Andréa Stanislav
River to Infinity - The Vanishing Points
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Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MAEP Galleries
January 25 - March 16, 2008


Perhaps every encounter with art is an invitation to suspend our disbelief. Some works try harder than others to do so, and with others we’re barely rewarded for the effort. But with Andréa Stanislav’s installation River to Infinity - The Vanishing Points, 2008, in at least entertaining the thought for a moment, we’re given an opportunity to see how belief operates as a principle of representation; in believing that some thing is ‘here’ we can recognize it.
And sometimes, recognition is all we need to remind ourselves that belief is still possible. Or, put another way, seeing is believing.

In one gallery of this two gallery exhibition, Stanislav wall mounted a number of massive mirrors that, when reflected within each other, open up numerous portals to illusionary, endlessly receding spaces. Of these, her Portrait - Ghost I , III, V &VI (all from 2008), etched with remnants of Edward S. Curtis’s famous North American Indian archive project, don’t ask that you believe in ghosts. In existing at the edge of presence and recognition, right on the surface of each mirror as barely-there portraits by a long-gone photo adventurer, they evoke the agonies of American history; in catching their eye, you’re reminded there is such a thing as a collective memory of traumatic events that aren’t so tidily separated from the present.

Stanislav has worked with cosmograms, mirrors and continental maps before, yet never together in a single piece. On opposite walls of the same gallery, she’s installed two massive mirrored astrological charts, Portrait I & Portrait II (both 2008) of the first Continental Congress of 1774 and the dates for provocations that have lead to all of America’s major wars. These aren’t maps or portraits per se. The birth of a nation combined with the inauguration of hostilities is a reminder that all beginnings require a rupture, and in leveraging her lo-fi special effects with astrological forecasting, she creates a kind of ‘cultural personality’. Looking into the mise-en-abyme of images that recede into the past and also stretch into the future, the infinite reproductions that we see are not exact likenesses, but at the same time we know how these hostile events have a way of repeating themselves.

The adjacent gallery’s twin video projections bookending floor- and ceiling-mounted mirror rivers are more attuned to how monuments, landscape, and one-point linear perspective are important tools of empire. Arrayed like gems on a jeweler’s velvet, Stanislav staged 9 mirrored obelisks in the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah for her video River to Infinity – The Vanishing Points (2008). We also see some close up shots of an owl and a mirror-eyed seer, each of them recalling mythological figures with extra-sensory powers of future vision and knowledge. The perfectly timed explosion, a dynamite and gasoline fireball composed by a pyrotechnics expert, that reduces the obelisks to rubble is both a beautifully creative and violent force. Once the dust settles, Stanislav conjures some lo-fi camera magic and reverses the diegetic destruction to bring the obelisks back to whole. Her rewind-repeat trick isn’t an elaborate and seductive illusion. The effect asks us to (re)witness the explosions over and over again, and in doing so, we see a resurrection of sorts. But instead of an opportunity to restart and avoid the inevitable, it’s a return to the beginning of a story that will repeat over and over again.

This loop of life and death that echoes through out all the work in both galleries keeps bringing us back to reiterations of circles, cycles, rotations and orbits. Still, the work doesn’t push too hard or try to convince us to believe in any specific model of time. Stanislav’s work, in looking across visual culture, is more concerned with critiquing and aestheticizing how different conceptions of repetition and return are common denominators that operate, to varying degrees, in all theologies, ideologies, and historiographies.

Brave New Worlds
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
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Originally published in Art Papers
January/February 2008: 46-47

Adding that little s to the end of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World accomplishes one very important thing: it cuts through the novel’s dystopic vision of the future by offering up multiple worlds that are yet-to-be. Or as the exhibition’s co-curator Doryun Chong puts it, “innumerable terra incognitae […] to be discovered with all sense of indignation and wonderment, curiosity and solemnity” [Walker Art Center; October 4, 2007—February 17, 2008]. This slight, yet productive, supplement is only the first political gesture in a massive group show of seventy works by twenty-four artists from sixteen countries. Here, the politics is not the polemical, election-season variety that we’re used to. Stepping into the refreshing air just outside of party platforms and political manifestos, the works speak as their own individual worlds or worldviews. What’s more, they are installed, with few exceptions, so that you pass through one work into the next. Against the grain of multiculturalism’s unifying and generalizing glosses, they present the world as ever-fractured and irresolvable, continually negotiated but not impossible to imagine without conflict.

These worlds are also shaped by multiple temporalities and histories. Some open up to national pasts, personal presents, and fictional futures. Walid Raad’s Let’s Be Honest, The Weather Helped, 1984-2007, almost manages to speak to all of these. The series of seventeen screenprints of ruined Beirut cityscapes carries on the artist’s Atlas Group project: to aestheticize and fictionalize the events surrounding the Lebanese Civil Wars. In this archival project, each colored dot allegedly represents a bullet, labeled according to caliber and country of origin. Gleaning the war’s minutiae instead of wading through reams of historical documents, Raad’s strategy points obliquely to violent events and further draws our attention to a traumatized place. These images make a claim, like most archives, that what we see is the results of a comprehensive data collection project that requires analysis, organization, and categorization. Referring to his work as “aesthetic facts,” Raad make the verifiability of the claims tenuous; we may not be able to confirm whether there are any scars underneath any of these lovely little dots but we are nonetheless informed, somehow, that “something has happened” here.

Artur Żmijewski’s multi-channel video installation Danuta, Doreta, and Halina, 2006, essays, with unvarnished intimacy, the lives of three women who work low-level jobs: grocery cashier, bottle labeler, and drycleaner. The three fifteen-minute videos are simultaneously onto their respective walls and looped to multiply and amplify this endless staggered labor; it is as if you were watching three overlapping work-shifts. When the workday comes to a close, the women quickly transition from their jobs to domestic duties that end only when it’s time to sleep. As the videos continue and contexts change, labor remains the constant—a perpetual state of beginning, ending, and starting again for each and all three.

Feel free to fling your comments about globalized labor and an alienated workforce as you see them at their respective stations, watching as bottles and groceries whiz by, waiting for the early bus ride to work, or changing into their work uniform. But Żmijewski isn’t interested in using the rapport he’s earned with each woman to make clumsy comments on exploitation and isolation. Halina is happy to be working in a laundry because “I simply like ironing.” The time spent with these women isn’t for us to better label and mark these women as Polish, married, or working class. Żmijewski allows Danuta, Doreta, and Halina to come into being through their address, without us overdetermining them.

While Żmijewski troubles the documentary’s inherent claim to speak for a person, Erik van Lieshout shares similar doubts when trying to speak from or about a specific place. His Homeland Security, 2007, a twenty-six-minute video installation, could come across as a puerile reality-television road trip through Israel and New Mexico. Traveling through these zones of increased security, his filmed commentary is effective because it is somewhat indirect and balanced with the right amount of best-friend banter and jittery hand-held camera work. What’s essential here is what happens on the margins of their journey—everything that is off to either side of the highway and just out of the camera’s view. Van Lieshout and his collaborator Core focus on the heightened sensations of each place, which they then channel through video and voice-over. The project becomes less about what the camera can record and more about the cultural conditions in which the two travelers find themselves, so that burned-out bus skeletons, M-16s slung like purses, and Hummers stacked on semis all add up to a climate rather than individual points of verification.

Jorge Macchi's Nuevo Mundo, 2006, is a collage of countries that, cut out from a map, Jorge Macchi then reorganized into micro-Pangaea formations according to color. It asks us to reconsider how these colors make assumptions about the coherency of each country— that is, that citizens share language, religion, and nationality. It is also an obvious play with maps as constructions rather than accurate representations. The resulting images create a counter-cartography that provides another, rather than an oppositional, global organization. In the end, however, this work and Macchi’s other map-based pieces just don’t sweat enough. They are too invested in preserving traditional mapmaking, stopping well short of contesting and un-drawing the borders of national sovereignty.

And what of the future? What are we to make, or more importantly, what are we to do with all of these worldviews? As a curatorial project that asks us to read and listen to each of the works as worlds in themselves, Brave New Worlds makes a fresh demand on us: can we look with rather than at these works? It’s a slight prepositional shift, but looking in this way recruits us, as an audience, to participate within the articulation, exchange, and critique of these different worldviews instead of passively consuming them.

'Ghost Detainees'
Prisoners of the Whereabouts
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Presented at Cornell University
'Logics of the Living' Conference
October 12-14, 2007





“We also have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We’re going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.”
-- Vice President Dick Cheney [1]

“It is as if investigation and punishment had become mixed.”
– Michel Foucault [2]

As exergues, Vice President Cheney and Foucault's quotes seem like good places to begin. That’s not to say that this confusion will be unraveled or become any more clear; there is still a chance that we will end up right where we began.
As I’m sure many of you are already aware, ghost detainee is a term for the unregistered prisoners held by the United States army at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison and other clandestine prison sites that have sprung up throughout Europe and the Middle East. To me, it is an unappeasable term that, on the one side, conjures the smooth and unforecasted movement of ghosts; or unpresent presences at the edges of perception. On the other, the detainee is an imprisoned and politicized body uniquely separated to become neither person nor convict. Together, these terms create a form of life that exists just outside the boundaries of visibility and prisoner of war status, and has come to exemplify some of the effects of the war on terror’s ability to decide on the state of exception.

The Taguba Report, otherwise known as ‘The Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade’, reported many breakdowns in the processing and accounting of prisoners in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, especially by the soldiers ordered with policing the Abu Ghraib prison. Of those, the report found “The 320th MP Battalion used a self-created ‘change sheet’ to document the transfer of a detainee from one location to another. […] At Abu Ghraib, this process would often take as long as 4 days to complete. The lag-time resulted in inaccurate detainee Internment Serial Number (ISN) counts, gross differences in the detainee manifest and the actual occupants of an individual compound, and significant confusion of the MP soldiers.” [3] Added to this, the report concluded, “the 800th MP Brigade have routinely helped persons brought to them by Other Government Agencies (OGAs) without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention. The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC) at Abu Ghraib called these detainees ‘ghost detainees.’ On at least one occasion, the 320th MP Battalion at Abu Ghraib held a handful of ‘ghost detainees’ (6-8) for OGAs that they moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) survey team. This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law (Annex 53).” [4] The precise description of the maneuver that the report refers to, as if it were a set of improvised skills or unpracticed movements, isolates the special circumstances and reverse engineers the process these detainees suffered. Yet it fails, perhaps neglects, to discuss the affects the it creates. Besides being in violation of international law and Army Doctrine, what other lines does this maneuver cross?

While staying with the military’s explanation of how the military police created a space of legal indeterminacy for prisoners, I want to include some thoughts on the ban (that is, being banned, banished, abandoned, or being labeled a bandit) in order to think through what we know about the ghost detainee as a sentence of mobile imprisonment. Closely linked to our idea of exile or political deportation, the ‘banned’ person is removed from one location and placed into another. The banned are removed from any legal protection but continue to be subjected to the legal structure that will not host them. This power to abandon is a penalty that ungrounds the banned person but it is also an admission, an admission that something cannot be digested by a social or national corpus. Forcing a separation of the bandit from a location is to show how the criminal actions as well as the criminal body are pushed out; a pushing to an outside where a presumed border marks an inside and outside, what is possible and not-possible. Said another way, and perhaps more clearly by Agamben, “What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it – at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured”. [5] For the detainee, being delivered over to this nebulous location is not just a legal indecision waiting for a resolution or a dispute over national boundaries. This is a unique case in which the punishment becomes the prisoner, literally written on to and ‘disappearing’ him.

The spatial component of the law, where a person is in relation to it, opens up an opportunity to think how the ghost detainee confounds some of our assumptions about haunting. I think we can agree, to a certain extent, with Steve Pile’s statement that “…to haunt is to possess some place.” [6] Easier said than done of course, but in my previous research on ghosts, this is one of the ways I’ve thought through haunting and the ghost’s unique potential: as a smooth, unstriated movement that makes interruptions and demands to be accommodated. To me, haunting has always been a strategy against partitioning. [7] The ghost detainee is a link to our concept of haunting as a kind of inhabitation that isn’t placed but spaced. Here, though, we can see how the ghost detainee is an inversion of the spectral potential to possess and define space. Importantly, this a presence that does not possess the space it haunts; as unregistered detainees that are hidden and shuffled from cell to cell ahead of international human rights organizations, ghost detainees suffer a spectral movement that hides their status as secret prisoners and also alters the partitioned logic of the prison, creating a dislocating localization. [8]

For my purposes here, I’d like to use the following quote from Foucault to describe a prison logic, if there is such a thing,

“Each individual has his own place; each place its individual. […] One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, the diffuse circulation, the unusable and dangerous coagulation. […] Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space.” [9]

The prison is partitioned for interrogation and discipline. It is a hyper-analytic space of supervision and knowing where communication channels between, to, from and amidst prisoners are under complete control. Prisoners are disciplined to behave and do as they are told. And within this disciplining and individualizing space, they are forced to presume that there is only an outside of but not an outside within the prison. […] In spite of the hyper-visibility and threat of punishment, what happens when the bandit or outlaw isn’t partitioned or located ‘properly’ when they are brought into the prison complex? And more importantly, what if the suspension of the normal rule of law within the prison is performed by the policing apparatus?

The ability to make secrets and secreting, of turning known information unknown and shielding it from public knowledge, is dependant on, among other things, rigid and enforced levels of access. And in the case of prisoners, going back to Foucault for a moment “…the entire criminal procedure, right up to the sentence, remained secret: that is to say, opaque […] It took place without him, or at least without his having any knowledge either of the charges or of the evidence. In the order of criminal justice, knowledge was the absolute privilege of the prosecution.” [10] What’s especially germane to this discussion is how the charges, evidence and details are kept hidden while at the same the prisoner suffers under this status and becomes a sort of living secret. Secret charges in secret locations, for secret amounts of time, these detainees are not just hidden from NGOs by CIA agents. While the details of their punishment, what laws they have broken, and how they were treated during interrogation will always be disputed, all of these, in addition to their exceptional isolation, turn them into absent testimonies to the state’s power to make people disappear. This state of being makes clear how the punishment, as it is written on the prisoner, is not done to reaffirm a law that has been broken. It is done to both hide and preserve the absence of regulations, making it impossible to determine what line, if any, has been crossed.

In this case of spatial and legal exceptions, where ghost detainees are admitted into the prison without going through standard registration procedures, a general state of exception rules the prison and makes it possible to counter the desire to know by claiming not to know. Or as Donald Rumsfield made quite clear, “We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know.” [11] Or for my purposes here, use unknown-knowns. Regardless, under the circumstances which permit these sorts of punishments, what is inside and outside of the prison, in terms of what constitutes legal discipline is, at best, confused. In its ability to create what we call ghost detainees, these micro-sites of exception have reemphasized one of the primary problems of discussing the state of exception, that is, deciding on where it is located; what as well as whereabouts it is. [12]

To quote Agamben again, “Whoever entered the camp moved into a zone of indistinction between outsides and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit...” [13] In the terms given us by ghost detainees, it isn’t simply a matter of mapping the camp’s zone of indistinction onto the industrial prison complex. The decision to practice a counter-incarceration, having both legal and political tools at hand to create micro-zones of indistinction creates an overlap between the space of the prison and the prisoner’s body. Where previously the outlaw’s body was a container from which confessions were to be extracted, now it is marked by the sovereign-police’s ability to mark the limit and decide on what is known and what is unknown: the ability to decide between knowing where prisoners are located and willfully keeping them lost. In both nature and duration, the punishment turns the detainee into a living, breathing form of this indefinability, an ‘unclassifiable being’ outside of the law but subject to it; like a ghost on, the threshold of perception but quickly forced to disappear.

The camp, as Agamben situates it, is both the physical localization where the state of exception is practiced and where it is suffered: a spatial inside and outside. And while modes of disciplining the prisoner have changed but are still designed to register prisoners, being able to account for each and every one at all times is unconditional. Yet while the camp is the precedent from which the present discussion on military prisons proceeds, I also appreciate the dangerous elasticity built into the concept. Zones of indistinction have begun to shrink as well as multiply. It is becoming harder and harder to locate these micro-zones as the State experiments with new political and legal technologies of locating them outside of sovereign territory. “The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state of law.” [14] The same spatial considerations that specify the camp can be used to think about the prison, or more specifically, the military prison.

Before concluding, I should take a moment to acknowledge how these thoughts provide an opportunity to listen to those who have suffered this punishment. And this is where I see the future of my project going… I’ve become more and more interested in the ways that prisoners talk about their experiences, how they speak to us about what has happened in order to reconstitute a self identity against, or counter to, the lack of identity that has been imposed upon them. Following some of Irit Rogoff’s thoughts on this topic, how does the testimony of what has happened to the ghost detainee at the margins of society reconstitute an identity that is brought back to the center?

ENDNOTES
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[1] Transcript of Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC’s Meet the Press, September 16, 2001, available at: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/attacked/transcripts/cheney090601.html

[2] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977: 41.

[3] Major General Antonio M. Taguba, ‘Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade,’ published in Mark Danner, ed. Torture & Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2004: 299.

[4] Ibid., 303.

[5] Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998: 110.

[6] Steve Pile, "Ghosts and the City of Hope” in The Emancipatory City? ed. Loretta Lees. London: Sage, 2004: 210-28.

[7] See Christopher Atkins ‘Sketches – Ghosts & Haunting,’ available at: http://blogspot.eyesears.com. See also Bülent Diken & Carsten Bagge Lausten, ‘Zones of Indistinction – Security, Terror, and Bare Life,’ in Territories: Islands, Camps, & Other States of Utopia. Curated by Anselm Franke, et al. Berlin: KW – Institute of Contemporary Art, 2003: p. 42-50.

[8] Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binette & Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000: 44.

[9] Foucault, 143.

[10] Ibid., 35.

[11] Quoted by Hart Seely in “The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld: Recent Works by the Secretary of Defense,” available at: www.slate.com/id/2081042/

[12] “In any case, to understand the problem of the state of exception, one must first correctly determine its localization (or illocalization). As we will see, the conflict over the state of exception presents itself essentially as a dispute over its proper locus.” Giorgio Agamben. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2005: 23-24.

[13] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 171.

[14] Agamben, Means Without End, 39.

2006-7 MCAD/McKnight Fellows
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June 6-August 12, 2007
MCAD Main Gallery
Minneapolis, MN

What is exceptional about this year’s MCAD/McKnight Fellows exhibition, compared to recent years, is the shared formal and thematic current running through all of the works. Whether all of the artists came to the fellowship with projects that explore comingledimages and text, or whether they arrived at the same point clairvoyantly, I don’t know but the Fellows have succeeded in bringing some new possibilities to text/art combinations.

Suckers. We all know there’s one born every minute. Chris Walla asks: do they die at the same rate? His Sucker, one of the stronger works in the show, has pride of place as you walk into the MCAD galleries through the main entrance. Each letter of the word is a 5-foot-tall block that has been faced with hand-wrapped paper flowers. Some may see it as an art-world indictment or a finger pointed at unsuspecting visitors. It’s actually closer in form and function to something we’d see at a funeral. The flower-foam-green letters, riddled with cheap paper carnations and propped on easels, are curious equivalents of the coffin-flanking lace-beribboned sympathy wreaths that usually read simply DAD, MOM, BROTHER. This one is actually quite funny, and it’s funny because it’s camp: camp lays the benediction of humor onto serious critical detachment, and it could apply to an implied funeral for art or to something closer to home.

Sucker also asks us an interesting question: do, or can, words ever die? We know the strategy of repeating and reappropriating slurs in order to dull their power to insult and demean. But that doesn’t mean the words go away completely, or that people will stop trying to bring them back.

While Jan Estep’s contributions to this year’s MCAD/McKnight show is diverse and multifarious, the most elaborate of her projects is a large-scale conceptual map she began a few years ago. Trail Map to Wittgenstein’s Hut is just that, a take-away trail guide that charts Estep’s trip to the woods of western Norway in search of the Austrian philosopher’s retreat.

Part pilgrimage and part performative record, Estep’s map is a personal cartography that provides you with directions to a specific location. Yet Estep’s project and accompanying essay are not a heroic adventurer’s log about arriving at the specific location in the wilderness. Instead of pointing you towards a presence, the map leads you to an absence. A grid of photos that accompany the map show how the hut is slowly disappearing into the landscape, overrun with fecund moss and saplings. Going back at the map you begin to realize that finding is less important than looking; meaning and closure, thankfully, are not your rewards.

The hut isn’t a protected landmark and as time goes by, it will slowly become lost in the natural surroundings—then it will disappear. Before it slips from view and from memory, Estep has captured how nicely both nature and building are discernible but inseparable. Keeping this idea of inseparability close by without stretching it too far, Estep has woven, but cleverly not illustrated, Wittgenstein’s texts into the project in such a way that the two, philosophy and art, are intertwined.

Hanging oil paintings on canvas with gilded frames alongside selections of her original poetry, Gladys Beltran has a passionate yet uncritical attachment to American History. By history I don’t mean to say that her work is a succession of specific events or personalities. She’s more concerned with the how of remembering. Beltran’s paintings are fisheye lens landscapes of Washington, DC that show how America represents its national narratives by ensconcing them in monument-containers that are constructed with a clarity of order at edifying scales. From Washington with Love 6, Beltran’s poem to Columbus Circle and its namesake goes:

The Sailor will not die/
The Sailor will live forever/
Forever in our memories/
Forever an inspiration.

The work is technically able and she has obviously taken her fellowship year to do some traveling, but it has to be said: I cannot imagine that Beltran has traveled any critical distance from her own work.She seems not to have asked herself any questions about American history or how it is written into the District of Columbia. At the very least, more attention paid to the present instead of the mythic past could enable critical questions that would enrich her art practice.

David Bartley’s work is a crowd of photos and hand-painted text. By crowded, I mean that there are many voices speaking at once, not that those voices are too many. His suite of works along the back wall of the gallery aren’t so much as series as they are an essay on this combinatorial practice.

On the one hand, the photos that he has cut from newspapers, art reproductions and popular magazines all speak in their respective visual languages. The images, collected, collaged, and pasted with wax, still carry some contextual baggage from their original sources but are more like visual phonemes for creating specific commentary rather than general discussions of media over-saturation. His text is also crowded, but what’s different is that the words (imagine day-glo graffitoed marginalia) aren’t so much read as heard. Like the overlapping voices of a crowd Bartley’s words twist and turn in front of and within each other. Imagine not being able to listen to the voice of the person sitting closest to you over the din of shouts coming from all sides. It takes time to decipher, more time than I had during my visits.

With all this crowding, don’t expect to see anything unruly. Bartley’s work is very composed and the clipping-collage of images and quotes from sundry sources is an irresistible aesthetic. If this way of working sounds familiar; I’ll leave the art-historical references his work may conjure to your imagination. But I will say that Bartley’s image and sound-byte sampling is getting better at asking us to appreciate the present context they create rather than drawing us back to the published sources from where they came.

Sketches - Ghosts & Haunting
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Originally submitted Fall 2004

“What/
What is this (revealing)/
Who are you what (concealing)/
Is this who (digesting)/
Are you what is (What is it you’re disturbing)/
This who are (occurring)/You what is this (recording)/
Who are you (disguising)/What is is this?” [1]
-- Matthew Herbert

“Ghosts…seem to be events rather than things or
creatures.” [2]
-- Robert Graves

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The immediate dilemma, and seemingly unavoidable paradox, of sketching the visual culture of ghosts is that apparitions and phantasmatic occurrences trouble analytic discourse by randomly slipping in and out of visual and sensorial perception. They are hard to locate. As the historically most common means of trying to capture and therefore study ghosts, the photographic record has, at best, a contested relationship to these phenomena. On the one hand, a ghostly presence captured on film stalking through any of the hundreds of haunted houses on record should be proof positive of an occurrence, that what we see in the photograph is a ‘this-has-been,’ “…it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred.” [3] Being held onto the paper we are to also to assume that the ghost, if for only the most miniscule of durations, has been captured (therefore removed from the event) by passing in front of both a camera lens and a photographer’s eye. This situates a witness at a certain place and time but also certifies their seeing the referent. But, on the other hand, photography also has a more passive role to play. There are many instances of photographers claiming to have unintentionally photographed ghosts that have chosen to appear (surrounding living relatives, lovers, or complete strangers) or were indirectly captured on film negatives. These presences (emanations of an emanation?) are revealed only when the image is developed, at the moment these ‘ghosts’ are literally written onto the paper. “So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page.” [4]

In each of these cases, a phantasm has been brought into the living realm of the photo, that it is here and present, that we believe it had an existence (if not at the same moment we see the photo, then at some time previously). Additionally, it’s not just that a ghost has been photographed but what we see is a presence of a life already lived. Ghosts are almost always recognized. As a device whose machinations and process were previously believed to be capable of capturing the ‘real,’ we find an historical phenomenon that interrupts that claim. We are bound to be doubly dubious, if not outright disparaging, of any photographed, recorded, or written representation of ghosts as a manipulated or post-produced entity instead of an irrefutable documentation of an ethereal return of the long dead relative or anonymous person one might hope to convince us it to be.

Shall we begin by outlining a strategy or discursive device that would mark, label, suspend, freeze, and frame ghosts? I prefer not to. The present gambit does not originate with the/a catalog of ghostly encounters in which numerous occurrences have been recorded and from which a carefully researched and distilled ontology might be extracted; i.e. repressed traumas or concealed crimes that have been indexed by the occurrence of a haunting: what has been. Instead, I’d rather conjure a coterie of (im)materials to help navigate through just how hauntings trouble the archival grasp and domesticated space that are buttressed, respectively, by documentation and policed territories.

“When do you think he will come? Don’t you think that we ought to write?” [5] My departure is to foreground a sort of contrivance of hauntings so that it might be possible to extrapolate on the ghostly events that I continually fail to incorporate. To be honest, there have been so many it would be impossible to recall just a fraction of them without exceeding the space that I have been allotted here. Unfortunately, and this is the way that it usually goes with this sort of thing, there is no one else to corroborate my stories and confirm the details of my intuitions. As long as that’s clear and you are willing to accept this up front, we won’t be too disappointed if this experiment and my position fall apart before our very eyes.

“Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and this of the object-in-general, must return to the ‘there is’ which precedes it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and humanly modified world such as it is in our lives and for our bodies – not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but this actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts. Further, associated bodies must be revived along with my body – ‘others,’ not merely as my congeners, as the zoologist says, but others who haunt me and whom I haunt; ‘others’ along with whom I haunt a single, present, and actual Being as no animal ever haunted those of his own species, territory, or habitat. In this primordial historicity, science’s agile and improvisatory thought will learn to ground itself upon things themselves and upon itself, and will once more become philosophy….” [6]

My reason for including this contraption in sum is to help begin the working through of an institutional procedure, compulsion and cultural habit, to archive that is prevalent at all personal and public registers. But more than this, and here is where the violence of the action lies, this performance of consignation is a cooperation of distinctive and resistant components towards a formal and structured (built) coherency. I remember reading, somewhere, an interesting bit by Derrida. Let’s listen to him for a moment,

“By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs. […] Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociate, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate, or partition, in an absolute manner.” [7]

Traditionally, the archive produces a structured, categorized, and systematized (housed) present book-ended between a responsibility to a past and a resource maintained for a future. Within that house, the pieces that have been placed into the archive, have also been physically suspended and held in place; the same holds (are) true for their readings as well, all the way down to the written words on the page. Working underneath this institutional grasp and suspension, there is the additional presumption that this will allow the beholder of the document to grasp and transfer its meaning as well, where “The attempt to master meaning, which ought to lead to its unification, to the elimination of its contradictions and its ‘splits,’ can reach its goal only at the cost, through the infliction of a new wound…” [8] To this, I would add the equally costly expenses of another chain, another set of shackles; whereby the document suffers physical and unconscious cleavages and imposed associations from which it cannot escape. There is an oppressively pervasive immobility that anchors signifiers to a ground where, without a centralized and fixed location, signs and meanings might float about errantly unattached. The document does not contain the event per se, but is only a remnant, a reminder to jog/open up memory, “…an encouragement of memory to become present.” [9] Performance is a singular event that can be recorded but does so under the auspices that it will be different from its previous manifestation, at the very best only the attempt to recollect with all the ensuing failures that are suddenly complicit with it. Ghosts are just this kind of ruin, just this kind of deferred supplement in the form of an ephemerality, that index recent and ancient traumas, events, phenomena. Yet the ghost and the event are no longer only proofs or evidences to an event that may or may not have occurred but are also something else: a remnant that will draw recollection inward, through a centripetal force, into the present for the privileged witness to an event, allowing them the ability (permission?) to perform a recollection of it.

It’s not (am I repeating myself?) a matter of locating and diagramming the cultural lineages or the traumatic archaeology from which hauntings may arise, that they index, remind us of, and recall to us. “Dishonoured and tragic, she was all before me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away.” [10] That bloody wound will never heal; I don’t want to relieve a melancholic search for a long lost other. Ghosts, in residing at the boundaries of vision and perception, upset an archival logic (could we even say hegemony?) that attempts to consign signs where they can be structured into a catalogued and referenced system, ordered to be accurately recalled by innumerable successive readings. Meanings, now isolated, can also be located and extracted: explained. Secreted and built into this system is an archival anxiety. This anxiety is both one of preserving a collection of information but also of creating a purview for that collection, marking a boundary that demarcates its realm of power.

Ghosts define the space in which they haunt; through their immobility and in their stasis, they perform against the bounds of the institution in such a way as to reveal the underlying cultural constrictions wrapped around these haunting constituents. “The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally.” [11] In the film The Others (If I remember it correctly), Grace maintains a rigid system of locks and curtains through out an enormous house that protects her children from the effects of a dangerous allergy to sunlight. Consequentially, they, and the house, are ‘protected’ from an exposure to and view of the outside through the numerous full-length windows; and the children are further consigned into smaller internal zones of spatial protection. This protection, dare I say institutionalization, is further exacerbated through the mother’s insistence of maintaining a rigid domestic mythology taught through religious texts and lessons. And to ensure that they focus more intently on their studies when need be, Grace locks her children into separate rooms at opposite ends of the house. As the one who controls the keys and locks that open and shut the doors within the house, it would be presumed that she would have the power to move most freely through out the home while using those keys and her privilege as matriarch to police that space as well. But that discipline and surveillance is prevented from being put to its fullest potential through the striations that she has put in place; the lock system not only prevents her children from moving out of the spaces in which she has consigned them but also reduces the speed by which she can navigate, patrol, and reinforce the space. Once she becomes increasingly suspicious of the noises and movements in the house that go unexplained, the violence that is inseparable from maintaining the domestic and spatial cohesion becomes very clear. The threat of violence must be used in order to maintain the limits of her home (therefore her power over the possible) and the systematic micro-striations put in place to ensure protection and security from the outside, while also suppressing the potential for movement. Yet, the haunting apparitions are a force that operates as a domestic counter-geography through, over, and irrespective of her striated spaces, transforming it from a fortification into a quagmire. The continued frequencies with which the outlaw occurrences continue happening gradually erode Grace’s grasp of the space and her ability to consign occurrences to people, and vice versa. [12]

In parceling space, the sovereign reacts to an outside threat by insulating itself behind successive zones and protections. This reaction is meant to multiply its limits of power and control in order to trouble and interrupt a nomadic trajectory so that it might be more easily contained. In maintaining their cover and invisibility, emanations can resist and pass through the State’s striations, and even the hostile smooth space. “…it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival.” [13] Hauntings interrupt empirical concepts of spatial coherency and navigation via a nomadic and smooth trajectory through space that ignores enforced striations and guarded localizations. They are non-specifications, un-locatabilities, and flickerings of visibility that interrupt bordered and framed spaces that seek to restrict movement and trajectories. In maintaining the element of surprise of appearing at any point at any time, phantoms have the potential to wield an ambient threat so as to suspend a space, to keep it on edge, in a state of alert that draws a terribly immobilizing attention to itself and the systems of the sovereign in which the appearance materializes.

We discover that the house and grounds is the extent to which Grace has the ability to navigate through and subdivide space. “In the end, it is the law of the house itself that is neither inside nor outside the space of the house. What is really indigestible is the law itself. Which is to say that spacing, in the end, is the law. The spatial logic of the house is not in itself spatial. No inside is ever simply severed from an outside. Space is but an elaborate effect of the spacing that appears to haunt it.” [14] (As I remember it, only at this very moment) Grace decides to leave the house to call on the local priest and loses her way in a dense fog. Walking deeper and deeper into the haziness she is unable to select, choose, or collect her spatial perceptions, she is lost. On her face, with hands in pockets, we can see a building anxiety as she goes further into this non-referential space, without road or perspective, made unfamiliar, left unframed, and ungrounded. [15] But not for long. From within the fog she sees her wandering and battle fatigued husband Charles, whom she has been waiting to return from fighting for the English in World War Two, materialize. They embrace. She forgets her previous trip and reroutes herself and husband back to the house where she can finally bring her family back together, united and re-centered under, at the very least, a spatial proximity of individual parts. Through the seemingly random, yet nonetheless exceedingly fortunate, crossing of paths, Grace can finally start the rebuilding of the family unit that she has so desperately been longing for. And she is relieved of having to conjure up memories of Charles in response to her children’s questions; a relation is (re)established between the family and their long lost other. In the reunion between Grace and Charles, their family corpus has been healed and the individual components are brought back into the previous working order. Therefore, what we would be seeing is a becoming-relation where movement is the connective tissue; not necessarily in the shape of a new form but in a yearned for reunion. It is a very limited form of relationality bound to the family and relatives. We might be encouraged to think that the end result of all relations is an illustration or unification, and with that, a certain kind of relief to ensue. [16] Yet, is there any reason to anticipate, or even hope, that a relation would be (re)established in an un-determined and undistinguished topography? In reconnecting this relation, is an inherent psychoanalytic anxiety relieved? Often, what has been written on ghosts, and how it has been written, has worked through a citational logic, an indexical circuit between an historical event and document where the past is located in order to explain the present. But can’t the fog of indistinction elicit, just as fortuitously, unexpected recoveries and unforeseen remedies? Is there another way to think that would not foresee a concrete example, aesthetic or inter-personal, that is on a continual threshold of becoming between inclusion and exclusion?

Catching a whiff of Derrida’s trait as we continue walking, we could learn to embrace the feeling of being lost and that our search continues (consciously or otherwise) without ever catching or capturing, much less tracking, what it is we seek. Deleuze and Guattari have also picked up the scent of Derrida’s trait, further removing it from the realm of the symbolic by reiterating that the trait is not a coherent entity, a specific subjectivity that can be placed, seen, found, and identified, therefore diagnosed into a normative framework. “It is a very special kind of distribution, one without division into share, in a space without border or enclosure. […] nomad space is smooth, marked only by ‘traits’ that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory.” [17] As the traces of a physical human existence, hauntings are, sometimes, only the faintest outline of a figure that returns from their separation and passage into an atemporal place where we cannot follow. As haunting paths and trajectories amble through space, they confront space as already parceled into larger and smaller regions, therefore map-able, and readable in terms of centers of power and coherency that restricts writing a free flow of movement across a landscape that is unhindered by enforced borders, limits, skins: a counter-territorialization. “The nomadic trajectory […] distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating.” [18] Obviously communication occurs within this space but, through enumerable relations of subjective and territorial space. Communication is no longer an empirical form that occurs through locatable parties on a shared platform. Not that it is mute but, instead, it cannot be mapped or diagrammed; it is continually refusing to being systematized within an economy of communication between differentiated nodes and agencies.

I have been hunting out my prey. The hounds have raced ahead in front of me, trying to chase it up a tree. Their barks have become less frequent and more scattered. Stalking the ghost through the woods and the haunted house, I’ve only had the shortest glimpse from around a tree or through a cracked window pane. It fragments itself at the same moment I raise my rifle. The trait is falling apart before my very eyes; I desperately tried to catch up but always lost the path again. (Which way did it go?). It moves too quickly and slips away even faster. “I bounded straight out of the door again, reached that of the house, got in an instant upon the drive and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned a corner and came in full sight. But it was in sight of nothing now – my visitor had vanished.” [19] My potential to grasp it gradually diminishes as well, leaving me lost. Now that I’ve been pulled so far into the woods, so far from where I began, why do I carry on chasing after this thing that shifts and changes in constant presents? As a mark written onto a space, the trait appears as that which escapes visibility at the moment that it is drawn. The traits, of which the drawn and written sketches are made, are so many marks upon a ground, articulations of beautiful ruin. But here, I’ve found myself wrapped up in a circuit between myself and an untraceable emanation. After continuing on like this, there might be enough fragments for me to put it all together but I’ve dropped my rifle. “…the self-eclipsing trait cannot even be spoken about, cannot even say itself in the present, since it is not gathered, since it does not gather itself, into any present…” [20] Stopping for a while and looking away to catch my thoughts, the trail only becomes embedded with an entirely new set of subjective mnemonic traits: the pursuit becomes no less arduous, only more enclosed. Picking up the pursuit of the trait again, it becomes clear that the hunted haunts me as well. It’s the thrill of continuous trans-direction and path breaking that draws each of us into an encounter with and transformation through a trait: of disappearing within a becoming-ghost. It’s not a matter of closing my grip on a swatch of its cloth in order to to hold on and bring it closer. Walking blindly through the fog with arms and hands extended is a conscious gesture of disorientation. But in closing our eyes and looking with our fingers, we are still allowing ourselves be pulled along by a collection of sensations. We can push this blindness and disorientation even further: let’s turn our palms up and continue walking. In a performative posture of offering and supplication our bodies would be even more open to affects that might pass over our hands and into us. We’d no longer be looking or feeling for the trait. It would choose us and pull us along its trajectory.



ENDNOTES
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[1] Matthew Herbert, ‘Foreign Bodies [feat. Dani Siciliano],’ Bodily Functions (Accidental Records), 2001: song length, 5:37.

[2] Quoted in Peter Haining. Ghosts: The Illustrated History. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd., 1974: 126.

[3] Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Verso, 2000 [1981]: 77.

[4] Henry James, et al. The Turn of the Screw: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Edited by Peter G. Beidler. Boston, MA: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995: 39.

[5] Ibid, 79.

[6] Galen A. Johnson, ed. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996: 123.

[7] Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995: 3.

[8] Shoshana Felman, in Henry James, et al. The Turn of the Screw: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Edited by Peter G. Beidler. Boston, MA: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995: 203.

[9] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993: 146.
James, 85.

[10] James, 85.

[11] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated with an introduction by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum Press, 2002 [1987]: 360 (authors’ italics). Unless otherwise noted, all italics in citations are the authors’ own.

[12] Besides the system of movement control that she has been enforcing, the larger, culturally woven, and irrefutable striation that unravels as the story continues is the one between the living and the dead.

[13] Deleuze and Guattari, 353.

[14] Mark Wigley. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998: 172.

[15] In using the word ‘ungrounded,’ I don’t mean to imply that she is literally floating, feet above the ground, or there isn’t some sort of physical surface she is walking upon. Instead, ‘ungrounded’ refers to her inability to perceive physical objects and position herself in relation to them. We might also be able to speculate that she might feel a sense of being watched and under surveillance.

[16] See Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002 [1998].

[17] Deleuze and Guattari, 380-381.

[18] Deleuze and Guattari, 380.

[19] James, 43.

[20] Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990: 54.

Patriotism & Performance: Andres Serrano's America
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Presented at 'Performing (In)Visibility'
Midwest Interdisciplinary Conference
University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee
February 23-24, 2007


My America. Without apology or prejudice. One flag, over all.’ [1]
-- Andres Serrano

“The performance is in the work.” [2]
-- Hannah Arendt
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In starting with Arendt's claim, her stating that ‘the performance is in the work,’ I’m setting up what follows for a quite task. After all, by making the claim that a performance is located in something is to agree to its physical presence or that the performance is somehow recorded. But doesn’t this go against the grain of performance’s ontology, that is, it disappears and doesn’t remain?

Andres Serrano’s America series premiered at Gimpel Fils Gallery, London in the fall of 2002. The work was begun the previous year, inspired by the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., 2001. [3] At the time of its premier, the series comprised only 49 photos and the artist promised that more photos were on the way. Currently, there are 100 photos and they have been published in a massive catalog along with some of Serrano’s previous work. While the whole series hasn't been installed in a single gallery space, a selection of 16 was on display during my two visits in 2002.

From the exhibition literature, the work, or at least the installation of it, was very careful to adhere to the imported chestnut of the reductive American cultural-relation concept, the melting pot: “A place where everyone, regardless of colour or religion is able to belong and prosper. By creating such a large series, Serrano has been able to catch this diversity” and, “In perceiving these small nuances [subtlety, underplayed beauty and dignity] Andres Serrano has produced a body of work that manages to place each person within the wider American community without losing sight of the individual.” In summing up, "The series is driven by the idea that America is a community of communities…but who are united by a common bond and a continuing belief in the American dream." [4] Hmmm, that’s quite a bit he’s managed to accomplish. But underneath the rhetorics of these gallery didactics what is the community of communities and the invisible common bonds that ties people together so tidily and un-problematically?

Turning away from the physical photographs and their formal style for a moment, while keeping them very close by, I’m interested in their public presentation in exhibition form as, what I’ve termed, a patriotic performance. While Serrano’s sitters are involved in their own personal and collective performances as occupational or sociological types, I’m concerned with Serrano’s more subtle part in spite of the troubles it causes. As a writer, I’m hesitant to embroil myself too closely with the artist’s own words. Yet, in this case, the vocabulary Serrano has used to articulate his thoughts on how the series began, as well as his position in relation to the September 11 attacks, leads me consider these photos as more than a description of his work. Instead, I hear and see a national mythology that is being re-staged. But this re-staging is different in that its performance is not temporal; it isn’t just spoken and, perhaps most importantly, it remains.

As Hannah Arendt has said in relation to events that occur in the public realm, “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice.” [5] That said, I’m attempting to tie Serrano’s artistic practice to a performed identity. The scene of this performance is not a public acting or speaking, yet he nonetheless reveals an identity that is formed through a national mythology. Not to overstate the point, but again, Serrano is taking portraits of people. More subtly he is also performing. In his photographic action (click) is the expression of an abstract concept of nationhood. Serrano’s America series could be fit within a wider tradition of patriotic rituals that promotes and illustrates national mythologies of cultural diversity and coherency. “Isn't that what America is all about? Being on equal ground?” But even further, Serrano’s photos don’t simply struggle to remind us of a collective identity. The effort is more anxious: it attempts to recover and restage a lost national community, whereby this restaging of the American community myth points to its absence rather than reminding us of its presence.

This conception of America is both unbounded and framed and, as we can see, bear-hugs “these people [who], in reality, would not only not know each other but would be completely unable to relate to one another.” [6] In spite of the range of conversations that Serrano might hope to initiate by arranging the photographs, the interplay among the photographic subjects is really only implied. The glaring contradiction here is that while Serrano, in his own words, is trying to express “that we’re all in this together,” in the next breath he acknowledges that, in fact, we aren’t in this together and probably never will be. In another configuration of community, Jean-Luc Nancy figures it something like this: “[community] is made up principally of the sharing, diffusion, or impregnation of an identity by a plurality wherein each member identifies himself only through the supplementary mediation of his identification with the living body of the community.” [7] This ‘identity’ of the community can be many things, but while we’re talking about Serrano’s work, the connective tissue for his communal concept, while he doesn’t state it specifically, is a mythic community called America. While Serrano’s own words will testify to his adherence to this myth of American diversity and community, I’m suspicious of whether he has taken into consideration an important operation of myths and the scene of mythology: that is, myths don’t just cohere people into communities of shared beliefs, they also create communities by enforcing and rewarding behavior.

Events, especially traumatic ones, have the same power to create communities: “I’ve never been patriotic. In any case, I think the word is open to interpretation. I have my own sense of what patriotism means. But what I felt in New York after September 11 was a sense of unity…There was a sense that we’re all in this together.” [8] Again, here is that intangible unity of “we,” “together,” “all.” Serrano cites the September 11 attacks as a connective tissue that, supposedly, bound people together and stirred patriotic feelings in him. Yet his work is not a group portrait. This is a series of very distinctly individual portraits. So we have Detective, Chinese Cook, and Boy Scout. In spite of what Serrano intended to project, his work is still reductive. “We interpret the world by dividing up our perceptions into categories: people may be policemen, say, or soldiers, or firemen. We assign an object or a person to an appropriate category as a result of judgments we make about which category the principle features of the person or object resemble.” [9] The longer I spend with these photos the more difficult it becomes to break free of them. By that I mean Serrano’s work is an idée fixe, held tightly in place and opposed to fluidity. He uses a rigidly standardized composition that holds subjectivities and personalities tightly in place, they’re anesthetized. And in this rigidity, they are forced to speak and stand for Serrano’s America. I’m finding it very difficult to make room for anything else.

National myths and symbols are transmitters of, and also for, political and theological meaning. But their form of storytelling is not always didactic. Symbols rely on seemingly contradictory properties of ambiguity and compression, permitting subjective readings but also strictly enforcing rituals. As David Kertzer explains: “Condensation refers to the way in which individual symbols represent and unify a rich diversity of meanings…these various ideas are not just simultaneously elicited but also interact with one another so that they become associated together in the individual’s mind.” Ambiguity, on the other hand, “means that symbols are not arcane ways of saying something that could be more precisely expressed in simple declarative form. The complexity and uncertainty of meaning of symbols are sources of their strength.” [10] While this dual nature would at first appear incommensurate, they are, in fact, commingled but are so at different registers. [...]

Patriotism, as a vigorous and uncritical devotion to a nation-state, generalizes in order to bind a population with common virtues and ideals. Serrano’s conception of America, what the work is in response to and the foundation upon which it is built, blankets over discourse. This myth of the melting pot and social diversity passes through, and asserts itself against, the opposing narrative that confronted America on September 11. But here, importantly, it does so not through counter-discourse or dialogue, it does so only by trumpeting a regained national identity that continues to ignore otherness. I use the prefix ‘re-‘ to point to the repetition that patriotism, and mythology in general, relies upon, especially in its rituals. Serrano’s repeated performance, which I am locating in the consistently formatted photos as they are arranged in exhibition and published form, attempts to regain a lost community that supposedly existed previous to the attacks, “…always it is a matter of a lost age in which community was woven of tight, harmonious, and intangible bonds in which above all it played back to itself, through its institutions, its rituals, and its symbols, the representation, indeed the living offering, of its own immanent unity, intimacy, and autonomy.” [11] It is a country of everyone yet is selective in the ways that it overlooks how many of the communities within have struggled for visibility. It overlooks struggle and avoids confronting conflict by taking refuge in the American myth. Quite simply, it overlooks.

America, and other national performances like the singing of the Start Spangled Banner and Pledge of Allegiance, are, amongst other things, records of and responses to historical events. As a celebration to the endurance of the American flag standing after the Battle of Fort Mc Henry, the event on which the National Anthem is based, so to do the collected personalities captured in Serrano’s photos stand up and carry on after the events of September 11. In all the colors of American culture, Serrano asserts their continued presence and immortalizes them as everlasting cultural facets. But keeping the September 11 attacks in mind, how has Serrano chosen to engage in recent American history or foreign policy? In other words, has he confronted why the attacks happened in the first place? Does this work ask any questions? I don't think so, no. Instead, following along the methodology of patriotism and patriotic performances in general, his language glosses over the specificities of the problem. These photographs don’t look outward or extend themselves beyond the confines of the nation in a way that engages in discourse. If they do engage anything, and I think that a few of them do, it is unapologetically, undiplomatically, and defiantly.

This effacement, turning his back on the outside and the international community doesn't encourage a reply or response. Serrano’s performance/exhibit is a one-sided statement that is thrown into the face of audiences and the world as evidence of an American recovery. Besides the unity, in a few of the photos there is also a sense of calm and even disregard, as if the country is able to simply absorb and envelope the attack. It does so by rekindling a hyperbolized myth of national pride, diversity, and idealism performed through a photographic exhibition. Amongst other things, it also overlooks confrontation, blockages, and cultural incommensurates.

While there is an argument that the act of repetition reinforces meaning…in being repeated over and over, orthodoxy becomes condensed and ossified, others have argued that repetition does the opposite. That repetition is not a repeating of the same but through repetition, difference is created. But within community building rituals, “The specific content as well as the general meaning of action and speech may take various forms of reification in art works…and, by transformation and condensation, show some extraordinary event in its full significance. However, the specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and speaker, is so indissolubly tied to the living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and ‘reified’ only through a kind of repetition.” [13] What Arendt is getting at is the need or necessity for repetition in order to impart and ossify meaning amidst shifting social contexts. Contained as it is in the flows of culture and the public realm, the art object can only impart it’s meaning by being repeated over and over again.

As a counter argument to Arendt, Judith Butler’s identity theory posits repetition as a subversive force that can break free of performatives…what we think of as cultural habits. Her question is laid out like this, “…if the ‘I’ is a site of repetition, that is if ‘I’ only achieves the semblance of identity through a certain repetition of itself, then the I is always displaced by the very repetition that sustains it. In other words, does or can the ‘I’ ever repeat itself, cite itself faithfully, or is there a displacement from its former moment that establishes the permanently non-self-identical status of that ‘I’?” [14] I don't think so, no. In performing a repetition to stabilize identity, repetition becomes only a shaky ground that finds itself unable to reproduce itself faithfully, or what others have termed as 'passing': passing for white, passing for gay, as an American, or a fireman. As an identity is repeated over and over, it becomes impossible to measure it against a faithful or original rendition.

So if we drop Serrano’s work into this discussion about identity formation, meaning, and repetition, I think we can see how, intentionally or not, the work echoes some of the points made by both Arendt and Butler. But my reading of America, both the photographs and the artist’s own words, is as a series that futilely employs repetition to enforce and condense meaning but, as I’ve tried to show through my interruption of patriotism, that this repetition only reinforces the absences that mythology seeks to fill. Or in this case, the America Serrano is looking for but has never existed.

ENDNOTES
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Andres Serrano, America (Lucas Suarez, Homeless), 2002
Cibachrome, silicone, plexiglas. 60x 49 1/2"
Courtesy Andres Serrano & Gimpel Fils Gallery, London

1. Heartney, Eleanor, et al. Andres Serrano: America & Other Works. Taschen, 2004: 1.

2. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998: 206.

3. Haliday, Jackie. 'America, Andres Serrano' (Press Release). London: Gimpel Fils Gallery, 2002.

4. ibid.

5. Arendt, 179.

6. Andres Serrano in conversation with Morgan Falconer. "USA Today," What's On In London. London (October 23, 2002). My emphasis.

7. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991: 9.

8. Falconer, 1.

9. Kertzer, David I. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988: 81.

10. ibid., 10.

11. Nancy, 9.

12. Arendt, 187.

13. Butler, Judith. 'Imitation & Gender Insubordination,' in Diane Fuss, ed. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London: Routledge, 1991: 18.

Ghosts & Other Fugitives of History:
Haunting Remains in the work of Toni Morrison & Ambrose Bierce
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Presented at 'Death & Loss in America: Colonial Era to the Present' Conference
October 19 - 21, 2006
Museum of Funeral Customs
Springfield, IL

“You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground”[1]

Maybe I do, perhaps you don’t. But this sentence is a succinct summary of the points that I’m trying to make in my paper this morning. In spite of its succinctness, this sentence is more complex than it appears. Hidden in this short string of words is an elaborate system through which we become aware of and negotiate negative and troublesome personal histories, and perhaps even a national legacy, with the present moment. Often times tragic and unresolved, this history insists that we don’t forget it.

The question becomes how is that you or I know “…that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground?” What kind of knowledge is this? It certainly isn’t scientific or logical. After all, once we’re dead we’re dead, right? Nonetheless, this sentence asks us to agree to an occurrence that is contradictory to what we know about death and dying. But I’m sure that some of you nodded in agreement when I first read it. It’s true, isn’t it? Something outside of scientific proof but understood in our popular knowledge, common experiences, or more precisely, our culture makes it possible for us to agree, or at the very least entertain the notion, that ‘people who die bad don’t stay in the ground’; in other words, that we believe in ghosts.

In ‘dying bad’ an event or an injustice has been left unresolved. A debt remains to be paid. Traditionally, this event is indexed by a ghostly figure, both terribly familiar and un-present, that inhabits a location...a cemetery or house. Speaking generally about the range of haunted house stories, the ghostly inhabitant is a complex cultural operation that troubles our relationship to the past, present, and ‘what has happened.’ The ghost brings all of these into very close proximity with each other. This is precisely where I will be speaking from this morning. During my readings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Ambrose Bierce’s The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch, I kept asking myself: what is the ghost trying to say? And how are they trying to say it? Each of these is a ghost story about a tragedy that occurred in the past. But instead of the dead staying dead, staying buried in the ground, they come back to haunt their family, relatives, and their homes. In this way, there is something present in death, not just a vacancy or a void where someone once was. Ghosts are this presence.

And further, ghosts, if they are anything, are interruptions. In their presence and scaring us to death, ghosts interrupt us and insist on being listened to. But this interruption is often hard to understand, we don’t often know the story that the ghost attempts to tell us. It is clouded in hearsay and conjecture, unverifiable testimonies from spectral witnesses. Telescoping this interruption that the ghost performs onto our understanding of history, ghosts insist that the past is in a constant negotiation with the present instead of being tidily separated. It asks for the past to be accommodated within the present, that room is made for it. There are moments in Beloved and The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch when the events are clouded in dreams and hallucinations, other times characters are constantly aware of historical triggers that are situated in specific locations whereby historical events come into sharp and terrible focus. What these two stories offer are very different conceptions of history and how ghosts throw into relief the tenuous connection between what we know and ‘what has happened.’

Haunted Houses: Hisotry That Lingers
Speaking very generally about death and burial ceremonies Giorgio Agamben configures them in this way, “According to these beliefs, death’s first result is to transform the dead person into a phantom – that is, into a vague, threatening being who remains in the world of the living and returns to the familiar places of the departed one. The purpose of funeral rites…is to guarantee the transformation of this unsettling, restless being into a friendly and powerful ancestor living in a separate world, with whom relationships are defined.”[2] Reading funeral rites in this way, they are a kind of technology for holding the dead in place, for fixing their location. On the one hand, funerals ceremonies are performed over the physical grave where the body is laid ensuring that it is here, this is where it will stay. But these rites also perform a spiritual function as well. They consign the spirit of the deceased to the afterlife where communication between the dead and living can be regulated, without any confusion between the two; what Agamben refers to as a ‘bridge.’ My interest in this discussion on funerals, which I will elaborate upon further, are the irregularities of death. That is, when people aren’t given a proper burial or simply…die bad. And even more interestingly, in spite of being laid to rest with a funeral the spirit of the deceased still lingers and insists itself.

Sethe was born into slavery. She escaped from the Sweet Home plantation and headed north, across the Ohio River from Kentucky and settled with other freed slaves in Cincinnati. When the slave hunters tracked her down to the house at 124 Bluestone Road to collect their property, she grabbed her children and rather than seeing them taken back to a life of slavery, she began killing them one by one but only managed to kill her oldest daughter. She wasn’t able to afford a proper ceremony so her daughter was buried under a tombstone marked, humbly, Beloved . This is the narrative around which Morrison’s Beloved revolves. It is the central trauma of the book that is departed from but that we are constantly drawn back to and made aware of. It’s the story within the story. Even though Sethe buried her daughter, Beloved is not dead. She comes back to haunt the house at 124 Bluestone Road and cause havoc for Sethe and her daughter, Beloved’s younger sister, Denver.

The haunting in the house lingers as a constant and perpetual reminder of what happened to Beloved, how her life was taken away, and how her mother must continue to live with the decision to love her daughter so much. 124 Bluestone Road is not just a haunted house, that is, it’s not a space of appearance for ghosts and a place where haunting occurs. More than the slamming of doors, the moaning, and turning over of tables, 124 is what I’ve termed a ghost-home: a home, like every home, that is infused with an haunting presence and where the space and dimensions of the haunting are the same thing. There is a stable incommensurability that I’m trying to get at, a contained volatility. There is also an intimacy to this notion as well. It is a haunted house, but more than that the house has become a dead relative’s presence that acts on its own desires and expressions. I got this idea from Denver, early in Beloved, when she “…approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled and fell into fits. Her steps and her gaze were the cautious ones of a child approaching a nervous, idle relative (someone dependant but proud).”[3] Or, instead of dependant and proud, more like angry and enraged. Aging along with the house and speaking through it, Beloved now has the voice to object with her mother’s decision.

By infusing haunting with architecture, Morrison’s elaboration on the haunted house as a literary trope brings history and space into more immanent contact. More than just a structure for the display and storage of history, the house is a building with agency; it acts on its own, replies, has feelings. It is a subject and it is a force to be reckoned with. While there is certainly an incorporation occurring in Beloved, it isn’t complete. Beloved’s death is unresolved and in dying bad, she hasn’t stayed in the ground. Instead, her memory and death refuse to be located in a grave and buried. The tombstone, both marker and name plate for this child, do not fix her location. Somehow, 124 Bluestone Road has incorporated her spirit and Beloved becomes a ‘familiar stranger’ that insists on not being forgotten.

Morrison’s concept of rememory isn’t a history found in books and isn’t buried in monuments or memorials. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It is a history that is tied directly to personal memories of places, very specific locations and is opened up to the outside where it can be ‘bumped into':

“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."

“Can other people see it?" asked Denver.

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm – every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there – you who never was there – if you go there and stand in the place where I was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over – over and done with – it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what."

Denver picked at her fingernails. "If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies."

Sethe looked right in Denver’s face. "Nothing ever does."[4]

Rememory is the possibility of becoming aware of history by being in the space where it occurred, literally, by bumping in to it. In the context of Beloved, that history is slavery: its technologies of subjection, the scars it leaves on the body, and the slaves who died bad. But as Sethe makes very clear to Denver, slavery is still present and it is waiting for her. Sethe will do everything she can to keep her from seeing what she saw.

Waiting is important to rememory. If, as Denver asks, ‘it is still waiting…’ we can imagine there is an agency and desire to wait. The past wants to be there and remain as a trace. And if rememory, this concept of historical presence is a patient lingering then it must ‘be there,’ and not buried. So, what Sethe is talking about is an un-personal memory of something that has happened. Yet I’m dubious of Sethe’s emphatic agreement, from the quote above, that nothing ever dies. This dismissal of disappearance needs to be carefully considered because it becomes too easy to agree that everything remains and that everything is accessible. There is something excessive about this. We must be aware of the blockages and barriers that withhold access to history and knowing ‘what has happened.’ That which is remembered isn’t always at our fingertips. And in talking about rememory, as a haunting history that it is waiting, I think that it can just as easily not want to be found, resist being caught, and happy to perform unforecasted interruptions. But Morrison’s point, I think, is to acknowledge that history isn’t contained in the past but is experiential.

Back to the idea of buildings and ghosts, for a moment. Avery Gordon, in her sociological understanding of haunting, talks about the ghost needing to be accommodated, that it needs to be taken care of, but most importantly room has to be made for it.[5] If the ghost is to be accommodated by the people that it haunts, it is attended to, and its needs and desires are recognized. This is an important adjustment because if we are paying attention to the needs and desires of the ghost we are seeing it as more than evidence of the crime that was done, the historical stain, or traumatic remnant.

After Paul D. scares the ghost of Beloved out of the house, she returns as a young woman who starts living in the house with Sethe, Paul D. and Denver. Beloved asks Sethe to talk about her past, tell her the story of her diamonds, “It became a way to feed her. […] Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling.”[6] Sethe gets the same ‘profound satisfaction’ as Beloved by confronting history through storytelling, to go back into her painful past. In speaking with and telling her history to Beloved, she is literally speaking to it, in dialogue with what has happened. It’s still more difficult than that but there is a comfort that Sethe gets from talking to this listening past. Beloved seems to absorb it all. Her simple questions turn into rambling answers from Sethe; it’s as if Beloved is enacting or making herself available for a special form of witnessing through the testimony of Sethe. These are the moments where everyone seems capable of talking about their past, what has happened to them. But as we see at the start of Part III, Beloved begins to demand more and more from Sethe, forcing her to attend to her needs. In spite of her motherly hospitality, Beloved slowly wears Sethe down and upturns the order of the house. “But it was Beloved who made demands. Anything she wanted she got, and when Sethe ran out of things to give her, Beloved invented desire."[7] This is not just any specific desire but any desire she can dream up.

So even though the ghost is gone, Beloved is still present but as an inhabitant that refuses to be accommodated and cannot be satisfied. The debt that she is owed is too large to be paid back. And it is in this way, I would argue, that she continues to haunt the house at 124 Bluestone Road.

Shared Secrets: Bones in the Crypt
“Death has left for me its imperishable mark on an ordinary copse of trees in the front yard. But would a stranger, coming upon it a century hence sense the sanctity of the death-inflected soil?”[8]

Buried within Ambrose Bierce’s short story The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch is a struggle between knowing and not knowing. Mr. Elderson, our narrator, takes shelter in an abandoned house after a long day of hunting. Feeling a sense of unease as he drifts off to sleep, he wakes from a dream that he remembers only “indistinctly […] all confused and inconsistent.” But later on, in fact, he does remember and he does come to know the home’s previous tenants were Janet and Thomas MacGregor and that they were from Edinburgh, Scotland before settling in California. Having woken, “…the scene of my dream, and my actual surroundings, had been blended, one overlying the other…”[9] I’m sure that he’s describing that uneasy feeling of being between dreaming and awake, not being quite able to tell the difference between what we see and what is in our dreams. It’s a very anxious feeling. Then, after waking and recovering from his initial confusion, he is jarred by the sound of a struggle,

“At that instant – almost, it seemed, before the gleam of the blaze had faded from my eyes – there was a dull, dead sound, as of some heavy body falling upon the floor, which shook beneath me as I lay. I sprang to a sitting posture and groped at my side for my gun; my notion was that some wild beast had leaped in through the open window. While the flimsy structure was still shaking from the impact I heard within reach of my hand, the sharp shrieking of a woman in mortal agony. So horrible a cry I had never heard nor conceived; it utterly unnerved me; I was conscious for a moment of nothing but my own terror! Fortunately my hand now found the weapon of which it was in search, and the familiar touch somewhat restored me. I leaped to my feet, straining my eyes to pierce the darkness. The violent sounds had ceased, but more terrible than these, I heard, at what seemed long intervals, the faint intermittent gasping of some living, dying thing.”[10]

Years after Elderson’s experiences in Macarger’s Gulch an acquaintance tells him that he had come across the same house recently and found the bones of Janet MacGregor buried under the floorboards. Only then does Elderson know that he witnessed a haunting reenactment of Thomas MacGregor murdering his wife in Macarger’s Gulch.

In only hearing and not seeing anything, what kind of witnessing is this? Elderson’s experience in the house is a unique kind of haunting because it’s primarily the aural remnant to the murder-event that conflates space and time. He has to rely on what he has heard to describe what has happened. The frantic struggle and screaming of the deadly recreation/reenactment are all he hears of the tragedy. How does this use of the aural speak to the ways that we prioritize the visual as evidence in making testimonies and verifying identities? The critical difference is that the haunting event isn’t simply an index that points, without describing, to what happened to the MacGregor’s. The reenactment, as an event, can only point imprecisely to the past that it refers to because it can never fully 'recreate' the event.

Bedding down in the MacGregor’s house for the night, crossing from the public into the private realm, he becomes privy to a haunting secret. It’s a story known only to the MacGregor’s. This is the important key to the haunting in The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch because the haunting is sharing a secret with him. The MacGregor's story, buried under the floorboards, has somehow seeped through the cracks, up from where it was hidden and so far undisturbed by time and people. The store obliquely points to itself in a way that makes it difficult to know what happened exactly or at all. As it appears to Elderson, there is enough to know something but not enough to connect the dots, draw a line back to the bones. Its connection to a past event is obscured. The secret wanted Elderson to find it and wanted the story to be shared. And when the bones are found the secret is no longer a secret. While there is no direct reference to it in the story, I’m sure that now that the bones have been found, the haunting in Macarger’s Gulch has disappeared.

Perhaps we’re not surprised that Elderson’s experiences take place in a run-down shack, a ruined little house without windows and the barest protection from the weather...it would be hard to imagine all of this happening in a brand new house. If our cultural formation of ‘the house’ can be thought of as, among other things, a container for and as a link to family narratives, the haunted house is the broken version, a contraption. The ghost is opposed to this operation of the house because it wrenches diachrony into the present, and instead of reinforcing the comfortable distance between past and present, it is redrawn and the linearity of history is brought into question. It provides imprecise links to the past instead of the tidier narratives that we construct, photograph, and display.

When Morgan happens upon the house at the end of Macarger’s Gulch and finds Janet’s buried bones he’s uncovered a kind of crypt and unearthed a secret buried into the foundation of the house. Even more interestingly, the house seems oriented around the secret buried in the crypt: that it is a state of decay, it is only a ruin of it’s former self, and there is a haunting presence that tells the story only obliquely. So the haunted house, in spite its imprecision as a historical container, still works. A haunting will always struggle to tell the secret, it will always attempt to reveal what has been hidden. When Thomas buried Janet’s body in the house, the secret-murder became part of the structure. He carved out a void under the floorboards but he also created a supplement to the house, an extra space for his secret. So his gesture was both additive and reductive. But in burying it and removing it from view he doesn’t necessarily keep it out of sight. Mark Wigley, an architectural theorist describes how the secret works in this way…“As both the hiding of a secret and the hiding of that hiding, the crypt cannot simply take its place in the topography it preserves. The traditional demarcations between inside and outside […] is disturbed by the internal fracturing of the walls by the crypt. The crypt organizes the space in which it can never simply be placed, sustaining the very topography it fractures. However, these fractures are not new. They have been present in the topography ever since the original traumatic scene, organizing the self and making the illusion that the scene never occurred possible. The fantasy of incorporation maintains a crypt that was already secreted within a pocket in the topography.”[11] More simply, the crypt is not just in the house but is part of it. In burying his dead wife, who is now a secret, Thomas MacGregor tried to keep the traumatic event (Janet’s remains) from being seen because the bones, as evidence, will speak and say 'what has happened.' Yet, in spite of his effort, there is still a story to be told. But where is that story located?

The American photographer Sally Mann’s most recent series of photographs, entitled What Remains, are reflections on death and nature. But more specifically, her photos are interested in the porosity of the natural landscape and how it slowly digests events, people, and history. It’s not about disappearance but more about how the ground is a kind of container for recording and literally soaking up history, leaving it just below the surface. A few years ago she received a phone call from the local sheriff who was pursuing an escaped convict. He warned her that the fugitive was armed, dangerous, and heading her way. To slow down the authorities, he crossed a river and came onto Mann’s property. He approached the house and hid behind a tree. Shortly thereafter, as the authorities were moving in, he put a gun to his head and killed himself. After the police collected all of their forensic evidence, Mann stepped outside and inspected the scene. There was a tiny pool of blood that moved slightly, “as if the earth had taken a delicate sip,” and she asked, “Death has left for me its imperishable mark on an ordinary copse of trees in the front yard. But would a stranger, coming upon it a century hence sense the sanctity of the death-inflected soil?”[12] In her question, Mann’s use of the word ‘sense’ is in sharp contrast to see or know or learn or remember “the sanctity of the death-inflected soil…” By using ‘sense’ she sticks to the minute traces that she saw at the crime scene where the fugitive died bad. And, as I mentioned above, her question and photos speak to both his death and the traces he left behind because that’s all there is to remember what happened. I think that Mann would rather have a sensation of an absence than nothing at all; there is no chance for a public monument to remember this event.

To answer her question honestly, no. Probably not. But the question is still an important one because it engages with a central question raised by Macarger’s Gulch. It asks: can history be remembered and stored in the ground rather than in monumental place-holders erected above it? Are archives necessary, or is there enough of a trace that a recollection is possible? Since her photos have been taken, exhibited, and published, it now seems impossible that ‘the death-inflected soil’ will ever be completely stricken from history. What I think she is getting at though is this: history is something made, written, and preserved. It is a constructed narrative that usually effaces the inaccuracies it contains and interests it serves. But history is also a process of decay that proceeds towards death and decomposition. Her photos are a mapping of these two concepts of history, as both a preservative and a corrosive, over each other.

Yet, these thoughts on seeping history and landscape bring back the notions of incorporation that I mentioned earlier. Hauntings show how history cannot be completely digested or assimilated, that it comes up and comes back, as we saw in Beloved. The secret, like the ghost, is another remnant of the traumatic event that returns to haunt the present. And the secret that is part of, built into, cut-out from the house is a troubled sort of inhabitation. Again, I draw a link between Mann’s photographs and Macarger’s Gulch because Mann and Elderson engage with history not as a succession of written and tidy events. The history they experience, and experience is the important difference, is contained in locations as imprecise ‘sensations’ that speak ambiguously to the living. Elderson, like Mann, has walked across a patch of land and has 'sensed the death-inflected soil'. As for the sanctity of the soil, that’s up for argument. The MacGregor’s house contains the secret of what has happened to Janet but this secret isn’t a confidential story that is shared between two people. The secret of Macarger’s Gulch is a physical secret. It is Janet’s skeleton, her pile of bones that remain and, when they are discovered, will testify to Thomas MacGregor’s crime.

In concluding, let’s go back to where I started, “You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.”[13] Maybe I was wrong and this quote doesn’t say everything that I wanted to say. But it’s still a great place to begin this discussion on ghosts and introduces some of the subtle slippages ghosts exploit in the absences created by death in Beloved and The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch. These two stories are linked by creative forms of storytelling and history. Death, amongst other things, is a time for telling stories and perhaps creating exaggerated narratives as well. Stories about the dead become supplements for and stand-ins for the departed, they have a way of filling in a void. But it is not a restitution, i.e. exactly as it once was. Thomas MacGregor has not erased Janet’s bones, the murder weapon, or his crime by swaddling them in a shawl and burying them in the ground. He has done the opposite. Digging the crypt out of the floorboards ensures that they are hidden but also that they are held in place. Preserving the secret ensures that these remains remain. But they remain differently. They haunt the house with an evocation of Thomas MacGregor’s crime as a unique form of historical reenactment. It’s a weird sort of address that only confuses Elderson. But once the house falls into ruins and the secret is revealed, the skeleton testifies to an embedded history that has become part of the MacGregor’s house. These bones are the secret buried in Macarger’s Gulch.

Storytelling is an important point that arises at the end of Beloved as well. The story of Sethe and Beloved, how a mother murdered her daughter rather than see her returned to a life of slavery “…was not a story to pass on.”[14] And this is repeated over and over, as if by saying it wasn’t a story to pass on, it would just disappear or be easier to forget. When the neighbors refuse to talk about it, by not speaking of it, they hope the story will stop circulating. That the haunting story doesn’t haunt anymore. And the final word in the book, ‘Beloved’, returns us to her gravestone and where she and her story are buried, held in place, and mute. But I don’t think that Morrison wants to keep this story from being told; she is referring to the sentiment of the neighbors that live on or near 124 Bluestone Road. Through this act of forgetting, “Disremembered and unaccounted for…” by not passing this story on, they bury her “…quickly and deliberately forgot her.”[15] But as we now know, you can’t just un-remember something and you can’t just bury it away in the ground. That's much easier said than done.

ENDNOTES
1. Toni Morrison. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 1987: 221.

2. Giorgio Agamben. Infancy & History: Essays on the Death of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1993: 81-82.

3. Morrison, 35.

4. Ibid., 43-4.

5. See Avery Gordon. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

6. Morrison, 69.

7. Ibid., 283.

8. Sally Mann. What Remians. Exhibition Catalog. New York: Bulfinch Press, 2003: 70.

9. Ambrose Bierce. The Secret of Macarger's Gulch in The Complete Stories of Ambrose Bierce. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985: 35.

10. Ibid., 35-6.

11. Mark Wigley. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993: 144-45.

12. Mann, 70.

13. Morrison, 221.

14. Ibid., 323.

15. Ibid., 323.

Salad Days Sunset:
2006 MCAD/Jerome Artists
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October 4 - 29, 2006
MCAD Main Gallery
Minneapolis, MN




Of all the art to be seen this fall in the Twin Cities, make sure that the 2006 Jerome/MCAD Fellows Show, now on at the MCAD Main Gallery, crosses your radar-screen. Having spent the past twelve months working under 'formative' status, the fellows are back with crisp-new bodies of work and have moved into the next stage of their careers. They are Megan Vossler, Janet Lobberecht, Angela Strassheim, Dan Tesene, and Megan Rye.

Megan Vossler’s Aftermath and Rubble, graphite drawings on massive sheets of paper, are meditations on war and image making. Focusing on the remains of conflict, what is left over and its lingering effects rather than indictments, Vossler manages to de-specify conflict from any geographic locality. In doing so, she recalls a multitude of recent military conflicts and refugee populations on the move. In spite of the gravity of these issues, her work is not didactic, a very successful feat considering how quickly images are weaponized and lobbed back and forth in the media-battlefield.

In her smaller framed works, Patrol and Refugees, Vossler draws attention to oppositional notions of movement and space through the absence of a fully rendered landscape. Soldiers patrol land in order to protect and enclose space. For them, territory is to be controlled. Refugees, on the other hand, are forced to move away from their homes and walk through a landscape of displacement with a more uncertain future, oftentimes never returning to their homes.

In refusing to be simply pinned up and hung idly from the wall, Janet Lobberechet’s mixed-media drawings insist on 3-dimensionality without being unruly. It’s Hard to Make the Good Things Last is a tangle of colorful irreconcilables that have been gently collected, rather than cohered. Swirling, spiraling, and gracefully torquing forms on paper, Plexiglass, and wall somehow commingle. There’s an oil-water magnetism that just barely holds it all together without mixing.

Sinuous lines crawl along and over, licking at the paper’s edges and quickly recoiling. Constantly in motion, and never sitting still, her hand tickles the surface and leaps from paper to the wall and back to paper. There’s an insatiable hunger for space and a thirst for more. It Lingers Then You Forget/Couldn’t Drag Me Away isn’t just a rendering though; it’s a drawing out. Her fantastic use of repeated lines and obsessively rewritten text is like the working through of an idea; in not wanting it to ever become too tidy, she leaves it perched at the precipice between sketch and shape. Lobberecht’s gestural bio-beaded-scripto-glyphs take off on a graceful tangent that will never be brought back to a center.

Tucked back into a corner of the gallery is Angela Strassheim’s installation, Grandma’s Closet. Taking inspiration from her photograph of the same closet, she has created an exact replica of just that. But in the installation these clothes, hung up and arranged so carefully, become tangible remnants of a life lived. Standing in front of Grandma’s Closet there’s a whiff of powdery perfume that brings back memories of my grandmother and her favorite Christmas sweater. Smells have an eerie ability to evoke recollections in ways that are stronger than photographs and Strassheim uses this unique olfactory dimension, along with the visual and aural, to provide an opportunity to remember as well as to see.

But is it a memorial? While it is definitely a container, the closet isn’t filled to the brim with minutiae the way an archive strives to hold or a memorial monumentalizes someone’s life. It has been reproduced as it may have appeared on any day, like a memory captures and holds onto a strangely familiar scene. As a kind of memorial, what’s most perilous to Grandma’s Closet is its impermanence; we know that it can, and will be, disassembled.

Rapid prototyping is a high-tech form of printing that creates 3-D shapes from digital renderings. A special printer builds shape in layer upon layer of delicate, sandy gypsum. The procedure is intricately labored but Dan Tesene is a patient and methodical artist. He’s willing to take his time with pushing the potential of the technology, seeing how far it will go in answering his questions on scale and vision.

In False City, he has assembled dozens of miniature buildings to create a rapid prototype cityscape. This is a ‘false city’ by not being modeled on any city in particular, but inaccurate as well because it’s a miniaturized representation. Both form and display seem bound with equal parts intense measurement and creative thinking. There is an attention to the delicate expression of ideas with the cold eye of logical observation.

Transit 1-5 are wall mounted map forms that carefully record Tesene’s daily movement over the span of two weeks. Rather than a street-level survey with storefronts and pedestrians each Transit is a tangle of lines looked down upon from above with an omniscience that conflates space and time. Supposedly, everything is there, right there. But we (and Tesene) know this isn’t true. His use of the cartographic ‘view from nowhere’, that fictional view of every city or road map that looks down from miles above the ground, speaks to the ineffability of establishing and recording his presence in the city.

Megan Rye’s oil paintings situate the viewer as witness but in such a way that we’re not totally excluded as participants. Riding in the backseat of a Hummer in Falluja to Abu Gharib, we’re offered the embedded viewpoint of a journalist or enlisted soldier that stares through the windshield into a deserted blankness. What you may not know is that this painting began as a photograph taken by Rye’s brother who was stationed in Iraq with the Marine Corps.

Working from snapshots and newspaper photos for the first time, Rye works through what it means to translate images into oil painting. She has deliberately left something of the original photo in her paintings but I keep asking myself, how are they different now that she has painted them? Maybe she’s amped up the intensity of each image, but surely there’s room for much more. When brought back as memoirs of the war or as newspaper photos attached to stories, these images spoke with a certain visual language. What happens when they become paintings? It will be interesting to see Rye continue to develop this interest in image reorientation while working through her brother’s massive archive of photos.

Again, make sure to see this strong show of new work at MCAD and treat yourself to some great work by artists who you will soon be seeing at local and national venues. The public opening is Friday, October 13 from 6-8pm and the show will on display until October 29.

Promise of Recovery
Photos by Katherine Turczan
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June 10 - July 29, 2006
Franklin Art Works
Minneapolis, MN

‘Promise of Recovery’, Katherine Turczan’s most recent photographic series, encompasses portraits, landscapes, and architectural images of the Crimean Peninsula. For generations this region, on the southern tip of Ukraine along the northern shore of the Black Sea, has been a refuge where Russian and Ukrainian workers spent summers vacationing and convalescing at local sanatoria. ‘Promise of Recovery’ is also a diagnosis and a look into the future based on an evaluation of the present. Included in the phrase is a notion of transformation, that is, recovery as a process of healing and an end to suffering. But most importantly, there is something optimistic in ‘Promise of Recovery’.

Adolescence: Optimism & Transformation
Turczan’s portraits of young boys and girls from the Crimea possess a charismatic calm. Each of them projects a confidence and presence that belies their teen-age years. It is easy to appreciate the rapport that Turczan has established with her subjects, how she draws us to their gaze, and transmits the lingering warmth she has so carefully captured. On the cusp of adulthood, these adolescents are about to grow into their changing bodies. In their faces, Turczan sees a future that is gently reconfigured and mapped onto the wider implications for the Ukrainian nation emerging through its own growing pains.

Responding to international criticism of rampant voter intimidation and ballot-stuffing after Ukraine’s 2003 Presidential elections, a non-violent protest called the Orange Revolution occupied Kiev’s Independence Square. The Revolution and ensuing reforms threw into relief the tensions underlying Ukraine’s past and future. It also revealed the polarization of the population between opposing political platforms: on the one hand, those that hold onto the Soviet past; on the other hand, reformers increasingly attracted to the economic potential promised by the European Union. Visiting the Crimea shortly after the election, Turczan paid particular attention to these events and how they marked a transition point for the country. Where youth and adulthood are more or less stable states of being, adolescence is only defined insofar as it exists in proximity to something else. These young personalities draw attention to their changing bodies and development, but Turczan telescopes these notions of transformation outwards onto the region’s continued recovery from the processes of political and cultural change.

Turczan’s optimism is accentuated by the photographs’ consistent lighting and temperature. In Serghei & Kitten, slivers of light dance and glow on the ground while the planes of red-orange tones radiate an ambient warmth to the edges of and beyond the frame; these colors are felt as well as seen. At the center of this are Serghei’s eyes. They re-center and hold us in place – but his looking is also a listening. His gaze meets ours in a dialogue that creates a conversation between him and us. As a photographer, Turczan is acutely observant of personality and character but she does more than focus an act of looking. She is an intent listener and her work tempers a moment of conversation between the audience and her subjects.

Sanatoria: Recovery & Possibility
Turczan’s work is also in dialogue with the buildings, landscape, and history of the Crimean Peninsula. A graffiti covered rotunda, titled Pavillion, overlooks the Black Sea from a picturesque outcropping. The plaster columns are chipped and scarred from years of harsh weather and neglect, but it is still possible to read through the ruins and imagine when the pavilion was white and new. The photos of medical facilities explore the slow process of decay and disrepair: layers of paint peel off the walls, husks of buildings stand eerily empty, and fecund greenery grows untrimmed. Turczan’s photos of these and other buildings possess a ruined beauty that evokes a link to the Crimea’s past.

In engaging with history Turczan very carefully avoids a nostalgic gloss or a glorified past. Instead, she sees an interesting inversion of architecture and the body. The sanatoria of the Crimea that provided treatment to so many for so long have aged and withered. Turczan captures the conspicuous presence of Lenin’s statue in an empty public square and reveals it for what it has become: a monument to a political voice that no longer has an audience. These monuments, as reminders of the past, recall another time that is no longer accessible but is, nonetheless, commingled with the Crimean present.

During my discussions with Turczan about ‘Promise of Recovery’, we talked about where Ukraine was located. Geographically, Ukraine is a country wedged on the border between Western Europe and the former Soviet Union. Turczan gestures subtly towards this liminal geography in the fashion choices of her adolescent subjects. Emblazoned with French and English words like ‘Love’ and ‘Je t’aime,’ this clothing points to an identification with Western European culture. Again, these youth are agents for a betweeness, displaying the regional tensions between East and West.

For Turczan, whose family is Ukrainian, Ukraine is more than a specific country that she has been visiting and photographing for the past 15 years. Ukraine and the Crimea are places that are linked to stories told by her parents and memories from her childhood. To Turczan these photos explore layers of the Crimea’s cultural history through its buildings and locations, and how they come into contact with her personal history. This concept of place exists irrespective of mapped geographical boundaries. While the Crimea is a specific region in a specific country, Turczan photos don’t make any statements for ‘knowing’ it. Instead, the Crimea is a place that is constantly changing, coming-into-being.

Turczan’s ‘Promise of Recovery’ keenly observes a process of transformation by meshing the aftermath of recent Ukrainian history with an extended look at Crimean sanatoria and their communities. In paying particular attention to the future, her work makes room for dialogue amidst a confluence of people, place and history. It asks us to question our own claims to place while also considering change. ‘Promise of Recovery’ is a fascinating metaphor for a healing body that is not about restitution or making things as they once were. After all, healing is generative. Turczan’s Crimea is a body in recovery that in its very recuperation gestures toward possibility, what is not yet there but what could be.

Die Familie Schneider
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Installation & Photos by Gregor Schneider
Essays by James Lingwood, Andrew O'Hagan, and Colm Tóibín

Many of you will remember the ‘Spot the Difference’ photos from your favorite newspaper or magazine. They were usually somewhere in the comic section next to the crossword puzzle and the word scramble. You know, those duplicate photos with just a few differences that you’re meant to find then circle with a pen. With a cursory glance, the photos were almost exactly the same but looking deeper, subtle differences began to emerge – sameness slowly transitioned into deviation.

Die Familie Schneider is an atlas of “Spot the Difference” photos, more than enough to spend the next few days ping-ponging back and forth, jotting down subtle differences. More to the point, Die Familie Schneider documents a recent art installation by the artist Gregor Schneider, commissioned by the London based art initiative Artangel. During the autumn of 2004, Schneider occupied two homes in London’s East End and constructed duplicate interiors to be inhabited by duplicate families. The houses were then opened for visitors to explore in groups of two. Each person was given a key to open either No. 14 or 16 Walden Road and you were allowed ten minutes to explore the homes: walk in the kitchen and watch a woman washing dishes, climb the stairs, peek in the toilet where a man masturbated in the shower, and then descend into the basement crawlspace. After your ten minutes were up, you left the house, switched keys with your visiting partner, then walked into the other house and repeated your exploration.

Schneider’s photos, black and white images laid side by side on opposite pages, document a simultaneous walk through both of the houses. There are a few color shots but, thankfully, he doesn’t belabor a perfectly lit and color corrected photo or create an overly elaborate document of the installation. Instead, imagine flipping through snapshots of a crime scene that has been cleaned. You’re too late and you’ve missed the sequence of events. All that remains are some still stand-ins for an installation that no longer exists and remains only in imprecise memories. Those of you familiar with other installation and performance documentation might appreciate how the book doesn’t try to convince you that this book is the artwork. You might also appreciate that while Schneider’s photos are deliberately casual it is belied by the twinned photo format. The succession of similar yet different photographic pairs transform the previous tone of comforting, effortless documentation into a real uneasiness. Schneider’s construction of exact duplication. combined with the criminal ambience mentioned previously, reconfigures the book as a document into a record of pathological precision and corrupted doubling.

Following the spread of photos are three tangy canapé-sized essays that, in varying degrees, riff off some of the Die Familie Schneider’s aftertastes. Artangel Co-Director James Lingwood very politely takes care of the family-installation introductions. I had the chance to walk through the Die Familie Schneider on two separate occasions and the feeling of haunting and domestic eeriness was palpable and fleeting, I could see it in the stained wallpaper and peeling paint. After putting the key in the lock, opening then closing the door to No. 14 Walden Road, I have never experienced an artwork that so completely cleaves itself, and the viewer, from the outside. Continuing my walk through the house without a host and disregarding the boundaries of etiquette, it felt as if I died and floated through the house. With the tangible sense of dread, and smooth movement between rooms, combined with access to the secrets some of the people are at pains to keep private, you become a ghost. Secrets had been hidden under the rug or pushed into the closets but there was a lingering stench in the air that hinted at what might have happened.

That said, I wasn’t surprised to read Andrew O’Hagan’s essay The Living Rooms and his response to some of the affects and ghosts coursing through the piece. As a participant, you’re drawn into a unique encounter between unresponsive occupants and a space that almost impels you to create a narrative. Contrary to the disconnectedness and emotional emptiness in the houses, Schneider’s work is an encouragement to find something in the space, something to help you understand or a story to explain why the atmosphere has turned so sour. As O’Hagan observes, “[…] a nothingness that one inhabits twice over, and on each occasion you discover a core strangeness about yourself that must be the signature feeling for ghosts. The houses did not frighten me straightforwardly: they made me realize that I myself am capable of being a cause of fear, like the voyeur in the guise of an intruder, like an actor in a nightmare.”

While O’Hagan makes some meaty comments about the installation, he can’t seem to hide an uneasiness with writing about Die Familie Schneider. Although this is a small essay he doesn’t hold back from larding it with sundry references to literary history. We go from citation to citation and the connections he draws are never really unpacked. He drops names—Proust , Dostoevsky, and Joyce—like little bread crumbs to keep him from losing his way through the houses and his own ideas. While there are very distinct narrative spurs running through the work, the Die Familie Schneider installation does not situate itself in relation to specific narratives. Instead, the installation encourages the desire to write, to create narratives that emerge without charting connections to specific authors. Perhaps O’Hagan’s work is haunted, a bit too literally, by the canon of modern literature but it would benefit by accentuating notions of a narrative desire rather than uninterestingly yoking the work to the past.

The second essay, Colm Tóibín’s Two Houses, doesn’t reference Die Familie Schneider directly. It is a fictional-recollection response that keeps the installation very close by, and like O’Hagan, Tóibín begins by opening a door into his personal past with a story about two homes belonging to unnamed relatives that he visited as a child. While he manages to recall plenty of minute details and events, they are paired with memory lapses that fail to make a ‘perfect’ recollection. Caught between knowing and not forgetting, Tóibín accentuates the ineffability of memory, especially as a narrative material. This liminal position of not/knowing adds another form of contested presence to the book, dovetailing nicely with O’Hagan’s ghostly visitors.

Tóibín’s two houses were very different. Bohreen Hill ‘was a serious house where serious things happened.’ It was filled with old patriotic books and magazines, and you can almost rub the dust of the past between your fingers. Munster Hill, on the other hand, ‘was a house of women talking about clothes and holidays,’ a house with a warm, beating heart. Now that they’ve stood vacant for years Tóibín walks through the husks of these homes, touching upon triggers that jog his memory, cleaning out what remains, and advises ‘You are trying also to take photographs with your eyes, to transform the grim tension of dead space into something memorable, useful, with meaning.’ This sentence cogently describes experiencing any performance but strikes at the heart of the Die Familie Schneider book.

After finishing the essays and looking back through the photos, my only guess for putting the essays at the end was to focus on what Schneider’s installation produced. The essays were written and are read in response to the house. That’s a unique take on the catalog format and very refreshing. Still, there’s a lingering thought that think the reason the essays come at the end of the book instead of the front is that Die Familie Schneider was created as a tidy memento for those that have seen the piece rather than an introduction to these strange twins and haunting repetitions.

An Inhabitant of Carcosa
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Written by Ambrose Bierce


Coming to writing, putting the first words of a sentence onto the blank page, is like breaking ground and starting a new path: everything proceeds from this point and will course towards an end. As readers, the same is true for coming to a book. We usually start with page-one don’t we? But for a moment, imagine starting somewhere else, or without a path. Imagine choosing a random place in the narrative and literally dropping yourself into it without knowing ‘what has happened’ in the previous pages or without any means of understanding what comes next. Disorientation.

Ambrose Bierce’s An Inhabitant of Carcosa is a disorienting story but it can also serve as a metaphor for writing and reading. In the span of a just a few pages he tells the story of a person lost in a bleak landscape and manages to imbue the reader with a distinct sense of bewilderment. It is as if the first few pages have been cut-off and the important introductory pages have gone missing. The effect is like being caught in the middle of the story instead of the beginning, and it draws attention to how we, as readers, rely on a certain amount of guidance while suspending our disbelief in the bounds of a story.

Our narrator is lost. He finds himself in an unfamiliar place and is struggling to find his way back home to the city of Carcosa. Wandering around this desert(ed) landscape, he can’t find anyone to help or any reference to lead him in the right direction. What he does find are constant references to decay: dry grass, bare branches, and weather-worn stones. The scene sets an ambient sense of dread, ‘a hint of evil, an intimation of doom’ where everything is ‘ruined.’ While he feels detached and lost in this space, we find out later that, he is in fact, strangely connected to it.

Ruins. Bleached-white bone and the remains of old buildings, like Bierce’s ‘somber-colored rocks’ and ‘tall overgrowth of sere grass,’ are evocative clues to previous civilizations and lives lived. For archaeologists, these cultural fragments are tools to reconstruct and learn about the past. And so while ruins are often used to establish a link with the past, they are full of possibility as well. After all, ruins never disappear. They are always on the verge of disappearing. Being caught in this state of transition, ruins are more than questions waiting for answers. While ruins seem to provide direct access to the past they still reside inextricably within the present and in relation to here-now. Drawing a line between the present and the past is only the beginning. Now, we must ask ourselves, what is to be done with it?

“How came I hither?” The narrator remembers being ill and suffering from a fever. His family was by his side but he was restless and asked for air. Now, suddenly awake, he can only partially interact with the landscape; he tries speaking to a decayed hunter-spirit that rises out of the ground; he hides from a mysterious lynx that approaches then disappears behind a rock; he looks up to guide himself with constellations in the afternoon sky. Stopping for a moment to rest by a tree, he notices how the tree has grown through the grave and the roots have slowly consumed the gravestone. The narrator laments the grave that has been lost, focusing particularly on how the edges of the stone have been worn by time and weather. It is another decaying remnant of the landscape that is both eroding and held firmly to the ground. But this marker is so much more: the narrator reads his name carved in the stone and suddenly finds himself.

This scene upends the notion that gravestones are fixed indexes. Disturbed by the roots, this gravestone no longer marks a burial place by stating a name, birth, and death. Unhinged from the coffin buried beneath, the gravestone has been swallowed but not completely digested by the roots. The gravestone is in a process of slowly being overgrown but also held firmly in place at the same time. This situation signals a form of burial that is locatable yet has become unresolved, a space where people and things are located but not bound to. Our narrator, who wanders unattached to his past, the present, or a future, represents this sort of troubled position between presence and absence: he wanders through Carcosa but is absent from his grave.

It may not come as any surprise when we read that our narrator is a ghost haunting the ruins of the ancient city of Carcosa, or that his story has been recounted through a spiritual medium. Suddenly it becomes clear how Bierce’s narrator practices a kind of haunting movement, whereby the ghost finds itself tied to a location but uniquely absent from it, placed yet on the border of perception. This is where I think Bierce’s narrative sets itself apart from other ghost stories; it explores a notion of a haunted space and movement, not haunted places and locations. More than a haunting narrative, An Inhabitant of Carcosa becomes a metaphor for writing, and possibly, if we can overcome the anxiety of disorientation, a way of being.


[Click the following link for a copy of An Inhabitant of Carcosa]

Night Haunts:
A Nocturnal Journey Through 2006
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Written by Sukhdev Sandhu
www.nighthaunts.org.uk

‘With the vocabulary of objects and well-known words, they [urban narratives] create another dimension, in turn fantastical and delinquent, fearful and legitimating. For this reason, they render the city ‘believable,’ affect it with unknown depths to be inventoried, and open it up to journeys. They are the keys to the city; they give access to what it is: mythical’[1]
-- Michel de Certeau

A living, breathing city is more than tangles of streets and alleys, traffic flows and jams, hidden histories and larger-than-life personalities. Some cities, as they grow and continue to grow, as people think them and write them, become more than collections of lives – they become characters in their own right. It’s as if the millions of words that have been written on the city streets have spilled into the gutters and now course like black blood through pipes and sewers, under streets and behind wallpaper.

Sukhdev Sandhu’s ongoing Night Haunts narrative is an online project and every month he’ll release a dispatch from his forays that will then be posted on the Night Haunts website. Readers can subscribe to the website and be informed when each dispatch is available. On the site, each story is accompanied by a visual collage and sound installation. Sandhu has tapped deep into the flows of London’s stories and streets with Night Haunts, documenting the nocturnal city that continues to move and flow while most of us sleep. London’s city streets have been graffitoed and washed clean thousands of times, yet the city continues to absorb innumerable journeys and to inventory overlapping sojourns. London is a mythical city – and by this I don’t mean to imply that the city is in some way coeval with Atlantis and Babylon or that its history has somehow placed it beyond the realm of the real. London’s status as a city that has remained itself through millennia of change has created a mythology about it, with and through contemporary realities. That is, a multitude of stories have been written about London but it also contains stories that have yet to be written.

Having recently relocated to Minneapolis from London, I’m constantly trying to acquaint myself with the city. Instead of spending hours driving through the streets and pounding the sidewalks, I’ve found other means to look under the city’s surface and learn what lies beneath. Many of the Minneapolis and Minnesota blogs and vlogs like MN Stories and Perfect Duluth Day use journalistic or documentary formats that provide news and insight into unique personalities and sub-cultures: they don’t, though, ask any questions about the city itself and its diverse communities, languages, and ethnic realities. In seeking to look further into Minneapolis, or any city, how might an online project like Night Haunts help us reconfigure our ideas of our own urban histories and spaces?

The idea of the mythical city is well-suited to the starry constellation that serves as the Night Haunts site map. From the opening page, what we see is a kind of narrative constellation that makes its way through the night sky. The chart is different during each visit to the site: points are arranged across the sky in an ever-shifting line from beginning to middle to end. Each star that appears on the opening screen of the site represents a story. The string of these stars, as a new one appears each month, will eventually draw a line through the night sky of the screen.

Constellations, as we know from ancient myths, are groups of stars mapped over the night sky that create some sense and order out of an infinite multitude. Tied as they are to mythological story telling, constellations are also a form of writing. They aren’t just random shapes drawn in the sky but actually organize the night sky into a text where myths are written and read, and move across the evening sky looking down from above. As shapes rather than words, each constellation stands for a character rather than a complete story. In locating Orion by his belt of three stars perhaps we can be reminded of his stories of heroic strength. The same is true of Night Haunts but instead of looping back on itself in order to create a closed form like Orion or the Big Dipper, the Night Haunts project is a collection of unfurling narrative points without an end.

While Sandhu presents his constellation map as if each story lies across the night sky like a mythological technology, his work, I think, also maps a walk across London’s pitch-black nighttime topography. As a nocturnal flâneur, Sandhu writes his stories at the street level. After one chooses a point in the site map, that map disappears, leaving room for only Sandhu’s forays. His words emerge slowly onto the screen and emphasize their appearance, drawing attention to the darkness as they amble across the page. Under the cover of darkness, the Night Haunts walk an irregular path through the city without references to the named streets, central squares, and magnetic monuments that mark out London’s familiar tourist landscape. This is an episodic pedestrian narrative, its events presented in isolation, and there is no obvious link between the sites that Night Haunts visits. In other words, Night Haunts is a poetic topography, as opposed to a literal city map. Readers must create their own narrative connections from place to place.

In addition to the written stories, Night Haunts also includes visual and sound design components that open up London’s sensory presence. The city is not reduced to text. Instead, the text is complemented and read in concert with ambient visuals and sounds that sometimes work together, and often times don’t, in order to create a livelier foray into the night. While Sandhu’s texts seem to describe a situation or place, the sounds that accompany it are more ambient and atmospheric. As for the pixels and images lying behind the text, they come into a nice proximity with the words in order to highlight that they are overlaid and temporary, part of an impermanent placement that will be written over, erased, then written over once again.

A ‘palimpsest’ was a manuscript page that had had its previous text scraped off in order to be reused; sometimes the previous text could be still seen through the new one. This project is a similar palimpsest. Its layers of traces are metaphoric for the city that is written on: both as an inscribable surface and as the subject of a text. As we move through each page of Sandhu’s forays, the text does not remain for long before it is effaced by another page and new atmospheric sounds. The critical difference between this piece and a palimpsest is that there aren’t any traces of the old text remaining to be read through what is currently on display. Sandhu is not working on an implicitly historical project of archeological recovery and sedimented narratives. His project is affective, akin to walking through the city with a miner’s helmet, shining a light on the city’s dark and tender corners.

When we click on the individual dispatches that Sandhu has written, how are they different from the other sorts of ‘landmarks’ or stories that we normally use to understand or navigate through a city? Sandhu says that he will be ‘moving over newer nocturnal topographies’; Night Haunts explores the city of London via previously unexplored paths and locations. In Avian Police Sandhu flies about the city in a police helicopter, spying on the people and buildings below. In Night Cleaners, he accompanies the semi-invisible street sweepers along their evening rounds in an elaboration of the English domestic worker tradition. In each foray, Sandhu positions himself within one of London’s nocturnal micro-communities and writes with them instead of simply looking at them. Other forays describe a sensory topography that is woven into the physical geography of London. In Loneliness, Sandhu writes to chart the desperation and depression that circulates through the city at 3am, ‘the hour of the wolf.’ The Samaritan volunteers at a phone bank patiently tele-collect the loneliness that arrives from the city’s aching nerve endings, turning their Soho office into a sort of urban ganglion, attached to the outside’s wounds via phone lines.

There is still more to come. Night Haunts is an ongoing project. There are a few tantalizing clues to where we’ll find Sandhu over the next few months but I’m sure we’ll continue to be surprised by London’s specificity and by its proximate virtuality.


ENDNOTES
1.Michel de Certeau. Ghosts in the City in The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998: 142.

A Semblance of Life:
The Art of Post-Mortem Photography
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October 15, 2005 – January 15, 2006
Hennepin Historical Museum
Minneapolis, MN

A Semblance of Life: the Art of Post-Mortem Photography, now on at the Hennepin Historical Museum, is your chance to gaze at death. In these photos you will see portraits and poses, caressing and cradling, people laying down or sitting. In other words, you’ll recognize the common body language of everyday family photography. But all the while you have to keep reminding yourself that the common denominator of all these photos is death. These are post-mortem photographs. Due to the prohibitive costs of photography in the late 19th-early 20th century, photographs were reserved for only special occasions. In this case, the photos in this exhibit taken shortly after (and sometimes before) relatives passed away from disease or old age.

There is a special attention paid to the dead body but there is something else happening here. In addition to indexing the death that is located in each of these photos, this exhibit avoids simply fulfilling a morbid fascination with death by providing a backward glance to a time when death, while no less traumatic to surviving relatives, was more immanent than we are used to today. Grief and mourning are written all over the surface of these photos and I’ve tried to read through the tears of the relatives that these mothers, children (so many children), and brothers left behind. But other times, I’m left without anything to say; in a fascinating reversal of the Pietà, one photo shows a baby sitting with her dead mother. The baby stares directly into the camera but her mother’s eyelids and lips are tautly shut, her hands closed into limp fists.

After spending some time with these photos, a few questions come to mind: do these images represent how the dead would want to be remembered to the living or, are they how the dead are remembered by the living? Taking in to account the obvious staging of the photos, are we looking at physical reminders of past lives, or are they a certain kind of memorial, a memorial that is somehow un-monumental? Death leaves a physical absence in the family and these photos, in addition to being fascinating historical documents, also evidence a curious anxiety to preserve a relative’s likeness at the last moment it is possible. As quickly as dead bodies are removed from their homes, buried in the ground, and left to decay, so too will the memories of them eventually fail to close the distance between then and now.

Over time, the post-mortem format evolved and the dead are almost lost amidst larger groups of relatives and boughs of flowers. It becomes clear that the photos are less attentive to the mourning of the recently deceased and more about preserving the broken family unit and overcoming the failures of memory. Fast forward to the present: think how easy it is for us to create family photos albums, how different we would remember relatives if it weren’t possible to create visual archives until someone had died, until they were gone forever.


[ This article originally appeared in The Pulse of the Twin Cities newspaper, 16 November, 2005.]