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Travel & See

Black Diaspora Art Practices Since the 1980s

Duke University Press

THE FRAGILE INHERITORS

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

— Karl Marx, THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

— Sigmund Freud, "MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA"

There has been a death in the family of man: modernism. The morbid symptoms of its slow decline have been with us for some time now, but as a body of myths central to the shaping of Western culture, it has taken a long time dying and in so doing has forced us into an interregnum in which "the old is dying and the new cannot be born" (Gramsci, 1971, 275).

The death of modernism thus leaves an inheritance and makes us heirs of its own demise. The dead take a long time dying because by way of a legal contract, such as a will, they continue to exert a certain power and influence over those who survive them: hence, in the form of a bequest, the dead transmit their deeds to their descendants — the postmodernists. Whether one comes into a family fortune or inherits only ancestral debts, as survivors we remain bound to mythologies from the past which constitute our common heritage of modernity. The death of universal Man, and with it the traditional liberal humanist belief in the family of man, is one such mythology which, dying in squalor, weighs like a nightmare on the bad brains of the living. In the United States today there is a name for this nightmare as it is lived in the collective imaginary of contemporary society — multiculturalism.

When there is a death in the family, especially when someone has been disinherited, survivors often quarrel with one another in dispute over the legacy of the deceased. The dead thus exert their power by reanimating jealousies, animosities, sibling rivalries, and resentments among surviving family heirs: all of which shows how much the family of man, like any family, was based not so much on love but on violence, error, and malice.

The museum has become one of the key institutions in which the death of modernism has bequeathed its terrible inheritance — it is the key site upon which the last will and testament of liberal humanist Man has been so bitterly contested by his illegitimate offspring as formed by "the African diaspora's peculiar position as 'step-children' of the West."

The museum acts as a repository of cultural capital in which accumulated objects and artifacts are exhibited, ordered, classified, and made meaningful as evidence of the sovereign and centered identity of Western man as the historical subject of knowledge whose certainties are staged, displayed, and returned in representation as the sum total ratio of what it means to be human. As myth systems of cultural, political, and symbolic power and prestige, the great museums of Europe and America are today in ruins. The sight of the museum in ruins has been important to the recognition of the postmodern condition in that our ability to believe in the mythic narratives of human history embodied in the museum has been radically undermined by our counterknowledge of the exclusionary practices through which Western man acquired his identity as the fixed and stable center of the knowable world only by denying the differences and discourse of others. While many have mourned "his" death, the decline and fall and decentering of the universal subject have revealed that "he" who historically monopolized the microphone in public culture, by claiming to speak for humanity as a whole while denying that right to representation to anyone who was not white, not male, and not Western, turned out to be merely a minority himself, an "other" among others (fig. 1.1).

The crisis of authority within the apparatus of cultural legitimation today thus reveals multiculturalism as the flip side of postmodernism, its other scene. It is 1992, and in the five hundred years since Columbus's voyage of destruction/discovery, the museum becomes the setting for diverse struggles over the very meaning of Americanness as a national identity. In Europe, desperately seeking a unified self-image in 1992, old imperial nation-states confront the postcolonial inheritance in their body politic, now the common home of countless people of the African, Caribbean, Asian, and Muslim diasporas.

Because he regarded crisis as a permanent condition of modernity, Gramsci argued: "If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer 'leading' but only dominant, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously." He then added, "NB. this paragraph should be completed by some observations on the so-called 'problem of the younger generation'— a problem caused by the 'crisis of authority' of the old generations in power" (Gramsci, 1971, 275–76).

The six artists featured in Inheritance may be regarded as exemplars of such a "younger generation" practicing a critical postmodernism which chooses the museum as the site for intervention in the mythmaking functions of the cultural imaginary. The artists each use (and creatively abuse) the conventions of museology as part of an art practice that exhibits a critical archival methodology, deployed in six very different ways around distinct topics, sites, and archaeological digs. It would be reductionist, however, to label these practices postmodern simply on account of their shared, overlapping concern with the museological artifact as an outcome of power/knowledge articulations; with the storytelling function of ideologies; or with the imaginary staging of representational access to an authentic past. All six are ipso facto pomo in their problematization of our perceptions of the past, but what intrigues me about their "detachment from traditional ideologies" is that they all seem passionately genealogical in their commitment to a methodology — a way of working through an ethical response to the museum's crisis of authority — that is best described by Foucault's conception of genealogy as an instrument of counterpractice.

What we have on display are six different ways of doing genealogy as part of a contemporary art practice that wants to get to the bottom of things with respect to the museum's crisis of credulity and to dig a little deeper into the depthless predicament of the postmodern. Whether this concerns the mise-en-scène of textual authority (in Brian Tucker's work) or a dread dystopian sci-fi fantasy of global endo-colonization (in Sylvia Bower's petri dishes), the methods and devices of genealogical inquiry are sharply felt not so much through the mere appropriation of the museum's codes and conventions but through the meticulous and ruthless perversion of the idea of a visible truth on which such conventions depend.

This strategy informs Melissa Goldstein's rereading of Freud and the Freudian concept of fetishism, parodying and playing to the nineteenth-century image-reservoir of the scientist of unconscious mental laws as an obsessed collector. Or from an adjacent angle, when Danny Tisdale's found objects, with all their faded aura from the Black Power era of the 1960s — dashiskis, black leather jackets, Afro combs, Ron O'Neal as Superfly, and Nu Nile pomade — are re-placed and re-presented in a fine art museum context as funked-up Duchampian ready-mades, the genealogical impulse in such art practices suggests a strategy of critical perversion which seeks to bend the clichés of museum display to counterhegemonic purposes. As Foucault put it, knowledge is not meant for understanding: it is meant for cutting (1977, 154). The aim is to subvert the codes of museological authority precisely by perverting our aesthetic contract with the artifact as a signifier of power, knowledge, and truth. Quite literally, such methods are perverse insofar as they aim to "lead us away from" the search for a final or absolute meaning in historical events (Dollimore, 1991), and encourage us instead to take pleasure in a rigorously skeptical disposition toward the truth embodied by the museum as an imagined representation of our relationship to the events of the past that made us who we are today.

The museum in ruins has become a site of struggle over representations of cultural history because new social actors have sought to reclaim what had been hidden from history, to rewrite the distorted versions of the past inherited from the dominant, Eurocentric paradigm. Yet in countermovements such as feminist herstory or Afrocentrism, to cite two examples, there is often a tendency that unwittingly replicates the master codes of dominant historicism by reducing the desire for knowledge of the past to the discovery of heroic ancestors and their origins, which often comes about because such movements also assume that there is something called truth to begin with. Genealogy, on the other hand, opposes itself to the search for origins (Foucault, 1977, 140) and departs from history as the telling of fabulous just-so stories of innocent origins and happy endings, for oppressor and oppressed alike (figs. 1.2 and 1.3).

The artists gathered here resemble genealogists rather than historians in that whereas historians take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy — the unavoidable obstacles of their passion (Foucault 1977, 156–57), in order to fabricate an "objective" account which must hide its singular malice under the cloak of universals (158), the genealogists on the other hand acknowledge their perspectival location. They thus resemble Gramsci's organic intellectuals as they imply a use of history that severs its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a counter-memory — a transformation of history into a totally different form of time (160). It is in this sense that the methods employed here refuse the certainty of absolutes in favor of an epistemological position of ambivalence and uncertainty through which the look solicited by their installations corresponds to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates and disperses, that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal elements — the kind of dissociating view that is capable of decomposing itself, shattering the unity of man's being through which it was thought that he could extend his sovereignty to the events of the past (153).

Genealogy cuts away from the interpretive authority of the museum for, if interpretation were the slow exposure of the hidden meaning in an origin, then only metaphysicians could interpret the development of humanity. But if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game, and subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations (Foucault, 1977, 151–52).

As counterpractice, genealogy concerns what Foucault called the search for descent — a phrase which marvelously describes what Fred Wilson and Renée Green are doing in their gray, meticulous and patiently documentary searches (Foucault, 1977, 139) into the toxic mythologies of race, whose sedimented traces in the fantasia of the popular imaginary are being reworked in the resurgence of racism in the United States today. Green and Wilson follow the complex course of descent (146) in order to take up what Cornel West calls a genealogical materialist analysis of race as an ideological phantasm of U.S. history which haunts its sense of national identity and its sense of "who we are."

In relation to the topos of race, I want to stress the importance of such genealogy in its critical difference from that abuse of popular memory which results, for example, in the Black History Month Hall of Fame version of the past in which the search for positive images, itself motivated by an urgent need to repair the damage done by the dominant paradigm, nonetheless has the effect of embalming and museumifying the past and thus paradoxically replicates its perceived marginality. By using genealogy, on the other hand, artists like Renée Green do not arrive at the therapeutic comfort of feel-good countermyths, but encounter the upsetting discovery that critical knowledge of the past is a dangerous legacy and that we should not be deceived into thinking that this heritage is an acquisition, a possession that grows and solidifies: rather, it is an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within and from underneath (Foucault, 1977, 146).

This is a critical move in contemporary struggles over the symbolic economy of the museum because it disrupts the simplistic duality of arguing only about exclusion and inclusion (the rhetoric of bureaucratic multiculturalism). It goes beyond the binary mode of narration in which history's victims and victimizers can only trade places, and opens instead onto a third space in which it becomes possible to rethink the social function of the museum and contemplate its radical transformation. This is because genealogy, unlike history, disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified (147). The introduction of such disturbance into the field of vision underlines that what is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origins: it is the dissension of things. It is disparity (142). In their different ways, the six artists here remind us that the purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation (162) (fig. 1.4).

Hold up. I'm a confirmed fan of Foucault, who remains one of my favorite dead, white, male thinkers, but like his other black readers I feel compelled to confront his Nietzschean emphasis on the total dissipation of identity with the question: Whose identity? It is one thing for Europeans like him to abandon any claim to identity, but some of us have struggled long and hard to grab hold of one and would like to hang on to it for the moment, thank you very much. What is missing from Foucault is Stuart Hall's (1987) counteremphasis on the necessarily provisional and arbitrary character of any identity that is historically formed in and through the process of struggle. But, on the other hand, when Foucault argues that nothing in man — not even his body — is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for the understanding of other men (Foucault, 1977, 153), I agree entirely. In taking aim at the Platonic prejudice against the body as an eternal and immutable substratum of an essential identity, Foucault emphasizes the painful and oppressive materiality of those phantasms — inscribed in old world ideologies of race, gender, nationality, sexuality, and ethnicity — which cut into the body and divide it from itself and hence undermine any claim to something as finished or as complete as an identity.

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Excerpted from Travel & See by Kobena Mercer. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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