Migratory Aesthetics Reader

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Table of Contents

Panel 1 (Monday, March 22nd

, 11:15-13:15)

Flora Lysen

The Art Historian of Contemporary Art

Clare Butcher

Here and There: the making of time in contemporary creative practice

Steven ten Thije

The end of history in the museum of the modern art Christina Li

From Monuments to Masses

Panel 2 (Monday, March 22nd

, 16:00-18:00)

Emily Drabinski and Alana Kumbier

Locating Wojnarowicz: Moving through library systems, structures and technologies

Inmi Lee

Migratory Aesthetics Through Digital Media And Performance

Julia Creet

Migrations of the Arborescent: Digital Genealogy and the Aesthetics of the Family Tree

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Panel 3 (Tuesday, March 23rd

, 11:30-13:30)

Sonia Weiner

The Lazarus Project

Mayy Hassan

Articulating the Future: Poetics of Transcultural Agency in the Poetry of Derek Walcott

and Seamus Heaney

Ozlem Koksal

Articulating Silences: Arshile Gorky in Ararat

Heike Endter

Migration as Identity

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Panel 4 (Wednesday, March 24th

, 11:30-13:30)

Ci!dem Bu!daycı

The Literary Migrant: A Late Ottoman Novelist at the Crossroads of Desire and Truth

Merav Yerushalmy

What are we to do without exile? On mnemonic traces, shared mutualities, and criticality in the work of Ilana Salama Ortar

Z.A. Khaldun

Migratory Aesthetics

Lara Mazurski

On the Borders of My Dreams I Encountered My Double's Ghost: An Analysis of Jean-Ulrick Déserts The Burqa Project

Appendix: Short bios of participants

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Panel 1 (Monday, March 22d, 11:15-13:15)

Flora Lysen

Clare Butcher

Steven ten Thije

Christina Li

Flora Lysen (University of Leiden)

The Art Historian of Contemporary Art

In the 1930s, when the world-renowned Medieval and Renaissance art scholar Erwin

Panofsky became acquainted with the New York contemporary art scene, he was challenged

with the most difficult dilemma for art historians. How could he, firmly entrenched in the

‘kunstwissenschaftliche’ study of art, use his historical methods for the scholarly research of

contemporary art? Can art historians deal with the art objects of their own time? This urgent

and still current problem of ‘contemporaneity’ will be the main topic of my paper, in which

I will depart from Panofsky’s review of a book on modern art by MoMa curator James

Johnson Sweeney. I will discuss Panofsky’s interesting conflation of historical/temporal

distance with ‘geographic/cultural distance. Panofsky’s praise of Sweeney’s American

scholarly ‘distance’ from contemporary art developments in Europe is backed by a claim for

America’s cultural distance, rather than a (historical) removal in time. As such, my article

demonstrates the extent to which any discourse on contemporary art and contemporary art

history is preeminently bound up with a contemporaneous political situation.

The Art Historian of Contemporary Art

In his early and foundational text ‘On the Problem of Description and Interpretation of

Artworks’ (1932), Erwin Panofsky briefly reflected on the difficulty of interpreting a recent,

almost contemporary, work of art. 1 According to Panofsky, Franz Marc’s painting Der

Mandrill (1913), exhibited in the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1919, did not offer art historians a

possibility for interpretation because they could not ‘enmesh’ themselves in the historical

situation, they could not yet understand the principles of representation at the heart of the

painting. Instead, an understanding of a contemporary work of art depended on an

“unconscious habituation to the new”.2 Consequently, one must conclude that for the “most

modern” art works, as Panofsky called them, the art historian is left without an apparent

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Erwin Panofsky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst,” Logos 21 (1932) p. 103-19. In: Erwin Panofsky, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin, 1964), p. 88. 2 Erwin Panofsky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst,” Logos 21 (1932) p. 103-19. In: Erwin Panofsky, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin, 1964), p. 88.

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scholarly, systematic method of interpretation. While for older art works one is able to use a

scientific, interpretative method (the three steps of iconological interpretation), for modern art

pieces it seems we are left to a haphazard and contingent process.

Two years later, Panofsky changed his opinion on the scholarly interpretation of

contemporary art works. By then, Panofsky, a Jewish intellectual from Hamburg, had fled to

New York after his exclusion from the German work force in 1933. In his review of a book

on twentieth century art by James Johnson Sweeney (1934), at the time curator at the

Museum of Modern Art, Panofsky contended: “Mr. Sweeney has now proved that it is, after

all, possible to apply the methods of art-history to contemporary art.”3 Sweeney’s book

followed an exhibition (curated by Sweeney) at the Renaissance Society of the University of

Chicago, entitled ‘A Selection of Works by Twentieth-Century Artists’ (1934). Similar to the

exhibition, the book exhibited new developments in modern art such as cubism, surrealism

and super-realism.4

Panofsky praised Sweeney’s scholarly ‘detachment’ from the works under scrutiny. “It is

possibly a privilege of American scholarship to construct the history of an art which in itself

is not yet a ‘historical phenomenon’ ”, Panofsky would conclude his review.5 As an American

art historian, Panofsky argued, Sweeney was able to construct the history of contemporary

developments in Europe with more objectivity. Panofsky’s review of Sweeney is an early

instance of an argument that he would frequently repeat: American historical scholarship is

less biased because it is not entangled in the risky web of national politics in Europe.

Especially when it comes to modern art, Americans, like Sweeney, are particularly capable of

reliable scholarly analysis, because from their position in America they are able to replace

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 Erwin Panofsky, review of Plastic Redirections in 20th Century Painting by James Johnson Sweeney, The Bulletin of the

Museum of Modern Art 2 (November 1934), p. 3. " James Sweeney, Plastic Redirections in 20th Century Painting. Published in the “Studies of Meaning in Art” series (Chicago: The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). Little has been written on the life and work of Sweeney. Recently, interest has increased resulting in a symposium: “The Poetry of Vision: James Johnson Sweeney and the Twilight of Modernism” April 25, 2008 at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. For further interest in Sweeney: James Johnson Sweeney, Vision and Image: A Way of Seeing (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1968), Denys Sutton, “Obituary for James Johnson Sweeney”, The Burlington Magazine 128, No. 1004 (November 1986) pp. 809-810. Eric de Chassey, “J.J. Sweeney, passeur entre l'Europe et les Etats-Unis” Connaissance des arts 600 (2002) pp. 72-77. 5 Panofsky, (1934), p. 3.

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historical distance, generally needed for the analysis of art objects, with a cultural and

geographical distance from the art movements in Europe.

In his review, Panofsky reminded his readers again of the rightful practice of an art historian:

“The scope of art history is: to understand a work of art with respect to its essential structure

(formal and iconographic), to evaluate this structure under the aspect of its historical

significance, and to connect phenomena so as to gain an insight into what is called

‘evolution’.” [emphasis Panofsky] 6 Any good art historian “applies to artistic creations what

seems to be a system of abstract categories and, in addition, considers them in connection

with as many other facts as are available.” 7

“European publications on contemporary art are often either mere manifestoes “for” or

“against”, or metaphysical speculations, not so much on as beyond the phenomena.”8

According to Panofsky, Americans were better equipped to write the history of the modern art

movements in question, because they did not participate in these themselves. American art

historians were better able to detach themselves from the “first emotional impact of a work of

art.”9

“When observed from America, the results of these movements seem to emerge more quickly

and completely from the turmoil in which they were generated and offer a comparatively clear

aspect almost in statu nascendi. The intellectual and cultural distance appears to clarify the

picture in the same way as the chronological distance, which is the usual prerequisite of

detachment. Thus it is possibly a privilege of American scholarship to construct the history of

an art which in itself is not yet an ‘historical phenomenon’.”10

Temporal Distance and Intellectual Distance

Hence detachment, for Panofsky, is not only the necessary temporal distance to a work in

order to place it within a history of traditions, but it can also refer to the cultural or intellectual !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!6 Idem, p. 3. 7 Idem, p. 3. 8 Panofsky (1934), p. 3. 9 Idem, p. 3. 10 Idem, p. 3.

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detachment that -compensating for a lack of temporal distance - fosters the ability to

understand the work within a history of traditions. Before I examine the implications of

Panofsky’s stance towards American scholarship in the arts, I want to look closer at

Panofsky’s conflation of temporal and intellectual distance, for which we must return to his

famous text “Perspective as Symbolic Form” of 1927.

In “Perspective as Symbolic Form”, Panofsky did more than just outline a theory of

perspective. Perspective, as it both constitutes and structures our visual apprehension of the

world, is a symbolic form because with it, “the means by which the process of making

knowledge characteristic of each period cannot be divorced from the knowledge it

produces.”11 Although Panofsky – as I have outlined in chapter one – first seems to have a

culturally relative conception of this process of knowledge production, he nonetheless grants

the Renaissance use of perspective a privileged status in its way of constructing and gaining

knowledge of the world. For Panofsky, it seemed Renaissance perspective represented the

most objective view of the world, as it exemplified the ability to conceive of a distance

between itself and the past by developing a geometric system that permitted a convincing

representation of space. As the spatial rationality of the Renaissance became a metaphor of

objectivity, it made way for an extension of Italian perspective into a metaphor for the

production of knowledge itself and above all, a metaphor for the role of the historian. Keith

Moxey adequately explains the metaphorical fusion of ‘perspective’ and ‘history’:

“History, like perspective, is not only a means of representing knowledge but a means of

constituting or becoming knowledge. Just as the word "history" can refer either to what

happened in the past or to accounts that purport to tell us what happened in the past, so the

word "perspective" can mean either one point of view among many, or the point which

organizes and arranges all the others.”12

For Panofsky, it was the Renaissance perspective that, due to its particular construction of

distance, can afford us genuine access to interpretation of past events. Panofsky hence related

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 Keith Moxey, “Perspective, Panofsky, and the Philosophy of History”. New Literary History 26 (1995) p. 778-779. 12 Moxey (1995), p. 779.

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the ability to interpret history to a particular cultural situation. After his move to the United

States, he would become increasingly forthright and confident of the superior position of the

culture of the Renaissance in the history of perspective, a shift most palpably expressed in the

publication of Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960), in which there is no trace

left of the cultural relativity of perspective and the gaining of knowledge.13 In his review of

Sweeney’s book, Panofsky attributed a particular ability for distance and access to knowledge

to American scholarship, similar to the way he privileged the Italian Renaissance. This

association of the American academia with the objectivity of the Renaissance, and the

superiority Panofsky thus granted to the field of American (art) history must be understood in

light of the political context of the 1930s. Panofsky was much concerned with the influence of

biased, nationalist tendencies to the practice of art history. During his stay in New York in

1933, Panofsky reflected upon the political developments in his home country and touched

upon the role of ‘distance’:

“The present situation in Germany, (...) (that is to say the international nationalism) is a mere

reaction against the modern means of communication which have narrowed the distance (both

physical and intellectual) between the various nations too much and, above all, too suddenly,

so that they have an opportunity of fighting (men always fight their neighbours rather than

far-off people, and now all the nations crowding this funny little planet are neighbours) and

are anxious about their ‘individuality’.”14

Hence, according to Panofsky, international nationalism caused a dangerous tendency to ward

of a decrease of physical and intellectual distance by glorifying particular national (artistic)

achievements. Modern art, because of its close temporal relationship to the nationalists, was

especially vulnerable to such a biased interpretation, as was for example the case with Franz

Marc’s work ‘Der Mandrill’, a painting that was included in the exhibition of ‘Entartete

Kunst’ in Munich in 1937. Against this, Panofsky emphasized the value of the American

intellectual and cultural distance to modern art. One year after his review of Sweeney’s book,

in 1935, Panofsky’s high esteem of American scholarship in the field of modern art resulted

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!13 Erwin Paofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wisksells), 1960. 14 Erwin Panofsky to Margaret Barr, 9 March 1933, Korrespondenz Vol. 1, p. 574.

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in a proposal for the establishment of a professorship of Modern Art at the Princeton Institute

of Advanced studies. In a memorandum to the university staff, Panofsky argued that although

“The post in the Institute for an authority on Modern Art may seem to bring the Humanistic

School rather dangerously up to date as a school of research (...) the fact is that American

scholarship is peculiarly fitted to exercise perspective over modern art in a way that is quite

impossible for the European student thereof, the reason being that what perspective is lacking

in time is made up by geographical distance, enabling the American students of the subject to

view the process as a whole.” [emphasis added]15

Panofsky’s praise for American scholarship of modern art

In 1944, Panofsky raised the issue again and rallied for the appointment of Alfred Barr for the

position of professor in a chair of Modern Art. At the time, Barr had been forced to step back

as the director of the MoMA.16 Research in modern art was fundamental, according to

Panofsky, not only to counterbalance the emphasis on classical and mediaeval studies in

Princeton and

“to establish a vital yet disinterested contact between humanistic research and life of our own

day”, but also because “it is only in this country that the art of the present can be studied and

interpreted with the same scholastic detachment and strictness of method as can that of the

past. (...) On this side of the Atlantic, the European developments [in art] could and can be

registered an coordinated both comprehensively and impartially, the distance in space and

traditions serving as an equivalent of that “historical perspective” which in Europe can be

engendered only by time; it is no accident that the very idea of a Museum of Modern Art (...)

could be conceived and realized only in the United States.”17

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!15 Erwin Panofsky and Charles Rufus Morey, Memorandum on Immediate and Future needs for Research in Art and Archeology in the

School of the Humanities of the Institute of Advanced Study (October 1935) partly reprinted in Korrespondenz Vol. 2, p. 539. 16 Barr was forced to resign from the MoMA in 1943 due to the influence of Stephen C. Clark, new chairman of the MoMA Board of trustees and Mrs. Rockefeller. Reason for Barr’s resignation was the fact that he still had not published his book on ‘modern art’, although he argued this was part of the agreement at the time of his appointment (according to Wuttke, Korrespondenz Vol 2, p. 464). 17 Panofsky, “Report of Mr. Panofsky on Mr. Alfred H. Barr, JR.” Erwin Panofsky to Frank Aydelotte, 27 February 1945. Korrespondenz Vol. 2, p. 536.

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It was about time, according to Panofsky, that IAS enabled the most knowledgeable scholar

of Modern Art to write “the History of Modern Art”.18 Ultimately, Panofsky did not succeed

in convincing the IAS staff. Barr would take up a specially created position at the MoMa, in

which he advised the new director and mainly devoted himself to research.

Finally, Panofsky’s statements against nationalist and biased art history would become most

acute in his famous text “Three decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a

Transplanted European”, written for a collection of essays on European scholars in America

(1953).19 For Americans, Europe could merge into ‘one panorama’, Panofsky said, whereas

European scholars were preoccupied with questions of which country was the first to invent

the cubiform capital or the rib-vault.20 Unbiased by nationalism, detached from the cultural

and intellectual roots of the objects, the Americans were not only more apt to look at the past,

but says Panofsky, “so were they able to see the present in a perspective picture undistorted

by personal or institutional parti pris.” [emphasis added]21 In Europe, the “direct impact” of

art movements such as French Impressionism, International Surrealism and Bauhaus, forced

either defence, attack or silence, but in America in contrast, Panofsky saw that there was

acceptable scholarship of contemporary art. “Historical distance” (we normally require from

sixty to eighty years) proved to be replaceable by cultural and geographical distance.”22

With his remarks on the American ability to come to a more objective evaluation of what

happened in tumultuous and violent Europe, Panofsky, yet again, expressed the redemptive

and humanistic qualities of the discipline of art history. His repeated trust in the American

capacity for cultural distance reads as an appeal to the exercise of scholarly analysis of what

happened – but more importantly – what is happening in Europe. Departing from a

philosophical account of perspective in his Perspective as Symbolic Form, Panofsky’s

conflation of intellectual, cultural, historical and geographical distance takes on a clear-cut

political dimension in his review of Sweeney and other writings. The political reasons for

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!18 Idem, p. 536. 19 Panofsky, Erwin “Three decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted European” first published as “The History of Art” in The Cultural Migration” The European Scholar in America. W. R. Crawford, ed. Philadephia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953. Reprinted in College Art Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, (Autumn, 1954), pp. 7-27. 20 Panofsky, (1953 reprinted 1954), p. 13. 21 Idem, p. 13. 22 Idem, p. 13.

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Panofsky’s emphasis on America’s ability to distance it self, were part of a larger agenda of

American cultural politics. According to Keith Moxey, Panofsky’s confident attitude and trust

in the sound methodological foundation of art history practices in America was “symptomatic

of a deeper philosophical and cultural change in his way of thinking”, caused by an across-

the-board atmosphere of positivism in American universities.23 Moxey sketches a situation of

unprecedented economic growth and national confidence after the Second World War.

America pulsated with a new feeling of ‘manifest destiny’, an eagerness to lead the world.

Within this climate, the academic field of the humanities tried to live up to the very apparent

successes of their empiricist, scientific colleagues in other departments, by emphasizing the

objectivity of sound (art) historical research methodology. Yet Panofsky’s outright trust in the

abilities of American scholarship would be tempered during his later years in the United

States. The dominant climate of positivism was both a “blessing” and a source of “conflict”,

said Panofsky in 1953.24

Distrust of German art history

While Exil-art historians were first hauled in for their particular erudition and cultivation, a

climate I have described in the introduction, Panofsky had already experienced distrust to his

‘German’ ideas on methodology upon his arrival in the United States, when he had been

dubbed the "Hitler of art study" by connoisseur and art historian Bernard Berenson.25 In 1943,

Panofsky’s study of the iconography of the ‘blind cupid’, published in ‘Studies in Iconology’

in 1939, was critiqued in the New York Times as

“pedantic scholarship (...) imbuing all but the initiate with a sense of ignorance and

unworthiness and erecting a wall of erudition between the ordinary citizen and the praetorian

guard of Germanic art specialists. (...)”26

Panofsky was appalled by the vicious and bigoted tone of the article. Behind it, he suspected

the guiding hand of Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art since

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#$ Moxey, Keith. “Perspective, Panofsky, and the Philosophy of History,” New Literary History 26 (1995), p. 777. 24 Panofsky, (1953 reprinted 1954), p. 14. #% According to Dieter Wuttke, Berenson considered Panofsky his worst enemy. He thought Panofsky and other immigrated German scholars tried to spoil his reputation. Of all people, it was to Margaret Barr he called Panofsky a ‘poseur’ and the Hitler of art study. See March 17, 1934. Korrespondenz Vol. I, p. 722, ff. 3. #& Howard Devree, The New York Times, Sunday, December 26, 1943, p. 9. Partially republished in Korrespondenz Vol. 2, pp. 444-45.

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1940, who had, according to Panofsky, “initiated a movement to protect the American

museums from foreigners."27 Taylor had published his book Babel’s Tower. The Dilemma of

the Modern Museum in 1945, which read as a particular attack on German scholarship.

According to Taylor,

“More than ever before the American museum will be called upon to fulfil a social function.

(...) Our soldiers and sailors, who have learned the lesson of world geography so bitterly, will

be the first to return once more to the humanities. (...) Unless, of course, we want to see these

veterans peddling the golden apples of the Hesperides on the street corners of Chicago and

New York, we must give them something more rewarding than iconology. Our job is to deal

straightforwardly in human values. Had our German colleagues been more concerned with

these in teaching their Nazi pupils, they might not find themselves in their present situation.

The veteran will want something more than empty vessels. Like Odysseus he will not be

content with the ghosts of past civilizations but will want their flesh and blood. To give him

this will require a better and more fundamental teaching, a teaching concerned with human

values rather than with accumulation of statistical knowledge.”28

Taylor thus argued the methods of German iconology were not apt to the social tasks of post-

War art history, but had instead driven art historians into the arms of Hitler. These hostile

reactions towards German scholarship and ostentatious examples of biased historical analysis

must have gradually tempered Panofsky’s trust in America’s intellectual ‘distance’ and

objectivity. Indeed, to date, various publications testify to the evident political and nationalist

dimension of the American art world after the Second World War. America appeared to be

hardly the ‘distanced’ and ‘objective’ vacuum Panofsky had hoped it to be.29 In retrospect,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!27 Erwin Panofsky to Wolfgang Stechow. Korrespondenz Vol. 2, p. 195. Panofsky also vigorously expressed his concerns about the reception of his methods in the United States in a letter to Henri van de Waal, professor of art history at Leiden University. Erwin Panofsky to Henri van de Waal, 20 November 1946, Korrespondenz Vol. 2, p. 770. Taylor had also become the opponent of Alfred Barr, director of the MoMa, by publishing the article “Modern Art and the Dignity of Man” in The Atlantic Monthly. According to Taylor, contemporary artists only communicated to an “intellectual elite – the fashionably initiated.” In: Irving Sandler, Defining Modern Art, selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (New York, Harry N. Abrams Inc. Publishers, 1986). 28 Henry Francis Taylor, Babel’s Tower. The Dilemma of the Modern Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945) p. 50. quoted in a review by Meyer Schapiro, review of Babel’s Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum by Henry Francis Taylor’s, Art Bulletin 27(1945), p. 273. 29 On national politics related to art in America after World War II, read for example, Serge Guilbaut. How New York Stole

the Idea of Modern Art. (Chicago and London: University Of Chicago Press, 1985) and Irving Sandler, Introduction to Defining Modern Art, selected writings of Alfred H. Barr. Jr. (New York, Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1986).

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Panofsky’s praise for Sweeney’s American ‘distance’ becomes thus all the more ironic, since

Sweeney would become one of the main propagators of the ‘great American artists’ of the

Post-War era. It was Sweeney, for example, who first championed Jackson Pollock together

with other American artists in his article “Five American Painters” in 1944, “each of these

men in this vitality, individuality of outlook, and present freedom from obvious debts to his

predecessors, holds the promise of a new and encouraging phase of American art.”30

“American art, it would seem, is gradually turning from the conventions of European art –

from even the postwar concepts of what a painting is – to fresh unfamiliar concepts of its

own.”31 Sweeney would come to embody a certain ambiguity of American scholarship

towards Europe in the 1950s, mapping out the pre-eminent direction of American artistic

developments and its duty as an intellectual leader and at the same time re-evaluating the

importance of European roots and European lessons.32

Conclusion

A close analysis of Panofsky’s review in this chapter has revealed an interesting political

factor in the appreciation of the art historical discipline. I have demonstrated how access to

the past and the practice of sound art historical methods depended, according to Panofsky, on

cultural and geographical distance. Succeeding this theoretical argument, I have shown how

national politics are entangled in Panofsky’s contention that America could exercise art

history from a more distanced and nuanced point of view. His plea for a distanced American

evaluation of art was part and parcel of his own identity as a Jewish refugee from Germany, a

famous ‘Exil-scholar’ effected by the war and removed from the European scene after 1936.

In my analysis, I emphasize Panofsky’s entanglement in the art historical world of America. I

do not wish to argue that his status as an Exil-scholar caused a certain ‘alienation’ that

enabled a more nuanced or distanced view upon art historical affairs. Instead, my article

illustrates the extent to which especially the discourse on contemporary art and contemporary

art history is always bound up with political discourse. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!$' James Johnson Sweeney, “Five American Painters,” Harper’s Bazaar (April 1944) p. 126, cited in Guilbaut, p. 87. The article featured Milton Avery, Morris Graves, Roberto Matta, Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky and came with a large colour reproduction of Jackson Pollock's The She-Wolf, which was purchased about a month later by Alfred Barr for The Museum of Modern Art. 31 James Johnson Sweeney, Vision and Image: A Way of Seeing. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), p. 17. 32 In 1952, he co-hosted a famous a symposium by the American journal Partisan Review, entitled “Our Country, Our Culture”, which considered the role of American intellectuals in American culture, see Guilbaut, p. 165.

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Clare Butcher (Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven)

Here and There: the making of time in contemporary

creative practice

The blank page

When writing about writing, Michel de Certeau lingers on the potentialities of the

blank page. He calls it a ‘space of its own delimits a place of production for the

subject…where the ambiguities of the world have been exorcised. It assumes the

withdrawal and the distance of a subject in relation to an arena of activities…made

available for partial but regulatable operation. A separation divides the traditional

cosmos, in which the subject remained possessed by the voices of the world. An

autonomous field is put before the eye of the subject who thus accords himself the

field for an operation of his own.’1

For de Certeau, this idea of the blank page reflects the modern shift in significance

from the finished statement to the process of enunciation.2 It becomes synonymous

with the possibility of a society to remake itself, backspacing history, and the

continuous enunciation of its values and constitution: to produce new pasts: ‘(refaire

l’histoire)’.3 If only it were that simple. The act of writing, a subject’s supposed

autonomy and the enviable silence when all the so-called “voices of the world” are

stilled, must at some point be read, used, framed, projected upon, repeated, plagarised

and derived. Yes, the blank page is a world awaiting making, but what of the book of

pages surrounding it, those torn out, those that have been stained, those bearing the

imprints of the hard press of a pen chapters earlier? What is the field of our partial

operation when exorcising the world as it is (was)?

The processual nature of enunciating worlds means that time is happening in two

ways (possibly two out of many more!): Firstly, de Certeau’s agent, the page and the

text being created in a single instance can never be finished in the present, they must

continuously circulate, be taken in and out of context, retold and again exorcised in

the “arena of activities” both were once withdrawn from. Secondly, this single

instance is happening in multiple ways, in multiple places, simultaneously. When one

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considers the number of societies undergoing dramatic change, even within the early

years of this century, the sounds of enunciation, these so-called “voices of the world”

rise to a cacophony. It is impossible that the worlds being made, the new histories

being produced could all be harmonious with one another as they themselves undergo

constant internal flux. The pages upon pages, books within books, not to forget the

hidden archives of any social imaginary are tossed to the wind.

‘Au dela’4 – this is what Homi Bhabha terms the hither and thither motion of our

position within the winds of change. Neither here nor there, neither now nor then,

these “ambiguities of the world” are impossible to capture and narrate with any

permanence. So how do those who seek to archive, to contextualise, to frame or retell,

find this space of “partial but regulatable operation” which achieves some kind of

autonomous distance but still porous enough to be influenced by and to influence the

world as it exists outside that space?5 To give this regulatable space of operation some

physical dimensions, I will speak about the exhibition space where lives, distances,

closeness, shadows, premonitions, and concrete present(s) must somehow be “re-

faire-ed”, while occurring simultaneously.

Jean-Luc Nancy: “the world is a multiplicity of worlds, and its unity is the mutual

sharing and exposition of all its worlds— within this world.”6

Taming time

The “au dela”, or go-betweening is inherent to the making of exhibitions in any sense.

Though I would like to postulate that the structure of contemporary exhibitions often

fails to achieve the mobility and agility required in backing and forthing between the

arenas of historical context, production and future circulation. These are merely a few

of the crude categories that should be challenging our proximity/distance to those

worlds we create or hope to change through exhibition-making. I’d like to link this

proximity/distance complication with a number of other binaries that the exhibition

must always cut through via a series of different trajectories (a line which occurs

through time and space – see de Certeau). Global/local, autonomous/implicated,

documentary/abstraction, general/specific, new/repeated, complete/unfinished,

provincial/cosmopolitan, timeless/short-lived.

13

The World Fair of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries seems to have

attempted to bridge something of these binaries. In a single spectacular moment it

encompassed worlds within worlds, while showing itself to worlds. Interestingly, the

World Fair operated on the tension between general and specific, constantly zooming

in and out by presenting material culture and inventions very specific to a particular

geography and culture while surrounding it in mystique as these were then juxtaposed

with completely unrelated elements around it, in the grand context of voluminous

exposition palaces. These fairs compressed time and space in a way that brought

viewers closer to their exhibition subjects, bringing actual people from the empire on

display. Of course this supposed “closeness” of the empire to its exhibitions was

circumscribed by an unimaginable system of exploitation and power imbalance. And

yet, the economic, cosmopolitan, historicity of such elements must have been

overwhelmingly present – never withdrawn or disguised by convenient theories of the

alter-modern. Modernity was the exhibition.7

These same narrative display tactics, making and then displaying worlds, were not

only employed within colonial centres of culture, but were imported into the

institutional structures of the colonies themselves. The Johannesburg Art Gallery was

inaugurated during a decade of high imperial exhibitionism before the First World

War. Its structure: monolithically classical. Its scale: bombastic. Its collection:

unrelated to the worlds beyond its walls.

*‘The African soul is a blank slate on which anything can be written, onto which any

fantasy can be transposed.’8

When first established, the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) sought to “tame the

wilderness”9 around the British/South African society who founded it. The gallery’s

more anthropological collection of artefacts was outweighed in status by pieces of art:

facsimiles of a European canonical taste, even after apartheid ended. One opinion,

after a flood at the JAG was that ‘galleries countrywide have to flip a rapidly

diminishing coin to decide what takes priority: updating collections, arranging

exhibitions, developing outreach programmes or repairing leaky roofs.’10 This case is

not exclusive to the African museum. There is a beautiful moment when the leaking

roof of a “developed” society in transition, dealing with immigration politics and

14

globalisation, seeps into the sanctity of the museum space in the short story, “The

Museum” by Sudanese writer, Leila Aboulela.

In Aboulela’s text, the visitor who might very well be the author herself, comes across

a display of African plunder taken by Scottish explorers.

‘The tangible reminders were there to see, preserved in spite of the years. Her eyes

skimmed over the disconnected objects out of place and time. Iron and copper, little

statues. Nothing was of her, nothing belonged to her life at home, what she missed.

Here was Europe’s vision, the clichés about Africa: cold and old…If she could enter

the cabinet, she would not make a good exhibit. She wasn’t right, she was too modern,

too full of mathematics.’11

This contradiction of so many times into one space is extreme: the past and the

present as well as the future of the narrator’s actions as she then attempts to translate

herself into a context where this kind of paradox exists. The reality could be that she

cannot fully interpret her modern-ness and the mathematics of migration and distance.

The same can be said for bringing the post-apartheid world beyond the swinging glass

doors of the Johannesburg Art Gallery into the complexity of its narrative. And it is

this kind of compressing and tectonic shifting of layers which has become

synonymous with the post-colonial, post-apartheid urban context – as societies seek to

rewrite themselves.

Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall’s seminal text, “Writing the World from an

African Metropolis” published in Duke’s Public Culture Journal, maps this territory

as such,

‘It is fundamentally in contact with an elsewhere. As such, it is a space that is not only “produced”; it is also a space that circulates, that is constantly in motion…we now know, the subject itself is always en fuite (leaking, fleeing)—a fiction of ourselves and a fabulation of our world. So is “the city.” Rationally planned or not, the city is “better understood in terms of the manner in which it deals with its fuites (leaks).”’12

So the leaky, porous nature of roofs, city and simultaneous timelines of memory and

presents collide amongst the pages of history being written. Making neither the blank

page nor the white cube the “regulatable” space of operation de Certeau wills. But

15

perhaps it is this constant motion, the fleeing and fabulation, spoken of by Mbembe

and Nuttall, that enables Bhabha’s “au dela”, where through constant repositioning –

closing in and distancing, specifying and generalising – we might still enunciate the

ambiguousness of our times. Without seeming too crude, perhaps it is possible to link

the grand aspirations of the World Exhibitions and the complications of post-colonial

institutional practice with these notions of distance and repetition in the making of

new worlds.

Difference/Distance and Repetition

The “untimely” is a phrase Deleuze borrows from Nietzsche which Delueze takes to

mean something acting counter to our time and therefore acts on our time.13 The

“untimely” transfers the unknown and the peripheral to the here and now: ‘on the

border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one

into the other’.14 Only this unknown, or the things we ‘know badly’ give us cause to

write.15 Onto the blank page designated by de Certeau. The blank page which, in a

sense, is elsewhere, or nowhere, 16 it is the silence we all must start from: The

moment when the museum visitor cannot speak of her concerns to others staring at

the vitrines. What is heroic to them is horrific to her and so they stand and stare.17

Deleuze reminds us that preservation is not repetition.18 In order to “re-do” histories,

making worlds, we cannot merely reaffirm old ones. Neither is the more popular

notion of exchange sufficient. In a moment when the Northern hemisphere suddenly

gasped at Bourriaud’s “discovery” of the ‘Alter Modern’,19 it is imperative that we

never consider the exchanging of histories/stories/present practices as the postmodern,

globally correct answer to that collective silence. ‘If exchange is the criterion of

generality, theft and gift are those of repetition.’20 The exchange of generality could

be likened to the mechanism of the World Exhibition where resemblances of a host of

specificities are presented under the all-encompassing variety show. Whereas

repetition insists on cutting and pasting (or thieving perhaps) of particularity, and the

gift of ‘instantineity opposed to variation, and an eternity opposed to permanence.’21

This instable stability where all we know is that we know badly is where the real

parameters of distance and poetic proximity emerge within the making of our

16

autonomous field (whether it be the page, the exhibition or indeed any kind of

narrative implicated in the making of worlds within worlds).

My conjecture at this point is that Derrida’s notion of ‘telepoesis’ might be transposed

to this scenario.

‘Tomorrow is another day.’

In her writing on Spivak’s Death of a Discipline, Corinne Scheiner deconstructs

Derrida’s term ‘telepoesis’ as used by Spivak within the practice of Comparative

Literature.22 Here, the word “tele” implies a crossing of spatial and temporal distance

and difference in a present and continuous sense, through the act of utterance.23

Scheiner states that this term engenders both movement as well as mediation (or

translation), where the mediation is aware of both the risks of imagination –

imagining oneself and others – and ‘reading at a distance.’24 In a seemingly

impossible way, or indeed in the spirit of the “au dela”, the act of telepoesis must be

simultaneously aware of spatial and temporal gaps while also transforming the object

or subject being brought (transported) closer via an imaginative process. The

repetition of one element by copying and pasting into another context,25 then links the

one specific being to other specificities also being mediated, the different to other

differences within the same “arena of activity”: not in order to produce “the Same” as

Deleuze would suggest, but to draw attention to that act of writing, mediating,

ennunciating and juxtaposing.

These instances of imaginative juxtaposing are what remake histories, and indeed art

histories – with a revised respect for the distant and differenced pasts at play on the

many “blank” pages of cultural and individual narratives. The dynamic eternal (rather

than the static, preserved permanence) of the exhibition narrative may be addressed

to, not projected onto, readers of both the present and the future. Never silencing

those who are “too modern” or too embedded that history itself.

In her inquiry of sustainable disciplinary activity, Spivak emphasises the out-of-time-

ness needed in the way we produce new pasts. In a sense, the leakiness of time and

space ensures that nothing is stable and it is sure that the history remade now through

autonomous acts of imagination, transportation, mediation and juxtaposition of

17

different (alter)modernities will again be reconstituted. And rather than intimidating

or disempowering our present oscillations up and down Homi Bhabha’s staircases

between the postcolonial, the postsocialist, the distant, the close, the specific, the

general, the silence, the cacophony – this realisation of continuous movement and

change should liberate us to take further poetic licence in our time.

As one spokesperson of the major American auto company, General Motors, so

famously announced at the start of the financial crisis – ‘It’s hard to predict the future,

as it’s never happened here before.’ We make worlds in order to change the existing

ones, so says de Certeau.26 And if this is so there is no time like the present.

18

Works Cited:

Leila Aboulela, 2001. Coloured Lights. Polygon: Edinburgh.

Homi Bhabha, 1994. The Location of Culture. Routledge: London.

Nicolas Bourriaud, 2009. The Radicant. Sternberg Press: New York.

Michel de Certeau, 1084. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press: Berkley.

Brenda Cooper, 2008. A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language. University of Kwazulu-Natal Press: Durban.

Gilles Deleuze, 1994. Difference and Repetition, Trans. Paul Patton. Athlone Press: London.

Steven Dubin, 2009. Mounting Queen Victoria: Curating Cultural Change. Jacana: Cape Town.

Achille Mbembe & Sarah Nuttall, 2004. “Writing the World from an African Metropolis”, in Public Culture Journal, Duke University Press: Charlotte.

Corinne Scheiner, “Teleiopoiesis, Telepoesis, and the Practice of Comparative Literature.” Comparative Literature 57:3 (Summer 2005): 239-245.

Pieter Van Wesemael, 2001. The Architecture of Delight: A socio-historical analysis of world exhibition as a didactic phenomenon (1798-1851-1970). 101: Rotterdam.

19

Steven ten Thije (PhD candidate Art History)

The end of history in the museum of the modern art

In his ‘different spaces’ Foucault famously mentions the museum as a ‘heterotopia’, a

place where categories are present in their extreme forms and as such show us who

we are. The museum thereby is a ‘heterotopia’ of time, for in its collecting it refers to

an idea of preserving that is antithetical to the destruction of the progression of time.

In this Foucault opposes it to the heterotopias of a transitions and fleeting-nature as

carnival. This suggestion, for it is no more then a remark to be worked out later, is

interesting when confronted with the notion of a museum that specializes itself in

somehow preserving the fleeting moment of the now: the museum for modern art.

In my presentation I would like to unpack the heterotopian quality of the

museum of modern and contemporary art by looking into to case studies. First, the

last room of Landesmsueum in Hannover, designed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and

Alexander Dorner, telling titled: Raum der Gegenwart (Room of the Now). This room

was designed in the late 20s, but was never executed and has recently been

reconstructed by the German art historian Kai-Uwe Hemken and designer Jakob

Gebert. Second, the famous ‘Abstract Art and Cubism’ exhibition of the Museum of

Modern Art in New York of 1936, as it has been questioned, collected a displayed by

the Museum of American Art in Berlin. To this end I want to focus especially on the

more ‘carnivalesque’ part of the museum by looking into how ‘the now’ or the

‘modern’ can be put on display and how this displaying relates to the repository-

character of the museum. For this I will link several observations of Walter Benjamin

made in his texts on the ‘Storyteller’ and ‘The work of art in the age of technological

reproducibility’ with the general outline of Foucault’s argument. As such I want to

relate the ‘conservation’ of history with the ‘telling’ of history and make suggestions

on the possible ‘ends’ one encounters of both historical narration and its preservation

in these two remarkable museum displays.

20

Christina Li (SKOR)

From Monuments to Masses

Monuments are built in remembrance of specific histories and memories and are links

the present have to the past. Yet in face of changing temporalities, do these

monuments’ significances and stories hold true decades after their erection? With the

different reasons behind the building of monuments, from honoring political heroes to

acting as vessels for utopian aspirations, many of them continue to exist after the

changes in political systems. What afterlives do these monuments have in relation to

the current discourse of spatial and temporal histories? Behind these statues and

monuments stand histories that are presently in constant negotiations between its re-

appearance, disappearance or re-fabrication as worked through debates between

political powers and the public in reflecting their stances and significances of these

histories.

The way in which historical narratives are being reiterated and upheld through

monuments have increasingly become of interest for artists meditating their

relationships with historicity, cultural archives and pubic space. Dealing the long and

extensive history and examples of such public works, why are monuments still being

built and how could the public shape the way they are built and exist in the society?

The paper will present artistic practices that examine the discrepant positions that

monuments have in the tide of current politics, encouraging alternatives positions in

thinking of the use of monuments in the writing of spatial history and identity politics.

Using existing and upcoming monuments, these investigations manifest in forms of

proposed or realised artistic interventions, reappropriations, iconoclastic acts, debates

and anti-monuments, in which they examine the potentials and problems of past

monuments and the ones to come in the future.

21

Panel 2: (Monday, March 22nd

, 16:00-18:00)

Emily Drabinski and Alana Kumbier

Inmi Lee

Julia Creet

!

22

Emily Drabinski and Alana Kumbier (!"#$%&'()#*%+#,-./',01%)#*%2.((.'(.1%

3"((.$.4

Locating Wojnarowicz: Moving through library systems,

structures and technologies

Some ways of describing David Wojnarowicz: queer, AIDS activist, artist, writer,

performer, filmmaker, photographer, longtime resident of New York City's East

Village, teenage hustler, witness, historian. In his visual art and written work,

Wojnarowicz documented the lives of those living "’in the shadow of the American

Dream,' outside of a normative national fantasy of community and identity" (Ramlow

178). Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992, at the age of 37. His writing and art

explored and depicted the violence endemic to the United States, in which the

normalizing impulse of the dominant social group effects serious material and

symbolic consequences for those who resist, or are rejected from, participation in a

(white, able-bodied, heterosexual, middle-class) national imaginary. He worked in a

variety of media: photography, painting, collage, film, and sculpture, creating and

assembling pieces that incorporate found objects and overheard stories, ephemera,

personal narrative, and photographs. His works are, themselves, articulations. Writing

about Wojnarowicz in 1989, Félix Guattari observed that: "Through the concatenation

of semiotic links he forges, he manages to produce a singular message that allows us

to perceive an enunciation in process. [...] The image is not only meant to exhibit

passively significant forms, but to trigger an existential movement, if not revolt, at

least of existential creativity. When everything seems to be said and repeated at this

point in Art History, something emerges from David Wojnarowicz's chaos which

confronts us with our responsibility to intervene in the movement of the world" (77).

Wojnarowicz compels us because of the ways in which he helps us illumine the

structure, workings, limits, and effects of a particular apparatus: the classificatory

system developed by the Library of Congress to organize access to information for

library users in the United States and around the world. Wojnarowicz’s complex

personhood, manifest in his multi-modal artistic and activist practice, resists a smooth

or singular incorporation. His incorporation is inevitably incomplete and inadequate,

but this does not mean there is no room to maneuver, no way to make good on the

promise of Wojnarowicz's radical, queer, articulatory practice. In this paper, we focus

23

on a particular mode of political and intellectual intervention, that of knowledge

production. We analyze a set of practices that constitute research: searching in

electronic databases, conceptualizing search terms and moving between vocabularies,

navigating classificatory systems, traversing library spaces, and working with sources

to create something legible. Finally, we analyze the spaces in which these practices

take place, defined through library organizing schemes.

Our understanding of research as an articulatory practice stems from theories of

articulation developed by radical democratic theorists Laclau and Mouffe (1985).

Developed in the early 1980s, in the context of a critique of Marxist essentialism,

their analysis describes the practice by which new social collectivities—such as

feminist, environmental, and peace movements, as well as movements of gay and

lesbian and antiracist activists—coalesce . Articulation is a process of relevance

making: collectivities are formed as participants establish shared interests, and

mobilize on those terms. Articulation is unstable: contingency and change are key

aspects of the process. Collaborations may be short-lived or long term, and collectives

may organize around a given project, and then disband. Participants’ identities are

also subject to change as they are “modified as a result of the articulatory practice”

(Laclau and Mouffe 105). Anthropologists studying environmental movements have

extended Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis, finding that articulation provides a helpful

framework for exploring how articulations happen within these movements, and what

enables some groups to be successful while others fail (Choy 7).

Anthropological engagements with articulation have yielded refinements and

enhancements of Laclau and Mouffe's work. As ethnographers have applied the

theory, they have discovered that they need more than the descriptive framework

articulation supplies: they need a way to explain how articulations happen.

Anthropologist Timothy K. Choy (2005) developed the concept of articulated

knowledges in the context of his ethnography of environmental politics in Hong

Kong. His concept enables an account of whose knowledges become articulated as

expert-discourse, whose knowledges remain unarticulated, and what factors matter in

the process. Choy explores how a collaboration between Greenpeace and local

villagers exemplifies articulation. As he studied the collaboration, Choy found that

translation was a crucial element of the process by which global and local

24

environmentalists' knowledges were “scaled, linked, and mobilized” (12). Through

his observation of group meetings, Choy found that articulated knowledges were

produced through the translation practices of speakers, translators, and audience

members. On a pragmatic level, translation was necessary for communication

between the campaign's stakeholders: villagers, representatives of Hong Kong's

Environmental Protection Department, an American chemist, and Choy himself. But

the translations Choy observed had metapragmatic effects as well. First, the act of

translation conferred authority on the original speaker through performative repetition

(e.g., when the scientist's statements are translated they are clearly worth repeating).

Second, translation circulated knowledge, moving ideas from one semiotic context to

another, figuring the “source meaning as in-motion” (12). Third, translation made the

speaker's statements relevant to others in the room, a key function in the articulation

process (11). Attending to these effects reminds us how translation is a repetitive,

performative process of negotiation—across differences of language, scale, and

cultural context.

The movements that happen in Choy’s analysis of translation--knowledges are

scaled, linked, and mobilized—also happen during research. While it would be

reductive to suggest that research is a form of translation or its analogue, translation is

a good practice to think with as we analyze a researcher's tasks and experiences.

Though a researcher does not necessarily translate material from one language to

another, she enacts a repetitive practice that requires that she consistently revise her

approach, negotiating differences in vocabulary and scope as she translates her

research question across fields. The researcher develops a variety of approaches for

her search (e.g., creating lists of key terms, finding new aspects of a topic to explore),

and repeats searches in multiple contexts. During this iterative process, she will likely

encounter challenges: when a search fails to yield helpful results, or when sources

don't fit the project at hand, the researcher must develop alternate strategies, like

looking elsewhere, re-phrasing her search, or re-framing her approach. The searcher

often negotiates distinct (sometimes unfamiliar) vocabularies, moving between her

own key terms, disciplinary terminologies, and the controlled vocabularies indexers

and catalogers use to describe and organize information. When she encounters terms

that are conceptually broader or narrower than those she uses, the researcher

determines how—or if—this difference in scale matters. The ability to recognize or

25

establish equivalences across vocabularies is an important part of the researcher’s

process, since it allows her to access sources she might miss by only conducting a

keyword search (which is limited to the specific terms she enters, and may elide other

conceptual matches). As she establishes these semantic linkages, the researcher

conjoins different and potentially-disparate vocabularies (and the actors, collectives,

and groups they represent) in the service of her project.

As she negotiates different vocabularies, the researcher also deals with questions of

relevance: how are the results of a search relevant to her query? How are the materials

she finds relevant to her argument or project? How will she make these different

sources speak to each other? How and what will they enable her to communicate

about her subject? Research is the means by which an author “effects a kind of

conjunction between domains that are not necessarily related” (Choy 11).

For the most part, work published about Wojnarowicz in the decade following his

death does not suggest any kind of radical conjunction. For example, a keyword

search for “David Wojnarowicz” in an online catalog yields some results that clearly

locate him as an artist working in a particular place and time: David Wojnarowicz:

Tongues of Flame, David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on

the Lower East Side, and Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz. But we also find

scholars bringing Wojnarowicz into locations beyond the domains of art history and

criticism: Kevin Floyd draws attention to Wojnarowicz's role as witness to and

agitator against the violence of neoliberalism manifest in the privatization of urban

space in The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (2009). When Todd

Ramlow places Wojnarowicz's work in conversation with Gloria Anzaldúa's

border(lands) theory, he helps us recognize how Wojnarowicz's work contributes to

and is illuminated by projects in border theory and migration studies, disability

studies, and queer theory (2006).

If we include citation as part of the practice of research, we can identify other

ways in which researchers articulate across domains. As with translation, citation has

both pragmatic and metapragmatic effects. On a practical level, citation allows its

reader to locate additional sources related to the content of the researcher's project

(the practice of citation-mining operates according to a logic of relevance similar to

26

the collation performed by library classification; we expect that an author's

bibliography will yield “more like this”). But citations also indicate the discursive

community in which a researcher locates herself (Simmons), and they tell us who the

researcher is engaging in her work. The practice of citation authorizes both the work

of the researcher and that of the author whose work she cites. A researcher invested in

signaling a strong disciplinary fidelity to art history, for example, may choose to cite

books and articles about Wojnarowicz by others in those fields. A researcher like

Ramlow goes further afield in his work on Wojnarowicz, citing Anzaldúa, disability

studies scholars including David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, disability activist-

scholar Eli Clare, key theorists for queer theory, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault,

and Chicana feminist theorists Norma Alarcón and Cherrie Moraga. By enrolling

these disparate foundational thinkers in his project, Ramlow achieves more than an

analysis of Anzaldúa’s and Wojnarowicz’s work: he shows how the cited authors’

work is mutually relevant—how they share concerns and illumine each other’s

projects, and he advances the articulation of the emergent field of queer disability

studies.

The technical work of this translation process requires the existence of an

apparatus that arranges texts in an order that enables researchers like Ramlow to find

these varied texts in place. If we think of research as a kind of articulation-in-motion,

an intellectual migration the library is inescapably a system of intellectual and

physical boundaries through which this movement takes place. Despite the flourishing

of alternative information environments on the Internet and elsewhere, libraries

continue to be at a material level responsible for purchasing, assembling, and making

accessible through one classification scheme or another the set of texts that constitute

an explorable archive. As inevitably limited and compromised as these collections of

texts might be (the absences in the library sent Mieke Bal in the direction of the

concept of migratory aesthetics, "when I could not find what I sought to understand

about the contemporary Western European cities in the library" (Bal)) they remain

inescapably the spaces of intellectual articulation. The classification structure of any

library provides one path through these collections via physical arrangement, along

with limited lines of flight made legible by the syndetic subject tracings in virtual

catalogs.

27

Libraries are highly boundaried spaces, reflections of the tightly classified

intellectual and spatial structures that organize materials in a given collection.

Classification schemes can take many forms, from closed-stack collections like that of

the New York Public Library's research collections (works are simply numbered and

arranged in accession order) to botanical libraries that physically arrange materials

according to particular taxonomic schemes. While classifications can take many

forms, the fact of classification is inescapable. Libraries contain and make accessible

the stuff of intellectual practice; accessibility relies on a coherent and legible

organizational scheme.

These schemes consist of two parts, the intellectual structure and the physical

arrangement that maps that structure in space. The classification collates materials,

grouping like with like at increasingly granular levels according to an overarching

ideological narrative reduced to a system of bounded categories. For example, the

Bessey botanical classification groups plants by species, order, family, etc. in a

hierarchical structure that presents a certain ideology about the world of plants, one

that privileges sensible qualities (number of visible petals, kind of bark, and so on)

over genetic conditions. Shelving schemes implicitly confirm a classification

scheme’s underlying ideology; users are assumed to desire access to materials

according to the ideological classification structure. For example, a user in a Bessey

library seeking a book about B. umbellatas, a rhizomatic aquatic grass, is imagined to

desire other books about that same plant, and next books about aquatic plants in

general, and so on. The intellectual scheme maps to the shelves, supporting browsing

that accords with the intellectual scheme. The library becomes a three-dimensional

reflection of the ideological or narrative structure that organizes the system.

Academic libraries in the United States are largely organized according to the

Library of Congress classification system. LC divides the universe of materials in the

library into 21 broad subject categories (e.g., Q = Science), each of which is further

divided into subclasses (e.g., QK = Botany) that drill down to ever more granular

levels (QK122 = underwater grasses). Catalogers assign each work that enters the

library a position in the intellectual scheme based on 'aboutness,' or the central topic

of the text. This subject placement is translated into a classification number that

indicates the work's location in a shelving system.

28

This system of classification numbers suggests that libraries are fundamentally

linear spaces to be traversed from A to Z--or QA to QK--according to the hierarchical

order assigned by cataloging librarians. But LC is both a hierarchical and a syndetic

structure, with syndeticism expressed primarily through subject headings. In

indicating relationships across the classification, LC generates dimensionality. Along

with the class number, librarians assign works subject headings from a list of

controlled vocabulary. The first subject heading maps to the classification number,

with additional subject headings assigned to capture other aspects of the work. For

example, a work about aquatic grasses and their use in particular food cultures would

carry subject headings related to both aspects. While the work would be located in the

class number associated with only the first subject heading--an inescapable material

constraint--the second would be represented and browseable in electronic catalogs,

linking the parts of the classification related to each subject area in a line of potential

flight. Subject headings bring otherwise remote parts of the classification together in

the virtual space of the catalog.

In the case of Wojnarowicz, the physical path drawn by the classification is a

narrow and telling one. His Close to the Knives, a collection of short pieces that

transcribe his fierce struggle to live against the violence of late 20th century America,

is located in the LC classification at RC607, the call number associated with

Immunologic Diseases. Wojnarowicz's blazing institutional critique is reduced to

disease as it is individualized and embodied by him. The linear boundary of the

library shelf designates a specific research project--the collated body of personal

disease narratives. Another of Wojnarowicz's texts, Waterfront Journals, a collection

of snapshots of American life at the margins, is shelved at PS3573, the location for

American literature. Placing Journals here centers authorship rather than the

encounters with shattered/ing lives that constitute the real subject of the text. The

classification collates the work of other American authors from the same moment in

history together, marking this as the initial and primary point of intellectual entry.

Subject tracings articulate additional limited lines of flight. Close to the Knives

carries three LC subject headings: Wojnarowicz, David--Health; AIDS (Disease) --

Patients --United States --Biography; and Gay men --United States --Biography. The

call number and physical arrangement are keyed to the first heading while the second

29

two constitute alternative points of departure, collating biographies and personal

narratives of people with AIDS in the first case and gay male biographies in the

second. These are virtual flight lines, articulated in the catalog but not on the shelf.

The researcher who chooses to migrate according to the boundary drawn by these

headings makes each of them real by following them, selecting books from

throughout the collection according to secondary and tertiary narratives told by the

catalog.

What emerges from this sketch of Wojnarowicz in the library is a limited map of

his expansive work, along with a set of questions occasioned by the absences in the

classification story. The LC scheme does not collate all materials by and about

Wojnarowicz. It does not collate his works with works about the systems--raced,

classed, sexed, and geographic—that he grapples with and against. Wojnarowicz's

roots in the downtown New York culture of the 1980s are invisible. And so on. In

other words, articulating the migratory paths undergirding Wojnarowicz's presence in

the archive also articulates the gaps and lacks where we might expect to find

Wojnarowicz but don't.

If boundaries proscribe certain research movements in a given collection, they

also suggest in their gaps the migrations that must be forged by researchers working

within the confines of the collection. They make room for Ramlow, and for the rest of

us. While the parameters of the bounded scheme have been sketched here, the theory

of migration allows us to consider less the failings of the system than potential

strategies for articulatory practices within it. As Inge E. Boer suggests, we might

"consider boundaries not in their definition of what they are and where they are, but

instead to theorize them as a function" (Boer 9). The boundaries of library

classification produce unstable formations that comprise the space of research,

essential indicators of the lines of flight within and against collections, and even

outside collections, when they lead Bal to take flight to film as a medium for

understanding migration in another sense. Library classification schemes, then,

comprise the "space of negotiation" [Boer 10] for the researcher's intellectual

migration.

30

WORKS CITED

Bal, Mieke. “Migratory Aesthetics: Double Movement.” ExitMedia.net. Exit #32: Exodus, November 2008/January 2009. Web. 30 Jan 2009.

Bourg, Inge E. Uncertain Territories: Boundaries in Cultural Analysis. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.

Choy, Timothy K. “Articulated Knowledges: Environmental Forms after Universality's Demise.” American Anthropologist 107.1 (2005): 5-18.

Floyd, Kevin. The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Laclau, Ernesto. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985.

Ramlow, Todd R. “Bodies in the Borderlands: Gloria Anzaldúa's and David Wojnarowicz's Mobility Machines.” MELUS 31.3 (2006): 169-187.

Simmons, Michelle Holschuh. “Librarians as Disciplinary Discourse Mediators: Using Genre Theory to Move Toward Critical Information Literacy.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 5.3 (2005): 297-311.

Wojnarowicz, David. David Wojnarowicz, Tongues of Flame. Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University, 1992.

---. David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape. New York: Aperture Foundation, Inc, 1994.

---. Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz. New York: Rizzoli, 1998.

---. In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz. 1st ed. New York: Grove Press, 1999.

---. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline. San Francisco: Artspace Books, 1992.

--- and Félix Guattari. “In the Shadow of Forward Motion.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 3.1 (1990): 75.

31

Inmi Lee (Kutztown University)

Migratory Aesthetics Through Digital Media and

Performance

Language is a creative act insofar as the construction of language permits the creation

of new acts. Not only is language boundless in scope, it also reflects the culture and

society in which it is used. In the center of individual, familial, economic and social

struggles are language. Language is more than a pure form of communication; it

carries the weight of history and culture.

Johannes Gutenberg’s printing technology accelerated and consolidated the power

and symbolic significance of language. For example, the printing technology ushered

the business of Gospel forward and it completely changed the way we see religion.

The written words do not disappear and they live longer than the person who wrote it.

The technology placed the Bible on the table of every household and it created the

forever struggle between unity and diversity.

As the pace of migration has increased and cross-border communication has

grown, spoken language has also become a political tool and has been used to

measure social acceptance—and the power gained from such acceptance—creating

winners and losers. This shift has both democratized and weaponized spoken words.

For example, the United States was confronted with large non-English speaking

populations in the aftermath of the Mexican War in 1848. The territories that were

seized after the war, which came to be known as California and New Mexico,

contained a mainly Spanish-speaking population. Statehood was granted to these

regions only when English speakers outnumbered Spanish speakers. This happened

much sooner to California than New Mexico and helps explain why former became a

state in 1850 while the latter did not receive statehood until 1912, when Anglos

finally outnumbered Hispanics putting an end to the possibility of a bilingual state.

While language is used as an economic and political tool, what is often

overlooked is the soft power of language to decide who “fits in”. As the sociologist

Carol L. Schmid asserts: “In the United States, immigrants and their children were

compelled to speak accentless English if they desired social acceptance and

32

integration in their adopted country.”1 To be accepted into mainstream society, do

immigrants need to speak English free of an accent? Schmid states: “In the United

States the acquisition of non-accented English and the dropping of foreign language

represents the litmus test of Americanization.”2 Language, then, can be viewed as a

tool used by those who practice it with perfection (native speakers) to separate from

or control those who practice it with lesser familiarity (immigrants).

Despite the divisive power of language, it also provides a means through which

non-native speakers can connect emotionally. People find comfort in a foreign land by

talking to people in their own mother tongue and expressing themselves freely.

Therefore, language is also a tool for creating strong interpersonal, emotional bonds.

Schmid argues: “Language binds them together and it is a powerful instrument for

promoting internal cohesion and providing an ethnic or national identity.”3 The

sociologist Randall Collins suggests this: “It is not, as Marx thought, that groups are

formed when people become conscious of their common interests. Their

consciousness and shared interests are only the surface of things. What is beneath the

surface is a strong emotion, a feeling of a group of people that they are alike and

belong together.”4

So, how do artists communicate linguistic marginalization without marginalizing

their works? Many artists using a variety of media, such as drawing, painting, found

objects, photography and film, video and new digital media, and performance create

reflective artworks that address the issues of migration, people, culture and trauma. In

this paper, I will focus on art that entails a performance aspect, such as digital

interactive art where the audience is placed in the role of a performer or performance

art in which the audience becomes a part of the performance. I will discuss how these

media help to facilitate the issues that I have encountered when dealing with

migratory aesthetics, including how subjective experience with migration and its

ramifications can embrace a broader audience. I will consider two of my works:

Making/Understanding Language and Words Fail Me.

1. Digital Art and Migratory Aesthetics

Many artists approach language in its pure form and language in relation to

33

culture. Antoni Muntadas’ work deals with a broad spectrum of social, political and

communications issues, the relationship between public and private space within

social frameworks, and investigations of channels of information and the ways they

may be used to censor central information or promulgate ideas. His The Internet

Project,

(<http://adaweb.walkerart.org/influx/muntadas/project.html>) discusses the inevitable

difficulties of understanding culture from the linguistic point of view and questions

the distribution of information on the Internet. Based on the children’s game “Chinese

Whispers”, a chain of 22 translators all around the world--each representing one of

the 22 most spoken languages on the planet--translated a sentence, posted it on the

website, and passed it onto the next translator. He comments on the usage of the

English language online.

“[The] Internet is mostly in English and that is a limitation, a problem to begin with. On internet there is some censorship, because a standard language is used. … English is becoming a language of cultural colonisation. How can we maintain specificity if everybody uses the same language?”5

We constantly interpret and get interpreted to an open-ended end, simultaneously

importing and exporting different cultural ideas and norms as the concept of place has

become very broad. With the constant exchange, people make assumptions about

people based on language they speak, giving more power to language. Presently, there

are various websites that translate one language to another. Language is heavily

influenced by the culture it belongs to, yet now a language can be understood and

translated with a mere click of a button.

In my work, I address issues of language with interactive art through performance

and/or digital media. When a viewer stands in front of artwork, a confrontation and

compromise takes place between the beholder and the beheld. While all art is

interactive in this sense, what distinguishes digital and performance art from other art

media is the capacity to alter, affect, play and build the work and ultimately change

the outcome of the piece based on viewer participation. With interactive art such as

interactive cinema, artificial intelligence, games, the internet art with multiple users,

virtual reality and performance art, the audience becomes a crucial part of the work,

and, as the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp said, the viewer “completes the work of

34

art.”6 The work as such is not about the work itself but about the process as how the

work becomes complete through experience.

My piece Making/Understanding Language directly deals with the power that

language holds, specifically considering the problems that immigrants face when

struggling with new languages and how that pertains to their position in society. This

piece puts the participant in the position of the immigrant struggling to learn the

English language phonetically for the first time. The audience participant is guided

through a series of written instructions that mimic the journey of language learning.

The audience is encouraged to read certain common words and phrases out loud. The

speech is recorded, reversed and played back over a loudspeaker to the audience so

that “apple” becomes “elppa” rendering the phrases undecipherable. The audience is

then prompted to repeat these ‘new’ sounds or ‘words’, out loud once more. Via this

interactive process, the audience learns an unfamiliar language through sound and in

the end realizes the difficulties of learning and speaking a language solely through

sound. This is the kind of difficulty that immigrants face daily. Furthermore, because

of their accented English, immigrants are often underestimated and underprivileged in

society.

In this piece, the audience participant is confronted with her/his own voice played

in reverse through the speaker and she/he performs by reproducing the sound.

Through the experience of recording and listening to their own voice, the audience

becomes part of the work. As the theorist of music and art history Douglas Kahn

states:

“When one speaks, the act of hearing one’s voice is the most widespread private act performed in public and the most common public act experienced within the comfortable confines of one’s own body. Hearing one’s own voice almost always passes by unnoticed, but once acknowledged it presents itself as a closed system remaining within the experience of the individual.”7

As much as there is a private space between the individual and the piece, there is

also an element of public matter that is shared with people around the participant. As

the viewer participates, she is placing herself in the place of a performer. She has to

perform to speak into the microphone and mimic the sound that comes out of the

speaker. The viewer experiences the process of learning a language as awkwardness.

35

She sounds incorrect, regardless of her ability to communicate effectively.

Listening to their own voice played back with an accent, viewers are confronted

with statements, facts and testimonies associated with how language is used as a

political tool. This becomes the climax of the interaction between art and the

audience. According to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, art is not conceptual in itself

but rather an embodiment of sensation that stimulates thought. The “intelligence,” as

Deleuze puts it, “comes after,” not before.8 And he also claims that it is the senses that

“force us to look, encounters which forces to interpret, expressions which force us to

think.”9 However, in Making/Understanding Language, it is the testimonies and facts

displayed on the screen that lead them to thought and make them to think and further

be educated. What the viewer first understood as a game is in fact an interpreted form

of “real life” experienced by others. The process is different and not a direct transfer

of the lived experience, but the essence of the experience is captured, applied,

modified, and used to trick the audience and provoke similar emotions. Along these

lines, digital art transports feelings with space and time providing the experience of

immediacy.

The interactive aspect of digital art allows the subjective experience to be

reinterpreted and be experienced by others. The term “interactive” or the word

“interactivity” is a much-exploited term and with the turning of the new century, it

had become an increasingly meaningless technical word. The artist Andrea Zapp

makes the point that interaction now “codifies a post-modern aesthetic slogan, which

describes a technical condition as ‘dynamic hands-on-experience.”10 And it is argued

that it should be termed “reactive” or “responsive” instead of “interactive.” Unlike

paintings, photographs, sculptures or other art media, digital and performance art does

invite the audience to be part of the work by touching, speaking and playing with the

work. It accommodates the audience with a different degree of openness and it excites

the viewers with the element of cause and effect.

The phonograph changed the way we listen as it permanently captured sound.

Technology has changed the experience of experiencing the present.

Making/understanding language is not seeking for empathy as art’s “truest reason,”

but rather, as the American literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman argues: “Art expands

36

the sympathetic imagination while teaching us about the limits of sympathy.”11

Digital art does not assume that the audience participants have exactly the same

experience as those who experienced in real life, but attempts to create an experience

of assimilation of the other. This allows the opportunity for the viewer to understand

the relationship between themselves and the society they live in—the ever-revolving

door.

2. Performance art and Migratory Aesthetics

I have primarily discussed digital art and how it engages people and forces people

to think about the lived experience of others. Another form of interactive art is

performance art. I will address how performance art, like digital art, allows the

audience to be part of the work and how the audience sometimes becomes the

collaborator. As various audiences enter the interactive space, it becomes a different

space, and subsequently the creative process is repeated. For this reason, the

experience itself becomes the medium of the artwork itself.

According to the Futurists who systematically initiated performances that relied

upon direct interaction from their audiences, what performance art offered to the

artists as well as the audience is “in having no tradition, no masters, no dogma.” It

also explained “quickly and incisively,” to adults and children alike, the “most

abstruse problems and most complicated political events.”12 It is not restricted by a

certain space and therefore the work can be easily delivered to the public. It takes the

participants away from the high-art and brings them closer to their reality by using

everyday actions and familiar objects. It creates more intimacy between the work,

performer and the audience and sometimes the audience participants take the role of

artists. For these reasons, I found performance art to be a good vehicle to

communicate more intimate ideas.

In my performance work, Words Fail Me13, I attempt to create a language that

has no social, political or cultural associations. The performance expresses a highly

personal and nomadic search for a transcendental language. Words Fail Me uses black

and white video projection, torn papers, books and a performer singing. In the video

projection, a mouth of an unidentified person performs a song that is composed only

37

of interjections, filler words such as ‘hmm’ or ‘um’ that have no grammatical value

and vowel sounds that exist in every language. In front of the screen, I rip printed

materials amidst piles of already-scattered torn papers that create a landscape. The

song of filler words performed in conjunction with my ripping of printed materials is

a gesture of the refusal of communication through words. I also engage with the

audience, inviting them also to rip the papers.

At the end of the performance, I walk towards the audience, singing the last verse

and covering the mouth of an audience member, and then the performance ends. The

title of performance makes reference to Virginia Woolf’s audio document, A Eulogy

of Words, which considers the historical analysis and fate of the English language. In

it, she states: “words are full of echoes, memories, and associations.” This piece

attempts to communicate through the absence of words and their associations.

The artist Bruce Nauman states: “Process is more important than outcome. When

the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If

process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we

want to be there.”14 Words Fail Me does not didactically force the audience to think in

a certain way, but guides them through pathways leading to the search for a common

language. Performance art, despite often being a choreographed and staged act,

accommodates the improvised aspect of audience participation, which has the power

to change the outcome of the piece. Unlike Making/Understanding Language, Words

Fail Me also calls for group participation and becomes more of a social rather than

individual experience.

Words Fail Me approaches the concept of power and language indirectly. Instead

of providing the audience with testimonies and facts with a departure and an arrival

point, they are open-ended. Regardless of the time the audience enters the room, they

still can be part of the experience and the work. I did not use the idea of “being in

someone else’s shoes” when I conceptualized the works Words Fail Me. These pieces

are a means to be more inclusive and make relevant the subject matter to a broader

audience through the interaction itself. While merely looking at these works, one may

find it difficult to decipher this underlying concept; they are, however, both based on

the struggle experienced through migratory processes.

38

3. Conclusion

Art that deals with subjective experiences, especially of those who are minorities

or marginalized, may be viewed as being political or begging for empathy. I believe

that this view has emerged from art that does not appeal to a broader audience. Digital

art, in contrast, is a new medium, which we are still in the process of developing

descriptions in social, economic, and aesthetic respects, and may provide a means to

engage the public. While I am an artist of new media and a practitioner, I realize that

the field has shortcomings, as it is still an emergence technology. Due to the constant

evolution of new media, there is the danger that people might be more attracted by

what the technology can do rather than by the actual content of the work. Branches of

interactive digital art, including virtual reality, web based art, and technology-

augmented environment are challenging forms with which to reflect migratory

aesthetics as they struggle to achieve the kind of intimacy of real world interactions.

Nevertheless the performative potential of the field is exciting as it engages people in

new ways across physical and psychological spaces.

39

Bibliography

Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic Vision: affect, trauma, and contemporary art. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Collins, Randall. 2nd ed.1992. Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-obvious Sociology. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, 2000. Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, University of Minnesota Press.

Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Goldberg, RoseLee. 1988. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers.

Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. The MIT Press.

Bruce Mau, Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, 1998, viewed on 11 December 2009, <http://www.brucemaudesign.com/#112942>

Rush, Michael. 1999. New Media in late 20th-Century Art. London: Thames & Hudson.

Schmid, Carol. 2001. The Politics of Language: Conflict, Identity, and Cultural Pluralism in Comparative Perspective, Oxford University Press.

2002. Muntadas: On Translation, Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) Actar.

Zapp, Andrea. ed. 2004. A Fracture in Reality: Networked Narratives as Imaginary Fields of Action, Manchester:Nuruad/FACT.

40

Julia Creet (York University)

Migrations of the Arborescent: Digital Genealogy and the

Aesthetics of the Family Tree

Sigrid Weigel’s definition “the logic of language of lineage” is a useful place to start:

“genealogy is the history of the symbolic, iconographic and rhetorical practices, the

systems for recording and the techniques of culture through and in which the

knowledge of families, races and species or of the succession of life within time is

handed down” (Genealogy np).

Earnst Haeckel, “Pedigree of Man” 1877. The Evolution of Man: A Popular Exposition of the Principal Points of Human Ontogeny and Phylogeny. New York: Appleton & Co., 1897, Plate xv. In the image of

the family or

genealogical tree

she finds “an

imaginary

synthesis of the

multiple

dimensions,” a

“master trope and

pathos formula”

(np). For the

genealogical tree

is, as Sigrid

41

Weigel explains, “a system for recording . . . through which the knowledge of

families, races and species or the succession of life within time is handed down”

(Weigel np). Both Weigel and cultural anthropologist Mary Bouquet, in her lucid and

illuminating discussion of the “visual imperative of the genealogical diagram,”

provide a genealogy of the family tree from its sacred roots, through its secular

manifestations to its philosophical and scientific uses. As Bouquet writes, “The

process whereby pedigree and genealogy have become common currency, both within

commodity capitalism and anthropological discourse, tends to obscure the visual

origins and representational weight of these graphic conventions” (44). Weigel argues

that the origins of genealogy begin with the two trees of paradise, the Tree of

Knowledge and the Tree of Life: “The tasting of the fruit from the wrong tree

signifies the renunciation of immortality, but also the origin of all systems of kinship;

the Tree of Knowledge is as it were the first family tree, not because the original

parents ate from it, but because they began the project of propagation of the human

race in its shadow” (np). Tracked through the 19th century, the tree of knowledge and

the tree of life become explicitly overlayed in iconography that maps, as does

Haeckel’s tree [1887], the ancestry of man on to a tree of knowledge, becoming the

standard iconography for phylogeny (Bouquet 57). Twentieth century anthropology,

according to Bouquet, reified this taxonomic device into an idea of kinship that

illustrates relatedness based on a (European) naturalized iconography of the “tree-

imagery” as a “piece of visual equipment” (44). Though Bouquet’s account casts “the

genealogical diagram as quite literally a thing of the past” she sees its future in its

“assimilation into methodological routine.” Any number of critics have offered a

reading of the ideology of arborescence (Deleuze & Guattari, Bourdieu, McClintock,

Strathern), and while we might now intellectually eschew its easy taxonomy, the

popularity of the idea and the icon has never been more widespread. From the myths

of origins to the Garden of Eden to Christ (the “Jesse Tree”) to the theory of evolution

to a theory of the arbitrariness of signs (think Saussure’s “arbre”) to studies of

kinship, the tree’s iconographic and ideological malleability means that it has a

certain future, one recently evinced by a digital version of Haekel’s “Pedigree of

Man” created by European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), whose “global

evolutionary map reveals new insights into our last common ancestor,” a new tree of

life, “likely the most accurate ever”(Letunic & Bork).

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=378

42

http://itol.embl.de/itol.cgi (interactive tree of life tool)

The question that organizes this early portion of a much larger project on the

genealogy of genealogy (an investigation into the fantasmatic pursuit and commercial

exploitation of the “innate” need to know from whence we come), is how the

naturalized iconography of genealogy, “the family tree,” is migrating in a hyper-

digitized environment. Two forms of migration coincide in this discussion, the global

migration of populations, displacements that have led to a exponential growth in the

industry of popular genealogy—“tracing one’s roots”—made possible by the

migration of the genealogical research itself from churches and municipal archives to

the mass digitization of records accessed by powerful search engines. With these

migrations, the aesthetics and logics of an icon, one that comforts us with the notion

that we are engaged in the most natural of pursuits (even if only possible in the most

technological of environments), the “family tree” promises comfort and stability by

insisting that nothing at all has changed. The comfort of this familiar iconography is

one that reassures us of our place in time and space, even our participation in a chain

of mythic dimensions, reduced to the scale of personal pedigree. The reassuring

familiarity of the tree helps us with the assimilation of deep time, an icon that secures

us though “unimaginable lengths of time” (Bouquet 57), evolution for example. The

uneasy relationship between synchronic and diachronic representation, between

tableau and evolution, as Weigel puts it, “where the latest members share a space and

time with the earliest” give rise to the return of the popularity of the tree in 19th C

scientific taxonomies, “as a symbol of a (re-)naturalized conceptualization of history,

but also as a schema in which the dimensions of time and taxonomy were always

already in conjunction and conflict with each other” (np).

We might consider the digital revolution to be another turning point in the genealogy

of the genealogical tree, where the flattening and shortening of time and space

combined with exponential advances in the phylogenetic and human genetic mapping

have heightened our anxieties about location and about the significance of our brief

lives as “leaves [that] die and fall” as one Russian genealogical site puts it, (“Family

family tree”). What nature of reassurance, taxonomy, genealogy and ideology is

manifest in the contemporary aesthetic forms that now correspond to the idea of

genealogical tree?

43

The context into which the long aesthetic history of the family tree has migrated is

one in which the digitization of “tree of man” is driving and being driven by a

lucrative business underpinned by a profoundly conservative religious mission. The

Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS), based in Salt Lake City, Utah operates the

largest genealogical library in the world, while a commercial outgrowth Generations

Network (Ancestry.com), operates the largest worldwide genealogical and social

interaction website, built from LDS and government databases, and by subscribers

adding to their family trees. “The Church,” as its community of faith prefer to be

called, began collecting family records in 1894 to assist its members with their

scriptural responsibility to seek after their dead, to be blessed and “sealed” for eternity

to a family traced back to Adam and Eve. This “lust for family” became, eventually,

as historian Donald Akenson put it, “one of the world’s best reference libraries and

humanity’s most ambitious attempt to narrate its collective story” (57, 64).

Concomitantly, the LDS were early adopters of microfilm technology in the 1930s

and bought their first computer in1961, recognizing that it would revolutionize

genealogical record keeping. Volunteer researchers of any faith and ethnicity,

including large numbers of Jewish family researchers looking for families and

genealogies wiped out by the Holocaust, were encouraged to contribute to the

international database through the “Extraction Program.” Scandal erupted when

Jewish contributors found their ancestors were being posthumously “baptized” by

proxy by church “Saints” (“A chronicle of the Mormon/Jewish controversy”). This

information, gathered and disseminated by over 4,500 non-profit, public-access

family history centres in more than 70 countries and online via the “Family Search”

site, which now contains more than 750 million names from 110 countries, is crucial

to the Church’s mission to create an accurate genealogical tree of the entire human

race. Its commercial offshoot (The Church encourages commerce, though its progeny,

The Generations Network, promptly privatized the Church’s databases) also offers a

genetic product suite with the intent, as CEO Timothy Sullivan declares, “to build the

world's largest database of genetic genealogy results” (“Ancestry.com Invests in

Future” np.). A competitor, Family Genetics, already claims to possess “the world’s

largest genetically beaded genealogical database” (Nash 2), and David Sacks, CEO of

Geni.com—“everyone’s related”—formerly CEO of Pay Pal, trumpets an even

grander ambition: “Geni is creating a family tree of the whole world, and layering in a

44

family social network and family wiki on top of that. We want to become a place to

connect and preserve the family” (“Interview with David Sacks” np). We have here

an example of “hypermemory” (Creet) expanding “into an increasingly empty

referent” (Hoffman 177). As Steven Pinker explains, “Genealogists call this ‘pedigree

collapse’: the necessity that as you trace your family tree backward, it will fan out for

a number of generations until it begins to encompass most of the people in the

available population, whereupon it falls back on itself, coinciding with the original

growth of that population” (3).

Nonetheless, Ancestry.com explains the scope of their success.

Over the past three years, our registered users have created over 11 million family trees containing more than 1.1 billion profiles. They have uploaded and attached to their trees over 22 million photographs, scanned documents, written stories and audio clips. This growing pool of user-generated content adds color and context to the family histories assembled from the digitized historical documents found on Ancestry.com. Our subscribers also have attached to their trees over 273 million records from our company-acquired content collection, a process that is helping further organize this collection by associating specific records with people in family trees.”(“Ancestry.com - About Ancestry.com”)

Ancestry.ca keeps a running total of the numbers of contributions on a weekly basis.

For the week leading up to January 31, 13,806,630 people added to family trees,

28,907 family stories were submitted, and 301,098 photos uploaded. In year since I

started this research, Ancestry.com claims that its records have grown from six to

eight billion records, mostly fed by digitization agreements with government

databases. But the devil is in the details.

By submitting material to Ancestry.ca, you grant Ancestry a perpetual, irrevocable licence to use, host and provide access to such material, allow hosting and access on co-branded services to that material, and to use the data contained in that material as search results and to integrate that data into the Service as it deems appropriate. You shall have no claim or other recourse against us for infringement of any proprietary right in User Provided Content. (“Terms and Conditions-Ancestry.ca” np).

In the course of building their family trees, genealogists and family historians also

build the larger forest signing away any rights to personal information they enter into

the database. So, while genealogy was once a private family pursuit of pedigree, it has

45

now turned into a

global personal

positioning device,

one presided over

by an enduring

sign combined

with powerful new technologies that coordinate access to exponentially growing

databases, which, in the end, serve commercial interests and the privatization of

information as much as drive to know our “roots.” What we might find most

interesting here is the aesthetic relationship between the hyper-technology of current

genealogical pursuits and the simplification of the iconography, a divergence between

icon and technology that charts a new manifestation of the family tree.

Take for example, this offer from “Arbor Arts,” a company that offers customized

illustrations of your family tree. “Share the discoveries of your ancestral past by

preserving your lineage on the welcoming branches of the most sacred of all trees—

the cedar tree.” “Through our artist’s interpretation of this time-honored tree, each

family member holds a special place on the steady branches of this large perennial,

which legend tells was coined the “tree of life” by the world’s earliest inhabitants for

its endless supply of wood and spiritual powers” (“ArborArts.com”).

We might be tempted to dismiss both the imagery and the sales pitch as nothing but

pathos and pathetic fallacy reduced to kitsch and purple prose; however, when we

consider this image and any number of

contemporary variations as the latest

migration of a visual metaphor this

old, we begin to understand that no

cultural critique is likely to curb the

power of its appeal.

Here are the graphics for a full-page

ad on the back of Canada’s largest

newspaper, The Globe and Mail, on

46

the inaugural “Family Day” in Ontario, first observed February 18, 2008. Here we

have the schematic and the naturalized icon encouraged by the political, commercial

and religious interests that promote a focus on blood family, identity—and difference

as human geographer Susan Nash has cogently observed, given the need of many

North American descendants of European immigrants to assert their cultural

distinctiveness in a discourse of multiculturalism (“Genealogical Identities” 36).

These images are the friendly front for something far more extensive. While the

project of the most ambitious genealogical sites is nothing short of the mapping of the

genealogy of the world, a project which is anything but neat, the contemporary

aesthetics of the family tree demand a simplified and symmetrical layout.

As the media of drawing family trees have changed, paint, canvas, pencil and paper

taped together supplanted by digital schemata, as mass market reproductions have

replaced the individual artistry of a pedigree, the shape of family trees has changed.

No longer do trees have branches that dwindle, or are hacked off (Bouquet provides a

detailed description of the dead ends that characterize Bendorp’s trees of Christ’s

earthly ancestry); no longer do trees depict the necessity of death to the to the

continuity of life (see the figure of death at the heart of John Goddard’s 17th Century

“The Tree of Man’s Life”). No longer are trees knotted, gnarled, severed, split,

stunted or otherwise naturally observed. Contemporary family trees have taken their

substance from the 19th century when, as Weigel observes of the Genealogical tree of

the Dubois family “with the aid of the new medium of photography and its utilisation

in family research, genealogy became a residual site of pre-modern figures of

knowledge in the heart of modernity. The use of portrait photographs in family

research marks a trace of the older notion of resemblance in a historical constellation

in which the transformation of genealogy into a science is accompanied by an

increasing domination of diagrammatic cultural techniques and encoded symbolic

systems.” (Weigel np).

47

Genealogical tree of the Dubois family,

(1883) in Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de

Mémoires III (18).

We have in some respects turned

another leaf (it becomes difficult to

resist the proliferation of the metaphor)

in which 19th century scientific

models, which drew their metaphors

from naturalized forms of

arborescence, with “man” always top

and bottom, have given way to cultural

critiques only to be remounted as a new

“transitional site between technical and

rhetorical knowledge” (Weigel np), one

which locates the individual in an ever-

increasing and unstable web of

diagrammatic relations with a

simplified form of permanence. No longer trees that embrace the asymmetry of actual

families, contemporary family trees have been

sanitized and systematized into a schematics that seems to have very little to do with

the messiness of life, death, actual families and procreation.

Here, for example, is a five generation chart (for President George W. Bush),

organized as are almost all contemporary trees as an descending personal genealogical

tree,

48

which maps onto a perfectly symmetrical arbour.

These simplified schema both model ideal families and obscure an vast ideological

and technological game of global positioning and historical imagination that has only

the thinnest of links to anything biological. Eviatar Zerubavel, in his lucid account of

how we map time and collective memory, points out that “social conventions. . .often

dictate how many degrees of collateral consanguinity would still qualify people as

one’s ‘relatives’” (67). Medieval genealogies were used to measure social distance to

determine the possibility of marriage, but time itself becomes the measure of social

49

distance where lineages diverge. In spite of the obvious limitations of genetics as a

measure of decent and modern familial relations (adoption, blended families, sperm

donation, “chosen” families cannot be easily accommodated), contemporary

narratives of blood and belonging flatten time in order to bring branches back into

proximity. We are lonely it seems and need the proximity of ancestors.

Let me draw two best-selling genealogical software sites to illustrate how the

new dimensions of family trees serve to flatten time, space and proximity.

LegacyFamilyTree.com

uses the tree-form genealogical chart as an immediate aesthetic lightening rod of

connectedness, where the ancestors stream out of the sky, a direct line to something

holy, be it God or a direct line to Jesus or Adam (or even the inadvertent suggestion

of a menorah). The naturalized, technological and the schematic are fused in the

online video tutorials for these sophisticated mapping tools whose sole purpose is to

create more and more extensive trees.

50

The opening sequence of OneGreatFamily.com shows the hypothetical family trees of

four people whose trees merge before our eyes into “one great family tree.”

http://www.onegreatfamily.com/LearningCenter/genealogy-learning-center.htm

which might well lead you—rhizomatically—back to Ceasar, or some other famous

figure who can provide a pedigree in a post-pedigree world. Easy, says Pinker, as

shooting ancestors in a barrel.

51

This new iconography of genealogy has introduced motility to the idea/icon of the

tree, where, paradoxically, the tree is both a locating device and a map to somewhere

else, at once descending and ascending. Creating a tree with these software suites

provides access to an (imaginary) past that is entirely accessible in the present (no

foreign country here), illustrated in full flight in one of Legacy 7.0’s special features,

a derivative of GPS and Google Earth technology that provides users who pinpoint

the homes of progenitors with a bird’s eye view of the lands of their ancestors. Except

that the land is land of today, a suburb complete with trees that will one day be

chopped down or die, but still provide a place for the migrating soul to roost.

52

In conclusion, which can never be a conclusion, but only a rhizome of a larger

argument, a quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s introduction to Thousand Plateaus is

apt, though redolent of a moment that recedes in the face of a new arborescence.

“We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots and radicles. They have

made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology

to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems

and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes. Amsterdam, a rhizome-city with

its stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest folly in relation to a

commercial war machine” (15).

53

Citations

“A chronicle of the Mormon/Jewish controversy.” 28 Nov 2008. Web. Akenson, Donald. Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of

Itself. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. Print. “Ancestry.com - About Ancestry.com.” Web. 29 Jan 2010. “Ancestry.com Invests in Future of Genetic Genealogy by Offering DNA Testing f or Only $79.” 27 Jan 2009. Web. Bouquet, Mary. “Family trees and their affinities: the visual imperative of the

genealogical diagram.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1996): 43-66. Print.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Print. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.

Univ of Minnesota Pr, 1987. Print. “Family family tree.” Web. 31 Jan 2010. “Interview with David Sacks, Geni and Yammer.” 30 Sep 2008. Web. Letunic, Ivica, and Peer Bork. “Interactive Tree Of Life (iTOL): an online tool for

phylogenetic tree display and annotation.” Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) 23.1 (2007): 127-128. NCBI PubMed. Web. 31 Jan 2010.

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial

Contest. 1st ed. Routledge, 1995. Print. Nash, Catherine. “Genetic kinship.” Cultural Studies 18.1 (2004): 1-34. Print. Pinker, Steven. “The Genealogy Craze in America: Strangled by Roots.” The New

Republic (2007). Web. Strathern, Marilyn. Kinship, law and the unexpected. Cambridge University Press,

2005. Print. “Terms and Conditions-Ancestry.ca.” Web. 29 Jan 2010. Weigel, Sigrid. “Genealogy - On the iconography and rhetorics of an epistemological

topos.” Web. 28 Jan 2010. “Welcome | ArborArts.com.” Web. 1 Feb 2010. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past.

University Of Chicago Press, 2004. Web.

54

Panel 3 (Tuesday, March 23rd

, 11:30-13:30)

Sonia Weiner

Mayy Hassan

Heike Endter!!

"#$%&!'()*+$

!

55

Sonia Weiner (Tel Aviv University)

The Lazarus Project

Aleksandar Hemon's latest novel, The Lazarus Project (2008), is a verbal and visual

articulation of migratory aesthetics, featuring both narrative and photography. By

inserting photographic imagery into his verbal narrative, Hemon introduces rupture,

and simultaneously inaugurates a dual – visual and verbal – storyline. The rupture,

disjunction and temporariness which lie at the heart of migratory aesthetics are further

explored by Hemon thru the introduction of a split time frame, of past (early 20th

century) and present (post 9/11). By introducing two time frames, Hemon facilitates

the contemplation of issues seminal to the migratory consciousness, such as memory

and loss, difference and similarity, and the ever elusive question of what constitutes

home, both geographically, culturally and linguistically. Subsumed within this

fractured time frame is a traversing of the boundaries of fact and fiction, as Hemon

blends historical anecdote with fictional accounts, thereby revealing the

constructedness of narratives as well as of the stereotypes they breed. The duality

apparent in the structure of the novel (verbal/visual; past/present; fact/fiction) eclipses

the novel in its entirety, as the assortment of characters populating it are doubled and

mirrored in the variety of media, in the different time schemes and in the historical

realms.

Primarily, Hemon creates a parallel between himself and his narrator, Vladimir Brik.

Both are natives of Sarajevo; both were stranded in America when war broke out

between Bosnia and Serbia; both worked as teachers of English to foreign students

and wrote a column in a local paper (committing linguistic acrobatics with the English

language that only a non-native speaker could conjure up and which this paper does

not have time to fully address); both marry American women and live in Chicago. Yet

most pertinently, in a meta-fictional twist, both author and narrator are researching

and writing a story about one Lazarus Averbuch, an early twentieth century

immigrant to Chicago. The novel revolves around Brik's reception of a grant which

enables him to travel to Europe to research the book he will write on Lazarus

(paralleling Hemon's reception of the MacArthur fellowship to which he is indebted

for writing the book). Yet, while the bulk of the book deals with Brik's research

towards writing it, we are in fact already reading the very book that he allegedly seeks

56

to write. While authors often interject their persona into their fictional characters, in

this case, the phenomenon is taken to an extreme, collapsing the flesh-and-blood

author into his fictional narrator, which suggests a fractured consciousness on the part

of the author; his ability to imagine himself as other, as the Other.

The meta-fictional query, the story-about-writing-a-story, goes to the very heart of

storytelling, a theme that permeates the novel, as Brik tries to get to the core of what

constitutes a good story. Unlike Americans, who crave truthfulness when they tell or

listen to a story, Brik adheres to the Bosnian way of storytelling, which values a story

based on its ability to fascinate and on its loyalty to its own inner logic: "Disbelief

was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the

pleasure of being in the story" (102-3). Brik's tense relationship with his wife is

illustrated through her inability to understand a story he is telling about the mating

habits of bunnies on the two sides of the Berlin wall. Her comment, "I find that hard

to believe" (104), shatters his story while keeps the wall between them intact; it also

demonstrates that the success of a story also has a lot to do with the audience's

willingness to believe. These self-reflexive issues draw attention to the narrative we

are reading, raising questions pertaining to the truths it seeks to establish,

problematizing the notion of Truth as such, and replacing it with a plurality of truths.

Secondly, Hemon establishes a parallel between his fictional narrator (and inevitably

himself) and the historical figure Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant to Chicago

in the early twentieth century. Both characters find themselves in Chicago as a result

of violent conflicts in Europe, and both characters, in varying degrees, face the

complications of being foreigners in a strange land. Lazarus arrives in America

following the violent pogrom against Jews in Kishinev (1903), where he joins his

sister in Chicago. On March 2, 1908, for reasons unknown to this day, Lazarus

arrived at the home of George Shippy, the Chief of Police of the city. Identified by

Shippy as a foreigner, a term that was practically synonymous with 'dangerous

anarchist', Lazarus was fatally shot by him. Police reports supported the notion that

Shippy acted in self-defense, resisting an attack by Lazarus. Hemon utilizes this point

to illustrate the ease with which facts and evidence can be misconstrued and misused

to yield the desired results. Although never fully proven, current research supports the

notion that Lazarus Averbuch was the innocent victim of Chicago’s – and America’s

57

– deep seated xenophobia.

The present day Brik "identifies easily with [the] travails" of the early twentieth

century immigrant, i.e., "lousy jobs, lousier tenements, the acquisition of language,

the logistics of survival, the ennoblement of self-fashioning…" (41). The immigrant

narrative trajectory – displacement, travails, redemption, and success – remains

incomplete in Brik's case, as success is continuously suspended. He is also acutely

aware that following the 9/11 attacks in New York, xenophobia raised its ugly head

yet again: "the war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror – funny

how old habits never die. The immigration laws were changed; suspected anarchists

were persecuted and deported; scientific studies on degeneracy and criminality of

certain racial groups abounded" (42). His critique is crystal clear when he describes

the mentally unstable he sees in the streets, who after 9/11 are as patriotic as everyone

else, and stick little flags in their matter hair. One man had pasted the sticker

UNITED WE STAND on his forehead, and Brik wryly observes that "his multiple

personalities [were] united for the war on terror. Belief and delusion are incestuous

siblings" (40). Brik further relates to the pointless death of a Bosnian immigrant,

Ismet, who was shot because he was perceived as dangerous when he failed to adhere

to warnings to stop smoking on a non-smoking patio of a Starbucks in San Francisco.

By employing characters that hail from a variety of religious and ethnic

denominations, Hemon criticizes hatred towards 'the other' in general, and undermines

the stereotypes that crop up around the various different groups. The Jew, Lazarus,

and the Muslim, Ismet, died for the same reasons, which had nothing to do with them

personally, and everything to do with the American psyche, or as Hemon puts it, with

"the sumptuous palate of American fears" (47).

To further illustrate the parallel between Brik and Lazarus and the worlds they

inhabit, their two storylines appear in alternating chapters, implying both a cyclicity

of history, while revealing that the underlying narratives out of which their history is

constructed are shaped by fear and misunderstanding of the other. In 1908 Lazarus

was a perceived as a dangerous anarchist whose death had the power to affect an

entire city; today he is deemed an innocent victim, a mere anecdote in American

history. As the chapters progress, a slippage between the neat division of storylines

occurs; we find Lazarus infiltrating into the Brik chapters, determining his

58

movements and coloring his consciousness. This transpires while Brik enacts a return

journey to the 'old world', ostensibly seeking for some clues about Lazarus's origin,

but in fact, seeking for some clues of his own. Brik is the perpetual migrant, the

eternal transient, always adrift, seeking for a sense of self, of home, of recognition, of

belonging. While he has an American passport as well as an American wife, Brik is

never really at home in America, musing that "Home is where somebody notices

when you are no longer there" (3). He develops a double-consciousness, learning how

to make the most of being a Bosnian in America, and of being an American in

Europe; his identity is contextual, and shifts in accordance. And yet he never seems to

fit anywhere; he seems too Bosnian to his American friends and too American to his

Bosnian friends; he always feels slightly 'off tune' and out of sync with the rest of the

world.

In Europe, rather than finding clues to Lazarus's past which could unlock some of the

mysteries surrounding his life and death, Brik encounters a post-Soviet landscape in

the throes of a radical make-over, where Madonna can sing in Ukrainian and a Ford

Focus can mutate into a 'Ford Feces'. This bleak landscape can offer no 'authentic' or

reliable traces of former lives, neither of Lazarus's nor of Brik's. The material

evidence no longer exists; the histories are written or narrated by people who are

removed from the events; they are presented as empty words at the best, and parody at

the worst. In a shrewd metaphor, Hemon posits that "concrete history" can often be

just that, not the actual Berlin wall, but merely a piece of concrete sprayed with paint,

passing as the real thing (22). Following Brik's reverse journey into what is no longer

the 'old world', the reader is permeated by a continual and overpowering sense of loss

– of a past, of home, of self – and becomes aware of the tentative, temporary and

transient nature of existence itself. Brik asks, "Where can you go from nowhere,

except deeper into to nowhere?" (178 ).

The sense of loss and of temporariness is further enhanced by the use of the

photographic medium, which constitutes a key element in the articulation of

migratory aesthetics insofar as it intensifies the sense of loss, the lack of permanence,

the disruption of time and most poignantly, introduces the notion rupture.

Photographs attempt to capture time, to hold on to a past moment; their quality of

being frozen in time often grants them a sense of permanence, of stability. Drawing

59

upon Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, I would argue that photographs often achieve

just the opposite. Barthes regards photographs as potential instances of rupture, or in

his terms, "punctum." A punctum is the visceral affect a photograph has the power to

cause its viewer: "that accident which pricks me but also bruises me, is poignant to

me” (27).1 It is non-voluntary and highly individual, and most affective when relating

to time (as opposed to detail). Barthes regards the photographic reference as the

founding order of photography, recognizing therein that every photograph represents

something that-has-been, a moment that has already been deferred, and hence, is by

definition an articulation of loss. When confronted with a photographic image, the

viewer has the potential to be ruptured by the realization that the photograph most

profoundly represents "a superimposition… of reality and of the past," creating a

'vertigo of time defeated' (97), a sense of distorted, condensed time, which rather than

granting us the past, reflects back onto the present, announcing 'an anterior future',

one that is saturated with loss, which in its ultimate condition, is death. Therefore,

whether depicting the dead or the living, an object or a landscape, photographs allude

to and are intimately connected to loss, to an irretrievable past, and ultimately, to the

recognition of the inevitability of death (96) – as the character of the photographer in

the novel says, "Anybody who has ever been photographed is either dead or will

die… I want to stay on this side of the picture" (189).

If photographs by definition articulate rupture and loss, these elements are further

enhanced by the content of the photographs in the novel. Each of the twenty-two

chapters begins with a full page photograph, demanding to be looked at, rupturing the

flow of the narrative and arresting the gaze of the viewer, who often struggles to find

the connection between the image and the chapter it heads.2 By isolating a single

moment and making it available to continuous scrutiny, a photograph can yield

insights not visible to the naked eye. Walter Benjamin termed this ability of

photographs to evoke a hidden realm the "optical unconscious", and regarded it as "a

space held together unconsciously," thereby granting it a psychological dimension.3

The optical unconscious of a photograph owes its existence not only to the

mechanical apparatus that created it, but also to the psyche that shaped it and to the

consciousness which perceives it. It is this realm that we access when looking closely

at the photographs.

60

The chapters that narrate the life and death of Lazarus feature photographs from the

Chicago Historical Society, taken circa 1908. These images include photographs of

the 'scene of the crime', of dead Lazarus looking ominously alive, of his sister Olga

and of the Jewish ghetto in Chicago, to mention but a few. On a surface level they

seem to authenticate the historical reality of the story, yet within the framework of the

narrative they signify more suggestively, as I will illustrate below.

The chapters narrating Brik's story feature contemporary photographs 'documenting'

his journey through Eastern Europe. These images were photographed by Hemon's

friend, Velibor Bozovic, himself a former Bosnian, yet the narrative conflates the

real-life photographer with the fictional one, Ahmed Rora, who is Brik's travel

companion on his journey. Rora is a major presence in the work, another doubling

character to Brik. He is also a native of Sarajevo, yet unlike Brik who is the ancestor

of Christian peasants from the Ukraine, Rora is the descendent of sophisticated

Muslim merchants from the 'old town', the Carsija. Rora loves not only to take

pictures (his camera was "the seat of his soul," 177), but also to tell tall tales that both

captivate Brik and end up in his book, creating a sub-plot consisting of Rora's war

stories which are neatly woven into the fabric of the narrative (Rora's stories actually

include a Bosnian Rambo as well as a host of characters that go by the same names as

characters in the Lazarus chapters, further conflating time and circumstance). Brik is

utterly seduced by the stories, yet seems to forget the Bosnian rules of storytelling

(which Rora has perfected to an art) and takes them like an American, at face value

(which causes some surprise and unpleasantness for Brik). Brik brought Rora along so

as to create a visual dimension that his narration cannot articulate, while Rora, the

photographer, is not satisfied with images alone, and is dependent upon Brik to give

voice to his stories. At one point, in a reversal of roles, when Brik suggests Rora write

down his war stories, Rora says to him, "That's what I have you for. That's why I

brought you along" (84). This exchange not only presupposes the failure of any media

to fully represent a situation, it actually calls for a plurality of ways of seeing, of

articulating, in order to gain a fuller picture. As such, it reflects the split or fractured

consciousness of the author, of the migrant, which rather than detracting from

comprehension, enhances it: the fractured consciousness need not be a liability, it can

be turned into an advantage.

61

The images create a sub-text or a counter-narrative, which can reinforce, undermine

or enhance meaning. Bozovic's (or Rora's) photographs, like those of the Chicago

Historical Society, are black-and-white, and at times it is difficult to distinguish

between the two types of photographs (paralleling the slippage between the two

different narratives), especially when Rora photographs actors in nineteenth century

garb or decaying tombstones in a Jewish cemetery in Moldova. This underlines the

similarities between the events, the characters and the conditions they experience. The

majority of Bozovic's photos have a hazy, blurry, vague look to them. To achieve this,

he uses techniques such as long exposure which erases objects, leaving only a ghostly

trace of their presence, and takes photographs while in motion, causing the landscape

to appear smudged, distorted and blurry. As a result the photographs exude a haunting

sense of absence and an aura of transience. This fits with Bozovic's claim that "what

interests and attracts me is what is not in the photograph – the absence that the

photograph signifies."4 Also absent from his repertoire of images are what we expect

cities such Lviv and Chernivtsi to look like, based on the vivid narrative descriptions

Brik provides of these cities. Most of the photographs that Brik describes Rora

shooting are also absent, and we are left to visualize them ourselves, based on their

prose descriptions. The photographs displayed do not give us much information or

detail; rather they reinforce the sense of transience, of dislocation, alienation and

displacement.

The photographs heading the historical chapters include images of people who are no

longer alive, such as Lazarus's sister Olga (who returned to Europe where she

perished in the Holocaust) and friend Isidor, interrogated by the police for being an

anarchist. The viewer is primarily struck by the discrepancy between the way s/he

expects the characters to look (based on their depiction in the verbal narrative and

based on our personal expectations), and the way they actually look. The stereotypes

we may expect do not appear, nor do Hemon's victimized renditions of Olga and

others. Rather, we see well dressed, defiant and composed portraits of people who

look dignified, not dangerous or shabby. The stereotypes are deflated, and the viewer

must reckon with his expectations, and is urged to implement his understandings in

his contemporary thinking on stereotypes. Additionally, Hemon allows his narrative

and the images to clash at times, which fits in with his belief in the plurality of truths,

and in his understanding of the power of the word to distort (as discussed in relation

62

to storytelling). The viewer also understands that while these people look alive, young

and vibrant, they are already dead; they engage us with their gaze, but they no longer

exist. This realization brings home the punctum most fully: through their quality of

'having-been-there', with the understanding that they actually are no longer there, the

transience of time and the idea of loss is perceived.

The most startling image, however, is that of Lazarus in the fifth chapter. Looking at

the image, we see a standing man wearing a black hat, black overcoat and bow tie. He

has a Vandyke like beard. His eyes are penetrating the camera's gaze, his look is

triumphant. His right hand is clasping the chin of a man seated before him; his left

hand is resting on his head. The sitting man is wearing a suit, but, it would seem, no

shirt. His hands are folded in his lap, his right hand placed on his left wrist. The hands

are limp-like. He is kind of slouched in the chair. His hair is fair and short. His eyes

are closed. Gazing at this still image for several moments, we realize with a shudder

that the sitting man is dead. Written on the photograph in white letters are the words,

"Capt. Evans Police Dept" (next to the standing man) and "Lazarus Averbuch" (next

to the sitting man). Unlike the contemporary images, which allude to loss and death,

this image places them square in our face, and our collective breath is taken away. We

are shocked not only by the sight of death made literal, not only by the fragility and

vulnerability of the dead man, but also by the triumphant expression on the face of

Captain Evans. The death of Lazarus makes concrete the connection between

photography and loss, death; time is condensed, collapsed as we are both present in

the here and now, and also submerged in the past, a past that threatens to spill over

into the present (as it is a harbinger of loss, and inevitably, of death), much in the

same way that xenophobia has spilled over into the present.

In a strange twist, the representation of Lazarus's death is also his resurrection. The

historical Lazarus Averbuch, lost in oblivion, returns to contemporary consciousness

through Hemon's literary resurrection, and through his photographic re-exposure to

the light of the twenty-first century. Hemon questions the ethical act of the biblical

resurrection, wondering whether it was for the benefit of Lazarus that he was

summoned back, or for that of Christ; perhaps, he suggests, Lazarus was merely "the

white rabbit in Mr. Christ's magic show"(76). This seems to be Hemon's self-reflexive

pondering on his own interest in Lazarus: was it personal or merely instrumental?

63

Hemon also manages a wink at his own expense, as he likens himself to a modern day

Christ, while simultaneously critiques the hubris and sense of potency that comes

along with literary success/celebrity status.

Finally, Lazarus's resurrection seems to be a return of the dead, a return of the

repressed history of American xenophobia. Emma Lazarus may have written these

words engraved in stone under the statue of liberty, but they continue to remain a

false promise for many: Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses

yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the

homeless, tempest-tossed to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" (The New

Colossus).

64

Mayy Hassan (The Arab Academy for Science)

Articulating the Future: Poetics of Transcultural Agency in

the Poetry of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart or whether we commit ourselves to an effort, a sustained effort to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children and to respect the dignity of all human beings. (Barack Obama)

In a post-postmodern1 world void of exclusive identities, limited localities or

hindering cultural borders, and in a period of "increasing globalization, the rapid

creation of multinationals, massive flows of transmigration, and border crossing,"

(Bhatia and Ram 2), the future of mankind should be envisioned as a shared mission

accomplished only through negotiation and reconciliation of contradictory cultural

experiences. Yet, to move beyond the entrenched boundaries of national space still

requires a considerable leap of the imagination – a leap that transgresses the narrow

borders of place, time and identity. Investigating such alternative imagination – which

recognizes the dramatic change in the politics of place, understands how there has

been both merged and emerged in the characterization of here (Zhang 69), views the

future as a transcultural treaty that needs to be peacefully negotiated, accepts the

limitless boundaries of self-consciousness, and perceives the potentials inherent in the

complex interaction and interruption of the other – is the main aim of this paper.

Nietzsche's description of the modern era as "the Age of Comparison" (33) – an

era in which the various cultures of the world were beginning to interpenetrate each

other," and "ideas of every culture would be side by side, in combination, comparison,

contradiction and competition in every place and all the time" – provides the

grounding principle for transcultural agency (Beck 19). Transculturality, according to

Mary Louise Pratt, is "a phenomenon of the contact zone2; it differs from concepts

like acculturation and assimilation in that it emphasizes activity and creativity in

contact situations" (36). Based on Homi Bhabha's notion of hybridity and the in-

between, James Clifford's trope of the traveller, Mary Pratt's transcultural techniques

of the contact zone, and Kevin Robins's conception of transcultural diversities, culture

can no longer be perceived as a stable, homogeneous or delimited phenomenon

dependent on national monologue. In a globalized translocal mode of living and

65

belonging, culture should be perceived as a universal contract negotiated through a

comprehensive dialogic agenda that not only accepts the otherness of the other but

also allows human beings to dwell in-between cultures, unshackled by the bonds of

belonging, yet bound up with an obligation to create a better future. Tracing the

poetics of transcultural agency in the poetry of the two Nobel Laureates, Derek

Walcott (1930 - ) and Seamus Heaney (1939- ) is an attempt to explore the

emergence of a new terrain of cultural debate established on the principle of culture-

as-creativity, rather than simply culture-as-belonging. In his book Poetry and

Displacement, Stan Smith writes:

Throughout both Heaney's and Walcott's work, language is not just a transparent window of communication but a dense material practice, where words and even syntax inscribe within themselves whole histories of social struggle, of oppression and resistance. (128)

No matter how far is Walcott's Caribbean island from Heaney's Irish family farm,

both poets were born into a world shackled with the chains of colonization, tortured

with historical burdens, shattered with sectarian and racial prejudices, and plagued

with national schizophrenia. Belonging to a polyglot world dominated by imported

races, wounded with the white and black muddle in his own veins, torn between his

European and African inheritances, traumatized with a legacy of enslavement,

Walcott has always felt entrapped in a weightless area between conflicting worlds

each demanding full loyalty. Heaney, on the other hand, felt estranged from his

society as he was a Northern Irish Catholic in a Protestant society suffering the

tension between Nationalists and Unionists – the first dreaming of liberty and the

latter defending British colonization. His feelings of alienation have also been

aggravated due to his poetic ventures, which constituted a betrayal of the tribal legacy

of silence.

In an attempt to face the difficulty of living in or in between various cultural

realms, to re-read history and articulate the future away from national bias and racial

stereotypes, to apprehend the potentials of dwelling within a transcultural context

which forcefully dilates all the circles of self-consciousness, both Walcott and Heaney

had to embark on a lifelong journey starting from reactionary traditionalism, passing

through alienating hybridity, and finally reaching transcultural agency. Sharing the

torments of choosing between no choices, and the desire to have a unified national

66

identity purified from the mutilating forces of colonization, both poets started their

career with the conviction that cultural in-betweenness is an agonizing trauma that

can only be resolved through "rigidification of indigenous tradition" – purifying it

from "anything that seems to make it weak" (Hogan 11-12) in the face of the hostland

culture.

Walcott's persona in “A Far Cry from Africa”, which was published in his volume

In a Green Night (1962), is a racially mixed outsider who seeks to identify his role in

the epic of the victimizers' outrageous victories, or in the tragedy of the victims'

heartbreaking defeats:

The gorilla wrestles with the superman. I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? (25-32)

Obliged to choose between divided loyalties or psychic amputation, Walcott feels

forced to accept an in-between situation. As the final word of the poem indicates:

"How can I turn from Africa and live?" (33), Walcott's temporary choice is to live

torn between the two worlds belonging fully to neither.

In "Digging", "the best known poem of his first book, Death of a Naturalist

(1966)" (Keen 10), Heaney resorts to pastoral nostalgia for addressing the trauma of

divided loyalties and amalgamated roots. Digging can retrieve stable national origins

which have been safely kept in the Irish soil, and can simultaneously purify the Irish

reality from the severing forces of colonial legacy, sectarian violence and

acculturation:

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravely ground:

My father, digging. I look down (1-5)

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Caught "in a genealogy of manual labour;" Heaney "will 'dig' with his pen and his

alter ego will imaginatively 'follow into the mud'" (Annwn 89): “Between my finger

and my thumb / The squat pen rests./ I'll dig with it” (29-31). Recovering the layers of

the past, however, cannot resolve Heaney’s dilemma. Paradoxically, digging is both

constructive and destructive; "it is both an act that bonds the generations as well as an

act that severs 'living roots'" (Molino 9). The recovered past is charged with the

tragedies of battles fought, lives lost and tortures endured; a legacy that rips rather

than links. Art, as a means of self articulation and cultural definition, turns into

betrayal of communal ethics and sinful withdrawal from defending the national cause.

Thus, Heaney remains sceptical of his national role, distrustful of his art, and

conscious of his fate as a domestic exile.

In the second phase of their literary career, when they had to leave their

homelands in search for better social or political circumstances, Walcott's and

Heaney's relations with their homelands became much more agitated. Instead of

purifying indigenous culture, the two poets felt estranged from both homeland and

hostland traditions. The genetically-poisoned artist of "A Far Cry from Africa", who

can neither consolidate his contradictory allegiances nor amputate his amalgamated

roots, gives way in "Homecoming: Anse La Raye" – published in The Gulf in 1969 –

to the Odyssean traveller who painfully discovers on returning home that he has

become an alien castaway, separated from his countrymen and isolated from native

traditions:

for once, like them

you wanted no career

but this sheer light, this clear

infinite, boring, paradisal sea,

but hoped it would mean something to declare

today, I am your poet, yours,

all this you knew,

but never guessed you'd come

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to know there are homecomings without home. (32-40)

The same feelings of alienating hybridity, communal detachment and artistic

frustration are echoed in Heaney's poem "The Tollund Man" which was published in

Wintering Out (1972). For Heaney the Tollund Man is another victim of cruelty

preserved by nature for thousands of years to stand for the victims of violence in all

countries throughout ages. Positing "a still operative psychic continuity between the

sacrificial practices of an Iron Age" (Lloyd 330) and the "bankrupt psychology of the

Irishmen and Ulstermen who do the killing" (Heaney, "Feeling" 57), Heaney

embodies the endless anguish of belonging to a homeland feeding upon its own men,

and the severe torments of feeling obliged to write poetry supporting violence or else

condemned as a traitor to national cause:

Something of his sad freedom

As he rode the tumbril

Should come to me, driving,

Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands

Of country people,

Not knowing their tongue.

Out there in Jutland

In the old man-killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home. (33-44)

Walcott’s rejected artist who painfully recognizes that his contribution as a poet in his

uncultured, insensitive community amounts to nothing is quite similar to Heaney's

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lone traveller who finally chooses to reenact the role of the Tollund Man – the artist

sacrificed for national cause, and the silent mythopoeia for a nation dispossessed of

private mythology.

In his essay “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” Derek Walcott writes:

In the case of my own identity, or my realness if you like, it is an absurdity that I can live with; being both American and West Indian is an ambiguity without a crisis, for I find that the more West Indian I become, the more I can accept my dependence on America as a professional writer, not because America owes me a living from historical guilt, nor that it needs my presence, but because we share this part of the world, and have shared it for centuries now, even as conqueror and victim, as exploiter and exploited. (51)

Greatly influenced by the experience of teaching and living in North America, and by

his friendship with other transplanted poets such as Joseph Brodsky and Seamus

Heaney, Walcott began “to refuse to consider himself a Commonwealth writer, but

instead felt himself an international writer who expected universal understanding"

(Breslin 42). He accepts his position "in this mid-world between the continents, a

point of connection and passage between North and South America, Africa and

Europe" (Hallengren viii), and his new function "as a colonial upstart at the end of an

empire, / a single, circling, homeless satellite” (“North and South” 5-6).

Living in America has also provided Heaney with a third level of consciousness.

The distance from homeland and family has urged him to view himself and the world

around him from a new illuminating perspective. As Heaney points out: “the

American experience may have confirmed and assisted what I think happens anyway

as you get toward your fifties, that is a certain rethinking of yourself, a certain

distance from your first self” (qtd. in Foster 11). The poet of the dark soil, whose

poetic career has been dominated by a desire to dig the earth to unravel the past and

interpret the present, is allowed to rewind and forward the tape of history to watch

again what had happened, what is happening and even what might yet happen. Setting

himself free from the gravity of earth, Heaney – in his poem "Tollund" which was

published in The Spirit Level (1996) – can soar high to explore the horizons

unmindful of time, place or race, unashamed for breaking tribal codes, unafraid of

acculturation lights, and untrammelled by marginality or otherness:

70

More scouts than strangers, ghosts who'd walked abroad

Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning:

And make a go of it, alive and sinning,

Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad. (21-24)

Allowing themselves the liberty of wandering freely through time and space, both

Walcott and Heaney could abandon alienating hybridity in favour of transcultural

agency. Perceiving their historical predicaments "as a microcosm of the world's

cultural encounters" (Breslin 223), and apprehending the fact that all nations have in

certain periods of their history tasted the torments of inferiority, subjugation and

dispossession, Walcott’s and Heaney’s national sentiments are transformed into a

dream of universal cultural rebirth – a new culture within which the best in all human

traditions is integrated. In his poem "The Season of Phantasmal Peace", which was

published in his book The Fortunate Traveler (1981), Walcott depicts all the nations

of birds stitching, crossing and lifting together the huge net of the shadows, "as the

many cultures that converged in the Caribbean stitched together a common culture in

their crossings" (Breslin 223): “Then all the nations of birds lifted together / the huge

net of the shadows of this earth / in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, /

stitching and crossing it…” (1-4).

In “From the Republic of Conscience” published in his volume The Haw Lantern

(1987), Heaney draws a post-postmodern allegorical picture of a world governed by

the unwritten laws of conscience – a world where everyone carries his own burden

and pays for his guilt: “No porters. No interpreter. No taxi. / You carried your own

burden…” (10-11). Recognizing the fact that “transculturality is gaining ground…not

only on the macro-cultural level, but also on the individual’s micro-level” (Welsch

198), Heaney accepts his fate as a dual citizen, and his position as an ambassador or a

missionary promoting mutual understanding and peaceful co-existence among

different cultures: He therefore desired me when I got home to consider myself a

representative and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue. (34-36) In his book

The New African Diaspora, Isidore Okpewho maintains:

African emigrants are, therefore, transferring to a transnational framework an old habit formed in their long history of incorporation within social and

71

political contexts that force them to reconfigure their identity and interests…Although born in the U.S., Barack Obama offers perhaps the most illustrious example. (20)

Obama’s election to the presidency of the United States has intensified Walcott’s

belief in the limitless possibilities and potentials of cultural in-betweenness. In his

poem “Forty Acres” – written in November 2008 to mark the election of Barack

Obama as a president – Walcott celebrates the great victory of an entire race which

has managed to turn the trauma of slavery into a history of painful endurance, cultural

metamorphosis and everlasting pride: “Out of he turmoil emerges one emblem, an

engraving — / a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls, / an emblem of

impossible prophecy” (1-3). Emerging out of Walcott’s mythologized New World

cultural furnace, the young Negro is fully equipped with the potentials of transcultural

hybridity and is quite ready to accomplish his sacred humanitarian mission – offering

hope for the desperate, care for the unprotected, and solace for the downtrodden:

The small plough continues on this lined page

beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's

black vengeance,

and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,

heart, muscles, tendons,

till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure

light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower. (11-17)

Transculturality, as Wolfgang Welsch puts it, “intends a culture and society whose

pragmatic feats exist not in delimitation, but in the ability to link and undergo

transition” (200). Such conception of transculturality is illustrated in Heaney’s poem

“The Tollund Man in Springtime” which was published in his volume District and

Circle (2006). The bog-preserved body, which was sacrificed in the Iron Age to

ensure the fertility of the goddess earth, is resurrected to teach humanity the ethics

and poetics of transcultural agency. With a cosmopolitan outlook when articulating

his new setting: “And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue” (28), with a perseverant

voice when expressing his cultural resistance: “I straightened, spat on my hands, felt

72

benefit / And spirited myself into the street” (41-42), and with a forgiving tone when

describing his tribal prediacment: “They strengthened when they chose to put me

down / For their own good” (10-11), the new Tollund Man illustrates man’s

obligations to re-read history and re-write the future:

"The soul exceeds its circumstances". Yes. History not to be granted the

last word Or the first claim ... In the end I gathered From the display-case

peat my staying powers, Told my webbed wrists to be like silver

birches, My old uncallused hands to be young sward, The spade-cut skin

to heal, and got restored (15-21)

With a dramatic shift in viewpoint (the Tollund Man is the interpreter not the

interpreted), Heaney reconsiders his old “cyclic or ahistorical view of time, according

to which individuals are powerless to inaugurate change or achieve progress, but can

only re-enact the lives of their forebears in a timeless ritual” (Picot 228). Coming to

the conclusion that the future is created not replicated, Heaney urges all human

beings to share in building new relations with earth based on cultural cross-

pollination.

Walcott and Heaney have managed to seize upon “the fragments at hand to

demonstrate that something new can arise, like the phoenix, out of imperial ashes”

(Hamner 2). Their morbid consciousness of the divisions fragmenting their national

and cultural background could have thrown them into the abyss of despair. Yet, their

aspiration to make creative use of their schizophrenia, and their insistence on

cultivating their ambiguities and complexities for the service of the silenced, debased

and dehumanized, have enabled them to stand against the impossibilities inherent in

their paradoxical backgrounds. Both Walcott and Heaney; thus, could finally

transcend the burdens of history uniting earthward life and heavenward art in shaping

human consciousness of the future.

73

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Bhabha, Homi K. "Culture's In Between." Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall, and Paul Du Gay. London: Sage, 1996. 53-60.

Bhatia, Sunil, and Anjali Ram. "Rethinking 'Acculturation' in Relation to Diasporic Cultures and Postcolonial Identities." Human Development 44 (2001): 1-18.

Beck, Ulrich. What Is Globalisation? London: Sage, 2000.

Becker, Carol. Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.

Breslin, Paul. Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.

Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Epstein, Mikhail. "Conclusion: On the Place of Postmodernism in Postmodernity." Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture. Ed. Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover. New York: Berghahn, 1999. 456-68.

Foster, Thomas C. Seamus Heaney. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Greer, Robert C. Mapping Postmodernism: A Survey of Christian Options. Madison: InterVarsity, 2003.

Hallengren, Anders. "Introduction." Nobel Laureates in Search of Identity and Integrity. Ed. Hallengren. NJ: World Scientific, 2004. vii-x.

Hamner, Robert D., ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington: Three Continents P, 1993.

Heaney, Seamus. District and Circle. London: Faber, 2006.

---. "Feeling into Words." Preoccupations 41-60.

---. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996. London: Faber, 1998.

---. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber, 1980.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crisis of Tradition in the

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Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Explorations in Postcolonial Study 9. New York: State University, 2000.

Keen, Suzanne. "Catching the Hear off Guard." Commonweal 123.10 (1996): 10-13.

Lloyd, David. : "Pap for the Dispossessed": Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity." Boundary. 13.2/3 (1985): 319-42.

Molino, Michael R. Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Washington: Catholic U of America P, 1994.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human. Trans. Gary Handwerk. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

Obama, Barack. Remarks by the President Barack Obama: On a New Beginning: Cairo University: June 4, 2009. California: Bnpublishing, 2009.

Okpewho, Isidore. “Introduction: Can We ‘Go Home Again’? ” The New African Diaspora. Eds. Isidore Okpewho and Nkiru Nzegwu. Bloomington: Indian UP, 2009.3-30.

Picot, Edward. Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry since 1945. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1997.

"Post-postmodernism." Wikipedia. Vers. 2008. Microsoft Encarta. 20 Oct. 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Postmodernism>.

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession (1991): 36.

---. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2006.

Smith, Stan. Poetry and Displacement. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007.

Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems: 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, 1986.

---. "The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry? (1974)" Hamner 51-57.

---. “Forty Acres: A Poem for Barack Obama from Nobel Winner Derek Walcott.” Times Online 5 Nov. 2008. 20 Dec. 2009

<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5088429.ece>.

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Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. Eds. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash. London: SAGE, 1999. 194-213.

Zhang, Benzi. "Beyond Border Politics: The Problematics of Identity in Asian Diaspora Literature." Studies in the Humanities 31.2 (2004): 69-91. !

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Ozlem Koksal (London Consortium/Birkbeck College)

Articulating Silences: Arshile Gorky in Ararat

In 2002, the director Atom Egoyan released his ninth feature film, causing

heated debates in Turkey and elsewhere as a result of its sensitive subject matter: the

massacres of Ottoman Armenians between 1915 and 1918, which is now widely

referred as the “Armenian genocide”. Egoyan, a Canadian Armenian director, was

born to Armenian parents who immigrated to Canada from Egypt. His grandparents

were both survivors of the massacres of 1915 and fled to Egypt from Turkey and later

from Egypt to Canada as a result of the rising nationalism in Egypt. He was raised as

a Canadian and it was while studying in the University of Toronto he became

interested in the history of the Ottoman Armenians. This paper looks at Egoyan’s film

Ararat, focusing on the film’s use of the prominent Armenian painter Arshile Gorky

(Simon Akbarian) as a mute character, occupying a third space between the film

being made within the film and the rest of the story33.

In the film Gorky is depicted in his studio, working on his most famous

painting Artist and His Mother, which is based on a photograph taken few years

before his mother died of starvation as a result of the deportations of the Ottoman

Armenian’s34. In what follows, I will try to illustrate the connection between memory

and silence in the context of Ararat, while arguing for the usefulness of the concept of

migratory aesthetics when dealing with similar attempts to represent a contested

history.

“The formulation migratory aesthetics draws attention to the ways in which

aesthetic practise might be constituted by and through acts of immigration” write Sam

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Durrant and Cathrenine M. Lord (2007:12). In the field of film studies there have been

a number of influential studies aiming to formulate and analyse the relation between

displacement, memory and the aesthetic conditions it/they bring; most notably Hamid

Naficy’s An Accented Cinema (2001) and Laura Marks’ The Skin of the Film (2000).

While Naficy tries to map a certain filmmaking practice with its own characteristics

that is specific to the experience displacement, which he calls accented/exilic cinema,

Marks analyses a large number of films and directors belonging –what she calls- to the

area of intercultural cinema. Intercultural cinema, for her, is an “international

phenomenon, produced wherever people of different cultural backgrounds live

together in the power-inflected spaces of diaspora” (2000: 1), and its most salient

aspect is its appeal to senses and memory. The formulation migratory aesthetics,

however allows us to consider the aesthetic conditions migration creates as well as the

migratory quality of aesthetic practices while making the “crucial connection between

aesthetics, politics and human survival” (Durrant&Lord 2007:12).

In her essay “Lost in Space Lost in Library”, Mieke Bal asks: “How can we be

culturally specific in our analysis of cultural processes and artefacts, without nailing

people or artworks to a provenance they no longer feel comfortable claiming as

theirs?” (2007:24). One way of doing this in films studies could arguably be breaking

away from the idea of national cinemas. Political and social changes are not

independent from artistic and cultural production, and borders themselves cannot stop

the movements of ideas. This is where the concept of migratory aesthetics becomes

important. As Durrant and Lord writes “the formulation migratory aesthetics draws

attention to the ways in which aesthetic practice might be constituted by and through

acts of migration” , it is both the “product and critique of a migratory world”

(2007:12-13).

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As a second generation immigrant, and as a person who is affected by the

history of Armenians, Egoyan has always maintained his interest in memory, how

memories are stored and how identity is constructed. He repeatedly comes back to the

concepts of loss and memory as well as the concept -and function- of substitutes

people find/invent in the process of re-inventing or revising the collective and

personal memory35. Next of Kin (1984), Family Viewing (1987), The Adjuster (1991),

Calendar (1993), Exotica (1994), Sweet Hereafter (1997) Adoration (2008) all deal

with memory, loss and the idea of substitute. What connects these films –in addition

to the obvious trope of memory and loss- is the silences Egoyan makes use of.

Whether it is by concealing certain facts and remaining silent about certain subjects

(Sweet Hereafter, Family Viewing, Next of Kin, The Adjuster, Ararat) or by having a

character who chooses to be silent altogether (after all it is a constitutional right in

many Western democracies) such as Seta’s character in The Adjuster or Gorky in

Ararat, Egoyan continuously explored the (im)possibilities silence offers/creates in

film. In a lengthy interview with Hamid Naficy, responding to a question regarding

the silent characters in his films (mostly Armenians), Egoyan mentions the notion of

“silent witness”:

“That is, someone who has information, a key, that would give the viewers some access to what is going on. [...] These [characters] are all people who have secrets but cannot actually express them because they’ve been traumatised into silence. I think that the whole notion of persecution, of speech being a potential weapon, and of being silenced are obviously things that are part of my history” (Egoyan, 1997: 222).

Arguably, then, by giving these characters a space in film, Egoyan translates these

silences into articulations.

Ararat, unlike similar historical films that deal with traumatic events, is not

interested in making a claim about the truth, and therefore does not assume an all

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knowing position. Instead it focuses on today, on the later generation Armenians, and

the practices of remembering. The film’s subject, and the act of preserving the

memory of it, becomes even more significant given that Turkish government has

always denied the genocidal claims, and for years the attitude towards it was silence.

The film consists of two major parts: the film-within-the-film, made by

Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour), depicting the Armenian uprising in Van in 1915

and rest of the film focusing on the daily encounters of the characters involved the

making of the film in the present time. However, the ghostly presence of Arshile

Gorky functions almost like a bridge between the two different time zones: the time in

the film being made, 1915, and the time of the making: 2001.

Gorky was originally from the present day Turkey, but escaped to Russia in

1915. At the age of sixteen he was reunited with his father in the United States of

America where he lived for the rest of his life. Although Gorky as a character exists in

both films (in Saroyan’s as a little boy and in the rest of the film as a famous

Armenian painter about whom Ani wrote a book), it is not clear which film the

sequences in his studio belong to. These sequences focus precisely on the part of his

life where he took on the project of painting his mother. This not only gives Gorky a

“liminal” existence in relation to the two films, but also allows the character to both

locate and dislocate the two temporalities. Gorky’s character functions almost like a

mirror (as well as a screen) for both narratives in addition to occupying its own space

within the narrative of the film.

Ararat opens with the camera gazing across the artefacts and other materials

in Arshile Gorky’s studio, including the sketch and the painted version of his painting

Artist and His Mother. The objects that surround the painter are all pieces of his past,

belonging to where he came from, who he was and what he is at present. Gorky’s

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personal memories are intertwined with the collective memories of the Armenians. It

is for this reason that both the painting and the photograph failed to be merely

personal testimonies. As Ani says in the film “it shows how [they] got here”.

While the credits run, the title of the film appears in Armenian, dissolving into

the English title with Mount Ararat at the background –an important, if not the most

important, symbol for Armenians. If “migration makes place overdetermined, turning

it into a mise-en-scene of different histories” (Aydemir&Rotas, 2008:6), this

overdetermination surely includes the place left behind. Mount Ararat, which is today

within the borders of Turkey, is reproduced constantly within the Armenian culture: it

is more than a mountain for Armenians, it serves as a monument.

Gorky’s painting agonises him as he tries to finish it. Losing his homeland

(motherland?), where the memories of his childhood and his mother are inscribed,

Gorky is left with a painful task of trying to remember and represent his own and his

mother’s experiences in the act of painting, erasing, adding and finally leaving it

“unfinished”.

In an article on the painting, art critic Jonathan Jones writes:

“The painting is a meditation on a photograph of them [Gorky and his mother] taken at a studio in Van before the First World War, to send to Gorky's father in America. Gorky found the photograph in his father's US home in the 1920s. This painting is testimony to how much it anguished him. The transfiguration of the image into cubistic planes of colour emphasises Gorky's complex reaction to the photograph, as he remade it in his mind. He gives it colour, animation, but cannot bring his mother back. While the boy moves in three dimensions, she remains fixed, a flat ghost. Armenia itself is a no-place. Gorky paints a brown square behind his mother's head resembling a window. But it is opaque, no view. Her landscape is gone” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2002/ mar/ 30/art).

The absence that marks the painting -the absence of the mother, the absence of the

land- is not mastered by the painter but lived.

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The book Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky, written by Nouritza

Matossian on Gorky, was used in the film as the book Ani wrote. In a reading session

Ani reads from the book: “With this painting Gorky saved his mother from oblivion,

snatching her out of a pile of corpses to place her on a pedestal of life”. The painting

Gorky paints from a photograph rescues the death, slows down the decaying process

and gives the dead a place in history. Gorky’s, as well as Egoyan’s, attempt to

represent it is not merely creating an art object. It is an attempt to give the image of

the mother back her auratic existence.

However, it can also be read as an attempt to “turn the incident into a moment

that has been lived”, by actively and intellectually being involved in the re-creation of

it, by creating a painting of a photograph and therefore highlighting the inconsumable

nature of the experience which photograph fails to achieve. According to Walter

Benjamin there is a clear distinction between photography and painting. He writes

that the eyes will “never have their fill of a painting”, whereas photography “is like

food for the hungry or drink for the thirsty” (Illuminations, 183). Once the hunger is

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fed, the thirst is satisfied the object will be forgotten, disposed. It is based on the idea

of consumption.

“What prevents our delight in the beautiful from ever being satisfied is the image of the past, which Baudelaire regards as the veiled by the tears of nostalgia. [...] Insofar as art aims at the beautiful and, on however modest scale, ‘reproduces’ it, it conjures it up (as Faust does Helen) out of the womb of time. This no longer happens in the case of technical production” (IL, 183).

Gorky, with his painting, ‘conjures up the beauty from the womb of the time’,

snatches it out of pile of corpses and gives it life.

The puncture the photograph creates says more than Gorky can with words.

His attempt to paint it, and the film’s ability to show both the photograph and the

painting at the same time, makes those gaps visible between the images. Gorky’s

spectacular failure to represent his pain is precisely the moment he is able to convey

his agony, in return allowing Egoyan to reflect on his own (dis)ability to represent the

event. A profound example of this (im)possibility is visualised through enacting the

sense of touch.

Sense of touch figures often into Egoyan’s films, making the sense of touch an

important part of the image. Laura Marks calls these images “haptic images” which

are not to be confused with Deleuze’s haptic images. Marks’ use of haptic visuality is

about images which break sensory-motor connections, lack causality between them.

Haptic visuality “forces the viewer to contemplate the image itself instead of being

pulled into narrative” (Marks, 2000: 163), which asks the eyes to temporarily function

as organs of touch. What these images are able to suspend is the unproblematic

engagement with the narrative and what they achieve is a different type of engagement

which forces one to relate to one’s own knowledge and memory in addition to, or

independent of, the knowledge (re)presented on the screen. “Haptic visuality, in its

83

efforts to touch the image, may represent the difficulty of remembering the loved one,

be it a person or a homeland” (2000: 193).

Gorky, after finishing the painting looks at it with a degree of discontentment

and frustration. Appearing almost at the edge of a nervous breakdown, he puts paint

on his hands and touches his mother’s painted hands tenderly, as if he is holding them

at first and then with more rage as if he is trying to erase them. Egoyan moves his

camera behind the canvas, capturing the momentary trace Gorky leaves on the

painting; a sense of touch develops in relation to the painting on the part of the

audience.

This moment, although it is the moment of a partial destruction of the painting,

is also the moment Gorky touches his memories of his mother and inevitably the pain

surrounding her death, a gesture that enacts both tenderness and violation at the same

time. When asked about this scene Egoyan stated that it was a huge challenge to find a

way “to deal with images of physical violence” and to show “the after effect of the

brutality of the Armenian genocide”.

“What Gorky is doing by erasing the hands is by its nature a very violent gesture, but it is done with great tenderness, with almost a sense of communion and transference. [...] There is a sense of something pressing against something else; there is obliteration at that point of contact. I think the film charts a number of obliterations, a number of places where the mere act of touching cancels out the latent physical properties of the materials that are being studied” (Egoyan, 2008: 252).

The scene becomes all the more powerful when combined with Gorky’s silence, since

it asks the audience to make full use of the other senses.

If the cultural home is an acoustic environment (Bal, 2007: 31-33), then

perhaps one can make the claim that displacement creates an acoustic environment

that is over-crowded with too many different sounds, which in turn might become a

deafening experience, resulting in the subject’s complete silence. In Ararat, Gorky is

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portrayed as a mute character whose “worldlessness” becomes his (and the

immigrant’s) “wordlessness”36.

In an article where she discusses the relation between silence and speech in the

contemporary setting, Wendy Brown argues that

“our contemporary crisis of truth has [..] been displaced into an endless stream of words about ourselves, words that presume to escape epistemological challenges to truth because they are personal or experiential. [...] While intended as a practice of freedom (premised on the modernist conceit that the truth makes us free), these productions of truth may have the capacity not only to chain us to our injurious histories as well as the stations of our small lives, but to instigate the further regulation of those lives while depoliticizing their conditions” (84-85).

Egoyan’s awareness of the problems of both discourse and the historical truth, forces

him to create a liminal character out of Gorky who exists, as a character, in between

the world of many discourses and claims to the truth. Egoyan, by not making him

utter a single word while going through a pain that is beyond imagination, asks his

audience to recognise the sound of the tree that fell in the forest, even though there

was nobody to hear it when it fell. Silence then becomes not only a condition of

survival, but also the possibility to overcome what created it in the first place. Its use

in film, which is surprisingly often in films dealing with displacement and

immigration, becomes a device that articulates a certain type of experience, emerging

out of particular (migratory) aesthetics.

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Endnotes

1 Gorky’s story is as much –if not more- personal as the rest of the stories in the film for Egoyan as he not only named his son after the painter but also made a short film called A Portrait of Arshile (1995) dedicated both to his son and the painter. For an analysis of the film see Baronian, 2007. 1 Between 1915 and 1918, a special secret branch within the governing party, Committee of Union and Progress, called Teskilat-i Mahsusa (Special Organisation) planned the deportations of Armenians, which, according to many historians, was with the intention to clear Anatolia of Armenians. Many Armenians died during these long marches due to starvation and illnesses, which later formed part of the accusations against the authorities claiming that they intentionally did nothing to protect the people. There are also eyewitness accounts claiming soldiers massacring and torturing Armenians, to which the authorities turned a blind eye. Turkey, within the official discourse denies the accusations and maintains the argument that the events took place during the First World War and should be examined accordingly. For more information on the history of the Ottoman Armenians see Hovannisian (2003), Akcam (2004, 2007). 1 For some of the concepts repeated in Egoyan’s films as well as the meaning and the function of such repetition see Marie-Aude Baronian, 2007. 1 I borrow this from Jale Parla, (2003).

86

References:

Akcam, Taner. From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide. New York: Zed Books, 2004.

Akcam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. London: Constable, 2007.

Aydemir, Murat and Rotas, Alex. “Introduction: Migratory Settings” in Migratory Settings eds. Aydemir&Rotas. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.

Bal, Mieke. “Lost in Space, Lost in Library” in Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural Practices Between Migration and Art-Making” eds.Sam Durrant and Catherine M. Lord Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.

Baronian, Marie-Aude. “History and Memory, Repetition and Epistrolarity” in Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan.Eds. Monique Tschofen and Jenifer Burwell. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press: 2007.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999.

Brown, Wendy. “Freedom’s Silences” in Edgework, New Jersey: Princeton, 2005.

Durrant, Sam and Lord, M. Catherine. “Introduction: Essays in Migratory Aesthetics” in Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural Practices Between Migration and Art-Making” eds.Sam Durrant and Catherine M. lord Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.

Egoyan, Atom. “The Accented Style of the Independent Transnational Cinema: A Conversation with Atom Egoyan” in Cultural Producers in Perilous States: Editing Events, Documenting Change” Ed. George E. Marcus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Egoyan Atom. “The Senses and Substitution: A Conversation with Atom Egoyan” by Emma Wilson in Paragraph, 31:2 (2008) 252-262.

Richard G. Hovannisian (ed) Confronting the Armenian Genocide: Looking Backward, Moving Forward. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003.

Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Jones, Jonathan. “The Artist and His Mother, Arshile Gorky” [last log in 20/11/2008] http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2002/mar/30/art

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Parla, Jale. “Car Narratives: A Subgenre in Turkish Novel Writing” in The South Atlantic Quarterly. Spring/Summer, 102 (2003): 535-550. !

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88

Heike Endter (University of Munich)

Migration as Identity

Introduction

There is a genre in Hollywood filmmaking that is connected to the motifs of

movement, the loss of space and search for a new, as no one other. It is the western

and the search for space means here a search for physical as cultural space. This

strong connection of room, mostly shown as a rough landscape, and a possible new

culture is basic for the visual potential of the western. It's specific visuality had and

has a worldwide influence on the myth of US-american identity. But the visuality as

the narratives are based on a paradox constellation: basically they serve to depict

homelessness, the search for a new home and movement by which, on the other hand,

a mythical concept of home is created.

What happened when artists leaving their home, their country, their space of identity

came to Hollywood and got an assignment to work on a film in a genre that is

readable as a symbol for the construction of a new home and for the national (and in

this case alien) identity? Fritz Lang who emigrated from Nazi-Germany to the United

States directed two Western films in Hollywood. These films and their director Lang

serve as examples for the articulation of identity in a diverse field. Lang was already a

famous director with an artistic (aesthetic) identity he brought to Hollywood. Was it

possible for him to transform it to a migration aesthetic? How did he use the symbolic

form of a film genre dealing with migration? What was the reaction of the publish

especially in Germany and the United States, his two poles of departure and arrival?

The starting point of the analysis is an effect of a doubling: a cinematic genre, the

Western, dealing with migration and a man doing migration. Out of it come two

elements of the analysis, which are an already fictional form and a real experience.

The third element is the fictional product, a concrete Western film making by Lang

during his stay in the United States. Therefore in this paper will be given first a short

history of the Western genre, second biographical details about Fritz Lang and third

an aesthetic analysis of a film. The film I will present is the film Western Union. The

year of release is 1941. In Germany it was shown as Überfall der Ogalalla, firstly in

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1949, eight years after the release in the U.S. and four years after the end of the World

War II and the end of the Nazi- regime in Germany. The three elements of my paper I

named so far ñ genre, biography, concrete film are the things one can be sure about,

one can find easily information or can find arguments verified by an artifact, the film.

The forth element is more speculative, difficult, tricky but especially interesting. It is

on what we have not and, as somebody told me, is methodological impossible to do.

The forth element is the synthesis, but a synthesis where the argumentative elements

possibly don't fit to the to question that shall be answered with, at least in the opinion

of my careful colleague. The film itself shall be seen as a synthesis of an individual

asthetic imagination and of a non-individual form that is provided by a genre, the

Hollywood studio system and, spoken more general, the US-society with a fictional,

metaphorical, mythical adaption of it's own history. I think the problem is clear and

not very new for film theorists: how can an individual change a non-individual form

and furthermore can make an individual asthetic articulation out of it? One can find

well-founded arguments why it still works. But in the case of Fritz Lang there is

another problem, a kind of doubling again. For his definition in film theory and his

self-definition as well it is essential to see him during his time in Germany as a strong,

independent director who was powerful enough to define the rules of his filmmaking,

someone who has the fully control over his artistic articulation.

In this perspective he is the ideal figure for the author theory which was constructed

years later for a self-definition of filmmaking. This perspective on Lang is usually

used for his time in Germany. But with his emigration to the US and his work in

Hollywood he is seen as an European artist struggling with the restrictions of the

Hollywood-studio-system what means that he has to fulfill the provided genre

stereotypes whereby he of course lost the control over his aesthetic articulation. This

argument may be discovered as a kind of a fiction itself, as an European myth that

serves to define a geo-political as cultural identity and to draw a clear dividing line to

others. That's why it is an argument that not only can't be ignored but initiate another

interesting view on the theme of migration and aesthetic articulation.

A Really Brief History of the Western as a Hollywood-Genre

The paper's title “Migration as Identity” was chosen as a hypothetical summary of the

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Western as a cinematic genre. Because there are some obvious links between Western

and migration which are interesting to point them out.

The golden age of the Western as a Hollywood-film-genre lays in the years between

1900 and 1960. In most of the Hollywood-Western-films the time between 1865 and

1890 is depicted.1

Historical elements are the treks to the west in covered wagons, the fight against the

Indians, the civil war, a gold rush, the rivalry between farmers and cowboys driving

herds of cattle over the land, the railway construction, seldom the construction of the

telegraph. The focus lays on figures who move, who have a nomadic or semi-nomadic

existence as cowboys, the pioneers, scouts, soldiers or outlaws and of course the

Indians. In Westerns one can observe a kind of rewriting and redefining the history to

make out of it a national identity in the tradition of forms of migration.

Compared with other migrations stories told in movies here it is the majority

wandering to a new land. Whereas the minority, the Indians as the original inhabitants

are forced to change their nomadic lifestyle and settle down on a defined space what

means nothing but an exile in their own land.

In the late 1960's the Western was a dying genre. It was replaced by the so-called

post- Westerns, the European Italo-Westerns and the road-movie. The road- movie

heirs the Western as a vital genre form. Like in Westerns mobility is a pattern to go

for happiness and to define an own identity.2 Furthermore both provides a popular,

Western and democratic kind of defining the self by migration.

Biographical Sketch on Fritz Lang

To test the motto “Migration as Identity” for Fritz Lang provides significant

perspectives, too. Fritz Lang was born 1890 in Vienna, Austria. After finishing high

school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied

civil engineering before he switched to art. In 1910 he left Vienna and starts to travel

throughout Europe and Africa and later Asia and the Pacific area. He studied painting

in Munich, Germany and Paris, France. Here migration serves as a way to develop an

artistic self and migration works as motif and sign of a social group, and furthermore

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of an elite. In 1914 Lang returned to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War. In

January 1914 he was drafted into service in the Austrian army and fought in Russia

and Romania during World War I. Up to now there are two kinds of migration: a

voluntarily and a less self-determined one as a soldier.

During wartime he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films before he was hired as a

writer to Erich Pommer's Berlin-based film production company. In Berlin Lang soon

started to work as a director. Already in early films as Der müde Tod (Destiny) or Die

Spinnen (Spiders), he combined popular genres with expressionist techniques to

create a synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema. His films in Germany

were all black-and-white movies and most of them silent movies. In 1924 he made

Die Nibelungen on a national German myth, 1927 the science-fiction-film Metropolis

and 1931 the crime story M. M was Lang's first talking picture. At the end of 1932

Lang started filming the The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, which was banned by Nazi-

officials. On June 1933 Lang left Germany for France, and later for the United States.

Again there are two motifs of migration in his biography. He started his stay in Berlin

because of an inner necessity and he left because of an external necessity. Lang

arrived in Hollywood in 1936 and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in

1939. He made twenty-one features in the next twenty-one years, working in a variety

of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, occasionally producing his films as an

independent. Some films are connected to the political situation in Europe during the

1940's as in Man Hunt (1941) and Hangman also die! (1943). But mainly he wanted

to make American films.3 In Hollywood Lang did his first Western The return of

Frank James (1940) followed by two others, Western Union (1941) and Rancho

Notorious (1952). One of his most famous Hollywood movies is the police drama The

Big Heat (1953). With this and other film noirs Lang became integral to the

emergence and evolution of this genre. During the 1950s the German producer Arthur

Brauner was expressing interest in remaking not only The Indian Tomb, a story that

Lang had developed in the twenties, but also Lang's earlier Doctor Mabuse pictures.

Lang returned to Germany in order to make his Indian Epic. Brauner was ready to

proceed with his remake of Das Testament des Doktor Mabuse when Lang

approached him with the idea of adding another original film to the series. During the

production Lang was approaching blindness, making it his final project. He died in

1976. One Western directed by Fritz Lang. The first impression of Fritz Lang's film

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Western Union was one of it's narrative and visual freshness. It was made in color

what is for a film from 1941 remarkable yet. The opening shot shows a view over a

wide and flat land. Faraway one can see a rock formation that is typical for Westerns.

The rock is situated on the left side of the picture whereas the right side is open to the

horizon. Above is a friendly sky, it's blue and speckled with little white clouds. In the

picture's foreground a herd of buffaloes is wandering. So, first it is shown a nearly

idyllic landscape untouched by men and in this sense open for new adventures. This

impression is supported by a cheerful music sounding like a fast march. Then a lonely

rider is to be seen. He is on the top of a stony hill, looking at the buffaloes in front of

him. As he is looking back the music changes to a more dramatic sound. A group on

horses is riding fast after him. Now the landscape as the animals become another

meaning. They are no longer a kind of an interior to illustrate a geological space that

offers the opportunity to ride alone over a new land but they become a dramatic

element because now the buffaloes are a barrier that obstruct the lonely rider's way to

escape his followers.

Sometimes later another lonely man is riding into the picture. He is injured and drinks

thirsty when he find a watering place. In this moment, when he is lying unprotected

on earth to drink, a shadow of a head with a hat on comes closer without making any

noise. One can identify the motif as a first reference to the director's earlier

expressionistic style and his work with light and shadows. But the menacing and

meaningful shadow is embedded in the use of a bright daylight. From the beginning

the situation is ambivalent. The shadow materializes as the man seen first who want to

escape but lost his horse meanwhile. He takes his chance to get a new horse and

explains his ambitions to the other man firm but friendly. As he recognizes that the

injured man can't make his way home alone and without horse he helps and save the

man's life. The film's conflict is established between a honest figure saved by an

outlaw probably involved in a bank robbery whereby the focus is on the outlaw who

showed opposite moral elements: a criminal desire as a human sympathy. He is

coldblooded in his will to survive as in his decision to help because he saves the

unknown other while he himself is in danger. Now the other man rescued by him can

function in the social context as a kind of a guarantor who will confirm that the

outlaw has the right and the authenticated opportunity to change his life, and in a

dramatic story where every detail works as a sign this means an opportunity to change

93

his destiny.

After this one can see an optimistic and unconcerned told story that is enriched with

many comic elements. The story follows the happily saved Edward Creighton, the

chief-engineer of the Western Union who's leading a team that is installing a

telegraph line from Omaha to Salt Lake City. After the arrival in his office in the city

of Omaha he is planning the next departure and at the end of his way lays another

city. In this Western story a kind of consolidation is reached. Not nearly everybody is

on the way with horses, the small possession that can be carried in covered wagons

and the strong utopian believe to find truly happiness in the west. Most of them live in

cities. The new reached position of non-movement can be reinforced and confirmed

by a technique to change information between the settlements in a partly immaterial

way. Whereas the most are settled down the story follows that one who are in

movement.

Most of the workers hired for the Western Union are ready to go at once. They are

ideal figures of movement, with one garment that will fit for the way, without a

materialized home or only an articulated ambition for it. Only the man who is

engaged as cook isn't ready to go. He's holding tight his traveling bag, the prominent

shown object that is a sign of home that is imaginary at the moment but is represented

by a container for a reduced version of home one can take along. In a funny scene the

cook let the audience know that he wouldn't like adventures with Indians and prefers a

quiet place to live. It is a highly formalized scene like a theater sketch. That's why one

can read the dialog lines as a meta-text about the Western genre as an aesthetic and

mythical form. On this level of the interpretation the cook is readable as a figure that

articulates his aversion to take part in a Western adventure because it can represent

the way to the US or a way under the conditions of the US and he is an immigrant

who would have rather stood home. This migration with it's possible political

background in 1941 appears in it's already symbolic form in the Western genre itself.

The figure has the German sounding name Herman. In the credits it is written in the

for Germans unusual form with one but at the same time known as a nickname for the

Germans in general. At this point it is important that the cook has a clearly defined

function as a funny figure. His funny struggles with living conditions he would rather

have avoided repeat the motif of the greenhorn, the mocked but supported newcomer.

94

And that could be red as an ironic statement about (German) migrants as a statement

about the rough but friendly way of the Old-established to help them. Before the trail

with the workers starts there is a reunion between the chief-engineer of the Western

Union Creighton and the outlaw named Vance Shaw who saved Creighton's life at the

beginning. Creighton offers Vance a real chance of changing his destiny as it was

prepared in the former scene. Vance becomes a scout accompanying the workers trail.

After a while the cows the workers have with them to have food on the way are stolen

by Indians. Vance in his duty as a scout is sent by Creighton to find the cows. Vance

discovers the stolen cattle and not far away the Indians sitting beside a fire place. As

he call them to reach and turn around slow he recognizes the seemingly Indians as the

members of his former gang. Vance says that he is working for the Western Union

now and demands the “rustled cows back”. Jack, the leader of the gang answers:

“What do you mean rustle? We are soldiers now, fighting for the confederacy.”

Between the two of them a smart dialog is developed. Jack justifies his criminal

acting with his patriotic duties as a soldier forthe Southern States. Vance points out

the failures in Jacks self-projection as a patriot such as the absent uniform as a sign

that he and his friends are bound to a national idea, the covering as Indians, their

spatial distance to the south and the army. Jack has clever answers for all of this but

then he is changing tactics and the dialog becomes more personal for both of them

and the real conflict is spoken out nearly. Jack says: “You talk like you forgot where

you was born. You came from Missouri same as me. You going against your own

people?” Vance replies: “When they turn against their own country then they aren't

my people anymore.” The Civil War serves as the metaphorical background in more

then one way. Jack derives an affiliation to a social group ñ and in this ambivalent

speech that can be a gang or a nation ñ bounded to the place of birth and with this to a

home country. Jack makes a double coding of the home as a nation such as a smaller

group of a gang or even a family, as it is to be seen later. In his double coding Jack

unites the morality of a system as a nation with the morality of a criminal gang. In

doing this he can refer to a political system uniting both: a national idea for covering

or initiating criminal intents. Now and because the Civil War serves such obviously as

a metaphor it is possible to interpret the lines as a dialog between a man who stayed in

Nazi-Germany asking another who discovered the criminal actions that are bound to a

false idea of patriotism if he forget his duties against his own people.

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A small detail in a later scene can confirm the possibility to read Jack as a

metaphorical figure that makes a link to the situation in Nazi-Germany as to Vance

who figures as a man who left the country. Jack and his gang made another attack

against the Western Union steeling the horses now. After he sold them back to

Creighton, Jack is drinking a whiskey on the confederate states of America, because if

there wouldn't be confederates there wouldn't be no war that offers him chances to

earn money in criminal ways. Adding he's a patriot Jack changes to a glass of beer.

The demonstrative change of the drinks emphasizes the combination of being a patriot

and drinking beer. While beer can work as a national sign it can signify a German

drinker. The Civil War as probably every civil war is often named in terms of a “war

between brothers”. Vance turned out as unable to act against Jack because, as it is

discovered later in the story they are not only brothers bounded by moral code but

bounded as biological brothers, too. More then stolen animals are necessary to bring

Vance to fight against Jack.

Synthesis

With the selection, description and interpretation of concrete scenes is given a

synthesis about how the form of the Western as a non-individual form, as a fictional,

metaphorical, mythical adaption of the history of the U.S. can be used and can be read

as an asthetic articulation marked by the individual experiences of a director who has

another cultural and historical background. It were given explanations how and why

there can be seen links to Lang's former background he left. But it is essential to bear

in mind that this is a subtext that can be read but hasn't to be read to understand the

story. Furthermore there are shown typical Western elements in the moral disaster of

the hero Vance Shaw. But in a kind of similarity they can be bound to a concrete

historical subtext that isn't specific for a story that is situated in the U.S. like a

Western.

Nearly the whole film crew from Western Union consisted of US-born persons except

for the director Fritz Lang.4 That means that the film obviously wasn't created within

a network of European or especially German emigrants. When Lang was making a

story situated in Europe he hired an European cast. In other more US-american genre

movies he refused to work especially with Europeans.5 They would have brought an

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element to the stories Lang wanted to avoid. While his stay in the U.S. Lang tried to

arrange with the new, to pick out it's specific features, to find a possibility to make

and individual contribution, that can be influenced by his status as a newcomer to this

specific cultural space but is not bound to a yearning for his former cultural space. In

interviews on the film Western Union he repeated that after the film was shown he got

letters from old-timers who had known the Far West where they admire his realistic

depiction of that time.6 Fritz Lang himself explained that he didn't had the intention of

showing a historical accurate depiction.

But the film made the public dream of how it should have been7 and that means a

successful connection of a concrete Western story and the Western as a genre that

shows an ideal, and therefore ideological version of history. Furthermore Lang

claimed that he as a newcomer had an advantage, because “since I've been in

America, I've seen many things which American cineastes haven't seen, because they

are too used to seeing them.”7 In another interview asked what ideas he think should

be dramatized he said “We should be making pictures about (...) how close our

American history is paralleling what happens in Europe today.”8 In this thought I

think lays the essence of his later works after his arriving in the U. S. As it was shown

with the interpretation of Western Union there is a metatext provided by the genre.

One can find a possible link to a historical fixed subtext. But more general it is about

the similarities of social or moral problems that are not bound to the form of a nation

or to a specific cultural background.

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Bibliography

Bapis 2006 Elaine M. Bapis, “Easy Rider (1969): Landscaping the Modern West”, in: The Landscape of Hollywood Western. Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre, edited by Deborah A. Carmichael, Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2006, pp. 157-181

Berg 2003 Gretchen Berg, “The Viennese Night: A Fritz Lang Confession, Parts Two and One” (1965), in: Fritz Lang. Interviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 50-76

Ciment / Fofi / Seguin / Tailleur 2003 Michel Ciment, Goffredo Fofi, Louis Seguin, Roger Tailleur, “Fritz Lang in Venice” (1967), in: Fritz Lang. Interviews, edited by Barry Keith

Grant, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 91-100 CINÉMA 1962

“Fritz Lang Speaks”, without author, CINÉMA 62/1962, in: Fritz Lang. Interviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 28-32

Grant 2003 Fritz Lang. Interviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003

Kiefer / Grob 2003 Filmgenres Western, edited by Bernd Kiefer and Norbert Grob, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2003

Morris 2003 Mary Morris, ìThe Monster of Hollywoodî (1945), in: Fritz Lang. Interviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 3-12

Powers / Reed / Chase 2003 James Powers, Rochelle Reed, Donald Chase, ìDialogue on Film: Fritz Langî (1974), in: Fritz Lang. Interviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 158-174

Seßlen 1995 Georg Seßlen, Western. Geschichte und Mythologie des Westernfilms, Marburg: Schüren, 1995

Sturm 2001 Georges Sturm, Die Circe, der Pfau und das Halbblut. Die Filme von Fritz Lang 1916-1921, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2001

Western Union, (Überfall der Ogalalla), directed by Fritz Lang, U.S. 1941 (German release date 1949), DVD: Überfall der Ogalalla, by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006 (Universum Film GmbH, München)

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Ci!dem Bu!daycı (ASCA)

The Literary Migrant: A Late Ottoman Novelist at the

Crossroads of Desire and Truth

We're the children of a crisis of mind and identity; we're living the question “To be or not to be” more poignantly than Hamlet. As we embrace this dilemma, we will more fully take control of our lives and our work. A. H. Tanpınar, “!stanbul” from Five Cities Introduction

Forbidden Love, written by Halid Ziya U"aklıgil in 1898, is celebrated to be the first

true Western novel of the Turkish literature by many Turkish literary critics in the

discussion of “the authentic” or “the national” Turkish novel (Naci: 9; Moran: 26).

Although Forbidden Love was only –even a late - one among some dozens of novels

in the aftermath of the Tanzimat Era37, its status as the first true Western novel in

Turkish literature is discussed to be arising out of its mastery of technique, the depth

of the character analyses and their psychological elaborations.

To a reader who is not acquainted with Turkish literature or the Ottoman

history, this piece of a history of Turkish literature perhaps might just seem to be

informative. It is indeed taken out of anthologies of Turkish literature accompanied by

justifications of why the first novels could not fulfill the expectations of the Western

novel. It is explained that the characters were usually stereotypical and melodramatic

without any depth or reality and all these attempts of fervent and ambitious novel-

writing produced no real literature.

However, I argue in this paper that this piece of information regarding Turkish

literature actually conceals the history of Westernization/modernization in terms of

the relation between desire and truth. For this discussion, I employ the personage of

Halid Ziya as the literary migrant for the specific purpose of narrativizing his story in

time and space as one of migration and secondly, his own mental and literary

migration or negotiation between two literary traditions, his that is, adopting the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!37 Tanzimat Era (1839-1876), meaning “reorganization of the Ottoman Empire”, was a period of reformation by various attempts to modernize the Empire.

99

Western form and structure of narration while following Perso-Arabian rhetoric and

tropes. Thus, I posit Forbidden Love as an ambivalent epistemological marker

between two mental systems and two different worldviews in terms of truth, desire

and sexuality.

The Labor Pains of the Turkish Novel

Jale Parla argues that even though the first Turkish novels that appear between 1870-

1890 reflect the social tensions, they are stubbornly loyal to the former absolute

epistemology (Parla: 9). She explains that this absolutist epistemological principle

was based on the unquestionability of the Qur’an, the superiority of the Aristotelian

deductive logic, a Manichean worldview in which the good and the evil are clearly

demarcated, an abstract idealism coming form the mystical tradition, and

enlightenment based on the Islamic law, jurisprudence, and theology (Parla: 15).

Parla argues that the shortcomings of this generation of authors arising out of

the allegiance to the absolute Islamic epistemology replicated the relationship

between a patriarchal father and a son:

The basis of the modernization movement had to be founded on the Eastern worldview with its moral and cultural dimensions; the safeguard of this worldview was the sultan on the level of society, the father in the family, and the author in literature. At times of weakened absolute power, if the worldview still insists on being absolutist, such as in Tanzimat, the responsibility of fatherhood befalls on the author. In each Tanzimat author, “the pedagogue of melancholy resides in, each line is for the progress of the affective little child” (Parla: 19).

Parla presents this father-son relationship in the Tanzimat era as one of continuity

instead of a conflict. “The sons of this conservative relationship” carry on the

tradition of the former Ottoman epistemology by applying the Western form, and not

changing the content and style. However, the Western norm was the aesthetics of

literary realism which could not fit in with the Neo-Platonic idealism depicting a

limited but stock of traditional tropes of the Ottoman literary style (Noyon: 137).

Still, the attempt of writing an Ottoman novel coincided with the aim of

Tanzimat which in the words of one of its poets, #inasi, was “to marry the Asian

wisdom of the dervishes with the European virgin reason.” (Parla: 17) Nevertheless,

despite all the preparation for the nuptial ceremony, the marriage did not work out

100

well, and the Ottoman diwan poetry now looked like “a well-dressed corpse in a

Christian funeral” even to those authors themselves (Önertoy: 26).

The metaphors of funerals, corpses, failed marriages and the ideal

consummation in relation to the change of the literary genre revolved around the

discussions of vernacularization of Ottoman which consisted of Arabic and Persian

words in a Turkish grammar. This era of early novel writers is followed by the short-

lived but extremely productive literary movement called Edebiyat-ı Cedide, The New

Literature (1896-1901), whose members made lasting contributions to Ottoman

literature in the fields of poetry, prose, journalism, and criticism. They printed a

journal entitled as the Servet-i Fünun, Wealth of Sciences, in which new styles of

literature were practiced by keeping up with the Ottoman vocabulary, composed of

many loan words from Arabic and Persian with ornate expressions. However, they

differed from their diwan antecedents by rejecting the Perso-Arabic traditions of the

form and purpose of literature for the development of a Western-oriented literary

theory. Still, their usage of the extensive and ornate Perso-Arab vocabulary, used in a

new way, was intended to demonstrate the Westernizers’ mastery of traditional

Islamic culture (Noyon: 129-131). The New Literature’s view of the role of art in the

society, exemplified by their dictum that “art leads; it does not follow the people,”

differentiated them from their predecessors orientated towards “social change.”

It is during this time the first true Western Turkish novel, Forbidden Love,

was published in the journal, Wealth of Sciences as a consecutive narrative. But what

makes it a real novel and Western after all those unsuccessful attempts? What does

such a literary turn tell about the Turkish modernization, the Ottoman/Turkish

subjectivity and aesthetics?

Occidental ways

“Being modern” is a word of multilayered meanings in Turkish since the word

modern covers a wide range of concepts. Alev Çınar explains that from the beginning

modernization in Turkey has actually been equated with Westernization and

secularization (Çınar: 5). Following this, “Westernization movement” is the main

paradigm of Turkish literature at least until the 1950s. Moreover, it significantly

determines its function, establishment and characters (Moran: 23-4).

101

To conceptualize how the West figures in the temporal/spatial imagining of

modern Turkish national identity, Ahıska offers the term ‘occidentalism’. According

to her, “the West”, from its initial conception in the process of defining the Turkish

national identity in the late nineteenth century to this day, has been contrasted to “the

East” in a continuous negotiation between the two constructs. ““The West” has either

been celebrated as a “model” to be followed or exorcised as a threat to the

“indigenous” national values” (Ahıska: 353).

However, what Ahıska means by “occidentalism” is different from an idea of

internalized Orientalism or a defensive reaction against the West. Instead, she points

to the specific mechanisms that “Orientals” employ to create their subject status

which is not a homogeneous identity and does not pursue same horizons. She writes:

The other is represented not only by the Western subject, as the theory of Orientalism would put it. Occidentalism also denotes the subjectivity of the other in relation to Orientalism. It opens a space for the positivity of the other –its experiences, utterances, and practices- instead of adopting the often negative definition of the other in theories of Orientalism. But it also shows how the subjectivity of the other is encapsulated in the discursive realm of the other that is denied the real thing of modernity. The other’s inhabiting the space of the other and speaking for itself occurs in the same universe of signification. But the double reflection (the viewpoint of the Western representation –that is, how the non-Western imagines that the West sees itself- is incorporated in the reflection on its own identity) complicates the identification process. Hence the critical study of Occidentalism not only deals with the ambivalent identity of the non-Western but also conveys that the imagined Western gaze is an integral part of this identity. It attends to how “center” and “periphery”, or “model” and “copy,” are already inscribed in the conception of modernity (Ahıska: 365). (my emphasis)

Needless to say, the “other” in this essay, Halid Ziya, is not the other of orientalism,

but of the positive space of Occidentalism, open to articulations while encapsulated

by the Western gaze. Thus, I position him as the literary migrant: a migrant of mental

constructions which substantialize in the artistic production called “the novel.”

The Literary Migrant: Halid Ziya

Halid Ziya’s life story, briefly, begins as the third child of a well-to-do Muslim

merchant in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, in 1867, and ends in Istanbul

in the Turkish Republic in 1945. Shortly after he is born, he and his family move to

!zmir (Symrna) where all merchandise is carried out by the non-Muslim subjects of

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the empire, that is, the Levantines, Greeks, Jews and Catholics. He is the first Muslim

to graduate from the Catholic Armenian School, Mechitariste, which educates him in

“strict Western discipline” as well as mastery in French language and literature.

(U"aklıgil 2008: 36) The Encyclopedia of Turkish Language and Literature writes that

“his interactions with the non-Muslim people strengthened his alafranga (European)

tendencies” (465). As early as his high school years, his translations of French poems

appear in the local papers and his first book is on the history of French literature,

published in 1885.

Jennifer Noyon writes that Halid Ziya played a crucial role in the development

of Turkey’s new cultural paradigms, especially during the fertile period of the New

Literature period which laid many of the foundations for modern Turkish aesthetics

(Noyon: 125). Noyon divides the Ottoman Literature into two time periods: the

classical Near Eastern or Islamic phase from about 1300 to 1839 and the period of

change from 1839 (Tanzimat) until the end of the empire in 1923. While the former is

characterized by an orientation toward classical Islamic or Perso-Arabic traditions, the

later is influenced by the products of Western cultural products. Thus, this transitional

period during which Halid Ziya flourished as a writer witnessed “the rejection of

classical diwan literary traditions and their replacement by Western European genres,

standards of literary criticism, and aesthetics” (Noyon: 126).

Still, the New Literature author/poets were generally considered by the critics

as not being able to break away from the Ottoman literary tradition. In contrast,

Noyon writes that this is actually the mastery of these authors who tried to find a

meaningful way between the Ottoman and Western literatures. According to her, this

attempt is not an imitation at all, it reflects a “remaking and reshaping of Ottoman

culture” (Noyon: 155). Therefore, the way these author/poets wrote was hybrid: the

form was Western while the style was Ottoman.

Like his contemporaries Halid Ziya adopted the innovative formal techniques

of Western literary realism, while he used an ornate, Arabo-Persian style and

vocabulary. According to Noyon, this shows his intention to mediate between two

cultures by adopting new genres or ideas from the West, and melding them with

elements that were recognizably Ottoman (Noyon: 127).

Like the Persian asylum seeker, Daryush, who is not able to express himself in

English gains his presence by speaking his language in the video footage that Mieke

Bal narrates in her article, Lost in Space, Lost in the Library, Halid Ziya, the literary

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migrant, uses Ottoman that makes him tell his story. Upon this and the following

discrepancy in the art work where she does not understand his speech in Persian but

touchingly holds his hand, Bal writes:

… what I realized through the interview with Daryush is this: the world as we knew it, art as we knew it, the limits and concepts and distinctions by which we lived, were all transformed by the brief sensation of losing clarity. Including the clarity of where this bit of art production comes from. The sentient encounter that is the aesthetic event became migratory in this sense: detached from the self-evident certainty of who and where we are, and tumbling inside the experience of someone else caught in a state of mobility which curiously imprisons him. Mobility as, paradoxically, a prison (Bal: 28).

What about Halid Ziya’s mobility between the Western form and Ottoman style?

How does the space that Occidentalism opens up for the positivity of the other

enabling him to utter and present his experiences relate to his language?

To call him truly a migrant, I have to elaborate a bit more on the Ottoman

language and style. Moreover, my relation to him, as any contemporary readers, show

how the place he occupies represents a foreign land to me even though Forbidden

Love is considered to be the first Western Turkish novel. For this, I have to confess

that I do not understand anything from his language. From the few words I pick up, I

can recognize the names of the characters and vaguely sense the course of events.

However, all these Arabic and Persian words that are not in current usage any more,

or the extremely long sentences in Perso-Arabian rhetoric nauseate me. It is a book

written totally in a foreign language that vaguely resembles my own language.38 Yet,

the frustration and melancholia I live upon not being able to read the very first

modern novel of Turkish written only about a hundred years ago creates a sentient

encounter in which I also want to hold Halid Ziya’s hand, this literary migrant’s, into

my own, and make him know that this discrepancy between us reflects the continuous

schizophrenia, the whole split between the past and present, in our identities that takes

place in the course of modernization.39

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!38 Even the title is ambiguous, since the word “forbidden”, memnu, is totally out of current usage and resembles “pleasant”, memnun, turning it ironically into “pleasant love”, especially for the viewers of its adaptation into a television series. 39 Historically speaking, the linguistic attempt in modernization/Westernization/ secularization took place in 1926 with the “script reform”. Along with the other secularization projects, this reform also meant un-Easternization. Thus, the Arabic script was changed to the Latin script and “simplification of Turkish” was started to

104

However, I consider this linguistic shift not only means a change in the

vocabulary, but also as the reflection of a drastic change in the worldview. Just as

Halid Ziya’s choice of Ottoman style and vocabulary reflects his allegiance to the

cultural and aesthetic heritage of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic culture, my lack

of understanding shows the rupture from it. Thus, the migrant position I find in Halid

Ziya takes place in two terrains: literature and religion, which are interconnected and

reflective of one another. His upbringing simultaneously consisted of two religions,

either through his father with his passionate interest in Sufism, or his teachers in the

Catholic school. Moreover, he had intense involvement with two literatures: French

and Ottoman. Therefore, my understanding of migration in terms of Turkish literature

is a textual migrancy. It concerns the mobility between two worldviews, two mental

systems which are continuously merging with one another, even though in a different

form, style and content in time and space. However, I do not think the polarities of

East/West, Occidentalism/Orientalism or colonialism/post-colonialism40 alone can

explain this mobility in the specific case of Turkey. I believe what they actually

conceal is the difference between religions; a differentiation more based on their ways

of finding the truth, that is, the relation between desire and truth.

Forbidden Love:

the enigmatic relation between pleasure and confession

The title of Halid Ziya’s 1898 novel is interesting as well as its topic in which the

sexual desire and love are depicted radically different to the previous tradition of the

Ottoman diwan tradition. In the diwan tradition, the poets who all showed their

faithful allegiance to the sultan wrote long, well-versed poems all of which praised

God by depicting the allegory of a love story of a couple, usually two men, deeply in

love and seeking physical union. This tradition of portraying physical desire as the

reflection of a longing for the unity with God is named as ars erotica by Michel

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!coin new Turkish words instead of the Arabo-Persian vocabulary. In line with this, the language of Forbidden Love was first Turkishified by Halid Ziya in 1935. However, since this seems still not Turkish enough to the present readers, the recent publications are printed by defining each of the Ottoman word in brackets. 40 As Ahıska writes Turkey’s situation has been extremely ambivalent in the discussions of post-colonialism since the modernization process was carried out as a willful act with the desire to have the Western civilization with vague thoughts on being Westerner.

105

Foucault as opposed to the scientia sexualis of the Western modernity as part of the

procedure for producing the truth of sex. Foucault writes that numerous traditions

apart from the Western civilization endowed themselves with ars erotica in their

literature and art, such as the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indian, the Roman and the

Arabo-Moslem societies (Foucault: 57). Foucault writes that:

In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to the absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by a reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul (Foucault: 57). (my emphasis)

Foucault claims that it is only the Western Christian society that possesses no ars

erotica but practices scientia sexualis in order to reach to the truth of sex. According

to Foucault, this procedure developed through centuries for telling the truth in total

opposition to the knowledge-power relationship of ars erotica is confession. (Foucalt:

58) However, Foucault does not limit the existence of confession within the religious

realm; rather he argues that this well-established tradition of confession has spread its

effects in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relationships.

Thus, “Western man has become a confessing animal.” (Foucault: 59)

Here, Foucault continuously talks about “the Western man”, “the Western

civilization” and “the Western culture” as a distinct product of history which

emphasizes a specific relation between sex and truth through the obligation to

confess. Indeed, in the Ottoman society and culture, there was no Foucaultian

incitement to talk about sex or obligation to confess desire since love and sexuality

explicitly coexisted as part of the divine order. In his discussion of the pre-nineteenth

century “Ottoman man”, Ze’evi explains the Ottoman ars erotica varied from dream

literature to shadow theater, or to the poems for the beauty of young boys. According

to him, all discussions of sexuality until the nineteenth century were only religious.

Ulemas41 and Sufis writings ranged from “legal tracts on marriage and divorce, and

fornication, to collections of the Prophet’s sayings (hadith) and legal opinions (fatwa),

to poems of devotion, and even to tracts extolling the beauty of young boys as a way

to imagine the magnificence of the divine.” (Ze’evi: 13) Despite all this devotional

writing, he argues that the basic understanding of the human body and its sexuality !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!41 Religious scholars

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has been broken down in the nineteenth century and hardly ever replaced with a new

set of scripts and discussions:

New legal codes of Western origin replaced the "eriat [sharia] and the kanun [law]; Sufi practices and doctrines were sometimes banned by centralizing governments, while the importance of their more orthodox counterparts diminished as a result of growing secularism, modern medical theory and practice replaced the older theoretical construction and brought with it a new attitude to sexual matters; dreams no longer appeared to have the same magical power of foresight, and their traditional interpretations were felt to be inadequate; a public introduced to modern theater and the moves neglected shadow theater and replaced it with new form of visual entertainments; new media –the modern novel, magazine, advertisement, and recorded song and music- appeared on the scene. (Ze’evi: 15)

Ze’evi analyzes the change that comes with the modernization as a replacement of the

Ottoman social, cultural, and religious life with the Western ones. Even though his

account of the male homosexual love and sexuality in the Ottoman life and culture is

extremely insightful, he thus fails to acknowledge the change as a process of

“remaking” and “revising” as Noyon points out. Ze’evi adds that as the nineteenth

century progressed, the Ottoman Middle East seemed to shirk almost all prevalent

forms of text-based sexual discourse and to retreat into “embarrassed silence”.

(Ze’evi: 15)

Nevertheless, with the advent of modernization in a non-Western land, I argue

that not only the categories of East and West blur, but also ars erotica and scientia

sexualis do. Contrary to Ze’evi’s announcement of the death of ars erotica and the

beginning of scientia sexualis, I claim that such a replacement does merely happen in

the form of the text. The prestigious literary form turns into the prose of the novel

instead of the long poems of the diwan literature. And the novel, writes Foucault, is

directly linked to the Christian confession. He explains that the Western culture has

witnessed a transition from “a pleasure to be recounted and heard” to a literature

“ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in

between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a

shimmering mirage.” (Foucault: 59) Likewise, the famous literary critic, Ahmet

Hamdi Tanpınar, observes the lack of religious confession in Islam to be solely

responsible for the belatedness of Turkish literature (Gürbilek: 601). For confession to

exist, the story of a sexual sin must first take place.

107

Entitling a Worldview:

Love Forbidden

In Forbidden Love, Halid Ziya writes about a love triangle set in a big and wealthy

house of a New Ottoman patriarch located by the Bosphorus in Istanbul, the capital

city of the Ottoman Empire in the last decades of the 19th century. The female

protagonist, Bihter gets married to a rich Ottoman gentleman double her age to satisfy

her commodity desire to find out that she actually desires love and sensuality. Then

she begins a secret affair with her husband’s nephew, the “dandy” Behlül42 who lives

in the same house.

Since this affair which is purely sexual in the beginning later turning into love

and finally into jealousy takes place in the patriarch’s house, it concerns various

aspects of “the forbidden”. However, the first is simply the story of Adam and Eve in

which Eve picks up the forbidden fruit from the forbidden tree and makes Adam eat

it. As a result, they both get expelled from the Garden of Eden and a life of suffering

begins for them. This story sets the ground in which the original sin of the Judeo-

Christian culture is committed and thereby it is the beginning of a new era in which

man and woman are condemned to live on the earth. The Islamic manuscript, the

Qur’an, also repeats the story of Adam and Eve, however with a slight change in the

narrative: instead of the notions of guilt and sin in the Christian sense, there is the

notion of shame in the Islamic account of the story of Adam and Eve. Abdelwahab

Bouhdiba writes that the Adam and Eve story in the Qur’an reflects discovering the

sexual truth. Because they get aware of their nakedness, they get ashamed, upon

which they invent clothing and thus enter into the social life (Bouhdiba: 10).

As soon as man was chased from paradise, he was thrown into a world in which Eros found meaning. The life of the world is a life devoted to Eros. The fundamental bond is essentially erotic. Becoming, alternation, opposition, diversity and all other forms of relation have in one way or another, an erotic significance. It is Eros, therefore, that governs the entire universe. Sexuality is diversity in unity. Hence its importance and purificatory power (Bouhdiba: 12).

The textual difference in this very first story of the monotheistic tradition, thus,

presents two different sets of meaning related to sexuality and love. However,

contextualizing it at the specific moment of Westernization of a Muslim culture !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!42 A category of the European gentleman, Gürbilek ?

108

brings about the question of which Adam and Eve story should be applied to

Forbidden Love. Do I have to choose the Muslim version because Halid Ziya comes

from a Muslim society?

Before giving any certain answer to it at all, I would like to interpret this title

as a reference to the previous artworks of the diwan literature which seek truth

through the allegory of love on earth. In this account, the physical/natural love might

take one to the spiritual love and to the love for the divine (Ibn-i Arabi43: 43). All

these three definitions of love reflected different levels on which a person could

experience a portion of love according to his/her creation which in turn determines the

degree of the temperance of his ego. Therefore, the love experience of one determined

by one’s creation means that the general understanding of love in such a culture is not

secular, but divine. And the divine encompasses the worldly, while the secular

differentiates itself from the divine.

Thus, the secular move from the diwan literature indicates a move from the

Islamic culture in art and aesthetics. As in the title of Forbidden Love, love becomes

forbidden which transgresses the idea of Eros as the basis of life. It is just not love as

the Islamic idea of Eros is forbidden, but also the literature and aesthetic it represents

is announced to be dead. In this context, love is secularized, and now bereft of its

divine meaning turns into a love in which sexual desire posits a threat and follows the

Western model with its confession of the sin. However, the topic is still love even

though it now refers to the boundaries that love face in a social setting in fluctuation.

Conclusion

As I have referred to the experience of Bal encountering a Persian migrant who is not

able to express himself in English, makes him talk in his mother tongue and he, thus,

calms down and acquires his presence, I have tried to initiate a talk with Halid Ziya,

the Ottoman writer who is celebrated to have written the first Western Turkish novel.

To my dismay, the way he spoke was at first literally unintelligible to me. However,

with the help of translations, Ottoman words turning into Turkish, I could follow him,

only to find him somewhere at the crossroads of desire and truth, between two literary

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!43 Ibn Arabi was an Islamic scholar who lived between 1165-1240 wrote on Sufism.

109

forms and worldviews. In this essay, I have briefly tried to account for this encounter

with the literary migrant and the way he represents an aesthetics in migration to me.

I call Halid Ziya “the literary migrant” who has not immigrated to any space,

but he has in time. It is not to repeat the linear ideal of progress, but to refer to a

different set of time, depending on the relation between desire and truth: in the

previous one the more one desires, the more he/she achieves truth, while the later one

advocates running quickly to find the truth of sex. Thus, the slow flow of time is now

replaced with the quick tick tacks of modernity. Once the Muslim Eve picks up the

forbidden love and eats it devouringly with Adam, the whole pink hue of the Garden

turns into grey, the story begins anew with a boat sailing on the azure waters of

Bosphorus, while it ends with the swift and loud sound of a pistol in the hands of

Bihter, an elegant, small pistol, which tears down the life and spirit of Bihter.

I have called Halid Ziya to be making a mental migration as a literary act since

what Foucault calls ars erotica is, after long attempts, changes into a Western

literature of scientific observations in his novels. With his insistence on keeping his

Ottoman language, he is still not a Westerner, but a migrant. However, the way he

moves between one set of space/time into another one resembles a physical migration

as it results with a physical object: a forbidden love story of the Ottoman Bihter, just

like her contemporaries the French Emma Bovary, the Russian Anna Karenina and

the German Effi Briest, traverses through sexuality and desire, while she is strangely

not feeling guilty, but ashamed of herself and her fate which determines her to be

looking for the sensuality her body asks for.

“Migratory aesthetics” suggests the various processes of becoming that are

triggered by the movement of people and peoples: experiences of transition as well as

the transition of experience itself into new modalities, new art work, new ways of

being. (Durrant and Lord: 11-12) Drawing on this, I have tried to explain how

Forbidden Love means a break from the divine understanding of love just like the

reaching out to the forbidden fruit meant for Adam and Eve to be driven away from

the Garden of Eden. Moreover, I find that this cultural object, historically and

spatially, occupies a place beyond the constructions of the East and West while it is

declared as the first Western novel in Turkey. Thus, Forbidden Love, revealing the

tension between the Christian and Muslim stories of Adam and Eve, functions within

the ambivalent space of the other through the gaze of the Westerner: looking at one’s

own culture of sexuality and pleasure, and feeling guilty for the culture of the other.

110

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Önertoy, Olcay. Edebiyatımızda Ele"tiri (Criticism in our Literature). Ankara:

Ankara Üniversitesi, 1980. Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. Be" #ehir (Five Cities). Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları,

2001. U"aklıgil, Halid Ziya. A"k-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love). Istanbul: Özgür Yayınları,

2009. U"aklıgil, Halid Ziya. Kırk Yıl (Forty Years). Istanbul: Özgür Yayınları, 2008.

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Ze’evi, Dror. Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East 1500-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

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Merav Yerushalmy (Ben Gurion University)

What are we to do without exile? On mnemonic traces,

shared mutualities, and criticality in the work of Ilana

Salama Ortar

"What are we to do without exile?" asks the poet Mahmoud Darwish in Who am I

Without Exile? "Outside the reach of gravity, of the 'land of identity,'" he writes, the

stranger on the river's bank may no longer be without exile. For "nothing sparkles

from the shore of ebb and flow, between the Euphrates and the Nile," he says.

"Nothing makes me descend from the pharaoh’s boats. Nothing carries me or makes

me carry an idea: not longing, and not promise." (Darwish 2007: 89).

For Darwish, who devoted much of his work to the subject of exile, it is friendship,

and love, and dreams of nomads and of other places that remain in exile, at least

according to this poem. But the river of exile, the poem tells us, does not allow for

recognition of places and their specificities, nor does it carry subjectivity or thought.

These are lost in exile, the poem suggests, and cannot be retrieved through longing or

promise. It is their loss and their continuing absence, says Darwish, that make us who

we are. They constitute us to such an extent that we no longer know what to do

without exile.

The subject of exile also lies at the heart of Ilana Salama Ortar's work, which is the

subject of this essay. The work of Ilana Salama Ortar, an artist living and working in

Israel and in Europe, often performed within the fraught histories of Israel and

Palestine, explores the traces of others who have migrated or have been exiled, as

they are inscribed in contemporary urban space and effaced from it. Delving into

Ortar's work, I wish to explore in this paper the ways in which both ideas and

subjectivities, lost to exile in Darwish's poem, may be carried by exile's rivers –

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transforming theory and practice in their encounters with others and with the

specificities of place. More plainly phrased what I am interested in here are the ways

in which aesthetic practices, and Ortar's in particular, allow for a performance of

memory and absence, while attending to specific localities and the locational

specificities of theory. Such practices underline the ways in which exile, and

migrational aesthetics more generally, may prompt us to rethink not only historical

and aesthetic specificities, but also the ways in which contemporary theory and

discourse are structured, and the modes of migration and exile through which they are

transformed.

One of Ortar's first major projects, titled Villa Khury (produced and exhibited

between 1995 and 1997), traced the histories of a specific site in the city of Haifa,

Israel, where previously stood the Villa Khury. The villa which had been a central

feature of the Haifa downtown before the Israeli-Palestine war of 1948, had been

taken over and occupied by Israeli forces during the battles, and was left in a decrepit

state until it was demolished in the 1970s, making way for a new commercial centre

known as Migdal HaNeviim – literally the "tower of prophets."i

Image of Villa Khury in 1975

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Over the two year period, Ortar exhibited four installations in and around Villa

Khury/Migdal HaNeviim, addressing the site's physical and mnemonic traces in the

current urban matrix. The first installations were located within the commercial centre

and its shop windows. They included scaled models of the villa and of the commercial

centre, aerial photographs, various documentary images and texts, and a video work

in which various Haifa residents recounted their experiences of living in the city.

Installation I: Villa Khury and Migdal HaNeviim, scaled model

In the second stage of the project, the installation was exhibited again, but this time at

the site of a local church, St. Luke, located in close proximity to the Villa Khury

location. The church had been built at the same time and style as the villa, and served

as Haifa's first public hospital and one of the city's most prominent buildings before

the 1948 war. The installation at the church thus recalled the memory of the Villa

Khury, but also worked to displace both artwork and viewers from the "original" site

of the villa to the site of the church, invoking questions of belonging and dislocation.

The church thus served both as a trace of the now demolished site of origin, providing

a mnemonic and discursive platform from which to engage with it, but also

underlined the non-site of the now demolished villa, and its absent presence.

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The third installation was located on a main thoroughfare starting at Villa Khury, and

included a series of plaques placed in the street. On the plaques were aerial

photographs and images of some of the street's main buildings and sites (including the

Haifa City Hall and the municipal memorial park) and questionnaires addressing the

sites and prompting personal recollections of them were handed to passers bys.

Iinstallation III, detail, Plaque in front of City Hall

In the fourth and final stage of the project, Ortar built a self-contained capsule that

included two chairs and a table, in which those who wished could discuss the site and

its histories with others.

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Installation IV, Capsule

Reviewing the questionnaires, one is struck by the widely differing views and

memories participants recounted of the Villa Khury and the other sites along the

thoroughfare. Amir Halil, for example, an Israeli-Palestinian child who responded to

an image of the municipal memorial park that appeared on some of the questionnaires

wrote:

My name is Amir Halil. I am one of those exiled from the Biram village. I study at the St. John school near Hassan Shukri St. In my class I have friends from Haifa, from the Galilee, from Ousafiya, and from Daliat el'Carmel. In 1948 we had a beautiful village – Biram. One day soldiers from the Zionist army came and took us out of there. Our land has not been returned to this day. We pray that you give it back, and I hope that we will go back there.ii

Addressing the same site, Zvi Miller – the original architect of the park wrote:

The local municipality and the government were in dispute about the designated use of this land. When Aba Houshi (Haifa's mayor at the time) heard about the government's plan to build offices on this plot, he asked me to draw plans for a sort of a "Central Park" for this highly populated area. At the time thousands of new immigrants were living in this area in very poor conditions, and this park was meant to better their living conditions – to serve as a place in which to relax and breathe some fresh air.

The issues Ortar's work underlines have been widely explored in recent theoretical

discourse that focuses on questions of relationality, the common and exile, as well as

site and locationality and the engagement with and of others. From Nicholas

Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud: 2002 [1998]) and the ensuing

theoretical debates, through Miwon Kwon's discussion of site and subjectivity in One

Place after Another (Kwon: 2004), to Jean Luc Nancy's exploration of the inoperative

community (Nancy: 1991[1983]) and the singular plural (Nancy: 2000[1996]), these

texts vary widely, but in many ways converge in their attempts to re-imagine, both

aesthetically and politically, a common or shared mutuality from which difference has

not been obliterated.

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The rise in interest, as well as the difficulties in thinking through shared mutualities

and difference may be seen in the emerging discourse prompted by Nicholas

Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. The initial manifesto-like text, published in 1998

and translated into English in 2002, referred to a set of performative practices in

which contemporary artists such as Rikrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, and Jens Haaning,

as well as earlier "relational artists" such as Felix Gonzales Torres and Stephen

Willats, provided platforms and sites in which viewers could engage in eating,

researching, cultivating land, educating, social activism, dialogue, and other shared

activities. These practices share many of their aesthetic and theoretical premises with

those of Ortar – from Gillick's platforms of discussion that could be read in

conjunction with Ortar's dialogue capsules, to the documentary aesthetics and

testimonials that comprise a crucial aspect of both Stephen Willats' and Ortar's

works.iii Many of the works discussed by Bourriaud, such as those of Gonzalez Torres

and Hanning, have also addressed issues of migration, as well as the memory and

absence of others, but these aspects of the relational aesthetics discourse have scarcely

been explored.

More than Bourriaud's text however, it was the heated debate it spurred that attested

to the growing interest in a wide spectrum of issues pertaining to the common and to

difference. Such issues were highlighted by Claire Bishop in an essay titled

Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (Bishop: 2004). Bishop’s highly acclaimed

essay was (and to some extent still is) one of the more extensive and better argued

criticisms of Bourriaud’s writing and of the practices of relational art. It focuses on

the importance of conflict and of exposing existing political and social conditions for

sustaining meaningful dialogue within relational aesthetics and political discourse at

large. Analysing Bourriaud’s understanding of relationality, often based in convivial

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notions of being-with-others, Bishop argued that such practices would not “usher in

all dialogue” as Bourriaud had hoped (Bourriaud 2002[1998]: 44), and offer us

pertinent alternatives to the growing commodification of human relations, but could

rather undermine the very possibility of politically meaningful relationality by the

eradication of conflict. Grounding her arguments in the work of Ernesto Laclau and

Chantal Mouffe, Bishop maintained that it is not the inclusive, coherent relationality

suggested by Bourriaud and the formulation of alternative relational models that we

must strive for, but the inherently in-coherent, open ended communal relations,

grounded in existing political and social conditions that we must seek. Retaining

conflict in both our conceptualisation and practice of relationality, suggested Bishop,

is the only way in which to sustain difference and avoid a community of sameness,

detrimental to both political and aesthetic practices.

Much has been written on the subject of relational aesthetics since Bishop published

her paper in 2004. Anthony Downey, for example, considered the main thrust of

relational aesthetics in identifying a key "movement" in contemporary art and

renewing art criticism (Downey 2007). Toni Ross criticised some of its more liberal

aspects and offered her own neo-Marxist reading of it (Ross 2006) and Stewart Martin

delved into the dialectic relations of commodification, reading Relational Aesthetics

as part of art's ongoing attempts to critique the commodity form and contextualise it

within the rethinking of Communism (Martin 2007).

All these readings offer valuable insight into our understanding of relational aesthetics

and the contested issues underlined by it. But what remains most relevant in this

emerging discourse, at least for the purpose of this essay are the underlying

assumptions about the practices of critical theory which, I suggest, lie at the heart of

the debate over relational aesthetics. Contextualising Bourriaud's and Bishop's essays

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within the contemporary discussions over the role of critical theory enables us to

reframe the debate between them and gain a better understanding of some of the

issues at stake for both relational aesthetics and critical theory more generally.

Bourriaud himself clearly stated his critical position in Relational Aesthetics, claiming

that "Social utopias and revolutionary hopes have given way to everyday micro-

utopias and imitative strategies," and that "any stance that is 'directly' critical of

society is futile, if based on the illusion of a marginality that is nowadays impossible,

not to say regressive" (Bourriaud 2002[1998]: 31). Bourriaud continues by arguing

that "traditional critical philosophy" such as that of the Frankfurt school has become a

"magnificent but ineffectual toy" (Bourriaud 2002[1998]: 31), and that rather than

negating existing conditions or charting grand utopias, contemporary art and artists

must "learn to inhabit the world in a better way" (Bourriaud 2002[1998]: 13). Such

practices, he claimed, however small scale, may provide us with a vision of a better

future – one forged through relational ties allowing for new forms of being-in-

common, as well as greater responsibility for others.

Bishop, by contrast, saw greater critical potential in exposing and negating existing

aesthetic and political conditions. In her essay, she discussed the work of Santiago

Sierra, who has become known for his performances in which marginalized people,

such as sex workers and illegal immigrants, are paid minimal sums by him for

carrying out demeaning and often literally scaring tasks, such as sitting hidden in

boxes or having a line tattooed across their backs. According to Bishop, Sierra's work

is a good example of the more disruptive and less convivial relationality she

advocates, as it manages to outline the limits of both aesthetic and political practice,

demonstrating the futility of even the more extreme attempts of undermining the

existing system. She quoted Sierra as saying:

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I can’t change anything. There is no possibility that we can change anything with our artistic work. We do our work because we are making art, and because we believe art should be something, something that follows reality. But I don’t believe in the possibility of change (Bishop 2004: 71).

Although Sierra may be understood in this instance to be outlining the boundaries of

aesthetic practice and alluding to its autonomy (issues that Bishop discussed

favourably in her essay), this quote also evokes Bishop's own critical stance, and the

value she sees in demonstrating the futility of change and underscoring our

determinate enclosure within the existing political, aesthetic, and economic systems.

Rather than fashioning alternative models of inhabiting the world, Bishop claimed

that it is the "exposing [of] that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of

[relational] harmony… that provide[s] a more concrete and polemical grounds for

rethinking our relationship to the world and to one other" (Bishop 2004: 79). It is on

such grounds advocates Bishop, that our critical thinking should be based.

The political roles of (micro)utopias, such as those suggested by Bourriaud, as well as

the critical thrust of practices that like Santiago Sierra's demonstrate our growing

inability to imagine a better world. These have been addressed in several recent

essays, including Fredrick Jameson's Politics of Utopia (Jameson 2004). In the essay

Jameson embraced both the “positive” or “active” roles of utopian imagining, and the

more “negative” or antagonistic ones. He argued that utopia is at its "most authentic

when we cannot imagine it... reveal[ing] the ideological closure of the system in

which we are somehow trapped and confined" (Jameson 2004: 46), but also that we

cannot possibly outline a "new and effective practical politics for the era of

globalization" without the impetus of utopian imagining (Jameson 2004: 36). Jameson

thus set the stage for a more complex understanding of utopian practices and their

critical apparatus, stressing their paradoxical nature and underlining their crucial

importance, not only for political practices, but also, I suggest, for aesthetic ones.

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Like Jameson, Irit Rogoff is also interested in the political and critical roles of

imagining other worlds and other ways of being in the world, understanding the

growing force of utopian imaging as a part of the recent changes within theory itself.

Recognising the critical viability of practices that seek to expose existing conditions,

but also their limitations, she asks:

What comes after the critical analysis of culture? What goes beyond the endless cataloguing of the hidden structures, the invisible powers and the numerous offences we have been preoccupied with for so long? Beyond the processes of marking and making visible those who have been included and those who have been excluded? Beyond being able to point our finger at the master narratives and at the dominant cartographies of the inherited cultural order? Beyond the celebration of emergent minority group identities, or the emphatic acknowledgement of someone else’s suffering, as an achievement in and of itself? (Rogoff 2006: 2).

The answer to these questions, suggested Rogoff, lies in "looking away" from existing

conditions and their critique, and learning to "access a different mode of inhabitation"

(Rogoff 2006: 2), in which one embodies criticality. Rogoff did not trace a clear

trajectory, instructing us how to better inhabit our world and embody criticality, but

she did flesh out some of the issues at stake in undertaking such an endeavour. The

crux of these issues seems to lie in the rethinking of collectivity, a rethinking that

suggests a better (rather than simply "different") way of understanding and practicing

shared mutualities. Such mutualities are not grounded in stable and carefully

differentiated identities around which similarly identified subjects may congregate,

but rather come into being fleetingly, formulating a political, aesthetic, or conceptual

sharing of a practice, an artwork, or an idea from which neither singularity not

plurality are excluded.

Going back to Ilana Ortar's work, we are now in a better position to understand some

of the contexts in which her work operates, as well as the specific formulations of

shared mutualities it may offer us.

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Reading the different accounts of the site of the Villa Khury prompted by Ortar's

questionnaires, it becomes obvious that the work manages to explicate some of the

many conflicts inherent in contemporary Israeli society. The testimonies collected by

Ortar attest to the tensions between the historical narratives of Palestinians and

Zionists, to the strained relations between the local municipalities and the emerging

state bureaucracy, to the conflicts between those recently exiled from the new state

and those freshly "absorbed" in it, and to other sites of friction.iv In some ways then,

we can read Ortar's work through Bishop's conceptualisation of antagonistic

relationality and Rogoff's understanding of critique. For if critique is the explicating

of master narratives and cartographies, as well as the marking and seeing of those

who have been excluded, then Ortar's work surely falls within this category. Such a

reading of Ortar's work has been offered by Sophie Wahnich, for example, who

describes Ortar's practices as a systematic critique of Zionism, working to uncover

marginalised narratives and identities (Wanich 2005).

But Ortar's elaboration of the Villa Khury is grounded not only in exposing existing

conditions, or in the practices of critique, but also in the fathoming of other, better

worlds, and the fashioning of new modes of criticality. Such modes are characterised

in Ortar's work (and elsewhere) by a deep interest in the site of the common and

shared mutualities, by an emphasis on the "positive" as well as the "negative" aspects

of utopia, and by the (re)thinking of what critical aesthetic and political practice might

mean today. Such modes of criticality are at play throughout Ortar's oeuvre, but they

seem particularly poignant in one of her more extensive projects, The Camp of the

Jews, researched and exhibited between 1998 and 2005.

In the Camp of the Jews, Ortar turned her attention to the traces of a former transit

camp in Marseille, a camp in which many Jews (including Ortar's own family), as

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well as other exiles and prisoners of war resided between the mid 1940s and the mid

1960s.v The camp, which Ortar visited in the late 1990s, was initially established at

the end of World War II by the Marseille authorities that needed a place to house

political prisoners, migrant workers from north Africa, refugees, and discharged

soldiers. The camp barracks were built using a method developed under the German

occupation for the building of bridges, in which truncated ceramic bottles were

inserted one into the other to form arches. These arches or vaults then served as the

basis for the semi-barrel-like barracks of the camp. Three million of these bottles had

been manufactured in Marseille for the Germans during the occupation, but were

never used, and thus at the end of the war, some of them were utilised to build the

"temporary shelters" for the war's refugees, its prisoners, and the migrant workforce

needed to rehabilitate its shattered cities. In 1946, after the camp had been emptied of

some of its former residents, parts of it were allocated for Jewish immigrants from

North Africa and post-war Europe (often illegally residing in France), who were en

route to Palestine, then under British mandate.

Ortar's initial exploration of the camp resulted in a series of installations exhibited at

various galleries in Europe and Israel, in which different elements of the camp were

documented and reconfigured. The installations, like those of the Villa Khury,

explored issues of migration and exile, historical memory and the traces of others, and

juxtaposed contesting narratives, differing subjects, and diverse historical and

personal documentation.

As in the Villa Khury, but perhaps to a greater extent, in the Camp of the Jews Ortar

sought to address not only the voices of those directly involved in the history of the

camp, but also those whose lives have been (or could have been) indirectly affected

by its history. Thus, in an installation at the Cittadellarte exhibition space in Rome

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(1999), Ortar exhibited not only the physical remains she excavated at the camp itself,

but also recast the truncated ceramic bottles used to build it in Hebron blue glass.

Hebron, now a part of the designated Palestinian territory under Israeli military rule,

has traditionally been a centre for the manufacturing of glassware, and blue bottles,

not too dissimilar to those Ortar exhibited, have been, and still are being produced by

traditional means within the city. Hebron has also been the site of intense struggles

between Palestinians, Jews, and Israeli military forces, struggles fuelled not only by

the ongoing conflicts between Israel and Palestine but also by the lingering memory

of the massacre of 1929, in which dozens of Jews living in the city were murdered.

The installation of the Hebron bottles thus extended the issues of exile and dislocation

from the specific site of the camp into the ongoing conflict of Israel and Palestine.

In a further installation exhibited at the Herzliya Museum of Art in Israel (2005), a

semi-barrel-like structure, similar to that of the Camp's barracks, was installed within

the museum space. Positioned within the foyer, the curved structure of the "barrack"

displayed a somewhat surprising resemblance to the structure of the museum, itself

built as a series of vaulted bunker-like spaces, a part of Israel's Brutalist architectural

tradition. Originally constructed in the 1970s and extended by the same architectural

firm in the 1990s, the Herzliya museum serves not only as a gallery but also as a

memorial site, commemorating the fallen soldiers of the city of Herzliya (Efrat 2005).

Its visual and conceptual structuring, evoking those of a bunker, are thus far from

coincidental and were meant to embody and "protect" both the memory of trauma and

the space of exhibition. Ortar's installation of the "barrack" within the museum walls

thus expanded our understanding of the camp's site and its traces, addressing not only

the historical barracks and their former residents, but also the mnemonic and

traumatic traces performed by the museum and its architecture. The reading of the

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museum as a part of an ongoing "architecture of emergency," which informed the

building of the barracks as well as that of the museum, highlighted the ways in which

the historical issues of exile and migrations, and the ongoing conflicts between Israel

and Palestine are inscribed not only in historical sites that now lie at the outskirts of

urban sprawl or in locations of intense national struggles, but also in the production of

the exhibition space itself, and of the work of art.

Ortar's project continued to evolve and expand over the years, employing the barrack-

like structure as an independent exhibition space outside the Museum of

Contemporary Art in Marseille, for example, and identifying "traces" of the camp's

truncated bottles in the ceramic pipes used as wind shafts in the roofs of east

Jerusalem.

The accumulated impact of the installations and the various sites they marked and

documented gradually became much greater than the sum of its parts. Suggesting an

ever growing web of practices and traces, Ortar's work conjured an understanding of

exile that far exceeded specific trajectories or events, yet allowed for their

singularities to become manifest. Exiles and migrations seem to permeate each

narrative explored in Ortar's work. They are everywhere yet tell specific stories, they

belong to us (whoever we may be), but also to others, and they constitute us in

specific ways, at specific times and in specific places, but also suggest a being-in-

common of differing subjects. The Hebron blue glass bottles, for example, are similar

to the truncated bottles of the camp of the Jews, and those in turn recall the wind

shafts in the roofs of east Jerusalem, but they are never identical, and their difference

constitutes the shared mutual space of exile. In a similar manner, the exile and

migration of Palestinians from Haifa and the destruction of the Villa Khury in the

1948 war are reminiscent of the migration and exile of Jews from North Africa and

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post-war Europe through Marseille (many of whom arrived in Haifa around 1948),

and echoes, but does not repeat, the exile of Jews from Hebron after the 1929

massacre and the ongoing deportation of Palestinians from the Hebron city centre

today. It is the crucial differences between these narratives, as well as the common

space of exile they demarcate, that Ortar's work offers us. Her work suggests an

understanding of criticality in which not only the exposing of antagonistic relations

are at play, but also the imagining of a space in which others and other narratives may

share without the erasure of difference and singularity. This may not be a fully

fledged utopian vision, as it does not offer us an image of what a world without exile

may look like, or how exile and migrations may be better addressed in contemporary

political or aesthetic practice. But it does point to the ways in which we may better

inhabit a world in which exile and migrations are an increasing part of, and how we

may inhabit such a world in ways that allow for being in common with others and

their traces.

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Endnotes

!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!i Much of the information presented here was gained through correspondence with the Ilana Salama Ortar over the years 2008-10. Some of the information was also gathered from Ortar's archival material and from a book published on her work (see Salama Ortar 2005). ii Both this and the following quote are taken from Ilana Salama Ortar's personal archives. iii See a discussion of these and other relational works of art in (Yerushalmy: 2008). iv Absorption is the official terminology for the reception of new Jewish immigrants by the state of Israel. v Again, much of the information presented here was gained through correspondence with the Ilana Salama Ortar over the years 2008-10. Some of the information was also gathered from Ortar's archival material and from a book published on her work (see Salama Ortar (2005).

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Bishop, Claire, (2004), Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, October, 110, pp. 51-

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al.), Paris: Presses du Réel.

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Townsend: Copper Canyon Press.

Doherty, Claire, (2004), From Studio to Situation: Contemporary Art and the Question of Context, London: Black Dog Publications.

Downey, Anthony, (2007), Towards a Politics of (Relational) Aesthetics, Third Text, 21:3, pp. 267-275.

Durrant, Sam, & Lord, Catherine M., (2007), Essays in Migratory Aesthetics, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi editions.

Efrat Zvi, On the Exhibition The Camp of The Jews at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, in Salama Ortar, Ilana (ed.), The Camp of the Jews: Uprooting, Refugeeism and Immigration, Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press, pp. 14-26.

Hanru, Hou, (2002), On the Mid-Ground, Hong Kong: Time Zone Publications.

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Jameson, Fredric, (2004), The Politics of Utopia, New Left Review, 25, pp. 35-54.

Kwon, Miwon, (2000), The Wrong Place, Art Journal, 59:1, pp. 32-43.

Mimon, Vered, (2009), The Third Citizen: On Models of Criticality in Contemporary Artistic Practices. October, 129, pp. 85-112. Morgan, Jessica, (2004), Common Wealth, London: Tate Publishing. Nancy, Jean-Luc, (1991[1983]), The Inoperative Community, (trans. Connor, Peter et al.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc, (2000 [1996]), Being Singular Plural, (trans. Richardson Robert D. et al.), Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Rogoff Irit, (2002), We - Mutualities, Collectivities, Participations, in Von Hantelmann Dorothea (ed.), I Promise It's Political, Cologne: Museum Ludwig.

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Rogoff, Irit, (2004), Looking Away - Participations in Visual Culture, in Butt Gavin (ed.), Art After Criticism, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 117-134. Rogoff, Irit, (2006), 'Smuggling' – An Embodied Criticality, http://transform.eipcp.net, accessed 2 December, 2009, pp. 2-7. Ross, Toni, (2006), Aesthetic Autonomy and Interdisciplinarity: A response to Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics, Journal of Visual Arts Practice, 5:3, pp. 167-183. Salama Ortra, Ilana and Wright, Stephen, (2006), Inadvertent Monuments, Third Text, 20:3, pp. 373-376.

Salama Ortar, Ilana, (2005), The Camp of the Jews: Uprooting, Refugeeism and Immigration, Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press. Stewart, Martin, (2007), Critique of Relational Aesthetics, Third Text, 21:4, pp. 369-386.

Wanich, Sophie, (2005), The Reverse Sides of History: An Artistic Critique of Zionism, in Salama Ortar, Ilana (ed.), The Camp of the Jews: Uprooting, Refugeeism and Immigration, Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press, pp. 36-50. Yerushalmy, Merav, (2008), The State of Relations: Issues of Relationality and Practices of Documentation in Contemporary Art, PhD Thesis, Colchester: University of Essex.

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Z.A. Khaldun

Travels Well

Admonished in its early stages as an art form dependent upon a brazen sampling of

previously recorded music, Hip Hop aesthetics entails a theft. In its production there

is a virtual looting of and recognition of a diverse and complicated cultural web. This

form of music was deemed illegitimate and lacking authenticity due to the fact that

there were usually no instruments played and it relied primarily on sampling pre-

recorded tracks. The debate continues today despite the abundance of sample-based

electronic music, but becomes central to many critiques of the form. Sampling in Hip

Hop was an extension of the looping of records by DJs as technological progress and

innovation allowed for those parts of the record to be isolated, looped, “chopped up”,

and mixed with other samples. Rappers and producers faced criticism in the

mainstream press as well as legal battles (most notably Biz Markie, Luke Skywalker

of 2 Live Crew, and Prince Paul) for the music they were making and the way in

which they made it. The way in which they made the music, this very illegitimacy

remains central to its meaning making and aesthetic and was present at it’s earliest

manifestations in the dance clubs.

This theft however is a recognition of rich culture cultural web from which to sample

and is a reclamation of such in the creation of an art form which becomes a way in

which to communicate in a ever complicated and entangled world– a making sense of

cultural signifiers as people move adopt and adapt ways of being. This aesthetic

practice allows for a “making sense” to oneself and the other of a complicated past

and convoluted presence that allows it to “travel well”.

Hip Hop started in the party, when in the mid 1970’s DJ’s began to play the most

popular parts of a records back to back and MC’s (or masters of ceremony) began

talking in synch over the record to the crowd. While it was taking place in a party

there was simultaneously a theft already taking place. The recorded music on vinyl

was being manipulated by the DJ and its narrative taken over by that of the M.C. An

M.C. only gains the title as such because he is able to master the crowd and be in

synch, more so than the pre-recorded track, with the audience. This taking, takeover,

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or theft that was perpetrated and present at the earliest stages in Hip Hop by the DJ

and the M.C. remains an important part of the genre and thus theft formulaic in its

aesthetics.

It is thus in sampling that rap music became an intertextual form. The attack on the

form’s legitimacy spawned defenses citing the African tradition of “signifying” a

“form of black discourse, one that significantly relies on the intertextual referencing

of previous texts in its making of meaning… Rap’s “double voiced discourse”

(through both aural and verbal cues) contains within it the inflected “voice” of its

antecedent “other”. The case of rap also highlights the ways in which notions of

authorship and originality do not necessarily apply across forms and cultural

traditions… because different musical practices defy the universals of legal

discourse1. This brazen intertextuality in it’s production makes Hip Hop a quite

obvious postmodern art form in which authorship is contested through thievery,

constructing a (common) ground in its continual citation of a communal text on which

the producers and rappers draw in order to relate and share their narrative. The

understanding that develops in the citation of a shared text creates this common

ground on which the individual can relate her narrative only through her citation of

the other and creates community.

In “The Practice of Everyday Life” Michel de Certeau calls this a poaching tactic in

which individuals produce something new from that which they consume. For him

this is a form of antidiscipline in resistance to a subjectifying power and also closes

the gap between the worker and that which she produces2. I posit that in Hip Hop this

poaching or theft of music and language creates not only something new but a space

in which a community can be formed in recognition of an inherited and embodied

subjectivity in this citation of the other. These ways of operating posited as “tactics”

compose the network of “antidiscipline” for de Certeau. He differentiates tactics and

strategies in that strategies assume a place (he uses proprietors, enterprises, cities, and

scientific institutions as examples), that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serve

as the basis for generating relations distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, targets,

objects of research). A “tactic, on the other hand, is a calculus which cannot count on

a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline

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distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of the tactic belongs to the

other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking

over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no

base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure

independence with respect to circumstances. The “proper” is a victory of space over

time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time- it is

always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized on ‘the wing”3. Whatever it

wins it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into

“opportunities.” These tactics for De Certeau are inextricably linked to art or ways of

making something new and we can immediately make connections with Hip Hop’s

earliest utterances by DJ Kool Herc in the Bronx, a transitional immigrant from the

island of Jamaica in the disenfranchised Bronx in the 1970’s he made his mark— he

was able to circumscribe a place for himself by a precise use of timing in his

manipulation of looping records and turn these pre-recorded tracks into a new

“opportunity” to connect with the crowd. This technique had been previously honed

in the dancehalls of Jamaica. It is in these stolen moments per se, that a music is

poached and something new is produced. But it is from something that has been taken

on by the crowd, something they have already poached themselves, made their own.

It was in New York however that this practice was exploited and an entire art form

was birthed and it was in these beats, or rhythms that the crowd has incorporated (or

constituted) their own rhythm that the Hip Hop DJ and later, Hip Hop producers

found these opportunities for articulation.

With the abundance of market research and trend reporting consumers are now even

producing the products they consume (eg. the specialization of McKroket and other

culture specific additions to the menu, and individualization of products eg. Nike ID).

Simultaneously these same preferences are determined (at least partly) by

viral/presence/grassroots marketing and social networking. There is a movement

towards a communal text regardless of who’s driving it and institutions have taken on

tactical maneuvers. Globalization and the numbers of transient, hybrid individuals, or

institutions (as they expand into new markets) with no circumscribed space are

relying on tactical maneuvers for survival. Is everyone marginal? Is this perhaps why

Hip Hop is so easily adapted in different spaces and spread so quickly across the

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globe to provide a new language for a generation? Is that common language one of

theft? I would posit yes. This production of/from what is consumed in the creation of

what is new, lies at the heart of Hip Hop aesthetics making it accessible to an ever-

growing audience that can identify with and communicate through this poaching of a

common text. It seems however that this form of migratory aesthetics craves a space

from which to strategize and this creation of communal space intrinsic also to the

transient form, long viewed as an individualistic ego-centered genre.

Hip Hop has always had a very strong connection to space, The form is fiercely

connected to place and provides a political space and language through theft to

communicate. There is in Hip-Hop a recognition of the importance of space. Like

Marxists geographer Henri Lefebvre, Hip-Hop culture has continually drawn attention

to the purposefully veiled communities for the survival of capitalism and told the

story of space4. Rappers are obsessed with “repping” for the (neighbor)“hood”,

block, or coast whether they “own” the physical property or not. There is a

recognition in this repeated subject matter of a “fundamental materiality, a

problematic social genealogy, a political praxis impelled through an indissoluble link

to the production and reproduction of social life, and behind all this an ontological

priority, an essential connection between spatiality and being.”5 From it’s earliest

utterances and shouts of the “South Bronx” by KRS-One, telling stories of “how it all

got started way back when… in the South Bronx, the South South Bronx,”6 a

neglected declining community within which DJ Kool Herc and others still managed

to birth a revolutionary art form. In DJ Kool Herc’s case he came from a different

place than the rest of the community and there was no space or way to communicate

with the crowd, as they were not responding to the music from his homeland,

Jamaica. He had to steal the rhythms to which they were dancing and add his voice,

inserting his subjectivity, to create a dialog and a space through this new technique to

make a community. Hip Hop serves to not only rep these “spaces” but create spaces

in which community can cohere. KRS-One’s, “The South Bronx,” spurred one of

Hip-Hop’s greatest battles, that between he and MC Shan. Shan rhymes on his

response, “let me tell you about the place where I come from, The Bridge,

Queensbridge,”7 and outlines the details of life in his own veiled community, the

Queensbridge housing projects, and attempts to place Hip-Hop’s birth 15 miles away

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from the South Bronx. This was to a certain extent a battle for the invention of the

form and the debate still goes on today, some 25 years later, but it was also a battle of

space. It was Shan’s battle to create a space of his own. A place from where he and

his community could strategize. But in this battle between spaces there was also the

need to show those outside of the space the difficulties and dangers of tactical living

within them. So in the bout we hear claims of which space was more authentic, which

space was “realer”, which space was more neglected and veiled. In that there is the

recognition of the uneven development and unfair conditions in these spaces literally

constructed by the government and then hidden. Lefebvre might say the battle was

over which space was more hidden by the veil and overcome by a capitalist

production of space in which both went neglected for the survival of capitalism8.

Subsequent rappers have continued to “represent their hood”, telling stories of what

makes them unique, stories of spaces purposefully veiled, which did not get attention

beyond the sensationalist headlines which further veiled their communities. Through

their detailed storytelling, rappers continue to show what happens in these socially

constructed spaces or ghettoes where tactics, including material theft are detrimental.

The illumination of these hidden places from which these rappers emerge seems one

of the primary concerns of the genre. Hip Hop has spread an oral tradition and story-

telling form with which marginalized groups can raise the veil in their respective

localities, for those marginalized in a globalized space with many barriers to entry.

These rappers and producers recognize that the space has been veiled and make it an

imperative to traverse and raise it while creating a space within which the community

can come together and cohere. There must be an institutionalization, a place from

which to strategize, with an exterior. This criterion of an “exterior” (or target) in his

explanation of strategy, for de Certeau seems to be for Hip Hop, a goal around which

and to which the community coheres and aspires collectively. Even in this recognition

of an exterior, there is a movement towards it and again the outside, the other (this

goal), is cited in the formulation of the self or collective identity. A recognition of a

community, the past in the sampling and is often a recognition of a constructed

present in the form of shout out and the making of metaphor of ones life in the lyrics.

This citation whether it be drums, guitars or “shout out” locks up a song and keeps a

community together. This sampling of the other a tactic of stealing has become a

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strategy for community building as individuals traverse borders and create new

spaces.

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SHORT BIOS

Butcher, Clare, seeks to converge the art of curating with the art of cooking. The rest of her time has been spent studying art history at the University of Cape Town. She was curator at the Centre for African Studies in Cape Town and assistant to Magnum photographer, Mikhael Subotzky. In 2008 Clare worked as a guest curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. She ran a series of non-lectures, The Usual Suspects (2009), while also completing the de Appel Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam (July, 2009). She currently writes for Metropolis M, Art South Africa and Artthrob Currently she is an art historian and curator, now working at the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven. Contact: [email protected]

Bugdayci, Cigdem, is a PhD Candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). In her research project:

Love, Religion and Modernity: An analysis of history of desire and sin in fin de siecle Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey she argues that non-Western nations acquire certain notions of Christianity in the process of modernization and globalization.

Contact: [email protected]

Creet, Julia,. is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, York University. She specializes in memory studies, literary nonfiction, and sexuality studies. She is the co-editor (with Andreas Kitzmann) of Memory and Migration—multidisciplinary approaches to memory studies (University of Toronto Press 2010), and the producer and director of a documentary, “MUM,” about the memoirs of a holocaust survivor who tried to forget. She has published numerous essays on identity, memory and testimony in various academic and literary journals including differences, Applied Semiotics, Paradoxa, English Studies in Canada, Resources for Feminist Research, Toronto Life, West Coast Line and Exile. Several of her essays have been translated into Hungarian and Polish and others published in edited collections in Sweden and the Netherlands. Julia Creet’s current documentary/book project is a genealogy of genealogy, a historicization of the “i(()*+,!(++-!*.!/(.0!.(+12!3)2*4!

5.(*)6*7!68++*9:.8/;46) !

Drabinski, Emily, is Electronic Resources and Instruction Librarian at Long Island University, Brooklyn, a mid-sized urban university in Brooklyn, New York (U.S.). She has an M.L.I.S. from Syracuse University and is currently completing an M.A. in Rhetoric and Composition at LIU. Her work on the politics of classification has appeared in Women and Environments International, K.R. Roberto's Radical Cataloging (McFarland, 2008), and in Radical Teacher, where she sits on the editorial board. She is co-editor with Maria T. Accardi and Alana Kumbier of Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, forthcoming from Library Juice Press in 2010. She is also editor of LJP's new monograph series, Gender and Sexuality in

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Librarianship, which seeks to explore critical queer and feminist perspectives on information production, organization, dissemination, and control. Contact: [email protected]

Endter, Heike, wrote her MA thesis 'Death and Photography' about Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman. Work as critic for art magazines such as Flash Art International, Camera Austria, Frame, Kunstforum International and for national newspapers. Since 2004 author for an art gallery in Munich. 2003 to 2009 doctorate with 'Economic Utopias and Their Visual Transformation in Science Fiction Films'. Supervisors were professor Peter J. Schneemann at the Universtiy of Bern, Switzerland and Elisabeth Bronfen, University of Zürich. Since 2009 linked with a research project on the phenomenon of migration and exile in 20th century art by professor Burcu Dogramaci, university of Munich.

Contact: [email protected]

Hassan Sayed El-Hayawi, Mayy is an instructor at Berlitz as well as the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport as an ESL Instructor in Egypt. She specialized in English Literary Studies. For the past ten years she has been working on the trauma of displacement and the tortures of living in a place while concurrently longing or belonging to another. Her MA thesis tackled "Imagery of Slavery in the Poetry of William Cowper" and her PhD thesis was entitled "Paradoxes of Diaspora in the Poetry of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney".

Contact: [email protected]

Khaldun, Zuhirah, is a native of New York City, Zuhirah moved to the island of Bermuda at age 11, returning to New York when she was 16 to attend Barnard College, Columbia University. At Barnard she majored in economics where she was also a DJ and music director at WBAR. After receiving her B.A., Zuhirah entered the music industry where she worked for several years. Interested in doing further academic work on the genre, Zuhirah entered the Research M.A. program in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam completing the degree in 2007. Zuhirah currently resides in New York and is a marketing executive for a non-profit focused on economic and social equity. Presently, Zuhirah is applying to PhD programs in Cultural Analysis/Studies for September 2010 to do further research on Hip Hop aesthetics, particularly its manifestations in the Gaza Strip and Africa.

Contact: [email protected]

Koksal, Ozlem, is a PhD student in London Consortium/Birkbeck College. Her research focuses cinema’s involvement in shaping collective memories in the context of Turkey. She is interested in the ways history gets shaped and re-shaped, the clashes between different collective memories, ways of representation the past, politics of remembering and forgetting as well as the forces at work in this process and how they reflect in the cultural production.

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Contact: [email protected]

Kumbier, Alana, is a Research and Instruction Librarian at Wellesley College, a liberal arts women's college in Massachusetts (U.S.). She works with students and faculty in interdisciplinary majors and programs including women’s and gender studies, cinema and media studies, American studies, the writing program, English and comparative literature, and education. She earned her M.L.I.S. from Kent State University and recently finished her Ph.D. in Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University, with emphases in the fields of cultural studies of science and technology, gender and sexuality studies, visual cultural studies, and disability studies. Her dissertation, Ephemeral Material: Developing a Critical Archival Practice, examines critical archival practices developed by a variety of actors including artists, documentarians, researchers, genealogists, geneticists, activist-archivists, drag kings, and ghostly historians. She is co-editor with Maria T. Accardi and Emily Drabinski of Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, forthcoming from Library Juice Press in 2010.

Contact: [email protected]

Li ,Christina, is a free-lance curator, currently working at SKOR. Lysen, Flora is an art historian, who haas recently graduated from the University of Leiden. Her special interest in (visual) historiography was initiated during a research scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a co-teacher of a course on contemporary art at the department of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and she taught a course on ‘artist’s books’ at Leiden University. She works as a researcher and editor at If I Can’t Dance... and was a coordinator of the DAI-‘Masquerade’ course for If I Can’t Dance. Currently, she is an organizer for the Deleuze 2010 art program. Lee, Inmi, was born in Korea and now lives and works in New York and Pennsylvania. She is currently an assistant professor at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work takes the form of sculpture, installation, video, collaborative project, public intervention, and performance art.

Her work often lies in cultural, political and linguistic anthropology and how it relates to space and environment. She especially works on translations of structure and the meaning of language to examine how it affects individuals—she is especially interested in how language generates power.Her work has been exhibited in the Boston Cyberarts Festival, and in New York and Italy. She was participated in the OPEN Performance Arts Festival in Beijing, China, Digital Art Biennale in Seoul, Korea, and Madrid Abierto, Spain.

Contact: [email protected]

Mazurski, Lara, is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the Univeristy of Amsterdam (UvA). Her work is concerned with the

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symbolic identification of veiled women’s bodies as a phenomenon in Europes mass media. The consequences of analyzing such representations will result in a re-evaluation of the ideals, which have at one time presented Europe as a hospitable place of refuge for foreigners. She is also a contributor to the TROUBLEMAKERS project, an interdisciplinary research platform about feminism at the intersection of academia and artistic practice. (Text will be available shortly) Contact: [email protected] ten Thije, Steven, (1980) is researcher who holds an MA in both Art History and Philosophy. He previously taught art theory at the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. Ten Thije is currently working on a PhD at the Hildesheim University, Hildesheim, supported by the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. His doctoral research focuses on the development of collection display in museums for modern and contemporary art in the second half of the twentieth century.

Contact: [email protected]

Weiner, Sonia, is a lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her interests include: American Literature, American Studies, African American Literature, Photography and Literature, Joyce Carol Oates.

Contact: snooch65@gmail

Yerushalmy, Merav, is a researcher and lecturer in the art history department at the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel. Her work focuses on issues of communality, documentation, and social and political engagement in contemporary art. In my doctoral research, she addressed the developments in relational and participatory discourse and their relevance for understanding the changes in photographic theory and practice in recent years. Her current post doctoral research examines issues of locality and historicity in the discourse of communality and migration and focuses on the work of contemporary Israeli artists who explore these issues in the particular contexts and histories of Israel.

Contact: [email protected]

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