Where Is Art Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art - Bibis - Ir

Where is Art?
Featuring chapters by a diverse range of leading international artists and theorists,

this book suggests that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the problem
of where and when it is situated.
While much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth-century was aligned
with the question “what is art?,” a key question for many artists and thinkers in the
twenty-first-century has become “where is art?” Contributors explore the challenge
of meaningfully identifying and evaluating works located across multiple versions and
locations in space and time. In doing so, they also seek to find appropriate language
and criteria for evaluating forms of art that often straddle other realms of knowledge
and activity.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art,
art criticism, and philosophy of art.
Simone Douglas is a Professor in the School of Art, Media, and Technology,

Parsons School of Design, The New School, NY, NY where she directed the MFA
Fine Arts program from 2009 to 2019.
Adam Geczy teaches at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.
Sean Lowry is Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies and Associate Director
(Research) at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies
This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies.
It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into
visual culture and art practice, theory, and research.
The Arabesque from Kant to Comics

Cordula Grewe
Art after Instagram

Art Spaces, Audiences, Aesthetics
Lachlan MacDowall and Kylie Budge
The Artist-Philosopher and Poetic Hermeneutics

On Trauma
George Smith
Art, the Sublime, and Movement

Spaced Out
Amanda du Preez
Visual Culture and the Forensic

Culture, Memory, Ethics
David Houston Jones
Posthuman and Nonhuman Entanglements in Contemporary

Art and the Body
Justyna Stępień
Race, Gender, and Identity in American Equine Art

1832 to the Present
Jessica Dallow
Where is Art?
Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art
Edited by Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, and Sean Lowry
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Advances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS
Where is Art?
Space, Time, and Location in
Contemporary Art
Edited by
Simone Douglas,
Adam Geczy, and
Sean Lowry
Cover image: Simone Douglas, Untitled, original cover concept, 2021 © Simone
Douglas, photograph.
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Taylor & Francis
The right of Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, and Sean Lowry to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-47868-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-29166-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-03707-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents
List of Figures vii

List of Contributors xi
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction 1
S I M O N E D O U G L A S , A DA M G E C Z Y, A N D S E A N L OW RY
2 Where Is Art? 4
S E A N L OW RY A N D A DA M G E C Z Y
3 Performance, Art, and the Relational Self 35

A M ELI A JON E S
4 Chronotopographical Nodes and Moments of Encounter 49

S R E S H TA R I T P R E M N AT H
5 Evidence 55
S H A R M I S T H A R AY
6 Ice Boat: Field Notes (in Advance of a Melt) 73

SI MON E DOUGL AS
7 Bland Matter: New Materialism, and Barking

Up the Wrong Tree 89
A DA M G E C Z Y
8 Bandness 101
S E A N L OW RY A N D I L M A R TA I M R E
vi Contents
9 Glittereiki 120
G E N E V I E V E H YAC I N T H E
10 Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020): Or: again, rubbed smooth,

a moment in time__caesura 132
J U LI CA RSON
11 IrDaEdNiTcI aTlY 149

J E F F R E Y S T R AY E R
12 Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up? 166

RO S A N N A R AY M O N D
13 Handiwork of Migrancy, Restitutions in the Contemporary 185

PAT R I C K F L O R E S
14 Erasure or Erased: An Artworld (AND WORLD) Adrift 197

BR AD BUCKLEY
15 All the World’s Futures 205

O R I A N N A C AC C H I O N E A N D J E S S I C A H O N G
16 Appendix: Project Anywhere 216

S E A N L OW RY A N D S I M O N E D O U G L A S
Index 219
Figures
0.1 Simone Douglas, from Field Notes, 2021 © Simone Douglas,

C-type print, 24 × 15.7″ (61 × 40 cm) 3
0.2 Simone Douglas, from Field Notes, 2021 © Simone Douglas,
C-type print, 24 × 15.7″ (61 × 40 cm) 215
4.1 Lapche in Purang County, Tibetan Autonomous Region, China.
Photo by Sreshta Rit Premnath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath 49
4.2 Lapche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta
Rit Premnath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath 51
4.3 Lapche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta
Rit Premnath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath 53
5.1 (Left: Evidence 001; Right: Evidence 002) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991,
digital scans of original color photographs of New English School,
Kuwait City, Kuwait, 5.75 × 3.41″ (14.6 × 8.66 cm), Tareq Rajab
Museum, Jabriya 64
Museum, Jabriya 66
Museum, Jabriya 67
Museum, Jabriya 68
5.5 (Left: Evidence 009, 1.8 × 3.03″ [4.6 × 7.7 cm]; Right: Evidence
010, 3.8 × 2.2″ [9.65 × 5.6 cm]) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans
of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City,
Kuwait, Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya 69
6.1 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned
2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This is an image of a
prototype site test made in 2014 from frozen water. Hand-caste
prototypes of varying sizes have been made both on, and off site,
commencing in 2013. Their starting (pre-melt) size varies © Simone
Douglas 73
viii Figures
6.2 Simone Douglas, Ice Boat (artist sketch), 2015, inkjet print,
30 × 20.2″ (76 × 51 cm). Poster Design by Lucille Tenazas
over photograph and text by Simone Douglas, this annotated
sketch was produced as a visual summary of the proposed
project © Simone Douglas 74
6.3 and 6.4 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–,
editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). The purpose
of prototypes such as these is to test rate of melt at different times
of the year, and over the years; the sculptural form (that will
only be revealed at the final installation); casting techniques; rate
of freeze; and crucially, the light refracted through the Ice Boat
itself © Simone Douglas 75
6.5 Simone Douglas, Untitled, 2016, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–,
editioned 2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Aerial image
from flight between Broken Hill and Sydney © Simone Douglas 76
2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This is an image of
a prototype site test made in 2014. The melting ice re-freezes
overnight forming glacier like deep greens and blues © Simone Douglas 76
2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This image is a detail
from a prototype site test in which the Ice Boat melted towards the
path of the sun. The remnant ice “skin” of the prototype liquefied
into the earth releasing bubbles of air as it did so © Simone Douglas 77
2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Ice Boat is positioned to
be viewed close-up and at a distance, and in the direct path of the
rising and setting sun © Simone Douglas 78
2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm) © Simone Douglas 79
6.10 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: Scale
and distance tests with assistance from Broken Hill community
members, 2018. Right: Drafts of the Ice Boat build, 2017, drawing
by Belinda Koopman © Simone Douglas 80
6.11 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: Detail
from scale drawings of the Ice Boat build, 2017, scale 1:500,
drawing by Belinda Koopman. Right: Initial scale tests, 2015,
photo by John Douglas © Simone Douglas 81
6.12 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, preparatory
research, 2017, digital image (detail), scale 1:500. Drawing
by Belinda Koopman over photograph by Simone
Douglas © Simone Douglas 82
6.13 Simone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: C-type
print, editioned 2020, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Right: Initial
concept sketch, 2014, pencil on archival paper, 8.3 × 11.8″
(21 × 30 cm) © Simone Douglas 84
Figures ix
2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This image is part of a
series of affiliated works (some of which have been included in this
chapter). Here, the setting sun sits low on the horizon, illuminating
the melting boat against the darkening landscape © Simone Douglas 85
8.1 The Ghosts of Nothing Advertisement for In Memory of Johnny
B. Goode: World Tour of Abandoned Music Venues 2014–15
as published in the Italian art magazine Mousse 45, (October–
November 2014): 261 107
8.2 The Ghosts of Nothing and Chris Lowry, Storyboard Still #1, from
Sounds of Unridden Waves, 2020, camera by Chris Lowry, image
remix by The Ghosts of Nothing, digital image, dimensions variable 114
8.3 The Ghosts of Nothing and Simone Douglas, Storyboard Still #2,
from Sounds of Unridden Waves (work in progress), 2020, camera
by Simone Douglas, image remix by The Ghosts of Nothing, digital
image, dimensions variable 115
9.1 Damali Abrams, “Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black
People,” video still, YouTube video, May 29, 2020, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=hCLtGtwnVJY © Damali Abrams 121
9.2 Damali Abrams, (Glitter Priestess, @damaliabrams), Cousin Jean,
Instagram collage, July 30, 2020 (post removed), https://www.
instagram.com/p/CDSQU2xlmVq/ © Damali Abrams 129
10.1 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle), directed by Rania Rafei
and Raed Rafei (Beirut: Orjouane Productions, 2012), color and
black & white, digital beta, DCP, in Arabic with English or French
subtitles, 95 mins, Courtesy of the artist 143
10.2 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle), directed by Rania Rafei
and Raed Rafei (Beirut: Orjouane Productions, 2012), color and
black & white, digital beta, DCP, in Arabic with English or French
subtitles, 95 mins 144
11.1 Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 1.0.0 (detail), 2009, language © Jeffrey
Strayer 162
11.2 Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 1.0.0, 2009, mixed media, 9½ × 12⅛ × 4″
© Jeffrey Strayer 162
11.3 Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 12.0.0 (detail), 2002, mixed
media, 20¼″ × 22½″ © Jeffrey Strayer 163
12.1 Pacific Sisters, Kaitiaki with a K, 2018, FAB.rication, installation
view, Te Papa Tongawera. Photo by Kerry Brown 167
12.2 Pacific Sisters, Tohu TūPuna, 2018, Aolele opening Acti.VĀ.tion, Te
Papa Tongawera. Photo by Kerry Brown © Pacific Sisters 172
12.3 Rosanna Raymond, Backhand Maiden, 2017, Acti.VĀ.tion,
American Natural History Museum © Pacific Sisters. Photo by
Kerry Brown 175
12.4 Rosanna Raymond, Backhand Maiden, 2017, Acti.VĀ.tion,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Pacific Sisters. Photo by
Richard Wade 181
x Figures
15.1 Ho Tzu Nyen, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia
(CDOSEA), 2017–ongoing, video-still from algorithmically
composed video, infinite loop, © courtesy the artist and Edouard
Malingue Gallery 207
15.2 Serge Alain Nitegeka, Identity is Fragile III, 2021 ©, charcoal
and paint on wood, 120 × 140 × 4.5 cm, courtesy Stevenson
Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg © Serge Alain Nitegeka.
Photo by Nina Lieska 212
Contributors
Brad Buckley is an artist, writer, activist, and Professorial Fellow at the University
of Melbourne. He was previously professor of Contemporary Art and Culture at
Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. Buckley’s work utilizes in-
stallation, theater, and performance, to investigate cultural control, democracy,
freedom, and social responsibility.
Orianna Cacchione is Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum,
University of Chicago, and is committed to expanding the canon of art to reflect
the transnational, cross-geographic flows of art and history. Cacchione holds a
PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San
Diego.
Juli Carson is a writer, art historian, curator, and Professor of Critical and Curato-
rial Studies in the Department of Art, University of California, Irvine. Carson’s
research focuses on the effect that the legacies of 1960s minimalism and 1970s
conceptualism have had on contemporary art, informed by psychoanalysis and
post-colonial discourse.
Simone Douglas is a New York City-based artist, curator, and writer. She is Professor
of Photography at Parsons School of Design. Her multidisciplinary art practice—
exhibited and published internationally—includes durational site-specific works.
Cultural and environmental responsibility, both on earth and in the skies, sits at
the core of her work.
Patrick Flores is a Filipino curator at Vargas Museum, Manila, and Professor in the
Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines. He was the Artistic Di-
rector of the 2019 Singapore Biennale, curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the
2015 Venice Biennale, and will curate the Taiwan Pavilion at the 2022 Venice
Biennale.
Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts, Uni-
versity of Sydney. His video installations and performance-based works have been
exhibited throughout Australasia, Asia, and Europe. He has published over 20
books and is editor of two journals with Penn State University Press.
Jessica Hong is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Toledo Museum of
Art. Her practice highlights overlooked narratives to address the colonial frame of
institutional sites to implement long-lasting change. She was previously Associate
xii Contributors
Curator of Global Contemporary Art at Hood Museum of Art and assistant cura-
tor at ICA/Boston.
Genevieve Hyacinthe is an artist and Assistant Professor at California College of the
Arts. Her work as a practitioner of West African and Haitian dance and doundoun
drumming intersects with her scholarly research concerning phenomenological
theories, self-critical explorations of the body, feminisms, and global black experi-
ence in art and culture.
Amelia Jones is an internationally recognized curator, theorist, and historian of art
and performance. She recently produced the exhibition and catalogue (co-edited
with Andy Campbell), Queer Communion: Ron Athey, and published the book In
between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. She teaches at the
University of Southern California.
Sean Lowry is a Melbourne-based artist, writer, curator, and musician. He is Head
of Critical and Theoretical Studies and Associate Director (Research) at Victo-
rian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne; Executive Director of Project
Anywhere; and one half of the Ghosts of Nothing. His work has been exhibited,
performed, and published internationally.
Sreshta Rit Premnath is a multidisciplinary artist and the founder and co-editor of
the publication Shifter. Based in Brooklyn, Premnath teaches at Parsons School of
Design, New York. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally.
Sharmistha Ray is an artist, art critic, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Their
work explores lived experience through the lens of queerness, language, and mem-
ory. Their art criticism has appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic, and Art-
critical, amongst other publications. They teach at Parsons School of Design and
Carnegie Mellon University.
Rosanna Raymond is a member of the Pacific and Māori collective, Pacific Sisters.
Her SaVAge K’lub is a collective that hosts artworks and performances. Raymond
is a curator and researcher. Her works are held by the Museum of New Zealand Te
Papa Tongarewa and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
Jeffrey Strayer is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Philosophy at Purdue University, Fort
Wayne. His research addresses philosophy of art, with attention given accordingly
where relevant to metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Strayer is also an
artist whose work in art and philosophy is both necessarily interactive and mutu-
ally informing.
Ilmar Taimre is a Brisbane-based artist, musician, and composer who holds a PhD in
Music from the University of Newcastle. Together with exhibiting as a contempo-
rary visual artist, he composes popular, alternative, and classically influenced mu-
sical works. He is also one half of the artistic collaboration the Ghosts of Nothing.
Acknowledgments
The editors respectfully acknowledge the Lenni-Lenape People, the Boonwurrung and
Wurundjeri People of the Eastern Kulin nation, and the Gadigal People of the Eora
Nation, on whose unceded lands and waters this book was conceived and developed.
The original idea for this book was developed through our relationships with the
global community of artists connected to Project Anywhere—many of whom have
come together through inspiring conferences and symposia in NYC and Melbourne.
Heartfelt thanks to all our extraordinary authors, whose demonstrated generosity
of thought and time throughout a global pandemic have made this book possible. Our
deep gratitude to Honi Ryan, Sophie Chalk, and Rengu Zhang for their extensive
support in copy and image editing. You have all brought much joy and expertise to
the process of building this book.
Our deep thanks and gratitude to Isabella Vitti, Katie Armstrong, Assunta Petrone,
and the team at Routledge. Thank you all so much for your patient and steadfast
belief in this book.
We are especially grateful for the support, care, and advice of our families, friends,
and colleagues.
Simone Douglas would like to thank Parsons School of Design, the New School;
Wendy, John, Katrina, and Fiona, for always being up for the journey; and Don, Mar-
ianne, Joel and Robyn for pointing the way.
Adam Geczy would like to thank Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.
Sean Lowry would like to thank Magda Ching, Finn Ching-Lowry, Eli Ching-
Lowry, and the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Art & Music, University
of Melbourne.
Finally, a big shout-out to all our students past and present for asking such wonder-
ful questions! The future is yours.
1 Introduction
Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, and Sean Lowry
Some experiences of art are not necessarily connected to a single image, object,
time, or location. Indeed, certain works of art are presented as a complex aggregate
of very different forms, locations, versions, and modes of delivery. In such cases,
it might be limiting to expect a single object or point of entry to be adequately
commensurate with the work as a whole. This diverse selection of contributions
from artists, curators, and theorists explores new and emerging conceptions of art
understood and experienced in relation to multiple and intersecting locations and
temporalities, interminable reproducibility, radical indeterminacy, and the collapse
of physical space. It considers new ways of thinking about aesthetics, historical
malleability, and the distributive relationships that collectively sustain but do not
delimit or define contemporary art. Emphasizing dynamic relationships between
material forms and social contexts set against sometimes radically materially and
spatially expanded conceptions of what might constitute a work of art, this book
presents a range of ways in which art can simultaneously inhabit very different
forms of transmission, spaces of relation, and modes of mediation.
At its core, this book seeks to broadly repurpose the still contested historical ques-
tion “what is art?” via a marked shift in co-ordinates. Comprising a diverse selection
of approaches and modalities, its fundamental thesis will suggest that contemporary
art is increasingly characterized by the significance of where and when it is situated.
In short, it will suggest that where much advanced artistic speculation of the twen-
tieth century was aligned with the provocation “what is art?,” the key question for
many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first century is instead “where is art?”
Given that many of the works and ideas discussed in this book inhabit very differ-
ent forms, places, and modes of transmission while drawing upon diverse disciplinary
backgrounds, knowledge systems, and ontologies, we see our editorial approach as
extending upon the central theoretical tenets of the book by deliberately present-
ing a dynamic selection of different ways of writing about locational specificity and
art. Accordingly, we seek to emphasize the contested and protean nature of artistic
knowledges, communities, stories, and representations through a range of original
perspectives on expanded and intermedial material thinking, exclusion, censorship,
race, gender, place, and the political nature of exhibition environments.
Much of the art explored in this book is characterized by a radical indeterminacy that
is both difficult to capture and potentially significant as a site of cultural production.
While it might be political, the kind of activism that art offers is not conventional—nor
should it be, lest it become what Theodor Adorno declared both bad art and bad pol-
itics.1 Importantly, art is a speculative and discursive realm with a distinctive capacity
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-1
2 Simone Douglas et al.,
to engage social, political, aesthetic, and philosophical problems while resisting con-
clusiveness. It can also offer an antidote to divisive certainty by presenting something
of how others see and experience the world. With this in mind, we are deeply thankful
to all the extraordinary contributors that collectively made this book possible by pre-
senting a range of very different responses to this “where is art?” conundrum.
The original genesis for this book developed in parallel with the global blind-peer-
reviewed exhibition program Project Anywhere (2012–), an expanded exhibition model
specifically designed to promote art outside traditional exhibition circuits (discussed in
detail in the appendix). This unique global exhibition program has availed a range of
valuable insights into how contemporary artists are thinking about the challenges of
presenting, evaluating, and disseminating art at the outermost limits of location speci-
ficity. Although many of the ideas that underpin the radical spatial and material expan-
sion of contemporary art have deep historical roots, it is also clear that unprecedented
social and political circumstances invariably create new opportunities and challenges.
Much has unfolded globally while this book was developed. During 2020 and 2021,
COVID-19 forced many of us to dramatically adjust our daily lives, priorities, and
relationships with the world. As the pandemic limited physical access to museums,
galleries, festivals, fairs, and auctions across the world, the artworld was only fur-
ther incentivized to reimagine established approaches to creating, exhibiting, curating,
writing, and thinking about art. Without dwelling on this point, it is probably fair to
say that this experience of restricted access to physical exhibition environments, to-
gether with the forced mediation and dispersal of social relations, only accelerated an
already well-established rethinking of the locational specificities of contemporary art.
Meanwhile, this period has also been one in which radically divergent world views and
progressively unstable political and social realities are forcing the artworld to face a
series of long overdue questions related to representation, accountability, and sustaina-
bility. Consequently, we believe that the central thesis of this book is now only timelier.
The “work of art’s world” is, in the words of Pamela M. Lee, “utterly continuous
with the world it at once inhabits and creates: a world Möbius-like in its indivisibility
and circularity, a seemingly endless horizon.”2 Notwithstanding the complexity of this
situation, there are nevertheless some givens. As Jeffrey Strayer puts it, at a minimum,
something must be intentionally delineated from everything else, reconfigured or re-
contextualized, and then presented somewhere conspicuously apparent to a subject’s
consciousness.3 Importantly, as this book will variously reveal, this process of transmis-
sion could (at least hypothetically) involve anything and occur anywhere. And, in some
cases, a more comprehensive or nuanced understanding of this process of transmission
might require a dynamic constellation of direct and mediated sensory experiences pre-
sented together with a complex matrix of information and materials extending across
time and space. Consequently, it is apparent that all we might require to interpret a work
of art is not necessarily available simply by looking. With this in mind, we hope that this
edited volume offers a complementary companion to deepening our understanding of
materially expanded and spatially distributed conceptions of contemporary art.
Notes
1 See, for example, Theodor Adorno, “Commitment: The Politics of Autonomous Art,”
New Left Review (1962) in Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi, ed.
Lee Morrissey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
2 Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 8.
3 This minimal requirement is analyzed at length by Jeffrey Strayer (also a contributor to this
volume) in Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
Introduction 3
Figure 0.1 S imone Douglas, from Field Notes, 2021 © Simone Douglas, C-type print,
24 × 15.7″ (61 × 40 cm).
2 Where Is Art?
Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy
From a premodern European vantage point, questions concerning the ontology or

location of art were empty and unnecessary. Art was largely configured for prescrip-
tive orders of power. These orders—the religion and the state reciprocally—provided
meaning, value, and access to art. They also helped to shape and define the content of
works of art. Although there were always spaces of equivocation and contestation, the
extent to which even these were determined is clearer in retrospect. In time, Western
art would begin to transform in tandem with a series of radical recalibrations of the
nature of relationships between the individual and society. From an Enlightenment
perspective, such contours are constraints. From a contemporary perspective, the sit-
uation is however considerably more complex.
Today, an experience of a work of art is not necessarily tied to a single object, loca-
tion, time, or event. Indeed, some works of art can be accessed in multiple ways—in
person, online, across multiple versions, or as a complex aggregate of very differ-
ent materializations and modes of delivery. Even the word accessed is contentious,
a noun-to-verb term that in the digital age has usurped the more amenable and still
anthropomorphic experienced. Although the material and spatial expansion of art is
far from a novel idea, the nature and implications of this expansion for twenty-first-
century artists are exigent if only for the velocity and extent to which they have been
exerted. Setting aside the clichéd use of the word unprecedented across our present
moment as a descriptor for everything from pandemics to populism to left- and right-
wing radicalism, it is well to remember that the significance of exceptional circum-
stances is found in ways in which they reveal and extend upon pre-existing structures
and conditions. What then are the new, renewed, and emerging conceptions of artistic
production, reception, and circulation? How are they to be understood and experi-
enced in relation to multiple and intersecting temporalities, distributed materializa-
tions, digital reproducibility, and the dissolution of physical space?
At a time in which radically divergent world views are feeding progressively un-
stable political and social realities, contemporary art is also undergoing a number
of long overdue re-evaluations. For its detractors, the contemporary artworld is un-
derscored by an unsustainable addiction to speculative capital, ever-tightening hype
cycles (aka fashion), precarious labor, and an insatiable appetite for freshly minted
emerging talent with requisite institutional or culturally sanctioned credentials. For
others, contemporary art remains an exciting and dynamic realm within which to cre-
atively speculate upon the conditions of our present moment, to imagine new futures,
or to rethink the past. Against a highly contested political backdrop, the gravity of
the precarity and unsustainability of the contemporary artworld has been laid bare
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-2
Where Is Art? 5
for many artists by the effects of a global pandemic, a sense of climate emergency, and
a series of backlashes and reckonings centered on race, gender, and power. Although
such frenetic and confusing conditions render many powerless and dazed, there are
still artists who feel it is possible to imagine the world anew. It is in this spirit that
we seek to repurpose the twentieth-century problem “what is art?” to consider where
and when art is understood, situated in the twenty-first century.
So, how did we get here?

From the late twentieth century onward—if we momentarily set aside a series of
historical precedents beyond the scope of this book—many artists began to trade
medium-specific categorizations and the production of discrete distributable objects
for a reactionary emphasis upon the significance of site, event, performance, porosity,
and relationality. A work of art was now less likely to be regarded as materially fixed
in space and time or in an idealized sequestration from the outside world. Since at
least the early twenty-first century, works of art have become increasingly accepted
as open to continual transformation and recoding across multiple versions, locations,
times, and even hypothetically infinite materializations. The condition of the pro-
liferation of the work of art is no longer just an act of destabilization to escape its
commodity status; it is a natural consequence of the iterative nature of digital technol-
ogies. Unsurprisingly, these marked shifts have also introduced a series of challenges
for the interpretation, critique, and evaluation of art. These challenges require new
ways—be they expanded, qualitative, paradigmatically shifted, or a combination of
these—to rethink aesthetics, historical malleability, and the distributive relationships
that collectively sustain but do not delimit or define contemporary art.
Beginning with Dada and developing in earnest since the Protest Era of the 1960s
and ’70s, artists and curators have been skeptical of the presumed objectivity and
neutrality of the gallery space—metonymically (and with mild sarcasm) referred to as
the “white cube.” This assumption is traceable to the late nineteenth-century, to the
rise of the one-person exhibition with artists such as Claude Monet, and to innova-
tions in exhibition installation advanced by James McNeill Whistler, who is credited
with the spaced, single-line hang (in his day sniffed at as aestheticist preciosity). The
gallery environment began to be read as a site of unity and contemplation, as op-
posed to the stacked visual rowdiness of the salon and the Royal Academy. It is no
surprise that this pristine gallery schema coalesced with the open commodity mar-
ket, the sanctity of the modernist art object, and the entrenchment of the artist as
celebrity that evolved out of early nineteenth-century Romanticism. Other contrib-
uting factors included the catalogue raisonné and collecting culture of art books, to-
gether with the rise of magazines, journals, broadsheets, and feuilletons. Thus, white
walls also implicitly echoed the white space surrounding the reproduction of works
on a printed page. Such developments were seconded by parallel developments in
twentieth-century modernist architecture and design that would transform museums
and galleries. Modernist architecture, considered in its most Miesian or Corbusian
modality, was deliberate and pan-temporal. Correspondingly, the modernist art ob-
ject transcended time and language to portend an altogether elevated experience anal-
ogous to religion but for a secular society.
In 1976, Brian O’Doherty wrote a series of essays for Artforum, later turned into
a book called Inside the White Cube (1986), in which he argued that this obsession
6 Sean Lowry and Adam Geczy
with the white cube tended to sanctify the art object to a point of imperviousness and
impermeability.1 For critics such as O’Doherty, the white cube had become a veiled
ideology that foreclosed discourse (but very much benefited the commodity market).
Doherty was writing at a time when any number of artists were subjecting the invi-
olability of these standards to dramatic scrutiny. In 1973, to cite just one of many
historical examples, Michael Asher—now named within a rather loose grouping of
conceptualist tendencies known as “institutional critique” (more later)—completely
sanded the walls and ceiling of the Franco Toselli gallery in Milan to expose the as-
sumed neutrality of the white paint.
A generation earlier, a group of self-declared Marxist agitators that called them-
selves the Situationist International, who were in turn influenced by early twentieth-
century avant-garde art movements such Dada and surrealism, were already intent
on dismantling the expression and mediation of social relations through objects. The
salient legacy of this period was to stress that the museum is a provisional, historical,
cultural, and ideologically inscribed idea and institution. However, its perdurance
to this day is more than one of expediency. It speaks to the tenacity of institutional
models complicit within capitalism, and the skill with which radical critiques of the
institution have become absorbed by and dissolved into it. It is against the backdrop
of capitalism’s co-option of forces inimical to it—that only enforce the need to stress
and explore, both theoretically as critics and practically as artists—that the myriad
conditions that have rendered the museum and gallery circuit would appear increas-
ingly anachronistic.
Notwithstanding the enduring presence of the white cube, new exhibition formats
and programming schedules that seek to actively problematize the limits of tradi-
tional exhibition spaces and circuits have become increasingly common in recent dec-
ades. Even major museums and established galleries now routinely schedule off-site
and supposedly institutionally critical projects as part of their regular programming.
Meanwhile, every “serious” contemporary art festival or biennale seems to want to
include supplementary events or activities at unexpected times and locations. These
tendencies—together with a renewed political engagement with issues such as cli-
mate, social justice, globalization, racialized injustice, economic precarity, digital
surveillance, and algorithmically accelerated challenges to democracy—all reaching
fever pitch, see the artworld staring down questions of sustainability, relevance, divi-
sions of power and labor, and modes of circulation. During the COVID-19 pandemic
of 2020–21, with national and international travel curtailed, global economies facing
once-in-a-century challenges, and screen-based interaction substantially increased for
much of the global population, artists, and audiences alike were only further incen-
tivized to reimagine the future, and in particular the nature of relationships between
images and objects within the progressively porous interchangeability of digital and
non-digital aspects of art and life.
This particular alignment of circumstances has only added further complexity to
the pre-existing problem of where a work of art is understood to be situated. With
much art already consumed as a mediated and spatially diffused distribution of el-
ements, the mutual insufficiency of art’s material and conceptual dimensions was
further exacerbated by this rapid increase in screen-based cultural consumption and
communication. 2 With that which was once considered documentation or reproduc-
tion now often regarded as simply an alternative point of entry into a work, the most
dynamic and “visited” places for art today are often found in the communal spaces of
Where Is Art? 7
screen-based cultures. At the same time (as we will argue later), art is no longer neces-
sarily found in the prescribed beds that the artworld prepares for it. Instead, art might
actually be found in other realms and sites of activity altogether, such as the many
arms of popular culture—many of which either are indifferent to art or have long
been blindly considered unequal to art’s august task and status (more on that shortly).
From what is art? … to where is art?

Locating art only begins as a problem with the rise of the modern individual and the
free market in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here, two critically
connected factors develop apace with these changes: Popular culture and reproduci-
bility. Even before the mainstream deployment of photography in the 1850s (following
its joint birth by the Niepce brothers and Louis Daguerre in France, and Fox Talbot
in the US in the 1830s), engravings were not only a way of making “fine” artworks
accessible and cheap, they were also central to the development of mass culture, in-
cluding sedition and pornography. Many artists contributed to one or both, and,
consequentially, we now think nothing of viewing Fragonard’s erotic engravings in
a museum. Meanwhile, Honoré Daumier’s caricatures, including his clay maquettes,
enjoy their own discrete gallery space in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Then there
is the slow and grinding struggle of photography to be seen as a legitimate artistic
medium, which only became uncontested in the 1970s. Ironically, photography was
only accepted as a serious artistic medium after it had played a significant role in
the disintegration of traditional medium categories—largely as a consequence of its
documentary role in intermedial expansion during the 1960s. (As we write, certain
exponents in areas deemed popular and transient such as street art, fashion, and
comics are now offered up for serious critical attention, with a discrete and growing
following of apologists and adherents.)
Copies of works of art have been prevalent since antiquity. An engraving was un-
ambiguously an interpretation, and an avowedly degraded version of the original
work (painting usually), while sculptures could be replicated from casts of the origi-
nal. Yet it was the proliferation and growing ubiquity of photographic reproduction
that caused the greatest philosophical consternation as to the specific location of art.
The most famous theoretical confrontation of photographic reproducibility is Walter
Benjamin’s heavily cited essay, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Re-
produzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Benja-
min argued that mechanical reproduction—photography, but also film—divested the
unique object of what he called its “aura,” through a process of deracination (from
where it is physically situated), demystification, and, ultimately, trivialization. Rep-
etition has the function of reducing the object (or word) to a material simplicity and
ultimately to meaninglessness. But, and a very big but, Benjamin also conceded that
while this was the case, the weight of reproduction could also have the opposite effect,
that is to re-sanctify the art object by dint of the level of ratification that so much
attention garners.3 Accordingly, we now recognize that reproduction can reassert the
located singularness of the work of art. Tourism is, after all, built on the cult of pil-
grimage, and art has a cardinal role to play in it. Is the Mona Lisa invisible or has it
reached a meta-status through its extraordinary iconicity? The flows of reproduction
operate like drumbeats, hammering each time into the consumer-observer the need to
believe and to revere—with each manifestation comes tacit approbation.
New technologies continually place the uniqueness of the work in limbo. A three-
dimensional printed copy, for example, despite potentially being literally indiscernible
from its prototype, is, once recognized as a copy, perceived as philosophically dis-
tinct. Most recently, the rise of the non-fungible token (NFT) represents yet another
attempt to reintroduce uniqueness into our perception of an otherwise easily repro-
ducible work. Ultimately, although artists of every generation for well over a century
have broadcast high-minded claims related to the purported democratization of art
through its reproducibility, the fact that most artists want their name associated with
their work invariably demands that some kind of authentication is required. Any
work that is not unique, insofar as it is not understood to be embedded in a singular
object, requires allographic attribution to be commodified.4 Just as the emergence of
photography radically altered the way we think about representation, and just as the
readymade displaced the primacy of artistic indexicality and all that implies (arti-
sanry, the signature, and so on), the rise of the internet and digital reproducibility ex-
tends the ontological limits of the question of what art is even further. Consequently,
following the emergence of radical intermediality5 and transcategoriality6 in art due
to a series of conceptual and performative developments during the second half of the
twentieth century, the early twenty-first century has borne witness to yet more specu-
lation about how art is defined and what it fundamentally is and does.
Another key issue emerging in the latter half of the twentieth century, and further
realized in the early twenty-first century, is the accelerated encroachment of both
popular cultural and broader socio-political concerns. Consideration of these devel-
opments is also critical to addressing our “where is art?” conundrum—especially
given the erosion of the established mediums, genres, platforms, and frameworks that
were once subject to relatively consistent standards of quality and modes of aesthetic
evaluation. The multiple worlds that we now routinely inhabit, the online identities
that we now assume, and so on, have only further implicated an ontic realm that is no
longer reducible to the physical. Accordingly, the space of affect has been re-oriented
in a dizzyingly short space of time. Although a digitally mediated experience is often
regarded as a more convenient point of entry, a corresponding nostalgic longing for
the artisanal or handmade is also keenly apparent (and often paradoxically shared
and discussed in the digital realm). It is a longing that has crept up on us with alarm-
ing rapidity, suggesting that it is a reflex more than anything osmotic or organic.
Unfortunately, it is a discourse that is its own quick dead-end.
This dialectic, while ubiquitous, is, unfortunately, for contemporary art, an anach-
ronism. Thus, the key problem underpinning our key question “where is art?” is that
our experience of the art “object” is now multiform. In other words, not only does
the art object, from the very outset, exist across multiple incarnations and platforms,
it is also cognitively apprehended and appreciated as such. Indeed, perhaps the most
frequented encounters with art are no longer physical galleries or museums but rather
social media platforms and other websites. Yet, conversely, the idea that a website
might constitute the primary or only site for an exhibition is surprisingly rare. Despite
this rapid increase in online artistic activity, art is still more likely to operate online in
an interpretative context or documentary form, rather than as a primary medium for
exhibition. (The still niche realm of “net art,” such as it is, offers one alternative to
this interpretative or documentary tendency—but more on that shortly.) Ultimately,
online representations of art are still almost ubiquitously used as vehicles for illumi-
nating the existence of works understood as located eternally elsewhere.
Where Is Art? 9
The necessity of materiality and the folly of immateriality
As we have already established, some works of art are no longer experienced as a sin-
gle or primary object, location, or event. Instead, when we apprehend certain works
of art, we might behold a constellation of materially, spatially, and contextually dis-
tributed elements that we accept as a unified work.7 (One significant progenitor to
this trend is the now accepted mode of video performance which displaces but still
residually retains the element of live presence.) Complicating this situation further, we
can become aware of the existence of this unified constellation of distributed elements
in various ways. We might, for example, initially encounter a work through direct
sense perception of a physical object. Alternatively, we might encounter it through an
online document or archive, a report or published article, a presentation or witness
account, a podcast discussion or video, and even as a remix or intermedial combina-
tion of any of the above.
But how do we perceive such complex, overlapping, and dynamic aggregates of dif-
ferent materializations, versions, and modes of delivery as a cohesive and singularly
recognizable work of art? (This challenge is explored in detail by Ilmar Taimre and
one us in Chapter 8.) Clearly, at an absolute minimum, we require something to be
made materially manifest to us in order for the experience of the work to be trans-
mitted from one mind to another. (Even a digital artifact must ultimately conform
to the laws of physics and requires both electricity and hardware to be transmitted
and perceived.) Moreover, it is also strangely apparent that although this something
materialized as art could (at least hypothetically) be anything, it is nevertheless not
everything. For us to apprehend a work of art, something needs to be meaningfully
delineated or marked off from everything else in the world. (This process is analyzed
in detail by Jeffrey Strayer in Chapter 11 of this volume and elsewhere.) But how did
we arrive at a consensual recognition of this fictionalized phenomenon that we call
art? Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are many different ways that we might map the ge-
nealogies underpinning this development. When we deploy Wittgenstein’s dictum that
the meaning of a word is its use, we encounter such a plurality of usages that the work
itself is understood as existing according to a plural state of being. A good example
of this phenomenon is found in the work of Hito Steyerl, whose practice consists of a
multiplicity, like planets orbiting not around a coruscating core but a pregnant void.
We might begin by asking “what kind of an entity is a work of art?” Is it a physi-
cal thing or an imaginary thing? Or necessarily both? How do works of art relate to
the minds of artists and viewers? Do all works of art belong to a single ontological
category? Under what kind of conditions are works of art understood to come into
existence, or, indeed, cease to exist? If a work of art is, at least in part, an imagined
object—that is, something first experienced by an artist and hopefully later by an
audience—what happens to that imagined object when nobody is experiencing it,
or, indeed, remembers that it ever existed? Does a work cease to exist along with the
individual or collective memories of a society that first bore its existence? At a bare
minimum, as we will demonstrate, the consensually recognized existence of any work
of art requires at least one object, one subject, and a subject’s consciousness of that
subject/object relationship.8 But before we continue any further, we need to briefly
attend to a few assumptions.
It is relatively common to assume that a work of art is a stable and discrete en-
tity, created by a particular individual or group, in a particular cultural and his-
torical context. According to this assumption, works of art are physical objects.
Notwithstanding the logic of this common-sense assumption, it nevertheless began
to unravel in various ways, as we have seen, during the twentieth century. As a result
of these developments, artists are now more aware than before of the logical necessity
that a work of art must also be more than its material presentation. This inevitability,
as we will discover, results from its necessary collective fictionalization as a socially
constructed object in order to be recognized as art. It is for this reason, for example,
that we might assume that a thirteenth-century audience would be incapable of rec-
ognizing a color field abstract painting as a painting, or indeed an album of indus-
trial drones as music. Yet, as we will also discover, any suggestion that a work of art
might somehow be capable of existing only immaterially is ultimately folly. (This is
discussed in greater detail by Ilmar Taimre and one us in Chapter 8.)
The false suggestion that a work of art is immaterial was presented by Benedetto
Croce in his 1912 book Breviario di estetica (The Essence of Aesthetics), in which
he argued that imaginative thought precedes all other thought. This suggestion was
taken up a few decades later by Robin Collingwood, who rejected any suggestion that
a work of art is a physical object at all.9 The main problem with this suggestion is that
it belies the basic requirement for some kind of material object, gesture, or form to
actually transmit this imagined work from one mind to another. Yet as any student of
conceptualism and intermedial expansion in twentieth-century art now knows, such
a materialization might assume the form of anything, from a traditional art object to
a text, performed gesture, or even a delineated absence marked in physical space. The
irrefutable nature of this requirement is perhaps most apparent whenever artists test
its limits. Robert Barry’s All the Things I Know but of Which I Am Not at the Mo-
ment Thinking (1969), for example, employed the minimal vehicular medium of a sen-
tence to imaginatively conjure the existence of inactivated memories in the artist’s own
mind. Another good example is Piero Manzoni’s mischievous 1961 work Base of the
World no. 3, Homage to Galileo, which is paradoxically dependent upon an inverted
sculptural plinth to transmit the idea that everything else in the world that is not the
physical object before us is actually the work. Looking to a more recent example, we
can see that despite the extent to which Tino Seghal’s conspicuously undocumented
performance works might aim to be radically immaterial, they still invariably require
material elements such as choreographed bodies, host architectures, or voiced witness
accounts in order to be transmitted as art from one mind to another. For another recent
example, we could turn to Salvatore Garau’s 2021 sculpture I am—a work which, al-
though “invisible,” still sits in a specifically demarcated physical space. Notwithstand-
ing the fact that the delivery mechanism itself in all of these examples is understood as
not constituting the work itself, there is no escaping the fact that a minimal material de-
livery mechanism is required to actually transmit the work from one mind to another.
The appeal of ideas such as these was infectious for many artists in the 1960s and
’70s. In 1969, for example, Douglas Huebler declared, “the world is full of objects,
more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”10 Soon, an avalanche of theo-
retical discourse would emerge to support such attitudes. The term dematerialization,
for example, was coined by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in 1968 to describe art
that stressed concept over material form.11 Although it was hoped by some at the
time that this tendency might somehow thwart the fetishization and commodification
of the material art object, it was soon apparent that capitalism is extraordinarily
adept at translating that which is literally “next to nothing” into symbolic market
value. Despite Lippard stressing that art could not be dematerialized as unmediated
Where Is Art? 11
information or experience, the term nevertheless endured as a descriptor for concep-
tual art of this era. Notwithstanding the elevation of ideas over material form in much
advanced art of the late twentieth century, it was ultimately clear that the complete
dematerialization of art was not logically possible. As Craig Dworkin put it in his
book, No Medium (2013): “Even the most abstract and cerebral works of conceptual
art cannot be separated from those material and technical supports. There is no single
medium, to be sure, but media are inescapable.”12 This necessity was never lost on
more astute artists of the time. Although Marcel Broodthaers, for example, stressed
the “idea before the plastic,” he also conceded that in order “to express an idea prop-
erly, I had necessarily to play around with plastic elements.”13 (For further examples,
see the writings of Ilmar Taimre and one us in Chapter 8 of this book and elsewhere.)
It was now apparent that even conceptual artists make more or less effective mate-
rial and formal decisions in order to effectively communicate an idea as art. There was
simply no way that some form of materialization could be avoided, even if decidedly
“anti-aesthetic” or barely evident in its public presentation. Ironically, the perceived se-
riousness of some works of conceptually driven art at the time were sometimes paradox-
ically brought into question if they didn’t “look” sufficiently anti-aesthetic. Amusingly,
Susan Hiller once quipped in response to “serious male” reception of her watershed
work, Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972–76), that had her found postcards been
black and white rather than color, perhaps Art & Language wouldn’t have critically re-
jected her work as “too visual.”14 At this juncture, we might simply conclude that good
and bad conceptual art both is and is not seductive in its material presentation.
Another key benefit gained from the morphological presentation of a concept is
that it enables the viewer not only to experience the idea, but to survey it from a
phenomenological vantage point. Although the inescapability of experiencing ideas
through material form runs counter to the aspirations toward immateriality sought
by hardened conceptualists, the important take home point here, as argued by Elis-
abeth Schellekens in 2009, is that conceptual artists ultimately “instantiate” ideas by
turning otherwise abstracted philosophical propositions into something “concrete”
and therefore experiential.15 Tellingly, even hypothetical works of art, such as those
featured in the philosophical ruminations of Arthur Danto, still require a physical
medium of sorts in the form of a printed page.16 In this sense, even hypothetical
works are exceptions that prove the rule, for imaginary creative works can only be
experienced when we imagine their effect in the world. The (impossible) existence of
hypothetical art is only further frustrated as we attempt to imagine effects designed
to preclude the imagining of effects.
Another common claim is that certain forms of art exist exclusively in “relational
space.” But almost immediately we can see that any delineated relational space still
needs to be understood as somehow occupying a realm in between various neces-
sary but insufficient material and paratextual elements (that encapsulate or “activate”
surrounding networks of materially evident interpretations, critiques, perceptions,
histories, documentations, values, accounts, encounters, etc.). Moreover, even in the
case of a traditional presentation of art, we can now recognize that the viewer can
only behold a work as part of a process that necessarily involves coming into con-
tact with a range of pre-existing histories and adjacent paratextual information or
other prosthetic and supplementary materials (which the artist typically claims are
not technically part of the work).17 Here, it is also relevant to stress that even a view-
er’s recognition that they are indeed in the company of art requires at least some prior
awareness of the historically developed and socially constructed idea of art itself.
Here, in drawing upon a philosophical tradition that can be traced back to the in-
sights of Immanuel Kant, we know that the relationship between physical and mental
experiences in human comprehension is something that is inextricably connected—
for just as concepts abstracted from experience are empty, experiences without con-
text are blind. Considered together, direct experience of a work and knowledge of
its accompanying social contexts give us more. This relationship, which now also
forms the basis of artistic research production in the academy, is indebted to Kant’s
dynamic integration of the two key traditions in Western knowledge production in
action—empiricism, which holds that our knowledge is primarily derived from sense
experience or observation, and rationalism, which holds that knowledge is primarily
based in reason.
So, as we have already established, we cannot even recognize something as art in
the first place without accessing, even in a most basic sense, a surrounding set of so-
cially constructed fictionalizations (such as art history or language itself). Although
the vehicular presence of the physical artifact or experience directs our aesthetic con-
templation and interpretation, we also cannot help but conjure knowledge or aware-
ness of its surrounding network in order to enter its world. This necessity is key to the
historical failure of formalism—which conveniently ignored, for example, the “soft
power” imperial (CIA-bolstered) currency of abstract expressionism. It is also why
we know that the physical object in itself cannot make an exclusive or autonomous
claim to the art condition. Consequently, from the vantage of our present, we now
understand that that the formalists and the conceptualists only ever had half the
story—despite tying themselves in knots attempting to defend their respective pro-
jects. Where the twentieth century was arguably full of artistic movements that threw
the proverbial baby out with the bathwater in manifesto-led frenzies, the twenty-first
century has witnessed many of these former antinomies become reluctant bedfellows.
This is probably why so many contemporary artists repetitively churn out artist state-
ments that present their work as “positioned between x and y” —a tactic, alas, that
tends only to confirm rather than elide the problem. “Liminality” and “intersticial-
ity” are the new normative, and the obscurer and uglier the word the better. In an
effort to surmount the tyranny of binaries, “inter” is the nom du jour, in many cases
tending to inadvertently enforce the old order as much as the new.
Art is, necessarily, built in a series of complex, layered, and ultimately mutually in-
sufficient relationships. Moreover, as Markus Gabriel puts it, “aesthetic experience—
that is, the perception of an artwork—is generally a second-order perceptual relation:
a perceptual relation to a perceptual relation.”18 In this sense, we might provision-
ally conclude that the physical materialization(s) associated with a work of art sim-
ply offers the viewer a portal into a dynamic relationship between material form(s)
and the surrounding networks of signs, concepts, myths, traces, sensations, and
contradictions—all intertwined in ever-expanding worlds of interpretations, fictions,
versions, and documentations. Without interpretation, and without this network of
relations between elements that collectively constitute the “space” or “world” of a
work of art, what we understand to be a work of art would be no more than a mere
object or arbitrary artifact in the continuum of everyday life.
Ultimately, although all ideas must be somehow communicated sensorially, all sen-
sory perception involves a greater or lesser degree of conceptual processing. More-
over, there is no defensible reason to claim that the presence of sensorial elements
Where Is Art? 13
should negate an intellectual dimension. Today, the artistic implications of this in-
escapable convergence of the sensorial and the conceptual in contemporary art are
sometimes referred to as “postconceptual art.” Central to the recent popularization of
this term is Peter Osborne’s description of the mutual insufficiency of two once dom-
inant dimensions in art—the conceptual and the aesthetic, which he sees as activated
in relation to a series of processes of active fictionalization. To this end, Osborne has
identified six features of postconceptual art:
1 A necessary—but insufficient—conceptuality
2 A necessary—but insufficient—aesthetic dimension
3 An anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials
4 An expansion to infinity of the possible material means of art
5 A radically distributive—that is, irreducibly relational—unity of the individual
artwork across the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at any particu-
lar time
6 A historical malleability of the borders of this unity19
Here a site, there a site, anywhere a site

Perhaps the most important development in the elevation and expansion of concep-
tions of location specificity in art is the late twentieth-century conception of site spec-
ificity. Importantly, it was also a potent antithesis to modernism’s historical assertion
of the work of art as autonomous. In this instance, Robert Smithson was particu-
larly instrumental during the 1960s and ’70s in rethinking the relationship between
a work of art and its environment. In particular, it was through an active interest in
a work’s host environment that Smithson developed his highly influential dialectical
conceptualization of “sites” and “non-sites.” For Smithson, a site referred to a specific
location, whereas a non-site referred to an exhibition environment such as a gal-
lery. 20 Many of Smithson’s most significant works deliberately drew upon the nature
of relationships between sites and non-sites. Smithson’s non-site exhibits typically
consisted of photographs, films, maps, sketches, or diagrams of a particular location
exhibited alongside physical materials removed from that location. Noting, for exam-
ple, that Smithson’s iconic “earthwork,” Spiral Jetty (1969–70), is also the title of a
32-minute color film and a series of exhibited film stills and sketches, Osborne has
argued that “the film Spiral Jetty appears as one element in a complex distribution of
artistic materials, across a multiplicity of material forms and practices, the unity of
which constitutes a singular, though internally multitudinous work.”21 For Osborne,
these “material forms appear as multiple materializations selected from an infinite
set of possible actualizations.”22 It is for this reason that he sees Spiral Jetty as not
an earthwork sculpture at all (as is it typically described in art historical accounts),
but rather as a transcategorical postconceptual work. Moreover, he argues, it is pro-
foundly conservative to historicize it as sculpture at all—as has been the tendency
since the publication of Rosalind Krauss’ influential, much-quoted essay “Sculpture
in the Expanded Field” (1979). 23
Krauss, by analyzing the structural parameters of sculpture, architecture, and land-
scape, had sought to clarify what these respective practices were and were not, and
what resulted when considered fused together. In doing so, Krauss influenced think-
ing in all three fields, together with off-shoot epithets such as “expanded cinema” and
“expanded painting,” etc. In so doing she also anticipated the way that postmodern-
ism (and beyond) was apt to desecrate the sacred cows of modernist formalisms. For
Krauss, unlike modernist sculpture, where one “enters a space of negative condition”
and “a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place,” sculpture had,
by the early 1960s, begun to enter categorical indeterminacy, for “it was what was
on or in front of a building that was not the building, or what was in the landscape
that was not the landscape.”24 Whereas modernist sculpture had typically fetishized
its plinth primacy—holding nostalgically to the invitation for idolatry—subsequent
sculpture had instead become “one term on the periphery of a field in which there are
other, differently structured possibilities. And one has thereby gained the ‘permission’
to think these other forms.”25
This “permission” to rethink the nature and the form of the presentation of art
would prove to be enormously significant for future artists and theorists. For Miwon
Kwon, writing in 1997, central to this radical rethinking was an “epistemological
challenge to relocate meaning from within the art object to the contingencies of its
context.”26 Consequently, a site could just as easily refer to institutional power, stolen
land, an economic transaction, a classroom, a shared meal, a journey on public trans-
port, the transactional nature of the gaze, or the giving of care.
Following this marked departure from the deification of the discrete art object,
the spatial and social contexts surrounding a work of art were routinely absorbed
into its orbit of aesthetic and critical interpretation. Cynically, we can also recognize
this development as yet another market-ready conflation. Like many other luxury
goods, this expansion of art into different modes of display and consumption can also
be seen as exemplifying capitalism’s extraordinary capacity to produce and sell the
“air” surrounding objects (think, for example, of high-end fashion stores displaying
a single garment in a large retail display, or a glossy fashion magazine listing, along-
side other credits, the fragrances models are supposedly wearing). 27 Notwithstanding
many contemporary artists’ presumptive claims that works presented through this
now radically expanded ontology somehow “interrogate” (another snappy word that
contemporary art seemingly cannot do without) the structures of late capitalism, it
is now possible for otherwise arbitrary objects and actions to be placed together in
a contextually “expanded field,” which, when presented together with a few supple-
mentary linguistic gymnastics and strategies of ironic doubling, somehow present as a
critique of capitalism. Today, this is a game with a sophistication that rivals the most
abstracted forms of speculative futures trading. At best, artists regard themselves as
partially redeemed by virtue of being at once critical and self-reflectively complicit (as
if it is somehow more palatable to sell half of one’s soul).
It was against this backdrop that a particularly clever critical branch of conceptual-
ism emerged, namely, institutional critique. This systematic inquiry into the workings
of art institutions, such as galleries and museums, would also evoke an inverse spec-
ulation upon the machinations of the market—especially its conditions of labor and
the other invisible economic, social, and political forces. This approach, at its core,
involves critically speculating upon the role that institutional forces play in the recep-
tion, interpretation, and subsequent currency of art. This development was also per-
haps an inevitable consequence of the spatial expansion of the possible means of art.
Here, as Osborne argues, it is now possible to retrospectively point to the paradoxical
way in which Smithson’s non-sites finally “acted as sites that represent other sites, and
hence, reflectively, that need to represent their own character as such sites as well.”28
Where Is Art? 15
This critical function, in which particular contextual qualities and currencies, acti-
vated by the blindly assumed neutrality of the white cube gallery space, can become
an artistic medium, would help establish the requisite grounding for more pointed
forms of institutional critique in the work of artists such as Michael Asher, Hans
Haacke, Adrian Piper, Fred Wilson, and Andrea Fraser. 29 Significantly, this kind of
expansion was no longer simply about space but rather about institutional forces and
their impact upon placemaking.30 Unlike space, which possesses abstract physical
and formal properties, a “place” is a socially constructed designation that overwrites
space.31 Today, for example, if we consider a socially constructed object/place, such
as a nation state, we can see traces of contested places violently overwritten by other
socially constructed acts of placemaking.
Institutional critique initially developed through a re-evaluation of the museum and
the studio as sites for the production of works ready for circulation. Artists such as
Haacke were particularly instrumental in shifting the idea of site from the physical
site to the system of socioeconomic relations within which art finds its being. Haacke’s
great contribution was to strip, or try to strip, the patina of prestige off art institutions,
to expose them as an intricate interconnected network of self-interested patronage and
self-affirmation favoring the minority who divvied out the honors and cash.
One particularly potent contemporary example of a practice indebted to insti-
tutional critique is found in the work of Cameron Rowland, whose work seeks to
illuminate systems and institutions that benefit from racial injustice. Rowland’s ex-
traordinary 2016 exhibition 91020000 at Artists Space in New York, for example,
featured objects produced by incarcerated felons which were all produced using the
penal code, through which the host institution is availed free prison labor. (Signifi-
cantly, this exhibition took place in the same year that US filmmaker Ava DuVernay
released the documentary 13th—which argued that because a disproportionally high
number of incarcerated felons are Black, this penal code system is simply a continua-
tion of the legacies of slavery under a different name.)
By the late twentieth century, drawing upon ideas developed by artists such as
Broodthaers in the 1960s, it was relatively commonplace for artists to claim the exhi-
bition itself as medium. Once again typically eschewing the discrete aesthetic object
in favor of the exhibition as a protean arena of expansion and variation, the “exhibi-
tion” had become an arena for activating contestations and relations. As Hal Foster
observes, the readymade gesture was now no longer simply “a tautology about art
as deluxe commodity” but rather “a performance of presentation that can put latent
contexts into play.”32 Such works, which were often presented as projects in expanded
exhibition formats, would also routinely reach beyond the visual arts to commingle
with other disciplines and knowledge systems. By the end of the twentieth century, as
John Armleder remarked, an “artwork’s success” had become dependent upon “its
capacity to co-opt an existing situation and to be co-opted in return.”33
In summary, “critical” contemporary art could no longer claim any independent
essence in relation to the systems it purported to critique, and, as a consequence,
much advanced art today consciously incorporates this awareness of the inextrica-
ble relationship of a work of art to broader systems of production, consumption,
distribution, and exploitation. Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s Mon-
ument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers (2007), for
example, traces the transformation of excess European sugar into generic serial min-
imalist blocks as “art” to elude European trade barriers. Similarly, Steve McQueen’s
Gravesend (2007) poetically follows the movement of the “new blood diamond,”
coltan, from exploitative labor conditions in Congo to the production of cellphones
and computers. It is of course important to distinguish between sophisticated poetic
responses to complex political issues and works that sit toward the instrumental or
“activist” end of the spectrum, which at worst simply reveal inaction rather than stir
any intention for real change.
Bodies in spaces
An idea experienced as art can potentially unlock insights and understandings that
might remain elusive in a theoretical proposition alone. With this in mind, feminist,
Black, and LGBTQI+ artists have long recognized that the relational register of bod-
ies in spaces can implicitly communicate socio-political ideas. Here, numerous exam-
ples emerge from the 1960s onward. VALIE EXPORT, for example, challenged the
public to engage with a real woman as opposed to an image on a screen. Covering her
naked chest with a makeshift “movie theatre,” EXPORT invited pedestrians (in ten
European cities between 1968 and 1971) to reach inside the box and directly touch
her breasts. This radical screen-free expanded “film” confronted social, political, and
sexual positionings of the female body by fracturing boundaries between cinema and
real life. Instead of a passive subject on a screen, the male gaze was met by the subject
looking back into the eyes of the viewer.
Similarly, James Luna, a US artist of First Nation American and Mexican back-
ground, challenged the way US culture, and by extension museums, presented his
people as essentially extinct by installing his own living breathing body in an exhibi-
tion case in the San Diego Museum of Man to produce Artifact Piece (1985–87). Posi-
tioned amongst surrounding exhibits in a museological section on the Kumeyaay—the
original inhabitants of San Diego County—Luna lay dressed in a leather cloth, with
labels supposedly pointing to scars from drinking and fighting. Personal items were
also displayed together with other cultural artifacts. Through this mixture of ele-
ments, he sought to reveal a still living and developing culture at odds with its muse-
ological representation.
Another potent example of the relational registration of a body in a contested space
is Pope.L’s provocative performance-based work How Much is that N***** in the
Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl (1991). In this performance, Pope.L crawled
military style in a business suit holding a potted flower, along the perimeter of Tomp-
kins Square Park in New York. At the time, the park was a site of ongoing riots in-
volving the homeless, squatters, activists, and police. On the day of Pope.L’s “crawl,”
Tompkins Square was barricaded for renovations. Assuming a prostrate posture, and
forcing onlookers to direct their gazes downward, Pope.L sought to make disenfran-
chised bodies and displaced communities visible. This remains a timely work today
within the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Where is social space?

Within the context of contemporary art, the now broadly used term social practice (as
opposed to the theory in psychology by the same name) emphasizes social engagement,
collaboration, and community as a medium in the creation of so-called “relational art.”
For its devotees, social practice seeks to activate relationships between production and
Where Is Art? 17
reception, the political nature of social relations, and the lived experiences of others
as aesthetic experience. It also challenges the idea that art only functions through its
reification as a circumscribed object or a traditional staged performance. The roots of
social practice can be traced back to the 1940s, when movements such as lettrism, then
after the Second World War, the Situationist International and Fluxus began to chal-
lenge established conceptions of the way in which viewers and audiences are implicated
in processes of artistic production. In his seminal text The Society of the Spectacle
(1967), Guy Debord argued that the “spectacular” image was symptomatic of capital-
istic alienation and, moreover, actually concealing this estrangement.34 Meanwhile,
during the Fluxus movement of the late 1960s, George Maciunas took aim at “illusion-
ism,” and like the Situationists, sought to expose the reification of life engendered by
the capitalist onslaught of the spectacular. Drawing upon ideas that had originated in
early twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Dada, this second horizon of
postwar neo-avant-garde tendencies was even more explicitly concerned with the crea-
tion of experiences that offer active viewer participation. Importantly, the outcomes of
these interventions were not singular objects but rather materialized experiences that
claimed to result in a blurring of boundaries between art and life.
In recent decades, variations of social, relational, and participatory practices,
which typically occur outside of traditional exhibition environments, have become
increasingly common. Within these restructured relationships between artist and au-
dience, the viewer is no longer modelled as passive and detached but rather as an in-
trinsic participatory medium. During the 1990s in particular, collaborative initiatives
such as the Turkish collective Oda Projesi (Room Project) set out to try and create
new functions for unused public spaces. During the late 1990s, participatory practice
was reframed by Nicolas Bourriaud, who argued that audience involvement made
work political, since the space of interaction created fleeting communities whose
inter-subjective relations and concrete communications might be politically affective.
The political, Bourriaud suggested, could emerge within and through the aesthetic
experience without the art or the artist engaging directly with politics. He laid claim
to the term relational aesthetics to describe “a set of practices which takes as their
theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their
social context.”35 One artist particularly enamored by Bourriaud was Rirkrit Tira-
vanija, who somewhat unconvincingly claimed to build on the work of Joseph Beuys’
1960s/’70s idea of “social sculpture” as a mechanism for dissolving the boundaries
between art and life. The Land (1998–present), which Tiravanija cofounded with
Superflex, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, and Kamin Lertchaiprasert, is typical of
projects that claim to bring art and social engagement together.
Bourriaud’s ideas, however, have also been roundly criticized, and rightly so. Claire
Bishop, in particular, points to a lack of critical antagonism, a loss of aesthetic judg-
ment, and the empty assumptions of democracy championed in the writing and cu-
ratorial work of Bourriaud. For Bishop, antagonisms and dynamic contradictions
presented in the work of artists such as Artur Żmijewski contain more critical po-
tential. Żmijewski’s Them (2007), for example, was a social experiment in which
representatives from conflicting social groups (conservatives, patriotic Catholics, na-
tionalist Polish youth, leftist socialists, democrats, and freedom fighters) were brought
together in a series of workshops to construct symbolic representations and respond
to others. In time, fights broke out, and “artworks” were set on fire and thrown out
of the windows.
When is a work?
The problem of unambiguously locating when a work begins and ends is somewhat
comparable to the “where is art?” conundrum. To begin this discussion, we might
look back to some of the earliest examples of cognitively advanced human artistic
expression to find examples of works that effectively stretch across millennia. Perhaps
the most extraordinary example is found in the multiple painted layers that make up
the ceilings and pillars of Nawarla Gabarnmang (Jawoyn for “hole in the rock”36).
Extraordinarily, although evidence of habitation at this site in southwestern Arnhem
Land in Australia has been dated to at least 44,000 years ago, paintings produced
more than 28,000 years ago sit alongside depictions of barramundi executed in a
style more typical of the last 400 years.37 Crayons have also been recovered from
nearby locations (Malakunanja II and Nauwalabila I) that are dated between 45,000
to 60,000 years, suggesting that Nawarla Gabarnmang may have even been creatively
modified for over 65,000 years, since the earliest known human habitation of the
same continental landmass on which this essay is being written. The site also includes
paintings dated roughly between AD 1433 and 1952, which is consistent with local
anecdotal reports that the cave was still visited within living memory.38 How do we
even begin to engage with histories this deep? Ironically, given that these dates will
most likely be updated by the time this essay is published, the research drawn upon in
this paragraph is probably as “up to date” as any claims made about the latest digital
technologies elsewhere in the text. Although it is easy to be astonished by the ineffa-
ble gravity of contemplating continuous painting practices stretching across tens of
millennia into the recesses of deep time, the most important point is the extent that
it trivializes the two centuries of colonial occupation that so recently put an end to
continuous adaptations of this site.
Moving much closer to our present day, a good example of a work of art that has
only affirmed its critical significance with each subsequent adaptation is Louise Lawl-
er’s Birdcalls (1972/1981/2008). In its initial 1972 version, the work consisted of a
series of high-pitched quasi-bird songs consisting of absurd repetitions of the names of
her more famous male artist contemporaries, many of whom who were being selected
for inclusion in exhibitions in which she was not taking part. In its second iteration
in 1981, the work was transformed into an exhibited audio document of the same
quasi-bird songs. In 2008, in its third and still current version, the work was perma-
nently installed as a sound work in the garden outside Dia Beacon in New York, the
same location where many of the historically celebrated male artists that she parodied
are now permanently exhibited inside the building.39 In this third iteration, Lawler’s
speculative capacity to predict the male art historical figures of the then future is
retrospectively confirmed. Clearly, activating connections to the past and speculating
upon possible futures can form an important part of deepening the meaning and
potency of a work. In this case, the act of interpretation requires the connection of
meanings expressed in the past, toward the future, made manifest in the present.
Methodological confusion and ontological indeterminacy

Art, even under controlled conditions, is indeterminate in character. Today, this in-
trinsic indeterminacy has become hyperbolic, sometimes manifesting as a surfeit of
meaning and affect. Given the inherent indeterminacy of artistic production and
Where Is Art? 19
discourse, there now appears to be no apparent upper limit to the extent to which
artists and theorists might glean ideas—sometimes superficially—from other disci-
plines and cultural contexts. This is a process that was already well under way in the
twentieth century. Indeterminacy, for example, was a central idea for John Cage, in
particular during the latter part of his career. Under the influence of Zen Buddhism,
indeterminacy underpinned the need to bring the creative act into the open without
excessive forethought, with a premium given to the moment of delivery and reception.
It also underscored the extreme porosity of practices: Genre disciplines were not to
be cordoned off or determined either linguistically or strategically, if only historically.
But the historical term, under the weight of the creative moment, was there to be rup-
tured and repositioned, thereby also repositioning and rereading history. This state
of heightened indeterminacy would serve to effectively emphasize the work of art’s
open-endedness in laying the most important stress on the encounter as opposed to
the object, which ought never to be considered static nor central.
Over that last half century or so, art has largely traded medium-specific categoriza-
tions for thematic positionings that typically stress socially and politically oriented re-
lations. Although, to a certain extent, medium-specific categorizations live on as part
of what Alex Bacon usefully describes as “a nostalgia for their former ontological sep-
aration,” the flexibility of conventional medium categories has, in many ways, been
expanded to the limits of plausibility.40 For some, art has expanded so far beyond
its internal concerns that it has lost any meaningful coherence. For others, advanced
artistic activity is liberated from the exhibition of discrete objects to focus on the
supposedly more important work of activating relationships. Unlike the assertions of
aesthetic autonomy that underpinned the various ideological battles staged between
abstract formalism and allegorical illustration during the twentieth century, a signifi-
cant proportion of artistic activity in the twenty-first century is more concerned with
negotiating tensions between the agency of forms and the outermost spatial and tem-
poral limits of a work of art. Consequently, to highlight this point again, a work of
art is now less likely to be regarded as fixed in space and time and closed off from the
world around it. Instead, the world of a work of art is understood as inherently labile,
relational, cross-disciplinary, and open to continual transformation across multiple
versions or locations. As a result, another problem has arisen: The challenge of mean-
ingfully evaluating potential works located across multiple mediums, material forms,
versions, disciplines, and histories. Consequently, it can be particularly challenging
to find appropriate or consistent language and methodological criteria for evaluating
forms of art that straddle seemingly incongruent realms of knowledge.
Where late twentieth-century histories of art still largely methodologically com-
prised relatively distinct critical models—such as formalism, structuralist semiotics,
psychoanalysis, feminism, and others—these methodologies had more or less merged
by the turn of the millennium. Today, as we try and make sense of this fuzzily de-
marcated, interdisciplinary, and transcategorical situation, it is almost pointless to
insist on any particular or singular methodological approach or position. Moreover,
this complexity has rendered any claim that a particular model is consistently or
exclusively valid as doomed within the interpretative processes of art history. Conse-
quently, it is paradoxically that which artists and theorists find appealing in the any-
thing goes radical relativism of our contemporary situation—that is, its inherent lack
of a stable definition, a-historicity, and heterogeneity—also tends to stymie a sense of
meaningful possibility.
For some artists, the term contemporary itself presents a barrier. For Liam Gillick,
although it was not uncommon for modernist artists to deny the name associated with
their respective style or movement, contemporary art activates this kind of denial
differentially. Frustratingly, the term contemporary does not describe a particular
approach or practice but rather a general “being in the context.”41 Another common
tendency is found in variously configured attempts to describe the contemporary as a
new epoch supposedly unburdened by the oppressive narratives of imperial Western
modernism. Here, one feature frequently overlooked by contemporary detractors of
modernism is the extent to which such declarations tend to mirror the kind of ab-
solutist claims once offered in modernist manifestos. Moreover, a general dearth of
historical literacy, together with an all-consuming flattening across a superficially
informationally obese, often self-obsessed, and increasingly algorithmically sorted
present, obscures most of us from really acknowledging that we still routinely use
Western “modernist precedents to claim that we surpass the modern.”42
Another way of looking at “the contemporary” is as a moniker of exhaustion. This
is to say, with postmodernism having faded away, and faced with no reasonable (or
catchy or consensual) alternative, a place-saver was inserted, only for that stand-in
term to generate its own autonomy and semantic economy. “Contemporary,” with
or without the scare quotes, now prevails as its own entity, where, as with such se-
miotic transitions, the original meaning of the word is all but lost and in its place
is a promissory meaning for what is in truth a lack, a void. Other terminological
candidates which have variously attempted to encapsulate the still ambiguous present
and historical era that has followed postmodernism include post-postmodernism, the
off-modern, meta-modernism, neomodern, new sincerity, remodernism, performa-
tism, altermodernism, supermodernity, andromodernity, speciousmodernity, and the
aftermodern. Ironically, the implicit lack of specific directionality and multiplicity
of meaning and possibility variously presented in each of these competing models
is demonstrated in their very failure to take hold. Furthermore, if we may allow a
few generalizations, if the main tendencies of postmodernism were appropriation and
deconstructive critique (resetting the habitual power structures deemed monolithic
in modernism), variations upon the contemporary are most typically characterized
along lines of gender and identity. As is keenly apparent across our present situation,
these are battlelines which dangerously tip, time and time again, into ideological war-
fare. The net effect is all too often to see art pressed into the instrumentalized service
of activist concerns—often using paper-thin tactics of ontological doubling or settling
psychopathological disquiet. For all its inconsistencies, we are apt to turn to Theodor
Adorno’s insistence that political art makes for both bad art and bad politics. It may
not be a universal truth, but it does resonate anew in our present time when art is so
freighted with values, concerns, and complaints that the viewer becomes cynically
inured to it, effectively drowning in caveats, with the unfortunate effect that the is-
sues themselves, extrinsic from art proper, may then not be given the attention they
deserve.
Moreover, the sheer breadth that art demands of itself, and that it is used so much
as a historical vehicle, means that efforts at a precision once expected of art histori-
cal scholarship are deemed reactionary. Art and art history is thus increasingly lost
in a grab-bag of methodological eclecticisms. Here, to repurpose Jacques Derrida’s
lexicon, we might say opposing categories have slowly interwoven and “contami-
nated” one another to create a generalized condition of heightened confusion. Yet
Where Is Art? 21
such circumstances have their benefits. Given the collapse of the categorical distinc-
tions of the past that have intended to police and exclude, there is arguably now
far more room for voices previously omitted from a world of clearer yet oppressive
delineations. With this important point of difference in mind, for better or worse, we
are open to integrating a diverse range of often contradictory methods and method-
ological positions. Although we are now on less stable ground, there are more voices
at the table.
To attempt to make or see something as something else is an act of understanding—
as is the case when reasoning shapes intuitions into a coherent structure of ideas and
words. Ultimately, art has no independent essence without being framed in relation-
ship to both life and everything that is not art. Art might not be life but is rather
something necessarily framed in parallax with it. Although there is often no substan-
tial literal difference between art and non-art objects, socially constructed structural
difference can nonetheless be attributed in such a way that otherwise vastly disparate
objects, methods, and formations can be brought into new sets of relation. Ultimately,
categories are, to a greater or lesser extent, indistinct—and at worst violently ex-
clusionary. It is important to remember that categorical distinctions are inherently
artificial, dynamic, contested, elusive, shifting, and context dependent. Moreover,
the significance of categories can easily evaporate along with the social or historical
setting that created them in the first place. In some respects, it is now trivial to stress
that broader contexts of production, conception, and reception are more significant
than particular formal or virtuosic qualities in the critical reception of advanced art.
Although “context” might typically consist of reasonably evident shared understand-
ings and expectations about the nature and purpose of the encounter, context is also
part of a mutually insufficient relationship between the formal properties of objects
and the systems of cultural “belief” that surround them. Considered together, this
mutually insufficient relationship between materials and contexts underpins both the
interpretation of art and the accompanying mysteries and indeterminacies of the cre-
ative act itself.
As is particularly evident in extreme cases, the exceptions to the rule, it is clear the
only thing that finally differentiates a work of art from everyday life, and everything
else in the world, is structural framing accorded through a work’s presentation. With-
out the legitimizing accompaniment of the artworld, many works would likely strug-
gle to transcend arbitrariness within the continuum of lived reality. It is perhaps when
something presented as art is also an apparently literal facsimile of that which is not
art that this curious philosophical transformation is most apparent.
This problem of “literal indiscernibility”43 was discussed at length as part of Ar-
thur Danto’s highly influential description of an “Artworld” (as an exclusive cap-
italized proper noun no less).44 For Danto, it was immediately apparent when he
first encountered an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes in the 1960s that the
all-important difference was not to be found in any superficial comparison of com-
mercially available Brillo box packaging and Warhol’s facsimiles. Instead, the most
important distinction was philosophically marked by its artworld presentation. It is
precisely here that the fictionalized conceit of the contemporary artworld is found, in
which strategies of ironic doubling and claims of implicit criticality are still used so
successfully to sell unremarkable objects, and their surrounding air, at inflated prices.
By the mid-1980s in New York, for example, loose imported theoretical references
to “simulationism” and so-called “commodity criticism” surrounded the exhibition
and sale of everything from the latest running shoes to lava lamps, liquid decanters,
and vacuum cleaners as art. Heavily promoted by their dealers, artists such as Ashley
Bickerton, Haim Steinbach, and Jeff Koons produced ironic simulations of luxury
consumer items, which, despite an underlying premise of deep intellectual despair and
cynicism, were sold at an unprecedented prices for living artists.
Today, many artworld participants take this constructed exclusiveness for granted.
Although for Danto, there could be no “artworks without the theories and the histo-
ries of the Artworld,” 45 the existence of many differently configured artworlds and
layered ontologies—some of which are utterly uninterested in one another yet simi-
larly capable of constituting a consensually constructed realm within which particu-
lar activities can be understood to be at once art and something else (i.e., a political
protest or a scientific research project)—has seen critical attention increasingly turn
to what Pamela Lee has usefully described as “the work of art’s world.”46 Although
Lee acknowledges the impossibility of “ignoring or standing outside it [the artworld],
as if one could lay claim to a space beyond its imperial reach by wandering just far
enough afield,” her focus has instead shifted from the “global art world” to the “work
of art’s world.” For Lee,
to speak of the “the work of art’s world” is to retain a sense of the activity per-
formed by the object as utterly continuous with the world it at once inhabits
and creates: a world Möbius-like in its indivisibility and circularity, a seemingly
endless horizon.47
Here, it is extraordinarily difficult to meaningfully demarcate the categorical edges of

work of art which are seemingly at once art and part of the world.
So, how do we meaningfully evaluate works of art that seek to be continuous with
the world? As Claire Bishop suggests, much contemporary art actively evades aes-
thetic judgment by conveniently straddling doubled ontologies.48 This situation, as
Bishop has consistently argued, is ultimately one in which an artist might claim, for
example, that the political implications of her work are far more important than mere
art (despite the fact that she might sound preposterously “arty” if asked to justify her
work in any serious political discourse). But isn’t art in and of itself capable of gener-
ating serious discourse? The “double dipping” Bishop is referring to here implicates
much contemporary art as always in danger of either retreating into the specialized
rhetoric used to frame it to an art-literate audience (and consequently of contradicting
any broadly inclusive ethos that it purports to promote) or, conversely, evading aes-
thetic judgment in the name of more easily morally justifiable values such as commu-
nity awareness or “good politics.” Furthermore, this is often the kind of work that is
accompanied by generic artist statements that uncritically regurgitate the fashionable
critical rhetoric of the day. Today, for example, artists are almost ubiquitously inter-
rogating ideas (just as they were once “unpacking” ideas in the 1980s or “unfolding”
ideas in the 1990s). It is also common to make extraordinarily vague claims that a
work is somehow rejecting established binaries by being positioned between or at the
intersection of more than one discourse, discipline, or medium (without recognizing
that this now generic approach is in turn paradoxically territorializing and uncriti-
cally fetishizing this unclearly demarcated “in-between zone”).
Given the tendency for artists to reject discrete aesthetic objects and traditional
gallery formats in favor of dynamic spatially and temporally expanded contexts,
Where Is Art? 23
coupled with the fact that anything can now potentially become art once it occupies
the structural place of art, it appears that the historical trajectory that has destroyed
hierarchies of form is now irreversible. Although we are no longer in a period of clear
dialectical distinction, the art/life distinction must remain active for the processes of
radical fictionalization that we consensually accept as contemporary art to continue.
Consequently, it is often when art is dressed in its most threadbare clothes, or in other
words, when the distinction between art and life is closest to arbitrary or indistin-
guishable, that it is most readily accepted as capable of producing novelty.
From Danto’s articulation of literal indiscernibility to Marcel Duchamp’s histor-
ical conceptualization of the “infra-thin” as the slightest margin of dissimilitude
between apparently identical entities, there are many historical examples of artists
that have produced novel content within the thinnest of delineations between art and
the continuum of lived experience.49 And, as we have already established, in order
for literally indiscernible difference to transcend arbitrariness and to be marked as
philosophical difference, the object or event must first be recognized as straddling
profoundly different ontologies. The performance artist Tehching Hsieh, for example,
is renowned for the way in which his extreme endurance performance works have
radically collapsed distinctions between art and life. His five One Year Performances
in New York between 1978 and 1986, for example—together with his Thirteen-Year
Plan (1986–99) (a period in which Hsieh made art but did not show it publicly)—all
ultimately required the liberal accompaniment of supplementary and paratextual ma-
terial in order to be meaningfully transmitted to audiences as art. Tellingly, for artists
such as Hsieh, such materials enable audiences to build the experience of the work in
their mind. In some ways, the imponderably high stakes of works such as these are
in many ways also their downfall. Perhaps, at least for some audiences, it is possible
to become so beset by the imponderability of scale and effort that we lose sight of
aesthetic value.
It is relatively easy to assemble a working list of historical examples of works of art
that pivot around that which is otherwise barely perceptible, invisible, or contingent.
One particularly pronounced example of the foregrounding of seeming invisibility
is found in the moment in 1969 in which Robert Barry staged the inconspicuous
release of invisible gas into the Mojave Desert to produce Inert Gas Series. Here, the
only evidence presented to the absent viewer was documentary photographs of the
artist’s actions. At around the same time, Michael Asher used industrial blowers to
punctuate architectural spaces or empty galleries with invisible shafts of air in his
series Vertical Columns of Accelerated Air (1966–67), while Terry Atkinson and
Michael Baldwin’s unspecified column of air over Oxfordshire, Air Show/Air Con-
ditioning (1966–67), offered another comparable example. (This kind of approach
was later given political content by Amy Balkin in her 2004 project Public Smog, an
“atmospheric park” created using financial, political, and legal methods to promote
awareness of air pollution.)
Historically, artists have attempted to illustrate the threshold between art and
everything else in a variety of ways. For his first New York solo show in 1973, for
example, Daniel Buren suspended 19 striped canvas squares on a cable that ran from
one end of the John Weber Gallery to the other and then out the window to a building
on the other side of the street and back. Once out of the gallery, the striped canvas
square assumed a literal semblance with other non-art iterations of stripes within the
continuum of everyday existence (i.e., awnings, curtains, clothing, etc.). Again, in
cases such as these, maintaining an artworld connection remains necessary to mark
this play of symbolic difference. And this artworld connection need not be activated
by physical proximity to an actual gallery. It is only, for example, through the pro-
motional activities of the Dia Foundation that the existence of many ambitious public
artworks—such as the especially subtle 24-hour/7-day-a-week harmonic sound in-
stallation Times Square by Max Neuhaus in New York’s Times Square—is noticeable
to any public at all.50
One intriguing recent example of a subtle artistic intervention is the ostensibly se-
cretive organization by the Random Institute51 of an exhibition in 2016 in Pyongyang
in North Korea titled All the Lights We Cannot See.52 For this exhibition, nine artists
were invited to contribute to a project in which they were both conceptually and nec-
essarily committed to secrecy. Apart from a very limited series of enigmatic installa-
tion shots, the most explicit trace of the exhibition’s existence is a one-line mention on
each of the participating artists’ résumés. Tellingly, when asked about the exhibition,
all participating artists agreed to respond with “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”53
Distribution and circulation

A key characteristic of much art produced in the internet era is that it employs compa-
rable technical means in circulation, storage, display, conservation, and reproduction.
In this sense, the problem of the inseparability of form and content in contemporary
art is further problematized. The internet is not simply a tool or medium but rather
a whole ecosystem in which artists research, conceptualize, produce, and distrib-
ute their work. Yet artists are only beginning to reckon with ways in which these
seemingly invisible yet extraordinarily powerful technologies dissolve boundaries and
unify distributive systems into multiform networked spaces. Where then is a work of
art in the age of the internet? Any response to this question demands consideration
of both the distributed nature of the internet and the materially distributed nature of
much contemporary art more generally. Historically, some forms of conceptual art,
such as “mail art,” for example, already exemplified a potential for maintaining a
unified identity despite global material distribution. Today, the shape and nature of
digital distribution is a core concern for many artists. Although artists continue to
identify explicitly with specific cultural and social groupings, the ways in which a
digital object moves across and through spaces and borders can be understood to at
once disperse and solidify cultural specificities.
As noted earlier, it is folly to call internet-based art immaterial, for the storage
and dissemination of internet-based content still conforms to the laws of physics. Al-
though the rise of the internet has led to a revival of interest in historical ideas related
to so-called dematerialization, the same problem facing conceptual artists in the late
1960s and 1970s prevails—the internet does not negate the need for a “vehicular me-
dium” of some kind to transmit an idea as art from one mind to another.54
The internet has only compounded pre-existing perplexities surrounding the where,
what, and when of a work of art. At a basic level, this question was of course already
encapsulated, as famously noted by Benjamin in 1936, in the inherent reproducibility
of the printed page and the photographic image. Yet the digital realm does introduce
additional layers to this conundrum, particularly in relation to the photographic im-
age. As Osborne observes, although “the whole question of where ‘the photograph’
is” was already “difficult to answer under the conditions of chemical-based analogue
Where Is Art? 25
55
images,” the digitally produced image now constitutes “a visible copy of an invisible
original.”56 Notwithstanding the requisite presence of at least one material form to
transmit an idea from artist to audience, the form of this materialization is (at least
hypothetically) infinitely interchangeable. As Artie Vierkant explains, a work of art in
the age of the internet can be accessed in a variety of different ways:
In the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the
images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print
publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations
on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author.57
We are thus presented with a new and unprecedented form of “commons” once ad-
vanced by Karl Marx. But even an intermediate user knows that this is where the
utopian ring ends. Free access to so much courts its own costs, not least by giving
multinationals, governments, and search agents free access to “us.” Consequently, we
inhabit an age Shoshana Zuboff has presciently named “surveillance capitalism.”58 In
a sense, within this involved discussion of where art is, we must never forget the high
degree to which we too, in all our convictions of being free agents, have become the
locus of information and control.
Post-internet
The already seemingly unfashionable neologism “post-internet art” was, at least pop-
ularly, coined by Marisa Olson in 200859 and further defined by Gene McHugh in
2009.60 Perhaps most succinctly, as Vierkant observes, post-internet art is “informed
by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of
physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability
of digital materials.”61 Tellingly, the fact that the term itself is now a cliché is perhaps
further evidence of its core thesis regarding the now ubiquitous banalities of the con-
ditions it seeks to encapsulate. In any event, the ever-increasing speed and accessibil-
ity of the technologies involved, and the sheer girth of the worlds in which art is now
produced, disseminated, and discussed, will ensure that much of the content of this
text will be dated by the time it goes to print.
In a so-called post-internet climate, a work or exhibition is understood to exist
concurrently across both traditional modes of object display and in the versions and
alternative materializations presented online. This situation has arisen on the back
of a historical era already described by Krauss as beset by a “post-medium condi-
tion”—a condition in which anything can be anything else and something formed in
one medium can be readily expressed through another whilst maintaining a connec-
tion to the originary medium through symbolically expanded discourse.62 We can
also recognize that this post-internet situation simply is a technologically augmented
extension of postconceptual art’s established capacity to maintain an identifiable
unity across, as Osborne describes it, a “complex distribution of artistic materials,
across a multiplicity of material forms and practices” despite being expressed through
a “singular, though internally multitudinous work.”63 For Vierkant, contemporary
artists routinely create works that move seamlessly from physical to online presenta-
tion, “either changing for each context, built with an intention of universality, or cre-
ated with a deliberate irreverence for either venue of transmission.”64 Within globally
distributed yet highly specialized digital communities, the process of digital transmis-
sion naturally becomes an inextricable part of the world of the work. Once again, by
activating a network of relations encapsulating various discrete materializations, we
can still identify specific works—irrespective as to whether the initial point of entry
is online or offline.
Net art and online exhibitions

As we have already established, new art forms and practices emerging in tandem with
digitally activated modes of presentation and dissemination have radically reshaped
the artworld. As is also the case with broader cultural production, informational
transmission has become as important as content creation. One consistent factor in
the dispositional development of internet and post-internet art are questions related
to the political nature of distribution and access. It is therefore unsurprising that
many contemporary artists seek to enter, disrupt, or take control of privately con-
trolled distribution systems to critique power inequities. One extraordinary historical
example on the incoming tide of net art was Cornelia Sollfrank’s 1997 response to a
Hamburger Kunsthalle call for submissions for a net art competition. In forming her
submission, Sollfrank used a program that collected random HTML materials from
the web and automatically combined them to enter 289 fictional women artists in
the competition. Sollfrank’s Female Extension was then activated in the moment in
which the unsuspecting museum proudly announced how many women had entered,
before predictably declaring an all-male list of winners.
Today, given that many artists are more familiar with using a computer than tradi-
tional fine art production techniques, and given that art audiences are already famil-
iar with digital media, the distinction between a work of art and an internet meme
or everyday digital artifact can sometimes seem rather amorphous. But before we get
too carried away with this ontological problem, there is no logical reason to view this
symbolic distinction differently to any post-Duchampian art.
If the internet has profoundly transformed how culture is created, documented, and
archived, how have artists met this transformation? It is uncontroversial to assert that
all art involves at least some form of mediation, translation, or transmission. Yet dig-
ital art exemplifies “remediation,” insofar as it assumes the form of a revision whilst
foregrounding a new medium.65 Perhaps in simply extending upon postmodern art
and popular cultural tendencies toward self-referencing (for instance, paintings about
painting or TV about TV), many artists have naturally gravitated toward the pro-
duction of websites about websites or social media about social media. In 2014, for
example, Amalia Ulman ran a semi-fictionalized makeover though her Instagram
account titled Excellences and Perfections. Here, Ulman pretended to undergo a
breast augmentation, followed the Zao Dha Diet, attended pole-dancing lessons, and
paraded lingerie in stylized interiors. Tellingly, even Ulman’s friends were unable to
distinguish her real and fictional persona. This work has already entered the canon as
the first serious Instagram artwork.
Some curators and institutions see the net as a platform for creating exhibitions.
Surprisingly, this can sometimes involve even more work than mounting a tradi-
tional exhibition. To develop an online exhibition, curators must consider the dis-
tributional nature of the web and technical characteristics such as variability and
virality. They also need be prepared to continue promoting and updating the project.
Where Is Art? 27
Looking beyond the exhibition, the task of documentation then encounters problems
of ephemerality and obsolete digital platforms. For some curators, these are chal-
lenges that can be built into the curatorial premise itself. The Tate’s The Gallery of
Lost Art (2012–13), for example, was an exclusively online museum exhibition which
sought to present “surrogates” for “lost” historical artworks, repurposed spatial and
televisual tropes from crime and forensic science programs to cast its online audi-
ence in the role of forensic investigator.66 Offering a scalable high-resolution array
of paratextual material presented on virtual display tables viewed from above, The
Gallery of Lost Art was available online for only one year, and then pulled down
permanently. Controversially, especially given the production price tag of £300,000
(over US$400,000), the decision to end the project after one year sought to accentu-
ate the exhibition’s core curatorial “insights into loss.”67 Significantly, the curatorial
premise for The Gallery of Lost Art emphasized that artworks should be understood
in relation to “a broad ecology of ideas, influences, and connections, in which the
material existence of the artworks was only one.”68 Undoubtedly, no artwork is ever
completely lost if we maintain some cultural knowledge and evidence, no matter how
meagre, of its existence. This fact brings us back to the problem of where and when
any work or exhibition is understood to exist.
Image ⇄ object
Mass-circulated digital images can quickly become unanchored from originary con-
texts, collapsing distinctions between specific locations and temporal zones, and in
doing so, contribute to a sense of a perpetual present that is deceptively divorced from
the world of actual bodies and objects in time. Meanwhile, given that images have
always existed outside of a visual art context, they cannot be ontologically contained
within the confines of its discourse. Today, we are surrounded by images as never
before. Yet although the digital image offers seemingly endless possibilities for manip-
ulation and dissemination, it is important to remember that we cannot receive images
without the vehicular support of objects. This image/object relationality also sits at
the core of our “where is art?” dilemma.
The production and dissemination of the digital image now touches most aspects
of late capitalist existence. Importantly, the internet and associated problems of lo-
cational specificity is also an issue for artists producing objects for traditional modes
of display. Even painters producing works for conventional gallery walls are doing
so in an era in which the digital invariably appears at least somewhere in the chain
from conception through production to exhibition, dissemination, and archive. As
Alex Bacon noted in 2016, even contemporary painting no longer primarily attends
to “pictorial space, but, rather, is engaged with the question of object versus image.”69
Moreover, he asks, “does a painting lie in the object, or in the image, or in the text
about the work?”70 What is actually present, and where? Osborne articulates this
bidirectional dilemma beautifully:
The image at once presents an absent thing and designates the thing presented as
unreal, because it is absent. In other words, the image presents in two directions
at once, the image is constitutively, ontologically ambiguous…. That’s the power
of the image. It points to the presence of the unreal and the absence of the real (it
performs both these functions simultaneously).71
Regardless of how we choose to look at it, there is no escaping the fact that contempo-
rary artists, irrespective of the content of their work, are implicated in ways of think-
ing and making formed in response to the ubiquity of the digital image. Moreover,
as noted earlier, it is now likely that more people will encounter a work through the
backlit glow of a portable screen than via any other means. This still new but already
dominant reality has not only fundamentally changed the way that we look at images,
it has also profoundly diminished our attention spans. In the words of Bishop, as im-
ages now dance across screens, “our eyes just scan the surface” as part of a process of
“rapid-fire skimming.”72 So how do artists meaningfully compete with the broader
cacophony of competing distractions that surround art received through or alongside
the backlit glow of portable screens? For Osborne, this situation is already inherently
paradoxical, for “art distracts, as well as resisting distraction [yet] is received in dis-
traction.”73 The implications of these technologies are still uncertain:
Today, with the digitally based convergence of audio-visual communication

technologies, the training ground of distracted reception has moved again, from
television to the multiplying sites and social functions of the interactive, liquid
crystal-display screen: smartphones and tablet computers, in particular. We are
experiencing a new, much more spatially diffuse “cult of distraction” of the in-
ternet, the social and economic—but not yet the artistic—significance of which
is clear.74
It is unsurprising, given the proliferation of online activity more generally, that the
dissemination of much contemporary artistic production also employs and reflects
the practices of copying, hyperlinking, sharing, tagging, and filtering that dominate
contemporary lived experience. The way in which the internet now forms a subject,
theme, and method has led to a growth of artistic events and activities that variously
reflect upon, take place within, or are organized online. In the digital age, artists have
in many ways become far more self-sufficient entities. Artists no longer simply make
works and exhibitions. They also create events, texts, and archives while consistently
managing online representations of their work. Peer-to-peer technologies, through
which users modify and re-post media objects, have also disrupted long established
assumptions that artists create, curators select and interpret, and gallerists or tra-
ditional publishers disseminate. Consequently, the locus of activity is as difficult to
ascertain as the nature of image/object relations.
The specter of popular culture

In the old days, as the phrase goes, it was easy to officiate between high and low
art. The encroachment of the low into the high was a fairly easy dialectic to grasp,
which, along with its implication of a transvaluation of values of the new over the
old, made pop art a favorite for high school and first year art students. Put bluntly,
cultural phenomena that were not art, from places not germane to art, entered into
art and art’s domain. We may continue to look back on this time with some degree of
wistfulness, since the shift is so comprehensible. It took wing in the 1960s, when there
was still faith in activism and social change, when the “inside” and the “outside” of
institutions—be they art-related or most other discipline-oriented activities—were
still relatively coherently demarcated. Since then, it was all but an expectation for
Where Is Art? 29
artists, including performers, composers, novelists, and poets, to muddy the waters
of “pure” expression. The appropriation of popular culture henceforth entered the
growing list of artistic devices.
But in the 1980s and perhaps into the 1990s, despite institutional critique and the
various other artistic ironists and anti-disestablishmentarians, there was a trust in
the walls of cultural institutions. Epistemically unstable as they were, museums and
academies could be seen to uphold values and were invaluable storehouses of knowl-
edge in the face of growing amnesia. Yet by the turn of the new millennium, it became
more and more evident that it was not all a case of ignorance, arrogance, nor amnesia.
Instead, we witnessed a rapid and sizeable change in episteme, a cultural paradigm
shift. In comparison to established historical standards, in which marked cultural
shifts initially took centuries and later decades to instate, this one seemed to arrive
almost overnight. Comics, street art and graffiti, internet memes, music videos, and
other moving image forms unrelated to art—and perhaps most evidently fashion—
would become the loci of practices that could not be ignored in their capacity for both
their criticality and their growing and increasingly sophisticated audiences. If we are
to give lip service to the unfortunate but unfortunately (for the moment) unassailable
criterion of the “success” of an exhibition according to the number of visitors, the
annual exhibitions held by the Fashion Institute of the Metropolitan Museum Art,
New York, count among the top since Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty in 2011,
while the Met Gala, a fashion event, now garners attention to begin to rival the Acad-
emy Awards. Meanwhile, the popular effect of Hiro Murai’s music video for Childish
Gambino’s song This Is America (2020)—which addressed US gun violence, systemic
racism, and discrimination—dwarfs that of many a feel-good attempt to curate away
racism in the visual arts (which is in turn dwarfed by the impact of 17-year-old Dar-
nella Frazier’s vernacular video of the death of George Floyd in 2020). In short, it is
not difficult to recognize that far more substantial shifts—in terms of critical social
change, innovative style, and substance—are taking place far away from the often-
introverted so-called critical concerns of the artworld.
In response to these new cultural conditions, one of us has coined the term “Gaga
aesthetics,” 75 which David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro a little earlier dubbed
“wild art.”76 Using the cult pop figure Lady Gaga (aka Stefani Germanotta) as
an avatar as opposed to central node, Gaga aesthetics can first be grasped in their
most literal sense of “aesthetics gone gaga,” hence a state of affairs when tradition
is up-ended such that we are compelled to look elsewhere for the critical strategies
for which we once turned to art. Contemporary audiences, for example, are far
more likely to turn to Jordan Peel, Banksy, or Ava DuVernay for a social message
over Jeff Koons or Ai Weiwei. Here, a twenty-first-century pop phenomenon such
as Lady Gaga herself is worth scrutiny, whether in sequences from her videos or
her appropriated “improvement” on the canonic feminist work by Jana Sterbak,
the meat dress.77 The number of university subjects and academic journal articles
devoted to the cultural significance of Madonna for an earlier generation or Be-
yoncé today adds further weight to this argument. Another variation worth men-
tioning here is Jack Halberstam’s “low theory.”78 There are myriad other examples
of critical practices that tell us about ourselves and the world, interrogate complex
matter with nuance and intensity—all within the perilous capitalist-driven domain
of what Adorno (with Max Horkheimer) called the “culture industry.”79 Adorno
pitted the culture industry (his specialized term for popular and mass culture)
against “authentic” art. Today, authentic art can be found embedded within the
culture industry. This had once been the culture industry’s “alienated” foil. Yet
now we are presented with texts and meta-texts, values of different quanta and
depth, meanings of unquestioning complexity living symbiotically in the dross of
popular culture—which is no longer to be easily relegated or cast aside as it was
in the “old days.” Consequently, our “where is art?” question is only further com-
pounded by the fact that art-like activities exist in pockets and enclaves within
“non-art” domains. Moreover, these domains all too frequently do not care for the
fictionalized conceit of the art label.
One of many early correctives in this shift of emphasis is found in the great fashion
photographer Helmut Newton who, since the 1970s, exerted an inestimable influence
on subsequent figurative photography, and later on video art. On the occasions when
he was asked whether he considered himself an artist, he replied that he didn’t care
either way. This indifference poses challenges on a number of levels for art and those
seeking out “artness.” It may also be a tacit indictment of what art as such—fine art,
artworld sanctioned art—has managed to achieve in response to the challenges of the
last few decades, helped on by a purblind market and craven curators. Note that we
are not advocating the end of art in the manner of Hegel, or more recently, Danto
or Donald Kuspit (“post-art”). Instead, we are arguing that maybe the life and soul
of the party is not in the museum but rather somewhere you might pass on the way
there…
So, where is art?

Although many of the same questions that have long defined art’s relationship with
the world hold, the dimensional scope of some art historical problems is being hy-
perbolically distorted across an obese present of global multi-temporal transcultural
interactivity. This is a world that can at times seem wider than history is deep. Against
this backdrop, contemporary art is hypothetically materially unlimited, ambiguously
fictionalized, defined by a mutual insufficiency of material and contextual elements,
and features a limit function provided only by the institutional networks of the art-
world. Perhaps counterintuitively, the more that we understand a work of contem-
porary art as a spatially diffused distribution of elements across time and space, the
more that the indeterminacy of art itself assumes a conspicuous materiality. Works of
art presented in both direct and indirect relationship with the internet are less likely
to be regarded as fixed in space and time, and, correspondingly, more likely to be re-
garded as porous and open to continual transformation. Moreover, given that we can
now effectively scroll along or zoom in and out of some objects potentially infinitely,
questions of scale are increasingly unhinged from bodily registers. At best, however,
art is still capable of performing an important and critically reflective intermediary
role between what we experience as embodied beings and that which is increasingly
abstracted in code on massive servers situated elsewhere in time and space. Today,
although an artist or artistic collective presented online might be indistinguishable
from a corporation or brand, comparable yet ontologically distinct creative activity
is always already happening online and around us. Unlike the assertions of aesthetic
autonomy that prevailed in key twentieth-century art, much art in the twenty-first
century is perhaps more concerned with negotiating relationships and testing spatial
and temporal boundaries. Consequently, many core twentieth-century contestations
Where Is Art? 31
pertaining to art’s identity, value, and meaning have been recast as increasingly fuzz-
ily demarcated and ambiguously oscillating multiform problems pertaining to art’s
situatedness, relationality, and relevance.
Notes
1 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, expanded ed.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
2 The mutual insufficiency of contemporary art’s aesthetic and conceptual dimensions is ex-
plored at length in Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary
Art (London: Verso, 2013).
3 Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in
Illuminationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 136–69.
4 Allographic is a term introduced by Nelson Goodman to describe works such as pieces
of music or literary texts where there can be multiple copies, each of which is equally an
instance of the work.
5 Intermedia was a term used in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe
artistic activities taking place in between disciplines, media, and genres.
6 See Peter Osborne, “Transcategoriality: Postconceptual Art,” in Anywhere or Not at All,
88–104.
7 This unified constellation of distributed material elements is explored at length in Os-
borne, Anywhere or Not at All.
8 See Jeffrey Strayer, Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction (Leiden:
Brill, 2007).
9 In his 1938 book, The Principles of Art, Robin Collingwood essentially argued that works
of art are expressions of emotion and not material things. See Robin Collingwood, The
Principles of Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).
10 Douglass Huebler, “Artist Statement,” in the gallery publication to accompany the exhibi-
tion January 5–31, 1969 at Seth Siegelaub Gallery, New York, 1969.
11 See Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object
from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973). First published as “The Dematerialization
of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–6.
12 Craig Dworkin, No Medium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 138.
13 Marcel Broodthaers, “Interview with Marcel Broodthaers with Jean-Michel Vlaeminck,
1965,” interview by Jean-Michel Vlaeminck in Marcel Broodthaers: Collected Writings,
ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafia, 2012), 151–2.
14 Susan Hillier, “Artists at Work: Susan Hiller,” interview by Sarah Lowndes, Af-
terall, February 2, 2011, accessed May 3, 2021, https://www.afterall.org/article/
artists-at-work-susan-hiller.
15 Elizabeth Schellekens, “The Aesthetic Value of Ideas,” in Philosophy & Conceptual Art,
ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 82.
16 See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
17 See Joseph Grigely, Exhibition Prosthetics (Boston, MA: Bedford Press; London: Stern-
berg Press, 2010).
18 Markus Gabriel, The Power of Art (Oxford: Polity Press, 2020), 34.
19 Peter Osborne, “Contemporary Art Is Post-Conceptual Art,” (public lecture, Fondazione
Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota, Como, July 9, 2010).
20 See Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writ-
ings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 152–3.
21 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 110.
22 Osborne, 113; emphasis in the original.
23 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44.
24 Krauss, 34.
25 Krauss, 38.
26 Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (1997): 91.
27 See Adam Geczy and Vicky Karaminas, “Fashion is a (Dis)Embodied Practice, or the Per-
sistence of Perfume,” conclusion to Fashion Installation: Body, Space, and Performance
(London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 103–5.
29 Osborne, 100.
30 Place (when used as a verb) can also denote the action of setting something in a particular
location. In humanistic geography, place refers to how people think about a specific space.
A place is therefore a space attributed specific meaning(s). A place might be anything from
a childhood playground to a nation state. In this context, we might also consider the dif-
ference between a/the “world” and the “earth.” By extension, a “placeholder” is an object,
a gesture, or a marker of some kind temporarily placed as a stand-in for a location or idea.
This can include anything from a personal item left to mind a space to a flag placed on a
celestial object in the name of a terrestrial nation state.
31 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1977), 6.
32 Hal Foster, “Close-Up: A Rrose in Berlin,” Artforum International 49, no. 8
(April 2011), accessed May 3, 2021, https://www.artforum.com/print/201104/
close-up-a-rrose-in-berlin-27825.
33 John Armleder “To Be Determined,” interview by Fabrice Stroun, Artforum International
49, no. 8 (April 2011): 174.
34 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York:
Zone Books, 1994), 10.
35 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Presses du reel, 2002), 113.
36 Bruno David et al., “Nawarla Gabarnmang, a 45,180±910 cal BP Site in Jawoyn Country,
Southwest Arnhem Land Plateau,” Journal of Australian Archaeology 73, no. 1 (2011): 73–7.
37 Fallen painted rock at this site has ash residue radiocarbon dated at 27631±717 years cal
BP, indicating that the ceiling must have been painted more than 28,000 years ago.
38 Robert Gunn, Bruno David, Jean-Jacques Delannoy and Margaret Katherine, “The Past
500 Years of Rock Art at Nawarla Gabarnmang, Central-Western Arnhem Land,” in The
Archaeology of Rock Art in Western Arnhem Land, Australia, ed. Bruno David, Paul
S.C. Taçon, Jean-Jacques Delannoy, Jean-Michel Geneste (Canberra: Australian National
University Press, 2017), 303–28.
39 Louise Lawler, Birdcalls, 1972/1981/2008, audio recording, text, 7:01 minutes, LeWitt
Collection, Chester, Connecticut, located at Dia Beacon, New York, accessed May 3,
2021, https://www.diaart.org/collection/collection/lawler-louise-birdcalls-19721981-l-
2005-100.
40 Alex Bacon, “Surface, Image, Reception: Painting in a Digital Age,” Rhizome,
May 24, 2016, accessed May 3, 2021, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/may/24/
surface-image-reception-painting-in-a-digital-age.
41 Liam Gillick, “Contemporary Art Does Not Account for That Which Is Taking Place,”
e-flux journal 21 (December 2010), accessed January 17, 2021, https://www.e-flux.com/
journal/21/67664/contemporary-art-does-not-account-for-that-which-is-taking-place/.
42 Andrew McNamara, “What Is Contemporary Art? A Review of Two Books by Terry
Smith,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 12 (2012): 255.
43 As Arthur C. Danto has argued since the 1960s, artistic difference is not asserted literally
but rather philosophically. For Danto, a good analogy for distinguishing literal indiscerni-
bility is found in the moment in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962) that references
Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)—a poem where the last
two lines are repeated: “And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.” The
first line literally and autobiographically states “I have a long way to go before I can sleep.”
The second, literally identical, line becomes metaphysical by implying “I have much to do
before I die.” Arthur C. Danto, “Is It Art?,” interview by Alan Saunders, The Philosopher’s
Zone, ABC Radio National, 1:35 p.m., March 4, 2006, accessed July 26, 2021, http://
www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/is-it-art/3301278.
44 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 581.
45 Danto, “The Artworld.”
46 Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 8.
Where Is Art? 33
47 Lee, 8.
48 See Claire Bishop, “Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?,” in Living as Form:
Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011, ed. Nato Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2012), 35–45.
49 Marcel Duchamp described the “infra-thin” as the slightest margin of dissimilitude be-
tween seemingly identical entities. He analogized such interstices of barely discernible
difference as reminiscent of the warmth of a recently vacated chair. Duchamp’s term was
closely linked to what he also called deferral or delay. Indeed, the infra-thin, Duchamp
declared, cannot be defined, “one can only give examples of it.” See Marjorie Perloff,
“‘But Isn’t the Same at Least the Same?’: Translatability in Wittgenstein, Duchamp, and
Jacques Roubaud,” Jacket 14 (July 2001), accessed September 5, 2021, http://jacketmaga-
zine.com/14/perl-witt.html.
50 Max Neuhaus, Times Square, 1977/2002, digital sound signal, Dia Art Foundation, New
York, located on Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets, New York. This artwork was
originally installed at Times Square from 1977 to 1992, and then permanently reinstalled
in 2002.
51 Based in Zurich, Switzerland, Random Institute has produced intriguingly ambiguous ex-
hibitions, events, and research initiatives around the world featuring work by artists such
as Richard Long, James Lee Byars, Cory Arcangel, Zilvinas Kempinas, Guido van der
Werve, Bethan Huws, Carey Young, Julian Charrière, Federico Herrero, Allora & Calza-
dilla, Luis Camnitzer, Alfredo Jaar, Regina José Galindo, Aníbal López, Teresa Margolles,
Rivane Neuenschwander, and Liliana Porter. Founded by Sandino Scheidegger and Luca
Müller in 2007, Random Institute’s focus is new exhibition formats and exhibition-making
as practice.
52 All the Lights We Cannot See (2016) was conceived by Random Institute and curated by
Anna Hugo and Sandino Scheidegger. The exhibition was held on April 9–12, 2016, on the
23rd floor of the Yanggakdo International Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. A manipu-
lated and reproduced issue of the state-owned Pyongyang Times served as the exhibition
catalogue. See “All the Lights We Cannot See,” Random Institute, accessed August 17,
2018, http://randominstitute.org/event/north-korea-show.
53 Random Institute, “All the Lights We Cannot See.”
54 David Davies, Art as Performance (Oxford: Blackwells, 2004), 59.
55 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 124; emphasis in the original.
56 Osborne, 129; emphasis in the original.
57 Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet,” Jstchillin, 2010, accessed May 3, 2021,
http://jstchillin.org/artie/vierkant.html.
58 Soshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the
New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019).
59 Maria Olson, “Interview with Marisa Olson,” interview by Régine Debatty, We Make
Money Not Art, March 28, 2008, accessed August 17, 2020, http://www.we-make-money-
not-art.com/archives/2008/03/how-does-one-become-marisa.php.
60 Gene McHugh, Post Internet, accessed August 17, 2020, http://122909a.com (site discon-
tinued). An archive of this blog, which was funded by a Warhol Foundation arts writers
grant, was preserved by Rhizome at the New Museum, New York, accessed July 12, 2021,
https://122909a.com.rhizome.org/.
61 Artie Vierkant, “Image Object Post-Internet.”
62 In describing a “post-medium condition,” Krauss recognized that the specificity of a me-
dium is not synonymous with its material form. Eschewing Greenberg’s modernist ideal of
medium specificity, Krauss re-conceptualizes the medium as an open field and discourse.
For Krauss, the medium as a supporting structure reconciles material and technical speci-
ficity with conceptual diversity. Ultimately, however, for Krauss, this relational differentia-
tion amplifies, rather than reduces, the conceptual importance of media. Moreover, Krauss
sees the medium as an aggregative “network” or “complex” of media. Consequently, the
idea of painting can be understood as a structural place, a performative action, a remedi-
ated form or even as an anti-formation containing no independent essence other than being
“not painting.” See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the
Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
Picking up on Krauss’s description, Craig Dworkin argues that we encounter an ines-
capability of media—within overlapping networks—that runs counter to the immateriality
claimed within some branches of conceptualism. See Craig Dworkin, No Medium (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
64 Artie Vierkant, “Image Object Post-Internet.”
65 See Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2000).
66 The Gallery of Lost Art (2012–13) was curated by Tate’s head of collection research Jen-
nifer Mundy. This online exhibition was developed together with Tate’s creative media
director Jane Burton and Glasgow-based digital design agency ISO which is led by Damien
Smith and Mark Breslin.
67 Jennifer Mundy and Jane Burton, “Online Exhibitions,” (paper presented at the Annual
Conference of Museums and the Web, Portland, Oregon, April 17–20, 2013), accessed
May 3, 2021, http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/online-exhibitions/.
68 Mundy and Burton, “Online Exhibitions.”
69 Alex Bacon, “Surface, Image, Reception: Painting in a Digital Age,” Rhizome,
May 24, 2016, accessed July 12, 2021, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/may/24/
surface-image-reception-painting-in-a-digital-age.
70 Bacon, “Surface, Image, Reception.”
71 Peter Osborne, “On the Historical Existence of Objects: Archive as Afterlife and Life
of Art,” (conference presentation, Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History
of Exhibitions, ECAL/University of Art and Design, Lausanne, Switzerland, October
21, 2016), audio recording, 33:48, accessed July 12, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=2XmSSQcII58.
72 Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide,” Artforum International 51, no. 1 (2012): 434–41.
74 Osborne, 185.
75 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, Gaga Aesthetics: Art, Fashion, Popular Culture, and
the Up-Ending of Tradition (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
76 David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins, the Margins of Aesthetics:
Wild Art Explained (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2019).
77 Jana Sterbak, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987, raw flank steaks sewn
together, edition of two, plus one artist’s copy, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre
Pompidou, Paris. This artwork was first shown at Galerie Rene Blouin, Montréal, and
later shown the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
78 “Any book that begins with a quote from SpongeBob SquarePants and is motored by
wisdom gleaned from Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run, and Finding Nemo, among other
animated guides to life, runs the risk of not being taken seriously. Yet this is my goal.
Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and
irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the
tried-and-true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few
detours. Indeed, terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia as well
as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness.” Jack (Judith) Halberstam, The Queer Art
of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 6.
79 The term “culture industry” was coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their
1947 book Dialectic of Enlightenment (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press,
2002).
3 Performance, Art, and the
Relational Self
Amelia Jones
Euro-American modernist discourse in the mid-twentieth century reinforced a con-

ception of artworks as singular objects to be apprehended and judged with “disinter-
est” in “neutral” spaces. However, even as it reached its height after World War II,
this paradigm started to change. As epitomized by the multidisciplinary performance
events held by John Cage and others at Black Mountain College in North Carolina on
the east coast of the US in the early 1950s, artists across Europe and the US began to
move dramatically away from the concept of art as object to enact art more directly
as a process of exchange between subjects and objects in a range of spaces, engaging
both art audiences and unsuspecting general publics. This shift emphasized art as a
form of relational exchange determining its meaning and value. Art could no longer
be seen as just the final, static, finished product enshrined in a gallery or museum. At
the same time, this new concept of art also foregrounded the relationality of the self,
connecting to the political rights movements, to the rise of social science models of the
individual subject as constructed in interpersonal exchanges in social situations, and
to poststructuralist philosophy and postmodern theory in the 1960s.
This essay will foreground four specific art practices from the 1960s through the
1980s to establish the parameters of the concept of art as a relational encounter. I
explore such works as exemplary of the shift from the question of “what is art?” to
that of “where is art?,” a transformation that I will argue to be inextricably connected
to the social context and to political and intellectual debates and evolving ideas at the
time, especially in the US.
***
1964–66 Cut Piece: Japanese artist Yoko Ono (born 1933 and raised in Japan), in
what is now known as one of the most famous performance art pieces of the past half
a century, sat on stages in Kyoto (1964), Tokyo (1964), New York (1965), and London
(1966), and invited members of the audience to come forward and cut off her clothes
as she sat passively.1 This simple piece shattered two longstanding conventions in
both theater and the visual arts: The theatrical separation of proscenium or artwork
and audience, as well as the necessary occlusion of the direct appearance of the artist
in the field of her or his visual artwork. Ono performed art as relational, the artist’s
body and the site it occupied as central to the artwork’s formation and meaning
(which took place in a specific social space, over time).
***
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-3
36 Amelia Jones
1968 Relational Object (Goggles) and 1967 The I and the You: Brazilian artist Lygia
Clark (1920–88) produced these radical works during a period of extreme repression
in Brazil (which suffered under a dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s). 2 These pieces
called for the explicit enactment of relations between two people as the open-ended
and socially situated work of art. With Relational Object (Goggles), two people en-
gage one another through pairs of swimming goggles fitted with hinged mirrors and
connected, forcing their heads and bodies into a direct relation. With The I and the
You, Clark literalizes relationality of self and other by making doubled rubber outfits
to be donned by two visitors to a gallery or public space. The two halves of the suit,
which include masks covering the face area, are joined by an umbilical cord of rubber.
Once put on, although the participants cannot see each other, they are, in Clark’s
formulation, psycho-sexually connected.
***
1968 Tap and Touch Cinema: Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940), a well-
known street performance in collaboration with Peter Weibel. The performance
existed and continues to exist in and through the process of relational encountering
as it takes place in public spaces and, simultaneously, in and through photographic
media (specifically photographic documentation and the parodied structures of
cinema). The participants are instructed by Weibel’s barking commands through
the megaphone, as he exhorts witnesses to reach through a box EXPORT wears on
her torso to touch her breasts. The performative action by a person self-identifying
as an artist is the “art” of the work, which otherwise would simply not exist as
art. The art is ratified both by the action and by the structures of photography and
cinema.
***
1986 My Calling Card: African American artist and philosopher Adrian Piper (b.
1948) produces two cards, one on white paper (#2) and one on beige (#1). The
former warns aggressive men: “Dear friend, I am not here to pick anyone up or to
be picked up. I am here alone because I want to be here. Alone.” The latter, more
famous, version she would purportedly hand out to people at social events who
made racist comments, people who seemed not to realize that the artist at the time
identified as Black:
Dear Friend, I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/
laughed at/agreed with that racist remark…. I regret any discomfort my pres-
ence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is
causing me.3
With the “calling cards” Piper actualizes the relationality through which Blacks and
women are relegated to object status by white dominant US culture and/or by white
men: The very “othering” process that Hegelian-based identity theory pinpointed
as constituting power imbalances in white Western patriarchy. By literalizing this
relationality, and assertively reversing it (enunciating the sexist or racist person to be
the object of her scolding), Piper forces the white person who made racist comments
Performance, Art, and the Relational Self 37
or the man who aggressed without invitation to become the objectified others to her
performative articulation of selfhood as a self-identified Black woman.
***
As these examples suggest, after 1960, a range of artists in Europe and North Amer-
ica enacted art as a relational exchange (notably Asian artists such as Ono, Shigeko
Kubota, and Nam June Paik were well connected to the Euro-American art scene).
Lucy Lippard had described this transformation in terms of a shift toward “dema-
terialization,” and Victor Burgin and many others as a move into “participatory”
or “situational” aesthetics.4 By the 1990s, I and other art historians and curators
variously pointed to the increasingly common use of the body in live situations—or
performance—as a mode of artistic making, and of insisting on this relational aspect
of art.5 Connected to this recognition, the term performative came to be mobilized
in queer theory and performance discourse, and eventually in art criticism and art
theory. The terms relational and performative came to function as a shorthand for
the complex set of shifts that, in the art context, meant a complete transformation
of the concept and structure of art (or, otherwise put, of the what, where, and when
of art).6 Location, the “where,” became relevant because of the shift to process and
toward using the body in relational situations.
There is a deep social and political context to the turn to the relational (to the
where—and perhaps the how—of art). Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics”
of the 1990s might seem to be an adequate, if late, recognition of the phenomenon
I trace here. But in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud specifically de-
nied the social and political contexts for the shift toward the relational and defines it
as a phenomenon new to the 1990s (clearly incorrect, per my examples above). The
erasure of social context is particularly disturbing. Bourriaud’s theory does not just
sidestep performance and the rights movements that often motivated its articulations
in the 1960s and 1970s, it explicitly denies any political motivations informing prac-
tices and theories connected to the relational:
It is in this sense that we can talk of a community effect in contemporary art. It

does not involve those corporate phenomena which too often act as a disguise for
the most die-hard forms of conservatism (in this day and age, feminism, anti-racism
and environmentalism all operate too frequently as lobbies playing the power game
by enabling it never to have to call itself into question in a structural way).7
Needless to say, my argument is precisely the opposite. The turn to relationality and
performativity as modes of activating the art situation—emphasizing the where of
art—is precisely parallel to, in some cases motivated by and in others encouraging of,
the rise of rights movements as well as of social science and philosophical models for
examining self-other relations as charged and significant in determining the meaning
and value of subjects but also, in the case of art, objects in social situations.
Relationality and social science

Relationality and related social science terms such as interaction, interactivity, and
interpersonal perception have come to be understood as crucial structures by which
38 Amelia Jones
subjects engage with one another, coarticulate each other’s expressions, responses,
and even personalities, and through which one subject makes or interprets meaning
in relation to another through texts or artworks. Relationality became a ubiquitous
concept during this period in Euro-American thought, signaling new ways of think-
ing about meaning and human social life—with even individuals themselves viewed
as interdependent rather than singular and fully coherent within themselves. This new
notion of the subject as relational also orients toward an understanding of gender/sex
as constructions, and thus toward the queer, and of race and other identifications as
also fabricated. The idea of gender/sex as produced in action was fully adopted by
queer theory as paradigmatic of the dynamic of queer performativity by the 1990s.
In this way, we see that since the 1950s there has been a deep interconnection among
artistic practices, rights movements, social science models, and (as I note below)
poststructuralist philosophical critiques of modern subjectivity as well as theories of
postmodernism.
By the 1980s, with the recognition of Richard Schechner, one of the founders of
performance studies, we see that the term relational is ensconced in the field as related
to performance and the performative. For Schechner, “the world that was securely
positional is becoming dizzyingly relational…. In-between is becoming the norm.”8
In her 1997 book Excitable Speech, queer feminist theorist Judith Butler even more
directly links performativity with relationality (or “transitivity”). In discussing the
origins of the term within linguistic philosophy she notes:
The title of J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words poses the question of
performativity as what it means to say that “things might be done with words.”
The problem of performativity is thus immediately bound up with a question of
transitivity.9
Massive social changes occurring in the 1950s and 1960s in the increasingly global
so-called Western world (and elsewhere, but European-based cultures and especially
the US are my focus here), including most notably the explosion of rights and post-
colonial movements based on the oppression of particular subjects or communities
due to their disadvantaged relationship to the power structures of patriarchy, impe-
rialism, colonialism, and capitalism. Theories of performativity and relationality are
linked to questions of identification as well as to structures of meaning and power,
and, I argue, can best be understood in relation to this rise of consciousness about
identity and selfhood as articulated in relation to otherness from the 1950s forward.
This understanding includes an increasing awareness of heteronormative structures
of gender and sexuality, but also of racial/ethnic identifications, and generally in-
tersectional and relational concepts of self and other. As the Cold War and colonial
conflicts in India, Vietnam, Algeria, and elsewhere moved into the 1960s, and travel
and communication among previously isolated parts of the world increased in volume
and speed, a general consciousness of self and otherness as taking place in encounters
in social spaces arose.10 In turn, this understanding of the self as relational in the so-
cial sciences and popular culture paralleled the development of poststructuralist and
postmodern critiques of modernist notions of the unified subject. By the 1970s, the
postmodern, decentered self was theorized as a challenge to the self/other binaries of
earlier Enlightenment philosophies (such as, most notably, Hegel’s c. 1800 model of
the “master/slave” dialectic).
As Jon McKenzie notes, these patterns corresponded as well to the rise of digital
technologies and of “techno-performance,” or performance-mobilizing digital and
networked technologies. Techno-performance, then, also paralleled this noted de-
velopment of poststructuralist philosophy’s concept of the postmodern subject (both
decentered and relational). McKenzie cites Jean-François Lyotard’s poststructuralist
observations in the highly influential 1979 book The Postmodern Condition about
the decentering of master narratives, including that of the sovereign subject of Euro-
pean modernity. McKenzie argues, following Lyotard but applying a performance
framework, that “performativity is the postmodern condition…. [I]t has come to
govern the entire realm of social bonds.”11 McKenzie’s focus is on “social bonds”
in 1950s and 1960s American culture—which I am bringing together under the ru-
bric of “relationality.” Importantly, a relational, postmodern self is imbricated in the
other, not diametrically opposed in a binary logic of difference.
Poststructuralist models of critiquing modernist concepts of coherent and unified
selfhood shift understandings in numerous ways, not the least by interrogating how, in
Enlightenment-based Euro-American modernity, the subject came into being through
oppositional moves that relentlessly defined qualities of normative gender/sexuality,
race/ethnicity, nationality, class, etc., in relation to the debased parallel qualities of an
“other.” As I discuss at greater length in my 2012 book Seeing Differently, this He-
gelian recognition of how the modern Euro-American subject had been constructed
through opposition per a permutation of the philosopher’s model of the master/slave
dialectic from his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit not only played a key role in general
concepts active in the post–World War II period, but was central to the rise of iden-
tity politics as we know them today.12 That Hegel’s theory and, later, Karl Marx’s
theory as well as Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological model of intersubjectivity are
deeply invested in exploring human existence as oppositional is clear in their mutual
understanding of human embodiment and labor as establishing a relation with the
natural world and its materialities. While this oppositional model is also relational, it
poses the opposites as dialectically related (maintaining their separation and radical
difference) rather than imbricated, as post–World War II experimental art practices
variously tend to imply.
Per the work of authors such as Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, the forma-
tion of identity as conceptualized in 1950s and 1960s European discourse often took
place via a recognition of the binary positing the other as subordinate and disempow-
ered. Basic to the struggles against oppression in this period were the strategies of
acknowledging the hierarchical othering of the oppressed group of people—women,
per Beauvoir’s example—and reversing the power structure to give them agency. This
could take, and has taken, two forms in identity politics: Either through a reversal
whereby “essentialist” ideas of the coalitionally defined self as inherently “female” or
“Black” were aimed at the reclaiming of an “authentic” and positive voice or image
and sense of cultural pride, or via notions such as Beauvoir’s famous claim that “one
is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” as an anti- or “de-essentialized” concept
of the self as “performed” in relation to social norms, other people, and larger struc-
tures of power—sometimes still implicitly binary in function.13 Both of these vari-
ants thus to some degree rely on concepts of the self as defined relationally—but still
oppositionally—via others. Coalitional identity politics most often aim to wrest the
oppressed person (or group) away from a negative definition as assigned by a domi-
nant power. The coalitionally identified subject thus takes on “selfhood” rather than
40 Amelia Jones
acceding to “objecthood,” but the opposition is still more or less in place, at least until
queer theory of the 1990s attempted to blur boundaries and work in less oppositional
(but still largely relational) ways. To this end, it is not surprising that one of the most
provocative debates in queer theory pitted advocates of anti-relational queer theory
(most visibly white gay men, including Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman) against sup-
porters of anti-anti-relational queer theory (promoted compellingly by José Muñoz
with a feminist queer-of-color agenda).14
As suggested, the concept of the subject or self as de-essentialized and decentered, a
key trope of postmodernism and poststructuralism (and ultimately of most queer the-
ory), aligns with postwar North American social science models of selfhood. In this
discourse, sociologists and social psychologists, as well as some anthropologists, ar-
ticulated theories of the self using a range of terms such as situational, relational, in-
teractive, or interpersonal—and elaborated this self as particular in its identifications
(i.e., the relational imbrication of subjects in one another is connected to their socially
determined as well as psychic identifications). Most important in this regard was the
work of sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1956 book The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life would become hugely influential within the fields of sociology and an-
thropology. Artists and theorists of performance, and even the general public, became
aware of Goffman’s theories as they became popularized (Goffman was Canadian
but his career was largely in the US).15 Lesser known and less often attended to is
the way in which Goffman saw identity and social performance as coextensive—the
tendency to focus on psychoanalytically informed models of gendered and raced self-
hood, dominant in French as well as Anglophone centers since at least mid-century,
meant that the more social science-oriented concepts such as Goffman’s have often
been marginalized in academic feminism in particular. But Goffman was obsessively
interested in gender and race identity. In a 1976 essay entitled “Gender Display,”
Goffman, sounding a bit like the queer feminist theorists who followed him a decade
later, argued that gender is enacted in social situations in relational ways, involving
“a dialogic character of a statement-reply kind, with an expression on the part of one
individual calling forth an expression on the part of another.”16
Most strikingly, for Goffman, gender is not “essential,” nor does it reside within
individuals. For Goffman, “[o]ne might just as well say there is no gender identity.
There is only a schedule for the portrayal of gender.” Moreover, he stressed, although
signs of gender might seem to confirm a preexisting reality, “[n]othing dictates that
should we dig and poke behind these images we can expect to find anything there—
except, of course, the inducement to entertain this expectation.”17 This is a huge shift
from the more crude identity politics model of radical difference in that it destabi-
lizes the self/other dynamic—each person takes their identity in relation to others in
continually shifting social interactions and situations. The where of the self is just as
determinate as the who and how of intersubjective identity formation.
Goffman’s contribution to understandings of the social self as relational, and iden-
tity as constituted in process through ongoing social relations, parallels the develop-
ment of theories and practices of relational or situational art. It is also foundational
to what would become hugely influential feminist theories of gender performance
or performativity: Notably in this regard, Judith Butler cites Goffman in her orig-
inal 1988 article on “performative acts and gender constitution,” a formative text
in establishing dominant models of gender performativity in the 1990s through a
queer feminist and also poststructuralist model. But, also notably, Butler discards this
discussion in the better-known, reworked version of this material in Gender Trouble,
where she excises any reference to Goffman.18 Goffman’s work should not be dis-
missed, however. Its ubiquity in social science writings about selfhood in the 1960s
and following points to a general interest among sociologists, social psychologists,
and anthropologists in exploring the meanings of sex/gender and other identifications
as constituted in relational situations—an interest that the artistic works described
at the beginning of this essay make clear was shared in the visual arts.19 Dismissing
Goffman by focusing on psychoanalytic, Hegelian models of self/other formation, as
Butler does, tends to encourage an erasure of specific social situations (the where) of
subjectification.
Just as poststructuralism parallels work by artists from the 1950s onward that
decenters the individual by opening art to relationality, and even as the rights move-
ments sensitized artists to the power of activating their bodies relationally in so-
cial spaces, the social sciences have thus clearly been central to understandings of
how these relational performances constituted identity and selfhood. Goffman’s
work clearly parallels the innovations among artists working to establish perfor-
mance practices in the art context from the late 1950s onward—for example, Allan
Kaprow. The parallels between Kaprow’s 1958 rescripting of action painter Jackson
Pollock as engaging later viewers by turning painting into performance (such that
“the artist, the spectator, and the outer world are much too interchangeably involved
here”) and Goffman’s 1959 notion of the self as performed in social spaces in rela-
tional ways are striking. 20 For both Kaprow and Goffman, the self is activated as
situational and relational. In The Presentation of Self, Goffman thus argues toward
the end of the book:
[The] self … is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The
self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific
location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dra-
matic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented…. [The body] merely
provide[s] the peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung
for a time…. [T]he firm self accorded each performed character will appear to
emanate intrinsically from its performer. 21
As Goffman makes clear, the self is but a “product of a scene” not its “cause”: This
is a radical shifting of agency from individual will to a relational situation. Goff-
man’s research insistently traces the “interactive” nature of subjectivity and society,
and of individuals in social situations, as mutually constituted or of “collaborative
manufacture.”
In his 1963 book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Goffman
also points to examples that are relational as well as highly charged in relation to
identity politics. Here, he defines stigma, or the assignment of negative attributes to
individuals and then their marginalization or rejection on that basis, as specifically
contextual and relational: The term stigma refers to
an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of

relationships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one
type of possessor can confirm the usualness of another and is therefore neither
creditable nor discreditable as a thing in itself. 22
42 Amelia Jones
Goffman makes a move that we can, in relation to poststructuralism and queer theory,
recognize as de-essentializing. Qualities of racial or sex inferiority are constructed
through relations, not inherent. And of course, these relations open the door to biases
held by others we encounter—hence discrimination and bigotry, which involve the
projection of stigma outward.
Goffman also points to other examples in describing the workings of stigma in a
discussion of “social deviants,” with the list running from “prostitutes, drug addicts,
delinquents, criminals, jazz musicians,” to “bohemians, gypsies, carnival workers, …
homosexuals, and the urban unrepentant poor,” as the “folk who are considered to be
engaged in some kind of collective denial of the social order.”23 Even here, Goffman is
crystal clear in his language: Homosexuals, like others considered social deviants, are
only imagined to “represent failures in the motivational scenes of society.”24 They are
not inherently deviant. The attaching of stigma to people is quintessentially relational
and contingent.
Goffman is addressing stigma as perceived or constructed during a period in which,
thanks to the Civil Rights and other nascent rights movements, sexual identifications
were starting to broaden and race relations were being seriously reconfigured, with
the rhetorical and actual violence toward Blacks and Chicano/a people (among others)
openly challenged in protest movements. Goffman clearly understood stigma in terms of
social hierarchies that are predicated on sexual, ethnic, or gender performances of non-
essential subjects who are constructed in relation to others in particular social situations.
Participation art and the bodies of the rights movements

As I have suggested, this social science work parallels developments in political and
artistic spheres in the US: From the early 1960s through the 1980s, a number of rela-
tional works redefined what art could be by mobilizing performance to insist on art as
a process taking place in the moment of interpretation, which was foregrounded as an
exchange with viewers (or more accurately participants) of the work. This particular
reconceptualization of art did so along structural lines—through the literal staging
of the artist’s body as the work, to be engaged by others in art situations, and was
complementary to the opening of art to process, time, and embodiment (all elements
foundational to the shift from the question “what is art?” to that of “where is art?”).
It led to a burgeoning discourse on “participation” in art or participatory art or even,
recently, in the polemical work of Gustaf Almenberg, to defining an “age of participa-
tion” in art. 25 Rarely in accounts of these shifts in the concept of art have the rights
movements or these social sciences insights been seen as relevant.
The development of relational and participatory approaches has however always
been closely connected to the ways in which rights movements have articulated their
claims. Specifically in the visual arts, practices have been linked in complex ways to
the various Black and Latinx rights movements, and to gay/lesbian, feminist, and
queer urban creative cultures and their related rights movements. More recently Chi-
canx and Black Studies in the US have also claimed the radical qualities of partici-
patory approaches for the cultures they examine. In both cases, the durationality of
the performative is explicitly linked to its quality of foregrounding the exchange with
future viewers or interlocutors through relationality, in a process that itself is seen as
liberatory (because it highlights rather than occludes the contingency of stigma and
negative identities projected onto marginalized others).
As well, relational and performative methods have been described as inherent to
the African American cultural traditions in particular. In her 2017 book South of
Pico, for example, art historian Kellie Jones draws on performance studies and Black
studies (particularly the work of Daphne Brooks) to argue that “[w]ithin an African
American context, concepts of performance have always been tied up with the means
of survival” and that “[l]iberation from enslavement often involved theatrical dissim-
ulation, including cross-dressing and ‘passing’ (for white).”26 The works of the Black
Arts movement, Jones concludes, were performative above all and performative strat-
egies opened works directly for audience participation. And I would argue that this
move to relational engagement of audiences had everything to do with the necessity
of denaturalizing the putatively “neutral” systems of determining the value of art so
as to insist upon the power of the creative Black body, just as feminists’ uses of their
bodies in 1960s and 1970s works (such as those of Ono and EXPORT noted above)
were aimed explicitly at asserting the body as both a making subject and potentially
an object of the gaze. 27 Piper’s calling cards brilliantly map the destabilizing potential
from an anti-racist and feminist point of view of this exposure of the relational nature
of identity formation.
It is no accident, then, that this kind of radical relational work has largely been
activated and produced most often in the history of contemporary art by women, Peo-
ple of Color, and queers. Ono, Clark, EXPORT, and Piper all mobilize the relational
self to interrogate the modernist belief in a (white male) sovereign subject, full within
himself—and, in their work, this is a fundamentally feminist and anti-racist gesture (if
not in these cases yet explicitly LGBTQ+ identified). These staged situations put forth
artists’ bodies in ways that open art to active relational engagements—wherein, as we
have seen in Allan Kaprow’s 1958 text noted above, “[t]he artist, the spectator, and
the outer world are much too interchangeably involved.”28 To involve agents and con-
texts “interchangeably”—forces that had been kept strategically completely separate,
so as to shore up the modernist notion of the coherent, fixed authorial origin—was
to insist that identity, meaning, and value are contingent, relational, and situational.
This gesture in itself has powerful political implications for marginalized people.
The foregrounding of the body in artworks that address political and conceptual
issues vis-à-vis structures of meaning and power thus often takes place in this period
through staging art as a relational encountering. As accessed through a process of
encountering, art (like the meaning and experience and identity of the body itself)
is shown to be profoundly contingent—inextricably (relationally) tied to social life,
political movements, and intellectual debates, as much as to individual bodies coming
into contact in spaces marked as aesthetically and politically charged. The relational
body activated in these performative modes of art was developed in tandem with the
parallel energies of the anticolonial and rights movements exploding across Europe
and North America from the 1950s onward—as is explicitly clear in Yoko Ono’s
work, such as Cut Piece. Significantly, it is also apparent in the explicit merging of art
and activism in a well-known performative sit-in with John Lennon in Bed In (1969),
in which they took a strong position against the Vietnam War. Bed In, in fact, was an
act of encountering specifically staged for the media, in an early example of social ac-
tivism through a live art action disseminated via networks of information exchange.
The framework of relational encountering, and linked terms such as participa-
tion, situation, and interactivity, suggests an inextricable immersion of the artist’s
action-driven and sometimes explicitly activist body in social space, mobilizing
44 Amelia Jones
interactions that defined personal, group, and larger social identities and modes of
empowerment. To this end, it is not surprising that social science arguments about
the relational self are explicitly paralleled in art discourse from Kaprow’s 1958 essay
into the 1960s and beyond. We have seen that Brazilian conceptual body artist Lygia
Clark developed works themselves called “relational” in the 1960s and that theorists
in performance studies also explicitly asserted relationality as key to performance. In
1970, for example, Richard Schechner beautifully summed up this aspect of perfor-
mance: “All performances are vis-à-vis someone…. performance is a set of exchanges
between the performer and the action. And of course among all the performers and
between them and the audience.”29 Schechner sums up the shift toward acknowledg-
ing the where of art with which I began this paper. He stresses that the significance of
the locationality of art rests as much on the relation between and among subjects in
that space as it does with the site itself.
The idea of art as taking place in (or constituting) a situation (inherently sited and
relational), closely linked to the interaction and context theories of social scientists,
was also elaborated in the 1960s by a younger generation of artists and art critics
seeking to move out of the stalemate of modernist formalism gripping art discourse
and practice in New York and other Euro-American artworld centers. As early as
1962 American artist Robert Morris had already determined that “art is primarily a
situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to… one’s awareness as art.”30
Situation was also elaborated in terms of participation, per Ono’s framing of Cut
Piece. And, in a 1963 Art in America article entitled “The Audience Is His Medium!,”
Dorothy Gees Seckler presciently described what at the time was called “neo-Dada”
art, including public performances of artmaking by French-American artist Niki de
Saint Phalle, as “audience participation art [in which] the artist is for the audience
and not against it,” as per the original confrontational Dada impulse.31 Seckler elab-
orates by giving credit to predecessors of neo-Dada (the French arm of which was also
called Nouveau Réalisme or “New Realism”) such as Duchamp, who, she argues,
“anticipated nearly all the devices used by ‘participation’ artists” in his objects and
exhibition designs. She also credits Fluxus artist George Brecht, who staged his Play
Incident at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1960, engaging visitors in a
game with ping-pong balls.32 Saint Phalle’s early 1960s “shooting” performances, in
which the artist encouraged visitors to take up a gun and shoot canvases or sculptures
she had made in which she had embedded bags or cans of paint, were paradigmatic
examples of this move toward engaging spectators and collaborators in relational
encounters that activated them and the works through action.
In 1966, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, in his article “Violence in Art,” addressed St.
Phalle’s work and expanded on the idea that artists were opening art to process and,
specifically, to the status of event. With this work:
Reality was no longer seen as a static “thing” that one attempted to understand, but
was seen to be an extended network of relationships, a juxtaposition of events. It
was something that needed to be experienced. For the artist, the painting or sculp-
ture had also to become something that was experienced, become, in fact, an event.
Aesthetic experience is now a matter of participation, a three-way dialogic situation
actually taking place in space and time between [sic] the artist, the spectator, and
the object. It is something which happens, in which one is actively and psychologi-
cally involved rather than something you look at and take on subjectively.33
Coutts-Smith stresses the experiential and reciprocal aspect of this kind of “three-
way dialogic situation” or “event” activated by contemporary artists such as Niki de
Saint Phalle.
By the late 1960s, then, a concept of art as situational, performative, and recip-
rocal or relational—as activating a situation of encountering in social spaces with
potential political effects—was circulating widely across Europe and North America,
and beyond. Art writers were understandably keen to theorize this shift. In 1969, for
example, expanding on the earlier writings and practices cited above, British artist
and theorist Victor Burgin published his important article “Situational Aesthetics” in
Studio International. In a 1974 article in Art in America, Allan Kaprow, originator
of Happenings, elaborated his concept of “situational models” of contemporary art;
and in 1980 Artforum published a special issue and roundtable on “Situation Esthet-
ics: Impermanent Art and the Seventies Audience,” edited by Nancy Foote and with
contributions from numerous artists.34 Foote introduces this special section by noting
the tendency of contemporary artists “to extend the art audience,” linking this to “[t]
he increase in the ’70s of ‘project,’ performance, film and video art, all of which have
their origins in the ’60s.”35 Among the artists reporting their thoughts on “Situation
Esthetics,” Vito Acconci notes the structure of art as an “exchange system,” and
Dan Graham stresses the “inter-subjectivity of the observer(s) and the artwork,” both
activating relationality between future viewers and the work of art in its situation.36
After the 1970s, the concept of situation aesthetics or situational art clearly shifted
to new terms—with Austrian artist and writer Peter Weibel (the very same who col-
laborated in EXPORT’s relational works of the late 1960s) characterizing similar
work as “context art” in a 1994 article. Weibel explores the way in which artists in
the 1960s and 1970s were increasingly oriented toward opening art to everyday life or
the harsh concerns of political and social spheres (moving art into “situations” so as
to engage viewers as participants in a process of meaning making). But, importantly,
he also provides a description that helps link these concerns to the developing theo-
retical and political interests of artists in the 1990s:
Artists are now becoming independent agents of social processes, partisans of

the real. The interaction between artist and social situation, between art and
extra-artistic context has led to a new form of art, where both come together:
Context art. The objective of the social structure of art is participation in the
social structures of reality.37
Weibel’s notion of context art and his emphasis on participation, as well as on art as
fully invested in “the social structures of reality,” in turn paralleled the relational aes-
thetics moment spearheaded by Bourriaud and the shift to what is now called “social
practice” or participatory art—terms often viewed by art critics, curators, and artists
as new, even though the concepts of relational and participatory had clearly already
been introduced in the 1960s, as I have demonstrated. For Weibel and theorists of
relational as well as social practices, the artist engages publics in spaces that allow for
a merging of art and activism.
Weibel’s theory, however, as with the feminist social practice work of US artists such
as Suzanne Lacy and Mierle Ukeles in the 1970s, is strongly differentiated from the
focus on the “convivial” in Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics. Here it is im-
portant to stress the potentially antagonistic nature of situated activist art especially
46 Amelia Jones
in the earlier period. Like Ono, Piper, and EXPORT, as artists and theorists, radical
feminists Lacy and Ukeles were not interested in making friends in the artworld, per
Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics argument emphasizing the convivial.38 Their work
was about engaging participants relationally but by creating public situations that
were not primarily aimed at being easy or “fun” (per Bourriaud’s arguments). Even as
Weibel (especially his work with EXPORT) was known for antagonizing audiences to
political effect, Lacy and Ukeles worked through a common feminist strategy of call-
ing out patriarchy in some pieces (such as Ukeles’s “Manifesto for Maintenance Art”
of 1969) while creating intimacies to solicit care and concern in others—for example,
Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation project, 1979–80, for which (among other elements) she
made a point of meeting and shaking the hand of every sanitation worker for the City
of New York, documenting each encounter.39
Relational work functions on multiple registers—conceptually, politically, aesthet-
ically, and corporeally, and, by extension, psychologically and phenomenologically—
and all through performance of one kind or another. Bodily experiences, gestures,
and of course the glue of desire or the repelling force of anxiety, anger, or other nega-
tive feelings provide the intersubjective connectors/dividers that make artwork based
on encountering and relationality function the way it does. This radical work insists
on highlighting the where of art by staging these relations openly, refusing to occlude
or veil interpersonal encounters involved in its making, dissemination, and reception.
This work most often begins with a political urgency or conceptual concern, which is
turned into aesthetic action through the embodied gesture of the artist in the specific
frameworks of art discourse (although very often not in official art institutions—
Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation epitomizes these structures). Both the bodies and
the specific situation are necessary for this kind of practice to work aesthetically and
politically. The aesthetic working is defined in and through the political working,
and vice versa. Activism is made art, and art informs activism.
Foregrounding the where of art is a structural but also political and aesthetic gesture.
Without these powerful earlier examples, which are political in structure and motiva-
tion but usually without didacticism, there would be no later activist art. Important
aesthetic/political practices from those of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gran Fury, and WAC!
(Women’s Action Coalition) to those of Black Lives Matter function by activating this
where, putting bodies in conceptual interrelation, pointing both to structures of power
that subordinate some bodies and privilege others and to the deep ways in which the
meaning and value of artworks as well as bodies are determined relationally.
Notes
1 Jieun Rhee discusses the different cultural resonances of these different performances and
sites in “Performing the Other: Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” Art History 28, no. 1 (February
2005): 96–118.
2 This text on the Ono, Clark, EXPORT, and St. Phalle pieces, and the discussion below
of staging “encountering” as an art strategy, are revised from my article “Encountering:
The Conceptual Body, or a Theory of When, Where, and How Art ‘Means,’” TDR: The
Drama Review 62, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 12–34.
3 Piper has recently publicly noted her discovery that she is only 1/8 Black and in 2012
she stated she had “retired from being black.” See Thomas Chatterton Williams, New
York Times Magazine, June 27, 2018, accessed March 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/06/27/magazine/adrian-pipers-self-imposed-exile-from-america-and-from-
race-itself.html.
4 See Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to
1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and
Victor Burgin, “Situational Aesthetics” (1969), in Art in Theory: 1900–1990, An Anthol-
ogy of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992),
883–5.
5 I have written numerous books and articles about this transformation (from Body Art/
Performing the Subject [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998] onward), collabora-
tively redefining contemporary art along with myriad other historians, responding to in-
novations by artists since at least the Black Mountain College initiative in the early 1950s.
6 See my new book, which includes Chapters 2, “Performativity,” and 3, “Relationality,”
in In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (New York and
London: Routledge, 2021), 34–82; 83–130. This chapter is excerpted and revised from
“Relationality.”
7 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998), trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods,
with participation of Mathieu Copeland (Paris: les presses du réel, 2002), 67.
8 Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (College Station: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 322.
9 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London:
Routledge, 1997), 43.
10 On these points, see Kenneth Gergen, “The Relational Self in Historical Context,” Inter-
national Journal for Dialogic Science 1, no. 1 (2006): 119–24.
11 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York and London:
Routledge, 2001), 14. See also Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Re-
port on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
12 See Chapter 2, “Art as a Binary Proposition; Identity as a Binary Proposition,” in my book
Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual (New York and
London: Routledge, 2012), 17–62.
13 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), ed. and trans. Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 283.
14 For the anti-relational position see Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1995); Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2010); and Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). For Muñoz’s counterarguments, see
José Esteban Muñoz, “Thinking beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer
Critique,” in Robert Caserio, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and
Tim Dean, “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006):
825–6.
15 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1959).
16 Erving Goffman, “Gender Display,” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communi-
cation 3, no. 2 (1976): 69–77, quote on 69. See also his “The Arrangement between the
Sexes,” Theory and Society 4 no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 301–31; and Candace West and Don
H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender & Society 1, no. 2 (1987): 125–51.
17 Goffman, “Gender Display,” 76, 77.
18 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 528; and Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge,
1990).
19 As Heather Love compellingly notes: “Goffman’s own late work on gender… is corrosive
to the notion of human sovereignty; it resonates with anti-identitarian, post-human, and
object-oriented queer and transgender scholarship of the past decade.” “Reading the So-
cial: Erving Goffman and Sexuality Studies,” in Theory Aside, ed. Jason Potts and Daniel
Stout (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 240. I am indebted to Love for sharing
this important essay with me before publication.
20 Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News, October 1958, 24–6, 55–7,
available in the Art News archives, accessed March 24, 2019, http://www.artnews.
com/2018/02/09/archives-allan-kaprow-legacy-jackson-pollock-1958/.
48 Amelia Jones
21 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 245.
22 Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1963), 3; my emphasis.
23 Goffman, Stigma, 29.
24 Goffman, Stigma, 143–4.
25 Gustaf Almenberg, Notes on Participatory Art: Toward a Manifesto Differentiating It
from Open Work, Interactive Art and Relational Art (Central Milton Keynes: Author-
House, 2010). Almenberg helpfully sketches the broader late capitalist imperative toward
participation (or “customer focus”), and differentiates it from contemporary artistic no-
tions of participation, which “give… the spectator an opportunity for her/his creativity to
be used in the here and now,” 2, 6; my emphasis. See also Robert Atkins, Rudolf Friedling,
Boris Groys, and Lev Manovich, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (London: Thames
& Hudson, 2008); Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London:
Whitechapel Gallery, 2006); and Adair Rounthwaite’s compelling Asking the Audience:
Participatory Art in 1980s New York (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
26 Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and
1970s (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 190–1.
27 I have long made this point; see Body Art, especially Chapter 4 on Hannah Wilke, 151–96.
28 Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.”
29 Richard Schechner, “Actuals” (1970), reprinted in Performance Theory (New York: Rou-
tledge Classics, 2003), 43, 54.
30 Robert Morris, “Blank Form” (1962), reprinted in Claire Doherty, ed., Situation (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press; London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2009), 25.
31 Dorothy Gees Seckler, “The Artist in America: The Audience Is His Medium!” Art in
America 51, no. 2 (April 1963): 62.
32 Seckler, “Artist in America,” 63.
33 Kenneth Coutts-Smith, “Violence in Art,” Art and Artists 1, no. 5 (August 1966): 5.
34 Burgin, “Situational Aesthetics”; Allan Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part
III” (1974), reprinted in Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 130–47; Nancy Foote, ed., “Situation
Esthetics: Impermanent Art and the Seventies Audience,” Artforum 18, no. 5 (January
1980): 22–9.
35 Foote, “Situation Esthetics,” 22.
36 Acconci and Graham quoted in Foote, “Situation Esthetics,” 22, 25.
37 Peter Weibel, “Context Art: Towards a Social Construction of Art” (1994), reprinted in
Doherty, Situation, 51.
38 Claire Bishop’s critical analysis of Bourriaud’s stress on conviviality is influential, see “An-
tagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall): 51–79.
39 On Ukeles see Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, ed. Patricia Phillips et al. (Lon-
don and New York: Prestel Publishing; New York: Queens Museum of Art, 2016); and
Shannon Jackson’s excellent “High Maintenance: The Sanitation Aesthetics of Mierle La-
derman Ukeles,” Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London and New
York: Routledge, 2011), 75–103; notes 356–8.
4 Chronotopographical Nodes and
Moments of Encounter
Sreshta Rit Premnath
Chorten, mani, and lapche are three different kinds of sacred structures built with
rocks that are found throughout the region of Humla in northwestern Nepal and
southern Tibet. While chorten resemble small shrines built by stacking cut stone and
reinforcing it with mud and concrete, mani are constructed with low, flat stacks of
stone that stretch out like walls or platforms. Individual stones have prayers engraved
upon them. Lapche, the third and simplest category, are essentially cairns, that is,
simple rock mounds that any passer-by might add to. I am particularly interested in
lapche, primarily because of the democratic and collaborative ways they are produced
over long periods.
Consider a mound of three rocks, each placed by a different passer-by, one year
apart. Another mound, an hour away, is five feet high and contains several hundred
rocks—ten of them placed by the same person every year over the last decade. These
mounds on the side of mountain paths may mark important geographical locations,
such as a peak, a pass, or a river. Others may mark the location of a death. Still
others mark lines of sight—a clear view of a sacred mountain, lake, or monastery.
Figure 4.1 L
apche in Purang County, Tibetan Autonomous Region, China. Photo by Sre-
shta Rit Premnath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-4
50 Sreshta Rit Premnath
Some are single mounds while others are dense collections of smaller mounds. Each
mound can be seen as a “polychronous node”—a gathering of many presences each
marked by its own particular time. In this sense, lapche constitute an accretion of
nows that are each embodied in the intentional selection and placement of an indi-
vidual rock.
Unlike villages or monasteries, which might serve as destinations for a traveler,
lapche are always in between or at the threshold of such places. In this way, they
can be understood as polychronic nodes that mark non-sites en route to somewhere.
Importantly, they are reminders of community in places outside habitation—traces of
human presence to accompany and give hope to the lonely traveler.
Rocks map a scale of geological time that is vastly beyond the limits of human
time. Indeed, they precede the very existence of humans and our conception of time.
Perhaps it is because we are fascinated with things that are beyond our grasp that we
collect rocks, holding and touching them, to fill them with meaning, and make them
ours.
Mountains compress space, and therefore by extension time, in their folds. Here,
a useful metaphor is found in the words of the late French philosopher, theorist, and
writer Michel Serres:
If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it
certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can
mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same hand-
kerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly
are close, even superimposed.1
Two points which are a short distance apart as the crow flies can of course be
much further apart when following the undulating circumference of a mountain
by foot. Walking a single kilometer could take anything from ten minutes to an
hour, depending on whether one is descending or ascending the mountain. For this
reason, when traveling through and around mountains, time is much more useful
as a unit of measurement than distance. How long does it take to walk from this
node to that? From this lapche to that? The time between two nodes might seem
small for some and inordinately long for others. In fact, the time taken between
nodes changes, dramatically depending on the direction that one walks and the
route that one takes. Point A to Point B is almost never the same time as Point B
to Point A.
A map that charts the time between places could be called a “chronotopography.”
Such a map would be peculiar because a chronotopography changes in relation to
direction, ability, familiarity, weather, etc. A route may become muddy, inordinately
difficult, or downright dangerous in bad weather. A bad stomach or altitude sick-
ness can make an otherwise easy walk impossibly long. A landscape can therefore
have many chronotopographies even though they may share some of the same nodes.
And, as noted previously, each cairn that functions as a node is itself polychronous—
containing not only multiple human times but also many layers of geological time that
may even predate humankind.
Now, consider each individual act of selection: “This stone or that? I like this
stone better.” Or even moments of aesthetic judgment: “I want to place this stone
there.” A pattern on the rock may resemble a deity or animal, or perhaps it is simply
Chronotopographical Nodes 51
apche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta Rit Prem-

Figure 4.2 L
nath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath.
the novelty of its abstract striations, the intensity of its colors, or the perfection of
its shape. Importantly, aesthetic judgment is not restricted to the sense of sight. The
feel of a particular rock, its irresistible texture, the way its volume fills one’s hand,
its density and weight—these are all factors that influence the decision to pick it up.
Each cairn consists of such individual aesthetic judgments aggregated into a single
memorial or monument. However, this aesthetic judgment does not extend to the
final form of the mound. In fact, a lapche is never finished but always in the process
of becoming.
Here the aesthetic act is simplified to the intentional displacement of a rock from
here to there, from its formless dimension as an anonymous rock to its newly assigned
cultural function as marker, sign, and node. As US scientist and journalist Robert
Thorson puts it, the difference between a rock and a stone is that a “rock is raw
material in situ … [while a] stone usually connotes either human handling or human
use.”2 In the case of the lapche, the shift from rock to stone rests on the simple act of
selection and recontextualization. In a landscape that is already a mound of rocks,
the human act of touching, lifting, and placing imbues the human-made mound with
an aura of cultural significance that precedes our specific understanding of it. Or in
other words, we understand that the cairn is not natural and is therefore symboli-
cally significant. This significance lies in between human attention and the intrinsic
quality of a rock. Certain rocks are unusual and deemed potentially significant. This
potential must be transformed through intentional selection for the rock to emanate
an aura of significance.
Now, imagine that a small stone topples off the structure and once again becomes
anonymous. Imagine then that this rock is picked up once again by a second per-
son and placed on the pile. Now, a single stone has been marked with two kinds
of time.
However, as stated previously, the significance of adding a stone to a lapche has
less to do with the specific qualities of a stone than the cultural or geological node
to which it pays homage. To refer back to Serres’ handkerchief metaphor, points in
a landscape that are separated by days of walking can be very close by line of sight.
Likewise, discrete locations might be very close by foot, but completely out of sight,
perhaps hidden behind a ridge. Vision therefore plays a key role in empowering a
chronotopographical node. Since lapche often mark lines of sight, they bear a relation
to powerful geographical features like mountain peaks, or human-made structures
such as monasteries. In this sense, a node draws power from objects that are visible
from its location but not necessarily nearby. Darshan, after all, is the act of seeing and
in turn being seen by the divine.
A lapche might act as a surrogate for a distant object by using the sense of sight
to compress space. The time between a lapche and an object that can be seen from
its location is zero. On a cloudy day, or in the absence of a clear view, the lapche
acts as a sign or surrogate presence for that which is absent and a marker of sa-
cred geography—a map without its referent. The pre-eminence of vision as a means
of encountering the sacred allows the viewer to ignore boundaries—political or
otherwise—so long as they do not obscure the sacred object.
If an object that serves as a powerful node is cut off from travelers as a consequence
of a new political boundary, or if an object is too far away to see, all the subsidiary
nodes that depend on the main node for their power will also wither away. Cutting off
an important node in a chronotopography is tantamount to cutting out an organ from
a body. Yet some powerful nodes that are cut off by the borders of nation-states are
often kept alive by surrogate bodies that become proxy sites for one’s own darshan.
This potential to see, and the longing it rekindles, energizes the routes to and from a
powerful node. This longing continues to pull pilgrims toward a node despite political
barriers. People bring home rocks and water from such sites as material evidence of
their darshan, and these souvenirs also become nodes in the chronotopography of a
sacred landscape.
In summary, a chronotopography consists of a network of polychronous nodes
located in between destinations. These nodes are always in the process of becom-
ing, for travelers incrementally add to them by making intentional aesthetic judg-
ments at the moment of encounter. The space between nodes is measured using
time, which in turn is affected by terrain, direction of travel, the ability of the
traveler, weather, and so on. This implies that the same topography has multiple
chronotopographies. In a chronotopography, visibility is almost equal to encounter
and collapses the distance between nodes. In a chronotopography, although one
node may function either as a surrogate or as a marker for another, the relation
between nodes would better be described by and as opposed to or. In a chrono-
topography, the destruction or cutting of one node affects multiple interrelated
nodes, and, if sufficiently powerful, could destroy the entire chronotopography.
Such destruction cannot be seen as the destruction of mere objects, but rather the
destruction of a phenomenological history aggregated in and between structures
always in the making.
While it is easy to see already present lapche as sites for veneration and pres-
ervation, it might be harder to see all rocks in the mountain landscape as poten-
tially sacred objects—objects that command the potential to be selected by future
travelers.
Chronotopographical Nodes 53
apche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta Rit Prem-

Figure 4.3 L
nath, 2016 © Sreshta Rit Premnath.
Notes
1 Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, in conversation with Bruno
Latour, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995),
60–1.
2 Robert M. Thorson, Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone
Walls (New York: Walker & Co., 2002), 238.
5 Evidence
Sharmistha Ray
(For Lily, from my childhood, who was lost to us because of the war.)
Evidence can also be a trace of where someone or something has been.1
Sara Ahmed
Prologue
On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. I was 11 years old. Overnight, my family
became refugees. My father went to Switzerland where he continued to work. I went
with my mother and three siblings to live with my paternal grandmother in India for
the next two years. The primary building blocks for this essay are a set of digital im-
ages I received from a former acquaintance from my secondary school in Kuwait. In
2018, I had reached out to him about a set of photographs I had encountered after the
Gulf War in 1992, in the lobby of my new school upon my family’s return from exile
abroad. These photographs described the conditions of the school after it had served
as barracks for the People’s Army during Iraq’s hostile takeover and the war that
ensued, and while the French army occupied it briefly as their local headquarters.2
Moreover, they were to me a gateway to childhood memories of the war that had been
displaced by the decades of migration that followed.
Instinctively, I felt that in acquiring these photographs, I would open up a new di-
mension in my studio work which would likely have some bearing on identity politics.
A few months later, I received a link from my acquaintance to a Google Photos album
with 21 digital images that had been scanned from analog photos and sent to me via
email. Since then, I have attempted to make sense of my relationship with these im-
ages. My purpose in adapting the now-digital proxies is to examine lived experience
through the imbrication of images and text to develop (and hopefully produce) new
self-reflexive material for my ongoing interrogations of identity and migration.
Dismantling representation
I find belonging—not because I am able to inhabit place and context but, rather—
despite not inhabiting a particular place and context. My affiliations and associations
are many, but they don’t fit into neat boxes with institutionalized check lists for what
I can and cannot examine. I am, for instance, ethnically Indian but, at the time of
writing this essay, a non-citizen of both India, where I was born, and America, where
I live. I have encountered exile more than once, and in different forms. The first time,
through war, from a country that was neither my birth country nor one in which I
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-5
56 Sharmistha Ray
held citizenship or any legal claim. The second, as a consequence of a long, drawn-
out process of immigration. I left the country in which I was seeking citizenship to
wait out the period of pending paperwork in my birth country, in which I sought a
sense of belonging. Belonging, for people like me, and for more people like me in the
future—in anticipation of mass displacement as a consequence of climate change—is
a multi-tiered thing. It is not a question of here or there, but rather one in which the
here and there must co-exist anywhere and everywhere.
In practice, this expanded sense of belonging has broad implications. Here, by way
of example, I address my experiences in both India and America. When I lived and
worked in India, the expectations of the artworld, if not the broader intellectual com-
munity, were that I engage in a dialogue in which I present myself as Indian first.3 In
America, I am viewed as part of a social and political minority belonging to the “South
Asian” community. It is expected that I present myself as South Asian and perform
my culture. In both instances, I have been forced to present a desirable political and
social position, which includes, among other things, adopting recognizable cultural
signifiers that are optimized for legibility and thus inclusion in a discourse. I am not
the one who decides. It is not my chosen group that decides. I am forced to “other”
myself by others who have decided for me. In deciding for me how I should represent
myself, they have forced my erasure. They have already decided who I should be. By
performing for them, I become what they want me to be.
This kind of becoming is of course problematic for several reasons. First, let’s
look at the construction of “Indian” identity. Here, it can be argued that the no-
tion of an Indian state is itself a postwar construct with a randomly drawn border
that presupposes everyone living within it is born of an Indian identity. India is, in
reality, a melting pot of cultures, languages, migrations, culinary traditions, and
faiths that proliferated, not as a result of a nation-state, but has instead been un-
comfortably bound by it. For instance, West Bengal, a northeastern state in India
where my parents come from and where I was born, hardly sees itself as part of
India per se. Bengalis from West Bengal have more in common ethno-linguistically
with Bangladeshis from Bangladesh (formerly East Bengal), and, indeed, before
the Partition in 1947, East and West were not split by national borders.4 We share
a culture which bonds us as Bangali first. Others see us as Indian. We do not see
ourselves that way.
Second, even within Bangali culture, there are of course other layers of separation,
difference, and hierarchy to confound notions of fixed identities further. The chief
difference is whether a Bengali lives inside or outside West Bengal and Bangladesh. A
Bangali who lives outside of the two Bengals is referred to as Probashi.5 It’s as if the
imagination had split into half and splintered. Once you leave Bengal, Bengal leaves
you. You become something else. I had this experience with an established curator in
Kolkata in 2006. I had just arrived in Kolkata from New York a few months earlier
and was trying to get my work shown at galleries in the city. The curator was organ-
izing a series of exhibitions of the work of emerging artists from Bengal and he agreed
to meet me. He claimed to like my work, but at the end of the meeting he stated rather
smugly (in English): “But you’re not a Bengali, are you?” It was a rhetorical strike
aimed to forestall any further naïve aspirations I may have had about my opportuni-
ties, not just in his show, but at large, in India. He had already decided who I was. He
had also decided who I was to be to others. Being a person of some authority, he was
certain these things were the same thing.
Evidence 57
Although I expected to be regarded as an outsider in America, I had not expected it
to happen in Kolkata and, when it did, I was taken aback by how blatant it was. After
all, although I had resided abroad for much of my life, I had visited often and was aware
of my cultural heritage. I ate the food and spoke the language. I had stayed in touch
with my relatives. More importantly, I had come back. Significantly, for this, there are
no words to describe a person in my language. In fact, because there are no words,
most people I encountered both personally and professionally thought I had suffered
an egregious lapse of judgment. I was told, on many separate occasions, that there was
nothing for me in Kolkata. That I should turn around and go back to America.
That same year, I wrote a first-person account of arriving in Kolkata for the widely
read newspaper The Telegraph, called “In Touch with the Indian Inside.” In it, I
probed what the radical shift in geographical context meant for my artistic identity.
The article concluded with the following words:
Since I arrived, I have noticed a subtle, but definite, change in my thinking. The
old nagging questions (“How do I communicate my Indian-ness?”) have been sup-
planted by new ones (“How do I communicate my experience here and now?”).
The shift has been freeing. Instead of searching for images that might best com-
municate my Indian-ness, I am able to focus more wholly on my response to
my immediate environment. Oddly enough, I find myself pulled further into the
world of abstraction and preoccupied thus with ideas of light, colour and gesture,
than towards any specific imagery. It could be that I’ve found my context and that
the images that play around me in real life are just waiting to creep into my work.
And even if they don’t, for now I am assured that the things around me are my
own, and that my claims to them need not be so emphatic.6
Before my years in India, I lived in the US between 1997 and 2005.7 I had just joined
Pratt Institute for a graduate fine arts degree program in New York when 9/11 hap-
pened. Overnight, it became apparent that brown bodies were now only further
marked by the state. Moreover, it was the first time I became acutely aware of my
politicized self in the larger sphere of the nation, of the undeniable fact that my skin
color wasn’t just a shade that grew darker in the sun, or paler during long northeast
winters. It was, in fact, a fixed identifier of my personhood, something highly sensi-
tive when offset by volatile, external events. It was at this moment that I understood
race in America for the first time. I was now branded as South Asian. I was no longer
a person with my own intrinsic attributes and abilities. It was now clear that I would
have to filter myself through a sieve of someone else’s making in order to be seen. In
the same account for The Telegraph, I wrote:
During my New York period, I had questioned the relevance of my own ethnic
identity and cultural background to art-making at length. What did my artistic
heritage mean to me? Could I incorporate it into my art in meaningful ways?
Would it find an audience outside of India?8
Race, Toni Morrison once said, is a distraction.9 By forcing us to engage in narratives

about race, ethnic identity, gender, and sexuality—that is, any kind of “difference”—
those who work to other us effectively create distractions serving only to keep us
from ourselves. This distancing would invariably affect the entirety of our being, our
58 Sharmistha Ray
experience, and our sensory perception of the world beyond the strictures of state
and socially defined limitations. Sadly, such limitations are grounded in nothing but
an abject failure of the imagination. Clearly, we are not permitted pleasure on our
own terms. We are not permitted our joy. We are only allowed to project a fraction
of our being. This, of course, is all simply so that those who do the othering can keep
us in our place and have it all. They alone can present what is universal and whole. It
would therefore seem that the further we move away from the normatively prescribed
bounds which delineate our lot, the more we must suffer. If we are to speak, it must
only be to speak of our pain. The other that defines us is never far away. They demand
complicity in our pain and, being inextricable from it, subjugate our pleasure and joy
until it becomes a diminished light. Do they fear that we will transcend what Sara
Ahmed terms “a figure of speech” and become speech itself?10 That we will become
human? Don’t they realize that they too, through a radical shift in perception, can
become more human in the process? But they will never surrender the fragile mantle
of privilege. To do so would cause them pain. The cost of being human is too high. It
would require them to carry the burden of their humanity, or lack thereof.
Before proceeding further, I should add a brief note here about my use of “they”
and “we.” I have long felt a general antipathy toward the binary social and politi-
cal systems that create and maintain sharp social and political divisions based on
rank and position. By contrast, I imagine “us” as unhinged particles in fluid ether.
And, given that we still exist within deeply structured dueling systems, I use we as
a placeholder for persons like myself for whom these systems seek to compromise.
Meanwhile, I use they as a placeholder for those who both implicitly and explicitly
maintain such violent delineations. In America, white heteropatriarchal supremacy
has become shorthand for the latter. In India, we find its equivalent in Brahmanical
heteropatriarchy. By extension, the artworld’s dominant ecosystems—with their de-
pendence upon private patronage—are proxies to further legitimize and uphold these
structures.
Intersectionality, I would argue, is a social construction that can be visualized as
constituting the form of the rhizome (a root structure like that of turmeric or ginger
that was used as a metaphor by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
for the non-hieratic and non-binary). I first became aware of this term in college in
the late 1990s when I started to come out as queer. It immediately made sense in
relation to the confusion I felt in my alienation from white queers on campus: We
seemed to emerge from different wombs of experience. It was only by studying the
feminist movement in the 1970s, and particularly the radical politics of Black women
like Audre Lorde, that I came to understand that difference is a blending of multiple
social realities. As Lorde states, “There is no hierarchy of oppression.”11 Accordingly,
I know that parts of me occur both simultaneously and together.
In the politics of representation, there is arguably an implicitly delineated yet
largely ever-present hierarchy of oppressions, within which we imagine race or eth-
nic identity residing at the top of the pyramid, depending upon who and where you
are. Consider, for example, a gay South Asian artist living in America who seeks to
participate within the institutional artworld of galleries, museums, and biennials.
The artist would most likely be implicitly expected to unpack their ethnic identity
as part of the presentation of their work first, followed by their sexuality. This im-
plicitly delineated hierarchy will likely become the frames through which their work
Evidence 59
will be judged from the vantage point of cultural legitimacy. Once these criteria are
met, the artist will be branded to be primed to participate (although this does not of
course ultimately determine their requisite currency in that world). In such instances,
an invisible upper hand is dealt which appears to presuppose a superior, albeit fixed,
cultural identity. It is, first, white, and everyone else is othered. It is, second, male.
All women and non-binary folk are othered, including white women. It is, third, het-
erosexual, and so on and so forth. Additional intersectional layers, such as religious
faith, disability, and age, are also substantial factors (as so many others beyond the
scope of this essay).
Suffice it to say, the system is rigged.
Short of dislodging the notion of identity altogether, there appears to be no escape
from existing structures. As I ponder this impasse, I offer a re-framing of Lorde’s
statement: There is no hierarchy of experience. Perhaps, through this lens, which is
centered upon individual experience, all parts could potentially constitute equivalent
evidential value. This is significant, primarily because it suggests the possibility of
opening up potentialities of experience beyond the narrow limits which are currently
socially demarcated, and of which the artworld is just a part. Accordingly, I would
like to stress that this is not simply a problem pertaining to the artworld and its in-
stitutions, but rather how we, unconsciously or not, create a mental equivalence be-
tween an artist and their place of birth, or, alternately, their ethnic heritage, as if these
were self-evident truths to be manifested through visual culture and its inheritances,
both socially and politically. Visualities are not inborn in people nor innate in them,
at least not completely. For instance, having grown up in Kuwait, I had a feeling for
Arabic calligraphy and its script long before I grew to appreciate the Indian miniature.
However, for the sake of elucidation of my point, I would have had a hard time jus-
tifying the use of Arabic calligraphy in my work, simply because it’s not perceived as
my “primary” culture. Here, I draw an analogy to my relationship to the Gulf War.
For years I overlooked its significance to the formation of my identity and outlook,
yet struggled to integrate it into the larger structural paradigms within which I am
pigeonholed (South Asian, Indian, queer, etc.). Consequently, these externally deter-
mined paradigms implicitly prevent me from examining the full range of my life’s ex-
periences, and which undoubtedly hold the potential for my fuller embodiment as an
artist, not just a token artist. On the other hand, white artists in America (including
European ones) have historically long been accorded implicit permission to “borrow”
at will, even if this borrowing is exploitative in nature.
Today, after two decades of pursuing identity politics in my work, I am no longer
convinced by the latent and implicit (and no less dogmatic) approaches which are
available to minority persons under the guises of “inclusion” and “discourse” in art
spaces. I am now becoming increasingly convinced that all that these politics actually
serve is to further exclude and tokenize us. Instances of my otherness in America are
far too many and complex to include in this essay. My point here is that categorical
identifiers such as Indian and South Asian are regressive and reductive. Moreover,
they deny me the full contours of my humanity, the full expression of my embod-
iment, and the freedom to determine my reflexive truths. This is crucial in under-
standing the nature of cultural production and the delimiting forces that hold our
imagination captive. It is precisely because I am the product of pluralities that present
impossible antinomies that I find it necessary to resist both structure and stricture.
60 Sharmistha Ray
The alternative is to be subsumed by them. We clearly need broader terms of address
and redress, and we must make them for ourselves.
In order to do this, we must dismantle the politics of representation and delink it
from our personhood.
Method
This text is organized in three parts. The first part (prologue), which you will have
just read, provides the groundwork and context for the second part, which is expe-
riential in nature, and where I take the most poetic license. The second part (mon-
ologue) is the “work.” Here, language, memory, and image come together to form,
what I hope, is the beginnings of a rhizomatic complex in which, to use the words of
Édouard Glissant, “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with
the Other.”12 In this middle section, I adapt different modes of writing: Art-oriented,
literary, critical, academic research, creative fiction, and experimental poetry. The
last section (epilogue) fills in some of the documentary gaps created in the middle sec-
tion, bridging the speculative nature of affective address with factual evidence which
is essential to my record of these images and the people involved.
Significantly, due to publishing restrictions, this text can only accommodate the re-
production of 10 of the 21 images I received, albeit in black and white. Consequently,
I have adapted the first ten into the text without any alteration to the order in which
I received them—primarily to retain the non-hierarchical nature of my approach to
them—and, accordingly, to treat each one as an equal subject. Given that these images
are the foundational evidence upon which I build my current research, I also allude
to describing them at times as forms of digital alt-text and as speculative evidence.
Accordingly, they become witnesses with a capacity to provide crucial information
through a process of cross-examination. Operating in plurality and not singularity, I
see these objects/images as existing within a fluid medium and as discursive in nature,
as opposed to entities within which to insulate and codify meaning.
Ideally, the color of these images is essential to the sedimentations of meaning in the
text. I often refer to the color of the desert sand, for example, which Simone Douglas
poetically referred to in one of our recent transatlantic Zoom meetings as “a riptide”
to the past. Given that color anchors my descriptions, I needed to find a different
solution to represent these images. Given the iterative nature of this text, and the na-
ture of the project as a whole, which is ongoing and expansive, the ten images in their
original digital form are published, and can be found on my website sharmistharay.
com in the “work” section titled “Images for essay in Where is Art?: Space, Time,
and Location in Contemporary Art.” These supplementary images are intended to be
an important experiential companion to this text. In a way, this solution provides a
richer outcome. The larger project is conceived to have multiple versions to generate
new associations, like an enmeshed root system, with each iteration broadening and
deepening the reading of the parts and the system.
The next part of this text was written with the primacy of the voice in mind—as a
stage actor who performs—and, importantly, as a figure who becomes speech. The
voice is mine. The sound that emerges is a carrier and transmitter of experiential
agency. Of affective knowledge. A non-replicable thing. A thing in and of itself.
Evidence 61
Monologue
The landscape of my youth
offers two dominant sensations:
The bleached sand, and limitless expanse

of the Arabian Sea.
Everything else bleeds into the sand.

I search for a sign of my own life.
[memory]
August 2, 1990
Thirty years ago, an army crossed the border to invade the country I lived in. I was
not born in this country. It was never mine per se: But it is the country of my child-
hood. An army illegally entered my place of domicile and invaded it. It is the be-
ginning of heartbreak that shattered the mirror. It is the sum capital of loss that
dug a trench.
(date unknown) 1992
The black sky has been cleared of smoke. The corpses have gone. The tanks have
left. Some desert mines remain. The crime scenes have been painted over.
I return.
***
A grouping of photos hangs in the front lobby of my new school. Analog photo-
graphs, blown up, behind a sliding glass case. Or are they ordinary Kodak snapshots?
I don’t remember. But I remember them. Chilling. Barren. Cold. My nose is pressed
up against the glass to take a closer look, to look more closely. I have to be up close
in order to enter a place of knowing. These pictures maneuver me from a place of
non-belonging to possession.
They are curious. Dispossessed.
Later,
I
become
obsessed.
[reality]
I need other memories to complete my own. I am not whole without my memories.

62 Sharmistha Ray
[imaginary]
A person with no place. A person who has no place.
Before the war, I lived one life. I was: Child.
Afterwards, I live many:
Queer Gay Non-binary

POC
South Asian Brown Diasporic
Non-resident alien
First-generation Immigrant
Expat Non-resident Indian (NRI)
R E F U G E E
One word spans the breadth of the page.

The others lie in relation. They are relative. To place, space, person.
Who else is sharing space with me?
I uncover my own historical traces of places I’ve been to and times I’ve existed in.
But there is the problem of forgetting. There are things that have been blotted out by
letting go. Remember? The traces, erased?
The ones that couldn’t hold the page.
Proof requires memories and imaginaries. I will get closer. Proximate.
I hope this is good enough.
[fact]
For 18 years of my life, I lived in Kuwait. Even though I didn’t physically live there
during the Gulf War and its aftermath, I was always there, hovering, in spirit. A life
in limbo still needs coordinates. My home, in limbo, was Kuwait. India, where my
family sought refuge, was the waiting room.
We didn’t return to Kuwait until a year and a half after the war was over. The
country needed time to rebuild. The oil wells had been set ablaze, smoke stained the
air and polluted the waters, murdering masses of marine life.
I saw these pictures in magazines.
After we returned, I joined the New English School. The school had served as both
Iraqi and French barracks during the war and the allied liberation that followed. The
school was as austere as the teachers, who barely laughed.
Death is always close by in the desert. That is to say: It is never very far.
The photographs that hung in the lobby were documentation of the school on the
heels of Iraq’s retreat. It was a site of despair. Walls were covered in spray painted
slogans in Arabic, trash was strewn all over, primal chaos encrypted in every frame.
They looked nothing like the neat and orderly classrooms I would enter to learn.
Rooms, like bodies, suffer tragedies. They hold memories within their walls.
Years later, I don’t recall facts, incidences, conversations. My memories of Kuwait
are trapped in this body of images that forms both a smokescreen and a veil. I have
simply forgotten what existed before and after them.
I have forgotten everything else, except these photographs.
[flights]
What is the future without a past?
Evidence 63
What would Barthes say?
Suspended in time, like a ghost rattling its chains from way down below. I hear you,
but you are too far down. I have an inkling of your presence. But I keep you down,
for fear of my drowning.
I push them away, but they continue to rise.
***
I email K., a friend of my brother, whose grandparents owned the school. He lives in
London with his wife, M., and two children, a girl and a boy. I’m not sure what to
expect. K.’s grandparents had died several years ago: It’s possible that these photos
had been buried in boxes in storage and unseen by the light of day for many years.
Worse. Discarded.
Had Kuwait moved on? Would anyone care to send me these images?
My words move through the web.
I am conjuring the ghost out of its well.
Later, still. I continue to rise.
[fact]
On June 23, 2018, at 4.12 am ET, I receive an email from K. with a link to a Google
Photos folder with images of photos that his aunt, Nur, scanned and uploaded. The
folder is titled “NES after Liberation.” It has 21 images.
The photos are lined up in rows, of threes and fours, flattened out across and down
the screen in digital space. They appear, at first, as a ubiquitous panel of images,
unremarkable, a record of fading, scratching, and increased grain of the originals.
They don’t look like anything, actually: But somewhere in the gut, they jab. There is
that sandy hue, a nondescript color of the sand, a pale color of I-don’t-know-what,
but it is not a color that I can readily describe. I can only say with certainty that it is
my childhood. That color, that dry heat and dust, that open stretch of desert running
along the Arabian Sea.
An image is a flash, a trigger warning, a painful wound. Scar tissue ripped open.
An image is a receptacle.
A container for other images.
[intuition-feeling]
I sit staring at the screen. I know these photos are supposed to mean something.
I may have made a mistake. I may have

displaced meaning.
I scroll down to see them all. A mass of grainy pixels hovering incalculably between
definition and abstraction. The originals had perceptibly aged: And so too, had the
digitized scans. A reminder that my memories were not new. But even while they
faded into pale oblivion, I had the sense that I had run up against history, one that felt
intimately like my own.
Three decades and a screen separate us.
Yet, these scans make me feel something.
64 Sharmistha Ray
I am overcome with emotion but lost for words to describe them, not only on ac-
count of the feeling engulfing me, but because the words that belong to that place and
time have receded from memory.
Without a language to grasp at, I am grasping at straws. It starts with the color of
the sand for which I have no name. I turn blank.
The first image conveys this.
Evidence 001 (Figure 5.1)

The first image is opaque. By this, I mean it reveals very little about itself. There is a
wall at an oblique angle—as if the photo had been taken by someone on the ground
looking up. It is that same hue I have no name for. The French flag flaps from a make-
shift horizontal mast affixed to the school’s exterior. To the left of the flag, perched
precariously on a long rectangular window’s ledge, is a large placard. The placard is
divided into a diagonal pattern, one half blue and the other red, with a central circle.
At the center of the circle is a peculiar animal motif. It could be a horse—but it looks
more like a donkey or a mule. The mascot is framed by two stripes on the left, white
and red, on the right, blue and yellow gold. An arc at the top of the circle reads: “2 DE
MARINE.” A second arc across the bottom reads: “1 COMPAGNIE.” The French
infantry’s insignia.
There are of course details I omit. This strikes me as a form of erasure. There are
sliding windows, for instance, and a window is partially open betraying nothing of
the dark interior. Daylight falls on the right windowpane, appearing like shards of
broken glass. The left windowpane looks like it may be boarded up. A drainpipe,
the color of the sand, runs up a side wall to the right of the window that protrudes
to create another façade, a monotone of sand bricks. But this is not purely a de-
scription either. If I was weaving another narrative, these details may have been
thrown into sharp relief. Instead, I forage for contrast: The presence of the French
flag and the color of the sand trigger difference and familiarity, respectively, as the
key anchoring devices for my narrative. Contrast is still a binary. For the subtleties
of nuance and knowing, I am forced to turn to others who, in turn, turn me toward
myself.13
Figure 5.1 ( Left: Evidence 001; Right: Evidence 002) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans
of original color photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait,
5.75 × 3.41″ (14.6 × 8.66 cm), Tareq Rajab Museum, Jabriya.
Evidence 65
The school architecture has an austerity that I once took for granted. The building sits in
the distance, monolithic and partially obscured by a large dark leafed tree. Were it not
for the building’s rigid framing against the pallid sky, it could have easily bled into both
the sky and sand with its pale, dusty hue. I recognize this view. I am looking across the
large vacant sandpit in which the school buses that took me to school and back home
used to be parked. In the middle ground of the image, and entering the image frame
from the left, is a canopied military vehicle with a camouflage pattern. There are a few
more jeeps at various distances within the frame, and also a few pitched tents. Piles
of heavy-duty containers filled with god-knows-what occupy the left half of the fore-
ground of the frame, creating a framing device for the canopied truck behind them. The
scene looks composed. The pit seems deserted, but, according to K., beyond the frame
of this image were many more helicopters and tanks stationed in the sand pit. He was a
young boy then, and he remembers running around and among these heavy armaments,
as if it were all a game, as if these were not, in fact, killing machines. The image I have
received is only a fragment. There’s not much to discern. But now every time I see this
image, I think of K., a young boy, beaming with pleasure, running between tanks and
copters. I imagine French infantrymen smiling at this lone display of innocence within
their midst of death and decay. What I know already lives outside the frame. This im-
age expands to fill that space. I am conscious of another person. Someone who is there
looking. The person who took these photographs. K.’s grandfather: I’ll call him Mr. T.
***
Looking at the school building now, in the distance beyond the sandpit, in this image
on my laptop in Brooklyn, New York I feel as if I am looking at a fortress: A repos-
itory of forbidden teenage desires, of unlived lives that went unspoken. Language
caught between forming thought and speaking words. Stop. What are the conse-
quences of these words? Stop again. I have lost words that were never spoken. There
were no actions that followed.

A man in a green khaki shirt sits at a desk in one of the school’s classrooms in the
center of the frame. His smile reminds me of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonder-
land. Somewhat smug. He is slightly blurred, rendering his expression indistinct. In
his hands he holds a paper document. I am relieved to see a human face looking back
at me and to know that, even during wartime, people do smile—if only for the dura-
tion of their being photographed. There are two other men in the frame. In the fore-
ground, a mustachioed, well-built man in army fatigues with rolled-up sleeves and a
wedding band busies himself with some administrative task. In front of him on a long
table are black and white photographic images, some annotated, and neatly placed in
groupings. I gather from this display that the officer is preparing another image for the
table with a photocopy and glue-stick. The tricolor stripes on his left sleeve underscore
the officers’ common allegiance to the French flag. The third officer is a photographic
prop. His lower body, clad in army greens, enters the left frame, in the background.
His posture mirrors the second officer, rendering a more dynamic composition.
66 Sharmistha Ray

Two infantrymen cross the school yard, dusty boots, casting shadows. French le-
gionnaires. The one farther away appears to have his hand thrust in his pocket, his
body gently torques toward other military vehicles in the yard, a few larger trucks.
The soldier closer to the lens has ginger hair and a mustache, the other, a bald
patch. The yard looks like a large dusty enclave. This nondescript sandy hue has a
terror borne inside of it. It describes everything and nothing at the same time. The
men walk toward the school canteen. K. reminds me the trees in the image are eu-
calyptus trees. This fact rustles up a forlorn memory of their texture which appears
between my fingertips. Crisp, brittle. The memory of their scent follows. Sharp, and
dry. An army jeep, the same tan and khaki camouflage, enters the frame at left, at
an angle. I can situate myself at its location, but I don’t know if it’s facing north,
south, east, or west. A strong beam of sun bleaches the posterior of the jeep and
officers. I attempt to determine the time of day from the sun’s position in the sky
(and fail). Three-quarters up the frame, on the left, is an upward-facing nozzle of
an anti-aircraft gun. Once K. points this out to me, it seems obvious and I wonder
why I hadn’t registered its presence before. I wasn’t looking for it. I was looking for
myself.

Scores of infantrymen gather in the shade of the canteen to fraternize, far away from
the camera’s eye. I can’t help but notice their muscular, tanned thighs. According to
K., the army trained in the yard. The scene, with its generosity of limbs and atten-
dant violence, is effortlessly erotic. Above the canteen is where the art classes used
to be located. I recognize the long stretch of windows that overlook the dusty yard.
There were many hours spent at those windows, sporadic breaks from drawing and
watercolors, when time held still. Sometimes I drew the brick wall of another building
across the playground into my compositions. For years after, I was always at a loss
for a background in my depictions of people and objects. Action requires context.
I had none. Or perhaps the displacement has been absolute. Oblivion occurs when
things don’t belong anywhere. Everything happens against an impasse. Or maybe it’s
the desert: The long stretches of bleached dry sand that register as a blank image, or
non-place.
Evidence 67

A pitched tent, the color of baked mud, occupies a small section of the sand lot across
from the school. Barbed wire is visible to the rear, left. Mr. T. is, again, concerned
with composition. He appears to favor framing devices. Two spare trees frame two
men standing in front of the open tent. Inside, there are some chairs and tables. A
white signboard on the tent’s exterior, and above the men’s heads, reads “NEW ENG-
LISH SCHOOL,” and “REGISTRATION OFFICE” in a smaller font size below.
This is the English translation of the Arabic script above, or is the Arabic a translation
of the English—which one came first? Or did they happen together? The men, one
dressed in what appears to be a white dishdasha, are teachers from the school. They
take the first registrations after liberation. A red bucket flanks the right corner of
the tent. Its color strikes me as a mental equivalent to soaring summer temperatures,
when the sheer graze of a seat belt’s metal clasp against my skin burned on contact.

The rooftop of the school looks out to other rooftops, indistinguishable from this one.
The temporary rooftop constructions with large metal water tanks are instantly recog-
nizable to me. I am reminded of the view from our old house in the Al Da’iya section
of the city. I call it a house, but it wasn’t our house. My father rented a floor from a Ku-
waiti man who lived on the floor below, and who gifted us decorated chocolate yule log
cakes and singing cards every Christmas, even though neither he nor we celebrated it.
Below him, on the ground floor, was a Palestinian family who kept to themselves. I can
recall their faces if I try, but not their names. Since it was my first home and, for much
of my childhood and adolescence, my only home, it’s the house that appears most often
in my dreams. The long corridor had a faded blue carpet, my bedroom, bright pink
walls, and the front gate was a large imposing white metal structure that I still arrive
at on some nights in a dream state, only to be locked outside. I wonder what other lives
have been lived there, what other dreams are awakened from their sleep in this way.
Sometimes, in my dream, when I look up at the window on the second floor where my
family lived, they are all still there but unaware that I am not. Did I leave without them
knowing? Did they not notice that I had gone? This dream puts me in an anxious state.
Back to the image. A green bucket is delicately placed to the far left, in the middle
ground, against a wall, establishing spatial relations within a blanket of monochromes
68 Sharmistha Ray
and compressed depth of field. To the right of it, a dilapidated concrete structure that
resembles an arte povera installation is, K. informs me, one of many makeshift bun-
kers that housed anti-aircraft guns and sheltered their operators during the war.

A large board on a school wall, the height of two building floors, reads:
WELCOME
AND
THANK YOU
MRS THATCHER
The memos, released by the National Archives, reveal how in the build-up to the 1990
Gulf War ministers and civil servants scrambled to ensure Britain’s arms manufac-
turers could take advantage of the anticipated rise in orders for military hardware.
In a letter marked “secret,” written on August 19, 1990, days after Saddam Hus-
sein’s forces had invaded Kuwait, Clark wrote a private memo to Thatcher in which
he described the expected response from the US and its allies as an “unparalleled op-
portunity” for the Defense Export Services Organization (now known as the DSO).14

What traces
were left behind in
those rooms
in which
we sat and learned?
What smells,
stench,
shit,
feces,
vomit, piss, anxious sweat?15
Evidence 69
Figure 5.5 ( Left: Evidence 009, 1.8 × 3.03″ [4.6 × 7.7 cm]; Right: Evidence 010, 3.8 ×
2.2″ [9.65 × 5.6 cm]) Tareq S. Rajab, 1991, digital scans of original color
photographs of New English School, Kuwait City, Kuwait, Tareq Rajab Mu-
seum, Jabriya.

Eight Kuwaiti flags fly triumphantly from the side façade of the school building. In this
picture, the school looks like a voyaging ship. A makeshift wooden scaffolding has been
erected to hang allied flags from the brick walls. On the left wall are the Western na-
tions, with America at the top and Great Britain and France below, and others (Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand) below those, and some others I don’t recognize. Looking
at that wall now, it’s as if the ghost of the old British Empire had summoned its former
colonies to war for one last triumph, led now by the new world it created. On the central
block are the Arab allies, with Saudi Arabia at the top, United Arab Emirates below
that, and Bahrain and Qatar below that. The flags on the right block haven’t been hung
yet. The wall is empty, save for the name of the school, in Arabic lettering above.
Epilogue
I am not the sole interlocutor of these images, memories, histories. I turned, first,
to Khalid, who I refer to as K. He was my primary source and co-interlocutor: He
reminded me of things I had forgotten and filled in the gaps for things I didn’t know,
can’t possibly have known, that I couldn’t read about or find on the web or in the li-
brary. I needed his memories to complete—no, enhance—my own. The conversations
that transpired between Khalid and myself on Zoom during the summer of the pan-
demic took place between London, where he lives, and Brooklyn, New York where I
live. Prior to that, we hadn’t spoken in a decade or more.
There are other interlocutors. The late Mr. Tareq Rajab, Khalid’s grandfather, who
I call Mr. T., without whom there would be no photographs. He was assiduous in
the task of documentation, according to his grandson. The late Mrs. Jehan Rajab,
Khalid’s grandmother and Mr. Rajab’s wife, who was in Kuwait during the occu-
pation and the war, and who subsequently published her journalistic entries in the
book Invasion Kuwait, which I devoured over a weekend as if it were a detective
novel. It details a first-hand witness account complete with intrigue, grit, and survival
70 Sharmistha Ray
which reignited my affective attachment to my childhood home through a subter-
ranean recognition of places and things. It also reminds me of the violence I did
not see.16
Then there’s Nur, K.’s aunt, maybe the most important of all: Who retrieved,
sorted, organized, and scanned the photographs, and then uploaded the images
to Google Photos. Thus, enabling a stationary thought to start moving and per-
form intertextually between lived experience, collective forms of subjectivity, alt-
histories, and disembodied archives. She’s the only person I refer to by name (a
random decision, perhaps, or maybe one I will understand later on, as most things
are understood).17
My alt-text uses images as source and words as material which then perform with
memories, my own and others, to construct a present in lieu of a past, but one that
runs parallel to it, until at some point, the lanes superimpose and merge as thick,
bold lines that force a curve. This essay is the past re-experienced. Recovered. Recon-
figured. Redrawn. Language, like memory, is imperfect. We tend to forget. Certain
objects lie in proximity to me, and others far away. Have I allowed language to forge
new relations to the past through description and collaboration with others, or have I
limited my memories to a container?
What if I had received a different set of images?

What if they had been sequenced differently?
What if my co-interlocutor had been someone other than Khalid?
My telling of history might have assumed another outcome entirely. My memories

could have taken a different shape and direction. Memory is a pliable thing. Under-
lying memory and its subjective functions are the unpredictable rhizome structure.
Like everyone else, my relationship with my memories changes over time. I am not
the person I was yesterday, nor the day before. Nor 30 years ago. Memory is also
porous. Stare at a color for a period of time and then close your eyes and try to re-
member the color, not just the hue, but its specific tone and saturation. No matter
how many times you turn to that color, or for how long, in order to commit it to
memory, when you close your eyes and attempt to conjure it from darkness, a spec-
tral abstraction takes its place. You can no less hold a memory than you can a color.
If you cannot hold a memory, it follows that images—which are constructions of
memories—are fugitive too. Although this text is an iterative account of them, it
is not a container for experience. It is but one of many temporal experiences these
images will produce of a single spatial event, which, like them, is in a constant state
of flux for the disruptions of memory, which is not only spatial and temporal, but
also collaborative. “The root is not important,” writes Glissant, “movement is.”18
Flux delimits the possibility of domination and control. If a thing keeps moving
and changing, it cannot be captured. Earlier, I argued that we need to dislodge the
notion of identity altogether. I would like to end by suggesting that we delink the
subject as person or object from categorical identifiers altogether and look instead
for subjects in the network of relations that form the rhizome of experiences, of the
self as well as with the other and in the world.
I will return to this idea in later texts.
Evidence 71
Notes
1 Sara Ahmed, “Evidence,” Feministkilljoys, July 12, 2016, https://feministkilljoys.com/
2016/07/12/evidence/.
2 The Iraqi Popular Army, also known as the People’s Army or People’s Militia, was a para-
military organization composed of barely trained and often the poorest of civilians. Their
role was to protect the Ba’ath regime against internal opposition and serve as a counterbal-
ance against any coup attempt by the regular Iraqi Army. Sadly, these soldiers came from
the most desperate ranks of society and were ill-equipped for war and combat.
3 I was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and went back to live in India on two separate
occasions: In Kolkata with my family from 1990 to 1992 as a consequence of forced dis-
placement during the Gulf War and the second time in 2006–17 which was initially a
forced outcome of the immigration process in America. My practical training period on
my student visa had expired and I needed to wait out the period before my papers for
my permanent residency in the US became current. In this latter period, I lived mostly in
Mumbai where I was deeply involved with the artworld and culture at large.
4 For the purpose of this essay, I talk about East and West Bengal as forms of shorthand.
In fact, the Bengal province has a complex history of kingdoms and, later, reorganization
and various partitions under British colonial rule. However, the Partition of Bengal along
religious lines in 1947 is more widely known. West Bengal, which had a Hindu majority,
became part of modern-day India. While East Bengal, with its Muslim majority, aligned
with Pakistan and became East Pakistan. In 1971, the latter split from Pakistan to become
Bangladesh, an independent nation.
5 Probashi is the name given to all Bangalis who reside outside the borders of Bengal: The
Bengali diaspora, so to speak. There are other sub-groups by name, such as Ghotis and
Bangals, that also locate from whereabouts a person arrived to West Bengal, but I won’t
get into that level of detail for this essay. I am chiefly interested in the fact that these names
have been created to identify a person’s physical and moral proximity to and within the
geography that was Bengal.
6 Sharmistha Ray, “In Touch with the Indian Inside,” The Telegraph, Nov 9, 2006. The
original link has been removed but the short essay can be found on my website: http://
sharmistharay.com/media/the-telegraph-calcutta-india-in-touch-with-the-indian-inside-
by-sharmistha-ray/. The original paragraph spacing of the newspaper article has been
re-formatted in this text.
7 In 1997, at the same time I left Kuwait to attend college in America, my family immigrated
to America, settling in New Jersey.
8 Ray, “In Touch with the Indian Inside.”
9 I’ve used a shorthand for Toni Morrison’s entire quote, which reads:
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from do-
ing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.
Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do.
Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the
fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says
you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary.
Toni Morrison, “Public Dialogue on the American Dream” (panel discussion, Portland
State, Black Studies Center public dialogue, pt. 2, May 30, 1975), accessed November
8, 2021, https://soundcloud.com/portland-state-library/portland-state-black-studies-1?si=
d0c2afb13bfd4d369ad9f20c6846c306.
10 I take the liberty of substituting Sara Ahmed’s figure of the migrant in her text Strange
Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (Oxford: Routledge, 2000) with the fig-
ure of any individual with a complex set of cultural inheritances as they produce similar
semiotic and semantic affects. She writes:
Migration becomes an impossible metaphor that no longer refers to the dislocation
from place, but dislocation as such (thought already dislocates). The migrant becomes
72 Sharmistha Ray
a figure: This act of granting the migrant the status as a figure (of speech) erases and
conceals the historical determination of experiences of migration, even though those
experiences cannot be reduced to a referent. As Uma Narayan puts it, “Postcolonial
global reality is a history of multiple migrations, rooted in a number of different his-
torical processes.” To talk literally about such migrations is to complicate rather than
reduce the meaning of migration: it is to introduce questions of context (postcoloniality/
globality), historicity, temporality and space.
81
11 Audre Lorde, “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions,” Interracial Books for Children
Bulletin: Homophobia and Education 14, no. 3–4 (1983): 9.
12 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997), 11.
Glissant applies Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome concept aesthetically and politically to
Caribbean identity, offering an understanding of creole and creolization as complex and
unpredictable forms of cultural hybridization that defy categories. They follow, instead,
an “enmeshed root system” that extends with and through the “Other,” and vice versa.
This shifts the emphasis for intercultural exchange from one of domination and control to
one of mutual transformation of oneself and the social environment through cooperation
and harmony. I am interested in the broader implications of this worldview and its holistic
application to studio praxis whereby the sum of the parts doesn’t add up to the whole.
Instead, notions of the whole are discarded to examine the parts.
13 Throughout this essay, I indirectly reference the seminal work by Sara Ahmed, Queer Phe-
nomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
Her formulations on queer orientation(s) formed the foundational premise for my solo
exhibition, we are all islands, in 2016, in Mumbai, India (the show subsequently traveled
to Kochi).
14 Jamie Doward, “Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait in 1990 Used by UK to Boost Weapon Sales,”
The Guardian, August 12, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/12/
arms-trade-margaret-thatcher-kuwait-saddam-hussein.
15 Jehan S. Rajab, in her book of journal entries about the occupation and the war, Invasion
Kuwait (London: Radcliff Press, 1993), describes the scene:
Complete and utter chaos reigned both inside and outside the school. There was noth-
ing, absolutely nothing left unsmashed, untorn, unripped, unsodden. Cupboard doors
hung askew from their hinges, desks were tipped broken on their sides. In the nurse’s
clinic the army had thrown the bed, screen, sterilizer and all the files into the yard
through the unopened windows. Spilling down the stairs almost like lava-flow, were
papers, the remains of books and stationery covered in spray paint, urine, excrement
and, in some places, chicken blood and feathers. No computers remained and the in-
struments from the music department lay scattered all over the school, either in pieces
or, in one case, as a flattened effigy. The rest had just disappeared.
188
16 Rajab, Invasion Kuwait. Rajab describes the brutalities of public lynching, executions,
and unexplained disappearances especially of men suspected to be part of the organized
resistance. Rampant looting and rapes, predominantly of Filipino maidservants. Sadly,
the atrocious violence against these overseas workers existed well before the war. A quick
online search of news reports reveals that these cruelties continue to persist, not only in
Kuwait but throughout the Gulf region.
17 In Arabic, Nur or Noor (spelled ‫ )رون‬means “light.” I suppose there’s a poetic refrain here.
I have persistently tried to push away the memory of the images which Nur eventually
salvaged for me from what I imagine to be a dark attic. It was light that transformed their
material from physical photo-paper through a series of mirrors and lenses in a scanner into
the digital images that arrived in my inbox.
18 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 14.
6 Ice Boat
Field Notes (in Advance of a Melt)
Simone Douglas
I acknowledge the Wilyakali People, on whose unceded lands Ice Boat was conceived,
developed, and will be made. I pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
To locate a work of art is to consider not only its position in space and time but also
its relationship and responsibility to people, land, and community. Some works of art,
particularly when developed across multiple forms, knowledge systems, timeframes,
and disciplinary configurations, are particularly challenging to responsibly describe,
categorize, or position. These challenges are further complicated when the core ma-
terial articulation of a complex long-term project remains forthcoming. Ice Boat,
Figure 6.1 S imone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type
print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This is an image of a prototype site test made in
2014 from frozen water. Hand-cast prototypes of varying sizes have been made
both on and off site, commencing in 2013. Their starting (pre-melt) size varies
© Simone Douglas.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-6
74 Simone Douglas
an active project since 2013, is already manifest as a materially exuberant world of
related works, models, prototypes, photographic tests, video, permissions, endorse-
ments, and risk assessments—despite the fact that the core public sculptural event
is still to be realized. Given that this project is being developed as part of a sensitive
and ongoing dialogue with conditions of land and community—inclusive of both rain
cycles and drought and contingent upon parallel technological developments such
as solar power—it will inevitably take time to fully manifest. The final material ar-
ticulation of Ice Boat is a 120-foot (37 meter) “boat” made entirely of ice, which
will be formed sustainably in situ and then melted back into the earth ground—thus
“returning” water to a mostly very dry desert location in Australia.1 Literally and
metaphorically connecting land to sky during the dry winter months yet in sync with
local rain cycles, it will then leave a “footprint” of wildflowers in its wake. Within
the context of a book exploring the situatedness of art, this work’s remote location,
its complex imbrication in contested and unresolved histories, and its multiple states
of prototypal and versioned existence, all exemplify the problem of art’s whereness.
Although my own artistic preoccupations have long been concerned with themes of
elemental and perceptual abstraction that elude empirical knowledge and perception
and are presented in implicit relation with forces of nature, no project of mine has
hitherto been this logistically elaborate, collaborative, and necessarily embedded in
its host location and community. 2
The central thematic orientation of Ice Boat is one of a paradoxical pairing of ice
and desert. Given that this project will, quite literally, eventually manifest as a boat
formed out of ice in the desert—a once glacial ancient seabed floor—the allegorical sig-
nificance of the figure of the boat is central. Boats are commonly understood as some-
thing that humans use to journey somewhere. In this instance, however, somewhere
remains a “hypothesis-in-the-making.”3 Historically, boats have long extended upon
human want for exploration, transportation, conquest, adventure, and escape—and
by extension, as an allegory for hope, sorrow, joy, love, or anticipation.4 Circumstan-
tial evidence, such as the inhabitation of Australia over 65,000 years ago, 5 reveals that
boats have long evidenced cognitively modern abstract thinking. Importantly, in an
Australian context, we can look back into the deep histories of the world’s oldest con-
tinuous cultures, from use of riverways, to early sea trading through to the arrival of
Figure 6.2 Simone Douglas, Ice Boat (artist sketch), 2015, inkjet print, 30 × 20.2″
(76 × 51 cm). Poster design by Lucille Tenazas over photograph and text by
Simone Douglas; this annotated sketch was produced as a visual summary
of the proposed project © Simone Douglas.
Ice Boat: Field Notes 75
Figure 6.3 and 6.4 S imone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020,
C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). The purpose of prototypes such
as these is to test rate of melt at different times of the year, and over
the years; the sculptural form (that will only be revealed at the fi-
nal installation); casting techniques; rate of freeze; and, crucially, the
light refracted through the Ice Boat itself © Simone Douglas.
settler colonialists, and more recent waves of migration and contestation, to recognize
Australia’s inextricable connection to the figure of the boat. Although Australia is nec-
essarily reached across water, it is at the same time a now largely dry island continent.
Yet, across at least 65,000 years of human inhabitation, and certainly well before the
recent rupture of colonization (234 years ago at the time of writing), the migration,
appearance, and disappearance of lakes and seas had considerable bearing on what
such inland spaces meant and how they were inhabited or negotiated.
Given its situatedness on an ancient seabed, Ice Boat is conceived not only as an
allegorical cipher for the movement of peoples across vast spaces, but also for the
very nature of displacement itself—as will be embodied in the elemental, entropic
disintegration of the boat from water to ice to water to vapor, and perhaps most
importantly—both literally and metaphorically—to the hydration and replenishment
of flora and fauna that will follow its melting as the sun in dialogue with ice returns
the boat into the ground. It will thus—given that it is a performative object designed
to bring heat, aridity, and the movement of peoples to the fore—symbolically activate
two core issues at stake in contemporary Australia: Climate change6 and sovereignty.7
By extension, this project also seeks to emphasize that places of purported inactivity,
such as deserts, are not places of nullity but rather “living deserts” set within a dy-
namic history that extends beyond the span of the world’s oldest living continuous
cultures. Cautiously set within the eternal infinitudes of these larger histories, Ice
Boat is pre-eminently a poetic object that seeks to quietly speak to an unmonumental
grandiosity, evanescence, and the loss of both geographic form and memory. These
are themes that have long sat at the core of my practice, and, by extension, in critical
responses to my work. Zachary Sachs, for example, writing in response to a satellite
exhibition containing a series of aligned works,8 recontextualized French scientist
Auguste Blanqui’s “astronomical hypothesis” as an effective analogue for the evoca-
tion of the ultimate cycling of all matter across the universe:
All bodies, animate and inanimate, solid, liquid and gaseous, are linked by the
very things that separate them. Everything holds together. All these systems, all
these variants and their repetitions make up innumerable series of partial infinities
76 Simone Douglas
Figure 6.5 Simone Douglas, Untitled, 2016, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned
2020, C-type print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Aerial image from flight between
Broken Hill and Sydney © Simone Douglas.
print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This is an image of a prototype site test made in
2014. The melting ice re-freezes overnight forming glacier like deep greens
and blues © Simone Douglas.
that rush towards the great infinite like rivers into the ocean. Immanence charac-
terises the smallest particles of matter. Even if they endure only for a second their
rebirth has no limits. The infinite in time and space is not the exclusive preroga-
tive of the universe as a whole. It also belongs to all the forms of matter, even to
the infusoria and to the grains of sand.9
print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This image is a detail from a prototype site test in
which the Ice Boat melted toward the path of the sun. The remnant ice “skin”
of the prototype liquefied into the earth releasing bubbles of air as it did so
© Simone Douglas.
In addition to these deeper historical and universal themes, Ice Boat is also con-
ceptualized in relationship to a specific moment in Australia’s colonial history. In
1844, Charles Sturt (1795–1869), a British officer and part of the European “explo-
ration” of Australia, set sail, up the Murray River from South Australia in search
of a then fabled “inland sea” within the European imaginary.10 As Sturt noted in
his diary at the time, “tomorrow we start for the ranges, and then for the waters—
the strange waters on which boat never swam.”11 And, as would then transpire,
he would travel, following the bird’s flight paths into a flooded landscape that he
believed to be an inland lake, only to encounter the desert. For Sturt, “the scene
was awfully fearful […]. It looked like the entrance into Hell.”12 He and his party
were subsequently stranded in the desert, camping by a water hole in a rocky basalt
glen, now known as Depot Glen,13 located near Milparinka.14 Here, the whaling
boat paradoxically came to rest on the ancient seabed floor above the Great Ar-
tesian Basin—the remnant “sea” from a time when much of what is now inland
Australia was below sea level.15 Then, after waiting in hope that the “lake” would
return, heavy rain finally enabled the group to travel another 725 kilometers (450
miles) into what is now the Sturt Stoney Desert and Simpson Desert. Finally, having
found no evidence of an inland sea, Sturt and his crew found themselves stranded.
78 Simone Douglas
Eventually they dispersed, leaving behind a whaling vessel that presumably disinte-
grated in the dry desert heat.
By the deep pool of Depot Glen

Sturt’s ink dried before his pen could write,
And for six months the pool shrank between the black flanks of rock.16
Alone in a profoundly different landscape to that with which they were familiar, Sturt
and his crew were kept alive by the Wilyakali People,17 who generously shared water
and food with Sturt and his men. After all, this has only ever been a “hostile” land to
those who are unfamiliar and unaccustomed to its complex living cycles. (To this end,
Wiradjuri woman Jeanine Leane saliently reminds us “that droughts, fires & floods
are NATURAL & they only become disasters when settlers can’t read the land and
are injured or killed.”18) Unlike many of his fellow colonists, Sturt’s subsequent re-
spect and indebtedness to Australia’s First Peoples19 and their knowledges represents
an allegorical détente within the broader context of ongoing contestations related to
First Nations sovereignty in Australia.
These historical resonances help to position Ice Boat as continuous with complex
histories underpinning processes of colonization, immigration, and displacement.
Moreover, the idea of a boat emerging from and returning to the land also poten-
tially performs an allegorical deference to cyclical orders of evolution, entropy, and
print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Ice Boat is positioned to be viewed close-up and
at a distance, and in the direct path of the rising and setting sun © Simone
Douglas.
environmental rehabilitation. At its core, I hope that this still forthcoming work
might be experienced as continuous with its world and the histories that underpin it.
Water is the greatest mystery. Earth and air

Are always around us, fire we can strike anywhere,
But water is given, and the sun takes it away. 20
print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm) © Simone Douglas.
80 Simone Douglas
Given Ice Boat’s proposed and culturally endorsed placement on unceded First Na-
tions lands once used for farming and now positioned within a state park, extensive
and ongoing consultation with First Nations owners, local community, and other
regional custodians and officials has been essential. Although much of this support is
documented through correspondence and letters, core aspects remain largely invisible
to Western conventions as living conversations with community. Importantly, each
of these very different communicative modalities carries validity and is accompanied
with very different responsibilities. Both literally and metaphorically, I see this rich
universe of correspondences and conversations—together with a world of already ex-
hibited affiliated works, prototypal forms, photographic tests, paratextual literature,
and planning documents—is already representational of the project’s prolepsis.
Originally conceived to be a single, site-specific event destined to be accessed
through video documentation, this substantially expanded project now spans the
realms of sculpture, design, architecture, photography, moving image, community
consultation, participation, and performance. In this sense it might be said to ex-
emplify contemporary art’s capacity to stretch disciplines and collapse distinctions
between process, product, research, and exhibited outcome. On this subject, it
draws upon both the histories of “earth work” sculpture in the midwestern de-
serts of the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s and the legacies
of emphasis upon action and event in the same period. Perhaps best described as
a durational sited work—which will take approximately two months to form, one
month to melt, and finally form an imprint of meltwater marked by a generational
native floral bloom—it is also richly manifest as a constellation of non-sited images,
plans, sketches, models, prototypes, and other archival materials. Responding in
Artforum to a non-sited exhibited prototype formed in wood, Promise (Site) 2017,
Zachary Zachs evocatively describes the way in which its “reverberation resounds,
suggesting that a topology of variance in wood might be as articulate as any string
of Latin letters.”21
Material expression has long been central within human efforts to mark cosmic
and geological time, invoke monumentality, and by extension project a range of sym-
bolic cultural meanings. Although some sited American art of the 1960s and 1970s
was in part inspired by images and traces of ancient Nazca monuments (which attest
Figure 6.10 S imone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: Scale and distance
tests with assistance from Broken Hill community members, 2018. Right:
Drafts of the Ice Boat build, 2017, drawing by Belinda Koopman © Simone
Douglas.
to stasis against cosmic and geological time), it is perhaps the unmonumentality and
ephemeral performativity of Agnes Denes’ pioneering environmental works, such as
Rice/Tree/Burial (1968), that offer a more appropriate analogue for Ice Boat. Rice/
Tree/Burial, which “grew” in Sullivan County, New York, was one of first ecologi-
cally oriented large scale contemporary site-specific works of the so-called “land art”
era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Denes would later develop one of her best-
known works, Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982), which constituted a specially
planted field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street
and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City
and the World Financial Center). Like Ice Boat, these works emphasize process over
a singular monumental outcome, and, accordingly, sought to reactivate relationships
between the human-centered world and elemental nature. They also, like Ice Boat,
demanded extensive planning, permissions, and practical material innovation to sen-
sitively respond to both natural forces and the vastness of geological and spiritual
time that frames the Australian landscape. Significantly, Ice Boat’s material mani-
festation will be contingent on rain cycles and the weather at large. In partnership
with the sun, it will melt toward its heat, gently following its arc as it reunites with
the land and activates relationships with local flora and fauna. Although situated in
a very different cultural context, this interdependence with requisite elemental and
cultural forces is reminiscent of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Sky Ladder, which, following three
attempts as a consequence of poor weather and post-9/11 security concerns, was fi-
nally realized in 2016.22
Ahead of its core material articulation, Ice Boat is clearly already manifest as a
richly material and socially activated world. This material exuberance in advance of
its primary outcome brings us to a curious question: To what extent is the world of
a work of art already activated through the creation and development of a proposal,
planning documents, and related prototypal forms? In response to this question, we
could insist that the requisite vehicular material needed to effectively communicate
something of the “idea” of Ice Boat experientially as art is already performed through
photographic images of the location, smaller-scale “test melts,” affiliated completed
works, digital virtualizations, animations of the proposed boat and native floral
Figure 6.11 S imone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: Detail from scale
drawings of the Ice Boat build, 2017, scale 1:500, drawing by Belinda Koop-
man. Right: Initial scale tests, 2015, photo by John Douglas © Simone
Douglas.
82 Simone Douglas
Figure 6.12 S imone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, preparatory research,
2017, digital image (detail), scale 1:500. Drawing by Belinda Koopman over
photograph by Simone Douglas © Simone Douglas.
bloom, together with models, prototypes, permissions, and endorsements from vari-
ous stakeholders, budgetary projections, and other archival materials. 23
The smaller-scale version—already exhibited in Sites of Knowledge24 curated by Re-
Sited25 for Jane Lombard Gallery in New York City in 2017—offers one clear example
of its public existence. In another still forthcoming US iteration, Returning the Future,
the project is offered as a community embedded pedagogical exemplar developed in re-
sponse to growing social and cultural divides emerging as a consequence of COVID-19
and damaged natural environments.26 Extending upon these “satellite” iterations, Ice
Boat also “exists” across a series of public talks and published writings.27
The exhaustive planning, collaboration, and consultation that can necessarily un-
derpin a project of this scale typically involves sustained collaboration and consul-
tation across very different disciplinary specializations. To date, the Ice Boat project
has engaged with the cutting edge of solar research, architecture, structural engineer-
ing, cinematography, land management, documentary and VR film making, and First
Nations archaeologies. 28 The exact site of Ice Boat has been guided by the Living
Desert Park Ranger, who is a custodian of the land.29 The activation of the water
reaching flora and fauna has been guided by Elders.30 Architectural and engineering
plans for the creation of the refrigeration cooler and the full-scale mold are com-
plete, together with architectural plans for use of the mold. To realize the sustainable-
energy commitment to be entirely carbon-neutral, we will utilize the latest solar, salt
conversion, meltwater capture technologies. Indeed, several stakeholders already rec-
ognize a potential to use the project as an exemplar for making sustainable energy
practices more visible. There are also plans to sustainably repurpose materials used
in the build to other ends. There are, for example, proposals in place in consultation
with the local community to repurpose the mold to form a First Nations “information
center” positioned within the entrance to the state park, a portable artist’s residency
studio, or a container for community rainwater collection.
While engaging with contested histories of colonialism, Ice Boat also offers an
implicit metaphor for climate change through an evocation of the glacier that once
shaped this landscape. For many observers, it is ice that most palpably manifests the
effects of climate change. In 2021 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) published its most explicit warning to date that we can now expect worsening
fires, longer droughts, and more severe floods over coming decades.31 Unlike scientific
research or more explicitly pointed forms of political activism, art possesses a highly
discursive and speculative capacity to imaginatively circle contradictions and subjec-
tive registers without necessarily producing tangible or instrumentalized outcomes.
The capacity of art to raise awareness of climate change is famously demonstrated
in Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch (2014–18), which involved the installation of large
blocks of ice in Copenhagen (2014), Paris (2015), and London (2018). In November
2015, Eliasson’s team transported 12 enormous blocks of ice from Greenland to Place
du Panthéon in Paris to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris.
For Timothy Morton, Ice Watch serves as an example of how art can help humans
understand their relationship with the nonhuman world amidst ecological crises.32
Similarly, Ice Boat will produce a mini glacier in response to the desert heat to reflect
the growing existential threat of a warming planet.
Whether you came out of the land, arrived by boat, or by plane yesterday, you
have responsibility to the land. If you don’t pay attention to the land, it doesn’t
pay attention to you.33
Notwithstanding the gravity of these broader historical and existential concerns, Ice
Boat is first and foremost an artistic speculation. The original impetus for this work
was photographic (encapsulating both still and moving image), led in part by ongo-
ing material experiments with material processes in the Australian landscape. Given
my grounding in the medium of photography, my ongoing interest in landscape and
the sublime remains connected, both materially and philosophically, to light. Many
years ago, when first visiting Sturt National Park, I was immediately struck by the
mirror-like effect of the light reflected in the black gibber stones. Sturt’s boat had
come to rest in a sea of light. Interestingly, in the Australian context out of which my
practice emerged, the historical association of light and knowledge has historically
underscored a series of cultural differences.
At this stage in history, the Australian landscape shimmers in the collective as a

mirage-like environment phasing in and out as sign.34
It is long noted that Antipodean light is distinct from northern European light. For
early colonial explorers, this difference may have implicitly represented something
yet-to-be-known, a challenge to their grasp of the world, an unknowing to be over-
come.35 There is a long historical relationship between photography and expanded
practices in the visual arts, for photography is both a medium in its own right and an
inextricable documentary tool for effectively disseminating awareness of ephemeral
and remote site-specific projects.36 This project also performs an expanded doubling
of photography, insofar as it holds and refracts light, and in doing so enacts a dialogue
between sun, water, and ice—with the sun “exposing” Ice Boat and the land upon
which it rests in a manner analogous with the way in which light reacts with silver
nitrate in traditional photographic processes by transforming it at a molecular level.
Since Roland Barthes’ highly influential book on photography, Camera Lucida, 37 the
term “photo-death” has become customary to photography parlance. Photo-death
applies to the sensation we feel when looking at a photograph in knowing that the
84 Simone Douglas
moment has irrevocably passed yet paradoxically lives on as a ghost. Pointedly, it is
in the very art of capturing that we are brought so irrepressibly close to what we have
lost and what will never be.
[Photography] shows us that there really is a world, that it wants to be seen by us,
and that it exceeds our capacity to know it.38
Perhaps discussion of transience serves to distract us from our own impermanence.

Ice Boat is conceivably as much a work that speaks to human bodies—whose physical
presence as audience will only accelerate the melt—as it does to place. From its arrival
to the point of its liquification into the land, it is a tribute to transitions and transito-
riness of peoples as well as matter. Ultimately, Ice Boat is offered as a symbolic object
for which the narrative of its genesis and its passing are metaphoric of imponderable
cyclical systems of rejuvenation and re-creation. Its boat-like form will at once present
an allegorical reference to the rarity of water in a desert location that was once an
ancient seabed, and, at the same time, quite literally manifest as boat made entirely
of water. Here, water is not only the primary medium but also a metaphorical holder
of sky, land, and light. For Sachs, this “literal melting into air exists without confine-
ment to boundaries between the constructed art-object and the ground and air” that
surrounds it, which “is not easily circumscribed by a definition, or the listed media
and dimensions meant to contain it.”39 As Ice Boat melts over the course of a month,
it tilts toward the heat of the sun, following its arc across the sky and reforming into
a sea of water. This process will regenerate the land and leave a footprint of brilliant
flowers in the boat’s wake to bloom more readily for seasons to come.
Figure 6.13 S imone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–. Left: C-type print, edi-
tioned 2020, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). Right: Initial concept sketch, 2014, pen-
cil on archival paper, 8.3 × 11.8″ (21 × 30 cm) © Simone Douglas.
Figure 6.14 S
imone Douglas, from Ice Boat (field notes), 2014–, editioned 2020, C-type
print, 20 × 24″ (51 × 61 cm). This image is part of a series of affiliated works
(some of which have been included in this chapter). Here, the setting sun
sits low on the horizon, illuminating the melting boat against the darkening
landscape © Simone Douglas.
Notes
1 Although typically defined as receiving less than 250 mm of rain per year on average,
Australia’s deserts can sometimes technically exceed this average due to uneven rain-
fall distribution. During rare heavy rains, the landscape is transformed into a kaleido-
scope of wildflower bloom and wetland foliage while birds flock and endemic frogs and
fish appear. Jared Richards, “Australia’s 10 Deserts” Australian Geographic, April 20,
2016, accessed November 2, 2021, https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/
science-environment/2016/04/australias-10-deserts/.
2 In a letter of support for a funding application to Regional Arts Grants NSW, Australia,
Secretary Taunoa Bugmy of the Community Working Party writes:
This boat will have strong meaning behind it which can be considered as a healing
project. This also represents the failure of colonial forces to “see” and “know” the land
they were in and also points to a regeneration of the desert.
Secretary Taunoa Bugmy, Community Working Party, letter to the author, 2014. For infor-
mation on the Community Working Party, see the following link, accessed November 15,
2021, http://www.mpra.com.au/community-working-parties.
3 In the words of US art historian Richard Shiff, “a work of art becomes a hypothesis-in-the-
making, as if it were calling out, ‘explain me, put me in order, give me a lasting purpose.’
Why this, not that?” Richard Shiff, “Every Shiny Object Wants An Infant Who Will Love
It,” Art Journal 70, no. 1 (2011): 7–33.
86 Simone Douglas
4 Robert A. Denemark, ed., World System History: The Social Science of Long-term
Change, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 208.
5 See Chris Clarkson and Ben Marwick, et al. “Human Occupation of Northern Australia
by 65,000 Years Ago,” Nature 547, (2017): 306–10, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22968.
(It should also be noted that for many First Nations Australians, this is a moot point—as
it is variously deeply felt and understood: “We grew here. We are part of here. We have
always been here.”)
6 Artists are increasingly attending to climate change and environment as subject: Con-
sider, for example, the recent exhibition In Human Time, featuring installations by Zaria
Forman and Peggy Weil that explore intersections of polar ice, humanity, and time at the
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons School of Design, the New School, NY, US.
The themes of climate and environment have been the subject of much parallel scholarly
activity. Nicholas Alfrey, Stephen Daniels, and Joy Sleeman, for example, wrote about it in
“To the Ends of the Earth: Art and Environment,” Tate Papers 17 (2012), and it has been
the subject of many academic courses.
7 In 2017, the Uluru Statement was symbolically presented to the Australian people as an
invitation to take the next step to addressing a raft of still unresolved legal, constitutional
issues concerning the unceded sovereignty of Australia’s First Nations Peoples:
This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or “mother
nature”, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born there-
from, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our
ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It
has never been ceded or extinguished and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.
How could it be otherwise?
“Uluru Statement from the Heart,” accessed September 22, 2021, https://ulurustatement.
org/the-statement.
8 Zachary Zachs, “Parallelogram,” in Simone Douglas: Parallel Infinities, Palour Projects,
Athens, NY, US, 2019–21, exhibition catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition
of the same title, curated by Re-Sited.
9 Auguste Blanqui’s 1871 text L’Eternité par les Astres (Eternity to the Stars) quoted in
Zachary Zachs, “Parallelogram.”
10 Sturt believed he was destined to discover a great saltwater lake, known as “the inland
sea,” in the middle of Australia. In August 1844, he set out with a party of 15 men, 200
sheep, 6 drays, and a boat. They traveled along the Murray and Darling rivers before
passing the future site of Broken Hill. They were then stranded for months in extreme heat
conditions. See Michael Cathcart, The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our
Dry Continent (Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2009), 126–47.
11 A passage from the little known “Sturts Letters, 14 October 1844,” quoted in Edward
John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland
from Adelaide to King George’s Sound, in the Years 1840–1 Volume II (London: T. and
W. Boone, 1845; repr. Freiburg im Breisgau: Outlook Verlag, 2018), 82.
12 A passage from “Sturts Letters, September 1845,” quoted in Nicolas Rothwell, Journeys
to the Interior (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2010), 79.
13 At the time of writing both Wangkumarra and Malyangapa have a Native Title claim over
Depot Glen.
14 Cathcart, The Water Dreamers, 126–47.
15 The Great Artesian Basin in Australia is the world’s largest and deepest artesian basin.
One of Australia’s most significant hydrogeological entities, it stretches over 1,700,000
square kilometers (660,000 sq. mi.) and provides the only source of fresh water through
much of inland Australia. See “Great Artesian Basin,” Geoscience Australia, Australian
Government, accessed November 19, 2021, https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/water/
groundwater/gab. This water is held in several sandstone layers formed during the Triassic,
Jurassic, and early Cretaceous periods. When much of what is now inland Australia was
below sea level, this sandstone was covered by marine sedimentary rock to form a confin-
ing layer. See “The Great Artesian Basin,” Geological Sites of NSW, accessed October 30,
2021, http://www.geomaps.com.au/scripts/artesianbasin.php.
16 Geoffrey Dutton, “Sturt’s Depot Glen,” Australian Poetry Library, accessed October
28, 2021, https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/dutton-geoffrey/poems/sturts-depot-
glen-0368081.
17 The Barkandji (aka Paakantyi, or Barkindji) is an Australian First Nations People of the
Darling River (Baaka) basin in far western NSW, Australia.
18 Jeanine Leane, “Writing Landscapes,” National Library of Australia, accessed October
30, 2021, https://www.nla.gov.au/content/writing-landscapes.
19 See Richard C. Davis, ed., The Central Australian Expedition 1844–1846: The Journals
of Charles Sturt (London: Hakluyt Society, 2003).
20 Dutton, “Sturt’s Depot Glen.”
21 Zachary Zachs, “Sites of Knowledge,” ArtForum Online: Critics Pick, accessed May 2,
2021, https://www.artforum.com/picks/sites-of-knowledge-69327.
22 Cai Guo-Qiang ultimately went ahead with Sky Ladder without seeking official permis-
sion on remote Huiyu Island Harbor in Fujian province in 2016.
23 To date, Ice Boat has already garnered significant media attention, including, for example,
a feature article in the Qantas Inflight magazine, national and regional radio appearances,
and extensive local press and youth media coverage. Given the level of interest in the
project to date, it is estimated that Ice Boat will generate substantial income for the local
community.
24 The Sites of Knowledge exhibition, curated by Melissa Bianca Amore and William Stover,
was held at Jane Lombard Gallery, NY from June 8 to July 28, 2017, and featured works
by Richard Artschwager, Henri Chopin, Simone Douglas, Guy Laramée, Jen Mazza, Kris-
tin McIver, Enrico Isamu Ōyama, Michael Rakowitz, Karen Schiff, and Sophie Totti. Here
a small-scale version of Ice Boat titled Return (2017) was located by the floor-to-ceiling
window, melting back into a vitrine. Return was situated next to Promise (Site) (2017) also
by Simone Douglas, a 15-foot wooden articulated sculpture, https://www.janelombardgal-
lery.com/sites-of-knowledge.
25 Re-Sited, a non-profit arts organization co-founded in 2016 by Melissa Bianca Amore and
William Stover, is dedicated to presenting new scholarly research and curated exhibitions
that examine the intersection of site, sculpture, and architecture. See “About,” Re-Sited,
accessed November 19, 2021, https://re-sited.org/about.html.
26 Returning the Future is supported by an American Craft Futures Fund Grant from the
Center for Craft. Due to closed borders and high caseloads of COVID-19 at the time of
writing, the project is on hold. Returning the Future connects traditional community-
based forms of making to environmental and political challenges in our present
and near future. See, accessed November 19, 2021, https://www.centerforcraft.org/
recipient/2020-craft-futures-fund-simone-douglas.
27 See Emma Coccioli ed., “Simone Douglas,” Animae: The Invisible Sources of the Artwork:
Talks with Today’s Artists (Wilmington, NC: Vernon Press, 2019); Ute Junker, “Art & the
Outback,” Qantas Spirit of Australia Inflight Magazine (June 2014); Zachs, “Parallel In-
finities”; Emma Horn, “Melting Moments in a Bone Dry Desert,” Crinkling News, August
2, 2016, https://www.crinklingnews.com.au/; Alexandra Back and Julie Clift, “Australian
Artist Simone Douglas to Build Ice Boat in Broken Hill’s Living Desert,” ABC Broken Hill,
July 24, 2015, accessed May 2, 2021, www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2015/07/23/4279382.
htm; Michael Murphy ed., “Project Promises Global Attention,” Barrier Daily Truth,
Broken Hill, July 7, 2014, https://bdtruth.com.au/main/news/article/6240-Project-
promises-global-attention.html; Alasdair Foster, “Disquietude: Landscape and the Aus-
tralian Imagination” (presentation given at Auckland Festival of Photography, Auckland
Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand; Instituto Escuela Nacional de Bellas
Arte, Montevideo, Uruguay; and RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia).
28 Solar research: Given that solar research is advancing rapidly, the solar engineering com-
ponent is deliberately provisional until close to the actual build. Importantly, this will
enable the team to employ the most energy-efficient solution at hand; Architecture: Be-
linda Koopman, a Sydney-based Architect and currently employed as Architect and Di-
rector at Peter Stutchbury Architecture, Sydney, Australia, is independently affording
expertise to the project to sustainably repurpose the materials from the mold for Ice Boat
to design an information center, a portable artist’s residency studio, or a container for
88 Simone Douglas
community rainwater collection; Structural engineering: Richard Matheson, a director
at the renowned engineering/design firm Van der Meer, has provided the structural engi-
neering of the mold inclusive of wind shear factors. See “Home,” Van der Meer, accessed
May 2, 2021, http://www.vandermeer.com.au/; Cinematography: Murray Fredericks is an
artist and cinematographer who is advising on the time-lapse film of Ice Boat’s melt. See
Murray Fredricks, accessed May 2, 2021, https://murrayfredericks.com; Documentary:
Dr. Rachel Bentley at Western Sydney University has made a short documentary, Promise
(2014), which foregrounds the early stages of Ice Boats’s development, see https://vimeo.
com/90311690.
29 Living Desert Ranger Darrell Ford has a deep knowledge of the land and, along with
Environs Archaeology Specialist Dr. Sarah Martin, has advised on the location for the
site of Ice Boat. Lyndall Roberts and Cathy Farry, who at the time were managers of Film
Broken Hill and Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, respectively, also gave invaluable advice
regarding the public location of the work.
30 Badger Bates is a Barkandji Elder, artist, cultural heritage consultant, and environmental
activist. He is the public face of the fight for waterways and support for the Barka (Darling
River). Badger Bates has afforded advice on the reticulation of the meltwater for the gener-
ative benefit of native flora and fauna.
31 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “Sixth Assessment Report,” ac-
cessed May 2, 2021, https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/.
32 Timothy Morton quoted in Anna Souter, “The Sprawling Ecologies of Olafur Eliasson,”
Hyperallergic, August 5, 2019, accessed July 13, 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/510475/
olafur-eliasson-in-real-life/.
33 Rhoda Roberts AO (presentation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, May
27, 2016, from the author’s person notes, no transcript archived). Roberts is a journalist,
broadcaster, actor, producer, writer, arts advisor, artistic director, member of Bundjalung
Nation, Wiyebal Clan of northern NSW and southeast Queensland, and was speaking
about her role as Director of Vivid Light, Vivid Festival, Sydney 2016.
34 Ross Gibson, “Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films,” in Southern
Crossings: Empty Land in the Australian Image, Helen Sloan ed. (London: Camerawork,
1992), 33, as quoted in Judy Annear ed., Landscape and Place: Australian Photography
Since the 1970s (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 2011), unpaginated.
35 I have long been intrigued by stories that some eighteenth-century scientists would delib-
erately stare into the sun, believing it to be a conduit of knowledge, and burn their retinas
out in the process. These experiments with vision during the early development of pho-
tography coincided with the European colonization of Australia.
36 As Peter Osborne has argued, photography only gained serious artworld recognition once
it had played a significant role in contributing to the collapse of medium-specific categories
in the 1960s and beyond, primarily because of its role in the documentation of expanded
practices. See Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art
(London: Verso, 2013), 127.
37 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1981).
38 Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press,
2014).
39 Zachs, “Parallelogram.”
7 Bland Matter: New Materialism,
and Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Adam Geczy
New materialism is already a vexed term. Relatively new in coinage, it is nonetheless

steeped in baggage as a result of what the name implies and connotes. It is immediately
expansive and positively ambiguous. If we leave aside the considerable encumbrances
of the phrase itself, we might assert that there are some creditable applications of the
notions that emanate from it, as well as the philosophical sources that are cited in its
lineage. Like all heavily loaded, ambiguous, and for that, suggestive terms whose lin-
eage and tenets remain obscure to most, it has been interpreted in a number of ways,
most dangerously without nuance, and most evidently in art. In art, “new material-
ism” is commonly defined as a “turn to matter” that runs contrary to the poststruc-
turalist exhortation that everything be treated as a “text.” It emphasizes that there
is something of a fundamental experience in our encounter with the material world,
while also embracing the imaginary. The “new” in new materialism is not only a sig-
nal of its repudiation of the effects of the “linguistic turn,” but also to distance it from
Marxist materialism, with its focus on material production and consumption. Rather,
new materialism has been a tool in postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory for seeing
the world in terms different from perspectives that operate according to transcenden-
tal laws that are made normative (deism, hegemonic discourse, etc.). Often referred to
as an ontology of immanence, new materialism has frequently been seen as allied to
the posthuman and the Anthropocene age in that it resists anthropocentrism in favor
of an ethics that sees humans within a set of causes and relationships, not as central
to it. But again, when translated to art, the complexities of new materialism tend to
become diluted to concentrate on the materialism of the object and the medium. It
is a reaction to the “dematerialization of the art object” of conceptual art, followed
by the virtualization of art through new media, now more commonly referred to as
digital art. The return to the material in art, however, is not without its hazards, as it
courts essentialism, myopia, sentimentality, and obscurantism. Spurred on by the lit-
eral interpretation that lies in wait in new materialism, its application in art is all too
frequently at loggerheads with the deeper philosophical definitions of the term. But its
deficiencies are also potentially casualties to the imprecise conclusions to which new
materialist philosophy is prone.
A research hub based in Amsterdam, New Materialism and Visual Arts, announces
in its mission statement that its aim is “to (re)position the visual/material arts as
agentic force within these contemporary debates.”1 Language like this is common to
writing on new materialism, suggesting a return to the echo-chamber of poststructur-
alist prolixity. It is worth singling out for the way in which the verbosity contradicts
the basic import of the project, which is a return to more authentic relations with
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-7
90 Adam Geczy
material. The “agentic force” is a phrase worth savoring; it possibly means that the
visual arts are a means of navigating and expressing new perspectives on ontology
and worldviews. What is not explored sufficiently is the extent to which the materi-
ality of art is inherent to this “agency.” What is also evident is that art and artists
that wish for a return to the material, as it were, and want to foreground the material
qualities of a work (“the physicality of paint”), can at the same time avail themselves
of the more complex philosophical definitions that suggest a reorientation to the way
in which we, humans, grasp the world, both phenomenologically and ontologically. A
gloss of new materialism in its more rigorous sense is first to juxtapose it against its
more simplistic abuses in art.
New materialism in theory

The historical predecessors of new materialism that are frequently cited are Spinoza
and Nietzsche, and then by extension (as an arch Spinozist and Nietzschean), Deleuze,
and Deleuze and Guattari. They are the progenitors, and alibis, to the conception of
a worldview that is not governed by transcendental narratives such as overarching
ideologies, which includes the belief in a supersensible God. Instead, the new mate-
rialist invokes the “pure immanence” of Spinoza (and Deleuze after him). Well be-
fore Deleuze, new materialism crops up in writings of the 1920s. For example, with
C. A. Richardson, who credits himself with the coinage, defining it as what denies
“anything corresponding to the idea of ‘mind’ and ‘subject.’ Its material is not atoms
and molecules but sense-material.”2 Near the beginning of his sprawling two-volume
work, The Particularity of the Aesthetic (Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen) of 1962,
Georg Lukács differentiates between realism and “naïve Realism (that is, Materi-
alism).”3 Its naïvety stems from its inability to fathom that we already create our
life-worlds through our perception, and that transformative power and intention is
required for reality to be brought to us convincingly. Aesthetically speaking, to speak
of mirroring as truth is to have left a large amount of intellectual work behind. It also
reflects a crushingly unsophisticated worldview (Weltanschauung).
New materialism insists that the world be conceived as a dynamically causal system
onto which humans have grafted systems and beliefs that are not necessarily proper to
it. In other words, new materialism seeks to separate the world as an operating system
from the narratives of human systematicity and agency. At the same time, new mate-
rialism rejects the nature-culture binary, which it sees as part of anthropocentric nar-
ratives, instead opting for a more wholistic approach to processes and interactions.
This also means that areas such as sexuality or creativity, which have been relatively
cordoned off as concepts in modern thought, are burst open to be accountable as
components in various forms of exchange and production. Thoughts and feelings can,
therefore, be studied materially since they too are attributable to objects and events.
Important for art in particular is the extent to which new materialism draws little or
no distinction between object and event, hence then the importance of performance
and performative subjectivity.
Matter, then, is always to be conceived as something for deduction according to the
forces that define it, including time. To think of a thing along new materialist lines
is therefore to conceive of it not as a circumscribable sign, but as a process, much as
Sphinx’s riddle to Oedipus about man, down to any entity or thing such as a fruit
which was once a bud and later will have decayed back into the soil. The world is a
Bland Matter 91
set of affective structures, to follow from Spinoza, in which humans are situated, and
which they cannot control. To privilege human control over matter, human primacy
and the human point of view are deemed to be narrow and delusory narratives that
disavow the myriad forces outside of our purview and control. Such new perspectives
have been harnessed by revisionist scholars including feminists, postcolonial, and
queer theorists, to embrace ways of conceiving the world that do not have the same
recourse to binaries, not only of nature and culture but of others such as theory and
practice. Deleuze, for one, emphasized that philosophy was a form of practice, a cre-
ative practice with concepts. It was an active form of conceiving the world in which
the actions are inseparable from the conception. For the new materialist, all things are
related to one another in some way—consequently, the loaded words relational and
contextual frequently arise—and values have to be built accordingly, not according
to predetermined, transcendental principles. As a result, new materialism favors ques-
tions related to being, as opposed to thinking: Ontology over epistemology, the latter
as seen as an interminable debate between realism and idealism.
In an essay on Spinoza written later in his career, Deleuze uses some examples from
art and aesthetics to explain Spinoza’s theory of modalities and affects. One way of
understanding a Spinozist mode is according to color, which are the effects of config-
urations of light in relation to an object: “Modes as the projection of light are equally
colors, coloring causes [causes colorants].”4 Further, Deleuze outlines the distinction
“between color and shadow, the coloring causes and the effect of shadow, one that
adequately ‘terminates’ light, the other that abolishes it in inadequacy.”5 From here
Deleuze uses the work of Vermeer to illustrate his position, concluding with a con-
trast between him and Rembrandt. Because Deleuze brings to the artist his parallax
insights, the passage needs to be quoted in full:
Of Vermeer one can say that he replaces chiaroscuro [clair-obscur] with the com-
plementarity and contrast of colors. It is not that shadow disappears but rather it
remains as an isolated effect of its cause, a separated correspondence, an extrinsic
sign, distinct from colors and their relations. In Vermeer one sees light detach it-
self to bring itself forward so as to enframe and border the luminous background
from which it proceeds (The Milkmaid, The Pearl Necklace, The Love Letter). As
such, Vermeer is opposed to chiaroscuro, and in this respect Spinoza is infinitely
closer to Vermeer than to Rembrandt.6
Far-fetched as it may sound, is Vermeer a Spinozist painter? On his own account,

Deleuze holds that Vermeer distances himself from the prevailing method of describ-
ing light as a relational force between figure and ground. In traditional chiaroscuro
objects are the product of undisclosed light, whereas in Vermeer’s hands objects and
planes are also responsible for the intensity of light and color. His intuition is true in
the most basic optical terms: Light cast onto a surface refracts onto another surface,
and the color of one will also inform the color of something else nearby. The nature of
this example will prove useful to exposing the kinds of contradictions and misprisions
of contemporary artists’ interpretations of new materialism, mainly because Vermeer
is not necessarily the first name to be used by new materialist adherents.
To return to some of the more contemporary theorists who have been embraced as
new materialists, these include Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Bruno Latour, as well as
Stacey Alamo, and Susan Hekman. Barad reckons upon an “onto-epistemology” in
92 Adam Geczy
which phenomena have to be accounted for according to context: There is no absolute
state of things. Here, the word agential raises its ugly head again with “agential real-
ity”7 used to describe the reciprocal relationship between dualisms (subject-observer,
nature-culture, word-world), and “agential cut”8 applies to the power and epistemic
presumption in any form of scientific inquiry or knowledge insertion. Working again
from the cue of Deleuze and Guattari, Barad emphasizes that there can be no prior-
ity given to either nature or culture. Further, and most importantly, she calls for the
construction of an entity that linguistically, subjectively, and ideologically cannot
preclude materiality. Barad’s reliance on the “in-between” is sufficiently vague, how-
ever, when she calls for a form of scientific inquiry that exists between “meanings
and matter” where “knowledge and being meet.”9 Such a statement presumes that
being is not a form of knowledge, as it seeks to deny the self-consciousness of humans
and the state of being of a jellyfish. Vicki Kirby also takes exception to the selective,
to the shaky and obscure logic advanced by new materialism. In reference to another
weird comment by Barad, Kirby rightly asks, “how can matter be subjective?”10
In her dissection of Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism (2015)—another example of
the new materialist somatic politics—Kirby again rightly states that “Wilson’s ex-
ploration of how cognition might be operative ‘below the neck’ opens a battery of
investigative puzzles that make no sense in terms of the nature/culture distinction.”11
In rejecting humanism, binaries, language, and all the other so-called evils, new
materialism has either thrown the baby out with the bathwater or else found itself
with problems it is ill-equipped to solve—except with (or highlighted by) obtuse and
unqualified reasoning. Barad’s agential realism is defined by Helen Palmer as “ma-
teriality understood as thing to materiality understood as a doing.”12 Is this, then, a
philosophy of immanence, one of radical immanence that ends in us thinking death?
If that be the case, in foregrounding mortality we are right back to the turgid mor-
bidities of Romanticism.
Although posthumanism began to be seriously theorized by Katherine Hayles in
1999,13 one of its subsequent thinkers is often cited as Rosi Braidotti. Dedicated to
finding new approaches to feminism through alternatives to historical (patriarchal)
humanism, in many ways Braidotti’s project is to develop from the work of Donna
Haraway, in the effort to overstep the problems that inevitably subtend binary logic.
How she goes about this, however, is not without its own pitfalls, as the conclusions
are summarily unclear and, arguably, unworkably ambiguous. In what is a historically
familiar lambast of the past, Braidotti foments against the abuses of anthropocen-
trism, which have been responsible for a litany of false assumptions and have drawn
humans into an inflated view of what they are capable. Instead, she insists upon “the
vital, self-organizing and yet non-naturalistic structure of living matter itself.”14 She
too seeks to pivot away from nature-culture dualisms toward “the self-organizing (or
auto-poietic) force of living matter.”15 This is again unnervingly vague, especially if
one wants not to avoid reading an essentialist and deterministic conception of nature
into it. That Braidotti wishes to surmount the errors or impasses of anthropocentrism
is clear and laudable, but her methods of escape are poetic, and perhaps destined to
be interpreted in not-so-flattering terms. Invoking Deleuze, she calls for modes of
becoming, flow over stricture, and a “minor science” (developed from Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of Kafka as an exemplar of a “minor literature”) that is “ethically
transformative and not bound to the economic imperatives of advanced capitalism
and its cognitive excursions into living matter.”16
Bland Matter 93
When looking at statements such as these, which can hardly be gathered as
conclusions, it is hard not to feel reactionary or obscurantist. Although the state-
ment makes a convenient straw man of Western science, it is blissfully unspecific.
Which science and which scientific laws are hegemonic or unethical? A few lines
later she states that “scientific Laws need to be returned according to a view of
the subject of knowledge as a complex singularity, an affective assemblage and a
relational vitalist entity.”17 This would be stirring if it were not so obscure. “Law”
is written in capitals as a way of again signaling the presence of a bully-bugbear
episteme. No examples are given as to what these laws, or Laws, might be, or
in what the “retuning” consists. Similarly, another advocate of new materialism,
David Wood, asserts that “there is agency beyond the human—not just in other
creatures but in material forces and other assemblages.”18 When not having re-
course to mystical statements such as these, Braidotti is content with generalities,
so long as the rhetoric is an oppositional call to arms: “The question is whether the
Humanities [again provocatively, resentfully capitalized] are allowed to set their
own agenda in relation to contemporary science and technology, or whether they
are confined to places they did not choose in the first place.”19 Which aspect of
the “Humanities” remains unstated, the “agenda” is not described, what aspects
of “contemporary science” remain undeclared, and what the spaces of confinement
exactly are is still up in the air. One wonders if we ought to boycott the use of the
internet as an example of capitalism and contemporary science. We might recall
that the French Revolution briefly tried to alter the calendar, to no lasting effect.
Meanwhile we are advised by Wood that the Enlightenment “undoubtedly has
blood on its hands.”20 Notwithstanding the partial truth of a claim like this, these
are assertive liberties indeed.
Art—but again what kind is untold—is a convenient repository for these vagaries:
By transposing us beyond the confines of bound identities, art becomes neces-

sarily inhuman in the sense of non-human in that it connects to the animal, the
vegetable, earthy and planetary forces that surround us. Art is also, moreover,
cosmic in its resonance and hence posthuman in its structure, as it carries us to
the limits of what our embodied selves can do or endure. 21
This is highly alarming stuff, especially in its masquerade of rigorous scholarship. It

is at best a crowning example of the worst and most vertiginous abuses of Deleuzian
vitalism. Thankfully at least, except where heading a sentence, art is not delivered as
capitalized. Art, as we understand and use it, is what grew out of Europe after the
Middle Ages, beginning with the Renaissance, hence the flowering of humanism.
Art since the 1960s, and contemporary understandings of art which were circulating
when Braidotti was writing the book, overstepped many historical premises of art,
but these were tenaciously retained in one way or another by the commercial market,
for art is a precious commodity, especially in times of economic uncertainty. But
perhaps all of these allowances are already taking the above comments too seriously:
Art “is … cosmic in its resonance and hence inhuman in its structure.” The cosmic
resonances of art would need more validation, as would the sneaky ploy of reasoning
in “hence.” We still lie in wait for more information about art’s “structure” which is
purportedly translatable to posthumanism. Let the parsing stop here lest it become
more infuriating than it already is.
94 Adam Geczy
Thankfully unintoxicated by Deleuze, Bruno Latour poses a more convincing set of
arguments against regnant forces captured under well-used terms such as hegemonic
masculinity (now transmuted to “toxic masculinity”) or capitalism by calling for a
need for more detailed and nuanced explanations of these terms as opposed to their
glib and suggestive use.22 Social inquiry is tasked with the need to make sense of
social forces, and in doing so to expose the heterogeneity of elements that underride
systems. That is, how biological, economic, semiotic, and sundry “realms” contribute
to the formation of nations, institutions, and cultural formations. 23 While Latour
has never declared himself as a new materialist per se, he can be cited as providing a
more sensible and workable set of intellectual keys to combating superannuated and
sclerotic epistemological models. He does not deal with art, which is where some of
the most aberrant examples and simplifications of new materialism are played out.
Posthumanist deliberations
This brief and admittedly selective gloss of the tenets of new materialism nonetheless
helps to lay out a definition of both its theoretical substance and the pitfalls of its
methods and rhetoric. One of the more disingenuous and fragile corollaries are with
new materialism and posthumanism, even to the extent that it does not take much
reading of new materialist writing (I resist using the word scholarship) to see that
they are often used interchangeably. Both terms are equally provocative and equally
liable to misunderstanding and misapplication. It is art that exposes their difference,
however, because art is made by humans with human interest in mind (in the very
broadest sense imaginable), and it is art that is rooted in the material—in the sense
of a thing. To clarify: When discussed in the abstract, art is an object, a work, or an
experience. When art is immaterial, it declares the material through its absence, or
gestures to one as a dematerialized image, or else an evocation in the viewer, such
as a memory. Art requires the mutual insufficiency of materialization of some sort
together with the socially constructed context, that is, the human aspect. Some very
serious problems arise when valorization is given to the material, which is the task to
unpack for the rest of what is to follow.
Posthumanism, as Hayles describes it, is a consequence of technology, cognitively
as well as physiologically. With posthumanism,
human functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it

inhabits expand. In this model, it is not a question of leaving the body behind,
but rather of extending embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material
ways that would be impossible without electronic prostheses. 24
Posthumanism radically restages and recalibrates the meanings of nature and reality.
In the humanist universe, nature and the natural are myths of foundational non-
mediation, whereas the posthumanist not only embraces mediation, but acknowledges
the extent to which our beings are embedded within it. The reoriented awareness of
nature and the human extends well beyond that of matter. If anything, when extrapo-
lated, posthumanism points to the dissolution of matter, since the destiny of matter is
to be pushed into a virtual plane. Posthumanism in art has vast implications in terms
of authorship, as well as those of the concrete body. It also destabilizes authorship
and subjectivity.
Bland Matter 95
To suggest that new materialism embraces the dissolution is to have it both ways,
or, it is admission from the start that new materialism is a term that teeters on being
a misnomer. We need to be reminded that new materialism is said to be a “materi-
alist turn” away from the “linguistic turn” of Saussure, Jakobsen, Wittgenstein, and
poststructuralism of the twentieth century. It is an effort to surmount or sidestep ide-
ologies and discursive arrangements through encounters with materials and bodies.
It maintains that the imposition of language games has blinded us to a more basic
encounter with matter. Barad, for instance, cites the possibilities of “intra-actions”
between meaning (language) and matter. Given that most art is both idea and mate-
rial, and that it is a form of mediation that seeks to make the material communicate,
it can be harnessed to the call of new materialism. There are enormous pitfalls to this,
not least because Barad is unclear as to what these intra-actions, as upliftingly novel
as they may sound, consist in, when they take place, and how they might be applied.
Unless of course, this is all just a rewriting of the age-old aesthetic encounter.
Before developing these ideas further, it might be best to turn to an artistic precur-
sor to these rewritten approaches: Relational art. Relational art is either the forerun-
ner to new materialism or just a component part, given the many definitions of new
materialist ontology as “relational.” Relational aesthetics, or relational art, as is well
known, grew out of the 1990s, under the theoretical leadership of the critic-curator,
Nicolas Bourriaud, and advanced in his eponymous book in 1998. Using terms that
had begun to be popularized by the internet, which was still in relative infancy, Bour-
riaud defines relational aesthetics as being interactive, “user-friendly,” and DIY. In
all, it was open to all, and eminently inclusive. It was, however, a reworking, a safe
remixing of Situationism from the 1950s and ’60s, while Situationism did not even
see itself as an artistic movement, but was harnessed and interpreted by artists (and
beyond such as by the designer-entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren) as a strategic toolkit
for countercultural activity. But Bourriaud’s sanitized version of it was yet another
reminder of the dissipation of sub- and countercultural movements, and their absorp-
tion into the capitalist system. 25
For under Bourriaud’s curation the artists were safely housed under a gallery roof,
and the artists engaged in suitably warming activities, such as serving soup for the
audience. Claire Bishop, writing in 2004, astutely observed that relational art “seems
to derive from a creative misreading of poststructuralist theory: rather than interpre-
tations of a work of art being open to reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to
be in perpetual flux.”26 In many ways relational art is an unwittingly elegiac activity,
as it mourns the time of authentic activism (when it was believed) with a ghostly sub-
stitute, a utopian stand-in that acts out community in counterfeit. The materiality of
interaction is a disavowal and hence a reminder of the increasing disenfranchisement,
division, and inequality in late capitalist society.
Art and the sacredness of matter, or, steeped in the thing

Art is haunted by things. It is made of something and is about something. One of
the most engaging and challenging aspects of minimalism was that something was
required for the expression, assertion, allusion, and registration of nothing. This is
an ancient mystical notion in any case, but is one of minimalism’s most powerful as-
pects, as it reacted to the saturation of visual information and subjectivity of abstract
expressionism. Conceptualism, which placed the idea before the object, nonetheless
96 Adam Geczy
needed some kind of object in order to instate the idea. As poets and artists from
Mallarmé to Kosuth have noted, an idea can be a work of art, and as soon as that
thought is thought as such, as art, it becomes a thing, because it is named and classi-
fied. Whether or not it is good art, or art worthy of even that small effort, falls under
a different category of inquiry.
Digitization affords the art object a potential limitlessness in iteration and incar-
nation: It can be in many places at the same time, on different interfaces, in different
sizes, different colors, and beyond. In the 1990s, when the internet and digital art
were beginning to evolve in a way accessible to an increasing number of people, pho-
tography also began to have more widespread popularity among curators and col-
lectors. The pervasiveness of photography as not only an acceptable art form (which
it had been for some time) but a marketable quantity for investment could be seen
as a destabilization of centuries-old hierarchies of the art object based on criteria of
physicality and uniqueness.
The noticeable surge in artists working in reproducible media, accompanied with
the desire to collect such works, had inevitable consequences. (Video would soon fol-
low to become a mainstream, fashionable practice.) Painting, which enjoyed a revival
in the 1980s in what was colloquially called the “return to painting,” witnessed yet
another display of its tenacity. In the presence of the reproducible object, painting’s
resilience could be seen, in part, as an expression of the commodity market. Digital
reproduction soon became the norm, as did the virtual sale, where galleries would
post the work of their blue-chip artists to a select number of VIP buyers before un-
leashing the work into the world. In a climate of mass virtualization, it is only un-
derstandable that there would be a backlash toward materialization, a return to the
material. This can be seen in new generations of expressionist and gestural art, and
the pride taken over painterliness, critical references to touch and tactility, and, most
heroically of all, the physicality of paint. The same of course can be said of countless
other media, from synthetic to “natural,” such as wood and metal. It is platitude to
say that the physicality of the medium and the material form part of the work of art.
We also know that touch, especially when it comes to art, is phenomenologically
inferred rather than directly experienced. We are prohibited from touching paintings
in museums, and most of us are content to look at them. The prevalence of digital
images in our lives begs the question, however, of the extent to which those who have
grown up with digital multiplicity are cognitively both inured and responsive, so as to
argue that the experience of a work of art seen digitally is only different as a modality,
and neither qualitatively inferior nor inauthentic.
It is also for this reason that the return to the material has a certain reactionary
appeal. Ideologically it implies a return to basics. Its implication is a return to truth.
As opposed to humanism and posthumanism, which are terms about constructed
elements, the use of the word material, in any of its cognate forms, as with matter,
courts with it a sensitively but still preponderately recursive connotation of a return
to the precognitive, pre-predicative if we want to use a word from Husserl, the primal,
the unmediated, and the true. If new materialism is a means of combating the tyranny
of discursive structure and the linguistic bind, it does so with an implicit rhetoric of
a recourse to what is before language and which language cannot fathom. It is invio-
lable. We might call this the “materiality myth.” This is not to discount materiality,
which is its foregrounding, at the expense of the discourses that call it into being. It is
sentimentality that is silencing.
Bland Matter 97
The discourse of the materiality of the work of art has two tiers, one philosophical,
the other critical, both of which are largely modernist concepts. The materiality of
art comes into question with Plato and the ancient Greeks, with the artist as poetes,
a maker. For the ancients, the artist is invariably a maker of things in the world that
mimic the already existing things in the world, and if depending on the extent to
which you subscribed to Plato’s view of the artist as a counterfeiter, then these fabri-
cated things were the image of something perfectible or perfected. It is in the work of
burgeoning aesthetics and art criticism in the eighteenth century that the materiality
of the art object becomes an object of serious scrutiny, first in the work of Lessing
and Winckelmann, culminating in Hegel’s Aesthetics (1835). Drawing liberally from
Winckelmann, Hegel reflected on the different degrees of materiality and embodi-
ment of the work of art, tracing a historical evolution from the ancient Egyptians to
the Greeks, to his present in the early nineteenth century. Each stage—the symbolic,
classical, and romantic—marked the eventual disclosure of “Spirit,” culminating in
his notorious prediction of the end of art, when the carapace of art would be insuffi-
cient to the Spirit, for which it was a conduit. His historical teleology, which would
eventuate into art history as a discipline in its own right, was conceived as a passage
from materialization to dematerialization. Adequate to the symbolic was architec-
ture; to the classical, sculpture; and to the romantic, music and painting. Poetry stood
outside and above the hierarchy because it was the least material and the most con-
ceptual of all the artforms.
Here is not the place to dwell on the inconsistencies of Hegel’s theories, of which
there are many, but it still has valency for several reasons, especially with regard to the
idea of material adequation. In more contemporary terms, we might speculate upon
what is the “zeitgeist medium.” Fashion photographer Nick Knight, for instance, in
musing upon his establishment of SHOWstudio, speculates that photography was
no longer the “zeitgeist medium” it once was, given that the interest and energy had
inexorably shifted toward film. 27 This is his justification for ushering in the now
accepted genre of fashion film, a new form of virtual embodiment, through time
and movement. During the classical period, sculpture was for form adequate to the
corporealization of Greek culture, while in the painting and music of the “Romantic”
period (which for Hegel actually meant from the Middle Ages onward), the harmony
of the classical period had become gradually replaced with music and painting, which
were more apt vehicles for the historical subjectivity of Hegel’s day, which was less
coherent due to a striving that was not as present in previous eras. Romantic, which
is, for Hegel, modern subjectivity, was not self-referential but grasping at something
beyond itself. As Hegel puts it: “infinite subjectivity, the absolute of romantic art, is
not submerged in its appearing; it is in itself, and for that does not have its individu-
ality for itself but for others, freed and exposed to the outer surface.”28 Both formally
and figuratively, the art of the surface is painting. Stephen Houlgate remarks that for
Hegel, painting “replaces the solidity and materiality of sculpture with the Schein of
natural space, and so explicitly dissolves the idea that what we behold is irreducibly
material.”29 The chief concern is the modern preoccupation that the work of art is
not irreducible to its physical and material characteristics, but instead is informed by
a complex web of narratives, assumptions, discourses, and value judgments.
The second major deployment of the language of the material and materialism
in art begins as a response (as it was not simply a reaction) to technology in the
painterly surfaces of Manet, the impressionists, and postimpressionism. It is another
98 Adam Geczy
irrepressibly linear narrative toward non-objective abstraction and formalism formu-
lated by Clement Greenberg from the 1930s, climaxing in the 1950s (and dwindling
noticeably by the 1960s). It was also in the 1930s, in the wake of Russian constructiv-
ism and De Stijl, that artists such as Hans Jean Arp, Henry More, Noam Gabo, and
Barbara Hepworth began to work manually in wood and stone, with the common
thread being a “truth to materials.” Just as with the many warming connotations
that materialism is pregnant with, this was a rallying cry that was not without its
seductions. Among other things, it was an artistic direction that was meant to suggest
a return to the right path after the gathering momentum of technology that saw its
grisly result in the First World War. Truth to materials could mean different things
to different artists, but it largely consisted in a responsiveness to the material, a call
to “listen” to the material, which meant not going against the grain, in both the figu-
rative and literal sense of the expression. The artist made the most of the burs in the
wood and allowed the flowing grain structure to dictate the evolution of the form.
Arp referred to his sculptures as “concretions” which was meant to signify its own
definite physicality while also suggesting that it was a physical distillation of natural
forces.
It is hard not to enjoy these works, but we may also ask ourselves about the extent
to which our enjoyment is tempered by the very lack of intellectual apparatus that
is needed to appreciate them, given that their intent, written into the very process of
production, is the experience of the physical form, in all its unique materiality. And
with anything unique, it devolves into solipsism, a solipsism that is different from
minimalist solipsism, which uses it self-consciously, in no small part as a critique of
the more disingenuous solipsism of the triumphant materialism of high modernism
which is bracketed by the cataclysms of two World Wars. Indeed, the horrors con-
temporary with modernist, materialist art of the twentieth century prompt one to ask
the extent to which it was not a form of retreat into an experience where to know
and to think were replaced with feeling, but a feeling resolved in the object, and thus
objectively limited. With the authority of the cosmic security that “pure” materiality
can bring, not to beg any questions has its attendant comforts, comforts that are not
without their unanticipated consequences.
The return to wood, or barking up the wrong tree

The political implications of truth to material, return to the material, and new mate-
rialism are many, and yet they repeatedly wind up in reactionary conservatism which
is built on a muted essentialism. That is, an essentialism that dare not show its face
because it is ostensibly grounded in subjective experience (itself a dead end for debate)
and in an apparent respect for the world, the seat of matter.
A historical corrective to the political impasse that materialism—as a “return,”
as “truth,” or as “new”—leads to the example of Martin Heidegger, the Heidegger
after he had resigned the Rectorship of the University of Freiburg in 1934, and his
retreat (return?) to what he vowed to be a wholesome and less politically trammeled
existence in his country retreat. Despite his resignation he remained a member of the
Nazi Party. Heidegger had long been suspicious of the power of technology over hu-
manity, while also viewing nature and matter as “standing reserve” in wait for human
agency. In 1950 he published Holzwege, a collection of essays, including his famous
1935 lecture “The Origin of the Work of Art.” The title of the book was a loaded one,
Bland Matter 99
especially in light of the Nazi legacy of “blood and soil,” and the heavy sloganeering
of a call to a predestined Teutonic path. There were other ambiguities as well: Hei-
degger’s ontology refers to a “home” of ontology, a need for being to find its place of
truth—this is also a form of immanence that is, admittedly, along very different lines
from that of Spinoza (and Deleuze). Holzwege unabashedly evokes the image of the
modest woodcutter, tramping through the woods, unalloyedly responsive to the call
of nature. In his opening to the book, Heidegger validates the conceit of the title with
the explanation:
Wood [Holz] is an old name for forest. In the woods, there are paths, which
mostly end up over-grown, where no-one has set foot [im Unbegangenen]. They
are called woodcutter’s paths. Each one runs separately, but in the same forest.
Often one appears to be like the other. But it only appears to be that way. Wood
gatherers and foresters know these paths. They know what it means to be on “the
forester’s path.”30
Some know the way; others are wayward: Obstructed by the delusions of technology
and the complications of modern life. There are, thankfully people who “know.”
They are in touch with nature, and with matter. There are all too many parallels with
another ugly new materialist word, enmeshedness. (One commentator uses this term
with the great American poet of nature, Thoreau.)31
The reader will notice that this chapter has resisted following a route in defense of
the virtual. Other chapters in this volume can do that. When a global pandemic has
accelerated the virtualization of human interaction and relationships, we can only be
mindful of the backlash that this may force in the name of what is purportedly un-
deniable and impassable. The virtues attributed to the brute force of matter, of dumb
matter, is a myth that takes us back to motherhood, to nationhood, and the truth of
being. With this in mind, it is also worth recalling that the German phrase auf dem
Holzwege sein (literally: to be on the woodcutter’s path) means to “bark up the wrong
tree”32 or to be “up the garden path.”
Notes
1 “New Materialism and Visual Arts,” University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam School for
Cultural Analysis, accessed April 18, 2020, https://asca.uva.nl/content/research-groups/
new-materialism-and-visual-art/new-materialism-and-visual-art.html?cb.
2 C. A. Richardson, “New Materialism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society 21 (1920–
21): 70.
3 Georg Lukács, Werke (Berlin: Hermann Lichterhand, 1971), 11:48.
4 Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza et les trois ‘éthiques’,” Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993),
177; emphasis in the original.
5 Deleuze, 177–8; emphasis in the original.
6 Deleuze, 178.
7 Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without
Contradiction,” in Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science, ed. L. H. Nelson and
J. Nelson (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 177.
8 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 185.
9 Barad, 185.
10 Vicki Kirby, What If Culture Was Nature all Along? (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2017), 10.
100 Adam Geczy
11 Kirby, 20.
12 Helen Palmer, “A Field of Heteronyms and Homonyms: New Materialism, Speculative
Fabulation, and Wor(l)ding,” in New Directions in Philosophy and Literature, ed. Da-
vid Rudrum, Ridvan Askin, and Frida Beckman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2019), 219.
13 Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Litera-
ture, and Infomatics (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1999).
14 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 2.
15 Braidotti, 3.
16 Braidotti, 171.
17 Braidotti, 171.
18 David Wood, On Being Geologically Human (New York: Fordham University Press,
2019), 101.
19 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 172.
20 Wood, On Being Geologically Human, 101.
21 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 107.
22 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 130–1.
23 Latour, 5–6.
24 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 290–1.
25 See Geczy, “Sanitised Situationism,” Broadsheet 37, no. 2 (2008): 124–7.
26 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 52.
27 Nick Night, “Thoughts on Fashion Film,” Show Studio, YouTube video, accessed April 22,
2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOBZMS9Bhr0&t=303s&has_verified=1.
28 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995),
2:144.
29 Stephen Houlgate, “Hegel and the Art of Painting,” in Hegel and Aesthetics, ed. William
Maker (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 1975), 64.
30 Gitta Honnegger, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2001), 244.
31 Michael Shrimper, “Thoreau’s Poetry and the New Materialism: A Matter of ‘Enmeshed-
ness’,” The Concord Saunterer 26 (2018): 55–78.
32 Honnegger, Thomas Bernhard, 244.
8 Bandness
Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre
Just as contemporary art absorbs objects and cultural phenomena that are not yet art
into its orbit, so too has rock and pop music become increasingly omnivorous at its
definitional borders. Core to these analogous developments is the mythologization
of the figure of the “band” as a creative agent and “world-maker.” These shared ab-
sorptive capacities in art and music bring us to the question at the heart of this essay:
What does a rock band have in common with a work of contemporary art? Although
this might initially appear to be a rather odd line of inquiry, we found this question
sufficiently intriguing to actually “form” a band—named the Ghosts of Nothing—to
perform an artist function within the “artworld.”1 And it is with this particular col-
laborative mutation of the artistic function in mind that we will attempt to tease out
the slippery notion of “bandness.”
Although the ontology of music—including popular and rock music—has, in gen-
eral terms, been the focus of much scholarly activity in recent decades, the ontology
of bandness as a specific topic within this expansive field has received surprisingly
little attention. 2 As John Andrew Fisher observes, there is an ontological complexity
to rock music—which he distinguishes from both popular and classical music—that
arises from “whole domains of aesthetic interest” that are not necessarily as evident
in other musical genres.3 Fisher, Gracyk, and others have identified the centrality of
recordings to any proper account of the ontology of rock music.4 We suggest that the
elusive quality of bandness also features prominently in this ontological landscape
and is important for both rock and other forms of popular music. Our aim, in what
follows, is not to develop a systematic account of all the relevant issues, but rather
to offer a preliminary sketch of the implications of pursuing one particular line of
thought in what turns out to be an intriguingly multi-faceted problem.
Let us open with the following proposition: Although a band might produce mate-
rial artifacts and sensorial affects, its perceived existence is predicated upon a consen-
sually recognized, although not uniformly projected, immaterial fiction somewhere in
space and time. At first glance, “immaterial,” “virtual,” or “fictional” bands are the
exceptions that prove the rule. Imaginary creative works can only be experienced when
we imagine their effect in the world. Yet how do we transmit these imaginary effects
from one mind to another? The (impossible, real-world) existence of a non-existent
band frustrates this as we attempt to imagine effects designed to preclude the imag-
ining of effects. However, a nagging doubt persists. Are fictional bands—or, indeed,
immaterial works of art more generally—ever really immaterial? Just as digital works
require physical networks, hardware devices, and electricity to be physically perceiva-
ble, concepts require physical organic structures to be conceived, borne in mind, and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-8
102 Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre
communicated to others. Today, as a consequence of this unequivocable fact, it is gen-
erally accepted that the dematerialization of conceptual art was never actually possi-
ble. By contrast, contemporary “postconceptual art,” as is usefully described by Peter
Osborne, is understood in terms of a dynamic mutual insufficiency of conceptual and
aesthetic dimensions activated through processes of fictionaliztion.5 So, in what kinds
of ways then might our fictional band the Ghosts of Nothing actually “exist?”
The flawed suggestion that a creative work might be immaterial has been put
forward by several thinkers over the last century.6 Notwithstanding the fallacy un-
derpinning this claim, when distilled to its central premise, it nevertheless serves to
highlight the way in which interpretation of any physical artifact or gesture is always
highly dependent upon an invisible informational backstory. The depth of that back-
story inevitably varies between different individuals and groups. For champions of
this view, the aesthetic procedure involves artist and audience jointly realizing certain
mental states, and, as a consequence, art is fundamentally expression.7 This expres-
sion is then individually decoded in light of an intersubjectively agreed context, that
is, culture, which is constantly changing, fragmenting, recombining, and mutating.
Consequently, as this argument goes, a work of art is not an artifact at all, just as a
song doesn’t need to be played or written down in order to exist in a mind—as an
imaginary thing—and nowhere else. The actual making of the tune is therefore the
physical creation of an imaginary tune. However, as cognitive neuroscience reveals,
even an entirely imaginary melody is still associated with neuronal traces in specific
areas of the brain, and is therefore irredeemably physical, at least in some small part.8
And herein lies the Achilles’ heel of any proposition which claims that works of art—
or indeed bands—can ever be absolutely and completely immaterial.
The idea that art exists in the space of ideas, feelings, values, and associations formed
around certain things or events seems to make sense, and can readily be accepted, up
to a point. However, as Jeffrey Strayer demonstrated in his 2007 book Subjects and
Objects,9 even the most immaterial works at the outermost limits of abstraction/con-
ceptualism still invariably require something that is irreducibly material—a “public
perceptual object” to use Strayer’s term—which “points,” possibly through a sequen-
tial chain of multiple intervening immaterial imaginings, to the intended conceptual
endpoint. Such material beginnings may well be very slight indeed, perhaps just a few
words or a sketchy image inked on a page or pixelated on a physical computer screen,
but, nevertheless, material they stubbornly remain. How the intended conceptual or
immaterial endpoint of these material beginnings is interpreted—whether as artwork,
band, or something else—depends, in turn, on the cultural context(s) in which the
material object(s) is considered, by a perceiving audience, to have the potential to be
meaningfully interpreted in certain ways and under certain conditions. To simplify
his meticulous analysis, Strayer shows us that, minimally, even the most abstracted
and dematerialized work of art depends on:
• At least one public perceptual object

• At least one perceiving subject
• The subject’s appreciation of an artworld10 context in which the object is
interpreted
Mindful of Strayer’s analysis, we will now attempt to demonstrate that an analogous

proposition holds for our elusive socio-cultural category of bandness.
Bandness 103
So, what are the minimum ingredients for a band? What evidence is required in
order to accept that a band actually exists? “Live” performances are clearly not man-
datory, as exemplified by bands such as the Monkees (initially), the Dukes of Strat-
osphear (an alter ego of XTC), or even the Beatles, who famously ceased touring
altogether but certainly did not cease to exist as a band. A lack of recordings is also no
obstacle, as the existence of countless garage bands will attest. Virtual performances,
including those by parodic or fictional bands, are evidently one means of coming
into being as a band—as exemplified by Spinal Tap, Flight of the Conchords, and
the Rutles. So, it might appear that some kind of musical performance is essential,
whether filmed, televised, virtual, or live. The fact that each of these fictional bands
eventually went on to also perform live concerts and release records, just like “real”
bands, might be interpreted as prima facie evidence that some form of perceivable
music is indeed essential. However, to show that this is not the case, consider the case
of completely fictional bands that have never played a note of music, live or otherwise,
and possibly never will.
Such amusical bands can and do nevertheless exist as memes in popular culture.
There are numerous examples. Take, for instance, Bennie and the Jets, the subjects
of the song of the same name from Elton John’s Yellow Brick Road (1973) album.
Or if not fully fledged memes, at least as literary references known well enough in
certain quarters; here we could point to Billy Barf and the Vomitones (from Thomas
Pynchon’s Vineland (1990)) or the Blow Goes (from Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork
Orange (1962)). What about the suggestion that a band is a uniplural descriptor, and
should therefore have at least two members, if not more? This criterion is quickly
negated through the example of one-member bands such as Nine Inch Nails (really
Trent Reznor). Many bands have also meaningfully existed for extended periods with
only one member. Dave Grohl, for example, was effectively the only member of the
Foo Fighters during the recording of their first studio album. Similarly, Billy Corgan
has been the only member of Smashing Pumpkins since 2009. Marina of Marina and
the Diamonds is now simply referred to as Marina. Our list could go on.
This gloss of variations that run close to the minimal limits of bandness demon-
strates that, if it is indeed a coherent cultural category (as common usage would
suggest), then all the usual attributes—music, performance, individually identifiable
members, and so on—may be present in reality. But it would seem that none of these
attributes are finally absolutely essential for a band to be considered to exist. This
much is apparent from the examples of the fictional bands cited above, whose ex-
istence depends merely on being named, in a book, song lyric, or film, and nothing
more. No music has ever been, nor ever needs to be, played by these bands. No photos
or interviews exist nor need ever exist. No members need to be identified. All that is
required in these cases is (1) at least one—but possibly no more than one—public per-
ceptual object (e.g., a name) able to be experienced (in a book, recording, or film), by
(2) a single perceiving subject, in (3) a cultural context that allows for the possibility
of inferring the existence of a band from perceptual experience only. In other words,
the minimal limits of bandness are just as Strayer concludes for art at the outermost
minimal limits of abstraction.
It might be argued that fictional bands do not qualify as proper bands. However,
the examples of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Dukes of Stratosphear
remind us that the boundaries between fiction and reality can be very blurred indeed.
Moreover, any demarcation along these lines is vulnerable to sudden reversal in light
of subsequent developments. Take again, for example, the transformation of Spinal
Tap from parodic fictional film band to touring live band with “follow-up” albums no
longer linked directly with the original film. Or to cite another example, the animated
band Gorillaz has also played live in concert as holographic projections alongside ac-
tual physical appearances from guest performers such as De La Soul, and Mick Jones
and Paul Simonon of the Clash.
It would seem that the threads of categorical continuity can be stretched very thin
indeed and yet, somehow, not entirely break. Consider the appropriation of the name
Heaven 17—another fictional band first presented in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange—
by a real band formed in 1980 by two departing members of the Human League. While
disambiguation may be important in certain contexts, it would seem that, at a higher
level of abstraction, Heaven 17 can be legitimately used as a band name which refers
to a cultural category that is large enough to contain both Burgess’ fictional band and
the real synth-pop band of the same name. More tenuously, consider the list of bands
whose names came from book titles with no obvious association with music; think
Belle & Sebastian, Soft Machine, Steppenwolf, and the Doors (to name just some). The
more we multiply examples, the more we find that the accrual of newly sedimented
layers of meaning over time is not the exception but rather the rule of bandness. Our
first observation is that whatever else a band may be, it is an inherently dynamic cat-
egory, fundamentally a temporal process, subject to continual changes—even major
discontinuities—in any of its constituent parts and ontological dimensions.11
Perhaps, we might suppose (in desperation), the only mandatory constant is the
name. But once again, we don’t have to look very hard for examples that throw even
this into doubt. Shihad, for example—originally named after a term used in David
Lynch’s 1984 film Dune (based on a Frank Herbert novel)—renamed their band as
Pacifier following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In an amusing press re-
lease issued on the same day as Shihad’s name change, punk band Frenzal Rhomb
mockingly announced that they would thereafter claim the name Shihad. Later, re-
gretting their decision, Pacifier would change their name back to Shihad in 2004.
(Here, we are also amusingly reminded of the Monty Python sketch about a band that
continuously changed its name.) Name changes are certainly not uncommon events
in the history of bands. Famously, the Silver Beetles became the Silver Beatles, and
then finally the Beatles in mid-1960, but perhaps few would insist that these names
don’t all (more or less) refer to the band we would accept as the real Beatles, albeit
in their earliest days. Other complications can also muddy the waters without totally
undermining the resilience of a band name in common use. For example, Ringo Starr,
arguably pivotal to any mainstream understanding of what “the Beatles” connotes
as a band, only joined the group in mid-1962. And when the Beatles performed in
Australia with a replacement drummer (Jimmy Nicol) because Ringo was unavaila-
ble due to illness, audiences still accepted that they were legitimately witnessing the
Beatles play live. Evidently, individual members can come and go, while a band as a
particular socio-cultural entity carries on.
Are we then to conclude that there are no absolutely essential characteristics of
bandness whatsoever? Perhaps we have been too hasty in dismissing any requirement
for some minimal association of bandness with music? To be sure, the examples al-
ready cited demonstrate that a band need not ever produce any music, real or imagi-
nary. However, this is not quite the same as saying that bandness does not imply the
possibility, or perhaps even the expectation, that any entity which qualifies as a band,
Bandness 105
fictional or otherwise, has the potential to produce music, even if that music has never
been heard, may never be heard, and indeed may never be made. In principle, all the
examples of bands that we have presented above could—or even should—be able to
make music, even if we can’t be sure what that music might sound like, or even if it
has not yet been made. Indeed, we are unable to think of any examples of bands, real
or fictional, which are fundamentally and permanently removed from the possibil-
ity of making music.12 In other words, it seems to us that—at least at this point in
history—the possibility of bandness in a given context also equates to the possibility
of music-making.
Based on this brief discussion, and adapting Strayer’s analysis presented above, we
might tentatively conclude that the minimal requirements of bandness are:
• At least one public perceptual object (not necessarily musical)

• At least one perceiving subject
• The subject’s awareness of a socio-cultural context that suggests or allows the
possibility of interpreting the public perceptual object in terms of bandness,
which at least includes the possibility that the band could make music
At this point, we could also ask what things look like at the opposite extreme. Is there
perhaps an upper limit to how much extra-musical content can be funneled into the
concept of a given band before the category of bandness collapses under the weight
of its non-musical overburden? Without laboring the argument, a couple of examples
suggest that, if there is indeed any upper limit, it is probably constrained by practical
considerations and human limitations rather than any a priori theoretical determi-
nations. Certainly, the band category of the Beatles, to return to this example, at the
zenith of its popularity, seemed effortlessly able to accommodate an extraordinarily
rich array of additional non-musical public perceptual objects— ranging from dolls,
to films, to cartoons, to plastic wigs, to fanzines, and well-publicized events with
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Lennon, and Yoko Ono, and much more besides—without
depleting their bandness and, more to our point, potentially amplifying what their
bandness might mean at a particular point in history. This example suggests that, if
there is any upper limit at all, it is a distant prospect. The same could be said of many
other heavily merchandised “super bands” at the height of their popularity, such as
Kiss, Abba, or One Direction.
Indeed, today, this capacity for superabundance in almost any imaginable cate-
gory of extra-musical merchandising has been taken to hyperbolic extremes by the
“K-Pop” (short for Korean pop) industry—as exemplified by the seven-member global
“boy band” sensation BTS. For many fans, the BTS universe that winds through the
band’s musical and extra-musical merchandising output has become a convincing and
all-encompassing alternate reality which has contributed to the staggering October
2020 valuation of BTS’s management company Big Hit Entertainment at KRW 8.7
trillion (US$7.6 billion).13 For another upper limit example of extra-musical mate-
rialization, consider the French electronic band M83 (nowadays also essentially a
one-person group), named after the galaxy Messier 83 (or M83), and thereby effort-
lessly absorbing a far distant extra-terrestrial dimension into its conceptual orbit.
Indeed, no connection to any previously unrelated categories seems to be unassailably
out of bounds, as the example of Depressizona exorum, a snail named after Dutch
post-punk band the Ex, demonstrates.14
Here, our own extra-musical explorations as the fictional band cum artistic collab-
oration the Ghosts of Nothing is also relevant. Our band (like any band) exists within
a mutually insufficient relationship between the vehicular function of physical arti-
facts/events and immaterial projections of thought. Consequently, we conspicuously
exploit the fact that aesthetic experience exists both within and beyond direct sense
perception. As discussed earlier, one obvious example of this play of sensory and
extra-sensory elements is found in our partly fictional and partly physically realized
work In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour (2014–18), presented in three
consecutive acts. Figure 8.1, for example, is a full-page advertisement that we placed
in issue 45 of the Italian art magazine Mousse (October–November 2014) “promot-
ing” the first act, In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour of Abandoned Music
Venues (2014–15). Here, a closer reading of the detailed text reveals that many of
the listed performances on this “tour” occur at historically significant music venues
which are abandoned, no longer exist, or have been decommissioned. Although there
is very little else to go on, this single advertisement, even if considered in hypothet-
ically perfect isolation from any and all other material traces, clues, and pointers,
nevertheless, manages to achieve a singular feat: It asserts, and thereby brings into be-
ing, the conceptual existence of a band—perhaps fictional, perhaps not—but a band
nevertheless, known as the Ghosts of Nothing.
Significantly, this world tour included dates that were nothing other than an act of
conceptual nomination—by virtue of a line in a printed advertisement—in the minds
of our audience. Yet perhaps even more significantly, our tour also included dates on
which specific events did actually occur on the dates and in the locations specified.15
Clearly, both the “gigs” in which something actually happened and the ones that were
simply “built in the mind” add something to our story and the expanding conceptual
architecture of our band cum artwork. As is the case with other partly fictionalized
works of art and artistic collectives (such as Walid Raad’s Atlas Group [1989–2004]),
it is also at least in part our intention that our fictionalizations might invite specula-
tion upon the nature of fictions more generally.
Looking back through the highly mythologized histories of both art and rock
“n” roll, it is tempting to ponder if some historically significant performances or
exhibitions actually took place at the time and place upon which their respective
mythologies are built. But does this ultimately matter? Surely, the partly or wholly
fictionalized nature of these performances or exhibitions does not necessarily dimin-
ish the weight or significance of their historical impact. The important thing is that
they ultimately influenced or affected far more people than could possibly have been
physically present. Although most of us did not directly experience the infamous
performances of some of the seminal rock bands that underpin our understanding of
rock “n” roll’s mythologies, we are nevertheless able to build something of them in
our minds. We might have seen some film footage, perhaps a single image, or perhaps
we simply heard a second-hand anecdotal account. Over time and space, these my-
thologies have proliferated as memes. We might know something of Iggy Pop cutting
himself on stage or Ozzy Osbourne “doing a line” of ants. We also, consciously or
subconsciously, channel the impact of such memes whenever we directly experience
performances by derivative artists in the same genre.
To what extent and in what ways does it really matter whether or not an audience
directly witnesses a supposedly originary event, or for that matter, whether or not any
documentary account of such an event—such as a photograph—can be “trusted” as a
legitimate record of what allegedly took place? Notwithstanding the well-established
Bandness 107
Figure 8.1 T
he Ghosts of Nothing Advertisement for In Memory of Johnny B. Goode:
World Tour of Abandoned Music Venues 2014–15 as published in the Italian
art magazine Mousse 45, (October–November 2014): 261.
fact that a photograph—or a video or sound recording—is necessarily fragmentary
and therefore fundamentally incapable of wholly indexing or accounting for the real-
ity it purports to index, the document can also become an important materialization
within the expanded world of the work capable of offering an alternative entry portal.
Moreover, when considered together with other material and narrative elements, doc-
umentation helps to performatively extend the identity of a given work in the minds
of audiences potentially located elsewhere in space in time. Conversely, any elision of
narrative elements highlights the basic synchronicity of the photograph—for it effec-
tively stops time and reifies the nominated scene as image. Yet an image is a bounded
representation (unavoidably edited and very possibly altered or enhanced) of a fleeting
instant in time. Its meaning is always contingent upon context and viewers’ presup-
positions for its interpretation.16 Thus, there is an inescapable under-specification
associated with all images and all fragments (no matter how monumental or vast). As
we discuss further below, this under-specification was especially foregrounded in the
aesthetics of Romanticism and its present continuations. These fundamentally una-
voidable connective chains only further reinforce the mutual insufficiency of concept
and material. Importantly, this essential connection can be activated via any number
of supplementary structures—such captioning, a beholder’s pre-existing knowledge
of the artist or event, and any other images and paratexts that might surround a “pri-
mary” presentation.
For Amelia Jones, writing on the relationship between performance art and pho-
tography, just as the “art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened;
the photograph needs the body art event as an ontological ‘anchor’ of its indexical-
ity.”17 Importantly, not only does this mutual interdependence of performance and
documentation challenge the status and deification of the originary event, it actually
affirms the status of documentation as a key point of access to the work. Philip Aus-
lander takes this line of argument further. For Auslander, “we cannot dismiss studio
fabrications of one sort or another from the category of performance art because they
were not performed for a physically present audience.”18 Drawing upon the histori-
cal example of a substantially altered photomontage by Shunk-Kender of an original
performance by French artist Yves Klein at Rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses
titled Le Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) (1960), Auslander claims,
to argue that Klein’s leap was not a performance because it took place only within
photographic space would be equivalent to arguing that the Beatles did not per-
form the music on their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album because
that performance exists only in the space of the recording.19
Notwithstanding the necessity of at least one public perceptual object to activate

audience recognition of the existence of a work, we can conclude that at least part of
the aesthetic experience of a work of art—or a rock band—is built in the minds of its
suitably predisposed audience, through layers of documentation and a mix of actual
events presented in conjunction with layers of active fictionalization. In the case of the
Ghosts of Nothing, our process of conceptually marking a world tour of In Memory
of Johnny B Goode involved superimposing new objects over the already established
historical record of each of the listed venues. For our audience, despite the fact that
much of this tour remained beyond the realm of direct experience, and the fact that
only a selection of the advertised dates would ultimately correspond with an actual
Bandness 109
live performance, we still provided an aesthetic experience made apparent via an ex-
ercise of orientation—and orienteering—of thought.
There are numerous historical examples of artists that have used thought projec-
tions as a primary element in their work. Two examples that push at the outer limits
of such an approach are Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin’s non-specific column
of air over Oxfordshire in 1967, and the moment of 1:36 pm, June 15, 1969, in which
Robert Barry nominated All the Things I Know but of Which I Am Not at the Mo-
ment Thinking. In both of these cases, it is still clear that a minimal vehicular support
was required (i.e., a declaration made public in words) in order to transmit the work
to an audience.
So, as we have shown, any attempt to create art—or a band—which is entirely im-
material and conceptual in nature is doomed to fail. Likewise, there can be no such
thing as a work of art—or a band—that is completely material, that is, completely de-
void of conceptual content. Without conceptual content, the kinds of materializations
that we recognize as a work of art—or a band—would be incapable of transcending
arbitrariness or ordinariness within the continuum of everything else that is not al-
ready socio-culturally considered to be a work of art, or a band. This, put simply,
is an inevitable consequence of the mutually insufficient dimensions of concept and
aesthetic that Osborne identified as requisite ingredients of a work of art.20
To briefly take stock before proceeding further, it seems apparent that the concep-
tual complex of any given band is potentially able to accommodate a hypothetically
infinite constellation of existent objects, real or imagined, without negating its con-
tinuing state of bandness. Therefore, as we tentatively conclude, there is no finite
maximal upper limit awaiting nomination.
It is at this juncture that we begin to suspect that we may have become somewhat
ensnared in the impasses of either/or thinking, searching for hard and fast limits or
permanent definitional dimensions where, in all probability, none exist. While we
have sketched out some apparently minimal requirements of bandness above, a gen-
eral suspicion lingers that these are, at best, tenuous and transient, subject to revision
as the socially accepted parameters of bandness as a conceptual category continue
to evolve in time. Even the potential for music-making, which we have salvaged as
a vestigial minimum criterion of bandness as generally understood today, may not
be immune to revision at some point in the future, for example, as the definition of
“music” itself escapes into unexpected territories. This is an open definition. Just as
Jean-Jacques Nattiez has argued that “the border between music and noise is always
culturally defined,”21 we might by extension assert that the border between band
and non-band is also necessarily culturally defined. It seems that all we can safely
conclude is that bandness is a concept, and concepts are processes, inherently fuzzy
and subject to change. To be sure, the concept of bandness is evidently a generously
accommodating one, even omnivorously so, while at the same time highly tolerant of
the circumstantial absence—or deliberate avoidance—of virtually all of its available
ontological dimensions. This confluence of omnivorous accommodation and toler-
ance of extreme minimality is what makes the terrain of bandness such an appealing
field for our artistic exploration.
Countless other cultural objects can be problematized along similar lines. It is for
this reason that creative works can be implicitly critically valued as fictions inso-
far as they reveal something about the nature of fictions more broadly. A multina-
tional corporation, for example, can turn over all of its employees, executive board,
geographical locations, physical infrastructures, change its name and line of prod-
ucts, or in some cases even its entire line of business, and all the while be regarded as
meaningfully and continuously existing as a single entity with a connected and trace-
able history. Perhaps the only thing that will deem a corporation as effectively non-
existent is a consensually recognized legal determination and subsequent liquidation
of its assets. Similarly, perhaps the only thing that will deem a band to be effectively
non-existent is a publicly recognized declaration that it has officially broken up. This
status, however, especially given the future prospect of a reformation tour or album,
is also potentially indefinite. In some cases, former band members have formed rival
reformation versions of the same band, each competing for perceived authenticity. To
cite just two examples, there have at various points in time been more than one Beach
Boys or Dead Kennedys in existence. It is also worth noting that long after some
bands have broken up, new fan bases can introduce radically divergent interpreta-
tions of their respective conceptual universes. In many cases, sincere appreciation can
evolve into ironic appreciation, and vice versa. In any event, it is certainly clear that
the conceptual universe of bandness can continue to mutate long after the officially
declared demise of the band itself.
Historically, there are a variety of different ways to theorize the seeming impos-
sibility of definitively pinning down a creative work in exclusive or specific relation
to any single object or symbolic configuration. Broadly speaking, however, it is clear
that in the case of a work of art, as Martin Heidegger puts it, “something other is
brought together with the thing that is made.”22 And, conversely, as Strayer use-
fully reminds us, even seemingly immaterial works still require something that is
irreducibly material—that is, a public perceptual object—which points, in concert
with various immaterial imaginings, to the intended identity of the work. For the
Ghosts of Nothing, the artistic potential for multiplying this curious quality across
multiple layers and cultural spaces using specific, material, artifactual devices is a
primary motivation. This is evidenced, for example, in our novel presentation of a
concept that now and hereafter effectively merges the two formerly independent fic-
tional worlds—the alienated artist/clown historically known as Pierrot 23 and the fic-
tional pop culture icon of Johnny B. Goode24 —to form the transmedia “story” that
is our rock album cum work of art, In Memory of Johnny B. Goode. In this case,
this juxtaposition of two fictional characters and their respective worlds—being the
confluence of an invented rock star and a nineteenth-century tragic clown—was used
to develop a radically materially and spatially distributed work of art. Meanwhile, at
the time of writing, another series of largely underappreciated yet strongly resonant
connections between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poets and artists with
late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century surf culture are being made in our sec-
ond major project, Sounds of Unridden Waves (2021–). This work, which sits some-
where between a reimagining of late Romantic era musings upon the ineffable power
of the ocean and the vernacular aesthetics of late twentieth-century surf culture, will
be presented as the world’s first feature-length surf film not to have any human surf-
ers, and set to an original instrumental soundtrack. Accompanying the core film and
soundtrack components, we are also developing a related series of materially diverse
exhibition and publishing outcomes.
There are, at least hypothetically, an unlimited range of objects and concepts that
a work of art or rock band might draw into its network of relations to form what
Osborne describes as the “space” of a “singular, though internally multitudinous
Bandness 111
25
work.” Somehow, both a work of contemporary art and a band are capable of
maintaining a sufficient degree of referential identity and unity, which, despite poten-
tial changes and evolutions, remain “irreducibly relational” across “the totality of its
multiple material instantiations.”26 The apparently permeable nature of these defini-
tional boundaries brings us to analogize contemporary postconceptual art with the
absorptive world-making capacity of bands, which we refer to as bandness. Strangely,
although it is relatively easy to recognize this unity, the “edges” of bandness are pro-
foundly indeterminate and seemingly impossible to neatly demarcate. Intriguingly,
when some non-musical things are intentionally or circumstantially brought into
conceptual proximity with a rock band, a strange ontological transformation can
take place. Here, much like the legacy of the Duchampian readymade, certain objects
or events can, under certain conditions, assume a dual ontological status. They are
recognizable both as everyday experiences and as part of a narrower complex of ma-
terializations that are also understood to contribute to the identity of a band.
Historically, it is apparent that many otherwise non-musical objects, locations, and
actions have become synonymous with specific rock band mythologies. Take, for ex-
ample, Liverpool or the Cavern, geographical locations now forever woven into the
definitional universe of the Beatles. Consider also the ways in which certain haircuts,
fashions, hotels, venues, memorabilia, drugs, myths, and lifestyle choices have become
synonymous with specific band-related “worlds.” As we will seek to demonstrate, this
peculiarly absorptive quality can be illuminated by adapting frameworks already well
established for discussing contemporary postconceptual art. Like a band, many con-
temporary works of art are not necessarily presented as a singular object, image, loca-
tion, or event. And, like a band, many artworks can be experienced by their respective
audiences in numerous ways, both directly and mediated, and, importantly, as an ag-
gregate of elements. As already noted, we see these shared qualities as productive ex-
amples of the dynamic mutual insufficiency of conceptual and aesthetic dimensions,
as activated through processes of fictionalization, and which Osborne has identified
as defining features of contemporary postconceptual art. Within Osborne’s account,
contemporary art can be characterized as part of a turn toward a transcategorical in-
finity of possible material means.27 Here he is referring to the almost ubiquitously ac-
cepted way in which virtually anything can now effectively function or be repurposed
as art, and the way that art can now be more or less embedded in any other way of
life. 28 This mutually absorptive quality is also described using the split ontology and
material exuberance which German art theorist Jörg Heiser brings to his formulation
of “Romantic conceptualism.”29 Considered together, we see these theoretical models
as a useful way to analogize the relational space between fact, fiction, and materiality
in both contemporary art and rock music.
With these questions and formulations in mind, we present the Ghosts of Noth-
ing’s particular version of bandness as existing in a quixotically expanded aesthetic
realm. In this realm, we have consciously foregrounded our own conspicuous physical
absence as human band members (in terms of avoiding traditionally branded pub-
lic presence or photographs). Importantly, the marked absence of such conventional
prompts and indices is intended to encourage audiences to look beyond our com-
mercially released musical works. For we seek to offer experiences of an intermedial
almost-band-like package (but, perhaps ambiguously, not quite) that appear to oper-
ate more like a work of art than a conventional music industry product. Accordingly,
we have sought both to actively problematize clear distinctions between exhibited
artifacts and band merchandise in our physical exhibitions, and, by extension, to use
these two distinct ontologies—of music industry and artworld—as part of a strategy
of continuous deferment. In our 2018 solo exhibitions at the Lock-Up in Newcastle30
and Contemporary Art Tasmania in Hobart, 31 for example, visitors could purchase
tour T-shirts and CDs but not the exhibited “art,” which consisted of a transient
installation and large wall areas papered over with tour posters. At the Lock-Up
exhibition, our “merch” table was extended to include tea towels, tote bags, books,
postcards, art prints, and even a special limited-edition artist’s multiple. We also
made it clear that our musical synchronization rights were for sale. Similar plans are
in place for forthcoming exhibitions of Sounds of Unridden Waves. Somewhat bra-
zenly, perhaps, we see this doubled ontology as a two-way street—while our merch
is a self-reflective part of our exhibition of art, the exhibition also served as a promo-
tional vehicle for our band’s “brand” of music.
For the Ghosts of Nothing, the production and presentation of a materially exu-
berant constellation of artifacts, merchandise, and various documentary forms also
serves to help build a credible—albeit often circumstantial—evidentiary base which
suggests the public existence of our band, at least to audiences who have prior ex-
perience and knowledge of bands in popular culture. In this sense we expect that if
we continue to do what bands do, we are more likely to be recognized publicly and
mythologized as a real band. Historically, as we have already noted, rock bands have
long embroidered the fabric of their mythic identity by introducing a range of extra-
musical elements. In the case of the Ghosts of Nothing, the languages of symbolic
accouterment, hyperbolic performative gesture, and merchandise both problematize
the definitional borders of our world and exemplify the way in which a band, like a
work of postconceptual art, is an inherently dynamic and porous entity. In Memory
of Johnny B. Goode, for example, could be described as exemplifying what Italian
philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco termed an “open work.”32 Initially presented
as a recorded quasi-rock-opera In Memory of Johnny B. Goode was slowly themat-
ically expanded around an allegorical repurposing of Johnny B. Goode anachronis-
tically re-cast as a contemporary emblem of Pierrot. This episodic series of radically
expanded and virtually unrecognizable cover versions of otherwise well-known pop-
ular songs was then shapeshifted into a radio play and then a global tour of aban-
doned music venues, remote wildernesses, and abandoned jailhouses in three acts, all
performed in mime by collaborating performers at each location.33
Similarly, our latest project at the time of writing—the aforementioned “surf film”
Sounds of Unridden Waves—is also an expanding work. Once again, this project
orbits around a commercially released instrumental soundtrack, this time a triple
album, recorded and produced by the band the Ghosts of Nothing. 34 This original
soundtrack is then set to a feature-length surf film without human surfers developed
in collaboration with ten renowned surf filmmakers and artists. 35 As this still un-
folding project begins to mutate into a larger materially distributed work encapsu-
lating a diverse range of objects and activities—which will include public exhibitions
of images related to the project, collaborations with vocalists,36 video essays, and
academic essays such as this present text—it will also exemplify two characteris-
tics which have emerged as hallmarks of much contemporary postconceptual art.
First, it reaffirms a principle forcefully made explicit in twentieth-century conceptu-
alism, that is, that certain creative works can resist being understood as singularly
exhibited materializations with clear definitional boundaries. Second, and somewhat
Bandness 113
quixotically, it illustrates an interestingly novel phenomenon: That it is eminently
feasible to maintain—even if only tenuously—a cohesive, coherent, and recognizable
public identity of artwork and artist, despite being indexically constituted through
a physically and temporally distributed aggregate of medial elements. This second
phenomenon still manages to assert itself in a postconceptually post-millennial world
in which authorship and production processes are often deeply intertwined and indis-
tinguishable (and sometimes partly or wholly pseudonymous or anonymous).
There is one question which persistently arises within this collaborative venture
that is simultaneously applicable both to a work of postconceptual art and to our con-
ception of bandness: If we are indeed a band, what determines the outermost limits
of this band? Or, what kinds of activities, events, and artifacts can be meaningfully
included within the uncertain borders of our particular instance of bandness while at
the same time maintaining a meaningfully identifiable sense of unity? Here, we note
that there are already numerous instances of mixed ontologies across the creative arts
that appear relatively similar. Specifically, we could briefly turn to some of the many
examples of visual artists, novelists, and filmmakers working along blurred lines of
definition despite maintaining a sense of identity and unity that we might reasonably
expect of a discreetly recognizable creative work.
One enduring example is found in the work of the late German author W. G. Se-
bald. Sebald’s books are notable for their broadly idiosyncratic mixture of actual
and seeming historical fact, recollection, and fiction interspersed with photographs
that serve a suggestive or supplemental, as opposed to illustrative, function. Another
comparable analogue for this approach is found in some of the work of British art-
ist Tacita Dean (who has acknowledged her debt to Sebald), who works primarily
in analogue film, a medium now largely obsolete. However, in creating Event for a
Stage at Carriageworks in Sydney in 2014, Dean worked with actor Stephen Dillane
to produce a self-reflective work of live theater which she then meticulously cut into
both a film version and an adaptation for radio. And, as already noted, Walid Raad’s
historically reflective “counter-archive” in the form of the fictional collective cum
artwork the Atlas Group (1989–2004) also exemplifies this tendency.
Like these examples, our fictionalized and radically transmedial recasting of Johnny
B. Goode as Pierrot in In Memory of Johnny B. Goode also contains much that is
non-fictional, together with uncanny hybrids of repurposed reality and invention. It
is here that the Ghosts of Nothing seek to inhabit the layered ontologies that we have
described above. Significantly, our open works are at once imaginary mythologized
projections of the kinds of things that bands do, infused with traces of a real-world
entity that actually does many of the things that bands typically do (such as making
and releasing commercial albums, touring, and making music videos).
Yet at the same time, some of the extra-musical elements located in the respective
universes of In Memory of Johnny B. Goode and Sounds of Unridden Waves, unless
specifically pointed to, could easily remain unnoticed by a casual observer. Conse-
quently, we require a range of additional supporting materials, such as this essay,
to make some of the more obscure connections publicly visible. Moreover, many of
these supplementary or paratextual elements, especially if considered in isolation
from the core elements of each project, are clearly incapable of producing anything
resembling a “full picture.” Similarly, some of the extra-musical and expanded artis-
tic elements surrounding the still expanding world of Sounds of Unridden Waves by
the Ghosts of Nothing are sufficiently removed from a connection between a band
and an album made by a band, that, if encountered in contextual isolation, would
most likely be read as standalone works of contemporary visual art. 37 One example
of a visually centered publicly exhibited variation of Sounds of Unridden Waves is
our ongoing collaborative series of fictionalized “film stills.” Several of these heav-
ily cropped “remixed” images of waves are at least loosely thematically related to
footage being used to produce the feature-length film component. They are based
on various source photographs, some of which were indeed taken by collaborators
working on the film itself, but some were sourced from an extended network of
other project participants. Importantly, many of these stills were not actually cap-
tured from the film itself. To date, some of these fictionalized film stills have been
presented in exhibitions in New York and Pingyao, China, 38 and in a photo-essay
published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. 39 In these contexts, it is highly likely
that—without explicit prompting—even a discerning viewer would probably not
consider these photographs as meaningfully connected to the work of a rock band.
In another still developing iteration for an artworld audience, a series of overpainted
photographs, titled Paintings on Unridden Waves, will also be attributable to the
collective artist moniker “The Ghosts of Nothing.” Perhaps, in such instances, we
might suggest that both low- and high-frequency connections to the idea of bandness
are potentially apparent.
In yet another still developing artworld iteration of the broader musical and cine-
matic project titled Sounds of Unridden Waves, selected fragments of text referring
to the ocean—taken from the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, po-
ets, and artists—are presented using uncanny, slightly dehumanized, “natural” digi-
tized voices which are overlaid with selected music and video from the feature-length
version of the film. This targeted artworld variation of the larger work is even fur-
ther removed from the broader popular culture and surf-world context in which the
Figure 8.2 T
he Ghosts of Nothing and Chris Lowry, Storyboard Still #1, from Sounds of
Unridden Waves, 2020, camera by Chris Lowry, image remix by the Ghosts
of Nothing, digital image, dimensions variable.
Bandness 115
Figure 8.3 T
he Ghosts of Nothing and Simone Douglas, Storyboard Still #2, from
Sounds of Unridden Waves (work in progress), 2020, camera by Simone
Douglas, image remix by the Ghosts of Nothing, digital image, dimensions
variable.
feature-length film and commercial album release will also be promoted. To date,
one version of this still developing spoken-voice iteration has been presented at an
academic conference.40
We believe that the historical Romantic idea of the fragment continues to resonate
with the eclectic material exuberance exemplified in some forms of postconceptual
art and intertextual relationality in certain forms of contemporary literature. In his-
torical Romanticism, the fragment is presented as a finite part of an infinite whole
that is not entirely present. Accordingly, Romanticism emphasized the active role of
the imagination in moving beyond the confines of immediate perception to build a
work in the mind. For the Ghosts of Nothing, such Dionysian qualities can also be
experienced when listening to a good rock album.
The Ghosts of Nothing are keenly aware that Sounds of Unridden Waves may
also be encountered far from any supporting ontologies of contemporary art or rock
music. New audiences might just as easily be found through commercial TV stream-
ing services or in surfing subcultures. Importantly, in any such contexts, different
kinds of evidentiary credibility will invariably be required to establish legitimacy with
new audiences. Although the overall conceptual architecture and final production of
both Sounds of Unridden Waves and In Memory of Johnny B. Goode rests with the
Ghosts of Nothing, we see these open works as omnibus vehicles capacious enough
to accommodate collaborative creative input from diverse and even unanticipated
sources. Our world tour of In Memory of Johnny B. Goode, for example, featured
contributions from numerous collaborating artists, dancers, and theater makers. And
wherever appropriate, we stress that any collaboratively developed components within
these projects are clearly listed as co-authored by the Ghosts of Nothing and the re-
spective collaborators. Consequently, these expanded worlds might be understood
as existing simultaneously inside and outside our dominion of authorship. In con-
temporary visual art, this is familiar territory. It is also something that rock bands
have long intuitively recognized. Even in the pre-digital era, for example, physical
distribution in the form of vinyl records spawned album cover art as a new genre, one
which was enthusiastically embraced by bands and visual artists alike. Meanwhile,
the definitional limits of the world of a band can keep expanding in the hands of fans,
satirists, bootleggers, deejays, official and unofficial remixers, and (more recently)
internet meme culture, well after the operational demise of the band itself.
In summary, we use our “works”—which we bring into existence through acts of
world-making41—to establish new relationships. These novel connections come into
being by virtue of a creative intention and action on our part. Once this action has
occurred, and provided that it is accepted as culturally meaningful by a qualified audi-
ence, it cannot thereafter be unmade. The creative act therefore serves as the minimal
connection, a kind of metonymy if you like, contingent to a greater or lesser degree on
chance and circumstance. The connection is strengthened if there are other resonances
and parallels to be perceived—that is, something beyond a seemingly arbitrary jux-
taposition or accident of collage. The Ghosts of Nothing strengthen this connection
by projecting bandness as a conceptual overlay binding together an array of disparate
elements and presences, both real and virtual. And in projecting our bandness, we
produce a diverse range of what Jeffrey Strayer usefully calls public perceptual objects.
Importantly, both In Memory of Johnny B. Goode and Sounds of Unridden Waves
consist of literal things and activities in the world that are both obliquely and explicitly
framed as both the products of a band and works of contemporary visual art.
Notes
1 Arthur C. Danto’s highly influential description of an “Artworld” (as a capitalized proper
noun) appeared to take its exclusiveness for granted. For Danto, there could be no “art-
works without the theories and the histories of the Artworld.” Arthur C. Danto, “The
Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 581. Today, however, it is increas-
ingly commonplace to speak of multiple and distinctly configured and contested artworlds.
Meanwhile, Pamela M. Lee acknowledges the impossibility of “ignoring or standing out-
side it [the artworld], as if one could lay claim to a space beyond its imperial reach by
wandering just far enough afield.” Her response is to shift the focus of analysis and critical
discussion from the “global art world” itself to the work of art’s world. She explains that
to speak of “the work of art’s world” is to retain a sense of the activity performed by
the object as utterly continuous with the world it at once inhabits and creates: a world
Möbius-like in its indivisibility and circularity, a seemingly endless horizon.
Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 2, 8.
2 Various excellent essays in the growing literature on the ontology of rock music do not
consider the ontology of bandness. See, for example, Andrew Kania, “Making Tracks:
The Ontology of Rock Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 6, (2006): 401–14;
Dan Burkett, “One Song, Many Works: A Pluralist Ontology of Rock,” Contemporary
Aesthetics (2015): 13, accessed December 15, 2020, http://www.contempaesthetics.org/
newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=722.
3 John Andrew Fisher, “Rock ‘n’ Recording,” in Musical Worlds: New Directions in the
Philosophy of Music, ed. Philip A. Alperson (University Park: The Pennsylvania State Uni-
versity Press, 2010), 109.
4 See Fisher, “Rock ‘n’ Recording,” 109; Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aes-
thetics of Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Christopher Bartel, “Music
without Metaphysics?,” British Journal of Aesthetics 51, no. 4 (2011): 383–98.
Bandness 117
5 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (New York and
London: Verso, 2013).
6 The idea that a work of art is immaterial was suggested by Benedetto Croce, principally
developed in his books Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (1902),
translated by Douglas Ainslie into Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Lin-
guistic, rev. ed. (New York: Noonday Press, 1922); and Breviario di estetica (1912), trans-
lated by Douglas Ainslie into The Essence of Aesthetic (London: Heinemann, 1921). Croce
claimed that all we know can be reduced to either logical or imaginative knowledge, such
as art, and that all thought is based in part on imaginative knowledge. In other words, for
Croce, imaginative thought precedes all other thought. See, for example, Croce, Aesthetic:
As Science, 1. For a useful discussion of Croce’s aesthetic theory see the chapter “Bened-
etto Croce: Art and Intuition” in Paolo Euron, Aesthetics, Theory and Interpretation of
the Literary Work (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2019), 129–32. Croce’s thesis was given
a modernist interpretation by R. G. Collingwood, when he asserted that not all people
could perceive a Cézanne even when looking at it. This idea has elitist overtones which
might make us uneasy today. Robin Collingwood’s key writings on the philosophy of art
are Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (1925), The Principles of Art (1938), and the posthu-
mous collection Essays in the Philosophy of Art (1964).
7 This point is made eloquently in Ernst Gombrich’s classic book, Art and Illusion: A Study
in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1960).
8 See, for example, Robert J. Zatorre and Andrea R. Halpern, “Mental Concerts: Musical
Imagery and Auditory Cortex,” Neuron 47, no. 1 (2005): 9–1; Sybille C. Herholz, An-
drea R. Halpern, and Robert J. Zatorre, “Neuronal Correlates of Perception, Imagery,
and Memory for Familiar Tunes,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24, no. 6 (2012):
1382–97.
9 Jeffrey Strayer, Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction (Leiden: Brill,
2017).
10 In her book Forgetting the Art World (2012), Pamela M. Lee argues that the idea of an
“art world” as historically conceived is in eclipse. While she may well be right, we use the
term here not to ignore the changes that Lee identifies, but as a reminder that some form
of contextualizing socio-cultural information is required in order for a perceiving subject
to understand that something has the potential to be understood as art.
11 These examples all suggest parallels to a process-oriented ontology of concepts, which
draws on a long tradition in Western philosophy, via Hegel back to the pre-Socratics. In
essence, this philosophical tradition maintains that all concepts are processes, in a state of
perpetual flux yet, paradoxically, somehow stable enough to act as the reliable currency
of human discourse. For an excellent discussion of concept as process, see Andy Blunden,
Concepts: A Critical Approach (Leiden: Brill, 2012). This topic is discussed at length by
one of the authors of this text in Ilmar Taimre, “An Interpretive Model for Conceptual Mu-
sic” (PhD diss., University of Newcastle, 2018), http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1385390.
12 Music is itself a socio-cultural category, subject to continual redefinition and evolution
over time.
13 See Ben Dooley, “BTS Management’s Stock Has a Lively First Day of Trading,” New
York Times, October 15, 2020, accessed December 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.
com/2020/10/15/business/bts-stock.html.
14 See D. L. Geiger, Phylogenetic Assessment of Characters Proposed for the Generic Clas-
sification of Recent Scissurellidae (Gastropoda: Vetigastropoda) “With a Description of
One New Genus and Six New Species from Easter Island and Australia,” Molluscan Re-
search 23, (2003): 21–83. See Mark Isaac, “Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature,” Cu-
rious Taxonomy, accessed June 26, 2021, http://www.curioustaxonomy.net/. Here, many
other examples of biological names linked to bands can be found.
15 See full page advertisements for “In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour 2014–18,”
in Mousse 45 (October–November 2014): 261; Mousse 51 (December 2015): 305; Mousse
55 (October–November 2016): 179.
16 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 204–44.
17 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1998),
35, 37.
18 Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of
Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): 7.
19 Auslander, “Performativity of Performance Documentation,” 7–8.
20 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 1–2.
21 Jean-Jaques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn
Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 48, 55.
22 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell
Krell (London: HarperPerennial, 2008), 145–6.
23 The Pierrot tradition, now largely forgotten except by historians of art and culture, traces
its origins to the Italian commedia dell’arte of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries. It enjoyed huge popularity in the early twentieth century, as witnessed by the mass of
references and allusions in the art, literature, and music of the time. The standard studies
include Martin Green and John Swain, The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell’Arte
and the Modern Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1986); Robert F. Storey, Pierrot: A
Critical History of a Mask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Robert F.
Storey, Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: Nineteenth Century French Literary Artists and
the Comic Pantomime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Lynne Lawner,
Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts (New York: Abrams,
1998).
24 “Johnny B. Goode” is the eponymous guitar-player in the famous rock-and-roll song of
the same name, written and first recorded by Chuck Berry in 1958. The song lyrics make
occasional references to Berry’s own real-life circumstances, suggesting that the presumed
fictional character is at least partly autobiographical.
26 Peter Osborne, “Contemporary Art is Post-Conceptual Art” (transcript of public lecture,
Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota, Como, July 9, 2010): 11, accessed December 15,
2020, https://fondazioneratti.org/projects/contemporary-art-is-post-conceptual-art.
27 Osborne, “Contemporary Art is Post-Conceptual,” 11.
28 Osborne, 10–11.
29 See, for example, Jörg Heiser, Romantischer Konzeptualismus (Vienna: Kunsthalle Nürn-
berg, 2007), exhibition catalog.
30 The Ghosts of Nothing, In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour 2014–18, July 7–
August 19, 2018, exhibition, the Lock-Up, Newcastle, Australia.
31 The Ghosts of Nothing, Three Scenes from In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour
(2014–17), featuring Laura Purcell, January 18–February 25, 2018, exhibition, presented
by Mofo, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart, Australia.
32 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
33 The Ghosts of Nothing, Johnny’s Departure, featuring Laura Purcell and Zackari Watt,
July 7, 2018, performance, the Lock-Up, Newcastle, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Su-
icide, featuring Laura Purcell, November 18, 2017, performance, the Tench, Hobart, Aus-
tralia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Black Butterflies, featuring Laura Purcell, November 18,
2017, performance, the Tench, Hobart, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Absinthe, fea-
turing Zoë Tuffin, July 22, 2017, performance, Boggo Road Gaol, Brisbane, Australia; The
Ghosts of Nothing, Johnny Robber, featuring Zackari Watt, May 6, 2017, performance,
the Lock-Up, Newcastle, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Johnny on Ice, featuring Frank
J. Miles, November 12, 2016, performance on the trail connector to the Appalachian trail,
and associated exhibition Plato’s Cave at EIDIA House, New York, United States of Amer-
ica; The Ghosts of Nothing, Children of the Moon, featuring Coleman Grehan, Septem-
ber 3, 2016, performance, Raygun Projects, Tabletop Mountain (summit), Toowoomba,
Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, The Mirror, featuring Laura Purcell, March 19, 2016,
performance, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Newhaven Track, Tasmania, Australia; The
Ghosts of Nothing, Intoxicated by the Moon, featuring Lee Devaney, August 31, 2015,
performance, between Tromsø and Lofoten, Norway; The Ghosts of Nothing, Madonna
of Hysterias, featuring Zoë Tuffin, April 25, 2015, performance, Brisbane, Australia; The
Ghosts of Nothing, An Impossible Question, featuring Lyndall Johnston, April 18, 2015,
performance, Newcastle, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, Betrayal, featuring Charles
Famous, April 11, 2015, performance, Sydney, Australia; The Ghosts of Nothing, This is
Bandness 119
Johnny, featuring Frank J. Miles, December 6, 2014, performance outside former CBGB’s
venue, New York, United States of America.
34 Sounds of Unridden Waves: The Ambient Mixes, composed by The Ghosts of Nothing,
Perfect Pitch, 2020, album, Spotify and Apple Music; Sounds of Unridden Waves: Origi-
nal Soundtrack, composed by The Ghosts of Nothing, Perfect Pitch, 2020, album, Spotify
and Apple Music; Sounds of Unridden Waves: Original Soundtrack Part II, composed by
the Ghosts of Nothing, Perfect Pitch, 2020, Spotify and Apple Music.
35 At the time of writing, the list of contributors to Sounds of Unridden Waves includes
Ashley Beer, Simone Douglas, Albert Falzon, Ishka Folkwell, Jon Frank, Phillip George,
Nathan Henshaw, Greg Huglin, Nathan Oldfield, and Monty Webber.
36 In another variant of the project currently in the early stages of development, a supplemen-
tary album titled Songs of Unridden Waves will be produced, in which singer songwriter
Sunny Kim will respond to the existing instrumental soundtrack.
37 Paradoxically, as Peter Osborne has noted,
photography only gained generalized institutional recognition as an artistic practice
after the destruction of the ontological significance of medium in the 1960s—a destruc-
tion to which photography itself made a distinctive contribution, primarily via its roles
in the documentation of performance and within conceptual art practice.
Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 127.
38 See The Ghosts of Nothing, “Stills from the Breakers: Sounds of Unridden Waves,” fea-
turing Albert Falzon (2018), in At the Edge of the Universe, curated by Simone Douglas,
Pingyao International Photography Festival (Winner of the Foreign Photographer Award),
September 19–25, 2019, Pingyao, China. Also shown in All the Rivers Run, curated by
Simone Douglas, October 2019–March 2020, Monash Room, the Australian Consulate,
New York, US.
39 Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre, “Sounds of Unridden Waves and the Aesthetics of Late
Romanticism: A Photo-Essay,” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 6, no.1 (2021): 13–78.
40 Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre, “Sounds of Unridden Waves” (presentation at Dark Eden:
The Sixth International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections be-
tween Art, Science and Culture, Artspace, Sydney, Australia, November 6–8, 2020).
41 Discussed further in Taimre, “An Interpretive Model,” 349–91, 451–3.
9 Glittereiki
Genevieve Hyacinthe
Care is a feminist technology.1

Some data suggest that the use of digital technology after trauma can cause elevated
cortisol levels, a condition that is harmful to various systems of the body and that
can in turn create disharmony in the affected person’s perception of themselves, their
lives, the world around them, and their interactions with others.2 The diminishment
of ahimsa, one of the eight yamas or yoga limbs that means “non-harming or nonvi-
olence, as well as compassion for self, others, and everything, not causing pain to any
sentient being,” is a likely result.3 Artist and reiki healer Damali Abrams, however,
employs social media to create healing spaces and share techniques for self-care in a
manner that potentially shifts the unconscious glow of wireless spectacle perfection
into a momentary opportunity for restoration. Accordingly, Abrams seeks to trans-
form the intimacies of healing arts traditionally aimed at affecting a beholder’s mind,
spirit, and body into a general state of positive transformation through which healing
is possible.
As we move our fingers across the smooth alkali—aluminosilicate glass of our
smartphones—we leave smudges that are traces of our corporeality: Skin, breath,
moisture, external desires, and experiences. What I refer to as Damali Abrams’s
“Glittereiki” process clears our screen: Glittereiki not only is a play on the term glit-
terati but also refers to Abrams’s moniker, the Glitter Priestess, and her profuse in-
corporation of the material in her art and life. The second half of the compound word
references Abrams’s integration into her art and life of reiki, “a palm-healing therapy
developed in Japan in the 1920s […] [meaning] ‘healing without energy depletion’”
that relaxes those receiving it.4 As in reiki, yoga has taught me that subtle shifts in
the position of the hands can open channels to the heart, as in the performance of the
Lotus Mudra or the action of turning one’s palms open in Tadasana to establish a
pathway to grace. 5 We use our hands to light the wick and set the puja candle ablaze
with devotion every morning. The action draws the devotee into a space of medita-
tion and healing. Shri Radha shared with me and my fellow yoga teacher certification
students at Ananda Ashram that we can heal ourselves by repeatedly writing our
Sanskrit letters.6 We touch our screens when we wake up and before going to sleep
according to the rhythm of spiritual practice: As Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert)
once noted, we might successfully accomplish the sometimes difficult task of ac-
cessing our hearts and exploring our inner being and life significance through daily
rituals, preferably performed in the early morning or evening before bed, “while the
world is still quiet […] [or] at the close of the day’s activities […]. Spiritual practice
offers us a chance to come back to the innate compassionate quality of our heart and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-9
Glittereiki 121
7
to our intuitive wisdom.” These insights in turn inform my view that the daily prac-
tice of checking one’s social media may be a ritual act with the potential for healing
if connected with the proper vibrations—those transmitted by a trusted, educated
guru. Abrams is such a guru, and an artist who circulates her work in virtual space
to heal Black people. Her Glittereiki inserts a meditative space within the digital
stream of unconsciousness so that one might, in the words of registered yoga teacher
and author Cortez Rainey:
Take a seat and find your breath—your North Star. No one owns you. You don’t
have to voluntarily place yourself under the authority and control of distracting
thoughts—or for that matter, anything, including people, beliefs and organiza-
tions […]. Reclaim your existence. Keep practicing meditation. This is the only
way to reach your destination. Keep going—until you arrive. It’s the only way
your mind can become free […]. Then, the inherent goodness, genius, and poten-
tial possessed by ten thousand generations of our ancestors will shine through
your life for all to view, like the stars in a clear night sky.8
Curiously, where Rainey suggests that Black people find stillness and turn inward to
become free, Abrams instead sends reiki vibrations, each session distributed through
her interconnected social media feeds (Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram), provid-
ing a charismatic, guiding presence and stillness offered through visual resplendency
and silence as a comparable means.9 Her Glittereiki process, manifested in actions
such as the video Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People (2020; Fig-
ure 9.1), and her mermaid formats, such as Cousin Jean (2020; Figure 9.2), convert
the flow of her posts into an altar-in-action emergent from her fine arts and reiki
educations.10
Figure 9.1 D
amali Abrams, “Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People,”
video still, YouTube video, May 29, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?reload=9&v=hCLtGtwnVJY © Damali Abrams.
122 Genevieve Hyacinthe
Significantly, Abrams looks out at the viewer, almost completely still, for over nine
minutes in Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People, an action she em-
beds in the YouTube platform with the following statement:
Damali Abrams
The feelings of frustration, trauma, rage, and terror that come from seeing con-
tinual images of Black people being murdered, tortured, and beaten can be very
detrimental to our mental and physical health.
Play this video when these feelings come up or you feel hopeless or powerless.
My favorite soothing herbal tea blend is oatstraw, lavender, and rose.
Essential oils that are relaxing for me are chamomile, lavender, and mugwort.
Sending you lots of love and reiki.
You can minimize the video and still receive the reiki.
Right click on the screen and click “loop” to repeat the video continuously.
Thank you so much for watching!
Please like, share & subscribe.
IG & twitter: @damaliabrams
FB: facebook.com/GlitterPriestess GlitterPriestess.com https://linktr.ee/
DamaliAbrams
Disclaimer: This video is for entertainment purposes only. It is not a substitute
for medical treatment. This video is not intended as a diagnosis, prescription, or
cure for any ailment. Please see a medical professional for any physical or mental
health concerns.11
Here, Abrams’s words include protocols related to circulation and legalities, which
may destabilize the healing field but nevertheless generally remain unnoticed, possi-
bly as a consequence of their omnipresence. Regardless, her words offer the sentience
of the soft voice or the touch of a nurturing healer. She helps establish a virtual safe
space with her statements. Her voice is that of the observer, the wounded, and the
folk healer, evoking such Black folk healing and self-precedents as Luisah Teish’s
Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals
(1985) and The Black Women’s Health Book, edited by Evelyn C. White (1990), as
well as one of Abram’s earlier works The Cure: Poetic Healing and Recipes (2005),
and the more recent Free Your Mind: An African American Guide to Meditation
and Freedom by Cortez R. Rainey (2015).12 As in these earlier books, Abrams’s
guiding text may optimize the reiki healing experience for the beholder due to its
vernacularity and down-to-earth feeling. More broadly, we can view Abrams’s Reiki
for Frustration about Police Killing Black People and the other reiki videos and ac-
tions she creates and circulates through digital space as being connected to the deep
traditions of Black Atlantic healing developed by slaves. Stephanie Y. Mitchem’s
African American Folk Healing (2007), Pablo F. Gómez’s The Experimental Car-
ibbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (2017), and
Londa Schiebinger’s Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2017) put these issues into a critical historical
perspective.13
In the reiki healing action, Abrams wears long dreadlocks divided to frame her
face. A red ribbon holds them back off her forehead and simultaneously ties them
on either side of her chin line, drawing our attention to her clavicle, under which
Glittereiki 123
a longish chain with a gold name plate that says QUEEN hangs in the middle of
her chest before a backdrop created by the top of her deep blue blouse, printed
with light blue African shapes and accented with red piping that matches her hair
ribbons. A tabloid-size screen-print hanging on the wall over her right shoulder
says “Stop Killing Black People” in white text on a black field. Next to it is a
sparkling silver and polychrome hanging called Melting and Oozing and Dripping
with Pleasure (2020), one of Abrams’s collages on fabric from a triptych called
Self-Love Spell. Both the print and the collage hang over a turquoise blue wall.
Poised before this backdrop, possessed of the visual radiance of the liminal spaces
of Hindu chromolithographs, Senegalese glass paintings, and orthodox gold leaf
images, Abrams resembles a gesturing icon due to her frontality, steady eye con-
tact, and carefully placed metallic accents, from her two delicate silvery hoop
earrings, to the chain and queen nameplate, the metallic and stone rings adorn-
ing her fingers, and the bangles on her arms. The hypnotic quality of her gaze,
her accoutrements, her raised hands, and the sparkle of the backdrop juxtaposed
with the hanging prayer add to her feeling as a saint or healer. This ritual design
approach is also in keeping with meditation guidelines suggested for Black mental
liberation, in which practitioners are encouraged to:
Imagine that your ancestor is wearing the following items which have been
carefully crafted by African shamans: elegant Kente cloth apparel; a necklace
made from ivory and gold, from which hangs a golden ankh; a wrist bracelet
made with blue beads and cowries shells; and a giraffe-skin leather belt around
the waist with a gold pyramid-shaped buckle engraved with the image of a
sphinx.14
By way of disclosure, I am a believer—but irrespectively, what one believes might

not be as important as being able to imagine what Abrams is proposing, for in
Black meditation contexts, “what we imagine, a part of our mind accepts as ex-
isting in reality.”15 Fortuitously, Abrams and I had the opportunity to discuss her
Glittereiki works in a recent video call.16 Here are some selected excerpts from this
discussion:
GENEVIEVE HYACINTHE. Thank you for speaking with me, Damali. I’d like to discuss
your self-care and healing actions that are currently in circulation online. I love
them and want to share them with others for a number of reasons. I think that
you are a master of DIY media, like a lot of Black women artists that have come
before: Adrian Piper’s videos of the 1980s and ’90s, some experiments by Howar-
dina Pindell and Maren Hassinger, and today, Tameka Norris and more. I think
Uri McMillian, as one example, has been writing in exciting ways about aspects
of these histories.17
Simultaneously, there is a beautiful lineage of folk healing in the Black Atlan-
tic that you are a part of, as well as a continuum of Black visual artists connect-
ing with healing practices: Simone Leigh is prominent here. She’s been creating a
range of works shining a light on Black women and healing for a while. I think
of her huge public sculptural bust of an African woman on the High Line at 30th
and 10th Streets [NYC], Brick House, that has been on view since June 2019,
standing strong in the midst of such vulnerability and loss. I remember seeing it
referred to as a “Black woman […] with the strength, endurance, and integrity
of a house made of bricks.”18 Before that, of course, at the New Museum, she
organized the collective action (and ongoing movement) Black Women Artists
for Black Lives Matter and installed Waiting Room (2016), which was a tribute
to Esmin Elizabeth Green who, in 2008, died of blood clots while waiting to
be treated for over 24 hours in the emergency room at Kings County Hospital
in Brooklyn.19 Also coming to mind is her Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014),
where she explored Black health initiatives like the United Order of Tents secret
sorority of Black women who’ve been caring for the sick since 1867, and the
Black Panther Free People’s Medical Clinics in service between 1968–1975. 20 I
actually love that in Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People you
are wearing the QUEEN medallion because the United Order of Tents healers
refer to themselves as “Queens.”
DAMALI ABRAMS. That’s interesting. I didn’t realize the United Order of Tents women
did that. […] I’ve always wanted to claim things that have higher connotations but
are not commonly associated with Black women. The nameplate also refers back to
hip-hop fashion in the late 1980s and early 1990s when lots of people, like Queen
Latifa for instance, were wearing African medallions. We still wear the plates to-
day, but back then wearing them was a requirement if you wanted to be on trend.
I definitely do feel like my work resonates with Simone’s and quite a few artists
working here and now, as well as those who are now ancestors. I have affinity with
current artists like Ebony G. Patterson, the Bajan artist Sheena Rose, Mickalene
Thomas […]. There’s my friend, the performance artist, Ayana Evans […]. Also
my friend, Shani Peters […]. She and her partner Joseph Cuillier started The Black
School, and then there is also The Free Black Women’s Library started by OlaRonke
Akinmowo […]. She’s one of the artists I collaborated with on the Allied Media Con-
ference panel on Zoom on July 26 [2020]. It was called Creating Portals: The Black
Speculative Imagination, so we spoke of our work in that context, where we were
joined by another artist, Khalif Thompson. Artists of the past generations who also
inspire my practice include Ana Mendieta and Faith Ringgold, Dindga McCannon
[…] Adrian Piper, Jean Michel Basquiat, Bette Saar, Frida Kahlo, and Pepon Osorio.
G. H. Who are you trying to heal?
D. A. My audience is definitely a Black audience. But I feel like it’s for everyone
[…]. I’m definitely thinking of myself and people like me. And just especially
the past five years have been so intense for Black people, in this country spe-
cifically […]. So yes, that’s who I’ve been thinking about and how we can take
better care of ourselves and each other, even within these systems that are not
going to do it.
G. H. What is the Glitter Priestess—its origin and significance?
D. A. In 2002, my cousin started this magazine called Mahogany Blues, and I was the
editor-in-chief, but instead of calling myself editor-in-chief, my title was priestess
of content. I chose priestess because I had been reading about these ancient priest-
esses who used art and music and dance and herbs and sexual energy all for the
purposes of healing and I really liked that as a lens for my practice or what I wanted
my practice to become. So, I called myself its priestess of content, and I also had
a column in that magazine called “Herb Grrl,” where I would write about herbal
remedies and self-care practices, and I ended up taking an eight-month course in
herbal medicine at the Open Center. And since then, I’ve just been researching and
Glittereiki 125
learning more and more about herbs both medicinally and metaphysically, because
I am really also interested in the magical properties of the herbs.
G. H. Wow, so since 2002, almost 20 years now, you’ve been cultivating and nuancing
your self-care practices. How did your commitment to the study of self-care ini-
tially intersect with your MFA studies at Vermont College of Fine Arts?
D. A. In 2006, the same year I started my MFA program, I also got my master-level
reiki attunements […]. While in grad school I started a video project called Self-
Help TV, a fictional television network that I developed similar to PBS. The con-
cept was that all of the programming would be about self-improvement in some
way. So, I created a lot of short videos. Some were a minute or two long, and then
some were longer, up to 15 minutes or a half an hour. There was a reality show
format, a dramedy, my version of Sesame Street that I called Frederick Douglass
Boulevard because I lived on Frederick Douglass Blvd in Harlem at the time, and
I also just liked the idea of calling it that. In addition, I turned my “Herb Grrl”
magazine column into a video series. The Herb Grrl spots were in a cooking show
kind of format where I would share herbal remedies.
G. H. I love your Herb Grrl “How to Make Peppermint Honey” spot where you’re in
Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem.21 I remember viewing that work a while back
on YouTube, closer to when I first met you circa 2013, when you came to one of
my institutions to talk to some of my MA Art History and MFA Art and De-
sign students. I loved that episode in particular, because it really seemed like an
herbal remedy apropos for the time—a hot day in the park. I know peppermint
is soothing. Even just watching the video felt like therapy a bit, because you have
this lovely, lush bunch of peppermint on the table and what looks like a bounti-
ful jug of honey—the purple tablecloth over what looks like a makeshift folding
table or something—and you’re just in this urban park. You’ve set up a soothing
setting that you enhance with your presence and the flower in your hair. All of
these spots seem to visually soothe, even if we don’t get to consume the things
you’re making at that moment. I feel that sense of self-help in the simplicity of
your approach. I notice all the recipes are pretty easy to make, not requiring a lot
of difficult-to-find ingredients.
D. A. Yes, simplicity is really important! The whole concept of my self-care actions is
about making [Black people’s healing] accessible. I want to highlight our own
empowerment. Someone doesn’t have to go outside of themself. As Black people,
and Black women especially, we don’t have doctors take us seriously. I had to fight
my doctor to test me for certain things. For instance, when I was having extreme
pain with my cycle, I had to press her for a more in-depth examination. It turned
out that I had fibroids. While these are common in women, particularly in Black
women, it felt like my doctor was not taking my pain seriously. She is a White
doctor in a community with a large Black patient population.
These kinds of experiences are […] why I do the kind of work I do, because we
have to rely on taking care of ourselves before we become very ill. Black people
have the highest rate of stress-related illness, such as heart disease, diabetes, and
hypertension […]. My art practice is addressing what I view as our need to im-
prove our health on a day-to-day basis with simple gestures […]. We are at the
mercy of those who might not have our best interest in mind. Sharing these modes
through easily accessible social media platforms is important for the purposes of
integrating some of these strategies into our everyday lives.
G. H. Yeah, I totally hear that […]. There’s Medicine with a capital M, which is part of
the medical industrial complex, that yes, we definitely need to interact with, but it
can’t be our savior. I agree that simple healing art practices can make a difference
because engagement makes us check in with ourselves and notice. Accessibility
through social media, I think, feels like a virtual botánica to me, like a corner
store run by a Madrina or Padrino who’s up on all the herbal medicine—herbal
remedies from the Caribbean. I like the arc through your practice where you offer
a diversity of self-care modes, so it’s not a one-practice-fits-all set of actions […].
I’m happy that there still seem to be a bunch of Herb Grrl videos on YouTube, but
I haven’t seen many recently. What happened to that series?
D. A. Well, I continued doing Self-Help TV for about three years on the Manhattan
Neighborhood Network, the cable-access channel in Manhattan, after I finished
my MFA. As I started getting older, I didn’t feel comfortable calling myself Herb
Grrl anymore, I didn’t feel comfortable calling myself a girl, so that’s when I
came up with the title Glitter Priestess. My sister, Abiola, helped me with that
during a coaching session. She’s a business coach, and we went through a lot of
different possibilities for a name. [I chose this name] because I use a lot of glitter
in my work and because of this idea of a priestess from my research into ancient
priestesses and their artistry, including herbal practices, dance, music, and sexual
energies, and thinking of myself as this contemporary priestess who is using art
and all of the tools at my disposal for the purposes of healing.
G. H. What is glitter? What do you love about glitter, maybe as a symbol, a tool, and
a material?
D. A. Yeah, it definitely is a symbol and a tool and a material. Why do I love it? I don’t
know […]. I’ve just always been drawn to sparkly things […]. I think part of it is
Guyanese culture, honestly. If you go to any of my family gatherings, all of the
women are in sequins. Everything is sparkly and shiny. Everyone’s home is filled
with gold and sparkly and shiny decor. So, I think that’s had a large influence on my
aesthetic. And then glitter is also used in Santeria and all of these Afro-Caribbean
religious practices, on candles, and in ritual practice as well. It’s ubiquitous—it has
all of these meanings. Different colors of glitter are used on different candles for
different purposes […]. In my work, I vary my glitter color for specific intentions.
G. H. I feel that what you’re doing is so important, actually quite serious. As an out-
sider, I feel there is a tension there because of the pink and the glitter, and that
some people may feel that what you do is not serious. I think there is some-
thing complicated there. I don’t want to go on and on, but your practice reminds
me a bit of how Adrienne Edwards described “kewt” aesthetics in relation to
Juliana Huxtable’s performative approach.22 Juliana appears like you—sort of
matter-of-factly—as a means to connect with her audience on an informal, yet
at the same time, charismatic level. So, like you use glitter and pink, Juliana
uses what Adrienne calls “minor aesthetics,” like intensely luminous but strate-
gically rather than excessively applied makeup. She also uses spare yet compli-
cated adornment—striking but without overt muchness. Adrienne calls this kewt,
meaning a colloquial version of cute, used by Black queer folx. I think Adrienne
is reading Juliana’s affect in relation to culturally prescribed notions of taste and
value where Black minor aesthetics have not been historically valued. 23
D. A. Yes, I actually take everything I do very seriously […]. I am not joking or play-
ing or being sarcastic or ironic in any way with my actions. People do expect
Glittereiki 127
something not serious when they see glitter, when they see pink and sparkles
and mermaids, they are thinking of something more childlike […]. The sparkle,
and also the way I appear composed or calm in front of the camera, is just my
aesthetic. That is who I am. It would be inauthentic for me to try to present it in
another way. I genuinely love everything that’s sparkly, bright, and colorful, and
I’m not trying to convert or convince anyone either. Everything is not for every-
body. For the people who are into it—they are the ones that will respond to it.
The other people—they just won’t.
For each reiki video, there is a specific topic or intention, just as in individual
reiki sessions in real time, outside of digital space. I focus on that intention, I
call in [benevolent] ancestors and spirit guides for myself and those who will
be watching and other ways that I prepare for a reiki session. I don’t talk. I just
transmit reiki, so it’s a distance healing reiki session for whoever watches […].
Basically, anyone who is watching the video is getting the reiki transmission.
G. H. I think for me, in addition to the colors, and Glitter Priestess references, the cult
of celebrity might also make your work feel light to some audience members. But
what is it for you regarding celebrity in your various contexts?
D. A. I’ve always been a person who has been obsessed with pop culture and celebri-
ties. I become very obsessed with specific figures, and I’ve come to look at it in
the work as similar to the way that in syncretic religions our ancestors had to
hide their deities behind the saints. These celebrity figures are representing larger
archetypes as well as different aspects of myself. They’re representing other ideas
that are much larger than their images. And I think that’s the case in life, too. I
think that’s why many people become so obsessed with celebrities. For those of
us who do, because they represent something much larger […]. So that’s what’s
happening in the work for me where I am utilizing celebrity figures in some way.
G. H. Are you healing the celebrities as part of that or telling archetypal stories? Is
there a healing you’re doing with these celebrities?
D. H. Yes, it’s different for each figure. I mean, recently, there was an incident where
Tamar Braxton attempted suicide, and then I made a piece called Prayers for
Tamar that was specifically for her healing. But then there are other [celebrity]
pieces that most of the time are for my own healing or trying to invoke a sense
of communal healing that is not necessarily about the person who is in the piece.
G. H. Black artists have used pop cultural media to tell their stories and do their thing
because historically, it’s been an issue of access, not using the tools of the art his-
tory masters but from another perspective, it’s been a lot about reaching broader
audiences […]. You are using a lot of tools of mass culture and accessibility, like
using celebrities, like being on the Manhattan remote access cable channel, creat-
ing self-help videos for everyday people—rather than specifically for the review of
the art elite, etc. […]. Why? You went to art school, so you have the formal MFA
canonical knowledge base, technical exposure, and expertise […]. I’m curious
about your choice of taking mastery over more mass cultural outlets, aesthetics
[even DIY or craft aesthetics], and tools.
D. A. In undergrad, I didn’t study visual art at all. I was in NYU’s Gallatin program,
where you create your own major, and mine was culture, gender, and the arts.
Senior year, I did take Intro to Drawing and Painting, but I didn’t study art
and I really didn’t know anything about art at first. So, I do consider myself a
self-taught artist. And because of this obsession I had with glossy magazines, I
started making art using these magazines. At the start, it was much more focused
on critiquing these images in the magazines, because I was really making the
connection between how much these mainstream images that didn’t reflect me at
all were affecting my self-esteem and self-worth, so that’s what a lot of the early
collages that I made were about […]. I was making all of this work […] applying
for different residences and different art opportunities and I wasn’t getting them.
That’s when I decided to get my MFA, so I would have access to those opportu-
nities. But my aesthetic never changed. And in grad school in the MFA program,
it’s very anti-beauty […]. The idea of making beautiful things is largely discour-
aged. And the idea of making work that is too accessible is largely discouraged.
During a critique, the cochair of the department Miwon Kwon, told me: “Make
the viewer work harder.” So, the ways that I worked were never really in line with
the capital A art ideas either.
G. H. Do you feel you followed Miwon’s advice?
D. A. While I was in grad school, that is definitely something I worked toward, and
I often hear her voice when I’m working, but I feel like my work is really literal,
really accessible, really straightforward, so I don’t know.
G. H. I’ve taught in MFA programs for over a decade, and what you’re saying about
how we advise students rings true to me—more abstraction, complexity, make the
viewer work hard—is all a part of it […]. So, if beauty and accessibility are depre-
ciated, then in a way, you are challenging the viewer because you are not working
in expected modes […]. Maybe from a certain perspective, it feels to me that your
work actually demands more active and thoughtful beholder-engagement. You
are, as Miwon aptly says, making “the viewer work harder,” but they are declin-
ing the invitation. The hubris of the institutional rules and critical expectation
causes a barrier to actually digging into and accessing your practice.
D. A. Oh, that’s interesting. That’s a good point, because I do feel that a lot of people
are so used to everything being ironic that they don’t think anything can be sin-
cere. They are always expecting some kind of irony or critique. It actually just is
what it is.
G. H. I love your Cousin Jean collage I saw on Instagram this summer. And though
it’s not a reiki project per se, it’s definitely a Glittereiki action due to its gloss,
kewtness, and social media circulation. You touched upon it earlier with regard
to your choice of glitter as a material that connects to Guyanese strategies of
adornment, but I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about how your
family and Guyanese-Americanness informs your work.
D. A. I’m actually really influenced by Guyanese culture, folklore, Mas Carnival, and
spiritual practices like Obeah and the Spiritual Church, of which my father is
a minister. My father wrote a book about Guyanese history and culture called
Metegee. 24 […] And I made a zine using passages from his book paired with my
artwork.25
So, all of these Guyanese aspects have always been a huge influence on my
work. Guyana is known for mermaid sightings as well, and I grew up hearing
a lot about that. They are called fairmaids because the seawater in Guyana is
black and the beings that live in the water are called fairmaids. Today people
will still say they saw a woman swim up and sit on a rock for a while—maybe
[she] combed her hair or lured someone in and then jumped back into the
water.
Growing up hearing a lot about these fairmaid sightings has of course always
stayed with me.
Glittereiki 129
Figure 9.2 D
amali Abrams, (Glitter Priestess, @damaliabrams), Cousin Jean, Insta-
gram collage, July 30, 2020 (post removed), https://www.instagram.com/p/
CDSQU2xlmVq/ © Damali Abrams.
Scrolling through Instagram this summer, I caught sight of two “fairmaids” when
I encountered Damali and Cousin Jean, sparkling through my iPhone screen with
beauty, hope, and healing. Deep fuchsias, peacock plumes, Dashiki patterns, Queen-
liness, and Mas energy touched my soul and helped me exhale. In the midst of all the
pandemics, I felt held.
July 30
Today I made Cousin Jean into a mermaid. Cousin Jean is my mom’s cousin
and we were having this family Facebook video chat that my sister Abiola set up
and Cousin Jean asked me to make her into a mermaid. So, I looked into Cousin
Jean’s Facebook photos and I found this super kewt photo of her looking like
she’s playing Mas. I’m assuming she’s playing Mas. She’s wearing this super kewt
butterfly costume. And she’s got super kewt pink hair. So, I decided to give her
a peacock feather headdress, add the Guyanese flags because you know you’ve
gotta represent when you’re playing Mas and I added this pretty flower. “I hope
you love it, Aunt Jean, because I really loved making it.” It’s just… I think it’s
super kewt.
damaliabrams
Guyanese Mermaid: Cousin Jean Playing Mas
#Guyanese #fairmaid #playingmas #carnival #mermaids #mermaidlife #mermaid
#Blackart #Blackmermaids #Blackmermaid #art #artist #collage #collageartist
#collageart #mermaidart #Blackmermaids #Blackwomen #Blackwomenartists
#mixedmedia #mixedmediacollage #mermaidsighting
#glitter #sparkle #Guyana #Blackartists #GlitterPriestess26
Notes
1 “Feminist Pedagogy in a Time of Coronavirus Pandemic,” Femtechnet, March 28, 2020,
http://femtechnet.org/feminist-pedagogy-in-a-time-of-coronavirus-pandemic/.
2 Holly M. Rus and Jitske Tiemensma, “Social Media under the Skin: Facebook Use after
Acute Stress Impairs Cortisol Recovery,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017): 1609.
3 Christiane Brems, Dharmakaya Colgan, Heather Freeman, Jillian Freitas, Lauren Justice,
Margaret Shean, Kari Sulenes, “Elements of Yogic Practice: Perceptions of Students in
Healthcare Programs,” International Journal of Yoga 9 (July–December 2016): table 1, 122.
4 Stina Westerlund, Maria Elvira González Medina, and Olga Pérez González, “Effect of
Electromagnetic Fields in Relief of Minor Pain by Using a Native American Method,”
Integrative Medicine 11, no. 1 (February–March 2012): 42.
5 “Open to Grace,” Anusara School of Hatha Yoga, accessed August 30, 2020, https://
www.anusarayoga.com/teacher-support/open-to-grace/.
6 Teaching of Shri Radha Gaines, Ananda Ashram Yoga, from my personal notebook from
Ananda 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training, August 2013.
7 Ram Dass, Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart (Boulder, CO:
Sounds True, 2013), xviii.
8 Cortez R. Rainey, Free Your Mind: An African American Guide to Meditation and Free-
dom (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2015), 188.
9 Steven J. Rosen, Black Lotus: The Spiritual Journey of an Urban Mystic (Washington, DC:
Hari-Nama Press, 2007), 38.
10 Damali Abrams, discussion with the author via Zoom, Queens, New York, July 31, 2020.
11 Damali Abrams, “Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing Black People,” YouTube video,
May 29, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCLtGtwnVJY.
12 See Luisah Teish, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practi-
cal Rituals (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1988); Evelyn C. White, ed., The Black Women’s
Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves (Seattle: Seal Press, 1990); Damali Abrams, The
Cure: Poetic Healing and Recipes (New York: self-pub, 2006); Cortez R. Rainey, Free
Your Mind: An African American Guide to Meditation and Freedom (Scotts Valley: Cre-
ateSpace Independent Publishing, 2015).
13 See Stephanie Y. Mitchem, African American Folk Healing (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2007); Pablo F. Gómez, The Experimental Caribbean: Creating Knowledge
and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2017); Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in
the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017).
14 Cortez R. Rainey, Free Your Mind, 299.
15 Cortez R. Rainey, Free Your Mind, 294.
16 Abrams, discussion.
17 Uri McMillian, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance
(Durham, NC: Duke, 2015).
18 “Simone Leigh: Brick House,” High Line, accessed August 2, 2020, https://www.thehigh-
line.org/art/projects/simoneleigh/.
19 Nadja Sayej, “Simone Leigh’s The Waiting Room: Art that Tries to Heal Black Women’s
Pain,” The Guardian, June 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/
jun/29/simone-leigh-waiting-room-esmin-elizabeth-green-new-museum.
Glittereiki 131
20 “Medicine: Simone Leigh in Collaboration with Stuyvesant Mansion: Free People’s Med-
ical Clinic,” Creative Time, accessed August 10, 2020, https://creativetime.org/projects/
black-radical-brooklyn/artists/simone-leigh/.
21 Damali Abrams, “Herb Grrl: How to Make Peppermint Honey,” YouTube video, Novem-
ber 1, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY146jQ6FkE.
22 Adrienne Huxtable, “Relishing the Minor: Juliana Huxtable’s Kewt Aesthetics,” Mu-
seum of Modern Art, accessed August 23, 2020, https://assets.moma.org/d/pdfs/
W1siZiIsIjIwMTYvMDEvMDUvOWF2bGY1dGlheF9N UDAxOTEyOF9KdWxpY-
W5hX0h1eHRhYmxlX0ZJTkFMLnBkZiJdXQ/MP019128_Juliana_Huxtable_FINAL.
pdf?sha=c7926cb946ae0a60.
23 See Adrian Piper, “Notes on Funk I–IV,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight I: Selected Writ-
ings in Meta-Art 1968–1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 203.
24 Ovid S. Abrams Jr., Metegee: The History and Culture of Guyana (Queens, NY: self-pub,
1998).
25 Damali Abrams, Obeah Man Meets Fairmaid (Queens, NY: self-pub zine, 2019).
26 Damali Abrams (Glitter Priestess, @damaliabrams), Cousin Jean, Instagram collage,
July 30, 2020 (post removed), https://www.instagram.com/p/CDSQU2xlmVq/; emphasis
added.
10 Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020)
Or: again, rubbed smooth, a moment
in time__caesura
Juli Carson
In [a] Gödel universe, it is provable that there exist closed timelike curves such that
if you travel fast enough, you can, though always heading toward your local future,
arrive in the past. These closed loops or circular paths have a more familiar name: time
travel. But if it is possible in such worlds, as Gödel argues, to return to one’s past, then
what was past never passed at all.1
Palle Yourgrau
Here and elsewhere (again)

Welcome to the multiverse. When we look at the world and ask “where is art?”
the impetus behind the question is the thought “when is art?” For contemporary
space is reciprocally, and inextricably, bound up with historical time. Accordingly,
art is always in transit. Not only in its various spatial adaptations throughout
history, where we encounter it, but in its temporal apparitions, which are at once
past, present, and future. Quantum mechanics has a name for this phenomenon:
Space-time.
For Beirutis, time bends and curves like a Gödel universe. Here, as elsewhere,
historical events mirror what semioticians call a sliding signifier, an image unit that
floats between the past, present, and future, then back again, in one’s mind. Coun-
terintuitively, Beirut is also a city where particular events function as a kind of col-
lective caesura—a historical blank space—within cultural consciousness. The most
prominent of these events is the Lebanese Civil War (1975–91), which has provoked
critically minded artists to engage in a “hermeneutic aesthetics” of the past. 2 For in-
stance, artists of one generation—ones who were in primary school in the seventies—
wrangle with screen memories of the civil war, an event that can neither be accurately
remembered nor completely forgotten. Alternately, a younger generation of artists
attempt to untangle that which they never knew themselves, but which they inherited
as a gap in Lebanon’s state sanctioned national history. That said, this generational
schema is already a bit too tidy. For there are those artists in the region whose work
critically investigates the more general questions of memory, history, and temporal-
ity, precisely by subtending the perspectival positions of the aforementioned genera-
tional lines.
In this essay, I will address the temporal roots of historically minded artwork pro-
duced vis-à-vis three interrelated perspectives: The there-then, the here-now, and the
aporic space of reflection/projection between the two. This will entail an analysis of
how historical and psychoanalytic time are imbricated with contemporary art and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-10
Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) 133
political events in both Lebanon and beyond. Concluding my explication, Rania and
Raed Rafei’s film 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle will serve as a case study for
how the space of an artwork’s production and, concomitantly, the type of historical
consciousness it seeks to arouse, is inextricably bound up with the producer’s own
temporal situatedness.3
First, a subjective reflection on Beirut’s time-space continuum. As a foreign na-
tional living in West Beirut’s Ras Hamra district from 2018 to 2019, I found myself
caught within the city’s “picture,” at once temporally positioned and historically im-
plicated. For I was a different (through related) kind of time traveler among my fellow
Beiruti time travelers. In 2018 I had embarked upon my future there, having recently
departed from Southern California’s own cultural landscape. Upon arrival, I found
myself residing in a Gödel timelike universe, in which my intended future destination
turned out to be a past that I shared with my Beiruti neighbors. It was a past best
signified by the year-concept “1975,” which was lobbed back and forth between the
two aforementioned generations. This left me feeling dizzy, like a cat whose gaze
rhythmically follows a ball in a tennis match, identifying with each generation simul-
taneously: With those past teenagers who still remember growing up in wartorn Bei-
rut and with those current teenagers who know this past only as a mysterious event
existing elsewhere.
Enter Jean-Luc Godard’s canonical film Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) of
1976. Publicly screened in the spring of 2019 at the American University of Beirut
(AUB), the film is imbued with new meaning in the context of post-reconstruction
Beirut. The title signifies much more than Godard’s original spatial question: Here,
the Palestinian fedayeen, there, the Parisian middle-class family. Consequently, while
watching the film I could sense the audiences’ individual calculations as to where they
were then, in Godard’s representation of the 1970s, “What country was I living in?”
or “How old was I?” Alternatively, I imagined students pondering, “Wow, I wasn’t
even born yet.” As an American born in 1962, my own calculation was a question of
the spatial “here and elsewhere” of California/Beirut vis-à-vis the temporal here and
elsewhere of 1975/2018. This space-time aporia produced, in my mind, two spatial
sites intertwined with two temporal sites—a here and elsewhere en-abyme—in which
a multiverse loophole conjoins the California/Beirut of 1975 to the Beirut/California
of 2018. I am not unique in this type of psychic time travel. Just sit in any café in
Beirut’s Hamra district and you’ll hear the same temporal-spatial orientation made
by self-aware American and European travelers, be they expats living in Beirut semi-
permanently or temporary residents like myself.
Hence the contemporaneous site specificity of Godard’s title cards interspersed
throughout Here and Elsewhere that decry all binaries, be they political, spatial,
temporal, or psychoanalytic: Foreign/national, everywhere/nowhere, space/time, in/
out, interior/exterior, yet/already, dream/reality, to be/to have, question/answer, en-
trance/exit, happiness/misery, today/tomorrow, all/nothing, more/less, to live/to die.
“It’s too simple and too easy to divide the world into two … too simple to say that the
wealthy are wrong, and the poor are right,” Godard’s voice-over proclaims.4 These
words, which still resonate today, reflect the film’s own historical embeddedness. For
upon the film’s release, in 1974, the famed Marxists associated with the French Trot-
skyite group Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949–65)—Jean-François Lyotard (who later
left), Jean Laplanche, and Claude Lefort key among them—had already shifted to-
ward a post-Marxist, heterodox position, a move aggravating both labor movement
134 Juli Carson
communists and Stalin apologists.5 What was at stake for post-Marxists was the
aporia central to both capitalism and communism, such that they had dispensed en-
tirely with the orthodox dialectical configuration of base and superstructure.6 In a
likeminded vein, Here and Elsewhere formulated that capital, in fact, which func-
tions in two directions: At any given moment it may add as much as it subtracts. But
what is added are zeros, “zeros that represent tens, hundreds, thousands of you and
me, the capitalist says, thus in fact they are not really zeros,” Godard declares.7 What
this gives us, then, is the classic 0/1 as a non-binary coupling, in which each integer
signifies more than its numerical function. In this Fregean logic, the concept “zero”
may, in fact, be signified by the integer “1.”8
Such mathematical paradoxes mirror the new historicist pulse that beats through-
out Here and Elsewhere, one defined by the Freudian concept of deferred action that
Godard visualizes by way of a hand calculating numbers-cum-years on an adding
machine. In accordance with Hegelian logic, rather than the laws of arithmetic, 1917
+ 1936 = (the year) 1968, not (the numeral) 3853. Under Godard’s camera eye, it’s
therefore the cultural image associated with the numbers 1917 and 1936 that the
so-called “invisible hand of the market” so visibly calculates. Hence, Godard’s first
voice-over to this calculating hand: “To see for instance that the image of a 17 plus
the image of a 36, equals the month of May, the image of ’68,”9 is succeeded by a
montage of images of the October Revolution, the Popular Front, Lenin, and then
Hitler with a flashing title: “Popular.” Immediately, the operation repeats. This time
the voice-over “Whereas, for example, the image of a 17 plus the image of a 36, in the
month of September still equals the image of a ’70”10 is followed by a photographic
montage of Lenin, Hitler, and now Golda Meier, with the flashing titles: “Israel”
and “Palestine.” In this Godardian multiverse, as time bends and curves, so do the
historical images and ideologies associated with them. If this kind of spatiotemporal
sequence—one reified in collective consciousness by any given sequence of historical
events, nation-states, and the state heads associated with both—is as cognitively plia-
ble as it is indelible, it’s because traumatic historical events tend to appear, disappear,
and reappear in any single contemporary moment. In tandem, this entails a projection
of any given current moment as an anterior future moment—this will have been—
as a means of sublimating historical trauma into political agency if not ideological
efficacy.11
It therefore occurred to me, sitting in an AUB conference room watching Here and
Elsewhere, that Beirut’s civil war story—one written (if only in their own minds)
by myriad subjects from heterogeneous perspectives—regularly surfaces, disappears,
resurfaces, and then submerges, again, within the city’s post-war contemporary art
scene. If this is Beirut’s temporal heartbeat, correspondingly, we must further contem-
plate two metaphysical questions: When in time is Beirut? Where in Beirut is time?
Peddling time when standing still (parallax)
I rather believe with Faulkner, “The past is never dead, it’s not even past,” and
this is for the simple reason that the world we live in at any moment is the world
of the past; it consists of the monuments and the relics of what has been done by
men for better or worse; its facts are always what has become.12
Hannah Arendt
Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) 135
In support of Arendt’s metaphysical assertion that “the world we live in at any mo-
ment is the world of the past,”13 John McTaggert’s The Unreality of Time (1908) has
renewed currency. McTaggert’s temporal rubric has come to be reflected in, if not re-
fracted by, a group of discordant sectarian players set on historicizing Beirut in ideolog-
ical terms. The consequence of which is that indeed the past isn’t dead because it hasn’t
even passed. Enter McTaggert’s universe, in which time is defined by two interwoven
strains of perception: The distinction of past, present, and future (A-series) and the
distinction of earlier and later (B-series). In the former, we encounter our most intuitive
sense of temporality because A-series time denotes what is fluid and dynamic in our
first-person experience of the world: A present “now” moving to us from the future and
passing by us into the past. In this way, A-series represents the sense of temporal flux,
comprising “a series of positions running from the far past through the near past to the
present, and then from the present to the future and the far future.”14 Accordingly, the
present is always ontological. To exist in the past is not to exist at all because the past
is forever fixed, while the future remains open, as that destination to which we will
someday arrive. Moreover, because A-series time is subjectively in flux, it contains no
objective worldwide now. With B-series time, on the other hand, we encounter a spatial
and objective model, one consisting of the temporal categories of “before” and “after.”
This is the temporal sequence comprising calendars, historical narratives, and seasonal
change. In B-series time, the year 1975 will always and forever come before 2020. That
said, in B-series time one can psychically “move around” its spatial configuration, for
time is laid out before us as a kind of meta-temporal map of the known universe’s
events, positions, and moments, such that I temporally define myself vis-à-vis the se-
quence of events that have come before me. As opposed to A-series time, the moments
in B-series time are thus static and discrete, since what is earlier in time will always
be just that. It follows, then, that since B-series time stands outside change or flux, it
has come to define what we cognitively denote as time proper. This led McTaggart to
paradoxically conclude: “A universe in which nothing changed (including the thoughts
of the conscious beings in it) would be a timeless universe.”15
If B-series time is static, then our subjective sense of temporality results from
the following philosophical equation: A-series + C-series = B-series. What then is
C-series? For McTaggart, C-series denotes that which is only of an order: An alpha-
bet, the days of the week, or a numerical system. Accordingly, while C-series lacks a
directional mandate, it is ruled by laws of sequence. Meaning, numerically we can say
1, 2, 3, or 3, 2, 1, but not 2, 1, 3. “It is only when change and time come in,” McTag-
gart explains, “that the relations of this C-series become relations of earlier and later,
and so it becomes a B-series.”16 Which is to say, “it is only when the A-series, which
gives change and direction, is combined with the C-series, which gives permanence,
that the B-series can arise.”17 This is the same metaphysical equation at the core
of Here and Elsewhere’s calculation montage. In semiotic terms, the signifier chain
A-series + C-series = B-series corresponds to the signified chain Subject + Position =
(Historical) Time. In which case, Godard’s equation—1917 + 1936 = 1968—only
makes sense when each year in that equation is within McTaggart’s temporal algo-
rithm. In other words, Godard’s 1917 requires an experiential subject (A-series), a
directional position (C-series), and a historical field (B-series) to make his montage
have the multivalent signification he sought. Hence, we derive the Godard/McTaggart
mash-up by which one might better perceive how the metaphysical unreality of time
comes to be real in both psychic and political consciousness.
136 Juli Carson
To view McTaggart this way is to deconstruct the A- versus B-series dichotomy,
because as Sandra B. Rosenthal argues in Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy
(2000), the world as we experience it intellectually—that is to say historically—is er-
roneously split between what Rosenthal calls A-theorists and B-theorists. The former
privileges a “prereflective” experience of time, in present-tense terms of “immedi-
acy, pure presence.”18 While the latter privileges a tenseless experience of the world,
wherein time—uncoupled from subjective temporal paradoxes—comprises a factual
succession of discrete real events, ones that never repeat or fold back onto each other.
Correspondingly, positivist historians tend to be B-theorists and presentist historians
A-theorists, while those deconstructionists challenging the privileged status of the
now within both B and A logic—either by negation or by assertion—might be called
“new historicists.” Count the materialist time travelers, such as Godard, as the prece-
dent for new historicists, along with a handful of dynamic theorists and artists living
in Beirut as Godard’s fellow travelers.19 Simply, for those Beiruti Godardians—ones
who experience the now by way of an unreconciled parallax view of the past—to
engage the world’s historical events entails conscientiously holding A- and B-series
time in the balance. Otherwise, when time is cognitively experienced as either A or
B, we enter into hegemonic time—that temporality of sectarian local politics, on the
one hand, and global neoliberal tactics, on the other. Both of these are founded upon
mythological narratives of past and future, in service of what the Beiruti artist and
theorist Walid Sadek has called Lebanon’s “protracted now,”20 to which I will turn
momentarily. But first, the question “when in time is Beirut?” entails a quick dive into
Lebanon’s B-series time, that static field in which the nation’s collective consciousness
is ideologically embedded.
While the region we now know as Lebanon is over 7,000 years old, predating
recorded history, the formation of the Lebanese Republic only occurred in 1920.
Prior to that, Lebanon was alternately occupied by various empires: Phoenician,
Greek, and Roman (4000 BC–AD 600); Arab, Crusaders, and Mamluks (600–
1516); and finally Ottoman and French (1516–1943). We should note, further, that
although Lebanon’s constitutional republic was founded in 1920, the nation-state
only gained its complete sovereignty from the French and Syrian mandate in 1943.
Contemporaneously, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolu-
tion 181, ordering the division of Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into
Jewish and Arab states by May 1948, when the British mandate was scheduled to
end. Just five years into Lebanon’s national independence, then, came the Nakba—
or Day of the Catastrophe—when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or
were expelled from their homes in Palestine, the consequence of the Arab-Israeli
wars from 1948 to 1949 that unilaterally transformed Palestine into the modern-
day nation-state of Israel.
The region’s lingua franca is that the Nakba was ground zero for Lebanon’s civil
war, a kind of primal scene deferred some 30 years later when Lebanon became a
sanctuary state for 110,000 Palestinian refugees. But there were other contribut-
ing geopolitical factors within that 30 years, most notably the six-day war in 1967,
which established the current Israeli occupied territories of Gaza, West Bank, and
Golan Heights, the latter of which lies along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.
As Palestinian refugees traversed that border in larger numbers after 1967, the inter-
state tensions increased between Israel, Lebanon, and the region at large. This, in
turn, fueled intra-state sectarian divisions within Lebanon, culminating in that fated
Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) 137
21
day “that destroyed peace in Lebanon.” On April 13, 1975, Kataeb Party militia-
men opened fire on a bus carrying Palestinians through the eastern Beirut suburb
of Ain Al-Rummaneh, killing over 20. This exacerbated the tensions between those
inhabiting Muslim and Christian areas of West and East Beirut, respectively. But
more significantly, perhaps, it proliferated the politically driven sectarian subdivi-
sions within each pole. 22 Such was the “origin” of the protracted Lebanese Civil
War that officially ended with Ta’if Accords in 1989. Henceforth, the nation’s war
that dare not speak its name would be the caesura within all historical accounts of
Lebanon, its history for all intents and purposes thereby ending in 1943, the birth
year of its republic.
What, then, would stand in for Lebanon’s past—within its historical caesura—on
Beirut’s B-series field? As Sarah Rogers observes, “according to archaeologists and
urban historians, the large-scale and extremely profitable postwar reconstruction of
Beirut’s city center has demolished more architectural and historical ruins than al-
most two decades of fighting,” such that “rather than historicize the war, official
and popular discourses recall an idealized prewar Lebanon—prompting the literary
scholar Saree Mikdasi to ask if Beirut, in fact, is a city without a history.”23 There
were many political and religious players on this field to proffer an idealized prewar
Lebanon—politically, spiritually, and ethnically. Lebanon might very well person-
ify the law of infinite divisibility—but two meta-ideologies, ones currently butting
heads, appear to dominate the post–civil war period. For those aligned with the
global financial market, Lebanon’s narrative is calibrated by Solidere, the Lebanese
company for the development and reconstruction of Beirut’s central district. Founded
by former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and incorporated as a Lebanese joint-stock
company on May 5, 1994, Solidere quickly rebuilt large portions of downtown Beirut
with luxury residential complexes and shopping centers. Under the motto “Beirut, an
Ancient City of the Future,” Solidere attracted big-name multinational companies to
Beirut in order to return the city to its fabled pre–civil war glory as “the Paris of the
Middle East.”24
That was Solidere’s narrative. On behalf of the Islamic nationalist faction there ex-
ists Solidere’s other, Hizb Allah. Founded in the early 1980s, at the height of the civil
war as one of the many warring militias, Hizb Allah is a Shi’a Islamist militia aligned
with Ayatollah Khomeni’s Iranian regime mandate to dissolve the Jewish state. Ac-
cordingly, Hizb Allah’s original 1985 manifesto was decidedly anti-globalist, with
the key objective of eliminating global, Western-American hegemony. Since 1992,
Hassan Hasrallah has served as Hizb Allah’s secretary general, doggedly maintaining
the group’s cohesive “enemy from outside” narrative, which still largely dominates
southern Lebanon. More recently, Hizb Allah has also been forceful in developing
affordable housing in Sahra Choueifat, a district southeast of Beirut, which serves
the large Shiite community displaced by the civil war and subsequent reconstructive
gentrification. 25 On the one hand, then, we have Solidere’s economic narrative—
driven by an idealization of Western liberal democracy for those of means—and,
on the other, we have Hizb Allah’s nationalist narrative—driven by an idealization
of regional ethno-religious identity for those marginalized by Lebanon’s neoliberal
reconstruction.
That said, binaries are deceptive, just as they are meant to be. The reality is that
Solidere and Hizb Allah’s defining ideologies rely on the same presentist notion
of time and therefore history, which brings us back to Walid Sadek’s concept of
138 Juli Carson
Lebanon’s protracted now. In “Peddling Time When Standing Still: Art Remains in
Lebanon and the Globalization That Was” (2006), Sadek sees an international art
market eager to commodify Beirut’s post-war grand récit while failing to compre-
hend the temporal aporias at the core of Beirut’s more recent collective conscious.
As he argued,
The tense and lingering interface provoked in Beirut—for instance between the
film Beyrouth Fantome, which grapples with the absences that dwell in civil war
survivors, and West Beirut, which weaves a light fable of war that seems to have
happened long ago to folks who may resemble our parents—is totally lost when
both are shown abroad.26
Those films were distributed in 1998. Subsequently, the local and regional gateway
through which those artists entered the global art market collapsed following Prime
Minister Rafiq Hariri’s assassination on February 14, 2005. This collapse was further
compounded by Israel’s attempt to annihilate Hizb Allah during the summer of 2006.
As a result, all the idealizations mentioned above were over. First of all, the centrality
of Beirut’s reconstruction that nourished artist’s reflection and critique was undone.
Second, Hariri’s tense but operative truce with the military force of Hizb Allah in
southern Lebanon, through which he was able to maintain the myth of economic
growth during the 1990s, was annulled. 27 A new myth of origin was thus in order.
Filling this lack, the Sunni Future Movement claimed to “represent a Lebanese
democratic forefront of a pan-Arab identity, born of its resistance to a dictatorial
Syrian Ba’ath regime,”28 which began with Hariri’s assassination and included others
out of courtesy and consortium building. Conversely, Hizb Allah—representing a
coalition of parties opposed to Hariri’s Future Movement—strove to “fix the identity
of the Lebanese nation, and not the state, through its leading Shi’i model of armed
resistance to Israeli military expansionism and American Imperialism.”29 In support
of these ideologies, two chronotopes were devised, each of which was launched with
carefully constructed mise-en-scenes.
First the Hariri camp’s “The Truth for Lebanon” campaign, as Sadek recounts:
At the Quntari crossroad in Beirut, an LED day-counter sits perched on a bill-

board showing a large portrait of Rafiq Hariri coupled with the slogan al-Haqiqa
Li-Ajl Lubnan (“The Truth for Lebanon’s Sake”). The lit red digits mark the
number of days passed since the assassination of the former prime minister. With
day zero falling on February 14, 2005, the counter has duly exceeded 1,300. The
cluster of portrait, slogan and counter has become for the Future Movement and
its allies the marker of a messianic wait for a promised deliverance by the Inter-
national Tribunal to be held in the Netherlands following more than 3 years of
investigative work by the International Independent Investigation Commission
(IIIC) set up by the UN through security council resolution 1595 on April 7,
2005. Between day zero—the assassination—and day one—the announcement
of a conclusive verdict by the tribunal—stretches a duration of insignificance.
The digits of the day-counter mark an increasing number, but in fact signify a
countdown. The assassination of Hariri promises a beginning, logistically de-
layed, which will eventually release the nation from 30 years of assassinations
left unpunished.30
Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) 139
This is followed by Hizb Allah’s “Now Is the Time” campaign. Again, I cite Sadek:
When on the evening of Sunday, July 16, 2006 the Secretary General of Hizb Al-
lah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah appeared on television to address the Lebanese for
the second time since the beginning of the Israeli war against Lebanon, he chose
to end his speech in unequivocal terms: “We, willing or not, whether the Leba-
nese are willing or not, Lebanon now and the resistance in Lebanon are engaged
in the battle of the Umma.” With these words, the Secretary General came to fix
the time of the nation in the present tense. Lebanon, and all those in it, will be
in the now until further notice. It seemed as if we were forcibly made to mobilize
within the domain of one particular time, of a prolonged now, defined by the
extreme proximity and imminence of disaster…. Yet, when contextualized within
local and regional politics, it emerges as a rebuttal and carries hence an alterna-
tive conception of time from that dominant in Lebanon since the assassination of
Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. In struggling to overshadow each other, these two
conceptions of time mark an exacerbation of strife in Lebanon.31
If Hizb Allah’s Now Is the Time chronotope is thus founded on the ancient Sumerian
battle between Lagash and Umma of 2450 BC, the primal scene’s past constituting
a forever entombed now, then Hariri’s Truth for Lebanon chronotope rushes us for-
ward, in the messianic manner of a perpetual waiting redemption and truth. Taken
together, both cases constitute a perpetual now as a static vantage point from which,
on the one hand, to look back on what has passed, projecting oneself back there, and,
on the other, to look forward, projecting what will have been once we have arrived
at the future. But, of course, that past is never returned to, nor the future arrived at,
because they are merely chronotopes, literally, mythologized tropes of time. While the
Hizb Allah model won’t relinquish the primal scene indulging ethno-nationalist mel-
ancholia, the Hariri model moves forward too fast, a neoliberal fantasy of the state’s
mourning process. But what of a third model? One that lingers upon an erased event,
rather than peddling time around it. What might that look like?
Reconstituting the event (lingering)
Since the phantom is not related to the loss of an object of love, it cannot be
considered the effect of unsuccessful mourning, as would be the case with melan-
cholics or with those who carry a tomb in themselves. It is the childrens’ or de-
scendants’ lot to objectify these buried tombs through diverse species and ghosts.
What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others. The phantoms of folklore
merely objectify a metaphor active in the unconscious: the burial of an unspeak-
able fact within the love-object.32
Nicholas Abraham
In “Notes on the Phantom” (1987) psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham recalls a patient

who was plagued by a personal phantom stemming from his father’s illegitimate
birth. This illegitimacy was a secret carried to the father’s grave by a complicated
piece of fiction that the family maintained: The patient’s bastard father was a de-
scendant of European nobility. By embodying the fictional account of his father’s
140 Juli Carson
genealogy, the son had unconsciously internalized the neurosis of being illegitimate
even though he lacked a repressed primal scene of bastardization. This internaliza-
tion indexed a gap standing between the father’s own reaction-formation (the asser-
tion of nobility standing for illegitimacy) and the son’s unconscious perpetuation of
the father’s neurotic behavior acted out in verbal fits and irrational claims. Abraham
explains how the father’s unconscious is focused on one thought (which gives rise to
the phantom):
“If my mother had not hidden the name of the illustrious lover whose son I am, I
would not have to hide the degrading fact that I am an illegitimate child.” How
could this thought, alive in the father’s unconscious, become transformed into the
unconscious of his eldest son, everyone’s favorite, and remain so active there as to
provoke fits? In all respects and by all accounts, the patient appears possessed not
by his own unconscious but by someone else’s.33
The difficulty of analyzing the patient thus
lies in [his] horror at violating a parent of a family’s guarded secret, even though
the secret’s text and content are inscribed in the [patient’s] unconscious. The hor-
ror of transgressing … is compounded by the risk of undermining the fictitious
yet necessary integrity of the parental figure in question.34
For a recent generation of Beiruti artists, those born after the Lebanese Civil War, a
phantom similarly haunts them. In Memory and Conflict in Lebanon (2012), soci-
ologist Craig Larkin describes a “postmemory generation” in Lebanon that is “best
defined as residual type of memory; a recollection of an event not personally expe-
rienced but socially felt; a traumatic rupture that indelibly scars a nation, religious
group community or family.”35 The formative primal scene of this generation which
has been inherited as a phantom—in the form of an historical caesura—might very
well be Lebanon’s Amnesty War Crimes law of 1991. With the moniker of “no victor,
no vanquished,” such agreements retroactively exempted a select group of people—
military and government leaders from all sects—from criminal liability for all crimes
committed during the civil war. This was all toward the government’s effort to “con-
trol the narrative” during the state’s reconstruction in order to vouchsafe against
memory, for—as state members argue—to remember is never to heal. Lebanon is by
no way unique on this account. A similar route was taken by both Germany’s Ade-
nauer administration after the Holocaust and Argentina’s Bignone administration
after their Dirty War of 1976–83. But such a failed anamnesis, such a forced histor-
ical caesura, becomes a tenacious presence for a post-war generation. Because, as
Larkin reminds us, “just as collective memories are shaped by historical evidences—
photographs, films, eyewitness accounts, visual recordings and media archives—they
are equally predicated on historical omissions and silences.”36 And where historical
memory is erased, identity becomes even more ideologically manipulatable than is
conventionally the case.37
By way of remedying this crisis of anamnesis, a return to another primal scene—
that of the civil war’s overture rather than its coda—is necessary. Let us first, then,
engage the civil war’s B-series historical time, establishing the event, followed by the
phantom’s A-series subjective time, instanced by the event’s filmic mise-en-scene.
Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) 141
Enter AUB’s Student Council, circa 1970. As Makram Rabah recounts in A Cam-
pus at War: Student Politics at the American University of Beirut 1967–1975 (2009),
AUB’s student movement was exteroceptive—meaning, the university’s physical
walls, which were intended to gate off the campus from its surrounding West Beirut
neighborhood, were in fact a porous membrane, through which the world’s conten-
tious events bore into the student body’s political consciousness. This was the case
from the university’s origin. Established in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College,
the AUB was renamed in 1919 when it adapted a secular American liberal arts cur-
riculum. And with that, AUB not only became the first American academy of higher
education in the Levant, it concomitantly became a power base for a consortium of
Western interest in the region.38 Therefore, it is unsurprising that when a cavalcade of
regional events occurred in the post-war period—the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, the
Egyptian monarchy’s downfall in 1952, and assumption of the Egyptian Republic un-
der Gamal Abdul-Nassar in 1954, the Lebanese mini civil war in 1958 between pro-
and anti-Nassarite factions, and subsequent landing (in the same year) of American
Marines in Beirut—AUB would become a kind of political behaviorist lab, wherein
the student body would act out these tumultuous events. In the midst of this, AUB’s
first Student Council was established in 1969 by AUB president Samuel B. Kirkwood,
conceived as a levee, of sorts, to stay off the political tsunami headed their way. As he
put it, the Student Council was “the ideal means to contain and regulate the justified
rage of the students over their tragic national predicament.”39 In Kirkwood’s eyes,
the council was thus to concern itself only with student affairs, as “an indivisible part
of the University [that is] an educational institution and as such doesn’t not take a
political stand.”40
And yet, to the administration’s chagrin, by 1969–70 the AUB campus had been
transmuted into a microcosm of the Arab world. Two student factions in particu-
lar echoed the region’s politics: Fateh, a local chapter of the Palestinian liberation
movement that led council in 1969–74; and Rabita, the Lebanese Student League,
established in 1958 to oppose the pan-Arab unity movement led by Nasser. But
as Kamal Tannir, a student member of al-Rabita from 1969 to 1972, put it, Fateh
always had the upper hand: “Fateh were like the political Beatles,” she recalls,
“there was mass hysteria about them, as all people except the Maronites were with
Fateh.”41 A case in point: Upon the famed Black September conflict in 1970—during
which the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was violently expelled from Jor-
dan, and concurrent with the Cairo agreement’s legitimization of Palestinian ref-
ugee camps in Lebanon—AUB’s student body was further radicalized. Rabita was
pulled even further to the right, while Fateh moved further to the left. Four years
later, the breaking point was reached when—as a result of the administration’s ten
percent tuition hike, and under the guidance of Fateh—the entire student body rose
in protest. On March 5, 1974, having delivered a list of demands to change, AUB’s
students proceeded to march in Beirut to the House of Parliament, clashing with
security forces. On March 18, the Student Council convened a General Assembly
followed by a 1,000-person march on campus to chants of “Occupation! Occu-
pation!”42 Meanwhile, students at the adjacent Beirut University College (BUC)
were also occupying campus buildings in reaction to their own eight percent tuition
increase. Soon thereafter, both universities called upon other institutes of higher
learning to march together to the Ministry of Education, swelling the number of
protesters to 5,000.
142 Juli Carson
We have thus arrived at the constellation of events to which Rania and Raed Ra-
fei’s film 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle would return some 40 years later. On
March 19, students occupying AUB’s buildings further seized control of the security
office and thus the university gates. With this advance, the tenuous demarcation be-
tween “on campus” academics and “off campus” politics was effectively eliminated.
The students immediately released the following statement:
We are striking because we do not want to be divorced from the problems of our
society. This concern is what the administration calls “politicized”. We refuse the
ivory towers. We refuse section 214. We do not want help from those who gave
2,2000 [sic] million dollars to Israel.43
The students’ 37-day occupation would end on April 24 when 800 Lebanese secu-
rity men stormed the campus, arresting 61 students.44 The Student Council was sus-
pended on the following day as the administration seized back control of the campus.
The administration’s small victory, however, proved only a minor caesura in the con-
text of the larger region’s conflicts. Soon thereafter, Lebanon’s civil war would erupt
full force, dividing Beirut in two—Muslim west and Christian east—and, over the
decade to follow, even further into subwarring factions until war’s end in 1992. Even
then, AUB would manage to function throughout the 15-year Lebanese Civil War,
which included Israel’s occupation of Beirut in 1982, the attack on the US embassy
and an American Marine base in 1983, and the assassination of AUB President Mal-
colm Kerr in January 1984.
Back to the future (again)

The film 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle gives us the improvisational interpre-
tation by seven current-day left activists of AUB’s 37-day student occupation. In so
doing, it is a film that neither turns the page on these events in order to move on,
apropos Solidere time, nor does it melancholically refuse to let them go, as in Hizb
Allah time. Rather, 74 lingers upon this moment, as a means of working through the
events of March and April 1974.
In Rania and Raed Rafei’s hands, improvisational repetition is thus the concep-
tual device by which a conscious, public display is made of an unconscious cultural
phenomenon: The Beiruti collective transference by millennial and post-internet gen-
erations onto a primordial cultural event, one which they paradoxically haven’t for-
gotten because they simply never knew it to begin with. Nevertheless, just as with
Nicholas Abraham’s analysand, this generation inherits the transference neurosis of
their parents in that—and there’s no better way to put this—it is transferred to them
by way of an actual lack, a blank spot in their cultural past. This is different from the
transference neurosis of their parents’ generation, whereby the parent’s repression of
an event that they lived through produces a blank spot as a form of amnesia. But this
blank spot is the breeding ground for a repetition of the repressed lived event, that is,
the transference of it, unknowingly, from the past to the present, where it is inherited,
unconsciously, by the next generation. In both cases, the unconscious compulsion
to repeat something missing is greater than the conscious impulse to confront it.
Exemplary of this phenomenon is the urban reconstruction of larger Beirut by every
political and religious faction, ostensibly to move on from the civil war but which is,
Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) 143
4 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle), directed by Rania Rafei and Raed

Figure 10.1 7
Rafei (Beirut: Orjouane Productions, 2012), color and black & white, digital
beta, DCP, in Arabic with English or French subtitles, 95 mins, Courtesy of
the artist.
144 Juli Carson
4 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle), directed by Rania Rafei and Raed

Figure 10.2 7
Rafei (Beirut: Orjouane Productions, 2012), color and black & white, digital
beta, DCP, in Arabic with English or French subtitles, 95 mins.
in fact, literally laying the ground for the war yet to come, as Hiba Bou Akar argues
in her book of the same name.45
As a counterpunch to transference neurosis, the Rafeis’ film instantiates—by way
of staged improvisational repetition of AUB’s student occupation on the eve of the
civil war—what Freud called “meaningful transference.” In “Remembering, Repeat-
ing, Working Through,” he explains how analysands unconsciously “remember”
things that they’ve repressed by way of unknowingly repeating them—by acting them
out—in response to the analyst’s prompts. In so doing, the analyst mindfully guides
the analysand’s repetition away from unconscious repetition compulsion toward
the meaningful understanding of the event(s) that have unconsciously shaped him
or her.46 By inverse analogy, in shooting 74, the actors are prompted by the direc-
tors to repeat knowingly those events they themselves never experienced but which
have come to color their contemporary activism, with the Arab Spring of 2011 as the
real lived backdrop for their improvisational endeavor. As Rania Rafei recalls, “We
started working on the project before the events in Tunisia. We said to ourselves, the
new generation is dormant. We wanted to call them. With the Arab Spring our film
has changed energy.” Accordingly, she adds, “The dialogues … were not written and
the amateur actors were invited to improvise. An improvisation guided by the work
of funds that the whole team carried out over one year, while working on the archives
of this time.”47 As such, the directors did not build the characters alone. Instead, as
Raed Rafei recalled, “We built the characters based on [the activists’] inputs and their
visions.” Consequently,
Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) 145
through the story of seven characters—the members of the student council
heading the occupation—the film presents a side of the Lebanese socio-political
context one year prior to the civil war, and reflects the different tendencies and
frustrations in revolutionary groups, especially the left, in Lebanon and around
the world.48
For instance, one of the actors, Molotov, was a member of the Lebanese Palestinian
group, while Katiba V. plays the role of Iyad, a Lebanese Palestinian student at AUB
who does not find himself in the pro-Israeli speech of the university. With him, it
is a question of the return to Palestine, a problematic always of topicality. … The
bridge between students of this year 1974 and activists of today is built. It takes
all the more weight in the context of the Arab revolutions.49
Yet another protagonist proclaims near the end of the occupation reenactment that
“one might not call it a great revolution, but I am sure that I am living the revolution
with myself!”50 Meaningful transference indeed!
If 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle is therefore a filmic double counterpunch
to Solidere’s repressive reconstruction of a city, on the one hand, and to Hizb Allah’s
repetition compulsion, on the other, then it is also a counterpart to Godard’s model
of time-traveling docu-fiction directed at excavating the gaps within Beirut’s inter-
generational collective consciousness. In so doing, a dreamscape is staged wherein
a constellation of triangulated signifieds—politics/wages/capital, theory/memory/
history, and image/representation/art—are condensed and displaced among myriad
signifiers, which is to say, historical identities. In Beirut, mining such constellations
in search of a deconstructed historical consciousness is the most radical endeavor one
can undertake. We have thus derived an answer, then, to our second question, “where
in Beirut is time?”
As a young student named Rafik put it while being interviewed by Craig Larkin,
“History is very controversial. It’s always going to end up in a fight.”51 I would argue
that in 74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle we have arrived at a sublimated version
of this fight, one manifested in the hands of two directors who publicly take Beirut’s
amnesiac crisis to both the practitioners of historical censorship, the state, and its
recipients, a younger generation who embody the historical lack by acting it out.
Along the way, the Beiruti cultural landscape displayed by the directors is not only a
cautionary tale of the kind of exteroceptive sectarianism which leads to civil war, here
and elsewhere, it’s an inspirational site for the kind of aesthetic and theoretical time
travel that can meaningfully give us the necessary thrust velocity to escape repetition
compulsion’s eternal death spiral.
Notes
1 Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein
(New York: Basic Books, 2004), 129–30.
2 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in The Gadamer Reader: A
Bouquet of the Later Writings (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). I take
recourse to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s term hermeneutic aesthetics to denote an experience
that communes a present moment to a historical event. Gadamer’s hermeneutic concept of
temporality, sifted through Jacques Derrida’s deft critique, is the guiding principle for this
146 Juli Carson
essay as well as my recent book, The Hermeneutic Impulse: Aesthetics of an Untethered
Past, (Berlin: b_books, 2019).
3 Two publications—each of which introduced post–civil war art production to the North
American and European world vis-à-vis contemporaneous political events—have been in-
fluential on my thinking. Walid Sadek, ed., “Not, Not Arab,” special issue, Third Text 117
(July 2012); Judith F. Rodenbeck, ed., special issue, Art Journal 66, no. 2 (Summer 2007).
The former was produced post the Arab Spring, six years after the latter had introduced
a first generation of post–civil war artists two years following the assassination of former
Prime Minister Hariri in 2005 and one year after the Israeli-Arab war of 2006. Mean-
while, the historical embeddedness of my essay here, along with that of a curatorial case
study I produced for the American University of Beirut, was conceived in the wake of what
I’m calling the “American Summer” of 2016, the eve of US President Trump’s election that
currently casts a very large shadow over the entire Middle East.
4 Jean-Luc Godard, Ici et Ailleurs, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and
Anne-Marie Miéville (Grenoble, France: Sonimage and Gaumont, 1976), 16mm.
5 In Eastern Europe
there were minorities in a number of countries who refused to regard the Soviet Union
as a “transitional society” between capitalism and socialism, as had Trotsky. These
minorities considered both East and West to have equally reprehensible systems of ex-
ploitation and repression.
Marcel van der Linden, “Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French Revolutionary Group (1949–
65),” Left History 5, no. 1 (1997), accessed May 15, 2006 https://libcom.org/library/
socialisme-ou-barbarie-linden. Meanwhile, a general return to Italian post-Marxists,
primarily through the writings of Toni Negri in the context of the 1970s/80s workerism
and autonomia, shores up the lingua franca of critical theory in such prominent cultural
institutions as Beirut’s AUB and Ashkal Awan. This branch of academic practice is beyond
the scope of this essay.
6 See Francois Lyotard, Économie Libidinale [Libidinal Economy] (Paris: Les Editions de
Minuit, 1974); and Francois Lytord, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir [The
Post-Modern Condition] (Paris: Les Editons de Minuit, 1979), the former being the more
radically experimental of the two.
7 Godard, Ici et Ailleurs.
8 For an explication of Jacques-Alain Miller’s Lacanian “suture” that aligns with this God-
ardian formulation, see Juli Carson, “On Critics, Sublimation and the Drive: The Photo-
graphic Paradoxes of the Subject,” in Art: Sublimation or Symptom, ed. Parveen Adams
(New York: The Other Press, 2003).
9 Godard, Ici et Ailleurs.
10 Godard.
11 This kind of psychic time travel is not germane to one kind of aesthetic practice or political
position. When Chibli Mallat—a neoliberal lawyer, law professor, and former candidate
for president in Lebanon—penned the manifesto for Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, he too
employed Godard’s historicist numerology.
Fast forward to 2221. What will a historian standing in the 23rd century say about the
Cedar Revolution of 2005? When 2221 comes, the bicentenary of the Cedar Revolution
will have passed, with many historians’ corresponding flurry of writings, maybe even
in the order of the 170 conferences worldwide which were held around the bicentenary
of the French Revolution in and around 1989. 2221 is a simple arithmetical equation:
2221 to 2005 is what 2005 is to 1789. The distance represents the historical perspective
acquired and underlines the accumulated knowledge that marks the bicentenary of the
Lebanese Revolution and a few years more, 216 solar years exactly. Add 216 to 1789,
you get 2005. Add the same to 2005, when the Cedar Revolution happened, you get
2221. Now 2221, or 2205, or even 2021 is a long human memory.
Chibli Mallat, March 2221: Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution: An Essay on Non-Violence and
Justice (Lebanon: Gubemare, 2007), 17.
12 Hannah Arendt, “Home to Roost,” in Responsibility and Judgment (1975; repr., New
York: Schocken Books, 2003), 270.
Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020) 147
13 Arendt, 270.
14 J.M.E. McTaggert, “The Unreality of Time,” in Philosophical Studies (1908): 111.
15 McTaggert, 113.
16 McTaggert, 116.
17 McTaggert, 119.
18 Sandra B. Rosenthal, Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy: A Pragmatic Engagement
with Contemporary Perspectives (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), 39–40.
19 Godard’s deconstructive play with personal versus historical temporalities is precedented.
In the 1970s Germany, a related historiography was termed Alltagsgeschitchte, or “the
practice of everyday life.” Alf Lüdtke describes it thusly:
In doing the history of everyday life, attention is focused not just on the deeds (and
misdeeds) and pageantry of the great, the masters of church and state [B-series]. Rather,
central to the thrust of everyday analysis is the life and survival of those who have
remained largely anonymous in history—the “nameless” multitudes in their workday
trials and tribulation, their occasional outbursts of dépenses. [A-series].
Alf Lüdtke, The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Experiences and Ways of Life
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 4.
20 Rosenthal, Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy.
21 Hussein Dakroub, “April 13, 1975: The Day that Destroyed Peace in Lebanon,” The Daily
Star (Lebanon), April 11, 2015, http://ftp.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2015/
Apr-11/294119-april-13-1975-the-day-that-destroyed-peace-in-lebanon.ashx.
22 The key sectarian players of the Lebanese Civil War were the Christian Kataeb Party
(Phalangist); conservative Christian militia founded by Pierre Gemayel; the Shiite Amal,
founded by Supreme Islamic Shiite Council Iman Musa al-Sadr; the Christian O (Na-
tional Liberal Party), founded by conservative Camille Chamoun; the Progressive So-
cialist Party (PSP), founded by Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt; the Palestinian Al-Asifah
(Fadayeen) led by Yasser Arafat, PLO. That said, apart from essentialist claims made by
each sect’s respective ideologies, sectarianism is a historically institutionalized geopolit-
ical phenomenon that in Lebanon’s case was first transposed into an official governing
system as early as 1864, by which the government’s confessional system was divided
between Maronite, Druze, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Sunni, and Shi’a, in de-
scending order of representation at that time. According to Bassel F. Salloukh et al.,
the sectarian system that for two centuries was enforced by the sovereign government
but driven by external forces—alternately Syria, Iran, Egypt, France, USSR, UK, and
US—has, to this day, denied “Lebanese of their existence as citizens with inalienable po-
litical and social rights, reducing them instead to unequal members of state-recognized
sectarian communities regulated by extended patriarchal kinship groups and clientelist
networks. Bassel F. Salloukh, Rabie Barakat, Jinan S. Al-Habbal, Lara W. Khattab, and
Shoghig Mikaelian, The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (London: Pluto
Press, 2015).
23 Sarah Rogers, “Out of History: Postwar Art in Beirut,” Art Journal 66, no. 2 (Summer
2007): 8–20.
24 See Sarah Irving, “Lebanon’s Politics of Real Estate,” The Electronic Intifada, August
31, 2009, accessed September 1, 2021, https://electronicintifada.net/content/lebanons-
politics-real-estate/8412. Two experimental documentary films are noteworthy for con-
fronting the utter devastation, if not complete annihilation, of communities (and the
memory thereof) that attended Solidere’s reconstruction of Beirut’s central district. Ghas-
san Halwani’s Erased,__ Ascent of the Invisible (2018) specifically attempts to trace the
1,000 people who disappeared during the civil war and the mass graves that underlie Bei-
rut’s city center—the former “greenline” or no man’s land between east and west Beirut
and its periphery. The filmmaker acknowledges his Sisyphean endeavor with the following
voice-over:
The persons appearing in this film are made visible only for the duration of the screen-
ing. When the film ends, these persons will plunge back into their state of invisibility.
However, this will not prevent them from existing. They linger silently somewhere be-
neath the bustle of daily life.
148 Juli Carson
We should note that these disappeared persons are not allowed to be visible because, ac-
cording to the state, their presence (even psychically) constitutes “a threat to national se-
curity.” Meanwhile, Nadim Mishlawi’s Sector Zero (2011), shot on site in the “Karatina”
district, explains the twofold reason that Solidere erased the sacred ownership of land
plots during Beirut’s reconstruction: (1) There were many claims to each plot, and (2)
owners had fled the country to other continents during the war. Their “solution” was to
compensate those owners they could find with shares in Solidere. Consequently, ownership
over something material (a deed to a land plot) was transposed to ownership of something
immaterial (shares in a company). Which is to say, instead of real estate, which had always
been ancestral in Lebanon, one now possessed a stock “holding.” Such that Solidere’s
Beirut was literally a city-as-future traded on the global stock exchange, its historical past
transposed into virtual commodity fetish.
25 In actuality there are four religious/political organizations in post-war battles over land
and access to housing in Beirut’s southern suburbs known as al-Dahiya, a zone that extends
south from central Beirut to its airport, and east to the agricultural fields of al-Hadath and
Choueifat. They are Hizb Allah (Shiite), the Future Movement (Sunni), the Progressive
Socialist Party (PSP, Druze), and the Maronite Christian Church (Catholic). See Bou Akar
Hiba, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2018).
26 Walid Sadek, The Ruin to Come: Essays on a Protracted War (Berlin: Motto Books; Tai-
pei: Taipei Biennial, 2016), 90.
27 Sadek, 91–2.
28 Sadek, 93.
29 Sadek, 93.
30 Sadek, 94.
31 Sadek, 92–3.
32 Nicholas Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom: A complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,”
Critical Inquiry (Winter 1987): 171–2.
33 Abraham, 289.
34 Abraham, 290.
35 Craig Larkin, Memory and Conflict in Lebanon (New York: Routledge, 2012), 10.
36 Larkin, 14.
37 Again, Lebanon is hardly unique. The US is currently undergoing such manipulation by
way of an administration’s cultural erasure of its civil rights moment, and the constitu-
tional law upon which it was legitimated, in the service of authoritarian white nationalism.
38 Jad Abi Kahlil, Soft Power: The US and the Middle East (Qatar, Al Jazeera Media Net-
work, March 2, 2016), video, 47min, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/al-jazeera-
world/2016/3/2/soft-power-the-us-and-the-middle-east (film no longer available online).
39 Makram Rabah, A Campus at War: Student Politics at the American University of Beirut
1967–1975 (Beirut: Dar Nelson, 2009), 44.
40 Rabah, 46.
41 Rabah, 49.
42 Rabah, 96.
43 Rabah, 97–8.
44 Rabah, 106.
45 Akar Hiba, For the War Yet to Come.
46 Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, Working Through (Further Recommenda-
tions on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. xiii (London: Hogarth
Press, 1958).
47 Marwa Morgan, “Film ‘74’: When Lebanon’s Past and Present Are Different Yet the
Same,” Ahramonline, April 19, 2015, accessed September 1, 20221, http://english.ahram.
org.eg/NewsPrint/128062.aspx.
48 Morgan, “Film ‘74.’”
49 “Between Documentary and Fiction: ‘74, the Reconstruction of a Struggle,’ by Rania and
Raed Rafei,” Agenda Culture, March 20, 2013, (no author).
50 “Between Documentary and Fiction,” 2013.
51 Larkin, Memory and Conflict, 62.
11 IrDaEdNiTcIaTlY
Jeffrey Strayer
Every work of art has a “particular identity” that everything else lacks. That every
work of art has an identity means that it is to be understood to be a particular object
or objects of some kind or kinds of object. However, it must be understood that the
concept of object is employed in the widest possible sense, making anything of any
kind of thing—whether an event, action, abstraction, state of affairs, concept, pro-
cess, property, or something else—an object, and an artwork need not be a perceptual
object, such as a painting or sculpture. It is impossible to give an example of anything
that is not an object since what would be offered as an illustration would have to be
at least an object of thought, thus confirming what the example was meant to contra-
vene. Depending on their nature, objects can be somewhere or nowhere, and may be
at the same or different places at the same or different times, and they can have such
coherent properties as being cohesive or scattered, singular or multiple, temporal or
atemporal, or recurrent or non-recurrent. Objects can be conceived or imagined in
addition to being perceived, felt, recollected, or otherwise experienced. And certain
objects can be conceived or imagined that do not or cannot exist. In addition to ob-
jects that are possible or actual in not violating any law of logic, certain objects are
impossible, in the sense of being logically contradictory. And an interesting question
for both art and philosophy is whether or not an artwork can be an impossible object
and, if so, how it would be produced and understood, and what value it may have as
a result of that production. This issue forms part of a more general theoretical consid-
eration of what kinds of object, in addition to perceptual objects, might figure in the
creative production of artistic possibilities of interest not yet identified, and how any
such novel determination would depend on, and be related to, the thought, percep-
tion, and understanding on which all artworks depend.
Certain artworks since Duchamp are radical in the sense of being identified with
objects that depart in extreme ways from norms of artistic practice established prior
to their appearance. Works of the kind cited below invite the question of just how far
something can be pushed toward an abstraction of pure thought, immateriality, or
even nothingness, and still be a work of art. For reasons stated below, answering this
question must include examining the sense in which something can also be radical in
the sense of being fundamental. As a result, the question of the extremes of identity
in art has both an artistic and a philosophical aspect.
Consideration of the fundamental aspect of radicality involves identifying the basic
requirements of making and apprehending works of art; showing how certain matters
in the epistemology and ontology of art are relevant to this investigation; and looking
at how the notion of where a work is can include situations, events, or circumstances
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-11
150 Jeffrey Strayer
that, in being determined by thoughts and actions, extend that notion beyond the
customary concept of place and its relation to space. Artistic identity depends on the
temporal events of thinking, perceiving, and choosing, as well as the fluid framework
that underlies, and is affected by, the social construction and consumption of art-
works as cultural objects. The relation of art to time and culture must then also be
recognized, and the question of when a particular object is a particular artwork is not
only philosophically significant but an issue that may be investigated artistically by
tying the identity of a work to time, agency, and comprehension.
All of these things are relevant to the deviant sense of identity in art that I call
“radical,” and can be seen to underlie a particular kind of exploration of the artistic
possibilities for radical artworks that, in also being radical in the fundamental sense,
I call “Essentialist.”1
I Historical generation of artworks with kinds of radical identity

One can understand any artwork to be radical when it differs unexpectedly from
the customary construction and understanding of artworks at the time at which the
novel work appears. It is implicit in the previous sentence that conventional “artwork
identity” is culturally determined and sustained until a novel effort results in a new
perspective on artistic possibility. An artwork, although it may be novel in another
sense, is not radical unless its offering as art requires that the concept of art be modi-
fied or extended for it to be recognized, interpreted, and valued as art. There are dif-
ferent kinds and degrees of radicality in art, and it is part of the creative dimension of
art to attempt to determine them. Part of art history is the record of the development
of such radicality in different places at different times. For instance, different ways
of presenting different kinds of image, and various explorations of space in painting
prior to the twentieth century, can easily be understood to have been quite radical in
their time. It is in a certain sense arbitrary, then, where one might begin to consider
“radical identity” in art history, since one could cite different works of different art-
ists at different times to have been a kind of creative assault on what was artistically
conventional at that time. 2 Notwithstanding these many and varied instances, a series
of radical changes in the early part of the twentieth century have made certain things,
including examples discussed in this chapter, possible.
When Braque and Picasso introduced the artworld to papier collé and collage in
1912, they initiated an investigation of the relation of mind, art, and reality that
spawned Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, led to such works of minimalism as Dan
Flavin’s fluorescent sculptures, and inspired works of conceptual, performance, earth,
and installation art that replaced the discrete stable object of traditional painting and
sculpture with ideas, constructions, and actions that often existed independently of
established places of exhibition. Relations of mind, art, and reality that have been
explored artistically since papier collé and collage are complex, challenging, and mul-
tifarious. However, for the central notion with which this volume is concerned—that
is, the question of where art is located, or where it can be understood to exist, subsist,
or otherwise reside—perhaps the most important consequence of papier collé and
collage is the insight that once reality comes into art on the wall, art can come off the
wall and enter other parts of reality, or even irreality.
The remaining paragraphs of this section briefly examine some of the kinds of
work that are part of the progression of radical artistic identity. In the most general
IrDa E d NiTc IaT lY 151
sense, the works cited involve and explore, in ways suited to their particular identity,
the use and dialectical relation of subjects and objects. More particularly, such works
can use, and reflect the use of, such things as perception and conception; stability
and change; actions and events; presence and absence; process and product; acts and
objects of thought; manufacture and invention; use and reuse; language, informa-
tion, and sense data; sense, paradox, and nonsense; intellect and emotion; privacy
and publicity; origination and derivation; single and multiple objects; time and space;
institution and object; and an extended perceptual, conceptual, active, and temporal
aesthetic that recognizes the relevance of the things cited to supplement (in various
ways) a view of valuing art that is traditionally linked to more common and stable
objects. The things listed are relevant to critical and creative consideration of the lo-
cation of art and show that that issue is not a simple and isolated matter.3
To produce his Step Piece in 1971 Vito Acconci stepped up on, and down from, a
stool in his apartment “at the rate of 30 steps per minute” for a period determined by
the artist in advance of initiating the actions of which the work would come to con-
sist. He performed the stepping action each morning and continued in each session, at
the rate stated, for as long as he was able to “perform it without stopping.”4 Because
it consists of a number of actions that follow from a concept, one might think that
the point of Step Piece is to function as performative recognition of the fact that every
artwork depends on an act or acts of thought, and on somatic actions of the sort re-
quired to result in what the work is intended to be. One might also link this work, as
the product of a sequence of movements designed to result in a work of art, to works
of abstract expressionism by earlier artists, such as Jackson Pollock, that were called
“action paintings” by Harold Rosenberg, and that were thought by Allan Kaprow to
have been forerunners of Happenings and performance art.5 However, whereas Pol-
lock’s activity was designed to result in a visible aesthetic object, Acconci’s activity,
in not being linked to the realization of something that would outlast the series of
actions that produced it, seemed to have no artistic point, and little or no aesthetic
merit. There was nothing to see, nothing to contemplate, and nothing to judge, at
least not according to conventional conceptions associated with seeing, contemplat-
ing, and judging received works of art.
Whereas Pollock used his mind and body to produce a constructed visual whole that
was the aesthetic result of a sequence of coordinated actions, Acconci’s movements—
although also coordinated—were not meant to do anything but conform to the pro-
gram of physical exertion that would seem, from a traditional perspective, to result in
nothing beyond the factual occurrence of a number of repetitive exertions. What they
culminated in was the artwork Step Piece, now past, that Acconci recorded in writing
and partially documented in black and white photographs. It is only because these re-
cords and photographs were made available to the artworld—not as themselves being
or supplanting the work that they document, but as traces of a work that no longer
exists—that it is possible to think about and evaluate an artwork that cannot be seen
but only understood.
Christine Kozlov’s Information, No Theory (1969) used a tape recorder to record
detectable sounds in the space in which it was exhibited.6 The recorder included a
loop tape, so that a completed cycle of recording was followed by a new cycle that
recorded new sounds over the sequence of sounds captured on the cycle before it. New
information replaced old information according to the working of a tape recorder that
was set up to realize a design articulated in language by Kozlov. Information, No
152 Jeffrey Strayer
Theory represents a contrast and a contest between the cycle of obliteration by pres-
ervation of related sets of historical data and the unchanging abstract rule according
to which the ephemeral information is to be recorded and then erased.
Kozlov’s earlier 271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding to 271 Days of Concepts
Rejected (1968) uses blank sheets of ordinary typing paper, each of which represents
a day in which the artist had at least one idea for an artwork that she did not then
think good enough to be realized in a form that would have fit the concept rejected.
The title page of this work contains the information of the title with the artist’s name
and date of the work. The empty perceptual expanse of each remaining page is not
offered to vision as a discrete kind of formless visual datum. In fact, no page or part of
a page can be seen as a specific, or segregated, part of the stack of paper that it helps
to compose, and the individual contribution that each edge makes to the boundary
of the stack is less a visual than a factual datum for awareness. Each blank page of
this work is meant to function as a symbol, and so comes to resemble the language in
which a rejected idea would have been framed. And each is just as anonymous as the
particular discarded concept of which it is the vehicle for representation. This work
then makes novel use of the blank surface, and creates a different kind of representa-
tion, both in signifying something in a novel way and in signifying an absent object
that, in being mental or conceptual, is no more something that can be seen than is the
concealed piece of paper by which it is represented. Something present is connected
to something absent through the language of the title that makes the concept of the
work comprehensible. It is significant that this work uses something present to con-
nect to something absent, by means of a concept whose being made public depends on
the use of language in the title of the work. And as use of language would have been
required to make public any discarded idea represented by the material parts of this
work, there is a connection through that medium of an original work to a number of
formerly possible works whose counterfactual actualization forms the content of the
work that uses them to be realized.
The Confession is a work by Chris Burden in which the artist invited 25 people that
he had met and conversed with during an exhibition of his work at the Contemporary
Art Center in Cincinnati in 1974 to a performance that would become the work of
that title. The exhibition included books that documented earlier works by Burden
and a videotaped interview with the artist about his work. Given their interest in, and
knowledge of, his work, and the opinions that they had formed of him based on their
conversations with him, Burden supposed that it was likely that they had formed an
image of him as an artist and individual that was largely positive. Burden decided to
make a work based on the contrast between this image and another less positive view
of him that might result from information that he would provide about a troubling
part of his personal life. When the invited guests arrived at the appointed time, they
saw Burden on the same monitor on which the recorded interview with him had pre-
viously played, but now talking about his unhappiness, and how he had lost control
of his life due to his involvement in “a love triangle.” The audience sat in silence as
Burden talked, revealing “disturbing knowledge,” until he could no longer continue.
With the monologue over, the performance ended, and the audience left without dis-
cussing amongst themselves what they had just listened to.7 Although this work is an
interesting exploration of how artist and audience respond to publicizing private in-
formation in a place meant for a different kind of audience engagement and reaction,
its principal relevance here is due more to the way in which the work extends beyond
the space and time of the exhibition through the minds and memories of the people
that witnessed the performance. That this work was not restricted to its realization
in a particular concrete form in a particular place at a particular time is part of its
radical nature. Instead, it included content that was disseminated through the people
who became participants in the realization and continuation of the work. Burden is
now deceased, and when the last memory of this work is lost no part of the work will
survive. Knowledge of it will be limited to its documentation and continuation in
reports such as this.
Samson is an installation first created by Burden in 1985 that consisted of a 100-
ton jack placed between 16-inch pieces of timber with steel ends.8 These ends were
placed against walls in the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, and set up in such a way that
the jack incrementally increased the pressure that it exerted on the walls through its
connection to a turnstile used by visitors to the installation. Accordingly, each person
who came through the turnstile slightly increased the pressure on the walls of the gal-
lery, which meant that if enough people came into the gallery the jack could in theory
cause the building to collapse.9 In using a jack, Samson employs a perceptible object
with strong visual and sculptural qualities to realize a state of affairs that includes the
institutional setting in which the perceptible object itself is exhibited as a key constit-
uent element. For this state of affairs to be understood to be a work of art, the percep-
tible object—the jack—which is itself a member of the state of affairs, must be located
either in or in relation to the museum or institutional space of which—through its
relation to beings of the sort on which the institution depends—it threatens to be the
destruction. The effect of a person’s entering the museum through the turnstile not
only becomes part of the state of affairs at the time at which the event occurs, it rep-
resents a dimension of the work that cannot be perceived but can only be understood.
The importance, value, and particular identity of Samson as a work of art depends
on understanding the relation of object, event, and institution, since it is in virtue of
that understanding that Samson can be seen to be a work of art that relies on a cul-
tural framework that it is set up in theory to destroy. Although all of the perceptible
aspects of the state of affairs set up in the museum are very visual, and in that sense fit
well with the history of sculpture, the understanding of how these things are designed
to work in relation to their place of exhibition makes that understanding as important
or more important than any aspect of the work that is visible. If understandings can
be understood to have locations, they must be where the brains on which understand-
ings depend are located, and so Burden multiplies and mobilizes the spaces relevant to
the work to include all of the changing places in which understandings of the identity
of the work exist.
Dennis Oppenheim did a series of works over a period of about two years, begin-
ning in 1968, that he called Transplants. A few of these were created by taking the
dimensions of the floor plan of a gallery space, such as gallery number three in the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and marking, with an implement such as a shovel,
an area in the ground of another location—such as an empty lot or field—that repre-
sented the size and shape of the gallery meant in this schematic way to be reproduced
and relocated. The residue of the performance of this action—the depicted space—was
then photographed to document the action and its effect, and the photograph became
part of a montage that included a map of where the outline of the gallery was made.
In the case of the Stedelijk gallery transplant, this was at a site of bare winter ground
in Jersey City, New Jersey. In addition to the colored map that had been stamped by
154 Jeffrey Strayer
the artist to mark the location where the outline of the gallery space was realized, the
montage included a scaled black and white floor plan of the Stedelijk Museum with
the gallery outlined in red that was outlined in full size in land in the United States. It
also contained the following text: “GALLERY TRANSPLANT. 1969. Floor specifi-
cations Gallery #3, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, transplanted to Jersey City, New
Jersey. Surface: Snow, dirt, gravel. Duration: 4 weeks.” This language also functions
as the title of the work, the montage of which is now in the collection of the Art In-
stitute of Chicago.10 Each Gallery Transplant work from Oppenheim’s Transplant
series employed, as a starting point, the size and shape of a room of an institution of
the kind on which the recognition and preservation of important works of art depend.
The realization of the size and shape of that room in the bare earth of a different loca-
tion was not motivated by the desire to make a realistic picture of something, to create
significant pictorial form, or to make an artifact that represented the externalization
of the artist’s emotions. Instead, the intention was to use diverse things in diverse
locations to produce a work in which art, nature, and concept are related through as-
sociation with a cultural structure on which the work itself relies to be a work of art,
at least one that is important enough to contribute to the history of art that museums
are dedicated to preserving. This multi-dimensional work, which must be understood
to include concept and action in addition to the other things cited, can be understood
to make us reflect on the relation of human beings and culture to nature given the
nature and culture of human beings.
In 1969 Robert Barry produced Inert Gas, Helium by releasing helium from a
standard container of balloon gas into the atmosphere in the Mojave Desert.11 This
work consists of the artist’s past action of discharging the gas into the atmosphere,
and of the history of its expansion and distribution in the atmosphere according to
the physical conditions to which it was then, and continues to be, subjected. As the
gas was and is invisible, the only evidence that the artworld has of the work is a
photograph of the container of the gas in the location in which it was released, with
Barry’s written testimony to the action of its release. Works such as this linked the
material of the work to time in addition to space allowing the temporal dimension of
the work to extend beyond the time of the action on which it depended. Seeming to
take invisibility to the extreme, it made the location of the artwork and its borders,
such as they were then and are now, something that one can only imagine and cannot
precisely identify.
Inert Gas, Helium did not, however, take dematerialization to the extreme to
which it was taken in Barry’s All the Things I Know but of Which I Am Not at the
Moment Thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969 (1969). This work is determined by us-
ing language to specify or single something out that it is to be understood to be. The
work is not the language written on a wall or typed on a piece of paper. It is what
is specified by the language. And this is something that is invisible and unknowable
in all of its particular content, both by us and by the artist who is responsible for
the work. Exactly what is specified by the language though has its difficulties. One
would assume that it is a class consisting of a very large number of things known by
Barry of which he was not conscious at the time appended to the specification. This
could seem then to have a straightforward relation to Barry and to the language that
he used to single out that class of objects of knowledge. Where is that class though?
To the extent to which the language concerns things that Barry could have called to
mind, it would be reasonable to suppose that they were states of knowledge located
in his brain. However, what is meant by “things” in the language the things I know
is ambiguous concerning the concept of things known, since things known could be
thought to concern, not just states in an epistemological being, but the things them-
selves to which the states pertain.
In addition, things known would include knowledge of particular and general im-
personal facts as well as biographical knowledge in the form of personal memories.
The relation of the latter kind of knowledge to Barry’s brain might seem relatively
clear, given the dependence of memories on brains. And although retention of, and
access to, knowledge about impersonal facts can be understood to have the same kind
of dependence on brains, the location of such facts, including facts as known, is not
clear. Where is the fact that 1 + 1 = 2? If this is better expressed as a relation between
the concepts of unit number, addition, and equality, where is that relation and where
are those concepts? If the right answer is that concepts and relations are abstract
objects—so that concepts inhabit a spaceless and timeless region in which relations
obtain, if that qualifies as, a location—then part of the class singled out by All the
Things I Know… would consist of things that, although targeted by knowledge, are
not themselves located in the brain. Then things known by Barry would have been
different in nature with diverse locations fitting their heterogeneity as different kinds
of epistemological object. This diversity of location could be thought to be part of the
artwork’s radical identity in addition to that associated with the opaque or anony-
mous nature of what is singled out by the specification, given its relation to thinking
as a conscious event.
This relation of thought to Barry’s All the Things I Know… specification has also
been thought, by Margaret Boden, to be paradoxical, and, by Diarmuid Costello, to
generate an infinite regress.12 The paradox concerns the language of which I am not
at the moment thinking since to have the notion of things not then being thought of,
one has to have the thought of the things of which one is not then thinking. But then
one is thinking of those things as not being thought, even if only descriptively as a
group, and not individually as particular items of knowledge. The infinite regress
results from forming the thought stated in the language All the Things I Know but
of Which I Am Not at the Moment Thinking since, as seen, in thinking about not
thinking about such things, one knows that one is thinking of them. But if the inten-
tion is, as seems clear, to single out things known that are not then being thought of,
then a new thought would have to be formed to fit the terms of the specification that
would exclude the previous problematic thought. And the specification, or equivalent
ways of wording it, seems to be the only way to single out what is intended to be con-
ceptually discriminated. However, the same problem that arose in relation to the first
thought violating the terms of the specification would arise here, and this problematic
relation between thought and specification would simply continue without end.
It is intriguing to consider whether the paradox and the infinite regress can them-
selves be understood to be singled out, as objects of thought, by the language that
results in them, or whether they are simply byproducts of the attempt to single some-
thing out that is problematic in the ways indicated. Where might either be located?
The question of the location of a paradox or an infinite regress, whether singled out or
educed in thought, may not be one that can be properly raised, given the kind of thing
that each is. Or it might be said that each is located in the understood product that
results from the use of the conceptual or abstract relations of the concepts involved in
the determination of each problem.
156 Jeffrey Strayer
However all of these things may be, the following assertions seem defensible:
1 Barry used the language All the Things I Know… to delineate something for
thought that used the thought expressed by the language to effect the delineation
2 The use of this specification produces a contest between what clearly seems possi-
ble and comprehensible for Barry’s language to single out and the problems with
thought and language noted above
3 This opposition—between the conceptual clarity and friction noted—is part of
the character of the radical identity of this work
The works of art cited, and perhaps Barry’s All the Things I Know… in particular, in-
vite the question of just how radical artistic identity can be. The answer to this query
depends on understanding what is essential both to producing and to understanding
any work of art, no matter how radical or reductive, as indicated in what follows.
II Making and apprehending works of art: Essentialism and

the basics13
a The fundamental artistic action presupposed by any work of art is singling some-
thing out. Artworks can be singled out in creation, as in a painting by Fra Angel-
ico; in selection, as in a readymade by Marcel Duchamp; or in specification, as in
Robert Barry’s All the Things I Know…. A complex artwork can also be singled
out by using a combination of any two or all three of these things.
b What is singled out is an object, in the widest sense of the concept of object, as
previously indicated. Objects can be divided generally into those that are exis-
tential and non-existential, and particularly into those that are phenomenal and
noumenal relative to a particular individual at a particular time.
An object exists if it is a temporal or spatio-temporal object now, in a frame-
work in which the present can be marked off from the past and future. For art and
culture this demarcation is effected in relation to consciousness since the present
is the time of consciousness—or all consciousness occurs when it occurs in the
present—all of art and culture depends on consciousness to exist, and things that
exist are located in the present. An object that exists is a present “existential”
object, one that existed in a past present is a past existential object, and one that
will exist in a future present is a future existential object. Past and future exis-
tential objects, for the purpose of art and culture, are determined in relation to
memory and expectation. Thinking is an existential event or process, and a rock
is an existential object that can be perceived in an existential event of perception.
Any object that is not an existential object is a “non-existential” object. Abstract
objects, such as numbers, and impossible objects, such as a forest without trees,
are non-existential objects. Non-existential objects are conceived, thought about,
imagined, or understood, but are not in any case located in time or space and time,
although any kind of conscious event directed at or pertaining to them is. The
existential-non-existential bifurcation is produced in relation to relevant kinds of
conscious event since art and culture depend on consciousness, and the under-
standing of the division depends on relevant kinds of conscious event.
An object is “phenomenal” when it is either a conscious event, such as ex-
periencing pain, or the object of a directed conscious event, such as thought or
perception, relative to a particular conscious subject when she is conscious. A
tree when seen is phenomenal relative to a person then seeing the tree. The con-
cept of a tree is phenomenal relative to someone thinking about that concept.
Any object that is not phenomenal relative to a particular subject in the present
is then “noumenal” relative to that conscious subject. The same object can be
phenomenal relative to one subject at the same time that it is noumenal relative
to a different subject at that time, and the same object may be phenomenal rel-
ative to the same subject at one time that is noumenal relative to that subject at
another.
The categorical distinctions between existential and non-existential, and
phenomenal and noumenal objects, are made in relation to current consciousness
since that is a necessary condition of both the continuation and advancement
of art and culture. They are recognized here because of their relevance to the
topic of this chapter. In particular, how noumenal in addition to phenomenal
and non-existential in addition to existential objects can profitably figure in the
artistic investigations of “Abstraction” and radical identity are things to be deter-
mined a posteriori in particular artistic investigations. Thus no a priori statement
can be made about the superiority or importance of one kind of object or another
to artistic inquiry once it is realized that the identity of any artwork of any kind
depends on a present existential object that is then phenomenal relative to at least
one observer.
c Every object, including each work of art, has the particular property of being the
particular object that it is, which is the object’s haecceity, and pertains to its this-
ness, or its being this thing that it is, that is nothing else, and that nothing else is.
The haecceity of any artwork is the property that it has of being that particular
work, which everything else, including every other artwork, necessarily lacks.
Each object, including each artwork, is different from each object to which it is
not logically identical, and as it is only logically identical to itself, it is logically
distinct from every object that lacks its particular identity. These things apply to
any object, no matter its nature, complexity, location(s) in space or time, or its
independence of space and time.
However, the points made pertain to the bare logical form of the concept
of haecceity and the more interesting metaphysical question concerns the prop-
erties on which an object depends to be the particular object that it is. The
particular identity of a particular work of art is determined by what it is that
makes the work that particular work, or on the properties on which it depends
to have its particular haecceity, and so requires examination beyond the simple
statement of haecceity guaranteed by logic. How particular artwork identity
can be constructed or determined within a fundamental framework that re-
flects, as it utilizes, essential conditions of making and apprehending works of
art is the inquiry motivated both by the reductive interests of Essentialism and
by its concern to identify kinds of radical identity that can emerge from such an
investigation.
d Any artwork presupposes the consciousness and agency of the artist whose work
it is. Consciousness is heterogeneous and includes thought, reflection, memory,
and understanding in addition to the perception on which any artwork relies. No
being, while unconscious, can produce a work of art, and any artist must have
at least one thought, and make a least one choice, in bringing about a particular
158 Jeffrey Strayer
work of art. Thus, an artist must intend to create or otherwise produce a work
of art, and that informed intention must be followed by at least one action that
follows from that decision. This requirement of intentional action holds even if
determinism is true, since the kind of determined action that appears to be a free
choice must occur for an artwork to be possible.
e It must be possible in theory for conscious subjects in addition to the artist to be
aware of the intended identity of a particular work of art. In particular, it must
be possible for the artworld to be aware of the identity of any artwork that would
enter art history. Any artwork depends on a perceptual object for the identity of
that work to be understood.14 However, it is not the case that an artwork must
be a perceptual object itself, and so need not be identified with, as opposed to
depending on, any perceptual object that is a condition of its identity. This is not
the case, for instance, with Barry’s All the Things I Know…. The point about
publicity is that any perceptual object on which any artwork depends must be di-
rected to communal understanding. This is as true of radical as it is of traditional
works of art. The works of art identified in the first section could only be cited
and discussed because of the public nature of the perceptual object or objects on
which knowledge of the intended identity of the work depends.
f To understand what a particular artwork is to be understood to be, one has to
attend to a perceptual object or objects that the work is meant to be, or through
which the identity of the work is made comprehensible. This involves conscious-
ness and agency since one has to be conscious of that object and one must choose
to attend to it. Each is required for appreciation, interpretation, and judgment, in
addition to comprehension.
A concern of Essentialism is to use the consciousness and agency of someone attend-

ing to a perceptual object, on which the identity of an Essentialist artwork relies, and
to construct the perceptual object in a way that uses the consciousness and agency
that inform that attention as means to produce the Essentialist identity intended.
III Essentialism and the concept of an artistic complex

When a subject chooses to attend to a perceptual object that an artwork is meant to
be, or on which its particular identity depends, an “artistic complex” results of which
the subject and perceptual object are necessary constituents. These two things are
united through the consciousness and agency that are also ineliminable elements of
the complex. Conceptual consciousness is an active constituent of the complex, with
sensation, since one must understand that the object being attended to is either a work
of art or an object on which the identity of a work of art depends.
Any artistic complex is essentially characterized by a number of things in addition
to those just stated that can be understood to be elements of the complex, and that
can be used in certain ways to investigate the most extreme ends of reductive art and
certain possibilities of radical identity. For instance, they include epistemological re-
lations of the subject to the perceptual object, her indexical relation to that object, her
history of awareness and agency, and causal relations that hold between subject and
object.15 A question for Essentialism is whether or not the ingredients of an artistic
complex, as elements essential to the comprehension of artistic identity, can somehow
be used to produce, and to be reflected in, the very identity to be comprehended.
IV The time and place of conventional and radical works of art
In depending on perceptual objects and conscious subjects, the issue of identity in art
must also consider the relation of art to space and time.
The perceptual objects of conventional artworks, such as paintings, are commonly
thought to be physical. However, physics assures us that paintings, qua physical, are
nothing like what they appear to be. For art then, one must make a distinction be-
tween physical and perceptual space. Perceptual objects can be understood to depend
on physical objects, but perceptual objects, as works of art, in having properties such
as color that physical objects do not, cannot be thought of as being physical objects.
Perceptual artworks are located in places in space determined in relation to other per-
ceptual objects in a network of perceptual objects of which they form part. Perceptual
objects in perceptual space are key for understanding art.
A radical artwork will be wherever what it is meant to be is located, if it has a lo-
cation. Any perceptual object on which a radical artwork depends will be in percep-
tual space, but a radical artwork might be located in the understanding of someone
attending to it, it could be spaceless, or it could be a combination of things thought to
occupy different places that, even if they cannot be given a location in relation to con-
ventional notions of space or place, can be marked off logically in relation to things
that we can understand.
A conventional perceptual artwork depends on a particular material organization
to be that perceptual object, but no perceptual artwork exists, as art, when not being
perceived. Even if objects retained the properties they have in perception apart from
perception, a perceptual artwork would still have to be perceived to be perceived
as art. That having been said, one can recognize a distinction between public and
private time. Private time is the time of individual consciousness and action. Any
perception, thought, or act has a particular position in the history of awareness of the
being whose perception, thought, or act it is. Accordingly, each occurs at a time, or
for a time, that delineates, as it composes, part of the private time of the biography
of a particular individual. At the same time everyone lives in a common public time
determined by clocks and calendars, and a more traditional artwork can be thought
to have an ostensibly continuous biography suited to that public time, from its coming
to its ceasing to be, as long as it is understood to be a factually discontinuous entity
during that time. Art history pertains to public time. The subjunctive discontinuous
status of artworks is linked to private times that occur within public time.
The question of when a work of radical art is depends on the kind(s) of object(s)
that it is to be understood to be, and so whether any such an object is itself temporal
or atemporal. In any case though, because of the dependence of art on perception and
understanding, and because of the temporality of consciousness and comprehension,
any artwork of any kind has at least an indirect relation to time, including one of
radical identity.
V Language, surface, ideational objects, and the configuration space

of Essentialism
The aim of Essentialism is to determine artwork identity in relation to use of essential
elements of artistic complexes as the means of identifying ultimate kinds of radical
identity and the limits of Abstraction in art. This requires using language in relation
160 Jeffrey Strayer
to consciousness, agency, and understanding to single out objects that all or part of
an artwork is to be understood to be. A piece of language used to single out such
an object is a “specification.” The language of specification must be publicized as a
permanent possibility of comprehension. As such, it must be so written and exhibited
to make it theoretically available to any number of different subjects at the same or
different times. Thus, the language, and the space of which it forms part, must be ap-
prehensible and reapprehensible by the same and different subjects. The phenomenal
nature and location of this language will involve considerations of space and time.
An object is “ideational” when whether it is all or part of a work of art depends on
understanding language that singles out the object in relation to that understanding. Es-
sentialist specifications single out ideational objects. The relation of an ideational object
to understanding may be implicit or explicit, depending on the wording of the language,
but it is Essentialist in either case in being indexed to the understanding on which it
depends to be ideational. Because of my interest in thisness and particular identity, I call
an Essentialist specification a “Haecceity,” and give it a number that locates it in the
Haecceities series (2002–), of which it is a member. An ideational object either closes the
separation of subject and object or links them by design in understanding. Eliminating
that distance is not part of most traditional artwork identity since, although dependent
on consciousness, the relation of the object to the subject is not typically directly ad-
dressed by the character of the object.16 For instance, no non-Essentialist artwork of
which I am aware explicitly makes the act or state of understanding what the work is to
be understood to be itself the work to be understood. This is the case though with Haec-
ceity 9.241.1, which reads: understanding that understanding what is understood is to
be understood in understanding this is what is to be understood in the understanding
of this in any understanding (2021). Here the specification singles out the understanding
of the specification as what is to be produced and identified by that constructive com-
prehension. Any understanding of what is singled out singles itself out as what is meant
to be understood, and so determines in a reflexive act of understanding what is designed
to be determined by that understanding. As nothing can be understood to be the work
except understanding the intended identity of the work, it represents one limit of Ab-
straction. And it is radical in placing the work in the invisible and terminal act or state
of understanding what the work is to be understood to be.17
I call the constructed space of the Essentialist perceptual object a “space of appre-
hension” to underline its relation to the cognitive processes of reading, reflecting, and
understanding in addition to perception. And these and other things, such as memory,
that are explicitly or implicitly used in the construction or determination of Essen-
tialist identity are part of the “field of understanding” that every subject attending
to an Essentialist perceptual object brings to that encounter. Both of these things are
aspects of an Essentialist artistic complex, and each is used in the investigation of
Abstraction and the exploration of identity.18 The particular way in which an Essen-
tialist artwork uses the space of apprehension in interactive relation to the field of un-
derstanding creates an Essentialist “configuration space,” the being and character of
which depend on the nature of the work’s specification, its relation to the space of ap-
prehension in which it appears, and of which it forms part, and its relation to the field
of understanding on which it depends, and to which it is directed.19 How to use and
delineate this configuration space, and so how to construct the space of apprehension
to engage the field of understanding in the construction or determination of ideational
objects is, with language, the primary target of creative explorations in Essentialism.
VI Essentialism and radical identity
As every artwork must have a particular identity that everything else lacks—being
this thing that nothing else is—the fundamental investigation of the possibilities of
identity must focus on the creative production of identity itself as actualized in var-
ious ways, in diverse kinds of object, that reflect the essential elements of artistic
complexes and the necessary conditions of making and apprehending works of art.
This includes not only identifying ways and results of producing the various identi-
ties that can be produced as a consequence of that interest, but it includes exploring
how the relation of identity to the consciousness and conditions on which it depends
to be brought about and recognized can be reflected in the identity determined and
understood, and includes investigating the relation of an identity to the difference
established in relation to it.
As concentration on the essential elements of an artistic complex constitutes the
most effective and reductive means of exploring thisness and the identity-difference
relation, a creative inquiry of this nature must concentrate on delineating the funda-
mental identity-difference relation in relation to particular uses of essential elements
of artistic complexes to produce a work that is a particular this. This requires using
language to engage certain elements of a complex explicitly, as others figure implicitly,
in the construction or determination of artwork identity. In particular, consciousness
and agency can function as media when engaged in particular ways by language to
figure in the determination of something that an artwork is to be understood to be. 20
Artworks will be more reductive and Essentialist to the extent to which they reflect
the conditions on which they depend to be the works that they are.
I suggest then that Essentialism is an inquiry that can use language and the essen-
tial elements of an artistic complex to explore certain artistic possibilities that cannot
arise from a different artistic approach or conceptual perspective. The Essentialist
inquiry includes identifying the reductive limits of art in works in which kinds of
radical identity, such as the following, are exhibited:
1 Two different artworks can be identified with the same object

2 Two different objects, of the same or different kinds, can be the same work of art
3 The same work of art can be understood to be identified with nothing, some-
thing, and everything, at the same or different times. This is the case with Haec-
ceity 1.0.0 seen in Figure 11.1, given the ways in which different lengths of the
language can be read and understood.21 The circular language of illustration 1
appears beneath the loupes in the work so that they read symmetrically from each
of the longer sides.
4 The identity of an artwork can be “determined in relation to understanding the
conditions themselves that provide for the possibility of that determination” as
the determined identity reflects the conditions on which that determination is
understood to depend 22
5 The identity of an artwork can result from understanding that the identity to be
understood is actualized in understanding the relation of the identity intended to
that understanding, as seen in Haecceity 9.30.1 (2021)
6 An artwork can be understood to be a nullified possibility that results from its re-
lation to the actual occurrence of an event of understanding language that singles
out the cancelled possibility in relation to that understanding 23
162 Jeffrey Strayer
Figure 11.1 Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 1.0.0 (detail), 2009, language © Jeffrey Strayer.
Figure 11.2 J effrey Strayer, Haecceity 1.0.0, 2009, mixed media, 9½ × 121∕8 × 4″ © Jeffrey
Strayer.
7 The language that specifies a work of art can be written to function in relation to
its apprehension so that “nothing understood to be specified by it can be under-
stood to be specified by it given that apprehension”24
8 The identity of an artwork can be determined in relation to an act of conceiving
of something of which it is not possible to conceive in attempting to form that im-
possible conception. Haecceity 12.0.0 (2002) is such a work. 25 The language of
this work appears in a detail of the perceptual object of the work in Figure 11.2. 26
All of the works and possibilities cited are relevant to the matter of the being, iden-
tity, and location of radical kinds of art, considered both artistically and philosoph-
ically. Other examples of radical identity are identified in works of what I call the
Figure 11.3 J effrey Strayer, Haecceity 12.0.0 (detail), 2002, mixed media, 20¼″ × 22½″
© Jeffrey Strayer.
Haecceities series that are works of Essentialism.27 Whether or not there are other
kinds of radical identity that are of aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical interest is
what ongoing Essentialist investigations are meant to determine.
Notes
1 I use the terms Essentialist and Essentialism solely in relation to the project of determin-
ing limits of “Abstraction” and identifying possibilities of radical identity in art. Each
of these interrelated projects depends on using the necessary, or essential, conditions of
making and apprehending works of art to produce works of art in which such limits and
possibilities can be recognized. Any other meaning, use, or understanding of the term,
inside or outside of either philosophy or art, is irrelevant to, and has no association with,
the particular concerns of this investigation. The capitalization of each term is meant, in
part, to reinforce the meaning that they have only in relation to the matters to which they
are meant to apply. In addition to material on Essentialism and Abstraction seen in Sec-
tions II–V of this chapter, see Jeffrey Strayer, Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and
Abstraction (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceities: Essentialism, Identity,
and Abstraction (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
2 See, for instance, Strayer, Subjects and Objects, 15–25.
3 The use of such things is also of interest to the multiple interests of Essentialism, including
raising questions about where works of art can reside. And as they may be pertinent to
other concerns, I do not mean to suggest that they can only be used artistically with the
goal of investigating possible locations of art and possibilities of radical identity. Finally,
the importance of each work considered should not be thought to be limited to the things
that I have to say about them.
4 See Frazer Ward, Mark C. Taylor, and Jennifer Bloomer, Vito Acconci (London: Phaidon,
2002), 37.
164 Jeffrey Strayer
5 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New (New
York: Grove Press 1961), 23–39; Harold Rosenberg, “The Concept of Action in Painting,”
in Artworks and Packages (New York: Delta Books, 1969), 213–28; and Allan Kaprow,
“The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” in Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life: Allan
Kaprow, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993), 1–9.
6 See Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (Berkeley:
The University of California Press, 1997), 80; and Paul Wood, Conceptual Art (New
York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002), 35–7.
7 Chris Burden, Chris Burden 74–77 (Los Angeles, CA: self-published, 1978), unpaginated.
8 Samson is now in the collection of the Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Mineas
Gerais, Brazil.
9 Guy Nordenson, “An Engineer’s View,” in Chris Burden: Extreme Measures, ed. Lisa
Phillips (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2013), 75–80.
10 See “Gallery Transplant, Floor Specifications Gallery #3, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,
Transplanted to Jersey City, New Jersey. Surface: Snow, Dirt, Gravel. Duration: 4 Weeks,”
Art Institute Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/211878/gallery-transplant-floor-
specifications-gallery-3-stedelijk-museum-amsterdam-transplanted-to-jersey-city-new-
jersey-surface-snow-dirt-gravel-duration-4-weeks.
11 Wood, Conceptual Art, 35–7.
12 Margaret A. Boden, “Creativity and Conceptual Art,” in Philosophy & Conceptual Art,
ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 230;
Diarmuid Costello, “Kant After LeWitt: Towards an Aesthetics of Conceptual Art,” in
Philosophy & Conceptual Art, ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2007), 112. The formulation of how the paradox and infinite regress
both occur is mine. The fact of paradox and infinite regress are cited by their respective
authors but are not elaborated upon.
13 Although the matters written about in the remainder of this chapter are considered more
thoroughly in the books Strayer, Subjects and Objects; and Strayer, Haecceities, the pas-
sages as written are sufficiently detailed to fit the purposes for which they appear.
14 When not otherwise emphasized, it should be understood that perception includes intellec-
tual awareness or comprehension in addition to sensation.
15 This list is not exhaustive. The complete list, as well as how they can figure in determining
the limits of Abstraction in art and possibilities of radical identity, can be found in Strayer,
Subjects and Objects; and Strayer, Haecceities.
16 Works that explore the relation of the viewer to the artwork include Las Meninas by Diego
Velázquez, 1656, oil on canvas, 10′ 5″ × 9′ 1″, Museo del Prado, Madrid; Mirrored Cubes
by Robert Morris, 1965/1971, mirror glass and wood, each cube: 914 × 914 × 914 mm,
overall display dimensions are variable, Tate Modern, London; and Any Five Foot Sheet of
Glass to Lean Against Any Wall by Joseph Kosuth, 1965, transparent glass, 5′ × 5′.
17 The word or here is inclusive since Haecceity 9.30.1 can be understood to specify an act
or state of understanding or both. And the word terminal pertains both to understanding
as the end of a process of reading and to understanding in its finite and conclusive nature.
18 See Strayer, Haecceities, 255–329.
19 See Jeffrey Strayer, Essentialism and Its Objects: Identity and Abstraction in Language,
Thought, and Action (unpublished manuscript, 2021–), Microsoft Word file.
20 See Strayer, Subjects and Objects, 234–62.
21 For how this is possible see Strayer, Haecceities, 340–64. As noted in the text, Essentialist
artworks are called Haecceities for their relation to thisness and particular identity, and
individual contribution to the Haecceities series.
22 Strayer, Haecceities, 394–5, for commentary on Haecceity 2.10.1 see 393–7.
23 See Strayer, 398–407.
24 Strayer, 410, for commentary on Haecceity 4.7.0 see 408–15.
25 See Strayer, 433–7.
26 The media of principal importance that are mixed in the Haecceities series are language,
consciousness, and agency, and it is in virtue of the latter two working in concert with the
words of a specification that the identity of the ideational object is produced or otherwise
determined. Sometimes these things are used with, and in relation to, other objects that
form part of the perceptual portion of the work, as in Haecceity 1.0.0 of Figure 11.1. This
is done when objects can be used to affect the relation of language to understanding, or to
effect a relation of interest of understanding to language that would not hold apart from
that use. Perhaps it is worth noting too that the perceptual object of a Haecceity artwork is
part of the work, and the ideational object is the other part. And, depending on the nature
of the ideational object, that part of the work may be in the head, in time but not in space,
or nowhere and nowhen in being abstract and so non-existential. For additional thoughts
on the notion of a medium see Strayer, Subjects and Objects 234–53.
27 See Jeffrey Strayer, Art and Philosophy, https://www.jeffreystrayer.com/.
12 Would the Real Tusk Please
Stand Up?
Rosanna Raymond
Seʻi muamua se faʻasao a manu vao1
I cry the ocean

I bleed the earth
I sleep with mountains
I greet you with my dead
May my waters greet your waters
May my mountains greet your mountains
May my house greet your house
Here I acknowledge Ngāti Whātua who keep the fires warm, tendering the
mana of this whenua, where I take shelter in Tāmaki Makaurau, Te Ika a Maui,
Aotearoa.
Let us take this time to acknowledge those who have passed, for we are the past, we
are the present, we are the future.
In.VĀ.TĀ.tion 2
I am the ancestor
I am the house of the ancestor
I am tino o faiā
Inside me … eons of past lives, layers of genealogical matter

Sharing time and space as they live through me … and I live through them
Manavā loloto … we are the whāNOW
I am the ancestor … the ancestor is me …
I am a body becoming
I am not male nor female, nor am I either or
I am the aitu once nurtured in the womb
Born to the lower heavens, a divine sequence handed down from the begin-
ning of time forging the vā tapuia, connecting me to the creator and all that is
created.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-12
Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up? 167
Figure 12.1 Pacific Sisters, Kaitiaki with a K, 2018, FAB.rication, installation view, Te
Papa Tongawera. Photo by Kerry Brown.
168 Rosanna Raymond
I am the vā … the vā is me …
I am more than the vā
I am the connective tissue a resting place for the atua
I am the va’a, a slippery boundary between heaven on earth
Manifested in blood, bone, heart, and soul … decorated, sustained, and

maintained
Sau o le ola … sogi mai, when my breath takes leave, the aitu and the mauli
remain … a perpetual gift from the depths of the past
Repeat after me … I am the ancestor, I am the aitu, I am the vāNOW
Ka haere tātou3
Ka haere tātou whakamua
tihewa mauri ora
tuia te muka tangata i takea mai
Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pamamao
kukume nga herenga, whakauru nga taura
kukume nga herenga, whakauru nga taura
kotahi te wairua e
haumi e, hui e, taiki e
(Let us progress forward
Let there be life
Bind the fibers of man and women together
These originate from Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pamamao
Pull the ropes, join them
Pull the ropes, join them
Bind all together, it is done)
This text has been developed in relation to tacit knowledges and insights drawn from
working as a practitioner in a community on the shores of Moana-nui-a-Kiwa4 in
Aotearoa (New Zealand). The preceding haka, 5 which is titled Ka haere tātou, was
composed by and gifted to Pacific Sisters6 in 2012 by Paitangi Ostick at my request
and in honor of the inauguration of the Niu Sister: Eyekonik at the Māngere Arts
Centre in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. We have used this haka since this inaugura-
tion, on this occasion to whakapai (prepare) a space to bind us together and to con-
nect us. As we will discover in this chapter, the value of the social relations is central
across Moana cultures. It is also something understood in a very different way from
negotiations between individuals and the collective in Western cultures. Perhaps most
importantly, conceptions of individuality are not something a person from the Moana
is necessarily comfortable with. This key point of difference can sometimes present
challenges when working within the languages and circuits of global contemporary
art. Just as there are no walls in the fale tele (traditional houses of Samoa), there is
no “I” in our language. Culturally, this distinction is a particularly important feature
in the lived diasporic experiences of New Zealanders of Samoan decent. It is also for
this reason that we must acknowledge the land, people, and extraordinary collective
creative energies that underpin the stories and ideas that follow.
Much of what others call “art” is already continuous and embedded within the
lived and deeply embodied cultural practices of Moana peoples. Hence if we wish
to find a “location” for art, it is imperative that we must begin with the “life/body”
itself. For those experientially unacquainted with the way in which we see, feel, and
communicate through our bodies, this feature might require some dispositional ad-
justment. Yet it is only one of many portals. This chapter will not attempt to offer a
definitive account of the multiplicities at play in contemporary Moana art and cul-
tural practices but rather a series of insights built through personal contributions,
observations, and practice.7 Being a vocal and active member of a thriving artistic
“urbanesian village”8 —a community that nourishes one another while forging niu
ways of being9 —my insider/outsider relationship with the Moana arts and cultural
movement is at once a strength and a weakness. For better or worse, however, this
insider/outsider reality has shaped both my practice and my being. Central to this
shared reality is the vā, which loosely translates into the space in between things that
is not empty and which actively relates and gives meaning to things. This ever-present
and all-encompassing unity that we call the vā is a powerful relational force that has
shaped Moana identities from their island origins right through to the Pacific Islander
diaspora in Aotearoa. Although it is space, it is never empty space or absent presence.
Unlike space that separates, it is a richly contextual space that relates and unites all
entities and things.
In reflecting upon my own three-decade journey into the arts through this in-
sider/outsider reality, I will need to reach deep into my manava (stomach). Although
art came into me in a roundabout and sometimes painful way, it is now permeated
through the core of my life/body. Accordingly, my body serves as the core material
through which I activate the mauli (life force) of my artistic creations. As I see it, I am
a “Culti.VĀ.tor,” “FAB.ricator,” and “Acti.VĀ.tor” of spaces, people, and things.10
(I will elaborate upon these three core threads in my work in the second part of this
chapter.) These are all processes now wound up in an expanded choreographic prac-
tice that extends far beyond the contexts of contemporary art to guide everything
from domestic routines to ritual protocols. To date, this choreographic practice has
encapsulated art and activism, ritual and regalia, group enactments, and multiple
manifestations. Crucially, it activates space and collapses time using the body and
genealogical matter as content. My body, its own inherent language, and the language
of the measina that I adorn it with have all converged to form a powerful space within
which my art practice and cultural heritage come together. Moreover, it is here that
the past and the present all congregate in the NOW. Consequently, my body is a site of
resistance that enables me to traverse genealogical times and geographical spaces. In
short, my body seeks nothing less than to collapse time and create a place to manifest
the ancient and the modern self as one.
The stories I seek to share all carry the fragrance of my cultural heritage.11 Con-
sidered together, they hopefully provide a glimpse into how stories, ancestral voices,
intangible histories, and possible futures might be revived. Helping me along the way
are the many bodies which variously and collectively comprise my creative commu-
nity: Defiant bodies,12 Vā bodies,13 Entangled Objects,14 Pacific Sisters,15 SaVĀges,16
and a host of Niu Aitu.17
170 Rosanna Raymond
Kinship as art
Like the transcultural arrangement of time and space, art is organized differently in
different cultures. Both the general and specific tenets of the ta-va theory of reality
have a bearing on art. Given its generality and formality, the ta-va theory enters into
art as a discipline and a social activity.18
Traditionally, the peoples of the Moana had no word for art (in the Western sense).
There was no need, for it was woven into the very fabric of society and made tangible
through cultural practices and practitioners. We have multiple terms for artisans:
Tufuga/tohunga (loosely translated into expert), and a deep and continuous cultural
heritage spanning over 3,000 years. Unlike distinctions typically drawn between
utility and aesthetics in Western cultures, the practical and the beautiful have long
coexisted in Moana cultures. Seen as together and inseparable, the practical and the
beautiful actively coexist throughout social activities, rituals, and celebrations. Our
art/life objects, forms, and gestures are circulated through society in a constant cycle
of reciprocation and are valued through the ongoing social maintenance of the rela-
tionships they helped to forge.
With the arrival of Europeans, and the subsequent introduction of Western ideas
and technologies into Moana cultures, significant ruptures would appear in these
longstanding patterns of reciprocity in our relationships with people and things. With
the advent of European collecting (appropriative) practices, a radical fragmentation
and dispersal of the material expressions of our culture would lead to blunt and ig-
norant ossifications. Artifacts that were once part of a living ecology, and which ac-
tively facilitated relationships between Indigenous people and their divinities, would
be entombed within the heterogeneous and generically foreign spaces of the museum.
The ineffable effect of this social rupture and subsequent material dispersal would see
artifacts once central to living circulation and exchange with ancestors cease to live
and socialize in the manner for which they were produced.
The social life of artifacts is a fundamental aspect of Moana culture. It is essential,
just as we conserve physical objects, we must also seek to protect and conserve their
vā relationships, which in this sense implicates living together with the associated
cultural practices from both the past and the present. With this need for active social-
ization of artifacts at the front of my mind, I am committed to the role that art and
performative practices might play in initiating new ways of conserving cultural be-
longings. This way, new and future relationships might build and grow with measina
(cultural treasures). Notwithstanding the violence and ignorance of the past, it is now
possible that museums might begin to play a more productive role in continuing to
bring us together, to share our vā with our people and things—especially given that
the traditional role of the village malae (open meeting space) and paepae (bench from
which to speak) has changed in a diasporic context.
Many people have no doubt at some stage inquisitively peered into a museological
display cabinet and assumed that they are encountering art from the Moana. Here,
floating out of context and devoid of its inextricable living social energy—and most
likely, darkly lit to preserve its physical life—these artifacts are instead laden with
anthropologically oriented didactic information that is largely divorced from their
originary social existences. Others have probably encountered artifacts in art history
books or art magazines. Here, they lay in moe mauiluli (a suspended state of anima-
tion), the ossified object is likely encountered as an expensive commodity, untainted
by modernity, and ready to be bought and sold—its social history cleansed in prepa-
ration for its life on a shelf, in a box, or on a wall.
But how many of these audiences have encountered contemporary Moana artistic
or cultural production? Today, many Moana artists combine their cultural heritages
with visual, performative, and ceremonial elements. Although engaging with a con-
temporary artworld still largely built in a Western image can be profoundly detrimen-
tal, there are also advantages, insofar as Moana artists have discovered and created
new contexts within which to continue to actively weave new social narratives into
heritage-based methods. Yet notwithstanding a growing interest in such practices,
stubborn assumptions still implicitly dictate what art is, where it can be found, and
what it can do. Suffice to say, they are not looking to share our vā or experience of
art through the life/body.
Experiences related to profound incommensurability and sometimes aggressive mis-
understandings are shared by many First Nations and Indigenous cultures globally.
Unsurprisingly, there is now a growing global movement, largely initiated by Indige-
nous curators and artists, to take back control of contexts of presentation and actively
reclaim creative and cultural practices. Métis artist and scholar Julie Nagham’s recent
co-edited volume (together with Carly Lane and Megan Tamati-Quennell), Becoming
Our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice (2020), for example, is a crucial
and timely overview of emerging conversations and budding kinships across a now
thriving world-wide Indigenous creative community of curators. As Nagham puts it
so eloquently:
We have built a kinship across oceans, forging a community with each other and
waiting with bated breath to see what the future of these dialogues will hold.
Many of us come with the colonial baggage of our geographic region but at the
same time we carry the strength and knowledge of our families, communities,
and land/ocean-based practices. Many of us also come armed with the languages
and protocols of our specific nations, which allow for connections to percolate
through Indigenous ontologies.19
In the hands of matriarchs

If I reach back into my earliest memories to look for art, I see it in the hands of my
matriarchs. These women had very busy hands. Indeed, theirs were the hands of mak-
ers. Their hands were routinely used for crocheting, knitting, sewing, and embroider-
ing. I also remember my mother painting when I was very young. There were many
books on her shelves featuring the master painters of European history. In retrospect,
I can now recognize that these formative experiences represent a common internal-
ized form of prejudice. Given that my mother would send me to very conventional art
and craft sessions in the school holidays and take my brother and me to galleries and
museums, I invariably grew up thinking that art was something only to be found in
galleries, hung on walls, or carved in marble. Māori and Pacific art, by contrast, was
something inherently primitive or tribal and only found in anthropological museolog-
ical contexts. This internalized prejudice would take a long time to undo.
My formative educational experiences would only compound this situation in my
young mind. When I eventually chose to study art in high school, I would once again
encounter the very same European masters I had seen in my mother’s books. Although
172 Rosanna Raymond
Figure 12.2 P
acific Sisters, Tohu TūPuna, 2018, Aolele opening Acti.VĀ.tion, Te Papa
Tongawera. Photo by Kerry Brown © Pacific Sisters.
I have a vague memory of encountering Māori and Pacific art on an excursion, the
curriculum certainly made it clear that European art forms such as easel painting,
printmaking, and drawing are synonymous with art. Bereft of any encouragement
or understanding of my cultural heritage and interests, any artistic ambitions I might
have once had were all but squashed.
So where did I find what I now understand as art? The foundation of my work as an
artist today began on the streets of Tāmaki Makaurau 20 in the 1990s with the Pacific
Sisters collective, described below. It was here that I learnt how to use my hands as
a maker and work with a clarity of purpose with my body. From that time onward,
I committed myself to fusing traditional techniques, oral histories, and genealogies
from the Pacific together with contemporary materials and methods. I would also be-
gin to create a presence in the urban landscape of Aotearoa, all the while re-rendering
and privileging my Moana body.
Pacific Sisters
Pacific Sisters is an artistic collective that doesn’t necessarily sit neatly in existing cul-
tural categories. It has met mixed reactions from Moana communities and has been
seen as inauthentic by others.21 Presenting work that is characteristically live and
direct in nightclubs, warehouse parties, and festivals, we have decorated ourselves in
leathers and feathers, shells and tusks, tapa cloth and tatau, 22 refusing many of the
social expectations of our diasporic parents. Our intermedial and interdisciplinary
practice utilizes moving images, performance, and fashion to juxtapose heritage tech-
niques with contemporary materials. Ultimately, being neither traditional nor generi-
cally contemporary, we seek to decolonize our bodies by creating new mythologies to
reimagine our past, present, and future.
I have long found and believed that storytelling and performance are intrinsically
linked. Samoan paramount leader and knowledge holder Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese
Ta‘isi, for example, uses fāgogo (stories from and of the past) to create and teach
new meanings in the present.23 The fāgogo storytelling style of Samoa is essen-
tially performative, and is likened by some observers to performance art.24 My own
performance-centered practice, both collaborative and individual, is permeated with
fāgogo stories as a source of both artistic and intellectual stimulation.
For Pacific Sisters (and other Moana practitioners), materials and artistic methods
inherently command their own fāgogo stories, gafa (geneologies), and mana (author-
ity, status, spiritual/supernatural power found in people, places, and things), which as
we understand it, literally surges through our hands in the act of making. When we
adorn our bodies with materials and fibers from our cultural heritage, we are inextri-
cably connected to the land, sea, and sky. A range of other political, social, cultural,
and material elements are also taken into consideration when designing our regalia.
Consequently, the conventional idea of a costume does not convey the depth of the
spiritual and physical form and function embedded in these creations. For Pacific
Sisters, they are best described as kaupapa-driven frocks.25
Although our initial presence in the artworld was nanoscopic, we would in time
develop artworld currency as a consequence of our relationship with members Ani
O’Neill and Lisa Reihana, both of whom were gaining local and international
recognition in their own right. Despite being seldom invited into official artworld
spaces and events, we nevertheless continued to create our own exhibitions and
happenings. Thirty years later, however, things have shifted markedly. In 2018,
for example, our acceptance into mainstream Aotearoa culture was marked by our
featured inclusion in the opening exhibition of the new gallery space Toi Art at Te
Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New Zealand) and later in 2019 at Toi o Tāmaki
(Auckland Art Gallery). Curated by Nina Tonga, who is Te Papa’s first ever Pacific
Curator of Contemporary Art, Pacific Sisters: Te Toa Tāera | Fashion Activists was
our first major retrospective exhibition, which featured 17 of our Niu Aitu creations
alongside a comprehensive series of photographic and moving works and documents
spanning nearly 30 years of collective practice and sisterhood. In many ways, it was
during the opening acti.VĀ.tion of the Te Papa Tongawera Museum’s new gallery in
the presence of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern that we realized just how far we had
come together.
It was within the Pacific Sisters collaborative space that I developed my embodied
performative practice and learnt to use my body to personify atua-gods and god-
desses and tipuna (ancestors from the past) to bring them into the present. It was
from this starting point in my practice that I began to use my body to “talk back” to
familiar tropes—such as the “dusky maiden” and “noble savage”—which have been
historically projected onto bodies such as mine through a white male gaze. Given
that the Moana body has lived under the fetishizing mantle of the savage since first
contact, these tropes have fascinated me (and my peers) for years. Rather than simply
banishing her from my visual landscape, I instead decided to diversify her. It was
174 Rosanna Raymond
clear, however, that she was in dire need of a little active reimagining. So, let me in-
troduce you to her many facets in my poem and artwork:
One a Day: A 7 Maiden Rave On or The Dusky Ain’t Dead She Just Diversified
[sic]26
Full Tusk Maiden

ex cannibal, still got a few head-hunting tendencies, and sometimes can’t tell a
predator from the prey … oh well they all taste the same. Long of the tooth but
still fertile, a red clay lady, been around since the first dawn, introduced Papa-
tūānuku and Nafanua to the Virgin Mary and they have been friends ever since,
certainly makes for great ladi nights out. Once had a shark king for a husband
but swapped him for a warrior god in the shape of an octopus because he gave
better cunnilingus.
Rave on Maiden
that girl can talk, you can’t help but listen, her voice is soft and dry like a breeze
playing with the autumn leaves, she’s got skin like the bark of the tree, so often
hides in the forest, don’t worry if you can’t see her as she smells of a thousand
gardenias. Good to have around on long black nights as she is full of myth and
magic and has her own sickle moon for you to make a wish on. Loves wearing
dog skin, banana flowers and no undies on formal occasions, so don’t make her
sit cross legged or try to hide her in the rafters.
Hand to Mouth Maiden

a sweet soul ladi, with paua-shell eyes, you can see her back arching across the
sky at night, it’s swathed in a cloak knitted from glitter, works so hard but al-
ways poor … keeps her slim though. Will never reveal your secrets, they are safe
with her. There’s not much to eat up there, so she feasts on rainbows and the odd
spaceman, when visiting her best friend, Sina, who lives on the moon, you can see
them sometimes spitting out the bones. No need for a spacewaka, she can fly, but
rarely comes down to visit, as earthly pleasures are not to her liking.
Hand in Hand Maidens

always ready for some girl on girl action, once they were stuck back to back but
were torn apart when they were out playing with some thunder and lightning.
Sometimes weighed down by life but loads of sex, good shoes and great friends
keeps them happy enough, they ain’t going to fade to black, because they can
chase the clouds away. Have been known to scare the boys so only men need
apply to take a peek at their tattooed thighs and hairless vaginas and don’t forget
to hang on if you go for a ride.
Back Hand Maiden

a ceremonial virgin, with centipede edges, never one for compliments, she’s a true
savage, quick to bare her buttocks at the slightest offence, has no qualms about
slapping your lips and telling you to eat shit, whilst trussing you up like pig ready
for the spit … but has the most fantastic manners and a loving face with much
warmth in her eyes. She had a big black eel for a lover but had him chased away,
Figure 12.3 R
osanna Raymond, Backhand Maiden, 2017, Acti.VĀ.tion, American Natu-
ral History Museum © Pacific Sisters. Photo by Kerry Brown.
176 Rosanna Raymond
least they were discovered, as it would be her own facial blood not that of her
hymen she would be covered in.
Fully Laiden Maiden

got big bones and big hair, when she breathes her breasts rise and fall like the
swell of the shallow sea, loves wearing mother of pearl and pounamu all at the
same time, so she chimes when she walks, always busy so can seem a bit dis-
tracted, nevertheless, a no fuss, no bother, sort of a girl. Pretty in a strange sort
of a way, you can’t help stare at her eyes, they are vast and can light up the night
sky, you see she has no pupils, they are vessels containing old gods … just don’t
trip over and fall in them … you won’t come back alive.
Tu Mucho Maiden
has the meanest huruhuru froufrou you ever did see, thick and dark, they look
great all oiled up and sprinkled with turmeric, matches her black lips and sun-
shine smile, loves the feel of leather and feathers and don’t pick a fight with her
as she knows what to do with a big stick. You should see her on the dance floor,
she’s got butterfly thighs you’ll want to take her home and introduce her to your
mother. Be aware, she needs the salt water to cleanse in, so she can’t live far from
the sea and make sure she has a soft mat to recline on when indoors, she’ll treat
you to a song and make you cry.
SaVĀge Kʻlub
Notwithstanding my ongoing commitment to working with collectives, my experi-
ence of working alone in some contexts across the global contemporary artworld—
especially during protracted periods living and working away from my Pacific Sisters
in the Northern Hemisphere—has necessitated the development of individuated en-
tities such as Sistar Sʻpacific. This work has often involved working inside museums,
with the collections essentially becoming my new community.
During a residency at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, for example, I
founded the SaVĀge Kʻlub27—a playfully critical response to a surprisingly resilient
relic of darker times: The seemingly anachronistic ongoing existence of a gentlemen’s
club called the Savage Club that is still thriving in some countries today. My reaction
was not simply formed in response to their repugnant incorporation of Indigenous
clothing and wearable artifacts, but the equally outdated fact that, as a woman, I
could not join them to work from the “inside.” So, I decided to form my own “club.”28
Through the SaVĀge Kʻlub, I have developed an artistic approach that emphasizes the
challenges of both race and gender-based othering, using intersectional Indigenous
methods. The deliberate wordplay in the club’s provocative title and logo performs
multiple meanings, from its visual appearance, to the sound that connects it to other
potential meanings.29 The capitalization of “VĀ” in the middle of the word, for exam-
ple, privileges the Samoan notion of vā at the center of Moana-based creative practices
and protocols.
Like the Pacific Sisters, SaVĀge Kʻlub uses the body and performative methods to
create temporal and spatial connections in order to retell our stories and to reclaim
our bodies from the diminishing realms of anthropological classification and fet-
ishized objectification. Performance, ritual activation, collaboration, and ceremonies
are fundamental methods within both collectives. Most importantly, the layered pres-
entation of genetic materials together with hand-crafted adornments, visual art ob-
jects, poetry, sound, ceremony, and performative methods all work together to form
a vehicular constellation that is inextricably connected to the vā.
Vā
Thus, we return to the centrality of the vā to both traditional Moana cultures and the
speculative capacities of contemporary artistic production. As noted earlier, the vā de-
notes, as Albert Wendt has so eloquently put it, “the space between, the betweenness,
not empty space, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds separate
entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving
meaning to things.”30 Importantly, this is not a fixed definition but rather part of a
continuous process of becoming that remains vital to the growth and new potentials
of contemporary Moana cultures, including its diasporic sisterhood. Indeed, the very
notion of the vā is in flux as it spreads throughout our transnational communities.31
This new geographically expanded vā begets new narratives and experiences as it
remains central to the task of creating new Moana thought and ways of being.
Describing or defining the ineffable potential of the vā is not a simple task, for as
I’uogafa Tuagalu puts it, “the conceptual terrain of the vā is vast.”32 Indeed, Tua-
galu has identified at least 37 different variations in its articulation of the nature of
spatial social relations. Rev. George Pratt, who wrote the first Samoan dictionary,
found that a typical response to any request for further definitional clarity is met
with the counter question: “What sort of va are you talking about?” Pratt neverthe-
less defines vā as a verb with two meanings: (1) To rival, and (2) To have a space in
between. 33 For Wendt, it was especially pertinent to develop a cohesive theory of the
vā outside the village for a cosmopolitan urban context. 34 It is for this reason that
we see value in any concerted work to give the vā new life, voice, and currency in
diasporic contexts.
Vā body
My body is marked with the unbroken 3,000-year tradition of the Samoan malu. 35
Importantly, this tattoo is not simply ink on skin but more importantly part of a
process that creates a shared space for activating and maintaining genealogies,
geographies, and (her)stories. Unlike the postcolonial body that Albert Wendt tau-
taued, 36 mine is a vā body. In my practice and lived experience, I engage the vā in
order to construct a vā body with which to challenge and negotiate space. I under-
stand that the vā needs a body before it can disrupt and contend with the stubborn
legacies of the colonial era by creating niu mythologies. As Kanaka Maoli 37 fem-
inist scholar Stephanie Teves puts it, Indigenous agency can be effectively chan-
neled through defiant bodies. Moreover, for Teves “performance creates knowledge
through action; creating subjectivities, it is a simultaneous process of worldmak-
ing.”38 In our case, worldmaking is simultaneously a process of restoration and
defiantly making anew.
The use of the body as a tool with which to recenter Indigenous ways of being and
knowing is also found in the work of many other First Nation artists and thinkers.
When, for example, Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes
178 Rosanna Raymond
embodied understandings connected to her tribal lands in Turtle Island (the continent
of North America), I recognize something that resonates strongly with my under-
standing of the nature of the vā body:
Recognition for us is about the presence, about profound listening, and about rec-
ognising and affirming the light in each other as a mechanism for nurturing and
strengthening internal relationships to our Nishnaabeg worlds. It is a core part of
our political systems because they are rooted in our bodies and our bodies are not
just informed by but created and maintained by relationships of deep reciprocity.
Our bodies exist only in relation to Indigenous complex, non-linear constructions
of time, space, and place better continually rebirthed through the practice and
often coded recognition of obligations and responsibilities within a nest of diver-
sity, freedom, consent, non-interference, and generated, proportional, emergent
reciprocity.39
Clearly, despite the very different geographies and cultural understandings at play
in a North American First Nations context, there are a number of relatively similar
forms of embodied knowings with the capacity to resonate across global Indigenous
cultures. In my experience, it is precisely because of such resonances that globally
connected First Nations kinship can flourish. It is also why, when Albert Refiti de-
scribes that “the body is the exemplary agent of vā relationships,” that I can be confi-
dent that my global First Nations communities will implicitly understand something
fundamental to the Moana experience.40
Refiti has also described another idea that I believe resonates strongly across
global First Nations experience—the “gene-archaeological body.”41 For me, it was
in 2008 as part of a small gathering in the bowels of the Royal Festival Hall in
London that I felt, strikingly, my own gene-archaeological body unfolding. This
experience is fundamental to socializing Moana experience across time and space.
As Refiti puts it:
Understanding the gene-archaeological matter is to realise that your body and

being-represent a line of ancestors/land/community/family, which is part of you.
Therefore, the body belongs to the ancestor. Your being there allows them (these
ancient bodies) to be present there too.42
It is through this notion of the gene-archaeological body that I can imagine the body
as the physical connective tissue enacting all forms of the vā, for as Refiti explains,
“our body therefore is already a vā matter, the ultimate vā, a porous/holey boundary
between the ancestor and the world.”43 The transhistorical and transsubjective con-
nection that is activated through the vā body is a non-gendered space where all ances-
tors and genealogies are housed. We are the house of the ancestor. The non-gendered
nature of this space is also expressed grammatically in the interchangeable male/
female pronouns used in most Moana language groups.
It is the interpretive and generative potential of a vā body that can bring people and
things into existence. In this sense, as an artist, I understand it as my primary zone of
production. Today, I know that my vā is a fluid, embodied, genderless, multi-strand,
urban, a transnational vessel for my ancestor that now constantly folds time and
spaces across a range of artistic, institutional, civil, and scholarly contexts.
Anchoring the aitu
Historically, ritual performativity and spirituality had a place in Samoan life through
a relationship with the aitu. This much-maligned ghostlike entity, like the native body
itself, was targeted by the missionaries as something incongruous with imported
Christian doctrine. Aitu are said to be descendants of the original atua (gods), per-
meating all aspects of life in lalolagi (world) from birth to death. They had their
own priesthood known as taula aitu (anchors of the spirits). Although sometimes
described as a tutelary deity,44 aitu are perhaps most defined as ghosts, spirits, or
demons. Yet others, such as Aiono-Le Tagaloa, dispute the generality of this claim,
instead describing the aitu as a ghost or spirit of a particular dead person, for “the
aitu is the creative and cheeky part of the inner being of the person,”45 and like mauli,
continues to exist when the ola (life) takes leave of our bodies.
Fale aitu
The aitu has its own spiritual home, which we call the fale aitu, which literally means
house of spirits. Although the exact origins of the fale aitu are uncertain, Victoria
Kneubuhl has speculated that they were likely associated with malaga (traveling par-
ties), and by extension, gatherings in which entire villages would come together.46
Following the formalities, pōula (night dances) were held, which were filled with
song, dance, and entertainment. Unfortunately, much of the detail of what actually
took place is now inaccessible due to the suppressive disapproval that missionaries
felt toward their licentious nature.47 One surviving highlight was the fa‘aluma (one
who humiliates), who would become possessed by the aitu using humor and satire
to parody leaders and figures of authority.48 In this sense, somewhat like Mikhail
Bakhtin’s description of the historical role of the “carnival” in a European context,49
the fale aitu was a form of culturally sanctioned chaos within which the fa‘aluma
could help alleviate the tensions of an otherwise ordered existence. Again, somewhat
like Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque,” the traditional fale aitu has provided a
source of inspiration widely adapted by Pasifika Theatre practitioners and comedians
to become a popular source of entertainment for urban Moana communities in both
theaters and on screens.50
Niu Aitu51
Today, there is a new wave of twenty-first century niu Moana creatives working to
transform the aitu. In 2003, for example, celebrated fa‘afafine artist Yuki Kihara
produced the photographic series Fale Aitu: The House of Spirits, in which aitu from
well-known Samoan fāgogo were restaged. In 2016, the multidisciplinary arts and
activist collective FAFSWAG hosted the inaugural Aitu Ball. The spirit of these nights
reminds me of early Pacific Sister and SaVĀge Kʻlub events. Raw and powerful, like
the fale aitu of old, these events now offer a place to playfully critique contemporary
subjugations to power. The aitu are not just brought to life in performance-based
celebrations. Pati Tyrell, one of the founding members of FAFSWAG and father to
the House of Aitu (established in 2019 by Tyrell and Falancie Filipo), has utilized
aitu to reimagine precolonial spiritual practices and reclaim ancestral, spiritual, and
sexual autonomy. Significantly, practices such as these are also actively making space
180 Rosanna Raymond
in the arts for queer brown bodies and sexually diverse identities. In 2018, Pacific Sis-
ters presented three Niu Aitu to Auckland Museum titled Moruroa, Supa Suga, and
TOHU TūPUNA. These three new aitu function as avatars to embody the underly-
ing values of Pacific Sisters: Environmental protection, Indigenous body sovereignty,
freedom of self-expression, and encouraging the best of humanity (or in other words,
being your own superhero!).52
Clearly, aitu can manifest across multiple spaces—theatrical, political, spiritual—
and in doing so make manifest an otherwise incommensurable realm between the
living and the dead in the tagata-lilo (inner self). We might meet aitu in either hy-
pernatural spaces or constructed scenarios that seek to rupture everyday routines.
Aitu are for special occasions, both portentous and absurd. Creating Niu Aitu sits at
the core of my practice. My vā body anchors them in the now. Moreover, I see them
as fully formed and fleshed out charismas with a performative capacity to embody
the mauli and the mana of the fāgogo and gafa they relay across space and time. My
“whāNOW,” which is my neologistic play on whānau (meaning giving birth or crea-
tion), now consists of 21 Niu Aitu creations. Eleven of these Niu Aitu now live on as
retirees in museum collections. The remaining ten still live in my studio. When a Niu
Aitu goes into a museum, or finds a niu home, I feel fa‘anoanoa (sad and lonely), for
they are an indelible part of me. We live through each other; we have shared history.
In their memory, I remake them as avatars. To date, seven Niu Aitu53 have been rein-
carnated in the form of an “^V^T^” (pronounced avatar).
My vā body has become a place where I can Culti.VĀ.te, FAB.ricate, and Acti.VĀ.te.
It enables me to rethink the nature of performance, and by extension how, where, and
with whom it might be experienced. Yet despite this liberatory capacity, Western
readings of my work still take precedence over Moana indexes and articulations.
Frustratingly, a profound lack of understanding and nuance continues to play out in
interpretations of both my work and the work of fellow Moana artists. As artist and
activist, Cat Ruka recently reminded us—upon the occasion of the abrupt resignation
of acclaimed Māori curator Nigel Borell from the Auckland Art Gallery54 —the now
historical words of Linda Tuhiwai Smith from 1999 still sadly resonate with us today
over two decades later:
It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all
that it is possible to know of us on the basis of their brief encounters with some of
us. It appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways
of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultane-
ously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny
them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.55
Personally, I believe that the core questions are not where Indigenous and First Na-
tions art can be found or indeed what it is, but rather how our artists, curators, and
cultural practitioners can effectively take charge of their own cultural sovereignties
and narratives. It is only through the living descendants and creative practitioners
of today that the mana of Moana arts and culture can be effectively recharged and
experienced in new places and spaces. Each new exhibition or project can provide
further opportunities for us to strengthen relationships and to keep our cultural and
artistic practice acti.VĀ.ted. In building upon the relationships we form in the process
of doing, we can bring past, present, and future together.
Figure 12.4 R
osanna Raymond, Backhand Maiden, 2017, Acti.VĀ.tion, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York © Pacific Sisters. Photo by Richard Wade.
Notes
1 This Samoan proverb translates into “Before bird catching an offering should be made,”
and can be used as part of any introductory ceremony in either spoken or written contexts.
2 In.VĀ.TĀ.tion was written by the author, originally rendered as a guided meditation and
invitation to sit with your ancestors as part of the SaVAge SEAonce for GHost Dance 2, at
the Centre for Performance, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, 2014.
182 Rosanna Raymond
3 This haka (defined in n. 5) by Paitangi Ostick (2012) seeks to bind us all together to the
same time and space. It concludes with my luaga mata (the opening speech in Samoan that
lays out the mat and opens a space for the prose of the world).
4 Moana-nui-a kiwa is the Māori name for the Pacific Ocean. Literally translated into the
Great Ocean of Kiwa-Kiwa, it is a diefied ancestor, one of the guardians of the ocean, and
a famed navigator.
5 A haka is a special posture dance collectively performed to fulfill social functions.
6 Founded in 1991, Pacific Sisters is one of the longest established Tagata Moana art collec-
tives in Aotearoa, NZ. Emerging from the fringes of mainstream arts and culture, Pacific
Sisters are now recognized locally and internationally for our multidisciplinary practice
and fashion activism. The Pacific Sisters apply Moana-based heritage art and cultural prac-
tices while incorporating contemporary art forms, embracing their urban Māori, Pacific,
and Queer identities, unique to Aotearoa, NZ.
Pacific Sisters is a Pacific and Māori collective of artists, performers, designers, jewelers,
and musicians formed by Selina Haami née Forsyth (NZ, Sāmoan), Nephi Tupaea (Ngāti
Katoa, Ngāti Tiipa, Ngāti Koroki Kahukura), and Suzanne Tamaki (Tūhoe, Ngāti Ma-
niapoto), and including members Rosanna Raymond (NZ, Sāmoan, Tuvaluan, French,
Gaelic, Norsemen), Feeonaa Clifton née Wall (NZ, Sāmoan, Swedish, German, English),
Ani O’Neill (NZ, Irish, Cook Islander), Lisa Reihana (Ngā Puhi), Ngāti Hine (Ngai Tū-
teauru, Ngai Tūpoto), Jaunnie Ilolahia (NZ, Tongan), Ema Lyon (Ngāti Porou, Scottish),
Ruth Woodbury (Ngāti Korokoro, Te Pouka, Ngāti Wharara, Te Hikutu), Henry Taripo
(Cook Islander, Tahitian, Sāmoan, Tongan), Salvador Brown (NZ, Sāmoan, Tuvaluan,
French, Gaelic, Norsemen), Karlos Quartez (NZ, Cook Islander), and Greg Semu (NZ,
Sāmoan).
7 For a good overview of the centrality of social relations in contemporary Moana art and
cultural practices, see Tēvita O. Ka’ili, Marking Indigeneity: The Tongan Art of Sociospa-
tial Relations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017), 23.
8 Courtney Sina Meredith is credited as coining this phrase in 2010 as one of the central
themes in her play Rushing Dolls. Meredith describes Urbanesia as
a philosophical utopia founded especially by brown women, a ring of unseen leadership
that had been looping invisibly for all time … I don’t think Urbanesia is a stand-alone,
I think you already figured this place out way before me – and you worked it, fashioned
it from earth and ideas, with your bare hands. I see Urbanesia now everywhere on the
internet lol. It belongs to the community now.
This quote is drawn from personal communication on Facebook Messenger between the
author and Meredith on December 10, 2020.
9 Niu became a popular word play that many Moana artists use to express our newness
or contemporary selves via a play on the nesian word niu (a young coconut suitable for
drinking).
10 Acti.VĀ.tion is an embodied methodology developed by the author in 2010, since expanded
as a methodology and method with the three main tenets: Culti.VĀ.te (research phase),
FAB.ricate (construction/installation), and Acti.VĀ.te (using the vā body to animate the
mauli imbedded in the works creating a space of connection).
11 As a maker and scholar often working outside my cultural contexts, the metaphorical
connection I have here is evident in the introduction to Su’esu’e Manogi: In Search of
Fragrance: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Efi and the Samoan Indigenous Reference
(Apia: Centre for Samoan Studies, 2009), when the editors Tamasailau M. Suaalii-Sauni,
I’uogafa Tuagalu, Tofilau Nina Kirifi-Alai, and Naomi Fuamatu explain it is part of the
historical Samoan saying “Su’esu’e manogi e su’i ai lau ‘ula fatu ai lou titi aua ou faiva
malo” (searching for fragrances to fashion a garland and skirt). Traditionally, this saying
is offered to someone to uplift their spirit and remind them that this is not done alone.
12 Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
13 Definition provided at length later in this chapter.
14 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in
the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
15 See n. 6 for a description of Pacific Sisters.
16 Definition provided later in this chapter.
17 Definition provided at length later in this chapter.
18 Okusitino Mahina, Joyce Dudding, and Kolokesa Uafa Mahina, eds., “Time, Space, Art”
in Tatau: Fenapasi ‘oe Fepaki the Art of Semisi Fetokai Potauaine (New Zealand: Lo’au
Research Society; Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2010).
19 Julie Nagam, “Art and Curation in Becoming Our Future,” All Lit Up, May 13,
2020, accessed September 10, 2021, https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2020/Art-and-Curation-
in-Becoming-Our-Future.
20 Tāmaki Makaurau is the Māori-language name for Auckland, meaning “Tāmaki desired
by many,” in reference to the desirability of its natural resources and geography, now
known as Auckland, the largest city in Aotearoa, NZ.
21 I tell the same story in “A Walk through My Eyelands,” Pantograph Punch, Pacific Arts Leg-
acy project, November 19, 2020, accessed September 10, 2021, https://www.pantograph-
punch.com/posts/walk-through-my-eyelands.
22 The English word tattoo is believed to have originated from the Samoan word tatau. Tatau
has many meanings in Samoa. Tā means to strike, and in the case of tattooing refers to the
sound of the tattooist’s wooden tools. Tau means to reach an end, a conclusion, such as
in war or battle. It can also denote rightness or balance, or to wring moisture from a wet
cloth or ink from the skin.
23 See Naomi Fuamatu, Tamasailau Sua’aliʼi-Sauni, I’uogafa Tuagalu, and Tofilau Nina
Kirifi-A lai, eds., Su’esu’e Manogi: In Search of Fragrance. Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi
and the Samoan Indigenous Reference (Apia: Centre for Samoan Studies, 2009).
24 Sean Mallon, Samoan Art & Artists (Auckland: Craig Potton Publishing, 2002), 163.
25 Rosanna Raymond, “Getting Specific: Pacific Fashion Activism in Auckland During the
1990’s,” in Clothing the Pacific, ed. Chloë Colchester (New York: Berg Publishers, 2003).
26 Rosanna Raymond, “Dusky Ain’t Dead She Just Diversified,” in Mauri Ola: Contempo-
rary Polynesian Poems in English, Whetu Moana II, ed. Reina Whaitiri Wendt and Robert
Sullivan (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010), 188–9.
27 Founded in 2010 by Rosanna Raymond, The SaVĀge K’lub presents twenty-first century
South Sea savagery, influencing art and culture through the interfacing of time and space,
deploying weavers of words, rare anecdotalists, myth makers, hip shakers, navigators, and
red faces to institute non-cannibalistic cognitive consumption of the other. The Savage
K’lub come together to celebrate all forms of art and culture, collaborating to acti.VĀ.te
people and things. They have participated in large-scale art projects in Australia; Hawaii;
Aotearoa, NZ; and have held workshops and gatherings in New York, Rarotonga, and
London.
28 For an excellent overview, see Billie Lythberg, “KRONIKling the K’lub—from 19th Cen-
tury Savages to 21st Century SaVAgery,” Savage Kronikles, accessed September 10, 2021,
https://www.savageklub.com/nav-bar/ranga-toi.
29 The club’s title and logo can be seen on the landing page of its host website, https://www.
savageklub.com.
30 Albert Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body” afterword to Inside Out: Literature,
Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Rob Wilson and Vilsoni Hereniko
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 399–412.
31 See the project Vā Moana: Space and Relationality in Pacific Thought and Identity, Mars-
den Fund, Royal Society Te Apārangi, Aotearoa, NZ, 2019–23, accessed September 4,
2021, https://www.vamoana.org/marsden-project.
32 I’uogafa Tuagalu, “Heuristics of the Vä,” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indig-
enous Peoples 4, no. 1 (2008): 110.
33 See George Pratt, A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language with English
and Samoan Vocabulary (London: London Missionary Society, 1862; repr, Papakura NZ:
Southern Reprints, 1984).
34 See Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” 399–412. Also of interest here is Lana
Lopesi’s term “Moana Cosmopolitanism” which aligns with developments related to ur-
ban Moana diaspora; for more information see Lana Lopesi, “Moana Cosmopolitan”
interview by Arcia Tecun on Wai? Indigenous Words and Ideas, podcast, July 17, 2020.
184 Rosanna Raymond
35 Malu is the female Samoan tatatau or tattoo signified by a diamond-shaped pattern called
malu, sometimes referred to as a sumu pattern.
36 Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” 399–412.
37 Kanaka Maoli is translated into “true people” and is a term adopted in recent years to
denote people who can trace Indigenous Hawaiian ancestry before the arrival of Captain
Cook.
38 Teves, Defiant Indigeneity, 15.
39 Leanne Betasamoke Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through
Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 182.
40 A. L. Refiti, “Being-Social: Critiquing Pasifika Education in the University” (conference
presentation, inaugural conference on teaching and learning by Pasifika, University AUT
Ngawai o Horotiu Marae, Auckland, 2007).
41 Refiti, “Being-Social.”
42 Refiti.
43 Refiti.
44 Derek Freeman and Margaret Mead, Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropo-
logical Myth (Suffolk, VA: Pelican Books, 1984), 176.
45 Le-Tagaloa Fanaafi Aiono, Tapuia Samoan Worship (Apia: Malua Printing Press,
2003), 49.
46 Victoria N. Kneubuhl, “Traditional Performance in Samoan Culture: Two Forms,” Asian
Theatre Journal 4, no. 2 (1987): 166–76, https://doi.org/doi:10.2307/1124189.
47 John Williams, The Samoan Journals of John Williams, 1830 and 1832 (Canberra: Aus-
tralian National University Press, 1984).
48 See more information on the fale aitu in Vilsoni Hereniko, “Clowning as Political Com-
mentary: Polynesia, Then and Now,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 1–28;
Bradd Shore, “A Samoan Theory of Action: Social Control and Social Order in a Polyne-
sian Paradox” (PhD diss., Anthropology, University of Chicago 1977); Kneubuhl, “Tradi-
tional Performance,” 166–76.
49 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1984).
50 David O’Donnell, “‘Spiritual Play’: Ritual Performance and Spirituality in Samoan The-
atre,” (conference presentation, Ritual and Cultural Performance Hui and Symposium,
Performance of the Real research theme, University of Otago, 2016).
51 This is my own term to describe urban aitu.
52 You can find these Niu Aitu at Auckland Museum, “Pacific Sisters,” accessed Septem-
ber 4, 2021, https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/visit/galleries/tamaki-herenga-waka/
pacific-sisters.
53 Gʻnang Gʻnear, ʻIna, Tuna, Aolele, Full Tusk Maiden, Backhand Maiden, and MamaTane.
54 In 2021 the Arts Foundation NZ created a new catetogory, the Moment in Time Award He
Momo, to acknowledge Nigel’s curation of Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art, the
largest exhibtion in Auckland City Art Gallery’s history, featuring the work of over 133
Māori artists.
55 Linda Tuhiwai Smith ed., Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples
(Dunedin: Otago Press, 1999), 1.
13 Handiwork of Migrancy,
Restitutions in the Contemporary
Patrick Flores
Let me begin on a tangent which also serves as an entry point into how a particular
contemporary form might be crafted in a crisis. In this scenario, craft, crisis, and
the contemporary are imagined as converging through the vehicular material form
of artworks presented for exhibition. In this instance, highly mediated material be-
comes vulnerable, at many levels, to a range of reconstitutions—notwithstanding its
exaltation as an object or event with a capacity to transcend arbitrariness. Here, we
can speculate on the object losing its stature as a consequence of absorbing aspects of
atmosphere or forces of history. Art is, thus, laid bare: Revealing nothing but its craft
or its nature.
Staging the exhibition Arte Povera: Italian Landscape in Manila—a project initi-
ated by the Italian ambassador to the Philippines—was a curious prospect.1 It was
made yet more curious by the fact that it opened in February 2020, one month before
the lockdown of the country as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and two months
before the death of the eminent Italian art historian, critic, and curator Germano Cel-
ant, the primary interlocutor of arte povera. Curated by Italian art critic and curator
Danilo Eccher, this exhibition prided itself as presenting seminal arte povera artists
in the Philippines for the first time. Eccher reminded us that the subtitle Celant ap-
pended to his manifesto in 1967 was “notes for a guerrilla war”—in which he called
for “an action within the language of the art … the performative aspect of the work,
which fed on chemical and metallic reactions, on live animals and on melting ice.”2
The term guerilla is particularly resonant for the Philippine context, exposing its
history of colonial encounters as well as the tactics of improvisation in the common
culture. The Metropolitan Museum of Manila organized this project and asked me to
curate an exhibition in dialogue with the Italian survey.
I will begin by outlining this situation. Not only to sketch out a context but also
to stress the “whereness” of art, placing context as paramount. Significantly, in this
case, a context is implicated by the subject of the exhibition itself as part of an effort
to reconceptualize “art” and the bare material through which it offers its autonomy.
Emphasizing context, however, is not simply a task of somehow connecting the “out
there” to the “over here” of art—a process substantially reconsidered in the wake
of so many colonialisms. Here, the problematic form of address is inscribed in the
contingency of having to locate it as if it were unrooted or cut loose. This form of
address, at once genealogy and locution, may well be the frisson of the critique
and reconstruction of context, the tension and the excitement of attending to art’s
doubled (although not binary) coding—a process which can become sensuously
particular.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-13
186 Patrick Flores
As a curator, I always look at exhibitions as opportunities to explore knowledge sys-
tems through the dynamic interrelationship between theoretical and artistic practice. It
is for this reason, in the context of this exhibition, that I looked to the work of Philippine
artist Brenda Fajardo as a way to potentially engage Italian arte povera in a new time
and place. First, I searched for a trope with which to glean the logic of guerilla practice
that could summon a biopolitical image, as it were, in which the everyday performative
qualities of life are amplified while remaining concurrently uneventful, stealthy, purpo-
sive. The title Cue From Life Itself: Filipino Artists Transform the Everyday was taken
from Fajardo: Artist, mentor, assembler, world maker, and farmer working in the fields
of theater, painting, the academe, and civil society. In the 1980s, Fajardo wrote a mon-
ograph for the Philippine Educational Theater Association called Aesthetics of Pov-
erty: A Rationale in Designing for Philippine Theater, in which she spoke to the way
an “attrition of material” can index an aesthetic where the ethical remains central. As
Fajardo asks, “how can an artist claim to be socially responsible when he mounts high-
cost productions during times of deprivation?”3 Her conception of the aesthetics of
poverty clearly began with the artist’s mindfulness of an encompassing but transform-
able world, that is, an attentiveness that led her to “choose deliberately particular nu-
ances and tones of color and texture that would express the qualities” to be perceived in
the world: “Economic deprivation, cultural pollution, senseless violence.”4 In doing so,
“a new art” emerges, regarded as “authentic, because it expresses life which happens to
be poor.”5 This passage into “newness” describes a process through which aesthetics
of poverty might take root and imply “a sense of beauty which belongs to people who
live in a condition of material deprivation as a result of a particular quality of life that is
conditioned by its reality.”6 It is important to remember that such an aesthetic pertains
to both the viewer’s reception and the artist’s faculty: “We began to capture the patina
of time and became more sensitive to the aesthetic qualities of our materials thereby in-
creasing our powers of expression.”7 As a pioneer member of this theater organization,
Fajardo was active in its aesthetic and pedagogical programs: She designed sets, acted,
co-wrote a training curriculum, and conducted workshops in communities across a
country of around 7,000 islands. The Philippine Educational Theater Association was
founded in 1967 on the aspiration for a people’s theater shaped by Asian traditions,
Brechtian aesthetics, and Filipino culture.8
Fajardo’s monograph foregrounds the value of experience. This is a reference to the
philosopher John Dewey, who thought that gardening in schools “affords an avenue
of approach to the knowledge of the place farming and horticulture have had in the
history of the human race and which they occupy in present social organization.”9
Her monograph opens with Dewey’s argument on the intimate relationship between
experience and ecology that heightens sensorial transmission as part of the art expe-
rience. Accordingly, the expressivity of art and its internal power are held in a sen-
sitive relationship with the material forces that make it possible. Thus, art possesses
integrity and intelligence, because it aspires to material and social value. The value
emerges from the life of forms, the techniques of their making, and is deemed social.
The phrase “aesthetics of poverty” confounds initially. On the one hand, aesthetics
signals the privilege of disinterested autonomy. By contrast, poverty points to dis-
possession brought about as a consequence of socially disproportionate systems. By
bringing these two terms together, Fajardo takes liberties with the formulation to
yield a paradox that transposes the notion of “value” from a hegemonic standard of
taste to an emergent ethos of making in the equivalent register of arte povera.
Migrancy and Restitutions 187
Fajardo’s notion of lived experience spills into arte povera’s heady welter of excep-
tionally organic and plastic materiality. Similarly, Celant acknowledges the copious
universe of the “alchemist artist.” According to him, “animals, vegetables, and min-
erals take part in the world of art. The artist feels attracted to their physical, chem-
ical, and biological possibilities, and he begins again to feel magic and marvelous
deeds.”10 Such materials include “copper, zinc, earth, water, rivers, land, snow, fire,
grass, air, stone, electricity, uranium, sky, weight, gravity, height, growth, etcetera.”11
Like Fajardo, Celant invokes Dewey in his explication of how the artist discovers the
body, memory, and gestures: “All that which directly lives and thus begins to carry
out the sense of life and of nature, a sense that implies, according to Dewey, numer-
ous subjects: The sensory, the sensational, sensitive, impressionable, and sensuous.”12
The anticipated future for the artist is the rediscovery of the artist of magic, growth,
danger, falsehood, and realness. It is also the reconstitution of experience and the
world through the contemplative procedures suggested by Dewey.13 For Fajardo, Cel-
ant, and Dewey, the acknowledgment of the “animate” widens not only the ambit
of humans and their social ties but also the inter-species universe. Such a widening
also restores a broader ecology through a generous democratic ethos in which the self
cedes its individualist conceit for the sake of a collective project.
Significantly, the aforementioned notion of attrition can refer to processes of ero-
sion, the wearing out of a substance, or to some kind of exhaustion. In the tropical
Philippines, which is visited by calamities very frequently, this sense of attrition is
ubiquitous. Accordingly, the artistic gesture of Fajardo in theater, in light of such
attrition, turns into restitution, a remaking of the world from scratch, a repossession
of material. Fundamental to this restitution is craft, the mode of transforming. In the
exhibition, intermedial artist and critical urbanist Mark Salvatus explicitly dwells
on the technology of rafts made largely by urban Filipinos. These makeshift vessels
are a bricolage of everyday items, from plastic water containers to inflatables, which
collectively form an object used to ferry their riders during flooding. They are also
an intimate testimony to the domestic universe and the instinct to overcome precar-
ious situations. Titled C_rafts, the improvised process of their making renders them
particular to the calamitous environment. This “c_raft,” with vessel and facture in-
scribed in a term, transforms and accretes as it moves and meets adversities. As the
personal belongings of households are disarticulated by the elements, they morph
into repurposed boats used to navigate the torrent that domestic culture feeds back
into nature. Consequently, both realms are imbricated in a state of flux—the deluge
washes away the house, the neighborhood, and the city, whilst the c_raft restitutes
ecology’s nexus between inhabitant and water, amid the upheaval of planetary peril.
In this exhibition, given that I deployed craft as an instance of fantasy and survival,
and as a type of representation, I argued that it could also perform allegorically as
an imaginary facsimile of natural history through processes of translation. This, in
short, is my investment in the whereness of art that is the subject of this volume. It is
a trajectory exemplified by the diorama, a veritable world-picture, or a design for the
stage in Fajardo’s art, or the quick-change inventive alchemy of arte povera, and one
which braids history and folklore into institutional description.
When Cue from Life Itself opened in February of 2020, the sixth Singapore Bien-
nale, which I directed, was in its final month. Both projects were soon caught up in
the frenzy of the global pandemic. Importantly, the premise of ethical action was also
important to the Biennale. Restitution is particularly central as an exploratory vehicle
188 Patrick Flores
for the Chinese artist Hu Yun in the work Carving Water, Melting Stones (2019). And
restitution begins with the diorama, which presents some kind of a world-picture, a
framing device of both structure and representation. As British scholar Geraldine
Howie puts it, the diorama comprises three key aspects: The three-dimensionality
of the miniature architecture and landscape within the diorama itself, the two-
dimensional tromp l’oeil landscape painting, and the actual space of the viewer.14
The notion of a world-picture, to be sure, consistently operated as an impetus
within processes of modernity. As Martin Heidegger put it, the “fundamental event
of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture … the structured image that
is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before.”15 Here, man is
the exceptional agent, the arbiter of everything that is. This is a claim and as such is a
particular, and not a random, contention: “Because this position secures, organizes,
and articulates itself as a world view, the modern relationship to that which is, is
one that becomes, in its decisive unfolding, a confrontation of world views.”16 The
world-picture, thus, is concretized intersubjectively between artifice and the sensible
observer in distinct situations, such as an exhibition. And this phenomenon becomes
more charged when the exhibition is a biennale, which some consider the locus clas-
sicus of the world-picture of the global contemporary.
The Singapore Biennale opened in 2019 in the same year that the nation was com-
memorating the bicentennial of the arrival of the British. It was a fraught moment
for Singapore: To at once remember the colonial past alongside the modernity that
afforded it financial prosperity, together with the history of revolutions against co-
lonialism that have been waged in the region since the nineteenth century. I wanted
to respond to ways in which these histories are and can be represented, and, moreo-
ver, to agitate this achievement by drawing a relationship between the colonial, the
diorama, and the figure of the Biennale. To do this, I employed a curatorial method
that might embody both the affective and the ethical in an urgent imperative (and
curious wistfulness). To this end, it was through the Filipino revolutionary woman
Salud Algabre that I would find the Biennale’s title, which, importantly, I would see
as a convivial invitation rather than a thematic evocation. Algabre took part in a
rebellion against the Americans in the 1930s that called for immediate emancipation
but was quelled in a day. In an interview from the 1960s, Algabre framed the revolt
not as a failure but rather as a moment within a larger trajectory. In what we might
call a manifesto of popular resistance, she declared: “No uprising fails. Each one
is a step in the right direction.”17 It was in the spirit of this patient struggle that I
approached Singapore, as an implicit part of a broader process of interrogating ac-
celerated development.
The history of Singapore, and its marked rise as part of the ascendant economies
of Southeast Asia, proved to be a formidable context to examine curatorially. This
curatorial examination took place through a process of actively reflecting upon mo-
dernity in art, the liberal recognition of identity, the authority of the museum in-
dustry, and the potency of the image. Within my curatorial conceptualization, all of
these factors aggregated within the figuration of the diorama. In the early 1980s, the
National Museum of Singapore commissioned woodcarvers from the town of Paete in
Laguna, a province south of the capital of Manila, to make dioramas of Singaporean
national history. The 20 resulting dioramas sought to variously represent “changes in
topography, architecture, fashion, and technology of the times.”18 Given the earnestly
identified need to document change, this commission was seen as contributing to an
idealization of the “history and development of Singapore from a fishing village to a
modern nation state.”19 This is of course a nationalist script, and the visual language
instrumentalized to grant the diorama a vast world-picture: “Each diorama captures
a scene in totality, thus bringing history to life.”20 This totality is not reckoned in
terms of broad strokes but instead crystallized in granular verisimilitude: “Every sin-
gle detail, down to the color of the thread used to tie pigtails, worn by the Chinese,
was painstakingly checked.”21 Tellingly, and notwithstanding this obsession for data,
there is no mention at all of the names of the carvers, except for the fact they came
from the Philippines and that they carved the wood called batikuling.
The curators of the National Museum of Singapore would probably have been im-
pressed with the dioramas at the Ayala Museum in Manila. In the records of the
museum, the Ayala dioramas of Philippine history were conceptualized by the Phil-
ippine historian Carlos Quirino in consultation with Enrique Zobel and Jaime Zobel
de Ayala of the clan that owned the museum. Quirino guided researchers (Rey Res-
urreccion, Juvenal Velasco), artists (Simeon Abaya, Tam Austria, Mamerto Evange-
lista, Amorsolo Tuazon, Guillermo Veloso, Wilfredo Villanueva), and woodcarvers
(Esmeraldo Dans, Mar Edjawan, and Lauro Sanchez). The dioramas consisted of
historical events, scenes from canonical literature, sites, and rituals. As the project
progressed, the museum focused on historical events. By 1968, the atelier and the
narrative were expanded. Accordingly, the following artists were enlisted to assist
to complete the remaining studies for the dioramas: Elmer Gernale, Rico Mariano,
Loreto Racuya, Pat Reyes, and Wilfredo Villanueva.
Art historian Pearlie Rose Baluyut draws a sharp line between the aesthetic require-
ments of the diorama and the political economies and colonial histories underwriting
the corporation through which the Ayala Museum was built (and which financed both
the empirical rigor of research and the fostering of the naturalist, imperial gaze). This
is a compelling point: “In manufacturing authentic history in its three-dimensional
form, the museum practised the concept innate to any free-enterprise—the classic
strict ‘division of labor.’”22 First, she takes note of the role of practitioners such as
historians, illustrators, and traditional sculptors of the carving town of Paete who
hand-carved the miniature figurines. Craftsmen who wove the tiny hats and mats
and invented tiny window panes, bicycles, and wisps of smoke. Artists who painted
shadows, skin complexions, foliage, and seascapes. Electricians who lit the tableaux
and devised special effects.23 Second, she refers to the process of the researchers who
“studied historical photographs, eyewitness accounts of the events and places, and
actual specimens to prepare the working plans for the settings and figurines” and
“paid careful attention to historical details” to convey “authentic representations.”24
This conception of authenticity is unnerving. On the one hand, it is an expectation
of the politics of representation and identity. On the other, it is believed only to arise
from the arduous processes of decolonization. For Fajardo—who offered the cate-
gory of “aesthetics of poverty”— wrote her thesis for Philippine Studies on Paete, in
which she delineates particular phases in the production of the craft practices in the
town, including the fabled woodcarving.25 Accordingly, she foregrounds both the
affective and the ethical dimensions of taking to the task of carving within the lived
experiences of the people in the place. It is a vernacular practice that feeds into the
cultural politics of decolonization. For her, “many craft communities have all but lost
their tradition to meet the urgent problems and needs of a society in crisis. A com-
munity such as Paete, for example, is being rapidly consumed by commercialism and
190 Patrick Flores
the industrialization of handcrafts.”26 Only decolonization through people’s art can
restitute, for “the people should be encouraged to … create from their life experience.
As a counter-consciousness movement, it necessitates an awareness of issues … to de-
stroy the colonial frame of mind.”27 Although compelling, this colonial critique tends
to impose a limit on how the world-picture can be made to play out within a locality
like Paete or within a biennale in Singapore. Thus, Paete is made present through the
miniature diorama within the overarching structure of the biennale and as part of the
conjuncture of neoliberal time and colonial remembrance broadly understood to be
postcolonial craft from the Philippines.
Hu Yun was first drawn to the Philippine wooden image when he met the Chilean
curator Rodolfo Andaur while in residency at the Centre for Contemporary Art in
Singapore in 2017. At this time, Andaur introduced him to religious sculpture in the
Philippines through the santos (a term for image and saint). The figurine of the santos
fascinated Hu Yun, particularly because his previous projects had been related to
Jesuit Catholic missionaries who went to China and Southeast Asia beginning in the
sixteenth century. He has been tracing the journeys of these missionaries, including
the well-known Francis Xavier who died on a small island south of China. Both of his
arms were kept in different churches as relics. Subsequently, the “hand” had become
a recurring trope in Hu Yun’s drawings and sculptures.
In 2018, as part of his residency at 1335 Mabini in Manila, Hu Yun was finally able
to visit the workshops of the image makers and woodcarvers in Paete in Laguna—
where they worked and lived—and found out that the dioramas of the Ayala Museum
in Manila were the handiwork of their mentors. He was drawn to the history of the
town as well as the situation of the tradition in the present. According to Hu Yun: “I
am very interested in different kinds of craft, and in craftspersonship. I am attracted
to the daily practice that inhabits everyday life—it becomes almost like a ritual.”28
Before his trip to Paete, he had worked with a group of women ranging in age from
early 20s to over 90 years old that practiced embroidery in Suzhou, a coastal city near
Shanghai. During this time, he produced several pieces of silk embroidery in collabo-
ration with the women. Collaboration with artisans who hover around the fringes of
art and cultural representation have had a crucial place in Hu Yun’s practice. Today,
although the National Museum of Singapore has retired these dioramas, several of
them are currently displayed at Elias Park Primary School, where they are kept in a
small museum that presents Singapore’s heritage.
Hu Yun’s interest in the diorama focuses on its craft, labor, and living representa-
tions of Singapore. The work for Singapore Biennale consisted of an installation of
three parts. The first part comprised the film that follows him to Paete to study the
quotidian life of the woodcarving workshop of Paloy Cagayat, where he is initiated
into the life of the woodcarver and the mostly religious images that he carves for
churches and private altars in the Philippines and overseas. This workshop is an en-
terprise, with its own assembly line of materials and workers who specialize in the
various aspects of the form, from the carving to the painting and on to the sewing
of vestments. As part of this process, Hu Yun chooses a carving of a limb from the
stacks of wooden body parts, and then asks one of the woodcarvers to shape it into a
branch of a tree, complete with the details of muscle and vein. The film describes this
process attentively, together with working and living anecdotes from the workshop.
Once completed, the woodcarver brings the diorama back to the clearing in which the
wood has been sourced, thereby returning it to its origin among the trees.
The second component featured a refrigerated diorama. To produce this compo-
nent, Hu Yun first invited a woodcarver from the same town to carve in Singapore.
Dominador Paz used to be a woodcarver, but, owing to the decline of the industry,
now carves ice, fruits, and vegetables on cruise ships. In this instance, he carved a
block of blue ice into the topography of present-day Singapore. Although this carving
is encased in a refrigerator, it melts over time. Here, Hu Yun lays bare a sequence of
enchantments. First, he marks inevitable mutations in the labor and enterprise of the
woodcarver, who first becomes an ice carver, and then leaves land for the sea. He then
connects this narrative with the history of early globalization through the circulation
of Catholicism in Southeast Asia—which may well coincide with the history of the
early modern in image making in this part of the world.
For Hu Yun, “ice is such a powerful material, as it changes all the time.” He also,
perhaps understandably, finds the existence of ice in the tropics intriguing insofar as
this artificiality creates:
A beautiful/romantic landscape or diorama in a glass box. Looking at it, I im-

mediately think about the Marina Bay Sands (a hotel and casino) light spectacle
which happens every evening. For me this is an image of Singapore, or any fu-
ture city for which most people long; there is an artificial beauty which is very
attractive. 29
The third part of this installation is the soundscape component, which involves the
voices of students from the school where the dioramas are installed talking about the
Singapore that springs to mind upon seeing the dioramas. Interestingly, these evoca-
tions are unhinged from the scripts prepared for them by their teachers. They also
mingle inculcated norm, strains of fantasy, commonplace memory, or just immediate
curiosity. As Hu Yun recollects:
In the end, when I asked them about the future … most of the kids actually went
back to the diorama The Arrival of Raffles, not because they had something to
say about Raffles, but because they noticed the background of the traditional
houses and the kids who are playing in the forest. They kept saying that Singa-
pore must be a really fun place (at the time Raffles arrived), as kids at that time
were very happy to be able to play in nature.30
It is indeed uncanny that children in the face of the phantasmagoric and historio-
graphic diorama can in effect take us right back to the so-called scene of the crime—
that is, colonialism—which is of course now linked with both failures of modernity
and hope within the present.
Interestingly, the sound element proves to be inextricably connected to the sculp-
tural objects it accompanies. We can recognize that both carving and music share
common aesthetic values. The interpretive process of sensing that which is good in
band music, for example, resonates with the language used to intuit that which is
good in sculpture. The qualities of fineness, balance, and tonality, as expressed in
the word afinado, are comparable with the experiential qualities of sculpture.31 The
realization that this understanding of carving comes not solely from the mastery of
the maker and the tradition of the craft is telling. The woodcarver that Hu Yun con-
sulted in his research for this project, Paloy Cagayat, confided that although tools
192 Patrick Flores
and knowledge matter in the practice, the skill with the chisel is essential—a process
which over time is honed by the whetstone on which the blade is sharpened. Impor-
tantly, it is a particular whetstone which is needed to ensure that the chisel bites into
the wood deeply and finely—a testimony to the instrument’s responsiveness to the
source of its efficacy, attuned in other words, or afinado, to the ecology of form.32
The history of the diorama is likewise a history of perceptions, or, as Jonathan
Crary usefully describes, the “technology of the observer.” A key part of instantiat-
ing this shift was a significant change in terms of the mobility of the gaze. This is an
important point, for as Crary notes, “unlike the static panorama painting that first
appeared in the 1790s, the diorama is based on the incorporation of an immobile
observer into a mechanical apparatus and a subjection to a predesigned temporal un-
folding of optical experience.”33 Significantly, this shift would signal “an increasing
abstraction of optical experience from a stable referent.”34 A contentious point here,
however, is a fixation on “nature” as both an acknowledgment of the real and an
ornament suffusing the real. As W. Neite notes in reponse to The Cologne Diorama
(1843–69), “the use of the expression ‘true-to-nature’ (‘naturgerun’) is indicative …
of a growing ‘desire for accurate rendering and sober perception.’ In a sense, the age
of photography was announcing its arrival.”35
The use of naturalism in dioramas would be extended to become a nearly ubiq-
uitous mechanism for describing nature in museums. As Dutch theorist and artist
Mieke Bal put it as part of a comparison of the American Museum of Natural His-
tory and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which are both in New York, “whereas
nature is a backdrop in the dioramas, transfixed in stasis, ‘art’ presented at the Met is
ineluctable in evolution, is endowed with a story.” But the American Museum of Nat-
ural History also tells its own tale: “Of fixation, [and] of the denial of time.”36 The
museum and the biennale find common ground here. In the Singapore Biennale, this
dualism is overcome by the installation work of Hu Yun, where the nature of history
is diligently annotated by migrancy. Thus, in this instance, the possibility of over-
coming binaries is embedded in the history of the diorama and its migration to the
museum. In this sense, we could recognize that the curatorial research project Staging
Dioramas historicizes the diorama as a medium “to look through something … to
deceive the viewer.”37 Although its historical underpinnings were “entertainment and
art,” its scope widened as it became a
template for a spectacle much like a department store window display of prod-
ucts and mannequins, the window itself dividing inside and outside, creating an
enclosed space of attraction. The museum visitor becomes a flâneur, walking past
or stopping to look at the diorama.38
Again, the impulse was to conjure nature through taxidermy to form “a foreground
of diverse flora and geological formations from their habitat and a curved, painted
background, creating an illusion of space and wider context.”39 Soon, the diorama as
method was grafted onto museology and exhibition making.
Writer and curator Dore Bowen demonstrates how the diorama historically tessel-
lated various impulses of vision and seeing, of the familiar and the exotic “enabled by
advances in lighting, optics, and chemistry … in the language of paint, installation,
and staging.”40 Moreover, she notes, the diorama was able “to participate in the cur-
rent dialogue among artists, scientists, and politicians about the risks and benefits of
41
progress.” This was the “diorama effect,” where projection and reflection “create
the illusion of places known to the audience while simultaneously transforming these
sites into ghostly presences, thereby creating the sense that … a world was in the pro-
cess of passing away.”42 As such, the diorama inevitably spoke to time or temporality,
specifically to a recent past or what Hélène Cixous calls a “present passing”:43
By placing the real (and this includes an emphasis on the everyday, fashion, tech-
nology, and contemporary events) in a dichotomous relation to illusion or fantasy
(Orientalism and fairytales, the notion of “local color” in novels and paintings,
the sublime, and the medieval revival), artists forged a sense of temporality that
Christophe Longbois-Canil calls the passé proche.44
Hu Yun has likewise produced another project centered upon the diorama at the
National University of Singapore. In this work, he revisits the photographs and sculp-
tures of Singaporean artist Shui Tit Sing in deliberate and critical proximity to the
archaeological collection of the museum. The photographic works by Shui depicted
Singapore from his arrival in the early 1950s until the 1980s. In the mind of Hu Yun,
these images constituted the visual diary of the life of an artist who had a distinct way
of cropping the black-and-white photographs, a method which reminded him of the
“vertical scroll composition of the traditional Chinese ink painting.”45 Hu Yun also
observes that in the later phase of Shui’s practice, he had decided to devote his time to
woodcarving, with earlier paintings and images serving as the archive for his wood-
carving repertoire. Here, once again, we see the specter of the diorama informing
the history of photography, which is famously claimed to be the invention of French
painter and physicist Louis Daguerre (1787–1851). British sociologist Don Slater ex-
amines this innovation instructively: “By painting different scenes on the front and
back of a huge screen, Daguerre could alter the lighting to dissolve from one scene to
the next.”46 The technique of “dissolve” is pertinent to the argument of migrancy and
restitution, together with the dissipation of a certain tumescence via representation.
The dissolve, Slater continues, is akin to the “fade” in the cinema, and “could be ex-
perienced by the audience as both magical and technological, a wonder of scientific
know-how which could transport the audience realistically from one place or time to
another.”47 Consequently, illusion and fantasy are served in alternate ways, for “to
transcend the real and efface its boundaries with the unreal; to produce magic—albeit
a magic known to be the accomplishment of science; and to transform science into the
cultural form of magic”—which, in other words, is to perform that which “modernity
is constantly producing … ‘natural magic.’”48
Hu Yun inserted the photographs in the glass vitrines containing the artifacts exca-
vated from various locations across Singapore, together with materials retrieved from
marine excavations in Singapore’s waters. These glass cases may well have evoked in
him the tableau of the Singaporean dioramas, which were made almost at the same
time that Shui made his sculptures, and the composition of the woodcarving of Shui,
through which daily scenes in communities were staged.
Perhaps, with this in mind, we can return to the contours of curatorial reflection
already sketched out in the movement of form from Manila to Singapore, and from
woodcarving to diorama to ice. Likewise, the condition of craft is constantly reme-
diated in a Philippine town, in a museum and primary school, and in the Biennale.
At this point, the notion of attrition as proposed by Fajardo in her discussion of the
194 Patrick Flores
“aesthetics of poverty,” as the slackening of material, or the loosening of substance,
the state of vulnerability, and the translation of form into other materialities, is ger-
mane. Such a transformation of art from place to place is not merely a rehearsal of its
material and ontological flexibility. Instead, it plays out under the sign of restitution
in the realms of labor and ecology. When the carver restores the limb of wood to the
forest, history infuses its nature with that of its maker. When the ice-form of Singa-
pore unerringly melts, the cartography and representation of the nation, sculpted by
a carver from elsewhere, disperses. When the voices of children rewrite the script of
history in the presence of inculcated images, meaning slips away or protracts.
In 2020, Hu Yun reprised the work from Singapore for the exhibition Study of
Things: Or a Brief Story about Fountain, Brick, Tin, Coin, Stone, Shell, Curtain,
and Body at the Times Museum in Guangzhou in China, but in this instance included
a recording of him and the ice carver Dominador Paz, where they talk about the tra-
vails of Paz at sea, his condition of being overworked and often unable to sleep, his
experience of sculpting concrete in an amusement park, and his lament on the loss
of the vital tradition of woodcarving in his hometown. This sonic presence, together
with the occasional rustle of the chisel chipping away at the mass of ice, surrounds an
object on the floor. It is the formerly carved branch from the fragment of a religious
statuary, this time cast as ice and made to melt every day in the museum, replaced
over again with a new prosthesis, as it were. As the dialogue between Hu Yun and
Paz unravels, a puddle of water slowly forms as if to signify the aqueous residue of the
worn-out migrant mariner.
As the Singapore Biennale 2019 was about to close in March 2020, there was a
spike in the transmission of COVID-19 in Singapore, a reality which would soon
begin to complicate the narrative of achievement for the government of the only First
World country in Southeast Asia to (initially) efficiently suppress the outbreak. Cen-
tral to the spread of the virus were the overcrowded dormitories of foreign workers in
Singapore, a delineation that threw a sharp light on the plight of migrant work and
its relationship with the economy of the country. According to journalist Kirsten Han,
most male migrant workers, brought in to work in the construction, shipyard,

and petrochemical industries, are housed in dormitories, many in industrial parts
of the island away from the rest of the population. … Even before the pandemic
… these crowded, stuffy lodgings were a recipe for disaster.49
The disaster is disease, from Zika to dengue. It is indeed telling that in delineating
the migrant problematic in the pandemic, the locus of the diagnosis is the “living con-
ditions” of the workers. Han continues, describing the way that the “Covid-19 pan-
demic has drawn attention to living conditions in these dormitories” of workers paid
so poorly and prone to repatriation. Clearly, these workers are also seen as threats to
public order, and therefore subject to surveillance even on their days off. 50 It is inter-
esting to note that the vernacular phrase living conditions is a haunting phrase which
acutely carves bodily material in high relief. All the while, the material body, that is,
the body of labor, hews nature into a history of the “recent past” and of a “present
passing”—much like ice deliquescing, or migrants infecting each other in cramped
quarters. Accordingly, art is not only marked as reflexive through the allegory of
the diorama that is the modernist world-picture. Indeed, it also becomes a vehicle
for speculating upon a species intervolved in a mangrove, a robust woodland that is
home to the intertide. It is this intense tactility, proximity, worldliness, and manual-
ity that the craftiness of late, neoliberal capital co-opts to flesh out the whereness of
the contemporary—much in the same way that the woodcarver-turned-ice sculptor
would speak of sleeplessness in the endless sea, or the craft master of Paete would
restitute the “crooked timber of humanity, the regularities of the misshapen day” to
the ground from whence it sprang.51
Notes
1 This was a project initiated by the Italian Ambassador to the Philippines, Giorgio
Guglielmino.
2 Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Arte Povera: Italian Landscape in Manila, exhibition
wall text, February 2020.
3 Brenda V. Fajardo, The Aesthetics of Poverty: A Rationale in Designing for Philippine
Theater (Manila: Philippine Educational Theater Association, n.d.), 3.
4 Fahardo, The Aesthetics of Poverty, 3.
5 Fahardo, 3.
6 Fahardo, 2–3.
7 Fahardo, 4.
8 See Patrick D. Flores, “Critical Body Performing,” in Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left
Alive?, ed. Cosmin Costinas and Ana Janevski (Hong Kong: Para Site, 2017), 199–204.
9 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (Toronto: Macmillan, 1966), 200.
10 Peter Selz and Kristine Stiles, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A
Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 662.
11 Selz and Stiles, Theories and Documents, 662.
12 Selz and Stiles, 662.
13 See Martin Jay, “Somaeshetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art,”
Journal of Aesthetic Education 36, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 55–69.
14 Geraldine Howie, “Diorama as Constructs of Reality: Art, Photography, and the Discur-
sive Space,” in Natural History Dioramas: History, Construction and Educational Role,
ed. Sue Dale Tunnicliffe and Annette Scheersoi (New York: Springer, 2014), 63.
15 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technol-
ogy and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 134.
16 Heidegger, “The Age,” 134.
17 Salud Algabre, “No Uprising Fails – Each One is a Step in the Right Direction…,” inter-
view by David R. Sturtevant, Solidarity 1 (October–December 1966): 19.
18 Teo Marianne, Dioramas: A Visual History of Singapore (Singapore: National Museum
Singapore, 1985), 1.
19 Marianne, Dioramas, 1.
20 Marianne, 1.
21 Marianne, 1.
22 Pearlie Rose S. Baluyut, “The Ayala Museum: A Site of Culture, Capital, and Displaced
Colonial Desire,” Australian Journal of Art 14, no. 1 (1998): 75.
23 Baluyut, “The Ayala Museum,” 76.
24 Baluyut, 76.
25 See Brenda V. Fajardo, Ang Inukit na Kaalamang Bayan ng Paete (Manila: National Com-
mission for Culture and the Arts, 2005).
26 Brenda V. Fajardo, “Decolonization Through People’s Art,” Asian Studies 28 (1990): 102.
27 Fajardo, “Decolonization,” 101.
28 Hu Yun, email conversation with the author, September 2020.
29 Yun, email conversation.
31 See Marie Angelica Armecin Dayao, “Ang ‘Taglay ng Musikang Paete: Isang Pagkukump-
ara ng Estetiko at Kaugalia sa Musikang Pang-Banda at ng Ukit ng Paete” (unpublished
manuscript, n.d.).
32 Paloy Cagayat, in conversation with the author, Paete, 2019.
196 Patrick Flores
33 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 112–3.
34 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 113.
35 W. Neite, “The Cologne Diorama,” History of Photography 3, no. 2 (1979): 108.
36 Mieke Bal, “On Show: Inside the Ethnographic Museum,” in Looking In: The Art of
Viewing (New York: Routledge, 2001), 119.
37 Stefan Aue, Jana Eske, and Jessica Páez, “Diorama History,” Staging Dioramas, accessed
September 5, 2020, https://www.staging-dioramas.com/diorama-history.html.
38 Aue, Eske, and Páez, “Diorama History.”
39 Aue, Eske, and Páez.
40 Dore Bowen, “The Diorama Effect: Gas, Politics, and Opera in the 1825 Paris Diorama,”
Intermédialités/Intermediality 24–5 (Autumn 2014–Spring 2015), https://www.erudit.
org/en/journals/im/2014-n24-25-im02279/1034155ar/.
41 Bowne, “The Diorama Effect.”
42 Bowne.
43 Hélène Cixous, preface to The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers (London: Rout-
ledge, 1994), xxii.
44 Bowen, “The Diorama Effect.”
46 Don Slater, “Photography and Modern Vision: The Spectacle of ‘Natural Magic,’” in
Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995), 218.
47 Slater, “Photography,” 218
48 Slater, 220.
49 Kristen Han, “The Cost of ‘Singapore Inc.’? A Coronavirus Outbreak among Mi-
grants,” The Nation, August 17, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/
singapore-coronavirus-migrant-workers/.
50 Han, “The Cost.”
51 Ranjit Hoskoté, “Paete, Laguna,” in Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems, 1985–
2005 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2006), 186.
14 Erasure or Erased
An Artworld (AND WORLD) Adrift
Brad Buckley
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world
was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as
mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they
were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope
might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.1
H.G. Wells
The Renais invention of one-point perspective, nearly 600 years ago, was the defin-
ing convention of painting. This offered a convincing illusion of the world until the
French painter Paul Cézanne, working at the start of the twentieth century, in the
small village of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, changed the equation from
“this is what I see” to “is this what I see?,” according to the US art critic Barber
Rose. 2 If Cézanne did the spade work for this shift in perception, then the cubists
Spaniard Pablo Picasso and Frenchman Georges Braque pushed hard to paint “what
they knew.” So, this artist troika of Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque, working at a time
of unparalleled new technical and scientific knowledge that included the invention of
the movie camera by the Lumière brothers, and the Wright Brothers’ powered flight
(which offered the first aerial view of the landscape), set off the modernist race in art.
As we have moved from modernism to a period loosely defined as the contempo-
rary, we are witnessing a new revolution in technology and knowledge creation that
has led to changes in the way artists make, think about, and exhibit their work. It has
also raised broader questions about the role of the art museum, and how they collect
or archive work that may be ephemeral, transitory, or easily erased. What role, if any,
does the “white cube” gallery space have in this new world?3 These changes are as
profound as the Renaissance and modernism were in their time.
Erasure
In his brilliant satirical novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Czech writer
Milan Kundera explores the lives and loves of ordinary Czechs, and the politics and
memories, both real and fictional, of his homeland under the Communists. On publi-
cation of the book in 1979, that country revoked his citizenship, even though Kundera
had been happily ensconced in France for a number of years. In the opening chapter,
Kundera sets the scene for his book—and in many ways also for this chapter—by
telling the story of the Czech Communist leader Klement Gottwald, who in 1948
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-14
198 Brad Buckley
addressed the crowds in the town square of Prague. However, Gottwald was with-
out a hat. His apparatchik, Vladimír Clementis, offered his own fur cap. “On that
balcony the history of Communist Czechoslovakia was born. Every child knew the
photograph from posters, schoolbooks and museums.”4 Unfortunately for Clementis,
he was later charged with treason, and with being a “bourgeois nationalist,” and was
erased or “airbrushed” from all the photographs and, of course, from history, leaving
nothing except his fur cap, which remained on the head of Gottwald.
At the time, this was a radical form of image manipulation and a powerful new
form of propaganda, tethered to the belief, perhaps rather naive from our perspective
in the twenty-first century, that the photograph represented the truth. Today the use
of Photoshop and other manipulative image programs is so ubiquitous that even the
veracity of photographic evidence presented in courts of law is regularly challenged.
Perhaps the sheer volume of information that comes to us, from so many sources at
once, means that to survive we constantly erase what is not front and center in this
blizzard of messages.
New technologies have exponentially accelerated our experience of erasure and
our dislocation from authorizing sites of art, like museums. For much of the twenti-
eth century there was an explicit relationship that underwrote modernism’s forward
march. A striking example of this co-dependency is the work of the US poet and
minimalist artist Carl Andre. His work Equivalent VIII (1966)—a double row of
house bricks placed on the floor—was shown at a major retrospective exhibition at
the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1970. In the Guggenheim, the bricks are
read as art, but if one were to stumble over them in the carpark, they would be just
a pile of bricks. This erasure of the authorizing relationship has also altered how we
look at and understand art of the last 100 years. Of course, this process of erasure
has been in train for several decades. As the British writer and novelist John Berger so
aptly comments in his seminal book (and television series) Ways of Seeing:
In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached

to them; their meaning becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes informa-
tion … it is a question of reproduction making it possible, even inevitable, that an
image will be used for many different purposes and that the reproduced image,
unlike an original work, can lend itself to them all.5
Memory
In the artworld—and to use Arthur Danto’s term “Artworld” is to signal that it is a
thing in its own right—we are now witnessing the rise of artists whose careers and
bodies of work exist almost exclusively on digital platforms. While these platforms
once promised freedom and independence and a way of bypassing the galleries, mu-
seums, and institutional gatekeepers, we have discovered that they are technically
unstable and can foster paranoia and resentful behaviors. These platforms often be-
come places where hatred of any difference, whether sexual, cultural, or political,
proliferates. This applies to both the political left and the political right.
The freedom once offered by these platforms is now an illusion, as website hyper-
links are corrupted or fail and Instagram accounts are cancelled, potentially erasing
much of an artist’s history. This capacity for erasure is driven by new media technol-
ogy, globalization, and new structures of work and consumption. If we take the sem-
inal act of US pop artist Robert Rauschenberg—his erasure of a drawing by abstract
Erasure or Erased 199
expressionist painter Willem de Kooning in 1953—as the point of departure that
perhaps signaled that an echo or trace might be all that is valued in the future. That
is the future that we now inhabit, and it is defined by the impact of technologies such
as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok.
Witness the rise of dating apps such as Tinder, Grindr, and Blendr that locate po-
tential partners based on proximity and sexual preference. Some of these issues have
been explored in the late Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Love:
On the Frailty of Human Bonds (2003), where the seminal figure of our post-MTV
world—the man or woman with enduring unstable bonds—is in a permanent state
of shifting circumstances. Members of the new “liquid society” are being affected
by the technologies, which are changing, fundamentally, the ways in which we com-
municate and conduct relationships, and, more broadly, how we act politically. Even
though Bauman was writing in 2003, he makes this rather salient observation which
resonates with our current predicament:
This only means, however, that at no other time [has] the keen search for com-
mon humanity, and the practice that follows such an assumption, been as urgent
and imperative as [it is] now. In the era of globalization, the cause and the politics
of shared humanity face the most fateful of the many fateful steps they have made
in their long history.6
One of the most significant aesthetic, cultural, and political phenomena in recent
times has been the changing role of memory in Western society—or, to put it another
way, the erasure of our collective memory. Indeed, as the German/US cultural the-
orist Andreas Huyssen has recently pointed out, there has been a profound turning
toward the past, in radical contrast to the valorization of the future so typical of
earlier decades of the twentieth century.7 Since the 1960s and ’70s there has been a
new contemplation of memory. As many commentators have correctly indicated, we
can speak of a “memory boom” since then, and today, in the new century, one can
legitimately describe it as a continuing one. This is not to suggest that memory itself,
in its individual, generational, and social dimensions, is a new topic. We have been
discussing memory’s complexities and mysteries across millennia, since the Tanakh
or Hebrew Bible with its clarion call of Zakhor! (Remember!) in the book of Deuter-
onomy 32:7, with Moses instructing his fellow Israelites to remember “the days of the
old/Consider the years of the many generations.”8
What is new is the proliferation of identity and gender politics, cancel culture (or
online shaming, as it is sometimes called), and the decline of the modernist narratives
of post-Enlightenment cultural and socially progressive movements. In the West, this
decline has been accompanied by an overtly aggressive policy shift to the far right
by many governments as they become more authoritarian, and more secretive. This
in turn has led to the disassembling of the welfare state as nation states endeavor to
assert their legitimacy by focusing on the past.9 The best evidence of this is the emer-
gence of so-called strongmen as leaders: Boris Johnson in the UK, Vladimir Putin in
Russia, Xi Jinping in China, Kim Jong-un in North Korea, Viktor Orban in Hungary,
and (until his recent defeat by Joe Biden) Donald Trump in the US,10 to mention only
a few of the more grotesque players.
The memory boom has seen a commodification of nostalgia. Witness in Australia
and New Zealand the romanticizing of the failed ANZAC Gallipoli landing over a
century ago, the popularization of history more generally, and the intensification of
200 Brad Buckley
the individual and collective nature of memory itself.11 Currently, both forms of mem-
ory are at marked risk: The former due to neurological decay and sensory information
overload, the latter because of the passing of generations and the state-sanctioned
denial of atrocities, catastrophes, wars, and other traumas. Two striking examples of
what we might refer to as organized memory loss are the continued rise of Holocaust
deniers and the official policy of the Australian War Memorial. The memorial refuses
to recognize or include any reference to what have become known as the Frontier
Wars that were fought between Aboriginal people and the British from the time of
the latter’s arrival in 1788. As University of Queensland academic Federica Caso has
recently commented:
Recognition and acknowledgement of the Frontier Wars between Indigenous

peoples and European colonizers and their inclusion in the national memory of
war is an important step towards reconciliation and national unity. Setting the
historical records right and naming the violence that has been perpetrated are
fundamental to heal the national trauma and move forward.12
In fact, we may trace the origins of studies of collective memory to modernity’s

dynamic reconfiguration of the past, the present, and the future, and to classical
sociological thought, particularly as represented by French philosopher Maurice Hal-
bwach’s groundbreaking work in 1925.13 Without wishing to canonize Halbwach,
let us say that his writings have significantly contributed to our understanding of the
social characteristics of memory. His concept of “collective memory” was founded
on the work of another French philosopher, Henri Bergson. Bergson’s subjectivist
perspective on the experience of time, memory, and remembering contrasted with the
logocentric characterization of culture, history, and science in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. Halbwach’s concept of collective remembering was also based on French sociol-
ogist Emile Durkheim’s work on the variability of perceptual changes in accordance
with forms of social organization.
Are the current debates about our contemporary memory culture also indicative of
an emerging paradigm of thinking about art, culture, history, and politics? Is our cur-
rent era one of forgetting? How does this impact on us as artists, academics, curators,
and citizens? How do we respond to it?
Memory surfaced as something significant to both individual and social identity
not only through Bergson’s philosophical musings, but also through Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalysis, and French novelist Marcel Proust’s autobiographical fiction. As nu-
merous commentators have indicated, there has been a substantial shift in the debate
during the twentieth century: From memory being psychoanalyzed, at the beginning
of the century, to the present situation of cultural memory, which, as the German aca-
demic Jan Assmann has described, “conveys a collectively shared knowledge.”14 What
is pertinent, besides thinking and writing about cultural memory having almost be-
come an industry in itself in recent decades, is that only since modernity have certain
specific types of structural forgetting become dominant in the discourse, as in life.
Trauma
The British writer H.G. Wells, began his novel The War of the Worlds in serialized
form in 1897 in the UK, at the height of the Victorian Age and the British Empire—or
as it was often described, “the empire on which the sun never sets.” Wells speculated,
with his brother Frank, about the impact a Martian invasion would have on Britain
if they behaved as the British did in their genocidal treatment, known as the Black
War, against the Palawa, the Indigenous people of Tasmania.15 So Wells offers The
War of the Worlds as a critique of colonization in general, but particularly of British
colonization during the nineteenth century. The exploitation, subjugation, and mur-
der of many Indigenous peoples by imperial conquest was justified and promoted by
the Christian belief in the need, the responsibility, to “civilize” those societies. These
ideas were embodied in the poem The White Man’s Burden: The United States and
the Philippine Islands (1899), by the English imperialist writer and poet Rudyard
Kipling. While this poem urged the US to colonize the Philippine Islands, the phrase
the White Man’s Burden became shorthand for the superiority of the white race and
thus its obligation to civilize all other races through conquest.
These conquests were celebrated, in the US, by erecting statues of slave traders,
Confederate generals and explorers of the New World, mainly during the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. In the US, triggered by a series of violent attacks in
2020 by police on Black Americans and other minorities, a movement calling for the
removal of these statues rapidly grew, and in some instances, direct action was taken,
and citizens tore them down. The movement quickly spread to Europe, Britain, and
Australia. At Oxford’s Oriel College, there were calls for the removal of a statue of
Cecil Rhodes, founder of the colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), who
went on to establish the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Rather ironically, funding
for the scholarship is based partly on the wealth he created through his partnership
with diamond mining company De Beers and the Anglo-French bank Rothschild and
Sons. As Oriel College was founded in 1324, one might speculate that Rhodes is not
the only alumni whose views, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, are
seen as repugnant and cruel.
However, as the English classist Dame Mary Beard suggests:
The idea that Rhodes was a particularly dreadful lone racist wolf in the late nine-
teenth century is completely barking. The chances are that almost every one of
the Victorian worthies who decorate our streets and cities held views as bad or
worse. And a great statue cull, based on twenty-first century values, would leave
few in place. Would Boudicca the sadistic terrorist (or alternatively founder of our
island’s imperial ambitions—as the inscription underneath her suggests) survive
on the Embankment? I doubt it.16
In Sydney, a statue of Lieutenant James Cook, erroneously referred to as “Captain” in

historical texts, was graffitied by activists, and in Perth a statue of Cook was painted
with the colors of the Aboriginal flag. Whether it be Australia or any other postco-
lonial society, Indigenous people continue to be marginalized and to sometimes be
treated with condescension and paternal (echoes of nineteenth-century Christianity)
attitudes. They also continue to be subjected to institutional and systemic violence.17
The ethical issue here, of course, is whether removing statues and monuments, or
murals, addresses in any meaningful way the injustices and traumas of the past. As
Beard also observes, “much more important is to look history in the eye and reflect on
our awkward relationship to it, and what we are actually beneficiaries of, not simply
to photoshop the nasty bits out.”18
202 Brad Buckley
Looking at the cultural and political horizon through a different lens, we remember
when in 2001 the Taliban destroyed statues of Buddha that had been carved in the
third and fifth centuries. This may have happened for much the same reasons that
statues in the West are being attacked and removed: Because they are monuments to
or signifiers of a period of different values and beliefs—in Afghanistan, its pre-Islamic
past. The Irish Times reported that “the destruction was being carried out in keeping
with instructions from the Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader Mr Mullah Mohammed
Omar, who ordered all statues in Afghanistan including the Buddha statues be de-
stroyed because they offended Islam.”19 Regardless of people’s religious beliefs, there
was a collective gasp of horror, as we witnessed our shared sense of humanity, our
shared history, being destroyed.
We clearly understand that some monuments are there not to celebrate the past but
to act as a graphic reminder, a brake, on our worst collective impulses. Perhaps the
extermination camps established by the German Nazis during World War II, such as
Auschwitz-Birkenau (March 1942–January 1945, in occupied Poland), stands today
as a monument that is among the most disturbing examples.
Adrift
Biennales and other large survey exhibitions have been in the throes of death for the
past two decades. One could speculate that COVID-19, along with predicted future
pandemics, has simply hastened the disappearance of what was already an exhausted
exhibition model. You can hear the death rattle as each new director—these are often
members of a breed known as “flying curators”—announces the latest exhibition title
and premise. Each time they struggle to find an approach, a structure, that will please
and placate the sponsors, the government funding bodies, and the general public.
Unfortunately, none of them seems to realize that art no longer has that eighteenth-
century sovereignty over society so desired by curators, so when the biennale fails
to engage with its audience in critical terms, success is then measured in “bums on
seats,” playing to the crowd, art as entertainment and lifestyle. Of course, even these
measures are now redundant, given the present pandemic. Who would wish to attend
a biennale, art fair, or blockbuster museum exhibition when the result could be a trip
to the ICU if, and this will depend on which country you are in, there is indeed an
available bed.
Curators, like anyone else, are obliged to frequently rethink their roles, and their
curatorial beliefs and practices. The underlying quest is always to reinvent ourselves
alongside the ever-evolving complexities of the democratization of art and culture.
According to German philosopher Martin Heidegger, curators play an indispensable
role in shaping our perception of what art is in relation to its frame, its Gestell, in
delimiting what is to be included or excluded in a work of art.20 Curators do matter:
They play a huge part in shaping our experience of art, artists, and culture, and yet
many of them seem ignorant of their ethical responsibilities.
Whether we speak of the German Jewish critic and essayist Walter Benjamin’s
“aura,” the thing that gives art its individuality and its authenticity; Heidegger’s
Gestell; or Italian philosopher Mario Perniola’s critique of contemporary art’s post-
modern “shadows,” the curator’s cultural and institutional role is of the utmost sig-
nificance.21 It cannot be overlooked or swept under the carpet. To do so is willful
ideological ignorance.
This is not news to anyone who is familiar with the exhausted biennale model of
art curating and programming. The Swedish curator and critic Daniel Birnbaum hit
the nail on its head when he recently suggested that the end of such a tired model
of curating was unavoidable, citing novelist John Barth’s controversial 1968 essay
“The Literature of Exhaustion,” and noted the compelling urgency of looking for
a new model. 22 Of course when someone speaks of the death of the novel, paint-
ing, cinema, or a particular art genre, you can be certain that there is still some
life left in whatever art form is being discussed. What is required is for curators to
think beyond the predictable and the safe, and find or develop new models, forms,
and contexts? The Swiss curator and artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries
in London, Hans Ulrich Obrist, in collaboration with Stephanie Moisdon, staged
the Lyon Biennale in 2007. They approached it as a kind of meta-literary game in
the playfully subversive spirit of the Oulipo group of writers and mathematicians,
which included the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau,
and Georges Perec. 23
For many, Birnbaum opines, the art fair has replaced the biennale. In fact, both the
art fair and the biennale, given the changes in technologies coupled with the impact
of the pandemic, are fast becoming obsolete. What we need are curatorial shifts of
thinking and doing; no one has a crystal ball to see what new forms of curating lie
around the corner. Just as notable curators such as the late Harald Szeemann (who
chose not to be a director of an art museum but to instead work as an independent
Ausstellungsmacher) and Pontus Hultén (the founding director of the Pompidou Cen-
tre, who turned the site into a multi-disciplinary laboratory and production venue)
forged new ways of curating, so today’s curators urgently need to seek new curatorial
ideas and routes, if they and their institutions are to play any role in this new cyber
landscape.
A final thought
John Berger’s statement—“The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its au-
thority is lost. In its place, there is a language of images. What matters now is who
uses that language for what purpose”—was prophetic. 24 Fifty years after Berger, we
are grappling with dislocation and erasure and a world defined and controlled by five
major US technology companies.
At the time of writing, there is a global pandemic that has impacted every coun-
try’s health system and economy, and of course the arts are a serious casualty. In the
midst of this global disaster there is the specter of a Jekyll and Hyde economy, where
whole industries are failing or are surviving on government life support. Yet Face-
book, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet (formerly Google), known collectively
as FAANG, with a combined market capitalization of over five trillion US dollars as
of January 2021, continue to prosper. Do the FAANGs offer a yet unrealized free-
dom or are they (with apologies to the book of Revelation) the Five Horsemen of the
apocalypse?
Notes
1 H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 1.
2 Robert Hughes, Shock of the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 18.
204 Brad Buckley
3 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 15.
4 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Lon-
don: Penguin Books, 1983), 3.
5 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 24–5.
6 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity,
2003), 156.
7 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995); Andreas Huyssen,
Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003).
8 Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzsky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds., The Collective Memory
Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.
9 Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, The Collective Memory Reader, 3, 10, 13–14.
10 Maggie Haberman, “Trump Departs Vowing, ‘We Will Be Back in Some Form,’” New
York Times, January 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/us/politics/trump-
presidency.html.
11 For a wide-ranging discussion on the creation of the Australian and New Zealand Army
Corps (ANZAC) and the military failure at Gallipoli see Peter Fitzsimons, Gallipoli (Syd-
ney: William Heinemann Australia, 2014).
12 Federica Caso, “Lest We Forget the Frontier Wars,” Independent Australia, August 25,
2020, https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/lest-we-forget-the-
frontier-wars,13840.
13 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Edward Coser (Chicago, IL:
Chicago University Press, 1992).
14 Roland Alexander Ißler, “Cultural Memory,” The Bonn Handbook of Globality, ed. L.
Kühnhardt and T. Mayer (Cham: Springer Verlag, 2019), 6.
15 Philip Ball, “What the War of the Worlds Means Now: Why the Victorian Anxieties
that Underlie H.G. Wells’ Masterpiece Have Never Gone Away,” New Statesman (Amer-
ican Edition), July 18, 2018, accessed August 2, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.
com/2018/07/war-of-the-worlds-2018-bbc-hg-wells.
16 Mary Beard, “A Don’s Life: Cecil Rhodes and Oriel College, Oxford,” TLS, accessed Au-
gust 20, 2020, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/cecil-rhodes-and-oriel-college-oxford/.
17 See “Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody,” National Archives of Aus-
tralia, 1987–91, accessed August 2, 2020, https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/
first-australians/royal-commission-aboriginal-deaths-custody.
18 Beard, “A Don’s Life.”
19 “Taliban Soldiers Demolish Ancient Buddha Statues,” The Irish Times, March 3,
2001, accessed August 1, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/taliban-soldiers-
demolish-ancient-buddha-statues-1.376336.
20 Mario Perniola, Art and Its Shadow (New York: Continuum, 2004), see Hugh J. Silver-
man’s introduction to Perniola’s thoughts on art and aesthetics in reference to Heidegger
and Benjamin, pp. vii–xiii.
21 Perniola, Art and Its Shadow, xv–xviii passim.
22 John Barth, “The Archeology of Things to Come,” in The Friday Book: Essays and Other
Non-Fiction. (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1984), 62–76.
23 For a broader discussion of the role of major survey exhibitions of contemporary art, see
Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Lyon Biennial 2007: The History of a Dec-
ade that Has Not Yet Been Named (Geneva: JRP Ringier, 2007).
24 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 33.
15 All the World’s Futures
Orianna Cacchione and Jessica Hong
This paper is a reflection on “All the World’s Futures: Global Art and Art History in
the Wake of COVID-19,” all quotations without citations are drawn from this panel
discussion which was conducted online on March 4, 2021 at the Smart Museum of
Art, University of Chicago.1
On March 23, 2021, the Japanese-owned, Taiwanese-operated, and Indian-staffed

container ship the Ever Given turned off course in the midst of a sandstorm, mooring
itself across the Suez Canal, and blocking all maritime traffic for seven days. While
not the first ship to get stuck in the canal, the plight of the Ever Given provides
an apt allegory for the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted daily life
around the world, including the artworld. The ship’s running aground emphasizes
how stoppages, slow-downs, and blockages almost immediately reveal the underlying
systems and structures that had previously been taken for granted or fully and often
intentionally occluded.
A little more than a year before, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organiza-
tion (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The virus had been spread-
ing throughout the world for at least four months and had caused massive national
lock-downs and stay-at-home orders, first in China, followed by Italy, Spain, and the
US, and eventually affecting every country in the world. National borders closed,
governments struggled to secure basic medical supplies and hospital beds, hundreds
of millions of people were infected with this novel coronavirus and at the time of
writing this chapter over five million people have died from the disease globally.2 The
artworld had to reorient as well: Exhibitions postponed, art fairs canceled, and much
of the international travel and shipping that helped produce and animate contempo-
rary events halted. This temporary pause allowed many of us to reflect on the insti-
tutions that we visit and work with, and the ways these institutions respond to our
local communities. It made us reassess our normal operating procedures and iden-
tify the limitations and blindspots of our practices as curators, cultural practitioners,
and scholars. In the US, the Black Lives Matter Movement has demanded changes
to address equity and access in American art museums, cultural institutions, and
art galleries. Furthermore, we as curators have been forced to look at our practices,
behaviors, assumptions, and our own complicity within these systems. These shifts
have profoundly affected how we think of the so-called “global” artworld and the
global turn in art history and contemporary curatorial practice. The “where” of art,
just as in the where of the production of our clothes, food, medicine, and electronics,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-15
206 Orianna Cacchione and Jessica Hong
is entangled in global networks, corporations, institutions, as well as people. Yet
through the slow-downs and stoppages caused by the pandemic, these systems, net-
works, and inequities are now too visible to ignore.
This essay expands upon the panel discussion “All the World’s Futures: Global Art
and Art History in the Wake of COVID-19” held virtually on March 4, 2021. The
title comes from the 2015 Venice Biennale curated by the late Okwui Enwezor, to
suggest a consideration of the current state of things as well as future states of things.
Organized about a year after the first COVID-19 cases were publicly identified in
the US, this panel brought together artists and curators from four continents—Ho
Tzu Nyen, Serge Alain Nitegeka, and Project Anywhere’s Sean Lowry and Simone
Douglas—to reflect on the impacts of the pandemic on global practices and even the
possibilities that may have arisen. The following are mediations on the themes that
emerged in our conversations together as summarized by the panel’s organizers and
moderators, supplemented by direct quotations from the panelists drawn from this
discussion. We must, however, acknowledge our specific and limited vantage points
as two curators working within American art museums.
Changing circulations
The pandemic wrought changes—expected and unexpected—in how art moves
around the world, but this brought new opportunities for artists and museums to pivot
and find new ways of working and engaging audiences. Museum closures resulted in
extreme losses of revenue either as visitors were either barred from these spaces or as
attendance was dramatically reduced to comply with public health guidelines. Exhibi-
tions closed, loans were canceled, and shipping rates increased exponentially. Artists,
curators, and couriers were often prohibited from entering other countries or faced
prolonged mandatory quarantines, diminishing the feasibility of international travel.
In our conversations, Ho persistently brought up how paths of circulation affected
not only daily life in Singapore but also the way he works. In Singapore, the effects of
the pandemic were first experienced through its effect on infrastructure and the sup-
ply chain, particularly questions around the country’s ability to sustain its predomi-
nantly imported food supply. This inspired Ho to collaborate with a migrant worker,
activist, and poet Ripon Chowdhury, on a video project, Waiting (2020), as part of
London gallery Edel Assanti’s “Contactless Delivery” online programming. Here the
pandemic itself inspired and altered Ho’s normal practice, ultimately resulting in a
new form of work.
In the artworld, the shutting down of typical routes of exchange and exhibitions
opened up alternative modes of working and access. This was perhaps most pro-
foundly experienced in the almost immediate shift to digital platforms and program-
ming for museum audiences—virtual tours were instituted, programs were presented
on Zoom, Instagram, and Facebook live, the recently launched Clubhouse, and the
online viewing room became ubiquitous for art fairs and galleries. The benefits of
providing content to global audiences who have access to the internet was alluring,
and seemed as if it might offer a counterbalance to the ways in which privilege and
international mobility exclude many from the international biennials and art fairs
that mark the elite levels of access to the artworld. Project Anywhere intentionally es-
chews traditional systems of circulation: “Project Anywhere uses an innovative blind
All the World’s Futures 207
peer-review program to replace the role of the curator. It provides artists and artistic
researchers working outside traditional exhibition systems with peer validation, com-
munity support, and global dissemination of their work.”3 They solicit exhibition
proposals from curators and artists around the world to be considered under peer
review. Once a project is accepted, it is presented at Project Anywhere’s annual con-
ference. The pandemic further affected their decentralized model and forced Douglas
and Lowry to reconceive their annual conference as a virtual event. Moreover, be-
cause of the pandemic, the project initiators could not travel and Douglas herself was
unable to leave Australia to return to her job and residence in New York. In shifting
to a virtual format, they were able to bring a global audience “into play” but also
provide a context for local artists to reach new audiences.
At the same time, the constant mediation of people and artworks onto the flat
screen of our computers, cellphones, and tablets inevitably affected human interactiv-
ity and how we experience physical artworks. In this virtual translation, what is lost?
For Nitegeka, presenting artworks intended to be experienced in three dimensions on
a screen or in digitized form cannot provide the same effect as seeing them in person,
standing beside or walking around them. For Ho, while he acknowledged the “impos-
sible task to translate a sculpture through the internet,” he suggested instead we shift
the question to ask not what the sculpture can be when it “meshed with a different
interface” but rather how the artist can be adaptable based on the project itself. He
continued:
So maybe the term translation is also interesting to think about. Sometimes we

think about translation as the attempt to somehow convey the original. And we
think about that process as incorporating a certain loss of meaning with the
Figure 15.1 H
o Tzu Nyen, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA), 2017–
ongoing, video-still from algorithmically composed video, infinite loop,
© courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery.
translation. But what if we think about it differently, we think about translation
as adding something to the original, and so we think about translation in a posi-
tive sense as transformation.4
Contemplating the multiple types of artworks and virtual mediations, Lowry sug-
gested discussing translation not in terms of loss and gain, but to “realize that there’s
more than one portal, if you will … more than one materialization.” Instead of think-
ing about how we translate what we do in the space of the gallery, the museum, or
the studio, how can we begin to find new ways to engage works of art that draw in
more audiences, and make not only the white cube but contemporary art in general
more accessible?
Reimaging cultural institutions

How the pandemic exposed the problems and limitations of current institutional
structures was one of the first discussions we had with the speakers in conceiving
this panel. It brought up pressing questions including whether this space and time of
reflection will signal a larger shift away from or a rejection of operations as usual,
and if so, whether that will impact how we define and undefine our practices and
institutions.
Simultaneously, at many museums, especially those in the US, long closures that
resulted from stay-at-home orders led to lay-offs and budget crises. In many cases,
part-time staff such as museum guards, front of house workers, facilities staff, and
museum educators were the first to be laid off. In other situations, the pandemic
exposed inequities in hiring practices, compensation, and benefits policies. Many of
our colleagues whose work is essential to activating the spaces of our institutions
and museums—welcoming visitors, invigilating, and teaching in our galleries—were
most often hourly workers who did not qualify for healthcare let alone sick leave.
More concerning still, many of these workers were People of Color and often rep-
resented the largest percentages of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)
staff members at our museums. Combined with #BlackLivesMatter—spurred into
action in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in
May 2020—museums were forced to reckon with their own policies and priorities to
examine how they perpetuate structural racism and white supremacy. One result was
that staff members felt they finally had the space to speak up about how they had been
treated and what they experienced or what they witnessed, thus putting pressure on
museum leadership to make significant changes, although it is uncertain when and if
change will come.
Beyond questions of how we support our staff and colleagues, the pandemic forced
a reconsideration of how we support artists and communities. As exhibitions, com-
missions, and residencies were canceled, rescheduled, or postponed indefinitely, many
artists lost income and opportunities to show their work or develop new projects.
In this void, some museums stepped up to commission new work by local artists.
However, Nitegeka noted the importance of curators boldly supporting artists: “I
think there needs to be more of the curators and the institutions showing diverse art
needs to be more brave in the sense that the curation of work has to be within rea-
son, without restrictions.” He argued for the necessity for curators and institutions
to work with an artist to “create the work further” instead of “restricting it further,”
so that the collaboration is not based around saying no but rather finding ways to let
the work have the space it needs and produce the effect originally intended by the
artist. More than anything, however, Nitegeka called for institutions to become more
welcoming and inclusive: “[In] Joburg [Johannesburg] as a city, I dream that where
everyone can have access to institutions and more people are knowledgeable enough
to enjoy and celebrate the arts.” This was a call to action. When we can reopen fully,
how will we make our institutions more accessible, and how will we thoughtfully and
intentionally welcome new audiences?
Acknowledging local histories and legacies

In order to do so, we must reckon with the histories that created our institutions and
how they continue to uphold inaccessibility and inequity. The museum, in its public
incarnation after the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rise, was founded upon
colonialism and conquest to display the spoils of war and amass assets and wealth
in the name of the empire. As we know, these imperial legacies remain and persist
in the structures and systems that underpin these institutions and are palpably felt
by visitors and staff alike. It cannot be underemphasized how the pandemic gravely
revealed the ineffectiveness, indeed failures, of these systems, and if not contended
with how the consequences of these failures—from collections being built with sto-
len cultural objects, visitors feeling misrepresented or excluded from these sites,
to refusing psychological safety for staff members that are meant to carry out the
museum’s work—will reverberate beyond the institutional site. This pandemic has
also brought to the fore that we are part of an interconnected whole, demonstrated
by the virus’s spread from person to person first affecting local communities then
affecting global travel, trade, as well as diplomacy. It is an experience that illus-
trated the connectedness of our actions and engagements with the lands and waters
where we live, work, curate, and make art to in fact resonate beyond our immediate
contexts. Yet our actions and daily lives obscure the histories of settler colonialism
that made our very existence possible. How do we unearth and respect the narra-
tives and histories within these lands to learn from, build, and expound upon what
came before?
In our conversation, Douglas echoed the sentiments of Rhoda Roberts, an arts
executive and Widjabul Wiyebal woman from the Bundjalung nation in Australia: “If
you don’t pay attention to the land, it doesn’t pay attention to you.” Hence a first step
is one of acknowledgment. We, as moderators both based in the US, began by recog-
nizing that our respective institutions are built on lands stolen from Indigenous na-
tions. So too did Douglas and Lowry, underscoring the distinct historical and cultural
contexts from which we work. Institutions in the US have historically erased Native
peoples from the land’s origin story. Within museological settings, Native cultures
are presented in the past tense, negating their continued existence (e.g., Chicago has
the third largest Native, urban population in the US), 5 and continued contributions
to the social, political, and cultural landscapes. Along with naming past and present
significance, Douglas and Lowry drew our attention to the ensuing generations of
Indigenous nations and knowledges and “a commitment to the beginning of the pro-
cess of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonization.” Once we
acknowledge the violent, colonial origins of many of our institutions, respect these
histories, embody Indigenous knowings and other knowledges, we can move toward
safer and more equitable futures for the collective. But this is only a start. While re-
viewing potential projects, Project Anywhere always considers “the way projects take
place within communities and to see whether appropriate consultation is taking place
and also whether they’re paying respect to the land that they stand on,” while being
mindful of the global cultural dialogues in which these projects take part. Douglas
observed that,
... the projects themselves, each artist and designer in the exhibition, powerfully
suggest that the world is not a fixed experience. Rather, that it is a shapeshifter re-
vealed through time, culture, necessity, and politics profoundly human. Through
their works, we encounter the intimate and the infinite, and their works reveal
our symbolic relationship to the world where our actions and environment are
entwined narratives.6
Another consideration is that of understanding how the lands and its many histories
shape cultural contexts and the conception of said lands as nations and geopoliti-
cal regions. Project Anywhere highlighted Gabriel Hensche, Björn Kühn, and Anna
Romanenko’s Liminal Dome (2014), presented at their first conference. Rather than
rooted within the lands per se, the work explored the liminal space between them,
in the waters connecting the lands. Beginning in Germany and situated in the ocean
between Germany and Poland, the artists would travel down in a circular “subma-
rine architecture” from the ocean’s surface to an underwater garden as an attempt
“to stage an environment that questions the conditions of possible aquatic life.”7
However, weather conditions drifted the structure across the border into Poland such
that Polish police returned them to German territory. What was intended as an ex-
ploration of prospective and alternative modes of living and new ways of being in the
environment was obstructed by enforced restrictions imposed by historic yet nonethe-
less fabricated boundaries. These regions and territories are highly mediated by gov-
ernments and political actors that limit their possibilities. So how can we collectively
rethink the ways we engage with the lands and waters that we inhabit?
Ho’s work, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) (2012–), ap-
pears to speak to this quandary. His conception of CDOSEA began with this ques-
tion: “What constitutes the unity of Southeast Asia—a region never unified by a
single religion, language, or political system?” Allied forces popularized the term
Southeast Asia following World War II, which was intended as a term of conven-
ience to refer to this broader region, to their ultimate privilege.8 Although Ho’s
work focuses on Southeast Asia, it also addresses the impulse of colonial entities
to impose “comprehensive” order and delineations across the globe, an impossible
and mercenary task with perilous consequences. Ho emphasizes that rather than
prioritizing the global, which is primarily concerned with economic and geopolitical
discourses, we might instead think of the new category which is that of the plane-
tary. As he states:
So maybe it’s a way of thinking that requires us to calibrate the scale at which
we are looking and to see [that] things can operate simultaneously at different
scales. So the scale of the local and also the scale of the planetary, these are sort
of interesting things for us to consider when we are practicing and thinking about
the dissemination, distribution, and engagement of our works.
We can start by considering the local, but by deploying the planetary as a framework
in which the local exists, we can remind ourselves that we are one part of a larger
whole—a communally networked planet—potentially to garner a sense of deeper
responsibility.
Conceptualizing the self

The planetary realm consists of sites that comprise communities of individuals. The
2020 pandemic year raised a series of new questions about the self. What influences
our conception of the self—our familial and intimate relationships, our professions,
our activities—have all been upended, even lost. What then does the self mean in
this context of restricted movement, forced physical distancing, and inorganically
recreating social worlds through an intangible virtual sphere? Nitegeka has ex-
plored this throughout his practice given his personal experience as a refugee while
waiting for his South African citizenship to be conferred. He is deeply familiar
with dual constraints of limited mobility and forced migration, which has shaped
his understanding of identity as complex, multifaceted, and fluid. However, when
Nitegeka talks about identity, it is “not the one defined by borders or … inscribed
in passports and identity documents or the one handed down from our parents.”
He is interested in what he calls the “mirror perspective, you standing in front of a
mirror and looking at yourself, asking yourself, ‘What are the sum of the things we
can learn about and construct identities from?’” In his new body of work, Nitegeka
incorporates his own face and body, which appears to be “struggling with a load.”
The metaphorical load can be what the self carries: Memories, experiences, narra-
tives, and ideas. It is a labor to carry this ontological load, which may get tempo-
rarily lost when one moves into new surroundings. But once they are able to reach
their destination, whether by choice or under duress, as Nitegeka states, “they’re
able to find themselves again. And the identity takes on a journey, and it takes on
wherever they find themselves.”
The pandemic has engendered a different kind of journey or interaction with the self
through the perpetual mirror of Zoom, among other video platforms. As Nitegeka
remarked:
It’s basically a time of looking in the mirror. For example, on this screen, I’m
looking at myself talking … and there’s an imagined audience that is looking
back at me. So there’s also that way of thinking about the mirror and being on
the other side looking at yourself, and not understanding how such forces, unseen
forces, can impact … the way you think about yourself and how you progress
forward, into shaping who you want to be.9
The load Nitegeka carries in his paintings could be an attempt to hold onto the for-
mer sense of self or perhaps grasping and comprehending this load in order to evolve
expanded conceptions of the self. That said, the constancy of looking at the self on
a virtual screen is exhausting and unnatural. In such a climate we feel the effects of
“Zoom fatigue” with its attendant physiological and psychological consequences,10
variable upon the demographic.11 Moreover, this fatigue will likely have lasting ef-
fects after the pandemic.12 With this in mind, the artist’s load takes on further meta-
phorical weight: We are unsure what additional, new forms our loads will take as we
Figure 15.2 S erge Alain Nitegeka, Identity is Fragile III, 2021 ©, charcoal and paint on
wood, 120 × 140 × 4.5 cm, courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, Johan-
nesburg © Serge Alain Nitegeka. Photo by Nina Lieska.
move into a “post-COVID” or “COVID-filled” future, but we know our bodies and
conceptions of ourselves will have to carry much more than we anticipated.
It is worth noting that the pandemic has foregrounded the divisions within our
societies. For those privileged enough to remain at home, to have a home, and have
access to the digital world, it has allowed people to look inward, examine, learn,
obsess, and even reconceive the self. Conversely, those who lost their livelihoods have
needed to reassess their priorities and their needs. So, this exploration of the self, re-
gardless of the circumstance, is not about attaining an idealized notion of the self for
the betterment of the individual but how the self that we both carry and embody can
contribute to something larger than the individual self.
Conclusion
When we create and produce in a given site, who and what do we impact, and what
is our reach? In this time of virtual and global circulation, what is the extent of such
impact? During our conversations with Ho Tzu Nyen, Serge Alain Nitegeka, and
Project Anywhere’s Simone Douglas and Sean Lowry, we began with overall systemic
consequences of this pandemic, moved onto how they distinctly affected our individ-
ual contexts, then tried to work through balancing our immediate locales and the
pressure as well as the necessity to participate in global cultural dialogues. When peo-
ple ruminate on the global, it can often be thought of in a holistic and unified manner.
But that can efface specificities and in turn the needs of actual communities. Even as
we write this, it is impossible to remove ourselves from the specific spaces in which
we work and live even while doing all we can to try and encapsulate the multifaceted,
unbalanced experiences people are having around the world. Throughout our conver-
sation and in this text, we acknowledge that slippages between the local and global
can lead us to hazardous terrain of falsely universalizing or generalizing experiences.
In the beginning of the pandemic, many politicians and celebrities alike called it the
“great equalizer,” which was quickly proven false, as BIPOC communities and those
facing economic scarcity had higher rates of infection as well as death.13 The blissful
ignorance of the individuals who could see or claim the pandemic as a great equal-
izer demonstrates extreme societal stratification, segregation, and the impossibility
as well as danger of globalizing pandemic experiences. To return to Ho’s sentiments,
perhaps there is a way to explore the simultaneity of the individual and the commu-
nal, local, and planetary, without neglecting our fellow humans.
While our intention is not to universalize, what seems apparent is that the conse-
quential COVID-19 pandemic has moved the planet into a new paradigm. Life as we
knew it, no matter its contexts, wherever it is, must be reimagined and restructured.
The possibility of a “new normal” is long awaited. Collectively, we began to ques-
tion openly our institutions in order to reveal structures, systems, and processes that
had been taken for granted as being fixed and assumed to work for society are mere
illusions and possibly on the brink of collapse. Yet while it took a pandemic for the
widespread awareness of these forms of inequity, marginal communities have expe-
rienced and already understood the effects of systemic inequity, many spending their
lives fighting these systems and dying or being killed amidst these struggles. Addi-
tionally, the pandemic has emphasized just how deeply interconnected we are. Such
realizations will manifest variously depending on one’s context, but it appears we are
all attempting to rethink and shape, even recreate, new models and new understand-
ings of being in the world. Eschewing this idea of linear progress, how can we truly
remain respectful of the lands on which we stand, honoring the lives and experiences
of our forebears, and reflecting on the histories and narratives we overlooked as we
learn from the past and present? How can we understand ourselves and societies as
multiplicitous, and see that difference is not a threat but a generative part of a larger
social, cultural, political, even economic fabric?
Returning to the Ever Given: Through tremendous collective efforts, the ship once
wedged in the Suez Canal was finally freed. But as of this writing it was being held in
a dispute over who should pay for the labor needed to dislodge it.14 Similarly, we have
seen extraordinary scientific collaborations across the globe leading to the develop-
ment, production, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in record time, but we are
witnessing the skepticism of this warp speed, unequal access to vaccines, and growing
tensions due to these distributional inequities. As we recognize our interconnectivity,
we are at the same time experiencing the challenges of global collaboration, but not
insurmountably. “All the World’s Futures” was intended as a prompt, an evocation,
even a provocation, because we seem to be in a period of critical discovery and tran-
sition. Rather than getting moored—whether by institutional parameters, divided by
frustration, or becoming focused on a single context—we must recognize that it is
our responsibility to participate and to keep each other accountable. And for those
with certain privileges, it is an even greater responsibility to strive together to shape
reformed systems, networks, and communities. This is for the sake of the collective
planet while in deference to our past, for the well-being of our present and our future.
Notes
1 Orianna Cacchione and Jessica Hong, mods., “All the World’s Futures: Global Art and
Art History in the Wake of COVID-19,” panel discussion with Ho Tzu Nyen, Serge Alain
Nitegeka, and Project Anywhere’s Sean Lowry and Simone Douglas, conducted online on
March 4, 2021, at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, and Hood Museum of Art,
Dartmouth College, US. Video recording is available at https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/
events/1830/all-the-worlds-futures-global-art-and-art-history-in-the-wake-of-covid-19/.
2 “Covid-19 Dashboard,” Coronavirus Resource Center, John Hopkins University, accessed
November 3, 2021, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html.
3 “Project Anywhere,” accessed April 19, 2021, http://www.projectanywhere.net/about/.
4 Ho, “All the World’s Futures.”
5 Daniel Hautzinger, “‘We’re Still Here’: Chicago’s Native American Community,” Wttw,
November 8, 2018, https://interactive.wttw.com/playlist/2018/11/08/native-americans-
chicago.
6 Douglas, “All the World’s Futures.”
7 Gabriel Hensche, Björn Kühn, and Anna Romanenko, “About Liminal Dome,” accessed
April 18, 2021, https://www.liminaldome.com/about-liminal-dome.
8 Russell H. Fifield, “Southeast Asia as a Regional Concept,” Southeast Asian Journal of
Social Science 11, no. 2 (1983): 2.
9 Nitegeka, “All the World’s Futures.”
10 Taneasha White, “‘Zoom Fatigue’ Is Real: Here’s How to Cope (and Make It Through
Your Next Meeting),” medically reviewed by Timothy J.Legg, Healthline, February 22,
2021, https://www.healthline.com/health/zoom-fatigue#why-it-happens.
11 Melissa de Witte, “Zoom Fatigue Worse for Women, Stanford Study Finds,” Stanford
News, April 13, 2021, https://news.stanford.edu/2021/04/13/zoom-fatigue-worse-women/.
12 Theresa Machemer, “‘Zoom Fatigue’ May Be With Us for Years: Here’s How We’ll Cope,”
National Geographic, April 13, 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/
article/zoom-fatigue-may-be-with-us-for-years-heres-how-well-cope.
13 Bethany L. Jones and Jonathan S. Jones, “Gov. Cuomo is Wrong, Covid-19 Is Anything
but an Equalizer,” The Washington Post, April 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.
com/outlook/2020/04/05/gov-cuomo-is-wrong-covid-19-is-anything-an-equalizer/; Toyin
Owoseje, “Coronavirus Is ‘the Great Equalizer,’ Madonna Tells Fans from her Bathtub,”
CNN, March 23, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/entertainment/madonna-
coronavirus-video-intl-scli/index.html.
14 Yuliya Talmazan, Charlene Gubash, and Arata Yamamoto, “Dislodged Suez Canal
Cargo Ship Ever Given Held Amid $916 Million Claim,” NBC News, April 14, 2021,
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/dislodged-suez-canal-cargo-ship-ever-given-
held-amid-916-n1264017.
Figure 0.2 S imone Douglas, from Field Notes, 2021 © Simone Douglas, C-type print,
24 × 15.7″ (61 × 40 cm).
16 Appendix
Project Anywhere
Sean Lowry and Simone Douglas
Many of the artworks and artistic projects explored in this book were not conceived
for display within traditional exhibition spaces and programming schedules. And,
as we have variously established across this edited volume, there is artistic value in
some forms of radically materially and temporally dispersed art. So, what kinds of
exhibition formats better suit contemporary artists working at the outermost limits of
location specificity? How do artists best represent and disseminate such work? How
should art of this kind be evaluated? In this appendix section, we briefly discuss an
exhibition model that seeks to address these challenges.
Project Anywhere is a global exhibition program specifically designed for evaluating
and promoting art and artistic research at the outermost limits of location specificity.
Conceived by Sean Lowry—one of the editors of this book—in 2012, and developed
in consultation with the Project Anywhere Editorial Committee,1 it provides artists
with peer validation, detailed expert feedback from a diverse range of established art-
ists and scholars, community support, and global dissemination of their work.
A key feature of Project Anywhere’s global exhibition model is its approach to
artistic selection and evaluation. This robust and exhaustive approach, in which the
function of curator is substituted for a democratizing double-blind peer evaluation
system, does not use artistic reputation or exhibition track record as a criterion for
assesment. Projects can be incomplete, highly speculative, or discursive in nature, and
can extend or contradict existing methodologies. Each year, all proposal submissions
are comprehensively reviewed by at least four artist academics of international stand-
ing, provisionally selected for initial resubmission, and then ranked for final selection
by the editorial committee. The annual international global exhibition program is
announced each year in February. 2
Project Anywhere accepts individual and collaborative proposals from artists and
researchers working anywhere in the world. (To date, Project Anywhere has received
proposals for artworks and artistic projects situated in extremely diverse locations
including remote deserts, rural communities, deep underground, underwater, on no-
madic journeys, online, and even low Earth orbit.) Although the global exhibition
program is hosted through a dedicated website3 and disseminated in conjunction with
other digital channels,4 it is not an online exhibition. Instead, its web presence is used
simply to illuminate the existence of work which is otherwise understood to be situ-
ated elsewhere in time and space.
Extending upon its core global exhibition program, Project Anywhere also hosts
international conferences, symposia, and published responses to the core exhibi-
tion program developed by Simone Douglas and Sean Lowry. 5 At the cessation of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003037071-16
Appendix: Project Anywhere 217
the annual global exhibition hosting period, hosted artists are invited to present
at the biennial conference—which has to date been held at Parsons School of De-
sign, the New School, in New York City. An additional annual symposium has to
date been held at the University of Melbourne to mark the launch of the global
exhibition program. These conferences and symposia bring hosted artists into
active public dialogue with leading artists, scholars, designers, and curators in the
host cities. All contributors at these public events are then invited to develop an
alternative page-based representation of their projects for the biennial publication
Anywhere—which provides another opportunity for artists to speculate upon or
rethink their work through text and image. 6
Given the challenges typically associated with exhibiting and evaluating art out-
side traditional exhibition environments, the evaluation criteria established by the
editorial committee is designed to sensitively balance radical openness and critical
rigor.7 Moreover, as peer evaluation takes place at the proposal rather than outcome
stage, Project Anywhere’s evaluation process and exhibition model seeks to accom-
modate the extent to which a creative work is a dynamic entity. Consequently, it
can be counterproductive to prescriptively pre-empt an outcome too early in its for-
mation. Of central concern throughout the often uneven processes of conception,
production, and dissemination is the importance of valuing and managing ambiguity
and contradiction.
Project Anywhere was conceived and developed in the same spirit of radical material,
temporal, and spatial distribution as this edited volume. Although by no means a new
development historically, these processes are now an increasingly ubiquitous feature of
contemporary art—despite the fact that institutional mechanisms and support struc-
tures remain largely beholden to more traditional exhibition formats, locations, and
programming schedules. It is precisely this conundrum that Project Anywhere addresses.
Ultimately, it is not possible to wholly explain or describe a creative work, and
there is no formula for consistently accounting for how experience and explanation
should ideally work together to produce and transmit meaning. It is vital that evalu-
ative frameworks and exhibition models designed to support radically spatially and
temporally distributed art do not expunge the value of contradiction, discursivity,
and speculation. Significantly, the challenges and insights associated with developing
Project Anywhere’s global exhibition program and peer evaluation model have been
germane and instructive to the conception and development of this book.
Notes
1 See “Committee and Contact,” Project Anywhere, accessed August 28, 2021, http://www.
projectanywhere.net/steering-committee/.
2 Project Anywhere’s annual global exhibition program is announced through the Art & Ed-
ucation newsletter. All announcements, dating from 2012 to the present, are archived in
the Art & Education directory, accessed October 28, 2021, https://www.artandeducation.
net/directory/79538/project-anywhere.
3 The annual Project Anywhere global exhibition program is published online, accessed
November 5, 2021, http://www.projectanywhere.net.
4 In addition to the Art & Education newsletter, the annual Project Anywhere global ex-
hibition program is disseminated through social media channels by editorial committee
member Honi Ryan, accessed November 5, 2021, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/
projectanywhereart/; Twitter https://twitter.com/PRJCTAnywhere; and Facebook https://
www.facebook.com/project.anywhere.art/.
218 Sean Lowry and Simone Douglas
5 See “Conferences and Publications,” Project Anywhere, accessed August 28, 2021, http://
www.projectanywhere.net/conference/.
6 See Project Anywhere “Conferences and Publications.”
7 See “Evaluation Criteria,” Project Anywhere, accessed August 28, 2021, http://www.
projectanywhere.net/peer-review/.
Index
Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures.
Abaya, S. 189 Almenberg, G. 42

Abdul-Nassar, G. 141 American Museum of Natural History 192
Abraham, N. 142; “Notes on the Phantom” American University of Beirut (AUB) 133,
139–40 134, 144; Student Council 141
Abrams, D.: Cure: Poetic Healing and Amnesty War Crimes law of 1991
Recipes, The 122; Glittereiki 120–31; (Lenabon) 140
Melting and Oozing and Dripping with Amore, M. B. 87n25
Pleasure 123; Reiki for Frustration about Andaur, R. 190
Police Killing Black People 121, 121–2, Andre, C.: Equivalent VIII 198
124; Self-Love Spell 123 Anywhere or Not at All (Osborne) 31n7
abstract expressionism 12, 95, 151 Arafat, Y. 147n22
Academy Awards 29 Arendt, H. 134, 135
Acconci, V.: “Situation Esthetics” 45; Step Armleder, J. 15
Piece 151 Arp, H. J. 98
Acti.VĀ.tion 182n10 art: conceptual 11, 24, 89, 102, 119n37;
Adorno, A. 2, 20, 29–30 contemporary 1, 2, 4–6, 8, 13–16, 20–4,
adrift 202–3 30, 31n2, 37, 43, 45, 47n5, 80, 101, 111,
Aesthetics (Hegel) 97 115, 132, 134, 168, 169, 171, 176, 182n6,
Aesthetics of Poverty: A Rationale in 202, 208, 217; context 45; definition of
Designing for Philippine Theater 7–8; as exchange system 45; First Nations
(Fajardo) 186 78, 80, 82, 171, 178, 180; kinship as
African American Folk Healing 170–1; mail 24; materiality of 97; net 8,
(Mitchem) 122 26–7; participation 42–6; performance
agential realism 92 35–48, 108, 151, 173; place of 30–1;
Ahmed, S. 58; Strange Encounters: Embodied postconceptual 13, 25, 102, 111–13,
Others in Postcoloniality 71–2n10 115; post-internet 25–6; practice 35, 39,
Air Show/Air Conditioning (Atkinson and 125, 126, 169; relational 16, 95; see also
Baldwin) 23 individual entries
aitu: anchoring 179; fale aitu 179; Niu Aitu Arte Povera: Italian Landscape
179–80 exhibition 185
Akinmowo, O. 124 Artforum (O’Doherty) 5, 45
Alamo, S. 91 Artifact Piece (San Diego Museum of Man) 16
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty 29 Art in America 44, 45
Algabre, S. 188 artistic complex 158
allographic 8, 31n4 artistic research 12, 207, 216
All the Lights We Cannot See (2016 Artschwager, R. 87n24
exhibition, Pyongyang, North Korea) 24, artworks with kinds of radical identity,
33n52 historical generation of 150–6
All the Things I Know but of Which I Am Artworld 21, 22, 198
Not at the Moment Thinking – 1:36 PM; Asher, M. 6, 15; Vertical Columns of
June 15, 1969 (Barry) 10, 109, 154–6, 158 Accelerated Air 23
220 Index
Assanti, E.: “Contactless Delivery” online Birdcalls (Lawler) 18
programming 206 Bishop, C. 17, 22, 95
Assmann, J. 200 Black Lives Matter Movement 46, 124,
Atkinson, T. 109; Air Show/Air 205, 208
Conditioning 23 Black Women’s Health Book, The (White) 122
Atlas Group (Raad) 106, 113 Blanqui, A.: astronomical hypothesis 75–6
AUB see American University of Beirut (AUB) bodies: of the rights movements 42–6; in
Auslander, P. 108 spaces 16–17
Austin, J.: How to Do Things with Words 38 Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The
Australian War Memorial 200 (Kundera) 197
Austria, T. 189 Borell, N. 180
authorship/agency 19, 25, 39, 41, 60, 90, 93, Bourriaud, N. 45; Relational Aesthetics 37;
94, 98, 113, 114, 116, 150, 157, 158, 160, relational aesthetics, concept of 17, 37,
161, 164n26, 177 46, 95
Bowen, D. 192
Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) 120 Braidotti, R. 91, 92, 93
Backhand Maiden (Raymond) 175, 181 Braque, G. 197
Bacon, A. 19, 27 Brecht, G.: Play Incident 44
Bakhtin, M. 179 Breslin, M. 34n66
Bal, M. 192 Breviario di estetica (The Essence of
Baldwin, M. 109; Air Show/Air Aesthetic) (Croce) 10
Conditioning 23 Brillo Boxes (Warhol) 21
Balkin, A.: Public Smog 23 Broodthaers, M. 11
Baluyut, P. R. 189 Brooks, D. 43
Banksy 29 BTS 105
Barad, K. 91–2, 95 Bugmy, T. 85n2
Barf, B. 103 Burden, C. 152–3; Confession, The 152;
Barry, R. 23; All the Things I Know but Samson 153
of Which I Am Not at the Moment Buren, D. 23
Thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969, 10, Burgess, A.: Clockwork Orange, A 103, 104
109, 154–6, 158; Inert Gas, Helium 154 Burgin, V. 37; “Situational Aesthetics” 45
Barth, J.: “Literature of Exhaustion, The” 203 Burton, J. 34n66
Barthes, R.: Camera Lucida 83–4 Butler, J. 40–1; Excitable Speech 38; Gender
Base of the World no. 3, Homage to Gali Trouble 41
(Manzoni) 10
Basquiat, J. M. 124 Cagayat, P. 191–2
Bates, B. 88n30 Cage, J. 19, 35
Bauman, Z.: Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Calvino, I. 203
Human Bonds 199 Camera Lucida (Barthes) 83–4
Beard, D. M. 201 Campus at War: Student Politics at the
Beauvoir, S. de 39 American University of Beirut 1967–1975,
Becoming Our Future: Global Indigenous A (Rabah) 141
Curatorial Practice (Nagham) 171 capitalism 6, 10, 38, 92–4, 134, 146n5; late
Bed In (Lennon) 43 14; surveillance 25
Beirut lab 132–48; back to the future 142–5; care 120
lingering 139–42; peddling time 134–9 carnivalesque 179
Beirut University College (BUC) 141 Carrier, D. 29
Benjamin, W. 24, 202; Das Kunstwerk Carving Water, Melting Stones (Hu Yun) 188
im Zeitalter seiner technischen Caso, R. 200
Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in Celant, G. 185, 187
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) 7 Cézanne, P. 197
Berger, J. 203 Chandler, J. 10
Bergson, H. 200 Chicken Run 34n78
Bersani, L. 40 Chopin, H. 87n24
bandness 101–19 chorten 49
Bickerton, A. 22 Chowdhury, R.: Waiting 206
Biden, J. 199 chronotopographical nodes 49–53
bigotry 42 circulation 24–5; changing 206–8
Index 221
Civil Rights 42 Debord, G.: Society of the Spectacle, The 17
Cixous, H. 193 Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (Hiller) 11
Clark, L. 44; The I and the You 36; deft critique 145n2
Relational Object (Goggles) 36 De Haan, S.: Monument of Sugar: How
Clementis, V. 198 to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade
Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess) 103, 104 Barriers 15
Cold War 38 De La Soul 104
collective memory 200 Deleuze, G. 58, 72n12, 90–4, 99
collective remembering 200 dematerialization 10–11, 24, 37, 89, 94, 97,
Collingwood, R. 10; Principles of Art, 102, 154
The 31n9 Denes, A.: Rice/Tree/Burial 81; Wheatfield –
commodity criticism 21 A Confrontation 81
communication 6, 17, 38 Derrida, J. 20, 145n2
conceptual art 11, 24, 119n37; Desert, M.: Inert Gas Series 23
dematerialization of 89, 102 De Stijl 98
conceptualism 95–6 Dewey, J. 186, 187
Confession, The (Burden) 152 Dia Art Foundation, New York 33n50
constructivism 98 Dia Beacon, New York 18
contemporary 20 diorama effect 193
contemporary art 1, 2, 4–6, 8, 13–16, 20–4, discrimination 29, 42
30, 31n2, 37, 43, 45, 47n5, 80, 101, 111, distribution 24–5
115, 132, 134, 168, 169, 171, 176, 182n6, Douglas, S. 60, 74, 87n24, 206, 209, 210,
202, 208, 217 212, 216
context art 45 Duchamp, M. 23, 33n49, 44, 149, 203
conventional works of art, time and place Dukes of Stratosphear 103
of 159 Durkheim, E. 200
Cook, J. 201 DuVernay, A. 29; 13th 15
Corgan, B. 103 Dworkin, C.: No Medium 11
Cousin Jean 129
Coutts-Smith, K. 45; “Violence in Art” 44 Eccher, D. 185
COVID-19, 205 Edelman, L. 40
C_rafts 187 Edjawan, M. 189
Crary, J. 192 Edwards, A. 126
Creating Portals: The Black Speculative Eliasson, O.: Ice Watch 83
Imagination 124 epilogue 69–40
Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia Equivalent VIII (Andre) 198
(CDOSEA) 207, 210 Erased,__Ascent of the Invisible (Halwani)
Croce, B.: Breviario di estetica (The Essence 147n24
of Aesthetic) 10 erasure 197–8
Cue From Life Itself: Filipino Artists Essentialism 156–8; configuration space
Transform the Everyday 186, 187 of 159–60; ideational objects 159–60;
Cuillier, J. 124 language 159–60; and radical identity
cultural institutions 208–9 161–3; surface 159–60
culture 5; industry 29–30, 34n79; popular 7, Evangelista, M. 189
28–30, 38, 103, 112, 114 Evans, A. 124
Cure: Poetic Healing and Recipes, The evidence 64, 64–9, 66–9
(Abrams) 122 Excellences and Perfections (Ulman) 26
Cut Piece (Ono) 35, 43, 44 Excitable Speech (Butler) 38
Experimental Caribbean: Creating
Dada 5, 6, 17, 44 Knowledge and Healing in the Early
Daguerre, L. 7, 193 Modern Atlantic, The (Gómez) 122
Dans, E. 189 EXPORT 45, 46
Danto, A. C. 11, 21–3, 32n43, 116n1, 198
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner fāgogo stories 173, 179, 180
technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Fajardo, B. 187, 189, 193; Aesthetics of
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Poverty: A Rationale in Designing for
Reproduction) (Benjamin) 7 Philippine Theate 186
Daumier, H. 7 fale aitu 1379
222 Index
Fale Aitu: The House of Spirits (Kihara) 179 Gottwald, K. 197–8
Fanon, F. 39 Gracyk, T. 101
Fantastic Mr. Fox 34n78 Graham, D. 45
Farry, C. 88n29 Gravesend (McQueen) 15–16
Fashion Institute of the Metropolitan Great Artesian Basin, Australia 86n15
Museum Art, New York 29 Greenberg, C. 98
Fateh 141 Grohl, D. 103
Female Extension (Sollfrank) 26 Guattari, F. 58, 72n12, 90, 92
feminism 40, 92 Guo-Qiang, C.: Sky Ladder 81, 87n22
Field Notes 3 Gut Feminism (Wilson) 92
Finding Nemo 34n78
First Nations art 78, 80, 82, 171, 178, 180 Haacke, H. 15
Fisher, J. A. 101 Haecceity 1.0.0, 162, 165n26
Floyd, G. 29 Haecceity 9.241.1, 160, 161
Fluxus 17 Haecceity 12.0.0, 162, 163
Foote, N. 45 haka 182n3, 182n5
Ford, D. 88n29 Halberstam, J. 29
Forgetting the Art World (Lee) 117n10 Halbwach, m. 200
formalism 12 Halwani, G.: Erased,__Ascent of the Invisible
Foster, H. 15 147n24
Franco Toselli gallery, Milan 6 Han, K. 194
Fraser, A. 15 handkerchief metaphor 50, 52
Frazier, D. 29 Haraway, D. 92
Free People’s Medical Clinic 124 Hariri, R. 137, 138
Free Your Mind: An African American Guide Hassinger, M. 123
to Meditation and Freedom (Rainey) 122 Hayacinthe, G. 123–8
Frost, R.: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Hayles, K. 92, 94
Evening 32n43 Hegelian-based identity theory 36
Fury, G. 46 hegemonic masculinity 94
Hegewl, G. W. F.: Aesthetics 97
Gabo, N. 98 Heidegger, M. 110, 188, 202; Holzwege 98–9
Gabriel, M. 12 Hekman, S. 91
Gadamer, H.-H. 145n2 Hensche, G.: Liminal Dome 210
Gaga aesthetics 29 Hepworth, B. 98
Gallery of Lost Art, The (The Tate) 27, Herb Grrl 124–6
34n36 hermeneutic aesthetics 132, 145n2
Gambino, C.: This Is America 29 Higgins, D. 31
Garau, S.: I am 10 Hiller, S.: Dedicated to the Unknown
gender 20, 38–42, 47n19, 176; identity 40; Artists 11
performativity 40; politics 199 Holzwege (Heidegger) 98–9
“Gender Display” (Goffman) 40 Horkheimer, M. 29
Gender Trouble (Butler) 41 Ho Tzu Nyen 206, 207, 210, 212
Gernale, E. 189 Houlgate, S. 97
Gillick, L. 20 Howie, G. 188
Glissant, É. 60, 72n12 How to Do Things with Words (Austin) 38
Glittereiki 120–31 Hsieh, T.: One Year Performances 23;
globalization 191, 198, 213 Thirteen-Year Plan 23
Godard, J.-L.: Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Huebler, D. 10
Elsewhere) 133–5 humanism 96
Goffman, E. 42; “Gender Display” 40; Husserl, e. 39
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The Huxtable, J. 126
40, 41; Stigma: Notes on the Management Hu Yun 190, 191, 193, 194; Carving Water,
of Spoiled Identity 41 Melting Stones 188
Gómez, P. F.: Experimental Caribbean:
Creating Knowledge and Healing in the I am (Garau) 10
Early Modern Atlantic, The 122 Ice Boat 73–82, 73–88, 84, 85
Gonzalez-Torres, F. 46 Ice Watch (Eliasson) 83
Goode, J. B. 110, 112, 113, 118n24 Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) (Godard)
Goodman, N. 31n4 133–5
Index 223
ideational objects 159–60 Krauss, R. 13–14, 25, 33–4n62; “Sculpture in
Identity is Fragile III 212 the Expanded Field” 13
image 27–8 Kubota, S. 37
immateriality 34n62, 149; folly of 9–16 Kühn, B.: Liminal Dome 210
Indigenous art 171, 176–8, 180 Kundera, M.: Book of Laughter and
Inert Gas, Helium (Barry) 154 Forgetting, The 197
Inert Gas Series (Desert) 23 Kunsthalle, H. 26
Information, No Theory (Kozlov) 151–2 Kuspit, D. 30
infra-thin 23, 33n49 Kwon, M. 14, 128
In Human Time exhibition 86n6
In Memory of Johnny B. Goode: World Tour Lacy, S. 45–6
(2014–18) 106, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113, Lady Gaga (aka Stefani Germanotta) 29
115, 116 Land, The (Tiravanija) 17
Inside the White Cube (O’Doherty) 5–6 Lane, C. 171
institutional critique 6, 14, 15, 29 lapche 49, 49, 51, 52, 53
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Laplanche, J. 133
(IPCC) 82–3 Laramée, G. 87n24
intermedia 1, 7, 9, 10, 25, 31n5, 111, Larkin, C.: Memory and Conflict in
172, 187 Lebanon 140
intersticiality 12 Las Meninas (Velâzquez): 16
Invasion Kuwait (Rajab) 72n15, 72n16 late capitalism 14
In.VĀ.TĀ.tion 166, 168, 181n2 Latour, B. 91, 94
IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Lawler, L.: Birdcalls 18
Change (IPCC) Lebanese Civil War (1975–91) 132, 140
Lee, P. M. 2, 22; Forgetting the Art World
Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of 117n10
Personal Charms and Practical Rituals Lefort, C. 133
(Teish) 122 Lennon, J. 105; Bed In 43
John, E.: Yellow Brick Road 103 Lertchaiprasert, K. 17
Johnson, B. 199 Le Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void)
John Weber Gallery 23 (Klein) 108
Jones, A. 108 Lessing 97
Jones, K.: South of Pico 43 lettrism 17
Jones, M. 104 Liminal Dome (Hensche, Kühn, and
Romanenko) 210
Kafka 92 liminality 12
Ka haere tātou 168 Lippard, L. 10–11, 37
Kahlo, F. 124 Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
Kaitiaki with a K 167 (Bauman) 199
Kanaka Maoli 177, 184n37 “Literature of Exhaustion, The” (Barth) 203
Kant, I. 12 lived experience 187
Kaprow, A. 41, 43–5, 151 local histories and legacies,
Kihara, Y.: Fale Aitu: The House of acknowledging 209–
Spirits 179 location specificity 1, 2, 13, 216
Kim Jong-un 199 Lorde, A. 58, 59
kinship, as art 170–1 Lotus Mudra 120
Kipling, R.: White Man’s Burden: The United Love, H. 47n19
States and the Philippine Islands, The 201 Lowry, S. 206, 209, 212, 216–17
Kirby, V. 92 low theory 29
Klein, Y.: Le Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Lukács, G.: Particularity of the Aesthetic (Die
Void) 108 Eigenart des Ästhetischen), The 90
Knight, N. 97 Lumière brothers 197
Kooning, W. de 199 Luna, J. 16
Koons, J. 22 Lyotard, J.-F. 133; Postmodern Condition,
Koopman, B. 87n28 The 39
Kozlov, C.: Information, No Theory 151–2;
271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding Maciunas, G. 17
to 271 Days of Concepts Rejected 152 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi 105
K-Pop 105 Mahogany Blues 124
224 Index
mail art 24 Much is that N***** in the Window a.k.a.
Mallat, C. 146n11 Tompkins Square Crawl (Pope.L) 16
mani 49 Musée d’Orsay 7
“Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (Ukeles) 46 My Calling Card (Piper) 36
Manzoni, P.: Base of the World no. 3,
Homage to Gali 10 Nabokov, V.: Pale Fire 32n43
Mariano, R. 189 Nagham, J.: Becoming Our Future: Global
Martha Jackson Gallery, New York 45 Indigenous Curatorial Practice 171
Martin, S. 88n29 Narayan, U. 72n10
Marx, K. 25, 39 National Museum of Singapore 188–90
masculinity: hegemonic 94; toxic 94 Nattiez, J.-J. 109
materiality 30, 39, 90, 92, 95–8, 111, 194; Nawarla Gabarnmang 18
myth 96; necessity of 9–16; organic 187; Neite, W. 192
plastic 187 net art 8, 26–7
materiality myth 96 Neuhaus, M.: Times Square 24, 33n50
Matheson, R. 88n28 new materialism 89–100; art and sacredness
matriarchs, hands of 171–2 95–8; posthumanist deliberations 94–5;
Mazza, J. 87n24 return 98–9; in theory 90–4
McCannon, D. 124 Newton, H. 30
McIver, K. 87n24 NFT see non-fungible token (NFT)
McKenzie, J. 39 Niepce brothers 7
McLaren, M. 130 Nietzsche, F. 90
McMillian, U. 123 91020000 (2016 exhibition, Artists Space,
McQueen, S.: Gravesend 15–16 New York) 15
McTaggert, T. 136; Unreality of Time, Nitegeka, S. A. 206, 208, 211, 212
The 135 Niu Aitu 179–80
media 11, 28, 33n62, 36, 43, 84, 87n23, 89, No Medium (Dworkin) 11
96, 140, 161, 164n26, 198; pop cultural non-fungible token (NFT) 8
127; digital 26; social 8, 26, 120, 121, 125, non-site 13, 14, 50, 80
126, 128 Norris, T. 123
Meier, G. 134 “Notes on the Phantom” (Abraham)
Melting and Oozing and Dripping with 139–40
Pleasure (Abrams) 123 Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) 44
memory 198–200
Memory and Conflict in Lebanon object 27–8
(Larkin) 140 Obrist, H. U. 203
Mendieta, A. 124 Oda Projesi (Room Project) 17
Meredith, C. S.: Rushing Dolls 182n8 O’Doherty, B.: Artforum 5; Inside the White
Met Gala 29 Cube 5–6
methodological confusion 18–24 Omar, M. M. 202
Metropolitan Museum of Art 192 O’Neill, A. 173
Metropolitan Museum of Manila 185 One Year Performances (Hsieh) 23
Mikdasi, S. 136 online exhibitions 26–7
Mirrored Cubes (Morris) 164n16 Ono, Y. 37, 46, 105; Cut Piece 35, 43, 44
Mishlawi, N.: Sector Zero 148n24 ontological indeterminacy 18–24
Mitchem, S. Y.: African American Folk Oppenheim, D.: Transplants 153–4
Healing 122 Orban, V. 199
modalities and affects, theory of 91 Osborne, P. 13, 24–5, 27, 28, 88n36, 102,
Monet, C. 6 109–11, 119n37; Anywhere or Not at
monologue 61–4 All 31n7
Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Osbourne, O. 106
Means to Elude Trade Barriers (van Osorio, P. 124
Brummelen and de Haan) 15 Ōyama, E. I. 87n24
More, H. 98
Morris, R. 44; Mirrored Cubes 164n16 Pacific Sisters 172, 172–6, 179, 180, 182n6
Morrison, T. 57, 71n9 Pacific Sisters: Te Toa Tāera | Fashion
Morton, T. 83 Activists (Tonga) 173
Moruroa 180 Paik, N. J. 37
Index 225
Paintings on Unridden Waves 114 Public Smog (Balkin) 23
Pale Fire (Nabokov) 32n43 Putin, V. 199
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) 141 Pynchon, T.: Vineland 103
Palmer, H. 92
participation art 42–6 queer theory 37, 38, 42, 89; anti-relational 40
Particularity of the Aesthetic (Die Eigenart Queneau, R. 203
des Ästhetischen), The (Lukács) 90 Quirino, C. 189
Patterson, E. G. 124
peddling time 134–9 Raad, W.: Atlas Group 106, 113
“Peddling Time When Standing Still: Art Rabah, M.: Campus at War: Student Politics
Remains in Lebanon and the Globalization at the American University of Beirut
That Was” (Sadek) 137–8 1967–1975, A 141
Peel, J. 29 Rabita (the Lebanese Student League) 141
Perec, G. 203 race 38, 57, 58, 176, 186, 197, 201; identity
performance art 35–48, 108, 151, 173 40; relations 42
performativity 39 Racuya, L. 189
Perniola, M. 202 radical identity 149–65; Essentialism and
Peters, S. 124 161–3; historical generation of artworks
phenomenological model of with kinds of 150–6
intersubjectivity 39 radical intermediality 8
Phenomenology of Spirit 39 radical works of art, time and place of 159
Philippine Educational Theater Rafei, Raed 144; 74: The Reconstitution of a
Association 186 Struggle 133, 142, 143, 144, 145
photo-death 83–4 Rafei, Rania 144; 74: The Reconstitution of a
Picasso, P. 197 Struggle 133, 142, 143, 144, 145
Pindell, H. 123 Rainey
Piper, A. 15, 36–7, 43, 46, 123, 124; My Rainey, C. R.: Free Your Mind: An African
Calling Card 36 American Guide to Meditation and
Pissarro, J. 29 Freedom 122
place 15, 32n30 Rajab, J. S.: Invasion Kuwait 72n15, 72n16
Plato 97 Rakowitz, M. 87n24
Play Incident (Brecht) 44 Rauschenberg, R. 198–9
Pollock, J. 41, 151 Raymond, R. 183n27; Backhand Maiden
polychronous node 50, 52 175, 181
Pope.L: Much is that N***** in the Window Refiti, A. 178
a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl 16 Reihana, L. 173
popular culture 7, 38, 103, 112, 114; specter Reiki for Frustration about Police Killing
of 28–30 Black People (Abrams) 121, 121–2, 124
postconceptual art 13, 25, 102, 111–13, 115 relational aesthetics 17, 37, 46, 95; theory
posthumanism 92–4, 96 of 45
posthumanist deliberations 94–5 Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud) 37
postimpressionism 97 relational art 16, 95
post-internet art 25–6 relationality 37–42
post-medium condition 33n62 Relational Object (Goggles) (Clark) 36
Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard) 39 relational self 35–48
postmodernism 14, 20, 38, 40 relational space 11, 111
poststructuralism 40–2, 95 representation, dismantling 55–60
Prayers for Tama 127 Resurreccion, R. 189
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The Return 87n24
(Goffman) 40, 41 Returning the Future 82, 87n26
Principles of Art, The (Collingwood) 31n9 Reyes, PO. 189
Project Anywhere 2, 206–7, 210, 212, Reznor, T. 103
216–18; Editorial Committee 216 rhizome 72n12
prologue 55–60 Rhodes, C. 201
Promise (Site) (2017) 80 Rice/Tree/Burial (Denes) 81
Protest Era 5 Richardson, C. A. 90
Proust, M. 200 Ringgold, F. 124
public perceptual object 110 Roberts, L. 88n29
226 Index
Roberts, R. 88n33, 209 site 13–16
Rogers, S. 137 Sites of Knowledge exhibition 82, 87n24
Romanenko, A.: Liminal Dome 210 site-specificity 13, 133
Romanticism 5, 92, 108, 115 “Situational Aesthetics” (Burgin) 45
Rose, S. 124 “Situation Esthetics” (Acconci) 45
Rosenberg, H. 151 Situationism 95
Rosenthal, S. B.: Time, Continuity, and Situationist International 6, 17
Indeterminacy 136 Sky Ladder (Guo-Qiang) 81, 87n22
Rowland, C. 15 Slater, D. 193
Royal Academy 5 Smith, D. 34n66
Rushing Dolls (Meredith) 182n8 Smith, L. T. 180
Smithson, R. 14; Spiral Jetty 13
Saar, B. 124 social practice 16–17, 45
Sachs, Z. 75 social science 37–42
sacredness 95–8 social sculpture 17
Sadek, W.: “Peddling Time When Standing social space 16–17, 35, 38, 41, 43, 45
Still: Art Remains in Lebanon and the Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord) 17
Globalization That Was” 137–8 Solidere 137
Saint Phalle, N. de 44 Sollfrank, C.: Female Extension 26
Salloukh, B. F. 147n22 Sounds of Unridden Waves 110, 112–16,
Salvatus, M. 187 114, 115
Samson (Burden) 153 South of Pico (Jones) 43
Sanchez, L. 189 sovereignty 76, 86n7, 136, 202; First Nations
San Diego Museum of Man: Artifact Piece 16 78; human 47n19; Indigenous body 180
SaVĀge Kʻlub 176–177, 179, 183n27 space: bodies in 16–17; social 16–17, 35, 38,
Schechner, R. 38, 44 41, 43, 45
Schellekens, E. 11 Spinoza, B. 90, 91, 99
Schiebinger, L.: Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Spiral Jetty (Smithson) 13
Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth- SpongeBob SquarePants 34n78
Century Atlantic World 122 Staging Dioramas 192
Schiff, K. 87n24 Starr, R. 104
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field” Steinbach, H. 22
(Krauss) 13 Step Piece (Acconci) 151
Sebald, W. G. 113 Sterbak, J.: Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino
Seckler, D. G. 44 Anorectic 34
Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and stigma 41, 42
Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled
Atlantic World (Schiebinger) 122 Identity (Goffman) 41
Sector Zero (Mishlawi) 148n24 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Seeing Differently 39 (Frost) 32n43
Seghal, T. 10 Stover, W. 87n25
self: conceptualizing 211–12; relational Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in
35–48 Postcoloniality (Ahmad) 71–2n10
Self- Help TV 125, 126 Strayer, J.: Haecceities 164n13; Subjects and
selfhood 39–40 Objects 102, 164n13
Self-Love Spell (Abrams) 123 Studio International 45
Serres, M. 50, 52 Study of Things: Or a Brief Story about
74: The Reconstitution of a Struggle 133, Fountain, Brick, Tin, Coin, Stone, Shell,
142, 143, 144, 145 Curtain, and Body exhibition 194
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 103 Sturt, C. 77, 87n10
Shiff, R. 85n3 Subjects and Objects (Strayer) 102, 164n13
Shui Tit Sing 193 Supa Suga 180
Shunk-Kender 108 Superflex 17
Simonon, P. 104 surrealism 6
Simpson, L. B. 177–8 surveillance capitalism 25
simulationism 21 Syrian Protestant College 141
Sistar Sʻpacific 176 Szeemann, H. 203
Index 227
Tadasana 120 Van Brummelen, L.: Monument of Sugar:
Talbot, F. 7 How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade
Tamati-Quennell, M. 171 Barriers 15
Tannir, K. 141 Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic
Tap and Touch Cinema (VALIE EXPORT) 36 (Sterbak) 34n77
Tate, The: Gallery of Lost Art, The 27, 34n66 Velasco, J. 189
ta-va theory of reality 170 Velâzquez, D.: Las Meninas 16
techno-performance 39 Veloso, G. 189
Teish, L.: Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Vertical Columns of Accelerated Airn
Book of Personal Charms and Practical (Asher) 23
Rituals 122 Vierkant, A. 25
Tenazas, L. 74 Villanueva, W. 189
Teves, S. 177 Vineland (Pynchon) 103
The I and the You (Clark) 36 “Violence in Art” (Coutts-Smith) 44
Them (Żmijewski) 17 Von Hausswolff, C. M. 17
13th (DuVernay) 15
Thirteen-Year Plan (Hsieh) 23 WAC! (Women’s Action Coalition) 46
This Is America (Gambino) 29 Waiting (Chowdhury) 206
Thomas, M. 124 Waiting Room 124
Thompson, K. 124 Warhol, A.: Brillo Boxes 21
Thorson, R. 51 War of the Worlds, The (Wells) 200–1
Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy Weibel, P. 36, 45
(Rosenthal) 136 Wells, H. G.: War of the Worlds, The 200–1
Times Square (Neuhaus) 24, 33n50 Wheatfield – A Confrontation (Denes) 81
Tiravanija, R.: Land, The 17 Whistler, J. M. 5
TOHU TūPUNA 180 White, E. C.: Black Women’s Health Book,
Tonga, N. 173; Pacific Sisters: Te Toa Tāera | The 122
Fashion Activists 173 white cube 5–6, 16, 197, 208
Totti, S. 87n24 White Man’s Burden: The United States
Touch Sanitation project (Ukeles) 46 and the Philippine Islands, The
tourism 7 (Kiplinig) 201
toxic masculinity 94 WHO see World Health Organization
transcategoriality 8 (WHO)
Transplants (Oppenheim) 153–4 Wilson, E.: Gut Feminism 92
trauma 200–2 Wilson, F. 15
Trump, D. 199 Winckelmann 97
Tuazon, A. 189 Wood, D. 93
271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding work, timing of 18
to 271 Days of Concepts Rejected World Health Organization (WHO) 205
(Kozlov) 152 World War II 35
Wright Brothers 197
Ukeles, M. 45–6; “Manifesto for
Maintenance Art” 46; Touch Sanitation Xi Jinping 199
project 46
Ulman, A.: Excellences and Perfections 26 Yellow Brick Road (John) 103
Uluru Statement 86n7
UN Climate Change Conference 83 Zachs, Z. 80
Unreality of Time, The (McTaggert) 135 Zao Dha Diet 26
Urbanesia 182n8 Zen Buddhism 19
Żmijewski, A.: Them 17
vā 177; body 177–178 Zobel, E. 189
VALIE EXPORT 16; Tap and Touch Zobel, J. 189
Cinema 36 Zuboff, S. 25

Where Is Art Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art - Bibis - Ir

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Where is Art?

Featuring chapters by a diverse range of leading international artists and theorists,

Simone Douglas is a Professor in the School of Art, Media, and Technology,

Adam Geczy teaches at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

The Arabesque from Kant to Comics

Art after Instagram

The Artist-Philosopher and Poetic Hermeneutics

Art, the Sublime, and Movement

Visual Culture and the Forensic

Posthuman and Nonhuman Entanglements in Contemporary

Race, Gender, and Identity in American Equine Art

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

ISBN: 978-0-367-47868-1 (hbk)

List of Figures vii

3 Performance, Art, and the Relational Self 35

4 Chronotopographical Nodes and Moments of Encounter 49

6 Ice Boat: Field Notes (in Advance of a Melt) 73

7 Bland Matter: New Materialism, and Barking

10 Beirut Lab: 1975 (2020): Or: again, rubbed smooth,

11 IrDaEdNiTcI aTlY 149

12 Would the Real Tusk Please Stand Up? 166

13 Handiwork of Migrancy, Restitutions in the Contemporary 185

14 Erasure or Erased: An Artworld (AND WORLD) Adrift 197

15 All the World’s Futures 205

16 Appendix: Project Anywhere 216

0.1 Simone Douglas, from Field Notes, 2021 © Simone Douglas,

From a premodern European vantage point, questions concerning the ontology or

So, how did we get here?

From what is art? … to where is art?

Here a site, there a site, anywhere a site

Where is social space?

Methodological confusion and ontological indeterminacy

Here, it is extraordinarily difficult to meaningfully demarcate the categorical edges of

Distribution and circulation

Net art and online exhibitions

Today, with the digitally based convergence of audio-visual communication

The specter of popular culture

So, where is art?

Euro-American modernist discourse in the mid-twentieth century reinforced a con-

It is in this sense that we can talk of a community effect in contemporary art. It

Relationality and social science

an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of

Participation art and the bodies of the rights movements

Artists are now becoming independent agents of social processes, partisans of

 apche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta Rit Prem-

 apche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta Rit Prem-

Race, Toni Morrison once said, is a distraction.9 By forcing us to engage in narratives

The bleached sand, and limitless expanse

Everything else bleeds into the sand.

I need other memories to complete my own. I am not whole without my memories.

Queer Gay Non-binary

One word spans the breadth of the page.

A container for other images.

I may have made a mistake. I may have

Evidence 001 (Figure 5.1)

Evidence 003 (Figure 5.2)

Evidence 004 (Figure 5.2)

Evidence 005 (Figure 5.3)

Evidence 006 (Figure 5.3)

Evidence 007 (Figure 5.4)

Evidence 008 (Figure 5.4)

Evidence 009 (Figure 5.5)

Evidence 010 (Figure 5.5)

apche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta Rit Prem-

apche in Humla District, northwestern Nepal. Photo by Sreshta Rit Prem-

4 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle), directed by Rania Rafei and Raed

4 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle), directed by Rania Rafei and Raed

II Making and apprehending works of art: Essentialism and

V Language, surface, ideational objects, and the configuration space