How

the West was won: Images in Transit It is no news to anyone that the story of modern western art as told by its practitioners and apologists, is a narrative of origins and progress. Two of the most famous chapters in this linear narrative involve, respectively, travels to a foreign land, and a visit to a museum. I am referring to Gauguins sojourn in the islands of the Pacific in the late 19th century; the visit to a museum is Picassos to the Trocadro in Paris in 1906/7. In the 1890s, the story goes, Gauguin visits the Islands of the Pacific, goes native, and undertakes a radical expurgation of the extraneous in his painting and sculpture which, according to the modernist creed, clears the path for 20th century abstraction. Picasso too, inspired and liberated by masks from Africa and Oceania, moves from the excess of precept to the crystalline essence of concept: he too makes a clearing in which modernist abstraction can burgeon. I want first to discuss these two episodes in terms of the longstanding romance between the West and the primitive, and then to pit these notions against the ways in which images travel, in contemporary art, and what such border-crossings may mean in terms of who controls the dissemination and signification of images. I shall be showcasing, in this context, three exhibitions held in Lisbon in 1998/9 under the general rubric Trading Images. My principal argument is that, despite undeniable changes in the processing of notions of self and other over the past couple of decades, that is, despite significant discursive shifts, the production and divulgation of images today continues to reproduce a hegemonic structure, since western money and western standards continue to control the flow of the mainstream. The bifurcation of the globe may be more accurately described today as running along the north/south axis, but my usage of the term western is generic and refers to Eurocentrism as an ideological orientation rather than to the West as a geographical location. The tradition of a romance with the primitive, dating to Rousseaus construction of man in a state of nature, and its other, shadowy face in 19th century Social Darwinism, has affected, explicitly not only western artistic and literary representations since the 19th century, but also, more recently, the tourist industry which continues to promote a nostalgia for a purer and more authentic social existence. In the stereotypical image of the tourist in search of authentic experience, or in the profitable industries of relics and authentic objects the world over, we see that despite globalisation, the primitive and the cultural other continue to exercise rhetorical power over the

culture industry. Since Edward Saids groundbreaking work of 1978, it has been a commonplace of cultural theory that, like orientalism, the primitivism produced by Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, supplied the necessary Other against which European rationalism reinforced itself. Put another way, in the colonial contexts which ratified and reinforced such otherness, the primitive stood in the same relation to the civilised as the margin to the centre. Temporality and spatiality are conflated in forgings of identity that end up validating western rationalism and hegemony. In Gayatri Spivaks words, when a cultural identity is thrust upon one because the centre wants an identifiable margin, claims for marginality assure validation from the centre (Gayatri Spivak). This must be read in the context of a Europe whose formation was figured and transfigured first by the project of colonialism and then by the project of its dismantling. To return to the modernist tale of progress: modernism is both an expression of and heir to western rationalism, the discreet sealing off of disciplines a descendent of Enlightenment taxonomies. The canonical version of the story of modern western art is told as a patriarchal (and ethnocentric) family history: its visual scheme is a genealogical tree where fathers beget rebellious sons who absorb their lessons before making a breakaway. In this version, extraneous influence the Japonaiserie of the mid- to late 19th century, the primitivism of late 19th and early 20th century are figured as exogamous marriages, where the exotic or peripheral Other (knowledge of whom is garnered by travel or in museums) is domesticated and brought into the fold in order to invigorate the moribund centre: In this version of the story, the traffic between non-western images and western art moves along a one-way street; the West absorbs its Others into a monolithic, uni-directional narrative structure. In the symbolic staging of self and other afforded by travel from the 19th century onwards, (a staging onto which, as many have shown, are attached tags of both gender and ethnicity) the primitive and cultural other are conflated and instrumentalised in the acquisition of knowledge/power. In the museum, the primitive reaches us in fragments: these fragments, decontextualised, are easily re- used in a spirit of bricolage. As fragments splintered from context, from bodies and from discourse, these objects allow us to assimilate the production of the primitive or cultural Other into the recognisable processes of 20th century art. Hence James Clifford speaks of ethnographic surrealism: the notion that below (psychologically) and beyond (geographically) ordinary reality, there existed another reality knowable by relativist ethnographic processes equatable to Surrealism. Prior to Clifford, Lvi Strauss had discussed the science of the concrete of primitive thought pense

sauvage as a kind of bricolage, an analysis indebted to the principles of collage developed by Surrealism. Such dissenting voices, over the past two decades, are re-telling the modernist story in ways which make a difference. Employing interdisciplinary conceptual strategies strategies that contaminate the purity of disciplines correlative of post-Enlightenment specialisation and expertise such narratives reconstrue Dada and Surrealism, rather than Cubism, as the fertile ground out of which recent art production emerges. Surrealist strategies of juxtaposition and non-linear association have also been employed as tools in the analysis of the methodologies of museology and ethnography as well as to support the contemporary revival of Freuds concept of the uncanny and the late twentieth centurys obsession with bodies and their boundaries. The identificatory boundaries of what Arthur Danto has termed distinction and exclusion are also called into question. In this version of the story, the distinction between extraneous and integral images ours and theirs is suppressed and replaced by the ostensibly democratic availability, through mechanical reproduction and global diffusion, of all representations. The pure products, in James Cliffords famous appropriation of a phrase from William Carlos Williams, go crazy. Here, the trade in images is figured as moving in two- way traffic on a road jammed with signposts and billboards. These two stories are given voice at particular historical moments and are underpinned by what might, broadly speaking, be termed ideologies. Looking at Gauguin and Picasso with contemporary eyes, we might note the exotic or primitive non-west was simply a treasure-trove of forms into which western artists dipped in their desire to forge new plastic vocabularies. In a famous response, Picasso once ventured Lart ngre? Connais pas. If he purposefully borrowed the cylindrical eyes of a Grebo mask for the inversion of solid and hollow forms in a metal construction of a guitar in 1912- 13, it is also true that he was little interested in Africa per se, or in the social context which generated the. Succinctly, James Clifford puts it thus: for Picasso, these masks had come in handy for making a difference. The truth is of course that not only is primitive a western construct but it is also the product of a particular campaign of acquisition (eg. looting of Benin bronzes in the 1890s). So-called primitive artefacts lost their authenticity as soon as the West got hold of them: no exchange without contamination. As Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham has succinctly put it in an essay on collecting, perhaps every imperium has its official collection, and perhaps those collections always began as piles of war trophies. Within the western aesthetic canon, such exotic or primitive objects were

instrumentalised, and their source mythologised as being more raw. The notion, for instance, that Africa lies outside or beyond the pale of history and that its cultural products are therefore ahistorical is clearly articulated by Hegel: What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature. Lying closer to a state of mere nature, such products were seen also as tapping the primeval drives such as sex and fear. We know today that in effect, the masks that prompted Picasso in his painting of the brothel scene that is his Demoiselles dAvignon had nothing whatsoever to do with either sex or fear, but that they were figured by him in a work whose iconographic origin lay in both sex and fear: syphilophobia. This association of l'rt ngre with danger, irrationality and rampant sexuality reinforces the cherished dichotomy between primitive and modern/ civilised fruit of colonialism, later reinforced by ethnographies such Malinowkis The Sexual Life of Savages of 1929 or Lvi-Strausss La Pense Sauvage (in both cases, particularly telling is the the in the title). The emphasis is on the rationality of modernity versus the irrationality, untramelled libidinality and timelessness of the primitive. Picasso in a conversation with Malraux, speaks of African works of art as objects of magic, weapons which allow people to free themselves of internal forces. Lart ngre is cannibalised and ingested as a means of performing an exorcism, a transformation. The idea of the use of an external object to release internal forces is not dissimilar to Freuds idea of a fetish. Since the late 1980s, attempts have been made to contextualise, politicise and historicize both primitive art and the contemporary production of the so-called cultural peripheries. One of the explicit aims of Jean-Hubert Martins Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris in 1989, was to redress the imbalance of William Rubins gigantic undertaking Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern held at MOMA in New York in 1984. Where Rubins show traced and dated the modern works sometimes to the week or day, the primitive works in his show were dated by the century, and were presented as artefacts of anonymous authorship. Martin took care to identify, name, and date all works, whether their provenance was the First or Third World, but in so doing in refusing to differentiate between the two was accused of new treacheries: of being ahistorical too, but in his case of repressing context and difference in the name of globalisation. In turn, then, Martins show was itself subject to deconstructive responses in exhibitions such as Dan Camerons Cocido y Crudo at the Raina Sofia in Madrid in 1994, Octavio Zaya and Anders Michelsens Interzones in Copenhagen and Uppsala in 1996, Okwui Enwezors Trade Routes: History and Geography in Johannesburg in 1997 and countless other exhibitions and bienale (Havana Istanbul Melbourne) that proliferated all over the world in the 1990s.

 As globalisation brings about a destruction of the local, the categories of the primitive and the cultural other lose legitimisation. The effects of this are multi-layered and sometimes not easy to classify. The effacement of differences between cultures is replaced by differences within culture ethnic, class, gender and so forth. Similarly, there is a logic of re-placement that continues to cross not only spatial lines but also temporal ones another place and another time are contiguous or indeed overlapping concepts. So we have infinite variables of sameness and difference, affinity and conflict, crossing spatial and temporal boundaries, or meeting in border zones or contact zones that are sometimes not easy to determine. Thus we may have neighbouring discourses within the same cultural context seeming foreign and exoticised, or, the opposite, discourses with affinities travelling across space and time to meet in an object of exhibition. If primitivism conflated the idea of another place and another time some place else becoming also some other time in the present version of globalisation, there is a kind of all-over discursive present which renders everything, independent of time or place, simultaneously available as spectacle to the ubiquitous traveller consuming culture. In this context, the items of modernist faith Gauguins sojourn in the islands of the Pacific and Picassos interest in the Trocadro Museum may be re-articulated. Kirk Varnedoe deconstructs the powerful cause-and-effect sequence of these narratives. He argues that Picassos absorption of the generically termed lart ngre was not a means of incorporating the foreign, but rather, of exploring and re-iterating neglected or repressed aspects of his own work, notably his caricatures and sketchbook drawings a kind of tussle between high art and lowly artefact within his own oeuvre (the finished, public painting versus the raw, immediate sketchbook). In this view, the Demoiselles becomes the site for the staging of this internal contest. With regard to Gauguin, Varnedoe is not alone in arguing that his imagery had little to do with direct observations of Tahitian society. He analogises Gauguins methods of picture making with the transit of the printed cloths used by Tahitian women between centre and peripheries. He notes that this fabric, rather than exemplifying the exoticism of local artefacts, was in fact imported into Tahiti from places like Frankfurt or Manchester. The Tahitian scenes, Varnedoe tells us, are trumped up with local colour much as the patterned fabrics [which...] were actually textiles made in places like Manchester and Frankfurt, with designs thought to echo South Seas style but considered too crude for European tastes. One might add that the cotton itself reached Manchester from places like Somalia. Indeed, this analogy has a pertinence that Varnedoe does not mention: the manufacture of

cotton cloth in the 19th century provided (quote Paul E. Lovejoy) a classic example of what came to be called triangular trade: cotton goods were profitably exchanged for slaves in Africa; the slaves were sold profitably in America, partly in profitable exchange for cotton; and in Britain, the cotton was profitably manufactured into cloth. Similarly, it has been convincingly argued that Gauguins images are drawn from the Parisian artistic and literary milieu; certainly, the market for his Tahitian paintings was Paris. Varnedoe notes that Gauguin, even prior to his trip to the islands, promoted a scrapbook style which destabilised the established hierarchies of Western art, splicing together influences from Daumier, Giotto, Javanese carvings and the drawings and prints of the 19th century Japanese artist Hokusai. In this version, we see the artist not as eyewitness reporter of exotic lands but as a bricoleur who patches his images together from observation, memory, photographs, literary allusion and artefacts of various cultures. What we have, then, is an eclectic practice both in Gauguin and in Picasso that, in reinforcing what had appeared to be trivial marginalia (the bricolage of sketchbooks), makes foreign alternatives analogous with internal reforms. I want now to leap forward in space and time and look briefly at three of the four exhibitions in the cycle Trading Images held at the Pavilho Branco in Lisbon through 1998 and early 99, because it is tied into the deconstructive, discursive strategies which have affected art institutions globally in the last decade or so. Bearing in mind the reading of Gauguin and Picassos instrumentalisation of the primitive and the cultural other, I want to query if and how the notion of the cultural other is given voice in the work of three contemporary artists. If claims for the autonomy of art have marked the rhetoric of Modernism sustaining the boundaries between art and the experience of the everyday postmodernism, (nourished by the dissemination of poststructuralist thought, by feminism and by Lacanian psychoanalysis, by social anthropology and cultural studies) ostensibly undermines, as Marcus and Myers put it, the institutional authority that has underwritten intellectual practices in discrete disciplines, including museology. Adriana Varejo works around questions regarding her own identity: what it means to be Brazilian; in other words, the construction of Brazilian ethnicities. Privileging what might be termed a first- person subject position, she constructs her work around research into the physical remains of the colonial project, its vestiges in works of art, architecture and artefacts. Varejo differs from many artists who work in this particular field of activity (in Hal Fosters succinct formulation, the artist as

ethnographer) by harnessing her at times Manichaean politics to a careful, almost old-fashioned sense of facture. She has at her disposal great mimetic facility: her aptitude for trompe loeil is noteworthy whether in the rendition of irregularities of tiles laid on walls, of the elaborate decorative painted motifs of these tiles, of seascapes or conventional portrait genres, or whether she takes on the naive style of votive images and colonial painting. Varejos work is entirely built around the circulation and articulation of readymade images within Brazilian cultures. Her representation of the Brazilian baroque, with its rich heritage of made objects, casts a critical eye on the making of Brazilian heritage (which includes European domination and the slave trade): at what cost at the cost of how many human lives such an identity was forged. In several of the works, the smooth skin of the trompe loeil surface of the painting is literally ripped apart: the canvas spills open revealing, as it were, the works gory entrails, an extraordinary under- surface of impasto reds and browns, the flagellated, eviscerated corpse of what once was the smooth architectural body. Overlaying the ornamental rhetoric of discovery and conquest with a lacerated corporality, or circulating subversively among the representations of the varied ethnicities of Brazil, Varejo allows the body to emerge as a powerful metaphor and as the signifier par excellence in all her work. The Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn is well known for his Airmail Paintings which he began making in 1984. Having decided to remain in Chile rather than go into exile, Dittoborns elected form of art- production works which are folded and posted in specially made airmail packages to their different international destinations itself becomes a political act. An act of memorialising and communicating; above all an act of exchange. Transit is intrinsic not only to the works content but also to its material existence, as is the problematised relationship between countries that are purportedly economically and culturally peripheral and an empowered, if idealised, hegemonic centre. Like Varejo, Dittborn utilises the principles of collage or bricolage, a procedure which, in Varnedoes terms, might be likened to the sketchbooks of Gauguin and Picasso. However, while there can be no coherent argument made to support the notion that either Picasso or Gauguin used such forms of bricolage in ways which were self-consciously critical of the colonial enterprise such an argument would be nothing short of anachronistic both Varejo and Dittborn poach readymade imagery in order to examine their ideological underpinnings and political legacies.

Detour and transit are central concerns in Dittborns work. The persistence of the creases and fold- marks in the exhibited works expose the traces of the works passage through time and space. Moreover, the relationship between events which are spatially and temporally distant is seminal to Dittborns work which is packed with allusions to co-incidence, whether temporal or spatial Depth and surface, like distance and proximity, become filled with significance; thus, writing and archaeology are the twin faces of a single and singular need to uncover/discover. The relationship between time and things (with its dense suggestions of mortality) is also underlined by the nature of the objects themselves. Simple drawings appropriated from a childrens manual evoke early learning and naming processes, Drawing and writing, mark-making and collecting images; these works, at once palimpsests and missives, become repositories of memories. Dittborn reveals several strata of memory the construction of anthropological, historical, collective and personal memory through technologies which move from the personal, autographic trace of the doodle or of handwriting to mechanical reproduction, and particularly photography and photocopy. Small events are salvaged from oblivion and given body through forms of representation that in themselves lay bare dominant modes of classification and legibility. Photography as a technology which has been used to take possession of the exotic is shown to be embedded in power politics, particularly as a historical means of documenting Latin American visuality. Dittborns work in its ephemeral yet stubborn material presence exposes the intersections of various conflicting discourses and representational genres. His Histories of the Human Face laying bare the conventions of portraiture from caricature to photography render into visual signs the tension between mask and identity, image and identification which articulates the fantasy of the portrait within what Homi Bhabha has identified as the ambivalent narcissism of the colonial psyche. Australian artist Narelle Jubelin creates a tension in her work between the contradictory strains of the political and the aesthetic, underpinning this tension with the notion that the modernist programme cannot be seen in disembodied and hermetically sealed aesthetic terms alone. In Ecru, the deconstruction of modernism as an authoritarian discourse was self-consciously pitted against the crisp architecture a white pavilion which epitomises modernist design. Always minutely researched, the quiet impact of this work relies on the confrontation between its polemic and violent content and a presentation that is pristine and elegant. One of the recurrent vehicles in Jubelins work is the use of needlework, whether sewing, weaving or petit point embroidery. Unlike painting or sculpture, these are traditionally unacknowledged and labour-intensive forms of expression performed, usually anonymously, by women. The mythical relationship between such crafts and

story-telling amongst women is manifest linguistically in the analogies between spinning and telling (spinning a yarn,) And Jubelins art is, subtly, always a form of telling. In Ecru, the story she tells is one of war and suffering, forging subtle analogies that underline questions of culpability and responsibility. An Australian artist working in a white pavilion in Portugal, weaving together narratives which involve not only Australia and Portugal through that which links them: Timor, Indonesia and England... Jubelins conceptual framework is based on extensive research on the suffering of the East Timorese people, and indeed on Australian, American and British culpability in this matter, usually repressed by the press. Basing her installation on a book by Australian writer Michele Turner who like Jubelin herself is of the opinion that to know means to bear responsibility, and hence to be obliged to bear witness, Jubelin focuses, from Turners account of hundreds of Timorese survivors, on the testimony of one Ftima Gusmo, who lost three of her four children and suffered other atrocities in her native land. Jubelin covered the windows of the Pavilho Branco with Ftima Gusmos testimony. This text, in Jubelins hand, covers the windows, upstairs and down, of one side of the pavilion; on the other side of the building, the text translated into Portuguese is written in the hand of Alexandra Costa e Sousa, who translated Turners texts from English into Portuguese. One Timorese woman (Gusmo), Two Australian women (Turner, Jubelin), one Portuguese woman (Costa e Sousa); several native languages: narratives and translations, transcriptions are crossed over, plaited and woven together so that we are given not a single (official) narrative thread but a polyphony of feminine voices bearing horrific witness. The writing on the window, part graffiti, part illusory lace curtain (from the outside, the writing cannot be read and coalesces into a kind of lacy weave) was, depending on the light, more or less difficult to read: the spectator was obliged to become an active participant in deciphering, in the responsibility of knowing. Upstairs, Jubelin presented tiny petit point renditions of modernist architectural icons in picture frames: Many of these buildings have been recently acclaimed by UNESCO as part of world heritage. These petit point photographs are placed on round side-tables designed in 1929 by Giuseppe Terragni, and today widely available commercially. Jubelin leads us rhetorically, if sotto voce, to the conclusion that design, like architecture, is not neutral but is steeped in ideology. The last part of this project consisted of two round tables suspended off the ground and displaying items of cutlery of acclaimed modernist design. The round tables, with overtones of international negotiation, are formally echoed by the smaller tables upstairs: a neat overlapping of the historical and the domestic.

The cutlery itself much of which extends beyond the modernist axiom that form must reflect function seems to be an ironic and domestication of the instruments of violence implicit in the testimony of Ftima Gusmo. Also placed upon the table are the transcripts, again in Jubelins own hand, from a trial which took place in Liverpool in 1996 (this part of the work was shown in Liverpool), known as the trial of the Ploughshare Four. Written on translucent paper, these texts seem to miniaturise the transcripts on the glass windows surrounding them. The case in question was one in which four women stood trial and were, to much jubilation, acquitted by the local Liverpool jury for destroying a Hawk Aircraft of the type sold by the British government to the government of Indonesia. Once again, subversive womens voices voices which will not acquiesce to violence, voices which will bear witness are at the heart of Jubelins critique. The marriage of exquisitely elegant formal means with such inflammatory content is the contradiction upon which Jubelins work is built; like Dittborn and Varejo, but using different conceptual and material procedures, Jubelin invites the public not to passive spectatorship but to a pertinent and timeous critical and ultimately, compromising involvement. The three bodies of work I have discussed all, in different ways, employ deconstructive idioms based on the presupposition that art must, in the first instance, mean, it must signify, be about something: this strategy is in the first instance a contestation of the formalism that marks modernist aestheticism. Varejo and Jubelin, in very different ways, highlight the ways in which women have traditionally been denied access to the spaces where knowledges are constituted and disseminated and reveal how to enter that space of knowledge is an act of personal and political risk: feminist and post colonial are intricately and intimately woven together. This is, perhaps even more interestingly, true in Dittborns work too, as he uses an idiom that side-steps any form heroic, self-affirmation. This motion towards meaning nevertheless continues to seek, in the last analysis, validation from a centre which, if shifting, is located in the cultural hegemonies of the west/north. Underlying most such works, there is an agenda for the aesthetically correct even at a time when the aesthetic has lost status as a relevant category. Of the three exhibitions I have discussed, Varejos makes the most immediate and physical appeal to what is erroneously and patronisingly termed the general public but her work runs, as I noted, the risk of ideological Manichaeism. Jubelin runs the contrary risk: the rarefied subtlety, the complexity of the connections run the danger of over-conceptualisation, reinforcing the gospel of rationality upon which western cultural hegemony has constructed itself. It is Dittborn; perhaps, who

treads the fine line between them. The main questions raised by all these shows hinges about matters that cannot, perhaps, find closure. This is the old problem of engag art, something Walter Benjamin was aware of when, in 1936, he wrote his essay The Author as Producer, but already implicit in The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. One of the reasons for the tensions existent in the very concept of engag art art that is ideologically correct is that of artists belonging to a privileged class and that therefore, with regard to the cultural other, all speaking is speaking for; perhaps for this reason, the most convincing work arises, as Trinh T. Minh- ha suggests, when artists take on board a known subject position that is, take their own subjectivity rather than theory as starting point. If the West has been structured by its others, it is also true to say that the voices of these others continue to heard when channelled back through the West, and are transformed into the more charismatic or photogenic forms of expression still privileged in the concept of major art. Contrariwise, when Deleuze and Guattari praise minor literature, they seem to be celebrating truly deterritorialised discourse as discourse not embedded in either place or conquest, What we have, alas, is the circulation of images which travel between exhibition venues and circulate among art publications, images that travel back and forth, are translated, transliterated, transposed, filtered back: at what point can the road along which this traffic passes become truly a highway along which information moves freely without legitimisation from a cultural centre? Ruth Rosengarten 2001, for Trading Images