excerpt from ISEA Istanbul talk

first part of a talk given at ISEA istanbul, sept 2011.

In 1957, the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola [Diamang] completed a hydroelectric dam on the Luachimo River in northeastern Angola, in the Lunda North province.  The dam was emblematic of Diamang’s monumental presence and technical capacity that it meticulously developed throughout the twentieth century.  Diamang was a mammoth diamond extraction company in Angola during the zenith of Portuguese colonial rule.  By the 1950s, Diamang provided a large portion of funding to the colonial state seated in the capital of Luanda.  It returned large profits to its Portuguese, Brazilian, American, and Russian investors.  It was a “state within a state” with its own police force, radio station, museum, health services, and agriculture.  Eighty percent of Diamang’s workforce in the Lunda region was made up of the ethnic Chokwe group, a once powerful state that was defeated as the Portuguese made their final push into the interior of its massive colony.  In this paper, the Luachimo Dam should come to symbolize the activity of mining an area for material and non-material resources, the transforming of matter into information and energy, and as being the catalyst of a disruption and enlargement of a feedback loop.  It should represent the dual nature of the media used to inscribe and transmit Chokwe art: electrification and rationalism.

            In 1953, Portuguese anthropologist José Redinha published a book on the topic of Chokwe wall murals, Paredes Pintadas da Lunda.  Redinha was director of the Dundo Museum on Diamang’s company compound and had for some time been interested in the murals; he was an artist and was fascinated by the murals’ popular execution.  He traveled around the immediate region and copied what he saw on the hut walls exactly, choosing paint in order to preserve the colors and even using the same pigments and binders as the Chokwe artists.  Bertrand Brothers publishing house in Lisbon then printed the book using offset print and color plates.  Since the company had no legal rights to sell the book, it was sent to academic libraries and museum collections worldwide.

In 2006, two online heritage projects were launched, both of which presented material digitized from Paredes.  The Trienal de Luanda’s website scanned the book’s image plates as part of the online component of the first major contemporary art exhibition in Angola after the end of a devastating thirty year civil war.  ITM Mining Ltd., a diamond company operating in Lunda North, launched www.culturalunda-tchokwe.com, which used both the scanned images from Paredes and transcribed its text.  Angolan artist and Trienal de Luanda director Fernando Alvim authored both projects.  Each was presented as a type of heritage project dedicated to disseminating the indigenous cultural production of Angola to a wider public.  The Trienal emphasized the artistic merit of the images as such, photoshopping out the characteristic signature that Redinha placed on all of his images, in order to return them to Chokwe authorship.  No context was provided for the images other than the project’s conceptual essay that proposed to correct the wrongs of Redinha’s appropriation of Chokwe art, as he did not include the names of individual artists.  ITM presented the anthropological content of Paredes.  As the company operates in the Lundas, they declare on their website, “Tradition as we respect cultural values.”  ITM is of the progeny of Diamang that resulted from Angola’s nationalization of the diamond industry following its independence in 1974.  Both the Trienal de Luanda and ITM’s website had an ethos of participation.  The Trienal encouraged public interpretation of Chokwe aesthetics through its gallery, internet, and billboard exhibitions, while ITM’s message board and online forum solicited feedback and exchange.

In 1987, Friedrich Kittler wrote his influential essay “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter” on the eve of the internet revolution.  Among other things, Kittler describes erasure of distinctions between media types with the transition to fiberoptic cable transmission and the gradual electrification of media.  On the issue of how meaning is generated within this relatively new standard of information, he writes, “quotidian data flow must be arrested before it can become an image or sign.  What is called style in art is only the switchboard of these scannings and selections.” [i]He then describes a type of information hierarchy as a natural outcome of re-mediation, where one medium ghosts another through its obsolescence and related changes to our senses.  Kittler’s analysis dissects a process that is often regarded as a natural progression: the alphabetic monopoly of print media to the eventual triumph of electricity-based digital information.

I want to bring in a different aspect to Kittler’s theory of media, one that accounts for both the historical contingencies of mediation and also to the blind spots in descriptions of its infiltration.  In colonial situations, the abstraction of information that develops with mediation is inextricably bound up with extraction of materials such as diamonds, achieved as it was most often through coerced labor and societal violence.  Consider, for instance, that one Diamang official could call the project to record folk songs “Song Service” in order to match it with the labels Mines Service, Construction Service, and Health Service. [ii]  Each of these was a piece of a total project of control over bodies and life in the Lundas.  It would be inaccurate, therefore, to claim that the implementation of media conditions were universally experienced or, for that matter, inevitable.

The Dundo Museum was part of Diamang’s project termed “Scientific Colonialism.”  The museum compound was a laboratory of Life found in the Lundas and must be seen as synonymous with Diamang’s labor practices.  The effort that materialized the diamonds, the book, the museum, the folk music records, and indeed the hydroelectric dam, all capitalized what Diamang extracted from Lunda North.  Here, not only were the Chokwe, in the crassest of interpretations, considered matter, or the “real,” but the idea of the real was itself developed within the logic of the media they used.  The conditions that Diamang established were coterminous with the electrification of production and the ephemeralization of information.

In the case of colonialism in Africa, the ghosting of indigenous media practices was not an unfortunate consequence of colonial rule, as most scholars of the time understood it, but rather an intentional divestment of indigenous populations of power by participation.  The now common knowledge that Europe created the notion of Africa as practicing unchanging traditions amounted to the limited definition of medium in Africa to that of objects and performances as emblems of superstitious practices.  Under that logic, they had to remain static.  One must look no further than the statement by Julio de Vilhena, who claimed that the Chokwe had a tendency to adopt music “other than the traditional, and withhold from the traditional the value and importance attributed to it by his ancestors.”  He goes on to argue that Diamang must “[show] him the value of his folklore, by inducing him to cultivate it regularly” by providing them with positive encouragement.  Vilhena even suggests that the whites clap for the natives after performances, a type of feedback that indicates paternalism, where Chokwe art and performance is not an open system, but rather artifactual data in a control system.  There were, then, implications of the process of etching voice into “fragile stock[s] of virgin discs…in the tropics” beyond just ghosting certain sense perceptions through transformations in media.

James Boggs, “The Negro and Cybernation”

see: http://ikechukwufrancis.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/radiocomputer-motherboards-a-dialogue-of-media-and-content/

In 1964, James Boggs spoke at the First Annual Conference on the Cybercultural Revolution–Cybernetics and Automation, entitled “The Evolving Society.”  Boggs was an activist, a theorist, and an autoworker in Detroit.  His essay is worth remembering when considering the “universalism” of technological integration, particularly with regards to the culturally specific “cyborg” or “netizen.”

He writes:

To visualize the future role of Negroes in a cybernated society,

one must review, if only briefly, their past role in American society

and what this means at the present stage of industrial devlopment.

Historically, the role of the Negro inside this society has been like

the role of a scavenger. That is, the Negro has been entitled to

the leavings, the cast-offs of the whites: jobs which the whites did

, not want any more or refused to do at all; housing that the whites

had moved out of; neighborhoods that whites no longer

considered good enough jor them; schools that they had abandoned.

In each industry where machinery played a vital role, the Negro

played a special role-that oj being the last to be recruited

and usually only on an emergency basis, e.g., war.

Detroit would later see a generation of musicians who seized upon technology, creating the first techno and house music–a lower middle-class suburban black youth who revolutionized dance music and challenged ideas of authorship and its transmission through technological apparatuses.

Here is the bio Boggs provides for the conference publication:

JAMES BOGGS was born in Marion Junction, Alabama. He never

dreamed of becoming President or a locomotive engineer, for he

grew up in a world where the white folks are gentlemen

by day and Ku Klux Klanners at night. Even today.

When he was seventeen, Jim” took off for the North. He bummed

his way through the Western part of the country, working in the hop

fields of Washington (State), cutting ice in Minnesota. In Detroit he

worked on WPA until World War II. Then he had his chance to

get into the automobile plants. He has been an autoworker ever since.

He has been a thinker since he was born,

and a rebel for as long as he can remember.

Mr. Boggs is a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on the

Triple Revolution.

response to ACASA panel on biennial exhibitions and africa

I recently attended the triennial conference of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association and responded to a panel on biennials. Papers given included topics of Dak’Art, the Luanda Triennial, Thupelo and Triangle workshops in South Africa, and Afrique en Créations. I’m including some of what I wrote in response here:

What is a biennial?  First to speak of Dak’art and Luanda: both contemporary art exhibitions with the familiar global/local tension. Smooth figured it as a tension between global and pan-African, while in Luanda it is figured as the tension between elite and commoner (demonstrated by the artwork with the photos of musseque residents and educated elite). Those concerns are both curatorial as in selection, but also reach to the problem of ethics. Biennials, arguably underpinned by postcolonial theory, have always figured themselves as ethical events, with various self descriptors such as new humanism, pan-African unity, and other suggestions of utopia.  But what of the issue of internationalism? We know that “biennial” is nearly shorthand for “international.”  What is interesting to me is the near absence (save the Jones essay I discuss below) of discussion about why such a time-based term has come to stand in for a space-based curatorial practice- in terms of both its site specificity and also the inclusion of art from around the world.  All four situations discussed on the panel, then, are similar in this joining of international scope with recurrence- might we call this contemporaneity?

The creators of the Venice Biennale first proposed the idea of a recurring international exhibition.  Caroline Jones has written, “repetition-as-commemoration was inserted at the heart of the putatively future-oriented event, glancingly determined to be biennial” (“Biennial Bulture: A Longer History” in The Biennials Reader, 73). Within hers and other essays in this new compendium, the issue of contemporaneity comes up quite a bit, not surprisingly.  But it is Jones that takes us to the logical next step, the idea of a past/present/future configuration that can only be assured in the idea that an exhibition will recur.  There is something interesting about the tie she makes between repetition and internationalism…a connection that doesn’t seem fully illuminated in this essay. Perhaps it is related to ritual.  Regardless, the stability of a recurring exhibition assumes the stability and, really, the future of a site that may seem so precarious as to have an impossible future. Through that conceit, the mysteriously veiled voices that speak in the empirical (passive) voice declare an institution stable by the fact of its mere existence. This is the voice of investment, this is the voice of finance capitalism, the most slippery of which is based on the easily disdained global oil trade.

Johannesburg, Luanda, Dakar, São Paulo, Havana… all cities where stable institutions of art struggle.  All have histories of spatial contestation—spatial in all senses of the word—and structural instability.  All have positioned their international exhibitions in terms of “alternatives,” “contestations,” or even anthropophagies.  Thus merely the labeling of an exhibition a “biennial” or “triennial” embeds a certain political statement that the city, the nation, the institution, does have a contract with the future.  It seems to me to tempt fate as soon as it is articulated.    The biennial promises change and transformation, the opposite of chaos and uncertainty, a sort of tragic celebration of the unsustainable contemporary urban space.  So who is “the biennial?”  Donald Preziozi argues that despite its appearance, the Crystal Palace was anything but transparent.  Instead it served to veil power as such.

Thus … is right to speak of Luanda in terms of its silences, the occlusion of the urban poor and such—something I found in researching its funding also and have been thinking about ever since. Similarly, we all invariably argue that the transnationalism of money is coterminous with the transnationalism of art exhibitions, and we debate whether socially-informed art can exist in such fraught exhibition conditions. Indeed, can we speak of a well-funded exhibition in the world today that does not have some ties to distasteful financial practices? But as soon as we ask the question, another exhibition is mounted, another catalog published. Finance capitalism is fluid and fleeting, instances of art are similarly fluid and ephemeral.  In the 1990s as this type of exhibition made its rise, Miwon Kwon called it the “one place after another” of site specific art.

But in terms of all of these papers, what could be explored is the legacy of Empire, which all papers touch on to some extent, and the empirical voice of theory and curatorial enunciation.  Money and theory are both fairly easy targets, as their catholicism and their authority depend on an immediately contestable empiricism.  I was interested in what Miriam quotes Alessio Antonioli as saying, “the Thupelo workshop responds to a need that comes from the ground…. Working on that level, everything else gets built on top.” In one interview that Antonio Ole gave concerning the Trienal de Luanda, he stated that the triennial put the roof on before the building.  Those are the two bookmarks I think we have operating here with these papers, a fluid scale that suggests the pitfalls but also the amazing potential of networking and collective art practice.

However, I want to suggest that in the worst case scenario of these exhibitions, the artwork itself, whether in production or in exhibition, can be overlooked as either secondary to the event or illustrative of a theme—a danger that Kate puts in terms of artists becoming generic signifiers of African structural problems.  She gives the example of Ole’s Margem da Zona Limite: Township Wall and Ihosvanny’s Urban Sox that depicted urban poor juxtaposed with the intellectual elite.  She raises a key question, that is what happens to provocative art in these arenas?  Are they neutralized by the very structure of the biennial that operates under a tacit but yet unrealized ethical imperitive? As I’m sure we’re all aware of, financial ills are not just an African problem.  In this discussion we would do good to remember Hans Haacke’s piece Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 that was effectively shut down by the Guggenheim because AS AN ARTWORK it exposed the emperor Shapolski and the sources of his income. At the 2003 Sharjah Biennial, Chen Lingyang wanted to show photos from a series in which she reflects on her body and her menstruation cycle but was not allowed to, given the prohibition on nudity in Sharjah.  Instead, she concealed the photos in an Arabic case, and made the censorship of her work the message itself.  In other words, the code of Sharjah, those hidden protocols of large-scale cultural events, was laid bare.

Expose the code- thus to ask how works of art in these exhibitions expose the social code-  the tapestry of Charles de Gaulle does not so much illustrate transnationalism, as that would reduce it to a functional object. Rather, its very medium instantiates this activity, it is the medium of flux, and our job should be to understand how it pries open the various protocols of exchange: cultural, ethical, artistic, and economic.

The title of an important watercolor by Angolan artist Viteix, Construção Civil (Antonio Cardoso) Tarrafal 2/10/71 (1985), references a poem by anti-colonial activist Antonio Cardoso in which he speaks of translation and experience, of shared grief and its representation.  He writes of the incompleteness of words to describe his experience, it is “of dreams and deeds I measure walking.” He goes on, “And the words, I undertake to write…/Neither is it for me that shared grief,/ but also will be in the promised/ future we will be complete.” Viteix’s adaptation shows a construction scene within the grid frame of Construção Civil that recalls socialist realist scenes of workers.  It also contains within that scene various free-floating Chokwe pictograms—line, dot grid, target, chevron—to indicate the work of linguistic production.  It is a shared activity, a civil construction, with a definite structure.

In Angolan literature and art, mourning is very much described on a visceral level. In the last stanza of Construção Civil Cardoso scathingly critiques civil construction thus: “in a house built to shelter/ under an ethical guise, only the mortar/ contains the color of blood that I put on it all!” Cardoso uses the Portuguese word rebouco for mortar, translated from the Arabic rabuq, which can mean, in addition to mortar, a plaster or gesso used as a surface to receive paint and decor.  At the time Cardoso authored this poem, he was imprisoned at Tarrafal concentration camp in Cape Verde. It is likely the rebouco Cardoso speaks of is the artistic format or surface that is the conceptual condition of art, but also that which covered the walls at Tarrafal, what was to become known as “the camp of slow death.”

Viteix’s Construção Civil best reveals the line that Angolan marxists straddled: While Viteix’s Construção Civil echoes socialist realist scenes of the heroic worker, the notion of work and its rootedness in the body is politicized.  The title delivers a shock of irony when we realize that these workers could be the forced laborers of Tarrafal. Irony was endemic to Tarrafal; it was in the village of Chão Bom (Good Ground) and on one of the most plentiful islands of Cape Verde. Warning against the simplistic content of propaganda, Viteix instead illustrates the dangers of nominal political gestures in art, or in creating scenes that mask power relations and their viscerally experienced consequences.  Viteix illustrates this bodily process not only showing the worker undergoing action in Construção Civil, but in pieces such as Os Mergulhadores and the sepia ink rendered Sem Titulo of 1992.  In the latter, the bodies are forcefully prominent as they pop out of the grid, emphasized by the ink-soaked legs and flecks of ink.

Miss Landmine Cambodia 2009

The Arts Council of Norway has serialized the Miss Landmine contest, with its latest manifestation in Cambodia this summer. http://miss-landmine.org/cambodia/index.php
This time, however, it had to go underground. Government officials stated they thought the contest “would make a mockery of Cambodian land mine victims.” There have been published a series of photographs of the survivors which will be on display at the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum (!) in Oslo Norway. The Miss Landmine website interprets this sponsorship as a vindication of the contest and of the landmine survivors, stating “it is more important than ever that society’s prominent institutions like the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum rise to the occasion, demonstrating both its commitment to freedom of expression and its willingness to engage in the ever-evolving ethical discussions that is such an essential part of the Miss Landmine project.”

Review of Yinka Shonibare in the NYTimes

IN his Victorian house in the East End here Yinka Shonibare, the British-Nigerian conceptual artist, perched on an exercise ball at the wooden table in his book-crammed study, sipping peppermint tea and examining a shipment of faux oysters on the half shell.

A stationary hand cycle sat beside him, an electric wheelchair across from him. One of Bob and Roberta Smith’s slogan paintings, “Duchamp stinks like a homeless person,” hung above him, and a tuna on toast prepared by his housekeeper was sandwiched between a vase of yellow tulips and a stack of Dante volumes: “Inferno,” “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso.”

It was a small tranquil moment in the midst of a whirlwind time for Mr. Shonibare, whose theatrically exuberant work, with its signature use of headless mannequins and African fabrics, will be featured in a major midcareer survey at the Brooklyn Museum starting Friday. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, large-scale installations, photographs and films.
read more… http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/arts/design/21sont.html

Patrick Chabal on Agostinho Neto: “Neto never gratuitously bathed in pathos. He sought solutions.”