Exhibition Review: Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting

ALTERNATIVAORGANIZED BY THE WYSPA INSTITUTEOF ART. GDAN’ SK, POLAND 25 MAY—30 SEPTEMBER 2012WWW.ALTERNATIVA.ORG.PL

The series of exhibitions, publications, and artis-tic events under the common denominator ofAlternativa started in 2010 as a two-year pilotprogram aiming at the establishment of a recur-ring large-scale, politically-informed curatorialpractice in a former Gdan’sk Shipyard. It is nei-ther an art biennial nor an annual festival, but ahybrid cultural format whose distribution isaccomplished across several channels. As such,Alternativa is less a new model for artistic produc-tion and distribution than an attempt to criticallydiscuss the idea of model itself. What is interest-ing in approaching the idea of a model is that itcan “suspend” meaning; the model incorporatesthe relational and professional space that liesbefore the making of a work, which stands onbehalf of something else, namely, the work andits circulation that will occur later. By refusing toopen up (to a representational claim) it can keephistory, and history-making, in suspension.

Materiality was the title of the main exhibitionpresented in the Hall 90B of the former shipyard.The curatorial team, comprised of Leire Vergara,Inês Moreira, Arne Hendriks, and Aneta Szyłak(the latter also Artistic Director of Wyspa), stagedan exhibition that attempted to illicit questionsabout “the matter” in the clash between art andknowledge. Starting from the consideration thatartists have always been struggling with theimmaterial and material forms of artistic practice,

the exhibition investigated how different genera-tions of thinkers and cultural operators havereconsidered their approach to materiality, and inturn, its political history and meaning. The proj-ect emphasized the need for the return to mate-rial stability, approaching the field of the politicalfrom the perspective of a tactile and concretepoint of view. There was a vast backdrop of the-oretical approaches to bite from. Rather thanabsorbing the works or the theories underpin-ning them, one could approach the exhibition asa process for the appraisal of a model. Myresponse takes the form of delineating four typesof models that correspond to four artistic posi-tions that struck me as the most compelling.

Model 1

The “pornography of the hammer” proposed byPartizan Publik and Arne Hendricks is a strikingexample of the deconstruction of a model. InAcademy of Work (Gastev’s workshop) (2012) theyunravelled, conceptually as well as physically, theideology of the Central Institute of Labour, anadult school funded in 1917 in Moscow. Theterm pornography aptly sums up the emphasis ofthe material tools of production, both in theSoviet era and in the installation presented. Thework was a re-staging of sorts of one of therooms of the Institute, stripped down to bareessentials: the structures for production, alongwith documentation of the original site throughnewspapers and books excerpts. The Institutewas the brainchild of engineer and poet AlekseiGastev, under the attentive eye of Lenin; it was aperfect example of the epigenetic, i.e., how theenvironment influences the genetics in an(r)evolutionary sense. The stated aim of theInstitute was to transform farmers into workersthrough a “social machine,” which combined thepower of engineering with the seduction of poet-ry. That is, to my reading, how to promote anideology of labour through aesthetics effectively,

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EXHIBITION REVIEW:ALFREDO CRAMEROTTI

On the Idea of the Model

intended as the process of gathering informationthrough the senses and transforming it into expe-riential knowledge. The idea of the Institute,with its potential and its contradictions, present-ed a strong parallel with the current generationof neoliberal politics through the creative indus-tries. Genius, in that sense.

Model 2

Mateusz Herczka’s Functional Programming for

Space to Marry Objects (2012) (Fig. 1) established aclose connection between an object (artwork), abuilding (setting), an industry (context) and aconflict (history) using the very layout (that is, amodel) of the exhibition for its scope. Suggestingan intimacy of an almost sexual nature betweenthe various elements of an exhibition (the art-work, the setting, the context, etc.) and high-lighting the process through which the “buildingmatter” comes together, Herczka plunged intothe realm of the materially absurd. The artistdesigned some solutions to “solve” the logistic,structural and aesthetics obstacles to “marry” atraditional family chapel with the industrialbuilding that hosted it. Herczka physically cou-pled a full-size wooden chapel to a concrete pil-lar of the exhibition hall. The goal was to achieve

a proper ritualistic union between human andobject. Confused? So was I. In retrospect though,it was a further example of the processes of amal-gamation between humans and materials towhich I, too am subject daily: getting in the car togo to the office, or queuing up at a supermarketcheckout. Only that, in most of the cases I do notrecognize the sexuality, and subtle perversion (ofcoupling myself with an object), of such actionssince they are ubiquitous and thus invisible. Byapplying the principle of aesthetic appreciation ofthe ritualistic union between human and objectto contexts such as praying and mass production,Herczka revealed the model of behaviour thatpeople obey in subtle ways.

Model 3

Hiwa K’s installation, It’s Spring and the Weather Is

Great so Let’s Close All Object Matters (2012) (Fig. 2),made of musical instruments and stepladderslooked like child’s play in the best sense of theterm: simple, resonant, and effective. But it wasnot for children, nor for play. Without denyingthe complex design of both utilitarian and aes-thetic objects, Hiwa K managed to build juxtapo-sition into a multilayered work that spoke out ofnecessity and desire, death and language, human

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Mateusz Herczka, Functional Programming for Space toMarry Objects (2012), installation view. Photo: Courtesy ofAlternativa.

Hiwa K, It´s Spring and the Weather Is Great So Let´s Close AllObject Matters (2012), installation view. Photo: MateuszHerczka. Courtesy of Serpentine Gallery London.

nature and collective contract. The work linkedthe “place of elevation” as the dedicated space forboth the possibility of free speech, and the lastword from the condemned. This act of elevationwas not only a material solution for both acts; itdefined the model for both acts. I found myselflinking this model (of free speech and subjuga-tion) to daily occurrences of my life. When trans-coded to the Internet, the model suddenlybecomes apparent, with the plethora of socialnetworks and platforms for critical evaluation,visibility and control. This is also the case whentransferred to the work/business organizationmodel, the context in which people strive, fight,survive, or succumb. Overall, the piece was playfuland seductive, until I realized how disturbing it was.

Model 4

A voice recognition pattern (“voice print”)sculpted in 3D, The Freedom of Speech Itself (2012)(Fig. 3), was the installation by Lawrence AbuHamdan. Picking up one of the more subtle, yetscientifically fascinating, current technologies ofbiopolitics, Hamdan uncovered a politically andhumanitarian knot that mostly escapes attention.Voice recognition patterns are used for immigra-tion analysis by border control forces in Westerncountries and by police officers within nation

states. It is not only about having the freedom tosay what one thinks (which is never granted, andalways in a process of becoming) but also tochoose the way one is heard. Since it is not onlydependent upon the speaker but also upon thelistener, socially and politically this is a far moretroublesome matter. Accent tests (LADO,Language Analysis for the Determination ofOrigin) are routinely applied in EU border immi-gration interviews to see if the speech matchesthe “standard” accent of the claimant’s declaredorigins. Such a standard depends on how a gov-ernment defines administrative and cultural bor-ders. However, phonetic borders shift continu-ously and change with time. For instance, my fel-low Italians struggle to grasp my origins since myaccent has changed from living abroad for manyyears. I would fail a test for the standard accentof my alpine region. As a model for speech, thevoice provides, in principle, a possibility to be avehicle of information but it is immediately with-drawn by societal and political structures as achannel of communication. Hamdan’s work wasa socio-linguistic “experiment” that definedsocio-political indexization. Both the culturalpractice and the artwork are scary.

* * *

There was a lot to take in from the exhibition andrather than enumerating the rest of the otherworks, I am going to take a conceptual detour togive an impression of my general experience inGda�sk. To start, there is a difference between arepresentation and a model—to make an artworkthat “represents” something is to declare a con-crete aspiration with an abstract example. Tomake a model for that something is an abstractaspiration but with a material set of examples. Istated at the beginning that Alternativa was less anew model for artistic production than an attemptto critically discuss the idea of the model itself. Asthe relational and professional space that laybefore the making of a work, the model is there-


Lawrence Abu Hamdan, The Freedom of Speech Itself (2012),installation view. Photo: Courtesy of Alternativa.

fore an act of translation—not of language, but ofcontext. Taking matter from one context andtranslating into another, using aesthetics as a toolof translation, as if a dictionary for converting onelanguage into another. In this perspective,Alternativa seemed to demonstrate that art hasmeaning only when it points beyond its ownstructure and relationships—to realize possibili-ties around and within the viewer’s own self.

EXHIBITION REVIEW:MEGHAN BISSONNETTEYork University

FRIDA & DIEGO: PASSION, POLITICS AND PAINTINGCURATED BY DOT TUER AND ELLIOT KINGART GALLERY OF ONTARIO, TORONTO,CANADA20 OCTOBER 2012 – 20 JANUARY 2013.

Moments before proposing to the young FridaKahlo, Diego Rivera, while looking at her paint-ings, says: “I could never paint like this… I paintwhat I see, the world outside. But you, you paintfrom here,” as he gestures to her heart.1 This inti-mate scene from the 2002 film Frida repeats oneof the common tropes in the Rivera/Kahlo story:the oppositional nature of their work. The filmalso serves as a reminder that biography is still acentral driving force in the cult of the artist, evenmore than four centuries after Vasari publishedthe Lives. The Art Gallery of Ontario’s recentblockbuster exhibition, Frida & Diego: Passion,

Politics and Painting, featured drawings, prints,paintings, three-dimensional objects, and studies,as well as an overwhelming amount of supple-mentary information including text panels, film,audio recordings, a computer interactive station,and a host of documentary photographs. It was

one of the few exhibitions to bring together thesetwo artists, and the aim, according to the litera-ture accompanying the show, was to “[explore]the affinities as well as differences that shaped thedynamics of their relationship and distinctiveœuvres.”2 Yet the themes of their works, such asMexican culture and left-wing politics, wereovershadowed by their life stories, their tumul-tuous relationship, and the dichotomy between hispublic works and her private works. Furthermore,despite the focus on both Kahlo and Rivera, thepopular fascination with Kahlo was evident inthe exhibition, reaffirming her cult status thathad previously been facilitated by fashion maga-zines, films, and biographies.

Walking through the gallery I was impressedby the quality of the works, and the inclusion ofmany canonical pieces that I had previously onlyexperienced in books. Highlights included manyof Kahlo’s self-portraits (Self-Portrait as a Tehuana

[Diego in My Thoughts], 1943 and Self-Portrait with

Cropped Hair, 1940), her enigmatic The Love Embrace

of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me, and

Señor Xólotl (1949), and her meticulous still lifepaintings with fruit, most notably The Bride

Frightened at Seeing Life Opened (1943). For Rivera,standouts consisted of major works such asFlower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita (1931), but alsolesser-known works, for instance, his studies ofindigenous people (Day of the Dead, c. 1936). Hisearly works showed the degree to which heassimilated the lessons of Manet, Cézanne,Impressionism, Post-impressionism, and Cubism.But his later landscape works (i.e., Sunset 2, 1956)provided a glimpse into the artist’s mindset at theend of his life. An exhibition comprised solely ofmajor works lacks interest, and here major worksbalance so-called minor works, especially printsand drawings, to capture the depth of their artisticpractices. Facilitating an understanding of theworks, the text panels outlined the major themesthroughout the exhibition and provided addi-tional information about Kahlo and Rivera’s

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political involvement. The catalogue essay by DotTuer further addresses the couple’s commitmentto left-wing politics.

Yet, unmistakable was the particular narra-tive told through the arrangement of the worksand the supplementary material. On entering theexhibition, I was greeted with Spanish music, aphotograph of the happy couple, and an intro-ductory text panel that outlined the main themesof the exhibition: Kahlo and Rivera’s volatilerelationship, their Marxist politics, and the con-trast between his public works and her intimateworks. In that first room, two photographs, oneof each artist, and two portraits painted byKahlo—one a self-portrait and one of Rivera—suggested that this exhibition was as much aboutthese larger-than-life people and their personali-ties, as it was about the work.

The first few rooms featured the work ofRivera—his early paintings completed while inEurope, and his murals and other works doneafter his return to Mexico. Kahlo does not enterthe picture until the fourth room of the exhibi-tion, which was dedicated to her early years. Onwalking into the room, I immediately facedKahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey (1938), and atext panel that discussed her mixed heritage,early bout with polio, and her bus accident. It ishere that the narrative was made explicit.Kahlo’s art is personal and intimate, shaped byher family and early formative experiences,while Rivera’s is about the masses and politics,informed by his exposure to the European avant-garde and his political convictions. Aside from themention of his artistic talent at a young age, therewas no discussion of his family or childhood.

This dichotomy between his public and herprivate work seems to be confirmed in one of thefirst rooms where they came together. Her moreintimate paintings, My Nurse and I (1937) andSelf-Portrait Sitting on the Bed (Me and My Doll)

(1937), were placed alongside works by Riverasuch as Maternity (1954) and Sunflowers (1943).

Rivera’s larger paintings deal with childhood, yetseem impersonal, as if exploring cultural themes.Yet the inclusion of broken dolls in both ofRivera’s paintings, for which no explanation wasgiven, suggests something else and goes againstthe dominant interpretation of Rivera’s art.3

An underlying theme of the exhibition wasthe fascination with Kahlo herself, especially herbeauty and enigmatic personality. One roomdevoted to “Photographing Frida” highlightedthis with numerous photographs of Kahlo byvarious photographers. The centerpiece of theroom, a short silent film of Rivera and Kahlo,filmed by Kahlo’s lover Nickolas Muray, showsRivera picking flowers for Kahlo, while Kahloeyes the camera. At times shying away from theMuray or staring directly at the viewer, the artistis acutely aware that she is an object of beauty.Another wall displayed a series of colour photo-graphs of Kahlo by Muray, which emphasize andshowcase her bold dress and features. With thisroom, I found that the tone of the exhibitionchanged. The images in this room brought Kahloalive and bear historical significance; however, Ifound myself asking whether this was necessaryto understand her art, or if it was a distraction(albeit a pleasurable one).

With the “Photographing Frida” section andthe numerous photographs of her scatteredthroughout the exhibition, you see the AGOplaying with the popular appeal of Kahlo. Thetragic details of her life, her difficult relationshipwith Rivera, her flamboyant dress, her beautyand personality—all reliably draw audiences andprovide an access point to her art, which oftendeals with culturally specific themes that are dif-ficult to understand from a North American pointof view. In other words, Kahlo’s biography sellstickets. The exhibition displays the same sort offascination with Kahlo’s looks seen in the 2002film Frida, starring Salma Hayek, and fashionspreads in Elle Magazine and Vogue, which popu-larized the “Frida Kahlo style.”4


Subsequent rooms address the work of Kahloand Rivera in the 1940s and 1950s and continueto uphold the narrative while also delving intothe preoccupations in their later works. Theirpassion for Mexican culture and their love foreach other at the end of their lives were a focusof the last few galleries, but they lacked the cohe-siveness seen earlier in the show. On the finalwall before the exit photographs of Diego andKahlo are displayed together, while alive andthen on their respective deathbeds. They serve tosignal the end of the story.5

The cult of the artist remains strong in thisexhibition and many common tropes regardingRivera and Kahlo are apparent: the contrastbetween his public and her private works, hertragic life circumstances, and their tumultuousrelationship. The exhibition eloquently addressesthe issues in their art and the politics informingit, but these are overshadowed by the popularappeal of these two dynamic figures.

NOTES1 Julie Taymor, dir. Frida. Miramax/Ventanarosa. 2002. Film.2 Dot Tuer, “Of Passion and Painting: The Revolutionary

Politics of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo,” in Frida &Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting (exhibition cata-logue) (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2012), 16. FridaKahlo, Diego Rivera, and Twentieth-Century MexicanArt also brought together the two artists, and providesa point of comparison. The works came from the Jacquesand Natasha Gelman collection. By focusing on theGelman’s collecting practices, and contextualizing Kahloand Rivera’s work in the context of twentieth-centuryMexican art, it avoided mythologizing these artists. See Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Twentieth-CenturyMexican Art: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection (exhibition catalogue) (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2000).

3 Dina Comisarenco addresses the common misconceptionthat Rivera’s artwork dealt solely with issues of history andpolitics. She argues that Rivera, like Kahlo, was shapedby early experiences that impacted his views on birthand death. These included the death of his twin brotherat 18 months, his separation from his parents to live inthe country at the age of two due to health concerns,and later the death of his first son in 1916. While it isunclear if works like Maternity and Sunflower wereshaped by his life, there is further room for investiga-tion. See Dina Comisarenco, “Frida Kahlo, DiegoRivera, and Tlazolteotl,” Woman's Art Journal 17.1(Spring - Summer, 1996): 14.

4 Frida Kahlo was the subject of articles in Elle Magazinein May 1989 and Vogue in February 1990. These articlesfocused on her style and featured models wearing then-contemporary fashions that were meant to capture thespirit of Kahlo. See Oriana Baddeley, “'Her Dress HangsHere': De-Frocking the Kahlo Cult,” Oxford Art Journal14.1 (1991): 10-11. Dot Tuer in her catalogue essaymentions Kahlo’s “cult status in popular culture;” how-ever, there is no mention of the need to redress thisissue. See “Of Passion and Painting: The RevolutionaryPolitics of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo,” in Frida &Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting (exhibition cata-logue) (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2012), 15.

5 There is one additional room at the end of the exhibitionentitled “Honoring Frida and Diego” with three largeJudas figures and Rivera and Kahlo as catrinas. Thisroom, however, feels tangential to the main exhibition.

EXHIBITION REVIEW:RICHARD WILLIAM HILL

THE RETURN OF A LAKEMARIA THEREZA ALVES AT DOCUMENTA 13CURATED BY CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEVKASSEL, GERMANY9 JUNE—16 SEPTEMBER 2012

Maria Thereza Alves’s The Return of a Lake (2012)might best be described as a documentary erup-tion. The artist has a story to tell and she deploysalmost every technique of display available to doso. There are dioramas, documentary photographs,sculptures, paintings, newspaper clippings, abook-length catalogue—even live specimens.Many of the representational modes seem appro-priated from (or appropriate to) the venue itself:Kassel’s natural history museum, the Ottoneum.The work therefore manages to be about manythings at once: the story itself, the significance ofstaging that story in an international art contextand the evocative and highly appropriate “excess”of the communicative strategies.

Alves’s subject is the stunningly asymmetricalrelationship between one man—the Spanish

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colonist Íñigo Noriega Laso—and the environ-ment and people of Mexico’s Lake Chalco regionwho continued to be affected by his economicactivities in the late nineteenth and early twenti-eth centuries. These activities included drainingLake Chalco out of existence. For a time, Noriegawas the second wealthiest man in Mexico, but itwas at the expense of an entire ecological systemand the indigenous people who depended on it.Eventually, the underground aquifer became sodesiccated that the lakebed sank, with the para-doxical effect that although water is still beingpumped to Mexico City, the area is now drawingadditional fluvial water and the lake is beginningto return. But even its return is vexed; it is cele-brated by some, but causing new problems forresidents who have adapted to its absence.

In parallel with Noriega’s exercise of force, therehas been a battle over representation, fought on

the same inequitable terms. Local activists recog-nize this and one of their strategies has been tobuild a museum. Alves’s installation itself can beread as a counter-exhibition to the first represen-tation of Íñigo Noriega Laso she saw. This was theMuseum of Emigration, in his hometown ofColombres in Asturias, Spain. Housed in ÍñigoNoriega’s former mansion, it dedicates consider-able energy to celebrating his colonial “success.”Alves has an eye out for colonial propaganda.She has lived in Europe since the early 1990s, butwas born in Brazil and grew up there and in theUnited States. She also lived in Mexico for eightyears. In this case it was not difficult to read theexhibit against the grain. She writes, “One sec-tion is entitled, ‘The Adventure of Íñigo Noriega’and boasts of his private army of 250 soldiers andyet no mention is made of what these men did tothe indigenous communities who resisted...”1


Alves’s installation features three centrallyplaced dioramas of the lake region, but in termsof its commitments this exhibition does not somuch have a centre as a collection of equallyimportant parts. Some are small, like the water-colour illustration of a series of rectangular greenareas, set out in a grid on a lake. These are chi-

nampas, a form of lake farming long used byindigenous peoples in Mexico, involving the cre-ation of engineered islands on which crops aregrown. Two walls are dominated by large, framedcolour photographs of indigenous activists fromthe region. The subjects appear to be in locationsof significance to them and they have clearlypaused to pose for the photographer. Below theseimages, heavy fabric is draped against the wall,pulled up into peaks to suggest a mountain sky-line. The juxtaposition between documentaryphotographs and the evocative fabric sculpturesis jarring but effective.

Other walls feature equally unlikely combi-nations. Botanical illustrations are next to lowrelief models of the facades of Noriega’s mansionand the Museum of Mexico City. The latter, alabel informs visitors, is run by a descendant ofNoriega, who, “says that he is a great man.”There is a brightly painted low relief carving ofNoriega himself. He is depicted from the chest up,with a haughty expression, despite the flames—hellfire, presumably—that rise up around him.The aesthetic language suggests a retablo, but itseems vengeful rather than votive.

For her book, Colección de Divulgación (1987),anthropologist Margarita Loera interviewed aChalca, Raymundo Martínez, and his grandpar-ents, who were forcibly relocated by Noriega.2 Heinsisted that the interview be titled, “ÍñigoNoriega Laso: The Destroyer of My Pueblo,” butit appears in Loera’s book as: “My Pueblo: ItsHistory and Traditions.” By retaining the word“my,” the new anthropological title simultane-ously appropriates and distorts Martínez’s voice.Alves published the Martínez family interviews

in her catalogue, restoring the original title.Each of the three irregularly shaped dioramas

of the exhibit depicts an aspect of the lake. Theyare covered with small handwritten labels pro-viding information about both its past and pres-ent. One depicts the lake bounded on one side byurban sprawl from Mexico City, as well as acanal, which is really an enormous open sewer.On the far side of the lake two grey PVC pipesemerge from a large oval opening along the dio-rama’s back edge. The pipes—each marked witha blue arrow indicating that it pumps water awayto Mexico City—snake up and enter the wallnear the ceiling. As they rise with each joint andbend, they transition to larger and larger gaugepipes. When they reach the wall they have per-haps quadrupled in diameter. The effect is vague-ly uncanny not just because of the lively twistingof the pipes, but because one would expect themto diminish in scale as they move away. Insteadthey grow toward the “real” scale of the gallery.

Another diorama depicts a different canal/sewer and is constructed on a larger scale. Labelsstate that the canal is elevated twelve metresabove the local landscape and in heavy rains itsdeforested embankments cause flash floods,threatening nearby homes. The diorama is longand narrow; its shape is dictated by the canalitself and the lower-lying territory immediatelyadjacent to it. It takes a sharp turn at its centreand on the inside angle, the artist has included acliff face that rises up at this location. On one endthe cliff-side tapers away, leaving a narrow gapbetween it and the elevated canal. There are sev-eral tiny houses jammed into this shadowycrevice and the nearby label declares, “The poor-est people live here.”

The final diorama focuses on the cone of thevolcano, into which dives an enormous serpent,its tail flicking up toward the ceiling and termi-nating in a bundle of transparent fluorescentrods. Bright red ribbons decorate its back, con-trasting with the shiny spun-black plastic mesh of

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its body. In the catalogue, indigenous activist DonGenaro, who was involved in establishing thelocal museum, describes how the communityappoints someone to guard and care for sacredspaces, including the volcano. Genaro says, “Ialways considered that protecting our patrimonywas done for our Volcano, who is the SacredLord.”3

Smaller but no less remarkable are the occu-pants of a fish tank that sits in a corner of thegallery. These are axolotl, a marvellous amphibian,about a foot long, with short legs and extrava-gantly decorative external gills. Native only tothis region, they are near extinction in the wilddue to pollution and loss of their primary habitat,Lake Chalco. As such, it functions in the exhibi-tion both as an indexical sign of a unique species—a threatened survivor—and as a metaphor forthe many regional particularities that may yet belost or regained.

All of this fluid movement through time,across boundaries of nature and culture and con-ventions of display is not a sign of confusion. It ishow things are. The present constantly trafficswith the past. Nature is constantly read throughculture and culture is constantly informed bynature (so many human-made “natural” disastersoccur that we ignore their inextricable connectionat our peril). And finally, no mode of display cancontain or control experience absolutely or forever.Things erupt and return.

NOTES1 Maria Thereza Alves, The Return of a Lake (Cologne:

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2012), 7.2 Margarita Loera, Colección de Divulgación (INAH

Gobierno del Estado de México, 1987).3 Quoted in Alves, 178.

BOOK REVIEW:

MATTHEW FLISFEDER,Independent Scholar

GAIL DAY Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar ArtTheory(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011),320 pages

Gail Day’s Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar

Art Theory is a wonderfully enjoyable examina-tion of some of the key figures, debates, andpoints of intrigue in art theory influenced by theNew Left, the fate of which was to became themere shadow of postmodernism following theso-called “linguistic turn” in the late 1960s. Thetheory that Day engages has its grounding inpolitical and aesthetic thought that departedfrom Soviet models in the late 1950s andthroughout the 1960s, the new avant-gardes, theinfluence of Guy Debord and the SituationistInternational, the Tel Quel collective, and later, inthe 1970s and 1980s, those radical Marxist andfeminist film and culture scholars writing for


Screen, Camera Obscura and October. What Day, asa Marxist art historian, wants to show is that,despite the poststructural shift towards figures ofaffirmation (Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation ofNietzsche, for example), negation “is part of theroutine language of art, and arguments aboutnegativity are thoroughly embedded in accountsof culture and the debate on modernity andavant-gardism.” And furthermore, that “negationcontinues to animate approaches to contempo-rary art,” even after the postmodern turn (6).

Postmodernism has been defined in differentways, but Fredric Jameson’s explanation is thatthe postmodern should be understood as thatmoment within modernism when the culturalinstitutions, canons, museums, and the universi-ty, become complicit and coextensive with mod-ern art, thus reducing its radical potential.1 Thepostmodern condition may equally be thought interms of what Slavoj Žižek has proposed as a shiftfrom the prohibition to enjoy in modernity to theobligation to enjoy in postmodernity. The inter-pellative call of postmodern authority is not“no!” but “yes!” Postmodernism is that whichoccurs when the negation of bourgeois ideology (thepolitical ethic of modernism, with its vocation tonot be commodity) itself becomes the norm; or, asŽižek puts it in the title to one of the chapters ofThe Ticklish Subject (1999), when “perversion” isno longer subversion. Here we have, on theinverse side of things, the affirmation of negation,which perhaps has done more for the culturallogic of capitalism’s persistence.

It is worth considering Day’s project in thecontext of Jameson and Žižek’s theories on post-modernism, which both posit the ‘end of nega-tion’ as one of its institutional and ideologicalfeatures. What she demonstrates is that the his-tory of the dialectic and of negative thought isstill unfinished business. Dialectical Passions has asits primary focus a social and political offering ofthe kind of postwar art criticism that did not suc-cumb to the cynicism of the postmodern. If one

of the central aspects of postmodernism is theabandonment of the dialectic, then Day showsthat negative thought has continued to add sig-nificantly to postwar art and cultural theory (par-ticularly between the mid- to late-1960s up untilthe end of the millenium), at a time when itappeared to be suffering from a crisis in self-con-fidence. It is this feature that makes Dialectical

Passions a worthwhile read.Former Situationist, T.J. Clark, and the Italian

architect, Manfredo Tafuri, are the focus of thefirst two chapters of Dialectical Passions. Despitesome of the initial confusion that arises inattempting to decipher the terminology presentin Clark’s social analysis of the history of art (i.e.,“practices of negation”), Day suggests that it isultimately Clark’s search for a method of think-ing the mediation of art and the social that needsto be taken into account. His project involves try-ing to avoid thinking politics and history as mere-ly the backdrop to a social history of art and artcriticism, and should be read as an attempt toresurface discontinuity, fissures, gaps, and con-tradictions in art and art history. One cannot helpbut see the emergence here of a strategy to differ-entiate Clark from Jameson, particularly as thelatter’s “political unconscious” sticks to a kind ofAlthusserian “structural causality” in his analysesof the emergence of ideology and cultural phe-nomena, which Day seems to want to avoid. Thechampioning of Clark’s method, in this way,establishes the kind of critique of Jameson thatcomes through in later chapters, particularly inchallenging his reading of Tafuri, and in the lastchapter, where she debates Jameson’s claimsregarding the rise of social abstraction under thedominance of finance capital and the disintegra-tion of “critical distance” in postmodernity.

Tafuri is considered alongside Clark, also forhis challenge to the modern avant-garde, thistime in architecture. For Tafuri, “the negativity ofthe avant-garde should be seen, from the outset,as wrapped up with capitalism’s modern coming-

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to-being, its artistic innovations ultimately play-ing a role in social restructuring”(80). The avant-garde, for Tafuri, “helped to acclimatize the pub-lic to the disruptions of the urban world” (82). Inthis sense, the modern avant-garde might beseen as a “vanishing mediator”—a prior negationthat bridges the old and the new orders. Like themodernizing ethic of “making it new,” Day por-trays the modern avant-garde through Tafuri toindicate something of the role played by the formof negation found in the latter that failed tomount a fundamental challenge to capital, butinstead aided in its efforts to make itself new: as“agents in the internal reshaping of capitalistsocial relations, avant-gardists’ search for newforms, for new ways of making art or designingbuildings, played an important role in sweepingaway older modes of being.” (87). In opposition,Tafuri offers a conception of “completednihilism:” when the devaluation of bourgeoisideology is pursued to fulfillment; towards totaldisenchantment with the world, at which point itis possible “to engage actively in the creation ofvalues appropriate to the current period” (106).

The second half of the book begins by consid-ering the work of the postmodern art critic, CraigOwens, particularly his essay on the allegoricalimpulse of postmodernism. Here, Day looks atthe antagonism between allegory and symbol asit was developed mainly in the pages of October inthe early 1980s (the culmination of which is thecollection of essays included in Hal Foster’s The

Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture).Theorists of the postmodern asserted the signifi-cance of allegory as a way of bringing down thedialectic—the symbol was seen as a substitute fordialectical mediation and sublation, “whereasallegory calls up deconstructive discontinuity anddeferral” (149). Looking at the way it is used inthe work of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man(drawing on Owens’ own foray into postmodernallegory), Day shows the insistence of ‘allegoricalnegativity’ that flies in the face of postmod-

ernism—that is, an allegorical negativity thatdemystifies, and renders visible the “politicalunconscious” of the symbol, without resorting tothe background of a master narrrative.

Comparing Jameson to Hal Foster andBenjamin Buchloh in the final chapter, Day chal-lenges the lamentation of the loss of critical dis-tance—a view that saw the waning hope of proj-ects for emancipation. What remains curious forDay is how these figures, committed to the socialand political analysis of culture, conceded to theerosion of emancipatory projects. This is perhapsunderstandable in the context of modernism’sabsorption into offical culture. It is a perspective,I think, that may have been correct in the early1980s—with the postmodern rejection of so-called grand narratives like Marxism—but todayit doesn’t have the same effect, as the ficitiousgrowth produced by finance has hit its limit. Thelatter signalls the conditions in which dialecticalthought has been brought back into prominence.In this respect, Dialectical Passions opens up dis-cussion on a significant, although neglectedaspect of official postwar art theory; but, it is itselfthe mark of a signficant historical moment in thepresent.

NOTES1 Fredric Jameson, “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History,’” The

Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern,1983–1998 (New York: Verso, 1998), 75.


BOOK REVIEW:JULIA AOKI, Simon Fraser University

TONYA K. DAVIDSON, ONDINE PARK, ANDROB SHIELDS, EDS. Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desireand Hope(Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2011), 346 pages

I suspect the elusive nature of affect—its slipperyin-between-ness1, its characterization as both aset of basic and prior motivational forces2, andthe accretions of bodily encounters3—requiresnothing less than ongoing and situated attemptsto uncover unique affective relations, passages,and interactions using the sharpest theoreticaltools at our disposal. As Brian Massumi puts it,analyses of affect require the naming and makingconscious of self-perception, “as long as a vocab-ulary can be found for that which is impercepti-ble but whose escape from perception cannot butbe perceived, as long as one is alive.”4 It is not thething itself that we can perceive, it is its notableabsence from the realm of perception. How thenmight we engage affects, in all their in-between-ness and in the face of such evasiveness?

The essays collected by Tonya K. Davidson,Ondine Park, and Rob Shields in Ecologies of Affect:

Placing Nostalgia, Desire and Hope offer recourseand present an intervention into affect studies byapproaching affects as virtualities with materialeffects, which are uniquely tied to the productionof place. Guided by the Deleuzean-Spinozist tra-dition of affect studies, the authors tend toward amaterialist approach, rooted in Spinoza’s monistmetaphysics that strives to understand the think-ing and knowing body as always emergent and inan inseparable relation to the material world. Inhis 1978 lectures on Spinoza, Gilles Deleuzeemphasized the distinction between the Latinaffectio (affection)—a mood or feeling evokedthrough the interaction between bodies—andaffectus (affect), “a melodic line of continuousvariation” in one’s force of existence, one’s poten-tial to act.5 The editors of Ecologies of Affect main-tain this definition of affect but re-emphasize therelationship between the affective passage—theincreased or decreased capacity to act—and myri-ad relationships and encounters beyond thethinking and knowing body that extend into asocial and spatial milieu. The affective passageexpands and multiplies, reaches outward throughrelationships, material and immaterial, humanand nonhuman, and is contingent upon the nat-ural world. These emergent relations of bodiesand things form through an affective expansionand allure, moving toward but never reachingcoherency and they do so as an event within acontext, as they are embedded in a situationalethos, the regimes of power enacted througheveryday practice and interactions. Conceived inthis way, affects and affective relations are deeplypolitical. It is this set of emergent unfolding rela-tions, assembled through affective passages andembedded within relations of power, that theauthors of Ecologies of Affect are concerned with inthis text and which they term an “ecology.”

Here we have the central premise of thebook: affective passages are formed out of situat-

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ed, material interactions and are thus intimatelytied to formations of places. Following the workof Kevin Hetherington6, the authors considerplaces to be the result of complex engagements ofhumans, things, and environments, though theyexceed their material order: place, writes AllisonHui in her contribution to the collection, is “animmaterial entity arising from the placing, order-ing, and representing of material objects…Thatis, place results from the process of interacting inmaterial surroundings.”7 Otherwise stated,emplacement occurs through the reciprocalengagements of humans with environments,shaped by attachments or orientations—andthese attachments are produced through affec-tive virtualities. “Ideal but not abstract, real butnot actual,”8 virtualities are constitutive of emer-gent spatial and temporal orderings. Althoughthey are immaterial, irreducible to data andunavailable to the various metrics of the socialsciences, they are real and knowable, if onlythrough their effects and concrete actualizations(or “virtually real objects,” as the authors at timesterm them, following the work of Rob Shields).9

The collected authors recognize nascent spatialand temporal orderings through the affective vir-tualities that are both conveyed by and exceedrelations between objects and bodies. Recallingagain the definition of affect deployed here, thatit is a melodic line of continuous variation inone’s life force or potential to act, and that theauthors extend this affective passage into a socialand spatial milieu, the ecologies of affective vir-tualities too extend a force or potential, with dif-ferent, though not discrete orientations.

The book is organized around three of theseaffective virtualities and their predominant ori-entations by “considering nostalgia as an affectoriented toward the past, desire situated in thepresent, and hope as an affect directed towardthe future,” though, the editors note the overlap-ping, permeable, and shifting nature of these cat-egories and their orientations.10

The collective theoretical language fromwhich the contributors explore the spatialdimensions of affective virtualities is refined andtextured in each successive essay. At the intersec-tions of the unique temporalities and virtualitiesexplored in each chapter is the privileged place ofaffect, as a force not only of individual emotionsand orientations but as means to social and polit-ical cohesion, disruption and prohibition. Tracingthe deployment and circulation of nostalgia,around which the first section of the books isorganized, can demonstrate an affective stancetoward history that is potentially both hegemon-ic and counter-hegemonic, as in the case ofGerman Ostalgie (Anne Winkler); it can revealintergenerational dimensions of affect (via post-memories) with the potential to evoke strongconnections to virtual places (Tonya K.Davidson); it can reveal through study of mem-oirs of return that places are marked by materialproximities and immaterial intensities (AllisonHui); and, it can uncover a discursive dimensionto nostalgia, such as that expressed throughmusic during various historical moments(Mickey Vallee).

In the second section, on desire, we areexposed to the syncretic relationship betweenactual and virtual embodiments and emotionsthat draw on nostalgic imagery and escapistdesires in Las Vegas (Rob Shields); the singularhuman and nonhuman formations (termedhaecceities by Deleuze) that afford or circum-scribe potential action, exemplified by the forma-tion of desire lines, or unplanned pathways, bymountain bikers (Matthew Tiessen); interven-tions into the material formation of post-SovietSt. Petersburg, galvanized by citizens’ emotionalrelationships to the city, which are constitutive ofthe virtual city, the ideational field of the urbanimaginary (Olga Pak); and the vacillating andreinforcing radical and hegemonic imaginationsof suburban life that are made available throughchildren’s picture books (Ondine Park).


The final essays offer accounts of hopeful(re)imaginings of place, including hopes that areimposed and resisted, as in the case of middle-class virtualizations of childhood deployed in aneffort to manage the virtual “inner-city” sur-roundings of a youth centre (Bonar Buffam). Inother instances, heuristic attentiveness to therecurring image of Che Guevara in disparateprotest movements demonstrates the potential ofpowerful imagery to create spaces of hope whilstsimultaneously gesturing toward other, outsidespaces (Maria-Carolina Cambre); scalar and tem-poral disruptions in expectations, specificallythrough the display of giant puppets in a publicspace, open up unforeseen and hopeful orienta-tions (Petra Hroch); scarcity, gradations, and vari-ations of hopefulness, unevenly dispersed acrossa neoliberal landscape are revealed through visu-al and verbal social mapping (Sara Dorow andGoze Dogu); and artificial islands, as-yet-project-ed spaces, offer a hope rooted in nostalgia for atime when the world was still available to discov-eries (Mark S. Jackson and Veronica della Dora).Together, these essays move beyond static itera-tions of affect, crystallizations of emotions, orimmobile sets of object relations; rather, theyoffer insight into variable intensities and capaci-ties, the singular, internal vacillations of bodyand thought as they emerge in relation to myri-ad external encounters. As the editors empha-size, the collection provides insight into the“flickering syncresis between material and virtu-al places, between affect and ecologies.”11

NOTES1 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The

Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press,2011), 1.

2 Silvan Tomkins, “What are affects?” Shame and ItsSisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve KosofskySedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1995), 33.

3 Gregg and Seigworth, 2. 4 Brian Massumi in Nigel Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling:

Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect,” GeografiskaAnnaler B 86.1 (2004): 63.

5 Gilles Deleuze in Tonya Davidson, Ondine Park and RobShields, “Introduction,” Ecologies of Affect: PlacingNostalgia, Desire, and Hope (Waterloo: Wilfred LaurierPress, 2011), 4.

6 Kevin Hetherington, “In Place of Geometry: TheMateriality of Place,” Ideas of Difference, eds. KevinHetherington & Rolland Munro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997),183-99.

7 Allison Hui, “Placing Nostalgia: The Process of Returningand Remaking Home,” Ecologies of Affect: PlacingNostalgia, Desire, and Hope (Waterloo: Wilfred LaurierPress, 2011), 68.

8 Davidson et al., 7.9 Rob Shields, The Virtual (London: Routledge, 2003), 20. 10 Davidson et al., 8.11 Ibid., 14.

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Exhibition Review: Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting

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