In a sketchbook that dates to her early student years at Framingham State College (now Framingham State University) in the mid-1970s, the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, 1940–2025) wrote, “[I] have a brainstorm . . . to do a series of paper dolls.”¹This annotation shares the page with two drawings: a paper figure with a folded base and the tabbed outfit with which it could be paired. The clothing ensemble includes a crisply starched dress layered underneath an apron embellished with a heart-shaped appliqué spelling “Mom.” Alongside the two drawings, Smith penciled a block of ruled lines as if from a composition book and neatly printed “American Public School Education Series.”

Smith recognized dolls to be powerful pedagogical tools that could shape aspirations, perpetuate stereotypes, and ascribe or reinforce societal roles.²Below the apron-strung mother in her sketch, Smith dotted the edge of the page with words including “doctor,” “detective,” and “lawyer.” These read like a laundry list of professions that most young girls of her generation were discouraged from pursuing. Born in 1940, Smith was herself a parent while completing her postsecondary training in fine art. Well-meaning and condescending instructors alike implored her to consider becoming an art teacher, reasoning it was a more suitable and rewarding line of work for a Native American woman.³

Smith didn’t create the first of the paper dolls until the early nineties, but she never abandoned the idea in those intervening years. Some of her earliest doll works were in fact sculptures, from raggedy cloth moppets to wire figurines. In Tribal Ties (1985), two lovingly hand-stitched and pillowy dolls with button eyes embrace one another.⁴ Later, Smith made use of store-bought toys. The Red Dirt Box (1989) is wooden and pocket-size with a plastic Statue of Liberty affixed to the lid. “Give me your tired, your poor” is handwritten on one side.

The “Mother of Exiles” had come to stand for a compassionate center of power, distinct from the conquering empires of yore. In Smith’s sculpture, she is set askew, revealing the contents of the box beneath her: action figures of Plains warriors, who lay flat on their backs, half-buried in the soil. The configuration of the work suggests that righting her would bury them. The scattered plastic bodies of the warriors are solid blue and white. There are no red men, leaving the would-be trio of patriotic colors incomplete. The expression of “red” as a shorthand slur for Native Americans is reappropriated by Smith to present an image of the United States as partial and unfinished without Indigenous peoples. The Red Dirt Box upends the superficial national story of a land for one and all; colonialism is not so easily disguised. 

Smith’s artistic games are serious. Her work alludes to childhood pastimes but not for fun (although play and humor are important)—or because her professors thought it would be better for her to work with children than in the field of contemporary art—but rather because early development is when the norms of social and cultural life are established.⁵In an unpublished document from the artist’s archive, Smith imagines a conversation between a katsina figure and a Cabbage Patch doll taking place in her studio in Corrales, New Mexico, over the course of two days in 1985. The transcript, titled “Fad or Fetish,” records the speakers politely bickering over their origins and responsibilities: Who is a more American product? Who has been more commercialized? Eventually, they come to realize their similarities, including a shared disdain for the bourgeois aspirations of Barbie and Ken. They also agree that each has a role to “help make order in our worlds” and to “teach children about love, hate and nurturing.” Whether used in ceremonial and religious rites or for secular purposes, “dolls reassured the human place in the universe by acting out what the human could not do . . . but they also involve fantasizing and dreaming which made their world a better place.”⁶Dolls are instruments that can reproduce social codes, but they are also agents of change.

In 1991, Smith created Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by the US Government, a suite of 13 xeroxed drawings tinted with watercolor and pencil.

Paper Dolls depicts an imagined family of Barbie, Ken, and young Bruce Plenty Horses, as well as the black-robed Jesuit priest Father Le de Ville––a homonym of “devil.” On the Flathead Reservation, where Smith grew up, the Jesuits operated a Federal Indian Boarding School from 1864 to 1972. This was one of more than 400 schools jointly run by missionaries and the colonial government in the United States. Like those that existed in Canada, these institutions aimed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into a Christian Euro-American worldview. This was done by separating them from their families, language, culture, and religion. These bitterly hostile places were rampant with abuse, and many children never made it home. Those who did survive were impacted in existential ways that Smith’s artwork carefully records.

Paper Dolls illustrates how boarding schools, land grabs, biological warfare, criminalizing ceremonial practice, and the theft of cultural belongings are interlinking strategies of genocide. As Smith once said, “People think that genocide is just about standing people in front of an open pit and shooting them. . . . They think it’s about murdering people. It’s way bigger than that.”⁷The sheet depicting the outfit for Bruce, the child, is especially demonstrative of this reality. Whereas the hospital gown or the capote or the maid’s uniform are garments alone, the “Flathead child’s boarding school outfit,” as Smith labeled it, comes complete with a figure.

The teacherly style of Smith’s handwritten notations is a direct response to the historical fallacies printed in textbooks and otherwise circulating widely at the time. These were the frenzied years leading up to the Columbian Quincentenary in 1992. Major cultural organizations received grants to develop blockbuster projects and exhibitions, many of which perpetuated a narrative of “encounter and exchange” between Indigenous peoples and European invaders––a perspective that offered a benign and teachable framework of multicultural harmony. To some, this even felt like a progressive step, an update of the older “discover and conquer” model. Students of history would learn that things were bad but that now they’re good, while absolving settler society of wrongdoing. “That’s what 1992 was about,” Smith recalled. “This whole big propaganda machine in America was overwhelming the whole story. Making up a new story. I couldn’t stand it.”⁸Smith’s infuriation catalyzed a few strategic shifts that she began to make at the time.

Paper Dolls is unusual as a drawing in that there are multiple sets.⁹It pushes against the categorical line that separates a drawing from a print. Smith was an expert printmaker, having worked with the renowned Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since 1979.¹⁰She could have easily created Paper Dolls as an editioned lithograph, for example, but instead produced the work more like the handbills and fliers that plaster streets and circulate on the ground during times of political activity. Indeed, a reproduction of Smith’s Paper Dolls landed on the cover of How to ’92: Model Actions for a Post-Columbian World.¹¹This interventionist booklet offers a guide for do-it-yourself actions to counter the misinformation of the quincentenary: how to mount a demonstration, how to initiate media campaigns, and how to petition for curricular revisions. By opting to draw Paper Dolls, Smith may have intentionally created some distance from the master matrix that printmaking relies upon. This artwork underscores the violence of enforcing a singular worldview, and drawing allowed Smith to forego identical impressions for a process more intimately connected to uniqueness and individuality. One drawing was maybe not enough to reach the audience she needed, given what was at stake, but perhaps several versions would be.

In 2021, Smith returned to the idea of paper dolls.

Even though her practice had always been invested in contemporary politics, this was an exceptional moment of prescience. The revisitation of this work coincided with the announcement of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The final volume of the investigative report was released in 2024. “For the first time in the history of the United States,” Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, declared, “the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children.”¹²This comprehensive federal effort outlined recommendations to recognize the legacy of these policies with the goal of addressing intergenerational trauma and providing a path toward healing.

Paper Dolls from 2021 shares its name with the earlier series, but Smith transformed the scale and the material. The installation involves nearly life-size aluminum cutouts of the painted figures and their outfits. Smith designed them so that they come away from the wall, creating a dimension of depth and shadow. The imagery is identical to the earlier work, but the written descriptions are absent. Whereas the paper versions were carriers of explanations and historical facts, the sculptural dolls—which connect to Smith’s earliest approach to doll-making—are physically embodied. It is as if the core of Smith’s lesson to audiences today is one of relationality. The history is important, but so is our position toward it in the present. “My messages are about things that have happened in the past that impact what’s happening today,”¹³she maintained.

Smith was awarded four honorary doctorates over the course of her lifetime and an honorary baccalaureate from Salish Kootenai College, an accredited tribal college founded in 1978 that offers essential services to those in her home community. Smith was a longtime supporter of Salish Kootenai’s library and arts programs. In her speech for the school’s 2015 commencement ceremony she began, “This honorary degree from Salish Kootenai means more to me than all four honorary doctorates from mainstream universities.”¹⁴Encouraging the students seated before her, she continued, “My story is about how a child develops resiliency and coping mechanisms in a difficult and disenfranchised world.”¹⁵Smith’s relationship to the classroom was one she navigated with criticality and determination. Her role as a teacher was neither vocational nor a consolation to her. She was deliberate in how, when, and where she taught, and her artwork became one of most powerful platforms from which she advocated for education. Smith used dolls throughout her practice in service of that wider strategy, as an unassuming yet powerful motif to redress political and cultural injustices.

In Memory of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025).

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World 1991 is currently on view in Gallery 208 at MoMA.

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Read the first part of the series here.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson believed that a systematic understanding of other cultures was important for a peaceful postwar world order. He also believed that the museum, particularly The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was the ideal institution to undertake this work. In MoMA’s press release for the exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation (1943), Bateson notes that “there is one common ground between the scientific world of the anthropologist and the world of art: the idea that in some sense the artist expresses himself. The exhibition is based on that idea which, in time of war, may become as grim as a mathematical equation in ballistics.”¹

Bali, Background for War captured the social science and art networks that were brought together during World War II by the war effort and an institution of modern art. In turn, the exhibition became an important constellation of global history. At MoMA, Bateson’s notion of the museum as a common ground for science, art, and social engineering dovetailed with Bauhaus thought on the shaping of visual culture and perception, leading to a historical confluence of proto-cybernetics, regional thinking, and the New Bauhaus within the modern art museum in the service of military goals and postwar rebuilding. The influence of Bali, Background for War resounded in the postwar years, possibly contributing to the formation and intellectual history of Southeast Asian modern art networks in terms of how the exhibition foreshadows but is also informative in reading the postwar rehabilitation of the US cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia.

During World War II, the Museum executed 38 contracts for various government agencies. Among these contracts and programs, Bateson found work in the Film Library developing cultural intelligence studies of Axis countries through film.² While Bateson was not a film specialist per se, it was his work in Bali and his use of still and motion photography in analyzing cultures that attracted the attention of Iris Barry, first curator of MoMA’s Film Library (now the Department of Film), and led to his employment.³ Prior to joining the Museum, Bateson believed that MoMA had a specific and important role in the war effort, particularly in producing wartime subjectivities through exhibitions. This resonates with how scholar Fred Turner has described the exhibition-form’s compilation of material and the vistas from which viewers could freely discern cultural patterns and navigate the exhibition as a “democratic surround.”⁴ This experience of moving from image to text, of observation, inference, and deduction, could lead the audience to become more psychologically flexible and democratic in nature.⁵ In this regard, Bali, Background for War was an occasion for viewers “to exercise democratic choice.”⁶ This was an exhibitionary logic that provided a counterpoint to Nazi Germany’s instrumentalized modes of communication and power associated with fascist propaganda. Turner notes that Mead and other members of the Committee for National Morale, of which Bateson was secretary (while still at MoMA), envisioned the museum as the proper setting for a new kind of propaganda that could nurture both the individual democratic personality and a collective sense of national purpose.⁷

As an institution, MoMA was committed to these same ideas. In addition, some of the emigrant Bauhaus artists who had made their way to the United States after the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933 were committed to ideas of producing psychological agency through vision. Bauhaus artist Alexander Schawinsky was invited by the Museum (as opposed to Bateson personally) to design Bali, Background for War. Turner has noted that the museum was an important wartime node, one that mobilized Bauhaus methods. Victor D’Amico (founding director of MoMA’s Department of Education), for example, mobilized László Moholy-Nagy’s ideas for treating and resocializing veterans through the Museum’s War Veterans’ Art Center, which opened in 1944.⁸ MoMA likewise employed Bauhaus artist and designer Herbert Bayer’s techniques for extending field of vision by hanging photographs below and above eye level to give viewers of wartime exhibitions a field of visual choices.⁹ Bayer designed MoMA exhibitions Road to Victory, which was curated by photographer Edward Steichen in 1942, and Airways to Peace: An Exhibition of Geography for the Future, which was planned and directed by Monroe Wheeler in 1943.¹⁰

Schawinsky attended the Bauhaus and studied with Moholy-Nagy, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and Oskar Schlemmer. At the invitation of Josef Albers, he taught from 1936 to 1938 at Black Mountain College, where he developed the “Spectodrama,” a multimedia stage design. In response to MoMA’s interest in Bauhaus ideas of how vision might inform subjectivity, on October 28, 1943, Monroe Wheeler, then director of Exhibitions at MoMA as well as the Museum’s first director of Publications, wrote to Schawinsky to solicit a proposal for an exhibition based on the artist’s notion of “perspective,” which Schawinsky explained in terms of the “changes in visual conceptions with the climax of today’s formation of new visual experience in the making.”¹¹

Bateson’s correspondence with Schawinsky in May 1943 indicates a highly collaborative exhibition-making process, wherein Bateson sent detailed notes, expanded the list of artwork to be included, and solicited feedback.¹² However, in July 1943, Bateson wrote to Wheeler and James Thrall Soby, then director of the Museum’s Armed Services Program, to request that Schawinsky be removed from the project. Bateson complained that Schawinsky lacked “respect for the material” and that he was “trimming . . . photographs to fit in with his scheme of rectangles regardless of the internal composition of the pictures.”¹³ Ultimately, Schawinsky was kept on, and in the press release for the exhibition, he is credited as designing the exhibition.¹⁴ Despite their differences, Schawinsky’s Bauhaus training was evident in the exhibition. His design employed Bayer’s extended field of vision techniques—with images placed at different proximities to eye level—and performatively staged modern Balinese art against linear fields in a way that recalled the Spectodrama.¹⁵

These affinities between Schawinsky’s Bauhaus ideas and Bateson’s interest in social engineering subjectivities through vision and aesthetic experience would take on an expanded and international vision through Bali, Background for War and Bateson’s work at MoMA. As part of his job at the Museum, Bateson attended a conference that, held in Chicago in March 1943 by the army’s Military Government Division, brought together faculty from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and universities in Wisconsin and Michigan to develop training for the Army Specialized Training Program. Upon returning to New York, he and MoMA Film Library founding director, John Abbott, drafted a proposal to set up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA that would be responsible for circulating artworks, cultural objects, graphic materials, photographs, and films to college campuses hosting the army program and eventually to nongovernmental agencies involved in postwar reconstruction. Bali, Background for War was an exhibition that attempted to put these ideas into operation. In his letter to Mortimer Graves, then executive director of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, Bateson identifies the exhibition as a basis for setting up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA.

Bateson’s papers include notes regarding who would be part of the unit and how it would be constituted through MoMA’s infrastructure. Bateson focused on the diversity of artistic and cultural material at the Museum, including graphic design and film, as well as on its public programs.¹⁶ He considered the Museum an ideal institution to host the unit because it dealt “both with the Arts and with the Sciences.”¹⁷ The notes draw defined lines from Abbot, founding director of the Film Library, to Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum, and Elodie Courter, who would organize circulating exhibitions, which were seen as fundamental to this unit. The unit was imagined to mobilize the different departments of the Museum, with dotted lines drawing different divisions across the institution into the unit. The inclusion of Barr in Bateson’s notes and Bateson’s supposed attempt at writing a Balinese modern art history point in turn to the transmutation of the currency of modern art history to military value. Bateson’s exhibition expanded the visions of modern art history that Barr had mapped out in his diagrams on the development of abstract art.¹⁸ The anthropologist’s vision for MoMA was that the Museum would be an apparatus that produced intelligence derived from exhibitionary experience and the visual analysis of art. This intelligence during the war represented a convergence of the anthropological and the art historical as these were mobilized toward militaristic ends. Ultimately, however, Bateson’s proposal to develop a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA was not realized.¹⁹

At first glance, Bali, Background for War was not a particularly successful venture. Yet, it can still be considered an important exhibition of its time and one that is significant in a Southeast Asian modern art history. At the close of the exhibition in 1943, Bateson joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an American wartime intelligence agency. This was an unusual achievement given Bateson was a British national. Created in 1942, the OSS was the first centralized intelligence agency in the United States. It was the institutional predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).²⁰ David Price, an American anthropologist who has spent his career studying the historical and contemporary military uses of anthropology, has noted in his archival research on Bateson’s wartime work that the OSS was interested in the techniques of visual anthropology.²¹

An OSS memo Bateson authored in November 1944 suggests strategies for maintaining the long-term interests of the United States in South Asia.²² Bateson’s position paper envisions the postwar period as an extension of the prewar colonial system. His memo posits a moderation of the dynamic of “exhibitionism” and “spectatorship” to manage possible rebellion from independence movements—concepts that Bateson had first deployed in explaining child-rearing norms in different cultures. In the memo, Bateson elaborates:

The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of relations between “superior” and “inferior” peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on. And the same attitude of spectatorship is then naturally extended to native achievements in production or organization. In contrast to this, where the white man thinks of himself as a model and encourages the native people to watch him in order to find out how things should be done, we find that in the end nativistic cults spring up among the native people. The system gets overweighed until some compensatory machinery is developed and then the revival of native arts, literature, etc., becomes a weapon for use against the white man. . . . If, on the other hand, the dominant people themselves stimulate native revivalism, then the system as a whole is much more stable, and the nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.²³

Bateson suggests that if Indigenous peoples are encouraged to exhibit and celebrate their culture, as opposed to being encouraged to model themselves on Western culture, then “nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.”²⁴ Taken at face value, Bateson’s comments read as patronizing prescriptions for how to manage the postwar decolonizing process. Yet at the same time, an inverse relationship of cultural relations of “occupation” was being brought to the fore. In Bali, Background for War, Bali defined the region that the American soldier was to reoccupy. In this framework, the exhibition established an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic in which American soldiers were the spectators celebrating the culture of a region that they were liberating. In theory, American soldiers were placed in an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic that prepared them for the more benign reoccupation and postwar worldbuilding that they would have to enact in the Pacific.

Price detailed that when he declassified Bateson’s documents under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1990s, Bateson’s memo from November 1944 was found in the CIA archive and not the OSS archive. This suggests that Bateson’s advice for intelligence gathering was influential beyond World War II and perhaps formative to the CIA. Indeed, in 1951, only four short years after its founding, the CIA outlined a policy on Cold War weapons. The classified report considers culture a “Cold War Front” and advocates for private foundations to patronize and issue commissions to artists “who could create works of art symbolical of the struggle against tyranny in their native lands.”²⁵ The CIA would also infamously fund cultural organizations around the world, including the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Asia Foundation.²⁶ Both organizations contributed to the advancement of modern art internationally in the postwar years. From 1951, the CIA put into effect a program code-named DTPillar to influence the development of nationbuilding in Asia as a means to limit the growth of communism. Stirred by a public exposé in Ramparts magazine (in circulation from 1962 to 1975), the CIA ceased funding of cultural organizations in 1967.²⁷

Bateson was also strategic in targeting individuals who should see Bali, Background for War. He wrote personal invitations to the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and to individuals at the OSS.²⁸ Particularly telling is a loose list that includes Cora Du Bois (OSS, 1942–45). Du Bois was chief of research and analysis for the Southeast Asia Command by 1944 and, after World War II, influenced the framing of Southeast Asia through her positions as chief of the Southeast Asia Branch of the US State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research (from 1945 to 1949) and as an academic at Harvard University. The list also includes Charles Fahs (OSS, 1941–45), who became chief of the Research and Analysis Division (Far East) of the OSS in 1942 and director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1950, where he was directly involved in allocating Rockefeller grants and providing critical support to individual artists and intellectuals as well as to museums and art spaces in Southeast Asia.²⁹ In 1947, as if telegraphing Bateson’s comment about regions as a sane orchestration of the world, Du Bois, having returned from her service in the OSS and been asked to speak about cultural anthropology and Southeast Asia, stated at Smith College: “Regions and areas, like fields of academic learning, are artificial boundaries which we erect around our curiosity. They do not represent limits of integrated reality, but defenses built to encompass the frailties of human comprehension.”³⁰ This correlation and the constellated network of Bali, Background for War raises complex questions about US postwar and postimperial worldbuilding and intelligence, as well as about Southeast Asian modern art.

After the war, Bateson would advance his ideas on visual anthropology in other fields. In 1947, he addressed the United Nations, giving a speech titled “Atoms, Nations and Cultures” to argue for the urgency of social engineering based on the cultural analysis derived from visual anthropology.³¹

Twenty-four years after Bali, Background for War opened, in 1967, Bateson published the essay “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art.”³² In this text, he performs an analysis of Balinese art as information coded in style, material, composition, and skill. He emphasizes the profundity of art in terms of its relational quality. Thus, he argues, Balinese paintings, under the influence of traditional and Western art forms, encapsulate the communication process between these societies. Furthermore, the text resonates with Bateson’s interest in addressing differences in international relations, which could also be read as laying out the framework for data to remake the world.³³ In this sense, Bali, Background for War in many ways foreshadowed Bateson’s work on cybernetics in the 1960s and throughout the Cold War.³⁴

The cross-cultural relations based on aesthetic experiences with modern art that defined Bali, Background for War were echoed in MoMA’s contributions to the postwar construction of modern art in Bali. In 1953, the foundation Puri Lukisan was set up to establish a museum of modern Balinese art in Ubud. Tjokorda Gee Agung was its founding chairman while Rudolf Bonnet was its curator. The museum sought support from patrons of Balinese art in Holland, the United States, and England. Monroe Wheeler answered the call. Beyond sending a book on the care of artworks, he supported the development of the museum by soliciting donations from American foundations. The first organization he approached was the Asia Foundation, which would contribute to the building in 1956 of Museum Puri Lukisan, the oldest museum in Bali. Wheeler might not have known at the time that the Asia Foundation received funds from the CIA. Nevertheless, the networked triangulation of capital flows from the CIA as well as the belief in aesthetic experience being able to mold subjectivities is important in the intelligence-making project of modern art in the Cold War.³⁵ In his letter to the Asia Foundation, dated July 10, 1955, Wheeler notes that a financial contribution to the Indonesian government to complete the building of the museum would be an admirable “token of American concern with the fine arts, which is too little understood in Asia,” extending MoMA’s wartime concern for Balinese modern art and Southeast Asia into the postwar period.³⁶

Bali, Background for War, when read against its possible influences on the cultural Cold War in the region and Bateson’s postwar accomplishments, anticipates exhibitions of Southeast Asian modern art as forms of intelligence-making, marrying the regional as a method in structuring the world with “modern art” and as a product of international exchange. Thus, Bali, Background for War offers a vista onto early cybernetic entanglements between Southeast Asia and modern art. It is important to keep in mind that MoMA did not set out to make a regional art exhibition with Bali, Background for War. Neither did the Museum set out to influence the policies of the cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia that Southeast Asian modern artists (like the Balinese modernists) would later navigate in seeking support for their own development through the Asia Foundation and other CIA-funded organizations. As an exhibition that predates Southeast Asia as a field of area studies, Bali, Background for War is an exhibitionary method: it is at once a field of relations, a feedback loop, and an open-ended imaginary produced from comparatively looking at modern art. Bali, Background for War foreshadowed future articulations of the relations that have come to define cybernetics as a field. As this essay argues, the exhibition also expands our understanding of MoMA’s influence as a museum and center for a global history of modern art, a critical part of the construction of a postwar world order.

*This essay has been adapted from and expands on an unpublished chapter from the author’s dissertation titled “Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s–1980s),” Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2023.

**With special thanks to Ana Marie of the Archives, Library, and Research Collections Department and Ottilie Lighte from the Imaging and Visual Resources Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

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The whites of eyes and the glint of teeth, the only discernible features in the otherwise dark shape of the Balinese shadow puppet of the witch Rangda in her supernatural form, were probably the first things visitors encountered when they entered the 1943 exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation. With its fiery head and tendril fingers, the shadow puppet is a totem for a ferocious “other.” Encapsulating the anxieties that contextualized this exhibition, which coincided with World War II, the shadow puppet embodied the sensibility of the exhibition-form—an elusive sensemaking of a culture oceans away.

A wartime exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson, Bali, Background for War opened at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in late summer 1943 and then traveled to universities and museums across North America.¹ Unlike MoMA’s other wartime exhibitions of the early 1940s, such as Road to Victory (1942) and Airways to Peace (1943), Bali, Background for War did not visually represent the efforts of the Allied Forces. Instead, it presented Balinese sculpture, paintings, puppets, and idols—Balinese modern art—collected by Bateson and Margaret Mead, his wife and collaborator at the time, as well as a selection of photographs from the more than 25,000 images taken during their joint anthropological expedition to Bali in 1936–39.²

Designed by Bauhaus artist and designer Xanti Schawinsky to be portable, the exhibition’s display system relied on wooden structures composed of thin vertical poles on which artworks and cultural objects were hung or otherwise installed in a variety of ways and at different heights. Balinese cultural objects were installed to facilitate distinct sight lines, which Bateson referred to as “vistas,”³ with the individual pieces appearing to float relative to one another. The exhibition presented works and objects on the same ground, alluding to how the artist and their making of the artwork were the material products of a society in which they lived and worked.

Bali, Background for War was an anthropological exhibition of Balinese modern art and culture conceived as a technology for producing a necessary subjectivity in the American infantry and civilian administrators who would oversee the “reoccupation” of Japanese-captured territories, such as Bali. The exhibition sought to cultivate the ability to recognize cultural patterns so as to foster understanding of “those habits of thought and behavior” characteristic of a particular people.⁴ In turn, it represented a weaponization of the then emerging methods of visual anthropology. Bali, Background for War was, in this respect, an exceptional exhibition. Bateson’s only curatorial effort while he was employed at MoMA (from 1942 to 1943), it encapsulated aspects of Bateson and Mead’s most influential work in visual anthropology—at the time, a new subfield of anthropology that would, in part, lead to a break from the racial codification informing exhibitions of Balinese culture in Western museums in the 1930s, wherein biological markers identified race as a defining paradigm of a people’s identity.⁵ Mead and Bateson’s use of film and photography in their fieldwork in Bali has been interpreted by scholars such as Urmila Mohan as a move away from such racialized logic.⁶

After their fieldwork in Bali, Mead and Bateson developed this inquiry into a method that became a “leading social-scientific strategy in World War II” through what Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan has described as “a new alliance of federal and foundation sponsorship with university and industrial partners.”⁷ This included the Committee for National Morale, which the couple joined in 1939, and the Council on Intercultural Relations, which they co-established in 1942 to coordinate research projects among an interdisciplinary group of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists interested in analyzing contemporary cultures to benefit the war effort.⁸

Mead and Bateson cowrote Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) based on their findings from their fieldwork in Bali. In this book, they lay out their new methodology of visual anthropology.⁹ Photographs capture “behaviors” that are seen as logics or patterns that were registered across a society and found in individual actions or objects. The book explores the social relations that form the basis of larger social patterns. However, this study of Bali by visually surveying the cultural other has been critiqued by scholars such as Geoghegan as indebted to a Dutch colonial policy of turning Bali into a “living museum,” that is, of looking upon it as an idyllic “primitive” society—the assumption being that Balinese culture remained unchanged and thus could be essentialized and understood through visual codes. To be sure, Mead and Bateson’s lack of analysis of the Dutch administration renders their documentation and analysis problematic.¹⁰

Bali, Background for War (1943) was, in essence, the physical manifestation of the method of visual anthropology fleshed out in Balinese Character. Indeed, the exhibition itself became a space in which anthropological methods produced a sense of knowing and relating through the visual encounter with art and cultural artifacts; yet, at the same time, it did not end up being solely an ethnographic representation. In one of Bateson’s many drafts of a press release, he explained that the exhibition would promote “[a] greater realistic understanding of the differences between peoples, of the ways in which each people has developed its own customs and its view of life” and that “if different people are to work together . . . and appreciate each other, some of these special peculiarities must be recognized” and “labelled and pointed out partly so that we may avoid stepping on each other’s toes but also so that each people may have opportunity to make its own special contribution to an organized world.”¹¹ These ideas formed the groundwork for an exhibitionary logic in which the artwork is understood as indexical of a culture and people. Furthermore, it anticipates the belief in postwar art exhibitions as visual arguments for cultural affinities and thus the basis of a shared identity and political consciousness.

Bali, Background for War was the first “regional” exhibition of art from Southeast Asia. In 1943, the imagination of Southeast Asia as a region was a product of World War II. An offshoot of the India Command and formed in response to the Japanese conquest of the region, the South East Asia Command was created by the Allied Forces in August 1943, the same month that Bali, Background for War opened at MoMA.¹² Southeast Asia is referenced in MoMA’s exhibition press release as the “conquered countries” of the Japanese.¹³ The Japanese occupation during World War II had been articulated as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, an economic, military, and cultural bloc of occupied countries in East and Southeast Asia that supported the Japanese war effort. In wartime propaganda, the Co-Prosperity Sphere was framed as part of a larger historic aim of resisting Western colonization and manipulation. Seeding a regional identity through a cultural program that included the establishment of “modern” arts education, it championed the revitalization of local, traditional, and Asian aesthetics across the region.¹⁴

As a regional exhibition, Bali, Background for War was less a geographic understanding of the region as a proof of concept of Bateson’s theorization of a world order based on regions of cultures. While he does not explicitly point to it, Bateson’s presentation of modern artworks alongside anthropological materials advanced an aesthetic argument about the role of art in navigating cultural differences. It reflected an understanding of the region that was sensitive to the effects of war, one that offered an alternative visual logic to “Asian” aesthetics advanced by Japanese wartime propaganda.

Bateson’s notes about the exhibition indicate “Southeast Asia” alongside other themes such as “Problems of Overseas Administration,” “Problems of National Character,” “Intercultural Relations and Propaganda,” and “Problems of Visual Presentation.”¹⁵ His conceptualization of the region was a framework for organizing and ordering the world—one based on visual identification of “cultural patterns.” In memos regarding the exhibition, he commented that “in the organization and orchestration of the postwar world [,] many different types of technical insight will be required—political, geographic, economic and cultural.”¹⁶ Furthermore, he highlighted that a key failure of the Treaty of Versailles was the lack of regional knowledge and warned that in the postwar epoch, there was a real risk that the cultural aspects of the various regions would “be ignored or imperfectly understood.”¹⁷ Bateson believed that this would lead to conflict. In a letter to Mortimer Graves of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, sent in April 1943, four months before the opening of Bali, Background for War, Bateson explained that he and Mead were “trying to arrange in the museum an exhibition of Balinese material (native paintings, carvings, observational films, and observational photographs of native behavior) as an example of what a single culture would look like when worked out in this way.”¹⁸ He concluded by claiming the exhibition was part of a larger framework that was “the next logical step towards a sane orchestration of the world’s regional culture.”¹⁹ If regions were a framework for organizing the world and integral to international relations and building a peaceful world, then the ability to read the cultural patterns found in art and its relationship to a society was crucial.

Bali, Background for War sought to represent “the patterns of thought and behavior” of the Balinese people through “works of art and [Bateson’s] photographs of daily life on the island.”²⁰ Developed with MoMA in mind, the exhibition set out a methodology of viewing that made the exhibition-form a generative site for producing “intelligence.” Intelligence in this regard took multiple forms, including the conversion of anthropological information on Balinese culture into “military intelligence,” wherein the viewer learning to read Balinese culture through the exhibition develops a skill necessary for the successful American “reoccupation” of Bali. The exhibition was firstly a collection of material and anthropological information that in the context of World War II had military value. Secondly, it was mobilized to cultivate skills and subjectivities for military application. In turn, the exhibition as a historical object points to an emergent “cultural” military industrial complex centered on modern art and anthropology.

In this context, the “regional” exhibition was a technology that converted anthropological intelligence into military intelligence, both in terms of apprehending a cultural other but also as a way of organizing the world through cultural regions. How was modern art integral to this convergence? How was the production of a modern subjectivity and exhibitionary logic of Southeast Asia entangled with the writing of modern art at MoMA, and how was it distinct from the colonial aesthetics of the census that scholars have pointed out in discussing Balinese Character?²¹

The artworks that Bateson and Mead presented in Bali, Background for War were procured from three main painting centers in Bali: Ubud, where most foreign artists in Bali had settled from the 1920s onward; Sanur, where some foreign artists lived and most vacationed; and Batuan, which tourists rarely visited. Bateson and Mead seemed to have been most interested in Batuan, where most of the paintings in Bali, Background for War were sourced from.²² By the time Mead and Bateson were in Bali, there was a thriving business of Balinese artists making tourist paintings for a Western audience. As products of transnational exchange, these works of art were quintessentially modern.

Hildred Geertz, in her study of Bateson and Mead’s collection of Balinese paintings and, more generally, of Batuan paintings, describes the paintings produced in Batuan as “bicultural” and “bound up in the meaning systems and aesthetic ideas of several cultures at once.”²³ She notes that only a few of the Batuan painters were directly taught by German artist Walter Spies and Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet, both of whom lived in Ubud. For the most part, Batuan or Balinese painters at the time encountered Western images in textbooks, in foreign magazines, and in the form of small commercial images distributed within the Dutch colony.

Prior to Bateson and Mead’s arrival in Bali, there were already precedents of exchange and modernism on the island. The year 1928 is marked as the first time Western observers recorded art in Bali as consisting of new forms of representation. These observers went on to cultivate a tourist economy for such images.²⁴ The Pita Maha, an artist society committed to modern art in Bali, was established in 1936 and active until 1940. It became associated with modern art of Bali, with Bonnet, a member of the society, organizing exhibitions of Balinese modernists in Indonesia and in Europe, including exhibitions in 1937 and 1938 in Amsterdam and London²⁵

The modern style that emerged from this period in the 1930s and which defined the artworks that Bateson presented in Bali, Background for War was thus informed by engagement with Western art. As Adrian Vickers has noted, Balinese modern art in the 1930s was seen as exotically primitive and distinctly different from Western modernism. And yet, art dealers such as Dutch gallerist Carel van Lier sold Balinese modern art in Europe alongside European modern art.²⁶

Walter Spies housed Bateson and Mead upon their arrival in Bali in 1936 and provided their first introduction to Balinese paintings, influencing Bateson’s perspective on Balinese modern art.²⁷ For MoMA’s installation of the exhibition, Bateson considered an additional section devoted to Balinese modern art.²⁸ In the anthropologist’s personal papers, there is a memo to Xanti Schawinsky about the wall text alongside instructions regarding which photographs and artworks were to be installed. In addition, Bateson scribbled down several possible configurations for the works. A section called “History of Modern Balinese Art,” for example, was to be arranged in a straight row, suggesting a linear historical narrative. The selection of works would include one or two paintings by Spies and about ten artworks from Bateson and Mead’s collection. The wall text focused on the genealogy of the making of the artwork and described how artists made their works as part of a loose art history of modern Balinese art development, information that was then interspersed with short stories and mythical accounts such as how Spies gave paper and black ink to Balinese artist Sorbet and a whole school was born. The genealogy privileged Spies and his position in Balinese modern art at the expense of other influences, implicitly reflecting Bateson’s own perspective of Balinese art.

Bateson claims in the written guide that accompanied the traveling exhibition that all the artworks were of the artists’ “spontaneous invention,” with the exception of a painting by Ida Bagus Made Togog, who was asked to make pictures of his dreams.²⁹ In this regard, Bateson’s mobilization of artworks might seem to speak to how Balinese artists authentically represented their inner lives and society. This was not necessarily the case, however. In her study of Bateson and Mead’s collection, Geertz found that the two anthropologists deeply influenced the Balinese artists. Throughout their fieldwork, the couple was in contact with Balinese painters who would not only travel to see them but also made art specifically to sell to them.³⁰

While Bateson intended the artworks to be seen as sources of information about the inner lives of the peoples they represented, their makers were aware of the Western anthropological gaze of Bateson and Mead, which informed their process and, in particular, their subject matter. Thus, the Balinese society that Bali, Background for War pictured was one already in dialogue with an international world order and a modern art history.In this sense, Balinese modern art in the exhibition was relational, not just representative of a faraway culture. The photographed Balinese man and more generally the people whose gaze met those visiting the exhibition was thus returning a gaze that was part of a cultural exchange that spanned back to the 1930s and was a critical part of the definition of Balinese modern art. The regional imagination captured in Bali, Background for War was, in turn, an emergent international order framed by an encounter with modern art. This nexus of the anthropological and militaristic sensemaking that took shape as an exhibitionary technology of worldmaking during the Cold War will be unpacked in the second part of this essay.

With special thanks to Ana Marie of the Archives, Library, and Research Collections Department and Ottilie Lighte from the Imaging and Visual Resources Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

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From the 1960s revival of SoHo in downtown Manhattan to the 2009 opening of the Sharjah Art Foundation Spaces, artists and gallerists have long sought out neglected and abandoned structures and adapted them for use as studio, exhibition, and performance spaces. During recent C-MAP visits to Mumbai, Delhi, Goa, Bangalore, and Kochi, I noticed similar art-driven adaptive reuse of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. This caused me to wonder about preservation of such structures in India, and what it signifies in a vast, diverse country experiencing rapid growth amid centuries of architectural heritage.

In India, various public and private institutions address preservation, but there’s no national mandate for relatively recent works. Nationally the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the Architecture Heritage Division of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) monitor sites that are more than one hundred years old.¹ The internationally oriented advocacy group Docomomo International (“Docomomo” stands for “documentation and conservation of buildings, sites, and neighborhoods of the modern movement”) follows developments in India but lacks a national chapter.² At the city level, initiatives vary. One promising development is the 2006 creation of the Indian Heritage Cities Network (IHCN), which is affiliated with UNESCO New Delhi.³ The thirty-two member cities (including Bangalore and Kochi, discussed below) have agreed to take on a lengthy list of responsibilities related to preservation and adaptive reuse.

In Delhi, preservation of works less than one hundred years old is limited to municipal initiatives that influence alterations to selected works built before 1950,⁴ and recently INTACH proposed a program called Modern Architectural Heritage of Delhi to address post-1947 architecture.⁵ In Mumbai, the Heritage Regulations for Greater Bombay Act of 1995 established graded protections for different types of built environments,⁶ the first law in India to protect a precinct (in this case, the Fort District).⁷ Two other groups—the Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) and the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee (MHCC)—also have influence. In addition, the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) acts as a think tank and advocacy group.⁸ But given the city’s size, deep history, and architectural complexity, preservation of relatively new works is only beginning. As one writer notes, Mumbai, “whose boom took off in the 1860s, is simply too new by the standards of a country that groans under its staggering wealth of historic buildings.”⁹

In Goa, according to one source, current obstacles to preservation include rent control as a disincentive for upkeep, the difficulty of dividing houses in inheritance resolutions, and increased land values motivating demolition.¹⁰ On the other hand, as a major tourist spot and home to several UNESCO World Heritage sites, there’s evidence that sensitivity to architectural heritage is becoming a factor in local development initiatives. In Kochi, as in Goa, heritage initiatives are influenced by the local tourism industry. For example, the Cochin Heritage Zone Conservation Society (CHZCS) is charged with planning and maintenance (though it’s ineffective, according to several sources),¹¹ and some property owners in the heritage zone complain of marketing difficulties due to maintenance requirements and alteration restrictions.¹² But preservation also figures into infrastructure planning, as seen in initiatives such as the Kerala Sustainable Urban Development Project (KSUDP). The state, in the form of the Kerala Art and Heritage Commission, also has some influence.¹³ As a result of these varied conditions, preservation and adaptive reuse in India are often the result of enlightened self-interest as much as organized planning. And that’s where the art community comes in. Several examples encountered during 2015 and 2016 C-MAP visits are discussed here.

In Mumbai, the group visited a revived Victorian-era museum and encountered an Art Deco district in need of attention. The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (BDL) exemplifies a public-private partnership. A striking Victorian structure in the heart of Mumbai constructed in response to the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the BDL opened in 1872 as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay. By the late 1990s the museum was neglected, but Tasneem Zakaria Mehta (managing trustee, honorary director, and MoMA International Council member) committed to restoring and revitalizing the institution, which reopened in 2008.

A key element of the new program is commissioned artist interventions, creating a platform for artists to enliven the space and to introduce new audiences to contemporary art. The museum’s visitors tend to be residents interested in Mumbai history, and so interventions that critically engage local culture are especially apt. A recent example is Games People Play, in which the artists known as Thukral and Tagra created interactive environments inspired by games in the collection.

Along Mumbai’s Marine Drive I noticed beautiful Art Deco buildings in various states of repair (Mumbai is said to be second only to Miami, Florida, in its number of Art Deco buildings).¹⁴ Regarding local interest in their preservation, it seems that in Mumbai, as in many cities, public initiatives and private developments form a patchy safety net. At the international level, the district was proposed for UNESCO World Heritage site status in 2013 (Delhi’s Old City was chosen instead),¹⁵ while on the local level, groups such as the Oval-Cooperage Residents Association (OCRA) are starting to incorporate Deco preservation into their missions.¹⁶ Meanwhile, sites such as the Liberty Cinema demonstrate how art-world adaptive reuse helps to fill a gap. The cinema has been open continuously since 1947 and is lovingly cared for by its owner .¹⁷ Though high operating costs make conventional programming difficult, film festivals and live performance rentals keep the doors open for appreciative visitors.

New Delhi has its own architectural identity, and adaptive reuse patterns reflect it. As the nation’s capital, with its sweeping urban plan, embassy district, and post-Independence state modernism, the city’s sensibility tends toward the monumental. Yet like Mumbai, economic growth and a swelling urban population are driving much demolition and rebuilding, often destroying significant modern architecture in the process. A case in point is the planned demolition of the Hall of Nations and Nehru Pavilion, the work of architect Raj Rewal and structural engineer Mahendra Raj at Pragati Maidan (1972). Recent efforts to save these endangered icons of Indian modernism demonstrate complex social and legal forces at work.¹⁸ As a representative from INTACH put it: “More than the fact that there is difficulty in wrapping one’s head around the idea of modern architectural heritage, it is the bureaucratic apathy that is causing trouble.”¹⁹ In that context, it was refreshing to encounter several art-driven preservation efforts in Delhi. One involved an actual structure—a house reinvented as an alternative space—while in others, artists, photographers, and architects are incorporating architectural documentation into their practice.

Gujral House, situated in the upscale Jor Bagh neighborhood, is a residence turned project space, the family property of architect and developer Mohit Gujral and entrepreneur Feroze Gujral. Our visit to the house was my first opportunity to go behind the scenes to see a domestic space. We entered the characteristically walled property to encounter a peaceful, landscaped courtyard in which the freestanding house and an outbuilding are situated. The multistory concrete dwelling has numerous windows, each with a concrete canopy typical of the area. Inside, rooms are organized around a central stairway, which leads to a roof terrace. Though it was difficult to make out the original program or guess at the architect’s intentions, one could get a general sense of the layout and infrastructure, discerning formal and informal spaces along with remnants of kitchen and storage areas.

These remnants of domesticity amplify the boldness of the interventions, in which artists have punched holes, excavated, and otherwise modified the building. I was especially interested in the residue of a work long since de-installed: The House of Everything and Nothing (2013) by the Raqs Media Collective. The original installation visualized data flow between the group’s New Delhi studio and the rest of the world, taking the form of a network of neon mounted in and on the building. The lighting was installed in channels formed by removing the concrete stucco to reveal the brick structure beneath. As if the building had been excavated from the outside in, the remains helped me to understand its underlying structure.

The group encountered other traces of New Delhi modernism in virtual form. Photographer, activist, and C-MAP advisor Ram Rahman, for example, has put great effort into documenting the work of his father, architect Habib Rahman.²⁰ The elder Rahman was a key figure in the development of Nehruvian state modernism in the post-Independence period, but with relatively few institutional archives available, preservation of the architect’s photographs, drawings, and correspondence remains a largely private endeavor. Similarly, architect and artist Saher Shah and her partner, photographer Randhir Singh, integrate architectural documentation into their practices. Shah’s drawings reflect upon the built environment, often incorporating photographs and plans. In Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force (2009), for example, the artist drew upon archival photography of the 1903 Delhi Durbar, a colonial spectacle, to embed alternative spatial—and by extension social—perspectives into her interpretation of the power-laden event.

Addressing more modest but equally symbolic structures, a fascinating series by Singh focuses on contemporary shrines. The photographs celebrate the way that these diverse ancient, transcendental forms are translated into modern industrial materials such as concrete, tile, and ironwork, and how they are integrated into the contemporary landscape. Since these structures are largely private and unofficial compared to more conventional building, simply documenting them is valuable, serving as an informal complement to the national archaeological survey.

The C-MAP group also visited Bangalore, a thriving, tech-driven city. One writer claims that the city has more alternative spaces than traditional galleries, positing that “in the absence of government infrastructure or commercial enterprise, artists and art students have taken on the responsibility of leading Bangalore’s art scene.”²¹ The group visited an exuberant example: 1 Shanthi Road, a collective founded by artist and historian Suresh Jayaram and designed by architect Meeta Jain. Jarayam argues that such efforts are critical as much as practical endeavors: “Most of these spaces are institutional critiques . . . They are an alternative to established art institutions because there is a disconnect between what is being taught and practiced.”²²

In addition to visiting 1 Shanthi Road, we were welcomed to the commercial GallerySKE, which stands out as an example of art-driven adaptive reuse in the midst of rapid urban change. In a recent interview, founder Sunitha Kumar Emmart describes how, seeking to expand from a more conventional gallery space, she found the unusual house: “I came across a ramshackle property on the lane that runs parallel to my home. The roof had caved in, it was all paved and concrete with no garden except for two old mango trees. It became a restoration project. People somehow now think I’m interested in restoring old properties but I’m not. It seemed like a great positioning for me to have this house built in the 1870s: a piece of old Bangalore which is disappearing and a window to show contemporary art in this historical setting.”²³ Her sensitive renovation of the house incorporates historical elements, such as the entry vestibule and exposed roof beams, into spacious contemporary gallery and office areas that flow into a gently landscaped courtyard. According to Kumar, the house would have been demolished long ago were it not for the adjacent graveyard (considered inauspicious) and a long, previous property dispute.

In Goa, the group visited the Heritage Hotel: Art Spaces, a one-hundred-year-old Portuguese-style villa turned hotel turned artist residency. Founded by artists Romain Loustau, Madhavi Gore, and Nikhil Chopra, Heritage Hotel is intended to be “a space for reflection, inspiration and creation; a place where artists come together, meet, make and share their ideas, processes, experiments and collaborative efforts with each other and the community.”²⁴ Artists from all over the world share seven studios, several bedrooms—and a cat. Pleasant shared spaces have been adapted to facilitate interaction among residents but also with the community beyond, which is invited to visit during the program’s regular open-studio days.

I will end this essay where I began the C-MAP visits to India, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Of all the sites discussed here, the biennale is arguably the most spirited artist-driven force integrating architecture of the past into the city’s present and future.

Kochi is a historical port town on India’s tropical southwest coast. Long a center for international trade (especially of spices), the built environment strongly reflects the city’s heritage, especially in its Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial architecture. The artists and curators who organize the biennale, now in its third iteration, set out to fully engage this history, aspiring to “create a new language of cosmopolitanism and modernity that is rooted in the lived and living experience of this old trading port, which, for more than six centuries, has been a crucible of numerous communal identities” and “to explore and . . . retrieve memories of this past, and its present, in the current global context to posit alternatives to political and cultural discourses emanating from the specific histories of Europe and America. A dialogue for a new aesthetics and politics rooted in the Indian experience, but receptive to the winds blowing in from other worlds, is possible.²⁵” As a result, the biennale is sited within historic venues in or near the Fort Kochi heritage area, from the maritime warehouses known as “godowns” to public parks, to former military barracks, to empty houses.²⁶ To visit is to feel thoroughly oriented to place and time, and to experience art in ways that strongly resonate with it.

As a result, several venues are being sensitively renovated. The Dutch-Colonial-era godown named the Pepper House has been most fully adapted by the biennale’s foundation and is now in year-round use, incorporating a gallery, café, residency program, and even an artist-organized library (Laboratory of Visual Arts, or LaVA, by Bose Krishnamachari).²⁷ Many other biennale sites are minimally renovated, however, creating unique opportunities to experience the buildings and the art placed there. In these spaces one senses their former functions through building orientation, layout, and general style, but also through tile-lined counters, wall wear, old wiring, and utilitarian shelving. Even temperature, light conditions, ambient sound, and smell become part of the experience.

Aspinwall House, the biennale’s anchor space, makes this immediately apparent. The large waterfront property, built in the 1860s for the eponymous English trading firm and later disused, incorporates large, atmospheric warehouses and related spaces. Ironically, this condition makes the property’s future uncertain: owned by a company affiliated with the original trading company, the land is more valuable than the neglected buildings.

In that context, a work sited at Aspinwall House in the 2012 biennale is especially relevant to the theme of art-driven adaptive reuse: Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz’s Stopover (2012). The pair collected and installed more than one hundred wet-grinding stones in a central, symmetrical room that opens onto a small pier. Such stones were once used domestically to grind spices and other ingredients for cooking. Usually embedded in the floor, they were a standard fixture in Indian homes built well into the early twentieth century. Today they are being replaced by food processors, but it’s hard to discard a four-hundred-pound boulder, and so the stones are often dumped in vacant lots—the artists describe how they would find them in “little cemeteries of grinders.”²⁸ The strong forms are smooth on top, showing their decades of daily use, but rough on the bottom, as if just excavated.

As an installation the stones represent once-unmovable objects set in motion by irresistible global forces. They also evoke gravestones, marking the death of a tradition. Their placement suggests the movement of spices out into the world, but one can also picture the abandoned stones being rolled off the pier and settling back into the land below. One is left to guess at the next site for the stones, the fate of the building, and the future of the biennale as a global force. In this way Stopover and Aspinwall House vividly manifest the spirit of art-driven adaptive reuse we witnessed in our travels, bringing new life to historic but marginalized structures in Indian cities.

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The Museum of Modern Art consistently attracts direct engagement—or what I call “messing with MoMA”—by artists, the general public, and staff. These actions take a wide variety of forms, from manifestos and conceptual gestures to protests and performances. “Messing” connotes the variety of these interventions, which question, play with, provoke, subvert, and comment on MoMA as an institution, and on the paradox of institutionalizing modernism.

Documents related to seven decades of interventions are shown here, selected from my ongoing attempt at a comprehensive chronology. (This related exhibition checklist has other examples.) The selections are organized chronologically, focusing on more intimate, less well-known interventions from which a common theme emerges: a consistent desire for inclusion in the messiness of the modern project, a drive to fully engage with the art of our time.

Even in its first decades, MoMA engendered debate and controversy. Much of the criticism came from journalists and concerned the nature and validity of modernism, but artists and staff sometimes joined the fray. The earliest example here is a satirical invitation to the 1939 opening party for the Museum’s new building. Miffed that some fellow staff members weren’t invited, Manager of Publications Frances Collins organized and circulated this official-looking card, complete with a deckled edge and engraving-style type. By opening the card, the front of which bore the phrase “Oil that glitters is not gold,” recipients were invited by hosts “Empress of Blandings” (a fictional sow featured in P. G. Woodhouse novels) and “Charles Boyer” (presumably the film actor) to the new digs of the “Museum of Standard Oil.”

According to Russell Lynes’s history of the Museum, Collins was especially irked that staff members such as telephone operator and “office boy” Jimmy Ernst weren’t invited.¹ (Ernst, a child of artists Max Ernst and Louise Strauss, later worked in the Museum’s film library). Lynes notes, “The staff, if not the trustees, were greatly amused by what their young colleague had done.” Indeed—Collins was promptly fired.

Today, Collins’s sardonic gesture would be called institutional critique—an analysis of the sociocultural context in which art functions. In fact, in 2007 the card was appropriated and incorporated into just such a work: R.S.V.P 1939 (2007–2009) by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin. Though the works were conceived seventy years apart, they show how questioning the role of oil-industry funding in philanthropy remains prescient.

A year after the new building opened, the American Abstract Artists (founded 1936) organized a protest, demanding more curatorial attention to contemporary American artists. This accompanying broadside by artist Ad Reinhardt asks, “How Modern Is The Museum of Modern Art?” Responding specifically to the exhibitions Art in Our Time (1939), Modern Masters from European and American Collections (1940), and Italian Masters (1940), the pointed text reads in part:

How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art? Let’s look at the record[.] In 1939 the Museum professed to show ART IN OUR TIME—

Whose time Sargent, Homer, La Farge and Harnett? Or Picasso, Braque, Leger and Mondrian? Which time? If the descendants of Sargent and Homer, what about the descendants of Picasso and Mondrian? What about American Abstract Art? [. . .] What about Towne and Ward—British cattle painters—turned loose on a Missouri farm? A Minnesota grain elevator painted by Daubigny? Bellows’ Stag at Sharkey’s done by Henri Regnault? The Nebraska prairies by Eugene Boudin? The Bowery by Eugene Carriere?

And MODERN MASTERS . . . Eakins, Homer, Ryder, Whistler. . . . Those are the only Americans included. Are they the grandfathers of the Europeans they are shown with? [ . . . ]
ITALIAN MASTERS—Caravaggio, Raphael, Bronzino! And such examples! How easy to justify a Praxiteles show! How revolutionary the Egyptians! [ . . . ]

Art in Our Time, a massive survey, was the first exhibition in the new 1939 Goodwin and Stone building (the opening party for which Frances Collins conceived her invitation). Italian Masters, a show of canonical Renaissance and Baroque art, was largely a historical accident: following their showing at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, New York, the works were stranded in the United States at the outbreak of war, and the Museum took advantage of the opportunity to put them on view. According to curator Dorothy Miller’s catalogue introduction, Modern Masters was intended to complement the Italian Masters show, demonstrating “the great indebtedness of the modern masters to the work of their ancestors. . . .”²

As it turned out, more than fifty peeved descendants of these “ancestors” signed the broadside, including A. E. Gallatin, Agnes Lyall, Louis Schanker, and Suzy Frelinghuysen—but also Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and David Smith, who were already becoming integrated into MoMA’s master narrative.

In the late 1950s, the esteemed art writer Calvin Tomkins made a quieter intervention. The intimacy of his gesture, his insight into it, and the feeling of being alone in a peaceful gallery is conveyed in his memoir:

. . . when I was just starting to look at contemporary art, a painting at the Museum of Modern Art stopped me cold. It was an exhibition called “Sixteen Americans [1959],” and the artist . . . was Robert Rauschenberg. The painting—its title was Double Feature [(1959)]—was covered with a number of apparently unrelated passages of messy paint . . . along with several odd collage elements [including] part of a man’s shirt, with pocket. . . . Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching me, I fished a quarter out of my pocket and slipped it into the pocket of the shirt in the painting. It was a dopey thing to do, but I felt good afterward. I’d made a connection to something that would become, for reasons I didn’t even suspect, increasingly important to me. Marcel Duchamp claimed that the creative act is bipolar, in that it requires not only the artist who sets it in motion but also the spectator who interprets it, and by doing so completes the process.³

In contrast, the 1960s are correctly associated with political activism as museums and other institutions began to be aggressively questioned by artists. MoMA in particular became a site of active debate on topics such as the artist’s role in the exhibition and the sale of his or her work, emerging and historical art movements, and overarching social issues such as the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and economic injustice. High-visibility activities well documented elsewhere include group interventions by the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC),⁴ Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG),⁵ Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, and Angry Arts. Specific gestures such as Takis’s removal of his sculpture from the exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968) and Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970) are also landmarks in this period.

Organizing efforts by curatorial staff were also highly visible at the time, but it’s worth pointing out that work actions by non-curatorial staff, in particular Security and Housekeeping, have received far less attention. This press release regarding a strike by security guards is one of few traces, even though non-curatorial departments were some of the first to be unionized and their quiet but crucial work keeps the Museum functioning.

The selections here focus on individual artists’ activities, most of which are critical but quieter and often mischievous or elegiac. These involve artists Bruce Conner and Ray Johnson, Vern Blosum and William Anthony, as well as writer and curator Gene Swenson.

Conner and Johnson’s gesture is discussed by Anastasia Aukeman in her forthcoming monograph on Conner.⁶ She traces how his SUPERHUMAN DEVOTION sic was considered for the 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, but the work was damaged during shipment to New York and declined for the show. In response, as the artist recalled, he put the assemblage back in the shipping crate and, along with Johnson, brought it to the opening:

I invited Ray Johnson to the gallery and we painted the box, drilled holes in it. I had previously asked Ray for 100 hands and he opened a box and scattered 100 watch hands in the box, set fire to part of it, glued things on it and made a rope handle to carry it. We caught a taxi to MOMA for the opening . . . and were refused acceptance at the check stand. The guard wouldn’t let me carry it inside the museum. The box sat in the center of the entryway and everyone walked around it. After the opening we took the Staten Island Ferry and Ray and I threw it off the ferry in front of the Statue of Liberty.⁷

Two years after Conner’s assemblage was hurled into New York Harbor, MoMA acquired Vern Blosum’s painting Time Expired (1962) as an early example of Pop art and displayed it in the exhibition Around the Automobile (1965), linking the parking meter image to the material culture of cars. Further research revealed the work to be, in fact, a critique of Pop, painted under a pseudonym, and one of several. Writer and artist Greg Allen and curator Lionel Bovier conducted in-depth research into Blosum and traced how the Museum came to understand (and misunderstand) the artist and his work.⁸ The theme of transience, embodied by the parking meter and time “expiring” in this work and echoed in others from the series, supported Allen and Bovier’s conclusion that the elusive artist was mourning the ascent of Pop at the expense of interest in Abstract Expressionism, to which he was committed.

In a similarly mischievous approach to the passing of art historical time, artist William Anthony’s Object Stolen, Circa 1965, by the Artist from The Museum of Modern Art (2011) incorporates a wall label “acquired” from a quiet gallery. His gesture is similar to Tomkins quarter-in-the-pocket move a decade prior, but using the strategy of removal instead of addition. In an e-mail, Anthony recalls:

[C]irca 1965 the galleries of the museum weren’t so populated as they are now. I had the gallery to myself when I did the dirty deed. After ripping the label off the wall I ran like hell out of there joining my girlfriend (now wife) Norma and some friends in a nearby gallery. I’m not sure but I think we all had dinner at the museum, shamelessly gloating over the stolen goods. Anyway I remember the gloating.

Ironically, Anthony “ran like hell” with the label for Abstract Painting (1960–61), by Ad Reinhardt, creator of the 1940 broadside objecting to the lack of artists like himself at MoMA.

A more mournful gesture from this period involves writer and (briefly) staff member Gene Swenson. According to a perceptive memoir in Artforum,⁹ recollections by Linda Nochlin,¹⁰and Swenson’s own writing in the New York Press, in the context of personal difficulties and alarm about social conditions he believed would lead to revolution, in 1968 Swenson began to picket the Museum, carrying a large question mark. Later that year he stridently objected to the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage (1968), arguing passionately that curator William Rubin’s formalistic approach trivialized profound, psychosexual, and revolutionary aspects of the movement, an interpretation Swenson called “The Other Tradition.” Again Swenson took it to the street, placing newspaper ads and instigating a protest at the opening. One of the ads reads:

Dada is Dead. MOMA is Dead. Celebrate! Mausoleum of Modern Art . . . Artists and poets! Do your thing! Join Les Enfands du Parody in: The Transformation! Tea and black tie optional.

Photographs from the event show Swenson in front of the Museum, in black tie, leading a cohort of costumed demonstrators. According to several accounts, at the time Swenson was likely undergoing a break with reality, adding a psychological dimension to his concern with Surrealism and its reach for the subconscious. Increasingly marginalized in the art community, Swenson died in a car crash in 1969.

Performance predominated messing during the 1970s, put toward a variety of expressive ends. These included political issues, responding to art world sexism and government repression in Brazil and Russia, but also lyrical and mischievous interventions, one involving a road trip and anothera prankster.

The poster Attention! Women Artists and Feminists! (1972), recently acquired by the library, embodies this spirit. Created under the auspices of the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts for a demonstration that year, the text demands that “Women artists must no longer be invisible” as a pattern of silhouetted women marches in the background. In a similar mode, as part of a 1976 demonstration, artist Joanne Stamerra placed erasers stamped with “erase sexism at MoMA” throughout the galleries, as documented in the magazine Womanart. More recently, the long-lived activist group Guerrilla Girls paid indirect homage to her gesture with their own series of erasers.

In her photographic series 100 Boots (1971–73), Eleanor Antin thoughtfully engaged public spaces at MoMA, and her project is an early example of collaboration with the Museum. Antin conceived a series of photographs showing one hundred pairs of boots installed in diverse settings. Photographed by Philip Steinmetz, the images were intended to function like film stills, suggesting a journey from California to New York. Antin printed and mailed the images as postcards. In the one shown here, the boots enter the Museum, engaging the sidewalk.

In a series of pranks likely intended to satirize the machine aesthetic and Minimalist sculpture, in 1971 one Harvey Stromberg placed “illegal art”—illusionistic photo-sculptures of fixtures such as an electrical outlet—in the MoMA galleries. A photo essay of examples in New York Magazine is shown here, along with an invitation to an unofficial opening.

Other interventions from this period addressed global politics. For example, artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan initiated his First Russian Propaganda Art Performance at Museum of Modern Art in New York (1978) by engaging with Russian avant-garde art in the Museum’s permanent collection from the perspective of an immigrant. According to fellow émigré artists Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, in his performance

Bakhchanyan walked around the Museum . . . dressed as a “walking propaganda center,” covered from head to toe with slogans like “Stalin is Lenin today,” “Beware, savage dog,” and “Why is there no vodka on the moon?”¹¹

Bakhchanayan documented the event in this modest, self-published artists’ book. In the wry linking of political propaganda and the persuasive language of gallery talks, as well as interest in the diaspora of early Russian avant-garde art, Bakhchanyan’s performance and book presage the activities of Goran Djordjevic and Yevgeniy Fiks, discussed below.

Similarly, Marta Minujín’s Kidnappening of 1973 appears playful at first sight, but reveals an equally somber political undertone. In her performance, enacted during a Museum gala, selected visitors were blindfolded by artists (whose faces were painted to resemble Picasso portraits) and driven around the city in taxis. On the one hand, the work enabled art worlders to enjoy a garden party Happening and “afterparty” adventure. On the other, by essentially enacting an abduction, Minujín was inviting the subjects to experience, in highly sanitized form, the disappearances and abuses of power under authoritarian regimes in her native Argentina.

Beginning in the 1980s, with politically engaged art practices ascendant, “messing” started to become an accepted practice at MoMA and other art institutions, with artists and curators collaborating on projects. Meanwhile, independent actions continued apace.

On the independent end of the spectrum, following completion of the Museum’s 1984 expansion, the group Women Artists Visibility Event [sic] protested the underrepresentation of women artists in the opening exhibition, An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. The group organized a color-coordinated series of protests, of which this flyer was part. Demonstrating their expertise in institutional critique, the group subverted the Museum’s own promotional methods, incorporating rigorous branding, curatorial statements, and even a satirical version of pins worn by Museum staff.

In a collaborative but also critical gesture, in her show Projects 9: Louise Lawler (1987), the artist mobilized MoMA’s means of production to send a political message. She designed the exhibition brochure to include this paper airplane, intended to contrast the complacency of attending cultural institutions with U.S. military action in Nicaragua.

A similar tension between participating in and being critical of the institution emerged when artist Chuck Close found a clever means to identify and fill a gap he found in the collection: Chuck Close: Head On/The Modern Portrait (1991), one of a series of guest-curated Artist’s Choice exhibitions. Close chose to assemble portraits from MoMA’s collection and wanted to include a portrait by Ray Johnson, but the Museum didn’t own any of his work. As a work-around, a portrait from the library collection, part of an extended mail art exchange between Johnson and MoMA librarian Clive Phillpot, was displayed. As Chief of Library Milan Hughston often points out, this exemplifies how the work of many now-established artists first entered the Museum through the library collection.

Returning to the theme of populations underrepresented in the collection, in the late 1990s the Guerrilla Girls organized a postcard campaign to protest the exhibition Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life (1997). The card reads: “3 white women, 1 woman of color and no men of color—out of 71 artists?” Of the many cards received by the Museum, one in the MoMA Archives bears the note, “How embarrassing for you,” while another recommends “Fish, Murphy, Matthíasdóttir. Brady. Quintanilla. Rego. Celmins. Etcoff. Blaine. Neel.”

In a final example from this period, filmmaker Tony Kaye mobilized his objection to Philip Morris’s sponsorship of the exhibition Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (1996–97) by having a giant canvas erected across the street from the Museum. Perched in a bucket lift, Kaye hand-painted the quip “look at Jasper’s pictures / think we are nice / smoke our cigarettes and die.” A year earlier, when Kaye was at the Museum to receive an ad-industry award, his request to park his car in the lobby was declined. In response, he had a similar banner hoisted, reading “CON CEPTUAL.”¹² Both actions suggest a figure ambivalent about the power of commercialized communications, even as he mobilizes them.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a millennial mindset prevailed at MoMA, taking the form of collection shows, a substantial expansion project, a staff strike, and a merger with P.S. 1. One of the strongest responses to the Museum’s expansion came from artist Filip Noterdaeme. Following completion of MoMA’s expansion project in 2004, Noterdaeme produced this flyer to protest high museum admission prices and to address the ongoing issue of homelessness. The flyer parodies an advertising theme created for the MoMA reopening and incorporates an image of Marcel Duchamp’s famously rejected Fountain (1917). A year later, Noterdaeme took the theme a step further with MoMA HMLSS (2005), a suitcase designed for on-the-fly display of miniature versions of objects in the Museum collection. Modeled on Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935–41), the artist’s traveling miniature monograph, Noterdaeme added a critical dimension by taking the suitcase on the road, in particular to the sidewalk outside of MoMA, making his “collection” freely available to literal outsiders. Both works are part of his Homeless Museum of Art (HOMU), founded in 2002.

Returning to the theme of Russian avant-garde diaspora, artist Goran Djordjevic’s ongoing project The Museum of American Art in Berlin deconstructs the circulation of Russian modernist tenets in Eastern Europe during the Cold War via MoMA and other Western institutions. The exhibition catalogue cover shown here appropriates the design of a book by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., intended to popularize modernism. Barr’s What Is Modern Painting? (1943) was revised and reprinted for decades, and it was translated into several languages—but not Russian. Djordjevic incorporates in-depth contextual research into the MoAA project, which encompasses performance (taking on personae such as Barr and Gertrude Stein), gallery models, copies of artworks, texts, and numerous other interpretive forms.

Artist Yevgeniy Fiks explores a similar theme, but Fiks approaches the dissemination of early modernist tenets from the other direction, critically (and humorously) examining the circulation of Communist tenets in the New York City context. Through the form of a 2011 gallery tour, Fiks explored complex relationships among Western artists, the Museum, and leftist ideas during the contentious Cold War period, deconstructing how they were leveraged by the Museum (at the time, MoMA often resisted Red Scare pressures by positioning modernism as apolitical—emphasizing individual expression independent of sociopolitical context). Fiks’s ongoing project seeks to reestablish the connections, bringing out nuanced attitudes among left-leaning Western artists and their Eastern counterparts as their works mingle in the permanent collection galleries. As seen in his reinterpretation of a printed map available to MoMA visitors, Fiks’s tour articulates leftist attitudes among and between artists whose political activities are often downplayed in Modernist narratives. For example, while Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso are readily associated with Communism, Fiks brings out less well-known artists’ relationships with leftist ideology, such as Henri Matisse, Rene Magritte, and Lee Krasner.

Another recent intervention is Maria Anwander’s The Kiss (2010). By giving the wall of the Museum’s atrium gallery a big smackeroo, the artist embodied both aggressive and affectionate attitudes toward the institution: she both kisses off and kisses up. Intervening during a point of transition in one of the Museum’s main galleries, she took advantage of the flux to make a gesture both outsized and intimate, political and personal. She marked the spot with a label, appropriately written and formatted in institutional style (reappropriated here in this institutional-style post), articulating the idea of kissing as a power dynamic:

Anwander uses art institutions as forums where hierarchical, social and economic models can be tested and reimagined. The piece is part of a series . . . which Anwander has developed since 2004, playing with the link between art institutions and the market . . . “The Kiss” was given to the MoMA without asking for permission . . . Kissing in some cultures and religions symbolizes the exchange of souls and powers.¹³

The elegance of the work lies in this contrast between the cool remove of the label copy and the visceral nature of the kiss itself—a conceptual gesture with a phenomenological jolt. We can’t help but imagine ourselves in her place, the touch of our own lips on the wall—and feel a shock similar to encountering Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936) for the first time, or to entering a steel-and-glass museum building in 1939.

The kiss up/kiss off tension of Anwander’s gesture brings us to the present and future of messing with MoMA. In particular, consider these decades of messing in light of current art world interest in participation, performance, and social practice art, in which critical intervention has been largely institutionalized. What is the nature of “messing” in the fully participatory museum? How do contemporary ideas about the social role of art museums change relationships between participant and observer, between collusive and critical actions, between what can and can’t be messed with?

I conclude with two examples that show this tension. Thilo Hoffmann’s video series 30 Seconds (2010) falls on the sanctioned end of the messing continuum. The artist initiated a practice of brainstorming and executing brief videos about the MoMA experience. The prevalence of playful behavior in these individually imagined videos is striking: visitors and staff enjoyed cartwheeling, skipping, bicycling, play-fighting, making music, and even bathing in otherwise highly controlled Museum spaces.

On the other end of the continuum are surprise visits by Occupy Museums in 2008, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement objecting to economic recklessness and inequality. Here, music-making in the galleries was considered disruptive, even as it reflected contemporary social conditions to which most gallerygoers could relate.

These types of messing are characteristic of our very participatory present. Where will they take us? With hashtags, selfies, sleepovers, kimono-wearing, and tastings the norm, where does messing sit on the participant-observer fan-critic continuum? Will the pendulum swing back toward encounters at new levels of remove, or perhaps emerge into other forms of even more intense participation not yet anticipated? I look forward to chronicling the future of “messing,” in which artists, public, and staff continue to creatively manifest diverse forms and attitudes toward the Museum and the art of our time.

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This question of temporality is directly related to the problematic of taxonomy engaged by Scratching . . ., and epitomized by ongoing debates about the value of such terms as “Modern Islamic Art” or “Contemporary Islamic Art.”¹ As Scratching . . . suggests, despite the rigid temporal taxonomies that ensure the disaggregation of the modern from the premodern and both from the contemporary, their institutional presentation has more in common than first appears. When The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s galleries of Islamic art were reinstalled in 2011, for example, they were renamed as the galleries showcasing the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. That choice was mirrored in Doha’s Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art, which had opened one year earlier. Both represent a move away from the universalist aspirations or pretensions of encyclopedic museums and toward ethnically or regionally based presentations reminiscent of earlier taxonomies. Similar tensions permeate the creation of regional franchises of national museums in the Gulf in order to promote access to a cultural heritage presented in universalist terms.

In terms of Islamic art, these developments raise significant questions about the politics of representation: about whether and how the art of vast regions extending from the Atlantic to the Tigris and beyond can be adequately represented in and by one center, and about what is at stake in the authority and economic or infrastructural capacity to represent.² In the case of the Gulf museums, the “homecoming” of Arab or Islamic art—ranging from ceramics, metalwork, and miniature paintings to large-scale canvases and sculptures—is an aspect and effect of contemporary geopolitics that highlights the utility of art in regional constructions of transregional identity and heritage. Tensions between pan-Arabism and nationalism or regionalism seem to suffuse some of the work in Scratching . . ., appearing, for example, as a disjunction between title and inscription in plates 88–90 of Appendix XVIII, in which each “plate” has its own, universal title ( . . . . A History of Art,  . . . A History of Museums,  . . . A History of Exhibitions) at odds with the Arabic micro-texts that it bears, which signal a more specifically Lebanese orientation.

In keeping with all of Raad’s earlier work, Scratching . . . eschews any shrill ideological position in favor of a politics of poetics. The project is nonetheless deeply implicated by questions about the possibilities and problematics of representation, questions arising from current economies of cultural production. Integral to one of the works within Appendix XVIII are costings—rough calculations, dollar amounts, figures and lists of beverages (for a gallery opening?) articulated around the words “Beirut” and “Cairo,” foregrounding interrelations between economic and cultural capital, between the production of value and the means of production, the visibility of art and its sustaining infrastructures. Translator’s introduction: Pension arts in Dubai (2012) unravels the global networks underpinning an unlikely investment fund for artists, laying bare the imbrications between global capital, information technology, and the Israeli military. Ultimately these global connections relate the objects of art to the bodies that shape and consume them, including those exploited in the construction of pristine architectural frames for the promotion of cultural values. Raad’s involvement with Gulf Labor, a coalition of international artists working to protect migrant workers’ rights during the construction and maintenance of foreign museums and universities in Abu Dhabi, makes the matter more than academic.

Collaborative endeavors between secular humanism and enlightened despotism to develop cultural infrastructures dependent on the predations of bonded labor throw into high relief the Janus-faced principles that permeate histories of the modern museum, histories and principles central to Scratching on things I could disavow. Such collaborations constitute a cosmopolitan coalition of the willing, a cultural coming-of-age that finds its mirror image in a recent widely circulated photograph of the United Arab Emirates’ first female pilot heading north to join American, Arab, and European aircraft dropping high-tech bombs on Syria. Which will be the face of the future remains to be seen. What the play with fragments, frames, taxonomies, and temporalities that constitutes Scratching on things I could disavow suggests is that collusions and occlusions integral to the construction of archives, histories, and cultural infrastructures in general are necessarily marked by what one critic of the newly installed Louvre Islamic galleries described as “the occultation of ambiguities.”³

This is the third and final section of the essay. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Excerpted from Finbarr Barry Flood’s essay “Staging Traces of Histories Not Easily Disavowed” in the exhibition catalog Walid Raad available at the MoMA Design Store.

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As Raad has often acknowledged, his work is indebted to the writings of the Lebanese artist and philosopher Jalal Toufic. In suggesting why colors, forms, lines, and shapes may have sought refuge in unlikely places, the introductory text for Scratching . . . cites Toufic’s idea of “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster,” an idea developed in an eponymous book of 2009.¹ Toufic suggests that in the wake of a surpassing disaster—the atomic bombings of 1945, or the series of catastrophes that have hit the Arab world since the 1980s—certain artistic, literary, and musical works remain immaterially withdrawn. Artifacts, buildings, documents, and paintings may persist in a material sense but are unavailable to those directly affected by the surpassing disaster, being seen but at the same time experienced and engaged with as if unavailable to vision. The idea owes something to a distinction between zahir and batin, between exoteric and esoteric, form and essence, in mystical strains of Islamic thought.

The notion that artworks might be both materially present and immaterially withdrawn calls into question the way histories, historical events, and memories are constituted, and by whom. The problem is the violence not simply of war (as if that were ever simple) but of the archive through which histories of war (or histories in general) are constituted—fragments worn and torn, ripped from their context in order to preserve the testimonies that they are made to instantiate. Under interrogation, all such documents are produced, valorized, valued, and enshrined through a process of stratification or winnowing that divides the wheat from the chaff, the historically significant from the apparently contingent.

Yet it is precisely in the promise or potential of the contingent, the ephemeral, that the possibility of a counterhegemonic history emerges. For Toufic, the works and documents subject to immaterial withdrawal after a surpassing disaster—books, films, monuments, photographs, paintings—remain available to the hegemonic histories promoted by perpetrators and victors, while those affected by the disaster are compelled to resurrect these same works. In Scratching . . ., objects, documents, and images afforded archival status as marooned instantiations of (often contested) histories are manifest not as historical documents but in ways recalling Toufic’s suggestion that, following a surpassing disaster, “while the documentation of the referent is for the future, the presentation of the withdrawal is an urgent task for the present.”² In both Toufic’s writings and Raad’s practice, the strategies of presenting withdrawal are multiple, including blurring, displacement, textual mediation, and temporal destabilization.³

In this sense Raad’s move from archive to museum is a natural one. A corollary of the recent rise of interest in modern Arab art, for example, is a headlong dash not simply to the archive but to constitute it, with varying results. In an arch in-joke, Raad’s Appendix XVIII: Plates 56–58 Dr. Kirsten Scheid’s Fabulous Archive (2008) plays with the anthropologist’s or art historian’s need for archives in order to resurrect occluded histories and the desire that permeates that archival quest. Named after a celebrated Beirut-based scholar of modern Arab art, the work includes blurry miniature reproductions of artworks, collated and collected yet still somehow inaccessible. Similarly, Preface to the fifth edition (2014) explores the mutually constituting relation between museum artifacts and archival ephemera, juxtaposing blurry photographs of museum objects with curatorial notes, statistical observations, and the sketches and reports of conservators.

Like much of Raad’s earlier work, Scratching . . . suggests that the project of resurrecting past histories of art is not simply a matter of bringing them to light, of (re-)establishing them by constructing archives necessarily permeated by contingency and ephemerality. On the contrary, it is a more fundamental matter of staging the relation between the material and immaterial qualities of artworks, of interrogating the relationships between accessibility, temporality, and visibility. Here Raad’s approach is clearly inspired by Toufic’s idea that the ultimate goal of artists operating in the wake of a surpassing disaster is the resurrection of withdrawn works, the overcoming of their immaterial withdrawal. Pending that resurrection, however, the artist’s mandate is to present a withdrawal of a kind that manifests itself only fleetingly and incompletely. It can be discerned in a film’s closing credits, for example, or in the photograph that performs not in its historical role as an archival document, an index of the past available to the present, but as an index of immaterial withdrawal, capable of preserving its blurred or off-center referent only in a future time, when the work of resurrection has been completed.⁴ In passages rich with resonances for Scratching . . . , Toufic proposes that an appropriate locus for the display of such photographic indexes of withdrawal would be the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, where the theft of thirteen paintings by Degas, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others on March 18, 1990, is memorialized by the continued display of the empty frames from which they were cut.⁵ In this way Toufic suggests how two distinct forms of absence or unavailability might be enshrined in the gallery, with photographic indexes of immaterial withdrawal complementing frames that memorialize material evanescence.

Several component works of Scratching . . ., among them the mixed-media installations Preface to the first edition (2014) and Section 88: Views from outer to inner compartments, literalize Raad’s engagement with practices of framing, functioning as stage sets that co-opt while echoing the framing role of the gallery itself. The principle operates in a cascading series of registers, from a vista of open doorways that leads the eye from one gallery space to the next (offering the tantalizing promise of a vanishing point that never quite appears) through material frames that articulate, define, and punctuate the space of the gallery, devices ranging from elegant classical door-jambs to skirting boards, walls, and picture frames, epitomes of an entire infrastructure of enframing. A text accompanying Section 88: Views from outer to inner compartments negates the invitation of these open doors and frames, telling the tale of a hypothetical resident of an unnamed Arab city who rushes toward the entrance of a new museum of modern and/or contemporary art only to find himself stopped in his tracks, frozen in place by the sense that should he proceed, he would “hit a wall.”

Showcasing institutional carapaces generally occluded in the production of aesthetic or historical value, the frame functions in Scratching . . . as a hieroglyph for the staging not only of display but of practices of viewing and consuming. Its role in this ambivalent parsing of institutional productivity recalls Jacques Derrida’s characterization of the role played by the parergon, the supplement that in Kant’s aesthetics remains (at least in theory) exterior to the work: “The violence of framing proliferates. It confines the theory of aesthetics within a theory of the beautiful, the theory of the beautiful within a theory of taste, and the theory of taste within a theory of judgment.”⁶

Little wonder, then, that like Kovalyov’s nose, many of the works in Scratching . . . seek to break their bonds and take on a life of their own. In Preface to the second edition (2012), reflected images flicker as shadows cast upon the pristine floors of Mathaf. The museum’s polished floor is pressed into service as a primary medium for evanescent artworks whose alienated traces morph with the physical structure of their spaces of display. Conversely, in an exhibition of Islamic art from the collection of Doris Duke held at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design in 2012, Raad supplied some of the captive objects caught in the glare of museum lights with shadows, anticipating the hope expressed in a text accompanying Preface to the second edition that the reflections captured in his images will eventually join the paintings in the museum, which currently lack them. By contrast, in Preface to the seventh edition (2012) these reflections and shadows take their place as prime objects, framed as canonical examples of Arab abstraction in a hypothetical Emirati museum. An accompanying text explains that eventually archival research divulges their true nature as paintings of a painting’s shadow, at which point they lose their status as paradigms of Arab abstraction and are removed from view.

As this suggests, Raad is master of the mise en abyme, his work at once archly ludic and infused with the poignant ambivalence and absurdity of contingency as a condition of life (and death).⁷ The miniaturization of his past work, and of the gallery itself as work, in Section 139: The Atlas Group (1989–2004) (2008) evokes a nostalgia for craft, for careful practices of making, by no means irrelevant to Raad’s own carefully constructed tableaux. The conceit underlying the work is the unexpected shrinkage of Raad’s Atlas Group works to 1/100th of their actual size when displayed in a Beirut gallery; in order to display the shrunken work, Raad constructed a white-cube gallery on the same scale. This model gallery housing tiny works constitutes a whole, which is displayed in gallery spaces that appear as macro-versions of its miniature spaces. Miniaturization through modeling provides privileged vistas into shrunken gallery spaces, engaging questions of exterior and interior that recall an observation of Susan Stewart’s: “miniature time transcends the duration of everyday life in such a way as to create an interior temporality of the subject.”⁸ At a formal level, several commentators have connected Raad’s gesture of miniaturization to canonical works of twentieth-century European art, invoking Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935–41) and the miniature museums of Marcel Broodthaers, but given the nature of the Scratching . . . project, other histories may be equally relevant. Among the most enigmatic and compelling examples of medieval Islamic art, for example, are small-scale ceramic replicas of houses and mosques, their roofs raised to show interiors replete with human figures, furnishings, and even well-stocked tables.⁹ Examples of these models can be found in most historical collections of Islamic art.

Similarly, Raad’s penchant for micro-calligraphy recalls the miniature scale of amuletic or talismanic scripts. It may not be entirely serendipitous that to an observer familiar with Islamic art, the horizontal line of micro-calligraphy extending across the width of Appendix XVIII: Plate 98 A History of Essays (2009) and other works in the Appendix XVIII series recalls medieval tiraz, textiles inscribed with a linear band of Arabic script, often containing historical information. This is the case with Appendix XVII, where a partly miniaturized reproduction of the contents page from a 2002 issue of Parachute magazine dedicated to the art of Beirut is rotated through ninety degrees, so that variations in the lengths of the articles’ titles register as verticals on a statistical bar chart.¹⁰ The texts of the Parachute issue include an essay on Raad’s Atlas Group by the art historian Sarah Rogers. Also present are writings by celebrated Beirut-based artists with whom Raad has collaborated, including Akram Zaatari, whose recent work also engages with themes of archaeology and archives, and Walid Sadek, whose work Raad has addressed in his own. Sadek’s Love Is Blind, an installation at Modern Art Oxford in 2006, comprised a group of framed captions and verbal descriptions of the landscape paintings of the Lebanese artist Mustafa Farroukh (1901–1957), images Sadek made accessible only through this textual narration; Raad’s On Walid Sadek’s Love Is Blind (Modern Art Oxford, 2006) (2008) restages that work as a trompe l’oeil painting after a photograph of the 2006 installation. The genealogy that Raad provides for this painterly recapitulation of a photograph of another artist’s work in which images are mediated by texts explicitly invokes Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953, an icon of transformative appropriation.¹¹ Less obviously, perhaps, the palimpsest qualities of the work recall the visual concatenations that produced the improbable objects of Preface to the third edition.

Comparisons have been made between Raad’s overlays and practices of photomontage from Dada to Gerhard Richter, but the centrality of photography to his practice of morphing and layering is especially reminiscent of the work of Sherrie Levine (with whom he has exhibited). Levine’s comments on her paintings after photographic reproductions of paintings in books (what she describes as “ghosts of ghosts”) are worth quoting: “I wanted to make a picture which contradicted itself. I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there are times when both pictures disappear and other times when they’re both manifest; that vibration is basically what the work’s about for me—that space in the middle where there’s no picture.”¹² This quality of vibration, of hovering between manifestation and occlusion, captures the defining spirit of Preface to the third edition, and perhaps of Scratching . . . more generally.

In its allusive and anachronic telling of fragments and flotsam, layered to evoke conditions of living on and practices of reading back, Raad’s work has been compared to that of the art historian Aby Warburg. Warburg’s fabled Mnemosyne Atlas—left unfinished when he died, in 1929—was designed to showcase the afterlife and transformation of antique images and motifs, and consisted of constellations of images (including Islamic astrological paintings) brought into dialogue in a precocious analogue version of the hypertext.¹³ Similarly, in Scratching . . ., as in Raad’s earlier work, memory and montage are mutually constituting. Proliferating visually striking hybrids, a work such as Preface to the third edition draws attention to the impure temporality of artworks, materializing their temporal stratifications and sedimentations through the medium of photomontage.¹⁴

The visual, even ontological indeterminacy effected through photomontage points to the epistemological uncertainties of the archive and of the object histories that it underwrites. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s observations on the capacity of translation to create its original, Toufic argues that it is precisely practices of re-creation and repetition, such as Levine’s, that prevent earlier works from appearing as counterfeits. In Toufic’s terms, these are works that have not undergone an attempted resurrection, the idea being that artistic traditions can only become fully visible as tradition if constituted retrospectively. In an inversion that might serve as an epigram for Raad’s earlier projects, which played with the authority of photography in their exploration of the Lebanese Civil War—one reason why the work has sometimes attracted criticism for undermining the very possibility of historical documentation—Toufic asserts that it is in fact the impression of being counterfeit that guarantees the reliability of the events that the work documents.¹⁵

In Raad’s earlier work, even photodocumentation is pressed into a performance of instability and uncertainty, an oscillation between states of occlusion and visibility, inner and outer, that also permeates many of the works constituting Scratching. . . . This dialectical quality invokes a tension between exoteric and esoteric, form and essence, a dialectic with evident relevance to the notion of withdrawal and the messianic specter of resurrection. Practices of re-creation, remaking, and repetition are integral to Raad’s undertaking, engaging the peculiar temporality of withdrawal. The easy temporality implied by such titles as Preface to the first edition is at once belied by the doubled allusion to sequential time implied by “preface” and “first,” a promise of progression consistently withheld from the reader/viewer of Raad’s work, with its appendices, indices, prefaces, interrupted series, and marooned numerical sequences.

If attenuated or mediated access is one index of withdrawal, temporal instability is another. This is art history as augury enabled by time travel and telepathy: the portfolio that constitutes Preface to the third edition was purportedly made by a female artist working in 2026; in Index XXVI: Red, blue, black, orange, yellow (2010) Raad appears as both choreographer and medium, exhibiting the names of Lebanese painters working during the last century. The names appear as relief Arabic texts in white on white vinyl, their full visibility frustrated by the materials of inscription; a text accompanying Index XXVI: Red, blue, black, orange, yellow explains that these names have been transmitted telepathically from artists in the future. Of the work’s dramatic corrections, crudely executed in colored, primarily red, paint, the text explains that these telepathic artistic mediums have purposefully distorted the names’ orthography, not to frustrate the writing of histories in the present but in the hope that the corrections necessitated by their errors will be made in colors immaterially withdrawn and unavailable to artists working in the future. The artists from the future, like the vampires that feature in Toufic’s work, will then seek to harvest this blood-red pigment from the present. Their mediated and opportunistic time-travel echoes the scavengings of contemporary art historians. Equally, the corrective policing of the contemporary canon necessitated by the orthographic distortions transmitted from the future performs an authority attenuated by the multiple mediations underlying it.

That artists from the future enable the writing of histories of art in the present (even if their activities are marked by an ambivalence emblematic of Scratching . . . itself) is one more indication of the way in which the project ranges blithely and refreshingly across temporal taxonomies. Once again, the impact of Toufic’s work is palpable: integral to the temporal disruptions that follow traumatic events, Toufic suggests, is the fact that artists who were once avant-garde are merely of their time, any future-oriented aspects of their work the results of anachronistic collaboration with artists from the future. Similarly, Toufic suggests that the eschewal of tradition often associated with a certain rhetoric of modernism leads to a form of relativism that exaggerates its own absolutist (or universal) credentials. Consequently, “Only those who fully discerned the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, tried to resurrect tradition, failed in doing so, may become truly absolutely modern.”¹⁶ Such a scenario levels the distinctions between tradition and modernity, so that what might once have appeared traditional is revealed not to be so, while “many modernist works of art which vehemently attacked ‘tradition’ are, prior to any reluctant gradual canonization, revealed by their withdrawal to be part of that tradition.”¹⁷

This is the second section of the essay. Read Part 1 here and Part 3 here. Excerpted from Finbarr Barry Flood’s essay “Staging Traces of Histories Not Easily Disavowed” in the exhibition catalog Walid Raad available at the MoMA Design Store.

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Over the past decade, major museums in Cairo, Copenhagen, Detroit, Doha, Kuwait, London, New York, and other cities have installed or reinstalled their collections of Islamic art. The results have attracted bouquets and brickbats in equal measure. Some of these museums house collections whose origins lie in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intersections between antiquarianism, commercialism, and orientalism. Others, especially those in the Gulf, house collections of more recent vintage, whose acquisition over the past two decades has infused the market with a giddy frisson of excess seldom previously associated with Islamic art.¹

This reinvestment of Islamic antiquities has been paralleled by the development of Middle Eastern franchises of museums such as the Guggenheim and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and the global emergence of an extensive array of galleries and museums dedicated to showcasing the modern and contemporary art of the Middle East. These range from small commercial galleries and private spaces in cities such as Beirut, Cairo, London, New York, and Ramallah to national institutions such as Doha’s Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, whose opening in 2010 signaled the role of the Gulf region in the vanguard of these developments. At the same time, biennials, exhibitions, and foundations for the collection and promotion of modern and contemporary “Islamic” art have proliferated in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Modern Middle Eastern art is enjoying an ongoing canonization as a field of collecting and study (both in its own right and as a chapter in the history of global modernism), witnessed by the establishment of professorships, the writing of doctoral dissertations, and the appointment of curators to such august institutions as the British Museum in London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

These developments have taken place against a background of tumultuous political instability and violence in the Middle East, from the United States–led invasion of Iraq in 2003, through Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, to the revolutions of the Arab Spring, the reassertion of a U.S.-funded military dictatorship in Egypt, and the transformation of a popular uprising against a brutal Syrian dictatorship into a proxy war fueled by the very petrodollars with which Gulf states are sponsoring their cultural infrastructures and institutions. The worlds of political violence and of the museum have occasionally intersected, with disastrous consequences: in January 2014, the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo, the world’s oldest museum of Islamic art, was seriously damaged when a car bomb detonated outside the police quarters across the road and almost entirely destroyed the museum’s facade, along with many prize artifacts.

Tensions between contemporary geopolitics, the emergence of major art institutions across the Arab world, and the economic developments that underwrite both provide the background to Walid Raad’s latest project. Scratching on things I could disavow (2007– ) is an amorphous congeries of intersecting images and texts meticulously crafted to interrogate the cultural, economic, material, and political infrastructures that produce and sustain certain kinds of work as art, while questioning the nature of the archives that enable us to write histories of and from artworks. Scratching . . . is an amorphous history of Arab art staged through images, installations, tales, and texts, an assemblage perhaps best encapsulated by the Arabic word athar, which can be variously translated as antiquity, impression, mark, relic, remnant, ruin, or vestige. Raad’s carefully staged constellations of artifacts, images, and narratives are loosely associated by their relation to the histories and historiographies of artistic production in the Arab world, both long entrenched and more recent. They include canonical artifacts of Islamic art, paradigmatic works of Arab modernism that have undergone more recent canonization, and a contemporary canon that is currently under construction and contestation.

The measured ambivalence that permeates the project is implicit both in the conditional disavowal that it evokes and in the “scratching” of the project’s title, with its dual sense of surface archaeology and the relief of capitulating to the masochistic urge to rake one’s fingers across an irritation. In this as in all of Raad‘s work, the materials of and for any history are fragmentary, disjunctive, and recalcitrant. Authoritative data presented as charts and diagrams resist easy co-option or circumscription by practices of representation, being simultaneously offered and withdrawn, asserting even while denying their own historicity. The play with statistical authority in the form of precise dates and carefully numbered captions is also typical. Titles appropriate the standard categories of teleological time while frustrating the expectations that they generate: prefaces, appendixes, interrupted sequences, random dates, partial views, and tantalizing excerpts of orphaned fascicles extracted from series that might never have been or never be—all assert the authority of the catalogue or monograph while simultaneously undermining it. The dialectic between the authority of Roman and Arabic numerals in the sequences of the titles only doubles the play.

Raad co-opts the space of the gallery or museum to autopsy the range of institutions that produce and sustain art as history. He turns his forensic gaze not only on the architectural space of the gallery but also on its sustaining infrastructures, including the institutional gestures and tics that constitute its role as part of the frame that gives work cultural and economic value: the lecture, the PowerPoint presentation, the dissertation, the catalogue essay. Like Raad’s earlier Atlas Group project, Scratching . . . enacts the way that stories spun around objects alter their meaning and value and hence their stability as historical reifications. The project is, in effect, a meta-curation, a performative restaging of the elusive artifacts, histories, practices, and spaces that it engages, with Raad as choreographer, impresario, and medium overseeing installations marked by displacement, shape-shifting, and time travel.

This “meta” quality is enhanced by the imprimatur that Scratching . . . has received not only from long-established sanctuaries of Islamic art but also from newly emergent sites of pilgrimage to the modern and contemporary art of the Arab world. The reopening of the galleries of the Louvre’s Département des Arts de l’Islam in 2012, for example, was accompanied by a series of commissioned works by Raad, which took as their subjects the department’s star objects. Among these, Raad’s 2013 work Preface to the third edition (2013) is a handsome portfolio containing luxurious images of twenty-eight canonical objects of Islamic art in the Louvre’s collection. An accompanying text explains that these are among the 294 objects from the Louvre that will travel to the museum’s new Abu Dhabi franchise (designed by starchitect Jean Nouvel) at some point between 2016 and 2046. On the journey, the text observes, these twenty-eight works will undergo changes whose causes will be contested but that may be material—results of the change in climate, for example; immaterial, manifesting only in the dreams and disorders of the non-Emirati workers constructing such temples of culture; or aesthetic, manifesting only once: in the portfolio’s twenty-eight polychrome photos, purportedly the work of a female artist sponsored to work in the museum in 2026.

The mutations evoked in Preface to the third edition are multiple, from the transformation of three-dimensional artifacts into two-dimensional photographs to the superimposition of one artifact’s surface patterns onto another. This latter cross-fertilization subverts function in the production of striking hybrids, as when a dense floral pattern from a lacquer book-cover comes to pattern the handle of a dagger, or the form of a metal helmet is inhabited by the delicate translucent surface of a medieval rock-crystal vessel. The helmet image is among those that reappear in Footnote II (2015), a recent installation in which photographs and models of Raad’s transformations of the Louvre’s objects are mounted against densely layered archival shots, palimpsest images of the vitrines that once constrained them. Preface to the third edition offers spectacularly beautiful ways of rethinking these objects, destabilizing their deployment as institutionalized representatives of singular times and spaces while presenting canonical artifacts as objets trouvés, like those that feature in Raad’s Atlas Group work.

The process of materialization and transubstantiation assumes more dynamic aspects in the video Preface to the fourth edition (2012). Here, prime objects in the Louvre’s Islamic collection—ceramics, crystals, ivories, metalwork, textiles—flick and flit by the viewer’s gaze, eventually merging and morphing into a dense vortex of incoherent forms and unstable hues. This then resolves into a series of chromatic verticals of variable densities and thicknesses, similar to those that recur in the mixed-media Section 88, Act XXII: Views from outer to inner compartments (2012– ). The extraction of pure color and form from images of historical objects, producing traces of traces, resonates with a core concept of Scratching . . . : according to a text accompanying one of its works, Appendix XVIII: Plates 22–257 (2008– ), the Lebanese wars of the past three decades displaced lines and shapes, colors and forms, which sought refuge not in artworks but in their sustaining documentary infrastructures: budgets, catalogues, covers, diagrams, fonts and footnotes, price lists and the titles of dissertations (especially those by foreign scholars of Lebanese art)—in short, the sorts of materials that feature prominently throughout Scratching. . . .

The transformation of historical artifacts into chromatic abstractions suggests the unstable relation between the museum object and the institutional and material frames that produce and sustain it. Recalling the twentieth-century valorizations of Islamic art as an art of abstraction,² Raad’s transformations also manifest one of the most original and radical aspects of Scratching . . . : its subversion of the temporal taxonomies that govern the presentation of art, whether in gallery or museum, lecture or text, stratifying the premodern from the modern and both from the contemporary.³ That the historical objects of Islamic art are capable of this kind of transformation suggests more complex imbrications between past and present, underlining the fact that Raad’s history of art in the Arab world neither begins nor ends with modernism. His production of fugitive color from the material certainties of historical objects is an interrogation not simply of chronology, taxonomy, the museum, or even the histories of Arab art, but of the conditions of visibility necessary for the production of histories tout court. In Scratching . . . as in much of Raad’s work, questions of legibility, visibility, and temporality are mutually implicating.

This is the first section of the essay. Read Part 2 here and Part 3 here. Excerpted from Finbarr Barry Flood’s essay “Staging Traces of Histories Not Easily Disavowed” in the exhibition catalog Walid Raad available at the MoMA Design Store.

The post “Staging Traces of Histories Not Easily Disavowed”, Part I appeared first on post.

In 1993 exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art were rolled out in rapid succession from Hong Kong to Australia, across Europe, and in the United States.¹ Although a handful of artworks had been shown in the United States and Europe before this, the sheer number of exhibitions and their occurrence in high-profile venues such as at the venerable Venice Biennale and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin ensured that 1993 would be remembered as a milestone in the history of contemporary Chinese art.

This essay presents some of the ways in which these 1993 exhibitions have contributed—and continue to contribute—to understandings of contemporary Chinese art. In the first part of this essay, I investigate how the exhibitions’ naming and circulation of specific styles and artists disseminated enduring narratives about Chinese art and politics to an international public. Though the reception of contemporary Chinese art raised important questions about the mechanisms of canonization, the dominance of this discourse has also overshadowed alternative readings of the post-1989 contemporary Chinese art scene. The second part of the essay thus approaches the exhibitions before their controversial legacies took hold. When explored in this light, these exhibitions serve as testaments to an emerging and surprising energy in contemporary Chinese art during the early 1990s, a dynamism that is often overlooked within the prevailing narratives of tragedy and dissent.

Post-1989

In order to understand how these exhibitions were received, it is first necessary to examine the contexts and conflicts from which they emerged. In 1989 momentous shifts in art and politics deeply affected the way people perceived China and its position in the world, and in turn the assumptions with which they greeted these exhibitions four years later. On June 4, 1989, news media around the world captured the Chinese central government’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. The fall of the Berlin Wall later that year, followed by the end of the Eastern Bloc and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992, meant that by 1993 China was seen as occupying a strangely alienated position as the last major stalwart of Communism. In 1992 Deng Xiaoping—the de facto leader of China—embarked on his famed Southern Tour through the country’s coastal cities to call for renewed economic reform.² The reforms portended the rise of a new capitalist ethos in China and further contributed to the country’s ideologically conflicted image. Within this convergence of sociopolitical events and conditions—Chinese authoritarianism, the worldwide collapse of Communism, and a new domestic shift toward capitalist economic reform—contemporary Chinese art offered curious observers a window into a politically and culturally enigmatic place.

The year 1989 also witnessed historical changes in the art world. Coinciding with the events of June 4, the exhibition Magiciens de la terre opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette in Paris. Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin with the aim of bringing together the world’s centers and peripheries—including China—this landmark exhibition attempted to use a “universalist conception of the act of art creation” to provide an even playing field for the participating artists.³ Art critics, particularly those from the “peripheries,” immediately panned Magiciens for ignoring the geopolitical and historical conditions that had led to the very center-periphery paradigm that the exhibition sought to redress. For example, artist-critic Rasheed Araeen charged: “The central concern remains the same old-fashioned debate about the relationship between modernism and the traditions of others. . . . The question is no longer only what the ‘other’ is but also how the ‘other’ has subverted the very assumptions on which ‘otherness’ is constructed by dominant culture.”⁴ Just as Magiciens marked a commitment to expanding the reach of global contemporary art, it also generated great attention and momentum for commentary on how to fulfill that task responsibly. Artists and critics from the world’s peripheries called for subaltern voices to rise up and speak for themselves.⁵

The 1993 exhibitions can thus best be situated against a background of ideological conflict, emerging critiques of global power dynamics, and cultural curiosity about China. With the expansion of the global art world after Magiciens de la terre, Western interest in the non-West was on the rise. Leading up to the 1993 Venice Biennale, the Milan-based international contemporary art magazine Flash Art ran a four-page spread on contemporary Chinese art by Kong Chang’an, a young art critic studying in Italy.⁶ Later tapped to be one of the curators of the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale, Kong was both well informed and eager to share his images and knowledge of the contemporary art scene in China. As Kong recalls, the editors of Flash Art seemed equally excited to receive these materials: “It was like they were waiting for this.”⁷ The magazine’s enthusiasm was confirmed by the appearance of Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism: Coca-Cola (1991) on the cover of the January/February 1992 issue.

Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism: Coca-Cola typifies the style known as Political Pop. Three men in the foreground—a worker, farmer, and soldier—stand unified in their postures and joined through a sense of fixed resolve. The figures’ exaggerated musculature, their depiction through black contour lines and flat colors, and the red flag behind their heads are all appropriated from early Cultural Revolution posters. Juxtaposed against these Socialist symbols is a swooping Coca-Cola logo at the bottom right of the picture, a sign of the proliferation of Western commodities in a new consumer culture. Characterized by bright colors, planar surfaces, and identifiable ideological symbols, Political Pop was quickly embraced by Western audiences for its graphic seductiveness and the legibility of its political references. Flash Art’s selection of this particular image presaged the 1993 exhibitions’ principal focus on Political Pop and Cynical Realism.

Art critic and curator Li Xianting coined the terms “Cynical Realism” and “Political Pop” in 1991. The label “Cynical Realism” first circulated in February 1992 in Li’s article for the Hong Kong publication Twenty-First Century. Though the article mentioned Pop, Li didn’t formally specify the term “Political Pop” until he began planning the 1993 exhibition China’s New Art, Post-1989. He more fully theorized “Political Pop” in a 1992 article for the Taiwan-based magazine Art Trends, in which he wrote of the two styles: “They are both interested in the dissolution of certain systems of meaning and both attend to reality. Cynical Realism focuses on the senseless reality of the self, whereas Political Pop directly portrays the reality of dissolved meanings.”⁸ Li Xianting’s swift labeling and historicized interpretations helped to corral contemporary Chinese art into identifiable categories. Furthermore, his writings on these particular styles provided an early glimpse into post-1989 China for inquisitive audiences abroad. According to Li, these early articles attracted substantial critical attention and were subsequently excerpted in other overseas journals.⁹ By 1993 the fact that works of Political Pop and Cynical Realism could be discussed as designated stylistic categories and accompanied by authoritative explanations made them all the more accessible and attractive for circulation.

After making a splash on the cover of Flash Art, Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism series continued to receive widespread international exposure and media attention across multiple exhibitions in 1993. Wang Guangyi and Yu Youhan, the principal figures of Political Pop, were included in the three exhibitions in Hong Kong, Berlin, and Venice; moreover, their works received special attention in the promotional materials for these exhibitions. After the initial blockbuster showing of China’s New Art, Post-1989 in Hong Kong, the exhibition traveled in different iterations to Australia, Europe, and the United States. For London’s Marlborough Fine Art gallery, Yu’s Mao Decorated (1993) adorned invitation cards. In perhaps the most overt declaration of this trend, the condensed version of the exhibition in Sydney was titled Mao Goes Pop: Post-1989 and featured Yu’s The Waving Mao (1990) on its catalogue cover.¹⁰ Similarly, Yu Youhan’s work Talking with Hunan Peasants (1991) graced the cover of the English and Chinese versions of the China Avant-Garde catalogue, while Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism—Marlboro (1990) was featured on the German version.

The 1993 exhibitions and the attention they received in the press made Political Pop and Cynical Realism tremendously popular among Western media and audiences. Featuring large faces and distorted perspectives, Cynical Realism shared with Political Pop a perceived streak of irreverence and satire. Fang Lijun, the leading figure of Cynical Realism, also exhibited at all three exhibitions. He, along with Wang Guangyi and Yu Youhan, enjoyed immediate success abroad. All three artists took part in China’s first-ever appearance at the São Paolo Biennial in 1994, and went on to have solo exhibitions and to participate in select group shows in Hong Kong and Europe throughout the decade.

In reviewing the catalogues and curatorial notes for these shows, it is perhaps surprising to see the vast array of writings and artists’ works. The catalogues for China Avant-Garde and China’s New Art, Post-1989 offer impressive frameworks that accommodate multiple perspectives. The essays in China Avant-Garde, in particular, expand well beyond art to include texts on experimental theater, music, and literature. Moreover, as the physical space at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt was limited, the curators included biographical details and images linked to forty-four artists beyond the sixteen who were shown. In Hong Kong, China’s New Art, Post-1989 similarly exhibited an enormous number of works, which were organized into six categories. Nevertheless, emphasis was on Political Pop and Cynical Realism: as Jane DeBevoise has calculated, about 45 percent of the images in the catalogue exemplified these two styles.¹¹

The ensuing media coverage further promoted this narrowed attention. Andreas Schmid, co-curator of the China Avant-Garde exhibition in Berlin, recalls: “The media echo was strong, but often shallow in nature. Too many newspaper articles favored the colorful, realistically painted, and figurative artworks on display because they were supposedly ‘easier’ to understand.”¹² In particular, Schmid laments: “The media hardly noticed the more complex video works of Zhang Peili or the conceptual work of Geng Jianyi, or tried to understand them.”¹³ In contrast to the straightforward visual and political accessibility of Political Pop and Cynical Realism, Zhang Peili’s exhibited videos—30 x 30 (1988), Document on Hygiene, No. 3 (1991), Water: The Standard Version Read from the Cihai Dictionary (1992), and Homework No. 1 (1992)—lacked iconographic legibility for a foreign audience. Document on Hygiene, No. 3, for example, presents the artist washing a chicken over the course of twenty-four minutes and forty-five seconds. With no sound and little change in action, the video of this performance denies a comprehensive narrative reading. Though part of the meaning of the video is tied to the very absurdity of the depicted action and its non-narrative format, Zhang’s work was seen as overly opaque when compared to the visual allure and perceived political messages in Wang Guangyi’s and Fang Lijun’s canvases.

An unfortunate consequence of this limited focus on Political Pop and Cynical Realism was the misconception that these styles were representative of the entire contemporary Chinese art scene. Equally problematic were readings of the paintings as imitative of Western styles. One critic’s review of the Berlin exhibition reported: “There are signs, similar to those in recent Russian art, that younger painters have only just discovered Western Pop Art, so for Westerners there is a déjà vu quality about the work of such as [sic] Wang Guangyi or Yu Youhan.”¹⁴ In this way, Political Pop confirmed international audiences’ existing views of China as culturally lagging and stylistically derivative of the West, where Pop had flourished decades earlier.

In December 1993 Andrew Solomon concluded the year with his seminal article “Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China” in the New York Times Magazine. The article, illustrated with works by Fang Lijun and Wang Guangyi, among others, included details of the effects that such exposure had had on cultural production inside China. Solomon described the scene at the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) in Beijing, where a community of painters resided, as “a mecca for Western tourists and journalists.” He wrote of the artists: “Many imitate each other, unimaginatively combining Cynical Realism and Political Pop. In fact, when you look closely at the paintings produced there, you feel that most of these artists are only a half step away from jade carvers or other practitioners of local handicraft for foreign consumption.”¹⁵ Solomon’s observations speak to the swift material consequences of the 1993 exhibitions. The convergence of international ambition with foreign consumers led to styles becoming rote formulae and the assumption that sheer technical labor could be a fast track to success. Yet as Solomon directs critique at Chinese cultural producers’ reactions to Western tastes, he leaves out more critical commentary on how Western media and audiences can be complicit in perpetuating reductive understandings of contemporary Chinese art. This is especially important given the magazine’s own choice to feature Fang Lijun’s painting Series 2, No. 2 (1991–1992) on the cover. Though Solomon’s lengthy article incorporates discussions of conceptual artists and their works—including Zhang Peili’s Document on Hygiene, No. 3—Fang Lijun’s distorted bald man with wide-open mouth and closed eyes remains the powerful representative image of this 1993 written exposition. In later histories of contemporary Chinese art and Fang’s own work and life, the New York Times Magazine cover figures prominently as a seminal moment in assuring the popularity of Cynical Realism with a foreign readership.¹⁶

Solomon’s titular point about “saving China,” furthermore, underscores the contrast in the perceptions of those inside and outside China with regard to contemporary Chinese art. For Western journalists, the question was invariably one of individualism and freedom against an authoritarian government. For Chinese critics, it was about the power of Chinese people to identify and contextualize themselves. The very issues described and represented by Solomon spoke to the concerns of Chinese critics over the dangers of Western reception and consumption.

Art critics inside China worried that coverage of Political Pop and Cynical Realism to the exclusion of other current tendencies would only serve to confirm the post–Cold War view of China as simply comprising derivative Western styles, cultures, and consumerism. They were concerned that inclusion in the global art world could be accomplished only by acceding to foreign tastes and that a more comprehensive view of the full range of contemporary Chinese art would be precluded. Art critic Lü Peng, as the chief organizer of the 1992 Guangzhou Biennial, had already attempted to remedy the situation. Intent on creating a Chinese art market funded by local entrepreneurs, he had set out to put the power of evaluation—critical and monetary—in the hands of Chinese critics.¹⁷

In 1994 this power dynamic was the subject of Wang Lin’s damning critique “Oliva is Not the Savior of Contemporary Chinese Art.”¹⁸ Wang faulted Achille Bonito Oliva, co-curator of the 1993 Venice Biennale, for using a Eurocentric framework to select artworks. He accused Oliva of deliberately choosing ideologically charged works that would present China as a “living fossil of the Cold War.” To combat the desire to seek “approval from a commanding height,” Wang charged Chinese art critics with the responsibility of selecting work that possessed an “experimental spirit and creative spirit based on the logic of Chinese art’s development.” This call to reclaim and establish for themselves the means and measures of success was posed as a direct challenge to Chinese artists’ growing assumption that they needed Western support in order to succeed.

Even after 1993 these same concerns over agency continued to haunt contemporary Chinese art exhibitions abroad. Hou Hanru, writing in the latter half of the 1990s, addressed what he saw as the continued marginalization of Chinese artists within international exhibitions: “Certainly, [the] Chinese avant-garde, especially Political Pop and Cynical Realism, are gaining more and more opportunities to exhibit in the international art world. In the meantime, the artists involved begin to notice that they themselves are being treated as ‘second-rate citizens’ or consumer goods in the ‘international consumer spectacle culture.’”¹⁹ To Hou, the repeated exposure of Political Pop and Cynical Realism across multiple exhibition and print platforms reaffirmed Western-centric readings of the “other” and signaled a lack of genuine interest in understanding the complexity of Chinese art. The one-dimensional readings of art and politics were like shiny goods with exotic labels, designed to appeal to distant audiences. With reference to Wang Guangyi’s works, David Clarke writes: “Recent Asian art may still largely be recuperated within a Western-centered vision. . . . Asian contemporary art may still be placed as a further temporary novelty for Western palates or viewed as comforting evidence that the non-Western world is becoming more like the West, is learning to speak its (artistic) language.”²⁰ Writings such as this, on the geopolitical currents surrounding the international reception of contemporary Chinese art, have formed an important subset in both contemporary Chinese art and global art histories.

This scholarly discourse rightfully positions the 1993 exhibitions as a starting point for the problematic reception and Western-centric canonization of contemporary Chinese art. Though it is important to recognize these aspects of the exhibitions, it is also necessary to study them beyond their legacies as purveyors of East-West tensions.

1993: Before the Aftermath

One of the by-products of the attention paid to Political Pop and Cynical Realism was the dominant view that, as art critic Geraldine Norman put it, “Idealism died in China with the victims of Tiananmen Square.”²¹ Though the Tiananmen Square massacre undoubtedly dealt a blow to young intellectuals’ hopes for China, declarations that “idealism died” can too easily reduce all artists’ motivations to narratives of despair, leaving little room to acknowledge their agency and capacity to change. A closer look at the 1990s reveals robust artistic momentum and even idealism, which can, in fact, be detected in the 1993 exhibitions.

To understand how idealism can be associated with this period, it is necessary to see the post-1989 period not merely as depressed and cynical, but also as a time marked by the birth of new artistic approaches. To participants in the Chinese art world, 1989 brought swift and drastic changes. “Post-1989” refers not only to post-Tiananmen, but also to the numerous shutdowns of the China Avant-Garde exhibition during its run at the National Art Gallery in Beijing (now the National Art Museum of China) in February 1989. The government’s closure of the weekly newspaper Fine Arts in China further signaled an end to the drive for cultural enlightenment that had galvanized artists throughout the 1980s.²² Though on the one hand this fed into the post–June 4 atmosphere of confusion and despondency, on the other hand, it precipitated new pockets of creativity in the art world. Even if tainted by tragedy, styles such as Political Pop and Cynical Realism still showed how a slew of new experiments in form and function took off in the early 1990s. Though artists were no longer driven by the same lofty goals that characterized the 1980s, idealism hadn’t died altogether. Instead, it took on a more critical bent. Political Pop and Cynical Realism were only a small sampling of the multiple kinds of experiments erupting across generations and geographies in China. When seen in a broader context, even these styles can be regarded as part of a surge in new interrogations, experiments, and ways of thinking about contemporary art that were emerging in the Chinese art world.

Attention should be given to the individuals who took up the mantle of organizing exhibitions that recognized and supported these new art forms. In 1993 there were no established procedures for showing contemporary Chinese art outside of China. As such, the exhibition organizers faced tremendous challenges. Though seldom mentioned, it is important to note that many of the figures involved in bringing the 1993 exhibitions to fruition were not professional curators attached to institutions but rather people who had lived in China for a number of years and were, in many instances, art enthusiasts and students of art. Andreas Schmid, Hans van Dijk, and Jochen Noth, the curators of the China Avant-Garde exhibition, had studied in China in the 1980s. They saw the experimental artists as their friends and believed deeply in the originality and spirit of the work they were producing. One of these curators’ key motivations for organizing the exhibition was the urgent belief that such work needed to be shared worldwide for the benefit of the artists and the international public. From today’s perspective, this may seem idealistic or even simplistic, but a sincere belief in exhibiting contemporary Chinese art blossomed against all odds. In the absence of established organizational mechanisms and an art market, the exhibition organizers’ sheer enthusiasm for and commitment to this art should not be underestimated.

Johnson Chang, the owner of Hanart TZ gallery in Hong Kong and the most business-oriented curator of the group, has objected “to any suggestions that the curatorial selection was developed with financial motives in mind.”²³ In his recollections of China’s New Art, Post-1989, he notes that foreign sponsorship for the exhibition was unattainable because the title’s allusion to 1989 deterred potential benefactors who “wanted to do business with China.”²⁴ Schmid, in recounting the challenges of securing support for China Avant-Garde, cites political sensitivities. The organizers of all the exhibitions faced the additional obstacle of locating channels for shipping works out of China. In many ways, the curators’ successes in organizing their respective exhibitions despite these challenges testifies to their firm commitment to showing the art.

Francesca Dal Lago, who worked in the Italian Embassy in Beijing in the early 1990s, was instrumental in initiating Passage to the East, a special exhibition at the 1993 Venice Biennale. She recalls: “It was clear there was an energy there that was engaging and really special. And the idea was that these people should be made known outside.”²⁵

Chang and Schmid both originally envisioned their respective exhibitions as encompassing longer spans of recent history. As each reveals in his recollections of that time, what was happening at that moment on the ground shifted the focus to the present. Chang remembers: “When I went back in 1991, everything had changed. So I changed my mind about bringing the last show to Hong Kong. . . . What was being made was very exciting. A lot of it very secretive, a lot of it was half-baked. What was evident was that this was the dawn of a new era. It was also evident that the 1980s was closed and we were on the dawn of a new period. So the strategy of the Post-1989 exhibition was to define what was different from the 1980s.”²⁶

Speaking of his return to China in November 1991 to prepare China Avant-Garde, Schmid relates: “Before autumn 1991, we had the idea to cover the 1980s including No-Name Group and Star Group, but already on this trip we had to face a new and different reality: times had changed and had brought a new generation of very young artists who were different from the 1980s in attitude as well as in artistic manner and style.”²⁷

Though he mentions Cynical Realism in particular, Schmid also notes the surprise he experienced when viewing photographs of works by the Big Tail Elephant Group in Guangzhou: “It was very interesting because we thought everything was repressed. But, it was not. This Guangzhou group was so experimental, they used so many media, so we decided to take them in, too.”²⁸ As a result, Lin Yilin was one of the sixteen artists featured in China Avant-Garde, while the other three members of Big Tail Elephant—Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, and Xu Tan—were included among the forty-four additional artists featured in the catalogue.

Indeed, the Big Tail Elephant Group is an excellent example not only of new stylistic experiments but also of the new ideas about artistic process that launched them. In their 1993 working meeting, Xu Tan explained: “In this group, every artist’s individual creation is encouraged and supported, and you can feel the liveliness of creativity; it is a place of freedom, such that our collaboration generates a force—a lasting potential. The openness of our working structure is the source of our confidence in the future.”²⁹ The sense of zeal and drive can be felt not only in the stylistic differentiation, but also in their forward-looking attitudes toward art and the creative processes of production.

The members of the Big Tail Elephant Group experimented widely with different materials, often in the form of elaborate installations and/or performance. Unlike Political Pop and Cynical Realist painters, they didn’t seek to formulate visual styles on canvas but rather to realize concepts by means of objects and spaces. Though the members of the group worked individually, they supported each other and helped to theorize each other’s work and drive each other’s creativity. In his 1991 performance Seven Days in Silence, Chen Shaoxiong painted a piece of hanging plastic for a week without saying a word. In this action, he attempted to create a situation in which time could be experienced differently from the way it is lived in the usual course of daily existence.³⁰ Xu Tan also engaged questions of time, particularly in terms of speed and pace, in his installation Uniform Velocity, Variant Velocity (1992). In the dim space of Big Tail Elephant Group’s second exhibition, Xu arranged neon tubing to create a playful, disorderly scene reminiscent of the bright, garish decor of restaurants and entertainment venues in Guangzhou. In addition to presenting colorful neon forms in recognizable shapes, the artist also dangled fluorescent wires from the ceiling and attached to them a range of objects: medicine bottles, syringes, foodstuffs, etc. Hooked up to an electric motor, these long neon strands rotated at different speeds. As Xu described it: “We are entering into a speed of un-adaptable changes, Western culture, traditional culture, commercial, and popular culture, and Socialist thinking.”³¹ Xu’s references to the coexistence of disparate ideologies and his inclusion in his 1992 piece of commercial signs recall important aspects of Political Pop paintings, however, his attention to velocity, repetitive motion, light, and asynchronicity marks a departure from the reliance on visual symbols and graphic composition found in Wang Guangyi’s paintings. The coexistence of these distinct languages and ways of thinking about art showcases the vast range of artistic experiments that were being conducted to communicate and critique contemporary experiences in the early 1990s.

This again points to an important way of thinking about the artistic energy of 1993: it was composed of and produced by a diversity of experiments. It reminds us that at any given time, multiple generations of artists are working at once, drawing upon distinct histories and artistic pasts, and generating a variety of artistic concepts. For example, though Political Pop and Cynical Realism are often mentioned in the same breath, Li Xianting’s observation that most Political Pop artists were born in the 1950s while Cynical Realists emerged from a younger generation, is usually overlooked. In fact, Fang Lijun, positioned his work in contradistinction to the art of Wang Guangyi’s generation, which he regarded as “superficial” and “pivoted on ‘too many motifs, gestures, symbols and narrative illustrations of an idea.’”³² Though Cynical Realists such as Fang Lijun and Liu Wei found fame alongside of the Political Pop artists such as Wang Guangyi and Yu Youhan, they were of a different generation and ultimately drew on their own histories and ideas of what art should be. Their peers included even more artists who were on the brink of developing new concepts and styles. Focusing on 1993 thus serves as a way of thinking about how generations and collective experiences inform staggered and varied trajectories of stylistic and conceptual maturity. This, in turn, allows us to recognize and distinguish among coexisting attitudes, opportunities, and artistic methods.

Conclusions

The 1993 exhibitions offer a valuable window onto the pressing concerns that were then germinating in global and local discourses. I have suggested three ways in which we can approach these exhibitions. First, focusing on the reception of the exhibitions opens up the problematic East-West power relations undergirding the ways in which contemporary Chinese art has been interpreted and canonized. Second, remembering that though 1993 was the year these exhibitions were seen, it was in the preceding years that they were conceived, planned, and fine-tuned. Therefore, when assessing the significance of the exhibitions, it is necessary to attend not only to the concerns over reception that developed in their aftermath, but also to the excitement and curatorial decisions that brought them to fruition. This leads to my third point: that in addition to adopting a wider temporal scope when considering the importance of these exhibitions, we need also to adopt a wider geographical and cultural perspective, to look further than the exhibition checklists and the artists who received the most attention.

Indeed, the examination of these two final points places emphasis on a new sense of energy in the early 1990s, which ultimately brought these exhibitions into being. This dynamism provides a significant counterpoint to the dominant understandings of contemporary Chinese art of the early 1990s that surround the 1993 exhibitions, in particular the notion that idealism had died in China. From the Garage Show in Shanghai (1991) to the New Generation exhibition in Beijing (1991) and the activities of the Big Tail Elephant Group in Guangzhou, the early 1990s witnessed artists of different generations and regions working in diverse modes yet also responding to one another. Regardless of who was exhibited in the 1993 exhibitions, their work came out of a context in which multiple generations—veterans of the ’85 Art New Wave, recent graduates, and artists not yet fully fledged—all contributed to a sense of percolating energy and creativity in the early 1990s.

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The interviews were conducted via email. post asked Reiko Tomii, co-curator of the exhibition’s Japan section, to respond to the following questions in 500 to 1,000 words.

1. What was your role in Global Conceptualism? How did you get involved in the exhibition?

I was a section co-curator for Japan, together with Dr. Chiba Shigeo. While working for my PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, my primary area of study was postwar American art. By the time I completed my dissertation in 1988, I was in love with American Conceptual Art. Then, working at the Center for International Contemporary Art (CICA) from 1988 to 1992 and collaborating with Alexandra Munroe on the publication of Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994), I received intense exposure to postwar Japanese art. I came to recognize that the radical experimentalism of Japanese conceptualism, along with performance, installation, and land art of 1960s Japan, often far exceeded that of their American counterparts. It was a major “eureka” moment for me, and I decided to concentrate my efforts on post-1945 Japanese art. In the fall of 1994, I received a letter from Jane Farver asking me to recommend a curator to work on the Japanese section of Global Conceptualism. Delighted with the fortuitous timing, I nominated myself.

2. How did you reconcile the exhibition’s curatorial agenda with your own definitions of conceptual art in Global Conceptualism? How did the main components of conceptual art in Japan differ from their counterparts in the US?

The exhibition’s agenda was to decenter the narrative of conceptualism to reflect its global diversity, while my goal was to place Japanese conceptualism, which was unique in its local development, internationally relevant, and full of historical implications, in a world history of conceptualism. These two goals formed the two sides of a coin, perfectly in sync.

Although American Conceptual Art is usually characterized by its strong analytical tendency and its emphasis on language, what enthralled me about it was its use of institutional critique and the potential this offered for social engagement. This understanding was nurtured by my reading for comps and was partly encouraged by the art discourse of 1970s Japan, which was also steeped in seido hihan (literally “institutional critique”). When I received Jane’s letter, I knew that other Japanese curators would stick to the linguistic and analytical aspects of Japanese conceptualism (for instance, Matsuzawa Yutaka’s use of language), which was the standard narrative at the time and had been strongly colored by the Japanese reception of Euro-American Conceptual Art. Global Conceptualism afforded me an opportunity to put forth my view of decentering. I am grateful that Jane took me on at a time when I had had little curatorial experience.

Since the curatorial parameters that were first established were rather limited in scope–five artists were to be included in each of the show’s ten sections–my initial idea was to highlight the institutional critique aspect with a focused look at “exhibition experiments” by key Japanese conceptualists. The projects I intended to present were Matsuzawa Yutaka’s Anti-Civilization Exhibition (1965), Akasegawa Genpei’s Courtroom Exhibition Event (1966), Bikyōtō Revolution Committee’s solo exhibition series interrogating international institutions (1971) and their pact not to make or exhibit art (1974), and a series of participatory situations devised by Kashihara Etsutomu under the title of Exhibition (early 1970s). This plan was subsequently expanded to examine a full range of institutional issues, from painting to authorship to system. Jane always encouraged me to think bigger. Since my curatorial agenda inherently encompassed the reevaluation of American Conceptual Art, the two of us often discussed this question along with two other project leaders, Rachel Weiss and Luis Camnitzer.

3. How has the notion of Conceptual art changed since then, in Japan as well as in New York?

The Euro-American notion of Conceptual Art and its Japanese transplant, Gainen geijutsu, were a dominant ideology back then, and it resists change even under the pressure of globalization today. A careful art-historical reassessment is necessary, which I have attempted in my book Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, Spring 2016).

4. How did your curatorial idea for Conceptualism echo (or not) in other sections in Global Conceptualism?

One of the major contributions of Global Conceptualism was its presentation of concrete, local examples—“object lessons”—that demonstrated the ubiquity and contemporaneity of the first phase conceptualism (1950s–1960s). I myself found it truly liberating to be able to call attention to the local specific aspects of conceptualism in 1960s Japan, following its internal logic. I saw the same thing happen in other sections: the exhibition presented solid local knowledge. There was indeed a lot to learn.

The challenge was how to consolidate these disparate parts, and it is understandable that critics faulted the exhibition’s region-by-region presentation for being fragmentary. An irony of the exhibition was that it successfully decentered the center-periphery narrative of conceptualism by taking the shared idea of conceptualism as its starting point and demonstrating the multiplicity and diversity of its local manifestations. Alas, it stopped short of regrouping them, say, by putting together similar examples from different regions. However, “regrouping” is a relatively new idea only recently tackled in museum exhibitions and in word art history. It should be noted that the practice of regrouping has its own hazards, one of which is that one is content with making a facile juxtaposition of works and failing to go no deeper than the surface. This leaves us without knowledge of individual local developments that inform each locale’s practice. Perhaps, given its physicality, the exhibition format makes it difficult to create multilayered and multivalent readings. For those to occur, there must be a clear methodological footing.

5. Could you share some of your memories of Jane Farver?

I will always remember the forward-looking vision Jane held of non-Western contemporary art. This made her an early contributor to the globalization of art. For example, she gave first U.S. solo museum exhibitions to Yanagi Yukinori (The World Flag Ant Farm and Wandering Position: Project—Red, White and Blue at Lehman College Art Gallery, New York, 1990) and Cai Guo-Qiang (Cultural Melting Bath, Queens Museum of Art, New York 1997), literally launching their global careers. Global Conceptualism could not have been realized without such an open vision underscored by her conviction and sympathy for the under-recognized. She was an early supporter and a frequent collaborator of mine. It was my good fortune to know her early in my career, since Global Conceptualism compelled me to consider methodologies for linking the global and the local in meaningful ways. The exhibition has remained a point of reference that I have returned to time and again; in a sense, how to “improve” it became an art-historical challenge for me. The idea of regrouping and a methodological proposal I put forth in Radicalism in the Wilderness came out of this reflection. About ten days before her passing, I telephoned Jane to discuss this particular point, as I was writing about it in the epilogue of the book. I am saddened that she has gone before the book is published, but my consolation is that she kindly read an early draft of the epilogue in the midst of the “crazy” (her word) preparations for Venice, and she knew the progress I had made since Global Conceptualism.

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