Conceptual Materialism: Installation Art and the Dismantling of Caribbean Historicism

This article was downloaded by: [UGR-BTCA Gral Universitaria] On: 01 April 2014, At: 06:41 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Third Text Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20 Conceptual Materialism Carlos Garrido Castellano Published online: 28 Mar 2014. To cite this article: Carlos Garrido Castellano (2014) Conceptual Materialism, Third Text, 28:2, 149-162, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2014.896493 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2014.896493 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions Conceptual Materialism Installation Art and the Dismantling of Caribbean Historicism Carlos Garrido Castellano Everything’s black, as if the space inside had swallowed the light and with it all that you know, all that’s recognizable. You step uneasily into the blackness. The floor is spongelike. Walking is tentative. You must do so slowly. Your feet are like a blind man’s fingers. Your senses sharpen. You are alone here, or not. You are implicated. Tania Bruguera, 2002 1 ‘Implication’ is an apt word for the experience of Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s untitled installation for the 7th Havana Biennial in 2000. 2 Visitors were invited to enter a room in La Fortaleza de la Caban˜a, a former fortification used as a prison in the mid-twentieth century by both Fulgencio Batista and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. La Caban˜a is a prominent and well-known landmark of Cuban heritage, so nobody could have anticipated the sense of disorientation and loss felt by visitors as they entered the space of the installation. In total darkness, they had to walk over a smelly, unstable surface that, only after their eyes had adapted to the lack of light, revealed itself to be mouldering sugar cane. Losing their sense of time and space, visitors came to realize that they were not alone: naked actors inhabited the room, and from time to time a projection showed footage of Fidel Castro declaiming on productivity, modernization and progress. The clarity of the screen light and of Fidel’s resolute message were, however, challenged by the oppressive, anguished atmosphere, and the feeling that visitors were, somehow, implicated. It is interesting that we can read Bruguera’s installation more intensely as a sensory experience than as an epistemological tool. While it intersects with colonial history, the plantation economy and the political present of Cuba, it teaches us nothing about those issues. There was no message Third Text, 2014 Vol. 28, No. 2, 149–162, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2014.896493 #2014 Third Text 1. Tania Bruguera, Untitled (Havana 2000), boundary 2, vol 29, no 3, autumn 2002 2. See http://universes-inuniverse.de/car/habana/ bien7/cabana1/e-bruguera. htm. Downloaded by [UGR-BTCA Gral Universitaria] at 06:41 01 April 2014 hidden in the repulsive tunnel of La Caban˜a. Although complex layers of meaning are embedded within it, sugar cane was not a symbol of anything; it was a real, unpleasant presence. Visitors were more likely to leave quickly than to find enjoyment or aesthetic appreciation. It was not in spite of, but through the touch and smell of sugar cane that visitors engaged with the artwork. They experienced it through sensory, ephemeral means – the smell produced by the decay of the material medium of the installation. Meaning arose as a partial, incomplete approach to the artwork, driven by sensory stimulus. Only by entering the fort, by being there, could one fully apprehend the experience designed by the artist. In Bruguera’s installation, engagement, experience and material culture were indissolubly entangled. As a way of investigating this entanglement further, this article considers the uses of material culture by Caribbean installation artists Nikolai Noel (born Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1976), Marcos Lora Read (born Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1965) and Blue Curry (born Nassau, Bahamas, 1974). In so doing, I search for a way of articulating the relations between the materiality of things included in installations, 3 the historical and economic referents they enact, and the artistic device that connects them. All three artists pay special attention to the sensory, material aspects of their work. They share similar concerns with the use of different media, the search for international audiences and with setting in train ambivalent discourses. Finally, in all three cases we find a similar interest in separating artistic practice from direct interpretations or explanations of external issues, conferring on each project an aesthetic dimension that does not preclude parallel political or social aspirations. I argue that, although charged with historical referents, the artworks analysed here do not represent history, nor do they address historical symbolisms. Rather, they appear to be sites of sensory and material negotiation not attached to a single, specific temporality, but to a holistic, multi-sensory approach to colonial and postcolonial processes. In that sense, the recovery of the Atlantic material culture they intend is not a way of fashioning historical narrations of the past; rather, it is a tool used to open new interpretations and possibilities within Caribbean present and future lives. The main idea I wish to express here is that installation art troubles notions of the referential and of visual recognition, establishing a ‘history of illegitimacy’ and enabling a threefold approach to material culture. 4 This has to do in the first place with the nature and meaning of artefacts and materials: Where do they come from? Who owned them? What did, and do, they mean for past and present societies? It relates secondly to their historicity: what is their ‘curriculum vitae’? 5 In other words, how did this situation evolve and broaden through history in terms of production, circulation and consumption? The third idea is linked to the display and perception of artefacts and materials, and implies not only a concern with their location in the past, but also about the mediation that determines their presentation in the present of the installation. In this, moreover, we can trace a meta-artistic thought related to the way those things serve as a space of negotiation of the position of Caribbean artists within an international, postcolonial art scene. 150 3. For a discussion of the difference between ‘things’ and ‘objects’ see Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relations between Humans and Things, WileyBlackwell, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2012. Since I try to highlight the sensory and social mediations implied not only in human-made objects but also in raw materials, I will opt for the first term throughout this article. 4. Rebecca Schneider, ‘Solo Solo Solo’, in Gavin Butt, ed, After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, p 37. Schneider uses the model of the jazz solo to conceptualize a model where the quality of actions ‘become profoundly riddled with the echoes of precedence and the forecast echoes of future response’, p 37. My approach to the materiality of installation art is close to the challenge to canons posed by Schneider. 5. See Arjun Appadurai, ed, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986; Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, World Archaeology, vol 31, no 2, 1999, pp 169–178. Downloaded by [UGR-BTCA Gral Universitaria] at 06:41 01 April 2014 SUGAR, SUN CREAM, KAPOK WOOD Three installations and three materials can be found at the beginning of this analysis. The first arises from a set of artworks made by Trinidadian artist Nikolai Noel between 2009 and 2012 as an experiment with the sensitive qualities of sugar and its historical implications. In one of his earliest and most powerful compositions, entitled Night and Sugar and shown for the first time in 2011, a light bulb was covered in brown sugar, which coloured and modified the light but also made the bulb blow after a while. Two main elements conditioned the sensory perception of the visitors here: the absence of illumination, the light bulb being the only source of light, and the particular odour of the sugar heating up and then destroying the bulb. In other untitled installations displayed the same year, Noel drew various silhouettes on the wall using sugar. 6 The surface was intended to blur with the warming of the exhibition space caused by the arrival and the breath of spectators, leaving an imprint in the wall and, again, an olfactory trace. Sensory perception was both essential to the installation and impossible to ignore. More recently, the artist used sugar to fashion sugar machetes that deteriorated during the installations. 7 Through the metonymic action of constructing the blade from the material it was designed to cut, the productive object became raw material and vice versa, conveying the interconnected and attainable character of Caribbean histories. In more recent installations created in 2012 (Some Kind of Vessel,The Sweet of My Brown and untitled compositions), Noel placed fingers and human jaws made of sugar on earth pedestals. Raised to the status of relics, they were ‘condemned’ to a finite existence, which the public could contemplate. 8 A cloying atmosphere akin to that created by Noel is employed by Bahamian artist Blue Curry. For the Sixth Liverpool Biennial in 2010, Nikolai Noel, Untitled, 2012, earth/soil, water, cast brown sugar, dimensions variable, photo courtesy the artist 151 6. See http:// nikolainoelprojects. blogspot.co.uk/. 7. Ibid 8. Ibid Downloaded by [UGR-BTCA Gral Universitaria] at 06:41 01 April 2014 Curry exhibited a customized shimmering blue cement mixer filled with gallons of sun cream that was in continual operation during the exhibition. As the cement mixer spun, the sweet smell of the sun cream invaded the entire room at Greenland Street, Liverpool. As a contribution to another project, the artist silk-screened a sun-cream pattern cover design onto the exhibition catalogue, giving it a sticky texture and the same olfactory sensation. He has also used sun cream painted directly onto the walls of the exhibition space to act as an element in his recent installations. Particularly sparing, this and other works of Curry offer a sensory appeal that makes it difficult to elicit a direct meaning. None of his works is titled; instead he lists the materials of which they are composed, and this is what reveals possible interpretations. That lack of descriptive meaning, consciously adopted by the artist, opens his works to a sensory approach. To this consideration we must add the noise produced by the industrial cement mixer, something that made the installation resemble a construction site. As its smell permeated the space, sun cream was thus inserted into a transformative context. The work of the Dominican artist Marcos Lora Read also shows a concern for the contradictions between the temporal condition of material life and the permanence attached to heritage items. Since 1990, Lora has used parchment and paper to reflect on materiality, technology and the archive. That combination is behind projects like Cinco car-rosas para la historia (1991), 9 presented in 2009 in Paris as part of the ‘Kre ´yol Factory’ exhibition. 10 The installation consisted of five wooden canoes, which Lora furnished with wheels before hanging them on the wall. The structure of the canoes was covered with words taken from documents he found in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, relating to the first slaves brought to La Espan˜ola, the island that now contains both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Each boat contained either a sword or a rose made Nikolai Noel, Member, 2012, cast brown sugar, salt, water, dimensions variable, photo courtesy the artist 152 9. The title contains word play that does not translate easily into English. On one level it reads as Five Carriages for History, but the Spanish ‘carrozas’ or ‘carriages’ is altered to ‘car-rosas’ so that it incorporates the ‘rosas’ or ‘roses’ of the installation. In Latin-American Spanish the pronunciation of the two spellings is identical. 10. See http://www.kyas.com/ P/Marcos/02.html. Downloaded by [UGR-BTCA Gral Universitaria] at 06:41 01 April 2014 of metal and cardboard. To make the canoes Lora used kapok trees from Sabana de la Mar, a coastal town located in the northern part of the Dominican Republic that faces the peninsula of Samana ´across a bay. The zone has historically been the point of departure for illegal migration towards Puerto Rico and is the location for the building of yolas, the small boats used to cross the Mona Passage, the strait that separates the countries. The use of local wood recalls not only present-day illegal migration by Dominicans but also the displacement of Taino communities across the Caribbean. Those communities also used the bark of the kapok, and would extract and discard the tree’s heart; a difficult process as the surface of the kapok tree is covered by thorns. There is a symbolism in the fact that the transformation of a tree by hollowing out its core enabled the mobility and the miscegenation of indigenous communities. The materialism of this process is hidden by several conscious measures that are also open to interpretation: the canoes are covered with text, hung from the museum wall, and displayed as museum objects. In abruptly incorporating them into museum discourse, Lora produces an estrangement of their material biography that is nevertheless a conscious part of the installation display. Blue Curry, Untitled, 2010, customized cement mixer, sun cream, Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial, photo courtesy the artist 153 Downloaded by [UGR-BTCA Gral Universitaria] at 06:41 01 April 2014 What do the artists examined here have in common? First, they share an interest in exploring the everyday materiality of the Atlantic landscape. Through the use of ordinary materials and objects, they track the politics of consumption and accessibility to those products from both a historical and a present-day perspective. Sugar, sun cream and wood offer a sensory experience that can tell us multiple things not only about how the Caribbean landscape looks, but also about the unconscious that pervaded the relations between things and human beings within the Atlantic space. Second, in none of the analysed cases is the sense given; rather, installations confront the public with a myriad of stimuli that appeal to all the senses, not only to sight. Third, things become ‘epidermalized’ when inserted in the installations, since they acquire a material dimension that speaks eloquently about the shared lives of human beings and material culture. 11 In that sense, artists make things to be ascribed and related to a human scale, materializing historic processes. ATLANTIC MATERIAL CULTURE What does ‘materialized’ mean in this context? How can we define those material objects? In other words, what do sugar, sun cream and wood mean for our purposes here? How can we approach them? A simple, general, answer could be: they are things. In recent years we Nikolai Noel, Some Kind of Vessel, 2012, showing detail of sugar machete, cast brown sugar, dimensions variable, photo courtesy the artist 154 11. Jennifer A Gonza ´lez, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art, University of Minneapolis Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2008, p 5 Downloaded by [UGR-BTCA Gral Universitaria] at 06:41 01 April 2014 have witnessed the emergence of the study of material culture associated with a greater acceptance of the senses as sources of knowledge, a development that can be observed in several disciplines, among them archaeology, 12 anthropology and sociology, 13 art 14 and collections and museum studies. 15 In this section I will outline some aspects of this debate and subject the work I have introduced to further analysis. As several authors have pointed out, objects are not isolated. They shape our lives and our world, as we shape their form. They are ‘the very substance of our societies’. 16 Nevertheless, as Hodder has pointed out, we tend to extract from them what we need, a particular aspect of them, instead of considering that things have their own life and set of values and relations. 17 According to him, both artefacts and natural things – and the border between them tends to blur – present themselves in eco-systems. 18 Despite that, we are so used to some objects that we consider them part of the landscape, which enables us to relate to them in a non-discursive way. This perspective confers an active voice to things. Each thing has, in that sense, a biography. This biography, however, is an ever-changing, troubled one. 19 If we agree to confer on things a life of their own, then, how can we approach them? In this case, we have to consider several implications of ownership, accessibility, consumption and exchange. Marcos Lora Read, Cinco Car-rosas para la historia, 2008, Parc de la Villete, Paris, dimensions variable, photo courtesy the artist 155 12. See Hodder, Entangled,op cit; Christopher Tilley, ed, Handbook of Material Culture, Sage, London, 2006. 13. See Ann Brower Stahl, ‘Colonial Entanglements and the Practice of Taste: An Alternative to Logocentric Approaches’, American Anthropologist, vol 104, no 3, 2002, pp 827–845; David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2003. 14. See Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images, Routledge, London, 2004; Helen Pheby, ‘Contemporary Art: an Inmaterial Practice?’, in Downloaded by [UGR-BTCA Gral Universitaria] at 06:41 01 April 2014 With regard to possession, collecting appears to be an act indissolubly linked to our approach to things. Chris Gosden has questioned, 20 after W J T Mitchell, 21 what objects want, pointing out the existence of an inter-artefactual domain that interacts with human communities. Moreover, though simple, everyday gestures such as eating and drinking imply a complex setting of power relations that regulate our position in relation to other human beings. Agency, then, comes into discussion, 22 allowing us to consider contact between cultures as subtle, long-term manoeuvres implying interdependence. In that sense, although constructed across situations of accessibility, inequality and privilege, objects and raw materials can also be approached as sites of divergence, difference and contest. In our case, the installations we have examined refer to the material culture of the Atlantic. The social life of Atlantic artefacts and materials is not isolated in a colonial past; rather, it is lived, transformed and challenged in postcolonial negotiations of place, history and dominance. We can easily assert, for example, that for many Caribbean communities sugar cane – not only its image, but also its odour, its taste, the sound produced when the canes are rustled by the wind – is more than a simple reference to the past. All those sensory experiences belong to the realm of the everyday. Things and raw materials have played a decisive role in configuring our understanding of colonialism and colonial territories as a central part of the modernity process. 23 The history of colonialism and slavery and the exchanges that shaped the colonial past and present can also be read in material terms. 24 Atlantic history is not only marked by transnational fluxes of persons, but also by the displacements, dislocations and relocations of things. We can read colonial and postcolonial processes that shaped this history by looking at the material culture that emerged from them. 25 DEFYING MEANING What happens if we translate this approach to Atlantic material culture to the three installation art practices we are examining? What kind of knowledge can we infer from the use of sugar, sun cream and wood in the installations of Noel, Curry and Lora respectively? I believe that any approach to those questions has to begin with a recognition: in these installations, meaning is defied. In other words, answering these questions has more to do with revealing the implications recorded in the work than with discovering a hidden message, a unifying reading. Installation art is an immersive practice that deals with multiple layers of knowledge and sensibility. Just as there cannot be a single way of engaging with installation art, so it is impossible to derive a single meaning from it. When looking at an installation, we are not static. Experience, temporality and movement are inseparable from our aesthetic engagement with it. This forces us to adopt a versatile approach with the capacity to challenge the predominance of visuality in our engagement with art and to transform artworks into ‘active sites of cultural production’. 26 When considering the installations under examination here, we can say that there is a significant difference between arriving at the exhibition 156 Sandra H Dudley, ed, Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, Routledge, London, 2010, pp 71–89. 15. See Susan Pearce, ed, Interpreting Objects and Collections, Routledge, London, 1994; Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C Mancall, eds, Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2011. 16. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993, p 4 17. Hodder, Entangled, op cit, p3 18. Ibid, p 4 19. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden and Ruth Phillips, eds, Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, Berg, Oxford, 2006, p 13 20. Chris Gosden, ‘What Do Objects Want?’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, vol 12, no 3, 2005, pp 193–211 21. W J T Mitchell, ‘What Do Pictures “Really” Want?’, October 77, 1996, pp 71–82 22. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Clarendon, Oxford, 1998 23. See, for example, the classic work of Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Viking, New York, 1985. 24. See Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Racial Histories and their Regimes of Truth’, Political Power and Social Theory 11, 1997, pp 183–255. 25. See Constance Classen and David Howes, ‘The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artifacts’, in Edwards, Gosden and Downloaded by [UGR-BTCA Gral Universitaria] at 06:41 01 April 2014