le journal de la triennale

Okwui Enwezor

Topographies of Critical Practice: Exhibitions as Place and Site

Barthélémy Toguo Looking in the Mirror

#5

p. 03 p. 08

Christine Barthe

The Artwork-Document, the Journal, and the Archive: Distinct Projects p.20

Terry Adkins

Nutjuitok (Polar Star) After Matthew Henson

p. 22

Stephan Köhler

A Dimension To Explore – Georges Adéagbo As A Writer and Historian

p. 28

Georges Adéagbo

Texts

p. 32

Okwui Enwezor

Art History and Its Discontents: Reconfiguring the Museum’s Permanent Collection – Conversation with Catherine Grenier p. 40

Minouk Lim

Portable Keepers

p. 46

Markus Müller

The King Is Gone But He’s Not Forgotten

p. 52

Jean-Christophe Marti

Discover and Restore the Music of Julius Eastman: the Trilogy Evil Nigger, Gay Guerrilla, Crazy Nigger p. 55



Contributors Credits / Colophon

p. 58 p. 60

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Editorial — by Okwui Enwezor

topographies of critical practice: exhibitions as place and site

To walk through an exhibition such as La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, an exhibition, which despite its intentionally conceived miscellany of projects, practices, methodologies, and concepts, and packed with a profusion of images, objects, techniques, and sounds, but which nevertheless remain on the threshold of the cognitive and phenomenological is to feel as if one is wandering through a forest of signs. It further underscores the fact that the opportunity to engage a range of issues that constitute the vital stakes in the practice, theory, and production of exhibitions is a reminder that every field or discipline requires a frame, or, perhaps, a concatenation of frames within which theoretical reflections and historical analyses can be made. In this short introduction to the final edition of Le Journal de La Triennale, my frame of analysis concerns a field generally defined as curatorial practice. I am not sure if the designation naturally fits all that can be said about the intellectual production of exhibitions and the cultural and epistemological assumptions that underpin it.

My queries in what follows may not necessarily begin with issues of disciplinary identification, but instead will focus on what at first might be understood as limiting forms of identification that concern the intellectual biography of the curator working in the enlarged geopolitical and global framework of today’s contemporary art disciplines. For the purposes of this text, my focus is on contemporary African art and some of the curatorial discourses supporting its public dissemination. This is a field in which a large part of my curatorial energies have, in more than two decades, been invested. However, the investment as personal as it might sometimes appear in the course my curatorial biography has taken, is nevertheless, above all else on a disciplinary and tactical level. Contemporary African art is a fraught disciplinary concept, but also, more importantly, a fraught geopolitical concept. No country in the world understands better the fraught analytical, conceptual, political, and historical questions concerning African art than France. And no city has played a more paradigmatic role in the uses of the codes of African art than Paris. If I have focused on contemporary African art in this introduction it is because of the deep historical entanglement between France and Africa, between French ethnographic production and Africa as a resource and backdrop for the types of institutionally supported research through which Africa has come to be known. The story is a long one. But a more simplified narrative places its beginning at the dawn of modernism. And modernism here was not just the name given to a style of art, but a whole eschatology; a weltanschauung on which the discourse of contemporary art is constructed.

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Topographies of Critical Practice: Exhibitions as Place and Site

Given this historical context, it is a fact of African critical practice that the disciplinary identification with contemporary African art occurred for many institutions and curators outside Africa, at a much later stage of curatorial development than it did for the more contextualist perspective of Western art history or of exhibitions in advanced capitalist societies in the West. While Western contemporary art — European and American art specifically — enjoyed robust programmatic contextualizations through disciplinary, stylistic, and periodizing structures, the wide scale introduction of contemporary African art to the global public was primarily based on a narrower culturalist viewpoint, rather than on a disciplinary perspective. In this view, the African aesthetic context was nothing like the high-minded intricacy of Western art, but was, rather, the space of a culturalist conception of art. In other words a world full of art and no artists. The looming dichotomy in the culturalist idea of African critical practice can be succinctly delineated in the jagged cut that separates our notions of the authentic from the inauthentic: The one is properly African because it reminds viewers of what Africa is supposed to be, and the other is not African because it confuses viewers with its hybrid, westernized ideas of aesthetics. This is an old issue. The business at hand is far more limited than the generally complex parsing of the “authentic and inauthentic” debate can permit, and I will not take us down that road. Rather, I will use this occasion as an opportunity to reflect on the subdiscipline of exhibition making and curatorial practice as a frame through which to inhabit new geographies of contemporary African art. As a curator whose practice over the last two decades has been resolutely concerned with contemporary art, and more specifically contemporary

Okwui Enwezor

African art, I think it is essential to understand the remarkable role exhibitions of contemporary African art have played in developing better knowledge and a more complex understanding of the work of African artists. Exhibitions represent both frames of analysis and topographies of critical practice. Here, I am offering exhibitions of contemporary African art as places of encounter and sites of production — localities where distinct and complex grammars of artistic practice can be found. By means of a limited survey of some of the exhibitions that I have been engaged with over the last fifteen years, I offer a way of understanding the role of an exhibition not only as a place of hospitality for contemporary African artists, but also as a site of critical production, historical analysis, and theoretical reflection. I will begin first with the idea that the field of African art exhibition making is a complicated one. To understand this field, to theorize or analyze it productively, requires specific attention to the typologies of African exhibition practice. These include the ethnographic and anthropological models, the genre model, the hybrid model, and the postcolonial model. Then there is the postmodern model, which combines genres, methodologies, practices, and localities. This model shakes things up, leaves the details and specificities in the air, pushing audiences to speculate on the meanings and status of objects, images, and ideas. Susan Vogel, the founding director of the Museum of African Art in New York, was during her years at the museum a provocative expert at the postmodern type of African art exhibition, often consciously seeking to violate seemingly settled ideas about the separation of genres, curatorial authority, and connoisseurship. When done well, such exhibitions offer new possibilities for reading the schemas of African artistic thought, providing insights that help expand the field. In shows such as ART/ Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections (1988) and Perspectives: Angles on African Art (1988) at the old Center for African Art, off Park Avenue in New York, Vogel’s work was boldly theoretical, taking historical and epistemological liberties with exhibition and curatorial models, dramatically rethinking how we stage and understand the function of objects and how the settings/localities of exhibitions are not neutral frames but sites of contending and clashing intellectual ideas. ART/Artifact was groundbreaking for the way in which it put forth the notion that African art cannot be understood simply from a culturalist/contextualist perspective (dichotomies of authentic or inauthentic, real or fake, functional or nonfunctional) but that it can be, and should be, explored through theoretical and conceptual frames. Of course, Vogel also learned from the distinct failures and accomplishments of the Museum of Modern Art’s p. 4

Topographies of Critical Practice: Exhibitions as Place and Site

Okwui Enwezor

“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (1984), curated by William Rubin in collaboration with Kirk Varnedoe, which struggled with its own dichotomy between “tribal” and “modern,” “primitive” and “civilized.” Vogel’s ART/Artifact was not merely about the state and status of African art objects, about whether they can be considered art or not (on that matter her tone was surprisingly cautious and equivocal, most certainly because of her background in anthropology). Rather, it was equally about the setting (the exhibition frame) and the place (the museum) within which these determinations and judgments are made. In this sense, the exhibition becomes a grand theater

of my idea of the exhibition as place and site. What can be isolated in Vogel’s statement is the idea of the “African setting” as designating spatial context, while the “Western museum” designates the African object’s temporal context. Vogel uses this temporal context to address the larger issue of her exhibition, which in its progressive shift away from the anthropological model and toward the postmodern model was also moving inexorably toward a more suspended, or as they used to say, in-between, albeit reified, state of illumination. This shift can be better understood as a soft war on the atemporal/ahistorical device of the anthropological cage in which African art objects usually tend to be crowded, pell-

in which we look to see who sits in the judgment seat of historical designations, and what aesthetic or epistemological lens they use to judge. In fact, as Vogel put it succinctly in the catalogue, the exhibition was motivated by unresolved philosophical, ultimately curatorial, problems surrounding “the way perception of a work of art is conditioned by its presentation.” She continues: “If the public knows one thing about African art, it knows that the original African setting was nothing like a Western museum.”1 This statement is useful for our purposes, because it points to the larger framework

mell, natural-history-museum style. Using the device of the readymade, Vogel transformed the exhibition space of ART/ Artifact, if not necessarily into a neutral site, then at least into a site that attempted to neutralize the way that ethnography and anthropology dehistoricize everyday objects and everyday practices. Her model was the exhibition site as a new topography of critical curatorial methodologies, a resonant site of discursive recontextualizations.

1  Susan Vogel, “Foreword” in Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, Susan Vogel, editor (New York and Munich: Center for African Art and Prestel Verlag, 1988) p.10

Take one example in the exhibition installation: a rolled-up and bound Zande hunting net, shown both in the exhibition and on the catalogue cover. It presents an oblong-shaped fiber object, carefully rolled and held in a tight bundle with p. 5

Topographies of Critical Practice: Exhibitions as Place and Site

a cross section of sinewy ropes. In the exhibition, it is displayed as a readymade on a low square white platform, and behind this object on the horizontal wall, another object, a long scroll-like Kuba woman’s “wrapper” cloth inscribed with a series of geometric abstract glyphs that gave the surface of the cloth the appearance of a map-like space. This piece clearly looks familiar in the sense of modernist abstraction. It is a piece of highly conceptual abstract painting, and could very much have been a Paul Klee painting or drawing. Concluding this curatorial vignette, is a slender Kasai metal

currency whose flat vertical panel again recalls modernist abstract sculpture. Nothing about these objects and their highly restrained forms and aesthetic resemblance to achromatic minimalist sculptures and abstract painting could ever alert the viewer of the original function of the hunting net, the woman’s wrapper, and the metal currency. What one beholds in the above mentioned vignette are forms which in their delicate and precise aesthetic states confound the notion of African art as purely fetishistic or quotidianly functional. What was being presented was an aesthetic argument highlighted through the device of presentation alone. What Vogel was conveying here was the primacy of the objects’ visual impact more than their functional materiality. To make her point, Vogel notes first in her catalogue introduction, that “most visitors are unaware of the degree to which their experience of any art in a museum is conditioned by the way it is installed.”2 She goes further to note that “museum installations have naturally reflected the philosophies and attitudes of their organizers from the time they first began. One of the first Western settings for African objects was the ‘curiosity room.’”3 These statements point to the contextualist issue of how an object is positioned through the process of reframing, a point well made by Marcel Duchamp in recontextualizing a urinal into a sculptural object. Of course I cannot do justice here to the complex set of issues that Vogel undertook

Okwui Enwezor

in this project and advanced in her later exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (1991-1993). But I believe that these curatorial projects were directed at enabling us to develop an awareness of an exhibition’s critical context as part of a broader discursive system that is not static, but continually evolving and theoretically unfixed. Vogel’s work owes a great debt to the discursive practices that emerged with postmodernism and postcolonial theory. While postmodernism offered elliptical and fragmentary approaches as alternatives to totalizing ones, postcolonial theory privileged the aleatory. It made us aware of the extent to which entanglements with, and contestations of, anthropological and ethnographic discourses reveal historical fissures that surround the uneven exchange between postcolonial cultures and western museum publics. Both of these constituencies converge to compete in a historical environment that remains disproportionately in favor of the advanced institutions and cultural markets of previous western powers.

I offer this example as a way to prompt us to reflect on more rigorous ways to think about exhibitions of contemporary African art not just as spaces to apprehend the latest preoccupations of African artists, but as theoretical spaces to reflect the changing strategies of artists and the institutions in which they become embedded. If I have advanced the view of the exhibition as a topography of critical practice, it is not only in the interest of what I do curatorially, but also to reflect on the necessity of curatorial work as an important theoretical model, a disciplinary field in which to elaborate the schemes of new artistic models. Perhaps, out of this, a more sophisticated intellectual infrastructure can be developed to analyze, historicize, critique, and exhibit contemporary African art. To insist on exhibitions as topographies of critical practice is to insist on developing and constructing sites for the advancement of the singular ideas of individual artists and groups of artists who share critical common ground in what is called contemporary African art.

2  Vogel, “Introduction” Ibid., p.11 3  Ibid, p.12 p. 6

Topographies of Critical Practice: Exhibitions as Place and Site

Okwui Enwezor

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Barthélémy Toguo

From the series “Looking in the Mirror”

30 cm x 21 cm, watercolor, 2012 p. 8

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Christine Barthe

THE ARTWORK-DOCUMENT, THE JOURNAL, AND THE ARCHIVE: distinct projects During research pursued for the organization of exhibition, La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, the team of curators selected three authors and three distinct corpuses in the collection of Musée du quai Branly: Walker Evans and the portfolio African Negro Art, Marcel Griaule and the photographs produced at the time of the Dakar-Djibouti mission, and Claude Lévi-Strauss and the images brought back from his mission to Brazil in 1935-1936. Following this selection, exhibition prints of these different authors were included in the exhibition. Their regrouping and their exhibition at the heart of the spaces of La Triennale constitute a new stage in their life as social objects into which we are once again able to look in order to evaluate the degree to which their respective paths differed. The case of Walker Evans is the best known and the most studied. 1 When, in 1935, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) organized the exhibition, African Negro Art, the institution wanted to mark a symbolic step. In fact, the exhibition provides a date that signifies African art’s entry into the pantheon of universal art history. Alfred Barr’s choice of Walker Evans to photograph a large number of the exhibited works is equally significant. Even if Evans did not yet have the great notoriety that he would later attain, the fact that he was invited shows that MoMA’s director considered the presentation of these objects to be important: made in a clear-cut way, “anti-mysterious,” antilyrical, in accordance with the photographer’s established documentary style. In this process of legitimizing African art, Walker Evans thus fully participated in creating a new vision 1  Virginia-Lee Webb, Perfect Documents, Walker Evans and African Art, 1935 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000).

of these objects by constituting a visual memory for them.2 The setting for the production of the photographs under Marcel Griaule’s supervision during the Dakar-Djibouti mission is different. The mission was conceived of as a large

Scanned pages from Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Tristes Tropiques,” Plon, Paris 1955

undertaking for which exceptional resources were put in place. It was valued as an example, as a model. The demonstration was of such ambition that this mission would remain an exceptional case in French ethnography. 3 The number of images produced (between 5000 and 6000) is part of this “urgent ethnography,” which was based more on

2  Recall, in effect, the amplitude of this production: 477 prints forming a total of four portfolios, produced in one year with 17 editions that are known about today. The different editions were destined for lenders and numerous educational institutions. The edition that is in the Quai Branly Museum’s collection comes from Charles Ratton. 3  James Clifford, Malaise dans la culture : l’ethnographie, la littérature et l’art au XXe siècle (Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1996). p. 20

The Artwork-Document, the Journal, and the Archive: distinct projects

Scanned pages from Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Tristes Tropiques,” Plon, Paris 1955

an accumulation of facts than on their interpretation.4 With photography, Griaule pushed the logic of recording by constituting his terrain as a group of “seen things,” by putting together a group of inevitably plural images that attempted to retrace the continued flow of the photographed event. It is important to underline the extent to which it is difficult for us today to perceive Marcel Griaule’s project without the filter of reading Afrique Fantôme. With the deconstruction operative in Leiris’s testimony, the archival function of Griaule’s documentary work appears even faster: the collecting of facts by the mission rapidly became an open source, of which a great number of images defy the desire for a univocal interpretation. This recorded f lux thus lends itself to multiple uses, as attested to by the variety of its uses in the 1930s. 5 Reproduced in the journal, Minotaure, as well as in more academic publications, the photographs from the DakarDjibouti mission testify to the great malleability of these image-documents. 4  Vincent Debaene, “Les Chroniques éthiopiennes de Marcel Griaule [The ‘Ethiopian Chronicles’ of Marcel Griaule”, Gradhiva, 6 | 2007, online 15 November 2010. URL: http://gradhiva.revues.org/955. “It is a common place for the period, and propagated vigorously by Griaule in all of his writings: it is too soon for anthropology. Implicitly, the perspectively is inductive: it is a question of bringing together a maximum amount of facts and it is only when the file is complete that we can elaborate laws. Ethnology is thus defined by Griaule as an archaeology by anticipation.” 5  Julien Bondaz, The Ethnographer’s Eyes, The Journal of the Triennale#4, 2012

Christine Barthe

The photographs produced by Claude Lévi-Strauss during his stay in Brazil between 1935 and 1936 reveal yet a different situation. There are fewer images here, in comparison with the preceding masses, not only because less photographs were created, but above all, due to the choice to operate at the interior of a choice, a selection. Here, we move from the logic of the archive to that of the careful selection. In practice, we know that the anthropologist produced a certain number of shots. For all that, the 200 or so photographs in the Musée du quai Branly’s collection show a desire to select a reduced group and to precisely document it with the citation of passages from Tristes tropiques. If it is difficult today to know whether the choice of citations was that of the author or rather the decision of an employee of the Musée de l’Homme at the time when the photographs were registered in 1937, they are rare enough to merit consideration. This close connection with the text, and among Claude LéviStrauss’ writings such as that which refers the most to the journal and the literary field, closely connects these images to the contexts of their production. Since being taken, these photographs, unlike Griaule’s, have not been the subject of multiple publications. They have stayed closely connected to their author, but also to the journal form that had accompanied their production. They seem effectively less autonomous from their initial project than the “Griaule archive” which, from the beginning, was conceived for reinterpretation, while Walker Evans’ project was inscribed, since its conception, in an artistic project that was clearly taken on. The joint exhibition of these photographs by Walker Evans, Marcel Griaule, and Claude Lévi-Strauss in close proximity with contemporary artworks permits us to verify today the permeability of our imaginaries and to interrogate how these different orders of images are a part of our contemporary visual culture.

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Terry Adkins Auteur

Texte

Many and many a time, for periods Titrecovering more than twelve months, I have been to all intents an Esquimo, with Esquimos for companions, speaking their language, dressing in the same kind of clothes, living in the same kind of dens, eating the same food, enjoying their pleasures, and frequently sharing their griefs. NUTJUITOK (POLAR STAR) AFTER MATTHEW HENSON American navigator and explorer Matthew Alexander Henson (1866-1955) made eight Arctic voyages with Commander Robert Peary in which he traded with the Inuit, mastered their language, built sleds and igloos, trained dog teams and became an expert driver, hunter and tanner. On April 6, 1909, Henson became the first man to stand at the North Pole. Although Admiral Peary received many honors, Henson was largely ignored and spent most of the next thirty years working in obscurity as a clerk in a federal customs house in New York. But in 1944 Congress awarded him a duplicate of the silver medal given to Peary. The spark that became Nutjuitok (Polar Star) was ignited while on a month-long exploratory residency at the Anchorage Museum in August 2011. My research confirmed that an active installation-based experience – a constellation of sculpture, video, photography and sound – was the most appropriate means to address Henson’s contributions to human culture. My primary objectives were to recast his artisanal skills as those of an artist proper and to reconsider his entire Arctic enterprise as a magnum opus of immersive artistic research. The insular nature of Inuktitut and the relationship of inner to outer space that is peculiar to the Arctic region (the illusory limitlessness of the vast landscape versus the inward sensory withdrawal from the extremity of its harsh climatic conditions) were ever-present guidelines. The prevailing symmetry in the Miy Paluk video and Nutjuitok photographic suite symbolizes an attempt to harness the centrality and magnetism of the polar axis itself. Actual and implicit gestures revolve around a static central figure that is either superimposed with circumpolar cartography or standing completely still in the snowbound landscape. Symmetry also governs the structural scaffold of the video, as seen in the schematic diagram of Time and Sequence Signatures and the Logic Pro 9 Soundtrack Screenshot. Archival images of the historic 1909 expedition offer a glimpse of the colossal scale and sheer immensity of the undertaking. The overlaid texts are excerpted from Henson’s 1912 volume, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. p. 22

Nutjuitok (Polar Star) After Matthew Henson

Terry Adkins

Auteur SNOWFLAKES

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CENTER CHANNEL M I R R O R I N G

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Supplies from the Roosevelt scatter the base of an iceberg between Cape Sheridan and Cape Columbia on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. Among the ship's crew and cargo were Matthew Henson, 49 Inuit men, women, and children; 246 sled dogs; 70 tons of whale meat; and the blubber of 50 walruses.

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Nutjuitok (Polar Star) After Matthew Henson

Terry Adkins

Auteur

Titre Texte

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Nutjuitok (Polar Star) After Matthew Henson

Terry Adkins

Auteur

Titre Texte

LOGIC PRO 9 ARRANGE WINDOW SCREENSHOT MIY PALUK 3 CHANNEL VIDEO SOUNDTRACK

Of the 246 sled dogs aboard the Roosevelt, only 16 would survive the final trek to the North Pole.

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Nutjuitok (Polar Star) After Matthew Henson

Terry Adkins

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Nutjuitok (Polar Star) After Matthew Henson

Terry Adkins

Auteur

Titre Texte

Imagine gorgeous bleakness, beautiful blankness. It never seems broad, bright day, even in the middle of June, and the sky has the different effects of the varying hours of morning and evening twilight from the first to the last peep of day. Early in February, at noon, a thin band of light appears far to the southward, heralding the approach of the sun, and daily the twilight lengthens, until early in March, the sun, a flaming disk of fiery crimson, shows his distorted image above the horizon. The south sides of the lofty peaks have for days reflected the glory of the coming sun, and it does not require an artist to enjoy the unexampled splendor of the view. The snows covering the peaks show all of the colors, variations, and tones of the artist's palette, and more. Artists have gone with us into the Arctic and I have heard them rave over the wonderful beauties of the scene, and I have seen them at work trying to reproduce some of it, with good results but with nothing like the effect of the original. To the northward, all is dark and the brighter stars of the heavens are still visible, but growing fainter daily with the strengthening of the sunlight. When the sun finally gets above the horizon and swings his daily circle, the color effects grow less and less, but then the sky and cloudeffects improve and the shadows in the mountains and clefts of the ice show forth their beauty, cold blues and grays; the bare patches of the land, rich browns; and the whiteness of the snow is dazzling. At midday, the optical impression given by one's shadow is of about nine o'clock in the morning, this due to the altitude of the sun, always giving us long shadows. Above us the sky is blue and bright, bluer than the sky of the Mediterranean, and the clouds from the silky cirrus mare's-tails to the fantastic and heavy cumulus are always objects of beauty. Imagine gorgeous bleakness, beautiful blankness. It never seems broad, bright day, even in the middle of June, and Matthew Henson sledding across a thin stretch of young ice on the Arctic Ocean near 87° north.

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Stephan Köhler

a dimension to explore - GEORGES ADÉAGBO as a writer and historian Georges Adéagbo embraces the visitor who enters his space with a symphony of paintings, books, statues, found objects, books, magazines and dozens of newspaper clippings. In this ocean of documents that hint at their identical multiples existing somewhere else, Adéagbo’s handwritten texts stand out as personal and precious original messages. His handwriting in black pen is neat and obviously meant to be easily deciphered, almost as clear as in a first grade school book.1 Similar to illuminated manuscripts, he emphasizes the first capital letter of each sentence with additional turns. The text papers are mostly A4 size, never larger, and often cut freehand into smaller pieces. The arrows pointing at specific paragraphs serve as a link to objects displayed nearby. Adéagbo, who does not use computers, describes them ironically “like the cursor on your screen.” They refer to the objects surrounding them, their relationships frequently encoded, their references rarely obvious… 2 Such contingency is, at first sight,an illusion: Adéagbo may move freely from one topic to another, even within the same paragraph, and the texts may be displayed feet away from each other, separated by objects rivaling for the viewer’s attention, but they still align like individuals in a swarm, held together by the artist’s investigative drive and his analysis of motivation and behavior. While creating his daily installations in his Benin studio, in hotel rooms while on the road, or during exhibition installations, Adéagbo spends most of his time writing new texts and integrating them immediately into his visual narration. The need for written instructions seems to arise when he sees one object interacting with another. The question of 1  One visitor commented that his style of writing “closely resembles the French language,” and could have derived from the way writing was taught in colonial-era schools in the forties and fifties. Georges Adéagbo was born 1942 in Cotonou. 2  Kerstin Schankweiler points out in her PhD thesis on Adéagbo, that the fact he insists on most texts in exhibitions outside France being translated into English or the respective vernacular languages, either by Stephan Köhler or assistants, who then write them in their handwriting, is an indicator for his concern to reach his entire audience. See Chapter 5.4 in: Kerstin Schankweiler: Die Mobilisierung der Dinge. Ortsspezifik und Kulturtransfer in den Installationen von Georges Adéagbo University of Bielefeld: transcript, 2012.

why he writes so much, certainly more than a thousand pages each year, might become clear by looking at the themes he focuses on, the grammar he uses, and the way in which he investigates and understands the world. In his texts Adéagbo weaves philosophical reflections with episodes from his personal life, allowing Christian metaphors to appear without any claim of faith, historical events, the relationship between art and nature, the role of the artist, the political present and descriptions of encounters with protagonists from the art scene. In addition, as Thomas Fillitz described in his essay published in 2002, Adéagbo plays frequently with digits appearing in dates, number plates and exhibition titles.3 Numbers coinciding sometimes in their fractions, sums, or reverse sense become meaningful in Adéagbo’s world view as links between events. In his proposal to Okwui Enwezor, Artistic Director of La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, for a new installation Adéagbo wrote:”Un vrai créateur, ne peut pas et ne pouvait pas refuser à d’autres de ne pas créer, un créateur qui sait pour connaître ce qu’il crée, pour toujours laisser quiconque désirant créer, créer…!” (A true creator cannot and could not refuse to another not to create, a creator who knows and understands what he creates, for letting whom ever who desires to create, create…!) 4 This message of tolerance is relatively easy to understand. However already when transcribing this short passage, the recurring loops make it difficult to keep track of where one is. The repetition of the same verbs in different tenses “peut-pouvait”, the iuxtaposition of similar words with a slight difference in nuance, “savoir-connaître” and finally, the implied and repeated imperative, “créer, créer” give this passage a spin, an auto-referential revolution similar to electrons in a cyclotron, gaining speed and energy, such as to finally yield a dynamic matter that can kick thinking habits out of their

3  Thomas Fillitz (2002): Georges Adéagbo. In: Zeitgenössische Kunst aus Cote d’Ivoire und Benin. Wien. Böhlau Verlag. 4  Georges Adeagbo, written correspondence with Okwui Enwezor, December 2011. p. 28

A Dimension To Explore – Georges Adéagbo As A Writer and Historian

Stephan Köhler

Georges Adéagbo, La porte: derrière la porte...! Qu’est-ce qu’il y a derrière la porte...?, 2012

routine tracks to a different state.5 To speed up even more, let’s look at this part of the same text: L’art et la force de l’art: j’ai à créer et à créer pour créer, j’ai pas à parler moi même de ma création faite, à créer pour créer à d’autre de voir ma création faite, et parler de ma création faite…! Création elle est, pour se voir dans la vie, qu’elle donne à vivre, création qui n’a pas de vie et ne fait pas de vie pour donner vie à vivre, n’est pas une création…!6 Art and the force of art : I have to create, and create for creating, I am not the one to talk about the creation I made. To create for creating, it is up to others to see my creation realized, and talk about my creation realized…! [If it is] a 5  Schankweiler discusses in her thesis mentioned above the unusual puncuation in Adéagbos writing, interpreting the extra…! and …? as Adéagbo’s invitation to the reader to fill in thoughts and questions, turning his texts into open systems. 6 “Art and the force of art : I have to create, and create for creating, I am not the one to talk about the creation I made. To create for creating, it is up to others to see my creation realized, and talk about my creation realized…! [If it is] a creation, it sees itself in [with] life, that it gives to live, [and] a creation that does not have a life, and does not make life to give life to live, is not a creation!”

creation, it sees itself in [with] life, that it gives to live, [and] a creation that does not have a life, and does not make life to give life to live, is not a creation…! The reoccurrence of the words “créer”, “vie” and “vivre” gives a rhythmic structure to the text, similar to a drum beat in a musical piece. It would be worthwhile investigating the extent to which Adéagbo plays purposefully with sound and rhythm in his writing, or whether the reader has this experience regardless of the unusual syntax and logical structure.7 After reading hundreds of texts by Adéagbo over the years, it has become clear to me that his thinking is aligned with the individual rather than the universal, and with the practical categorization of elements by virtue of their similar qualities. As if not trusting the agreed upon label for a group of similar or alike objects, Adéagbo repeats each individual phenomena, again and again, adding attributes that seem

7  As a sidenote: When making installations in his studio in Benin, Adéagbo sings his own songe for hours with a very precise rhythm, which seem to bring him into a state of trance. p. 29

A Dimension To Explore – Georges Adéagbo As A Writer and Historian

totally redundant, and superfluous.8 On the second page concerning his project for La Triennale, he repeats “La Triennale 2012, dans la ville de Paris-France…!” three times. Who needs to be reminded that Paris is in France? Being a nominalist excludes the use of syllogisms, which is the most commonly practiced shortcut in Western thinking. The common properties of the elements of a group are described, a phenomena is declared as part of that group, therefore it must have the same properties. I am not sure, if this logic rule taken for granted and governing western subconsciousness, necessarily applies to Adéagbo’s thinking and writing. Being aware that syllogisms must not globally rule everyone’s thought-patterns helps enormously, in my opinion, to understand Adéagbo’s re- and re- and redefinition of each protagonist appearing in his narrations. His stubborn repetitions of seemingly obvious facts almost feel like a protest against the rationally compressed narration that is abbreviated without verification of the rules.

Stephan Köhler

So far, Adéagbo’s writing was mostly seen as functional and decodable only in the context of his installations. Reading more carefully, one discovers that the texts have their own dynamic. They are deep and dense, idiosyncratic, witty and disorientating to a degree; that they constitute their own world even though they are written in the process of making an art installation. The attempt to look at Adéagbo as a writer, a poet and a chronicler, separate from the context of his installations, suggests both the need for further research, and the promise of new insights into the artist’s practice. When applied to the writing of Adéagbo, an interdisciplinary combination of methods deriving from art history, philosophy, literature and cultural sciences with a focus on the dynamics between the oral and the written (for example, the research of Walter J. Ong or Jack Goody, among others), might lead to surprising findings. Last but not least, asking him to present his texts as a book of only hand-written pages would become another type of installation.

How history should be passed on, oral or written, is one of mankind’s ongoing questions, and one that comes up frequently in Adéagbo’s work and especially in his writing. Again and again Adéagbo weaves in episodes from his life, talks about encounters that were meaningful in both a positive and a negative sense. He writes the story of his life in a ritualized and elliptical way, expecting the reader to fill in the gaps and draw his own conclusions. The massive accumulation of “exempla” drawn from personal experience, biblical quotation, and the fables of Jean de La Fontaine, seem indicators that Adéagbo believes in Cicero’s often quoted words “Historia magistra vitae” (History is the teacher of life). Obviously Adéagbo plays with the question of what is a reliable source, by linking sequences from related events that others regard as trivial. The discontinuity in Adéagbo’s texts is so obvious, such that one could compare his strategy of resistance to the continuous discursive structure of arguments found in Walter Benjamin’s writings, as for example in his compilation Die Urgeschichte des 19.Jahrhunderts.9 Rather than “stating”, Adeagbo’s texts —like Benjamin’s Arcades Project — “point at” phenomena in an open constellation and avoid the pit fall of establishing a closed historical system that excludes alternative versions of the past and denounce the Darwinism of tradition.

8  One of my forthcoming projects is to research to what extent Adéagbo sees the world from the perspective of a nominalist, and to which extent this is common or unusual for Western-African culture. 9  Throughout the Passagenwerk, Benjamin attempted to describe the birth of modernity through a compilation of quotes concerning architectural changes in Paris in the 19th century. He worked at the Bibliothèque National in Paris most of the time. p. 30

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Conversation with Catherine Grenier — by Okwui Enwezor

art history and its discontents: reconfiguring the museum’s permanent collection Okwui Enwezor: I thought it might be interesting to have an opportunity to discuss with you both in the context of La Triennale, but mostly your work at Centre Pompidou with regards to building a collection of artists from different parts of the world that is not European, especially in the context of contemporary African artists. But also I wanted to see if we can talk about two exhibitions, of course, Magiciens de la terre at Centre Pompidou and Africa Remix, and the importance of exhibitions of this nature, and the fact that they sometimes become the context in which new information emerges. So I thought this maybe could be the basis of our discussion, and what institutional strategies that you may have to make some of this material more understandable and accessible. Catherine Grenier: Of course, the exhibition, Les magiciens de la terre, was of considerable importance for the Centre Pompidou, just as it was for the entire artistic community. But unfortunately, it was not followed by all of the reactions that we could have anticipated concerning the recognition of non-western artists and, for example, there were too few repercussions in exhibitions during the years that followed. Africa Remix allowed us to strongly reaffirm this orientation and interest. We noticed in retrospect that even if these exhibitions were major events, they did not contribute to the evolution of the museum’s collections in a significant way. Even though, in the wake of Magiciens de la terre, JeanHubert Martin was able to make several important acquisitions of artists like Frédéric Bruly-Bouabre, Chéri Samba, or Kane Kwei, this did not lead to a fundamental shift and the full integration of African artists in the general reflections on the collection’s contents. The curators’ knowledge of non-Western artists improved, but this did not directly translate into the collection. It is therefore a project that we have undertaken more systematically over the last two years, as part of the program I direct called “Research and Globalization.” Our plan is to transform the collection by incorporating artists from different countries that are either underrepresented or not represented at all. We also want to contribute to a re-writing of art history that recognizes these

artists and their work. These two objectives are connected, but of a different order. We do not only want to open borders and broaden the collection to include artists from countries all over the world. We think that the museum must reconsider the canonical way in which it conceives of 20th and 21st century art. It is absolutely fantastic to hear what Centre Pompidou seems to be proposing. In many ways it goes very well in relation to the first attempt in Magiciens de la terre to reconsider the landscape of exhibition practice in light of other areas of production, in light of other conditions of production, in light of diverse iconographies that emerged from the practice of artists living in many different cultural and sociopolitical contexts. The thing that is very striking to me in this sense is that it is amazing that Centre Pompidou was at the forefront of rethinking these modalities as you just laid them out. But now that you are insistently developing a new articulation not only of collection formation, but engaging an analysis of the structure of historicity in so far as artist’s production is concerned and in so far as museums relate to this particular question. Now I want to ask you when you take a look at this landscape that you are developing, the orientation within the collection, the analysis of the collection, and the new forms of practice that will enter the collection from wherever they may come from, what are your guiding principles in formulating some new thoughts on the movement of the collection vis à vis some of the questions that you have spoken about, in relation to the art of the 20th century? OE

First of all, we are not going to work alone, which I think is really important. We are going to develop a collaboration with specialists and researchers. We have already established links with numerous universities, in particular with LabEx, a series of already existing partnerships between universities and cultural institutions. For example, over the past two years, we have led a joint seminar with the University of Paris I on art and globalization. Furthermore, thanks to three doctoral fellowships that were created in 2010, we now CG

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Interview of Catherine Grenier

welcome and work closely with numerous young researchers at the Centre Pompidou. It is very important for us to share our practices with universities, as well as with curators from other institutions in France and elsewhere. We will thus work with Musée du quai Branly, Musée Guimet, and other institutions, as well as curators and art historians who specialize in different regions. We should not approach this program only from the angle of art history, but also that of history, as well as anthropological, political, etc., perspectives. Up until this point, our collaborations with scholars have been limited and mainly concerned contributions to our catalogues or conferences. Now, we hope to develop regular collaborations that also bear on other areas, such as the work on the collection. It is a new initiative in France, where this kind of collaboration is rather rare.

Okwui Enwezor

As our primary tool, we are using art journals from across the globe, of which the Centre Pompidou has an exceptional collection that we continue to enhance. This helps us decenter our gaze, transform our normal point of view by recognizing situations from the 1910s, 20’s, 30’s, etc., that contain many different experiences of cosmopolitanism, exchanges, and transfers. This work with journals, like that in the archives, is very important. The study of studio collections, of which we have many very significant examples in the collection, is also very enriching because it permits us to take into account the entire spectrum of the artworks, the art or craft objects, of the friendships that constituted the creation of the look of modern artists. In this research, we bear in mind the fact that it is not a question of deconstructing art history in order to rebuild a new edifice that is just as unitary. Rather, it is more a question of resituating the multiplicity and the heterogeneity of these multiple modernities. Our work is not to invent a new guiding schema to replace the one Alfred Barr proposed, and which determined the majority of museum installation for decades. This makes the task very exciting, but also more complicated. Before we delve into some of the methodological issues that accompany this rather ambitious, bold approach that Centre Pompidou is taking, as well as, shall we say, the political economy of art history, if such thing exists, if we were to put these things aside for now, you mentioned that the reinstallation of the Pompidou collection will be an opportunity to test some of the premises of the research you have engaged over the last two years. You did say that one consideration is aesthetic quality, although you did not think it necessarily had to be polemical or political. But don’t you think that to constitute the kind of art historical formation that you are putting forward, that being polemical and political could be actually quite productive in making the determination of what aesthetic quality means in relation to the collection that you are building? OE

Ivan Kozaric, installation view from the exhibition “La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity”.

Concerning the second point about the rewriting of art history, we maintain our orientation as an art museum in that the aesthetic criteria remain important, but we are also working on historical context and its restitution. Our rereading of art history rests on documentary research into different countries under consideration, with a basis that is more historiographical than political or ideological. We have initiated several research projects with the help and expertise of Bibliothèque Kandinsky, our research and archive center, at the heart of which we are building a corpus that documents globalization. Currently, we are working in particular on how to define the presentation of modern collections, which I encouraged and which will revisit the modern period by integrating it within a global context and by no longer presenting “modernity,” but rather “multiple modernities.”

In fact, what I meant was that we are not in the process of becoming a museum of civilization or a documentary museum. We do not want the artworks to become illustrations of a discourse about art, however new and interesting it is. At the same time, we are conscious of the fact that even if our intention is neither polemical nor political, this work and the reevaluation of certain artworks and certain artistic scenes implicated therein engage questions of this order. CG

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Interview of Catherine Grenier

Okwui Enwezor

In addition, certain artworks under consideration have a strong polemical and political content. However, our main concern remains a general revisiting of modern art history, from all angles and with many points of view. When I speak of “aesthetic criteria,” it is promptly to add that these are not immovable. To reconsider the history of art leads to the reemergence of aesthetic forms that were neglected or rejected because they were judged anti-modern, or not modern enough, maybe even provincial. In the context of a general reevaluation, certain artistic expressions might, in fact, take an important place. For example, this is what happened with the modern art of Latin America, whose quality and role has been completely reevaluated. In a sense the work of art remains the primary object of analysis through which to understand this multiple art histories and multiple modernities that have informed, if you will, all the kinds of productions that have been taking place across the world in the last hundred years. In this reconsideration of the history of art, how do you deal with forms of, what I call, belatedness? For example of say, the reception of certain forms of Western art in different places in the world, or the reception of non-Western art in the West on the other hand? How do you deal with issues of belatedness, for example dealing with abstractions that seem to have been liquidated in previous contexts but which now seems to have been revived elsewhere? If you deal with abstraction in the context of modern African art, one can say that that language of abstraction could decidedly be seen to be belated, and yet it is not necessarily uninteresting to consider that… How do you deal with questions of the avant-garde and the non avant-garde, modernism and anti-modernism, in the context of this formulation of histories of art through various points of view? OE

CG We

are trying to free ourselves from the evaluation model that distinguishes between artworks as “avant-garde” and “non avant-garde.” When we take up the task of considering multiple modernities, we must forget this distinction and adopt a completely different perspective. By challenging the progressive vision of art and abandoning these hierarchies, contemporary artists have shown us the way. We must modify our conceptions and abandon the classification of works as pioneering, belated, provincial, marginal, etc. None of these labels is meaningful anymore. When I studied art history at the beginning of the 1980s, there was an animated debate on who produced the first abstract work of art. Was it Picabia, Kandinsky, Kupka? This is no longer a relevant question for young art historians. For a long time, artists have aimed to appear as forerunners, going so far as to predate their works. What artist would do that today? The criteria and the issues have changed. Modernity was a much

Exhibition views from La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris: 1  Michael Buthe, Untitled, 1989-1993 and Untitled (Door and Paddles), 1973; Carol Rama, Autorattristatrice, 1970; Untitled, 1971-2004; 3 studi a memoria, 1974; Dorina, 1940; Bricolage, 1966; Composizione, 1953; Omaggio a Man Ray, 1974; La mucca pazza, 2000. 2 Sarkis, Tête blessée avec os Timor, 2011; La frise des trésors de guerre, 1976-2012; La choréographie des trésors de guerre, 2011; La grande vitrine, 1982-2011. 3  Huma Bhabha, Jhukarjodaro, 2011; Ewa Partum, Self Identification, 1980; Eugenio Dittborn, The 2nd History of the Human Face, Airmail Painting nº66, 1989. p. 42

Interview of Catherine Grenier

more complex concept than the one depicted in the history we have constructed, a history that results from a process of simplification and purification. This complexity makes it impossible to make out clear categories that distinguish between what is avant-garde or what is not, and, above all, to establish a value scale based on this criteria. For example, the realism of the 1920s and 1930s was indistinctly classified under the sign of “the return to order” and considered as a betrayal of modernity. From now on, we have to reconsider these movements and their project, and reevaluate the different political and aesthetic intentions to which they testify in different parts of the world. Some stand for going beyond modernity and a Western-resistant trend that is accompanied by an avant-garde discourse. The fact of considering history from the peripheries toward the center, instead of the other way around, brings up many new questions. Is it possible to make that distinction between the p e r i p h e r y a n d c e n t e r, because I come from the point of view that contemporary art at this particular moment, or art in general at this particular moment, exists in the condition of the off-centered reality. This off-centered condition means that there are neither peripheries nor centers, that what you have are very specific contexts of practice that have both fragmentary relationships with other places and yet are connected, albeit in a discontinuous historical sense, with other art histories. Given this sense of fragmentariness and discontinuities of historical formations, how will Centre Pompidou deal with the untenable idea of the center / periphery dichotomy?

Okwui Enwezor

Mahmoud Mokhtar came to Paris, then returned to Mexico, Brazil, India, South Africa, Egypt… And in reality, even when Paris or Berlin occupied a very prominent position, artistic communities diversified very quickly. Artists from Central Europe who participated in the avant-garde movements founded in France or Germany are well represented in our collection. We are now looking into those who were active in the different local scenes, and into the connections between these scenes and the main centers of production. We find out, notably through the journals, that these local artistic scenes had a very internationalized network that does not necessarily correspond to a geography of “centers.” We also realize that the clear separation between movements that we are accustomed to presenting does not reflect the reality as experienced at the time, when artists displayed a great desire for syncretism of the various avant-gardes with the local and vernacular culture.

OE

I was speaking about modern art, thus about a period where the main references for artists from the whole world were the European artistic centers. The world has changed a lot, and internationalization happened very quickly, leading to the current situation that you describe. In fact, in retrospect, we notice that starting in the 1920s and 1930s, the artistic scene was already extremely globalized with a very intense circulation of artists and ideas. Artists like Diego Rivera, Tarsila de Amaral, Amrita Sher Gil, Irma Stern, and CG

Ellen Gallagher, Morphia, 2008-2012,exhibition view from La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris

You speak about one of the impetuses of the museum’s collection project being the reconsideration of the history of art through other points of view, given that the artistic objects are inscribed in a network of signs that carry both symbolic and cultural meanings, how will you deal with the various canons of artistic signs if there are no universal aesthetic principles that can ascribed to them? OE

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Interview of Catherine Grenier

It is true that to engage a project of rewriting that begins with new points of view leads to establishing a new consensus. But this consensus must bear more on principles and methods than on establishing new universal aesthetic criteria. Rereading history shows us all of the ways in which the universality of criteria is an illusion. Criteria are relative, even when it comes to judging artworks created in the same context or at the same time. Do we really use the same criteria to judge the artwork of Matisse and Duchamp? Aesthetic criteria are inextricably linked with historical and ideological considerations. This is why we were able to witness strong reevaluations, what we normally call “rediscoveries,” even though they generally pertain to wellknown artists who had been judged negatively up until this. Meanwhile, other figures considered essential in their time, are now undervalued or forgotten. It is fascinating to work on a museum’s collection, particularly a collection like the Centre Pompidou’s which, from its founding, was intended as universal. The collection is the mirror of a society whose choices we can analyze and whose unconscious we can probe in retrospect. CG

I am especially mindful of the fact that anthropological and ethnographic sources have played an overwhelming role (sometimes negatively so, and often in reductive, over

Okwui Enwezor

determined ways) in the writing of the history of art produced outside of the modern European canon. Yet, it is also necessary not to be become seduced by a modernist essentialism that dismisses ethnographic theory in its undertaking directed at understanding the language of artistic production of non-western artists. How will you strike a balance between these two competing visions, which at least have been at the core of the modernist reception of the work of non-western art? Even if we take anthropological knowledge into consideration, we are still adopting a historical perspective. The museum’s first role is to present a history of art to the public, even if certain hangings might be freed from this principle and become thematic. For non-western countries, we thus adopt a historiographical approach that is identical to that which we use for the cultural regions that we know better. This is why our work is based on research, and we have adopted a quite strict and systematic methodology. Even if it takes much longer, we conduct our research country by country and not at the scale of large entities such as “Africa,” “Latin America,” and “Asia,” which do not have CG

OE

Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Some Objects Blackened and a Body Too, 2011, exhibition view from La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris

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Interview of Catherine Grenier

a unified cultural reality. However, it is very important for us to give the artist a singular place in this process, keeping in mind that the purpose is not to limit the artwork and the artist into a reductive identity. This is the reason why we also consider artists living in different continents as well as those from the diaspora. And we are careful to distinguish between a research methodology and a logic of display, for which the criteria is completely different. A related concern is the idea of multiple modernities, a designation that I have heard used a number of times, but which remains ambiguous in what it really means. When I think of the term, what comes immediately to mind are different tracks of modernity, modernization, and ultimately institutionalization of what could be called a modern sensibility. As we know there is a certain understanding of modernity that comes from development theory which posits that there are different paces and velocities at which the term modernity appears in different cultural and historical contexts. If this is the case, can modernity, and by extension the modern work of art, be properly historicized without falling into the trap of defining modernism through the logic and lens of development theory? OE

Okwui Enwezor

increasingly migrate to the world art market, belong in ethnographic museums or modern art museums? These questions also lead us to consider artistic forms without a specific position because they are balanced between the categories of traditional and modern, like the first modernities developed in Asia, the Middle East, or in Africa. For example, we are researching the African schools that developed in the colonial context between 1930 and 1960. These artworks are not collected in the Musée du quai Branly, nor are they in the Centre Pompidou. However, they testify to an original adaptation of vernacular sources that Leopold Senghor later adopted in order to found the École de Dakar, and they were important sources of inspiration for contemporary African artists who were present in international exhibitions. It is precisely these reflections which, in the work undertaken in the collection, lead us to reevaluate rarely exhibited artworks by western and non-western artists and to propose new acquisitions. The next hanging of the collection will present this work to the public.

“Multiple modernities” is a useful term, an image that allows us to say in two words that there is not one modernity, but many, and that each of them is plural. This term emphasizes diversity and implicates the idea of heterogeneity, which is very important. But the limit of this expression, and what still needs to be defined, is of course what we mean by modernity. Here again, we keep a historical perspective: we distinguish between concepts of modernity and of the avantgarde. We take a polyfocal perspective, but also with a temporality that is relative and thus more elastic. The first step is to free ourselves from the evolutionary schema of a history of “influences” and “diffusion,” to restore the complexity of exchanges andnon-exchanges, to take seriously assertions like that of Heitor Villa-Lobos when, in the 1920s, he said, “I did not come to Paris to learn, I came to show what I had done,” and to take a more nuanced look at the traditional opposition between “universalism” and “nationalism,” two claims that could have been well reconciled by artists, including those of the avant-garde. No longer making the classic distinction between modernism and antimodernism leads us to expand our borders, which generates new questions that we have not completely resolved: it is necessary to represent movements whose forms were not decreed by artists, such as socialist realism, whose production crossed many geographic zones, particularly non-western ones? Is the border between “modern art” and “traditional art” that we established as a rule for non-western countries still valid? Do Indian tribal art or Aboriginal art, whose artists CG

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Minouk Lim

portable keepers

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« Portable Keepers »

Minouk Lim

Drawings: Minouk Lim, sketch study for “Portable Keepers” p. 47

« Portable Keepers »

Minouk Lim

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« Portable Keepers »

Minouk Lim

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« Portable Keepers »

Minouk Lim

Photographs: Minouk Lim, Installation view from Heat of Shadows exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2012

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« Portable Keepers »

Minouk Lim

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Markus Müller on — Julius Eastman — and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

the king is gone but he’s not forgotten Classical Music worlds. Consequently S.E.M. also represented compositions by African American composers and improvisers like Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Leroy Jenkins, and Henry Threadgill, in addition to Julius Eastman’s work. This is remarkable in so far as African Americans were generally underrepresented in any classical and experimental musical setting beginning in the early 70’s and documented (involuntarily) by the programs of festivals such as the New Music America events in the 1980s and 90s1.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, For Julius Eastman (Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, Gay Guerrilla), 2012 Exhibition view from La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Julius Eastman is one of the most well known mysteries in modern American music. Classically trained at Ithaca College and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia he made his debut as a pianist at New York’s Town Hall in 1966. In 1970 he joined the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo and met Petr Kotik, with whom he co-founded the S.E.M. Ensemble. The S.E.M. Ensemble quickly established itself as one of the foremost international interpreters of contemporary music and performed a wonderfully heterogeneous mix of music by composers that were both new and established in a quite polarized environment. In addition to New School/Old School representatives like John Cage, Morton Feldman or Earle Brown the S.E.M. in its first concert ever introduced Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise. A graphic musical score comprising 193 pages of lines, symbols, and various geometric or abstract shapes, Treatise undermines the traditional hierarchy that separates the role of composer from that of performer; Treatise positions itself at the center of the convergence of the Jazz and

In 1973 Eastman sang the lead in the recording of Peter Maxwell Davis’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, which made his beautifully elegant yet brassy 5-octave baritone internationally recognized. After this, his singing was in demand and he collaborated with Meredith Monk on a number of her productions, as heard, for example, on the first recording of Dolmen Music (1981) for ECM Records. By the beginning of the 80s Eastman had composed a handful of piano pieces as well as Stay on It (1973) for voice, clarinet, two saxophones, violin, piano and percussion, 440 (1973) for voice, violin, viola and double bass, Femenine (1974) for chamber ensemble, and the sensationally dynamic and poignantly titled If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? (1977) for violin, two French horns, four trumpets, two trombones, tuba, piano, two chimes, and two basses. Stay on it is usually considered to be Eastman’s best-known work. And it is quite understandable how a piece that was composed and presented with such enthusiastically upbeat drive could make an impact on the dry, austere, sincere, no frills-beginnings of minimalism. Stay on it predates both Steve Reich’s Music for 18 musicians and Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, and certainly foreshadows the minimal-musicpop-amalgamation of the later 80’s and early 90’s that led 1  See George Lewis: A Power Stronger Than Itself. The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago, London 2008, p. 387f. p. 52

The King Is Gone But He’s Not Forgotten

from Kraftwerk’s Autobahn (1974), Manuel Göttsching’s seminal E2-E4 (1984) via Juan Atkins and Derek May to the minimal techno of Basic Channel and Wolfgang Voigt. Apropos dryness, beginning in 1979, Eastman composed a trilogy of pieces for four pianos entitled Evil Nigger (1979), Gay Guerrilla (c. 1980), and Crazy Nigger (c. 1980). According to Kyle Gann’s liner notes for the one and only (posthumous) commercial recording of Eastman’s work to date,2 the concert for the only recording of these riotously reclaiming and redefining titles at Northwestern University on January 16, 1980 was met by concern and censorship, so much so that the provocative titles of the compositions were not printed in the program. To rephrase Carlo Levi’s book title, it was if Richard Pryor stopped in Chicago. The collision of radical black power and gay rights responses to political oppression made clear Eastman’s interest in expanding the boundaries of music beyond the radicality of form into the inscription of subjectivity.The overtly titled compositions were spiked with such irony and bitter wit, as if they were obviously informed by Pryor’s drawing of a thin line between parody and tragedy. One could also possibly point out that such irony, was anathema in a New Music context that had taken in the Adornian critique of anything mass — or pop cultural. The music world, in other words, was not ready for Eastman’s radical contemporaneity. The dire consequence was that the “damned outrageous”3 one did not quite find a professionally sustainable footing in neither the performance nor the academic circles of his times. Suffice it to say that the consequences of the Thatcher-Regeanite recalibration of the State’s support for the arts did not really help the programmers and the institutions that were dedicated to presenting the new and oftentimes commercially unsuccessful artistic contributions from the forefront of creative practice. And even though Eastman’s relationship with alternative spaces like The Kitchen in New York, where George Lewis programmed both Crazy Nigger (Febuary 1980) and The Holy Presence of Jeanne d’Arc (1981), clearly shows that he was not only very wellconnected but also highly regarded by some of the most prominent representatives of the alternative New York scene of the early 80’s (Eastman’s assistants for the performance of Crazy Nigger included Wharton Thiers, Glenn Branca, Yasunao Tone amongst others). However, Eastman’s 2  Kyle Gann: “Damned Outrageous”: The Music of Julius Eastman in: Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise, New World Records, New York 2005 3  see above

Markus Müller

connections, as well as his expanding œuvre did not translate into a stable economic reality for him. His increasingly desperate impoverishment led to his homelessness - he was evicted from his flat in the early 80s. He lived for a time in the drug-infested environment of the Tompkins Square Park in New York’s notoriously public homeless scene in the mid80’s. Eastman died under unknown circumstances in late 1990 and his first obituary was published only eight months after his death4. Thanks to the persistence of a handful of enthusiasts, the work of Julius Eastman has ever so slowly, been made available in different formats and on different platforms. Foremost amongst the composer ’s supporter is the incredible dedication of Mary-Jane Leach5 a composer and performer who has managed to preserve the remaining remnants of Eastman’s musical legacy and cared for what survived his eviction.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, For Julius Eastman (Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, Gay Guerrilla), 2012 Exhibition view from La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris

In the last several years, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, the young, Paris-based French artist has engaged Eastman’s work at the level of a critical resuscitation of the composer’s late 1970s and early 1980s piano quartet trilogy. Abonnenc’s interest in Eastman’s work began when he first read about Eastman in an inflammatory essay by Stacy Hardy that was published in 2007 in the South-African magazine Chimurenga. After reading Hardy’s essay he contacted her 4  Kyle Gann: that which is fundamental, Julius Eastman 1940 – 1990 in: Village Voice, New York 1991 5  http://www.mjleach.com/eastman.htm p. 53

The King Is Gone But He’s Not Forgotten

and thus began the process of excavating the theoretical and practical possibilities of performing the Nigger Series. The result was a presentation of a truncated version in a monographic exhibition by Abonnec at Le Plateau in Paris in 2010. However, an invitation to participate in La Triennale 2012, offered a second opportunity for the full realization of the full scope of the entire pieces presented live in the cavernous rotunda of Palais de Tokyo. Together with JeanChristophe Marti, who is conducting the Nigger Series at La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, Abonnenc developed a way to turn Eastman’s scores, which are very much based on improvisations of the performer, into approximations of what Eastman had done with them in the course of his own performances. The fact that Abonnenc and his co-conspirers have performed the single parts of the trilogy eleven times in the course of La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, and will perform the totality in one sitting on the last day of the exhibition sounds a bit unreal given that these piano quartets might have received less than five public performances since they were composed 33 years ago. The defining, almost overwhelming visual component of Abonnenc’s presentation are the four grand pianos (looking like the ultimate hyper-bourgeois, four-leaf clover sculpture) centered in the cavernous Agora of the Palais de Tokyo. The combination of the lacquered pianos set in the Tarkowskian post-industrial roughness of the architectural program of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Phillipe Vasall present an uncanny contrast to the structure of the music. Four grand pianos are a rare sight anywhere. And even though there is a tradition of the use of this high culture-symbol in the visual arts (think about Beuys or Allora and Calzadilla) rarely are four of them ever presented in an exhibition context. When not being played one possible reaction to the sight is to ask oneself whether they might be actually played at all. One should also keep in mind that even in its natural habitat, the concert hall, the grand piano might be doubled every once in a while, but four of them are not that common at all (Actually the only other composition I can think of right now, also from 1979, is Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato). Once the pianos spring to life, once played, they certainly do fill a room that is much larger than just the Agora. They turn into a physical net of ostinato sounds thrown out to haul the visitors/listeners in. Eastman’s music and especially the Nigger Series is quite a force of nature: minimalism is vamped up by stomping boogie down-riffs, with injections of the mega-Lutheran “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (at the end of Gay Guerrilla).

Markus Müller

This music swings in glistening, crystal-clear overtones that remind one as much of John Cale’s collaborations with Tony Conrad, as of the English post-punk industrial rhythm inferno of 23 Skidoo or Wolfgang Voigt’s Studio 1 from 1995. The music is demanding and exhilarating, and asks for the maximum physical charge from both the performers and the instruments: the ostinato hammering of Evil Nigger leaves the listener wanting for more, and the instruments in need of tuning. Eastman said that these pieces evolve organically, meaning that phrases are added onto phrases, repeated figures or notes appear every ninety seconds in the case of Crazy Nigger, and Kyle Gann has described the “organic forms” quoting Eastman, as forms “…in which every phrase contains the information of the phrase before it, with new material gradually added in and old material gradually removed: minimalism’s additive process expanded to the level of phrase structure.” 6 The very difference between “classical” methods of minimalism and serialism, and Eastman’s approach lies in his all-encompassing ability to include not just hints, but rather tsunamis of the contemporary pop context, as for instance the heavy-metal tinged riffs that are part of the The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc. Those riffs do make one want to head-bang when listening to the piece. In a similar fashion, the musical references in the four pianos in the Nigger Series recall Jerry Lee Lewis and Mal Waldron’s blues runs and nod to the chimes of La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano (1964). Only ten years later the people might have danced to it. Get ready for the dance-floor now!

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, For Julius Eastman (Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, Gay Guerrilla), 2012 Exhibition view from La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris

6  Kyle Gann; Damned Outrageous, see above p. 54

Jean-Christophe Marti

DISCOVER AND RESTORE THE MUSIC OF JULIUS EASTMAN: the trilogy evil nigger, gay guerrilla, crazy nigger The adventure begins with reading the handwritten musical scores: fascinating, covered with jerky lines, tiny notes that, without a doubt, translate something urgent or the desire to make signs rare. Here, there are none of the indications that normally mark a musical piece – tempo, expression, nuances… Even more intriguing: no rhythmic figure “clothes” the sounds; nor is there any mention that would permit attributing these superimposed lines to one or to many instruments… Right away the question of interpretation becomes an important one: is it necessary to fill in the gaps in the musical score as one does to resolve such enigmas?

Julius Eastman, photographer unknown, from Mary Jane Leach’s collection

The only guide, the chronometric value playing time that accentuates its unfolding, divides it into timed sections. But it is an understatement to say that musicians are not used to this kind of counting which, incidentally, seems to contradict the temporality specific to musical discourse: that which only troubles itself with clocks after the fact, for example, to time an excerpt…

Our work will allow us to discover that these lacks, these gaps in the notation, have an essential purpose at the highest degree of musical writing: neither involuntary lacunas nor riddles, they are completely contrary to the choices, the solutions, that the composer found so that his sonorous ideal could be embodied. Summarizing this ideal, I would say that Eastman was able to create a relationship with rhythm and time that is completely different from that to which performers and listeners are accustomed. This comes back to what seems to be the decisive and unmistakable point of his project: the confrontation between Western and African music. But we must immediately be wary of misunderstanding: in Eastman’s work, there are neither citations nor a pastiche of any traditional African music. There is no trace of “folklore,” whether it be erudite or metabolized, like the Ghanaian rhythms of Steve Reich. Eastman is much more radical: he deploys confrontation, or a dialectical game, between music’s two possible essences. One of these essences is bestowed by the history of Western music, carrying with it the richness of elements that have sedimented from the Middle Ages until today. This history was recorded and amplified by the phenomenon of writing and the speculations that followed from it. The other essence, on the contrary, is “oral” music: it totally engages the body with an open temporality, without a univocal direction, it elicits a letting go of perceptions, capable perhaps of leading to trance. Consequently, we must not be surprised that, throughout his work, Eastman chose many scholarly modes of writing that go back to the period when musical notation was invented, arising in Europe in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries: hockets, taleas, colors (Medieval rhythmic and speculative tools) are explicitly mentioned or revisited. p. 55

Discover and Restore the Music of Julius Eastman

Then Eastman freely travels through history, notably using a succession of musical scales in the second part of Crazy Nigger, each of which symbolizes an aesthetic identified with the music of the twentieth century. It is his way of “citing” Schönberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Messiaen… thus proving that he is not self-taught at all because he assimilates traditions and new models. Similar to other modern composers, Eastman clearly positioned himself in relation to a history of musical language. Although we find deep within his music an otherness, even a modification of these Western languages that Eastman carries out. Sometimes by evoking the scales of African instruments like the marimba or the sansa… But it is above all through the physical experience radicalized by the repetition, a time open to rhythmic non-measure, arousing disorientation and maybe even trance, a limit-experience that submerges the phrases and rhetorics that belong to Western music. In this confrontation – is it a combat, a guerrilla, or a search for a synthesis? It is up to each of us to decide – there is nothing Manichean, nor anything ideologically dubious: in the creation of this tension lies the work, the experience, the drama, even the passion, and it is there that the composer’s choices confer a fully personal musical unity.

Jean-Christophe Marti

which he develops his figures, processes. In other words, he instrumentalizes African music in order to master it. At the same time, his claims to asceticism and his uncluttered sound and rhythm, which would, in Europe, earn him the recognition of the most chic, obsessive, and cerebral “avantgardes,” which Eastman didn’t want, or never got. He who manifests with all his power the signification of the term, African-American, he whose radical, polemic tendencies transform into a passion lived in the flesh. In order to situate him, the names of Thelonious Monk, Jimi Hendrix, or other 1970s rock experiences, are ultimately more pertinent. His music is finally one of the body and of opening at the risk of disequilibrium and distress. Eastman’s relationship to instrumental tones is proof. For La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, we chose four pianos (Eastman did the same in his time). However, because the scores give no indications, these pieces could be played with multiple instrumental combinations, harmonious or not. Be that as it may, the tones of the instruments in this music quickly metamorphose. From the grand piano, the king of classical recitals, emerges an unprecedented myriad of marimbas, koras, percussion… The real sound becomes imaginary.

Besides, we could also talk about a dialectic between reason and unreason, construction and destruction, order and modification… The titles of the works speak to this part of madness, subversion, to the disturbance of how identities are assigned. At a minimum, we can no longer obscure Eastman in writing the history of repetitive American music. Certainly influenced by Terry Riley (Riley’s In C, created in 1964, rests on a kind of “open writing” that is sometimes similar but with another goal), Eastman transcends what is systematic and, quite simply, fundamentally puritan in this aesthetic school, a showy mastery of the systems of repetition – phrase differences and well ordered counterpoints – which marked the ways of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Reich draws from the Ghanaian and pygmean rhythms which, he says, influenced him so much and from

Julius Eastman, photographer unknown, from Mary Jane Leach’s collection

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contributors Georges Adéagbo Georges Adéagbo is a conceptual artist and writer from Benin. He creates exclusively site-specific installations featuring objects from West Africa and those found and acquired on site in the cities where he exhibits. He contributed to the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial, twice to the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2009), winning the Jury Award in 1999, documenta 11 (2002), and several other major shows. His work is in international collections including Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Toyota Municipal Museum, Aichi among others. He is currently at work on a piece for the Stenersen Museum in Oslo as part of the group show “The Storytellers”, and is preparing his contribution to the “Take, Take, Take and…?” exhibition at the Regard Benin 2012 biennial. Terry Adkins Terry Adkins is an interdisciplinary artist, musician and cultural practitioner engaged in an ongoing quest to reinsert the legacies of unheralded immortal figures to their rightful place within the panorama of history. Under the auspices of the Lone Wolf Recital Corps, he stages an emblematic installation based in the arctic experiences of the explorer Matthew Henson (1866-1955), utilizing a variety of real time and static media. Adkins has exhibited and performed widely since 1982: La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; New Museum, New York; American Academy, Rome; The Menil Collection, Houston; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Studio Museum, New York; Rote Fabrik, Zurich; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; New World Symphony, Miami, and Sculpture Center, New York, among others. Recital, a retrospective exhibition, was organized at the Tang Museum in Saratoga, New York in July 2012. He is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Philadelphia. Christine Barthe Christine Barthe is the scientific director and curator of the Photographic Collection of the Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

She studied Fine Arts and Ethnology, and attended the École nationale supérieure de photographie in Arles. She joined the Musée de l’Homme (Paris) in 1992, and was initially in charge of evaluating the photographic collections. She implemented important new archive, research, restoration and inventory initiatives that transformed the museum’s photography collection and its acquisitions policy. Barthe undertook an in-depth study of the oldest collections at Musée de l’Homme, and Désiré Charnay’s work in particular. In 2004, she was assigned the evaluation of the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle’s photographic collections, and was appointed scientific director and curator of the photographic collection of Musée du quai Branly. She acted as a photography consultant on Musée du quai Branly’s first international exhibition “D’un regard l’Autre.” Barthe is a board member of Photoquai, a photography biennial launched by Musée du quai Branly in 2007. Catherine Grenier Catherine Grenier is chief curator and adjunct director at Musée national d’art modern – Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. As an art historian, she has published numerous books, essays, and monographies. She was appointed in 2010 at the head of the “Research and Globalization” program, whose goal is the international development of the Centre Pompidou modern and contemporary art collections. This new program implements a new acquisition policy as well and a research project developed in partnership with artists and academic researchers specialized in the various fields of study, which include Africa, Latin America, Asia, North America, Central Europe, MENASA (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia) Stephan Köhler Stephan Köhler is an independent curator and researcher in cultural studies. He worked periodically with James Lee Byars since 1986, realizing numerous exhibitions as curatorat-large at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Aichi for ten years, including the first presentation of Roman Opalkas’s work in Japan, and the group show “In Bed”. Since 2001 he lives and works between Benin and Germany, channeling cultural exchanges through exhibitions and artists’ p. 58

residence projects. Currently he serves as chairman for the association “Regard Benin,” and is commissioner of the Regard Benin 2012 biennial. Minouk Lim Minouk Lim is a visual artist based in Seoul (Korea). Merging performance, video, and documentary and motivated by the desire to respond to the everyday realities of her surroundings, her work has been shown in increasingly wider circles since she was awarded the Hermès Korea Art Prize in 2007 and the 1 st Media Art Korea Award in 2010. She seeks to capture collective memory and make the invisible visible. Past, present, and future intersect in her performanceinfused installations and fabrications. Her Portable Keepers are totemic-like constructions made from discarded household materials. Lim’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions at venues around the world, including the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Art Institute; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and ArtSonje Center, Seoul. In addition, she has participated in major international biennales and festivals including the 2011 Festival BOM; the 2010 Liverpool Biennial Touched at FACT, Liverpool; the 2009 Yokohama International Festival of Arts and Media; the 7 th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju; the 10th International Istanbul Biennale; and La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Lim has just had her first major U.S. museum exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She studied in Paris, graduating from the École des Beaux Arts de Paris in 1994, and from the Université de Paris I in 1996. Jean-Christophe Marti Jean-Christophe Marti is a composer trained in Paris and Salzburg, currently based in Marseille. He has written numerous vocal and instrumental compositions for various ensembles (Musicatreize, C Barré), and has collaborated with theater directors and writers such as Céline Minard and Alexander Dickow. Markus Müller Markus Müller is the founder and director of Bureau Mueller, a boutique communication and consultancy firm in Berlin. He studied History, Art History and American Studies at the Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, the Royal Holloway College in London, and the American University in Washington, D.C. Since 2003 he is a lecturer at the postgraduate Institute for Art in Context at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. Before founding Bureau Mueller in 2007, Müller was Deputy Director and Head of Communication at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. He was Director of Communications for documenta 11 (1999-2002). He acted

as Director of Communications for the 3rd and 4th Berlin Biennial (2004 and 2006), Sculpture Projects, Münster (1997), and the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1993 and 2011). He was Head of Communication and Curator for Contemporary Art at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster from 1995 through 2002. Müller has curated a small number of exhibitions including Throbbing Gristle, TG@KW Annual Industrial Report, KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2005); General Idea, General Idea Editions (1967- 1995) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2006); Psychotopes, YYZ, Toronto (2003); Gordon Matta-Clark, Food, Westfälisches Landesmuseum Münster (1999); and more recently, as part of the non-for-profit branch of Bureau Müller, a series of solo exhibitions featuring Fischli/Weiss, Heimo Zobernig, Agnes Martin, Stan Douglas, Jenny Holzer, Peter Roehr, Günter Fruhtrunk, Michaela Meise, Birgit Hein, Terre Thaemlitz, and William Eggleston (2007-2011). Müller has published extensively on music and contemporary art, including more than a thousand interviews with Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, Renée Green, Christian Marclay, Martin Creed, Greil Marcus, Alex Katz, Jutta Koether, Douglas Gordon, Tobias Rehberger, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Glenn Branca, Tony Oursler, and Jeff Wall among others, as well as concert and record reviews. Since 1999 he is a regular contributor to Texte zur Kunst, Berlin, and was for over 15 years the editor of two German jazz magazines, Jazzthetik and Jazzthing. Müller acted also as member of the jury of the German Jazz Award, “Albert Mangelsdorff-Preis” from 1994 to 2002. Barthélémy Toguo Barthélémy Toguo is a multi-disciplinary artist working across different artistic vocabularies, establishing no disciplinary hierarchy amongst a profusion of media. His prolific practice encompasses performance, intervention, sculpture, painting, installation, photography, drawing, and prints. Amongst this repertoire of practices, Toguo has devoted considerable attention on the act of drawing, favoring especially the medium of watercolor. He studied at the Abidjan School of Fine Arts in Ivory Coast, the École supérieure d’art (Grenoble) and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He founded in 2005 Bandjoun Station, a non-profit cultural center in Cameroon committed to the promotion and support of local and international artists in Africa.

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image credits Barthélémy Toguo Barthélémy Toguo , from the series “Looking in the Mirror”, 2012, watercolor, 30 cm x 21 cm. / Courtesy: Barthélémy Toguo, Galerie Lelong Paris, Galerie Nausbau and Reding, Luxembourg, Galerie Mario Mauroner, Vienna, and Bandjoun Station, Cameroon / p. 1, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19 Christine Barthe Scanned pages from Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Tristes Tropiques,” Plon, Paris 1955 / pp. 20-21 Terry Adkins Terry Adkins, Nutjuitok (Polar Star) After Matthew Henson / pp. 22-29

Stephan Köhler Georges Adéagbo, La porte: derrière la porte...! Qu’est-ce qu’il y a derrière la porte...?, 2012, Courtesy of the Artist and jointadventures.org, ADAGP Paris 2012 Exhibition view “La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris // Photo: André Morin / p. 28

Gqabhuza, 2012; Xhoma, 2012; Courtesy of the Artist, Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Collection Zeitz, Montricher // Exhibition view “La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris // Photo: André Morin / p. 44 Minouk Lim Drawings: Minouk Lim, sketch study for “Portable Keepers”, Courtesy the Artist and PKM Gallery, Seoul / p. 42-43 Photographs: Minouk Lim, installation view of the exhibition “Heat of Shadows” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2012 / photo: Jenna Klein, Courtesy Walker Art Center / pp. 46-51



Markus Müller Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, For Julius Eastman (Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, Gay Guerrilla), 2012, installation view in exhibition “La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Courtesy Marcelle Alix, Paris / Photo: André Morin / pp. 52-54 Jean-Christophe Marti Photographer unknown, Julius Eastman, from Mary Jane Leach’s collection / p.55-56

Georges Adéagbo Georges Adéagbo, Texts, Courtesy of the Artist and www.jointadventures.org / pp. 32-39 Conversation with Catherine Grenier Ivan Kozaric, installation view from the exhibition “La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Courtesy Collection MSU Muzej suvremene umjetnosti - Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb // Photo: André Morin / p. 41 Michael Buthe, Untitled, 1989-1993 and Untitled (Door and Paddles), 1973; Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York; Carol Rama, Autorattristatrice, 1970; Untitled, 1971-2004; 3 studi a memoria, 1974; Dorina, 1940; Bricolage, 1966; Composizione, 1953; Omaggio a Man Ray, 1974; La mucca pazza, 2000; Courtesy of the Artist, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin and Collection Ulrich Reininghaus, Cologne // Exhibition view “La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris // Photo: André Morin / p. 42 Sarkis, Tête blessée avec os Timor, 2011; La frise des trésors de guerre, 1976-2012; La choréographie des trésors de guerre, 2011; La grande vitrine, 1982-2011; Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, Brussels; ADAGP Paris 2012 // Exhibition view “La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris // Photo: André Morin / p. 42 Huma Bhabha, Jhukarjodaro, 2011; Courtesy of the Artist and Salon 94, New York; Ewa Partum, Self Identification, 1980; Courtesy Kontakt, the Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation, Vienna; Eugenio Dittborn, The 2nd History of the Human Face, Airmail Painting nº66, 1989, Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York // Exhibition view “La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris // Photo: André Morin / p. 42 Ellen Gallagher, Morphia, 2008-2012, Courtesy of hte Artist and Gagosian Gallery, Paris, New York, London; Greasy, 2011, Courtesy The FLAG Art Foundation, Collection of Glenn et Amanda Fuhrman, New York // Exhibition view “La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris // Photo: André Morin / p. 43 Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Some Objects Blackened and a Body Too, 2011; Collection Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; Courtesy de l’artiste et Mary Mary, Glasgow; Nicholas Hlobo, Ugqatso, 2012; Imnkile, 2012;

text credits Okwui Enwezor, Topographies of Critical Practice: Exhibitions as Place and Site / This essay is an excerpt from an unpublished lecture given at Harvard University in 2008 © Okwui Enwezor / p. 3-7 Christine Barthe, The Artwork-Document, the Journal, and the Archive: Distinct Projects / Translated from the French by Emma Chubb, Paris 2012 / pp. 20-21 Stephan Köhler, A Dimension To Explore – Georges Adéagbo As A Writer and Historian (For more on Georges Adéagbo’s current projects: www.jointadventures.org / Also currently available: Octavio Zaya and Kerstin Schankweiler, Georges Adéagbo, The Mission and the Missionaries; Charta Books), Hamburg 2012 / pp. 28-30 Okwui Enwezor, Art History and Its Discontents: Reconfiguring the Museum’s Permanent Collection – Conversation with Catherine Grenier, Munich / Paris 2012 © Okwui Enwezor / Partly translated from the French by Emma Chubb /pp. 40-45 Markus Müller, The King Is Gone But He’s Not Forgotten, Berlin 2012 / pp. 52-54 Jean-Christophe Marti, Discover and Restore the Music of Julius Eastman: The Trilogy Evil Nigger, Gay Guerrilla, Crazy Nigger, Marseille 2012 / Translated from the French by Emma Chubb / pp. 55-56

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colophon Le Journal de La Triennale #5 August 2012 Chief Editor Okwui Enwezor Assistant Editor Luz Gyalui As part of La Triennale, 2012, Intense Proximité, 2012 Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor Associate Curators Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Émilie Renard, Claire Staebler Chief Project Manager Luz Gyalui

La Triennale, 2012 Intense Proximité Palais de Tokyo and Bétonsalon Crédac Musée Galliera Grand Palais Instants Chavirés Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers Musée du Louvre From April 20th through August 26, 2012 La Triennale is organized at the initiative of the ministère de la Culture et de la Communication / Direction générale de la création artistique, commissioned, by the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), associate commissioner, and the Palais de Tokyo, producer.

Contributors to this issue Georges Adéagbo, Terry Adkins, Christine Barthe, Okwui Enwezor, Catherine Grenier, Stephan Köhler, Minouk Lim, Jean-Christophe Marti, Markus Müller and Barthélémy Toguo.

Publisher Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) Artistic Production Director of la Triennale Marc Sanchez Translations Emma Chubb Copy editing Okwui Enwezor, Luz Gyalui, and James Merle Thomas Graphic design g.u.i

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