Domestic Left #26: Finity goes up on trial
The program for the 58th Carnegie International, titled Is it morning for you yet?, makes some big promises:
Is it morning for you yet? ... traces the geo-political imprint of the United States since 1945 to situate the “international” within our local context. This framework prepares a historical ground for the movement of images, ideas, objects, and people that incite emancipatory expressions and artworks. [...]
The 58th Carnegie International borrows its title from a Mayan Kaqchikel expression, where instead of saying “Good morning” it is customary to ask, “Is it morning for you yet?” The question acknowledges that our internal clocks are different; our anxieties, troubles, and heartaches are not the same. When it is morning for some, it might still be night for others.
It’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve seen to curate an exhibition of contemporary art that does not take the Western art tradition as its starting point, its center, and then supplement it with artists from the “periphery” in an attempt to be “inclusive.” The vast majority of the artists represented in the International are from cultures and peoples and nations that have been reshaped over the past century or more by some form of Western (and in most cases specifically U.S.) imperialism, but this is by no means simply a collection of “resistance” art. Most if not all of the artists are in some way in dialogue with the Western art tradition, but from a position of autonomy, not supplication. In the place of the linear, tellable, finite story of art that most museums (including the Carnegie’s permanent collection) tell, the 58th International lays out a multipolar field, one that can’t be encompassed in a single narrative.
* * *
I’ve been to the International four times now since it opened at the end of September. Because of the way the Carnegie Museum of Art is laid out, there are a variety of ways to enter the International, which fills the Heinz Galleries (generally used for special exhibits), the Heinz Center for Architecture, the Hall of Sculpture, and the Forum Gallery; takes over a chunk of the Scaife Galleries (where the permanent collection is housed); and includes installations in the Grand Staircase, the main hallway of the first floor, outside the front of the museum, and in a handful of other places around the city.
For this most recent visit, I began by taking the elevator to the second floor (one could also walk up the long staircase from the entryway) and entering the Heinz Galleries. This is the approach I would recommend, because the Heinz Galleries contain what I would consider the core work of the International, the ones that most clearly “trace the geo-political imprint of the United States since 1945” (and earlier) and establish a framework that “prepares a historical ground” for the rest of the exhibition.
You first enter a room containing Dia al-Azzawi’s Ruins of Two Cities: Mosul and Aleppo, a sculptural work which fills the floor, and works by Melike Kara — five paintings on two walls, one of which is otherwise blank and one of which is covered, behind the paintings, with a sixth work, images from photographs of the Kurdish diaspora transferred to the wall through a process of being painted over with bleach.
Ruins of Two Cities is roughly 20 by 25 feet, but its highest point is only maybe 6 inches. It is made from polyester resin, but reminds me of nothing so much as the miniature castles and other fantasy-inspired buildings that I would make from slabs of clay in the ceramics classes I took as a kid. Except virtually none of the buildings have roofs.
It stretches out across the floor like a vast archaeological dig, mazes of walls in a monochrome earthen brown, but as you look closely you start to notice, here and there, towers that are knocked over, piles of rubble spilling down from the sides of walls. Not an ancient city that has been dug out of the earth, but a modern city that has been reduced to it.
The destruction of Mosul and Aleppo (cities in Iraq and Syria, respectively) is, needless to say, a pretty clear example of the geo-political, ahem, “imprint” of the United States. Contemplating the Kurdish diaspora, as Kara’s work asks the viewer to do, requires more thinking and humility before the complexities of history.
Kara’s paintings “begin from the form of the knot and the different knot-making techniques, motifs, and patterns used by Kurdish weavers. ... She characterizes the knot as a form of abstraction, a register of the proximate cultures and hybridity tied to the Kurdish diaspora.”
To be honest, I have almost no knowledge of the history behind the Kurdish diaspora. But even the cursory knowledge that I do have — that the Kurds are a stateless people who have suffered (and continue to suffer) various oppressions at the hands of the modern nations which occupy their traditional homelands, in which the majority of them continue to live — points to another, perhaps “invisible,” hand behind that oppression. Those four nations are Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran — respectively, the “British Mandate” and “French Mandate” established following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and two nations that attempted to evade the post-1918 colonization of their neighbors by emulating Western European nation-states — specifically by enforcing ethnic homogenization. A knotty history indeed.
* * *
I remember having an insight, while visiting the 57th Carnegie International (which ran from 2018-19), about the role of elite art institutions in helping the ruling class, and their deputies in the managerial class, understand and manage global society.
Art is and always has been as much (if not more) about domination as about liberation, and one of the more awkward parts of visiting the current International is the ways in which the curators try to avoid recognizing this.
(And perhaps to some degree the artists. I’m never sure how much of the language in exhibition programs and on wall cards for work done by the living is the work of museum staff and how much of it originates from the “wishful artists’ statements that art schools require their students to write — a godforsaken prose genre that is, at best, wholesomely cynical,” as the late New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in one of his last pieces.)
Contemporary social-justice-inflected discourse about art, the kind which talks about “images, ideas, objects, and people that incite emancipatory expressions and artworks,” is certainly a welcome change from the old narrative of great masters and heroic modernizers. The problem with the old narrative is not just that the vast majority of masters and modernizers were European (or white American) men of some means. In fact, the danger of that narrative arises not from its exclusivity but from its (selective) inclusivity, its ability to incorporate artists from the margins of race, nation, gender and class into a liberal but still triumphalist narrative of Western progress.
The new discourse does do a good job of refusing that narrative. But ... it has to. The old narrative simply does not serve the increasingly multi-national, multi-racial* ruling class of the 21st century.
Realistically, you can’t do business in most parts of the world unless you have some nuanced understanding of “the geo-political imprint of the United States since 1945.” I mean, sure, in most places you can probably still cut deals with local compradors to extract natural resources, but capitalism, as the Hungarian philosopher István Mészáros wrote, is more than buying and selling, it is “a socio-economic metabolic system of control.” Keeping that metabolic system of control running smoothly requires understanding and managing social contradictions, and culture is one the means available for doing that.
Much like other discourses arising from our new, liberal (and thoroughly neoliberal) managerial class, the new discourse of art recognizes art’s work of domination — because to refuse to recognize it would be to abandon any of hope of credibility with populations that have been thoroughly brutalized by white supremacy, patriarchy and colonialism(s) — while pushing that work into the past, or proving we’ve got a hold on it now by surrounding the old castle of privilege with “emancipatory expressions and artworks,” a Gregorian Reform of moral and spiritual renewal.
*The ruling class, of course, remains overwhelmingly white, male, and from Europe and North America — when compared to humanity as a whole. But when compared to, say, the ruling class of the mid-20th century, it is distinctly more multi-national and multi-racial. This is even more true of the managerial class who run the major political, educational and cultural institutions that mediate conflict and shape worldviews.
* * *
That said, the artworks themselves — especially the core works in the Heinz galleries, virtually all of them by non-European artists — certainly transcend the awkward and contradictory texts that sometimes accompany them.
After the room with al-Azzawi’s and Kara’s works, you progress through a series of monumental works that evoke the traumas of political violence in Guatamala, sexual violence in Indonesia, colonialism in Africa and the wars in Iraq; the human and ecological cost of war and industrialization in Vietnam; the technological and emotional pain of modernization in South Korea. The missing, lost and disappeared, the people and land, flora and fauna destroyed and disfigured by two centuries of imperialism, play hide-and-seek with the visitor as elegant ink line drawings peeking out of the corners of manila envelopes, voiceless spirits sliding through tightly coiled steel wire, nonspecific internal organs of silicone being endlessly ground by rotating metal blades.
I describe these works as “monumental” not necessarily because of their size — indeed, few individual works are “monuments” in the sense of a statue of Douglas MacArthur or even a Rothko, large works that take up space for themselves — but because of the way they are individually and collectively arranged in the open spaces of the Heinz Galleries and the Hall of Sculpture. Even the largest works are composed of smaller pieces, or, like Ruins of Two Cities, expand primarily in two dimensions. These works claim space not from a single, heroic ego but from the space created by the web of connections between their individual components, between artworks from different countries and cultures, between their history and ours.
It’s in that space, a space filled with loss, with handfuls of rain and ghosts of electricity and farewell kisses, that the vision of the International really comes alive, where it holds the realities of domination and expressions of emancipation in contradictory tension, allowing us to turn them over in our heads and our hearts, contemplating whether it is morning yet and if not, when it might be.
* * *
Prior to my visits to the 58th International, I had rarely if ever contemplated the role of time in artistic practice. Time is, of course, a vital aspect (perhaps the central aspect) of music and dance, theater and stand-up comedy. Its presence in video and film, in sculptures and installations with moving parts, is trivially obvious. But most visual art (and, let’s be honest, most writing) is a stab at immortality. We attempt to take the infinite complexities of the world, reduce them to something finite and intelligible — and then preserve that artifact across the ages.
Time is central to the creation of some of the works in the 58th International, and to the very nature of others. Several of Trương Công Tùng’s works list “time” as an artistic material — he assembles his artworks from organic materials and part of his practice is simply allowing them to age. The gold letter balloons that compose Banu Cennetoğlu’s right? are intended to deflate over the course of the show.
Daniel Lie’s works — large fabrics stained with turmeric then allowed to ferment, decompose and mold — hang, in one of the most brilliant placements of the entire show, in the center of the museum’s Grand Staircase, the walls of which are covered with John White Alexander’s mural The Crowning of Labor, painted from 1905-08. The Crowning of Labor depicts a fantasy of harmonious industrial progress, in which hard work and technological progress uplift the human race from darkness to light; it “symbolizes Pittsburgh’s ascent to enlightenment” as understood by generous, philanthropic industrial barons like Andrew Carnegie. Lie’s fabrics float in the center of this story like silent ghosts, lit sporadically, depending on time and weather conditions, by the skylight that crowns the staircase. Decay both mocks the supposed achievements of progress, and proves itself more beautiful.
* * *
I first got a membership to the Carnegie Museum in 2018, during the 57th International. Having a membership allowed me to return as often as I wished, and freed me from the curse of “getting my money’s worth” from each visit. As I’ve written about before, my repeated solo trips to the museum “gave me, for the first time, an appreciation of the sheer physicality of great works of art.”
During one of what became regular Sunday visits, I ran into someone I vaguely knew from the Pittsburgh DSA chapter. He also had a membership and made regular solo visits, sometimes composing music on his iPhone while viewing the art. He explained that he thought of the museum as his church.
I began to think of some of the artworks as close friends, spiritual confidants, secular eikons who could perhaps intercede with the Universe on my behalf, or at least help me bring my inner world into right relationship with the outer world. The museum was a place of timelessness, not only the timelessness of great works but the timelessness of repeated ritual.
And I still remember the sense of loss when the 57th International came to an end.
* * *
During one of my recent visits to the museum, I noticed that the reading room on the second floor, off of the “Free Radicals” section of Crossroads, the permanent exhibition of postwar modern and contemporary art, is open again (it was closed during the pandemic). In my pre-pandemic visits to the Carnegie, I would occasionally wander into the reading room and leaf through the books there, and sometimes think about how it would be nice to spend a Sunday afternoon reading or writing in the well-lit and usually empty space.
The reading room is currently filled with books recommended by Tony Cokes, one of the few U.S. artists in the 58th International. And one of those is Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, which I had been meaning to read for a while. I picked it up and, had the seating options in the reading room been as comfortable as I remember them being before the pandemic, might have spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon reading the whole thing. (Instead I purchased a copy from Amazon, nicely illustrating one of Fisher’s own points about how capitalism presents itself as the only “realistic” option.)
The book opens with a discussion of Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film adaptation of a P.D. James novel. Fisher describes “one of the key scenes” in the film:
Clive Owen’s character, Theo, visits a friend at Battersea Power Station, which is now some combination of government building and private collection. Cultural treasures — Michelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica, Pink Floyd’s inflatable pig — are preserved in a building that is itself a refurbished heritage artifact. This is our only glimpse into the lives of the elite, holed up against the effects of a catastrophe which has caused mass sterility: no children have been born for a generation.
Fisher argues that “the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new?” and this is central to his critique of “capitalist realism”:
We do not need to wait for Children of Men’s near-future to arrive to see this transformation of culture into museum pieces. The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history.
In other words, capitalism is not threatened by the idea that we all have different internal clocks. Indeed, each of our mornings becomes a differentiated, discrete and measurable opportunity for maximizing profit, whether through our labor or our consumption.
To Fisher, capitalist realism enforces the belief that “there is no alternative” to capitalism by obliterating any sense of the future, and with it any possibility of a new society. It does so not by claiming any virtues for capitalism (indeed, capitalist realism skillfully incorporates the performance of critique, of “emancipatory expressions,” as Fisher explores in the chapter “What if you held a protest and everyone came?”), but by warning that any political project to fundamentally change society leads inevitably to fanaticism and totalitarianism: “capitalist realism presents itself as a shield protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself.”
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The 58th International includes five “works” that are themselves curations of multiple pieces of art. Refractions, curated by the 58th International team, brings together works produced from 1945 to 2021 that “[respond] to historical events and political struggles.” Seismography of Struggle, curated by the Algerian-born Zahia Rahmani, is “an inventory of non-European critical and cultural journals ... produced in the wake of the revolutionary movements at the end of the 18th century up to the watershed year of 1989.” As if there is no sun, Spores of Solidarity, and the Fereydoun Ave and Laal Collection, in different ways, “respond” to the “New Order” regime of President Suharto in Indonesia (1966-98), the coup which deposed Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973 and established the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and the Islamic Republic of Iran which followed the 1979 Iranian revolution.
All three of those regimes tried to obliterate the future through violent, repressive means. Suharto’s government — with enthusiastic U.S. support — massacred between half a million and a million people in 1965-66. He was seeking to exterminate any trace of the revolutionary government of President Sukarno, who led Indonesia’s struggle for independence from Dutch colonialists, served as its first president, and organized the 1955 Bandung conference to unite Asian and African countries into a “Non-Aligned Movement” during the Cold War. Indonesia’s recent ban on extramarital sex is a chilling echo of the charges of sexual perversion leveled against the country’s left and used to justify Suharto’s massacres.
Allende, a socialist who came to power in Chile through democratic elections in 1970, was attempting to lead his country on a “Chilean path to socialism” when he was deposed by a military coup on September 11, 1973. Deeply committed to non-violent means of change, he committed suicide rather than attempt to escape and lead armed resistance to the coup. Just before taking his, he proclaimed to the nation that “much sooner than later, the great avenues will again be opened through which will pass free men to construct a better society.” Following the coup, thousands of Chilean leftists and trade unionists were “disappeared” — rounded up and murdered. Pinochet remained in power until 1990 and the free-market constitution he imposed on the country remains in effect to this day.
In Iran, leftist and secular revolutionaries enthusiastically supported the 1979 revolution. Some accounts paint them as foolish dupes of the Islamicists, others as naive in a different way, possessed of a blind faith that history runs in one direction, that a “revolution” would inevitably benefit the left, that the future couldn’t simply be cancelled at gunpoint.
* * *
Every holiday season, the Carnegie displays an eighteenth-century Neapolitan “Presepio,” a massive nativity scene made up of “miniature figures arranged in a detailed panorama of 18th-century life in Naples” (augmented, of course, with the familiar figures of the nativity).
When I was visiting the museum last week, a museum guide was explaining to two older women how the Carnegie came to acquire the presepio in 1957. Massive economic and social changes in the Italian peninsula in the 19th and 20th centuries first forced the aristocratic households who commissioned such displays in the 18th-century Kingdom of Naples to sell them to collectors in a unified Italy, then forced or encouraged those collectors to sell or donate them after World War II.
The women viewing the presepio remarked to each other how they had been coming to see it since their childhoods, and how much they appreciated the fact that it never changed.
* * *
The most remarkable work on display in Refractions, and the only one which receives its own entry in the exhibition guide, is Poeme Colectivo Revolución. From 1981 to 1983, the Mexico City-based Colectivo 3 “sent a simple template on a letter-sized sheet of paper to artists living in 43 countries and received hundreds of responses that comprised a collective meditation on the theme of revolution.”
For someone who came of age under Reaganism, it was a shock to see these expressions of un-ironic revolutionary optimism not from the 60s or even 70s, but from the actual 80s themselves.
They are not historically significant — just fragile epistles from marginal artistic cultures which hadn’t yet been suppressed by or incorporated into the Thatcher-Reagan colossus. Nor are they especially politically coherent — more than one praise the Polish “Solidarnosc” movement, which ultimately proved itself an agent of that colossus. Nonetheless, they are a tantalizing connection to a political and artistic generation that nearly touched mine and still believed in the future, like a dim fragment of a dream barely remembered and hardly believable.
* * *
Capitalist Realism was written in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. “Despite initial appearances (and hopes), capitalism realism was not undermined by the credit crisis of 2008,” Fisher writes, but “what did happen in 2008 was the collapse of the framework which has provided ideological cover for capitalist accumulation since the 1970s.”
There is a certain intellectual claustrophobia in Fisher’s writing; he brilliantly depicts the way capitalist realism closes in on all sides, compressing any sense of human possibility into an increasingly tiny, dark and suffocating box of “realistic” hopelessness about our situation. As he writes, capitalist realism “is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion.”
This claustrophobia makes the conclusion of the book, in which he argues that “[t]he long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity,” less than convincing. He argues for the left to struggle against “bureaucracy,” for the politicization of mental illness, for teacher unions to abandon strikes and instead embrace a struggle against “business ontology.” I know he means them to be signposts, however provisional, for a way out. But they just don’t convince.
* * *
Fisher died by suicide in January of 2017.
* * *
What is the way out? Fischer says recover the future, and argues that to recover a sense of the future we (the left) have to stop recycling the past, the glories and tragedies of the Paris Commune, the great revolutions of the 20th century, the mid-century triumph of trade unions and social-democratic parties in the West.
During the time Fisher was writing, from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, most of the left (including myself) was part of the same search party, looking for new agents of change, or a way to make change without agents. We were infected with the same capitalist-realist despair about the dead-end that we believed the great revolutionary agents of the nineteenth and twentieth century — the socialist working classes and the nationalist peoples — had failed to save us from or, worse, led us into. Those agents were lost to us, we thought, hopelessly corrupted or anesthetized or brutalized or divided by capitalism’s wily delivery of abundance here and repression there.
What we failed to see, what Fisher saw but ultimately saw no way out of, is that no matter how much we proclaimed that “another world is possible,” all of the fantasies of “new social movements” and horizontalism and public opinion as a global superpower and being able to birth new worlds without burning the old could not bring back the lost makers of the future.
But the reality is that exploitation and oppression are, in fact, finite, and they run into material limits. People are, at some point, forced to fight to have a future. Capitalist realism can keep intellectuals in thrall forever, but it can’t keep workers safe from a global pandemic. And suddenly the formerly impossible, unimaginable, becomes both possible and real: unions at Amazon and Starbucks in the U.S., strike waves rolling across Fisher’s Britain. Maybe not a full future, but the material beginning of one.
* * *
Capitalist realism also runs into psychological (or, if you will, spiritual) limits. Fisher recognized this in his call to politicize mental illness, but I’m not sure the way he sketches out such a project make sense, either as politics or as effective approach to improving mental health. (Freddie deBoer published a good discussion last summer of the problems with, admittedly, a very simplistic version of this analysis.)
The work that, for me, lies at the heart of the 58th Carnegie International (created by the artist whose conversations with the curators provided its title), is Édgar Calel’s Oyonïk (The Calling). It consists of an array of clay pots set on the museum floor, filled with water in which rose petals float, and on which fruit-tree branches are set. The clay pots on the floor are complemented by drawings Calel made of shards of pottery he found buried on his family’s land, which he believes were intentionally destroyed by their makers to keep their secrets from falling into the hands of colonizers.
The rose petals are already beginning to curl up and fade, but that does not detract from the power of the work. It resonates at a slightly different frequency for me now than it did when I saw it a few days after the opening of the International, but as that resonance merges with the brighter red and white and yellow frequencies of my memories, it creates a richer field of contemplation.
The work is, I suppose, technically an “installation,” but to me that word conjures up images of world-famous artists directing teams of assistants, artisans or even engineers, assemblages of metal and plastic and concrete. This work, composed of pre-industrial and organic materials, placed simply on the floor and hung on walls, feels more like a gift.
Oyonïk is “a healing ritual for people who are lost, both physically missing or spiritually adrift” — and a reminder that mornings, especially when our internal clocks have yet to reach them, can still be moments of infinite possibility, of the future.
All quotations not otherwise attributed are from the Exhibition Guide for the 58th Carnegie International.
I don’t get to write about visual art very much for work, but this month marked the 25th anniversary of the passing of the great American painter of urban working-class life Ralph Fasanella. Since he worked as a UE organizer for several years before embarking on a career in painting — and remained close to UE and its principles for the rest of his life — I took the opportunity to write a UE NEWS feature on his life and work. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to dig a little bit into one of his paintings of sport, Sunday Afternoon, which depicts a street baseball game and, I would argue, highlights the importance of claiming space for play.