Where is Art?: Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art 9780367478681, 9781032291666, 9781003037071

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Where is Art?

Featuring chapters by a diverse range of leading international artists and theorists, this book suggests that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the problem of where and when it is situated. While much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth-century was aligned with the question “what is art?,” a key question for many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first-century has become “where is art?” Contributors explore the challenge of meaningfully identifying and evaluating works located across multiple versions and locations in space and time. In doing so, they also seek to find appropriate language and criteria for evaluating forms of art that often straddle other realms of knowledge and activity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, art criticism, and philosophy of art. Simone Douglas is a Professor in the School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons School of Design, The New School, NY, NY where she directed the MFA Fine Arts program from 2009 to 2019. Adam Geczy teaches at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. Sean Lowry is Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies and Associate Director ­(Research) at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research.

The Arabesque from Kant to Comics Cordula Grewe Art after Instagram Art Spaces, Audiences, Aesthetics Lachlan MacDowall and Kylie Budge The Artist-Philosopher and Poetic Hermeneutics On Trauma George Smith Art, the Sublime, and Movement Spaced Out Amanda du Preez Visual Culture and the Forensic Culture, Memory, Ethics David Houston Jones Posthuman and Nonhuman Entanglements in Contemporary Art and the Body Justyna Stępień Race, Gender, and Identity in American Equine Art 1832 to the Present Jessica Dallow Where is Art? Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art Edited by Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, and Sean Lowry

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

Where is Art? Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art

Edited by Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, and Sean Lowry

Cover image: Simone Douglas, Untitled, original cover concept, 2021 © Simone Douglas, photograph. First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Taylor & Francis The right of Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, and Sean Lowry to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-47868-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-29166-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03707-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments 1 Introduction

vii xi xiii 1

S I M O N E D O U G L A S , A DA M G E C Z Y, A N D S E A N L OW RY

2 Where Is Art?

4

S E A N L OW RY A N D A DA M G E C Z Y

3 Performance, Art, and the Relational Self

35

A M ELI A JON E S

4 Chronotopographical Nodes and Moments of Encounter

49

S R E S H TA R I T P R E M N AT H

5 Evidence

55

S H A R M I S T H A R AY

6 Ice Boat: Field Notes (in Advance of a Melt)

73

SI MON E DOUGL AS

7 Bland Matter: New Materialism, and Barking Up the Wrong Tree

89

A DA M G E C Z Y

8 Bandness S E A N L OW RY A N D I L M A R TA I M R E

101

vi Contents 9 Glittereiki

120

G E N E V I E V E H YAC I N T H E

10 Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020): Or: again, rubbed smooth, a moment in time__caesura

132

J U LI CA RSON

11 IrDaEdNiTcI aTlY

149

J E F F R E Y S T R AY E R

12 Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up?

166

RO S A N N A R AY M O N D

13 Handiwork of Migrancy, Restitutions in the Contemporary

185

PAT R I C K F L O R E S

14 Erasure or Erased: An Artworld (AND WORLD) Adrift

197

BR AD BUCKLEY

15 All the World’s Futures

205

O R I A N N A C AC C H I O N E A N D J E S S I C A H O N G

16 Appendix: Project Anywhere

216

S E A N L OW RY A N D S I M O N E D O U G L A S

Index

219

Figures

0.1 Simone Douglas, from Field Notes, 2021 © Simone Douglas, C-type print, 24 × 15.7″ (61 × 40 cm) 3 0.2 Simone Douglas, from Field Notes, 2021 © Simone Douglas, C-type print, 24 × 15.7″ (61 × 40 cm) 215 4.1 Lapche in Purang County, Tibetan Autonomous Region, China. Photo by Sreshta Rit Premnath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath 49 4.2 Lapche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta Rit Premnath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath 51 4.3 Lapche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta Rit Premnath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath 53 5.1 (Left: Evidence 001; Right: Evidence 002) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, 5.75 × 3.41″ (14.6 × 8.66 cm), Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya 64 5.2 (Left: Evidence 003; Right: Evidence 004) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, 5.75 × 3.41″ (14.6 × 8.66 cm), Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya 66 5.3 (Left: Evidence 005; Right: Evidence 006) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, 2.75 × 1.63″ (6.98 × 4.14 cm), Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya 67 5.4 (Left: Evidence 007; Right: Evidence 008) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, 2.75 × 1.63″ (6.98 × 4.14 cm), Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya 68 5.5 (Left: Evidence 009, 1.8 × 3.03″ [4.6 × 7.7 cm]; Right: Evidence 010, 3.8 × 2.2″ [9.65 × 5.6 cm]) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya 69 6.1 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This is an image of a prototype site test made in 2014 from frozen water. Hand-caste prototypes of varying sizes have been made both on, and off site, commencing in 2013. Their starting (pre-melt) size varies © Simone Douglas 73

viii Figures 6.2 Simone Douglas, Ice Boat (artist sketch), 2015, inkjet print, 30 × 20.2″ (76 × 51 cm). Poster Design by Lucille Tenazas over photograph and text by Simone Douglas, this annotated sketch was produced as a visual summary of the proposed project © Simone Douglas 6.3 and  6.4 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). The purpose of prototypes such as these is to test rate of melt at different times of the year, and over the years; the sculptural form (that will only be revealed at the final installation); casting techniques; rate of freeze; and crucially, the light refracted through the Ice Boat itself © Simone Douglas 6.5 Simone Douglas, Untitled, 2016, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Aerial image from flight between Broken Hill and Sydney © Simone Douglas 6.6 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This is an image of a prototype site test made in 2014. The melting ice re-freezes overnight forming glacier like deep greens and blues © Simone Douglas 6.7 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This image is a detail from a prototype site test in which the Ice Boat melted towards the path of the sun. The remnant ice “skin” of the prototype liquefied into the earth releasing bubbles of air as it did so © Simone Douglas 6.8 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Ice Boat is positioned to be viewed close-up and at a distance, and in the direct path of the rising and setting sun © Simone Douglas 6.9 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm) © Simone Douglas 6.10 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: Scale and distance tests with assistance from Broken Hill community members, 2018. Right: Drafts of the Ice Boat build, 2017, drawing by Belinda Koopman © Simone Douglas 6.11 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: Detail from scale drawings of the Ice Boat build, 2017, scale 1:500, drawing by Belinda Koopman. Right: Initial scale tests, 2015, photo by John Douglas © Simone Douglas 6.12 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, preparatory research, 2017, digital image (detail), scale 1:500. Drawing by Belinda Koopman over photograph by Simone Douglas © Simone Douglas 6.13 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: C-type print, editioned 2020, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Right: Initial concept sketch, 2014, pencil on archival paper, 8.3 × 11.8″ (21 × 30 cm) © Simone Douglas

74

75 76

76

77

78 79

80

81

82

84

Figures  ix 6.14 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This image is part of a series of affiliated works (some of which have been included in this chapter). Here, the setting sun sits low on the horizon, illuminating the melting boat against the darkening landscape © Simone Douglas 85 8.1 The Ghosts of Nothing Advertisement for In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour of Abandoned Music Venues 2014–15 as published in the Italian art magazine Mousse 45, (October– November 2014): 261 107 8.2 The Ghosts of Nothing and Chris Lowry, Storyboard Still #1, from Sounds of Unridden Waves, 2020, camera by Chris Lowry, image remix by The Ghosts of Nothing, digital image, dimensions variable 114 8.3 The Ghosts of Nothing and Simone Douglas, Storyboard Still #2, from Sounds of Unridden Waves (work in progress), 2020, camera by Simone Douglas, image remix by The Ghosts of Nothing, digital image, dimensions variable 115 9.1 Damali Abrams, “Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People,” video still, YouTube video, May 29, 2020, https://www. youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=hCLtGtwnVJY © Damali Abrams 121 9.2 Damali Abrams, (Glitter Priestess, @damaliabrams), Cousin Jean, Instagram collage, July 30, 2020 (post removed), https://www. instagram.com/p/CDSQU2xlmVq/ © Damali Abrams 129 10.1 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle), directed by Rania Rafei and Raed Rafei (Beirut: Orjouane Productions, 2012), color and black & white, digital beta, DCP, in Arabic with English or French subtitles, 95 mins, Courtesy of the artist 143 10.2 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle), directed by Rania Rafei and Raed Rafei (Beirut: Orjouane Productions, 2012), color and black & white, digital beta, DCP, in Arabic with English or French subtitles, 95 mins 144 11.1 Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 1.0.0 (detail), 2009, language © Jeffrey Strayer 162 11.2 Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 1.0.0, 2009, mixed media, 9½ × 12⅛ × 4″ © Jeffrey Strayer 162 11.3 Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 12.0.0 (detail), 2002, mixed media, 20¼″ × 22½″ © Jeffrey Strayer 163 12.1 Pacific Sisters, Kaitiaki with a K, 2018, FAB.rication, installation view, Te Papa Tongawera. Photo by Kerry Brown 167 12.2 Pacific Sisters, Tohu TūPuna, 2018, Aolele opening Acti.VĀ.tion, Te Papa Tongawera. Photo by Kerry Brown © Pacific Sisters 172 12.3 Rosanna Raymond, Backhand Maiden, 2017, Acti.VĀ.tion, American Natural History Museum © Pacific Sisters. Photo by Kerry Brown 175 12.4 Rosanna Raymond, Backhand Maiden, 2017, Acti.VĀ.tion, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Pacific Sisters. Photo by Richard Wade 181

x Figures 15.1 Ho Tzu Nyen, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA), 2017–ongoing, video-still from algorithmically composed video, infinite loop, © courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery 207 15.2 Serge Alain Nitegeka, Identity is Fragile III, 2021 ©, charcoal and paint on wood, 120 × 140 × 4.5 cm, courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg © Serge Alain Nitegeka. Photo by Nina Lieska 212

Contributors

Brad Buckley is an artist, writer, activist, and Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He was previously professor of Contemporary Art and Culture at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. Buckley’s work utilizes installation, theater, and performance, to investigate cultural control, democracy, freedom, and social responsibility. Orianna Cacchione is Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum, University of Chicago, and is committed to expanding the canon of art to reflect the transnational, cross-geographic flows of art and history. Cacchione holds a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego. Juli Carson is a writer, art historian, curator, and Professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art, University of California, Irvine. Carson’s research focuses on the effect that the legacies of 1960s minimalism and 1970s conceptualism have had on contemporary art, informed by psychoanalysis and post-colonial discourse. Simone Douglas is a New York City-based artist, curator, and writer. She is Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design. Her multidisciplinary art practice— exhibited and published internationally—includes durational site-specific works. Cultural and environmental responsibility, both on earth and in the skies, sits at the core of her work. Patrick Flores is a Filipino curator at Vargas Museum, Manila, and Professor in the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines. He was the Artistic Director of the 2019 Singapore Biennale, curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and will curate the Taiwan Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. His video installations and performance-based works have been exhibited throughout Australasia, Asia, and Europe. He has published over 20 books and is editor of two journals with Penn State University Press. Jessica Hong  is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Toledo Museum of Art. Her practice highlights overlooked narratives to address the colonial frame of institutional sites to implement long-lasting change. She was previously Associate

xii Contributors Curator of Global Contemporary Art at Hood Museum of Art and assistant curator at ICA/Boston. Genevieve Hyacinthe is an artist and Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts. Her work as a practitioner of West African and Haitian dance and doundoun drumming intersects with her scholarly research concerning phenomenological theories, self-critical explorations of the body, feminisms, and global black experience in art and culture. Amelia Jones is an internationally recognized curator, theorist, and historian of art and performance. She recently produced the exhibition and catalogue (co-edited with Andy Campbell), Queer Communion: Ron Athey, and published the book In between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. She teaches at the University of Southern California. Sean Lowry is a Melbourne-based artist, writer, curator, and musician. He is Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies and Associate Director (Research) at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne; Executive Director of Project Anywhere; and one half of the Ghosts of Nothing. His work has been exhibited, performed, and published internationally. Sreshta Rit Premnath is a multidisciplinary artist and the founder and co-editor of the publication Shifter. Based in Brooklyn, Premnath teaches at Parsons School of Design, New York. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Sharmistha Ray is an artist, art critic, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work explores lived experience through the lens of queerness, language, and memory. Their art criticism has appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic, and Artcritical, amongst other publications. They teach at Parsons School of Design and Carnegie Mellon University. Rosanna Raymond is a member of the Pacific and Māori collective, Pacific Sisters. Her SaVAge K’lub is a collective that hosts artworks and performances. Raymond is a curator and researcher. Her works are held by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Jeffrey Strayer is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Philosophy at Purdue University, Fort Wayne. His research addresses philosophy of art, with attention given accordingly where relevant to metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Strayer is also an artist whose work in art and philosophy is both necessarily interactive and mutually informing. Ilmar Taimre is a Brisbane-based artist, musician, and composer who holds a PhD in Music from the University of Newcastle. Together with exhibiting as a contemporary visual artist, he composes popular, alternative, and classically influenced musical works. He is also one half of the artistic collaboration the Ghosts of Nothing.

Acknowledgments

The editors respectfully acknowledge the Lenni-Lenape People, the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri People of the Eastern Kulin nation, and the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, on whose unceded lands and waters this book was conceived and developed. The original idea for this book was developed through our relationships with the global community of artists connected to Project Anywhere—many of whom have come together through inspiring conferences and symposia in NYC and Melbourne. Heartfelt thanks to all our extraordinary authors, whose demonstrated generosity of thought and time throughout a global pandemic have made this book possible. Our deep gratitude to Honi Ryan, Sophie Chalk, and Rengu Zhang for their extensive support in copy and image editing. You have all brought much joy and expertise to the process of building this book. Our deep thanks and gratitude to Isabella Vitti, Katie Armstrong, Assunta Petrone, and the team at Routledge. Thank you all so much for your patient and steadfast belief in this book. We are especially grateful for the support, care, and advice of our families, friends, and colleagues. Simone Douglas would like to thank Parsons School of Design, the New School; Wendy, John, Katrina, and Fiona, for always being up for the journey; and Don, Marianne, Joel and Robyn for pointing the way. Adam Geczy would like to thank Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. Sean Lowry would like to thank Magda Ching, Finn Ching-Lowry, Eli ChingLowry, and the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Art & Music, University of Melbourne. Finally, a big shout-out to all our students past and present for asking such wonderful questions! The future is yours.

1 Introduction Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, and Sean Lowry

Some experiences of art are not necessarily connected to a single image, object, time, or location. Indeed, certain works of art are presented as a complex aggregate of very different forms, locations, versions, and modes of delivery. In such cases, it might be limiting to expect a single object or point of entry to be adequately commensurate with the work as a whole. This diverse selection of contributions from artists, curators, and theorists explores new and emerging conceptions of art understood and experienced in relation to multiple and intersecting locations and temporalities, interminable reproducibility, radical indeterminacy, and the collapse of physical space. It considers new ways of thinking about aesthetics, historical malleability, and the distributive relationships that collectively sustain but do not delimit or define contemporary art. Emphasizing dynamic relationships between material forms and social contexts set against sometimes radically materially and spatially expanded conceptions of what might constitute a work of art, this book presents a range of ways in which art can simultaneously inhabit very different forms of transmission, spaces of relation, and modes of mediation. At its core, this book seeks to broadly repurpose the still contested historical question “what is art?” via a marked shift in co-ordinates. Comprising a diverse selection of approaches and modalities, its fundamental thesis will suggest that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the significance of where and when it is situated. In short, it will suggest that where much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth century was aligned with the provocation “what is art?,” the key question for many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first century is instead “where is art?” Given that many of the works and ideas discussed in this book inhabit very different forms, places, and modes of transmission while drawing upon diverse disciplinary backgrounds, knowledge systems, and ontologies, we see our editorial approach as extending upon the central theoretical tenets of the book by deliberately presenting a dynamic selection of different ways of writing about locational specificity and art. Accordingly, we seek to emphasize the contested and protean nature of artistic knowledges, communities, stories, and representations through a range of original perspectives on expanded and intermedial material thinking, exclusion, censorship, race, gender, place, and the political nature of exhibition environments. Much of the art explored in this book is characterized by a radical indeterminacy that is both difficult to capture and potentially significant as a site of cultural production. While it might be political, the kind of activism that art offers is not conventional—­nor should it be, lest it become what Theodor Adorno declared both bad art and bad politics.1 Importantly, art is a speculative and discursive realm with a distinctive capacity DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-1

2  Simone Douglas et al., to engage social, political, aesthetic, and philosophical problems while resisting conclusiveness. It can also offer an antidote to divisive certainty by presenting something of how others see and experience the world. With this in mind, we are deeply thankful to all the extraordinary contributors that collectively made this book possible by presenting a range of very different responses to this “where is art?” conundrum. The original genesis for this book developed in parallel with the global blind-peer-­ reviewed exhibition program Project Anywhere (2012–), an expanded exhibition model specifically designed to promote art outside traditional exhibition circuits (discussed in detail in the appendix). This unique global exhibition program has availed a range of valuable insights into how contemporary artists are thinking about the challenges of presenting, evaluating, and disseminating art at the outermost limits of location specificity. Although many of the ideas that underpin the radical spatial and material expansion of contemporary art have deep historical roots, it is also clear that unprecedented social and political circumstances invariably create new opportunities and challenges. Much has unfolded globally while this book was developed. During 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 forced many of us to dramatically adjust our daily lives, priorities, and relationships with the world. As the pandemic limited physical access to museums, galleries, festivals, fairs, and auctions across the world, the artworld was only further incentivized to reimagine established approaches to creating, exhibiting, curating, writing, and thinking about art. Without dwelling on this point, it is probably fair to say that this experience of restricted access to physical exhibition environments, together with the forced mediation and dispersal of social relations, only accelerated an already well-established rethinking of the locational specificities of contemporary art. Meanwhile, this period has also been one in which radically divergent world views and progressively unstable political and social realities are forcing the artworld to face a series of long overdue questions related to representation, accountability, and sustainability. Consequently, we believe that the central thesis of this book is now only timelier. The “work of art’s world” is, in the words of Pamela M. Lee, “utterly continuous with the world it at once inhabits and creates: a world Möbius-like in its indivisibility and circularity, a seemingly endless horizon.”2 Notwithstanding the complexity of this situation, there are nevertheless some givens. As Jeffrey Strayer puts it, at a minimum, something must be intentionally delineated from everything else, reconfigured or recontextualized, and then presented somewhere conspicuously apparent to a subject’s consciousness.3 Importantly, as this book will variously reveal, this process of transmission could (at least hypothetically) involve anything and occur anywhere. And, in some cases, a more comprehensive or nuanced understanding of this process of transmission might require a dynamic constellation of direct and mediated sensory experiences presented together with a complex matrix of information and materials extending across time and space. Consequently, it is apparent that all we might require to interpret a work of art is not necessarily available simply by looking. With this in mind, we hope that this edited volume offers a complementary companion to deepening our understanding of materially expanded and spatially distributed conceptions of contemporary art.

Notes 1 See, for example, Theodor Adorno, “Commitment: The Politics of Autonomous Art,” New Left Review (1962) in Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi, ed. Lee Morrissey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2 Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 8. 3 This minimal requirement is analyzed at length by Jeffrey Strayer (also a contributor to this volume) in Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

Introduction  3

Figure 0.1  Simone Douglas, from Field Notes, 2021 © Simone Douglas, C-type print, 24 × 15.7″ (61 × 40 cm).

2 Where Is Art? Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy

From a premodern European vantage point, questions concerning the ontology or location of art were empty and unnecessary. Art was largely configured for prescriptive orders of power. These orders—the religion and the state reciprocally—provided meaning, value, and access to art. They also helped to shape and define the content of works of art. Although there were always spaces of equivocation and contestation, the extent to which even these were determined is clearer in retrospect. In time, Western art would begin to transform in tandem with a series of radical recalibrations of the nature of relationships between the individual and society. From an Enlightenment perspective, such contours are constraints. From a contemporary perspective, the situation is however considerably more complex. Today, an experience of a work of art is not necessarily tied to a single object, location, time, or event. Indeed, some works of art can be accessed in multiple ways—in person, online, across multiple versions, or as a complex aggregate of very different materializations and modes of delivery. Even the word accessed is contentious, a noun-to-verb term that in the digital age has usurped the more amenable and still anthropomorphic experienced. Although the material and spatial expansion of art is far from a novel idea, the nature and implications of this expansion for twenty-first-­ century artists are exigent if only for the velocity and extent to which they have been exerted. Setting aside the clichéd use of the word unprecedented across our present moment as a descriptor for everything from pandemics to populism to left- and rightwing radicalism, it is well to remember that the significance of exceptional circumstances is found in ways in which they reveal and extend upon pre-existing structures and conditions. What then are the new, renewed, and emerging conceptions of artistic production, reception, and circulation? How are they to be understood and experienced in relation to multiple and intersecting temporalities, distributed materializations, digital reproducibility, and the dissolution of physical space? At a time in which radically divergent world views are feeding progressively unstable political and social realities, contemporary art is also undergoing a number of long overdue re-evaluations. For its detractors, the contemporary artworld is underscored by an unsustainable addiction to speculative capital, ever-tightening hype cycles (aka fashion), precarious labor, and an insatiable appetite for freshly minted emerging talent with requisite institutional or culturally sanctioned credentials. For others, contemporary art remains an exciting and dynamic realm within which to creatively speculate upon the conditions of our present moment, to imagine new futures, or to rethink the past. Against a highly contested political backdrop, the gravity of the precarity and unsustainability of the contemporary artworld has been laid bare DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-2

Where Is Art?  5 for many artists by the effects of a global pandemic, a sense of climate emergency, and a series of backlashes and reckonings centered on race, gender, and power. Although such frenetic and confusing conditions render many powerless and dazed, there are still artists who feel it is possible to imagine the world anew. It is in this spirit that we seek to repurpose the twentieth-century problem “what is art?” to consider where and when art is understood, situated in the twenty-first century.

So, how did we get here? From the late twentieth century onward—if we momentarily set aside a series of historical precedents beyond the scope of this book—many artists began to trade medium-­specific categorizations and the production of discrete distributable objects for a reactionary emphasis upon the significance of site, event, performance, porosity, and relationality. A work of art was now less likely to be regarded as materially fixed in space and time or in an idealized sequestration from the outside world. Since at least the early twenty-first century, works of art have become increasingly accepted as open to continual transformation and recoding across multiple versions, locations, times, and even hypothetically infinite materializations. The condition of the proliferation of the work of art is no longer just an act of destabilization to escape its commodity status; it is a natural consequence of the iterative nature of digital technologies. Unsurprisingly, these marked shifts have also introduced a series of challenges for the interpretation, critique, and evaluation of art. These challenges require new ways—be they expanded, qualitative, paradigmatically shifted, or a combination of these—to rethink aesthetics, historical malleability, and the distributive relationships that collectively sustain but do not delimit or define contemporary art. Beginning with Dada and developing in earnest since the Protest Era of the 1960s and ’70s, artists and curators have been skeptical of the presumed objectivity and neutrality of the gallery space—metonymically (and with mild sarcasm) referred to as the “white cube.” This assumption is traceable to the late nineteenth-century, to the rise of the one-person exhibition with artists such as Claude Monet, and to innovations in exhibition installation advanced by James McNeill Whistler, who is credited with the spaced, single-line hang (in his day sniffed at as aestheticist preciosity). The gallery environment began to be read as a site of unity and contemplation, as opposed to the stacked visual rowdiness of the salon and the Royal Academy. It is no surprise that this pristine gallery schema coalesced with the open commodity market, the sanctity of the modernist art object, and the entrenchment of the artist as celebrity that evolved out of early nineteenth-century Romanticism. Other contributing factors included the catalogue raisonné and collecting culture of art books, together with the rise of magazines, journals, broadsheets, and feuilletons. Thus, white walls also implicitly echoed the white space surrounding the reproduction of works on a printed page. Such developments were seconded by parallel developments in twentieth-­century modernist architecture and design that would transform museums and galleries. Modernist architecture, considered in its most Miesian or Corbusian modality, was deliberate and pan-temporal. Correspondingly, the modernist art object transcended time and language to portend an altogether elevated experience analogous to religion but for a secular society. In 1976, Brian O’Doherty wrote a series of essays for Artforum, later turned into a book called Inside the White Cube (1986), in which he argued that this obsession

6  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy with the white cube tended to sanctify the art object to a point of imperviousness and impermeability.1 For critics such as O’Doherty, the white cube had become a veiled ideology that foreclosed discourse (but very much benefited the commodity market). Doherty was writing at a time when any number of artists were subjecting the inviolability of these standards to dramatic scrutiny. In 1973, to cite just one of many historical examples, Michael Asher—now named within a rather loose grouping of conceptualist tendencies known as “institutional critique” (more later)—completely sanded the walls and ceiling of the Franco Toselli gallery in Milan to expose the assumed neutrality of the white paint. A generation earlier, a group of self-declared Marxist agitators that called themselves the Situationist International, who were in turn influenced by early twentieth-­ century avant-garde art movements such Dada and surrealism, were already intent on dismantling the expression and mediation of social relations through objects. The salient legacy of this period was to stress that the museum is a provisional, historical, cultural, and ideologically inscribed idea and institution. However, its perdurance to this day is more than one of expediency. It speaks to the tenacity of institutional models complicit within capitalism, and the skill with which radical critiques of the institution have become absorbed by and dissolved into it. It is against the backdrop of capitalism’s co-option of forces inimical to it—that only enforce the need to stress and explore, both theoretically as critics and practically as artists—that the myriad conditions that have rendered the museum and gallery circuit would appear increasingly anachronistic. Notwithstanding the enduring presence of the white cube, new exhibition formats and programming schedules that seek to actively problematize the limits of traditional exhibition spaces and circuits have become increasingly common in recent decades. Even major museums and established galleries now routinely schedule off-site and supposedly institutionally critical projects as part of their regular programming. Meanwhile, every “serious” contemporary art festival or biennale seems to want to include supplementary events or activities at unexpected times and locations. These tendencies—together with a renewed political engagement with issues such as climate, social justice, globalization, racialized injustice, economic precarity, digital surveillance, and algorithmically accelerated challenges to democracy—all reaching fever pitch, see the artworld staring down questions of sustainability, relevance, divisions of power and labor, and modes of circulation. During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–21, with national and international travel curtailed, global economies facing once-in-a-century challenges, and screen-based interaction substantially increased for much of the global population, artists, and audiences alike were only further incentivized to reimagine the future, and in particular the nature of relationships between images and objects within the progressively porous interchangeability of digital and non-digital aspects of art and life. This particular alignment of circumstances has only added further complexity to the pre-existing problem of where a work of art is understood to be situated. With much art already consumed as a mediated and spatially diffused distribution of elements, the mutual insufficiency of art’s material and conceptual dimensions was further exacerbated by this rapid increase in screen-based cultural consumption and communication. 2 With that which was once considered documentation or reproduction now often regarded as simply an alternative point of entry into a work, the most dynamic and “visited” places for art today are often found in the communal spaces of

Where Is Art?  7 screen-based cultures. At the same time (as we will argue later), art is no longer necessarily found in the prescribed beds that the artworld prepares for it. Instead, art might actually be found in other realms and sites of activity altogether, such as the many arms of popular culture—many of which either are indifferent to art or have long been blindly considered unequal to art’s august task and status (more on that shortly).

From what is art? … to where is art? Locating art only begins as a problem with the rise of the modern individual and the free market in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here, two critically connected factors develop apace with these changes: Popular culture and reproducibility. Even before the mainstream deployment of photography in the 1850s (following its joint birth by the Niepce brothers and Louis Daguerre in France, and Fox Talbot in the US in the 1830s), engravings were not only a way of making “fine” artworks accessible and cheap, they were also central to the development of mass culture, including sedition and pornography. Many artists contributed to one or both, and, consequentially, we now think nothing of viewing Fragonard’s erotic engravings in a museum. Meanwhile, Honoré Daumier’s caricatures, including his clay maquettes, enjoy their own discrete gallery space in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Then there is the slow and grinding struggle of photography to be seen as a legitimate artistic medium, which only became uncontested in the 1970s. Ironically, photography was only accepted as a serious artistic medium after it had played a significant role in the disintegration of traditional medium categories—largely as a consequence of its documentary role in intermedial expansion during the 1960s. (As we write, certain exponents in areas deemed popular and transient such as street art, fashion, and comics are now offered up for serious critical attention, with a discrete and growing following of apologists and adherents.) Copies of works of art have been prevalent since antiquity. An engraving was unambiguously an interpretation, and an avowedly degraded version of the original work (painting usually), while sculptures could be replicated from casts of the original. Yet it was the proliferation and growing ubiquity of photographic reproduction that caused the greatest philosophical consternation as to the specific location of art. The most famous theoretical confrontation of photographic reproducibility is Walter Benjamin’s heavily cited essay, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction—photography, but also film—divested the unique object of what he called its “aura,” through a process of deracination (from where it is physically situated), demystification, and, ultimately, trivialization. Repetition has the function of reducing the object (or word) to a material simplicity and ultimately to meaninglessness. But, and a very big but, Benjamin also conceded that while this was the case, the weight of reproduction could also have the opposite effect, that is to re-sanctify the art object by dint of the level of ratification that so much attention garners.3 Accordingly, we now recognize that reproduction can reassert the located singularness of the work of art. Tourism is, after all, built on the cult of pilgrimage, and art has a cardinal role to play in it. Is the Mona Lisa invisible or has it reached a meta-status through its extraordinary iconicity? The flows of reproduction operate like drumbeats, hammering each time into the consumer-observer the need to believe and to revere—with each manifestation comes tacit approbation.

8  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy New technologies continually place the uniqueness of the work in limbo. A three-­ dimensional printed copy, for example, despite potentially being literally indiscernible from its prototype, is, once recognized as a copy, perceived as philosophically distinct. Most recently, the rise of the non-fungible token (NFT) represents yet another attempt to reintroduce uniqueness into our perception of an otherwise easily reproducible work. Ultimately, although artists of every generation for well over a century have broadcast high-minded claims related to the purported democratization of art through its reproducibility, the fact that most artists want their name associated with their work invariably demands that some kind of authentication is required. Any work that is not unique, insofar as it is not understood to be embedded in a singular object, requires allographic attribution to be commodified.4 Just as the emergence of photography radically altered the way we think about representation, and just as the readymade displaced the primacy of artistic indexicality and all that implies (artisanry, the signature, and so on), the rise of the internet and digital reproducibility extends the ontological limits of the question of what art is even further. Consequently, following the emergence of radical intermediality5 and transcategoriality6 in art due to a series of conceptual and performative developments during the second half of the twentieth century, the early twenty-first century has borne witness to yet more speculation about how art is defined and what it fundamentally is and does. Another key issue emerging in the latter half of the twentieth century, and further realized in the early twenty-first century, is the accelerated encroachment of both popular cultural and broader socio-political concerns. Consideration of these developments is also critical to addressing our “where is art?” conundrum—especially given the erosion of the established mediums, genres, platforms, and frameworks that were once subject to relatively consistent standards of quality and modes of aesthetic evaluation. The multiple worlds that we now routinely inhabit, the online identities that we now assume, and so on, have only further implicated an ontic realm that is no longer reducible to the physical. Accordingly, the space of affect has been re-oriented in a dizzyingly short space of time. Although a digitally mediated experience is often regarded as a more convenient point of entry, a corresponding nostalgic longing for the artisanal or handmade is also keenly apparent (and often paradoxically shared and discussed in the digital realm). It is a longing that has crept up on us with alarming rapidity, suggesting that it is a reflex more than anything osmotic or organic. Unfortunately, it is a discourse that is its own quick dead-end. This dialectic, while ubiquitous, is, unfortunately, for contemporary art, an anachronism. Thus, the key problem underpinning our key question “where is art?” is that our experience of the art “object” is now multiform. In other words, not only does the art object, from the very outset, exist across multiple incarnations and platforms, it is also cognitively apprehended and appreciated as such. Indeed, perhaps the most frequented encounters with art are no longer physical galleries or museums but rather social media platforms and other websites. Yet, conversely, the idea that a website might constitute the primary or only site for an exhibition is surprisingly rare. Despite this rapid increase in online artistic activity, art is still more likely to operate online in an interpretative context or documentary form, rather than as a primary medium for exhibition. (The still niche realm of “net art,” such as it is, offers one alternative to this interpretative or documentary tendency—but more on that shortly.) Ultimately, online representations of art are still almost ubiquitously used as vehicles for illuminating the existence of works understood as located eternally elsewhere.

Where Is Art?  9

The necessity of materiality and the folly of immateriality As we have already established, some works of art are no longer experienced as a single or primary object, location, or event. Instead, when we apprehend certain works of art, we might behold a constellation of materially, spatially, and contextually distributed elements that we accept as a unified work.7 (One significant progenitor to this trend is the now accepted mode of video performance which displaces but still residually retains the element of live presence.) Complicating this situation further, we can become aware of the existence of this unified constellation of distributed elements in various ways. We might, for example, initially encounter a work through direct sense perception of a physical object. Alternatively, we might encounter it through an online document or archive, a report or published article, a presentation or witness account, a podcast discussion or video, and even as a remix or intermedial combination of any of the above. But how do we perceive such complex, overlapping, and dynamic aggregates of different materializations, versions, and modes of delivery as a cohesive and singularly recognizable work of art? (This challenge is explored in detail by Ilmar Taimre and one us in Chapter 8.) Clearly, at an absolute minimum, we require something to be made materially manifest to us in order for the experience of the work to be transmitted from one mind to another. (Even a digital artifact must ultimately conform to the laws of physics and requires both electricity and hardware to be transmitted and perceived.) Moreover, it is also strangely apparent that although this something materialized as art could (at least hypothetically) be anything, it is nevertheless not everything. For us to apprehend a work of art, something needs to be meaningfully delineated or marked off from everything else in the world. (This process is analyzed in detail by Jeffrey Strayer in Chapter 11 of this volume and elsewhere.) But how did we arrive at a consensual recognition of this fictionalized phenomenon that we call art? Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are many different ways that we might map the genealogies underpinning this development. When we deploy Wittgenstein’s dictum that the meaning of a word is its use, we encounter such a plurality of usages that the work itself is understood as existing according to a plural state of being. A good example of this phenomenon is found in the work of Hito Steyerl, whose practice consists of a multiplicity, like planets orbiting not around a coruscating core but a pregnant void. We might begin by asking “what kind of an entity is a work of art?” Is it a physical thing or an imaginary thing? Or necessarily both? How do works of art relate to the minds of artists and viewers? Do all works of art belong to a single ontological category? Under what kind of conditions are works of art understood to come into existence, or, indeed, cease to exist? If a work of art is, at least in part, an imagined object—that is, something first experienced by an artist and hopefully later by an audience—what happens to that imagined object when nobody is experiencing it, or, indeed, remembers that it ever existed? Does a work cease to exist along with the individual or collective memories of a society that first bore its existence? At a bare minimum, as we will demonstrate, the consensually recognized existence of any work of art requires at least one object, one subject, and a subject’s consciousness of that subject/object relationship.8 But before we continue any further, we need to briefly attend to a few assumptions. It is relatively common to assume that a work of art is a stable and discrete entity, created by a particular individual or group, in a particular cultural and historical context. According to this assumption, works of art are physical objects.

10  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy Notwithstanding the logic of this common-sense assumption, it nevertheless began to unravel in various ways, as we have seen, during the twentieth century. As a result of these developments, artists are now more aware than before of the logical necessity that a work of art must also be more than its material presentation. This inevitability, as we will discover, results from its necessary collective fictionalization as a socially constructed object in order to be recognized as art. It is for this reason, for example, that we might assume that a thirteenth-century audience would be incapable of recognizing a color field abstract painting as a painting, or indeed an album of industrial drones as music. Yet, as we will also discover, any suggestion that a work of art might somehow be capable of existing only immaterially is ultimately folly. (This is discussed in greater detail by Ilmar Taimre and one us in Chapter 8.) The false suggestion that a work of art is immaterial was presented by Benedetto Croce in his 1912 book Breviario di estetica (The Essence of Aesthetics), in which he argued that imaginative thought precedes all other thought. This suggestion was taken up a few decades later by Robin Collingwood, who rejected any suggestion that a work of art is a physical object at all.9 The main problem with this suggestion is that it belies the basic requirement for some kind of material object, gesture, or form to actually transmit this imagined work from one mind to another. Yet as any student of conceptualism and intermedial expansion in twentieth-century art now knows, such a materialization might assume the form of anything, from a traditional art object to a text, performed gesture, or even a delineated absence marked in physical space. The irrefutable nature of this requirement is perhaps most apparent whenever artists test its limits. Robert Barry’s All the Things I Know but of Which I Am Not at the Moment Thinking (1969), for example, employed the minimal vehicular medium of a sentence to imaginatively conjure the existence of inactivated memories in the artist’s own mind. Another good example is Piero Manzoni’s mischievous 1961 work Base of the World no. 3, Homage to Galileo, which is paradoxically dependent upon an inverted sculptural plinth to transmit the idea that everything else in the world that is not the physical object before us is actually the work. Looking to a more recent example, we can see that despite the extent to which Tino Seghal’s conspicuously undocumented performance works might aim to be radically immaterial, they still invariably require material elements such as choreographed bodies, host architectures, or voiced witness accounts in order to be transmitted as art from one mind to another. For another recent example, we could turn to Salvatore Garau’s 2021 sculpture I am—a work which, although “invisible,” still sits in a specifically demarcated physical space. Notwithstanding the fact that the delivery mechanism itself in all of these examples is understood as not constituting the work itself, there is no escaping the fact that a minimal material delivery mechanism is required to actually transmit the work from one mind to another. The appeal of ideas such as these was infectious for many artists in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1969, for example, Douglas Huebler declared, “the world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”10 Soon, an avalanche of theoretical discourse would emerge to support such attitudes. The term dematerialization, for example, was coined by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in 1968 to describe art that stressed concept over material form.11 Although it was hoped by some at the time that this tendency might somehow thwart the fetishization and commodification of the material art object, it was soon apparent that capitalism is extraordinarily adept at translating that which is literally “next to nothing” into symbolic market value. Despite Lippard stressing that art could not be dematerialized as unmediated

Where Is Art?  11 information or experience, the term nevertheless endured as a descriptor for conceptual art of this era. Notwithstanding the elevation of ideas over material form in much advanced art of the late twentieth century, it was ultimately clear that the complete dematerialization of art was not logically possible. As Craig Dworkin put it in his book, No Medium (2013): “Even the most abstract and cerebral works of conceptual art cannot be separated from those material and technical supports. There is no single medium, to be sure, but media are inescapable.”12 This necessity was never lost on more astute artists of the time. Although Marcel Broodthaers, for example, stressed the “idea before the plastic,” he also conceded that in order “to express an idea properly, I had necessarily to play around with plastic elements.”13 (For further examples, see the writings of Ilmar Taimre and one us in Chapter 8 of this book and elsewhere.) It was now apparent that even conceptual artists make more or less effective material and formal decisions in order to effectively communicate an idea as art. There was simply no way that some form of materialization could be avoided, even if decidedly “anti-aesthetic” or barely evident in its public presentation. Ironically, the perceived seriousness of some works of conceptually driven art at the time were sometimes paradoxically brought into question if they didn’t “look” sufficiently anti-aesthetic. Amusingly, Susan Hiller once quipped in response to “serious male” reception of her watershed work, Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972–76), that had her found postcards been black and white rather than color, perhaps Art & Language wouldn’t have critically rejected her work as “too visual.”14 At this juncture, we might simply conclude that good and bad conceptual art both is and is not seductive in its material presentation. Another key benefit gained from the morphological presentation of a concept is that it enables the viewer not only to experience the idea, but to survey it from a phenomenological vantage point. Although the inescapability of experiencing ideas through material form runs counter to the aspirations toward immateriality sought by hardened conceptualists, the important take home point here, as argued by Elisabeth Schellekens in 2009, is that conceptual artists ultimately “instantiate” ideas by turning otherwise abstracted philosophical propositions into something “concrete” and therefore experiential.15 Tellingly, even hypothetical works of art, such as those featured in the philosophical ruminations of Arthur Danto, still require a physical medium of sorts in the form of a printed page.16 In this sense, even hypothetical works are exceptions that prove the rule, for imaginary creative works can only be experienced when we imagine their effect in the world. The (impossible) existence of hypothetical art is only further frustrated as we attempt to imagine effects designed to preclude the imagining of effects. Another common claim is that certain forms of art exist exclusively in “relational space.” But almost immediately we can see that any delineated relational space still needs to be understood as somehow occupying a realm in between various necessary but insufficient material and paratextual elements (that encapsulate or “activate” surrounding networks of materially evident interpretations, critiques, perceptions, histories, documentations, values, accounts, encounters, etc.). Moreover, even in the case of a traditional presentation of art, we can now recognize that the viewer can only behold a work as part of a process that necessarily involves coming into contact with a range of pre-existing histories and adjacent paratextual information or other prosthetic and supplementary materials (which the artist typically claims are not technically part of the work).17 Here, it is also relevant to stress that even a viewer’s recognition that they are indeed in the company of art requires at least some prior

12  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy awareness of the historically developed and socially constructed idea of art itself. Here, in drawing upon a philosophical tradition that can be traced back to the insights of Immanuel Kant, we know that the relationship between physical and mental experiences in human comprehension is something that is inextricably connected— for just as concepts abstracted from experience are empty, experiences without context are blind. Considered together, direct experience of a work and knowledge of its accompanying social contexts give us more. This relationship, which now also forms the basis of artistic research production in the academy, is indebted to Kant’s dynamic integration of the two key traditions in Western knowledge production in action—empiricism, which holds that our knowledge is primarily derived from sense experience or observation, and rationalism, which holds that knowledge is primarily based in reason. So, as we have already established, we cannot even recognize something as art in the first place without accessing, even in a most basic sense, a surrounding set of socially constructed fictionalizations (such as art history or language itself). Although the vehicular presence of the physical artifact or experience directs our aesthetic contemplation and interpretation, we also cannot help but conjure knowledge or awareness of its surrounding network in order to enter its world. This necessity is key to the historical failure of formalism—which conveniently ignored, for example, the “soft power” imperial (CIA-bolstered) currency of abstract expressionism. It is also why we know that the physical object in itself cannot make an exclusive or autonomous claim to the art condition. Consequently, from the vantage of our present, we now understand that that the formalists and the conceptualists only ever had half the story—­despite tying themselves in knots attempting to defend their respective projects. Where the twentieth century was arguably full of artistic movements that threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater in manifesto-led frenzies, the twenty-first century has witnessed many of these former antinomies become reluctant bedfellows. This is probably why so many contemporary artists repetitively churn out artist statements that present their work as “positioned between x and y” —a tactic, alas, that tends only to confirm rather than elide the problem. “Liminality” and “intersticiality” are the new normative, and the obscurer and uglier the word the better. In an effort to surmount the tyranny of binaries, “inter” is the nom du jour, in many cases tending to inadvertently enforce the old order as much as the new. Art is, necessarily, built in a series of complex, layered, and ultimately mutually insufficient relationships. Moreover, as Markus Gabriel puts it, “aesthetic experience—­ that is, the perception of an artwork—is generally a second-order perceptual relation: a perceptual relation to a perceptual relation.”18 In this sense, we might provisionally conclude that the physical materialization(s) associated with a work of art simply offers the viewer a portal into a dynamic relationship between material form(s) and the surrounding networks of signs, concepts, myths, traces, sensations, and ­contradictions—all intertwined in ever-expanding worlds of interpretations, fictions, versions, and documentations. Without interpretation, and without this network of relations between elements that collectively constitute the “space” or “world” of a work of art, what we understand to be a work of art would be no more than a mere object or arbitrary artifact in the continuum of everyday life. Ultimately, although all ideas must be somehow communicated sensorially, all sensory perception involves a greater or lesser degree of conceptual processing. Moreover, there is no defensible reason to claim that the presence of sensorial elements

Where Is Art?  13 should negate an intellectual dimension. Today, the artistic implications of this inescapable convergence of the sensorial and the conceptual in contemporary art are sometimes referred to as “postconceptual art.” Central to the recent popularization of this term is Peter Osborne’s description of the mutual insufficiency of two once dominant dimensions in art—the conceptual and the aesthetic, which he sees as activated in relation to a series of processes of active fictionalization. To this end, Osborne has identified six features of postconceptual art: 1 2 3 4 5



A necessary—but insufficient—conceptuality A necessary—but insufficient—aesthetic dimension An anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials An expansion to infinity of the possible material means of art A radically distributive—that is, irreducibly relational—unity of the individual artwork across the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at any particular time 6 A historical malleability of the borders of this unity19

Here a site, there a site, anywhere a site Perhaps the most important development in the elevation and expansion of conceptions of location specificity in art is the late twentieth-century conception of site specificity. Importantly, it was also a potent antithesis to modernism’s historical assertion of the work of art as autonomous. In this instance, Robert Smithson was particularly instrumental during the 1960s and ’70s in rethinking the relationship between a work of art and its environment. In particular, it was through an active interest in a work’s host environment that Smithson developed his highly influential dialectical conceptualization of “sites” and “non-sites.” For Smithson, a site referred to a specific location, whereas a non-site referred to an exhibition environment such as a gallery. 20 Many of Smithson’s most significant works deliberately drew upon the nature of relationships between sites and non-sites. Smithson’s non-site exhibits typically consisted of photographs, films, maps, sketches, or diagrams of a particular location exhibited alongside physical materials removed from that location. Noting, for example, that Smithson’s iconic “earthwork,” Spiral Jetty (1969–70), is also the title of a 32-minute color film and a series of exhibited film stills and sketches, Osborne has argued that “the film Spiral Jetty appears as one element in a complex distribution of artistic materials, across a multiplicity of material forms and practices, the unity of which constitutes a singular, though internally multitudinous work.”21 For Osborne, these “material forms appear as multiple materializations selected from an infinite set of possible actualizations.”22 It is for this reason that he sees Spiral Jetty as not an earthwork sculpture at all (as is it typically described in art historical accounts), but rather as a transcategorical postconceptual work. Moreover, he argues, it is profoundly conservative to historicize it as sculpture at all—as has been the tendency since the publication of Rosalind Krauss’ influential, much-quoted essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979). 23 Krauss, by analyzing the structural parameters of sculpture, architecture, and landscape, had sought to clarify what these respective practices were and were not, and what resulted when considered fused together. In doing so, Krauss influenced thinking in all three fields, together with off-shoot epithets such as “expanded cinema” and

14  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy “expanded painting,” etc. In so doing she also anticipated the way that postmodernism (and beyond) was apt to desecrate the sacred cows of modernist formalisms. For Krauss, unlike modernist sculpture, where one “enters a space of negative condition” and “a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place,” sculpture had, by the early 1960s, begun to enter categorical indeterminacy, for “it was what was on or in front of a building that was not the building, or what was in the landscape that was not the landscape.”24 Whereas modernist sculpture had typically fetishized its plinth primacy—holding nostalgically to the invitation for idolatry—subsequent sculpture had instead become “one term on the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities. And one has thereby gained the ‘permission’ to think these other forms.”25 This “permission” to rethink the nature and the form of the presentation of art would prove to be enormously significant for future artists and theorists. For Miwon Kwon, writing in 1997, central to this radical rethinking was an “epistemological challenge to relocate meaning from within the art object to the contingencies of its context.”26 Consequently, a site could just as easily refer to institutional power, stolen land, an economic transaction, a classroom, a shared meal, a journey on public transport, the transactional nature of the gaze, or the giving of care. Following this marked departure from the deification of the discrete art object, the spatial and social contexts surrounding a work of art were routinely absorbed into its orbit of aesthetic and critical interpretation. Cynically, we can also recognize this development as yet another market-ready conflation. Like many other luxury goods, this expansion of art into different modes of display and consumption can also be seen as exemplifying capitalism’s extraordinary capacity to produce and sell the “air” surrounding objects (think, for example, of high-end fashion stores displaying a single garment in a large retail display, or a glossy fashion magazine listing, alongside other credits, the fragrances models are supposedly wearing). 27 Notwithstanding many contemporary artists’ presumptive claims that works presented through this now radically expanded ontology somehow “interrogate” (another snappy word that contemporary art seemingly cannot do without) the structures of late capitalism, it is now possible for otherwise arbitrary objects and actions to be placed together in a contextually “expanded field,” which, when presented together with a few supplementary linguistic gymnastics and strategies of ironic doubling, somehow present as a critique of capitalism. Today, this is a game with a sophistication that rivals the most abstracted forms of speculative futures trading. At best, artists regard themselves as partially redeemed by virtue of being at once critical and self-reflectively complicit (as if it is somehow more palatable to sell half of one’s soul). It was against this backdrop that a particularly clever critical branch of conceptualism emerged, namely, institutional critique. This systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions, such as galleries and museums, would also evoke an inverse speculation upon the machinations of the market—especially its conditions of labor and the other invisible economic, social, and political forces. This approach, at its core, involves critically speculating upon the role that institutional forces play in the reception, interpretation, and subsequent currency of art. This development was also perhaps an inevitable consequence of the spatial expansion of the possible means of art. Here, as Osborne argues, it is now possible to retrospectively point to the paradoxical way in which Smithson’s non-sites finally “acted as sites that represent other sites, and hence, reflectively, that need to represent their own character as such sites as well.”28

Where Is Art?  15 This critical function, in which particular contextual qualities and currencies, activated by the blindly assumed neutrality of the white cube gallery space, can become an artistic medium, would help establish the requisite grounding for more pointed forms of institutional critique in the work of artists such as Michael Asher, Hans Haacke, Adrian Piper, Fred Wilson, and Andrea Fraser. 29 Significantly, this kind of expansion was no longer simply about space but rather about institutional forces and their impact upon placemaking.30 Unlike space, which possesses abstract physical and formal properties, a “place” is a socially constructed designation that overwrites space.31 Today, for example, if we consider a socially constructed object/place, such as a nation state, we can see traces of contested places violently overwritten by other socially constructed acts of placemaking. Institutional critique initially developed through a re-evaluation of the museum and the studio as sites for the production of works ready for circulation. Artists such as Haacke were particularly instrumental in shifting the idea of site from the physical site to the system of socioeconomic relations within which art finds its being. Haacke’s great contribution was to strip, or try to strip, the patina of prestige off art institutions, to expose them as an intricate interconnected network of self-interested patronage and self-affirmation favoring the minority who divvied out the honors and cash. One particularly potent contemporary example of a practice indebted to institutional critique is found in the work of Cameron Rowland, whose work seeks to illuminate systems and institutions that benefit from racial injustice. Rowland’s extraordinary 2016 exhibition 91020000 at Artists Space in New York, for example, featured objects produced by incarcerated felons which were all produced using the penal code, through which the host institution is availed free prison labor. (Significantly, this exhibition took place in the same year that US filmmaker Ava DuVernay released the documentary 13th—which argued that because a disproportionally high number of incarcerated felons are Black, this penal code system is simply a continuation of the legacies of slavery under a different name.) By the late twentieth century, drawing upon ideas developed by artists such as Broodthaers in the 1960s, it was relatively commonplace for artists to claim the exhibition itself as medium. Once again typically eschewing the discrete aesthetic object in favor of the exhibition as a protean arena of expansion and variation, the “exhibition” had become an arena for activating contestations and relations. As Hal Foster observes, the readymade gesture was now no longer simply “a tautology about art as deluxe commodity” but rather “a performance of presentation that can put latent contexts into play.”32 Such works, which were often presented as projects in expanded exhibition formats, would also routinely reach beyond the visual arts to commingle with other disciplines and knowledge systems. By the end of the twentieth century, as John Armleder remarked, an “artwork’s success” had become dependent upon “its capacity to co-opt an existing situation and to be co-opted in return.”33 In summary, “critical” contemporary art could no longer claim any independent essence in relation to the systems it purported to critique, and, as a consequence, much advanced art today consciously incorporates this awareness of the inextricable relationship of a work of art to broader systems of production, consumption, distribution, and exploitation. Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers (2007), for example, traces the transformation of excess European sugar into generic serial minimalist blocks as “art” to elude European trade barriers. Similarly, Steve McQueen’s

16  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy Gravesend (2007) poetically follows the movement of the “new blood diamond,” coltan, from exploitative labor conditions in Congo to the production of cellphones and computers. It is of course important to distinguish between sophisticated poetic responses to complex political issues and works that sit toward the instrumental or “activist” end of the spectrum, which at worst simply reveal inaction rather than stir any intention for real change.

Bodies in spaces An idea experienced as art can potentially unlock insights and understandings that might remain elusive in a theoretical proposition alone. With this in mind, feminist, Black, and LGBTQI+ artists have long recognized that the relational register of bodies in spaces can implicitly communicate socio-political ideas. Here, numerous examples emerge from the 1960s onward. VALIE EXPORT, for example, challenged the public to engage with a real woman as opposed to an image on a screen. Covering her naked chest with a makeshift “movie theatre,” EXPORT invited pedestrians (in ten European cities between 1968 and 1971) to reach inside the box and directly touch her breasts. This radical screen-free expanded “film” confronted social, political, and sexual positionings of the female body by fracturing boundaries between cinema and real life. Instead of a passive subject on a screen, the male gaze was met by the subject looking back into the eyes of the viewer. Similarly, James Luna, a US artist of First Nation American and Mexican background, challenged the way US culture, and by extension museums, presented his people as essentially extinct by installing his own living breathing body in an exhibition case in the San Diego Museum of Man to produce Artifact Piece (1985–87). Positioned amongst surrounding exhibits in a museological section on the Kumeyaay—­the original inhabitants of San Diego County—Luna lay dressed in a leather cloth, with labels supposedly pointing to scars from drinking and fighting. Personal items were also displayed together with other cultural artifacts. Through this mixture of elements, he sought to reveal a still living and developing culture at odds with its museological representation. Another potent example of the relational registration of a body in a contested space is Pope.L’s provocative performance-based work How Much is that N***** in the Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl (1991). In this performance, Pope.L crawled military style in a business suit holding a potted flower, along the perimeter of Tompkins Square Park in New York. At the time, the park was a site of ongoing riots involving the homeless, squatters, activists, and police. On the day of Pope.L’s “crawl,” Tompkins Square was barricaded for renovations. Assuming a prostrate posture, and forcing onlookers to direct their gazes downward, Pope.L sought to make disenfranchised bodies and displaced communities visible. This remains a timely work today within the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Where is social space? Within the context of contemporary art, the now broadly used term social practice (as opposed to the theory in psychology by the same name) emphasizes social engagement, collaboration, and community as a medium in the creation of so-called “relational art.” For its devotees, social practice seeks to activate relationships between production and

Where Is Art?  17 reception, the political nature of social relations, and the lived experiences of others as aesthetic experience. It also challenges the idea that art only functions through its reification as a circumscribed object or a traditional staged performance. The roots of social practice can be traced back to the 1940s, when movements such as lettrism, then after the Second World War, the Situationist International and Fluxus began to challenge established conceptions of the way in which viewers and audiences are implicated in processes of artistic production. In his seminal text The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord argued that the “spectacular” image was symptomatic of capitalistic alienation and, moreover, actually concealing this estrangement.34 Meanwhile, during the Fluxus movement of the late 1960s, George Maciunas took aim at “illusionism,” and like the Situationists, sought to expose the reification of life engendered by the capitalist onslaught of the spectacular. Drawing upon ideas that had originated in early twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Dada, this second horizon of postwar neo-avant-garde tendencies was even more explicitly concerned with the creation of experiences that offer active viewer participation. Importantly, the outcomes of these interventions were not singular objects but rather materialized experiences that claimed to result in a blurring of boundaries between art and life. In recent decades, variations of social, relational, and participatory practices, which typically occur outside of traditional exhibition environments, have become increasingly common. Within these restructured relationships between artist and audience, the viewer is no longer modelled as passive and detached but rather as an intrinsic participatory medium. During the 1990s in particular, collaborative initiatives such as the Turkish collective Oda Projesi (Room Project) set out to try and create new functions for unused public spaces. During the late 1990s, participatory practice was reframed by Nicolas Bourriaud, who argued that audience involvement made work political, since the space of interaction created fleeting communities whose inter-­subjective relations and concrete communications might be politically affective. The political, Bourriaud suggested, could emerge within and through the aesthetic experience without the art or the artist engaging directly with politics. He laid claim to the term relational aesthetics to describe “a set of practices which takes as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context.”35 One artist particularly enamored by Bourriaud was Rirkrit Tiravanija, who somewhat unconvincingly claimed to build on the work of Joseph Beuys’ 1960s/’70s idea of “social sculpture” as a mechanism for dissolving the boundaries between art and life. The Land (1998–present), which Tiravanija cofounded with Superflex, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, and Kamin Lertchaiprasert, is typical of projects that claim to bring art and social engagement together. Bourriaud’s ideas, however, have also been roundly criticized, and rightly so. Claire Bishop, in particular, points to a lack of critical antagonism, a loss of aesthetic judgment, and the empty assumptions of democracy championed in the writing and curatorial work of Bourriaud. For Bishop, antagonisms and dynamic contradictions presented in the work of artists such as Artur Żmijewski contain more critical potential. Żmijewski’s Them (2007), for example, was a social experiment in which representatives from conflicting social groups (conservatives, patriotic Catholics, nationalist Polish youth, leftist socialists, democrats, and freedom fighters) were brought together in a series of workshops to construct symbolic representations and respond to others. In time, fights broke out, and “artworks” were set on fire and thrown out of the windows.

18  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy

When is a work? The problem of unambiguously locating when a work begins and ends is somewhat comparable to the “where is art?” conundrum. To begin this discussion, we might look back to some of the earliest examples of cognitively advanced human artistic expression to find examples of works that effectively stretch across millennia. Perhaps the most extraordinary example is found in the multiple painted layers that make up the ceilings and pillars of Nawarla Gabarnmang (Jawoyn for “hole in the rock”36). Extraordinarily, although evidence of habitation at this site in southwestern Arnhem Land in Australia has been dated to at least 44,000 years ago, paintings produced more than 28,000 years ago sit alongside depictions of barramundi executed in a style more typical of the last 400 years.37 Crayons have also been recovered from nearby locations (Malakunanja II and Nauwalabila I) that are dated between 45,000 to 60,000 years, suggesting that Nawarla Gabarnmang may have even been creatively modified for over 65,000 years, since the earliest known human habitation of the same continental landmass on which this essay is being written. The site also includes paintings dated roughly between AD 1433 and 1952, which is consistent with local anecdotal reports that the cave was still visited within living memory.38 How do we even begin to engage with histories this deep? Ironically, given that these dates will most likely be updated by the time this essay is published, the research drawn upon in this paragraph is probably as “up to date” as any claims made about the latest digital technologies elsewhere in the text. Although it is easy to be astonished by the ineffable gravity of contemplating continuous painting practices stretching across tens of millennia into the recesses of deep time, the most important point is the extent that it trivializes the two centuries of colonial occupation that so recently put an end to continuous adaptations of this site. Moving much closer to our present day, a good example of a work of art that has only affirmed its critical significance with each subsequent adaptation is Louise Lawler’s Birdcalls (1972/1981/2008). In its initial 1972 version, the work consisted of a series of high-pitched quasi-bird songs consisting of absurd repetitions of the names of her more famous male artist contemporaries, many of whom who were being selected for inclusion in exhibitions in which she was not taking part. In its second iteration in 1981, the work was transformed into an exhibited audio document of the same quasi-bird songs. In 2008, in its third and still current version, the work was permanently installed as a sound work in the garden outside Dia Beacon in New York, the same location where many of the historically celebrated male artists that she parodied are now permanently exhibited inside the building.39 In this third iteration, Lawler’s speculative capacity to predict the male art historical figures of the then future is retrospectively confirmed. Clearly, activating connections to the past and speculating upon possible futures can form an important part of deepening the meaning and potency of a work. In this case, the act of interpretation requires the connection of meanings expressed in the past, toward the future, made manifest in the present.

Methodological confusion and ontological indeterminacy Art, even under controlled conditions, is indeterminate in character. Today, this intrinsic indeterminacy has become hyperbolic, sometimes manifesting as a surfeit of meaning and affect. Given the inherent indeterminacy of artistic production and

Where Is Art?  19 discourse, there now appears to be no apparent upper limit to the extent to which artists and theorists might glean ideas—sometimes superficially—from other disciplines and cultural contexts. This is a process that was already well under way in the twentieth century. Indeterminacy, for example, was a central idea for John Cage, in particular during the latter part of his career. Under the influence of Zen Buddhism, indeterminacy underpinned the need to bring the creative act into the open without excessive forethought, with a premium given to the moment of delivery and reception. It also underscored the extreme porosity of practices: Genre disciplines were not to be cordoned off or determined either linguistically or strategically, if only historically. But the historical term, under the weight of the creative moment, was there to be ruptured and repositioned, thereby also repositioning and rereading history. This state of heightened indeterminacy would serve to effectively emphasize the work of art’s open-endedness in laying the most important stress on the encounter as opposed to the object, which ought never to be considered static nor central. Over that last half century or so, art has largely traded medium-specific categorizations for thematic positionings that typically stress socially and politically oriented relations. Although, to a certain extent, medium-specific categorizations live on as part of what Alex Bacon usefully describes as “a nostalgia for their former ontological separation,” the flexibility of conventional medium categories has, in many ways, been expanded to the limits of plausibility.40 For some, art has expanded so far beyond its internal concerns that it has lost any meaningful coherence. For others, advanced artistic activity is liberated from the exhibition of discrete objects to focus on the supposedly more important work of activating relationships. Unlike the assertions of aesthetic autonomy that underpinned the various ideological battles staged between abstract formalism and allegorical illustration during the twentieth century, a significant proportion of artistic activity in the twenty-first century is more concerned with negotiating tensions between the agency of forms and the outermost spatial and temporal limits of a work of art. Consequently, to highlight this point again, a work of art is now less likely to be regarded as fixed in space and time and closed off from the world around it. Instead, the world of a work of art is understood as inherently labile, relational, cross-disciplinary, and open to continual transformation across multiple versions or locations. As a result, another problem has arisen: The challenge of meaningfully evaluating potential works located across multiple mediums, material forms, versions, disciplines, and histories. Consequently, it can be particularly challenging to find appropriate or consistent language and methodological criteria for evaluating forms of art that straddle seemingly incongruent realms of knowledge. Where late twentieth-century histories of art still largely methodologically comprised relatively distinct critical models—such as formalism, structuralist semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and others—these methodologies had more or less merged by the turn of the millennium. Today, as we try and make sense of this fuzzily demarcated, interdisciplinary, and transcategorical situation, it is almost pointless to insist on any particular or singular methodological approach or position. Moreover, this complexity has rendered any claim that a particular model is consistently or exclusively valid as doomed within the interpretative processes of art history. Consequently, it is paradoxically that which artists and theorists find appealing in the anything goes radical relativism of our contemporary situation—that is, its inherent lack of a stable definition, a-historicity, and heterogeneity—also tends to stymie a sense of meaningful possibility.

20  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy For some artists, the term contemporary itself presents a barrier. For Liam Gillick, although it was not uncommon for modernist artists to deny the name associated with their respective style or movement, contemporary art activates this kind of denial differentially. Frustratingly, the term contemporary does not describe a particular approach or practice but rather a general “being in the context.”41 Another common tendency is found in variously configured attempts to describe the contemporary as a new epoch supposedly unburdened by the oppressive narratives of imperial Western modernism. Here, one feature frequently overlooked by contemporary detractors of modernism is the extent to which such declarations tend to mirror the kind of absolutist claims once offered in modernist manifestos. Moreover, a general dearth of historical literacy, together with an all-consuming flattening across a superficially informationally obese, often self-obsessed, and increasingly algorithmically sorted present, obscures most of us from really acknowledging that we still routinely use Western “modernist precedents to claim that we surpass the modern.”42 Another way of looking at “the contemporary” is as a moniker of exhaustion. This is to say, with postmodernism having faded away, and faced with no reasonable (or catchy or consensual) alternative, a place-saver was inserted, only for that stand-in term to generate its own autonomy and semantic economy. “Contemporary,” with or without the scare quotes, now prevails as its own entity, where, as with such semiotic transitions, the original meaning of the word is all but lost and in its place is a promissory meaning for what is in truth a lack, a void. Other terminological candidates which have variously attempted to encapsulate the still ambiguous present and historical era that has followed postmodernism include post-postmodernism, the off-modern, meta-modernism, neomodern, new sincerity, remodernism, performatism, altermodernism, supermodernity, andromodernity, speciousmodernity, and the aftermodern. Ironically, the implicit lack of specific directionality and multiplicity of meaning and possibility variously presented in each of these competing models is demonstrated in their very failure to take hold. Furthermore, if we may allow a few generalizations, if the main tendencies of postmodernism were appropriation and deconstructive critique (resetting the habitual power structures deemed monolithic in modernism), variations upon the contemporary are most typically characterized along lines of gender and identity. As is keenly apparent across our present situation, these are battlelines which dangerously tip, time and time again, into ideological warfare. The net effect is all too often to see art pressed into the instrumentalized service of activist concerns—often using paper-thin tactics of ontological doubling or settling psychopathological disquiet. For all its inconsistencies, we are apt to turn to Theodor Adorno’s insistence that political art makes for both bad art and bad politics. It may not be a universal truth, but it does resonate anew in our present time when art is so freighted with values, concerns, and complaints that the viewer becomes cynically inured to it, effectively drowning in caveats, with the unfortunate effect that the issues themselves, extrinsic from art proper, may then not be given the attention they deserve. Moreover, the sheer breadth that art demands of itself, and that it is used so much as a historical vehicle, means that efforts at a precision once expected of art historical scholarship are deemed reactionary. Art and art history is thus increasingly lost in a grab-bag of methodological eclecticisms. Here, to repurpose Jacques Derrida’s lexicon, we might say opposing categories have slowly interwoven and “contaminated” one another to create a generalized condition of heightened confusion. Yet

Where Is Art?  21 such circumstances have their benefits. Given the collapse of the categorical distinctions of the past that have intended to police and exclude, there is arguably now far more room for voices previously omitted from a world of clearer yet oppressive delineations. With this important point of difference in mind, for better or worse, we are open to integrating a diverse range of often contradictory methods and methodological positions. Although we are now on less stable ground, there are more voices at the table. To attempt to make or see something as something else is an act of ­understanding— as is the case when reasoning shapes intuitions into a coherent structure of ideas and words. Ultimately, art has no independent essence without being framed in relationship to both life and everything that is not art. Art might not be life but is rather something necessarily framed in parallax with it. Although there is often no substantial literal difference between art and non-art objects, socially constructed structural difference can nonetheless be attributed in such a way that otherwise vastly disparate objects, methods, and formations can be brought into new sets of relation. Ultimately, categories are, to a greater or lesser extent, indistinct—and at worst violently exclusionary. It is important to remember that categorical distinctions are inherently artificial, dynamic, contested, elusive, shifting, and context dependent. Moreover, the significance of categories can easily evaporate along with the social or historical setting that created them in the first place. In some respects, it is now trivial to stress that broader contexts of production, conception, and reception are more significant than particular formal or virtuosic qualities in the critical reception of advanced art. Although “context” might typically consist of reasonably evident shared understandings and expectations about the nature and purpose of the encounter, context is also part of a mutually insufficient relationship between the formal properties of objects and the systems of cultural “belief” that surround them. Considered together, this mutually insufficient relationship between materials and contexts underpins both the interpretation of art and the accompanying mysteries and indeterminacies of the creative act itself. As is particularly evident in extreme cases, the exceptions to the rule, it is clear the only thing that finally differentiates a work of art from everyday life, and everything else in the world, is structural framing accorded through a work’s presentation. Without the legitimizing accompaniment of the artworld, many works would likely struggle to transcend arbitrariness within the continuum of lived reality. It is perhaps when something presented as art is also an apparently literal facsimile of that which is not art that this curious philosophical transformation is most apparent. This problem of “literal indiscernibility”43 was discussed at length as part of Arthur Danto’s highly influential description of an “Artworld” (as an exclusive capitalized proper noun no less).44 For Danto, it was immediately apparent when he first encountered an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes in the 1960s that the all-important difference was not to be found in any superficial comparison of commercially available Brillo box packaging and Warhol’s facsimiles. Instead, the most important distinction was philosophically marked by its artworld presentation. It is precisely here that the fictionalized conceit of the contemporary artworld is found, in which strategies of ironic doubling and claims of implicit criticality are still used so successfully to sell unremarkable objects, and their surrounding air, at inflated prices. By the mid-1980s in New York, for example, loose imported theoretical references to “simulationism” and so-called “commodity criticism” surrounded the exhibition

22  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy and sale of everything from the latest running shoes to lava lamps, liquid decanters, and vacuum cleaners as art. Heavily promoted by their dealers, artists such as Ashley Bickerton, Haim Steinbach, and Jeff Koons produced ironic simulations of luxury consumer items, which, despite an underlying premise of deep intellectual despair and cynicism, were sold at an unprecedented prices for living artists. Today, many artworld participants take this constructed exclusiveness for granted. Although for Danto, there could be no “artworks without the theories and the histories of the Artworld,” 45 the existence of many differently configured artworlds and layered ontologies—some of which are utterly uninterested in one another yet similarly capable of constituting a consensually constructed realm within which particular activities can be understood to be at once art and something else (i.e., a political protest or a scientific research project)—has seen critical attention increasingly turn to what Pamela Lee has usefully described as “the work of art’s world.”46 Although Lee acknowledges the impossibility of “ignoring or standing outside it [the artworld], as if one could lay claim to a space beyond its imperial reach by wandering just far enough afield,” her focus has instead shifted from the “global art world” to the “work of art’s world.” For Lee, to speak of the “the work of art’s world” is to retain a sense of the activity performed by the object as utterly continuous with the world it at once inhabits and creates: a world Möbius-like in its indivisibility and circularity, a seemingly endless horizon.47 Here, it is extraordinarily difficult to meaningfully demarcate the categorical edges of work of art which are seemingly at once art and part of the world. So, how do we meaningfully evaluate works of art that seek to be continuous with the world? As Claire Bishop suggests, much contemporary art actively evades aesthetic judgment by conveniently straddling doubled ontologies.48 This situation, as Bishop has consistently argued, is ultimately one in which an artist might claim, for example, that the political implications of her work are far more important than mere art (despite the fact that she might sound preposterously “arty” if asked to justify her work in any serious political discourse). But isn’t art in and of itself capable of generating serious discourse? The “double dipping” Bishop is referring to here implicates much contemporary art as always in danger of either retreating into the specialized rhetoric used to frame it to an art-literate audience (and consequently of contradicting any broadly inclusive ethos that it purports to promote) or, conversely, evading aesthetic judgment in the name of more easily morally justifiable values such as community awareness or “good politics.” Furthermore, this is often the kind of work that is accompanied by generic artist statements that uncritically regurgitate the fashionable critical rhetoric of the day. Today, for example, artists are almost ubiquitously interrogating ideas (just as they were once “unpacking” ideas in the 1980s or “unfolding” ideas in the 1990s). It is also common to make extraordinarily vague claims that a work is somehow rejecting established binaries by being positioned between or at the intersection of more than one discourse, discipline, or medium (without recognizing that this now generic approach is in turn paradoxically territorializing and uncritically fetishizing this unclearly demarcated “in-between zone”). Given the tendency for artists to reject discrete aesthetic objects and traditional gallery formats in favor of dynamic spatially and temporally expanded contexts,

Where Is Art?  23 coupled with the fact that anything can now potentially become art once it occupies the structural place of art, it appears that the historical trajectory that has destroyed hierarchies of form is now irreversible. Although we are no longer in a period of clear dialectical distinction, the art/life distinction must remain active for the processes of radical fictionalization that we consensually accept as contemporary art to continue. Consequently, it is often when art is dressed in its most threadbare clothes, or in other words, when the distinction between art and life is closest to arbitrary or indistinguishable, that it is most readily accepted as capable of producing novelty. From Danto’s articulation of literal indiscernibility to Marcel Duchamp’s historical conceptualization of the “infra-thin” as the slightest margin of dissimilitude between apparently identical entities, there are many historical examples of artists that have produced novel content within the thinnest of delineations between art and the continuum of lived experience.49 And, as we have already established, in order for literally indiscernible difference to transcend arbitrariness and to be marked as philosophical difference, the object or event must first be recognized as straddling profoundly different ontologies. The performance artist Tehching Hsieh, for example, is renowned for the way in which his extreme endurance performance works have radically collapsed distinctions between art and life. His five One Year Performances in New York between 1978 and 1986, for example—together with his Thirteen-Year Plan (1986–99) (a period in which Hsieh made art but did not show it publicly)—all ultimately required the liberal accompaniment of supplementary and paratextual material in order to be meaningfully transmitted to audiences as art. Tellingly, for artists such as Hsieh, such materials enable audiences to build the experience of the work in their mind. In some ways, the imponderably high stakes of works such as these are in many ways also their downfall. Perhaps, at least for some audiences, it is possible to become so beset by the imponderability of scale and effort that we lose sight of aesthetic value. It is relatively easy to assemble a working list of historical examples of works of art that pivot around that which is otherwise barely perceptible, invisible, or contingent. One particularly pronounced example of the foregrounding of seeming invisibility is found in the moment in 1969 in which Robert Barry staged the inconspicuous release of invisible gas into the Mojave Desert to produce Inert Gas Series. Here, the only evidence presented to the absent viewer was documentary photographs of the artist’s actions. At around the same time, Michael Asher used industrial blowers to punctuate architectural spaces or empty galleries with invisible shafts of air in his series Vertical Columns of Accelerated Air (1966–67), while Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin’s unspecified column of air over Oxfordshire, Air Show/Air Conditioning (1966–67), offered another comparable example. (This kind of approach was later given political content by Amy Balkin in her 2004 project Public Smog, an “atmospheric park” created using financial, political, and legal methods to promote awareness of air pollution.) Historically, artists have attempted to illustrate the threshold between art and everything else in a variety of ways. For his first New York solo show in 1973, for example, Daniel Buren suspended 19 striped canvas squares on a cable that ran from one end of the John Weber Gallery to the other and then out the window to a building on the other side of the street and back. Once out of the gallery, the striped canvas square assumed a literal semblance with other non-art iterations of stripes within the continuum of everyday existence (i.e., awnings, curtains, clothing, etc.). Again, in

24  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy cases such as these, maintaining an artworld connection remains necessary to mark this play of symbolic difference. And this artworld connection need not be activated by physical proximity to an actual gallery. It is only, for example, through the promotional activities of the Dia Foundation that the existence of many ambitious public artworks—such as the especially subtle 24-hour/7-day-a-week harmonic sound installation Times Square by Max Neuhaus in New York’s Times Square—is noticeable to any public at all.50 One intriguing recent example of a subtle artistic intervention is the ostensibly secretive organization by the Random Institute51 of an exhibition in 2016 in Pyongyang in North Korea titled All the Lights We Cannot See.52 For this exhibition, nine artists were invited to contribute to a project in which they were both conceptually and necessarily committed to secrecy. Apart from a very limited series of enigmatic installation shots, the most explicit trace of the exhibition’s existence is a one-line mention on each of the participating artists’ résumés. Tellingly, when asked about the exhibition, all participating artists agreed to respond with “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”53

Distribution and circulation A key characteristic of much art produced in the internet era is that it employs comparable technical means in circulation, storage, display, conservation, and reproduction. In this sense, the problem of the inseparability of form and content in contemporary art is further problematized. The internet is not simply a tool or medium but rather a whole ecosystem in which artists research, conceptualize, produce, and distribute their work. Yet artists are only beginning to reckon with ways in which these seemingly invisible yet extraordinarily powerful technologies dissolve boundaries and unify distributive systems into multiform networked spaces. Where then is a work of art in the age of the internet? Any response to this question demands consideration of both the distributed nature of the internet and the materially distributed nature of much contemporary art more generally. Historically, some forms of conceptual art, such as “mail art,” for example, already exemplified a potential for maintaining a unified identity despite global material distribution. Today, the shape and nature of digital distribution is a core concern for many artists. Although artists continue to identify explicitly with specific cultural and social groupings, the ways in which a digital object moves across and through spaces and borders can be understood to at once disperse and solidify cultural specificities. As noted earlier, it is folly to call internet-based art immaterial, for the storage and dissemination of internet-based content still conforms to the laws of physics. Although the rise of the internet has led to a revival of interest in historical ideas related to so-called dematerialization, the same problem facing conceptual artists in the late 1960s and 1970s prevails—the internet does not negate the need for a “vehicular medium” of some kind to transmit an idea as art from one mind to another.54 The internet has only compounded pre-existing perplexities surrounding the where, what, and when of a work of art. At a basic level, this question was of course already encapsulated, as famously noted by Benjamin in 1936, in the inherent reproducibility of the printed page and the photographic image. Yet the digital realm does introduce additional layers to this conundrum, particularly in relation to the photographic image. As Osborne observes, although “the whole question of where ‘the photograph’ is” was already “difficult to answer under the conditions of chemical-based analogue

Where Is Art?  25 55

images,” the digitally produced image now constitutes “a visible copy of an invisible original.”56 Notwithstanding the requisite presence of at least one material form to transmit an idea from artist to audience, the form of this materialization is (at least hypothetically) infinitely interchangeable. As Artie Vierkant explains, a work of art in the age of the internet can be accessed in a variety of different ways: In the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author.57 We are thus presented with a new and unprecedented form of “commons” once advanced by Karl Marx. But even an intermediate user knows that this is where the utopian ring ends. Free access to so much courts its own costs, not least by giving multinationals, governments, and search agents free access to “us.” Consequently, we inhabit an age Shoshana Zuboff has presciently named “surveillance capitalism.”58 In a sense, within this involved discussion of where art is, we must never forget the high degree to which we too, in all our convictions of being free agents, have become the locus of information and control.

Post-internet The already seemingly unfashionable neologism “post-internet art” was, at least popularly, coined by Marisa Olson in 200859 and further defined by Gene McHugh in 2009.60 Perhaps most succinctly, as Vierkant observes, post-internet art is “informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials.”61 Tellingly, the fact that the term itself is now a cliché is perhaps further evidence of its core thesis regarding the now ubiquitous banalities of the conditions it seeks to encapsulate. In any event, the ever-increasing speed and accessibility of the technologies involved, and the sheer girth of the worlds in which art is now produced, disseminated, and discussed, will ensure that much of the content of this text will be dated by the time it goes to print. In a so-called post-internet climate, a work or exhibition is understood to exist concurrently across both traditional modes of object display and in the versions and alternative materializations presented online. This situation has arisen on the back of a historical era already described by Krauss as beset by a “post-medium condition”—a condition in which anything can be anything else and something formed in one medium can be readily expressed through another whilst maintaining a connection to the originary medium through symbolically expanded discourse.62 We can also recognize that this post-internet situation simply is a technologically augmented extension of postconceptual art’s established capacity to maintain an identifiable unity across, as Osborne describes it, a “complex distribution of artistic materials, across a multiplicity of material forms and practices” despite being expressed through a “singular, though internally multitudinous work.”63 For Vierkant, contemporary artists routinely create works that move seamlessly from physical to online presentation, “either changing for each context, built with an intention of universality, or created with a deliberate irreverence for either venue of transmission.”64 Within globally

26  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy distributed yet highly specialized digital communities, the process of digital transmission naturally becomes an inextricable part of the world of the work. Once again, by activating a network of relations encapsulating various discrete materializations, we can still identify specific works—irrespective as to whether the initial point of entry is online or offline.

Net art and online exhibitions As we have already established, new art forms and practices emerging in tandem with digitally activated modes of presentation and dissemination have radically reshaped the artworld. As is also the case with broader cultural production, informational transmission has become as important as content creation. One consistent factor in the dispositional development of internet and post-internet art are questions related to the political nature of distribution and access. It is therefore unsurprising that many contemporary artists seek to enter, disrupt, or take control of privately controlled distribution systems to critique power inequities. One extraordinary historical example on the incoming tide of net art was Cornelia Sollfrank’s 1997 response to a Hamburger Kunsthalle call for submissions for a net art competition. In forming her submission, Sollfrank used a program that collected random HTML materials from the web and automatically combined them to enter 289 fictional women artists in the competition. Sollfrank’s Female Extension was then activated in the moment in which the unsuspecting museum proudly announced how many women had entered, before predictably declaring an all-male list of winners. Today, given that many artists are more familiar with using a computer than traditional fine art production techniques, and given that art audiences are already familiar with digital media, the distinction between a work of art and an internet meme or everyday digital artifact can sometimes seem rather amorphous. But before we get too carried away with this ontological problem, there is no logical reason to view this symbolic distinction differently to any post-Duchampian art. If the internet has profoundly transformed how culture is created, documented, and archived, how have artists met this transformation? It is uncontroversial to assert that all art involves at least some form of mediation, translation, or transmission. Yet digital art exemplifies “remediation,” insofar as it assumes the form of a revision whilst foregrounding a new medium.65 Perhaps in simply extending upon postmodern art and popular cultural tendencies toward self-referencing (for instance, paintings about painting or TV about TV), many artists have naturally gravitated toward the production of websites about websites or social media about social media. In 2014, for example, Amalia Ulman ran a semi-fictionalized makeover though her Instagram account titled Excellences and Perfections. Here, Ulman pretended to undergo a breast augmentation, followed the Zao Dha Diet, attended pole-dancing lessons, and paraded lingerie in stylized interiors. Tellingly, even Ulman’s friends were unable to distinguish her real and fictional persona. This work has already entered the canon as the first serious Instagram artwork. Some curators and institutions see the net as a platform for creating exhibitions. Surprisingly, this can sometimes involve even more work than mounting a traditional exhibition. To develop an online exhibition, curators must consider the distributional nature of the web and technical characteristics such as variability and virality. They also need be prepared to continue promoting and updating the project.

Where Is Art?  27 Looking beyond the exhibition, the task of documentation then encounters problems of ephemerality and obsolete digital platforms. For some curators, these are challenges that can be built into the curatorial premise itself. The Tate’s The Gallery of Lost Art (2012–13), for example, was an exclusively online museum exhibition which sought to present “surrogates” for “lost” historical artworks, repurposed spatial and televisual tropes from crime and forensic science programs to cast its online audience in the role of forensic investigator.66 Offering a scalable high-resolution array of paratextual material presented on virtual display tables viewed from above, The Gallery of Lost Art was available online for only one year, and then pulled down permanently. Controversially, especially given the production price tag of £300,000 (over US$400,000), the decision to end the project after one year sought to accentuate the exhibition’s core curatorial “insights into loss.”67 Significantly, the curatorial premise for The Gallery of Lost Art emphasized that artworks should be understood in relation to “a broad ecology of ideas, influences, and connections, in which the material existence of the artworks was only one.”68 Undoubtedly, no artwork is ever completely lost if we maintain some cultural knowledge and evidence, no matter how meagre, of its existence. This fact brings us back to the problem of where and when any work or exhibition is understood to exist.

Image ⇄ object

Mass-circulated digital images can quickly become unanchored from originary contexts, collapsing distinctions between specific locations and temporal zones, and in doing so, contribute to a sense of a perpetual present that is deceptively divorced from the world of actual bodies and objects in time. Meanwhile, given that images have always existed outside of a visual art context, they cannot be ontologically contained within the confines of its discourse. Today, we are surrounded by images as never before. Yet although the digital image offers seemingly endless possibilities for manipulation and dissemination, it is important to remember that we cannot receive images without the vehicular support of objects. This image/object relationality also sits at the core of our “where is art?” dilemma. The production and dissemination of the digital image now touches most aspects of late capitalist existence. Importantly, the internet and associated problems of locational specificity is also an issue for artists producing objects for traditional modes of display. Even painters producing works for conventional gallery walls are doing so in an era in which the digital invariably appears at least somewhere in the chain from conception through production to exhibition, dissemination, and archive. As Alex Bacon noted in 2016, even contemporary painting no longer primarily attends to “pictorial space, but, rather, is engaged with the question of object versus image.”69 Moreover, he asks, “does a painting lie in the object, or in the image, or in the text about the work?”70 What is actually present, and where? Osborne articulates this bidirectional dilemma beautifully: The image at once presents an absent thing and designates the thing presented as unreal, because it is absent. In other words, the image presents in two directions at once, the image is constitutively, ontologically ambiguous…. That’s the power of the image. It points to the presence of the unreal and the absence of the real (it performs both these functions simultaneously).71

28  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy Regardless of how we choose to look at it, there is no escaping the fact that contemporary artists, irrespective of the content of their work, are implicated in ways of thinking and making formed in response to the ubiquity of the digital image. Moreover, as noted earlier, it is now likely that more people will encounter a work through the backlit glow of a portable screen than via any other means. This still new but already dominant reality has not only fundamentally changed the way that we look at images, it has also profoundly diminished our attention spans. In the words of Bishop, as images now dance across screens, “our eyes just scan the surface” as part of a process of “rapid-fire skimming.”72 So how do artists meaningfully compete with the broader cacophony of competing distractions that surround art received through or alongside the backlit glow of portable screens? For Osborne, this situation is already inherently paradoxical, for “art distracts, as well as resisting distraction [yet] is received in distraction.”73 The implications of these technologies are still uncertain: Today, with the digitally based convergence of audio-visual communication technologies, the training ground of distracted reception has moved again, from television to the multiplying sites and social functions of the interactive, liquid crystal-display screen: smartphones and tablet computers, in particular. We are experiencing a new, much more spatially diffuse “cult of distraction” of the internet, the social and economic—but not yet the artistic—significance of which is clear.74 It is unsurprising, given the proliferation of online activity more generally, that the dissemination of much contemporary artistic production also employs and reflects the practices of copying, hyperlinking, sharing, tagging, and filtering that dominate contemporary lived experience. The way in which the internet now forms a subject, theme, and method has led to a growth of artistic events and activities that variously reflect upon, take place within, or are organized online. In the digital age, artists have in many ways become far more self-sufficient entities. Artists no longer simply make works and exhibitions. They also create events, texts, and archives while consistently managing online representations of their work. Peer-to-peer technologies, through which users modify and re-post media objects, have also disrupted long established assumptions that artists create, curators select and interpret, and gallerists or traditional publishers disseminate. Consequently, the locus of activity is as difficult to ascertain as the nature of image/object relations.

The specter of popular culture In the old days, as the phrase goes, it was easy to officiate between high and low art. The encroachment of the low into the high was a fairly easy dialectic to grasp, which, along with its implication of a transvaluation of values of the new over the old, made pop art a favorite for high school and first year art students. Put bluntly, cultural phenomena that were not art, from places not germane to art, entered into art and art’s domain. We may continue to look back on this time with some degree of wistfulness, since the shift is so comprehensible. It took wing in the 1960s, when there was still faith in activism and social change, when the “inside” and the “outside” of ­institutions—be they art-related or most other discipline-oriented activities—were still relatively coherently demarcated. Since then, it was all but an expectation for

Where Is Art?  29 artists, including performers, composers, novelists, and poets, to muddy the waters of “pure” expression. The appropriation of popular culture henceforth entered the growing list of artistic devices. But in the 1980s and perhaps into the 1990s, despite institutional critique and the various other artistic ironists and anti-disestablishmentarians, there was a trust in the walls of cultural institutions. Epistemically unstable as they were, museums and academies could be seen to uphold values and were invaluable storehouses of knowledge in the face of growing amnesia. Yet by the turn of the new millennium, it became more and more evident that it was not all a case of ignorance, arrogance, nor amnesia. Instead, we witnessed a rapid and sizeable change in episteme, a cultural paradigm shift. In comparison to established historical standards, in which marked cultural shifts initially took centuries and later decades to instate, this one seemed to arrive almost overnight. Comics, street art and graffiti, internet memes, music videos, and other moving image forms unrelated to art—and perhaps most evidently fashion— would become the loci of practices that could not be ignored in their capacity for both their criticality and their growing and increasingly sophisticated audiences. If we are to give lip service to the unfortunate but unfortunately (for the moment) unassailable criterion of the “success” of an exhibition according to the number of visitors, the annual exhibitions held by the Fashion Institute of the Metropolitan Museum Art, New York, count among the top since Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty in 2011, while the Met Gala, a fashion event, now garners attention to begin to rival the Academy Awards. Meanwhile, the popular effect of Hiro Murai’s music video for Childish Gambino’s song This Is America (2020)—which addressed US gun violence, systemic racism, and discrimination—dwarfs that of many a feel-good attempt to curate away racism in the visual arts (which is in turn dwarfed by the impact of 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s vernacular video of the death of George Floyd in 2020). In short, it is not difficult to recognize that far more substantial shifts—in terms of critical social change, innovative style, and substance—are taking place far away from the often-­ introverted so-called critical concerns of the artworld. In response to these new cultural conditions, one of us has coined the term “Gaga aesthetics,” 75 which David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro a little earlier dubbed “wild art.”76 Using the cult pop figure Lady Gaga (aka Stefani Germanotta) as an avatar as opposed to central node, Gaga aesthetics can first be grasped in their most literal sense of “aesthetics gone gaga,” hence a state of affairs when tradition is up-ended such that we are compelled to look elsewhere for the critical strategies for which we once turned to art. Contemporary audiences, for example, are far more likely to turn to Jordan Peel, Banksy, or Ava DuVernay for a social message over Jeff Koons or Ai Weiwei. Here, a twenty-first-century pop phenomenon such as Lady Gaga herself is worth scrutiny, whether in sequences from her videos or her appropriated “improvement” on the canonic feminist work by Jana Sterbak, the meat dress.77 The number of university subjects and academic journal articles devoted to the cultural significance of Madonna for an earlier generation or Beyoncé today adds further weight to this argument. Another variation worth mentioning here is Jack Halberstam’s “low theory.”78 There are myriad other examples of critical practices that tell us about ourselves and the world, interrogate complex matter with nuance and intensity—all within the perilous capitalist-driven domain of what Adorno (with Max Horkheimer) called the “culture industry.”79 Adorno pitted the culture industry (his specialized term for popular and mass culture)

30  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy against “authentic” art. Today, authentic art can be found embedded within the culture industry. This had once been the culture industry’s “alienated” foil. Yet now we are presented with texts and meta-texts, values of different quanta and depth, meanings of unquestioning complexity living symbiotically in the dross of popular ­culture—which is no longer to be easily relegated or cast aside as it was in the “old days.” Consequently, our “where is art?” question is only further compounded by the fact that art-like activities exist in pockets and enclaves within “non-art” domains. Moreover, these domains all too frequently do not care for the fictionalized conceit of the art label. One of many early correctives in this shift of emphasis is found in the great fashion photographer Helmut Newton who, since the 1970s, exerted an inestimable influence on subsequent figurative photography, and later on video art. On the occasions when he was asked whether he considered himself an artist, he replied that he didn’t care either way. This indifference poses challenges on a number of levels for art and those seeking out “artness.” It may also be a tacit indictment of what art as such—fine art, artworld sanctioned art—has managed to achieve in response to the challenges of the last few decades, helped on by a purblind market and craven curators. Note that we are not advocating the end of art in the manner of Hegel, or more recently, Danto or Donald Kuspit (“post-art”). Instead, we are arguing that maybe the life and soul of the party is not in the museum but rather somewhere you might pass on the way there…

So, where is art? Although many of the same questions that have long defined art’s relationship with the world hold, the dimensional scope of some art historical problems is being hyperbolically distorted across an obese present of global multi-temporal transcultural interactivity. This is a world that can at times seem wider than history is deep. Against this backdrop, contemporary art is hypothetically materially unlimited, ambiguously fictionalized, defined by a mutual insufficiency of material and contextual elements, and features a limit function provided only by the institutional networks of the artworld. Perhaps counterintuitively, the more that we understand a work of contemporary art as a spatially diffused distribution of elements across time and space, the more that the indeterminacy of art itself assumes a conspicuous materiality. Works of art presented in both direct and indirect relationship with the internet are less likely to be regarded as fixed in space and time, and, correspondingly, more likely to be regarded as porous and open to continual transformation. Moreover, given that we can now effectively scroll along or zoom in and out of some objects potentially infinitely, questions of scale are increasingly unhinged from bodily registers. At best, however, art is still capable of performing an important and critically reflective intermediary role between what we experience as embodied beings and that which is increasingly abstracted in code on massive servers situated elsewhere in time and space. Today, although an artist or artistic collective presented online might be indistinguishable from a corporation or brand, comparable yet ontologically distinct creative activity is always already happening online and around us. Unlike the assertions of aesthetic autonomy that prevailed in key twentieth-century art, much art in the twenty-first century is perhaps more concerned with negotiating relationships and testing spatial and temporal boundaries. Consequently, many core twentieth-century contestations

Where Is Art?  31 pertaining to art’s identity, value, and meaning have been recast as increasingly fuzzily demarcated and ambiguously oscillating multiform problems pertaining to art’s situatedness, relationality, and relevance.

Notes 1 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, expanded ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 2 The mutual insufficiency of contemporary art’s aesthetic and conceptual dimensions is explored at length in Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013). 3 Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Illuminationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 136–69. 4 Allographic is a term introduced by Nelson Goodman to describe works such as pieces of music or literary texts where there can be multiple copies, each of which is equally an instance of the work. 5 Intermedia was a term used in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe artistic activities taking place in between disciplines, media, and genres. 6 See Peter Osborne, “Transcategoriality: Postconceptual Art,” in Anywhere or Not at All, 88–104. 7 This unified constellation of distributed material elements is explored at length in Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All. 8 See Jeffrey Strayer, Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 9 In his 1938 book, The Principles of Art, Robin Collingwood essentially argued that works of art are expressions of emotion and not material things. See Robin Collingwood, The Principles of Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). 10 Douglass Huebler, “Artist Statement,” in the gallery publication to accompany the exhibition January 5–31, 1969 at Seth Siegelaub Gallery, New York, 1969. 11 See Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973). First published as “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–6. 12 Craig Dworkin, No Medium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 138. 13 Marcel Broodthaers, “Interview with Marcel Broodthaers with Jean-Michel Vlaeminck, 1965,” interview by Jean-Michel Vlaeminck in Marcel Broodthaers: Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafia, 2012), 151–2. 14 Susan Hillier, “Artists at Work: Susan Hiller,” interview by Sarah Lowndes, Afterall, February 2, 2011, accessed May 3, 2021, https://www.afterall.org/article/ artists-at-work-susan-hiller. 15 Elizabeth Schellekens, “The Aesthetic Value of Ideas,” in Philosophy & Conceptual Art, ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 82. 16 See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 17 See Joseph Grigely, Exhibition Prosthetics (Boston, MA: Bedford Press; London: Sternberg Press, 2010). 18 Markus Gabriel, The Power of Art (Oxford: Polity Press, 2020), 34. 19 Peter Osborne, “Contemporary Art Is Post-Conceptual Art,” (public lecture, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota, Como, July 9, 2010). 20 See Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 152–3. 21 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 110. 22 Osborne, 113; emphasis in the original. 23 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. 24 Krauss, 34. 25 Krauss, 38. 26 Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (1997): 91.

32  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy 27 See Adam Geczy and Vicky Karaminas, “Fashion is a (Dis)Embodied Practice, or the Persistence of Perfume,” conclusion to Fashion Installation: Body, Space, and Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 103–5. 28 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 100. 29 Osborne, 100. 30 Place (when used as a verb) can also denote the action of setting something in a particular location. In humanistic geography, place refers to how people think about a specific space. A place is therefore a space attributed specific meaning(s). A place might be anything from a childhood playground to a nation state. In this context, we might also consider the difference between a/the “world” and the “earth.” By extension, a “placeholder” is an object, a gesture, or a marker of some kind temporarily placed as a stand-in for a location or idea. This can include anything from a personal item left to mind a space to a flag placed on a celestial object in the name of a terrestrial nation state. 31 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1977), 6. 32 Hal Foster, “Close-Up: A Rrose in Berlin,” Artforum International 49, no. 8 (April 2011), accessed May 3, 2021, https://www.artforum.com/print/201104/ close-up-a-rrose-in-berlin-27825. 33 John Armleder “To Be Determined,” interview by Fabrice Stroun, Artforum International 49, no. 8 (April 2011): 174. 34 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 10. 35 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Presses du reel, 2002), 113. 36 Bruno David et al., “Nawarla Gabarnmang, a 45,180±910 cal BP Site in Jawoyn Country, Southwest Arnhem Land Plateau,” Journal of Australian Archaeology 73, no. 1 (2011): 73–7. 37 Fallen painted rock at this site has ash residue radiocarbon dated at 27631±717 years cal BP, indicating that the ceiling must have been painted more than 28,000 years ago. 38 Robert Gunn, Bruno David, Jean-Jacques Delannoy and Margaret Katherine, “The Past 500 Years of Rock Art at Nawarla Gabarnmang, Central-Western Arnhem Land,” in The Archaeology of Rock Art in Western Arnhem Land, Australia, ed. Bruno David, Paul S.C. Taçon, Jean-Jacques Delannoy, Jean-Michel Geneste (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2017), 303–28. 39 Louise Lawler, Birdcalls, 1972/1981/2008, audio recording, text, 7:01 minutes, LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut, located at Dia Beacon, New York, accessed May 3, 2021, https://www.diaart.org/collection/collection/lawler-louise-birdcalls-19721981-l2005-100. 40 Alex Bacon, “Surface, Image, Reception: Painting in a Digital Age,” Rhizome, May 24, 2016, accessed May 3, 2021, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/may/24/ surface-image-reception-painting-in-a-digital-age. 41 Liam Gillick, “Contemporary Art Does Not Account for That Which Is Taking Place,” e-flux journal 21 (December 2010), accessed January 17, 2021, https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/21/67664/contemporary-art-does-not-account-for-that-which-is-taking-place/. 42 Andrew McNamara, “What Is Contemporary Art? A Review of Two Books by Terry Smith,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 12 (2012): 255. 43 As Arthur C. Danto has argued since the 1960s, artistic difference is not asserted literally but rather philosophically. For Danto, a good analogy for distinguishing literal indiscernibility is found in the moment in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962) that references Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)—a poem where the last two lines are repeated: “And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.” The first line literally and autobiographically states “I have a long way to go before I can sleep.” The second, literally identical, line becomes metaphysical by implying “I have much to do before I die.” Arthur C. Danto, “Is It Art?,” interview by Alan Saunders, The Philosopher’s Zone, ABC Radio National, 1:35 p.m., March 4, 2006, accessed July 26, 2021, http:// www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/is-it-art/3301278. 4 4 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 581. 45 Danto, “The Artworld.” 46 Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 8.

Where Is Art?  33 47 Lee, 8. 48 See Claire Bishop, “Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?,” in Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011, ed. Nato Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 35–45. 49 Marcel Duchamp described the “infra-thin” as the slightest margin of dissimilitude between seemingly identical entities. He analogized such interstices of barely discernible difference as reminiscent of the warmth of a recently vacated chair. Duchamp’s term was closely linked to what he also called deferral or delay. Indeed, the infra-thin, Duchamp declared, cannot be defined, “one can only give examples of it.” See Marjorie Perloff, “‘But Isn’t the Same at Least the Same?’: Translatability in Wittgenstein, Duchamp, and Jacques Roubaud,” Jacket 14 (July 2001), accessed September 5, 2021, http://jacketmagazine.com/14/perl-witt.html. 50 Max Neuhaus, Times Square, 1977/2002, digital sound signal, Dia Art Foundation, New York, located on Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets, New York. This artwork was originally installed at Times Square from 1977 to 1992, and then permanently reinstalled in 2002. 51 Based in Zurich, Switzerland, Random Institute has produced intriguingly ambiguous exhibitions, events, and research initiatives around the world featuring work by artists such as Richard Long, James Lee Byars, Cory Arcangel, Zilvinas Kempinas, Guido van der Werve, Bethan Huws, Carey Young, Julian Charrière, Federico Herrero, Allora & Calzadilla, Luis Camnitzer, Alfredo Jaar, Regina José Galindo, Aníbal López, Teresa Margolles, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Liliana Porter. Founded by Sandino Scheidegger and Luca Müller in 2007, Random Institute’s focus is new exhibition formats and exhibition-making as practice. 52 All the Lights We Cannot See (2016) was conceived by Random Institute and curated by Anna Hugo and Sandino Scheidegger. The exhibition was held on April 9–12, 2016, on the 23rd floor of the Yanggakdo International Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. A manipulated and reproduced issue of the state-owned Pyongyang Times served as the exhibition catalogue. See “All the Lights We Cannot See,” Random Institute, accessed August 17, 2018, http://randominstitute.org/event/north-korea-show. 53 Random Institute, “All the Lights We Cannot See.” 54 David Davies, Art as Performance (Oxford: Blackwells, 2004), 59. 55 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 124; emphasis in the original. 56 Osborne, 129; emphasis in the original. 57 Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet,” Jstchillin, 2010, accessed May 3, 2021, http://jstchillin.org/artie/vierkant.html. 58 Soshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019). 59 Maria Olson, “Interview with Marisa Olson,” interview by Régine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art, March 28, 2008, accessed August 17, 2020, http://www.we-make-­moneynot-art.com/archives/2008/03/how-does-one-become-marisa.php. 60 Gene McHugh, Post Internet, accessed August 17, 2020, http://122909a.com (site discontinued). An archive of this blog, which was funded by a Warhol Foundation arts writers grant, was preserved by Rhizome at the New Museum, New York, accessed July 12, 2021, https://122909a.com.rhizome.org/. 61 Artie Vierkant, “Image Object Post-Internet.” 62 In describing a “post-medium condition,” Krauss recognized that the specificity of a medium is not synonymous with its material form. Eschewing Greenberg’s modernist ideal of medium specificity, Krauss re-conceptualizes the medium as an open field and discourse. For Krauss, the medium as a supporting structure reconciles material and technical specificity with conceptual diversity. Ultimately, however, for Krauss, this relational differentiation amplifies, rather than reduces, the conceptual importance of media. Moreover, Krauss sees the medium as an aggregative “network” or “complex” of media. Consequently, the idea of painting can be understood as a structural place, a performative action, a remediated form or even as an anti-formation containing no independent essence other than being “not painting.” See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).

34  Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy

63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79

Picking up on Krauss’s description, Craig Dworkin argues that we encounter an inescapability of media—within overlapping networks—that runs counter to the immateriality claimed within some branches of conceptualism. See Craig Dworkin, No Medium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 110. Artie Vierkant, “Image Object Post-Internet.” See Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). The Gallery of Lost Art (2012–13) was curated by Tate’s head of collection research Jennifer Mundy. This online exhibition was developed together with Tate’s creative media director Jane Burton and Glasgow-based digital design agency ISO which is led by Damien Smith and Mark Breslin. Jennifer Mundy and Jane Burton, “Online Exhibitions,” (paper presented at the Annual Conference of Museums and the Web, Portland, Oregon, April 17–20, 2013), accessed May 3, 2021, http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/online-exhibitions/. Mundy and Burton, “Online Exhibitions.” Alex Bacon, “Surface, Image, Reception: Painting in a Digital Age,” Rhizome, May 24, 2016, accessed July 12, 2021, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/may/24/ surface-image-reception-painting-in-a-digital-age. Bacon, “Surface, Image, Reception.” Peter Osborne, “On the Historical Existence of Objects: Archive as Afterlife and Life of Art,” (conference presentation, Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions, ECAL/University of Art and Design, Lausanne, Switzerland, October 21, 2016), audio recording, 33:48, accessed July 12, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2XmSSQcII58. Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide,” Artforum International 51, no. 1 (2012): 434–41. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 186. Osborne, 185. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, Gaga Aesthetics: Art, Fashion, Popular Culture, and the Up-Ending of Tradition (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins, the Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2019). Jana Sterbak, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987, raw flank steaks sewn together, edition of two, plus one artist’s copy, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris. This artwork was first shown at Galerie Rene Blouin, Montréal, and later shown the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. “Any book that begins with a quote from SpongeBob SquarePants and is motored by wisdom gleaned from Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run, and Finding Nemo, among other animated guides to life, runs the risk of not being taken seriously. Yet this is my goal. Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried-and-true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours. Indeed, terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness.” Jack (Judith) Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 6. The term “culture industry” was coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their 1947 book Dialectic of Enlightenment (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

3 Performance, Art, and the Relational Self Amelia Jones

Euro-American modernist discourse in the mid-twentieth century reinforced a conception of artworks as singular objects to be apprehended and judged with “disinterest” in “neutral” spaces. However, even as it reached its height after World War II, this paradigm started to change. As epitomized by the multidisciplinary performance events held by John Cage and others at Black Mountain College in North Carolina on the east coast of the US in the early 1950s, artists across Europe and the US began to move dramatically away from the concept of art as object to enact art more directly as a process of exchange between subjects and objects in a range of spaces, engaging both art audiences and unsuspecting general publics. This shift emphasized art as a form of relational exchange determining its meaning and value. Art could no longer be seen as just the final, static, finished product enshrined in a gallery or museum. At the same time, this new concept of art also foregrounded the relationality of the self, connecting to the political rights movements, to the rise of social science models of the individual subject as constructed in interpersonal exchanges in social situations, and to poststructuralist philosophy and postmodern theory in the 1960s. This essay will foreground four specific art practices from the 1960s through the 1980s to establish the parameters of the concept of art as a relational encounter. I explore such works as exemplary of the shift from the question of “what is art?” to that of “where is art?,” a transformation that I will argue to be inextricably connected to the social context and to political and intellectual debates and evolving ideas at the time, especially in the US. *** 1964–66 Cut Piece: Japanese artist Yoko Ono (born 1933 and raised in Japan), in what is now known as one of the most famous performance art pieces of the past half a century, sat on stages in Kyoto (1964), Tokyo (1964), New York (1965), and London (1966), and invited members of the audience to come forward and cut off her clothes as she sat passively.1 This simple piece shattered two longstanding conventions in both theater and the visual arts: The theatrical separation of proscenium or artwork and audience, as well as the necessary occlusion of the direct appearance of the artist in the field of her or his visual artwork. Ono performed art as relational, the artist’s body and the site it occupied as central to the artwork’s formation and meaning (which took place in a specific social space, over time). *** DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-3

36  Amelia Jones 1968 Relational Object (Goggles) and 1967 The I and the You: Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–88) produced these radical works during a period of extreme repression in Brazil (which suffered under a dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s). 2 These pieces called for the explicit enactment of relations between two people as the open-ended and socially situated work of art. With Relational Object (Goggles), two people engage one another through pairs of swimming goggles fitted with hinged mirrors and connected, forcing their heads and bodies into a direct relation. With The I and the You, Clark literalizes relationality of self and other by making doubled rubber outfits to be donned by two visitors to a gallery or public space. The two halves of the suit, which include masks covering the face area, are joined by an umbilical cord of rubber. Once put on, although the participants cannot see each other, they are, in Clark’s formulation, psycho-sexually connected. *** 1968 Tap and Touch Cinema: Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940), a wellknown street performance in collaboration with Peter Weibel. The performance existed and continues to exist in and through the process of relational encountering as it takes place in public spaces and, simultaneously, in and through photographic media (specifically photographic documentation and the parodied structures of cinema). The participants are instructed by Weibel’s barking commands through the megaphone, as he exhorts witnesses to reach through a box EXPORT wears on her torso to touch her breasts. The performative action by a person self-­identifying as an artist is the “art” of the work, which otherwise would simply not exist as art. The art is ratified both by the action and by the structures of photography and cinema. *** 1986 My Calling Card: African American artist and philosopher Adrian Piper (b. 1948) produces two cards, one on white paper (#2) and one on beige (#1). The former warns aggressive men: “Dear friend, I am not here to pick anyone up or to be picked up. I am here alone because I want to be here. Alone.” The latter, more famous, version she would purportedly hand out to people at social events who made racist comments, people who seemed not to realize that the artist at the time identified as Black: Dear Friend, I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/ laughed at/agreed with that racist remark…. I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.3 With the “calling cards” Piper actualizes the relationality through which Blacks and women are relegated to object status by white dominant US culture and/or by white men: The very “othering” process that Hegelian-based identity theory pinpointed as constituting power imbalances in white Western patriarchy. By literalizing this relationality, and assertively reversing it (enunciating the sexist or racist person to be the object of her scolding), Piper forces the white person who made racist comments

Performance, Art, and the Relational Self  37 or the man who aggressed without invitation to become the objectified others to her performative articulation of selfhood as a self-identified Black woman. *** As these examples suggest, after 1960, a range of artists in Europe and North America enacted art as a relational exchange (notably Asian artists such as Ono, Shigeko Kubota, and Nam June Paik were well connected to the Euro-American art scene). Lucy Lippard had described this transformation in terms of a shift toward “dematerialization,” and Victor Burgin and many others as a move into “participatory” or “situational” aesthetics.4 By the 1990s, I and other art historians and curators variously pointed to the increasingly common use of the body in live situations—or performance—as a mode of artistic making, and of insisting on this relational aspect of art.5 Connected to this recognition, the term performative came to be mobilized in queer theory and performance discourse, and eventually in art criticism and art theory. The terms relational and performative came to function as a shorthand for the complex set of shifts that, in the art context, meant a complete transformation of the concept and structure of art (or, otherwise put, of the what, where, and when of art).6 Location, the “where,” became relevant because of the shift to process and toward using the body in relational situations. There is a deep social and political context to the turn to the relational (to the where—and perhaps the how—of art). Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” of the 1990s might seem to be an adequate, if late, recognition of the phenomenon I trace here. But in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud specifically denied the social and political contexts for the shift toward the relational and defines it as a phenomenon new to the 1990s (clearly incorrect, per my examples above). The erasure of social context is particularly disturbing. Bourriaud’s theory does not just sidestep performance and the rights movements that often motivated its articulations in the 1960s and 1970s, it explicitly denies any political motivations informing practices and theories connected to the relational: It is in this sense that we can talk of a community effect in contemporary art. It does not involve those corporate phenomena which too often act as a disguise for the most die-hard forms of conservatism (in this day and age, feminism, anti-­racism and environmentalism all operate too frequently as lobbies playing the power game by enabling it never to have to call itself into question in a structural way).7 Needless to say, my argument is precisely the opposite. The turn to relationality and performativity as modes of activating the art situation—emphasizing the where of art—is precisely parallel to, in some cases motivated by and in others encouraging of, the rise of rights movements as well as of social science and philosophical models for examining self-other relations as charged and significant in determining the meaning and value of subjects but also, in the case of art, objects in social situations.

Relationality and social science Relationality and related social science terms such as interaction, interactivity, and interpersonal perception have come to be understood as crucial structures by which

38  Amelia Jones subjects engage with one another, coarticulate each other’s expressions, responses, and even personalities, and through which one subject makes or interprets meaning in relation to another through texts or artworks. Relationality became a ubiquitous concept during this period in Euro-American thought, signaling new ways of thinking about meaning and human social life—with even individuals themselves viewed as interdependent rather than singular and fully coherent within themselves. This new notion of the subject as relational also orients toward an understanding of gender/sex as constructions, and thus toward the queer, and of race and other identifications as also fabricated. The idea of gender/sex as produced in action was fully adopted by queer theory as paradigmatic of the dynamic of queer performativity by the 1990s. In this way, we see that since the 1950s there has been a deep interconnection among artistic practices, rights movements, social science models, and (as I note below) poststructuralist philosophical critiques of modern subjectivity as well as theories of postmodernism. By the 1980s, with the recognition of Richard Schechner, one of the founders of performance studies, we see that the term relational is ensconced in the field as related to performance and the performative. For Schechner, “the world that was securely positional is becoming dizzyingly relational…. In-between is becoming the norm.”8 In her 1997 book Excitable Speech, queer feminist theorist Judith Butler even more directly links performativity with relationality (or “transitivity”). In discussing the origins of the term within linguistic philosophy she notes: The title of J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words poses the question of performativity as what it means to say that “things might be done with words.” The problem of performativity is thus immediately bound up with a question of transitivity.9 Massive social changes occurring in the 1950s and 1960s in the increasingly global so-called Western world (and elsewhere, but European-based cultures and especially the US are my focus here), including most notably the explosion of rights and postcolonial movements based on the oppression of particular subjects or communities due to their disadvantaged relationship to the power structures of patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. Theories of performativity and relationality are linked to questions of identification as well as to structures of meaning and power, and, I argue, can best be understood in relation to this rise of consciousness about identity and selfhood as articulated in relation to otherness from the 1950s forward. This understanding includes an increasing awareness of heteronormative structures of gender and sexuality, but also of racial/ethnic identifications, and generally intersectional and relational concepts of self and other. As the Cold War and colonial conflicts in India, Vietnam, Algeria, and elsewhere moved into the 1960s, and travel and communication among previously isolated parts of the world increased in volume and speed, a general consciousness of self and otherness as taking place in encounters in social spaces arose.10 In turn, this understanding of the self as relational in the social sciences and popular culture paralleled the development of poststructuralist and postmodern critiques of modernist notions of the unified subject. By the 1970s, the postmodern, decentered self was theorized as a challenge to the self/other binaries of earlier Enlightenment philosophies (such as, most notably, Hegel’s c. 1800 model of the “master/slave” dialectic).

Performance, Art, and the Relational Self  39 As Jon McKenzie notes, these patterns corresponded as well to the rise of digital technologies and of “techno-performance,” or performance-mobilizing digital and networked technologies. Techno-performance, then, also paralleled this noted development of poststructuralist philosophy’s concept of the postmodern subject (both decentered and relational). McKenzie cites Jean-François Lyotard’s poststructuralist observations in the highly influential 1979 book The Postmodern Condition about the decentering of master narratives, including that of the sovereign subject of European modernity. McKenzie argues, following Lyotard but applying a performance framework, that “performativity is the postmodern condition…. [I]t has come to govern the entire realm of social bonds.”11 McKenzie’s focus is on “social bonds” in 1950s and 1960s American culture—which I am bringing together under the rubric of “relationality.” Importantly, a relational, postmodern self is imbricated in the other, not diametrically opposed in a binary logic of difference. Poststructuralist models of critiquing modernist concepts of coherent and unified selfhood shift understandings in numerous ways, not the least by interrogating how, in Enlightenment-based Euro-American modernity, the subject came into being through oppositional moves that relentlessly defined qualities of normative gender/sexuality, race/ethnicity, nationality, class, etc., in relation to the debased parallel qualities of an “other.” As I discuss at greater length in my 2012 book Seeing Differently, this Hegelian recognition of how the modern Euro-American subject had been constructed through opposition per a permutation of the philosopher’s model of the master/slave dialectic from his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit not only played a key role in general concepts active in the post–World War II period, but was central to the rise of identity politics as we know them today.12 That Hegel’s theory and, later, Karl Marx’s theory as well as Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological model of intersubjectivity are deeply invested in exploring human existence as oppositional is clear in their mutual understanding of human embodiment and labor as establishing a relation with the natural world and its materialities. While this oppositional model is also relational, it poses the opposites as dialectically related (maintaining their separation and radical difference) rather than imbricated, as post–World War II experimental art practices variously tend to imply. Per the work of authors such as Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, the formation of identity as conceptualized in 1950s and 1960s European discourse often took place via a recognition of the binary positing the other as subordinate and disempowered. Basic to the struggles against oppression in this period were the strategies of acknowledging the hierarchical othering of the oppressed group of people—women, per Beauvoir’s example—and reversing the power structure to give them agency. This could take, and has taken, two forms in identity politics: Either through a reversal whereby “essentialist” ideas of the coalitionally defined self as inherently “female” or “Black” were aimed at the reclaiming of an “authentic” and positive voice or image and sense of cultural pride, or via notions such as Beauvoir’s famous claim that “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” as an anti- or “de-essentialized” concept of the self as “performed” in relation to social norms, other people, and larger structures of power—sometimes still implicitly binary in function.13 Both of these variants thus to some degree rely on concepts of the self as defined relationally—but still oppositionally—via others. Coalitional identity politics most often aim to wrest the oppressed person (or group) away from a negative definition as assigned by a dominant power. The coalitionally identified subject thus takes on “selfhood” rather than

40  Amelia Jones acceding to “objecthood,” but the opposition is still more or less in place, at least until queer theory of the 1990s attempted to blur boundaries and work in less oppositional (but still largely relational) ways. To this end, it is not surprising that one of the most provocative debates in queer theory pitted advocates of anti-relational queer theory (most visibly white gay men, including Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman) against supporters of anti-anti-relational queer theory (promoted compellingly by José Muñoz with a feminist queer-of-color agenda).14 As suggested, the concept of the subject or self as de-essentialized and decentered, a key trope of postmodernism and poststructuralism (and ultimately of most queer theory), aligns with postwar North American social science models of selfhood. In this discourse, sociologists and social psychologists, as well as some anthropologists, articulated theories of the self using a range of terms such as situational, relational, interactive, or interpersonal—and elaborated this self as particular in its identifications (i.e., the relational imbrication of subjects in one another is connected to their socially determined as well as psychic identifications). Most important in this regard was the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life would become hugely influential within the fields of sociology and anthropology. Artists and theorists of performance, and even the general public, became aware of Goffman’s theories as they became popularized (Goffman was Canadian but his career was largely in the US).15 Lesser known and less often attended to is the way in which Goffman saw identity and social performance as ­coextensive—the tendency to focus on psychoanalytically informed models of gendered and raced selfhood, dominant in French as well as Anglophone centers since at least mid-century, meant that the more social science-oriented concepts such as Goffman’s have often been marginalized in academic feminism in particular. But Goffman was obsessively interested in gender and race identity. In a 1976 essay entitled “Gender Display,” Goffman, sounding a bit like the queer feminist theorists who followed him a decade later, argued that gender is enacted in social situations in relational ways, involving “a dialogic character of a statement-reply kind, with an expression on the part of one individual calling forth an expression on the part of another.”16 Most strikingly, for Goffman, gender is not “essential,” nor does it reside within individuals. For Goffman, “[o]ne might just as well say there is no gender identity. There is only a schedule for the portrayal of gender.” Moreover, he stressed, although signs of gender might seem to confirm a preexisting reality, “[n]othing dictates that should we dig and poke behind these images we can expect to find anything there— except, of course, the inducement to entertain this expectation.”17 This is a huge shift from the more crude identity politics model of radical difference in that it destabilizes the self/other dynamic—each person takes their identity in relation to others in continually shifting social interactions and situations. The where of the self is just as determinate as the who and how of intersubjective identity formation. Goffman’s contribution to understandings of the social self as relational, and identity as constituted in process through ongoing social relations, parallels the development of theories and practices of relational or situational art. It is also foundational to what would become hugely influential feminist theories of gender performance or performativity: Notably in this regard, Judith Butler cites Goffman in her original 1988 article on “performative acts and gender constitution,” a formative text in establishing dominant models of gender performativity in the 1990s through a queer feminist and also poststructuralist model. But, also notably, Butler discards this

Performance, Art, and the Relational Self  41 discussion in the better-known, reworked version of this material in Gender Trouble, where she excises any reference to Goffman.18 Goffman’s work should not be dismissed, however. Its ubiquity in social science writings about selfhood in the 1960s and following points to a general interest among sociologists, social psychologists, and anthropologists in exploring the meanings of sex/gender and other identifications as constituted in relational situations—an interest that the artistic works described at the beginning of this essay make clear was shared in the visual arts.19 Dismissing Goffman by focusing on psychoanalytic, Hegelian models of self/other formation, as Butler does, tends to encourage an erasure of specific social situations (the where) of subjectification. Just as poststructuralism parallels work by artists from the 1950s onward that decenters the individual by opening art to relationality, and even as the rights movements sensitized artists to the power of activating their bodies relationally in social spaces, the social sciences have thus clearly been central to understandings of how these relational performances constituted identity and selfhood. Goffman’s work clearly parallels the innovations among artists working to establish performance practices in the art context from the late 1950s onward—for example, Allan Kaprow. The parallels between Kaprow’s 1958 rescripting of action painter Jackson Pollock as engaging later viewers by turning painting into performance (such that “the artist, the spectator, and the outer world are much too interchangeably involved here”) and Goffman’s 1959 notion of the self as performed in social spaces in relational ways are striking. 20 For both Kaprow and Goffman, the self is activated as situational and relational. In The Presentation of Self, Goffman thus argues toward the end of the book: [The] self … is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented…. [The body] merely provide[s] the peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time…. [T]he firm self accorded each performed character will appear to emanate intrinsically from its performer. 21 As Goffman makes clear, the self is but a “product of a scene” not its “cause”: This is a radical shifting of agency from individual will to a relational situation. Goffman’s research insistently traces the “interactive” nature of subjectivity and society, and of individuals in social situations, as mutually constituted or of “collaborative manufacture.” In his 1963 book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Goffman also points to examples that are relational as well as highly charged in relation to identity politics. Here, he defines stigma, or the assignment of negative attributes to individuals and then their marginalization or rejection on that basis, as specifically contextual and relational: The term stigma refers to an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor can confirm the usualness of another and is therefore neither creditable nor discreditable as a thing in itself. 22

42  Amelia Jones Goffman makes a move that we can, in relation to poststructuralism and queer theory, recognize as de-essentializing. Qualities of racial or sex inferiority are constructed through relations, not inherent. And of course, these relations open the door to biases held by others we encounter—hence discrimination and bigotry, which involve the projection of stigma outward. Goffman also points to other examples in describing the workings of stigma in a discussion of “social deviants,” with the list running from “prostitutes, drug addicts, delinquents, criminals, jazz musicians,” to “bohemians, gypsies, carnival workers, … homosexuals, and the urban unrepentant poor,” as the “folk who are considered to be engaged in some kind of collective denial of the social order.”23 Even here, Goffman is crystal clear in his language: Homosexuals, like others considered social deviants, are only imagined to “represent failures in the motivational scenes of society.”24 They are not inherently deviant. The attaching of stigma to people is quintessentially relational and contingent. Goffman is addressing stigma as perceived or constructed during a period in which, thanks to the Civil Rights and other nascent rights movements, sexual identifications were starting to broaden and race relations were being seriously reconfigured, with the rhetorical and actual violence toward Blacks and Chicano/a people (among others) openly challenged in protest movements. Goffman clearly understood stigma in terms of social hierarchies that are predicated on sexual, ethnic, or gender performances of non-­ essential subjects who are constructed in relation to others in particular social situations.

Participation art and the bodies of the rights movements As I have suggested, this social science work parallels developments in political and artistic spheres in the US: From the early 1960s through the 1980s, a number of relational works redefined what art could be by mobilizing performance to insist on art as a process taking place in the moment of interpretation, which was foregrounded as an exchange with viewers (or more accurately participants) of the work. This particular reconceptualization of art did so along structural lines—through the literal staging of the artist’s body as the work, to be engaged by others in art situations, and was complementary to the opening of art to process, time, and embodiment (all elements foundational to the shift from the question “what is art?” to that of “where is art?”). It led to a burgeoning discourse on “participation” in art or participatory art or even, recently, in the polemical work of Gustaf Almenberg, to defining an “age of participation” in art. 25 Rarely in accounts of these shifts in the concept of art have the rights movements or these social sciences insights been seen as relevant. The development of relational and participatory approaches has however always been closely connected to the ways in which rights movements have articulated their claims. Specifically in the visual arts, practices have been linked in complex ways to the various Black and Latinx rights movements, and to gay/lesbian, feminist, and queer urban creative cultures and their related rights movements. More recently Chicanx and Black Studies in the US have also claimed the radical qualities of participatory approaches for the cultures they examine. In both cases, the durationality of the performative is explicitly linked to its quality of foregrounding the exchange with future viewers or interlocutors through relationality, in a process that itself is seen as liberatory (because it highlights rather than occludes the contingency of stigma and negative identities projected onto marginalized others).

Performance, Art, and the Relational Self  43 As well, relational and performative methods have been described as inherent to the African American cultural traditions in particular. In her 2017 book South of Pico, for example, art historian Kellie Jones draws on performance studies and Black studies (particularly the work of Daphne Brooks) to argue that “[w]ithin an African American context, concepts of performance have always been tied up with the means of survival” and that “[l]iberation from enslavement often involved theatrical dissimulation, including cross-dressing and ‘passing’ (for white).”26 The works of the Black Arts movement, Jones concludes, were performative above all and performative strategies opened works directly for audience participation. And I would argue that this move to relational engagement of audiences had everything to do with the necessity of denaturalizing the putatively “neutral” systems of determining the value of art so as to insist upon the power of the creative Black body, just as feminists’ uses of their bodies in 1960s and 1970s works (such as those of Ono and EXPORT noted above) were aimed explicitly at asserting the body as both a making subject and potentially an object of the gaze. 27 Piper’s calling cards brilliantly map the destabilizing potential from an anti-racist and feminist point of view of this exposure of the relational nature of identity formation. It is no accident, then, that this kind of radical relational work has largely been activated and produced most often in the history of contemporary art by women, People of Color, and queers. Ono, Clark, EXPORT, and Piper all mobilize the relational self to interrogate the modernist belief in a (white male) sovereign subject, full within himself—and, in their work, this is a fundamentally feminist and anti-racist gesture (if not in these cases yet explicitly LGBTQ+ identified). These staged situations put forth artists’ bodies in ways that open art to active relational engagements—wherein, as we have seen in Allan Kaprow’s 1958 text noted above, “[t]he artist, the spectator, and the outer world are much too interchangeably involved.”28 To involve agents and contexts “interchangeably”—forces that had been kept strategically completely separate, so as to shore up the modernist notion of the coherent, fixed authorial ­origin—was to insist that identity, meaning, and value are contingent, relational, and situational. This gesture in itself has powerful political implications for marginalized people. The foregrounding of the body in artworks that address political and conceptual issues vis-à-vis structures of meaning and power thus often takes place in this period through staging art as a relational encountering. As accessed through a process of encountering, art (like the meaning and experience and identity of the body itself) is shown to be profoundly contingent—inextricably (relationally) tied to social life, political movements, and intellectual debates, as much as to individual bodies coming into contact in spaces marked as aesthetically and politically charged. The relational body activated in these performative modes of art was developed in tandem with the parallel energies of the anticolonial and rights movements exploding across Europe and North America from the 1950s onward—as is explicitly clear in Yoko Ono’s work, such as Cut Piece. Significantly, it is also apparent in the explicit merging of art and activism in a well-known performative sit-in with John Lennon in Bed In (1969), in which they took a strong position against the Vietnam War. Bed In, in fact, was an act of encountering specifically staged for the media, in an early example of social activism through a live art action disseminated via networks of information exchange. The framework of relational encountering, and linked terms such as participation, situation, and interactivity, suggests an inextricable immersion of the artist’s action-driven and sometimes explicitly activist body in social space, mobilizing

44  Amelia Jones interactions that defined personal, group, and larger social identities and modes of empowerment. To this end, it is not surprising that social science arguments about the relational self are explicitly paralleled in art discourse from Kaprow’s 1958 essay into the 1960s and beyond. We have seen that Brazilian conceptual body artist Lygia Clark developed works themselves called “relational” in the 1960s and that theorists in performance studies also explicitly asserted relationality as key to performance. In 1970, for example, Richard Schechner beautifully summed up this aspect of performance: “All performances are vis-à-vis someone…. performance is a set of exchanges between the performer and the action. And of course among all the performers and between them and the audience.”29 Schechner sums up the shift toward acknowledging the where of art with which I began this paper. He stresses that the significance of the locationality of art rests as much on the relation between and among subjects in that space as it does with the site itself. The idea of art as taking place in (or constituting) a situation (inherently sited and relational), closely linked to the interaction and context theories of social scientists, was also elaborated in the 1960s by a younger generation of artists and art critics seeking to move out of the stalemate of modernist formalism gripping art discourse and practice in New York and other Euro-American artworld centers. As early as 1962 American artist Robert Morris had already determined that “art is primarily a situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to… one’s awareness as art.”30 Situation was also elaborated in terms of participation, per Ono’s framing of Cut Piece. And, in a 1963 Art in America article entitled “The Audience Is His Medium!,” Dorothy Gees Seckler presciently described what at the time was called “neo-Dada” art, including public performances of artmaking by French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, as “audience participation art [in which] the artist is for the audience and not against it,” as per the original confrontational Dada impulse.31 Seckler elaborates by giving credit to predecessors of neo-Dada (the French arm of which was also called Nouveau Réalisme or “New Realism”) such as Duchamp, who, she argues, “anticipated nearly all the devices used by ‘participation’ artists” in his objects and exhibition designs. She also credits Fluxus artist George Brecht, who staged his Play Incident at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1960, engaging visitors in a game with ping-pong balls.32 Saint Phalle’s early 1960s “shooting” performances, in which the artist encouraged visitors to take up a gun and shoot canvases or sculptures she had made in which she had embedded bags or cans of paint, were paradigmatic examples of this move toward engaging spectators and collaborators in relational encounters that activated them and the works through action. In 1966, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, in his article “Violence in Art,” addressed St. Phalle’s work and expanded on the idea that artists were opening art to process and, specifically, to the status of event. With this work: Reality was no longer seen as a static “thing” that one attempted to understand, but was seen to be an extended network of relationships, a juxtaposition of events. It was something that needed to be experienced. For the artist, the painting or sculpture had also to become something that was experienced, become, in fact, an event. Aesthetic experience is now a matter of participation, a three-way dialogic situation actually taking place in space and time between [sic] the artist, the spectator, and the object. It is something which happens, in which one is actively and psychologically involved rather than something you look at and take on subjectively.33

Performance, Art, and the Relational Self  45 Coutts-Smith stresses the experiential and reciprocal aspect of this kind of “threeway dialogic situation” or “event” activated by contemporary artists such as Niki de Saint Phalle. By the late 1960s, then, a concept of art as situational, performative, and reciprocal or relational—as activating a situation of encountering in social spaces with potential political effects—was circulating widely across Europe and North America, and beyond. Art writers were understandably keen to theorize this shift. In 1969, for example, expanding on the earlier writings and practices cited above, British artist and theorist Victor Burgin published his important article “Situational Aesthetics” in Studio International. In a 1974 article in Art in America, Allan Kaprow, originator of Happenings, elaborated his concept of “situational models” of contemporary art; and in 1980 Artforum published a special issue and roundtable on “Situation Esthetics: Impermanent Art and the Seventies Audience,” edited by Nancy Foote and with contributions from numerous artists.34 Foote introduces this special section by noting the tendency of contemporary artists “to extend the art audience,” linking this to “[t] he increase in the ’70s of ‘project,’ performance, film and video art, all of which have their origins in the ’60s.”35 Among the artists reporting their thoughts on “Situation Esthetics,” Vito Acconci notes the structure of art as an “exchange system,” and Dan Graham stresses the “inter-subjectivity of the observer(s) and the artwork,” both activating relationality between future viewers and the work of art in its situation.36 After the 1970s, the concept of situation aesthetics or situational art clearly shifted to new terms—with Austrian artist and writer Peter Weibel (the very same who collaborated in EXPORT’s relational works of the late 1960s) characterizing similar work as “context art” in a 1994 article. Weibel explores the way in which artists in the 1960s and 1970s were increasingly oriented toward opening art to everyday life or the harsh concerns of political and social spheres (moving art into “situations” so as to engage viewers as participants in a process of meaning making). But, importantly, he also provides a description that helps link these concerns to the developing theoretical and political interests of artists in the 1990s: Artists are now becoming independent agents of social processes, partisans of the real. The interaction between artist and social situation, between art and extra-artistic context has led to a new form of art, where both come together: Context art. The objective of the social structure of art is participation in the social structures of reality.37 Weibel’s notion of context art and his emphasis on participation, as well as on art as fully invested in “the social structures of reality,” in turn paralleled the relational aesthetics moment spearheaded by Bourriaud and the shift to what is now called “social practice” or participatory art—terms often viewed by art critics, curators, and artists as new, even though the concepts of relational and participatory had clearly already been introduced in the 1960s, as I have demonstrated. For Weibel and theorists of relational as well as social practices, the artist engages publics in spaces that allow for a merging of art and activism. Weibel’s theory, however, as with the feminist social practice work of US artists such as Suzanne Lacy and Mierle Ukeles in the 1970s, is strongly differentiated from the focus on the “convivial” in Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics. Here it is important to stress the potentially antagonistic nature of situated activist art especially

46  Amelia Jones in the earlier period. Like Ono, Piper, and EXPORT, as artists and theorists, radical feminists Lacy and Ukeles were not interested in making friends in the artworld, per Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics argument emphasizing the convivial.38 Their work was about engaging participants relationally but by creating public situations that were not primarily aimed at being easy or “fun” (per Bourriaud’s arguments). Even as Weibel (especially his work with EXPORT) was known for antagonizing audiences to political effect, Lacy and Ukeles worked through a common feminist strategy of calling out patriarchy in some pieces (such as Ukeles’s “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” of 1969) while creating intimacies to solicit care and concern in others—for example, Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation project, 1979–80, for which (among other elements) she made a point of meeting and shaking the hand of every sanitation worker for the City of New York, documenting each encounter.39 Relational work functions on multiple registers—conceptually, politically, aesthetically, and corporeally, and, by extension, psychologically and phenomenologically— and all through performance of one kind or another. Bodily experiences, gestures, and of course the glue of desire or the repelling force of anxiety, anger, or other negative feelings provide the intersubjective connectors/dividers that make artwork based on encountering and relationality function the way it does. This radical work insists on highlighting the where of art by staging these relations openly, refusing to occlude or veil interpersonal encounters involved in its making, dissemination, and reception. This work most often begins with a political urgency or conceptual concern, which is turned into aesthetic action through the embodied gesture of the artist in the specific frameworks of art discourse (although very often not in official art institutions—­ Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation epitomizes these structures). Both the bodies and the specific situation are necessary for this kind of practice to work aesthetically and politically. The aesthetic working is defined in and through the political working, and vice versa. Activism is made art, and art informs activism. Foregrounding the where of art is a structural but also political and aesthetic gesture. Without these powerful earlier examples, which are political in structure and motivation but usually without didacticism, there would be no later activist art. Important aesthetic/political practices from those of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gran Fury, and WAC! (Women’s Action Coalition) to those of Black Lives Matter function by activating this where, putting bodies in conceptual interrelation, pointing both to structures of power that subordinate some bodies and privilege others and to the deep ways in which the meaning and value of artworks as well as bodies are determined relationally.

Notes 1 Jieun Rhee discusses the different cultural resonances of these different performances and sites in “Performing the Other: Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” Art History 28, no. 1 (February 2005): 96–118. 2 This text on the Ono, Clark, EXPORT, and St. Phalle pieces, and the discussion below of staging “encountering” as an art strategy, are revised from my article “Encountering: The Conceptual Body, or a Theory of When, Where, and How Art ‘Means,’” TDR: The Drama Review 62, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 12–34. 3 Piper has recently publicly noted her discovery that she is only 1/8 Black and in 2012 she stated she had “retired from being black.” See Thomas Chatterton Williams, New York Times Magazine, June 27, 2018, accessed March 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/06/27/magazine/adrian-pipers-self-imposed-exile-from-america-and-fromrace-itself.html.

Performance, Art, and the Relational Self  47 4 See Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Victor Burgin, “Situational Aesthetics” (1969), in Art in Theory: 1900–1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 883–5. 5 I have written numerous books and articles about this transformation (from Body Art/ Performing the Subject [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998] onward), collaboratively redefining contemporary art along with myriad other historians, responding to innovations by artists since at least the Black Mountain College initiative in the early 1950s. 6 See my new book, which includes Chapters 2, “Performativity,” and 3, “Relationality,” in In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 2021), 34–82; 83–130. This chapter is excerpted and revised from “Relationality.” 7 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998), trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods, with participation of Mathieu Copeland (Paris: les presses du réel, 2002), 67. 8 Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (College Station: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 322. 9 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 43. 10 On these points, see Kenneth Gergen, “The Relational Self in Historical Context,” International Journal for Dialogic Science 1, no. 1 (2006): 119–24. 11 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 14. See also Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 12 See Chapter 2, “Art as a Binary Proposition; Identity as a Binary Proposition,” in my book Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 17–62. 13 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), ed. and trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 283. 14 For the anti-relational position see Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). For Muñoz’s counterarguments, see José Esteban Muñoz, “Thinking beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique,” in Robert Caserio, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 825–6. 15 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959). 16 Erving Goffman, “Gender Display,” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 3, no. 2 (1976): 69–77, quote on 69. See also his “The Arrangement between the Sexes,” Theory and Society 4 no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 301–31; and Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender & Society 1, no. 2 (1987): 125–51. 17 Goffman, “Gender Display,” 76, 77. 18 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 528; and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). 19 As Heather Love compellingly notes: “Goffman’s own late work on gender… is corrosive to the notion of human sovereignty; it resonates with anti-identitarian, post-human, and object-oriented queer and transgender scholarship of the past decade.” “Reading the Social: Erving Goffman and Sexuality Studies,” in Theory Aside, ed. Jason Potts and Daniel Stout (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 240. I am indebted to Love for sharing this important essay with me before publication. 20 Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News, October 1958, 24–6, ­55–7, available in the Art News archives, accessed March 24, 2019, http://www.artnews. com/2018/02/09/archives-allan-kaprow-legacy-jackson-pollock-1958/.

48  Amelia Jones 21 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 245. 22 Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), 3; my emphasis. 23 Goffman, Stigma, 29. 24 Goffman, Stigma, 143–4. 25 Gustaf Almenberg, Notes on Participatory Art: Toward a Manifesto Differentiating It from Open Work, Interactive Art and Relational Art (Central Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2010). Almenberg helpfully sketches the broader late capitalist imperative toward participation (or “customer focus”), and differentiates it from contemporary artistic notions of participation, which “give… the spectator an opportunity for her/his creativity to be used in the here and now,” 2, 6; my emphasis. See also Robert Atkins, Rudolf Friedling, Boris Groys, and Lev Manovich, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008); Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2006); and Adair Rounthwaite’s compelling Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 26 Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 190–1. 27 I have long made this point; see Body Art, especially Chapter 4 on Hannah Wilke, 151–96. 28 Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” 29 Richard Schechner, “Actuals” (1970), reprinted in Performance Theory (New York: Routledge Classics, 2003), 43, 54. 30 Robert Morris, “Blank Form” (1962), reprinted in Claire Doherty, ed., Situation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2009), 25. 31 Dorothy Gees Seckler, “The Artist in America: The Audience Is His Medium!” Art in America 51, no. 2 (April 1963): 62. 32 Seckler, “Artist in America,” 63. 33 Kenneth Coutts-Smith, “Violence in Art,” Art and Artists 1, no. 5 (August 1966): 5. 34 Burgin, “Situational Aesthetics”; Allan Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part III” (1974), reprinted in Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 130–47; Nancy Foote, ed., “Situation Esthetics: Impermanent Art and the Seventies Audience,” Artforum 18, no. 5 (January 1980): 22–9. 35 Foote, “Situation Esthetics,” 22. 36 Acconci and Graham quoted in Foote, “Situation Esthetics,” 22, 25. 37 Peter Weibel, “Context Art: Towards a Social Construction of Art” (1994), reprinted in Doherty, Situation, 51. 38 Claire Bishop’s critical analysis of Bourriaud’s stress on conviviality is influential, see “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall): 51–79. 39 On Ukeles see Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, ed. Patricia Phillips et al. (London and New York: Prestel Publishing; New York: Queens Museum of Art, 2016); and Shannon Jackson’s excellent “High Maintenance: The Sanitation Aesthetics of Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 75–103; notes 356–8.

4 Chronotopographical Nodes and Moments of Encounter Sreshta Rit Premnath

Chorten, mani, and lapche are three different kinds of sacred structures built with rocks that are found throughout the region of Humla in northwestern Nepal and southern Tibet. While chorten resemble small shrines built by stacking cut stone and reinforcing it with mud and concrete, mani are constructed with low, flat stacks of stone that stretch out like walls or platforms. Individual stones have prayers engraved upon them. Lapche, the third and simplest category, are essentially cairns, that is, simple rock mounds that any passer-by might add to. I am particularly interested in lapche, primarily because of the democratic and collaborative ways they are produced over long periods. Consider a mound of three rocks, each placed by a different passer-by, one year apart. Another mound, an hour away, is five feet high and contains several hundred rocks—ten of them placed by the same person every year over the last decade. These mounds on the side of mountain paths may mark important geographical locations, such as a peak, a pass, or a river. Others may mark the location of a death. Still others mark lines of sight—a clear view of a sacred mountain, lake, or monastery.

Figure 4.1  Lapche in Purang County, Tibetan Autonomous Region, China. Photo by Sreshta Rit Premnath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-4

50  Sreshta Rit Premnath Some are single mounds while others are dense collections of smaller mounds. Each mound can be seen as a “polychronous node”—a gathering of many presences each marked by its own particular time. In this sense, lapche constitute an accretion of nows that are each embodied in the intentional selection and placement of an individual rock. Unlike villages or monasteries, which might serve as destinations for a traveler, lapche are always in between or at the threshold of such places. In this way, they can be understood as polychronic nodes that mark non-sites en route to somewhere. Importantly, they are reminders of community in places outside habitation—traces of human presence to accompany and give hope to the lonely traveler. Rocks map a scale of geological time that is vastly beyond the limits of human time. Indeed, they precede the very existence of humans and our conception of time. Perhaps it is because we are fascinated with things that are beyond our grasp that we collect rocks, holding and touching them, to fill them with meaning, and make them ours. Mountains compress space, and therefore by extension time, in their folds. Here, a useful metaphor is found in the words of the late French philosopher, theorist, and writer Michel Serres: If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed.1 Two points which are a short distance apart as the crow flies can of course be much further apart when following the undulating circumference of a mountain by foot. Walking a single kilometer could take anything from ten minutes to an hour, depending on whether one is descending or ascending the mountain. For this reason, when traveling through and around mountains, time is much more useful as a unit of measurement than distance. How long does it take to walk from this node to that? From this lapche to that? The time between two nodes might seem small for some and inordinately long for others. In fact, the time taken between nodes changes, dramatically depending on the direction that one walks and the route that one takes. Point A to Point B is almost never the same time as Point B to Point A. A map that charts the time between places could be called a “chronotopography.” Such a map would be peculiar because a chronotopography changes in relation to direction, ability, familiarity, weather, etc. A route may become muddy, inordinately difficult, or downright dangerous in bad weather. A bad stomach or altitude sickness can make an otherwise easy walk impossibly long. A landscape can therefore have many chronotopographies even though they may share some of the same nodes. And, as noted previously, each cairn that functions as a node is itself polychronous—­ containing not only multiple human times but also many layers of geological time that may even predate humankind. Now, consider each individual act of selection: “This stone or that? I like this stone better.” Or even moments of aesthetic judgment: “I want to place this stone there.” A pattern on the rock may resemble a deity or animal, or perhaps it is simply

Chronotopographical Nodes  51

Figure 4.2  Lapche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta Rit Premnath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath.

the novelty of its abstract striations, the intensity of its colors, or the perfection of its shape. Importantly, aesthetic judgment is not restricted to the sense of sight. The feel of a particular rock, its irresistible texture, the way its volume fills one’s hand, its density and weight—these are all factors that influence the decision to pick it up. Each cairn consists of such individual aesthetic judgments aggregated into a single memorial or monument. However, this aesthetic judgment does not extend to the final form of the mound. In fact, a lapche is never finished but always in the process of becoming. Here the aesthetic act is simplified to the intentional displacement of a rock from here to there, from its formless dimension as an anonymous rock to its newly assigned cultural function as marker, sign, and node. As US scientist and journalist Robert Thorson puts it, the difference between a rock and a stone is that a “rock is raw material in situ … [while a] stone usually connotes either human handling or human use.”2 In the case of the lapche, the shift from rock to stone rests on the simple act of selection and recontextualization. In a landscape that is already a mound of rocks, the human act of touching, lifting, and placing imbues the human-made mound with an aura of cultural significance that precedes our specific understanding of it. Or in other words, we understand that the cairn is not natural and is therefore symbolically significant. This significance lies in between human attention and the intrinsic quality of a rock. Certain rocks are unusual and deemed potentially significant. This potential must be transformed through intentional selection for the rock to emanate an aura of significance. Now, imagine that a small stone topples off the structure and once again becomes anonymous. Imagine then that this rock is picked up once again by a second person and placed on the pile. Now, a single stone has been marked with two kinds of time.

52  Sreshta Rit Premnath However, as stated previously, the significance of adding a stone to a lapche has less to do with the specific qualities of a stone than the cultural or geological node to which it pays homage. To refer back to Serres’ handkerchief metaphor, points in a landscape that are separated by days of walking can be very close by line of sight. Likewise, discrete locations might be very close by foot, but completely out of sight, perhaps hidden behind a ridge. Vision therefore plays a key role in empowering a chronotopographical node. Since lapche often mark lines of sight, they bear a relation to powerful geographical features like mountain peaks, or human-made structures such as monasteries. In this sense, a node draws power from objects that are visible from its location but not necessarily nearby. Darshan, after all, is the act of seeing and in turn being seen by the divine. A lapche might act as a surrogate for a distant object by using the sense of sight to compress space. The time between a lapche and an object that can be seen from its location is zero. On a cloudy day, or in the absence of a clear view, the lapche acts as a sign or surrogate presence for that which is absent and a marker of sacred ­geography—a map without its referent. The pre-eminence of vision as a means of encountering the sacred allows the viewer to ignore boundaries—political or ­otherwise—so long as they do not obscure the sacred object. If an object that serves as a powerful node is cut off from travelers as a consequence of a new political boundary, or if an object is too far away to see, all the subsidiary nodes that depend on the main node for their power will also wither away. Cutting off an important node in a chronotopography is tantamount to cutting out an organ from a body. Yet some powerful nodes that are cut off by the borders of nation-states are often kept alive by surrogate bodies that become proxy sites for one’s own darshan. This potential to see, and the longing it rekindles, energizes the routes to and from a powerful node. This longing continues to pull pilgrims toward a node despite political barriers. People bring home rocks and water from such sites as material evidence of their darshan, and these souvenirs also become nodes in the chronotopography of a sacred landscape. In summary, a chronotopography consists of a network of polychronous nodes located in between destinations. These nodes are always in the process of becoming, for travelers incrementally add to them by making intentional aesthetic judgments at the moment of encounter. The space between nodes is measured using time, which in turn is affected by terrain, direction of travel, the ability of the traveler, weather, and so on. This implies that the same topography has multiple chronotopographies. In a chronotopography, visibility is almost equal to encounter and collapses the distance between nodes. In a chronotopography, although one node may function either as a surrogate or as a marker for another, the relation between nodes would better be described by and as opposed to or. In a chronotopography, the destruction or cutting of one node affects multiple interrelated nodes, and, if sufficiently powerful, could destroy the entire chronotopography. Such destruction cannot be seen as the destruction of mere objects, but rather the destruction of a phenomenological history aggregated in and between structures always in the making. While it is easy to see already present lapche as sites for veneration and preservation, it might be harder to see all rocks in the mountain landscape as potentially sacred objects—objects that command the potential to be selected by future travelers.

Chronotopographical Nodes  53

Figure 4.3  Lapche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta Rit Premnath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath.

54  Sreshta Rit Premnath

Notes 1 Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, in conversation with Bruno Latour, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 60–1. 2 Robert M. Thorson, Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls (New York: Walker & Co., 2002), 238.

5 Evidence Sharmistha Ray

(For Lily, from my childhood, who was lost to us because of the war.) Evidence can also be a trace of where someone or something has been.1 Sara Ahmed

Prologue On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. I was 11 years old. Overnight, my family became refugees. My father went to Switzerland where he continued to work. I went with my mother and three siblings to live with my paternal grandmother in India for the next two years. The primary building blocks for this essay are a set of digital images I received from a former acquaintance from my secondary school in Kuwait. In 2018, I had reached out to him about a set of photographs I had encountered after the Gulf War in 1992, in the lobby of my new school upon my family’s return from exile abroad. These photographs described the conditions of the school after it had served as barracks for the People’s Army during Iraq’s hostile takeover and the war that ensued, and while the French army occupied it briefly as their local headquarters.2 Moreover, they were to me a gateway to childhood memories of the war that had been displaced by the decades of migration that followed. Instinctively, I felt that in acquiring these photographs, I would open up a new dimension in my studio work which would likely have some bearing on identity politics. A few months later, I received a link from my acquaintance to a Google Photos album with 21 digital images that had been scanned from analog photos and sent to me via email. Since then, I have attempted to make sense of my relationship with these images. My purpose in adapting the now-digital proxies is to examine lived experience through the imbrication of images and text to develop (and hopefully produce) new self-reflexive material for my ongoing interrogations of identity and migration. Dismantling representation I find belonging—not because I am able to inhabit place and context but, rather—­ despite not inhabiting a particular place and context. My affiliations and associations are many, but they don’t fit into neat boxes with institutionalized check lists for what I can and cannot examine. I am, for instance, ethnically Indian but, at the time of writing this essay, a non-citizen of both India, where I was born, and America, where I live. I have encountered exile more than once, and in different forms. The first time, through war, from a country that was neither my birth country nor one in which I DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-5

56  Sharmistha Ray held citizenship or any legal claim. The second, as a consequence of a long, drawnout process of immigration. I left the country in which I was seeking citizenship to wait out the period of pending paperwork in my birth country, in which I sought a sense of belonging. Belonging, for people like me, and for more people like me in the future—in anticipation of mass displacement as a consequence of climate change—is a multi-tiered thing. It is not a question of here or there, but rather one in which the here and there must co-exist anywhere and everywhere. In practice, this expanded sense of belonging has broad implications. Here, by way of example, I address my experiences in both India and America. When I lived and worked in India, the expectations of the artworld, if not the broader intellectual community, were that I engage in a dialogue in which I present myself as Indian first.3 In America, I am viewed as part of a social and political minority belonging to the “South Asian” community. It is expected that I present myself as South Asian and perform my culture. In both instances, I have been forced to present a desirable political and social position, which includes, among other things, adopting recognizable cultural signifiers that are optimized for legibility and thus inclusion in a discourse. I am not the one who decides. It is not my chosen group that decides. I am forced to “other” myself by others who have decided for me. In deciding for me how I should represent myself, they have forced my erasure. They have already decided who I should be. By performing for them, I become what they want me to be. This kind of becoming is of course problematic for several reasons. First, let’s look at the construction of “Indian” identity. Here, it can be argued that the notion of an Indian state is itself a postwar construct with a randomly drawn border that presupposes everyone living within it is born of an Indian identity. India is, in reality, a melting pot of cultures, languages, migrations, culinary traditions, and faiths that proliferated, not as a result of a nation-state, but has instead been uncomfortably bound by it. For instance, West Bengal, a northeastern state in India where my parents come from and where I was born, hardly sees itself as part of India per se. Bengalis from West Bengal have more in common ethno-linguistically with Bangladeshis from Bangladesh (formerly East Bengal), and, indeed, before the Partition in 1947, East and West were not split by national borders.4 We share a culture which bonds us as Bangali first. Others see us as Indian. We do not see ourselves that way. Second, even within Bangali culture, there are of course other layers of separation, difference, and hierarchy to confound notions of fixed identities further. The chief difference is whether a Bengali lives inside or outside West Bengal and Bangladesh. A Bangali who lives outside of the two Bengals is referred to as Probashi.5 It’s as if the imagination had split into half and splintered. Once you leave Bengal, Bengal leaves you. You become something else. I had this experience with an established curator in Kolkata in 2006. I had just arrived in Kolkata from New York a few months earlier and was trying to get my work shown at galleries in the city. The curator was organizing a series of exhibitions of the work of emerging artists from Bengal and he agreed to meet me. He claimed to like my work, but at the end of the meeting he stated rather smugly (in English): “But you’re not a Bengali, are you?” It was a rhetorical strike aimed to forestall any further naïve aspirations I may have had about my opportunities, not just in his show, but at large, in India. He had already decided who I was. He had also decided who I was to be to others. Being a person of some authority, he was certain these things were the same thing.

Evidence  57 Although I expected to be regarded as an outsider in America, I had not expected it to happen in Kolkata and, when it did, I was taken aback by how blatant it was. After all, although I had resided abroad for much of my life, I had visited often and was aware of my cultural heritage. I ate the food and spoke the language. I had stayed in touch with my relatives. More importantly, I had come back. Significantly, for this, there are no words to describe a person in my language. In fact, because there are no words, most people I encountered both personally and professionally thought I had suffered an egregious lapse of judgment. I was told, on many separate occasions, that there was nothing for me in Kolkata. That I should turn around and go back to America. That same year, I wrote a first-person account of arriving in Kolkata for the widely read newspaper The Telegraph, called “In Touch with the Indian Inside.” In it, I probed what the radical shift in geographical context meant for my artistic identity. The article concluded with the following words: Since I arrived, I have noticed a subtle, but definite, change in my thinking. The old nagging questions (“How do I communicate my Indian-ness?”) have been supplanted by new ones (“How do I communicate my experience here and now?”). The shift has been freeing. Instead of searching for images that might best communicate my Indian-ness, I am able to focus more wholly on my response to my immediate environment. Oddly enough, I find myself pulled further into the world of abstraction and preoccupied thus with ideas of light, colour and gesture, than towards any specific imagery. It could be that I’ve found my context and that the images that play around me in real life are just waiting to creep into my work. And even if they don’t, for now I am assured that the things around me are my own, and that my claims to them need not be so emphatic.6 Before my years in India, I lived in the US between 1997 and 2005.7 I had just joined Pratt Institute for a graduate fine arts degree program in New York when 9/11 happened. Overnight, it became apparent that brown bodies were now only further marked by the state. Moreover, it was the first time I became acutely aware of my politicized self in the larger sphere of the nation, of the undeniable fact that my skin color wasn’t just a shade that grew darker in the sun, or paler during long northeast winters. It was, in fact, a fixed identifier of my personhood, something highly sensitive when offset by volatile, external events. It was at this moment that I understood race in America for the first time. I was now branded as South Asian. I was no longer a person with my own intrinsic attributes and abilities. It was now clear that I would have to filter myself through a sieve of someone else’s making in order to be seen. In the same account for The Telegraph, I wrote: During my New York period, I had questioned the relevance of my own ethnic identity and cultural background to art-making at length. What did my artistic heritage mean to me? Could I incorporate it into my art in meaningful ways? Would it find an audience outside of India?8 Race, Toni Morrison once said, is a distraction.9 By forcing us to engage in narratives about race, ethnic identity, gender, and sexuality—that is, any kind of “difference”— those who work to other us effectively create distractions serving only to keep us from ourselves. This distancing would invariably affect the entirety of our being, our

58  Sharmistha Ray experience, and our sensory perception of the world beyond the strictures of state and socially defined limitations. Sadly, such limitations are grounded in nothing but an abject failure of the imagination. Clearly, we are not permitted pleasure on our own terms. We are not permitted our joy. We are only allowed to project a fraction of our being. This, of course, is all simply so that those who do the othering can keep us in our place and have it all. They alone can present what is universal and whole. It would therefore seem that the further we move away from the normatively prescribed bounds which delineate our lot, the more we must suffer. If we are to speak, it must only be to speak of our pain. The other that defines us is never far away. They demand complicity in our pain and, being inextricable from it, subjugate our pleasure and joy until it becomes a diminished light. Do they fear that we will transcend what Sara Ahmed terms “a figure of speech” and become speech itself?10 That we will become human? Don’t they realize that they too, through a radical shift in perception, can become more human in the process? But they will never surrender the fragile mantle of privilege. To do so would cause them pain. The cost of being human is too high. It would require them to carry the burden of their humanity, or lack thereof. Before proceeding further, I should add a brief note here about my use of “they” and “we.” I have long felt a general antipathy toward the binary social and political systems that create and maintain sharp social and political divisions based on rank and position. By contrast, I imagine “us” as unhinged particles in fluid ether. And, given that we still exist within deeply structured dueling systems, I use we as a placeholder for persons like myself for whom these systems seek to compromise. Meanwhile, I use they as a placeholder for those who both implicitly and explicitly maintain such violent delineations. In America, white heteropatriarchal supremacy has become shorthand for the latter. In India, we find its equivalent in Brahmanical heteropatriarchy. By extension, the artworld’s dominant ecosystems—with their dependence upon private patronage—are proxies to further legitimize and uphold these structures. Intersectionality, I would argue, is a social construction that can be visualized as constituting the form of the rhizome (a root structure like that of turmeric or ginger that was used as a metaphor by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for the non-hieratic and non-binary). I first became aware of this term in college in the late 1990s when I started to come out as queer. It immediately made sense in relation to the confusion I felt in my alienation from white queers on campus: We seemed to emerge from different wombs of experience. It was only by studying the feminist movement in the 1970s, and particularly the radical politics of Black women like Audre Lorde, that I came to understand that difference is a blending of multiple social realities. As Lorde states, “There is no hierarchy of oppression.”11 Accordingly, I know that parts of me occur both simultaneously and together. In the politics of representation, there is arguably an implicitly delineated yet largely ever-present hierarchy of oppressions, within which we imagine race or ethnic identity residing at the top of the pyramid, depending upon who and where you are. Consider, for example, a gay South Asian artist living in America who seeks to participate within the institutional artworld of galleries, museums, and biennials. The artist would most likely be implicitly expected to unpack their ethnic identity as part of the presentation of their work first, followed by their sexuality. This implicitly delineated hierarchy will likely become the frames through which their work

Evidence  59 will be judged from the vantage point of cultural legitimacy. Once these criteria are met, the artist will be branded to be primed to participate (although this does not of course ultimately determine their requisite currency in that world). In such instances, an invisible upper hand is dealt which appears to presuppose a superior, albeit fixed, cultural identity. It is, first, white, and everyone else is othered. It is, second, male. All women and non-binary folk are othered, including white women. It is, third, heterosexual, and so on and so forth. Additional intersectional layers, such as religious faith, disability, and age, are also substantial factors (as so many others beyond the scope of this essay). Suffice it to say, the system is rigged. Short of dislodging the notion of identity altogether, there appears to be no escape from existing structures. As I ponder this impasse, I offer a re-framing of Lorde’s statement: There is no hierarchy of experience. Perhaps, through this lens, which is centered upon individual experience, all parts could potentially constitute equivalent evidential value. This is significant, primarily because it suggests the possibility of opening up potentialities of experience beyond the narrow limits which are currently socially demarcated, and of which the artworld is just a part. Accordingly, I would like to stress that this is not simply a problem pertaining to the artworld and its institutions, but rather how we, unconsciously or not, create a mental equivalence between an artist and their place of birth, or, alternately, their ethnic heritage, as if these were self-evident truths to be manifested through visual culture and its inheritances, both socially and politically. Visualities are not inborn in people nor innate in them, at least not completely. For instance, having grown up in Kuwait, I had a feeling for Arabic calligraphy and its script long before I grew to appreciate the Indian miniature. However, for the sake of elucidation of my point, I would have had a hard time justifying the use of Arabic calligraphy in my work, simply because it’s not perceived as my “primary” culture. Here, I draw an analogy to my relationship to the Gulf War. For years I overlooked its significance to the formation of my identity and outlook, yet struggled to integrate it into the larger structural paradigms within which I am pigeonholed (South Asian, Indian, queer, etc.). Consequently, these externally determined paradigms implicitly prevent me from examining the full range of my life’s experiences, and which undoubtedly hold the potential for my fuller embodiment as an artist, not just a token artist. On the other hand, white artists in America (including European ones) have historically long been accorded implicit permission to “borrow” at will, even if this borrowing is exploitative in nature. Today, after two decades of pursuing identity politics in my work, I am no longer convinced by the latent and implicit (and no less dogmatic) approaches which are available to minority persons under the guises of “inclusion” and “discourse” in art spaces. I am now becoming increasingly convinced that all that these politics actually serve is to further exclude and tokenize us. Instances of my otherness in America are far too many and complex to include in this essay. My point here is that categorical identifiers such as Indian and South Asian are regressive and reductive. Moreover, they deny me the full contours of my humanity, the full expression of my embodiment, and the freedom to determine my reflexive truths. This is crucial in understanding the nature of cultural production and the delimiting forces that hold our imagination captive. It is precisely because I am the product of pluralities that present impossible antinomies that I find it necessary to resist both structure and stricture.

60  Sharmistha Ray The alternative is to be subsumed by them. We clearly need broader terms of address and redress, and we must make them for ourselves. In order to do this, we must dismantle the politics of representation and delink it from our personhood. Method This text is organized in three parts. The first part (prologue), which you will have just read, provides the groundwork and context for the second part, which is experiential in nature, and where I take the most poetic license. The second part (monologue) is the “work.” Here, language, memory, and image come together to form, what I hope, is the beginnings of a rhizomatic complex in which, to use the words of Édouard Glissant, “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”12 In this middle section, I adapt different modes of writing: Art-oriented, literary, critical, academic research, creative fiction, and experimental poetry. The last section (epilogue) fills in some of the documentary gaps created in the middle section, bridging the speculative nature of affective address with factual evidence which is essential to my record of these images and the people involved. Significantly, due to publishing restrictions, this text can only accommodate the reproduction of 10 of the 21 images I received, albeit in black and white. Consequently, I have adapted the first ten into the text without any alteration to the order in which I received them—primarily to retain the non-hierarchical nature of my approach to them—and, accordingly, to treat each one as an equal subject. Given that these images are the foundational evidence upon which I build my current research, I also allude to describing them at times as forms of digital alt-text and as speculative evidence. Accordingly, they become witnesses with a capacity to provide crucial information through a process of cross-examination. Operating in plurality and not singularity, I see these objects/images as existing within a fluid medium and as discursive in nature, as opposed to entities within which to insulate and codify meaning. Ideally, the color of these images is essential to the sedimentations of meaning in the text. I often refer to the color of the desert sand, for example, which Simone Douglas poetically referred to in one of our recent transatlantic Zoom meetings as “a riptide” to the past. Given that color anchors my descriptions, I needed to find a different solution to represent these images. Given the iterative nature of this text, and the nature of the project as a whole, which is ongoing and expansive, the ten images in their original digital form are published, and can be found on my website sharmistharay. com in the “work” section titled “Images for essay in Where is Art?: Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art.” These supplementary images are intended to be an important experiential companion to this text. In a way, this solution provides a richer outcome. The larger project is conceived to have multiple versions to generate new associations, like an enmeshed root system, with each iteration broadening and deepening the reading of the parts and the system. The next part of this text was written with the primacy of the voice in mind—as a stage actor who performs—and, importantly, as a figure who becomes speech. The voice is mine. The sound that emerges is a carrier and transmitter of experiential agency. Of affective knowledge. A non-replicable thing. A thing in and of itself.

Evidence  61

Monologue The landscape of my youth offers two dominant sensations: The bleached sand, and limitless expanse of the Arabian Sea. Everything else bleeds into the sand. I search for a sign of my own life. [memory] August 2, 1990 Thirty years ago, an army crossed the border to invade the country I lived in. I was not born in this country. It was never mine per se: But it is the country of my childhood. An army illegally entered my place of domicile and invaded it. It is the beginning of heartbreak that shattered the mirror. It is the sum capital of loss that dug a trench. (date unknown) 1992 The black sky has been cleared of smoke. The corpses have gone. The tanks have left. Some desert mines remain. The crime scenes have been painted over. I return. *** A grouping of photos hangs in the front lobby of my new school. Analog photographs, blown up, behind a sliding glass case. Or are they ordinary Kodak snapshots? I don’t remember. But I remember them. Chilling. Barren. Cold. My nose is pressed up against the glass to take a closer look, to look more closely. I have to be up close in order to enter a place of knowing. These pictures maneuver me from a place of non-belonging to possession. They are curious. Dispossessed. Later, I become obsessed. [reality] I need other memories to complete my own. I am not whole without my memories.

62  Sharmistha Ray [imaginary] A person with no place. A person who has no place. Before the war, I lived one life. I was: Child. Afterwards, I live many: Queer Gay  Non-binary POC South Asian  Brown Diasporic Non-resident alien First-generation Immigrant Expat Non-resident Indian (NRI) R E F U G E E One word spans the breadth of the page. The others lie in relation. They are relative. To place, space, person. Who else is sharing space with me? I uncover my own historical traces of places I’ve been to and times I’ve existed in. But there is the problem of forgetting. There are things that have been blotted out by letting go. Remember? The traces, erased? The ones that couldn’t hold the page. Proof requires memories and imaginaries. I will get closer. Proximate. I hope this is good enough. [fact] For 18 years of my life, I lived in Kuwait. Even though I didn’t physically live there during the Gulf War and its aftermath, I was always there, hovering, in spirit. A life in limbo still needs coordinates. My home, in limbo, was Kuwait. India, where my family sought refuge, was the waiting room. We didn’t return to Kuwait until a year and a half after the war was over. The country needed time to rebuild. The oil wells had been set ablaze, smoke stained the air and polluted the waters, murdering masses of marine life. I saw these pictures in magazines. After we returned, I joined the New English School. The school had served as both Iraqi and French barracks during the war and the allied liberation that followed. The school was as austere as the teachers, who barely laughed. Death is always close by in the desert. That is to say: It is never very far. The photographs that hung in the lobby were documentation of the school on the heels of Iraq’s retreat. It was a site of despair. Walls were covered in spray painted slogans in Arabic, trash was strewn all over, primal chaos encrypted in every frame. They looked nothing like the neat and orderly classrooms I would enter to learn. Rooms, like bodies, suffer tragedies. They hold memories within their walls. Years later, I don’t recall facts, incidences, conversations. My memories of Kuwait are trapped in this body of images that forms both a smokescreen and a veil. I have simply forgotten what existed before and after them. I have forgotten everything else, except these photographs. [flights] What is the future without a past?

Evidence  63 What would Barthes say? Suspended in time, like a ghost rattling its chains from way down below. I hear you, but you are too far down. I have an inkling of your presence. But I keep you down, for fear of my drowning. I push them away, but they continue to rise. *** I email K., a friend of my brother, whose grandparents owned the school. He lives in London with his wife, M., and two children, a girl and a boy. I’m not sure what to expect. K.’s grandparents had died several years ago: It’s possible that these photos had been buried in boxes in storage and unseen by the light of day for many years. Worse. Discarded. Had Kuwait moved on? Would anyone care to send me these images? My words move through the web. I am conjuring the ghost out of its well. Later, still. I continue to rise. [fact] On June 23, 2018, at 4.12 am ET, I receive an email from K. with a link to a Google Photos folder with images of photos that his aunt, Nur, scanned and uploaded. The folder is titled “NES after Liberation.” It has 21 images. The photos are lined up in rows, of threes and fours, flattened out across and down the screen in digital space. They appear, at first, as a ubiquitous panel of images, unremarkable, a record of fading, scratching, and increased grain of the originals. They don’t look like anything, actually: But somewhere in the gut, they jab. There is that sandy hue, a nondescript color of the sand, a pale color of I-don’t-know-what, but it is not a color that I can readily describe. I can only say with certainty that it is my childhood. That color, that dry heat and dust, that open stretch of desert running along the Arabian Sea. An image is a flash, a trigger warning, a painful wound. Scar tissue ripped open. An image is a receptacle. A container for other images. [intuition-feeling] I sit staring at the screen. I know these photos are supposed to mean something. I may have made a mistake. I may have displaced meaning. I scroll down to see them all. A mass of grainy pixels hovering incalculably between definition and abstraction. The originals had perceptibly aged: And so too, had the digitized scans. A reminder that my memories were not new. But even while they faded into pale oblivion, I had the sense that I had run up against history, one that felt intimately like my own. Three decades and a screen separate us. Yet, these scans make me feel something.

64  Sharmistha Ray I am overcome with emotion but lost for words to describe them, not only on account of the feeling engulfing me, but because the words that belong to that place and time have receded from memory. Without a language to grasp at, I am grasping at straws. It starts with the color of the sand for which I have no name. I turn blank. The first image conveys this. Evidence 001 (Figure 5.1) The first image is opaque. By this, I mean it reveals very little about itself. There is a wall at an oblique angle—as if the photo had been taken by someone on the ground looking up. It is that same hue I have no name for. The French flag flaps from a makeshift horizontal mast affixed to the school’s exterior. To the left of the flag, perched precariously on a long rectangular window’s ledge, is a large placard. The placard is divided into a diagonal pattern, one half blue and the other red, with a central circle. At the center of the circle is a peculiar animal motif. It could be a horse—but it looks more like a donkey or a mule. The mascot is framed by two stripes on the left, white and red, on the right, blue and yellow gold. An arc at the top of the circle reads: “2 DE MARINE.” A second arc across the bottom reads: “1 COMPAGNIE.” The French infantry’s insignia. There are of course details I omit. This strikes me as a form of erasure. There are sliding windows, for instance, and a window is partially open betraying nothing of the dark interior. Daylight falls on the right windowpane, appearing like shards of broken glass. The left windowpane looks like it may be boarded up. A drainpipe, the color of the sand, runs up a side wall to the right of the window that protrudes to create another façade, a monotone of sand bricks. But this is not purely a description either. If I was weaving another narrative, these details may have been thrown into sharp relief. Instead, I forage for contrast: The presence of the French flag and the color of the sand trigger difference and familiarity, respectively, as the key anchoring devices for my narrative. Contrast is still a binary. For the subtleties of nuance and knowing, I am forced to turn to others who, in turn, turn me toward myself.13

Figure 5.1  (Left: Evidence 001; Right: Evidence 002) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, 5.75  × 3.41″ (14.6  × 8.66  cm), Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya.

Evidence  65 Evidence 002 (Figure 5.1) The school architecture has an austerity that I once took for granted. The building sits in the distance, monolithic and partially obscured by a large dark leafed tree. Were it not for the building’s rigid framing against the pallid sky, it could have easily bled into both the sky and sand with its pale, dusty hue. I recognize this view. I am looking across the large vacant sandpit in which the school buses that took me to school and back home used to be parked. In the middle ground of the image, and entering the image frame from the left, is a canopied military vehicle with a camouflage pattern. There are a few more jeeps at various distances within the frame, and also a few pitched tents. Piles of heavy-duty containers filled with god-knows-what occupy the left half of the foreground of the frame, creating a framing device for the canopied truck behind them. The scene looks composed. The pit seems deserted, but, according to K., beyond the frame of this image were many more helicopters and tanks stationed in the sand pit. He was a young boy then, and he remembers running around and among these heavy armaments, as if it were all a game, as if these were not, in fact, killing machines. The image I have received is only a fragment. There’s not much to discern. But now every time I see this image, I think of K., a young boy, beaming with pleasure, running between tanks and copters. I imagine French infantrymen smiling at this lone display of innocence within their midst of death and decay. What I know already lives outside the frame. This image expands to fill that space. I am conscious of another person. Someone who is there looking. The person who took these photographs. K.’s grandfather: I’ll call him Mr. T. *** Looking at the school building now, in the distance beyond the sandpit, in this image on my laptop in Brooklyn, New York I feel as if I am looking at a fortress: A repository of forbidden teenage desires, of unlived lives that went unspoken. Language caught between forming thought and speaking words. Stop. What are the consequences of these words? Stop again. I have lost words that were never spoken. There were no actions that followed. Evidence 003 (Figure 5.2) A man in a green khaki shirt sits at a desk in one of the school’s classrooms in the center of the frame. His smile reminds me of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. Somewhat smug. He is slightly blurred, rendering his expression indistinct. In his hands he holds a paper document. I am relieved to see a human face looking back at me and to know that, even during wartime, people do smile—if only for the duration of their being photographed. There are two other men in the frame. In the foreground, a mustachioed, well-built man in army fatigues with rolled-up sleeves and a wedding band busies himself with some administrative task. In front of him on a long table are black and white photographic images, some annotated, and neatly placed in groupings. I gather from this display that the officer is preparing another image for the table with a photocopy and glue-stick. The tricolor stripes on his left sleeve underscore the officers’ common allegiance to the French flag. The third officer is a photographic prop. His lower body, clad in army greens, enters the left frame, in the background. His posture mirrors the second officer, rendering a more dynamic composition.

66  Sharmistha Ray

Figure 5.2  (Left: Evidence 003; Right: Evidence 004) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, 5.75  × 3.41″ (14.6  × 8.66  cm), Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya.

Evidence 004 (Figure 5.2) Two infantrymen cross the school yard, dusty boots, casting shadows. French legionnaires. The one farther away appears to have his hand thrust in his pocket, his body gently torques toward other military vehicles in the yard, a few larger trucks. The soldier closer to the lens has ginger hair and a mustache, the other, a bald patch. The yard looks like a large dusty enclave. This nondescript sandy hue has a terror borne inside of it. It describes everything and nothing at the same time. The men walk toward the school canteen. K. reminds me the trees in the image are eucalyptus trees. This fact rustles up a forlorn memory of their texture which appears between my fingertips. Crisp, brittle. The memory of their scent follows. Sharp, and dry. An army jeep, the same tan and khaki camouflage, enters the frame at left, at an angle. I can situate myself at its location, but I don’t know if it’s facing north, south, east, or west. A strong beam of sun bleaches the posterior of the jeep and officers. I attempt to determine the time of day from the sun’s position in the sky (and fail). Three-quarters up the frame, on the left, is an upward-facing nozzle of an anti-aircraft gun. Once K. points this out to me, it seems obvious and I wonder why I hadn’t registered its presence before. I wasn’t looking for it. I was looking for myself. Evidence 005 (Figure 5.3) Scores of infantrymen gather in the shade of the canteen to fraternize, far away from the camera’s eye. I can’t help but notice their muscular, tanned thighs. According to K., the army trained in the yard. The scene, with its generosity of limbs and attendant violence, is effortlessly erotic. Above the canteen is where the art classes used to be located. I recognize the long stretch of windows that overlook the dusty yard. There were many hours spent at those windows, sporadic breaks from drawing and watercolors, when time held still. Sometimes I drew the brick wall of another building across the playground into my compositions. For years after, I was always at a loss for a background in my depictions of people and objects. Action requires context. I had none. Or perhaps the displacement has been absolute. Oblivion occurs when things don’t belong anywhere. Everything happens against an impasse. Or maybe it’s the desert: The long stretches of bleached dry sand that register as a blank image, or non-place.

Evidence  67

Figure 5.3  (Left: Evidence 005; Right: Evidence 006) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, 2.75  × 1.63″ (6.98  × 4.14  cm), Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya.

Evidence 006 (Figure 5.3) A pitched tent, the color of baked mud, occupies a small section of the sand lot across from the school. Barbed wire is visible to the rear, left. Mr. T. is, again, concerned with composition. He appears to favor framing devices. Two spare trees frame two men standing in front of the open tent. Inside, there are some chairs and tables. A white signboard on the tent’s exterior, and above the men’s heads, reads “NEW ENGLISH SCHOOL,” and “REGISTRATION OFFICE” in a smaller font size below. This is the English translation of the Arabic script above, or is the Arabic a translation of the English—which one came first? Or did they happen together? The men, one dressed in what appears to be a white dishdasha, are teachers from the school. They take the first registrations after liberation. A red bucket flanks the right corner of the tent. Its color strikes me as a mental equivalent to soaring summer temperatures, when the sheer graze of a seat belt’s metal clasp against my skin burned on contact. Evidence 007 (Figure 5.4) The rooftop of the school looks out to other rooftops, indistinguishable from this one. The temporary rooftop constructions with large metal water tanks are instantly recognizable to me. I am reminded of the view from our old house in the Al Da’iya section of the city. I call it a house, but it wasn’t our house. My father rented a floor from a Kuwaiti man who lived on the floor below, and who gifted us decorated chocolate yule log cakes and singing cards every Christmas, even though neither he nor we celebrated it. Below him, on the ground floor, was a Palestinian family who kept to themselves. I can recall their faces if I try, but not their names. Since it was my first home and, for much of my childhood and adolescence, my only home, it’s the house that appears most often in my dreams. The long corridor had a faded blue carpet, my bedroom, bright pink walls, and the front gate was a large imposing white metal structure that I still arrive at on some nights in a dream state, only to be locked outside. I wonder what other lives have been lived there, what other dreams are awakened from their sleep in this way. Sometimes, in my dream, when I look up at the window on the second floor where my family lived, they are all still there but unaware that I am not. Did I leave without them knowing? Did they not notice that I had gone? This dream puts me in an anxious state. Back to the image. A green bucket is delicately placed to the far left, in the middle ground, against a wall, establishing spatial relations within a blanket of monochromes

68  Sharmistha Ray

Figure 5.4  (Left: Evidence 007; Right: Evidence 008) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, 2.75  × 1.63″ (6.98  × 4.14  cm), Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya.

and compressed depth of field. To the right of it, a dilapidated concrete structure that resembles an arte povera installation is, K. informs me, one of many makeshift bunkers that housed anti-aircraft guns and sheltered their operators during the war. Evidence 008 (Figure 5.4) A large board on a school wall, the height of two building floors, reads: WELCOME AND THANK YOU MRS THATCHER The memos, released by the National Archives, reveal how in the build-up to the 1990 Gulf War ministers and civil servants scrambled to ensure Britain’s arms manufacturers could take advantage of the anticipated rise in orders for military hardware. In a letter marked “secret,” written on August 19, 1990, days after Saddam Hussein’s forces had invaded Kuwait, Clark wrote a private memo to Thatcher in which he described the expected response from the US and its allies as an “unparalleled opportunity” for the Defense Export Services Organization (now known as the DSO).14 Evidence 009 (Figure 5.5) What traces were left behind in those rooms in which we sat and learned? What smells, stench, shit, feces, vomit, piss, anxious sweat?15

Evidence  69

Figure 5.5  (Left: Evidence 009, 1.8  × 3.03″ [4.6  × 7.7  cm]; Right: Evidence 010, 3.8  × 2.2″ [9.65 × 5.6 cm]) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya.

Evidence 010 (Figure 5.5) Eight Kuwaiti flags fly triumphantly from the side façade of the school building. In this picture, the school looks like a voyaging ship. A makeshift wooden scaffolding has been erected to hang allied flags from the brick walls. On the left wall are the Western nations, with America at the top and Great Britain and France below, and others (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) below those, and some others I don’t recognize. Looking at that wall now, it’s as if the ghost of the old British Empire had summoned its former colonies to war for one last triumph, led now by the new world it created. On the central block are the Arab allies, with Saudi Arabia at the top, United Arab Emirates below that, and Bahrain and Qatar below that. The flags on the right block haven’t been hung yet. The wall is empty, save for the name of the school, in Arabic lettering above.

Epilogue I am not the sole interlocutor of these images, memories, histories. I turned, first, to Khalid, who I refer to as K. He was my primary source and co-interlocutor: He reminded me of things I had forgotten and filled in the gaps for things I didn’t know, can’t possibly have known, that I couldn’t read about or find on the web or in the library. I needed his memories to complete—no, enhance—my own. The conversations that transpired between Khalid and myself on Zoom during the summer of the pandemic took place between London, where he lives, and Brooklyn, New York where I live. Prior to that, we hadn’t spoken in a decade or more. There are other interlocutors. The late Mr. Tareq Rajab, Khalid’s grandfather, who I call Mr. T., without whom there would be no photographs. He was assiduous in the task of documentation, according to his grandson. The late Mrs. Jehan Rajab, Khalid’s grandmother and Mr. Rajab’s wife, who was in Kuwait during the occupation and the war, and who subsequently published her journalistic entries in the book Invasion Kuwait, which I devoured over a weekend as if it were a detective novel. It details a first-hand witness account complete with intrigue, grit, and survival

70  Sharmistha Ray which reignited my affective attachment to my childhood home through a subterranean recognition of places and things. It also reminds me of the violence I did not see.16 Then there’s Nur, K.’s aunt, maybe the most important of all: Who retrieved, sorted, organized, and scanned the photographs, and then uploaded the images to Google Photos. Thus, enabling a stationary thought to start moving and perform intertextually between lived experience, collective forms of subjectivity, alt-­ histories, and disembodied archives. She’s the only person I refer to by name (a random decision, perhaps, or maybe one I will understand later on, as most things are understood).17 My alt-text uses images as source and words as material which then perform with memories, my own and others, to construct a present in lieu of a past, but one that runs parallel to it, until at some point, the lanes superimpose and merge as thick, bold lines that force a curve. This essay is the past re-experienced. Recovered. Reconfigured. Redrawn. Language, like memory, is imperfect. We tend to forget. Certain objects lie in proximity to me, and others far away. Have I allowed language to forge new relations to the past through description and collaboration with others, or have I limited my memories to a container? What if I had received a different set of images? What if they had been sequenced differently? What if my co-interlocutor had been someone other than Khalid? My telling of history might have assumed another outcome entirely. My memories could have taken a different shape and direction. Memory is a pliable thing. Underlying memory and its subjective functions are the unpredictable rhizome structure. Like everyone else, my relationship with my memories changes over time. I am not the person I was yesterday, nor the day before. Nor 30 years ago. Memory is also porous. Stare at a color for a period of time and then close your eyes and try to remember the color, not just the hue, but its specific tone and saturation. No matter how many times you turn to that color, or for how long, in order to commit it to memory, when you close your eyes and attempt to conjure it from darkness, a spectral abstraction takes its place. You can no less hold a memory than you can a color. If you cannot hold a memory, it follows that images—which are constructions of memories—are fugitive too. Although this text is an iterative account of them, it is not a container for experience. It is but one of many temporal experiences these images will produce of a single spatial event, which, like them, is in a constant state of flux for the disruptions of memory, which is not only spatial and temporal, but also collaborative. “The root is not important,” writes Glissant, “movement is.”18 Flux delimits the possibility of domination and control. If a thing keeps moving and changing, it cannot be captured. Earlier, I argued that we need to dislodge the notion of identity altogether. I would like to end by suggesting that we delink the subject as person or object from categorical identifiers altogether and look instead for subjects in the network of relations that form the rhizome of experiences, of the self as well as with the other and in the world. I will return to this idea in later texts.

Evidence  71

Notes 1 Sara Ahmed, “Evidence,” Feministkilljoys, July 12, 2016, https://feministkilljoys.com/ 2016/07/12/evidence/. 2 The Iraqi Popular Army, also known as the People’s Army or People’s Militia, was a paramilitary organization composed of barely trained and often the poorest of civilians. Their role was to protect the Ba’ath regime against internal opposition and serve as a counterbalance against any coup attempt by the regular Iraqi Army. Sadly, these soldiers came from the most desperate ranks of society and were ill-equipped for war and combat. 3 I was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and went back to live in India on two separate occasions: In Kolkata with my family from 1990 to 1992 as a consequence of forced displacement during the Gulf War and the second time in 2006–17 which was initially a forced outcome of the immigration process in America. My practical training period on my student visa had expired and I needed to wait out the period before my papers for my permanent residency in the US became current. In this latter period, I lived mostly in Mumbai where I was deeply involved with the artworld and culture at large. 4 For the purpose of this essay, I talk about East and West Bengal as forms of shorthand. In fact, the Bengal province has a complex history of kingdoms and, later, reorganization and various partitions under British colonial rule. However, the Partition of Bengal along religious lines in 1947 is more widely known. West Bengal, which had a Hindu majority, became part of modern-day India. While East Bengal, with its Muslim majority, aligned with Pakistan and became East Pakistan. In 1971, the latter split from Pakistan to become Bangladesh, an independent nation. 5 Probashi is the name given to all Bangalis who reside outside the borders of Bengal: The Bengali diaspora, so to speak. There are other sub-groups by name, such as Ghotis and Bangals, that also locate from whereabouts a person arrived to West Bengal, but I won’t get into that level of detail for this essay. I am chiefly interested in the fact that these names have been created to identify a person’s physical and moral proximity to and within the geography that was Bengal. 6 Sharmistha Ray, “In Touch with the Indian Inside,” The Telegraph, Nov 9, 2006. The original link has been removed but the short essay can be found on my website: http:// sharmistharay.com/media/the-telegraph-calcutta-india-in-touch-with-the-indian-insideby-sharmistha-ray/. The original paragraph spacing of the newspaper article has been re-formatted in this text. 7 In 1997, at the same time I left Kuwait to attend college in America, my family immigrated to America, settling in New Jersey. 8 Ray, “In Touch with the Indian Inside.” 9 I’ve used a shorthand for Toni Morrison’s entire quote, which reads: The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. Toni Morrison, “Public Dialogue on the American Dream” (panel discussion, Portland State, Black Studies Center public dialogue, pt. 2, May 30, 1975), accessed November 8, 2021, https://soundcloud.com/portland-state-library/portland-state-black-studies-1?si= d0c2afb13bfd4d369ad9f20c6846c306. 10 I take the liberty of substituting Sara Ahmed’s figure of the migrant in her text Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (Oxford: Routledge, 2000) with the figure of any individual with a complex set of cultural inheritances as they produce similar semiotic and semantic affects. She writes: Migration becomes an impossible metaphor that no longer refers to the dislocation from place, but dislocation as such (thought already dislocates). The migrant becomes

72  Sharmistha Ray a figure: This act of granting the migrant the status as a figure (of speech) erases and conceals the historical determination of experiences of migration, even though those experiences cannot be reduced to a referent. As Uma Narayan puts it, “Postcolonial global reality is a history of multiple migrations, rooted in a number of different historical processes.” To talk literally about such migrations is to complicate rather than reduce the meaning of migration: it is to introduce questions of context (postcoloniality/ globality), historicity, temporality and space. 81 11 Audre Lorde, “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions,” Interracial Books for Children Bulletin: Homophobia and Education 14, no. 3–4 (1983): 9. 12 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997), 11. Glissant applies Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome concept aesthetically and politically to Caribbean identity, offering an understanding of creole and creolization as complex and unpredictable forms of cultural hybridization that defy categories. They follow, instead, an “enmeshed root system” that extends with and through the “Other,” and vice versa. This shifts the emphasis for intercultural exchange from one of domination and control to one of mutual transformation of oneself and the social environment through cooperation and harmony. I am interested in the broader implications of this worldview and its holistic application to studio praxis whereby the sum of the parts doesn’t add up to the whole. Instead, notions of the whole are discarded to examine the parts. 13 Throughout this essay, I indirectly reference the seminal work by Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Her formulations on queer orientation(s) formed the foundational premise for my solo exhibition, we are all islands, in 2016, in Mumbai, India (the show subsequently traveled to Kochi). 14 Jamie Doward, “Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait in 1990 Used by UK to Boost Weapon Sales,” The Guardian, August 12, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/12/ arms-trade-margaret-thatcher-kuwait-saddam-hussein. 15 Jehan S. Rajab, in her book of journal entries about the occupation and the war, Invasion Kuwait (London: Radcliff Press, 1993), describes the scene: Complete and utter chaos reigned both inside and outside the school. There was nothing, absolutely nothing left unsmashed, untorn, unripped, unsodden. Cupboard doors hung askew from their hinges, desks were tipped broken on their sides. In the nurse’s clinic the army had thrown the bed, screen, sterilizer and all the files into the yard through the unopened windows. Spilling down the stairs almost like lava-flow, were papers, the remains of books and stationery covered in spray paint, urine, excrement and, in some places, chicken blood and feathers. No computers remained and the instruments from the music department lay scattered all over the school, either in pieces or, in one case, as a flattened effigy. The rest had just disappeared. 188 16 Rajab, Invasion Kuwait. Rajab describes the brutalities of public lynching, executions, and unexplained disappearances especially of men suspected to be part of the organized resistance. Rampant looting and rapes, predominantly of Filipino maidservants. Sadly, the atrocious violence against these overseas workers existed well before the war. A quick online search of news reports reveals that these cruelties continue to persist, not only in Kuwait but throughout the Gulf region. 17 In Arabic, Nur or Noor (spelled ‫ )رون‬means “light.” I suppose there’s a poetic refrain here. I have persistently tried to push away the memory of the images which Nur eventually salvaged for me from what I imagine to be a dark attic. It was light that transformed their material from physical photo-paper through a series of mirrors and lenses in a scanner into the digital images that arrived in my inbox. 18 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 14.

6 Ice Boat Field Notes (in Advance of a Melt) Simone Douglas

I acknowledge the Wilyakali People, on whose unceded lands Ice Boat was conceived, developed, and will be made. I pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging. To locate a work of art is to consider not only its position in space and time but also its relationship and responsibility to people, land, and community. Some works of art, particularly when developed across multiple forms, knowledge systems, timeframes, and disciplinary configurations, are particularly challenging to responsibly describe, categorize, or position. These challenges are further complicated when the core material articulation of a complex long-term project remains forthcoming. Ice Boat,

Figure 6.1  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This is an image of a prototype site test made in 2014 from frozen water. Hand-cast prototypes of varying sizes have been made both on and off site, commencing in 2013.  Their starting (pre-melt) size varies © Simone Douglas.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-6

74  Simone Douglas an active project since 2013, is already manifest as a materially exuberant world of related works, models, prototypes, photographic tests, video, permissions, endorsements, and risk assessments—despite the fact that the core public sculptural event is still to be realized. Given that this project is being developed as part of a sensitive and ongoing dialogue with conditions of land and community—inclusive of both rain cycles and drought and contingent upon parallel technological developments such as solar power—it will inevitably take time to fully manifest. The final material articulation of Ice Boat is a 120-foot (37 meter) “boat” made entirely of ice, which will be formed sustainably in situ and then melted back into the earth ground—thus “returning” water to a mostly very dry desert location in Australia.1 Literally and metaphorically connecting land to sky during the dry winter months yet in sync with local rain cycles, it will then leave a “footprint” of wildflowers in its wake. Within the context of a book exploring the situatedness of art, this work’s remote location, its complex imbrication in contested and unresolved histories, and its multiple states of prototypal and versioned existence, all exemplify the problem of art’s whereness. Although my own artistic preoccupations have long been concerned with themes of elemental and perceptual abstraction that elude empirical knowledge and perception and are presented in implicit relation with forces of nature, no project of mine has hitherto been this logistically elaborate, collaborative, and necessarily embedded in its host location and community. 2 The central thematic orientation of Ice Boat is one of a paradoxical pairing of ice and desert. Given that this project will, quite literally, eventually manifest as a boat formed out of ice in the desert—a once glacial ancient seabed floor—the allegorical significance of the figure of the boat is central. Boats are commonly understood as something that humans use to journey somewhere. In this instance, however, somewhere remains a “hypothesis-in-the-making.”3 Historically, boats have long extended upon human want for exploration, transportation, conquest, adventure, and escape—and by extension, as an allegory for hope, sorrow, joy, love, or anticipation.4 Circumstantial evidence, such as the inhabitation of Australia over 65,000 years ago, 5 reveals that boats have long evidenced cognitively modern abstract thinking. Importantly, in an Australian context, we can look back into the deep histories of the world’s oldest continuous cultures, from use of riverways, to early sea trading through to the arrival of

Figure 6.2  Simone Douglas, Ice Boat (artist sketch), 2015, inkjet print, 30 × 20.2″ (76 × 51 cm). Poster design by Lucille Tenazas over photograph and text by Simone Douglas; this annotated sketch was produced as a visual summary of the proposed project © Simone Douglas.

Ice Boat: Field Notes  75

Figure 6.3 and 6.4  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). The purpose of prototypes such as these is to test rate of melt at different times of the year, and over the years; the sculptural form (that will only be revealed at the final installation); casting techniques; rate of freeze; and, crucially, the light refracted through the Ice Boat itself © Simone Douglas.

settler colonialists, and more recent waves of migration and contestation, to recognize Australia’s inextricable connection to the figure of the boat. Although Australia is necessarily reached across water, it is at the same time a now largely dry island continent. Yet, across at least 65,000 years of human inhabitation, and certainly well before the recent rupture of colonization (234 years ago at the time of writing), the migration, appearance, and disappearance of lakes and seas had considerable bearing on what such inland spaces meant and how they were inhabited or negotiated. Given its situatedness on an ancient seabed, Ice Boat is conceived not only as an allegorical cipher for the movement of peoples across vast spaces, but also for the very nature of displacement itself—as will be embodied in the elemental, entropic disintegration of the boat from water to ice to water to vapor, and perhaps most importantly—both literally and metaphorically—to the hydration and replenishment of flora and fauna that will follow its melting as the sun in dialogue with ice returns the boat into the ground. It will thus—given that it is a performative object designed to bring heat, aridity, and the movement of peoples to the fore—symbolically activate two core issues at stake in contemporary Australia: Climate change6 and sovereignty.7 By extension, this project also seeks to emphasize that places of purported inactivity, such as deserts, are not places of nullity but rather “living deserts” set within a dynamic history that extends beyond the span of the world’s oldest living continuous cultures. Cautiously set within the eternal infinitudes of these larger histories, Ice Boat is pre-eminently a poetic object that seeks to quietly speak to an unmonumental grandiosity, evanescence, and the loss of both geographic form and memory. These are themes that have long sat at the core of my practice, and, by extension, in critical responses to my work. Zachary Sachs, for example, writing in response to a satellite exhibition containing a series of aligned works,8 recontextualized French scientist Auguste Blanqui’s “astronomical hypothesis” as an effective analogue for the evocation of the ultimate cycling of all matter across the universe: All bodies, animate and inanimate, solid, liquid and gaseous, are linked by the very things that separate them. Everything holds together. All these systems, all these variants and their repetitions make up innumerable series of partial infinities

76  Simone Douglas

Figure 6.5  Simone Douglas, Untitled, 2016, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Aerial image from flight between Broken Hill and Sydney © Simone Douglas.

Figure 6.6  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This is an image of a prototype site test made in 2014.  The melting ice re-freezes overnight forming glacier like deep greens and blues © Simone Douglas.

that rush towards the great infinite like rivers into the ocean. Immanence characterises the smallest particles of matter. Even if they endure only for a second their rebirth has no limits. The infinite in time and space is not the exclusive prerogative of the universe as a whole. It also belongs to all the forms of matter, even to the infusoria and to the grains of sand.9

Ice Boat: Field Notes  77

Figure 6.7  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This image is a detail from a prototype site test in which the Ice Boat melted toward the path of the sun. The remnant ice “skin” of the prototype liquefied into the earth releasing bubbles of air as it did so © Simone Douglas.

In addition to these deeper historical and universal themes, Ice Boat is also conceptualized in relationship to a specific moment in Australia’s colonial history. In 1844, Charles Sturt (1795–1869), a British officer and part of the European “exploration” of Australia, set sail, up the Murray River from South Australia in search of a then fabled “inland sea” within the European imaginary.10 As Sturt noted in his diary at the time, “tomorrow we start for the ranges, and then for the waters— the strange waters on which boat never swam.”11 And, as would then transpire, he would travel, following the bird’s flight paths into a flooded landscape that he believed to be an inland lake, only to encounter the desert. For Sturt, “the scene was awfully fearful […]. It looked like the entrance into Hell.”12 He and his party were subsequently stranded in the desert, camping by a water hole in a rocky basalt glen, now known as Depot Glen,13 located near Milparinka.14 Here, the whaling boat paradoxically came to rest on the ancient seabed floor above the Great Artesian Basin—the remnant “sea” from a time when much of what is now inland Australia was below sea level.15 Then, after waiting in hope that the “lake” would return, heavy rain finally enabled the group to travel another 725 kilometers (450 miles) into what is now the Sturt Stoney Desert and Simpson Desert. Finally, having found no evidence of an inland sea, Sturt and his crew found themselves stranded.

78  Simone Douglas Eventually they dispersed, leaving behind a whaling vessel that presumably disintegrated in the dry desert heat. By the deep pool of Depot Glen Sturt’s ink dried before his pen could write, And for six months the pool shrank between the black flanks of rock.16 Alone in a profoundly different landscape to that with which they were familiar, Sturt and his crew were kept alive by the Wilyakali People,17 who generously shared water and food with Sturt and his men. After all, this has only ever been a “hostile” land to those who are unfamiliar and unaccustomed to its complex living cycles. (To this end, Wiradjuri woman Jeanine Leane saliently reminds us “that droughts, fires & floods are NATURAL & they only become disasters when settlers can’t read the land and are injured or killed.”18) Unlike many of his fellow colonists, Sturt’s subsequent respect and indebtedness to Australia’s First Peoples19 and their knowledges represents an allegorical détente within the broader context of ongoing contestations related to First Nations sovereignty in Australia. These historical resonances help to position Ice Boat as continuous with complex histories underpinning processes of colonization, immigration, and displacement. Moreover, the idea of a boat emerging from and returning to the land also potentially performs an allegorical deference to cyclical orders of evolution, entropy, and

Figure 6.8  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Ice Boat is positioned to be viewed close-up and at a distance, and in the direct path of the rising and setting sun © Simone Douglas.

Ice Boat: Field Notes  79 environmental rehabilitation. At its core, I hope that this still forthcoming work might be experienced as continuous with its world and the histories that underpin it. Water is the greatest mystery. Earth and air Are always around us, fire we can strike anywhere, But water is given, and the sun takes it away. 20

Figure 6.9  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm) © Simone Douglas.

80  Simone Douglas Given Ice Boat’s proposed and culturally endorsed placement on unceded First Nations lands once used for farming and now positioned within a state park, extensive and ongoing consultation with First Nations owners, local community, and other regional custodians and officials has been essential. Although much of this support is documented through correspondence and letters, core aspects remain largely invisible to Western conventions as living conversations with community. Importantly, each of these very different communicative modalities carries validity and is accompanied with very different responsibilities. Both literally and metaphorically, I see this rich universe of correspondences and conversations—together with a world of already exhibited affiliated works, prototypal forms, photographic tests, paratextual literature, and planning documents—is already representational of the project’s prolepsis. Originally conceived to be a single, site-specific event destined to be accessed through video documentation, this substantially expanded project now spans the realms of sculpture, design, architecture, photography, moving image, community consultation, participation, and performance. In this sense it might be said to exemplify contemporary art’s capacity to stretch disciplines and collapse distinctions between process, product, research, and exhibited outcome. On this subject, it draws upon both the histories of “earth work” sculpture in the midwestern deserts of the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s and the legacies of emphasis upon action and event in the same period. Perhaps best described as a durational sited work—which will take approximately two months to form, one month to melt, and finally form an imprint of meltwater marked by a generational native floral bloom—it is also richly manifest as a constellation of non-sited images, plans, sketches, models, prototypes, and other archival materials. Responding in Artforum to a non-sited exhibited prototype formed in wood, Promise (Site) 2017, Zachary Zachs evocatively describes the way in which its “reverberation resounds, suggesting that a topology of variance in wood might be as articulate as any string of Latin letters.”21 Material expression has long been central within human efforts to mark cosmic and geological time, invoke monumentality, and by extension project a range of symbolic cultural meanings. Although some sited American art of the 1960s and 1970s was in part inspired by images and traces of ancient Nazca monuments (which attest

Figure 6.10  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: Scale and distance tests with assistance from Broken Hill community members, 2018.  Right: Drafts of the Ice Boat build, 2017, drawing by Belinda Koopman © Simone Douglas.

Ice Boat: Field Notes  81 to stasis against cosmic and geological time), it is perhaps the unmonumentality and ephemeral performativity of Agnes Denes’ pioneering environmental works, such as Rice/Tree/Burial (1968), that offer a more appropriate analogue for Ice Boat. Rice/ Tree/Burial, which “grew” in Sullivan County, New York, was one of first ecologically oriented large scale contemporary site-specific works of the so-called “land art” era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Denes would later develop one of her bestknown works, Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982), which constituted a specially planted field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center). Like Ice Boat, these works emphasize process over a singular monumental outcome, and, accordingly, sought to reactivate relationships between the human-centered world and elemental nature. They also, like Ice Boat, demanded extensive planning, permissions, and practical material innovation to sensitively respond to both natural forces and the vastness of geological and spiritual time that frames the Australian landscape. Significantly, Ice Boat’s material manifestation will be contingent on rain cycles and the weather at large. In partnership with the sun, it will melt toward its heat, gently following its arc as it reunites with the land and activates relationships with local flora and fauna. Although situated in a very different cultural context, this interdependence with requisite elemental and cultural forces is reminiscent of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Sky Ladder, which, following three attempts as a consequence of poor weather and post-9/11 security concerns, was finally realized in 2016.22 Ahead of its core material articulation, Ice Boat is clearly already manifest as a richly material and socially activated world. This material exuberance in advance of its primary outcome brings us to a curious question: To what extent is the world of a work of art already activated through the creation and development of a proposal, planning documents, and related prototypal forms? In response to this question, we could insist that the requisite vehicular material needed to effectively communicate something of the “idea” of Ice Boat experientially as art is already performed through photographic images of the location, smaller-scale “test melts,” affiliated completed works, digital virtualizations, animations of the proposed boat and native floral

Figure 6.11  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: Detail from scale drawings of the Ice Boat build, 2017, scale 1:500, drawing by Belinda Koopman. Right: Initial scale tests, 2015, photo by John Douglas © Simone Douglas.

82  Simone Douglas

Figure 6.12  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, preparatory research, 2017, digital image (detail), scale 1:500.  Drawing by Belinda Koopman over photograph by Simone Douglas © Simone Douglas.

bloom, together with models, prototypes, permissions, and endorsements from various stakeholders, budgetary projections, and other archival materials. 23 The smaller-scale version—already exhibited in Sites of Knowledge24 curated by ReSited25 for Jane Lombard Gallery in New York City in 2017—offers one clear example of its public existence. In another still forthcoming US iteration, Returning the Future, the project is offered as a community embedded pedagogical exemplar developed in response to growing social and cultural divides emerging as a consequence of COVID-19 and damaged natural environments.26 Extending upon these “satellite” iterations, Ice Boat also “exists” across a series of public talks and published writings.27 The exhaustive planning, collaboration, and consultation that can necessarily underpin a project of this scale typically involves sustained collaboration and consultation across very different disciplinary specializations. To date, the Ice Boat project has engaged with the cutting edge of solar research, architecture, structural engineering, cinematography, land management, documentary and VR film making, and First Nations archaeologies. 28 The exact site of Ice Boat has been guided by the Living Desert Park Ranger, who is a custodian of the land.29 The activation of the water reaching flora and fauna has been guided by Elders.30 Architectural and engineering plans for the creation of the refrigeration cooler and the full-scale mold are complete, together with architectural plans for use of the mold. To realize the sustainableenergy commitment to be entirely carbon-neutral, we will utilize the latest solar, salt conversion, meltwater capture technologies. Indeed, several stakeholders already recognize a potential to use the project as an exemplar for making sustainable energy practices more visible. There are also plans to sustainably repurpose materials used in the build to other ends. There are, for example, proposals in place in consultation with the local community to repurpose the mold to form a First Nations “information center” positioned within the entrance to the state park, a portable artist’s residency studio, or a container for community rainwater collection. While engaging with contested histories of colonialism, Ice Boat also offers an implicit metaphor for climate change through an evocation of the glacier that once shaped this landscape. For many observers, it is ice that most palpably manifests the effects of climate change. In 2021 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ice Boat: Field Notes  83 (IPCC) published its most explicit warning to date that we can now expect worsening fires, longer droughts, and more severe floods over coming decades.31 Unlike scientific research or more explicitly pointed forms of political activism, art possesses a highly discursive and speculative capacity to imaginatively circle contradictions and subjective registers without necessarily producing tangible or instrumentalized outcomes. The capacity of art to raise awareness of climate change is famously demonstrated in Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch (2014–18), which involved the installation of large blocks of ice in Copenhagen (2014), Paris (2015), and London (2018). In November 2015, Eliasson’s team transported 12 enormous blocks of ice from Greenland to Place du Panthéon in Paris to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. For Timothy Morton, Ice Watch serves as an example of how art can help humans understand their relationship with the nonhuman world amidst ecological crises.32 Similarly, Ice Boat will produce a mini glacier in response to the desert heat to reflect the growing existential threat of a warming planet. Whether you came out of the land, arrived by boat, or by plane yesterday, you have responsibility to the land. If you don’t pay attention to the land, it doesn’t pay attention to you.33 Notwithstanding the gravity of these broader historical and existential concerns, Ice Boat is first and foremost an artistic speculation. The original impetus for this work was photographic (encapsulating both still and moving image), led in part by ongoing material experiments with material processes in the Australian landscape. Given my grounding in the medium of photography, my ongoing interest in landscape and the sublime remains connected, both materially and philosophically, to light. Many years ago, when first visiting Sturt National Park, I was immediately struck by the mirror-like effect of the light reflected in the black gibber stones. Sturt’s boat had come to rest in a sea of light. Interestingly, in the Australian context out of which my practice emerged, the historical association of light and knowledge has historically underscored a series of cultural differences. At this stage in history, the Australian landscape shimmers in the collective as a mirage-like environment phasing in and out as sign.34 It is long noted that Antipodean light is distinct from northern European light. For early colonial explorers, this difference may have implicitly represented something yet-to-be-known, a challenge to their grasp of the world, an unknowing to be overcome.35 There is a long historical relationship between photography and expanded practices in the visual arts, for photography is both a medium in its own right and an inextricable documentary tool for effectively disseminating awareness of ephemeral and remote site-specific projects.36 This project also performs an expanded doubling of photography, insofar as it holds and refracts light, and in doing so enacts a dialogue between sun, water, and ice—with the sun “exposing” Ice Boat and the land upon which it rests in a manner analogous with the way in which light reacts with silver nitrate in traditional photographic processes by transforming it at a molecular level. Since Roland Barthes’ highly influential book on photography, Camera Lucida, 37 the term “photo-death” has become customary to photography parlance. Photo-death applies to the sensation we feel when looking at a photograph in knowing that the

84  Simone Douglas moment has irrevocably passed yet paradoxically lives on as a ghost. Pointedly, it is in the very art of capturing that we are brought so irrepressibly close to what we have lost and what will never be. [Photography] shows us that there really is a world, that it wants to be seen by us, and that it exceeds our capacity to know it.38 Perhaps discussion of transience serves to distract us from our own impermanence. Ice Boat is conceivably as much a work that speaks to human bodies—whose physical presence as audience will only accelerate the melt—as it does to place. From its arrival to the point of its liquification into the land, it is a tribute to transitions and transitoriness of peoples as well as matter. Ultimately, Ice Boat is offered as a symbolic object for which the narrative of its genesis and its passing are metaphoric of imponderable cyclical systems of rejuvenation and re-creation. Its boat-like form will at once present an allegorical reference to the rarity of water in a desert location that was once an ancient seabed, and, at the same time, quite literally manifest as boat made entirely of water. Here, water is not only the primary medium but also a metaphorical holder of sky, land, and light. For Sachs, this “literal melting into air exists without confinement to boundaries between the constructed art-object and the ground and air” that surrounds it, which “is not easily circumscribed by a definition, or the listed media and dimensions meant to contain it.”39 As Ice Boat melts over the course of a month, it tilts toward the heat of the sun, following its arc across the sky and reforming into a sea of water. This process will regenerate the land and leave a footprint of brilliant flowers in the boat’s wake to bloom more readily for seasons to come.

Figure 6.13  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: C-type print, editioned 2020, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Right: Initial concept sketch, 2014, pencil on archival paper, 8.3  × 11.8″ (21 × 30 cm) © Simone Douglas.

Ice Boat: Field Notes  85

Figure 6.14  Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This image is part of a series of affiliated works (some of which have been included in this chapter). Here, the setting sun sits low on the horizon, illuminating the melting boat against the darkening landscape © Simone Douglas.

Notes 1 Although typically defined as receiving less than 250 mm of rain per year on average, Australia’s deserts can sometimes technically exceed this average due to uneven rainfall distribution. During rare heavy rains, the landscape is transformed into a kaleidoscope of wildflower bloom and wetland foliage while birds flock and endemic frogs and fish appear. Jared Richards, “Australia’s 10 Deserts” Australian Geographic, April 20, 2016, accessed November 2, 2021, https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/ science-environment/2016/04/australias-10-deserts/. 2 In a letter of support for a funding application to Regional Arts Grants NSW, Australia, Secretary Taunoa Bugmy of the Community Working Party writes: This boat will have strong meaning behind it which can be considered as a healing project. This also represents the failure of colonial forces to “see” and “know” the land they were in and also points to a regeneration of the desert. Secretary Taunoa Bugmy, Community Working Party, letter to the author, 2014. For information on the Community Working Party, see the following link, accessed November 15, 2021, http://www.mpra.com.au/community-working-parties. 3 In the words of US art historian Richard Shiff, “a work of art becomes a hypothesis-­in-themaking, as if it were calling out, ‘explain me, put me in order, give me a lasting purpose.’ Why this, not that?” Richard Shiff, “Every Shiny Object Wants An Infant Who Will Love It,” Art Journal 70, no. 1 (2011): 7–33.

86  Simone Douglas 4 Robert A. Denemark, ed., World System History: The Social Science of Long-term Change, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 208. 5 See Chris Clarkson and Ben Marwick, et al. “Human Occupation of Northern Australia by 65,000 Years Ago,” Nature 547, (2017): 306–10, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22968. (It should also be noted that for many First Nations Australians, this is a moot point—as it is variously deeply felt and understood: “We grew here. We are part of here. We have always been here.”) 6 Artists are increasingly attending to climate change and environment as subject: Consider, for example, the recent exhibition In Human Time, featuring installations by Zaria Forman and Peggy Weil that explore intersections of polar ice, humanity, and time at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons School of Design, the New School, NY, US. The themes of climate and environment have been the subject of much parallel scholarly activity. Nicholas Alfrey, Stephen Daniels, and Joy Sleeman, for example, wrote about it in “To the Ends of the Earth: Art and Environment,” Tate Papers 17 (2012), and it has been the subject of many academic courses. 7 In 2017, the Uluru Statement was symbolically presented to the Australian people as an invitation to take the next step to addressing a raft of still unresolved legal, constitutional issues concerning the unceded sovereignty of Australia’s First Nations Peoples: This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or “mother nature”, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown. How could it be otherwise? “Uluru Statement from the Heart,” accessed September 22, 2021, https://ulurustatement. org/the-statement. 8 Zachary Zachs, “Parallelogram,” in Simone Douglas: Parallel Infinities, Palour Projects, Athens, NY, US, 2019–21, exhibition catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title, curated by Re-Sited. 9 Auguste Blanqui’s 1871 text L’Eternité par les Astres (Eternity to the Stars) quoted in Zachary Zachs, “Parallelogram.” 10 Sturt believed he was destined to discover a great saltwater lake, known as “the inland sea,” in the middle of Australia. In August 1844, he set out with a party of 15 men, 200 sheep, 6 drays, and a boat. They traveled along the Murray and Darling rivers before passing the future site of Broken Hill. They were then stranded for months in extreme heat conditions. See Michael Cathcart, The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent (Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2009), 126–47. 11 A passage from the little known “Sturts Letters, 14 October 1844,” quoted in Edward John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland from Adelaide to King George’s Sound, in the Years 1840–1 Volume II (London: T. and W. Boone, 1845; repr. Freiburg im Breisgau: Outlook Verlag, 2018), 82. 12 A passage from “Sturts Letters, September 1845,” quoted in Nicolas Rothwell, Journeys to the Interior (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2010), 79. 13 At the time of writing both Wangkumarra and Malyangapa have a Native Title claim over Depot Glen. 14 Cathcart, The Water Dreamers, 126–47. 15 The Great Artesian Basin in Australia is the world’s largest and deepest artesian basin. One of Australia’s most significant hydrogeological entities, it stretches over 1,700,000 square kilometers (660,000 sq. mi.) and provides the only source of fresh water through much of inland Australia. See “Great Artesian Basin,” Geoscience Australia, Australian Government, accessed November 19, 2021, https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/water/ groundwater/gab. This water is held in several sandstone layers formed during the Triassic, Jurassic, and early Cretaceous periods. When much of what is now inland Australia was below sea level, this sandstone was covered by marine sedimentary rock to form a confining layer. See “The Great Artesian Basin,” Geological Sites of NSW, accessed October 30, 2021, http://www.geomaps.com.au/scripts/artesianbasin.php.

Ice Boat: Field Notes  87 16 Geoffrey Dutton, “Sturt’s Depot Glen,” Australian Poetry Library, accessed October 28, 2021, https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/dutton-geoffrey/poems/sturts-depotglen-0368081. 17 The Barkandji (aka Paakantyi, or Barkindji) is an Australian First Nations People of the Darling River (Baaka) basin in far western NSW, Australia. 18 Jeanine Leane, “Writing Landscapes,” National Library of Australia, accessed October 30, 2021, https://www.nla.gov.au/content/writing-landscapes. 19 See Richard C. Davis, ed., The Central Australian Expedition 1844–1846: The Journals of Charles Sturt (London: Hakluyt Society, 2003). 20 Dutton, “Sturt’s Depot Glen.” 21 Zachary Zachs, “Sites of Knowledge,” ArtForum Online: Critics Pick, accessed May 2, 2021, https://www.artforum.com/picks/sites-of-knowledge-69327. 22 Cai Guo-Qiang ultimately went ahead with Sky Ladder without seeking official permission on remote Huiyu Island Harbor in Fujian province in 2016. 23 To date, Ice Boat has already garnered significant media attention, including, for example, a feature article in the Qantas Inflight magazine, national and regional radio appearances, and extensive local press and youth media coverage. Given the level of interest in the project to date, it is estimated that Ice Boat will generate substantial income for the local community. 24 The Sites of Knowledge exhibition, curated by Melissa Bianca Amore and William Stover, was held at Jane Lombard Gallery, NY from June 8 to July 28, 2017, and featured works by Richard Artschwager, Henri Chopin, Simone Douglas, Guy Laramée, Jen Mazza, Kristin McIver, Enrico Isamu Ōyama, Michael Rakowitz, Karen Schiff, and Sophie Totti. Here a small-scale version of Ice Boat titled Return (2017) was located by the floor-to-ceiling window, melting back into a vitrine. Return was situated next to Promise (Site) (2017) also by Simone Douglas, a 15-foot wooden articulated sculpture, https://www.janelombardgallery.com/sites-of-knowledge. 25 Re-Sited, a non-profit arts organization co-founded in 2016 by Melissa Bianca Amore and William Stover, is dedicated to presenting new scholarly research and curated exhibitions that examine the intersection of site, sculpture, and architecture. See “About,” Re-Sited, accessed November 19, 2021, https://re-sited.org/about.html. 26 Returning the Future is supported by an American Craft Futures Fund Grant from the Center for Craft. Due to closed borders and high caseloads of COVID-19 at the time of writing, the project is on hold. Returning the Future connects traditional community-­ based forms of making to environmental and political challenges in our present and near future. See, accessed November 19, 2021, https://www.centerforcraft.org/ recipient/2020-craft-futures-fund-simone-douglas. 27 See Emma Coccioli ed., “Simone Douglas,” Animae: The Invisible Sources of the Artwork: Talks with Today’s Artists (Wilmington, NC: Vernon Press, 2019); Ute Junker, “Art & the Outback,” Qantas Spirit of Australia Inflight Magazine (June 2014); Zachs, “Parallel Infinities”; Emma Horn, “Melting Moments in a Bone Dry Desert,” Crinkling News, August 2, 2016, https://www.crinklingnews.com.au/; Alexandra Back and Julie Clift, “Australian Artist Simone Douglas to Build Ice Boat in Broken Hill’s Living Desert,” ABC Broken Hill, July 24, 2015, accessed May 2, 2021, www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2015/07/23/4279382. htm; Michael Murphy ed., “Project Promises Global Attention,” Barrier Daily Truth, Broken Hill, July 7, 2014, https://bdtruth.com.au/main/news/article/6240-Projectpromises-global-attention.html; Alasdair Foster, “Disquietude: Landscape and the Australian Imagination” (presentation given at Auckland Festival of Photography, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand; Instituto Escuela Nacional de Bellas Arte, Montevideo, Uruguay; and RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia). 28 Solar research: Given that solar research is advancing rapidly, the solar engineering component is deliberately provisional until close to the actual build. Importantly, this will enable the team to employ the most energy-efficient solution at hand; Architecture: Belinda Koopman, a Sydney-based Architect and currently employed as Architect and Director at Peter Stutchbury Architecture, Sydney, Australia, is independently affording expertise to the project to sustainably repurpose the materials from the mold for Ice Boat to design an information center, a portable artist’s residency studio, or a container for

88  Simone Douglas

29

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31 32 33

34

35

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37 38 39

community rainwater collection; Structural engineering: Richard Matheson, a director at the renowned engineering/design firm Van der Meer, has provided the structural engineering of the mold inclusive of wind shear factors. See “Home,” Van der Meer, accessed May 2, 2021, http://www.vandermeer.com.au/; Cinematography: Murray Fredericks is an artist and cinematographer who is advising on the time-lapse film of Ice Boat’s melt. See Murray Fredricks, accessed May 2, 2021, https://murrayfredericks.com; Documentary: Dr. Rachel Bentley at Western Sydney University has made a short documentary, Promise (2014), which foregrounds the early stages of Ice Boats’s development, see https://vimeo. com/90311690. Living Desert Ranger Darrell Ford has a deep knowledge of the land and, along with Environs Archaeology Specialist Dr. Sarah Martin, has advised on the location for the site of Ice Boat. Lyndall Roberts and Cathy Farry, who at the time were managers of Film Broken Hill and Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, respectively, also gave invaluable advice regarding the public location of the work. Badger Bates is a Barkandji Elder, artist, cultural heritage consultant, and environmental activist. He is the public face of the fight for waterways and support for the Barka (Darling River). Badger Bates has afforded advice on the reticulation of the meltwater for the generative benefit of native flora and fauna. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “Sixth Assessment Report,” accessed May 2, 2021, https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/. Timothy Morton quoted in Anna Souter, “The Sprawling Ecologies of Olafur Eliasson,” Hyperallergic, August 5, 2019, accessed July 13, 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/510475/ olafur-eliasson-in-real-life/. Rhoda Roberts AO (presentation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, May 27, 2016, from the author’s person notes, no transcript archived). Roberts is a journalist, broadcaster, actor, producer, writer, arts advisor, artistic director, member of Bundjalung Nation, Wiyebal Clan of northern NSW and southeast Queensland, and was speaking about her role as Director of Vivid Light, Vivid Festival, Sydney 2016. Ross Gibson, “Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films,” in Southern Crossings: Empty Land in the Australian Image, Helen Sloan ed. (London: Camerawork, 1992), 33, as quoted in Judy Annear ed., Landscape and Place: Australian Photography Since the 1970s (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 2011), unpaginated. I have long been intrigued by stories that some eighteenth-century scientists would deliberately stare into the sun, believing it to be a conduit of knowledge, and burn their retinas out in the process. These experiments with vision during the early development of photography coincided with the European colonization of Australia. As Peter Osborne has argued, photography only gained serious artworld recognition once it had played a significant role in contributing to the collapse of medium-specific categories in the 1960s and beyond, primarily because of its role in the documentation of expanded practices. See Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 127. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). Zachs, “Parallelogram.”

7 Bland Matter: New Materialism, and Barking Up the Wrong Tree Adam Geczy

New materialism is already a vexed term. Relatively new in coinage, it is nonetheless steeped in baggage as a result of what the name implies and connotes. It is immediately expansive and positively ambiguous. If we leave aside the considerable encumbrances of the phrase itself, we might assert that there are some creditable applications of the notions that emanate from it, as well as the philosophical sources that are cited in its lineage. Like all heavily loaded, ambiguous, and for that, suggestive terms whose lineage and tenets remain obscure to most, it has been interpreted in a number of ways, most dangerously without nuance, and most evidently in art. In art, “new materialism” is commonly defined as a “turn to matter” that runs contrary to the poststructuralist exhortation that everything be treated as a “text.” It emphasizes that there is something of a fundamental experience in our encounter with the material world, while also embracing the imaginary. The “new” in new materialism is not only a signal of its repudiation of the effects of the “linguistic turn,” but also to distance it from Marxist materialism, with its focus on material production and consumption. Rather, new materialism has been a tool in postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory for seeing the world in terms different from perspectives that operate according to transcendental laws that are made normative (deism, hegemonic discourse, etc.). Often referred to as an ontology of immanence, new materialism has frequently been seen as allied to the posthuman and the Anthropocene age in that it resists anthropocentrism in favor of an ethics that sees humans within a set of causes and relationships, not as central to it. But again, when translated to art, the complexities of new materialism tend to become diluted to concentrate on the materialism of the object and the medium. It is a reaction to the “dematerialization of the art object” of conceptual art, followed by the virtualization of art through new media, now more commonly referred to as digital art. The return to the material in art, however, is not without its hazards, as it courts essentialism, myopia, sentimentality, and obscurantism. Spurred on by the literal interpretation that lies in wait in new materialism, its application in art is all too frequently at loggerheads with the deeper philosophical definitions of the term. But its deficiencies are also potentially casualties to the imprecise conclusions to which new materialist philosophy is prone. A research hub based in Amsterdam, New Materialism and Visual Arts, announces in its mission statement that its aim is “to (re)position the visual/material arts as agentic force within these contemporary debates.”1 Language like this is common to writing on new materialism, suggesting a return to the echo-chamber of poststructuralist prolixity. It is worth singling out for the way in which the verbosity contradicts the basic import of the project, which is a return to more authentic relations with DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-7

90  Adam Geczy material. The “agentic force” is a phrase worth savoring; it possibly means that the visual arts are a means of navigating and expressing new perspectives on ontology and worldviews. What is not explored sufficiently is the extent to which the materiality of art is inherent to this “agency.” What is also evident is that art and artists that wish for a return to the material, as it were, and want to foreground the material qualities of a work (“the physicality of paint”), can at the same time avail themselves of the more complex philosophical definitions that suggest a reorientation to the way in which we, humans, grasp the world, both phenomenologically and ontologically. A gloss of new materialism in its more rigorous sense is first to juxtapose it against its more simplistic abuses in art.

New materialism in theory The historical predecessors of new materialism that are frequently cited are Spinoza and Nietzsche, and then by extension (as an arch Spinozist and Nietzschean), Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari. They are the progenitors, and alibis, to the conception of a worldview that is not governed by transcendental narratives such as overarching ideologies, which includes the belief in a supersensible God. Instead, the new materialist invokes the “pure immanence” of Spinoza (and Deleuze after him). Well before Deleuze, new materialism crops up in writings of the 1920s. For example, with C. A. Richardson, who credits himself with the coinage, defining it as what denies “anything corresponding to the idea of ‘mind’ and ‘subject.’ Its material is not atoms and molecules but sense-material.”2 Near the beginning of his sprawling two-volume work, The Particularity of the Aesthetic (Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen) of 1962, Georg Lukács differentiates between realism and “naïve Realism (that is, Materialism).”3 Its naïvety stems from its inability to fathom that we already create our life-worlds through our perception, and that transformative power and intention is required for reality to be brought to us convincingly. Aesthetically speaking, to speak of mirroring as truth is to have left a large amount of intellectual work behind. It also reflects a crushingly unsophisticated worldview (Weltanschauung). New materialism insists that the world be conceived as a dynamically causal system onto which humans have grafted systems and beliefs that are not necessarily proper to it. In other words, new materialism seeks to separate the world as an operating system from the narratives of human systematicity and agency. At the same time, new materialism rejects the nature-culture binary, which it sees as part of anthropocentric narratives, instead opting for a more wholistic approach to processes and interactions. This also means that areas such as sexuality or creativity, which have been relatively cordoned off as concepts in modern thought, are burst open to be accountable as components in various forms of exchange and production. Thoughts and feelings can, therefore, be studied materially since they too are attributable to objects and events. Important for art in particular is the extent to which new materialism draws little or no distinction between object and event, hence then the importance of performance and performative subjectivity. Matter, then, is always to be conceived as something for deduction according to the forces that define it, including time. To think of a thing along new materialist lines is therefore to conceive of it not as a circumscribable sign, but as a process, much as Sphinx’s riddle to Oedipus about man, down to any entity or thing such as a fruit which was once a bud and later will have decayed back into the soil. The world is a

Bland Matter  91 set of affective structures, to follow from Spinoza, in which humans are situated, and which they cannot control. To privilege human control over matter, human primacy and the human point of view are deemed to be narrow and delusory narratives that disavow the myriad forces outside of our purview and control. Such new perspectives have been harnessed by revisionist scholars including feminists, postcolonial, and queer theorists, to embrace ways of conceiving the world that do not have the same recourse to binaries, not only of nature and culture but of others such as theory and practice. Deleuze, for one, emphasized that philosophy was a form of practice, a creative practice with concepts. It was an active form of conceiving the world in which the actions are inseparable from the conception. For the new materialist, all things are related to one another in some way—consequently, the loaded words relational and contextual frequently arise—and values have to be built accordingly, not according to predetermined, transcendental principles. As a result, new materialism favors questions related to being, as opposed to thinking: Ontology over epistemology, the latter as seen as an interminable debate between realism and idealism. In an essay on Spinoza written later in his career, Deleuze uses some examples from art and aesthetics to explain Spinoza’s theory of modalities and affects. One way of understanding a Spinozist mode is according to color, which are the effects of configurations of light in relation to an object: “Modes as the projection of light are equally colors, coloring causes [causes colorants].”4 Further, Deleuze outlines the distinction “between color and shadow, the coloring causes and the effect of shadow, one that adequately ‘terminates’ light, the other that abolishes it in inadequacy.”5 From here Deleuze uses the work of Vermeer to illustrate his position, concluding with a contrast between him and Rembrandt. Because Deleuze brings to the artist his parallax insights, the passage needs to be quoted in full: Of Vermeer one can say that he replaces chiaroscuro [clair-obscur] with the complementarity and contrast of colors. It is not that shadow disappears but rather it remains as an isolated effect of its cause, a separated correspondence, an extrinsic sign, distinct from colors and their relations. In Vermeer one sees light detach itself to bring itself forward so as to enframe and border the luminous background from which it proceeds (The Milkmaid, The Pearl Necklace, The Love Letter). As such, Vermeer is opposed to chiaroscuro, and in this respect Spinoza is infinitely closer to Vermeer than to Rembrandt.6 Far-fetched as it may sound, is Vermeer a Spinozist painter? On his own account, Deleuze holds that Vermeer distances himself from the prevailing method of describing light as a relational force between figure and ground. In traditional chiaroscuro objects are the product of undisclosed light, whereas in Vermeer’s hands objects and planes are also responsible for the intensity of light and color. His intuition is true in the most basic optical terms: Light cast onto a surface refracts onto another surface, and the color of one will also inform the color of something else nearby. The nature of this example will prove useful to exposing the kinds of contradictions and misprisions of contemporary artists’ interpretations of new materialism, mainly because Vermeer is not necessarily the first name to be used by new materialist adherents. To return to some of the more contemporary theorists who have been embraced as new materialists, these include Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Bruno Latour, as well as Stacey Alamo, and Susan Hekman. Barad reckons upon an “onto-epistemology” in

92  Adam Geczy which phenomena have to be accounted for according to context: There is no absolute state of things. Here, the word agential raises its ugly head again with “agential reality”7 used to describe the reciprocal relationship between dualisms (subject-­observer, nature-culture, word-world), and “agential cut”8 applies to the power and epistemic presumption in any form of scientific inquiry or knowledge insertion. Working again from the cue of Deleuze and Guattari, Barad emphasizes that there can be no priority given to either nature or culture. Further, and most importantly, she calls for the construction of an entity that linguistically, subjectively, and ideologically cannot preclude materiality. Barad’s reliance on the “in-between” is sufficiently vague, however, when she calls for a form of scientific inquiry that exists between “meanings and matter” where “knowledge and being meet.”9 Such a statement presumes that being is not a form of knowledge, as it seeks to deny the self-consciousness of humans and the state of being of a jellyfish. Vicki Kirby also takes exception to the selective, to the shaky and obscure logic advanced by new materialism. In reference to another weird comment by Barad, Kirby rightly asks, “how can matter be subjective?”10 In her dissection of Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism (2015)—another example of the new materialist somatic politics—Kirby again rightly states that “Wilson’s exploration of how cognition might be operative ‘below the neck’ opens a battery of investigative puzzles that make no sense in terms of the nature/culture distinction.”11 In rejecting humanism, binaries, language, and all the other so-called evils, new materialism has either thrown the baby out with the bathwater or else found itself with problems it is ill-equipped to solve—except with (or highlighted by) obtuse and unqualified reasoning. Barad’s agential realism is defined by Helen Palmer as “materiality understood as thing to materiality understood as a doing.”12 Is this, then, a philosophy of immanence, one of radical immanence that ends in us thinking death? If that be the case, in foregrounding mortality we are right back to the turgid morbidities of Romanticism. Although posthumanism began to be seriously theorized by Katherine Hayles in 1999,13 one of its subsequent thinkers is often cited as Rosi Braidotti. Dedicated to finding new approaches to feminism through alternatives to historical (patriarchal) humanism, in many ways Braidotti’s project is to develop from the work of Donna Haraway, in the effort to overstep the problems that inevitably subtend binary logic. How she goes about this, however, is not without its own pitfalls, as the conclusions are summarily unclear and, arguably, unworkably ambiguous. In what is a historically familiar lambast of the past, Braidotti foments against the abuses of anthropocentrism, which have been responsible for a litany of false assumptions and have drawn humans into an inflated view of what they are capable. Instead, she insists upon “the vital, self-organizing and yet non-naturalistic structure of living matter itself.”14 She too seeks to pivot away from nature-culture dualisms toward “the self-organizing (or auto-poietic) force of living matter.”15 This is again unnervingly vague, especially if one wants not to avoid reading an essentialist and deterministic conception of nature into it. That Braidotti wishes to surmount the errors or impasses of anthropocentrism is clear and laudable, but her methods of escape are poetic, and perhaps destined to be interpreted in not-so-flattering terms. Invoking Deleuze, she calls for modes of becoming, flow over stricture, and a “minor science” (developed from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of Kafka as an exemplar of a “minor literature”) that is “ethically transformative and not bound to the economic imperatives of advanced capitalism and its cognitive excursions into living matter.”16

Bland Matter  93 When looking at statements such as these, which can hardly be gathered as conclusions, it is hard not to feel reactionary or obscurantist. Although the statement makes a convenient straw man of Western science, it is blissfully unspecific. Which science and which scientific laws are hegemonic or unethical? A few lines later she states that “scientific Laws need to be returned according to a view of the subject of knowledge as a complex singularity, an affective assemblage and a relational vitalist entity.”17 This would be stirring if it were not so obscure. “Law” is written in capitals as a way of again signaling the presence of a bully-bugbear episteme. No examples are given as to what these laws, or Laws, might be, or in what the “retuning” consists. Similarly, another advocate of new materialism, David Wood, asserts that “there is agency beyond the human—not just in other creatures but in material forces and other assemblages.”18 When not having recourse to mystical statements such as these, Braidotti is content with generalities, so long as the rhetoric is an oppositional call to arms: “The question is whether the Humanities [again provocatively, resentfully capitalized] are allowed to set their own agenda in relation to contemporary science and technology, or whether they are confined to places they did not choose in the first place.”19 Which aspect of the “Humanities” remains unstated, the “agenda” is not described, what aspects of “contemporary science” remain undeclared, and what the spaces of confinement exactly are is still up in the air. One wonders if we ought to boycott the use of the internet as an example of capitalism and contemporary science. We might recall that the French Revolution briefly tried to alter the calendar, to no lasting effect. Meanwhile we are advised by Wood that the Enlightenment “undoubtedly has blood on its hands.”20 Notwithstanding the partial truth of a claim like this, these are assertive liberties indeed. Art—but again what kind is untold—is a convenient repository for these vagaries: By transposing us beyond the confines of bound identities, art becomes necessarily inhuman in the sense of non-human in that it connects to the animal, the vegetable, earthy and planetary forces that surround us. Art is also, moreover, cosmic in its resonance and hence posthuman in its structure, as it carries us to the limits of what our embodied selves can do or endure. 21 This is highly alarming stuff, especially in its masquerade of rigorous scholarship. It is at best a crowning example of the worst and most vertiginous abuses of Deleuzian vitalism. Thankfully at least, except where heading a sentence, art is not delivered as capitalized. Art, as we understand and use it, is what grew out of Europe after the Middle Ages, beginning with the Renaissance, hence the flowering of humanism. Art since the 1960s, and contemporary understandings of art which were circulating when Braidotti was writing the book, overstepped many historical premises of art, but these were tenaciously retained in one way or another by the commercial market, for art is a precious commodity, especially in times of economic uncertainty. But perhaps all of these allowances are already taking the above comments too seriously: Art “is … cosmic in its resonance and hence inhuman in its structure.” The cosmic resonances of art would need more validation, as would the sneaky ploy of reasoning in “hence.” We still lie in wait for more information about art’s “structure” which is purportedly translatable to posthumanism. Let the parsing stop here lest it become more infuriating than it already is.

94  Adam Geczy Thankfully unintoxicated by Deleuze, Bruno Latour poses a more convincing set of arguments against regnant forces captured under well-used terms such as hegemonic masculinity (now transmuted to “toxic masculinity”) or capitalism by calling for a need for more detailed and nuanced explanations of these terms as opposed to their glib and suggestive use.22 Social inquiry is tasked with the need to make sense of social forces, and in doing so to expose the heterogeneity of elements that underride systems. That is, how biological, economic, semiotic, and sundry “realms” contribute to the formation of nations, institutions, and cultural formations. 23 While Latour has never declared himself as a new materialist per se, he can be cited as providing a more sensible and workable set of intellectual keys to combating superannuated and sclerotic epistemological models. He does not deal with art, which is where some of the most aberrant examples and simplifications of new materialism are played out.

Posthumanist deliberations This brief and admittedly selective gloss of the tenets of new materialism nonetheless helps to lay out a definition of both its theoretical substance and the pitfalls of its methods and rhetoric. One of the more disingenuous and fragile corollaries are with new materialism and posthumanism, even to the extent that it does not take much reading of new materialist writing (I resist using the word scholarship) to see that they are often used interchangeably. Both terms are equally provocative and equally liable to misunderstanding and misapplication. It is art that exposes their difference, however, because art is made by humans with human interest in mind (in the very broadest sense imaginable), and it is art that is rooted in the material—in the sense of a thing. To clarify: When discussed in the abstract, art is an object, a work, or an experience. When art is immaterial, it declares the material through its absence, or gestures to one as a dematerialized image, or else an evocation in the viewer, such as a memory. Art requires the mutual insufficiency of materialization of some sort together with the socially constructed context, that is, the human aspect. Some very serious problems arise when valorization is given to the material, which is the task to unpack for the rest of what is to follow. Posthumanism, as Hayles describes it, is a consequence of technology, cognitively as well as physiologically. With posthumanism, human functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it inhabits expand. In this model, it is not a question of leaving the body behind, but rather of extending embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prostheses. 24 Posthumanism radically restages and recalibrates the meanings of nature and reality. In the humanist universe, nature and the natural are myths of foundational non-­ mediation, whereas the posthumanist not only embraces mediation, but acknowledges the extent to which our beings are embedded within it. The reoriented awareness of nature and the human extends well beyond that of matter. If anything, when extrapolated, posthumanism points to the dissolution of matter, since the destiny of matter is to be pushed into a virtual plane. Posthumanism in art has vast implications in terms of authorship, as well as those of the concrete body. It also destabilizes authorship and subjectivity.

Bland Matter  95 To suggest that new materialism embraces the dissolution is to have it both ways, or, it is admission from the start that new materialism is a term that teeters on being a misnomer. We need to be reminded that new materialism is said to be a “materialist turn” away from the “linguistic turn” of Saussure, Jakobsen, Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism of the twentieth century. It is an effort to surmount or sidestep ideologies and discursive arrangements through encounters with materials and bodies. It maintains that the imposition of language games has blinded us to a more basic encounter with matter. Barad, for instance, cites the possibilities of “intra-actions” between meaning (language) and matter. Given that most art is both idea and material, and that it is a form of mediation that seeks to make the material communicate, it can be harnessed to the call of new materialism. There are enormous pitfalls to this, not least because Barad is unclear as to what these intra-actions, as upliftingly novel as they may sound, consist in, when they take place, and how they might be applied. Unless of course, this is all just a rewriting of the age-old aesthetic encounter. Before developing these ideas further, it might be best to turn to an artistic precursor to these rewritten approaches: Relational art. Relational art is either the forerunner to new materialism or just a component part, given the many definitions of new materialist ontology as “relational.” Relational aesthetics, or relational art, as is well known, grew out of the 1990s, under the theoretical leadership of the critic-curator, Nicolas Bourriaud, and advanced in his eponymous book in 1998. Using terms that had begun to be popularized by the internet, which was still in relative infancy, Bourriaud defines relational aesthetics as being interactive, “user-friendly,” and DIY. In all, it was open to all, and eminently inclusive. It was, however, a reworking, a safe remixing of Situationism from the 1950s and ’60s, while Situationism did not even see itself as an artistic movement, but was harnessed and interpreted by artists (and beyond such as by the designer-entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren) as a strategic toolkit for countercultural activity. But Bourriaud’s sanitized version of it was yet another reminder of the dissipation of sub- and countercultural movements, and their absorption into the capitalist system. 25 For under Bourriaud’s curation the artists were safely housed under a gallery roof, and the artists engaged in suitably warming activities, such as serving soup for the audience. Claire Bishop, writing in 2004, astutely observed that relational art “seems to derive from a creative misreading of poststructuralist theory: rather than interpretations of a work of art being open to reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.”26 In many ways relational art is an unwittingly elegiac activity, as it mourns the time of authentic activism (when it was believed) with a ghostly substitute, a utopian stand-in that acts out community in counterfeit. The materiality of interaction is a disavowal and hence a reminder of the increasing disenfranchisement, division, and inequality in late capitalist society.

Art and the sacredness of matter, or, steeped in the thing Art is haunted by things. It is made of something and is about something. One of the most engaging and challenging aspects of minimalism was that something was required for the expression, assertion, allusion, and registration of nothing. This is an ancient mystical notion in any case, but is one of minimalism’s most powerful aspects, as it reacted to the saturation of visual information and subjectivity of abstract expressionism. Conceptualism, which placed the idea before the object, nonetheless

96  Adam Geczy needed some kind of object in order to instate the idea. As poets and artists from Mallarmé to Kosuth have noted, an idea can be a work of art, and as soon as that thought is thought as such, as art, it becomes a thing, because it is named and classified. Whether or not it is good art, or art worthy of even that small effort, falls under a different category of inquiry. Digitization affords the art object a potential limitlessness in iteration and incarnation: It can be in many places at the same time, on different interfaces, in different sizes, different colors, and beyond. In the 1990s, when the internet and digital art were beginning to evolve in a way accessible to an increasing number of people, photography also began to have more widespread popularity among curators and collectors. The pervasiveness of photography as not only an acceptable art form (which it had been for some time) but a marketable quantity for investment could be seen as a destabilization of centuries-old hierarchies of the art object based on criteria of physicality and uniqueness. The noticeable surge in artists working in reproducible media, accompanied with the desire to collect such works, had inevitable consequences. (Video would soon follow to become a mainstream, fashionable practice.) Painting, which enjoyed a revival in the 1980s in what was colloquially called the “return to painting,” witnessed yet another display of its tenacity. In the presence of the reproducible object, painting’s resilience could be seen, in part, as an expression of the commodity market. Digital reproduction soon became the norm, as did the virtual sale, where galleries would post the work of their blue-chip artists to a select number of VIP buyers before unleashing the work into the world. In a climate of mass virtualization, it is only understandable that there would be a backlash toward materialization, a return to the material. This can be seen in new generations of expressionist and gestural art, and the pride taken over painterliness, critical references to touch and tactility, and, most heroically of all, the physicality of paint. The same of course can be said of countless other media, from synthetic to “natural,” such as wood and metal. It is platitude to say that the physicality of the medium and the material form part of the work of art. We also know that touch, especially when it comes to art, is phenomenologically inferred rather than directly experienced. We are prohibited from touching paintings in museums, and most of us are content to look at them. The prevalence of digital images in our lives begs the question, however, of the extent to which those who have grown up with digital multiplicity are cognitively both inured and responsive, so as to argue that the experience of a work of art seen digitally is only different as a modality, and neither qualitatively inferior nor inauthentic. It is also for this reason that the return to the material has a certain reactionary appeal. Ideologically it implies a return to basics. Its implication is a return to truth. As opposed to humanism and posthumanism, which are terms about constructed elements, the use of the word material, in any of its cognate forms, as with matter, courts with it a sensitively but still preponderately recursive connotation of a return to the precognitive, pre-predicative if we want to use a word from Husserl, the primal, the unmediated, and the true. If new materialism is a means of combating the tyranny of discursive structure and the linguistic bind, it does so with an implicit rhetoric of a recourse to what is before language and which language cannot fathom. It is inviolable. We might call this the “materiality myth.” This is not to discount materiality, which is its foregrounding, at the expense of the discourses that call it into being. It is sentimentality that is silencing.

Bland Matter  97 The discourse of the materiality of the work of art has two tiers, one philosophical, the other critical, both of which are largely modernist concepts. The materiality of art comes into question with Plato and the ancient Greeks, with the artist as poetes, a maker. For the ancients, the artist is invariably a maker of things in the world that mimic the already existing things in the world, and if depending on the extent to which you subscribed to Plato’s view of the artist as a counterfeiter, then these fabricated things were the image of something perfectible or perfected. It is in the work of burgeoning aesthetics and art criticism in the eighteenth century that the materiality of the art object becomes an object of serious scrutiny, first in the work of Lessing and Winckelmann, culminating in Hegel’s Aesthetics (1835). Drawing liberally from Winckelmann, Hegel reflected on the different degrees of materiality and embodiment of the work of art, tracing a historical evolution from the ancient Egyptians to the Greeks, to his present in the early nineteenth century. Each stage—the symbolic, classical, and romantic—marked the eventual disclosure of “Spirit,” culminating in his notorious prediction of the end of art, when the carapace of art would be insufficient to the Spirit, for which it was a conduit. His historical teleology, which would eventuate into art history as a discipline in its own right, was conceived as a passage from materialization to dematerialization. Adequate to the symbolic was architecture; to the classical, sculpture; and to the romantic, music and painting. Poetry stood outside and above the hierarchy because it was the least material and the most conceptual of all the artforms. Here is not the place to dwell on the inconsistencies of Hegel’s theories, of which there are many, but it still has valency for several reasons, especially with regard to the idea of material adequation. In more contemporary terms, we might speculate upon what is the “zeitgeist medium.” Fashion photographer Nick Knight, for instance, in musing upon his establishment of SHOWstudio, speculates that photography was no longer the “zeitgeist medium” it once was, given that the interest and energy had inexorably shifted toward film. 27 This is his justification for ushering in the now accepted genre of fashion film, a new form of virtual embodiment, through time and movement. During the classical period, sculpture was for form adequate to the corporealization of Greek culture, while in the painting and music of the “Romantic” period (which for Hegel actually meant from the Middle Ages onward), the harmony of the classical period had become gradually replaced with music and painting, which were more apt vehicles for the historical subjectivity of Hegel’s day, which was less coherent due to a striving that was not as present in previous eras. Romantic, which is, for Hegel, modern subjectivity, was not self-referential but grasping at something beyond itself. As Hegel puts it: “infinite subjectivity, the absolute of romantic art, is not submerged in its appearing; it is in itself, and for that does not have its individuality for itself but for others, freed and exposed to the outer surface.”28 Both formally and figuratively, the art of the surface is painting. Stephen Houlgate remarks that for Hegel, painting “replaces the solidity and materiality of sculpture with the Schein of natural space, and so explicitly dissolves the idea that what we behold is irreducibly material.”29 The chief concern is the modern preoccupation that the work of art is not irreducible to its physical and material characteristics, but instead is informed by a complex web of narratives, assumptions, discourses, and value judgments. The second major deployment of the language of the material and materialism in art begins as a response (as it was not simply a reaction) to technology in the painterly surfaces of Manet, the impressionists, and postimpressionism. It is another

98  Adam Geczy irrepressibly linear narrative toward non-objective abstraction and formalism formulated by Clement Greenberg from the 1930s, climaxing in the 1950s (and dwindling noticeably by the 1960s). It was also in the 1930s, in the wake of Russian constructivism and De Stijl, that artists such as Hans Jean Arp, Henry More, Noam Gabo, and Barbara Hepworth began to work manually in wood and stone, with the common thread being a “truth to materials.” Just as with the many warming connotations that materialism is pregnant with, this was a rallying cry that was not without its seductions. Among other things, it was an artistic direction that was meant to suggest a return to the right path after the gathering momentum of technology that saw its grisly result in the First World War. Truth to materials could mean different things to different artists, but it largely consisted in a responsiveness to the material, a call to “listen” to the material, which meant not going against the grain, in both the figurative and literal sense of the expression. The artist made the most of the burs in the wood and allowed the flowing grain structure to dictate the evolution of the form. Arp referred to his sculptures as “concretions” which was meant to signify its own definite physicality while also suggesting that it was a physical distillation of natural forces. It is hard not to enjoy these works, but we may also ask ourselves about the extent to which our enjoyment is tempered by the very lack of intellectual apparatus that is needed to appreciate them, given that their intent, written into the very process of production, is the experience of the physical form, in all its unique materiality. And with anything unique, it devolves into solipsism, a solipsism that is different from minimalist solipsism, which uses it self-consciously, in no small part as a critique of the more disingenuous solipsism of the triumphant materialism of high modernism which is bracketed by the cataclysms of two World Wars. Indeed, the horrors contemporary with modernist, materialist art of the twentieth century prompt one to ask the extent to which it was not a form of retreat into an experience where to know and to think were replaced with feeling, but a feeling resolved in the object, and thus objectively limited. With the authority of the cosmic security that “pure” materiality can bring, not to beg any questions has its attendant comforts, comforts that are not without their unanticipated consequences.

The return to wood, or barking up the wrong tree The political implications of truth to material, return to the material, and new materialism are many, and yet they repeatedly wind up in reactionary conservatism which is built on a muted essentialism. That is, an essentialism that dare not show its face because it is ostensibly grounded in subjective experience (itself a dead end for debate) and in an apparent respect for the world, the seat of matter. A historical corrective to the political impasse that materialism—as a “return,” as “truth,” or as “new”—leads to the example of Martin Heidegger, the Heidegger after he had resigned the Rectorship of the University of Freiburg in 1934, and his retreat (return?) to what he vowed to be a wholesome and less politically trammeled existence in his country retreat. Despite his resignation he remained a member of the Nazi Party. Heidegger had long been suspicious of the power of technology over humanity, while also viewing nature and matter as “standing reserve” in wait for human agency. In 1950 he published Holzwege, a collection of essays, including his famous 1935 lecture “The Origin of the Work of Art.” The title of the book was a loaded one,

Bland Matter  99 especially in light of the Nazi legacy of “blood and soil,” and the heavy sloganeering of a call to a predestined Teutonic path. There were other ambiguities as well: Heidegger’s ontology refers to a “home” of ontology, a need for being to find its place of truth—this is also a form of immanence that is, admittedly, along very different lines from that of Spinoza (and Deleuze). Holzwege unabashedly evokes the image of the modest woodcutter, tramping through the woods, unalloyedly responsive to the call of nature. In his opening to the book, Heidegger validates the conceit of the title with the explanation: Wood [Holz] is an old name for forest. In the woods, there are paths, which mostly end up over-grown, where no-one has set foot [im Unbegangenen]. They are called woodcutter’s paths. Each one runs separately, but in the same forest. Often one appears to be like the other. But it only appears to be that way. Wood gatherers and foresters know these paths. They know what it means to be on “the forester’s path.”30 Some know the way; others are wayward: Obstructed by the delusions of technology and the complications of modern life. There are, thankfully people who “know.” They are in touch with nature, and with matter. There are all too many parallels with another ugly new materialist word, enmeshedness. (One commentator uses this term with the great American poet of nature, Thoreau.)31 The reader will notice that this chapter has resisted following a route in defense of the virtual. Other chapters in this volume can do that. When a global pandemic has accelerated the virtualization of human interaction and relationships, we can only be mindful of the backlash that this may force in the name of what is purportedly undeniable and impassable. The virtues attributed to the brute force of matter, of dumb matter, is a myth that takes us back to motherhood, to nationhood, and the truth of being. With this in mind, it is also worth recalling that the German phrase auf dem Holzwege sein (literally: to be on the woodcutter’s path) means to “bark up the wrong tree”32 or to be “up the garden path.”

Notes 1 “New Materialism and Visual Arts,” University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, accessed April 18, 2020, https://asca.uva.nl/content/research-groups/ new-materialism-and-visual-art/new-materialism-and-visual-art.html?cb. 2 C. A. Richardson, “New Materialism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society 21 (1920– 21): 70. 3 Georg Lukács, Werke (Berlin: Hermann Lichterhand, 1971), 11:48. 4 Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza et les trois ‘éthiques’,” Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993), 177; emphasis in the original. 5 Deleuze, 177–8; emphasis in the original. 6 Deleuze, 178. 7 Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction,” in Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science, ed. L. H. Nelson and J. Nelson (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 177. 8 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 185. 9 Barad, 185. 10 Vicki Kirby, What If Culture Was Nature all Along? (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 10.

100  Adam Geczy 11 Kirby, 20. 12 Helen Palmer, “A Field of Heteronyms and Homonyms: New Materialism, Speculative Fabulation, and Wor(l)ding,” in New Directions in Philosophy and Literature, ed. David Rudrum, Ridvan Askin, and Frida Beckman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 219. 13 Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Infomatics (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1999). 14 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 2. 15 Braidotti, 3. 16 Braidotti, 171. 17 Braidotti, 171. 18 David Wood, On Being Geologically Human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 101. 19 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 172. 20 Wood, On Being Geologically Human, 101. 21 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 107. 22 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 130–1. 23 Latour, 5–6. 24 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 290–1. 25 See Geczy, “Sanitised Situationism,” Broadsheet 37, no. 2 (2008): 124–7. 26 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 52. 27 Nick Night, “Thoughts on Fashion Film,” Show Studio, YouTube video, accessed April 22, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOBZMS9Bhr0&t=303s&has_verified=1. 28 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 2:144. 29 Stephen Houlgate, “Hegel and the Art of Painting,” in Hegel and Aesthetics, ed. William Maker (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 1975), 64. 30 Gitta Honnegger, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 244. 31 Michael Shrimper, “Thoreau’s Poetry and the New Materialism: A Matter of ‘Enmeshedness’,” The Concord Saunterer 26 (2018): 55–78. 32 Honnegger, Thomas Bernhard, 244.

8 Bandness Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre

Just as contemporary art absorbs objects and cultural phenomena that are not yet art into its orbit, so too has rock and pop music become increasingly omnivorous at its definitional borders. Core to these analogous developments is the mythologization of the figure of the “band” as a creative agent and “world-maker.” These shared absorptive capacities in art and music bring us to the question at the heart of this essay: What does a rock band have in common with a work of contemporary art? Although this might initially appear to be a rather odd line of inquiry, we found this question sufficiently intriguing to actually “form” a band—named the Ghosts of Nothing—to perform an artist function within the “artworld.”1 And it is with this particular collaborative mutation of the artistic function in mind that we will attempt to tease out the slippery notion of “bandness.” Although the ontology of music—including popular and rock music—has, in general terms, been the focus of much scholarly activity in recent decades, the ontology of bandness as a specific topic within this expansive field has received surprisingly little attention. 2 As John Andrew Fisher observes, there is an ontological complexity to rock music—which he distinguishes from both popular and classical music—that arises from “whole domains of aesthetic interest” that are not necessarily as evident in other musical genres.3 Fisher, Gracyk, and others have identified the centrality of recordings to any proper account of the ontology of rock music.4 We suggest that the elusive quality of bandness also features prominently in this ontological landscape and is important for both rock and other forms of popular music. Our aim, in what follows, is not to develop a systematic account of all the relevant issues, but rather to offer a preliminary sketch of the implications of pursuing one particular line of thought in what turns out to be an intriguingly multi-faceted problem. Let us open with the following proposition: Although a band might produce material artifacts and sensorial affects, its perceived existence is predicated upon a consensually recognized, although not uniformly projected, immaterial fiction somewhere in space and time. At first glance, “immaterial,” “virtual,” or “fictional” bands are the exceptions that prove the rule. Imaginary creative works can only be experienced when we imagine their effect in the world. Yet how do we transmit these imaginary effects from one mind to another? The (impossible, real-world) existence of a non-existent band frustrates this as we attempt to imagine effects designed to preclude the imagining of effects. However, a nagging doubt persists. Are fictional bands—or, indeed, immaterial works of art more generally—ever really immaterial? Just as digital works require physical networks, hardware devices, and electricity to be physically perceivable, concepts require physical organic structures to be conceived, borne in mind, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-8

102  Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre communicated to others. Today, as a consequence of this unequivocable fact, it is generally accepted that the dematerialization of conceptual art was never actually possible. By contrast, contemporary “postconceptual art,” as is usefully described by Peter Osborne, is understood in terms of a dynamic mutual insufficiency of conceptual and aesthetic dimensions activated through processes of fictionaliztion.5 So, in what kinds of ways then might our fictional band the Ghosts of Nothing actually “exist?” The flawed suggestion that a creative work might be immaterial has been put forward by several thinkers over the last century.6 Notwithstanding the fallacy underpinning this claim, when distilled to its central premise, it nevertheless serves to highlight the way in which interpretation of any physical artifact or gesture is always highly dependent upon an invisible informational backstory. The depth of that backstory inevitably varies between different individuals and groups. For champions of this view, the aesthetic procedure involves artist and audience jointly realizing certain mental states, and, as a consequence, art is fundamentally expression.7 This expression is then individually decoded in light of an intersubjectively agreed context, that is, culture, which is constantly changing, fragmenting, recombining, and mutating. Consequently, as this argument goes, a work of art is not an artifact at all, just as a song doesn’t need to be played or written down in order to exist in a mind—as an imaginary thing—and nowhere else. The actual making of the tune is therefore the physical creation of an imaginary tune. However, as cognitive neuroscience reveals, even an entirely imaginary melody is still associated with neuronal traces in specific areas of the brain, and is therefore irredeemably physical, at least in some small part.8 And herein lies the Achilles’ heel of any proposition which claims that works of art— or indeed bands—can ever be absolutely and completely immaterial. The idea that art exists in the space of ideas, feelings, values, and associations formed around certain things or events seems to make sense, and can readily be accepted, up to a point. However, as Jeffrey Strayer demonstrated in his 2007 book Subjects and Objects,9 even the most immaterial works at the outermost limits of abstraction/conceptualism still invariably require something that is irreducibly material—a “public perceptual object” to use Strayer’s term—which “points,” possibly through a sequential chain of multiple intervening immaterial imaginings, to the intended conceptual endpoint. Such material beginnings may well be very slight indeed, perhaps just a few words or a sketchy image inked on a page or pixelated on a physical computer screen, but, nevertheless, material they stubbornly remain. How the intended conceptual or immaterial endpoint of these material beginnings is interpreted—whether as artwork, band, or something else—depends, in turn, on the cultural context(s) in which the material object(s) is considered, by a perceiving audience, to have the potential to be meaningfully interpreted in certain ways and under certain conditions. To simplify his meticulous analysis, Strayer shows us that, minimally, even the most abstracted and dematerialized work of art depends on: • • •

At least one public perceptual object At least one perceiving subject The subject’s appreciation of an artworld10 context in which the object is interpreted

Mindful of Strayer’s analysis, we will now attempt to demonstrate that an analogous proposition holds for our elusive socio-cultural category of bandness.

Bandness  103 So, what are the minimum ingredients for a band? What evidence is required in order to accept that a band actually exists? “Live” performances are clearly not mandatory, as exemplified by bands such as the Monkees (initially), the Dukes of Stratosphear (an alter ego of XTC), or even the Beatles, who famously ceased touring altogether but certainly did not cease to exist as a band. A lack of recordings is also no obstacle, as the existence of countless garage bands will attest. Virtual performances, including those by parodic or fictional bands, are evidently one means of coming into being as a band—as exemplified by Spinal Tap, Flight of the Conchords, and the Rutles. So, it might appear that some kind of musical performance is essential, whether filmed, televised, virtual, or live. The fact that each of these fictional bands eventually went on to also perform live concerts and release records, just like “real” bands, might be interpreted as prima facie evidence that some form of perceivable music is indeed essential. However, to show that this is not the case, consider the case of completely fictional bands that have never played a note of music, live or otherwise, and possibly never will. Such amusical bands can and do nevertheless exist as memes in popular culture. There are numerous examples. Take, for instance, Bennie and the Jets, the subjects of the song of the same name from Elton John’s Yellow Brick Road (1973) album. Or if not fully fledged memes, at least as literary references known well enough in certain quarters; here we could point to Billy Barf and the Vomitones (from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990)) or the Blow Goes (from Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962)). What about the suggestion that a band is a uniplural descriptor, and should therefore have at least two members, if not more? This criterion is quickly negated through the example of one-member bands such as Nine Inch Nails (really Trent Reznor). Many bands have also meaningfully existed for extended periods with only one member. Dave Grohl, for example, was effectively the only member of the Foo Fighters during the recording of their first studio album. Similarly, Billy Corgan has been the only member of Smashing Pumpkins since 2009. Marina of Marina and the Diamonds is now simply referred to as Marina. Our list could go on. This gloss of variations that run close to the minimal limits of bandness demonstrates that, if it is indeed a coherent cultural category (as common usage would suggest), then all the usual attributes—music, performance, individually identifiable members, and so on—may be present in reality. But it would seem that none of these attributes are finally absolutely essential for a band to be considered to exist. This much is apparent from the examples of the fictional bands cited above, whose existence depends merely on being named, in a book, song lyric, or film, and nothing more. No music has ever been, nor ever needs to be, played by these bands. No photos or interviews exist nor need ever exist. No members need to be identified. All that is required in these cases is (1) at least one—but possibly no more than one—public perceptual object (e.g., a name) able to be experienced (in a book, recording, or film), by (2) a single perceiving subject, in (3) a cultural context that allows for the possibility of inferring the existence of a band from perceptual experience only. In other words, the minimal limits of bandness are just as Strayer concludes for art at the outermost minimal limits of abstraction. It might be argued that fictional bands do not qualify as proper bands. However, the examples of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Dukes of Stratosphear remind us that the boundaries between fiction and reality can be very blurred indeed. Moreover, any demarcation along these lines is vulnerable to sudden reversal in light

104  Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre of subsequent developments. Take again, for example, the transformation of Spinal Tap from parodic fictional film band to touring live band with “follow-up” albums no longer linked directly with the original film. Or to cite another example, the animated band Gorillaz has also played live in concert as holographic projections alongside actual physical appearances from guest performers such as De La Soul, and Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of the Clash. It would seem that the threads of categorical continuity can be stretched very thin indeed and yet, somehow, not entirely break. Consider the appropriation of the name Heaven 17—another fictional band first presented in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange— by a real band formed in 1980 by two departing members of the Human League. While disambiguation may be important in certain contexts, it would seem that, at a higher level of abstraction, Heaven 17 can be legitimately used as a band name which refers to a cultural category that is large enough to contain both Burgess’ fictional band and the real synth-pop band of the same name. More tenuously, consider the list of bands whose names came from book titles with no obvious association with music; think Belle & Sebastian, Soft Machine, Steppenwolf, and the Doors (to name just some). The more we multiply examples, the more we find that the accrual of newly sedimented layers of meaning over time is not the exception but rather the rule of bandness. Our first observation is that whatever else a band may be, it is an inherently dynamic category, fundamentally a temporal process, subject to continual changes—even major discontinuities—in any of its constituent parts and ontological dimensions.11 Perhaps, we might suppose (in desperation), the only mandatory constant is the name. But once again, we don’t have to look very hard for examples that throw even this into doubt. Shihad, for example—originally named after a term used in David Lynch’s 1984 film Dune (based on a Frank Herbert novel)—renamed their band as Pacifier following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In an amusing press release issued on the same day as Shihad’s name change, punk band Frenzal Rhomb mockingly announced that they would thereafter claim the name Shihad. Later, regretting their decision, Pacifier would change their name back to Shihad in 2004. (Here, we are also amusingly reminded of the Monty Python sketch about a band that continuously changed its name.) Name changes are certainly not uncommon events in the history of bands. Famously, the Silver Beetles became the Silver Beatles, and then finally the Beatles in mid-1960, but perhaps few would insist that these names don’t all (more or less) refer to the band we would accept as the real Beatles, albeit in their earliest days. Other complications can also muddy the waters without totally undermining the resilience of a band name in common use. For example, Ringo Starr, arguably pivotal to any mainstream understanding of what “the Beatles” connotes as a band, only joined the group in mid-1962. And when the Beatles performed in Australia with a replacement drummer (Jimmy Nicol) because Ringo was unavailable due to illness, audiences still accepted that they were legitimately witnessing the Beatles play live. Evidently, individual members can come and go, while a band as a particular socio-cultural entity carries on. Are we then to conclude that there are no absolutely essential characteristics of bandness whatsoever? Perhaps we have been too hasty in dismissing any requirement for some minimal association of bandness with music? To be sure, the examples already cited demonstrate that a band need not ever produce any music, real or imaginary. However, this is not quite the same as saying that bandness does not imply the possibility, or perhaps even the expectation, that any entity which qualifies as a band,

Bandness  105 fictional or otherwise, has the potential to produce music, even if that music has never been heard, may never be heard, and indeed may never be made. In principle, all the examples of bands that we have presented above could—or even should—be able to make music, even if we can’t be sure what that music might sound like, or even if it has not yet been made. Indeed, we are unable to think of any examples of bands, real or fictional, which are fundamentally and permanently removed from the possibility of making music.12 In other words, it seems to us that—at least at this point in history—­the possibility of bandness in a given context also equates to the possibility of music-making. Based on this brief discussion, and adapting Strayer’s analysis presented above, we might tentatively conclude that the minimal requirements of bandness are: • • •

At least one public perceptual object (not necessarily musical) At least one perceiving subject The subject’s awareness of a socio-cultural context that suggests or allows the possibility of interpreting the public perceptual object in terms of bandness, which at least includes the possibility that the band could make music

At this point, we could also ask what things look like at the opposite extreme. Is there perhaps an upper limit to how much extra-musical content can be funneled into the concept of a given band before the category of bandness collapses under the weight of its non-musical overburden? Without laboring the argument, a couple of examples suggest that, if there is indeed any upper limit, it is probably constrained by practical considerations and human limitations rather than any a priori theoretical determinations. Certainly, the band category of the Beatles, to return to this example, at the zenith of its popularity, seemed effortlessly able to accommodate an extraordinarily rich array of additional non-musical public perceptual objects— ranging from dolls, to films, to cartoons, to plastic wigs, to fanzines, and well-publicized events with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Lennon, and Yoko Ono, and much more besides—without depleting their bandness and, more to our point, potentially amplifying what their bandness might mean at a particular point in history. This example suggests that, if there is any upper limit at all, it is a distant prospect. The same could be said of many other heavily merchandised “super bands” at the height of their popularity, such as Kiss, Abba, or One Direction. Indeed, today, this capacity for superabundance in almost any imaginable category of extra-musical merchandising has been taken to hyperbolic extremes by the “K-Pop” (short for Korean pop) industry—as exemplified by the seven-member global “boy band” sensation BTS. For many fans, the BTS universe that winds through the band’s musical and extra-musical merchandising output has become a convincing and all-encompassing alternate reality which has contributed to the staggering October 2020 valuation of BTS’s management company Big Hit Entertainment at KRW 8.7 trillion (US$7.6 billion).13 For another upper limit example of extra-musical materialization, consider the French electronic band M83 (nowadays also essentially a one-person group), named after the galaxy Messier 83 (or M83), and thereby effortlessly absorbing a far distant extra-terrestrial dimension into its conceptual orbit. Indeed, no connection to any previously unrelated categories seems to be unassailably out of bounds, as the example of Depressizona exorum, a snail named after Dutch post-punk band the Ex, demonstrates.14

106  Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre Here, our own extra-musical explorations as the fictional band cum artistic collaboration the Ghosts of Nothing is also relevant. Our band (like any band) exists within a mutually insufficient relationship between the vehicular function of physical artifacts/events and immaterial projections of thought. Consequently, we conspicuously exploit the fact that aesthetic experience exists both within and beyond direct sense perception. As discussed earlier, one obvious example of this play of sensory and extra-sensory elements is found in our partly fictional and partly physically realized work In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour (2014–18), presented in three consecutive acts. Figure 8.1, for example, is a full-page advertisement that we placed in issue 45 of the Italian art magazine Mousse (October–November 2014) “promoting” the first act, In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour of Abandoned Music Venues (2014–15). Here, a closer reading of the detailed text reveals that many of the listed performances on this “tour” occur at historically significant music venues which are abandoned, no longer exist, or have been decommissioned. Although there is very little else to go on, this single advertisement, even if considered in hypothetically perfect isolation from any and all other material traces, clues, and pointers, nevertheless, manages to achieve a singular feat: It asserts, and thereby brings into being, the conceptual existence of a band—perhaps fictional, perhaps not—but a band nevertheless, known as the Ghosts of Nothing. Significantly, this world tour included dates that were nothing other than an act of conceptual nomination—by virtue of a line in a printed advertisement—in the minds of our audience. Yet perhaps even more significantly, our tour also included dates on which specific events did actually occur on the dates and in the locations specified.15 Clearly, both the “gigs” in which something actually happened and the ones that were simply “built in the mind” add something to our story and the expanding conceptual architecture of our band cum artwork. As is the case with other partly fictionalized works of art and artistic collectives (such as Walid Raad’s Atlas Group [1989–2004]), it is also at least in part our intention that our fictionalizations might invite speculation upon the nature of fictions more generally. Looking back through the highly mythologized histories of both art and rock “n” roll, it is tempting to ponder if some historically significant performances or exhibitions actually took place at the time and place upon which their respective mythologies are built. But does this ultimately matter? Surely, the partly or wholly fictionalized nature of these performances or exhibitions does not necessarily diminish the weight or significance of their historical impact. The important thing is that they ultimately influenced or affected far more people than could possibly have been physically present. Although most of us did not directly experience the infamous performances of some of the seminal rock bands that underpin our understanding of rock “n” roll’s mythologies, we are nevertheless able to build something of them in our minds. We might have seen some film footage, perhaps a single image, or perhaps we simply heard a second-hand anecdotal account. Over time and space, these mythologies have proliferated as memes. We might know something of Iggy Pop cutting himself on stage or Ozzy Osbourne “doing a line” of ants. We also, consciously or subconsciously, channel the impact of such memes whenever we directly experience performances by derivative artists in the same genre. To what extent and in what ways does it really matter whether or not an audience directly witnesses a supposedly originary event, or for that matter, whether or not any documentary account of such an event—such as a photograph—can be “trusted” as a legitimate record of what allegedly took place? Notwithstanding the well-established

Bandness  107

Figure 8.1  T he Ghosts of Nothing Advertisement for In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour of Abandoned Music Venues 2014–15 as published in the Italian art magazine Mousse 45, (October–November 2014): 261.

108  Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre fact that a photograph—or a video or sound recording—is necessarily fragmentary and therefore fundamentally incapable of wholly indexing or accounting for the reality it purports to index, the document can also become an important materialization within the expanded world of the work capable of offering an alternative entry portal. Moreover, when considered together with other material and narrative elements, documentation helps to performatively extend the identity of a given work in the minds of audiences potentially located elsewhere in space in time. Conversely, any elision of narrative elements highlights the basic synchronicity of the photograph—for it effectively stops time and reifies the nominated scene as image. Yet an image is a bounded representation (unavoidably edited and very possibly altered or enhanced) of a fleeting instant in time. Its meaning is always contingent upon context and viewers’ presuppositions for its interpretation.16 Thus, there is an inescapable under-specification associated with all images and all fragments (no matter how monumental or vast). As we discuss further below, this under-specification was especially foregrounded in the aesthetics of Romanticism and its present continuations. These fundamentally unavoidable connective chains only further reinforce the mutual insufficiency of concept and material. Importantly, this essential connection can be activated via any number of supplementary structures—such captioning, a beholder’s pre-existing knowledge of the artist or event, and any other images and paratexts that might surround a “primary” presentation. For Amelia Jones, writing on the relationship between performance art and photography, just as the “art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened; the photograph needs the body art event as an ontological ‘anchor’ of its indexicality.”17 Importantly, not only does this mutual interdependence of performance and documentation challenge the status and deification of the originary event, it actually affirms the status of documentation as a key point of access to the work. Philip Auslander takes this line of argument further. For Auslander, “we cannot dismiss studio fabrications of one sort or another from the category of performance art because they were not performed for a physically present audience.”18 Drawing upon the historical example of a substantially altered photomontage by Shunk-Kender of an original performance by French artist Yves Klein at Rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses titled Le Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) (1960), Auslander claims, to argue that Klein’s leap was not a performance because it took place only within photographic space would be equivalent to arguing that the Beatles did not perform the music on their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album because that performance exists only in the space of the recording.19 Notwithstanding the necessity of at least one public perceptual object to activate audience recognition of the existence of a work, we can conclude that at least part of the aesthetic experience of a work of art—or a rock band—is built in the minds of its suitably predisposed audience, through layers of documentation and a mix of actual events presented in conjunction with layers of active fictionalization. In the case of the Ghosts of Nothing, our process of conceptually marking a world tour of In Memory of Johnny B Goode involved superimposing new objects over the already established historical record of each of the listed venues. For our audience, despite the fact that much of this tour remained beyond the realm of direct experience, and the fact that only a selection of the advertised dates would ultimately correspond with an actual

Bandness  109 live performance, we still provided an aesthetic experience made apparent via an exercise of orientation—and orienteering—of thought. There are numerous historical examples of artists that have used thought projections as a primary element in their work. Two examples that push at the outer limits of such an approach are Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin’s non-specific column of air over Oxfordshire in 1967, and the moment of 1:36 pm, June 15, 1969, in which Robert Barry nominated All the Things I Know but of Which I Am Not at the Moment Thinking. In both of these cases, it is still clear that a minimal vehicular support was required (i.e., a declaration made public in words) in order to transmit the work to an audience. So, as we have shown, any attempt to create art—or a band—which is entirely immaterial and conceptual in nature is doomed to fail. Likewise, there can be no such thing as a work of art—or a band—that is completely material, that is, completely devoid of conceptual content. Without conceptual content, the kinds of materializations that we recognize as a work of art—or a band—would be incapable of transcending arbitrariness or ordinariness within the continuum of everything else that is not already socio-culturally considered to be a work of art, or a band. This, put simply, is an inevitable consequence of the mutually insufficient dimensions of concept and aesthetic that Osborne identified as requisite ingredients of a work of art.20 To briefly take stock before proceeding further, it seems apparent that the conceptual complex of any given band is potentially able to accommodate a hypothetically infinite constellation of existent objects, real or imagined, without negating its continuing state of bandness. Therefore, as we tentatively conclude, there is no finite maximal upper limit awaiting nomination. It is at this juncture that we begin to suspect that we may have become somewhat ensnared in the impasses of either/or thinking, searching for hard and fast limits or permanent definitional dimensions where, in all probability, none exist. While we have sketched out some apparently minimal requirements of bandness above, a general suspicion lingers that these are, at best, tenuous and transient, subject to revision as the socially accepted parameters of bandness as a conceptual category continue to evolve in time. Even the potential for music-making, which we have salvaged as a vestigial minimum criterion of bandness as generally understood today, may not be immune to revision at some point in the future, for example, as the definition of “music” itself escapes into unexpected territories. This is an open definition. Just as Jean-Jacques Nattiez has argued that “the border between music and noise is always culturally defined,”21 we might by extension assert that the border between band and non-band is also necessarily culturally defined. It seems that all we can safely conclude is that bandness is a concept, and concepts are processes, inherently fuzzy and subject to change. To be sure, the concept of bandness is evidently a generously accommodating one, even omnivorously so, while at the same time highly tolerant of the circumstantial absence—or deliberate avoidance—of virtually all of its available ontological dimensions. This confluence of omnivorous accommodation and tolerance of extreme minimality is what makes the terrain of bandness such an appealing field for our artistic exploration. Countless other cultural objects can be problematized along similar lines. It is for this reason that creative works can be implicitly critically valued as fictions insofar as they reveal something about the nature of fictions more broadly. A multinational corporation, for example, can turn over all of its employees, executive board,

110  Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre geographical locations, physical infrastructures, change its name and line of products, or in some cases even its entire line of business, and all the while be regarded as meaningfully and continuously existing as a single entity with a connected and traceable history. Perhaps the only thing that will deem a corporation as effectively non-­ existent is a consensually recognized legal determination and subsequent liquidation of its assets. Similarly, perhaps the only thing that will deem a band to be effectively non-existent is a publicly recognized declaration that it has officially broken up. This status, however, especially given the future prospect of a reformation tour or album, is also potentially indefinite. In some cases, former band members have formed rival reformation versions of the same band, each competing for perceived authenticity. To cite just two examples, there have at various points in time been more than one Beach Boys or Dead Kennedys in existence. It is also worth noting that long after some bands have broken up, new fan bases can introduce radically divergent interpretations of their respective conceptual universes. In many cases, sincere appreciation can evolve into ironic appreciation, and vice versa. In any event, it is certainly clear that the conceptual universe of bandness can continue to mutate long after the officially declared demise of the band itself. Historically, there are a variety of different ways to theorize the seeming impossibility of definitively pinning down a creative work in exclusive or specific relation to any single object or symbolic configuration. Broadly speaking, however, it is clear that in the case of a work of art, as Martin Heidegger puts it, “something other is brought together with the thing that is made.”22 And, conversely, as Strayer usefully reminds us, even seemingly immaterial works still require something that is irreducibly ­material—that is, a public perceptual object—which points, in concert with various immaterial imaginings, to the intended identity of the work. For the Ghosts of Nothing, the artistic potential for multiplying this curious quality across multiple layers and cultural spaces using specific, material, artifactual devices is a primary motivation. This is evidenced, for example, in our novel presentation of a concept that now and hereafter effectively merges the two formerly independent fictional worlds—the alienated artist/clown historically known as Pierrot 23 and the fictional pop culture icon of Johnny B. Goode24 —to form the transmedia “story” that is our rock album cum work of art, In Memory of Johnny B. Goode. In this case, this juxtaposition of two fictional characters and their respective worlds—being the confluence of an invented rock star and a nineteenth-century tragic clown—was used to develop a radically materially and spatially distributed work of art. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, another series of largely underappreciated yet strongly resonant connections between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poets and artists with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century surf culture are being made in our second major project, Sounds of Unridden Waves (2021–). This work, which sits somewhere between a reimagining of late Romantic era musings upon the ineffable power of the ocean and the vernacular aesthetics of late twentieth-century surf culture, will be presented as the world’s first feature-length surf film not to have any human surfers, and set to an original instrumental soundtrack. Accompanying the core film and soundtrack components, we are also developing a related series of materially diverse exhibition and publishing outcomes. There are, at least hypothetically, an unlimited range of objects and concepts that a work of art or rock band might draw into its network of relations to form what Osborne describes as the “space” of a “singular, though internally multitudinous

Bandness  111 25

work.” Somehow, both a work of contemporary art and a band are capable of maintaining a sufficient degree of referential identity and unity, which, despite potential changes and evolutions, remain “irreducibly relational” across “the totality of its multiple material instantiations.”26 The apparently permeable nature of these definitional boundaries brings us to analogize contemporary postconceptual art with the absorptive world-making capacity of bands, which we refer to as bandness. Strangely, although it is relatively easy to recognize this unity, the “edges” of bandness are profoundly indeterminate and seemingly impossible to neatly demarcate. Intriguingly, when some non-musical things are intentionally or circumstantially brought into conceptual proximity with a rock band, a strange ontological transformation can take place. Here, much like the legacy of the Duchampian readymade, certain objects or events can, under certain conditions, assume a dual ontological status. They are recognizable both as everyday experiences and as part of a narrower complex of materializations that are also understood to contribute to the identity of a band. Historically, it is apparent that many otherwise non-musical objects, locations, and actions have become synonymous with specific rock band mythologies. Take, for example, Liverpool or the Cavern, geographical locations now forever woven into the definitional universe of the Beatles. Consider also the ways in which certain haircuts, fashions, hotels, venues, memorabilia, drugs, myths, and lifestyle choices have become synonymous with specific band-related “worlds.” As we will seek to demonstrate, this peculiarly absorptive quality can be illuminated by adapting frameworks already well established for discussing contemporary postconceptual art. Like a band, many contemporary works of art are not necessarily presented as a singular object, image, location, or event. And, like a band, many artworks can be experienced by their respective audiences in numerous ways, both directly and mediated, and, importantly, as an aggregate of elements. As already noted, we see these shared qualities as productive examples of the dynamic mutual insufficiency of conceptual and aesthetic dimensions, as activated through processes of fictionalization, and which Osborne has identified as defining features of contemporary postconceptual art. Within Osborne’s account, contemporary art can be characterized as part of a turn toward a transcategorical infinity of possible material means.27 Here he is referring to the almost ubiquitously accepted way in which virtually anything can now effectively function or be repurposed as art, and the way that art can now be more or less embedded in any other way of life. 28 This mutually absorptive quality is also described using the split ontology and material exuberance which German art theorist Jörg Heiser brings to his formulation of “Romantic conceptualism.”29 Considered together, we see these theoretical models as a useful way to analogize the relational space between fact, fiction, and materiality in both contemporary art and rock music. With these questions and formulations in mind, we present the Ghosts of Nothing’s particular version of bandness as existing in a quixotically expanded aesthetic realm. In this realm, we have consciously foregrounded our own conspicuous physical absence as human band members (in terms of avoiding traditionally branded public presence or photographs). Importantly, the marked absence of such conventional prompts and indices is intended to encourage audiences to look beyond our commercially released musical works. For we seek to offer experiences of an intermedial almost-­band-like package (but, perhaps ambiguously, not quite) that appear to operate more like a work of art than a conventional music industry product. Accordingly, we have sought both to actively problematize clear distinctions between exhibited

112  Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre artifacts and band merchandise in our physical exhibitions, and, by extension, to use these two distinct ontologies—of music industry and artworld—as part of a strategy of continuous deferment. In our 2018 solo exhibitions at the Lock-Up in Newcastle30 and Contemporary Art Tasmania in Hobart, 31 for example, visitors could purchase tour T-shirts and CDs but not the exhibited “art,” which consisted of a transient installation and large wall areas papered over with tour posters. At the Lock-Up exhibition, our “merch” table was extended to include tea towels, tote bags, books, postcards, art prints, and even a special limited-edition artist’s multiple. We also made it clear that our musical synchronization rights were for sale. Similar plans are in place for forthcoming exhibitions of Sounds of Unridden Waves. Somewhat brazenly, perhaps, we see this doubled ontology as a two-way street—while our merch is a self-reflective part of our exhibition of art, the exhibition also served as a promotional vehicle for our band’s “brand” of music. For the Ghosts of Nothing, the production and presentation of a materially exuberant constellation of artifacts, merchandise, and various documentary forms also serves to help build a credible—albeit often circumstantial—evidentiary base which suggests the public existence of our band, at least to audiences who have prior experience and knowledge of bands in popular culture. In this sense we expect that if we continue to do what bands do, we are more likely to be recognized publicly and mythologized as a real band. Historically, as we have already noted, rock bands have long embroidered the fabric of their mythic identity by introducing a range of extra-­ musical elements. In the case of the Ghosts of Nothing, the languages of symbolic accouterment, hyperbolic performative gesture, and merchandise both problematize the definitional borders of our world and exemplify the way in which a band, like a work of postconceptual art, is an inherently dynamic and porous entity. In Memory of Johnny B. Goode, for example, could be described as exemplifying what Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco termed an “open work.”32 Initially presented as a recorded quasi-rock-opera In Memory of Johnny B. Goode was slowly thematically expanded around an allegorical repurposing of Johnny B. Goode anachronistically re-cast as a contemporary emblem of Pierrot. This episodic series of radically expanded and virtually unrecognizable cover versions of otherwise well-known popular songs was then shapeshifted into a radio play and then a global tour of abandoned music venues, remote wildernesses, and abandoned jailhouses in three acts, all performed in mime by collaborating performers at each location.33 Similarly, our latest project at the time of writing—the aforementioned “surf film” Sounds of Unridden Waves—is also an expanding work. Once again, this project orbits around a commercially released instrumental soundtrack, this time a triple album, recorded and produced by the band the Ghosts of Nothing. 34 This original soundtrack is then set to a feature-length surf film without human surfers developed in collaboration with ten renowned surf filmmakers and artists.35 As this still unfolding project begins to mutate into a larger materially distributed work encapsulating a diverse range of objects and activities—which will include public exhibitions of images related to the project, collaborations with vocalists,36 video essays, and academic essays such as this present text—it will also exemplify two characteristics which have emerged as hallmarks of much contemporary postconceptual art. First, it reaffirms a principle forcefully made explicit in twentieth-century conceptualism, that is, that certain creative works can resist being understood as singularly exhibited materializations with clear definitional boundaries. Second, and somewhat

Bandness  113 quixotically, it illustrates an interestingly novel phenomenon: That it is eminently feasible to maintain—­even if only tenuously—a cohesive, coherent, and recognizable public identity of artwork and artist, despite being indexically constituted through a physically and temporally distributed aggregate of medial elements. This second phenomenon still manages to assert itself in a postconceptually post-millennial world in which authorship and production processes are often deeply intertwined and indistinguishable (and sometimes partly or wholly pseudonymous or anonymous). There is one question which persistently arises within this collaborative venture that is simultaneously applicable both to a work of postconceptual art and to our conception of bandness: If we are indeed a band, what determines the outermost limits of this band? Or, what kinds of activities, events, and artifacts can be meaningfully included within the uncertain borders of our particular instance of bandness while at the same time maintaining a meaningfully identifiable sense of unity? Here, we note that there are already numerous instances of mixed ontologies across the creative arts that appear relatively similar. Specifically, we could briefly turn to some of the many examples of visual artists, novelists, and filmmakers working along blurred lines of definition despite maintaining a sense of identity and unity that we might reasonably expect of a discreetly recognizable creative work. One enduring example is found in the work of the late German author W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s books are notable for their broadly idiosyncratic mixture of actual and seeming historical fact, recollection, and fiction interspersed with photographs that serve a suggestive or supplemental, as opposed to illustrative, function. Another comparable analogue for this approach is found in some of the work of British artist Tacita Dean (who has acknowledged her debt to Sebald), who works primarily in analogue film, a medium now largely obsolete. However, in creating Event for a Stage at Carriageworks in Sydney in 2014, Dean worked with actor Stephen Dillane to produce a self-reflective work of live theater which she then meticulously cut into both a film version and an adaptation for radio. And, as already noted, Walid Raad’s historically reflective “counter-archive” in the form of the fictional collective cum artwork the Atlas Group (1989–2004) also exemplifies this tendency. Like these examples, our fictionalized and radically transmedial recasting of Johnny B. Goode as Pierrot in In Memory of Johnny B. Goode also contains much that is non-fictional, together with uncanny hybrids of repurposed reality and invention. It is here that the Ghosts of Nothing seek to inhabit the layered ontologies that we have described above. Significantly, our open works are at once imaginary mythologized projections of the kinds of things that bands do, infused with traces of a real-world entity that actually does many of the things that bands typically do (such as making and releasing commercial albums, touring, and making music videos). Yet at the same time, some of the extra-musical elements located in the respective universes of In Memory of Johnny B. Goode and Sounds of Unridden Waves, unless specifically pointed to, could easily remain unnoticed by a casual observer. Consequently, we require a range of additional supporting materials, such as this essay, to make some of the more obscure connections publicly visible. Moreover, many of these supplementary or paratextual elements, especially if considered in isolation from the core elements of each project, are clearly incapable of producing anything resembling a “full picture.” Similarly, some of the extra-musical and expanded artistic elements surrounding the still expanding world of Sounds of Unridden Waves by the Ghosts of Nothing are sufficiently removed from a connection between a band

114  Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre and an album made by a band, that, if encountered in contextual isolation, would most likely be read as standalone works of contemporary visual art. 37 One example of a visually centered publicly exhibited variation of Sounds of Unridden Waves is our ongoing collaborative series of fictionalized “film stills.” Several of these heavily cropped “remixed” images of waves are at least loosely thematically related to footage being used to produce the feature-length film component. They are based on various source photographs, some of which were indeed taken by collaborators working on the film itself, but some were sourced from an extended network of other project participants. Importantly, many of these stills were not actually captured from the film itself. To date, some of these fictionalized film stills have been presented in exhibitions in New York and Pingyao, China, 38 and in a photo-essay published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. 39 In these contexts, it is highly likely that—without explicit prompting—even a discerning viewer would probably not consider these photographs as meaningfully connected to the work of a rock band. In another still developing iteration for an artworld audience, a series of overpainted photographs, titled Paintings on Unridden Waves, will also be attributable to the collective artist moniker “The Ghosts of Nothing.” Perhaps, in such instances, we might suggest that both low- and high-frequency connections to the idea of bandness are potentially apparent. In yet another still developing artworld iteration of the broader musical and cinematic project titled Sounds of Unridden Waves, selected fragments of text referring to the ocean—taken from the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, poets, and artists—are presented using uncanny, slightly dehumanized, “natural” digitized voices which are overlaid with selected music and video from the feature-length version of the film. This targeted artworld variation of the larger work is even further removed from the broader popular culture and surf-world context in which the

Figure 8.2  T he Ghosts of Nothing and Chris Lowry, Storyboard Still #1, from Sounds of Unridden Waves, 2020, camera by Chris Lowry, image remix by the Ghosts of Nothing, digital image, dimensions variable.

Bandness  115

Figure 8.3   T he Ghosts of Nothing and Simone Douglas, Storyboard Still #2, from Sounds of Unridden Waves (work in progress), 2020, camera by Simone Douglas, image remix by the Ghosts of Nothing, digital image, dimensions variable.

feature-length film and commercial album release will also be promoted. To date, one version of this still developing spoken-voice iteration has been presented at an academic conference.40 We believe that the historical Romantic idea of the fragment continues to resonate with the eclectic material exuberance exemplified in some forms of postconceptual art and intertextual relationality in certain forms of contemporary literature. In historical Romanticism, the fragment is presented as a finite part of an infinite whole that is not entirely present. Accordingly, Romanticism emphasized the active role of the imagination in moving beyond the confines of immediate perception to build a work in the mind. For the Ghosts of Nothing, such Dionysian qualities can also be experienced when listening to a good rock album. The Ghosts of Nothing are keenly aware that Sounds of Unridden Waves may also be encountered far from any supporting ontologies of contemporary art or rock music. New audiences might just as easily be found through commercial TV streaming services or in surfing subcultures. Importantly, in any such contexts, different kinds of evidentiary credibility will invariably be required to establish legitimacy with new audiences. Although the overall conceptual architecture and final production of both Sounds of Unridden Waves and In Memory of Johnny B. Goode rests with the Ghosts of Nothing, we see these open works as omnibus vehicles capacious enough to accommodate collaborative creative input from diverse and even unanticipated sources. Our world tour of In Memory of Johnny B. Goode, for example, featured contributions from numerous collaborating artists, dancers, and theater makers. And wherever appropriate, we stress that any collaboratively developed components within these projects are clearly listed as co-authored by the Ghosts of Nothing and the respective collaborators. Consequently, these expanded worlds might be understood

116  Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre as existing simultaneously inside and outside our dominion of authorship. In contemporary visual art, this is familiar territory. It is also something that rock bands have long intuitively recognized. Even in the pre-digital era, for example, physical distribution in the form of vinyl records spawned album cover art as a new genre, one which was enthusiastically embraced by bands and visual artists alike. Meanwhile, the definitional limits of the world of a band can keep expanding in the hands of fans, satirists, bootleggers, deejays, official and unofficial remixers, and (more recently) internet meme culture, well after the operational demise of the band itself. In summary, we use our “works”—which we bring into existence through acts of world-making41—to establish new relationships. These novel connections come into being by virtue of a creative intention and action on our part. Once this action has occurred, and provided that it is accepted as culturally meaningful by a qualified audience, it cannot thereafter be unmade. The creative act therefore serves as the minimal connection, a kind of metonymy if you like, contingent to a greater or lesser degree on chance and circumstance. The connection is strengthened if there are other resonances and parallels to be perceived—that is, something beyond a seemingly arbitrary juxtaposition or accident of collage. The Ghosts of Nothing strengthen this connection by projecting bandness as a conceptual overlay binding together an array of disparate elements and presences, both real and virtual. And in projecting our bandness, we produce a diverse range of what Jeffrey Strayer usefully calls public perceptual objects. Importantly, both In Memory of Johnny B. Goode and Sounds of Unridden Waves consist of literal things and activities in the world that are both obliquely and explicitly framed as both the products of a band and works of contemporary visual art.

Notes 1 Arthur C. Danto’s highly influential description of an “Artworld” (as a capitalized proper noun) appeared to take its exclusiveness for granted. For Danto, there could be no “artworks without the theories and the histories of the Artworld.” Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 581. Today, however, it is increasingly commonplace to speak of multiple and distinctly configured and contested artworlds. Meanwhile, Pamela M. Lee acknowledges the impossibility of “ignoring or standing outside it [the artworld], as if one could lay claim to a space beyond its imperial reach by wandering just far enough afield.” Her response is to shift the focus of analysis and critical discussion from the “global art world” itself to the work of art’s world. She explains that to speak of “the work of art’s world” is to retain a sense of the activity performed by the object as utterly continuous with the world it at once inhabits and creates: a world Möbius-like in its indivisibility and circularity, a seemingly endless horizon. Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 2, 8. 2 Various excellent essays in the growing literature on the ontology of rock music do not consider the ontology of bandness. See, for example, Andrew Kania, “Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 6, (2006): 401–14; Dan Burkett, “One Song, Many Works: A Pluralist Ontology of Rock,” Contemporary Aesthetics (2015): 13, accessed December 15, 2020, http://www.contempaesthetics.org/ newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=722. 3 John Andrew Fisher, “Rock ‘n’ Recording,” in Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music, ed. Philip A. Alperson (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 109. 4 See Fisher, “Rock ‘n’ Recording,” 109; Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Christopher Bartel, “Music without Metaphysics?,” British Journal of Aesthetics 51, no. 4 (2011): 383–98.

Bandness  117 5 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (New York and London: Verso, 2013). 6 The idea that a work of art is immaterial was suggested by Benedetto Croce, principally developed in his books Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (1902), translated by Douglas Ainslie into Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic, rev. ed. (New York: Noonday Press, 1922); and Breviario di estetica (1912), translated by Douglas Ainslie into The Essence of Aesthetic (London: Heinemann, 1921). Croce claimed that all we know can be reduced to either logical or imaginative knowledge, such as art, and that all thought is based in part on imaginative knowledge. In other words, for Croce, imaginative thought precedes all other thought. See, for example, Croce, Aesthetic: As Science, 1. For a useful discussion of Croce’s aesthetic theory see the chapter “Benedetto Croce: Art and Intuition” in Paolo Euron, Aesthetics, Theory and Interpretation of the Literary Work (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2019), 129–32. Croce’s thesis was given a modernist interpretation by R. G. Collingwood, when he asserted that not all people could perceive a Cézanne even when looking at it. This idea has elitist overtones which might make us uneasy today. Robin Collingwood’s key writings on the philosophy of art are Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (1925), The Principles of Art (1938), and the posthumous collection Essays in the Philosophy of Art (1964). 7 This point is made eloquently in Ernst Gombrich’s classic book, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1960). 8 See, for example, Robert J. Zatorre and Andrea R. Halpern, “Mental Concerts: Musical Imagery and Auditory Cortex,” Neuron 47, no. 1 (2005): 9–1; Sybille C. Herholz, Andrea R. Halpern, and Robert J. Zatorre, “Neuronal Correlates of Perception, Imagery, and Memory for Familiar Tunes,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24, no. 6 (2012): 1382–97. 9 Jeffrey Strayer, Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 10 In her book Forgetting the Art World (2012), Pamela M. Lee argues that the idea of an “art world” as historically conceived is in eclipse. While she may well be right, we use the term here not to ignore the changes that Lee identifies, but as a reminder that some form of contextualizing socio-cultural information is required in order for a perceiving subject to understand that something has the potential to be understood as art. 11 These examples all suggest parallels to a process-oriented ontology of concepts, which draws on a long tradition in Western philosophy, via Hegel back to the pre-Socratics. In essence, this philosophical tradition maintains that all concepts are processes, in a state of perpetual flux yet, paradoxically, somehow stable enough to act as the reliable currency of human discourse. For an excellent discussion of concept as process, see Andy Blunden, Concepts: A Critical Approach (Leiden: Brill, 2012). This topic is discussed at length by one of the authors of this text in Ilmar Taimre, “An Interpretive Model for Conceptual Music” (PhD diss., University of Newcastle, 2018), http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1385390. 12 Music is itself a socio-cultural category, subject to continual redefinition and evolution over time. 13 See Ben Dooley, “BTS Management’s Stock Has a Lively First Day of Trading,” New York Times, October 15, 2020, accessed December 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/10/15/business/bts-stock.html. 14 See D. L. Geiger, Phylogenetic Assessment of Characters Proposed for the Generic Classification of Recent Scissurellidae (Gastropoda: Vetigastropoda) “With a Description of One New Genus and Six New Species from Easter Island and Australia,” Molluscan Research 23, (2003): 21–83. See Mark Isaac, “Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature,” Curious Taxonomy, accessed June 26, 2021, http://www.curioustaxonomy.net/. Here, many other examples of biological names linked to bands can be found. 15 See full page advertisements for “In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour 2014–18,” in Mousse 45 (October–November 2014): 261; Mousse 51 (December 2015): 305; Mousse 55 (October–November 2016): 179. 16 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 204–44. 17 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1998), 35, 37.

118  Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre 18 Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): 7. 19 Auslander, “Performativity of Performance Documentation,” 7–8. 20 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 1–2. 21 Jean-Jaques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 48, 55. 22 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: HarperPerennial, 2008), 145–6. 23 The Pierrot tradition, now largely forgotten except by historians of art and culture, traces its origins to the Italian commedia dell’arte of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It enjoyed huge popularity in the early twentieth century, as witnessed by the mass of references and allusions in the art, literature, and music of the time. The standard studies include Martin Green and John Swain, The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell’Arte and the Modern Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1986); Robert F. Storey, Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Robert F. Storey, Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: Nineteenth Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Lynne Lawner, Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts (New York: Abrams, 1998). 24 “Johnny B. Goode” is the eponymous guitar-player in the famous rock-and-roll song of the same name, written and first recorded by Chuck Berry in 1958. The song lyrics make occasional references to Berry’s own real-life circumstances, suggesting that the presumed fictional character is at least partly autobiographical. 25 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 110. 26 Peter Osborne, “Contemporary Art is Post-Conceptual Art” (transcript of public lecture, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota, Como, July 9, 2010): 11, accessed December 15, 2020, https://fondazioneratti.org/projects/contemporary-art-is-post-conceptual-art. 27 Osborne, “Contemporary Art is Post-Conceptual,” 11. 28 Osborne, 10–11. 29 See, for example, Jörg Heiser, Romantischer Konzeptualismus (Vienna: Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 2007), exhibition catalog. 30 The Ghosts of Nothing, In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour 2014–18, July 7– August 19, 2018, exhibition, the Lock-Up, Newcastle, Australia. 31 The Ghosts of Nothing, Three Scenes from In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour (2014–17), featuring Laura Purcell, January 18–February 25, 2018, exhibition, presented by Mofo, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. 32 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 33 The Ghosts of Nothing, Johnny’s Departure, featuring Laura Purcell and Zackari Watt, July 7, 2018, performance, the Lock-Up, Newcastle, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Suicide, featuring Laura Purcell, November 18, 2017, performance, the Tench, Hobart, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Black Butterflies, featuring Laura Purcell, November 18, 2017, performance, the Tench, Hobart, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Absinthe, featuring Zoë Tuffin, July 22, 2017, performance, Boggo Road Gaol, Brisbane, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Johnny Robber, featuring Zackari Watt, May 6, 2017, performance, the Lock-Up, Newcastle, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Johnny on Ice, featuring Frank J. Miles, November 12, 2016, performance on the trail connector to the Appalachian trail, and associated exhibition Plato’s Cave at EIDIA House, New York, United States of America; The Ghosts of Nothing, Children of the Moon, featuring Coleman Grehan, September 3, 2016, performance, Raygun Projects, Tabletop Mountain (summit), Toowoomba, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, The Mirror, featuring Laura Purcell, March 19, 2016, performance, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Newhaven Track, Tasmania, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Intoxicated by the Moon, featuring Lee Devaney, August 31, 2015, performance, between Tromsø and Lofoten, Norway; The Ghosts of Nothing, Madonna of Hysterias, featuring Zoë Tuffin, April 25, 2015, performance, Brisbane, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, An Impossible Question, featuring Lyndall Johnston, April 18, 2015, performance, Newcastle, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Betrayal, featuring Charles Famous, April 11, 2015, performance, Sydney, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, This is

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34

35 36 37

Johnny, featuring Frank J. Miles, December 6, 2014, performance outside former CBGB’s venue, New York, United States of America. Sounds of Unridden Waves: The Ambient Mixes, composed by The Ghosts of Nothing, Perfect Pitch, 2020, album, Spotify and Apple Music; Sounds of Unridden Waves: Original Soundtrack, composed by The Ghosts of Nothing, Perfect Pitch, 2020, album, Spotify and Apple Music; Sounds of Unridden Waves: Original Soundtrack Part II, composed by the Ghosts of Nothing, Perfect Pitch, 2020, Spotify and Apple Music. At the time of writing, the list of contributors to Sounds of Unridden Waves includes Ashley Beer, Simone Douglas, Albert Falzon, Ishka Folkwell, Jon Frank, Phillip George, Nathan Henshaw, Greg Huglin, Nathan Oldfield, and Monty Webber. In another variant of the project currently in the early stages of development, a supplementary album titled Songs of Unridden Waves will be produced, in which singer songwriter Sunny Kim will respond to the existing instrumental soundtrack. Paradoxically, as Peter Osborne has noted, photography only gained generalized institutional recognition as an artistic practice after the destruction of the ontological significance of medium in the 1960s—a destruction to which photography itself made a distinctive contribution, primarily via its roles in the documentation of performance and within conceptual art practice.

Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 127. 38 See The Ghosts of Nothing, “Stills from the Breakers: Sounds of Unridden Waves,” featuring Albert Falzon (2018), in At the Edge of the Universe, curated by Simone Douglas, Pingyao International Photography Festival (Winner of the Foreign Photographer Award), September 19–25, 2019, Pingyao, China. Also shown in All the Rivers Run, curated by Simone Douglas, October 2019–March 2020, Monash Room, the Australian Consulate, New York, US. 39 Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre, “Sounds of Unridden Waves and the Aesthetics of Late Romanticism: A Photo-Essay,” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 6, no.1 (2021): 13–78. 40 Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre, “Sounds of Unridden Waves” (presentation at Dark Eden: The Sixth International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture, Artspace, Sydney, Australia, November 6–8, 2020). 41 Discussed further in Taimre, “An Interpretive Model,” 349–91, 451–3.

9 Glittereiki Genevieve Hyacinthe

Care is a feminist technology.1 Some data suggest that the use of digital technology after trauma can cause elevated cortisol levels, a condition that is harmful to various systems of the body and that can in turn create disharmony in the affected person’s perception of themselves, their lives, the world around them, and their interactions with others.2 The diminishment of ahimsa, one of the eight yamas or yoga limbs that means “non-harming or nonviolence, as well as compassion for self, others, and everything, not causing pain to any sentient being,” is a likely result.3 Artist and reiki healer Damali Abrams, however, employs social media to create healing spaces and share techniques for self-care in a manner that potentially shifts the unconscious glow of wireless spectacle perfection into a momentary opportunity for restoration. Accordingly, Abrams seeks to transform the intimacies of healing arts traditionally aimed at affecting a beholder’s mind, spirit, and body into a general state of positive transformation through which healing is possible. As we move our fingers across the smooth alkali—aluminosilicate glass of our smartphones—we leave smudges that are traces of our corporeality: Skin, breath, moisture, external desires, and experiences. What I refer to as Damali Abrams’s “Glittereiki” process clears our screen: Glittereiki not only is a play on the term glitterati but also refers to Abrams’s moniker, the Glitter Priestess, and her profuse incorporation of the material in her art and life. The second half of the compound word references Abrams’s integration into her art and life of reiki, “a palm-healing therapy developed in Japan in the 1920s […] [meaning] ‘healing without energy depletion’” that relaxes those receiving it.4 As in reiki, yoga has taught me that subtle shifts in the position of the hands can open channels to the heart, as in the performance of the Lotus Mudra or the action of turning one’s palms open in Tadasana to establish a pathway to grace. 5 We use our hands to light the wick and set the puja candle ablaze with devotion every morning. The action draws the devotee into a space of meditation and healing. Shri Radha shared with me and my fellow yoga teacher certification students at Ananda Ashram that we can heal ourselves by repeatedly writing our Sanskrit letters.6 We touch our screens when we wake up and before going to sleep according to the rhythm of spiritual practice: As Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) once noted, we might successfully accomplish the sometimes difficult task of accessing our hearts and exploring our inner being and life significance through daily rituals, preferably performed in the early morning or evening before bed, “while the world is still quiet […] [or] at the close of the day’s activities […]. Spiritual practice offers us a chance to come back to the innate compassionate quality of our heart and DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-9

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to our intuitive wisdom.” These insights in turn inform my view that the daily practice of checking one’s social media may be a ritual act with the potential for healing if connected with the proper vibrations—those transmitted by a trusted, educated guru. Abrams is such a guru, and an artist who circulates her work in virtual space to heal Black people. Her Glittereiki inserts a meditative space within the digital stream of unconsciousness so that one might, in the words of registered yoga teacher and author Cortez Rainey: Take a seat and find your breath—your North Star. No one owns you. You don’t have to voluntarily place yourself under the authority and control of distracting thoughts—or for that matter, anything, including people, beliefs and organizations […]. Reclaim your existence. Keep practicing meditation. This is the only way to reach your destination. Keep going—until you arrive. It’s the only way your mind can become free […]. Then, the inherent goodness, genius, and potential possessed by ten thousand generations of our ancestors will shine through your life for all to view, like the stars in a clear night sky.8 Curiously, where Rainey suggests that Black people find stillness and turn inward to become free, Abrams instead sends reiki vibrations, each session distributed through her interconnected social media feeds (Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram), providing a charismatic, guiding presence and stillness offered through visual resplendency and silence as a comparable means.9 Her Glittereiki process, manifested in actions such as the video Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People (2020; Figure 9.1), and her mermaid formats, such as Cousin Jean (2020; Figure 9.2), convert the flow of her posts into an altar-in-action emergent from her fine arts and reiki educations.10

Figure 9.1  Damali Abrams, “Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black ­People,” video still, YouTube video, May 29, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?reload=9&v=hCLtGtwnVJY © Damali Abrams.

122  Genevieve Hyacinthe Significantly, Abrams looks out at the viewer, almost completely still, for over nine minutes in Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People, an action she embeds in the YouTube platform with the following statement: Damali Abrams The feelings of frustration, trauma, rage, and terror that come from seeing continual images of Black people being murdered, tortured, and beaten can be very detrimental to our mental and physical health. Play this video when these feelings come up or you feel hopeless or powerless. My favorite soothing herbal tea blend is oatstraw, lavender, and rose. Essential oils that are relaxing for me are chamomile, lavender, and mugwort. Sending you lots of love and reiki. You can minimize the video and still receive the reiki. Right click on the screen and click “loop” to repeat the video continuously. Thank you so much for watching! Please like, share & subscribe. IG & twitter: @damaliabrams FB: facebook.com/GlitterPriestess GlitterPriestess.com https://linktr.ee/ DamaliAbrams Disclaimer: This video is for entertainment purposes only. It is not a substitute for medical treatment. This video is not intended as a diagnosis, prescription, or cure for any ailment. Please see a medical professional for any physical or mental health concerns.11 Here, Abrams’s words include protocols related to circulation and legalities, which may destabilize the healing field but nevertheless generally remain unnoticed, possibly as a consequence of their omnipresence. Regardless, her words offer the sentience of the soft voice or the touch of a nurturing healer. She helps establish a virtual safe space with her statements. Her voice is that of the observer, the wounded, and the folk healer, evoking such Black folk healing and self-precedents as Luisah Teish’s Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals (1985) and The Black Women’s Health Book, edited by Evelyn C. White (1990), as well as one of Abram’s earlier works The Cure: Poetic Healing and Recipes (2005), and the more recent Free Your Mind: An African American Guide to Meditation and Freedom by Cortez R. Rainey (2015).12 As in these earlier books, Abrams’s guiding text may optimize the reiki healing experience for the beholder due to its vernacularity and down-to-earth feeling. More broadly, we can view Abrams’s Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People and the other reiki videos and actions she creates and circulates through digital space as being connected to the deep traditions of Black Atlantic healing developed by slaves. Stephanie Y. Mitchem’s African American Folk Healing (2007), Pablo F. Gómez’s The Experimental Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (2017), and Londa Schiebinger’s Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2017) put these issues into a critical historical perspective.13 In the reiki healing action, Abrams wears long dreadlocks divided to frame her face. A red ribbon holds them back off her forehead and simultaneously ties them on either side of her chin line, drawing our attention to her clavicle, under which

Glittereiki  123 a longish chain with a gold name plate that says QUEEN hangs in the middle of her chest before a backdrop created by the top of her deep blue blouse, printed with light blue African shapes and accented with red piping that matches her hair ribbons. A tabloid-size screen-print hanging on the wall over her right shoulder says “Stop Killing Black People” in white text on a black field. Next to it is a sparkling silver and polychrome hanging called Melting and Oozing and Dripping with Pleasure (2020), one of Abrams’s collages on fabric from a triptych called Self-Love Spell. Both the print and the collage hang over a turquoise blue wall. Poised before this backdrop, possessed of the visual radiance of the liminal spaces of Hindu chromolithographs, Senegalese glass paintings, and orthodox gold leaf images, Abrams resembles a gesturing icon due to her frontality, steady eye contact, and carefully placed metallic accents, from her two delicate silvery hoop earrings, to the chain and queen nameplate, the metallic and stone rings adorning her fingers, and the bangles on her arms. The hypnotic quality of her gaze, her accoutrements, her raised hands, and the sparkle of the backdrop juxtaposed with the hanging prayer add to her feeling as a saint or healer. This ritual design approach is also in keeping with meditation guidelines suggested for Black mental liberation, in which practitioners are encouraged to: Imagine that your ancestor is wearing the following items which have been carefully crafted by African shamans: elegant Kente cloth apparel; a necklace made from ivory and gold, from which hangs a golden ankh; a wrist bracelet made with blue beads and cowries shells; and a giraffe-skin leather belt around the waist with a gold pyramid-shaped buckle engraved with the image of a sphinx.14 By way of disclosure, I am a believer—but irrespectively, what one believes might not be as important as being able to imagine what Abrams is proposing, for in Black meditation contexts, “what we imagine, a part of our mind accepts as existing in reality.”15 Fortuitously, Abrams and I had the opportunity to discuss her Glittereiki works in a recent video call.16 Here are some selected excerpts from this discussion: GENEVIEVE HYACINTHE. Thank

you for speaking with me, Damali. I’d like to discuss your self-care and healing actions that are currently in circulation online. I love them and want to share them with others for a number of reasons. I think that you are a master of DIY media, like a lot of Black women artists that have come before: Adrian Piper’s videos of the 1980s and ’90s, some experiments by Howardina Pindell and Maren Hassinger, and today, Tameka Norris and more. I think Uri McMillian, as one example, has been writing in exciting ways about aspects of these histories.17 Simultaneously, there is a beautiful lineage of folk healing in the Black Atlantic that you are a part of, as well as a continuum of Black visual artists connecting with healing practices: Simone Leigh is prominent here. She’s been creating a range of works shining a light on Black women and healing for a while. I think of her huge public sculptural bust of an African woman on the High Line at 30th and 10th Streets [NYC], Brick House, that has been on view since June 2019, standing strong in the midst of such vulnerability and loss. I remember seeing it

124  Genevieve Hyacinthe referred to as a “Black woman […] with the strength, endurance, and integrity of a house made of bricks.”18 Before that, of course, at the New Museum, she organized the collective action (and ongoing movement) Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter and installed Waiting Room (2016), which was a tribute to Esmin Elizabeth Green who, in 2008, died of blood clots while waiting to be treated for over 24 hours in the emergency room at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn.19 Also coming to mind is her Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014), where she explored Black health initiatives like the United Order of Tents secret sorority of Black women who’ve been caring for the sick since 1867, and the Black Panther Free People’s Medical Clinics in service between 1968–1975. 20 I actually love that in Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People you are wearing the QUEEN medallion because the United Order of Tents healers refer to themselves as “Queens.” DAMALI ABRAMS. That’s interesting. I didn’t realize the United Order of Tents women did that. […] I’ve always wanted to claim things that have higher connotations but are not commonly associated with Black women. The nameplate also refers back to hip-hop fashion in the late 1980s and early 1990s when lots of people, like Queen Latifa for instance, were wearing African medallions. We still wear the plates today, but back then wearing them was a requirement if you wanted to be on trend. I definitely do feel like my work resonates with Simone’s and quite a few artists working here and now, as well as those who are now ancestors. I have affinity with current artists like Ebony G. Patterson, the Bajan artist Sheena Rose, Mickalene Thomas […]. There’s my friend, the performance artist, Ayana Evans […]. Also my friend, Shani Peters […]. She and her partner Joseph Cuillier started The Black School, and then there is also The Free Black Women’s Library started by OlaRonke Akinmowo […]. She’s one of the artists I collaborated with on the Allied Media Conference panel on Zoom on July 26 [2020]. It was called Creating Portals: The Black Speculative Imagination, so we spoke of our work in that context, where we were joined by another artist, Khalif Thompson. Artists of the past generations who also inspire my practice include Ana Mendieta and Faith Ringgold, Dindga McCannon […] Adrian Piper, Jean Michel Basquiat, Bette Saar, Frida Kahlo, and Pepon Osorio. G. H. Who are you trying to heal? D. A. My audience is definitely a Black audience. But I feel like it’s for everyone […]. I’m definitely thinking of myself and people like me. And just especially the past five years have been so intense for Black people, in this country specifically […]. So yes, that’s who I’ve been thinking about and how we can take better care of ourselves and each other, even within these systems that are not going to do it. G. H. What is the Glitter Priestess—its origin and significance? D. A. In 2002, my cousin started this magazine called Mahogany Blues, and I was the editor-in-chief, but instead of calling myself editor-in-chief, my title was priestess of content. I chose priestess because I had been reading about these ancient priestesses who used art and music and dance and herbs and sexual energy all for the purposes of healing and I really liked that as a lens for my practice or what I wanted my practice to become. So, I called myself its priestess of content, and I also had a column in that magazine called “Herb Grrl,” where I would write about herbal remedies and self-care practices, and I ended up taking an eight-month course in herbal medicine at the Open Center. And since then, I’ve just been researching and

Glittereiki  125 learning more and more about herbs both medicinally and metaphysically, because I am really also interested in the magical properties of the herbs. G. H. Wow, so since 2002, almost 20 years now, you’ve been cultivating and nuancing your self-care practices. How did your commitment to the study of self-care initially intersect with your MFA studies at Vermont College of Fine Arts? D. A. In 2006, the same year I started my MFA program, I also got my master-level reiki attunements […]. While in grad school I started a video project called SelfHelp TV, a fictional television network that I developed similar to PBS. The concept was that all of the programming would be about self-improvement in some way. So, I created a lot of short videos. Some were a minute or two long, and then some were longer, up to 15 minutes or a half an hour. There was a reality show format, a dramedy, my version of Sesame Street that I called Frederick Douglass Boulevard because I lived on Frederick Douglass Blvd in Harlem at the time, and I also just liked the idea of calling it that. In addition, I turned my “Herb Grrl” magazine column into a video series. The Herb Grrl spots were in a cooking show kind of format where I would share herbal remedies. G. H. I love your Herb Grrl “How to Make Peppermint Honey” spot where you’re in Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem.21 I remember viewing that work a while back on YouTube, closer to when I first met you circa 2013, when you came to one of my institutions to talk to some of my MA Art History and MFA Art and Design students. I loved that episode in particular, because it really seemed like an herbal remedy apropos for the time—a hot day in the park. I know peppermint is soothing. Even just watching the video felt like therapy a bit, because you have this lovely, lush bunch of peppermint on the table and what looks like a bountiful jug of honey—the purple tablecloth over what looks like a makeshift folding table or something—and you’re just in this urban park. You’ve set up a soothing setting that you enhance with your presence and the flower in your hair. All of these spots seem to visually soothe, even if we don’t get to consume the things you’re making at that moment. I feel that sense of self-help in the simplicity of your approach. I notice all the recipes are pretty easy to make, not requiring a lot of difficult-to-find ingredients. D. A. Yes, simplicity is really important! The whole concept of my self-care actions is about making [Black people’s healing] accessible. I want to highlight our own empowerment. Someone doesn’t have to go outside of themself. As Black people, and Black women especially, we don’t have doctors take us seriously. I had to fight my doctor to test me for certain things. For instance, when I was having extreme pain with my cycle, I had to press her for a more in-depth examination. It turned out that I had fibroids. While these are common in women, particularly in Black women, it felt like my doctor was not taking my pain seriously. She is a White doctor in a community with a large Black patient population. These kinds of experiences are […] why I do the kind of work I do, because we have to rely on taking care of ourselves before we become very ill. Black people have the highest rate of stress-related illness, such as heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension […]. My art practice is addressing what I view as our need to improve our health on a day-to-day basis with simple gestures […]. We are at the mercy of those who might not have our best interest in mind. Sharing these modes through easily accessible social media platforms is important for the purposes of integrating some of these strategies into our everyday lives.

126  Genevieve Hyacinthe G. H. Yeah,

I totally hear that […]. There’s Medicine with a capital M, which is part of the medical industrial complex, that yes, we definitely need to interact with, but it can’t be our savior. I agree that simple healing art practices can make a difference because engagement makes us check in with ourselves and notice. Accessibility through social media, I think, feels like a virtual botánica to me, like a corner store run by a Madrina or Padrino who’s up on all the herbal medicine—herbal remedies from the Caribbean. I like the arc through your practice where you offer a diversity of self-care modes, so it’s not a one-practice-fits-all set of actions […]. I’m happy that there still seem to be a bunch of Herb Grrl videos on YouTube, but I haven’t seen many recently. What happened to that series? D. A. Well, I continued doing Self-Help TV for about three years on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, the cable-access channel in Manhattan, after I finished my MFA. As I started getting older, I didn’t feel comfortable calling myself Herb Grrl anymore, I didn’t feel comfortable calling myself a girl, so that’s when I came up with the title Glitter Priestess. My sister, Abiola, helped me with that during a coaching session. She’s a business coach, and we went through a lot of different possibilities for a name. [I chose this name] because I use a lot of glitter in my work and because of this idea of a priestess from my research into ancient priestesses and their artistry, including herbal practices, dance, music, and sexual energies, and thinking of myself as this contemporary priestess who is using art and all of the tools at my disposal for the purposes of healing. G. H. What is glitter? What do you love about glitter, maybe as a symbol, a tool, and a material? D. A. Yeah, it definitely is a symbol and a tool and a material. Why do I love it? I don’t know […]. I’ve just always been drawn to sparkly things […]. I think part of it is Guyanese culture, honestly. If you go to any of my family gatherings, all of the women are in sequins. Everything is sparkly and shiny. Everyone’s home is filled with gold and sparkly and shiny decor. So, I think that’s had a large influence on my aesthetic. And then glitter is also used in Santeria and all of these Afro-Caribbean religious practices, on candles, and in ritual practice as well. It’s ubiquitous—it has all of these meanings. Different colors of glitter are used on different candles for different purposes […]. In my work, I vary my glitter color for specific intentions. G. H. I feel that what you’re doing is so important, actually quite serious. As an outsider, I feel there is a tension there because of the pink and the glitter, and that some people may feel that what you do is not serious. I think there is something complicated there. I don’t want to go on and on, but your practice reminds me a bit of how Adrienne Edwards described “kewt” aesthetics in relation to Juliana Huxtable’s performative approach.22 Juliana appears like you—sort of matter-of-factly—as a means to connect with her audience on an informal, yet at the same time, charismatic level. So, like you use glitter and pink, Juliana uses what Adrienne calls “minor aesthetics,” like intensely luminous but strategically rather than excessively applied makeup. She also uses spare yet complicated adornment—­striking but without overt muchness. Adrienne calls this kewt, meaning a colloquial version of cute, used by Black queer folx. I think Adrienne is reading Juliana’s affect in relation to culturally prescribed notions of taste and value where Black minor aesthetics have not been historically valued. 23 D. A. Yes, I actually take everything I do very seriously […]. I am not joking or playing or being sarcastic or ironic in any way with my actions. People do expect

Glittereiki  127 something not serious when they see glitter, when they see pink and sparkles and mermaids, they are thinking of something more childlike […]. The sparkle, and also the way I appear composed or calm in front of the camera, is just my aesthetic. That is who I am. It would be inauthentic for me to try to present it in another way. I genuinely love everything that’s sparkly, bright, and colorful, and I’m not trying to convert or convince anyone either. Everything is not for everybody. For the people who are into it—they are the ones that will respond to it. The other people—they just won’t. For each reiki video, there is a specific topic or intention, just as in individual reiki sessions in real time, outside of digital space. I focus on that intention, I call in [benevolent] ancestors and spirit guides for myself and those who will be watching and other ways that I prepare for a reiki session. I don’t talk. I just transmit reiki, so it’s a distance healing reiki session for whoever watches […]. Basically, anyone who is watching the video is getting the reiki transmission. G. H. I think for me, in addition to the colors, and Glitter Priestess references, the cult of celebrity might also make your work feel light to some audience members. But what is it for you regarding celebrity in your various contexts? D. A. I’ve always been a person who has been obsessed with pop culture and celebrities. I become very obsessed with specific figures, and I’ve come to look at it in the work as similar to the way that in syncretic religions our ancestors had to hide their deities behind the saints. These celebrity figures are representing larger archetypes as well as different aspects of myself. They’re representing other ideas that are much larger than their images. And I think that’s the case in life, too. I think that’s why many people become so obsessed with celebrities. For those of us who do, because they represent something much larger […]. So that’s what’s happening in the work for me where I am utilizing celebrity figures in some way. G. H. Are you healing the celebrities as part of that or telling archetypal stories? Is there a healing you’re doing with these celebrities? D. H. Yes, it’s different for each figure. I mean, recently, there was an incident where Tamar Braxton attempted suicide, and then I made a piece called Prayers for Tamar that was specifically for her healing. But then there are other [celebrity] pieces that most of the time are for my own healing or trying to invoke a sense of communal healing that is not necessarily about the person who is in the piece. G. H. Black artists have used pop cultural media to tell their stories and do their thing because historically, it’s been an issue of access, not using the tools of the art history masters but from another perspective, it’s been a lot about reaching broader audiences […]. You are using a lot of tools of mass culture and accessibility, like using celebrities, like being on the Manhattan remote access cable channel, creating self-help videos for everyday people—rather than specifically for the review of the art elite, etc. […]. Why? You went to art school, so you have the formal MFA canonical knowledge base, technical exposure, and expertise […]. I’m curious about your choice of taking mastery over more mass cultural outlets, aesthetics [even DIY or craft aesthetics], and tools. D. A. In undergrad, I didn’t study visual art at all. I was in NYU’s Gallatin program, where you create your own major, and mine was culture, gender, and the arts. Senior year, I did take Intro to Drawing and Painting, but I didn’t study art and I really didn’t know anything about art at first. So, I do consider myself a self-taught artist. And because of this obsession I had with glossy magazines, I

128  Genevieve Hyacinthe started making art using these magazines. At the start, it was much more focused on critiquing these images in the magazines, because I was really making the connection between how much these mainstream images that didn’t reflect me at all were affecting my self-esteem and self-worth, so that’s what a lot of the early collages that I made were about […]. I was making all of this work […] applying for different residences and different art opportunities and I wasn’t getting them. That’s when I decided to get my MFA, so I would have access to those opportunities. But my aesthetic never changed. And in grad school in the MFA program, it’s very anti-beauty […]. The idea of making beautiful things is largely discouraged. And the idea of making work that is too accessible is largely discouraged. During a critique, the cochair of the department Miwon Kwon, told me: “Make the viewer work harder.” So, the ways that I worked were never really in line with the capital A art ideas either. G. H. Do you feel you followed Miwon’s advice? D. A. While I was in grad school, that is definitely something I worked toward, and I often hear her voice when I’m working, but I feel like my work is really literal, really accessible, really straightforward, so I don’t know. G. H. I’ve taught in MFA programs for over a decade, and what you’re saying about how we advise students rings true to me—more abstraction, complexity, make the viewer work hard—is all a part of it […]. So, if beauty and accessibility are depreciated, then in a way, you are challenging the viewer because you are not working in expected modes […]. Maybe from a certain perspective, it feels to me that your work actually demands more active and thoughtful beholder-­engagement. You are, as Miwon aptly says, making “the viewer work harder,” but they are declining the invitation. The hubris of the institutional rules and critical expectation causes a barrier to actually digging into and accessing your practice. D. A. Oh, that’s interesting. That’s a good point, because I do feel that a lot of people are so used to everything being ironic that they don’t think anything can be sincere. They are always expecting some kind of irony or critique. It actually just is what it is. G. H. I love your Cousin Jean collage I saw on Instagram this summer. And though it’s not a reiki project per se, it’s definitely a Glittereiki action due to its gloss, kewtness, and social media circulation. You touched upon it earlier with regard to your choice of glitter as a material that connects to Guyanese strategies of adornment, but I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about how your family and Guyanese-Americanness informs your work. D. A. I’m actually really influenced by Guyanese culture, folklore, Mas Carnival, and spiritual practices like Obeah and the Spiritual Church, of which my father is a minister. My father wrote a book about Guyanese history and culture called Metegee. 24 […] And I made a zine using passages from his book paired with my artwork.25 So, all of these Guyanese aspects have always been a huge influence on my work. Guyana is known for mermaid sightings as well, and I grew up hearing a lot about that. They are called fairmaids because the seawater in Guyana is black and the beings that live in the water are called fairmaids. Today people will still say they saw a woman swim up and sit on a rock for a while—maybe [she] combed her hair or lured someone in and then jumped back into the water. Growing up hearing a lot about these fairmaid sightings has of course always stayed with me.

Glittereiki  129

Figure 9.2   Damali Abrams, (Glitter Priestess, @damaliabrams), Cousin Jean, Instagram collage, July 30, 2020 (post removed), https://www.instagram.com/p/ CDSQU2xlmVq/ © Damali Abrams.

Scrolling through Instagram this summer, I caught sight of two “fairmaids” when I encountered Damali and Cousin Jean, sparkling through my iPhone screen with beauty, hope, and healing. Deep fuchsias, peacock plumes, Dashiki patterns, Queenliness, and Mas energy touched my soul and helped me exhale. In the midst of all the pandemics, I felt held. July 30 Today I made Cousin Jean into a mermaid. Cousin Jean is my mom’s cousin and we were having this family Facebook video chat that my sister Abiola set up and Cousin Jean asked me to make her into a mermaid. So, I looked into Cousin Jean’s Facebook photos and I found this super kewt photo of her looking like she’s playing Mas. I’m assuming she’s playing Mas. She’s wearing this super kewt butterfly costume. And she’s got super kewt pink hair. So, I decided to give her a peacock feather headdress, add the Guyanese flags because you know you’ve gotta represent when you’re playing Mas and I added this pretty flower. “I hope

130  Genevieve Hyacinthe you love it, Aunt Jean, because I really loved making it.” It’s just… I think it’s super kewt. damaliabrams Guyanese Mermaid: Cousin Jean Playing Mas #Guyanese #fairmaid #playingmas #carnival #mermaids #mermaidlife #mermaid #Blackart #Blackmermaids #Blackmermaid #art #artist #collage #collageartist #collageart #mermaidart #Blackmermaids #Blackwomen #Blackwomenartists #mixedmedia #mixedmediacollage #mermaidsighting #glitter #sparkle #Guyana #Blackartists #GlitterPriestess26

Notes 1 “Feminist Pedagogy in a Time of Coronavirus Pandemic,” Femtechnet, March 28, 2020, http://femtechnet.org/feminist-pedagogy-in-a-time-of-coronavirus-pandemic/. 2 Holly M. Rus and Jitske Tiemensma, “Social Media under the Skin: Facebook Use after Acute Stress Impairs Cortisol Recovery,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017): 1609. 3 Christiane Brems, Dharmakaya Colgan, Heather Freeman, Jillian Freitas, Lauren Justice, Margaret Shean, Kari Sulenes, “Elements of Yogic Practice: Perceptions of Students in Healthcare Programs,” International Journal of Yoga 9 (July–December 2016): table 1, 122. 4 Stina Westerlund, Maria Elvira González Medina, and Olga Pérez González, “Effect of Electromagnetic Fields in Relief of Minor Pain by Using a Native American Method,” Integrative Medicine 11, no. 1 (February–March 2012): 42. 5 “Open to Grace,” Anusara School of Hatha Yoga, accessed August 30, 2020, https:// www.anusarayoga.com/teacher-support/open-to-grace/. 6 Teaching of Shri Radha Gaines, Ananda Ashram Yoga, from my personal notebook from Ananda 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training, August 2013. 7 Ram Dass, Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2013), xviii. 8 Cortez R. Rainey, Free Your Mind: An African American Guide to Meditation and Freedom (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2015), 188. 9 Steven J. Rosen, Black Lotus: The Spiritual Journey of an Urban Mystic (Washington, DC: Hari-Nama Press, 2007), 38. 10 Damali Abrams, discussion with the author via Zoom, Queens, New York, July 31, 2020. 11 Damali Abrams, “Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People,” YouTube video, May 29, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCLtGtwnVJY. 12 See Luisah Teish, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1988); Evelyn C. White, ed., The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves (Seattle: Seal Press, 1990); Damali Abrams, The Cure: Poetic Healing and Recipes (New York: self-pub, 2006); Cortez R. Rainey, Free Your Mind: An African American Guide to Meditation and Freedom (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2015). 13 See Stephanie Y. Mitchem, African American Folk Healing (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Pablo F. Gómez, The Experimental Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017). 14 Cortez R. Rainey, Free Your Mind, 299. 15 Cortez R. Rainey, Free Your Mind, 294. 16 Abrams, discussion. 17 Uri McMillian, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (Durham, NC: Duke, 2015). 18 “Simone Leigh: Brick House,” High Line, accessed August 2, 2020, https://www.thehighline.org/art/projects/simoneleigh/. 19 Nadja Sayej, “Simone Leigh’s The Waiting Room: Art that Tries to Heal Black Women’s Pain,” The Guardian, June 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/ jun/29/simone-leigh-waiting-room-esmin-elizabeth-green-new-museum.

Glittereiki  131 20 “Medicine: Simone Leigh in Collaboration with Stuyvesant Mansion: Free People’s Medical Clinic,” Creative Time, accessed August 10, 2020, https://creativetime.org/projects/ black-radical-brooklyn/artists/simone-leigh/. 21 Damali Abrams, “Herb Grrl: How to Make Peppermint Honey,” YouTube video, November 1, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY146jQ6FkE. 22 Adrienne Huxtable, “Relishing the Minor: Juliana Huxtable’s Kewt Aesthetics,” Museum of Modern Art, accessed August 23, 2020, https://assets.moma.org/d/pdfs/ W1siZiIsIjIwMTYvMDEvMDUvOWF2bGY1dGlheF9N UDAxOTEyOF9KdWxpYW5hX0h1eHRhYmxlX0ZJTkFMLnBkZiJdXQ/MP019128_Juliana_Huxtable_FINAL. pdf?sha=c7926cb946ae0a60. 23 See Adrian Piper, “Notes on Funk I–IV,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 203. 24 Ovid S. Abrams Jr., Metegee: The History and Culture of Guyana (Queens, NY: self-pub, 1998). 25 Damali Abrams, Obeah Man Meets Fairmaid (Queens, NY: self-pub zine, 2019). 26 Damali Abrams (Glitter Priestess, @damaliabrams), Cousin Jean, Instagram collage, July 30, 2020 (post removed), https://www.instagram.com/p/CDSQU2xlmVq/; emphasis added.

10 Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) Or: again, rubbed smooth, a moment in time__caesura Juli Carson

In [a] Gödel universe, it is provable that there exist closed timelike curves such that if you travel fast enough, you can, though always heading toward your local future, arrive in the past. These closed loops or circular paths have a more familiar name: time travel. But if it is possible in such worlds, as Gödel argues, to return to one’s past, then what was past never passed at all.1 Palle Yourgrau

Here and elsewhere (again) Welcome to the multiverse. When we look at the world and ask “where is art?” the impetus behind the question is the thought “when is art?” For contemporary space is reciprocally, and inextricably, bound up with historical time. Accordingly, art is always in transit. Not only in its various spatial adaptations throughout history, where we encounter it, but in its temporal apparitions, which are at once past, present, and future. Quantum mechanics has a name for this phenomenon: Space-time. For Beirutis, time bends and curves like a Gödel universe. Here, as elsewhere, historical events mirror what semioticians call a sliding signifier, an image unit that floats between the past, present, and future, then back again, in one’s mind. Counterintuitively, Beirut is also a city where particular events function as a kind of collective caesura—a historical blank space—within cultural consciousness. The most prominent of these events is the Lebanese Civil War (1975–91), which has provoked critically minded artists to engage in a “hermeneutic aesthetics” of the past. 2 For instance, artists of one generation—ones who were in primary school in the seventies—­ wrangle with screen memories of the civil war, an event that can neither be accurately remembered nor completely forgotten. Alternately, a younger generation of artists attempt to untangle that which they never knew themselves, but which they inherited as a gap in Lebanon’s state sanctioned national history. That said, this generational schema is already a bit too tidy. For there are those artists in the region whose work critically investigates the more general questions of memory, history, and temporality, precisely by subtending the perspectival positions of the aforementioned generational lines. In this essay, I will address the temporal roots of historically minded artwork produced vis-à-vis three interrelated perspectives: The there-then, the here-now, and the aporic space of reflection/projection between the two. This will entail an analysis of how historical and psychoanalytic time are imbricated with contemporary art and DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-10

Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020)  133 political events in both Lebanon and beyond. Concluding my explication, Rania and Raed Rafei’s film 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle will serve as a case study for how the space of an artwork’s production and, concomitantly, the type of historical consciousness it seeks to arouse, is inextricably bound up with the producer’s own temporal situatedness.3 First, a subjective reflection on Beirut’s time-space continuum. As a foreign national living in West Beirut’s Ras Hamra district from 2018 to 2019, I found myself caught within the city’s “picture,” at once temporally positioned and historically implicated. For I was a different (through related) kind of time traveler among my fellow Beiruti time travelers. In 2018 I had embarked upon my future there, having recently departed from Southern California’s own cultural landscape. Upon arrival, I found myself residing in a Gödel timelike universe, in which my intended future destination turned out to be a past that I shared with my Beiruti neighbors. It was a past best signified by the year-concept “1975,” which was lobbed back and forth between the two aforementioned generations. This left me feeling dizzy, like a cat whose gaze rhythmically follows a ball in a tennis match, identifying with each generation simultaneously: With those past teenagers who still remember growing up in wartorn Beirut and with those current teenagers who know this past only as a mysterious event existing elsewhere. Enter Jean-Luc Godard’s canonical film Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) of 1976. Publicly screened in the spring of 2019 at the American University of Beirut (AUB), the film is imbued with new meaning in the context of post-reconstruction Beirut. The title signifies much more than Godard’s original spatial question: Here, the Palestinian fedayeen, there, the Parisian middle-class family. Consequently, while watching the film I could sense the audiences’ individual calculations as to where they were then, in Godard’s representation of the 1970s, “What country was I living in?” or “How old was I?” Alternatively, I imagined students pondering, “Wow, I wasn’t even born yet.” As an American born in 1962, my own calculation was a question of the spatial “here and elsewhere” of California/Beirut vis-à-vis the temporal here and elsewhere of 1975/2018. This space-time aporia produced, in my mind, two spatial sites intertwined with two temporal sites—a here and elsewhere en-abyme—in which a multiverse loophole conjoins the California/Beirut of 1975 to the Beirut/California of 2018. I am not unique in this type of psychic time travel. Just sit in any café in Beirut’s Hamra district and you’ll hear the same temporal-spatial orientation made by self-aware American and European travelers, be they expats living in Beirut semi-­ permanently or temporary residents like myself. Hence the contemporaneous site specificity of Godard’s title cards interspersed throughout Here and Elsewhere that decry all binaries, be they political, spatial, temporal, or psychoanalytic: Foreign/national, everywhere/nowhere, space/time, in/ out, interior/exterior, yet/already, dream/reality, to be/to have, question/answer, entrance/exit, happiness/misery, today/tomorrow, all/nothing, more/less, to live/to die. “It’s too simple and too easy to divide the world into two … too simple to say that the wealthy are wrong, and the poor are right,” Godard’s voice-over proclaims.4 These words, which still resonate today, reflect the film’s own historical embeddedness. For upon the film’s release, in 1974, the famed Marxists associated with the French Trotskyite group Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949–65)—Jean-François Lyotard (who later left), Jean Laplanche, and Claude Lefort key among them—had already shifted toward a post-Marxist, heterodox position, a move aggravating both labor movement

134  Juli Carson communists and Stalin apologists.5 What was at stake for post-Marxists was the aporia central to both capitalism and communism, such that they had dispensed entirely with the orthodox dialectical configuration of base and superstructure.6 In a likeminded vein, Here and Elsewhere formulated that capital, in fact, which functions in two directions: At any given moment it may add as much as it subtracts. But what is added are zeros, “zeros that represent tens, hundreds, thousands of you and me, the capitalist says, thus in fact they are not really zeros,” Godard declares.7 What this gives us, then, is the classic 0/1 as a non-binary coupling, in which each integer signifies more than its numerical function. In this Fregean logic, the concept “zero” may, in fact, be signified by the integer “1.”8 Such mathematical paradoxes mirror the new historicist pulse that beats throughout Here and Elsewhere, one defined by the Freudian concept of deferred action that Godard visualizes by way of a hand calculating numbers-cum-years on an adding machine. In accordance with Hegelian logic, rather than the laws of arithmetic, 1917 + 1936 = (the year) 1968, not (the numeral) 3853. Under Godard’s camera eye, it’s therefore the cultural image associated with the numbers 1917 and 1936 that the so-called “invisible hand of the market” so visibly calculates. Hence, Godard’s first voice-over to this calculating hand: “To see for instance that the image of a 17 plus the image of a 36, equals the month of May, the image of ’68,”9 is succeeded by a montage of images of the October Revolution, the Popular Front, Lenin, and then Hitler with a flashing title: “Popular.” Immediately, the operation repeats. This time the voice-over “Whereas, for example, the image of a 17 plus the image of a 36, in the month of September still equals the image of a ’70”10 is followed by a photographic montage of Lenin, Hitler, and now Golda Meier, with the flashing titles: “Israel” and “Palestine.” In this Godardian multiverse, as time bends and curves, so do the historical images and ideologies associated with them. If this kind of spatiotemporal sequence—one reified in collective consciousness by any given sequence of historical events, nation-states, and the state heads associated with both—is as cognitively pliable as it is indelible, it’s because traumatic historical events tend to appear, disappear, and reappear in any single contemporary moment. In tandem, this entails a projection of any given current moment as an anterior future moment—this will have been— as a means of sublimating historical trauma into political agency if not ideological efficacy.11 It therefore occurred to me, sitting in an AUB conference room watching Here and Elsewhere, that Beirut’s civil war story—one written (if only in their own minds) by myriad subjects from heterogeneous perspectives—regularly surfaces, disappears, resurfaces, and then submerges, again, within the city’s post-war contemporary art scene. If this is Beirut’s temporal heartbeat, correspondingly, we must further contemplate two metaphysical questions: When in time is Beirut? Where in Beirut is time?

Peddling time when standing still (parallax) I rather believe with Faulkner, “The past is never dead, it’s not even past,” and this is for the simple reason that the world we live in at any moment is the world of the past; it consists of the monuments and the relics of what has been done by men for better or worse; its facts are always what has become.12 Hannah Arendt

Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020)  135 In support of Arendt’s metaphysical assertion that “the world we live in at any moment is the world of the past,”13 John McTaggert’s The Unreality of Time (1908) has renewed currency. McTaggert’s temporal rubric has come to be reflected in, if not refracted by, a group of discordant sectarian players set on historicizing Beirut in ideological terms. The consequence of which is that indeed the past isn’t dead because it hasn’t even passed. Enter McTaggert’s universe, in which time is defined by two interwoven strains of perception: The distinction of past, present, and future (A-series) and the distinction of earlier and later (B-series). In the former, we encounter our most intuitive sense of temporality because A-series time denotes what is fluid and dynamic in our first-person experience of the world: A present “now” moving to us from the future and passing by us into the past. In this way, A-series represents the sense of temporal flux, comprising “a series of positions running from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present to the future and the far future.”14 Accordingly, the present is always ontological. To exist in the past is not to exist at all because the past is forever fixed, while the future remains open, as that destination to which we will someday arrive. Moreover, because A-series time is subjectively in flux, it contains no objective worldwide now. With B-series time, on the other hand, we encounter a spatial and objective model, one consisting of the temporal categories of “before” and “after.” This is the temporal sequence comprising calendars, historical narratives, and seasonal change. In B-series time, the year 1975 will always and forever come before 2020. That said, in B-series time one can psychically “move around” its spatial configuration, for time is laid out before us as a kind of meta-temporal map of the known universe’s events, positions, and moments, such that I temporally define myself vis-à-vis the sequence of events that have come before me. As opposed to A-series time, the moments in B-series time are thus static and discrete, since what is earlier in time will always be just that. It follows, then, that since B-series time stands outside change or flux, it has come to define what we cognitively denote as time proper. This led McTaggart to paradoxically conclude: “A universe in which nothing changed (including the thoughts of the conscious beings in it) would be a timeless universe.”15 If B-series time is static, then our subjective sense of temporality results from the following philosophical equation: A-series + C-series = B-series. What then is C-series? For McTaggart, C-series denotes that which is only of an order: An alphabet, the days of the week, or a numerical system. Accordingly, while C-series lacks a directional mandate, it is ruled by laws of sequence. Meaning, numerically we can say 1, 2, 3, or 3, 2, 1, but not 2, 1, 3. “It is only when change and time come in,” McTaggart explains, “that the relations of this C-series become relations of earlier and later, and so it becomes a B-series.”16 Which is to say, “it is only when the A-series, which gives change and direction, is combined with the C-series, which gives permanence, that the B-series can arise.”17 This is the same metaphysical equation at the core of Here and Elsewhere’s calculation montage. In semiotic terms, the signifier chain ­A-series + C-series = B-series corresponds to the signified chain Subject + Position = (Historical) Time. In which case, Godard’s equation—1917 + 1936 = 1968—only makes sense when each year in that equation is within McTaggart’s temporal algorithm. In other words, Godard’s 1917 requires an experiential subject (A-series), a directional position (C-series), and a historical field (B-series) to make his montage have the multivalent signification he sought. Hence, we derive the Godard/McTaggart mash-up by which one might better perceive how the metaphysical unreality of time comes to be real in both psychic and political consciousness.

136  Juli Carson To view McTaggart this way is to deconstruct the A- versus B-series dichotomy, because as Sandra B. Rosenthal argues in Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy (2000), the world as we experience it intellectually—that is to say historically—is erroneously split between what Rosenthal calls A-theorists and B-theorists. The former privileges a “prereflective” experience of time, in present-tense terms of “immediacy, pure presence.”18 While the latter privileges a tenseless experience of the world, wherein time—uncoupled from subjective temporal paradoxes—comprises a factual succession of discrete real events, ones that never repeat or fold back onto each other. Correspondingly, positivist historians tend to be B-theorists and presentist historians A-theorists, while those deconstructionists challenging the privileged status of the now within both B and A logic—either by negation or by assertion—might be called “new historicists.” Count the materialist time travelers, such as Godard, as the precedent for new historicists, along with a handful of dynamic theorists and artists living in Beirut as Godard’s fellow travelers.19 Simply, for those Beiruti Godardians—ones who experience the now by way of an unreconciled parallax view of the past—to engage the world’s historical events entails conscientiously holding A- and B-series time in the balance. Otherwise, when time is cognitively experienced as either A or B, we enter into hegemonic time—that temporality of sectarian local politics, on the one hand, and global neoliberal tactics, on the other. Both of these are founded upon mythological narratives of past and future, in service of what the Beiruti artist and theorist Walid Sadek has called Lebanon’s “protracted now,”20 to which I will turn momentarily. But first, the question “when in time is Beirut?” entails a quick dive into Lebanon’s B-series time, that static field in which the nation’s collective consciousness is ideologically embedded. While the region we now know as Lebanon is over 7,000 years old, predating recorded history, the formation of the Lebanese Republic only occurred in 1920. Prior to that, Lebanon was alternately occupied by various empires: Phoenician, Greek, and Roman (4000 BC–AD 600); Arab, Crusaders, and Mamluks (600– 1516); and finally Ottoman and French (1516–1943). We should note, further, that although Lebanon’s constitutional republic was founded in 1920, the nation-state only gained its complete sovereignty from the French and Syrian mandate in 1943. Contemporaneously, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, ordering the division of Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states by May 1948, when the British mandate was scheduled to end. Just five years into Lebanon’s national independence, then, came the Nakba— or Day of the Catastrophe—when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes in Palestine, the consequence of the Arab-Israeli wars from 1948 to 1949 that unilaterally transformed Palestine into the modern-­ day nation-state of Israel. The region’s lingua franca is that the Nakba was ground zero for Lebanon’s civil war, a kind of primal scene deferred some 30 years later when Lebanon became a sanctuary state for 110,000 Palestinian refugees. But there were other contributing geopolitical factors within that 30 years, most notably the six-day war in 1967, which established the current Israeli occupied territories of Gaza, West Bank, and Golan Heights, the latter of which lies along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. As Palestinian refugees traversed that border in larger numbers after 1967, the inter-­ state tensions increased between Israel, Lebanon, and the region at large. This, in turn, fueled intra-state sectarian divisions within Lebanon, culminating in that fated

Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020)  137 21

day “that destroyed peace in Lebanon.” On April 13, 1975, Kataeb Party militiamen opened fire on a bus carrying Palestinians through the eastern Beirut suburb of Ain Al-Rummaneh, killing over 20. This exacerbated the tensions between those inhabiting Muslim and Christian areas of West and East Beirut, respectively. But more significantly, perhaps, it proliferated the politically driven sectarian subdivisions within each pole. 22 Such was the “origin” of the protracted Lebanese Civil War that officially ended with Ta’if Accords in 1989. Henceforth, the nation’s war that dare not speak its name would be the caesura within all historical accounts of Lebanon, its history for all intents and purposes thereby ending in 1943, the birth year of its republic. What, then, would stand in for Lebanon’s past—within its historical caesura—on Beirut’s B-series field? As Sarah Rogers observes, “according to archaeologists and urban historians, the large-scale and extremely profitable postwar reconstruction of Beirut’s city center has demolished more architectural and historical ruins than almost two decades of fighting,” such that “rather than historicize the war, official and popular discourses recall an idealized prewar Lebanon—prompting the literary scholar Saree Mikdasi to ask if Beirut, in fact, is a city without a history.”23 There were many political and religious players on this field to proffer an idealized prewar Lebanon—politically, spiritually, and ethnically. Lebanon might very well personify the law of infinite divisibility—but two meta-ideologies, ones currently butting heads, appear to dominate the post–civil war period. For those aligned with the global financial market, Lebanon’s narrative is calibrated by Solidere, the Lebanese company for the development and reconstruction of Beirut’s central district. Founded by former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and incorporated as a Lebanese joint-stock company on May 5, 1994, Solidere quickly rebuilt large portions of downtown Beirut with luxury residential complexes and shopping centers. Under the motto “Beirut, an Ancient City of the Future,” Solidere attracted big-name multinational companies to Beirut in order to return the city to its fabled pre–civil war glory as “the Paris of the Middle East.”24 That was Solidere’s narrative. On behalf of the Islamic nationalist faction there exists Solidere’s other, Hizb Allah. Founded in the early 1980s, at the height of the civil war as one of the many warring militias, Hizb Allah is a Shi’a Islamist militia aligned with Ayatollah Khomeni’s Iranian regime mandate to dissolve the Jewish state. Accordingly, Hizb Allah’s original 1985 manifesto was decidedly anti-globalist, with the key objective of eliminating global, Western-American hegemony. Since 1992, Hassan Hasrallah has served as Hizb Allah’s secretary general, doggedly maintaining the group’s cohesive “enemy from outside” narrative, which still largely dominates southern Lebanon. More recently, Hizb Allah has also been forceful in developing affordable housing in Sahra Choueifat, a district southeast of Beirut, which serves the large Shiite community displaced by the civil war and subsequent reconstructive gentrification. 25 On the one hand, then, we have Solidere’s economic narrative— driven by an idealization of Western liberal democracy for those of means—and, on the other, we have Hizb Allah’s nationalist narrative—driven by an idealization of regional ethno-religious identity for those marginalized by Lebanon’s neoliberal reconstruction. That said, binaries are deceptive, just as they are meant to be. The reality is that Solidere and Hizb Allah’s defining ideologies rely on the same presentist notion of time and therefore history, which brings us back to Walid Sadek’s concept of

138  Juli Carson Lebanon’s protracted now. In “Peddling Time When Standing Still: Art Remains in Lebanon and the Globalization That Was” (2006), Sadek sees an international art market eager to commodify Beirut’s post-war grand récit while failing to comprehend the temporal aporias at the core of Beirut’s more recent collective conscious. As he argued, The tense and lingering interface provoked in Beirut—for instance between the film Beyrouth Fantome, which grapples with the absences that dwell in civil war survivors, and West Beirut, which weaves a light fable of war that seems to have happened long ago to folks who may resemble our parents—is totally lost when both are shown abroad.26 Those films were distributed in 1998. Subsequently, the local and regional gateway through which those artists entered the global art market collapsed following Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s assassination on February 14, 2005. This collapse was further compounded by Israel’s attempt to annihilate Hizb Allah during the summer of 2006. As a result, all the idealizations mentioned above were over. First of all, the centrality of Beirut’s reconstruction that nourished artist’s reflection and critique was undone. Second, Hariri’s tense but operative truce with the military force of Hizb Allah in southern Lebanon, through which he was able to maintain the myth of economic growth during the 1990s, was annulled. 27 A new myth of origin was thus in order. Filling this lack, the Sunni Future Movement claimed to “represent a Lebanese democratic forefront of a pan-Arab identity, born of its resistance to a dictatorial Syrian Ba’ath regime,”28 which began with Hariri’s assassination and included others out of courtesy and consortium building. Conversely, Hizb Allah—representing a coalition of parties opposed to Hariri’s Future Movement—strove to “fix the identity of the Lebanese nation, and not the state, through its leading Shi’i model of armed resistance to Israeli military expansionism and American Imperialism.”29 In support of these ideologies, two chronotopes were devised, each of which was launched with carefully constructed mise-en-scenes. First the Hariri camp’s “The Truth for Lebanon” campaign, as Sadek recounts: At the Quntari crossroad in Beirut, an LED day-counter sits perched on a billboard showing a large portrait of Rafiq Hariri coupled with the slogan al-Haqiqa Li-Ajl Lubnan (“The Truth for Lebanon’s Sake”). The lit red digits mark the number of days passed since the assassination of the former prime minister. With day zero falling on February 14, 2005, the counter has duly exceeded 1,300. The cluster of portrait, slogan and counter has become for the Future Movement and its allies the marker of a messianic wait for a promised deliverance by the International Tribunal to be held in the Netherlands following more than 3 years of investigative work by the International Independent Investigation Commission (IIIC) set up by the UN through security council resolution 1595 on April 7, 2005. Between day zero—the assassination—and day one—the announcement of a conclusive verdict by the tribunal—stretches a duration of insignificance. The digits of the day-counter mark an increasing number, but in fact signify a countdown. The assassination of Hariri promises a beginning, logistically delayed, which will eventually release the nation from 30 years of assassinations left unpunished.30

Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020)  139 This is followed by Hizb Allah’s “Now Is the Time” campaign. Again, I cite Sadek: When on the evening of Sunday, July 16, 2006 the Secretary General of Hizb Allah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah appeared on television to address the Lebanese for the second time since the beginning of the Israeli war against Lebanon, he chose to end his speech in unequivocal terms: “We, willing or not, whether the Lebanese are willing or not, Lebanon now and the resistance in Lebanon are engaged in the battle of the Umma.” With these words, the Secretary General came to fix the time of the nation in the present tense. Lebanon, and all those in it, will be in the now until further notice. It seemed as if we were forcibly made to mobilize within the domain of one particular time, of a prolonged now, defined by the extreme proximity and imminence of disaster…. Yet, when contextualized within local and regional politics, it emerges as a rebuttal and carries hence an alternative conception of time from that dominant in Lebanon since the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. In struggling to overshadow each other, these two conceptions of time mark an exacerbation of strife in Lebanon.31 If Hizb Allah’s Now Is the Time chronotope is thus founded on the ancient Sumerian battle between Lagash and Umma of 2450 BC, the primal scene’s past constituting a forever entombed now, then Hariri’s Truth for Lebanon chronotope rushes us forward, in the messianic manner of a perpetual waiting redemption and truth. Taken together, both cases constitute a perpetual now as a static vantage point from which, on the one hand, to look back on what has passed, projecting oneself back there, and, on the other, to look forward, projecting what will have been once we have arrived at the future. But, of course, that past is never returned to, nor the future arrived at, because they are merely chronotopes, literally, mythologized tropes of time. While the Hizb Allah model won’t relinquish the primal scene indulging ethno-nationalist melancholia, the Hariri model moves forward too fast, a neoliberal fantasy of the state’s mourning process. But what of a third model? One that lingers upon an erased event, rather than peddling time around it. What might that look like?

Reconstituting the event (lingering) Since the phantom is not related to the loss of an object of love, it cannot be considered the effect of unsuccessful mourning, as would be the case with melancholics or with those who carry a tomb in themselves. It is the childrens’ or descendants’ lot to objectify these buried tombs through diverse species and ghosts. What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others. The phantoms of folklore merely objectify a metaphor active in the unconscious: the burial of an unspeakable fact within the love-object.32 Nicholas Abraham In “Notes on the Phantom” (1987) psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham recalls a patient who was plagued by a personal phantom stemming from his father’s illegitimate birth. This illegitimacy was a secret carried to the father’s grave by a complicated piece of fiction that the family maintained: The patient’s bastard father was a descendant of European nobility. By embodying the fictional account of his father’s

140  Juli Carson genealogy, the son had unconsciously internalized the neurosis of being illegitimate even though he lacked a repressed primal scene of bastardization. This internalization indexed a gap standing between the father’s own reaction-formation (the assertion of nobility standing for illegitimacy) and the son’s unconscious perpetuation of the father’s neurotic behavior acted out in verbal fits and irrational claims. Abraham explains how the father’s unconscious is focused on one thought (which gives rise to the phantom): “If my mother had not hidden the name of the illustrious lover whose son I am, I would not have to hide the degrading fact that I am an illegitimate child.” How could this thought, alive in the father’s unconscious, become transformed into the unconscious of his eldest son, everyone’s favorite, and remain so active there as to provoke fits? In all respects and by all accounts, the patient appears possessed not by his own unconscious but by someone else’s.33 The difficulty of analyzing the patient thus lies in [his] horror at violating a parent of a family’s guarded secret, even though the secret’s text and content are inscribed in the [patient’s] unconscious. The horror of transgressing … is compounded by the risk of undermining the fictitious yet necessary integrity of the parental figure in question.34 For a recent generation of Beiruti artists, those born after the Lebanese Civil War, a phantom similarly haunts them. In Memory and Conflict in Lebanon (2012), sociologist Craig Larkin describes a “postmemory generation” in Lebanon that is “best defined as residual type of memory; a recollection of an event not personally experienced but socially felt; a traumatic rupture that indelibly scars a nation, religious group community or family.”35 The formative primal scene of this generation which has been inherited as a phantom—in the form of an historical caesura—might very well be Lebanon’s Amnesty War Crimes law of 1991. With the moniker of “no victor, no vanquished,” such agreements retroactively exempted a select group of ­people— military and government leaders from all sects—from criminal liability for all crimes committed during the civil war. This was all toward the government’s effort to “control the narrative” during the state’s reconstruction in order to vouchsafe against memory, for—as state members argue—to remember is never to heal. Lebanon is by no way unique on this account. A similar route was taken by both Germany’s Adenauer administration after the Holocaust and Argentina’s Bignone administration after their Dirty War of 1976–83. But such a failed anamnesis, such a forced historical caesura, becomes a tenacious presence for a post-war generation. Because, as Larkin reminds us, “just as collective memories are shaped by historical evidences— photographs, films, eyewitness accounts, visual recordings and media archives—they are equally predicated on historical omissions and silences.”36 And where historical memory is erased, identity becomes even more ideologically manipulatable than is conventionally the case.37 By way of remedying this crisis of anamnesis, a return to another primal scene— that of the civil war’s overture rather than its coda—is necessary. Let us first, then, engage the civil war’s B-series historical time, establishing the event, followed by the phantom’s A-series subjective time, instanced by the event’s filmic mise-en-scene.

Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020)  141 Enter AUB’s Student Council, circa 1970. As Makram Rabah recounts in A Campus at War: Student Politics at the American University of Beirut 1967–1975 (2009), AUB’s student movement was exteroceptive—meaning, the university’s physical walls, which were intended to gate off the campus from its surrounding West Beirut neighborhood, were in fact a porous membrane, through which the world’s contentious events bore into the student body’s political consciousness. This was the case from the university’s origin. Established in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College, the AUB was renamed in 1919 when it adapted a secular American liberal arts curriculum. And with that, AUB not only became the first American academy of higher education in the Levant, it concomitantly became a power base for a consortium of Western interest in the region.38 Therefore, it is unsurprising that when a cavalcade of regional events occurred in the post-war period—the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, the Egyptian monarchy’s downfall in 1952, and assumption of the Egyptian Republic under Gamal Abdul-Nassar in 1954, the Lebanese mini civil war in 1958 between proand anti-Nassarite factions, and subsequent landing (in the same year) of American Marines in Beirut—AUB would become a kind of political behaviorist lab, wherein the student body would act out these tumultuous events. In the midst of this, AUB’s first Student Council was established in 1969 by AUB president Samuel B. Kirkwood, conceived as a levee, of sorts, to stay off the political tsunami headed their way. As he put it, the Student Council was “the ideal means to contain and regulate the justified rage of the students over their tragic national predicament.”39 In Kirkwood’s eyes, the council was thus to concern itself only with student affairs, as “an indivisible part of the University [that is] an educational institution and as such doesn’t not take a political stand.”40 And yet, to the administration’s chagrin, by 1969–70 the AUB campus had been transmuted into a microcosm of the Arab world. Two student factions in particular echoed the region’s politics: Fateh, a local chapter of the Palestinian liberation movement that led council in 1969–74; and Rabita, the Lebanese Student League, established in 1958 to oppose the pan-Arab unity movement led by Nasser. But as Kamal Tannir, a student member of al-Rabita from 1969 to 1972, put it, Fateh always had the upper hand: “Fateh were like the political Beatles,” she recalls, “there was mass hysteria about them, as all people except the Maronites were with Fateh.”41 A case in point: Upon the famed Black September conflict in 1970—­during which the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was violently expelled from Jordan, and concurrent with the Cairo agreement’s legitimization of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon—AUB’s student body was further radicalized. Rabita was pulled even further to the right, while Fateh moved further to the left. Four years later, the breaking point was reached when—as a result of the administration’s ten percent tuition hike, and under the guidance of Fateh—the entire student body rose in protest. On March 5, 1974, having delivered a list of demands to change, AUB’s students proceeded to march in Beirut to the House of Parliament, clashing with security forces. On March 18, the Student Council convened a General Assembly followed by a 1,000-person march on campus to chants of “Occupation! Occupation!”42 Meanwhile, students at the adjacent Beirut University College (BUC) were also occupying campus buildings in reaction to their own eight percent tuition increase. Soon thereafter, both universities called upon other institutes of higher learning to march together to the Ministry of Education, swelling the number of protesters to 5,000.

142  Juli Carson We have thus arrived at the constellation of events to which Rania and Raed Rafei’s film 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle would return some 40 years later. On March 19, students occupying AUB’s buildings further seized control of the security office and thus the university gates. With this advance, the tenuous demarcation between “on campus” academics and “off campus” politics was effectively eliminated. The students immediately released the following statement: We are striking because we do not want to be divorced from the problems of our society. This concern is what the administration calls “politicized”. We refuse the ivory towers. We refuse section 214. We do not want help from those who gave 2,2000 [sic] million dollars to Israel.43 The students’ 37-day occupation would end on April 24 when 800 Lebanese security men stormed the campus, arresting 61 students.44 The Student Council was suspended on the following day as the administration seized back control of the campus. The administration’s small victory, however, proved only a minor caesura in the context of the larger region’s conflicts. Soon thereafter, Lebanon’s civil war would erupt full force, dividing Beirut in two—Muslim west and Christian east—and, over the decade to follow, even further into subwarring factions until war’s end in 1992. Even then, AUB would manage to function throughout the 15-year Lebanese Civil War, which included Israel’s occupation of Beirut in 1982, the attack on the US embassy and an American Marine base in 1983, and the assassination of AUB President Malcolm Kerr in January 1984.

Back to the future (again) The film 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle gives us the improvisational interpretation by seven current-day left activists of AUB’s 37-day student occupation. In so doing, it is a film that neither turns the page on these events in order to move on, apropos Solidere time, nor does it melancholically refuse to let them go, as in Hizb Allah time. Rather, 74 lingers upon this moment, as a means of working through the events of March and April 1974. In Rania and Raed Rafei’s hands, improvisational repetition is thus the conceptual device by which a conscious, public display is made of an unconscious cultural phenomenon: The Beiruti collective transference by millennial and post-internet generations onto a primordial cultural event, one which they paradoxically haven’t forgotten because they simply never knew it to begin with. Nevertheless, just as with Nicholas Abraham’s analysand, this generation inherits the transference neurosis of their parents in that—and there’s no better way to put this—it is transferred to them by way of an actual lack, a blank spot in their cultural past. This is different from the transference neurosis of their parents’ generation, whereby the parent’s repression of an event that they lived through produces a blank spot as a form of amnesia. But this blank spot is the breeding ground for a repetition of the repressed lived event, that is, the transference of it, unknowingly, from the past to the present, where it is inherited, unconsciously, by the next generation. In both cases, the unconscious compulsion to repeat something missing is greater than the conscious impulse to confront it. Exemplary of this phenomenon is the urban reconstruction of larger Beirut by every political and religious faction, ostensibly to move on from the civil war but which is,

Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020)  143

Figure 10.1  74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle), directed by Rania Rafei and Raed Rafei (Beirut: Orjouane Productions, 2012), color and black & white, digital beta, DCP, in Arabic with English or French subtitles, 95 mins, Courtesy of the artist.

144  Juli Carson

Figure 10.2  74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle), directed by Rania Rafei and Raed Rafei (Beirut: Orjouane Productions, 2012), color and black & white, digital beta, DCP, in Arabic with English or French subtitles, 95 mins.

in fact, literally laying the ground for the war yet to come, as Hiba Bou Akar argues in her book of the same name.45 As a counterpunch to transference neurosis, the Rafeis’ film instantiates—by way of staged improvisational repetition of AUB’s student occupation on the eve of the civil war—what Freud called “meaningful transference.” In “Remembering, Repeating, Working Through,” he explains how analysands unconsciously “remember” things that they’ve repressed by way of unknowingly repeating them—by acting them out—in response to the analyst’s prompts. In so doing, the analyst mindfully guides the analysand’s repetition away from unconscious repetition compulsion toward the meaningful understanding of the event(s) that have unconsciously shaped him or her.46 By inverse analogy, in shooting 74, the actors are prompted by the directors to repeat knowingly those events they themselves never experienced but which have come to color their contemporary activism, with the Arab Spring of 2011 as the real lived backdrop for their improvisational endeavor. As Rania Rafei recalls, “We started working on the project before the events in Tunisia. We said to ourselves, the new generation is dormant. We wanted to call them. With the Arab Spring our film has changed energy.” Accordingly, she adds, “The dialogues … were not written and the amateur actors were invited to improvise. An improvisation guided by the work of funds that the whole team carried out over one year, while working on the archives of this time.”47 As such, the directors did not build the characters alone. Instead, as Raed Rafei recalled, “We built the characters based on [the activists’] inputs and their visions.” Consequently,

Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020)  145 through the story of seven characters—the members of the student council heading the occupation—the film presents a side of the Lebanese socio-political context one year prior to the civil war, and reflects the different tendencies and frustrations in revolutionary groups, especially the left, in Lebanon and around the world.48 For instance, one of the actors, Molotov, was a member of the Lebanese Palestinian group, while Katiba V. plays the role of Iyad, a Lebanese Palestinian student at AUB who does not find himself in the pro-Israeli speech of the university. With him, it is a question of the return to Palestine, a problematic always of topicality. … The bridge between students of this year 1974 and activists of today is built. It takes all the more weight in the context of the Arab revolutions.49 Yet another protagonist proclaims near the end of the occupation reenactment that “one might not call it a great revolution, but I am sure that I am living the revolution with myself!”50 Meaningful transference indeed! If 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle is therefore a filmic double counterpunch to Solidere’s repressive reconstruction of a city, on the one hand, and to Hizb Allah’s repetition compulsion, on the other, then it is also a counterpart to Godard’s model of time-traveling docu-fiction directed at excavating the gaps within Beirut’s intergenerational collective consciousness. In so doing, a dreamscape is staged wherein a constellation of triangulated signifieds—politics/wages/capital, theory/memory/ history, and image/representation/art—are condensed and displaced among myriad signifiers, which is to say, historical identities. In Beirut, mining such constellations in search of a deconstructed historical consciousness is the most radical endeavor one can undertake. We have thus derived an answer, then, to our second question, “where in Beirut is time?” As a young student named Rafik put it while being interviewed by Craig Larkin, “History is very controversial. It’s always going to end up in a fight.”51 I would argue that in 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle we have arrived at a sublimated version of this fight, one manifested in the hands of two directors who publicly take Beirut’s amnesiac crisis to both the practitioners of historical censorship, the state, and its recipients, a younger generation who embody the historical lack by acting it out. Along the way, the Beiruti cultural landscape displayed by the directors is not only a cautionary tale of the kind of exteroceptive sectarianism which leads to civil war, here and elsewhere, it’s an inspirational site for the kind of aesthetic and theoretical time travel that can meaningfully give us the necessary thrust velocity to escape repetition compulsion’s eternal death spiral.

Notes 1 Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 129–30. 2 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). I take recourse to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s term hermeneutic aesthetics to denote an experience that communes a present moment to a historical event. Gadamer’s hermeneutic concept of temporality, sifted through Jacques Derrida’s deft critique, is the guiding principle for this

146  Juli Carson essay as well as my recent book, The Hermeneutic Impulse: Aesthetics of an Untethered Past, (Berlin: b_books, 2019). 3 Two publications—each of which introduced post–civil war art production to the North American and European world vis-à-vis contemporaneous political events—have been influential on my thinking. Walid Sadek, ed., “Not, Not Arab,” special issue, Third Text 117 (July 2012); Judith F. Rodenbeck, ed., special issue, Art Journal 66, no. 2 (Summer 2007). The former was produced post the Arab Spring, six years after the latter had introduced a first generation of post–civil war artists two years following the assassination of former Prime Minister Hariri in 2005 and one year after the Israeli-Arab war of 2006. Meanwhile, the historical embeddedness of my essay here, along with that of a curatorial case study I produced for the American University of Beirut, was conceived in the wake of what I’m calling the “American Summer” of 2016, the eve of US President Trump’s election that currently casts a very large shadow over the entire Middle East. 4 Jean-Luc Godard, Ici et Ailleurs, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Anne-Marie Miéville (Grenoble, France: Sonimage and Gaumont, 1976), 16mm. 5 In Eastern Europe there were minorities in a number of countries who refused to regard the Soviet Union as a “transitional society” between capitalism and socialism, as had Trotsky. These minorities considered both East and West to have equally reprehensible systems of exploitation and repression. Marcel van der Linden, “Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French Revolutionary Group (1949– 65),” Left History 5, no. 1 (1997), accessed May 15, 2006 https://libcom.org/library/ socialisme-ou-barbarie-linden. Meanwhile, a general return to Italian post-Marxists, primarily through the writings of Toni Negri in the context of the 1970s/80s workerism and autonomia, shores up the lingua franca of critical theory in such prominent cultural institutions as Beirut’s AUB and Ashkal Awan. This branch of academic practice is beyond the scope of this essay. 6 See Francois Lyotard, Économie Libidinale [Libidinal Economy] (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1974); and Francois Lytord, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir [The Post-Modern Condition] (Paris: Les Editons de Minuit, 1979), the former being the more radically experimental of the two. 7 Godard, Ici et Ailleurs. 8 For an explication of Jacques-Alain Miller’s Lacanian “suture” that aligns with this Godardian formulation, see Juli Carson, “On Critics, Sublimation and the Drive: The Photographic Paradoxes of the Subject,” in Art: Sublimation or Symptom, ed. Parveen Adams (New York: The Other Press, 2003). 9 Godard, Ici et Ailleurs. 10 Godard. 11 This kind of psychic time travel is not germane to one kind of aesthetic practice or political position. When Chibli Mallat—a neoliberal lawyer, law professor, and former candidate for president in Lebanon—penned the manifesto for Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, he too employed Godard’s historicist numerology. Fast forward to 2221. What will a historian standing in the 23rd century say about the Cedar Revolution of 2005? When 2221 comes, the bicentenary of the Cedar Revolution will have passed, with many historians’ corresponding flurry of writings, maybe even in the order of the 170 conferences worldwide which were held around the bicentenary of the French Revolution in and around 1989. 2221 is a simple arithmetical equation: 2221 to 2005 is what 2005 is to 1789. The distance represents the historical perspective acquired and underlines the accumulated knowledge that marks the bicentenary of the Lebanese Revolution and a few years more, 216 solar years exactly. Add 216 to 1789, you get 2005. Add the same to 2005, when the Cedar Revolution happened, you get 2221. Now 2221, or 2205, or even 2021 is a long human memory. Chibli Mallat, March 2221: Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution: An Essay on Non-Violence and Justice (Lebanon: Gubemare, 2007), 17. 12 Hannah Arendt, “Home to Roost,” in Responsibility and Judgment (1975; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 270.

Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020)  147 13 14 15 16 17 18

Arendt, 270. J.M.E. McTaggert, “The Unreality of Time,” in Philosophical Studies (1908): 111. McTaggert, 113. McTaggert, 116. McTaggert, 119. Sandra B. Rosenthal, Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy: A Pragmatic Engagement with Contemporary Perspectives (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), 39–40. 19 Godard’s deconstructive play with personal versus historical temporalities is precedented. In the 1970s Germany, a related historiography was termed Alltagsgeschitchte, or “the practice of everyday life.” Alf Lüdtke describes it thusly: In doing the history of everyday life, attention is focused not just on the deeds (and misdeeds) and pageantry of the great, the masters of church and state [B-series]. Rather, central to the thrust of everyday analysis is the life and survival of those who have remained largely anonymous in history—the “nameless” multitudes in their workday trials and tribulation, their occasional outbursts of dépenses. [A-series]. Alf Lüdtke, The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 4. 20 Rosenthal, Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy. 21 Hussein Dakroub, “April 13, 1975: The Day that Destroyed Peace in Lebanon,” The Daily Star (Lebanon), April 11, 2015, http://ftp.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2015/ Apr-11/294119-april-13-1975-the-day-that-destroyed-peace-in-lebanon.ashx. 2 2 The key sectarian players of the Lebanese Civil War were the Christian Kataeb Party (Phalangist); conservative Christian militia founded by Pierre Gemayel; the Shiite Amal, founded by Supreme Islamic Shiite Council Iman Musa al-Sadr; the Christian O (National Liberal Party), founded by conservative Camille Chamoun; the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), founded by Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt; the Palestinian Al-Asifah (Fadayeen) led by Yasser Arafat, PLO. That said, apart from essentialist claims made by each sect’s respective ideologies, sectarianism is a historically institutionalized geopolitical phenomenon that in Lebanon’s case was first transposed into an official governing system as early as 1864, by which the government’s confessional system was divided between Maronite, Druze, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Sunni, and Shi’a, in descending order of representation at that time. According to Bassel F. Salloukh et al., the sectarian system that for two centuries was enforced by the sovereign government but driven by external forces—alternately Syria, Iran, Egypt, France, USSR, UK, and US—has, to this day, denied “Lebanese of their existence as citizens with inalienable political and social rights, reducing them instead to unequal members of state-recognized sectarian communities regulated by extended patriarchal kinship groups and clientelist networks. Bassel F. Salloukh, Rabie Barakat, Jinan S. Al-Habbal, Lara W. Khattab, and Shoghig Mikaelian, The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (London: Pluto Press, 2015). 23 Sarah Rogers, “Out of History: Postwar Art in Beirut,” Art Journal 66, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 8–20. 24 See Sarah Irving, “Lebanon’s Politics of Real Estate,” The Electronic Intifada, August 31, 2009, accessed September 1, 2021, https://electronicintifada.net/content/lebanons-­ politics-real-estate/8412. Two experimental documentary films are noteworthy for confronting the utter devastation, if not complete annihilation, of communities (and the memory thereof) that attended Solidere’s reconstruction of Beirut’s central district. Ghassan Halwani’s Erased,__ Ascent of the Invisible (2018) specifically attempts to trace the 1,000 people who disappeared during the civil war and the mass graves that underlie Beirut’s city center—the former “greenline” or no man’s land between east and west Beirut and its periphery. The filmmaker acknowledges his Sisyphean endeavor with the following voice-over: The persons appearing in this film are made visible only for the duration of the screening. When the film ends, these persons will plunge back into their state of invisibility. However, this will not prevent them from existing. They linger silently somewhere beneath the bustle of daily life.

148  Juli Carson We should note that these disappeared persons are not allowed to be visible because, according to the state, their presence (even psychically) constitutes “a threat to national security.” Meanwhile, Nadim Mishlawi’s Sector Zero (2011), shot on site in the “Karatina” district, explains the twofold reason that Solidere erased the sacred ownership of land plots during Beirut’s reconstruction: (1) There were many claims to each plot, and (2) owners had fled the country to other continents during the war. Their “solution” was to compensate those owners they could find with shares in Solidere. Consequently, ownership over something material (a deed to a land plot) was transposed to ownership of something immaterial (shares in a company). Which is to say, instead of real estate, which had always been ancestral in Lebanon, one now possessed a stock “holding.” Such that Solidere’s Beirut was literally a city-as-future traded on the global stock exchange, its historical past transposed into virtual commodity fetish. 25 In actuality there are four religious/political organizations in post-war battles over land and access to housing in Beirut’s southern suburbs known as al-Dahiya, a zone that extends south from central Beirut to its airport, and east to the agricultural fields of al-Hadath and Choueifat. They are Hizb Allah (Shiite), the Future Movement (Sunni), the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP, Druze), and the Maronite Christian Church (Catholic). See Bou Akar Hiba, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). 26 Walid Sadek, The Ruin to Come: Essays on a Protracted War (Berlin: Motto Books; Taipei: Taipei Biennial, 2016), 90. 27 Sadek, 91–2. 28 Sadek, 93. 29 Sadek, 93. 30 Sadek, 94. 31 Sadek, 92–3. 32 Nicholas Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom: A complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 1987): 171–2. 33 Abraham, 289. 34 Abraham, 290. 35 Craig Larkin, Memory and Conflict in Lebanon (New York: Routledge, 2012), 10. 36 Larkin, 14. 37 Again, Lebanon is hardly unique. The US is currently undergoing such manipulation by way of an administration’s cultural erasure of its civil rights moment, and the constitutional law upon which it was legitimated, in the service of authoritarian white nationalism. 38 Jad Abi Kahlil, Soft Power: The US and the Middle East (Qatar, Al Jazeera Media Network, March 2, 2016), video, 47min, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/al-jazeeraworld/2016/3/2/soft-power-the-us-and-the-middle-east (film no longer available online). 39 Makram Rabah, A Campus at War: Student Politics at the American University of Beirut 1967–1975 (Beirut: Dar Nelson, 2009), 44. 40 Rabah, 46. 41 Rabah, 49. 42 Rabah, 96. 43 Rabah, 97–8. 4 4 Rabah, 106. 45 Akar Hiba, For the War Yet to Come. 46 Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, Working Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. xiii (London: Hogarth Press, 1958). 47 Marwa Morgan, “Film ‘74’: When Lebanon’s Past and Present Are Different Yet the Same,” Ahramonline, April 19, 2015, accessed September 1, 20221, http://english.ahram. org.eg/NewsPrint/128062.aspx. 48 Morgan, “Film ‘74.’” 49 “Between Documentary and Fiction: ‘74, the Reconstruction of a Struggle,’ by Rania and Raed Rafei,” Agenda Culture, March 20, 2013, (no author). 50 “Between Documentary and Fiction,” 2013. 51 Larkin, Memory and Conflict, 62.

11 IrDaEdNiTcIaTlY Jeffrey Strayer

Every work of art has a “particular identity” that everything else lacks. That every work of art has an identity means that it is to be understood to be a particular object or objects of some kind or kinds of object. However, it must be understood that the concept of object is employed in the widest possible sense, making anything of any kind of thing—whether an event, action, abstraction, state of affairs, concept, process, property, or something else—an object, and an artwork need not be a perceptual object, such as a painting or sculpture. It is impossible to give an example of anything that is not an object since what would be offered as an illustration would have to be at least an object of thought, thus confirming what the example was meant to contravene. Depending on their nature, objects can be somewhere or nowhere, and may be at the same or different places at the same or different times, and they can have such coherent properties as being cohesive or scattered, singular or multiple, temporal or atemporal, or recurrent or non-recurrent. Objects can be conceived or imagined in addition to being perceived, felt, recollected, or otherwise experienced. And certain objects can be conceived or imagined that do not or cannot exist. In addition to objects that are possible or actual in not violating any law of logic, certain objects are impossible, in the sense of being logically contradictory. And an interesting question for both art and philosophy is whether or not an artwork can be an impossible object and, if so, how it would be produced and understood, and what value it may have as a result of that production. This issue forms part of a more general theoretical consideration of what kinds of object, in addition to perceptual objects, might figure in the creative production of artistic possibilities of interest not yet identified, and how any such novel determination would depend on, and be related to, the thought, perception, and understanding on which all artworks depend. Certain artworks since Duchamp are radical in the sense of being identified with objects that depart in extreme ways from norms of artistic practice established prior to their appearance. Works of the kind cited below invite the question of just how far something can be pushed toward an abstraction of pure thought, immateriality, or even nothingness, and still be a work of art. For reasons stated below, answering this question must include examining the sense in which something can also be radical in the sense of being fundamental. As a result, the question of the extremes of identity in art has both an artistic and a philosophical aspect. Consideration of the fundamental aspect of radicality involves identifying the basic requirements of making and apprehending works of art; showing how certain matters in the epistemology and ontology of art are relevant to this investigation; and looking at how the notion of where a work is can include situations, events, or circumstances DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-11

150  Jeffrey Strayer that, in being determined by thoughts and actions, extend that notion beyond the customary concept of place and its relation to space. Artistic identity depends on the temporal events of thinking, perceiving, and choosing, as well as the fluid framework that underlies, and is affected by, the social construction and consumption of artworks as cultural objects. The relation of art to time and culture must then also be recognized, and the question of when a particular object is a particular artwork is not only philosophically significant but an issue that may be investigated artistically by tying the identity of a work to time, agency, and comprehension. All of these things are relevant to the deviant sense of identity in art that I call “radical,” and can be seen to underlie a particular kind of exploration of the artistic possibilities for radical artworks that, in also being radical in the fundamental sense, I call “Essentialist.”1

I  Historical generation of artworks with kinds of radical identity One can understand any artwork to be radical when it differs unexpectedly from the customary construction and understanding of artworks at the time at which the novel work appears. It is implicit in the previous sentence that conventional “artwork identity” is culturally determined and sustained until a novel effort results in a new perspective on artistic possibility. An artwork, although it may be novel in another sense, is not radical unless its offering as art requires that the concept of art be modified or extended for it to be recognized, interpreted, and valued as art. There are different kinds and degrees of radicality in art, and it is part of the creative dimension of art to attempt to determine them. Part of art history is the record of the development of such radicality in different places at different times. For instance, different ways of presenting different kinds of image, and various explorations of space in painting prior to the twentieth century, can easily be understood to have been quite radical in their time. It is in a certain sense arbitrary, then, where one might begin to consider “radical identity” in art history, since one could cite different works of different artists at different times to have been a kind of creative assault on what was artistically conventional at that time. 2 Notwithstanding these many and varied instances, a series of radical changes in the early part of the twentieth century have made certain things, including examples discussed in this chapter, possible. When Braque and Picasso introduced the artworld to papier collé and collage in 1912, they initiated an investigation of the relation of mind, art, and reality that spawned Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, led to such works of minimalism as Dan Flavin’s fluorescent sculptures, and inspired works of conceptual, performance, earth, and installation art that replaced the discrete stable object of traditional painting and sculpture with ideas, constructions, and actions that often existed independently of established places of exhibition. Relations of mind, art, and reality that have been explored artistically since papier collé and collage are complex, challenging, and multifarious. However, for the central notion with which this volume is concerned—that is, the question of where art is located, or where it can be understood to exist, subsist, or otherwise reside—perhaps the most important consequence of papier collé and collage is the insight that once reality comes into art on the wall, art can come off the wall and enter other parts of reality, or even irreality. The remaining paragraphs of this section briefly examine some of the kinds of work that are part of the progression of radical artistic identity. In the most general

IrDa E d NiTc IaT lY  151 sense, the works cited involve and explore, in ways suited to their particular identity, the use and dialectical relation of subjects and objects. More particularly, such works can use, and reflect the use of, such things as perception and conception; stability and change; actions and events; presence and absence; process and product; acts and objects of thought; manufacture and invention; use and reuse; language, information, and sense data; sense, paradox, and nonsense; intellect and emotion; privacy and publicity; origination and derivation; single and multiple objects; time and space; institution and object; and an extended perceptual, conceptual, active, and temporal aesthetic that recognizes the relevance of the things cited to supplement (in various ways) a view of valuing art that is traditionally linked to more common and stable objects. The things listed are relevant to critical and creative consideration of the location of art and show that that issue is not a simple and isolated matter.3 To produce his Step Piece in 1971 Vito Acconci stepped up on, and down from, a stool in his apartment “at the rate of 30 steps per minute” for a period determined by the artist in advance of initiating the actions of which the work would come to consist. He performed the stepping action each morning and continued in each session, at the rate stated, for as long as he was able to “perform it without stopping.”4 Because it consists of a number of actions that follow from a concept, one might think that the point of Step Piece is to function as performative recognition of the fact that every artwork depends on an act or acts of thought, and on somatic actions of the sort required to result in what the work is intended to be. One might also link this work, as the product of a sequence of movements designed to result in a work of art, to works of abstract expressionism by earlier artists, such as Jackson Pollock, that were called “action paintings” by Harold Rosenberg, and that were thought by Allan Kaprow to have been forerunners of Happenings and performance art.5 However, whereas Pollock’s activity was designed to result in a visible aesthetic object, Acconci’s activity, in not being linked to the realization of something that would outlast the series of actions that produced it, seemed to have no artistic point, and little or no aesthetic merit. There was nothing to see, nothing to contemplate, and nothing to judge, at least not according to conventional conceptions associated with seeing, contemplating, and judging received works of art. Whereas Pollock used his mind and body to produce a constructed visual whole that was the aesthetic result of a sequence of coordinated actions, Acconci’s movements—­ although also coordinated—were not meant to do anything but conform to the program of physical exertion that would seem, from a traditional perspective, to result in nothing beyond the factual occurrence of a number of repetitive exertions. What they culminated in was the artwork Step Piece, now past, that Acconci recorded in writing and partially documented in black and white photographs. It is only because these records and photographs were made available to the artworld—not as themselves being or supplanting the work that they document, but as traces of a work that no longer exists—that it is possible to think about and evaluate an artwork that cannot be seen but only understood. Christine Kozlov’s Information, No Theory (1969) used a tape recorder to record detectable sounds in the space in which it was exhibited.6 The recorder included a loop tape, so that a completed cycle of recording was followed by a new cycle that recorded new sounds over the sequence of sounds captured on the cycle before it. New information replaced old information according to the working of a tape recorder that was set up to realize a design articulated in language by Kozlov. Information, No

152  Jeffrey Strayer Theory represents a contrast and a contest between the cycle of obliteration by preservation of related sets of historical data and the unchanging abstract rule according to which the ephemeral information is to be recorded and then erased. Kozlov’s earlier 271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding to 271 Days of Concepts Rejected (1968) uses blank sheets of ordinary typing paper, each of which represents a day in which the artist had at least one idea for an artwork that she did not then think good enough to be realized in a form that would have fit the concept rejected. The title page of this work contains the information of the title with the artist’s name and date of the work. The empty perceptual expanse of each remaining page is not offered to vision as a discrete kind of formless visual datum. In fact, no page or part of a page can be seen as a specific, or segregated, part of the stack of paper that it helps to compose, and the individual contribution that each edge makes to the boundary of the stack is less a visual than a factual datum for awareness. Each blank page of this work is meant to function as a symbol, and so comes to resemble the language in which a rejected idea would have been framed. And each is just as anonymous as the particular discarded concept of which it is the vehicle for representation. This work then makes novel use of the blank surface, and creates a different kind of representation, both in signifying something in a novel way and in signifying an absent object that, in being mental or conceptual, is no more something that can be seen than is the concealed piece of paper by which it is represented. Something present is connected to something absent through the language of the title that makes the concept of the work comprehensible. It is significant that this work uses something present to connect to something absent, by means of a concept whose being made public depends on the use of language in the title of the work. And as use of language would have been required to make public any discarded idea represented by the material parts of this work, there is a connection through that medium of an original work to a number of formerly possible works whose counterfactual actualization forms the content of the work that uses them to be realized. The Confession is a work by Chris Burden in which the artist invited 25 people that he had met and conversed with during an exhibition of his work at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati in 1974 to a performance that would become the work of that title. The exhibition included books that documented earlier works by Burden and a videotaped interview with the artist about his work. Given their interest in, and knowledge of, his work, and the opinions that they had formed of him based on their conversations with him, Burden supposed that it was likely that they had formed an image of him as an artist and individual that was largely positive. Burden decided to make a work based on the contrast between this image and another less positive view of him that might result from information that he would provide about a troubling part of his personal life. When the invited guests arrived at the appointed time, they saw Burden on the same monitor on which the recorded interview with him had previously played, but now talking about his unhappiness, and how he had lost control of his life due to his involvement in “a love triangle.” The audience sat in silence as Burden talked, revealing “disturbing knowledge,” until he could no longer continue. With the monologue over, the performance ended, and the audience left without discussing amongst themselves what they had just listened to.7 Although this work is an interesting exploration of how artist and audience respond to publicizing private information in a place meant for a different kind of audience engagement and reaction, its principal relevance here is due more to the way in which the work extends beyond

IrDa E d NiTc IaT lY  153 the space and time of the exhibition through the minds and memories of the people that witnessed the performance. That this work was not restricted to its realization in a particular concrete form in a particular place at a particular time is part of its radical nature. Instead, it included content that was disseminated through the people who became participants in the realization and continuation of the work. Burden is now deceased, and when the last memory of this work is lost no part of the work will survive. Knowledge of it will be limited to its documentation and continuation in reports such as this. Samson is an installation first created by Burden in 1985 that consisted of a 100ton jack placed between 16-inch pieces of timber with steel ends.8 These ends were placed against walls in the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, and set up in such a way that the jack incrementally increased the pressure that it exerted on the walls through its connection to a turnstile used by visitors to the installation. Accordingly, each person who came through the turnstile slightly increased the pressure on the walls of the gallery, which meant that if enough people came into the gallery the jack could in theory cause the building to collapse.9 In using a jack, Samson employs a perceptible object with strong visual and sculptural qualities to realize a state of affairs that includes the institutional setting in which the perceptible object itself is exhibited as a key constituent element. For this state of affairs to be understood to be a work of art, the perceptible object—the jack—which is itself a member of the state of affairs, must be located either in or in relation to the museum or institutional space of which—through its relation to beings of the sort on which the institution depends—it threatens to be the destruction. The effect of a person’s entering the museum through the turnstile not only becomes part of the state of affairs at the time at which the event occurs, it represents a dimension of the work that cannot be perceived but can only be understood. The importance, value, and particular identity of Samson as a work of art depends on understanding the relation of object, event, and institution, since it is in virtue of that understanding that Samson can be seen to be a work of art that relies on a cultural framework that it is set up in theory to destroy. Although all of the perceptible aspects of the state of affairs set up in the museum are very visual, and in that sense fit well with the history of sculpture, the understanding of how these things are designed to work in relation to their place of exhibition makes that understanding as important or more important than any aspect of the work that is visible. If understandings can be understood to have locations, they must be where the brains on which understandings depend are located, and so Burden multiplies and mobilizes the spaces relevant to the work to include all of the changing places in which understandings of the identity of the work exist. Dennis Oppenheim did a series of works over a period of about two years, beginning in 1968, that he called Transplants. A few of these were created by taking the dimensions of the floor plan of a gallery space, such as gallery number three in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and marking, with an implement such as a shovel, an area in the ground of another location—such as an empty lot or field—that represented the size and shape of the gallery meant in this schematic way to be reproduced and relocated. The residue of the performance of this action—the depicted space—was then photographed to document the action and its effect, and the photograph became part of a montage that included a map of where the outline of the gallery was made. In the case of the Stedelijk gallery transplant, this was at a site of bare winter ground in Jersey City, New Jersey. In addition to the colored map that had been stamped by

154  Jeffrey Strayer the artist to mark the location where the outline of the gallery space was realized, the montage included a scaled black and white floor plan of the Stedelijk Museum with the gallery outlined in red that was outlined in full size in land in the United States. It also contained the following text: “GALLERY TRANSPLANT. 1969. Floor specifications Gallery #3, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, transplanted to Jersey City, New Jersey. Surface: Snow, dirt, gravel. Duration: 4 weeks.” This language also functions as the title of the work, the montage of which is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.10 Each Gallery Transplant work from Oppenheim’s Transplant series employed, as a starting point, the size and shape of a room of an institution of the kind on which the recognition and preservation of important works of art depend. The realization of the size and shape of that room in the bare earth of a different location was not motivated by the desire to make a realistic picture of something, to create significant pictorial form, or to make an artifact that represented the externalization of the artist’s emotions. Instead, the intention was to use diverse things in diverse locations to produce a work in which art, nature, and concept are related through association with a cultural structure on which the work itself relies to be a work of art, at least one that is important enough to contribute to the history of art that museums are dedicated to preserving. This multi-dimensional work, which must be understood to include concept and action in addition to the other things cited, can be understood to make us reflect on the relation of human beings and culture to nature given the nature and culture of human beings. In 1969 Robert Barry produced Inert Gas, Helium by releasing helium from a standard container of balloon gas into the atmosphere in the Mojave Desert.11 This work consists of the artist’s past action of discharging the gas into the atmosphere, and of the history of its expansion and distribution in the atmosphere according to the physical conditions to which it was then, and continues to be, subjected. As the gas was and is invisible, the only evidence that the artworld has of the work is a photograph of the container of the gas in the location in which it was released, with Barry’s written testimony to the action of its release. Works such as this linked the material of the work to time in addition to space allowing the temporal dimension of the work to extend beyond the time of the action on which it depended. Seeming to take invisibility to the extreme, it made the location of the artwork and its borders, such as they were then and are now, something that one can only imagine and cannot precisely identify. Inert Gas, Helium did not, however, take dematerialization to the extreme to which it was taken in Barry’s All the Things I Know but of Which I Am Not at the Moment Thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969 (1969). This work is determined by using language to specify or single something out that it is to be understood to be. The work is not the language written on a wall or typed on a piece of paper. It is what is specified by the language. And this is something that is invisible and unknowable in all of its particular content, both by us and by the artist who is responsible for the work. Exactly what is specified by the language though has its difficulties. One would assume that it is a class consisting of a very large number of things known by Barry of which he was not conscious at the time appended to the specification. This could seem then to have a straightforward relation to Barry and to the language that he used to single out that class of objects of knowledge. Where is that class though? To the extent to which the language concerns things that Barry could have called to mind, it would be reasonable to suppose that they were states of knowledge located

IrDa E d NiTc IaT lY  155 in his brain. However, what is meant by “things” in the language the things I know is ambiguous concerning the concept of things known, since things known could be thought to concern, not just states in an epistemological being, but the things themselves to which the states pertain. In addition, things known would include knowledge of particular and general impersonal facts as well as biographical knowledge in the form of personal memories. The relation of the latter kind of knowledge to Barry’s brain might seem relatively clear, given the dependence of memories on brains. And although retention of, and access to, knowledge about impersonal facts can be understood to have the same kind of dependence on brains, the location of such facts, including facts as known, is not clear. Where is the fact that 1 + 1 = 2? If this is better expressed as a relation between the concepts of unit number, addition, and equality, where is that relation and where are those concepts? If the right answer is that concepts and relations are abstract objects—so that concepts inhabit a spaceless and timeless region in which relations obtain, if that qualifies as, a location—then part of the class singled out by All the Things I Know… would consist of things that, although targeted by knowledge, are not themselves located in the brain. Then things known by Barry would have been different in nature with diverse locations fitting their heterogeneity as different kinds of epistemological object. This diversity of location could be thought to be part of the artwork’s radical identity in addition to that associated with the opaque or anonymous nature of what is singled out by the specification, given its relation to thinking as a conscious event. This relation of thought to Barry’s All the Things I Know… specification has also been thought, by Margaret Boden, to be paradoxical, and, by Diarmuid Costello, to generate an infinite regress.12 The paradox concerns the language of which I am not at the moment thinking since to have the notion of things not then being thought of, one has to have the thought of the things of which one is not then thinking. But then one is thinking of those things as not being thought, even if only descriptively as a group, and not individually as particular items of knowledge. The infinite regress results from forming the thought stated in the language All the Things I Know but of Which I Am Not at the Moment Thinking since, as seen, in thinking about not thinking about such things, one knows that one is thinking of them. But if the intention is, as seems clear, to single out things known that are not then being thought of, then a new thought would have to be formed to fit the terms of the specification that would exclude the previous problematic thought. And the specification, or equivalent ways of wording it, seems to be the only way to single out what is intended to be conceptually discriminated. However, the same problem that arose in relation to the first thought violating the terms of the specification would arise here, and this problematic relation between thought and specification would simply continue without end. It is intriguing to consider whether the paradox and the infinite regress can themselves be understood to be singled out, as objects of thought, by the language that results in them, or whether they are simply byproducts of the attempt to single something out that is problematic in the ways indicated. Where might either be located? The question of the location of a paradox or an infinite regress, whether singled out or educed in thought, may not be one that can be properly raised, given the kind of thing that each is. Or it might be said that each is located in the understood product that results from the use of the conceptual or abstract relations of the concepts involved in the determination of each problem.

156  Jeffrey Strayer However all of these things may be, the following assertions seem defensible: 1 Barry used the language All the Things I Know… to delineate something for thought that used the thought expressed by the language to effect the delineation 2 The use of this specification produces a contest between what clearly seems possible and comprehensible for Barry’s language to single out and the problems with thought and language noted above 3 This opposition—between the conceptual clarity and friction noted—is part of the character of the radical identity of this work The works of art cited, and perhaps Barry’s All the Things I Know… in particular, invite the question of just how radical artistic identity can be. The answer to this query depends on understanding what is essential both to producing and to understanding any work of art, no matter how radical or reductive, as indicated in what follows.

II Making and apprehending works of art: Essentialism and the basics13 a

The fundamental artistic action presupposed by any work of art is singling something out. Artworks can be singled out in creation, as in a painting by Fra Angelico; in selection, as in a readymade by Marcel Duchamp; or in specification, as in Robert Barry’s All the Things I Know…. A complex artwork can also be singled out by using a combination of any two or all three of these things. b What is singled out is an object, in the widest sense of the concept of object, as previously indicated. Objects can be divided generally into those that are existential and non-existential, and particularly into those that are phenomenal and noumenal relative to a particular individual at a particular time. An object exists if it is a temporal or spatio-temporal object now, in a framework in which the present can be marked off from the past and future. For art and culture this demarcation is effected in relation to consciousness since the present is the time of consciousness—or all consciousness occurs when it occurs in the present—all of art and culture depends on consciousness to exist, and things that exist are located in the present. An object that exists is a present “existential” object, one that existed in a past present is a past existential object, and one that will exist in a future present is a future existential object. Past and future existential objects, for the purpose of art and culture, are determined in relation to memory and expectation. Thinking is an existential event or process, and a rock is an existential object that can be perceived in an existential event of perception. Any object that is not an existential object is a “non-existential” object. Abstract objects, such as numbers, and impossible objects, such as a forest without trees, are non-existential objects. Non-existential objects are conceived, thought about, imagined, or understood, but are not in any case located in time or space and time, although any kind of conscious event directed at or pertaining to them is. The existential-non-existential bifurcation is produced in relation to relevant kinds of conscious event since art and culture depend on consciousness, and the understanding of the division depends on relevant kinds of conscious event. An object is “phenomenal” when it is either a conscious event, such as experiencing pain, or the object of a directed conscious event, such as thought or

IrDa E d NiTc IaT lY  157 perception, relative to a particular conscious subject when she is conscious. A tree when seen is phenomenal relative to a person then seeing the tree. The concept of a tree is phenomenal relative to someone thinking about that concept. Any object that is not phenomenal relative to a particular subject in the present is then “noumenal” relative to that conscious subject. The same object can be phenomenal relative to one subject at the same time that it is noumenal relative to a different subject at that time, and the same object may be phenomenal relative to the same subject at one time that is noumenal relative to that subject at another. The categorical distinctions between existential and non-existential, and phenomenal and noumenal objects, are made in relation to current consciousness since that is a necessary condition of both the continuation and advancement of art and culture. They are recognized here because of their relevance to the topic of this chapter. In particular, how noumenal in addition to phenomenal and non-existential in addition to existential objects can profitably figure in the artistic investigations of “Abstraction” and radical identity are things to be determined a posteriori in particular artistic investigations. Thus no a priori statement can be made about the superiority or importance of one kind of object or another to artistic inquiry once it is realized that the identity of any artwork of any kind depends on a present existential object that is then phenomenal relative to at least one observer. c Every object, including each work of art, has the particular property of being the particular object that it is, which is the object’s haecceity, and pertains to its thisness, or its being this thing that it is, that is nothing else, and that nothing else is. The haecceity of any artwork is the property that it has of being that particular work, which everything else, including every other artwork, necessarily lacks. Each object, including each artwork, is different from each object to which it is not logically identical, and as it is only logically identical to itself, it is logically distinct from every object that lacks its particular identity. These things apply to any object, no matter its nature, complexity, location(s) in space or time, or its independence of space and time. However, the points made pertain to the bare logical form of the concept of haecceity and the more interesting metaphysical question concerns the properties on which an object depends to be the particular object that it is. The particular identity of a particular work of art is determined by what it is that makes the work that particular work, or on the properties on which it depends to have its particular haecceity, and so requires examination beyond the simple statement of haecceity guaranteed by logic. How particular artwork identity can be constructed or determined within a fundamental framework that reflects, as it utilizes, essential conditions of making and apprehending works of art is the inquiry motivated both by the reductive interests of Essentialism and by its concern to identify kinds of radical identity that can emerge from such an investigation. d Any artwork presupposes the consciousness and agency of the artist whose work it is. Consciousness is heterogeneous and includes thought, reflection, memory, and understanding in addition to the perception on which any artwork relies. No being, while unconscious, can produce a work of art, and any artist must have at least one thought, and make a least one choice, in bringing about a particular

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e

f

work of art. Thus, an artist must intend to create or otherwise produce a work of art, and that informed intention must be followed by at least one action that follows from that decision. This requirement of intentional action holds even if determinism is true, since the kind of determined action that appears to be a free choice must occur for an artwork to be possible. It must be possible in theory for conscious subjects in addition to the artist to be aware of the intended identity of a particular work of art. In particular, it must be possible for the artworld to be aware of the identity of any artwork that would enter art history. Any artwork depends on a perceptual object for the identity of that work to be understood.14 However, it is not the case that an artwork must be a perceptual object itself, and so need not be identified with, as opposed to depending on, any perceptual object that is a condition of its identity. This is not the case, for instance, with Barry’s All the Things I Know…. The point about publicity is that any perceptual object on which any artwork depends must be directed to communal understanding. This is as true of radical as it is of traditional works of art. The works of art identified in the first section could only be cited and discussed because of the public nature of the perceptual object or objects on which knowledge of the intended identity of the work depends. To understand what a particular artwork is to be understood to be, one has to attend to a perceptual object or objects that the work is meant to be, or through which the identity of the work is made comprehensible. This involves consciousness and agency since one has to be conscious of that object and one must choose to attend to it. Each is required for appreciation, interpretation, and judgment, in addition to comprehension.

A concern of Essentialism is to use the consciousness and agency of someone attending to a perceptual object, on which the identity of an Essentialist artwork relies, and to construct the perceptual object in a way that uses the consciousness and agency that inform that attention as means to produce the Essentialist identity intended.

III  Essentialism and the concept of an artistic complex When a subject chooses to attend to a perceptual object that an artwork is meant to be, or on which its particular identity depends, an “artistic complex” results of which the subject and perceptual object are necessary constituents. These two things are united through the consciousness and agency that are also ineliminable elements of the complex. Conceptual consciousness is an active constituent of the complex, with sensation, since one must understand that the object being attended to is either a work of art or an object on which the identity of a work of art depends. Any artistic complex is essentially characterized by a number of things in addition to those just stated that can be understood to be elements of the complex, and that can be used in certain ways to investigate the most extreme ends of reductive art and certain possibilities of radical identity. For instance, they include epistemological relations of the subject to the perceptual object, her indexical relation to that object, her history of awareness and agency, and causal relations that hold between subject and object.15 A question for Essentialism is whether or not the ingredients of an artistic complex, as elements essential to the comprehension of artistic identity, can somehow be used to produce, and to be reflected in, the very identity to be comprehended.

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IV  The time and place of conventional and radical works of art In depending on perceptual objects and conscious subjects, the issue of identity in art must also consider the relation of art to space and time. The perceptual objects of conventional artworks, such as paintings, are commonly thought to be physical. However, physics assures us that paintings, qua physical, are nothing like what they appear to be. For art then, one must make a distinction between physical and perceptual space. Perceptual objects can be understood to depend on physical objects, but perceptual objects, as works of art, in having properties such as color that physical objects do not, cannot be thought of as being physical objects. Perceptual artworks are located in places in space determined in relation to other perceptual objects in a network of perceptual objects of which they form part. Perceptual objects in perceptual space are key for understanding art. A radical artwork will be wherever what it is meant to be is located, if it has a location. Any perceptual object on which a radical artwork depends will be in perceptual space, but a radical artwork might be located in the understanding of someone attending to it, it could be spaceless, or it could be a combination of things thought to occupy different places that, even if they cannot be given a location in relation to conventional notions of space or place, can be marked off logically in relation to things that we can understand. A conventional perceptual artwork depends on a particular material organization to be that perceptual object, but no perceptual artwork exists, as art, when not being perceived. Even if objects retained the properties they have in perception apart from perception, a perceptual artwork would still have to be perceived to be perceived as art. That having been said, one can recognize a distinction between public and private time. Private time is the time of individual consciousness and action. Any perception, thought, or act has a particular position in the history of awareness of the being whose perception, thought, or act it is. Accordingly, each occurs at a time, or for a time, that delineates, as it composes, part of the private time of the biography of a particular individual. At the same time everyone lives in a common public time determined by clocks and calendars, and a more traditional artwork can be thought to have an ostensibly continuous biography suited to that public time, from its coming to its ceasing to be, as long as it is understood to be a factually discontinuous entity during that time. Art history pertains to public time. The subjunctive discontinuous status of artworks is linked to private times that occur within public time. The question of when a work of radical art is depends on the kind(s) of object(s) that it is to be understood to be, and so whether any such an object is itself temporal or atemporal. In any case though, because of the dependence of art on perception and understanding, and because of the temporality of consciousness and comprehension, any artwork of any kind has at least an indirect relation to time, including one of radical identity.

V Language, surface, ideational objects, and the configuration space of Essentialism The aim of Essentialism is to determine artwork identity in relation to use of essential elements of artistic complexes as the means of identifying ultimate kinds of radical identity and the limits of Abstraction in art. This requires using language in relation

160  Jeffrey Strayer to consciousness, agency, and understanding to single out objects that all or part of an artwork is to be understood to be. A piece of language used to single out such an object is a “specification.” The language of specification must be publicized as a permanent possibility of comprehension. As such, it must be so written and exhibited to make it theoretically available to any number of different subjects at the same or different times. Thus, the language, and the space of which it forms part, must be apprehensible and reapprehensible by the same and different subjects. The phenomenal nature and location of this language will involve considerations of space and time. An object is “ideational” when whether it is all or part of a work of art depends on understanding language that singles out the object in relation to that understanding. Essentialist specifications single out ideational objects. The relation of an ideational object to understanding may be implicit or explicit, depending on the wording of the language, but it is Essentialist in either case in being indexed to the understanding on which it depends to be ideational. Because of my interest in thisness and particular identity, I call an Essentialist specification a “Haecceity,” and give it a number that locates it in the Haecceities series (2002–), of which it is a member. An ideational object either closes the separation of subject and object or links them by design in understanding. Eliminating that distance is not part of most traditional artwork identity since, although dependent on consciousness, the relation of the object to the subject is not typically directly addressed by the character of the object.16 For instance, no non-Essentialist artwork of which I am aware explicitly makes the act or state of understanding what the work is to be understood to be itself the work to be understood. This is the case though with Haecceity 9.241.1, which reads: understanding that understanding what is understood is to be understood in understanding this is what is to be understood in the understanding of this in any understanding (2021). Here the specification singles out the understanding of the specification as what is to be produced and identified by that constructive comprehension. Any understanding of what is singled out singles itself out as what is meant to be understood, and so determines in a reflexive act of understanding what is designed to be determined by that understanding. As nothing can be understood to be the work except understanding the intended identity of the work, it represents one limit of Abstraction. And it is radical in placing the work in the invisible and terminal act or state of understanding what the work is to be understood to be.17 I call the constructed space of the Essentialist perceptual object a “space of apprehension” to underline its relation to the cognitive processes of reading, reflecting, and understanding in addition to perception. And these and other things, such as memory, that are explicitly or implicitly used in the construction or determination of Essentialist identity are part of the “field of understanding” that every subject attending to an Essentialist perceptual object brings to that encounter. Both of these things are aspects of an Essentialist artistic complex, and each is used in the investigation of Abstraction and the exploration of identity.18 The particular way in which an Essentialist artwork uses the space of apprehension in interactive relation to the field of understanding creates an Essentialist “configuration space,” the being and character of which depend on the nature of the work’s specification, its relation to the space of apprehension in which it appears, and of which it forms part, and its relation to the field of understanding on which it depends, and to which it is directed.19 How to use and delineate this configuration space, and so how to construct the space of apprehension to engage the field of understanding in the construction or determination of ideational objects is, with language, the primary target of creative explorations in Essentialism.

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VI  Essentialism and radical identity As every artwork must have a particular identity that everything else lacks—being this thing that nothing else is—the fundamental investigation of the possibilities of identity must focus on the creative production of identity itself as actualized in various ways, in diverse kinds of object, that reflect the essential elements of artistic complexes and the necessary conditions of making and apprehending works of art. This includes not only identifying ways and results of producing the various identities that can be produced as a consequence of that interest, but it includes exploring how the relation of identity to the consciousness and conditions on which it depends to be brought about and recognized can be reflected in the identity determined and understood, and includes investigating the relation of an identity to the difference established in relation to it. As concentration on the essential elements of an artistic complex constitutes the most effective and reductive means of exploring thisness and the identity-difference relation, a creative inquiry of this nature must concentrate on delineating the fundamental identity-difference relation in relation to particular uses of essential elements of artistic complexes to produce a work that is a particular this. This requires using language to engage certain elements of a complex explicitly, as others figure implicitly, in the construction or determination of artwork identity. In particular, consciousness and agency can function as media when engaged in particular ways by language to figure in the determination of something that an artwork is to be understood to be. 20 Artworks will be more reductive and Essentialist to the extent to which they reflect the conditions on which they depend to be the works that they are. I suggest then that Essentialism is an inquiry that can use language and the essential elements of an artistic complex to explore certain artistic possibilities that cannot arise from a different artistic approach or conceptual perspective. The Essentialist inquiry includes identifying the reductive limits of art in works in which kinds of radical identity, such as the following, are exhibited: 1 Two different artworks can be identified with the same object 2 Two different objects, of the same or different kinds, can be the same work of art 3 The same work of art can be understood to be identified with nothing, something, and everything, at the same or different times. This is the case with Haecceity 1.0.0 seen in Figure 11.1, given the ways in which different lengths of the language can be read and understood.21 The circular language of illustration 1 appears beneath the loupes in the work so that they read symmetrically from each of the longer sides. 4 The identity of an artwork can be “determined in relation to understanding the conditions themselves that provide for the possibility of that determination” as the determined identity reflects the conditions on which that determination is understood to depend 22 5 The identity of an artwork can result from understanding that the identity to be understood is actualized in understanding the relation of the identity intended to that understanding, as seen in Haecceity 9.30.1 (2021) 6 An artwork can be understood to be a nullified possibility that results from its relation to the actual occurrence of an event of understanding language that singles out the cancelled possibility in relation to that understanding 23

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Figure 11.1  Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 1.0.0  (detail), 2009, language © Jeffrey Strayer.

Figure 11.2  Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 1.0.0, 2009, mixed media, 9½ × 121∕8 × 4″ © Jeffrey Strayer.

7 The language that specifies a work of art can be written to function in relation to its apprehension so that “nothing understood to be specified by it can be understood to be specified by it given that apprehension”24 8 The identity of an artwork can be determined in relation to an act of conceiving of something of which it is not possible to conceive in attempting to form that impossible conception. Haecceity 12.0.0 (2002) is such a work. 25 The language of this work appears in a detail of the perceptual object of the work in Figure 11.2. 26 All of the works and possibilities cited are relevant to the matter of the being, identity, and location of radical kinds of art, considered both artistically and philosophically. Other examples of radical identity are identified in works of what I call the

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Figure 11.3  Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 12.0.0  (detail), 2002, mixed media, 20¼″ × 22½″ © Jeffrey Strayer.

Haecceities series that are works of Essentialism.27 Whether or not there are other kinds of radical identity that are of aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical interest is what ongoing Essentialist investigations are meant to determine.

Notes 1 I use the terms Essentialist and Essentialism solely in relation to the project of determining limits of “Abstraction” and identifying possibilities of radical identity in art. Each of these interrelated projects depends on using the necessary, or essential, conditions of making and apprehending works of art to produce works of art in which such limits and possibilities can be recognized. Any other meaning, use, or understanding of the term, inside or outside of either philosophy or art, is irrelevant to, and has no association with, the particular concerns of this investigation. The capitalization of each term is meant, in part, to reinforce the meaning that they have only in relation to the matters to which they are meant to apply. In addition to material on Essentialism and Abstraction seen in Sections II–V of this chapter, see Jeffrey Strayer, Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceities: Essentialism, Identity, and Abstraction (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 2 See, for instance, Strayer, Subjects and Objects, 15–25. 3 The use of such things is also of interest to the multiple interests of Essentialism, including raising questions about where works of art can reside. And as they may be pertinent to other concerns, I do not mean to suggest that they can only be used artistically with the goal of investigating possible locations of art and possibilities of radical identity. Finally, the importance of each work considered should not be thought to be limited to the things that I have to say about them. 4 See Frazer Ward, Mark C. Taylor, and Jennifer Bloomer, Vito Acconci (London: Phaidon, 2002), 37.

164  Jeffrey Strayer 5 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New (New York: Grove Press 1961), 23–39; Harold Rosenberg, “The Concept of Action in Painting,” in Artworks and Packages (New York: Delta Books, 1969), 213–28; and Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” in Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life: Allan Kaprow, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993), 1–9. 6 See Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1997), 80; and Paul Wood, Conceptual Art (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002), 35–7. 7 Chris Burden, Chris Burden 74–77 (Los Angeles, CA: self-published, 1978), unpaginated. 8 Samson is now in the collection of the Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Mineas Gerais, Brazil. 9 Guy Nordenson, “An Engineer’s View,” in Chris Burden: Extreme Measures, ed. Lisa Phillips (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2013), 75–80. 10 See “Gallery Transplant, Floor Specifications Gallery #3, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Transplanted to Jersey City, New Jersey. Surface: Snow, Dirt, Gravel. Duration: 4 Weeks,” Art Institute Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/211878/gallery-transplant-floorspecifications-gallery-3-stedelijk-museum-amsterdam-transplanted-to-jersey-city-newjersey-­surface-snow-dirt-gravel-duration-4-weeks. 11 Wood, Conceptual Art, 35–7. 12 Margaret A. Boden, “Creativity and Conceptual Art,” in Philosophy & Conceptual Art, ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 230; Diarmuid Costello, “Kant After LeWitt: Towards an Aesthetics of Conceptual Art,” in Philosophy & Conceptual Art, ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 112. The formulation of how the paradox and infinite regress both occur is mine. The fact of paradox and infinite regress are cited by their respective authors but are not elaborated upon. 13 Although the matters written about in the remainder of this chapter are considered more thoroughly in the books Strayer, Subjects and Objects; and Strayer, Haecceities, the passages as written are sufficiently detailed to fit the purposes for which they appear. 14 When not otherwise emphasized, it should be understood that perception includes intellectual awareness or comprehension in addition to sensation. 15 This list is not exhaustive. The complete list, as well as how they can figure in determining the limits of Abstraction in art and possibilities of radical identity, can be found in Strayer, Subjects and Objects; and Strayer, Haecceities. 16 Works that explore the relation of the viewer to the artwork include Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez, 1656, oil on canvas, 10′ 5″ × 9′ 1″, Museo del Prado, Madrid; Mirrored Cubes by Robert Morris, 1965/1971, mirror glass and wood, each cube: 914 × 914 × 914 mm, overall display dimensions are variable, Tate Modern, London; and Any Five Foot Sheet of Glass to Lean Against Any Wall by Joseph Kosuth, 1965, transparent glass, 5′ × 5′. 17 The word or here is inclusive since Haecceity 9.30.1 can be understood to specify an act or state of understanding or both. And the word terminal pertains both to understanding as the end of a process of reading and to understanding in its finite and conclusive nature. 18 See Strayer, Haecceities, 255–329. 19 See Jeffrey Strayer, Essentialism and Its Objects: Identity and Abstraction in Language, Thought, and Action (unpublished manuscript, 2021–), Microsoft Word file. 20 See Strayer, Subjects and Objects, 234–62. 21 For how this is possible see Strayer, Haecceities, 340–64. As noted in the text, Essentialist artworks are called Haecceities for their relation to thisness and particular identity, and individual contribution to the Haecceities series. 22 Strayer, Haecceities, 394–5, for commentary on Haecceity 2.10.1 see 393–7. 23 See Strayer, 398–407. 24 Strayer, 410, for commentary on Haecceity 4.7.0 see 408–15. 25 See Strayer, 433–7. 26 The media of principal importance that are mixed in the Haecceities series are language, consciousness, and agency, and it is in virtue of the latter two working in concert with the words of a specification that the identity of the ideational object is produced or otherwise determined. Sometimes these things are used with, and in relation to, other objects that

IrDa E d NiTc IaT lY  165 form part of the perceptual portion of the work, as in Haecceity 1.0.0 of Figure 11.1. This is done when objects can be used to affect the relation of language to understanding, or to effect a relation of interest of understanding to language that would not hold apart from that use. Perhaps it is worth noting too that the perceptual object of a Haecceity artwork is part of the work, and the ideational object is the other part. And, depending on the nature of the ideational object, that part of the work may be in the head, in time but not in space, or nowhere and nowhen in being abstract and so non-existential. For additional thoughts on the notion of a medium see Strayer, Subjects and Objects 234–53. 27 See Jeffrey Strayer, Art and Philosophy, https://www.jeffreystrayer.com/.

12 Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up? Rosanna Raymond

Seʻi muamua se faʻasao a manu vao1

I cry the ocean I bleed the earth I sleep with mountains I greet you with my dead May my waters greet your waters May my mountains greet your mountains May my house greet your house Here I acknowledge Ngāti Whātua who keep the fires warm, tendering the mana of this whenua, where I take shelter in Tāmaki Makaurau, Te Ika a Maui, Aotearoa. Let us take this time to acknowledge those who have passed, for we are the past, we are the present, we are the future. In.VĀ.TĀ.tion 2 I am the ancestor I am the house of the ancestor I am tino o faiā Inside me … eons of past lives, layers of genealogical matter Sharing time and space as they live through me … and I live through them Manavā loloto … we are the whāNOW I am the ancestor … the ancestor is me … I am a body becoming I am not male nor female, nor am I either or I am the aitu once nurtured in the womb Born to the lower heavens, a divine sequence handed down from the beginning of time forging the vā tapuia, connecting me to the creator and all that is created. DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-12

Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up?  167

Figure 12.1  Pacific Sisters, Kaitiaki with a K, 2018, FAB.rication, installation view, Te Papa Tongawera. Photo by Kerry Brown.

168  Rosanna Raymond I am the vā … the vā is me … I am more than the vā I am the connective tissue a resting place for the atua I am the va’a, a slippery boundary between heaven on earth Manifested in blood, bone, heart, and soul … decorated, sustained, and maintained Sau o le ola … sogi mai, when my breath takes leave, the aitu and the mauli remain … a perpetual gift from the depths of the past Repeat after me … I am the ancestor, I am the aitu, I am the vāNOW

Ka haere tātou3 Ka haere tātou whakamua tihewa mauri ora tuia te muka tangata i takea mai Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pamamao kukume nga herenga, whakauru nga taura kukume nga herenga, whakauru nga taura kotahi te wairua e haumi e, hui e, taiki e (Let us progress forward Let there be life Bind the fibers of man and women together These originate from Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pamamao Pull the ropes, join them Pull the ropes, join them Bind all together, it is done) This text has been developed in relation to tacit knowledges and insights drawn from working as a practitioner in a community on the shores of Moana-nui-a-Kiwa4 in Aotearoa (New Zealand). The preceding haka, 5 which is titled Ka haere tātou, was composed by and gifted to Pacific Sisters6 in 2012 by Paitangi Ostick at my request and in honor of the inauguration of the Niu Sister: Eyekonik at the Māngere Arts Centre in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. We have used this haka since this inauguration, on this occasion to whakapai (prepare) a space to bind us together and to connect us. As we will discover in this chapter, the value of the social relations is central across Moana cultures. It is also something understood in a very different way from negotiations between individuals and the collective in Western cultures. Perhaps most importantly, conceptions of individuality are not something a person from the Moana is necessarily comfortable with. This key point of difference can sometimes present challenges when working within the languages and circuits of global contemporary art. Just as there are no walls in the fale tele (traditional houses of Samoa), there is no “I” in our language. Culturally, this distinction is a particularly important feature

Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up?  169 in the lived diasporic experiences of New Zealanders of Samoan decent. It is also for this reason that we must acknowledge the land, people, and extraordinary collective creative energies that underpin the stories and ideas that follow. Much of what others call “art” is already continuous and embedded within the lived and deeply embodied cultural practices of Moana peoples. Hence if we wish to find a “location” for art, it is imperative that we must begin with the “life/body” itself. For those experientially unacquainted with the way in which we see, feel, and communicate through our bodies, this feature might require some dispositional adjustment. Yet it is only one of many portals. This chapter will not attempt to offer a definitive account of the multiplicities at play in contemporary Moana art and cultural practices but rather a series of insights built through personal contributions, observations, and practice.7 Being a vocal and active member of a thriving artistic “urbanesian village”8 —a community that nourishes one another while forging niu ways of being9 —my insider/outsider relationship with the Moana arts and cultural movement is at once a strength and a weakness. For better or worse, however, this insider/outsider reality has shaped both my practice and my being. Central to this shared reality is the vā, which loosely translates into the space in between things that is not empty and which actively relates and gives meaning to things. This ever-present and all-encompassing unity that we call the vā is a powerful relational force that has shaped Moana identities from their island origins right through to the Pacific Islander diaspora in Aotearoa. Although it is space, it is never empty space or absent presence. Unlike space that separates, it is a richly contextual space that relates and unites all entities and things. In reflecting upon my own three-decade journey into the arts through this insider/outsider reality, I will need to reach deep into my manava (stomach). Although art came into me in a roundabout and sometimes painful way, it is now permeated through the core of my life/body. Accordingly, my body serves as the core material through which I activate the mauli (life force) of my artistic creations. As I see it, I am a “Culti.VĀ.tor,” “FAB.ricator,” and “Acti.VĀ.tor” of spaces, people, and things.10 (I will elaborate upon these three core threads in my work in the second part of this chapter.) These are all processes now wound up in an expanded choreographic practice that extends far beyond the contexts of contemporary art to guide everything from domestic routines to ritual protocols. To date, this choreographic practice has encapsulated art and activism, ritual and regalia, group enactments, and multiple manifestations. Crucially, it activates space and collapses time using the body and genealogical matter as content. My body, its own inherent language, and the language of the measina that I adorn it with have all converged to form a powerful space within which my art practice and cultural heritage come together. Moreover, it is here that the past and the present all congregate in the NOW. Consequently, my body is a site of resistance that enables me to traverse genealogical times and geographical spaces. In short, my body seeks nothing less than to collapse time and create a place to manifest the ancient and the modern self as one. The stories I seek to share all carry the fragrance of my cultural heritage.11 Considered together, they hopefully provide a glimpse into how stories, ancestral voices, intangible histories, and possible futures might be revived. Helping me along the way are the many bodies which variously and collectively comprise my creative community: Defiant bodies,12 Vā bodies,13 Entangled Objects,14 Pacific Sisters,15 SaVĀges,16 and a host of Niu Aitu.17

170  Rosanna Raymond

Kinship as art Like the transcultural arrangement of time and space, art is organized differently in different cultures. Both the general and specific tenets of the ta-va theory of reality have a bearing on art. Given its generality and formality, the ta-va theory enters into art as a discipline and a social activity.18 Traditionally, the peoples of the Moana had no word for art (in the Western sense). There was no need, for it was woven into the very fabric of society and made tangible through cultural practices and practitioners. We have multiple terms for artisans: Tufuga/tohunga (loosely translated into expert), and a deep and continuous cultural heritage spanning over 3,000 years. Unlike distinctions typically drawn between utility and aesthetics in Western cultures, the practical and the beautiful have long coexisted in Moana cultures. Seen as together and inseparable, the practical and the beautiful actively coexist throughout social activities, rituals, and celebrations. Our art/life objects, forms, and gestures are circulated through society in a constant cycle of reciprocation and are valued through the ongoing social maintenance of the relationships they helped to forge. With the arrival of Europeans, and the subsequent introduction of Western ideas and technologies into Moana cultures, significant ruptures would appear in these longstanding patterns of reciprocity in our relationships with people and things. With the advent of European collecting (appropriative) practices, a radical fragmentation and dispersal of the material expressions of our culture would lead to blunt and ignorant ossifications. Artifacts that were once part of a living ecology, and which actively facilitated relationships between Indigenous people and their divinities, would be entombed within the heterogeneous and generically foreign spaces of the museum. The ineffable effect of this social rupture and subsequent material dispersal would see artifacts once central to living circulation and exchange with ancestors cease to live and socialize in the manner for which they were produced. The social life of artifacts is a fundamental aspect of Moana culture. It is essential, just as we conserve physical objects, we must also seek to protect and conserve their vā relationships, which in this sense implicates living together with the associated cultural practices from both the past and the present. With this need for active socialization of artifacts at the front of my mind, I am committed to the role that art and performative practices might play in initiating new ways of conserving cultural belongings. This way, new and future relationships might build and grow with measina (cultural treasures). Notwithstanding the violence and ignorance of the past, it is now possible that museums might begin to play a more productive role in continuing to bring us together, to share our vā with our people and things—especially given that the traditional role of the village malae (open meeting space) and paepae (bench from which to speak) has changed in a diasporic context. Many people have no doubt at some stage inquisitively peered into a museological display cabinet and assumed that they are encountering art from the Moana. Here, floating out of context and devoid of its inextricable living social energy—and most likely, darkly lit to preserve its physical life—these artifacts are instead laden with anthropologically oriented didactic information that is largely divorced from their originary social existences. Others have probably encountered artifacts in art history books or art magazines. Here, they lay in moe mauiluli (a suspended state of animation), the ossified object is likely encountered as an expensive commodity, untainted

Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up?  171 by modernity, and ready to be bought and sold—its social history cleansed in preparation for its life on a shelf, in a box, or on a wall. But how many of these audiences have encountered contemporary Moana artistic or cultural production? Today, many Moana artists combine their cultural heritages with visual, performative, and ceremonial elements. Although engaging with a contemporary artworld still largely built in a Western image can be profoundly detrimental, there are also advantages, insofar as Moana artists have discovered and created new contexts within which to continue to actively weave new social narratives into heritage-based methods. Yet notwithstanding a growing interest in such practices, stubborn assumptions still implicitly dictate what art is, where it can be found, and what it can do. Suffice to say, they are not looking to share our vā or experience of art through the life/body. Experiences related to profound incommensurability and sometimes aggressive misunderstandings are shared by many First Nations and Indigenous cultures globally. Unsurprisingly, there is now a growing global movement, largely initiated by Indigenous curators and artists, to take back control of contexts of presentation and actively reclaim creative and cultural practices. Métis artist and scholar Julie Nagham’s recent co-edited volume (together with Carly Lane and Megan Tamati-Quennell), Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice (2020), for example, is a crucial and timely overview of emerging conversations and budding kinships across a now thriving world-wide Indigenous creative community of curators. As Nagham puts it so eloquently: We have built a kinship across oceans, forging a community with each other and waiting with bated breath to see what the future of these dialogues will hold. Many of us come with the colonial baggage of our geographic region but at the same time we carry the strength and knowledge of our families, communities, and land/ocean-based practices. Many of us also come armed with the languages and protocols of our specific nations, which allow for connections to percolate through Indigenous ontologies.19

In the hands of matriarchs If I reach back into my earliest memories to look for art, I see it in the hands of my matriarchs. These women had very busy hands. Indeed, theirs were the hands of makers. Their hands were routinely used for crocheting, knitting, sewing, and embroidering. I also remember my mother painting when I was very young. There were many books on her shelves featuring the master painters of European history. In retrospect, I can now recognize that these formative experiences represent a common internalized form of prejudice. Given that my mother would send me to very conventional art and craft sessions in the school holidays and take my brother and me to galleries and museums, I invariably grew up thinking that art was something only to be found in galleries, hung on walls, or carved in marble. Māori and Pacific art, by contrast, was something inherently primitive or tribal and only found in anthropological museological contexts. This internalized prejudice would take a long time to undo. My formative educational experiences would only compound this situation in my young mind. When I eventually chose to study art in high school, I would once again encounter the very same European masters I had seen in my mother’s books. Although

172  Rosanna Raymond

Figure 12.2  Pacific Sisters, Tohu TūPuna, 2018, Aolele opening Acti.VĀ.tion, Te Papa Tongawera. Photo by Kerry Brown © Pacific Sisters.

I have a vague memory of encountering Māori and Pacific art on an excursion, the curriculum certainly made it clear that European art forms such as easel painting, printmaking, and drawing are synonymous with art. Bereft of any encouragement or understanding of my cultural heritage and interests, any artistic ambitions I might have once had were all but squashed. So where did I find what I now understand as art? The foundation of my work as an artist today began on the streets of Tāmaki Makaurau 20 in the 1990s with the Pacific Sisters collective, described below. It was here that I learnt how to use my hands as a maker and work with a clarity of purpose with my body. From that time onward, I committed myself to fusing traditional techniques, oral histories, and genealogies from the Pacific together with contemporary materials and methods. I would also begin to create a presence in the urban landscape of Aotearoa, all the while re-rendering and privileging my Moana body.

Pacific Sisters Pacific Sisters is an artistic collective that doesn’t necessarily sit neatly in existing cultural categories. It has met mixed reactions from Moana communities and has been seen as inauthentic by others.21 Presenting work that is characteristically live and direct in nightclubs, warehouse parties, and festivals, we have decorated ourselves in leathers and feathers, shells and tusks, tapa cloth and tatau, 22 refusing many of the social expectations of our diasporic parents. Our intermedial and interdisciplinary

Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up?  173 practice utilizes moving images, performance, and fashion to juxtapose heritage techniques with contemporary materials. Ultimately, being neither traditional nor generically contemporary, we seek to decolonize our bodies by creating new mythologies to reimagine our past, present, and future. I have long found and believed that storytelling and performance are intrinsically linked. Samoan paramount leader and knowledge holder Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta‘isi, for example, uses fāgogo (stories from and of the past) to create and teach new meanings in the present.23 The fāgogo storytelling style of Samoa is essentially performative, and is likened by some observers to performance art.24 My own performance-­centered practice, both collaborative and individual, is permeated with fāgogo stories as a source of both artistic and intellectual stimulation. For Pacific Sisters (and other Moana practitioners), materials and artistic methods inherently command their own fāgogo stories, gafa (geneologies), and mana (authority, status, spiritual/supernatural power found in people, places, and things), which as we understand it, literally surges through our hands in the act of making. When we adorn our bodies with materials and fibers from our cultural heritage, we are inextricably connected to the land, sea, and sky. A range of other political, social, cultural, and material elements are also taken into consideration when designing our regalia. Consequently, the conventional idea of a costume does not convey the depth of the spiritual and physical form and function embedded in these creations. For Pacific Sisters, they are best described as kaupapa-driven frocks.25 Although our initial presence in the artworld was nanoscopic, we would in time develop artworld currency as a consequence of our relationship with members Ani O’Neill and Lisa Reihana, both of whom were gaining local and international recognition in their own right. Despite being seldom invited into official artworld spaces and events, we nevertheless continued to create our own exhibitions and happenings. Thirty years later, however, things have shifted markedly. In 2018, for example, our acceptance into mainstream Aotearoa culture was marked by our featured inclusion in the opening exhibition of the new gallery space Toi Art at Te Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New Zealand) and later in 2019 at Toi o Tāmaki (Auckland Art Gallery). Curated by Nina Tonga, who is Te Papa’s first ever Pacific Curator of Contemporary Art, Pacific Sisters: Te Toa Tāera | Fashion Activists was our first major retrospective exhibition, which featured 17 of our Niu Aitu creations alongside a comprehensive series of photographic and moving works and documents spanning nearly 30 years of collective practice and sisterhood. In many ways, it was during the opening acti.VĀ.tion of the Te Papa Tongawera Museum’s new gallery in the presence of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern that we realized just how far we had come together. It was within the Pacific Sisters collaborative space that I developed my embodied performative practice and learnt to use my body to personify atua-gods and goddesses and tipuna (ancestors from the past) to bring them into the present. It was from this starting point in my practice that I began to use my body to “talk back” to familiar tropes—such as the “dusky maiden” and “noble savage”—which have been historically projected onto bodies such as mine through a white male gaze. Given that the Moana body has lived under the fetishizing mantle of the savage since first contact, these tropes have fascinated me (and my peers) for years. Rather than simply banishing her from my visual landscape, I instead decided to diversify her. It was

174  Rosanna Raymond clear, however, that she was in dire need of a little active reimagining. So, let me introduce you to her many facets in my poem and artwork: One a Day: A 7 Maiden Rave On or The Dusky Ain’t Dead She Just Diversified [sic]26 Full Tusk Maiden ex cannibal, still got a few head-hunting tendencies, and sometimes can’t tell a predator from the prey … oh well they all taste the same. Long of the tooth but still fertile, a red clay lady, been around since the first dawn, introduced Papatūānuku and Nafanua to the Virgin Mary and they have been friends ever since, certainly makes for great ladi nights out. Once had a shark king for a husband but swapped him for a warrior god in the shape of an octopus because he gave better cunnilingus. Rave on Maiden that girl can talk, you can’t help but listen, her voice is soft and dry like a breeze playing with the autumn leaves, she’s got skin like the bark of the tree, so often hides in the forest, don’t worry if you can’t see her as she smells of a thousand gardenias. Good to have around on long black nights as she is full of myth and magic and has her own sickle moon for you to make a wish on. Loves wearing dog skin, banana flowers and no undies on formal occasions, so don’t make her sit cross legged or try to hide her in the rafters. Hand to Mouth Maiden a sweet soul ladi, with paua-shell eyes, you can see her back arching across the sky at night, it’s swathed in a cloak knitted from glitter, works so hard but always poor … keeps her slim though. Will never reveal your secrets, they are safe with her. There’s not much to eat up there, so she feasts on rainbows and the odd spaceman, when visiting her best friend, Sina, who lives on the moon, you can see them sometimes spitting out the bones. No need for a spacewaka, she can fly, but rarely comes down to visit, as earthly pleasures are not to her liking. Hand in Hand Maidens always ready for some girl on girl action, once they were stuck back to back but were torn apart when they were out playing with some thunder and lightning. Sometimes weighed down by life but loads of sex, good shoes and great friends keeps them happy enough, they ain’t going to fade to black, because they can chase the clouds away. Have been known to scare the boys so only men need apply to take a peek at their tattooed thighs and hairless vaginas and don’t forget to hang on if you go for a ride. Back Hand Maiden a ceremonial virgin, with centipede edges, never one for compliments, she’s a true savage, quick to bare her buttocks at the slightest offence, has no qualms about slapping your lips and telling you to eat shit, whilst trussing you up like pig ready for the spit … but has the most fantastic manners and a loving face with much warmth in her eyes. She had a big black eel for a lover but had him chased away,

Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up?  175

Figure 12.3  Rosanna Raymond, Backhand Maiden, 2017, Acti.VĀ.tion, American Natural History Museum © Pacific Sisters. Photo by Kerry Brown.

176  Rosanna Raymond least they were discovered, as it would be her own facial blood not that of her hymen she would be covered in. Fully Laiden Maiden got big bones and big hair, when she breathes her breasts rise and fall like the swell of the shallow sea, loves wearing mother of pearl and pounamu all at the same time, so she chimes when she walks, always busy so can seem a bit distracted, nevertheless, a no fuss, no bother, sort of a girl. Pretty in a strange sort of a way, you can’t help stare at her eyes, they are vast and can light up the night sky, you see she has no pupils, they are vessels containing old gods … just don’t trip over and fall in them … you won’t come back alive. Tu Mucho Maiden has the meanest huruhuru froufrou you ever did see, thick and dark, they look great all oiled up and sprinkled with turmeric, matches her black lips and sunshine smile, loves the feel of leather and feathers and don’t pick a fight with her as she knows what to do with a big stick. You should see her on the dance floor, she’s got butterfly thighs you’ll want to take her home and introduce her to your mother. Be aware, she needs the salt water to cleanse in, so she can’t live far from the sea and make sure she has a soft mat to recline on when indoors, she’ll treat you to a song and make you cry.

SaVĀge Kʻlub Notwithstanding my ongoing commitment to working with collectives, my experience of working alone in some contexts across the global contemporary artworld— especially during protracted periods living and working away from my Pacific Sisters in the Northern Hemisphere—has necessitated the development of individuated entities such as Sistar Sʻpacific. This work has often involved working inside museums, with the collections essentially becoming my new community. During a residency at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, for example, I founded the SaVĀge Kʻlub27—a playfully critical response to a surprisingly resilient relic of darker times: The seemingly anachronistic ongoing existence of a gentlemen’s club called the Savage Club that is still thriving in some countries today. My reaction was not simply formed in response to their repugnant incorporation of Indigenous clothing and wearable artifacts, but the equally outdated fact that, as a woman, I could not join them to work from the “inside.” So, I decided to form my own “club.”28 Through the SaVĀge Kʻlub, I have developed an artistic approach that emphasizes the challenges of both race and gender-based othering, using intersectional Indigenous methods. The deliberate wordplay in the club’s provocative title and logo performs multiple meanings, from its visual appearance, to the sound that connects it to other potential meanings.29 The capitalization of “VĀ” in the middle of the word, for example, privileges the Samoan notion of vā at the center of Moana-based creative practices and protocols. Like the Pacific Sisters, SaVĀge Kʻlub uses the body and performative methods to create temporal and spatial connections in order to retell our stories and to reclaim our bodies from the diminishing realms of anthropological classification and fetishized objectification. Performance, ritual activation, collaboration, and ceremonies

Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up?  177 are fundamental methods within both collectives. Most importantly, the layered presentation of genetic materials together with hand-crafted adornments, visual art objects, poetry, sound, ceremony, and performative methods all work together to form a vehicular constellation that is inextricably connected to the vā.

Vā Thus, we return to the centrality of the vā to both traditional Moana cultures and the speculative capacities of contemporary artistic production. As noted earlier, the vā denotes, as Albert Wendt has so eloquently put it, “the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things.”30 Importantly, this is not a fixed definition but rather part of a continuous process of becoming that remains vital to the growth and new potentials of contemporary Moana cultures, including its diasporic sisterhood. Indeed, the very notion of the vā is in flux as it spreads throughout our transnational communities.31 This new geographically expanded vā begets new narratives and experiences as it remains central to the task of creating new Moana thought and ways of being. Describing or defining the ineffable potential of the vā is not a simple task, for as I’uogafa Tuagalu puts it, “the conceptual terrain of the vā is vast.”32 Indeed, Tuagalu has identified at least 37 different variations in its articulation of the nature of spatial social relations. Rev. George Pratt, who wrote the first Samoan dictionary, found that a typical response to any request for further definitional clarity is met with the counter question: “What sort of va are you talking about?” Pratt nevertheless defines vā as a verb with two meanings: (1) To rival, and (2) To have a space in between. 33 For Wendt, it was especially pertinent to develop a cohesive theory of the vā outside the village for a cosmopolitan urban context. 34 It is for this reason that we see value in any concerted work to give the vā new life, voice, and currency in diasporic contexts.

Vā body My body is marked with the unbroken 3,000-year tradition of the Samoan malu. 35 Importantly, this tattoo is not simply ink on skin but more importantly part of a process that creates a shared space for activating and maintaining genealogies, geographies, and (her)stories. Unlike the postcolonial body that Albert Wendt tautaued, 36 mine is a vā body. In my practice and lived experience, I engage the vā in order to construct a vā body with which to challenge and negotiate space. I understand that the vā needs a body before it can disrupt and contend with the stubborn legacies of the colonial era by creating niu mythologies. As Kanaka Maoli 37 feminist scholar Stephanie Teves puts it, Indigenous agency can be effectively channeled through defiant bodies. Moreover, for Teves “performance creates knowledge through action; creating subjectivities, it is a simultaneous process of worldmaking.”38 In our case, worldmaking is simultaneously a process of restoration and defiantly making anew. The use of the body as a tool with which to recenter Indigenous ways of being and knowing is also found in the work of many other First Nation artists and thinkers. When, for example, Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes

178  Rosanna Raymond embodied understandings connected to her tribal lands in Turtle Island (the continent of North America), I recognize something that resonates strongly with my understanding of the nature of the vā body: Recognition for us is about the presence, about profound listening, and about recognising and affirming the light in each other as a mechanism for nurturing and strengthening internal relationships to our Nishnaabeg worlds. It is a core part of our political systems because they are rooted in our bodies and our bodies are not just informed by but created and maintained by relationships of deep reciprocity. Our bodies exist only in relation to Indigenous complex, non-linear constructions of time, space, and place better continually rebirthed through the practice and often coded recognition of obligations and responsibilities within a nest of diversity, freedom, consent, non-interference, and generated, proportional, emergent reciprocity.39 Clearly, despite the very different geographies and cultural understandings at play in a North American First Nations context, there are a number of relatively similar forms of embodied knowings with the capacity to resonate across global Indigenous cultures. In my experience, it is precisely because of such resonances that globally connected First Nations kinship can flourish. It is also why, when Albert Refiti describes that “the body is the exemplary agent of vā relationships,” that I can be confident that my global First Nations communities will implicitly understand something fundamental to the Moana experience.40 Refiti has also described another idea that I believe resonates strongly across global First Nations experience—the “gene-archaeological body.”41 For me, it was in 2008 as part of a small gathering in the bowels of the Royal Festival Hall in London that I felt, strikingly, my own gene-archaeological body unfolding. This experience is fundamental to socializing Moana experience across time and space. As Refiti puts it: Understanding the gene-archaeological matter is to realise that your body and being-represent a line of ancestors/land/community/family, which is part of you. Therefore, the body belongs to the ancestor. Your being there allows them (these ancient bodies) to be present there too.42 It is through this notion of the gene-archaeological body that I can imagine the body as the physical connective tissue enacting all forms of the vā, for as Refiti explains, “our body therefore is already a vā matter, the ultimate vā, a porous/holey boundary between the ancestor and the world.”43 The transhistorical and transsubjective connection that is activated through the vā body is a non-gendered space where all ancestors and genealogies are housed. We are the house of the ancestor. The non-gendered nature of this space is also expressed grammatically in the interchangeable male/ female pronouns used in most Moana language groups. It is the interpretive and generative potential of a vā body that can bring people and things into existence. In this sense, as an artist, I understand it as my primary zone of production. Today, I know that my vā is a fluid, embodied, genderless, multi-strand, urban, a transnational vessel for my ancestor that now constantly folds time and spaces across a range of artistic, institutional, civil, and scholarly contexts.

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Anchoring the aitu Historically, ritual performativity and spirituality had a place in Samoan life through a relationship with the aitu. This much-maligned ghostlike entity, like the native body itself, was targeted by the missionaries as something incongruous with imported Christian doctrine. Aitu are said to be descendants of the original atua (gods), permeating all aspects of life in lalolagi (world) from birth to death. They had their own priesthood known as taula aitu (anchors of the spirits). Although sometimes described as a tutelary deity,44 aitu are perhaps most defined as ghosts, spirits, or demons. Yet others, such as Aiono-Le Tagaloa, dispute the generality of this claim, instead describing the aitu as a ghost or spirit of a particular dead person, for “the aitu is the creative and cheeky part of the inner being of the person,”45 and like mauli, continues to exist when the ola (life) takes leave of our bodies.

Fale aitu The aitu has its own spiritual home, which we call the fale aitu, which literally means house of spirits. Although the exact origins of the fale aitu are uncertain, Victoria Kneubuhl has speculated that they were likely associated with malaga (traveling parties), and by extension, gatherings in which entire villages would come together.46 Following the formalities, pōula (night dances) were held, which were filled with song, dance, and entertainment. Unfortunately, much of the detail of what actually took place is now inaccessible due to the suppressive disapproval that missionaries felt toward their licentious nature.47 One surviving highlight was the fa‘aluma (one who humiliates), who would become possessed by the aitu using humor and satire to parody leaders and figures of authority.48 In this sense, somewhat like Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the historical role of the “carnival” in a European context,49 the fale aitu was a form of culturally sanctioned chaos within which the fa‘aluma could help alleviate the tensions of an otherwise ordered existence. Again, somewhat like Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque,” the traditional fale aitu has provided a source of inspiration widely adapted by Pasifika Theatre practitioners and comedians to become a popular source of entertainment for urban Moana communities in both theaters and on screens.50

Niu Aitu51 Today, there is a new wave of twenty-first century niu Moana creatives working to transform the aitu. In 2003, for example, celebrated fa‘afafine artist Yuki Kihara produced the photographic series Fale Aitu: The House of Spirits, in which aitu from well-known Samoan fāgogo were restaged. In 2016, the multidisciplinary arts and activist collective FAFSWAG hosted the inaugural Aitu Ball. The spirit of these nights reminds me of early Pacific Sister and SaVĀge Kʻlub events. Raw and powerful, like the fale aitu of old, these events now offer a place to playfully critique contemporary subjugations to power. The aitu are not just brought to life in performance-based celebrations. Pati Tyrell, one of the founding members of FAFSWAG and father to the House of Aitu (established in 2019 by Tyrell and Falancie Filipo), has utilized aitu to reimagine precolonial spiritual practices and reclaim ancestral, spiritual, and sexual autonomy. Significantly, practices such as these are also actively making space

180  Rosanna Raymond in the arts for queer brown bodies and sexually diverse identities. In 2018, Pacific Sisters presented three Niu Aitu to Auckland Museum titled Moruroa, Supa Suga, and TOHU TūPUNA. These three new aitu function as avatars to embody the underlying values of Pacific Sisters: Environmental protection, Indigenous body sovereignty, freedom of self-expression, and encouraging the best of humanity (or in other words, being your own superhero!).52 Clearly, aitu can manifest across multiple spaces—theatrical, political, spiritual— and in doing so make manifest an otherwise incommensurable realm between the living and the dead in the tagata-lilo (inner self). We might meet aitu in either hypernatural spaces or constructed scenarios that seek to rupture everyday routines. Aitu are for special occasions, both portentous and absurd. Creating Niu Aitu sits at the core of my practice. My vā body anchors them in the now. Moreover, I see them as fully formed and fleshed out charismas with a performative capacity to embody the mauli and the mana of the fāgogo and gafa they relay across space and time. My “whāNOW,” which is my neologistic play on whānau (meaning giving birth or creation), now consists of 21 Niu Aitu creations. Eleven of these Niu Aitu now live on as retirees in museum collections. The remaining ten still live in my studio. When a Niu Aitu goes into a museum, or finds a niu home, I feel fa‘anoanoa (sad and lonely), for they are an indelible part of me. We live through each other; we have shared history. In their memory, I remake them as avatars. To date, seven Niu Aitu53 have been reincarnated in the form of an “^V^T^” (pronounced avatar). My vā body has become a place where I can Culti.VĀ.te, FAB.ricate, and Acti.VĀ.te. It enables me to rethink the nature of performance, and by extension how, where, and with whom it might be experienced. Yet despite this liberatory capacity, Western readings of my work still take precedence over Moana indexes and articulations. Frustratingly, a profound lack of understanding and nuance continues to play out in interpretations of both my work and the work of fellow Moana artists. As artist and activist, Cat Ruka recently reminded us—upon the occasion of the abrupt resignation of acclaimed Māori curator Nigel Borell from the Auckland Art Gallery54 —the now historical words of Linda Tuhiwai Smith from 1999 still sadly resonate with us today over two decades later: It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.55 Personally, I believe that the core questions are not where Indigenous and First Nations art can be found or indeed what it is, but rather how our artists, curators, and cultural practitioners can effectively take charge of their own cultural sovereignties and narratives. It is only through the living descendants and creative practitioners of today that the mana of Moana arts and culture can be effectively recharged and experienced in new places and spaces. Each new exhibition or project can provide further opportunities for us to strengthen relationships and to keep our cultural and artistic practice acti.VĀ.ted. In building upon the relationships we form in the process of doing, we can bring past, present, and future together.

Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up?  181

Figure 12.4  Rosanna Raymond, Backhand Maiden, 2017, Acti.VĀ.tion, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Pacific Sisters. Photo by Richard Wade.

Notes 1 This Samoan proverb translates into “Before bird catching an offering should be made,” and can be used as part of any introductory ceremony in either spoken or written contexts. 2 In.VĀ.TĀ.tion was written by the author, originally rendered as a guided meditation and invitation to sit with your ancestors as part of the SaVAge SEAonce for GHost Dance 2, at the Centre for Performance, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, 2014.

182  Rosanna Raymond 3 This haka (defined in n. 5) by Paitangi Ostick (2012) seeks to bind us all together to the same time and space. It concludes with my luaga mata (the opening speech in Samoan that lays out the mat and opens a space for the prose of the world). 4 Moana-nui-a kiwa is the Māori name for the Pacific Ocean. Literally translated into the Great Ocean of Kiwa-Kiwa, it is a diefied ancestor, one of the guardians of the ocean, and a famed navigator. 5 A haka is a special posture dance collectively performed to fulfill social functions. 6 Founded in 1991, Pacific Sisters is one of the longest established Tagata Moana art collectives in Aotearoa, NZ. Emerging from the fringes of mainstream arts and culture, Pacific Sisters are now recognized locally and internationally for our multidisciplinary practice and fashion activism. The Pacific Sisters apply Moana-based heritage art and cultural practices while incorporating contemporary art forms, embracing their urban Māori, Pacific, and Queer identities, unique to Aotearoa, NZ. Pacific Sisters is a Pacific and Māori collective of artists, performers, designers, jewelers, and musicians formed by Selina Haami née Forsyth (NZ, Sāmoan), Nephi Tupaea (Ngāti Katoa, Ngāti Tiipa, Ngāti Koroki Kahukura), and Suzanne Tamaki (Tūhoe, Ngāti Maniapoto), and including members Rosanna Raymond (NZ, Sāmoan, Tuvaluan, French, Gaelic, Norsemen), Feeonaa Clifton née Wall (NZ, Sāmoan, Swedish, German, English), Ani O’Neill (NZ, Irish, Cook Islander), Lisa Reihana (Ngā Puhi), Ngāti Hine (Ngai Tūteauru, Ngai Tūpoto), Jaunnie Ilolahia (NZ, Tongan), Ema Lyon (Ngāti Porou, Scottish), Ruth Woodbury (Ngāti Korokoro, Te Pouka, Ngāti Wharara, Te Hikutu), Henry Taripo (Cook Islander, Tahitian, Sāmoan, Tongan), Salvador Brown (NZ, Sāmoan, Tuvaluan, French, Gaelic, Norsemen), Karlos Quartez (NZ, Cook Islander), and Greg Semu (NZ, Sāmoan). 7 For a good overview of the centrality of social relations in contemporary Moana art and cultural practices, see Tēvita O. Ka’ili, Marking Indigeneity: The Tongan Art of Sociospatial Relations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017), 23. 8 Courtney Sina Meredith is credited as coining this phrase in 2010 as one of the central themes in her play Rushing Dolls. Meredith describes Urbanesia as a philosophical utopia founded especially by brown women, a ring of unseen leadership that had been looping invisibly for all time … I don’t think Urbanesia is a stand-alone, I think you already figured this place out way before me – and you worked it, fashioned it from earth and ideas, with your bare hands. I see Urbanesia now everywhere on the internet lol. It belongs to the community now. This quote is drawn from personal communication on Facebook Messenger between the author and Meredith on December 10, 2020. 9 Niu became a popular word play that many Moana artists use to express our newness or contemporary selves via a play on the nesian word niu (a young coconut suitable for drinking). 10 Acti.VĀ.tion is an embodied methodology developed by the author in 2010, since expanded as a methodology and method with the three main tenets: Culti.VĀ.te (research phase), FAB.ricate (construction/installation), and Acti.VĀ.te (using the vā body to animate the mauli imbedded in the works creating a space of connection). 11 As a maker and scholar often working outside my cultural contexts, the metaphorical connection I have here is evident in the introduction to Su’esu’e Manogi: In Search of Fragrance: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Efi and the Samoan Indigenous Reference (Apia: Centre for Samoan Studies, 2009), when the editors Tamasailau M. Suaalii-Sauni, I’uogafa Tuagalu, Tofilau Nina Kirifi-Alai, and Naomi Fuamatu explain it is part of the historical Samoan saying “Su’esu’e manogi e su’i ai lau ‘ula fatu ai lou titi aua ou faiva malo” (searching for fragrances to fashion a garland and skirt). Traditionally, this saying is offered to someone to uplift their spirit and remind them that this is not done alone. 12 Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 13 Definition provided at length later in this chapter. 14 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up?  183 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

See n. 6 for a description of Pacific Sisters. Definition provided later in this chapter. Definition provided at length later in this chapter. Okusitino Mahina, Joyce Dudding, and Kolokesa Uafa Mahina, eds., “Time, Space, Art” in Tatau: Fenapasi ‘oe Fepaki the Art of Semisi Fetokai Potauaine (New Zealand: Lo’au Research Society; Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2010). Julie Nagam, “Art and Curation in Becoming Our Future,” All Lit Up, May 13, 2020, accessed September 10, 2021, https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2020/Art-and-Curationin-Becoming-Our-Future. Tāmaki Makaurau is the Māori-language name for Auckland, meaning “Tāmaki desired by many,” in reference to the desirability of its natural resources and geography, now known as Auckland, the largest city in Aotearoa, NZ. I tell the same story in “A Walk through My Eyelands,” Pantograph Punch, Pacific Arts Legacy project, November 19, 2020, accessed September 10, 2021, https://www.pantograph-­ punch.com/posts/walk-through-my-eyelands. The English word tattoo is believed to have originated from the Samoan word tatau. Tatau has many meanings in Samoa. Tā means to strike, and in the case of tattooing refers to the sound of the tattooist’s wooden tools. Tau means to reach an end, a conclusion, such as in war or battle. It can also denote rightness or balance, or to wring moisture from a wet cloth or ink from the skin. See Naomi Fuamatu, Tamasailau Sua’aliʼi-Sauni, I’uogafa Tuagalu, and Tofilau Nina Kirifi-­A lai, eds., Su’esu’e Manogi: In Search of Fragrance. Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi and the Samoan Indigenous Reference (Apia: Centre for Samoan Studies, 2009). Sean Mallon, Samoan Art & Artists (Auckland: Craig Potton Publishing, 2002), 163. Rosanna Raymond, “Getting Specific: Pacific Fashion Activism in Auckland During the 1990’s,” in Clothing the Pacific, ed. Chloë Colchester (New York: Berg Publishers, 2003). Rosanna Raymond, “Dusky Ain’t Dead She Just Diversified,” in Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, Whetu Moana II, ed. Reina Whaitiri Wendt and Robert Sullivan (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010), 188–9. Founded in 2010 by Rosanna Raymond, The SaVĀge K’lub presents twenty-first century South Sea savagery, influencing art and culture through the interfacing of time and space, deploying weavers of words, rare anecdotalists, myth makers, hip shakers, navigators, and red faces to institute non-cannibalistic cognitive consumption of the other. The Savage K’lub come together to celebrate all forms of art and culture, collaborating to acti.VĀ.te people and things. They have participated in large-scale art projects in Australia; Hawaii; Aotearoa, NZ; and have held workshops and gatherings in New York, Rarotonga, and London. For an excellent overview, see Billie Lythberg, “KRONIKling the K’lub—from 19th Century Savages to 21st Century SaVAgery,” Savage Kronikles, accessed September 10, 2021, https://www.savageklub.com/nav-bar/ranga-toi. The club’s title and logo can be seen on the landing page of its host website, https://www. savageklub.com. Albert Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body” afterword to Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Rob Wilson and Vilsoni Hereniko (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 399–412. See the project Vā Moana: Space and Relationality in Pacific Thought and Identity, Marsden Fund, Royal Society Te Apārangi, Aotearoa, NZ, 2019–23, accessed September 4, 2021, https://www.vamoana.org/marsden-project. I’uogafa Tuagalu, “Heuristics of the Vä,” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 4, no. 1 (2008): 110. See George Pratt, A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language with English and Samoan Vocabulary (London: London Missionary Society, 1862; repr, Papakura NZ: Southern Reprints, 1984). See Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” 399–412. Also of interest here is Lana Lopesi’s term “Moana Cosmopolitanism” which aligns with developments related to urban Moana diaspora; for more information see Lana Lopesi, “Moana Cosmopolitan” interview by Arcia Tecun on Wai? Indigenous Words and Ideas, podcast, July 17, 2020.

184  Rosanna Raymond 35 Malu is the female Samoan tatatau or tattoo signified by a diamond-shaped pattern called malu, sometimes referred to as a sumu pattern. 36 Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” 399–412. 37 Kanaka Maoli is translated into “true people” and is a term adopted in recent years to denote people who can trace Indigenous Hawaiian ancestry before the arrival of Captain Cook. 38 Teves, Defiant Indigeneity, 15. 39 Leanne Betasamoke Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 182. 40 A. L. Refiti, “Being-Social: Critiquing Pasifika Education in the University” (conference presentation, inaugural conference on teaching and learning by Pasifika, University AUT Ngawai o Horotiu Marae, Auckland, 2007). 41 Refiti, “Being-Social.” 42 Refiti. 43 Refiti. 4 4 Derek Freeman and Margaret Mead, Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Suffolk, VA: Pelican Books, 1984), 176. 45 Le-Tagaloa Fanaafi Aiono, Tapuia Samoan Worship (Apia: Malua Printing Press, 2003), 49. 46 Victoria N. Kneubuhl, “Traditional Performance in Samoan Culture: Two Forms,” Asian Theatre Journal 4, no. 2 (1987): 166–76, https://doi.org/doi:10.2307/1124189. 47 John Williams, The Samoan Journals of John Williams, 1830 and 1832 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1984). 48 See more information on the fale aitu in Vilsoni Hereniko, “Clowning as Political Commentary: Polynesia, Then and Now,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 1–28; Bradd Shore, “A Samoan Theory of Action: Social Control and Social Order in a Polynesian Paradox” (PhD diss., Anthropology, University of Chicago 1977); Kneubuhl, “Traditional Performance,” 166–76. 49 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 50 David O’Donnell, “‘Spiritual Play’: Ritual Performance and Spirituality in Samoan Theatre,” (conference presentation, Ritual and Cultural Performance Hui and Symposium, Performance of the Real research theme, University of Otago, 2016). 51 This is my own term to describe urban aitu. 52 You can find these Niu Aitu at Auckland Museum, “Pacific Sisters,” accessed September 4, 2021, https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/visit/galleries/tamaki-herenga-waka/ pacific-sisters. 53 Gʻnang Gʻnear, ʻIna, Tuna, Aolele, Full Tusk Maiden, Backhand Maiden, and MamaTane. 54 In 2021 the Arts Foundation NZ created a new catetogory, the Moment in Time Award He Momo, to acknowledge Nigel’s curation of Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art, the largest exhibtion in Auckland City Art Gallery’s history, featuring the work of over 133 Māori artists. 55 Linda Tuhiwai Smith ed., Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin: Otago Press, 1999), 1.

13 Handiwork of Migrancy, Restitutions in the Contemporary Patrick Flores

Let me begin on a tangent which also serves as an entry point into how a particular contemporary form might be crafted in a crisis. In this scenario, craft, crisis, and the contemporary are imagined as converging through the vehicular material form of artworks presented for exhibition. In this instance, highly mediated material becomes vulnerable, at many levels, to a range of reconstitutions—notwithstanding its exaltation as an object or event with a capacity to transcend arbitrariness. Here, we can speculate on the object losing its stature as a consequence of absorbing aspects of atmosphere or forces of history. Art is, thus, laid bare: Revealing nothing but its craft or its nature. Staging the exhibition Arte Povera: Italian Landscape in Manila—a project initiated by the Italian ambassador to the Philippines—was a curious prospect.1 It was made yet more curious by the fact that it opened in February 2020, one month before the lockdown of the country as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and two months before the death of the eminent Italian art historian, critic, and curator Germano Celant, the primary interlocutor of arte povera. Curated by Italian art critic and curator Danilo Eccher, this exhibition prided itself as presenting seminal arte povera artists in the Philippines for the first time. Eccher reminded us that the subtitle Celant appended to his manifesto in 1967 was “notes for a guerrilla war”—in which he called for “an action within the language of the art … the performative aspect of the work, which fed on chemical and metallic reactions, on live animals and on melting ice.”2 The term guerilla is particularly resonant for the Philippine context, exposing its history of colonial encounters as well as the tactics of improvisation in the common culture. The Metropolitan Museum of Manila organized this project and asked me to curate an exhibition in dialogue with the Italian survey. I will begin by outlining this situation. Not only to sketch out a context but also to stress the “whereness” of art, placing context as paramount. Significantly, in this case, a context is implicated by the subject of the exhibition itself as part of an effort to reconceptualize “art” and the bare material through which it offers its autonomy. Emphasizing context, however, is not simply a task of somehow connecting the “out there” to the “over here” of art—a process substantially reconsidered in the wake of so many colonialisms. Here, the problematic form of address is inscribed in the contingency of having to locate it as if it were unrooted or cut loose. This form of address, at once genealogy and locution, may well be the frisson of the critique and reconstruction of context, the tension and the excitement of attending to art’s doubled (although not binary) coding—a process which can become sensuously particular. DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-13

186  Patrick Flores As a curator, I always look at exhibitions as opportunities to explore knowledge systems through the dynamic interrelationship between theoretical and artistic practice. It is for this reason, in the context of this exhibition, that I looked to the work of Philippine artist Brenda Fajardo as a way to potentially engage Italian arte povera in a new time and place. First, I searched for a trope with which to glean the logic of guerilla practice that could summon a biopolitical image, as it were, in which the everyday performative qualities of life are amplified while remaining concurrently uneventful, stealthy, purposive. The title Cue From Life Itself: Filipino Artists Transform the Everyday was taken from Fajardo: Artist, mentor, assembler, world maker, and farmer working in the fields of theater, painting, the academe, and civil society. In the 1980s, Fajardo wrote a monograph for the Philippine Educational Theater Association called Aesthetics of Poverty: A Rationale in Designing for Philippine Theater, in which she spoke to the way an “attrition of material” can index an aesthetic where the ethical remains central. As Fajardo asks, “how can an artist claim to be socially responsible when he mounts highcost productions during times of deprivation?”3 Her conception of the aesthetics of poverty clearly began with the artist’s mindfulness of an encompassing but transformable world, that is, an attentiveness that led her to “choose deliberately particular nuances and tones of color and texture that would express the qualities” to be perceived in the world: “Economic deprivation, cultural pollution, senseless violence.”4 In doing so, “a new art” emerges, regarded as “authentic, because it expresses life which happens to be poor.”5 This passage into “newness” describes a process through which aesthetics of poverty might take root and imply “a sense of beauty which belongs to people who live in a condition of material deprivation as a result of a particular quality of life that is conditioned by its reality.”6 It is important to remember that such an aesthetic pertains to both the viewer’s reception and the artist’s faculty: “We began to capture the patina of time and became more sensitive to the aesthetic qualities of our materials thereby increasing our powers of expression.”7 As a pioneer member of this theater organization, Fajardo was active in its aesthetic and pedagogical programs: She designed sets, acted, co-wrote a training curriculum, and conducted workshops in communities across a country of around 7,000 islands. The Philippine Educational Theater Association was founded in 1967 on the aspiration for a people’s theater shaped by Asian traditions, Brechtian aesthetics, and Filipino culture.8 Fajardo’s monograph foregrounds the value of experience. This is a reference to the philosopher John Dewey, who thought that gardening in schools “affords an avenue of approach to the knowledge of the place farming and horticulture have had in the history of the human race and which they occupy in present social organization.”9 Her monograph opens with Dewey’s argument on the intimate relationship between experience and ecology that heightens sensorial transmission as part of the art experience. Accordingly, the expressivity of art and its internal power are held in a sensitive relationship with the material forces that make it possible. Thus, art possesses integrity and intelligence, because it aspires to material and social value. The value emerges from the life of forms, the techniques of their making, and is deemed social. The phrase “aesthetics of poverty” confounds initially. On the one hand, aesthetics signals the privilege of disinterested autonomy. By contrast, poverty points to dispossession brought about as a consequence of socially disproportionate systems. By bringing these two terms together, Fajardo takes liberties with the formulation to yield a paradox that transposes the notion of “value” from a hegemonic standard of taste to an emergent ethos of making in the equivalent register of arte povera.

Migrancy and Restitutions  187 Fajardo’s notion of lived experience spills into arte povera’s heady welter of exceptionally organic and plastic materiality. Similarly, Celant acknowledges the copious universe of the “alchemist artist.” According to him, “animals, vegetables, and minerals take part in the world of art. The artist feels attracted to their physical, chemical, and biological possibilities, and he begins again to feel magic and marvelous deeds.”10 Such materials include “copper, zinc, earth, water, rivers, land, snow, fire, grass, air, stone, electricity, uranium, sky, weight, gravity, height, growth, etcetera.”11 Like Fajardo, Celant invokes Dewey in his explication of how the artist discovers the body, memory, and gestures: “All that which directly lives and thus begins to carry out the sense of life and of nature, a sense that implies, according to Dewey, numerous subjects: The sensory, the sensational, sensitive, impressionable, and sensuous.”12 The anticipated future for the artist is the rediscovery of the artist of magic, growth, danger, falsehood, and realness. It is also the reconstitution of experience and the world through the contemplative procedures suggested by Dewey.13 For Fajardo, Celant, and Dewey, the acknowledgment of the “animate” widens not only the ambit of humans and their social ties but also the inter-species universe. Such a widening also restores a broader ecology through a generous democratic ethos in which the self cedes its individualist conceit for the sake of a collective project. Significantly, the aforementioned notion of attrition can refer to processes of erosion, the wearing out of a substance, or to some kind of exhaustion. In the tropical Philippines, which is visited by calamities very frequently, this sense of attrition is ubiquitous. Accordingly, the artistic gesture of Fajardo in theater, in light of such attrition, turns into restitution, a remaking of the world from scratch, a repossession of material. Fundamental to this restitution is craft, the mode of transforming. In the exhibition, intermedial artist and critical urbanist Mark Salvatus explicitly dwells on the technology of rafts made largely by urban Filipinos. These makeshift vessels are a bricolage of everyday items, from plastic water containers to inflatables, which collectively form an object used to ferry their riders during flooding. They are also an intimate testimony to the domestic universe and the instinct to overcome precarious situations. Titled C_rafts, the improvised process of their making renders them particular to the calamitous environment. This “c_raft,” with vessel and facture inscribed in a term, transforms and accretes as it moves and meets adversities. As the personal belongings of households are disarticulated by the elements, they morph into repurposed boats used to navigate the torrent that domestic culture feeds back into nature. Consequently, both realms are imbricated in a state of flux—the deluge washes away the house, the neighborhood, and the city, whilst the c_raft restitutes ecology’s nexus between inhabitant and water, amid the upheaval of planetary peril. In this exhibition, given that I deployed craft as an instance of fantasy and survival, and as a type of representation, I argued that it could also perform allegorically as an imaginary facsimile of natural history through processes of translation. This, in short, is my investment in the whereness of art that is the subject of this volume. It is a trajectory exemplified by the diorama, a veritable world-picture, or a design for the stage in Fajardo’s art, or the quick-change inventive alchemy of arte povera, and one which braids history and folklore into institutional description. When Cue from Life Itself opened in February of 2020, the sixth Singapore Biennale, which I directed, was in its final month. Both projects were soon caught up in the frenzy of the global pandemic. Importantly, the premise of ethical action was also important to the Biennale. Restitution is particularly central as an exploratory vehicle

188  Patrick Flores for the Chinese artist Hu Yun in the work Carving Water, Melting Stones (2019). And restitution begins with the diorama, which presents some kind of a world-picture, a framing device of both structure and representation. As British scholar Geraldine Howie puts it, the diorama comprises three key aspects: The three-­dimensionality of the miniature architecture and landscape within the diorama itself, the two-­ dimensional tromp l’oeil landscape painting, and the actual space of the viewer.14 The notion of a world-picture, to be sure, consistently operated as an impetus within processes of modernity. As Martin Heidegger put it, the “fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture … the structured image that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before.”15 Here, man is the exceptional agent, the arbiter of everything that is. This is a claim and as such is a particular, and not a random, contention: “Because this position secures, organizes, and articulates itself as a world view, the modern relationship to that which is, is one that becomes, in its decisive unfolding, a confrontation of world views.”16 The world-picture, thus, is concretized intersubjectively between artifice and the sensible observer in distinct situations, such as an exhibition. And this phenomenon becomes more charged when the exhibition is a biennale, which some consider the locus classicus of the world-picture of the global contemporary. The Singapore Biennale opened in 2019 in the same year that the nation was commemorating the bicentennial of the arrival of the British. It was a fraught moment for Singapore: To at once remember the colonial past alongside the modernity that afforded it financial prosperity, together with the history of revolutions against colonialism that have been waged in the region since the nineteenth century. I wanted to respond to ways in which these histories are and can be represented, and, moreover, to agitate this achievement by drawing a relationship between the colonial, the diorama, and the figure of the Biennale. To do this, I employed a curatorial method that might embody both the affective and the ethical in an urgent imperative (and curious wistfulness). To this end, it was through the Filipino revolutionary woman Salud Algabre that I would find the Biennale’s title, which, importantly, I would see as a convivial invitation rather than a thematic evocation. Algabre took part in a rebellion against the Americans in the 1930s that called for immediate emancipation but was quelled in a day. In an interview from the 1960s, Algabre framed the revolt not as a failure but rather as a moment within a larger trajectory. In what we might call a manifesto of popular resistance, she declared: “No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right direction.”17 It was in the spirit of this patient struggle that I approached Singapore, as an implicit part of a broader process of interrogating accelerated development. The history of Singapore, and its marked rise as part of the ascendant economies of Southeast Asia, proved to be a formidable context to examine curatorially. This curatorial examination took place through a process of actively reflecting upon modernity in art, the liberal recognition of identity, the authority of the museum industry, and the potency of the image. Within my curatorial conceptualization, all of these factors aggregated within the figuration of the diorama. In the early 1980s, the National Museum of Singapore commissioned woodcarvers from the town of Paete in Laguna, a province south of the capital of Manila, to make dioramas of Singaporean national history. The 20 resulting dioramas sought to variously represent “changes in topography, architecture, fashion, and technology of the times.”18 Given the earnestly identified need to document change, this commission was seen as contributing to an

Migrancy and Restitutions  189 idealization of the “history and development of Singapore from a fishing village to a modern nation state.”19 This is of course a nationalist script, and the visual language instrumentalized to grant the diorama a vast world-picture: “Each diorama captures a scene in totality, thus bringing history to life.”20 This totality is not reckoned in terms of broad strokes but instead crystallized in granular verisimilitude: “Every single detail, down to the color of the thread used to tie pigtails, worn by the Chinese, was painstakingly checked.”21 Tellingly, and notwithstanding this obsession for data, there is no mention at all of the names of the carvers, except for the fact they came from the Philippines and that they carved the wood called batikuling. The curators of the National Museum of Singapore would probably have been impressed with the dioramas at the Ayala Museum in Manila. In the records of the museum, the Ayala dioramas of Philippine history were conceptualized by the Philippine historian Carlos Quirino in consultation with Enrique Zobel and Jaime Zobel de Ayala of the clan that owned the museum. Quirino guided researchers (Rey Resurreccion, Juvenal Velasco), artists (Simeon Abaya, Tam Austria, Mamerto Evangelista, Amorsolo Tuazon, Guillermo Veloso, Wilfredo Villanueva), and woodcarvers (Esmeraldo Dans, Mar Edjawan, and Lauro Sanchez). The dioramas consisted of historical events, scenes from canonical literature, sites, and rituals. As the project progressed, the museum focused on historical events. By 1968, the atelier and the narrative were expanded. Accordingly, the following artists were enlisted to assist to complete the remaining studies for the dioramas: Elmer Gernale, Rico Mariano, Loreto Racuya, Pat Reyes, and Wilfredo Villanueva. Art historian Pearlie Rose Baluyut draws a sharp line between the aesthetic requirements of the diorama and the political economies and colonial histories underwriting the corporation through which the Ayala Museum was built (and which financed both the empirical rigor of research and the fostering of the naturalist, imperial gaze). This is a compelling point: “In manufacturing authentic history in its three-­dimensional form, the museum practised the concept innate to any free-enterprise—the classic strict ‘division of labor.’”22 First, she takes note of the role of practitioners such as historians, illustrators, and traditional sculptors of the carving town of Paete who hand-carved the miniature figurines. Craftsmen who wove the tiny hats and mats and invented tiny window panes, bicycles, and wisps of smoke. Artists who painted shadows, skin complexions, foliage, and seascapes. Electricians who lit the tableaux and devised special effects.23 Second, she refers to the process of the researchers who “studied historical photographs, eyewitness accounts of the events and places, and actual specimens to prepare the working plans for the settings and figurines” and “paid careful attention to historical details” to convey “authentic representations.”24 This conception of authenticity is unnerving. On the one hand, it is an expectation of the politics of representation and identity. On the other, it is believed only to arise from the arduous processes of decolonization. For Fajardo—who offered the category of “aesthetics of poverty”— wrote her thesis for Philippine Studies on Paete, in which she delineates particular phases in the production of the craft practices in the town, including the fabled woodcarving.25 Accordingly, she foregrounds both the affective and the ethical dimensions of taking to the task of carving within the lived experiences of the people in the place. It is a vernacular practice that feeds into the cultural politics of decolonization. For her, “many craft communities have all but lost their tradition to meet the urgent problems and needs of a society in crisis. A community such as Paete, for example, is being rapidly consumed by commercialism and

190  Patrick Flores the industrialization of handcrafts.”26 Only decolonization through people’s art can restitute, for “the people should be encouraged to … create from their life experience. As a counter-consciousness movement, it necessitates an awareness of issues … to destroy the colonial frame of mind.”27 Although compelling, this colonial critique tends to impose a limit on how the world-picture can be made to play out within a locality like Paete or within a biennale in Singapore. Thus, Paete is made present through the miniature diorama within the overarching structure of the biennale and as part of the conjuncture of neoliberal time and colonial remembrance broadly understood to be postcolonial craft from the Philippines. Hu Yun was first drawn to the Philippine wooden image when he met the Chilean curator Rodolfo Andaur while in residency at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore in 2017. At this time, Andaur introduced him to religious sculpture in the Philippines through the santos (a term for image and saint). The figurine of the santos fascinated Hu Yun, particularly because his previous projects had been related to Jesuit Catholic missionaries who went to China and Southeast Asia beginning in the sixteenth century. He has been tracing the journeys of these missionaries, including the well-known Francis Xavier who died on a small island south of China. Both of his arms were kept in different churches as relics. Subsequently, the “hand” had become a recurring trope in Hu Yun’s drawings and sculptures. In 2018, as part of his residency at 1335 Mabini in Manila, Hu Yun was finally able to visit the workshops of the image makers and woodcarvers in Paete in Laguna— where they worked and lived—and found out that the dioramas of the Ayala Museum in Manila were the handiwork of their mentors. He was drawn to the history of the town as well as the situation of the tradition in the present. According to Hu Yun: “I am very interested in different kinds of craft, and in craftspersonship. I am attracted to the daily practice that inhabits everyday life—it becomes almost like a ritual.”28 Before his trip to Paete, he had worked with a group of women ranging in age from early 20s to over 90 years old that practiced embroidery in Suzhou, a coastal city near Shanghai. During this time, he produced several pieces of silk embroidery in collaboration with the women. Collaboration with artisans who hover around the fringes of art and cultural representation have had a crucial place in Hu Yun’s practice. Today, although the National Museum of Singapore has retired these dioramas, several of them are currently displayed at Elias Park Primary School, where they are kept in a small museum that presents Singapore’s heritage. Hu Yun’s interest in the diorama focuses on its craft, labor, and living representations of Singapore. The work for Singapore Biennale consisted of an installation of three parts. The first part comprised the film that follows him to Paete to study the quotidian life of the woodcarving workshop of Paloy Cagayat, where he is initiated into the life of the woodcarver and the mostly religious images that he carves for churches and private altars in the Philippines and overseas. This workshop is an enterprise, with its own assembly line of materials and workers who specialize in the various aspects of the form, from the carving to the painting and on to the sewing of vestments. As part of this process, Hu Yun chooses a carving of a limb from the stacks of wooden body parts, and then asks one of the woodcarvers to shape it into a branch of a tree, complete with the details of muscle and vein. The film describes this process attentively, together with working and living anecdotes from the workshop. Once completed, the woodcarver brings the diorama back to the clearing in which the wood has been sourced, thereby returning it to its origin among the trees.

Migrancy and Restitutions  191 The second component featured a refrigerated diorama. To produce this component, Hu Yun first invited a woodcarver from the same town to carve in Singapore. Dominador Paz used to be a woodcarver, but, owing to the decline of the industry, now carves ice, fruits, and vegetables on cruise ships. In this instance, he carved a block of blue ice into the topography of present-day Singapore. Although this carving is encased in a refrigerator, it melts over time. Here, Hu Yun lays bare a sequence of enchantments. First, he marks inevitable mutations in the labor and enterprise of the woodcarver, who first becomes an ice carver, and then leaves land for the sea. He then connects this narrative with the history of early globalization through the circulation of Catholicism in Southeast Asia—which may well coincide with the history of the early modern in image making in this part of the world. For Hu Yun, “ice is such a powerful material, as it changes all the time.” He also, perhaps understandably, finds the existence of ice in the tropics intriguing insofar as this artificiality creates: A beautiful/romantic landscape or diorama in a glass box. Looking at it, I immediately think about the Marina Bay Sands (a hotel and casino) light spectacle which happens every evening. For me this is an image of Singapore, or any future city for which most people long; there is an artificial beauty which is very attractive. 29 The third part of this installation is the soundscape component, which involves the voices of students from the school where the dioramas are installed talking about the Singapore that springs to mind upon seeing the dioramas. Interestingly, these evocations are unhinged from the scripts prepared for them by their teachers. They also mingle inculcated norm, strains of fantasy, commonplace memory, or just immediate curiosity. As Hu Yun recollects: In the end, when I asked them about the future … most of the kids actually went back to the diorama The Arrival of Raffles, not because they had something to say about Raffles, but because they noticed the background of the traditional houses and the kids who are playing in the forest. They kept saying that Singapore must be a really fun place (at the time Raffles arrived), as kids at that time were very happy to be able to play in nature.30 It is indeed uncanny that children in the face of the phantasmagoric and historiographic diorama can in effect take us right back to the so-called scene of the crime— that is, colonialism—which is of course now linked with both failures of modernity and hope within the present. Interestingly, the sound element proves to be inextricably connected to the sculptural objects it accompanies. We can recognize that both carving and music share common aesthetic values. The interpretive process of sensing that which is good in band music, for example, resonates with the language used to intuit that which is good in sculpture. The qualities of fineness, balance, and tonality, as expressed in the word afinado, are comparable with the experiential qualities of sculpture.31 The realization that this understanding of carving comes not solely from the mastery of the maker and the tradition of the craft is telling. The woodcarver that Hu Yun consulted in his research for this project, Paloy Cagayat, confided that although tools

192  Patrick Flores and knowledge matter in the practice, the skill with the chisel is essential—a process which over time is honed by the whetstone on which the blade is sharpened. Importantly, it is a particular whetstone which is needed to ensure that the chisel bites into the wood deeply and finely—a testimony to the instrument’s responsiveness to the source of its efficacy, attuned in other words, or afinado, to the ecology of form.32 The history of the diorama is likewise a history of perceptions, or, as Jonathan Crary usefully describes, the “technology of the observer.” A key part of instantiating this shift was a significant change in terms of the mobility of the gaze. This is an important point, for as Crary notes, “unlike the static panorama painting that first appeared in the 1790s, the diorama is based on the incorporation of an immobile observer into a mechanical apparatus and a subjection to a predesigned temporal unfolding of optical experience.”33 Significantly, this shift would signal “an increasing abstraction of optical experience from a stable referent.”34 A contentious point here, however, is a fixation on “nature” as both an acknowledgment of the real and an ornament suffusing the real. As W. Neite notes in reponse to The Cologne Diorama (1843–69), “the use of the expression ‘true-to-nature’ (‘naturgerun’) is indicative … of a growing ‘desire for accurate rendering and sober perception.’ In a sense, the age of photography was announcing its arrival.”35 The use of naturalism in dioramas would be extended to become a nearly ubiquitous mechanism for describing nature in museums. As Dutch theorist and artist Mieke Bal put it as part of a comparison of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which are both in New York, “whereas nature is a backdrop in the dioramas, transfixed in stasis, ‘art’ presented at the Met is ineluctable in evolution, is endowed with a story.” But the American Museum of Natural History also tells its own tale: “Of fixation, [and] of the denial of time.”36 The museum and the biennale find common ground here. In the Singapore Biennale, this dualism is overcome by the installation work of Hu Yun, where the nature of history is diligently annotated by migrancy. Thus, in this instance, the possibility of overcoming binaries is embedded in the history of the diorama and its migration to the museum. In this sense, we could recognize that the curatorial research project Staging Dioramas historicizes the diorama as a medium “to look through something … to deceive the viewer.”37 Although its historical underpinnings were “entertainment and art,” its scope widened as it became a template for a spectacle much like a department store window display of products and mannequins, the window itself dividing inside and outside, creating an enclosed space of attraction. The museum visitor becomes a flâneur, walking past or stopping to look at the diorama.38 Again, the impulse was to conjure nature through taxidermy to form “a foreground of diverse flora and geological formations from their habitat and a curved, painted background, creating an illusion of space and wider context.”39 Soon, the diorama as method was grafted onto museology and exhibition making. Writer and curator Dore Bowen demonstrates how the diorama historically tessellated various impulses of vision and seeing, of the familiar and the exotic “enabled by advances in lighting, optics, and chemistry … in the language of paint, installation, and staging.”40 Moreover, she notes, the diorama was able “to participate in the current dialogue among artists, scientists, and politicians about the risks and benefits of

Migrancy and Restitutions  193 41

progress.” This was the “diorama effect,” where projection and reflection “create the illusion of places known to the audience while simultaneously transforming these sites into ghostly presences, thereby creating the sense that … a world was in the process of passing away.”42 As such, the diorama inevitably spoke to time or temporality, specifically to a recent past or what Hélène Cixous calls a “present passing”:43 By placing the real (and this includes an emphasis on the everyday, fashion, technology, and contemporary events) in a dichotomous relation to illusion or fantasy (Orientalism and fairytales, the notion of “local color” in novels and paintings, the sublime, and the medieval revival), artists forged a sense of temporality that Christophe Longbois-Canil calls the passé proche.44 Hu Yun has likewise produced another project centered upon the diorama at the National University of Singapore. In this work, he revisits the photographs and sculptures of Singaporean artist Shui Tit Sing in deliberate and critical proximity to the archaeological collection of the museum. The photographic works by Shui depicted Singapore from his arrival in the early 1950s until the 1980s. In the mind of Hu Yun, these images constituted the visual diary of the life of an artist who had a distinct way of cropping the black-and-white photographs, a method which reminded him of the “vertical scroll composition of the traditional Chinese ink painting.”45 Hu Yun also observes that in the later phase of Shui’s practice, he had decided to devote his time to woodcarving, with earlier paintings and images serving as the archive for his woodcarving repertoire. Here, once again, we see the specter of the diorama informing the history of photography, which is famously claimed to be the invention of French painter and physicist Louis Daguerre (1787–1851). British sociologist Don Slater examines this innovation instructively: “By painting different scenes on the front and back of a huge screen, Daguerre could alter the lighting to dissolve from one scene to the next.”46 The technique of “dissolve” is pertinent to the argument of migrancy and restitution, together with the dissipation of a certain tumescence via representation. The dissolve, Slater continues, is akin to the “fade” in the cinema, and “could be experienced by the audience as both magical and technological, a wonder of scientific know-how which could transport the audience realistically from one place or time to another.”47 Consequently, illusion and fantasy are served in alternate ways, for “to transcend the real and efface its boundaries with the unreal; to produce magic—albeit a magic known to be the accomplishment of science; and to transform science into the cultural form of magic”—which, in other words, is to perform that which “modernity is constantly producing … ‘natural magic.’”48 Hu Yun inserted the photographs in the glass vitrines containing the artifacts excavated from various locations across Singapore, together with materials retrieved from marine excavations in Singapore’s waters. These glass cases may well have evoked in him the tableau of the Singaporean dioramas, which were made almost at the same time that Shui made his sculptures, and the composition of the woodcarving of Shui, through which daily scenes in communities were staged. Perhaps, with this in mind, we can return to the contours of curatorial reflection already sketched out in the movement of form from Manila to Singapore, and from woodcarving to diorama to ice. Likewise, the condition of craft is constantly remediated in a Philippine town, in a museum and primary school, and in the Biennale. At this point, the notion of attrition as proposed by Fajardo in her discussion of the

194  Patrick Flores “aesthetics of poverty,” as the slackening of material, or the loosening of substance, the state of vulnerability, and the translation of form into other materialities, is germane. Such a transformation of art from place to place is not merely a rehearsal of its material and ontological flexibility. Instead, it plays out under the sign of restitution in the realms of labor and ecology. When the carver restores the limb of wood to the forest, history infuses its nature with that of its maker. When the ice-form of Singapore unerringly melts, the cartography and representation of the nation, sculpted by a carver from elsewhere, disperses. When the voices of children rewrite the script of history in the presence of inculcated images, meaning slips away or protracts. In 2020, Hu Yun reprised the work from Singapore for the exhibition Study of Things: Or a Brief Story about Fountain, Brick, Tin, Coin, Stone, Shell, Curtain, and Body at the Times Museum in Guangzhou in China, but in this instance included a recording of him and the ice carver Dominador Paz, where they talk about the travails of Paz at sea, his condition of being overworked and often unable to sleep, his experience of sculpting concrete in an amusement park, and his lament on the loss of the vital tradition of woodcarving in his hometown. This sonic presence, together with the occasional rustle of the chisel chipping away at the mass of ice, surrounds an object on the floor. It is the formerly carved branch from the fragment of a religious statuary, this time cast as ice and made to melt every day in the museum, replaced over again with a new prosthesis, as it were. As the dialogue between Hu Yun and Paz unravels, a puddle of water slowly forms as if to signify the aqueous residue of the worn-out migrant mariner. As the Singapore Biennale 2019 was about to close in March 2020, there was a spike in the transmission of COVID-19 in Singapore, a reality which would soon begin to complicate the narrative of achievement for the government of the only First World country in Southeast Asia to (initially) efficiently suppress the outbreak. Central to the spread of the virus were the overcrowded dormitories of foreign workers in Singapore, a delineation that threw a sharp light on the plight of migrant work and its relationship with the economy of the country. According to journalist Kirsten Han, most male migrant workers, brought in to work in the construction, shipyard, and petrochemical industries, are housed in dormitories, many in industrial parts of the island away from the rest of the population. … Even before the pandemic … these crowded, stuffy lodgings were a recipe for disaster.49 The disaster is disease, from Zika to dengue. It is indeed telling that in delineating the migrant problematic in the pandemic, the locus of the diagnosis is the “living conditions” of the workers. Han continues, describing the way that the “Covid-19 pandemic has drawn attention to living conditions in these dormitories” of workers paid so poorly and prone to repatriation. Clearly, these workers are also seen as threats to public order, and therefore subject to surveillance even on their days off. 50 It is interesting to note that the vernacular phrase living conditions is a haunting phrase which acutely carves bodily material in high relief. All the while, the material body, that is, the body of labor, hews nature into a history of the “recent past” and of a “present passing”—much like ice deliquescing, or migrants infecting each other in cramped quarters. Accordingly, art is not only marked as reflexive through the allegory of the diorama that is the modernist world-picture. Indeed, it also becomes a vehicle for speculating upon a species intervolved in a mangrove, a robust woodland that is

Migrancy and Restitutions  195 home to the intertide. It is this intense tactility, proximity, worldliness, and manuality that the craftiness of late, neoliberal capital co-opts to flesh out the whereness of the contemporary—much in the same way that the woodcarver-turned-ice sculptor would speak of sleeplessness in the endless sea, or the craft master of Paete would restitute the “crooked timber of humanity, the regularities of the misshapen day” to the ground from whence it sprang.51

Notes 1 This was a project initiated by the Italian Ambassador to the Philippines, Giorgio Guglielmino. 2 Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Arte Povera: Italian Landscape in Manila, exhibition wall text, February 2020. 3 Brenda V. Fajardo, The Aesthetics of Poverty: A Rationale in Designing for Philippine Theater (Manila: Philippine Educational Theater Association, n.d.), 3. 4 Fahardo, The Aesthetics of Poverty, 3. 5 Fahardo, 3. 6 Fahardo, 2–3. 7 Fahardo, 4. 8 See Patrick D. Flores, “Critical Body Performing,” in Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive?, ed. Cosmin Costinas and Ana Janevski (Hong Kong: Para Site, 2017), 199–204. 9 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (Toronto: Macmillan, 1966), 200. 10 Peter Selz and Kristine Stiles, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 662. 11 Selz and Stiles, Theories and Documents, 662. 12 Selz and Stiles, 662. 13 See Martin Jay, “Somaeshetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 36, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 55–69. 14 Geraldine Howie, “Diorama as Constructs of Reality: Art, Photography, and the Discursive Space,” in Natural History Dioramas: History, Construction and Educational Role, ed. Sue Dale Tunnicliffe and Annette Scheersoi (New York: Springer, 2014), 63. 15 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 134. 16 Heidegger, “The Age,” 134. 17 Salud Algabre, “No Uprising Fails – Each One is a Step in the Right Direction…,” interview by David R. Sturtevant, Solidarity 1 (October–December 1966): 19. 18 Teo Marianne, Dioramas: A Visual History of Singapore (Singapore: National Museum Singapore, 1985), 1. 19 Marianne, Dioramas, 1. 20 Marianne, 1. 21 Marianne, 1. 22 Pearlie Rose S. Baluyut, “The Ayala Museum: A Site of Culture, Capital, and Displaced Colonial Desire,” Australian Journal of Art 14, no. 1 (1998): 75. 23 Baluyut, “The Ayala Museum,” 76. 24 Baluyut, 76. 25 See Brenda V. Fajardo, Ang Inukit na Kaalamang Bayan ng Paete (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2005). 26 Brenda V. Fajardo, “Decolonization Through People’s Art,” Asian Studies 28 (1990): 102. 27 Fajardo, “Decolonization,” 101. 28 Hu Yun, email conversation with the author, September 2020. 29 Yun, email conversation. 30 Yun, email conversation. 31 See Marie Angelica Armecin Dayao, “Ang ‘Taglay ng Musikang Paete: Isang Pagkukumpara ng Estetiko at Kaugalia sa Musikang Pang-Banda at ng Ukit ng Paete” (unpublished manuscript, n.d.). 32 Paloy Cagayat, in conversation with the author, Paete, 2019.

196  Patrick Flores 33 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 112–3. 34 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 113. 35 W. Neite, “The Cologne Diorama,” History of Photography 3, no. 2 (1979): 108. 36 Mieke Bal, “On Show: Inside the Ethnographic Museum,” in Looking In: The Art of Viewing (New York: Routledge, 2001), 119. 37 Stefan Aue, Jana Eske, and Jessica Páez, “Diorama History,” Staging Dioramas, accessed September 5, 2020, https://www.staging-dioramas.com/diorama-history.html. 38 Aue, Eske, and Páez, “Diorama History.” 39 Aue, Eske, and Páez. 40 Dore Bowen, “The Diorama Effect: Gas, Politics, and Opera in the 1825 Paris Diorama,” Intermédialités/Intermediality 24–5 (Autumn 2014–Spring 2015), https://www.erudit. org/en/journals/im/2014-n24-25-im02279/1034155ar/. 41 Bowne, “The Diorama Effect.” 42 Bowne. 43 Hélène Cixous, preface to The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers (London: Routledge, 1994), xxii. 4 4 Bowen, “The Diorama Effect.” 45 Yun, email conversation. 46 Don Slater, “Photography and Modern Vision: The Spectacle of ‘Natural Magic,’” in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995), 218. 47 Slater, “Photography,” 218 48 Slater, 220. 49 Kristen Han, “The Cost of ‘Singapore Inc.’? A Coronavirus Outbreak among Migrants,” The Nation, August 17, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ singapore-coronavirus-migrant-workers/. 50 Han, “The Cost.” 51 Ranjit Hoskoté, “Paete, Laguna,” in Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems, 1985– 2005 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2006), 186.

14 Erasure or Erased An Artworld (AND WORLD) Adrift Brad Buckley

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.1 H.G. Wells

The Renais invention of one-point perspective, nearly 600 years ago, was the defining convention of painting. This offered a convincing illusion of the world until the French painter Paul Cézanne, working at the start of the twentieth century, in the small village of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, changed the equation from “this is what I see” to “is this what I see?,” according to the US art critic Barber Rose. 2 If Cézanne did the spade work for this shift in perception, then the cubists Spaniard Pablo Picasso and Frenchman Georges Braque pushed hard to paint “what they knew.” So, this artist troika of Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque, working at a time of unparalleled new technical and scientific knowledge that included the invention of the movie camera by the Lumière brothers, and the Wright Brothers’ powered flight (which offered the first aerial view of the landscape), set off the modernist race in art. As we have moved from modernism to a period loosely defined as the contemporary, we are witnessing a new revolution in technology and knowledge creation that has led to changes in the way artists make, think about, and exhibit their work. It has also raised broader questions about the role of the art museum, and how they collect or archive work that may be ephemeral, transitory, or easily erased. What role, if any, does the “white cube” gallery space have in this new world?3 These changes are as profound as the Renaissance and modernism were in their time.

Erasure In his brilliant satirical novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Czech writer Milan Kundera explores the lives and loves of ordinary Czechs, and the politics and memories, both real and fictional, of his homeland under the Communists. On publication of the book in 1979, that country revoked his citizenship, even though Kundera had been happily ensconced in France for a number of years. In the opening chapter, Kundera sets the scene for his book—and in many ways also for this chapter—by telling the story of the Czech Communist leader Klement Gottwald, who in 1948 DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-14

198  Brad Buckley addressed the crowds in the town square of Prague. However, Gottwald was without a hat. His apparatchik, Vladimír Clementis, offered his own fur cap. “On that balcony the history of Communist Czechoslovakia was born. Every child knew the photograph from posters, schoolbooks and museums.”4 Unfortunately for Clementis, he was later charged with treason, and with being a “bourgeois nationalist,” and was erased or “airbrushed” from all the photographs and, of course, from history, leaving nothing except his fur cap, which remained on the head of Gottwald. At the time, this was a radical form of image manipulation and a powerful new form of propaganda, tethered to the belief, perhaps rather naive from our perspective in the twenty-first century, that the photograph represented the truth. Today the use of Photoshop and other manipulative image programs is so ubiquitous that even the veracity of photographic evidence presented in courts of law is regularly challenged. Perhaps the sheer volume of information that comes to us, from so many sources at once, means that to survive we constantly erase what is not front and center in this blizzard of messages. New technologies have exponentially accelerated our experience of erasure and our dislocation from authorizing sites of art, like museums. For much of the twentieth century there was an explicit relationship that underwrote modernism’s forward march. A striking example of this co-dependency is the work of the US poet and minimalist artist Carl Andre. His work Equivalent VIII (1966)—a double row of house bricks placed on the floor—was shown at a major retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1970. In the Guggenheim, the bricks are read as art, but if one were to stumble over them in the carpark, they would be just a pile of bricks. This erasure of the authorizing relationship has also altered how we look at and understand art of the last 100 years. Of course, this process of erasure has been in train for several decades. As the British writer and novelist John Berger so aptly comments in his seminal book (and television series) Ways of Seeing: In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information … it is a question of reproduction making it possible, even inevitable, that an image will be used for many different purposes and that the reproduced image, unlike an original work, can lend itself to them all.5

Memory In the artworld—and to use Arthur Danto’s term “Artworld” is to signal that it is a thing in its own right—we are now witnessing the rise of artists whose careers and bodies of work exist almost exclusively on digital platforms. While these platforms once promised freedom and independence and a way of bypassing the galleries, museums, and institutional gatekeepers, we have discovered that they are technically unstable and can foster paranoia and resentful behaviors. These platforms often become places where hatred of any difference, whether sexual, cultural, or political, proliferates. This applies to both the political left and the political right. The freedom once offered by these platforms is now an illusion, as website hyperlinks are corrupted or fail and Instagram accounts are cancelled, potentially erasing much of an artist’s history. This capacity for erasure is driven by new media technology, globalization, and new structures of work and consumption. If we take the seminal act of US pop artist Robert Rauschenberg—his erasure of a drawing by abstract

Erasure or Erased  199 expressionist painter Willem de Kooning in 1953—as the point of departure that perhaps signaled that an echo or trace might be all that is valued in the future. That is the future that we now inhabit, and it is defined by the impact of technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok. Witness the rise of dating apps such as Tinder, Grindr, and Blendr that locate potential partners based on proximity and sexual preference. Some of these issues have been explored in the late Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (2003), where the seminal figure of our post-MTV world—the man or woman with enduring unstable bonds—is in a permanent state of shifting circumstances. Members of the new “liquid society” are being affected by the technologies, which are changing, fundamentally, the ways in which we communicate and conduct relationships, and, more broadly, how we act politically. Even though Bauman was writing in 2003, he makes this rather salient observation which resonates with our current predicament: This only means, however, that at no other time [has] the keen search for common humanity, and the practice that follows such an assumption, been as urgent and imperative as [it is] now. In the era of globalization, the cause and the politics of shared humanity face the most fateful of the many fateful steps they have made in their long history.6 One of the most significant aesthetic, cultural, and political phenomena in recent times has been the changing role of memory in Western society—or, to put it another way, the erasure of our collective memory. Indeed, as the German/US cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen has recently pointed out, there has been a profound turning toward the past, in radical contrast to the valorization of the future so typical of earlier decades of the twentieth century.7 Since the 1960s and ’70s there has been a new contemplation of memory. As many commentators have correctly indicated, we can speak of a “memory boom” since then, and today, in the new century, one can legitimately describe it as a continuing one. This is not to suggest that memory itself, in its individual, generational, and social dimensions, is a new topic. We have been discussing memory’s complexities and mysteries across millennia, since the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible with its clarion call of Zakhor! (Remember!) in the book of Deuteronomy 32:7, with Moses instructing his fellow Israelites to remember “the days of the old/Consider the years of the many generations.”8 What is new is the proliferation of identity and gender politics, cancel culture (or online shaming, as it is sometimes called), and the decline of the modernist narratives of post-Enlightenment cultural and socially progressive movements. In the West, this decline has been accompanied by an overtly aggressive policy shift to the far right by many governments as they become more authoritarian, and more secretive. This in turn has led to the disassembling of the welfare state as nation states endeavor to assert their legitimacy by focusing on the past.9 The best evidence of this is the emergence of so-called strongmen as leaders: Boris Johnson in the UK, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, Kim Jong-un in North Korea, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and (until his recent defeat by Joe Biden) Donald Trump in the US,10 to mention only a few of the more grotesque players. The memory boom has seen a commodification of nostalgia. Witness in Australia and New Zealand the romanticizing of the failed ANZAC Gallipoli landing over a century ago, the popularization of history more generally, and the intensification of

200  Brad Buckley the individual and collective nature of memory itself.11 Currently, both forms of memory are at marked risk: The former due to neurological decay and sensory information overload, the latter because of the passing of generations and the state-sanctioned denial of atrocities, catastrophes, wars, and other traumas. Two striking examples of what we might refer to as organized memory loss are the continued rise of Holocaust deniers and the official policy of the Australian War Memorial. The memorial refuses to recognize or include any reference to what have become known as the Frontier Wars that were fought between Aboriginal people and the British from the time of the latter’s arrival in 1788. As University of Queensland academic Federica Caso has recently commented: Recognition and acknowledgement of the Frontier Wars between Indigenous peoples and European colonizers and their inclusion in the national memory of war is an important step towards reconciliation and national unity. Setting the historical records right and naming the violence that has been perpetrated are fundamental to heal the national trauma and move forward.12 In fact, we may trace the origins of studies of collective memory to modernity’s dynamic reconfiguration of the past, the present, and the future, and to classical sociological thought, particularly as represented by French philosopher Maurice Halbwach’s groundbreaking work in 1925.13 Without wishing to canonize Halbwach, let us say that his writings have significantly contributed to our understanding of the social characteristics of memory. His concept of “collective memory” was founded on the work of another French philosopher, Henri Bergson. Bergson’s subjectivist perspective on the experience of time, memory, and remembering contrasted with the logocentric characterization of culture, history, and science in the late nineteenth century. Halbwach’s concept of collective remembering was also based on French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s work on the variability of perceptual changes in accordance with forms of social organization. Are the current debates about our contemporary memory culture also indicative of an emerging paradigm of thinking about art, culture, history, and politics? Is our current era one of forgetting? How does this impact on us as artists, academics, curators, and citizens? How do we respond to it? Memory surfaced as something significant to both individual and social identity not only through Bergson’s philosophical musings, but also through Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, and French novelist Marcel Proust’s autobiographical fiction. As numerous commentators have indicated, there has been a substantial shift in the debate during the twentieth century: From memory being psychoanalyzed, at the beginning of the century, to the present situation of cultural memory, which, as the German academic Jan Assmann has described, “conveys a collectively shared knowledge.”14 What is pertinent, besides thinking and writing about cultural memory having almost become an industry in itself in recent decades, is that only since modernity have certain specific types of structural forgetting become dominant in the discourse, as in life.

Trauma The British writer H.G. Wells, began his novel The War of the Worlds in serialized form in 1897 in the UK, at the height of the Victorian Age and the British Empire—or

Erasure or Erased  201 as it was often described, “the empire on which the sun never sets.” Wells speculated, with his brother Frank, about the impact a Martian invasion would have on Britain if they behaved as the British did in their genocidal treatment, known as the Black War, against the Palawa, the Indigenous people of Tasmania.15 So Wells offers The War of the Worlds as a critique of colonization in general, but particularly of British colonization during the nineteenth century. The exploitation, subjugation, and murder of many Indigenous peoples by imperial conquest was justified and promoted by the Christian belief in the need, the responsibility, to “civilize” those societies. These ideas were embodied in the poem The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands (1899), by the English imperialist writer and poet Rudyard Kipling. While this poem urged the US to colonize the Philippine Islands, the phrase the White Man’s Burden became shorthand for the superiority of the white race and thus its obligation to civilize all other races through conquest. These conquests were celebrated, in the US, by erecting statues of slave traders, Confederate generals and explorers of the New World, mainly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the US, triggered by a series of violent attacks in 2020 by police on Black Americans and other minorities, a movement calling for the removal of these statues rapidly grew, and in some instances, direct action was taken, and citizens tore them down. The movement quickly spread to Europe, Britain, and Australia. At Oxford’s Oriel College, there were calls for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, founder of the colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), who went on to establish the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Rather ironically, funding for the scholarship is based partly on the wealth he created through his partnership with diamond mining company De Beers and the Anglo-French bank Rothschild and Sons. As Oriel College was founded in 1324, one might speculate that Rhodes is not the only alumni whose views, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, are seen as repugnant and cruel. However, as the English classist Dame Mary Beard suggests: The idea that Rhodes was a particularly dreadful lone racist wolf in the late nineteenth century is completely barking. The chances are that almost every one of the Victorian worthies who decorate our streets and cities held views as bad or worse. And a great statue cull, based on twenty-first century values, would leave few in place. Would Boudicca the sadistic terrorist (or alternatively founder of our island’s imperial ambitions—as the inscription underneath her suggests) survive on the Embankment? I doubt it.16 In Sydney, a statue of Lieutenant James Cook, erroneously referred to as “Captain” in historical texts, was graffitied by activists, and in Perth a statue of Cook was painted with the colors of the Aboriginal flag. Whether it be Australia or any other postcolonial society, Indigenous people continue to be marginalized and to sometimes be treated with condescension and paternal (echoes of nineteenth-century Christianity) attitudes. They also continue to be subjected to institutional and systemic violence.17 The ethical issue here, of course, is whether removing statues and monuments, or murals, addresses in any meaningful way the injustices and traumas of the past. As Beard also observes, “much more important is to look history in the eye and reflect on our awkward relationship to it, and what we are actually beneficiaries of, not simply to photoshop the nasty bits out.”18

202  Brad Buckley Looking at the cultural and political horizon through a different lens, we remember when in 2001 the Taliban destroyed statues of Buddha that had been carved in the third and fifth centuries. This may have happened for much the same reasons that statues in the West are being attacked and removed: Because they are monuments to or signifiers of a period of different values and beliefs—in Afghanistan, its pre-Islamic past. The Irish Times reported that “the destruction was being carried out in keeping with instructions from the Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader Mr Mullah Mohammed Omar, who ordered all statues in Afghanistan including the Buddha statues be destroyed because they offended Islam.”19 Regardless of people’s religious beliefs, there was a collective gasp of horror, as we witnessed our shared sense of humanity, our shared history, being destroyed. We clearly understand that some monuments are there not to celebrate the past but to act as a graphic reminder, a brake, on our worst collective impulses. Perhaps the extermination camps established by the German Nazis during World War II, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau (March 1942–January 1945, in occupied Poland), stands today as a monument that is among the most disturbing examples.

Adrift Biennales and other large survey exhibitions have been in the throes of death for the past two decades. One could speculate that COVID-19, along with predicted future pandemics, has simply hastened the disappearance of what was already an exhausted exhibition model. You can hear the death rattle as each new director—these are often members of a breed known as “flying curators”—announces the latest exhibition title and premise. Each time they struggle to find an approach, a structure, that will please and placate the sponsors, the government funding bodies, and the general public. Unfortunately, none of them seems to realize that art no longer has that eighteenth-­ century sovereignty over society so desired by curators, so when the biennale fails to engage with its audience in critical terms, success is then measured in “bums on seats,” playing to the crowd, art as entertainment and lifestyle. Of course, even these measures are now redundant, given the present pandemic. Who would wish to attend a biennale, art fair, or blockbuster museum exhibition when the result could be a trip to the ICU if, and this will depend on which country you are in, there is indeed an available bed. Curators, like anyone else, are obliged to frequently rethink their roles, and their curatorial beliefs and practices. The underlying quest is always to reinvent ourselves alongside the ever-evolving complexities of the democratization of art and culture. According to German philosopher Martin Heidegger, curators play an indispensable role in shaping our perception of what art is in relation to its frame, its Gestell, in delimiting what is to be included or excluded in a work of art.20 Curators do matter: They play a huge part in shaping our experience of art, artists, and culture, and yet many of them seem ignorant of their ethical responsibilities. Whether we speak of the German Jewish critic and essayist Walter Benjamin’s “aura,” the thing that gives art its individuality and its authenticity; Heidegger’s Gestell; or Italian philosopher Mario Perniola’s critique of contemporary art’s postmodern “shadows,” the curator’s cultural and institutional role is of the utmost significance.21 It cannot be overlooked or swept under the carpet. To do so is willful ideological ignorance.

Erasure or Erased  203 This is not news to anyone who is familiar with the exhausted biennale model of art curating and programming. The Swedish curator and critic Daniel Birnbaum hit the nail on its head when he recently suggested that the end of such a tired model of curating was unavoidable, citing novelist John Barth’s controversial 1968 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” and noted the compelling urgency of looking for a new model. 22 Of course when someone speaks of the death of the novel, painting, cinema, or a particular art genre, you can be certain that there is still some life left in whatever art form is being discussed. What is required is for curators to think beyond the predictable and the safe, and find or develop new models, forms, and contexts? The Swiss curator and artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries in London, Hans Ulrich Obrist, in collaboration with Stephanie Moisdon, staged the Lyon Biennale in 2007. They approached it as a kind of meta-literary game in the playfully subversive spirit of the Oulipo group of writers and mathematicians, which included the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, and Georges Perec. 23 For many, Birnbaum opines, the art fair has replaced the biennale. In fact, both the art fair and the biennale, given the changes in technologies coupled with the impact of the pandemic, are fast becoming obsolete. What we need are curatorial shifts of thinking and doing; no one has a crystal ball to see what new forms of curating lie around the corner. Just as notable curators such as the late Harald Szeemann (who chose not to be a director of an art museum but to instead work as an independent Ausstellungsmacher) and Pontus Hultén (the founding director of the Pompidou Centre, who turned the site into a multi-disciplinary laboratory and production venue) forged new ways of curating, so today’s curators urgently need to seek new curatorial ideas and routes, if they and their institutions are to play any role in this new cyber landscape.

A final thought John Berger’s statement—“The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place, there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose”—was prophetic. 24 Fifty years after Berger, we are grappling with dislocation and erasure and a world defined and controlled by five major US technology companies. At the time of writing, there is a global pandemic that has impacted every country’s health system and economy, and of course the arts are a serious casualty. In the midst of this global disaster there is the specter of a Jekyll and Hyde economy, where whole industries are failing or are surviving on government life support. Yet Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet (formerly Google), known collectively as FAANG, with a combined market capitalization of over five trillion US dollars as of January 2021, continue to prosper. Do the FAANGs offer a yet unrealized freedom or are they (with apologies to the book of Revelation) the Five Horsemen of the apocalypse?

Notes 1 H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 1. 2 Robert Hughes, Shock of the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 18.

204  Brad Buckley 3 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 15. 4 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Penguin Books, 1983), 3. 5 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 24–5. 6 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 156. 7 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 8 Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzsky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3. 9 Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, The Collective Memory Reader, 3, 10, 13–14. 10 Maggie Haberman, “Trump Departs Vowing, ‘We Will Be Back in Some Form,’” New York Times, January 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/us/politics/trump-­ presidency.html. 11 For a wide-ranging discussion on the creation of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and the military failure at Gallipoli see Peter Fitzsimons, Gallipoli (Sydney: William Heinemann Australia, 2014). 12 Federica Caso, “Lest We Forget the Frontier Wars,” Independent Australia, August 25, 2020, https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/lest-we-forget-thefrontier-wars,13840. 13 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Edward Coser (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992). 14 Roland Alexander Ißler, “Cultural Memory,” The Bonn Handbook of Globality, ed. L. Kühnhardt and T. Mayer (Cham: Springer Verlag, 2019), 6. 15 Philip Ball, “What the War of the Worlds Means Now: Why the Victorian Anxieties that Underlie H.G. Wells’ Masterpiece Have Never Gone Away,” New Statesman (American Edition), July 18, 2018, accessed August 2, 2020, https://www.newstatesman. com/2018/07/war-of-the-worlds-2018-bbc-hg-wells. 16 Mary Beard, “A Don’s Life: Cecil Rhodes and Oriel College, Oxford,” TLS, accessed August 20, 2020, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/cecil-rhodes-and-oriel-college-oxford/. 17 See “Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody,” National Archives of Australia, 1987–91, accessed August 2, 2020, https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/ first-australians/royal-commission-aboriginal-deaths-custody. 18 Beard, “A Don’s Life.” 19 “Taliban Soldiers Demolish Ancient Buddha Statues,” The Irish Times, March 3, 2001, accessed August 1, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/taliban-soldiersdemolish-ancient-buddha-statues-1.376336. 20 Mario Perniola, Art and Its Shadow (New York: Continuum, 2004), see Hugh J. Silverman’s introduction to Perniola’s thoughts on art and aesthetics in reference to Heidegger and Benjamin, pp. vii–xiii. 21 Perniola, Art and Its Shadow, xv–xviii passim. 22 John Barth, “The Archeology of Things to Come,” in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction. (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1984), 62–76. 23 For a broader discussion of the role of major survey exhibitions of contemporary art, see Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Lyon Biennial 2007: The History of a Decade that Has Not Yet Been Named (Geneva: JRP Ringier, 2007). 24 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 33.

15 All the World’s Futures Orianna Cacchione and Jessica Hong

This paper is a reflection on “All the World’s Futures: Global Art and Art History in the Wake of COVID-19,” all quotations without citations are drawn from this panel discussion which was conducted online on March 4, 2021 at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.1

On March 23, 2021, the Japanese-owned, Taiwanese-operated, and Indian-staffed container ship the Ever Given turned off course in the midst of a sandstorm, mooring itself across the Suez Canal, and blocking all maritime traffic for seven days. While not the first ship to get stuck in the canal, the plight of the Ever Given provides an apt allegory for the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted daily life around the world, including the artworld. The ship’s running aground emphasizes how stoppages, slow-downs, and blockages almost immediately reveal the underlying systems and structures that had previously been taken for granted or fully and often intentionally occluded. A little more than a year before, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The virus had been spreading throughout the world for at least four months and had caused massive national lock-downs and stay-at-home orders, first in China, followed by Italy, Spain, and the US, and eventually affecting every country in the world. National borders closed, governments struggled to secure basic medical supplies and hospital beds, hundreds of millions of people were infected with this novel coronavirus and at the time of writing this chapter over five million people have died from the disease globally.2 The artworld had to reorient as well: Exhibitions postponed, art fairs canceled, and much of the international travel and shipping that helped produce and animate contemporary events halted. This temporary pause allowed many of us to reflect on the institutions that we visit and work with, and the ways these institutions respond to our local communities. It made us reassess our normal operating procedures and identify the limitations and blindspots of our practices as curators, cultural practitioners, and scholars. In the US, the Black Lives Matter Movement has demanded changes to address equity and access in American art museums, cultural institutions, and art galleries. Furthermore, we as curators have been forced to look at our practices, behaviors, assumptions, and our own complicity within these systems. These shifts have profoundly affected how we think of the so-called “global” artworld and the global turn in art history and contemporary curatorial practice. The “where” of art, just as in the where of the production of our clothes, food, medicine, and electronics, DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-15

206  Orianna Cacchione and Jessica Hong is entangled in global networks, corporations, institutions, as well as people. Yet through the slow-downs and stoppages caused by the pandemic, these systems, networks, and inequities are now too visible to ignore. This essay expands upon the panel discussion “All the World’s Futures: Global Art and Art History in the Wake of COVID-19” held virtually on March 4, 2021. The title comes from the 2015 Venice Biennale curated by the late Okwui Enwezor, to suggest a consideration of the current state of things as well as future states of things. Organized about a year after the first COVID-19 cases were publicly identified in the US, this panel brought together artists and curators from four continents—Ho Tzu Nyen, Serge Alain Nitegeka, and Project Anywhere’s Sean Lowry and Simone Douglas—to reflect on the impacts of the pandemic on global practices and even the possibilities that may have arisen. The following are mediations on the themes that emerged in our conversations together as summarized by the panel’s organizers and moderators, supplemented by direct quotations from the panelists drawn from this discussion. We must, however, acknowledge our specific and limited vantage points as two curators working within American art museums.

Changing circulations The pandemic wrought changes—expected and unexpected—in how art moves around the world, but this brought new opportunities for artists and museums to pivot and find new ways of working and engaging audiences. Museum closures resulted in extreme losses of revenue either as visitors were either barred from these spaces or as attendance was dramatically reduced to comply with public health guidelines. Exhibitions closed, loans were canceled, and shipping rates increased exponentially. Artists, curators, and couriers were often prohibited from entering other countries or faced prolonged mandatory quarantines, diminishing the feasibility of international travel. In our conversations, Ho persistently brought up how paths of circulation affected not only daily life in Singapore but also the way he works. In Singapore, the effects of the pandemic were first experienced through its effect on infrastructure and the supply chain, particularly questions around the country’s ability to sustain its predominantly imported food supply. This inspired Ho to collaborate with a migrant worker, activist, and poet Ripon Chowdhury, on a video project, Waiting (2020), as part of London gallery Edel Assanti’s “Contactless Delivery” online programming. Here the pandemic itself inspired and altered Ho’s normal practice, ultimately resulting in a new form of work. In the artworld, the shutting down of typical routes of exchange and exhibitions opened up alternative modes of working and access. This was perhaps most profoundly experienced in the almost immediate shift to digital platforms and programming for museum audiences—virtual tours were instituted, programs were presented on Zoom, Instagram, and Facebook live, the recently launched Clubhouse, and the online viewing room became ubiquitous for art fairs and galleries. The benefits of providing content to global audiences who have access to the internet was alluring, and seemed as if it might offer a counterbalance to the ways in which privilege and international mobility exclude many from the international biennials and art fairs that mark the elite levels of access to the artworld. Project Anywhere intentionally eschews traditional systems of circulation: “Project Anywhere uses an innovative blind

All the World’s Futures  207 peer-review program to replace the role of the curator. It provides artists and artistic researchers working outside traditional exhibition systems with peer validation, community support, and global dissemination of their work.”3 They solicit exhibition proposals from curators and artists around the world to be considered under peer review. Once a project is accepted, it is presented at Project Anywhere’s annual conference. The pandemic further affected their decentralized model and forced Douglas and Lowry to reconceive their annual conference as a virtual event. Moreover, because of the pandemic, the project initiators could not travel and Douglas herself was unable to leave Australia to return to her job and residence in New York. In shifting to a virtual format, they were able to bring a global audience “into play” but also provide a context for local artists to reach new audiences. At the same time, the constant mediation of people and artworks onto the flat screen of our computers, cellphones, and tablets inevitably affected human interactivity and how we experience physical artworks. In this virtual translation, what is lost? For Nitegeka, presenting artworks intended to be experienced in three dimensions on a screen or in digitized form cannot provide the same effect as seeing them in person, standing beside or walking around them. For Ho, while he acknowledged the “impossible task to translate a sculpture through the internet,” he suggested instead we shift the question to ask not what the sculpture can be when it “meshed with a different interface” but rather how the artist can be adaptable based on the project itself. He continued: So maybe the term translation is also interesting to think about. Sometimes we think about translation as the attempt to somehow convey the original. And we think about that process as incorporating a certain loss of meaning with the

Figure 15.1  Ho Tzu Nyen, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA), 2017– ongoing, video-­still from algorithmically composed video, infinite loop, © courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery.

208  Orianna Cacchione and Jessica Hong translation. But what if we think about it differently, we think about translation as adding something to the original, and so we think about translation in a positive sense as transformation.4 Contemplating the multiple types of artworks and virtual mediations, Lowry suggested discussing translation not in terms of loss and gain, but to “realize that there’s more than one portal, if you will … more than one materialization.” Instead of thinking about how we translate what we do in the space of the gallery, the museum, or the studio, how can we begin to find new ways to engage works of art that draw in more audiences, and make not only the white cube but contemporary art in general more accessible?

Reimaging cultural institutions How the pandemic exposed the problems and limitations of current institutional structures was one of the first discussions we had with the speakers in conceiving this panel. It brought up pressing questions including whether this space and time of reflection will signal a larger shift away from or a rejection of operations as usual, and if so, whether that will impact how we define and undefine our practices and institutions. Simultaneously, at many museums, especially those in the US, long closures that resulted from stay-at-home orders led to lay-offs and budget crises. In many cases, part-time staff such as museum guards, front of house workers, facilities staff, and museum educators were the first to be laid off. In other situations, the pandemic exposed inequities in hiring practices, compensation, and benefits policies. Many of our colleagues whose work is essential to activating the spaces of our institutions and museums—welcoming visitors, invigilating, and teaching in our galleries—were most often hourly workers who did not qualify for healthcare let alone sick leave. More concerning still, many of these workers were People of Color and often represented the largest percentages of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) staff members at our museums. Combined with #BlackLivesMatter—spurred into action in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020—museums were forced to reckon with their own policies and priorities to examine how they perpetuate structural racism and white supremacy. One result was that staff members felt they finally had the space to speak up about how they had been treated and what they experienced or what they witnessed, thus putting pressure on museum leadership to make significant changes, although it is uncertain when and if change will come. Beyond questions of how we support our staff and colleagues, the pandemic forced a reconsideration of how we support artists and communities. As exhibitions, commissions, and residencies were canceled, rescheduled, or postponed indefinitely, many artists lost income and opportunities to show their work or develop new projects. In this void, some museums stepped up to commission new work by local artists. However, Nitegeka noted the importance of curators boldly supporting artists: “I think there needs to be more of the curators and the institutions showing diverse art needs to be more brave in the sense that the curation of work has to be within reason, without restrictions.” He argued for the necessity for curators and institutions to work with an artist to “create the work further” instead of “restricting it further,”

All the World’s Futures  209 so that the collaboration is not based around saying no but rather finding ways to let the work have the space it needs and produce the effect originally intended by the artist. More than anything, however, Nitegeka called for institutions to become more welcoming and inclusive: “[In] Joburg [Johannesburg] as a city, I dream that where everyone can have access to institutions and more people are knowledgeable enough to enjoy and celebrate the arts.” This was a call to action. When we can reopen fully, how will we make our institutions more accessible, and how will we thoughtfully and intentionally welcome new audiences?

Acknowledging local histories and legacies In order to do so, we must reckon with the histories that created our institutions and how they continue to uphold inaccessibility and inequity. The museum, in its public incarnation after the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rise, was founded upon colonialism and conquest to display the spoils of war and amass assets and wealth in the name of the empire. As we know, these imperial legacies remain and persist in the structures and systems that underpin these institutions and are palpably felt by visitors and staff alike. It cannot be underemphasized how the pandemic gravely revealed the ineffectiveness, indeed failures, of these systems, and if not contended with how the consequences of these failures—from collections being built with stolen cultural objects, visitors feeling misrepresented or excluded from these sites, to refusing psychological safety for staff members that are meant to carry out the museum’s work—will reverberate beyond the institutional site. This pandemic has also brought to the fore that we are part of an interconnected whole, demonstrated by the virus’s spread from person to person first affecting local communities then affecting global travel, trade, as well as diplomacy. It is an experience that illustrated the connectedness of our actions and engagements with the lands and waters where we live, work, curate, and make art to in fact resonate beyond our immediate contexts. Yet our actions and daily lives obscure the histories of settler colonialism that made our very existence possible. How do we unearth and respect the narratives and histories within these lands to learn from, build, and expound upon what came before? In our conversation, Douglas echoed the sentiments of Rhoda Roberts, an arts executive and Widjabul Wiyebal woman from the Bundjalung nation in Australia: “If you don’t pay attention to the land, it doesn’t pay attention to you.” Hence a first step is one of acknowledgment. We, as moderators both based in the US, began by recognizing that our respective institutions are built on lands stolen from Indigenous nations. So too did Douglas and Lowry, underscoring the distinct historical and cultural contexts from which we work. Institutions in the US have historically erased Native peoples from the land’s origin story. Within museological settings, Native cultures are presented in the past tense, negating their continued existence (e.g., Chicago has the third largest Native, urban population in the US), 5 and continued contributions to the social, political, and cultural landscapes. Along with naming past and present significance, Douglas and Lowry drew our attention to the ensuing generations of Indigenous nations and knowledges and “a commitment to the beginning of the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonization.” Once we acknowledge the violent, colonial origins of many of our institutions, respect these histories, embody Indigenous knowings and other knowledges, we can move toward

210  Orianna Cacchione and Jessica Hong safer and more equitable futures for the collective. But this is only a start. While reviewing potential projects, Project Anywhere always considers “the way projects take place within communities and to see whether appropriate consultation is taking place and also whether they’re paying respect to the land that they stand on,” while being mindful of the global cultural dialogues in which these projects take part. Douglas observed that, ... the projects themselves, each artist and designer in the exhibition, powerfully suggest that the world is not a fixed experience. Rather, that it is a shapeshifter revealed through time, culture, necessity, and politics profoundly human. Through their works, we encounter the intimate and the infinite, and their works reveal our symbolic relationship to the world where our actions and environment are entwined narratives.6 Another consideration is that of understanding how the lands and its many histories shape cultural contexts and the conception of said lands as nations and geopolitical regions. Project Anywhere highlighted Gabriel Hensche, Björn Kühn, and Anna Romanenko’s Liminal Dome (2014), presented at their first conference. Rather than rooted within the lands per se, the work explored the liminal space between them, in the waters connecting the lands. Beginning in Germany and situated in the ocean between Germany and Poland, the artists would travel down in a circular “submarine architecture” from the ocean’s surface to an underwater garden as an attempt “to stage an environment that questions the conditions of possible aquatic life.”7 However, weather conditions drifted the structure across the border into Poland such that Polish police returned them to German territory. What was intended as an exploration of prospective and alternative modes of living and new ways of being in the environment was obstructed by enforced restrictions imposed by historic yet nonetheless fabricated boundaries. These regions and territories are highly mediated by governments and political actors that limit their possibilities. So how can we collectively rethink the ways we engage with the lands and waters that we inhabit? Ho’s work, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) (2012–), appears to speak to this quandary. His conception of CDOSEA began with this question: “What constitutes the unity of Southeast Asia—a region never unified by a single religion, language, or political system?” Allied forces popularized the term Southeast Asia following World War II, which was intended as a term of convenience to refer to this broader region, to their ultimate privilege.8 Although Ho’s work focuses on Southeast Asia, it also addresses the impulse of colonial entities to impose “comprehensive” order and delineations across the globe, an impossible and mercenary task with perilous consequences. Ho emphasizes that rather than prioritizing the global, which is primarily concerned with economic and geopolitical discourses, we might instead think of the new category which is that of the planetary. As he states: So maybe it’s a way of thinking that requires us to calibrate the scale at which we are looking and to see [that] things can operate simultaneously at different scales. So the scale of the local and also the scale of the planetary, these are sort of interesting things for us to consider when we are practicing and thinking about the dissemination, distribution, and engagement of our works.

All the World’s Futures  211 We can start by considering the local, but by deploying the planetary as a framework in which the local exists, we can remind ourselves that we are one part of a larger whole—a communally networked planet—potentially to garner a sense of deeper responsibility.

Conceptualizing the self The planetary realm consists of sites that comprise communities of individuals. The 2020 pandemic year raised a series of new questions about the self. What influences our conception of the self—our familial and intimate relationships, our professions, our activities—have all been upended, even lost. What then does the self mean in this context of restricted movement, forced physical distancing, and inorganically recreating social worlds through an intangible virtual sphere? Nitegeka has explored this throughout his practice given his personal experience as a refugee while waiting for his South African citizenship to be conferred. He is deeply familiar with dual constraints of limited mobility and forced migration, which has shaped his understanding of identity as complex, multifaceted, and fluid. However, when Nitegeka talks about identity, it is “not the one defined by borders or … inscribed in passports and identity documents or the one handed down from our parents.” He is interested in what he calls the “mirror perspective, you standing in front of a mirror and looking at yourself, asking yourself, ‘What are the sum of the things we can learn about and construct identities from?’” In his new body of work, Nitegeka incorporates his own face and body, which appears to be “struggling with a load.” The metaphorical load can be what the self carries: Memories, experiences, narratives, and ideas. It is a labor to carry this ontological load, which may get temporarily lost when one moves into new surroundings. But once they are able to reach their destination, whether by choice or under duress, as Nitegeka states, “they’re able to find themselves again. And the identity takes on a journey, and it takes on wherever they find themselves.” The pandemic has engendered a different kind of journey or interaction with the self through the perpetual mirror of Zoom, among other video platforms. As Nitegeka remarked: It’s basically a time of looking in the mirror. For example, on this screen, I’m looking at myself talking … and there’s an imagined audience that is looking back at me. So there’s also that way of thinking about the mirror and being on the other side looking at yourself, and not understanding how such forces, unseen forces, can impact … the way you think about yourself and how you progress forward, into shaping who you want to be.9 The load Nitegeka carries in his paintings could be an attempt to hold onto the former sense of self or perhaps grasping and comprehending this load in order to evolve expanded conceptions of the self. That said, the constancy of looking at the self on a virtual screen is exhausting and unnatural. In such a climate we feel the effects of “Zoom fatigue” with its attendant physiological and psychological consequences,10 variable upon the demographic.11 Moreover, this fatigue will likely have lasting effects after the pandemic.12 With this in mind, the artist’s load takes on further metaphorical weight: We are unsure what additional, new forms our loads will take as we

212  Orianna Cacchione and Jessica Hong

Figure 15.2  S erge Alain Nitegeka, Identity is Fragile III, 2021 ©, charcoal and paint on wood, 120 × 140 × 4.5  cm, courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg © Serge Alain Nitegeka. Photo by Nina Lieska.

move into a “post-COVID” or “COVID-filled” future, but we know our bodies and conceptions of ourselves will have to carry much more than we anticipated. It is worth noting that the pandemic has foregrounded the divisions within our societies. For those privileged enough to remain at home, to have a home, and have access to the digital world, it has allowed people to look inward, examine, learn, obsess, and even reconceive the self. Conversely, those who lost their livelihoods have needed to reassess their priorities and their needs. So, this exploration of the self, regardless of the circumstance, is not about attaining an idealized notion of the self for the betterment of the individual but how the self that we both carry and embody can contribute to something larger than the individual self.

Conclusion When we create and produce in a given site, who and what do we impact, and what is our reach? In this time of virtual and global circulation, what is the extent of such impact? During our conversations with Ho Tzu Nyen, Serge Alain Nitegeka, and Project Anywhere’s Simone Douglas and Sean Lowry, we began with overall systemic

All the World’s Futures  213 consequences of this pandemic, moved onto how they distinctly affected our individual contexts, then tried to work through balancing our immediate locales and the pressure as well as the necessity to participate in global cultural dialogues. When people ruminate on the global, it can often be thought of in a holistic and unified manner. But that can efface specificities and in turn the needs of actual communities. Even as we write this, it is impossible to remove ourselves from the specific spaces in which we work and live even while doing all we can to try and encapsulate the multifaceted, unbalanced experiences people are having around the world. Throughout our conversation and in this text, we acknowledge that slippages between the local and global can lead us to hazardous terrain of falsely universalizing or generalizing experiences. In the beginning of the pandemic, many politicians and celebrities alike called it the “great equalizer,” which was quickly proven false, as BIPOC communities and those facing economic scarcity had higher rates of infection as well as death.13 The blissful ignorance of the individuals who could see or claim the pandemic as a great equalizer demonstrates extreme societal stratification, segregation, and the impossibility as well as danger of globalizing pandemic experiences. To return to Ho’s sentiments, perhaps there is a way to explore the simultaneity of the individual and the communal, local, and planetary, without neglecting our fellow humans. While our intention is not to universalize, what seems apparent is that the consequential COVID-19 pandemic has moved the planet into a new paradigm. Life as we knew it, no matter its contexts, wherever it is, must be reimagined and restructured. The possibility of a “new normal” is long awaited. Collectively, we began to question openly our institutions in order to reveal structures, systems, and processes that had been taken for granted as being fixed and assumed to work for society are mere illusions and possibly on the brink of collapse. Yet while it took a pandemic for the widespread awareness of these forms of inequity, marginal communities have experienced and already understood the effects of systemic inequity, many spending their lives fighting these systems and dying or being killed amidst these struggles. Additionally, the pandemic has emphasized just how deeply interconnected we are. Such realizations will manifest variously depending on one’s context, but it appears we are all attempting to rethink and shape, even recreate, new models and new understandings of being in the world. Eschewing this idea of linear progress, how can we truly remain respectful of the lands on which we stand, honoring the lives and experiences of our forebears, and reflecting on the histories and narratives we overlooked as we learn from the past and present? How can we understand ourselves and societies as multiplicitous, and see that difference is not a threat but a generative part of a larger social, cultural, political, even economic fabric? Returning to the Ever Given: Through tremendous collective efforts, the ship once wedged in the Suez Canal was finally freed. But as of this writing it was being held in a dispute over who should pay for the labor needed to dislodge it.14 Similarly, we have seen extraordinary scientific collaborations across the globe leading to the development, production, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in record time, but we are witnessing the skepticism of this warp speed, unequal access to vaccines, and growing tensions due to these distributional inequities. As we recognize our interconnectivity, we are at the same time experiencing the challenges of global collaboration, but not insurmountably. “All the World’s Futures” was intended as a prompt, an evocation, even a provocation, because we seem to be in a period of critical discovery and transition. Rather than getting moored—whether by institutional parameters, divided by

214  Orianna Cacchione and Jessica Hong frustration, or becoming focused on a single context—we must recognize that it is our responsibility to participate and to keep each other accountable. And for those with certain privileges, it is an even greater responsibility to strive together to shape reformed systems, networks, and communities. This is for the sake of the collective planet while in deference to our past, for the well-being of our present and our future.

Notes 1 Orianna Cacchione and Jessica Hong, mods., “All the World’s Futures: Global Art and Art History in the Wake of COVID-19,” panel discussion with Ho Tzu Nyen, Serge Alain Nitegeka, and Project Anywhere’s Sean Lowry and Simone Douglas, conducted online on March 4, 2021, at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, and Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, US. Video recording is available at https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/ events/1830/all-the-worlds-futures-global-art-and-art-history-in-the-wake-of-covid-19/. 2 “Covid-19 Dashboard,” Coronavirus Resource Center, John Hopkins University, accessed November 3, 2021, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html. 3 “Project Anywhere,” accessed April 19, 2021, http://www.projectanywhere.net/about/. 4 Ho, “All the World’s Futures.” 5 Daniel Hautzinger, “‘We’re Still Here’: Chicago’s Native American Community,” Wttw, November 8, 2018, https://interactive.wttw.com/playlist/2018/11/08/native-americanschicago. 6 Douglas, “All the World’s Futures.” 7 Gabriel Hensche, Björn Kühn, and Anna Romanenko, “About Liminal Dome,” accessed April 18, 2021, https://www.liminaldome.com/about-liminal-dome. 8 Russell H. Fifield, “Southeast Asia as a Regional Concept,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 11, no. 2 (1983): 2. 9 Nitegeka, “All the World’s Futures.” 10 Taneasha White, “‘Zoom Fatigue’ Is Real: Here’s How to Cope (and Make It Through Your Next Meeting),” medically reviewed by Timothy J.Legg, Healthline, February 22, 2021, https://www.healthline.com/health/zoom-fatigue#why-it-happens. 11 Melissa de Witte, “Zoom Fatigue Worse for Women, Stanford Study Finds,” Stanford News, April 13, 2021, https://news.stanford.edu/2021/04/13/zoom-fatigue-worse-women/. 12 Theresa Machemer, “‘Zoom Fatigue’ May Be With Us for Years: Here’s How We’ll Cope,” National Geographic, April 13, 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/ article/zoom-fatigue-may-be-with-us-for-years-heres-how-well-cope. 13 Bethany L. Jones and Jonathan S. Jones, “Gov. Cuomo is Wrong, Covid-19 Is Anything but an Equalizer,” The Washington Post, April 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost. com/outlook/2020/04/05/gov-cuomo-is-wrong-covid-19-is-anything-an-equalizer/; Toyin Owoseje, “Coronavirus Is ‘the Great Equalizer,’ Madonna Tells Fans from her Bathtub,” CNN, March 23, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/entertainment/madonnacoronavirus-video-intl-scli/index.html. 14 Yuliya Talmazan, Charlene Gubash, and Arata Yamamoto, “Dislodged Suez Canal Cargo Ship Ever Given Held Amid $916 Million Claim,” NBC News, April 14, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/dislodged-suez-canal-cargo-ship-ever-givenheld-amid-916-n1264017.

All the World’s Futures  215

Figure 0.2  Simone Douglas, from Field Notes, 2021 © Simone Douglas, C-type print, 24 × 15.7″ (61 × 40 cm).

16 Appendix Project Anywhere Sean Lowry and Simone Douglas

Many of the artworks and artistic projects explored in this book were not conceived for display within traditional exhibition spaces and programming schedules. And, as we have variously established across this edited volume, there is artistic value in some forms of radically materially and temporally dispersed art. So, what kinds of exhibition formats better suit contemporary artists working at the outermost limits of location specificity? How do artists best represent and disseminate such work? How should art of this kind be evaluated? In this appendix section, we briefly discuss an exhibition model that seeks to address these challenges. Project Anywhere is a global exhibition program specifically designed for evaluating and promoting art and artistic research at the outermost limits of location specificity. Conceived by Sean Lowry—one of the editors of this book—in 2012, and developed in consultation with the Project Anywhere Editorial Committee,1 it provides artists with peer validation, detailed expert feedback from a diverse range of established artists and scholars, community support, and global dissemination of their work. A key feature of Project Anywhere’s global exhibition model is its approach to artistic selection and evaluation. This robust and exhaustive approach, in which the function of curator is substituted for a democratizing double-blind peer evaluation system, does not use artistic reputation or exhibition track record as a criterion for assesment. Projects can be incomplete, highly speculative, or discursive in nature, and can extend or contradict existing methodologies. Each year, all proposal submissions are comprehensively reviewed by at least four artist academics of international standing, provisionally selected for initial resubmission, and then ranked for final selection by the editorial committee. The annual international global exhibition program is announced each year in February. 2 Project Anywhere accepts individual and collaborative proposals from artists and researchers working anywhere in the world. (To date, Project Anywhere has received proposals for artworks and artistic projects situated in extremely diverse locations including remote deserts, rural communities, deep underground, underwater, on nomadic journeys, online, and even low Earth orbit.) Although the global exhibition program is hosted through a dedicated website3 and disseminated in conjunction with other digital channels,4 it is not an online exhibition. Instead, its web presence is used simply to illuminate the existence of work which is otherwise understood to be situated elsewhere in time and space. Extending upon its core global exhibition program, Project Anywhere also hosts international conferences, symposia, and published responses to the core exhibition program developed by Simone Douglas and Sean Lowry. 5 At the cessation of DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-16

Appendix: Project Anywhere  217 the annual global exhibition hosting period, hosted artists are invited to present at the biennial conference—which has to date been held at Parsons School of Design, the New School, in New York City. An additional annual symposium has to date been held at the University of Melbourne to mark the launch of the global exhibition program. These conferences and symposia bring hosted artists into active public dialogue with leading artists, scholars, designers, and curators in the host cities. All contributors at these public events are then invited to develop an alternative page-based representation of their projects for the biennial publication Anywhere—which provides another opportunity for artists to speculate upon or rethink their work through text and image. 6 Given the challenges typically associated with exhibiting and evaluating art outside traditional exhibition environments, the evaluation criteria established by the editorial committee is designed to sensitively balance radical openness and critical rigor.7 Moreover, as peer evaluation takes place at the proposal rather than outcome stage, Project Anywhere’s evaluation process and exhibition model seeks to accommodate the extent to which a creative work is a dynamic entity. Consequently, it can be counterproductive to prescriptively pre-empt an outcome too early in its formation. Of central concern throughout the often uneven processes of conception, production, and dissemination is the importance of valuing and managing ambiguity and contradiction. Project Anywhere was conceived and developed in the same spirit of radical material, temporal, and spatial distribution as this edited volume. Although by no means a new development historically, these processes are now an increasingly ubiquitous feature of contemporary art—despite the fact that institutional mechanisms and support structures remain largely beholden to more traditional exhibition formats, locations, and programming schedules. It is precisely this conundrum that Project Anywhere addresses. Ultimately, it is not possible to wholly explain or describe a creative work, and there is no formula for consistently accounting for how experience and explanation should ideally work together to produce and transmit meaning. It is vital that evaluative frameworks and exhibition models designed to support radically spatially and temporally distributed art do not expunge the value of contradiction, discursivity, and speculation. Significantly, the challenges and insights associated with developing Project Anywhere’s global exhibition program and peer evaluation model have been germane and instructive to the conception and development of this book.

Notes 1 See “Committee and Contact,” Project Anywhere, accessed August 28, 2021, http://www. projectanywhere.net/steering-committee/. 2 Project Anywhere’s annual global exhibition program is announced through the Art & Education newsletter. All announcements, dating from 2012 to the present, are archived in the Art & Education directory, accessed October 28, 2021, https://www.artandeducation. net/directory/79538/project-anywhere. 3 The annual Project Anywhere global exhibition program is published online, accessed November 5, 2021, http://www.projectanywhere.net. 4 In addition to the Art & Education newsletter, the annual Project Anywhere global exhibition program is disseminated through social media channels by editorial committee member Honi Ryan, accessed November 5, 2021, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ projectanywhereart/; Twitter https://twitter.com/PRJCTAnywhere; and Facebook https:// www.facebook.com/project.anywhere.art/.

218  Sean Lowry and Simone Douglas 5 See “Conferences and Publications,” Project Anywhere, accessed August 28, 2021, http:// www.projectanywhere.net/conference/. 6 See Project Anywhere “Conferences and Publications.” 7 See “Evaluation Criteria,” Project Anywhere, accessed August 28, 2021, http://www.­ projectanywhere.net/peer-review/.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures. Abaya, S. 189 Abdul-Nassar, G. 141 Abraham, N. 142; “Notes on the Phantom” 139–40 Abrams, D.: Cure: Poetic Healing and Recipes, The 122; Glittereiki 120–31; Melting and Oozing and Dripping with Pleasure 123; Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People 121, 121–2, 124; Self-Love Spell 123 abstract expressionism 12, 95, 151 Academy Awards 29 Acconci, V.: “Situation Esthetics” 45; Step Piece 151 Acti.VĀ.tion 182n10 Adorno, A. 2, 20, 29–30 adrift 202–3 Aesthetics (Hegel) 97 Aesthetics of Poverty: A Rationale in Designing for Philippine Theater (Fajardo) 186 African American Folk Healing (Mitchem) 122 agential realism 92 Ahmed, S. 58; Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality 71–2n10 Air Show/Air Conditioning (Atkinson and Baldwin) 23 aitu: anchoring 179; fale aitu 179; Niu Aitu 179–80 Akinmowo, O. 124 Alamo, S. 91 Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty 29 Algabre, S. 188 allographic 8, 31n4 All the Lights We Cannot See (2016 exhibition, Pyongyang, North Korea) 24, 33n52 All the Things I Know but of Which I Am Not at the Moment Thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969 (Barry) 10, 109, 154–6, 158

Almenberg, G. 42 American Museum of Natural History 192 American University of Beirut (AUB) 133, 134, 144; Student Council 141 Amnesty War Crimes law of 1991 (Lenabon) 140 Amore, M. B. 87n25 Andaur, R. 190 Andre, C.: Equivalent VIII 198 Anywhere or Not at All (Osborne) 31n7 Arafat, Y. 147n22 Arendt, H. 134, 135 Armleder, J. 15 Arp, H. J. 98 art: conceptual 11, 24, 89, 102, 119n37; contemporary 1, 2, 4–6, 8, 13–16, 20–4, 30, 31n2, 37, 43, 45, 47n5, 80, 101, 111, 115, 132, 134, 168, 169, 171, 176, 182n6, 202, 208, 217; context 45; definition of 7–8; as exchange system 45; First Nations 78, 80, 82, 171, 178, 180; kinship as 170–1; mail 24; materiality of 97; net 8, 26–7; participation 42–6; performance 35–48, 108, 151, 173; place of 30–1; postconceptual 13, 25, 102, 111–13, 115; post-internet 25–6; practice 35, 39, 125, 126, 169; relational 16, 95; see also individual entries Arte Povera: Italian Landscape exhibition 185 Artforum (O’Doherty) 5, 45 Artifact Piece (San Diego Museum of Man) 16 Art in America 44, 45 artistic complex 158 artistic research 12, 207, 216 Artschwager, R. 87n24 artworks with kinds of radical identity, historical generation of 150–6 Artworld 21, 22, 198 Asher, M. 6, 15; Vertical Columns of Accelerated Air 23

220 Index Assanti, E.: “Contactless Delivery” online programming 206 Assmann, J. 200 Atkinson, T. 109; Air Show/Air Conditioning 23 Atlas Group (Raad) 106, 113 AUB see American University of Beirut (AUB) Auslander, P. 108 Austin, J.: How to Do Things with Words 38 Australian War Memorial 200 Austria, T. 189 authorship/agency 19, 25, 39, 41, 60, 90, 93, 94, 98, 113, 114, 116, 150, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164n26, 177 Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) 120 Backhand Maiden (Raymond) 175, 181 Bacon, A. 19, 27 Bakhtin, M. 179 Bal, M. 192 Baldwin, M. 109; Air Show/Air Conditioning 23 Balkin, A.: Public Smog 23 Baluyut, P. R. 189 Banksy 29 Barad, K. 91–2, 95 Barf, B. 103 Barry, R. 23; All the Things I Know but of Which I Am Not at the Moment Thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969, 10, 109, 154–6, 158; Inert Gas, Helium 154 Barth, J.: “Literature of Exhaustion, The” 203 Barthes, R.: Camera Lucida 83–4 Base of the World no. 3, Homage to Gali (Manzoni) 10 Basquiat, J. M. 124 Bates, B. 88n30 Bauman, Z.: Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds 199 Beard, D. M. 201 Beauvoir, S. de 39 Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice (Nagham) 171 Bed In (Lennon) 43 Beirut lab 132–48; back to the future 142–5; lingering 139–42; peddling time 134–9 Beirut University College (BUC) 141 Benjamin, W. 24, 202; Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) 7 Berger, J. 203 Bergson, H. 200 Bersani, L. 40 bandness 101–19 Bickerton, A. 22 Biden, J. 199 bigotry 42

Birdcalls (Lawler) 18 Bishop, C. 17, 22, 95 Black Lives Matter Movement 46, 124, 205, 208 Black Women’s Health Book, The (White) 122 Blanqui, A.: astronomical hypothesis 75–6 bodies: of the rights movements 42–6; in spaces 16–17 Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The (Kundera) 197 Borell, N. 180 Bourriaud, N. 45; Relational Aesthetics 37; relational aesthetics, concept of 17, 37, 46, 95 Bowen, D. 192 Braidotti, R. 91, 92, 93 Braque, G. 197 Brecht, G.: Play Incident 44 Breslin, M. 34n66 Breviario di estetica (The Essence of Aesthetic) (Croce) 10 Brillo Boxes (Warhol) 21 Broodthaers, M. 11 Brooks, D. 43 BTS 105 Bugmy, T. 85n2 Burden, C. 152–3; Confession, The 152; Samson 153 Buren, D. 23 Burgess, A.: Clockwork Orange, A 103, 104 Burgin, V. 37; “Situational Aesthetics” 45 Burton, J. 34n66 Butler, J. 40–1; Excitable Speech 38; Gender Trouble 41 Cagayat, P. 191–2 Cage, J. 19, 35 Calvino, I. 203 Camera Lucida (Barthes) 83–4 Campus at War: Student Politics at the American University of Beirut 1967–1975, A (Rabah) 141 capitalism 6, 10, 38, 92–4, 134, 146n5; late 14; surveillance 25 care 120 carnivalesque 179 Carrier, D. 29 Carving Water, Melting Stones (Hu Yun) 188 Caso, R. 200 Celant, G. 185, 187 Cézanne, P. 197 Chandler, J. 10 Chicken Run 34n78 Chopin, H. 87n24 chorten 49 Chowdhury, R.: Waiting 206 chronotopographical nodes 49–53 circulation 24–5; changing 206–8

Index  221 Civil Rights 42 Cixous, H. 193 Clark, L. 44; The I and the You 36; Relational Object (Goggles) 36 Clementis, V. 198 Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess) 103, 104 Cold War 38 collective memory 200 collective remembering 200 Collingwood, R. 10; Principles of Art, The 31n9 commodity criticism 21 communication 6, 17, 38 conceptual art 11, 24, 119n37; dematerialization of 89, 102 conceptualism 95–6 Confession, The (Burden) 152 constructivism 98 contemporary 20 contemporary art 1, 2, 4–6, 8, 13–16, 20–4, 30, 31n2, 37, 43, 45, 47n5, 80, 101, 111, 115, 132, 134, 168, 169, 171, 176, 182n6, 202, 208, 217 context art 45 conventional works of art, time and place of 159 Cook, J. 201 Corgan, B. 103 Cousin Jean 129 Coutts-Smith, K. 45; “Violence in Art” 44 COVID-19, 205 C_rafts 187 Crary, J. 192 Creating Portals: The Black Speculative Imagination 124 Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) 207, 210 Croce, B.: Breviario di estetica (The Essence of Aesthetic) 10 Cue From Life Itself: Filipino Artists Transform the Everyday 186, 187 Cuillier, J. 124 cultural institutions 208–9 culture 5; industry 29–30, 34n79; popular 7, 28–30, 38, 103, 112, 114 Cure: Poetic Healing and Recipes, The (Abrams) 122 Cut Piece (Ono) 35, 43, 44 Dada 5, 6, 17, 44 Daguerre, L. 7, 193 Dans, E. 189 Danto, A. C. 11, 21–3, 32n43, 116n1, 198 Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) (Benjamin) 7 Daumier, H. 7

Debord, G.: Society of the Spectacle, The 17 Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (Hiller) 11 deft critique 145n2 De Haan, S.: Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers 15 De La Soul 104 Deleuze, G. 58, 72n12, 90–4, 99 dematerialization 10–11, 24, 37, 89, 94, 97, 102, 154 Denes, A.: Rice/Tree/Burial 81; Wheatfield – A Confrontation 81 Derrida, J. 20, 145n2 Desert, M.: Inert Gas Series 23 De Stijl 98 Dewey, J. 186, 187 Dia Art Foundation, New York 33n50 Dia Beacon, New York 18 diorama effect 193 discrimination 29, 42 distribution 24–5 Douglas, S. 60, 74, 87n24, 206, 209, 210, 212, 216 Duchamp, M. 23, 33n49, 44, 149, 203 Dukes of Stratosphear 103 Durkheim, E. 200 DuVernay, A. 29; 13th 15 Dworkin, C.: No Medium 11 Eccher, D. 185 Edelman, L. 40 Edjawan, M. 189 Edwards, A. 126 Eliasson, O.: Ice Watch 83 epilogue 69–40 Equivalent VIII (Andre) 198 Erased,__Ascent of the Invisible (Halwani) 147n24 erasure 197–8 Essentialism 156–8; configuration space of 159–60; ideational objects 159–60; language 159–60; and radical identity 161–3; surface 159–60 Evangelista, M. 189 Evans, A. 124 evidence 64, 64–9, 66–9 Excellences and Perfections (Ulman) 26 Excitable Speech (Butler) 38 Experimental Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic, The (Gómez) 122 EXPORT 45, 46 fāgogo stories 173, 179, 180 Fajardo, B. 187, 189, 193; Aesthetics of Poverty: A Rationale in Designing for Philippine Theate 186 fale aitu 1379

222 Index Fale Aitu: The House of Spirits (Kihara) 179 Fanon, F. 39 Fantastic Mr. Fox 34n78 Farry, C. 88n29 Fashion Institute of the Metropolitan Museum Art, New York 29 Fateh 141 Female Extension (Sollfrank) 26 feminism 40, 92 Field Notes 3 Finding Nemo 34n78 First Nations art 78, 80, 82, 171, 178, 180 Fisher, J. A. 101 Floyd, G. 29 Fluxus 17 Foote, N. 45 Ford, D. 88n29 Forgetting the Art World (Lee) 117n10 formalism 12 Foster, H. 15 Franco Toselli gallery, Milan 6 Fraser, A. 15 Frazier, D. 29 Free People’s Medical Clinic 124 Free Your Mind: An African American Guide to Meditation and Freedom (Rainey) 122 Frost, R.: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening 32n43 Fury, G. 46 Gabo, N. 98 Gabriel, M. 12 Gadamer, H.-H. 145n2 Gaga aesthetics 29 Gallery of Lost Art, The (The Tate) 27, 34n36 Gambino, C.: This Is America 29 Garau, S.: I am 10 gender 20, 38–42, 47n19, 176; identity 40; performativity 40; politics 199 “Gender Display” (Goffman) 40 Gender Trouble (Butler) 41 Gernale, E. 189 Gillick, L. 20 Glissant, É. 60, 72n12 Glittereiki 120–31 globalization 191, 198, 213 Godard, J.-L.: Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) 133–5 Goffman, E. 42; “Gender Display” 40; Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The 40, 41; Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity 41 Gómez, P. F.: Experimental Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic, The 122 Gonzalez-Torres, F. 46 Goode, J. B. 110, 112, 113, 118n24 Goodman, N. 31n4

Gottwald, K. 197–8 Gracyk, T. 101 Graham, D. 45 Gravesend (McQueen) 15–16 Great Artesian Basin, Australia 86n15 Greenberg, C. 98 Grohl, D. 103 Guattari, F. 58, 72n12, 90, 92 Guo-Qiang, C.: Sky Ladder 81, 87n22 Gut Feminism (Wilson) 92 Haacke, H. 15 Haecceity 1.0.0, 162, 165n26 Haecceity 9.241.1, 160, 161 Haecceity 12.0.0, 162, 163 haka 182n3, 182n5 Halberstam, J. 29 Halbwach, m. 200 Halwani, G.: Erased,__Ascent of the Invisible 147n24 Han, K. 194 handkerchief metaphor 50, 52 Haraway, D. 92 Hariri, R. 137, 138 Hassinger, M. 123 Hayacinthe, G. 123–8 Hayles, K. 92, 94 Hegelian-based identity theory 36 hegemonic masculinity 94 Hegewl, G. W. F.: Aesthetics 97 Heidegger, M. 110, 188, 202; Holzwege 98–9 Hekman, S. 91 Hensche, G.: Liminal Dome 210 Hepworth, B. 98 Herb Grrl 124–6 hermeneutic aesthetics 132, 145n2 Higgins, D. 31 Hiller, S.: Dedicated to the Unknown Artists 11 Holzwege (Heidegger) 98–9 Horkheimer, M. 29 Ho Tzu Nyen 206, 207, 210, 212 Houlgate, S. 97 Howie, G. 188 How to Do Things with Words (Austin) 38 Hsieh, T.: One Year Performances 23; Thirteen-Year Plan 23 Huebler, D. 10 humanism 96 Husserl, e. 39 Huxtable, J. 126 Hu Yun 190, 191, 193, 194; Carving Water, Melting Stones 188 I am (Garau) 10 Ice Boat 73–82, 73–88, 84, 85 Ice Watch (Eliasson) 83 Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) (Godard) 133–5

Index  223 ideational objects 159–60 Identity is Fragile III 212 image 27–8 immateriality 34n62, 149; folly of 9–16 Indigenous art 171, 176–8, 180 Inert Gas, Helium (Barry) 154 Inert Gas Series (Desert) 23 Information, No Theory (Kozlov) 151–2 infra-thin 23, 33n49 In Human Time exhibition 86n6 In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour (2014–18) 106, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116 Inside the White Cube (O’Doherty) 5–6 institutional critique 6, 14, 15, 29 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 82–3 intermedia 1, 7, 9, 10, 25, 31n5, 111, 172, 187 intersticiality 12 Invasion Kuwait (Rajab) 72n15, 72n16 In.VĀ.TĀ.tion 166, 168, 181n2 IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals (Teish) 122 John, E.: Yellow Brick Road 103 Johnson, B. 199 John Weber Gallery 23 Jones, A. 108 Jones, K.: South of Pico 43 Jones, M. 104 Kafka 92 Ka haere tātou 168 Kahlo, F. 124 Kaitiaki with a K 167 Kanaka Maoli 177, 184n37 Kant, I. 12 Kaprow, A. 41, 43–5, 151 Kihara, Y.: Fale Aitu: The House of Spirits 179 Kim Jong-un 199 kinship, as art 170–1 Kipling, R.: White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands, The 201 Kirby, V. 92 Klein, Y.: Le Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) 108 Knight, N. 97 Kooning, W. de 199 Koons, J. 22 Koopman, B. 87n28 Kozlov, C.: Information, No Theory 151–2; 271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding to 271 Days of Concepts Rejected 152 K-Pop 105

Krauss, R. 13–14, 25, 33–4n62; “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” 13 Kubota, S. 37 Kühn, B.: Liminal Dome 210 Kundera, M.: Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The 197 Kunsthalle, H. 26 Kuspit, D. 30 Kwon, M. 14, 128 Lacy, S. 45–6 Lady Gaga (aka Stefani Germanotta) 29 Land, The (Tiravanija) 17 Lane, C. 171 lapche 49, 49, 51, 52, 53 Laplanche, J. 133 Laramée, G. 87n24 Larkin, C.: Memory and Conflict in Lebanon 140 Las Meninas (Velâzquez): 16 late capitalism 14 Latour, B. 91, 94 Lawler, L.: Birdcalls 18 Lebanese Civil War (1975–91) 132, 140 Lee, P. M. 2, 22; Forgetting the Art World 117n10 Lefort, C. 133 Lennon, J. 105; Bed In 43 Lertchaiprasert, K. 17 Le Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) (Klein) 108 Lessing 97 lettrism 17 Liminal Dome (Hensche, Kühn, and Romanenko) 210 liminality 12 Lippard, L. 10–11, 37 Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Bauman) 199 “Literature of Exhaustion, The” (Barth) 203 lived experience 187 local histories and legacies, acknowledging 209– location specificity 1, 2, 13, 216 Lorde, A. 58, 59 Lotus Mudra 120 Love, H. 47n19 Lowry, S. 206, 209, 212, 216–17 low theory 29 Lukács, G.: Particularity of the Aesthetic (Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen), The 90 Lumière brothers 197 Luna, J. 16 Lyotard, J.-F. 133; Postmodern Condition, The 39 Maciunas, G. 17 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi 105 Mahogany Blues 124

224 Index mail art 24 Mallat, C. 146n11 mani 49 “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (Ukeles) 46 Manzoni, P.: Base of the World no. 3, Homage to Gali 10 Mariano, R. 189 Martha Jackson Gallery, New York 45 Martin, S. 88n29 Marx, K. 25, 39 masculinity: hegemonic 94; toxic 94 materiality 30, 39, 90, 92, 95–8, 111, 194; myth 96; necessity of 9–16; organic 187; plastic 187 materiality myth 96 Matheson, R. 88n28 matriarchs, hands of 171–2 Mazza, J. 87n24 McCannon, D. 124 McIver, K. 87n24 McKenzie, J. 39 McLaren, M. 130 McMillian, U. 123 McQueen, S.: Gravesend 15–16 McTaggert, T. 136; Unreality of Time, The 135 media 11, 28, 33n62, 36, 43, 84, 87n23, 89, 96, 140, 161, 164n26, 198; pop cultural 127; digital 26; social 8, 26, 120, 121, 125, 126, 128 Meier, G. 134 Melting and Oozing and Dripping with Pleasure (Abrams) 123 memory 198–200 Memory and Conflict in Lebanon (Larkin) 140 Mendieta, A. 124 Meredith, C. S.: Rushing Dolls 182n8 Met Gala 29 methodological confusion 18–24 Metropolitan Museum of Art 192 Metropolitan Museum of Manila 185 Mikdasi, S. 136 Mirrored Cubes (Morris) 164n16 Mishlawi, N.: Sector Zero 148n24 Mitchem, S. Y.: African American Folk Healing 122 modalities and affects, theory of 91 Monet, C. 6 monologue 61–4 Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers (van Brummelen and de Haan) 15 More, H. 98 Morris, R. 44; Mirrored Cubes 164n16 Morrison, T. 57, 71n9 Morton, T. 83 Moruroa 180

Much is that N***** in the Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl (Pope.L) 16 Musée d’Orsay 7 My Calling Card (Piper) 36 Nabokov, V.: Pale Fire 32n43 Nagham, J.: Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice 171 Narayan, U. 72n10 National Museum of Singapore 188–90 Nattiez, J.-J. 109 Nawarla Gabarnmang 18 Neite, W. 192 net art 8, 26–7 Neuhaus, M.: Times Square 24, 33n50 new materialism 89–100; art and sacredness 95–8; posthumanist deliberations 94–5; return 98–9; in theory 90–4 Newton, H. 30 NFT see non-fungible token (NFT) Niepce brothers 7 Nietzsche, F. 90 91020000 (2016 exhibition, Artists Space, New York) 15 Nitegeka, S. A. 206, 208, 211, 212 Niu Aitu 179–80 No Medium (Dworkin) 11 non-fungible token (NFT) 8 non-site 13, 14, 50, 80 Norris, T. 123 “Notes on the Phantom” (Abraham) 139–40 Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) 44 object 27–8 Obrist, H. U. 203 Oda Projesi (Room Project) 17 O’Doherty, B.: Artforum 5; Inside the White Cube 5–6 Omar, M. M. 202 O’Neill, A. 173 One Year Performances (Hsieh) 23 online exhibitions 26–7 Ono, Y. 37, 46, 105; Cut Piece 35, 43, 44 ontological indeterminacy 18–24 Oppenheim, D.: Transplants 153–4 Orban, V. 199 Osborne, P. 13, 24–5, 27, 28, 88n36, 102, 109–11, 119n37; Anywhere or Not at All 31n7 Osbourne, O. 106 Osorio, P. 124 Ōyama, E. I. 87n24 Pacific Sisters 172, 172–6, 179, 180, 182n6 Pacific Sisters: Te Toa Tāera | Fashion Activists (Tonga) 173 Paik, N. J. 37

Index  225 Paintings on Unridden Waves 114 Pale Fire (Nabokov) 32n43 Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) 141 Palmer, H. 92 participation art 42–6 Particularity of the Aesthetic (Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen), The (Lukács) 90 Patterson, E. G. 124 peddling time 134–9 “Peddling Time When Standing Still: Art Remains in Lebanon and the Globalization That Was” (Sadek) 137–8 Peel, J. 29 Perec, G. 203 performance art 35–48, 108, 151, 173 performativity 39 Perniola, M. 202 Peters, S. 124 phenomenological model of intersubjectivity 39 Phenomenology of Spirit 39 Philippine Educational Theater Association 186 photo-death 83–4 Picasso, P. 197 Pindell, H. 123 Piper, A. 15, 36–7, 43, 46, 123, 124; My Calling Card 36 Pissarro, J. 29 place 15, 32n30 Plato 97 Play Incident (Brecht) 44 Pollock, J. 41, 151 polychronous node 50, 52 Pope.L: Much is that N***** in the Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl 16 popular culture 7, 38, 103, 112, 114; specter of 28–30 postconceptual art 13, 25, 102, 111–13, 115 posthumanism 92–4, 96 posthumanist deliberations 94–5 postimpressionism 97 post-internet art 25–6 post-medium condition 33n62 Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard) 39 postmodernism 14, 20, 38, 40 poststructuralism 40–2, 95 Prayers for Tama 127 Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The (Goffman) 40, 41 Principles of Art, The (Collingwood) 31n9 Project Anywhere 2, 206–7, 210, 212, 216–18; Editorial Committee 216 prologue 55–60 Promise (Site) (2017) 80 Protest Era 5 Proust, M. 200 public perceptual object 110

Public Smog (Balkin) 23 Putin, V. 199 Pynchon, T.: Vineland 103 queer theory 37, 38, 42, 89; anti-relational 40 Queneau, R. 203 Quirino, C. 189 Raad, W.: Atlas Group 106, 113 Rabah, M.: Campus at War: Student Politics at the American University of Beirut 1967–1975, A 141 Rabita (the Lebanese Student League) 141 race 38, 57, 58, 176, 186, 197, 201; identity 40; relations 42 Racuya, L. 189 radical identity 149–65; Essentialism and 161–3; historical generation of artworks with kinds of 150–6 radical intermediality 8 radical works of art, time and place of 159 Rafei, Raed 144; 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle 133, 142, 143, 144, 145 Rafei, Rania 144; 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle 133, 142, 143, 144, 145 Rainey Rainey, C. R.: Free Your Mind: An African American Guide to Meditation and Freedom 122 Rajab, J. S.: Invasion Kuwait 72n15, 72n16 Rakowitz, M. 87n24 Rauschenberg, R. 198–9 Raymond, R. 183n27; Backhand Maiden 175, 181 Refiti, A. 178 Reihana, L. 173 Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People (Abrams) 121, 121–2, 124 relational aesthetics 17, 37, 46, 95; theory of 45 Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud) 37 relational art 16, 95 relationality 37–42 Relational Object (Goggles) (Clark) 36 relational self 35–48 relational space 11, 111 representation, dismantling 55–60 Resurreccion, R. 189 Return 87n24 Returning the Future 82, 87n26 Reyes, PO. 189 Reznor, T. 103 rhizome 72n12 Rhodes, C. 201 Rice/Tree/Burial (Denes) 81 Richardson, C. A. 90 Ringgold, F. 124 Roberts, L. 88n29

226 Index Roberts, R. 88n33, 209 Rogers, S. 137 Romanenko, A.: Liminal Dome 210 Romanticism 5, 92, 108, 115 Rose, S. 124 Rosenberg, H. 151 Rosenthal, S. B.: Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy 136 Rowland, C. 15 Royal Academy 5 Rushing Dolls (Meredith) 182n8 Saar, B. 124 Sachs, Z. 75 sacredness 95–8 Sadek, W.: “Peddling Time When Standing Still: Art Remains in Lebanon and the Globalization That Was” 137–8 Saint Phalle, N. de 44 Salloukh, B. F. 147n22 Salvatus, M. 187 Samson (Burden) 153 Sanchez, L. 189 San Diego Museum of Man: Artifact Piece 16 SaVĀge Kʻlub 176–177, 179, 183n27 Schechner, R. 38, 44 Schellekens, E. 11 Schiebinger, L.: Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the EighteenthCentury Atlantic World 122 Schiff, K. 87n24 “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (Krauss) 13 Sebald, W. G. 113 Seckler, D. G. 44 Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Schiebinger) 122 Sector Zero (Mishlawi) 148n24 Seeing Differently 39 Seghal, T. 10 self: conceptualizing 211–12; relational 35–48 Self- Help TV 125, 126 selfhood 39–40 Self-Love Spell (Abrams) 123 Serres, M. 50, 52 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle 133, 142, 143, 144, 145 Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 103 Shiff, R. 85n3 Shui Tit Sing 193 Shunk-Kender 108 Simonon, P. 104 Simpson, L. B. 177–8 simulationism 21 Sistar Sʻpacific 176

site 13–16 Sites of Knowledge exhibition 82, 87n24 site-specificity 13, 133 “Situational Aesthetics” (Burgin) 45 “Situation Esthetics” (Acconci) 45 Situationism 95 Situationist International 6, 17 Sky Ladder (Guo-Qiang) 81, 87n22 Slater, D. 193 Smith, D. 34n66 Smith, L. T. 180 Smithson, R. 14; Spiral Jetty 13 social practice 16–17, 45 social science 37–42 social sculpture 17 social space 16–17, 35, 38, 41, 43, 45 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord) 17 Solidere 137 Sollfrank, C.: Female Extension 26 Sounds of Unridden Waves 110, 112–16, 114, 115 South of Pico (Jones) 43 sovereignty 76, 86n7, 136, 202; First Nations 78; human 47n19; Indigenous body 180 space: bodies in 16–17; social 16–17, 35, 38, 41, 43, 45 Spinoza, B. 90, 91, 99 Spiral Jetty (Smithson) 13 SpongeBob SquarePants 34n78 Staging Dioramas 192 Starr, R. 104 Steinbach, H. 22 Step Piece (Acconci) 151 Sterbak, J.: Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic 34 stigma 41, 42 Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Goffman) 41 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Frost) 32n43 Stover, W. 87n25 Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (Ahmad) 71–2n10 Strayer, J.: Haecceities 164n13; Subjects and Objects 102, 164n13 Studio International 45 Study of Things: Or a Brief Story about Fountain, Brick, Tin, Coin, Stone, Shell, Curtain, and Body exhibition 194 Sturt, C. 77, 87n10 Subjects and Objects (Strayer) 102, 164n13 Supa Suga 180 Superflex 17 surrealism 6 surveillance capitalism 25 Syrian Protestant College 141 Szeemann, H. 203

Index  227 Tadasana 120 Talbot, F. 7 Tamati-Quennell, M. 171 Tannir, K. 141 Tap and Touch Cinema (VALIE EXPORT) 36 Tate, The: Gallery of Lost Art, The 27, 34n66 ta-va theory of reality 170 techno-performance 39 Teish, L.: Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals 122 Tenazas, L. 74 Teves, S. 177 The I and the You (Clark) 36 Them (Żmijewski) 17 13th (DuVernay) 15 Thirteen-Year Plan (Hsieh) 23 This Is America (Gambino) 29 Thomas, M. 124 Thompson, K. 124 Thorson, R. 51 Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy (Rosenthal) 136 Times Square (Neuhaus) 24, 33n50 Tiravanija, R.: Land, The 17 TOHU TūPUNA 180 Tonga, N. 173; Pacific Sisters: Te Toa Tāera | Fashion Activists 173 Totti, S. 87n24 Touch Sanitation project (Ukeles) 46 tourism 7 toxic masculinity 94 transcategoriality 8 Transplants (Oppenheim) 153–4 trauma 200–2 Trump, D. 199 Tuazon, A. 189 271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding to 271 Days of Concepts Rejected (Kozlov) 152 Ukeles, M. 45–6; “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” 46; Touch Sanitation project 46 Ulman, A.: Excellences and Perfections 26 Uluru Statement 86n7 UN Climate Change Conference 83 Unreality of Time, The (McTaggert) 135 Urbanesia 182n8 vā 177; body 177–178 VALIE EXPORT 16; Tap and Touch Cinema 36

Van Brummelen, L.: Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers 15 Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (Sterbak) 34n77 Velasco, J. 189 Velâzquez, D.: Las Meninas 16 Veloso, G. 189 Vertical Columns of Accelerated Airn (Asher) 23 Vierkant, A. 25 Villanueva, W. 189 Vineland (Pynchon) 103 “Violence in Art” (Coutts-Smith) 44 Von Hausswolff, C. M. 17 WAC! (Women’s Action Coalition) 46 Waiting (Chowdhury) 206 Waiting Room 124 Warhol, A.: Brillo Boxes 21 War of the Worlds, The (Wells) 200–1 Weibel, P. 36, 45 Wells, H. G.: War of the Worlds, The 200–1 Wheatfield – A Confrontation (Denes) 81 Whistler, J. M. 5 White, E. C.: Black Women’s Health Book, The 122 white cube 5–6, 16, 197, 208 White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands, The (Kiplinig) 201 WHO see World Health Organization (WHO) Wilson, E.: Gut Feminism 92 Wilson, F. 15 Winckelmann 97 Wood, D. 93 work, timing of 18 World Health Organization (WHO) 205 World War II 35 Wright Brothers 197 Xi Jinping 199 Yellow Brick Road (John) 103 Zachs, Z. 80 Zao Dha Diet 26 Zen Buddhism 19 Żmijewski, A.: Them 17 Zobel, E. 189 Zobel, J. 189 Zuboff, S. 25