Textual pleasures

I was asked to write something for this blog. More, I think, because I travel a lot, than because I am an expert about art. Like a lot of people, I spend a lot of time looking at images and thinking about them, but I have no qualifications, either as a maker of art or as a connoisseur. So I will have to stick with my status as a traveler. I’m now on a plane, traveling from Conakry, on the West Coast of Africa, to Berlin, one of the capitals of late capitalism, if that’s what it is….

The images that haunt me from the exhibition are Youssef Nabil’s and Lalla Essaydi’s. When I was asked to write this, I visited the web page for the exhibit. I was immediately drawn to Nabil’s photos, and my reaction was instantaneous: ‘Cindy Sherman meets Proust.’ I wasn’t sure what I meant. As I read the biographies of the artists, I learned that Nabil grew up in Cairo during ‘the golden era of Hollywood on the Nile’, so I felt that the film-still quality of his photos was obviously not accidental. The hand-colored photos also call to mind old postcards. Like other souvenirs, postcards distill our sense of longing—for a place, for its smells and sights, for the people (or a particular person) living there. As Susan Stewart writes, the souvenir uses narrative to bring together longing and the desire to possess.

Place, desire, narrative. This is where Proust enters. Nabil’s photos are soaked with an aura of male sexual desire, to be sure. He has taken care to color himself in the hues of ripe fruit, rather than human skin. But the relationship between desire and travel is equally foregrounded. It’s strange the ways that different languages encode the relationship. In German, the lust attributed to travel is the itch to be elsewhere. In Portuguese, the depressive eroticism of saudade is the longing to be home. In Mande societies of West Africa, it is the play between ‘mother child-ness’ and ‘father child-ness’ that have driven generations of young men since Sundiata toward l’aventure, that particularly West African usage in French that both engages and challenges bourgeois notions of the romance inherent in travel.

This has been a long trip. New Haven to Johannesburg via Hartford, Atlanta, Dakar. Jo’burg to Dakar. Dakar to Conakry. Conakry to Berlin via Casablanca and Frankfurt. When I’m on a long trip like this I sometimes bring worn out items—socks with a hole in them, a tube of toothpaste that’s almost finished—and leave them behind, fully exhausted. I get strange satisfaction from the idea that my bags are getting infinitesimally lighter. All the more so when I travel to West Africa, where I’ve lived for many years—then, my bags are always half-full with gifts, letters, small packages. Some are from me, others from mutual friends who don’t want to let Western Union take a cut of their money, or don’t trust the postal system. In a way, this is the same dynamic as the postcard, only backward. The longing for narration, inscription, a concrete trace of human affection, is as much a part of what we leave behind as what we pick up in the airport gift shop. Essaydi’s photos, filled with writing, also evoke this urge. I love art that incorporates words. Especially Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jenny Holzer. As an academic, I’m biased towards texts. But from the angle of art reception, I also like the way that textual incorporation disturbs the one-way street of art appreciation and connoisseurship, which are, after all, just euphemisms for ownership. I would not like to have to write wall panels for such art, which has already provided its own caption. Le plaisir du texte, indeed.

—Michael McGovern, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Yale University

On people and passing, home and away

As I was planning the exhibition Far from Home I took great care to capture the themes of displacement, dislocation, relocation, and transformation from various perspectives. For instance, in some cases the person or subjects of the work are people that have relocated during their lifetimes; in others, the artists themselves have moved from one place to another, and this informs their work. In still other cases, my own reading of the work relates it to the topic, and is one of many possible interpretations, as is often possible with modern and contemporary art.

In my first blog entry, I ended by posing the question, what is ‘home”, and what makes it so? I write this later entry with this question in mind, because I recently became acutely aware of one facet that I had not considered while preparing the exhibition—at least, that I hadn’t consciously addressed. That is the role that a person or people, specifically family, can play in making a place ‘home’.

This facet came strikingly to the fore for me last month with the recent passing of my grandfather, age 92, in Toledo, Ohio. Toledo is very much one of our family’s homes, even for those of us who did not actually live there (most of the grandchildren). It was always home, in a sense, because Grandma and Grandpa were there and, in our minds, always had been. Following my grandfather’s death, I went to visit my grandmother for a week, though not in Toledo; she took some time away shortly after Grandpa died, and went to Florida’s Gulf Coast where my aunt and uncle have a second home. This, then, is where I went to visit her, and we spent many hours together, both speaking and in silence.

This physical displacement itself is not what called to mind the idea of displacement inherent the exhibition, however. Instead, it was the conversations I had with Gram there. During that time, Gram mentioned that she was grateful to have a place to get away following the harrowing loss, and couldn’t imagine going back without Grandpa there—in effect, it would no longer be home, so what was the point? After 67 years of marriage, the concept of 'home' had become inseparable from this person who was no longer there, sitting in his iconic (within our family, at least) olive green, mid-century modern leather chair and ottoman.

In retrospect, I wonder whether this was a gross oversight in my own planning of the exhibition, one borne of my unmarried status and itinerant life in which my family has always been far away from me. It sounds rather strange to me now, but only once in my adult life—a span of 3 years in Washington, DC, where I was surrounded by family as well as friends from several different stages of my life all within a few blocks or a few miles—has home ever been associated with people rather than with place or work.

For those five days in Florida last month, though, I did feel at home, because I was living with Gram, planning our days together, mostly what to have for breakfast and scavenging the beach for shells when her energy permitted and other such banalities. Otherwise we reclined in chairs by the waves excavating the past and speculating about our futures, and sharing daily activities together, as well as with my aunt, uncle, cousin-in-law, and her children—all this in a place that was wholly unfamiliar to me.

Even though this exhibition, its nuances and content are intimately familiar to me, in the last several weeks I find that I have started to revisit the Far from Home galleries more frequently given this profound shift in my own thinking, and I see things very differently. This transformation of my view of the exhibition makes me wonder what other people have seen in the show that I missed in the planning process, but may still lie beneath the surface. For example, I appreciate an aspect of Youssef Nabil’s work that he discussed during his lecture last night at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he related his self-portrait work to a longstanding preoccupation death, sleep, and peacefulness as closely allies, and the notion that being far from home one day will mean moving onto the hereafter, whatever that may be.

—Kinsey Katchka, curator of Far from Home