Issue 11

BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL

ISSUE 11: BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL

Christopher Green From the Editors Dana Liljegren

ARTICLES

1. Max Bonhomme Human scale and the technological sublime. An iconology of the ‘crisis of civilization’ in the 1930s

2. Julia Bozer Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map of , 1975

3. Trangđài Glassey- Un/Earthing Borderland-Motherland: Stateless Trầnguyễn Bodies Intimating the Waves, the Woods, and the Walls

4. Alyssa Bralower Land Grant: Complicating Institutional Legacies Allison Rowe

SPECIAL FEATURE

5. Anne Spice Give us our Knives

ARTIST PROJECT

6. Jackson Polys Morph Target Displacement Mapping: Zack Khalil Removals / Pre-Creative Acts Adam Khalil

DISPATCH

7. Teresa Retzer The resurgence of Blood and Soil: symbols and artefacts of Völkische Siedlungen and Neo-Nazi Villages in

REVIEWS

8. Stephanie Lebas Huber Review: De Wereld van Pyke Koch

9. Crystal Migwans A Monumental Undertaking

10. Horacio Ramos On Representation, Appropriation, and Everything in Between

Cover artwork: Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, Morph Target Displacement Mapping: Removals / Pre-Creative Acts (details), 2019. © Jackson Polys, Zack Khalil, and Adam Khalil.

Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture

From the Editors

CHRISTOPHER GREEN DANA LILJEGREN

“Whose blood and soil?” asked a subheading in a recent article by The Economist about the rise of Native American politicians in the .1 The question was posed to suggest that the stunning victories of Native American Congressional and local state representatives in the 2018 midterm elections represented a challenge to the Trumpian dogma that white nativists have a proprietorial claim to America. A year prior, white supremacist overtures fully emerged into the light when alt-rightists chanted “Blood and Soil,” the infamous Nazi slogan advocating racial purity located in the earth of the homeland, during the summer 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. In opposition, political activists and environmentalists have made inherently anti-fascist counter-claims to land and ancestry. As oppositional claims to land, heritage, and state have rapidly crescendoed, how might we evaluate the nature of the soil over which such claims to and identifications with (the) E/earth are fought? “The very notion of soil is changing,” Bruno Latour has recently written in Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. “The soil of globalization's dreams is beginning to slip away.”2 Latour describes how Brexit, Trump’s election, and the migration process are all the result of modernization making two complementary movements contradictory: "attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil on the one hand, having access to the global world on the other."3 The articles we offer in this issue of Shift examine concrete historical examples through which these contradictory attachments to soil and access to the global world have been formed, barred, and inflected. Issue 11, “BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL,” seeks to take a broad view of the interaction and interrelation of bloodlines, labor, and the natural world as they have been expressed in visual and material culture across time. In examining more recent art, the contributions herein consider possibilities in which the contradictions of the local and global can be made complementary. Latour suggests that we look to what he terms the Terrestrial to bring together the opposing figures of the soil and the world, a soil that belongs to no one and a world that forbids us to limit ourselves to a single location inside constructed boundaries. In its title, Issue 11 of Shift anticipated Latour’s provocation to

1 “Off the reservation,” The Economist, November 29, 2018. 2 Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 4. 3 Latour, Down to Earth, 12. ii SHIFT

center the Terrestrial. By inserting “EARTH” into the midst of the racially defined nationalist slogan “Blood and Soil,” we seek to decouple and escape any essentialist illusions in the pairing of land and heritage. But even as critical theorists search for a glimpse of the commons on our collectively shared planet, techno-capitalist oligarchs seem poised to abandon the planet to the forces of material extraction. They look to the oceans (as in “Seasteaders” seeking to colonize special economic zones), or to outer space (as in Elon Musk’s spectacularized extraterrestrial pollution with branded explorations into commercial space travel) and propose to use technology to escape, as much as save, humanity. Is a healthy dose of technoskepticism called for? In his article “Human scale and the technological sublime. An iconology of the ‘crisis of civilization’ in the 1930s,” Max Bonhomme gives us historical context for similar questions in Europe in the 1930s. He argues that the visual culture of France in this period expresses an anxiety towards the technological through scale relationships between man and machine. Against the backdrop of a widespread return to the rural, Bonhomme nonetheless finds that critiques of mechanization were accompanied by a “humanist” iconography that aimed to reconcile man, machine and land. In the confrontation between nature and technologies of organization and control, like the passport or map, new possibilities of identity arise. Julia Bozer’s article “Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map of Chile, 1975” interprets the Chilean artist Juan Downey’s 1975 installation Map of Chile as a multilayered geopolitical critique. She traces the formal and cultural roots of the installation, which featured a live anaconda slithering across a map of Downey’s home country, and finds in them a critical confrontation of the international relations of the inter-American Cold War. She connects his use of maps, natural resources, and the very movements of the snake’s body to a breakdown of borders and demarcations that revealed to Downey new ways of thinking through the relationship between structures of space and power. Trangđài Glassey-Trầnguyễn draws on years of research into the Vietnamese diaspora to further consider how the relationship between borders and migratory bodies is expressed in visual art. Her article “Un/Earthing Borderland-Motherland: Stateless Bodies Intimating the Waves, the Woods, and the Walls” asks how the earth maps out human bodies, and how the earth in turn is mapped out by human movement. By highlighting three contexts of Vietnamese migration, Glassey-Trầnguyễn considers the shifting status of distinct groups of immigrants and the ways in which journeys over sea, land, and wall are experienced, remembered, and visualized. Alyssa Bralower and Allison Rowe reflect on the limits of institutional memory and archival collections to make visible the histories of violence and erasure that are embedded in the land of public American universities. Their article “Land Grant: Complicating Institutional Legacies” traces the curatorial process of an exhibition held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the logic underlying the display of university-owned objects and artworks. The exhibition revealed the legacies of settler colonialism that are still at work within land-grant university systems and from within the institution questioned the university’s foundational entitlement to public lands. In the Green and Liljegren | From the Editors iii

haunting cyanotype of a lone university researcher surveying the land amid a cornfield, Bralower and Rowe argue, one can find the link between the scientific studies of the academy and a long history of colonial displacement. As a curatorial case-study, Land Grant offers a lesson in working with and through the parameters of the university art to weaponize the collection and the archive towards fugitive mores. Anne Spice’s special feature, “Give us our Knives,” poetically dissects the captive nature of the museum, science, and collecting, as well as the violence behind them as tools of colonial oppression. In recent months Spice’s work has taken her to the frontlines of Indigenous struggles against the resource extraction industry and its state support. At Unist’ot’en Camp in presently named British Columbia, members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation blocked access to their territories by pipeline corporations seeking to exploit the unceded land. In early January 2019, heavily armed RCMP officers enforced a court- ordered injunction to dismantle the checkpoint and allow pipeline workers access to the bridge and territories which Unist’ot’en Camp had been safeguarding. Spice asks in her present contribution to make the link between settler fantasy storytelling, Indigenous genocide, and the museum. Particularly when the settler colonial courts are the ones enforcing dispossession, how can one “make ethical and legal sense of white possession?” Her presence on the frontline of an ongoing and violent conquest that ended with neither Wounded Knee nor Standing Rock makes that link explicit. Yet she also proposes a “speculative future Indigenous retrospective” in which she looks back from a future space in which the museum and anthropology have been abolished. From such a position, Spice posits, emerge vastly new possibilities to build living webs and links with the collected ancestors and material culture presently locked behind glass cases. Spice’s provocations are followed by an Artist Project by Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, whose design graces this issue’s cover. In their ongoing investigations into the process by which culture is collected, studied, and consumed by the museum and dominant society, these artists have turned digital capture technology back onto the presumed captor. Through film, video installation, and curated public programs, Polys and the Khalils seek out fissures in the technologies of display and control to lay bare the multi-faceted natures of appropriation and the fantasies of removal as a creative or scientific act. The project presented here builds on Spice’s essay with images that suggest the spectral removal of monuments, calcified equestrian remains, and the digital transmutation and transportation of appropriated culture. In Issue 11 we have introduced the Dispatch, a report on new research from the frontlines of the field. Teresa Retzer provides a glimpse of the ongoing and essential research into the ecosystem of German neo-Nazi and “New Right” communities with her essay “The resurgence of Blood and Soil: symbols and artefacts of Völkische Siedlungen and Neo-Nazi Villages in Germany.” As Retzer describes, the close examination of the visual and material culture of radical right-wing communities allows one to parse the nefarious ways in which their ideologies are being spread and critically developed across online and rural networks, lending essential methodological lessons to much-needed investigations of like-minded groups across the globe. iv SHIFT

The issue is rounded out by a series of exhibition reviews from across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Stephanie Lebas Huber evaluates how fout (wrong) politics were addressed in an exhibition of the Dutch painter Pyke Koch, whose celebrated status in the Netherlands is overshadowed by his troubling membership in the Dutch Fascist party and collaboration with the German Occupation. Crystal Migwans praises the historic solo exhibition Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental at the , the largest survey of the Anishinaabe artist’s work to date. Migwans considers the monumentality of Belmore’s legacy and forms in terms of her career-long labors to reclaim, alongside other Indigenous artists and curators, the institutional spaces from which they have been systematically excluded. Following a similar vein, Horacio Ramos parses the institutional approach to the complex relationship between Latinx art, modernist aesthetics, and Indigenous identities in the Whitney Museum’s exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art. As Ramos points out, the legacy of indigenismo, or the appropriation of Indigenous traditions and practices, in Latinx art can conceal or distract from fraught political and racial inequities throughout Latin America. In the work on display, representation and appropriation existed along a complicated spectrum of conflated claims to identity and related claims to land and language. This conflation cuts to the root of this issue’s theme. The projects and essays in this issue of Shift offer a diverse look at artistic strategies and recent exhibitions that confront the evolving notions of land, borders, and cultural heritage, made ever more fraught and urgent within the current political climate.

Christopher Green is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY and a 2018–2019 Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American and National Museum of the American Indian. His dissertation considers the interplay between Euro-American modernism and Northwest Coast Native art.

Dana Liljegren is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY and a 2019 scholar-in-residence at RAW Material Company in Dakar. Her current dissertation research examines the repurposing of trash in contemporary Senegalese art and pays special attention to materiality and the circulation of objects under condi•tions of postcolonialism.

Human scale and the technological sublime. An iconology of the “crisis of civilization” in the 1930s

MAX BONHOMME

Compared with the technophile enthusiasm that generally characterized the 1920s, the visual culture of the 1930s was marked by imagery of civilizational decline nourished by allegorical images, the rhetoric of which I propose to analyze here. The key hypothesis of this survey is that technological anxiety finds its visual formulae through scale relationships. In the 1930s, the humanist ideal of man understood as “the measure of all things” was countered by an image of man threatened by his own technical achievements. Of course, this type of representation was not dominant in mass culture as a whole. In the midst of the crisis, the illustrated press continued to glorify technological progress achieved by Western countries, while a new consumer culture was developing; one that embraced technical modernity (automobiles, aviation, the radio, and promises of television). Photographically-illustrated magazines—the principal mass medium of the era—fully participated in this modernist culture while offering, though not without paradox, increasingly sharp criticism of industrial civilization and the dangers of technology. In March 1933, the illustrated weekly Vu published a special issue devoted to the social consequences of machinisme (the French term for mechanization) and the threats it represented to civilization.1 Published at the heart of the economic crisis, which affected France a few years after the United States, the magazine echoes a debate that had been stirring the French intellectual world since the late 1920s and that Georges Duhamel referred to as the querelle du machinisme.2 A photomontage by Marcel Ichac provides the cover: a dystopian image of a civilization doomed by over-mechanization (fig. 1). This motif of a man trapped between colossal gears, the meaning of which is explained by the title of the issue, “End of a Civilization,” is part of a long series of similar images; a famous sequence from Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936) is a memorable example. The common media trope of civilizational decline that developed around 1930 can be summed up by three recurring elements: First, the image of gears as a metonym to designate either industrial work or work in general, or a phenomenon of autonomous and

1 Vu no. 259 (March 1, 1933). 2 Georges Duhamel, “Sur la querelle du machinisme” in Revue de Paris, XL (15 avril 1933), 721-752; Michel Raimond, Éloge et critique de la modernité (Paris: PUF, 2000), 92–117. 2 SHIFT

uncontrollable movement; second, a depersonalization of the human figure reduced to a silhouette whose identity is difficult to distinguish; and third, the disproportion between man and machine, a contrast maximized by the rupture of scale.3

Figure 1. Vu, no. 259 (March 1, 1933), cover. Photomontage by Marcel Ichac. © Musée Nicéphore-Niépce, ville de Chalon-sur-Saône, France.

Should we consider these images of the “crisis of progress” as political allegories? Indeed, it is tempting to understand them as the visual equivalent of the “rhetoric of decline,” very much praised by the pamphleteers of the far right.4 However, the political use of these images betrays diverse and sometimes antithetical ideological positions. The ideal of a return to the rural, which has its visual counterpart in the revalorization of landscape, does not reflect a left-right political split.5 Hence, my aim here will be to read mass media images in their relation to contemporary debates regarding nature, man and

3 We assume that the reduction of the human figure to a silhouette epitomizes humanity as a whole, not just the industrial worker. In some cases, the reference to the assembly line is more explicit; the image would refer to anonymity and alienation as effects of the scientific rationalization of work on the individual. 4 Juliette Rennes, “L’argument de la décadence dans les pamphlets d’extrême droite des années 1930” in Mots 58, no.1 (1999), 152–164. 5 Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 3

technology inasmuch as they betray common rhetorical devices. I propose to identify a body of both visual and verbal images, characterized by the use of the same stylistic tropes. But images also possess specifically visual rhetorical means, typically used for communication or propaganda purposes. These rhetorical devices are the object of “political iconography,” a current of art history concerned with the political relevance of Aby Warburg’s and Erwin Panofsky’s iconological method.6 Thus, political iconography is concerned not only with how images represent relations of power but also how images actively contribute to shaping political forms. In that sense, it calls for close iconographical analysis, since the relation between visual elements is considered an allegory and/or a prefiguration of political organization.7 But considering that the images studied here were all published in the mass media, the notion of narrative imagery, put forward by André Gunthert, could also be relevant for understanding the dynamics of imitation and appropriation typical of the functioning of cultural industries: “To the question: what do images do? we can answer: they produce other images. This characteristic productivity makes it possible to distinguish between iconography, a group of images isolated from any criterion, and imagery defined by its public success, which presents internal coherence traits, but also an evolutionary dynamic.”8

Critics of mechanization in France and Europe

The cover of Vu cannot be understood outside the ideological context of France circa 1930, marked by harsh debate over the merits and dangers of machinisme. The intensity of the polemic increased after 1931, when the effects of the economic crisis were first felt, even though the condemnation of “the Machine” is a literary topos whose roots go back to Romanticism.9 The critics of mechanization, emanating both from the intellectual world and from workers’ resistance, had until then been rather measured in the French context, compared, at least, to the situation in Britain.10 After the ravages of the First World War, the enthusiasm for technical progress was already strongly altered: it was

6 Uwe Fleckner, Martin Warnke, Hendrik Ziegler, eds., Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie, 2 vol. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2011). 7 A classic example is the frontispice of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: Horst Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007). Carlo Ginzburg, Fear, Reverence, Terror (Calcutta and London: Seagull Books, 2017). See also Christian Joschke, “À quoi sert l’iconographie politique?” in Perspective, no.1 (2012), 187–192. Patrick Boucheron, The Power of Images: Siena, 1338 (Cambridge, UK and Medford, USA: Polity, 2018). 8 André Gunthert, “Comment lisons-nous les images? Les imageries narratives” in Politiques visuelles, ed. Gil Bartholeyns (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2016), 223, author’s translation. 9 Serge Audier, La société écologique et ses ennemis (Paris: La Découverte, 2017). 10 François Jarrige, Techno-critiques. Du refus des machines à la contestation des technosciences (Paris: La Découverte, 2014).

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now clear that “the Machine” could prove to be destructive and that industrial war could take on horrifically inhuman forms. This memory of the First World War weighed heavily on the authors, whom, in the interwar period, placed themselves on the side of critics of machinisme. Georges Duhamel, one of the main protagonists in this debate, stressed the importance of his first-hand experience of war as he raised awareness about the potentially destructive nature of technology. In 1930, Duhamel published a pamphlet entitled Scènes de la vie future, which was met with considerable success.11 In this account of the writer’s journey to the United States at the end of 1929, he criticizes the supposed materialism of American civilization, which he detects in industrial production and increasingly mechanized daily life as well as cultural production (cinema and recorded music). In what Duhamel considers an excess of rationalism, he targets both the transformation of work due to mechanization, which he opposes to qualified manual work, and the transformation of culture, which has become a mass culture; in particular cinema, whose unbridled rhythm he believes is not conducive to reflection. Scènes de la vie future was commented on profusely by critics at the time and gave rise to a vivid debate in the press around 1930.12 Many works contemporary to Duhamel’s pamphlet multiply arguments against mechanization by further developing this rhetoric of excessiveness.13 For Georges Duhamel, as for most of the French authors who took part in the quarrel, the United States constituted the emblem of the modern machinist civilization characterized by excessiveness. The skyscraper is but one of the symbols of its technological excess. Jean-Louis Cohen has shown to what extent this association has marked, often in the negative, the French architectural imagination.14 In this notion of excessiveness, political and aesthetic stakes are tightly knotted, as the negative image of the United States (but also of its Eastern mirror, the USSR) represents for these authors a threat to a “spirit of measure” considered specifically French. For Duhamel, America and gigantism are inseparable, if only by the very scale of the American territory:

11 Georges Duhamel, America: The Menace, trans. by Charles Miner Thompson (New York and Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931). 12 Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, “De l’anti-américanisme en France vers 1930: la réception des Scènes de la vie future” in Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 48-1 (2001), 120–137. See also Gérard de Catalogne, Dialogue entre deux mondes: enquête (Paris: Alexis Redier, 1931). 13 Jean-Léopold Duplan, Sa majesté la machine (Paris: Payot, 1930); Gina Lombroso, La rançon du machinisme (Paris: Payot, 1931); Louis Hoyack, Où va le machinisme? (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1931); Henri Bergson, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1932); Henri Daniel-Rops, Le Monde sans âme (Paris: Plon, 1932); Nicolas Berdiaev, L’Homme et la Machine (Paris: Éditions Je sers, 1933). 14 Jean-Louis Cohen, ed., Scènes de la vie future: l’architecture européenne et la tentation de l’Amérique, 1893-1960 (Montréal: Centre canadien d’architecture and Paris: Flammarion, 1995). Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 5

Its inhuman cities, the American people have set them up on a ground that never invites moderation. Lakes, valleys, rivers, forests, plains, everything is oversized, nothing seems to be done to incline man towards a thought of harmony. Everything there is too big. Everything discourages Apollo and Minerva.15

Contrary to criticisms of mechanization developed since the nineteenth century, which focused essentially on the nature of industrial work and sometimes on its environmental consequences, the discourse of decline around 1930 goes so far as to anticipate the destruction of humanity itself. In later decades, science fiction would make its own the narrative of the uprising of machines: a result of the original Promethean sin.16 In Germany, philosopher Oswald Spengler pursued a similar idea in a markedly more tragic tone than Duhamel’s Voltairian satires. Spengler’s reception in France was, nonetheless, very limited. This is not surprising given the explicitly Francophobic character of his Decline of the West (1918–1922).17 Technology had an ambivalent status in Spengler’s view: considered as the epitome of Western civilization in its Faustian relationship to nature, the exponential development it had recently experienced testified, according to him, to a harmful domination of materialism; a symptom of the civilizational decline he condemned.18 Above all, it was with Spengler that the idea of a technological excess— both fascinating and terrifying—was most explicitly formulated, in terms that betray his taste for the aesthetics of the sublime. Modern technology would indeed testify to an impetus “towards faraway places without limits”19:

15 “Ses cités inhumaines, le peuple américain les a dressées sur un sol qui, jamais, n’invite à la modération. Lacs, vallées, rivières, forêts, plaines, tout est démesuré, rien ne semble fait pour incliner l’homme vers une pensée d’harmonie. Tout y est trop grand. Tout y décourage Apollon et Minerve.” Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future [1930] (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2003), 81, author’s translation. 16 Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’apocalypse joyeuse : une histoire du risque technologique (Paris: Seuil, 2012). The myth of machines uprising dates back at least to the nineteenth century, in particular to the work of Samuel Butler (1835-1902) which had been rediscovered in the 1930s: see J.B. Fort, “Les idées de Samuel Butler” in Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, t. 122, no. 9–10 (Sep–Oct. 1936), 215–239. 17 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West [1918-1922], trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). First French translation by M. Tazerout: Paris, Gallimard, 1931 [first part] and 1933 [second part]. 18 “The creature is rising up against its creator. As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man. The lord of the World is becoming the slave of the Machine, which is forcing him—forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not—to follow its course. The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team.” Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Life [1931], trans. C.F. Atkinson (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1932), 46. See also Eric Michaud, “Figures nazies de Prométhée, de l’’homme faustien’ de Spengler, au ‘Travailleur’ de Jünger” in Communications, no.78 (2005), 163–173. 19 Oswald Spengler, Le déclin de l’Occident, esquisse d’une morphologie de l’histoire universelle, v. II [1922], trans. by M.Tazerout (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 462, author’s translation from the French edition.

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That is why the word spoken is sent instantly beyond the seas; that is why we witness this ambition for records and dimensions, giant hangars for giant machines, frightening ships and bridges, skyscraper constructions; fabulous forces that obey, in a hurried point, the hand of a child; factories of steel and glass that reel, tremble, groan, and in which the tiny homunculus circulates as absolute master and finally feels nature below him.20

Lucien Febvre rightly noticed how Spengler’s theory of History was fed by the fears of Germany in the 1920s and how the rhetoric of civilizational decline nourished an unhealthy joy (Schadenfreude) that consisted in anticipating one’s own ruin:

Spengler had, in the 1920s, some of the most coveted commodities, say, a certain pathos, a resolute anti-intellectualism, the heroic notion of destiny, anti-aesthetics, the thrill of the human creature before the majesty, the ample majesty of History.21

In France, some authors described as “non-conformists,” most of whom shared a rejection of democracy and liberalism, agree with certain Spenglerian theses concerning the role of technology in the “decline” of civilization, considered as a harmful victory of materialism over “the Spirit.”22 It would be inaccurate, however, to attribute these criticisms of modernity solely to a reactionary line of thinking, not only because dictatorships have often put forward a façade of reconciliation between the Blut und

20 “C’est pour cela que le mot prononcé est envoyé instantanément au delà des mers; c’est pour cela qu’on assiste à cette ambition des records et des dimensions, géants hangars pour des machines géantes, bateaux et ponts effrayants, constructions de gratte-ciel; forces fabuleuses qui obéissent, en un point pressé, à la main d’un enfant; usines d’acier et de verre qui tanguent, tremblent, gémissent, et dans lesquelles le minuscule homunculus circule en maître absolu et sent finalement la nature au-dessous de lui.” Spengler, Le déclin de l’Occident, 463. 21 “Spengler tenait boutique, en ces années 20, des denrées alors les plus convoitées disons, un certain pathétique, un anti-intellectualisme résolu, la notion héroïque du destin, l’anti-esthéticisme, le frisson de la créature humaine devant la majesté, l’ample majesté de l’Histoire.” Lucien Febvre, “De Spengler à Toynbee, quelques philosophies opportunistes de l’histoire” in Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 43rd year, no. 4 (1936), 579, author’s translation. 22 Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30: une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris: Seuil, 1987). Olivier Dard, Le rendez-vous manqué des relèves des années trente (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002). In fact, since the 1920s, mechanization has been associated with a kind of unnatural perversion by conservative writers: “The machine is an automaton artisan by which the man, lured and exhausted by the very effort of this birth, pretends to be replaced. But he is betrayed. He grieves himself and spoils himself in his vain machinations as in the substitutions of sexual life. [. . .] Because there can be no question of repudiating it, [. . .] it is necessary to ward off the deviation, the inversion.” Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Mesure de la France (Paris: Grasset, 1922), 112, author’s translation. (“La machine est un artisan automate par quoi l’homme, leurré et épuisé par l’effort même de cet enfantement, pretend se faire remplacer. Mais il est trahi. Il se chagrine et s’abîme dans de vaines machinations comme dans les substitutions de la vie sexuelle. […] Car il ne peut être question de la répudier, […] il faut conjurer la deviation, l’inversion.”) Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 7

Boden tradition and Promethean technology, but also because anarchist and socialist currents also warned—for other purposes—against the possible dangers of technological development (with positions that helped to form the modern concept of political ecology or ecological society).23

From the crucified worker to the worker-monument

The cover of Vu calls for another genealogy, one that highlights the presence of mythological Nachlaben in twentieth century political iconography.24 Indeed, Marcel Ichac’s photomontage makes visual references that evoke the negative connotations of the iconography of torture (the breaking wheel), the representation of the underworld (with the flames in the background) and, more specifically, the figure of Ixion. This association between mechanized work and torture instruments was already very present within militant iconography, especially in anarchist imagery. In 1906, the painter František Kupka published a lithograph showing a worker crucified on a cogwheel in the anarchist newspaper Les Temps nouveaux (fig. 2). This iconographic type works as a visual analogy between work and torture. Possibly, this visual formula could have developed in reference to the supposed etymology of the word travail (work), purportedly derived from the Roman word tripalium, a torture device used in ancient Rome to punish rebel slaves. Although this etymology has been questioned by linguists, it is likely that it fed the analogies observed in the political imagery of that time.25 The visual metaphor was used in the 1930s in connection with criticism of the “scientific” organization of work known as Taylorism. For example, in 1934 the American communist illustrator Hugo Gellert published a pictorial interpretation of ’s Capital (fig. 3), in which workers are shown tortured on huge gears.26 The metaphor works on two levels: the worker is reduced to a simple cog in the industrial machine, but he is also sacrificed (like the crucified Christ) on the altar of capitalist profit.

23 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Audier, La société écologique. 24 On the notion of Nachleben, see Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). 25 André Eskénazi, “L’étymologie de Travail” in Romania, vol. 126, no. 503 (2008), 296–372. Christoph Bertsch, “Der grekreuzigte Arbeiter. Anmerkung zu einem vernachlässigten Bildtypus der Zwischenkriegzeit” in Arbeit und Industrie in der bildenden Kunst, ed. Klaus Türk (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), 40–49. 26 Hugo Gellert, Karl Marx’s Capital in Lithographs (New York : Ray Long & Richard Smith, 1934), n.p.

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Figure 2. František Kupka, lithograph Figure 3. Hugo Gellert, Karl Marx Capital in published in Les Temps nouveaux 12, no.32 Lithographs (New York : Ray Long & Richard (December 8, 1906), 8. © Bibliothèque La Smith, 1934), n.p. © Digital Library of India, Contemporaine, Nanterre, France. Kolkata.

As a counterpoint to this negative imagery of industrial labor under a capitalist regime, the affirmative visual strategies of communist propaganda tended to reverse the relation of scale between man and machine. From the crucified worker, dominated by the mechanical element, one passes then to the worker-monument, now overhanging the means of production of which he has become master. A photomontage by John Heartfield for the cover of the German communist magazine Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung could be defined as a visual hyperbole, the meaning of which is oriented by scale relationships (fig. 4). The face of a Soviet worker occupies two thirds of the image, surmounting industrial buildings. These cover the man’s arms, turning him into a man-machine hybrid, as suggested by the caption “A new man—Master of a New World.” Communism, in fact, is characterized by an emancipatory vision of technology, insofar as it places power in the hands of the workers and not the capitalists. We know, for example, the enthusiasm with which Taylorist principles were welcomed in Lenin’s Russia. At the time of the French querelle du machinisme, the Communists of course took part in the debate, but only to denounce the reactionary “bourgeois” character of Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 9

these critics of mechanization.27 The position of the French Communist Party in this regard is summed up by sociologist Georges Friedmann in the communist magazine Regards:

Line work, in itself, facilitates production, makes it faster, often easier. But for this to happen (as Marx still says about the tool) man must use it and not serve it. This control of the machine is only possible in a socialist regime where the instruments of production are actually exploited for the benefit of the community, as we see in the USSR.28

In this respect, one should stress the importance of the magazine L'URSS en Construction (USSR in Construction), a propaganda magazine illustrated with photographs and designed by artists, most of whom were protagonists of Constructivism. This magazine contributed crucially to the dissemination of the Soviet ideal of technological progress in Western Europe, magnified by the magazine’s large format (30 by 41 centimeters) and the quality of its photographic reproductions. From the visual point of view, one of the recurring elements of communist propaganda consists in formulating an analogy between the gigantism of the machine and the gigantism of the worker himself (these “heroic” figures are mostly masculine). This is the case, for example, with the cover of a book by Paul Vaillant-Couturier published by the French Communist Party (fig. 5). The blue lettering of the title, “The Industrial Giants,” is superimposed on a photograph by Max Alpert showing two workers from below, which accentuates the effect of monumentality. Photomontage lends itself particularly well to these antinaturalistic scale games, insofar as it is based on the assembly of photographic fragments, sometimes heterogeneous in size, without necessarily relying on the rules of linear perspective. In this regard, one can speak of meaningful perspective or perspective of importance to characterize an image in which objects are represented not according to their spatial situation but according to their symbolic importance, as is often the case in medieval art.29 In the photomontages of the 1920s and 1930s, there are also occurrences of inverted perspective (the vanishing lines do not meet in the background of the image, but in front of it). For art historian Devin Fore, this reversal of perspective testifies to a desire to undermine the anthropocentric

27 Georges Friedmann, Problèmes du machinisme en URSS et dans les pays capitalists (Paris: Éditions Sociales Internationales, 1934); Georges Friedmann, “Machine et humanisme” in Europe, no. 151 (July 15, 1935), 437–444. 28 “Le travail à la chaîne, en lui-même, facilite la production, la rend plus rapide, souvent plus aisée. Mais il faut pour cela (comme dit encore à propos de l’outil, Marx) que l’homme s’en serve et non pas qu’il le serve. Ce contrôle de la machine n’est possible qu’en régime socialiste où les instruments de production sont réellement exploités au bénéfice de la collectivité, comme nous le voyons en URSS.” Georges Friedmann, “Machinisme” in Regards sur le monde du travail, no. 16 (April 1933), n.p., author’s translation. 29 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form [1927] (New York: Zone Books, 2012).

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humanist paradigm, particularly within the constructivist avant-garde which celebrated the new culture of the machine.30

Figure 4. Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung 13, no.44 Figure 5. Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Les bâtisseurs (November 1, 1934), cover. Photomontage by John de la vie nouvelle : neuf mois de voyage dans Heartfield. © Bibliothèque La Contemporaine, l’URSS du plan quinquennal. Volume 3 : Les Nanterre, France. géants industriels (Paris: Bureau d’éditions, 1932), cover. Designer unknown, photographs by Max Alpert. © Bibliothèque La Contemporaine, Nanterre, France.

Technological Sublime

In the United States in the 1930s, representations of industry in the illustrated press were often imbued with the aesthetics of the sublime, in continuation with what David Nye

30 Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 27–74. Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 11

described as the “American technological sublime.”31 Intended to counter the very idea of alienation and technological risk by placing modern industry within a horizon of mastery over the earth and crossing of borders (the frontier), the aesthetics of the technological sublime is inseparable from a political project. That is, it maintains the ferment of national unity in times of crisis, by reestablishing a transcendence, formerly associated with the wilderness and now with the works of man himself. David Nye also underlines the fact that the sublime is inseparable from a feeling of terror mixed with admiration. Associated in principle with the unlimited powers of nature, the sublime generated by human creations (Nye gives as examples bridges, dams, and towers) can induce the idea of a threat to man himself, overwhelmed by the scale of his own achievements. The first cover of Life magazine, a weekly founded by Henry Luce in 1936, shows Fort Peck Dam photographed by Margaret Bourke-White (fig. 6), a photographer well known for her images of factories and industrial objects. Bourke-White had already done much to spread a positive image of great American industry, particularly through her collaboration with Fortune magazine, an illustrated weekly dedicated to trade and

Figure 6. Life, no.1 (November 23, 1936), cover. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. © Bibliothèque La Contemporaine, Nanterre, France.

31 David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America [1964] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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industry, also founded by Henry Luce in 1930. The dam, the construction of which was part of the policy of major works conducted as part of the New Deal, is staged here in such a way as to highlight its gigantic scale. The technical feat represented is in contrast with the minuteness of the human figure, which lends scale to the image. The enormous mass of the cliff-like dam evokes the geological formations of canyons and such emblematic national sites as Yosemite. Inscribed in the image, therefore, is the imagination of the conquest of the West and the aesthetic of the sublime by which the American landscape had been characterized since the nineteenth century.32 For Terry Smith, the industrial sublime is part of a political and cultural strategy that consists in naturalizing technology and nationalizing the idea of modernity (hitherto rather associated with European culture, especially in the artistic field).33 James S. Miller also shows how Fortune contributed to the invention of an “industrial folklore” legitimizing industrial capitalism as the result of an authentically American vernacular and equally shared entrepreneurial spirit between the people and the elites.34 While the glorification of modern industry seemed to contradict the regionalist artistic currents then very popular in the United States, Fortune’s case demonstrates that the valorization of the American vernacular and “primitive” traits serves to formulate a reconciliation between the past and the present, and to inscribe modern technological development in a long- term tradition. Following a reading of history in terms of civilizations (rather than nations or social classes, for example), the photographs of the Fort Peck Dam elevate it to the status of a monument, an equivalent to the colossal buildings built by ancient civilizations: a monument of the machinist civilization. This articulation between modernism and primitivism is also found among American precisionist painters such as Charles Sheeler or Charles Demuth, who entitled one of his paintings of silos My Egypt (1927).

France, the “country of balance”

From the French point of view, American technological excess aroused both fear and fascination. In a special issue of Vu (May 30, 1936) devoted to the theses of economist Jacques Duboin, we find a photograph of the Hoover Dam reproduced on a double-page spread (fig. 7).35 The intervention of graphic designers Marc Réal and Alexandre

32 Anthony F. Arrigo, Imagining Hoover Dam: The Making of a Cultural Icon (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2014). 33 Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 34 James S. Miller, “White-collar Excavations: Fortune Magazine and the Invention of the Industrial Folk” in American Periodicals 13 (2003), 84–104. 35 Jacques Duboin defended a distributive economy based on an acceleration of mechanization and a reduction in working time. The issue of Vu was published shortly after the victory of the Popular Front in the 1936 legislative elections. Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 13

Liberman consisted in underlining the microscopic size of man confronted with the titanic mass of the dam. The graph on the right emphasizes the exponential increase in industrial production since the 1920s, while repeating, in legend, the haunting fear of a loss of control over machines: “Will the machine get its revenge? Will man lose control of his work?” Faced with the two technological giants that were the United States and the USSR, journalists and politicians have constantly presented France in the 1930s as the “country of balance.” “La France, pays de la mesure” was indeed the title given to a special issue of Vu (fig. 8) dedicated to the consequences of the economic crisis in France.36 This ideal also pervades one of the most widely distributed collections of photographs in the 1930s: La France travaille (France at Work) by François Kollar, published in several issues from 1931 to 1934. If some of Kollar’s images perpetuate certain codes of industrial photography in which the workers pose next to gigantic machines, the photographer generally refused the rhetoric of excessiveness. Most of his images show the workers in close-up, emphasizing their manual skill and control over their work tools (fig. 7). In short, Kollar’s work exemplifies the so-called “humanist” photographic style, in the sense

Figure 7. Vu, special issue (May 30, 1936). Photographer unknown, graphic design by Alexander Liberman and Marc Réal. © Musée Nicéphore-Niépce, ville de Chalon-sur-Saône, France.

36 Vu, no. 220 (June 1, 1932).

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that it opposes the depersonalization and disproportion that I identify as iconic figures of the “crisis of civilization.” Three years after Scènes de la vie future, Georges Duhamel published a lecture entitled L'Humaniste et l'automate, illustrated by photographer Jean Roubier.37 Against the excesses of technical rationalization, Duhamel defended the transmission of manual knowledge and the intuitive knowledge that a practitioner can have of his working tool, which demands long-time learning. The “humanist” ideal of technique that characterizes Kollar’s collection thus crossed the visual and verbal formulations of the man-machine relationship in France before becoming a leitmotif in the propaganda of the Popular Front. The International Exhibition of “Arts and Techniques Applied to Modern Life,” which took place in Paris in 1937, could be globally interpreted as an attempt, on the part of the organizers, to present France as the country of measure, faced with totalitarian countries’ demonstrations of power. As Shanny Peer has shown, the image of the nation conveyed by the exhibition was that of a balanced economy, in which industry would not

Figure 8. Vu, no. 220 (June 1, 1932), cover. Artist unknown. © Musée Nicéphore-Niépce, ville de Chalon-sur- Saône, France.

37 Céline Glatard, “Jean Roubier et Georges Duhamel” in Études photographiques 33 (Autumn 2015), http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3557 (accessed April 13, 2018). Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 15

overtake agriculture.38 Unlike some retrospective readings that would like to see it as a precedent for the “return to the soil” ideology put forward by the State of Vichy under Nazi rule, the 1937 Exhibition must be understood as an effort on the part of the government to display the image of measured modernization, a position of balance between communist productivism and the haunting fear of excessive mechanization.39 François Kollar’s images are ubiquitous in the exhibition. One of his photographs is used in a monumental photomontage entitled Travailler, made by Fernand Léger for the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux. Conceived as a showcase for the CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture), the Pavilion deploys a didactic approach in favor of modern urban planning, whose philosophical foundations rely on faith in the virtues of mastered technology in the service of human progress. From this point of view, Fernand Léger’s photomontage works as an emblem of a harmonious relationship with technology, associating the Promethean dimension of the modern project with a concern for “humanistic” human scale. According to Romy Golan, “The motif reads like an actualization of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, who continues to stand, imperturbably, at the epicenter of the mechanical world and remains, as such, the measure of all things.”40

Conclusion

This case study of an iconographical motif omnipresent in 1930s visual culture has shown how certain images and rhetorical devices cross discourses and pictures, drawing the contours of a coherent political mythology. “The Machine” (in the singular, according to a recurrent hypostasis in the discourse), and more specifically the cogwheel, function as visual allegories of the uncontrolled movement of History, the fatal outcome of which is then announced. To the verbal topoi of excessiveness correspond as many images in which proportion ratios function as signifying elements. Faced with the predicted collapse of modern civilization, the iconography of decline must be analyzed for its prospective and mobilizing value. Operating on the register of anticipation, readily hyperbolic, the rhetoric of these images is intended to strike the imagination and possibly trigger action. Following the inventory of political iconography initiated by Martin Warnke, the motif of the man and the wheel can be considered one of those visual formulae loaded with historical references and ready to be

38 Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 14–20; Gérard Namer, “Les imaginaires dans l’exposition de 1937” in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, year 28, vol. LXX (January–June 1981), 35– 62. 39 Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, 119–136. 40 Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Mural Painting in Europe 1927–1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 162. On the modern reinterpretations of the Vitruvian man, see Giovanni Lista, Da Leonardo a Boccioni: l’Uomo vitruviano e l’arte moderna (Milan: Mudima, 2012).

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used for (sometimes antithetical) political purposes.41 Coming from socialist and anarchist iconography, the motif of the machine as torture wheel has been gradually abandoned in favor of a new Promethean vision of technology, put forward by both the USSR and the United States. In the context of France in the 1930s, these two countries were seen as countermodels for their supposed technological gigantism; hence the elaboration of a “humanist” iconography that aimed to reconcile man, machine and land.

Max Bonhomme is a PhD candidate in Art History at Paris-Nanterre University. His doctoral dissertation deals with political photomontage in France between 1925 and 1945.

41 Fleckner et al., Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie.

Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map of Chile, 1975

JULIA BOZER

We might perhaps say that wherever suffering and helpless humanity is found in blind quest for salvation, the snake will be close by, as an explanatory image of the cause. —Aby Warburg1

In April 1975, Juan Downey’s solo show, “Energy Systems,” opened at the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR) in Manhattan. At its center was an installation entitled Map of Chile, which featured a live green anaconda slithering atop a map of Downey’s native Chile (fig. 1). The artist had salvaged the map from a trashcan near the Chilean Embassy in Washington, D.C., colored it in by hand, and used it to line the bottom of a plexiglass-covered box.2 Air holes were drilled along each edge, and a small pool of water was added to the base, in order to sustain the snake. “Energy Systems” represented Downey’s second exhibition at the CIAR—he had participated in its group show of “Latin American New Painting and ” in November 1969—but it was to be his most eventful, for within hours of its performative debut the anaconda was forcibly removed from the venue. Downey opted to leave the rest of his piece intact, adding a handwritten note half explaining the act of censorship (fig. 2).3 His audience was left to wonder how, exactly, the snake had offended. The relationship between the anaconda and the map of Chile has resonance on multiple levels. Most obviously, the snake and the country bear a distinct morphological affinity. Geographically, Chile is so long and serpentine that, on the map, its length is distributed in three vertical sections; like the anaconda, it is forced to contort itself to fit within the horizontal frame of the box. More significantly, however, the anaconda lends its name to the US-owned Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which profited from Chile’s rich copper reserves before they were nationalized by socialist president Salvador

1 From Warburg, “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual” (1923), originally delivered as “Reminiscences from a Journey to the Pueblo Indians,” a lecture to a “non-professional audience.” Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 2, no. 4 (April 1939), 291. 2 Marilys Downey recounted the events of the map’s discovery during an interview with the author on April 24, 2018. 3 The anaconda—along with the rest of the installation—would not be re-exhibited until thirteen years later, when it was reinstalled at Exit Art, New York, as part of the exhibition “The Debt,” June 28–July 9, 1988.

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Allende in 1971. The economic pressures exerted by Anaconda (and other multinational corporations) contributed heavily to the violent military coup led by General Pinochet against Allende’s government in 1973. Perhaps the formal dissonance between the snake and the map in Downey’s installation—where the smooth, earth-toned pattern of the anaconda’s skin clashes with the garish reds, blues, and yellows the artist has scribbled coarsely over the cartographic markings—underscores the contrived, abstract status of the map and its arbitrary divisions of space, compared to the natural lands they represent.

Figure 1. Juan Downey, Map of Chile, 1975. Wood, water receptacle, colored pencil on found map of Chile, live anaconda, 83 7/17 x 66 15/16 x 17 11/16 in. Juan Yarur Collection, Fundación AMA, , Chile. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York.

This essay interprets Downey’s installation as a multilayered geopolitical critique by tracing its formal and cultural roots. An examination of the CIAR’s specific institutional entanglements in the Chilean coup gives way to a wider analysis of how Downey used maps and national/natural resources as allegories to reflect on international relationships. As the following pages will show, Downey’s “anaconda map” emerged at a charged point in the artist’s career, when his approaches to art, ecology, technology, and travel converged as critical tools to confront the forces of cultural influence and political control that had come to define inter-American dynamics—and the inter-American art world—in the Cold War era.

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Figure 2. Juan Downey with Map of Chile, installation, 1975. Photo by Harry Shunk. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York.

The CIAR—known today as the Americas Society—had opened to the public eight years before “Energy Systems” at 680 Park Avenue, a six-story townhouse previously occupied by the Soviet Mission to the United Nations.4 The building’s reinvention—and the institution’s inception—paralleled the political strains of the Cold War, which had escalated in the Americas since the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Led by chairman David Rockefeller, then the President of Chase Manhattan Bank, the CIAR promoted the interests of a group of US businessmen eager to keep the hemisphere’s remaining capitalist nations free from communist governments that would threaten their trade.5 At its inauguration on September 18, 1967, an address by then-Vice

4 The townhouse itself had featured prominently in a New York Times cover article in 1960, where an accompanying press photograph showed Nikita Khrushchev (then the Premier of the Soviet Union) delivering a speech from its stone balustrade. See “Khrushchev Offers Views from a Park Ave. Balcony” in , September 22, 1960 (pages 1, 11). 5 Rockefeller had already established the Business Group for Latin America (BGLA) in 1963 as the “private sector” branch of President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Alliance for Progress, a policy intended to “accelerate the economic and social development of the participating countries of Latin America” and thus limit the appeal of communism. The BGLA would later become the Council of the Americas and would partner with CIAR upon the latter’s incorporation in 1965. Notably, the CIAR’s first president, William D. Rogers, had

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President Hubert Humphrey (also an honorary trustee) underlined how such economic concerns should become a political mandate for organizations like the CIAR. “Given the conditions of everyday life in many parts of Latin America,” he warned, “what is a tiny minority in this country could be a dangerous and broad movement—or a majority—in other countries of the hemisphere.”6 The Center’s membership, representing about ninety percent of US investment in Latin America, stood poised, under the safe guise of cultural diplomacy and artistic patronage, to hold significant sway in ongoing debates over US policy in the region.7 While it is unclear who explicitly took action, these muddied Cold War politics and their related ideological maneuvers are universally seen as responsible for (among other unfortunate events) the ousting of Downey’s anaconda. The political implications of the snake and its allusion to Anaconda Copper were apparently not lost on CIAR leadership.8 They were well aware that, for Downey and other left-leaning critics, Anaconda Copper served as a prime symbol for the US economic forces that fueled the Pinochet coup. But neither were the CIAR’s own ties to the mining conglomerate lost on Downey. Board chairman Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank had been Anaconda’s main creditor throughout the 1960s, and his great uncle, William Rockefeller Jr., had owned the company in its early years and overseen its expansion in the late 1800s.9 In the loaded game of cultural chess in which Rockefeller, the CIAR, and artists like Downey were engaged, Map of Chile thus contributed to what Luis Pérez Oramas—using the framework of Michel de Certeau—refers to as a “succession of tactical moves at the heart of a strategic institution.”10 been a former deputy United States Coordinator of the Alliance. See David Rockefeller, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 2003), 425–431. 6 The full transcript of Humphrey’s address was accessed in the René d’Harnoncourt Papers, [VII.56], The Archives, New York. For a discussion of the political points made, see Homer Bigart, “Humphrey Finds Latin Parallel to U.S. Racial Strife” in The New York Times, September 19, 1967. 7 A summary of the institution’s membership is given in Rockefeller, Memoirs, 429. The full record of its leadership, membership, and financial contributors in early years (accessed in the René d’Harnoncourt Papers, [VII.57], The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York) unsurprisingly reads as a laundry list of US corporate giants—such as Standard Oil, the United Fruit Company, and the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation—with explicit business interests in South America, as well as prominent governmental figures such as , who would later become Vice President to Gerald Ford. 8 One source recounts that David Rockefeller saw Map of Chile shortly before “Energy Systems” opened. 9 Also, shortly before—and likely in anticipation of—Anaconda’s nationalization by Allende, the Vice Chairman of Chase Manhattan, John B.M. Place, was appointed to be Anaconda’s Chief Executive Officer. Notably, this was not the first time a Rockefeller of David’s generation had been involved in cultural censorship for political reasons. His older brother, Nelson, was responsible for the 1934 plastering-over of ’s fresco at Rockefeller Center—entitled , it included a prominent portrait of Lenin. 10 See Luis Pérez Oramas, “Looking South: Strategic Visions, Tactical Revisions” in A Principality of Its Own: 40 Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society, ed. José Luis Falconi and Gabriela Rangel (New York: Americas Society, 2006), 48.

Bozer | Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map 21

In this light, it is tempting to view Downey’s Map of Chile as a straightforward protest by a Chilean national against an aggressive foreign state. As a political statement, it aligned with more overt actions Downey had orchestrated in the years since Allende’s defeat. These included Chile Sí, Junta No (Chile Yes, Junta No) (1974), in which demonstrators gathered outside the New York headquarters of International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT)—another institution with financial ties to the 1973 coup—wearing white T-shirts printed with the eponymous slogan and stained with blood-red spots.11 More in kind, Downey’s “anaconda map” recalls prior instances when he had used the names of US-owned multinationals operating in Chile to reflect metaphorically on the political events unfolding there, much as his friend and compatriot Pablo Neruda had done in his epic Canto general.12 For example, in Downey’s 1974 video Publicness, imaginary characters such as “Miss ITT” feature in satiric interviews in which they comment on the incidents of 1973 and parody associated organizations such as Anaconda and Kennecott Copper. In one performance, entitled Imperialistic Octopus, Downey had the names of eight major US corporations printed onto the eight long arms of a large, octopus-like sculpture—“tentacles” that ensnare their prey in much the same way as an anaconda. But to reduce Downey’s Map of Chile to such a two-dimensional, specific parable about the effects of one formidable predator/corporation on another exposed target/nation is to miss the project’s more nuanced critiques. The tense spaces and relationships that Map creates are constructed not around simplistic binaries, but in cleverly imbricated layers of contact, contradiction, and disjuncture. Resting on a subtle jest—despite the corporate reference, Chile is one of the only nations in South America where the anaconda is not native—and a thinly veiled cartographic challenge—if the political and economic reach of the United States is boundless, then what purpose do Chile’s national borders actually serve?—Downey’s installation examines the more complex currents at play between geographic identities, cultural institutions, and governing bodies during the Cold War. Specifically, in a venue such as the CIAR, founded on a purely hemispheric vision of the “inter-American relationship”—a capitalist West united against a communist East—Downey’s model questions the efficacy and wisdom of Pan-American partnership from a South American point of view. With the added Rockefeller link between the CIAR and Anaconda, the institution itself, and the “soft diplomacy” of the art world by extension, become complicit in the extraction of resources, order, and ultimately life from southern lands. The collaboration between history and art history in

11 Declassified CIA documents have since confirmed the connection between IT&T—which owned a majority share of the Chilean Telephone Company prior to Allende’s election—and the 1973 coup. 12 Neruda’s epic book of poetry, published in 1950, rewrites the history of the New World in fifteen sections from an anticolonial, South American perspective. In the section entitled “The Sand Betrayed,” he includes the poems “Standard Oil Co.,” “Anaconda Copper Mining Co.,” and “United Fruit Co.,” illustrating the damages these companies have done to South American lands. Downey had met Neruda while living and studying in Paris in the early 1960s. He references the poet often in his art, quoting his work in his travelogues and editing footage of his 1972 poetry readings into his videos. For example, for Do Your Own Concert (1968), Downey copied Neruda’s poem “Significa Sombras” by hand onto three accompanying drawings.

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disturbing balances of power is actually reinforced within Map of Chile by the presence of Pedro Lira’s La fundación de Santiago (1888) in the upper left-hand corner of the map; the iconic painting depicts in relatively peaceful terms the violent founding of the Chilean capital in 1541 by Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia.13 An ambivalence toward idealistic models of cultural exchange in general, and Pan- American models in particular, came to mark Downey’s artistic career after his return to the Americas in 1965, after five years spent studying in Europe. That fall, he was featured in two shows almost simultaneously, one at the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C. and the other in the Galería Latinoamericana at Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba—two spaces dedicated to continental internationalism, yet fundamentally opposed in their respective methods and motivations.14 Following the Washington show, Downey reluctantly chose to relocate his life and studio to the United States, weighing his “solidarity with Cuba” and passionate rejection of “cold war imperialism” against the opportunities and connections that such a move could provide.15 Over the next decade, first in Washington, then in New York, Downey became immersed in the growing field of cybernetics. For him, machines and technology-based art represented vehicles of “invisible energy” that could encourage audience participation and facilitate human interaction across lines of difference.16 The majority of his resulting works were charted out in a universal, expansive conception of space that he called “invisible architecture,” where connections are forged through electronic and quasi-telepathic networks, rather

13 At the “Energy Systems” show, Lira’s painting was placed in subtle dialogue with Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), a copy of which was hanging in an adjacent room. The exhibition marked the debut of Downey’s video installation, also entitled Las Meninas, which (like the painting) involves spectators in a sort of spatial and perspectival game, rooted in the gaze of the king and queen. In addition to the copied painting, Downey’s installation included pre-recorded video footage (with professional dancers playing the various characters), mirrors, and live video feedback. For Downey, Las Meninas revolved around power dynamics: in his travelogues, he recounts how, for him, Velázquez “identified the monarchs with their subjects, infolding space and centuries in a video manner.” He then links these themes with the Spanish conquest and contemporary conditions, writing a string of words associated with imperialism, violence, and greed: “Bestialism, colonialism, gesticulation, stupidity, right-wing, decadence, crumbling, animalization, the wife of the cop, superimposed, anti-human, International Corporations, extortion, bloodshed, oppression, repression, death, and rebirth!” See “Travelogues of the Video Trans Americas,” reprinted in Nuria Enguita Mayo and Juan Guardiola Román, eds. Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls, exhibition catalogue (Valencia: IVAM Centre del Carme, Generalitat Valenciana, 1998), 332. A press release of the show from late March reveals that Las Meninas was meant to be the exhibition’s “principal work,” but it seems it was later displaced to an adjacent room to make space for Map of Chile in the center. (Juan Downey Artist File, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.) 14 The exhibition “Juan Downey of Chile” ran at the Pan-American Union in Washington, D.C. from September to October 1965; “Calcografías de Juan Downey” showed at Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, in November 1965. 15 See James Harithas and David Ross, “‘Offspring of My Soil’: Juan Downey’s Art of the 1960s and 1970s” in Enguita Mayo and Guardiola Román, Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls, 88. 16 Juan Downey, “Electronically Operated Audio-Kinetic , 1968” in Leonardo, Vol. 2, no. 4 (October 1969), 403. Bozer | Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map 23

than physical structures. For instance, in his “” Invisible Energy Dictates a Dance Concert (1969), five dancers based their movements on sounds produced by different pieces of sensory equipment distributed around the Smithsonian, which responded to different “energies” emitted by the audience. When he tried to map this process in geographic, international terms, however—in his proposal Invisible Energy in Chile Plays a Concert in New York (1969) (fig. 3), the same sensory information would be transmitted via satellite—the model fell apart. The project was never completed. Internally, privately, Downey doubted whether institutions, technology, or even art could generate a sense of community and shift the determined power balances of cultural interaction. Writing about his interactive works, he maintained a cynical belief that they create merely “the illusion that the public can participate in the work of art. Actually, we are still spectators mystified by the order that makes the world grow and move, although we pretend that we are determining what happens to us.”17 Though his electronic works were planned as collaborative, cybernetic processes, it was the power of the “system,” and not the agency of the participants, that determined an event’s outcome.

Figure 3. Juan Downey, Invisible Energy in Chile Plays a Concert in New York, 1969. Collage, acrylic, and pencil on board, 60 x 40 in. Photo by Harry Shunk. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York.

17 Downey, “Electronically Operated Audio-Kinetic Sculptures, 1968,” 403. 24 SHIFT

The same held true for the ecological “Life Cycles” Downey would construct in the early 1970s, which, like his “anaconda map,” used natural resources as shrewd political metaphors. The most explicit of these featured sodium nitrate, also known as Chilean saltpeter. Occurring in large deposits in the arid Atacama Desert in what is now northern Chile, the mineral was once valuable as both a fertilizer and as a key ingredient in gunpowder. It was the cause of multiple land disputes between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia over the region’s ownership, most notably during the War of the Pacific, fought between 1879 and 1884. Though Chile “won” the conflict, a majority of the profitable nitrate mines were actually under English possession, connected by a railroad network running

Figure 4. Juan Downey, from Make Chile Rich, 1970. Collage, 34 x 30 in. Collection of Raúl Naón. Photo by Harry Shunk. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York. across the desert.18 By the time a Chilean corporation purchased extraction rights in 1934, the industry was already operating at a substantial loss, as European chemists had developed a synthetic version of the compound in the 1910s—just in time to contribute to

18 The largest company—the Peru Nitrate Company—was established by English engineer James Thomas Humberstone, who had moved to Peru in 1875 to capitalize on the Atacama’s rich mineral deposits. Bozer | Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map 25

the weaponry of .19 By mid-century, the Chilean markets were all but wiped out, and the country had lost a major export and source of revenue. Downey addresses this economic episode in Make Chile Rich (1970), an installation bearing thematic similarities to his 1975 Map of Chile. In a collage placed beside a sack of Chilean nitrate, he alludes to the international forces that played a hand in its production (fig. 4). Pitting “artificial” foreign fertilizers against the “natural” Chilean nitrates, the drawing’s text notes that the former has “proven to be, in the long run, harmful to animals, mankind, plants, soil, and even fatal to some species”—a sly reference not only to the health risks associated with synthetic products, but also to the damaging effects that industrialized, largely Western models of “progress” and trade (not to mention gunpowder-armed conflict) have had on Latin American countries. Shortly after his “Life Cycles,” in the early 1970s, Downey turned to another nascent medium—video—to fuse his participatory aesthetics and ideological undertones through the use of instantaneous feedback on a closed circuit. He partnered with artist collectives such as Raindance Corporation and contributed to journals such as Radical Software, which framed —and particularly the use of portable, handheld equipment like the Sony Portapak—as a viable, countercultural alternative to broadcast television and mainstream visual culture.20 Departing from these principles, in the spring of 1973, Downey began his most ambitious project to date: a series entitled Video Trans Americas, intended as a continuous three-month, videotaped road trip “from New York to the southern tip of Latin America.”21 Announcing his plans in a published manifesto, the artist described his own role in the project as that of a “cultural communicant” who would alternately record and screen his video footage in the different villages he encountered, in order “for people to see others and themselves.”22 In addition to these on- the-ground, impromptu screenings, Downey intended eventually to edit “all the interactions of time, space, and context into one work of art” that would collapse the distances and differences of his destinations into the illusive seamlessness of video playback. While utopian on the surface, in the idealistic, countercultural spirit of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, Downey’s proposal also suggests an awareness of the role that travel and travel narratives—whether in the Spanish conquest or the expeditionary tradition of Alexander von Humboldt—had played in building an “imperial imaginary” of the tropical Americas, making its lands and

19 Contemporary accounts of these events are laid out in R.A.F. Penrose Jr., “The Nitrate Deposits of Chile” in The Journal of Geology, Vol. 18, no. 1 (January–February 1910), 1–32; and M.B. Donald, “History of the Chile nitrate industry” in Annals of Science, Vol. 1, no. 2 (1936), 193–216. 20 Raindance Corporation was founded in 1969 by video artists and media activists Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, and Ira Schneider. Inspired by cybernetics and communications theory (especially the ideas of Marshall McLuhan), Raindance supported video art that bypassed the centralized production and broadcasting model of mainstream television. In the summer of 1970, the group began producing Radical Software, a journal originally edited by artists Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny. 21 Juan Downey, “Video Trans Americas” in Radical Software, Vol. 2, no. 5 (Winter 1973), 4. 22 Juan Downey, “Video Trans Americas,” 4.

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resources attractive and accessible for political and commercial gain.23 As writers such as Julieta González have pointed out, Downey’s series serves as both an extension and a criticism of such histories by sharing the lines of vision—an attempt to “[subvert] the model and [turn] it into an instrument for the critique of colonial legacies in Latin America.”24 As Downey must have known at the time, however, his itinerary was overly optimistic at best. In another example of intercontinental frustration, there is no contiguous motorable road through North and South America. Even the grand Pan- American Highway is separated by the dense Darién Gap between Panama and Colombia and consists of a chain of individual, national highways that run through a variety of difficult terrains. Instead of an epic road trip, Downey’s route unfolded through discrete, sporadic trips by air, land, and water, first to Mexico and Guatemala, then to Peru and Bolivia, then to Chile, between 1973 and 1974, followed by extended stays among Guahibo and Yanomami tribes in the Amazon rainforest between 1976 and 1977. More distressingly, he was only a few months into his travels when political turmoil in Chile boiled over into the full-blown Pinochet coup on September 11, 1973. That day, from his home in New York, Downey recorded in his travel journal that he would “never, never, never forgive!”25 Later that year, while traveling in nearby Lima, he wrote of his ensuing nostalgia for and alienation from Chile as a self-imposed exile. Instead of the “cultural communicant” he had hoped to become for the Americas series—a connective figure bringing the villages of North and South into mutual contact—he had come to feel disconnected from both regions. A travelogue entry from December 1973 describes the final collapse of any remaining trans-American ideal into a total sense of isolation:

In my late childhood, I made up my mind to drive along the American continents. Later, I was enchanted by the reading of Jack Kerouac’s highway epics. In my twenties, after exposure to the New York art world I decided to return south and recuperate my culture. After ten years spent in Spain, France, and the USA, I realized that I would never adapt to the developed world and, conversely, my own third world would never be a market for my cultural aesthetic makings. A perpetual cultural shock was easy to handle at

23 References to Kerouac arise on more than one occasion in Downey’s travel writings—as in the below entry from December 28, 1973 [FN 20]—as do other countercultural road trip models like ’s Romance of the Open Road (in an entry from Mexico City on July 27th, 1973). 24 Julieta González, “Notes on Juan Downey’s Project for a Fake Anthropology” in Juan Downey: El ojo pensante, ed. Marilys Downey (Santiago, Chile: Fundación Telefónica, 2010), 204–205. González bases her argument in large part on the critical analyses of “travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world” presented by Mary Louise Pratt in her seminal Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). The connections between road narratives, colonizing expeditions, and liberationist theologies—and their impact on Downey’s work—is also discussed at length in Nicolás Guagnini, “Feedback in the Amazon” in October, Vol. 125 (Summer 2008), 91–116. 25 Juan Downey, travelogues, as transcribed and translated in With Energy Beyond These Walls / Con energía más allás de estos muros, 331.

Bozer | Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map 27

first; but age only increased the gap and the saudade for a country that no longer exists.26

When “Energy Systems” opened at the CIAR in April 1975, Downey was between the two major stages of his Video Trans Americas travels, having returned from his final trip to Chile (in July 1974), but not yet having departed for the Amazon (in August 1976). The ongoing video project and its attendant issues of geography, identity, and encounter were still clearly on the artist’s mind. Indeed, while back in New York, he was in the process of editing his initial VTA footage for what would become its first exhibition four months later, in September 1975.27 Also troubling the artist, however, were questions of how to balance his growing political sentiment with his established artistic practice. The same month that “Energy Systems” opened, he reflected on these themes in his journal while riding the New York City subway, drafting a “partial soundtrack” for voiceover on his edited videotapes. In part, the entry reads:

An artist should just give an insight of the universe and not an account of domestic problems. . .

. . .There is no cultural freedom in socialist countries; consequently, artists should not be concerned with politics.

I hate non-political art.

What is this shit? Is this art or politics?

Should art be political?

Art and politics do not mix, but look beautiful together, just like oil and water. . .

26 Juan Downey, travelogues, 331. 27 A journal entry written very shortly after, in May 1975, declares, “The Video Trans Americas black and white expeditions have been completed.” (See “Travelogues,” With Energy Beyond These Walls, 333). Their debut as video art would occur with the inclusion of Moving (1974) in the group show “Landscape Studies in Video,” curated by David Ross at the Long Beach Museum of Art from September 27 to October 26, 1975. A solo show of “Juan Downey: Video Trans Americas,” also curated by Ross and including seven video installations, would follow at the same institution from February 21 to March 21, 1976. (See “Chronology of Film and Video Exhibitions” in Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive, 1964–2003 at The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles). Prior to these exhibitions, Downey’s Video Trans Americas video footage had been screened only in “video-performances” where they accompanied live action performances, mostly dance. These included Nazca and Debriefing Pyramid, both 1974, which took place at The Kitchen in New York, and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY, respectively.

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. . .This is a political rally in Lima, Peru, in support of their leftist military dictatorship. The Peruvian government is right now about to nationalize foreign-owned copper mines. This government for is not liked by the masses. But I dig it anyway because it has done some social good and because I love to hear rich people complaining at their plush dinner tables.

You are contradicting yourself.

Aesthetics and Revolution are difficult to balance: a little bit of this and how big a bit of that?28

Downey appears to have met these tensions and contradictions in the middle, and, using the fraught spatial models inherent in the Videos Trans Americas, applied them to his display at the CIAR. Though it appears that Downey originally intended to screen tapes from the Americas series at “Energy Systems,” in the end he simply used language from its original proposal as an introduction to Map of Chile in the entrance hall.29 Transferred verbatim from the second paragraph published in Radical Software, they read:

A form of infolding in space while evolving in time. Playing back a culture in the context of another, the culture itself in its own context, and, finally, editing all the interaction of time, space, and context into one work of art.30

Repurposed within the space of the CIAR, however, and specifically applied to Map of Chile, the words take on a different meaning. On the most simplistic level, by seeking to hold the institution and the art world accountable for the actions of their sponsors, the work quite directly examines a “culture itself in its own context.” On a more abstract level, the “infolding” of space referenced in the text now transpires over a number of meaningful associations. The anaconda—while standing for an overreaching American corporation and its company town in Montana—is also Chile itself, echoing its winding shape across the length of the map.31 In formal terms, the active, irregular movements of the anaconda recall the “gestural abstraction” of the New York School, while as a symbol it evokes the “exotic,” primitivistic style expected at the time from Latin American

28 Downey, “Travelogues” in With Energy Beyond These Walls, 333. 29 Press release for “Energy Systems,” March 31, 1975 (Juan Downey Artist File from the records of the Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, New York). 30 From the Americas Society Archives, as quoted by Luis Pérez Oramas in “Looking South,” 51. 31 Interestingly, the title of the company (borrowed from the large Anaconda Copper Mine near Butte, Montana) also derives from an important territorial split, this time during the US Civil War. The first prospector to buy the mine was Michael Hickey, a Civil War veteran who named his new asset after the “Anaconda Plan,” the successful wartime strategy developed by General Winfield Scott that involved surrounding Robert E. Lee’s army like a giant snake.

Bozer | Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map 29

artists.32 Most significantly, though physically constrained by the confines of the box and thus by necessity coiled over one area of the map or another, the green anaconda (the longest snake in the world) could potentially extend to untold dimensions, creating geographical connections yet to be imagined—certainly beyond the drawn borders of Chile, probably beyond the implicit span of South America. In the end, the serpent is not one symbol but many, both local and international, both dominant and submissive. It presents not a definitive conclusion, but a complex series of questions around internal and external hierarchies and encounters that a viewer, at ground level, can only begin to piece together.

Figure 5. Juan Downey, Map of Chile, 1975 (detail). Juan Yarur Collection, Fundación AMA, Santiago, Chile. Photo by Harry Shunk. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York.

At the same time, as the snake enters and emerges from its hollowed water pool at the map’s center, its damp body slowly smudges Downey’s colorful markings and erodes his map (fig. 5). Eventually, the artistic interventions, the original cartographic lines, and all the borders of Chile will be erased. Already, as the snake glides across the picture’s surface, it conceals countless regions and boundaries under its girth, shifting entire geographies through natural motion. This new cartographic model of disintegrating demarcations—indicating the breakdown of national and international politics—would open for Downey other ways of thinking about the relationship between structures of space and structures of power. In particular, it would lead to a phase in his artistic career in which maps would become increasingly “malleable metaphors” to explore the possibilities of identity beyond imposed contours, linear structures, and coercive partnerships (fig. 6).33 Ultimately, for the culminating Amazonian travels of his Video

32 This snake’s association with gestural abstraction is taken from Luis Pérez Oramas, “Looking South,” 48. 33 Sarah Montross, “Cartographic Communications: Latin American New Media Artists in New York, Juan Downey and Jaime Davidovich (1960s-1980s)” (PhD Dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2012), 157.

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Trans Americas series, it would inspire Downey to seek out, if naively, an imagined source of the “pure” southern continent, unencumbered by the neocolonial industries of the North. For this, he headed to the indigenous tribes of the Amazon—ironically, to the tropical home of the anaconda.

Figure 6. Juan Downey, Map of America, 1975 (detail). Colored pencil and synthetic polymer paint on map on board, 34 1/8 x 20 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Harry Shunk. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York.

Julia Bozer is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she concentrates on modern and contemporary traveler-artists in the Americas. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she earned a BA in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 2005 and an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute, London, in 2009.

Un/Earthing Borderland-Motherland: Stateless Bodies Intimating the Waves, the Woods, and the Walls

TRANGĐÀI GLASSEY-TRẦNGUYỄN

Overview: Conceptualizing ‘Borderland-Motherland’ in the Vietnamese diasporic context

In his reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, the late scholar Benedict Anderson shows that the immediate genealogy of nationalism—both genuinely-felt and systemic manifestations—should be traced to the imaginings of the colonial state.1 The rise of nationalism in the Southeast Asian colonies was responsible for the formation of the independent nation states and their political orientation, be it socialism, democracy, or other forms. Under these conditions, three institutions of power—the census, the map, and the museum—enabled colonizers to imagine their dominion and, by extension, the control of borders and movement of bodies within and across them. The most crucial aspect of the census was its mapping of the human populations, while map-making has always been a highly politicized project in colonialism and nation-state building.2 The mapping of both the human population through the census and the mapping of the land served the purpose of colonial control and exploitation. French colonizers extracted human labor to sustain and expand their colonial project by forcing the Vietnamese to work in rubber plantations, or to be shipped to France as worker soldiers.3 Southeast Asian mobilities, therefore, are intertwined with global forces such as imperialism, socialism, and global capitalism. It is with these competing and contesting historical terrains and their residues that I conceptualize “borderland-motherland” as a site of critical inquiry into the interstitial spaces in which undocumented Vietnamese immigrants move and are moved.4

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 163. 2 Anderon, Imagined Communities, 171. 3 r n nh, The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation (Athens: Ohio University Monographs in International Studies, 1985), 22–85; Hoàng Hoa Khôi, “ iographical oral history interview,” interview by rangđài r nguyễn, Vietnamese Diasporas Project, Paris, France, February 2005. 4 hongchai Winichakul, “Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Postnational Histories in Southeast Asia” in New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, ed. Abu Talib and Tan Liok Ee (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 3–5.

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Studies of diasporic Vietnamese populations around the world have been uneven, with a strong focus on the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Western European countries—the perceived centers of Vietnamese overseas communities. Literature on Vietnamese/Southeast Asian diasporas has highlighted different forms of migration, yet the most prominent form of migration out of Southeast Asia has been induced by wars. Refugee and war-related literature has proliferated since the beginning of the SEA diasporas, taking up a variety of experiences and methodological frameworks.5 Early literature on Vietnamese refugees and immigrants in the U.S. focused on family relations and educational success against the backdrop of the immeasurable challenges they face in the new country.6 More recent works on migration from Southeast Asia have become highly gendered and have addressed labor migration, marriage migration, and socialist mobilities.7 Immigration from Vietnam by and large emerged after the Vietnam War

5 For literature on women’s experiences, see Asian Women United of California, Making waves: an anthology of writings by and about Asian American women ( oston: eacon Press, 1989); rangđài r nguyễn, “Vietnamese American Women in the West” in Anthology of Women in the West, ed. Gordon Bakken (California: Sage Publications, 2003 & 2006). For oral history narratives of Vietnamese Americans, see rangđài r nguyễn, “From Childhood Storytelling to Oral History Interviews” in The Oral History Review 29, no. 2 (Summer - Autumn, 2002), 119–126; also, rangđài r nguyễn, “Orange County, Yellow History: An Intimate Encounter with Vietnamese American Lives,” ed. homas J. Frusciano, Journal of the Society of American Archivists 2, no. 4 (2004). For diasporic women dealing with post-war trauma, see rangđài Glassey- r nguyễn (formerly rangđài r nguyễn), “Chapter 17, (Women) Civilians After Wars: Any Nation State Asking for their Forgiveness?” in Forgiveness: Probing the Boundaries, ed. David White and Stephen Schulman (United Kingdom: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2009), 223–229; and Glassey- r nguyễn, rangđài, “Viewpoints: Out of struggle, a new direction” in The Sacramento Bee, May 5, 2012. For refugee memories and expressions, see rangđài Glassey- r nguyễn, “Articulating Refug-endity in VietnAmerica and the Diasporas 1975-2015: From Ethnic Autonomy to Global Visibility” in Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement 10, no. 1, article 5 (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/2153-8999.1120. 6 Nazli Kibria, Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993). Also, Nathan Caplan, Marcella H. Choy, and John K. Whitmore, Children of the Boat People: A Study of Educational Success (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1991). 7 On labor migration see Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Pipo Bui, Envisioning Vietnamese Migrants in Germany: Ethnic Stigma, Immigrant Origin Narratives and Partial Masking, LIT Verlag Münster, 2003; Julia Schweizer, “ he Informal ehind the Formal: he Unofficial Workers Supporting Vietnamese-Owned Retail usinesses in erlin” (Praktiken informeller Okonomie, uni-franfurt.de, 2004), 54–70; Julia Schweizer, “ he Vietnamese Ethnic Economy in erlin: Actors, Niches, and Spatial Dimensions” (Magisterarbeit/MA Thesis in Geography, Humboldt-Universitat zu , Geographisches Institut, 26 February 2005); and Pei-Chia Lan, Global Cinderellas (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006). On marriage migration see A. W. ang and H. Wang, “From Victims of Domestic Violence to Determined Independent Women: How Vietnamese Immigrant Spouses Negotiate aiwan’s Patriarchal Family System” in Women Studies International Forum 34, no. 5 (2011), 430–440. On socialist mobilities see Schwenkel, Christina Schwenkel, “Rethinking Asian Mobilities: Socialist Migration and Post-Socialist Repatriation of Vietnamese Contract Workers in East Germany” in Critical Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2014), 235–258; Alena K. Alamgir, “Recalcitrant Women: Internationalism and the Redefinition of Welfare Limits in the Czechoslovak-Vietnamese Labor Exchange Program” in Slavic Review 73, no. 1 (Spring 2014), 133–

Glassey-Trầnguyễn | Un/Earthing Borderland-Motherland 33

ended in 1975, but there were migrations prior to this time, such as Vietnamese soldier workers in France (sojourners), exchange students and professionals to Europe and the US in the 1960s and ’70s, and so-called “war brides” who were Vietnamese women immigrating via marriage to a foreigner who had worked in Vietnam in war-related activities.8 Nevertheless, an important but understudied topic is the various waves of unauthorized or undocumented immigrants from Vietnam since 1975. This form of migration is understudied, particularly when it comes to the Vietnamese diasporas, because of its clandestine nature. Since 2004, I have conducted research in response to the dearth of studies on Vietnamese immigrants in locations that were perceived as peripheral in the Vietnamese diasporas, such as Northern and Eastern Europe, particularly in socialist or former socialist states and on undocumented Vietnamese immigrants.9 I wish to point out and emphasize the semi-formal and ad-hoc nature of the earliest waves of migration from Vietnam upon the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the chaotic exodus on April 30, 1975.10 Shortly after the War ended, despite the new regime’s persecution, Vietnamese boat people were fleeing the country in search of freedom through their own autonomous will and means. Their determination to seek refuge at great and grave risk prompted the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) and the international community to help rescue and relocate them. I will be clear: the boat people were the first waves of undocumented immigrants from Vietnam. This observation has not been made or discussed in literature on Vietnamese boat people due to the focus on their plight, their courage, and the international efforts (albeit terminated after the mid-1990s) for resettlement. This very observation complicates and moots the criticism and/or condemnation by any Vietnamese diasporic members about the current undocumented immigrants from Vietnam (or elsewhere) in Eastern Europe and around the world.

155; and Alena K. Alamgir, “Race is elsewhere: state-socialist ideology and the racialisation of Vietnamese workers in Czechoslovakia” Race Class 54, no. 67 (2013), doi: 10.1177/0306396813476171. 8 r nguyễn, “Orange County, Yellow History,” 2004. 9 rangđài r nguyễn, “Are here Really Vietnamese in Sweden?” Fulbright Lecture for the College of Humanities & Social Sciences, hosted by the Center for Oral & Public History, CSU Fullerton, April 2005; rangđài r nguyễn, “Home in Stockholm: Vietnamese Narratives of Transnationalism,” Fulbright Scholar Seminar. Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholms Universitet, May 2005; rangđài r nguyễn,“Viet irds, Euro Sky.” Featured Fulbright Research Panel. 51st Annual Berlin Seminar, German Fulbright Commission, Germany, 2005; rangđài r nguyễn, “Immigrant Placenta-Fellows across the altic Lands,” in English with summary in Lithuanian. The Institute of Baltic Sea Region History and Archaeology, University of Klaipeda, Lithuania, 2007; rangđài Glassey- r nguyễn, “Risk as Mobility: Undocumented Vietnamese Migrants in A ransnational Legal Limbo” (MA thesis, University of California, Riverside, 2016); rangđài Glassey- r nguyễn, “Risk as Mobility”; rangđài Glassey- r nguyễn, “Squatting in Racialized Berlin 1975-2015: Vietnamese ransnational Subjectivity in a Climactic Double Division” in Radical Criminology, Issue #6 (2016), 131–208. 10 Du Lê, “ iographical oral history interview,” interview by rangđài Glassey- r nguyễn, Vietnamese American Project, Garden Grove, CA, February 3, 2002.

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In the constraints of this paper, I will highlight three contexts of Vietnamese unauthorized migration: the boat people in the Pacific Ocean starting in the mid-1970s, the undocumented migrants through the Ukraine forests since the early 1990s, and the undocumented immigrants in Berlin since 1989. These undocumented trajectories are multidirectional and contextually diverse.11 I embrace the departure from the sacrosanct separation of nature and society seen in various bodies of recent scholarship, including political ecology, infrastructural ethnographies, and urban studies. I heed the call to integrate and attend to the non-human in urban spaces and explore what that call means for Vietnamese immigration.12 I intend to examine underground immigration not just via the various conduits I have identified, but also in relation to the risks therein. Of the three contexts through which I explore undocumented Vietnamese immigration, I want to call attention to the distinction or shift in legal status of the three groups of immigrants. The boat people were unauthorized immigrants that could either gain legal status as refugees in a host country or be returned home. During the undocumented migrations through the Ukraine forests since the early 1990s, migrants continued to suffer the lack of legal status after arriving in Warsaw, as do their counterparts in Berlin, who lead a precarious life in legal limbo. It is important to note the longitudinal approach in this paper, which puts three bodies of data in conversation with each other: my multi-sited multidisciplinary research over the decades, my cross-lingual oral histories across the Vietnamese diasporas, and the visual art productions analyzed. As such, the concepts of ecology, land, and environmental geography as they pertain to visual culture will be hashed out in the next section as the ethnographic moments unfold.

Ethnographic Movements: Intimating the Waves, the Woods, and the Walls

This section conveys the accounts in which Vietnamese undocumented immigrants intimated the routes of migration in three contexts: the boat people in the Pacific Ocean starting in the mid-1970s, undocumented migrations via the Ukraine forests beginning in the early 1990s, and the undocumented immigrants living in Berlin as of 1989. I would like to note that throughout this paper, as well as in my research in the last two decades, I privilege the voices and perspectives of ethnic Vietnamese immigrants, refugees, and artists and treat them as both data and theories. That is, situated at the center of the discussion, these voices and perspectives reveal their radical intimacy with blood, earth, soil, and statelessness. Data and ethnographic fieldwork were collected in Vietnamese (all translations are mine). My deepest thanks go to the Vietnamese undocumented

11 r nguyễn, “Orange County, Yellow History,” 2004; Glassey- r nguyễn, “Articulating Refug-endity,” 2015. 12 Neil Smith, Uneven Development (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984); Bruce Braun, The Intemperate Rainforest (Twin Cities: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004).

Glassey-Trầnguyễn | Un/Earthing Borderland-Motherland 35

immigrants who made time to share their experiences with me. I hope that what I have (re)constructed is germane to the constructions that my informants have made about their own legal limbo during our encounters and in their daily lives.

Intimating the Waves

I first met Chị Sen at a monthly Vietnamese mass for Giáo đoàn, the Vietnamese Catholic Congregation in Stockholm, Sweden, on the first weekend of September in 2004. As I kneeled in the last pew of the small but only half-filled suburban chapel, I heeded prayers that I had not heard since I came to the U.S. in 1994. While scholarship once suggested that the cultural practices of immigrant communities are frozen in time when immigrants try to retain their roots, I argue that such practices are in fact active efforts in affirmations of ethnic identity and roots. For Vietnamese Catholics in Stockholm, these older prayers and the way they celebrated mass show how they stay connected with their cultural and social past. The prayers have migrated with people, and helped conjure a sense of belonging. After mass, the whole congregation of about forty people traveled to Chị Sen’s home in Bandhagen, a municipality of Stockholm, where the group prayed for another hour and shared a day-long feast with all varieties of social activities, including ear- piercing, sharing of family photos and videos, exchanges of kitchen resources and appliances, and trading of personal news. Despite the quietness of Stockholm City, I came to realize that there was ample motion under the still surface of Vietnamese life there. It is with these movements—between past and present, between prayers of yore and chanting of now, between the here and there, between presence and absence, between war and peace, between Vietnam and Sweden—that I look at her intimacy with waves during her boat escape. When I left her house, Chị Sen offered me her business card and invited me to visit. Our many meetings included a recorded interview which lasted a full day. Chị Sen was born in 1964 in Sóc răng, Vietnam. When she was eight years old, her father moved to a military base near Chợ Lớn. She was forced to separate from her mother because her father had a second wife. Chị Sen lived in Saigon until escaping Vietnam by boat in 1979. She stayed at the refugee camps for six months before resettling in Sweden in November of that year. As she recounted:

My whole family escaped illegally. We paid five taels of gold per person. We did not have enough money to pay the fee, so my grandmother asked my uncle to loan us thirteen units of gold which we paid back with interest in 1,300 US dollars. Although we repaid him in money, I think we still owe him for helping us. Without his help, we wouldn’t be here today. After we paid off the loans with him, we would visit him every time we came back. Our boat was registered for two hundred people. We escaped at night from Mỹ Tho. I don’t know what happened, but there were six hundred people on our boat.

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The boat was only twenty four feet. We were actually pushing elbows. There were supposed to be food and water on board. But if you sat in the middle, you couldn’t reach out and get anything. Every day they would give you a deciliter of water. My youngest brother was too young, so my family saved all of our water for him. I did not have water to drink. My oldest brother collected seawater which we squeezed lime in to make lemonade. We tried to make do with that. We were in the high sea for five days before we reached the refugee camps.

Still from Khoa 's Mother Fish, 2009. Film, 92 min. Distributed by Titan View. © Titan View Pty Ltd.

Intimating the Woods

During my fieldwork in Warsaw in the summer of 2005, my various hosts accompanied me to an open-air market called the “Stadium," or Sân Vận Động in Vietnamese, to visit the stalls and shops run by Vietnamese immigrants and undocumented workers. The Stadium was a site where Vietnamese migrants tapped into the existing networks of underground migration and the informal economies that continue to enable their ethnic fellows to come and live in the Polish capitol today. The Stadium, opened in 1955, was situated on the east bank of the Vistula River in Praga Poludnie, Poland, and constructed from the debris of the Warsaw revolution. For decades, it hosted sporting events and, in 1983, the visit of the late Pope John Paul II with over 100,000 people in attendance. After that last international function, the Stadium deteriorated. In 1989, an open-air market emerged on the site, quickly becoming the largest of its kind in Europe. The Stadium provided work for hundreds of thousands of locals and migrants including a substantial number of Vietnamese, and had an even greater role for the Vietnamese in Warsaw and Poland at large, serving as a community site for gathering and work. Even Vietnamese in

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other parts of the world would refer to “the Stadium” as a Vietnamese communal destination. At its peak, the Stadium hosted around 1,200 Vietnamese-owned businesses, many of which made a fortune there. Some entrepreneurs have become wealthy through profits at the Stadium; some return to Vietnam, while others continue to arrive. At the same time, there are unknown but substantial numbers of undocumented Vietnamese immigrants who came to Warsaw through Eastern Europe, especially by walking through the Ukraine forests to evade the border patrols. In 2008, the Polish government decided to dissolve the Stadium and spent 560 million euros to construct a national stadium to co- host with Ukraine the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Euro 2012 events. The open market gradually shrank and was officially closed in July 2010. The closure was especially devastating for the Vietnamese who earned a living at this site. Nonetheless, these migrants soon forged new spaces at Marywilska in northeastern Warsaw, or at the commerce center in the Wólka Kosowska area. In an extended interview, Võ Thành Khánh recounted the treacherous journeys through the woods before reaching the Stadium:

Fifty to one hundred Vietnamese come to Poland illegally every day. They fly from Vietnam to Moscow, and stay in car trunks from Moscow to Ukraine. They go through the forest from Ukraine to Poland. Each person pays 5500 to 6000 Zloty. It is very expensive to immigrate this way. Everyone hopes to work and earn enough to repay the smuggling fee, and to provide for their family. Both the rich and the poor go through this channel. Some spend up to seven months trying to immigrate illegally. They are caught, imprisoned, and try again once released. Some try for an entire year.

Smuggled men face fewer problems than women. They all endure the lack of food and strenuous walking between sites. People walk around 200 kilometers in the forest. Women, especially young beautiful girls, run the risk of being raped. All of the girls are sexually abused. The second problem is the fee increase en route. Between sites, the fee jumps up. If the people are unable to pay extra, the traffickers beat them up and force the families in Vietnam to send more money. The smuggled people have to pay many prices throughout the journey. Many young girls jump off from the high buildings to commit suicide when forced into sexual activities. Words get out. People are frightened when they go through those sites. The smuggled people are afraid of many things. They are afraid of the police. They are afraid of the smugglers. They are afraid that they can’t pay the extra fee.

There exists a highly gendered violence in migration experiences, particularly in undocumented mobilities. As Vietnamese migrants move between the waves, the woods, and the walls, women face the most horrendous attacks that they often keep to themselves due to cultural stigma and shame. These silenced memories are breeding grounds for

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prolonged PTSD and other health issues that the immigrants continue to deal with long after their arrival and resettlement.

Intimating the Walls

The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall marked the re-union of Germany with the Wende and a new era for the Eastern Bloc.13 The collapse of the Wall also marked a new historical moment for immigrants in former East Germany, where Vietnamese guest workers lost their contracts due to the Wende. Some returned to Vietnam with compensation from the German government, but several fought for their right to stay. Former guest workers forged an informal economy in the service sector that allowed them to earn a living, and created a niche that enabled new undocumented immigrants to come. Lê hắng Lợi entered Berlin through a flight from Hanoi to Moscow on a tourist visa and a trafficked passage through the Ukraine forest. When I first met Lợi at the refugee camp in East Berlin in March of 2005, I was struck by his rhetoric on immigration rights and human rights. At the start of his hours-long interview, Lợi constructed himself and his family as refugees and asylum seekers, deserving but denied the right to stay in Germany. He took the initiative to relay his urgencies as a family of asylum seekers. Lợi’s migration trajectories were at times circular, with a four-year interval of reentry into Vietnam. He recalled the crossing of borders by himself, or with his wife and children:

I first sought asylum because of faith. In 1993, the Christian ministers here in Berlin had baptized me. I came back to Vietnam in 1995 and returned to Germany in 1999. . . In 1996, we had our first child. I planned to escape again because of harassment from the local authority. We split up and hid. In 1998, we had our second baby and life became too difficult. We either died there in Vietnam, or escaped. . . In 1999, we went to Russia and then Germany. . . I want to work, but am not allowed. I do not want to burden the German society. Had it not been for my wife and my children, to live like this [would be] suicide for me. . . There’s no return for me in Vietnam. But to stay here is barely an option. . .

I have never experienced a moment of peace here in Germany. The court had just processed my refugee application, and turned it down again. I reapplied right away. Back then, the police had caught me and wanted to deport me. I got crazy. I just went nuts. Imagine living eighty days in a space that is forty by seven meters. My only friend was the watch. My only food was instant

13 Die Wende (“ he urn” or “ he urnaround”) (1989–1990) refers to a turning point in German political history that marks the complete process of change from the rule of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and a centrally planned economy to the revival of parliamentary democracy and market economy in the German Democratic Republic.

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noodle, three packs a day. When I ate, it was only to stay alive. I had no feelings, no taste. I had insomnia. I was too shocked by the persecution and fearful for my condition. At midnight, I was soaked in sweat. I was scared and I was screaming loudly. Then the court agreed not to deport me. They forced me to report to them which church had hid me. When I came to this refugee camp, they punished me by not giving me any food stamps for three months. I just came out of six starving months in hiding, and confronted with three months without food.

Visual Articulations: The Political Ecology of Vietnam as a Refugee

A central aspect of underground immigration is risk, which I examine as “a collective construct” whose perception evolves around social factors in the context of cities as “dense networks of interwoven socio-ecological processes.”14 The undocumented immigrants actively embrace risk as a means to claim their “right to the city” despite spatial governmentality and technologies of control.15 They participate in what de Certeau calls “a texturology in which extremes coincide” and continue to be on the move while juggling their risk, at once “squatting” and moving.16 This section looks at the memory work of Vietnamese diasporic migration experiences and the radical intimacy that the immigrants shared with the high sea, the deep forests, and the metropolis. Through visual productions, I examine the memory affectivities in human and non-human relations in migration. In many ways, the memories of undocumented mobilities are like abandoned infrastructures: they are there, painfully present yet utterly hidden. In the ethnographic movements described above, undocumented Vietnamese immigrants recall how their experiences involve several complex networks of actors beyond human bodies, which continue to influence the immigrants long after the actual encounter—particularly if such encounters unfold in risky moments. As such, the migration route remains vividly real post-migration when memories coalesce with the present in an immigrant’s psyche. he waves continue to ebb and flow in the mind of former boat people, and the woods and the walls are alive in the everyday life of undocumented immigrants. Inherent in unauthorized emigration, risk is an embodied affectivity that remains strong for the immigrants, not only because the

14 Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Mary Douglas, Risk Acceptability According to the Social Sciences (Manhattan: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1985); E. Swyngedouw, N. Heynen, and M. Kaika, In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (New York: Routledge, 2006). 15 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996); Martin Murray, Taming the Disorderly City: The Spatial Landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 16 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: UC Press, 1984).

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memory of risk experienced en route often remains unprocessed, but also because the temporal continuity of risk is mapped onto the human psyche as well as the physical spaces it traversed. In the human psyche, the experiential reality of the earth takes dominance over the geographical outlays, so that experiences continue to be real even in the (physical) absences of the waves, the woods, or the walls. I will engage with the visual productions of director Khoa and artists Danh Võ, Jerry rương, and nh hái Danh to examine how the borderland-motherland is forged across space and time both within and without legal spheres. In effect, I show that Vietnam itself is a refugee, shifting from the fixed notion of a nation-state and land mass to more fluid experiential expressions and realities. I gesture beyond the Vietnamese diasporic context toward the recent refugee crisis in the Middle East or the ongoing struggles of immigrants at the US- Mexico border, which very much embody a “borderland-motherland” spirit. In particular, for the post-migration presence of the migration route, what does the human body and memory make of travelling in a flimsy boat, floating without certainty in the high sea, in pitch-black nights, in inclement storms? In his acclaimed feature film Mother Fish - Cá Mẹ (2009), director Khoa superimposed a boat escape in the Pacific Ocean onto the sewing shop in Australia where its survivor worked in her post-migration life to show how memories coalesce with the present in an immigrant’s psyche. he movie recounts the story of four boat persons escaping from Vietnam in 1980 and goes inside the mind of the only survivor as she resettles and lives in Australia. As memories melds with the present, the survivor relives, within the walls of the factory, the traumatic journey at sea with her sister, who continues to speak to her through her memories. As such, Mother Fish maps the past onto the present, meshing memories—especially traumatic moments—with everyday life after migration. Here, the memories undergo a spatial transposition, having moved from the open ocean to inland and within the walls of the sewing factory. The past remains real for those who continue to live it emotionally and psychologically. In similar ways, the Ukraine forests remain real in the everyday lives of undocumented Vietnamese in Warsaw and Berlin. For some undocumented migrants, the forests are residual spaces in the memory; risk therefore remains ‘real,’ not only because of the memory of risk encountered en route to Berlin, but also because of the risk they face in Berlin. Risk is haunting. Risk is never over. Undocumented immigrants live and relive risky experiences long after they occurred. Memory is a form of invisible, unstable ecology. There exist physical memories such as abandoned infrastructures. “It was here that tens of thousands of guest workers were staying right after the Wall fell,” my host Phạm hị nh told me as we stood on iced ground at a dead lamp post outside a fenced-off deserted housing complex on a bleak night in March of 2005. Bình took in the sight, and turning to me, spoke as if to herself: “ here were shootings here, too, between the groups. You can still see the shattered glass windows.” Her words were as if to conclude an informal pilgrimage to a shrouded past. The memory work of risk can forge a kind of residual space that sustains the associated fear and trauma the way the housing complex brings back haunting experiences of gunfire and violence.

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My fieldwork in Vietnamese Berlin did not begin with visits to the refugee camp and the housing complex, but these two sites keep resurfacing. They are like the void that is not truly empty, for they hold the unspoken tales of Berlin’s past and present. They are the between spaces, or the “non-place” in Marc Augé’s alternative understanding of space, and the human practices and experiences in and between spaces.17 They return to haunt the pages of my field notes and writings on Berlin. The sites suggest that while Berlin aspires to be a world city, the German capitol still has unfinished business from an uneasy past when it comes to Vietnamese former guest workers and their aborted contracts. It is important to note here that the vacated housing complex and the refugee camp, albeit sharing no historical connection pre-Wende, do connect in the post-Wende era through undocumented immigrants, who seek asylum at the refugee camp but came to Berlin because of the economic prospects created by the former guest workers. The

Vietnamese-owned flower shop at a Berlin train station. Photo by the author, March 2008.

17 Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).

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complex and camp are physical reminders of geopolitical projects and their remnants, the residues of a part of Germany’s recent history. While the former guest workers are now either back in Vietnam or have migrated to other parts of Germany or Berlin, the housing complex remains symbolic of a transitional time that means different things for the people involved. The housing complex reflects an abandoned project that is physically “squatting” in unified Germany. hough the guest workers had passed through these apartments during the post-Wende years and are now occupying new spaces in German (or Vietnamese) society, this space remains a part of an untold and forgotten narrative. They are landmarks that suggest immobility within the immigrants’ self-directed mobilities. Though these sites are visible public spaces, they are simultaneously obscured from the public view because they no longer attract media attention, nor do they have an active function in Berlin’s aspiring growth and ongoing changes. Like footnotes, they exist almost independent of the now bustling, hustling Vietnamese Berlin cityscapes, such as the wholesale and cultural centers, the faith communities, the non-physical communal scape of Vietnamese Multikulti, and the Vietnamese-owned businesses scattering around the city. Residual risk can work to suture the memories of traumatic migration that undocumented immigrants once faced, long after the actual risky events have taken place. I have also argued elsewhere about the transmission of trauma and memories across generations, as seen in Jerry rương’s most recent works entitled từ nước: tử-sinh -- boat people: lived/living/lost (2018).18 On March 26, 2018, Jerry rương called me to ask for help with his forthcoming show as part of Spring SOLOS 2018, on view April 14–June 2, 2018 at the Arlington Arts Center in Virginia. rương explained the nature of two drawings so that I could help craft the titles. He was considering, but not satisfied with, Rời Khỏi Nước (To Leave the Country), Ra Khỏi Nước, and Thoa t Khỏi Nước. After much contemplation, I crafted the Vietnamese title as từ nước, tử-sinh, and its English companion as boat people: leaving/living/lost, both of which were used in the exhibition. he titles reflected both rương’s drawings as well as my own interpretations of what he wanted to convey about his family’s journeys.

18 Spring SOLOS 2018 was on view April 14–June 2 at the Arlington Arts Center (AAC) in Virginia, USA. he AAC selected artists through an open call juried by Kate Haw, Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s , and Mika Yoshitake, Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. he jury proffered that “Jerry ruong’s artistic practice draws on the incomplete and informal archive of images and memories passed down from his parents, who fled war-torn Vietnam by boat. They spent time in a refugee camp in Thailand before settling in the United States where Truong, born in California, grew up largely oblivious to the trauma that they had endured. For Spring SOLOS 2018, the artist presents large-scale drawings created from charcoal and incense ash drawn from a Vietnamese ancestral altar. The drawings depict land, water, and sky, imagining the landscape that acted as both escape route and mortal threat to those fleeing their homeland.”

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Từ has a double meaning: từ (bỏ)—to leave; từ (nơi nào đó)—from (a certain place). This double meaning is further complicated by the double meaning of nước, which literally means “water” or “homeland.” As such, từ nước can mean: 1) “to be from the homeland” (of Vietnam); 2) “to be from water” (the ocean in which the boat people searched for freedom); 3) “to leave the motherland;” and 4) “to leave the water.” Each of the four meanings conveys a different trajectory in the attempts to escape by boat. Though each escapee tried to leave nước (the homeland) through nước (the water/ocean),

Jerry rương, Từ Nước (To Be from the Homeland /To Leave the Water), 2018. Charcoal and incense ash on panel, 80 x 90 in. © Jerry rương. some made it to the sea and arrived at the shores of freedom, like rương’s parents, while others died in the ocean (like some of rương’s uncles and aunts and thousands of boat people) or never made it out to sea (like rương’s other uncles and aunts, and other Vietnamese). The layered meaning of the first part of the Vietnamese title is connected with the layers of meanings in its second half, tử-sinh, which literally means “death-life.” I extracted this pair from the Vietnamese proverb sinh ký, tử quy which alludes to the idea that life on this earth is impermanent, and death is the passage through which we truly come home. Here, I use the ostensibly contradicting pair to convey three different things. First, following the first half of the title, tử-sinh expresses the dangers of boat escapes and the agonies of leaving one’s home—a matter of life and death. Second, tử sinh also conveys the varying trajectories that boat people experienced: some survived, others didn’t. hird, I want to highlight rương’s usage of nature—the ocean, the sand, the

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sky—to convey the impermanence and the lightness of it all; that is, with all the trauma and pain that humans experience, one can always look to nature for a way home. In other words, in the end, we are all going home. This perspective is by no means making light of the plight of the boat people, but reaches deep into Vietnamese culture and philosophy as an attempt to understand the resilience and survival of Vietnamese people (and the

Jerry rương, Từ Nước (To Be from Water/To Leave the Motherland), 2018. Charcoal and incense ash on panel, 80 x 90 in. © Jerry rương.

Vietnamese boat people in particular). The beach, the ocean, and the sky have been in radical intimacy with the boat people in their escapes and survival. In this communion with nature, the Vietnamese boat people and all those who endure traumatic flights are

always at home and coming home, grasping peace and hope amidst pain and loss. As perfect translation is impossible, the English title is an adaptation at best and is meant to complement the Vietnamese title, as well as to stand on its own. With “boat people - leaving/living/lost,” I put the word “boat people” as the first half of the English title to index the Vietnamese exile and refugee experiences as central to rương’s work. In particular ways, this word stirs the consciousness of the Viet people in the diasporas and that of the world since the early 1980s. As a historical marker, the word “boat people” conveys not only the experiences of those escaping Vietnam in search of freedom after the Vietnam War ended, but also the international affairs surrounding it. With the recent refugee crisis, the word “boat people” is again mapped onto bodies of

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refugees trying to flee war-torn countries (Syria) or persecution (Myanmar), once more expressing the perpetual human search for freedom and dignity. The latter half of the title, leaving/living/lost, gestures towards the divergent paths that a boat person might take. “Leaving” speaks of departure (on a journey for freedom, like a boat escape) and separation (from one’s country, loved ones, and a past life), of leaving behind everything, risking everything. “Living” conveys both survival (the living versus the dead) and the experience (living through the boat escapes). he word “lost” is open-ended, beckoning known and new interpretations about those who didn’t arrive (lost at sea), the feeling that boat people lived with during their escapes when flimsy boats floated into uncertainty in the high sea (feeling lost in the vast open ocean, losing direction), and the sense of lost hope on a prolonged journey with an inconclusive outcome. “Lost” is a word that lingers, as is “life.” he forward slashes conjure the simultaneous yet contradicting fates of boat people, even those from the same family, like rương’s parents and their siblings. Some made it to the free world (“living”), others forever rest on the ocean floor (“lost”), but they are all connected through the water and their daring nautical flights. o be sure, Jerry rương’s work shows no geographical

specificities: the ocean, the sky, and the beach can be of any location around the earth. Processing the past and its memories takes great contemplation and innovative expression. Artists who were born and raised after the Vietnam War ended still wrestle with the residues of wars, relocation, and conflict that inundate their sub/consciousness. Like their contemporaries of this generation, artists Bình Danh and Danh Võ have succeeded in making these residues visible and tangible. In Bình Danh's various projects, the insistence of the Vietnam War’s memories takes center stage. One of his projects, Immortality, The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War (2005), articulates the continuum of wars through war images on chlorophyll prints. Danh’s trademark technique of making chlorophyll prints speaks eloquently of the past and its residues, and how they migrate across time, generations, and spaces. In yet another Vietnam-related project, Ikea, Made in Viet Nam (2006), Danh reflects on the translocal connections of objects and memories. It is in the act of remembering that an artist transforms the past and evokes the future. Like Bình Danh, Danh Võ revisits the past through personal experiences and has brought together fragmented personal and historical pasts. Võ draws from the historical archives to grapple with his personal past and Vietnam’s national history. In Danh Võ’s Mother Tongue, the viewers encounter the historical from a personal perspective. Lot 40. Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (2013), for instance, is the nib of a fountain pen—the very symbolic instrument that inscribes the fate of Vietnam time and time again, from the French colonial period to the American involvement. Another of Võ’s prominent installations that speaks of foreign influence in Vietnam is Go Mo Ni Ma Da (2013). The mixed-lingo title and the historical objects across Vietnam’s recent history juxtapose Vietnam and the West, both in their interactions and their independent spaces: a Western- centric phrase that has been Vietnamized, yet reflects its French and English

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Bình Danh, IKEA, Made in Viet Nam (detail), 2006. Installation of found objects, 8 x 6 ft. © Binh Danh.

Bình Danh, Untitled, from the Pulau Bidong Island: Southeast Asian Refugee camp series, 2003. Silver Gelatin print, 16 x 20 in/30 x 40 in. © Binh Danh.

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origins nonetheless. The gaze is from the West, and the Vietnamization can be seen as a form of resistance or adaptation through the act of creolizing Western words. I wish to emphasize that the dualities of domination/influence and resistance/Vietnamization are key in Võ’s articulation of how Vietnam as a nation negotiated its status in world politics in the past (with present implications, to be sure). In that sense, not only have Vietnamese people become refugees, but Vietnam as a nation state was and has been a refugee in the political negotiations that took place in the West and in Vietnam. Through Võ’s works, one encounters Vietnam as a transnational refugee across historical periods and locales.

By Way of Conclusion: Un/Earthing Borderland-Motherland

I’d like to ponder the question: How does the earth map out human bodies, and how is the earth mapped out by human bodies? The world map would look very different if it were based on human movements that bleed into each other. These movements would highlight a much more complex experiential world in which a conscious historicization of the human experiences exposes how imperialism and colonization have dispossessed indigenous local populations in its throes of invading “virgin land.” There would not be neat territorial lines, no simple blood-based claims in several prominent nation-states, and no single ideology as the ultimate pretext for immigrant exclusion. If we visualize human movements and their intimacy with the earth, we can move away from historical amnesia and come a bit closer to the vulnerabilities and violence in contemporary immigration management. he “human earth” is never static, stable, or linear, and cannot be simply mapped out in plate tectonics theories. Human activities and movements show that people carry the experiential landscapes in their blood, and not just in an ancestral connection. In the act of border crossing and squatting, for instance, Vietnamese (undocumented) immigrant bodies transpose the soil they were on—Vietnam—unto the soil they traverse, be it the ocean, the forest, or the metropolis. Hence the human realities of these marginalized people render an in-between world that is lived in “thirdspace” and non-space—a spatialized and racialized “unofficial earth” of precarity.19 It conjures up a world that is much more reflective of human realities and experiences, “a borderland- motherland.” Borderland-motherland can be seen in relation to the earth anywhere as long as human bodies are compromised and marginalized, as in the millions of refugees still walking/camping/squatting aimlessly throughout the world today, and in the 2,300 minors being separated from their parents upon entering the US in May and June of 2018, all under the pretext of “zero tolerance.” Like her fellow displaced peoples, Anzalúa declares: “ his is my home / this thin edge of / barbwire.”20

19 On “thirdspace” see Miriam Kahn, “ ahiti Intertwined: Ancestral Land, ourist Postcard, and Nuclear Test Site” in American Anthropologist 102, no. 1 (2000), 7–26; on “non-space” see Augé, Non-Places, 1995. 20 Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 25.

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Binh Danh, Mother and Child, from Immortality, The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War, 2005. Chlorophyll print and resin, 7 x 5 in. © Binh Danh.

Borderland-motherland is an interstitial space over which exclusion and precarity hover, but in which hope is nursing cross-ethnic solidarity and possibilities. A true humanity is, and should always be, an option, especially for a worldwide community of dislocated, disadvantaged, and disrupted people. Borderland-motherland depicts the experiences of racialized immigrants everywhere and anywhere in the world, laden with tension, ambivalence, unrest, and death. The native peoples are displaced and denied the right to return home. Their home is no longer. The colonization of land, people, and culture has robbed non-white peoples of the right to be, cornered them into futile lands, submerged them into nameless slavery through further labor exploitation, disrupted their biological makeup through toxic food and environmental destruction, and created dependency in all aspects. But they keep rising. Hope is their soil. Solidarity is their blood.

Trangđài Glassey-Trầnguyễn is an award-winning bilingual author and has conducted hundreds of oral history interviews and multi-sited ethnographies on the Vietnamese diasporas in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia for over 24 years. She holds an M.A. in History from CSU Fullerton, an M.A. in Anthropology from Stanford University, an M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies from UC Riverside, and is completing her dissertation on Vietnamese American political subjectivities.

Land Grant: Complicating Institutional Legacies

ALYSSA BRALOWER ALLISON ROWE

Figure 1. Billy Morrow Jackson, We the People: The Land Grant College Heritage, 1987. Oil on canvas, 55 x 80 in.Introduction Board of the University of Illinois on behalf of its Krannert Art Museum. Museum Commission of the John Needles Chester Fund, 1987-19-1.

In 1987, Billy Morrow Jackson (1926–2006) was commissioned to create the large-scale painting We the People: The Land-Grant College Heritage (1987) for the President’s Office at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where it still hangs in the reception room (fig. 1). In addition to an overview of a multiplicity of activities being undertaken on the UIUC campus, the central elements of the painting are portraits of three of the key founders of the Federal Land-Grant College Act, or the Morrill Act, 50 SHIFT

which was passed in 1862 and enabled the construction of the university in 1867.1 On the left is Illinois native Jonathan Baldwin Turner, who advocated for agricultural reform via public education. Towering in the center is Abraham Lincoln, who holds in his hands a piece of parchment, a document meant to signify the Morrill Act. To the right of Lincoln is Justin Smith Morrill, a Vermont congressman who sponsored the legislation.2 Below these three figures, the university is depicted as a well-oiled machine, with numerous educational and research operations taking place around their looming presence. The Morrill Act established 130 universities on 30,000 acres of public land with the intention of educating farmers and low-class industrial workers in the fields of agriculture, engineering, science, and technology.3 These universities were built on public lands attained by force against peoples indigenous to the land including the Cahokia, Ho- Chunk, Kaskaskia, Meskwaki, Myaamia, Odawa, Peoria, Piankesaw, Potawatomi, Quapaw, and Wea, among many others.4 While often cast as an important accomplishment during the U.S. Civil War, the Morrill Act of 1862 was, as scholar la paperson notes, “truly intimate to war and to the production of a Yankee North American empire.”5 While Justin Morrill introduced the legislation, Lincoln’s signing of the act solidified it into a law that created a foundation for the development of many institutions which have, in multiple ways, erased and diminished Indigenous presences. We the People is one such example in that the painting does not depict these Indigenous peoples or the processes of violence that underwrite Jackson’s vision of the land-grant university. This violent history is wholly erased within the idyllic campus scene and is replaced with the inclusion of a singular primitivist caricature of a Native American man in the lower right corner of the painting. The erasure of lived Indigenous presence on campus, along with the inclusion of this caricature, constitutes a dual act of violence. This caricature—a “portrait” of the university’s former mascot, which was retired in 2007 after decades of Indigenous-led protest for its removal—is used to signify a romantic past amidst the flurry of innovation and progress that is portrayed throughout

1 Muriel Scheinman, “We the People: The Land-Grant College Heritage, 1987,” ExploreCU, accessed September 5, 2018, https://explorecu.org/items/show/11. 2 Muriel Scheinman, A Guide to the Art at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 38-39. 3 37th Congress, Session II, July 2nd, 1862, Ch. CXXX, section 4, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875, 504, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi- bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=012/llsl012.db&recNum=535. 4 Sharon Irish, “Institutional Racism and the Morrill Act,” Digitized Heart (blog), October 14, 2012, http://sharonirish.org/2012/10/14/institutional-racism-and-the-morrill-act/. Edgar Heap of Birds also acknowledged many of these tribes in his exhibition Beyond the Chief, discussed later in this article. 5 la paperson, “Land. And the University is Settler Colonial,” A Third University is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), n.p., https://manifold.umn.edu/read/7ba69a54-7131-4598-9fec- 815890725d91/section/561c45d2-9442-42d5-9938-f8c9e2aafcfc#ch02. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 51

the rest of the scene.6 We the People affirms Jodi Byrd’s observation that “American Indians and other indigenous peoples have often been evoked . . . as past tense presences. Indians are typically spectral, implied and felt.”7 Rather than acknowledge the violence of the founding of UIUC and other land-grant universities—a legacy that still affects the campus today—Jackson’s painting favors a mythic presentation of the university. In its disavowal of this history, this myth reproduces the violent relationship between the university, the land it is built upon, and Indigenous peoples. The fantastical space of We the People casts the land-grant university as a positivistic, utopian space. In doing so, the violence embedded in the promise of a public land-grant institution is erased or refigured as an inevitable episode in the march toward progress. This article traces the logic underlying objects and artworks owned by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign like We the People that, when put on display in a relational manner, assert a fraught but nonetheless critical interpretation of the 150-year history of the university and its relationships to land and Indigenous peoples. We argue these items reveal the legacies of settler colonialism that are still at work within land-grant university systems and question their entitlement to public lands. The objects discussed in this paper were included in Land Grant, an exhibition hosted at the Krannert Art Museum (KAM) from January to June 2017 (figs. 2, 3, 6, 9). The exhibition was the culmination of research conducted in Dr. Terri Weissman and Dr. Amy Powell’s fall 2016 curatorial practicum seminar.8 During this seminar ten graduate students,9 including the authors, spent the semester researching local history, visiting archives, and scouring off-campus university collections with the intention of curating an exhibition from these items. In advance of the practicum, Dr. Weissman and Dr. Powell arranged a series of visits to campus archives and collections including the University of Illinois Archives, the Spurlock Museum, the University of Illinois Rare Book and

6 Robert Warrior, “Vandalizing Life Writing at the University of Illinois: Heap of Birds’s Signs of Indigenous Life,” Profession (2011), 46. Warrior writes, “Most universities with Native-themed sports mascots had ended their use by the early 1980s, but some schools in areas without a visible presence of Native people persisted in their use. Supporters of Illinois’s mascot continued through the decade to hold to the position that having a white student dress in a buckskin outfit and feathered headdress while performing a dance routine having nothing to do with any North American Native dance tradition was a form of honoring Native North American Peoples.” 7 Jodi A. Byrd, “Introduction: Indigenous Critical Theory and the Diminishing Returns of Civilization,” Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xx. 8 The seminar was entitled Graduate Seminar in Contemporary Art: Practicum in Curatorial Methods, and Land Grant was conceived of as an exhibition that would coincide with the sesquicentennial of the establishment of the University of Illinois. 9 Land Grant was truly a collaborative effort, and thus we would like to thank and acknowledge the other members of Dr. Weissman and Dr. Powell’s curatorial practicum: Yue Dai, Evin Dubois, Maria Garth, Michael Hurley, Cory Imig, Lilah Leopold, Jenny Peruski, and Luis Gonzalo Pinilla. We also would like to especially thank Dr. Weissman, Dr. Powell and the staff of the Krannert Art Museum for their insight, guidance, and support throughout the creation of this exhibition. 52 SHIFT

Manuscript Library, the Ricker Library of Architecture, the Krannert Art Museum, and the President’s Office. We collectively considered the information from these visits in concert with literature on contemporary curatorial practices to establish three thematic, intersecting focuses for the exhibition: Indigeneity, land use, and the university.

Figure 2. Land Grant, installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017. Installation view features Billy Morrow Jackson, We the People: The Land Grant College Heritage (1987) installed on the left wall of the gallery, flanked by a transistor panel from the Illiac II (1985); Kevin Hamilton, A Place in Time (2012); and several editions of the Illini Wise student handbooks (1950-57).

These focuses were further investigated by curatorial teams of three or four people, each charged with undertaking additional object research and developing proposals for items to be included in the show. There were some items, such as the archival photograph Morrow Plots, Corn and Oats, 1903 (fig.7), which all thematic curatorial groups identified as valuable to the exhibition. Other objects, like a rather ambiguous grey lump of crinoid fossil, were defended by only one person in the room. We used collective decision making to make a final selection of artworks and artefacts based on how they would interact with one another in an exhibition context. Land Grant, and this article, consider notions of both real and imagined university spaces, pedagogical practices, and the university’s complex relationship to Indigenous histories and local landscapes. This complicated history of violence, erasure, and progress is embedded within the land of the UIUC campus and has been re-inscribed and reified Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 53

through many of the objects and archival materials displayed in Land Grant. Central to the exhibition was Billy Morrow Jackson’s regionalist painting, which depicts a progressive narrative of the university as a site of linear betterment; a notion that continues to carry weight. Thus, we endeavored to buttress dominant representations of the school against oft silenced and critical responses by students and faculty, using strategies that read university archives against their grain.10 Guiding our exhibition was Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, which maintains that it is possible to both reproduce the university and to produce a position of fugitivity.11 To do so, according to Moten and Harney, requires “a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization.”12 In this sense, the curatorial method of Land Grant emerged out of a collective orientation and sought to reproduce this orientation within museum visitors. This strategy suggests, as Joshua Chambers-Letson has argued, that what Moten and Harney term the “undercommons of enlightenment,” a minoritarian position that exists within and occupies a fugitive relation toward the university, emerges through a relational practice.13 Land Grant sought to create such conditions, which enabled the university art gallery to become a site wherein the Undercommons could be temporarily located. Following Moten and Harney, we also resisted didactic argumentation, thus refusing to put museum users in a “for-or-against” position. Rather, by interweaving visual histories of regional land use, Indigeneity, and the university itself, we fostered a deeper and more complex temporal scale than that offered by a more binary exhibition model or by looking at any one of these topics in isolation. We begin with a brief account of the history, political stakes, and methodology of the radical and self-reflexive turn in museum curation. We espoused this curatorial approach throughout the organization of the exhibition, most acutely in the selection of Jackson’s We the People, which we removed from its normal home in the waiting area of the President’s Office for the exhibition, thereby reframing and calling public attention to the underlying politics that led to its commission and continued veneration. Taking this painting as a point of departure, the remaining sections contextualize We the People and the other objects included in the exhibition in relation to issues of land use, the university itself, and Indigeneity. Throughout, Moten and Harney’s Undercommons undergirds our

10 Ann Laura Stoler, “Introduction: A Prologue in Two Parts,” Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 3. 11 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 26–27. 12 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 26–27. 13 Joshua Chambers-Letson, “Workshop with Joshua Chambers-Letson After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life” (presentation, Krannert Art Museum, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Department of Latina/Latino Studies, Champaign, Illinois, September 13, 2018). 54 SHIFT

analysis, demonstrating the way in which radical curation can enable a position of fugitivity.

Figure 3. Land Grant, installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017. Installation view features Bea Nettles, Imaginary Prairie (1969) (center) and a core sample loaned from the Illinois State Geologic Survey (taken 2016) comprised of soil, sand, gravel, Paleosol and glacial till, glacial sediment and bedrock, coal and siltstone (bottom right).

Curating and the Undercommons

In the late 1960s and early 1970s a number of artists sought to challenge and galleries through the creation of art projects that analyzed and took positions on political museological issues like gender representation and the role of capitalism in the display of art.14 Though the term that emerged to describe this style, “institutional critique,” has since been debated, there is little question about the pivotal role work in this vein had in expanding the variety of materials and methods practiced by contemporary artists and in the ways many curators, museums, and artists understand institutions and their roles

14 Alexander Alberro, “Institutions, critique, and institutional critique” in Institutional Critique an Anthology of Artists’ Writings Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 3. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 55

within them.15 For example, in her essay “How to Install Art as a Feminist,” Helen Molesworth articulated the difficulty and importance of mapping “discursive formations,” such as feminist or postcolonial theory, into “the spatial logic and requirements of the museum.”16 The physical and social forms of institutions shape and even direct the trajectory of inquiry and research outcomes.17 With Land Grant, we created an exploratory mode of display that translated the discursive into the spatial and visual by physically positioning sanctioned works like We the People alongside activist, feminist student publications, forcing the viewer to consider the materials foregrounded by the institution. In The Undercommons, Moten and Harney build upon traditions of black radicalism to argue that American universities embody neoliberal institutionalism through their emphatic insistence on professionalism and notions of civility that are defined based on white, European codes of conduct.18 Even direct antagonism against the university through critical scholarship legitimizes the institution’s individualistic modes of operation. As they observe, “. . . to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, which is to recognize it and be recognized by it.”19 Instead, Moten and Harney propose the Undercommons as a fugitive alternative that is not confrontational but rather a radical, collective, sociability achieved through “prophetic organization.”20 As a student-centered curatorial collaboration, Land Grant enacted Moten and Harney’s arguments both through our shared collective approach to the labor of exhibition making and in our deliberate selection of artworks, documentation, and artefacts of other non-professionals, with a particular emphasis on items that demonstrated resistance to expectations of civility. Land Grant rejected chronological exhibition expectations or a singular theme, collapsing multiple timelines: that of agricultural time, the canon of modernism, and university history.21 This curatorial position can be seen as a practice-based exploration

15 Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (London: May Fly Books, 2009), xiv. 16 Helen Molesworth, “How to Install Art Like a Feminist,” Modern Women, eds. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York: MoMA, 2011), 499. 17 Paul O’Neil, Lucy Steeds and Mick Wilson (eds.), “Introduction,” How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 21. 18 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 30–32. 19 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 105. 20 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 28. 21 This curatorial approach was also informed by Claire Bishop’s recent work on “dialectical contemporaneity,” a “museological practice and art-historical method” that is divorced from the market- driven interests of the art world, takes a stance on political issues, and most importantly, is a curatorial framework not built upon exclusively Western worldviews, histories, and epistemologies. Claire Bishop, Radical Museology, Or, What's Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Berlin: Walther Koenig, 2013), 9, 27. 56 SHIFT

of ideas similar to what Mark Rifkin articulates in Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Rifkin proposes that temporality is not a “fact” as Western scholarship claims, but rather a colonial epistemological construct that is used to organize and articulate life on earth.22 Rifkin writes, “The supposedly objective givenness of simultaneity, of an unfolding mutual now, depends on a historic conception of time as an unfolding, universal line of development.”23 Rifkin takes umbrage with the way that domination of Native people is interwoven into modernity, placing Indigenous peoples and colonizers into a shared “presentness” and thereby normalizing settler- occupation and its continued effacement of Indigenous ways of being in-time.24 Land Grant sought to trouble settler-time through the inclusion of documents and artefacts that call the university’s treatment of Indigenous people into question. The display of colonial artifacts for public audiences was one of the primary objectives of early museums and continues to be an important facet of contemporary museological practice as institutions around the world install, reinstall, and reframe their collections today. Though many institutions posit themselves as reflexive and “post- colonial,” there remain an alarming number of museums that re-inscribe colonial violence though their display design, signage, and storytelling techniques.25 One such example is the endurance of public monuments that uphold white supremacy and settler colonialist fantasies, whose removal has been increasingly demanded by multiple organizations.26 Decolonize This Place, organized by the MTL+ collective, has called for the removal of the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History. The statue, which is city-owned and occupies public land, was rendered in 1939 by James Earl Fraser. It depicts Theodore Roosevelt on horseback, flanked by a primitivized depiction of a black man, who is half-clothed, and a non-descript Native American chief.27 Of their call for the removal of this statue, the MTL+ collective argues that this action “[points] beyond the artistic tradition of ‘institutional critique’ and exceed[s] a single-issue or single-site activist campaign.”28 As the MTL+ collective

22 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 8–9. 23 Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 19. 24 Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 8. 25 Two examples often cited within museum studies include the Royal Ontario Museum’s 1989 exhibition Into the Heart of Africa, which employed a tone of irony and sarcasm that undermined the exhibition’s aim to offer a critical perspective on the colonization of Africa, as well as the opening of the Musée du Quai Branly in 2006, which uses display techniques such as dimly lit cases and a “jungle-inspired” architecture to house artifacts acquired in the French colonies during colonial expansion. 26 A related example is the call for and eventual removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia which was employed as the symbol of the “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally that broke into a riot in August 2017. 27 MTL+, “A Questionnaire on Monuments,” October 165 (Summer 2018), 119. 28 MTL+, “A Questionnaire on Monuments,” 122. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 57

suggests, curatorial or activist gestures need to move beyond isolated gestures. At the Art Gallery of Ontario, for example, curatorial efforts by Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik have shifted one third of the museum’s gallery space to display Indigenous artists and rendered all wall texts in the newly rehung J.S. McLean Centre for Canadian and Indigenous Art in Anishinaabemowin, English, and French.29 In Subject to Display, Jennifer A. González examines the curatorial logics of primitivizing museum exhibitions through the lens of race discourse to demonstrate the ways that visual and other cultural regimes produce racialized subjects.30 Both living beings and material objects can constitute racialized subjects via a process González identifies as epidermalization, “a process . . . in which the object is positioned in history, in a collection, in the marketplace, or in a museum display as racially defined.”31 Modes of display often reproduce and thus reify the iconography of a particular racialized subject position.32 A form of that González conceives of as a “situational aesthetics” emerged as one response to such modes of display, in which an artist will recontextualize existing objects and/or spaces in order to expose oppressive modes of display and processes of subjection. Installations by artists such , Renée Green, and Fred Wilson seek to challenge a history of racialized violence that is perpetuated within cultural institutions. Our research and curatorial strategy within Land Grant was influenced by such activist movements and curatorial efforts. We sought to demonstrate the ways these gestures can work within the parameters of the university art museum itself, reconfiguring the space to be a site of both resistance and refusal—a space that allows for art objects, archival materials, and the installation itself to contextualize one another. The university art museum is a unique space as a nexus in which multiple publics, disciplines, and learning outcomes are realized. While clearly related to the work of civic museums, the institutional situation of university art museums creates distinct circumstances for exploratory exhibitions. Two key facets of the university art museum are the museum’s emphasis on teaching and curricular research and a museological focus on creating a space that, ideally, guarantees academic freedom.33 As we discuss below, in the context of the unjust firing of Steven Salaita, these tenets of the university and university art museum are fraught in practice, but nonetheless serve as an idealistic foundation that is

29 Ted Loos, “A Canadian Museum Promotes Indigenous Art. But Don’t Call It ‘Indian.’” The New York Times, July 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/arts/design/art-gallery-of-ontario-indigenous- art.html. 30 Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 3. 31 González, Subject to Display, 5. 32 González, Subject to Display, 6. 33 Anna Hammond, Ian Berry, Sheryl Conkelton, Sharon Corwin, Pamela Franks, Katherine Hart, Wyona Lynch-McWhite, Charles Reeve and John Stomberg, “The Role of the University Art Museum and Gallery,” Art Journal 65, no. 3 (Fall 2006), 26. 58 SHIFT

fundamentally different from the aims of civic museums.34 Moten and Harney articulate this tension in their observation that “it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.”35 A similar duality is at work within the broader history of land-grant institutions, where enlightenment-era values are undercut by the legacies of settler-colonial violence that continue to shape culture today.

‘Settled’ Lands and Agricultural Occupations

These curatorial priorities manifested in Land Grant through the troubling of the logics made concrete by the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, which established a claim to Illinois land on the tail of a series of treaty “negotiations” with the Indigenous occupants of the region.36 These negotiations were complicated by the fact that many Indigenous peoples entered into these conversations with an epistemological framework that did not include the concepts of land ownership espoused by colonizers.37 Even historians like Mr. J. Seymour Currey, who demonstrated prejudice towards Indigenous peoples in his writings, acknowledged the dubious validity of the terms and tactics used by government officials when establishing treaty documents. As Currey noted in his 1912 publication on Illinois treaties, “The provisions of these treaties were often not clear to the ignorant chiefs, who, after the agreement was made and ratified, would raise objections and demand another council . . . The odds were all against them, with their unstable conditions of land tenure . . . and the keen, often unscrupulous wits of the government agents on the other side.”38 As this quote illustrates, even as treaties were being negotiated, the American government officials guiding these processes were apt to be deceptive and misleading. The immediate challenges to these treaties when they were drafted indicate the debatable legality of documents that were essential to the founding of land-grant institutions and settler-colonial communities at large.

34 Hammond et al., “The Role of the University Art Museum,” 26. 35 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 26. 36 Frank R. Grover, “Indian Treaties Affecting Lands in the Present State of Illinois: A Paper Read before the Illinois State Historical Society.” Springfield, 1915, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112104139060. 37 Shaw, Herman, and Dobbs argue that “although indigenous perspectives can be widely diverse, they are often rooted in a common epistemological standpoints.” They go on to explain that a widely conceptualized Indigenous worldview does not share the concept of land-ownership as it is understood in the Western sense but rather views land as a part of as dynamic, interactive relational systems. Wendy S. Shaw, R. D. K. Herman, and Rebecca G. Dobbs, “Encountering Indigeneity: Re-Imagining and Decolonizing Geography,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 3 (2006), 269. 38 J. Seymour Currey, Chicago: Its History and Its Builders: A Century of Marvelous Growth (Chicago, IL: S. J. Clarke Pub. Co., 1912), 202. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 59

The questionable legality of these treaties and the subsequent 1862 Morrill Act is an example of what Ariella Azoulay calls “paper-regulated destruction,” by which she means that the circulation and administration of world-changing documents— bureaucratic forms, seals, signed certificates—renders certain histories as inevitable processes that ultimately protect and legitimize the perpetrators of colonial violence.39 Jackson’s We the People further exemplifies this paper-regulated destruction through the way it situates the document of the Morrill Act in the center of the canvas. The document reads as both figure and ground, operating as a piece of legislation and as a glowing, white light source that radiates around the statue of the Alma Mater. This dual function exemplifies the uncertain grounds on which the Morrill Act was ratified. Jackson’s work can be found across the University of Illinois campus, from the aforementioned President’s Office to the Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences library. Jackson received his MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign in 1954, and taught there as an art professor from 1954-1987. Known primarily for his mural commissions, including works done for the Illinois State Capitol and the Bureau of Reclamation, Jackson painted his oil landscapes of the Midwest prairie in a realist manner but took liberties in his representation to create emotional and atmospheric effects. Jackson’s use of realism within a compressed temporal and spatial plane is in line with 1930s regionalist painting, a style that promoted a pastoral myth of the Midwest as a land simultaneously occupied by migrant agrarian workers, growing industry, and a preserved rural landscape. Judith A. Barter has observed that Regionalism “was an art that attempted to retain cultural history and be modern at the same time.”40 This dichotomy is at work within the logic of We the People. While the three historic figures, Turner, Lincoln, and Morrill, dominate the central space, a variety of figures occupy the foreground, demonstrating a range of forms of labor enabled by the land-grant institution. On the left, Turner holds open a book that exposes a nondescript field of green. In it, four figures in clothing reminiscent of 19th century prairie life wander into the “blank page,” a space that suggests that prior to the arrival of homesteaders the lands of Illinois were void of occupants. This depiction of agrarian life and migration is surrounded by representations of modern day industrialism, including space exploration, engineering, and large-scale farming. This shift from an agrarian past to an industrial present is in line with other hallmark works of Regionalist painting. Take, for example, the panel Midwest in Thomas Hart Benton’s mural America Today (1930–31), which Alvin Johnson, the director of the

39 Laura Elizabeth Shea, “Ariella Azoulay: Potential History of the Archive: The Micro Study of a Macro Institution,” Kritik (December 1, 2017). https://unitforcriticism.wordpress.com/2017/12/01/ariella-azoulay- potential-history-of-the-archive-the-micro-study-of-a-macro-institution-response-by-laura-elizabeth-shea/. 40 Judith A. Bartner, “Prairie Pastoral” in America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s, ed. Judith A. Bartner (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2016), 49. 60 SHIFT

New York School for Social Research, commissioned in 1929 (fig. 4).41 The mural is comprised of ten panels that relate to American life in the early 1930s, ranging from depictions of the deep South to coal mining in the West and dancehall culture in the East. The panel entitled Midwest depicts the cultivation of land and the labor necessary to create the lush wheat fields that are synonymous with Midwest pastoralism. A logging scene on the right side of the canvas demonstrates the transformation of the land during westward expansion, while the left shows wheat fields amidst a modern grain elevator which, it has been observed, looks like a skyscraper on the horizon, collapsing ruralism with modern industry.42

Figure 4. Thomas Hart Benton, Midwest, panel from America Today, 1930–31. Ten panels: Egg tempera with oil glazing over Permalba on a gesso ground on linen mounted to wood panels with a honeycomb interior. Panel e): 92 x 117 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of AXA Equitable, 2012 (2012.478e). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

41 “Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural Rediscovered,” accessed June 26, 2018, https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2014/thomas-hart-benton-america-today. 42 Randall R. Griffey, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, and Stephanie L. Herdich, “Thomas Hart Benton's America Today,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 72, no. 3 (Winter, 2015), 28–29. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 61

In order to unsettle such idealized depictions of farming and industry seen in Benton and Jacksons’s paintings, Land Grant began with the video work Submerging Land (Act One: Between the Bottomlands & the World) (2015) by Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross, which challenges the world-changing legislative power of the Morrill Act and the past 100 years of agricultural practices in central Illinois (fig. 5). This video work opens with a long shot of endless rows of corn filmed from a car window while radio weather and commodity reports drone over the white noise of a vehicle moving at a considerable speed. As fields pass by, the radio is replaced by the voice of a female narrator who reports, “This is a story about vision, about seeing lines, deciphering a composition, and tracing systems. It is also about the ability to suspend belief, to see a different past and future. It’s about perception of the long-term kind.”43

Figure 5. Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross, Submerging Land (Act One, Between the Bottomlands & the World), 2015. NTSC digital video.

Over the eleven minute twenty-three second video, the viewer is moved between footage of corn processing, fields of crops shot from cars, and farm machinery. The imagery is contextualized by a voiceover that explains, amongst other things, components of the Morrill Act, such as how the act permitted states to sell land allotments to create universities, thus divorcing land from its materiality into abstract capital.44 Ross and Griffis’s video emphasizes the materiality of the state and the land that the university

43 Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross, Submerging Land (Act One, Between the Bottomlands & the World), 2015, NTSC Digital Video, Champaign, IL, https://vimeo.com/28668090. 44 paperson, “Land. And the University is Settler Colonial,” n.p. 62 SHIFT

itself is built upon, rather than the abstract market system that fuels it.45 In foregrounding Ross and Griffis’s artwork at the beginning of the exhibition (fig. 6) and situating Jackson’s We the People on a decentralized wall space in the gallery (fig. 2), we sought to demonstrate how university art museums can take up Moten and Harney’s call to go beyond critique by encircling, thus enveloping “settled” ideas of the institution and fugitive “unsettling” understandings into a single space where they bounce off one another.46

Figure 6. Land Grant, installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, 2017. Installation view features Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross, Submerging Land (Act One: Between the Bottomlands & the World) (2015) and a vitrine with mineral samples loaned from the Illinois State Geologic Survey, including Fluorite, Calcite, Barite and Benstonite.

While the Morrill Act partitioned lands upon which to build colleges, land use and accumulation continues to be an important trait of modern research universities.47 One of the main aims of establishing land-grant universities was to generate experts in agriculture who could settle the lands of the state, thus further entangling the university in

45 “RR05: Ryan Griffis/Sarah Ross, Between the Bottomlands & the World,” Regional Relationships, accessed September 15, 2018, http://regionalrelationships.org/rr05/. 46 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 19. 47 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 19. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 63

the politics of colonization. The Morrow Plots corn fields located in the center of the UIUC campus attest to the continued importance of farming and agri-business at the college. The two historic cyanotypes of the Morrow plots included in Land Grant document the early days of what have since become the oldest experimental agronomic research plots in North America, including “the oldest continuous corn plot in the world,” which have even been designated as a National Historic Landmark.48 The Morrow Plots were established in 1876 for the purpose of studying soil and crop management and have continued to be used as a site for agriculture query, with the rest of the college campus expanding to surround them.49

Figure 7. Photographer unknown, Morrow Plots, Corn and Oats, 1903. Cyanotype. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives, Image 0007443.

The photograph Morrow Plots, Corn and Oats, 1903 is an image of a white man in a sun hat and bowtie, standing in the center of a large cornfield (fig. 7). The man in the

48 R. T. Odell, W.M. Walker, L.V. Boone, and M.G. Oldham, The Morrow Plots: A Century of Learning, Bulletin no. 775 (Champaign, IL: Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, August 1982), http://hdl.handle.net/2142/28415, 7. 49 Odell et al., “The Morrow Plots,” 8. 64 SHIFT

image, Dr. Cyril Hopkins, assumes a position of authority: arms crossed across his chest, surveying the lands before him. Though Dr. Hopkins was one of many researchers studying in the fields, his stance speaks to the ownership he feels over the space he inhabits.50 Unlike early American landscape paintings that include small representations of Indigenous peoples to attest to the “wildness of the land,” Dr. Hopkins occupies a central position in a man-made landscape, referencing the way that European settlers took up the task of controlling and dominating the land in line with the type of labor depicted in Benton’s Midwest. Similarly, the photograph Morrow Plots Soil Sample, 1904 documents two white men in formal jackets and hats performing gestures of scientific research for the camera, bestowing their civility onto the earth (fig. 8). The inclusion of the archival Morrow plot photographs alongside other objects resituates these documents within the violent history of settler colonialism, calling attention to the misalignment between the university’s performance of white, European civility and the barbaric acts that tilled the soil for the university’s existence.

Figure 8. Photographer unknown, Morrow Plots, Soil Sample 1904. Cyanotype. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives, Image 0007548.

50 E. Davenport, “Cyril G. Hopkin” in Science 50, no. 1295 (1919), 387–88. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 65

Though none of the official materials about the Morrow Plots mention it, the cultivation of corn in Illinois predates the arrival of European colonists by centuries.51 Corn has long held an important role in the diet of the Indigenous peoples of North America. In Haudenosaunee agricultural tradition, for example, corn is one of the Three Sisters, a group of complementary crops of corn, beans, and squash grown together for the mutual benefit of all three plants. 52 Unlike the mono-cultural agricultural approach of the Morrow Plots, the large-scale commodity farming depicted in Ross and Griffis’s video piece, or the organized rows of crops represented in We the People, Indigenous gardening practices are grounded in reciprocal, kinship relationships with the natural environment.53 Land Grant made the erasure of Indigenous land practices visible by showcasing objects that reference colonial approaches to land ownership and displaying them alongside works like Griffis and Ross’s video, which directly questions Western agriculture practices. Our curatorial decision to have the audio from Ross and Griffis’s work project into the gallery aimed to ensure that all objects in the exhibition were viewed with a critical eye, thus complicating the colonial land practices exemplified by the Morrill Act whose legacy lives on in the continued land use practices at the university today.

Authoring the Fugitive University

We the People renders Illinois’s legacy as entrenched in the advancement of agriculture and technology, and promotes diversity in the university’s curriculum and student body. At the same time, Jackson’s painting upholds a vision of the land-grant institution and its figureheads as benevolently patriarchal. As a means of unsettling this proposition, we included two examples of experimental pedagogical projects that emerged from within the university space itself. These examples, the Whole University Catalog and the Blueprint for Counter Education, challenge such formulations through democratic experiments in knowledge production, wherein students worked with their faculty to design course content. This spirit reverberated into the Land Grant exhibition through a mode of collaborative curatorial choices and shared authorship that, as Moten and Harney argue for, celebrates self-organized, illicit, and fugitive acts of study.54 Study allows for

51 Sunmin Park, Hongu Nobuko, and James W. Daily, “Native American Foods: History, Culture, and Influence on Modern Diets” in Journal of Ethnic Foods 3, no. 3 (2016), 171. 52 Melissa Kruse-Peeples, “How to Grow a Three Sisters Garden” in Native Seeds, May 27, 2016, https://www.nativeseeds.org/learn/nss-blog/415-3sisters. 53 Shaw, Herman, Dobbs, “Encountering Indigeneity,” 269. Cajete describes how these practices reflect broader Indigenous approaches to science: “Native science is also about mutual reciprocity, and which presupposes a responsibility to care for, sustain, and respect the rights of other living things, plants, animals, and the place in which one lives.” Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe: Clear Lights Publishers, 2000), 79. 54 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 29. 66 SHIFT

an active, open-ended intellectual pursuit that values sociality as a form of education.55 It is an ongoing practice with no predetermined learning outcomes, one that occurs beyond the limits of a semester or even the hours cramming before an exam. Moten and Harney explain that increasingly, mandatory assignments, administrative duties, and other forms of labor required of the university actually impede one’s ability to study within the university.56 Such requirements are depicted in We the People, where incoming students move in a centralized procession around Lorado Taft’s bronze sculpture, Alma Mater (1929). Students in the painting enter the university in street clothes but emerge on the other side of the statue as graduates in uniform caps and gowns. Jackson rendered his painting in the style of Thomas Hart Benton and the Regionalist art movement of the 1930s, a narrative style that responded to the Great Depression. This stylistic choice signals a return to idealistic and conservative values during the 1980s and raises questions about the reassertion of Turner, Lincoln, and Morrill as beacons of equality in public higher education in that decade. These figures are conflated with notions of futurity as they are surrounded by laboring students. One man works at a now-outdated computer; another figure works at a drafting board; and a central figure, a young African American woman, is shown gazing through a compass. The student body is depicted as heterogeneous in terms of gender and race, which doesn’t reflect the actual demographics of the university at the time. For example, a 1982 survey entitled UIUC On-Campus Student Enrollment by Curriculum, Sex, Race, and Residency reports that of a total of 26,260 undergraduate students, 11,632 students identified as women, 54 students identified as Native American, 981students as African American, 1,043 students as Asian American or Asian Pacific Islander, and 418 students identified as Hispanic, while 23,479 students identified as Caucasian.57 Furthermore, contrary to Moten and Harney’s open-ended notion of study, these figures also demonstrate education as producers within a system where the act of study concretely reaffirms the vision of a progressive university. This depiction is parallel to the Regionalist impulse to incite desire in viewers for a past that had already disappeared, or, in the case of Jackson’s painting, an idealized university space that never actually existed.58 As previously noted, a main objective of the Morrill Acts was to establish universities that focused on agriculture and technological development. The 1862 act states, “The leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to

55 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 110. 56 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 114. 57 On the survey, the only options for reporting gender were “Men,” “Women,” and “Unknown.” “UIUC On- Campus Student Enrollment by Curriculum, Sex, Race, and Residency,” (Fall 1982), data gathered by the Division of Management Information. Accessed on June 26, 2018. http://www.dmi.illinois.edu/stuenr/ethsexres/ethsex82.htm. 58 Bartner, “Prairie Pastoral,” 29. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 67

agricultural and the mechanic arts. . . in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.”59 With this impetus in mind, the educational mission of land-grant universities is embedded in the aims of the U.S. imperial project:60 agricultural industrial development, creating infrastructures and technologies that regulate and manage populations, and an investment in militarization and defense. Indeed, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira argue, “the state of permanent war that is core to U.S. imperialism and racial statecraft has three fronts: military, cultural, and academic.”61 Within this configuration, the university is a site in which culture wars play out and where multiple histories and knowledges about the United States are shared and contested.62 The university, Jodi Melamed argues, is a site that reproduces settler-colonial logistics through an administrative violence. Like Azoulay’s notion of “paper-regulated destruction,” the management of bodies and the linkage of human rights to property- ownership work together to obscure social relationships.63 Melamed goes on to say that despite being obscured, these social relationships are ever-present, regardless of whether administrative powers recognize them. Social relations are, therefore, a fertile ground for refusal and the shaping of alternative networks that circumvent universities’ administrative power. This is made clear in Moten and Harney’s observation that capitalizing upon “the necessarily failed administrative accounting of the incalculable” is an effective strategy of resistance in academia.64 In Land Grant, the university operated on three levels: through its physicality as a real space, the university as an imagined space, and as a network of social relations. Within the context of the exhibition, two examples of counter-cultural ephemera were exhibited as a means of suggesting other alternative forms of producing knowledge. The first, the Whole University Catalog, considers the three levels on which the university operates from a student’s perspective. The publication—an homage to the Whole Earth Catalog, a 1968 countercultural publication that provided resources for lifestyles rooted in a holistic, environmentally conscious, and DIY ethos—was produced as the final project for an undergraduate Heuristics course offered at the University of Illinois in 1969 by Dr. Heinz von Foerster, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Biophysics. As a collaborative project, the Whole University Catalog emphasized social relationality rather than the pursuit and development of individual, completed projects.

59 37th Congress, Session II, July 2nd, 1862, Ch. CXXX, section 4, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, 504. 60 paperson, “Land. And the University is Settler Colonial,” n.p. 61 Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, “Introduction” in The Imperial University, eds. Chatterjee and Maira (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 7. 62 Chatterjee and Maira, “Introduction,” 7. 63 Jodi Melamed, “The Open Secret of Racial Capitalist Violence.” (Presentation, The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Champaign, Illinois, March 27th, 2018.) 64 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 35. 68 SHIFT

Whole University features an array of information, including manifestos that call for education reform as well as information about everyday student life. Other images reveal the students’ own awareness of university infrastructure. Several pages of the catalog visualize administration through banal photographs of nondescript hallways, classrooms, and closed administrators’ doors. The Whole Earth Catalog presented a vision of daily life as one part of a global ecological system. Similarly, the Whole University Catalog creates an image of the university as a designed social system intended to output a “model” student. In many ways, it calls out the model of education that is advocated for within We the People. While much of the publication is humorous, spreads such as “The University Game” depict the university as a closed system, where players begin at “registration” and move through a series of classes, parties, and graduation requirements to make it to the outside world.65 In a similar manner, Jackson’s We the People features representations of a diverse student body and a variety of career paths. The central graduation procession illustrated in the painting exemplifies the limited educational system that von Foerster and his students sought to undermine. Central to von Foerster’s experiment are questions of knowledge production, participatory and collaborative practices, and inquiry into the formulation of social space within and outside of university settings. The Whole University Catalog emphasizes the creation of alternative means of understanding or navigating space through participatory practices. Within Land Grant, the Whole University Catalog was displayed on the same wall as We the People, creating a dialogue between the two takes on forms of higher education, both of which are out of reach. A second experimental pedagogical project from that era, the Blueprint for Counter Education (fig. 9), offers another proposal for an alternative mode of education—one that is primarily visual.66 The Blueprint is the product of Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s research at the California Institute of the Arts, where they sought to create an alternative model of higher education that worked within and against existing curricula. Stein, Miller, and their students created a portable education tool: a boxed set containing a curriculum guidebook called the “shooting script” and three posters displaying a networked model of theorists and movements. Designed by Marshall Henrichs, the posters maintain a DIY-aesthetic and reference Dadaist and Futurist collage. Stein and Miller, much like von Foerster, created the posters through an iterative drafting process with their students and teaching assistants, whereby the multiple versions of the poster were collaboratively synthesized into a singular version.67

65 Heinz von Foerster, The Whole University Catalog, 1969, n.p. 66 In 2016, an online archive and inventory of the Blueprint for Counter Education and its multiple iterations was made available to the public, see http://blueprintforcountereducation.com/ 67 Maurice Stein and Larry Miller, Blueprint for Counter Education (New York: Inventory Press, 2016), 2. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 69

Figure 9. Land Grant, installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017. Installation view features a core sample loaned from the Illinois State Geologic Survey (2016), posters from the Blueprint for Counter Education (1970) and a concrete canoe designed by the Boneyard Yacht Club, loaned from the Engineering department.

Blueprint’s aims and critiques are in line with many counter-education projects of the late 1960s, as noted by Lorraine Wild and David Karwan, who wrote that “New interpretations of art, literature, sex, music, and cinema . . . became paramount to the campus learning experience, and as a result it could be hard to decipher where the ‘classroom’ began and ended.”68 Scholars have also connected this piece of countercultural ephemera to larger developments in cybernetics at the time, envisioning the posters along with the companion guidebook as a sort of analogue form of hyperlinking.69 However, it is noteworthy that Stein and Miller conceived of these posters as a “constellating configuration,” a notion that was also employed in the installation for the Land Grant exhibition. The design of the three charts disorient timelines built around canons of modernism and postmodernism, offering three different networked models of

68 Lorraine Wild and David Karwarn, “Agency and Urgency: The Medium and Its Message” in Hippie Modernism (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 53. 69 Paul Cronin, “Recovering and Rendering Vital: Blueprint for Counter Education at the California Institute of the Arts” in Blueprint for Counter Education, by Maurice Stein and Larry Miller (New York: Inventory Press, 2016), 52. 70 SHIFT

thinking through the material. Despite their constellating quality, the charts retain a right- left orientation, where modernism on the right is a “meditative environment” and post- modernism on the left as a “participatory environment.”70 This highlights one of the main limitations of the charts: regardless of their dynamic design, they remain static in their use and uphold disciplinary binaries as well as a predominately Eurocentric canon.71 Indeed, while each of the three posters has a unique design, rhythm, and emphasis, in each chart, political theorist Herbert Marcuse and media theorist Marshall McLuhan are positioned as the central figures of study. The Blueprint for Counter Education is remarkable in the multiple ways that it calls attention to its own limitations and failures. Although scholars have framed this project as utopian in nature, Stein and Miller emphasized its shortcomings within the introduction to their Shooting Script, the publication that accompanies the posters. There they note several issues with their final product of the Blueprint, including questions of relevance over time and the posters’ blatant omissions. Furthermore, despite all the possible intellectual connections one could make using these posters, they remain largely opaque as educational resources. The posters require the user to already be familiar with many of the topics they chart. These shortcomings reflect that the Blueprint did not intend to completely replace a university education. According to Julie Niemi, “Stein and Miller never saw the charts as an alternative to the classroom or as something that would replace a college education. For them, Blueprint was a new way to navigate academic institutions and a new framework for developing a radical, critical path through them.”72 Rather than aim to reject a university education outright, Stein and Miller sought methods to reorganize the university’s curriculum and to create tools for study that would take place outside of, but still dependent upon, university infrastructure. Both the Whole University Catalog and the Blueprint are ambivalent in their position to the university. This ambivalence is a form of fugitive study as outlined in The Undercommons. As Moten and Harney write, one’s position in relation to the university must be “in but not of.”73 Moten and Harney’s recognition of a relationship that is not merely “for-or-against”74 the university is also in line with Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the ambiguous relation between physical and social spaces.75 These models of alternative pedagogies disrupt the narrative of progress put forth by Jackson’s We the People by producing a social space founded on creating open-ended possibilities that emerge from

70 Stein and Miller, Blueprint for Counter Education, 10–11. 71 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Blueprint for a Blueprint” in Blueprint for Counter Education, by Maurice Stein and Larry Miller (New York: Inventory Press, 2016), 18. 72 Julie Niemi, “Blueprint for Counter Education at Cal Arts,” accessed June 25, 2018, http://blueprintforcountereducation.com/archive/Blueprint_for_Counter_Education_at_CalAr.pdf. 73 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 26. 74 Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond” in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 9. 75 Henri Lefebvre, “Social Space” in The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 68–168. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 71

multiple iterations and outcomes rather than a factory-like production of knowledge. The interest in focus on the university as both a real and imagined space for the Land Grant exhibition stemmed largely from examples of the social dimensions of the university demonstrated in projects such as the 2009–10 exhibition Beyond the Chief, curated by Robert Warrior and hosted by the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Indigeneity and the Ever-Present Role of Colonialism on Campus

From February 2009 to September 2010, Robert Warrior curated the public art exhibition Beyond the Chief by Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds on the campus of UIUC. The project comprised twelve aluminum panels resembling road signage, an iteration of Heap of Birds’s Native Hosts series. The works were installed in front of the American Indian Studies, African American Studies, and Asian American Studies buildings, as well as the campus cultural houses.76 The signage depicted the names of a dozen Indigenous peoples whose homelands fall within Illinois state lines: the Peoria, Piankesaw, Kaskaskia, Wea, Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Odawa, Myaamia, Quapaw, Meskwaki, Sac, and Kickapoo. Beyond the Chief also evoked the values of Heap of Birds’s own Cheyenne tribe. According to Heap of Birds, “In Cheyenne tradition a chief had no personal property. . . A chief is far beyond one person and should reflect an honor and allegiance—as well as truth, tradition, listening, openness, and good way—to a whole people. As we install these twelve sign panels, we walk forward on the University of Illinois campus to honor these ideals and intertribal brothers and sisters from a circular position of respect.”77 Through the duration of the Beyond the Chief exhibition, nine accounts of vandalism were documented.78 In his reflection on this vandalism Warrior observed that “these panels, in their memorialization of lives that were essentially ethnically cleansed from Illinois, present a modern Native voice critiquing the way the erasure and removal of those lives have been unmarked, a critique that some people would rather attack and steal than appreciate or even just ignore.”79 Beyond the Chief serves as an example of the mobilization of the notions of the Undercommons put forth by Moten and Harney. Sharon Irish has suggested that the visibility of a Native critique of the campus was a motivating factor of retaliation through vandalism.80 Indeed, Heap of Birds’s installation

76 Robert Warrior, “Vandalizing Life Writing at the University of Illinois: Heap of Birds’s Signs of Indigenous Life,” Profession (2011), 44. 77 Edgar Heap of Birds, “Artist Statement,” Beyond the Chief Exhibit, http://www.ais.illinois.edu/news/features/beyond/. 78 A complete list of the accounts of vandalism can be found at http://www.ais.illinois.edu/mascot/news/archive/2010/beyondhistory.aspx. 79 Warrior, “Vandalizing Life Writing,” 45. 80 Sharon Irish, quoted in Warrior, “Vandalizing Life Writing,” 47. 72 SHIFT

made visible the contemporary presence of Indigenous voices on campus, the way this presence is diminished, and the structural racism that exists under the surface of the neoliberal university’s call for a multicultural, diverse campus.81 Despite efforts by the Land Grant curators, the exhibition did not feature any documentation or work from Heap of Birds’s project. This important installation currently resides within the collections of American Indian Studies department and will be installed in an upcoming exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum. The situatedness of these artifacts highlights the centrality and importance of the work of the American Indian Studies department as well as the Native American cultural house on campus. The design of the exhibition began with a reproduction of Charles C. Royce’s map of Illinois

Figure 10. Charles C. Royce, “Illinois 1,” from Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1803-05. Courtesy of Newberry Library. in Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1803-05, foregrounding the history of settler-colonial violence embedded in the campus (fig. 10). This curatorial move called attention to the themes of the real and the imaginary introduced in the conception of the university as both a physical place and an imagined space. This strategy is in line with Helen Molesworth’s vision for an institution that is a “fundamental reorganization of the institutions that govern us, as well as those that we, in turn, govern.”82 Molesworth goes

81 Chatterjee and Maira, “Introduction,” 7–8. 82 Molesworth, “How to Install Art Like a Feminist,” 499. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 73

on to say that it is not enough to simply reinsert works created by marginalized voices in a chronological order, but rather that a fundamental re-ordering of exhibitions is necessary to reveal an alternative history that doesn’t paper over violent absences.83 In this way, Land Grant sought to give these absences their own material referent. The only depiction of the retired University of Illinois mascot in Land Grant is contained within We the People and was placed on the final and least visible wall in the gallery, disempowering the image while harkening to its continued, sanctioned, presence on campus. In the painting, the former mascot is rendered wearing an orange and white feathered headdress and traditional buckskin garments, likely drawn from the 1982 regalia purchased by the University from Frank Fools Crow of the Oglala Sioux Tribal Nation of South Dakota.84 The former mascot stands with his open arms raised to the sky in a position like the other figureheads featured in the painting, the Alma Mater statue and the signatories of the Morrill Act. In contrast to these symbolic characters, the former mascot is depicted on a smaller scale, mirroring the laboring academic and agricultural workers in the piece. However, he is also removed from the progressive narrative of action and betterment they embody, and is instead is relegated to a frozen position, reflecting the University’s ascription of past-tense status to Indigeneity, a position the institution uses to “justify” the appropriation of traditional garments. Like the image of the retired mascot in We the People, the exhibition included a series of photographs in which primitivist performances meant to be understood by spectators as “Indian” exemplify North American legacies of ‘playing Indian.’ As Philip J. Deloria notes, white people undertake performances wherein they adopt Indigenous dress and culture for numerous, complicated, and paradoxical reasons.85 As Deloria explains, one of the primary functions of ‘Indian play’ is that it allows colonizers to temporarily inhabit an identity that is unquestionably American.86 Understood in this framework, the young people in the problematic photographs included in the exhibition Land Grant were enacting both their own yearning for American authenticity as well as the final paradox Deloria notes in his book: “The self-defining pairing of American truth with American freedom rests of the ability to wield power against Indians. . . while simultaneously drawing upon them.”87 While Land Grant disempowered the sanctioned image of the retired mascot, our curatorial collective placed the historic photographs of ‘playing Indian’ directly beside the Indian Land Cessions map on the gallery’s first wall, making an explicit connection between the initial physical and ongoing cultural theft perpetrated by settlers on Illinois’s Indigenous peoples.

83 Molesworth, “How to Install Art Like a Feminist,” 504. 84 Julie Wurth, “Sioux Request Prompts Look at History of Chief Illiniwek Garb,” The News Gazette, January 27, 2007, http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2007-01-27/sioux-request-prompts-look-history-chief- illiniwek-garb.html. 85 Deloria, Philip J., Playing Indian (Chelsea: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–9. 86 Deloria, Playing Indian, 183. 87 Deloria, Playing Indian, 191. 74 SHIFT

The exhibition also contained an archival photograph of a building, Davenport Hall (3) (fig. 11). Visible in the upper left-hand corner of the image is a landscape of fields that would, more than a century later, become the site of the Native American House on the University of Illinois campus, as we noted in our wall label for this image. The Native American House opened in 2002 after fifteen years of organizing and protests. As Moten and Harney suggest, cultural houses serve important roles on contemporary university campuses because they are one of the few spaces dedicated to fostering relational, “being with” study. The opening of the Native American House addressed a longstanding absence of Native American representation on campus; an absence that was exacerbated by the omnipresent images of the former mascot and, in 2014, when all but one faculty member vacated their positions in the American Indian Studies program in response to the blocked hire of Indigenous scholar and activist Dr. Steven Salaita.88

Figure 11. Photographer unknown, Davenport Hall (3), 1900. Photograph on board. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives, Image 0002887.

Through the process of curating the objects that spoke to Indigeneity at UIUC from the university’s own collections, it became apparent to the co-curators of Land Grant that

88 Julie Wurth, “Post-Salaita: UI Program’s Future Unclear,” The News Gazette, August 29, 2016, http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2016-08-29/post-salaita-ui-programs-future-unclear.html. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 75

the institution’s approach to Native American communities and histories has been reactionary in nature. As with the reactionary violence towards Heap of Birds’s Beyond the Chief, the original violence of Indigenous removal is reenacted through each conflict between the university and its Native American critics. This reactionary relationship between the university’s logics of administration and critiques raised by faculty and students through course-offerings, exhibitions, and campus protests underscores Moten and Harney’s recognition of the futility of being a critical academic. Of this position, they ask, “Does the questioning of the academic not become a pacification?”89 To critique is to participate in the university’s logics of administration, which, as Ahmed points out in her recent work on complaint, creates space for the institution to deny the legitimacy of the person leveraging the critique, thus rendering them silent.90 Critical representations of Illinois and the university by Indigenous authors are absent from the campus collections drawn upon for Land Grant. The absence of these materials from the exhibition is thus reflects the institutional erasure of criticism directed towards the university. We addressed this shortcoming, as well as the settler-colonial violence which underlines it, by including wall labels that made mention of holes in collections, as well as drawing viewers’ attention to the ways that colonialism has and continues to shape the institution. Though Land Grant made use of available archival materials, our position remained suspicious of the archive as a colonial mechanism. Following Molesworth, as well as Melamed and Azoulay, we posit that while archives serve to legitimize particular historical narratives, they do not exclude the reality that others exist. By drawing public attention to the current limitations of institutional archives, our curatorial collective hopes that Land Grant can serve as a starting point for dissatisfied students, silenced administrators, and marginalized faculty to take up fugitive forms of study that better reflect their values and their experiences of the university.

Conclusion

The same discourses of academic civility that Moten and Harney critique in The Undercommons to took a concrete form at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in August 2014, when the college’s Board of Trustees made the decision to fire Dr. Steven Salaita after he had signed his employment contract but before he was able to officially take up a tenure-track position in the American Indian Studies Department because of his ‘uncivil’ tweets against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.91 In the

89 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 39. 90 Sara Ahmed, “Complaint as Diversity Work” in Feministkilljoys (November 10, 2017). Accessed June 26, 2018, https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/11/10/complaint-as-diversity-work. 91 As Chancellor Wise stated, “As chancellor, it is my responsibility to ensure that all perspectives are welcome and that our discourse, regardless of subject matter or viewpoint, allows new concepts and differing points of view to be discussed in and outside the classroom in a scholarly, civil and productive manner.” 76 SHIFT

aftermath of his firing there was considerable commentary and outrage about the impingement of Salaita’s right to academic freedom.92 Many asserted that since Twitter is a public forum not associated with, nor formally acknowledged as labor by, the university, Salaita’s dismissal was a policing of his “extramural utterances.”93 There was, however, surprisingly little attention paid to the clear anti-Indigenous position of the university. The firing of Salaita was not merely about the ‘uncivility’ of his words; it was a statement against the American Indian Studies Department’s decision to expand the frame of their scholarship to Indigenous peoples from around the world, including Palestinians. When considered in concert with the university’s appeal to the National Collegiate Athletic Association to disregard a 2006 organization-wide ban on Native American sports mascots, the vandalization of Heap of Birds’s Beyond the Chief, and the localization of objects and artworks to sit within the American Indian Studies department, rather than larger university collections, makes plainly visible a pattern of administrative anti-Indigenous racism whilst the American Indian Studies department itself is another site wherein the Undercommons can be located.94 When approaching the Land Grant exhibition our curatorial collective sought to take up Moten and Harney’s call to appropriate the resources of the university to complicate and undermine problematic aspects of the institution’s history. Working with the Krannert Art Museum, professor Terri Weissman, and curator Amy Powell allowed us to borrow objects that students would not normally be allowed to access, such as Jackson’s We the People, which was on loan from the President’s Office for the run of the show. By positioning this revered painting alongside underground student publications and photographs that highlight the anti-Indigenous racism on campus, Land Grant sought to fulfill Moten and Harney’s cry to “abuse [the university’s] hospitality, to

Christine Des Garennes, “Updated: Wise Explains Salaita Decision, Gets Support from Trustees,” The News Gazette (Champaign, IL), Aug. 23, 2014. 92 The focus on academic freedom in the wake of the Salaita affair is exemplified by the over 1900 signatories of a call to boycott requests to speak at UIUC initiated by Frederick Moten in solidarity with the Campus Faculty Association of UIUC. Fred Moten, “In Defense of Academic Freedom,” Accessed April 5, 2018, https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfEFSgE4UmpjpZJeIhRK0J3pkMmxT6dk0Znbr3QdxUvY31jl Q/viewform. Scholarly works on academic freedom and the Salaita firing include Matthew Abraham, “Conceptualizing Academic Freedom after the Salaita Affair” in First Amendment Studies 49, no. 1 (2015), 8–12; John K. Wilson, “Academic Freedom and a Tale of Two Dismissals” in First Amendment Studies 49, no. 1 (2015), 5–7; Steven Salaita, “Normalizing State Power: Uncritical Ethical Praxis and Zionism” in Piya Chatterjee and Sumaina Maira (eds.), The Imperial University (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 217–236. 93 John K. Wilson “Academic Freedom and Extramural Utterances: The Leo Koch and Steven Salaita Cases at the University of Illinois” in American Association of University Professors: Journal of Academic Freedom 6 (2015), 2. 94 Inside Illinois, “UI Appeals NCAA Policy Regarding Chief Illiniwek,” Illinois News Bureau: Campus News, February 2, 2006, https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/211456. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 77

spite its mission.”95 As a space dedicated to the celebration of creative expression, the university art museum is uniquely positioned to construct frameworks for the Undercommons to perform fugitive, prophetic organization in public.96

Alyssa Bralower is a PhD student in art history researching women photographers in the interwar period at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has previously worked as a gallery assistant at Figure One in Champaign, IL and has held curatorial internships at the , Washington, D.C., and the Krannert Art Museum in Urbana, IL.

Allison Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher. She is a PhD candidate in Art Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she is researching gallery and museum supported socially engaged art, and is the recipient of a 2016-2019 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship and the 2017-2018 Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship.

95 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 26. 96 Borderland Collective's installation Northern Triangle hosted at the Krannert Art Museum from August to December 2016 was a foundational influence on the development of Land Grant. For additional information on Northern Triangle, see “Borderland Collective: Northern Triangle,” Krannert Art Museum, accessed February 20, 2019, https://kam.illinois.edu/exhibition/borderland-collective-northern-triangle. In addition, while working on this essay, we very much had the recent firing of Helen Molesworth from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Laura Raicovich from the Queens Museum on our minds. Their removal from high status positions at large, public art museums highlight the pervasiveness of status-quo, apolitical civility expectations in American art galleries as well as the unquestionable tentacular hold that neoliberal professionalism has on institutions across the country.

Give us our Knives

ANNE SPICE

Detail of “Weapons” display, Northwest Coast Hall, American Museum of Natural History, New York. Photo © AMNH/E. Labenski.

Seen on a display case label in the Northwest Coast Hall in the American Museum of Natural History, New York City:

The surprise raid and the ambush were the basic techniques for war on the Northwest Coast. The Indians waged war for a variety of purposes. Plunder and the acquisition of slaves were the most important motives for war. The northern tribes, like the Tlingit, also fought to conquer territory. Feuds to avenge a murder or insult were common throughout the area. Captives were enslaved. The principal Tlingit weapons were clubs, knives, and the bow and arrow, all of which were used by the other Northwest Coast Indians. The northern tribes used double-bladed knives with a long and a short blade on either side of a central grip.

Spice | Give us our Knives 79

Every day, hundreds of schoolchildren visit the museum. They see: Taxidermied animals in dioramas Dinosaurs Northwest Coast Indians

An abstract mud figure wears our regalia A series of severed mud ears wear our “adornments” Outside every section in the hall a tiny diorama of our funerary practices

Coast Salish Gitxsan Haida Heiltsuk Kwakwa ka ’wakw Nis a'a Nuu-Chah-Nulth Nuxalk Tlingit Tsimshian

We can play a game: Based on the evidence presented here, what (who) is extinct? What (who) is past/ passed?

Every semester in my Anthropology 101 class, I encounter students who don’t know Indigenous peoples still exist. When given thirty seconds to name as many Indigenous people as possible, the class compiles a list:

Pocahontas Tonto Sacagawea Geronimo Sitting Bull

No one student can name more than three. As a class of seventy, they collectively name only two living Indigenous people. A basketball player, a tribal historian.1 They Google their names on their phones to make sure they are still alive. So many dead and fictional

1 Ron Baker, citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, plays for the New York Knicks; La Donna Brave Bull Allard is a Lakota historian who started the Sacred Stone camp at Standing Rock (students had just read an article she wrote about the Whitestone massacre). 80 SHIFT

Indians, and so few living. They even seem to forget, momentarily, that a living Indigenous person teaches their class. What (who) is past/ passed?

We keep looking for the missing link, between what we thought was the truth and what really is the truth. Anthropologists, museum curators, scientists place themselves (ourselves) in the between.

What we thought was the truth: Indians are gone

What really is the truth?: they tried to kill us but we are not gone2

More importantly: What is in between? What is the missing link? What is missing? Who is missing?

In between, our ancestors are incarcerated in glass boxes, and mud mannequins wear our regalia.

In between, a settler fantasy spins tales of pioneer spirit and manifest destiny to reverse- engineer national belonging. How to make ethical and legal sense of white possession in what is (for now) the United States? 3 When the storytelling breaks down in light of Indigenous genocide, attempts are made to spin it from stronger stuff. What is the

2 In Patrick Wolfe’s foundational article “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006), he explores the “lo ic of elimination” drivin settler colonial expansion in North America, su estin that this lo ic is not always enocidal (but it can be). Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), 387-409. The edited collection Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America explores state strategies to eliminate Indigenous peoples, from the explicitly genocidal bounty-hunting campaigns of the American west, to the theft of Indigenous children to abusive residential schools or foster families. Andrew John Woolford,, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). What is clear from all of the examples is that settler colonial governance has aimed to erase and eliminate Indigenous life, either by killing Indigenous people or destroying our sense of ourselves as Indigenous peoples, or by breaking down cultural connections and kinship. Whether these eliminatory movements map cleanly onto the historical discourse and definition of genocide continues to be debated. 3 In Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive, she details how patriarchal white sovereignty manipulates law, racial imaginaries, and historical narratives to maintain settler states (Australia and the United States) as a priori white possessions. Archaeology and science, too, can be mobilized as tools to insist on white possession before and beyond invasion—either by claiming prior occupancy by European ancestors, or by appealing to a universal quest for knowledge that removes Indigenous ancestors from communities to make them serve the science of human origins. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Kim TallBear has also described how ancestral remains have been used to support theories about human migration that undermine Indigenous claims to their own homelands. Kim TallBear, “Who Owns the Ancient One?” Buzzfeed News Reader, July 23, 2015, https://www.buzzfeed.com/kimtallbear/how-the-man-stole-ancient- man-from-his-native-descendents. Spice | Give us our Knives 81

missing link between white America and its origin story? Nobody wants to start with “Once upon a conquest.” Surely such violence isn’t what made the New World.

Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (still), 2017. Image courtesy of the artists.

In the short film The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets (2017), Ojibway filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil and Tlingit artist Jackson Polys explore the white desire for belonging as it operationalized anthropological science to claim Kennewick man (the Ancient One) as a European ancestor native to North America.4 The film is a meditation on museum collections and the violent shift between subject and object that twists the remains of Indigenous ancestors into tools for white supremacist origin stories.

As I watched this film, I compiled a series of true, factual statements. I am interested in working with and through scientific language, which traffics in the categorical and apparently “objective”:

4 The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, directed by Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys (2017; Mechelen, Belgium: inhabitants for Contour 8 Biennial, 2017) digital video. The 9000 year-old skeleton was unearthed in 1996 in Kennewick, Washington. Early scientific analysis of the remains suggested that it lacked Native American features. This prompted questions into whether Indigenous peoples were really “first peoples,” and white supremacist roups also claimed the Ancient One as a “Caucasian” ancestor in hopes of proving early white settlement in North America. The request from the local Nez Perce, Colville, Umatilla, Wanapum, and Yakama nations to reclaim the remains as an ancestor and bury them was denied in 2004, and the nations only gained the right to repatriate the remains after a new round of DNA testing was done in 2015, linking the Ancient One to local Indigenous peoples. 82 SHIFT

Fact: there is no science outside of power. Fact: there is no neutral knowledge. Fact: there is no common good.

Fact: objective scientific inquiry has used the bones of Indigenous ancestors to say we don’t belon here.

Fact: objective scientific inquiry has been co-opted easily in a white supremacist project of replacement.

Fact: objective scientific inquiry facilitates wild and violent time travel that allows white, euro-descendant people to skip the historical violence of settlement, to ignore their own ancestors’ conquest, to erase current power relations stemmin from colonization, and to proclaim themselves the original people, the rightful inheritors of the continent.

Fact: objective scientific inquiry produces a narrative that legitimizes settler colonial elimination of native peoples.

This is not a fi ht between scientific “fact” and Indi enous “belief”. That binary is false, as scientific discovery itself becomes a pathway through which colonial discovery can travel.

Fact: they have tried to erase us with our own bones.

What really is the truth? The violence of a civilization without secrets lies in its impulse to display. To expose. To exhume. They unearth our bones to shed light on their own origins. Unearth our bones. They bleach in the sun, turn white white white. The truth is not for us.

In The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, the filmmakers follow two interlocutors as they wander through the Northwest Coast Hall of the American Museum of Natural History. Wearing melted silicone masks, the two individuals approach the display cases, mime and recreate the poses of the clay mannequins, and photograph the objects on display. In a follow-up video work, the photographs pull the objects out of the case to a virtual space, where they are digitally manipulated and distorted. 5 The bust of a clay mannequin wearing Tlingit regalia is captured and superimposed on the museum floor. It spins and floats out of a display case. It appears again alone and melts, bulges, freaks out.

5 Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, Culture Capture, video installation, 2017, in Unholding (exhibition presented by Artists Space, New York, November 19, 2017- January 21, 2018). Spice | Give us our Knives 83

This work has made me think about what it means to mirror, mime, and distort the work of capture, of taking captive that which has already been incarcerated in the halls of the museum. The museum’s own text insists that Tlin its take captives, while the museum holds our own ceremonial objects, regalia, and ancestors behind glass.6

Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (still), 2017. Image courtesy of the artists.

6 And the histories of enslavement, colonialism, and imperialism that supported the collection of “artifacts” are actively disavowed. In 2016, in collaboration with the Decolonize this Place, the NYC Stands with Standing Rock collective planned an anti-Columbus Day decolonization tour of the American Museum of Natural History, highlighting the colonialist legacies of the various halls of the museum. The tour was repeated and expanded in 2017. Decolonize This Place, “2nd Annual Anti-Columbus Day Tour: Decolonize this Museum,” http://www.decolonizethisplace.org/content/6-zines-and-posters/dtp_tour_map_brochure_ 2017-3.pdf. See also MTL+ in Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “A Questionnaire on Monuments,” October 165 (Summer 2018), 119-133. Here, the museum is also carceral space, part of the “carceral eo raphies” that expand beyond the prison industrial complex to produce the structure of racial capitalism. For more on carceral geographies, infrastructures of feeling, and challenging racial capitalism through the Black Radical Tradition, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geo raphy and the Problem of Innocence,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 224-240. The museum, too, is built on land cleared of Indigenous peoples, on the edges of Central Park, where a Black community was destroyed and displaced to create green space for the city’s white inhabitants. The museum and its halls of knowled e are not separate from the gentrification of New York neighborhoods, or the education of children, or the militarization of police, or the other carceral geographies that connect these institutions. Indigenous dissidents must link our work to other revolutionary knowledges and projects, and commit to supporting the abolition geographies that connect us to other anti-racist, anti-capitalist anti-colonial movements. 84 SHIFT

What (who) is captive/ captured/ captivating?7

The science around Kennewick man allowed white supremacists to time travel back to find their roots on this continent, skipping the violence of conquest which has shaped the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples. I want to distort and mirror this time travel into the future.

Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (still), 2017. Image courtesy of the artists.

I want to propose a speculative future Indigenous retrospective.8

7 We can ask also, what (who) is apprehended? How does the knowledge/power communicated through display also capture Indi enous peoples in representational boxes that we don’t et to choose? Audra Simpson describes the politics of representation in terms of “apprehension”— apprehension describes the kinds of representational capture that are woven into Iroquoianist anthropology, as well as the kinds of anxiety and fear produced in this encounter. Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 8 Here I’m thinkin about Avery Gordon’s most recent work, in which she employs a future conditional temporality, compiling an archive of what must have existed in order for us to survive the apocalypse. From the future conditional tense, she looks back at the material remains, she treats the “what if”, “as if”. Gordon describes her effort as a way of explorin what she calls “the other utopianism”—the array of alternative world-building projects that have escaped the canon of utopian scholarship. The Zapatistas. The Seminoles. Maroon communities. The “temporary autonomy” of rebellion and the existence of alternatives alon side the status quo. I want to combine this approach with what Jodi Byrd has called a pessimistic Indigenous futurism, that in her words “refuses to relinquish the future tense, while predicting the continuation of settler industrial capitalistic dispossession.” Pessimistic Indi enous futurism assumes that we (Indi enous peoples) make it to Spice | Give us our Knives 85

Museums love retrospectives. They may not love this one. They may not be around to love this one.

Let’s speculate. Move into the future. From that future think-space, I want to look back at our work.

I want to do this because I want to skip the debate about how we decolonize the museum. I want to skip the debate about who’s oin to preserve the cultural artefacts and how. I want to skip the debate that is centered on the palliative project of repairing the ethical compass of institutions built on theft and Indi enous dispossession. I don’t want questions that start with “should we really,” “can we,” “is it realistic to.” Instead I want to move to the future tense:

We have abolished the museum We have abolished anthropology We have liberated our ancestors from the glass cases We have stopped collecting other people's lives for display

What, now, is possible? Now, we can talk to our ancestors. Now, we can wear our regalia. Now, our cultural materials cannot circulate without us.

I run my hands through the fringe in the Chilkat blanket I hold the double-bladed knife The cedar chips crunch under my feet

What is in between? What is the missing link? What is missing? Who is missing?

I collect my missing relatives I trace connections between our nations We build a living web. No more missing links

the future, but so does capitalism. Here, Byrd proposes puttin the “speculative” back into speculative fiction. Byrd’s pessimism reminds us that we can’t hitch our liberation to the complete absence of oppression. Gordon’s project shows that the creation of other utopias has continued without wholesale approval from or overthrow of the dominant capitalist and imperialist system. Together, Gordon and Byrd offer a kind of temporal play that allows us to see the alternative futures embedded in the present, and the close proximity of dystopia and utopia in settler colonial worlds. I am less interested in choosing sides between optimism and pessimism, and more concerned with the institutional limits to our collective imaginations. The way that certain lines of questioning police the borders of the possible. The strategies we can use to play with time in order to stretch our minds back/ forward/ between the truth of science and fiction and everyday life, to create more liveable futures. Avery Gordon, The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 86 SHIFT

What else is possible? Pushing radically into the future tense allows our imaginations to break through institutional walls, through the realities of funding and regulation. What else is possible? What happens now?

And how did we et here? Here we are, lookin back at what we’ve done.

The surprise raid and the ambush were the basic techniques for war on the Northwest Coast. The Indians waged war for a variety of purposes. Plunder and the acquisition of slaves were the most important motives for war. The northern tribes, like the Tlingit, also fought to conquer territory. Feuds to avenge a murder or insult were common throughout the area. Captives were enslaved. The principal Tlingit weapons were clubs, knives, and the bow and arrow, all of which were used by the other Northwest Coast Indians. The northern tribes used double-bladed knives with a long and a short blade on either side of a central grip.

Installation view, Northwest Coast Hall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, October 20, 2018. Photo by Christopher Green.

Spice | Give us our Knives 87

Anne Spice is a Tlingit member of Kwanlin Dun First Nation, a queer Indigenous feminist, and anti-colonial organizer. She works with Indigenous peoples resisting resource extraction, and her political and academic interests intersect on the frontlines of Indigenous land defense movements. She is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center in Lenapehoking (NYC). Artist Project

Morph Target Displacement Mapping: Removals / Pre- Creative Acts

JACKSON POLYS ZACK KHALIL ADAM KHALIL Displacement (detail) 4981/0022 Displacement (detail) 4981/0053 Displacement (detail) 1391/0014 Displacement (detail) 1391/0019

Dispatch

The resurgence of Blood and Soil: symbols and artefacts of Völkische Siedlungen and Neo-Nazi Villages in Germany

TERESA RETZER

View of Jamel, Germany, August 2015. From “Höllenhell, die Nacht.Jamel: Brandstiftung bei Künstler- Kollegen,” Verband deutscher Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftsteller. Accessed January 28, 2019, https://vs.verdi.de/themen/nachrichten/++co++b2b0ae14-4a6c-11e5-b9f0-525400438ccf. Photo © T. Lobenwei n.

This paper focuses on new Rechte Siedlungsbewegungen (movements of right-wing “settlers”) in Germany, whose historical origins partly lead back to the Völkische Bewegung (Völkisch movement) in the mid of the 19th century.1 I will define several

1 This essay is related to my research topic “Right-wing spaces—Right-wing activism in Germany building up its own collective memory beginning with the occupation of architecture,” that has been presented at the Conference “Flags, Identity, Memory” (Lille, February 2018). My interest in contemporary Right Movements 94 SHIFT

different types of Rechte Siedler (right-wing settlers) descending from the Alte Rechte (neo-Rightists) and the Neue Rechte (New Right), and investigate their history, ideologies and ways of living.2 The Alte Rechte believes that Germany, according to its national law, language and culture, is identical to the Deutsche Reich (1933–1945) and refers positively to the National Socialist ideology. Their supporters glorify Hitler’s regime, and deny the holocaust and other war crimes of the Nazis.3 In contrast, the Neue Rechte believes that modern-day Germany is a successor state of the Deutsche Reich and tries to employ new political concepts within this frame distinct from National Socialist ideology. Most of their supporters also deny a share in responsibility for the Nazi crimes. Both Alte and Neue Rechte identify with the German Militarism Movement, but only members of the Alte Rechte can also be described as “neo-Nazis”.4 Neo-Nazism can, in contrast to groups from the Neue Rechte, be defined as a counter culture that is practically based on their antithetical attitude towards the central beliefs of the political, societal and cultural landscape in Germany.5 Their extremist ideology is mostly based on the repetition of historical far right ideas; relatedly, they deploy a diverse set of symbols and artefacts in their visual culture that refer to a variety of historical right-wing ideologies, revealing inconsistencies within their Weltanschauung (world view). New Rightists, by contrast, engage critically with their ideology in order to create new ideas, which has been described as a “positive” rather than the neo-Nazis’ purely “negative” attitude. Right-wing intellectuals describe themselves as New Right in order to gain a positive image and they often support Völkische and youth movements of the New Right rather than radical neo-Nazi (youth) groups. To be born in Germany means to inherit a collective memory of guilt, a condition that presents Germany—in my opinion—with opportunity rather than loss: instead of plunging into a self-pity that might destroy their national identity, many Germans gave up patriotism. In its place they generated a role that is internationally known for taking responsibility for the crimes of World War II and moreover, those people who are today exposed to war crimes, anti-Semitism, racism, euthanasia or homophobia. Angela Merkel in Germany derives from the project “Rechte Räume (Right-wing Spaces),” organized by Professor Stephan Trüby, who teaches architecture and urban theory at the Technical University of Munich and coined the term. 2 The literal translation of Alte Rechte as “Old Right” is misleading, as it might refer to the Old Right Movements in the United States which have a different historical background than the neo-rightists in Germany. 3 Richard Stöss, “Rechtsextremismus im vereinten Deutschland,” in Polit-Lexikon, ed. Everhard Holtmann, 3rd ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), 573. 4 The German Militarism Movement begun in the Kingdom of Prussia in the 19th century as a consequence of the French invasions. Militarists believe that only a strong military ensures national autonomy following the law of the strongest that also equips military states to expand geographically, influentially and culturally. German Militarism only came to an end after World War II. 5 Stephan Trüby, “Right-Wing Spaces,” e-flux Architecture: Superhumanity (January 2017), https://www.e- flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/68711/right-wing-spaces/.

Retzer | The resurgence of Blood and Soil 95

had been heavily criticized by the German parliament and the general public for her welcoming attitude during the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, but instead of backpedaling she reminded her critics of the Third Reich when German intellectuals lived in exile. Nevertheless, the rise of the right-wing is a problem that Germany, as many others, is facing today. While radical neo-Nazis in urban areas get much attention from the instruments of the German state, Rechte Siedler can be disregarded more easily as they live secluded lifestyles and appear to be harmless. The purpose of this study is to address the current rise of the Rechte Siedlungsbewegungen in Germany. This movement seeks to extend its communities over the whole of Germany, including the former states of the Germanische Reich throughout Europe. A short evaluation of the current state of right-wing groups in Germany and the analyses of the symbols and iconography different groups use will show some distinctions and also make clear that the most radical communities deceptively appear to be the least harmful.

The Völkisch, Siedlungen, (historical) Völkische Siedlungsbewegung, and Rechte Siedler today

The term völkisch is supposedly untranslatable. While the root Volk means “people,” the implications of völkisch are broader and profoundly ethnic in scope.6 The Völkischen or the Völkisch people of past and present iterations are often identified as a splinter group of the supporters of National Socialism, and today they are often seen as neo-Nazis. But as much as the history of the Third Reich has managed to overshadow the pluralism of German nationalisms, in both, its ideologies and its organizations, the nationalism and ideology of the Völkischen cannot be reduced solely to the dogmas of the NS ideologues such as Walter Darré, Alfred Rosenberg, and—least of all—Adolf Hitler. The ideologies of Völkische Siedler are built upon a newly organized conception that consists of old and new ideas and which manifests in their well-considered use of symbols and artefacts. While neo-Nazis are often uneducated people, many intellectuals can be found amongst the Völkische Siedler, who, moreover, expand their ideas by founding their own kindergartens and schools, publishing magazines (such as the Nordische Zeitung), and organizing symposia and internet platforms to distribute and also reflect on their ideologies.7

6 Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge Massachusetts/ London: Harvard University Press, 2017), 17. Völkisch was, by the beginning of the modern era, a loan translation from the term poularis to describe the simple, uneducated people (Volk), who did not Latin but rather the language of the people (Volkssprache) and did not belong to the medieval educated middle-class and the ruling elite. The philosopher of German Idealism, Johann Gottlieb Fichte used the term völkisch already in 1811 as a synonym for German in order to differentiate German-specific cultural and linguistic characteristics from the other people of Europe. See Uwe Puscher, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich. Sprache. Rasse. Religion (Bonn: VG Bild-Kunst 2001), 29. 7 Anna Schmidt, Völkische Siedler/innen im ländlichen Raum (Berlin: Amadeu Antonio Stiftung 2014), 14. 96 SHIFT

The term Siedlung (pl. Siedlungen) derives from the Old English word sedel which means abode or residence.8 Since the industrialization of the early 19th century, with its high demand for factory workers, Siedlungen were planned settlements in rural and urban environments for worker families located close to the factories. Rechte and Völkische Siedlungen can be understood as networks of politically, and culturally like-minded people. The families living in a Völkische Siedlungsgemeinschaft (settlement community) are also called Sippen, which implies in part that they are biological relatives, but also suggests an ideological bond beyond a blood-relationship.9 During the historical Völkische Bewegung of the 19th century and later in the Third Reich the Sippe became more important than the family for its political function to unify ideologically like- minded people. As such, it was one of the key words in the NS propaganda apparatus. Blood, soil, and language were the foundational trinity on which the Völkischen built to reactivate the nationalism and social contract of the 19th and early 20th century. The historical Völkische Bewegung was grounded on the Deutsche Bewegung (1770– 1830), a German Nationalist Movement leading back from philosopher, poet and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder to Romanticism, better described as a Weltanschauung than an ideology. The Völkische Bewegung was a central movement within the German Kulturnationalismus (Culture Nationalism) of the last three decades of the 19th century and became official with the foundation of a Völkische organization, the Deutschbund, in 1894.10 The Völkische Bewegung drew its fundamental beliefs from the principles of “alternative” doctrines such as alternative medicine, vegetarianism and naturism, and was influenced my occultism and Northern mythology. Before and during the Weimar Republic, Völkisch was not only a propaganda term but also reflected the identity crisis of the German people. To them, Völkisch expressed a xenophobic and traditionalist nostalgia based in folklore in order to glorify German’s prehistory. In addition to its spiritualist, populist, and rural-agrarian dimensions, Völkisch meant “racist” and by 1900, it also signified “anti-Semitic”.11 Since the early 1920s, under the influence of Hitler’s power politics, Walter Darré formed the premise of Germaneness rooted in a central place, the Deutsche Reich, a

8 Dr. Phil. Habil. Paul Grebe, ed., Duden. Etymologie (: Dudenverlag, 2007), 643. Today the word Siedlung is being used to describe a group of similar mostly small houses at a city’s or town’s outskirts or in rural areas. 9 Sippe describes the blood-relationship within a family, on which their patriarchal structure is based on. The patriarchy was the dominating societal system of the Germanic culture and politics which had emerged again in the age of European Enlightenment in the 18th century. See Grebe, Duden. Etymologie, 659. 10 Stefan Breuer, Die Völkischen in Deutschland (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008), 26. 11 While they were long understood as one single movement, the Völkische Bewegung and Anti-Semitism are now being describes as separate historical movements that merged at the end of the 19th century. Even though the Völkische today are not necessarily also Anti-Semites, its majority is. Stefan Breuer, Die Völkische Bewegung in Deutschland. Kaiserreich und Republik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008), 32–33.

Retzer | The resurgence of Blood and Soil 97

formation that resembled the idea of the ancient Roman Imperium rather than that of a nation-state as in France. Like other right-wing movements in the beginning of the 20th century, the Völkische Bewegung was absorbed by Nazis and its organizations, such as the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) and the Schutzstaffel (SS). However, the (re-)construction of an essentially mythical German past detached the Völkischen from Christian monotheism, and the Völkische Bewegung endeavored to reinvent a German, pagan religion. This tendency to build up a purely German society, politically, religiously and culturally strengthened was also the cornerstone for other nationalist reorientations in Europe after World War II and today, in divisions as varied as revolutionary nationalism, and neo-Nazism.12

The connectedness of the far right-wing in Germany: political parties, organizations, and Siedlungen

A short outline of the right-wing scene of Germany will show that Völkische Siedler and other sorts of inclusive right-wing spaces in particular—if in Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, or —have to be taken seriously by the public and the European governments. Both Völkische Siedler and the inhabitants of neo-Nazi villages often support or are dedicated to right-wing progressive political parties, associations, public and private institutions, (extremist) activists from autonomous groups, or publishing houses.13 One of these most influential autonomous organizations from the New Right is the Identitären. The European prototype was founded in 2002 in France as the Mouvement national républicant. Austrian supporters founded their own public association in Austria; Germany followed in 2014 with the foundation of the Identitäre Bewegung. The Identitären in Germany are mostly active in the East; in the cities Halle and Leipzig in Saxony they have founded living communities and organize nationalist protests on Mondays. Another currently very active far right association is Pegida—Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West)—which originated in 2014 in Dresden. The members of many of these new autonomous groups are young and educated people; some of the founders of Identitären met while studying philosophy in Vienna. Pegida, the Identitären, and many other radical groups from the New Right dissociate themselves from the political symbols and ideologies of the Nazis, such as the swastika and overt anti-Semitism. The public performances of these groups are much more professional and civilized than the ones from neo-Nazi groups like the Volksfront.14

12 Camus and Lebourg, Far-Right Politics, 17. 13 Roger Woods, Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics (New York: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2017), 1–3. 14 Jörg Michael Dostal, “The Pegida Movement and German Political Culture: Is Right-Wing Populism Here to Stay?,” The Political Quaterly 86, no. 4 (2015), 523–531. 98 SHIFT

In the 1990s the most influential organizations of right-wing extremists were still strongly connected to neo-Nazism and anti-democratic youth scenes. The Volksfront, for example, emerged from Skinhead culture in the USA and Europe and used unmistakable symbols such as the swastika and the number 88 (standing for Heil Hitler, as the letter ‘H’ is the eighth in the alphabet). However, the demonstrations organized by the Identitären and Pegida nonetheless often result in harmful riots. Some of the speakers they invite are known for their anti-Islamic and racist hate speeches. Many members of Pegida or the Identitäre Bewegung have been imprisoned before, or are under active police investigation because of xenophobia, demagoguery, duress, defamation and/or physical or grievous assault. Furthermore, political parties such as the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) and the Alternative Für Deutschland (AFD), along with intellectuals and groups from the youth scene, have taken on the possibilities of the Internet and assert their presence within social networks in order to digitally distribute their ideologies.15 Many Commissions of Inquiry appointed by the major political parties in the German Parliament, the Federal Court of Justice and independent research associations and universities are investigating these right-wing movements in Germany. It is the project of both the Neue Rechte and the Alte Rechte to relativize the Nazi past, which they seek to disentangle from Germany’s fate for all time. While the Alte Rechte glorifies the Nazis, the Neue Rechte searches for a non-Nazi past from which to form a positive German identity that might serve as a moral foundation for the future. Instead, the Neue Rechte turns to alternative German traditions that seem to be embodied by the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar years and the aristocratic and military resistance to Hitler. While neo-Nazis (Alte Rechte) express their ideas quite explicitly by showing their affinity towards the NS-ideologies through paintings, symbols and open speech, Völkische and Neue Rechte Siedler propagate their ideology in a much subtler way; for instance, as parents socially engaged with the kindergarten and school of their children, as friendly neighbors, or even as social and pastoral workers.16

Rechte Siedlungen in East Germany: The neo-Nazi village Jamel

Compared to the West, the former GDR states are still underdeveloped. The public infrastructure, including urban planning and fire-optic communication hardware, is backward, the quality of public schools is often bad—especially in relation to the south— and many young people fall into the failed “modernization trap”.17 There are not only

15 It is also important to notice that the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) that is forming a coalition with the Angela Merkel-led CDU shifted to the right and some members of the Bavarian parliament even to the far right which has to be traced back to the ‘refugee crisis’ in Germany and the federal national interests of the free state Bavaria. 16 Schmidt, Völkische Siedler/innen, 13. 17 Lukáš Novotný, “Right-Wing Extremism and No-Go Areas in Germany,” Sociologický Časopis / Czech

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more neo-Nazi (youth) groups active in the East but its stagnation is a fruitful area for other right-wing movements. It is as an ideal playground for the Völkischen. As demonstrated by a map produced by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, a human rights organization and initiative for civil society and democratic culture, sites across Germany have been appropriated by Rechte Siedler (fig. 1). Many of the sites in this collection of alleged Rechte and Völkische Siedlelungsprojekte (settlement projects) are in the countryside of the North-East, in the former GDR (fig. 2). In , the largest concentration of right-wing Siedlungen is in Lower Saxony.18

Figure 1. Suspected Völkische Siedlungen. From Figure 2. West Germany and the GDR. From M. H. Anna Schmidt, Völkische Siedler/innen im Brooke, “The Foundation of West and East ländlichen Raum (Berlin: Amadeu Antonio Germany,” Military Histories. Accessed January 29, Stiftung 2014), 8. © Amadeu Antonio Stiftung. 2019, http://www.militaryhistories.co.uk/berlin/germany. © M. H. Brooke.

Sociological Review 45, no. 3 (June 2009), 596–7.

18 Falk Nowak, Die letzten von gestern, die erstne von Morgen? Völkischer Rechtsextremismus in Niedersachsen (Berlin: Amadeu Antonio Stiftung 2017), 4. 100 SHIFT

One exclusive right-wing space is the village Jamel in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (fig 3).19 The first rightists settled down there a few years after the reunification of Germany, in the early 1990s. Other than the spaces occupied by the Völkische Siedler, Jamel has not been a planned right-wing space.

Figure 3. Jamel on the map. “Jamel, Germany.” Accessed January 24, 2018, https://www.google.com/maps. © Google Maps.

Jamel is a rural place in the countryside that seems idyllic with its flanking lake, surrounded by farming fields. The people living in this small village—that only consists of 8 to 10 families—should not be classified as Neue Rechte but as neo-Nazis because they explicitly orient themselves to the ideology of the NS-Regime before and during World War II. Unlike the Neue Rechte movements and intellectuals that position themselves (predominantly) against the NS-crimes, the leadership of Jamel does not

19 Jamel has stood in the focus of other far-right investigations and of the Federal Ministry of Justice for years already. Christian Bangel, “In Jamel-Deutschland,” Zeit-Online (August 13, 2015), accessed on January 30, 2019, https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2015-08/jamel-nazis-kommentar. The Amadeu Antonio Stifung for many years has supported the music festival “Jamel rockt den Föster” that takes place every summer in Jamel. It was initiated by two artists living in Jamel to offer resistance against the rightist people in the village. See Amadeu Antonio Stifung, “Übersicht der geförderten Projekte und unterstützten Personen 2018,” accessed on January 30, 2019, https://www.amadeu-antonio-stiftung.de/projektfoerderung/bilanz/.

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differentiate the ideologies of the village from the National Socialists. Flags and symbols that refer to the propaganda art, films and the ideology of the NS Regime, such as fascist and anti-Semitic messages, are showcased freely around the village. Until last year, when entering the village, you would have passed a wall painting placed on a garage wall (fig. 4).In the center is written in simplified German type “Dorfgemeinschaft Jamel—frei–sozial–national” (“village community of Jamel—Free– Social–National”. To the left of the wall-text one sees an archetype of an Aryan family and to the right a way marker, indicating the distances to cities and towns such as Rostock, Königsberg and Breslau. “Free–Social–National” has been the title of an by the German white power music band Nordmacht, a band that is connected to Blood and Honour, a right extremist music network from the neo-Nazi scene that exists since the 1980s and is active in many countries in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom and in Scandinavia. Blood and Honour organizes transnational concerts of white power bands and coordinates musicians—mostly playing rock music—to expand their racial and anti-semitic ideologies.20 The network also published radical propaganda writings such as “The Way Forward” and “Field Manual” that plead for the recapture of the world by the white northern race. In Germany, the network has been banned since 2000.

Figure 4. Wall painting in Jamel, 2014. From Esther Diestelmann and Paul Middelhoff, “Brandenschlag in Jamel. Wen interessiert’s?,” Zeit-Online (August 15, 2015). Accessed January 24, 2019, https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2015-08/jamel-lohmeyers-rechtsextremismus-mecklenburg- brandstiftung. Photo © Jens Büttner/dpa.

20 Romano Sposito, “Einstiegsdroge Musik,” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (April 2007), accessed on January 30, 2019, http://www.bpb.de/politik/extremismus/rechtsextremismus/41758/einstiegsdroge-musik. 102 SHIFT

Among the three cities that the way marker points to is Breslau—today the Polish city Wroclaw, having belonged to Poland since 1945. For many neo-Nazis, these places are used symbolically to commemorate the German victories in World War II. In 1944, Hitler declared Breslau a fortress to be defended at any cost. During the Siege or Battle of Breslau, the city was besieged by Russian troops during the last three months of the war. The sign pointing towards Breslau and the others cities should be understood as a provocation, claiming the rights of the German-national ownership of these cities.

Figure 5. NSDAP Propaganda poster designed by René Ahrlé, 1942. © Bundesarchiv Plak 002-003-046.

The composition of the family is clearly inherited from a propaganda poster produced by the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in 1942 (fig. 5). The text of the propaganda poster reads, translated into English “The Nazi Party safeguards the people of the Nation” and “Fellow Countrymen! If you need advice and help then approach the NSDAP.”21 The message of the farming family has to be seen within the context of Blood and Soil propaganda of the NS-regime. While the blood would stand for a pure German and Northern ancestral lineage, the soil has not to be understood as a commodity serving for

21 “Die NSDAP sichert die Volksgemenschaft. Volksgenossen braucht ihr rat und hilfe so wendet euch an die Orstgruppe.” Translation by the author.

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agriculture and the Lebensraum (living space) of the Volk (people).22 This propaganda lauded the German peasant farmer as the salt of the earth, as the backbone of society. The simple life and the above average birth rate of small farmers were acclaimed as an example to urban citizens, who had been unrooted by industrialization.

Figure 6. Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbrück, Familienbild, 1939. Oil on canvas, 63 x 78 ¾ in (160 x 200 cm). Photo © Gallery, The Netherlands

The paintings of the Reichskünstler (artists of the Reich) Adolf Wissel and Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbrück show the special place of family and agriculture (figs. 6-7). Both NS art and ideology created romantic images of simple, hard-working, undemanding peasant folk nurturing large families who would work selflessly to feed the nation. While some NS-artists wanted to support the Nazi propaganda apparatus actively, others can be rather described as Völkische painters, who believed in conservative values other than the

22 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil. A Word History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale: University Press, 2007), 427. 104 SHIFT

Nazi ideologies. Wissel had painted Völkische subjects already before 1933 and even if his work benefited from the NS regime he always rejected being a Nazi himself.

Figure 7. Adolf Wissel, Kalenberger Bauerfamilie, 1939, Oil on canvas, 59 x 78 ¾ in (150 x 200 cm). Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. Photo © DiDi (Digitale Diathek), Technische Universität Berlin.

Within the Nazi propaganda apparatus farmers acquired particular significance because of the regime’s policy of self-sufficiency and autarky in food and other essential raw materials, an article of faith with some NSDAP leaders even before 1933. A particular cause of concern to conservatives of all kinds in the 1920s and 1930s, including NSDAP functionaries and peasants, was German society’s hunger for material possessions and dependence on foreign goods, especially those imported by the US. Many neo-Nazis and supporters of the Neue Rechte today boycott US-American franchise companies such as McDonalds or Starbucks, are against globalization, and often express an anti-cosmopolitan attitude. Nevertheless, the Nazis’ “agrarian romantic” of the 1920’s and early 1930’s was contradictory to the actual infrastructural management that was employed by the NSDAP. They focused predominantly on the development of Hitlers Reichsstädte such as Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Nürnberg and Linz. So instead of really pursuing the reruralization of

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Germany, the agrarian romantic has to be understood as a poltically constructed utopia.23 In this time many people were dissatisfied with the effects of industrialization and large- scale urbanization and looked for alternative ways of life. The projections produced by the Blood and Soil ideology were designed to seduce people into approving Hitler’s expansionary strategy into the East, rather than establishing the realization of a farming society. In the example of the painting in Jamel, we can see that feelings of dissatisfaction with the socio-economic situation in Germany have returned and these people are reactivating the Nazi nostalgia for an idealized rural past which had already been vanished back in the 1930s. Interestingly, the wall painting of Jamel was changed last year into an even more radical symbolic language (fig. 8).

Figure 8. Wall painting in Jamel, 2017. From “Forstrock in Jamel,” Recherchegruppe AST (August 17, 2017). Accessed January 24, 2019., http://astwestmecklenburg.blogsport.eu/2017/08/28/ueberraschungs- forstrock-in-jamel/. © Recherchegruppe AST.

The composition of this new version (shown below) has become even more close to the NSDAP poster of 1942. The Imperial eagle or the heraldic eagle is holding the farming family like a bird’s nest symbolizing the imperial rule of the nation. The eagle has been used for the labeling of coat of arms of Germany since the second German

23 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 454. 106 SHIFT

Empire (from 1871 to 1918), and during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and the Third Reich (1933–1945). The eagle derives from the Roman Empire and has remained in use since 1945 also by the current Federal Republic of Germany, even though if the designation has changed into Federal Eagle. Within these pictures—the NSDAP poster and the wall painting from 2017 in Jamel—the eagle should be seen as an imperial symbol depicting not only Germany as a shelter for an archetypal Aryan family but also as the visualization of the exclusion of “the Other,” non-Aryans or non-Germans. Therefore the imperial eagle symbolizes protectionism and shielding. In the background of the new garage painting you can also see a group of farmers that is raising a wooden sculpture with ropes. This sculpture represents an Irminsul, the highest sacred relic of the Saxons, which was destroyed by the troops of Karl the Great in 772 (fig. 9).24 One of the most important symbols of the pagan-German religion of the Germanen, the image is being instrumentalized here to promote the affinity of the inhabitants with German history. Hitler and his propaganda ministers had likewise made use of Germanic symbols such as the Irminsul or the Keltenkreuz (celtic cross) to mystify the history and to glorify the past of Germany. The symbol’s appearance in the new painting in Jamel could lead to the conclusion that the Siedlung has combined its neo- nationalistic values with other right-wing ideologies. The Irminsul is one of the central relics of the Völkische Siedler, which uses it, amongst other symbols, to illustrate their movement.25

Figure 9. Irminsul. Drawing by Marianne Klement- Speckner, 1996. Distributed under CC-BY 2.0.

24 Ernst Wagner and Ferdinand Haug, “Die Irminsul,” undst tten und Funde aus vorgeschichtlicher, r mischer und alamannisch-fr nkischer Zeit im Grossherzogtum Baden (Tübingen: Mohr 1908), 70. 25 Schmidt, Völkische Siedler/innen, 22.

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Völkische Siedlerbewegung

Völkische Siedler can be described as a sect that is built on both old and new ideologies. The belief in a racial line of succession that is based on the Blood and Soil ideology was further developed by Walter Darré, who played a crucial role in the raise of Hitler between 1930 and 1933 by theorizing the ideal farming society of the National Socialists.26 In his first book from 1930 Bauerntum als Lebensquell der Nordischen Rasse (Peasantry as the life-source of the Nordic Race), Darré argued for the restoration of Nordic Blood and the ancient tradition of the Germanentum (Germanic People) through the elimination of the weak and non-Germanic people. His text “Das Schwein als Kriterium für nordische Völker und Semiten” (“The Pig as criterion for the Northern Volk and Semites”) argued for fundamental differences between Aryans and Jews. While German farmers are characterized as brave and noble, he describes Jews as sponging nomads.

Figure 10. Klaber, in Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania. From Schmidt, Völkische Siedler/innen, 22. Photo by Anna Schmidt, © Amadeu Antonio Stiftung.

Both the historical and the current movements of Völkisch Siedler cannot simply be described as an Anti-Movement against the alleged dominant structures in Germany, like most right-wing movements throughout history. Rather they have to be taken seriously as a positivist movement, as they purport to provide solutions to prevent the ‘decline of the

26 Gustavo Corni, “Blut- und Bodenideologie,” in Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Judenfeinschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 3 Begriffe, Theorien, Ideologien, ed. Wolfgang Benz, (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2010), 45–46. 108 SHIFT

German state’. These Siedler look for spaces in the countryside to build a collective. Some of these settlements have existed for a long time as Sippen that have been active since the Weimar Republic. These Sippen are often intermixed with radical rightists and conservatives who do not necessarily share the extreme grade of their ideology but sympathize with the basic ideas of a Parallelgesellschaft (parallel society). Today, Völkische Siedlungen can be found in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Russia, Poland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. These Siedler are often rooted in the tradition of the Artamans, the leaders of the Germanic people in the early middle ages. In this way they recycle movements from earlier in the 20th century, such as the youth movement known as the Bund der Artamanen that was dedicated to finding true Volkstum (folkdom).27 The Irminsul symbol is often added to paintings, such as in Jamel, but mostly it is found in form of a stone sculpture, such as in the Siedlungen Koppelow and Klaber in Mecklenburg Pomerania (fig. 10). The German philologist Ferndinand Haug has explained that the etymology of the term Irminsul derives from the word sul which comes close to the German word Säule (column).28 The first part of the word, Irmin, cannot be conclusively clarified. Irmin is probably the enforcement of the second word and can be translated with adjectives such as strong, noble and great. The Irminsul has often been associated with the Northern god Irmin of the pagan religion of the German pre-Christian era. Today the Irminsul is being used as an anti-Christian symbol and is the key symbol of the Artamanenorden (Artaman community). The Artaman league was an agrarian and Völkisch movement that formed in the beginning of the 20th century and was dedicated to a Blood and Soil-inspired ruralism.29 The name derived from the old German words “art” and “mahnen” meaning agriculture man. The primary insignia of the Artaman is traditionally rendered in gold on blue, with a figure that represents a plough pointing to the Northern star (fig. 11). The Artamans were active during the inter-war period, so the league became closely linked to, and eventually absorbed by the NSDAP in the 1920s. The cover of the 2015 issue of the Völkische and Artaman magazine Nordische Zeitung centrally features a symbol of the Third Reich, the black sun (fig. 12); its design consists of twelve radial mirrore d sig runes, symbols employed as a logo by the Schutzstaffel.30 It seems unusual that the neo-Artamans make use of this symbol which was rather created newly by Hitler instead of reflecting old Northern and Germanic ideologies. By contrast, an eagle holding a fish in his claws—which can be found in many Völkische publications and on their websites—is a symbol that fully reflects

27 Corni, “Blut- und Bodenideologie,” 45. 28 Wagner and Haug, “Die Irminsul,” 71. 29 Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil. Walther Darré & Hitler’s ‘Green Party’ (London: Kensal Press, 1985), 101. 30 Schmidt, Völkische Siedler/innen, 14.

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Völkische values; as it shows the supremacy of the Germanic eagle that symbolizes the pagan Northern religion of the Völkischen over the Christian fish. The Völkische Siedlungen of Koppelow and Klaber, were founded partly by traditionalists during the industrialization in Germany in the mid-19th century and partly by Neuen Rechten that had left the city or other rural spaces in order to build up a community with Völkisch National values. These settlers first aim to change everyday life in the countryside, and as soon as the community becomes large enough these Siedler intend to expand their following. Nevertheless, experts such as Anna Schmidt, author of various books and texts about right-wing populism and extremism in Germany since 1945, posits that the primary danger of these right-wing Siedler is their isolated way of living and their subliminal means of recruiting other followers.

Figure 11. Artamans Insignia. Design by Figure 12. Cover of the Nordische Zeitung 3, no. 79 (2013). Elizabeth De Witt. © Elizabeth De Witt Accessed January 30, 2018., http://asatru.de/versand/main_bigware_29.php. © Asatru.de. Nordische Zeitung.

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Conclusion

All over the world organizations, scientists, and politicians are looking for ways to enable the fight against right-wing extremism. In order to succeed in proceeding against anti- democracy, hatred and xenophobia we need to reveal the false constructions of their ideologies, especially of the New Right whose cultural and political purposes have not been widely investigated yet. Siedler from the Neue and the Alte Rechte reinterpret the German and global history through their political ideology, they use special artefacts and symbols to visualise the bounding of their community—and hence produce narratives of their own beliefs. Both, neo-Nazis and l ische Siedler, create large families living amongst village communities and associated neighbourhoods. When neo-Nazis settle down in villages amongst like-minded people or when they found new Rechte Siedlungen, they are not afraid to depict their affinity towards the National Socialists through outdoor paintings, sculptures and other symbols. Völkische Siedler, in contrast, may seem from the outside to be harmless, but their radical beliefs turn out to be just as racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic, as those of radical neo-Nazis and more extremist youth groups of the Neue Rechte. While the Völkische Siedlungsbewegung historically belong to a revolutionary conservative movement that is an alternative to the radical-conservatism of National Socialist ideologies, other Rechte Siedlungen remain strongly connected to Nazi beliefs. The different types of Siedler share some concepts in their ideologies, but it is the way in which they cultivate their ideas, the representational strategies, and the symbols they use to visualize and promote their beliefs that distinguish them most. “Never ever again” is a well-known phrase accounting for Germany’s national heritage of shame. However instead of hoping for its affirmation, we need to face the problem of ideologically-driven collective memories as a real danger taking place in the present and confront rather than avoid spaces already occupied by right-wing extremists.

Teresa Retzer studied art history and philosophy in Vienna, Siena, Zurich, and Basel. Since 2017, she has concentrated on contemporary right-wing extremist subcultures in the former East Germany. Her developing PhD project investigates the interconnected relationship of contemporary art, society, politics, media theory and critical historiography. You can follow her work at teresaretzer.com.

Review: De Wereld van Pyke Koch

STEPHANIE LEBAS HUBER

Perhaps in an attempt to find resonance with the current political landscape, Utrecht’s Centraal Museum in The Netherlands recently revisited the problematic paintings of one of the city’s most celebrated artists. De Wereld van Pyke Koch (The World of Pyke Koch) was the first major retrospective held for the Dutch magic realist painter Pieter Frans Christiaan Koch—nicknamed Pyke—in over twenty years. Still recognized for his remarkable talent, Koch’s career has long been overshadowed by his membership to the Dutch Fascist party between the World Wars and his collaboration with the Germans during the Occupation.

Installation view of De Wereld van Pyke Koch (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, November 11, 2017-March 18, 2018). Image and copyright Centraal Museum, Utrecht/Ernst Moritz. T201704.

Attracting more than 50,000 visitors in over three months, the Koch show was one of the Centraal Museum’s most successful exhibitions in recent memory; its popularity can—at least in part—be attributed to the sudden relevance of populist movements in Europe and elsewhere. As political polarization has metastasized across the world, extremist movements—even in The Netherlands—have threatened to move past the political fringe. The traditionally equanimous Dutch have long prided themselves on their ability to maintain a social environment nurtured by mutual cooperation and coalition- building. They recently resisted a brush with populist far-right figure Geert Wilders in 2017, but thirty-five-year-old Thierry Baudet has since risen from the political vestiges 112 SHIFT

like a superweed inured to hostile soil, boasting a polished, charming persona even more insidious than his predecessor. Baudet relies on an elitist retrograde flair, a more palatable counterpoint to Wilders’ crass bombast. In this last respect the political newcomer resembles the life and paintings of Pyke Koch. De Wereld van Pyke Koch has revealed the awkward plight of mounting a retrospective for an artist whose legacy has been marred by his “fout” (wrong) politics. Its organizers decided to take the route of treating his troublesome political ideology with painstaking nuance; an understandable, but fraught editorial choice at a time when reading into the subtler points of far-right, extremist politics can seem like a shirking of accountability. There is a heightened expectation that moral absolutes be carved in stone, and confronting noxious populism is often presented as a civic duty. Grey areas as murky as these can be minefields no matter the national context. The exhibition addressed the most important periods in Koch’s oeuvre through its thematic arrangement. Unfurling the length of his career as it originated in Utrecht, the narrative constantly circled back to the city as the locus for his self-made identity as an aristocrat-painter. His mark on the community was further confirmed in his design for the lampposts, which can still be seen around Utrecht. Their understated, conventional design mirrors Koch’s similar manner of painting – a visitor would be forgiven for having overlooked his invisible artistic signature. Much like the artist’s career after the war, these fixtures do not draw attention to themselves and could easily slip undetected, unless someone is truly looking. Works by fellow interwar Dutch artists such as Carel Willink and Charley Toorop shared space on the walls with their German contemporaries, but the reasons for these inclusions can only be assumed. ’s cold Neue Sachlichkeit portraits and Karl Hubbuch’s vulgar street women compare to Koch’s work on a stylistic- and thematic-level respectively. The violence of ’s Lustmords, however, helped to underscore the qualities that make Koch’s work distinct from the Germans; he may have trafficked in imagery of prostitutes in their autumn years, but he never ventured into the realm of gratuitous sadism. Koch was not a prolific painter, but even a brief visit to the Centraal Museum can prove to the casual visitor that he was one of Utrecht’s—and more generally The Netherlands’—most formidable talents of the early twentieth century, particularly from a technical perspective. He was known for his masterful, imperceptible brushwork, which demands to be appreciated in person – individual strokes appear as if they have liquified upon contact with his glossy, glass-like surfaces. The portrait of his wife Heddy (Hedwig) de Geer from 1940 is one of the gems of Centraal Museum’s permanent collection and is an astonishing painting to behold in person. It is a sensuous, stately image of a well-born society woman, befitting this daughter of a former Prime Minister. Heddy stands remarkably erect, like a marble column against a background that is at once stage-like and ambiguous, as if masked by a darkened scrim. Her pale porcelain skin seems to luminate from within, producing a spotlight effect in striking contrast against the enigmatic setting. Koch teases at suggesting a location with the hint of a nondescript Fascist-style building in the

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background. Elegant white gloves run the length of her arms. Her shoulders remain conspicuously uncovered in relationship to her floor-length gown. This is an image of an aristocratic yet modern woman; a testament to the artist’s combination of source material. Koch’s handling of the fabrics recalls Old Masters such as Jan van Eyck or Johannes Vermeer, but his intuitive sense of lighting and staging owes to his love of cinema.

Installation view of De Wereld van Pyke Koch (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, November 11, 2017-March 18, 2018). Image and copyright Centraal Museum, Utrecht/Ernst Moritz. T201704.

It should be noted that Heddy’s father, Dirk Jan de Geer, who was serving his second stint as Prime Minister in 1940, would be remembered for his rather unpopular decision to back a peace treaty with Germany. To be an informed visitor of this exhibition, however, meant following the circuitous route of the audio-guide, which explained Koch’s revisionist personal history in detail. As the curator explained, at the

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time of this painting’s first showing of 1940, it was praised as a personification of the New Order. When it came back into his possession after the war, Koch removed a sash and altered Heddy’s hairstyle so as to soften her image. These postwar alterations to the painting have come to embody the ongoing rehabilitation of his career following World War II. His work was presented as a constant struggle within and against aesthetic conservatism, an implicit corollary to his politics: an idiosyncratic authoritarianism, a credo of absolute, concrete, yet strange truths. Yet, missing from the exhibition was explicit moral condemnation of Koch’s ideological positions in light of seventy years of retrospect, some of which run unequivocally beyond the pale. Rather than the white- washing that was de rigueur in earlier art historical accounts of his life, the sheer number of clarifications used to mildly condemn, but also elucidate, the subtle peculiarities of his political convictions verged uncomfortably close to grey-washing, or worse – moral relativism. It appealed to the viewer to consider his politics in the context of the 1930s, and as a result, downplayed Koch’s choice to associate with organizations whose worldview closely aligned with that of Adolf Hitler. One particularly uncomfortable issue is the problem of Koch’s anti-Semitism, which the exhibition catalogue describes as selective in its choice of targets. Only counter-examples are cited, such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, who were exempted from Koch’s contempt due to their status as renowned thinkers in their fields. One of the biographical films on display addressed Koch’s predilection for dictators, but also remarked that he was very particular on this subject. He hoped that an authoritarian would come to power, one with credentials as an intellectual member of the elite. Such distinctions helped to qualify Koch’s beliefs, forming a buffer between the artist and the Dutch National Socialist Party that he viewed as too petty bourgeois to be worthy of his respect. In any case, the contextual fine points were conspicuous in their excess, crossing the fine line separating nuance from apologetics and could be read as (at best) defensive, or (at worst) rationalizing. This approach does, however, successfully convey the idea that history is never as black and white as the accounts would have us believe. It is true that Koch was never shunned by the artistic community, and even enjoyed the patronage and support of some Jewish collectors after the war. His career serves as a reminder that the clear moral boundaries that have come into high relief with seventy years of hindsight bear little resemblance to the social reality of Europe during the immediate postwar years. The exhibition’s concluding chapter explored the artist’s later years, when he withdrew into an imaginary landscape of his own invention. As if denying the realities and aesthetics of the postwar experience, he firmly rejected the formlessness and primordial themes that had been embraced by CoBrA and the Abstract Expressionists. Koch remained staunch in his nods to traditionalism, retreating to themes from Greco- Roman mythology such as the nymph Daphne (ca. 1946) and the compositional formats of Quattrocento portraiture, as seen in the painting of his good friend in Profile Portrait of Jonkvrouw J. C. van Boetzelaer (1948). Hanging opposite this wall was a series of paintings related to the circus, which Koch completed in the 1950s. Here, the image of

Huber | De Wereld van Pyke Koch 115

silent-film star Asta Nielsen—whose mask-like face haunted the paintings that he produced in his youth—makes a return as an acrobat in The Large Contortionist (1957). The references embedded in the paintings of the final chapter are sad, beautiful reminders of a bygone past. They are emblematic of the artist’s dream for cultural renewal that would remain unrealized. Frightening, frozen, exquisite, beautiful: the final room of the exhibition balanced the expressions of escapism and rigidity that characterized Koch’s latest work. Tension was the common thread that tied together the last works of his career, manifest in the bodies in a rugby scrum and the apparatus of a tight-rope walker. Viewing Koch’s work of the late 1940s and 1950s, one is left with a lingering melancholy: his youthful ideals of a societal rebirth, realized in the horrors of the Second World War, are locked in suspended animation. Latent in this exhibition’s account was the idea that if Koch’s legacy was haunted by his sordid political past, then he would have to create his own world.

The exhibition De Wereld van Pyke Koch was on view at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, November 18, 2017 to March 18, 2018.

Stephanie Lebas Huber is a PhD candidate at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, where she is writing her dissertation on the Dutch Neorealists. Her research interests include figurative painting in Europe, intersections between traditional and contemporary media, and the revival of historical techniques and themes as a means to cope with trauma.

A Monumental Undertaking

CRYSTAL MIGWANS

The Art Gallery of Ontario’s solo exhibition Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental is an elegant and arresting presentation that marks a victory in the struggle by Indigenous artists and curators to reclaim institutional space from which they have been systematically excluded. Rebecca Belmore is a performance and installation artist, recipient of the 2013 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts and the 2016 Prize, several times a representative of Canada at the Venice and Sydney Biennales, and an Anishinaabekwe of Lac Seul First Nation. Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental is the largest survey of the lauded artist’s work to date.

Installation view of Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, July 12-October 21, 2018). Left: Rebecca Belmore, Tower, 2018. Clay and Shopping carts. Right: Rebecca Belmore, tarpaulin, 2018. © Rebecca Belmore.

The soaring spaces of the fifth floor contemporary art galleries are well suited to the monumental character of Belmore’s wide oeuvre. A dark room and an intense sensory Migwans | A Monumental Undertaking 117

encounter with the waterfall projection Fountain (2005), followed by the towering clay- and-shopping-cart obelisk of Tower (2018) create a sense of the ‘monumental’ that is expected from the start. Tower and its neighbor tarpaulin (2018) are new works— dedicated to the homeless and landless, both sculptures are rendered in clay harvested from a site within Winnipeg. Belmore treats the clay, a new material for the artist, with caring attention, and the dense pattern of handprints at the base of Tower’s column of shopping carts testifies to the sheer physical work of its construction. This trace of the absent human is echoed eerily in tarpaulin, a ceramic blanket tented as though wrapped around a hunched figure but which, once confronted head-on, reveals only an empty space in the shape of a body. They are tributes to the displaced, constructed out of materials that constitute housing for many. Projected video is a strong feature of the exhibition, with four large multimedia installations. One is a media room with a video mosaic of documented performances and two viewing stations with headphones. Fountain and The Named and Unnamed (2002) are both signature video-based works, installed in rooms to themselves, which experiment with alternative screen surfaces. In Fountain, projected onto a screen of falling water, the artist’s struggles to bring a bucket of water from sea to shore culminate in her throwing its contents at the camera, the water hitting the lens transmuted into blood. In The Named and Unnamed, the artist calls out names, pulls a rose through her teeth in grief, nails her dress to a post, and then tears it away—a passionate performance projected onto a screen of lightbulbs. As someone who had previously seen both only through online media, I found the sensory presence of these ‘screens’ particularly interesting. Cool mist wafting from Fountain, Belmore’s contribution to the 2005 , makes water a felt presence in the darkened room. The subtle heat of fifty light bulbs (representing fifty missing or murdered Indigenous women) in The Named and Unnamed likewise suggests bodily proximity. In the largest and second-to-last room of the exhibition, the viewer becomes caught in a snowy chase scene from two shifting perspectives. March 5, 1819 (2008) is a two-channel video projected on opposite walls which reenacts the historical flight of a Beothuk woman, Demasduit, from capture and murder by unseen settler pursuers. Here, too, one’s position in the wrenching struggle is ambiguous. Standing between these projections, the viewer is caught in the sightline of an empty, blood-topped chair. Blood in the Snow (2002) blankets a huge area of the floor with a soft white duvet. The vacant, red-stained chair emerges from the duvet’s center. On the wall nearby, a quote by the Oglala Lakota visionary Black Elk describes the sight of fallen Lakota women, children and elderly being buried in falling snow following the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. In an interview with Erica Commanda of Muskrat Magazine, Belmore noted that this piece was conceptualized in the year that Canada joined the American invasion of Afghanistan, and that struggles on the land globally and across time were on her mind.1 The chair suggests a witness to this violence.

1 Rebecca Belmore, quoted in Erica Commanda, “Rebecca Belmore Facing Monumental at the AGO,” Muskrat Magazine, June 26, 2018, http://muskratmagazine.com/belmore-facing-monumental-at-ago/. 118 SHIFT

Rebecca Belmore, Blood on the Snow, 2002. Fabric dye, cotton, feathers, chair, 240 5/32 x 240 5/32 x 42 1/8 in. Courtesy the Mendel Art Gallery collection at Remai Modern, purchased with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Mendel Art Gallery foundation, 2004. © Rebecca Belmore.

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Throughout the exhibition, the idea of the monumental seems self-evident in the sobering scale and often overwhelming presence of the installations. “Monumental” is an apt characterization of Belmore, her legacy, and the objects before us. It is only at the final stop on the fifth-floor exhibition route, however, that the artist’s use of this term becomes clear. There the viewer encounters the large-scale photographic work X series: The Artist (2014). In it the artist faces away from us, standing small and straight before a wide, blank wall, with the X of a construction vest on her back. This piece from the “X” series was originally printed for a billboard, such that the life-size artist would seem to be considering the enormous space before her. In this smaller incarnation the artist is at our eye level, and the under-construction space before her is the gallery wall. A quote by the artist beside this piece reads: “For decades / I have been working / as the artist amongst my people / calling to the past / witnessing the present / standing forward / facing the monumental.” Belmore positions herself as a labourer for her people, and it is the task before her that is monumental. The exhibition continues in various spaces throughout the AGO and Toronto. Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) (2017), Belmore’s contribution to documenta 14, sits at the entrance to the AGO’s Henry Moore Sculpture Center, a fitting site for a piece that in its original installation overlooked the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Marble quarried from the same source as the Parthenon takes on the form of the domed vinyl tent—a vernacular dwelling suggestive of Anishinaabe traditional homes. It is also a heavy reference to the makeshift shelters of millions of displaced migrants who during the project’s inception had landed on Greece’s shores. Belmore’s beaver dam gown Rising to the Occasion (1991) holds down a pivotal spot in the newly re-imagined Indigenous & galleries. Here, it is contextualized by beaded bandolier bags made by unknown Anishinaabe women and Cree artist ’s The Academy (2008) —all important interventions in the Canadian Art canon. The dress itself was created on the occasion of a British royal visit to Canada in 1987, constructed out of colonial debris, “native” trappings and royal family kitsch. As I listened, a non-Native gallery guide struggled to explain its message to a group of schoolchildren, concluding finally that it was about a meeting of cultures. True. But what is missing from this explanation is how the dress was first worn during a protest by Belmore and others against the Federal Government’s imposition on Indigenous lives. There is a meeting of cultures here, and it is fraught with colonial violence. Co-starring in this monumental undertaking is the show’s curator Wanda Nanibush, who was named Curator of Indigenous Art at the AGO in 2017, one half of the newly restructured Department of Indigenous & Canadian Art. Nanibush has already spearheaded several decolonizing initiatives at the AGO, including the translation of wall text into Anishinaabemowin, English, and French, and the renaming of works on display that had been originally titled with language demeaning to Indigenous people. Both are bold interventions upon the gallery space and its legacies of erasure, and opportunities to observe how ‘decolonization’ within a large institution might edge toward or evade old-fashioned inclusion. For example, a common and troubling settler gloss of Indigenous nationhood is that it is “past and part-of” Canada—a 120 SHIFT

mischaracterization that still slips into every crack in the otherwise strong assertions of Indigenous sovereignty throughout these decolonized galleries. “This gallery […] honours Indigenous people as one of the founding nations—creating visible space in the wake of lost, stolen and confiscated land,” reads the introductory panel. It is so unexpected and so gratifying to see such a clear statement of the gallery’s role in addressing colonial histories that the issue of nation versus Nation status might seem like a minor quibble. But it is worth noting the slippage that occurs in the characterization of a generalized demographic (“Indigenous people”) as a “founding nation” (of what?), rather than speaking of specific, still-standing entities such as the Anishinaabeg Nation. It would be hard, of course, to list every single Nation upon whose territory Canada intrudes in the gallery title (Gallery of Canadian & Anishinaabeg & Haudenosaunee & Huron &...), and that’s why the differential in ethnically- versus territorially-defined nationhood (Indigenous & Canadian) is notable—it’s a matter of real estate all over, and Canada has not yet been made to cede supremacy in such institutions. Give Nanibush a few years.

Rebecca Belmore, Rising to the Occasion, 1987-1991. Mixed media. 78 3/4 x 47 1/4 x 39 3/8 in. Gift from the Junior Volunteer Committee, 1995. Art Gallery of Ontario. © Rebecca Belmore. Photo: Craig Boyko.

All of these things are nonetheless significant victories that have only come about after generations of work by Indigenous artists and curators like Belmore and Nanibush. Canadian art has long been something which pictures Indigenous people, rendering them Migwans | A Monumental Undertaking 121

as passive objects rather than active presences. Interventions like the integration of Indigenous art throughout the AGO, and wall texts that addresses an Indigenous reader are important experiments in disrupting the colonial mechanisms of erasure in the art museum. Those schoolchildren are perhaps now aware of Indigenous people not just as objects pictured and seen in art, but as artistic minds and viewing presences in the gallery among them. Hopefully the presence of an Indigenous artist in this lofty position means that not just non-Indigenous school children are being engaged here. The project of inclusion is always predicated on a performance of presence (is there a reader to go with those Anishinaabemowin panels? Is the Anishinaabe reader assumed to stand in for all Nations local to Ontario? Can these gestures truly address structural obstacles that continually remove the Native from this place?). Though Nanibush has firmly stated her intentions to resist Indigenous inclusion in an existing settler structure and instead lead an Indigenous occupation of it, the AGO is already proving how seamlessly settler institutions can enfold resistance into nationalism under the aegis of diversity. As an Anishinaabekwe myself, I found myself standing uneasily in a space that has been laboriously won by and for Anishinaabekwewag, struggling to read the panels with my limited Anishinaabemowin, and struggling to reconcile the placement of beadwork next to landscape paintings. I think that an uneasy stance is a useful one, though, and Belmore’s work provides a powerful example in this regard—cautious and critical, yet hopeful and humane. This solo exhibition, along with the aabaakwad symposium on Indigenous contemporary art organized in conjunction with it, are a solid foundation stone on which to build further interventions. As unresolved and experimental as these interventions are, there is no understating the monumental importance of having Belmore, beadwork, and long Anishinaabemowin text panels take up real estate on Bloor Street. It is a pleasure and a privilege to stand before these pieces, and critical that they have this platform from which to do their own decolonizing work.

Miigwech Nanibush miinawaa Belmore.

The exhibition Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental was on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, July 12 to October 21, 2018.

Crystal Migwans is an Anishinaabekwe of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory, hailing from the Mazhenahzing River. She is a doctoral candidate in Art History at , currently undertaking her dissertation research on natural fiber weaving traditions in the Great Lakes.

On Representation, Appropriation, and Everything in Between

HORACIO RAMOS

It is a laudable risk to present at a major American art museum a show that deals with Latinx and Indigenous identities.1 Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum presented seven artists born outside of the United States (in South America, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, and Mexico) who explore practices “inherited from, and also still alive in, Indigenous groups in Mexico and South America.”2 Laudable because—still in 2018—some might question the “Americanness” of the works, dismiss their themes (among them, migration to the United States) as “too remote,”3 or simply misconstrue them (as a well-intended New York Times reporter who claimed that the show featured “indigenous groups”).4 Risky because claiming to represent Latinx and Indigenous cultures is to enter a heated debate about where those identities end and where appropriation begins. To complicate matters more, the exhibition’s stakes were remarkably high. This was the Whitney’s first show explicitly branded as Latinx and the first curated by Puerto Rican assistant curator Marcela Guerrero—hired to improve representation of Latinx art.5 Further, it inaugurated the use of bilingual wall texts in Spanish and English and of a title in Quechua (an Indigenous language-family from South America).6 Clearly, “representation” (to portray and to champion a constituency) was central to the show’s

1 Latinx is the gender-neutral term for people of Latin American descent. The term was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary on September 2018. “Latinx,” Merriam-Webster, accessed on September 17, 2018, https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-history-latinx. 2 “Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art,” The Whitney Museum of Art, accessed on August 31, 2018, https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/PachaLlaqtaWasichay. 3 Marcela Guerrero, personal communication, August 10, 2018. 4 Robin Pogrebin, “Museums turn their focus to U.S. Artists of Latin Descent,” The New York Times, last modified April 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/arts/latinx-museums-artists.html. 5 Robin Pogrebin, “With New Urgency, Museums cultivate Curators of Color,” The New York Times, last modified August 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/arts/design/museums-curators-diversity- employment.html. 6 The Quechua terms pacha, llaqta, wasichay do not have precise translations to Spanish or English. Per the show’s webpage, “pacha denotes universe, time, space, nature, or world; llaqta signifies place, country, community, or town; and wasichay means to build or to construct a house.” Ramos | On Representation 123

discourse (on social media one found comments such as “The Whitney is brown now!”). What is less clear is who exactly the exhibition represented. Guerrero, along with project assistant Alana Hernandez, did an excellent job at identifying formal echoes between artists evoking notions of Indigeneity through modernist aesthetics (the real unifying thread of the show).7 Such “family resemblances,” I argue here, obscured important differences in the artists’ distinct political and identity claims.

Installation view of Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). From left to right: Clarissa Tossin, Ch’u Mayaa, 2017; Ronny Quevedo, Errant Globe, 2015; Ronny Quevedo, ULAMA-ULE-ALLEY OOP, 2017. Photograph by Ron Amstutz.

7 In this review, I use “modernist aesthetics” as a blanket term to describe the use of abstract, geometric, color-saturated forms and structures. Twentieth-century artists from different generations working in Europe and the Americas associated their use of such aesthetic with pre-Columbian notions and images. See, for example, Josef Albers in Mexico, edited by Lauren Hinkson (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2017); and Robert Kett, “Monumentality as Method: Archaeology and Land Art in the Cold War,” Representations 130- 1 (Spring 2015), 119-151. 124 SHIFT

Brazilian artist Clarisa Tossin’s video Ch’u Maya (2017) illuminated the show’s first corridor.8 In it, dancer Crystal Sepúlveda (b. Puerto Rico) performs an elegant choreography that evokes Maya iconography in front of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House—iconic example of Mayan Revival. Labeled by Tossin as a “re-appropriation” of pre-Columbian sources from a US [white male] architect, the video and the abstract sculptures next to it made use of the most stereotypical images of Maya art (the glyphs, the jaguar, the quetzal), conveying a sense of parody. 9 Importantly, the installation’s playfulness distinguished it from the solemnity of twentieth-century modernisms— responding thus not only to US visions of the “south of the border,” but also to the prominence of modernist architecture in Brazil, where the artist grew up and exhibits. To be sure, references to modernism and Indigeneity are common in contemporary art from South America and Mexico, where indigenismo (the appropriation of Indigenous practices by non-Indigenous artists) had and still has a central role in the artistic mainstream for more than a century.10 In a similar vein, william cordova (b. Peru) and Claudia Peña Salinas (b. Mexico) employed geometric forms for their post-minimalist evocations of pre-Columbian monuments. Ronny Quevedo (b. Ecuador) and Guadalupe Maravilla (b. El Salvador), for their part, added autobiographical perspectives that underscored their experiences of migration. Maravilla, who crossed the US border as child, intervened with undocumented immigrants a contemporary version of the colonial Nahuatl-language manuscript Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca.11 In A Requiem for my Border Crossing (2018), the resulting series of drawings, participants traced lines that resembled geometric glyphs, Fred Flintstone, and immigration routes. Here is where things get complicated. Creative appropriation of pre-Columbian forms has different implications depending the artist’s background. Tossin’s elegant deconstruction of modernism contrasts with Maravilla’s more personal “rituals,” which merge “his pre-colonial ancestry, fiction, and autobiography” in the context of “the ongoing U.S. immigration crisis.”12 The artists’ distinct backgrounds are

8 Cinematography by Jeremy Glaholt. 9 See Clarissa Tossin’ webpage, accessed on August 31, 2018, https://clarissatossin.net/Ch-u-Mayaa. 10 For example, the recent show desMarcados: Indigenismo, Arte y Política 1917-2017 surveys the long history of indigenismo in Ecuador from the 1910s to the present. The show was curated by Alexandra Keneddy, Trinidad Pérez, Pilar Estrada, Malena Bedoya, and Lucía Durá, and was held at the Centro Cultural Metropolitano de Quito and the Museo de la Ciudad from December 2017-May 2018. Artist and art historian Mariana Botey is leading a transnational exhibition and publication project Indigenisms: Amerindian Imaginaries in the Avant-Garde and the Modern Era, 1800-2015. See Mariana Botey, “INDIGENISMS: Amerindian Imaginaries in the Avant-Garde and Modern Era, 1800-2015,” CIMAM 2015 Annual Conference, Tokyo, Japan, November 8, 2015, video of lecture, https://vimeo.com/151680653. 11 Formerly known as Irvin Morazán, the artist recently readopted his birth name “Guadalupe” and his undocumented father’s pseudonym “Maravilla” as his last name “to show solidarity during these challenging political times.” See Guadalupe Maravilla’s webpage, accessed on August 31, 2018, https://www.guadalupemaravilla.com/contact. 12 See “The OG of Undocumented Children,” The Whitney Museum of Art, accessed on August 31, 2018, https://whitney.org/events/og-of-undocumented-children. Ramos | On Representation 125

certainly not a problem but a sign of the diverse experiences that are labeled as “Latinx” in the United States today. It could have been productive, however, to evidence these different places of enunciation in a show that posited identity debates at its core— especially considering that the Whitney’s interest in representing Latinx art was the outcome of recent conversations on how United States-born Latinx artists are systematically overlooked in favor of their colleagues from Latin America.13

Installation view of Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). From left to right: Guadalupe Maravilla, Tripa Chuca, 2018; Ronny Quevedo, every measure of zero (Nazca beyond the plain), 2017; Ronny Quevedo, every measure of zero (errantry), 2017; Ronny Quevedo, every measure of zero (periphery), 2017; Ronny Quevedo, (lyra), 2017; Jorge González, Ayacavo Guarocoel, 2018; Monica Flaherty, Petroglyph studies at Coabey River, Jayuya, Puerto Rico, c. 1957. Photograph by Ron Amstutz.

13 Maximilíano Durón, “News Study: Latino Art Underrepresented at College Art Association’s Annual Conference,” Art News, last modified September 20, 2016, http://www.artnews.com/2016/09/20/study-latino- art-underrepresented-at-college-art-associations-annual-conference/. 126 SHIFT

Similarly, the show missed the opportunity of underscoring the different ways in which young Latinx artists establish relationships and responsibilities with the Indigenous groups in which the practices they “inherited” are “still alive in.” In her review of the show, art historian Ananda Cohen claimed that to frame the works as appropriations does not make justice to the fact that many Latin Americans and Latinx identify as “mestizo”14—an ambiguous term used to suggest diverse racial backgrounds. Many scholars have noted, however, that the discourse of mestizaje (of colonial origin but championed by modern politicians) is a fertile terrain for racist practices, as it flattens differences and obscures discrimination against people that are read as more black or more Indigenous.15 Importantly, historians have identified a tendency to conceal such discriminations by evoking Indigeneity through pre-Columbian images while leaving unattended contemporary problems of land ownership and/or economic inequalities.16 Aware of these contexts, artists such as Livia Corona Benjamín (b. Mexico) and Jorge González (b. Puerto Rico) foregrounded not the pre-Columbian past but the contemporary lives of underrepresented (and racialized) constituencies. In her abstract photograms and documentary video Nadie Sabe, Nadie Supo-Graneros del Pueblo,17 Corona documented the “the people’s granaries”—pyramid-like silos that the Mexican government constructed since the 1960s in rural areas. Local farmers adapted the government’s designs (made with indigenista undertones by star architect Pedro Ramírez Vásquez), making them examples of vernacular architecture. The video captured their current users’ voices but, cleverly, not their faces, breaking our expectation of visualizing (and racializing) “the people.” González’s site-specific installation Ayacabo Guarocoel (2018), on the other hand, inserted walls and roofs made following vernacular techniques in the galleries. While this strategy might have felt too literal, it was significantly framed as a collective learning experience from traditional artists such Fernando Torres Flores (b. Puerto Rico) and Alice Chéveres (Borikén)—a powerful gesture considering that in several countries their art would still be reduced to “artesanías” (handicrafts). Finally, Maravilla organized collective performances that directly addressed the United States government's role in the migration of Central American people. This gesture gained a new layer of meaning when it was revealed (after the show ended) that the Whitney's vice chairman is complicit with the Trump administration’s border policies. 18

14 Ananda Cohen-Aponte, “Latinx Artists are Highlighted for the First Time in a Group Show at the Whitney,” Hyperallergic, last modified August 28, 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/456710/pacha-llaqta- wasichay-indigenous-space-whitney-museum/. 15 Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd ed. (New York: Pluto Press, 2010), 94. 16 Among others, Cecilia Méndez, Incas sí, indios no: Apuntes para el estudio del nacionalismo criollo en el Perú (Lima: IEP, 1995). The title broadly translates as “Yes to the Incas, no to the Indians.” 17 A previous version of this installation was shown as Nadie sabe, nadie supo at Parque Galería, Mexico City, from September 2016 to January 2017. 18 More than 100 staffers at the Whitney, including curator Marcela Guerrero, signed a letter opposing the institution’s defense of vice chairman Warren B. Kanders, who owns Safariland, LLC, a manufacture of the tear gas and smoke grenades hurled by United States border agents at asylum-seekers in Tijuana, Mexico in Ramos | On Representation 127

In an interview, Guerrero told me that she did not want to curate a survey in which the only similarity between artists was the label “Latinx.” Instead of cramming together a larger roster of artists, works, or texts, she chose to give each artist an individual gallery to breathe. Her curatorial strategy was at its strongest when it visually shown how Indigeneity is imagined vis-à-vis modernism by young Latinx artists. By displaying this association, she aimed at countering the stereotype that Latinx art is exclusively figurative or social, as well as to make viewers aware that modern art was and

Installation view of Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). From left to right: Livia Corona Benjamín, Infinite Rewrite VI, 2016; Infinite Rewrite LIII, 2018; Infinite Rewrite LVI, 2018; Infinite Rewrite LII, 2018; Infinite Rewrite L, 2018; Infinite Rewrite XXXI, 2016; Graneros del Pueblo / Nadie Sabe, Nadie Supo, 2016; Infinite Rewrite LV, 2018; Infinite Rewrite LIV, 2018; Infinite Rewrite LI, 2018; Infinite Rewrite XVIII, 2016. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

late November, 2018. See Zachary Small, “Artist Mounts Guerrilla Art Exhibition at Whitney Calling for Removal of Vice Chairman,” Hyperallergic, last modified December 11, 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/475476/artist-mounts-guerrilla-art-exhibition-at-whitney-calling-for-removal-of- vice-chairman/. 128 SHIFT

still is enriched by Indigenous traditions.19 The trade-off of her well-paced, visually alluring installation is that it left unpacked the projects’ distinct political frameworks. Hence, inattentive US viewers were led to believe that the show featured “indigenous groups.” Ultimately, to frame the works as “preservations” and not as “appropriations” needed further justification. It is understandable that the word “appropriation” was avoided considering that the museum recently faced (and tried to come to terms with) such allegations for the cases of African American and Native North American identities.20 Further, the word might have been awkward in a show that celebrated (as it should!) that the Whitney and the country “are brown.” But appropriation has roots (and legs) almost as long as the concept of Indigeneity itself. To ignore that would be to create double standards—one for Latin American art and another for United States-based art, one for Latinx culture and another for African American—in the global conversation on the politics of representation. Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay offered a relevant (and, alas, still rare) public space to reflect on how young artists explore representation and appropriation, and to note that they come not in binaries but in a complicated spectrum.

The exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, July 13 to September 30, 2018.

Horacio Ramos is a PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, who specializes in Latin American modern and contemporary art. He has worked as curatorial and research assistant at the Museo de Arte de Lima (Peru) and El Museo del Barrio, NYC.

19 Marcela Guerrero, personal communication, August 10, 2018. She mentioned in our interview that she wanted to “nuance” the image of Latinx art beyond works more commonly associated with the label, such as Pepón Osorio’s En la barbería no se llora (1994), as well as to respond to recent New York-based shows of Latin American architecture, art, and design that privileged modernist aesthetics over Indigenous traditions. On this, see Marcela Guerrero, “Conceptual Blueprints: Artistic Approaches to Indigenous Architecture,” The Whitney Museum of Art, accessed on August 31, 2018, https://whitney.org/Essays/Pacha-Llaqta- Wasichay. 20 I am talking about the Dana Schutz controversy at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and the Jimmie Durham retrospective of the same year. For an overview that makes references to both contexts, see Julia Halperin, “How the Dana Schutz Controversy—and a Year of Reckoning—Have Changed Museums Forever,” Artnet News, last modified March 6, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/dana-schutz-controversy-recent- protests-changed-museums-forever-1236020.

ABOUT SHIFT

Host Institution The Graduate Center, CUNY

Editorial Committee Onur Ayaz, The Graduate Center, CUNY Monica Bulger, Columbia University Ben Clifford, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU Janine DeFeo, The Graduate Center, CUNY Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, The Graduate Center, CUNY Yizhuo Li, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Siwin Lo, The Graduate Center, CUNY Alice Martin, New York University Rachel Valinsky, The Graduate Center, CUNY Ian Wallace, The Graduate Center, CUNY Chloe Wyma, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Editorial Board Adrian Anagnost, Tulane University Brigid Doherty, Princeton University Romy Golan, The Graduate Center, CUNY Katherine Manthorne, The Graduate Center, CUNY Nora Annesley Taylor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Norman Vorano, Queen's University

Faculty Advisor Rachel Kousser, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Co-Editors Christopher Green, The Graduate Center, CUNY Dana Liljegren, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Copy Editor Ian Wallace, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Cover Artwork Jackson Polys, Zack Khalil, and Adam Khalil

Shift Logo Alex Dodge

Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture