Following Algeria’s independence in 1962, a group of artists aspired to create a new visual idiom, one that could carry collective memory while moving beyond state-sponsored art movements—particularly Socialist Realism—and breaking away from colonial representations.² This impulse developed as a momentum shaped by the urgency to redefine modes of artistic production within a postcolonial framework. Among the designations used to describe it, the “School of the Sign” remains the most ambivalent, at once reductive and generative. The term itself is often misunderstood in two ways: First, it implies the existence of a unified movement based on a shared aesthetic. Second, it risks confining a broad concept to a form of formal nationalism, suggesting that the turn to the Sign is a retreat into identity or the revival of a dormant tradition.

The “School of the Sign” refers to a conceptual and material proposition concerned with how the Sign can be mobilized as a critical space through art and literature. Far from constituting a school in the institutional sense, it is more aptly understood as a constellation of artists who explored the “Sign”—a term they preferred to “letter” or “symbol”—as a dense visual structure capable of articulating a grammar of liberation.³ Guided by the thought of writer Jean Sénac, Algerian artists such as Mohamed Khadda (1930–1991; fig. 1), Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), Denis Martinez (b. 1941; fig. 2) and, later, Ali Silem (b. 1947) contributed to a conceptualization of the Sign as a palimpsest that is simultaneously abstract and situated, mystical and insurgent.⁴ This concept must also be considered in relation to the visual frameworks that have long shaped the reception of North African art, ranging from Orientalist projections to patrimonial models. Rather than reiterating colonial categories, these artists treated the Sign as a site of critical engagement against academic norms.

A central figure in Algeria’s postindependence cultural scene, Jean Sénac was primarily known as a poet and art critic, but he also played a crucial role as a mediator among artistic, intellectual, and political circles. In 1964, he founded Galerie 54, the first independent exhibition space in Algiers, which he conceived as a platform for experimental practices. Here, Sénac presented the work of artists such as Khadda and Martinez and coined the term “École du Noûn” (Noûn School). At the height of the postcolonial cultural revival, he made a first attempt at theorizing his observations, writing: “The Sign, rising from centuries past, from remote douars, from the songs of the meddahs [storytellers], bears witness to the permanence in the Maghreb of what could be called the École du Noûn.”⁵ The “École du Noûn,” according to him, arises from the sensuality of the letter noûn, drawing on its dual resonance as a sacred character in the Qur’an and a visual form associated with desire. Sénac’s interpretation posits the noûn as all at once a female breast,⁶ an open beginning, a Sufi promise, and a corpoème (body-poem)—the latter a figuration in which poetry and corporeality are inseparable. This fusion of corporeal pleasure and textual creation lies at the heart of his poetry.⁷

Rather than defining a unified movement, Sénac sought to name a shared sensibility he perceived across the practices of several artists. From the late 1960s onward, he increasingly referred to this sensibility as the School of the Sign. The Sign, in his view, constitutes a living matrix rooted in Algerian heritage while remaining open to contemporary invention. While some artists—most notably Mohamed Khadda—engaged closely with Sénac’s writings and shared his conviction that the Sign could catalyze an artistic renewal,⁸ others maintained a more distant or independent relationship to his theoretical framework. Indeed, the School of the Sign did not emerge as a self-declared collective or common agenda but rather as Sénac’s own critical reading of converging artistic trajectories connected through dialogue and proximity. Artists of the Sign drew inspiration from Amazigh and Arabic scripts, prehistoric petroglyphs, and vernacular forms, aspiring to create a simultaneity of heritage and revolution. They did this by, for example, fragmenting cursive letters into angular modules, overlaying layers of script until legibility dissolved, or embedding geometric motifs from woven textiles into abstract chromatic fields. 

The School of the Sign resonated with other artistic strategies in the region, such as Hurufiyya, an aesthetic movement that emerged among artists reinvesting ancestral signs as a means of resisting folklorization and gesturing toward plural modernities.⁹ Emerging across the Arab world from the late 1940s onward, Hurufiyya designated a broad tendency that reintroduced the Arabic letter into modern artistic practice, often emphasizing its calligraphic and spiritual dimensions. While artists associated with the School of the Sign shared this refusal of folkloric repetition, they approached the letter less as a calligraphic form and more as a destabilized visual structure displaced from its conventional function. The turn to rock paintings, desert lines, and marginal alphabets did not aim to produce a nostalgic aesthetic; rather, it sought to reactivate the semiotic depth of these forms by working their internal tensions between figuration and abstraction, legibility and opacity. In Algeria, this engagement developed largely outside formal Hurufiyya circles and was instead shaped by local postindependence debates and artistic networks. Later figures, such as Rachid Koraïchi (b. 1947), would more explicitly align with Hurufiyya principles, albeit within a different historical moment and a transnational framework.

The School of the Sign was not devoid of internal frictions—notably, artists debated the very definition of popular art. The tensions ranged, on the one hand, from opposition to approaches that understand popular art as a shared visual heritage to be stabilized and made socially legible to, on the other hand, positions that emphasized abstraction and formal experimentation as a necessary break from inherited and imposed models. Multiple approaches to the Sign coexisted without canceling one another. These divergences became particularly visible in the distinct ways individual artists positioned themselves in relation to abstraction, spirituality, and the use of the letter. Artists such as Abdallah Benanteur (1931–2017) gravitated toward lyrical abstraction infused with an Islamic sensibility.¹⁰

Born in Western Algeria, Benanteur followed an artistic path shaped by close personal and intellectual affinities rather than formal group affiliations. His long-standing friendship with Mohamed Khadda, forged in the mid-1940s when the two painted together around Mostaganem before traveling together to Algiers and later to France, was formative in this respect. Benanteur also maintained close ties with Jean Sénac, whose work he illustrated on several occasions and with whom he shared a commitment to postindependence cultural renewal.¹¹ Taken together, these relationships situate Benanteur within the same generational and cultural milieu as the artists associated with the School of the Sign, even though his practice gradually shifted toward a more autonomous lyrical abstraction.¹² His work draws on the iconoclastic heritage of Maghrebi Islam and articulates a dynamic sense of universality. Although he occasionally deployed letters in his work and engaged in debates surrounding the Sign, Benanteur remained wary of prescriptive frameworks, privileging an approach grounded in individual spirituality and a universal conception of modern art.¹³

For his part, Sénac emphasized the proximity and divergence of Benanteur and Khadda in terms of their relationship to the Sign and to Islamic visual heritage. Referring to Khadda’s audacity in “reintegrating the Signs into the Body”¹⁴ and seeking to “reincarnate the arabesque of his ancestors,”¹⁵ Sénac notes that Benanteur, for his part, “having started from the Sign, seems to want to preserve only its trace, its aura,” bringing the noûn back “to its point of preciseness,”¹⁶ whereas Khadda carried it toward a lyrical transcendence. This distinction sheds light on Benanteur’s singular position: situated within the same generational milieu, yet gradually moving toward a more autonomous and meditative abstraction.

Others, like Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), worked the letter as a sensual form in its own right, one saturated with ambiguity, and explored the representation of the female body. His engagement does not follow the conventions of the academic nude; it is an allegorical image of the nation itself, tattooed, inscribed, and resilient, carrying cultural memory and strength in the face of war and historical trauma.¹⁷ In the later Les Protectrices (1991), he continued to work the Sign in close relation to the female body, intertwining fragments of letters with corporeal forms (fig. 3). Here, writing does not appear as an autonomous calligraphic pattern but instead as an inscription borne by the figure itself—tattoo-like marks and the Arabic title al-ḥāmiyāt (the protectresses) fold the letter into the body, suggesting language as something carried and worn. The painting shows that even decades after the emergence of the School of the Sign, Mesli maintained an interest in the Sign as a lived and embodied language rather than a purely formal device.

Mohamed Khadda, by contrast, approached the Sign as a political project.¹⁸ In his collection of essays Éléments pour un art nouveau (1972), he insists on the need to create a plastic writing that is neither subjected to Western abstraction nor limited to a rigid tradition.¹⁹ This position was shaped in part by his experience as a typographer in France, as well as by his artistic training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he was exposed to modernist debates while remaining attentive to the materiality of writing. In this same collection of writings, Khadda describes his creative process as one shaped by layers, rhythm, the interplay of positive and negative spaces, and the tensions between surface and depth.²⁰ He emphasizes the plastic transformation of writing and its capacity to convey spiritual, poetic, and political dimensions, evoking letters as “male or female, solar or lunar,” and animated by a suggestive power akin to incantation.²¹

A photograph of Khadda’s atelier (fig. 4) provides a more concrete understanding of this process. This image shows a space filled with canvases at different stages, placed side by side and often overlapping. Signs reappear in one painting after another, shifting in scale and density. Tools and materials remain visible. The studio reflects a practice based on repetition, layering, and gradual transformation, which is consistent with Khadda’s background in typography and his sustained attention to the potentials of the Sign.

Some artists associated with the School of the Sign decided to further expand their reflection on the Sign by founding the Aouchem group (aouchem means “tattoo”) in 1967. Initiated by Denis Martinez, Choukri Mesli, and Mohamed Benbaghdad, among others, the group proclaimed in a groundbreaking manifesto that “the Sign is stronger than bombs.”²² Aouchem approached the Sign as a trace of ancestral gestures and collective memory. They drew from the prehistoric cave paintings of Tassili n’Ajjer, popular talismans, and sacred scripts, introducing a decolonial interplay between art and ritual. The group asserted a lineage that was both African and Arabo-Berber and bound together less by formal doctrine than by friendship. Aouchem was, above all, a circle of close friends who met regularly, particularly in Blida, where long discussions and moments in everyday life contributed to their cohesion. These ties were not limited to exhibitions: Members also collaborated on texts, radio programs with poets, and the drafting of the manifesto. Alongside their collective initiatives, they informally circulated symbolic gestures, such as emblems or amulets bearing the group’s name, without ever imposing a uniform aesthetic.

Jean Sénac, acting as a mentor, encouraged the inclusion of other Algerian artists, such as Baya (1931–1998) and Arezki Zerarti (1938–2024). He also played an important role as a mediator between artists and writers, maintaining close ties with members of the group and supporting the circulation of their work through exhibitions, publications, and broadcasts. In Algeria, where figuration could be perceived as either an academic colonial inheritance or propaganda, Aouchem chose abstracted figuration, opting for hybrid and interstitial creatures. Their refusal of both illustrative imagery and pure abstraction became a gesture of emancipation. The covers of the 1967 Aouchem exhibition catalogues (figs. 5, 6) reflect this stance. Both compositions bring together signs, fragmented figures, handwritten elements, and ornamental motifs, which are arranged without a clear hierarchy or focal point. Figurative references appear and dissolve without settling into a stable image or legible scene. Printed with a mimeograph, the catalogues preserve traces of their production: irregular lines, uneven lettering, visible overlaps. These material imperfections distinguish them from institutional graphic formats. The covers do not present a coherent visual statement; instead, they allow disparate marks, images, and gestures to coexist on the page.

Within Aouchem, the Sign became a means of activating a form of visual consciousness grounded in collective practice. While the group shared common concerns with the artists associated with the School of the Sign, it did not operate as its continuation. Rather, Aouchem developed in parallel, shifting the emphasis to material processes, ritual gestures, and collective experimentation. The materiality of the works themselves played a part in this effort. Some artists treated the canvas as a ritual surface, layered with ochers, earth, ash, natural pigments, and ink—materials that evoke an ancestral and vernacular register (such as henna or mineral earths), linking the pictorial gesture to imagined precolonial practices. For them, the Sign was no longer confined to drawing or inscription, but instead embodied in matter itself, making materials carriers of meaning. In addition to sourcing ancestral materials, Aouchem artists drew from their recent historical experience to develop a new vocabulary of the Sign. The barbed wire—a recurrent motif in the works of Denis Martinez, for example, emerged as a charged symbol: at once border, carceral memory, and visual marker of the constrained body.²³

Denis Martinez’s Le petit miroir (1967; fig.7) illustrates how the precepts of the School of the Sign materialized within Aouchem as an expanded artistic practice. The piece is a mixed-media assemblage made of three branches, animal bones, and paper, among other materials, and stands somewhere between an image and a sculpture. Across the surface, there are silver, calligraphy-like motifs—dots, geometric patterns, short gestural arabesques, and words drawn from Algerian dialect—that are placed on fractured planes and roughly human-shaped forms. These Signs do not organize themselves into writing; indeed, they remain dispersed, uneven, and materially present. The combination of painted wood and raised forms gives the Sign a totemic presence, grounding it in artisanal practice. Here, it is no longer conceived as a system of visual forms to be read, but rather as a physical presence embedded in the object itself. Freed from its function as writing and reconfigured as an element of the assemblage, the Sign emerges through matter and volume, extending its logic beyond the pictorial field into a material and experiential register.

Ali Silem is another Algerian artist who built on the concept of the Sign. He defended the idea of a Sign in motion and of an open visual alphabet that rejects both identity-based assignment and state appropriation. He once remarked, “When you take a bird’s feather, for instance, you notice that it has the shape of the [Arabic letter] alif.”²⁴ For him, the task was to move beyond the “School of the Sign” as a label or myth and to reimagine it as a fluid space of creation nourished by the friction between ancient forms and contemporaneity. While Silem’s work remains in dialogue with the concerns articulated by Mohamed Khadda and the artists associated with Aouchem, it unfolds along a distinct register. The Sign, in Silem’s view, does not reference a glorified past.²⁵ Moreover, although his practice—like that of Aouchem—reflects his interest in nonrepresentational Signs and a refusal of academic figuration, it is not positioned as a rupture and ritual confrontation. In one untitled work, for example, calligraphic fragments dissolve into color, rhythm, and painterly gestures, preventing the Sign from settling into meaning, keeping it in a state of visual flux (fig. 8).

Whereas Benanteur tended to preserve the Sign as an evanescent trace or aura, while Mesli embedded it within figuration, Silem approached the letter through restraint and compositional measure. As Khadda observed, Silem’s surfaces are structured by carefully “mastered trajectories,” a “cascade of noûn,” an “ascension of lâm,” and the discreet presence of alif as tutelary linear anchors, so that the Sign functions less as an embodied or atmospheric motif than as a controlled calligraphic architecture oriented toward balance and serenity.²⁶ For Silem, the Sign functions as a phenomenological event that is experienced before it is interpreted.²⁷ This emphasis on color, vibration, and poetic resonance is reinforced by the artist’s parallel activity as a poet, a pursuit he shares with artists such as Denis Martinez, for whom the Sign also circulates between visual and textual registers. In his lecture “Peintres et poètes d’Algérie,” Silem situated Algerian visual practice within a long continuum of “written stones” (hajarat el maktûba), where alphabets and drawings have been intertwined for millennia, and where contemporary artists continue to seek an embodied memory of inscription.²⁸ In this lecture, Silem reflected on the long-standing entanglement of poetry and painting in Algeria, situating contemporary practices of the Sign within an older culture of orality, and tracing the role of artist-poet collaborations and bibliophile editions in the postindependence period.

What is singular in the way these artists engage the Sign is its semiotic operation. It is neither purely symbolic (in the Saussurean sense) nor reducible to index or icon. Beyond repeating motifs from pre-Islamic, Islamic, or Amazigh visual repertoires, these artists have transformed the Sign into a language charged with symbolic meaning that has been polished and displaced from its original function. It is often syncretic, combining plastic elements from disparate image regimes—magico-religious, vernacular, calligraphic, modern—within an unstable grammar. The point for these artists was not to convey a clear message but instead to unsettle the gaze, to demand a mode of reading that remains open, partial, and unresolved. These practices echo critical semiotic theories (such as those of Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco), which consider the Sign not as a transparent translation of content but rather as a surface of friction between the visible and the sayable.²⁹

If the Sign once served as a tool of decolonization, it has also, over time, been absorbed, recontextualized, and periodically emptied of its initial function. The legacy of the so-called School of the Sign has been transmitted in fragmented ways—celebrated as a landmark of Algerian modernity, yet often reconstructed retrospectively through teleological narratives.³⁰ Over the decades, some artists have claimed this lineage. The very use of the term “school” has contributed to a partial museification of their artistic gestures, transforming what was a critical impulse into a closed chapter in the national art historical canon. This shift must also be understood within a broader context: the rise of postcolonial cultural policies, the globalization of art markets, and the rebranding of the Sign as a “cultural marker.” Displayed in this context, the Sign risks becoming precisely what it once resisted: an inert ornament rather than a living grammar of liberation. 

In this sense, the School of the Sign is more than just a historical episode or an art movement. It is a critical horizon ready to be reactivated within other struggles and that stands as a philosophy of making and an ethic of form. In his essay “Sur L’olivier,” Khadda compares the Sign to an ancestral olive tree: a living structure, as opposed to a fixed form, in a steady process of growth and resistance, continually reshaped by time and experience.³¹ For Khadda, the olive tree stands as a point of origin, a genesis from which Signs and writing emerge as traces (and not representations) bearing the memory of endurance, erosion, and continuity. With his conception of the Sign, Khadda proposes a method to inhabit Signs without either taming or submitting to them.

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In March 2025, members of the C-MAP Southeast and East Asia Group visited Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi. In Vietnam, we met the curator Van Do, who served as one of our interlocutors, joining us on visits to museums, galleries, and studios. Her essay “Hanoi Children’s Palace: Nostalgia for the “New Socialist Human” stems from this engagement.

With red scarves knotted at our necks, we gather in rows every Monday morning before class for the weekly flag-raising ritual. Beneath the national flag, members of the ceremonial team, dressed in red-and-white uniforms and wearing hats shaped like bamboo shoots perched on their heads, beat drums and crash cymbals fiercely, as we sing along to the national anthem. At its close, we respond in unison: “For the socialist homeland, for the great ideal of Uncle Hồ: Ready!” In every classroom, the Five Teachings of Uncle Hồ hang neatly beside the blackboard (usually on the right side): “Love your Fatherland, love the people. Study well, work well. Unite well, discipline well. Keep good hygiene. Be honest, brave, and modest.” After school, following the instructions of Uncle Hồ, we rally quickly in the schoolyard for collective physical exercise. Outside the classrooms, storytelling contests about Uncle Hồ, revolutionary heroes, or moral lessons; theatrical reenactments of historical events; and the collection of scrap materials for “small plan campaigns” to raise funds for the school and instill environmentally conscious habits become endearing rituals of discipline in camaraderie.

More than simply school routine, such rituals were designed to develop the body and mind of the “new socialist human”¹, laying the foundation for building socialism in post-independence Vietnam. Beyond our formal schooling, Hanoi Children’s Palace extended socialist cultivation into our leisure time, reverie, artistic endeavors, and sports training. I spent the summer of 2004, when I was nine, at the Children’s Palace learning to read music and how to play the organ. Ten years later, in 2024, I revisited these childhood memories when alongside Le Thuan Uyen and Pham Minh Hieu, I approached the Palace as curator of Hanoi Children’s Palace: Nostalgia for the Future.² Taking the ideological history, architecture, and uncertain future of the Children’s Palace as a point of departure within the city’s broader projection of the creative industries as a strategic force, the project sought to examine how the institution’s pedagogical inheritance persists within the textures of everyday life and socialist memory.³ 

Mass singing and choral performances, often of revolutionary or patriotic songs—especially those expressing love for “Uncle” Hồ Chí Minh—once filled the music classrooms of the Children’s Palace. I can still hum and recall the dance steps to “Last Night I Dreamed of Uncle Hồ” and sing along to “Who Loves Uncle Hồ Chí Minh More than Teenagers and Children?” Written by composer Phong Nhã after his visit to the Palace in 1945, the latter song encapsulates a moment of nation-building, one coinciding with Vietnam’s declaration of independence from French colonial rule and the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

The layered history of the Hanoi Children’s Palace can be traced back to the 1930s, when the site first served as a kindergarten during the French colonial era. Later, in 1946, it was taken over by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and transformed into the headquarters of the Young Pioneer Organization—a central institution during the resistance against French colonialism for mobilizing children, adolescents and young adults, and for organizing cultural activities. Under different names and in varied form, this political mission continued throughout the anti-American war until national reunification following the Geneva Agreements in 1954.

In 1974, with support from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in the spirit of Soviet-bloc solidarity, the original French structure was converted into a six-story complex featuring signature perforated concrete sunshades and the Red Scarf Theatre. The building was designed by architect Lê Văn Lân (born 1938), a graduate of the first Architecture and Construction cohort of the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (fig. 1). Lê Văn Lân’s career spanned leadership positions in urban-planning agencies, a residency in Moscow focused on urban planning (1961), and advanced training in the German Democratic Republic in cultural architecture (1968–72).

Lê Văn Lân’s trajectory situated him within transnational socialist architectural discourse, in which rational urban planning, collectivist functions, and the civic role of public institutions were intertwined. The Hanoi Children’s Palace was therefore not a singular project but rather part of a broader network of cultural-educational infrastructures dedicated to shaping the socialist subject. The architect’s immersion in Eastern bloc urbanism and institutional design likely reinforced his conviction in architecture’s formative power—to spatialize ideology, discipline the senses, and stage a future-oriented collectivity—as a means to help build a new socialist country and contribute to the renewal of a nation devastated by war.

The name “Hanoi Children’s Palace” was adopted in 1985; prior to that, the institution was known as the Children’s Cultural House (1975–85) and the Children’s Club (before 1975). This renaming in the 1980s was likely intended to align with the nomenclature used across socialist nations, while also asserting the ideological role of the institution. The very concept of a “children’s palace” originated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s–30s with the Palaces of the Young Pioneers (Дворец пионеров)—extracurricular centers where children engaged in sports, arts, science, and ideological education. 

From the 1950s onward, this model spread throughout the socialist world—in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and allied countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, children’s palaces and youth cultural houses became urban landmarks and emblems of socialist modernity. In China, they proliferated from the 1950s under Maoist ideology, with many still operating today. North Korea monumentalized the model with the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace in Pyongyang (built in 1989). In Cuba, the Ernesto Che Guevara Children’s Palace (Palacio de Pioneros Ernesto Che Guevara) opened in 1979 as a large-scale extracurricular center combining ideological education, vocational training, and cultural, technical, and athletic programs for young students.

In Hanoi, three major institutions—the Vietnam–Soviet Friendship Cultural Palace, the Youth Cultural Centre, and the Hanoi Children’s Palace—remain architectural traces of a socialist ambition to cultivate the citizens of the future, each corresponding to a different stage of subject formation: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and the working masses. The architecture of these institutions localized socialist aesthetics through modernist planning, multifunctional public spaces, and symbolic ornamentation. In Vietnam, Hanoi Children’s Palace continues to operate under the administration of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union. Established following the founding of the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1930, the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union was formalized in 1931 as a socio-political organization responsible for youth education, mobilization, and cadre formation. Operating under Party leadership, the Union functions as a key intermediary between the state and young people, combining political training with cultural, artistic, and social activities.

Despite their continued operation, the civic-educational functions of these institutions have significantly eroded; these spaces have increasingly shifted toward ideologically neutral cultural-commercial programming. Under the pressures of neoliberal marketization, the architecture of collective dreams—once overflowing with optimism for a socialist future—has deteriorated. It now not only competes with an expanding landscape of private arts, sports, and educational facilities, but also is facing the risk of appropriation if not outright demolition.

For generations of children who came of age after the war, me included, the Hanoi Children’s Palace endures as a tender repository of childhood memory. On my first site visit to the Palace, which coincided with its 69th anniversary, observed under the title Bầy chim về tổ (A Flock of Birds Returning to Its Nest), a group of Palace alumni—now in their sixties and seventies—performed on the stage of the Red Scarf Theatre. They sang the same songs they had performed in their youth. Beneath airy corridors and patterned concrete sunshades shimmering in the sunlight, childhood was celebrated through collective play, reverie, performances, and long, exhilarating hours of creative learning.

Held from November 9–17, 2024, Nostalgia for the Future was a curatorial project that unfolded within the three buildings that make up the Hanoi Children’s Palace: Ấu Trĩ Viên (or Childhood Institute), the six-story classroom building, and the Red Scarf Theatre, expanding into an exhibition that spanned indoor and outdoor spaces, public programs, and playgrounds. In this essay, I focus on Nguyễn Trần Nam (born 1979)’s “We Never Fall” (2010), Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên (born 1993)’s “About the Weight of a Tragic Eyelid” (2024), and Nguyễn Huy An (born 1982)’s Vowels series (2014–24) to examine how each of these works entangles socialist memory with the political role of pedagogy, while probing the possibilities of art to intervene in and reinterpret an ideological pedagogical project that has long receded. Here, “nostalgia” is not sentimental longing; instead, it names a stance that acknowledges the discipline, violence, and psychic residues of socialist education, along with its broader politico-ideological ambition to forge the “new socialist human,” and the ways in which this past continues to inscribe itself in the present. By reintroducing and recontextualizing contemporary artworks within a site once instrumentalized for political pedagogy, the curatorial gesture confronts and reshapes socialist legacies, enabling the Children’s Palace to assume a new role (albeit for only nine fleeting days) as a space for artistic and curatorial intervention—as an attempt to write into its history before the uncertain future overtakes it.

The Red Scarf Theatre—a 500-seat auditorium with recessed, starlike ceiling lights that sits on the right side of the classroom building—once hosted hundreds of thousands of performances, from ballets and dramatic productions to music competitions for children across the country. It now became the stage for Nguyễn Trần Nam’s “We Never Fall” (fig. 2). Five life-size composite sculptures resembling Russian balance dolls stood silently in the dim hall. The work drew on the lật đật (balance doll or Nevalyashka (Неваляшка) which means “one that never falls”). The lật đật was a familiar imported toy that was brought to Vietnam in the 1960s–80s through Soviet and Eastern European aid and trade. It circulated among generations of children and students studying abroad at the time.

Each of the dolls, modeled after the artist’s family members, represents a role within socialist Vietnam: the peasant, the teacher, the worker, the student, and the artist—a symbolic taxonomy of laboring, disciplinary, and creative bodies mobilized to visualize the socialist “collective subject.” Installed within the Red Scarf Theatre, the work took on a fictive dramaturgy: four dolls occupied the position of the former orchestra pit, facing an empty audience, as one doll—the student wearing a red scarf—waited in the wings.

The roly-poly mechanism—righting itself each time it is pushed over—embodied resilience and stability, yet this very capacity to endure revealed its paradox: an endless return that hardens into rigidity, a self-operating system that survives by refusing transformation. Are we the ones doing the pushing, or have we already been absorbed into a programmed movement? Are we watching them perform their choreographed gestures, are they watching us in return? The scene unfolded as a meditation on socialist pedagogy—on discipline, observation, and the suspension of action—in which resilience becomes indistinguishable from resistance to change, and a collective is trained to watch, to wait, and to return, again and again, to its predetermined place.

Behind the wings of the Red Scarf Theatre, another “stage” was concealed within a former dressing room, where Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên’s “About the Weight of a Tragic Eyelid” quietly asserted a commanding presence (fig. 3).⁴ The work took the form of a monumental sculpture: a basin of Hồng Hà violet ink—shaped like the traditional lectern found in public school classrooms across Vietnam—paired with a set of distorted stainless-steel fountain pens poised above but not touching the liquid surface. For generations of students in Northern Vietnam, Hồng Hà violet was the compulsory ink used in grades one through six; children were taught to write only with the right hand and to follow the Latin alphabet. At the Children’s Palace, as in schools nationwide, “penmanship contests”—in which award-winning handwriting featured immaculate proportions, precisely measured letter spacing, balanced strokes of thin and thick lines, a calibrated tilt, and rhythmically connected curves—reflected prolonged disciplinary training. Discipline here was not simply correct posture or repetitive practice—it also came with punishment. How many generations remember the sharp crack of a wooden ruler across the palm for messy writing, wrong stroke order, left-handedness, or the failure to memorize a lesson?

In socialist pedagogy, discipline and punishment “naturalized” violence through repetition, surveillance, and self-control, echoing the proverb that frames strictness as affection: Thương cho roi cho vọt, ghét cho ngọt cho bùi (roughly, “Those who love discipline with the rod and the whip; those who hate offer sweetness and indulgence”). Such a saying becomes an alibi for coercion. In Thuỷ Tiên’s work, this history has been materialized as bodily, edging toward exhaustion—hovering between physical and psychological fatigue. The word “eyelid” (mi mắt) in the title becomes an extended metaphor—a thin, trembling threshold between alertness and rest, discipline and collapse.

A trio of works by Nguyễn Huy An, produced over the span of a decade—“A à ” (2014), “Musical Notes” (2023), and “Music Notations” (2024)—was installed across two locations within the Children’s Palace: the “Uncle Hồ and Children” Memorial Room (where Hồ Chí Minh signed the Preliminary Agreement with the French on March 6, 1946) and the drum-and-trumpet rehearsal room of the former Ấu Trĩ Viên, where the Young Bamboo Shoot ceremonial team still practices weekly. As with many of Huy An’s projects, this constellation of works operates simultaneously as performance and conceptual installation. Though produced ten years apart, they resonate as variations on a shared impulse: dismantling the visual and sonic architectures of socialist propaganda and returning them to their raw, pre-ideological forms.

In “A Ă Â,” the artist extracted all 29 letters of the Vietnamese alphabet and five Vietnamese tone marks from faded or partially destroyed propaganda slogans painted on the walls of cultural houses across Northern provinces outside of Hanoi (fig. 4). Painstakingly isolating each character, Huy An reframed them individually, stripping them back to a neutral, emptied state, prior to reassembling them into words, meaning, and ideology. Made of layered lime paint, these slogans accumulate over time: new ones are painted over old, then crack, chip, and erode, leaving overlapping fragments of what once lay beneath. Some letters remain decipherable; others are broken, orphaned, or illegible, severed from any coherent phrase. For the Children’s Palace, Huy An retained only the 12 vowels (A, Ă, Â, E, Ê, I, O, Ô, Ơ, U, Ư, Y) and five Vietnamese tone marks, placing them high up against an aged wall like remnants of a bygone propagandistic past.

In Huy An’s live performance as part of “4th Quarter Report” (Á Space, 2023), in which the work “Musical Notes” first appeared, the artist carried a bundle of bronze bars as he walked out before the audience.⁵ He slowly scattered the bars across the floor while reciting a poem that begins, “In two-four time and the marching rhythm / March to Hanoi – March to Saigon / I count” (fig. 5). He then proceeded to count aloud the 255 musical notes that make up two songs, both of which are often broadcast as “victory anthems” through public loudspeakers on national commemorative days: “Tiến về Sài Gòn” (“March to Saigon”) by Huỳnh Minh Siêng, is played on April 30 in honor of the reunification of South Vietnam, and “Tiến về Hà Nội” (“March to Hanoi”) by Văn Cao, is played on October 10 to mark the liberation of the capital from French colonial rule. Once considered triumphant, celebratory, and bound to historic moments of liberation, these songs—repeated year after year until their glory erodes—are, here, stripped of narrative and affect, in effect reduced to abstract sonic objects.

After counting, Huy An concluded: “The sum of two marches / plus nine single rests, / amounts to 255 tones.” The 255 notes are thus reduced to a simple numerical sequence, then translated into bronze bars capable of producing sound. At the end of the performance, the artist struck the bar corresponding to the note G (sol). Exhibited later as a museological artifact in the “Uncle Hồ and Children” Memorial Room—surrounded by archival photographs and documents—the bronze bars lie neatly on a long table draped in dark green velvet, assuming a solemn presence that confronts the persistence of ideology as it is ritualized into everyday life (figs. 6, 7).

In “Musical Notations,” public monuments across Hanoi have been transformed into musical instruments: the Martyrs’ Monument in Vạn Xuân Park (Quán Thánh district), the Martyrs’ Monument in Bà Kiệu Temple Square, the Martyrs’ Monument in the Vietnam–Soviet Friendship Cultural Palace, the statue of King Lý Thái Tổ, the statue of painter Victor Tardieu at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts, monuments to Alexandre Yersin and José Martí Péréz, the Lenin Monument in Lenin Park, monuments to Nguyễn Trãi and Emperor Quang Trung, the statue of Saint Paul at Xanh Pôn Hospital, and the Nguyễn Văn Trỗi monument at West Lake, among others. By striking each monument with a hammer and recording their resonant echoes, Huy An produced a series of “notations” that collapses symbolic hierarchies: socialist heroes, ancient kings, foreign intellectuals, and anticolonial figures are all reduced to the acoustic materiality of hammered stone and metal—later transcribed into onomatopoeic words. Monuments to martyrs, emperors, and revolutionaries are symbolically leveled, leaving behind nothing but the sound of matter.

Across the three works in Huy An’s “Vowels” series, a process of deconstruction has transpired: letters, musical notes, and monuments have each been returned to elemental form. In their transition, the works invite us to consider how political symbols might be released from ideological function and returned to the realm of pure sensory encounter, open to potential poetic reassembly beneath a sky that seems anything but new.

Rather than treating the Hanoi Children’s Palace as a neutral site for artistic display, Nostalgia for the Future engaged it as a historical apparatus—a space designed to enact socialism as a performative project, in which the “new socialist human” is not merely imagined but continuously produced through education, discipline, collective ritual, and bodily training. Within this context, nostalgia is not about singing the same old songs or indulging in sentimental recollections of the past. Instead, it operates as a critical stance—one that acknowledges both the emancipatory promises and the disciplinary violence embedded in socialist pedagogy as well as interrogates how socialist ideals were rehearsed, normalized, and internalized through everyday bodily practices.

The works discussed here do not simply reference this legacy; they position themselves in relation to it, testing what remains operative, what has failed, and what continues to structure subjectivity in the present. While reactivating pedagogical residues and recalling lived histories, the project orchestrated nostalgia as a critical field of strategies through which artists perform, rehearse, distort, or refuse inherited pedagogical forms and socialist values. Nguyễn Trần Nam draws on his own familial memories to question socialist ambition by unsettling its symbols through intimate and playful engagement. Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên, by contrast, approaches nostalgia as an embodied and affective residue, foregrounding how socialist education persists not only as ideology but also as somatic memory—in posture, endurance, sensation, and affect. For Nguyễn Huy An, nostalgia takes the form of a quiet, destructive poetics, a subtractive process in which structures and symbols are gradually eroded and rendered fragile, opening them to semantic and sonic reconfiguration.

At the center of the Children’s Palace complex lies an open courtyard that once functioned as a space for collective activity and play. Here, gym classes and group exercise took place, parents and grandparents waited to collect their children, and brass bands rehearsed their repertoire (fig. 8, 9). Under the pressures of urban densification, the courtyard has since been repurposed as a ticketed parking lot. For the project, a playground was reintroduced into this space. Modeled after Điềm Phùng Thị’s modular sign system and designed by Think Playgrounds, it included slides, swings, and climbing structures.⁶ The playground temporarily reclaimed the courtyard and returned it to its intended subject—children—while simultaneously calling into question the site’s future capacity for play, reverie, and cultural enrichment amid its ideological defunctionalizing and the rise of market-driven, privatized educational infrastructures.

Together, these positions formed not a consensus but rather a spectrum of interventions across which socialist legacies are variously negotiated, resisted, and reconfigured in the present. In drawing these tensions into the present, the project proposed nostalgia not as reconciliation or closure, but instead as ongoing negotiation with the political and affective residues of socialist ambition.

With special thanks to Carlos Quijon, Jr., and Minh Nguyen for their editorial input. 

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The annual Asilah Cultural Moussem, an international festival held in northern Morocco, was cofounded in 1978 by Mohamed Benaïssa and Mohamed Melehi in collaboration with Toni Maraini and Al Muhit Cultural Association. It served as a significant postcolonial cultural platform, involving activists from the Casablanca Art School and artists from Africa, the Arab world, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The festival featured outdoor exhibitions, murals, visual art workshops, theater, music, and social and cultural programs aimed at rehabilitating the neglected city of Asilah and integrating art into social progress and daily life. The Asilah Cultural Moussem is still ongoing to this day.

Morad Montazami: Toni, to start the conversation, can you tell us how the idea of creating a festival of murals in Asilah—literally on the city’s walls (fig. 1)—came to you and Mohamed Melehi?

Toni Maraini: Firstly, I would like to mention that Mohamed Benaïssa was with us from the outset. Melehi and Benaïssa were born in Asilah, and our mutual friendship had blossomed many years before under various circumstances. Back when we were teaching at the Casablanca Art School in the 1960s, Melehi and I frequently traveled to Asilah, where we met Benaïssa. At that time, Asilah’s old medina was in poor condition; walls were deteriorating, many houses were abandoned, and the streets were quite dirty. When we got together with Benaïssa, we often discussed how we could contribute to the community’s cultural and economic development. Our goal was to enhance Asilah’s living standards, and for this, we thought about creating a festival. However, instead of calling it a “festival,” we decided to call it a “moussem,” the term traditionally used in Morocco for local festivities organized by the community. Thus, the Asilah Moussem needed to be community-driven from the outset. This is how the concept of a moussem emerged. Fortunately, there were elections during this time, and both Benaïssa and Melehi had campaigned for local office. Their active involvement in various community projects sparked enthusiasm among the residents,  and they were voted in: Benaïssa was elected mayor, which was a significant milestone for Asilah’s political landscape, and Melehi was elected member of the municipality and took on a prominent cultural role, creating a group called Al Muhit Cultural Association. This cultural association represented a fresh start, marking a new chapter in the city’s history. Concurrently, the Ministry of Culture provided funding to restore the city’s walls and its long-neglected houses. This was when the vision of visible walls took form.

MM: This photo conveys a sense of how artists organized and assigned the walls for painting. 

TM: Take a look at the state of the walls in this image (fig. 2). The house you see in the background was abandoned. Fortunately, we had numerous friends who were artists. We forged these connections through our involvement in the Casablanca Art School and through various other activities,¹ including organizing a series of public outdoor exhibitions—Présence Plastique—on the streets of Marrakech and Casablanca.² These artists participated with great dedication. In figure 2, we see them walking around the medina, deliberating on which area to tackle.

Artists were organized into six groups, with each one focusing on a specific location. The walls would initially be painted white, and then each artist would create a composition with the assistance of local young people. Everyone collaborated regardless of gender and age. Take, for example, this mural by Mohammed Chabâa (fig. 3; see also fig. 1). In the photograph, you can see Chabâa himself, but there is also someone assisting him. The wall was painted white, and the streets have been cleaned.

MM: Toni, you pointed out your experience with collaborative methodologies, dating back to the renowned Présence Plastique outdoor exhibition series held in Marrakech and Casablanca in 1969. Therefore, by the time of the Asilah moussem, roughly a decade later, you all had had experience with public space exhibitions. Could you elaborate on the specificity of the Asilah Cultural Moussem and the unique interactions that it fostered between artists and the local community?

TM: First of all, it differed in that in Jemaa el-Fna Square, paintings were hung on the walls of a large, unique public space. Here in Asilah, murals were created on the walls in various corners and city streets. The enthusiasm of the people was enormous, as they would pitch in to help with the painting.

MM: Did local people spontaneously join the mural collaboration, or had you planned for these murals to involve the local community?

TM: As muralists, we naturally considered the principles of street art. It needs to be in public spaces, contributing to urban development, and involving people’s participation. This is why, when working with Benaïssa on the concept of the Moussem, Melehi and I proposed a special art and culture project with three components: workshops, exhibitions, and street art.

MM: And can you tell us about the role of the local inhabitants, especially women? When we examine some of the photographs taken by you and Melehi, we can see many women collaborating on the murals.

TM: Yes, many female students had gathered to create their walls, and older women would come around to look, offering suggestions and help (fig. 4). That was indeed socially important. It sparked interest and friendship and, moreover, it reflected the female community’s desire to turn to more modern habits and experiences, changing from what Asilah was and engaging for better local conditions.

MM: Yes, as you say, apparently the local inhabitants understood the project, and there was some sort of synergy between the project, the city’s state, and how local people responded with enthusiasm and positivity to the Moussem, which brings me to my next question: Was Asilah already a tourist destination in 1978, or did it become one after the creation of the Moussem?

TM: Before the 1970s elections, Asilah was in such poor condition that it only drew a transient crowd—people who would briefly visit and then leave. The restaurants were shut down, and there was nothing to offer visitors. However, after 1978, Asilah’s economic situation improved significantly as shops started to open. Artisans, both men and women, would now sell their products, like rugs and ceramics. The weekly market became a gathering place for people from the countryside to sell their goods—vegetables, tomatoes, and many other products from nearby farms and fields. It was always crowded and very animated. The streets were cleaned, and many shops and houses reopened. Two traditional restaurants (one owned by a woman) opened as well. All of this attracted tourists, who came to see the murals. A museum was also established in the ancient Portuguese Al-Kasbah Tower, where some exhibitions were organized. These significant changes encouraged thoughtful tourism—tourism that pauses, observes, and values. Eventually, as people’s income improved, local families found it easier to send their children to school.

MM: Let’s discuss the workshops that featured so many key artists, especially in such a cosmopolitan environment. Can you tell us how these workshops were organized? I know, for instance, that the printmaking workshop was very significant.

TM: There was a painting workshop that welcomed artists of different nationalities and offered lessons to the youth from the city, but the printmaking workshop (fig. 5) was particularly significant, thanks to three outstanding artists, Mohammad Omar Khalil, Krishna Reddy and Robert Blackburn, who were experts in the field and supervised the workshop activities for several years. They coordinated all aspects, secured all the printing machines, etc. The printmaking workshop was the first of its kind in Morocco. Several artists, such as Farid Belkahia and Malika Agueznay (fig. 6), came to learn how to print their own works on paper, and over the years, they engaged in teaching these techniques to local students.

MM: How and when did you and Melehi connect with Mohammad Omar Khalil, Krishna Reddy and Robert Blackburn?

TM: We became acquainted with them during our stay in New York from 1962 to 1964. Melehi had been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and I had been given a scholarship to Smith College. While in New York, visiting exhibitions and participating in cultural meetings, we became good friends with several artists.

MM: So you actually knew these artists for almost 18 years before inviting them to Asilah. That’s impressive!

TM: In those years, we traveled to New York several times, and met them again, and we became friends. The Moussem was a good occasion to invite them to Morocco. Given our collaborations on projects associated with the Casablanca Art School and international exhibitions or meetings, we also traveled to Baghdad, Lebanon, Tunis, Algiers, France, and Spain, and met many other artists. It was a fascinating cosmopolitan time that fostered numerous international, cultural, and artistic connections. Unlike today, there was a positive atmosphere, one characterized by a strong desire to collaborate in every direction—north, south, east, and west.

MM: It’s evident that our current fascination with the 1960s and 1970s, along with the broader postcolonial networks and solidarities, indicates we are facing challenges today. This suggests that our solidarities and networks clearly have limitations, and we need to draw our inspiration from that era.

TM: Exactly. There were no borders at that moment.

MM: Could you remind us if international artists were invited to the first edition, or if the 1978 edition primarily featured Moroccan artists—with international artists being invited starting from the second edition?

TM: Since our initial concept was to conduct local activities with an international approach, fostering connections between the north and south, east and west, and of course, Africa, the first edition was absolutely international (fig. 7) . . .

MM: For example, if I recall correctly, the first time you met Etel Adnan was around the time of the First Biennale of Arab Art in Baghdad in 1974. Four years later, she came to Asilah. I mean, there was a very strong dialogue and an artistic friendship between you and Adnan, as you even translated some of her poems into Italian.

TM: Yes, over the years, I translated and published three of her books and several poems in Italy. I also wrote for the catalogues of a couple of her exhibitions. As you say, I met Etel Adnan in 1974 at the Baghdad biennale, which I attended with Melehi and Belkahia. Since she told us she wanted to visit Morocco, we invited her in 1978; she visited Asilah, traveled around, had an exhibition in Rabat, and then in 1979, came again to participate in the Moussem painting workshop.

MM: There were printmaking workshops, painting workshops, and ceramics workshops, right? Who were the main participants practicing in these workshops? Were they mostly young Moroccan artists from Asilah? Obviously, many incredible artists came together, like Etel Adnan, Mona Saudi, and Malika Agueznay—all the ones we mentioned. But who were the workshop practitioners? Were they young people from Asilah or even youth from other Moroccan cities coming to Asilah in the summer?

TM: The workshops were open to everyone. Some of the artists invited would be responsible for organizing workshops and teaching programs. Artists from many countries would work at the workshops, as did young people from Asilah, including some who came from Tangiers or Rabat. Workshops were a great place for artistic convergences, not only for painting, sculpture, and ceramics but also for learning printmaking, as it was, at that time, the only place to learn it in Morocco (fig. 8).

MM: So this was a poster exhibition (fig. 9), right? Can you tell us if there was a direct relationship between the printmaking workshop and such displays? Were the works on display there mainly by artists who took part in the workshops, or were there other printmakers?

TM: This poster exhibition was held with works made for the occasion by the artists participating to the painting and printmaking workshops. The wide exhibition space was once an abandoned factory that had been restored. It became a very important municipal gallery called “Al-Qasaba,” where many exhibitions have been held over the years.

MM: Were you the curator of this exhibition?

TM: The art exhibitions were curated collaboratively! Certainly, Melehi and I would participate in their conception, yet much of the work was made possible thanks to the collaboration with the new local association called “Al Muhit,” created by Melehi and Benaïssa with the enthusiastic participation of other friends and people from Asilah, Tangier, and Rabat.

It is important to remember that during the Moussem there were not only the workshops and exhibitions, but also many other different projects—conferences, music and theater rehearsals, film screenings, and all the while street art activities. Every day, women and men worked hard and collectively to make all this happen. This is what the Moussem was intended to convey: a collaborative effort that showcased the dynamic enthusiasm of the community.

MM: OK, I get it. So there was never really one person, for example, responsible for the poster exhibitions; it was always a collective effort.

TM: As a newly elected member of the city council, Melehi was responsible for cultural activities. He would work from morning to evening on everything related to the arts, and I would help—but, as I said, without the participation of work groups and the great collective force, it would have been impossible to realize these cultural, artistic, and social projects concretely.

MM: It’s quite clear that you and Melehi were significant driving forces, albeit within a collective framework. Additionally, you both stood out as key figures in fostering connectivity, effectively bringing together artists from diverse backgrounds and countries in Asilah.

In the children’s workshop, you played a crucial role. I know you always tell me not to exaggerate your contributions, but in this case, it was definitely you who raised the idea of creating workshops for children. I’m aware that your experience with children and art pedagogy goes back further, as you had already been involved in art therapy, even in schools in Casablanca in the early 1970s. Can you share how the concept of children’s workshops and art pedagogy became so meaningful for you, and how you later implemented it in Asilah?

TM: When I was teaching at the Casablanca Art School, I also wanted to do something for younger audiences and the public schools. In 1976, I was asked by the headmistress of the Ibn Abbad school—a public school in a neglected neighborhood in Casablanca—to organize a free art workshop there. It turned out to be a great experience not only for me but also for the students, who joined with enthusiasm and, in many cases, did much better in their studies and their behavior as a result. That prompted me to study art therapy. In fact, every art historian knows that art serves as a form of therapy. I had a good friend, the psychiatrist Abdallah Ziou Ziou, who encouraged me and with whom I often exchanged ideas. Then, I had the opportunity in 1980 to open an art therapy workshop at the Children’s Hospital Ibn Rochd in Casablanca for two years. That was a great responsibility but also a fantastic experience.

MM: Did you implement the children’s workshop beginning with the first edition of the Moussem?

TM: Yes, since the very beginning . . . and I didn’t want the artists to join and teach . . . there was nothing to teach. The children would teach the artists (fig. 10)!

MM: The workshop’s approach was that we shouldn’t try to teach them anything; rather, they can teach us something.

TM: Certainly! They have valuable lessons to teach us and share. The issue was that at their school, students were asked to copy images, and instead of letting them express themselves, the children would have their drawings severely judged and corrected. During the first week, the first month, and the very first years of the Moussem, the doors of my workshop—which was organized in an open space between the street and the garden of the Raissouni Palace—were wide open, welcoming children and teenagers, boys and girls, from the streets and the neighborhoods around. They came, some from very poor backgrounds, others not. They came in, stayed, and played. Initially, there were approximately 20 children, and within two years, the number grew to around 200, possibly even 250 (fig. 11).

MM: Many of these children seem to have attended the workshop consistently over the years. Some of them you followed over the years; it wasn’t a one-time meeting. I believe you worked with several of them for many years, which implies that you saw some of them grow up, correct?

TM: Yes, many attended the workshop for many years; they literally grew up in it! And I kept in touch with them. Many have become excellent artists and some, art teachers. They still write to me, which is the most important thing. If somehow over the years, my name was forgotten by the Moussem’s organizers, young people who attended my workshops did not forget me …

MM: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the independence of the Asilah Cultural Moussem compared to other more formal postcolonial festivals, which seemed more state-organized. For instance, the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966 was state-organized and highly political, as was the Baghdad biennale of 1974. Similarly, the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969 had a distinctly centralized organization, despite its international character. Given that the Asilah Moussem was organized on a citywide scale rather than as a state-run event, was it more independent or less political from an official standpoint?

TM: We attended the Bagdad biennale of 1974 with Melehi—as the artists related to the Casablanca Art School representing Morocco. We attended the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969 as well. All these events were fantastic artistically, but they indeed felt overtly political and official. Consequently, there were independent artist groups engaged in protest, like the Aouchem artist collective in Algeria and others. Asilah was different because it was organized locally by the municipality and the Al Muhit Cultural Association, and it involved local people primarily—this is why it was important to call it a moussem and not a festival.

MM: It’s quite interesting that it was just as international as in Algiers. It matched the internationalism of those earlier festivals, but the organization operated on a different scale. And, as you mentioned, it felt more local and grounded in some way, perhaps. So I believe it’s a very intriguing point regarding the originality of the Asilah Moussem within the broader context of postcolonial platforms, festivals, and transnational solidarities.

This conversation took place at a meeting of the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Africa group at MoMA in September 2024. The 2024 C-MAP Africa research program was conceived and organized by Beya Othmani (C-MAP Africa Fellow) and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi (Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and leader of the C-MAP Africa Group). Read more about C-MAP here

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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.

The post Learning with Dolls in the Work of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith appeared first on post.

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.

The post Bali, Background for War (1943), Part II: A Proposal for Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA; A Proposal for the Cultural Cold War appeared first on post.

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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