The performances conducted by the late Filipino artist Roberto Villanueva (1947–1995) prompted the effects and the facture of ritual. In 1989, a sprawling circular labyrinth constructed out of eight-foot runo reeds occupied the grounds of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in Metro Manila. Inspired by a pattern found in the Cordilleran rice fields of northern Luzon, the labyrinth orchestrated a walk, or dance, toward the center, where one found a circular pit lined with river stones and presided over by totemic figures like the bulul, a carved wooden sculpture representing a guardian spirit. The center was an area resembling a dap-ay, a place for gatherings and rites, traditionally the foundation of Cordilleran learning. Archetypes: Cordillera Labyrinth, like many of Villanueva’s works, combined installation, chanting, magical invocations, and other ritualistic tropes drawn from Indigenous sources.¹ Writer Charlson L. Ong, in a 1989 article for the Daily Globe, articulates a popular impression of Villanueva toward the height of the artist’s prolific practice: “[Villanueva is] most everyone’s idea of a mumbaki—a Cordilleran shaman who invokes ancestral and nature spirits.”²

The events that signaled the opening and dismantling of the maze aspired to states of revelry and trance by way of an eclectic ensemble. Musicians wearing their malong, or tubular garments, played Muslim instruments. Cordilleran elders performed a cañao, a sacrificial ritual. Villanueva’s performative agency assembled a social world through degrees of mimicry and guise. Though not of Indigenous origins, Villanueva wore a bahag (loincloth) and applied white circular patterns on his skin, signaling affinities with Indigeneity through a competently invented self. Certain magical effects were attained through crafty, logistical trickery, while others solicited improbable cosmic interventions. At the closing ceremony, Villanueva performed a borrowed ritual to call rain to the site, expressing the artist-shaman’s ambitions to synchronize spirit and atmosphere. A documentary by Egay Navarro and Rica Concepcion condenses Villanueva’s fascinating duality through its title Showman/Shaman, a duplicitous play between guise and embodiment that parallels what he, in his life, had sought to overcome.  

While the trope of the artist-as-shaman is certainly as alluring as it is ethnographically contentious, it must be seen in light of a sensibility that thrived in the Baguio Arts Guild (BAG), of which Villanueva was a founding member. The Cordilleran region is a mountainous territory inhabited by several ethnolinguistic groups. In the nearby city of Baguio, BAG cultivated a subjectivity that not only sought affinities with the Indigenous but also found, within the halo of that affinity, the aesthetic and moral grounds on which to practice their postcolonial agency. This essay looks at the modern as the discursive milieu that grants the figure of the artist-shaman its historical vitality, which I will also call its anomaly.

In 1992, the Indigenous inclination of BAG was inscribed into a narrative of modernism when three of its members—Villanueva, Tommy Hafalla, and Willy Magtibay—received the Thirteen Artists Awards from the CCP. The Thirteen Artists was first conceived as an exhibitionary project in 1970. Then CCP director Roberto Chabet pinned its lineage to the historical group of Filipino modernists who had turned away from Classical values. The loose metric upon which he based the selection of artists—“recentness, a turning-away from past, familiar modes of art-making”³—expressed the modernist urge for forward traction which oriented succeeding iterations of the awards. The attention given to BAG in 1992, however, suggests other institutional desires. In his notes as CCP director for visual arts, Virgilio Aviado praised the awardees’ use of “old, ancient and traditional methods for modern expression.”⁴ Pointing to pursuits such as “the retribalization of the Filipino” and the search for identity through a recuperation of traditions, this sentiment stresses the national as it draws on the otherness of Indigeneity as a modernist cipher of the authentic.⁵

The term “tradition” is in itself duplicitous, one that assumes diverse uses in countries that share colonial histories. Art historians Geeta Kapur and Leonor Veiga, in tracing fragments of tradition within the largely secularized arenas of Indian and Indonesian art, rethink the notion of tradition as an ancestral practice that has survived modernization. Kapur approaches it as “an ambivalent, often culpable sign,” deployed in post-colonial nation-building, at times conceived and re-functioned for nationalist aims.⁶ Veiga cites British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s argument that the invention of tradition, often prompted by the birth of the modern nation-state, attempts to repair the “social voids caused by secularization.”⁷ Whether enacted on the level of the state or at the grassroots, the process of invention can be essentialist in its appropriations, as it lifts an ideal tradition from a ritual milieu and casts it along the quest for nationhood, identity, and origins.

It is from these discursive frames that I draw the term “invention”—but in conceiving it as a guise, I refer to invention as an activity that is intimate in that it arises out of appearance and bodily enactments. Its pronounced exteriority, commanding recognition through all its elaborate adorning, nonetheless strives for a depth of affinity. Shamanism is traditionally practiced within paradigms of the magical and the religious. The shaman is a medium who brings access to the sacred in communal life. Villanueva echoes this function of mediality and retools it into a poetics. In an undated essay titled “Cosmology in Art: An Experiential Process,” he writes that it “is the unique position of the artist as a go-between of the visual and recognizable world and that of the world that is beyond phenomena that strengthens the artist’s role in the society.”⁸ By rendering sensuous form to “unconscious feelings and thoughts of the social environment,”⁹ the artist-medium, much like the shaman, is seen to perform both a psychic duty and a social one. The artist may not necessarily aspire to summon the sacred but at least to access the subliminal through communal experience.

Early on, Villanueva’s poetics of a world-beyond-phenomena materialized in what several writers had contemporaneously tagged as his surrealist paintings. Taking part in a 1975 exhibition that announced the surrealistic as a common ground, Villanueva relished the ways in which this pictorial modality granted him “a freedom of expression” to mine “dreams, desires, and even fears,” a subliminal repertoire from which he found “a greater sense of realism.”¹⁰ Painting butterflies and arid terrains with winged and “evolutionary beasts,”¹¹ the artist signaled the dreamlike before assuming the register of social allegory, like the painting Aqui descansa el rio defunto, Pasig; año 1985, which divines the degradation of the Pasig River.

In these secular visions, the painter, allied to the prophet or seer, foils a faithful inscription of an external reality; he prefers the clairvoyant register to signal a harboring malaise. The subliminal in Archetypes may refer to the visceral qualities of ritual revelry heightened by drumming and dancing as well as to understandings of the primordial—from Indigeneity to the archetype of a labyrinth. Villanueva notes the archetype’s recurrence “in many ancient cultures—from Ancient Egypt to Neolithic Europe, particularly England, to the American Indians, the Chinese, the Australian Aborigines.”¹² Through the motifs and sociality of ritual, artist and viewer are presumably drawn closer to a primordial consciousness rooted in Indigeneity—an affinity that is nonetheless anomalous as it assumes that psychic license can collapse material difference.

Villanueva was raised in Metro Manila, the urban center of modernization in an archipelago defined by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Indigeneity and tradition typically correspond to an imagination of what lies beyond this center, a vision of cultural periphery conceived according to colonial delineations of territory. Ethnolinguistic groups in the Cordilleran highlands, having resisted Spanish colonial efforts, retained significations of otherness during the American occupation as they cast a reverse-image of what was largely seen as a Hispanized and Christianized population in the lowlands. In Philippine modernist painting, this otherness becomes material for an artist’s self-conscious evocations of identity and shared origins, which are at times prone to essentialist portrayals. As Filipino art historian Flaudette May Datuin remarks of modernist Victorio Edades’s depictions of a Cordilleran idyll in Two Igorot Women (1913), “Identity is presented as an eternal and unchanging ‘primitive’ or ‘ethnic’ moment, often associated with the chthonic and submissive female ‘savage.’”¹³

Villanueva’s anomaly rests on a more pronounced representational ambivalence as it is the artist’s body that gestures and personifies, while the otherness of the highlands remains the milieu’s chief source of invention.¹⁴ The fraught territorial divides—wherein periphery and center ideologically align with constructions of tradition and modernity—produce anxieties surrounding the right to represent. Villanueva’s shamanism may thus inspire contrasting attitudes: on the one hand, the celebratory yearning for precolonial identity and then, on the other, the charge of appropriation and self-exoticization. If both these viewpoints spin on tense questions of authenticity, might other readings be possible when we consider what it is about the mediality of the artist-shaman that is fruitfully anomalous?

Villanueva’s biography unwittingly subverts the myth of identity as origin. The anomaly of a body standing in as a medium, proxy, or artifice emphasizes identity’s performativity, one that entails a prolonged process of affinity to stage and to overcome its masquerade. His consciousness of ethnic diversity developed during his childhood visits to Palawan and, eventually, through projects in documentary filmmaking, where he observed and befriended Indigenous groups in several parts of the country. In the late 1970s, dismayed by what anthropologist and BAG member David Baradas has described as a commercialized arts scene that favored homogenizing Western styles, Villanueva moved from Manila to Baguio.¹⁵ This transition brought crushing financial strains; he was then a young father developing an art practice with little commercial or institutional support. What perhaps relieved these precarities was a growing sense of affinity with the thriving cultural and spiritual life he encountered in his visits to the Cordilleras—an affective kinship that differs from systematic ethnography. Scholar Katrin de Guia notes Villanueva’s apprenticeship with an Ifugao mumbaki as well as his visits to healers and mystics in Japan, the United States, and Australia.¹⁶

This affinity with the Indigenous coalesced into a politics of identity through the formation of BAG in 1987. The end of the decade witnessed demands for the state to establish regional autonomy in the Cordilleras. Members of BAG foregrounded cultural identity by inflecting genres of Western origins—film, painting, photography, sculpture, performance—with markers of the local. Materials were sourced from immediate environments and themes carried Indigenous motifs. As an alternative to the secular, commercial, and individualized model of art production in Manila, BAG advanced an ethos of communality: disciplined, spirited organizing—which bred the artist-run international Baguio Art Festival—and a freewheeling camaraderie among travelers, musicians, performers, and artists of all persuasions. The modernist atmosphere of experimentation energized BAG’s postcolonial quest—a quest not just for national origins but also for a real sense of originality, a defining self-consciousness that yielded, for Villanueva, the liberties and the conceit of representation.

In probing the meeting points between tradition and modernity, Geeta Kapur advises us to look “not for hybrid solutions . . . but for a dialectic.”¹⁷ Leonor Veiga then nominates the category of a “third avant-garde” that recognizes the postcolonial agency of artists in using appropriation as a conceptual strategy to capture tradition’s transgressive stance. The “third avant-garde,” in undoing “the taxonomical division between art and ethnography,”¹⁸ fulfills what Kapur has described as a “double-dismantle.”¹⁹ It objects to invented traditions that serve nationalist interests, and it defies the Western monopoly of the avant-garde.²⁰ While much of Veiga’s astute propositions resonate with the conditions of BAG—chiefly, with its ambitions to undo Western aesthetic models and modes of display—Villanueva’s visceral and spiritual performances seem somewhat at odds with the transgressive, radical, and antagonistic edge that defines the vanguardist posture.

The artist-shaman is positioned here as an anomalous figure of postcolonial modernity. What I have been describing as an anomaly is motivated less by the wish to advance than by a long look backward, a nostalgic turning that is naively but also deliberately revivalist in its urges. In working with ritual, however, Villanueva was not only concerned with the symbolic operations that bind it to tradition but also interested in its facture, its design, and its plasticity, recalling the modernist fascination with medium specificity and surface. The artist-shaman thus commits impieties in their revivals, animating the atmosphere of ritual while remaining unfaithful to its ethnographic source.

An anomaly is an instance of irregularity, an improbability, or a moment of anachronism; it derives its effects by virtue of its dislocations. When Villanueva traveled to stage more ritualistic performances in countries like Japan and New York, he seemed more inclined to approach Indigeneity as an activity of invention and guise. It is perhaps the artist-shaman’s more improvised works, like the 1991 project Panhumuko, that reveal another side to his mediality. Largely intuitive, diverging from the elaborate ensembles of Archetypes, Panhumuko foregrounds the shared, symbolic, subliminal space of ritual, which is also a conceptual space to address modernity and its attendant malignancies.

Showman/Shaman documents the performance.²¹ In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in central Luzon displaced several Indigenous Aeta communities, forcing them into evacuation camps. Panhumuko, a Sambal word that translates as “surrender,” was prompted by the intention to make an offering that could appease Apo Namalyari, a deity of the Aetas. Around this time, Villanueva had been preparing to travel to New York to serve as an artist-in-residence upon the invitation of the Filipino cultural group Amauan.²² He was conceiving an engagement that could inform his work at the residency. Villanueva, accompanied by documentarians and a linguist, made the trip to Zambales to find Aetas receptive to holding a ritual offering. The plan did not work with one group, but he was welcomed by another, whose elders (whom he described as “shamans of the community”) reacted with enthusiasm.²³

The central element of this project was the ritual atmosphere approximating a collective trance; the making of the installation-offering appeared like a means to achieve this end. Improvisation, play, and eclecticism marked Panhumuko: Cordilleran dances inspired Villanueva’s actions, the Aetas made percussive sounds with bamboo drums and tin cans, and intuitively, the group assembled the installation by an open well by scattering coals, erecting bamboo stems, hanging vegetables, and arranging candles shaped in human form. A semblance of this resulting material form was then constructed as an indoor installation at Lincoln Square Gallery, New York a month after. Villanueva’s impious, eclectic acts seem like an echo of folk religiosity, a cultural response to the colonial imposition of Christian belief. Writing about the human-shaped candles taken from Quiapo Church in Manila, Villanueva relays his fascination with these ritual objects whose “roots are in the animistic traditions of the past” but are now integrated in Christian practices, an integration he regards as “one of the richest points in Filipino culture.”²⁴

Villanueva’s ritual performances may be read as sites of a similar dialectic. Episodes of calamity most sharply manifest an existential rupture, what Villanueva intuits as “man’s alienation from nature,” which brings about environmental havoc.²⁵ The poetics of a world-beyond-phenomena—fulfilled in Panhumuko as a communal experience of psychic release—signal a postcolonial disavowal of modernization’s rational processes. Villanueva favors installations because their assembly calls for communal acts that “quiet the rattles of intellect and allows intuition to reign.”²⁶ For hours in Zambales, drumming, dancing, and chanting ensue as they build the offering. As a performative gesture, Panhumuko attempts to alleviate a collective unease toward modernity’s malignancies, here construed as calamity, loss of community, and ecological disconnect.²⁷

Villanueva held Indigeneity as a modality of being that may yield a cure for modern problems. The artist then assumed the role of a medium to access an eroded subjectivity or to approximate its guise. What he aspired for, it seems, was an exit from modernity, an exit that was never totally fulfilled when modernity created the conditions for his agency and emergence. The anomaly of ritual proceeds from the artist-shaman’s autonomy and invention. Villanueva’s charismatic performances, while sympathetic to Indigeneity, claim a duplicitous worldliness, an independence that appears to keep him unbeholden to one group or spiritual belief. It is through this anomalous position that he performed his dislocations, ruptured categories, and constituted the self as an improbability.

The artist died of leukemia in 1995. The early onset of illness and exhaustion may have manifested in the pain he expressed during the ritual of Panhumuko, which led the Aeta elders to initiate a curing ritual.²⁸ If an anomaly absorbs the time’s contradictions, the modern played out its paradox fully through his body, through to its demise, as though the shaman also absorbed the very malignancy he sought to cure. This emblematic affliction finally makes palpable the contradictory status assumed by the artist and the shaman in modernity, as these figures dwell at the tense point of magicality and marginalization that comes with embodied, material, and terminal pains. To foreground an anomaly is to anticipate such fetishizations, duplicities, and ambivalences. Villanueva’s shamanism was in some ways a show and a representative conceit. It was also a profound affinity, an invention that was, at the same time, his becoming.

The author is grateful to Agnes Arellano, Billy Bonnevie, Rica Concepcion, and Kawayan de Guia for sharing their archives, documentation, and memories.

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Like the subject of his world-renowned installation The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1981–88), artist Ilya Kabakov is no longer with us. While this reality was inevitable, pronouncing it still remains difficult. The giant hole in the ceiling of this installation—left by its protagonist, who abandoned his isolated Soviet existence by catapulting into the cosmos—mirrors that left by Kabakov in the art world, in society, and in our hearts in the wake of his death.

Born in 1933 in what is today Dnipro, Ukraine, Kabakov spent his formative years in the Soviet Union, immigrating via Western Europe to the United States in the late 1980s, when he was well into his fifties. He claimed, “I consider myself a Soviet artist. . . . I am a Soviet person. . . . My texts are Soviet texts”¹

Much of the artist’s work, which he produced over the course of his more than seventy-year career, mirrors his own life. In addition to The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, his characters, namely those from his Albums or portfolios of sequential art, including Flying Komarov (1970–74), Looking-out-the-Window Arkhipov (1970–74), and Sitting-in-the-Closet Primakov (1970–74), are all dedicated to distinct but fictional subjects experiencing existential crises in the face of the Soviet regime. Kabakov devised them on paper throughout the 1970s and early 1980s and eventually mounted some of them as installations—as was his original intention—in the 1988 exhibition Ten Characters at Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York. What followed were numerous international engagements, including his participation in Robert Storr’s group exhibition Dislocations at The Museum of Modern Art in 1991–92 and his commission for documenta IX in 1992. Storr, then a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, brought Kabakov into conversation with six large-scale installation artists from the proverbial “West”—Louise Bourgeois (American, born France, 1911–2010), Chris Burden (American, 1946–2015), Sophie Calle (French, born 1953), David Hammons (American, born 1943), Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941), and Adrian Piper (American, born 1948)—in a show exploring the impacts of space and place on our thinking.

Thus, as the Soviet Union was crumbling in the late 1980s, Kabakov was being propelled into fame. In the book Exhibit Russia: The New International Decade, 1986–1990, curator Kate Fowle easily gets caught up in the numbers: between 1988 and 1999, Kabakov participated in an average of thirteen shows per year—twenty-three in 1993 alone—on five out of the seven continents.² Nine years later, in 2008, the artist’s Beetle (1985) became the most expensive painting by a living “Russian” artist when it realized £2.9 million at auction.³ In 2013, Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova, founders of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, spent an estimated $60 million on one of the largest private collections of Kabakov’s early works, including his series Holiday (1987).⁴ This group of twelve paintings, which he made immediately before his immigration, features saccharine Socialist Realist scenes overlaid with crinkled candy wrappers that have been tacked onto the surface of the canvases.

Whether it was his innate nature or his humble Soviet roots, Kabakov was always ready to admit fallibility. “Not everyone will be taken into the future,” he declared in a text first published in 1983 in A-Ya, an art magazine written and produced by Soviet émigrés in Paris and New York.⁵

In this short allegorical text, he explains that based on the fortitude of their character, people fall into one of three groups: those who take, those who are taken, and those who are left behind. Whether among the living or the dead, the haves are always separated from the have-nots. Those who make the cut end up in the future by way of history books while the remainder fall by the wayside, omitted even from the footnotes of history.

Kabakov’s vision and, subsequently, his works of art have secured him a place well beyond the footnotes. Shortly after his immigration, he began working with Emilia Kanevsky (American, born Dnipro, Ukraine, 1945), a distant cousin who had established herself as a curator, art advisor, and overall savvy businesswoman. Their marriage in 1992 formalized their artistic collaboration, which included countless global public projects, museum commissions, print editions, and charitable works produced up until his death.

While today many works by Ilya Kabakov can be seen in the collections of museums worldwide, including a number of works on paper at MoMA, the best place to view them remains—as it was during Soviet times—in the artist’s home-studio, which has been on Long Island for almost thirty years. When I was the C-MAP Central and Eastern European Fellow, I organized a visit in July 2016 for group members.

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Wong Binghao: Julie, Kang, how and when did you meet? 

Kang Seung Lee: I was introduced to Julie by Young Chung, founder of Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles, sometime in 2016. I think it was right before my second show at the space, titled Absence without leave (2017). I had moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 2013 and was not too familiar with Julie’s recent work at that time, though I knew of their¹ work with ACT UP NY; her early collaborations with Ron Athey and others; their involvement with New York’s queer womxn’s space, the Clit Club; and, of course, the famous 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do” campaign by Gran Fury. Julie is a legend in many ways.

Julie Tolentino: I remember Young Chung talking to me about Kang’s work; I can’t recall when exactly, but it was long before we actually met. I had lived and worked in New York for twenty-seven years and had just moved to the Mojave Desert. I took a chance to define a practice that had been moving through performance, conceptual, and visual art. My introduction to the gallery exposed me to many local artists. I was immediately caught by Kang’s commitment to re-orientations of representation, presence/absence.

KSL: I vividly remember that my first encounter with Julie’s work was Future Gold (2014), their collaborative exhibition with her partner Stosh Fila (aka Pigpen) at Commonwealth and Council. It consisted of remnants of their recent performance in Abu Dhabi, such as honey, gold thread, and saliva that were “smuggled” to Los Angeles and mixed with silicon and mortar in a glass box with a steel frame. The artwork was permanently installed inside a brick wall in the gallery space, visible from both inside and outside of the building, and it became part of the architecture of the gallery. It almost looked like a fish tank full of amber-colored water lit by sunlight. Through this artwork, I began to understand Julie’s artistic ethos, particularly their consideration of the body as an archive of embodied knowledge.

JT: My first performance-based interactive exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, RAISED BY WOLVES (2013), was actually the basis of Future Gold, the work that Kang mentioned. RAISED BY WOLVES was an outreach to a new creative community, in which I sought out physical and conceptual contributions from fifteen local visual and performing artists that I then transposed into drawings on laminated cards. The audience collectively pulled three to five cards from the deck that I, in turn, responded to through an improvised performance. Each artist’s work would “work on” the other, and thus influence me and the objects and people in the gallery space. The exhibition left behind a permanent wall work entitled Echo Valley, for which we had painted an excerpted text from Shame: A Collaboration by Birgit Kemper and Robert Kelly on a gallery wall. Over time, my partner, Stosh Fila and I would age (that is, darken and blur) the hand-painted text. As an additional transformation, and after we toured the durational performance installation Honey (2013) in Abu Dhabi, we repurposed empty oud perfume bottles and smuggled the performance’s excess honey to create an intervention. Removing a concrete block from the wall, we inserted a handmade thin glass container into the opening. The container was filled with the gold metallic thread, saliva, and honey from the performance. The work was renamed Future Gold.

The first work of Kang’s that I encountered was a wall mural that was part of a collaborative piece with Young Joon Kwak and Candice Lin. It emerged soon after RAISED BY WOLVES. I recall that the collection of work was situated on two walls, with a piece hanging from the ceiling, and a soundscore that accompanied it. It was near a door that is often left open and traversed—a social doorway. This work continues to hold significance for me as it embraces and holds my own wish for intergenerational, interdisciplinary, East-West art-activist-queer collisions, and transnational exchange. It was more “writing on the wall,” carrying collective love and many kindred conversations among us. It was a stunning way to meet Kang as I was already in love with Candice and Young Joon. 

WBH: Kang, what do you remember about the collaborative work/exhibition that Julie mentioned? 

KSL: The artwork is a collaborative installation in a hallway of Commonwealth and Council and was assembled by Young Chung. It consisted of my wallpaper installation Untitled (William Yang_The Morning After_1976) (2016) with Young Joon’s hanging mirror ball sculpture and Candice’s sound piece. I remember Candice’s work was played using a cassette player, and Young had to replace the battery almost every day. 

WBH: In what ways have you collaborated since your first encounter? Are there any ideas or projects that you’d like to embark on together but haven’t gotten around to?

KSL: Julie’s engagement in queer activism, kinship, and care are especially pronounced in her work Archive in Dirt (2019–ongoing). The work, also known informally as “Harvey,” is a living cactus that Julie revived, that had been propagated from its “mother” plant that originally belonged to the activist/politician Harvey Milk. It came from their friend, an archivist in the special collections department at UCLA, who acquired cuttings from one of Milk’s ex-roommates in San Francisco. When I saw the work for the first time in the exhibition Altered After curated by Conrad Ventur at PARTICIPANT INC (July–August 2019), which both Julie and I were part of, the plant was quite fragile, with just one new, pale green leaf sprouting. The plant is a container of multigenerational memories of activism and connections in constant transformation as it grows and multiplies.

In 2020, Julie allowed me to include Archive in Dirt in Becoming Atmosphere, my collaborative exhibition with Beatriz Cortez at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. I thought of it as a gesture of transference of intergenerational responsibility and care to Beatriz, me, and the staff at the gallery. With the help of Julie and Young, I became a participant in the evolution of the work through making ceramic planters and repotting the plant, taking care of cuttings, and sharing them with other members of the community, documenting the growth of each plant, making drawings and mapping connections, etc. In 2021, I extended this gesture by including Archive in Dirt in Permanent Visitor at Commonwealth and Council, as well as in New York as part of my untitled installation for the 2021 Triennial at the New Museum.

JT: After submitting Archive in Dirt and my accompanying anxious, Siri-mediated catalogue text for Altered After, which was part of Conrad Ventur’s Visual AIDS project, I was pleased to learn that Kang and I were showing together, and that our works were in proximity to each other. I sensed a mutual responsiveness to the intricacy of Kang’s gold-threaded embroidery on the floor of the gallery and the liveness of “Harvey.” As Kang mentioned, Harvey was a cutting, gifted from friend, beloved, anarchist, educator, archivist Kelly Besser from the still-here garden of Harvey Milk in San Francisco. A gift from a friend of his, then a piece shared with me. My best guess after some research is that its genus may be derived from the Schlumbergera russelliana—a species pollinated by hummingbirds. It’s understood that the birds stab the seed with their beak, then rub it off onto the bark of a tree, which is an impetus for germination and, too, that this species often gives pink or reddish flowers. The particularly opaque seed interests me as it is known to not open easily, and thus needs intervention and movement for growth. I resonate with this personally and related this to the Archive in Dirt’s origin as a gift. Community and archival care are both a form of conjuring and a way to see oneself in others.

Harvey, the succulent, had endured plane trips, various re-pottings, and imperfect conditions in an effort to find its roots as an artwork. It was extremely fragile in the post-exhibition transition—a very key moment for its multi-future as it was sprouting and rooting in different locations, under extreme changes. It was shared with Conrad, Kang, Commonwealth and Council/Young, and was eventually returned home to Pigpen and my apartment in Northern California—just seven miles from its original home, the activist Harvey Milk’s rooftop garden.  Everyone received these tender shoots—experiencing the responsibility of the split, transfer, transition, and reach. Kang posts how Harvey is doing and installed Harvey in a show at the New Museum. There is a rich three-way text thread running between Young, Kang, and myself. Conrad touches in from time to time, and we all gasp at the flowers and any tiny offshoots—signs of life. 

KSL: Skin (2021) and Untitled (Skin) (2021) are two other works in Permanent Visitor that came out of our conversations. Drawing from Julie’s consideration of the body, I was thinking about tattoos and scars as bearers of and witnesses to memories, pain, trauma—a mode of knowledge inscribed directly into the body. The two works are my attempts at capturing lifelong transformations through aging. I scanned the skin of Julie and three other friends: artists Jen Smith, Jennifer Moon, and Young Joon Kwak, who are all represented by Commonwealth and Council, trying to map a multigenerational fabric of our community’s embodied experiences. Skin is a video work in which the scanned images from the four artists are mixed together and move from one screen to another, resembling a flow of a river or human text as one collective body. In the floor installation Untitled (Skin), I embroidered these tattoos and scars on sambe cloth in antique 24-karat gold thread and juxtaposed them with fossilized leaves, seeds, and copper from the Pennsylvanian and Eocene eras. Sambe, a woven hemp textile, is traditionally used in Korea for funeral shrouds. Through the use of these materials, I was trying to honor our shared personal histories, address mourning and reverence, and reimagine collectivity through the flows of forces beyond one single life.

JT: Our bodies are laced together in Skin, tracing an opaque history that is built into the way we find ourselves drawn together—both with and onto each other. We are all UNEVEN in our togetherness—key to the way we use the archive. I lean toward the term “COUNTER ARCHIVE” to activate a liveness in oral recollections—that is, the liveness in the work shares the touch of Harvey, not a representation of Harvey Milk. This is not a critique so much as it is allowing terms around and between us that I experience as productive and queer.

I imagine that we take part in artworks and exhibitions as a kind of “forever practice.” Perhaps what I am saying, especially in the proposition in the tender-holding of Archive in Dirt as an archival expansion, is that we will always have opportunities to think with this kind of affiliation—as advocates for those among us and ourselves. This is always-in-process as our terms shift, as our surroundings and bodies change. I believe that Harvey and all the simpatico Harveys are part of a speculative forever-invitation offered to me—and thus, an Archive in Dirt translates as a verb: a care that is active, in action.  

I hope that we can find ways to continue to talk at all the various stages of our encounters with Harvey. I feel like this interview across time, distance, space, caregiving, touring, artmaking, teaching, research, etc. is a form of continued public and privately negotiated dialogue, writing, and rewriting.

WBH: What first drew you to your engagement with queer histories (for example, genderqueer clubs, community organizing, HIV/AIDS activism) in and/or beyond art?

KSL: Growing up in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s, I was very frustrated with the lack of representation of queer people in the mainstream media. My mining of queer archives definitely started from the desire to be connected and to be part of a lineage. It also meant negotiating with Western-oriented hierarchies that shaped the narratives and histories of the queer community, a complex position for queer Asians, who face oppression and homophobia within their own culture while being on the margins of the White Euro/US–centric queer culture.

As I go back and forth between Los Angeles and Seoul, I try to find ways to contribute to the queer communities in both countries from my privileged transnational position. For example, for the past four years, I have worked with QueerArch, also known as Korea Queer Archive, a personal archive of activist Chae-yoon Hahn that was established in 2002 but became public soon after. 

I make use of resources and funding opportunities from the contemporary art world to exhibit collections of books, magazines, newsletters, etc., and items such as ephemera from Pride parades from the archive, collaborate with younger generations of queer artists based in Korea creating new works influenced by our research at the archive, and also include items from their publication collection within my participation in the biennial in Gwangju, among other venues.

My projects are rooted in archival research. I try to reposition queer archives and collections, to connect distinct geographies and experiences to forge new sites of knowledge. For example, in my 2018 exhibition Garden, I juxtaposed the artworks and lives of two activist-artists, Oh Joon-soo and Derek Jarman, who were from two different continents but both died of AIDS in the 1990s. In a series of drawings on paper called Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi) (2018–20), part of which was exhibited in a recent solo exhibition Permanent Visitor, I appropriated and attempted to create a critical context and history for the Hong Kong–born artist Tseng Kwong Chi’s works. I want to keep the legacies of these artists and HIV/AIDS activism alive to challenge dominant whitewashed narratives.

JT: I grew up deeply impacted by early LGBT and race riots in San Francisco, raised by teen parents and first-generation Filipino and El Salvadoran immigrant grandparents. Language and access bore down on how we navigated progress narratives, access, the reality of living with and among HIV and AIDS, the various forms of belongings and the righteous making of lives through clubs, affinities, drugs, difficulty, disabilities, art forms. . . . In retrospect, I learned to take in isolation as something to address, support, and surround, yet also allow myself to identify and work with. I look at how archives can be challenged to examine and champion other kinds of marks and signs of life—to see into the shape of (im)possibilities. Our experiences are uneven and this is important to remain open to. Legibility can also be elusive, exclusive. Relationships are dreams that need care. Art-making helps us reimagine ways towards another—and along queer lines, past and future.

WBH: How does dance figure (or not) in your artistic practice?

KSL: I am currently working on a new project The Heart of A Hand, which pays tribute to Goh Choo San (1948–1987), an internationally renowned Singaporean-born choreographer who died of an AIDS-related illness at thirty-nine years old. During his lifetime, he performed and choreographed for prominent ballet companies throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. His legacy remains largely absent from dance history in the United States, most likely due to his diasporic identity. His accomplishments have been slightly more recognized in Singapore, perhaps fueled by nationalism, but his place in global queer cultural contexts is still vague.

The research process for this project has been quite challenging as I had to follow traces of Goh’s inherently ephemeral work and life between worlds. Last summer, I took a very rewarding trip to Singapore, where I met with a group of queer artists and cultural workers who helped me move through the huddles: Ming Wong, Jimmy Ong and, of course, Bing, who made all the connections. It felt like we were on a mission to learn about this queer predecessor and his last years, and I had a realization that the invisible memories of queer lives can only be sustained by this kind of cross-generational curiosity.

Through Janek Schergen, Goh’s friend and ballet master, and his sister Goh Shoo Kim, I learned much about Goh’s last years in New York City; his partner Robert Magee, who died of AIDS-related complications a few months before Goh; and how they were looked after by a group of friends for the last year as they became weak. I am trying to find ways to address these untold memories and to convey the ongoing grief and their bodily experiences of caregiving and resistance. The centerpiece will be my collaboration with Joshua Serafin, a performance artist born in the Philippines and based in Brussels. We are in the process of creating a video inspired by Goh Choo San’s Configurations (1982), a queerer, nonconforming, and clubby version, of course.

JT: Dance—ah, so much to say here. I left capital D dance long ago, having trained via a queer, brown, not-designed-for-dance, classed, and racialized body. Coming up, out, and through formal training in the ’80s highlighted how my formation was imbued with mixed racialization—a kind of triple-dosed consciousness and its special brand of impacting encounters with classism, racism, and homophobia. Though it lingers, forty years ago, being an “imperfect and unrecognizable” body in the dance room, in its skinny mirror and stage that prizes the spectacle, there was always something to work through (resist) and break with (refuse). Movement (and movements) create choreographies of being with and listening for other bodies, speculatively echoing back and forth across time. 

I worked professionally in David Roussève’s REALITY, originally a predominantly Black experimental dance company for twelve years. With many other artists, I contributed as performer/mover in more theatrical settings and this propelled my own practice into movement-based durational performance installation in the mid ’90s, when I experimented with folks like Grisha Coleman and Patty Chang. Years later, for my own work The Sky Remains the Same (2006–present), I archived works of other body-centered artists such as Lovett/Codagnone, Athey, and Franko B, as well as choreographers David Roussève and the late Stanley Love into/onto my body as a form of advocacy and community recognition expressed as curation<!>—while fully acknowledging the inadequacy of such a claim due to my own (disintegrating) body. This leans heavily on the necessity of movement—its weight, space, time, gathering.

Movement always leads, as in the 108-hour durational performance and visual art exhibition entitled REPEATER (2019) or the invitation to float and submerge, one-on-one, with audience members underwater in a gold-lined tent and cedar pool in Slipping into Darkness (2019). In recent collaborative and durational performances ECHO POSITION (with Ivy Kwan Arce, 2022), HOLD TIGHT GENTLY (with Stosh Fila, 2022), and LET’S TALK (with Jih-Fei Cheng and other artist/activist/writers, 2022), I consider the potency of collective movement embedded in light, reflection, and glass to call upon the voices of past and future to help us express stealth learning and the intricacies of public and private mourning, kink, care practices that are moving, and complex forms of love. There is so much more to say about the role of dancing and its material contagion—alone, on stage, slow drags, stuck in things, or just being the last messy one still swaying at the bar. Perhaps it’s the feeling of a kind of melancholic punk lingering, an in-person pulsing that remains. All that submerged melancholy drenched in fierce dancer epaulement. A nod to improvisation, ball culture, and the blues. All that swish. . . There is a kind of loosening I aim to engage in as a form of touch. A rigorous shaking (it up).

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This is the second of two parts. Read the first part of the interview here.

Ana Janevski: And so you decided to start using tape as a way to go beyond painting?

Jaime Davidovich: Yeah.

AJ: But it seems that very early on you also became interested in videotape. Because in the drawing of the Tape Wall Project that’s part of MoMA’s collection, it looks like you’re already thinking about the TV screen that should be on the wall.

JD: Yes.

AJ: Very early on, you had a clear idea of how would you like to use technology and, in particular, television.

JD: Oh, sure. I wanted to embed the television, to make the screen even with the wall. I didn’t want it to be a three-dimensional, bulky object—like TVs were at the time—I wanted it to be flat.

AJ: Hmmm . . . like a flat-screen.
JD: Like a flat-screen, yes. And then I started doing work in New York, in the places

that had started to show video. And I was very active.

AJ: Your first video work was Road, from 1972.

JD: Yes, yes. My first “tape period” was 1965 to 1975. Ten years. Ten years of tape. Actually, I have the first collage with adhesive tape in my possession and it’s dated 1965.

AJ: And when did you discover video? JD: Video . . . I discovered video in 1970.

AJ: 1970, and then you immediately made the connection between videotape and adhesive tape.

JD: Sure. And also, it’s the word. It’s videotape. The videotape in those days literally was tape. People today, especially young people, don’t know that a videotape is a roll of tape. I started a whole series about art as tape and tape as art—a series that combined the two. It was a pretty natural connection.

AJ: Another thing that is interesting in both your tape interventions and your video works is the way you use the architectural space . . .

JD: Well, that’s a very important thing, very important. I was not interested in covering a wall in an exhibition space with tape. I was interested in using spaces that were not considered appropriate frameworks for an artwork—for instance, in doing a tape project on a sidewalk, which is a public space, or on a billboard . . . I also wanted to have pieces in museums but not in the traditional exhibition spaces, but rather in the elevator or staircase. In the case of the Whitney Biennial, when Marcia Tucker asked me what I wanted to do, I said, “I want to do the largest piece ever shown at the Whitney Museum.” And so I ran tape from the top floor all the way to the basement.

Then, I was invited to do a show at the Bykert Gallery. There, I didn’t use the traditional exhibition space but rather a platform they had, where all the lights were inserted, and I covered it with tape. Like what Brian O’Doherty was proposing at that time, I was arguing that art should not be shown in the beautiful, pristine white cube. I wanted to say that art should go out of the museum and into the general life, into the general public, to show the contrast between the work and the space. And you know, I think that Minimal art should be shown at Macy’s and Bob Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing should be shown at Walmart. Instead of taking the Brillo

box from the supermarket and putting it into the gallery, taking what is in the gallery and putting it in the supermarket.

AJ: And is this what you tried to do with television?

JD: Yes. In 1975 I came in contact with this new technology that made a huge revolution in the way we see television, and it was cable television. And I was very interested in that—in the possibilities of cable television, of doing things at home and putting them in a context that is not supported by an institution. There’s no distinction. Cable television was presented as a subversive alternative to what you were seeing on commercial television. And that’s when I started working with Cable SoHo and then the Artists’ Television Network. This started in 1975 and ran until 1985—for another ten years.

AJ: And what were you doing at Cable SoHo?

JD: Well, the idea of Cable SoHo was very ambitious, and many decades ahead of its time. Cable SoHo’s concept was to create an independent television channel based in SoHo. We wanted to incorporate the activities that were happening in SoHo, and to cablecast them to the rest of the city or to the rest of the country. Because at that time, in SoHo, we had all the alternative spaces in New York—and in the United States. We had The Kitchen, Anthology Film Archives, Artists Space, Franklin Furnace . . . And the idea behind Cable SoHo was to dedicate one day to Artists Space, another day to Anthology Film Archives . . . Every night, we would go to The Kitchen and videotape the performance and cablecast it live . . . We had a van with all the necessary equipment, the transmission and reception equipment, and we’d take it to these different locations and cablecast from there.

AJ: Were there other artists working with you? JD: Yes. Doug Davis, Bob Stearns . . .
AJ: And how was it transmitted?
JD: From the truck.

AJ: From the truck?

JD: From the truck, because cable television in New York City came from the New York City Hall. And the main cable was underneath Broadway. So for SoHo, it was very easy to get a hookup to that main cable and have a line of direct transmission to the cable television station that, at that time, was called Manhattan Cable Television. At that time, there was no cable in SoHo. The only cable in New York was between 14th and 55th Streets. So it was very limited service.

AJ: What was the difference between the Cable SoHo and the Artists’ Television Network?

JD: Cable SoHo was creating a discrete system. We were not able to raise funds, because the idea was too farfetched for the funding organizations—and the cable company did not see the potential. Actually, there were dozens of channels with nothing to broadcast. They would broadcast bulletin boards, because they had no product. Nobody was producing anything. Financially, we could not do what we wanted. So we had to either forget about the whole project or make a deal with the cable company to get a channel. Because, again, they had nothing to show.

We would take the channel and broadcast programs that we had already produced. There were a lot of video artists at the time. We would organize the shows into series, like commercial television, that ran for thirteen weeks. Thirteen weeks is the magic number. We would organize a thirteen-week series, using the cable-station channel, and then we would take these shows to people’s homes and they could watch them from there. However, at that point, a lot of artists disagreed with the idea, because they thought that they were not gaining anything specific from it. Others said, “This is an opportunity of a lifetime, but the artists have to get something out of it. A fee, something.” So I went to the National Endowment for the Arts and had a long talk with Brian O’Doherty, who was the director of visual arts there, and I explained to him the situation. He was 100 percent behind the idea. And he said, “I’ll give you the initial funding to start operating.” And with that funding, Cable SoHo changed its name to Artists’ Television Network—a network of very experimental work, with new formats, new standards, and work that had never before been imagined on television.

The series was called SoHo Television Presents. It was 1977 and we showed work by Nam June Paik, Laurie Anderson, Boghosian, Juan Downey, John Cage . . . many, many artists. And then in 1978, I had another idea: a live show.

AJ: And this was your own show?

JD: That [The Live! Show] was my own show. Live from the TV station in Manhattan. It was later distributed to different cities and countries. It ran until the middle of 1984 or 1985. 1985 was a year of major change in the art world. Before, since 1975, was like the golden years of SoHo. Everything was happening there, outside museums and mainstream galleries. There was a whole movement focused on taking elements from popular culture and putting them into the art world, and vice-versa. At that time, we called the artists working in this way crossover artists. Laurie Anderson was a typical crossover artist. Cindy Sherman was a typical crossover artist.

AJ: How was your work read in Latin America? Was it discussed at all? JD: No, no, not at all.

AJ: The first time you had the opportunity to show the Tape Wall Project was in the Bronx Museum, right?

JD: Which show?
AJ: The “Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970.”

JD: Yes. And that was an important show, in part because it was focused on Latin America, but more because it was a creative force in the international art movement.

AJ: But you had been doing tape installations since the 1970s . . .

JD: Yes, in 1971, I did very similar things—video installations, tape installations. I did one piece covering the whole coastline of Latin America with tape. A lot of Conceptual pieces, at the CAYC [Centro de Arte y Comunicación (Center for Art and Communication)] in Buenos Aires.

It was not the first time. But within the context of Latin American art and anthological shows, I was never involved. I’m still not. But that’s a Latin American issue; they have their own set of guidelines. But I think that’s changing, because people are traveling, people are studying in different countries, and they’re realizing what’s going on in other places. One thing that is very good about the Internet is that you cannot lie. You have all the materials right there. You have the documentation right there.

AJ: Did you ever exhibit in other Latin American countries?

JD: I was in the São Paulo Biennial. I think it was in ’85 or ’83. But not as a representative of Latin America. No, no . . . rather as a representative of the new artists using new technologies. But as part of Latin America? No. No, I never showed in any other Latin American city. No. No. So my career basically . . .

AJ: Is here.
JD: . . . is here. . . Those things, yes, those things happened. All right. Anyway, we

should finish now, I have to be someplace else . . .

This is the second of two parts. Read the first part of the interview here.

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The history of Baltic art during the Soviet era (1944–1991) has been reconsidered by re-evaluating the socialist legacy and its multifaceted art scene via local and regional studies, exhibitions, and conferences. But looking more closely at the period reveals a much more complex landscape, where alongside the art processes taking place in the Soviet Union, a parallel history of Baltic art and culture was being formed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Soviet occupation drove many artists into exile,
¹ but the resulting exile and diaspora art has been little discussed over the years. Exiled artists are still passed over, and their work not adequately considered in the development of interpretations of Eastern European art history. To highlight this overlooked legacy, the research project “Portable Landscapes,” initiated by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, examines the histories within Latvian exile and emigrant artist communities from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. The project aims to reintroduce exile art to local and regional art history writing as well as to contribute to the understanding of border art events of the twentieth century.

One of the histories reconsidered in this research is the artist and literary collective Hell’s Kitchen, which was active in New York from the 1950s through the 1970s. The group combined visual art and text-based practices, bringing together more than fifteen artists, writers, and literary scholars on an on-again, off-again basis.² They associated themselves with Hell’s Kitchen, a neighbourhood on Manhattan’s West Side, where they most often met to organize poetry readings and performance events that brought identity issues into high relief within the contexts of exile and migration as the two related to the group members’ own experiences. Unfortunately, their collective activities were never systematically documented, but tracing the individual archives of group members in Latvia and the United States allowed to reconstruct the group’s history and to map the questions important to their creative expression. The group adopted exile and displacement as their main focus as a collective—and in their work as individuals. Activating their historical and cultural knowledge, and in that way distancing themselves from their new environment and the art scene undertaken there, they constructed new meanings and alternative forms of expression. To shed light on what was, from the perspective of the exiled artist, essentially a parallel infrastructure within the New York art scene, I will discuss two group members, in particular: the writer Mudīte Austriņa (1924–1991) and the painter Sigurds Vīdzikste (1928–1974).

Information about the formation of the Hell’s Kitchen collective is limited, leaving much room for speculation, but the origins of the collective are linked to Tübingen, a university town in southern Germany, where around 1946, a group of Latvians began their studies after being forced to leave their own country. Rare evidence of their shared interest includes the two samizdat magazines Mīstiklas (1946) and Kākslis(1948), where with irony and humor, young writers and artists commented on the harsh realities of migrant and student life in Germany.³ Despite the serious nature of the subject, both publications reveal creativity and humor as important tools in overcoming the trauma associated with forced emigration. These tools were also vital components to the group in New York City, where the formation of the collective, as it is considered today, took place sometime after 1948, when the Displaced Persons Act was signed into law, and refugees from Europe were admitted into the United States.⁴ The group in New York developed as a dynamic unit in their stance against rigid social norms and rationalism. This self-declared opposition was a reaction to the exile situation they were facing and was at odds with the ideas prevailing in the Latvian diaspora, which was generally more prone to conservatism.⁵

For “Heavenly Pagans,” as group members called themselves, the collective served as a laboratory that stimulated their individual work, creating a platform for collaborations and a context in which they were able to strengthen their positions in the art world and put forward their ideas in their new environment.⁶ A statement of their philosophy, their “Heavenly Pagan Cohabitation Manifesto” (1956) contains thirteen points that, written with a great deal of absurdity and humor, demonstrate the group’s creative approaches to the realities they were facing as young artists in exile: the complexity of getting their work published in the United States and the need for support from colleagues. In this context, their Latvian language and national identity were important points of reference in their creative production—despite their willingness to be integrated into the local art world and culture. Most of their writings and organized events were in Latvian, which could be interpreted as a rejection of their new context and obstinacy in terms of needing to prove their existence as a distinct community within the multicultural New York City environment. But within the context of their displacement, it can also be interpreted as a hybrid form of self-historicizing in the international art system of which they were part. Pushed to search for their own historical, social, and cultural context within a new country, they found identity and language to be important tools in developing their collective history and establishing their own autonomous territory, one in which they could document and interpret their experiences. In this way, language, historical experience, and identity served not only as identifying, but also as historicizing elements.

Mudīte Austriņa: Surrealism as a Catalyst for Exile Experience

The work of the writer Mudīte Austriņa, one of the main initiators of the group’s activities, illustrates such self-historicizing. Her creative interests were broad, but surrealist art and literature were especially important to her, both aesthetically and conceptually. Austriņas’s interest in surrealism began while she was studying art history at the University of Tübingen, but the city’s cultural environment contributed to its development. Tübingen was part of the French occupation zone, and so French culture was very strong: bookshops sold French literature, the cinemas showed French movies, and visiting theater troupes from Paris regularly performed. The cultural atmosphere as well as her knowledge of the French language stimulated in her a deeper study of French literature, especially with regards to the work of André Breton. In the magazine Kākslis (1948), one of her first surrealist expressions, describes a poem written by long-term group member Jānis Krēsliņš (born 1924) entitled “Surrealist Movement in Tübingen.”⁷ It describes “Two violet hat days,” performances in which participants wearing violet accessories strolled through the city and then engaged in poetry readings. Unfortunately, not much more is known about this event as it wasn’t documented. The quintessence of Austriņas’s surrealist expressions are her “baletiņi” (small ballets), or her short absurd scripts that she wrote in New York starting the 1950s as theatre plays or scenarios for short films. She built the main characters from the Hell’s Kitchen collectives’ personalities, looking at culture and identity in the context of exile—at its traumas and challenges—and documenting her own and her companions’ experiences in New York. These surrealist pieces can be interpreted as a means of escaping the traumas of exile and of dealing with displacement by irrationalizing it. Yet they also evoke the ambience of the group’s context of New York, an environment they saw as irrational—and their lack of a suitable social, political, and historical background within it, or a specificity that would have strengthened their position.

Sigurds Vīdzirkste: A Little-Known Contributor to Cybernetics in New York

The painter Sigurds Vīdzirkste is another example of an artist in exile responding to the environment of the New York City art world by developing ideas outside of it, while nonetheless participating within it. Vīdzirkste constructed his artistic language by reacting to the rising interest in technology at that time, and through that, bringing artistic production to a new level. After his studies at the Art Students League, he developed a unique style of painting that he called “cyber-painting,” in which he synthesized his interests in mathematics, chemistry, and music. He first exhibited this work in 1964, in a solo show in his studio at 148 Liberty Street, where, next to abstract compositions of circles and stripes, he displayed canvas with dot-like reliefs, callous clots, and metallic-powder compressions organized in different rhythms.⁸ This show was followed in 1968 by a solo show entitled Cybernetic Canvases, which, held at the Kips Bay gallery at 613 Second Avenue, was the first time Vīdzirkste publicly used the term “cybernetics” in relation to his work.⁹ All of the exhibited canvases were composed of relief dots on monochrome ochre or grey backgrounds, and they were untitled, undated, and unsigned; only a number was assigned to each work.

After Vīdzirkstes’s death in his studio in New York, different pots with metallic powder and toluene were found, and after his paintings were brought to Latvia, a chemical analysis of one of his works revealed a mixture of pigments—metal particles soaked in a chemical substance and mixed with resin and resin lacquer.¹⁰ Such combinations and experiments with pigments were most likely stimulated by his chemistry studies at the Riga State Secondary School before his emigration in 1944.

It is hard to trace a definite theory behind Vīdzirkstes’s dot paintings as he did not expand on his ideas in writing; but from sources available, we know that each work was created as an information system similar to that of punched cards for early digital computers.¹¹ With each new painting, the artist organized dots in different rhythms and sizes and, as Voldemārs Avens (born 1924), another member of the Hell’s Kitchen group, remembers, he used precise calculations to create each system.¹² As part of his process, he layered dot drawings done on transparent plastic sheets to create variations of patterns that could later be transferred onto canvas. This brings us back to his 1964 show, in which he also exhibited three drawings, which according to Vīdzirkstes’s letter written to his parents, formed the base of his information systems. Unfortunately, only one of them can be found in his archive, making it impossible to break his code.

With the development of technology after World War II, the use of cybernetics in art was prevalent in Europe,¹³ whereas in the United States, this was not the case. Even though one can map out early experiments linking art and technology, cybernetic and computational thinking in artistic production did not become widespread until the 1970s.¹⁴ Given this, Vīdzirkstes’s works developed in the 1960s, which demonstrate a unique and alternative system of visual signs bridging computing technologies and art, can be interpreted as a pioneering praxis that introduced the idea of programming to painting as a way to reconsider artistic production of the time. 

~ 

Rethinking the group’s and its individuals’ history in New York allows us to expand our understanding of the processes that define Baltic art and culture during the Soviet era, and to map a more complete story of its global, regional, and national history. This re-examination reveals a parallel to and alternative facet of Baltic art of the second part of the twentieth century that was not only in dialogue with a global art scene, but was also confronted by an identity crisis that became a catalyst in creative production.

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MoMA’s second annual Good Design exhibition, which opened on November 27, 1951, featured 335 objects brought together in the Museum’s first floor galleries in a display designed by the Danish designer Finn Juhl (1912–1989). Among the new-to-the-market home furnishings on view were seventy-plus fabrics, many hung at the edges of the room to emphasize their collective volume, which together revealed a range of surprising patterns and materials.

Four printed textiles manufactured by L. Anton Maix, Inc., were included in the selection, each produced using the firm’s signature Belgian linen and retailing at Bloomingdale’s for nine dollars per yard.¹ A press release jointly issued by MoMA and the Chicago Merchandise Mart earlier that year singled out one particular Maix fabric, calling it a “fascinating essay in graded proportions, printed in charcoal and black on white.”² That textile, designed by the New York designer Joel Robinson (c. 1923 – ?) and called Ovals, achieved its dazzling effect through the repetition of elliptical forms, stacked one on top of the other, that recall the pattern of an architect’s stencil. Another version of Robinson’s textile, called Ovals # 1, made repeat appearances in the 1952 and 1955 editions of Good Design, a rare feat reserved only for the best-known designers of the day.

Despite these early signs of success, Robinson is today a figure lost to history, a fact this article aims to correct. Thanks to excellent research from colleagues at the Cora Ginsburg Gallery in New York, we now know that Robinson was the first black designer to be exhibited in a MoMA Good Design exhibition series. He is also the first to enter the Architecture and Design collection.³ Though heralded at the time for his “strikingly original”⁴ textile designs, much about his life since his inclusion in the 1951, 1952, and 1955 Good Design exhibitions remains unknown. Robinson’s story, in many ways, mirrors the story of so many others featured in the Good Design series, whose promising careers never gained the traction that such recognition might reward. But fighting to make it in the “lily-white field”⁵ of design as a black man from New York City must have carried with it a unique set of challenges, necessitating a consistent and sustained battle against the prevailing forces of institutional racism. This article therefore attempts to situate artist-designer Joel Robinson’s career in the larger context of MoMA’s early 1950s Good Design initiatives, just before the outset of the Civil Rights era, and looks at how African American media outlets like Ebony magazine created a venue for the celebration and expression of black excellence. This article serves as a beginning, not an end; a way to assess the institutional histories that so readily enshrine the careers of some but not others; and the ways that such histories require near-constant revision.

—

In the May 1952 issue of Ebony magazine, a multipage story on Joel Robinson’s breakout career called him “one of the most promising newcomers in the highly-competitive field of fabric design.”⁶ According to editors, the “youthful, multi-talented New Yorker” was the “[f]irst Negro to crack the fabric design field and only Negro ever to win Good Design Awards.”⁷ At twenty-nine, the “ex-bellhop” had just developed a new “kaleidoscopic” fabric-printing process, “which some claim will revolutionize the textile industry.”⁸ A profile portrait of the handsome designer, with his Ovals fabric design in the background, appears at the top of the article, while his sister, Mrs. Callie Middleton, models an elegant Ovals dress designed by the pair in an image on the same page.

Subsequent pages reveal his industriousness, placing him in the studio designing new fabrics; in the factory selecting color swatches with L. Anton Maix, his manufacturer; at the easel, tobacco pipe in hand, with one of his paintings; and at home moving a chest of drawers of his own design into place. Robinson’s multifaceted career is further described, indicating that he “has written and illustrated a children’s book” and is “an advertising layout specialist.”⁹

Elsewhere, the reader learns that Robinson turned to architecture as a course of study at New York University and then at Cooper Union, but “discovered that no New York firm was interested in hiring a Negro architect. Instead he became a caddy master, bartender, bellhop—anything which would earn him a living during the long wait between the few small jobs in commercial art which came his way.”¹⁰ Eventually, Robinson made a name for himself at Hartwell Ayles’s advertising agency, designing a series of successful 1940s campaigns for Steuben Glass, “twice selected among the 100 best ads of the year,” according to the article. It was this work that brought him to the attention of Maix, who in 1948, had left Knoll Associates, Inc., to set up his own printed textiles firm.¹¹ Robinson’s success in developing the Ovals fabrics with Maix, who at the time worked with prominent designers like Serge Chermayeff (1900–1996), Paul Rand (1914–1996), and Alvin Lustig (1915–1955),¹² led to the introduction of three other patterns, including Glen Plaid, Honeycomb, and Roman Candles.¹³ According to the article, Robinson’s professional pursuits left little time for leisure or for love: “The serious-minded New Yorker takes only one night off a week from his work and that is spent in a session on painting with other young artists.” Still, the article concludes, Robinson campaigned “vigorously to get other Negro artists accepted into the fabric industry.”¹⁴

The forthright and upbeat portrayal of a designer on the rise was by no means a rarity in the pages of Ebony, which along with its sister publication Jet became one of the most potent crusaders for racial equality in postwar America by publishing stories of successful black Americans succeeding in the face of incredible odds. Founded in 1945 by the black entrepreneur John H. Johnson, Ebony appealed to the growing African American middle class by challenging “the negative depictions of African Americans all too pervasive in the larger society.”¹⁵ Ebony, a monthly magazine, and Jet, a weekly, “debunked these stereotypes by presenting more accurate accounts of black life, history, and culture; and they provided African Americans with more positive self-images.”¹⁶ A regular feature of Ebony entitled “Speaking of People” was devoted to everyday black Americans doing everyday work. In the same issue in which Robinson appeared, a “Big League Baseball Player,” a “Rio Telephone Executive,” a “Girl Auto Mechanic,” and a “74-Year-Old Skater” were all highlighted, their stories all the more extraordinary given America’s history of racial subjugation.¹⁷ Other articles in the May 1952 issue similarly celebrated the success of black people around the world, including a feature on “Foreign Negro Authors” and another which pondered, “Can Negro Athletes Stop the Russians?”. A story on the singer Dorothy Dandridge proclaimed her “America’s hottest singer,” suggesting that the “slim, sensuous” chanteuse “has captured Broadway audiences as no vocalist in recent years with her sultry singing.”¹⁸

Reading the letters to the editor over the course of multiple issues, it is clear that Ebony had a sizable footprint in the larger culture, reaching audiences as far afield as Australia, Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia. In the May 1952 issue, one reader from Hong Kong wrote: “Your magazine has opened my mind to a lot of things that I was hitherto ignorant about and this makes me all the more curious to get in touch with some of you at least so that I can get to know your people better. I have always been a keen admirer of your race, but I have had very little occasion to meet them or come in close contact with them personally. Here’s wishing Ebony every success and a greater circulation, particularly in Asia.”¹⁹

Other letters to the editor wondered about the use of the term “Negro”; relayed their experiences as a white person in an almost entirely black neighborhood (“intelligent whites do not flee a neighborhood—they are driven!”²⁰); or, as was the case with one reader from Liberia, critiqued a November 1952 article on African natives, saying, “It bewilders your readers to see that Ebony has joined the crusade in the continuous cataloguing of Africa as the ‘Dark Continent.’”²¹ Poring over hundreds of letters in the pages of the magazine from the early 1950s reveals an intense devotion to a publication that sat at the crossroads between black culture and white-dominated society. “I am a Negro soldier, at the present time in the hospital,” wrote one reader in the July 1952 issue. He continued: “Being the only Negro in this particular ward, I wondered what would happen when the other soldiers asked to read my magazines and I offered them Ebony. Well, the results were surprising to me because every man in this ward has read this month’s issue of Ebony (April) and a couple of fellows started talking about how good Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan and others were when they appeared in Nashville, Tenn. Keep up the good work.”²² In reviewing many of these letters, it is clear that readers saw the value in the Ebony brand of black excellence, and felt that the continual pursuit of stories that elevated the status and position of African Americans in society was in general a positive effort. 

The reporting in Ebony often tackled hard issues (“South Weaves New Pattern of Violence,” “Why Negroes Don’t Adopt Children,” and “Baha’i Faith: Only Church in the World That Does Not Discriminate”), but also found room for lighter fare, publishing features on black celebrities, marriageable mates, and quests for love. A January 1952 article entitled “The Men in My Life” chronicled the actress Ethel Waters’s sexual exploits, detailing with lurid interest her clashes with abusive men. Men were frequently depicted as the head of the household, with women positioned in roles of subservience, mirroring the themes of male dominance at play in the burgeoning white American middle class. An October 1952 photo feature entitled “Wealthy Bachelors” introduced the selection of eligible singles thusly: “Were these nuptial-shy gentlemen to advertise for mates (an old and accepted practice in India) they would ask for applicants between the ages of 22–38; attractive and ‘well distributed,’ able cooks, housekeepers, hostesses and lovers; in colors ranging from light to luscious brown.”²³ The article introduces us to Joel Robinson yet again, pegging him as a “the 29-year old celebrated New Yorker who has sideline careers as advertising artist, technical illustrator and furniture creator”. 

His enviable ten thousand dollars per year salary (nearly one hundred thousand in today’s dollars) made him a desirable catch, but as the article makes plain, he “has no steady girlfriend, insists he is ‘too busy to fall in love.’”²⁴A letter to the editor from Mrs. Dolores Robinson in July 1954 indicates that Joel Robinson’s exposure in the magazine did in effect put the fabric designer’s bachelorhood to an end: “It’s because of your wonderful magazine Ebony that I am one of the most happy girls alive. In the May 1952 issue of Ebony, you had an article on Joel Robinson, a fabric designer—and that’s how it all started . . . We have been married now since October and I know if I hadn’t seen him first in Ebony all this happiness would not be mine.”²⁵

That Joel Robinson appeared on numerous occasions in the pages of any mainstream magazine of the day would be extraordinary. But in the pages of Ebony, it felt just right, the kind of everyday African American that founder John H. Johnson sought to highlight over and over again. “Johnson wanted to show people on both sides of the color line a simple truth: black is beautiful, too.”²⁶Robinson, along with countless others who appeared in the pages of Johnson’s magazines, was the personification of blackness made excellent, a person succeeding against incredible odds to do things that a generation previously might have been possible only in the deepest realms of the imagination. 

—

Whereas Robinson’s identity as an African American man was centered in black media outlets like Ebony, it was entirely absent from any records related to his selection for the Good Design exhibitions. In many cases, reference to the fabric is made in connection with Maix, his manufacturer, who by the early 1950s was already a known entity in the American design industry. Letters from Good Design director Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., were always directed to Maix, requesting samples of the latest designs to be submitted for consideration and inclusion in the exhibitions.²⁷ Only designers directly involved in the manufacture of their own wares, or those who had achieved a level of fame, such as Charles (1907–1978) and Ray Eames (1912–1988), and Eero Saarinen (1910–1961), seemed to be directly in touch with Kaufmann as he was researching the current marketplace. Yet the dominating influence of the commercial interests involved in the exhibitions were part of the point.

Developed in collaboration with the Chicago Merchandise Mart, then an important wholesale center for retailers across the United States, and The Museum of Modern Art, the Good Design exhibition program was devoted to surveying the contemporary American design marketplace. A scion of a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, retailing empire and a MoMA curator since 1940, Kaufmann saw the Good Design exhibitions as a way to connect museum-going audiences with the latest examples of contemporary furniture, fabrics, lighting, home appliances, and other household goods. “The Good Design exhibitions mean different things to a great many people. . . . To me, these exhibitions are an instrument of knowledge, a job of research undertaken twice a year to find out what the relationship is, that season, between the home furnishings trades and the progressive designers,” Kaufmann wrote in the March 1951 issue of Interiors magazine.²⁸ A Good Design exhibition committee, comprised of Kaufmann and two other members chosen from a rotating cast of design experts of the day, met twice a year in Chicago, once in January and once in June, to make their selections. The criteria for branding objects with the Good Design seal of approval was generally subject to the individual jury’s discretion, but as a MoMA press release from 1950 makes clear, all selected designs had to be “intended for present-day life, in regard to usefulness, to production methods and materials and to the progressive taste of the day.”²⁹ The committee’s selections were first shown in an exhibition in Chicago at “the Mart,” an edited assortment of which was later brought to MoMA in November to coincide with the holiday shopping season. 

“Good Design can sell merchandise because the public is naturally receptive toward new and progressive ideas, especially if these are endorsed by people with no axes to grind,” Kaufmann wrote in 1951. “Good Design serves the public as a buying guide, it serves the designers as an index of current achievements, it serves the manufacturer as a focus of design trends, it serves the retailer as a basis for securing an additional market.”³⁰ Kaufmann believed that Good Design was a catalyst for wider acceptance of modern design in America, a vessel that embodied the principles of modernist design—form follows function, being one—that, from the very beginning, The Museum of Modern Art sought to embed in public discourse. For five seasons, the Good Design exhibitions were a marked success, positioning MoMA as a leading voice in the realm of contemporary design. 

Claiming the endorsement of the committee was a boon for American manufacturers and retailers, who prominently utilized the name in advertisements and store displays, sometimes, as Ebony did, erroneously designating products as “a Good Design award winner.” An advertisement for L. Anton Maix, Inc., fabrics did just that, celebrating the firm’s “Good Design Awards” in the December 1951 issue of Interiors magazine.

Robinson’s Ovals textile serves as the backdrop for the ad, which celebrates the work of five American designers whose work was identified by the committee. Such recognition helped working designers as well, many of whom were looking to break into the burgeoning post–World War II American market. Though largely limited to work produced by Americans, the exhibition included a number of international designers, including Danes Hans Wegner (1914–2007) and Finn Juhl, who obtained international recognition for their involvement or inclusion in these shows and would go on to have highly successful careers. Robinson never raised his profile to the level of many fellow designers who participated in the exhibitions, despite repeated signs of his breakout talent.

—

In 2017, William DeGregorio, a researcher at Cora Ginsburg Gallery, alerted the Museum to the existence of several fabrics that had been designed by Joel Robinson, a designer whose textiles were included in the MoMA Good Design exhibitions. The Museum already held a length of his Ovals #1 textile, which was added to the study collection in 1975, but about which the current generation of curators knew very little. Robinson’s story is not unlike that of many other artists and designers whose work comprises MoMA’s collection; countless stories remain untold or unknown. This chance discovery was an opportunity to expand understanding of the collection and engage new avenues for research, especially as the Museum prepares to close for several months to reinstall the permanent collection with a more expansive view of modern art. 

Information on Robinson’s life is thus far limited, but what is known reveals a man who continually tested the limits of the color barrier in his work as a creative professional. After leaving school in the early 1940s having studied architecture—it is not known yet whether he graduated from either NYU or Cooper Union—he did a variety of jobs to make a living until he found design work as an art director for the magazine of the National Aeronautic Association. After working on advertising and illustration projects during the war, according to Ebony, he moved on to a series of ad agencies, including Hartwell Ayles and then William Douglas McAdams. According to DeGregorio, he designed sheet music covers in the 1940s, including for “A Gal in Calico” from 1946, and he “also probably designed the spare, elegant look of the short-lived progressive literary journal The Contemporary Reader (1953–55), edited by Benjamin Brown, former head of The Harlem Quarterly, and staffed by a volunteer corps of liberal-minded, mainly African American intellectuals.”³¹

In October 1953, Robinson married and settled in Brooklyn with his new wife Dolores. In February 1954, Jet announced Robinson’s promotion from creative art director to executive vice president of the David D. Polon Advertising Agency, a New York firm that specialized in packaging design.

According to an announcement about the promotion in the February 22, 1954, issue of Broadcasting Telecasting, “He will direct an expanded department for new client services for product design, packaging, promotion, and direct mail.”³² A March 9, 1985, issue of New York Amsterdam News, a newspaper with a primarily African American readership, mentions Robinson’s inclusion in an exhibition of contemporary black artists at the Great Neck Library in Great Neck, New York.³³ Beyond that, little else is known of his life; research is ongoing.

Robinson’s inclusion in Good Design 1951, 1952, and 1955 is a story like countless others featured in these exhibitions: a brief moment in the spotlight for a career that, one can only hope, went on to flourish, albeit in relative anonymity. As his career developed in the 1950s, what emerges is a portrait of a man with boundless creativity, producing a variety of fabric designs for Maix alongside well-established, highly regarded white designers of the day. That he appears in Ebony as a fabric designer on the rise is just validation of what the Good Design exhibitions had already made clear: this was a designer worth watching. The obstacles he must of have faced to get to that point are indeed an indication of the adversity he was forced to overcome; that he couldn’t get a steady job after stints studying architecture at NYU and Cooper Union likely owed more to who he was than to his innate talent. As the Ebony profile indicates, “Jobless Architect Turned to Design as Career in Art,” noting that “no New York firm was interested in hiring a Negro architect.”³⁴ His meteoric success in the years between 1951 and 1954, from his inclusion in Good Design to his promotion to executive vice-president at a New York advertising firm, confirms that he had found a path forward, a way to make it as a creative professional.

This is a story that has no conclusion; it’s a beginning, a place to start, as institutions like MoMA seek to expand the canon and tell a richer, more nuanced story of visual culture. The project of cultural workers today is not to condemn existing narratives, but to work to redefine them, to insert new stories that hopefully give us a much richer understanding of our own human experience. Joel Robinson’s tale is but one in a vast ocean of possible narratives, the story of a man whose own unique talent is as worthy of our praise as any titan of the design field. His is a story still being written, a project that reminds us that museum collections—and by extension, art histories—are in constant need of reappraisal.

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Ephemerality, intangibility, un-collectability, performativity, and temporality are all conditions intrinsic to art education. Once an action in art education is considered over, its participants (educators, learners, artists, policy makers) “take their presence away with them, embodied in personal memories and narrations of the events.”¹ Oral histories are key tools to capture experiences of learning. They are, in many cases, the last strand from which to pull a pale representation of how something was. The way in which the interviewee narrates the events prompted by the particular take of the interviewer creates a story that belongs neither to the past nor to the present. It lives in a third space configured by emotional memory and the benefit of hindsight. Despite the inherent subjectivity and complexity of oral histories, they still remain priceless pieces to scaffold the history of art education. On December 2018, in the role of interviewer, I was privileged to get one such narration. 

Dr. Prabha Sahasrabudhe, a retired professor of art and art education at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City, welcomed me into his home in New Jersey. With his characteristic natural flair, he made me coffee as he quietly shared his life story and achievements in art education. As he spoke, he repeatedly referred to the many people he had been blessed to meet and learn from, claiming that he had met so many brilliant minds in the field because he purposefully sought out those he thought would nourish him as an educator. 

There was one name that came up over and over again: Indira Gandhi.

Sahasrabudhe first met Gandhi on November 9, 1960, at the Westbury Hotel. “Indira Gandhi,” he said, “was going to be in the city for three days. So, she and I spent three days of breakfast time . . . in a long breakfast, talking about what she wanted to do.”²

Indira Gandhi would go on to become India’s first female prime minister, a position she held from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 to 1984. Her political career was surrounded by controversy, and her life cut short when she was assassinated by her own bodyguards in 1984. Obviously, none of this had taken place when she met with Sahasrabudhe for breakfast in 1960, but she was nonetheless already a very public figure at the time and her political aspirations were gaining momentum. 


While Indira Gandhi remains a compelling figure in the history of India, I confess that I was surprised to hear her name mentioned in connection to the field of art education. When I asked Dr. Sahasrabudhe what led to the opportunity to share three breakfasts with her, he replied, “It was the idea of bringing the Children’s Art Carnival to India.”³

The Children’s Art Carnival was a pedagogical experiment that originated at The Museum of Modern Art in 1942. Conceived by Victor D’Amico, then director of education at MoMA, the Carnival was designed to cultivate the development of children’s imaginations and creativity. Upon entering through a child-shaped contour gate, young visitors would find themselves in a semi-darkened room painted in deep blues and greens. Spotlights revealed works of art chosen by children or made especially for them by modern artists such as Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Ruth Vollmer, Toni Hughes, William Zorach, and Chaim Gross. These objects were displayed at a child’s eye level—a height that allowed them to be touched and/or manipulated. 

The Carnival plan consisted of two distinct areas, or galleries: one for motivating or inspiring children, and the second for engaging them in art activities. In the inspirational area, children explored the fundamentals of line, space, light, and motion through play with specially designed toys. In the studio workshop, they made their own creations: paintings, collages, mobiles, and other three-dimensional constructions. To foster independent activity and concentration, as well as to prevent adult interference or influence, adult visitors were blocked from entering but could observe from the gate and through specially designed portholes. The only adults present were teaching artists who had been trained to enrich and broaden the children’s experience by motivating and challenging them in unimposing ways. As D’Amico expressed: “The artist has a close kinship with the child in imagination, liveliness of spirit, and creative response. As a result, the truly creative artist is a child’s best teacher.”⁴

The Carnival was held annually at the Museum between 1942 and 1964 for a period of six to eight weeks and was open to children between the ages of four and twelve.⁵ Carnival sessions lasted one hour. 

In 1957, the US Government commissioned duplicate editions of the Carnival for international trade fairs in Milan and Barcelona and, in 1958, for the US Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair.⁶ It was estimated that in Brussels, over the course of six months, more than 55,000 children from different countries visited the Carnival and that more than 10,000 adults from different parts of the world had observed it in operation.⁷ Indira Gandhi was among those observers. 

Gandhi visited the fair in Brussels with Dorothy Norman, an arts advocate and longtime friend of the Gandhi family. Gandhi was enthusiastic about the Carnival, and so later, she, Norman, and Pupul Jayakar (a cultural activist and writer who had previously worked closely with MoMA) visited D’Amico to discuss the possibility of creating a version of the Carnival for India, which they envisioned might circulate to several cities and then be installed permanently in New Delhi.

Around the same time, Sahasrabudhe had become acquainted with both the Carnival and D’Amico in New York and expressed his interest to D’Amico in the possibility of setting up a similar art center in India. Moreover, he had spent a great deal of time observing the Carnival in operation. If there was to be a Children’s Art Carnival in India, D’Amico felt that Sahasrabudhe was the right person to coordinate it.⁸ Funding for such an undertaking was, however, uncertain.

Almost simultaneously, a different project was in the making: in September 1960, Sahasrabudhe was approached by officials from the Government of India, at the request of Jayakar, to propose a tentative plan for a National Children’s Museum in Delhi. 

By 1960, Sahasrabudhe had been asked to coordinate two projects, neither of which had secured funding: the adaptation of MoMA’s Children’s Art Carnival for India and the proposal for a National Children’s Museum in Delhi. This was the situation when D’Amico informed Sahasrabudhe that Indira Gandhi was coming to New York City for a long-dreamed-of private visit and suggested that he should meet with her. 

On November 9, 1960, Gandhi and Sahasrabudhe met for the first of the three breakfasts they were scheduled to share. It is not unusual that key moments in decision-making in art education go unnoticed and undocumented as they happen. Sometimes it is only after years, maybe even decades, that one traces great projects back to their moment of inception. Such was the case when Dr. Sahasrabudhe and I, sitting in his house having coffee, decided that going back sixty years to those breakfasts and trying to re-create the dialogues that took place over them would be an unusual but worthwhile experiment. When we started this endeavor, we couldn’t anticipate that in the process of reconstructing history, its ephemerality would become ruthlessly explicit with Dr. Sahasrabudhe’s passing on January 27, 2019. The experiment we started together, I finish alone in this article. I humbly ask the reader to bear with me in this speculative act of rebellion against art education memory loss.

In attempting to reconstruct Sahasrabudhe’s and Gandhi’s dialogue, I have drawn upon my own conversations with Dr. Sahasrabudhe in the months before he died and integrated his narrative and the information he provided about his exchange with Gandhi with direct quotes from the latter’s correspondence and writings. The content of these conversations as presented here has been checked against different accounts in order to represent Dr. Sahasrabudhe’s and Gandhi’s words and positions as accurately as possible.

Questions such as how many hours they spent together or what they were having for breakfast are missing. There are other inevitable gaps that are impossible to fill now that both Gandhi and Dr. Sahasrabudhe are gone. However, the scattered pieces that do remain deserve attention as they sparked key ideas that Gandhi and Sahasrabudhe would continue to develop together in the decades to come. What follows highlights possible aspects of their discussions—those moments in which Gandhi and Sahasrabudhe speculate about what should be considered when adapting a US experiment in art education, that is, the Children’s Art Carnival, to the context of major cities in India. 

Sahasrabudhe’s memories of his conversations with Gandhi were that they flowed between the defense of art education as a means of transforming society and the asymmetrical influence of Western creative teaching methods. His narrative not only provides a historical record, it also offers an opportunity to recognize and question the art pedagogies of our own time.

FIRST BREAKFAST: “We need not waste time on preliminaries.” 

It was not a particularly cold November morning on New York City’s Upper East Side when Prabha Sahasrabudhe, a thirty-two-year-old art educator entered the luxurious Westbury Hotel in New York City. At the suggestion of his supervisor Victor D’Amico, then director of education at The Museum of Modern Art, Sahasrabudhe was there to meet with Indira Gandhi, president of the Indian National Congress.⁹ It was breakfast time, and when Sahasrabudhe entered the elegant dining room of the hotel, Gandhi was already sitting at a table and waiting for him.

INDIRA GANDHI: Pupul [Jayakar] has told me about you, and she would like you to be the director of a new children’s museum and adjoining children’s recreation-cum-education center [Bal Bhavan] in New Delhi.¹⁰ I know at present you are connected with New York University and work with [Victor] D’Amico at The Museum of Modern Art, but nevertheless, I have asked the Indian Ministry of Education to send you the relevant papers as well as blueprints of the plans for the museum so that “we need not waste time on preliminaries.”¹¹

PRABHA SAHASRABUDHE: Mrs. Jayakar requested that I propose a plan for the children’s museum, which the Government [of India] would like to sponsor.¹²

IG: My father [Jawaharlal Nehru] loves museums and never misses an opportunity to visit them, however busy his schedule.¹³ With his knowledgeable interest and appreciation, he is a curator’s delight. He would like our country to be dotted with children’s museums, because he believes that even a small beginning is better than none at all—and that we should not let our lack of resources deter us from forming collections even though they might at first be inadequately housed and displayed. A few years ago, my father visited the Artek Pioneer Camp in the USSR, and he was moved to see hundreds of children immersed in the world of fantasy and creativity, unlimited by barriers of caste, class, religion, or place.¹⁴ The idea of developing a similar institution in India, one solely for children, emerged in his mind. Following the “pioneer camp” schema, my father founded Bal Bhavan, which began offering physical education and science activities in a tin shed at Turkman Gate in Delhi. This project marked the start of a nationwide mission to promote the creative enhancement of children through play in a child-friendly environment. We now aim to build the first National Children’s Museum in the New Delhi Bal Bhavan.¹⁵

PS: I’ll present a preliminary proposal for the National Children’s Museum next month. But in light of the transitional period in India’s educational reconstruction program, plans for educational institutions should not contain final blueprints for proposed building construction.¹⁶ The emphasis should be to establish the need for the center and its significance to India’s educational program, rather than to focus on the architecture of its buildings and grounds.

IG: “We should try to use whatever resources and materials are immediately available while constantly endeavoring to improve the personnel, the installation, and the nature and quality of exhibits. The same applies to the building and other exterior aspects.”¹⁷ “I am genuinely concerned about the present educational system in India. I was fortunate to attend institutions and to be taught by people whose teaching went far beyond the normal routine. But my own experience has made me doubtful about the value of most schools.”¹⁸ “After all, plenty of literate people get nowhere, and vice versa. We need of course, to wipe out illiteracy, but people of intelligence can do remarkable things under any circumstances, if given the opportunity.”¹⁹ “I am convinced that if we had been able to change our outmoded educational system when we became free, it would have made a big difference. We are now trying to see what can be done.”²⁰

PS: The problems that educational reform in India faces, cannot be thought of in unilinear terms. What applies to urban India may not be suitable for rural India, for example. India has often been described as a land of contrasts. This contrast is nowhere clearer than in terms of education. No doubt some states and metropolitan cities can boast of modern schools or school systems; but India’s villages, which first entered the picture after India achieved independence in 1947, have been grossly neglected for decades. In my opinion, what rural India needs is a program that extends community services—a program that will meet these areas’ deficiencies in goods, services, and amenities. It will be quite some time before art education comes to the Indian villages.²¹

IG: Pupul says that in the schools in urban India that have more ambitious art departments and programs, there is a false sense of “Indian” or “Oriental,” as opposed to modern or contemporary, which further narrows the child’s sensibility. In the name of the “great and ancient tradition,” direct seeing and listening by the child diminishes, and ideological, conceptual grooves of thinking become established. Tradition becomes synonymous with making copies from Ajanta, or the work of the Bengal School.²² Essentially, it leads to imitation. This is so even in schools that profess to be progressive in their approach. Here there is an attempt to reject the so-called traditional, but the intent is still not with discovery and perception in mind. So, the whole approach becomes rooted in imitation, whether it be of works of the past, or of the present.²³

PS: Philosophically, the education of the senses, the importance of learning by doing and thinking with the hands, the joy of creative work, the importance of constructive activity, and other art education premises have become accepted notions. But the reality is that in the schools where art is taught, it is approached as training for skill in drawing based on so-called indoctrinary methods.²⁴ Until recently, education has stressed only the intellectual and practical needs of the individual. Education has been the acquisition of useful and valuable knowledge, skills, and understanding. Existing patterns of social and cultural conditions have defined educational needs. This education, however, has neglected human needs in the aesthetic realm. “The need to experience, and the need to relate to the world, the need for self-discovery through self-expression and the need for self-identification, and other such needs have only recently become part of our own educational thinking.”²⁵ “Reform in education and the rethinking of current practices in education, appraisal of new trends, and newer ideas on education very rarely come down from the top. [. . .] It is the lay people, the teachers and parents who must advocate for change.”²⁶

IG: “We want persons with ideas to stimulate our own people to new thinking.”²⁷ I’ve seen the Children’s Creative Center in Brussels, which Victor D’Amico created for young visitors. It stresses the tactile, sensory, and visual qualities of the materials on view, encouraging the children to paint what they experience, in terms of their own imaginations. I am enthusiastic about D’Amico’s project and think it would be relevant to Indian children. Pupul thinks so too. We have scheduled a visit for today with Dorothy [Norman] and Victor D’Amico at The Museum of Modern Art.²⁸

That afternoon, Sahasrabudhe and D’Amico showed Gandhi and Norman the Children’s Art Carnival at MoMA, held that year inside the Buckminster Fuller Dome in the garden of the Museum.

During the visit, D’Amico registered a statement made by Gandhi: “Mr. D’Amico, we want an Art Carnival of our own and we want you to come with a staff of teachers and train our teachers so that we will be able to carry on creative teaching for our children.”²⁹

After visiting the Children’s Art Carnival at MoMA, Gandhi was convinced about wanting to secure a Children’s Art Carnival for India. An appointment with Sahasrabudhe was made for the following morning so the two could work together not only on a plan to raise interest and funds but also to define the purpose of such a project. They decided that the Carnival in India was to have its permanent headquarters inside the Bal Bhavan in New Delhi.

SECOND BREAKFAST: “The creative energies of our own time . . .”

PRABHA SAHASRABUDHE: It is important to discuss the philosophy behind the Children’s Art Carnival: that is, creative education. I think a creatively oriented philosophy of art education, one that supports new methods of teaching art, will in all possible ways facilitate the advancement of art education in Indian schools. The Children’s Art Carnival in India must “help assist in [the] transformation of a society by recognizing and establishing the creative energies of our own time.”³⁰ The aim should be to develop an art education center as a base from which to introduce a philosophy of creative art education. “The philosophy of creative art education can be successfully introduced, demonstrated, and implemented where an atmosphere of freedom prevails, and where values such as respect for individual dignity, faith in individuality, and other democratic values, are generally accepted.”³¹

INDIRA GANDHI: I must confess I am attracted by the relationship between participatory democracy and education. But how does one bring it about? 

PS: “Art education offers every individual an opportunity to partake in the bounty of cultural goods, and makes it possible for everyone to become culture-makers.”³² A society that proposes to encourage aesthetic activity must provide an atmosphere in which personal uniqueness is recognized and take delight in the individual’s right to freedom. “What the Indian child needs most is recognition of his individuality, acceptance of himself as an individual in his own right, with a claim for a world of his own.”³³ It is the need for self-assertion, for self-realization. The need to be individual—the very survival of democracy depends on this.

IG: What I have been trying to do in India is to involve more people in the political processes and to initiate public discussions about education and other important subjects.

PS: “Art is an activity of the evolving human consciousness. A work of art is the manifestation, the symbolic image of man’s awareness of his relatedness to the external world and of his consciousness of his inner being.”³⁴ As the child engages in self-expression, he becomes aware of the possibilities and responsibilities of individual action.

IG: Why is creative education the right method to be introduced?

PS: Because it is within the context of creative education that the concept of freedom of the individual is cherished. Creative education derives its strength from the environment, from the values that the society upholds. The method behind such an education is a creative, constructive, and critical one. Sir Herbert Read has called it the method of “natural wisdom” and “the integral method.”³⁵ John Dewey terms it the approach of “creative intelligence.”³⁶ It is the method that integrates the intellectual and emotional, rational and intuitive, conscious and unconscious aspects of a child’s personality. It is the method that fosters creative intelligence as well as aesthetic sensibility. It is the method that combines the way the artist approaches a problem with the approach of the scientist.

IG: Pupul says it is important that the child does not lose his sense of wonder at the tremendous glory of everyday things—tender green shoots, the sun and the stars, the majesty of man and also his frailties. She also believes there has to be wonder and delight, reverence and frugality and cleaving attention. It is only then that the listening mind can take root in the child—the listening mind, which is in direct communication with art. Your references, Dewey and Read, are not Indian scholars.³⁷

PS: References to the importance of art in education are not lacking in the writings of influential Indians. Creative activity is the basic principle of [Mahatma] Gandhiji’s nationally adopted scheme of Basic Education, for example.³⁸

IG: In bringing the Children’s Art Carnival to India, we need to infuse this creative way of doing things, with Indian thought.³⁹

THIRD BREAKFAST: “Art is not a question of ownership, either of a country, or of a people.” 

INDIRA GANDHI: The philosophy of creative education that sustains the Children’s Art Carnival derives from Western, and particularly American, educational sources. How does this American philosophy of creative education apply to India?

PRABHA SAHASRABUDHE: This question is appropriate and legitimate. My answer is that American education reflects the social structure of a free and fluid society—in that free, tax-supported schools are a concrete manifestation of these ideals. Creative education, an educational tradition in a free, liberal democratic society can very rightly be termed “democratic education,” rather than simply “American education.” An education that regards every individual as an end, and never as a means; an education that gives all children equal opportunity and that strives toward the liberation of the individual’s potential for creative, intelligent, and self-disciplined living; an education that generates a sense of interdependence between the individual and the society is not, in this researcher’s opinion, foreign in its spirit or in its temper to India. This is not to suggest that the structure or seeds of American art education can be transplanted to Indian soil as is, without consideration of certain local factors. We need to discuss creative education in the context of the aesthetic educational needs of Indian children, the characteristics of Indian culture, and the status of art education in Indian schools.⁴⁰

IG: Pupul explained to me that one of the burdens we carry is the method of art education brought to us [to India] by the British more than a hundred years ago. The separation of art from craft disciplines, and the type of teaching established for the training of art and craft teachers in art schools, has led to enormous waste of men and resources. Cadres of art teachers who are mediocre in terms of their vision, who are neither artists nor craftsmen nor communicators, have emerged. It is these teachers who are responsible for the child during the most formative periods of his life. This time, will we be carrying the burden of American education to the Indian people?⁴¹

PS: It is no wonder that the Children’s Art Carnival is an American idea, for I would assert that a museum can fulfill its educational promise only in an atmosphere of liberal and progressive ideas fostered by a democratic society. “It would take the constant enthusiasm of an awakened and enlightened community concerned with education of its growing generation of children, its faith in the uniqueness and dignity of the human being, its atmosphere of freedom and democracy to demonstrate the workability of this concept of museums as an instrument of children’s education.”⁴²

IG: I’m concerned about how “craft has become a way of producing mediocre ornamental objects, cut away from the needs of the child and unrelated to the child’s environment. No attempt is made to make the child understand the materials he uses or the discipline inherent to his tools. Even before the child has gained control of the muscles of his hand and can hold a pencil, he is taught to copy drawings from a copy book on small pieces of paper. The child never has access to materials or spaces, such as a wall or a mud floor, where he can work on large surfaces. This narrowing of the child’s vision results in a general diminishing of the child’s basic capacity to perceive in a vast way.”⁴³

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali polymath, poet, musician, and artist. On February 9, 1919, he delivered a lecture titled “The Centre of Indian Culture in Madras,” which dealt with what should be the educational ideal in India.PS: Following the ideas of [Gurudev Rabindranath] Tagore, in order for an art educational philosophy to become a valid educational theory for India, it must (1) be based on the fundamental beliefs of the people, shaped by their common heritage, (2) consider the aim of education, the growth and developmental stages of children, and the needs of children, and (3) understand the implications of this art education philosophy for the individual and the society.⁴⁴

IG: For the Children’s Art Carnival to function effectively, it will have to concern itself with the training of a new type of art educator: a teacher who is sensitive, observant, and awake to the needs of the child and his environment. It is only through this process of observation, questioning, and learning that the teacher will find revealed those forms that are essential to the germination of a living art tradition.

PS: “Only by making culture a ‘live issue’ for every individual can India put itself in contact with the vital and life-giving qualities in her past.”⁴⁵

IG: But at the same time, Pupul has pointed out to me that among the factors the Children’s Art Carnival will have to stress is the need to break down the limiting concepts of national and local frontiers of art. “The child must understand that art is not a question of ownership, either of a country, or of a people.”⁴⁶

Indira Gandhi left New York City by train after this meeting to receive the Howland Memorial Prize of Yale University for Distinguished Achievement. Sahasrabudhe and Gandhi continued their discussions in the following months. In 1961, after earning his doctoral degree, Sahasrabudhe moved to New Delhi with his wife, Sybil, and their first child, Kyra. In New Delhi, Sahasrabudhe took over as director of the Children Centers for Creative, Critical, and Constructive Education at the Bal Bhavan and National Children’s Museum. During this time, Sahasrabudhe prepared for the arrival of the Children’s Art Carnival, planned for 1963.

CODA: After three breakfasts . . . an elephant’s snack

On March 14 1962, Urvashi, “the baby elephant,” found herself at the Teen Murti House, the residence of Jawaharlal Nehru in New Delhi, to be fed by US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Kennedy’s good will in offering a snack to Urvashi is captured in images taken by Indian photojournalist Homai Vyarawalla as an awkward moment: candid in the first lady’s attitude and also the elephant’s dramatic response.⁴⁷ The occasion of this episode was none other than the symbolic presentation of the Children’s Art Carnival to Indira Gandhi as “An American Gift to the Indian Child.” The “gift-giving” formula of the ceremony presented what had been a reciprocally shared search for answers in art education as an uneven cultural exchange. It, in fact, offered an image that can be read as not too different from the exchange between America’s first lady and Urvashi: the US dominant culture “feeding” a Western pedagogical experiment to a young postcolonial India.

On October 30, 1963, Indira Gandhi inaugurated the Children’s Art Carnival in New Delhi. MoMA’s International Council, the Asia Society, MoMA’s Education Department, and individual donors provided the necessary funds for putting the Carnival in full motion. It had maintained its original two-part structure, with an inspirational area and studio workshop, and embodied Gandhi and Sahasrabudhe’s joint conviction that art education can create a new spirit in society through opportunities for creative development.

The Children’s Art Carnival in India was distinctively different from past US iterations. For the first time, the Carnival was to be housed entirely within its own structure. The building for the Carnival was designed to be portable and thus able to travel to different cities in India. The structure was fabricated in New Delhi from designs and working drawings by Frank Vitullo and Victor D’Amico. The Children’s Art Carnival in India was located in two octagonal rooms that were joined along one side that connected the motivational and studio areas.

This portable design responded to Gandhi and Sahasrabudhe’s aim of taking the Carnival to different Indian contexts. The Carnival toured five cities in India: Hyderabad, Madras, Bangalore, Bombay, and Ahmedabad, before returning to New Delhi, where it was permanently installed in the National Children’s Museum.⁴⁸

This singular story of a leading politician sitting down with an art educator offers an opportunity to think about the importance of having policy makers and art education practitioners address key questions together. In my conversations with Dr. Prabha Sahasrabudhe, he remembered fondly: “I was just blessed with this opportunity. Indira Gandhi never, never, never said no to me. Never.” 

The Children’s Art Carnival played, according to Sahasrabudhe, a small but vital role. It gave him and Gandhi a reason to meet and to tackle crucial questions that would permeate the field of art education. At a government level in India, the Children’s Art Carnival was a public acknowledgment that art education should promote creative thinking. At an institutional level, the most important consequence was the establishment of a permanent Carnival inside the Bal Bhavan and National Children’s Museum in New Delhi (with Sahasrabudhe as its director). This joint institution supported initiatives including Delhi’s first Art Teachers’ Conference, held in 1963, and followed by ongoing seminars and conferences in the ensuing decades that strengthened the art education research network in schools in New Delhi as well as established a teacher’s training program that (with transformations) exists today. 

However, from the broader lens of art education in India, the impact of the Carnival dilutes. Many questions that arose in the conversations between Gandhi and Sahasrabudhe remain far from resolved: Is it possible (or even responsible) to devise an educational system that addresses the multiplicity of contexts that coexist in India? Is art a global language whose education can be outlined in all-inclusive terms? Is addressing democratic values part of what should be included in an art education curriculum? Is it acceptable to assume that democratic values in India and the United States are the same? How does self-assertion, self-realization, and the need to be individual translate into an awareness of the relatedness to the external world? 

In this larger perspective, MoMA, the Children’s Art Carnival, or the day the US first lady fed Urvashi, “the baby elephant,” seem anecdotal. The Children’s Art Carnival in India was only a small event, “an elephant’s snack,” when compared to the important issues whose surface Sahasrabudhe and Gandhi had only begun to scratch over three breakfasts in 1960 at the Westbury Hotel in New York City.

The Bengal School of Art, commonly referred to as the Bengal School, was an art movement and style of Indian painting that originated in Bengal, primarily in Kolkata and Shantiniketan, and that flourished throughout India during the British Raj in the early 20th century. Also known as the “Indian style of painting” in its early days, it was associated with Indian nationalism and led by Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), but was also promoted and supported by British arts administrators such as E. B. Havell.

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In the May/June 1970 issue of Vrishchik,¹ there is a conversation between six Indian printmakers in Delhi that includes the artist Zarina. “On Printmaking” was initiated by the editors of the journal, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar, both well-known artists in their own rights, after a Smithsonian printmaking workshop in Delhi that they had all participated in. Zarina’s contributions to the conversation pivot around formal considerations regarding questions of color, variation, and reproduction in printmaking, and an insistence upon thinking of printmaking as a unique visual medium. This issue of Vrishchik includes an image of Zarina’s Cage (1970), a black-and-white relief print made from collaged wood, along with other prints by the Indian artists. 

In 1979 Zarina, now in New York, was on the guest editorial staff of “Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other,” a special issue of the feminist publication Heresies. This editorial group included “painters, poets, educators, multi-media artists, students, shipbuilders, sculptors, playwrights, photographers, socialists, craftswomen, wives, mothers and lesbians.”² Zarina was the only South Asian in the group, indicated by the descriptor in the editorial statement that describes an “Indian (from New Delhi).” Zarina’s cast-paper sculpture Wall (1979) was included in the issue, which she designed, along with images of artworks by Beverly Buchanan, Ana Mendieta, Betye Saar, and others that were interspersed between the essays and poetry.

Sadia Shirazi: What was it like being an artist in Delhi in the late 1960s and early 1970s? 

Zarina: Delhi was very exciting in the seventies. There were lectures and discussions. I was living in Delhi when Nasreen [Mohamedi] came back from Kuwait or Bahrain and Tyeb Mehta came back from New York—he [Mehta] always loved books and movies—we’d go to Old Delhi and I’d buy paper.³ Tyeb’s place was our adda.⁴ When I first returned to Delhi from Paris, I brought a lot of paper with me—French paper, and BFK and all.⁵ Then, in Delhi, I started studying the tradition we have, because the Indian market was feeding the colonies and people had no jobs, and our papermaking had gone down because it was cheaper to buy imported paper. So I started using handmade paper, Indian made from the Gandhi ashram. 

SS: What did you like about the Indian handmade paper compared to the paper from France?

Z: It was very good quality; it was very even. I liked the rawness of it. 

SS: I found these pamphlets for workshops where you taught papermaking at the New York Feminist Art Institute in the late seventies and eighties.

Z: By that time, I had decided that I would learn how to make paper and where it comes from, because I wanted to know more about the material. I know chemistry, so I knew paper is made from cotton. You make a pulp of it, and you put it in water. With a lot of water, you don’t need any glue—it’s called hydrogen bonding—but if I hadn’t studied chemistry, I wouldn’t have understood that. I think timing is everything. When I came here, there was the revolution in handmade paper—in Santa Cruz, in New York, all over the place, so the timing was right. I taught a class on the ABC’s of papermaking, and I suddenly thought, this material has the potential of being cast. Not a plaster cast or a shell. I had moved and I didn’t have space or money, so I devised my own mold with wood, and I took a plastic sheet and drilled holes in it so the paper would drain out and also take on the surface of the plastic, so it would shine. So, in the seventies, in New York, I made my first cast-paper sculpture.

SS: You were also part of the editorial collective of the Heresies “Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other” issue. You were the only South Asian woman but one of two Muslims, which wasn’t a category of interest as it is today and isn’t mentioned anywhere in the publication. It’s interesting how explicit your editorial group’s introduction is about the problems your collective had with the main Heresies collective, which is described in the introduction as “racist and paternalistic.” 

Z: I always read the Heresies issue as being about third-class artists. We were not part of the first world because we were not Europeans, we were not white. We were communists and leftists. I really didn’t like the term third world. It felt like a negative designation . . . there was not one person of color in Heresies. Feminism for me was about equal pay for equal work—not about burning bras. Then they invited me to join the collective and I said no. They were horrible to me! I didn’t want to work for them. 

SS: It’s not just you, as a person, who was unintelligible, I imagine, but also your work, which was quite distinct from the process-based “feminist” work coming from the Heresies collective at that time. 

Z: They’d say my work is very abstract and very minimal. I didn’t know what minimal was. I’d never heard the term, because I didn’t go to an art school. 

SS: You were also a co-curator of the exhibition Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists in United States (1980) with Ana Mendieta and Kazuko Miyamoto at A.I.R. Gallery. You designed that catalogue, along with the Heresies one. 

Z: Yes. Ana was part of A.I.R. Gallery. She wanted me to be part of it, too, but they didn’t want to have me. They thought I was an upper-class Indian [laughter].⁶ I took editing classes at the New School for the Heresies publication, to learn how to edit.

SS: I know that you had a network of friends in New York—from the Reddys, who had been in Paris with you, to Ram Rahman, who you knew from Delhi and who introduced you to Mehlli Gobhai.⁷ What did you do on Friday nights as a young artist in New York? Any memorable stories? 

Z: For me, Friday evenings were for going to the Met. I could just see anything I wanted. All the guards knew me because they were all artists. Once on the Lower East Side, at Kenkeleba House, Judy [Reddy]⁸ turned around and asked for a cigarette, and it was Philip Glass she asked! Then she said, “Oh, never mind.” [Laughter] Nobody was a star; you could run into people. People were accessible.

SS: When you move to the United States, your work grows in a certain sense from your dislocation. You bring things together in a way that has an uncanny effect; first you take the horizon from the etchings in Santa Cruz (1996), which you pair with Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry, and reduce the horizon formally in Subh (Morning) and Raat (Night) from Home Is a Foreign Place (1999), a work that recalls everyday life in Aligarh.⁹

Z: In Santa Cruz, there was a beautiful sunset on Monterey Bay, and the lights going up—twilight they call it—it was so beautiful.¹⁰ Then I thought of Faiz’s “kai baar us ka daaman bhar diya husn-e-do aalam se” and then there is a misra, “magar dil hai ki us ki khana virani nahin jaati,”¹¹ which is in the Santa Cruz portfolio. I wanted to do ten but time was running out and so I just did this one, Santa Cruz (1996).

SS: In your work from the late 1970s in New York, you begin to explore space, sculpture, and materiality, the untitled pin drawings, your cast-paper sculptures, and then your bronze sculptures . . .

Z: The space—I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t go into sculpture—that helped me. Until I did this sculpture [points to bronze sculpture on wall]—I did it in New York. 

SS: Your work makes a lot of use of modes of spatial representation, from aerial maps of cities to architectural floor plans. How did you begin working with maps?

Z: I had a small map from an atlas, and I blew it up. I’ve always been interested in geography and how cities are laid out. My father took me on a joyride in a plane over Aligarh when I was a child, and I saw how the city was laid out. I sat in his lap—it must have still been during British India. I flew a glider later, myself, in Delhi. 

SS: I know you wanted to study architecture as a child and have had a lifelong interest in it. Do you have a favorite building in India?

Z: Yes. I was always interested in architecture. I love Fatehpur Sikri and Humayun’s Tomb more than the Taj Mahal. My favorite, though, is Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, the Buddhist stupa. It is so pure that you think it was made yesterday. Forget Chandigarh.

SS: Although you have often said that in your work words come first, before the image, Dividing Line has no words and is such a powerful piece. I mentioned in your panel discussion at NYU this past November how you gouged the wood block, how you carved the entire ground of the image as opposed to the line, and I think this haptic sensibility of yours has something to do with the difficulty of visual representation and partition.¹²

Z: I left Aligarh in 1958. That was the last time I lived in my country, in a home with my family, with my language, and I didn’t realize that once I stepped out, I’d never go back. So, when I came here, I made a promise to myself that when I retire, I will go back to woodcuts, and the first thing I did was Dividing Line. With woodcut, generally, you see it is black and people do white lines through it, but this line stands out. And the line I cut by hand with an electric tool . . . yes, it has no words.

SS: I feel like Dividing Line expresses the afterlife of partition—not just the violence of it as an event, but also its continuing aftereffects, which you and your family experienced. We often discuss your relationship to India, which is as vexed as India’s relationship to its minorities, and post-Babri, post-Gujarat, and post-Modi, particularly Muslims.¹³ I imagine all of this is something that took time to unfold and that you could only express it with some distance.

Z: I think that I revisited partition when I came here and then I suddenly thought, what have I done to my life. In the big picture, my story is nothing. There are stories of people who got slaughtered, and women who were raped, but it’s not all Manto’s “Thanda Gosht” and “Toba Tek Singh,”¹⁴ and so we are not important, but we are witnesses. 

When I did Letters from Home, I also thought that in thirty years someone will look at them and see we wrote them, the letters, in Urdu, because my mother didn’t know English, so of course I wrote to her in Urdu. At home we never spoke English. It was considered very rude to speak English when people didn’t understand, so we all spoke in Urdu. Suppose I hadn’t left. I don’t know where I would be now . . . but I wanted to leave. I wanted to see the world. And traveling is our destiny—“sitaron se aage jahan aur bhi hain”—as a child, we were supposed to memorize and I memorized Iqbal.¹⁵ [Recited together] “Abhi ishq ke imtihan aur bhi hain.”

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This is the first of two parts. Read the second part here.

ANA JANEVSKI: Jaime, one of your works, Cincinnati Tape Piece (1972), was part of the MoMA collection since some years ago. Recently, Tape Wall Project (1970/1988) was also acquired and is now part of the Media and Performance Art collection. Tell us a little bit about it and also about your practice, your arrival in New York City, and how your experience in the US has influenced your production.

JAIME DAVIDOVICH: I came to New York at the end of 1963. The first thing I did . . . the first thing I did in the city—I stayed with my sister in Queens—was to go to MoMA to see Guernica. At that time it was on extended loan to the Museum. And that was my first chance to see it. Before that, I had only seen it in reproductions. But seeing the real Guernica? That was a major, major event. After seeing the Guernica, I tried to contact some of the other Latin American artists living in the city. I didn’t speak much English. My English was very rudimentary, and so I wanted to meet other Latin American artists living in the US, to have some kind of contact with them. I wanted to see what they were doing. At that time in New York, there was an American woman, a critic and art historian named Jacqueline Barnitz who was very interested in Latin American art. Later on, she went to Texas University in Austin, and became the head of the Latin American art department there. She wrote the seminal textbook on twentieth-century Latin American art and has organized many exhibitions of Latin American art. But back then, once a week, she would open the doors of her very small studio apartment in the Upper West Side and host a sort of salon that was attended by every Latin American artist in New York City. You could go there, talk, have a glass of wine . . . new people would introduce themselves, and you would make connections and share ideas. And that was important for Latin American artists, because at the time we had no idea about how the New York art scene worked. We were very familiar with France, with Paris. Paris was the ideal place for the majority of Argentine artists. They would go to Paris to study at the André Lhote Academy. That was considered the place.

AJ: And so you were supposed to go to Paris?

JD: Yes, I was supposed to go to Paris. But instead of going to the André Lhote studio, I was planning to go to the studio of a new artist, a young artist named Pierre Soulages. He was one of the most prominent contemporary artists after the war. I had been corresponding with him and he had invited me to come and work there in his studio. But things didn’t work out for political reasons, and so I pursued a grant to come to New York instead. But then I was not at all prepared for the environment in New York.

AJ: Who else was at the salon?

JD: In terms of artists, the first person I met was an Argentine artist from Córdoba: Marcelo Bonevardi. Other artists there were Jose Antonio Fernández-Muro, Sara Grillo, Fernando Botero, Omar Rayo, Carlos Mérida, Fernando de Szyszlo, and Kazuya Sakai. But as a group, we didn’t have much in common with each other.

AJ: Apart from being Latin American.

JD: Yeah, our origins were Latin American. But I was not interested in Latin American art. I was more interested in Duchamp; I was more interested in the Dada artists; I was more interested in Picabia; I was more interested in Morandi; I was more interested in the things that artists were doing in Europe, in Group Zero—or in the things that artists had started doing in Japan, in the Gutai group. So I had another focus, another view. I didn’t have anything in common with these other Latin American artists. So anyway, I went to Jaqueline’s a couple of times but then stopped going. Luckily, I was able to get a job in Greenwich Village, in a publishing company that was dedicated to the distribution and promotion of Latin American art and literature—of anything made in Latin America. This was 1964. President Kennedy had created this organization called the Alliance for Progress, which promoted greater contact with the Latin American countries, and sponsored all kinds of exchange programs. One of the things they did was to collect all the books written by Latin American writers and published in Latin America. They had representatives in every country in Latin America, who would buy every single book written by a Latin American writer and published in Latin America.

AJ: That’s very ambitious.

JD: They would buy a few copies and send them to this place, to this publishing company called Hafner. Then, Hafner would distribute the books to major US institutions like the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Harvard University, the University of Texas. There were many universities and institutions that were part of this program, and I was hired by Hafner to be the archivist and cataloger of all the Latin American books. Hafner was located on 10th Street and Broadway, which also happened to be a very important area for American art. The 10th Street artists were the pioneers—before SoHo. And they had opened cooperative spaces called the 10th Street galleries, where they showed people like Mark di Suvero and the second–generation Abstract Expressionists—artists like Philip Guston. Also around there… Rothko had his studio in the Bowery, de Kooning had his studio on 11th Street. They would all go to the famous Cedar Tavern on University Place and spend time with people like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation. The 10th Street galleries were alternative galleries. They were not like the bigger commercial galleries in New York at that time. The center of that gallery world was the Upper East Side, from 57th Street to 77th Street. On 57th Street, you had the Pierre Matisse Gallery and the Kootz Gallery, which represented Picasso. And then you had the Martha Jackson Gallery on 68th Street, which represented foreign artists like Fontana, Tàpies, and Goldberg. And at the end was 77th Street was where the Leo Castelli Gallery was located.

Then, on Third Avenue and 10th Street, there were the alternative galleries, the alternative spaces. You know, the very raw spaces, where the walls were unfinished, and the exhibitions were very, very . . . unpolished. I was working one block from there, and I would go to those galleries at lunchtime and think, “Hey, this is the place that I have more things in common with, that I’m more interested in.” And so I started going to those 10th Street–Third Avenue galleries more regularly. And then a few years later, a gallery opened on LaGuardia Place and Bleecker, which is just a few blocks from 10th Street and Third. And this gallery was the Park Place Gallery. Later, galleries slowly started moving to the Bowery, into SoHo, and I got more involved with that scene. Basically, I lost contact with the whole Latin American group. They were living in another area, and had different interests. There were very few Latin American artists who shared my interests—there was Juan Downey, who came to New York in 1970, and Rafael Ferrer, who was friends with Robert Morris and Richard Serra . . . Marisol, another Latin American artist, had her studio on 10th Street and Broadway. She was doing Pop art and was part of the Castelli group. There were very, very, very, very few Latin American artists. And then I got more involved in the neighborhood. And in the early seventies, I became part of the SoHo scene.

AJ: And what was your practice during that period?

JD: I was interested in what I was doing when I was in Argentina, in the last pieces that I had done there: large paintings of segments of a landscape with no beginning and no end. I would take one wall in a gallery and I would do a huge painting that would show the landscape—like a night landscape, but with only one horizon. Later I did another series of paintings that were all white—of the horizon line during the day. I did those works on burlap, or on Masonite. And I showed them in several places. I was a member of a group of abstract artists. I was friendly with Greco, who was one of the few artists to return to Argentina in the early sixties. He had ideas about this German style of abstract art called tachisme, which corresponded to late Abstract Expressionism in America. And also we were in touch with some of the new Spanish artists like Canogar and Tàpies. I had been doing monochromatic work, and I continued doing that when I moved to New York. I would unroll the canvas and paint these infinite landscapes, and then I would take the canvas, without stretchers, and hang it on the wall. If somebody came, I would just hang it on the wall. I used pushpins or little nails for hanging. And then, around 1965, I decided that I didn’t like the way the pushpins looked and so I started using tape. That is when I started the tape projects. The tape became part of the composition of the work, which I started showing privately—not through a gallery or an institution, just to friends.

In 1970 I got a part-time job in Cleveland, Ohio. There, I discovered this new technology called videotape. And videotape was not available. Well, except for the Portapak, which became available in 1965—but it was only black-and-white, and it lasted only twenty minutes. The television studios, however, had very sophisticated equipment. And at the time, I was able to get to a hospital in Cleveland that had state-of-the-art equipment with color cameras and tapes that are not half inch, like they are in the Portapak, but one inch. I was able to start working there on videotapes and began using adhesive tape. In those works, like in my paintings, there was no starting point, no ending point; they would just continue and continue… This work is now at MoMA: a tape project that includes videotape and adhesive tape. When I started doing this work, I started getting attention.

AJ: Was your first tape work an installation? The work that we have at MoMA is from 1972.

JD: Yes.

AJ: So you spontaneously had this idea of taping half of the wall and then, on the other half of the wall, installing a screen that would show you doing the taping?

JD: Yes. That’s correct. In 1972 a lot of things changed. It was then that I had the first invitation to do a video-and-tape installation at the Akron Art Museum.

AJ: But didn’t you do another tape installation in Cleveland before that, in the staircase?

JD: Well, yes, I did a lot of tape installations. I started doing these in 1969. I worked a lot in galleries, in museums, on the street… But the inclusion of video was in 1970, and the first exhibition of video and tape, of adhesive tape, was in a museum in 1972.

AJ: But you did the first one, the one that is part of MoMA’s collection, in 1972, no?

JD: So here’s the thing. Historically, this is the context: How can you do that kind of work in what is basically a small town, outside the centers of the avant-garde? Because in Cleveland, I was not living off my art… But when I got there, two things happened: First is that I got in contact with a hospital that had state-of-the-art equipment that I was able to use. Then second is that Nina Castelli, who is Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend’s daughter, opened a very small gallery called the New Gallery in an old house in Cleveland. It became a focal point for art activity. All of Nina’s artist would come to Cleveland: Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Richard Serra… and then she would select some local artist to “merge” with the New Yorkers. So that’s how I became a member of the gallery.

AJ: How were you financing your stay in Cleveland, and how long were you there for?

JD: It was maybe a year and a half and I was working in graphic design. And when I was there, doing those tape shows, I got a lot of publicity. I was doing things on the street, in staircases, on big walls .. Somebody came from Artforum… things were very good. Then, a curator from the Whitney Museum came to Cleveland, and she selected me to be part of Whitney Biennial. At that point I said to myself, “I have to go back to New York. I have no choice.” And so I returned to New York. I think it was 1973. I got a few grants, which helped me buy my video equipment, and I became a very active member of the video art community in SoHo.

AJ: Did you have a show at Nina’s Gallery?

JD: Yes, I had several shows at the New Gallery. Nina also introduced me to some people. It was an incredible experience. In hindsight, I think about the pieces that she had and couldn’t sell… Oh my God! It was like a thousand dollars for a Richard Serra or a Joseph Kosuth. Original pieces… And then Nina, too, came back to New York and she created this organization that is still very active: Independent Curators International.

AJ: In Cleveland, then, was where you first used tape . . .

JD: Yes, yes, Cleveland was first. And then I started doing [it] in New York, where I was also doing drawing and collage. In New York, I had a bigger studio–three thousand square feet—and I was working full-time on my art. That was a big, big difference. It was the beginning of the time when museums and some alternative spaces became interested in video. It was the time when MoMA started their video program, when the Whitney started the New American Filmmakers, when the Kitchen opened, when Anthology Film Archives opened. It was the early seventies.

This is the first of two parts. Read the second part here.

The post “I have to go back to New York. I have no choice”: Interview with Jaime Davidovich (Part 1) appeared first on post.