Michael Taussig, ‘The Language of Flowers’

Michael Taussig is an Australian born anthropologist with professorships at Columbia University in New York, and at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.  Combined with a wariness of dominant Western-capitalist cultural perspectives, his interests particularly regarding ideas of commodity fetishism are enlarged via Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin.

In his chapter The Language of Flowers, from Walter Benjamin’s Grave, Taussig addresses himself to the work of Juan Manuel Echavarria and his photographs of flowers made of human bones.  The work is poetic and has a clear political critique of the violence occurring in his country of Colombia.  As the discussion moves to the implicated reference of Jose Celestino Mutis’ plant illustrations – which play a very different political role as virtual ‘icons of the nation’ (191) – notions of what is natural and contrived come under scrutiny.  What is initially an honest botanical-record of a resplendent ‘art in nature’ is suddenly recognized as arranged to, ‘conform to an aesthetic’ (193). 

This apparent duplicity where an example of, ‘art in nature turns out to be an art of nature’ (194), causes Taussig to bellow ‘treason’!  Yet Taussig is being dramatic for affect.  A glance over his biography reveals that he understands well how the aesthetic of stories get muddled with objective observation in culture formations, and that, ‘no account was intrinsically innocent or objective any longer’ (European Graduate School EGS).  He knows that fictions can be at the service of making facts clearer and he can be seen making ethnographic studies that parallel this pictorial version of the ‘in nature’/’of nature’ dynamic.  Like Karl Blossfeldt’s Art Nouveau lens, the idea of something understood as natural, being aesthetically arranged so as to present its ‘truth’ automatically engages with a politics of fiction or design.  This is not to say ‘false’, but perhaps, mythical.  

 

The presentation ‘of nature’ as if being ‘in nature’ put me in mind of that great ‘flower’ of the American avant-garde, Jackson Pollock.  He declared, “I am nature”(cited Seckler) to situate his art without external models.  This artifice is extended in having himself aesthetically arranged, in the sense that, ‘the press did attempt to use photographs to help make him the “disturbed genius” of American painting’ (Cox, 89).  Such was the shifting cultural politics where notions of the avant-garde – by definition a politicized art: to effectively, ‘challenge the rule of the bourgeoisie by creating a novel and disturbing art’ (Cox, 6) – slipped into the politics of nationhood. 

In our post-avant world abstract painting is perhaps now the least of the arts to be effective politically.  Abstract paintings are like flowers.  In this sense there may be parallels with Michael Pollan’s definition of, ‘the value of flowers as lying with their uselessness.  “‘Flowers are a luxury,’ Mr. Pollan said.  ‘They’re not useful… You don’t worry about flowers until you’ve solved a lot of other problems in life’”’(cited in Taussig, 199).  Yet if abstract paintings are like flowers it is worth noting that, ‘when disaster strikes, the useless becomes useful’ (Taussig, 200).  As Lauren Winstone pointed out in our group, the current economic crisis seems to have given rise to a lot of painting.  This might be political.

Citations

Cox, Annette. Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society. Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982.  

European Graduate School EGS. “Michael Taussig – Biography”.  The European Graduate School: Graduate and Postgraduate Studies. 1997 – 2010.

15 May 2011.

 <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/michael-taussig/biography/>

Seckler, Dorothy. “Oral history interview with Lee Krasner, 1964 Nov. 2-1968 Apr. 11”. Archives Of American Art. 2011. Smithsonian Institute.

             15 May 2011.

<http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-lee-krasner-12507>

Taussig, Michael. “The Language of Flowers”. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006

Isabelle Graw, ‘High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture’

I remember standing before a Lee Lozano work, Whom Graw includes amongst her examples of the ‘artist’s artist’.  It was 2007, I was at Documenta 12, and I had just graduated.  While discovering the painting called Clash, at this time I was ignorant of whom its painter was, or that she had a very conceptual practice quite apart from the paintings on display then in Kassel.  I mention this experience, because it goes some way toward marking out the terrain of my own position with regard to art and its marketable value. 

When I encountered this painting I was immediately captivated.  It seemed to require my movement about it, in, around and outward.  My first thought to its context was post-Minimal, if a label was wanted.  While orienting to this work, I was not certain of the artist’s gender, since her name is sufficiently androgynous, and the work likewise sat at some threshold between robust and tender, lyrical and matter-of-fact: not that this necessarily pertains to actual gender, but I was curious.   The surface was sensitive and knowing.  Todd Alden, in the catalogue for this painting said, ‘Lozano’s textures here represent a rare commitment to sensuality, distinguishing Lozano from virtually all Minimalists’ (66).  The brush had been dragged across the surface in even, steady directions, with shifts in direction marking the boundaries of form.  The monochrome paint was thick enough, and of a metallic sheen, so as to gather light along its directional strokes.  There was also some content being alluded to here, as the work of tint and shade created the illusory sense of volume amongst all its flatness.  This seemed almost a baroque thing of chiaroscuro affects.  It was satisfying to learn later of the content that, ‘While they appear to be abstract, each work evolved or transformed out of earlier representational depictions of tools – screws, cones, and hammers’ (Alden, 66).

The surface was divided at an angle, into two distinct parts, which seemed to do more than mark a change in direction of brush-stroke.  It was so precise and incisive that it ‘called’ me in, and yes I discovered that the painting was made of two panels abutted.  They fight and grind at each other as the title of the work suggests, and the actual boundary here seemed to make this a very physical act.

I was seduced.  This is at the heart of my point.  In order for a painting to lay claim to the projections and introjections that make up the ground of its knowledge production, it needs to invite pause and attendance.  And so there is a flirtation with the contested borders of bourgeois taste, bound up, as it is, with its history as a commodity.  Painting more than most art, can scarcely be a painting at all without looking like a commodity.  It has to work in spite of this.  More than this, it is living proof for all art, ‘… against the idealistic belief in art as the market’s Other’ (Graw, 81); it just has to work twice as hard to not be conceived as commercial for commercial sake.  Graw implies that Lozano’s, ‘(more marketable) paintings’ largely get their important art-world status from the radical (more avant-garde, less commercial, and therefore-must be-a-real-artist) conceptual works (85).  She goes further, pointing out that the status these works have are possibly assumed to, ‘automatically rub off on Lozano’s tool paintings and tool drawings, [as] the latter were shown – with no reference to the conceptual pieces made at the same time – at Documenta 12’ (86).  But the paintings, for me at least, held their own.

Citations

Alden, Todd. “1965 Lee Lozano”. Documenta Kassel 16/06-23/09 2007 #12. Catalogue. Taschen, 2007: 66

Graw, Isabelle. High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009.

Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”

Arjun Appadurai is a socio-cultural anthropologist who has formulated frameworks in which to study media, consumption, and migration across the globe.  He proposes that today’s world is a ‘complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models’ (Appadurai, 32).  He locates this disjuncture, as opposed to any homogenizing conjunction of culture, in a dynamic of ‘indigenization’, where ‘…at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way’ (32). 

This particular tendency, however, seems not so new.  An interesting historical example to consider, in New Zealand, of this kind of vital ‘indigenization’ that Appadurai refers to, might be when Maori were exposed to the technologies and imagery of colonial settlers.  One result was an innovative period in the use of paint for figurative depictions, which also included the painted word, on, and inside their houses.  Hamish Keith, in his book The Big Picture, emphasizes their radical innovation on a par with any European conception of the avant-garde, but which has at times been misconstrued as an inconsequential folk art not proper to Maori traditions.  The point was that Maori art was alive and responding to an economy and ‘look’, in its own idiosyncratic way.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s recent colonial history seems to present a small foretaste of what Appadurai now sees as ‘new’ in our global situation, where the unprecedented mobility of populations has broken up the habitual territories of custom and inclination.  Culture has become, ‘more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences’ (44).  Although not exactly what was being described here, I thought about how Pakeha culture rises from a deterritorialised ancestry, which once may have considered itself as representing a ‘centre’ here in a ‘periphery’ land.  It might now be considered as doubly deterritorialised: positioned somewhere between Not Maori and therefore not of the whenua, and Not European.  We are a culture that perhaps truly occupies the landscape Appadurai calls an Ideoscape, since we are the living semantic of a treaty written into the land. 

 

Pakeha abroad in Europe can become more aware of what elements of environment or ecology, and proximity to Maori, has made a difference (as compared to the British) to their cultural sense of self-understanding.  Hamish Keith emphasizes with regard to the Maori-Pakeha relationship that, ‘From the beginning each had borrowed from the other – imagery and technology – but nowhere could it be said that these borrowings flowered into some common experience that their art reflected’ (254). This also seems to follow Appadurai’s meaning of disjuncture and difference between influencing cultures.  However, it does not also follow that artists have not been able to find fertile connections and extensions.   Keith puts forward the example of Ralph Hotere and Colin McCahon where, ‘Hotere had provided … McCahon with the waiata written by Hotere’s father … that became The Song of the Shining Cuckoo’ and, ‘The biblical text in Hotere’s Aramoana screen is as much homage to McCahon as it is simply a quote from Ezekiel’ (257). 

Citations

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Keith, Hamish. The Big Picture: A History of New Zealand Art from 1642. Auckland, London, Sydney, Houghton, and New Delhi: Random House, A Godwit Book, 2007.