Last weekend, in one of my customary forays for old and rare books, I found a small French postcard album with the title “Bataille de la Marne, 1918, Chateau-Thierry”. I have been interested in historic images and narratives of XXth century wars for reasons I will explain later.
This one booklet has the format of a traditional tourist postcard collection, one of those where postcards are detachable and can be written on the back and mailed. The unusual aspect of it is that the images are primarily of buildings that have been bombed down to rubble. The battle of Château -Thierry, which this booklet documents, was part of the second Battle of the Marne, the last major Battle of World War I and the one where the Allied counterattack allowed for them to break through in an advance that would eventually win the war. It was one of the first battles where the American Expeditionary forces participated.
One of the images is of the ruins of de Place de Marche at Château -Thierry. Combat in this area took place on June and July of 1918 between American and French allies against the German forces, the latter which retreated. The image shows a lone person walking down a road where one can see the shell of a large building, now in ruins. Another postcard depicts the railroad station of. Chateau-Thierry where the American forces seem to be preparing their wounded, awaiting a train to evacuate them from the area.
Postcards —now an almost defunct concept— have a long association with tourism. Related to this story, the golden age of the postcard is associated with France, particularly with the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, which prompted the production of a picture postcard as “official souvenir”. Two decades later, when World War I started, postcard communication was inexpensive and reliable, and it was utilized by soldiers to report news back home. Thus the apparent incongruous notion of an album of “souvenir postcards” of the war, showing not beautiful scenes or art works but instead death and destruction. It was the newsworthiness of the image that mattered, or so it appears. The spirit of the messages would be less the touristy “wish you were here” and more the journalistic “this is where I am right now.”
The album made think about the days in New York City after 9/11— a somber period of mourning, confusion, and sadness we lived through. For a few weeks the city was closed to non-residents below Canal Avenue. However, right on Canal—which was always the area for street vendors, knockoff watches and designer handbags and cheap Chinese toys— several people started selling 9/11 T-Shirts almost immediately after the attacks. The week after 9/11 brought in a huge surge of support for New York City, prompting Milton Glaser’s famous variation of his “I love NY” logo into “I love NY more than ever”. Somewhat relatedly, these T-shirts presented 9/11 with the two towers, the date, and different versions of “NYC” and “New York” and “Stronger than Ever”, “Never Forget”, and so on.
The strange aspect about these T-shirts was that —perhaps in true New York fashion— they had a touristic vibe to them. They ostensibly were statements of solidarity and resilience, but they also were commercial products, often looking like the CNN headline during those days “America Under Attack”, presented as the news but also moonlighting as a reality show and a highly profitable real-life drama.
I have recently thought about those T-shirts, not because of these postcards, but mainly because of another current example of how we are often prey of the monetization of political tragedy: the news coverage following the January 6th Capitol insurrection has seemingly become a huge gift for CNN and MSNBC as they exhaustively analyze, deconstruct and scrutinize every little detail related to the last weeks of the Trump presidency and the decomposed state of the US’s political debate— generating huge viewership and — I am sure— revenue from those debates to which many of us are addicted to (and I confess to being one of them).
In the aftermath of 9/11 when I thought that this is the wrong time to be making art, an opportunistic artist friend of mine disagreed with me, arguing instead that it was an excellent time to take advantage of the moment and make biennial-worthy pieces. He was not being cynical or ironic when he told me this.
In a certain way he was not wrong: artists and their work are often treated like readymade touristic postcards of the places they come from and the political and cultural issues they face. And a very common, and perhaps understandable curatorial impulse is to feature artists from places that are in crisis, both as a public gesture of support for their cause and to raise public awareness about the political significance of it, but also under the expectation that the artist’s work will in some way become representative of that place and the moment it is current living, and that their work is an attempt to represent that reality, often with a critical perspective. This largely unspoken expectation constitutes the core basis of many curatorial philosophies, from regular exhibitions to international biennials.
It is a rationale summarized by the famous phrase by José Ortega y Gasset: “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo” (I am myself and my circumstance, and if I don’t save it, I don’t save myself.”
Except that artists resent being defined by any circumstance, and even more so, they resent becoming representatives of a group of people. This push toward group representation not only has an ethnographic dimension to it, but it becomes an othering force.
I had a conversation on this topic with a group of artists, curators, and educators in Mexico City exactly 15 years ago. I was conducting a workshop as part of The School of Panamerican Unrest, as part of which different groups of artists would write a collective statement to be shared with other cities where the project would stop by in its physical journey from Alaska to Chile. This project was in fact the direct result of my reflections after 9/11 and the implementation of the Bush Doctrine before the invasion of Iraq: the project sought to understand American hegemony in the Americas and the way in which national identity is constructed and the role that art can play in this process.
In that Mexico City conversation the focus was primarily, and precisely, on the subject of national representation. Thinking specifically on developing countries, the group critiqued the way in which art becomes a sort of ethnographic product in the international art circuit. One of the participants, Jorge Reynoso Pohlenz, remarked on how “artists are always perceived as having this child-like quality, like a gnome from a magic forest who imagines things and finds marvels in the simplest things, as representations from a savage world.” His comment at the time made me think of the Venezuelan writer Carlos Rangel, who in the 1970s in his book “Del Buen Salvaje al Buen Revolucionario” (“From the Good Savage to the Good Revolutionary”) where he argues that the embracing of Marxism of the Latin American left constituted an unsuccessful exorcism of its own history while at the same time an affirmation of the contradictions of its society, unable to express a clear path of its own and instead furthering its own mythology.
The collective statement from the Mexico City workshop spoke to the idea that artists, while never fully feeling at ease with the expectation from the market or the art system in which they are “given the role of spokespersons for the people” would nonetheless agree to play into that role. The group concluded its collective statement by saying that “we believe that a system of representations is a system of exclusions.”
But the question on why as artists we take the bait to produce this kind of works is not as interesting as the reasons why the art world seems to have a constant need for these kinds of representations. One answer, it seems to me, might be related to a neologism created by writer John Koenig, author of the forthcoming book Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, also a website. Koening devotes his efforts in coining new terms for emotions, feelings and experiences for which we still don’t have a term—a project that is simultaneously literary, psychological and etymological.
In it you can find this word:
Chrysalism
Chrysalism (noun): The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.
The experience of walking around in a museum exhibition with works that respond or comment on trauma and tragedy, sometimes with the distance of history and geography, is perhaps a form of Chrysalism. I know that this is not a universally shared experience, and some works that deal with trauma can be triggering to some people. But at the same time artworks can be cathartic, helping to process those emotions.
In “Concerning the Pain of Others”, Susan Sontag writes:
“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”
Artworks that narrate, describe, or represent trauma, in a strange way, can aid our anxieties and our feelings of impotence around a problem. For those who organize exhibitions, engaging with it might feel like a form of curatorial activism: exhibiting artworks by artists who address the social and political ailments of the places where they live and work is not only something that feels appropriate but necessary in order to address the current global political reality as a curator. As to viewers, if the art works refers to a problem that represent us, we might feel seen; if it is something we care about we see it placed in a public platform for everyone to recognize. But generally, it is art firmly in the territory of representation, (and granted, it is not social practice as I tend to favor) but for that reason it is firmly framed within the confines of an exhibition, it is “only art,” and we can always step away from it if we so choose to. In that sense, these art works are just safe windows to peek onto other realities.
This is not to mean that looking at the representation of tragedy is soothing in any way. But the distance from which we look at it, within the protection of the exhibition space, ostensibly a quiet, spacious place where to anonymously view, meditate and reflect if we want to, and the way in which the tragic issue is treated through the filter of art, have a similar effect to the distant storm described by Koening: crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.
In recent months, late at night as I make my collages, I have taken to listening to podcasts and documentaries about World War II and the rise of fascism. I feel it is important to understand that historical period, not least because it is important to understand the patterns that we are witnessing currently in the political discourse, where truth and objectivity are under attack by forces that favor authoritarianism and a false, cultish, alternate reality.
I listen to those stories in silence, experiencing perhaps a degree of Chrysalism. But I also do it with the firm awareness that the next morning myself and many more of us need to wake up to act on the world through artistic actions, with a renewed sense of responsibility— hopefully making and doing things that might eventually amount to more than decorative postcards.