Iman Issa’s exhibition ‘Material’, developed a critical position around monuments quite different to that of the ‘anti-monument’. Anti-monuments, after all, are now part of the mainstream. The British public, for example, not only instantly grasped the critical thrust of the unassuming, feminized, interactive aspects of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain (2004) in Hyde Park, London, but also fully and instinctively grasped the  failures of this very criticality. Monument and anti-monument have a complementary relationship that completes a circle and constitutes – as is the fate of all subversions – only the expansion of a language. Issa maintains her parallel relationship to this language by producing, not monuments or anti-monuments but ‘material for’ sculptures that might address the failings of, or apply alternative possibilities for, existing monuments.

Iman Issa, 'Material for a sculpture recalling the destruction of a prominent public monument in the name of national resistance' 2011. Image courtesy of Rodeo Gallery

In ‘Material’, the wall texts acted both as the title and a key component of the works, telling you no specifics of the original monument’s location or cultural specificity; only circumstantial details. The texts might refer directly to the original monument, (as with Material for a sculpture recalling the destruction of a prominent public monument in the name of national resistance, 2010); or a replacement for a failed monument (as with Material for a sculpture proposed as an alternative to a monument that has become an embarrassment to its people, 2010); and sometimes an original monument is not even mentioned (Material for a sculpture acting as a testament to both a nation’s pioneering development and continuing decline, 2011).

The materials accompanying the texts were correspondingly indeterminate;  readable as maquettes or sculptures, but, thanks to the texts, not heavily committed to either status. This allows the ‘materials’ to occupy precisely the opposite status of a monument itself, which is overdetermined with declarative purpose, recognition, and interpretability.

Nevertheless, they clearly evidenced attention to the formal tactics of the monument. Material for a sculpture recalling the destruction of a prominent public monument in the name of national resistance, for example, worked well as a pretty close description of bathos: a polished wooden slat ascended at something less than a 45-degree angle, supported by another vertical slat, with a long, black, drooping tassel fastened to its top end – the tassel was full of pomp but lacked the rigidity and power of inclination that the wooden structure suggested. Other uses of the language of commemoration were more obvious, such as the use of a vitrine containing personal effects in Material for a sculpture commemorating an economist whose name now marks the streets and squares he once frequented (2011).

As it happens, the monuments to which ‘Material’ referred are real objects with real histories that Issa relates to closely, but which she has chosen not to locate or describe. The viewer’s dependence on the textual clues and physical ‘materials for’ provokes a process of identification quite different to that of simply looking at the monument, one that opens up relationality between elements (and between those elements and ourselves) rather than symbolism. She seems not to be interested in a politicised acceptance or rejection of the process of interpellation (as with anti-monuments), but rather with analyzing its very forms and functions. Rather than invoking the monument itself, with all its distracting biographical and political specificities, Issa cuts straight to the questions of what physical forms are leveraged in the production of recognition, identification, sentiment, familiarity?

As a bass throb came from a speaker in the wall, and a second speaker, higher up, started emitting sounds reminiscent of rippling papers growing into the roar of a distant crowd, I felt a certain interpellation of experience corresponding to the title Material for a sculpture acting as a testament to both a nation’s pioneering development and continuing decline (2011). It’s up to the listener to decide what is the decline and what is the development – either sound, either speaker position could work. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the days in Cairo following the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, when, even when the streets were normal, the buildings still seemed to constantly resound with a sort of seashell crowd-roar. I know this piece is not about that, and this is the point: being reminded of the sound has far more force of interpellation than the handy naming of a specific revolutionary event itself, which in the context of this review already feels like a trite, reductive thing for me to do. In the same way a tuning fork can be struck on any surface, the effect is nonspecific but absolutely true, and if this is how Issa wishes to operate then she has more faith in the tactics (if not the specifics) of the monument than one might first assume. And this is fine, because given that currently I’m resistant to acts of monumentalisation, a piece such as Issa’s seems to be far more powerful.

إﻳﻤﺎﻥ ﻋﻴﺴﻰ
ﺭﻭﺩﻳﻮ ﻏﺎﻟﻴﺮﻱ – ﺍﺳﻄﻨﺒﻮﻝ

ﻳﻗﻒ ﻣﻌﺮﺽ إيمان ﻋﻴﺴﻰ ﺍﻟﻤﻌﻨﻮﻥ “ﻣﺎﺩﺓ” ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﻭﺡ ﻣﻮﻗﻔﺎً ﺍﻧﺘﻘﺎﺩﻳﺎً ﻭﻣﻐﺎﻳﺮﺍً ﻟﻤﻮﻗﻒ ﺍﻟﻼ- ﺻﺮﺡ. لقد ﺃﺻﺒﺢ ﺍﻟﻼ- ﺻﺮﺡ ﺍﻟﻴﻮﻡ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻛﻞ ﺣﺎﻝ ﺟﺰﺀً ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﺘﻴﺎﺭ ﺍﻟﺠﻤﺎﻫﻴﺮﻱ.  ﻋﻠﻰ ﺳﺒﻴﻞ ﺍﻟﻤﺜﺎﻝ، ﻟقد اﺴﺘﻮﻋﺐ ﻓﻮﺭﺍً ﺍﻟﺠﻤﻬﻮﺭ ﺍﻟﺒﺮﻳﻄﺎﻧﻲ ﺍﻟﺪﻓﻖ ﺍلاﻧﺘﻘﺎﺩﻱ ﻷﻭﺟﻪ التواﺿﻊ ﻭالتأنيث ﻭﺍﻟﺘﻔﺎعلية ﺍﻟﺘﻲ ﺍﻧﻄﻮﺕ ﻋﻠﻴﻬﺎ ﻧﺎﻓﻮﺭﺓ ﺩﻳﺎﻧﺎ ﺃﻣﻴﺮﺓ ﻭﻳﻠﺰ ﺍﻟﺘﺬﻛﺎﺭﻳﺔ ﺍﻟﻤﻘﺎﻣﺔ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻌﺎﻡ ٢٠٠٤ ﻓﻲ ﻫﺎﻳﺪ ﺑﺎﺭﻙ، ﺑﻞ ﺍﺳﺘﻮﻋﺐ ﻛﺬﻟﻚ- ﻭبصورة ﻛﺎملة ﻭفطرية – ﻓﺸﻞ ﺗﻠﻚ ﺍلاﻨﺘﻘﺎﺩﻳﺔ ﺫﺍﺗﻬﺎ.  ﺗﺭﺑﻂ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﻭﺡ ﻭﺍﻟﻼ- ﺻﺮﻭﺡ ﻋﻼﻗﺔ ﺗﻜﺎﻓﻠﻴﺔ، ﻋﻼﻗﺔ ﺗﻜﻤﻞ ﺩﺍﺋﺮﺓ ﻭﺗﺨﻠﻖ ﺍﻣﺘﺪﺍﺩﺍً ﻟﻠﻐﺔ ﻻ ﺃﻛﺜﺮ، ﺷﺄﻧﻬما ﻓﻲ ﺫﻟﻚ المصير ﺷﺄﻥ اي نقيضين. ﺗﺤﻓﻆ ﻋﻴﺴﻰ ﻋﻼﻗﺘﻬﺎ ﺍﻟمتوﺍﺯﻳﺔ ﻣﻊ ﺗﻠﻚ ﺍﻟﻠﻐﺔ، ﻭﺑﺪلاً ﻣﻦ ﺃﻥ ﺗﻨﺘﺞ ﺻﺮﻭﺣﺎً ﺃﻭ ﻻ-ﺻﺮﻭح، ﺗﻓﺮﺯ “ﻣﺍﺩﺓ ﻣﻦ ﺃﺟﻞ” ﻣﻨﺤﻮﺗﺎﺕ ﻗﺪ ﺗﻌﺎﻟﺞ ﻓﺸﻞ ﺑﻌﺾ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﻭﺡ ﺍﻟﻤﻮﺟﻮﺩﺓ ﺑﺎﻟﻔﻌﻞ، ﺃﻭ ﺗﻃﺮﺡ ﺇﻣﻜﺎﻧﺎﺕ ﺑﺪﻳﻠﺔ ﻟﻬﺎ.  ﺗﻠﻌﺐ ﻧﺼﻮﺹ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﺋﻂ ﻓﻲ “ﻣﺎﺩﺓ” ﺩﻭﺭﺍً ﻣﺰﺩﻭﺟﺎً، ﺣﻴﺚ ﺗﺤﻤﻞ ﻋﻨﻮﺍﻥ ﺍﻟﻌﻤﻞ ﻭﺗﻤﺪﻧﺎ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻮﻗﺖ ﺫﺍﺗﻪ ﺑﻤﻜﻮﻥ ﺃﺳﺎﺳﻲ ﻣﻦ ﻣﻜﻮﻧﺎﺗﻪ، ﻭﻓﻲ ﺣﻴﻦ ﺗﺤﺠﺐ ﻋﻨﺎ أﻳﺔ ﺗﻔﺎﺻﻴﻞ ﺣﻮﻝ ﻣﻮﻗﻊ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﺡ الأﺻﻠﻲ ﺃﻭ ﺧﺼﻮﺻﻴﺘﻪ ﺍﻟﺜﻘﺎﻓﻴﺔ، ﻓﺈﻥ ﻣﺎ ﻳﺘﺒﻘﻰ ﻟﻨﺎ ﻫﻭ ﺍلتفاصيل الظرفية.  ﻗﺪ ﺗﺸﻴﺮ ﺍﻟﻨﺼﻮﺹ ﺻﺮﺍﺣﺔ ﺇﻟﻰ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﺡ ﺍلأﺻﻠﻲ (ﻛﻤﺎ ﻓﻲ ﻣﺍﺩﺓ ﻣﻦ ﺃﺟﻞ ﻋﻤﻞ ﻧﺤﺘﻲ ﻳﺴﺘﺤﻀﺮ تدمير ﺻﺮﺡ ﻋﺎﻡ ﺑﺎﺭﺯ ﺑﺎﺳﻢ ﺍﻟﻤﻘﺎﻭﻣﺔ ﺍﻟﻭﻃنية، ٢٠١٠) ﺃﻭ ﺇﻟﻰ ﺍﺳﺘﺒﺪﺍﻝ ﺻﺮﺡ ﻓﺎﺷﻞ (ﻛﻤﺎ ﻓﻲ ﻣﺎﺩﺓ ﻣﻦ ﺃﺟﻞ ﻋﻤﻞ ﻧﺤﺘﻲ ﻣﻘﺘﺮﺡ ﻛﺒﺪﻳﻞ ﻟﺼﺮﺡ ﺻﺎﺭ ﻋﺎﺭﺍً ﻋﻠﻰ ﺷﻌﺒﻪ، ٢٠١٠) ﻭﻓﻲ ﺃﺣﻴﺎﻥ ﺃﺧﺮﻯ ﻻ ﻳﺬﻛﺮ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﺡ الأﺻﻠﻲ ﺑﺎﻟﻤﺮﺓ (ﻣﺎﺩﺓ ﻣﻦ ﺃﺟﻞ ﻋﻤﻞ ﻧﺤﺘﻲ ﻳﺸﻬﺪ ﻋﻠﻰ التنمية الرائدة ﻷﻣﺔ ﻭﻋﻠﻰ ﺍﻧﺤﺪﺍﺭﻫﺎ ﺍﻟمستمر، ٢٠١١)

ﻭﺑﺎﻟﻤﻘﺎﺑﻞ فقد ﻏﻠﻒ ﺍﻟﻐﻤﻮﺽ ﺍﻟﻤﻮﺍﺩ ﺍﻟﻤﺼﺎﺣﺒﺔ ﻟﻠنصوص، ﺇﺫ ﻳﺠﻮﺯ ﻗﺮﺍﺀﺗﻬﺎ ﺑﻮﺻﻔﻬﺎ ﻣﺠﺴﻤﺎﺕ ﺃﻭ ﻣﻨﺤﻮﺗﺎﺕ، ﻭﻗﺪ ﻛﺎﻥ ﻟﻠﻨﺺ ﻓﻀﻝ ﻓﻲ ﺃلا ﺗﺮﺗﻜﻦ “ﺍﻟﻤﻮﺍﺩ” ﺇﻟﻰ ﺇﺣﺪﻯ ﺍﻟﻣﻨﺰﻟﺘﻴﻦ ﺩﻭﻥ ﺍﻷﺧﺮﻯ.  ﻭﻗﺪ ﺳﻤﺢ ﻟﻬﺎ ﺫﻟﻚ بأن ﺗﺸﻐﻞ ﺗﺤﺪﻳﺪﺍً ﺍلمنزلة ﺍﻟمقابلة ﻟﻤﻨﺰﻟﺔ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﺡ، ﻭﺍﻟﺫﻱ ﻳﺜﻘله ﺍﻟﺠﻬﺮ ﺑﻤﺎ يحمل ﻣﻦ ﻣﻐﺰﻯ ﻭﺗﻘﺪﻳﺮ ﻭﺍﺣﺘﻤﺎلاﺕ ﺗﺄﻭﻳﻠﻴﺔ.

ﺑﺎﻟﺮﻏﻢ ﻣﻦ ﺫﻟﻚ ﻓﻘﺪ ﺍﺛﺒﺘﺖ ﺍﻟﻤﻮﺍﺩ ﻋﻨﺎﻳﺔ ﺧﺎﺻﺔ بتكتيكات ﺍﻟﺼﺮﻭﺡ ﺍﻟﺸﻜﻠﻴﺔ.  فعلى ﺳﺒﻴﻞ ﺍﻟﻤﺜﺎل، ﻳﻨﺠﺢ ﻣﺍﺩﺓ ﻣﻦ ﺃﺟﻞ ﻋﻤﻞ ﻧﺤﺘﻲ ﻳﺴﺘﺤﻀﺮ تدمير ﺻﺮﺡ ﻋﺎﻡ ﺑﺎﺭﺯ ﺑﺎﺳﻢ ﺍﻟﻤﻘﺎﻭﻣﺔ الوطنية ﻓﻲ ﺃﻥ ﻳﻜﻮﻥ ﻭﺻﻔﺎً ﻗﺮﻳﺒﺎً ﻟصفة ﺍﻟﺒﺎﺜﻮﺱ٭: ﺷﺮﻳﺤﺔ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﺨﺸﺐ ﺍﻟﻼﻣﻊ ﺗﻤﻴﻞ ﺑﺰﺍﻭﻳﺔ ﺗﻘﻞ ﻋﻦ ٤٥ ﺩﺭﺟﺔ ﻭﺗﺮﺗﻜﺰ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺷﺮﻳﺤﺔ ﺃﺧﺮﻯ ﺭﺃﺳﻴﺔ ﻭتتدﻟﻰ ﻣﻦ ﻃﺮﻓﻬﺎ ﺷﺮﺍﺑﺔ ﺳﻮﺩﺍﺀ ﻃﻮﻳﻠﺔ.  فبالرغم ﻣﻤﺎ تمتلئ به ﺍﻟﺸﺮﺍﺑﺔ ﻣﻦ ﻋﻈﻤﺔ ﻭﺃﺑﻬﺔ، ﻓﺈﻧﻬﺎ لا ﺗﻘﺎﺭﺏ ﻣﺎ يحمله ﺍﻟﺒﻨﻴﺎﻥ ﺍﻟﺨﺸﺒﻲ ﻣﻦ ﺻﺮﺍﻣﺔ ﻭﺇﺭﺍﺩﺓ. ﻭﻗﺪ ﺟﺎﺀ ﺗﻮﻇﻴﻒ ﻟﻐﺔ ﺍﻟﺘﺬﻛﺎﺭ ﻓﻲ ﻣﻮﺍﺿﻊ ﺃﺧﺮﻯ ﺃﻛﺜﺮ ﺟﻼﺀ، ﻛﻤﺎ ﻓﻲ ﺍﺳﺘﺨﺪﺍﻡ ﻭﺍﺟﻬﺎﺕ عرﺽ  ﺯﺟﺎﺟﻴﺔ ﺗﻀﻢ ﻣﻘﺘﻨﻴﺎﺕ ﺷﺨﺼﻴﺔ ﻓﻲ ﻣﺎﺩﺓ ﻣﻦ ﺃﺟﻞ ﻋﻤﻞ ﻧﺤﺘﻲ ﻓﻲ ﺫﻛﺮﻯ عالم ﺍﻗﺘﺼﺎﺩ ﺗﺤﻤﻞ ﺍﺳﻤﻪ ﺍﻟﻴﻮﻡ ﺍﻟﺸﻮﺍﺭﻉ ﻭﺍﻟﻤﻴﺎﺩﻳﻦ ﺍﻟﺘﻲ ﻛﺎﻥ ﻳﺘﺮﺩﺩ ﻋﻠﻴﻬﺎ، ٢٠١١.

إﻥ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﻭﺡ ﺍﻟﺘﻲ ﻳﺸﻴﺮ ﻟﻬﺎ “ﻣﺎﺩﺓ” ﻫﻲ ﻓﻲ ﻮﺍﻗﻊ الأمر ﻣﻮﺍﺩ ﺣﻘﻴﻘﻴﺔ، ﺗﺤﻤﻞ ﺗﺎﺭﻳﺦ ﺣﻘﻴﻘﻲ ﺗﺮﺑﻄ به إيمان ﻋﻴﺴﻰ بشكل شخصي، ﺑﻴﻨﻤﺎ ﺗﺤﺠﻢ هي ﻋﻦ وصفها ﺃﻭ ﺗﻌﻴﻴﻦ ﻣﻜﺎﻧﻬﺎ.  ﻳﺴﺘﺜﻴﺮ ﺍﻋﺘﻤﺎﺩ ﺍﻟﻤﺸﺎﻫﺪ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺍلأﺩﻟﺔ ﺍﻟﻨﺼﻴﺔ ﻭﻋﻠﻰ “ﺍﻟﻤﻮﺍﺩ” ﺍﻟﻤﺎﺩﻳﺔ ﻋﻤﻠﻳﺔ ﺗﻌﺮّﻑ ﺗﺨﺎﻟﻒ ﺗﻠﻚ ﺍﻟﺘﻲ ﺗﺨﺘﺒﺮ ﻟﺪﻯ ﻣﺠﺮﺩ ﺍﻟﻨﻈﺮ ﺇﻟﻰ ﺗﻠﻚ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﻭﺡ، ﺇﺫ ﺗﺷﻖ ﺳﺒﻞ علاﻗﺎﺗﻴﺔ ﺑﻴﻦ ﺍﻟﻌﻨﺎﺻﺮ ﻭﺑﻌﻀﻬﺎ ﺍﻟﺒﻌﺾ (ﻭﺑﻴﻦ ﺗﻠﻚ ﺍﻟﻌﻨﺎﺻﺮ ﻭبيننا) ﻋﻮﺿﺎً ﻋﻦ ﺍﻟﺮﻣﺰﻳﺔ.  ﻻ ﻳﺒﺪﻭ ﺷﺎﻏﻞ ﺍﻟﻔﻨﺎﻧﺔ ﺍلأﺳﺎﺳﻲ ﻫﻮ ﻗﺒﻮﻝ أﻭ ﺭﻓﺾ ﻣﺴﻴّﺲ ﻟﻌﻤﻠﻴﺔ ﺍﻋﺘﺮﺍﺽ ﺍﻟﺨﻄب (التي تستحضرها ﺍﻟﻼ- ﺻﺮﻭﺡ) ﻭﺇﻧﻤﺎ ﺗﺤﻠﻴﻞ ﺃﺷﻜﺎﻟﻬﺎ ﻭﻭﻇﺎﺋﻔﻬﺎ ﺫﺍﺗﻬﺍ.  ﻭﺑﺪلاً ﻣﻦ ﺍﺳﺘﺤﻀﺎﺭ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﺡ ﻧﻔسه – ﺑﻜﻞ ﻣﺎ ﻳﺤﻤﻞ ﻣﻦ ﺧﺼﻮﺻﻴﺔ ﺑﻴﻮﻏﺮﺍﻓﻴﺔ ﺃﻭ ﺳﻴﺎﺳﻴﺔ ﻣﻠﻬﻴﺔ – ﺗﺼﻴﺐ ﻋﻴﺴﻰ ﻛﺒﺪ ﺗﺴﺎﺅلاﺕ ﺣﻮﻝ الأﺷﻜﺎﻝ ﺍﻟﻤﺎﺩﻳﺔ ﺍﻟﺘﻲ ﺗﺴﺨﺮ ﻟﺪﻯ إﻧﺘﺎﺝ ﺍﻟﺘﻌﺮﻳﻒ والتمثيل ﻭالاحساس ﻭالأﻟﻔﺔ.

ﻣﻊ ﺍﻧﺒﻌﺎﺙ ﻧﺒﻀﺔ ﻣﻨﺨﻔﻀﺔ ﺍﻟﻨﻐﻤﺔ ﻣﻦ ﺳﻤﺎﻋﺔ ﺑﺎﻟﺠﺪﺍﺭ،  تعلوها ﺳﻤﺎﻋﺔ ﺗﺣﺎﻛﻲ أﺻﻮﺍﺕ ﺗﻤﺰﻳﻖ أوراق، ﺛﻢ ﺗﻨﺎﻣﺖ ﺣﺘﻰ ﺑﻠﻐﺖ ﻫﺪﻳﺮ ﺟﻤﻊ بعيد، ﺷﻌﺮﺕ ﺑﺎﻋﺘﺮﺍﺽ ﺗﺠﺮﺑﺔ ﺗﻘﺎﺑﻞ العنوان ﻣﺎﺩﺓ ﻣﻦ ﺃﺟﻞ ﻋﻤﻞ ﻧﺤﺘﻲ ﻳﺸﻬﺪ ﻋﻠﻰ التنمية الرائدة لأمة ﻭﻋﻠﻰ ﺍﻧﺤﺪﺍﺭﻫﺎ ﺍﻟمستمر، ٢٠١١.  ﻳﺼﺒﺢ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺍﻟﻤﺸﺎﻫﺪ ﺃﻥ ﻳﻘﺮﺭ أياً ﻫﻮ ﺍﻟﻨﻤﻮ ﻭأياً ﻫﻮ الاﻧﺤﺪﺍﺭ، ﻓأﻱ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﺼﻮﺗﻴﻦ أﻭ ﻣﻦ ﻭﺿﻌﻲّ ﺍﻟﺴﻤﺎﻋﺘﻴﻦ يسمح بالتأويل.  ﻟﻢ ﻳﺴﻌﻨﻲ ﺳﻮﻯ استرجاع القاﻫﺮﺓ ﻓﻲ ﺍلأﻳﺎﻡ ﺍﻟﺘﺎﻟﻴﺔ ﻟﺘﻨﺤﻲ ﺣﺴﻨﻲ ﻣﺒﺎﺭك، ﺣﻴﻨﻤﺎ ﺑﺪﺕ ﺍﻟﻤﺒﺎﻧﻲ وكأنها ﺗﺮﺩﺩ ﺃﺻﺪﺍﺀ ﻫﺪﻳﺮ ﺍﻟﺤﺸﻮﺩ، ﺣﺘﻰ ﺑﻌﺪ ﻋﻮﺩﺓ ﺍﻟﺸﻮﺍﺭﻉ ﺇﻟﻰ ﻃﺒﻴﻌﺘﻬﺎ.  أﻋﺮﻑ أﻥ ﺫﻟﻚ ﻟﻴﺲ ﻣﻮﺿﻮﻉ ﺍﻟﻌﻤﻞ، ﻭﻫﺬﺍ ﻫﻮ ﺑﻴﺖ ﺍﻟﻘﺼﻴﺪ: إﻥ لاﺳﺘﺬﻛﺎﺭ ﺍﻟﺼﻮﺕ ﻗﻮﺓ ﺍﻋﺘﺮﺍﺿﻴﺔ ﺗﻔﻮﻕ أﻳﺔ ﻣﺤﺎﻭﻟﺔ ﺍﺳﺘﺴﻬﺎﻟﻴﺔ ﻟﺘﺴﻤﻴﺔ ﺣﺪﺙ ﺛﻮﺭﻱ، ﻭﻫﻮ ﺍﻟﻔﻌﻞ ﺍﻟﺬﻱ ﻳﺒﺪﻭ ﻟﻲ ﻣﺒﺘﺬلاً ﻭﻣﻄﻨﺒﺎً ﻓﻲ ﺳﻴﺎﻕ ﻫﺬﺍ ﺍﻟﻤﻘﺎﻝ ﺍﻟﻨﻘﺪﻱ.  ﻓﻤﺜﻞ ﺍﻟﺸﻮﻛﺔ ﺍﻟﺘﻲ ترﻥ ﻟﺪﻯ ﻃﺮﻗﻬﺎ ﻋﻠﻰ أﻱ ﺳﻄﺢ، ﻓﺈﻥ ﺍلأﺛﺮ ﻫﻨﺎ ﻋﻤﻮﻣﻲ ﺑﻘﺪﺭ ﻣﺎ ﻫﻮ ﺣﻘﻴﻘﻲ. ﻭﺇﺫﺍ ﻛﺎن ﺫﻠﻚ ﻫﻮ ﺍلأﺳﻠﻮﺏ ﺍﻟﺬﻱ ﺗﻔﻀﻠﻪ ﻋﻴﺴﻰ، ﻓﺈﻥ ﺛﻘﺘﻬﺎ ﻓﻲ تكتيكات ﺍﻟﺼﺮﻭﺡ (ﻭﻟﻴﺲ ﻓﻲ ﺧﺼﻮﺻﻴﺎﺗﻬﺎ) أﻛﺜﺮ ﻣﻤﺎ ﻗﺪ تبدو.  ﻭلا ﺑﺄس، ﺇﺫ أﻣﺮّ ﺍلآﻥ بفترة أعارض ﻓﻴﻬﺎ الأفعال ﺍﻟﺘﻲ ﺗﺸﻴﺪ ﺼﺮﻭحاً، ﻭﻳﺼﺒﺢ فيها ﻋﻤل ﻣﺜﻞ ﻋﻤﻞ إﻳﻤﺎﻥ ﻋﻴﺴﻰ أﻛﺜﺮ ﻗﻮﺓ ﻣن أي من ﺗﻠﻚ ﺍلأﻓﻌﺎﻝ.
ﻣﻴﺎ ﻳﺎﻧﻜﻮﻓﻴﺘﺶ

٭ﺍﻟﺒﺎﺛﻮﺱ:bathos  ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﻼﺗﻴﻨﻴﺔ bathys ﻭﺗﻌﻨﻲ ﺍﺳﺘﺤﻀﺎﺭ الجلالة ﻭﺍﻟﻔﺨﺎﻣﺔ ﻓﻲ ﺍلأﻣﻮﺭ ﺍلاﻋﺘﻴﺎﺩﻳﺔ، ﺃﻭ ﺍلاﺳﺘﻌﺎﻧﺔ ﺑﻠﻐﺔ ﺭﻧﺎﻧﺔ ﻭﺻﻮﺭ ﺭﻓﻴﻌﺔ ﻟﻠﺘﻌﺒﻴﺮ ﻋﻦ ﺍﻟﺘﻮﺍﻓﻪ (ﺍﻟﻤﺘﺮﺟم)

A convenient generation divide in curating is easily observed, or at least frequently invoked, between those who began curating before the emergence of curatorial programs and those who did so after. Curators advanced in their careers are often heard pronouncing in panel discussions that they never undertook a curatorial program, with the implication that they are proof positive of the superfluity of curatorial education. What is rarely asked in these situations is, had curatorial programs been available at the sprouting of these careers, whether at least some of them might have given it a go?

Maria Lind’s text in The Exhibitionist no. 3, aside from giving me the novel experience of thinking of myself as a tomato, recalls various hallmarks of my experience in the de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam. The urge to be a Curator with a capital “C,” the feeling that one must perform curatorial “pirouettes,” and the force of political correctness (which often plumps for what Lind calls “overcollaboration”) were all somehow present. The hothouse metaphor is especially important to consider, as one of the most resounding elements of curatorial education is intensive access to high-placed contacts, research material, and, through a form of institutional endorsement, artistic trust. This privilege is an essential career ingredient, but it does not entirely make for a high-toned defense of curatorial education.

What does this hothouse constitute? At least with de Appel, it involves intensive periods of travel; personal space replaced by the constant presence of five ambitious strangers; a blistering who’s-who schedule of meetings and tutorials; and a body of resources and obligations (contacts, local officials, assignments, base budget) from which to develop a project. The project is to be collectively curated, responsive to an alien geographical context, and done in a very short time. While any of these conditions can individually crop up in a curatorial career, to have them all happen at once is a perfect storm of curatorial artificiality.

The hothouse, then, is not entirely a shelter, but also a place of unnatural exposure. This crucially leads to a point that Lind omits: that the kind of curator you are during your curatorial program (quite possibly a “narcissistic apparatchik”) is, thank God, most certainly not the kind you are in more sensible contexts. This means that many of the conditions she describes—and particularly the dreaded final project itself—are not necessarily indicative of the value of curatorial education.

The question, then, is what is? The same question is frequently aimed at art education, where it is also particularly difficult to answer. As one potential response, I want to offer a tentative defense of a description often leveled at (implicitly, graduate) curators: in Lind’s words, that they have “intellectual and artistic varnish rather than profound capabilities.” To recast this description, perhaps the curatorial program in its stone-skimming approach doesn’t produce well-rounded intellectuals or artistic experts, but is at least a multiplier of the best aspects of the dilettante. That is, someone whose unusual, enthusiasm-driven capacities in artistic and intellectual fields has a role besides virtuosity; in the case of the curator often the priority is in working out diverse aesthetic and conceptual connections between leading practices, before attempting to lead those practices themselves.

Ironically, the dilettante is closely allied with the position of the amateur, so it is paradoxical to defend a professional education program on this principle. However, an accepted, almost definitive aspect of the curator is the ability to mine and reference the theorists of certain fields, typically in but not always limited to the social sciences. Curators are (rightly) not expected to be experts in these fields, which correspondingly relieves them of the territorial certainty of the proper boundaries and languages of a field of study. Rather, and quite crucially, it enables them to develop witty, mercurial, occasionally fascinating projects with artists and others. While this can be enormously problematic, it strikes me as far more essentially proper to the figure of the curator than the themed exhibition curated by the academic expert, which often is so watertight that one imagines the distinguished curator defending her thesis all over again through artworks. Exhibit A.

The spectacularly earnest, intellectually poseur-ish, messy propositions of end-of-curator-school projects are the product of a set of experiences that probably leave you far less expert than you thought you were before, but possibly more open. As for more profound experience—given the immense oddity of the role itself, we can only hope that our glittering post-curatorial-education careers will offer us that.

Doa Aly, still from 'A Tress of Hair' (2008) 12'43"

Some images: my cat’s tufty little forelegs are a source of great comfort to me, planted either side of her fat furry stomach. I can barely keep my mind off her for more than a few minutes, particularly given her constant determination to walk across my keyboard. Yet before I can give her insistent paws yet another shove, I’m involuntarily recalling the knees of a horse I saw today in the middle of a market lane, shivering and cringing like a shy supermodel caught in the drizzle. And from that there is the image of a pair of camel legs cut off at the knee, standing neatly and horrifically alone in the unpaved alley as though the rest of the animal had just chosen to detach them and walk away on the stumps.

Unintentionally, this trajectory took me from pure sentimentality through to the terrifying catalogue of memory somehow hoarded when we are not paying attention. It reveals the unreasonable and disturbing behaviour of visceral association. While logical thought flows according the dictates of accepted restrictions, the uncontrolled mode of association allows things to cling in the memory and then to crop up as they please, paving the way to obsession, phobia, and fetishism.

Doa Aly’s short video work A Tress of Hair presents a world in which the strength of a wildly associative order has entirely replaced any other mode of signification. Firstly, however, the privileged viewer should know that it is refers to two stories by the 19th Century writer Guy de Maupassant, Berthe and A Tress of Hair. Described in both the subtitled narrative and in physical form is Berthe, indeed, the greedy, simpleton beauty whose almost nonexistent intelligence is only stimulated by the fulfilment of her desires. ‘Trained’, after some pains, to associate the clock with sensual fulfilment (the arrival of food and later, her husband), her one connection with the realm of meaning eventually leads her into madness. There is also the unnamed madman of A Tress of Hair, whose diaries from the madhouse tell of his falling under the erotic spell of a heavy golden rope of female hair found in a second hand cabinet, eventually leading him to believe in the woman it conjures for him. They are both stories of people whose symbolic order is violently rearranged, and they are genuinely frightening. In Aly’s A Tress of Hair, they are plaited together through character, physical gesture, and narration.

This work is not a rendition but an arrangement. Most noticeably with de Maupassant, they are written as stories-within-stories, removed already from the immediate readerly senses and put at a safe distance, retold through the eyes of the sane narrator. Aly’s A Tress Of Hair removes this luxury: we are faced directly with some less rational realm. Subtitled lines from the two stories – references to the conditions of Berthe and the madman – constitute the only narrative element, which instantly shed any navigational quality they had in the story. Characters and gestures are meaningful only through repetition and uncertain, tautological associations. In some ways, we’re put in the position of de Maupassant’s Berthe, whose only notion of meaning was painfully administered to her by attaching the fulfilment of her desire to a symbolic element, the hands of the clock. In the video, Berthe is horizontal and spins, her head in the lap of a suited man, turning anticlockwise in his lap.

Within this queasy and vague realm there is a heavy dose of literalness in the form of three dominant characters, the Women of Yesterday. Three elegant young women in pretty dresses, directly represent a nostalgic femininity described by the madman in de Maupassant’s A Tress of Hair. It’s a strange, over-literal thing to do, because in the story – even to the madman, really – they’re very easily read as some metaphor for privileged male heterosexual nostalgia. Making them into prominent, genuine characters has an adolescent gaucheness that prevents them from becoming mere replication of a slick male fantasy.

This gaucheness is emphasised through Aly’s deliberate use of nonprofessional actors with no dance training to co-devise the elements of movement. It is really gesture, rather than dance, that fascinates Aly, involuntary or unrefined gesture that stems from contact between an uncertain body and the social world, and it is a key device across all her works. Often, it is formalised enough to become dance – such as the Women of Yesterday making their slow, rhythmic way along a back wall – but it is still ultimately understood somehow within the realm of their constituent repetitive, decorative, coordinated gestures. They are also never quite polished enough not to make you think of the repetitive gestures of the insane, the physical tics of the terminally anxious, or the self-conscious poses of a teenage girl.

In fact, gaucheness might be a key term in understanding Aly’s use of gesture; that which pertains to ‘the left hand’. The hand whose ability is atrophied, which can only have an auxiliary practical function, and use of which society has taken to be somehow suspect, unreliable, or occult. You might say that A Tress of Hair is an exercise in removing the dominant hand and compelling the other to work, where systems of significance are, like drawings made with the non-dominant hand, faint in some places and wild, heavy-handed in others.

Aly herself, slim and dark, plays Berthe, a deliberate decision that immediately contradicts the character’s description as a vacant, plump blonde Venus. And though the tress of hair was blonde, an abundance of glossy brunette curls dominate the video: certainly on the Women of Yesterday, and as the longest tresses of all belong to Aly, she also seems to stand in place of the metonymic object of the madman’s obsession. By comparison the male character – young, suited, nondescript – is a cipher who could directly represent, equally, Berthe’s husband, doctor; or the madman in A Tress of Hair. Aly’s presence, then, is not just one of playing a character, but of standing in for things: a embodied, symbolic occupation of the stories’ key conditions.

بعض الصور: تشعرني يدا قطتي بالراحة الكبيرة وكل منها ناعمة ومنتفخة تتفرع من جانب بطنها الكبير المغطى بالفراء، بالكاد أستطيع أن أمنع ذهني عن التفكير فيها لأكثر من بضع دقائق خاصةً وأنها تصرّ على العبور فوق لوحة مفاتيح الكمبيوتر، ولكن قبل أن أدفع مخالبها لتبتعد عني مرة أخرى وجدت نفسي أتذكر سيقان ذلك الحصان الذي رأيته اليوم وسط السوق يرتعد وينكمش كعارضة أزياء رقيقة باغتتها قطرات المطر، ومن هنا أتت صورة ساقين لجمل قد تقطعتا عند الركبتين وتقفان في هدوء ورعب وسط زقاق غير مرصوف وكأن سائر الحيوان قرر أن ينفصل عن الساقين ويمشي مبتعداً على الجذوع.

وبدون قصد ذهب بي هذا المسار من العاطفة المحضة إلى التراكمات المخيفة بداخل الذاكرة والتي تتخرن بأسلوب ما على غفلة منّا، وتُظهر لنا كيف يتم الربط اللاإرادي بشكل غير منطقي ومقلق، ففي حين تسير الأفكار المنطقية طبقاً لما تمليه القيود المقبولة تسمح تلك الحالة غير المنضبطة من الربط بالتصاق أمور في الذاكرة بحيث تعاود الظهور فجأةً كما يحلو لها فتمهّد الطريق إلى الهواجس والهلع والولع.

الفيديو القصير «ضفيرة شعر» لـ «دعاء علي» يعرض عالماً طغت فيه قوة نظام الربط العشوائي تماماً على أي نوع آخر من أنواع الدلالة على المعنى، ولكن أولاً، على المشاهد المميَّز أن يعرف أن الفيديو مبني على قصتين من القرن التاسع عشر للكاتب «جي دي موباسان» هما «بيرث» و «ضفيرة شعر»، والشخصية الموصوفة في كل من الترجمة المكتوبة والشكل المجسد في الفيديو هي الجميلة «بيرث» الأنانية المغفلة التي تُنشِّط ذكاءها الغير موجود تقريبا بإرضاء رغباتها الغريزية، وقد تدرّبت بعد عناء على الربط بين ساعة الحائط وبين إرضاء الجسد – الذي يتمثل في وصول الطعام وزوجها بعد ذلك – وفي نهاية الأمر تؤدي بها صلتها الوحيدة بعالم المعنى إلى الجنون. وهناك أيضاً الرجل المجنون غير المسمّى في «ضفيرة شعر» الذي تروي يومياته في مستشفى المجانين حكاية وقوعه تحت تأثير السحر الشهواني لخصلة ذهبية من الشعر الأنثوي وجدها في خزانة مستعملة وأدت به في النهاية إلى التصديق بوجود المرأة التي استحضرها ذهنه بسبب تلك الضفيرة. القصتان تتناولان أشخاصاً أعيد ترتيب نظامهم الرمزي بشكل عنيف وهما مخيفتان حقاً، وفي «ضفيرة شعر» لـ «دعاء علي» تتداخل القصتان معاً من خلال الشخصية والإشارات الحركية والرواية المكتوبة.

ليس هدف هذا العمل أن يُعطيَ تفسيراً مُسلّماً به وإنما هو مجرد ترتيب، وأكثر ما يُلاحَظ عند «موباسان» أنهما كُتِبَتا كقصص بداخل قصص تم بالفعل انتزاعها من مدارك القارئ المباشرة لتوضع على مسافة منه حيث يعيد روايتها الراوي العاقل، وتنزع «ضفيرة شعر» لـ «دعاء علي» هذه الرفاهية فنتواجه مواجهة مباشرة مع عالم أقل عقلانية، ويأتي العامل الروائي الوحيد من سطور الترجمة لبعض جمل القصتين التي تشير إلى أحوال «بيرث» والرجل المجنون وقد فقدت هذه الجمل أي قدرة توجيهية قد تمتعت بها في القصص من قبل، فالشخصيات والحركات لا تحمل معنى إلا من خلال التكرار، ويمكن القول أننا وُضِعنا في موقف «بيرث» التي لم تجد سبيلاً إلى عالم المعنى إلا من خلال الربط المؤلم بين تحقيق غريزتها وبين عنصر رمزي هو عقارب الساعة. تظهر «بيرث» في الفيديو في وضعٍ أفقي وتدير رأسها فوق ساقي رجل يرتدي بدلة فتتحرك باتجاه معاكس لعقارب الساعة.

تكمُن بداخل هذا العالَم الداعي إلى الغثيان والمُبهَم جرعة ثقيلة من الحَرفِية في صورة ثلاث شخصيات رئيسية هي «نساء الأمس» وهنّ ثلاث فتيات أنيقات يرتدين فساتين جميلة ويرمزن مباشرة إلى أنثوية يصفها الرجل المجنون في «ضفيرة شعر» لـ«موباسان» ويشعر بالحنين إليها، إنه أمر غريب ومفرط في الحرفية لأن هذه الشخصيات يسهل قراءتها في القصة – حتى بالنسبة للرجل المجنون – على أنها كناية عن الحنين الجنسي عند الرجال المرفهين، وإظهارها كشخصيات حقيقية فيه شيء من فظاظة المراهقين يمنع النساء الثلاثة من أن يصبحن مجرد نسخة مكررة من الخيال الذكوري الماكر.

تتأكد هذه الفظاظة من خلال استخدام «علي» المتعمد لممثلين غير محترفين لم يحصلوا على تدريب في الرقص ليشاركوها في تصميم عناصر الحركة، إنها فعلاً الـ «لفتة» وليس الرقص التي تجدها «علي» مثيرة جداً، إنها اللفتات اللاإرادية وغير المهذبة التي تنبع من احتكاك جسم متردد بالعالم الاجتماعي، إنها أداة أساسية في كل أعمال «علي»، وكثيراً ما تأخذ اللفتة طابعاً رسمياً حتى تصبح رقصاً – كما تسير «نساء الأمس» عبر حائط أسود ببطء وبحركة إيقاعية – ولكنها تظل مفهومة في النهاية بداخل عالم لفتاتهم المتناسقة المتكررة، وهن لا يتزيّنّ أبداً لدرجة تجعلك لا تفكر في لفتات المجنون المتكررة أو تشنجات جسد من أصابه القلق العضال أو تحركات فتاة مراهقة خجولة تقف أمام الناس.

في الحقيقة، قد يكون مصطلح «الفظاظة» أساسياً في فهم استخدام «علي» لللفتات: ذلك الذي يتعلق بالـ «يد اليسرى»، تلك اليد التي ضمرت قدرتها فلا تستطيع إلا أن تقدم وظيفة ثانوية وقد رأى المجتمع أنها محل شك وغير جديرة بالثقة وسحرية. يمكن القول بأن العمل الفني «ضفيرة شعر» عبارة عن تمرين في نزع اليد المسيطرة وإجبار الأخرى على العمل، وفيه تخفُت نظم الدلالة في مواضع بينما تنطلق بلا ضابط في مواضع أخرى، كما الرسم المرسوم باليد التي لا تحظى بالسيطرة.

تؤدي «علي» دور «بيرث» بنفسها، بجسدها النحيل وبشرتها الداكنة، بحيث يناقض على الفور هذا القرار المتعمد وصف الشخصية بأنها شقراء ممتلئة الجسم، وبالرغم من أن ضفيرة الشعر كانت شقراء فالتي تهيمن على الفيديو هي وفرة من خصلات الشعر الأسمر اللامعة: خاصةً على «نساء الأمس» وحيث أن أطول ضفيرة هي التي تتزين بها «علي» فيبدو أنها أيضا تحل محل الأداة التي تتركّز عليها هواجس الرجل المجنون، وعندما ننظر إلى شخصية الرجل – وهو شاب يرتدي بدلة ولا تظهر عليه صفات كثيرة – نجد أنه قد يشير مباشرة بنفس الدقة إلى أي من زوج «بيرث» الطبيب أو الرجل المجنون، وبالتالي فوجود «علي» ليس مجرد تجسيد لشخصية ما وإنما يرمز لأشياء: إنها تجسيد رمزي للظروف الرئيسية في القصتين.

Mia Jankowicz:

When I worked in a small space in South London, my colleague, who was coordinator for education, did a youth workshop about protest. It was themed around participation, speaking up, the right to self expression, and so on. The participants were about ten years old and included a lot of kids with a tendency to misbehave, and the workshop went pretty well. At the end, they were asked to make protest placards, really nice wooden signs with their messages on them. out of all of them, the best one was cryptic and seemed very ‘conceptual’. It said:

My colleague hung it above her desk and we both admired it frequently. we liked its bold black writing – the vocabulary of emancipation and refusal – the simplicity of its emphatically stated self-contradiction. A few months later, my colleague stopped what she was doing and cried: ‘I’ve just realised what that sign says.’ I looked and I too suddenly read it like a Dingbats image, one of those lateral-thinking word/image puzzles, and it all made sense. of course, the protest placard actually said: ‘I don’t understand.’

So, all that time, that kid had been pulling our leg. This statement, made at the epicentre of contemporary art’s most earnestly channelled conduit of understanding and participation, seems symptomatic of something fundamental to how education in art has been thought about (particularly as regards institutions and their targets). we had understood and lauded the placard purely within our own frames of reference, an example of a ‘successful’ workshop, when, in fact, it was far cleverer. I hesitate to over-interpret the girl’s intentions, but let’s say that some spectre of ‘understanding’ art had been dangled in front of her to no avail, that she was suspicious of these particular attempts to bring her obediently into this privileged set of forms and vocabularies; but had instead made a gesture that confronted the most immediate power relation to hand, regardless of whether or not the workshop had given her ‘permission’ to do so, instinctively understanding that protest begins at home.

Charles Esche:

If somebody says you don’t mediate enough or when it comes to the phrase ‘I don’t understand’, at what point does that person think that understanding would be satisfied? I think that ‘I don’t understand’ is a displaced way of saying ‘I don’t think it’s very good,’ but not wanting to say so in case it is good and they’ve got it wrong. So, I don’t think education is about understanding. The response might be: ‘You don’t think it’s good. That’s fine.’ And then you talk about that. ‘Understanding’ has become a kind of substitute for very simple good/bad assessments actually. We get that a lot in the Van Abbemuseum. If somebody thinks that something is interesting, they don’t use that phrase.

And if I didn’t understand something on a visit to an exhibition, I’m going to spot some new references when I go back; that’s the pleasure of working it out, of unfolding something. of course, you have to be interested enough to want to do that and maybe you’re not, and that’s also fine. If you want to see art that is specifically trying to be understandable – and this is not necessarily wrong – then we have to look at Socialist Realism as the art that is specifically driven by the statement ‘I don’t understand it’. There probably isn’t any other answer, in the end, but an art that has to be absolutely transparently representative of its ideology. So, ‘The workers are in control,’ so what we do is we paint a big worker in the middle of the canvas, and that means the workers are in control. Then when someone says, ‘I don’t understand,’ you can say, ‘well you see that the worker is big and young and he’s pointing to the future, so he’s in control, while the capitalists are small people crawling around in the background.’

Before the interview, we had all met to discuss a focus and Charles had suggested that we all think about a particular formative educational moment from our personal experiences, that might provide an expanded context for our discussion about his working, personal and political perspective on the educational turn in curating.

CE:

I would say there are two separate moments, but one led to the other. I was brought up politically; my parents were immigrants from Socialism who remained Communist in a certain way, so there wasn’t really a ‘moment’ that I got engaged. So I think the pivotal moments were around disillusionment with politics, rather than my entry into politics.

It was during this specific moment of the miner’s strike in the UK and there were a lot of speeches on the docks in Yorkshire, against Polish coal coming in and replacing the coal that wasn’t being dug because of the strike. The leaders would not tackle the absurdity of having supported the Solidarnosc workers two or three years earlier, and then now rejecting the coal they were digging up after they were defeated in quite difficult circumstances. They might claim to be acting in the interests of the Polish miners but there clearly wasn’t much of an attempt to do so.

That situation seemed to me to draw a limit around the so-called internationalism of Socialism. It made me think that if we want to export our coal, what we are doing is effectively trying to deprive the people in Poland of jobs. So that means the people in Poland, when they rise up again in solidarity and try to overthrow this Stalinist government, then they’ll try to do the same to us. And then there came the vote when the miners rejected having women members, even though they had been the backbone of the strike. And it just seemed to be about convention and strategy and nothing about principle any more. That’s how I read it, at least – I was 21 or 22 when the strike was on, so I can see the misunderstandings of it now – but it was a very raw and powerful moment for me.

And, so, then I started asking questions in the left of the Labour Party, in a small group called Socialist Organiser (that was later kicked out of the Labour Party), and I didn’t get the answers that I wanted. And I felt, as a result of that, that this was not a field where you could imagine the world otherwise. I remember asking, ‘well, why couldn’t we find this connection of solidarity with this or that group?’ and they said, ‘well, no, because they think this and this.’ This tendency for ideological hair-splitting in the far left became really tedious.

I had been intending to, you know, be part of the revolution – and then I wasn’t part of the Labour movement any more.

At the same time as dealing with the humdrum institutional and regional politics occasioned by being a director of a museum, something that Esche takes everywhere with him is a sensibility influenced by Marxism. When he speaks of ‘understanding’, he does in relation to questions of emancipation and ethics as much as explaining aesthetic developments.

Ana Nikitovic:

The role of making art comprehensible is usually given to museums. If someone who has uncertainty comes by, how then do institutions open up that possibility for them to ask their questions?

CE:

Within the Van Abbemuseum, I think it’s our job to ask questions in response – like that particular form of Freudian psychology where you only answer a question with a question. If someone says, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ then you ask: ‘what don’t you understand?’ I think that’s the way you can work, because if you start to engage in answering someone, or providing a service for someone and saying, ‘let me explain,’ then you’re completely lost. Then the relationship with the artwork is already bounded by the institution. The possibility that artwork might have to change somebody’s way of imagining the world is devolved to the person who is explaining it. So, the work of art then disappears, in a sense, and it’s the explainer who is responsible for this transformation that the work of art should actually make happen.

So, you constantly have to throw back on some third party – don’t say, ‘Let me explain,’ but say, ‘why do you want this thing to be explained to you?’ This is practised literally, at the moment, with the interpretation at the Van Abbe, where we will only ask questions and we won’t make any statements, which I think will really annoy people but it just seems important.

Also, there is this broader shift. Modernism is about providing answers and whatever world is emerging now – slowly, out of the wreckage – is not modernist, and is not going to be about answers, but more about how you formulate the questions.

AN:

This almost sounds like an art stereotype, being not about giving answers but about asking questions.

CE:

I don’t think art is about asking questions. Maybe that’s where it is wrong, where the stereotype is given – it’s the job of the curator to ask the question. I have been thinking about this a bit in the last ten years; if we need to start to describe what has happened from the wreckage of modernism, which we don’t even have a name for … then it seems to be more related to the 18th Century than to the 20th Century. These developments emerge really from the pre-modern or the pre-modernist. whether this is part of a moment or a set of conditions, this is something where there is no longer a horizon, where the hegelian idea of history is no longer living in our actions. whether or not this idea of history is wrong is another question, but the idea is no longer implemented in life as it was throughout the whole messianic 20th Century. The 20th Century thought in terms of finding this moment of Utopian achievement, of the communist or national socialist revolutions or fascism or even of democracy in a certain sense, and even the utopian idea of freedom.

All these ideas were wrapped up in the idea that the messiah will come and everything will be right. And I think that the Benjaminian idea of messianic time is absolutely and thoroughly connected to modernism. It is absolutely secularised. And it’s fading away, which is fucking hard. whether it’s temporary or not, I don’t know. I think you can observe it, though, in the lack of messianic possibility, that there is no ‘future’. The future is already packed up.

AN:

I was thinking of my grandmother who, in her teenage years, was a member of the Communist Party Youth in Montenegro. I was raised with this idea of emancipation. The thing that stuck with me was how organised they were there – education was emancipation, a really important thing for them. So, they would meet every day after school and read, sitting in groups, talking and exchanging their interpretations. So, I was thinking, in my time and context, how would I translate that?

I realised it’s the reading group, something that contemporary art is using and has accepted and transformed. This history is also something that answers the question ‘why am I here, in the art world?’ Because both these activities – political self-organisation and contemporary art’s discursivity – allow an imaginative realm in which you can question things, which is perhaps the most political aspect of the educational turn in contemporary art.

CE:

I think this is true and so we are talking less about the art asking questions, and more about a space where you are allowed to ask questions and you can speculate about the answers without necessarily having them given to you. Party politics comes out of that structure or line – asking questions and thinking about the answer and then saying, ‘that’s the answer’ – well, the last step is where it all goes wrong, but the first two steps in that are actually
fine.

If contemporary art is that which always postpones the idea of a fixed ideology, or at least tries to, it gives me the space to be able to try very hard to overthrow my Marxist hegelian upbringing. This would mean trying to think about what happens when there isn’t a horizon of history any more, and asking how you go from avant-gardist to ‘gardist’, i.e. to live in the everyday world rather than being out there leading or saying ‘this way’. How do you do that? This is something I have been confronted with personally, particularly in the last six months, and it has become a very big part of my thinking. That move from avant-gardist to ‘gardist’, that loss of horizon or direction is very hard to deal with, but at least contemporary art seems to have that structure of openness, or being able to remake itself without threatening itself or its survival, in the way that ideology is always threatened by any questioning.

Ji Yoon Yang:
There are plenty of other fields that are defined by this sort of fundamental openness to questioning – like critical theory or sociology or philosophy – yet contemporary art now seems to be at the centre. Why do you think this is?

CE:

The answer might be that we’re all involved in it and that’s why we think it is at the centre. Surprise – for all the people in contemporary art, contemporary art is the choice.

It’s possible that that’s true, but I’m not sure. I want to leave it as a possibility as otherwise you become hubristic. But, possibly, to try to answer, in contrast to philosophy, for instance, art has not only an academic side; it has a connection with the public.

MJ
Or could it be that curating allows dilettantism? Although as a curator you’re often expected to be an expert in art history, or something of an expert of art mediation…

CE:
That’s the worst curating!

MJ:
… you’re also dabbling in a number of fields, like those JYY mentioned, and there you have permission not to be an expert at all. One role I value that a curator might have (particularly as regards certain kind of artists) is to be the person who deregulates the idea of expertise; or who deregulates the forms and means of learning, about the work and about the world upon which the work draws.

CE:
I think another way of talking about it is through what Sarat Maharaj calls ‘non-knowledge’ production, this idea that you don’t have to conform to the disciplinary structures of knowledge, and that art is, perhaps, exceptional in having licence within our expectations. within our social agreements, it doesn’t have to be ‘right’ or justified in the outside world in the same way. So we can say, ‘ok, as a philosopher this is totally wrong but it’s art so therefore I can accept it.’

I think, when he uses the term ‘non-knowledge’, Maharaj is trying to de-specify the disciplines of knowledge and that’s why it has enormous impact academically. In order to give what he’s doing some body, the person who’s declaring something not to be knowledge is confronted with the reality of this non-knowledge and can’t just come back and say, ‘no, I know the truth.’ And remember that modernist academia – much like modernist art – is always concerned with knowing the truth.

AN:
‘Knowledge exchange’ is one of the three postulates of the Van Abbemuseum. The term feels like a conscious swap for the term ‘education’.

CE:
If you think of the Latin educare, which means ‘to lead out’, it has within it the idea that you are bringing something out of someone, rather than the idea that you are putting things in.

This maxim that was used by Steiner is very old fashioned and anthroposophic but still a very good notion of education: ‘the mind is a fire to be kindled and not a vessel to be filled’. I really want nothing to do with the kind of education that thinks in terms of vessels to be filled.

I think that the more modest, or maybe more contemporary, mode of this is to understand education as knowledge exchange. At least knowledge exchange may offer a slight difference in that it suggests that the would-be ‘receiver’ also has knowledge. That way, you’re not only encouraging something out of them, but also acknowledging that they have something to offer whether you encourage it or not.

It’s constructing a mode in which they can also leave something behind in a museum, whether that’s an experience or a memory or an anecdote or whatever. The reality of this is always disappointing, but we try to do it, we have it in mind – that should, then, inform our practice – that we should think about how to learn from the way that people use the museum. It’s a slow process because people aren’t used to that in the Van Abbemuseum. Museums were, for so many years, top-down institutions where the director determined what happened and the other people were there to be the extra arms.

It’s very pragmatic and functional – almost a shareholder model – and that’s not what I’ve ever been interested in. When we go back to my political upbringing, that was precisely what I was taught that we didn’t do, which is to accept the world around us as it is.

Later, in conversation, AN put it a very simple way: that what the ‘educational turn’ has brought to contemporary art, is not only the extended use of terms such as ‘knowledge production’ and ‘research’, but also their implication in the current integration of art education in the future ‘knowledge society’. And this is what happens when institutional critique becomes the institution itself.

Lilian Engelmann:
How do you separate the idea of informal knowledge exchange and other expanded means of education in museums, and other contexts, from the expectations of ‘life-long learning’? That growing neoliberal expectation of individual self- improvement, that you simply aren’t keeping up with the world unless you are self-sufficient and on top of things and that it is your lifelong responsibility.

CE:
I’m not sure you can draw a definitive line. That idea of ‘I don’t understand’ – that art is not really educationally effective because you don’t understand it – is really valuable in this situation. With strictly pre-specified educational expectations, it’s difficult to make art other than that which would follow Socialist Realist lines of development, although it doesn’t necessarily have to look like a figurative painting, as such, but rather has certain rules to it. It’s usually more in the field of ambiguity, of uncertainty, of paradox, in which this model of knowledge exchange works. I think that’s one way you try not to be totally instrumentalised

MJ:
Could it also be in collectivity? LE’s idea of life-long learning involves the individuation of responsibility for your fate, and an ultimate mindset of total self sufficiency, even when it’s putacross as an opportunity – who can criticise someone who wants to learn? But with knowledge exchange, maybe you have potential for collectivity as an end as well as a means?

CE:
I’m a great fan of collectivity, obviously, I’m convinced of its significance, even though it was abandoned. This has resulted in an extreme individualisation, which seems to me extraordinarily fundamentalist in its privileging of the individual and of autonomy, to the point that you can talk about institutional autonomy and you don’t talk about institutional responsibility, and you certainly talk about individual autonomy and not about individual responsibility. If we’re in a time of such fundamentalist individualisation, then how can we talk about collective ethics? how do we behave with each other at that moment when we can so easily be together? There isn’t, for example, a community or collectivity in the ‘Creative Industries’,
even when they’re networked. It’s to do with the network and with being individually connected, but that’s nothing to do with collectivity.

And, so, my only objection to the idea of collectivity would be a pragmatic one: how, in this period of fundamentalist individualisation, can you institute the idea of an ethics of collectivity? I don’t know how to do that at the moment. I don’t know how to be in solidarity with people – certainly, in the Netherlands, where they hate the word ‘solidarity’, hate the word ‘collective’, where they resist any form of saying that we share more than divides us.

It’s almost in that old way of the left, finding the most hair-splitting differences from each other. I’m sick of this fucking uniqueness in reality, it kills my spirit. You know, my uniqueness can easily suffer because of that; I can find uniqueness again, if I need it, but let’s not prize it as the most precious thing there is. It’s absurd. The basis of our humanity is the copy – we’re reproductions of our parents.

I don’t know how to fight it as the whole force of contemporary capitalism is geared towards declaring your uniqueness and the idea of consumer choice. There’s so much money invested in ensuring that you feel unique, and there’s so little money invested in the idea that you actually feel the same.
I don’t mean a kind of abandonment of the individual in terms of the group. I’m just talking about how we can construct an ethics of being together or, in Homi Bhaba’s terms, an ethics of being strange and close. The curatorial group ‘what, how and for whom’ is about that, trying to build an ethics of collectivity, which is sometimes really hard. And this Curatorial Programme at de Appel is still sitting round the same table and talking – that’s remarkable given the past record of the CP – it does seem to me that its educational potential is in this building of an ethics of collectivity between you, which means knowledge exchange and a certain lack of absolute defence of individual rights and ownership to ideas.

I think it’s very hard, within the hierarchies of position in a museum; for me personally, to insist on a collective ethics, this would mean us all being paid the same and working in the same conditions but also taking the same responsibilities and sharing the problems and not expecting to be led. I can abandon the director’s office, as I have, but it doesn’t shift the fundamental expectations of leadership. It is only a symbolic move to demonstrate the aesthetics of an idea that we can exchange without necessarily having a hierarchical power. Instead of saying ‘now that I’m the director, you have to do these things that I do and if you happen to think the same thing, then great; but, if not, I’m going to stop you’, I would ideally like to think about a ethics of collectivity that would then say this is not the job of the director, which, of course, other people would say is a dereliction of responsibility. In business hierarchies, they’d say, ‘well you’ve been given responsibility therefore you have to have the power’ – that’s the ethics of the individualist.

MJ:
There is still this rather neoliberal way of saying, ‘oh, everybody can be XYZ because you are each individuals, you can just do it your own way and it’ll wonderful,’ despite the lack of support to do so. This question of supporting learning leads us to the problematic relationship between authority, expertise and hierarchy and the means of learning. In learning, how do we define the value of the greater experience that tends to lead to greater authority? A valid description of authority might be when it is not allocated via a fixed hierarchy but rather emerges as a symptom of the interest of the person who comes asking questions. This model would seem to relate to the Protoacademy, an initiative you set up in 1998 with students from Edinburgh College of Art.

CE:
It was simply a table with chairs around it, and one of its principles was that anyone who came to sit there was part of it. There was no kind of membership. What you brought to the table was how you determined the hierarchy. So, if we were talking about a subject and somebody had knowledge about it, at that moment they were the boss in that sense. Maybe they would be people, like artists from the college [Edinburgh College of Art], who were more experienced, or visitors who would come and exchange certain information, or me as an older person who would regularly take a
position of authority. At certain points, this process of discussion could become problematic depending on how the rules of the discussion or how the subject matter was working out. But, if some professor who was part of the college and who didn’t really like what we were doing would just come and sit there, not saying anything because he wanted to control it, then he’s really at the lowest level. According to the ethics of that table, he’s at the bottom, he’s first year; he has just come in.

That was a principle that I still think is worthwhile – that you can construct a kind of picture, or even a sculptural reality, to the education moment, which is the table and chairs and the sitting there, and that begins to give you some sort of ethics.

AN:
Still, at some point, you also said that Protoacademy was somehow a parasite on the existing educational structure. In the translation of education into knowledge exchange, relative structures seem important.

CE:
Yes, the Protoacademy was contingent on the fact that all the students had an institutional affiliation, which meant that we didn’t have to deal with any of that institutional infrastructural processing etc. When we travelled and did projects in the Staedelschule, Stuttgart, Gwangju 2002, or Malmö, those projectswere organised in essence because of these organisations that already existed and provided the infrastructure. There were a few places where we performed the sculptural function of the table, and this was always parasitical. For example, Korea was probably themost independent but it was still attached to the Gwangju Biennale,and that allowed us to operate but it also gave you certain constraints. we weren’t as open as we wished, in the sense that anybody could come along. It would be unlikely that people would hear of it, and it would be unlikely that they would have the confidence to walk through the institutional structure to find us.

So we were dependent on the people in the institution to join us. I think the best times were when we mixed the together the students and recent graduates from situations in Stuttgart and Staedelschule and in Edinburgh and Glasgow, when it was mixed and it felt like this manic construction of community. This is where the name made sense in a way, the ‘Proto’, meaning to be in the process of becoming an academy but never meaning to actually do so. It would always be prototypical or protean, a structure and process of becoming. That seems to be a nice way of naming it because, with
a name, you fix something that is in process and you kind of restrict its possibility to grow. And, of course, ultimately, pragmatically, the un-fixity was fatal as it meant we could never anchor ourselves in a situation or actually become an academy.

AN:
This sculptural place of tables and chairs as a metaphor of the place within education, it’s interesting – is this more or less what the educational turn in the art world is?

CE:
The Protoacademy very literally was that – put some chairs in the room, there you go.

Quite often, it was empty – just as a meeting room in an office would be. It was useful, everybody became very pragmatic. People asked: ‘I don’t understand it, why aren’t you having a meeting here?’ ‘well, it’s a meeting room; with meeting rooms you don’t always have a meeting.’ ‘But then why do you have it?’ ‘well, because it’s a meeting room.’

The metaphorical sculptural power of that statement was far more interesting, I think, than the fact that people might wander in and you’d be there having a meeting. You ended up with these conversations where you had to ask a question back: ‘Well, why do you think there should be a meeting here? Why, in your experience, is there always a meeting in a meeting room?’

AN:
So, can we say than that the place of education within exhibition-making is symbolic?

CE:

I never really want to get into signs and symbols to be honest. ‘Is the place of education symbolic?’ If I cross out the silent ‘only’ in that sentence, then, yes, part of it is, I think. It’s also about a gesture towards the idea that this education – in the sense of knowledge exchange – is available to you. I think the Viewing Depot work that we do at the Van Abbe has a symbolic power, but it is also real. It has iconic status and it signifies, but the actual act of doing it is also at play. I think of it as an icon for a way of thinking about the collection as being ‘accessible’. It signifies an idea of us trying to create a dialogue in which we want to know people’s motivations as regards what to see in the collection. If it’s not an education project, then I don’t know how you would define it. It’s certainly a project that tries to engage in an exchange of knowledge of the collection.

Clare Butcher:
You already told us one experience of yours that changed your perspective or taught you something about learning itself, yet you said there were two parts – what was the other half of the story?

CE:

I was in Manchester, and it was 1984, and one day I went to an exhibition space called Cornerhouse and there was an exhibition by Stephen Willats. I didn’t know him at all, but he was making work in high-rise housing schemes, in Manchester, Oxford, Edinburgh, and London – and he’d done a series of works around the punk movement. I was a kind of fake punk, and it spoke to me about the conditions that I had experienced and the speculative ways that you might address the world. he seemed to be asking the questions that I couldn’t ask in politics, like: How do we live together? How do we make symbols that we can share, without those symbols being inherited from somebody else and having no chance to influence them? He seemed to be offering that possibility – so, not the hammer and sickle or the red flag or the clenched fist, but giving life to one’s own symbols. That was inspiring for me.

Nowadays, I would be more critical about the work because, as time passes, you build a relationship and a different vocabulary. But I still have a lot of respect for Stephen. Some time after that I thought: ‘Ok, so this art thing is what it’s about then. Not politics. I’d better find out something about it.’

de Appel Curatorial Programme 2008/2009 were: Clare Butcher, Lilian Engelmann, me, Christina Li, Ana Nikitovic, and Ji Yoon Yang

Frances Stark, Readying for Reflection. Vinyl paint, collage on panel, 36 × 62 in, 2006.

And also, what of the sheet? - on Frances Stark

But what of Frances Stark, standing by itself, a naked name, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet? does a lot of things as an exhibition title. It is a title and a proposal for a title, a discussion of the idea that ’Frances Stark’ on its own might need some help. It is not as coy as one might think; had the show just been called ‘Frances Stark’ – the title would go uncommented-upon, so it provokes a discussion of the very translucency a sheet might cover up.

The semi-invisible ghost depends on the surface layer – a sheet – in order to take form. Frances Stark’s work is largely two-dimensional, and much of its beauty comes from allusion to, and formal experimentation with, two-dimensional things: butterfly wings, gallery invitation cards, the spread fantail of a peacock, the printed page. Only rarely is any sort of depth of field attempted. Translatlantic *3 (2003) conveys depth in two ways – the wash of blue that could possibly represent the sea (if the title is to be believed) in exactly the same charming way that a blue stripe at the top of a child’s drawing represents the sky. Secondly, there’s a heroic demonstration of a cuboid storage box. But in both cases the use of such readily identifiable, unsophisticated, and mutually conflicting techniques seems to mark them out as being more about the attempt than the figuration. Yet we still get the rather bleak idea of a box – to store what?- stranded and waterlogged in the middle of the ocean.

Frances Stark, Translatlantic*3. Carbon transfer and ink on paper, 355 x 255. 2003

The quality of flatness will always conjure those value-laden formal descriptors shallow and decorative. All surface, no feeling. In fact, Transatlantic *3 can be said to have deeply emotional content (1), but as the viewer cannot always know these things, we can’t rely on depth of content in what are frequently very sparse images to convey all the affect the work has to offer. So this text discusses the sheet, and not the ghost: not making detailed ‘readings’ based on privileged knowledge of the works; nor is it, having highlighted the works’ frequent two-dimensionality, my task then to take some defensive line on Stark’s work as being nevertheless very very ‘deep’ – which, of course it certainly can be, when as a viewer you are equipped with all the curiosity and means necessary to find out what informs the work’s creation. Instead, it aims to speak of more immediate encounters between the viewer, the work, and the associations that are possible; to speak of what that very flatness and emphasis on surface might convey, deflect, deny, atone for, conceal, and excite, looking at what the work throws outwards, and not what is ‘behind’ it. If Stark’s work is flat, our gaze and our thoughts can dance on its surfaces like droplets of water on a hotplate.

Some of the works included in this exhibition were once presented as part of longer sequenceswhose scheme is no longer apparent in this new combination. Modestly Becoming (2007) was exhibited at the Vienna Secession, an exhibition in which Stark, over several large works on paper, reappropriated the circuits of creative agony described in Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke. In this scenario, Modestly Becoming depicts one of several timid people who, punctuating the linearity of the show, acted as embodiments of the anxieties in the text. They peeked out from behind large butterflies adorned with pieces of invitation cards, as if all this revelation might be a little indecent.

Frances Stark, Modestly Becoming. Inlaid printed matter with linen tape on rice paper, 1450 x 790. 2007

Now that some works are recontextualised from these settings, in a sense newly vulnerable outside of their native logic, the idea of covering one’s modesty is brought up afresh. ‘Standing ‘alone’, they undergo a typical condition of a Frances Stark work, which is to be subject always to an interrogation of its own robustness as a ‘good’ or ‘proper’ art work.(2) The ways Stark re-presents or recasts her own work, such as this exhibition, serve more to undermine efforts at interpretation than to fix signification. Parts of the running commentary she makes in her book Agonising Yet Blissful Little Orgies of Soul Probing (2007) have an air of justification, as though she has been discovered found to be involved in an absorbing but mildly embarrassing task and has, perhaps rather unfairly, been called upon to account for herself. This isn’t the impetus for the book at all (as is explained very clearly in the text), however the result is that rather than an authoritative guide to interpretation, there is a fragmentary thread of associations that makes the book feel more like an extension of the kind of self-reflexive questioning that goes on within her work.

New layers of meaning and new recombinations are always possible, but they do not get any closer to the ghost underneath the sheet. As Martin Prinzhorn put it, ‘individual works also initially exhibit a kind of indecision as to whether they want to be seen as works in their own right or as a document or illustration of something.’ (3) This constant sense of deflection away from its own content is one of the principal and most exciting ways that Stark’s work operates.

The hand-held fan was once the shield-armour of feminised polite society. It conceals, protect, and adorns – this adornment coming as much through the mystique it conveys, as through its decorative surface. Fan-like functions are often evident in Stark’s works – the butterfly wings of Modestly Becoming; the tail feathers, open or closed, in the various peacock works; the pansies plastered directly over the face of a contemplative man in a sublime Caspar David Friedrich’s painting used to illustrate the cover of a Nietzsche book Stark has collaged.

Suitably fancy image of a lady with a fan, found online

Supposedly, according to people who like this sort of thing, there was once a ‘language of fans’. Through the careful handling of her fan, a woman at an 18th Century ball might signal a vast array of romantic encouragements and emotional states. The following are some examples of what can be said in the language of fans:

Desirous of acquaintance;
I wish to get rid of you;
You are too willing I love another;
Do you love me?
At what hour?
Do not be so imprudent;
Why do you misunderstand me?
Forgive me I pray you;
Do not betray our secret;
GET ON THE FUCKING BLOCK AND FUCK.

The last one I added in, but actually they are all made up: the ‘language of fans’ is a marketing wheeze dreamt up by a 19th Century fan manufacturer; he circulated, and distributed (most of) the above list and these instructions for free, providing a kind of added value for his whimsical product. In accepting this nostalgic language, there is a simultaneous and bathetic combination of intention, desire, and ornament – all on the same plane – that in reality can only exist as a proposal (because if practiced in actuality the result might be very strange indeed), a proposal which is already anyway doing too much. The ‘language of fans’ piles an unfeasible desire for elaborate communication on top of an already-fanciful object, to say nothing of the person behind the fan. As with the pansy – romance on top of the Romantic – it is the proposal of this surface as a viable medium that introduces a simultaneous note of the absurd and the poignant. ***

Frances Stark, from the series Ecce Homo, pansy on book

In an essay that deplored the primary emphasis of interpretation of content in critical art writing, Susan Sontag famously said: ‘instead of a hermeneutics of art we need an erotics of art’ (4). If interpretation is the ’reading’, (the deeper it goes, the better), then by erotics I take to mean the transfer of affect – the development of a relation of association and intimacy thrown sparked off in the encounter between the viewer and the work. If this is so, the most excessive relationship of this type is of fandom. A fan is someone whose strongest attachments to cultural phenomena render extra visible the excessively associative relationship of people to culture. A fan cannot give a rational explanation for the force of her attachment to something, and instead lives a frequent state of association with the thing in question. That might be through fan art and other meta-cultural production, or more often through the very pleasant state of mind where a disproportionate quantity of life’s phenomena suddenly finds some connection to the thing you’re a fan of. There is a substantial irrationality to this development of enduring personal mythologies, and it has strong aesthetic possibilities. The fan does not seek the wholesale glorification of things – in fact the associations produced are often very private, due to the fact that they are rather insignificant when set against the wider cultural hierarchy. But, like lint in the clothes drier, it builds up substantially nonetheless. Stark is not defined by being a fan (in the sense of craven fanatic, adulator, imitator), nor is she making work about fandom, but the hyper-associativeness of things that stick seems to resonate in her work. How we become fans is a strangely indiscriminate process, and Stark has spoken of her enjoyment of Henry Miller despite her suspicion that he was not an appropriate ‘artist’s writer’. If you are forearmed with the knowledge that much of the language in Stark’s collages and paintings derives from literary sources, you might still construe the possibility of a primarily ’readable’ work. As a consequence, when looking at and also another one at the same time, not (2003) there is something to be gained from knowing that the work’s title is part of an axiom from Miller’s Sexus (‘For nobody knows himself if he is only himself, and not also another one at the same time’). And yet the work’s more vital potentiality, and the multiplicity of viewers’ responses to it, are not dependent on awareness of this reference. The drawing conveys the idea of a mental note already dispersing, but clearly significant. This dispersal happens pictorially, through the flock that arises from the tree-shapes, both birds and trees being formed of letters. But it also happens through the sense that we are given uncomprehending access to a fragment of someone else’s thoughts. What is evoked is something deeply uncertain yet giving the impression of being also tangibly familiar.

Frances Stark, And also another one at the same time, not. Ink and casein on canvas board, 610 x 457, 2003.

Frances Stark, And also another one at the same time, not (detail). Ink and casein on canvas board, 610 x 457, 2003.

The effect on the viewer is not unlike the feeling one has when trying to retrieve the contents of a dream upon waking. The peacock in GET ON THE FUCKING BLOCK AND FUCK (2006) – another Henry Miller quotation – is a walking advertisement for itself, a tautology of surfaces: I am great, a sign of which is this excellent fantail, and it is this excellent fantail that makes me great. The work is not contingent on knowing Henry Miller, but as with and also another one at the same time, not it does swing on a sense of contingency on something, and it matters less that we access that thing, than that we sense its ghostlike presence as the absent reference material. I found this hyper-semantic contingency most apparent in Stark’s powerpoint essay STRUCTURES THAT FIT MY OPENING AND OTHER PARTS CONSIDERED IN RELATION TO THEIR WHOLE (2006). I had automatically reached for my pencil to underline the following: ’Or do I just want to have written something / that someone else has underlined?‘ The text is from a letter to the curators of the exhibition If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, in which Stark attempts to outline her position in relation to the project’s feminist concerns. Normally, when you underline something for quotation, you acknowledge that it holds self-sufficient depth of meaning. Yet this quote, taken alone, doesn’t really say much; it can only talk about itself, and it can even only do this in the event of me underlining and quoting it.

Yet it struck at something between me, the reader, and Stark, the writer, and its underlining creates a hall-of-mirrors performativity of the line’s inherent need for reference. Moments like this are similar to when you record an interview in which everything is going well, and between you you feel like you’ve hit on some really important understandings, only to play it back and find that there’s very little there in the words themselves, that when transcribed would actually communicate that brilliant thing you both hit on. This might well describe an encounter with Stark’s works, the evocation of striking possibilities and experiences that cannot subsequently be evidenced within the work or its direct interpretation. In a conversation, Stark told me that this failure of nevertheless ‘faithful’ media and methods to record intangible understandings or personal truths was expressed in a picture she found in an old high school yearbook. Next to one boy’s entry is scrawled: ‘***Total babe (bad picture)’. She reproduced this picture as part of a very early work, Total Babe (1991). The generosity of this scribbler towards the girl in the picture doesn’t make the picture any more beautiful, but the poignant dependency between the additional commentary and the recorded image is the absent aesthetics that Stark’s work explores and brings forth – often through equally mundane scenarios. (5) As words and pictures struggle to approximate a reality that is barely expressible anyway, Stark’s economy of style still constructs a framework of dependencies – her referencing of cultural sources that matter to her; her use of found images like the birds, perched punctuation-style in the images; the frequent gesture of shielding, providing a new surface on which to speculate, distract and decorate; and the sense of the viewer’s generosity and engagement – each supporting the fragile status of the other. A strange achievement for work that is mostly two-dimensional.

footnotes

(1) Stark explains, in Agonising Yet Blissful Little Orgies of Soul-Probing, that the drawing is of a box that contained, amongst many very ordinary things, several drafts of a deceased friendís essay, that she had to locate at short notice.
(2) As summarised by the blurb on the back of Agonising Yet Blissful Little Orgies of Soul-Probing: where she speaks of “the unrelenting suspicion that my way of making is not art marking” [yet] I cannot deny the absolutely curious and surprising fact that I have created some nice works of art.” (2007)
(3) Prinzhorn, M., Indecision as Criticism in “A Torrent of Follies, Frances Stark” (exhibition catalogue), Secession, Vienna and Buchhandlung Walther Koenig, Cologne, 2008. p.87.
(4) Sontag, S. Against Interpretation in “Against Interpretation: And Other Essays”, Picador, New York, 2001. p98
(5) an important theme that cannot be address within the scope of this essay is Stark’s exploration of domestic life and the fulfilment of mundane professional duties; another possible framework for thinking about her work could easily be as small possibilities for, and about, escapism within the everyday.

Combined stills from Hamra Abbas' MoMA is the star (2004) digital video

At the Berlin Biennial this year [2008], I like everybody else visited the Neue Nationalgalerie. Such visits seem to be made up of seven parts distraction, three parts attention, and when I was caught between a sugar low and a Susan Hiller my eye fell on a small black and pink sticker. Das MoMA in Berlin it announced, in cheerfully bombastic graphics.

Stuck on the corner of one of the invigilators’ stools, and fuzzy at the edges, it was still a sharp reminder of the Nationalgalerie’s past engagements. In 2004, a selection from MoMA’s collection visited Berlin. Following a recent hit show of East German artists, whose audience reached a respectable 220,000 visitors, the museum had hoped to equal this for its next blockbuster. Das MoMA in Berlin got 1.2 million visitors.

Berlin today is populated by little reminders like the old sticker I found; memories of other times when monolithic foreign bodies of thought have arrived here, running cartwheels across the city, dropping monuments here and pronouncements there, until everything leaves and the city falls silent again. Hamra Abbas’ video work MoMA is the Star (2004) records the scenes of Nationalgalerie’s honoured American guest drawing awe-filled crowds, wrapping the building in loving queues in order to catch a glimpse of this famous collection.

As the documentary MoMA in Berlin records, “Everyone believed that what was inside the Neue Nationalgalerie was no less than the history of Western art, and that what was outside was not”. The notion of the show’s North American ‘cultural colonialism’ did not go unremarked by the German art establishment. In Abbas’ video, the use of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, now inseparable from its use in the giant-leap-for-mankind scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, parodies, at the very least, a demonstrative sense of cultural triumph.

Abbas, however, is more interested in the show as a popular phenomenon; appropriating its graphic identity and filming the crowds, she records the carnival as it happens at the museum entrance. ‘What was outside’ the canon of Western art was the jumble of opportunist entertainers, gawkers and hawkers – jugglers, masseurs, kissing lovers, buskers, pyrotechnics, ’MoMA’-branded t-shirt-wearers, and, apparently, people camping from 3am. Carnival versus canon; low culture versus high. For however drily theorised the act of looking may be, isn’t it strange that with art it should begin with a hot pink logo, your museum brochure as a makeshift fan, your only sustenance the coffees and ice creams peddled near the museum entrance?

My life is hanging by a thread.
- Florence Nightingale, 1896.

Zeeshan Muhammad, Dying Miniature, graphite on sandpaper 2008

The series Dying Miniature (2008) departs significantly from most recognisable aspects of Mughal miniature painting, to the extent that without its title there would be little means of anchoring this work to the genre it nevertheless discusses. The works are exercises in emphatic denial beginning most notably with the sandpaper support, the absolute inverse of the deliberately super-smooth surface of wasli. Whereas wasli enables the hairline-fine, fluid detailing characteristic of miniature painting, the sandpaper not only inhibits but actively aggravates the material of the image, in a kind of gestural violence. The strange congress of graphite and sandpaper is mutually destructive, the surfaces destroying as they destroy, and being marked as they mark – Zeeshan was obliged to use a number of plain old pencils, because the sticks of graphite he had bought for the task kept crumbling under the force of his drawing. The drawings are the result of a process whose violence prompts the awareness that drawing happens by a process of abrasion and residue.

The only recognisably ‘miniature’ aspect of these works is their two-dimensionality and their subjects, whose stylised outlines and poses are recognisably typical. The figure, empty of detail, is a silvery, worn-down silhouette; one of the fading populace of the universe of the miniature. It is as though the genre of miniature painting has exhausted itself for Zeeshan, through overuse; in this situation of overfamiliarity, what is gained in nuance can be lost to banality. As the relentless pacing of a caged animal eventually wears a flat, dry path in the grass, so might the genres of painting eventually make their subject barely detectable.

At the heart of Muhammad Zeeshan’s enquiry and practice for the last few years is the knowledge that that which distinguishes a form also constitutes its limits. The general trajectory of works such as Dying Miniature has its roots in Zeeshan’s earlier painting practice. Bodies of work such as Well Directed (2005) and High Notes (2005) are recognisably and methodologically miniature painting, but their content was a departure, depicting distinctly unpleasant subject matter. Repeatedly featuring delicately bandaged or otherwise concealed objects such as pistols, bananas, rats and vultures, the works alluded to phallocentrism, corruption and violence via extremely delicate, almost vulnerable renderings. Like graphite on sandpaper, here is another conflict; the more disturbing the combinations of images, the more lyrically and compellingly they are laid down. It is uncertain whether the bandages are intended to conceal corruption, or nurse the wounds, but what is clear is the tension, as nurturing and violence tentatively co-exist. And here perhaps are the roots of the irrevocable and paradoxical link between creation and destruction in Dying Miniature. Somewhere along the way, the subject matter was beginning to overflow and even destroy the form.

***********

In 2007, Gasworks and Green Cardamom invited Muhammad Zeeshan on residency in London. As I was the curator of the residency programme at Gasworks, we had plenty of opportunity to talk as we meandered around the damp London summer. The question of how an artist’s practice, interests and assumptions take life, in varying contexts of international art, is raised nowhere more frequently than on residencies. While there is something of an international artistic neverland developing across places with highly mobile and well-funded artistic populations – transnational practitioners with a number of shared values that would seem to undermine the rhetoric of ‘internationalism’ (and, more politically, multiculturalism in the arts) – it is not easy to brush away the element of eurocentrism within the inherited values of such practitioners. The residency programme at Gasworks, in striving to invite artists who would not as automatically enter these freewheeling networks, was often faced with artists who knew what their practice meant at home (for whom, indeed, the notion of an artistic ‘home’ still existed in one way or another), and whose residencies were a process of confronting their work with the multiplicities, banalities, and excitements of London. None more so than in the case of Muhammad Zeeshan.

In London, and at Braziers workshop in Oxfordshire, the differing potentialities of his practice in different contexts began to dawn on him. In Pakistan, he had frequently been told, he said, that his work was ‘not miniature’. In contemporary art circles in the UK, this question was barely relevant anyway, and the transgressive nature of his work – insofar as that was necessarily desirable in an art culture that produces exhibitions such as Sensation (Royal Academy of Art, London, 1997) and the Turner Prize exhibitions – was largely in question. It made sense to Zeeshan, in this situation, to explore different media entirely, such as audio multiples, video, performance, and collage, producing, amongst other things the video work Flag Ceremony (2007), which was later exhibited as an artist’s project at the Dubai Art Fair in 2008. In these conditions it seemed as though Zeeshan could only explore his interests – including, perhaps obliquely, the limits of miniature painting – by using other contemporary media.

Painting has, of course, always had its ‘deaths’, in claims reminiscent of Florence Nightingale’s deathbed assertion – which she in fact made sixteen years before she eventually expired. And the threads in Zeeshan’s paintings in the expanded field of miniature are, after all, remarkably robust. In In God We Trust (2008), the eponymous text of the image is rendered in painted stitches on wasli. These fine lines, reminiscent of the wraith-like hairlines that featured in many of his earliest paintings, represent the, surprisingly immaterial, warp and weft that holds together the most cherished ideals and structures of a society – a construct that also runs through his book work A Colligation (Isolated Facts) (2008). In God We Trust, due to be destroyed by ritual immersion in black ink, in fact survived its ‘death’ in an event that, according to one’s persuasion, spoke strongly of the robustness of God, painting, or just wasli. The thematic and gestural violence of Zeeshan’s works are not there, it seems, in order to destroy, but to renew. Survival – of process, or surviving a process – is then the strongest thread running through Zeeshan’s work. So from here on out, miniature survives in Zeeshan’s practice – even if it is on sandpaper.

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Internet macro posted on the Livejournal community stupid_free in response to a call for images on the theme of 'BAWWWWWWWW'. The unknown author is thanked.

Disappointment is a difficult thing to glorify. In trying to come up with a good, pop-historical list of the world’s greatest disappointments for this text, I thought of nothing that isn’t better characterised by treachery, failure, and misfortune (all of which have their glorious aspects), and no disappointment that isn’t eclipsed by the tragedy of its own effects.

It would, for example, be absurd to describe the sinking of the HMS Titanic on its maiden voyage merely as a disappointment. On the other hand, Tim Henman’s continued failure to fulfil the unreasonable expectation of winning at Wimbledon no longer disappoints, because we have stopped assigning him that expectation. Disappointment is the quiet guest at the party, only noticeable in the absence of more glorious negatives like violence or disaster. It is most felt at the moments when the stakes are quite low, and in the interpersonal.

It’s far easier to pin down when it is a character trait. In film, history and literature, there is a trope of the character who is a disappointment to his family (usually it is a he, given the fact that the privilege of well-rounded characterisation in mainstream fiction is routinely still given to men). His highest attainment is usually to be born of privilege, and to be evil – if he’s not evil, he is merely weak. (Though if he is evil, he’s truly evil: in the ultimate disappointment-child scenario, Mormon theology is frequently misunderstood as asserting that Satan is the other son of God, who just didn’t turn out as well as Jesus.) Edward Tudor, the weakly and studious prince who died undramatically of an ear abscess, was a terrible disappointment as the firstborn son of King Henry VIII, who openly wished that the princess Elizabeth had been born a boy. These disappointments are the offspring of grand and macho parents, but have none of the qualities their parents desire in them. Commodus, the imperial prince fictionalised in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), exemplifies this role and its evil potential:

… I have other virtues, father. Ambition. That can be a virtue when it drives us to excel. Resourcefulness, courage, perhaps not on the battlefield, but there are many forms of courage. Devotion, to my family and to you. But none of my virtues were on your list.

(This is just before he strangles his father and usurps the imperial throne.) Easily the most interesting character, Commodus had another key characteristic of the disappointment child, which is sexual deviance, in his incestuous impulses. In comedy, too, these etiolated princes exist, such as the Swamp King’s son Herbert who refuses to marry the wealthy princess and only wishes to sing light musical numbers and be carried off by a handsome knight (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, year).

In his book How To Do Things With Words (1955), JL Austin’s treatment of the speech act reverses our common understanding of performance as imitative; instead demonstrating how what is understood as the real is constituted by performative gestures and statements. He also notes that the assigned falsity of the performative results in the theatrical being consistently associated with the weak, the etiolated, the effeminate; strikingly similar to the disappointment-child¹. And while the stronger, more wholesome characters go on to win out as the heroes of mainstream culture (Elizabeth I with her heart and stomach of a prince, and Maximus to whom Marcus Aurelius intended the imperial throne, and the ridiculously battle-prone Sir Launcelot, all being the inverse examples of the characters above), the disappointment-child continues on bitterly and unhealthily in the shadows.

As this child is to his robust and noble parents, perhaps, even more so than theatre, so contemporary art is to mainstream culture. Art is generally inherently unsatisfying according to the criteria of mainstream culture (to entertain, to add to the sum of human knowledge, to glorify or debase, to educate, to provide spectacle). Mainstream culture tends to look to contemporary art for it to provide more profound and gratifying versions of its own output, only to find that instead of being the golden child, contemporary art is the one in the corner burning ants to death with a magnifying glass. This status of disappointment we can bear, in contemporary art; we provide cafes and other nicely designed consumer experiences to pacify those who brought the expectations of mainstream culture to our galleries and museums.

It is little surprise, then, that art has its fascination with failure. In an abstract sense, and in full consciousness of this disappointing position of contemporary art, failure has a lot of appealing qualities. These happen to concur quite nicely with some of the most recurrent artistic preoccupations of the last couple of centuries such as abjection, misunderstanding, bathos, and the quixotic; also, particularly according to the rest of the world, artists themselves tend to spend the majority of their careers occupying one definition or another of failure. It makes sense that we’re interested in it.

The problem with all this is a common neglect of rigour. In accepting art’s failures, we forget to be disappointed, and neglect to define genuinely what failure might constitute for us, for artists and curators and even critics. On a simple level, but one that is essential to understanding the work, Philippe Parreno’s 2007 work Speaking to the Penguins was a total failure. It was known from the beginning that there is no means of communication – on any intellectual level at least, and in that form – with penguins. But in a move reminiscent of the hundred monkeys on one hundred typewriters scenario, he tried anyway, travelling to Patagonia and addressing the masses – would one phrase stick with a penguin? Would their anthropomorphic attentiveness and dapper exteriors pay off, finally? Would their eponymous association with modernism’s great publishing project have given them some appreciation for letters? Of course not. As far as we know, it was a resounding failure. And we like it that way.

There’s a weird compulsion in me now to talk about Anthony Gormley’s work. This is because for all the things you can say about Gormley, is that he never, ever, ever fails. In his great, passive- impressive homunculi are bound the simple and visually sensationalist desires of the British public, and the public art commissioners who strive to please them. Sometimes, you just want a giant, burning effigy of a man, burning so meaningfully, and with his part in The Margate Exodus (2007) Gormley gave it to you. Here is art with a stated, concrete intention – don’t be fooled by its easily-drafted dalliance with intangible-sounding artistic languages, it is all quite tangible – and in this it succeeds.

So this is basically why failure is still on the cards. Despite its prescribed success, even those art professionals who find an arch thrill in some knowing configuration of ‘the popular’ can’t claim to value Gormley’s work despite what it does for the vast majority of people who have, justifiably, no time to react profoundly to art. It’s not just to do with a snobbish aversion to spectacle, or to popular participation, as both a lecture to penguins and a village burning a huge junkheap effigy have their elements of both.

Between these two poles are any number of positions and any number of definitions of failure, which provides plenty of grounds for discussion. The seminar Histories of Productive Failures: From French Revolution to Manifesta VI, organized by Anton Vidokle & Tirdad Zolghadr in 2006, reflected on exactly this thematic as prompted by the apparent political and bureaucratic fiasco that resulted Manifesta VI‘s failure to materialise. Perhaps the most pragmatic question that the seminar could have addressed is: what would we prefer, for Manifesta VI to have failed – and produce interesting seminars such as this – or for it to have actually happened? Given the level of anticipation before, and eulogising of the project after, it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s still preferable for a good project to happen, rather than for the failure of a good project to be theorised.

The danger for this situation – particularly as we face the foreclosure of state and private funding of the non commercial art sector – is that we begin to anticipate failure as the ‘interesting anyway’ posture most easily relaxed into after something was patently a mess. Not all failures, unlike Manifesta VI, have the luxury of being that interesting. Not only that, we also need to question how useful it actually is to attempt to re-establish a sense of posture in the whole discussion, with surprisingly few assumptions or sense of authority undone, particularly regarding the value of artistic discussion in itself. Unlike the status of being the disappointment-child of mainstream culture, which we can legitimately celebrate, the exciting aspects of failure to achieve more internalised terms and desires stop being exciting when we relax about such failure and over-anticipate its potential. What is needed for such discussions is candour and indignity, and for this one needs a sense of personal investment, and for that one needs disappointment.

How to formulate this? The Histories of Productive Failures seminar addressed, most strikingly, ‘[…]the question of the elusive nature of collective ideals in a situation where the political projections at hand are lacking in any adequate referent to latch on to²’ – precisely such ideals as are needed for the production of disappointment after things fail. But the idea of art setting, and achieving, concrete objectives is repugnant to many. The hifalutin claims art makes on its own terms and within its own frames of reference are unwittingly parodied in the language of press releases, as Jennifer Higgie paraphrases:

… hollow boasts about subverting, riffing, reordering, dialoguing, deconstructing, investigating and renegotiating; about destroying assumptions, provoking, participating, blurring boundaries or destroying borders, beliefs, poverty, globalism, the World Bank, you name it. (Who do they think they are, Attila the Hun?)’³.

This language is ridiculous because we accept art’s ineffectiveness; if we wanted to hold art to common standards of all these objectives we wouldn’t have art, we’d have interrogation chambers.

So neither the louche pseudo-candour of the curator riffing on failure, nor the strictly instrumentalist approach is quite right; because either position is too comfortable, too opportunist. Perhaps sometimes we just need to be like the kid in the picture: step back from our failures, contemplate them for the embarrassments they truly are, and howl in outrage.

Soi Project’s Island was not conveniently reached except by taxi, through an unlovely set of light industrial streets clearly earmarked for ‘cultural development’ by the local council. However, arriving at the Ikon Gallery’s newest offsite space, in Birmingham’s East Side, it was impossible not to marvel at the contrast – at least when I visited, on the most assiduously wet day of the year – with the fact that I was visiting a tropical Thai island. (Surely the gallery marketing department’s easiest sell ever.)
Soi Project is a fluctuating group of collaborators, with artists and architects Jiro Endo (Japan), Wit Pimkanchanapong and Pitupong Chaowakul (both Thailand) at their core. Their projects display a clear, Baudrillardian love for the symbolic commodity’s loosening association from any anchoring referent. In their Fruits project, also on display at Ikon’s main site that day, visitors could soothingly fold and glue together a variety of paper fruit, which was then put on display and swapped for its real counterpart, marking the process of change from edible fruit to symbolic existence.

For Island they worked with satellite images to create a composite Thai national reserve; a tropical fibreglass landmass rising out of a paper sea pasted over the entire ex-warehouse floor. For the artists the island represented an abstracted version of a Thai official national reserve island, overlapping in part with the presumed UK viewer’s more abstract ideas of paradise. The temptation to add details such as a mossy surface and little model trees must have been strong; instead, the forests and beaches of this island are printed on, and the landmass shaped according to the triangulated tessellation of 3D computer rendering rather than geologically defined shapes. Preserving the work’s architectonic backbone basically saves it from becoming a really good place for a Hornby model railway.

In fact, it is this tension between convincing simulation and deliberately visible technicality that makes the work fascinating. It was carefully negotiated in a number of ways. A complex lighting installation of 42 large computer-controlled lamps simulated the daylight phase of a 24-minute circadian rhythm that moves over the island; yet the appearance of night-time is conveniently represented by Buzz Aldrin’s polyresin lamp designed for Habitat’s ‘Very Important Products for kids’ range. It all but announces ‘this lanthorn doth the hornèd moon present’ before wobbling cheerfully across its mechanical track. Such visibly contemporary falsities and borrowings – including the images that make up the island itself (which, despite being surprisingly high-resolution, still bear the mental watermark of Google Earth) – pay attention to the fact that make-believe with good props is always going to be more effective than the best virtual reality. The combined effect is unexpectedly charming. That day even the rain played its part, beating on the roof precisely like a roaring sea. It’s easy to spend time with this work: lying back, cradled by a small bay, and watching the sun set, like a tropical Little Prince.

There was a more prescribed participatory aspect of this work, though, which ramped up the Utopian narrative: visitors to the project were handed sheets of glow-in-the-dark stickers. The idea goes that you have the opportunity to despoil, develop or beautify the island with stickers of cars, sections of road, elephants, palm trees, road signs and holiday flats. Much coherent development – such as roads – is only possible through collaboration and barter with other sticker-bearers. Visiting on the first day, it was hard to know whether this would eventually result in a heart-warmingly well-organized series of lush villages with a robust infrastructure or whether everything would be spoilt by the basic fact that a sticker of any shape is just one of those things that need to be stuck. Some visitors, I am told, went ‘off-plan’ and used all the remainder sticky odds and ends to build their own shapes. From images sent to me later, what it produced was the evidence of a very local obsession with property, and a micro-history of conflicts of interest – and it’s clearly been a hit. The full implications of this William Golding-esque metaphor don’t easily follow, though; in truth we can’t compare the complex and competing machinations of international property developers, environmentalists, miners and governments with the ham-fisted imperatives of a Birmingham toddler. (Actually, maybe we can.) As the ‘sun’ went down, the glowing stickers lit up, pleasingly, like satellite pictures of the earth glowing at night.

This aspect almost overrode the work’s potential for make-believe; maybe we don’t always need a ‘social experiment’ for a work to be effectively participatory. Seen in this way alone, it can only tell us what a lot of people with stickers can do with such illusory control over a shared imaginary, and distracts from the work’s undeniable ability to comment on the underlying mediation and fabrication of that imaginary in the first place – ending up as an almost literal play-off between structure and surface.