our understanding of critical issues such as gender, nationality, race, and memory. Based on this premise, many of the contemporary essays, exhibitions, and art works addressing the archives seek to expose the power relations inherent in them and undermine their regulatory powers. In recent years, art works and discourses have also aspired to complexify our readings of the archive by supplementing existing archives or imagining new ones (whether documentary and/or fictional) which redress histories, communities, and artifacts that have been marginalized, ignored, or usurped, thereby allowing us to read the archive as a place of potentiality as well as coercion.28 In light of the central role of the archive in the contemporary art world and its historical importance in the Palestinian discourse, it may seem less surprising that the uef Gallery has taken on such a large-scale documentary project. Supporting its already established exhibition program, which addresses issues of Palestinian culture and history, the uef archive is grounded in many of the post-structuralist archival practices: it uses informal sources such as private albums and oral testaments to reclaim Palestinian histories; reads against the grain of the images’ “original” colonialist or Zionist frameworks to recover local contexts, and always works in a fragmentary framework, a clear departure from the universalist ambitions of the all-encompassing modernist archive.29 Alongside these marked affinities with post-structuralist understandings of the archive, however, the uef archive seems to depart from post-structuralist discourse in one of its most crucial premises. For rather than working to undermine, complexify, or supplement existing archives to expose their regulatory powers, the uef archive seeks to establish and promote local and national narratives of Palestinian history, and to provide a chronological and thematic reading of Palestinian lives in Palestine/Israel. This claim must of course be qualified, as the uef archive does work in many ways to undermine Zionist narratives and to expose their regulatory powers, providing us with alternative and all too often marginalized readings of histories in Palestine/Israel. However, to read the uef archive solely as a critique of Zionist history is to risk obscuring much of its historical and political thrust, as well as its relevance for Palestinian memory culture and identity, thereby paradoxically strengthening rather than undermining the hegemony against which it is read. In order to understand the uef archive’s relations with and against Zionist and Israeli contexts in more detail, it might be useful to examine the gallery’s relations with the Israeli artworld and its institutions. We have already seen that the uef archive is well couched in Palestinian memory culture and its visual practices, but these conceptual ties do not extend to its institutional affiliations, which are closely linked to the Israeli art and cultural fields. Of

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particular importance are the gallery’s relations with the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (abbreviated here to tama ), one of the two largest art institutions in Israel. Indeed the initial impetus for establishing the uef Gallery, according to Sa’id Abu Shakra, its head, was the retrospective exhibition of Asim Abu Sha­qra (1961–1990), Sa’id Abu Shakra’s nephew, at the tama (1994). Asim Abu Shaqra was a celebrated artist, and died at the young age of twenty-nine.30 His work, which quickly entered the Israeli and Palestinian canons of art, is best known for its depiction of a potted sabra cactus – a potent symbol for Israelis, for whom it denotes Jews born in Israel, and Palestinians, for whom it serves as a symbol for adherence to the land, literally meaning “patience.” Umm el-Fahem, where Asim Abu Shaqra was born and raised, had no space in which to exhibit his work, and thus, says Sa’id Abu Shakra, the idea of the gallery was hatched.31 Throughout the years the ties between the uef Gallery and the tama grew stronger and Abu Shakra’s announcement of the new uef museum for example, was made in 2006 at the tama , as was a second announcement regarding the results of the architectural competition to design the museum.32 A major retrospective exhibition showing the work of Walid Abu Shakra (another established artist of the Abu Shakra family) was jointly opened in 2011 at the tama and the uef Gallery, and the gallery’s website clearly declared that the exhibition came about “as a result of the strong bond that developed in recent years between the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery and thanks to the support of the late Prof. Mordechai Omer [former head of the tama ].”33 The relations between the tama and the uef Gallery seem, at least initially, perplexing. The tama is known for exhibiting mostly mainstream, or up and coming artists from Israel and elsewhere, limiting potentially controversial political exhibitions to well established artists or those likely to be so in the near future. Unlike the uef , the tama accords very little importance to historical photography, and only one, scantly documented exhibition based in historical photography and titled Images from the Holy Land (1980) can be found in its records of the last three decades.34 In such institutional circumstances it would seem that other, more politically charged galleries in Israel/Palestine would make better partners for the uef Gallery, allowing it to align its forces with others that challenge Zionist historical narratives and to provide alternative histories of Palestine/Israel.35 Examined more closely, however, the relations between the uef Gallery and the tama seem mutually beneficial, affording the Tel Aviv museum the privileged positions of supporting Israel’s Arab “others,” while boosting the uef Gallery’s position as a future museum and a legitimate player within the Israeli art field. These relations require further research, especially in regard to the tama ’s own history and its conceptualizations of both modernity and

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7.1  General view of the exhibition Photography in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, 2000. Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. Courtesy of the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art and the curator of the

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exhibition, Dr Rona Sela.

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nationality, but even with the limited materials available, it would seem reasonable to suggest that both institutions have a strong interest in promoting a de-politicized vision of art and museology which is simultaneously critical and attentive to the other, but also unchallenging to the Israeli public realm.36 In such a framework it is not surprising that cooperation between the uef Gallery and the tama has remained within the more confined realms of the art world and has never been extended to the archive. Indeed, although art institutions in Israel have exhibited some Palestinian visual history (as mentioned above), these exhibitions have been few and far between. One such rare exhibition, which addressed Palestinian histories within an Israeli art museum, took place in 2000 at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. Mentioned above, it was curated by Rona Sela and titled Photography in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s.37 The exhibition was based on extensive research and theory, and included numerous photographs from a variety of archival and personal sources, both Palestinians and Zionist, national and private. The images were displayed in a grid-like fashion in the museum’s galleries as well as in display boxes, and were divided into four main themes: institutional Zionist photography, Palestinian photography, Jewish avant-garde

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photography, and a section dedicated to a rare large-scale photographic exhibition held at the Tel Aviv museum in 1943 (Fig. 7.1). Sela’s historical exhibition was a relatively exceptional occurrence at the Herz­li­ya museum, better known for exhibiting high-profile international artists such as Sigmar Polke (1941–2010), Rineke Dikstra (b. 1959), and Hugo Ron­di­nene (b. 1964), alongside Israeli artists. In the same year, however, the museum exhibited another historical and documentary exhibition dedicated to Israel’s mass architecture of the 1950s, as well as a highly political art exhibition curated by Ariella Azoulay and titled, after Walter Benjamin, The Angel of History.38 These exhibitions marked the museum’s first year as an extended and purpose-built exhibition space, the first in Israel dedicated solely to contemporary art. It was not, however, characteristic of the museum’s exhibition program in the following years. When asked about Sela’s exhibition and the decision to include it in the museum’s exhibition program, Dalia Levin, the head of the museum from 1993 to 2014, suggested that Sela’s exhibition was simply an “interesting exhibition which was offered to the museum and accepted.”39 Levin agreed that the Sela’s exhibition was not typical of the museum’s agenda of focusing on contemporary art, but suggested that contemporary art museums must be “flexible and experimental, presenting exhibitions which challenge their own agenda.”40 Sela’s exhibition did not explicitly attend to the relations between the museum and the historical and political nature of the exhibition, and the many questions raised by visitors in regard to these issues were answered by the education staff with direct reference to post-structuralism’s challenging of the borders between aesthetic and historical documentation, and the museum’s own challenging and experimental approach. Very little emphasis was put on the political or historical aspects of the exhibition.41 The exhibition and its accompanying book were only reviewed twice in local art publications. One review, by Michal Brosh, lamented its political focus, which “obscured the photographs themselves” while the second, by Ronit Shani, suggested that these political ambitions were admirable but raised concerns that, like the Jewish photographers of the past who were enlisted into the nationalist Zionist cause, today’s photographers might be inadvertently “drafted” into the cause of postmodernism, providing an “off the shelf ” critical photography.42 Although this comment was made in the review only in passing, it might offer some insight into the ways in which Sela’s exhibition and book escaped any critical (or other) reception while exhibiting materials that directly challenge accepted historical narratives within Israel. It is worth mentioning that in Israel, post-structuralism and its emphasis on critique and the “other” became significant in academic and cultural discourses in the late 1980s and 1990s and was still dominant in the early twenty-first century. This,

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7.2 Photographer unknown, A camel caravan at Wadi A’ra Road (Musmus Crossing), 1925. Courtesy of Oberlin College Library, Special Collections. Courtesy of Umm el Fahem Historical Archive.

7.3 Photographer unknown, The Wadi A’ra route before the road was paved, 1935. British National Archives. Courtesy of Umm el Fahem Historical Archive. OV ERLE A F

7.4  Azaria Alon, Wadi A’ra Road, Musmus Crossings, 1962. Private collection of Azaria Alon. Courtesy of Umm el Fahem Historical Archive.

7.5  Fritz Cohn, Widening the Wadi A’ra Road, east of Musmus, 1963. Government Press Office. Courtesy of Umm el Fahem Historical

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Archive.

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combined with Dalia Levin’s comment about contemporary art museums’ obligations to challenge themselves and cross their own disciplinary boundaries, would seem to suggest that post-structuralist discourse worked in this case to substitute the challenging political and historical discourse provided by the exhibition, with a de-politicized and ahistorical reading of critique that focused more on the crossing of disciplinary boundaries and the presentation of the “other” than on the exploration of existing national conflicting narratives and their alternatives. Returning to the uef archive it might be time to examine the archive’s images themselves. As mentioned before, the archive is currently unavailable online, and its contents, which remain in constant flux, may be accessed by prior request only or selectively, online.43 As the first phase of the archive is no longer exhibited in the gallery, its catalogue has become the most accessible and widely circulated form in which to view the historical images of the Wadi A’ra region and Umm el-Fahem.44 The opening images of the catalogue (when reading in Arabic or Hebrew, that is, from right to left) are inserted between the texts written by Abu Shakra, Kabha, and Raz, and consist of two aerial images of Umm el-Fahem and Wadi A’ra. The first photograph was taken by the British Royal Air Force in 1944 and archived at the Geography Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, while the second is a commercial image, taken by the National Photographic Co. in 2007.45 Both photographs were taken from roughly the same point of view and in both the city of Umm el-Fahem is centrally positioned. One can immediately spot the difference between them, recognizing that Umm elFahem has grown immensely, that the narrow road has become a highway, and that a wall separating Israel and the Palestinian Authority has been erected. A second series of five photographs, again taken from roughly the same angle, depicts the Musmus passage in Wadi A’ra, allowing the viewers to see how a dirt road traversed by a caravan of camels in 1925 became a site for a small, and then a larger Palestinian settlement marked by the sabra cactus hedges (1935, 1962); how a new road was built by the Israeli state (1963); and what the built-up area looks like now (2008).46 There are few such accounts in the archive, as similar photographic evidence is extremely hard to come by, but the mainly chronological ordering of the archive suggests, as these opening photographs do, a constant and growing Palestinian presence in the region (Figs. 7.2–7.6). The Nakba and its ongoing repercussions, the crux of Palestinian national history, figure prominently in the narrative suggested by the archive. Some of the images focus directly on the conflict with Israel – for instance, photographs depicting the official “handing over” of Umm El Fahm to Israel in 1948, and the violent 2000 clashes of the police and Palestinians living in Israel. Other photographs attend to the ongoing repercussions of the Nakba and the dispersal of

7.6  Asrar al-Wad, Wadi A’ra Road, Musmus Crossing, 2008. Courtesy of Umm el-Fahem Historical Archive and the curator Guy Raz.

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Palestinians, as can be witnessed in images depicting local workers preparing food aid for Palestinians in the West Bank during the second intifada and the remains of the depopulated Palestinian villages in the Wadi A’ra region. The archive’s catalogue also presents other aspects of the lives lived in Umm el-Fahem and Wadi A’ra. We see, for example, a local band of school boys from 1967, sporting the era’s flare bottoms while one of their teachers, holding the Oud, looks beyond the photograph’s frame.47 Taken in the same year, we see an image depicting a row of new white houses perched on the edge of the hill, described in the caption as “The Shikun (housing project [in Hebrew]) neighbourhood, Umm el-Fahem West”48 (Fig. 7.7). In another, older image (date unspecified, first half of the twentieth century) we see a rider and his horse, both dressed in heavy garb. A long rifle is slung across his back and his belt is strung with bullets.49 Like the teacher, he too is looking elsewhere. Moving forward in time to 2008, we see the image of a woman praying on the remains of the mosque in Abu Zurayq. She has taken off her shoes and laid a prayer rug on the

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7.7  Amiran Arev, The Shikun (housing project) neighbourhood, Umm elFahem west, 1967. Courtesy

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of Shikun + Binui archive.

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earth. The remains of the village cannot be seen, nor can her face, but her pose tells of a deep and solemn contemplation.50 There are other images. One from 1918 shows a vast number of Ottoman prisoners at the Musmus passage (the photograph was found at the British Imperial archive)51 while a contemporary image of a half-finished house demonstrates a plethora of building materials and traditions – from a first floor clad in wood sporting trapezoid windows, to a symmetrical second floor clad in commercially cut stone and a small third floor added hastily on top. All these photographs tell a complex story of a place and its histories. There are the traces of empires and colonialist forces that have shaped the region and its subsequent conflicts; local building traditions now recast in mechanized forms; modernist housing projects, typical of Israel’s socialist housing program, built only a year after the military regime enforced on Arab towns in Israel had been withdrawn; local youth whose teacher plays the Oud while their fashion sense follows that of global culture; and gendered remembering offering insight into history and trauma as experienced by women. There are also many incidental details which, like any photograph – and more so in the context of local histories and loss – evoke both absence and a strong indexical sense of having once been there. Following the photographs, the texts included in the catalogue also tell of various histories. In his essay, Kabha addresses this issue clearly, stating that “under the impact of the Palestinian issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict most

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historians have engaged in documentation of the conflict and its development [and this] has resulted in the exclusion of many sectors and the silencing of other voices.” He continues by saying that the uef archive was born of such a need to “compensate for this lack by presenting the absent voices and aspects.”52 These ambitions have clearly influenced the shape and scope of the uef archive, which includes not only the hegemonic historical images ordered in a mostly chronological manner, but also explicit thematic sections devoted to women and blue-collar workers, local traffic jams, and makeshift fruit stalls – images that are not always a part of national, or even local archives. Yet, when analyzed more closely, the archive’s structure, texts, and captions seem to maintain a more linear and hegemonic depiction of Umm el-Fahem’s histories, leaving some of the more intricate issues and tensions that make up its imagined communality unattended. Abu Shakra’s text, for instance, which opens the catalogue, speaks of an inherent local identity based in a continuation of family traditions and oral histories and stories. Although the text acknowledges that these traditions have now been broken, the intricacies of this rupture (grounded in national conflict, colonialism, and capitalism), as well as its hoped-for remedy in the form of the new museum, are not addressed in his short text. 53 Kabha and Raz offer more detailed accounts of the archival project, as well as local photographic histories and national narratives, but both texts remain quite vague as to the complex issues and practices that make up Palestinian nationality and its visual culture. Thus, while Kabha hopes that the uef archive will “spur different groups to follow [suit], as part of an overall effort to write and consolidate a collective Palestinian narrative,” his text glosses over the power relations involved in the writing of national histories through various localities.54 This is especially pertinent in the case of Umm el-Fahem, which, despite its rapid growth, is sometimes still considered marginal within Palestinian history and civil society, taking a back seat to centres such as Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Ramallah. Sidelining such issues risks portraying Palestinian nationality as growing “naturally” out of its local roots, overlooking the difficult, incommensurable, and productive practices at play in its formation. The role of Umm el-Fahem within Palestinian society is also a relevant issue for Raz. Addressing this matter more explicitly, Raz attends to a number of photographs depicting workers making charcoal. These images conclude the catalogue and had served as the opening images in the archive’s first exhibition. As Umm el-Fahem literally means “mother of coal,” charcoal-making has played an important part in local history and is also important for Raz’s text. Indeed the name of the text is “Umm al-Nur,” literally meaning “mother of light,” an informal name used by the residents of Umm el-Fahem to counter the

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7.8  Khader Oshah, Yassin, 2007. Mixed media, 70 cm × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

negative associations of Fahem (which means “coal” but also “darkness”), that have been attributed to the town.55 The images of coal-making in the archive were not taken in Umm el-Fahem, however, as coal-making in the town has all but disappeared, but rather were photographed in the nearby Yaabed village, now a part of the Palestinian authority. As Yaabed was historically part of the Wadi A’ra region, and as the village name was indicated in the photographs’ captions, including it in the archive and its exhibition seems highly fitting. Yet almost no contemporary images of localities now a part of the Palestinian territories have been included in the exhibition catalogue, and more significantly, the very separation of the Wadi A’ra region into two national territories and two economic regimes is only fleetingly mentioned in the catalogue. This, combined with Raz’s emphasis on Umm el-Fahem as the centre of coal-making and the key role these images played in the exhibition and catalogue, frames the coal-making photographs not so much as a contemporary depiction of a neighbouring village, but rather as historical documentations of Umm el-Fahem itself. Such a framing underplays the great political and economic changes in the region, presenting, once again, a seemingly uninterrupted development of Palestinian nationality where great turmoil has occurred.

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Closing the Circle

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I would like to end this essay where I began, by thinking about the relations between the uef Gallery as an art institution and future museum and about the roles of the archive. Much remains to be researched in regard to these relations, to the archive itself, and to the gallery’s art exhibitions, which deserve an extensive study of their own which I have only begun in this chapter. What has been discussed here, however – the exhibitions of historical photography within art institutions in Israel/Palestine, the gallery’s institutional relations within the field of art in Israel, the Palestinian memory culture, and the archival turn within contemporary art discourse – all suggest that the archive’s position within an art gallery greatly influences its reception and potential reading, providing numerous contexts that frame the archive in contradictory and complementary ways. One thing that has been made apparent here is that being a part of the uef Gallery serves the archives as a double-edged sword. On the one hand it provides the archive a greater sense of legitimacy within Israel – a support that would have greatly diminished (if not disappeared completely) had the archive been a part of a Palestinian national museum, for example. On the other hand, the gallery’s ties to the Israeli art field have perhaps compromised its reception within Palestinian publics. This possibility requires more investigation, but taking into consideration the bds movement and the growing

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separation between Israeli and Palestinian art fields in recent years, it seems a fair, if speculative, suggestion. The archive’s position in relation to today’s theoretical art discourse may also present its own set of challenges. As we have seen, art theory’s reading of the archive as mainly serving to rethink existing narratives creates a lacuna in the theorization of projects that strive, like the uef archive, to construct national narratives today. This lacuna, augmented by the post-structuralist understanding of critique as serving first and foremost to undermine existing power relations rather than to construct alternative ones, has also the potential to curtail the archive’s political and historical impact, and to present it simply as Zionism’s “other,” or an example of contemporary art’s experimental nature, as was the case with Sela’s exhibition in the Herzliya Museum of art in 2000. But can art and its discourses still provide a viable and critical framework for those who wish, like the uef archive, to construct national narrative in Israel/Palestine today? One such artwork, exhibited at the uef gallery itself might offer just that. Made by Khader Oshah (b. 1966) and displayed in his solo exhibition at uef Gallery entitled Arab Spring (2012), the work depicts a photograph of a historical, bearded figure sitting under an olive tree next to a traditional, domed stone building and a caravan of mules and camels.56 From the photograph’s tiny caption we learn that the site of the photograph is the Biblical Rachel’s tomb in Beth Lehem and that it was taken in 1900. The landscape depicted in the photograph is barren and its iconography is firmly couched in the romantic, orientalist visual traditions of the Holy Land. Under the photograph, a large title declares “The Photographic Heritage of the Holy Land – the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Autumn 1980.” We thus learn that Oshah’s work began its life as a poster for the Tel Aviv Museum’s only historical photographic exhibition in the last three decades of the same name (mentioned above). Imposed on this poster, now sold at the museum’s shop, Oshah sketched a portrait of his son Yassin, whose name also serves as the title of the work. This work brings together many of the issues addressed in this paper and in the Umm el-Fahem archive: the complicated juxtaposition of historical archives and a modern art museum, the photographic structuring of Palestine/Israel and its people, the relations of the art field and its institutions to those included and excluded by it, and the (often missed) potential of reading such histories as shared if conflictual spaces of nationality. Oshah, as is clearly evident, has added his own stamp in this palimpsest of images and histories – a mark of his own personal history as a Palestinian originating from Gaza and living in Israel married to Bedouin woman that sits uneasily in many of the existing national categories of the region, but also offers us insight into their manifold encounters that have shaped, and continue to shape nationality in Palestine/Israel (Fig. 7.8).

Dalriada, the Lordship of the Isles, and the Northern Rim Decentralizing the Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland Li nd s ay B l a ir

T

he variegated nature of the country has been noted by travellers to Scotland from earliest times, and it is quite natural that these geographical differences be reflected in the culture as well. The Highlands of Scotland has a distinct cultural history (and language) and significant parts of this history are its links with Ireland and a determination to look outward to the sea and beyond for inspiration. The Highlands has also attracted travellers from other lands – for many reasons – but from the time of St Columba’s arrival in the sixth century, people have come particularly to find a sense of the spiritual, or the revelatory. With this attraction in mind, I focus in this chapter on the significant contributions that a few individuals have made to the development of contemporary art in the Highlands. These individuals brought with them traces of languages from other art worlds – from the abstract expressionism of the 1950s as represented by American Jon Schueler (1916–1992), through the conceptual performance art in the 1970s as represented by German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), to the experimental video and installation art of the 1980s as represented by American Daniel Reeves (b. 1948). I want to suggest that these incursions have allowed for several distinctive lines of discovery in the region. The emergence of radical counter-narratives from an indigenous satirical tradition, as well as innovative research and commissioning of socially engaged creative projects in combination with these international incursions, has enabled the people of the Highlands to enter into a renewed dialogue with their histories. My first study of this phenomenon drew upon the conceptual vocabulary of Gilles Deleuze;1 this research has now taken another turn toward a contemporary mapping of visual art in the Highlands. Beginning with a brief geopolitical

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history of the Highlands, I go on to establish a few cultural milestones that form the basis of a rooted, historiographical approach. I then introduce a number of “travellers” – artists who came to the Highlands and established their practices there, as well as significant visitors who manifested the importance of place, incorporating the history and mythology of the Highlands into their work. This new orientation addresses the potential for a genuinely transnational identity in a postcolonial situation: a thrust toward decentralization can be seen to coincide with the stirrings of cultural renewal through the establishment of connections with a range of international aesthetics. The Scottish National Dictionary describes the Highlands of Scotland as “the mountainous district of Scotland lying north and west of a line drawn approximately from Dumbarton to Ballater and thence to Nairn, and enclosing the territory formerly occupied by the clans and speaking the Gaelic language.”2 The geography of the area, as well as the language, distinguishes it from the rest of Scotland. Scotland’s place within the Union with England changed dramatically after the Union of the Parliaments in 1707: Scotland increasingly became a colony of its much larger and more powerful neighbour, especially within the hegemony of the British Empire. The Highlands of Scotland changed in a very particular way after Charles Edward Stuart’s defeat at Culloden in 1746. Before this time, the system of clanship placed the clan chief and his clan in a relationship of trust and mutual dependency quite unlike any other sector of society in the British Isles. After 1746, as the Highland landlords increasingly looked to the South for models of behaviour, the relationship between the clan chief and the clan changed irrevocably. Historian James Hunter states the case with startling clarity: “The transformation of clan chiefs from essentially tribal leaders into cash-obsessed owners of commercially organized estates was ‘the great fact’ of Modern Highland history.”3 While recent histories have drawn attention to the fact that Clearances took place in the Lowlands as well as in the Highlands of Scotland, most would agree that the Highlands of Scotland has a distinctive historical as well as geographical identity. The art of the Scottish Highlands, however, has not generally been viewed as possessing the distinctive cultural characteristics of its literature or its music. The art has been doubly circumscribed: first, by its peripheral relation to Holyrood and second, through Scotland’s peripheral relation to Westminster. It is typically included as a sub-section in overviews of Scottish art. Only in recent times has Highland art been recognized as a subject requiring a discrete historiography of its own.

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Toward a Highland Art History

The first major advance came from the Outer Hebrides: An Lanntair Art Centre in Stornoway. A farsighted exhibition and publication, As An Fhearann (1986),

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brought together a wealth of visual material from newspapers, documentaries, art photographs, postcards, and paintings.4 Polemical essays by poet Sorley MacLean and playwright John McGrath politicized the project by revealing the narrow, distorted, and stultifying nature of the visual representation of the Highlands. The exhibition brought to light a vast archive of visual signifiers that had created a mythical region inhabited by cartoon character types and all manner of “othernesses” for a centralized consciousness to gawp at: photographs, postcards, film, television programs, and illustrated magazine articles were gathered as evidence; it disclosed the Highland culture that had been concealed beneath the signification of a dominant colonial neighbour. Alexander Moffat’s essay “Beyond the Highland Landscape,” also in the As an Fhearann publication, highlighted the deficiencies of the Highland art tradition: “The vast majority of paintings about the Scottish Highlands conform to a certain type. These paintings can generally be called Romantic in conception and depict natural phenomena such as rugged mountains, misty glens, and remote lochs … Alongside the romantic associations of Highland landscape has grown a comical view of the way of life of the Highlands, with grouse shooting, bagpipes, and clan gatherings.”5 Moffat finishes his summation with a forceful rhetorical question: “But what if we look beyond this façade at the complex social realities of the real Highlands and ask if this has been a suitable subject for art and artists. Has an image of the people of the Highlands emerged since the passing of the Crofting Act in 1886?”6 As An Fhearann was followed by a series of equally adroit exhibitions which would include a significant political perspective, including Calanais (1995) and MacTotem (1998).7 As far back as 1986, Moffat had identified the crucial role that artist Will Maclean (b. 1941), who featured in As An Fhearann, was playing in respect of developing a sophisticated and contemporary imagery to address the political and social complexities in the Highlands: “the most meaningful and sustained body of work on the theme of Highland life, both past and present, by an artist living and working today is by Will Maclean.”8 Maclean is known primarily for his boxes, sculptural assemblages or light relief works, intricately crafted pieces that have earned him recognition as one of Scotland’s most significant contemporary artists. Maclean’s actual experience as a fisherman, in the tradition of his mother’s folk from Skye and his father’s sea-faring ancestors from Coigach, proved crucial to his development as a maker.9 As his art developed so did his range of references – to whaling, to Atlantic voyages of exploration to the Inuit people of North America – but always with empathy for the peoples whose very survival depended on the dangerous and often tragic encounter with the sea. Later in this chapter, when we move to one of the sculptural cairns on the Isle of Lewis by Maclean in collaboration with Marian Leven, An Sùileachan (2014), we will see how these political complexities remain in his artwork.

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In 2002 Malcolm Maclean and Theo Dorgan commissioned a hundred artists to respond creatively to a hundred Gaelic poems from the Scots and Irish traditions. Calligraphers worked with the artists to integrate key lines of poetry into the artworks in their great Gaelic enterprise: An Leabhar Mòr. This was a major book and exhibition which aimed to renew the links between Gaelic Scotland and Ireland. While Duncan MacMillan’s essay does connect the book to European Modernism, it only fully comes to life when he connects the project back to the Book of Kells (ca. ad 800) and a tradition of illumination: “In the early medieval period, as the carved stones and crosses of Scotland and Ireland and the illuminated books whose forms they echo bear elaborate witness, the Celtic world had a visual tradition that was second to none.”10 Another important publication, Arts of Resistance (2008), by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach, is subtitled Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland and this links to An Leabhar Mòr with an emphasis on the poetry/ painting connection. Moffat and Riach relate developments in modern Scottish culture to the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s led by Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978).11 The second part of the book is devoted to the Highlands; it moves from Romanticism to landscape painter William McTaggart (1835– 1910), then on to David Forrester Wilson (1873–1950), Polish émigré Josef Herman (1911–2000), and finally to American Paul Strand (1890–1976) and from there to the poets. This appreciation of the culture reveals something of its rich transnational diversity, but the language used throughout fails to connect it to a wider conversation. The book openly declares itself to be anti-theoretical.12 Murdo Macdonald’s essay “Gàidhealtachd Art: Historical and Contemporary” (2013) sets out a crucial problem for Highland art: “although Scottish Gaelic has given rise to one of the great oral, literary and musical cultures to the world, the visual aspect of Scottish Gaelic culture has received relatively little attention.”13 Macdonald seeks an authenticity within the visual tradition to equal or even rival that which is widely acknowledged within the literary and song tradition. In his thesis, the outlining of a new visual history of Highland art should link the visual to the poetic, to the literary, to the song tradition, to the McTaggart line: “if anyone has a claim to the title of founder of modern painting in Scotland it is McTaggart.”14 The demand for the authentic is articulated in Macdonald’s insistence on the link between art and the Gaelic language: “Our contemporary artist should be able to speak or in some way engage with the language.”15 Macdonald’s objective is to recover something of the authentic – to rescue that element which is peculiar to Highland culture from the scourge of colonization. This is a search for essentialism. Historian Neal Ascherson has written of the seductive power that this image of an authentic past continues to wield within the Scottish psyche when he says: “the Gaelic-speaking society disintegrated by the Clearances was a model

It is well known that images of the Highlands and Islands dominate popular concepts of Scottishness. Castles and clans, tartan, bagpipes, whisky, bens and glens, and mountain torrents, stags at bay, heather and

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for how human beings can live well together in community. In what survives of that society, Scotland seeks to find its own image.”16 As with Macdonald, what is still sought is the sense of the national rather than the transnational: the sense of being, rather than “becoming.” The art histories I have mentioned all have one thing in common, which is the search for the authentic, or the tree of belonging.17 This quest for authenticity, an archeological practice now largely abandoned by the discipline, has been beautifully satirized by Ascherson in his anecdote of the axe: “This is my grandfather’s axe. My father gave it a new handle, and I gave it a new head.”18 An explanation for the Scottish desire for authenticity has been provided in Scottish Photography: A History (2007) by art historian Tom Normand, who shows that, as Scotland industrialized so quickly in the nineteenth century, photographers were offering “consolation” in proffering images of a harmonious Highland (and Scottish) rural arcadia.19 In other words, the notion of timelessness – in places like Newhaven and St Andrews – suggests a community that continues in harmony despite the industrial changes taking place in the country at large. In the photographs Normand discusses, we see different generations, in collective endeavours, or at rest, apparently oblivious and impervious to change. These images are essentially compensatory images to provide an escape from reality. People saw these as authentic – this was a wish fulfillment, because from the outset they are nostalgic and idealized, existing as residual images on the fringes of industrialization. While a desire for the authentic is totally understandable as a reaction to colonialism, it does not allow for a “minoritarian” Scottish culture to become part of a larger conversation.20 I focus on what has been brought into the Highlands by artists with completely different perspectives who are not part of any colonialist relationship with the area but who have immeasurably broadened the vocabulary of signifiers available to Highland artists today. But, given the force of tradition, the question is: how to write such a narrative? Anne MacLeod’s major scholarly study, From an Antique Land: Visual Representations of the Highlands and Islands 1700–1880 (2012), shifts outdated notions and begins the process of opening up the territory to alternative ways of seeing. MacLeod investigates a wide and diverse range of signifiers in the visualization of the Highlands toward the end of the early modern period. Showing how far the discourse has advanced since 1986, MacLeod expresses her determination to understand the forces underlying historical or cultural effects:

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hairy cattle: all have a well-established place in the visual canon. This is old news. What is less well understood is the process through which such stereotypes were forged and sustained.21 MacLeod goes on to trace a complex and variegated history of representation that is essentially dominated by a preservationist ideology from the classical to the geological, from the advance of empiricism to the grand Highland tour. The concluding chapter of her exhaustive study of visual representations articulates the problem for the would-be authenticist: Discussing modern Gaelic poetry, Malcolm Chapman has addressed the problem of distinguishing between a self-representation which is true to its source and one which is influenced by the majority culture. According to him: “The appropriation of Gaelic culture has had such manifold effects upon the relationships between Gael and Gall over the last two hundred years that to sort out a simple truth or an unambiguous stance is perhaps impossible.”22 MacLeod’s study separates the Highlands from the general overview of Scottish art – avoiding any sense of connoisseurship or elitism, it moves far beyond the canon or tree structure to interrogate concepts such as nature, pedigree, origins, and authenticity, while operating within the tradition of deduction supported by empirical evidence.23 MacLeod refers to another study of photographers of the Highlands, Photographers of the Western Isles by Martin Padget (2010). This book draws attention to the Americans Margaret Fay Shaw (1903–2004) and Paul Strand, and the German Werner Kissling (1895–1988), who brought distinctive international “lenses” to the imagery of the Highlands. Other photographic historians are participating in the same project of reappraisal, showing how photography has constructed our perception of the world.24 These transnational cultural studies have begun to clear the path.

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Rewriting and Reimagining Highland History

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The rewriting of Highland history has been crucial to the advance of its visual history. James Hunter brought about a momentous shift with his The Making of the Crofting Community (1976). This study was based on sources oftentimes ignored by historians – Gaelic songs and poetry, testimony given by crofters to royal commissions and tribunals, newspaper accounts of speeches made at crofters’ meetings, and the letters sent by crofters to politicians and civil

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servants. It represents a remarkable example of “a history-from-below,” a reaction to the traditional historian’s counsel for Landlord Defense in relation to the Highland Clearances.25 Just how much of a departure from what had gone on before is intimated by Hunter: “I take comfort … from the fact that thinking of the kind which underpins The Making of the Crofting Community has been reinforced recently, at the international level if not yet at the Scottish one, by innovative developments in history writing. Those developments have begun to impact, with fascinating results, on Ireland … And despite the parochialism in which academic historians of Scotland – a singularly isolationist breed – have always wallowed, the new ideas which historians elsewhere have started to embrace will eventually impact on historical studies here also.”26 Significant progress has been made since the publications of Hunter, and when it is linked to the work of Andy Wightman, an alternative history begins to emerge.27 The rewriting of history, as in Hunter’s approach, while absolutely necessary, is not entirely unproblematic. The encryption of place as embodiment of dispossession and exile has created an iconography of the Highlands that has a vast geographical and emotional reach. While Hunter’s work has been so vital in the rewriting of history, this vision of the past into clearly defined oppositional entities can all too readily reinforce the mythical fixities so familiar in the cultural landscape of Scotland – the landowner and the dispossessed; ruthless lairds and crofter victims; heroes (precious few), and villains. However, we do see in Hunter’s work the sense that there is a vision within Highland history that is different from that within Scotland as a whole – a vision that resists centralizing tendencies and rather relishes the intersections/ crossings and communications that it fosters from its geographical location on the Western seaboard. Historic links can be traced back to the ancient kingdom of Dalriada, which essentially combined South Western Scotland (mainland Argyll and the Inner Isles) with the North of Ireland (especially the Glens of Antrim). These early bonds between Ireland and Scotland would be renewed and strengthened by the immensely powerful Lordship of the Isles from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Gaelic scholar Calum Maclean describes the principal characteristic of the Lordship as “a veritable Kingdom within a Kingdom and a continual threat to central authority for over a century and a half … The fundamental difference between the principality of the Isles and the Scottish Court was that the Lords of the Isles were Gaelic and the Court to a large extent Anglo-Norman in tradition and no longer Gaelic … The Lords of the Isles had their own legal system and administration, and in reality they were in closer cultural contact with their kindred in Ireland than with the Lowlanders of Scotland.”28 In recent times the Columba Initiative (1997) has set about re-invigorating the links between Scotland and Ireland and their united

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8.1  Calum Colvin, Vestiarium Scoticum ii , 2005. Digital photomontage, 58 × 51 cm.

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Courtesy of the artist.

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Gaelic cultural heritage.29 We are seeing elements of that outward-looking, decentralizing propensity which suggest that the Gàidhealtachd may yet again prove fertile ground for alternative ways of thinking, seeing, and art-making. Some of the most innovative developments in contemporary Scottish art have come from the deconstruction of the binaries which remain deeply entrenched within the popular imagination: Highland/Lowland; Jacobite/Hanoverian; Gaelic/English; real/artificial; mythical/empirical. These have come from widely divergent directions: for example, from Highland artist Charles Avery (b. 1973), with his exercises in the Rabelaisian grotesque. Avery’s vast and comprehensive installations, all based on the “mythologies” of an imaginary island, raise philosophical conundrums at the same time as they reference the island of Mull just off the coast of Argyll in the Highlands. Avery assaults

the stereotypes of islanders propagated through popular histories, fictions, and travellers’ tales in his great sprawling Swiftian satire. Calum Colvin (b. 1961) rethinks and consistently reworks the iconography of Balmoralism in his multi-layered theatrical assemblages. He disentangles familiar Highland icons from their normal space, creating unexpected signification in a reconstructed universe of artifice, and in so doing lifts the Highland icons into the domain of the “uncanny.” This is seen in the series Vestiarium Scoticum (2005) made from a series of montages of images taken at Culloden Battlefield Site (on the field and in the old Visitors Centre), a venison-processing factory in Sutherland, and a kilt shop in Edinburgh (Fig. 8.1). Avery and Colvin use a complex and contemporary set of signifiers to un­ dermine the stereotyped commodification of the imagery of the Highlands. This is the way that they address the appropriation of the real; they are all too aware of a world of simulacra against which their signifiers work as counternarratives. Both artists have created microcosmic other worlds that satirize the commodified present. The vision that they share is deeply critical of society and its manipulative powers; it is skeptical, dark, and acerbic, finding echoes in the cut-and-paste worlds of European photomontage in the case of Colvin, and in the dark and grotesque political illustrations of Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), George Grosz (1893–1959), and Otto Dix (1891–1969), especially in Avery. Both artists, in other words, look back not to find an essentialism but to concentrate, in a postmodernist way, on the representation and ideologies that have determined our readings of history, some of which have been imported to the Highlands. New Directions from Without Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

The individual artists who are the real focus of this chapter are not part of any colonialist relationship with the area. While I provide some historical background to their practices, the structure of what follows is not linear, advancing chronologically, encounter to encounter. Inspired by literary theory and philosophy, I have instead opted for a more open structure, allowing ideas to seep out, probing into Highland art practice to shake up and unsettle a strict linearity. In Matthew Wickman’s essay in the International Journal of Scottish Literature, Wickman argues that, rather than viewing Scotland or Scottish culture as an essential nation or what Derrida refers to as a “philosopheme,” we have to view Scotland as more Deleuzian: a series of branching paths, transitions, tendencies, habits that are less the result of some raw nature but are rather the result of pathways cleared through dense forests of experience. He goes on to reinforce the point of Deleuze’s rejection of linearity: “the event is a vibration

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with an infinity of submultiples – of potential associations.”30 Carla Sassi writes in a very similar vein, alluding to Homi Bhabha alongside Deleuze by applying the concept of hybridization to the Scottish case. She argues for a kind of “glocality” whereby the universal or the global is rewardingly read in the context of the local. So, while each culture can be defined as local as it is produced in a specific time and place, it is also subject to hybridization and encounter (cultural identity is created in the contradictory and ambivalent in-between space of “enunciation”).31 Cairns Craig has written persuasively on the Scots essayist and poet Kenneth White (b. 1938) and his nomadic stance, which paradoxically lifts him away from the margins to the very forefront of a movement that may lead to a regrounding of modern thought. In brief, White may seem to be marginalized by his decision to live on the edge (in Brittany) and by writing about a culture on the edge (Scottish culture), but by his use of a language and a conceptual vocabulary that is current and theoretical he becomes relevant to an international conversation. Craig sees this stance as part of a rediscovered Celtic tradition – certainly not from within an establishment culture or from within the culture industry, but from a deeply Scottish tradition nevertheless. That is a tradition of cultural nomadism that includes the likes of Duns Scot, George Buchanan, David Hume, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Patrick Geddes. White writes passionately about the need for cultural renewal:

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What has generally characterized vanguard writing … is the move from monument to movement, from model and ideal … out onto way. I’m talking about writing as itinerary and as cartography, a tracking and a tracing, out to delineate new space, carrying with it the enlargement of mental categories and an increasing sense of world … Thereafter, it means moving out of history … the end of history as primal reference, and as vector towards some longed-for absolute.32

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Perhaps what I am attempting here is not so much a moving out of history as an intrusion into the symmetry of Highland cultural history. Again, White, commenting on his somewhat troubled relations with Scotland, writes about living a “transnational atopia.” He goes on to quote from Roger Caillois: “In any constituted symmetry, a partial and non-accidental break can occur, which tends to complicate the established balance … Its effect is to enrich the structure or the organism in which it arises by endowing them with a new property, making them move up to a higher level of organization [White’s emphasis].” White clarifies the point further when he says: “If I’ve apparently turned my back on Britain, it’s maybe in order to find it again, at a deeper level and in a wider context.”33 The break in White’s case is his decision to leave Britain to deepen

his understanding, and we can use this as a model for the way in which other artists and poets – indigenous artists who briefly travel, who leave and come back able to reach “a deeper level,” or those who are travellers who bring with them other ways of seeing. In a similar vein, I intend to show the value of including both the travellers and the politicized indigenous artists in a study of contemporary Highland visual culture. The “De-territorialization” of Landscape

Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

The work of the American Jon Schueler exemplifies this notion of “deterritorialization.” Schueler’s decision to move to a remote location in the Scottish Highlands at the height of his ascendancy in the New York art world was based on a chance meeting and the notion of a promised land. In the 1950s when he was showing with the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, he moved to the village of Mallaig, overlooking the Sound of Sleat. The artworks of his early confrontation with the Highland seascape deliver an intensity, an obsession, a frenzy. At one blow he lifts the approach to the Scottish landscape out of the drawing room with all its picturesqueness, its ancientness, its ethnographical oddities, its “otherness” into another scale, another intensity, another presence, another “self.” Out of the combination of the spectacular landscape of the Highlands and the vast in-scape of abstract expressionism, Schueler formed a remarkable hybrid (Fig. 8.2). He was able to find a series of visual correspondences in the seascape off the West Coast that would reflect states of mind or being. He was able to “de-territorialize” his New York abstract-expressionist language and in turn “de-territorialize” all earlier images of the Highland landscape. This transformed a tired and jaded pictorialism inherited from Victorian times (with the notable exception of William McTaggart) into a contemporary language of mark-making. Schueler’s work has not been wholly absorbed into the narrative of abstract expressionism, which frees art historians to insert his work into a far more complex reading; because his way of seeing was at odds with the dominant discourses of his day, he may yet become part of a discourse in which he takes his place in the development of a transnational visual language of the Scottish Highlands. Signs in movement, movement in signs were the elusive elements which Schueler was seeking. The signifier does not have to reproduce some natural object; it can just produce the shape of the movement itself – the stroke, the curve, the slash, the turn, the daub, the swirl. Schueler obviously sensed that, when motion rather than perspective is chosen as the means of expression, it yields instead of a static picture a dynamic one. There are photographs of the

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8.2  Jon Schueler, Snow Cloud over the Sound of Sleat, 1959. Oil on canvas, 228 × 198 cm (o/c 58-13). © Jon Schueler Estate. Courtesy

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of the Jon Schueler Estate.

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artist seated before a series of paintings he is working on: the image embodies the nature of the process. That which was active within the man has become suddenly powerfully alive in the works themselves. One particular photograph of Schueler very near the end of his life has him leaning forward in a kind of quietness regarding the energy in front of him.34 The juxtaposition of the real (in the sense of simulacrum) and the abstract is dramatic. Schueler himself as iconic signifier faces onto the indexical, and the energy that was once within the man has been translated into a parallel energy within these stunning and powerful abstract pieces in their swirling yet constructed reds and blues.35 Schueler also brought with him a different attitude toward audience. His relationship with the fishing community in Mallaig encouraged him to exhibit his work in a small, local village hall, without “white box” conditions (1971); he

collaborated with a filmmaker – a practice, at that time, more common in New York – screening the outcome at both Mallaig and the Usher Hall, Edinburgh (1972). Also, given the financial implications of shipping large canvases from the United States, he took the extraordinary decision to paint his Edinburgh, Talbot Rice Art Centre exhibition (1981) live in front of the audience, starting out the show with blank, neutral canvases – Schueler introduced into the visualization of the Highlands another physical scale. A remarkable testimony to the artist’s relationship with the Highland community of Mallaig was delivered at An Linne: The Jon Schueler Centenary Symposium, 2016 on the Isle of Skye when members of the fishing community described just how they had been affected by the artist and his transformative vision.36 To see a contemporary development of the vision that Schueler brought to the representation of the landscape, we can look to the work of Scottish/ Highland–located artist Marian Leven (b. 1944). Leven works from studios in Tayport and Achiltibuie. She studied weaving and textiles at college but has been working with acrylics, oils, and watercolours on paper and canvas since

Flux, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 122 × 122 cm. © Marian Leven. Photo: Chris Park.

Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

8.3  Marian Leven,

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the late 1960s. She has moved decisively away from large mimetic canvases to discover her own abstract forms. The stimulus may begin with landscape – the coastline, sea, and sky – but it then becomes mark-making and the creation of spaces, or a “kind of stage” upon which art “unfolds”37 (Fig. 8.3). Anna Lovatt’s writing on mark-making reminds us of Jacques Derrida’s “Scene of Language,” where the “subject of writing is not an isolated author, but a layered system of differential relations in which the writer, the instrument of inscription, the reader and society all play a part.”38 Instead of presenting us with a fait accompli, a full narrative, Schueler and Leven offer us instead, marks on a canvas – sometimes even just the sketchiest of armatures – upon which our own experience comes into play.

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Performance, Encounter, Image, and Text

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Among the cultural figures of the twentieth century, it can be argued that the one who has done the most to effect a radical change in the way people think about or perceive art in their lives is German artist Joseph Beuys.39 His practice of “Social Sculpture” and performance, as well as his lectures and teachings in Scotland, challenged the dominant narratives of the prevailing ideology.40 Instead of framing something in front of the passive “elect” body as typically found in Scotland’s cultural space, Beuys generated a meaningful dialogue as part of the 1970 Edinburgh Festival’s Strategy: Get Arts program, bringing peat, bog pine, and copper from an interaction and communion with Loch Awe and Rannoch Moor in the Highlands (Fig. 8.4) to an “action” in the city called Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony (1970). Over the course of his eleven years of visiting Scotland and the Highlands, Beuys raised questions about social and political issues: about poverty; about the penal system; about the oil industry. He attempted to re-map the function of art in society by suggesting a replacement of the fatalistic allegories of the inevitable with his own radical allegories of the possible – this vision was key to his Highland focus.41 Richard Demarco (b. 1930), founder of the Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, brought Beuys to Scotland. Demarco strongly believes that the Highlands represent something altogether different from Edinburgh and the Scottish art scene, and his work has helped make it so. Scottish-born Demarco was always looking outward for connections – as artist, curator, cultural activist – and was as iconoclastic as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid with the same high seriousness about the social and moral role that culture should play in the world.42 Social engagement is a distinctive feature of much of the culture of the Gàidhealtachd and so Beuys’s approach found resonance in its literature and folklore, as well as in its visual culture. The blackboard as “a demonstration object” plays an increasingly prominent role in Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch).43 Caroline Tisdall explains further: “From the earliest days of his Fluxus con-

The Road to Meikle Seggie is a road both in reality, defined by the history of Scotland, and also in the world of mythology, associated with

8.4  Richard Demarco, Joseph Beuys exploring the shoreline of Loch Awe in the act of making his first art work in Scotland – entitled “The Loch Awe Piece” – as a gift to Richard Demarco, 1970. Original: 35mm negative. Courtesy of Richard Demarco.

Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

certs, Beuys had been using blackboards as carriers of information that could be changed during the course of an action … Throughout the performance [of Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch)] Beuys made and erased a series of drawings on a single board, manoeuvring it with a shepherd’s crook and holding it aloft as if it were a highly charged piece of equipment.”44 Art no longer emitted its “aura” within the confines of the cultural community but became part of the everyday.45 The part Demarco played in setting out a whole new grounding for Highland art and its transnational potential cannot be overstated. For him, the Highland landscape and culture represent another world altogether from the rest of Scotland. Demarco’s huge ambitions for a Highland/Celtic contemporary art form are paradoxically intertwined with the distant past. His own sense of internationalism is grounded in a sense of the mythic – a mythic/historic consciousness of the ancient kingdom of Dalriada. In interview with Janet McKenzie for Studio International, he said:

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8.5  Helen MacAlister, A Participant Observer, 2011. Pencil on paper, 2008,

a2. Screenprint, edition of 10.54 × 76 cm. Printed by Paul Liam Harrison, Visual Research Centre, Dundee. Original image © British Geological Survey. Photographer: John McKenzie.

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such legendary figures as Fingal and his son, Ossian, and Thomas the Rhymer … It is the road that takes you resolutely away from the urban space where you will find modern art galleries and museums. It is the road offering adventure and risk-taking. It eventually joins the mystical “Road to the Isles” as it crosses Rannoch Moor and heads for the Hebridean islands and shorelines.46

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Demarco’s internationalism, allied with his sense of a distinctive Highland cultural identity, is an essential component in another map of a transnational Highland artistic consciousness. Euan McArthur, in his essay “A Highland Decade” (2007), writes: “the Highlands and what they contain … were never for Demarco, code for ‘the past.’ His interest is always in the living culture. The past that shapes the present and how the present construes the past is one of the many cultural dialogues that fascinate him wherever he travels.”47 Something of this didactic element, as well as the primacy of the oral tradition, is found in the work of Scots artist Helen MacAlister (b. 1969), but there is something beyond this as well: something that owes more to the whole development of semiotics especially within the radical intellectual movements in France throughout the twentieth century. MacAlister’s work is stridently anti-pictorial: she will concentrate on text as a thing in itself to re-signify a word or an idiom from Scots or Gaelic. Éric Alliez and Peter Osborne draw attention to the continuing preoccupation in France with the relationship between aesthetics and semiotics: “the philosophical question of the relationship

between image and word … continues to delineate the parameters of debate. And with regard to contemporary art, discussion thus focuses on the aesthetic image, the image in its aesthetic determination as (conceptually) underdetermined.”48 MacAlister has embraced the idea that the aesthetic image is conceptually underdetermined by rejecting any kind of image that could be appropriated by hegemonic forces (political, commercial, or cultural). She will typically represent either the indexical word or phrase or even just a number, as in the number of monoglot Gaelic speakers recorded in census data. The same conviction runs through the pieces that she constructed from landform diagrams of the Highlands for the geological society epitomized in the piece entitled A Participant Observer (2011) (Fig. 8.5). She depicts for us an alluvial fan, a meeting point in the natural world, a moment of transformation where one substance confronts and partially assimilates another. The title, a term borrowed from the legendary folklore collector Hamish Henderson, returns us to the pedagogical, Beuys, and the idea of the collective consciousness. While the expression is axiomatic with the collector’s relationship with the tradition, we are remarkably close to the idea in the parallel world of the visual arts of the “artist as witness.” Personal and Public Histories and the Place for Technology

The crofters’ cottages crouch like animals sheltering on the ground for the night. Everything moves on, the larches, the bracken, the caledonian pines, the heather, the juniper bushes, the scrap grass. And then moving

Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

Another artist to bring into the visual language of the Highlands a whole new range of signifiers is Daniel Reeves. Reeves arrived into the Outer Hebrides from the United States in 1985, via occupations and periods of living in the Philippines, Vietnam, Guatemala, India, Wales, Northern Spain, and the North of France.49 He remained in the Highlands until the year 2000. During this period he produced a body of profoundly original works: digital paintings, video films, and multi-media installations. He articulated precisely the conditions in the Highland thoughtscape which allowed him to discover “multiplicities” within: “Essentially in my life during those years there was a calmness, quietude and deliberate attention to kestrels, peat bogs, marine life, tide pools, constantly shifting skies and wind patterns, voles, and stones so old and weathered; all set down in patterns beyond the edge of remembered time, full of mystery and resisting any simple explanation.”50 Reeves’s sense of constant movement and patterns waiting to be read is remarkably reminiscent of the writing of English novelist and poet John Berger (1926–2017) in his description of the Scottish Isle of Gigha:

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8.6  Daniel Reeves, I Have This One Afternoon, 1999. Digital painting, Lambda print bonded to glass, 115 × 293 cm. Daniel Reeves,

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private collection.

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into the land, water: the rivers running to the sea, the sea with its tides filling lochs. And across both land and water the wind. And, above all, the northwest wind. The honking of the wild geese in the sky is like a fleeting measure, a counting in another algebra, of all this movement.51 What is especially pertinent to my argument here is the emphasis on movement and the response of the senses. In their responses to place, Berger and Reeves do not analyze or interpret, they describe; they do not feel a sense of self or identification. They describe the relationship between landscape and things as Reeves muses, “resisting any simple explanation.”52 Reeves’s film Obsessive Becoming (1990–95), resolved during the period he lived in the Outer Hebrides, is a dense rhetorical and visual stream-narrative lasting fifty-four minutes, which forms a completely new structure, or public space, for an exploration of both self and politics. Obsessive Becoming begins with the camera closing in and interrogating his own family on the subject of abuse and violence with its roots in “secrets and lies.” The film tape widens into a montage of the horrors of twentieth-century warfare – the one begets the other – “the secrets in this family were immense, the secrets in this world are immense.”53 Reeves’s strategy to reject the divide between the private and public is visualized with a poetic virtuosity as he weaves and layers images of his childhood self with iconography from the Warsaw Ghetto, Vietnam, Hiroshima, and the Gulf War. The unrelenting profusion of violent images presents us with a kind of phantasmagoria of the real (Fig. 8.6).

Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

Reeves’s receptivity to innovations in video technology and his mastery of technical processes gave him the language through which he could uncover his own past and connect this to a collective consciousness. He appropriated the very latest technologies to arrange and compose his archival probing as he unfixed the apparently stable and static images from the past. His visual poems/ documentaries/installations are like religious meditations: circular, revolving around a point whose location is limitless, circles of ever-expanding and contracting attention. It was as though he found in the Highland communities and landscapes the sense of so many other selves within. His works have redefined our sense of what experimental video can bring to the politicized autobiography – relations are multiple, not linear, the self morphs and evolves, familiar faces from our histories dissolve and reappear, and the whole stream is accompanied by incantations and echoes amid the omnipresent metaphorical motifs of stone and water. We might reflect here on Ascherson’s description of the “concentric circles pecked into the rock around a central cup” which were cut between 5,500 and 4,500 years ago.54 Argyll is particularly rich in these markings: in Kilmartin Glen, for example, there are about a dozen known markings in a family of designs. The synergy between Reeves’s thinking within the Highland landscape and these traces of the “rock art” from Neolithic times unexpectedly reinforces Ascherson’s contention that the most powerful revelation is the one where the mental boundary between life and non-life is transcended. To further illustrate the synergy between Ascherson’s thinking and Reeves’s work created when living in the Highlands, we have Eingang (1990–98), a three-channel video installation and sculpture composed of sections of Douglas Fir, beach cobbles, glass bowls, volcanic rock, rice, and saffron – Reeves’s ingenious materialization of the Zen principles of the interconnectedness of all things.55 And we see, most tellingly, in the poetic short film Sombra a Sombra (1988), a meditation on the architecture of an abandoned village as evoked in the poetry of Cesar Vellejo.56 Reeves here employs the dissolve and the isolated disappearing object as a technique, almost a metaphor, for his conceptual approach – there is no simple linear life to death progression within his vision but rather all is cyclical, part of a pattern of ever-changing forms. The death masks of the poet John Keats, composer Felix Mendelssohn, naturalist John James Audubon, and physicist Isaac Newton are subtly merged with the faces of young Scottish soldiers in Korea to produce a haunting confluence in Reeves’s digital painting Keats in Korea (1990). This is a more literal example of Reeves’s engagement with cyclical time – “that all moments exist in not only the present moment but in all other moments past and still to come.”57 In Ascherson’s text the historian’s musings on the biographies of the stones suggest that the ancient people are still there, present and incised into their rock art.

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“Social Sculpture” Acting as “Witness”

8.7  Will Maclean and Marian Leven, An Sùileachan, 2013. Stone, wood, granite, iron, 24 × 8 m. Copyright artists. Photo by Dr Colin Macdonald.

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Will Maclean and Marian Leven’s collaboration on the stone construction An Sùileachan (2013) is a distinctive piece of socially engaged practice from the Highlands (Fig. 8.7). It is interesting to reflect on the connections at this point: Maclean, Leven, Schueler, and Beuys were artists at the heart of the Demarco circle in the early 1970s and through the 1980s. Demarco staged Maclean’s first show in the Melville Crescent Gallery in October of 1970 and, according to Maclean, the gallery director played “a big part in [their] lives.”58 Demarco discouraged Maclean and Leven from emigrating to Australia and facilitated the

first major research project by Maclean – a visual record of West Coast ring net fishing (1978). In the connections between Beuys and Maclean, there is a shared vital interest in the minority cultures at the margins of Europe and North America. They also share the notion that an object can contain magical or sacred qualities – for Maclean, the scapular bone, a pigskin pouch, the sternpost of a boat and for Beuys, fat, felt, peat bog, and the “Eurasian staff.” Both Beuys and Maclean distance themselves from connoisseurship and the “objet d’art.” Maclean’s early project The Ring-Net (1978) is wholly integrated within a locale, an industry, and a way of life – the place/work/folk algorithm. Maclean and Leven’s An Sùileachan is a site-specific, environmental sculpture with radical, political dimensions. It sits in a remarkable geophysical setting at Reef on Lewis. In terms of the specifics of the forms, the distinctive doorway speaks of the Inuit tupqujaq – a large structure through which a shaman might enter the spirit world – and the two circular chambers invoke the Pictish double-disc markings of the East Wemyss caves in Fife. Maclean’s search for connections have often led him to the North – recent works include Shelly Man/Iceland (2011) and Sildar Dance/Iceland (2011). Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North (2005) cites many visual examples of a specifically Northern consciousness linking the Highlands of Scotland with the arts of the Scandinavian countries, Japan, China, and Canada. Davidson achieves some deft and lyrical summations especially in the speculative early pages, which relate directly to Maclean’s and Leven’s work An Sùileachan:

An Sùileachan is dedicated to the Lewis people of the nineteenth century who were cleared from their land and to the twentieth-century Land Raiders of Reef.60 As such, it examines the notion of the counter-narrative from the perspective of the dispossessed. Being a piece of participatory art, with stone works, iron works, and woodwork by Lewis craftsmen, this artwork reflects far more than the perceptions of the two individuals. An Sùileachan works, politically and philosophically, to engage the people of Lewis in a dialogical relationship with their histories. In other words the language is connected syntagmatically with land art, “Social Sculpture,” and in an aesthetic sense shares something of that language; but it operates paradigmatically also with the past

Visual Culture of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

Once they have been seen, even in photographs, the landscapes of the Arctic are an inevitable and insistent element in anyone’s idea of north. One of their most haunting elements is the Inuit work in placed stones within the Arctic landscape of Nunavut, in northernmost Canada. These works are minimal interventions – the slight, but moving rearrangement of what is already there – placed and balanced stones. These inuksuit articulate, transform and (at times literally) frame the north.59

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and a projected future for the community. It denotes the possibilities of what the community may become. The position of An Sùileachan certainly finds its echo in Beuys’s notion of the function of art. Beuys envisaged an art that would resume a centrality within the life of the community. “Social Sculpture” for Beuys is “how we mould and shape the world in which we live: Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone an artist.”61

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In Conclusion

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At the opening of their recent publication on Art and Politics, philosophers Éric Alliez and Peter Osborne write about transnational discourses as they are at the present time. They consider three sets of essays on art and politics from France, Germany, and Italy and look at the differences between them. The philosophers aim to be absolutely clear about the nature of these differences: “The distinctiveness of each set [of essays] derives not from any singular national intellectual tradition – however broadly defined – but from its nationally specific articulation of transnational discourses: internationally circulating discourses received and transformed into ‘culture’ as part of the histories of particular states.”62 What is distinctive about these postnational discourses is that they are politically oppositional or alternative streams of thought: “they are not just part of the cultural histories of these states, but situated ‘in and against’ – as well as between – them.”63 I hope that this chapter as a whole could serve as the starting point for a different kind of writing about Highland art. The Scottish satirists Colvin and Avery, with their postcolonial/post-modernist discourse, Jon Schueler with his abstract expressionist syntax, Beuys with his reprised high modernist ideals and the far-sighted advocacy of Demarco, Reeves with his mesmeric visual poetry, MacAlister with her new historicism, and Maclean and Leven with their radical, political “re-territorialization” of land art and sculpture: such is the sketch of an emergent dynamic visual language. In recent times the Columba Initiative has revitalized the dialogue between the Scottish and Irish Gàidhealtachd, but alongside this reorientation we must celebrate the way that the international artists who came to the Highlands in the twentieth century have dramatically altered the outlines of the visual art map of the area. They have immeasurably broadened the terms of the debate and reinvigorated the language of the discourse. This chapter begins the process of locating contemporary Highland visual culture within its evolving futures in order to rearticulate how new technologies, new radical political geographies, and new aesthetic forms can recharge existing narratives.

New Maps for Networks Reykjavík Fluxus – A Case of Expanding Connections Æ s a Sig ur j ó n s d ót t ir

T

he historiography of art is relatively recent in Iceland, where contemporary art has become important as a representation of cultural identity. My research is not so much concerned with filling in art-historical gaps by mak­ ing Icelandic artists visible (even though I believe this is an important issue). Rather I am concerned with the ways that contemporary art was (and still is) deployed as an aspect of remodelled identity construction among artists, and how these reconfigured identities were mobilized through the close contact with non-Icelandic Fluxus artists, such as Dieter Roth (1930–1998) and Robert Filliou (1926–1987). Earlier iterations of this research have focused on the pedagogical influence of Roth and Filliou on the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in Reykjavík.1 Part of this investigation involves consideration of the cultural influence of Amsterdam during the 1960s and 1970s, and the critical role of artist-run spaces and radical art education. These initiatives collectively produced new paradigms and initiated new thinking about art in the growing capital of Iceland. Making Connections

Creating connections between cities and making places for art, artists, and curators coming from countries on the periphery has become a significant element in the global approach to writing about art over the past decade. As art historian Terry Smith has argued: “The postcolonial turn has generated the need for narratives that work on global, regional, and local levels. These are essential to understanding art, not only as it is created within cultures but also as it enters into the exchanges between them.”2 The signal importance of Fluxus for the development of contemporary art is rarely acknowledged in historiographic accounts chronicling the avant-garde

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movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In an interview about her book Fluxus Experience, art historian Hannah Higgins points out “that Fluxus is something besides a group of artists circled around George Maciunas.”3 She considers that interpretation as historically inaccurate because within the Fluxus community, there was no central source of production and certainly no centre – therefore no main protagonist. Higgins traces the roots of Fluxus to experiments in music education conducted by John Cage (1912–1992) in his classes at the New School for Social Research in New York 1957–59. In the summer of 1958, students in this class were: Allan Kaprow (1927–2006), Al Hansen (1927– 1995), Dick Higgins (1938–1998), Florence Tarlow (1922–1992), George Brecht (1926–2008), and Scott Hyde (b. 1926).4 She argues that Fluxus in Europe had “similar beginnings” in the class of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928– 2007), which included video artists such as Nam June Paik (1932–2006).5 For Higgins the secret behind the long life of Fluxus is inscribed in their pedagogical project, the commitment to “experiential learning,” and to the notion of “interdisciplinary exploration, self-directed study, collective work, and the nonhierarchical exchange of ideas.”6 Art historian Bertrand Clavez takes a step further and suggests that “Fluxus should be considered as the paradigm of our contemporary art.”7 Clavez argues that Fluxus established the general frame of contemporary art in reshaping the paradigm within which art is made. He considers Fluxus as “a point of origin that created a new frame of action and conception within which the works are elaborated without the artists even being conscious of this general frame.”8 Fluxus has been described as “a piece of reality”9 and Fluxus artists liked to employ the map as a visual trope. Fluxus activities were fundamentally antiinstitutional and networks were most often created on the basis of personal relations. One of the important ideas explored by Fluxus artists was the elimination of the idea of geographic art centres. Therefore, small cities were as important as art capitals and, according to Filliou’s principle, all artists could become a part of the “Eternal Network” on a horizontal level.10 The method of mapping can be used to describe and explore these transnational networks, which, in turn, help provide an overview and make sense of particular art connections within a specific place. The “hot spots,” so to speak, on the contemporary art map of Iceland were Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, and Reykjavík, and the history of contemporary art in Iceland is interwoven with the art education and art production that emerged in these cities. Tracing the connections between art experiments taking place in grass-root spaces and art schools reveals the synergy between geographic locations and cultural milieux that were important to the individual artists and offers a better understanding of the meaning of these places and actions in the larger perspective of art production. That said, I now want to focus on the importance of Fluxus

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in Reykjavík, and show how it not only shaped art production and art education but in general inspired a new way of thinking about art. The process of developing the so-called New Art11 was initiated and perpetuated by Dieter Roth, who moved to Iceland in 1957 and throughout his life acted as a “passeur” between Icelandic artists and avant-garde networks in Europe and the United States. The research model of cultural transfer, as defined initially by Michel Es­ pagne and Michael Werner in their seminal texts from the mid-1980s, is useful as a research frame to study micro-histories of such transfers.12 However, it is of limited use in this case, as the networks I am looking into were initiated, maintained, and multiplied through non-institutional personal contacts and therefore not through transfers between cultures per se. The notion of the passeur seems pertinent. It has been used in cultural and literary theory and is discussed by historians Serge Gruzinski and Diana Cooper-Richet.13 However, in my study, I make use of the personification of the passeur or the “gobetween,” as this role is defined by historian Simon Schaffer: “The go-between … is thus not just a passer-by or a simple agent of cross-cultural diffusion, but someone who articulates relationships between disparate worlds or cultures by being able to translate between them.”14 I will look into how this articulation was set in motion by such artists as Roth and Filliou, through their networks, educational approach, and direct art production; and later by the Icelandic artist Sigurður Guðmundsson (b. 1942), notably through his involvement in experimental artist-run spaces in Reykjavík and Amsterdam. I would also like to put forward the textual interpretation of the passeur as a paradigm of the “trans-,” opposite to the function of the “inter,” as explained by Franco Cassano.15 The notion of transgression is particularly clear in Roth’s practice, and similar tendencies are to be observed in the works of other Icelandic artist “nomads” such as Guðmundsson and Róska (Ragnhildur Óskarsdóttir 1940– 1996). Other influential foreign figures in contemporary Icelandic art could be mentioned: the Dutch artists Douwe Jan Bakker (1943–1997) and Pieter Holstein (b. 1934), for instance, both stand out as go-betweens who instructed a great number of Icelandic art students in the Netherlands and in Iceland, and exhibited regularly with Icelandic artists.16 My interest in the subject is in the difficulties encountered when connecting the local and the global in between countries inside Europe during the Cold War period. In Iceland, art production and exhibitions were fostered by transnational networks outside institutions, between larger cities and peripheries. Artists had become progressively mobile after the Second World War and a few artists started working together on collaborative projects and travelling exhibitions. However, the nomadism of many of the Danish C ob ra artists such as Asger Jorn (1914–1973) did not affect their Icelandic colleagues, and it was

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only through the impulse of Dieter Roth that nomadism was gradually considered as value added to the artistic practice. This shift in “status” or change in definition of the artist from being a stable studio worker into becoming a migrant was not, however, openly discussed in Icelandic journals or in the press. The mobile function of the artist, as put in action by Roth, Filliou, and later Guðmundsson, became a new paradigm. Not only did they travel between workplaces, turning their nomadism into an important aspect of their practice, but also they implemented exhibition activities and direct mobility of artworks, expanding their students’ horizons. The Cold War brought economic prosperity to the island and artists’ and art students’ mobility increased. I am therefore looking into the social reality of the sites of production, the urban spaces that were occupied by artists or put to use, and how exchanges functioned as networks based on personal connections and public encounters. These include galleries and progressive art schools, as well as more established art education, all of which are elements in the determination of what a given influence meant in a specific geographical context, whether in Reykjavík, Amsterdam, or other Dutch cities frequented by Icelandic art students.

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In and Out of Reykjavík

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In Iceland art played an important role in constructing national identity through different phases of the building of the nation-state.17 The first national art history, published in Iceland in 1964, emphasizes the importance of supporting modern abstract art for the new state.18 When this political and cultural task was completed, contemporary art took on the role of cultural tool, and subsequently became an element of urban dynamics and international outreach. Writing a new historical art narrative of twentieth-century and contemporary art in Iceland became an issue in cultural politics around 2000, when Reyk­ javík was named as that year’s European Capital of Culture. The international media became interested in Iceland, their curiosity triggered by the presence of emerging global stars such as Björk (b. 1965) and Ólafur Elíasson (b. 1967). A few Icelandic artists began to be assimilated into the global art market and a greater number of Icelandic artists were invited to international exhibitions and biennials.19 The first internationally distributed account of contemporary art in Iceland was an article written by the American art critic Gregory Volk published in Art in America in September 2000.20 Volk’s general overview is enthusiastic; he remarks on how “In a ‘remote’ country growing rapidly more urban and cosmopolitan, Icelandic artists readily adopt – and meet – global art world standards.”21 Still, the aim of Volk’s critique seems to be to distinguish some

kind of essential Icelandicness among Icelandic artists, whom he sees embedded in some kind of “otherness,” represented by historical narrative, traditions, and a shared love of nature: This work is so diverse that it might seem pointless to ask what is peculiarly “Icelandic” about it. One thing you do notice … is that no matter how internationally minded Icelandic artists are (and almost all have studied and lived abroad), eventually the country itself comes to figure in their work: as a physical locus, as a trove of images and materials or – more mysteriously for outsiders – as a comprehensive force with which one is perpetually in dialogue. It’s not that the compelling work now being produced is about Iceland in any literal sense. Far from it. But Iceland is nevertheless there, in the deep grain of the inquiry, a constant presence that can be approached with a sense of wonder, humor or irony, via poetic engagement or tough-minded criticism.22

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Is this obsession with a place perhaps thought to be a characteristic of small nations? The art scene described by Volk is a reflection of postcolonial approaches adopted by artists in the late 1990s. Their practices reflect a deep concern with identity construction and a search for difference that is characteristic of artistic thought in postcolonial situations. In his article, Volk emphasizes the state of insularity so often identified when foreign commentators write about the “otherness” of Icelandic culture, thereby contributing to an archive of naturalized knowledge, and imputing a shared mentality and shared characteristics to these “others.” In this manner, discourse produces an imaginary knowledge, thereafter taken as real, a phenomenon famously described by Edward Said.23 Writing a comprehensive national art history in the early twenty-first century is a belated process, and participating in such projects provoked theoretical and methodological questions of the meaning and issues raised in the writing of such narratives. But as the gaze of the outside world was progressively turned toward Iceland, the lack of an inclusive art narrative became evident. Consequently, national institutions began to organize and fund the writing of national art-historical surveys, but without much discussion as to how these narratives could be framed. The publication Icelandic Art Today (2009) was a breakthrough in the sense that it was the first large-scale publication about Icelandic contemporary art in the English language, published in collaboration with an internationally renowned publishing house and with international distribution, but financed by the Icelandic Ministry of Culture. Writing about contemporary art is, inevitably, the production of historiography – and historiography cannot exclude methodological and theoretical

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concerns. Art historian Christian Schoen, one of the two editors of Icelandic Art Today, took a post-romantic, nationalistic approach and asked in his preface: “Just what is it that makes Iceland’s art of today so different, so appealing? Be it from a conceptual, experimental, or poetic angle, today’s art in Iceland is what artists in other nations struggle to achieve: it is direct and genuine. It playfully oversteps the boundaries of other art forms. Interesting collaborations between artists, musicians, actors, designers, or authors are the norm.”24 Schoen’s enthusiastic description, with its clever pun on Richard Hamilton’s famous work-title,25 echoes Volk’s analyses and refers to the correlation between artistic creativity and nature that is embedded in romantic philosophy. Halldór B. Runólfsson, then director of the National Gallery of Iceland and coeditor with Schoen of Icelandic Art Today, takes a more neutral stance, explaining the “unusually high degree of variety and vitality” of the contemporary art scene in Iceland in somewhat different terms: “The fact that most Icelandic art students continue their studies [in] other Western countries … after completing their graduate studies at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, might be the decisive twist of luck and influence.”26 The blossoming of contemporary art in Iceland is here defined as the result of successful cultural transfers, including the important historical role of the experimental súm group and the influence of Dieter Roth’s extensive networking. The most detailed narrative of Icelandic art from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century is the five-volume History of Art in Iceland, published in 2011.27 In this publication, co-authored by a number of art historians, an effort was made to provide a deeper understanding of the complexity of art practices within a small territory whose art institutions and art education were for a long time concerned to solidify national identity. Unfortunately, historiographical problems are not addressed in the two last volumes dealing with art after 1960; nor are concepts of hosting, diaspora, translation, and transnational flows discussed. The importance of Fluxus and the “conceptual” Dutch connection are considered, but no historiographical conclusions to these formations are proposed.

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It All Started with Dieter Roth

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I have briefly mentioned how art historiographies in Iceland have been constructed over the last years. New narratives, often tinged with romantic ideas and mythologies, have been produced from the inside and the outside. Art historians have used genealogies of artists and postcolonial notions, as well as more pragmatic views based on theories of cultural transfers, to explain the processes active in the formation of the new art and the place of contemporary art in Iceland. The lack of deeper analyses draws attention to the importance of

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studying the ways in which international connections and circulation of works and ideas played out in localized contexts – what paradigms were selected and followed by the artists? At the same time, a strong mythological narrative is already in place among Icelandic artists and art historians saying it all started with Dieter Roth. As early as 1978, in an interview with Icelandic artist and teacher Magnús Pálsson (b. 1929), this historical framework was established.28 Roth moved to Iceland in 1957 after meeting his future wife, art-therapist Sigríður Björnsdóttir (b. 1929), in Copenhagen some months before. Roth did in fact become active in Iceland as an artist and designer, but he was not a central figure. He was always on the margins, a stranger, but more involved than a passer-by. He moved perpetually between European cities and travelled regularly to the United States. His first solo show in America was mounted by the Philadelphia Museum College of Art (1964), and he taught graphic arts at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He was in Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, London, Basel, Zurich, and Reykjavík, taking his ideas, works, and practices from one place to another. In retrospect, Roth was indeed a singularly important figure in the restricted art world of postwar Europe, not only because of his multi-faceted and heterogeneous production but also because of his high mobility and his important network. Moving between languages, media, art genres, and geo-localizations, he was constantly articulating his new experiments and transgressing borders and practices. He therefore incarnates all the characteristics of the passeur as defined by Schaffer, articulating and translating between social groups and languages. However, the tendency to give Roth credit for introducing contemporary art practices into a putatively static Iceland is problematic. Although he established the connections and maintained the networks, Iceland might also be said to have marked his art production. He became fascinated and was in fact deeply influenced by Icelandic vernacular culture, which at the time had a particular material rawness representing both the postwar economic boom and Cold War politics. The presence of an American military base in Iceland provoked among writers and artists a critical impulse to subvert the image of American consumer culture, and may have accelerated his research into pop culture and early uses of everyday materials. In general, and through all his prolific art production, Iceland is very present as a physical place, and he incorporated some of his Iceland experiences directly into his works. These interests are exemplified by several of his book-works for which Icelandic newspapers and journals provide the raw material. Personification of nature is a strong tradition in Icelandic language and this phenomenon caught Roth’s attention. His lithographs Surtsey,29 based on popular aerial views of the island of Surtsey30 that emerged in 1963 in an explosive volcanic eruption originating from below the sea, and Postkarten an Emmett Williams,31 showing the emblematic puffin,

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9.1  Dieter Roth, Postkarte an Emmett Williams, after 1975. Paint on postcard, 10.5 × 14.7. Courtesy: Dieter Roth Foundation,

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Hamburg.

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can be named as direct examples of “détournement” of popular Icelandic cultural representations (Fig. 9.1). Furthermore, Roth’s articulation of the concept of insularity and the notion of the “island” as a creative metaphor is present in his appropriation of the commercial postcards of Surtsey as well as in his multiple versions of the theme Insel (1968).32 These works express his strong relationship with a place, as does his serial work based on long-term visual documentation, such as The Reykjavík Slides (1973–75/1990–93), whose stated ambition was to document every single house and building in the capital.33 More important is the fact that Roth’s local engagement and his way of including artists, architects, photographers, printers, writers, and art students into his practice on a horizontal level meant that some new avant-garde experiments were presented almost simultaneously in Reykjavík, Düsseldorf, and Amsterdam. For Roth, Iceland also became a place of creative healing that encouraged his experimentation and production. He had his first books printed in Iceland and began publishing under the imprint forlag ed [Einar/ Dieter] with the Icelandic poet Einar Bragi (1921–2005), founder and editor of the literary magazine Birtingur.34

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It is precisely at this time, concurrent with Roth’s participation in the exhibition Vision in Motion – Motion in Vision (1959), in Hessenhuis, Antwerp, and in the show Dynamo 1 (1959), in Wiesbaden, that Roth started produc­ ing transformable and kinetic works. Roth was already associated with the German Zero group formed in Düsseldorf in 1957 by Heinz Mack (b. 1931) and Otto Piene (1928–2014), and he published in their magazine, Zero 3, in 1960.35 Kinetic art became art historically institutionalized in a major travelling exhibition of 1961, Bewogen Beweging (Moving Movement or Moved Movement), co-curated by Pontus Hultén (1924–2006), then director at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Willem Sandberg (1897–1984), director of the Stedelijk Museum.36 This exhibition was described as the first “International Exhibition of Art in Motion” and it figured as an important turning point for Roth. He exhibited several works and made sure that the Icelandic artist Jón Gunnar Árnason (1931–1989) would also be invited to show his transformable sculptures. Árnason is now considered a pioneer of kinetic art in Iceland. His participation in Bewogen Beweging could have been groundbreaking for him, but unfortunately he did not participate in any other large travelling shows abroad and his works are now known only in Iceland. The theme or the idea behind the show recalls László Moholy-Nagy’s (1895– 1946) testament “vision in motion”37 astutely visualized in the “interactive” exhibition poster designed by Roth.38 The exhibition never came to Iceland, as there was no art institution or infrastructure able to mount such an important show. Still, the theme of motion resonated in Reykjavík in the autumn, through Roth’s transformable works made from everyday materials, such as Gummi­ bandbild (Rubber-band Picture)39 and Kugelspiel (Bead Game),40 presented in Ásmundarsalur at a small exhibition space owned by the modernist sculptor Ásmundur Sveinsson (1896–1982), which also hosted the privately run Reykjavík Art School, directed by Roth’s friend, the sculptor Ragnar Kjartansson (1923–1988).41 Outside the exhibition space, on what was then deserted ground on a windy hill, Roth erected a mobile sound sculpture attached to a telephone pole. This was his first large kinetic piece, called the Wind-Harp/Vindharpa, a tower-like assemblage made from recuperated iron – a sound machine measuring more than seven metres in height. The work was a variation on The Tower constructed by Swiss-born sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) outside the Stedelijk Museum earlier the same year.42 A connection could also be made with Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960), the self-destroying mechanism that blew itself up in front a crowd of specially invited guests in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art on 18 March 1960.43 The Wind-Harp (Fig. 9.2) was the beginning of something new, both in Roth’s career as well as in the small progressive art circles in Iceland. It was

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9.2  Dieter Roth, WindHarp. Front page of the

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daily Tíminn, 1961.

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Roth’s first sound piece, and the first “mobile” artwork the public had ever seen. Sited outdoors, it was a new experience of public space for the audience, as reported in the daily papers. However, despite Roth’s multiple engagements in progressive networks, and collaborative shows with American and European Fluxus artists, it was only in the spring of 1965 that the Icelandic public experienced a Fluxus performance. Nam June Paik and cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933–1991) were invited

to Iceland by composer Atli Heimir Sveinsson (b. 1938), who had studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. The performance (with Robot 345) was advertised as a concert by the experimental music society Musica Nova and created a scandal among music lovers in Reykjavík, who were not used to this kind of sexualization of classical instruments and body performance.44 The action was described in detail in the press, who claimed that the public was outraged by the “male strip-tease” taking place during the concert, especially when the artist Nam June Paik pulled down his pants and turned his bare bottom toward the public.45 This was also the year of the creation of the avantgarde group súm in Reykjavík.46 The catalogue of their first show, súm i, was designed by Roth in the form of a folded poster printed on both sides (Fig. 9.3). It attracted international attention through Roth’s network, and indeed it showcases his cool use of photographs and vernacular documents. However, it does not give much information on the state of progressive Icelandic art; nor did it directly represent the works in the show. The poster includes family photographs, photographs of the artists participating in the show, bills,

9.3  Dieter Roth, Poster for the súm i exhibition in Reykjavík, 1965. Offset print, 55 × 85 cm. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Iceland.

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American comic strips, Roth’s drawings, and a photograph showing one of Árnason´s transformable sculptures. In fact, the works exhibited in the first súm show were more influenced by ready-made, pop collages and kinetic art than Fluxus. Sigurjón Jóhannsson (b. 1939) and Hreinn Friðfinnsson (b. 1943) had earlier both spent some months in London, where Roth introduced them to Richard Hamilton (1922–2011). One of the pieces in the show was an appropriated ready-made by Friðfinnsson, a simple broken door turned into a painted installation, with the quizzical title: Stopping by at Jón Gunnar’s place. The piece could be analyzed as a “combine”; that is, both a painting and a sculpture, as coined by Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). Jón Gunnar Árnason exhibited kinetic metal reliefs made of aluminum and steel, while Sigurjón Jóhannsson showed pop collages inspired by Hamilton. The súm group rapidly expanded and included artists, musicians, and writers.47 The brothers Kristján (b. 1941) and Sigurður Guðmundsson (not present in the 1965 show) became central characters of the artist-run Gallery súm in Reykjavík which organized exhibitions with unknown Icelandic artists as well as internationally known artists during the years 1969–75. The Gallery súm became internationally appreciated with the help of Roth, who brought an important number of foreign artists and art works to Iceland. The group show súm iii (1969) is considered to be groundbreaking, as it brought together this growing nucleolus of Icelandic experimental artists and an impressive selection of works by Fluxus artists such as Addi Köpcke (1928– 1977), Ben Vau­tier (b. 1935), Daniel Spoerri (b.1930), Emmett Williams (1925– 2007), George Brecht, Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), Robert Filliou, Richard Hamilton, and Die­ter Roth. Among the Icelandic artists were the brothers Guðmundsson, Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Magnús Pálsson, Þórður Ben Sveinsson (b. 1945), who exhibited a taxidermied calf titled: Good morning! On its back were placed two identical photographs of a cute kitten. Quibbles, puns, and tricksterisms are characteristic of the “spirit” in the súm group, and Sveinsson’s calf can be read as a quip aimed at Robert Rauschenberg’s stuffed Angora goat, the now famous Monogram (1955–59), purchased by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1964. Róska was among the few women who exhibited with the male-oriented súm group (Fig. 9.4). She spent most of her adult life in Italy during the socalled Years of Lead, marked by social tensions and terrorism. Róska was politically engaged both in Iceland and in Italy, and her work takes its distance from her male counterparts through her direct political activism, genderoriented work, and her political use of photography and film. Her contribution to súm iii stirred the Icelandic art world because of its direct political content mirroring her participation in the riots that took place earlier that year in Reggio Emilia, Italy.48

9.4  Róska (Ragnhildur Óskarsdóttir), poster for her first solo show in Reykjavík, 1967. Offset print, 57.5 × 41 cm. Private collection.

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Several individual shows were organized in the Gallery súm and the progressive grassroots activities of the Reykjavík-Amsterdam connection gradually became institutionalized.The exhibition súm iv (1971) took place in Museum Fodor, Amsterdam, with works by a number of Icelandic artists; George Brecht, Pieter Holstein, and Robert Filliou were among the invited guests.49 Finally, the last important súm exhibition in Iceland, súm 1972, was

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transitional, as it formed a respectable part of the Reykjavík Art Festival and showcased the conceptual “photographic turn” in the art production of Sigur­ ður Guð­munds­son and Frið­finns­son. The invited guests were a cosmopolitan selection that comprised (among others): the Americans Dennis Op­pen­heim (1938–2011), Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939), and Vito Acconci (b. 1940); the Dutch conceptual artists Douwe Jan Bakker, Pieter Holstein, and Bas Jan Ader (1942–1975); the French Fluxus artists Ben Vautier and Robert Filliou; the Hungarian artist Gábor Attalai (b. 1934), with Dieter Roth and painter Dorothy Ian­none (b. 1933).50

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In and Out of Amsterdam

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As observed by art historian Christophe Cherix: “Amsterdam became one of the first European cities, along with Düsseldorf and Wiesbaden, to host, by 1963, Happenings and performances of experimental music, as well as Fluxus events. Moreover, numerous international artists groups, among them C oB rA , the Situationist International, the German Zero group (together with its Dutch offshoot, the Nul group) … found in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum fertile ground in which to develop new ideas about art and contemporary culture.”51 Amsterdam became “a hotbed for conceptual art” and an important host city for non-Dutch artists.52 However, “emerging Dutch artists … did not necessarily share this perception of a vibrant cultural atmosphere.”53 They discussed the necessary turn to art originating in the United States. “Dibbets [Jan Dibbets (b. 1941)], for exemple, regarded the capital as a provincial city.”54 Therefore Arjun Appadurai’s theory of “locality as primarily relational and contextual rather than as scalar or spatial”55 is a useful frame for discussing the networks and relationships among Dutch, Icelandic, and other foreign artists in Reyk­ javík and Amsterdam. Additionally, Rasheed Araeen’s notion of the artist as a postcolonial subject is particularly relevant in this context of the paradoxical situation of many foreign artists in Amsterdam.56 At least a hundred foreign artists are reported to have been working in Amsterdam in 1970.57 Experimental artist-run spaces, art publications, happenings, concerts, and so forth, encouraged an artistic culture created by advantageous socio-economic conditions, as government grants were available to support artists regardless of their nationality. The city thus became a melting pot of diverse artistic practices, many of them produced by non-WesternEuropean nationals. In 2009 an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976, told this story by bringing together works by “ten European and American artists active intermittently in Amsterdam during the 1960s and early 1970s to explore the city

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as a critical nexus for artistic exchange.”58 It followed the trajectories of the selected artists, who were all somehow or at some point connected to the wellknown experimental gallery Art & Project in Amsterdam.59 Unfortunately, this selection limited the story to the usual happy few, and most of the foreign artists living, working, and travelling in and out of Amsterdam were relegated to the background. Following Roth’s advice, Sigurður Guðmundsson moved to the Netherlands in 1963.60 After a stint in the open Academie ’63 in Haarlem, he moved between Reykjavík and Holland. Inspired by his experience with Galley súm in Reykjavík, Guðmundsson became active in the progressive gallery scene in Amsterdam where he co-founded an international art space named the InOut Center operating from 1972 to 1975 with Ulises Carrión (b. Mexico, 1941–1989), Raul Marroquin (b. Colombia, 1948), Kristján Guðmundsson, and Hreinn Friðfinnsson.61 Other pioneers, such as Michel Cárdenas (b. Colombia, 1934), co-organized with Guðmundsson video presentations and performances, and book production also became an important output. In-Out Center was one of the first cooperatives created by foreign artists in the Netherlands with its own gallery, attracting artists of diverse cultural backgrounds, some of whose work in some ways commented on Dutch art and society from their cultural perspective.62 Art historians Jan Van Adrichem and Tineke Reijnders have observed how progressive galleries such as the InOut Center fulfilled a very specific and important function of signalling new currents and presenting the new art to the public. Reijnders points out how In-Out Center represented new forms of art (performances, artists books, mail art, and so on) that the Stedelijk Museum did not present until years later. She argues that In-Out Center inspired the creation of De Appel in 1975, as well as Carrión’s multi-functional project Other Books and So (1975–78).63 In-Out Center as well as Other Books and So might have functioned as “inbetween space” as defined by Homi K. Bhabha; “through which the postcolonial artist must pass before he or she becomes a fully recognized historical subject.”64 This transfer from the local artist-run space into the “global” institution was achieved (for example) when the “Icelandic artists from Amsterdam,” the brothers Guðmundsson with Hreinn Friðfinnsson, exhibited in the Biennale de Paris (1973) and were later invited by Pontus Hultén to the Centre Pompidou in 1977 with their project Ça va? Ça va. Through these established connections the important signalling function of artist-run galleries continued to be performed simultaneously in Amsterdam and Reykjavík through such loosely connected small entities as the Gallery Suð­urgata 7 (1977–81),65 a small artist-run space in Reykjavík, while Gallery Lóa was an Icelandic initiative operating in Haarlem and Amsterdam (1976– 78). Founded by Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson (b. 1953), Kees Visser (b. 1948), and

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Rúrí (b. 1951), it became an important place of contact between Icelandic and foreign artists, some from the Eastern Bloc. Friðjónsson later continued hosting activities through his home gallery, Gangurinn (The Corridor), from 1980, in order to maintain the networks he had established while studying in the Netherlands.66 His domestically based art gallery contributed to the multiplication of exchanges and connections with artists abroad and still functions as a hosting location for foreign artists in Reykjavík.67 The Living Art Museum, an artist-run exhibition space and a contemporary art collection founded in 1978, became an important incubator of experimental actions. The museum’s collection, based on donations from artists, is still another manifestation of the grassroots activities that shaped the contemporary art scene in Reykjavík, which was characterized by an important international circulation of works. Still another consequence of all these transnational activities was that an important group of Icelandic artists and art students moved to Holland and stayed for longer or shorter periods. The art students enrolled principally at De Vrije Academie in Den Haag and Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Rúnólfsson confirms that in 1979 there were more than twenty Icelandic art students in the Netherlands and at that time both Sigurður Guðmundsson and Magnús Pálsson were teaching in Dutch academies.68

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Inside and Outside the Classroom

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Hannah Higgins has discussed the discursive function of Fluxus in art education, and in a very practical sense the Fluxus “toolbox” or the Fluxus experience (as Higgins calls it69) became a general matrix for art practice in the “New Art Department” of the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts created in 1975 as an experimental hub under the direction of Hildur Hákonardóttir (b. 1938) and Magnús Pálsson. The department was launched in response to pressure from students to create a new kind of artistic training, including new media. Many of Iceland’s most prominent and successful contemporary artists received their art education there. In reality the department functioned in close connection with certain artist-run spaces, such as the already mentioned Gallery Lóa and Gallery Suðurgata 7. It became a part of the network that hosted foreign artists in Reykjavík and became an experimental hub where a new generation of artists emerged. Roth, Filliou, Dick Higgins, Douwe Jan Bakker, Pieter Holstein, and many others provided art students with a range of tools and ideas that allowed them to break free of modernist orthodoxies and focus on their own vernacular experience as sources for theory and practice (despite the complaints of some

9.5  Robert Filliou with students from the College of Arts and Crafts, Reykjavík, 1978. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Living Art Museum, Reykjavík.

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that Roth’s idea of “teaching as non-teaching” was not helpful and other comments about Filliou being a “kind of God”70) (Fig. 9.5). Magnús Pálsson, the leading art teacher in the New Art Department from 1978 to 1981, met Filliou in Düsseldorf in 1969, where both were gravitating toward Roth, Beuys, and Daniel Spoerri. That year Filliou was preparing the publication of Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, in which he embraced his theories about “permanent creation and audience participation.”71 The book also contains interviews with Kaprow, Roth, Cage, and Beuys, each replying to Fillou’s questions about the relation between their art practice and teaching.72 With Kaprow, for example, he discusses the interrelation between happenings and environments and Kaprow’s thoughts about art outside the classroom.73 In Fluxus Experience, Higgins discusses Fluxus’s educational ideas in depth and makes the correlation between Filliou’s thought and the art philosophy of John Dewey (1859–1952), as discussed in his famous work Art as Experience.74 Similarly, in his introduction to Kaprow’s Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Jeff Kelley goes so far as to call Dewey “Allan Ka­prow’s intellectual father.”75 Kaprow’s and Filliou’s ideas about art as experience in the classroom

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were important sources for Pálsson, who later described them as “a great inspiration” for his further development not only as a teacher but also as an artist.76 The implications of the educational network promulgated by Robert Filliou and his disciple Magnús Pálsson were crucial. Several Icelandic artist have reported that Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts was used as a sort of manual among art students at the New Art Department at the College of Arts and Crafts in Reykjavík when Filliou was teaching in 1978, and became as popular a reading as Spoerri’s An Anecdoted Topography of Chance.77 Dick Higgins’s definition of intermedia78 and its overlapping with Fluxus’s experiential approach was likewise employed as a pedagogical model in the Iceland Academy of the Arts founded in 1998, and was put in practice by new generations of artists. Pálsson developed Filliou’s ideas inspired by Kaprow (and Dewey) about involvement and sharing through friendship into his concept about the collective production as a method of art-making. Doing things together and creating collective artworks became a paradigm and a long-lasting method of developing art projects and actions among the young generation of artists in the mid-1970s and later. Between 1981 and 1989 Pálsson organized four international workshops (Mob Shops/The Summer Mobile Workshop) inviting Fil­liou and Philip Corner (b. 1933) as instructors. Filliou’s pedagogical thought can be grasped directly through his work Poïpoïdrome, which he constructed with Joa­ chim Pfeufer (b. 1935) and performed with art students in Gallery Suð­ur­gata 7 in 1978. “Poï” is the first syllable of the verb poiein (Greek), which means “to make or create.”79 The work is a proto-relational art piece, a model of participatory art with a strong pedagogical component – a space open for public engagement through texts and various forms of visual information. It has a fixed structure (twenty-four square metres) divided into four spaces, each devoted to a particular theme. It is open to everyone and allows pedagogical, emotional, and physical experiences through interactive public practice.80 The work is a frame, where convivial relations and spectator participation would take place. It was rebuilt in the Living Art Museum in 2007, for the show Presque Rien, re-enacted by French and Icelandic artists and art students who explored Filliou’s idea of “permanent creation,” this time, however, framed by the notion of “relational aesthetics” rather than by Filliou’s utopia of expanding the limits of art.81 Writing Art History from the Inside and the Outside

In this chapter I have tried to put into question the various ways in which contemporary art in Iceland has been (and is being) historicized. Even though considerable institutional effort has been invested over the last decade to foster art

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historical narratives about Icelandic artists and about art in Iceland, and while a certain gap has been filled from the inside, Icelandic artists (even those who have lived and worked in the centre) remain marginalized if not excluded from the Western European narrative of contemporary art. Rarely have Icelandic artists been considered members of the foreign diaspora in Amsterdam, nor have they been acknowledged as active participants in the progressive European gallery scene and the networks of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. Events and actions made by internationally known artists such as Roth and Filliou, which took place in Iceland, have also been excluded. This absence and silence raises questions about how artists and artworks are selected and contextualized for inclusion within the “master narrative.” What criteria are involved in the choice of artistic activities that merit inclusion in such narratives? What links are established between specific events and between the art produced and the networks? Roth’s Wind-Harp is never mentioned as an important manifestation of kinetic or sound art, even though it can be seen as a significant translation or even as a simultaneous event mirroring the historicized Bewogen Beweging exhibition. The construction of the Wind-Harp is thus rendered historiographically invisible primarily because it took place outside “recognized” art centres and is therefore excluded, as are so many other avant-garde events that took place in Iceland from the late 1960s into the 1980s. Art histories of the near-contemporary period – the 1960s and after – are histories of networks and cities, individual artists, travelling exhibitions, grassroots activities, and art education. Institutional art-historical surveys such as the exhibition In & Out of Amsterdam tend to turn manifold situations into genealogic narratives and remain focused on a specific canon of artists without further investigation into the complexities of artists’ networks, diasporas, and related educational projects. However, the understanding of the post-1960s art worlds is now undergoing a shift, mostly since the opening of borders and archives in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. New national art histories are being written, motivated by dissatisfaction with existing narratives and the recognition of a lack of information rather than from the desire to adopt a nationalistic or essentialist approach to art and/or to art history writing.82 However, one component of this discourse is specifically gendered; that is, the taken-for-granted masculinity of those artists who enter into art history, even contemporary narratives. Within Iceland’s cultural scene, one must acknowledge the omnipresence of masculine role models in and for the construction of contemporary artistic identity, a situation that has determined the terms in which contemporary art history has been written. Roth, Filliou, and Sigurður Guðmundsson have not only been set apart as role models for artists and art students, but their practices, writings and views about art and the art world have likewise became dominant paradigms for

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contemporary art and contemporary art practice in Iceland as it searches for a cultural, artistic identity. All the above-mentioned artists incarnate the role of the passeur, which historically is surrounded by an archetypal primitive – and masculine – aura. This particular – and gendered – notion of role models seems not only to have dominated the contemporary art scene but also to be sustained historiographically by the metaphor of the passeur, which was especially powerful through the network of exchanges represented by those artists associated with Fluxus, and who came to Iceland as mentors and teachers. This discussion sheds some light on the important connection between nomadic identity, migrating lifestyle, and the development of contemporary art in peripheral capitals such as Reykjavík. It also illustrates the current paradox that, while global inclusivity tends to draw different art categories and different geographical locations into a unified narrative, artists working on the peripheries of the so-called global art world are nevertheless excluded from the account, as well as from contemporary art journals, biennales, and documentas. The transnational educational role of Fluxus highlights the way in which pedagogical experiments, developed collectively, were applied in a variety of ways depending on local particularities. Investigating these other histories (often repressed or silenced) and writing different and gender-based narratives enables us to examine the discontinuities of historical discourse and consider the possibilities for drawing new maps of cultural production. This research remains as urgent as ever, as the dominant art historical narratives continue to exclude these presumably “marginal” artistic phenomena in the present, just as they did in the past.

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Hitching a Ride American Know-How in the Engineering of Canadian Photographic Institutions M artha L a ng f o r d

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he institutionalization of Canadian photography – its recognition as an art form and academic field – began in the late 1960s and was considerably advanced over the next decade. Milestones include the foundation of photographic collections at the National Gallery of Canada (ngc ), the Edmonton Art Gallery (now Art Gallery of Alberta), and the Banff Centre. Mainstream projects came from museums not yet prepared to collect photography but cognizant of its growing significance; for example, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s touring exhibition Exposure.1 Artist-run centres sprang up in major urban centres such as Toronto and Montreal; artist-organized exhibitions such as Vancouver’s Photo Show (1969) and Montreal’s Camerart (1974) introduced approaches that would be firmly identified with those cities2 (Fig. 10.1). Magazines were founded, including image nation and Photo Communiqué, and Canadian Art, rebranded as artscanada, began grappling with photography. Universities, art colleges, and polytechnic institutes liberated photography from its commercial and industrial curriculum, training students for artistic, curatorial, and critical practices; Concordia University, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and Ryerson Polytechnical Institute effected these changes. A few private galleries specializing in photography opened at that time: Nova Gallery (1976–81) in Vancouver and Jane Corkin Gallery (1978–) in Toronto.3 Canadian cultural historians will recognize this as a partial list that omits much of what was going on in French Canada, as well as the evolutions of longstanding operations such as the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada (spd/nfb ) and the National Archives (now Library and Archives Canada), whose criteria for collection and circulation were changing to reflect contemporary photographic trends. I plead “guilty with an explanation”: this list is shot through with American influence, but it is also a fair

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10.1  Cover of Camerart. Montreal: Galerie Optica, 1974. Cover reproduction: Suzy Lake, A Genuine Simulation of …, 1973–74. Optica fonds p 056. With permission of Optica Gallery. Courtesy of Concordia University

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representation of the efflorescence of photographic activity in Canada after 1967. Indeed, so important was the American factor that only the rarest photographic institution, deeply rooted in community, was firewalled against it – here I am thinking of The Photographers Gallery in Saskatoon.4 At the same time, each of the photographic initiatives that I have listed contributed to and benefited from internal drives to modern nation-building, “progressive ideas” sustained by a range of political philosophies and agendas. International conflicts, notably the Cold War and decolonization, sometimes expressed in intergenerational struggles – the counterculture – were motive forces in Canada as elsewhere. Desires for global connectivity and utopic universality accelerated the ascent of photography as a tool of art, persuasion, and intercultural communication. For some, photography encapsulated what American anthropologist Edward T. Hall had called “the silent language,” nonverbal transcultural communication; this notion of visual literacy – photography as Esperanto – was ripe for the taking by Canada’s photographic champions.5 Across Canada this was indeed a time of cultural championship. Buoyancy created by the centennial celebrations of 1967 was carried forward by the federal government in programs designed to maintain confidence in Canada as a youthful nation of bottomless resources and creative promise.6 Such confidence flew in the face of internal debates: the Quiet Revolution, which had

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moved the province of Quebec from religious repression and economic exploitation toward secularization and sovereignty – toward its own nationalist movement – and the increasing militancy of Canadian Indigenous populations seeking enforcement of treaty rights and protection of traditional lands – toward the status of First Peoples, Métis, and Inuit. Against this disquietude, the Canadian government and some of the provinces launched boosterish programs of cultural identity aimed primarily, though not exclusively, at settlercolonial culture under the banner of multiculturalism. These governments were waging campaigns on two fronts: against the splitting of the country by Quebec nationalism; against the splitting of the world into East and West by Cold War antagonists.7 The government sought to calm restive populations and bring radical youth on side through direct support to community initiatives and cultural entrepreneurship. Activist artists formed cooperatives and collectives to qualify for grants from the Secretary of State and the Canada Council, thereby participating, however cynically, in a statist culture. In terms of institutionalization, this was an era of experiment and improvisation, much of it inspired by activities elsewhere, yet rationalized and even exulted as grassroots Canadian expression – a bulwark against United States cultural imperialism, and a Canadian bildungsroman. A peculiarity of the Canadian story is the dramatic increase in immigration from the United States during the so-called Vietnam War, an influx that began in 1965 and peaked dramatically after the American invasion of Cambodia. Estimates vary, most hovering at around sixty thousand men and women who actively resisted the war, whether by refusing the call, deserting, or accompanying a loved one.8 This migration was assisted by political and religious activists on both sides of the border, Canadian organizations sometimes being led by American exiles who had both experience and drive. Some of these activists were themselves resisters, while others invulnerable to the draft had chosen to leave the United States, whether to safeguard their children or to signal their disgust with US-led foreign wars.9 The impact of this population on Canadian culture and countercultural movements such as anti-militarism, feminism, and environmentalism is generally acknowledged, sometimes cited as a temporary reversal of the “brain drain” that normally flows from Canada into the United States.10 Photography and its institutionalization were no exception; ironically, given the circumstances, Canadian photographic culture in the post-centennial years might be considered a primary example of US cultural colonization, given the prominence of the actors and their enduring influence. This chapter is not simply about naming names, but if it were, the list of American photographers and writers who came to Canada would be very long, and the ancillary list of Canadian photographers, curators, critics, and students who were inspired by American photography as it was presented by

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these actors would be longer still. The subject here is “transnational transfer,” sometimes referred to as “exchange history,” and the intriguing terms of the cultural exchange that took place on Canadian soil in those years.

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Transnational history is, by definition, the representation of a two-way street. US history contains many episodes that would not qualify. Indeed, as Australian historiographer and Americanist Ian Tyrrell has written: “For periods where the United States’ economic or political influence has been a dominant one, American experience may subsume global experience.”11 At this pivotal moment of cultural exchange, the influence of the United States was riven. On one hand, its photographic culture was highly influential, its visionary institutions much admired. On the other, the moral authority of the nation-state was in tatters; its foreign aggression and internal unrest were the cornerstones of expatriate communities in Canada and elsewhere. Tyrrell suggests that, “Much work needs to be done on working out what ‘American space’ might have constituted in the past, through studies of expatriate communities.”12 While that project has already benefited from considerable effort by David S. Churchill, John Hagan, and others, this chapter emphasizes cultural practices and institutions, reconstituting the American space of Canadian photography through a transnational lens. The phenomenon that interests me is both social and political, specifically the movement to create institutions that would advance the cause of Canadian photography – the medium bounded and conceptualized in a way that put radicalism at the service of nation-building, and vice-versa. Bricks and mortar were involved, but also histories. Writing in 1979, Lorne Falk, former director of The Photographers Gallery in Saskatoon, then acting director of the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Alberta, worried that the “apparent acceptance of the medium as a visual art may be short-lived.” These were needless worries, as we now know, but as Falk took stock of the “boom in photography,” he was determined to make the point that the last decade’s gains should be credited to a growing awareness of American photographic tradition, imported by US emigrants to Canada and Canadian graduates of American schools, such as the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. These pioneers had laid the foundation for a photographic community in Canada and since their influence had begun to be felt, “it should be realized that an identifiable history of [photography as a visual art] in Canada really begins with the photographs that have been made in the last two decades.” He called for historians and curators to pay attention to contemporary Canadian photography, that they might “have the satisfaction of documenting the emergence of a Canadian photographic tradition.” The rest of

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Falk’s article sees mediocrity in almost every facet of Canadian photographic activity, especially its support systems, despite some good-faith efforts. His observations of an acute dilemma are confirmed by presentations, some good, some bad, at a recent conference on photography, “Perspectives” (Canadian Perspectives – A Conference on Photography in Canada, 1979), organized by the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto.13 This conference, which introduced the newly spawned Photo Communiqué – the magazine in which Falk published these thoughts, is widely acknowledged as a watershed in Canadian photographic studies. I cite this article to make the point that my reading of American influence on the institutionalization of Canadian photography is not without precedent; nor is it quite as simple as Falk’s premature appraisal would lead us to believe. During his time at The Photographers Gallery, Falk had witnessed what a grassroots co-operative structure could achieve in terms of regional development and national recognition; he was perhaps too close to that experiment to appreciate its uniqueness and rootedness in the province’s socialist formations. Was Falk in the thrall of an American passeur, Hubert Hohn (b. 1944), who had left his mark on the Edmonton Art Gallery (eag ) and was then beginning his tenure as director of photography at Banff?14 Perhaps, for Hohn was not just anyone; before coming to Canada, he had studied and worked with Ansel Adams (1902–1984) and Minor White (1905–1976); he had touched their mantles, and quite possibly handled their machines. His Prairie landscapes – 8 × 10 view-camera work – carried their visions northward, especially Adams’s, and leaving the works “untitled” lent them an effect of terra nullius (Fig. 10.2). Hohn taught photography in an extension course at the University of Alberta. Orest Semchishen (b. 1932), a native of Muldare, Alberta, absorbed Hohn’s models, as well as the example of American documentary photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975), as he developed his purist approach to vernacular religious architecture on the Prairies.15 Hohn and eag director Terry Fenton co-curated the eag’s first photography exhibition as part of Summer ’74 at the Edmonton Art Gallery16 (Fig. 10.3). The degree of “American” influence on the foundation and development of Canadian photographic studies was and is still difficult to estimate, though the mid-twentieth-century leadership of US-born actors in all aspects of the field is impossible to deny. It has always been the “elephant in the room,” large and studiously ignored in most accounts of Canadian photographic history. New approaches to the writing of national art histories in general and photographic histories in particular allow me to broach the topic, and in this chapter I hope to accomplish some foundational work, primarily by shifting attention from individual artistic or curatorial practices to the cultural communities, social spaces, and embryonic networks, or circles, that subtended

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10.2  Hubert Hohn, Untitled, 1973. Gelatin silver print, 19.5 × 24.5 cm. Courtesy of Hubert Hohn and the National Gallery of Canada.

10.3  Karen Wilkin, ed., Summer ’74 at the Edmonton Art Gallery. Exhibition catalogue. Edmonton Art Gallery, 1974. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Alberta.

them. These sorts of discussions were taking place at the time and they remain fruitful. To say that “the Americans were here” is one thing, but the influx occurred under particular circumstances that favoured some applicants – those who could “pass,” those who could “contribute” – over others. The “Vietnam War” US immigrants to Canada were numerous and far from uniform in their political beliefs and social attitudes, and in a period of Canadian opportunity for certain classes of immigrants, they were not the only Americans to come. Nor, it should be added, did they all intend to stay; some, rather, treated their time in Canada as a temporary exile – a position from which to heal their sick country. And then there were the Canadians who moved back and forth across the border, creating a culture that in the hindsight of 1991, artist and writer Bill Jones (b. 1946) ruefully called “Free Trade.” Jones himself was a war resister who had returned to the United States “for the love of a Canadian … who sought access to an international dialogue in the States.”17 The human factor is obviously important – people lived these lives – but here again, I am primarily interested in institutional actors, human and non-human, at this critical moment of Canadian photographic culture. An Imagined Community?

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Foreign-born photographers were part of the post–Second World War transformation of Canadian society, which admitted both political refugees and, in the economic boom of the 1960s, technical and professional workers who wove themselves into corporate and governmental activities as photojournalists and industrial photographers, while pursuing their creative projects.18 Histories of Canadian photography, such as there are, focus on individual contributions within photographic traditions and international, mainly Western, movements, while attempting to describe a growing sense of ambition, even militancy, for the medium – a desire to stake its claim on the Canadian imagination. Fuelled by the usual admixture of humanist values and human ambition, this was the motor of a “national photographic community,” an aspirational phrase much utilized at the time and still today.19 Benedict Anderson’s crystalline concept of the nation as an “imagined community” might seem apposite here, and given his attention to print culture as an instrument of nation-building, Canadian photography as deployed by publishers and government agencies might have provided Anderson with an interesting case study.20 It did not, though others have connected the dots. In The Official Picture, a history of spd/nfb from 1941 to 1971, Carol Payne cannot neglect Anderson’s influential concept, but in the Canadian multicultural context she submits it to the critique mounted by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha to bring out the inadequate treatment of “cultural difference” within

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the government photographic agency’s national frame.21 Cultural difference as sensed by individuals (photographers, subjects, and viewers) and differences between institutional cultures (established and nascent) are equally important to the phenomenon being excavated here – they were, in some minds, analogous. Photographers frequently described their medium as marginalized, photographers constituting a subaltern population of visual artists. Anderson himself acknowledges an “anthropological spirit” behind his politicalphilosophical concept.22 We too must turn to the social sciences to draw out the characteristics of this “national photographic community” as it was forming both individual and collective imaginations. In 1976 an American behavioural scientist, Charles Kadushin, transposed a current definition of “network” – “a set of social objects onto which is mapped a set of relationship or ‘flows’ not necessarily in a 1:1 fashion” – onto cultural production. Network theory, a sub-set of ideas “flowing” from social interactionism, was then coming on strong. Kadushin’s observations must be seen as historically seated, though no less valuable as snapshots of social relations within the cultural formations of his day. His particular focus is on “emergent networks,” which are “less visible than formally instituted networks”: “interstitial,” meaning that they link different types of social units, and macro, as opposed to micro phenomena.23 This last distinction is important, emphasizing relations that are not individual but societal in scope.24 Kadushin explains emergent networks of cultural production as circles that support collective ideas and aspirations but lack what we now call “infrastructure”: defined boundaries; systems of interaction, leadership and visible structure; and autonomy. He identifies three types of circles: intellectual, scientific, and movement. Porous borders must indeed be constituted as a factor, for photography participated in all three circles, spilling into visibility through its movement circles in which, as Kadushin explains, “it is the sense of embattlement that leads to common bonding.”25 In terms of photographic culture in the 1970s, truer words were never spoken. The struggle to position photography as a legitimate art form, commanding respect and institutional support, created a sense of common purpose for practitioners of very different stripes: photojournalists, documentary photographers, and all manner of visual artists, from landscapists to conceptualists. People in positions of considerable authority felt like petitioners within their institutions; they scrapped with the outside world; they bemoaned the neglect of the medium. Photography completed its emergent-network phase when its social actors took aim at making their circles visible and rationalized this objective in terms of social values such as public education, and political ideals such as national pride. The emergence of a photographic network must be understood as related and coincident, but initially distinct from the contemporaneous redistribution

of power within the visual arts in Canada. Those broader cultural formations have been justly described by artist and curator AA Bronson (b. 1946) as being dominated by one group of social actors: artists. In his invaluable compendium From Sea to Shining Sea, Bronson describes a national network of artistinitiated institutional activity characterized by “regional differences and individual differences.”26 He leaves out media differences, but this correction could only come from hindsight.27 Photographic artists’ initiatives are part of Bronson’s history, but with few exceptions photography constituted its own network within the network, forging local, regional, and national alliances with both private and public interests, some of which were not cultural, but social and political.28 Pierre Bourdieu’s somewhat deflating notion of photography as a “middle-brow art” cannot be neglected either, as photographic champions appealed to the popularity of the medium, even as they cringed at commercial and vernacular expression.29 Formations of Resistance

American Know-How and Canadian Photographic Institutions

A Vietnam-era American emigrant to Canada, sociologist John Hagan, has written the standard account of war-resister society in Canada, with a special focus on Toronto’s so-called American Ghetto, which was a cluster of advocacy and counselling offices, co-operative businesses, and the infamous Rochdale College high-rise residence, an experiment in open education on the edge of the University of Toronto. Baldwin Street was the “main street” of this new immigrant community, a meeting place for new arrivals and focal point for social and political resistance activities, including “fund-raising rock concerts, street demonstrations, festivals, and celebrations.”30 Hagan draws on a remarkable set of interviews commissioned in 1978 by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario and conducted by members of the original community, who thereby self-identify as a distinct cultural group.31 These interviews map what sociologist Eviatar Zeruvavel calls a “sociomental topography” – stories rooted into place by a community’s collective memory, by individual members’ recollections of their common past.32 Reading them for the photographic plot also illuminates the fissures: the successes and failures of common initiatives, such as the Baldwin Street Gallery of Photography (Fig. 10.4), opened in May 1969 by Laura Jones (b. 1948) and John F. Phillips (1945–2010), and the disintegrating effect of the 1977 Carter amnesty, which induced another leading figure, photographer and editor Fletcher Starbuck (1945–2008), to return home. Both Jones and Starbuck were featured in English-Canada’s visual art magazine of record, artscanada, which in the early 1970s paid very little attention to photography unless produced by established multi-media artists such as Roy Kiyooka (1926–1994) and Michael Snow (b. 1928), or taken up by one of the editors.33

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10.4  John Phillips, Laura Jones, and Morgan Jones Phillips standing on the porch of the Baldwin Street Gallery of Photography, with friends Penny Dixon and Karen Lavut, on Baldwin Street in Toronto, 1973. Photographer unknown. Courtesy: Baldwin

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Rare outbreaks of straight photography in the pages of artscanada represent not just an opening to the medium, but its admission in two diametrically opposed forms (and circles): the photographic document (scientific circle) and the photographic work of art (intellectual circle). Before coming to Canada, Jones had begun taking pictures with Phillips in 1967, recording both the peace movement and her personal life in a very low-key style. Her work continued on Baldwin Street where she and her children were part of tight-knit neighbourhood; they wandered in and out of each other’s houses, they nursed each other’s babies. Baldwin Street’s intimacy and spaces of sociability were recorded by Jones in a series of portraits of nude pregnant women acquired for the Canadian collection of the spd/nfb to be featured in the International Women’s Year exhibition of 1975: Pregnancies and Birth, Baldwin Street, Toronto, Ontario, June–August 1973.34 The 1978 interview captures her sense of belonging, benefitting, and contributing: the couple joined the federally funded Company of Young Canadians (1966–77) within

10.5  Laura Jones, Rita’s Mom in her favourite spot, c. 1972. From image nation 11. Photographs By Women About Women. Edited by the Women’s Photo Co-op, 23 Baldwin Street, Toronto, Ontario: June Greenberg, Pamela Harris, Judith Holman, Laura Jones, Lynn Murray, Liz Maunsell, Linda Rosenbaum, and Lisa Steele, 1972. Courtesy of Laura Jones and Coach House Press.

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six weeks of arriving in Canada; their community day care centre, Snowflake, was funded by a Local Initiatives Grant (lip ); Jones had begun a major project of recovering the work of Canadian women photographers, many of them settlers like herself.35 Jones had put down roots in Canada, but assimilation, which means adopting the ways of another culture, was not what was going on. Instead, the host culture was to be transformed. Phillips and Jones had strong opinions about photography, which they advanced in his words and her photographs in an article published by artscanada in 1971. This manifesto aimed to put photography in the hands of the people: “the vicarious experience of art in our society is overemphasized.”36 As a candid portraitist and a social documentarian, Jones produced black and white photographs of people in her environs. Documentary photography should not be created by “experts,” but by “the people already in those situations.”37 A photograph such as Rita’s Mom in her favourite spot, c. 1972, disturbs neither sitter nor viewer. Photography is the means to acknowledge the existence of a woman who compacted her identity into a few words that Jones weaves into the Baldwin Street story (Fig. 10.5).38 At

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the same time, as Phillips explains to the readers of artscanada, he and Jones are educating their audience by exposing them to publications, most from the United States, as well as to “serious contemporary Canadian photographers, who have very few other outlets … a frustrated nation of photographers.” This population was putting pressure on the Baldwin Street Gallery to give them exposure. Two and a half years after opening their gallery, Jones and Phillips felt completely overwhelmed by “the needs of a nation of photographers,” and called for the creation of “a well-financed national museum-gallery devoted to the preservation, exhibition and publication of historical and contemporary Canadian photography, something like the Eastman House in Rochester, New York.”39 While Baldwin Street Gallery was a pioneering space, Jones’s informal portraits of her neighbours sitting on their front steps broke no aesthetic or technical ground, but rather used photography plainly and democratically, as a tool to forge community around her home and workplace. Her role as an equal partner in the gallery – a feminist in what Phillips bluntly describes as a chauvinist culture – cannot be neglected.40 By contrast, draft resister Fletch­er Starbuck was an edgy flâneur, and as his 1978 interview makes clear, an American city boy who entered Canada on the west coast, but left the “village” of Vancouver to ramble across Canada, working seasonal and service jobs, until eventually he settled with his wife and child in Toronto.41 There he found a job at Coach House, an alternative press working in the “visceral/ verbal language” that emerged in hybrid forms of poetry and visual art at the time.42 David Rosenberg, a poet and literary scholar who worked at the press “after the Vietnam draft crashed in,” challenges the myth that Coach House was “a Canadian cottage industry.” Its founder, Stan Bevington, hailed from Alberta, but the publishing house he headed had a list that included American poets and artists. “Coach House was not a consciously Canadian place,” explains Rosenberg; it was “serious about creating an artistic community.”43 Starbuck must have found this atmosphere congenial, though he was ultimately disappointed. As founding co-editor of image nation, “a magazine dealing with photographic ideas,” with fellow expatriate Norman Bringsjord (b. 1946), he became sole editor after Bringsjord returned to the United States, but stayed at the helm for only two more issues (Fig. 10.6).44 Coach House sought funding from the Canada Council, meaning that image nation was restricted to Canadian content. Starbuck found national boundaries intolerably limiting, and left the magazine for that reason. image nation aside, what is striking about Starbuck is the impression he left on the Canadian photographic landscape. In interview, he is modest, even offhand, about attention and support garnered in the form of exhibitions,

publications, and grants. The work was unquestionably powerful, but it was also a very small body of work: street photography (people, objects, buildings, store fronts, and windows displays); theatrically staged human figures, including female nudes and more lyrical urban landscapes, sometimes montaged. That said, his work garnered a great deal of attention. In August 1970, when artscanada published four works from “A Photography Show at Nightingale Galleries, June–July 1970” – a fourteen-man (plus Coach House) show – Starbuck’s black and white photograph of the same year was featured, along with a colour photograph by Bringsjord, a tiny reproduction of a multi-media work by Gary Greenwood (b. 1946), and an image by Phil Bergerson (b. 1947) on the opposite page45 (Fig. 10.7). It is worth noting in passing that Nightingale

10.6  Fletcher Starbuck, ed., image nation 9 (n.d.). Cover photograph by John Taylor, untitled, 1972. Courtesy of John Taylor and Coach House Press.

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10.7  “A Photography Show at Nightingale Galleries. June–July 1970,” artscanada, August 1970. Courtesy of Phil Bergerson, Norman Bringsjord, Gary Greenwood, and the

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Gallery had been founded in Toronto in 1968 by another American expatriate, Chris Youngs. It would go through some changes before setting into its enduring identity as A Space.46 Starbuck’s work was visually arresting, whatever genre he tackled, and its lineage was clear; the untitled image reproduced here could be explained as the fusion of two American photographers’ signature styles: from Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) the optical fragmentation, and from Garry Winogrand (1928– 1984) a street theatre of cruelty (Fig. 10.8). He himself accurately described the early phases of his work as “aggressive … almost a sort of viciousness … Using the camera as a kind of weapon … a release for all this pent up frustration that I was feeling myself.” In 1974 four of this tenor were included in artscanada’s “inquiry into the aesthetics of photography.”47 Starbuck was one of only eight photographers featured in the Canadian portfolio.48 Canadians form a distinct minority in this special issue, which was edited by Time Canada art critic Geoffrey James (b. 1942).

James himself was in Canada because of the US Selective Service. Born in Wales, he had emigrated to the United States where he became interested in photography; he took a job in Canada when he realized that he was eligible for the draft.49 James came with considerable intellectual baggage, which his table of contents reveals. The special issue is dominated by American and European photography and authority; Princeton University’s Peter C. Bunnell evaluates the collection of the National Gallery; William Stott, author of Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1974) contributes an essay on Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Jennifer Harper’s short article on small-town Ontario studio photographer Duncan Donovan (1857–1933) is the only overtly Canadian piece of research, though as I am arguing here, James’s editorial work and James Borcoman’s essay, “Purism versus Pictorialism: The 135 Years War” cannot be discounted, as they accurately reflect the slavish devotion to European and American photography that was endemic in those times. As James contextualizes the Canadian portfolio, his reference points are almost exclusively American. His bibliography includes eighteen titles on individual photographers: not a single Canadian. He inscribes Starbuck in the late modernist American style that US photographer and educator Nathan Lyons

10.8  Fletcher Starbuck. Untitled, n.d. From Eldon Garnet, ed., Im(pulse) 4, 1 (1975). Courtesy of Eldon Garnet and the Fletcher Starbuck Estate.

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labelled “Social Landscape.” I will return to Lyons below, but to finish with Starbuck, we must first take account of a special issue of Im(pulse), in which editor Eldon Garnet (b. 1946) dramatically turned the magazine from poetry to visual art. Starbuck was the instrument of this coup: Volume 4, 1 (1975)50 focused exclusively on his photography, with the only text, a declamatory statement in 36 pt. type: “I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck. The shot from the wheel, described above, is from that publication. As Garnet later recalled, “The literary readership hated it,” and broadcast their distaste on the radio.51 By 1977 Starbuck was again featured in artscanada, this time in a review article by US-born composer and art critic Peter Perrin that was occasioned by an exhibition of thirty-four prints at Yarlow-Salzman Gallery.52 Remembered for its early attention to contemporary photography, Yarlow-Salzman was founded by Loretta Yarlow in 1974, shortly after she moved from Boston to Toronto. Taking issue with James’s classification of Starbuck’s production, Perrin describes its many facets and effects in scrupulous detail, concluding that “Starbuck is without doubt one of the very best original photographers in Canada.”53 The very next year, Starbuck was interviewed surrounded by packing boxes; he was going home because, “I respond to a quality of energy or vitality more strongly in the States.”54 One could argue that he had never been without it, at least not in Toronto, and another curious aspect of this story is that after his return to the United States, Fletcher Starbuck became a potter. Unlike Jones and Phillips, in Starbuck’s mind, the personal was not political. Though he had resisted the draft, he characterized himself as uninvolved in politics: “I never have, I doubt if I ever will … I’m a non-participant when it comes to political things.”55 In her 1978 interview, Jones spoke freely about her exodus from the United States. In the 1971 artscanada article, Phillips never mentioned it. These histories echo the formations of exilic consciousness and the resister movement, which were far from monolithic as recent scholarship on the Vietnam-era migration shows. Hagan’s account has been challenged, starting with his propagation of a Liberal and liberalist image of Canada – its warm embrace of the war resister. This idea was based on a widely repeated anti-militarist statement attributed to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau; research by Joseph Jones proves it to be a misleading compilation.56 Exploding the myth of Canada as a haven for all resisters, whether draftdodgers or deserters, sheds a stronger light on the actors and organizations, how they positioned themselves in relation to the United States and Canada, and how they conducted their business. Jessica Squires’s meticulous Building Sanctuary: The Movement to Support Vietnam War Resisters in Canada, 1965– 73 revisits the history in terms of political philosophy; tensions between adaptation and assimilation; degrees of authority and agency attached to different identities, such as exile, refugee, expatriate, and immigrant; and different

approaches to nation-building, including territorial and cultural sovereignty as both symbolized by and enforced at the border. David Churchill’s “An Ambiguous Welcome” surveys the uncertainties of Canadian officials, teetering between their ambitious nation’s desire for skilled and easily assimilated immigrants and the Cold War–era rise of the security state.57 His later study of American expatriates in Toronto (1965–77) argues that their “language, education, and familiarity with North American mass culture” allowed them “to enter, participate in, and even generate ‘Canadian’ modernity – at least in its alternative manifestations.” They could pass, in other words, if they were middle-class, educated, and white, and they could lead if they transferred their experience of self-reinvention to other types of work. One of the Toronto-based supporting organizations, the Student Union for Peace Action (supa ), “undertook numerous initiatives, based on the community-organizing model of participatory democracy advocated by the US-based Students for a Democratic Society (sds ).” The successor organization, the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme (tadp ), was led by an expatriate of the McCarthy era, Bill Spira, a strong exponent of assimilation: “Spira encouraged political activism and called on politically committed Americans to channel their energies toward Canadian causes … [They should] embrace the emerging movement of Canadian nationalism, precisely because it was an anti-imperialist movement.”58 This was a nationalism of the Left, to be sure, which was the eye of the needle through which some photographic circles, scientific and intellectual, tried to thread their activities. Import-Export American Know-How and Canadian Photographic Institutions

Participants in anti-war resistance were not the only US citizens who came to Canada during this period, for Canadian immigration laws were changed in the late 1960s, from a system that discriminated against certain ethnic and racial groups, to what appeared at least a more equitable process of evaluation, the “point system” introduced in 1967.59 Universities and colleges were able to recruit with impunity in the United States and Europe, a window that began to close in the mid-1970s but whose effects had already been felt in the creation of new programs in fine arts and the humanities and the reorientation of others. A famous example is the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, whose photography curriculum shifted from technical training to artistic practice in a few short years. This departmental change was part of a radical reconstruction of the college, whose principal architect was Garry Neill Kennedy (b. 1935), president from 1967 to 1990. There are numerous accounts of nscad ’s metamorphosis, not all positive. Kennedy’s first-person narration is revelatory, as he remembers his former job at Northland College in Wisconsin, and recalls his evaluation of nscad ’s

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10.9  Alvin Comiter. Untitled, n.d. From his Jokes. Artist’s book, 1977. Courtesy of Alvin Comiter.

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situation as he took up his post. “I was so involved with the College in my early years in Halifax that I don’t really have a clear memory of the city at the time.” Himself Canadian, he was nevertheless conditioned by American “optimism” as it formed in opposition and grief: anti-war protests, race riots, and collective response to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King: “the message of a profoundly troubled society immediately to our south arrived here through the media and, more directly, from US expatriates, including those seeking refuge from the draft.” As Kennedy describes the student movement and its demands for relevant education, he borrows their vocabulary, including the imputation that some universities were “supporting the ‘military-industrial complex’ through their research and financial investment.”60 Against the rigidity of metropolitan institutions, the lack of infrastructure in Nova Scotia allowed the college to cut its own path. The trailblazers, however, were mostly male artist-teachers, recruited from American art schools that were refreshing their programs or making themselves up in response to current movements, such as conceptual art and performance. The transformation of photography at nscad was accomplished by immersing all

first-year students in a foundation year that exposed them to international trends in contemporary art and theory, as well as a number of strategic hires. In photography, the new broom was Alvin Comiter (b. 1948), who came to the college in 1974 from CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) – his presence redefined the department, whose curriculum had been technical and design-oriented. Suddenly photographic content could be a found object or a language game (Fig. 10.9). Another CalArts import was painter Eric Fischl (b. 1948), whose international career would be launched through group exhibitions, such as Canadian Canvas, funded by Time Canada, and an exhibition of promising Canadian painters organized by Jean-Christophe Ammann for the Kunsthalle in Basel. As Fischl blurts out in his memoir Bad Boy, “Didn’t anyone realize I was American?”61 nscad students, of which I was one, were discouraged from thinking along such parochial lines. There is much more to be said about Canadian photography’s intellectual circles, for even as US citizens and some expatriates, Canadian and other, were fleeing the United States, a number of Canadians who wanted to study photographic history and practice were crossing the border to do so. Important photographic collections existed in the States, and academic programs were beginning to be established. In 1969 the Visual Studies Workshop (vsw ) in Rochester, New York, inaugurated a Master of Fine Arts, with degrees granted by the State University of New York at Buffalo. Nathan Lyons was the driving force behind this and countless other initiatives that implanted photographic education across the United States and Canada.62 The first crop of students studied the canonical History of Photography, 1839 to the Present (1948) in the presence of its author, Beaumont Newhall, director of the Eastman House in Rochester (later the International Museum of Photography) from 1958 to 1971. As photographer Tom Gibson (b. 1930), founder of Concordia University’s photography program, reflected on his cohort: “The thing about the Workshop is that it brought people together, people who have since become fairly well known: Roger Mertin and Jim Borcoman; Gary Metz, Charles Hagen, Annie Tucker, Bill Edwards and Lionel Suntop who started Light Impressions; Diane Atkins [sic], who had a gallery in Paris and who is now the photo editor for Vogue – about twenty people who have since gone on to a whole variety of things.”63 Having formed what Gibson experienced as a “tight bond,” vsw ’s American graduates fanned out across the United States, landing or creating institutional positions, and maintaining their friendships through professional educational and curatorial organizations founded by their visionary teacher.64 The Canadians went back to Canada with historical and technical knowledge, a critical vocabulary, connoisseurship, hands-on experience, and membership in this US-based elite. They also had the example of Lyons’s derring-do, which inspired emulation. 227

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When Gibson returned to Toronto, John Phillips alerted him to the possibility of obtaining federal funding for a workshop/darkroom/gallery, such as he and his fellow students had literally helped build in Rochester. Quickly calling a meeting of established and emergent photographers, Gibson became the founding director of Mind and Sight Gallery and Communications Centre (circa 1972–73), which over its two-year funding, fostered and exhibited work while collaborating with an artist-run gallery, A Space, to bring in photographers such as Duane Michals (b. 1932), Garry Winogrand (1928–1984), Lee Friedlander (b. 1934), and Ralph Gibson (b. 1939) – all habitués of the vsw .65 On completing his studies at vsw , James Borcoman was promoted from acting curator to curator of the photography collection of the National Gallery of Canada (ngc ), a position he occupied for some thirty years; an early version of Lyons’s Notations in Passing was acquired for the collection and exhibited in 1971.66 The ngc mandate for photography was historic and international. Acquisitions of Canadian contemporary photography had to be justified as having repercussions beyond the border. It takes nothing from the intrinsic value of works by Lynne Cohen (1944–2014), David Heath (1931–2016), or Robert Del Tredici (b. 1938), all born in the United States, to understand that attention to their work by the ngc was partially and internally rationalized by their non-Canadian origins. In-depth acquisition of significant figures, as opposed to more scattershot iconic approaches, became part of the department’s acquisition policy. vsw alumnus Roger Mertin (1942–2001) is represented in the vsw collection by over four hundred works. Penny Cousineau-Levine and Katherine Tweedie, both vsw alumnae, taught photographic history and theory at the University of Ottawa and Concordia University, published extensively, and collaborated on the “Photography” article in the Canadian Encyclopedia.67 Both Cousineau-Levine and Tweedie have made enormous contributions to the documentation and writing of Canadian photographic history. Cousineau-Levine’s Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination is specifically concerned with elucidating national characteristics in photographic production and reception – it is groundbreaking in many respects, not least of which that it begins in a confessional mode by exposing the author’s and her Canadian colleagues’ “feeling of impotence [in the 1980s] in the face of our culture’s perpetual fascination with imagery and discourse produced anywhere but here,”68 an inability to recognize what was Canadian, which was weakening her teaching. In Faking Death, Cousineau-Levine seeks to decolonize her thinking, summoning psychoanalysis and literary theory to structure her analysis. If her methodologies and interpretations in part conform to her studies in Rochester, notably Lyons’s predilection for poetic analogies and symbols of death, she is only operating within the circular logic of cultural production: photographic practice is

founded on the photographable, and cannot be recognized as a practice without recourse to pictorial convention and common language.69 Her display of reflexivity as she works through her position as a visual analyst is a genuine contribution to the field. Networked Circles

American Know-How and Canadian Photographic Institutions

Extreme mental contortions would be required to define the essence of Canadian-ness in photographic production, though this is not unimaginable; there are examples in the literature. In the inaugural of issue of Photo Communiqué (March/April 1979), US-born Canadian photographer and writer Carol Marino (b. 1943) attempts to argue that the “something which holds Canadian photography within a frame of its own” is landscape. Canadian treatment of the landscape offers “something in common, something different from U.S. photographs, from Japanese work, from European photos.” With considerable hutzpah she asks: “After all, are there more than a handful of Canadians – born, naturalized, immigrant, expatriate – photographers or not – who are not, at the bottom of their souls governed by it [the landscape].” If some otherwise motivated Canadians or Canadian photographers immediately come to mind, Marino is ready to defend her assertion. The photographs of Arnaud Maggs (1926–2012) – his rigorously formulaic studies of human physiognomy taken systematically in front of a plain studio backdrop – “can be considered only as landscapes of the purest kind.” Likewise, the social documentary photographs of Pamela Harris (b. 1940) are, according to Marino, landscapes because “her subjects are often those who live in close cooperation with their landscape: Inuit and … migrant farm workers.”70 One should not make a meal of such tortured reasoning; Marino only exemplifies the sometimes strenuous efforts to erect a Canadian photographic school. Her article is the servant of two masters: it promotes the stable of Jane Corkin Gallery, newly founded by this American expatriate in Toronto; and contributes a “Canadian perspective” to the sortie of Photo Communiqué, whose co-founder, publisher, and editor was US-born critic Gail Fisher-Taylor. In her first editorial, Fisher-Taylor lays out the mission of Photo Communiqué, which is responding to “a need for serious discussion of photography,” including in-depth articles denied space in other magazines, and better communication across a vast and under-populated country, beginning with a calendar of exhibitions and events. The formula was pretty standard, but Fisher-Taylor underscores one important rule: “At first we must look at Canadian photography; then we must place it in an international context.”71 Dear reader, as regards the outcome of this mission, I must leave you in suspense. The advent of Photo Communiqué marks the end of this chapter; the magazine’s

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10.10  Cover of Photo Communiqué 1, 6 (January/ February 1980). Image: Bill Owens, Our Kind of People: American Groups and Rituals. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1975.

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attempt to capture the Canadian photographic community’s aspirations and accomplishments is worthy of a separate study that will, I hope, be informed by the decade-plus of conditioning factors described here (Fig. 10.10). For the missing element in Fisher-Taylor’s editorial is reflexivity. Established in Canada, engaged in a North American movement circle, she assumes the authority to speak for Canadian photographic interests and, given the history of counter-assimilation that can be traced through its institutions, it seems right that she should. Historiographers of Canadian photographic experience have other responsibilities, and this chapter begins to discharge them.

Migratory Affiliations Contemporary Romanian Art Co ri na Ile a

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nder what regimes of visibility should contemporary Romanian art be defined? Within a globalized artistic context, this is a legitimate question to be posed of any nation’s production. It becomes particularly pressing when art appears to be called upon to account for gaps in a country’s cultural production, when it is seen to stage a repertoire of the once invisible, now visibly exotic – the barbaric East, the totalitarian state, the post-Communist capitalist triumph – to illuminate the conditions of existence of a world that was not quite of this world, that still belongs to an ill-defined “out there.” During the Communist era (1945–89), Romanian art was virtually unknown in the West. The Cold War allowed few channels of communication between the two socio-cultural spaces, while Romania was considered to dwell on the margins, to represent the unknown and the unseen, located and locked under the veil of Communism. Such partial lack of knowledge shielded the East from the West, doubling the lock on the production of Romanian artists. This history and its development through stages of decommunization and Europeanization continues to preoccupy Romanian artists whose themes of repression and migration, in particular, have exploded into a multifold “national” trend, paradoxically characterized by its transnational character. This is the phenomenon that I explore in this chapter through a brief recapitulation of Romanian cultural history, an analysis of its performance on the European stage, and an illumination of its subterranean motifs. These factors subtend contemporary Romanian art, enlarging its presence and leaving it vulnerable to another mode of invisibility, which is misunderstanding. One work in particular captures the paradoxical nature of contemporary Romanian practice – its desire to be seen for its invisibility: Matei Bejenaru’s Travel Guide (2005–07). I discuss this from my own dual perspective as a Romanian Canadian art historian, living in and between two cultures.

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As a totalitarian state, Romania instituted a system of repression that created a permanent “state of exception”1 affecting all aspects of society, largely considered “the class enemy,” with the intent of changing its values, coordinates, and traditional beliefs to make room for forcibly implemented new Communist ideology. Whereas most aspects of life were regulated by fear, propaganda mechanisms also constructed a parallel reality to the actual living conditions of the people, producing a so-called “documentation” with no correspondence whatsoever to social and political realities. The state orchestrated a visual masquerade that was blatant to the Romanian population, but could only be acknowledged as such in the private sphere. Conversely, in the public sphere Romanian citizens were obliged to assert their belief and faith in the image of fulfillment projected by the ruling power. During Communism, social and political ideologies interrupted the normality of people’s actions and restricted their freedom. Non-ideological art production was relegated to public invisibility. Certain cultural productions represented a means of resisting the Communist regime, yet in a limited, highly coded manner. They manifested mainly in a marginal way in “underground [and] laboratory experiments,”2 which, because of their ephemeral quality, itself at odds with the stable heroic principles valorized by Communism, were systematically censored. Romanian cultural production has passed through several layers of (in)vis­ ibility, both internal and external. I use the term “invisibility” in two ways. On one hand, invisibility is understood as a consequence of the non-functionality of the public social space due to surveillance, censorship, distortion, and imposed representations. On the other hand, and as a consequence of this socio-political situation, the “invisibility” of these subjects implies only partial integration, or interaction, with dominant contemporary European cultural practices. The Romanian Revolution, which began in December 1989, marked an important threshold that radically altered Romanian society, as well as the regime of visibility: it was seen “live” in a television broadcast that ran for the duration of the events, with few interruptions. From a national television channel sending propaganda from the centre of power to the subjected citizens, tvr became a new media channel in a matter of days. For the newly empowered population, unprecedented access to their own representation in the form of images was a form of legitimization of their deeds and actions, while simultaneously marking a doubled trauma of violence that Romanian identity suffered in both real and mediated forms as the revolution turned violent.3 Michel Foucault’s equation between visibility and surveillance fully erupts in the “regime of the spectacle,” a conflation which, according to Suren Lalvani, defines the modern subject: “Instead of opposing one regime of visibility to

Contemporary Romanian Art

another, we must take into account the presence of both, so that we may discover their interrelationships. A genealogy of modern subjectivity constituted by vision must account for both.”4 Under conditions of trauma and obliteration from memory, the visual field has the ability “to curb the fiercest will to obliterate,”5 even when it does not manage to pierce the veil of silence and censorship for long periods of time, and even when it surfaces only after the conditions that imposed the visual order have ceased to manifest. Apart from changes in the social and political structure, the years after the revolution witnessed a transformation in terms of art practice, thanks to an increased access to the international artistic scenes as well as to internal mutations. The constitution of the Romanian subject and Romanian art could be seen struggling out of the totalitarian visibilities of “surveillance and spectacle” as well as the invisibilities of state and self-censorship. Current art practices, now visible, retain traces of their former “invisibility.” They are encoded with histories that are effectively indecipherable by the West without a guide. As Romanian contemporary art has emerged from a state of invisibility, both inside and outside the country, how has it been perceived? Contributing to the resurgence within a European discourse of Eastern European culture, conditioned by Western marketing and artistic strategies, and playing – sometimes ironically – the “seduction” card, Romanian contemporary art has passed through several stages of self-definition. It has acquired and sustained a more stable visibility while gradually shedding some of its exoticism and glamour, representing the healing of Romanian society, as well as its mutation into a diasporic and globalized phenomenon. Measured in terms of art world success, the transition has been seamless, in part because the alterity of Romanian art – its long-term states of exception and containment – and the national discourses of Eastern Europe as a whole have been defined by Western audiences and cultural institutions. The tendency has been to absorb Eastern Europe into the larger circuit of Western art production, through neutral assimilation, as a project of recuperation or capitalist recovery. Situating these “emergent” art practices in this marginal position, within the limited reception of “alterity” has made them both tolerable and safe. As Romanian artists, including those in the diaspora, have responded to this situation, radical reformulations have taken place in terms of artistic and exhibition strategies, challenging the stereotyped understanding of Romanian art and gradually drawing attention to its individual characteristics. Whether seen through the lens of decolonization or decommunization, the emergence of Romanian contemporary art into visibility resists easy categorization. How should this art production be contextualized and explained? Is the response situated between “European influenza” and “seductiveness” as strategies of visibility? I borrow these arresting terms from the titles of two

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exhibitions shown at the Venice Biennale. The first one is European Influenza (2005), for which Daniel Knorr (b. 1968) seemingly left the Romanian Pavilion empty, devoid of artworks. But it contained history: the walls of the gallery preserved traces of previous exhibitions, scratches, inscription, holes, and nails that remained still unpulled. And it sparked debate: visitors paid no entrance fees but they received, free of charge, a thousand-page English reader containing controversial critical texts on the pending Romanian inclusion in the European Union. The second one is Seductiveness of the Interval (2007) – including works by Stefan Constantinescu (b. 1968), Andrea Faciu (b. 1977), and Ciprian Muresan (b. 1977) – which interrogated the role of the viewer and the regime of the exhibition as spectacle performed through theatricality, mise-en-scène, and (re)enactment.6 To phrase my question differently: is the artistic response situated somewhere between “nothingness” as an extreme form of (self-) surveillance and the “spectacle” as a now-appropriated strategy of visibility? These two examples are strong arguments for the persistent specificity of Romanian art and against locating Romanian art solely in relation to its absorption by the West. Some sense of history is necessary to a critical understanding of this art production, and this is difficult knowledge. The artists themselves are asking questions about how Romanian art should be perceived, and they are doing so from dual perspectives: from the inside, as participants in the decommunization period, and from the outside at a diasporic cultural distance. Their greater presence in the international contemporary art world still manifests considerable uneasiness with the terms of visibility. The context of presentation for their work has been dramatically widened; it is no longer strictly confined to the social reality of Communism or of post-Communist Eastern European societies but is now part of the European Union and of the global art circuit. These rapid changes have significantly reconfigured Romanian cultural discourse and contemporary artistic practice.7 In 2010 the group exhibition Over the Counter: The Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art, presented at the Mucsarnok Museum, Budapest, Hungary, featured thirty artists from Central and Eastern Europe whose work challenged the national and regional cultural paradigms of “introducing” former Communist art practices to a Western audience. Mircea Cantor (b. 1977), a Romanian artist based in Paris, showed his Double Heads Matches (2002–03), a movie documenting the production of twenty thousand matches, modified so that both ends were covered in phosphorus, objects that would have been illegal elsewhere yet still remained possible in the Romania of the 2000s – that is, before its inclusion in the European Union. The exhibition and catalogue Romanian Cultural Resolution: Contemporary Art in Romania (2010) presents twenty-seven Romanian artists whose works investigate the multi-faceted stages of the decommunization period and the

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cultural production of post-Communism, molded by sets of Western norms and mechanisms of cultural dissemination and also, in essayist Marius Bab­ ias’s terms, as a result of “self-colonization,”8 The discourses that shape Eastern European identity are increasingly attuned to implied dichotomies and the dangers of excessive identification in terms of geopolitical coordinates, while at the same time acknowledging the formation of a paradigm of “Easternness,” both in terms of localization of production and of the content required to be thus identified in curatorial and exhibition projects. The Romanian story is a pertinent case history for the delicate transition from national to global. What is gained, what is lost, and what remains unresolved in the process? To avoid falling into the trap of marketing the East as both fixed and different, producing an identity that is “refined, diverse, local and specific – with a flavour of exoticism, if possible,” essayist Cristian Nae, advances a performative analysis: “Artistic identity in the cultural field is not only represented in language or images, neither described nor invented … it is the result of performative cultural acts and not a substantive description or a behavioural attribute of the ‘given’ set of differences.”9 This ambitious project was divided into four major sections – three of them vigorously challenging the very act of curating such an exhibition. In “An Image Instead of a Title,” curator Mihnea Mircan examined the oblique and incomplete nature of archival art practices;10 “Here and Then,” curated by Magda Radu, explored the autobiographical inscription of the “artist at work” in a transgenerational dialogue;11 “Fetish Factory,” by Adrian Bojenoiu, examined the legacy of the formerly restrictive cultural and socio-economic environments.12 The fourth theme of Romanian Cultural Resolution was “Figurative Painting in Romania, 1970–2010,” curated by Mihai Pop, which was a survey bridging the Communist and post-Communist years.13 If Romanian Cultural Resolution was intended to interpret contemporary work, the inclusion of this backward look is a meaningful gesture. In effect, many of the artworks in this exhibition take a position of temporal and territorial indeterminacy – as in Matei Bejenaru’s performance Together (2007) and Strawberry Fields Forever (2002) on Romanian immigration to the UK and Spain; Stefan Constantinescu’s book The Golden Age for Children (2007), based on vernacular and official photography archives from Communism; and Pavel Braila’s video Shoes for Europe (2002), which transmutes the West/East discourse at the border between Romania and Moldavia, and thus transforms the so-called East (Romania) into a newly labelled West, simply by changing the geopolitical coordinates and axes of perception. This major project was not only exhibited in Romania but also exposed to Western audiences – the artworks migrating to the confluences of divergent scopic and cultural desires. In this chapter I develop an interpretational structure to grapple with the ambiguities and conflicts that arise from the mobilization of Romanian

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contemporary art as it creates new regimes of visibility that both enjoy and resist migration patterns. An additional level of estrangement, a “virus” and a dimension that is rarely acknowledged, has recently become evident to me. As an inside-outsider, with the perspective of a Romanian migrant to North America, I write as a subject formed by the intimacies and contradictions of Romanian artistic practice who sometimes operates at a physical, temporal, cultural, and interpretative remove. This double vision is a symptom of migratory trajectories that the artists themselves follow: some of them live and work both in Romania and abroad. It is also a wider cultural condition. Within contemporary patterns of mobility, the production and exhibition of art are relocated according to centres of influence, exchange, and collaboration – manifesting a continuous restlessness that positions the resulting works in constant negotiation with the cultural spaces and traditions they come in contact with.14 Romanian artists extend their preoccupations to realities outside the sphere of their native society, grounding their artistic gestures in an understanding of present-day society, its manifestations, forms of protest, and social implications. A good example is Stefan Constantinescu’s collaborative project The Last Analog Revolution, a Memory Box (2011), co-curated with Xandra Popescu, which, by including artists both from Western and Eastern Europe, challenged the ideology inherent in the construction of Easternness and its imagery. It featured Péter Forgács (Hungary), Zuzanna Janin (Poland), Karen Mirza and Brad Butler (England), Deimantas Narkevicius (Lithuania), Yves Netzhammer (Switzerland), Liliana Moro (Italy), and Via Lewandowski (Germany). The years following the fall of Communism were beset by indecision on the denominations that could or should be used to define the former Eastern Bloc – a new socio-cultural space. Inclusion within a European Union raised dilemmas about the names previously used – Central-Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe, and South-Eastern Europe – and new terms started to appear, such as, for instance, the Balkans. Artistic curatorial projects followed these discourses by questioning the inclusion of such diverse ethnic and national manifestations under the same cover. As the boundaries of Europe continue to shift, resistance to defining Eastern art in relation to Western art is still growing, in conjunction with a demand for specific analyses that oppose “the inclusion of the other”15 in political and social terms, and also as visual artistic paradigms of representation. Romanian artists emerge fully formed with a history that they want their audiences to grasp, but one that involves considerable trauma, and as such, implies a belated understanding, even for themselves, due to the continuously missed encounter with the (historical) event that produced trauma – not completely recalled, not completely possessed, and ultimately, not completely reliable. Through a continuous return to the initial event, trauma manifests, according to Cathy Caruth, as “distortion of meaning,” and

those affected “become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”16 This distortion continues in the order of knowledge and the art practice as well as the art-historical perspective that speaks to a heterogeneous audience: Romanians at home and abroad – some who had lived during Communism, others accessing this knowledge through trans- and inter-generational social and cultural heritage, as well as the Western audience, who did not know, who were not told or who simply did not want to know. More than twenty years after the fall of Communism, the art of the East resists simplistic categorization as post-totalitarian or post-Communist art that was attached to the regime in the past decades. Bogdan Ghiu advocates for recognizing the difference between East and West and for a form of resistance to assimilation through the eradication of difference, developing his concern over the “resubjectification of the East” through the misinterpretation of art practices aimed at “awaking from the narcosis of the resorbence within the West.”17 I share this concern, while wondering how certain aspects of Romanian history can be brought to light, and how long they must remain there.18 Dan Perjovschi’s work Romania/Removing Romania (1993–2003), presented as part of the exhibition In the Gorges of the Balkans, involves two phases, as two sides of an artistic discourse on the situation of the artist in the Romanian cultural and social context. The first part took place in 1993, when he tattooed the word “Romania” on his left shoulder. Sinziana Ravini interpreted this act as ridiculing the aesthetic attachment and identification of an artist with his birthplace,19 describing it as feeling “cattle-marked, owned by someone beyond my reach.”20 The “permanence” of the tattoo would be reversed in 2007, when the artist removed this sign. He performs a critique of the “essentialisation of identity discourse,” in terms suggested by Cristian Nae, who interprets Perjovschi’s gesture as signalling “the beginning of a period when artists could break with national and regional associations.”21 But the removal of the tattoo leaves a scar. The remaining traces point symbolically to the artistic and social existence of Romanians, reconfigured as somatic identity within the body: while a permanent mark may be erased, it also becomes an internalized and conflicted presence underlining a floating identity. In Perjovschi’s words: Contemporary Romanian Art

I thought the performance should last as long as its author did. However, ten years later the context changed. I too changed my views and decided to remove the tattoo. This was a political statement made within the international context of the Balkans. You see, in 1995 I was exhibiting in East Central European shows, at the end of the 1990s in East European shows, at the beginning of 2000 in South East European shows, and subsequently in Balkan shows. Yet I have never moved from Bucharest. This geopolitical situation compelled me to remove the tattoo. I

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sometimes joke that erasing the word Romania from my shoulder marks the moment when I became an international artist.22

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An interesting process of (im)migration and mobility can be observed in the absorption of the art of the East. In addition to A Romanian Cultural Resolution, two important international exhibitions from 2009–10 – Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe23 and Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe24 – recapture this discussion and contextualize it. More than twenty years after the fall of Communism in the Eastern Bloc, these exhibitions prompted complex interrogations of the realities and contradictions of the reductionist socio-cultural stance of a coherent East. Returning Eastern European art to visibility comes as a consequence of a revised concept of history and cultural representation, which bridges the gap between the two bio-political regions that developed under different political conditions for nearly half a century. East and West were divided and, for some, their art is in need of rehabilitation and coordination. This re-evaluation presupposes a discontinuity at the level of history, and also in terms of art practices. The reconfiguration takes place through a double perspective, as Ghiu points out, coming from the marginality of both history and contemporary art: “Twice out of the borders does the ‘assault’ upon the (history of the) Occident (re)begin: out of the East of Europe and out of the history of contemporary art.”25 The East seems to prefigure a re-evaluation of the Western canon as a means to complete a perspective that lacks the important dimension of alterity, embodied by recent history and art of the East. However, as Ghiu advocates, this is only one step in a larger deconstruction, which should also consider not just a reconfiguration internal to Western art practice but also one that develops a larger discussion of the principles of canonization. Recovering the alterity of the East and of its art is a necessary phase for the relativization of the Western canon of art.26 Sharing a liminal conceptual border, contemporary art from the East – and from Romania in this case – redefines its presence within the larger body of European art. At the same time, this reconfiguration threatens assimilation; that is, it resists the annulment of its constitutive character of alterity. The annihilation of alterity would imply an erasure of the traits that made its existence – its very visibility – possible. The recuperation of the East would close down the openness toward its “foreigner” status. Brushing history against the grain, Romanian art practices in the global context of the last twenty years have changed the modalities through which the art of Eastern Europe is understood, in terms of seeking a re-evaluation that does not dissolve the outlines of its specificity. For, as Jean-Luc Nancy points out, the stranger should preserve the quality of a stranger and should be

acknowledged as such in order not to disappear. The intrus is always within, it is always there, and it remains as long as it is acknowledged as being a stranger. As Nancy explains: There must be something of the intrus in the stranger; otherwise, the stranger would lose its strangeness: if he already has the right to enter and remain, if he is awaited and received without any part of him being unexpected or unwelcome, he is no longer the intrus, nor is he any longer the stranger. It is thus neither logically acceptable, nor ethically admissible, to exclude all intrusion in the coming of the stranger, the foreign.27 On the one hand, strangers and exiles – and in this context, works of art that exist as “exiles” of a globalized art world – cannot find a place of belonging, being constantly in an “hors-lieu,” a non-place, a non-inhabiting, that maintains them in a suspended space. There is no final destination. Instead of recognizing, recuperating, and reintegrating the East – therefore still speaking in patronizing terms – the art of the East should be acknowledged in its “strategic discontinuity”28 and seen as recovering, but without assimilation. Patterns of Mobility

Contemporary Romanian Art

After the fall of Communism, Romanian border rules became less restrictive. Emigration seemed to offer a solution to the realities and dilemmas of a society in perpetual transition. But far from being a smooth process, immigration proved also to be dominated by unprotectedness. A number of Romanian artists began to address themes of migration in works that explored the transition from private to public and figured the transgression of physical, ideological, and cultural borders. Mobilization is not without baggage, however; it carries history. The fall of Communism did not effect a sudden and complete historical breach with no future consequences or social burdens. Decommunization was marked also by convulsions that shaped perspectives on recent social and cultural history, as well as by the reconfiguration of Romanian art production within a global art scene. The question of immigration illustrates one long-term consequence of the previous Romanian socio-political system that has ramifications in the present and underlies the fundamental vulnerability at the core of mobility patterns, radically dislodging the “common ground” of Romanian art production. The stories of immigrants often remain untold, fall into oblivion, and ultimately fail to pierce the silence that accompanies displacement. However, some artistic works bear witness to this phenomenon and transform it through acts of imagination and fictionalization. Bejenaru’s Travel Guide

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11.1  Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, 2007. Installation: vinyl wall map with train routes from Romania to

uk; 1,000 Travel Guide leaflets offered free of charge to the public. Prague Bienniale, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

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(2005–07) and Maersk Dubai (2007), both address illegal immigration, as well as the precariousness of this liminal status. And Constantinescu’s Passagen/ Passages (2005) unveils the estrangement that accompanies immigration, and the social and economic hurdles faced when embarking on such a journey. Bejenaru’s Travel Guide is a pocket brochure (Fig. 11.1) that functions as an unofficial guide for illegal emigration from Romania to Europe and more specifically, to the United Kingdom. Containing real maps of train routes from Romania to France and Belgium, with legends attached, locating with precision train stations, border stations, or punct terminus in this case, in England,

Contemporary Romanian Art

the brochure is designed in a small format to be easily carried along. Precise details are revealed by unfolding and expanding it; a larger map, besides providing geographical positioning, offers valuable suggestions on migration trajectories and directions to be followed. There is an authenticity effect: even the quality of the paper resembles that found in official travel guides. Elaborate textual information is offered in a systematic and clearly organized manner; columns of text run throughout the length of the brochure, with material subdivided into short chapters ranging from “Ways of Getting to France or Belgium,” “By Bus,” “By Train,” “Travelling by Boat,” and “Basic Information about Containers” to “About the Illegal Romanians in Great Britain.” Important visual clues are instantly spotted by the reader, the visitor to the exhibition, or the immigrant, as the case may be: photographs of harbour zones in Bruges and Le Havre, and illustrations of container mechanisms (Fig. 11.2). A colour-coded chart provides graphic details on the degree of risk in crossing the frontiers at different transit points. The feasibility of selecting certain cities as transit points is statistically measured on a scale from zero to ten, ranging from qualifications such as “minimum/maximum” when referring to crossings and risk; “convenient/very difficult” when recording travel conditions; and “inattentive/ alert,” when evaluating the vigilance of the border control. This work was completed in 2005, two years before Romania became a member of the European Union. When borders between Romania and the European Union became fluid, Travel Guide lost its practical function, in political and geographical terms. But the uncertainty about the future after the Brexit vote suggests that something of the sort might be needed again. Art biennials, museums, and galleries worldwide provide brochures that offer information, carefully orchestrated instructions and tips for understanding art, and patterns of interpretation, often including precise geographical and national localization of artists presented. These documents can be taken away, as souvenirs of the show – proof of a visitor’s attendance at an important art venue – to be shared with other potential viewers. As with Bejenaru’s Travel Guide, the intention is to limit the range of surprises, and all the more so, when the exhibition presents artists who are external to the Western network of art dissemination. The twist of critically repositioning the art of the East, as this study proposes, is that the Western audience is not meant to enjoy a leisurely “trip,” but to engage with the contradictions of relegating this art production to a global interpretive paradigm. A migratory pattern is enacted, with coordinates constantly adapting and shifting, repeatedly actualizing the potentiality of the “space of appearance” of Romanian art production, a potentiality desired and denied in the past. Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “space of appearance”29 is understood as giving cohesion to human actions and speech. As she writes, cohesion is made possible

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11.2  Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, detail from the leaflet with information about opening the cargo containers used by illegal immigrants, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

Contemporary Romanian Art

“where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men … make their appearance explicit,”30 and is the original manifestation of the public realm that “comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action.”31 According to Arendt, through its dependence on the presence of others and their interactions, action is subject to several pitfalls: it builds a world determined by plurality and, while it has a definite beginning, it is irreversible and has no predictable end. This plurality and potentiality are thereby considered through an earlier cultural and social (in)visibility. While asserting its specificity, the space of appearance of Romanian art production defies nationalistic cultural paradigms and exposes the heteroglossic voices that testify to and shape social and cultural events; thus the importance of considering it anew, in terms of mobility and migration. Even though ubiquitous in the contemporary world, illegal immigrants do not belong to any success story. They are, as Zygmund Bauman explains, “out of view, out of thought and out of action.”32 They remain hidden: a dark little secret, uncovered, in Bejenaru’s case, by artistic discourse. As a travel guide for illegal immigrants, his project would likely have failed if published as a regular brochure beyond the circles of artistic aesthetic and conceptual discourse. It could have been banned, precisely because it contained information about illicit ways of crossing the border. Traces of illegal immigration that the artist brings into the open follow rules of insecurity. Liquefying communities and lacking stability and coherence,33 immigration disrupts the “caring-andsharing” quality of community. Illegal immigrants, as represented by Bejenaru in Travel Guide, experience a precarious situation by their acceptance of the status of illegality. Illegals form a category that disrupts the understanding of citizenry because they break “the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis.”34 Despite the large numbers of refugees and immigrants,35 their existence is “generally conducted away from the global gaze.”36 They are, in Michel Agier’s terms, a “population formed out of this confusion, this mixture of impasse and rejection. A single population but not a homogeneous one, made up of individual trajectories of wandering.”37 Each of their destinations is potentially unstable, since they benefit from no clear status: in order to reach a destination, illegal immigrants must obtain visas and sometimes fake passports, develop human connections, and acquire work permits along the way; and they have to change their lodging constantly. Bejenaru makes invisible knowledge visible. The underground surfaces into the public realm, making official what normally remains carefully guarded within the economics of society’s rules and behaviour. Inserting the guide into artistic discourse forces audiences who enjoy travel to consume works of art into an awareness of difficulties faced by immigrants and the information they

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11.3  Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, kuba Exhibition, installation, vinyl wall map with train routes from Romania to uk , table, 500 Travel Guide leaflets offered free for the public. Thyssen-Bornemisza, Vienna, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

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seek to preserve their lives when embarking on their voyages. Whereas Travel Guide functions as an artistic project, conveying into representation and visibility the social situation of the illegal immigrant, it does so by playing against the mechanisms that deny the very existence of the people they depict. The work is presented in large museums, thereby acquiring a challenging degree of legitimacy. Ironically, it is acceptable to talk about illegal immigration within such a context, as long as the illegals can be contained. This project has taken on different modes of presentation; it was published in the art journal Idea arts + society, Cluj Napoca, Romania in 2005; and it was shown as an installation in international galleries, museums, and biennials in Romania and abroad, among them Thyssen-Bornemizsa Contemporary Art Vienna, Nestroyhof, Vienna (2006) (Fig. 11.3); Prague Biennial 3 (2007); Posibila Gallery, Bucharest, Romania (2007); Tate Modern London – Level 2

11.4  Matei Bejenaru, Impreuna / Together, 2007. Public performance involving 250 Romanian residents from London, 5 minutes, Tate Modern Esplanade, London. Photo: Ioana Marinescu. Courtesy of the artist.

Contemporary Romanian Art

Gallery, UK (2007); and Mucsarnok Museum, Budapest. Brochures were easily accessed by visitors, who could grab one and take it away, as free information. Some of them may have been immigrants themselves. The railway map on the cover of the brochure is also shown separately as an enlarged image, mapped out either horizontally on the floor, with visitors literally stepping on a blown-up red chart that fully reveals the routes of immigration, or vertically on the walls of the gallery space. Visually, this map cannot be avoided. It is presented to be analyzed, either with curiosity, or for purposes of extracting precious information. Bejenaru interrogates the function of an art project within a gallery environment and outside the perimeter of artistic discourse, turning a document into a valid art gesture and an artistic act into a document with practical functionality. At Tate Modern in London, Travel Guide was presented with Together (2007) (Fig. 11.4). This was a highly charged curatorial decision, since the Guide provided survival kit information for illegal immigrants to reach the United Kingdom, while Together, a performance recorded as a film, appeared to represent

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success in this endeavour, as Romanian nationals living in London responded to the artist’s call to gather as a crowd outside the museum. The road inbetween is marked by all the untold stories, where failure cannot be denied. In Together, following the artist’s instructions, 250 immigrants slowly form a temporary community. Here, immigrants lack individuality and are defined only as belonging to a larger community. Apart from that, they shared no traits identifiable as Romanian, no names were involved, nor any other specific characteristics that revealed the nationality or legal status of the participants. For the duration of the performance, immigrants occupied the same public art space, which is not a neutral one, but quite the contrary – Tate Modern is an emblem of European success and the crowd was organized to face it. Its cohesion and visibility were temporary. After the performance, the participants would melt back into the population at large, neutralizing their national traits, and therefore experiencing a form of disappearance and voicelessness that some would have experienced before. As heterogeneous as migrating populations might be in terms of legal status, conditions of displacement, and the causes that triggered their situation, they are by necessity unified under a certain category: “an identity of existence that is unforeseen, unnamable and on the margins of common humanity,”38 as Michel Agier explains. By crossing borders, individuals are expected to become part of a larger community, but one that proves to be illusory, in Marc Augé’s terms, for problems of identification arise from the very moment one tries to define and contain the notion of community: “Identifying with a singular term individuals who have something ‘in common’ means creating an illusory entity, taking its desires or its fears as realities.”39 When migrant status is confirmed and publicly acknowledged, migrants are thrust toward the social periphery and identified with the figure of the unwelcome stranger, the intruder. In the absence of public acknowledgment and legitimization, access to visibility can only be offered in the form of stories, or other cultural products that bear witness to radical displacement, as the Guide testifies. Bejenaru addresses the “periphery” from multiple perspectives, inquiring into the manifestations of societies that have not completed their decommunization, and also into the art production of this social space, its tools of dissemination, and its access to visibility within an artistic global perspective. These issues were also addressed through his involvement in the development of the Periferic Biennial in Iasi, which grew from a local event – peripheral with respect to the centre of cultural power represented by Bucharest in the 1990s – into an important manifestation of contemporary art, linking Romanian artists with international ones and performing a kind of artistic migration simultaneously from inside to the exterior and the other way round. It exposed a twofold approach to artistic collaborations promoting “regional mobility.”40

In this case, international exposure refers not only to the Western art world but also to an essential re-evaluation and re-positioning within the art of the East. Bejenaru underlines this necessity: ”Unfortunately, at present, we don’t know much about each other. Romanians know very little about Macedonians, Bosnians know almost nothing about Romanians, and the Serbs have probably never traveled to Romania before. Both Bulgarians and Romanians are focusing too much on Brussels.”41 Crossings and Closings

Contemporary Romanian Art

Mobility is an increasingly important phenomenon of contemporary society; it implies both freedom and dislocation. Native lands, borders, and new social and cultural environments pose imaginary and factual challenges that must be faced in the process. Under conditions of uprootedness, migration, social transformations, and exclusions from the domain of visibility, the means to tackle these phenomena are inadequate. The “solidity” of communities as experienced in modern times has given over to the “liquidity”42 of social and cultural paradigms, fundamentally transforming communal experience. Art follows similar routes of uprooting, challenging borders, cultural patterns, and institutions. A case in point is the Mobile Biennale 1: The Tour of Oltenia in 7 Days in Romania (2014), initiated by Adrian Bojenoiu and Alexandru Niculescu. Including both Romanian and international artists, this project fundamentally challenges the structure of the modern biennale and the notion of stable space, while disrupting the concept of artistic work itself. Participation in the biennale – a seven-day bus trip constituted the first edition – counts as an international relational artwork, bounded by Romanian borders. The art production investigated here in terms of (im)migration and its changing structures activates a discussion pertinent to the unresolved problems and dilemmas that currently confront Europe: a series of encounters among, and sometimes the absorption of, divergent values and norms, both cultural and socio-political, stemming from the migratory forces that define the contemporary historical and cultural dynamics of the East/West dichotomy. Artworks not only address issues of migration and immigration; as cultural productions, they are also informed by them. These are works that exist partially in “exile.” Their conditions of conception, production, and dissemination respond to internal (national) configurations, and to the redefinition that occurs from contact with the larger field of artistic discourse in a complex East/ West negotiation. Mieke Bal addresses this double identification, double exposure, as “migratory aesthetics”: “if aesthetics is primarily an encounter in which the subject, body included, is engaged, the aesthetic encounter is migratory if it takes place in the space of, on the basis of, and on the interface with,

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the mobility of people as a given, as central, and as the heart of what matters in the contemporary, that is, ‘globalized’ world.”43 Developing this perspective, Sam Durrant and Catherine Lord understand it to represent “the various processes of becoming that are triggered by the movement of people and peoples, experiences of transition as well as the transition of experience itself, into new modalities, new art work, new ways of being.”44 Whereas the East/West distinction is still operative, it cannot be conceived simply as a cultural or social dichotomy. Its workings are far more elaborate and contradictory, with centrifugal vectors crossing centripetal ones. A twoway direction is active, especially since the inclusion in the European Union of countries that for almost half a century belonged to the Eastern Bloc, Romania among them. Expectations on both sides often clash and revive divergent interpretive paradigms, while programmatically advocating an inclusive common social and cultural “language.” A migratory pattern can be detected in art practice, in terms of both reception and exhibition strategies: in short, in terms of the conditions of existence of art in an international context. Romanian artworks cannot strictly be defined as stemming from Romanian realities; they derive also from contact with expectations and selective patterns of inclusion that come from elsewhere. Renewed interest in the art of Eastern Europe, galvanized by Western cultural actors and the public, has reconfigured Romanian cultural production to “incorporate” it within a larger artistic circuit. This is not done in the absence of ideology. On the contrary, the expectations of the West are seemingly designed to be fulfilled, and the East should remember to conform in order to be identified and legitimated as the “East” and thereby be recuperated by the West. To silently accept these rules would be to confine Romanian art production to new forms of containment and invisibility, which is why Romanian artists are instead materializing and performing them as a means of resistance. Against the West’s ideological recuperation of national art narratives, a more disquieting process needs to be implemented, a process that preserves the strangeness, specificity, and also “normalcy” of the East’s art production. Within the field of contemporary Romanian art, expressions of exile and structures of migration offer useful interpretive analogies, even when the artists and their guest workers stay home.

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Maraya’s Sisyphean Cart Twinned Visions of Vancouver and Dubai

12

Alice Mi ng Wa i Jim

T

he chronically deceitful King Sisyphus of Greek mythology was punished by the gods to an eternity of rolling a boulder up a steep mountain only to watch it roll back down again every time he reached the summit. Destined forever to such seemingly futile labour, Sisyphus is the quintessential absurd hero whose punishment, the twentieth-century French Algerian philosopher Albert Camus argued, is representative of the basic paradoxical human condition: perpetual, conscious struggle to find the meaning of existence, a better tomorrow, with no hope of success because tomorrow is just one day closer to death.2 In his acclaimed essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” in 1942, Camus was referring to the millions of lives spent at endless laborious and pointless 24/7 jobs in factories and offices, a scenario not unfamiliar nearly three-quarters of a century later: Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.3 As long as humans, without resignation (“passion”), recognize, accept, and bear that life is irresolvably meaningless – that death is unavoidable – they can continue to live “without appeal” in spite of it (“revolt”) and in this embrace achieve absolute “freedom” and happiness. This is the best set of outcomes for the Sisyphean metaphor; the only other alternative upon the realization of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life is suicide.4 “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”5

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face … But that very difficulty deserves reflection … Great works are often born on a street corner … So it is with absurdity.1

Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

12.1 Maraya, Maraya Sisyphean Cart (False Creek), 2014. Documentation of custom-designed handdrawn cart, mounted with an automated pantilt-zoom (ptz ) camera generatively capturing hd video. Image exhibited in Dubai and Vancouver. Colour photograph, dimensions variable, either 76.2 × 101.6 cm or 61 × 81.3 cm. Photo: Maraya. Courtesy of the artists.

In the Arabian Desert, there are few mountains per se, just colossal sand dunes that can only be climbed by stepping very lightly and very slowly, lest more sand be displaced than the altitude advanced. Most prefer the more thrilling, quick-paced, and death-defying fifteen-minute dune-bashing experience in a 4wd Jeep that, as long as it doesn’t stop and sink, can gracefully, quickly, and expertly ascend and descend the steepest sandy slope. In this context, the idea of transporting and then actually getting people to pull the custom-designed hand-drawn metal Sisyphean Cart, the Maraya Project’s latest experiment for the 2014 International Symposium on Electronic Art, “isea 2014: Location,” in Dubai, the most populous city of the United Arab Emirates situated in the middle of the desert, may have seemed a Sisyphean task. Fortunately, the mobile “sousveillance” artwork was intended to conduct a site-specific participatory spatial investigation of the developed and paved Dubai Marina Walk as “a creative and critical response to the global movement

of city building and the impact on those who live in, move through and in between them.”6 Mounted with an automated pan-tilt-zoom (ptz ) camera nestled discreetly among a packed assemblage of reflective mirror blocks made in the shape of recognizable landmark buildings in Dubai, the Sisyphean Cart was designed to be pulled along the Marina’s seawall by residents, passersby, and corralled conference colleagues on their leisurely afternoon walk on the promenade. After the cart has been strenuously taken a good stretch of the seawall, which enables the upward-facing camera to capture the surrounding skyscrapers from a vantage point that intentionally torques a conventional street-view perspective, the cart puller gets to take on the task of city builder who can rearrange the packed blocks on the vehicle to the way he or she would like to see the city. According to Maraya: “The cart would invoke the spectre of labour – purposeful walking as a form of resistance to readily consumed images of idealized leisure – and the Sisyphean weight of this vision.” Maraya: Sisyphean Cart premiered at isea 2014 in Dubai as part of the curated exhibition at the American University in Dubai (aud ), 2–8 November 2014, and then was exhibited as part of isea 2015 in Vancouver at 221A Gallery, 4–29 August 2015 (Fig. 12.1). This chapter historicizes this latest twinned-city intervention as the culmination of Maraya’s seven-year research-creation project to interrogate the reappearance of Vancouver’s False Creek in the United Arab Emirates as the Dubai Marina and explore the uncanny similarities between these largescale urban developments. Vancouver al-Arabe

In just over a decade, the uncanny twinning of Vancouver and Dubai via the exported architectural typology of Vancouverism has become lore in the annals of sustainable urban planning in the twenty-first century. Reports in 2004 by

Twinned Visions of Vancouver and Dubai

A full-scale replica of Vancouver’s False Creek is today even being carved out of the desert sands outside of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Having walked the seawall on visits to British Columbia, the Sultan of Dubai and senior hereditary princes adopted Concord Pacific as a model for a massive development near their Burj Al-Arabe, the world’s most expensive hotel – the famous high-tech tower in the shape of a Persian Gulf dhow [a traditional sailing vessel]. Today, the first of a planned $2 billion worth of housing has been completed here, a series of thin towers on podium bases set beside an artificial body of water shaped to evoke Vancouver’s inner harbor. The whole complex is a strange monument to globalism: “Vancouver al-Arabe.”7

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Vancouver architectural critic Trevor Boddy about the importation of a distinctive Vancouver model of urbanism to the Middle East were germane to the beginnings of the Maraya Project, an experimental research-creation platform critiquing the parallel urban mega-developments in the two cities. Undergoing a number of name changes (including “True/False Creek”), the project has consistently focused on connecting, physically and metaphorically, the lookalike urban waterfront promenades of the Emaar Properties development, Dubai Marina, in the United Arab Emirates, and the Concord Pacific Place between the Marinaside Crescent and Beach neighbourhoods of Vancouver’s North False Creek, both designed by some of the same architects, engineers, and planners. Initiated in 2006 by Vancouver artists M. Simon Levin (b. 1961), Glen Lowry (b. 1965), and Henry Tsang (b. 1964), Maraya was intended, broadly speaking, as “a provocation – to raise questions about who makes cities” and, more specifically, to “compare, contrast and complement the similarities and differences between sites separated by twelve time zones or by a ‘false’ body of water: in Vancouver’s case, by name, and in Dubai, an artificial marina carved out of the desert.” Over six years, the critical creative collaboration has produced several exhibitions of photographs and videos, walking tours, public talks, transit-shelter posters, an electronic billboard, a social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter, a commissioned interactive website, and dozens of adhoc seawalk interventions. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of artists, educators, scientists, theorists, urban planners, architects, and academic researchers who draw on expertise in the visual arts, media, cultural theory, urban geography and history, the Maraya Project promotes dialogue through research-creation to a wider public about how this phenomenon came to be. In doing so, the implications of citation and postcolonial urbanism in the interAsian context are brought to bear within current scholarship on site-responsive artistic practices. The city-to-city cultural exchange paradigm in contemporary art is by now a familiar phenomenon. It is a particular staple within the international biennial exhibition system, where urban landscapes are transformed for better or worse through site-specific artworks seeking to activate transnational connections of over-determined yet changing city cultures around the globe. Attesting to the increased attention being paid to these projects is the sheer number of urbanand city-to-city-themed exhibitions focusing on the implications of rampant urbanization, particularly in the newly industrialized countries of Asia where urban development is moving at an all-time unprecedented rate. The 2012 Shanghai Biennale on Reactivation, for example, showcased over thirty InterCity Pavilions, of which the Canadian representative was Vancouver.

Twinned Visions of Vancouver and Dubai

“City-making is an art, not a formula,” according to UK-born, Shanghaibased urban theorist Charles Landry.8 What if the terms were reversed? Only recently have cultural theorists turned to considerations of the cultural dimension of urban and regional development. What happens, for example, when contemporary artists engage with spatial-planning and city-building processes? The City of Vancouver ties with Victoria for second place on the Canadian Creativity Index (Ottawa tops the list) devised by US-born, Torontobased urban guru Richard Florida.9 Maraya’s last six years of activity coincided with the build-up to Vancouver’s designation as Cultural Capital of Canada in 2011, just in time for the city’s 125th anniversary. The uae is also Canada’s biggest trade partner in the Middle East, with multi-billion-dollar developments linking it to Canada, including recent purchases by Dubai World (the multinational developer of Dubai Marina) of container terminals in the ports of Vancouver and Halifax. What is the role of various dimensions of culture for urban imaging and marketing, for local economic development and job creation, and for sustaining identity and quality of life for citizens in the twentyfirst century? From American-Canadian urban activist Jane Jacobs to Landry, who coined the term “creative city” in the 1980s, and Florida, who helped popularize the creative cities movement for his “creative class,” these lines of inquiry continue to deeply motivate the Maraya Project, which fundamentally asks: What does it mean to have another version of a place elsewhere?10 In the anthology Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (2011), editors Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong present two contrasting perspectives on the relationship between the concept of “worlding” and the place of postcolonial theory in the engagement with current urbanism. They identify “three styles of being global that, while not exclusive to Asia, seem to be distinctive practices associated with urban development in the region”: modelling (replicable model cities); inter-referencing (the comparison and referencing of cities, as in, for example, the “Vancouverization” of Dubai); and new urban solidarities (new “combinations of entrepreneurial and civic elements straddling class, city, and national divisions”).11 The authors take “worlding” to be a kind of critical postcolonial practice that goes against the grain of the reified, institutional modes of these same categories. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Cha­ kravorty Spivak, in her own canonized and presciently worlding-wary essay, advised vigilance with regard to these categories, seeing them as reinvented signifiers of neo-liberal globalization.12 However, whereas Ong argues the limitations of postcolonial theory to engage with current transnational urban developments, Roy maintains the possibility of “another route through postcolonial urbanism” to study cities as a pressing challenge.13 Undeniably, the project of such an analysis would need to remain critical of the limitations

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posed by postcolonial theory’s emphasis on subaltern agency, to describe and explain urban experiments and formations of development that are seemingly dissociated from previous colonial conditions. In this chapter I explore the main configurations of the Maraya Project to discern its possibilities and limitations as a kind of worlding “research-creation” practice within the conjuncture of the transnational turn in contemporary art and perspectives on postcolonial urbanism. My analysis takes up Roy’s challenge by also examining discursive formations that would inflect and prompt in the cultural imaginary the construct of a “Vancouver al-Arabe” in the current political climate of Canada–Middle East relations. I am particularly interested in the convergences of various kinds of modelling and inter-referencing that would dichotomize discussions of Vancouverization (via the exportation of the “Hongcouver” urban model) and Asianization (via the “Arab world” and Dubai’s positioning as the “Hong Kong of the Middle East”) and ways in which a project such as Maraya might deconstruct “the ‘worlding’ of knowledge.” For Roy, a way to embark on this deconstruction is, to quote Jane Jacobs, by shifting urban analysis from “its historical position of colonial complicity to productively postcolonial spatial narratives.”14 More broadly speaking, I explore the positioning of research-creation as potentially embodying “the postcolonial as a critical, deconstructive methodology,” as Roy suggests, but not without questioning what is postcolonial within the “geographies of authoritative knowledge” and the way postcolonial geographies also concern articulations of subject-power expressed by such platforms.15 This analytical framework would entail keeping in mind the very diverse modalities of empire that have historically shaped Vancouver, Hong Kong, and Dubai, which are seemingly in the distant past but nevertheless underpin contemporary transnational links between these putatively “Asian” cities; hence the foray into a provisional inter-Asian discussion. Ultimately, I see research-creation as a way to critically engage with changing urban contexts and to understand cultural and place identities as well as the cities that are mutually implicated and entangled.

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The Maraya Project: “It’s … very False Creek!”

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“The ancients,” writes Italian novelist Italo Calvino, “built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water. Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down.”16 Imagine how a resident Vancouverite might react upon seeing “almost a perfect clone of downtown Vancouver, right down to the handrails on the seawall, the skinny condo towers on townhouse bases, all about a 100-per-cent artificial, full-scale version of False Creek filled with seawater from the Persian Gulf.”17

Maraya artist Henry Tsang has described the experience as inducing a state of centripetal vertigo: This kind of imagery would effectively feel as if there’s another world just beneath your feet, as if you are standing on top of another world and you have access to it, and you can peer down and hopefully it will suck you into this other experience. There would be this visceral effect, vertiginous at times, using movement and hopefully cinematic trickery. The Maraya Project, whose name is the Arabic word m’raya “‫ ”مرايا‬for “mirror,” “reflection,” or “mirage,” takes precisely this experience as its conceptual premise. Numerous research photographs taken between 2007 and 2011 in Vancouver and Dubai, all in, along, or near False Creek and the Dubai Marina, are displayed as diptychs juxtaposing both sites, which act as mirrors “for publics in both cities to see themselves and their built environments reflected through the lens of contemporary art” (Fig. 12.2). Given the scenario, the mirror

12.2 Maraya, Untitled (Diptych), 2011. c -prints, 61 × 45.3 cm. Photo: Maraya. Courtesy of the artists.

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metaphor seems unavoidable. References abound, from the ancient lakefront city of Valdrada in Calvino’s 1972 classic Invisible Cities to French art historian Hubert Damisch’s 1996 Skyline: The Narcissistic City on European visions of new world cities, and French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s 1991 Strangers to Ourselves, an essay on the foreigners within ourselves.18 In 2011 Maraya’s largest exhibition, comprising nearly all the different project configurations to date, was fittingly held at the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A ), which was located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Even before the 2010 Winter Olympics, real estate developers were moving into the area to build upscale condos, mixed-use residential, retail, and educational projects (for instance, Simon Fraser University’s Woodward’s project – sfuw ) and to shake up the “social mix,” devastatingly transforming, even replacing, what was known as the poorest urban neighbourhood in Canada to one that ironically reinforces Vancouver’s reputation as one of the most unaffordable cities in the world.19 Most obviously and spectacularly meriting the title, however, are the high-density glass and steel residential towers in nearby False Creek, stretching from Chinatown to the West End: the built form and aesthetic of the new Vancouverism, Canada’s own twenty-first-century answer to an outdated Manhattanism. Maximizing long-view corridors, this downtown tower-podium model first appeared in the late 1980s along the entire north shore of Vancouver’s False Creek, the site of the former Expo 86. The inlet of tidal flats was originally the site of Sun’ahk or Snauq, an indigenous village established around 1839 and occupied by the Musqueam, the Tsleil Waututh, and the Squamish. False Creek Flats, as it was called, was designated reserve land (1870–1913) when it was expropriated under the 1876 Indian Act and other legislation for public works (logging, timber harvesting, wood-burning, sawmilling, and armoury). In the early 1880s, Vancouver became an “instant city” invented as part of a lucrative land development scheme by the Canadian Pacific Railway.20 By the 1980s False Creek was “the polluted heart of the city’s manufacturing and wood processing industries,” with side products being abysmally dense fog and smog.21 All of that changed quite drastically following Expo 86 and Hong Kong industrialist Li Ka-shing’s subsequent purchase of the 240 acres for redevelopment according to the 1991 Downtown Plan, which called for massive rezoning to transform the area into a residential zone. At present, real estate development of the Southeast False Creek, home to the 2010 Olympics Athletes’ Village, is doubling previous highest downtown prices for “condos in a resort town.”22 As Lowry and McCann write: “the built form and the changing identity of Vancouver were conditioned by flows of capital, people, architecture, and urban design knowledge from Asia.”23 Today, this sustainable, compact city architecture, itself an import from Hong Kong, which in turn is borrowed from Waikiki resort architecture, dominates what was once territory used by Coast

The City as Portal

Vancouver and Dubai are part of an elite group of what Boddy calls “portal cities,” a new global phenomenon that began with Hong Kong and continued with Miami and Panama City.29 These cities are nothing like each other in

Twinned Visions of Vancouver and Dubai

Salish peoples, and is now a highly visible and lucrative node of Hong Kong investment. As the urban legend goes, this mega urban planning model so impressed Emirati developer Mohamed Alabbar, chairman of Emaar Properties (one of the largest development corporations in the world) and also director general of economic development for the government of Dubai, that a decision was made to invest in its replication. Under construction since 2003, the 650-acre (53 million-square-foot) Dubai Marina quickly became an exemplar of sustainable luxury city planning that would be adopted throughout the Persian Gulf, India, Pakistan, and North America. Upon completion, the two-mile (three-kilometre) “very False Creek” canal city claimed to be the world’s largest artificial marina and is still among the world’s largest master-planned waterfront developments. Given the limited supply of its offshore oil, Dubai escaped poverty by a Singaporean strategy of becoming the key commercial, financial, and recreational hub of the Gulf that was able to survive the 2008 economic downturn. Foreign investments take place in free-trade zones, in English, in US dollars, and with Western-based commercial systems, while elite transnational real estate developers literally plug in “cities within cities” as you would a circuit board, making Dubai, as American urban theorist Mike Davis puts it, “the new global icon of imagineered urbanism”24 with “countless entertainment, shopping, and artificial worlds.”25 Like Concord Pacific Place in Vancouver, which was “developed and marketed as a high-tech communications hub, where apartments would be linked into a global ‘networked society’ though fiber-optics communications,”26 the Dubai Marina is located adjacent to Dubai Media City (the tax-free regional hub for the media industry and organizations, including news agencies and publishing, online media, advertising, production, and broadcast facilities) and Dubai Internet City (a designated free economic zone and global information technology park, with firms such as Microsoft, ibm, hp, Nokia, and Siemens, which offers 100 percent foreign ownership, 100 percent exemption from taxes, 100 percent repatriation of assets and profits, and effortless visa-issuance procedures). Non-oil activities such as finance and tourism, along with real estate development, now make up most of the desert emirate’s gross national product in the form of Brand Dubai. If “Vancouver is to the Overseas Chinese exactly as Miami is to Latin Americans,”27 Brand Dubai makes Dubai the “Miami of the Persian Gulf,”28 or, in Boddy’s terms, a leading “Portal City” in the Middle East.

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12.3 Maraya, Portal (Dubai Marina), 2010. c -print, 45.7 × 61 cm. Photo: Maraya. Courtesy of the artists.

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terms of local experiences of colonialism, threats to empire, and ongoing conflictual relationships between indigenous peoples and settler societies over land. Yet, contrary to Heideggerian de-distancing, there is an oblivious disconnect between the historical imperial worlding of these “New Worlds” and the equally optimistic digital and economical connectedness that is touted today.30 Stacked with “world condos” owned primarily by investment speculators, portal cities, according to Boddy, are “service sector cities that verge on resorts, enclaves of connection and distraction, breaking all the rules of conventional city-building”; “more than ports, airports or even data-ports,” portal cities are “a new type of metropolitan condition.”31 In information and communications technology (ict ) parlance, portals refer to user-driven access to information resources and services. Data are provided based on authentication of the user’s identity keyed in at login, enabling customized self-selection and content “portalling.” An initial configuration of the Maraya Project combined both these meanings by proposing to embed interactive portals or, more precisely, portholes,

12.4 Maraya, Portal (False Creek), 2010. c -print, 45.7 × 61 cm. Photo: Maraya. Courtesy of the artists.

Twinned Visions of Vancouver and Dubai

along the pavement of the twinned promenades to engage pedestrians from the respective cities. Using wireless networking and video-streaming technology to create real-time links between the two seawall walkways, residents and tourists alike have the possibility of “communicating” with each other. When people gather at two or more locations simultaneously, the portal senses their presence and comes to life, streaming live video feeds that allow those in Dubai to see and interact with their counterparts in Vancouver, and vice versa (Figs. 12.3 and 12.4).32 The “live chat” aspect soon gave way to staggered and delayed playback interspersed with pre-recorded sequences, and the grounded portholes were swapped in favour of Zero Halliburton suitcases with customized interiors. These enabled a more reflective experience and mobile practice, the artists being interested in investigating a politics of co-location, to be distinguished from a situation of co-presence, and the process of what they call “neighbourliness,” through both built and virtual spaces. To a certain point, notions of “meetingness” and the cult of “intimate relationships at-a-distance,”

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12.5 Maraya, Maraya Halliburton Case, 2011. Zero Halliburton case, with

lcd superbright monitor, Mac Mini, aluminum, Lexan, router, sensors. Dimensions of the case: 53.3 × 43.2 × 19 cm. Photo: Maraya. Courtesy of the

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artists.

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of mobile lives, explored by Anthony Elliott and John Urry, come into play.33 Retrofitted with a special high-lumen monitor, computer, sensor and router, the Maraya Halliburton prototype cases (two to date) are taken for walks along the two promenades and placed in locations where the artists have placed their own surveillance cameras overhead (Fig. 12.5). Switching between pre-recorded footage and a live video stream of passersby who stop to peer into the cases, they “function as portable portals into another part of the city or another part of the world” – from studio to the Vancouver Museum, and to as far as Art Dubai 2012 and other stopovers. The Zero Halliburton case has been familiar since 1938 as the durable aluminum carry-all case rugged enough to withstand travel in pick-up trucks through oil fields from Oklahoma to Texas and later on in Hollywood, the ideal container for transporting anything from weapons of mass destruction or top-secret documents to cash or arguably more appreciated items. Although no longer manufacturing suitcases, having sold its consumer division in 2006 to ACE Co. Ltd. in Osaka and Tokyo, Halliburton is now one of the world’s largest oilfield services companies, with dual headquarters in Houston and Dubai and sometimes-controversial major projects in the Middle East. This corporate alignment in which the Maraya Halliburton suitcases are invested intensifies the project’s interrogation into ways in which the global network of portal cities constitutes “a milieu through which Asian economic and cultural capital

flows and proliferates during the 1980s and 1990s on into the present.”34 The repurposed suitcases in a sense, then, provide a counterpoint to an emergent transnational urban geography, in the case of Maraya’s ground-transported portals, literally from below. Mirrored Cities: Complicated Sameness

Twinned Visions of Vancouver and Dubai

Perhaps conveying the most immediate sense of the visually striking similarities between the two waterfront sites are Maraya’s different wall and floor projections. Shown at Centre A , the looped video footage, shot from a boat that followed the False Creek seawall and the Marina Walk in Dubai three years apart (2008 and 2011), is simultaneously presented, using a split-screen format and a computer program that switches between the two periods and locations that make up the twelve possible combinations. “The rhythm of the switching is based on a musical structure that evokes the melancholy of these controlled and restrictive environments: 12 bar blues in 12/8 time at 160 bpms, repeating after 8 verses.” The quick sequencing of the surface images, sometimes twinning the same city, reinforces the likeness of the two sites, speaking at once to the interchangeability of generic cities as well as its to ultimate impossibility. Certainly, other similarities between the two cities make for easy comparison. Both cities are tourist-oriented port cities as much as portal cities: Vancouver is Canada’s gateway city to Asia; Dubai is uae ’s global gateway city. Adjacent to the Dubai Marina, west of the Persian Gulf shore, the Jebel Ali port, near the Palm Islands, was the world’s largest man-made harbour and container port when it was completed in 1976. The Port of Vancouver is Canada’s largest port by tonnage and the fourth largest in North America. Both are postcolonial cities of the British Empire, as is the urban form’s progenitor, Hong Kong. Vancouver’s history of indigenous/settler relations has unfolded in the former British colony of British Columbia, which became, in 1870, a province of Canada, itself formed as a country and dominion within the British Empire in 1867 and gaining political independence with the Constitution Act as recently as 1982. Under the protection of Britain (against the Ottoman Empire) by the “Exclusive Agreement” of 1892, Dubai gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1971. Until recently, all the local land in the small emirate has been controlled by the Sheikhs. Dubai now has bachelor societies of men, the vast majority from Pakistan and India, who come to work in the “City of Gold,” joining thousands of indentured foreign workers who provide vital services in capacities ranging from labourers (a quarter of the labour force is employed in the building boom), maintenance staff, secretaries, sales clerks, and bus drivers to junior and midlevel managers, lawyers, doctors, and accountants. Roughly 71 percent of the

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population, this indentured invisible labour force runs the hotels, the civil services, and the utilities and commercial businesses to support the binge mobile lifestyles of the elite; but as immigrant workers, they cannot become citizens, have few rights to speak of, and are allowed no trade unions – and 99 percent of them are immediately deportable.35 They live alone in corporate housing or shared apartments in poorer neighbourhoods such as Satwa or Deira. In comparison, many of their more affluent British and American colleagues live in upscale, gated communities, such as Dubai Marina, with their families. Vancouver’s Chinatown bachelor societies, made up mostly of Chinese men, some fifteen thousand of whom came to “Gold Mountain” (gum san) in the late 1800s, undertook the dangerous work of building the Canadian Pacific Railway. In 2006 the Canadian government offered an apology for the head tax levied on Chinese immigrants between 1885 and 1923 and the subsequent restriction on Chinese immigration that lasted until 1947, acknowledging the contribution made by Chinese labourers to that most important of nation-building enterprises, the railway. More recently, Vancouver is seen to be Asianized (via “monster houses” and the “Hongcouver” high-rise boom), while Dubai (more specifically, the Dubai Marina neighbourhood) is being Vancouverized. In its heyday (just a few years ago, really), Dubai was the world’s largest building site, and largely recovered from the 2008 global financial crisis, with the current speculative condo boom sustained by foreign investors made possible primarily thanks to legal changes in 2001 that allowed non-Emiratis to buy property on long-term leased land and to issue condo buyers “right of residence.” Just as “Pacific Place and its surrounding environs became a base for a growing class of wealthy, footloose, cosmopolitan, ‘flexible citizens’ and ‘pied-à-terre’ subjects,” speculative investors and Canadian non-residents representing “Vancouver’s only new source of rental housing in a decade,” sales at Dubai Marina are not primarily aimed at uae citizens, but at semi-permanent, well-heeled international business residents.36 The real estate market, already fuelled by tourism, was further boosted when the Emirate of Dubai granted foreigners permission to purchase property in 2001. The following year, Dubai announced a “freehold revolution,” unique in the region, which allows foreigners to buy luxury property outright and not just as ninety-nine-year leases. Two of Dubai’s sister cities, as it were, are Hong Kong and Vancouver. In sum, a comparative description of similarities can seem endless. However, differential mobilities (systematic differences in the terrain creating uneven forms of access and exclusionary striations of power) are also evident in the antagonistic perspectives generated by the Maraya Project, crucially raising questions concerning different publics, social and gendered strata, and specificities of former colonial settler histories vis-à-vis ex-protectorate autonomy.

Vertical Gated Communities

At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored. The twin cities are not equal, because nothing that exists or happens in Valdrada is symmetrical.37

Twinned Visions of Vancouver and Dubai

In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, readers come to realize that all the accounts of exotic places as given to Kublai Khan by Marco Polo are actually simply different perspectives on his own city of Venice. While Maraya subtly insists that Vancouver and Dubai may appear to be alike but are far from identical or without discrepancy on many levels, their research-creation is not immune to projection. The diegetic worlds (for they are constructed, to all intents and purposes) invoked through Maraya’s photographs and videos, then, are neither in Vancouver nor in Dubai but partially in both, establishing not one or two but a series of city images that are constantly in contestation, and fundamental for reworlding. As the artists put it, “Maraya invites multiple publics into the many visual and textual discourses that shapes our sense of here in all its uncanny similarities and its disarmingly blatant differences to a there.” Images from Vancouver, for example, reiterate the Asian miracle on the one hand, and, on the other, a multicultural array of cultural differences bifurcated by “Super, Natural BC ” as a “white man’s province,” and instances of indigeneity and “Asiancy” (Roy Miki’s term).38 In this, Lowry and McCann make a case through Henry Tsang’s 1997 public art installation on the False Creek walkway, which spells out its title Welcome to the Land of Light in both English and Chinook Jargon (Chinuk Wawa), the latter being the pidgin, trader, hybrid language of English, French, and Nootkan, the lingua franca of the Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century.39 Critics such as Boddy have been lamenting False Creek’s “fate as a dormitory suburb’” (“dedowntownification” – condos replacing downtown jobs) with its downtown future as a “resort,” “not a true metropolis,” and its “vertical gated communities” as “shaping a Penticton [referring to retirement homes in the Okanagan Valley] with point towers.”40 Vancouver’s condo-building craze, which has forced out its middle class, in fact awaits collapse as its property market overheats (“Canada now has the highest stock of unsold condos since the early 1990s”).41 Like Narcissus, the city risks falling victim to a vanity fuelled by its own reflected image. Maraya would insist that by holding a mirror to Dubai, Vancouver might just gain an altered perspective and a greater understanding of itself before matters get worse. A serious consequence of the luxury real estate development industry has been the questionable stewardship of Vancouver’s most important public space, False Creek. Public spaces in cities

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operate on many different registers but in the main they are urban entertainment spaces in the wider sense, appreciated by tourists and local residents alike. However, entertainment consumption patterns logically vary depending on who actually constitutes these socio-cultural groups. Vancouver’s seawall, which runs all around the peninsula, with easy park, beach, and waterfront access, has long been renowned for being 100 percent accessible to the public. Yet, already the section between the Marinaside Crescent and Beach neighbourhoods “has become a parking lot for 1,280 seldom used yachts,” transforming North False Creek, at least, “into one big marina” and possibly locking in its future “as a resort for the wealthy and the aged,” one much less welcoming of different echelons of society.42 By contrast, the seven-kilometre pedestrian Dubai Marina Walk, with cafés and restaurants along the waterfront and dozens of luxury yachts and fancy speedboats moored up alongside, save for one publicly accessible path with views to Palm Jumeirah archipelago, is undeniably one vast gated community reserved for moneyed migrants from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, India, Pakistan, Iran, and China, and for Westerners who own second homes. With hotel landscapes and private development taking up more and more space, in many other areas the categorically “invisible majority” labour class are excluded from access to the beaches and the sea.

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Postcolonial Urbanism: Structures of Invisibility

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Luxury vertical cities that combine commercial, residential, and transportation infrastructure within one mega-complex create the impossibility of escaping from surveillance. In Dubai, state control and surveillance “in the workplace and in places of leisure is extensive and varied,” overlapping with “corporate interests and power”; in malls and workplaces, “extensive regimes of surveillance are implemented”; and the mechanisms of self-policing and self-censorship extend spaces of control “even where there is no overt mechanism of direct surveillance.”43 For migrants on work visas, fear of deportation is reason enough. Oscillating between breathtaking views that tower over the streets below and banal shots of quotidian acts on the ground (enacting Michel de Certeau’s tactic of walking in the city to counter the Panoramic City that persuades from the top down44), the images of seawall activity captured by Maraya simultaneously signal privilege and restricted access, as well as the absence of the majority of the population upon whose labour the luxury lifestyles of the privileged depend. In contrast to ground-up views, images shot from numerous rooftops and balconies overlooking the two promenades, some from penthouse suites, afford an aerial view of the city from the perspective of an

urban planner, master-planning architect, developer, or even domestic worker. According to the Maraya artists: “These are views that few who inhabit the city can experience, and given how many of these condominiums are seldom occupied, magnify both the fullness and emptiness of these towers.” Suffice it to say, there are very limited signs of social mobility in terms of the range of classes who frequent the area depicted in the Dubai images. In this place of transit, “geographic mobility is directly linked to social mobility.” Although people employed in servicing “are also often on the move from other places, in a mobile and mobilizing capitalism,” little is seen of the women, the majority

12.6 Maraya, Maraya Sisyphean Cart (Dubai), 2014. Documentation of interactive artwork and Dubai participant. Exhibited at 221-A as part of a constellation of photographs, each 20.3 × 30.5 cm. Photo: Maraya. Courtesy of the artists.

of whom are from South and Southeast Asia. Maraya captures few images of the female domestic servants who are most visible on the streets and Marina Walk of Dubai, their bodies “commodified in and through moving about and being moved about” in what Elliott and Urry call “binge mobility” (60 to 65 percent of Dubai’s population are men, making the streets predominantly a place of men).45 Notably, what is cleared, or cleaned, from view are brownskinned men who, hired within their home countries through employment contractors, have their passports held by the companies they work for and are therefore unable to travel outside the uae without permission. At most, then, Maraya’s images of traffic along Dubai’s promenade shore up the misleading reports of the multi-ethnic cosmopolitanism touted by the tourism industry, exposing instead the highly segregated circumstances of the site in question (Fig. 12.6). What are seen are representatives of the native population of uae nationals, constituting the 15 percent leisure class,and pampered mercenaries, including more than a hundred thousand British expatriates. Brief glimpses are picked up of white cotton dishdashas (long-sleeved, ankle-length robes), headscarves, and shopping bags. Seeing What Is Not There: Muslimness

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The only way to make sense of Dubai is to never forget that it isn’t real. It’s a fable, a fairy tale, like The Arabian Nights. More correctly, it’s a cautionary tale.46

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The moniker “Vancouver al-Arabe” may conjure up images of Dubai as a Middle East enclave already charged with identity politics of difference and Islamophobia in a post-9/11 and Arab Spring world, with Iran and Afghanistan just across the Persian Gulf. However, Dubai is clearly unabashed at having made great efforts to downplay Islam, even in the structuring of “the physical landscape,” its skyline of superlative high-rises containing not “a single reference to Arab or Muslim architectural design.”47 According to Chad Haines, one of Brand Dubai’s “major components is a veiling of its Muslimness”; moreover, the uae regime of “modular liberties” is based on the rigorous spatial segregation of economic functions and ethnically circumscribed social classes, religious orientations, and nationality class: “Brand Dubai … is not just about selling Dubai, but constructing segregated landscapes and asserting power through the control over labor/migration.”48 This “veiling” of Muslimness and the careful segregation that help to brand Dubai’s image as modern rather than Muslim further underscore the structures of invisibility that Maraya’s visual archive cannot capture. As Roy reminds us, “To read Dubai as Development, as Reason, is to confront the aspirations and

Twinned Visions of Vancouver and Dubai

limits of postcolonial worldiness.” Brand Dubai’s ambiguity is “one where the city occupies an unstable position in different worlding frames: Asia, Arab, success, speculation, excess and crisis.”49 One of Maraya’s most daunting challenges was to represent the city from below while looking at it from above. How, for example, is the representation of a transnationally imported model of relevance to the Pakistani and Indian subaltern communities in Vancouver and Dubai? Could Vancouver and Dubai be Asian cities that, as Roy puts it, were once hysterically “depicted as unreasonable megacities, concentrations of poverty and misery, [are] now being reframed as unreasonably hyperdevelopment, concentrations of urban megalomania”?50 That the slick exhibitions by Maraya seem to support the characterization of a world space entirely at the mercy of reactionary market norms, accompanied by a rhetoric of excess with which the project struggles to contend, may not be a fundamental aspect of the project in the context of this discussion. To see it in such terms would be to ignore the Maraya organizers’ numerous attempts beyond the visual to test and provide openings for new publics and for a creative praxis as both exchange and counterpoint to the uncritical worlding of Asian cities such as their own. Thus, Maraya’s displays, with their “cheerily promotional character [where] endless sunshine glints off glass towers and green water, white yachts gleam in spotless marinas, individuals stroll at their leisure,” as one art critic put it, undeniably “could be mistaken for a real-estate developer’s display at a condo pre-sale centre.”51 It equally must be argued that to fully grasp the scope of the project and the issue of the lack of minority representation, the extensive public programs organized around the theoretical project and integral to it must be taken into account. These activities included a plethora of critical reflections in the form of transactions, exchanges, instances, and interventions, as well as the participation of nearly a hundred students (80 percent from Vancouver, 20 percent from Dubai). Many of these activities manifested as contributions to the “path making” visualization applet within Maraya’s online platform (Fig. 12.7). Only in this way can one of Maraya’s key objectives – to “make visible the efforts that go into making a transnational city” – be carried through. Vermont-based artist Matthew Whitney, for example, performed a walk of a Sisyphean nature in May 2012 entirely using his Reflection Carrier, “a scraggly log with mirrors attached to each end,” to guide his movements through Vancouver’s seawall. The device “forces strain, focus, a filtering of periphery and multiple perspectives.” Other walks and workshops along the False Creek waterfront also critically engaged participants with ways in which the urban environment’s composition of glass and steel buildings and sidewalks, waterfront walkways, painted streets and crosswalks forces upon the body a mediated, subjective environment through which it must continually navigate. Meanwhile, Dubai is undergoing the landfill construction

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12.7 Maraya, Maraya online platform (screenshot), 2012. Flash-based application. www.marayaprojects.com. Photo: Maraya. Courtesy of the artists.

of numerous artificial islands in the Gulf modelled after a world map, with twenty-seven or so different local identities ranging from Italy to Thailand. As “the world puts the map on Dubai,” where does Vancouver fit in?52 The Maraya Project fundamentally questions the ability of global remix culture to allow for a re-examination of worlding as a concept, making room for its influence as a transformative and radical force in contemporary art practice.

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Twinned Cities

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The seawall becomes the stage where the “walker” is the subject, the actor who creates the narrative, with the potential for engagement or indifference, identification or conflict. The seawall is seen as a social circuit within which we, as actual or potential participants, are implicated in the acts of reading, mapping and re-orientation. In so doing, it begins to court a spatial dissonance – a here that is also there and not only here, a there that is also here and not only there.  For “isea 2015: Disruption” in Vancouver, there were two Maraya carts – one pulled along Vancouver’s seawall, and one displayed in the front gallery. Literally reflecting the city from below, they are seen to be dragged simultaneously along Vancouver’s seawall and the Dubai Marina as one projected

split screen video in the gallery. In the video the automated ptz camera searches for connections, similarities, and anomalies, generatively remixing video-captures from both twinned locales (Fig. 12.8). “Each clip would play until one of the two clips reached another camera position, then jump to the other screen, to be replaced by another clip with the camera aimed in the same direction.” The proposal thus continues the focus on the seawall walkway as a significant common trope linking the two sites “as an interurban promenade that stretches across twelve time zones that not only connects but also blurs the line between here and elsewhere.” Significantly, it is also a provocation to “consider and engage with the built forms that each city has inherited, transformed, and traded with other twenty-first-century urban waterfronts.” As it turned out, although Maraya did not attend, “isea 2016: Cultural R>evolution” was held in Hong Kong – the third port, or more accurately, portal city integral to this narrative – ostensibly pegging the new media art project’s Sisyphean challenge to issues concerning the sustainability of liveable cities. Conclusion

Our online platform allows every viewer and contributor the ability to personalize (remix) each glance, each step, each paver, creating paired images that together delineate a metaphorical seawall that spans the globe. Within these user-generated articulations, images and their parts are repurposed, connections made, commonalities revealed. These are the true moments and spots of exchange. These spots glow and flicker, suggesting the simultaneous coming together of people, places and points of public-ness.

12.8 Maraya, Maraya Sisyphean Cart (still), 2015.

hd video, generative remix of 11 hours, 42 minutes, captured from the Dubai Marina and Vancouver False Creek seawalls. Recorded over many days, spanning 2014 and 2015. Photo: Maraya. Courtesy of the artists.

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In this chapter I have attempted to trace “models-in-circulation,” the material and discursive practices of inter-referencing within the Vancouver–Hong Kong–Dubai nexus, to discuss the Maraya Project as a worlding practice that would enable an alternative perspective on transnational urbanism in the inter-Asia context. Drawing from art historian Whitney Davis, I have tried to track “series, the projected rules that govern them, and their unavoidable devolutions and unintended consequences in differently governed series, in ungoverned series, and in new series,” in the hope of learning something about “what the worlds are.” For Davis, “reworlding can occur whenever and wherever series devolve, just as a world is consolidated whenever a series smoothly replicates.”53 I have argued that the Maraya Project has the potential to shift the purview, as Mark Crinson expresses it, “from the personal experience of being formed under racialized regimes of difference, to an interrogation of how one’s place in the world and the properties of that world itself are formed,” but without losing sight of the making within these spaces that render difference altogether indeterminable.54 Until 2017 the Maraya Project’s experimental online platform, which contains thousands of images and dozens of hours of video footage chronicling the construction of both waterfront communities from 2007–11, invites publics to engage with the large scope of Maraya artworks, research documents and discussions, and “to build digital paths and connections between publics both here (wherever you are) and there (presumably Dubai) through online participation.” The Maraya website realistically acknowledges the project’s ultimate goal: “Time will tell if this experimental collective art-making online can actually bring about ‘true moments and spots of exchange.’”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche sur la societé et la culture du Québec. The Maraya Project (2007–11) was supported by a five-year Research/Creation in Fine Arts Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I want to thank the artists and the anonymous reviewers for their generous contributions to and insightful comments about this text. This chapter is an updated and expanded version of an earlier article, “The Maraya Project: Research-Creation, Inter-reference and the Worlding of Asian Cities,” published in Third Text 28, 1 (2014): 15–31.

Urban Art Histories (in Canada) J o han n e Sloan

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ancouver was the only Canadian city included in the 2013 Phaidon Press book entitled Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-gardes. The book’s brief introduction announces that each of the twelve featured cities has its own “distinct avant-garde,”1 while the Phaidon website at the time of publication encouraged readers to “forget New York, London and Paris – the old establishment is being challenged by a new order of art communities seizing the contemporary art agenda around the world.”2 The local art scene in Vancouver was thus presented as part of a global reconfiguration, a “new order” whereby contemporary art is something that can spring up simultaneously in Bogota, Beirut, Johannesburg, etc., as well as in Vancouver (the only other North American city was San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the lone European city was Cluj, Romania).3 While the selection of cities in this book was left unexplained, the intersection of contemporary art and cities is a genuinely compelling topic that deserves art-historical attention, not only as a globally oriented phenomenon, but in national contexts as well. In this chapter, therefore, I take up the challenge of identifying so-called art cities in Canada, introducing three case studies: Montreal and Winnipeg, in addition to Vancouver. I chose these cities because of their dynamic contemporary art scenes, sustained over several decades,4 and because each city has acquired some sort of international profile. These case studies allow me to explore how the concept of “urban art histories” might challenge the paradigm of a national art history, and how a focus on cities can lead to a legitimate art-historical methodology. It remains to be seen whether a terminology of “art cities” and “distinctive avant-gardes” is indeed appropriate, either nationally or internationally; I also want to ask whether those terms are commensurate with the concept of multiple “artworlds” recently put forward by the art historian Hans Belting. Art history and nationhood have certainly been deeply interconnected in the Western tradition. Donald Preziosi has described art history as “a social and epistemological technology which has been essential to the conception,

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fabrication, and maintenance of (originally European, subsequently all) modern nation states.”5 In other words, histories of art were nationalized alongside the rise of modern statehood, art thereby becoming a useful instrument for forging a sense of collective identity. This is certainly demonstrable in Canada, looking back. Canadian art historians have explained and critiqued the ideological machinations through which a local manifestation of modernism (the early twentieth-century landscape painters known as the Group of Seven) was valorized and put into circulation as a national art; reproductions of their wilderness imagery appeared across institutional, governmental, and educational contexts, eventually becoming, through this reiteration, an unavoidable pictorial discourse.6 In contrast, contemporary art in Canada has not, for the most part, become embedded in nationalist narratives; nor do contemporary art and artists often figure in the imaginative work of nationhood, even if funding for many art institutions and individual art practices continues to emanate from Ottawa.7 Governor General’s medals are ceremoniously awarded to late-career artists, and there are a few privately funded, high-profile prizes with an explicitly cross-country purview.8 Every two years an artist is called upon to “represent” Canada at the Venice Biennale, although that international role is anomalous since most biennales, art fairs, and other large-scale international art events do not operate according to pre-existing national slots. It is unfortunate, in a sense, that the very effective system of aesthetic education and ideological reinforcement that accompanied modern art was not reinvented for the contemporary era; twenty-first-century Canadian schoolchildren are not systematically introduced to the queer conceptualism of General Idea (1967–94), the dematerialized practice of Janet Cardiff (b. 1957), or the re-mixed objects made by Indigenous artist Brian Jungen (b. 1970). Meanwhile, the country’s artist-run centres can rarely afford to send artworks and artists through a cross-country network. This means that when a discourse linking art and nationhood surfaces today, it often seems outdated, nostalgic, or conservative.9 (The art/ nationhood question plays itself out in other ways in Quebec, as I mention in the section on Montreal.) While cities such as New York and Paris have repeatedly been the object of scrutiny by historians of art and culture, only recently has a geographically expanded repertoire of cities become central to the understanding of contemporary art. An important milestone in this regard was the 2001 Tate Modern exhibition Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis that proposed Bombay, Lagos, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo as distinctive urban hubs, alongside London, Vienna, Paris, and New York. Otherwise it is the worldwide proliferation of biennales over the past twenty years or so that has increasingly called attention to cities. Biennales are often site-specific

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events, which is to say that artists and artworks are invited to engage directly with architectural, historical, and social aspects of city life. The curator Hou Hanru, who has been responsible for a number of large-scale international exhibitions, including the Istanbul, Shanghai, and Gwangju biennales, argues for the importance of urban environments for contemporary art, because cities provide “a space where global-local negotiations take place.”10 Another highly influential curator, Okwui Enwezor, in a contribution to the book Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, rejects the notion that the present-day staging of biennale exhibitions is merely a neocolonial extension of Eurocentric principles. Instead, he says these are fields of struggle, “transnational mediating systems” that engage in each separate instance with local “forms of civic politics and identity.”11 The contemporary intersection of art and cities can also be illuminated by studies of earlier historical periods. Addressing the role of print culture in sixteenth-century Venice, for instance, Bronwen Wilson explains that an earlier “image of civic consensus” gave way to imagery expressing how “identities in early modern Venice were increasingly shaped through exchanges with outsiders.”12 And if we thus recognize that cities have long been sites of transnational or cosmopolitan encounters, the commodification of urban space becomes evident in T.J. Clark’s account of nineteenth-century Paris; Clark describes the modern city reconfigured as spectacle, to be experienced “simply as an image, something occasionally and casually consumed in spaces expressly designed for the purpose.”13 These art historians assume that artists actively contribute to the collective project that is the city, and indeed this approach overlaps with a broader terrain of interdisciplinary research, interested in how “urban imaginaries” are continually evolving. In the words of Andreas Huyssen, “an urban imaginary marks first and foremost the way city dwellers imagine their own city as the place of everyday life, the site of inspiring traditions and continuities as well as the scene of histories of destruction, crime, and conflicts of all kinds.”14 One of the most influential theorists in this domain has been Henri Lefebvre, who brought a Marxist understanding to his analysis of how economic and technocratic forces determine urban life. But Lefebvre also argued, in The Urban Revolution and elsewhere, that the city is a site of genuine social transformation and renewal, generated through the everyday actions of its inhabitants. He went as far as to suggest that the very term “the city” should be avoided, because it implies a coherent totality; “the complexity of the urban phenomenon,” he says, is not that of an ‘object.’”15 Because the city is inherently an unfinished piece of work (oeuvre), a work-in-progress, the terms “urbanism” and “the urban phenomenon” are deployed, to emphasize on-going processes. The early twentieth-century insights of Georg Simmel and Walter

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Benjamin can be said to support this methodological position; both were fascinated by the sights and sensations of a city, its inhabitants’ daily comings and goings, and other ephemeral manifestations of urban life. As Simon Parker notes, “Simmel constructs his vision of metropolitan society by observing micro-level behaviour,” while Benjamin is famous for his mode of gathering urban fragments (whether by zeroing in on street names or tracking the very figure of the ragpicker), regarding these as repositories of collective memory.16 The specificity of the city as an object of study has also been addressed by the urban theorist Saskia Sassen, and in her case the city is explicitly compared to the nation; she writes: “the space of the city is a far more concrete space for politics than that of the nation.”17 This comment drives a wedge between nationhood, which perpetuates itself largely through symbolic attributes, and the possibility of urban knowledge gained by descending into the streets, into a social environment that is materially rich and adamantly concrete. And while Sassen is concerned with the plight of politics in this passage, I want to suggest that her words can be reoriented toward art. We might then ask: is the space of the city a more concrete space for art than that of the nation? A city cannot be regarded as an empty container within which art or any other cultural activity takes place. Cities are methodologically challenging as objects of study, for any discipline or field of inquiry, because at any given moment a city is made up of a complex network of actions, gestures, contingent encounters, and negotiations. It is surely by drawing on such aspects of urban theory that the field of “urban art histories” can begin to take shape as an intellectually substantive alternative to the powerful paradigm of national art histories. It is significant too, that Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver are cities with unique characteristics, because an urban-oriented art-historical approach must persuasively explain how artworks come to be embedded in a particular city’s history and morphology, its social relations, and cultural patterns. Before turning to my three case studies, I should note that for emerging artists scattered across the vast territory of the Canadian nation-state, there is no city that serves as the obvious portal to either national or international recognition and acclaim. Toronto is Canada’s largest city and Ottawa is the capital (and home to the National Gallery of Canada), but neither has ever functioned as a national centre for artistic activity,18 and Toronto is not where young artists from Montreal, Winnipeg, or Vancouver imagine themselves “breaking through.” Until fairly recently it seemed that the embrace of a discrete urban identity was less pronounced in Toronto than in the three cities I’m bringing forward – perhaps because each of these has a more vexed relationship to Canadian nationhood. The rise of a Toronto-specific urban consciousness is evident, however, in recent events and discussions: the This is Paradise conference (2015) announced the intention to “explore the relationship between

the urban context and local artistic cultures in Canada’s largest city,”19 Philip Monk has published a book claiming radical avant-garde status for Toronto in 1970s,20 and there has been increasing public discussion about the possibility of a Toronto biennale.21 Montreal

Urban Art Histories (in Canada)

Montreal’s uniqueness as an “art city” is inevitably linked to its complex linguistic ecology. French is officially the language of work and public life in Quebec, but negotiations over language occur in the city’s art institutions as they do in innumerable everyday contexts in Montreal; every time I leave my home to enter the public realm, I must consider whether to speak French or English to a neighbour, a colleague, or a bank teller, for instance. While Montreal is sometimes described as a linguistically fractured city, it is more interesting to consider it as deeply permeated by acts of translation, in terms proposed by Sherry Simon: “most of the translation that takes place in the city is covert or implicit … processes of translation take place below the surface of the city, irrigating its cultural life like underground rivers.”22 If translation is thus understood as an imaginative undercurrent, it can be argued that this has been culturally productive throughout much of Montreal’s modern and contemporary periods. One can point to certain galleries, magazines, art schools, artist-run centres, and social scenes that have operated primarily in French or English, but in many cases an intermingling is evident. Notable in this respect was Parachute magazine, the influential, internationally circulating art publication that was based in Montreal during its run from 1975 to 2007. Parachute presented (untranslated) English and French texts side by side, and several other Montreal-based art magazines have carried on this tradition of (some degree of ) bilinguality: Ciel variable (CV ), ETC Media, Espace, and esse, for instance. Sociologist Guy Bellavance has commented on the cultural impact of Parachute, that its agenda was “bilingual, multicultural, internationalist and eventually ‘postmodern,’” and that this clearly “undercut the dominant trend towards Québécois specificity and authenticity in the arts.”23 This magazine thus exemplified an attitude whereby the city’s art scene could flourish and establish international connections without being yoked to Québécois nationhood. It is true that the notion of “Québécois art” still has cultural momentum, as compared to its Canadian counterpart, surely because Québécois nationhood remains a partially attained, aspirational project for many people – even if separate statehood is not, apparently, a majority concern. The tension that can arise between nation and city is evident in the story of the rebooted and rebranded Biennale de Montréal (bnl mtl ) (Fig. 13.1). After two iterations of a Triennale Québécoise (2008, 2011), which featured

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13.1  Posters for La Biennale de Montréal, 2014–15. Design: Uniform. Courtesy of Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and La Biennale de Montréal.

the latest art from across the province, this event was cancelled by the city’s Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (mac ) in favour of an internationally oriented biennale. (A Montreal-based biennial exhibition had in fact existed for some years, but without solid institutional or state funding.24) Press releases announced the global visibility that the museum was overtly aiming for in 2014: this event was supposed to become “one of the 20 or 25 biennales that you absolutely have to see worldwide,” and it would “make Montreal a prime destination for contemporary art.”25 It is too soon to judge whether this grandiose ambition will be realized, but it is telling that a global-city stature is being sought through the sacrifice of nationally defined (that is, Québécois) art. A number of other questions remain unanswered: Does the Biennale successfully call attention to the social, spatial, or architectural aspects of the city? Will it foster dialogue and exchange between Montreal artists and international artists? The mac ’s takeover of the Biennale also involved its relocation; whereas previous incarnations of this exhibition had often occupied vacant malls, old schools, and industrial locations outside the downtown core, now the Montreal Biennale joins other large-scale international arts events located in the city’s recently branded “Quartier des Spectacles,” a specially designated area where festivals of jazz, comedy, gastronomy, among others, succeed each other with regularity throughout the year – every one of these staged with much fanfare at a closed circuit of indoor and outdoor venues. In this sense the bnl

mtl now contributes to the centralization and spectacularization of culture

Urban Art Histories (in Canada)

in Montreal. In contrast, Montreal’s vibrant art scene has long thrived through a decentralized network of small-scale galleries, urban interventions, and ephemeral events. Here it is worth considering T.J. Clark’s insight about the commodification of urban space, that “the spectacle is never an image mounted securely and finally in place; it is always an account of the world competing with others, and meeting the resistance of different, sometimes tenacious forms of social practice.”26 International events such as the photography and new media biennale Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (in existence since 1989), and the annually held Art souterrain exhibition are interesting in part because they are staged in a variety of buildings, sites, and neighbourhoods. This embeddedness in the urban environment complements what is, in broader terms, an important feature of contemporary art in Montreal: a sustained, ongoing debate about public art and the nature of public space.27 Artist-run centres and galleries such as Dare-Dare, Skol, and Quartier Éphemère have been committed to sponsoring temporary artistic projects in spaces outside galleries, often in interstitial and/ or contested parts of the city. Dare-Dare is unique in the sense that its members opted some years ago to abandon their rented gallery space entirely, instead strategically inserting themselves (and their signature caravan) into key locations for extended periods of time in order to engage with the site’s architectural or natural features and generate dialogue with its inhabitants.28 After initially setting up in a deteriorating downtown square in 2004 and then in a would-be park, Dare-Dare was moored until May 2015 on the fringes of the Quartier des Spectacles, sponsoring projects that unsettled (even if in small ways) the tourist-brochure cliché that Montrealers enter public space primarily to enact their irrepressible joie de vivre (Fig. 13.2). The “urban imaginary” of Montrealers thus includes critical perspectives on public space, whether in object-based practices such as Cynthia Girard’s (b. 1969) paintings and cloth assemblages inspired by the massive student protest of 2012,29 or as ephemeral and performative works such as the banquets for homeless people organized by the artists’ collective atsa (founded 1997).30 Two contributions to the 2014 Biennale de Montréal are worth calling attention to for their reconsideration of the city’s modern heyday in the 1960s. (This turn to the past subtly subverted the Biennale’s theme of “L’avenir” – literally meaning “the future” but translated as “looking forward” for the event’s official title.) Étienne Tremblay-Tardif ’s (b. 1984) Signage Matrix for the Refection of the Turcot Exchange, 2014, focused on a 1960s-era futuristic elevated highway that is now a dangerously entropic concrete monument; the artist’s montage of “signage” was polyvocal and activist in its delineation of urban space. Space Fiction & The Archive, 2012, the work of Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen (b. 1979), featured

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13.2  The artist-run centre Dare-Dare’s caravan in downtown Montreal, 2014. Courtesy of Dare-Dare and Stéphane Cocke.

a film about space aliens, Expo 67 (the world’s fair held in Montreal during the summer of 1967), and Canada’s shifting policies relating to immigration and multiculturalism. The contribution of Nguyen (a trilingual VietnameseCanadian woman born in Montreal, who has studied in New York and lives in Europe) calls attention to the fact that negotiations over language and culture in Montreal can never be reduced to a problem of two nations, or of French versus English. These artworks thus speak to the promise held out by the Biennale de Montréal, beyond the rhetoric of making a top-twenty list: that artists and visitors alike can be both rooted in the city and globally aware, attuned to the materiality of the urban environment and also open to cosmopolitan encounters. As Alan Blum has written, “the cosmopolitan city … penetrates the imagination of the people of the world as an object of desire.”31

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In the spring of 2011 the Paris gallery La Maison Rouge hosted the group exhibition My Winnipeg, which brought together the work of seventy-one artists from that Canadian city (Fig. 13.3). It is worth mentioning, firstly, that worldly Parisians were ready to be seduced by the cultural production of remote and wintry Winnipeg, and secondly, that La Maison Rouge opted to keep that possessive determiner “My” for subsequent city-based exhibitions: My Jo’burg,

(Johannesburg) (2013), and My Buenos Aires (2015). It was Guy Maddin (b. 1956) who first used the title My Winnipeg; his 2007 feature film of that name has been justly celebrated for its remarkable fusion of personal memories and collectively experienced history. In the essays written for the Paris exhibition catalogue, the notion of a city that belongs simultaneously to multiple individuals and groups was expanded and multiplied. Maddin’s My Winnipeg introduces a present-day protagonist having difficulty tearing himself away from his home town, even as he seems haunted by the past. The film recreates the home Maddin lived in as a child, with actors standing in for family members (most wonderfully, the aged film-noir actress

13.3  Cover of My Winnipeg exhibition catalogue, for exhibition held at La Maison Rouge gallery in Paris, 23 June–25 September 2011. Courtesy of La Maison Rouge.

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Ann Savage playing the matriarch). Beyond these vestiges of a personal past, moments in the city’s history, its folkloric heroes, and its now-lost architectural heritage, surge up only to be subjected to surreal narrative distortion and a range of cinematic effects. And yet Maddin persuasively creates a sense of pathos around the potent desire to summon up and exorcise the past. His films and film-installations have featured séances, spirits, and ghostly presences – and he explicitly links these to the city he inhabits: “to me Winnipeg is a supernatural city.” He has also referred to Winnipeg as “an extremely nostalgic city,” and a “delirious metropolis” whose “streets are full of drowsy and forgetful wanderers.”32 If this idiosyncratic view of the city were Maddin’s alone, that would be interesting enough, but that is certainly not the case. Many others (from among the city’s artists, filmmakers, curators, and writers) have claimed that Winnipeg is a “mythological place,” a “dream city,” a “gothic” city.33 This vocabulary, pointing to mysterious forces that artists tap into, has been nurtured within the city itself and has become central to the Winnipeg brand as it’s been successfully exported. One young artist who left the city to study reported: “Mentioning that I’m from Winnipeg has never harmed me. Quite the opposite – it is a rustic, oddly exotic pedigree. I could not have predicted that hailing from this frayed, downmarket loser of a city would elicit (such) perky reactions.”34 This self-mythologizing and evocation of the supernatural isn’t just talk. Winnipeg artists have collectively produced a sequence of fantastical, comic, and alternate worlds, which include: the visionary environments painted by Eleanor Bond (b. 1948); the pantheon of creatures invented by Marcel Dzama (b. 1974) and other ex-members of the Royal Art Lodge (1996–2008);35 the queer taxonomies of Daniel Barrow (b. 1971) or Shawna Dempsey (b. 1963) and Lori Millan (b. 1965); the revisionist tableaux of Indigenous history created by Kent Monkman (b. 1965); and comparably hermetic works by Sarah Anne Johnson (b. 1976), Diana Thorneycroft (b. 1956), Simon Hughes (b. 1973), and others. Most of these artists have not set out to recreate Winnipeg’s past, as was explicitly the case with Guy Maddin, nor even to overtly represent the city. But a heightened sensitivity to historicity, sometimes manifested as nostalgia, does prevail. Dempsey and Millan, expressing their position as artists and curators of the 2008 exhibition Subconscious City, wrote in the catalogue: “we are influenced by the lost, forgotten, discarded and submerged; the swallowed up and paved over; people long past and stories oft repeated.”36 In Winnipeg, it seems that the past (or rather, multiple pasts) can mysteriously surface, emerging out of a collective and civic sub-consciousness. If contemporary artists, curators, and writers collude in describing the city’s mysterious forces, that is certainly only part of what has made Winnipeg so vibrant when it comes to art. These extravagant claims are in fact complemented

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by very pragmatic gestures of institution-building and community activism that guarantee a solid network of support for contemporary art. Two institutional anchors for this self-sustaining community are Plug-In Gallery (founded 1972), and Border Crossings magazine (in existence for over thirty years); both have been essential in showcasing local art while mediating levels of engagement between city, province, nation, and international scene. Another key organization is mawa (Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art), launched in 1984 and widely considered to be foundational to the Winnipeg scene. Its importance is illustrated by the fact that, in the fall of 2014, virtually every gallery, museum, and artist-run centre in Winnipeg and across the province of Manitoba scheduled concurrent exhibitions of women artists, explicitly to honour and celebrate mawa ’s thirtieth anniversary. This extraordinary example of support and solidarity indicates that at least sometimes, there is one coherent artworld in Winnipeg. The My Winnipeg catalogue and exhibition (which was reprised in Winnipeg after its Paris launch) did lay claim to more disparate constituencies and histories, though. For instance, Noam Gonick’s catalogue essay weaves together various players past and present into an aesthetic continuum that is queer, feminist, and adamantly erotic. And then, a specifically Indigenous “My Winnipeg” was brought into visibility through the contribution of Métis contemporary art curator Cathy Mattes. In fact, a number of scholars and curators have been constructing a Winnipeg-centric genealogy for present-day Indigenous art in Canada, reaching back to some foundational artistic practices and actions from the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition 7: Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., from 2014, with its accompanying multi-authored catalogue, is an important example of this rewriting of Winnipeg’s art history from an Indigenous perspective, as is the scholarship of Métis art historian Sherry Farrell Racette.37 Winnipeg is in fact home to more First Nations and Métis people than any other city in Canada,38 and this distinctly urban concentration is echoed in the name and mandate of the Urban Shaman gallery – another hub of Indigenous art activity for the city, and nationally as well, since its foundation in the 1990s. The spectacle of “urban regeneration” as trumpeted or contested in other cities is not something Winnipeggers have had to contend with in recent years, even if it was only in the 1970s that Vancouver overtook Winnipeg as the third-largest city in Canada. Winnipeg has instead faced shrinkage and an uncertain future; as the artist Eleanor Bond has commented, “for a while it seemed as though Winnipeg would become another Detroit”;39 one of her paintings explicitly addresses this possibility (Fig. 13.4). This comparison rings true because so many cities and towns across North America have struggled to come to terms with post-industrial degeneration, with Detroit on the

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13.4  Eleanor Bond, The Spectre of Detroit Hangs over Winnipeg, 2007. Mixed media on paper, 58 × 76 cm. Photo: William Eakin. Courtesy of Eleanor Bond.

horizon as the worst-case scenario. What is so fascinating about Winnipeg as a case study is that this dystopian perception gets absorbed into a complex imaginative universe, and fuels a commitment to this city as a perpetual workin-progress, in the sense described by Henri Lefebvre. What has become convincing to people in faraway places, including Paris, is that Winnipeg is a city of proliferating past and future tenses.

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Vancouver

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Writing in 2011, Jeff Wall (b. 1946) expressed his disenchantment with Vancouver, the city where he was born and where he lives today, remarking that “a combination of land speculation, urban zoning and rezoning, accelerating suburbanization … has resulted in the disappointing city we live in today. Vancouver in 1950, 1960, or 1970 had a real beauty … Most of that has been swept away.”40 This is not an unfamiliar lament among Vancouverites, but these words

are especially resonant for having been voiced by an artist whose stellar international career took off with ingeniously reconstructed photographic views of the city. For the art audience across Europe and the Americas who avidly responded to Wall’s work, the exact Vancouver locations in Mimic (1982), Bad Goods (1984), or The Storyteller (1987) would not have been immediately identifiable, but his pictures of marginalized people and interstitial spaces could apparently stand in for a broader category of urban experience. Wall’s urban orientation has been shared by other members of the city’s so-called photoconceptual school of artists. If Wall dominated the 1980s in this respect, Ken Lum (b. 1956) came to the fore with his own distinctive take on Vancouver and urban life in the 1990s, with photo/text works describing street-level behaviour (Fig. 13.5) or reworked commercial signage now bearing personal and political messages (Shopkeeper series, from 1999). Since 2000 Stan Douglas (b. 1950) has consistently produced striking Vancouver-based artworks, with panoramic photography (Every Building on 100 West Hastings, 2001), monumentallyscaled public art (Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, 2009), and most recently, a digitized immersive environment (Circa 1948, 2014) – all these projects linking the materiality of buildings and streets, even those razed long ago, to the very possibility of collective memory.41 These and other photoconceptual art practices borrow from aspects of documentary and street photography, while

13.5  Ken Lum. Felicia Maguire Moves Again, 1991. Chromogenic print, aluminum, enamel, Sintra. 165.10 × 279.40 × 6.35 cm. Collection of frac Bretagne. Courtesy of Ken Lum.

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13.6  Announcement for the exhibition Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists in Antwerp, 17 December 2005–26 February 2006. Screen-print from e-flux

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website. Courtesy of e-flux.

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adding layers of meaning through fictional tropes and social critique. Because the work of these artists has achieved international renown, their re-imagined urban scenarios have triggered a secondary geographic effect – that of securing Vancouver’s position on a map of global contemporary art (Fig. 13.6). Reid Shier, in his essay for Art Cities of the Future, says that “rapacious civic erasure and renewal still provoke an acute historical attentiveness” in Vancouver, even if the eight artists he assembles do not, for the most part, focus overtly on the city.42 Shier frames his discussion of art in terms of “Vancouverism,” a concept that has no direct bearing on art, for we are told this is now globally recognized jargon referring to a “comprehensively planned urban regeneration scheme.”43 Vancouver has indeed been architecturally remade over the course of one generation, resulting in today’s impressive skyline of glass towers, with every new condo development promising its buyer access to magnificent views of mountain and ocean. It has also become Canada’s most expensive city to live in, with many homes purchased by foreign buyers solely for investment purposes; even the Downtown Eastside, an area notorious for its poverty and population of substance-abusers, is not immune to the logic of “Vancouverism.”44 Jeff Derksen, commenting on the city’s unchecked real estate speculation, remarks that “neoliberal governance … has distorted urbanism in Vancouver as it has in so many cities.”45 It is clear, in any case, that “Vancouverism” has its artworld correlate: numerous art practices, curatorial projects, and art-critical writing have responded critically to the “urban regeneration”

Urban Art Histories (in Canada)

set in motion since the 1980s, asking what Vancouver should look like, who it legitimately belongs to, and how its future identity will be determined. Vancouver’s photoconceptualism eventually became the city’s internationally recognizable contemporary-art brand, even if that project has been both reinforced and contested locally.46 But photoconceptualism was never the only game in town; Vancouver is also home to other “artworlds.” Hans Belting has argued that we must replace the notion of a singular contemporary artworld (one that is obliged to keep expanding with every increase in globalized art activity) with the recognition of multiple, coexisting artworlds. Belting writes: “The global reality is, in fact, no longer synonymous with the all-encompassing term ‘world,’ but is composed of a multiplicity of worlds [which] includes the newly established art worlds.”47 Belting’s proposition could be taken to mean that each city has its own artworld, but this definition does not suffice from a methodological standpoint. We have seen that Montreal’s art scene is characterized by linguistic negotiation and debates over public space, and in the case of Winnipeg, that the presentation of one person’s “My Winnipeg” served as a provocation and invitation to other stakeholders in the city, to describe and circumscribe the unique artworlds they inhabit. Vancouver too is home to multiple agents, art practices, institutions, communities, and histories – which cannot be assimilated to one avant-garde movement or artworld. If Belting’s multiple-artworlds model is to be adopted, therefore, it must be acknowledged that this multiplicity can occur within individual cities. The concept of artworlds can help to circumscribe what might be referred to as Vancouver’s Asian diasporic artworld; this is worthwhile, considering that approximately 40 percent of the city’s population is of East Asian or South Asian descent. Two institutions have been crucial here: the publication Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, launched in 2002, and the art gallery Centre A : Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, which opened its doors in 1999. Centre A has a mandate to showcase artists of diverse Asian affiliations, and while their website announces that a primary aim is “to position Asia within the Canadian imagination,”48 it can be argued that the greater impact of this institution has been that it successfully tapped into transnational and diasporic expressions of Asian art. Yishu was the first Englishlanguage journal to focus on Chinese contemporary art, tracking and theoretically framing its development and reception worldwide. Both Yishu and Centre A have treated the artworks, ideas, and people pertaining to Asian art as entities within a wide-ranging network, which are physically and digitally on the move across urban, national, hemispheric, and trans-Pacific zones.49 The photoconceptualists’ Vancouver became visible at the interface between photographic representation and urban spectacle, while the city has at the

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same time become a privileged site for the convergence of contemporary art and diasporic Asian identity. Here, then, is an example of two relatively autonomous artworlds coexisting within the same city, both of them contributing to the cultural complexity and cosmopolitan stature of Vancouver. These artworlds do on occasion overlap: Ken Lum and Keith Wallace are crossover figures, for example, and curator Zheng Shengtian has noted how “Vancouver school” photographic practices have been influential for artists in China. This comment was made in 2012, when six Vancouver museums and galleries held coordinated exhibitions of contemporary Chinese new media art; it was then that Shengtian, the curator responsible for this city-wide initiative, also remarked that, “Vancouver has been a perfect platform to initiate and further these dialogues.”50 It is difficult to reconcile this upbeat attitude, and the vitality of these Vancouver-centric projects since the turn of the millennium, with Wall’s assertion that Vancouver is today a “disappointing city.”

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Urban Art Histories: Art Cities, Artworlds, Avant-gardes?

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In returning to the debate about art and nationalism which is central to this book, it can be argued that artworlds have materialized in present-day Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Montreal without much concern about fitting into a larger categorization of “Canadian art” (or in the case of Montreal, Québécois art). Montreal’s cultural complexity defies absorption into either English-Canadian or Francophone-Québécois master-narratives. Winnipeg’s geographic isolation seems to trigger a city-state mentality that is imaginatively detached from the nation-state. Vancouverites often ignore what goes on in the country east of them, aligning themselves instead with the continental West Coast or with an oceanic Pacific Rim. This de facto indifference to national paradigms has not hampered the cultivation of international connections: through exhibitions and publications Montreal has developed an international profile; contemporary art from Winnipeg is shown in Paris and the city gets featured in the UK ’s Frieze magazine; thanks to the actions of numerous artists and institutions, Vancouver has acquired a position in global networks. It could also be said these cities are energized by a desire for cosmopolitanism, which at its best means that the cultural richness of urban life grows out of a convergence of different ethnicities, communities, languages, artistic legacies, and intellectual traditions. Some of these factors do undermine the consolidating effect of a nationalized art history, but the study of contemporary art in Canada (as opposed to the more loaded category of “Canadian art”) must find ways to address these urban, cosmopolitan, and global formations. I have suggested that the methodology necessary to implement “urban art histories” must draw on interdisciplinary urban theory. This ensures that a

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city’s artistic activity (encompassing artworks, curatorial projects, critical writing, and institutional initiatives) is not merely posed against an urban backdrop, but is understood to be deeply embedded in patterns of urban change, in discourses of degeneration and regeneration, in modes of street-level behaviour and everyday interaction, in collective memories and desires. Certainly many of the art practices mentioned in this essay confirm the idea that the city is a “concrete space” for art, and that urban experience can be deciphered through the re-presentation of material and experiential fragments. One of the most methodologically challenging aspects of cities is their state of architectural, technological, and demographic flux. Henri Lefebvre interpreted that unfinished quality to mean that the social space of the city is perpetually reinvented by its inhabitants. Understood in these terms, the city can never be entirely commodified or spectacularized, or its identity wholly determined by capitalist forces; the gestures of everyday life (including those by artists) can reveal redemptive glimmers of agency, and potentially utopian dreams of collectivity. Another commonality that has become apparent among these three cities is that their artistic vitality depends on an activated sense of historicity. This again speaks to concrete circumstances and to the unique character of each city, in that each urban historical consciousness gets played out in a specific way. Vancouver’s futuristic appearance is accompanied by anxiety about an obliterated past; Winnipeg’s glorious past and uncertain future have prompted an obsession with temporal dislocation; Montrealers repeatedly look back to the city’s interrupted modernist project in terms that are political as much as architectural or artistic. The ability to tap into the latent power of historical memory in these urban artworlds holds tremendous value, especially when this impulse is contrasted to the never-ending present-tenseness that plagues contemporary art. I’d like to conclude with a return to terminology. Phaidon’s Art Cities of the Future implied that the honorific title “art city” would only be bestowed on cities that demonstrated a suitably “distinctive avant-garde.” In studying Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, though, the concept of multiple artworlds is more persuasive than the proposition that one exceptional avant-garde presence can confidently be located in a given city. If the idea of avant-garde art is to become relevant again for the contemporary period (after fading away along with other modernist orthodoxies), it is in the sense described by Gene Ray; instead of searching for a few heroic artists to lead the way, he affirms the importance of heterogeneous and dispersed artistic activity: “There is no one avant-garde. They are plural: historical cells, groupings, networks, and movements.”51 It is this plurality of avant-garde initiatives that forms the basis of urban art histories.

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14

A Stranger in New York S te v e Lyo n s

Insider Knowledge

22/09/2013 311 East Broadway. An etched bronze plaque tells me I am at the right place – e-flux headquarters – for the launch of American artist Martha Rosler’s (b. 1943) Culture Class, the latest book commissioned by e-flux, an enterprise known in equal measure as a global press-release distribution platform and as a publisher of Left political and media theory. Rosler’s new book critiques the soft violence of urban renewal while responding to the convenient fictions perpetuated by Creative Class guru Richard Florida. That’s all I know in advance. Up to the third floor offices to secure a seat. Fifteen minutes early, I am instructed to wait in the second floor exhibition space, where an exhibition by the Portuguese artist-duo Pedro Neves Marques (b. 1984) and Mariana Silva (b. 1983) is on view. I space out in front of a screen-saver–like graphic animating a series of flowcharts from a 1972 report on the future of capitalist economic growth. The gallery fills to capacity. In due time we are ushered upstairs to our seats, which are arranged in rows of five or six. It’s a full house. I get the sense that it usually is. Rosler sits at a table with Stephen Squibb, who wrote the introductory text to Culture Class and is charged with moderating the discussion. Behind them is a projection screen, behind the screen is a wall of glass, and behind the wall of glass is Anton Vidokle (b. 1965), the founder of e-flux, casting a devious stare in the direction of his audience as he sips a glass of red wine. The liquor is flowing, but only for the e-flux family. Seated to my right, a man with glasses and a shaved head sends a text: “Brian and them are walking around with booze even though there’s none for the public.” Brian is Brian Kuan Wood, coeditor of e-flux journal, who soon introduces the distinguished speaker. Clutching a microphone with one hand and Rosler’s new book in the other, Wood begins the night by sharing news of Mayor Bloomberg’s recently announced Spura Project, a billion-dollar urban renewal plan for New York’s

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Essex Crossing and Seward Park, which, as we are told, will add 1.65 million square feet of real-estate development space to the Lower East Side. Under scrutiny tonight, Wood tells us, is the rarely acknowledged participation of artists in the relentless process of gentrification and its corollary: the displacement of the urban poor. Traversing the length of the room, a handsome man in a grey oxford shirt fiddles with a digital slr camera. He takes a few shots, first of the invited guests, then of the audience. Opposite him, another man orients a high-end video camera toward the projection screen, where a slideshow set to auto-play is already rotating through a series of images – mostly of book covers related to the themes of gentrification, activism, and theories of everyday life – at fifteen-second intervals. The e-flux headquarters is a welloiled machine. Perfectly choreographed and perfectly documented, it runs like clockwork. When it is time for Rosler to talk, she reads, in her iconic deadpan, an extract from Culture Class that surveys the historical relationship between art and urbanism in the postwar era. She describes Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre and architect Le Corbusier’s conflicting visions of the city, calls on mid-century French political theorist Ivan Chtcheglov to demolish Le Corbu once and for all, and proceeds to chart the history of an elaborate turf war between policy makers, real-estate developers, and the urban residents whose neighbourhoods were threatened in the aftermath of deindustrialization in the United States and Western Europe. An image appears on the projection screen: a view of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as seen through the floor-to-ceiling window of a luxury condominium. Hushed laughter bubbles throughout the audience, but the joke eludes me. I glance around nervously, searching for an answer. I am a stranger in the room. I have only been in New York for about a week, and plan to stay just for four months while I do research for my dissertation. I only know a few people in the city, friends I met during my undergraduate studies in Ontario. Although I can recognize many of the New York art world’s influential protagonists in the street or identify them in a line-up, I haven’t spoken to any of them. I’ve heard who has affairs during their global travels, who’s in debt, and I’ve come to know each one of them through Artforum’s gossip column, Facebook reposts, conversations with friends, and events like this one. But while I could plot a social network of the New York art world with moderate complexity, this secret code cannot be cracked by cultural capital alone. “Yes, I see somebody recognizes their abode,” quips Rosler with a sardonic grin. Vidokle, now standing to my immediate left, whispers to a colleague, “That’s my apartment!” He grins. Is this an inside joke or an act of sabotage, a friendly pat on the back or Rosler’s attempt, perhaps, to shift the critical debate away from the role of the artist in the process of gentrification and toward the

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unstated interests of a specific cultural entrepreneur? Either way, the fact that Vidokle lives in a Williamsburg condo is neither unexpected nor scandalous. Rosler’s minor intervention is significant, but not simply as a critical jab. It also summons a rupture, a crack, a division that runs through the event space along an axis of access. There are some audience members who are primed to receive her jab (whether they are friends with Rosler and Vidokle or are simply familiar with their banter), and others like me who do not quite belong. At moments like this I feel my remoteness from the social world I inhabit. This irruption of discontinuity and the separation it activates casts into relief, if only for a moment, the edges of a hierarchical and stratified social structure undergoing reproduction. When thrown into the mix of public discourse, insider knowledge seems designed to alienate those excluded from its purview. But in a paradoxical twist, it provokes not only frustration but also, potentially, an even greater desire for inclusion or recognition in the alienated faction. Insider knowledge reveals a centre to those who exceed its grasp, a centre that remains a phantasm, just out of reach. In what follows, I draw from my own field notes taken during that fourmonth stint in New York in order to narrate my experience as a stranger in this milieu, and to explore the threshold between strangeness and what replaces it when the strangeness begins to wear off. As an experiment in performing irresponsible fieldwork, I make mountains out of molehills, pulling structural truths from my own subjective response to a series of fleeting and unrepeatable occurrences. In so doing, I knowingly repeat the methodological flaws of the bad mid-century participant observer who swoops into a foreign territory without learning the native language, makes hurried judgments, and leaves to write his or her definitive account from the comfort of home. I cannot deny that this is a shaky foundation for a scholarly text on stranger-relations in present-day New York. Nevertheless, it opens up a line of inquiry that seems worth following: revoking any claim to experiential authority or critical distance, might the exoticizing gaze of the bad ethnographer be put to use to render an alien view of a city that remains, to this day, the symbolic centre of the global art world? Once acknowledged and assumed, might such an optic offer an unexpected point of entry into the shadowy networks of social relations that compose New York’s various artistic milieus? This is not an essay about the New York art world as a social assemblage. It is a personal account of a stranger in New York, and a reflection on the peculiar interactions afforded the stranger as a social type. Characterized by a simultaneous remoteness from and involvement in the milieu he or she enters, the stranger, as famously described in 1908 by German sociologist Georg Simmel, is a tourist who has, momentarily, chosen not to move on to the next destination.1 A foreigner, trader, short-term resident, or, in my case, a student, the

stranger is unpractised in the rules of decorum that govern the social world, and as such, finds these rules awkward, bizarre, and in some cases obscene. But they do appear, and with a clarity that may be lacking for those who already know the rules. The stranger recognizes the strangeness of social relations but enters them anyway. Every engagement qualifies as a social experiment. He or she is neither an outsider nor a colonizer. Rather, the stranger occupies the outer edges of existing infrastructures in a perpetual state of alienation and attraction. The stranger is not objective and distanced but invested and affected, jolted in every encounter. He or she feels free – not of interest, but of social connections. However, when the stranger begins to accumulate social connections, his or her freedom to use acquired knowledge begins to erode, and as this freedom erodes so does the stranger’s capacity to function as an actor both near to and remote from the object of study. This essay does not propose a rigorous sociological extension of Simmel’s stranger.2 Rather, it suggests that Simmel’s classic text can be productively misused to test the ethical predicaments that emerge when conducting research on a living art scene. A necessary element of any social milieu, the stranger is neither uninvited nor made welcome; but yet there he or she is, showing up early, taking up a seat, occasionally writing notes. Rites, Rituals, and Rules of Decorum

11/10/2013

A Stranger in New York

In New York the stranger floats from venue to venue, from a panel discussion at e-flux to a lecture at Artists Space, to an exhibition opening in Chelsea, to a roundtable at the New School for Social Research, encountering different and new arrangements of actors in each instance. I spot a few familiar faces, but not many. I suspect the ones I recognize are strangers like me, travellers who feel no need to commit, who float between scenes and attach themselves to new configurations, and who have the leisure time to attend events on a regular basis. The stranger never pledges allegiance, signs up for too many mailing lists, and accumulates perspectives without outwardly declaring his or her own. It is precisely through mobility and transience that the stranger constructs his or her own social world, a fragmented view of the city. Gliding from venue to venue, the stranger senses the distinctive character of each, senses, that is, how each event space defines its own rhythms and rules of decorum. Sixteen Beaver. I first learned about this event space a few years ago. I’m not sure where – probably in an article about collective organizing spaces associated with Occupy Wall Street – but I had forgotten about it until a new acquaintance mentioned, in passing, a free course he was taking every Monday evening at Sixteen Beaver with heavyweight thinkers such as David Harvey,

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Michael Taussig, and Silvia Federici. The course is called “A Common(s) Course: Commoning the City and Withdrawing from the Community of Money,” and it draws me in not only because of its guest list but also because I’m curious to see if it can offer something that other institutions invested in Left politics like e-flux cannot. A few blocks from Zuccotti Park, next to the Burger King on Beaver Street, I find the number 16 printed above a glass door. I follow the sign, open the door, and proceed to the elevator. As it opens on the fourth floor, I am warmly greeted by a man in a thick sweater and scarf, with a mass of black hair pulled over one shoulder. This is René Gabri (b. 1968), who together with Ayreen Anastas (b. 1968) founded Sixteen Beaver in 1999 as a platform to continue conversations about art and activism they began while enrolled in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program the previous year. Gabri, born in Tehran, Iran, and Anastas, born in Bethlehem, Palestine, were once strangers in New York. Accordingly, their perspective on local politics and culture is avowedly non-Eurocentric and attentive to the unacknowledged and underserved. I am introduced to Anastas, and then to an older man named Ron, who indulges me in a conversation about some alternative art spaces in New York I have never heard of. The elevator opens again and again, and the loft space begins to fill up until there are probably thirty or forty people present. Without prompting, everyone begins to spread chairs around the room in a circular formation. I pitch in as well. Gabri places an audio recorder in the centre of the circle. The group congregates, again without prompting. I follow, taking a seat near the elevator. Anastas brings a piping-hot pot of tea, placing it next to the recorder. A few people lean forward and help themselves to a cup. “Why are we so spread out?” asks Gabri in a gentle but firm voice. “Can we bring the chairs closer together?” Unused chairs are discarded, opening up space for us to inch our seats toward the centre, closer and closer, tighter and tighter, until the circle is sealed. My shoulders rub against my neighbours’ on both sides. We share awkward smiles. I get the sense this is a kind of ritual at Sixteen Beaver, and that this particular spatial arrangement and the atmosphere of congeniality and solidarity it imposes is not incidental but highly symbolic of the politics its founders hope to instil. Later visits will prove this to be true. This is not a lecture hall; organizers, invited guests, regulars, and strangers occupy the same horizontal plane. The Common(s) Course started a few weeks ago as an offshoot of a course taught by David Harvey at the Graduate Centre in the spring of 2013. Proposed as a framework for revitalizing and extending a discourse on commoning the city that bloomed during the Occupy movement, the Common(s) course aims not only to educate but also to nurture a “space of friendship, collective inquiry, experiments, political activity and reclaiming a culture of the common(s).”3 One of its most pressing questions engages with the structure of the

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course itself: how might one organize a Common(s) course without reproducing the very hierarchical power structures that impede the very possibility of communal life? As such, the course has contributors not instructors, it requires less attending than tending, and it has no leader. Instead it is “cared for by David, Neil, Helen, George, Silvia, Malav, Ayreen, Morgan, René, Mick, Yates, Luis, David … and hopefully others, like yourself, who may take part.”4 This is the language of caring and sharing, of anarchism not administration. On the agenda this evening is a group discussion about Harvey’s 1985 essay “Money, Time, Space, and the City,” a classic text addressing how money organizes our experience of space and time in the city.5 Harvey is in attendance, slouched on a seat across the circle from me. I immediately recognize his famous white beard. I am excited that he’s here, but I am also fascinated by the informality of the context. No one, not even Harvey himself, is publicly introduced. This again seems like a deliberate move, a symbolic gesture to reinforce the very nature of the Common(s) course. We are all commoners. I came prepared, having read the text at home and jotted down some notes on the subway. After a few brief remarks to set up the conversation, Gabri opens the floor to the group. A pause. The rustle of legs shifting positions. I’m worried that this is going to be an uncomfortable silence, a waiting game, that maybe I’ll be called upon to contribute first. Fortunately, Luis – whom I haven’t met but who turns out to be one of Sixteen Beaver’s core contributors – has brought a summary of the text to start us off. The conversation soon builds, bouncing back and forth from Luis to Ben to Yates to Nicholas, back to Yates, to Anastas, and back to Gabri. I write their names down feverishly as I struggle to keep up. I know I’ve read something by Yates McKee in October, but I can’t recall the details, and Nicholas is definitely Nicholas Mirzoeff, an Oxford-educated media historian drawn into the realm of political organizing during the Occupy movement. The others I’ll have to Google when I get home. The conversation – very loosely tethered to today’s reading – centres on the processes by which capitalism expropriates, rationalizes, and reifies what is common (air, water, land, and the very experience of space and time) into the property form, a topic made urgent by recent news of city-mandated power outages in some of the poorest neighbourhoods in Detroit, Michigan. I follow the discussion for the most part, but I’m sure I am missing the context. I glance at Harvey. I think he’s sleeping, although he might be listening with his eyes closed. Spurred by Mirzoeff, who suggests that the deflated housing market in Detroit lays bare the arbitrariness of real estate values worldwide, Harvey springs back to life. He tells an anecdote about the protest groups he supported while living in Baltimore in the early 1980s. That context – the same context in which his “Money, Time, Space, and the City” essay was conceived – revealed to him that protesters in Baltimore were concerned not with the availability

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of affordable housing but with the diminishing value of the real estate they owned. Solidarity was achieved through a shared view of housing as an asset. Gabri interrupts to pose the predicament of housing activism in a new way: money colonizes our outlooks, circumscribing the ways we think about land and shelter. Ron interjects: “but whaaat are we going to dooo about it ?” This is Ron’s spin on the Leninist question, “What is to be done?” I will hear him offer it next week, and the week after that. Each time, Anastas responds, “I think there’s a problem with the question.” Ron’s question privileges strategy over tactics, implying that problems can be solved from above, in a fourth-floor loft space, by a group of artists and activists in Lower Manhattan. Sixteen Beaver isn’t about order and administration; these, Gabri explains, are the practices of right-wing think-tanks. If capitalism has infiltrated our minds and attitudes, any anti-capitalist force worth the name must start by freeing itself from this intellectual bind. Sixteen Beaver stages a class struggle at the level of the intellect, providing a training ground to think outside of capitalist determination. What is interesting is not just the nuanced political perspective foregrounded at Sixteen Beaver, but how this perspective is defined and defended through its event format. Everything from its spatial layout – designed to encourage, even enforce, a view of collective solidarity – to the resistance of its primary organizers to see themselves as such, underscores and imposes a principle of non-hierarchical social organization. Ron’s interjection merely reinforces this view by offering a moment for careful self-reflection. The rules of decorum at Sixteen Beaver – perhaps most important that we should know what kinds of questions and perspectives are agreed to be generative – are never overtly expressed, but are conveyed through a series of spatial and atmospheric cues. At Sixteen Beaver, practical concerns – the form and structure of the event, its atmosphere of care, even its rules of decorum – seem designed not only to reinforce the ideological stance of its founders, but also to encourage a kind of egalitarian social relationship across the spectrum of regulars, strangers, contributors, and invited guests. Despite the air of informality, nothing at Sixteen Beaver has been taken for granted. It is a kind of living theatre where the choreography of bodies in space tells at least half the story. All of this I draw from my first encounter here. At every turn, my attention is divided, drawn to both the content of speech and the qualities of its utterance, to the subjects who talk and the subjects who don’t. To the stranger, even the most banal incidents seem notable, and for fleeting moments events appear as complex organizational forms dictated by both ideological and pragmatic concerns, as rituals governed by their own specific codes of conduct. The stranger feels the subtlety of social cues precisely because they are not familiar; they are specific to each venue, even when

14.1  Approximate floor plan of Sixteen Beaver on 11 October 2013, drawn from memory by the author in 2015. © Steve Lyons.

14.2 Approximate floor plan of e-flux headquarters on 22 September 2013, drawn from memory by the author in 2015. © Steve Lyons.

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the venue follows a conventional academic format (lecture, panel discussion, roundtable, and so on). More to the point, it is precisely by moving from one venue to the next in rapid succession that the specificity of each becomes vivid. Sixteen Beaver not only reveals its own rites, rituals, and rules of decorum but it also casts into relief the differing social structure of a venue such as the e-flux headquarters. If Sixteen Beaver performs a commoning ritual through its organizational structure (Fig. 14.1), the e-flux headquarters might just perform the opposite, stamping a micro-class structure onto everything from its seating plan, which is oriented toward the visible but basically inaccessible executive office, to the uneven distribution of alcohol at its events (Fig. 14.2). If ideology and pragmatics appear tightly enmeshed at Sixteen Beaver, they appear divided at the e-flux headquarters. For the stranger, events are experienced as theatre. As a consequence, any firm distinction between lecture and performance becomes tenuous and unstable: both occupy an expanded field of public programming. The stranger might view a panel discussion on Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle at

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Light Industry with the same optic as he or she views a Marxist fashion show at White Columns. In every instance, the stranger is sensitive to the processes by which audiences are segmented. These are, after all, the same processes that make the stranger feel strange. The stranger’s particular relationship to the social – where every event appears as a ritual performance, every instant feels singular – suggests one of the privileges of the stranger as an intellectual position: when nothing appears familiar, the work of defamiliarization is already done. But even if the stranger is structurally predisposed to sense unfamiliar rites, rituals, and rules of decorum, this does not mean that all strangers are also ethnographers of their social environments, or that structural insights appear magically and vividly in every encounter. In fact, the stranger works against conventional wisdom on ethnographic writing at almost every turn: he or she cannot stay in one place long enough to claim ethnographic authority, makes hasty judgments during a first encounter with a social group, and engages without critical distance. Leaping from the micro-event to the macroscopic view, from the study of particular social relations to the broader social and political structures reproduced by those relations, the stranger’s approach to critical commentary is highly subjective, determined by a limited view of the milieu in question. The stranger has the capacity to describe the processes of division that expose his or her own strangeness, but only until that strangeness wears off. At the Threshold of Strangeness

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Strangeness is exceedingly difficult to maintain, and strangers are not always strange. The quality of strangeness and the forms of interaction it allows require a level of mobility, promiscuity, and restlessness. A stranger who doesn’t move, or who defines his or her route through (or routine in) the city will quickly cease to feel strange. Instances that once appeared as theatre will soon look banal, the scene will appear knowable, and its mechanics will be naturalized. The city will not look alien but familiar, unremarkable. Gone will be any lingering illusion of anonymity, any fantasy of observing the city with freedom and objectivity. Gone will be the delusional prospect of publishing freely, of distributing scandalous bits of insider knowledge accumulated at events and in conversation. When the stranger falls into habit, he or she is bound to develop social connections: contacts, networks, allies, friends. It is at this point, when suddenly there are bridges to burn, that the stranger finds him or herself at the threshold of strangeness. I anticipated it for weeks: COMME des MARXISTS , a fashion show organized by Austrian artist Rainer Ganahl (b. 1961) at the alternative art space White

Columns for Performa 13. The event was a delirious spectacle, a clashing of some of the New York art world’s most powerful stakeholders – art historian Claire Bishop (b. 1971), curator Bice Curiger (b. 1948), art advisor Thea Wes­ trich (b. 1942) – with artists such as Karl Holmqvist (b. 1964) and Peter Fend (b. 1950), Ganahl’s two young children, and many others in a loosely scripted runway show of Karl Marx-inspired garments and fashion accessories (Fig. 14.3). The event resonated with the widespread fetishization of Marxist discourse in the international art world today, but it left me with unresolved questions about Ganahl’s own motivations and political stance. Was this a cynical parading of power or a critical gesture aimed against its own elite guest list? Returning to the scene three days after the exhibition, where Ganahl’s clothing

14.3  Garments from the series Marx 4 Kids, modelled by children in Rainer Ganahl’s comme des marxists , performance, White Columns, New York, 3 November 2013. © Rainer Ganahl.

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14.4  Rainer Ganahl, comme des marxists, installation view, White Columns, New York, 3–9 November 2013.

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© Rainer Ganahl.

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and jewelry designs have been re-arranged in a scattered installation of videos, drawings, and collages, I hope to see if I have missed something, if perhaps the garments themselves can offer a less ambiguous interpretation of the event (Fig. 14.4). I swing open the door at 320 West 13th Street and before I can take off my coat, I am welcomed by Ganahl himself. Holding a camera and clearly in the process of documenting the installation, the artist shows me around the space, explaining in detail the significance of every garment. Each was produced through a collage of inside jokes and wordplay related to the history of Marxist thought, art, high fashion, and activism. Intrigued by Ganahl’s generosity and openness, but now even more confused about his work than I was after the fashion show, I tell him that I am writing an essay called “Field Notes

A Stranger in New York

from an Ethnography of Manhattan Marxism,” and that I would like to discuss the project with him more when he is less busy. The essay will consider how Marxism is performed in a variety of New York’s art spaces, and will prominently feature Ganahl’s fashion show. I was not planning to interview Ganahl before today, but it seems like the right thing to do. The artist writes down his email address on a scrap piece of paper and asks me to get in touch. A week later I arrive at Ganahl’s East Harlem studio with questions in one hand and an audio recorder in the other. My questions are direct and pointed, and I’m prepared to dive into a serious and engaged discussion about the art world’s vulgar appropriation of Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and about Ganahl’s own interest in Marxist intellectual fashions. He seems like the kind of thick-skinned artist who embraces a challenge. Before I can lay my cards on the table, Ganahl draws my attention to the laptop sitting on his desk, opened onto a half-written email. Two screen grabs from the artist’s bank account show the financial disaster that COMME des MARXISTS has wrought for him. Ganahl is sending these images to a number of his most successful colleagues – artists and art historians whose work I know well – along with a note about the devastating news that, because the project went way over budget, he is now forced to pull his children out of private school. The cost of fabric, it seems, has put the artist’s life in crisis. At this moment I am completely disarmed. The last thing Ganahl needs is a stranger demanding answers about a project that has already brought him so much stress. I no longer see Ganahl as a figure, a public persona, but as a man in his early fifties whose artwork is entangled in the mess of life itself, and whose livelihood depends on the success or failure of his creative work. I empathize with the artist, appreciate his transparency and, more than anything, I do not want to be rude. For the next four hours we talk about the artist’s intentions behind COMME des MARXISTS , about the distribution of power in the New York art world, about current events in the city, and about the reputations of New York’s various platforms for exhibition, pedagogy, and debate. I skip over every question that seems too direct, too leading. Our conversation is full of stops and starts, of tangents about cliques that form around particular curators and gallerists, about the competitive nature of the New York art world, and about the bad blood lurking just under its surface, rivalries and resentments that exist between some of the city’s most influential protagonists. I am not sure why Ganahl trusts me with so much sensitive information. Maybe he doesn’t see me as a threat. Simmel made this clear: the stranger is oftentimes put in the role of managing secret domains, where “he often receives the most surprising revelations and confidences, at times reminiscent of a confessional, about matters which are kept carefully hidden from everybody with whom one is close.”6 The stranger is trustworthy because he or she has little power

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to effect change within the social group. Perhaps, in my case, I am trusted because I lack the means or social ties to disseminate the insider knowledge that I have accumulated. Something strange has occurred in the course of our conversation. I am left not only disarmed, but also connected to Ganahl through this exchange. This is not to say that I can ask the artist for favours, but that I feel a certain bond with him, and that this bond has seriously affected how I might situate his work within the cultural context of New York. The fantasy that the stranger occupies a privileged intellectual position crumbles the moment he or she decides to use the knowledge he or she has accumulated. Every disclosure, every bit of information that could be made public is subjected – consciously or not – to a kind of risk assessment. What is the cost of disclosing insider knowledge, of telling the secrets we have been entrusted with? What is at stake when we view the secret domains we manage as repositories of ethnographic data? Such questions arise as soon as our audiences grow beyond our immediate peer groups; we begin to weigh the costs against the benefits, the risks against the possible rewards. And the risks are substantial. When we betray the trust we have gained as strangers, we risk isolating ourselves, becoming not only strange but also radioactive. These risks increase as we accumulate personal and social bonds, in other words, as we cross the threshold of strangeness. The moment we realize there are risks to public disclosure, we discover that risk assessments are performed with reference not only to the social connections we have already made but also to the prospective ties that could be severed in advance. In fact, the stranger is never truly free from personal or social ties. The very structure of stranger relations negates the possibility of an external or completely autonomous subject position; the categorical division between outside and inside is supplanted by a dialectic of remoteness and nearness, where simply by being present, by occupying space within the milieu, the stranger holds a proximate relationship to every actor in the social group. Bonds exist not only between the stranger and those he or she has spoken to, but also between the stranger and those he or she desires to know, and those who they know, ad infinitum. These intellectual constraints impose themselves on every stranger who chooses to study a living artistic or intellectual scene. For this reason, rather than make indefensible claims to critical distance and intellectual autonomy, we should scrutinize the criteria we establish in our own risk assessments. If we view self-censorship as a product of the system we work in, as a symptom of our own unwritten codes of professional conduct, perhaps we can identify some of the barriers we erect between the thinkable and the sayable. Only then can we develop new and productive methods for testing these boundaries, for pushing back against the protocols

that circumscribe our practices as strangers, students, and scholars. What if we seized these moments of strangeness and put them to use? The Stranger Returns

12/04/2014

A Stranger in New York

It is mid-April, almost half of a year after my conversation with Ganahl. This is my first time in New York since December. I am back in the city not as a stranger but as an invited guest, a panellist at a conference hosted by the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. My conference presentation is titled “Field Notes from an Ethnography of Manhattan Marxism” – the same title I mentioned to Ganahl at White Columns last autumn. Written more as a performance script than as a scholarly publication, the text questions how Marxism is performed in the New York art world’s independent platforms for exhibition, pedagogy, and debate, and how the particular contours of the Left – in its most abstract construction – are drawn through such performances. Two video cameras are trained on the platform. The event will be recorded and made available on the Internet in the coming months. This is my first public presentation in New York, and it is explicitly critical of some of the New York art world’s most powerful actors. The session begins, and as my co-panellists are introduced, my blood runs cold. One happens to be an employee of e-flux, whose co-founder Anton Vidokle features prominently in my presentation. I divert my attention to the audience. I am no less comforted by the sight of a familiar face, not of a friend but of a performer in Ganahl’s fashion show. She is grinning. I suspect she knows that she will see her likeness posed on the projection screen behind me in a few minutes. I feel a tension emanating throughout the room, probably radiating outward from myself. This must be what it means to perform without the cover of anonymity. The room is packed with surveillance mechanisms, both automated and human. Everything I say will be recorded, can be reported, and may be used against me at a later date. At this moment I realize that even the most insignificant local debate, set in a city that often appears as a metonymy for the global art world, risks being amplified beyond its immediate context. The New York art world is a sprawling and unstable assemblage. Extending in opposing directions, it breeds competition and collaboration in equal measure. It is unknowable even to its most networked actors. However, as an abstract site of struggle over visibility, the New York art world is an environment where identities are defended and performed, myths are made, power is delineated, and strangers are rendered strange. In such a context, every localized eruption of incongruity also gains

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in significance, offering a partial view of what feels like a high-stakes game at the centre of the world.

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Vibrations from Another Era

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Forty years ago, not long after arriving in New York on an academic fellowship, Australian art critic and Art & Language member Terry Smith published the landmark essay “The Provincialism Problem” in Artforum. Observing the New York cultural scene with the fresh eyes of a tourist, Smith laid bare what he saw as a power dynamic governing the field of art production on a global scale. Informed by debates in Australian art criticism about the marginality and provincialism of much art in Australia, Smith saw an opportunity to modify the prevailing definition of provincialism and cast it as a central aspect of art produced in regional and metropolitan contexts alike. Printed in New York’s most widely distributed art magazine, “The Provincialism Problem” was designed to get a reaction. Smith opened his essay with a sweeping provocation: if provincialism could be defined as “an attitude of subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values,” then “most New York artists, critics, collectors, dealers, and gallery-goers are provincialist in their work, attitudes and positions within the system.”7 Declaring that provincialism was “not merely a function of geographic location,” as the term normally implied, Smith argued that it was an attitude, an embodied condition shaping the thoughts and actions of every artist and critic who held a marginal position within the dominant art world.8 Provincialism was a product of power, not geography, and its attitudes proliferated in two forms: either as a trumpeting of regional eclecticism in the face of dominant trends or as an impulse to emulate the hottest styles and aesthetic programs championed in the New York art milieu. In Smith’s account, provincialism was the effect of a structural imbalance between the centre, where dominant codes of stylistic and critical innovation were defined and defended, and the periphery, where these codes appeared preformatted for consumption. This fault line between centre and periphery functioned to organize practices, postures, and social relations on a local, national, and international scale. In fact, it extended right down to the core of the New York art elite, where, in Smith’s view, the power to generate the criteria for artistic innovation was conferred to only a handful of masters at any given time. Provincialism was, in the final instance, the byproduct of an emphatically hierarchical and centralized consolidation of power, a symptom of imperial rule. Smith’s expanded view of provincialism offers a vocabulary for understanding how even banal experiences of alienation or subjugation in immediate and local contexts might relate to a broader social structure founded on

A Stranger in New York

systematic processes of exclusion. Responding to the emerging concept of an international art world and the growth of its privileged forms – art fairs and biennial exhibitions – Smith’s essay was directed against the techno-utopian ideal that the new communications infrastructures of “global village internationalism” would effectively de-centre the international economy of attention and consequently liberate culture from its hierarchical and imperial order.9 From Smith’s perspective, the expansion of the Western art world to new regions would lead not to New York’s diminished power as an art capital but to its further dominance as an imperialist force. The apparent impossibility of breaking the provincialist bind, even in the face of a thriving internationalist agenda, raised the question of how a tenuous power structure that labelled New York the de facto centre of a globally expanding art world could possibly be sustained. “The Provincialism Problem” is far from a perfect text, and as a skeletal description of the art world as a field of power, it comes up against limitations that have become increasingly clear in the years since its publication. Today, Smith’s emphatic stance that the art world is governed by a hierarchical and centralized form of power sounds too conspiratorial; it pictures the art world as a New World Order, where trends are set and movements are made by secret groups of consecrated masters. One might imagine that Smith’s text was influenced by the Cold War politics of the era, by a vision of power as hierarchical and monolithic. It comes long before the emergence of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “Empire,” before the concept of globalization, and before neo-liberalism became a dominant ideological force.10 Understandably, Smith can only partially explain how provincialism persists even after power in the art world is horizontally distributed and dispersed across networked infrastructures. However, Smith’s radical recasting of the provincialism debate remains significant because it emphasizes the imbrication of the local in the global, insisting on how local identities and practices are formed in view of their potential to amplify, to become influential on a global scale. In other words, Smith reframes the provincialism problem as primarily a problem of aspirational thinking, of the desire for power, visibility, and inclusion so commonly felt by strangers and near-strangers alike. This desire is at the core of every risk assessment, which, left unexamined, can only lead to the reaffirmation of the reigning hierarchy of cultural values. Like artists, critics and art historians are ensnared within this matrix of power, and Smith’s text prompts us – as writers and researchers on the history of art – to scrutinize the attitudes of subservience that pervade our own fields of study. If the New York art world can be pictured as a living theatre where identities are performed, myths are managed, and ideological positions are defended, what function do art historians serve as amateur ethnographers of this scene?

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And what might be gained by writing local histories from the viewpoint of strangers, of actors at once alienated from and seduced by the milieus under study? Foregrounding the limits and added value of the stranger’s participation, we can divert the researcher’s attention away from the creative performances of influential actors and toward the actors and atmospheric cues that are always present but rarely recorded in print. According to Gregory Sho­lette, while the bulk of the cultural field is populated by hobbyists, struggling artists, studio assistants, interns, activists, and students, such actors remain largely invisible to “those who lay claim to the management and interpretation of culture – the critics, art historians, collectors, dealers, museums, curators, and arts administrators.” Sholette calls this glut of surplus labour the art world’s “dark matter.” 11 The stranger I have described writes in solidarity with the art world’s dark matter, using his or her position as cultural interpreter to acknowledge and inscribe this unaccounted mass. If we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed and distracted by the affective dimensions of experience, by the eruptions of discontinuity that appear in every encounter, we can begin to capture new perspectives, perspectives that tend to evade and exceed the archive and can help to crack open the “surplus archive” imagined by Sholette.12 As strangers, we are not peripheral in the sense of Smith’s provincialist or Sholette’s dark matter. Rather, we are suspended between centre and periphery, held in tension between our desire for visibility and our allegiance to the neglected body of uninvited guests. If as strangers we fashion ourselves as active mediators and myth makers trafficking between centre and periphery, perhaps we can address and narrate the affective qualities of our own experiences and draw from our repositories of feelings to speculate on the structural operations they may indicate. It is not enough to simply acknowledge the pressures we face as strangers, students, and scholars. We must also attend to the effects of these pressures on the myths that we make.

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Mending Walls Imagining the Sovereign Subject in Contemporary Exhibition Practices Er i n Silv er

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omi Bhabha’s pivotal 1994 book, The Location of Culture, begins with an epigraph from Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking”: “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.” Cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative in nature, is produced performatively – not as a reflection of something that is given or set in stone, but as an ongoing process of negotiation. As Bhabha states: “It is in the emergence of interstices – the overlap and displacement of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.”1 It can be said that, more than two decades since the publication of this critical text in Bhabha’s ongoing project, which worked to re-articulate a notion of Western modernity from a postcolonial perspective, its influence continues to be felt and developed as a tool of inquiry. The 2014 exhibition A Problem So Big It Needs Other People,2 at the sbc Gallery in Montreal, operated under the gallery’s two-year research-based programming on sovereignty initiated by its director/curator Pip Day in 2012. A series of exhibitions, programs, workshops, talks, and screenings presented a complex response to questions related to the sovereign subject “in light of accepted notions of citizenry and of orthodox state/subject power relations.”3 Beyond dominant narratives related specifically to sovereignty in the Quebec context, Day explored, through a series of curatorial, pedagogical, and artistic gestures, questions of the sovereign subject as formulated by statelessness and non-citizenry, and the enactment of human rights for and on the non-citizen, reflecting on strategies in urban centres around the world to test and challenge existing forms of governance.4

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15.1  Maggie Groat, Fences Will Turn Into Tables, 2010–13. Installation view of A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, sbc Gallery of Contemporary Art, 15 March–3 May 2014. Photo: Guy L’Heureux. Courtesy of sbc Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, and the artist.

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Undertaking a curatorial residency that would culminate in that exhibition, cheyanne turions explored the hypothesis that sovereignty lies not with the nation-state, but in the processes of negotiation at the level of the subject, negotiation being understood as a process in which “sovereignty manifests through intimacy, contact and sociality.”5 The visual and functional centrepiece of the exhibition was Fences Will Turn Into Tables (2010–13) by Canadian artist Maggie Groat (b. 1985), a table made of fence boards that Groat collected from Toronto and Guelph (Fig. 15.1). With artists from a variety of cultural, regional, and political origins coming to the proverbial and literal table, what was brought forward by this curatorial call to order were the implicit contradictions as well as compatibilities of subject positions, and the acts of negotiation, both explicit and implied, on display and under interrogation. Reflecting

Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

Imagining the Sovereign Subject

on these acts of negotiation and reconciliation in acknowledging seemingly contradictory forms of self-identification, turions, who is from just south of present-day Grouard, Alberta, on the farmlands of Treaty 8 (one of eleven numbered treaties between the Government of Canada and First Nations) and identifies as being of both settler and Indigenous ancestry, asked: “What does it mean, this movement and mixing of blood and cultures? At the least, it implie[s] that self-identifications are complex, so that I am of Aboriginal descent and a settler both; the binary breaks down. A Palestinian living in Canada is both subject to settler-colonial practices and an enactor of them. These subjectivities cannot be reconciled further. We are multiple.”6 In this chapter I propose that negotiation can be framed, and sometimes determined, by curatorial strategies that engage the political dimensions of sovereignty. I organize articulations of the pursuit of sovereignty not around nation-specificity but around aesthetic and philosophical issues related to negotiation, nation-adaptability, and cultural translation. While Groat’s table and the two-dimensional video and wall works set in the space around it evoke land artist Robert Smithson’s non-site (which he describes in his 1968 “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites” as a “two dimensional analogy or metaphor,” a “logical picture” or representation of an actual site that does not resemble it), the non-site of the gallery provides the discursive, controlled, and yet malleable environment for this exploration and articulation of the sovereign subject. Nevertheless, the installation also embodies various acts of cultural crossing and non-state-defined identification that work to reaffirm the subject as defined by cultural location.7 My study focuses on a set of recent curatorial gestures and performances that outline acts of negotiation in articulating this moveable “otherness,” which is defined not only by geographic context but also by the implicit negotiations that characterize the subject as racialized, ethnicized, gendered, and/or queered. Recalling the theoretical work of Bhabha, and also important feminist theoretical work undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Elspeth Probyn, Rosi Braidotti, and Adrienne Rich, on a politics of location – not to mention more recent histories of relational art, socially engaged practices, and institutional critique – these contemporary curatorial projects reflect a new political urgency instigated by a renewed pursuit of sovereignty in the present day.8 In Robert Frost’s 1914 poem “Mending Wall,” the narrator, a New England farmer who is perplexed by his neighbour’s repeated phrase, “Good fences make good neighbours,” asks:

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What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down. In reflecting on the subject as sovereign, I focus on curatorial strategies that envision otherness in ways that play out in the imaginatively – sometimes problematically so – sovereign “non-site” of the gallery. Walls that are intended to act as forms of neighbourly fortification are transformed into ceremonial acts of reparation, so that “good fences [that] make good neighbours” is reconstituted in A Problem So Big It Needs Other People to become “fences that turn into tables.” The question of sovereignty revolves around the political and activist aims of the encounters and negotiations that occur in the gallery space, and their transformative potential – or impossibility – beyond the gallery walls. As a project with stakes in the pursuit of Indigenous sovereignty, the cultural negotiations theorized by the curatorial premise threaten to undermine the pursuit of sovereignty as formative to a notion of Indigenous aesthetics; as Jarrett Martineau and Eric Ritskes have argued, “if all we seek is decolonization of the mind, then we will have already conceded the loss of the most precious and transformative foundation of decolonization: land and place. Theory removed from the land, removed from practice, and detached from the contexts that give it form and content propose[s] a decolonizing strategy that risks metaphorizing its constitutive ground.”9 This chapter examines the political value of curatorial explorations of histories of settler-colonialism, sovereignty, and self-determination as they are performed within the space of the gallery in ways that articulate understandings of performative and generative situations, as well as historical reconfigurations of these situations. In the exhibition that forms the centrepiece of this chapter, these possibilities are uniquely introduced by processes of negotiation as a curatorial premise, as well as promise, both represented and enacted.

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Coming to the Table: A Space for Negotiation

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Groat’s Fences Will Turn Into Tables was completed over three years during which Groat, who works in a variety of media and whose research-based practice explores connections to Indigenous land, collected fence boards from around Toronto and Guelph. This gathering followed a predetermined set of rules: Groat would only take a fence board that she could tear off with her hands without the use of tools and carry home herself (although over time, her method was redefined, as she began to collect fence boards through exchanges carried out on online message boards). The resulting table is 429.3 cm long by

99 cm wide by 81.3 cm high (169 inches by 39 inches by 32 inches), with four benches of varying dimensions that invite visitors to gather around the table and engage in dialogue.10 turions explains her rationale for the inclusion of this massive work – a work that functions as an autonomous structure and as a site of performance and encounter – as follows: While fences mark off private property, the evidenced disrepair of the liberated materials pointed to a neglected logic of the fence: the onetime care taken to keep others out has been abandoned as a project of separation. Groat’s small destructions can be thought of in service of this new imperative of degradation and there exists (in imagination only) a shadow map – of all the small gaps her acts of removal left behind – resonating outward from the table.11

Imagining the Sovereign Subject

As turions notes, her intention is “to think through what sovereignty means in Canada, in Québec, in a gallery, from [her] specific position … in a country with a deep history of colonization.”12 The idea of the “shadow map” functions as a metaphorical backdrop for the geographic context in which the gallery is located: Montreal, Quebec, itself a historical and present-day stage for negotiations, translations, demonstrations, and altercations. Montreal has historically been conceptualized and experienced along its own lines of division, which influence articulations of language, class, ethnicity, culture, religion, and politics, and introduce a number of mixed and often problematic metaphors, as well as metaphorical elisions, related to colonization and decolonization. The interrelated and contradictory struggles for decolonization, self-determination, and emancipation among Québécois and Indigenous peoples first became pronounced in the 1960s; it was 1960 that drew a line between a Quebec dominated by the pervasive influence of Maurice Duplessis’s conservative Union Nationale and the Roman Catholic Church in government and society, and a Quebec modernizing in the direction of secularization and a welfare state. The election following Duplessis’s death in 1959 and the death of his successor, Paul Sauvé of Jean Lesage’s Liberal provincial government, allowed Quebec to move rapidly out of the “Grand Noirceur,”13 the “Great Darkness” of the Duplessis regime, and significantly changed power relations between francophone and anglophone populations; it moved francophones out of their position of economic inferiority and encouraged the province’s urban development in the interests of Quebec’s francophone majority. The rallying cry “Maîtres chez nous” (“Masters in our own house”) promoted a new nationalism around the Quebec nation and the French language, and a contemporary problem was mapped onto an officially obfuscated historical backdrop of the sixteenth-century European colonization of Native land.

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Links between language and class also came to be strongly felt in the 1960s. In the Revue socialiste, founded by Raoul Roy in 1959, it was argued that French Canadians could be viewed as a class opposed to the equating of “anglophone” with “bourgeoisie” – but how?14 The paradoxical framework was the alignment of French Canadians with the working class, and the identification of the working class with all oppressed groups in North America, complicated by Roy’s view of immigrants as “tools of the imperial power.”15 Nevertheless, though Roy’s political views, in particular his belief in an ethnically based “French-Canadian people,” came to be rejected by a new generation of radicals, his Revue socialiste had a significant ideological impact and influenced the formation of several radical sovereignty groups, including the Front de libération du Québec (flq ) and the Rassemblement pour l’indépendence nationale (rin ), both of which advocated for Quebec’s political independence, which increasingly came to be viewed as critical to revolution and liberation, while the Mouvement de Libération Populaire, which formed in 1965, positioned the working class as the key component of independence. In 1967 René Lévesque left the Liberal Party because of its refusal to discuss the issue of sovereignty, and went on to form the Mouvement souveraineté-association (msa ). The merging of the msa with the Ralliement national (rn ) led to the formation of the Parti Québécois (pq ) in 1968, which the rin also joined in 1968. The pq ’s win, under the leadership of Lévesque, of a majority in the National Assembly in 1976 led to the formation of the 1977 Charter of the French Language, which declared French the official language of Quebec. However, the move for Quebec sovereignty as proposed in the 1980 and 1995 Quebec referendums (under the leadership of Premier Lévesque and Premier Jacques Parizeau, respectively) were both defeated. It is important not to read 1960s Montreal radicalism as having been fuelled solely by the internal politics of the province but rather to see it as what Sean Mills describes as forming “part of a larger global movement against imperialism” via its engagement with the global, student-led New Left.16 In their perception of conditions they shared, the Third World francophone radicals forged intellectual allegiances with the worldwide movement for decolonization. As Mills explains, this affiliation was strengthened through publications such as Pierre Vallières’s Nègres blancs d’Amérique and the phrase “Speak White!” a racist command documented as having been used by English-speaking Canadians in the 1960s to insult individuals speaking other languages in public. The radical communities that formed in Montreal in the 1960s in pursuit of political emancipation perpetuated their own forms of oppression and exclusion. The hyper-masculinity of the Quebec decolonization movement, for instance, had the effect of excluding women from central political roles, while those involved in the movement often failed to recognize their own roles as

As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely by condemning its government or by saying three times “As a woman my country is the whole world.” Tribal loyalties aside, and even if nation-states are now just pretexts used by multinational conglomerates to serve their interests, I need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create. Begin, though, not

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“White settler colonists who had pushed Aboriginals to the margins of Quebec society and relegated them to subordinate status.”17 Historical narratives about Montreal that position language as the central tension around which different cultural groups have expended political energy neglect to account for the important social, ethnic, cultural, economic, and identificatory tensions that have been obscured by this overly-simplistic reading. One need look no further than the 1990 Oka Crisis, which pitted the Mohawk people of Kanesatake against the town of Oka in a violent land claim dispute that exposed racist and colonial attitudes toward the original inhabitants of Canada on the eve of a renewed bid for Quebec sovereignty.18 In the context of an exhibition about sovereignty as negotiation, and in the face of the political urgencies posed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (established by the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2008 and completed in 2015),19 Groat’s table might also be positioned as a work that negotiates antagonism: an approach that diverges from earlier, more harmonious iterations of relational art. Indeed, the present-day political and activist dimensions of curatorial strategies, which work through questions of nationalism, identity, and sovereignty, both reframe and diverge from the models put forth in the 1990s, around the time that Bhabha’s The Location of Culture was published. The identity politics that defined the 1980s and 1990s built on earlier and concurrent developments in feminist theory in many ways. I am thinking here, notably, of writings by Indian postcolonial and feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty, which move beyond a definition of women as a monolithic group toward more historical and geographic specificity; and of the view that race cannot be levelled alongside gender among other identifications; and of the Italian-Australian philosopher and gender theorist Rosi Braidotti, who argued for the politics of location: “the practice of decoding – expressing and sharing in language the conditions of possibility of one’s own political and theoretical choices. Accountability and positionality go together.” Braidotti also noted the “importance of accounting for one’s investments [and] the level of unconscious desire and consequently of imaginary relation to the very material conditions that structure our existence.”20 American feminist theorist and poet Adrienne Rich wrote:

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with a continent or a country or a house, but with the geography closest in – the body.21 In earlier theorizing by these writers, in the simultaneous avowals and disavowals of geographic and political specificity, there is nevertheless always a return to the primacy of subjecthood, both defining and defined by the material conditions of the world. Recalling the charges of theatricality levelled at the plinths and plywood structures of minimalism, a time when the autonomy of art could no longer be guaranteed or its subjects predetermined, Groat’s Fences Will Turn Into Tables insists on similar avowals and disavowals and an elevation of the primacy of the subject as specific, yet relationally determined. As an object that might be seen to serve a deeply instrumentalized, as well as instrumentalizing role in the institutional environment, Groat’s table must thus be considered not only for its phenomenological functions but also for its domestic affirmations: Edmund Husserl’s writing table as a location from which, in the words of theorist Sara Ahmed, “the world unfolds,”22 where the bodily presence of the philosopher creates an “intimate co-dwelling of bodies and objects,”23 or Martin Heidegger’s table, a space of action in which the table maintains its centrality and defines and is defined by those who gather around it:

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What is there in the room there at home is the table (not “a” table among many other tables in other rooms and houses) at which one sits in order to write, have a meal, sew, or play. Everyone sees this right away, e.g. during a visit: it is a writing table, a dining table, a sewing table – such is the primary way in which it is being encountered in itself. This characteristic of “in order to do something” is not merely imposed on the table by relating and assimilating it to something else which it is not.24

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In bringing these definitions together, Ahmed interprets Heidegger to be writing about what “we do” with the table: “what we do with the table, or what the table allows us to do, is essential to the table. So we do things ‘on the table’ which is what makes the table what it is and take shape in the way it does. The table is assembled around the support it gives.”25 Groat’s table thus becomes an object that denotes the subject’s place in the world among objects as well as her place in the world among other subjects. This notion of communion in ways that are affirmed under the weight of difference suggests, as well, an engagement with the phenomenological invocations of Minimalism, here imbued with an overt body politic. A work by Canadian artist and urbanist Adrian Blackwell (b. 1966), Circles Describing Spheres (2014), also becomes legible via the activation of audience members and the pursuit

15.2  Adrian Blackwell, Circles Describing Spheres  in Getting Rid of Ourselves, curated by Helena Reckitt, Onsite Gallery, ocad University, Toronto, 16 July–11 October 2014. Courtesy of the artist.

Imagining the Sovereign Subject

of sovereignty, performed by those sitting “around” the autonomous object (Fig. 15.2). Circles Describing Spheres is a series of overlapping and intertwined plywood circles intended for visitors to sit on. The work, inspired by anarchist meeting circles arranged to promote non-hierarchical forms of discussion, can be repositioned to produce different seating configurations; these in turn influence, expand, and/or impede different relational and antagonistic possibilities organized around an anarchist ethos of self-governance. A circle that levels everyone who sits around it by virtue of their facing one another might also, in another configuration, promote an antagonistic relationality: with the addition of a second circle, backs are turned toward one another, legs are uncomfortably close to those of a stranger, and individuals are seated at awkward slants, forcing the body to physically compensate in order to achieve balance.26 The work might be seen to perform its own outcome, staging the structural conditions necessary for viewers to negotiate the various relational encounters the work makes possible. Circles Describing Spheres featured prominently in three recent exhibitions: the 2014 Getting Rid of Ourselves, at Onsite (ocad University), curated by Helena Reckitt, an exploration of the effacement of the self, of authorship, and of individualism; the 2014 This Could Be the Place, a symposium curated by

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Bojana Videkanic and Ivan Jurakic at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery; and If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution, curated by Natalie Musteata at Haverford College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In all settings, Circles Describing Spheres instigated similar questions of relational and phenomenological negotiation and antagonism, seeing contingency and encounter as being critical to the work’s activation.27 In the 1990s theories of art and curatorial practice took a turn toward the relational, with curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud (relational art) and Mary Jane Jacob (socially engaged art), as well as artist-curators such as Suzanne Lacy (new genre public art) promoting an outward-looking model of curatorial practice that moved art into non-art communities and drew non-art communities into the gallery. In Bourriaud’s words, relational art was intended to encompass “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent private space.”28 Bourriaud claimed that the role of artwork was “no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real.”29 This theoretical model for thinking about socially engaged art practices was intended to create useable models for interaction and political engagement that responded to contemporary culture. With an air of incredulity, Claire Bishop responded:

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Rather than a discrete, portable, autonomous work of art that transcends its context, relational art is entirely beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience. Moreover, this audience is envisaged as a community: rather than a one-to-one relationship between work of art and viewer, relational art sets up situations in which viewers are not just addressed as a collective, social entity, but are actually given the wherewithal to create a community, however temporary or utopian this may be.30

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Bourriaud argued that relational art “invent[s] possible encounters” and the “conditions for an exchange,”31 displacing the utopias that were sought in earlier countercultural movements in favour of microtopias, by which artists learn “to inhabit the world in a better way” in the present.32 As Anthony Downey reflected: “Aesthetic practice, in this instant, requires a reply of sorts – or at the very least, a reaction. In focusing on ‘relations of exchange,’ social interplay and inter-subjective communication, relational art practices – in their exhibitionary method – also provide nodal points for reflections on their socially transitive potential.”33 Happening concurrently was a re-examination of institutional critique – as Hito Steyerl has outlined, the shift from the 1970s to the 2000s away from institutional critique to the critique of institutions prompted

Imagining the Sovereign Subject

yet another shift from a criticism that “produced integration into the institution” to a criticism that “only achieved integration into representation.”34 She comments that Benedict Anderson’s 1991 Imagined Communities provides an important analysis of the ways in which museums both create a sense of a national past and generate and legitimate the nation-state. But she argues that the institutional critique that wages war against the institutional processes of nation-building also produces the very subjects that become legible via this critique, simultaneously obliterating the institution instead of improving it: “so in this sense institutional critique serves as a tool of subjectivation of certain social groups or political subjects.”35 turions’s exhibition might be seen to mark an acknowledgment of, as well as a move away from, the relational practices of the 1990s, in that it departs from an inward-outward model to one of the outside looking into a situation in which art objects become newly reified for their performative, political, and cathartic potential – for what they, like the table, “do” in the context of institutional space, rather than for what they represent outside of it. This change reflects what Alex Farquharson, referring to J.L. Austin’s definition of speech acts,36 critiqued in the early 2000s as “performative curating”: an Austinian notion of curating would be “that [which] always actively structures and mediates the relationships of art and audience.”37 To read A Problem So Big It Needs Other People in light of these debates is to see that its central premise of negotiation produces the idea of a subject not “in solitude,” but sovereign “through contact, intimacy, and sociality.”38 In line with Bishop’s caution, “however temporary or utopian this may be,” negotiation is here stripped of its litigious dimensions and imbued with a dimension of generosity, whereby “negotiation implies reciprocity, all parties with vested interests, all parties subject to encounter, acknowledgment and compromise.”39 In this central focus on negotiation, face-to-face, but implicitly plural in nature, turions offers a definition of sovereignty as “an oscillation between different ways of knowing; the recognition of other understandings as they rub up against one’s own; the act of holding a space of not-knowing. Sovereignty is the work of mediation in recognizing the irreducible sovereignty of another, like one’s own, and the corresponding legitimacy of another’s claims on one’s self.”40 A glance beyond Groat’s table to works on the gallery walls effectively reinforces this definition: the Italian-born, British Columbia–raised, Vancouverbased multimedia artist Tiziana La Melia (b. 1982) explored the ways by which medium-specificity and materials might also occupy and oscillate between multiple meanings. Her work stretches the limits of materials, framing, and space so as to suggest objects that are not fixed in space or meaning, and nods to experiments in sculpture, notably Russian constructivism’s politically driven desire to challenge artistic conventions (Fig. 15.3). This emphasis on

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“truth to materials,” it can be argued, extends to the curatorial premise overall: the materials, here, being various models of sociality and negotiation. Reesa Greenberg, in her essay “The Exhibition as Discursive Event,” writes: “In the majority of exhibitions that become known as discursive events, the discussion is uninitiated by the exhibition’s organizers and is seen as a happy or unhappy result of unforeseen circumstances. There are exhibitions, however, in which discussion is intentionally built into their very framework.”41 Positing the exhibition as discursive event, Greenberg offers a model for thinking about the exhibition in performative terms that might be more broadly useful in thinking about exhibition spaces as spaces for negotiation:

O P PO S I TE

15.3  Tiziana La Melia, Dust selves, reflect and flex, 2012. Installation view of A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, sbc Gallery of Contemporary Art, 15 March –3 May 2014. Photo: Guy L’Heureux. Courtesy of sbc Gallery of Contemporary Art,

What if another verbal model for exhibitions is considered, a model which posits the exhibition less as entity and more as event, less as finite and fixed and more as a temporally fluid phenomenon, less as an insular construct and more as a relational structure in its internalized and externalized connections, less as address and more as conversation – in other words, the exhibition as discursive event? Such a model would emphasize the oral rather than the written; the social rather than the individual; the poetic rather than the predictable; and permeable, aleatory meanings rather than interpretations based on interpolation, interrogation, or iconography.42

Imagining the Sovereign Subject

In the context of A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, Groat’s table prompts such a mode of experiencing and enacting the exhibition. Although a work unto itself, in turions’s exhibitionary discourse, Fences Will Turn Into Tables became the stage for a series of performative negotiations, and witnessed various players coming to the table from a variety of cultural locations – locations that, in the context of turions’s premise, were notable for their geographic, cultural, and political contingencies. Basil AlZeri, born in 1982 in Jordan to Palestinian parents, living in Toronto, and having recently become a Canadian citizen, presented the work Pull, Sort, Hang, Dry, and Crush (Fig. 15.4), in which he spoke English, French, and Kanien’keha words to name various subjective relationships to land, dragging his materials from the office into the exhibition space and performing a series of actions, including the clipping of sage leaves from a bundle hanging from the ceiling: the burning of sage, the spreading of rose-coloured salt, and the making of za’taar. Speaking in Arabic as he went through the process of preparing the herb-based spread, he used the space of the gallery as a temporary space for communion and cultural translation. Daina Ashbee (b. 1990) and Tanya Lukin Linklater (b. 1976) performed negotiation as choreography, reading from the banners that comprise Lukin Link­later’s work Slow Scrape, a series of nine banners (three of which were

Montreal, and the artist.

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O P PO S I TE

15.4  Maggie Groat, Fences Will Turn Into Tables, 2010–13; Basil AlZeri, Pull, Sort, Hang, Dry, and Crush, performed at sbc Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, 29 March 2014; Tanya Lukin Linklater, Slow Scrape – So it goes like this – map of syllabics – we spark the spongy wood, 2013. Installation view of A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, sbc Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, 15 March–3 May 2014. Photo: Guy L’Heureux. Courtesy of sbc Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, and the artists.

Imagining the Sovereign Subject

included in the exhibition) developed from her poem “The Harvest Sturdies” (2014), written in response to Chief Theresa Spence’s forty-four-day hunger strike, which began on 11 December 2012. Chief Spence (of Attawapiskat First Nation) wore mitts that are considered an important symbol for the people of James Bay, Northern Ontario, and Lukin Linklater conducted interviews with James Bay residents Agnes Hunter, Marlene Kapasheshit, and Lillian Mishi Trapper (relatives of Lukin Linklater’s husband, artist Duane Linklater), who described the process for making the traditional mitts, which became the basis for the poem. The banners themselves reflected various processes of negotiation, teaching, and learning, with further acts of negotiation and translation conducted between Lukin Linklater and Ashbee, between the artists and their audiences, and between the artists, audiences, and the gallery space itself. The ongoing negotiation of treaty rights and self-government underway between Indigenous communities and the Canadian government was intricately woven into an experience of the work, the banner texts providing the score for the performance. Additional events included a meeting of turions’s salon-style reading series No Reading After the Internet, which focused on Chelsea Vowel’s important text “The Reports of Our Cultural Deaths Have Always Been Greatly Exaggerated” (first published in the now-defunct Fuse Magazine in 2013) – Vowel’s text serving as an entry point to thinking about the relationship between language and colonization in the Canadian (and Quebec) context. Gabrielle Moser’s No Looking After the Internet, a “looking group” that takes its inspiration from turions’s No Reading group and asks participants to suspend their interpretive impulses to “know” or project preconceived narratives onto images, was co-facilitated by participating artist Annie MacDonell (b. 1976). MacDonell’s forays into the Toronto Reference Library Picture Collection had yielded a motley collection of photographic images, and formed the basis of her photographic series On Originality and the Avant-Garde, positioned prominently on the long wall behind Groat’s table, and spilling out of folders onto Groat’s table during this collective exercise in meaning-making and not-knowing. The frame – here, archival folders revealing idiosyncratic taxonomies – was not a support for a more central object, experience, performance, or spatial delineation but was an essential element of the work. Transposing a series of workshops, discussions, and reading and looking groups onto the table, the table became more than a structural support; it became a relational apparatus, a Brancusi plinth.43 In relating her experience of sitting around the dining room table, the collective experience of the dining room table versus the solitary writer’s table, and the idea of the dining table as “a table around which bodies cohere through the mediation of its surface, sharing the food and drink that is on the table,”44 I am citing Ahmed who, importantly, links her theorizing of the phenomenological function of the physical table to that of

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15.5 The stag Library

Hannah Arendt: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it.”45

(Aja Rose Bond and Gabriel Saloman) and Gina

Drinking Our Bitterness: Curating as Catharsis

Badger, with cheyanne turions and Eric Emery, Brew Pub 3: “Relanding with Mugwort,” 2014. Mugwort distribution map, 1870–2000. Drawing by Gina Badger.

15.6 The stag Library (Aja Rose Bond and Gabriel Saloman) and Gina Badger, with cheyanne turions and Eric Emery, Brew Pub 3: “Relanding with Mugwort,” 2014. Mugwort stand, Toronto, June 2014. Photo by Gina

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Badger.

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The 2014 exhibition tbd , curated by Su-Ying Lee at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (mocca ) in Toronto, attempted to “[expose] the defining factors of contemporary art galleries for scrutiny and [examine] the institutions’ effects on communities in order to imagine possible futures and new approaches” by working with alternative forms of display and innovative constructions of exhibition, from the now-canonical (Gordon MattaClark, 1943–1978) to the of-the-moment (including Groat’s Fences Will Turn Into Tables). As part of the curatorial premise of exploring the notion of the contemporary art gallery as unfixed, tbd included offsite programming, including meetings of the Brewtality of Fact Beer Club, in which homebrewed beers are tested by participants who offer feedback and form the body of a living publication. One such exhibition-occasioned project, Brew Pub 3: “Relanding from Mugwort,” was organized/edited by Gina Badger, Eric Emery, and turions, in collaboration with the stag Library (Vancouver-based artists Aja Rose Bond, b. 1982, and Gabriel Saloman, b. 1977), to explore the relationship between Artemesia vulgaris (commonly known as mugwort), a plant that flourishes in urban spaces that have been altered by human intervention, and its roots in Indigenous European medicine. For this edition of the “brew pub,” Emery, a brewmaster, brewed beer using mugwort from the city of Toronto – land historically belonging to the Huron, Haudenosaunee, and Anishnaabe people – the mugwort-based beer acting as an object to ingest and a marker of Indigenous land (Figs. 15.5 and 15.6). Meeting on the back porch of the home of two of the collaborators, participants in this work were asked to gather around a personal altar collaboratively created by the makers of the work and, at different points in the evening, to go around in a circle, introducing themselves by chosen name, place of origin, and the name of their place of origin before colonization. As the project description stated: “Through the development of a beer using wild-crafted mugwort from the city of Toronto, land with which the Huron, Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe people have a long, historic and profound relationship, these artists consider what and how mugwort can teach those exploring the conflictual complexity of settlement.”46 In a participatory and relational turn, those present were asked to speak their feelings about settler guilt into their beer glasses, an action that at once forced participants into direct confrontation with potentially ugly and shameful histories of and complicity in colonization, and also inferred the possibility of a

cathartic experience intended to lift the participant from the weight of colonial oppression. The work called to mind the world-changing potential of the 1970s feminist practice of consciousness-raising, a practice that was originally appropriated from the model of “speaking our bitterness” that was used during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was popularly believed that the practice was inclusive of all women, given its focus on a “common oppression based on … gender”47 and on describing and analyzing “individual lived experience” as it centred on a perception of shared gender identification.48 In addition to speaking bitterness, consciousness-raising came to include an unprecedented range of experiences of female embodiment: “Sexual acts and feelings, orgasm, motherhood, reproduction, lesbianism, pleasure, food, body image, rape, domestic labor, and the like were given a new vocabulary of expression.”49 The belief in a shared experience of women became troubled, in later decades, with the advent of Third Wave feminism, trans studies, queer theory, intersectionality, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and masculinity studies. Thus, an articulation of the inherent power of consciousness-raising, as feminist theorist Drucilla Cornell has offered, must now be read through this troubled lens:

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One crucial aspect of feminism as it developed as a political movement in the late Sixties and early Seventies was to break the silence of women so as to articulate their suffering as women; to give us, in other words, another recourse than that of muteness. This breaking of the silence and the solidarity it made possible was associated with consciousnessraising groups. To raise consciousness was to understand the self as a woman, to know suffering collectively so as to grasp its basis not only in gender but in a system of gender that subordinates women. The truth of women was precisely in letting our suffering speak, to understand what was happening to each one of us not individually, but as women.50

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The burgeoning practice of consciousness-raising provided a performative kind of catharsis for working through daily experiences of oppression based in gender. When taken up in the present moment, the model of consciousnessraising, it could be argued, replaces earlier essentialisms with an essentialized experience of being settler, on the one hand offering confrontations, acknowledgments, and correctives, yet at the same time flattening the complexities of the subject position and, via the shared performance of drinking the beer and speaking into the glass, suggesting a shared complicity in the position of oppressors, devoid of more complex considerations of intersectional difference and distinct embodied experience in relation to diaspora, hybridity, and exile. As one participant recounted, unlike feminist consciousness-raising, and

even the utopic aspirations of relational art, the focus here was not on pleasure, physical or psychic, but on bitterness – the experience of settler shame and the taste of mud and blood. Increasingly common is the tendency to situate these performances and explorations within the context of an art gallery, however imagined or loosely framed that space may be, from the white cube to the private porch that frames the parameters of “experience.” What is it about a gallery space, this non-site, that opens up to and invites these kinds of explorations? It might be argued that it is within such relatively low-stakes political spaces that theoretical and pedagogical work happens – as a commentary, a corrective, a reflection, a trace, or a document of far more politically complex and at times dangerous events. And yet, at times, these exercises feel belated, unable to move in time with the political urgencies of the moment – settler-colonialism not relegated to the past but deeply inscribed in contemporary culture; and sovereignty not a metaphorical ideal but an active, and urgent, pursuit. Fences, Tables, Neighbours

Imagining the Sovereign Subject

When does consciousness transform into action? Exhibitions in the vein of turions’s evoke Bhabha’s thinking about the cultural and political power of art. In Bhabha’s commitment to theory we can read a case for the political power of the artist and of cultural production, at the point where Bhabha problematizes the film professor who argues, “We are not artists, we are political activists.”51 Bhabha observes: “By obscuring the power of his own practice in the rhetoric of militancy, he fails to draw attention to the specific value of a politics of cultural production … Forms of popular rebellion and mobilization are often most subversive and transgressive when they are created through oppositional cultural practices.”52 A Problem So Big It Needs Other People exemplifies Bhabha’s contention, gaining its political valence via its commitment to the discursive. But in the face of the political urgencies of the present, it introduces questions about the political efficacy of the exhibition space itself, as well as the aesthetic dimension of works used to philosophical and/or political ends, the works in the exhibition forfeiting their own emancipation in their service to the broader pursuit of sovereignty. I wonder about the cathartic tendency embedded in these processes of coming together around the table, as they seem to be a reckoning, in many cases, for oppressive experiences in the world beyond the gallery, brought into the space of the gallery, as though the gallery might function as a space for consciousness-raising, for “speaking our bitterness.” I am thinking of experiences I have recently had in exhibition spaces, both traditional and alternative, in which the call to meeting has centred on the desire to work through the guilt of settler-colonialism as a collective, performative process in which

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these difficult feelings risk becoming fodder for spectacle or, perhaps worse, categorizable, organizable, and displayable, like objects in a museum, reifying and reinforcing the sovereign subject as contingent on dominant culture. In thinking about the pursuit of decolonization and the possibility of the gallery space promoting sovereignty, I am left with questions about projects of this type, which evoke the relational practices of the 1990s but with the political currency of the present and the promise of Indigenous aesthetic approaches being used to translate processes of negotiation into concrete action. As Martineau and Ritskes have argued: “Against colonial erasure, Indigenous art marks the space of a returned and enduring presence. But this presence is complicated by its fraught relationality to the persistence of settler-colonialism, which always threatens to reappropriate, assimilate, subsume/consume and repress Indigenous voicings and visuality, their forms and aesthetics, within its hegemonic logic of domination.”53 My point of contention is not with the ideology of exhibitions but with the idea that the imagined political space of the gallery enacts a politics more broadly useful beyond gallery walls. What can we ask of these types of exhibitions and what can we expect them to deliver? A curatorial hypothesis based on negotiation performs its own premise and introduces a tautological relationship to the objects in the gallery, where the gallery, always a receptacle for a series of pedagogical experiences around the object, flips the subject-object relation. When meaning is transferred from the object to the subject, the subject is emancipated by the recognition of the contingency of overlapping identifications. The object comes into legibility in the performances of negotiation instigated by its display. The imagined space of the gallery produces at once the object and its audiences as enacting processes of negotiation that emancipate both. But it also reinforces the process whereby the legibility and autonomy of the subject is contingent on its proximity to the dominant structure of the institution. How does the metaphor of sovereignty influence change at a structural level, so that projects can be supported, yet not determined, by galleries? Without moving beyond the metaphor, fences turned into tables will always retain the potential to again become good fences that make good neighbours.

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Embodying Sovereignty Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada C ar l a Taunto n

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he building and writing of self-determined Indigenous art histories is a global research project that transcends the borders of the nation-state, while contextualizing distinct Indigenous lived experiences within Canadian national borders. An Indigenous art history can be defined as a living archive that visually represents both cultural continuance and continuities between eras of production. The current mobilization of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination challenges historic Eurocentric approaches that have generated writing about rather than for or by Indigenous peoples. This new privileging of Indigenous methodologies constitutes a fundamental shift from Western art history to Indigenous art history. Indigenous art histories reference the multiplicity of sovereign Indigenous nations and the distinctness of Indigenous cultures and experiences. As ongoing decolonizing acts that foreground Indigenous perspectives and knowledges, Indigenous art histories call into question the historic marginalization of Indigenous art practices by art historical discourse. Indigenous women’s performance art must be understood as belonging to a living archive that mobilizes Indigenous sovereignty, and connects to a transnational Indigenous art history.1 Their performances write, create, and produce culturally localized Indigenous histories of Indigenous lived experiences. In this chapter, I incorporate multiple lenses of enquiry rooted in definitions of Indigenous art histories. I aim to show the complexities of Indigenous cultural production and to challenge the limitations of Western art-historical methodology in discussions of Indigenous art practices. I draw on criticism of art historical discourse by Indigenous scholars such as Loretta Todd, who in 1992 wrote: “By reducing our cultural expression to simply the question of modernism or postmodernism, art or anthropology, or whether we

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are contemporary or traditional, we are placed on the edges of dominant culture, while the dominant culture determines whether we are allowed to enter the realm of art.”2 The performances that I explore are centrally located and discussed through a framework of locally and culturally specific Indigenous perspectives and theoretical approaches, as well as through a re-envisioning of critical pedagogy. This chapter responds to the question, “Why national art histories?” and puts forward the following questions. What is the role of Indigenous performance art in both Indigenous and Canadian art history? How has Indigenous performance participated in the project of decolonization, and how does it still? What histories do Indigenous performance artists bring forward? For whom do they perform? How does performance create unsettling narratives for non-Indigenous audience members by creating space for Indigenous sovereignty (nationhood)? Ultimately, what does a nation-to-nation art history look like? By this I mean an art history that centralizes Indigenous art practice and methodologies while contextualizing them within the borders of the nation-state, Canada. I divide this discussion of Indigenous women’s performance art into three main sections – self-determined representation, Indigenous cultural continuance, and Indigenous sovereignty – in order to show how performance functions as a living archive of Indigenous nations, how it produces the history of Indigenous nations. Critical practices employed by the artists should be considered as research elucidated through the performative act that contributes to the writing of decolonized Indigenous stories, histories, and memories. I examine the work of four contemporary artists – Rebecca Belmore (b. 1960), Lori Blondeau (b. 1964), Shelley Niro (b. 1954), and Cheryl L’Hirondelle (b. 1958) – through the lenses of critical Indigenous pedagogy, to frame acts of performing Indigenous memories and stories as tactics of resistance, intervention, and decolonization. Indigenous performance art is also a form of storytelling – an act of claiming and retelling that displaces settler-based narratives about Indigenous peoples and their cultural practices. In this way, Indigenous women’s performance art can be seen and understood as testimony, another form of history writing, or archiving, in cultural continuance with oral-based customs. Performative storytelling and embodied practices are fundamental components of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. Performed stories are the documents of Indigenous histories; they resist the erasure of Indigenous lived experience by the apparatus of settler colonialism – the archive, the academy, and the museum. In the context of colonialism in Canada, Indigenous nations and individuals have employed performance as a vehicle for intervention, resistance, and cultural continuance. Indigenous performers as storytellers, knowledge-keepers, actors, and performance artists have since time

Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada

immemorial embodied Indigenous ways of knowing and being through the performative act. The history of Indigenous performance art is connected to Indigenous customary practices of transmitting histories, knowledges, and cosmologies. Since the 1980s contemporary Indigenous performance art has contributed and intervened in the exhibition programs of Canadian cultural institutions (artist-run centres, university, regional and national galleries). Currently, Indigenous women’s performance practice continues to tell important stories about Indigenous lived experience and participates in ongoing dialogue about historic and contemporary individual and collective identities. My research responds to Ian McKay’s call for studies of Canada by postnationalist historians to critically re-examine the consequences of the liberal political order in northern North America.3 From the perspective of a whitesettler scholar, I address the specific effects that the various forms of Canadian nationalism have had on Indigenous nations and their peoples, and how artists and performers have responded, intervened, and resisted colonial and national rhetoric. In line with these art practices, my research intends to disrupt Canadian national/ist narratives that have framed and marginalized Indigenous histories. By challenging Canadian national/ist history, I hope to contribute to the disruption of the silences and to support the dispelling of the myths surrounding Indigenous histories and settler colonialism in Canada. To this end I highlight the ongoing impact of settler society’s ignorance and apathy toward colonial processes – a decolonizing act that aims to unravel and reveal the apparatus of colonialism. My work is also informed by “critical Indigenous pedagogy,” a concept developed by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Norman K. Denzin, and Yvonna Lincoln as a merging of Indigenous and critical methodologies. This borderland epistemology is formed from research that benefits the needs of specific Aboriginal communities. Denzin and Lincoln explain critical Indigenous pedagogy as the use of methods in a critical way for the mobilization of social justice, noting that this type of research methodology is both politically and ethically based. They write that critical Indigenous pedagogy “values the transformative power of Indigenous, subjugated knowledges.”4 Denzin and Lincoln argue that this type of framework challenges and critiques the historical-research lenses used to explore Indigenous life, such as positivist and post-positivist approaches, which, they argue, merely address the interests and concerns of non-Indigenous scholars.5 Tuhiwai Smith explains that during the Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (1994–2004), Indigenous scholars challenged and disrupted Western approaches while developing “methodologies and approaches to research that privileged Indigenous knowledges, voices, and experiences.”6 Borrowing Tuhiwai Smith’s distinction between methodology as a theory of research and

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a research method as a way of gathering empirical data, I define Indigenous methodology as a theory of inquiry that incorporates Indigenous methods such as storytelling, drama, poetry, and critical personal narratives.7 Indigenous research methods are performative practices that make Indigenous life visible on Indigenous terms, represented through Indigenous lenses and, as Tuhiwai Smith insists, “very strategic in [their] purpose and activities and relentless in [their] pursuit of social justice.”8 By employing the concept of “critical Indigenous pedagogy,” my research on Indigenous performance art acknowledges the “transformative power” of Indigenous knowledges and perspectives. Rooted in an understanding of self-determination and sovereignty, the untangled histories presented in this chapter stress the always-already presence of Indigenous agency and cultural autonomy in performance arts. As Jolene Rickard argues, “The struggle for autonomous nationhood embedded in a political discourse of sovereignty is a critical factor for the ongoing presence of indigeneity in the Americas.”9 Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars such as Rickard, Lee-Ann Martin, and Steven Loft, I contend that Indigenous women performance artists activate their bodily artistic practices as a means to resist, intervene, and confront marginalization of Indigenous communities, peoples, and cultures. In so doing, their performances connect and explore issues of Indigenous politics, cultural production, and activism. Critical Indigenous pedagogy creates space for the assertion of diverse Indigenous perspectives and stories or histories and incorporates into its political framework notions of sovereignty, self-determination, autonomy, agency, and decolonization. Annishinabek performance and installation artist Rebecca Belmore was one of the first Indigenous performance artists in Canada. Her work has manifested all three aspects that I am exploring here: Indigenous self-representation, cultural resistance, and the performance of cultural sovereignty. Belmore first came to public attention with Rising to the Occasion (1987), “a dress that simulated a beaver house and which figured prominently in the parade and video performance Twelve Angry Crinolines, staged on the occasion of a royal visit to the city by Prince Andrew and his new wife.”10 Her performance persona, High Tech Teepee Trauma Mama, emerged around the same time; she was then a student in the experimental art program at the Ontario College of Art and Design. High Tech Teepee Trauma Mama developed as a means of mocking, subverting, and challenging the history of vaudeville theatre, specifically the maintenance and presentation of native Indian stereotypes. Belmore often performed High Tech Teepee Trauma Mama for Native audiences in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Marilyn Burgess describes the persona as “a sort of postmodern crazed ‘warrior maiden’ who has shaken to her very bones the enduring image

Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada

of the passive Indian princess … She is loud and fighting mad, but she is also a trickster seducing her audience with play.”11 In a Trauma Mama performance on 16 February 1988 at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Belmore performed for the Indian Days event organized by the Native Students Association. Her performance space, surrounded by the audience, consisted of a 2.4-metre plastic teepee without a covering and a 3-metre-high totem pole made out of alcohol boxes. Belmore started the performance by emerging from the tepee. She turned on the television, which played edited scenes from the movie Little Big Man, showing the US Calvary invading and massacring an Indian encampment. She concluded her performance by turning on a cassette player and danced barefoot until exhausted to the Bobby Cortolla song You Indian Giver.12 Later the same year, Trauma Mama performed in a music-based collaboration project with Allen De Leary. The Howuh! performance includes a song, whose chorus mocked the souvenir seeker: “I’m a high-tech tepee trauma mama, a high-tech tepee trauma mama, Plastic replica of Mother Earth; Plastic replica of Mother Earth Souvenir Seeker, You may think you can buy me – cheap! Plastic woman, Long black hair, Shy woman, Silent. whoop !”13 Belmore’s living archive also contains the stories and memories of missing and murdered Indigenous women and confronts public indifference. In Canada over a thousand Indigenous women have gone missing or have been murdered since the 1980s. Indigenous communities have worked tirelessly over decades to demand inquiries and justice from local, provincial, and national governments. Artists’ responses include Belmore’s Vigil (2002) and Blondeau’s Asiniy Iskwew (2009), performances that commemorated the women, many as yet unidentified, and memorialized Indigenous lived experience. They predated national and international media attention, which, despite calls to action for the missing and murdered Indigenous women by Indigenous community leaders, by Amnesty International, and the United Nations,14 only started to accumulate in recent years. Vigil was performed and videotaped on the streets of Vancouver at the corner of Gore Avenue and Cordova Street in June 2002. Belmore placed herself on the streets that the women had disappeared from and called out their names. In doing so she created a record of this contemporary invisible history. Vigil is made up of several performative physical actions: washing the street with water; lighting candles; drawing roses through the mouth; washing the mouth with water; putting on a red dress; nailing that dress to a telephone pole and ripping it off (Fig. 16.1). The work was recorded and a video installation of Vigil was incorporated into the The Named and the Unnamed (2002), an exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at University of British

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16.1  Rebecca Belmore, Vigil, video still, 2002, Vancouver. Photo Credit: Paul Wong and Rebecca Belmore. Courtesy of Paul Wong.

Columbia in 2002.15 Curator Scott Watson states that Vigil and other works ask provocative questions:

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The question one must ask is: did the murderer(s) choose these women because the police would be less likely to care if they were “missing”? If that is the case then in a real way society marked these women and is implicated in their demise. Quietly, indeed, without uttering any words except the names of the missing, Belmore leads the viewer to make his or her own subtle connections.16

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The performance of Indigenous cultural sovereignty has been a major theme in Belmore’s work, as I discuss further below. In 2005 Belmore was selected to represent Canada at the 51st Venice Biennale; she was the first Indigenous woman artist to exhibit at the Canadian Pavilion. Her presentation of her video-based performance installation Fountain (Fig. 16.2) was a significant moment in the history of exhibiting contemporary Indigenous art in both local and global gallery contexts and exemplifies the ways in which Indigenous artists over the past four decades have used innovative strategies to critique art institutions, revealing their historic and ongoing roles as an apparatus of colonialism. Belmore’s performance-based video projection – her very presence as Canada’s representative at Venice – elucidates the roles that Indigenous art practice plays in urgent projects of activating decolonization, representing self-determination, and asserting sovereignty.

Fountain was projected onto a waterfall – the water acted as the viewing screen for five powerful scenes, performed and recorded on a typical, cold January day in the Pacific Northwest. The video projection starts with a panoramic view of grey ocean and sky, which moves quickly along a sandy beach littered with logs from the forest industry and salvaged by the tide. Suddenly, fire explodes on the beach, and Belmore walks away from the explosion. The next scene shows Belmore in the ocean, struggling to fill a bucket with water. She continues to struggle, but repeatedly falls. She is then shown walking toward the camera, holding the bucket in her hand. Moving forward with great resolve, she “heaves” the bucket at the viewer. The water has transformed into blood, which flows down the screen. Lee-Ann Martin remarks that Belmore “confronts the camera with a somber, resilient look … the expression of someone ready to move forward, with nothing but fear and, sadly, nothing more to lose.”17 She

16.2  Rebecca Belmore, Fountain, performance still, 2005. Photo Credit: Belkin Gallery, ubc .

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stands staring at her audience and then walks away. Belmore states that her sequence of actions and her body’s physical struggle tell several stories: I am returned to myself through the familiar labour of carrying a bucket of water. To me, this refers to women’s labour and simultaneously to my own task of bringing a “fountain” back to Venice, the city where the idea of fountain originated. This “gift” – the contents of the bucket – carries the weight of colonial history and I am able, through art, to wash it from my body and splash it on the screen where it become an object for reflection. It is my way of painting this history, of rendering the invisible visible.18 Belmore’s video and installation insert Indigenous worldviews into the museum space, thereby exposing the inequitable power relationships inherent in museum spaces.19 These inequities mirror and reflect the larger context of gallery spaces and their relationship within Canadian settler society. Indigenous women performance artists activate their bodily artistic practices as a means of resisting the marginalization of Indigenous women’s histories. In other words, their embodied practices decolonize memories, histories, and stories. Performative Representation: Indigenous Self-Determination

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Indigenous women performance artists have produced and continue to produce dynamic work that creates space for activating Indigenous self-determination and establishes a new archive of Indigenous self-representation. In the 1990s works such as Mohawks in Beehives by Shelley Niro (1991) and cosmosquaw (1996) by Lori Blondeau were creating a new archive of representation of Indigenous women, while resisting the settler-Euro artists’ historic dehumanization of Indigenous women’s bodies, as exemplified by the iconic “Indian Princess” (Fig. 16.3). The works of Belmore, Blondeau, and Niro actively respond to the trauma of representational and colonial violence, and in so doing highlight the impact that imperialism has had on the valuation of Indigenous bodies, as well as knowledges (worldviews) in settler society. In discussing her persona Betty Daybird, showcased in the photographs cosmosquaw and Lonely Surfer Squaw (1997), Blondeau writes:

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For years I had been doing research into Native women. I became frustrated with the research because it was always written from a non-Native perspective. I saw Daybird as a way to take little jabs at the Western viewpoint … and I wanted to play with some of the history. For her character I also use situations that have affected and made me who I

16.3  Lori Blondeau, cosmosquaw, 1996. Courtesy of the artist.

Betty Daybird is a Hollywood diva, chic and savvy in a sassy red negligee and feather boa, black boots, beehive hairdo, and an “Indian princess” tattoo titled falls to pieces.21 The artist employs costume to mimic the complex signs of Indigenous women and subvert the dominant culture’s image of women’s beauty. As Homi Bhabha argues, “Mimicry emerges as the representation of

Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada

am. This meant looking at the women in my family, my mother and her sisters and my grandmother.20

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a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform.”22 Blondeau’s performance personas arguably are “double articulations,” negotiating identities and stereotypes. In “Dressed to Thrill,” Jayne Wark introduces the necessity of considering costume in relation to body politics: If the body is indeed the site where the particularities of identity are visibly marked, it is also indisputable that the body in performance is rarely unadorned. More often than not, the body is accompanied by various cultural artifacts, from simple street clothes to theatrical costumes to elaborate constructions that function as hybrids between prop and art.23 Blondeau’s choice of a red outfit recalls the representation of the Indian princess as the “lady in red.” While historically the “lady in red” image was used as a symbol of the availability of the lands in the West, here Betty Daybird stakes a claim to her own space. She offers herself as a self-determined representation of Indigenous women’s identity, controlled by the self-determined Indigenous lens, not the colonial gaze. Lonely Surfer Squaw and cosmosquaw were produced during a performative photo-shoot by Blondeau, as was Niro’s series, Mohawks in Beehives (1991), which consists of photographs of her sisters performing in the city of Brantford, Ontario. Playing with stereotypes, these works can be situated within the history of Indigenous photography, as well as the history of Indigenous performance. Blondeau acknowledges Niro as an influence, especially in her early work.24 She created these personas as part of a strategy to unsettle her audience’s perceptions of the image and identity of Indigenous women, as she writes:

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The signifiers of Indian-ness (such as coloured feather, beaded headbands and faux buckskin dress and moccasins) are not true representations of Indians. They are stereotypical representations that have been created by the dominant society to appease its way of seeing Native Americans. The stereotypes of Indian women can be traced back to first contact with Europeans through narratives, drawings, paintings, and photographs.25

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Betty Daybird uses the parodic mode to re-represent the cultural stereotype of the “squaw.”26 This persona made her debut as a magazine cover girl, cosmosquaw, as part of a light-box image made in collaboration with Brad­ lee LaRocque for a show entitled Native Love in 1996.27 Since then, cosmo ­ squaw has appeared in live performances, gallery openings, television

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interviews, videos, and on the Internet. Her audacious personality, confident attitude, and flamboyant clothes derive from Blondeau’s personal experience with popular culture.28 Her genesis dates to the time when Blondeau “started thinking about inventing a magazine like Cosmopolitan for Native women … coming up with the name CosmoSquaw.”29 The decision to use the word “squaw” was difficult for Blondeau, as the term is generally regarded as derogatory and harmful – and because she was aware that she could receive criticism from the Native community.30 However, her use of the term reflects her intention to reclaim the word’s original meaning in Cree: “woman.” In this regard, Blondeau is strategically employing what Rebecca Schneider identifies as counter-mimicry in order to renegotiate the identities of the colonial stereotypes of Indigenous women.31 Through her personas, Blondeau explicitly presents the construction of identity within a colonial framework.32 Her incorporation of the term “squaw” is, as she states, “about taking away the negative connotations and replacing them with something positive,”33 and about drawing attention to the colonial stereotypes that have influenced Aboriginal women’s sense of self.34 Judith Butler argues that the act of reclaiming is the initiating moment of a counter-mobilization.35 According to Blondeau, the decision to incorporate the prefix “cosmo” relates to her belief that all women are cosmo-squaws, or women of the universe. One could argue that Cosmopolitan magazine represents the artificiality of Euro-American fashion and beauty industries and that the women represented in its pages are stereotypes. In other words, there is little that is “real” in Cosmopolitan magazine. Blondeau’s cosmosquaw may thus be seen to challenge not only the representations of Indigenous women but also the unrealistic images in the magazine. cosmosquaw employs mimicry and parody in providing Aboriginal women with an alternative, while addressing the erasure of their bodies in popular culture’s hegemonic model of beauty. This strategy of performative redress or intervention within the dominant society’s structures was first employed in the mid-1970s by feminist artists who used the body as a way of protesting, resisting, and challenging. Amelia Jones terms this kind of practice “body art” and locates the use of the body as a means of emphasizing subjectivity, encoded in theories of feminism and post-structuralism. Jones argues that body art “emphasizes the implication of the body (of what I call the ‘body/self,’ with all of its apparent racial, sexual, gender, class and other apparent or unconscious identifications) in the work.”36 Essays in Belmore’s Fountain catalogue for Venice underscore this strategy. Rickard connects the representation of the Americas as an Indigenous wo­ man’s body with Belmore’s body politics, and discusses the ways in which the native body signified and stands in for the “desired occupation or ownership of the land.”37 As she puts it, Belmore’s body “has always been a decolonizing

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zone.”38 Body work by Belmore and Blondeau powerfully performs the historical experiences of Indigenous women on settler stages; their subversion of the Indian maiden calls out the stereotype and the confines of such representations in the imaginations of settler audiences. High Tech Teepee Trauma Mama and cosmosquaw are activist works of protest – performative works that make the hitherto invisible histories of Indigenous women in North America overtly central and visible. Performative Cultural Resistance

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Indigenous women performance artists participate in the project of decolonization through their tactics of performance, using their bodies as a means of presenting Indigenous perspectives and claiming space for Indigenous stories/histories and memories. Their performances of Indigenous memories are tactics of resistance, intervention, and decolonization. As Tuhiwai Smith argues, “[the] collective memory of imperialism has been perpetuated through the ways in which knowledge about Indigenous peoples was collected, classified, and then represented in various ways back to the West, and then, through the eyes of the West, back to those who have been colonized.”39 She defines decolonization as “a process which engages with imperialism and colonialism at multiple levels.”40 It involves “knowing of the colonizer and a recovery of ourselves, an analysis of colonialism, and a struggle for self-determination.”41 Decolonizing representation through performance also activate spaces for Indigenous cultural continuance. Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s (waynohtêw) performances embody the concept of nêhiyawîhcikêwin (Cree teachings) and examine the place of tradition, or rather cultural continuities and continuance, in a postindustrial, postcolonial contemporary world. Commenting on L’Hirondelle’s art practice, Huron-Wendat new media artist and curator Ahasiw MaskegonIskwew explains:

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In a manner more aligned with tradition, from a critical distance but certainly not isolated from academia, waynohtêw’s devotion to “nêhiyawîhcikêwin” (Cree teachings) is precisely that – a practice of the Cree way, of Cree culture. She grounds it in face-to-face relationships with discussions both “trivial and sublime,” visiting and learning from Elders, close relationships with friends and family, inscribing her experience within creative projects and, “always, the ceremonial life.”42 L’Hirondelle’s key strategies in her 2001 performance of Cistemaw Iyiniw Ohci, meaning “for the tobacco being,” performed on the Makwa Sahgaiehcan reserve in northern Saskatchewan, include cultural continuance/practice,

storytelling, and memory (Fig. 16.4). Through her act of running a 21 km route and stopping at local homes along the way to meet with local people, she uses performance art as a site for engaging with a local community. Cistemaw Iyiniw Ohci is arguably a performance of history through the acts of continuing cultural practice, sharing stories, and remembering both the artist and the community. As Candice Hopkins explains, this performance re-enacted “running done two generations earlier by Cistemaw Iyiniw, a Cree man who delivered tobacco from community to community to ask for their attendance and support at ceremonies.”43 The location of this work is crucial. As Archer Pechawis writes, “In this performance L’Hirondelle illuminates the themes that run through her work: nêhiyawîhcikêwin, intervention in ‘public’ space and disregard for accepted notions of audience.”44 In other words, L’Hirondelle’s act of bringing performance art to Makwa Sahgaiehcan reserve, a remote location whose community members would have had little exposure to performance and contemporary art, is an act of intervention and inclusion. In an interview published in fuse , Anishnawbe-kwe curator Wanda Na­ nibush asked L’Hirondelle: “Is there a difference in the meaning of your work in the context of an Aboriginal audience? We rarely get to travel our art to our own people. Have you found that to be true?” L’Hirondelle, referring to her experiences at the Development of Performance gathering organized by Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder, stated that she “was moved by the interventionist work … but some of it was kind of like an inside joke”:

This work is about community engagement. L’Hirondelle describes one of her “most poignant moments,” experienced at an artist talk sponsored by Tribe Inc. on the day before her run:

Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada

If you did not get the joke, it was meant to be an abrasive piece, meant to irritate the audience. I just have so much love for people that I do not want to irritate people in that community. You do not want to irritate people who have been traumatized or who have been left on the outside. So I wanted to subvert that in some way. I asked instead how you could go onto a reserve and do work that just embraced people. That’s where cistemaw iyiniw ohci came from. I wanted to start doing these homages. The run was 21km and began on Crown land, where Big Bear fought the North West Mounted Police during the North West Resistance, and ended at the residence of an Elder at Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation. I did it as an homage to honour the community’s ceremonial runner, Cistemaw Iyiniw. The old ladies on the reserve were phoning each other, saying “she’s running for our ancestors.” People would drive by and yell out their truck windows, “ahkameyimew” (keep going).45

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We held it at the school. When you are working with youth, if they do not leave the room that’s a standing ovation. The standing “O” on a reserve is when everyone comes up afterwards and shakes hands with you. At the end of my talk, this youth who was at the back looking disinterested, legs stretched out, asked a question. I had been talking about how I would stop at people’s houses who tagged their doors. I would know I could go there for water on my run. This youth asked what he would have to write on his house to get me to stop and visit the next day. I almost wept.46

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As revealed in her conversation with Nanibush, L’Hirondelle was performing cultural knowledge and histories/stories of the people, specifically for a local community, the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation, while using the performative mode for socio-cultural continuance and resistance. From the artworld perspective, this performance intervenes in entrenched colonial spaces such as galleries and museums, by using the reserve as the site of performance. But perhaps more important, Cistemaw Iyiniw Ohci creates a site for multigenerational exchanges, recalling the community’s cultural knowledge. In Hopkins’s astute analysis of this performance, L’Hirondelle’s “goal was to engage another kind of viewer” – audience members from Makwa Sahgaiehcan – and in order to do this she had to “negotiate a new set of rules and develop a differ-

16.4  Cheryl L’Hir­ondelle, Cistemaw Iyiniw Ohci, Photographic document of the performance, 16 June 2001. The sign on the artist’s back gives the title and date of the performance in syllabics (translation: for the tobacco being). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Joseph Naytowhow (left); Photo: Louise Halfe (centre and right).

Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada

ent set of cultural strategies.” Hopkins also quotes an insightful pre-performance remark by the artist: “The activity has to somehow engage people instead of alienate them. It has to occur where people live and where performance has survived for many years – in people’s camps, homes and at the kitchen table.” Hopkins concludes: “Her task of engaging people instead of alienating them was determined from the outset. Her strategy was to stage the performance in the local, engaging the community by performing a part of their history.”47 L’Hirondelle’s comment about how performance has survived is insightful. Her words evoke and allude to Indigenous peoples’ struggles with colonialism, tactics of oppression, marginalization, and assimilation (seen in such government legislations as the ceremonial ban of 1894–1951). Despite such oppressive agendas, diverse and sophisticated socio-political, spiritual, and cultural practices continue. Hers is a performative act of cultural continuance that combines a homage to the local practice of delivering sacred medicine (tobacco) through the action of running with the transmission of Cree cultural knowledge/language via syllabics and language. Cistemaw Iyiniw Ohci is a multivocal site of storytelling, one that is centred in Cree knowledge, stories, and memories of the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nations and the artist. Within the project of decolonization. Cistemaw Iyiwi Ohni accomplishes a multi-vocality that engages the artist’s experience of stories and the community’s memory of cultural practice and both the specific life of their ancestor,

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Cistemaw, and ancestors in general. As several women of the community stated, L’Hirondelle “was running for our ancestors.” She participated as a performance artist and a woman of Cree heritage with the histories and stories of the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nations, and simultaneously reveals Indigenous oral histories and perspectives that have been ignored, silenced, and marginalized in the history of settler Canada. Her art practice, exemplified by Cistemwa Iyiwi Ohni, privileges stories and oral knowledge, performing histories and memories and, by transmitting knowledge through the performance of her body, contributes to an Indigenous archive of cultural knowledge. Performance art can participate in the decolonization of colonial archives, creating new memories and stories from Indigenous perspectives about Indigenous experiences. L’Hirondelle’s work exemplifies the intersection and investigation of nêhiyawin (the Cree worldview) and indigenous peoples’ historical and contemporary experiences. Many of her performances are physically demanding. The endurance of her body in site-specific performances interconnects with Indigenous histories, representing cultural continuity, the history of Indigenous resistance, and intervention. As Archer Pechawis writes:

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Her practice is an investigation of the intersection of Cree worldview (nêhiyawin) and the creative inter/multidisciplinary inherent in indigenous, world and (so called) youth cultures. As part of this investigation, L’Hirondelle develops performative physical endurances, infiltrations and interventions, site-specific installations, interactive net.art projects and keeps singing, making rhythm, dancing and telling stories whenever and where ever she can.48

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Lori Blondeau’s Sisters also performs history, asserting Indigenous presence and cultural continuance and continuities in sites and within histories that have excluded Indigenous knowledge, experience, memory, history, identity, and stories. The interaction of Sisters with colonial and settler archives contributes to indigenizing the archive and constructing a contemporary Indigenous archive or repertoire. The performance is also an act of storytelling that examines ways in which this act of claiming and retelling displaces settler-based narratives about Indigenous peoples and their cultural practices. In Blondeau’s performance, the grounding act of storytelling is transmitted through her body, as she uses her actions and her body as her voice. As Lynne Bell observes, “Rooted in childhood memories and family stories, Sisters, speaks to the impact of colonialism on the traditional Plains lifestyle and food culture of Blondeau’s family.”49 Blondeau’s performance makes connections between customary Indigenous ways of being – specifically, Plains Indigenous traditions – and the impact of the loss of such a lifestyle due to colonialism, such as the present epidemic of diabetes in Indigenous communities.

Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada

Blondeau says: “My great-great-grandfather lived on a diet of pemmican, wild roots, berries, and wild game. The demise of the buffalo meant that in one generation our traditional lifestyle was changed forever. Today’s fast food is killing Native people with diabetes, obesity, and other diseases.”50 Sisters is a performance made up of a sequence of four scenes of physical actions, which, in some cases, lead to a double-twist ending.51 These scenes are linked through the ritualization of actions. Each is a physical act connected with the concept of food as both sustenance and poison,52 as well as the transmission of memory and story through physical actions. As seen from the audience, Blondeau’s claimed Indigenous space comprises a hand-sized stone that rests on a larger, rougher rock. To the right of the rock and stone, a fish and a neatly folded piece of red cloth await the performer. Blondeau walks into the space wearing a simple off-white cloth dress cut above the knees. She carries a basket of Saskatoon berries or, as in the ocad University performance in Toronto (March 2008), a basket of blueberries. David Garneau describes the work from the perspective of the audience: “For the next fifteen minutes, she crushes the berries, guts the fish, and tears the cloth into strips. She remains straight-faced and silent throughout. The unfolding events are reproduced as a video projection on a screen in the middle of the stage.”53 The audience encounters the sounds of crushing berries against a rock and the ripping of cloth, the smell of the berry juice and of fish, while the live-feed projection focuses on her bodily actions. As Blondeau explains: “They [the audience members] have the option of watching the projection, which zooms in on my hands as I crush the berries, or they can watch me as the piece unfolds – my facial expressions, body gestures, and the way I occupy space.”54 The live-feed projection heightens Blondeau’s occupation of the gallery space. Assertively inclusive, her presence as an Indigenous woman in the gallery claims this often exclusionary space: a space encoded in settler power dyna­ mics that have continuously ignored transmissions of Indigenous cultural and historical knowledge on account of the gallery’s history and relationship to colonial attitudes and national/ist exclusion. Blondeau’s use of her body as her art practice asserts and claims spaces as sites of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, connecting histories of exclusion with contemporary moments of resistance. Unpacking these histories of stereotypical repre­ sentations and colonial violence, and making connections with performance art, theatre, and other body- and performance-based art practices, the multilayered performance of Sisters comments on the colonial erasure of Indigenous knowledge/lifestyles from national/ist narratives and institutions and their preservation within Indigenous communities. Sisters is a beautiful performative act of ritual, ceremony, memory, and story, communicated not through words but through repetitive actions. Blondeau’s body is the site of the transmission of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous

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O PPO SI TE

16.5  Lori Blondeau, Asiniy Iskwew, performance stills, 2009. Ottawa, Natural Disaster Performance Series. Photos: Elaina Martin. Courtesy of Lori Blondeau and Elaina Martin.

experience of colonialism, and the site of asserting Indigenous resistance, survivance, and self-determination. Blondeau utilizes her memories to perform her ritual actions, once part of the daily lives of Indigenous women: “The piece is about my memories of watching my mother and her sisters at our house cleaning ducks. I remember the awful smell of singed feathers. Another memory is of watching my mother and all the other women in my family gut fish.” Through the repetition of these actions, Blondeau links herself to the women of her family and to ancestral women’s practices. The act of cleaning ducks or gutting fish was a communal experience that brought the women in Blondeau’s family together; it was a time to connect and share stories of daily life. Her performance also speaks to the relearning of Indigenous customary practices, alluding to traditions lost because of colonialism, assimilation, and governmental policies – stories and practices once camouflaged, silenced, and forced underground. As Blondeau writes, “One of the reasons I wanted to do this performance was to teach myself the skills that the women in my family have known for generations.”55 In some families, these “common practices” continue, while in others, this knowledge is lost. Recalling the roles of Aboriginal women in their communities, including storytelling, Sisters mirrors the larger Indigenous, and specifically Plains Cree and Saulteaux, experience of colonial history. Blondeau writes:

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My grandmother told me a story about the late 1930s when they had no food. They were starving, and my grandfather was too proud to hunt small game like pheasants and prairie chickens, which were traditionally the preserve of the women. So my grandmother snared all these partridges. (She claims there are no partridges on the prairies because she snared them all.) But she stopped snaring them when she cut one open to gut it and maggots came out. She read this as a sign, and that was the last partridge she snared.56

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Although Blondeau is verbally silent throughout the performance of Sisters, her repetitive actions tell numerous stories and share multiple Indigenous experiences. She writes: “After I perform Sisters, audience members often come up to me and talk about their own memories, and experiences: as if my action somehow triggers their memories.”57 Witnessing Blondeau’s repetitive and laborious physical actions made me acutely aware of the impact of colonization and the legacies of ethnocide, genocide, and assimilation. Furthermore, focusing on interpretation as an exchange or negotiation between performer and her audience, she emphasizes the reciprocal relationship present in both performance art and Indigenous storytelling. As Blondeau writes, “For me this piece is visually beautiful because all you see is this red, red liquid, which runs

down the stone like blood. All you hear is the hypnotic sound of rocks colliding against each other.”58 Sisters is also the foundation for Blondeau’s Asiniy Iskwew (Rock Woman), which addresses the violence experienced, endured, and fundamentally survived by Indigenous bodies (Fig. 16.5). First presented in the fall of 2009 at Ottawa’s Natural Disaster, Asiniy Iskwew is a performative response to the stolen Indigenous women in Canada. Blondeau tells a contemporary story all too familiar in Indigenous urban, rural, and reserve communities that until very recently has been a public secret: the thousands of Indigenous women who have gone missing and have been murdered in recent decades across Canada. This multi-layered performance vocalizes the ongoing history of Indigenous genocide in Canada. As Anishnabe curator Wanda Nanibush writes: Media events like the Pickton trial and the arrest of John Martin Crawford make us realize that the police are not apt to follow up when it’s First Nations women being murdered. A 20-kilometre stretch of highway between Prince Rupert and Prince George in the northern interior of British Columbia has come to be known as the “Highway of Tears” after a number of Indigenous women and girls were assaulted, disappeared or were found murdered in communities on or near the highway in the 1990s. This is a disaster, daily and unnatural.59

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Performing Indigenous Cultural Sovereignty

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Work of Indigenous women performance artists that activate self-determina­ tion and cultural continuance are ultimately performative acts of cultural sovereignty. Rebecca Belmore’s Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991) is a performance that demonstrates the use of Indigenous oratory for political activism and assertion of Indigenous sovereignty (Fig. 16.6). It is a site of exchange and communication, exemplifying the intrinsic relationship between Indigenous socio-political and cultural frameworks, knowledge, and identities with land. This communal performance employs a beautiful and enormous wooden megaphone reminiscent of birch-bark cones used for moose calling in Northern Ontario.60 It moved to various locations across Canada, addressing mother earth, acting in continuum as a collective story.61 Belmore explains her feelings of anger and frustration after the 1990 Oka Crisis and how, in essence, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan was her way of responding to the violence (and perhaps the ongoing struggles for Indigenous land rights). In hindsight, she elucidates the importance of the performance tour for her audience of Indigenous people and herself:

This giant megaphone negotiated and opened up spaces for Indigenous peoples to voice their experiences. Rickard suggests that this piece “created a site for the recognition of the historical erasure of Aboriginal voices, and empowered Aboriginal people to speak to all of their relations.”63

16.6  Rebecca Belmore, Ayumee-aawach Oomamamowan: Speaking to Their Mother, performance still, 1991. Photo Credit: Banff Centre.

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Now I can see myself as that younger artist who needed to temper the personal turmoil that she felt because of what had gone down and to recognize that the political landscape in the country had shifted for Aboriginal people. This is what led me to imagine building a large megaphone with the idea of asking Aboriginal people to speak through it and directly to the earth. I recall that at one of the sites where we installed the artwork, a woman who identified herself as a young mother stated that she did not find this way of addressing the earth (speaking through the megaphone) any different than our traditional ceremonies. In retrospect, the concept for this artwork was motivated by my own need to hear our voices on the land, to recall this land as our audience – one that is listening.62

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Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan was constructed in Banff, where it was first performed, as curator Daina Augaitis describes: “On July 27, 1991, over sixty people walked in a procession to a mountain meadow in Banff National Park where Aboriginal speakers, invited by the artist, addressed the land and their relationship to it by speaking into the sculptural device and having their voices echo across the landscape.”64 In a series of performances, Belmore approached the megaphone and spoke first, addressing her personal words to mother earth. At Banff, she said: My heart is beating like a small drum, and I hope that you mother earth can feel it. Someday I will speak to you in my language. I have watched my grandmother live very close to you, my mother the same. I have watched my grandmother show respect for all that you have given her … Although I went away and left a certain kind of closeness to you, I have gone in a kind of circle. I think I am coming back to understanding where I come from.65 In 1992 Belmore took the work to reserve, urban, and small town locations, illustrating the presence of indigenous people across Canada. As she recalls:

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Essentially, we were simply moving the art object from one site to the next. Although I was specifically interested in taking this artwork into the Aboriginal world, everyone was welcome to participate and to speak. Each gathering began with me approaching and using the megaphone. I did this as a way of showing people how the object functioned. I recall that my words always felt hesitant. I was simply there to offer the use of the artwork and then I would walk away and wait for someone to accept. In retrospect, I was impressed with the openness of the individuals who came forward to activate my art idea with their voice, and with the depth of what was spoken by the many people who shared their words through this visually absurd but beautiful object. 66

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Dot Tuer notes that the performative work/megaphone “served as a flashpoint of protest and storytelling in different locations across Canada from Banff National Park to the prime minister’s Sussex Drive residence to a northern Saskatchewan logging blockade.”67 It created a site for gathering and served to communicate greater awareness of Indigenous issues, assert political protest and actions, and instigate the act of listening, functioning as the apparatus for sharing and creating sites for listening to Indigenous voices. For Belmore: “The art object became merely a function tool; the essence of the piece was

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the voice and its reverberation across the land. Strategically, I was consciously hoping to remind listeners that our Aboriginal histories are carried by our original languages and are directly connected to the land.”68 Clive Robertson argues that, “the large wooden megaphone conceptually was designed as a device to ‘break the windows of government on Parliament Hill – because they don’t listen’; as well the sculpture became a constructive technology for reconnecting with family and community.”69 In 1996 it was included as part of the formal Aboriginal People’s Protest held in Ottawa over the exclusion of their representatives from the First Ministers’ conference. Charlotte Townsend-Gault notes that Belmore’s megaphone enabled the members of the Assembly of First Nations “to voice their anger … outside the Prime Minister’s official residence during the conference dinner.” As regards to this use, Belmore comments: “Perhaps I have moved this artwork into a different place by allowing it to enter into an official political realm. Hopefully, it insists and continues to echo: we are of this land.”70 The megaphone returned to Ottawa, as part of the National Gallery of Canada’s Caught in the Act: The Viewer as Performer exhibition (2008–09), where it was placed outside the gallery space in the Great Hall facing Parliament Hill. Witnessing the location of the piece and having the opportunity to speak into the enormous megaphone more than ten years after its first performance was a powerful experience. Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan claims a decolonized space for sharing multiple Indigenous voices. This performance can be seen as a tool for talking to the land and talking back to colonial history and legacies. It also offers the opportunity to share stories – participating in Indigenous political and cultural movements toward sovereignty. The work is also about creating a space to share Indigenous lived experiences; in other words, experiences of “being” Indigenous. Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan offered a platform for personal voices to be vocalized, voices that throughout the processes of colonization had been marginalized and muted.71 Townsend-Gault discusses how in Ayumeeaawach Oomama-mowan, the lyrical and political negotiate equal roles in giving voice to others, while also enabling Belmore to find hers.72 Belmore’s work thus creates an indigenized space for contemporary Indigenous stories and voices to be heard, recorded, transcribed, and passed on.73 Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan is also a communal performance, one that acknowledges the significance of oral traditions and ritual gatherings of peoples through its facilitation of metaphorical and literal amplifications of First Nations voices.74 When a performer speaks into the megaphone, an echo can be heard – in Tuer’s words, “as the earth returned words scattered in the wind back to the speaker, stories were embedded in the landscape.”75 This is a performative act for decolonizing the colonial landscape and for the embodied claiming of Indigenous lands and territories.

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16.7  Shelley Niro, The Shirt, video still, 2003.

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Courtesy of the artist.

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Shelley Niro’s video The Shirt (2003, 5:55 minutes) is another example of Indigenous activism in the arts and the use of the Indigenous body to performatively protest Indigenous issues, such as land rights, genocide, ethnocide, and ongoing settler indifference76 (Fig. 16.7). In this work, images of renowned Seminole/Muskogee/Diné photographer Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, wearing a white t -shirt and American flag bandana and standing in a grassy North American landscape, are interspaced with scenes of the Grand River. The story of colonization is presented to the viewer in a series of statements screened onto t -shirts worn by Tsinhnahjinnie; she stands strong asserting her agency

this site is an attempt to re-dress current relations between natives & non-natives by re-examining the intent, issue and details of the canadian government’s ‘certificate of indian status’ which is more

Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada

and self-determination in defiance of colonialism and its legacies on the contemporary realities of Indigenous peoples. The first shirt reads, “My ancestors were annihilated exterminated murdered and massacred.” In the next frame the text reads, “They were lied to cheated tricked and deceived,” and this is followed by, “Attempts were made to assimilate colonize enslave and displace them.” And finally, “And all I get is this shirt.” Niro uses Tsinhnahjinnie’s body to assert Indigenous resistance and survival. She proclaims Indigenous sovereignty over North American land by placing her body on the land, showing the connections between Indigenous identities, cultures, and lands. In the last scene of The Shirt, Tsinhnahjinnie is stripped of her t -shirt and her spot is appropriated by a white woman, curator Veronica Passalacqua, who stands in place of the Indigenous woman in the North American landscape. This scene comments on continued Euro-American/Canadian colonization and cultural appropriations of Indigenous knowledges, lands, and cultures. Niro’s silent message serves as a reminder of colonial histories, which are commonly forgotten within structures of nation-states and nationalist narratives. Her inclusion of the white-settler woman, who seems unaware that she is wearing a stolen t -shirt, references settler consciousness – the tendency of settler society to not engage with the politics of Indigenous sovereignty and legacies of colonialism. The Shirt represents such erasures and is a politically potent assertion of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination over Indigenous minds, bodies, and lands in the ongoing struggles over Indigenous land rights and treaty rights. As a performative act, The Shirt asserts Indigenous survival and resilience while ultimately declaring Indigenous land, cultural and political sovereignty. Treaty Card (2003) is a performative web-based work produced by Cheryl L’Hirondelle that addresses the reality that all peoples living in Canada, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, are treaty peoples (Fig. 16.8). The work asks the audience to question their treaty-status and their location on Indigenous lands. Suggesting that all Canadians are treaty peoples asserts many controversial ideas: for example, if a treaty can only be signed by two sovereign nations, then why does the nation-state of Canada not recognize Indigenous nations as sovereign? As L’Hirondelle states: “When the treaties were signed it was between a chief on behalf of the people and a representative of the queen on behalf of her people. Since the treaties were made between at least two parties, then both should have a card.” The artist makes her decolonizing intentions very clear:

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16.8  Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Treaty Card, web-based

commonly known as “treaty card” in mainly the plains on the land base now called canada.

installation, 2004. http://www.datcha.ca/ grrls/treatycard. Courtesy

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of Cheryl L’Hirondelle.

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today “treaty indians” are the only holders of the card which is commonly known to be a carry-over from the reserve pass system whereby indian people living on reserves were not allowed to leave (to hunt & gather, visit relatives or carry out business) unless the indian agent who also controlled food rations would issue this pass. perhaps this is why the card is a canadian government issue and doesn’t acknowledge the original treaty agreement as much as it still attempts to control the identity & movement of the card holder by branding all “… is an indian within the meaning of the indian act, chapter 27, statutes of canada …” and has efficiently trained card holders to present as a regular part of daily interaction (and sadly even used to boast as some elevated form of government certification). Treaty Card asks: What if all peoples, specifically settler populations, living in the occupied territories now known as Canada were identified by a card and

or a number? The artist includes directions on how to make your own card. On her website or in the gallery space, an audience member can follow step-bystep instructions. For example, L’Hirondelle states: for current holders: this version will enable you to now provide more relevant information as it pertains to your landbase (ie. original names in your language, & hopefully a more flattering photo of yourself ) for metis, non-status: this version allows you to finally have your own personal facsimile of the gov’t issue (if you’ve been feeling left out of the club). If you are part of a “surrendered” band and/or are under re-entitledment this can be added in the place of origin/birth field. for non-natives: never let the words “i wish I had a treaty card” pass your lips again – sign up today (refer to use)77 L’Hirondelle’s directions for non-Indigenous participants underscores the fact that, in many cases, indigenous treaty rights are not upheld by governments. She asks non-Indigenous participants to realize the implications of treaty cards, meaning Indian Status cards, with regard to surveillance and identification: this is intended for first time non-native card holders only:

She then includes an action list for non-Indigenous participants based on the ways that the state marginalizes, mediates, controls Indigenous bodies. Her project represents the numbering of Indigenous peoples – locating the racist histories of their numbering, such as Inuit tags and the residential schools experience of becoming nameless numbers. She writes: if you have created your own card, or are about to, please consider taking action and do all or some of the following: after you’ve printed the card (colour inkjet works best), cut around edge of card, fold in half and insert into a plastic sleeve and:

Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada

the purpose of the “treaty card” has been to track the movement ie. spending patterns, prescription drug use, doctor & dentist care, police contact, social services use etc. and institutionalize the identity of “… Indians within the meaning of the Indian act, chapter 27, statutes of canada.”

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carry this card in your wallet, purse or on your body as your primary form of identification – memorize the registry number & be prepared to quote it by stating “my treaty number is _____” (refer to registry # on front of card) – present it whenever identification is requested. present it when you purchase anything – present it when you visit the doctors’, dentists’ or any other government subsidized health practitioner – present it when visiting any government agency – present it if stopped by the police or rcmp – most importantly, take note of how it feels always have to account for your identity – show off to your friends by stating that you now finally have “your very own treaty card” – refer to yourself as being ‘treaty’ above any other type of self identification78 Treaty Card is an attempt to address relations between Indigenous and nonIndigenous people living on the land now known as Canada by re-examining the intent, issue, and details of the Canadian Government’s “Certificate of Indian Status.” With this php -driven database project, anyone can login and create their own Treaty Card, or modify the details on their already existing card to better represent their identity and relationship to land and state.79 Judy Iseke-Barnes and Deborah Danard comment in relation to L’Hirondelle’s Treaty Card project:

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This inter-active production allows site visitors to create their own Treaty cards or modify the details on their already-existing cards to better represent their identities. This may be an empowering activity for Indians who have been issued Treaty cards as a carry-over from the reserve pass system whereby Indian people living on reserves were not allowed to leave (to hunt and gather, visit relatives or carryout business) unless the Indian agent who also controlled food rations would issue this pass.80

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Iseke-Barnes and Danard suggest that the business of registering “status” Indians is a complicated and tedious law, which is considered a form of apartheid in Canada. L’Hirondelle’s work creates a space for considering the issues of treaty cards and the history of Indian status, including the exclusion from status – the gendered process whereby some Aboriginal women were refused status or lost their status when they married outside their bands or married white men. As Iseke-Barnes and Danard explain: Creating a treaty card may also be important to those who have been denied these cards, such as status women who married (before 1988)

non-Indian/non status men and who were required to leave their on-reserve community and were no longer registered as status Indians. Their children were also excluded. Some people consider the Canadian Indian Act registry to be numerical genocide and that within 25 to 70 years many reserves will have no registered members and therefore no one to claim their inherent rights, including land claim settlements.81 The act of creating a treaty card on this website constitutes both contemporary and retroactive resistance to historical and ongoing colonial suppression experienced by Indigenous peoples. It provides the opportunity to consider what classifications (internal and external) constitute being “an Indian within the meaning of the Indian act, chapter 27, statutes of Canada.”82 This work generates conversations and questions about individual and collective identities within the territories of Indigenous nations occupied by the nation of Canada. It forcefully brings forward a conversation about Indigenous sovereignty and territory. Conclusion

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Works explored in this chapter address contemporary Indigenous women’s performance art in the transnational and translocal contexts of Canada. My aim has been to establish how Indigenous peoples have used and interpreted performance as a method for both cultural survivance/continuance and resistance. Perhaps one way of looking at these performances is to acknowledge how they communicate hope and the possibility of social change and decolonization. Performances by Lori Blondeau and Rebecca Belmore, for example, participate in a larger project of Indigenous cultural, political, and economic activism, which is both locally and globally connected. As Denzin and Lincoln assert, “These transformations shape processes of mobilization and collective action,” noting that these types of performances, or rather actions, “help persons realize a radical performative politics of possibility.”83 Tuhiwai Smith addresses the role of listening and storytelling in the efforts toward social change, arguing that the act of listening to Indigenous stories can potentially create opportunities for learning new ways of being, understanding, and sharing the world, based in a politics of morality and responsibility.84 This is also a research and pedagogical model, according to Denzin and Lincoln, who endorse a “performative model of emancipatory decolonized Indigenous research”85 that supports the analysis of performances and performance events as struggles and interventions. With this type of politicized and decolonized lens, performances can become “gendered, transgressive achievements,

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political accomplishments”86 that challenge the status quo of nationalist narratives that have been fixed in the imaginations of settlers, and which intervene in “normative traditions” of dominant society.87 As Kagendo Mutua and Beth Blue Swadener have argued, counter-narratives – that is, Indigenous perspectives – participate in the decolonization of histories and of Indigenous personal experiences. Indigenous performance art, which recounts both personal and communal stories, becomes a vehicle for disrupting erasure and exposes the complexities and contradictions of socalled official history.88 Mutua and Swadener discuss the strategy of decolonizing writing and the centrality of personal narrative in this creative political practice. They argue that decolonizing writing can be employed to challenge and resist “the prevailing structures and relationships of power and inequality.”89 By arguing that Indigenous performance participates in the practice of writing history, or rather in the discourse of decolonizing writing, by means of producing Indigenous narratives, this chapter has examined performances that explore “the intersections of gender and voice, border crossing, dual consciousness, multiple identities, and selfhood in a … post-colonial and postmodern world.”90 In this way, Indigenous women’s performance art can be seen and understood as a work of testimony, which is arguably another form of history writing or archiving as well as a form of cultural continuance of oral-based customs (storytelling). In a politic of Indigenous activism and decolonization, the use of testimony or testimonial raises political consciousness and intervenes in the colonial erasures of Indigenous experience. Mutua and Swadener argue that the use of testimony for the act of decolonizing writing creates a space of witnessing, by which they mean that the writer/performer bears witness to social injustices and colonial racism experienced by diverse Indigenous communities.91 To this end, Indigenous performance art is an art practice engaged in the resistance of colonial and neo-colonial occupations and in the articulation of Indigenous sovereignty, agency, and cultural autonomy. By discussing the complexity of strategies and the stories vocalized by means of Indigenous women, performance art participates in the politics of asserting Indigenous sovereignty. It reveals issues of Indigenous survivance, continuance, empowerment, and agency, as well as “equity, healing and social justice.”92 Indigenous women’s performance art participates in the urgent project of decolonization by envisioning indigenous being: the artists incorporate key Indigenous issues using, among other things, cultural memory and storytelling to raise issues of colonial violence, cultural loss, exploitation, and dislocation as well as to highlight self-determined cultural continuance and resistance histories.

n o te s

P reface 1 Smith, “The State of Art History,” 379. 2 Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” in his Location of Culture, 19–39. 3 Art Cities of the Future. 4 Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 3.

C h a p t er O ne 1 O’Brien, “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives,” 4. Jani Marjanen draws on Beck and Sznaider’s concept of the current millennium as an “age of cosmopolitanism,” a forwardlooking conceptual approach that captures the historian’s state of mind, if not the historical period in question. See Marjanen, “Undermining Methodological Nationalism,” 249. He refers to a thematic section of The British Journal of Sociology (2006) that includes the co-authors’ call for a “cosmopolitan turn” in the social sciences, and to their review of the literature, both excellent resources. Also see Iriye and Saunier, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History. 2 “Translation” is a notion of great semiological richness for those art historians who understand form as language, who are interested in transcultural practices, or who study the physical, performative, and ideational traces left by the movement of Christian relics. In this volume, “translation” is a key concept for Martin Beattie, as he maps a convergence of Western and nonWestern forms and their cultural associations onto cubism. Transcultural exchange – a process of reciprocal transformations – is also taken up by Johanne Sloan in her characterization of cultural adjacencies in urban experience. In conceptualizing such practices, Sloan and I are both inspired by Simon, Translating Montreal. 3 Passini, La fabrique de l’art national. 4 Ibid., 16.

5 The proposed title for the first Canadian history of photography is Histories of Photography in Canada, thereby deflecting questions of citizenship and place of production to focus on photographic culture in Canada, however cultivated. For more on this history, see Langford, “Hitching a Ride,” in this volume. 6 Chapters by Blair, Sigurjónsdóttir, and Lyons explore the phenomenon of the visionary visitor. 7 See Johnson, et al., “Mnemosyne: Meanderings through Aby Warburg’s Atlas.” References here are to Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion and Despoix, “Translation and Remediation.” 8 Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, 164. 9 Marjanen, “Undermining Methodological Nationalism,” 240. Here I am gesturing toward the sometimes woolly discourse of global citizenship, or imaginative residence in a global village, precipitated by Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), and sometimes patriotically cited as an example of Canadian visionary thinking. The irony is as broad as the country. 10 In 2012 I was privileged to attend a workshop on settler-colonial art history, co-organized by Canadian art historians Kristina Huneault and Anne Whitelaw, and Aotearoa New Zealand art historian Damian Skinner, and hosted by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University in Montreal. This meeting led to a thematic issue of the Journal of Canadian Art History/ Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien that included Skinner’s invaluable elaboration of the field, as well as a response from a Quebec specialist and other responses – my own in the editorial, a nineteenth-century journal, a contemporary work of Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaboration, and an in-depth review of the recent retrospective of a contemporary Indigenous artist. Editing

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a collection that cut across borders, periods, and positions to recast notions of nationhood, historical distance, and subject-formation rehearsed my approach to this volume. See Langford, ed., Journal of Canadian Art History/ Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien. 11 To explore dimensions of this research in the museum setting, see Sleeper-Smith, Contesting Knowledge. Research and collaboration protocols are developed by Davis in her anthology Alliances and Kovach in Indigenous Methodologies. 12 O’Brien, “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives,” 4. 13 Ibid., 7. 14 Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism since 1789. 15 Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” 42. With exemplary efficiency, Kocka summarizes the heuristic, descriptive, analytical, and paradigmatic purposes of comparative frameworks, making reference to key figures, notably Marc Bloch and Max Weber, before turning to methodological weaknesses and the recasting of comparison in the post-1990 global context. 16 Vertovec, Transnationalism, 2, cited by WiesnerHanks in “Crossing Borders in Transnational Gender History,” 357. 17 Wiesner-Hanks, “Crossing Borders in Transnational Gender History,” 358. 18 For a synthesis of the authors’ iterations of their system and a test against his own research on child abandonment, see Harrington, “Historians without Borders?” 79–90. 19 Werner and Zimmerman, “Beyond Comparison,” 31–3. 20 Stanworth, Visibly Canadian, 13–18; citations, 14, 18. 21 This assertion by University of Toronto president John Robert Pritchard (1990–2000) is twice cited by Stanworth as she establishes criteria that admit this British painting to Canadian art history. See Stanworth, “Visual Rhetoric: Storytelling, History, and Identity in a Portrait of Three Friends,” in her Visibly Canadian, 333. 22 Ibid., 333–4. 23 Magda Fahrni, “Reflections on the Place of Quebec in Historical Writing on Canada,” in Dummitt and Dawson, eds., Contesting Clio’s Craft, 1–20, citation, 20. Sean Mills cites Fahrni as he ponders the interconnections of Canada’s “fractured historiographies” in “The End of Empire? Third World Decolonization and Canadian History,” which forms the last chapter of Dubinsky,

Perry, and Yu, Within and Without the Nation, 34–63; citation, 355. This historiographical construction – nation within nation (an identificatory mise en abyme) – is traceable in chapters of this volume by Blair, Ben-Asher Gitler, Özpinar, Silver, Taunton, and Yerushalmy. 24 Fahrni, “Reflections on the Place of Quebec in Historical Writing on Canada,” 2, including note 4. 25 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 251. He cites Immanuel Wallerstein, “Open the Social Sciences,” items , Social Science Research Council 50, 1: 1–7. 26 Ibid., 252. 27 Ibid., 253. 28 See Jim in this volume for a perfect example of uncanny architectural twinning. 29 Bhabha is cited by eight of the fifteen contributors to this volume, a statistic verifiable by name and concept searches of the index. Many of these references will be found tethered to the literature, tracing the deployment of keywords, such as “hybridity” and “mimicry,” as well as interstitial perspectives, in studies of cultural and national identity. 30 Acheraïou, Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization, 151. 31 See Stavans, José Vasconcelos, which includes “Mestizaje,” the first chapter of La raza cósmica [The Cosmic Race] (1925), translated in the late 1990s by John H.R. Polt, and “The Race Problem in Latin America” (1926). 32 See Bary, “Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’” and de Andrade and Bary (trans.), “Cannibalist Manifesto.” 33 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 362, cited by Sabine Mabardi, “Encounters of a Heterogenous Kind: Hybridity in Cultural Theory,” in de Grandis and Bernd, Unforeseeable Americas, 1–20; citation, 5. Asian and European cubisms are cast in this manner – each language read by the light of the other – by Beattie in this volume. 34 Fanon, “On National Culture,” from The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington, 181. 35 Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair, introduction to “Nationalisms and Nativisms,” Desai and Nair, eds., Postcolonialisms, 181. They are referring to Fanon’s chapter, “On National Culture,” which is included in their volume as a slightly abridged version of the Farrington translation. 36 Fanon, “On National Culture,” from The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington, 181.

55 Like globalization, the centre-periphery model is identified primarily with economic theory, but as recourse to the mid-twentieth century writings of sociologist Edward Shils makes clear, the model presents as a system of core values, with charismatic spokespersons inside and outside the circle of authority creating a sense of community and possibility. As Shils writes, and first published in 1961: “The emergence of nationalism, not just the fanatical nationalism of politicians, intellectuals, and zealots, but a sense of nationality as an affirmative feeling for one’s own country, is a very important aspect of this process of the incorporation of the mass of the population into the central institutional and value systems.” Developing this crucial element of charisma in the economic development of new states – this text first published in 1968 – he felt it “indispensable that men and women in underdeveloped countries come to feel and believe that a ‘spark of divinity’ or some other manifestation of what is sacred to human life swells as much in those who live outside the circle of authority as it does in those who live within it.” The global art world presents as the carrier of these sparks, though with considerable anxiety that economic gain for a now mobilized centre – a nomadic one percent – remains the ultimate goal. See Shils, Center and Periphery, 15, 421. 56 Kimmelman, “Paris Aims to Embrace Its Estranged Suburbs.” It remains to be seen whether further episodes of terrorism will change life in the French capital or, indeed, France’s position within the European Union. 57 National Public Radio, “We Are in a New Normal.’” 58 Thomas Hirschhorn’s public art project Musée Précaire Albinet (2004) – a temporary museum built in a suburban housing project in the Landry neighbourhood of Aubervilliers – dramatized the possibilities and limitations of intra-urban interchange. The project brought artworks loaned by the Musée national d’art modern (Centre Pompidou) and the Fonds national d’art contemporain into the district, where they were installed and animated by local people. But the focal point remained the Western modernist pantheon (Duchamp, Malevitch, Mondrian, Dali, Beuys, Le Corbusier, Warhol, and Léger), meaning that exportation from the centre, both in terms of objects and skills, was enacted, but the reverse was not. See Chapuis, “Preface to Thomas Hirschhorn – Musée Précaire Albinet.”

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37 Renan’s influential text of 1882 is Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (“What Is a Nation?”), which is now widely available online. It is discussed by Benedict Anderson in the revised edition of his Imagined Communities; see chapter 11, “Memory and Forgetting.” Bhabha speaks to Renan’s importance in “DissemiNation,” in his Location of Culture, 159–61. 38 Anderson, Imagined Communities; Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” 39 Attentiveness to simultaneity runs through Said’s Culture and Imperialism and with particular punch in his second chapter’s readings of Jane Austen, 62–97. 40 Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 145. 41 See Hareven, “Synchronizing Individual Time, Family Time, and Historical Time.” 42 Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 155. 43 Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” 247–8. 44 Ibid., 243–4. 45 Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 155. 46 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 128–35. 47 Like Narratives Unfolding, Global and Local Art Histories developed from a session of the Association of Art Historians conference, convened by Celina Jeffery and Gregory Minissale in 2006. See Minissale, “Introduction: Recombinant Art Histories,” in Jeffery and Minissale, Global and Local Art Histories, x–xxvii; citation, x . 48 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms since 1780, 10. 49 Ibid., 182 50 Minissale, citing Jonathan Blackwood’s “Mapping Estonian Modernism: Märt Laarman and the Eesti Kunstnikkude Ryhm,” 97, in “Introduction: Recombinant Art Histories,” in Jeffery and Minissale, eds., Global and Local Art Histories, xvii. 51 Blackwood, “Mapping Estonian Modernism: Märt Laarman and the Eesti Kunstnikkude Ryhm,” in Jeffery and Minissale, eds., Global and Local Art Histories, 86. 52 Minissale, “Introduction: Recombinant Art Histories,” xvii. Blackwood’s account ends in 1940 with the Soviet occupation. The Cold War is conventionally said to have started in 1947. 53 Ibid. 54 Codell, Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930, 1–2. Also see Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities.

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59 Codell, Transculturation in British Art, 1770– 1930, 3. 60 Ibid., 4. 61 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2003), 32–3, as cited by Codell, Transculturation in British Art, 4. 62 Codell, Transculturation in British Art, 4. 63 Kaufmann, Dossin, and Joyeux-Prunel, “Introduction: Reintroducing Circulations: Historiography and the Project of Global Art History,” in Kaufmann, Dossin, and Joyeux-Prunel, eds., Circulations in the Global History of Art, 2. 64 Ibid., 3–9. The editors’ introduction synthesizes some of the adventures in French and German historiography treated by Passini in her more concentrated study. The back-and-forth of “techniques, artists, and concepts,” in addition to finished objects, which is mapped over four centuries by Serge Gruzinski in “Art History and Iberian Worldwide Diffusion: Westernization/ Globalization/Americanization” (47–58) offers precedents for the more recent transnational exchanges chronicled in this book by Beattie, Ben-Asher Gitler, Blair, El-Sheikh, Ilea, Langford, and Sigurjónsdóttir. Immensely instructive are Gruzinski’s observations on the afterlife of imported objects, whether minor works promoted to iconic status, images that generated “mestizo production,” or faddish collectibles relegated to the “back of the cupboard” (53–5). As studies of transnationalism in this volume suggest, institutionalization, including the writing of art history, is an antidote to serendipity and whimsy. 65 Kaufmann, “Reflections on World Art History,” in Kaufmann, Dossin, and Joyeux-Prunel, eds., Circulations in the Global History of Art, 23–45. This recent publication covers some of the same ground that I am surveying here. 66 Anderson, Imagined Communities; Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” 67 Belting and Buddensieg, “From Art World to Art Worlds,” in Belting, Buddenseig, and Weibel, eds., The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, 28–31. 68 Smith, “The State of Art History.” 69 Phillips, On Historical Distance, 3. 70 Ibid., 6. 71 Ibid., 156–9; citations, 158–9. 72 Ibid., 184. 73 Moxey, Visual Time, 2–3.

74 Ibid., 3. I am citing Moxey’s introduction, but the key chapter is “Contemporaneity’s Heterochronicity,” 37–50, in which he integrates the ideas of Mark Augé, Nicolas Bourriaud, Harry Harootunian, Miguel Angel Hernandez Navarro, Mieke Bal, and Piotr Piotrowski, as well as foundational work by George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962). Moxey’s reading of Kubler, in fact, his entire argument, draws fire from Kaufmann in his “Reflections on World Art History,” which is the first chapter of Kaufmann, Dossin, and Joyeux-Prunel, eds., Circulations in the Global History of Art, 28–31. For related arguments, see Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance; Pieters’s works from this text in “The Travels of Fiction.” 75 Moxey, Visual Time, 45. 76 Simon Gikandi, “Preface: Modernism in the World,” Modernism/Modernity 13, 3 (2006): 419–24; citation, 421; cited by Khullar, Worldly Affiliations, 17. 77 Terry E. Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? 27; cited by Khullar, Worldly Affiliations, 27. 78 Khullar, Worldly Affiliations, 29–30. 79 Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia; O’Brien, Nicodemus, Chiu, Genocchio, Coffey, and Tejada, eds., Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; Gabara, Errant Modernism. 80 Smith, “The State of Art History.” 81 Ibid., 367. 82 Smith, “The Provincialism Problem.” And see the updating of this dilemma in Lyons, in this volume. 83 Smith, “The State of Art History,” 374. 84 Peter Osborne, as introduced and cited in Smith, “The State of Art History,” 376. It is worth noting that Mark Cheetham sees the swashbuckling of Art & Language, “their international membership, impact and pretensions notwithstanding,” as a prime example of resistance to theory being expressed in national terms. See Cheetham, Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain, 118–19. 85 Smith, “The State of Art History,” 376–7. 86 Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” based on a lecture given by Enwezor at the Tate Modern, London, on 26 April 2008. Published in Bourriaud, ed., Altermodern, 27–40; citation, 30. Republished in South Atlantic Quarterly 109, 3 (summer 2010), 595–620; citation, 600.

106 Ibid. 107 Among the wealth of literature on memory and its representation, sources that have informed my thinking for this and previous books include: Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory; Boyer, The City of Collective Memory; Halbwachs, On Collective Memory; Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory; Kuhn and McAllister, eds., Locating Memory; Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology; Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting; Santner, Stranded Objects; Slyomovics, The Object of Memory; Sturken, Tangled Memories; Zerubavel, Time Maps. 108 Cottingham, “The Formation of the Avant-Garde in Paris and London, c. 1880–1915,” 600. 109 Cottingham, “The Formation of the Avant-Garde in Paris and London, c. 1880–1915.” 110 Cheetham, “Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain,” 8. 111 Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic, ix–xvi; citation, xi–xii. 112 Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community,” in Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic, 135–59; citations, 139–40. 113 Ibid., 158. Said credits photographic theorist John Berger for opening up these ideas. 114 Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic, 20. In her chapter for this volume, Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler considers this notion as it applies to the architecture of Israel/Palestine after 1948. 115 Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” 25. In this volume, Heidegger’s definition of “boundary” is the jumping-off point for Erin Silver’s consideration of exhibition spaces, and Hannah Arendt’s “space of appearance” is a key concept for Corina Ilea’s analysis of Romanian contemporary art. 116 Ibid., 29. 117 Ibid. 118 Kymlicka and Walker, eds., Rooted Cosmopolitanism, 3. Their introduction, “Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Canada and the World,” credits the popularization of the term “rooted cosmopolitanism” to Kwame Anthony Appiah, citing his chapter “Cosmopolitan Patriots” in Joshua Cohen, ed., For the Love of Country (1996) and his monograph Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2005). In addition to these sources, Appiah’s article “Cosmopolitan Patriots” (1997) and another monograph, The Ethics of Identity (2005), are here listed in the bibliography.

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87 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; this historiographical project was adumbrated in his 1992 article “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History.” 88 Smith, “Contemporary Art: World Currents in Transition beyond Globalization,” 186–92; citation, 187. 89 Ibid., 188; here Smith also cites his “Currents of World-Making in Contemporary Art,” in World Art 1, 2 (2011): 20–36. 90 Ibid.; citation, 191. 91 Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” in Belting and Buddensieg, eds., The Global Art World, 38–73; citation, 40. 92 Ibid., 45. 93 Hing-kay, “Government, Business and People,” 266; cited by Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 50. 94 Korstrom, “Critics Decry Vancouver Art Gallery Expansion Plan.” 95 Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” in Belting and Buddensieg, eds., The Global Art World, 54. 96 Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 56–7. 97 Ibid., 43. 98 Price, Paris Primitive. 99 Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 44. 100 For a perceptive and witty analysis of the “transnational turn” and its weighty presentation in The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, see Knudsen and Gram-Skjoldager, “Historiography and Narration in Transnational History.” 101 Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Levine, ed., Georg Simmel, 143–50. Lyons addresses this trope in his chapter in this volume, while Ilea turns to Nancy in hers. 102 See Barber, in this volume, who comments on the émigré community clustered around James Joyce in Paris as an example of cosmopolitanism in action. 103 Here I am reminded of Tina M. Campt’s instructive notion of “diasporic dwelling,” which shifts our attention from “migration or displacement” to the simple fact that “diaspora is also quite fundamentally about dwelling and staying put.” See Campt, “Diaspora, Difference, and the Visual Archive,” 88. 104 Brettell, “Introduction,” 327–34; citation, 329. 105 Donald E. Pease, “Introduction: Re-mapping the Transnational Turn,” in Fluck, Pease, and Rowe, eds., Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, 1–46; citation, 4.

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119 Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” 633. 120 Kymlicka and Walker, eds., Rooted Cosmopolitanism, 2–3; Calhoun citation, 3. 121 Ibid., 3. 122 Pollock et al., Cosmopolitanism, 6. The volume was originally published as Public Culture 12, 3 (2000). 123 Ibid., 6. 124 De Duve does not go into this, but the arousal of local interest though the insertion of nationals into international exhibitions is a well-known curatorial and marketing strategy. 125 De Duve, “The Glocal and the Singuniversal,” 684. 126 Ibid., 681. 127 Ibid., 685. 128 Nail, “Migrant Cosmopolitanism,” 191. 129 Ibid., 193. 130 Ibid., 187. Also see Nail, The Figure of the Migrant. 131 Sara Ahmed also takes issue with cultural theorizations of the “migrant” (Iain Chambers) and the “nomad” (Rosi Braidotti) that translate these terms into metaphors for transgressive thinking and unbounded identity; she reels these words back to their literal use and application to subject-formation in “Home and Away.” 132 Belting, “From World Art to Global Art: View on a New Panorama,” in Belting, Buddensieg, and Weibel, eds., The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, 178–85. 133 Onians, “World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural History of Art.” 134 Camille, “Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters,” 198; Steiner, “Can the Canon Burst?” 135 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, “Collections Overview.” 136 Onians, “World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural History of Art,” 206, 208. 137 Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux, 1980 [A Thousand Plateaus, 1987]. Their influential structure of the “rhizome” subtends Blair’s study of the circulation of concepts and forms in the Scottish Highlands, published in this volume. 138 Phillips, On Historical Distance, 232. 139 Susan L. Feagin, “Introduction,” in Feagin, ed., Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics, 1–9; citation, 2. 140 I thank Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande for posing this important question. 141 In his four-volume Social History of Art, Hungarian Marxist film and art historian Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) issues an unforgettable warning about facile comparisons – one that every interdisciplinary art historian should keep in mind:

142 1 43 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152

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“For there is nothing easier than to construct striking connections between the various styles in art and the social patterns predominating at any particular time, which are based on nothing but metaphor, and there is nothing more tempting than to make a show of such daring analogies.” Substituting the word “global” for “social” captures the caution I have in mind. See Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1, 21. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 164–6. Silver’s chapter in this volume recaptures some of this history. Langford, “Calm, Cool, and Collected.” Lacroix, “Writing Art History in the Twentieth Century,” in Whitelaw, Foss, and Paikowsky, eds., The Visual Arts in Canada, 413–23. Lippard, The Lure of the Local. See Kenneally and Sloan, eds., Expo 67. Michael Greenwood, “Some Nationalist Facets of Canadian Art,” in Brodsky, ed., “Art and Nationalism,” 69–72; citation, 72. François-Marc Gagnon, “Paul-Émile Borduas and Modernism: ‘I Hate All Nationalisms,’” in Brodsky, ed., “Art and Nationalism,” 15–18. John O’Brian, “Wild Art History,” in O’Brian and White, Beyond Wilderness, 26–9. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 21–37, and especially see 27 and 35–7. Jessup, Morton, and Robertson, “Rethinking Relevance: Studying the Visual in Canada,” in Jessup, Morton, and Robertson, eds., Negotiations in a Vacant Lot, 3–19; citation, 3–4. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 4. Robertson, “Discontiguous Dependencies,” in Jessup, Morton, and Robertson, eds., Negotiations in a Vacant Lot, 179–87. Heather Igloliorte, “Arctic Culture/Global Indigeneity,” in Jessup, Morton, and Robertson, eds., Negotiations in a Vacant Lot, 150–70; citations, 159, 167. Jim, “Dealing with Chiastic Perspectives: Global Art Histories in Canada,” in Jessup, Morton, and Robertson, eds., Negotiations in a Vacant Lot, 66–90; citation, 71. Hill, “The Vacant Lot: Who’s Buying It?” in Jessup, Morton, and Robertson, eds., Negotiations in a Vacant Lot, 171–8; citation, 178. Conlin, “Considering Sovereignty and Neoliberalism within Indeterminate States and Self-determined Spaces,” in Jessup, Morton, and

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Cool, and Collected”; Langford, “Cette autre femme.” Jeffrey A. Engel and Katherine Carté Engel, “Introduction: On Writing the Local within Diplomatic History,” in Engel, ed., Local Consequences of the Global Cold War, 3. Langford, Scissors, Paper, Stone, 141. Condensation Cube can refer to two different works, if the dimensions of the object are taken into account. The larger version (76.2 × 76.2 × 76.2 cm), produced in an edition of five, is held by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The smaller version (30.5 × 30.5 × 30.5 cm) is held by Tate Modern, London; the Generali Foundation, Vienna; the Slought Foundation, Edward Fry and Sandra Ericson Collection, Philadelphia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and a private collection in London. Personal correspondence with Laura Hunt, Image Archivist, Rights and Reproductions, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 20 June 2016. Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 1965. Accessed 27 June 2015. http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/ subterranean-homesick-blues#ixzz3eGlhBfeF. Lorenz, “Predictability,” n.p. Ibid. For a reconsideration of this period, see BenAsher Gitler in this volume. Rykwert, The Seduction of Place, 230. I am fortified in this resolution by Michela Passini, who rejects the condescension of histories that acknowledge the unscientific approaches of the past as the best efforts of their day. See Passini, La fabrique de l’art national, 6. Also see Beattie, in this volume, who specifically addresses historiographic problems in his conclusion. Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? 21–3. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. Ahmed, “Home and Away,” 117. Chamberlin, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 14–15. Network theory forms a pattern of ebb-and-flow that Sloan’s research is mapping in Canada. See Alloway, Network: Art, and the Complex Present, for early thoughts in the 1960s, as well as his Network (1984). Also see Galloway, “Networks”; Latour, Reassembling the Social; Munster, An

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Robertson, eds., Negotiations in a Vacant Lot, 236–51; citations, 248, 250. Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 48–9. The Vancouver-based art magazine Vanguard presented its analysis of the widely acknowledged failure of this event and exhibition, including a revised version of Berlin critic Heinz Ohff ’s “devastating” review. See Vanguard 12 (summer 1983): 22–5. If this project was misbegotten, it should be considered among the exceptions, for countless important and successful manifestations of Canadian art and cultural exchange were supported financially and creatively by External Affairs in the heyday of its cultural division. Markonish, “Oh, Canada, or: How I Learned to Love 3.8 Million Square Miles of Art North of the 49th Parallel,” in Markonish, ed., Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America, 18–53; citation, 20n9. Robin Simpson, “Canadian Art: 1847–1985,” in Markonish, ed., Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America, 54–61. Also see Bronson et al., eds., From Sea to Shining Sea. Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in his The Interpretation of Culture, 3–30, especially Part VI , 21–3; Goffman, Asylums. Elkins, “Art History as a Global Discipline,” in Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? 3–23; citation, 22. Croizier, “Modernism(s) and Global Modernity(ies),” 162. Chang and Jim, “Asian/Americas,” 2. Carroll, “Art and Globalization: Then and Now,” in Feagin, ed., Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics, 131–43; citations, 131–2. Ibid., 138–9. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg refer to a “multiplicity of worlds,” an observation taken up by Johanne Sloan in this volume. See Belting and Buddensieg, “From Art World to Art Worlds,” in Belting, Buddensieg, and Wiebel, eds., The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, 28–31; citation, 28. Carroll, “Art and Globalization: Then and Now,” 131. Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; Daugherty, A Psychological Warfare Casebook. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391. Langford and Langford, A Cold War Tourist and His Camera; Langford, “Circuits de foi”; Langford, “Richard Harrington’s Guide”; Langford, “Calm,

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Aesthesia of Networks; Payne, The Promiscuity of Network Culture. Larsen’s anthology for the Documents of Contemporary Art series, Networks, offers key sources and his excellent introduction. Russell Ferguson, “Introduction: Invisible Center,” in Ferguson, Gever, Minh-ha, and West, eds., Out There, 9–14; citation, 9. Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-run Spaces as Museums by Artists,” in Bronson et al., eds., From Sea to Shining Sea, 164–9; citation, 167. Shils, Center and Periphery. For this definition, I have deliberately gone to a voice of authority. See Philpott, “Sovereignty.” Michael Frisch’s concept of “shared authority” is cited by Steven High in his “Sharing Authority in the Writing of Canadian History: The Case of Oral History,” in Dummitt and Dawson, eds., Contesting Clio’s Craft, 21–46. The dynamic and protocols of an oral history interview are very different from Taunton’s commitment to citing Indigenous artists, historians, and theorists, but the motivations are similar.

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1 Lausanne Peace Treaty, 1923.

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2 The word Rum comes from Greek and means “Roman.” It has been used since the Ottoman period, first to refer to the people who lived during the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and then to the Greeks who lived under the Ottoman Empire. The term is still in use in modern Turkey to refer to the people of Greek origin living in the country. 3 Stamatopoulos, “From Millets to Minorities,” 255. 4 Sarı, “Bana Göre Türk’tür Size Göre Ermeni.” Author’s translation. 5 Wallerstein, “The National and the Universal,” 99. 6 World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples – Turkey. 7 Hobsbawm, On History, 270. 8 In August 2014, presidential candidate and prime minister R.T. Erdoğan remarked in a tv program: “Some called me a Georgian. Others called me even, excuse me, an Armenian in a shameful way. I am a Turk!” http://www.bianet.org/english/ politics/157632-erdogan-excuse-me-but-theycalled-me-armenian. 9 Tansuğ, “1820–1920 Pentürde İstanbul Sergisi,” 5. Author’s translation.

10 Perloff, “Cultural Liminality/Aesthetic Closure?” 2. 11 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 2. 12 Tansuğ, “Köfteci Kaptan Hakkında,” 5. Author’s translation. 13 The Armenian Genocide (Armenian: Hayots Tseghaspanutyun), also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, traditionally by Armenians, as Medz Yeghern (Armenian: “Great Crime”) was the Ottoman government’s systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects from their historic homeland within the territory constituting the present-day Republic of Turkey. The number of people killed during the event is estimated to be between 1 and 1.5 million. 14 Tansuğ, “Vatansız Sürgünün İkili Oyunu,” 9. Author’s translation. 15 Zabunyan, From Him to Us, 55. 16 Köksal, “Türkiye’de Çağdaş Sanat,” 172. Author’s translation. 17 Bhabha describes “the many as one” as the progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion, or the nation, in Location of Culture, 142. 18 Altuğ, Interview with Sarkis, 19. 19 Üster, “Bugünden Söz Eden Bellek,” 7. Author’s translation. 20 Zabunyan, From Him to Us, 132. 21 Kosova, “Slow Bullet II ,” 3. 22 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 142. 23 Erdemci, “Breaking the Spell, Re-Routing,” 264. 24 Ibid., 268. 25 This work has created controversy in the past since Sarkis wrote the words “spoils of war” on the shoes in German (Kriegsschatz). The critics suggested a reference to the Holocaust with it. However Zabunyan asserts that Sarkis decided to use the words in German, “for it was while in residence in Berlin … that he made the intrinsic connection to those values of western art … to apply to a colonialist ideology.” From Him to Us, 132. 26 Akay, “Ali Akay,” 41. Author’s translation. 27 Akay, “Genç Etkinlik,” 181. Author’s translation. 28 Keyder, “Turkish Bell Jar,” 72. 29 Lausanne Peace Treaty, Article 39. 30 Keyder, “Turkish Bell Jar,” 71–4. 31 World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples – Turkey. 32 Kahraman, “The End of the ‘New’ as We Know It,” 25.

33 Yasa-Yaman, Suretin Sireti, 137–40. 34 Çalıkoğlu, “90’lı Yıllarda Çağdaş Sanat,” 13. Author’s translation. 35 Erdemci, “Breaking the Spell, Re-Routing,” 290. 36 Kosova, “Slow Bullet II ,” 3. 37 Erdemci, “Breaking the Spell, Re-Routing,” 303. 38 Akay, “Ali Akay,” 42. Author’s translation. 39 Minorities: Roma. 40 Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 3–12. 41 Ibid., 4. 42 For more information on the inclusion of women artists in museum exhibitions, see Ahu Antmen, Kimlikli Bedenler: Sanat, Kimlik, Cinsiyet, 93, 139–50. 43 Ödekan, “The Transformation of the Image,” 58–62. 44 Kosova and Kortun, “Cinsiyet,” Ofsayt Ama Gol. Author’s translation. 45 Antmen, “Why Do the Pioneers of Contemporary Art Have Pink id ’s?” 72–8. 46 Altındere and Evren, “Preface: Who Reads a User’s Manual Anyway?” 2.

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1 The exhibition Spaces of Black Modernism: London 1919–1939 (Tate Britain Gallery, London, 13 October 2014–4 October 2015) with its emphasis on both the work of black artists and black people as subjects in modernist representation is an important corrective to this situation. 2 Bourke and Bhreathnach-Lynch, Discover Irish Art, 178. 3 Ryan, “Multiculturalization,” 207. 4 Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 8. 5 Beattie, “Problems of Translation”; see chapter 4, this volume. 6 Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War. 7 In 1921 the Anglo-Irish Treaty ended the War of Independence fought with Britain since 1919, establishing the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion within a newly defined British Commonwealth. The terms of the treaty, including the right of Northern Ireland to opt out of the Free State were, however, strongly contested. Éamon de Valera, the president of the Irish Republic that preceded the Irish Free State, strongly opposed the terms that had been negotiated by the Irish delegation’s leader, Michael Collins. In 1922 these conflicts erupted in a bitter Civil War between

the pro- and anti-treaty factions. Although the conflict ended in 1923 with the victory of the Free State forces, it is recognized as having left a deeply traumatic legacy within both Irish politics and culture. 8 The 1929 Censorship of Publications Act banned any publication that might be considered obscene or morally corrupting. The Free State’s legislation reflected the influence of the Catholic Church during a period of cultural and economic protectionism, and its main aim was to prevent the introduction of what were perceived to be damaging influences from abroad. 9 Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War, 55. 10 Dyer, White, 3. 11 Said, Orientalism. 12 Dyer, White, 4. 13 Bodkin, “Studio Talk – Dublin,” 284. 14 Briggs, Margaret Clarke, 48. 15 Briggs, “Strindbergian,” 90. 16 Ibid. 17 Briggs, Margaret Clarke, 48. 18 Steward, When Time Began, 130. 19 Jenkner, “Mary and Brigid,” 150. 20 Ibid. 21 Valiulis, “Virtuous Mothers and Dutiful Wives,” 101. 22 Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child, 63. 23 Ibid., 173. 24 First established in the eighteenth century, the Magdalene Laundries were institutions generally run by the Catholic Church in Ireland, and sanctioned by the state. Although initially intended to reduce prostitution, they later became notorious for the containment of unmarried mothers and other women perceived as socially transgressive. The institutions were known for the brutalizing, prison-like conditions in which the women were held. In addition to providing a source of unpaid labour in the laundries themselves, the punitive conditions for the women also included being forced to give up their children for adoption. It is estimated that over ten thousand women were incarcerated in the laundries from the inception of the Free State onward; however, the Catholic Church has consistently refused to reveal any relevant statistics or information about the conditions in which the women lived. The necessity to reveal the hidden histories of women in the laundries, including the unheard voices of survivors, has become the subject of major feminist campaigns in Ireland in recent years, despite the

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ongoing opposition of the Church. See Finnegan, Do Penance or Perish. 25 Luddy, “Unmarried Mothers in Ireland,” 110. 26 The representation of Irish immigrants in the United States during the nineteenth century is discussed by Cullen in Ireland on Show, 125–2; an earlier publication by both Cullen and Roy Foster, Conquering England, focuses on the Irish experience in Victorian London. 27 Keogh, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland, 9. 28 Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 5. 29 Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 9. 30 Irish Times, “Tivoli Theatre,” 7. 31 Hart, “Africans,” 19. 32 Ibid., 21. 33 McEvansoneya, “The Black Figure.” 34 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 278. 35 Riach, “Blacks and Blackface,” 231. 36 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 278–87. 37 Heleniak, William Mulready, 103. 38 Ibid. 39 Nead, “England’s Greatness,” 170. 40 Brannigan, Race in Modern Irish Literature, 31. 41 MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race. 42 Nead, “England’s Greatness,” 163. 43 Ibid., 181. 44 Ibid., 180.

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1 The mapping of these groupings has only just be­ gun. Refer to: Symposium on the European Artistic Avant-garde c. 1910–30: Formations, Networks and Trans-national strategies, 11–13 September 2013. Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. 2 In “Decentering Modernism,” Partha Mitter attempts to “recuperate the importance of the artistic modernisms of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Australia, which are regarded as derivative of the Western avant-garde.” Mitter, “Decentering Modernism,” 543, 544. 3 Key texts on the relativity of knowledge include, Bergson, Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), Creative Evolution (1907), Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932); Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense” (1873), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Will to Power (1901). 4 Key texts on primitive art include Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art; Rubin, “Primitivism” in

Twentieth Century Art; Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art; Harrison, Frascina, and Perry, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century. 5 Mashadi, “Negotiating Modernities,” 127. 6 Ibid., 123. 7 Danto et al., ART /Artefact; Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places; Torgovnick, Gone Primitive; Hiller, ed., The Myth of Primitivism; McEvilley, Art and Otherness; Hall and Metcalf, eds., The Artist Outsider; Barkan and Bush, Prehistories of the Future; Marcus and Myers, The Traffic in Culture; Root, Cannibal Culture; Phillips and Steiner, Unpacking Culture. 8 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin makes a fundamental distinction between two types of hybridity, namely “organic” and “intentional.” Organic hybridity explains how cultures evolve historically through unreflective borrowings, appropriations, and exchanges, fusing or merging a new language or worldview. Intentional hybridity sets different views against each other in a conflictual structure that retains “a certain elemental, organic energy and openendedness.” 9 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 156. 10 Ibid., 25. 11 Ibid., “How Newness Enters the World,” 212–35. 12 Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 72. 13 Ibid., 77. 14 de Man, The Resistance to Theory, 92, quoted in Bhabha, Location of Culture, 228. 15 Smith and Godlewska, Geography and Empire, 7. 16 Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” 16. 17 Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” 63. 18 Mitter, “Decentering Modernism,” 535. 19 Part of the reason that so little had been written about the exhibition was the location of the Bauhaus archives in Weimar, in the former German Democratic Republic, which made access difficult, until the reunification of Germany in 1990. One of the earliest academics to investigate the exhibition was the Indian scholar Ratan Parimoo, in 1967. His failed attempt is recounted in The Paintings of the Three Tagores, 168–9. Refer also to Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, 16–18; and Rüedi Ray, Bauhaus Dream House, 150. 20 Mitter, “Das Bauhaus in Kalkutta.” 21 Marjapra, “Stella Kramrisch and the Bauhaus in Calcutta,” 34.

35 Oskar Schlemmer was the exception, although he was informed about the exhibition in an unsigned letter probably from the Bauhaus administrator, Lotte Hirschfeld, 7 August 1922. 36 Kramrisch, “The Present Moment of Art, East and West,” 224. 37 Barr, “Lyonel Feininger: American Artist,” 10. 38 Feininger, letter to Alfred Churchill. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Prasse, Lyonel Feininger, 30. 42 Feininger, quoted in Faass, “Obsession Gelmeroda,” 235. 43 Hess, Lyonel Feininger, 85. 44 Feininger produced a series of graphic portfolios in the Bauhaus print shop. The first was published in 1921 and contained twelve woodcuts by Feininger. 45 Feininger dialogue with Knoblauch, reprinted in Ness, Lyonel Feininger, 29. 46 Barr, “Lyonel Feininger: American Artist,” 11. 47 Roters, Painters of the Bauhaus, 24. 48 Haskel, Lyonel Feininger, 50. 49 “Thirty spokes meet the hub, but the empty spaces between them makes for the essence of the wheel … Fundamentally: the material elements contain usefulness; the immaterial causes the essence.” Julia Berg letter to Lyonel Feininger, quoted in Haskel, Lyonel Feininger, 50. 50 Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 279. 51 Feininger dialogue with Knoblauch, reprinted in Ness, Lyonel Feininger, 29. 52 Schardt, “Lyonel Feininger,” 17. 53 Key articles that define the Bengal School include: Havell, “Some Notes on Indian Pictorial Painting”; Gangoly, “The Study of Indian Pictorial Art – A Rejoinder”; Havell, “The New School of Indian Painting”; Coomaraswamy, “The Modern School of Indian Painting”; Gangoly, “The New Indian School of Painting”; Karpelès, “The Calcutta School of Painting.” 54 Gaganendranath’s sketches appeared from 1917 onward in three volumes, Birup Bajra (Play of Opposites), Adbhut Lok (Realm of the Absurd), and Naba Hullod (Reform Screams). 55 Mitter, Art and Nationalism, 171, 172. 56 Tagore, “Cousin Gaganendra,” 12. 57 Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, 23. 58 “The Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art,” Rupam, 15.

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22 Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, “Bauhaus in Kalkutta Exhibition, 27 March–30 June 2013.” Bittner and Rhomberg, “The Bauhaus in Calcutta,” in Bittner and Rhomberg, eds., The Bauhaus in Calcutta, 83. 23 For a detailed explanation of notions of plural modernity see Alastair Bonnett, “Occidentalism and Plural Modernities: Or How Fukuzawa and Tagore Invented the West.” 24 Tages Zeitung, Weimar, “Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar”; Zweites Blatt Weimar, “Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar.” 25 Boris Friedewald casts doubt on whether the sketch was of Rabindranath, stating that it “does not show a man with flowing hair and a long beard, but a music-making tabla player.” Boris Friedewald, “The Bauhaus and India: A Look Back to the Future,” in Bittner and Rhomberg, eds., The Bauhaus in Calcutta, 117–33; citation, 120. 26 Rabindranath’s key texts that reflect the ideas behind Visva Bharati are The Centre for Indian Culture (February 1919), An Eastern University (1920–21), and The Visvabharati Ideal (1923). 27 “I had met Johannes Itten in Vienna and I subsequently suggested to Abanindranath Tagore to hold an exhibition at the Indian Society of Oriental Art.” Kramrisch letter to Beate Kruger, quoted in Manjapra, “Stella Kramrisch and the Bauhaus in Calcutta,” 35. 28 Stella Kramrisch to Johannes Itten, 5 May 1922, Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art. 29 Lotte Hirschfeld to Abanindranath Tagore, 31 August 1922, Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art. 30 P. Chatterjee to Lotte Hirschfeld, 6 December 1922, Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art. 31 Bittner and Rhomberg, “The Bauhaus in Calcutta,” 65. 32 The Englishman, “Indian Society of Oriental Art,” 6; and The Statesman, “Indian Society of Oriental Art,” 6. 33 “The Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art,” Rupam. 34 A third section also listed out work by Andrée Karpelès, who exhibited seventy oil paintings from India, Ceylon, France, Belgium, and Holland. Karpelès had arranged an isoa exhibition in Paris in 1914, and also taught at Kala Bhavan, the art school at Santiniketan run by Rabindranath Tagore.

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59 The Englishman, 4 September 1928. References are to J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and James Abbott McNeil Whistler (1834–1903). 60 Parimoo, Paintings of the Three Tagores, 98. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 100. 64 Mukherjee, “Art of Gaganendranath Tagore,” 8. 65 “The Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art,” Rupam, 15. 66 Mitra, Four Painters, 40. 67 Ibid., 46. 68 Kramrisch, “An Indian Cubist.” 69 Englishman, 5 January 1924; Statesman, 6 January 1924; Forward, 6 January 1924; Indian Daily News, 10 January 1924; Banerjee, “Mr. Gaganendranath Tagore’s New Indian Art”; Englishman, 19 December 1925; Vakhil, Bombay Chronicle, 30 June 1926; Welfare, “Art of Gaganendranath Tagore”; Englishman, 24 September 1928. 70 Roy, “Shilpe Atyukti,” quoted in Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, 15. 71 “Gleanings,” quoted in Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, 15. 72 Ratan Parimoo speculated whether his acquaintance with the Russian dancer Anna Pavlova in Calcutta, led to him coming in contact with the work of Russian avant-garde painters and set designers Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Parimoo, Paintings of the Three Tagores, 102. 73 Vakhil, Bombay Chronicle, quoted in Parimoo, Paintings of the Three Tagores, 100. 74 Mukherjee, “Art of Gaganendranath Tagore,” 9. 75 Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, 23. 76 Mukherjee, “Art of Gaganendranath Tagore,” 10. 77 Kramrisch, “An Indian Cubist,” 107. 78 Ibid., 109. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Visva Bharati Quarterly 4, 1 (May–July 1938); Journal of International Society of Oriental Art, Special Issue on Gaganendranath, June–December 1938; Mukherjee, “Art of Gaganendranath Tagore”; Appasamy, Gaganendranath Tagore; Kar, “Gaganendranath Tagore”; Parimoo, Paintings of the Three Tagores; Gangopadhyay, Gaganendranath; Sarker, Rupdaksha Gaganendranath. 82 Osborn, “The Indian Art Exhibition in Berlin,” 77. 83 Ibid., 76.

85 Ibid., 77. References are to Edvard Munch (1863– 1944), Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), Moritz von Schwind (1804–1877), Emil Nolde (1867–1956), and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (founded 1848). 85 Ibid., 77. 86 Ibid. 87 Archer, India and Modern Art, 43. References are to Georges Braque (1882–1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), co-founders of the cubist movement. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Mitter, “Decentering Modernism,” 537. 91 Ibid., 540. 92 Kramrisch, “An Indian Cubist,” 108. 93 Kramrisch, Catalogue of the Fourteenth Annual Exhibition, 21–3. 94 Kramrisch, “An Indian Cubist,” 109. 95 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 227. 96 Ibid., 225. 97 Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 73. 98 Rodolphe Gasché, “The Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language,” quoted in Bhabha, Location of Culture, 228. 99 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 228. 100 Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 73. 101 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 227.

C ha p t er F iv e 1 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 5. 2 Smith, The Nation in History, 52. 3 A process such as this has been evolving in the historiography of Israeli art. See Bar-Or and Ofrat, Sixty Years of Art in Israel; Manor, “Pride and Prejudice.” 4 Jarzombek, “A Prolegomena to Critical Historiography,” 203. 5 Ibid., 201. 6 Ibid., 202. 7 An exhibition catalogue central to the formation of the second kind of historiography is Efrat, The Israeli Project; a recent addition that works to canonize the architecture of the British Mandate in Palestine is Karmi-Melamede and Price, Architecture in Palestine during the British Mandate. 8 Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, 3. 9 Shenhav and Hever, “Directions in Postcolonial Research,” 192–3.

terms of the British Mandate in Palestine were characterized by a basic contradiction between a commitment to establishing in Palestine a “National Home” for the Jews, and at the same time a pledge to protect Arab rights in the land. The history of this clash of interests, especially as reflected in the Balfour Declaration, is discussed in Tuchman, Bible and Sword, 198–203, and in Adelson, London and the Invention of the Middle East, 149–54. 23 Fuchs and Herbert, “A Colonial Portrait,” 95. 24 Annabel Wharton also discusses the British urban schemes and some conservation plans for Jerusalem. She contextualized these plans and interpreted them as an embodiment of British Orientalist visual culture and religious sentiment. See Wharton, Selling Jerusalem, 189–232. 25 Fuchs and Herbert, “A Colonial Portrait,” 85–6. 26 For in-depth discussion of these issues see: BenAsher Gitler, “Marrying Modern Progress,” 39–58; Hysler-Rubin, “Arts & Crafts and the Great City,” 347–68; Pullan and Gwiazda, “The Development of Modern Sacred Geography.” 27 Shohat and Stam, “Narrativizing Visual Culture,” 38. 28 Fuchs and Herbert, “A Colonial Portrait,” 93. 29 Fuchs and Herbert underscore these similarities, ibid., 85–6, 104. 30 Ibid., 94, 102. 31 See for example Luz, “The Re-making of Beersheba,” 187–210; Avci, “The Application of Tanzimat in the Desert,” 969–83. 32 Fuchs, “The Palestinian Arab House,” 157–77. 33 Fuchs and Herbert, “A Colonial Portrait,” 87, 93, 97. The rejection of Ottoman architecture is exemplified by the case of Jerusalem’s clock tower; see ibid., 91. Examples of emulation are the walls of the old city itself, singled out for preservation, as well as Islamic details used in British architecture, which in their generalization do not exclude Ottoman characteristics. See Ben-Asher Gitler, “Marrying Modern Progress,” 51–4; Kroyanker, Architecture in Jerusalem, 28–31, 88. 34 Fuchs and Herbert, “A Colonial Portrait,” 98. 35 For a discussion of these buildings see Kroyanker, Architecture in Jerusalem, 177–8, 139–40. 36 Herbert and Sosnovsky, Bauhaus on the Carmel, 141–2. 37 Kroyanker, Architecture in Jerusalem, 139. 38 Fuchs, “Austen St Barbe Harrison,” figures B18.3, B 18.4. 39 Fuchs and Herbert, “A Colonial Portrait,” 102.

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10 Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism; Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations. 11 See for example: Ducet and Cupers, “Agency in Architecture,” 1n5; Liscombe, “Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa,” 207; Yacobi, “From State-Imposed Urban Planning to Diasporic Place,” 70. 12 Welter, “Constructing a Sense of Place,” 641–3; Dutta, “Modern Architecture and the End of Empire,” 292–3. 13 Jarzombek is clearly aware of his own position within his academic argument, although he refers to this only briefly. See Jarzombek, “A Prolego­ mena,” 204–5n29. 14 See, for example, Kimmerling, “Academic History Caught in the Crossfire,” especially 47–8. For criticism more specifically relating to the reception of postcolonialism in Israeli historiography, see Shohat, “In Memory of Edward Said,” 16–18. 15 Shamir, “Convenient in Seven Mistakes.” 16 British military rule and the mandate administration are grouped together in the discussion that follows under the term “British Mandate,” and I list their cumulative dates, 1918–48. The British army conquered Palestine during the First World War, in December 1917. The British Military Administration in Palestine was instigated at the beginning of 1918 and lasted until the formal approval of the Mandate by the League of Nations in 1922. See note 30 below and Porath and Shavit, The History of Eretz Israel, 18. 17 A comprehensive bibliography pertaining to Zionist modern architecture of this period is presented in Nitzan-Shiftan, “On Concrete and Stone,” 64–5n30, n56. 18 Fuchs and Herbert, “A Colonial Portrait of Jerusalem,” 83–110. 19 For a development of these ideas see Alsayyad’s preface and introduction: Alsayyad, Hybrid Urbanism, ix–xi, 1–18. 20 Fuchs and Herbert published a similar paper at about the same time entitled “Representing Mandatory Palestine: Austen St Barbe Harrison and the Representational Buildings of the British Mandate in Palestine, 1922–37.” 21 Ben-Asher Gitler, “Marrying Modern Progress,” 44–5. 22 Porat and Shavit, The History of Eretz Israel. For a discussion of the unique terms of the Palestine Mandate in the framework of the mandate system as a whole, see The Mandate System, 24–32. The

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40 Dolev does address this issue at length. Her research revealed that the patrons had little involvement in the architectural plans for the Hebrew University. She viewed Geddes’s approach as closely connected to the Orientalizing aspects in current Zionist visual culture. See Dolev, “Architectural Orientalism in the Hebrew University,” 217–24. 41 Shohat, “Notes on the Postcolonial,” 110. 42 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 110–11. 43 Ben-Asher Gitler, “Marrying Modern Progress,” 45. 44 For a discussion of these devices see Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 43–57. 45 Mitchell, “Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity,” 539. 46 Dianne Harris, “That’s Not Architectural History!” 150. 47 Neuman, “Al Mansfeld and the Interpretation of the Israel Museum,” 803–30. 48 Efrat, The Israeli Project, 901. 49 Ibid., 892, fig. 4; 899, fig. 8. 50 Mansfeld and Teut, Al Mansfeld, 59. 51 Kollek, For Jerusalem, 164. 52 Nitzan-Shiftan, “Seizing Locality in Jerusalem,” 245. 53 Minta, Israel Bauen, 152. 54 Neuman, “Al Mansfeld and the Interpretation of the Israel Museum,” 803–30. 55 Efrat, The Israeli Project, 895–6. Efrat cites Mansfeld describing his own work as “Oriental textures,” but does not provide the source. A full interpretation of Mansfeld’s implementation of structuralism in the architecture of the Israel Museum is beyond the scope of this paper. It is, however, important to note that the definition of structuralism in architecture is subject to debate, as is the understanding of structuralist approaches to traditional/primitive architecture. See Avermaete et al., Structuralism Reloaded. 56 Efrat, The Israeli Project, 895–901. See also Martha Langford’s discussion of “critical regionalism” in the introduction to this volume. 57 This lack of distinctions is discussed by Shohat in “Notes on the Postcolonial,” 103. 58 Eyal, “Between East and West: The Discourse on the ‘Arab Village’ in Israel,” 201–23. Eyal’s essay was originally published in Teoria ve Bikoret 3 (1993) [Hebrew]: 39–55. For an important discussion that includes an analysis of both Israeli and Palestinian approaches to the land and its space, see Edward Said, “Invention, Memory and Place,” 175–92.

59 Nitzan-Shiftan, “Seizing Locality in Jerusalem,” 241. 60 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 37. 61 Shadar, “The Evolution of the Inner Courtyard in Israel,” 51–74. 62 For similar French projects in Algiers, see Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations, 130–79. 63 For a discussion of “habitat” with relation to French colonial projects see Eleb, “An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism,” 55–6. 64 von Osten, “Architecture without Architects,” 9. 65 Shadar, “Evolution of the Inner Courtyard,” 65. 66 The French projects in North Africa have been extensively researched in Eleb, “An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism,” 55–74; see also Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations, 130–79. 67 Shadar, “Evolution of the Inner Courtyard,” 65–6. 68 Nitzan-Shiftan, “Seizing Locality in Jerusalem,” 235–41. 69 For an in-depth discussion of this controversy, see Aaronsohn, “Settlements in Eretz-Israel,” 214–29. 70 Nitzan-Shiftan, “On Concrete and Stone,” 54. 71 Smith reviews some of the seminal current approaches; see Smith, The Nation in History, 53–60; Anderson in Imagined Communities, 5–7, proposes a definition while pointing to the very different conceptions of nation among both laymen and scholars. Anderson also underscores the problematic stance of defining a certain religion as a nation. 72 Extensive research has been published about Israel as a nation-state and its complex situating of religion, ethnicity, democracy, and so on. See Brandt, “‘Jewish State,’ ‘Vision State’ and Israeli Nation State,” 87–103; Weissbrod, “Religion as National Identity,” 188–205; Walzer, “Zionism and Judaism,” 125–36; Smooha, “The Model of Ethnic Democracy,” 475–503; Gavison, “Jewish and Democratic? A Rejoinder to the ‘Ethnic Democracy’ Debate,” 44. 73 Brauch et al., Jewish Topographies, 9. 74 Nitzan-Shiftan, “On Concrete and Stone,” 63. 75 Ibid. 76 Welter, “Constructing a Sense of Place,” 642. 77 For the Ben-Gurion University’s early construction, see Moskovitch, “Ben-Gurion University of the Negev”; for a discussion of Karmi-Melamede’s architecture there, see Ben-Asher Gitler and Tamari, “The Marcus Family Campus,” 560–3.

90 Ching et.al., A Global History of Architecture, xi. 91 Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions, 140. 92 Welter, “Constructing a Sense of Place,” 641–3.

C ha p t er S ix 1 Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 10. 2 The attacks of 11 September 2001 sparked international interest in art from the Middle East that has increased steadily through American-led invasions and revolutionary waves across the Arab world. In Europe and North America, major exhibitions focusing on “Arab” art have included Contemporary Arab Representations, curated by Catherine David for the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, but begun in 2001; and Disorient ation: Contemporary Arab Art Production from the Near East, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, curated by Jack Persekian. The latest exhibition of this sort, entitled Here and Elsewhere: Contemporary Art from and About the Arab World, opened in September 2014 at the New Museum in New York. 3 See Said, Orientalism. On the roots of such approaches to curating art from both the Middle East and Africa, see Meier, “Authenticity and Its Modernist Discontents.” 4 Ramadan, “Regional Emissaries.” 5 Ramadan, “The Aesthetics of Modern Art.” 6 Ibid. 7 LaCoss, “Egyptian Surrealism and ‘Degenerate Art’ in 1939,” 97. 8 Ibid., 85. 9 Ibid., 84. 10 El-Shakry, “The Arabic Freud,” 89–118. 11 Ibid., 93. 12 As El-Shakry notes at the beginning of her study, Murad’s approach to psychology was premised on a conception of the self as a unity with psychic, social, and bodily aspects. Murad’s philosophy of the subject accordingly seeks to explain subjectformation in psychological, positivistic, and phenomenological terms. He shows how the subject’s integrity is maintained by introspection, and by coming to understand or coordinate speaking and observing positions in the physical and social worlds. Significantly, for El-Shakry this philosophy of the subject was aimed at a refusal of Cartesian dualism. Again the goal of Murad’s theory is to integrate elements of the subject, not separate them, as Descartes did, into fundamentally different mental and physical substances.

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78 Jarzombek discusses and alludes to the idea of architectural practice as historiography throughout his paper. See, for example, Jarzombek, “A Prolegomena,” 201. 79 The book was published in Hebrew as well. It is interesting to note that the Hebrew title given to it was Architectura be Palestina-EI Biyemey ha Mandate ha Briti. EI stands for Eretz Israel, and Palestina-EI or Palestine-Eretz Yisrael (used in the present essay) was the common name used for the land during the Mandate years. 80 Karmi-Melamede, “Introduction: A New Beginning in an Old-New Land,” in Karmi-Melamede and Price, Architecture in Palestine, 33. 81 Karmi-Melamede and Price, Architecture in Palestine, 37–53. 82 Karmi-Melamede, “Introduction: A New Beginning in an Old-New Land,” 16. 83 I am intentionally refraining from labelling Karmi-Melamede’s work as postmodernist architecture, since I believe that this appellation too is an issue that merits in-depth discussion. 84 The Bedouins reside chiefly in the Negev desert in which Be’er-Sheva is the central town. They are Muslims who, prior to the twentieth century, were a tribal nomadic society. The Bedouins have been disenfranchised and discriminated against by the Ottomans, the British, and the Israelis consecutively. See n38 and Yiftachel, “Epilogue: Studying Naqab/Negev Bedouins,” 83–108; Abu-Saad, “Spatial Transformation and Indigenous Resistance,” 1713–54. 85 For a critique of the implementation of postcolonialism in this field, one that raises issues similar to those raised in this discussion, see Lees, “The Geography of Gentrification.” For a specific case study see Winling, “Students and the Second Ghetto.” 86 Yacobi has published work on the mixed ArabIsraeli city of Lod that deals with urban geography but certainly lays the ground for an architectural discussion of Palestinian architecture and its traditions. See Yacobi, “The Architecture of Ethnic Logic,” 171–87. Iris Levin has done some characterization of the Palestinian city Fureidis, a study that also belongs more to the discipline of urban geography than architectural history and criticism; see Levin, “Fureidis, On the Way of the Place,” 107–16. Both Lod and Fureidis are located within the recognized borders of Israel. 87 Massad, “Zionism’s Internal Others,” 53–68. 88 Tzfadia and Yacobi, Rethinking Israeli Space, 20. 89 Interview with Avi Zarfati, 10 September 2015.

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This is not strictly a philosophical point. Murad’s integration of bodily, psychic, and societal elements of the subject’s experience refuses the tradition of Cartesian dualism “in the context of Egypt’s emergent postcoloniality.” It is on this basis that El-Shakry argues, “Murad provided the contours for what we might term a postcolonial subjectivity for twentieth-century Egypt.” ElShakry, “The Arabic Freud,” 90, 97. Ibid., 93. Focusing as it does on the Egyptian context, ElShakry’s work builds on that of Amira Mittermaier. See Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter. But El-Shakry borrows the notion of a “worlding of psychoanalysis” from Ranjana Khanna. See Khanna, Dark Continents, 5, 10–11. El-Shakry aligns her work with that of Khanna on this point. For Khanna, religious or divine aspects of psychoanalysis outside the European context have been interpreted as limiting traces of a pre-modern, religious culture. For Khanna, psychoanalysis in this view is an “impossible achievement of selfhood for the colonized who remain primitive and concealed.” See Khanna, Dark Continents, 6. El-Shakry emphasizes the scientific aspect of Murad’s work. She notes that the synthetic and adaptive subject of Egyptian psychoanalysis for Murad is not to be understood as an “allegory of decolonization” or a figure that is epiphenomenal to political realities within Egypt. Rather, she argues, Murad offers a substantial account of psychological operations of synthesis and adaptation. See El-Shakry, “The Arabic Freud,” 98–118. Hassan Khan, 17 and in auc . Khan’s introduction to the transcript describes the conditions of the performance and its complex objectives, which extend beyond a simple critique of the university’s role in the region: “For 14 nights … I sat in a soundproofed one-way mirrored glass room … drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and speaking. My main focus [was] my undergraduate years … at the American University in Cairo (auc ) … Although people could see and hear me I could not see or hear except myself … [The] performative action [was] documented on a digital video camera. The result is a mixture of deeply personal recollections and various theoretical attempts at deciphering and analyzing the period as well as the situation itself, a specific relation to an audience – a technology of communication. This is a personal investigation of the construction

of memory and persona in relation to a specific institution and the context it is in. The following text is a transcription of every legible word uttered during these hours, the text has been lightly edited to avoid the repetitions of oral delivery, however the decision to keep the unpunctuated flow of the spoken word was dictated by the interest of maintaining the rhythms and enigmas of a consciousness on the brink.” Khan, 17 and in auc, 1. In Khan’s view the work engages with “the production of a historical subjectivity” that takes account of, but reaches well beyond the university context. El-Sheikh, Correspondence with Hassan Khan, 13 July 2016. 17 Khan mentions David Lynch’s film Eraserhead (1977) and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972). Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) is mentioned repeatedly and Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) is mentioned once. William Burroughs is mentioned along with other beat poets, and Khan spends a fair bit of time reflecting on the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North (1969). In a discussion with curator Nida Ghouse held at the Delphina Foundation in London in 2011, Khan reflects on the significance of “14 proper nouns” that appear in his transcript. See Ghouse and Khan, “14 Proper Nouns.” 18 Khan, 17 and in auc , 168. 19 Ibid., 26. In a characteristic self-critical moment toward the beginning of the transcript Khan remarks on the “curse” and advantage of his middle-class privilege. 20 Another very indirect reference to the Egyptian surrealists specifically occurs in an anecdote about an exhibition that Khan and a friend of his wanted to organize. The exhibition was to be called El-Gazireen (The Butchers) and was to include raw pieces of meat nailed to the wall. The name of the exhibition, as Khan explains in conversation with Nida Ghouse, was a play on the name of Egyptian surrealist painter Hadi Al-Gazzar. See Khan, 17 and in auc , 179. 21 Khan, 17 and in auc , 1. 22 Ibid. 23 LaCoss, “Egyptian Surrealism,” 107. 24 El-Sheikh, Interview with Hassan Khan, 28 June 2014. See Khan, “Trusted Sources.” 25 Khan, “Trusted Sources,” 261. 26 Ibid., 265–6. For Khan the likeness of artist Mahmoud Khaled is a “stand-in for a presence.” In his view the model could have been

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collaboration. And it is characteristic of Khan’s work. Zainab Khalifa, the owner and chief creative power in the company, is also Khan’s mother. This relationship is represented more directly, as will be seen in the photo on the facing page of Khan’s mother. 35 El-Sheikh, Interview with Hassan Khan. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. Khan discussed his difficult process of scouting for a location. After finding a rooftop vantage point in Abbasiyah, Khan was stopped by a group of concerned citizens on his return to the building to shoot. Not wishing to defy them, Khan found another rooftop nearby. This resistance from the community was predictable in the wake of the ouster of Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and in the wake of the 2011 revolution in general – a time of pervasive anxiety about surveillance within Cairo. 38 El-Shakry, “The Arabic Freud,” 101–2. 39 Ibid., 107. 40 Ibid., 115. 41 See “Their Favorite Exhibitions of the Year” in Artforum (December 2011). Khan’s response is included along with those of, among other art world luminaries, Lena Dunham, Christian Marclay, Ian Wallace, and Martha Wilson. 42 Khan describes the radio broadcast made up from “weirdly depressive nationalist songs” as “a kind of psychological warfare waged upon us by the state.” El-Sheikh, Interview with Hassan Khan, 2 September 2014. 43 El-Sheikh, Interview with Hassan Khan. Khan notes that he did not want his contribution to be cast triumphantly in terms of “an event that had happened,” or in terms of a successful and completed revolution. Reflecting back on the work and its moment, Khan notes: “I was aware that the whole thing had just begun … the framing is political in any case I just didn’t accept the fixed narrative of the time.” Khan adds that after he explained his position the editors were quite accommodating and agreed to not revise his text. El-Sheikh, Correspondence with Hassan Khan, 13 July 2016. 44 El-Sheikh, Interview with Hassan Khan. 45 Ibid. 46 Frantz Fanon was an early postcolonial critic who served as a psychiatrist in Algeria during the War of Independence. His best-known works are Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. The work by Fanon that Khan mentioned in an

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different without changing the sense of the work. El-Sheikh, Correspondence with Hassan Khan, 13 July 2016. Khan, “Trusted Sources,” 261. LaCoss, “Egyptian Surrealism,” 107. El-Sheikh, Interview with Hassan Khan, 28 June 2014; El-Sheikh, Interview with Mahmoud Khaled, 13 June 2014. El-Sheikh, Interview with Hassan Khan. In his dialogue with the editors at Artforum, some of Khan’s specifications for the project were resisted. In addition to the commercial artist named in the title, Khan commissioned the designer Engy Aly to work on the layout of the project. Special care was taken to produce pictures that would fit perfectly within the magazine’s square format. The portrait of Khaled is the only image of the nine commissioned for the project that is rectangular, but it is absorbed into the design scheme of the magazine in other ways – Khan’s red-letter speech bubble in the drawing echoes the red title of the magazine, and perhaps accidentally, the cover’s barcode lines correspond with the lines on the page that Khan provided to Nour for his drawing. I thank Martha Langford for her insightful reading of these details of the cover image. Khan insisted on including Aly’s name and those of other contributors to the project on the first page and in the titles of the works. The editors resisted this at first, but they eventually agreed. This imperative is taken from an essay by the painter Ramses Younan, a key member of the Egyptian Art and Liberty Group. He writes: “We all share the psychological struggle between dreams and reality; therefore we all share in the surrealist’s efforts since their promising aspiration is the spreading of surrealism in life.” See LaCoss, “Egyptian Surrealism,” 104. El-Shakry, “The Arabic Freud,” 97. El-Sheikh, Interview with Hassan Khan, 28 June 2014. Khan notes that Nour was not aware of the purpose of the commission. In Khan’s view it was crucial to approach Nour in the space of an everyday service-market transaction – anonymously, or “like buying a t -shirt.” In an interview Khan explained that his collaboration with the glassblowers was close. He began by giving a sketch of the design to the craftspeople and then directed the pulling and manipulation of the glass while it was in a liquid state. This might better be described as a directorial role in the fabrication process rather than an even

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interview was The Wretched of the Earth. It is for him the work of Fanon’s that “made the strongest impression.” Interview with Hassan Khan, 28 June 2014. Khan explains that the “Read Fanon” project began as a response to curators who seemed to him to represent neo-imperial forces within the international art world. It is not surprising that Khan developed this idea or strategy in 2003, in the wake of September 2001, and amid an increasing international appetite for art from the region. As Ramadan argues in her essay mentioned above, this moment created pressure on artists within the region to act as “emissaries” or representatives of nations rather than artists, with work that could be interpreted in its own terms. See Ramada, “Regional Emissaries.” Reflecting back on this exchange with Artforum, Khan notes that he did not intend to “undermine” the magazine with the “Read Fanon” piece. He imagined that it would be read mainly in relation to his other works for the special project, and as a “zoom-out onto the general cultural landscape” of which Artforum is a part. In retrospect, Khan adds that he does not regret the magazine’s decision, since the “Read Fanon” piece would certainly have “overwhelmed” the more “elusive, associative, fragile and subtle” images in the project. El-Sheikh, Correspondence with Hassan Khan, 13 July 2016. El-Sheikh, Interview with Mahmoud Khaled, 13 June 2014. Khaled notes in conversation that he approached three actors/friends to be recorded receiving the tattoo, but they declined. Ibid. Khaled calls the sculpture a “minimal object that generates a romantic atmosphere that would not be expected in (or from) a white cube.” See Jessica Winegar’s chapter on the history and genealogy of the debate between mu’asira (contemporary) and asala (traditional) artists within Egypt. In general, Winegar finds, this distinction is one between mu’asira, artists who make use of internationally established contemporary art materials (film, video, installation), and asala, artists who remain attached to traditional media (painting, sculpture, etc.) and, more significantly, to traditional iconography drawn from the Pharaonic, Coptic, and Islamic heritage. While asala artists aim to recover a national Egyptian identity after the disappointment of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the mu’asira artists claim a right to borrow freely from cultural traditions both inside and outside Egypt. For Winegar, in spite of their differences, these

kinds of artists operate within a common national “cognitive frame” that is either sympathetic to Nasser’s Pan-Arab and socialist vision for Egypt, or sympathetic to Anwar Sadat’s Infitah (“open door”) policies. See Winegar, “Cultural Authenticity, Artistic Personhood and Frames of Evaluation,” in her Creative Reckonings, 88–130. Khaled seems to be interested in moving beyond such a binary debate and its grounding in the politics and economics of the Nasser and Sadat years within Egypt. 51 El-Sheikh, Interview with Mahmoud Khaled. 52 El-Shakry, “The Arabic Freud,” 115. 53 The residency at Ashkal Alwan is called the Home Workspace Program. Khaled participated in the inaugural 2012 edition. The program involves lectures by visiting professors and artists and studio visits. In the 2012 edition, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Tony Chakar, Emily Jacir, Hassan Khan, Hito Steyerl, and Akraam Zaatari, among others, were the visiting artists/professors. Khaled was joined that year by twelve other participants. 54 El-Sheikh, Interview with Mahmoud Khaled, 13 June 2014. 55 Ibid. This question was one of several that Khaled asked Berardi. The artist’s questions were generally concerned with the relationship between art and politics, and artistic practice and activism. 56 Berardi’s reflections in this part of the video have to do with conventional politics and revolutionary alternatives to it. See Mahmoud Khaled, A Memorial to Failure (2013). 57 Khaled, A Memorial to Failure. 58 El-Sheikh, Interview with Mahmoud Khaled, 13 June 2014. 59 Khaled, A Memorial to Failure. 60 El-Shakry, “The Arabic Freud,” 106. 61 El-Sheikh, Interview with Mahmoud Khaled. 62 El-Shakry, “The Arabic Freud,” 90. 63 For an art historical account of cosmopolitanism in Beirut, see Rogers’s “Daoud Corm, Cosmopolitan Nationalism, and the Origins of Lebanese Modern Art.” The international donors or patrons of Ashkal Alwan included, in the year of Khaled’s residency, the Ford Foundation, the British Council, the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, the French Institute in Lebanon. Since the year of Khaled’s residency, patronage from within the region has increased. 64 Toukan, “Art, Aid, Affect.” 65 Ibid., especially chapter 7, “Art and Radical Democracy.” On the role of cngo ’s in local

cultural politics within Beirut, also see Toukan’s chapter 5, “From plo to ngo and the Art Market.” 66 Toukan’s fieldwork was conducted in 2008 in Lebanon, and her narrative of the development of cultural practices in Beirut covers the postwar period – the 1990s. She does not write about Berardi’s visit. She argues that, ironically, Rancière’s and Mouffe’s radical democratic philosophy had a normative force within Beirut. According to Toukan, Rancière’s notion of “dissensus” and Mouffe’s notion of “agonism” gained a kind of currency within Beirut that resulted in a prescription of artistic themes (the Civil-War, and “affective memory”) and aesthetics (conceptual and archive-based works). See Toukan, chapter 7, “Art and Radical Democracy.” 67 El-Sheikh, Interview with Mahmoud Khaled, 13 June 2014. 68 El-Shakry, “The Arabic Freud,” 93. 69 A fatwa is a religious decree published by a Muslim scholar or Imam. 70 Ramadan, “The Aesthetics of Modern Art,” 24–5. 71 Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 3. 72 Ibid., 4.

C h a p t er S e ven 1 A search on the art and architecture database Art

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Source shows that between 2009 and 2014, only three scholarly papers focused on the work of galleries that were neither privately owned nor governed directly by governments/municipalities. See: Brown, Malatjie, Geyer, and Muller, and my own paper on the Barbur Gallery. 2 See, for example, Ariella Azoulay’s discussion of these issues in her “With Open Doors.” 3 There is very little written documentation of the gallery and its work. The information presented here is thus based on personal observations through numerous visits over the last decade to openings, exhibitions, and organized workshops and talks, as well as conversations with Sa’id Abu Shakra and the gallery’s head and several of the gallery staff, including Mustafa Kabha and Guy Raz (interviews listed under Yerushalmy in the bibliography). For more details, see the gallery’s website: Umm el-Fahem Gallery of Art, http://myschool.co.il/galleryhe/. 4 The gallery website has undergone several changes during the time this essay was written, but different definitions of the gallery’s mission remain as described in this essay. Accessed 16 September 2015. http://ummelfahemgallery.org/.

5 Mitchell, “Palestinian-Israeli Totemism.” 6 Kabha and Raz, eds., Memories of a Place and Shadows of Time. 7 For a survey of recent developments within archives and archival work, see Craven, What Are Archives? 8 This issue was discussed in an oral history workshop organized by Prof. Mustafa Kabha and Dr R. Cohen at the uef gallery: Mustafa Kabha and Raya Cohen, “Oral History, Memories and Places in Umm el-Fahem,” March 2013. 9 “Umm el-Fahem Gallery of Art, From Vision to Reality.” Accessed 1 March 2014. http://myschool.co.il/galleryhe/?page_id=25837. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Kabha, “The Photographic History of Umm el-Fahem and Wadi A’ra,” in Kabha and Raz, eds., Memories of a Place, 279. 13 Kabha, in conversation with Merav Yerushalmy, 21 January 2013. 14 Abu Shakra, “Memories of a Place,” in Kabha and Raz, eds., Memories of a Place, 280–2; Abu Shakra, in conversation with Merav Yerushalmy, 13 February 2014. 15 Raz, “Umm al-Nur: Photography, History, Identity,” in Kabha and Raz, eds., Memories of a Place, 267–74; Raz, in conversation with Merav Yerushalmy, 23 May, 2013. 16 See a survey of Palestinian historiography: Sfeir, “Palestinian Historiography between History and Memory” (draft). Referenced with explicit permission of the author. 17 For a discussion of Palestinian memory books, see Slyomovics, The Object of Memory. 18 See the project’s website at Palestine Remembered. Accessed 1 September 2014. http://www.palestineremembered.com/ index.html. For Palestinian oral histories, see Gluck, “Oral History and al-Nakbah.” 19 Gil-Glazer, “Family Albums as Collective Memory of a Community.” 20 A discussion of the new Palestinian Museum was held at the Swedish Christian Study Centre in Jerusalem on 4 June 2014: Jack Persekian, The Palestinian Museum: Evolving Models of Public/Private Partnerships. See a discussion of the monument in Sakhnin and the events it commemorates in Ben-Zvi, “The Story of a Monument.” On the Kafr Qasim massacre, see Robinson, “Local Struggle, National Struggle.” For an announcement regarding the opening of the museum, see Nachmias, “Kafr Qasim.”

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21 See Kabha’s “The Invisible Hand and the Strange Fate of the National Palestinian Archives” [Hebrew]. 22 See unrwa Photo and Film Archive. Accessed 1 September 2014. http://archive.unrwa.org/. For exhibition reviews see: Levi, “The Narrative Battle;” Croitoru, “The Long Journey to Uncertainty.” 23 Zochrot website. Accessed 1 September 2014. http://www.zochrot.org/en. For an essay about Zochrot’s work, see Gutman, “Transcultural Memory in Conflict.” 24 For information on both these exhibitions, see curator Rona Sela’s online files. Accessed 1 September 2014. http://www.ronasela.com/en/ index.asp?show=22. 25 Enwezor, Archive Fever. 26 Foster, “An Archival Impulse”; Godfrey, “Artist as Historian”; Simon, ed., “Following the Archival Turn.” 27 For a discussion of these issues, see Maimon’s succinct review of Enwezor’s Archive Fever, which addresses the genealogy of the archival turn. An extended discussion of the employment of the archive in contemporary art and postmodernism may be found in Simon’s introduction to “Following the Archival Turn,” 101–7. 28 These issues are discussed in Godfrey’s “Artist as Historian,” as well as in my own writing. See Yerushalmy, “Performing the Relational Archive.” 29 There are numerous discussions of changes within archival practices in modernist and post-structuralist frameworks. See, for example, Schwartz and Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power,” 1–19. 30 The most comprehensive analysis and documentation of Asim Abu Shaqra’s work, biography, and reception to date has appeared in an extensive catalogue entitled Asim Abu Shaqra (2015). In an essay included in this catalogue, W.J.T. Mitchell develops his understanding of the communality of Israel and Palestine, which I have used throughout this chapter (see note 5). 31 Abu Shakra, in conversation with the author. 32 See details about the announcement of the uef Museum at the tama in “A New Image” [Hebrew], Haaretz Newspaper. Accessed 1 September 2014. http://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/1.1528950. For details about the announcement of the architectural competition to design the museum, see Zandberg, “Who Will Design the Museum at Umm el-Fahem?”

33 Umm el-Fahem gallery. Accessed 1 March 2014. http://umelfahemgallery.org/?page_id=26275. 34 Bar-Am, The Photographic Legacy of the Holy Land 1839–1914. 35 The uef Gallery has established good working relations with the nearby museum of Ein Harod Kibbutz which is known for examining the historical narratives of Israeli art. But despite these close relations, which include joint exhibitions and public relations, the gallery’s most prominent events have taken place at the tama . See for example an announcement of a recent joint exhibition of the Druze artist Asad A’zi at the Ein Harod Museum and the uef gallery: Asad A’zi – Wandering Horseman [Hebrew], Ein Harod Museum of Art, http://museumeinharod.org.il/ hebrew/exhibitions/2015/asad_azi/. Accessed 13 June 2016. 36 As far as I know there have not been extensive studies of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art as an institution. To date, despite repeated attempts, it has also not been possible to discuss the issues addressed here with the museum’s main curators. The museum itself has been under criticism by the artists and the art field in Israel for various reasons, including those mentioned above. See, for example, an extensive discussion of the tama in the Haaretz newspaper culture magazine: Azoulay, “The Tel Aviv Museum at a Crossroad.” See a critical analysis of the tama in response to the article above which also includes direct criticisms of the tama for a lack of political or social agenda: Amir. “Who Is the Tel Aviv Museum?” 37 For an overview and images of the exhibition, see Rona Sela’s website: Rona Sela – curator. Accessed 1 September 2014. http://www.ronasela.com/en/ details.asp?listid=6. Also see Sela, Photography in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s. 38 See an online archive of all the Museum Herzliya for Contemporary Art’s exhibitions, as accessed 1 September 2014. http://www.herzliyamuseum.co.il/english/archive. 39 Levin, correspondence with the author, 20 July 2014. 40 Ibid. 41 This account of the educational program for Sela’s exhibition is based on the author’s own notes: Yerushalmy, Rona Sela’s Exhibition – Notes for Educational Programme [Hebrew], 2000. 42 Brosh, “Politics in the Shadow of War,” 52–3; Ronit, “Who’s Drafted and Who’s Not Drafted?” 87–90.

43 Some of the archive’s contents have now been made available online. See: Umm el-Fahem Archive. Accessed 13 June 2016. http://ummelfahemarchive.com/?lang=en. 44 Kabha and Raz, eds., Memories of a Place. 45 Ibid., 24–5. 46 Ibid., 40–1. 47 Ibid., 130. 48 Ibid., 135. 49 Ibid., 71. 50 Ibid., 229. 51 Ibid., 48–9. 52 Kabha, “The Photographic History of Umm el-Fahem and Wadi A’ra,” in Kabha and Raz, eds., Memories of a Place, 279. 53 Abu Shakra, “Memories of a Place,” in Kabha and Raz, eds., Memories of a Place, 280–2. 54 Kabha, “The Photographic History of Umm el-Fahem and Wadi A’ra,” 279. 55 Raz, “Umm al-Nur: Photography, History, Identity,” in Kabha and Raz, eds., Memories of a Place, 267–74. 56 See the online documentation of the exhibition at the uef Gallery website: Khader Oshah – The Arab Spring, Umm el-Fahem Gallery. Accessed 1 September 2014. http://umelfahemgallery.org/ ?page_id=26265.

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1 The original paper, “‘Lines of Flight’: ‘Rhizomatic’ Reachings in the Gàidhealtachd (Scottish Highlands),” was presented at the Association for Art Historians Conference, 10–12 April 2014, Royal College of Art, London, in the session “Networking National Art Histories, or, [insert nationality] specialist seeks relationships with like-minded persons,” chaired by Martha Langford, Concordia University. 2 Grant and Murison, Scottish National Dictionary. Quoted in Soden, “Highland: Views and Visions,” 17. 3 Hunter, The Making of the Crofting Community, 24. 4 As An Fhearann was co-curated by Malcolm Maclean (director of Pròiseact Nan Ealan, Gaelic Arts Agency) to celebrate the centenary of the Crofting Act of 1886. The exhibition was shown in the Outer Hebrides but also, because it was a collaborative project, at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, on the mainland. 5 Moffat, “Beyond the Highland Landscape,” As An Fhearann, 65.

6 Ibid. 7 Calanais (1995) and MacTotem: Reviewing the Statue of the Duke of Sutherland (1998) were two exhibitions generated by An Lanntair, Island of Lewis. 8 Moffat, As An Fhearann, 68. 9 The echo of Badentarbert, for example, comes through with the sternpost etched into the surface of the “James Caird” works (2011) and in many pieces created before and after this period. 10 Macmillan, “Scottish and Irish Visual Art,” 12. 11 Normand’s The Modern Scot (2000) examines the dialogue between nationalism and modernism within Scottish art (1928–55). Normand highlights “where political agendas overlap with aesthetic programmes” and where “the character of a ‘nationalist art’ is called into question.” He looks principally at the work of William Johnstone (1938–2004), William McCance (1894–1970), and John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961). 12 The anti-theoretical stance of Moffat and Riach is euphemistically expressed in the opening pages: “our rather modest and anecdotal method, nothing too stentorian and no jargon,” Arts of Resistance, x. In the summation the writers state one of their aims: “Have we countered the academic or merely professional tendencies to fossilize intellectual interests, even amongst well-educated people?” Ibid., 168. 13 Macdonald, “Gàidhealtachd Art: Historical and Contemporary,” 92. Macdonald uncovers much little-known material and argues convincingly that emigration during the nineteenth century, the Gaelic-averse Education Act of 1872, and the losses of the First World War combined to effectively prevent the formal articulation of visual culture despite the availability of material. 14 Macdonald, “Gàidhealtachd Art: Historical and Contemporary,” 94. 15 Macdonald, “Preface: Unboarding Sorley’s Window,” 10. 16 Ascherson, Stone Voices, 176. 17 For further discussion on the tree structure, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 23–8. 18 Ascherson, Stone Voices, 8. 19 Normand, Scottish Photography: A History, 114. Hill and Adamson’s North Street, Fishergate, St Andrews: Baiting the Lines, 1843–46, George Washington Wilson, Corn Grinding, circa 1880, and James Cox, At Auchmithie, 1881, are several examples of the “consolation” images.

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20 “We must distinguish between: the majoritarian as a constant and homogeneous system; minorities as subsystems; and the minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming.” Ibid., 117. 21 MacLeod, From an Antique Land, 2. 22 Ibid., 178. 23 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 23–8. 24 Sara Stevenson’s “Discoveries and Explorations: The Scottishness of Scottish Photography,” Tom Normand’s Scottish Photography: A History, discussed earlier, and Andrew Blaikie’s The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory have contributed toward generating a renewed interest in early Scottish photography. 25 Eric Richards uses the term “a history-frombelow” to describe the methodology employed by James Hunter, as explained in the preface to Hunter’s The Making of the Crofting Community, 16. 26 Hunter, The Making of The Crofting Community, 19. 27 See Wightman, The Poor Had No Lawyers. 28 Maclean, The Highlands, 54. 29 The Columba Initiative is the academic partnership between the University of Strathclyde and St Mary’s University College, Belfast. The Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative (1997–2006), the ahrc Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies (2001–10), and the International Research Consortium for Irish and Scottish Studies (2008–13) also flourished. 30 Wickman, “Scotland the Event; or Theory after Muir,” 3 (autumn/winter) 2007. 31 Sassi, “Re-establishing Complexities.” Michael Gardiner has also used Deleuzian concepts to great effect to open up Scottish cultural debate in the International Journal of Scottish Literature. Leith Davis and Kristen Mahlis use a theory of Brathwaite’s (Interculturation) to explore notions of postcolonialism in relation to the two poets. Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizomatic” approach explores issues of radical, countercultural orality between the poets. Instead of a one-way model of influence between Burns and Braithwaite, they chose a map that would be “detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification.” See Davis and Mahlis, “A Conceptual Alliance.” 32 White, The Wanderer and His Charts, 205–7. White also speaks of “getting rid of inherited conceptions of the human being, and getting out of the psycho-sociological ruts they have got us

into – ruts which we often interpret as roots: in some philosophies, the self doesn’t exist at all (Hume here in Scotland was pretty close to that), and recent biology conceives the human being as ‘open system.’” White, The Wanderer and His Charts, 205–7. 33 Ibid., 46. 34 Jon Schueler in His Studio, New York, 1991. Nordland and Ingleby, Jon Schueler: To the North, back flap of jacket cover. 35 Schueler, himself, identified something of this in his own writings: “More and more I’ve considered that working is the point of the work, and that all else is incidental. Compared to the work in the studio, the rest of life is a passive act. Extremely passive. I say that advisedly. Looking at the sky, walking the moors, fighting wars, making money, building houses, teaching students, all these are passive acts compared to the act in the studio. The residue of the struggle is the painting or the poem. It has an existence outside of the artist, who can join others in contemplating it, feeling it, having it become part of the passive act of living.” Schueler, The Sound of Sleat, 192–3. 36 A panel – Finlay Finlayson (entrepreneur, former fisherman, and architect), Will Maclean (artist and former fisherman, who operated on the Skye ring net fishing boats), Rob Fairley (an artist who worked in Mallaig at the same time as Schueler), and Hamish Smith (who worked for Schueler as an apprentice joiner) – comprised some of the local Mallaig community members at the symposium. 37 Lovatt, “Cy Twombly,” 7. 38 Ibid. See also, Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 246–91. 39 See Rainbird’s Joseph Beuys and the Celtic World, 43–79; and Richardson, Scottish Art Since 1960, 69–71 and 112–14. 40 Beuys’s term “Social Sculpture” describes his idea of art’s potential to transform society. He said: “Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘a social organism as a work of

art’ … every human being is an artist

who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns

to determine the other positions of the total art work of the future social order.”

C ha p t er N in e 1 Aspects of this research were presented at the conference Figures et méthodes de la transmission artistique: Quelle histoire? held in Geneva in 2011, and published as Sigurjónsdóttir, “Magnús Pálsson et le département New Art à Reykjavík, 1975–1984: ‘Teaching: The Maddest Artform,’” in Transmettre l’art: Figures et méthodes – Quelle histoire? 129–51. 2 Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? 259. 3 Abell, “hannahhiggins,” Interview recorded in Chicago, November 2003. Accessed 30 March 2014. http://mouthtomouthmag.com/ higgins.html. 4 Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 1. Also see Banes, Greenwich Village 1963, 28. 5 Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 11. 6 Ibid., 189. 7 Clavez, “Fluxus: Reference or Paradigm for Young Contemporary Artists?” 246.

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Tisdall, Art into Society, Society into Art, 48. 41 David Gibson says, in an essay entitled “Joseph Beuys 40th Anniversary Journey”: “On 8 May 2010, Demarco led an expedition retracing the entire journey, which altered the course of Beuys’ lifework and arguably changed our understanding of art and how it continues to change in the early part of the 21st century. The journey was not a nostalgia trip but a reinvigorated ‘Edinburgh Arts’ expedition. ‘Edinburgh Arts’ is Demarco’s experimental summer school modelled on the Black Mountain College and the Free International University that included Joseph Beuys as teacher between 1972 and 1981.” 42 Demarco spoke to Janet McKenzie at Studio International in 2014: “The three most significant exhibitions that I have [had] the responsibility for presenting … were … Strategy: Get Arts in 1970, which introduced the avant-garde spirit from Düsseldorf as a European capital of culture capable of making New York’s art world look parochial. The second exhibition was that of Romanian contemporary art in 1971 … Paul Neagu had to be considered the outstanding Romanian artist in 1971. In 1972, there was the Polish avant-garde, led by the genius of Tadeusz Kantor, supported by all his artist-colleagues and two of the great gallery directors in Europe, Ryszard Stanislawski, director of the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, and Wieslaw Borowski, director of the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw.” The way that Neagu was received in Scotland is indicated by sculptor Anish Kapoor: “Inevitably, he struggled against a British art world that preferred to see the artist as a maker of things rather than, as he saw it, art, and therefore the artists, as a generator of a philosophical world view.” Rainbird, Joseph Beuys and the Celtic World, 66. The same, of course, could be said about Beuys. 43 Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 204. 44 Ibid. 45 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1166–86. 46 McKenzie, “Richard Demarco interview,” Studio International, 7 October 2014. 47 McArthur, The Demarco Collection, 95. 48 Alliez and Osborne, “Introduction,” 9. 49 Reeves, as a young man (1969), was in Vietnam when his platoon was ambushed by the

Vietnamese in the Tet Offensive – he was brutally wounded. 50 Reeves, Telephone interview with the author, 2 February 2014, recorded conversation between San Francisco and Lochbroom. 51 Berger, “Once in the Highlands,” 43. 52 Reeves, Interview with the author, 2014. 53 Voice-over, Obsessive Becoming. 54 Ascherson, Stone Voices, 217. 55 Eingang premiered at the High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1990 and toured seven sites in the UK as part of Tate Gallery Liverpool’s New North exhibition, 1990–91. 56 Commissioned by New Television/wgbh/wnet and by Channel Four, London. 57 Daniel Reeves, A World Perfect at Last: New Digital Paintings, 2002, Streetlevel Gallery, Glasgow. Exhibition notes by Reeves. 58 “Will Maclean in Conversation with Sandy Moffat,” Will Maclean Collected Works 1970–2010, The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, London, 60. 59 Davidson, The Idea of North, 18. 60 The eastern circle is inscribed with the names of the 14 Reef Land Raiders. The artwork is also dedicated to the recent Land Reforms and to the creation of the Bhaltos Community Trust. 61 Beuys, “Introduction,” Joseph Beuys, 6. 62 Alliez and Osborne, “Introduction,” 8. 63 Ibid.

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378

8 Ibid. 9 Philip Corner, in Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 103. 10 Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, 204. 11 New Art (Nýlist) was the word used in Icelandic to designate all the new art practices after 1960. 12 Espagne, “La notion de transfert culturel,” Revue Sciences/Lettres 1 (2013); Joyeux-Prunel, “Les transferts culturels: Un discours de la méthode,” Hypothèses 1, 6 (2003), 149–62; Rossini and Toggweiler, “Cultural Transfer: An Introduction,” Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 4, 2 (December 2014), 5–9. 13 See discussion in Cooper-Richet, Passeurs culturels dans le monde des médias et de l’édition en Europe (XIX e et XX e siècles) (Lyon: Presses de l’enssib , 2005); and Gruzinski and Bénat-Tachot, eds., Passeurs culturels: Mécanismes de métissage. 14 Schaffer, The Brokered World, xiv. 15 Cassano, La Pensée méridienne, 65. See also Carmignani, “Introduction,” 7–18. 16 Gíslason, “Ísland er eyja í alþjóðlegri menningarsúpu,” 8–9. 17 Iceland declared independence from Denmark in 1944. 18 Björnsson, Íslenzk myndlist á 19. og 20. öld. Dög að sögulegu yfirliti, vols. 1 and 2. 19 A work by Kristján Guðmundsson was selected for Art Unlimited, Art Basel 38, 2007. Kling & Bang Gallery in Reykjavík was invited to contribute to Frieze Projects in 2008. 20 Volk, “Report from Reykjavik,” 40–5. 21 Ibid., 41. 22 Ibid. 23 Said, Orientalism, 41–2. 24 Runólfsson and Schoen, Icelandic Art Today, 7. Collaboration remains an important matrix inside the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík. One recent example is the acclaimed nine-screen video work The Visitors (2013) by performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, where the work is performed collectively with his musician friends and shot on location in a villa in upstate New York. 25 Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1965) by Richard Hamilton is a collage often named the first work of pop art. It is now in the Zundel Collection in the Kunsthalle in Tübingen, Germany. 26 Runólfsson, “Times of Continuous Transition,” 26. 27 Kvaran, ed., Íslensk listasaga frá síðari hluta 19. aldar til upphafs 21. aldar [History of Art in

Iceland from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century], 5 volumes. This work has not yet been translated. 28 Kristmundsson and Harðarson, “Viðtal við Magnús Pálsson,” Svart á Hvítu, 1, 2 (1978), 3–13. The point is made on page 9. It has been maintained by later generations of artists such as Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson, in Friðjónsson, “Erlendir gestir,” 75. See also Kjartansson, The End, 66. 29 Surtsey (1973–74), Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau/ Collection Andreas Züst. 30 This new island that emerged in 1963 was given the name Surtsey, but Surtur is a destructive god of fire in Norse mythology. 31 Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg. See Roth Zeit, 123–4. 32 Sammlung Birgit und Ulf Bischoff. Roth Zeit, 109–11. 33 A work composed of approximately 31,000 slides, showing the distinctive character of Icelandic twentieth-century architecture. Shot in collaboration with a few art students and Roth’s sons. Roth Zeit, 161. 34 Ingólfsson, “Bók um bók frá bók …,” 51–82. 35 Piene and Mack, Zero, 236, 269. 36 The exhibition took place in the Stedelijk Museum (10 March–17 April 1961), then in Moderna Museet (Rörelse i Konsten), Stockholm, and finally in Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, Denmark, as Bevægelse i Kunsten. 37 Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion. 38 Roth Zeit, 70. 39 A photograph taken in Iceland showing kids playing with the Gummibandbild. See Roth Zeit, 64. 40 Two examples of the Kugelspiel (1961) are kept in the collection of the Living Art Museum, Reykjavík. Both are available from: http://sarpur.is/Adfang.aspx?AdfangID=491539 and http://www.sarpur.is/Adfang.aspx? AdfangID=555832. 41 The sculptor Ragnar Kjartansson was the grandfather of the now well-known multimedia artist Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976). Kjartansson senior ran a ceramic workshop in Reykjavík where Dieter Roth experimented and produced ceramics. Kjartanson donated an important collection of Roth’s work to the Living Art Museum, Reykjavík. 42 Hultén, Tinguely, 102. Photographs by SunkKender showing the construction of the work are kept at the Museum Tinguely, Basel.

van der Meij,” 55. Reijnders, “Ephemeral and Consistent: The Artists’ Initiative in Amsterdam,” 153. 64 Araeen, “The Artist as a Post-Colonial Subject,” 233. 65 About fifty exhibitions were organized in the Gallery Suðurgata 7. All the artists involved had close links to the Fluxus movement, mail-art, conceptual art, performance art, or feminism. These were Eric Andersen (b. 1949), Gabor Attalai (1934–2011), Douwe Jan Bakker, Robin Crozier (1936–2001), Mary Beth Edelson (b. 1933), Robert Filliou, Michael Gibbs (1949–2009), Dick Higgins, Dorothy Iannone, Wolf Kahlen (1940), Maurizio Nannucci (1939), Peter Schmidt (1931– 1980), Endre Tót (1937), Jacek Tylicki (b. 1951), Jan Voss, and the Feminist Improvising Group. 66 Gangurinn 20 ára/The Corridor: 20 years. 67 A list of artists having exhibited in The Corridor is available on http://www.helgi-fridjonsson.com/ corridor/. 68 Runólfsson, “Times of Continuous Transition,” 19. 69 Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 189. 70 Sigurjónsdóttir, “Magnús Pálsson et le département New Art à Reykjavík, 1975–1984,” 144. 71 Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, 7. 72 See also Beuys, “To Be a Teacher Is My Greatest Work of Art.” Beuys, interviewed by Willoughby Sharp, Artforum 8, 3 (November 1969), 40–7. Cited in Lippard, Six Years, 121. 73 Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, 127–30. 74 Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 188. 75 Kelley, Allan Kaprow: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, xxvi. Yoann Barbereau has also traced the contours of the dialogue that took place between Allan Kaprow and John Dewey in Barbereau, “Expérience et performance,” 24–35. 76 Pálsson, “List og kennsluList,” 19–21. See also interview with Magnús Pálsson in Ingvarsdóttir, “Andstaðan var okkur innblástur,” 8–9. 77 Spoerri, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (Re-anecdoted Version). 78 Higgins, “Intermedia,” Something Else Newsletter (1965), 49–54. 79 Bret, “Les performances pédagogiques de Robert Filliou: Pour une histoire de la ‘création permanente’ comme science de l’éducation,” 120. 80 See description and a photograph of the model in Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, 191–7. The work as it was exhibited in 1978 is kept in the Living Art Museum, Reykjavík.

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43 The Museum of Modern Art holds Fragment from Homage to New York (1960), the original sculpture described by the artist as a “self-constructing and self-destroying work of art.” Accessed 30 March 2014. http://www.moma.org/collection/ object.php?object_id=81174. 44 “Skrípalæti trúða í Lindarbæ,” Morgunblaðið, 19 May 1965, 27. Accessed 20 June 2015. http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp? issId= 112925&pageId=1368833&lang=is&q= LIND ARB%C6%20%ED%20Lindarb%E6 %20%ED. 45 Arnórsdóttir, “‘Bossa-Nova’!!!” Tíminn, 20 May 1965, 13. 46 The súm group was a loose collective of Icelandic artists founded in 1965. Founders were: Jón Gunnar Árnason, Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Haukur Dór Sturluson (b. 1940), and Sigurjón Jóhannsson. 47 Gíslason, súm 1965–1972. 48 Sveinsson, Róska, 174. 49 súm iv . Catalogus van de tentoonstelling gehouden van 20 maart t/m 25 april 1971. 50 Friðfinnsson, súm á Listahátíð í Reykjavík. 51 Cherix, “Greetings from Amsterdam,” in Cherix, ed., In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976, 15. 52 Ibid., 9. 53 Ibid., 19. 54 Ibid. 55 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 178. 56 Araeen, “The Artist as a Post-colonial Subject and This Individual’s Journey to the ‘Centre,’” 231. 57 Van Winkel, Conceptual Art in The Netherlands and Belgium 1965–1975, 88. 58 Cherix, “Director’s Foreword,” in Cherix, ed., In & Out of Amsterdam, 7. 59 The selected artists were: Bas Jan Ader (1942– 1975), Stanley Brouwn (b. 1935), Hanne Darboven (1941–2009), Jan Dibbets (b. 1941), Ger Van Elk (1941–2014), Gilbert and George (Gilbert Prousch [b. 1943] and George Passmore [b. 1942]), Sol Lewitt (1928–2007), Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985), Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944), and Lawrence Weiner (b. 1942). 60 Sigurður Guðmundsson, interviewed by the author in Amsterdam, 23 April 2013. 61 Boers, “Foreigners in Amsterdam,” 102. Cited by Cherix, “Greetings from Amsterdam,” 18–19. 62 Kok, Interaction: Performance Art and International Contacts in the Netherlands in the 1970s, 26. Cherix, “Greetings from Amsterdam,” 18. 63 Van Adrichem, “Progressive Galleries in the 1960s and 1970s: Riekje Swart, Art & Project and Helen

379

http://www.sarpur.is/Adfang.aspx?Adfang ID=1407558. 81 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 30–1. 82 As discussed in Rampley, Art History and Visual Studies in Europe.

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C h a p t er T en

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1 The full title was Exposure: Canadian Contemporary Photographers/Photographes canadien contemporains. 2 These include Optica Art Gallery (now Optica Gallery) founded in 1972 and Toronto Photographers Workshop (now Gallery tpw ), founded in 1977; the Photo Show (1969) was an early manifestation of Vancouver photoconceptualism, while Camerart (1974) stressed phenomenological process and its mediation. 3 Arden, “Tabula Nova.” At this writing, the Corkin Gallery, as it is now called, is celebrating thirtyfive years. 4 The Photographers Gallery of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, incorporated in 1973, grew out of The Group (1970–72), whose co-operative structure and mission were deeply rooted in the socialist tendencies of the province. 5 See Hall, The Silent Language. Considerably weakened as an analytical framework – indeed, become a trademark – Hall’s phrase was adopted by the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada as the second title of the spd/nfb’s Photo 77: The Photograph as Canada’s Silent Language/La photographie – voix silencieuse du Canada (Ottawa, 1 July–14 August 1977). 6 The most prominent of these centennial celebrations was the International and Universal Exposition “Expo 67” held in Montreal, which naturally made much use of photographic media. See Kenneally and Sloan, eds., Expo 67. 7 I discuss these connections in “Calm, Cool, and Collected.” 8 Churchill grapples with these statistics, as does every scholar who broaches the subject – the net increase in American immigration attributable to the war ranges from 30,000 to 120,000. See “An Ambiguous Welcome,” 3–4. 9 Well-known examples include urban theorist and activist Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), who left New York with her husband and draft-aged son, as well as photographers David Heath (1931–2016) and George S. Zimbel (b. 1929).

10 This is a commonplace, also cited by Churchill in “An Ambiguous Welcome,” 4. 11 Tyrrell, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” 464. 12 Ibid., 465. 13 Falk, “The Dilemma of Photography in Canada,” 15–17; citations, 15. 14 The Edmonton Art Gallery under the direction of Terry Fenton (1972–1988) was very susceptible to American modernist abstraction, and the foundation of a photography collection was successfully rationalized in modernist terms. Hubert Hohn joined the staff of the Edmonton Art Gallery in 1975 as a photographic curator under the aegis of a National Museums Travelling Exhibition Grant. At the eag ’s Acquisition meeting of the following year (3 June 1976), Hohn’s accomplishments were lauded. He had “almost single-handedly improved the quality of photography in Alberta.” His Portrait of a Province exhibition project had “provided The Edmonton Art Gallery with an instant collection of photographs which should be properly catalogued and registered … Mr. Hohn has also encouraged a number of other photographers in the province to do outstanding work and we should be in a position to receive gifts from them as well as purchase portfolios of their work when the need arises … We should also consider purchasing photographs by key historical figures which have influenced, or provide an aesthetic and historical context for work we collect and exhibit.” City of Edmonton Archives, Edmonton Art Gallery files, box 16, book 6: “Board Meetings etc. February 1976–January 1977.” I thank Anne Whitelaw and Karla McManus for bringing this to my attention. On the website of the Art Gallery of Alberta, the moment is expressed in this way: “The Gallery also acquired a significant photography collection, including works by Hubert Hohn and Douglas Clarke and works by major American photographers such as Ansel Adams, E.J. Bellocq, Edward Curtis, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn.” Accessed 4 November 2014. http://www.youraga.ca/wp-content/uploads/ 2010/01/AGA_History.pdf. Hohn is justifiably credited with the encouragement of native-born Canadian photographers, and his return to the United States was much lamented. 15 Hanna, Orest Semchishen, 31. Also see Hohn, ed., Byzantine Churches of Alberta. 16 The catalogue is credited to Karen Wilkin. Photographer Jerome Martin, who was included in the

Chicago, 2001) became the basis of articles cited here. In his introduction to “An Ambiguous Welcome,” Churchill refers to Douglas Fetherling’s “moving memoir,” Travels by Night. 31 The genesis of this project, which was at root a history of the Ragnarokr Cordwainery, a leather shop at 33 Baldwin Street, is recounted by Mullins in “Writing the Story.” 32 Zerubavel, Time Maps, 1–10. 33 artscanada editor Barry Lord appears to have been very interested in documentary photographer Ian MacEachern (b. 1942). See the unsigned commentary in artscanada, “Ian MacEachern’s Photographs of Saint John” and Lord, “The People in Ian MacEachern’s Pictures.” 34 The exhibition catalogue was also issued as a trade publication. See Monk, ed., The Female Eye/ Coup d’oeil féminin. Jones has five images in the book, 24–8. Other American expatriates included in the collection are Barbara Astman (b. 1950), Lynne Cohen (1944–2014), June Clark Greenberg (b. 1941), Clara Gutsche (b. 1949), Pamela Harris (b. 1940), Suzy Lake (b. 1947), and Carol Marino (b. 1943). 35 mhso American Collection. Laura Jones interview conducted by Mary Mullins on 20 or 30 December 1978. mhso Oral History Inventory. Reference number AME -7032-JON . Call number AME-6960-JON. 36 Ibid. 37 These principles seem to echo ideas subtending the National Film Board program Challenge for Change, and might therefore be understood as Canadian influences on Phillips and Jones. An article by an nfb staffer, Dorothy Todd Hénaut published in 1971, provides a history of Challenge for Change to that point and clarifies some of its sources. Hénaut explains that the program was initiated at the request of the Privy Council, the secretariat of the Cabinet, as a response to media attention aroused by the “War on Poverty” social reform campaign launched in parallel by the United States and Canada in 1964–65. Considering the “top-down” approach of the Canadian version, Gareth Davies explains that Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson was inspired by “the remarkable energy and reformist zeal that then infused the Great Society agenda” of US president Lyndon B. Johnson, and also driven by a sense of competition with the restive province of Quebec. See Davies, “Understanding the War on Poverty,” citation, 430. Hénaut recalls that the

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eag exhibition, recalls the Fenton-Hohn curatorial collaboration. See Martin, “Jeromemartin.ca.” 17 Jones, “Free Trade,” 36–43; citation, 37. 18 Soon-to-be important figures included Sam Tata (1911–2005), unmoored after his native Shanghai embraced Communism in 1949; Gabor Szilasi (b. 1928), in the aftermath of the Hungarian revolt of 1956; as well as Lutz Dille (1922–2008), Pierre Gaudard (1927–2010), André Le Coz (1929–1998), and John de Visser (b. 1930) who independently emigrated from Europe for personal and professional reasons. For a succinct history, see Whitaker, Canadian Immigration Policy since Confederation. 19 Fisher-Taylor, “Volume I , Issue I ,” 1. 20 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 21 Payne, The Official Picture, 186. 22 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5. 23 Kadushin, “Networks and Circles in the Production of Culture,” 769–84; citations, 770. 24 Münch and Smelser, “Relating the Micro and the Macro,” 356–7. 25 Kadushin, “Networks and Circles,” 779. 26 AA Bronson, “Introduction,” in Bronson et al., eds., From Sea to Shining Sea, 8–9; citation, 8. 27 In his own essay in this volume, AA Bronson identifies artists’ periodicals and artists’ video as “connective tissues” – the two major means of artists seeing themselves to create a scene. See AA Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-run Spaces as Museums by Artists,” in Bronson et al., eds., From Sea to Shining Sea, 164–9; especially 168. Renee Baert’s reprinted essay, originally written in 1984, opens with a summary of difficulties faced by video art and artists: “after more than a decade of history, its virtual exclusion from established venues of presentation requires the constant cultivation of a context in which it can exist.” See Baert, “Video in Canada: In Search of Authority,” in Bronson et al., eds., From Sea to Shining Sea, 170–9; citation, 170. Advocates for photography and video expressed similar sentiments, but did not form coalitions, or share spaces, at this juncture. 28 This is not to suggest that artists working in other media were not involved in social and political movements; of course, they were. 29 Bourdieu, ed., Un art moyen. 30 Hagan, Northern Passage, 82. David S. Churchill’s “When Home Became Away: American Expatriates and New Social Movements in Toronto, 1965–1977” (PhD dissertation, University of

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nfb response to the Privy Council’s request was

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The Things I Cannot Change (1967) directed by Tanya Ballantyne, a feature documentary focused on a single family living in poverty in Montreal. This film was “an unmitigated disaster” for the subject family, shamed by its presentation on television, which they watched for the first time when their neighbours did. It was George Stoney, an American documentary filmmaker subsequently hired as a producer for Challenge for Change, who explained to his new nfb colleagues that the experience of the subject-family could have been transformed for the better had they been shown the film in a private pre-screening. See Hénaut, “The Media: Powerful Catalyst for Community Change.” Stoney’s influence on Challenge for Change cannot be ignored; nor can the importance of the participatory film-making exemplified by vtr St-Jacques (1969), directed by war resister Bonnie Klein and produced by Stoney; nor can the visionary work of nfb producers John Kemeny and Colin Low be diminished by understanding the political implications of Canadian social welfare programs and the sometimes paradoxical cross-border exchanges of ideas. 38 Author’s e-mail correspondence with Laura Jones, 15 June 2016. 39 Phillips, “The Baldwin Street Gallery of Photography,” 45–8; citations, 45 and 48. The article is signed “Words: John F. Phillips/Photos: Laura Jones.” Jones’s street photography makes the case for the partners’ primary interest in “the ‘contemporary, straight, documentary photograph.’” 40 Phillips, “The Baldwin Street Gallery of Photography,” 48. 41 mhso American Collection. Fletcher Starbuck interview conducted by Mary Mullins on 5 November 1978. mhso Oral History Inventory. Reference number AME -7010-STA . Call number AME-5009-STA. 42 Coleman, “The Coach House Press,” 26–35; citation, 30. 43 Rosenberg, “Crossing the Border,” 9–15; citations, 9, 11, 10, 10. 44 Starbuck and Bringsjord’s co-edited issue is image nation 8; Starbuck then edited numbers 9 and 10. image nation 11 was edited by the Women’s Photo Co-op, which Laura Jones helped to initiate. image nation was originally published as a weekend supplement to the Daily, a paper bringing news and opinion to the residents of Rochdale College, a cooperative housing project and free university

in downtown Toronto (1969–75). I discuss the alternative nature of image nation, including its counter-cultural nation-building and the contribution of its most influential editor, US-born David Hlynsky (b. 1947), in Langford, “About image nation, 1970–1982,” 103–27. 45 artscanada, “A Photography Show at Nightingale Galleries,” 66. 46 By 1971, Youngs’s gallery had been incorporated as a non-profit organization, Nightingale Arts Council, giving it access to public funding, and by April 1971 it became known as A Space. See entries in Bronson et al., eds., From Sea to Shining Sea, 47, 49, 53. 47 James, ed., “An Inquiry into the Aesthetics of Photography.” 48 The other seven are John Blahut (b. 1950), Robert Bourdeau (b. 1931), Charles Gagnon (1934–2003), Stephen Livick (b. 1945), Nina Raginsky (b. 1941), Michael Spencer (likely Michael J. Spencer, born in Cleveland, Ohio, 1948), and Gabor Szilasi. 49 Geoffrey James moved to the United States in 1964, felt the urge to move on in 1966, as the Vietnam War was accelerating and he was not exempt from the draft. He took a job at the Montreal Star, one year later moving to Time Canada as its art critic. James would eventually become the head of Visual Arts, Film, and Video at the Canada Council. See Katherine Stauble, “Chronology,” in Pauli, ed., Utopia/Dystopia, 166. 50 Im(pulse) 4, 1 (1975). The masthead includes the editorial statement: “Imp(u)lse will consider any mode of expression which may be represented in magazine format.” The brackets were very mobile and capitalization seemed almost impulsive: (IMPU )LSE on the spine: Im(pulse) on the cover; IMPU (LS )E on the inside front cover – the masthead – which in addition to the editorial statement acknowledges cultural agency support: “Impulse) is published quarterly by the editor with the assistance of the Canada Council & the Ontario Arts Council.” 51 The Impulse archive is presented on Eldon Garnet’s website. Accessed 5 November 2014. http://www.eldongarnet.com/impulse_71.75.asp. A q&a , which was the editorial for Impulse 9, 1 (spring 1981) contains Garnet’s account of the reception of the Starbuck monograph. Accessed 5 November 2014. http://www.eldongarnet.com/ impulse_81.85.asp. 52 Perrin, “Fletcher Starbuck,” 35–8. 53 Ibid., 38.

66 For Borcoman’s and Lyons’s exhibition statements, see McDonald, Nathan Lyons, 42–5. 67 Tweedie and Cousineau, “Photography.” Other notable vsw alumni include Sylvain (Henri) Cousineau (1949–2013), Randy Saharuni (b. 1947), and two key figures from the Acadian community in New Brunswick: Herménégilde Chiasson (b. 1946), Acadian artist, poet, filmmaker, indefatigable builder of cultural infrastructure, and lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick from 2003 to 2009; and Francis Coutellier (b. 1945), artist, curator, public educator, who taught at the University of Moncton. 68 Cousineau-Levine, Faking Death, 4. 69 Both Borcoman, in his 1971 catalogue essay for the ngc exhibition of Notations in Passing, and Cousineau (Cousineau-Levine), in her 1976 review of the Lyons monograph, translate literary terms to photographic analysis. Lyons’s sequences are arranged with “poetic artifice” (Borcoman, quoted in McDonald, ed., Nathan Lyons, 44); he uses a “visual vocabulary,” “signs,” a “vernacular to form a grammar,” and “a collectively shared and highly complex language” (Cousineau, in ibid., 51–3). Lyons was a poet before he was a photographer, and transferred its processes to the indexical medium. A reprint of Borcoman’s essay and an excerpt from Cousineau’s review are included in McDonald, ed., Nathan Lyons, 43–5, 50–3. 70 Marino, “A Frame of its Own,” 4–6. Pamela Harris, immigrant to Canada in 1967, is a dedicated social documentarian with a focus on communities. In the 1970s she photographed in two Newfoundland villages, with the Inuit community of Spence Bay, nwt , and with the United Farm Worker’s members in Watsonville, California. Her Arctic work, published as Another Way of Being, is now in the collection of Art Gallery of Ontario; her farmworker photographs are held by the California State Library. See Mullins, “The History of Labor and Education Unions in California and the U.S.” 71 Fisher-Taylor, “Volume I , Issue I ,” 2.

C ha p t er El e v e n 1 Agamben, Homo Sacer. 2 Guta, “Riders on the Storm,” 80. 3 The 1989 December Revolution, the only revolution in Eastern Europe that turned into a violent upheaval where blood was shed, marked the end of Communism in Romania.

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54 mhso American Collection. Fletcher Starbuck interview. 55 Ibid. 56 Jones, Happenstance and Misquotation. 57 Churchill, “An Ambiguous Welcome.” 58 Churchill, “American Expatriates and the Building of Alternative Social Space in Toronto, 1965– 1977,” 31–44; citations, 32, 33, 34. 59 Racial and/or economic factors could not be ignored, however, as the Canadian point system perpetuated discriminatory conditions of the applicant’s country. The additional difficulties encountered by deserters who wished to come to Canada were not based only on their legal status at home – these considerations were eventually seen to have no bearing on their eligibility and eliminated – but deserters as a class tended to have less education and training than draft resisters, many of whom had held out with college deferments, and other strategies. These inequities and the battle to redress them are thoroughly explained in Squires, Building Sanctuary, especially in chapter 3, “Deserters: Treatment, Tactics, Identity,” 69–111. 60 Kennedy, The Last Art College, xii. 61 Fischl, Bad Boy, 87. 62 In addition to groundbreaking exhibitions and books, Nathan Lyons’s enduring contributions include the Society for Photographic Education, which he co-founded in 1963, becoming its first chair, and the leading journal Afterimage, founded in 1972. See Jessica S. McDonald, “Introduction: Persistence of Vision,” in McDonald, ed., Nathan Lyons, 1–33. 63 Langford, “A Conversation with Tom Gibson,” in Langford, ed., Tom Gibson, 8–47, 90–100 (English and French versions interleafed); citation, 35. All these individuals had photographic practices that were conducted in parallel with teaching, writing, or curating, or in some cases, subordinated to other roles: Roger Mertin (1942–2001; graduated from suny Buffalo, though the vsw in 1972) and Jim Borcoman (b. 1926; graduated 1976); Gary Metz (b. 1941; graduated 1972), Charles Hagen (graduated 1975), Anne Wilkes Tucker (b. 1945; graduated 1971), Bill Edwards (graduated 1973), Lionel Suntop (graduated 1972), and Diana Edkins (graduated 1972). 64 Former students are listed as part of McDonald’s evaluation of Lyons’s legacy. See her Nathan Lyons, 25. 65 Langford, “A Conversation with Tom Gibson,” 39.

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4 Suren, “Modernity, Vision, and the Regimes of Visibility,” 344. 5 Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 23. 6 Seductiveness of the Interval was subsequently recreated at the Renaissance Society Chicago (2010). 7 Cinematic production is perhaps the best-known manifestation of this trend. The Romanian New Wave, as it has been called by cinema critics and the general public (a term contested by the directors thus categorized) represents a series of movies produced in recent years, either confronting the social realities of a Communist Romania, or the long-term consequences produced by the political regime. Important in this respect are: Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, winner of the Palme d’Or in 2007, Tales from the Golden Age (2009), and Beyond the Hills (2012); Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) and Aurora (2010); Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin’ (2007); and Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (2009). 8 Babias, “Self-Colonisation,” 73. 9 Nae, “Undoing the East,” 18. 10 This section featured work by Mircea Cantor, Anca Munteanu Rimnic, Ciprian Muresan, Ioana Nemes, Miklos Onucsan, Cristian Rusu, and Serge Spitzer. 11 Artists include Alexandra Croitoru and Stefan Tiron in collaboration with Vasile PopNegresteanu; Ion Grigorescu with Matei Lazarescu, Julian Mereuta, Aurelia Mihai, Ciprian Muresan and Adrian Ghenie, Miklos Onucsan. 12 This section featured work by Pavel Braila, Stefan Constantinescu, Daniel Knorr, Alexandru Niculescu, and Dan Perjovschi. 13 “Figurative Painting in Romania, 1970–2010” was curated by Mihai Pop and included an overview of Romanian painting in the past forty years: Adrian Ghenie, Victor Man, Gili Mocanu, Serban Savu, Ioana Batranu, Sorin Campan, Constantin Flondor, Gheorghe Ilea, and Corneliu Brudascu. 14 Important to this discussion are recent art exhibitions that reconsider post-socialist Central and Eastern European art, such as Romanian Cultural Resolution, exhibited at Noua Galeria, Romanian Institute for Culture and Humanistic Research, Venice, on the occasion of the 2011 Venice Biennale; Social Cooking Romania, presented at Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin in 2007; Body and the East, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 1998; Gender Check: Feminity and

Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, presented at mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig), Vienna, and at Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2010; Over the Counter, The Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art (2010); and Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe (2010), shown at Centre Pompidou, Paris. 15 Verwoert, “On Potential Histories, Discontinuity, and Politics of Desire,” 23. 16 Caruth, Trauma, 4. 17 Ghiu, “For a Resubjectification of the East,” 66. 18 The current instability in Europe in the context of an extended migrant crisis is reshaping geopolitical coordinates, as in the case of brexit , with long-term consequences that, given the reaction to migrants and the breeding of a renewed nationalistic discourse, must affect cultural production and its reception. 19 Ravini, “Dan Perjovschi,” 136. 20 Marcoci and Perjovschi, “What Happened to Us?” 166. 21 Nae, “Undoing the East Postcommunist Art and Performative Critique of Identity,” 21. 22 Marcoci and Perjovschi, “What Happened to Us?” 166–7. 23 Gender Check: Feminity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe exhibition was presented at mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig), Vienna, 13 November 2009–14 February 2010, and at Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Varşovia, 19 March–13 June 2010. 24 Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe exhibition was shown at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 14 April– 19 July 2010. 25 Ghiu, “For a Resubjectification of the East,” 62. 26 Ibid. 27 Nancy, “L’Intrus,” 1. 28 Ghiu, “For a Resubjectification of the East.” 29 Arendt, The Human Condition (1998). 30 Ibid., 199. 31 Ibid. 32 Bauman, Wasted Lives, 24–5. 33 Bauman, Liquid Fear, 21. 34 Bauman, Community, 131. 35 The attempts at immigration in the Mediterranean are highly mediated, triggered by recurrent humanitarian catastrophe and hundreds of lost lives. A poignant example is the recent (September 2015) case of the widely circulated photograph of a drowned Syrian boy, which prompted

sharp global awareness of a crisis that had already been going on for years. 36 Agier, On the Margins of the World, 10. 37 Ibid., 11. 38 Ibid., 73. 39 Augé, La communauté illusoire, 21. Original in French: “Englober sous un même terme des individus qui ont quelques chose ‘en commun,’ c’est créer une entité illusoire, prendre ses désirs ou ses craintes pour des réalités.” Author’s translation. 40 Bejenaru, http://www.networkedcultures.org/ index.php?tdid=45. Accessed 5 March 2012. 41 Ibid. 42 Bauman, Liquid Fear. 43 Bal, “Lost in Space, Lost in the Library,” 23. 44 Durrant and Lord, eds., “Essays in Migratory Aesthetics,” 10–11.

C h a p t er T we lve 1 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays,

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11–12. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 12–13. 4 Ibid., 3. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” 5 Ibid., 123; “Living, naturally, is never easy,” 5; “What counts is not the best living but the most living,” 194. 6 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are by the artists and from the Maraya website, http://marayaprojects.com/ and http://marayaprojects.com/articles/blog. 7 Boddy, “New Urbanism,” 18–19. 8 Landry, The Art of City Making. 9 Rankings for the Canadian Creativity Index are based on Florida’s 3T s of economic development: technology, talent, and tolerance. Florida, Rise of the Creative Class. 10 See, for example, Landry, The Creative City, and Hospers and van Dalm, “How to Create a Creative City?” 11 Ong, “Introduction: The Art of Being Global,” 14, 17, and 21. 12 Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” See also Wilson, “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic.” 13 Ong, “Introduction: The Art of Being Global”; Roy, “Postcolonial Urbanism,” 307–8. 14 Roy, “Postcolonial Urbanism,” 308. I discuss the term “Hongcouver” as being among the negative

reactions to Vancouver during the era of the High Tower Boom in my essay “Thoughts on the Meaning of Return: hkg>