dohmen, renate (2016) encounters beyond the gallery. relational aesthetics and cultural difference?...

v

Contents

List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements viii

Prologue xi

Introduction 1 1 Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and

Modes of Writing 24 2 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and

Cultural Alterity 40

FACTION 1 ‘THE RAW AND THE COOKED IN COMMON PLACES’ – ‘RIKKI T’ AT THE SERPENTINE GALLERY, REVIEW BY ‘JOHNNY ZUCKER’ 61

FACTION 2 RIKKI T AND CURATOR C EN ROUTE 67

3 Voices: Dossier of Texts on Shipibo-Conibo Designs 79

4 Making Sense of Shipibo-Conibo Designs 96

FACTION 3 ITINERANT THOUGHTS – LONDON, PARIS, PERU AND ELSEWHERE 127

5 Voices: Dossier of Texts on Tamil Th reshold Designs 152

6 Making Sense of Tamil Th reshold Designs 163

FACTION 4 ITINERANT THOUGHTS – PARIS, LONDON, TAMIL NADU AND ELSEWHERE 195

Epilogue 211

Notes 219 Bibliography 256 Index 267

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13

Introduction

But this cultural multi-linguistics is not limited to artists negotiating their respective cultural situatednesses. It also poses a challenge for curators, critics, art theorists and general audiences as they encounter works of art that refer to unfamiliar cultural contexts. For Mosquera, the challenge at present is how to keep track of developments across the globe and to have the necessary receptiveness to move around with ‘open eyes, ear and minds’. He acknowledges that this poses a problem as ‘our minds, ears and eyes have been programmed by specifi c canons and positions’. 64 So how can viewers, curators, critics and artists be truly open to the unfamiliar? And can pre-conceptions, which inevitably blinker the engagement with alien aesthetic codes, be suspended? In other words what are the conditions of visuality in global scenarios and how can productive evaluative criteria be developed that are able to cater for this new and complex global scenario?

Relational Aesthetics

Th is volume proposes that engaging with these concerns requires a para-digm shift and acknowledges that such far-reaching questions necessar-ily solicit a range of refl ections, approaches and perspectives informed by the situatednesses of respective responses. Th e expectation that these issues could be fully resolved once and for all is therefore misguided and propositions put forward can be but a possible response to these issues. Approaches developed by the present discussion will also be infl ected by an anchoring concern with the disavowal of ethnic or ‘primitive’ art in the global world of contemporary art. As part of this investment, it raises the question of coevalness articulated by the anthropologist Johannes Fabian who, like Garcia dos Santos, argues for greater acknowledgement of the contemporaneity of the so-called ‘primitive’ in the contemporary world. 65 A further fundamental premise of this discussion is that the force and transformative potential of ‘encounter’ needs to be reckoned with, and that an experimental approach to the re-examination of the theoretical frame-work of ‘relational aesthetics’ is best suited to tackle these concerns.

Overall the project is conceived in terms of a creative laboratory of thought. It probes whether relational aesthetics can be stretched beyond its current Eurocentric infl ection that posits the experience of the post-industrial West as benchmark for the whole world. Bourriaud himself

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14

Encounters Beyond the Gallery

acknowledged that this is problematic when he noted that the experience of the information superhighway and a heightened spectacularization of the social do not capture everybody’s contemporary reality. 66 However, he failed to act on this realization and continued to proclaim First World post-industrial perspectives as defi ning general experience. In contradis-tinction, this book’s aim is to explore what an expanded notion of relational aesthetics that seeks to go beyond a normative Western perspective could deliver for encounters with radical aesthetic diff erence such as indigenous and folk art, the very practices global aesthetic contemporaneity excludes, and whether indeed it can rise to this challenge. But before relational aes-thetics can be taken on an experimental foray into the realm of culture, some framing of its main tenets and current state of aff airs is required.

Th e French curator Nicolas Bourriaud formulated the framework of relational aesthetics in the late 1990s in response to the new kind of art he saw emerging at the time, which he deemed unreadable by existing critical paradigms. In his just over 100-page exposé of the same title, the curator draws on an eclectic mix of theorists, philosophers and artists. His tone is oft en polemic and at times messianic, and he takes pot shots at an array of ‘enemies’ ranging from ‘contemporary supplier/client’ relations to ‘feminism, anti-racism and environmentalism’ 67 that are presented as in league with a disguised corporate conservatism. He proposes to rewrite art history along the lines of relationality, 68 invokes user-friendly, interactive technologies as ideological frameworks for the new spaces of relational-ity created in the gallery 69 and draws on, or, as Alliez would say, ‘nastily co-opts’, 70 notions of an interconnected subjectivity developed by Guattari. His ideas have been infl uential but have also received fi erce critical atten-tion. In what follows, key themes of relational aesthetics and its critical responses will be presented.

According to Bourriaud, the new type of art he was witnessing in the 1990s was interested in creating a social environment in which people could come together and participate in a shared activity. He referred to this trend as the ‘birth of the viewer’. For him this work foregrounded artist–audience collaborations as artists set up scenarios for the audience to ‘use’ and participate in. Rirkrit Tiravanija and his signature-style cooking and serving of Pad Th ai in galleries around the globe is presented as a case in point and he serves as an exemplary relational artist in Bourriaud’s


15

Introduction

delineation of relational aesthetics. Citing Guattari, Bourriaud claims a transformative potential for relational art. He bases his argument for relational art’s positive convivial potential and its transformative societal eff ect on Guattari’s emphasis on the connection between the transformation of subjectivity and societal change, a cornerstone of the latter’s ecosophy. Bourriaud furthermore contrasts this new convivial mode of art and its emphasis on ‘ways of living and models of action within the existing real’ 71 with ‘a passé avant-garde utopianism’. 72 For him the utopian radicalism and revolutionary hopes of the old avant-garde have now given way to everyday micro-utopias of the ‘community or neighbourhood committee type’ 73 that allow for ‘alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed conviviality’ 74 to be developed.

Bourriaud’s proposition of relational aesthetics has been of profound infl uence in the sphere of art. Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine , for instance, considers relational art’s ‘public-oriented mix of performance, social sculpture, architecture, design, theory, theatre, and fun and games’ 75 to be ‘the most infl uential art strain to emerge in art since the early seventies’. He also states that relational aesthetics ‘re-engineered art over the past fi ft een years or so’ and that its impact ‘can be seen in count-less exhibitions’. 76 Th is assessment is underscored by the fact that artists associated with relational art have achieved and sustained glittering artis-tic careers, remain highly visible in gallery and biennial circuits, and are equally present in major international art shows held at museums. In 2008, for example, the Guggenheim showed a group retrospective of many of the artists associated with relational aesthetics called ‘theanyspacewhatever’ that was considered a landmark as it was the ‘fi rst big exhibition devoted exclusively to the group in an American museum’. 77 And in 2011 there were three signifi cant shows of core artists associated with relational aesthetics just in New York. Th is show of force of relational art was kicked off by the artist Tiravanija, frequently referred to as the ‘poster boy of relational aes-thetics’ 78 at Gavin Brown’s ‘Fear Eats the Soul’ (5 March to 23 April 2011), followed by Carsten Höller showing in the New Museum (26 October 2011 to 15 January 2012) and a major exhibition of Maurizio Cattelan’s work at the Guggenheim (4 November 2011 to 22 January 2012). Moreover the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently acquired and displayed Tiravanija’s piece Untitled 1992/1995/2007 (Free/Still) . 79


16


But while relational aesthetics continues to be of infl uence in the contemporary art world, it has also attracted fi erce criticism. Th e recent concentration of relational art in New York rekindled fi ery exchanges about relational aesthetics fi rst unleashed by Claire Bishop’s 2004 article Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics . Cardinal critiques of relational art revolve around its lack of self-refl exivity and acknowledgement of larger contexts that impact on art. Relational art’s assumption of art’s autonomy and its claim that social spaces created by encounters in the gallery qualify as zones of exemption from capitalism and hence are asserted as emancipa-tory sites have also drawn heavy criticism. 80 In a similar vein, the imme-diacy of the ‘real’ posited by relational art is proposed as an unconstructed space that allows for the dissolution of art into life has also attracted critical attention. As critics point out, what actually occurs is a dissolution of art into the very capitalist life that relational art is claiming to overcome. Th e quality of the interactivity solicited by many relational art works is a fur-ther bone of contention and is challenged on the grounds that interactivity per se without raised awareness or critical consciousness amounts to noth-ing but self-congratulatory entertainment. 81

In addition the notion of the gift , invoked in particular in relation to Tiravanija’s repeated acts of cooking and serving of free food in exhibition spaces, has also been mobilized. Drawing on Maussian discussions of the gift economy, critics point out that the gift is never truly free but trades social status and indebtednesses for what is seemingly given away. In other words while the gift economy is not a capitalist form of marketization, it is nonetheless a veritable economy, with acts of gift ing represent-ing an exchange of social capital rather than true acts of generosity, as Tiravanija’s off erings of food tend to be framed. 82 For some critics, this lack of self-refl exivity by relational artists and their star curators place their gallery events in the proximity to free events at the mall laid on for consumers as part of a public relations event; a development that merges the museum with the entertainment industry and highlights the fact that museums, now reliant on corporate sponsorship for economic survival, have undergone profound reconceptualizations. 83 Relational aesthetics has hence been labelled a ‘contemporary populism’ ‘characterized by the selective, participatory interactive governmentality of infotainment’ 84 and a ‘new consumerist model for counter-culture’. 85


17

Introduction

Claire Bishop raised further concerns about the political model that underpins relational aesthetics and critiques the granting of democratic credentials to the most trivial intersubjective encounters in the gallery. For her, democracy involves a negotiated resolution of confl ict rather than the forced grin of a happy consensus. 86 Th e artist and critic Joe Scanlan takes this objection one step further. He argues that the relational bonhomie in the gallery smacks of repressive peer pressure premised on the threat of public humiliation as an in-built control mechanism and is closer to anaes-thesia than a fulfi lled (micro-)utopia as claimed. 87

Yet there is a further neglected issue regarding the conviviality of rela-tional gallery events that needs to be mentioned here: the mental bracket-ing out of the larger cultural and economic contexts of artists, galleries, museum spaces, biennials, host cities and countries, and respective audi-ences that frame the work, engage with its scenarios and infl ect its mean-ing. Questions that are on the whole not addressed in the critical literature are how the cooking and sharing of Pad Th ai reads in New York and Korea, Venice and Sydney, Havana and Johannesburg and so forth – that is, how the cultural contexts of articulation and display impact on the meaning of the work. 88

While Bourriaud does not address issues of culture in Relational Aesthetics , he does so in his later articulation of ‘alter-modernity’ through the fi gure of the ‘radicant’ that will be discussed in what follows for the sake of completeness, even though he loses sight of the relational in these propositions. According to Bourriaud the fi gure of the ‘radicant’ constitutes a new type of global super- fl âneur who sets roots while in motion and engages in an ethical translation of cultural codes as he passes through the world. Th e aim of radicant perambulations is to arrive at a truly worldwide culture of the ‘altermodern’. 89 Bourriaud off ers this new type of global artist as a panacea for what he sees as the post-modern reifi cation of diff erence that has generated a multiculturalist apartheid. He claims to have created a new system of thought that is capable of ‘making connections between disparate cultures without denying each one’s singularity’; 90 that is the invention of a world culture by itinerant artist-semionauts or nomadic sign gatherers 91 uniquely able to engage in acts of cultural translation that do not impose but transpose and trans-plant to create new worlds. 92


18


But how this ethical and happy translation is to be achieved in diff er-ent and maybe also diffi cult cultural terrains is left to individual radicant artists operating alone ‘in the fi eld’. Th eir magic wand is the knowledge of the digital binary code as the new modality of reading and transmitting images. For Bourriaud, this allows for information to fl ow easily from one code to another in a manner that erases notions of origin and of originality. Based on this model, Bourriaud declares translatability a key criterion for global contemporary art and his construct of the ‘altermodern’ lays claim to an ethics of ‘recognition of the other’. 93 Bourriaud contrasts this con-temporary ‘transferism’ to what he sees as the traditional, multiculturalist model where artists ‘merely import the signs of their visual culture and give them a vague face-lift , and thus help to reify them and reify themselves in an act of self-exploitation’, engaging in what he refers to as ‘a little cottage industry of signs’. 94 For Bourriaud there is thus only one possible retort to the problems of the multiculturalist: to ‘surf on forms without penetrating them’, ‘to move in cultures without identifying with them’, to accept the ‘destiny of man without aura’ 95 and without origin. He enlists the internet as an ‘ideal metaphor for the state of global culture’ as it constitutes ‘a liquid ribbon on whose surface we are learning to pilot thought’ 96 and posits the capacity to navigate information as central for the intellectual or artist.

According to Bourriaud, this future mobilized world is to be ushered in by the eff orts of a nomadic tribe of artists who, cut loose from their origins, glide across the globe propelled by digital binarity. Curiously though, as Bourriaud posits, these lone-star radicant artists are all headed in the same direction – the future world of the ‘altermodern’ epitomized by the ‘immigrant, the exile, the tourist, and the urban wanderer’. 97 For Bourriaud the ‘ diasporic mobilization of signs’ generated by the interven-tions of these art-nomads goes beyond a mere multiculturalist recognition of the other as viatorized signs are transformed and displaced as the artists pass through heterogeneous territories. For Bourriaud this constitutes an ethical response to alterity. 98 He counters ‘the problem of multiculturalism’ and its quantifying and reifying approach to cultures with ‘intercultural-ism’ or the ‘double dialogue of artists’ 99 who mediate between their artistic cultures of origin and the aesthetic values derived from the modern.

Echoing Deleuze and Guattari, he furthermore off ers a vegetal imaginary for this new globality, invoking couch grass and suckers on strawberry


19

Introduction

plants, that is, botanicals that develop secondary roots in addition to their primary ones, to underpin his theorizations. According to Bourriaud, this new fi gure of the artist, the ‘radicant’, has successfully adapted to the new global environment of economic and cultural fl ows. He characterizes the new global art world epitomized by the ‘radicant’ as a place where all forms co-exist peacefully in a happy new world of jolly ‘altermodernity’ 100 even if this sphere remains, for unexplained reasons, rooted in Euro-American notions of the modern. Bourriaud admittedly mentions, if only briefl y, the existence of a continued diff erential between the centre and the periphery which he sees as economically rather than culturally grounded and accepts as a given that is not further refl ected upon. His propositions on artis-tic mobilization and transcoding thus remain highly abstract and avoid any concrete reference to cultural specifi city and locality. Reading these hypotheses, one can but wonder how Bourriaud’s earlier emphasis on encounter could be so thoroughly displaced by a notion of translation that slides and slithers along cultural surfaces without taking time to stop and meet, be with, or engage.

But can relational aesthetics be redeemed and rearticulated to negotiate the kind of cultural encounters central to the global condition of contem-porary art, or should it be considered a lost cause? Despite the fi erce criti-cism that relational aesthetics has attracted, surprisingly the philosopher Stewart Martin argues that relational aesthetics can be salvaged. While critical of what he sees as Bourriaud’s limited conception of relational aesthetics, he lauds relational art for tackling the issue of social exchange in a capitalist society which, in his view, any critical art practice or theory needs to address. 101 He furthermore credits relational art (along with art photography) for setting ‘the terms of debate over what form a critical art of the social can take today’. 102

Yet Martin goes one step further still with the redemption of relational aesthetics. He argues that once the aspect of commodifi cation disavowed by Bourriaud is taken into account, relational aesthetics has the poten-tial to constitute a truly critical theory of contemporary art that off ers a dialectic of commodifi cation and art. For Martin, this opens up a diff er-ent reading of the practice, a ‘third way’ that interpolates the entrenched stand-off between notions of pure art and anti-art. According to Martin, relational aesthetics thus potentially achieves an immanent critique of


20


capitalist exchange relations and overcomes the reifi cation of art without destroying it, off ering an ambivalent presentation of the contradictions of an art of social exchange that no longer runs the danger of slipping into an aestheticization of capitalist exchange. He thus lays the blame for the per-ceived limitations of relational aesthetics squarely at Bourriaud’s feet but inadvertently also implicates its critical receptors who ran with the models laid out by Bourriaud rather than drawing out aspects of relational art not developed by its author.

Th is book adopts a diff erent but not unrelated perspective and seeks to critically experiment with the emphasis on encounter that relational aesthetics has brought to the fore. It aims to tease out neglected aspects and potentialities of this immensely successful yet problematic framework that now constitutes if not the , then certainly an ‘academy’, by extending relational art beyond its habitual framework into the realm of cultural alterity. Th is discussion thus suggests that the potential of engaging with cultural alterity opened up by the platform of relational aesthetics has been underexplored, a critical omission it seeks to address.

Th e project is furthermore concerned with the new hegemonic meta- language of contemporary art, and responds to the challenge of how Laymert Garcia dos Santos’s ‘post-underdeveloped, post-peripheral, and tropical Brazilian eye’ can be situated in view of the global contemporary. Th e discussion thus revolves around a specifi c kind of cultural alterity and its encounter with an increasingly globalized contemporary art prac-tice: the visual cultures of indigenous peoples and other traditions classed as ‘tribal art’ or ‘folk art’ which were disavowed as art, relegated to the sphere of anthropology, and yet appropriated for art.

Th e concern is to experimentally challenge the new globality of art in view of the contemporaneity of such alterior visual cultures. Th e book approaches this challenge not in the form of an abstract treatise but makes the case that a diff erent approach is needed for this inquiry. It revolves around the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, a prime relational artist instrumental to Bourriaud’s conception of relational aesthetics (see Figures 2.1 – 2.3 ), and discusses his work in relation to two specifi c examples of minority art: the visual practices of the Shipibo-Conibo design culture of the Amazon region (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2 ) and Tamil domestic drawings (see Figures 6.1 – 6.4 ).


21

Introduction

Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires to Th ai parents and was raised in Th ailand, Ethiopia and Canada. He subscribes to a Buddhist outlook on art and life, lives and works in Chiang Mai (Th ailand), New York and Berlin, and epitomizes the global art-nomad. His work is not related to Amazon or Tamil visual cultures which constitute radically alterior aesthetic practices that do not fi t the remit of international art.

So why bring these practices together in this discussion? Th e argument is that all three practices share an element of incommensurability with regard to traditional languages of art and are concerned with life, neigh-bourliness and communal relations that will serve as points of connection.

Th e abstract geometric design language of Shipibo-Conibo art (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2 ) has appealed to audiences with a predilection for mod-ernist aesthetics for decades and Shipibo-Conibo art objects have enthralled collectors and anthropologists alike. Anthropological museums around the world have stocked up on their ceramics, 103 yet despite best eff orts, attempts to decode these designs have largely failed. Th e designs, furthermore, are premised on a traditional notion of conviviality deeply rooted in Amazon culture that provides an interesting counterpoint to relational aesthetics. Southern Indian threshold designs (see Figures 6.1 – 6.4 ) have also fallen foul of Western-centric aesthetic conventions. Found in front of homes, shops and municipal buildings, the designs are a constant, ever-changing presence on streets across the Indian subcontinent and are thought to have been handed down from mother to daughter since time immemorial. 104 Yet for the women, the question of art does not arise: they see the designs as part of their domestic duties. Th e patterns are drawn as an off ering to their families and local community, are created in order to be erased by everyday life and therefore speak to relational art.

Th e question posed in this discussion, therefore, is whether relational aesthetics – which foregrounds the everyday and emphasizes inter-human relationality – can off er a conceptual framework able to register these alterior cultural practices in a non-pejorative manner. It explores whether the aes-thetics proposed by relational art can be expanded into the sphere of culture and if it can off er productive modes of engagement with these radically alte-rior aesthetic practices. Th is discussion thus presents a radical test case.

It furthermore proposes that the task at hand requires the articulation of a method that refl ects this remit and seeks to engage with this question


22


in an experimental and performative manner. As part of this quest, and taking its cue from artistic practices of Tiravanija and the group of artists he associated with, this volume introduces the fi gure of Rikki T, a fi ctitious character who acts as a counter of sorts to Tiravanija, and performatively adds an oblique critique and creativity to the process of art writing. Th e discussion thus stages, with a little help from Rikki T, a fi ctitious encounter between the art of Rirkrit Tiravanija ( Chapter 2 ) and Shipibo-Conibo ( Chapter 4 ) and Tamil designs ( Chapter 6 ), that is, visual practices that not only hail from diff erent parts of the world but also from diff erent places in the hierarchies of the art world. Th e experiment deliberately adopts a triadic approach as the probing of potential relations between only one minority practice and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work would invariably invoke traditional ‘West–Rest’ binaries. Th e project thus inserts relational aesthet-ics into the realm of culture and folds its claimed transformative eff ect back in on itself. Th is allows the framework to be ‘knocked around’ by the forces generated by these staged encounters while its scope for engaging with cultural diff erence is probed. Th e discussion, furthermore, adopts Félix Guattari’s notion of transversality claimed for Bourriaud’s articulation of relational aesthetics as methodological model ( Chapter 1 ). It, however, also exceeds this framework as it engages with a fuller range of Guattarean notions and Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics than Bourriaud envisaged.

Th e project draws in particular on Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation of the non-human grounding of perception ( Faction 3 ) and aesthetics epitomized by the Brown Stagemaker ( Chapter 6 ), as well as the Janus-faced connectivity of discursive and non-discursive registers of Deleuze–Guattarean machinism and its inherent relation to the other ( Chapter 1 ). Th e proposed ‘othering’ of relational aesthetics furthermore reunites the social aspect of Guattari’s ecosophy Bourriaud adopts for his articulation of relational aesthetics with ecosophy’s other three aspects which he disavowed: the animal, vegetable and the cosmic ( Chapter 6 ).

But these staged encounters are not a one-way street. Th e alterior per-spectives introduced to relational aesthetics draw out diff erent aspects of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work, such as the reception of his work in Th ailand ( Chapter 2 ). Th ey also spotlight the disavowal of relational aesthetics’ roots in Buddhist and Th ai cultural values as delineated by Tiravanija ( Chapter 2 ) and draw out the implications of negotiating cultural diff erence in view of


23

Introduction

multiculturalist agendas in the 1990s ( Chapter 4 ). Furthermore, Amazon notions of conviviality are discussed in relation to Bourriaud’s proposi-tions and are argued to off er a corrective to the latter ( Chapter 4 ), just as Tamil notions of territoriality, matter and force put Deleuze and Guattari on the spot for the highly gendered and Eurocentric examples of art on which they draw ( Chapter 6 ). Pointing to the potential of their non-human grounding of art and aesthetics, the encounter with Tamil threshold draw-ings thus carries on where Deleuze and Guattari left off , actualizing latent implications of their aesthetic propositions. Rikki T’s show discussed in this volume ( Faction 1 ), her refl ections ( Factions 2 , 3 and 4 ), as well as dossi-ers of short excerpts from anthropological texts relative to Shipibo-Conibo designs and Tamil threshold drawings ( Chapters 3 and 5 ), also feature and are integral to the premise that the delivery of new content also requires a revision of the methods and tools of delivery ( Chapter 1 ).

Ultimately, however, the expanded notion of relational aesthetics put forward in this volume aims to off er a framework with the potentiality to square the global circle in contemporary art in a way that acknowl-edges cultural situatedness as well as transcultural translative movements, disposes of false assumptions of transparency in cultural encounter and alters the normativity of Eurocentric hegemony in the arts while invariably, albeit self-refl exively employing the Europe-derived conceptual tools at the world’s disposal. 105 Th e project thus is envisaged as a transformative and connective intervention in the spheres of contemporary art, aesthetic theory and anthropology that expands relational aesthetics beyond the gallery, and re-envisages relations between contemporary art, aesthetics, anthropology and cultural translation.


24

1 Transversality, Relational Aesthetics

and Modes of Writing

Th is project is committed to experimentally expand relational aesthetics into the sphere of culture and revolves around transformative encoun-ters between the art of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Shipibo-Conibo and Tamil designs, and the fi ctitious artist Rikki T. A further key issue this chapter explores is the question, What might constitute an appropriate mode of writerly address for this project? Methodologically it takes inspiration from Guattari’s conception of the transversal, and experiments with how this notion can be engaged and translated into a method that refl ects the project’s intellectual horizons and concerns. It thus seeks to conjunctively explore Guattari’s notion of transversality and subjectivity, Bourriaud’s interpretation of Guattari’s ideas in relational aesthetics, anthropology’s self-refl exive engagement with writing, issues of ‘speaking for’, questions of criticality in art as well as Fabian’s notion of the coeval as fundamental conditions of the global contemporary. 1

Transversality as Method

Guattari’s conception of transversality is intimately linked to the re- envisaged, productive notion of subjectivity he proposed as part of his critique of psychoanalysis. He sought to develop a creative, therapeutic


25

Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

model that expands psychoanalysis beyond the analyst–analysand cou-pling epitomized by the couch. Guattari initially focused his critique on the role played by psychoanalytic contexts such as the psychiatric institution and its inhabitants. But he soon broadened this focus and declared the interconnectivity of the three ecological registers of environment, social relations and human subjectivity 2 central to his reoriented understanding of subjectivity, on which Bourriaud’s articulation of relational aesthetics draws. Guattari takes issue with the scientifi c orientation of psychoanalysis and sees the established therapeutic method as participating in a symbolic order that ‘weighs down like a deterministic lead cape, like a deathly fate’ on human existentiality. 3 For him a constructive therapeutic framework needs to be based on an integrated and transformative strategy, which takes personal and collective aspects into account.

His revised processual notion of subjectivity, characterized by fl ux and creative leaps, is therefore also characterized by exchanges with contextual collectivities. For Guattari, the individual can no longer be seen as the ‘other’ of society. 4 Furthermore, his collective repositioning of subjectivity abandons the notion of the bounded and centric subject as ‘a nucleus of sensibility, of expressivity – the unifi er of states of consciousness’. 5 It rather stresses the porousness of an individual now seen to fundamentally par-ticipate in a whole range of environments as part of dispersed actualities or vectors of subjectifi cation that as partial subjectivities are located beyond the order of signifi cation. 6 For him, these breakaway or dissident subjec-tivities are the prime means of liberation from semiotic fi xity. 7

Th e subject for Guattari is thus no longer a straightforward matter. It is linked to ‘all sorts of other ways of existing’ 8 outside consciousness. It con-sists of ‘components of subjectifi cation’ 9 that have their own autonomous existence and meet in the interiority of the subject conceived as a place of encounter for diverse trajectories that pass through it and harbour a pro-ductive potential. Guattari refers to these generative forces as ‘machinic’, a term not to be confused with mechanistic. 10 Rather, Guattarean machin-ism is defi ned as a multiplicity-generating operative mode with a ‘collec-tive character’ 11 situated ‘before’ or ‘alongside’ ‘discursive subject–object relations’. 12 It brings together various modes of existence in a contact zone or machinic interface where multiple exchanges can occur. 13 For Guattari, machines are as diverse as the territories they traverse and link in the


26


process, reshaping them by a ‘sort of dynamism’. 14 Th e creation of machinic assemblages is central to Guattari’s notion of the transversal. It, however, does not create bonded parts or new fusions, but generates an ‘assemblage of possible fi elds, of virtual as much as constituted elements, without any notion of generic or species’ relation’. 15 Machinism’s transversal move-ments are thus characterized by an enormous variety and variability of connectivity and infl uence. Th ey underpin the constitutive heterogeneity Guattari posits at the heart of subjectivation and generate processual open-ings for new, future productions of subjectivity. 16

For Guattari, this is central as it allows for a therapeutic optimism lacked by traditional approaches to human individuation. Psychoanalysis is now no longer based on a transferential interpretation of symptoms understood as a function of a pre-existing, latent content. It rather is ‘the invention of new catalytic nuclei capable of bifurcating existence’ 17 engendered by machinic interactions that are key for the transversalism of the processes of subjectivation. Guattari supports these statements with evidence from his clinical practice at the psychiatric hospital La Borde, and presents the idea that the event can act as ‘the potential bearer of new constellations of Universes of reference’. 18

Take a simple example: a patient in the course of treatment remains stuck on a problem, going round in circles, and coming up against a wall. One day he says, without giving it much thought: ‘I have been thinking of taking up driving lessons again, I haven’t driven for years’; or, ‘I feel like learning word processing.’ A remark of this kind may remain unnoticed in a traditional conception of analysis. However, this kind […] can become a key […] which will not only modify the immediate behaviour of the patient, but open up new fi elds of virtuality for him: the renewal of contact with long lost acquaintances, revis-iting old haunts, regaining self-confi dence […] 19

Th is passage demonstrates an instance of transversality that underscores a productive notion of subjectivity. As new existential territories are claimed, the subject takes off , and moves into a terrain beyond itself. Guattari refers to this phenomenon as ‘auto-production’ or ‘auto-poiesis’ and sees it as constitutive of a processual ethico-aesthetic paradigm modelled on artistic


27


creativity, which he proposes as an alternative to traditional psychoanalytic approaches. He holds that psychoanalysis has everything to gain from art’s ability to generate the unprecedented and unexpected. In his view, art is the perfect antidote to what he considers the shackles of science. But he also warns that art ‘does not have a monopoly on creation’. 20 He champions art as the much-needed dissensual creator of productive ruptures in the textures of meaning, yet qualifi es this by stating that he does not mean the kind of work that circulates in the institutions of the art world but refers to ‘a proto-aesthetic paradigm’ that represents ‘a dimension of creation in a nascent state’. 21 Th erefore, for him art is the activity of a ‘subjective creativ-ity, which traverses the generations and oppressed peoples, ghettoes and minorities’, and he sees ‘the aesthetic paradigm’ 22 as foundational ‘for every possible form of liberation’. 23

Th ese repositionings of subjectivity and aesthetics are central to Guattari’s philosophy of immanence that revolves around the notion of non-identical being-as-becoming understood as representative of a world of potentials qualifi ed by partiality rather than totality. Th is understanding is off ered as an epistemological alternative to the transcendental in Western philosophy characterized by universals and fi xity. 24 Guattari emphasizes a manner of being and a condition of self-identity that is no longer tied to transcendental points of reference, 25 but is based on ‘generative praxes of heterogeneity and complexity’. 26 For Guattari, this ‘should lead to the fall of the “ontological Iron Curtain” […], the philosophical tradition erected between mind and matter’, 27 and constitutes a conception that is potent for this discussion, as neither Shipibo-Conibo nor Tamil worldviews subscribe to a mind–matter dualism.

A transversal methodology based on the collective reconceptualization of subjectivity therefore not only resonates with conceptions of human interconnectedness claimed for relational aesthetics but also with the ‘indigenous’ epistemologies with which this exploration is concerned. Furthermore, Guattari’s notion of transversality and the machine off ers new departures for thinking that the ‘other’ as the machine ‘always depends on exterior elements in order to be able to exist’ 28 and is permanently installed in ‘a relation of alterity’. 29 Guattari thus sees the machinic as guarantor of a transgressive connectedness of mind and matter, that is, the non-discursive infi nitude and discursive fi nitudes of ‘energetico-spatio-temporal fl uxes’ 30


28


fundamentally linked to potentialities and to becomings, which he sees as characteristic of a forward-looking, future-oriented stance.

Guattari translated these ideas into therapeutic practice through a regular displacement of institutional hierarchies or a ‘peripatetic psychia-try that is not stuck behind a desk’. 31 His method for creating transver-sal moments in a regularized institutional scenario was to introduce La Grille or the Grid , a schedule of rotating tasks undertaken by the staff of La Borde. Th is was not easy to implement, as it involved a doctor’s accept-ance of a periodic suspension of his or her authority. It also proved diffi cult to fi nd compatible, rotatable duties: while medical staff could quite easily be persuaded to ‘take up tasks such as dishwashing’, 32 it was much more diffi cult to get non-medical staff to perform functions relating to patient care. As Guattari relates, the ‘compromises were many, the fears were great’. 33 For Guattari this transformation and diversifi cation of institutional routines represented a transversalization of hierarchy that demonstrated the mutability of inherited models and provided the opportunity for an active participation in social aff airs, which Guattari refers to as ‘initiatic’ moments. 34 For him they created a space where transformation could take place, where a group of people could overcome their separateness and ‘come together in the “fl ash of a common praxis”, in mutual reciprocity rather than mutual Otherness’. 35 And even though transformations charac-terized by a transversal fl ash can only be momentarily achieved, the trans-formative eff ect can be considerable. He saw this ‘mobile analysis’ as an antidote to the rigidity of the power relationship between the analysand and the analyst that displaced traditional, limited transference scenarios, which, according to Guattari, obstruct transversal relations, only allow for a vertical hierarchy and create negative societal structures in the form of fi xations on the super-ego ‘indelibly stamped by daddy’s authority’. 36

Bourriaud picks up on these ideas and reinterprets them for scenarios in contemporary art that for him epitomize scenarios similar to Guattari’s institutional therapeutic mobilizations. He adopts Guattari’s productive reframing of subjectivity and the centrality of an aesthetic paradigm for emancipatory processes but repositions Guattari’s understanding of the ‘proto-aesthetic’ which did not refer to professional art practice by associating it with the fi eld of fi ne art. Bourriaud defends this move with the argument that ‘artistic practice forms a special terrain for this individuation,


29


providing potential models for human existence in general’. 37 He sees con-temporary art as a privileged generator of a liberating transversality and endorses Guattari’s assessment that the solution to the current political and ecological crisis lies in the reinvention of ‘the ways in which we live as cou-ples or in the family, in an urban context or at work, etc.’. 38 He emphasizes that ‘social utopias and revolutionary hopes have given way to everyday micro-utopias’ 39 and states that the ‘subversive and critical function of contemporary art is achieved by the invention of individual and collective vanishing lines’. 40 For him the ‘friendship culture’ 41 in contemporary art inadvertently expresses Guattari’s ideas, and artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija who have ‘no preordained idea about what would happen’ 42 in the gallery scenarios they set up and who depend on audience participation to complete the work exemplify this correlation.

For Bourriaud, this transposition of Guattarean notions of aesthetics into the fi eld of art is not counter to Guattari’s thought even though his aesthetic paradigms did not encompass gallery art. Bourriaud holds that contemporary art qualifi es to be included in Guattari’s ethico-aesthetics as these ‘works are no longer paintings, sculptures, or installations, all terms corresponding with categories of mastery and types of products, but simple surfaces , volumes and devices , which are dovetailed within strategies of exist-ence’. 43 For Bourriard, contemporary art practice characterized by ‘sam-pling’ and the ‘recycling of socialized and historicized forms’ 44 produces partial objects ‘whose assumption of autonomy makes it possible to “ foster new fi elds of reference ” ’ 45 and hence introduces the gallery as venue for the creation of new subjectivities. 46 Th e contemporary artist is thus accorded a place of special importance in Bourriaud’s relational scenario and is now defi ned as ‘a world of subjectivization on the move’. 47

Bourriaud thus equates Guattari’s machinic production of subjectivity that generates new forms of existence through an aff ective contamination by the territories it passes through with an artist’s movement through physical space. Th is literalization of Guattari’s processual notion of sub-jectivity characterized by the fl ux of partial subjectivities and contextual collectivities lies at the heart of Bourriaud’s claim to the transversal for relational aesthetics. However, he leaves experimentation to the artists. For him, the question of transversality as a mode of critical textual and theoretical address does not arise. My project proposes that this omission


30


turns his adoption of Guattarean concepts into a signifying regime and constitutes a mere switching out of concepts. It demonstrates a ‘business as usual’ approach to criticality that separates thinking about art from the transformative processes claimed for relational art. Bourriaud continues to write from a stance of authority and uses Guattarean notions to adopt the very ‘mode of science’ that Guattari was so passionately seeking to disrupt. Th is project sees this approach as inconsistent and argues that Bourriaud’s claiming of the Guattarean toolbox only references the tools rather than experiments with them. Th is project’s challenge is to develop a critical mode that disrupts the voice of authority and is immersed in and moves through and with the terrain discussed. But how could such a transver-sal mode of writerly address be envisaged? How can a discursive project operate in a transversalist chaosophic mode and provide a framework for conceptual and artistic coordinates and points of reference to rebound on each other?

Th ese are diffi cult questions, especially as transversality defi es cut and dried standards applicable across the board. It rather remains a ‘creature of the middle, a non-localizable space’, 48 a potentiality of the ‘in-between’ that can only be approached indirectly. Its operations are always particular and specifi c and can only be defi ned by singling out pertinent traits. Th ey include high levels of experimentation, an emphasis on non-hierarchical systems, and link discursive and non-discursive, signifying and a-signifying elements. Transversality is also associated with a preference for the frag-ment, an orientation towards potentialities and the future, and the inter-relation and connectivity between heterogeneous materials. Th e outcome of a methodology based on such elements furthermore will always remain uncertain. And while Guattari underscores that the ‘primary purpose of eco-sophic cartography is thus not to signify and communicate but to produce assemblages of enunciation’, 49 he also acknowledges that we live in a world of co-implication and that his ethico-aesthetic meta-modelizations are characterized by double-articulation. He thus warns that any substitution of one mode for another simply engenders yet another, if diff erent, one-dimensionality, and only replaces one set of values with another. 50 Machinic crossings and couplings, by contrast, link actualized and incor-poreal universes, discursive and non-discursive states. Th ey participate in chaosmotic foldings that superpose ‘the immanence of infi nity and


31


fi nitude onto the immanence of complexity and chaos’, 51 which exist in related, parallel worlds, rather than as consummate oppositionalities. Th e transformative potential of the transversal thus needs to be seen against the foil of cultural and historical givens and any one-sided unleashing of processualities constitutes a misinterpretation of ecosophic cartography. 52

Th e challenge is to transpose these perspectives into a fl exible structure that off ers discursivity and potentiality and allows for the examination of cultural contexts without perpetuating certainties. Th us, the objective is to generate themed traversals of selected topographies which, mindful of the specifi city of respective cultural contexts, encompass signifi cation yet generate creative openings between these fi elds. Th e aim, furthermore, is to develop a writerly mode of address that sets up the conditions for a trans-formative encounter and takes the reader through the conceptual terrain in a processual and aff ective manner. Th is ambition poses no small challenge and in what follows, critical refl ections in the fi eld of anthropology on the incongruities of ‘writing culture’, especially in view of how non-discursive anthropological fi eldwork experiences are transformed into academic treatises, will be examined for clues.

Anthropology and the Textual

Th e anthropologists Cliff ord Geertz, James Cliff ord and George Marcus question the possibility of unconditioned description. 53 Th ey draw atten-tion to the literary and rhetorical constitutedness of anthropological texts and the uneven acts of cross-cultural translation that inform them. Th ey have also queried how intense, intersubjective engagements, arduous bodily experiences and the phenomenon of cultural shock characteristic of fi eldwork situations are transformed into smooth, univocal, authorita-tive academic accounts. For example, Cliff ord asks, How ‘is a garrulous, over determined, cross cultural encounter shot through with power rela-tions and personal cross purposes circumscribed as an adequate version of a more-or-less discrete “other world”, composed by an individual author?’ 54

But the issue is not just how experience is translated into text. A fur-ther concern is how the conditionalities of cross-cultural representations and genres of writing that are deeply engrained in the anthropological fi eld impact on the writing of fi eldwork accounts. Ethnographic realism,


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that is, the ‘pretence of looking at the world directly, as though through a one-way screen’, 55 is a fundamental anthropological trope that has drawn intense criticism for its assumption of scientifi c objectivity in the context of participant-observation as research model. Ethnographic writing has thus been proposed as ‘cultural fi ction’ rather than fact, pointing to the ‘con-structed, artifi cial nature of cultural accounts’. 56 Where previously ‘literary infl uences’ were held at a distance from the ‘rigorous’ core of the discipline, 57 the literariness of ‘writing culture’ was now established, and the separation of artistic and scientifi c modes of representation unmasked as a historical, culturally construed event. Cliff ord thus sees the separation of spheres that developed in the seventeenth century as constitutive of European culture. He notes that ‘Western science has excluded certain expressive modes from its legitimate repertoire: rhetoric (in the name of “plain”, transparent sig-nifi cation), fi ction (in the name of fact), and subjectivity (in the name of objectivity).’ 58 He also points out that the ‘qualities eliminated from sci-ence were localized in the category of “literature” ’. 59 Once this splitting of science and art, objectivity and subjectivity, was acknowledged the ‘easy realism’ of ethnographic prose could be exposed as a one-sided, ‘inappro-priate mode of scientifi c rhetoric’. 60 Now ‘ “objects”, “facts”, “descriptions”, “inductions”, “generalizations”, “verifi cation”, “experiment”, “truth” ’ 61 – the constitutive elements of the canon of scientifi c rhetoric – were recognized to index a cultural convention, which, even if persuasive, was revealed to be no less constructed than more imaginative modes of writing. Geertz hence speaks of the need to give up ‘the strange idea that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described’. 62

Interpretive anthropology 63 therefore sees as problematic the endeavour to describe cultures ‘as if they were fully observable’ 64 . It considers the burden of authorship weighty, and the trope of a generalized academic persona reporting on an equally generalized ‘absolute subject’ such as ‘the Nuer’, ‘the Trobriand Islander’, or ‘the Balinese’ as no longer feasible. 65 Th ese insights generated a spate of textual experiments that sought to make the subjective basis of accumulating ‘knowledge’ in the fi eld transparent. Th e new consensus was that the world is not directly apprehendable but can only be isolated in sections that are ‘perceptually cut out of the fl ux of experience’. 66 Th is new style of anthropology exposed the rhetorical con-struction of ethnographic authority and foregrounded the inventedness of


33


culture. According to Cliff ord, interpretive anthropology thus ‘demystifi es much of what had previously passed unexamined in the construction of ethnographic narratives, types, observations, and descriptions’. 67 He also points to the ‘increasing visibility of the creative (and in a broad sense, poetic) processes by which “cultural” objects are invented and treated as meaningful’. 68 For Cliff ord and Marcus, literary procedures therefore pervade ethnographic texts as much as any other forms of cultural repre-sentation, 69 and they refer to ethnographic texts as ‘serious fi ctions’. 70

Cliff ord furthermore endorses a perspective of ‘partiality of cultural and historical truths’ 71 and sees the selective constructedness of cultural representations as inevitably given. For him, even the best ethnographic texts ‘are systems, or economics, of truth’ 72 and he acknowledges that ‘power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully control’. 73 Th e awareness of the limitations of representation is crucial here. Acts of ‘writing culture’ were now recognized to require a rigorous, committed partiality as ‘a source of representational tact’ 74 rather than ethnographic self-absorption or the conclusion that it is impossible to know anything about other cultures. And as the genre of ‘ethnographic realism’ unravelled, self-refl exive fi eldwork accounts emerged, where the author, oft en adopting a confessional mode, refl ected on contextual and epistemological issues that impinged on his or her fi eldwork account. Th e fi rst-person singular thus became popular and was employed in autobiographical essays and ironic self-portraits as the individual ethnographer, previously obscured, took centre stage as a character in ethnographic fi ctions.

Th e issue of ‘speaking for’ also emerged as part of these critical refl ec-tions, and ‘ethnographic ventriloquism’, that is, ‘the claim to speak not just about another form of life but to speak from within it’, 75 became prob-lematic. Ethnographic texts subsequently were orchestrated as multivocal exchanges and were situated in politically charged situations. Dialogic constructions also became popular, which gave a voice to informants and positioned the ethnographer and the informant in a visible, if staged, inter-subjective relation. In his refl ections on ethnographic writing, Cliff ord thus wonders whether the ethnographic author should ‘portray what natives think by means of a Flaubertian “free indirect style” ’, 76 or whether a less homogenous style ‘fi lled with Dickens’ “diff erent voices” ’ 77 is best suited for the ‘portrayal of other subjectivities’. 78


34


Yet even ‘alternative’ formats that give prominence to circumstantial elements, performatively present the give-and-take of fi eldwork situa-tions and introduce a counterpoint to monologic constructions of ethno-graphic authority are recognized to remain cultural representations that present a ‘displacement, but not elimination of, monological authority’. 79 As Cliff ord points out, any fi ctional dialogue is inevitably a ‘condensation, a simplifi ed representation of complex, multi-vocal processes’. 80 And even a dialogic framing does not necessarily forestall the danger of staging the cultural counterparts as representative of their cultures in absolutist terms. Direct citations of informants’ contributions, and scenarios where native informers ‘dictate’ what is to be recorded also do not altogether solve the problem. Th ese strategies only partially displace ethnographic authority, as the fi nal product still relies on the ‘virtuoso orchestration by a single author of all the discourses in his or her text’. 81 Yet despite these limitations, com-pelling experiments with multi-authored strategies were carried out where discursive ethnographies succeed in presenting the ‘other’ as a speaking subject ‘who sees as well as is seen, who evades, argues back, probes back’. 82

Anthropological self-refl exivity therefore acknowledges that ‘ethnog-raphy encounters others in relation to itself ’ 83 and rehearses a ‘constant reconstitution of selves and others through specifi c exclusions, conventions, and discursive practices’. 84 Anthropology’s grappling with issues of repre-sentation hence is closely related to the realization that the very ‘assump-tion that self and other can be gathered in a stable narrative coherence’ 85 and that the ‘other’ can be understood is problematic. Lévi-Strauss for example describes the following situation in Tristes Tropiques :

Th ey were as close to me as a refl ection in a mirror; I could touch them, but I could not understand them. I had been given, at one and the same time, my reward and my punishment. […] I had only to succeed in guessing what they were like for them to be deprived of their strangeness […] Or if […] they retained their strangeness, I could make no use of it, since I was incapable of even grasping what it consisted of. 86

Anthropological texts that experiment with textual strategies and seek to undercut monologic authorial conceptions therefore off er a relational approach to culture where interpretation emerges from diverse, reciprocal


35


situations, and cultural realities are recognized to be multi-subjective, power-laden, incongruent and processual. Th ey also resist fi nal summations and the ‘anthropological other’, traditionally construed as ‘primitive’, ‘tribal’, ‘pre-literate’ and ‘ahistorical’, now appears as an articulate cultural broker who not only partakes in historical time, but also participates in a contem-porary, collaborative scenario.

Th ese insights are central for this discussion and the question of what approach might be appropriate for this project. But where do they leave the question of what constitutes a mode of critical address appropriate for this project, given that a residual authorial authority can never be wholly suspended? What textual model can be singled out as most fi tting? Cliff ord holds that apart from ‘scientifi c realism,’ all styles are equally appropri-ate for ethnographic writing, as there is ‘room for invention within each paradigm’. 87 He acknowledges that the author, as ‘coherent presentation presupposes a controlling mode of authority’ but also points out ‘that this imposition of coherence on an unruly textual process is now, inescapably, a matter of strategic choice’. 88 For Cliff ord, ‘writing culture’ thus becomes an exercise in selective, creative enactments of textual strategies that maintain a stance of innovation and rupture, while acknowledging the inevitability of authorial predispositions and centricities. Th is stance echoes Guattari’s caution that the transversal always operates on the basis of co-implication, that signifi cation and non-discursivity go hand-in-hand.

But a further issue needs to be examined here: the force of encounter, the eff ect of its ‘eventness’, and the creative rupture this may engender. In other words, how can the aff ectivity of any such meetings be imparted in writing? Th e anthropologist Stephen Tyler proposes the fragment as ‘weapon’ against the ‘crime of natural history in the mind’, 89 which seeks to arrest cultural givens in representational fi xtures. For him this can take the form of classifi cations, generalizations, structuralist signifi cations, dialogic representations of native discourse, or unconscious patterns. He holds that an ethnography of co-written narratives requires a fractious approach to writing which echoes the disjointedness of the present-day societal ‘real’ and of the fi eldwork experience which is not ‘organized around familiar ethnological categories such as kinship, economy, and religion’. 90 He also adds a therapeutic dimension to cultural poiesis, which comes surprisingly close to aspects of Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm. He states that a


36


‘post-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible word of common sense reality, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic eff ect’. 91

Like Cliff ord, Tyler advocates polyphony and cooperative approaches to cultural narration, but adds paratactic and contrapuntal textual juxtapositions as further elements to allow for emergent textualiza-tions. But for him the crucial ingredient is a participatory perspective, as ‘non-participatory textualisation is alienation’. 92 He declares that a ‘partici-patory and emergent post-modern ethnography cannot have a predeter-mined form’ 93 as any genuine participatory approach needs to allow formats to evolve. For him evocation is key and he argues that ‘if a discourse can be said to “evoke”, then it need not represent what it evokes, though it may be a means to representation’. 94 He thus sees evocation as a liberating factor for anthropology that ‘frees ethnography from mimesis and the inappropriate mode of scientifi c rhetoric’ 95 in which academic writing is embroiled. But for him, evocation does not seek to conjure up absent presences; rather it is ‘a unity, a single event or process’; 96 a description therefore reminiscent of the transversal fl ash which agglomerates self and other, subject and object. 97 Tyler thus conceives this ‘post-scientifi c world’ as an ‘enigmatic and para-doxical […] conjunction of reality and fantasy’. 98 And, again in surprising concordance with Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm, for Tyler the aim is not ‘to foster the growth of knowledge but to restructure experience; […] to restructure the conduct of everyday life’, 99 a concern that also resonates with relational aesthetics’ stated aim of reinventing possibilities for living. And for Tyler it is important to recognize that ethnographic writing ‘might take any form but never be completely realized. Every attempt will always be incomplete.’ 100

Art History and the Practice of Writing

Th e discussions around anthropological self-refl exivity and writing had considerable appeal in the humanities. Th e ensuing crisis of representation whittled away certainties in the humanities and threw modes of describing variously constituted ‘reals’ into relief. Th e questioning of epistemology


37


and interpretation in the humanities brought about a recognition that acts of comprehending the world need to take account of contradictions, paradoxes and uncertainties. Interpretation now was acknowledged as a multiple, open-ended and situated set of perspectives impacted by cultural givens refl ective of diff erence rather than universals. Yet these refl ections were not taken up as avidly in the arts. Art history and art criticism, unlike anthropology, which revolves around fi eldwork and was taken by surprise by the textual turn, were always associated with writerly acts. Moreover diff erent styles of writing have historically been associated with respective paradigms of art theory. Art writing also did not have to struggle with sci-ence as it traditionally looked to aesthetic contemplation and philosophy for epistemological orientation. Th e critique of representation therefore did not usher in a wave of experimental writing or creative innovation in the ‘how to’ of art criticism.

More recently, however, voices have emerged that critique the notion of the critic as ‘authority on matters of art and culture’ and as a fi gure charac-terized by critical distance. 101 Th ey propose that ‘the theorist, rather than being remote from that which he or she surveys’, 102 needs to be ‘enmeshed in the very, perhaps even “creative”, production of the cultural fabric itself ’. 103 But for the cultural theorist Butt this critical unease does not constitute a rerun of deconstruction which took issue with traditional forms of criti-cism in the 1980s. It rather is of a diff erent order: it is ‘post-criticism’. 104 He holds that criticism needs to operate paradoxically as in ‘ para – against and/or beside – the doxa of received wisdom’. 105 He proposes the ‘eventness’ of the critical encounter as the guiding principle, and sees it as indebted to performance studies where writing had to occur aft er the event, that is, in its absence, while seeking to conjure up its ‘full presence’. For Butt, a performative approach to writing does not ‘reproduce the object or event it addresses, but instead enacts it through the very practice of writing’. 106

According to Butt, this refl ects how contemporary writers on art have ‘increasingly come to rethink the relation between art and writing’, 107 and have sought to shift from writing ‘about’ art to writing ‘with’, which ‘enfolds its subject into the very mode of writerly address itself ’. 108 But in contra-distinction to anthropology’s textual experiments, art writing’s creative innovations revolve around the critic’s personal experience. John Seth’s kaleidoscopic narration of his thoughts while searching for a gallery in


38


Manhattan conjoins seemingly haphazard elements, frequently drawn from contexts at a considerable remove from the art world, to perform an oblique critical commentary of the work of Gabriel Orozco. 109 Th is indirect criticality unfolds in the act of reading. It operates by way of evocation rather than unequivocal representation and echoes Stephen Tyler’s empha-sis on a paradoxical conjunction of reality and fantasy, which evokes ‘an understanding’, rather than a rehearsing, of knowledge. Th ese approaches thus contrast sharply with Bourriaud’s mode of writing about contemporary art as he adopts Guattari’s framework to articulate relational aesthetics but falls short of enacting Guattarean concerns through experimentation. Th is omission arguably reduces relational aesthetics as a critical framework to the kind of theory Guattari was writing against, a fact that is further heightened by the experimental approach to writing performed in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative project, A Th ousand Plateaus . What can be taken away therefore from these refl ections and anthropology’s investiga-tion of writerly modes is the importance of textual experimentation and an informed weariness of any semblance of a monologic (ethnographic) authorial stance.

Coevalness and Contemporaneity

A further issue to be negotiated, however, is the question of coevalness raised by the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who argues for a more per-ceptive understanding of contemporaneity in the sense of a ‘shared time’. 110 In his view, anthropological texts are constructed on the very denial of this temporal communality as they have a ‘persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’. 111 For Fabian, anthropology uses time in a ‘schizogenic’ manner since the coevalness experienced dur-ing the fi eldwork is denied when the ethnographer has returned home and engages in academic writing. 112 Th e tendency to position the indigenous other in a disparate time is also prevalent in the art world and informs con-temporary aesthetic discourses that engage with ethnic arts. It constitutes a key issue this book is seeking to address, as ‘it is increasingly diffi cult to get out of each other’s ways’. 113 Th us even though globalization is on everybody’s lips and so-called ‘primitives’ watch television, speak English,


39


Spanish or French, and participate in the contemporary world in numerous ways, the tropes of temporal separation still have traction and need to be addressed. 114

But which writerly mode can best serve the plethora of issues this discussion seeks to engage? Should it be Flaubert or Dickens, experi-ential or interpretive, fragmentary, dialogic or evocative, paratactic or contrapuntal? Since, as Cliff ord points out, there is room for inventive rupture in every paradigm 115 , it is not only the chosen format but also the mode of its utilization that makes the diff erence; and every style off ers diff erent possibilities. Th e project hence adopts a combination of writerly modes that are seen to allow for instances of creative transversal connec-tivities through their juxtaposition. It combines contextual readings of Rirkrit Tiravanija, a ‘thickening’ 116 of the conditions of Shipibo-Conibo and Tamil visual practices and their ‘tracing’ 117 in Geertzian ‘factions’, 118 with dialogues and refl ections by and between fi ctitious persons. Th e transversal premise thus has inspired a cartographic interweaving of textual and (virtual) visual strata comprising authorial analysis, anthro-pological contextual voices, and meditations by the fi ctitious female art-ist ‘Rikki T’ from Romford, a counter of sorts to Rirkrit Tiravanija the ‘exotic Th ai guy’. It furthermore encompasses her imagined exhibition and exchanges with the fi ctitious ‘Curator C’. It seeks to engender an evoca-tive experimental engagement between an expanded notion of relational aesthetics that is taken for a cultural spin and draws more extensively on Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics than Bourriaud, and the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Shipbo-Conibo and Tamil designs in pursuit of questions of the global and the other in contemporary art.


40

2 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics

and Cultural Alterity

Th e artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is an international superstar and a key represent-ative of relational art. He is also of Th ai extraction and draws on this cultural background in his work, yet neither Bourriaud nor the contemporary art world engage with the Th ai aspect of his work or acknowledge its infl uence on relational art and aesthetics. Th e chapter explores how the perception of his work changes when relational aesthetics is expanded into culture.

Rirkrit Tiravanija is a New York-Berlin-Chiang Mai-based contemporary artist. He was born in Buenos Aires to Th ai parents, was raised in Th ailand, Ethiopia and Canada, and made the cooking and serving of Pad Th ai to visitors in galleries around the globe his signature piece (see Figure 2.1 ). His cook-ins were inaugurated in 1992 at the 303 Gallery in Soho, New York, where he moved the back offi ce to the main gallery and installed a tem-porary kitchen in the now emptied offi ce, cooking Th ai curry which he served to visitors for free. He created a similar piece in 1995 at the Carnegie International exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 1 and restaged the piece once more in its original 1992 format as Untitled (Free/Still) in 2007 at David Zwirner’s West 19 th Street Gallery in New York (see Figure 2.2 ). In 2011 the piece, now acquired by MoMA, was recreated again and went on display in the contemporary gallery where a free vegetarian curry lunch was served every day. 2


Figure 2.1 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Just Smile and Don’t Talk , Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 11 July–10 October 2010 in Kunsthalle Bielefeld. Th e artist poses in the exhibition space with pots and 800 bowls ready for the opening when he himself will be cooking.

Figure 2.2 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 1992 (Free), 1992/2007 . Here is the 2007 re-creation (David Zwirner Gallery, New York) of his original 1992 piece Untitled 1992 (Free) at 303 Gallery in Soho. Th ere he emptied out the offi ce of the gallery, installing a makeshift kitchen, where he cooked and served Th ai curry free to any-one who dropped by.


42


For Tiravanija, the preparation and sharing of food constitutes the art-work and transforms impersonal galleries into spaces of sustenance and sociability. His enactment of commonsalinity within the arenas of the art world is off ered to counter the alienation in present-day society and is aimed at the transfi guration of the everyday. Tiravanija’s work, like the art of his peers that emerged in the 1990s, employs performative and interac-tive techniques that rely on responses of pedestrians, shoppers, browsers and, importantly, gallery goers. 3 For Bourriaud, the impossibility of reading such work using established aesthetic frameworks became apparent with the group show ‘Traffi c’ that he curated at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux in 1996 where Tiravanija featured prominently. Bourriaud formulated relational aesthetics in response to this diffi culty of discussing this new style of artwork. Th e framework has since become a mainstay in the international art world and Tiravanija has emerged as a central fi gure of relational art. Th e art critic Claire Bishop thus comments that ‘his work has been crucial to both the emergence of relational aesthetics as theory, and to the curatorial desire for “open-ended”, “laboratory” exhibitions of relational art’. 4 She describes Rirkrit Tiravanija as ‘one of the most estab-lished, infl uential, and omnipresent fi gures on the international art circuit’. 5 Th is view is supported by his 2005 retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2005), staged ‘to explore, review and celebrate the work of an artist who has had widespread impact by assembling and presenting semi-nal works that demonstrate the scope or breadth of the practice histori-cally, conceptually and/or formally’. 6

Th e present discussion takes its cue from the task performed by retro-spectivity, but seeks to draw out a ‘diff erent’ Rirkrit Tiravanija. It is inter-ested in questions of cultural alterity with regard to his work. Tiravanija’s cultural background informs his choice of serving Th ai food as a gallery staple. But apart from his trademark Th ai cooking, he also sees his work rooted in his Buddhist inheritance, a context that has been little refl ected upon so far. In an interview with Gavin Brown, for example, Tiravanija describes himself as ‘a Buddhist alongside a so-called progressive/modern world that seems to recognize only a particular, Western kind of future’. 7 Th is statement represents a critique of Eurocentricity and off ers a con-ceptual reorientation by positing a world ‘alongside’ the normativity of Western conceptions. It is thus surprising that relational aesthetics, the


43

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Alterity

theoretical framework Rirkrit Tiravanija helped shape, which declares the intersubjective encounter with the other as its chosen terrain, has not paid any attention to the implications of his prominently staged culinary preference, nor his self-professed Buddhist stance. A question which under-pins this discussion is to what extent such diverse practices as Tiravanija’s work, Shipibo-Conibo designs and Tamil threshold drawings can be seen to share a condition of incommensurability since all three practices resist the grasp of traditional aesthetics; and whether relational aesthetics can provide a productive framework for discussing Tamil and Shipibo-Conibo designs. 8 Th is discussion, however, also asks whether Tiravanija shares more with Tamil and Shipibo-Conibo designs than being unreadable by traditional aesthetic conceptions. It asks whether relational aesthetics, the theoretical framework Bourriaud developed in order to articulate work such as Tiravanija’s, fails the ‘poster boy of relational aesthetics’ 9 on the front of cultural alterity, since, as we have seen, even though he is a key fi gure in relational art, the import of his non-Western background has so far been neglected. In other words does the artist and his work exceed the limits and resources of relational aesthetics?

Rirkrit Tiravanija and Relational Art

Tiravanija’s art transforms the gallery into a site for reinventions of sociality and creates scenarios where audiences become participants and co-creators. In his piece for the Kölnische Kunstverein in 1996, for example, he reproduced his private New York apartment and made it available to the public around the clock. People could make food in the kitchen, use the bathroom, sleep in the bedroom and chat in the living room. In his piece Untitled 2002 (He Promised) , staged at the Vienna Secession in 2002 and at the Guggenheim in New York in 2004, he cre-ated a chrome and stainless steel structure that served as an arena for artistic, public and private activities. Blurring the boundaries between art and life, he staged a barbecue on the opening night and turned the gallery into a space for cultural exploration. Participants could avail themselves of Th ai massages and fi lm screenings, participate in panel discussions and enjoy DJ sessions. For Tiravanija, these events cannot be fully realized without the active participation of the viewer. He sees


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himself as the catalyst for the work, but contests that he determines the outcome, stating that he doesn’t know ‘what is going to happen’. 10 For Tiravanija, his work creates new possibilities for life by providing dif-ferent experiences. Th e scenarios he creates work in two directions: on the one hand they aim at inter-human relations, on the other they are oriented towards the art world and its institutions in an eff ort to reposi-tion conceptions about art and aesthetic experience. 11

But how does the audience react to the scenarios presented? Do they perceive themselves as empowered participants? What is the response to the eat-ins, sleep-ins and chat-ins that are off ered as potentiality? Surprisingly, the critical literature is fairly nondescript when it comes to the discussion of audience participation and responses. Apart from reports about ‘who met whom’ at Tiravanija’s dinners, there is little refl ection on the declared aim of the relational eff ort or the experiences of the audience. Th e few references there are seem to indicate that gallery goers not only participate in the workshops and special events laid on, but also feel inspired to spontaneous and individual creative actions.

In conversation with Tiravanija, fellow artist Matthias Herrmann high-lights this aspect of the work. He comments on how Tiravanija left ‘the walls of the main hall completely unused and blank’, noting that visitors took the initiative ‘to make lots of sometimes very elaborate drawings on the white walls’, a spontaneous, participatory act that occurred ‘without any hint from you or the institution that this was an ok thing to do’. 12 For Tiravanija, this spontaneous engagement by the audience ‘within a certain kind of setting’ is welcome and he refl ects that while ‘there could be chaos’, people instead tend to refrain from anarchy, that is, ‘people move the cush-ions around and form them into sculptures, but they don’t burn them’ 13 – a point that art critic, poet, and professor Bruce Hainley also noted. He makes reference to the potentiality of interruptions and complications that ‘lots of people’ entail, and refl ects that ‘something could go wrong’, men-tioning ‘allergic reaction, food poisoning’ or the crowd ‘turning mob’ 14 as possibilities. Indeed, what would happen to the work if members of the audience did not like Th ai curry? What if they wanted to eat something else? Or were not interested in the cushions provided?

Herrmann raises a further critical issue by asking how the participation of the audience relates to life outside the gallery. He asks Tiravanija whether


45


he is not giving ‘the fake illusion of being a real participant or of changing something in real life, whereas we’re still in an institution for contemporary art’. 15 Tiravanija responds by rejecting the splitting of life and gallery that he sees inherent in Hermann’s question. He points to the realm of subjec-tive experience and states that ‘for me it’s important how people come away from it with their own feelings and their own judgement and experience’. 16 He declares that it is not the role of the artist to ‘make a survey of what they get out of it’ 17 and that the work is ‘more about possibilities, not solutions’. 18 Tiravanija also explains that he does not think in terms of success or failure of his work. For him a small turnout would not make much of a diff erence, even if, as he admits, the number of people participating represents ‘some kind of a measure’. 19 On refl ection he settles for a minimum requirement of at least one participant ‘who works or is in the place and deals with the situation’ 20 for the scenario to be a success.

But if the work is geared towards an audience, should audience num-bers not play a crucial role? And how do ‘people’ ‘come away’ from the work, who are the ‘lots of people’ that are a frequently listed prerequisite for Tiravanija’s pieces 21 and who takes Tiravanija up on his invitation to have a Th ai meal? For the art historian, curator and critic Katy Siegel, there is an obvious answer. Referring to Tiravanija’s replica of his East Village apart-ment inside Gavin Brown’s gallery in New York (1999), she comments on how it tends to be famous artists and critics who ‘leave their nice, air con-ditioned loft s to hang out in the dirty plywood playpen’. 22 In a similar vein, art critic and historian Jerry Saltz refers to the installation as an ideal place to catch up on art world gossip and reports how he ate ‘at Tiravanija’s’ 23 with the prominent New York gallerists Paula Cooper, 24 Lisa Spellman 25 and David Zwirner 26 among other celebrities. It thus seems that apart from creative displacements of cushions and spontaneous eruptions of graffi ti on the gallery walls, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s scenarios also fulfi l a connective function in the art world.

Th e art critic and historian Claire Bishop raises yet diff erent concerns. She questions whether the interaction between artist and audience is based on a democratic, egalitarian model as Bourriaud claims. She draws atten-tion to the nature of the interactions created by the scenarios of relational aesthetics and points out that democratic engagements encompass confl ictual encounters as ‘a democratic society is one in which relations of


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confl ict are sustained , not erased’. 27 She sees debate and discussion as the ‘other’ of an ‘imposed consensus of authoritarian order’ 28 and suggests that ‘the relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic, as Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too comfortably within an idea of subjectivity as a whole and of community as immanent togetherness’. 29 She furthermore sees the work as ‘cosy’ and self-congratulatory entertainment characterized by a feel-good factor, 30 based on the uncritical assumption of a unifi ed self, rather than ‘the divided and incomplete subject of today’. 31 Th is is a serious charge since relational aesthetics lays claim to Guattari’s ethico-aesthetics, which champions the generation of polyphonic, partial subjectivities that decentre the subject. 32

Bourriaud is aware of the accusation. He defends the democratic claims of relational art based on its eff ort to ‘give everyone their chance’ and emphasizes that for him relational art operates through forms, which ‘are not resolved beforehand’. 33 For Bourriaud, this indeterminacy allows for the emancipatory eff ect of relational art. Tiravanija underscores this point when he states that he knows as little or as much about what is going to happen in his scenarios as anybody else. 34 Claire Bishop, however, sees a lack of refl exivity in the claim that viewers are totally ‘free’ to interact in any way they like with the gallery situations he creates. For her it ‘is no longer enough to say that activating the viewer tout court is a democratic art, for every work of art – even the most “open-ended” – determines in advance the depth of participation that viewers may have within it’. 35

Th e issue of predetermination and the limitations imposed on the audience’s response, however, are not of concern to Bourriaud, nor does he refl ect on whether they are reactive or creative. But he is clear about the nature of the political engagement relational aesthetics represents. He argues that the present day is no longer about ‘social utopias and revolution-ary hopes’ 36 but about micro-utopias, that is, step-by-step transformations of society of the ‘neighbourhood committee type’. 37 And relational art is about living this utopia on a subjective, everyday basis. 38 For Bourriaud this represents a politics of the present rather than what he posits as a deferred ‘happiness of tomorrow’. 39 He takes issue with a confl ictual approach to societal change, and argues that while modernism ‘was based on confl icts’, the present, that is, ‘the imaginary of our day and age, is concerned with negotiations, bonds and co-existences’. 40 Bourriaud furthermore argues


47


that making a judgement about relational art in view of its political eff ec-tiveness alone represents a mental discarding of the aesthetic dimensions of the work, which in his view gives a false account of the art and its politics that expressly operates via the aesthetic. 41 But Bourriaud also concedes that Tiravanija’s work, if seen from a ‘conventional’ perspective, could appear superfi cial and could lead the viewer to ‘lament the slightness and arti-fi ciality of the moment of conviviality on off er’. 42 But for Bourriaud this critique misunderstands the work, as artists can only be held responsible for the conditions they set up, not for the eff ects these exert on an audience free to choose how to respond. For him what matters about the work is the moment of togetherness that is produced, that is, ‘the product of this conviviality’ which ‘combines a formal structure, objects made available to visitors, and the fl eeting image issuing from collective behaviour’. 43 Yet the nature of this product is not critically examined, that is, it is not discussed what it means if cushions are moved in the zone of encounter, if strangers sit side by side eating noodles, or if a Th ai massage is received in a gallery setting rather than the privacy of a treatment room.

Furthermore, the frequent collaborative exchanges between artists associated with relational aesthetics that are posited as models of positively re-envisaged social relations, that is, ‘the kind of complex interaction that is possible between friends’, 44 also need to be considered in the context of convivial scenarios created in exhibition spaces. In such collaborations one fi nds the boundaries between artistic personalities deliberately blurred, such as in the fi lm Vicinato (1995) (‘Neighbourhood’) co-produced by Carsten Höller, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija. In the introduc-tion to the script we are told that ‘separate identities merge into one and divide again’ 45 through the writing process and that there ‘is no clear corre-lation between an author and character’. 46 Such artistic collaborations take the concept of relational aesthetics a signifi cant stage further. Whereas the audience-participants in the gallery can choose to respond in a number of ways to the situations they encounter, artistic collaborations operate on a much more fundamental level as they participate in and shape the very articulation of these scenarios. Th is raises the question whether we are dealing with a two-tier creative system where artistic collaborations are celebrated as creative utopia at the peak of relational experience, while ‘regular’ audience interactions by gallery goers constitute secondary, if not


48


second-rate interventions in predetermined situations that only enable choices within the frameworks preconceived by the artist(s).

Th ese questions draw attention to the power relationship between the scenario-setting artists and their audience-participants that are remi-niscent of debates in anthropology about how to negotiate the problem of ‘speaking for’. Is relational aesthetics’ assumption that viewers cannot overcome their alienation and create meaningful inter-human relations without the intervention of the artist comparable to the anthropologist’s speaking on behalf of an inarticulate, ‘primitive’ other? Are Tiravanija’s pieces ultimately one-way directives, as the participant, put in the position of a silent ‘other’, fulfi ls an expectation, a role within a preconceived artistic scenario? What if the ‘other’ talked back, took over the kitchen and taught the artist to cook a diff erent dish? In other words, what if the participants brought their realities to the site of encounter, beginning to relate back on their own terms?

Art, Anthropology and the Ethnographic Turn

Th ere is a considerable amount of ‘traffi c’ between the fi elds of art and anthropology. Artists associated with the ‘ethnographic turn’ in con-temporary art which emerged in the 1990s have adopted an ‘anthro-pological gaze’ on selected cultural contexts, employed quasi-fi eldwork methodologies and honed in on collaborative and participatory modes of art-making inspired by ethnographic fi eldwork interac-tions. Furthermore, there are anthropologists who have recently taken an interest in contemporary art, oft en in view of developing visual research methodologies, for example in the subfi eld of visual anthro-pology. 47 But for the anthropologist James Cliff ord, the art world’s interest in anthropology is not notably based on intellectual curios-ity and a concern with how to ethically negotiate the culturally dis-tanced ‘other’, but rather on acts of making the familiar strange, that is, on anthropology as ‘defamiliariser and juxtaposer’. 48 Yet the attrac-tion is great, in fact so much so that it prompted Hal Foster to famously coin the term ‘ethnographer envy’, a condition that in his view ‘con-sumes many contemporary artists’. 49 Yet while Cliff ord and Foster off er


49


rather diff erent perspectives on the phenomenon of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art practice, both critics agree on the relevance and reality of the phenomenon and on its subversive potential. Th ey see the interest in the representation of marginal, populist modes of life and the readiness to engage in everyday practices – characteristic of the work of artists associated with the ethnographic turn – as a form of cultural critique. Th e practising artist becomes a quasi-ethnographer: a self-aware reader of culture ‘sensitive to diff erence and open to chance’. 50

Th e work of Sophie Calle, who is claimed by both ‘movements’, is a case in point. She has been described as a ‘self-styled ethnographer of the everyday’ 51 and is interested in interpersonal encounters, the social spaces that frame people and the ‘small worlds of personal relationships’. 52 Th e sites she explores are random encounters with strangers in the city such as in Suite Venetienne (1980), which documents her following a stranger from Paris to Venice, photographing him over a period of two weeks until he confronted her, or Homme au Carnet (1983), where she enlisted the help of individuals listed in an address book she found to build a pro-fi le of its owner. She also staged a role reversal and subjected herself to a similar, albeit deliberate, scrutiny by asking her mother to hire a pri-vate detective to follow her around and document her movements ( Th e Detective , 1981). Th is role-reversal articulates an awareness of the power relationship at play in the acts of surveillance that constitute her work, and demonstrates a refl exivity Tiravanija’s work arguably does not off er. Calle’s interest in detailed documentations of intimate, everyday encounters with ‘others’ qualifi es her work as representative of the ‘ethnographic turn’, yet Bourriaud sees her work as ‘a relational device’ characterized by random-ness which establishes convivial relations. 53 Both frameworks thus overlap and share an interest in the ‘everyday’ and the intersubjective, yet curiously, neither of them foregrounds cultural alterity in their creative explorations.

Th is recognition tallies with Foster’s critique of anthropology’s popularity in contemporary art, which he sees informed by the West’s long-standing, problematic and persistent primitivist fantasy. For him contemporary art’s romance with anthropology is premised on an uncritical positing of the ‘other’ as ‘truth’, as having access to primal psychic and social processes from which ‘the white (petit) bourgeois subject is blocked’. 54 Th us while Foster agrees on the subversive potential of the


50


quasi-anthropological methods applied by artists, he also diagnoses mis-recognitions between art and anthropology, in fact sees ‘a whole circuit of projections and refl ections’. 55 For him Cliff ord’s enthusiastic embrace of the artist as model ethnographer is problematic, and he wonders whether ‘artist-envy’ is not in actual fact a projected self-idealization, which fails the ‘other’. 56

Tiravanija, Thainess and Thai Art

Given the tout court neglect of questions of cultural alterity by artists associated both with relational aesthetics and the ‘ethnographic turn’, it is not surprising that Tiravanija’s Th ai cultural background has only been marginally registered, even though it manifestly informs his choice of serving Th ai food as a gallery staple and he states that it is rooted in a Th ai-Buddhist inheritance. As has already been mentioned, Tiravanija describes himself as a Buddhist and critiques the Western world as Eurocentric. For him a Buddhist outlook off ers an alterna-tive to the normativity of Western conceptions that however is not conceived in terms of an opposition but an ‘alongside’. 57 Th is critique also applies to relational art which Tiravanija helped shape, and which declares the intersubjective encounter with the ‘other’ as its chosen terrain, yet paradoxically does not acknowledge the Buddhist infl u-ence Tiravanija has brought ‘along-side’. Tiravanija, when asked, freely states that the emphasis on the everyday in his work, a core concern of relational aesthetics, is derived from the Buddhist infl uences of his childhood. And he comments that his preoccupation with human relations is a ‘Th ai thing’:

Th ai society […] is very communal. Everybody is brother and sister, everybody is mother and father, everyone is family. Your attitude toward life is that you exist in a kind of family. Th e lady who sells you groceries is like your aunt, the man who sweeps the fl oor is your uncle, the attitude is one of respect as the other is always somebody who’s in your world. 58

It would seem, then, that relational aesthetics is more deeply enmeshed with cultural alterity – and more specifi cally, with what Tiravanija proposes


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as Th ai cultural values – than previously acknowledged, especially since Tiravanija’s work has been ‘crucial to […] the emergence of relational aes-thetics as a theory’. 59 Might Tiravanija’s prominence in the movement thus be read as evidence that a degree of cultural transfer from ‘East to West’ has occurred, that art has gone ‘other’ on the quiet? Or is this instance representative of a cultural ‘borrowing’ by stealth that is claimed as an original invention by the ‘West’? Except that in this case the artist who has shot to fame due to this appropriation of the ‘East’ has an off -centric international background that adds an exotic pinch of alterity for addi-tional appeal, yet remains suffi ciently associated with the centre to avoid being confi ned by an ethnic label. But what if there was a middle ground that could acknowledge the infl uence of relational art’s Th ainess without invoking prejudicial perceptions?

Tiravanija certainly embraces his role as ‘art-nomad’, the new fi gure of the artist that James Meyer identifi es as a breed of ‘artist-travellers’ or ‘archetypal travellers of cultural memory’. 60 Yet Tiravanija presents this itin-erancy along Buddhist lines of non-determination. Tiravanija thus holds that he is not interested in destinations, and is happy to ‘just land wher-ever’. 61 But, as Meyer points out, the sites claimed by contemporary artists as travelling ‘wherever’ remain securely tethered within the fold of the art world. Tiravanija’s destinations are not ‘anywhere’; the ‘nomad artist does not “land wherever”. Moving from one commission to the next, he has a specifi c destination – a commercial or non-profi t space, a Kunsthalle or a contemporary museum.’ 62 Tiravanija, however, insists that his peripatetic existence refl ects a stance of ‘being outside’. 63 For him ‘there is always another place, another condition, another situation’, 64 and he sees it as the task of art to articulate this relationship to this perpetual ‘otherness’. 65 Yet for Meyer, Tiravanija’s dispensing of food in art spaces around the world does not ref-erence a condition of alterity, but rather encapsulates the ‘mechanisms of exchange of the global art market in which the artist operates’. 66 In other words, Meyer sees Tiravanija’s itinerancy as performing the conditions of the global market without critical address, whereas in Tiravanija’s view this is a Eurocentric perspective: for him, direct and confl ictual engagements counter his Buddhist credo. ‘Th ere is no confl ict between capitalism and Buddhism’, Tiravanija asserts. ‘Being a Buddhist you just let go, you can see destruction in front of you and just accept it.’ 67 And in contradistinction to


52


Western models, he argues that Th ai activism ‘takes a largely passive role’ and is premised on the monk whose word ‘carries a lot of weight’ and is ‘one of the best ways of being an activist in Th ailand’. 68

But while Tiravanija these days largely limits articulations of his cul-tural alterity and politics to the cooking of Pad Th ai and to allusions to his Buddhist inheritance that, however, are not foregrounded in how his work is conceived, he has in the past been prone to more straightforwardly political gestures. At the Venice Biennale of 1993, for example, he installed Untitled (1271) , which saw him serving Th ai noodles from a boat (see Figure 2.3 ). Th e piece evoked the trajectory of Marco Polo’s travel route and, as Pandit Chanrochanakit explains, since ‘Bangkok is already well known as the Venice of the Orient, his installation symbolized an interconnection between East and the West vis-à-vis Bangkok and Venice’. 69 Similarly in 1999, while showing at the 48 th Venice Biennale as part of the exhibition ‘dAPERTutto’, he planted a small teak tree near the American pavilion ‘just round the corner from the three “great powers” of England, Germany and France’ 70 to draw attention to the fact that Th ailand was not represented at the event. He built a wooden platform around the sapling and chris-tened it the ‘First Royal Th ai Pavilion’. 71 Yet while, in these instances, he took up the Th ai cause, Tiravanija rose to stardom as a global art-nomad. Discussions about him and his work thus foreground his itinerancy and international schooling, and reference his Th ainess only in passing. 72 As ‘hybrid insider-outsider,’ 73 he thus escapes the limitations of an ethnic label, but retains just enough of an exotic appeal to make him distinct.

What is telling, however, is how the few critics in the Euro-American centres of art that reference Tiravanija’s alterity respond to his cultural back-ground. Th e curators Flood and Steiner, for instance, cite Hermann Hesse’s ‘Eastern’ cult novel Siddhartha and note that the experience of staging a show with Tiravanija is like being taught a lesson in spiritual understanding. ‘Hermann Hesse could have saved himself an enormous amount of soul searching’, they suggest, ‘if he had simply had the opportunity of working on an exhibition with Rirkrit Tiravanija. Th e struggles endured by Hesse’s protagonist to achieve an understanding that “life is a river” could have, under Rirkrit’s tutelage, resulted in a gentle, occasionally soulful comedy of manners.’ 74 Should we understand this as an embarrassing Orientalist lapse, picturing Tiravanija as the exotic representative of a mysterious East, as


53


dispensing spiritual wisdom along with portions of Pad Th ai? Th e art critic Carol Lutfy seems to think so: ‘In an age of multicultural star searching he combines a Western education and the exotic ambiguity of the East.’ 75

In a similar vein, Saltz stresses Tiravanija’s hybrid insider-outsider status. But rather than invoking Eastern mystique, Saltz references the Native American ceremonial feast of potlatch, which is characterized by the exchange of gift s, describing Tiravanija as ‘Potlatch-Conceptualist’ of the ‘art world tribe’. 76 What Saltz, fails to mention, however, is that pot-latch exchanges serve to reinforce hierarchical societal relations. He thus follows the trend of ‘Tiravanija-writing’, which overlooks the power rela-tions entailed in intersubjective encounters as well as the plethora of writing on the gift . 77 In addition, Saltz suggests that there is a ‘shamanistic side to Tiravanija’ that ties him to Joseph Beuys, whom he resembles in that he also

Figure 2.3 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (1271) , New Museum. Th is piece by Rirkrit Tiravanija was fi rst exhibited at the 1993 Venice Biennale. It refers to the myth of Marco Polo who is thought to have travelled to China and to have introduced Chinese noodles to Italy which are thought to have morphed into Italian pasta since. Th e piece consists of instant noodles and a pot of hot water in an aluminium canoe. Th e instant noodles are boiled in the pot and off ered to visitors. In situ in the New Museum exhibition NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star , 13 February–26 May 2013.


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‘gives of himself ’ and ‘is a kind of one-man travelling circus, a magician who carries his tools with him’. 78 He also portrays him as a ‘medicine man who literalized art’s primitive functions: sustenance, healing, and communion’. 79

Tiravanija clearly invites an array of ‘other-cultural’ associations, ranging from the East to the North American indigenous West, none of which, how-ever, is pursued in any depth. Nor is the specifi city of his Th ainess examined in detail, or put in relation to the Th ai contemporary art scene by Western curators and critics. His at least in part Th ai-derived outlook on art making which underpins relational aesthetics is thus not discussed with any refer-ence to this cultural background or Buddhist perspective, but is subsumed under Bourriaud’s reorientation of Western aesthetics. Is this, then, yet another example of the Eurocentricity of the international art world at play?

Beatrix Ruf, the Director of the Kunsthalle in Zürich, does not think so. For her, Tiravanija off ers an important critique of ‘traditional’ politi-cal art as well as Western modes of negotiating the ‘cultural other’, as for her, even exhibitions that include the other in a politically correct way ‘still always think in terms of “us” and “them” ’. 80 As far as Ruf is concerned, the convivial situations created by Tiravanija reach far above and beyond multiculturalism’s limited binarisms. She states that there is ‘a more politi-cally relevant cultural transfer – or cultural integration that doesn’t create hierarchies – taking place here than in most “politically correct” attempts to integrate supposedly marginalized artists from supposedly marginalized cultural circles’. 81 Ruf criticizes multiculturalism for framing cultural oth-ers as stable and essentialized identities fi xed in the image of a diff erenced ‘authenticity’ and argues that the cultures in question end up positioned in a negative relation to the West, that is, they are placed outside contem-porary interactive relations of art and culture. For her, this perpetuates existing power relations where the ‘West’ borrows from the ‘Rest’ while Western infl uences taken up by the ‘Rest’ are seen as derivative. 82 For Ruf, in 2003 at least, cultural integration seemed the better option. Yet does this perspective not also preserve the culture of Western appropriations as it obscures Th ai contributions to relational aesthetics? And have things now moved on suffi ciently in the contemporary art world to make the kind of self-fashioning that may have been a successful strategy in the 1990s obsolete and allow for a recasting of Tiravanija’s image that embraces his alterity and acknowledges the Th ainess at the heart of relational aesthetics?


55


Furthermore, these thoughts raise the question of how Tiravanija’s work is perceived from a Th ai perspective. Notably, despite the global art world’s disavowal of Tiravanija’s ‘Th ainess’ and his own muted references to his cultural background, he is claimed as a Th ai artist from within Th ailand itself. In fact, as Pandit Chanrochanakit remarks, he has become a role model for young Th ai artists who seek independence from the constraints of Th ai art tied to a national imaginary via the triad ‘nation–religion–monarch’. In Th ailand, the concept of ‘art’ in the Western sense developed only in the early twentieth century. It was initiated by the Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci 83 who taught art in Th ailand and encouraged his students to combine Th ai and Western styles. More recently, contemporary Th ai artists have started to challenge this ‘ethno-realist’ or ‘ethno-modern’ politically sanctioned representation of Th ai culture. Th ey see Tiravanija’s ‘outsider-insider’ status as an inspiration and a genuine alternative as Tiravanija is seen to success-fully negotiate ‘both the Western and the Th ai gaze’. 84

But Chanrochanakit also reports how Th ai critics are baffl ed by Tiravanija’s indiff erence to the authenticity of Pad Th ai since the artist adapts to local food markets and substitutes core ingredients that prove unavailable. According to critics Carol Lutfy and Lynn Gumpert, Tiravanija does not excel in cooking, which ‘puts an unexpected spin on why he has chosen cooking as the hallmark of his work – and why the art world has eaten it up’. 85 Furthermore, Tiravanija frequently hands over the cooking to ‘docents and volunteers’, resulting in ‘a curious American-Th ai hybrid’. 86 For Chanrochanakit, however, this apparent lack of authenticity potently conveys the ‘fl uidity of Th ainess rather than the fi xity of offi cial Th ainess’. 87 Th e seemingly innocuous act of cooking Pad Th ai can therefore be argued to have a critical dimension in the contexts of Th ai culture. But whereas the concern with the signature ingredient of Tiravanija’s art dominates in Th ai discussion forums, on the international scene it is largely ignored as issues of cultural alterity are subsumed in the overall ‘goodness’ of relational art’s conviviality.

Contemporary Art and Fieldwork

Alterity also features in Tiravanija’s work on a further level. Th e encounters between strangers in the gallery generated through artistic scenarios; meetings therefore which are premised on negotiating alterity and the challenges


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such encounters entail. Yet while the nature and eff ect of these encounters, as we have seen, have not solicited much interest in the arts, they prove to be rather absorbing of late in the fi eld of anthropology. Th e anthropologist George Marcus, who has been at the forefront of conceptual shift s in anthro-pology since the 1980s, has taken a keen interest in Rirkrit Tiravanija and relational aesthetics. Marcus argues that Writing Culture failed to critically address anthropology’s essential reliance on a traditional conception of fi eld-work as a ‘ mise en scène of the lone fi eldworker crossing a marked boundary of cultural diff erence’. 88 For him the ‘persistence and regulative power’ 89 of this ‘Malinowskian scene of encounter’ is surprising as the model no longer fi ts ‘the radically changed present circumstances of anthropological fi eld-work’. 90 For Marcus the task, rather, is to connect ‘the “here and now” of the traditional mise en scène of fi eldwork to the “elsewheres” in which they are enmeshed’ 91 in the contemporary world and he asserts that contemporary fi eldwork scenarios are multi-sited and connective.

But for him this not only requires a shift in practice but also a rework-ing of the authenticating Malinowskian imaginary of the lone fi eldworker working as an outsider in a remote, oft en exotic location. In his view this entails a disciplinary reimagining of ‘the scene of encounter of fi eldwork in anthropology’ 92 that caters for ‘worlds in change’ 93 and endorses Fabian’s positing of coevalness. 94 He presents the arts as inspiration for anthro-pology’s eff orts to ‘re-confi gure scenes of encounter’ 95 in response to the contemporary world and the challenge of the ‘clash of cultures’ 96 it pre-sents, and cites Tiravanija’s work as exemplary for ‘what it is to do anthro-pological research now in the contemporary world’. 97 Marcus sees the work as descended from ‘the modernist line of installation, performance, event-based conceptual art movements with roots in Dada, Surrealism but also the Situationists and Fluxus, among others’ and advocates Tiravanija’s scenarios as relevant ‘parallel worlds of endeavor’. 98 He sees ‘scenes of spec-tacle in such works of art, created in the context of real-life situations’ 99 as inspirational correctives to scenes of encounter imagined in an anthropo-logical context. He singles out relational aesthetics as ‘the orchestration of sites, settings, and social actors, and processes for certain eff ects that have complex social topologies’, are ‘investigated through background research (like fi eldwork)’ and ‘are realized in a scene of spectacle’. 100 Moreover, he refers to the work of Tiravanija as a spectacle ‘conceived as symbolic art,


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stimulating a critical refl exivity on the part of participants and observers’ and a socially conscious art ‘in the installation-performance-happenings mode’. 101 He furthermore thinks that Foster’s critique of artists adopting a quasi-ethnographic stance was written with the conditionalities of pre-1980s anthropology in mind, arguing that the present circumstances of the discipline are very diff erent and require ‘the sort of play with its prac-tices that artists have been doing, and about which Foster was sceptical’. 102 He thus praises the ‘openness and experimental nature’ of how these artists ‘are doing fi eldwork, so to speak, to occupy the scene of spectacle that art produces’, calling them ‘valuable exemplars for articulating systematically changes in the mythic scene of encounter in contemporary anthropological research’. 103

Th is anthropological enthusiasm for relational art, however, must not curb critical analysis of the conditionalities of contemporary art’s rela-tional encounters. While they undoubtedly throw into relief for anthropol-ogy aspects that need attention, contemporary art has not taken on board debates within anthropology that are relevant to its practice. Critical discus-sions of the structural privileging of the ‘view of the centre’, the assumption of ethnographic authority and the problem of ‘speaking for’ that arise from participant-observation as a fi eldwork method have therefore been largely left behind when aspects of anthropological practice were adopted in the visual arts. Th e work of French artist Valéry Grancher is a case in point. In collaboration with the Palais de Tokyo, the prestigious experimental art space then co-directed by Bourriaud, Grancher created the Shiwiars Project which entailed a stay with the Shiwiar Indians, a Jivaro tribe living along the border of Ecuador and Peru in the Amazon area (7–20 October 2005). Grancher was previously known as an ‘internet’ artist who explored the space of virtuality. Th e aim of the Shiwiars Project , as Grancher declared in his e-communications, was to switch his aesthetic parameters. Whereas before he worked in a virtual space seeking to examine the ‘real’, he now decided to work on the basis of an experienced ‘real’ and to represent it in virtuality. His choice of opting for a sojourn in the Amazon jungle to encounter an experiential ‘real’ underscores the continuing relevance of Hal Foster’s critique of contemporary art’s appropriation of anthropology and its blindness to its lingering primitivism. It also underscores Foster’s highlighting of a problematic realist assumption in the art world, which


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holds that the other ‘is in the real, not in the ideological’. 104 For Foster, quasi-ethnographic encounters in the arts constitute a narcissistic othering of the self rather than a genuine recognition of alterity. Grancher’s encoun-ter with the Shiwiars supports this verdict as the Indians only fi gure as an exotic foil to Grancher artistic agenda. 105

For Foster, the practice of ethnographically mapping institutions or social communities – another prominent activity by artists associated with the ethnographic turn – also harbours diffi culties. For example he raises concerns about the following frequently encountered scenario and critiques the superfi ciality of the encounter:

An artist is contacted by a curator about a site-specifi c work. He or she is fl own into town in order to engage the community targeted by the institution. However, there is little time or money for much interaction with the group […] Nevertheless, a pro-ject is designed […] Few of the principles of the ethnographic participant-observer are observed […] And despite the best intentions of the artist only limited engagements of the sited other are aff ected. Almost naturally the focus wanders from collaborative investigation to ethnographic self-fashioning, in which the artist is not decentred so much as the other is refash-ioned in artistic guise. 106

Tiravanija’s work on the whole avoids such problems, as he is less interested in mapping existing groups or sites than in creating and off ering spaces of interaction and of interpersonal encounter. He also seems to have learnt from the self-refl exivity of anthropology, as he is blurring the boundaries between the objective and subjective, and is not laying any claims to an objectifying distancing stance. But he opts for a direct engagement that is claimed as an authentic, unmediated experience and invokes an imme-diacy of encounter that is seen to disavow the need for translation and exemplifi es the much-critiqued ‘ethnographic real’.

A further question to be raised is whether his gallery scenarios rehearse an outmoded model of anthropology where participants remain silent or have at best a marginal voice even though they are central to the comple-tion of the work. Th is parallels the traditional fi eldwork scenario where the informants play a crucial yet hardly acknowledged role and are subsumed


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under the authorial voice of the ethnographer who representationally stages the encounters in his or her fi eldwork account. Th ese refl ections raise the question of how awareness of the diffi culties and ‘socially and politically fraught nature of cross-cultural representations’ 107 gleaned from anthropology’s exercise in self-awareness could be translated for contem-porary art’s scenarios. And what might their potentiality be for the project of decentring Western art? In other words what sounds has the ‘ear out for non-Western, and partially Western, voices’ 108 brought into the aesthetic equation?

As we have seen, in contrast to Foster’s more critical stance that warns of pseudo-ethnographic encounters, 109 Cliff ord strikes an idealistic note about ethnographic self-refl exivity and its translations into the realm of contemporary art. Cliff ord, however, also laments that despite the enthusi-astic uptake of his ideas and his notion of anthropology as cultural critique, very little actual ethnography is known in the academy and in the art world at large. For him this is striking as it concerns an informed audience of sophisticated scholars, artists and intellectuals who, despite their enthu-siastic embrace of expanded notions of ethnography as critical procedure and enthusiasm about contemporary art’s global turn, seem to remain largely Eurocentric in their outlook. 110 Th e cultural critics Ella Shohat and Robert Stam voiced a similar concern. Th ey bemoaned the ongoing ‘oversight’ of the aesthetic, non-Western margins, despite a plethora of critical writing on the subject of decentring the art world, and point out that despite a noted eff ort in exposing ‘the exclusions and blindnesses of Eurocentric representations and discourses, the actual cultural produc-tions of non-Europeans have been ignored’. 111 For them this constitutes a ‘neglect which reinscribes the exclusions even while denouncing it, shift ing it to another register’. 112 And while the present globalized situation of the art world has brought some positive changes, the condition of invisibil-ity of Tiravanija’s Th ainess, the disavowal of the Th ai cultural perspective which informs his work and potentially inheres relational aesthetics – not to mention the continuing exclusion of forms of art that do not fi t the visual idioms of Western-style contemporary art – are all indicative of the continued presence of the predicament.

It therefore seems that Tiravanija shares more with Shipibo-Conibo and Tamil designs than has previously been assumed. His work is not


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only ‘unreadable’ from a traditional aesthetic point of view, but impor-tant aspects of it are invisible due to the art world’s unacknowledged Eurocentricity. And as artistic practices, despite their adoption of anthropological methodologies, oft en overlook debates in anthropology regarding the diffi culties of negotiating and representing marginalized cultural ‘others’, the question of whether relational aesthetics’ emphasis on encounter can be expanded to sensitively encompass cultural alterity and to take on board the lessons that can be learnt from the fi eld of anthropology is even more pertinent.


dohmen, renate (2016) encounters beyond the gallery. relational aesthetics and cultural difference?...

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