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Chapter 40, p. 1313-1325 in The Humanities: Culture, Continuity, and Change by Sayre, H. M.Chapter 40Without Boundaries

Multiple Meanings in a Postmodern World

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when “modernism” ended and “postmodernism” began, but the turning point came in the 1970s and 1980s. Architects began to reject the pure, almost hygienic uniformity of the Bauhaus and International styles, represented by the work of Mies van der Rohe (see figs. 37.30 and 38.20), favoring more eclectic architectural styles that were anything but pure. A single building might incorporate a Classical colonnade and a roof line inspired by a piece of Chippendale furniture. Or it might look like the Rasin Building that occupies a corner block in Prague (fig. 40.1). Built on the site of a Renaissance structure destroyed in World War II, the building’s teetering sense of collapse evokes the postwar cityscape of twisted I-beams, blown-out facades with rooms standing open to the sky, and sunken foundations, all standing next to a building totally unaffected by the bombing. But that said, the building is also a playful, almost whimsical celebration, among other things, of the marvels of modern engineering—a building made to look as if it is at the brink of catastrophe, even as it is completely structurally sound. So lighthearted is the building that it was called the “Dancing House,” or, more specifically, “Ginger and Fred,” after the American film stars Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. The more solid tower on the corner seems to be leading the transparent tower—Ginger—by the waist, as the two spin around the corner. The building was the idea of Czech architect Vlado Milunić (1941–), and he enlisted American architect Frank Gehry (1929–) to collaborate on the project. To many eyes in Prague, a city renowned for its classical architecture, it seemed an absolutely alien American element dropped into the city. But Milunić conceived of the building as addressing modern Prague even as it engaged with the city’s past. He wanted the building to consist of two parts: “Like a society that forgot its totalitarian past—a static part—and a society that forgot its totalitarian past but was moving into a world full of changes. That was the main idea. Two different parts in dialogue, in tension, like plus and minus, like Yang and Yin, like man and woman.” It was Gehry who nicknamed it “Ginger and Fred.”

The use of many different, even contradictory elements of design is the hallmark of  postmodern  architecture. The English critic Peter Fuller explained the task of the postmodern architect this way:

The west front of Wells Cathedral, the Parthenon pediment, the plastic and neon signs on Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, even the hidden intricacies of a Mies curtain wall, are all equally “interesting.” Thus the Post-Modern designer must offer a shifting pattern of changing strategies and substitute a shuffling of codes and devices, varying ceaselessly according to audience, and/or building type, and/or environmental circumstance.

But perhaps the clearest and most seminal statement of the postmodern aesthetic is that of architect Robert Venturi (1925–), whose 1966 “Gentle Manifesto” described criteria for a new eclectic approach to architecture that abandoned the clean and simple geometries of the International Style (see Chapters 36 and 37). For Mies van der Rohe, “less is more” had become a mantra which he used to describe the refined austerity of his designs. Venturi argued for the opposite:

An architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.

The model for this new architecture became, for Venturi, Las Vegas (fig. 40.2). In Learning from Las Vegas, written in 1972 with his wife Denise Scott Brown (1931–) and Steven Izenour (1940–2001), both fellow architects, Venturi describes Las Vegas as a “new urban form”:

Although its buildings suggest a number of historical styles, its urban spaces owe nothing to historical space. Las Vegas space is neither contained and enclosed like medieval space nor classically balanced and proportioned like Renaissance space nor swept up in a rhythmically ordered movement like Baroque space, nor does it flow like Modern space around freestanding urban space makers.

It is something else again. But what? Not chaos, but a new spatial order. … Las Vegas space is so different from the docile spaces for which our analytical and conceptual tools were evolved that we need new concepts and theories to handle it.

In what the authors describe as “the seemingly chaotic juxtaposition of honky-tonk elements,” they also discovered an “intriguing kind of vitality and validity.” Thus, for Venturi and his colleagues, faced with the multiplicitous visual stimuli of Las Vegas, the postmodern architect has no choice but to design with various, even contradictory elements in order to communicate not a homogeneous sense of unity, but rather “a difficult whole.”

Especially at night, Las Vegas attacks the senses with a profusion of signs and lights. The area known as the “Strip,” a 4.2-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard South, represents the overload of sensory input that has created the postmodern condition. The neon cowboy on the left is known as “Vegas Vic.” In 1981, Vegas Vickie rose across the street above Glitter Gulch, which took its name from what locals were already calling the four-block length of Fremont Street.

Credit: Ron Dahlquist/SuperStock

Living in this “difficult whole” constitutes the postmodern condition. The postmodern art and architecture examined in this chapter cannot be understood as a product of a single style, purpose, or aesthetic. It is defined by multiple meanings and its openness to interpretation. “Meaning” itself becomes contingent and open-ended. Indeed, postmodern media art introduces situations in which sight, sound, and text each challenge the “undivided” attention of the audience, sometimes creating a sensory overload in which meaning is buried beneath layers of contradictory and ambiguous information. Confronting the postmodern object, the postmodern mind must ask itself, “How do I sort this out?” And this is a question that, as people living in the postmodern age, we are increasingly adept at answering.

Postmodern Architecture: Complexity, Contradiction, and Globalization

1. 40.1 What are the characteristics of postmodern architecture?

Architects and builders exemplify the affluent nomads of the new postmodern society. They, like the people for whom they design and build, inhabit the “world metropolis,” a vast, interconnected fabric of places resembling Las Vegas in large measure, where people do business, and between which they travel, work, and seek meaning. Travel, in fact, accounts for nearly 10 percent of world trade and global employment. As nearly 700 million people travel internationally each year, a half million hotel rooms are built annually across the globe to house them.

Today’s architect works in the culture first introduced by the Sony Walkman and carried forward by the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. These are technologies “designed for movement,” as cultural historian Paul du Gay describes their function, “for mobility, for people who are always out and about, for traveling light … part of the required equipment of the modern ‘nomad.’” And architects are also responsible for helping to provide the most elusive of qualities in the postmodern world—a sense of meaning and a sense of place.

Architecture in this culture is largely a question of creating distinctive buildings, markers of difference like Frank Gehry’s “Ginger and Fred” building in Prague that stand out in the vast sameness of the “world metropolis,” so that travelers feel they have arrived at someplace unique, someplace identifiable. In this climate, contemporary architecture is highly competitive. Most major commissions are competitions, and most cities compete for the best, most distinctive architects.

Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, and International Competitions

Gehry first distinguished himself with the design of his own home in Los Angeles (fig. 40.3), a project that was hardly international in scope, but which fostered his sense of how to stand out among the many other architects of international stature. On the surface, it is a collision or eruption of parts. In the mid-1970s, still a young and relatively unknown architect, Gehry and his wife moved into a Santa Monica house that fulfilled their main criterion—it was affordable. “I looked at the old house that my wife found for us,” Gehry recalls, “and I thought it was kind of a dinky little cutesy-pie house. We had to do something to it. I couldn’t live in it. … Armed with very little money, I decided to build a new house around the old house and try to maintain a tension between the two.” The new house surrounding the old one is deliberately unfinished, almost industrial. A corrugated metal wall, chain-link fencing, plywood walls, and concrete block surround the original pink frame house with its asbestos shingles. The surrounding wall, with randomly slanted lines and angled protrusions, thus separates not only the “outside” house from the house within, but the entire structure from its environment. The tension established by Gehry between industrial and traditional materials, between the old house and the almost fortresslike shell of his home’s new skin, intentionally creates a sense of unease in viewers (one certainly shared by Gehry’s neighbors). The sense that they are confronting the “difficult whole” Venturi speaks about defines, for Gehry, the very project of architecture. If Gehry’s architecture is disturbingly unharmonious with its surroundings, it cannot be ignored or taken for granted. It draws attention to itself as architecture.

1977–78.

 

Gehry’s neighbors were not at all pleased with his new house, but Gehry claims that he was trying to use “materials that were consistent with the neighborhood.” He explains: “When I built that house, that neighborhood was full of trailer trucks in the back yards, and often on the lawn. A lot of old, aging Cadillacs and big cars on blocks on the front lawn, people fixing their cars. A lot of chain link fences, corrugated metal; I know they didn’t use it like I did, and that’s the difference.”

Credit: Photo: Wolfgang Neeb/Bridgeman Images

Gehry’s use of sculptural frames to surround his house—note the steel and wire fencing that extends over the roof behind the front door, which would be “decorative” or “ornamental” were it not so mundane—has continued throughout his career, culminating in his design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (fig. 40.4), a commission he won in 1991. Working on the models with the Catia computer program originally developed for the French aerospace industry, Gehry notes, “You forget about it as architecture, because you’re focused on this sculpting process.” The museum itself is enormous—260,000 square feet, including 19 gallery spaces connected by ramps and metal bridges—and covered in titanium, its undulating forms evoking sails as it sits majestically on the river’s edge in the Basque port city. But it is the sense of the museum’s discontinuity with the old town and the surrounding countryside (fig. 40.5) that most defines its postmodern spirit. It makes Bilbao, as a city, a more “difficult whole,” but a more interesting one, too.

Fig. 40.4

Frank Gehry, GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

Bilbao, 1991–97.

 

The official description of the building begins: “The building itself is an extraordinary combination of interconnecting shapes. Orthogonal blocks in limestone contrast with curved and bent forms covered in titanium. Glass curtain walls provide the building with the light and transparency it needs.” Even in its materials, it embodies complexity and contradiction.

Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim in Bilbao was stunningly successful, drawing critical raves, massive numbers of visitors, and even reservations that the architecture was so noteworthy that it overshadowed the art within the structure. One of the key elements of this success was Gehry’s ability to ensure that the “organization of the artist” prevailed, as he put it, “so that the end product is as close as possible to the object of desire that both the client and architect have come to agree on.” So postmodern architectural design and theory were not necessarily incompatible with the efficient completion of large, complex, and innovative structures like the Guggenheim (or the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle, another large-scale Gehry structure). And it turns out that the digital design models produced by the Catia program were not only useful for envisioning the shapes of “sculpted” buildings. The data produced by such computerized designs was also critical in estimating construction costs and budgets.

Besides Gehry, one of the most successful architects in these international competitions where contemporary architects make their reputations has been Spaniard Santiago Calatrava (1951–), who has degrees in both engineering and architecture. Known especially for the dynamic curves of his buildings and bridges, his designs include the Athens Olympics Sports Complex (2001–4), the Tenerife Opera House in the Canary Islands (2003), and the Turning Torso residential tower in Malmö, Sweden (2005). Based on the model of a twisting body, the 54-story Malmö tower consists of nine cubes, twisting 90 degrees from bottom to top, and rising to a rooftop observation deck with vistas across the Øresund strait to Copenhagen. Calatrava also won the design competition for the Port Authority Trans Hudson (PATH) train station at the site of the former World Trade Center in New York (fig. 40.6). Completed in 2016, it is based on a sketch Calatrava drew of a child’s hands releasing a bird into the air. Calatrava said that the goal of his design was to “use light as a construction material.” At ground level, the station’s steel, concrete, and glass canopy functions as a skylight that allows daylight to penetrate 60 feet to the tracks below. On nice days, the canopy’s roof retracts to create a dome of sky above the station.

Fig. 40.6

SANTIAGO CALATRAVA, DESIGN FOR PORT AUTHORITY TRANS HUDSON (PATH) STATION

The Green Architecture Movement

One of the newest approaches to contemporary architecture takes into consideration the compatibility of the building with its environment. Increasingly, a building’s viability—even beauty—is measured by its environmental self-sufficiency. Rather than relying on unsustainable energy sources, architects strive to design using sustainable building materials—eliminating steel, for instance, since it is a nonrenewable resource. The other important factor in modern architecture is adapting new buildings to the climate and culture in which they are built. These are the principles of what has come to be known as “green architecture.”

One of the more intriguing new buildings to arise in the South Pacific region is the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia, an island northeast of Australia. It illustrates green architecture at work (fig. 40.7). The architect is Renzo Piano (1937–), an Italian, but the principles guiding his design are indigenous to New Caledonia. Named after a leader of the island’s indigenous people, the Kanak, the center is dedicated to preserving and transmitting indigenous culture as well as incorporating sustainable environmental principles. The buildings are constructed of wood and bamboo, both easily renewable resources, and each of the center’s ten pavilions represents a typical Kanak dwelling. Piano left the dwelling forms unfinished, as if under construction, but they serve a function as wind scoops, catching breezes from the nearby ocean and directing them to cool the inner rooms. As in a Kanak village house, the pavilions are linked with a covered walkway. Piano describes the project as “an expression of the harmonious relationship with the environment that is typical of the local culture. They are curved structures resembling huts, built out of wood joists and ribs; they are containers of an archaic appearance, whose interiors are equipped with all the possibilities offered by modern technology.”

The principles of environmentally sensitive architecture are, of course, harder to implement in densely populated urban environments. But when the city of Fukuoka, Japan, realized that the only space available for a much-needed government office building was a large two-block park that also happened to be the last remaining green space in the city center, Argentine-American architect Emilio Ambasz (1943–) presented a plan that successfully maintained, even improved upon, the green space (fig. 40.8). A heavily planted and pedestrian-friendly stepped terrace descends down the entire park side of the ACROS building. Reflecting pools on each level are connected by upward-spraying jets of water, to create a ladderlike climbing waterfall, which also masks the noise of the city streets beyond. Under the building’s 14 terraces lie more than 1 million square feet of space, including a 2,000-seat theater, all cooled by the gardens on the outside. The building is not entirely green—it is constructed of steel-framed reinforced concrete—and its interior spaces are defined by unremarkable and bland white walls that might be found in any modern high-rise office building. Still, the building suggests many new possibilities for reconceptualizing the urban environment in more environmentally friendly terms.

In planning for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese government invested in expensive energy-efficient heating and transportation systems and water-saving technologies that were designed to improve greatly the environmental quality of the city—one of the world’s most populated. For the Olympic Stadium (fig. 40.9), the Chinese hired the Swiss design firm of Herzog & de Meuron, who conceived of a double structure, dubbed the “Bird’s Nest”: a red concrete seating bowl and, 50 feet outside the bowl, the outer steel frame, which structurally resembles the twigs of a bird’s nest. The stadium floor provides enough space for the underground pipes of a geothermal heat pump (GHP) system, which in winter absorbs the heat from the soil and helps heat the stadium, while in summer the soil cools the stadium. A rainwater-collection system, on the stadium roof and the surrounding areas, purifies water and recycles it for use in the venue. The translucent roof provides essential sunlight for the grass below, and a natural, passive ventilation system. Pluralism and Postmodern Theory

1. 40.2 How does pluralist thought inform postmodern theory?

During the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, a painting by Chinese artist Zhang Hongtu (1943–), Bird’s Nest, in the Style of Cubism (fig. 40.10), was seized by Chinese officials when it arrived at customs for exhibition at the German embassy. They were holding it, they said, pending “clarification of its meaning.” As it turned out, officially, the painting’s muted palette was deemed inappropriate for the celebratory nature of the Olympic Games, and the government demanded that the painting be removed from China. But more than the painting’s Cubist idiom, the government was provoked by the inclusion of the word “Tibet” just above “Human Right,” both of which directly refer to China’s 50-year occupation of that country (or province, from China’s point of view). Also prominently displayed in the picture are the Chinese characters for the French supermarket chain Carrefour, which has stores all over China, and whose purported support of the Dalai Lama (the Buddhist head of the Tibetan government in exile) resulted in protests across the country in the spring of 2008. The number “8” is repeated 23 times: the Chinese had decided to open the Olympics at 8 pm on August 8, 2008, and Zhang Hongtu was mocking what he called China’s “stupid” numerological superstitions. At the bottom right is the letter J beside four horizontal lines, a reference to June 4, the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989. Finally, the motto for the 2008 Olympics appears in Chinese characters: “One World, One Dream.” If nothing else, these words clearly mean very different things to Zhang Hongtu and to Chinese government officials.

Zhang Hongtu’s Bird’s Nest, in the Style of Cubism is a clear-cut demonstration of one of the primary theoretical principles of postmodern thought: the growing conviction that meaning resides not in the work itself but in its audience, together with the understanding that the audience is itself diverse and various. Such thinking in turn gives rise to the belief that meaning is itself always plural in nature. There is no meaning, only a plurality of meanings. Structuralism and the Linguistic Study of Signs

The roots of this idea lie in French structuralism first developed in the early twentieth century by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), which argues that meaning occurs not through identification but through difference. For instance, the words woman and lady both refer to the human female, and yet their meanings are determined by cultural markers or codes of enormous difference. Structuralism also forms the basis for semiotics, the study of signs. A sign consists of the relation between the signifier and the signified—that is, the relation between the word tree, for instance, and all the possible trees to which that word might refer. Semiotic theory thus posits the following formula as fundamental to the study of signs:

The string of signifieds is potentially infinite. That is, the word tree technically refers to every possible tree, and we understand its reference only in context. For instance, we add other words to “tree” to differentiate it from other trees—“pine tree” or “willow tree”—to delimit the plurality of its potential meanings, or still more words, “the tallest pine tree in the park.” This construction of difference is fundamental to understanding, but it is important to understand that the word tree in and of itself is infinitely plural in its potential meanings.

Some signs carry with them larger cultural meanings. The French philosopher Roland Barthes (1915–80) described these as “mythologies.” Anything can take on the characteristics of myth. For example, two-story pillars supporting the portico of a house are a mythic signifier of wealth and elegance, and Barthes’s great self-appointed task as a philosopher was to expose the mythologies—instances of what he calls the “falsely obvious”—that inform contemporary understanding. Zhang Hongtu’s Bird’s Nest, in the Style of Cubism could usefully be approached as an example of just such a reading of the Beijing Olympic Games. The act of reading cultural “texts”—and “texts” need not be thought of here as actual sentences strung together, but as any system of signs, including painting, performance, advertising, film, and so forth—becomes an act of decoding and revealing the mythologies at work in the text. We have come to call this process deconstruction.

Deconstruction and Poststructuralism

The chief practitioner of deconstruction was the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Deconstruction is not synonymous with “destruction,” as is commonly thought, but rather it suggests that the “text” be analyzed and taken apart in order to show what has been left out or overlooked. Why does this matter? Because it indicates that there is always more to be said, that meaning is never complete. Deconstruction poses meaning as an arena of endless and open possibility.

Derrida is considered a poststructuralist (as is Barthes in his later writing) because one of the “texts” that poststructuralists most thoroughly submit to deconstruction is structuralism itself. Because it is founded on the principle of difference, structuralism tends to focus on the binary opposition as fundamental to the structure of thought. In his most famous work, Of Grammatology (published in France in 1967 and in English translation in 1976), Derrida points out that binary oppositions are algebraic (a = not-b), and thus the two terms in binary pairs (good/evil; conscious/unconscious; masculine/feminine; light/dark; presence/absence) cannot exist without reference to the other. That is, light (as presence) is defined as the absence of darkness, goodness as the absence of evil, and so on. Of Grammatology looks particularly at the opposition speech/writing. In Western philosophy, speech has always been privileged over writing because in the act of speech the self is fully present in its being; on the other hand, writing, in its dissemination across time and space to an audience necessarily removed from the originary moment of meaning, is always experienced as an absence, as second-hand speech. Metaphoric speech is a particularly potent example of this. A metaphor is a form of substitution, at one remove from its meaning. It is but a trace (Derrida’s word) of what is already absent. In the end, what Derrida reveals in his deconstruction of the speech/writing binary in Western culture is that the emphasis on that fullness of being realized in the act of speech is actually a cultural nostalgia for a wholeness that has long since—perhaps always—been lost.

Chaos Theory

Derrida is by no means easy to understand, but it should be clear that his thinking is not unrelated to Robert Venturi’s idea of the “difficult whole.” It is also akin to developments taking place in the natural sciences first introduced to a wider public in James Gleik’s 1987 Chaos: Making a New Science. To many, in fact, the new chaos theory offered a way to go beyond deconstruction, which seemed doomed to subvert endlessly the binary structures that structuralists construct. Chaos theorists posited that biological and mathematical patterns that appear random, unstable, and disorderly are actually parts of larger, more “difficult wholes.”

The fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010) is a prime example. Mandelbrot disdained traditional Euclidean geometry because it was incapable of describing such forms as clouds, mountains, and coastlines, all of which, like most things in nature, exhibit a different order of complexity than the traditional building blocks of geometry—the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone, for instance. Mandelbrot was convinced that such irregular shapes as coastlines and mountains display previously unrecognized orders. When certain basic forms, he argued, are repeated again and again at different scales of length, structures emerge that are quite different from the basic forms of which they are composed. One of Mandelbrot’s favorite examples was the so-called Koch snowflake in which the structure of an equilateral triangle is repeated again and again to create remarkably intricate curvilinear and twisted shapes. Equipped with mathematical models he developed to describe these shapes, Mandelbrot was able to generate dynamic, unpredictable, and seemingly living organisms on the computer screen from basic rectilinear or triangular forms.

The computer has, in fact, made it possible to visualize this complexity. If each pixel on a computer screen is assigned a numerical value and then submitted to what is known in mathematics as iterative equations, a series of increasingly and infinitely complex patterns emerge that have come to be known as the Mandelbrot set (fig. 40.11). If the result of these iterative equations is stable, the pixel is colored black. If the equation moves off toward infinity, the pixel is assigned a color, depending on its rate of acceleration—blue, for instance, for slow rates, red for faster ones. Acceleration occurs at the boundaries of the set, and it is possible, in these areas, to bring out finer and finer detail by zooming in to smaller and smaller areas of the edge. The haunting beauty of these designs has attracted artists and scientists alike.

From Hans-Otto Peitgen and Peter H. Richter, The Beauty of Fractals (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1986).

 

Since an infinite number of points exist between any two given points, by zooming in to a small area of the set, the infinite complexity of the set reveals itself. The detail of the Mandelbrot set is infinite. The stable iterative equation of this set is at the lower left of this image in black.

Credit: James Oakley/Alamy

Of at least equal importance to chaos theory is the work of meteorologist Edward Lorenz (1917–2008). In 1961, he was working on the problem of weather prediction. His computer was equipped with a set of 12 equations to model what the weather might be. One day, he wanted to see a particular sequence again, and to save time, he started in the middle of the sequence, instead of at the beginning. When he came back an hour later, he discovered that instead of the same pattern as before, a wildly different one had emerged. He eventually discovered what caused the difference. In the original sequence, the beginning number had been 0.506127, but to save paper, in the second instance, he had only typed the first three digits, 0.506. This result came to be known as the butterfly effect. The amount of difference in the starting points of the two curves is so small that it is comparable to a butterfly flapping its wings, thus producing a minute change in the state of the atmosphere, but one of profound consequence. That tiny difference might (in, say, a month’s time) produce a hurricane in the Atlantic, or prevent a hurricane that would otherwise have happened.

The Human Genome

Today, chaos theory is being usefully applied to everything from project management to population dynamics, to the descriptions of the spread of disease, and to DNA and genome research. In fact, in 2003, the federally sponsored Human Genome Project, initiated in 1990, succeeded in identifying all of the approximately 20,000 to 25,000 genes in human DNA that regulate the human cellular system in its operations and functions. The project determined the structural sequences of the approximately 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA. There are four similar chemicals that make up DNA, paired in the human genome and repeated 3 billion times; their order determines how we look, eat, and fight disease, and even, sometimes, how we behave. Through their understanding of this order, scientists are increasingly able to diagnose and predict hereditary disease and, perhaps the most exciting application of DNA research, use gene therapy to repair and regenerate tissue. Among the more recent outcomes of this revolutionary new medical practice are a treatment for a type of inherited blindness, the use of reengineered immune cells to attack cancer cells in patients with advanced metastatic melanoma (the most deadly form of skin cancer), the cure of deafness in guinea pigs, and the eradication of sickle cell anemia in mice—these last two being treatments that scientists hope to apply to human subjects one day.

Capsule Review

POSTMODERN THEORY

Pluralism and Diversity in the Arts

1. 40.3 How are pluralism and diversity reflected in postmodern art and literature?

Our understanding of the complexities of experience as realized in the practice of deconstruction, chaos theory, and the opportunities opened to science by the mapping of the human genome, has found expression in the arts as well. Despite the apparent plurality of its many “-isms,” modern art, from the moment that Braque and Picasso affirmed the primacy of the conceptual over the optical, systematically replaced the representation of the world with the representation of an “idea.” This was a process that led to ever greater abstraction, culminating in many ways in the art of Minimalism. Pop Art offered a different model—works that aimed at inclusion, not exclusion, and the promise that anything might be permissible. A photograph by Louise Lawler (1947–), Pollock and Tureen (fig. 40.12), summarizes this sense of diversity and multiplicity. Lawler’s work attempts to demonstrate how context, from museums to exhibition catalogs to private homes, determines the ways in which images are received and understood. Thus, the Pollock painting in this photograph is transformed into a decorative or ornamental object, much like the tureen centered on the side table in front of it. Lawler both underscores the fact that the painting is, like the tureen, a marketable object and suggests that the expressive qualities of the original work—its reflection of Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist feelings—have been emptied, or at least nearly so, when looked at in this context.

Fig. 40.12

Louise Lawler, POLLOCK AND TUREEN

A Plurality of Styles in Painting

By the end of the 1960s, artists felt free to engage in a wide spectrum of experimental approaches to painting, ranging from the stylized imagery introduced by Pop artists to the street style of graffiti writers, and from full-blown abstraction to startlingly naturalistic realism. Indeed, the exchange of ideas between proponents of realism and those of abstraction during the post–World War II era had far-reaching effects. Rather than an either/or proposition, there is abundant cross-fertilization between the approaches. We can see this in the work of the contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter (1932–), who moves freely between the two—sometimes repainting photographs, black-and-white and color—and sometimes creating large-scale abstract works. Richter uses photographs, including amateur snapshots and media images, because, he says, they are “free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art … no style, no composition, no judgment.” To him, they are “pure” pictures, unadulterated by the intervention of conscious aesthetic criteria. Meadowland (fig. 40.13), an oil painting on canvas, might as well have been taken from the window of a passing car. The questions it raises are quite simple: Why did he select this photograph to translate into a painting? How and when does the eye sense the difference between a painting and the photographic surface?

In comparing Meadowland to the artist’s abstractions, which he concentrated on throughout the 1980s and 1990s, we can begin to answer these questions. Works such as Ice (2) (fig. 40.14) are obviously paintings. One senses that Richter begins with a realistic image, and before the ground completely dries, he drags another layer of paint through it with a squeegee or palette knife. The result is like viewing an object close up while passing it at high speed. But the resulting work is above all a painterly surface, not a photographic one. Nevertheless, in Richter’s words:

abstract paintings … visualize a reality which we can neither see nor describe but which we may nevertheless conclude exists. We attach negative names to this reality; the unknown, the ungraspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have depicted it in terms of substitute images like heaven and hell, gods and devils. With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood because abstract painting illustrates with the greatest clarity, that is to say with all the means at the disposal of art, “nothing.” … [Looking at abstract paintings] we allow ourselves to see the un-seeable, that which has never before been seen and indeed is not visible.

Fig. 40.14

Gerhard Richter, ICE (2)

Given this artistic strategy, Richter’s photograph-based works are paintings of the graspable and visible. Why did he select the photograph upon which Meadowland is based? Precisely because it is so mundane, a prospect we have so often seen before. How and when do we recognize Meadowland as a painting and not a photograph? When we accept photographic clarity—or photographic blurring, for that matter—as one of the infinite methods of painting. Richter’s photographic paintings are thus the very antithesis of his abstractions, except that both styles are equal statements of the artist’s vision—and he continues to explore, in addition, the problems and difficulties inherent in seeing, especially when what we see is in some measure incomprehensible (see The Continuing Presence of the Past). Together, in them, Richter explores not only the conditions of seeing but the possibilities of painting. Richter might be the ultimate postmodernist: “I pursue no objects, no system, no tendency,” he writes. “I have no program, no style, no direction. … I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continuedAbstraction as Meditative Space

Another approach to the question of the relation between abstraction and representation is seen in the works of Brice Marden (1938–). In 1985–86, Marden began a series of paintings based on the poems of the ninth-century, Tang-dynasty Buddhist hermit “Cold Mountain”, or Han Shan. He was particularly moved by an edition of Cold Mountain’s poems published by the Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Washington, in which the original Chinese poems appear on the left-hand page, and their translations on the right. Chinese is written in vertical columns top to bottom, going right to left. On each page there were four vertical couplets, and this grid-structure appealed to Marden. In essence, he adapted this calligraphic structure to the flow of a kind of restrained Jackson Pollock-like line. The final paintings are meant to reflect something of the spiritual reverence for nature that Marden found in the Buddhist poems (fig. 40.15). “In the poems,” Marden has explained,

they’re constantly talking about these monks wandering in the mountains and they’re meditating and [seeking] the achievement of truth. You know, you cross this bridge, and it’s a very tricky stone bridge high in the Tiantai mountains. You cross the bridge and that’s where the immortals are living. This painting evolved so that there was a sort of arc. That’s why it’s called Cold Mountain (Bridge).

The painting, in other words, represents a kind of spiritual quest, a striving that might ultimately lead to enlightenment.

989–91. Oil on canvas, 9' × 12'. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Purchase through a gift of Phyllis Wattis. 99. 367.

 

Marden once told the author of a monograph on his work that in paintings such as this one he was trying to find “a glyph for paradise.”

Credit: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Purchase through a gift of Phyllis Wattis. 99. 367. © 2017 Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The paintings of Pat Steir (1940–) are likewise deeply informed by Tibetan and Chinese religious lore, and she too is interested in creating something of their same meditative space. In 1989, she adapted Pollock’s drip technique to her own ends, allowing paint to flow by force of gravity down the length of her enormous canvases to form recognizable waterfalls. Yellow and Blue One-Stroke Waterfall (fig. 40.16) is 14 feet high, its format reminiscent of Chinese scroll paintings of waterfalls. Steir explained the rationale behind her series of waterfall paintings in a 1992 interview:

I don’t think of these paintings as abstract. … These are not only drips of paint. They’re paintings of drips which form waterfall images: pictures. … [Nor are] they realistic … I haven’t sat outdoors with a little brush, trying to create the illusion of a waterfall. The paint itself makes the picture. … Gravity makes the image. …

These paintings are, in a sense, a comment on the New York School [i.e., the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, including Pollock and de Kooning], a dialogue and a wink. They [her waterfall paintings] say, “You didn’t go far enough. You stopped when you saw abstraction.” … I’ve taken the drip and tried to do something with it that the Modernists denied.

She has, in other words, returned abstraction to representation and revealed their co-dependency.

Fig. 40.16

Pat Steir, YELLOW AND BLUE ONE-STROKE WATERFALL

Graffiti and Street Art

Perhaps no popular art style has more thoroughly entered the mainstream art world, disintegrating the distinction between high culture and low, than graffiti and graffiti-related painting. It was the availability of acrylic paint in aerosol cans that spawned graffiti writing as a movement. Aerosol spray paint was first invented in 1949 by Ed Seymour, the owner of a Sycamore, Illinois, paint company, who used it to spray an aluminum coating on radiators. By the early 1970s the home-decorating companies Krylon and Rust-Oleum were producing hundreds of millions of cans of acrylic spray paint a year. Not only small and easy to carry, these cans were also easy to steal, and graffiti writing exploded onto the New York scene in the 1970s, borne of the same cultural climate that produced the popular poetry/music/performance/dance phenomenon known as rap, or hip-hop. While still considered a criminal activity by many, graffiti has entered the mainstream art world in, for instance, the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat (see Closer Look) and even on the walls of art spaces such as the former Deitch Projects space (now curated by Hole Gallery) in New York’s Soho district (fig. 40.17). Here, beginning in 2008, the wall’s owner has invited numerous artists to create work. Shown here is a mural by Kenny Scharf (1958–), which he painted without a predetermined plan in five days in late November 2010. It required over 200 cans of spray paint and was in place until late June 2011.

Fig. 40.17

Kenny Scharf, MURAL ON HOUSTON STREET, NEW YORK

The pseudonymous British graffiti artist Banksy has taken the form to a new level, stenciling his work on walls across Great Britain. Kissing Coppers (fig. 40.18) was first stenciled on the wall of the Prince Albert pub in Brighton, England, but it has reappeared in various sites. Even as it challenges macho stereotypes, it humanizes the very authority figures charged with enforcing laws prohibiting graffiti. The work literally “disarms” law enforcement. ca. 2005. Spray paint on wall, various sites, Brighton and London, England.

 

The piece was removed from the wall in Brighton in 2011, replaced with a replica, and shipped to the United States, where it sold to an anonymous buyer for $575,000.

Credit: Michael Shuttleworth/Alamy

“Despite what they say,” Banksy wrote in his 2006 book Banksy: Wall and Piece, “graffiti is not the lowest form of art … it’s actually one of the more honest art forms available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and nobody is put off by the price of admission.” The lowest form of art, he says, is corporate: “The people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff.” A large part of Banksy’s popularity lies, in fact, in his attack on corporate culture, including that of the art market itself. For example, in the fall of 2013, Banksy had an elderly man tend a stall in New York’s Central Park offering the artist’s work for $60 each.

Banksy’s identity remains a matter of speculation, but his work is so widely revered that all London art museum bookstores stock Martin Bull’s Banksy Locations & Tours: A Collection of Graffiti Locations and Photographs in London, England, first published in 2006, with new editions issued almost yearly since.

Multiplicity in Postmodern Literature

The pursuit of meaning lies at the heart of postmodern literature, but because meaning is always plural and fleeting, attempting to find any permanent or stable meaning in the postmodern world can only lead to frustration. The postmodern hero seeks meaning, but accepts the fact that the search is never-ending. At the beginning of his study of the Western experience of order, entitled The Order of Things (in English translation), French historian Michel Foucault (1926–84) describes the origins of his study (Reading 40.1):

READING 40.1

from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966)

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things. … This passage quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.” In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that … is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

The impossibility of Borges’s encyclopedia is based on how impossible it is for contemporary thought to recognize difference with no relation to opposition or relation to a common ground—each element in Borges’s taxonomy requires a complete shift in point of view, requiring readers to reposition their viewpoint. There is, as Foucault points out, “no common locus” beneath this taxonomy, no center around which to organize its elements. But it is precisely this possibility of “thinking that” that is the goal of postmodern literature. To this point in this survey of the Western humanities, we have referred to a historical series of shifting geographic centers, each one providing a common cultural locus for thought. Postmodern thought alters the situation. The postmodern world consists of multiple centers of thought, each existing simultaneously and independently of one another.

Jorge Luis Borges’s (1899–1986) short “fiction” entitled “Borges and I” (see Reading 40.2) may be the first postmodern exploration of this state of affairs. Although Jorge Luis Borges published widely in almost every imaginable form, his reputation as one of the leaders of modern Latin-American literature rests almost entirely on a series of some 40 short stories, tales, and sketches—“fictions,” as he called them—the bulk of them published between 1937 and 1955. Many of these sometimes very brief fictions take on a quality of dreamlike mystery. In “Borges and I” Borges describes himself as a bodily self divided from his persona as a writer. In the postmodern world, meaning shifts according to place and time and, Borges teaches us, point of view—not only the writer’s but our own. Meaning might well be determined by a myriad of semantic accidents or misunderstandings, or by a reader whose mood, gender, or particular cultural context defines, for the moment, how and what he or she understands. Postmodern writing produces texts that willingly place themselves in such an open field of interpretation, subject to uncertainty.

READING 40.2

Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I” (1967)

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Postmodern Fiction

A working definition of postmodern fiction thus might include any form of writing that defeats the readers’ expectations of coherence, that dwells on the uncertainty and ambiguity of experience, and that requires readers who can adjust to that situation. Among its most notable practitioners are Paul Auster (1947–), William Gass (1924–), Don DeLillo (1936–), Donald Barthelme (1931–89), John Barth (1930–), John Hawkes (1925–98), Italo Calvino (1923–85), Umberto Eco (1932–2016), and Thomas Pynchon (1937–).

Pynchon’s 1963 novel V. is a good example. Set in the mid-1950s, it takes its title from the ongoing quest of one of its two protagonists, Herbert Stencil, for a woman mentioned in his late father’s journals. The journal entry is cryptic: “Florence, April, 1899 … There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she.” She is connected, Stencil understands, “with one of those grand conspiracies or foretastes of Armageddon which seemed to have captivated all diplomatic sensibilities in the years preceding the Great War. V. and a conspiracy.” Stencil is convinced that “she” still exists, that she is something of an explanation for World War II, for the bomb, for apartheid in South Africa, for all evil. And, as it turns out, “she” is everywhere. She is Venus, the Virgin, the Vatican, Victoria Wren (who had seduced Stencil’s father in Florence in the late nineteenth century), Veronica Manganese (Victoria Wren’s reinvention of herself in World War I Malta), and Vera Meroving (her next incarnation in Southwest Africa). Ultimately she is transformed from the animate human being to an inanimate “force” behind Germany’s V-1 missiles, which devastated London in World War II. Perhaps most of all, V. is the vanishing point, the place on the horizon where two parallel lines appear to converge, but which is never reachable. Pynchon’s novel ends as a conventional murder mystery, but one in which the criminal does not turn out to be a person so much as a metaphysical force.

In another metaphysical detective story, City of Glass (1985), Paul Auster finds himself a character in his own story, confronting another of his characters, the mystery writer Daniel Quinn who writes under the pseudonym William Wilson. Quinn comes to Auster’s door (Reading 40.3a):

READING 40.3a

from Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

It was a man who opened the apartment door. He was a tall dark fellow in his mid-thirties, with rumpled clothes and a two-day beard. In his right hand, fixed between his thumb and first two fingers, he held an uncapped fountain pen, still poised in a writing position. The man seemed surprised to find a stranger standing before him.

“Yes?” he asked tentatively.

Quinn spoke in the politest tone he could muster. “Were you expecting someone else?”

“My wife, as a matter of fact. That’s why I rang the buzzer without asking who it was.”

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Quinn apologized. “but I’m looking for Paul Auster.”

“I’m Paul Auster,” said the man.

The elimination of any distance between the author and his work draws attention to the act of writing, a typical strategy of postmodern fiction. In blurring the boundaries between life and art, reality and fiction, Auster’s fictional work becomes real in some sense. We can thus gain a clue to Auster’s motivation by his character Quinn’s explanation early in the novel, about why he writes detective stories (Reading 40.3b):

READING 40.3b

from Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so—which amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end.

The detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective’s eyes, experiencing the proliferation of its detail as if for the first time. He has become awake to the things around him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence.

By abolishing distinction between detective, writer, and reader, Auster not only highlights the act of writing, but the act of reading as well, with the reader becoming implicated in the novel’s intrigues. Literally caught up in his own fiction, Auster’s fictional self spins into a life “seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions.”

Postmodern Poetry

Because the postmodern self is plural, postmodern literature—including poetry—encompasses a plurality of meanings. Indeed, one of the principal strategies of postmodern poetry is to take advantage of the indeterminacy of certain words—particularly “it,” and so-called “pointers,” such as “this” and “that”—which, without clear antecedent, might designate anything and everything. This short poem, by David Antin (1932–2016), is a clear example (Reading 40.4a):

READING 40.4a

David Antin, “Sky Poem” (1987–88)

IF WE GET IT TOGETHER

CAN THEY TAKE IT APART

OR ONLY IF WE LET THEM

To make the point even more indeterminate (and evanescent), Antin’s poem was traced out by skywriters in the skies above Santa Monica beach, one line at a time, each line disappearing as the planes circled back to start the next, on Memorial Day, May 23, 1987. Over a year later, on Labor Day weekend, 1988, skywriters wrote the second stanza of Antin’s poem over a beach in La Jolla, north of San Diego (Reading 40.4b):

READING 40.4b

David Antin, “Sky Poem” (1987–88)

IF WE MAKE IT TOGETHER OR

FIND IT WILL THEY BREAK IN

OR OUT OF IT OR LEAVE IT

AS THEY FIND IT STRICTLY ALONE

The “it” here is completely imprecise and open to interpretation, and the opacity of its reference was exacerbated by the fact that each line of the poem disappeared from sight before the next was written, and the second stanza followed the first after a delay of 15 months. Always in the process of its own dissolution and revision, the poem is never “wholly” present to its audience; its meaning is always disappearing.

The abolition of meaning is the express subject of many of the poems of one of America’s most prominent—and eclectic—poets, John Ashbery (1927–). As Ashbery relates in “On the Towpath,” every time we arrive at meaning, we realize, “No, / We aren’t meaning that any more.” The poem opens as narrative, but the promise of a story almost immediately recedes (Reading 40.5):

READING 40.5

from John Ashbery, “On the Towpath” (1977)

At the sign “Fred Muffin’s Antiques” they turned off the road into a narrow lane lined with shabby houses. If the thirst would subside just for awhile It would be a little bit, enough. This has happened. The insipid chiming of the seconds Has given way to an arc of silence So old it had never ceased to exist On the roofs of buildings, in the sky. The ground is tentative. The pygmies and jacaranda that were here yesterday Are back today, only less so. It is a barrier of fact Shielding the sky from the earth.

When Ashbery writes, “This has happened,” the reader asks, what has happened? Ashbery’s “This” is entirely ambiguous. What is “tentative” ground? Muddy? Slippery? Along the “towpath” it might well be, but it is also possible for “the ground” to mean “meaning” itself. Is not “meaning” frequently tentative and slippery? Similarly, when Ashbery writes “It is a barrier of fact,” to what does his “it” refer? Later in the poem, he writes,

The sun fades like the spreading Of a peacock’s tail, as though twilight Might be read as a warning to those desperate For easy solutions.

Ashbery’s sense of play and experimentalism, along with his subversive humor, deliberately frustrates those who desire closure, or meaning. “No,” he writes at the end of the poem:

We aren’t meaning that any more. The question has been asked As though an immense natural bridge had been Strung across the landscape to any point you wanted. The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.

The pun here involves the elliptical arch of Ashbery’s imaginary bridge: “The ellipse is” is also “the ellipsis,” literally omitting from a sentence a word or phrase that would complete or clarify its meaning. The poem, finally, returns to the point where we recognize we must go on, “into the future,” with however little “meaning” there is. For Ashbery, there are only questions, uncertainties, and tentative ground—a concise statement of the postmodern condition.

Postcolonialism, Identity, and the Arts

1. 40.4 How are postcolonial experience and the quest for self-definition manifested in contemporary art and literature?

Just as the postmodern theory of Jacques Derrida revealed that the binary oppositions so fundamental to the structure of Western thought (good/evil; conscious/unconscious; masculine/feminine, etc.) cannot exist without reference to one another, so postcolonial writers and theorists have argued that this same binary structure was imposed on colonial cultures from the moment of contact with the West, creating a binary power relationship of us (the West) versus them (the colonized subject) where they were a necessarily inferior “other” (see the discussion of Edward Said’s Orientalism in Chapter 28, Closer Look). This reductionist logic allowed for the easy categorization of the many vastly different peoples and cultures of the world into homogeneous terms— “The Third World,” most notably—imposing an over-simplified logic to the hybrid and multiplicitous spaces of which the world is composed. While it is easy to think of postcolonialism in temporal terms—as a transglobal form of self-awareness that followed colonialism (after, that is, the nationalist independence movements that arose after World War II; see Chapter 37)—postcolonial theory really refers to any creative act of opposition to the dominant discourse of the colonizer. That said, the postmodernist attack on homogeneous uniformity—its sense of complexity and contradiction, of a “difficult whole”—has served to foreground the diversity of postcolonial thought.

Contesting the Postcolonial Self

“Language is a virus,” declared American author William S. Burroughs (1914–97), referring, at least in part, to the fact that American English had by then become the international language of business, politics, the media, and culture—a plague upon indigenous languages that threatened their extinction. In this context, the collision of global cultures could hardly be ignored. In Asia and Africa, in the Latino, Hispanic, and American Indian worlds, and in Islam, artists have responded by acknowledging that life in a global world increasingly demands that they accept multiple identities. They increasingly find themselves in a double bind—how, they ask, can they remain true to their native or ethnic identities and still participate in the larger world market? What happens to their work when it enters a context where it is received with little or no understanding of its origins?

Although the Japanese have traditionally considered their culture as literally “insular,” and largely isolated from outside influence, artists such as Yasumasa Morimura (1951–) directly engage with the West. In Portrait (Futago) (futago is Japanese for “twins”) (fig. 40.19), the artist poses as both Manet’s Olympia and her maid (see Chapter 30, Closer Look), subverting the idea of Japanese isolationism by staging the photograph with props and sets and then blending the images digitally. On the one hand, Morimura copies the icons of Western culture, but at the same time he undermines them, drawing attention to the fact that the courtesan and her maid share the same identity—they are “twins”—slaves to the dominant (male) forces of Western society. At the same time, he places Japanese culture in the same “frame,” as prostitute and slave to the West. By cross-dressing—and, in this image, un-cross-dressing—Morimura challenges Japanese male gender identity as well.

Fig. 40.19

Yasumasa Morimura, PORTRAIT (FUTAGO) 1988. Color photograph, clear enamel medium 82¾" × 119".

 

As opposed to Manet’s hissing black cat, the black cat at the end of Morimura’s bed is a maneki-neko, or “Beckoning Cat,” a common Japanese good-luck charm that is often displayed in stores and restaurants, its raised left paw supposedly attracting customers.

Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Shigeyuki Kihara (1975–) is an artist of Japanese/Samoan extraction who resides in New Zealand as a transgender woman (a biological male who lives as a woman), the word for which among the Samoan peoples—for whom the “third gender” has historically held a place as not only socially acceptable but also widely practiced—is fa’a fafine. Kihara’s work is directly inspired by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of Samoan islanders taken by non-Samoans, whose assumptions about the lives of their subjects were deeply tainted by the same colonial ideas that drew painter Paul Gauguin to the South Seas during the same era—the dream of a “primitive” culture of unity, peace, and naked innocence far removed from the turmoil of “civilized” life (see fig. 33.17). Ulugali’i Samoa: Samoan Couple (ulugali’i is Samoan for “married couple”) (fig. 40.20) is a re-creation of one of these colonial photographs, which were, in fact, distributed worldwide as postcards. But as a result of the impact of Christian missionaries in the islands, by the time these postcards were circulating throughout the West as part of a burgeoning trade in pornography (the photographers required their adolescent Samoan models to expose their breasts in order to satisfy the same fantasies that so appealed to Gauguin), the Samoans themselves most usually dressed in Western clothing.

Fig. 40.20

Shigeyuki Kihara, ULUGALI’I SAMOA: SAMOAN COUPLE, FROM THE SERIES FA’A FAFINE: IN THE MANNER OF A WOMAN

2004–5. C-type photograph, 31½" × 23⅗". Edition of five.

 

Kihara thinks of this photograph as a kind of faleaitu (“house of spirits”), a form of traditional Samoan theater in which men perform political satire by cross-dressing and undercutting gender roles.

Credit: © 2017 Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence/© Shigeyuki Kihara

Kihara has posed herself as the woman in this photograph, bare-breasted, holding a plaited fan (a traditional status symbol), and wearing a bark cloth dress, traditionally made throughout the Pacific Islands from the paper mulberry tree. The male is similarly attired and holds a flywhisk, another status symbol. Around his neck he wears a ulafala, a red lei crafted from the fruit of the pandanus tree and normally worn by a high-ranking Samoan tulafale (orator chief). As in nineteenth-century photographs, the couple is posed in the studio in front of an array of tropical foliage, as if in a natural setting. Kihara further undermines this construction of “authentic” island identity by digitally superimposing her own face, now made-up with a wig and mustache, on the body of the male. The photograph challenges accepted notions of identity at every level: in terms of gender roles, colonial assumptions about Samoan culture, and even the authenticity of the photographic image itself.

The photographs of Moroccan-born artist Lalla Essaydi (1956–) approach the relationship between traditional Western representations of Arab women and these women’s own, far more personal and hybrid sense of self-definition. Her work is about the impact of the Western gaze on Arab culture, and it is specifically about the ways in which Orientalist nineteenth-century painting has inscribed itself on Arab women (see Chapter 28, Closer Look). The title of her series of photographs Les Femmes du Maroc (2005–8) is an explicit reference to a famous painting by Eugène Delacroix, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (The Women of Algiers in their apartment), 1834, a depiction of three Algerian concubines and their servant. La Grande Odalisque from the series by Essaydi (fig. 40.21) is a direct reference to Ingres’s painting of the same name (see fig. 28.9). In all the photographs in the series, Essaydi covered her model and the space surrounding her with Arab calligraphy. The model melds with the space, a fact that is actually implied by the word “harem,” which derives from the Arabic haram or haraam, which means, on the one hand, “a sacred inviolable space” or “sanctuary,” and on the other, “sinful.” It is this tension and this complexity that Essaydi’s photographs exploit. The texts, which cover everything, are written in henna, a traditional dye used for body decoration in Arab culture, and they originate from a personal story from Essaydi’s youth. But in the course of inscribing the story on the walls, clothing, and body of the model—a process that can take several months—the texts take on the character of a dialogue with the model, a sort of journal documenting both Essaydi’s story and the stories of the women she photographs. In this sense, the women are no longer Western stereotypes, but real people with real stories to tell, a reality emphasized here by the dirt on the model’s feet—she walks on real ground.

Fig. 40.21

Lalla Essaydi, LA GRANDE ODALISQUE

From the series Les Femmes du Maroc (The Women of Morocco), 2008. Photograph, C-print.

 

The complexity of Essaydi’s work is encapsulated in the following statement from her website: “In my art, I wish to present myself through multiple lenses—as artist, as Moroccan, as traditionalist, as Liberal, as Muslim. In short, I invite viewers to resist stereotypes.”

Credit: Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

The tension between political reality, cultural identity, and personal identity is especially evident in the work of Middle Eastern women artists, such as Essaydi, who have moved between their homelands and the West. Shirin Neshat (1957–) grew up in Iran in an upper-middle-class family, but after graduating from high school, she moved to the United States to study art. When the Islamic Revolution overtook her homeland in 1979, 22-year-old Neshat found herself living in exile. When she returned home 11 years later, Iran had completely changed. She recalls:

During the Shah’s regime, we had a very open, free environment. There was a kind of dilution between West and East—the way we looked and the way we lived. When I went back everything seemed changed. There seemed to be very little color. Everyone was black or white. All the women wearing the black chadors. It was immediately shocking. Street names had changed from old Persian names to Arabic and Muslim names. … This whole shift of the Persian identity toward a more Islamic one created a kind of crisis. I think to this day there’s a great sense of grief that goes with that.

In Neshat’s series of photographs, Women of Allah, of which Rebellious Silence (fig. 40.22) is characteristic, many of the women hold guns, subverting the stereotype of women as submissive. At the same time, they bury their individuality beneath the black chador, and their bodies are inscribed in Farsi calligraphy with poetry by Tahereh Saffarzadeh, whose verses express the deep belief of many Iranian women in Islam. Only within the context of Islam, they believe, are women truly equal to men, and they claim that the chador, by concealing a woman’s sexuality, prevents her from becoming a sexual object. The chador also expresses women’s solidarity with men in the rejection of Western culture. Yet, even as she portrays the militant point of view, Neshat does not blindly accept the Islamic fundamentalist understanding of the chador. It is clear that the Women of Allah photographs purposefully underscore the Islamic world’s difficulty in separating beliefs that focus on religion and spirituality from those that concern politics and violence.

Fig. 40.22

Shirin Neshat, REBELLIOUS SILENCE, FROM THE SERIES WOMEN OF ALLAH

994. Gelatin silver print and ink.

 

“The main question I ask,” Neshat has said, “is, what is the experience of being a woman in Islam? I then put my trust in those women’s words who have lived and experienced the life of a woman behind the chador.”

Credit: Photo: Cynthia Preston. © Shirin Neshat, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

The Pakistani painter Shahzia Sikander (1969–) addresses her heterogeneous background in works such as Pleasure Pillars (fig. 40.23) by reinventing the traditional genre of miniature painting in a hybrid of styles. Combining her training as a miniature artist in her native Pakistan with her focus on contemporary art during her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, Sikander explores the tensions inherent in Islam’s encounter with the Western world, Christianity, and the neighboring South Asian tradition of Hinduism. In the center of Pleasure Pillars, Sikander portrays herself with the spiraling horns of a powerful male ram. Below her head are two bodies, one a Western Aphrodite or Venus (see fig. 5.21), the other Devi, the Hindu goddess of fertility, rain, health, and nature, who is said to hold the entire universe in her womb. Between them, two hearts pump blood, a reference to Sikander’s dual sources of inspiration, East and West. Eastern and Western images of power also inform the image as a lion kills a deer at the bottom left, a direct artistic quote from an Iranian miniature of the Safavid dynasty (1499–1736), and at the top, a modern fighter jet roars past.

Fig. 40.23

Shahzia Sikander, PLEASURE PILLARS

The Global Marketplace and the Commodification of Culture

If the primary motive of colonization has always been the exploitation of the natural resources of the colonized—rubber and diamonds from Africa, cotton from India, spices from the islands of the South Seas, gold and silver from the Americas—the prospect of selling Western-produced commodities in the world’s vast markets has proven equally attractive. Perhaps no image better embodies the impact of Western markets on world culture than Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (fig. 40.24) by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (1957–). Ai first came to the United States in 1981, and lived in New York’s East Village, where he absorbed the critique of commodity fetishism that was Pop Art and the work of a younger generation of American artists that included Jeff Koons (see The Continuing Presence of the Past, Chapter 25). Since returning to China in 1993, he has worked as a political activist, focusing particularly on the government’s censorship of the Internet. In 2009, the government shut down his blog; in 2011 he was held under arrest for 81 days, ostensibly for “economic crimes”; and in 2012, just before his major retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum (which he was not allowed to attend), the government closed his Beijing company, through which he makes and distributes most of his work. One of Ai’s principal strategies as an artist has been to transform historical artifacts in gestures that traditional Chinese historians consider vandalism, and Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo is one of these. Critiquing the impact of capitalism on Chinese life, the gesture is an ironic commentary on the tension between cultural and economic values in contemporary society.

1994. Paint and Han dynasty urn, 10" × 11" × 11".

 

Ai has made it clear that the fake Han dynasty pots on the market are made in exactly the same way as the ancient pots and are almost indistinguishable from real ones. The name of his Beijing company is, not coincidentally, FAKE Design.

Credit: Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York. © Ai Weiwei

Yinka Shonibare (1962–), who was born in England to Nigerian parents, lived in Nigeria for several years before returning to art school in London, where he began creating artworks from the colorful printed fabrics that are worn throughout West Africa. The irony, of course, is that all of these fabrics are created by English and Dutch designers, then manufactured in Europe, and exported to Africa. At that point (in what amounts to a complete subversion of the global marketplace) they are then remarketed in the West as authentic African designs (fig. 40.25). “By making hybrid clothes,” Shonibare explains, “I collapse the idea of a European dichotomy against an African one. There is no way you can work out where the opposites are. There is no way you can work out the precise nationality of my dresses, because they do not have one. And there is no way you can work out the precise economic status of the people who would’ve worn those dresses because the economic status and the class status are confused in these objects.” Sometimes, even the time period of these costumes is drawn into question. They are identified as “Victorian,” and indeed the bustle on the woman’s dress is a Victorian fashion, but the man’s outfit seems startlingly hip. In 2005, Shonibare was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), an honorary title that he now adds, with a certain irony, to his name.

Ten Thousand Waves (fig. 40.26), a nine-screen video installation by British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien (1960–), is emphatically a condemnation of the exploitation of workers in the new global marketplace. The installation was inspired by the drowning of 23 Chinese cockle pickers from Fujian province in southeast China, in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire (England), on the evening of February 5, 2004. Their tragedy is juxtaposed with a Chinese fable, “The Tale of Yishan Island,” in which the Chinese goddess and protector of sailors, the Fujian goddess Mazu—played by Chinese actress Maggie Cheung—saves five boats of fishermen from a storm at sea by directing them to an island that, after they are saved, they can never find again. Layered over these two stories is a third story of a contemporary goddess—a sort of reenactment of Wu Yonggang’s 1934 silent film The Goddess (about a woman who becomes a prostitute to support herself and her son), which tracks her as she moves from the historic Shanghai Film Studio sets of the 1930s into the present-day Pudong district of Shanghai. The exploitation of the cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay is thus overlayered with the exploitation of the prostitute in contemporary Shanghai—and, in no small part, the exploitation of actresses in the 1930s Shanghai film industry.

Fig. 40.26

Isaac Julien, TEN THOUSAND WAVES I

2010. Installation view, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. Nine-screen installation. 35mm film, transferred to High Definition, 9.2 surround sound. Duration 49 min, 41 sec. Edition of six plus 1AP.

 

Here, Maggie Cheung, in her role as Mazu, flies over Morecambe Bay searching for the drowning cockle pickers. Julien shot the scene by hoisting Cheung on pulleys and filming her flying against a green screen, rendering the ropes invisible. The churning sea was created with computer-generated imagery (CGI).

Credit: Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London, Metro Pictures, New York, and Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid. © Isaac Julien. Photography © Adrian Zhou

Julien’s multiscreen images at first seem chaotic, but they underscore that the fixed viewpoint of cinematic experience is highly institutionalized—the onslaught of visual stimulus in Julien’s installation is actually very much like “the new spatial order” that Robert Venturi discovered in Las Vegas. In that sense, Julien’s installation represents a kind of “visual liberation,” its Dolby surround sound environment—the dialogue of helicopter pilots attempting their rescues of the cockle pickers, the poetry of Wang Ping, the atonal music of Maria de Alvear, and fusion mix of Jah Wobble & the Chinese Dub Orchestra—immerses us in a cacophony of sonic structures that parallels aurally the visual constructedness of the film. We are caught up in the “ten thousand waves” of Chinese—and world—history. The Plural Self in the Americas

In 2011, the Brazilian-born artist Paulo Nazareth (1977–) set out from his home in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on one of his “durational performances”—long, improvised walks through various countries which he documents with photographs and ephemera collected along the way (fig. 40.27). This particular walk lasted almost nine months, as he walked along the Pan-American Highway through 15 countries wearing a pair of flip-flops and gathering the dust of the Americas on his unwashed feet. He is himself of mixed heritage—African, Krenak (an almost extinct indigenous people of the Brazilian rainforest), and Italian—and as he traveled he photographed himself with the people he met along the way, works that document not only his sense of shared identity with those people, but also his difference from them. Finally, arriving in New York, in an act of absolution, he washed his dirt-caked feet in the Hudson River, then turned around and walked back to Brazil again.

The Latino and Hispanic Presence in the United States

A cross-fertilization of traditions and identities that Nazareth’s work underscores has traditionally infused the art of Latino and Hispanic cultures of the Americas. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Hispanization of Indian culture and the Indianization of Hispanic culture in Latin and South America created a unique cultural pluralism (see Chapter 23). By the last half of the twentieth century, Latino culture had become increasingly Americanized, and an influx of Hispanic immigrants helped Latinize American culture. The situation has been summed up by Puerto Rico-born poet Aurora Levins Morales (1954–), in “Child of the Americas” (Reading 40.6):

READING 40.6

Aurora Levins Morales, “Child of the Americas” (1986)

I am a child of the Americas, a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean, a child of many diaspora, born into this continent at a crossroads. I am a U.S. Puerto Rican Jew, a product of the ghettos of New York I have never known. An immigrant and the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants. I speak English with passion: it’s the tongue of my consciousness, a flashing knife blade of crystal, my tool, my craft. I am Caribeña, island grown. Spanish is my flesh, Ripples from my tongue, lodges in my hips: the language of garlic and mangoes, the singing of poetry, the flying gestures of my hands. I am of Latinoamerica, rooted in the history of my continent: I speak from that body.

I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return. I am not taína. Taíno1 is in me, but there is no way back. I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there. I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish. I was born at the crossroads and I am whole.

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One of the most important writers to have addressed Latino and Hispanic identity in the United States is Luis Valdez (1940–). He was already a playwright when he joined Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) in his efforts to unionize farm workers through the creation of the National Farm Workers Association (today known as the United Farm Workers) in 1965 in Delano, California, where Chavez had initiated the Delano Grape Strike (which would inspire a national boycott of table grapes from 1966 to 1970). On the picket lines, Valdez founded El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworkers’ Theater) to raise funds for “La Causa” (the cause), the simple but effective term that helped transform a local strike into a broad, instantly identifiable global movement. Combining Italian commedia dell’arte (improvisational comedy) and Mexican vaudeville, by 1968, the Farmworkers’ Theater had redefined itself as a “teatro chicano” and moved out of the fields and into Los Angeles in an effort to portray a wider range of Chicano experience.

Valdez’s national success came in 1978, when he produced Zoot Suit, a play that exposed the police brutality and injustices faced by the Chicano community during the “Zoot Suit Riots” and the “Sleepy Lagoon” trial of the 1940s. The main character in the play, Henry Reyna, is the leader of the 38th Street Gang. Heading to a party that has been terrorized by rival gang members just moments before, Henry and his friends are mistaken for members of the rival gang and they are attacked. After a man from the party is killed, the entire gang is indicted on charges of murder. Their identity, both cultural and criminal, is tied to “zoot suits,” two-piece suits consisting of a long jacket and pegged pants, accompanied by a long keychain that loops almost to the ankle. The importance of the apparel is expressed by the character El Pachuco—part Aztec god, part quintessential 1940s Zoot Suiter, and part Greek chorus—when he sings the following corrido, or traditional Mexican narrative ballad (Reading 40.7):

READING 40.7

from Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit (1978)

Trucha, ese loco, vamos al rorlo Wear that carlango, tramos y tando Dance with your huisa Dance to the boogie tonight! ’Cause the zoot suit is the style in California También en Colorado y Arizona They’re wearing that tacuche en El Paso Y en todos los salones de Chicago You better get hep tonight And put on that zoot suit!

Valdez’s use of “Spanglish” is like that described by Aurora Levins Morales in “Child of the Americas,” and both exemplify the confluence of cultures that the Latino experience in the United States represents—a plural language for a plural self.

Nevertheless, the difficulties Latino and Hispanic populations face in their assimilation into American culture are manifold, a fact probably nowhere more poignantly articulated than in the work of Ana Mendieta (1948–85). In 1961, when she was just 12 years of age, the Cuban-born artist and her 14-year-old sister were sent, along with 14,000 other Cuban children, to the United States through the “Operation Peter Pan” program run jointly by the United States government and Catholic charities. Her politically prominent family sent them away, fearing reprisals from Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution. She lived, at first, in refugee camps and other institutions, until she finally entered foster-home networks in Iowa. It was not until 1966 that she was reunited with her mother and younger brother, and not until 1979 that her father joined them, finally having been released from prison for his role in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Mendieta never fully recovered from the trauma of separation, not merely from her family but also from her native land. In Iowa, she felt she had no sense of self, no identity. As a graduate painting student at the University of Iowa, she addressed this issue directly by transplanting the beard of fellow student Morty Sklar onto her own face. The immigration of the beard reenacted, in terms of gender, her own removal from Cuba to Iowa. The beard did not “belong,” although she claimed that, when she saw it on her face, it seemed to have become “natural,” quite likely a reference to the “naturalization” process undertaken by foreign immigrants.

Soon after graduating, Mendieta journeyed to Mexico and felt a connection to the land that she had not experienced since leaving Cuba. There, she began to place her silhouette—silueta in Spanish—onto and into the earth itself. In the action illustrated here (fig. 40.28), she formed a silueta on the beach at La Ventosa, Mexico, filling it with red tempera that was ultimately washed away by the ocean waves. “I am overwhelmed,” she would later write, “by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). … Through my earth/body sculptures, I become one with the earth. … The after-image of being encompassed within the womb is a manifestation of my thirst for being.”

1973–77. Color photograph from a suite of 12, 19⅜" × 269/16".

Credit: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with a grant provided by The Judith Rothschild Foundation. © Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York

But the image is not merely a bodily imprint in the sand. It is simultaneously the image of a broad-handled knife, and a bloody knife at that. This is a reference to the Africa-Cuban religion of Santería, specifically to the orisha (a spirit or deity who is one manifestation of God) called Ogún, the fierce warrior and inventor of the knife who defends the followers of Santería against injustice. It is he who gives the initiate the authority to use the knife in animal sacrifice, a required part of any initiation into the religion, since without blood sacrifice the orishas are not present and the consecration is illegitimate. This double meaning reflects Mendieta’s own sense of a double identity—Cuban and American. As her image is washed away by the tide, it undergoes a complete lifecycle—born of Mendieta’s hand only to succumb to the inevitable forces of nature.

Recovering Tradition: Contemporary Native American Art

Native North Americans have been among the most isolated and marginalized of all the world’s indigenous peoples. Diverse but sequestered on arid reservations, enmeshed in poverty and unemployment, their traditions and languages on the brink of extinction, Native Americans seemed the consummate “Other.” However, in 1968, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a gathering of local Native Americans, led by Dennis Banks, George Mitchell, and Clyde Bellecourt, decided to address these problems through collective action, and founded the American Indian Movement (AIM). Banks would later recall that what motivated the group were the slum housing conditions of Native American communities, exacerbated in no small part by the fact that the unemployment rate among Native Americans was the highest in the country, and made paramount by the fact that the police were routinely brutalizing Native American elders, women, and children. AIM, then, would be a collective action of Minnesota “Warriors,” exhausted and humiliated by the welfare state, who would choose instead to build on the strengths of their own people. They would build their own schools, initiate their own job training programs—in short, create their own future. Theirs would be an “Era of Indian Power.”

AIM was, from the outset, a militant organization. On Thanksgiving Day, 1970, AIM members boarded the Mayflower II at its dock in Plymouth harbor as a countercelebration of the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock. A year later, they occupied Mount Rushmore National Monument. In AIM’s point of view, the site, which was sacred to their culture, had been desecrated by the carving of the American presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln into the mountain. The occupation was designed to draw attention to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had deeded the Black Hills, including Mount Rushmore, to the Lakota Sioux. The U.S. military had ignored the treaty, forcing the Lakota onto the Pine Ridge reservation on the plains south of the Black Hills. There, on December 29, 1890, with the Battle of Wounded Knee, conflict erupted (see Chapter 32). In 1973, AIM militants took control of Wounded Knee and were quickly surrounded by federal marshals. For over two months, they exchanged gunfire, until the AIM militants surrendered. Of course, not everyone agreed with AIM’s tactics, but the group did help to revitalize Native American cultures throughout the hemisphere and furthered an interest in traditional art forms.

Although Native American communities are arguably better off today than they were in 1970—in no small part due to the emergence of reservation-based casino gambling—many concerns remain. Contemporary life in the Southwestern pueblos is the subject of Indian Country Today (fig. 40.29) painted by David P. Bradley (1954–), a Native American of Ojibwe descent who has lived for the last 30 years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Behind the pueblo, to the left, the parking lot of an Indian-run casino is filled with tourist buses. Behind it, in the distance, is the city of Santa Fe. The train passing behind the pueblo is the Santa Fe Railroad’s “Chief”—the very image of Anglo-American culture’s appropriation of Native traditions. To the right of the central mesa is the Four Corners Power Plant in northwestern New Mexico, one of the largest coal-fired generating stations in the United States and one of the greatest polluters. (Note the smoke reemerging on the far side of the mesa.) Behind the plant is an open-pit strip mine. Fighter jets rise over the landscape, reminders of the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, where classified work on the design of nuclear weapons is performed.

Fig. 40.29

David P. Bradley (Ojibwe), INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY

1996–97. Acrylic on canvas, 70" × 60". Museum purchase through the Mr. and Mrs. James Krebs Fund. Peabody Essex Museum.

 

In the foreground is the Rio Grande River, teeming with fish, the lifeblood of the region.

Credit: Peabody Essex Museum. © and courtesy the artist

In the center of the pueblo, Bradley depicts a traditional kachina dance taking place. Performed by male dancers who impersonate kachinas, the spirits who inhabit the clouds, the rain, crops, animals, and even ideas such as growth and fertility, the dances are sacred and, although tourists are allowed to view them, photography is strictly prohibited. The actual masks worn in ceremonies are not considered art objects by the pueblo. Rather, they are thought of as active agents in the transfer of power and knowledge between the gods and the men who wear them in dance. Kachina figurines are made for sale to tourists, but they are considered empty of any ritual power or significance. This commercialization of native tradition is the real subject of Bradley’s painting. The native peoples’ ability to withstand this onslaught is suggested by the giant mesa, endowed with kachina-like eyes and mouth, that overlooks the entire scene, suggesting that the spirits still oversee and protect their people.

New African-American Identities

Since the 1960s, the “double consciousness” that W.E.B. Du Bois articulated more than a century ago (see Chapter 36) has multiplied into a more plural and diverse set of consciousnesses, as attested by “calling cards” created by the black activist artist and philosopher Adrian Piper (1948–). As a light-skinned African-American woman, Piper’s race was not always recognized, and racist remarks were made in her presence. “Dear Friend,” the card read in part. “I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. … I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me. Sincerely yours, Adrian Margaret Smith Piper.” A second card read: “Dear Friend, I am not here to pick anyone up, or to be picked up. I am here alone because I want to be here, alone. This card is not intended as part of an extended flirtation. Thank you for respecting my privacy.” The calling cards were designed to rebuke the offenders, and she considered the occasions on which she was driven to hand them out as “Reactive Guerilla Performances for Dinner and Cocktail Parties” (words she sometimes used as a sort of subtitle to the cards). As a product of both the civil rights and feminist movements, Piper’s identity was now triple—she was a black American woman, and none of these identities rested easily with the others.

The complexities of African-American identity took a new turn in 2001, when curator Thelma Golden’s exhibition “Freestyle” at the Studio Museum in Harlem introduced the phrase “Post-Black” into the discussion. She used it to mean artists who were first and foremost artists and only secondarily black. The youngest artist in the show was Rashid Johnson, whose mother taught African history and African-American history at Northwestern University while he was growing up. “I grew up enveloped in this kind of Afro-centric conversation,” Johnson explains:

We celebrated Kwanzaa. My mother wore dashikis and had an afro. But the thing that I think is most interesting to me is that one day they just weren’t wearing dashikis any more, and there were no more afros. And we weren’t celebrating Kwanzaa any more. That transition from Afro-centrism … to your parents becoming essentially just like middle-class soccer moms … is why humor has become so interesting to me.

Johnson’s shelf-like sculpture Souls of Black Folk (fig. 40.30) embodies just this “Post-Black” sensibility. It is composed of 100 green-spined copies of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk. In the middle of the central panel, composed of black soap and wax—black soap is an African skincare product used for nurturing sensitive skin—is the golden logo of Sigma Pi Phi, the first African-American Greek-lettered fraternity, a secret society perhaps better known simply as “the Boulé.” Sitting on small shelves across the work, dishes of shea butter evoke Johnson’s first trip to West Africa at age 18, where he saw Ashanti warriors slathering themselves in it in order to make them so slippery that their enemies could not grab them. Overlooking the whole shrine is the cover of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis’s 1986 album Tutu, named for South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The gold “space rocks” that flank Davis’s image refer to the cosmic, quite literally “far-out,” music of Sun Ra, the experimental jazz musician who claimed to be an alien from Saturn sent to Earth to preach peace. All in all, the work suggests not just the history of African-American culture, but, more than a little irreverently, the vast array of “things” that have come to compose Johnson’s and the culture’s identity.

Fig. 40.30

Rashid Johnson, SOULS OF BLACK FOLK

A Multiplicity of Media: New Technologies

1. 40.5 How have developments in technology impacted the arts?

Just as the electronic media have revolutionized modern culture, ranging from Thomas Edison’s first audio recording to the motion picture, radio, television, and digital technologies, and from the Internet to the iPod, so too have the arts been revolutionized by these media. This transformation was most fundamentally realized in the visual arts through the medium of video. In a culture increasingly immersed in the moving image—as television became increasingly the primary medium of news and entertainment, and live events could be broadcast around the globe in real time—artists sought for ways to intervene in and participate in this culture. But until the introduction of the relatively inexpensive handheld Sony Portapak video camera in 1965, the equipment needed to create moving-image art was by and large beyond the means of most artists. Today, of course, video art per se no longer exists—the medium has become entirely digital, and in fact, although it is more expensive, artists working in time-based media have preferred to work with film, given the higher quality of the image (see fig. 40.26). But video attracted artists after it was first introduced at the end of the 1960s because it foregrounded the image in a space that had previously eluded it—the space of time and duration.

Video as Medium

Eleanor Antin came to video art through performance. She understood that her race- and gender-blurring performances—as the invented personae the King of Solana Beach (see fig. 39.19) and Eleanora Antinova, the black ballerina of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—could be documented by video camera. But she also realized that she could project multiple versions of herself and others simultaneously in installation settings.

An example is Minetta Lane—A Ghost Story (fig. 40.31), first exhibited in New York City in 1995. It consists of a re-creation of three buildings on a Greenwich Village (New York) street that runs for two blocks. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was the site of a low-rent artists’ community, and Antin’s installation recreates the bohemian character of that lost world. The installation itself consists of three narrative films, transferred to video disc, and back-projected onto the tenement windows of the reconstructed lane. The viewer, passing through the scene, thus voyeuristically peers into each window and views what transpires inside. In one window, two lovers play in a kitchen tub. In a second, an Abstract Expressionist painter is at work. And in a third, an old man tucks in his family of caged birds for the night. Ghosts of a past time, these characters are trapped on celluloid, but their world is inhabited by another, unseen ghost. A little girl, who is apparently invisible to those in the scene but clearly visible to us, paints a giant X across the artist’s canvas and destroys the relationship of the lovers in the tub. She represents a destructive force that, in Antin’s view, is present in all of us—and, in fact, present in the very nature of her electronic medium. The artist, the lovers, and the old man represent the parts of us that we have lost—our youth. They represent ideas about art, sexuality, and life that, despite our nostalgia for them, are no longer relevant.

Fig. 40.31

Eleanor Antin, MINETTA LANE—A GHOST STORY

1994–95. Filmic installation. “Through the Artist’s Window,” one of three video projections.

 

Each of the installation’s three films is about ten minutes long.

Credit: Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York/www.feldmangallery.com

Contemporary video art is, in fact, haunted by ghosts. In a catalog essay that she wrote for another installation of Minetta Lane, Antin mused, “What I’m after is some image in my mind that I want to make visible, knowable, perceivable. Make the immaterial material, so that someone else can turn it back into some other immaterial image that I hope is not too alien from my own.” Antin’s films produce images that are imprinted on our minds, where they become immaterial again, summoned by an act of memory. The filmic image is the trace—or what remains—of a lost past. It is, of its nature, inherently “ghostly.”

As the “ghost” metaphor suggests, temporal media like video art are often concerned with the passing of time itself, the life cycle from birth to death. Video artist Bill Viola (1951–) has been fascinated, throughout his career, by the passage of time. His principal metaphor for this passage is water, which not only flows, like time, but because it can be seen, seems to make both time and space tangible and palpable. His video installation piece Five Angels for the Millennium (fig. 40.32) is composed of five individual video sequences that show a clothed man plunging into a pool of water. The duration of each video is different, with long sequences of peaceful aqueous landscape suddenly interrupted by the explosive sound of the body’s dive into the water. He describes the process of making the piece:

Five Angels came out of a three-day shoot in Long Beach that I had undertaken for several

other projects. All I knew was that I wanted to film a man plunging into water, sinking down, below, out of frame—drowning. A year or so later, going through this old footage, I came across five shots of this figure and started working with them—intuitively and without a conscious plan. I became completely absorbed by this man sinking in water, and by the sonic and physical environment I had in mind for the piece.

When I showed the finished work to Kira [Perov], my partner, she pointed out something I had not realized until that moment: this was not a film of a drowning man. Somehow, I had unconsciously run time backwards in the five films, so all but one of the figures rush upwards and out of the water. I had inadvertently created images of ascension, from death to birth.

Because the videos are continuously looped and projected onto the gallery walls, their different durations make it impossible to predict which wall will suddenly become animated by the dive—the one behind you, the one in front of you, the one at your side. The experience is something like being immersed in both water and time simultaneously, in the flow of the moment. For Viola, video differs from film in exactly this sense. The most fundamental aspect of video’s origin as a medium is the live camera. Video is in the moment. And Viola’s installation literally spatializes time, even as time becomes as palpable as the watery surfaces that Viola depicts. What he offers the viewer is a quasi-mystical space of reflection, at once fraught with a sense of anticipation (when and where will the next angel explode through the water?) and simultaneously the relief of completion (as ripples flow out from a completed dive). In other words, in this space viewers become completely aware that they stand in that space where we all stand, usually without acknowledging it—the space between the past and the future. One is plunged into the present.

2001. Video/sound installation, five channels of color video projection on walls in a large, dark room (room dimensions variable); stereo sound for each projection; image size 7'5" × 10'6" each. Edition of three.

Credit: Photo Mike Bruce/Courtesy Anthony d’Offay, London/Bill Viola Studio, LLC

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s—and down to our present time (consider YouTube)—video became one of the primary agents of a new transglobal culture, moving more or less freely across borders, through and among distinct ethnic communities, providing access to transient identities, both personal and communal. After the first broadcast of the 24-hour all-music television network Music Television (MTV) in August 1981, music, that most transient of media, was “received” by audiences around the world not just as sound but as videos. This phenomenon was explored by English artist Phil Collins (1970–) who began creating posters in 2004 inviting people to perform karaoke renditions of all the songs from the Smiths’ classic 1987 album The World Won’t Listen, first in Bogotá, Colombia, then in Istanbul, Turkey, and finally in Jakarta and Bandung, Indonesia. “In all the locations,” Collins told the Dallas Museum’s curator of contemporary art, where the three sessions were first screened simultaneously, “some people had a very rudimentary grasp of English. But they knew the songs so devastatingly well through repetition, every breath and every ad lib, which, considering the importance of lyrics in the songs … is pretty amazing.” The performers sing in front of travelogue leisure-world backdrops (fig. 40.33) ranging from lakeside villas to tropical resorts to American national parks, each entering, as they sing, even if only for a moment, the glamorous world of pop idols. “Other people sometimes find karaoke embarrassing, or laughable, or delusional,” Collins explains, “but I find it moving and incredibly courageous. … It’s like a mild form of heroism.” What Collins’s trilogy suggests, finally, is a human community of far-flung “fans,” but believers, too, in lyrics like those in the song “Rubber Ring”: “Don’t forget the songs / That made you cry / And the songs that saved your life.”

Fig. 40.33

Phil Collins, STILL FROM PART ONE OF THE SMITHS KARAOKE TRILOGY, THE WORLD WON’T LISTEN

2004–7. Synchronized three-channel color video projection with sound, approximately 60 min. Film still.

 

The music for The Smiths karaoke was performed by Colombia’s biggest rock group, Aterciopelados (“The Velvety”).

Credit: Courtesy Shady Lane Productions and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

There can be little doubt that rock and roll culture has had a considerable impact on the arts over the course of the last 50 years. Pipilotti Rist (1962–) began working with video in 1986 with a single-track video, I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (fig. 40.34), a sort of parody of the videos that had begun to air on television with the advent of MTV. The video transforms the lyrics to the Beatles’s song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (1968) from “She’s not a girl,” to “I’m not the girl.” Rist, who would play percussion, bass, and flute in the all-girl rock band Les Reines Prochaines (“The Next Queens”) from 1988 to 1994, bounces up and down as she dances, manipulating her voice by speeding it up to a frenetic pace and slowing it down to the pace of a funeral march, her image sliding in and out of focus. Her blatant dismissal of high production values is equally a dismissal of the social values of MTV itself, where women had quickly been diminished to mere sexual objects.

Fig. 40.34

Pipilotti Rist, THREE STILLS FROM I’M NOT THE GIRL WHO MISSES MUCH

1986. Single-channel video (color, sound), 5 min.

 

As much as Rist’s video is a parody of music videos in general, it also evokes the horror of John Lennon’s assassination in 1980 and the terrible irony that would come to inform the lyrics of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.”

Credit: © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York

Rist’s video can also be taken as an attempt to free her feminist work from any sense of shame. In an installation by Pipilotti Rist first screened at the Venice Biennale in 1997, Ever Is Over All (fig. 40.35), a woman is seen walking down a street, dressed in a conservative blue dress and bright red shoes à la Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. She is carrying a large red flower—in fact, a flower known as a red-hot poker, images of which are simultaneously projected around the corner of the room. A soft, even soothing “la, la, la” of a song accompanies her. With a broad smile on her face, she lifts the long-stemmed flower in her hand and smashes it into the passenger window of a parked car. Glass shatters. She moves on, smashing more car windows. Up from behind her comes a uniformed woman police officer, who passes her by with a smiling salute. Her stroll down the boulevard plays in a continuous loop in the gallery. This is the new Oz, the Emerald City that we discover “somewhere over the rainbow,” where the tensions between nature and civilization, violence and pleasure, the legal and the criminal, impotence and power—all seem to have dissolved, and almost any imaginable act of transgression is normalized or suspended in a new feminist world.

The Computer and New Media

With the advent of the computer age, a new space for art has opened up, one beyond the boundaries of the frame and, moreover, beyond the traditional boundaries of time and matter. Few artists have more thoroughly succeeded in integrating the viewer into digital space than Chinese artist Feng Mengbo.

In 1993, two years after graduating from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, Mengbo created a series of 42 paintings entitled Game Over: Long March. They amounted to screenshots of an imaginary video game, and, as the viewer walked by them, they could imagine themselves in a side-scrolling game of the classic Super Mario Bros. variety. When Mengbo finally acquired a computer, in 2003, he began transforming his project into an actual video game based on the 6,000-mile, 370-day retreat (known as the Long March) of the Chinese Communist Party’s Red Army, under the command of Mao Zedong, in 1934–35. The audience’s avatar in Mengbo’s work is a small Red Army soldier, who, seated on a crushed Coca-Cola can, encounters a variety of ghosts, demons, and deities, in an effort to rescue Princess Toadstool. Retitled Long March: Restart (fig. 40.36), the work is now a giant digital space consisting of two walls each 80 feet long. The viewer is invited to take control of the Red Army avatar, who moves through five screens following the Great Wall into 14 progressively difficult levels of play, lobbing explosive Coca-Cola cans at iconic figures such as Mario, the hero from Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros., who must be destroyed. The Red Army soldier encounters American astronauts, who now attack him with ray-guns, and USSR satellites threaten him from the moon. In this topsy-turvy universe, capitalism (represented by Coca-Cola) saves the Red Army’s day, heroes turn out to be villains, and the violence of battle is laughably unrewarding. There is no princess to be rescued, no prize to be won, only the game, which is, for Mengbo, a kind of sardonic comedy. “You go inside the video game,” Mengbo explains. “You don’t passively sit and play it.” The speed at which the avatar moves causes viewers to propel themselves at a frenetic pace down the gallery, then to spin around and move back up the opposite wall. Disembodied, fighting long odds, at the brink of disaster, to no end, one realizes that Mengbo’s Long March is a metaphor for the long march that is contemporary life itself.

Fig. 40.36

Feng Mengbo, LONG MARCH: RESTART

2008. Video-game installation, one of two screens, each approx. 20' × 80'. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously. 1168.2008.

 

The look of Mengbo’s video game is purposefully—and ironically—nostalgic, as if it yearns for the return of the original, “heroic” Long March.

Credit: © 2017. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © Feng Mengbo

Thus, if the image on a computer monitor is quite literally flat and two-dimensional, the screenspace occupied by the image is increasingly theatrical, interactive, and time-based, just as we are immersed in the panoramas that are a feature in this digital edition. We are, as in Mengbo’s Long March, immersed in it. In his groundbreaking study of the global digital network, E-topia (MIT Press, 1999), William J. Mitchell, former Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it this way:

In the early days of PCs, you just saw scrolling text through the rectangular aperture [of your personal computer], and the theatrical roots of the configuration were obscured. … [But] with the emergence of the PC, the growth of networks, and ongoing advances in display technology, countless millions of glowing glass rectangles scattered through the world have served to construct an increasingly intricate interweaving of cyberspace and architecture. … As static tesserae [pieces of glass or ceramic used to make mosaics] were to the Romans, active pixels are to us. Signs and labels are becoming dynamic, text is jumping off the page into three-dimensional space, murals are being set in motion, and the immaterial is blending seamlessly with the material.

The advances in technology are startling. In the late 1970s, artists such as Bill Viola used the new CMX 600 nonlinear editing system at the WNET Television Laboratory in New York. This was the first system to free video editors from working chronologically from the beginning of the tape to the end, giving them the ability to retrieve any segment of original video footage at any time—and place it anywhere in the sequence. It was not until ten years later, in 1989, that Avid’s Media Composer system was launched, a digital nonlinear editing program that provided editors with the ability to copy videotape footage in real time to digital hard disks. This invention allowed a video editor to use a computer to view shots easily, make cuts, and rearrange sequences faster than traditional tape-based methods. The cost was about $100,000. Today, comparable software costs less than $300.

In 1990, when Steven Spielberg began discussions about transforming Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park into a movie, CGI (computer-generated imagery) did not exist. Three years later, the movie made its stunning animated dinosaurs come to life. Today, software with far greater capabilities is available for use on your laptop, and, as we have seen, artists such as Isaac Julien have integrated CGI technology into their video works (see fig. 40.26).

Part of the original attraction of video art for artists was that its imagery was ostensibly unedited and instantaneous—thus authentic and “true”—but as editing techniques became more and more sophisticated, especially as digital media and CGI superseded video per se, the moving image became increasingly subject to manipulation. At the same time, beginning as early as 1969, when police cameras were first installed in the New York City Municipal Building, and then throughout the 1970s as Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems proliferated across the country, it became increasingly clear that life as it is lived, at least in public, had become life in front of a camera.

David Claerbout’s 2007 single-channel video installation Sections of a Happy Moment (fig. 40.37) is a stunning realization of just how thoroughly digital production can test the “reality” quotient of what we see. It also underscores the fact that the condition of being watched is not photographic, it is durational; not a condition of being-in-the-moment, as in Viola’s Five Angels for the Millennium, but of being-on-camera. Nearly 26 minutes long, it depicts a single moment in the life of a Chinese family, who are grouped in a circle in the courtyard of an urban housing complex, gazing up at a ball that hangs in mid-air. At first, the video seems to be a slideshow of shots of the scene, apparently taken simultaneously by myriad cameras positioned all around the courtyard at different heights and focal lengths—but it is nothing of the sort. Claerbout, in fact, used 15 cameras simultaneously to photograph the 11 characters in the scene in front of a blue background, each time concentrating on one or two people. In the process he generated more than 50,000 images, of which he finally chose 180 to insert digitally into the background scenes, themselves shot from a number of different angles and digitally manipulated.

The setting is a social housing complex designed by the Belgian modernist architect Renaat Braem, built in 1950–57 in the Kiel district of Antwerp. Claerbout’s postmodern moment is located, ironically, in modern space, just as his Chinese family has been dislocated to Antwerp, Belgium. Similarly, his highly manipulated and digitized creation looks, to the viewer, like little more than an old-fashioned slideshow that moves at a pace of about one image every eight or nine seconds, and is accompanied by an altogether unremarkable solo piano soundtrack underscoring, as it were, the movement of the slides. The viewer is caught up in a paradoxical representation of time, which is simultaneously suspended, like the ball, and moving, in the continuous loop of the slideshow and score. And the act of looking begins to feel suspiciously like surveillance. Here, finally, time and space, East and West, old media and new, the modern and the postmodern—the binaries that so determine our habits of thought—collapse into one another in a real space that we know to be a fiction as fragile as happiness itself.

Fig. 40.37

David Claerbout, SECTIONS OF A HAPPY MOMENT

Continuity & Change: The Environment and the Humanist Tradition

What is the role of art today? What does the museum offer us? What about literature, the book, the poem? Is the museum merely a repository of cultural artifacts? Is the poem a tired and self-indulgent form of intellectual narcissism? Can opera move us even more meaningfully than popular music? How can the arts help us to understand not only our past, but our present and our future? These are questions that artists, writers, and musicians are continually asking themselves, and questions that a student of the humanities, coming to the end of a project such as this one, might well ask themselves as well.

Consider an installation by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (1967–), The Weather Project (fig. 40.38). When he installed it in the mammoth Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, in the winter of 2003, it was roundly criticized as “mere” entertainment, in no small part because it attracted over 2 million visitors. At the end of the 500-foot hall hung a giant yellow orb, 90 feet above the floor. The ceiling itself was covered with mirrors, thus doubling the size of the space. The “sun” was actually a semicircle of some 200 yellow sodium streetlights, which, when reflected in the ceiling mirrors, formed a circle. Artificial mist machines filled the hall with a dull, wintry fog. What was the attraction?

In no small part, it seemed to reside in the very artificiality of the environment. Visitors to the top floor of the gallery could easily see the trussing supporting the mirrored ceiling as well as the construction of the sun shape. The extraordinary visual effects of Eliasson’s installation were, in the end, created by rather ordinary means. But this ordinariness, in turn, suggested some profound and somewhat disturbing truths about our world and our environment. If Eliasson could create this almost postapocalyptic environment—with its dead, heatless sun, perpetual fog, and cold stone ground—with such minimal means, what might we, as a world, create with the advanced technologies so readily at our disposal? In other words, as viewers lay on the floor of the museum, and saw themselves reflected on the ceiling above, were they viewing themselves in the present, or seeing themselves in the future? What hath humanity wrought?

The Weather Project was, then, something of a chilling experience, both literally and figuratively. “I regard … museums,” Eliasson has said, “as spaces where one steps even deeper into society, from where one can scrutinize society.” It is perhaps relevant for you to consider this book as such a space. To conclude, what is it about your world that you have come to understand and appreciate more deeply and fully?