by Rod Mengham
In Plegaria Muda we are faced with a mass of tables and a repetition of elements, and yet each unit of paired tables, both joined and separated by a layer of earth, is individuated by the unpredictable growth pattern of grass seedlings sown into the earth. The contradictory structure of the installation echoes the tension between commemoration and anonymity that has always complicated the social psychology of cenotaphs and graves of unknown soldiers. Describing Colombia as the country of ‘unburied death’, she conceives of her work as a demarcated space for symbolic burial [and states]: ‘Reyes Mate writes that each murder generates an absence in our lives and demands that we take responsibility for the absent, since the only way they can exist is within us, in the process of living out our grief.’ Recognising that process of interiorisation as inevitable and unspeakable, Plegaria Muda – the title means ‘mute prayer’ – nonetheless proposes to restore such deaths to the sphere of the human, to the mute eloquence of the objects and relationships from which they were so violently wrenched.
In our installation, in the Romanesque chapel at the heart of the medieval buildings of Jesus College, Cambridge, where I am curator, we had five units of Plegaria Muda, five pairs of tables and layers of earth to arrange within the stone built-rectangle of a transept of the chapel. The space was empty apart from medieval grave slabs in the floor and memorial slabs on the wall – a reticent space but one which already spoke quietly of commemorative practice. On the day of the installation we had not yet received a floor-plan from Doris’s studio and were short of time before the opening. We decided to try out an arrangement of the five units and slowly but surely found one that seemed to lock into place. We had just finished when the floor-plan came through. Extraordinarily, four of the five units were exactly where Doris wanted them, and the fifth was only one table’s length away from where it needed to be. This produced a measure of complacency, always unwise in curation. I visited the installation several times during the first week, feeling more and more that everything about it was just right. Then the grass started to die, and panic – my panic – set in. The fabulous stained glass windows that were all the work of Edward Burne-Jones were not admitting enough light. It wasn’t that I was worried Doris might be angry (though I was, a little) it was more an anxiety that the underlying purpose of the work was not being served, that the obligation on me was becoming less and less curatorial, more and more ethical: I had to keep alive something that was dying, and by so doing, preserve that margin of the work that was addressed more importantly to the dead than to the living. (We saved the grass – we put a stadium’s worth of lamps on it every night and watered it as if it was the only green thing in the whole of the east of England.)
Those paired tables are almost identical to one another, but while one achieves the function all tables have for the living, the other denies and reverses it. They are mirror images of one another, not just in their physical disposition and visual aspect, but in their fitness for purpose. Like the houses for the dead constructed during the Neolithic, which duplicate the architecture, furniture and internal arrangements of houses for the living, they are exact counterparts in everything but use. Our houses are full of furniture, but we no longer build replicas of them for the dead – instead we have art galleries, where we see the paraphernalia of our daily lives undergo metamorphosis into another state.
So much of Salcedo’s earlier work involves a breaking and grafting, dividing and fusing of different objects and materials with an assertiveness that makes the understated discrepancies of Plegaria Muda’s furniture assemblages seem initially much less disturbing. But the latter’s simple inversions of form are more systematic and more insidious. The aesthetic symmetry of their mirrored tables threatens semantic disorder on the scale envisaged by Mary Douglas’s reflections on matter that is out of place, in Purity and Danger:
‘Order implies restriction: from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So disorder is by implication unlimited, no pattern has been realised in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognise that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolises both danger and power.’50
The mirrored tables of Plegaria Muda seem perhaps too logical in their inversions of order: seen in isolation, the paired gestures are almost too perfectly synchronised. But taken together, their multiple misalignments produce a chain-reaction of disorder, a ricochet-effect of entropy, an unravelling of pattern wherever we look.
The dead exist in our mindfulness about them, a mindfulness that often takes shape as a search for closure, a search for the right pattern; but there is no finality in such patterns, and our mindfulness about the dead is an ever-renewed pattern-making that never settles into order; we say we want the dead to find rest, but it is only a form of words to bring comfort to the living; and the most adequate form of attention towards the dead is to keep them in mind, restlessly alive.
I used the word metamorphosis earlier to describe what happens when art takes hold of the everyday and changes the kind of attention we pay towards it, selecting articles of everyday use that we are accustomed to push into the back of our minds, in order to bring them into focus, and with them, the value of what they make possible: the condition of being fully human. We mark the stages of our induction into the conventional range of experiences making up that condition with rites of passage, more or less ostentatious performances of growth through transition. But there are certain artists who propose that these rites are joined end to end, in a condition of slow and continuous transition whose progress and value we are hardly aware of. These artists include Salcedo, and they include Kafka.
Kafka’s story Die Verwandlung, usually translated as Metamorphosis takes as its premise an overnight transformation from the human condition to something quite alien: that of a beetle or cockroach. But the process by which Gregor Samsa loses his sense of belonging to a family, a social and economic structure, a species, is slow and continuous throughout the narrative; the story puts into reverse the usual process by which the individual becomes integrated into a gender role, family membership, social identity, and it marks the significance of the ever loosening hold that these things have on Gregor’s awareness of existence through what happens to the furniture.
It is only when his mother and sister decide to remove the furniture from his room that Gregor understands what it means to cease to be human: ‘Did he really want his warm room, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be turned into a naked den in which he would certainly be able to crawl unhampered in all directions but at the price of shedding simultaneously all recollection of his human background? […] They were clearing his room out; taking away everything he loved; the chest in which he kept his fret saw and other tools was already dragged off; they were now loosening the writing desk at which he had done all his homework when he was at the commercial academy, at the grammar school before that, and yes, even at the primary school […] And so he rushed out […]’51 The furniture is nothing more nor less than an instrument of sedimented time and experience. The complete undoing of Gregor’s belief in his own humanity is marked by his ultimate indifference when the furniture in his room is eventually replaced by refuse and bric-a-brac.
The Metamorphosis dates from 1915; one year earlier Kafka describes in a letter a shopping expedition made with his then fiancée Felice Bauer:
We went shopping in Prague for furniture for a Prague official. Heavy furniture that looked as though it could never be removed once it was in place. Its solidity is exactly what you liked most about it. My chest felt crushed by the sideboard; it was a perfect tombstone or a monument to the life of an official in Prague. If a funeral bell had begun to chime anywhere in the distance while we were in the furniture store, it would not have been inappropriate.’52
What Kafka is effectively saying here is
that we went shopping – not for me, or for you, or for the both of us, but for an idea of existence, the existence of a ‘Prague official’, which I do not want. The metamorphosis from unmarried to married man is identified with another rite of passage, between life and death, in which Kafka’s sense of self will be buried in his identity as a Prague ‘official’. The transformation is marked by the threat of being oppressed and overwhelmed by the wrong kind of furniture: a tombstone that is masquerading as a sideboard.
Beckett is another writer – one that we know is important to Salcedo – whose work gives to furniture a crucial role in measuring the dimensions of human relationships in the very process of their withdrawal. His notebooks are stuffed full of descriptions of furniture that have all been disposed of before publication in one account after another of the remorseless exfoliation of human contact. What sticks of furniture remain become the focus of obsessive routines that are progressively isolating in effect.
I think Salcedo is using furniture in her work to make it ask questions of us that are very similar to the questions asked by Beckett and Kafka. In Kafka’s fragmentary narrative ‘Home-Coming’, a prodigal son is unable to return home, unable to be reintegrated into family life, because he cannot come to terms with the furniture, cannot hear what it is saying to him: ‘My father’s house it is, but each object stands cold beside the next, as though preoccupied with its own affairs, which I have partly forgotten, partly never known. What use can I be to them, what do I mean to them?’53 Leaving home and returning home are, of course, important rites of passage. What Salcedo’s furniture-based sculptures are doing is not making us ask, what use are these works to me, what do they mean to me? but what use can I be them, what do I mean to them? They are works that have been rendered formless with legendary care and precision; they use materials that have been rendered homeless on purpose and on principle; they come to us bringing all kinds of sedimented meanings that have been metamorphosed in the processes of fabrication and installation; and they place on us an obligation to be mindful of the very real, historical experiences that they have been drawn from.
2015
Steve McQueen’s Static and the State We’re In
McQueen’s Static circles around more than just the Statue of Liberty, which is one of the most familiar icons of all time, yet one whose meanings have been anything but static in the almost one hundred and fifty years since first conception. The name chosen for McQueen’s film is ironic in respect of the constant shifting of position between the original intentions of the French abolitionist activist Laboulaye, the broad appeal of the statue’s national symbolism, fostered by American politicians, and the spontaneous perceptions of immigrants on arrival at Ellis Island. As a black artist, McQueen will surely have registered the deriding of the statue’s received meanings by the African American press on the occasion of its dedication in 1886. And in the one hundred and thirty years since then, it has been impossible to stabilise or consolidate the perceptions of artists and writers – especially poets – whose very active conscriptions have turned the statue into a virtual monument of disunity. This essay will concentrate on the writing strategies of Hart Crane and Samuel Beckett that offer especially powerful models for thinking about and representing the evasive symbolism of the Statue of Liberty, whose presence on the North American shoreline comes to resemble that of a modern Proteus.
Even materially, the statue has undergone constant change. It existed for many years as just a part of itself – the arm holding the torch – exhibited separately in Philadelphia in 1876. The head came next, also as a separate entity, exhibited in Paris in 1878. When the construction of the whole figure was underway, the plan to clothe a 150ft-high brick pier in copper sheeting was exchanged for that of an iron scaffold that would be more flexible in high winds. The statue itself has never actually stood still; by the 1980s the point of one of the sunrays projecting from its crown was seen to be sawing through the arm as its rocking motion grew more pronounced. It is possible to move around inside the statue and to share its own perspective on the world, but not always: public access has been withdrawn for long periods of time, especially after the events of 9/11 and the re-examination of ideas of liberty and licence, and how variously they can be understood. McQueen’s film was made towards the end of a period of closure, lasting from 2001 to 2009, when the statue could only be experienced at a distance.
In this context, the bird’s eye view of the statue shared by McQueen’s camera cannot avoid an association with the kinds of surveillance manoeuvres performed routinely by police helicopters. The statue is more than just a symbol of liberty, a vehicle for the idea of a society founded on the principle of individual rights, it is also a metonym for the condition in which that society actually exists, subject to certain limitations on its freedom of movement. In McQueen’s film, liberty itself is being shadowed and monitored like a suspect – as well it might be, since absolute liberty is a serious threat to the state.
Static hovers obsessively over the question of how much or how little the reduction of liberty is justified; and in whose interest, finally, is a regime of control to be maintained? Of course, this question is sharpened by the realisation that the circling movement of the airborne camera is also that of the airliners whose mercilessly controlled collision with the Twin Towers was what triggered the introduction of emergency powers. We can understand the suspension of access to the Statue of Liberty as a practical measure, but the statue is not just an actual place but also an idea, a problematically constructed idea with a long history of controversy over its meanings, and it is therefore a site whose local reality is almost lost behind the global reputation it has acquired. The question of liberty is truly cornered by this film, which has no time or space for anything else, its brief span an epitome of the arbitrariness involved in any truncation of its scope.
‘Static’ is also a noun referring to the noise that interferes in the transmission of radio or telecommunications systems. The only noise we hear in McQueen’s film of the same name is that of the helicopter engine that drowns out all other ambient sounds. The medium of aural representation is filled with the sound of its own apparatus, the helicopter being a necessary component in the mechanical system of filmmaking – as necessary as in a surveillance regime. Radical critique in the medium of film uses the same machinery as that of counter-terrorism. The output signal of independent film-making encounters feedback when its point of view, its style of documentation and its technical media all reproduce those of control systems. And vice versa: surveillance procedures can be foregrounded by independent film-making as key elements in the move to a social reality where an increased degree of control is accepted as normal; just part of the everyday routines of the modern state.
When it was first thought of, by the French anti-slavery campaigner Edouard Rene de Laboulaye, the statue was intended to celebrate the principle of freedom exemplified by the abolition of slavery in 1865. But it is now understood universally as a symbol of the open arms policy towards immigration that has prevailed for much of the history of the United States. The decisive factor in this respect has been poetry; in particular, the words of the sonnet ‘The New Colossus’ written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, when the statue was still under construction. As a figure welcoming new arrivals to the United States, the statue has become indissolubly linked to the phrasing of the sonnet’s lines 10–12:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
However, the poem was not in fact mounted on the pedestal of the statue until 1903, with word and image circling around one another for a period of twenty years before their relationship was literally cemented. The poem’s title links the statue to yet another association that was certainly in the mind of its designer, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who had proposed in the 1860s to build a lighthouse at the entrance of the Suez Canal amalgamating elements of two of the a
ncient Wonders of the World, the Pharos of Alexandria and the Colossus of Rhodes. The torch in the hand of the Statue of Liberty retains the association with a lighthouse beacon, while Lazarus’s poem envisages the upraised arm of the statue holding a lamp to light the way to an open door. This scenario is behind Lazarus’s appellation of the statue as ‘Mother of Exiles’, beckoning emigrants to their true home. However, the maternal element is absent from classical and Revolutionary French conceptions of Liberty as a virginal figure.
Subsequent poetry has changed the meanings that the sponsors and builders of the statue hoped to leave to posterity, but it has also given it a longer and longer anteriority by tracing the origins of its meanings in historical and mythological precedents. The passage of time occupied by the viewer of McQueen’s film is enough to register the fact that what is being contemplated is always seen during a period of transition; is always undergoing some degree of semantic transformation – at times gradual and unspectacular; at other times, sudden and dramatic. But it is actually never static.
