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