January 20, 2009
amnesia
[All images below are from the San Francisco MoMA's permanent collection, with the exception of the first, which merely offers a sense of On Kawara's work; the museum's Kawara on display is dated March 16, 1993. The accompanying notes were commissioned by the Museum for their "Collection Rotation" with no brief other than to write something in relation to items selected from the permanent collection; it was then declined (by parties more highly-placed at the Museum) expressly on grounds of political content]
As my own memory begins to craze like a tea cup I need art to remember for me more and more. I am thinking particularly of an old blue and white teacup, its surface finally fissured, nested unevenly within a similar cup sitting above a sink toward the back of a house in Coyoacan, a house that is a museum hosted by the ephebes of a dead man, an image that I suspect will be the very last thing I remember. The teacup is a memory, and an image of memory, but it’s not art, or it is art, however this doesn’t strike me as a productive debate. The point is, I need art to remember for me and it has many kinds of memory and counter-memory, but it has just as many ways of forgetting.
The occasion – this occasion, Inauguration Day – is a kind of art that way: it remembers and forgets. Art and commemoration are never far apart, nor art and amnesia; this is near the core of On Kawara’s blank dates, perfectly historical but contentless. It must find its content in relation to other things, other moments, "external" history. The one on display in San Francisco, dated March of 1993, can't help but gesture at the beginning of another presidency — a beginning that this inauguration remembers and forgets. The idea that today’s new president campaigned to the center but will move to the left once in office is a kind of amnesia: the same claim was made word for word on behalf of the previous supposedly progressive president and swiftly proved delusory. Of course it is not just the incoming president who helps us forget this fact, but the outgoing president as well; surely it is a small matter to appear progressive in comparison, to take on that aspect both in the present and in memory. But it was Bill Clinton who in 1996 signed the Defense of Marriage Act — a choice the Inauguration forgets and recalls with the appointment of Rick Warren to bless today’s events. In 1993, Bill Clinton consecrated his move to the right, not to the left, by engineering the passage of NAFTA, a pivotal moment in the increasing global inequality between the rich and the poor. Today’s occasion, a moment shared by the audience and the players, seems intent on forgetting this; at the same time it recollects the history resolutely, as the architects, bagmen, and children of NAFTA take the dais with the new president, as his team. In some regard the museum collection too is a memory of NAFTA, and the FTAA and the World Bank and the IMF.
Adidas currently seeks to shift manufacture to Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam; the monthly wage at factories supplying Adidas in El Salvador is almost exactly equal to the minimum cost of basic foodstuffs for one month. This is not to point out that museums shouldn’t have nifty running shoes on display, but that the shoes are trying to remember and trying to forget certain things because they are real artworks that way. If there is a question, it seems to me that question might be “under what conditions might we find running shoes so aesthetically appealing that it seems reasonable to encounter them in a world-class museum?”
It’s nor art because it’s pretty. Art — any art, not just the plastic arts — is charged with the conditions of its making and its display, with the hand of the artist or with that hand’s absence. The object is a moment that has survived its moment. I remember being struck, when I visited the then-new museum building and its collection, by the remarkable array of desks, work chairs, and like items from the modern workplace: a memory of the fact that the new SFMOMA was born of the local-global history that gave birth to cubicle culture 2.0, and a recollection also that in one version of the global imaginary, San Francisco is a suburb of Silicon Valley. Or so it seemed in 1995. Such items seem to occupy a far smaller portion of the public display these days as that memory fades away; 1995 isn’t coming back again. The thousand dollar desk chair isn’t coming back either.
Once shoes and art belonged to the same process. The historical moment when a person made a shoe from start to finish, a single process resulting in a singular object, is largely lost to human memory. That conception of making survives — despite Duchamp, despite Benjamin and Barthes — in the broad, aggressvely vague category of art. The myth of the artist, the author, the singular maker has not been eradicated by theory. In 2000, a class action suit was filed against Donna Karan, Inc. The five listed plaintiffs did not live in a third world country; they were all New York residents, legal Chinese immigrants. They, and the shoes, and the parts from which the shoes were made, moved though the space of flows that we called the world. The report from the Center for Economic and Social Rights released a report on Donna Karan Inc.’s human rights violations, titled “Treated Like Slaves.”
I am writing this on an iPhone.
And so, to pick up a thread — writing is an aid to memory — this ideal of art, of making, finds itself more and more separated from the mode of production. This space opened between modes, this difference between art-making and shoe-making, is not an intrinsic characteristic of art; it is a fact with a history. Perhaps art is to be celebrated for preserving some conception of unitary making: preserving it in the face of alienation, fragmentation, separation. Or perhaps art is to be doubted for dissembling — for disguising what has been lost from the world beyond the fantasia of the museum. Art as preservation of the space of autonomous action, art as fig leaf on the naked domination of everyday life: the dialectic of these two possibilities is the engine of modern art. Or one of them. It is not between van Gogh’s shoes and Andy Warhol’s, but between the Converse in the museum collection and the Bien Hoa plant in Vietnam, which supplies parts for Nike (Converse’s owner since 2003).
I am not merely trying to point out with heavy irony that some people suffer while others go to the museum. I too find these objects appealing. Finding them appealing reminds me — this is all that can be meant by memory — that I am part of this transnational series of exchanges, tensions, this historical drama of NAFTA, of ever-opening markets, of the fight for the underdeveloped world. The photo from the Vietnam war, so famous I can almost remember it, wants to be a memory too — thus Vik Muniz’s title Memory Rendering of Saigon Execution (made in 1990, a punctuation to the last progressive presidency). His drawing is a memory, and an image of memory for all its fine cracks, like a teacup on a ledge. It remembers some things and distorts others and forgets the rest: the figures at the far margins of the original photo missing, the storefronts in the background fallen into fog. Only the two figures survive in the memory-piece, shooter and shot, both named Nguyen. The gunman’s body here somehow more heroic than in the original photo, the shoulders sturdier, like a soviet peasant after Zhdanov. The event here is mythic. It does not have a history, and it does. It was local, but it was also a policy outcome. We were on one of the sides in this picture; we were on the left. Has the essential thing been remembered or forgotten? And this question too moves through the space of flows along which art and images and workers and shoes travel, I remember and forget this all the time.
