Greets everyone.
The exhibition "World of Matter" opened on February 20 in Montreal:
http://ellengallery.concordia.ca/en/expositions_worldofmatter.php
This exceptionally philosophical exhibition on global agriculture and
extraction technologies is also a web platform,
http://www.worldofmatter.net. In my view, the website represents a
definitive breakthrough for open and free access to socially significant
art.
Below is my review of the show as it was recently presented in New York.
The illustrated and linked version of the review is here:
http://midwestcompass.org/something-that-has-to-do-with-life-itself
**********************
"Something that has to do with life itself"
A review of *World of Matter*
CUNY Graduate Center, New York, 9/1-11/1, 2014 / by Brian Holmes
How to face the natural crisis of global society? How to engage with the
overwhelming material conditions of the Anthropocene? In the year 2014,
awareness of human-induced global warming seemed to reach a kind of
planetary tipping-point. Yet earlier experiences like the Fukushima
meltdown, the BP oil spill or the flooding of New Orleans show that
profound shocks to consciousness can be erased by dull, everyday
reinforcements of the industrial norm. The point is to go beyond just
reacting to the next inevitable blowout. If we want to break the cycle
of disaster, public outcry and induced denial, then changes in our
mental maps, or indeed, in our shared cosmologies, must be followed by
transformations of our social institutions. Maybe it's not such a bad
idea to begin exactly where World of Matter does, with the institutions
of representation. At stake is the relation between the capacity to make
images of worldly things and the capacity to remake an inhabitable world.
I would like to open this review with a philosophical proposal. The link
between image and world is at the heart of what the philosopher
Cornelius Castoriadis calls the "imaginary institution of society." For
him, the radical imaginary is "the capacity to posit that which is not,
to see in something that which is not there." But the question is not
*whether* this is done, for all societies are so instituted. The
question is *what* do we invent, how do we see the world? How do we
institute a new territory, a new reality? If we could learn to perceive
other things than the objects of our desires, other beings than
ourselves alone, then the radical imagination could provide the missing
key to a currently unthinkable planetary democracy. For Castoriadis,
emancipation is the process whereby the collective self (autos) creates
its own laws (nomos). This is done, not only through negociation over
meaningful words, but also through the circulation of affective images.
As he writes: "I call autonomous a society that not only knows
explicitly that it has created its own laws but has instituted itself so
as to free its radical imaginary and enable itself to alter its
institutions through collective, self-reflective, and deliberate activity."
Today the societies of the so-called developed world have no such
autonomy. We cannot even imagine the collectivity, let alone the laws or
the norms that could resolve the natural crisis of global society. The
very possibility of change remains invisible, like a spirit in a rock
that you can't see. Yet that missing spirit may have everything to do
with your own material survival. A foundational role awaits for artistic
images at grips with the planetary real.
The exhibition and web platform World of Matter follows crisscrossed
paths through a number of major processes whereby humans are
transforming the land, the water and the atmosphere. For this ongoing
visual research, a core group of some ten authors carries out
documentary probes, cartographic renderings, scientific explorations and
juridical analyses of worldly matters that include oil and mineral
extraction, industrialized and organic agriculture, dams, water-works
and fisheries. The results so far have been shown in Dortmund, Germany,
and at the CUNY Graduate center in New York, with further showings
coming up in Montreal and Minneapolis. The majority of the videos,
photographs, maps and texts can be consulted at www.worldofmatter.net.
They focus on human and non-human actors, at scales from macro to micro.
Let's start from the beginning: Ursula Biemann's Egyptian Chemistry,
which opens the tightly packed exhibition in New York. We're greeted by
a display of laboratory flasks and beakers, echoing a video image
projected high against the back of the gallery, showing a white-coated
scientist manipulating the same equipment. A tracery of the meandering
Nile runs laterally along deep blue walls, guiding the eye toward a
lower projection that shows casually dressed locals gathering water
samples from the river bank. To the right, three small monitors hang in
a row, head high, each with dangling headphones. The invitation is
clear: it's time to take the plunge into complex narratives. At stake in
each fragmentary sequence is the overwhelming agency of the river, whose
bounteous and destructive floods have given rise to the water-management
projects of successive "hydraulic civilizations." How does the Nile flow
today?
With delicately chosen documentary clips informed by off-screen or
full-face interviews, the videos tell of dam-building campaigns,
irrigation technologies, peasant struggles in the countryside and
scientific testing and modeling of the river's currents. The atmospheric
physicist Carl Hodges describes utopian schemes to plant
carbon-absorbing mangroves in seawater canals for the production of
food, animal feed and biofuels. Standing ankle deep in the tide with his
sport coat and jaunty leather hat, Hodges rejoins the long line of
Faustian inventors and developers portrayed in Marshall Berman's
scathingly critical book, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. A scandalous
sense of hubris gathers around those who want to change the very face of
the earth, or in this case, to lay their own hand on the waters. Yet in
the face of famines and penuries to come, one can also feel inspired by
this visionary scientist.
Other modernization campaigns - like making the desert bloom with
irrigation and antibiotics - do not look anywhere near so good. We see
the tubes and wheels of an automated sprinkler rolling across parched
soil like the skeleton of some silvery dinosaur. Eschewing pyramids or
mummies and looking from the present to the future, Biemann evokes the
processes of coevolution that have fashioned the Egyptian landscape.
Inside a warehouse-like structure we see scale models of the flowing
river and its associated control devices (dams, locks, hydroelectric
power generators, etc). Fragmentary captions flash up on the screen:
"Millennia of engineers / who measure and calculate / draw plans and
build models." We are being asked to conceive how the mind articulates
vast material transformations.
This show has it own very powerful philosophical debate, provided by
thinkers like Michel Serres, Donna Haraway, Graham Harman, Timothy
Morton, Jane Bennet and Bruno Latour. At the close of Ursula Biemann's
series, in a 2012 video that is not on the website, Harman himself
appears against the chemical background of tear gas floating into the
compound of Cairo's American University where he teaches. The key
concepts of Harman's object-oriented ontology are evoked in a few
phrases. "All knowledge is oblique, all knowledge is an allusion," he
says. In this ontology - which is also called "speculative realism" -
objects inevitably withdraw from direct access. Things exist
autonomously, on their own terms; they are irreducible to the vagaries
of our perception. Yet by the same token, "any real relation
automatically becomes a new object" - that is to say, a mental
phenomenon, a thing for humans, or what Castoriadis might call a figment
of the radical imaginary. "That's the political level," Harman explains,
wiping his eyes against the tear gas. "But I would also say that I do
not feel the need to ground everything in politics. This idea that the
cash value of any political philosophy is its political virtues is in a
way the last phase of correlationist philosophy."
Cash values aside, it's very hard to see how any valid philosophy could
elude contemporary politics. But Biemann translates Harman's thinking
into her own exploratory practice, attentive to the complex
actor-networks that shape the Nile ecology. The point is to pay
attention to the things themselves, to look outside the closure of
specific cultural frames. Then we become aware of new agencies. As we
read on the gallery wall: "Metachemistry is a planetary narration that
alludes to the earth as a mighty chemical body where the crackling noise
of the forming and breaking of molecular bonds can be heard at all
times." So where does metachemistry touch political flesh?
Turn the corner for one answer. A giant Dymaxion map spreads out above a
vitrine filled with texts and objects. On Buckminster Fuller's
defamiliarizing cartography, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer have
located container ship bottlenecks, rare earth deposits, oil and
immigration choke points - geographical sites where the limits to global
growth become starkly evident. Each dot on the map warns of future
crises. "It is here that we find the call for a new ecological
understanding coalescing with the call for a new political economy,"
reads the wall text. Technoscience makes the molecular global. Case
studies of disaster-prone environments are presented in the vitrines
below, initiating us to a vertiginous telescoping of scales.
Take a few steps further: images of huge, highly rationalized fields
spring into view. You're flying in the air, you're trapped inside an
endless factory, you're gazing on night-dark furrows stippled with
bright flocks like snow. Below these large projections, a line-up of
four small monitors guides you though a planet planted in cotton. From
Brazil to India to Texas to Burkina Faso, Uwe Martin conducts
reportage-style interviews with peasants, so-called "conventional"
farmers, agro-ecological researchers, organic pioneers and the food
activist Vandana Shiva. Gradually you realize that this distant subject
is really very close to your own skin. The global scale shrinks down to
the shirt you are wearing. The planter Gilsen Pinesso recounts how he
transferred GMO methods from Brazil to the rich black soil of the Sudan,
where he was invited by a government minister. For ten uncomfortable
minutes, a cotton-grower from the Global South looks us straight in the
eye and talks pure corporate strategy. "The Sudanese farmers will take
some time to internalize all this know-how, all this technology," he
explains, predicting a ten-year lapse before they complete their
rendezvous with capitalist destiny.
Those trained in the subtleties of contemporary art tend to shudder when
they encounter this kind of blunt reportage. Rightly so: because it
reveals, or even embodies, the banal and continuous violence that links
us all into the contemporary division of labor.
In the past, vanguard political artists engaged their struggles by means
of shocking divides, in symbolic portrayals of military conflicts,
sexual rifts, labor hierarchies, commodity fetishes and excluded or
self-assertive others. For them, ideology was understood in
structuralist terms, as a violently deterministic relation between
individual lives and fundamental symbolic categories. The role of the
artist or theorist was to lift the veil of particulars and show these
structures at work in your own life. At best, an existential
breakthrough might open the floodgates of emancipation. The artists in
World of Matter take a very different approach. They develop an
ecological vision that includes human involvement at every turn. By
focusing on concrete geographical relations such as the circulation of
goods, technologies and scientific concepts, they trace out a metonymic
skein that ultimately forces us to recognize ourselves as functioning
parts of the global whole. The shock, if that's still the word, comes
not from a split but a suture. We are all Gilsen Pinesso, but each with
our particular specialties. The coherence of the global system is the
radical imaginary of contemporary capitalism itself: a pervasive
just-in-time economy whose ubiquitous flow-objects are not only at your
fingertips, but also inside you, as world-pictures that you continually
recreate and propagate through your professional activity. Ideology is
neither a veil nor a pair of heavy chains, but an actively maintained
connection between endless sequences of images. At the root (at the
radical level) the capitalist world economy is a socially instituted
fiction.
Yet reality, as Harman reminds us, remains distinct from all merely
human correlations. The strength of World of Matter is to present
itself, not as fully integrated single narrative, but as distinct and
recombinable files, fragmentary testimonies from a hearing that is still
in progress. Its strength to let the world break down into real
complexity, so that "the crackling noise of the forming and breaking of
molecular bonds can be heard at all times." So how does chemistry
dissolve into materialist politics?
Sit down to Paulo Tavares' work: Non-Human Rights. Now you're in for a
long and fascinating journey through the indigenous struggles of the
1990s in Ecuador, leading up to the country's new 2008 Constitution
which recognized the rights of nature, or better, of La Pachamama.
Scenes of rural protesters and landscapes devastated by oil and mineral
extraction alternate with quotations from the Michel Serres' 1900 book,
The Natural Contract. Look at the settling ponds in the jungle, where
Texaco pumped billions of gallons of toxic effluents from its wells. As
indigenous activist Luis Macas recounts: "We're fighting for something
that has to do with life itself." But that living reality is inseparable
from a cultural idea. At the end of the video, Tavares addresses himself
directly to the environmentalist Esperanza Martínez: "It is said that
Modernity is that system in which there is one nature and various
cultures, right? But what you are saying is different. There exist
various different natures." "Yes," she replies. "Precisely as many as
there are cultures."
A subtle tension runs throughout this project, between the
anthropological claim that human groups create their own distinct worlds
and the central philosophical claim of object-oriented ontology, which
is that reality withdraws from any merely human correlation. This
contradiction between the two approaches becomes explicit in Tavares'
video, where the scenes of extractivist devastation are preceded by
inter-titles evoking "object-oriented violence." Again this is a
reference to Michel Serres, who forcefully shows how human beings make
war on the rest of the living world. But it is also an attack on
object-oriented thinking. The implication is that philosophy must never
neglect its ecological context, lest it participate in unbearable
atrocities.
Nonetheless, Graham Harman's philosophy is vindicated in this same work,
although in terms he would probably not himself accept. For the "natural
contract" of which it is question here springs into being through the
recognition of hitherto ignored and discounted material things - rocks,
trees, soil, air - which the indigenous people conceive as inseparable
from "spirits of the forest." There is foundational potential in that
which withdraws from Western instrumental rationality.
I began this review with the notion of the radical imaginary: a raw
psychic representation of the world which is normed and stabilized by
social institutions, but which can also break away, reconfigure itself
and take new roots among the community of living beings - on the
condition that social institutions are themselves transformed to match
the new vision. For Castoriadis, that transformation begins when
individuals and groups start to recognize that the only guarantee of
their own autonomy, of their own emancipation and pathway to a good
life, is to be found in common norms and laws that guarantee good living
for others. What World of Matter tries to do - with some help from both
Michel Serres and the speculative realists - is to extend this
democratic process to non-humans.
Let's close with a short proposal by Mabe Bethonico, an
artist-researcher from Belo Horizonte, Brazil. It's the "Museum of
Public Concerns," improvised on the ground in the face of the
privatization of cultural institutions by mining companies in the
Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The recipe for institutional autonomy
is disarmingly simple: involve sociologists, media theorists,
anthropologists and artists in the creation of a mobile museum that
could present precisely those things that corporate culture skips over -
notably the histories of oil and mineral extraction. Plans unfold on the
video screen for a DIY display structure that looks eminently practical.
Only such an activist approach can deal with "matters of public
concern." Yet what else is World of Matter doing, on a website and in a
university rather than out on the streets?
There may be an invitation here. Download the videos, put them on your
bicycle or solar-powered vehicle, and show them to everyone you meet.
Treat them just like material things that have to do with life itself.
It's high time to make a break with our own normalized ways of creating
and propagating world-pictures. Don't imagine the apocalypse, that's old
hat. Just bring your radical imagination to focus on the end of global
capitalism.
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