More Notes Towards an Essay That May Never Be Written

Jerry Cullum


Angelbert Metoyer and Charlie Koolhaas’ collaboration is meant to direct attention to particular ways in which the world’s beloved specificities are being diluted and diverted by the currents of global commerce. You can’t count on not finding the most culturally improbable imports even in spots that seem unlikely to have the wherewithal to pay for them. Toss in the imponderables of global migration, and you have the recipe for the cultural collisions and negotiations that are C. Koolhaas’s photographic bread and butter.

Ms Koolhaas (who almost certainly doesn't require these attached honorifics or first-name cites to avoid confusion with her architect father) documents the indistinguishable components of the world’s conurbations, set cheek by jowl with the cultural inflections that remind outsiders of where they are. And the juxtaposed results are precisely part of what the writers in the Huyssen anthology would call an urban imaginary: the shifting imaginative nodes whereby residents not only navigate in an urban space but re-interpret its shifting physical modes and moods. It is possible, these days, to feel lost in one’s own home territory, and that particular condition has led and will lead to moments of spectacular violence.

But for every displaced migrant community or discomfited longtime local population at one another’s throats, there are dozens that seem to have settled into a functional style of co-existence that is not quite tolerance and certainly not cosmopolitanism. But it is a style based on the realization that in the absence of intolerable immediate conditions (and what constitutes “tolerable” shifts according to moods and modes of the moment), everyone is better served by going along to get along.

There is a great deal of impassioned theory-laden rhetoric about the lives of urban populations that we will not revisit here. What is at stake is how the imaginative lives of those populations shape the urban imaginaries of cities that have been tossed into the global discourse in ways that are distinctly their own, using the same components that the forces of multinational capitalism and state socialism have distributed unevenly across the planet.

Pico Iyer has written some of our best subjective impressions of the condition of the global soul, that particular socioeconomic class that is formed by not just the ability bujt the necessity to travel from one globalized cultural bubble to the next, on business or on the business of making and exhibiting art. (Nicolas Bourriaud is the most recent curator to write about artists as global nomads, a topic on which I noted a dozen years ago that not only are most artists the opposite of nomadic, but that most of the people who are actual global nomads are individuals who in other circumstances might not have chosen to wander the globe in search of better-paying work.)

So there really is what Iyer poetically (if with some degree of alarm) calls a global soul, a globalized social type. But ironically, globalized consciousness and what used to be called cosmopolitanism do not go hand in hand; some of our better-compensated global nomads are as provincially encapsulated in their own quite limited social worlds as was any young Englishman off on the Victorian version of the Grand Tour.

Metoyer and Koolhaas are not in that category, and the fruits of their world wanderings are meant to be explorations of the personal and social underpinnings of identity and difference. Metoyer’s mystical cross-blendings of cultural symbolizations overlay prettily on Koolhaas’ documentation of the parts of cities that could be anywhere, and the parts that are distinctly of their own time and place, and the parts in which whole genres of time and place collide and intermingle or sit uncomfortably adjacent.

Whether all their ventures communicate adequately, or whether all are successful as aesthetic objects: that, formalist critics can address. The mirrored hypercubes in the Sandler Hudson exhibition seem like windows into another world, but a world that is the one we live in. The single film out of the fifty-two currently in Metoyer’s oeuvre seems another such window into the not-yet of the time that is coming and in some ways is already here, and in many ways right outside the window in Midtown West. As William Gibson famously wrote, the future is already here, but is unevenly distributed. As is obvious once you think about it and bother to look around with eyes that are more than half-open and a mind more than half-awake.

I believe that Metoyer wrote in an earlier exhibition that we are enlightened but we are not yet awakened. But now it is high time to wake out of sleep.

Dufftown to Istanbul, or the wages and wagers of globalization

Dufftown to Istanbul (going westward?)







There are many reasons why my 2007 essay “Dufftown to Istanbul” was never completed (and why the chief documentation of that trip is the long poem Changing Planes in Prague, now apparently available on amazon.com as well as the lulu.com website…at a 30% markup that goes to Amazon).

Planning the extension to a proffered press tour, I had been struck originally by the curious appropriateness of traveling from the northwestern fringe of Europe to the southeastern fringe of the continent…and in fact I stayed on the European side of the bicontinental city, when eventually I flew there (changing planes in Prague) to attend the press conference for the Istanbul Biennial. Asia remains outside my personal experience.



Dufftown, Banffshire, Scotland was a planned community of the eighteenth century that has become a center of the distilling of single malt Scotch, the one commodity that has continued to do well in the midst of the great global downturn, apparently as the one affordable luxury of which no one has felt they could postpone or reduce the consumption.

Glenfiddich, the distillery that pioneered the single malt concept (after generations of selling their product for inclusion in blended whiskies), has for half a dozen years sponsored an on-site summer residency program for a number of global artists (not coincidentally from countries where Glenfiddich is already a valued product). I was brought over with the assignment of writing about the multicultural, complexly encoded artwork of Romeo Alaeff, which I eventually did in a couple of online posts.

Scotland had earlier voted in a majority of nationalist parliamentarians, leading London alarmists to write as though the Scots were on the verge of, as it were, firing on Fort Sumter. It led me to think of the oddity of Scotland’s position as a fringe country within Europe, so opposite in every sense to Turkey’s position on the other fringe; the dualities being too many to enumerate, with the position of the geographic margin being the single point of similarity between a little-known Scottish town and the onetime capital of a continent-spanning empire.


But the products of the Speyside district (and I might have more euphoniously and accurately titled my never-written essay “Aberlour to Istanbul” were that town name not also the brand name of Glenfiddich’s French-owned competitor) are distributed globally, and what comes out of Dufftown in green glass bottles finds its way to the farthest corners of the planet’s marketplaces. (Contemplating Glenfiddich’s global reach during my August 2007 visit, I found myself recalling the moment in the film Hotel Rwanda when the military strongman reminisces fondly about having visited the Scottish distilleries and muses, “I wonder if I shall ever see those places again.”)


All of this was brought to mind by the arrival at Atlanta’s Sandler Hudson Gallery of a collaboration between Houston- and Guangzhou-based artist Angelbert Metoyer and his wife, photographer and sociologist Charlie Koolhaas (Rem’s daughter, if you really must know, as I did).

And the implications of their particular take on globalization may form the subject of yet another unwritten essay. (Cf. my fortunately timed preliminary Counterforces review of Andreas Huyssen’s Other Cities, Other Worlds: though they never use the term, Metoyer and Koolhaas are very much tackling the issue of urban imaginaries in the era of globalization.) Guangzhou to Lagos, Dubai to Shanghai, it’s all one global city (I don’t mind)…inside my heart remains the same? or not, and that is the point. (Apologies for thus mangling the lyrics of a 1980s song familiar to fans of Wim Wenders.)

The photographs above are all by Jerry Cullum, 2007; images from the Sandler Hudson Gallery exhibition will appear in subsequent posts specifically about that body of collaborative work.

what is to be done and not done, version the whatevereth

I have written repeatedly about this odd transitional moment, in which, in Atlanta at least, all the art reviewing is being done by unsalaried volunteers (and likethedew.com has become the uncompensated feature-story base in which assorted ex-AJC writers and photographers address Southern mores and matters other than the artworld—if as one friend says, "a job is something you wouldn't do if you weren't getting paid for it," writing research-based prose is clearly not a job, just as the non-writers always suspected).

I haven't been fully understood when I write about the ways in which nobody has yet figured out how to take full advantage of the technology available to us, and I'm not sure if this attempt will be any less subject to misprision, misinterpretation, and misreading, pick your term and pick your theorist.

I have written some downright wrongheaded pieces on the Counterforces blog, in the expectation that, a la Wikipedia, the self-correcting function of the Internet would quickly come into play. Perhaps because Blogspot makes it a pain to record comments (LiveJournal is better in that regard, and debates happen on my joculum blog regularly), my blog posts are being treated as though they had the status of full-blown reviews. (And indeed, some of my two thousand word essays are meant to be regarded as such.)

But the nature of the digital medium allows for immediate corrections. Just as it was once possible to alter copy (or at least headlines) in time for the afternoon edition, today the digital equivalent of the afternoon edition can happen any time somebody points out an egregious misperception.

In parallel fashion, the half-formed opinion on a blog can be reformulated in a finished piece for an art-reviewing website in a matter of hours, if the writer is accustomed to meeting tight deadlines from the days of print and hard copy. There is no need for reviewing sites to compete for turf with blogs, which are playing different games and which, as I have said, are too diverse and too dispersed to make for a very efficient means of communication with an art audience that, unlike us art types, does not spend most of its day thinking about what is out there to be contemplated or purchased art-wise. Reviewing sites, supplemented by print for the bereft readers of newspapers, are the wave of the future. Individual reviewers, however, are currently living in their own separate bloggy worlds, and need to be approached to write something more formal and complete when it appears they have said something that needs to be seen by someone other than their own loyal readership.

So why do we persist as though our digitalia possessed the unalterable status of cold print? In part, I presume, it's for reasons of recollecting Orwell; having been assured by a novelist's number one fan that I had offended the novelist's sensibilities, I deleted an observation and informed said novelist that I had done so, remarking that except for those addicted to downloads or screen captures, there was now no evidence that the remark had existed, save on Google's servers: "Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."

But surely it ought to be possible for the digitalized artworld to take on some of the positive aspects of Wikipedia, through an agreement to refrain from snark in the comments section and make one's remarks focus on areas where one feels or can demonstrate that the reviewer has gotten it wrong. Said reviewer can then revise, rethink, retort in kind, or delete as he or she sees fit.

And eventually an agreed-upon format will emerge that will be the twenty-first-century replacement for the kind of newspaper review that, in the Atlanta metro print market, appears to be effectively extinct.

I now wish to illustrate the truth of my original observations regarding the capacity for quick updates, by adding a centrally important piece of news:

Former AJC arts reviewers Cathy Fox and Pierre Ruhe have instituted a blog devoted specifically to supplementing AJC arts coverage with the sorts of reviews for which both of them became highly respected prior to their departure from the publication (for which both continue to write on a freelance basis):

http://www.artscriticatl.com/

Scott Silvey at Whitespace

Scott Silvey's ambitious sculptural installations will be remembered by those who attended various alternative-space shows prior to his decamping for parts ever further afield.

His new and quite different paintings of flowers and architecture, transported to Atlanta at immense expense from his current home base of Tokyo, reflect his sensitive effort to transmit the spiritual currents of a culture via visual metaphors. But first and foremost, they are uncommonly fine paintings.

Though the show runs into July, it should be visited early and often (and for once, that cliche should be taken literally). Silvey's combination of painterly gesture and precise drawing technique results in a body of work that rewards extensive and repeated viewing.

One hopes that the various artsites on the Web will provide full-length reviews in due course, or are already in process of doing so. There are formal and factual questions that ought to be addressed in greater depth.

http://www.whitespace814.com/

an interim post, pending a better one

I am pondering the problems of parochialism versus localism (i.e., local spins on global issues that arise from ignorance more than from informed takes on local specificities, or escapist strategies that are unacceptably shallow versus escapist strategies that know they are escapist and believe that there is something worth escaping from) but that will have to wait. So will the review I actually intend to write of the Andreas Huyssen anthology of which a preliminary note appears below.

This was written for the readers of the joculum blog, most of whom come out of an intensive literature rather than visual art background, and since Huyssen's particular angle on the culture of specific global cities is informed by works of fiction, I pitched the review that way. Then I realized it would be both shallow and parochial to omit some of the amazing insights of the individual essayists, regarding Buenos Aires and Johannesburg and Beijing and all those other cities of which we know less than we think we know...just as we know less regarding Istanbul than we think we know because Orhan Pamuk has done such a good job of representing the city he remembers and sometimes inhabits, but one which is changing spectacularly even as I write these words....

So don't hold me to this preliminary draft, which I'll most likely delete once I finish something more substantial:

Last year Andreas Huyssen published a volume of collected essays (fruits of an earlier year-long seminar) titled Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age.

I have learned to live with the word “imaginary” as a noun, though it means that one has to make clear each time that an imaginary is not “the imaginary,” not the abstract concept of “that which is imagined,” and that an urban imaginary is no more imaginary than the rather physically organized social order that it governs.

We are ruled by our images and our ideas, which, as Bob Dylan sang of dreams in “Talking World War III Blues,” are only in our heads. But what is in our heads results in real deaths and real commodities and real hunger and real everything else.

Huyssen is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, which makes him the perfect person to compile data on global cities and the real reach of globalization as distinct from the statistically observable (or so they say) aspects of same. For Huyssen can perceive, at least to some degree, the imaginative structures that inform the dominant schools of theory.

In fact, Huyssen’s introduction to the volume is probably a quick way for literary types to get up to speed on the state of urban studies, since it begins with a glimpse of the sociological wisdom of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and gallops from there through the modernity studies of the 1980s and their subsequent incorporation of the impact of differing forms of imagination in global circumstances. Differences matter. (All cities are not the same; not everybody is McDonaldized in the manner that universalizing theoreticians would suppose; modes of resistance are not as uniform as they would suppose, either.) “An urban imaginary marks first and foremost the way city dwellers imagine their own city as the place of everyday life, the site of inspiring traditions and continuities as well as histories of destruction, crime, and conflicts of all kinds. [It}is the cognitive and somatic image we carry within us of the places where we live, work, and play. …Urban imaginaries are thus part of any city’s reality, rather than being only figments of the imagination.”

And as we thus “live by fiction” (to quote a once well-known book title), we also live in collisions of the global and the local, collisions that differ in the contexts of Buenos Aires, or Beijing, or Johannesburg or Mumbai, to mention only a few of the cities discussed by the seminar participants. The reality experienced by Okwui Enwezor’s globe-hopping consumers of the planet’s numerous art biennials is not at all that of…well, of anybody else, and this much is almost too crushingly obvious to point out. The genuinely globalized among us are few in number, and it is not necessarily a superior condition.

Huyssen assumes that the debate he analyzes is already known to his readers, at least in outline, but he does make reasonably clear what theories he and his fellow essay contributors are reacting against. This is a book to lend complexity and specificity to a discussion too often weighted in favor of vast generalities—of the immense forces that are indeed shaping the destinies of the citizens of the world’s many cities, but that are by no means the whole story.

In fact, the vast generalities are seldom a story at all, and that is why this volume ends with an excerpt from a lyric narrative of a city, Orhan Pamuk’s meditation on the dialectic between hüzün and melancholy and tristesse (the three terms not quite synonymous) in the Istanbul of only yesterday and how it shaped individual imaginations as well as urban imaginaries. (What has happened in the frantic postmodernization of recent years, followed by whatever the Great Global Recession has done, is not part of Pamuk’s story, nor of any of the other essayists in a volume that originated in the first years of our present century, already almost a decade in the past.)

As Huyssen’s citation of Calvino implies, the stories we tell ourselves are always already too simple. We never see reality whole, any more than we construct it all by ourselves. But we do construct it collectively and individually within the limits imposed by physics and biology, and we stretch endlessly against the limits imposed by history.

And Other Cities, Other Worlds is a useful volume for helping us to remember that and to better understand its implications.

George Kornegay

A number of years ago, the legendary Bill Arnett introduced me to the folk-art installation of the Reverend George Kornegay. Kevin Duffy now brings us up to date on this remarkable 95-year-old's story:

http://likethedew.com/2009/05/11/turning-lifes-debris-into-art/

The larger story of the perennially threatened folk-art environments of the South (and of the state of Wisconsin, and of a good many other places around the globe) remains neglected, or shunted off to the specialty pages of the vernacular-art journals such as Raw Vision. But the story needs to be told in a more general context. And it needs to be linked to the quite different story of the vernacular environments of art-school-educated creators (as well as the category of "folk artists with Ph.D's in non-art fields").

On Cross-Cultural Comprehension: Yana Dimitrova at Kibbee Gallery

Viewing “we collected stories,” Yana Dimitrova’s just-closed Kibbee Gallery show, I remarked, “It’s always important to understand what it is we don’t understand.” I have since realized I was paraphrasing the punch line of one of my favorite Charles Shultz cartoon strips, but the point remains valid.

Dimitrova’s installation was meant to respond to the architectural space of the gallery while turning it into a version of a small Eastern European museum, a simplified museum of Bulgarian patriotism. Since one room honors a nineteenth-century martyr of the Bulgarian war of independence against the Ottoman Empire and another room is devoted to a nineteenth-century Bulgarian poet, I gather (not necessarily accurately, which is my ongoing point here) that the rough equivalent would be an installation in Bulgaria devoted to Nathan Hale and Walt Whitman—except that Whitman somehow has acquired a global reputation; and a poem in English posted next to a portrait of the poet would have a different resonance in a world where nonsense phrases in English decorate T-shirts and jackets across continents.

So the type and degree of cultural sub- or semi-literacy isn’t quite symmetrical or reciprocal across dominator and marginalized cultures, although Bulgaria is a special case because, unlike its Balkan neighbors, it was a Russophile state from the beginning, linked by religion and the Cyrillic alphabet as well as the other accidents of history that counted for more than geographic proximity did. (The next-door Romanians looked to Paris, not Moscow or St. Petersburg, and were proud of their ancestral “latinity.”)

So here we have—well, never mind their names, although we do have a biographical paragraph in English regarding the martyr, rather than the original-language extract from the poet, and Dimitrova gives us their last names in the titles of the portraits. We still won’t recognize or even be able to read the slogans nor will we understand the significance of the effective erasure of one, overlaid by the decorative trim of the museum.

The point is that to judge from the comments about the show that have appeared thus far, the opening night crowd (and there was only one other public event during the run of the show) understood nothing. And why should they? I thought the Bulgarian poet looked a bit like Arthur Rimbaud, and likewise misidentified the semi-erased reproduction of a famous photograph of the martyr in full resistance regalia. (We won’t go into what I thought it was a picture of, but it would have fit into the overall theme of twentieth-century Bulgarian history, not nineteenth.)

Dimitrova’s point, expressed with her customary exquisite command of pictorial conventions, is that the history and symbols that mean so much in her homeland are of no use or significance whatever in her present context. But this is the circumstance of nearly everyone in the age of globalization. The myths and cultural tribalisms of the dominant industrial democracies have not so much come under question as they have been set aside by a digitalized world-without-borders in which corporate logos and brand slogans have displaced the totems of national governments when it comes to the imaginations of the subject populations. Cynical about national pretensions and brand loyalty alike, the denizens of the demesne of global commerce don’t understand what it is they don’t understand.

And installations like Dimitrova’s might help them understand that fact, if anyone had the time to look and to write about them. There are ample imperfections in this particular presentation (I’m not sure that all the moments of incomprehension are instructive) but I’m glad that Kibbee Gallery made the space available for the experiment.