an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 9, July - December 2012,
ISSN 1552-5112
Beyond the Landscape, or Agamben and the
Impotentiality of Art
To be free
is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to
have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is (...) to be capable of one's own impotentiality,
to be in relation to one's own privation. This is why freedom is freedom for
both good and evil.[1]
Contemporary artists' residencies
can be considered traces of early modern artistic colonies, situated outside
the cities, which served as gathering sites for artists willing to detach from
the rigors and constraints of Formalism and Academism in art, and to dedicate
themselves to the direct painting of nature, or the “real”. These “places of
inspiration” formed at the same time, influential “schools” with their specific
theoretical background, and were placed in distant areas (islands – for the
Romantics, the forest for the paysagistes of
(Washerwomen at the Oise River
near Valmondois by Charles-Francois Daubigny,1865).
The landscape painters of
(Charles-Francois Daubigny -
Rising moon in
(Jean-Francois Millet,1856-1858,by
Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (Nadar))
A new content in painting was
therefore formulated by incorporating into the subject matter an unrepeatable experience,
that also dictated a new methodological approach. Still, their getting together
was not based merely on artistic considerations, but mostly on social networks,
and friendship, as they didn't formulate a coherent manifesto, but maintained
artistic independent positions[2]. The
works subsumed now in the “school” of
As opposed to the more closed and
mostly religious oriented artistic brotherhoods of that epoch,[5] the
school of Barbizon set the basic parameters for the concept of residency,
finding alternative ways that permitted them to adapt to changing social
circumstances, make use of local resources, and also the latest commercial and
technological conditions in order to exercise progressive solutions in the art
profession. A spatial seclusion – a group settlement with its own functional microstructure,
away from the social “self”, but also a retreat to a temporality of
contemplation, apart from the pressures of commercial obligations, are
therefore historically part of the idea of residence.
Deeply connected
to what Giorgio Agamben calls the abyss of human power, a residency is a site
of potential. Politically charged, this potential that any voluntary
intervention carries will be discussed, not from the point of view of its
dimension of realization through particular works, but from the perspective of
the impotentiality that every act
carries. What Agamben conceives as potential – the capacity of one's own
incapacity, the potentiality not-to-do – will be put into relation with the
complex nature of retreats, with mobility and the responsibility of
intervention, that depart from a 'foreign-owned' postcolonial marked discourse.
Ambiguous issues regarding
residencies, are forwarded by this year's “Higher Atlas” 2012 Marrakesh Biennial,
that promoted site-specificity and long duration creative periods in the
production of the works. The biennial curated by Carson Chan and Nadim Samman
and sustained mainly and privately by art patron Vanessa Branson, has been
supported also by the Swiss-based international foundation and residency center
Dar Al-Ma’mûn near Marrakech. As host for artistic colonies
since the end of the nineteenth century,
(Marrakech, by Winston Churchill,
1950s)
(Koutoubia Mosque -
Winston-Churchill, 1943)
This encounter became a founding
event in the history of Moroccan art, since it is considered to have
precipitated the development of the Moroccan “modern school”, which El Glaoui
initiated, but also as a paradigmatic gesture of creative convergence, which
now “academized”, still shows its traces in the environment of art
education – marked by expressionism.
The complex nature of
retreats, in light of their forceful political statement is a contested
terrain. The retreat, as “away”, but at the same time a “seclusion” from
social-personal but mostly also economical concerns, can be a refuge or a site
of protest. Treated from the point of view of its oscillation between still
and moving, the retreat becomes an expression of a political potential that
inhabits every action or the restraint from it. Mobility, like nomadism and its
effects of deterritorialization are profoundly connected to forms of embodiment
and to a tactile approach to the world, which defy an external vision centered
perspective. “The resident” is on the edge between surrender to the foreign
environment and imposing an intervention, that is not always in a relation of
exchange with the host environment. Only the fact that a residency represents the
possibility of doing something that has no place in the spatial and temporal
continuity of a dominant system, states its political and
ethical ambiguity. This is how the Portuguese artist Alexandra do Carmo
comments on the potential of residencies, in a text published by her for
Residency Unlimited in
...The work may happen anywhere, where there’s a clear intention
to act upon certain social and political conditions, a disruption of the social
norm. The residence arrangement should be one that actively helps the
artists achieve their ends, even if the result is not fixed spatially.
Unfortunately, peculiar arrangements abound: residency programs that call for
the discrete production of an art work as a product within a specified amount
of time – a delivering of goods, residencies that advertise the natural
surrounding – a vacation to paradise land, residencies proud of their monastic
isolation, or photos of the artist’s prospective studio, so carefully prepared
that a sushi plate on the kitchenette counter waits to receive the artist in
style. I envision a perfect residency: one with no walls,
using all the necessary walls available in the community, one where to build
new walls means to carefully design them according to people’s discourse,
transforming language into a concrete room.[7]
Engaging a residency affirms a particular
mode to engage with the world. It manifests itself always through comparison:
expressing an anarchic desire to be more intense, more haptic, more affective,
more vital or more exposed than one’s own environment of reference. On the
other hand, the immersion into a foreign environment is a modality to negotiate
one's own position with a dimension of surrender. Processuality of production
and the “not-finite”
character that site-specificity brings with itself,
imply a not always effectively marketable work. The factor of
unpredictability is implicit and states a niche inside the art market system.
Freedom/leisure and labor, step on this terrain into each other, but the
ultimate goal of this “stepping-aside” is still that of self-realization through
the search of new resources. David Bissell and Gillian Fuller explain[8] that ‘remaining still’ exists as a condition of political
possibility, but at the same time it is seized upon and engineered by other
forces - particularly through channels of authoritarian capitalism to great material and symbolic effect. “Still” is both
anti-democratic (as being a deprivation of the right to move freely) and a
threat to neoliberal capitalism, and leads to its disintegration. Artistic
mobility can often make use of structures of exploitation that abuse local
resources, and are based on nationalist discourses and staged moral
responsibilities, which actually presuppose socioeconomic inequality. On the
other hand, as they are located not outside, but beside the mainstream flow
of commodities, they support the retreat of the artists from economic
obligations and offer a rather artificial time span, in which not mere
production, but the potential for it can come to expression. As residencies are
favoring the commitment of the artist to an adopted environment, and often
encourage socially-oriented works that confront and interpret local causes –
they provide means to incorporate into the artistic experience a reality, which
is implicitly considered as running parallel to the mainstream flow of
commodities. A residency represents, from this point of view, a possibility
that has not yet been consumed.
As affiliated with the
2012 Marrakech Biennial, the Dar Al-Ma’mûn has hosted a three month residency program,
with artists such as – Berlin-based Sinta Werner, Elin Hansdottir, and the
Japanese artist, Megumi Matsubara – but also organized associated events. As the
two directors of Dar Al-Ma’mûn, Carleen Hamon and Julien Amicel explain in
an interview[9],
the project aims to support both Moroccan and African artists by promoting
cultural identity beyond borders, and to dedicate itself to the proximate
geographical environment in which it is situated, the village of Tassoultante.
The center supports young African artists, in order to continue their
education for a year at the national art
(Dar Al-Ma'mûn)
Still it is often the
microgeography of the site itself that sets the parameters of discourse. Here is how Sinta Werner, a Berlin-based artist of the Biennial
and resident in Dar Al-Ma’mûn, talks about her
concrete contact with the local environment and the work of Elin Hansdottir,
who constructed with local building techniques, a labyrinthine installation in
Tassoultante:[10]
Q: Many residencies are based on the idea of contact with the
local community. Is the idea of community itself not supposing a bunch of
preformed expectations?
Sinta
Werner: Dar Al-Ma’mûn was a special situation. As the
residency building is not constructed yet, the residency artists are
accommodated at the neighboring luxury Fellah Hotel. The immediate local
community are rather poor inhabitants of a small village. The contact between
hotel and village has so far only been by them helping with the construction of
the hotel and the gardening. A wall and a watchman 24 hours a day keep them
separated. A fellow artist and friend, Elin Hansdottir made an installation
between the village and the hotel. A hole in the wall has been made so that
there is direct access to the installation from the hotel.
(Ellin Hansdottir. Mudbrick Spiral
in construction process)
(Elin Hansdottir. Wall opening)
It is
progressively hard to speak about one’s own and the
foreign. These concepts, as they are
involved in a political way, seem not specific enough to encompass the present
divergences, and circulation on an economic and conceptual level. One of the
curators of the 2012 Marrakech Biennial, Carson Chan put it quite clearly, when
approached on this question by a Berlin Artinfo[11] journalist regarding the Biennial being financed mainly with
funds from the exterior:
Q: The (Marrakech) Biennale has always been supported by the West
financially, by Vanessa Branson in particular, which puts it in a kind of
precarious postcolonial space. Is that something you are contending with within
the exhibition itself?
CC:
That kind of colonialist gesture hasn’t escaped us for sure. I think one
can reflect on it through postcolonialism or one can reflect on it by saying,
“Well,
The problem of
immersion and intervention in a foreign context has often raised a biased
vision: of the “site” defined by sedentary qualities, whereas the guest artists
and curators implement structures, which are seen as being mobile,
interchangeable, liquid, and pertaining to a global flow. “Dar Al-Ma’mûn is a unique structure in
Mobility is seen in recent tourism theory as a form of dwelling, whereas moving
is a modality of practicing space, of practicing culture through the experience
of space.[13] Place is not an individual experience, but a set of
relationships, which assemble in time, adapt to different circumstances and
stay in continuous formation. Interventionist practices,
residencies and site-specific projects are symptomatic of complex relations
that connect movements of travel with the fixity of what is understood as
‘home,’ enabling re-grounding and re-formulation of the delimitations of one's
own place. Subjectivity and its formulation across a nomadic ‘home’ space is
part of this cultural capital.
In 1997 Kevin
Hetherington[14] described nomadic ‘home’ places in the contemporary world as
ships, or mobile platforms, formed and sustained by the folding together of
spaces and the relations of difference established by these folds. Place
conceived as ‘circulating’[15] connects
cultural immersion with a haptic dimension of geographical exploration.
Hetherington discusses construction of place and subjectivity through the role
of touch, as a form of non-representationalist knowledge.[16] These approaches, which have put the accent on continuous
contamination and movement, and not separation, have also been related to an
affective approach to geography[17], as a vision that is not exterior to its objects. Based on
an attitude that goes back to the innovations of artist colonies, the
artist-explorer is effectively and affectively delivered in a sort of cultural
voyeurism, to a world that requires a decidedly performative approach, but that
also produces, as a consequence, a network for the assimilation of a not
immediately predictable and marketable work. This is how Dar Al-Ma’mûn
directors refer to the position, in the market system, of works produced during
a residency: “A residence is not a counterpoint to the market, but a time
for the construction of work, and producer of works, that are possibly destined
to arrive at institutions or other market participants. Although Dar Al-Ma’mûn has a
non-profit status, a residency is finally a structure that rises as a market
player to public recognition, and the recognition of the professional artists
with whom it engages.”[18]
A theoretical
volume edited by the two curators
Q: Did the “Arab
Spring” affect curation of this project?
CC: The
so-called Arab Spring (no one here would ever associate any kind of political
unrest as a problem relating to other countries…) was definitely on my mind
when I started conceptualizing the exhibition. Before spending time in
Marrakech, all I knew of
Q: Was it
difficult for you to get rid of postcolonial shades and Orientalist
romanticism?
CC:
Postcolonialism and its echoes are definitely here, but not unlike other cities
such as Hong Kong, Montreal or Mexico City.
Later in the interview Carson Chan
affirms: “The exhibition, often spectacular, sometimes very quiet, was curated
to appeal first and foremost to the senses.” Also, he concludes his own article
included in the Biennial volume with: “An exhibition is also called a show,
because in the end, it should be a space of entertainment, of amusement.”[21]
This accent on
the fluidity and universality of experience, which permits being at ease in a
foreign environment and enjoying immersion in it, states an apparent
non-hierarchical approach, but can be based also on a forced identification of
the so-called “other” with one's own value system and movements, that equalizes
in order to assimilate; for example, belonging/participation to universal
activities in global capitalism (shopping, dining and YouTube) or the goal of
integrating the works (as final results of a directed process) into the global
market. Part of this assimilation can be also an ethnographic interest for
collecting elements of the “local culture” (seen implicitly as “real” or
“authentic”) and introducing them into one's own art that is – since the Barbizonists' escapades into “the
rural” – a proof of clashing within a certain context.
(Charles Jacque, 1848, aquaforte)
Alexandre Defaux – The Bazaar,
1856
Employing the residency time
offered by Dar Al-Ma’mûn for some of the artists, the
“Higher Atlas” show sustained apprenticeship and implication of local crafts.
(Megumi Matsubara, Void Between,
2012, credit by R.V.Wienskowski)
Borrowing local craft techniques
or elements, and deploying them within contemporary art practices may then pass
than as a “re-valorization”, a “saving“ of traditional values by the
contemporary artist, running the risk of affirming an implicitly domineering
discourse or feeding a local nationalistic sensibility.
The position of
the artist-explorer can hardly be conceived other than in the concrete terms of
a particular situation, in which the subject gets entangled. Mobility studies
help to determine if these factors are ordinary, common experiences or belong
to the register of the extra-ordinary, and can be retained, documented,
archived. But mobility encompasses as such a virtual dimension, in the sense
that it determines a becoming with an indefinite outcome. It represents
in itself a potentiality, which expresses the power to transform, to reaffirm and
regenerate both temporal and spatial coordinates. Such a dimension of becoming,
inherent in all non-local experiences, as a temporary, fluctuating, but
continuous actualization, has also political relevance. Rather than in the
realization, or in the accomplished dimension of achieved objectives, the
political dimension of residencies dwells in their not manifested, potential.
Giorgio Agamben
discusses potentiality from the
perspective of what we cannot do. For Agamben, at stake in understanding the concept
of potentiality, is not the mere impotentiality,
in the sense of impossibility, but rather the potentiality ‘not-to-do.’ This is
not the absence of what could be done, but is that which proves that there
exists the potential to do something. The freedom to refrain from an act,
proves that there exists a potentiality to act in a certain situation, which is
in itself a positive/affirmative act. Agamben understands potentiality as
something real, as it is a constituent part of reality. The potentiality not
to discussed in “On Potentiality” included in Agamben's volume Potentialities[22] and especially in chapter 11, ‘On Potentiality,’ is based on
Aristotle, which Agamben considers to have been misinterpreted in regard to potentiality. Agamben is arguing
that the essence of potentiality is not simply non-Being, but the existence of
non-Being, the presence of an absence. This potential not to pass into
actuality, is the one that interests Agamben. “To be potential means: to be
one's own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that
exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality,
and only in this way do they become potential.”[23] The
capacity, of one's own incapacity, is that in which freedom actually exists.
Agamben calls the “I can” - “…for
each of us perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the
experience of potentiality.”[24] That every human potentiality is in relation to its own
privation is for him “the origin (and the abyss) of human power, which is so violent
and limitless with respect to other living beings.”[25] From this perspective, it also becomes visible, “…how the
root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality.”
Thinking about
voluntary interventions in a given environment and the power that every act
expresses, the fundamental paradox which rises, is how can the actuality of the
potentiality to-not-be, be
considered? How can the potentiality to not act (without being a manifestation
of passivity and refrain from action), be actualized as a potential? In
Agamben's vision the potentiality to-not-be does not disappear into, nor is
annulled by actuality, but survives actuality and preserves itself as such in
actuality.[26] The understanding of impotentiality
as fulfilled and not destroyed by an act/intervention, accomplishes the
experience of potentiality and its actualization.
An expression of
the consciousness of the potentiality not-to-do, is often missing from
discourses that equalize difference in order to legitimize intervention and the
affirmation of authority. Not only within the dual potential of becoming that
mobility carries with it - but mostly in the awareness of this virtual
dimension that any intervention implies - lies also its political significance.
The impotentiality of every act needs to be fulfilled in order that the act be
actualized. Relevant in this context is the fact that Agamben discusses the
moment after a potentiality has passed into actuality. In the case of “I can” -
the sentence becomes ‘I did,’ whereas in the case of “I cannot” - it becomes ‘I
could have not’, which is the
possibility in which an intervention into a foreign environment, can function
as a politically correct act. The
negation is accompanying the act, and the negation passes into the act, even
when this is actualized: so “I could have not” accompanies the “I did”. Only
out of a relation to one's own incapacity can the freedom of a voluntary act -
which any intervention into an environment claims, along with the ease of a
capacity and capability to act - be fulfilled as a potential of which the
subject is aware:
To be suddenly present in
completely another context has a political aspect to a certain extent. To make
yourself function better, it sometimes helps to put yourself in another
context. This is in the nature of art or creativity. You have to always escape
from anything that institutionalizes you or simply puts you in a box. You are
lucky if you are able to avoid such pressures by not leaving your home at all.
It is only when a project is conducted, that an artist shows her/his gesture.
Art suddenly adds something to the context. Whether this gesture is political
or not depends on the project and its engagement to the context around. It is
not the fact that you are in a foreign country that makes your practice
political.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 9, July - December 2012,
ISSN 1552-5112
Notes