ELLIPSIS

Suit Case

Prologue. Santiago de Chile. Nov. 9. 2011.

Suitcases are an obsession of mine these weeks. I have dreamt about them four nights in a row. Curious to find meaning in such a serial experience I searched online and found dreammood.com and dreamdoctor.com. Following their dictionaries dreaming about a suitcase symbolizes that you are a ”very composed, together person”, in need of a much wanted vacation or looking for a ”change of scenery in your life”. Yet, does the suitcase appear unpacked in your dream, you are not prepared for the coming transition and is it over-packed you are too heavily tied to your emotional baggage. They ask; is it ”time to release the past, so that you may successfully arrive at your future?” I think so, yes, I answer the dream interpreter, it is time to let go of some of the content of the suitcase in order to prepare for a trip to the future open for new acquisitions on the way.

 

Santiago de Chile. Nov. 10.

During the past decades the working conditions for art writers have changed. Art history and art practices have turned global not only for a small avant garde and it necessarily asks of art writers to reconsider the way in which they interpret contemporary global art practices and relate to traditional art history. In short, how to go about referencing. There are many ways of interpreting artworks and to delimit and coherently direct the possibilities, art history as a discipline serves as a consecrated net in which to place an artwork and connect it with historical periods and works of other artists. Such a manoeuvre, successfully done, lines up the art historic genealogy of the work and adds a trajectory of artistic concepts, techniques and forms that both enhance the content of the analysis, place the artwork in a context and validates its existence in the world. So far, this is largely done within the framework of a tradition of Western art history, but with an increasingly globalised and culturally diverse art scene the following question has to be posed; how can one as an art writer establish artwork genealogies, when art and art history turn global the way in which they do today? You could add; is it time to release the past, so that we may successfully arrive at our future?

Cambridge, Massachusetts. Oct 19.

The point of departure for the above posed question has been on the way for a while and materialized itself in a public mid-term review session at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology in mid October 2011. An MA student, Giacomo Castagnola, presented a project he developed as part of Proyecto Coyote at the independent project space Taller 7 in Medellín in Colombia during the biennial Encuentro Internacional de Medellín MDE11: Enseñar y aprender. Lugares del conocimiento en el arte in 2011 (MDE11: Teaching and Learning. Sites of Knowledge Through Art). Proyecto Coyote, curated by the independent curator Lucía Sanromán, invited artists residing in Tijuana in Mexico to create work based on different neighbourhoods in Medellín. Castagnola chose to work on the area called Moravia and he told us during the review that it has undergone a significant change in the past years. A decade ago it was affected by delinquency, unemployment, drug addiction, drug trading and class inequality, but now it is a blossoming area with a cultural sector that the population has appropriated and generated in their own way. As the project description of Proyecto Coyote reads, the change came through “processes of civic regeneration through art and cultural activism in response to the social and physical decomposition caused by “narco“ violence in Medellín especially during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s.” The situation of Medellín in the 80-90’s is not unlike the one of Tijuana today, so, inspired by the pedagogical theme of the biennial the curatorial concept consisted in asking artists to learn from the successful development in Moravia and teach their lesson in Tijuana through artistic and cultural production – as a coyote smuggling knowledge and information across the border.

 

Castagnola’s project Moravia archive, social construction from Medellín to Tijuana: a project about tranference of knowledge consists of an unfoldable cardboard display containing different documents all related to social and cultural initiatives in Moravia. The display measures approximately 2×3 meters and can be folded so as to fit an old, red suitcase of Castagnola’s in which to be transported to Tijuana. The idea with the display was to collect material that reflect the positive change in Moravia and send it to Tijuana as an optimistic example of how to exit the extreme violence in which Tijuana and its citizens find themself.

After the presentation Castagnola and I set up a meeting to exchange ideas and thoughts one of the following days. It was in this conversation that he showed me photos of the micro-economies in Peru, Colombia and Mexico, which are carried by one person and can unfold into a small street shop. As he is an architect by education, the aesthetics and the for m of micro-economies had inspired him in his work, also in working with the Moravia archive. This source of aesthetic and formal inspiration did not come up in the review session, which is maybe why one of the reviewers finished the session by referring to Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte en Valise. An obvious reference in terms of formal gestures, however, Castagnola, did not create the display thinking of that reference. Instead, he focused on creating a portable imaginary inspired by the formal aesthetics of informal economies recognizable in both Medellín and Tijuana and thus, I would argue, a means of visual communication that could be easily inserted and appropriated in Tijuana. The form had a practical and contextual function, not an art historical one.

Williamstown, Massachusetts. Nov. 5.

A few weeks later in the conference In the Wake of the “Global Turn”: Practices for an Exploded Art History Without Borders at the Clark Art Institute I happened to discuss this experience of referencing with the art historian and critic T.J. Demos. The interpretive mechanism puzzled me. The reference of the Moravia archive was automatically made to Duchamp and I wondered what it meant for the analysis, if anything, that the aesthetic source was in fact something entirely different. Something which moreover exists due to specific socio-political and economic conditions that one would not recognize without an intimate knowledge about the context.

The conversation ended at the problem of connecting artworks mainly by form, something Demos referred to as pseudomorphosis. Pseudomorphosis is an act of mis-projected referencing where two artworks, across periods in time, get connected because they share the same form or formal gestures. Erwin Panofsky defines the concept in Tomb Sculpture. Four Lessons on its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini from 1964 this way: “The emergence of a form A morphologically analogous to or even identical with a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view” (p. 26-27). However, already in the canonical work Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance from 1939 he works out the concept by showing how “certain Renaissance figures became invested with a meaning which, for all their classicizing appearance, had not been present in their classical prototypes.” Meaning is added to an object or artwork, he argued, because it is identical to a similar object, which carries such meaning. The point is that two identical forms can develop across time without necessarily being related or invested with the same meaning.

From Panofsky’s iconographic articulation of the concept the art critic and historian Yve-Alain Bois places it into a 20^th century context by discarding comparisons especially of paintings with lookalikes from earlier periods and other genres. In the talk “Pseudomorphism: What to make of Look-alikes?” from November 2007 at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago he mentions the comparison of tantric paintings with paintings by Kazimir Malevich and Alphonse Allais’ caricature and framed white image Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige from 1893 with white monochromes by Robert Rauschenberg, Pierre Manzoni and Robert Ryman. Such comparisons by likeness can also happen among contemporaries, as Bois cites artist Sol LeWitt for having said. Examples are Manzoni and Ryman, who are said to be similar because of their white monochromes, and Joseph Beuys and Robert Morris who both use felt. Such “petty gossips” do not look at the oeuvre as such, only tendencies or lookalike qualities. However, it is difficult not to do it, Bois adds, as depicting resemblances is at the “astethic heart of human knowledge”. However, ignorance is key, the less one knows about the context and the period, the more one enacts pseudomorphisis. And the danger of such a formal identification, Bois points out, is to project content from one artwork to the other, thus mis-aligning artworks into an already existing order of art.

So far so good, artworks, as the theoretical assertion above states, should not only be compared due to formal resemblance, but also due to a historical contextualization. This statement, however, should today be expanded to also include cultural contexts. The art scene is a complex arena after the global turn, where artists, curators and writers work in sometimes incompatible cultural contexts with unlike art histories and thus are open to pseudomorphological interpretive acts.

Irvine, California. Dec. 7.

There are two levels on which the current global turn of art operates that should be highlighted here; international exhibitions and growing mobility among artists, curators and art historians. The former is accentuated by the transnational focus of mega-exhibitions (fermented and consolidated with Documenta X and XI curated by Catherine David and Okwui Enwezor. Recent examples are the Sao Paulo Biennial 2010 and the Istanbul Biennial 2009 and 2011) and an art history, which is increasingly happening and written not only on European and North American territory. Growing mobility, however, questions what it does to the actors on the art scene to either work globally or to be presented to art from other cultural contexts at ‘home’. Chinese, Middle Eastern, South American, Indian and African contemporary art scenes have gone worldwide the past fifteen years and it asks all actors to reconsider what has been the shared knowledge so far and what should be it in the future. With increased circulation and convergence we might ask which systems of references we use and what references we call attention to when we connect things – be it artworks, art histories, socio-political contexts and forms. Are we in need of building up new common references or other ways of referencing?

Williamstown, Massachusetts. Nov. 4.

The scenario of automatic referencing appeared again at the Clark Art Institute. Here, it was the Brazilian art historian and theorist Renata Camargo Sá who showed the work of a young Brazilian artist that at a first glance sent my thoughts back to a colorful Agnes Martin, but which, she explained, was work based on forms and aesthetics from the street in Brazil; last year’s summer clothing fashion and goods wrapped in plastic and brown scotch. Even though I have been to Brazil, have lived in South America and am aware and fascinated by such phenomena, the abstraction was high and I did not think of a street phenomena as its reference. I went straight to known traditions of a known art history. Being self-reflexively aware of that instant interpretive move it became clear that how we establish open mechanisms of interpretations in the engagement with artworks is a great challenge of the future. It reminded me of a German colleague who during MFA studies in Santiago de Chile was told by students and professors that they could not give feedback to her work as it was (too) “German”. They thus implied that it was beyond their reach because of national and cultural difference and that they needed another set of references with which to understand her work.

Los Angeles. Dec. 9

Let us now, however, return to the suitcase of Duchamp. Because, even though the reference made to it was not intended by Castagnola it can add interesting layers to the Moravia archives. In the article “Duchamp’s Boîte en Valise: Between Institutional Acculturation and Geopolitical Displacement” Demos argues that Boîte en Valise unfolds how context and conditions shape the work of an artist; in the case of Duchamp, it was the exile to the US during World War II that made him place the box, boîte, of miniatures of his artworks into a suitcase, en valise, so that he could send them by boat across the ocean. The form and the aesthetics of the artwork were thus conditioned by the circumstances in which it was created. Demos moreover proposes an aesthetic of the suitcase, which is characterized by the “qualities of mobility, compactness, fragmentation, miniaturization, and the impulses toward nostalgic collection and portable containment” (p. 9).

However, the condition of geopolitical exile of Duchamp, as Demos frames it, is a particular one, one that is embedded in the “modernist homelessness” described by Rosalind Krauss (p. 16), of cutting off ties to the national and thereby also to a national, historical moment and its specific, national iconography. For Duchamp, this came about particularly in the work of the suitcase, which in itself embodies mobility. Moreover, that Duchamp chose to bring reproductions of his work in a suitcase also implied the act of re-defining the museum institution by reducing it to a portable miniature exhibition space. Other redefinitions of the museum was brought about by the modern condition of homelessness, which prepared art for mobility and also cleared the exhibition space into the white cube in order for it to contain artworks without reference to a particular context.

Demos notes in the article that we are more open to works like Duchamp’s suitcase today due to our continuous struggle with the modern condition of homelessness and geopolitical dislocation. Coming back to the Moravia archive the conditions that bring about the aesthetics of the suitcase in this work is not a geopolitical exile, rather, the piece reflects Castagnola’s unhindered mobility, a nomadic life and engagement with different and specific socio-political contexts. Castagnola used the suitcase as a link between the realities of a community, which he extracted, folded, packed and sent to be received and inserted in a community elsewhere. Using the aesthetics of the suitcase in this case unfolds an artist’s will to interfere in and connect people’s living conditions using the mobile aesthetics of these particular and popular contexts. The social aesthetic of the suitcase grows out of an economic limitation of possessions and out of using what is there, the existing possibilities, on the level of the individual in concordance with the objects and materials at hand. In the case of the Moravia Archive content and form goes hand in hand with the social responsibility of the artist.

Copenhagen. Dec. 16.

Coming back to the main question in this essay about mis-interpretation and mis-referencing it is not so that the reference to Duchamp is wrong, in fact, together with the analysis of Demos it can unfold how a suitcase, the objects it carries and its carrier are embodied in the specific conditions for artistic production and socio-political realities in which they exist and respond. However, to have knowledge about the sociopolitical contexts help to make the analysis resonate in its complexity. Yet, there seem to be one consideration to give thought to. How will the future methodology of art historians, theorists and writers take shape if they both have to gain an overview knowledge about art on a global scale and contextually very specific knowledge related to the artwork in question? It seems like an insurmountable task, but if it is not done, how to write about art in its intricacies in the wake of the global turn?

When discussing this question with my PhD supervisor at the University of Copenhagen, Anne Ring Petersen, she referred to the literary scholar Franco Moretti and his concept of distant reading as opposed to close readings – which the literary tradition hold in high regard. Distant reading is based on statistics of formal gestures of literature or background information (year and country of publishing, gender of the author, genre etc.), as a way to grapple world literature in its massiveness. In fact, at Stanford University Department of English where Moretti is a professor, they work with computer-generated analyses of literature feeding computers with an enormous amount of digital data in order to show general tendencies and developments, sometimes over centuries.

The readings proposed in this text do not point toward such an approach because they focus on the particularity of individual art works, not statistics. Still, applying Moretti’s literary concept of distant reading to global contemporary art history is helpful. It brings about the acknowledgement of the impossibility of close readings of artworks when operating on a global art scene. Yet, it is indeed important to know the contexts in which artworks are created in order only to refer back to a canonical art history when it is constructive. And not because it happens automatically. Inevitably, the analytical grip has to loosen in order to look up and out at the world and then into sources about the context one is writing about. My proposal for a future methodology includes conducting interviews with artists and art historians of the context/s in which the artwork in question is embedded. Tending toward a sociological research methodology is productive as it opens up for other types of referencing. Contemporary art history is still in the making, so the art historical writer of contemporary art has to create his or her own empirical material as well as knowing his or her art historical material. This is a double task, yet, only when we stop referring by default to canonical art history and start listening to other histories, art history will become global.

Epilogue. LAX Airport. Dec. 11. 2011.

In half an hour the bag drop will open and I can descend to the floor below and check in my two suitcases. They have been my companions the last two months in and out of airports, train stations and bus terminals. One was intentionally empty at departure and is now stuffed with books, prints, drafts and exhibition leaflets.

It is not improbable to dream about suitcases in such a stage, and even less when one is obsessed with how to deal with the inheritance of references and referencing. As with the Moravia Archive of Castagnola, it implies responsibility to live, work and operate between contexts and countries. For the art writer, this responsibility transfers into being attentive toward the not yet known as well as knowing when to ignore the known. I am off to the bag drop, ready to move on.

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Image Captions

Image 1: Giacomo Castagnola, Moravia Archive Project, Medellín- Colombia, 2011

Image 2-5: Scott Berzofsky, Moravia Archive in Process of Unfolding, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2011

Image 6-7: Moravia Archive in Process of Unfolding, Mid-review of the course Zones of Emergency: Artistic Interventions – Creative Responses to Conflict & Crisis, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 201. Photograph by Nadia Volicer

Image 8: Giacomo Castagnola, Recuperar Cooperative’s Interview, Medellín- Colombia, 2011

Image 9: Recuperar Cooperative’s Archive, Moravia’s Dumpster, Medellín- Colombia, 1958

Image 10: Giacomo Castagnola, Teen Hip Hop Dancers in Moravia’s Cultural Centre, Medellín- Colombia, 2011

Image 11: Giacomo Castagnola, Metro Cable, Medellín- Colombia, 2011

Image 12: Marcel Duchamp, Boite-en-Valise. 1935-1940

Image 13: Giacomo Castagnola, Suitcase Street Vendor, Medellín – Colombia, 2011

Image 14-15: Giacomo Castagnola, Cardboard CDs Street Vendor, Medellín – Colombia, 2011

Image 16: Giacomo Castagnola, Bread Street Vendor, Lima- Peru, 2011

Image 17: Giacomo Castagnola, Clamatos Street Vendor, Tijuana- México, 2011

Image 18: Kazimir Malevich. Black Square and Red Square. 1915

Image 19: Unknown. Tantric painting