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