Review: Undoing Earthwriting at Optica

Last week, I discussed Delphine Huguet’s Les corps complexes at Projet Casa. Part of a feminist biennial, it thematically and structurally foregrounded censorship (or redaction) and confession as forms of created selfhood. This was given an additional (apparently unintentionally comic) dimension since the body of this presented self was depicted as a kind of (extremely familiar) alien object/commodity. These two aspects functioned together to create a mirage of performative depth (largely three-dimensional or durational work in a quasi-domestic space). This was doubled by a makeshift confessional where the participatory “confessions” would be redacted, the exhibitionistic display of their self-censorship an ironic recognition that the self is censorship. Visually this was conveyed by black blots and squares over words. The black square was even applied to an exit sign. Whether intended or not, this had the symbolic suggestion that the self, that repressive and obfuscatory function, blocked out departure. Liberation was equated with blocking up a line of flight. (It could also be equated with violating the codes of safety of anyone who comes in contact with this self.) All of this was doubled again in the broader framing of the exhibition within the biennial, which extended the redaction to a process of historical mystification.

The thing that got a bit sidelined in my discussion of Huguet’s exhibition was the sculptural aspect, which rehearsed what in the 1970s was already a clichéd attack on the fetishization of the female body and the alienation of the self from such fetishes. This was accompanied by a celebration of “nature” in the form of gardening, arguably a more extreme kind of artificial “violence” and alienation than the sex objects she references, but which are kept safe, presented as a nostalgic fantasy adjacent to, and interconnected with, domesticity (selfhood). This also tied the show into the recent “botanical” trend that has been circulating for a few years. 

 Aesthetically, the exhibition at Optica rehashes a related set of tropes and strategies, retaining the gardening and fetish aspects but shifting the overcoding from generic “feminism” to generic “racial capitalism,” “Afro-diasporism,” or “post-colonialism.” It rehearses the puritanism that commonly cropped up in post-conceptual minimalism, particularly in its “activist” sub-genre and typically marketed in Lacanian terminology (this was deliberately and non-deliberately parodied at Momenta last year). Semiological denseness is absent here but moral entrepreneurialism remains, channeled through a series of fetishes (capitalism, culture, kinship/ancestorship, etc.) and totemic fantasies (blackness, the West, the Anthropocene, Nature). While it is curatorially squared in rhetoric that occasionally makes it sound like it is based in history, the work makes clear that it is mythical (both in the sense of a foundational fantasy and a second-hand representational scheme).

This exhibition is a symptomatic example of the mythologization and what I have referred to as an embodiment of the Canadian state in its pastoralizing function. Paid for by the Canada Council for the Arts, Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the International Studio and Curatorial Program:

Undoing Earthwriting attends to the themes of plants and land, through an Afro-diasporic lens, specifically because of the charged history that Black subjectivity has with these materials. To write upon the earth is to extract, to dispossess, to inscribe violence onto land’s surface through the displacement of soil, rocks, plants, and people. Botanic and geologic matter have been cultivated and extracted on a massive scale to create the apparatuses of the plantation and the mine, co-constituted with the disciplining of forced or exploitative human labour as racial capitalism. Because of the ways in which soil and plants are imbued with these histories, while simultaneously, at times, have resisted colonial forms of knowing or capturing, the exhibition looks to position these materials, alongside blackness, as a set of material vectors that create geographic ruptures in space and time.

Spread over the centre’s two exhibition rooms, the works are divided in a way that complements them more visually than thematically, and with an anemic starkness that could not register further from a rupture with anything. The primary pedagogical aspect is a wall text on entry, but the overall sense is blankness (or whiteness, but that seems so crudely obvious it is hard to assume it is deliberate). Work by four artists is spaced around in a way that seems arbitrary and adds nothing to the experience of the work and does little to establish relationships between works. There is little indication unless you read the accompanying literature, of who made what, and this gives them an anonymous, institutional quality, inviting depersonalization of the work as well as blanket generality.

Curated by Ella den Elzen, the show brings together work from separate bodies of work. Kapwani Kiwanga’s Flowers for Africa (2013–ongoing); Kosisochukwu Nnebe’s the seeds we carry (bury this where the one you want to trick walks); Patrick Henry’s cast bronze sculptures, Soi-même comme un autre, and Eve Tagny’s Partition scores and Mythologies de la valeur. The curatorial choices disproportionately privilege the first two over the second, which barely register.

Three of the four artists were trained in the normative modes of the state’s styles of representation. Tagny trained primarily as a journalist, Kiwanga as an anthropologist, and Nnebe trained in sociology and worked with the Federal government, although her work essentially resembles current banker art. The practices of each artist outside of the exhibition are generic enough that they can be read as representative instances of a genre.

Almost every one of their strategies (as well as much of the imagery) we already saw deployed (and more complexly) by Eddy Firmin (and even that came off as a cobbling together of a set of pre-established market fads pushed to a maximalism that ended up diffusing it).Undoing Earthwriting lacks the giddy fetishistic perversity and inventiveness of something like Diyar Mayil’s show at Centre Clark a few seasons ago, and which had some overlapping thematic concerns, but was a much better variant of this. It also shares some thematic overlap with Timothy Yanick Hunter’s show for Momenta (which, again was substantially more rigorously and inventively formulated). And it has something of the unintentional funereal comedy of L’imaginaire radical II: désœuvrer la valeur at VOX, but the rest of the framing runs through environmental clichés I have already highlighted with other exhibitions.

It is a show about “racial capital,” to appropriate Nnebe’s casting of her work, in the sense that it is a capitalization on race filtered through a series of familiar bromides. [“Her curatorial practice focuses on anti-colonial solidarities and alternative readings of colonial histories through the lens of racial capitalism and ecology.”]

Even more than the show at Casa, what is at play here is the creation of a set of fetish objects, and this is not simply because Nnebe’s work is explicitly concerned with fetish items. That fetishism as a concept fell out of fashion after the 1980s has had less to do with the ongoing viability of it as a theoretical tool than with the fact, established if not fully acknowledged (in very different ways) early on in social theory with Comte and Durkheim, that it posed a serious threat to the credibility of the meta-narrative descriptions that would give legitimacy to the social or cultural as referents. Most of cultural theory, certainly since the 70s (neo-feminist, neo-Marxist, post-colonial, queer, etc.), has been a desperate attempt to patch over its inherent absurdity. This exhibition continues this, but it lacks the anxiety that tends to make such gambles interesting and comes off as bland and smug.

Fetish is used by me in two senses: (1) the sense that it was given primarily by early anthropologists rather than the unfortunately convoluted senses that it has been imbued with by Marxist theory and psychoanalysis, both of which ended up constructing even more pernicious superstitious fantasies than the things they attempted to describe. And (2), the genre sense in which it is employed by the sex industry (dominatrices, pornographers, sex toy producers, etc.) although you could also add things like tarot card reading, magic crystals, spirit walks, Reiki, etc., and much of Contemporary Art. It is superstition and the business of gratifying superstition through objects and rituals. In this instance, the peculiarity of it all is how drained it is of what anthropologists like to call “thickness” and how much it makes a show of its sterility.

I will concentrate on Kiwanga’s work since it is the most complex of the four, straddling several of the basic categories of Contemporary Art: the archive, participation, institutionality as performance, duration, and quasi-ironic art historical appropriation. Concerning her pieces, it has been more fully explained elsewhere that:

Each work in the series takes the form of a protocol, whereby the artist asks the holder to work with a florist to recreate, as accurately as possible, the floral arrangement from an archival image, while allowing for an inevitable share of interpretation. [np] Destined to wilt over the course of their display, these flowers invite us to reflect on time, beyond the idea of the monument and the commemoration, in order to continue in the tradition of vanitas art.

It is like what happened on Bold and the Beautiful the other day when himbo influencer/designer RJ Forrester covered his bed in flower petals before deflowering his virginal girlfriend to synth-pop. That’s the level of intellectual sophistication and depth at play here. With their blunt enframing within this exhibition, it is hard not to read the works as parody but they are not intended as such.

Unfortunately, curators tend to be less self-aware than soap opera scribes, so for Undoing Earthwriting we get statements about the above work like, “Addressing duality, specifically the unexpectedness of growth and decay in relation to time–the plant holds the potential for breath–expanding or withering depending on the positionality of the viewer as they approach the work.” There is nothing unexpected about growth and death in relation to time. If anything, those are the most generic expectations that can be met or associated with it, and the function of “positionality” is so arbitrary here that beyond being a genre cliché it is meaningless. The point here is not to mock the curator (the curatorial essay is rife with this kind of writing) because this applies equally to how the artists discuss the works on their own.

Set on plinths that slightly remove them from their flower shop aesthetics, they read as props for advertising more than anything else. Nnebe’s pieces, in this sense, complement them, extending the showroom quality. In her case, her small items sit upon furnishings with flower petals at their feet. Both bodies of work seem to suggest indexing their objects to some type of implied narrative. But what this is is so vague, so lacking in the concrete or imaginative, that the presentation evacuates the narrative quality that the curatorial framing requires to make sense.

While Kiwanga’s work, as a practice rather than presentation, foregrounds its “participatory” aspect, it does so while highlighting its conceptual and labour hierarchy while obfuscating it with an appeal to a (very minimal) pluralizing of interpretation. The irony of this is that it only ends up being a demonstration of the artificiality of communication and community and presents “Black subjectivity” as little more than decor.

What the work of art demonstrates by its very facticity is the absurdity of the fetish fantasy of historical narrative (which is by no means to say historical fact). It is a severe ironization of the alleged pathos of human being and one that stands as an objection to the type of narrative capture the curation incompetently attempts to cultivate.

An exhibition like this should not be dismissed for being aesthetically and intellectually vapid, although it is both of those things. That much of the art produced or exhibited in the city is “moronic” (in Donald Kuspit's sense) deserves to be taken seriously because this will likely be one of its (and its historiography’s) defining features for the next several generations. Recognizing this should serve as a complement to a critical theory of intelligence that recognizes, as the avant-garde had a century ago, the superfluousness of artists and “cultures” to the existence of art; that art’s real autonomy may render the romantic fantasy of expressivity moot.

Nor is this recognition of the “moronic” intended to be wholly dismissive. It is entirely possible to make interesting and creative arguments in favour of zombifications of one sort or another, whether that is conceived as a “formal” or “political” content or practice. This sort of work is a bit too dull to do that with, and it seems to be more the accidental product of laziness than of disciplined conceptualization or practice.

*2nd and 3rd photos are from Optica's Instagram, the others are my own.