The Cruel Optimism of Doris Salcedo

The Cruel Optimism of Doris Salcedo © J. Gibran Villalobos (2012) 1 Community becomes possible thanks to the holding power of place. Not only this, but the event occurring is itself an instant of materiality, stretched over the wood, stone, and bring of any given location. Monuments of Memory, The Memory of Place: Phenomenology of the Uncanny Dylan Trigg Through a reading of Lauren Berlant’s text Cruel Optimism I will demonstrate that Doris Salcedo’s acknowledgement of her identity as a Third World artist is cruelly optimistic in her desire for recognition, and the longing for membership in globalized polity. Through Salcedo’s use of the everyday and the city, she invokes individualized histories and memory as a technology to produce an intimate or communal public; however, in the process of acknowledging her Third World identity she forfeits her approach at attaining First World status. Cruel Optimism In Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, she states that the goal of her project is to explore relations of desire and obstacles. She explains, cruel optimism exists “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing… It might rest on something like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being.”1 Her assertion is aimed at responding to the repetitive and exhausting position of the politically depressed that seek repair of what may constitutively be broken; however, for Berlant this pressure to resolve “can eventually split the activity of optimism from expectation and demand [towards the suspension of] one’s attachment to the political, to one’s sense of membership in the idea of the polity.” In terms of the project of contemporary art, the desire to be recognized, to be seen, in the globalized biennial format, suggests that the artist carries their identity to a political forefront, by which the First World assumes that the problem of inclusion has been resolved. Problematically, in the process towards being present, her identity reaffirms the hierarchical structure of exclusivity. Salcedo’s identity and participation in the globalized biennial places her in a identity bind, where she must utilize the “local” and memory to point towards political absence. In an interview with Salcedo, she states, “if I’m presenting my proposal and my knowledge as a person from the Third World it is not validated as the knowledge of a person from the First World. For me living in Colombia is a privilege, it is like living in a condensed capsule of human experience; for me third world identity is enough.”2 The artist self-identifies as a Third World artist, as well as recognizes that her identity and position informs the politics of her work. In her admittance that someone from the First World carries more validity than someone from the Third World, Salcedo is placed as a depressed political figure; however, it is this very same status that garners her placement as a political figure. For Salcedo, Third World identity is source material for collective memory. Colombia’s history is marked with sites of trauma that transgress national identity into nebulous affective memory zones. Salcedo’s work and identity are thus created through her recognition with these sites, political depression of the public, and the prevalence of trauma. Salcedo taps from a violence that reaches into the academia and what is published by the mass media. The sites that Salcedo works from, both physically and temporally, are as Taussig has written, purged, or as termed by Colombians, sites that have undergone a limpia. 3 1 Berlant, Lauren Cruel Optimism Duke Press, Durham, 2011. Inverview with Doris Salcedo, Art21, http://www.art21.org/videos/short-doris-salcedo-third-world-identity 3 Taussig, Michael. Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia. New Press, New York. 2003. xii. “Maria del Rosario Ferro, a young anthrolopoligst in Colombia, made Taussig aware of the ambiguity of ht work, 2 The Cruel Optimism of Doris Salcedo © J. Gibran Villalobos (2012) 2 These spaces have been cleaned, and left only with absences—absences of people, recesses, and objects that point to memory. Cabrera notes, these absences “of formal remembering of violence, the spaces of art play a key role in the articulation of the multiple narratives of violence… they end up constructing a ‘dense forest with deceptively homogenous contours.’”4 It is important to recognize that for Salcedo, the homogenous contours are not limited to Colombian history, although this is largely at play in Noviembre 6 y 7, but rather are open to the participation of First World agents. Noviembre 6 y 7 “No one knows with absolutely certainty what happened” wrote Ana Carrigan on the seize of the Palace of Justice building in Bogota in 1985. November 6 and 7, the days when the M-19 guerilla stormed the building with such force that the internal structure of the palace became permanently injured, became historic blows that would never be forgotten by Colombia; however, as Taussig wrote about his visit to Colombia, it is knowing what not to know that elicits survival. Salcedo, seventeen years later, reminds the residents of Bogota minute by minute and body by chair what they should also remember to forget. Her project Noviembre 6 y 7 directly titled after the historical attack on the building was a public intervention into both the city and the memory of its citizens. The attack in 1985, which lasted a span of two days led to the disappearance and death of over 150 individuals and the destruction of the Palacio de Justicia building. The new building, rebuilt after the siege, was the site for Salcedo’s Noviembre 6 y 7. The work was a 53-hour performance in which approximately 300 chairs appeared at the roof and descended onto the sides of the justice building. The documentary photographs demonstrate that over the course of the performance the chairs would slowly descend. Intended to mimic the loss of the 150 individuals at the siege as well as the eleven individuals who disappeared, each chair that descended became a surrogate for a body. The chairs would slowly accumulate and mark a presence that would very subtly become a mass. Perhaps an exploration on the amalgamation of political strife in Colombia, the chairs erupt from the tension built within the gubernatorial facility. In her proposal for the project, Salcedo states, “the empty chairs are statements of absence allowing one to be aware of the fragility of those who were behind those walls 17 years ago… the empty chair emphasizes the vulnerability, not only of those who worked in the Palace of Justice, but of us all.” I would like to focus on this statement for the dual nature of her proposal. Under one guise she invokes time and the space. She draws upon memory of the massacre in relation to time and to think about history. Upon the site, she intends to disrupt the notion of the government by pointing towards its fragility. The city, which is essentially prescribed and built by gubernatorial systems, is a physical manifestation of coded language as buildings embody their use. Historian Lewis Mumford has written on the interpretation of this coded system as a city comprise of buildings as intense vocational compartmentalizations, over-specialization, and hierarchic subordination of pervasive bureaucratic discipline. His conceptualizations are build upon an understanding of the functionality of the city as a cultural grid by which pedestrian bodies enter communication exchange networks. However, for Mumford, the expansive system of coded information exchange “has been the progressive dehumanization of the fractional man… incapable of embracing a whole situation, or giving a whole response, with emotions, feelings, and imagination as disciplined as intellectual reactions.”5 Mumford’s suggestion is that the imposing nature of these coded sites are affectively impenetrable, as the symbolic meaning has become dehumanized space. In terms of the Palace of Justice, the suggestion exists that limpieza, as “cleansing” meaning to wipe out and kill defenseless people, much the same as a “purge” of the unclean. But, it was pointed out to him” it is also used—and has a far older history—in healing a person or a home from malignity due to spirit attack or sorcery. Such healing not only neutralizes deadly force, but enhances a sense of self in place and time. 4 Cabrera, Marta. Impossible Histories: Violence, Identity, and Memory in Colombian Visual Arts in Technologies of Memory in The Arts. Plate, Liedek et. Al. New York, 2009. 203. 5 Mumford, Lewis. “The Regimentation of Congestion.” The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. MJF Books, New York. 1961, 433. The Cruel Optimism of Doris Salcedo © J. Gibran Villalobos (2012) 3 within those walls, justice is produced; however, Salcedo’s use of the building as a site-specific performance is as Miwon Kwon states, “inclusive of nonart spaces, nonart institutions, and nonart issues and take up a more intense engagement with the outside world and everyday life.”6 Salcedo’s gesture is performative memorializing, in its reflection on a moment in history. Her disruption, both as a literal interruption of the coded meaning of place, as well as an interruption on its visual aspects create rupture by which the public can enter the site’s affective zones. It is in the tradition of the silent protest that Noviembre 6 y 7 adopts Berlant’s suggestion that “art aims broadly to remobilize and redirect the normative noise that binds the affective public of the political to normative politics. Without having speech as a cushion, affect shapes the event.” However, I would like to extend the argument away from a solely political argument towards a secondary issue: the public sphere. Given that the public is made witness solely by proximity, and by invoking memory, a sense of community is invented. Monuments of Memory, by Dylan Trigg, constructs the formation of a we through the compression of time, he writes, Where ecstasy and trauma are concerned, an event occurs, whereby the insulation of the self is shattered, so marking the arrival of a memory rooted in the public sphere. Because of this enclosure of the past, the compression of time is reinforced by the shared experience. As the event takes place, so it becomes enmeshed in the surrounding environmental areas, such that an affiliation between different people is broadly constructed. By remembering an event of heightened proportions, therefore, we simultaneously invoke a broader region of properties, places, and objects that remain implicated within that event. The memory is not mine alone, despite its being taken from a singular perspective. Instead, the image is bound by a relation of other remembering agents, each of whom constitutes and is constitutive of the event itself. The result is a formation of a “we.”7 The Palace of Justice, already a politically charged site, is transformed and creates a site of shared remembrance—Salcedo successfully generates a political space not only of commemoration but of one based on collective memory and continuity. The disruption of the coded site re-creates the violence of the attacks on November 6th and 7th; however, her recreation compresses the past with the present appropriating the site and broadening its shared experience. The constitution of the trauma is fractured by each individual chair—the proportions of the chair in contrast to the massive building allowed viewers to embody the absent space marked by the chair but as individual pedestrians would look upon the empty chair and a collective we is engendered. Indeed what Salcedo has created is an intimate public; one in which the public “senses that matters of survival are at stake and that collective mediation through narration and audition might provide some routes out of the impasse and the struggle of the present, or at least some sense that there would be recognition, were the same participants in the room together… Minimally, you need just be interested in the scene’s visceral impact.” I utilize Berlant’s argument for the construction of an intimate public because of its ability to be translated as way to read Salcedo’s projects. Before I continue I would like to further delineate what Cabreras has suggested as the construction of cultural memory in “Impossible Histories: Violence, Identity, and Memory in Colombian Visual Arts,” comprising that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose “cultivation” serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity”8 6 Kwon, Miwon. One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. 7 Trigg, Dylan. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens: Ohio, 2012. Print. 75. 8 Assman, Jan. “Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective Constructions of the Past” in Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500. Oxford, 2004, 37. The Cruel Optimism of Doris Salcedo © J. Gibran Villalobos (2012) 4 Cabrera expands this understanding of identity by tracing boundaries; she suggests cultural memory is categorized by reconstructing traces of the past that are significant in the present, organizing common knowledge, creating a hierarchical system of values, and lastly by its self-reflexivity.9 Salcedo’s projects largely engage reconstructions, as seen in Noviembre 6 y 7 as a way to organize self-reflexivity. Noviembre 6 y 7 literally reconstruct the time frame in which the violent attack occurred but instead of a theatrical reenactment, Salcedo creates a present significance by adopting the quotidian nature of functional furniture in its dysfunctional state. Likewise, she marks the desire for seats of power to become functional. In this unspoken desire, Salcedo reorganizes a common history into a common affect as she disrupts the hierarchical stability of the justice building. And lastly by not announcing or publicizing her performance, she allows the seemingly un-directed performance to produce selfreflexivity. Self-reflexivity oscillates between the interrogation of history and the fixing of identity, however it always remains suspended between both constructions. As mentioned earlier, cruel optimism is when something desired is in actuality an obstacle in attaining the fulfillment—Salcedos’ approach in the creation of a shared memory or identity is what has garnered her membership in international discourse. She has absolved language found in cultural history and reintroduced the political, in different terms, into the forms of the everyday. Salcedo’s constructions are largely successful due to their use of the quotidian, material that is inherently affective with a conscious of the everyday. However, it is also the aesthetic personality of worn furniture, bare brick, and dysfunctional cracks and fissures that evoke her Third World identity to be marked. The everyday as utilized by Salcedo is found in her materials. She is has the ability to evoke from chairs and bricks their domestic value and thereby captures the essence of what they hold. It is the bareness and fragility of the material that evokes the purged space, having undergone a limpia, spaces that begin to lose form of being. Abyss Abyss, presented at the Castello di Rivoli for the Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2005 was intended to, as Salcedo herself writes “show that space can play an active role in the construction of consciousness.” 10 As in her previous projects, the history of the site largely informs the work. In this case, she proposes to use room 18 of the Castello di Rivoli. Mieke bal explains the site: “the space is underscored by the history of this particular room where Carlo Emanuele III immured his father, King Vittorio Amedeo… a space used for politics inside the domestic space.”11 In room 18, constructed with a brick dome at its center, Salcedo executes her piece by extending the brickwork within the walls of what is now the museum down the sides of the room. The wall crept down from the center of the dome and encase, from within, the space. The brick construction only left about one meter of the exposed wall visible in its underside. Light, from the windows would not change throughout the day, by which captives held inside would become disoriented in terms of time. The immense nature of the space 9 Illustration based on text by author. Bal, Mieke. Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010. 11 Ibid. 10 The Cruel Optimism of Doris Salcedo © J. Gibran Villalobos (2012) 5 becomes affected as it engages viewers to shift their perception of time and space. Captivity, however, is Salcedo’s goal—to hold the viewer in a suspended state between the oscillating nature of history and fixed identity. In The Poetics of Space, Bachalard’s impressions of space are narrated through Baudelaire’s conception of vastness and immensity.12 For Bachalard vastness is most active in the realm of the intimate space because vastness itself “does not come from the spectacle witnessed, but from the unfathomable depths of vast thoughts.13 Abyss as constructed by Salcedo alienates the viewer from grounding terms such as time and space. As the room is consumed from within, and the immensity of the bricks are suspended shell within the white cube, the viewer is left severed from the powers of gravity, and through memory, succeeded in recapturing, through solitude, but solitude with an immense horizon and widely diffused light “immensity with no other setting than itself.”14 Salcedo successfully transforms the politicized space of Room 18 by purging its history, and, unlike Noviembre 6 y 7 instead of disrupting the codified space, she grounds a new meaning in the same setting. It is her desire to enact her Third World identity in a First World event that Concerned with her position as a Third World artist, Salcedo Presented at the Turin Triennial, already a site that is looked upon, as David Neill describes, “to model the “local as a kind of microcosmic manifestation of vast global ebbs and flows that while they manifest in unique form at each location, nevertheless preceded-and are external to—local phenomena is a fraught model not because it gestures towards a very real unequal relations of power, but rather because it postulates the local as being in some sense “exterior” to the global, which clearly it is not.” Neill’s proposal to revise perception of the biennialized artist draws from Salcedo’s project—in her effort to conjure a collectively affected public sphere, she draws from self-reflexive history, and gestures towards the arrival of the third world to the first world. Abyss not only creates an emptiness, an affective space for self-reflexivity to occur, but also, the place for a secondary public sphere, one where the first and third world meet and the through its amplification and mapping, an affective cultural economy are some of tasks to be undertaken. Iain Chambers suggests in “Race Modernity and the Challenge of democracy” these spaces we call “public spheres” are never simply open, they have consistently been constituted through inclusion and exclusion through possibilities of access, control and negation, and above all, through the shifting political cultural and historical orchestration of what passes for identity and belonging.” Again, I’ll reintroduce Berlant’s project of cruel optimism—her claim is that a new ordinary has emerged recasting conventional, archaic political emotions towards the production of better ways of mediating the sense of a historical moment that is affectively felt but undefined in the social world that is supposed to provide some comforts of belonging. For Berlant it is possible to imagine, or in salcedo’s case to be sustained in the potentialized present that does not reproduce all of the conventional collateral damage of the past. Abyss usurps the Castello di rivoli’s history as a site of a center of power. As the proposal reads, the space is and attempt to address irreconcilable disparity, to attempt at the unsgraspable nature of its dome, located somehwer between a political hegemony and a transcendental idea.” Much scholarship has already been written about Salcedo’s materiality, the use of worn materials, somber fragility, and 12 Bachelard, Gaston, and M. Jolas. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. In Journaux Intimes, cited by Bachelard (loc. Cit. p. 29) Baudelaire writes, “In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however, ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it.” Bachalard writes, “Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.” I utilize this in my narrative of Salcedo’s Abyss for the unifying ability to tie the phenomenological understanding of space, away from memory as used in Noviembre 6 y 7 into a synthesized view of the ordinary into a the grand. From the Third World affected aesthetic into the grandeur of the biennial. 14 Ibid 13 The Cruel Optimism of Doris Salcedo © J. Gibran Villalobos (2012) 6 empty space. However, in this project I am interested in reading Salcedo’s work and identity as they are attached to a political discourse through affected public and private identities. Robert Storr’s 2007 venice biennial was branded with “think with the senses—feel with the mind”, an approach to the curatorial project that McNeill says “failed to animate relationships between participant works, or rather fail to animate these relationships on a level that moves beyond the purely formal.” He was interested in the curatorial approach that approaches a reading about the intersubjective, or as Berlant writes the “in betweeness” of viewer and affect, but never fully satisfies. Salcedo did not participate in the biennial, but it does mark the year that her installation Shibboleth is cut onto the floor of the Tate’s Turbine Hall and that she presents Neither at London’s White Cube. Both are executed in the year where the first world audience is asked to think with their feelings. Her work presented at the epicenter of the Western world, marks her arrival to the First World. She is granted space largely on the condition that her identity as woman from Colombia be present in its absence. However, her self-acknowledged Third World identity is exactly what places her in cruel optimism’s double double bind, “ even with an image of better good life available to sustain optimism, it is awkward and it is threatening to detach from what is already not working.