The Cuckoo Clock Argument

Is national conflict good for artmaking?

Final scene of Orson Welles’s film The Stranger (1946)

I am a great admirer of Swiss art and culture. I could compile a long list that includes Henry Fuseli, Giacometti, Paul Klee’s works and writings, Meret Oppenheim, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Bauhaus artist Gunta Stölzl, the eccentric Adolf Wölfli, the snare-pictures of Daniel Spoerri, the works of Fischli and Weiss and Pipilotti Rist. Le Corbusier amongst architects;  writers Robert Walser and Max Frisch,  Jean Jacques Rousseau and Carl Jung among thinkers and Jean-Luc Godard in film. 

I feel I need to clarify this in advance because for a while I have wanted to unpack the premise of the famous, humorous and yet unfair and disparaging statement made by the character Harry Lime in Orson Welles’s 1949 film  The Third Man, also known as the Cuckoo Clock speech:

“…in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland  they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” 

This quote might not have survived seven decades had it not been a cliché to which many still resort (and which, I would argue, points at a phenomenon that is not specifically connected to Switzerland). I wanted to understand what that stereotype represents.

We can depart from the generally agreed-on premise that very privileged individuals who have not directly experienced struggle (social, economic, political, etc.) might not be particularly versant, or even interested, in making art that meaningfully examines or speaks of struggle. Put in another way, just as the dream of reason produces monsters, the slumber of comfort produces complacent artworks.

I remember an ex-art school classmate who I befriended at a drawing class. At some point in that class we were assigned a particular project consisting in creating hybrid shapes that he really enjoyed doing. Six or seven years after we graduated we reconnected and he invited me to his home. He had married and was living comfortably in a spacious suburban house, not having to work because his wife had a high-paying job that would allow him to dedicate himself fully to art making. When I walked into his studio I found that he was still doing drawings following the same exact assignment from that drawing class , as if no time had ever elapsed and we were still students. Because his life had not encountered any major challenges, his practice had simply continued evolving in a straight line, unchanged for years.

I thought about the possible collective version of this individual phenomenon. Knowing how treacherous is to navigate the waters of cultural determinism, I nonetheless still grappled with the question: how does the presence or absence of economic comfort and political stability influence the type of artistic production?

When I first visited Guatemala in the early 2000s, I encountered a country that had just emerged from a bloody civil war and a series of military dictatorships that perpetrated genocide; a country that suffers high levels of poverty, crime and violence. At the same time, Guatemala has an incredibly rich indigenous culture that is very much alive today and has contributed some of the most important literature and art in Latin America. The artists that I met during those early years and after— Regina José Galindo, the late Aníbal López, and Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, among others— put Guatemala on the map through their work, some of which speaks to many of those very social issues. In South America, Colombia is another country that endured a bloody civil war of its own and has  great economic and social difficulties; and at the same time its art scene is one of its most vibrant in the Americas, energized by a kind of wit, inventiveness and alternativity that whether it might stem from necessity or not, constantly surprises and produces extraordinary artists.

Now, does art making have the same urgency in places that are not besieged by conflict? One might consider that question when looking at the cases of  first-world countries where there is almost 100% literacy, incipient crime, and the highest quality of life as indicated by the social progress index as studied by the international non-profit Social Progress Initiative.

As I gave further thought to this topic I realized that I was falling into two dangerous traps. The first involves understanding of how privilege works, specifically  in small art scenes. A taboo subject that is rarely mentioned is that many leading artists who come from developing countries and often represent their nations at different international biennials come from privileged backgrounds.  Many (and I acknowledge being one of them) studied art abroad becoming versant in international contemporary art language and theory. Implicitly or not, their work is often seen or interpreted as an authoritative perspective/portrayal of their local contexts. In its worst version, artists might be viewed as cultural informants, providing a sophisticated ethnography through the contemporary art discourse. Comparatively, artists from developed countries (specifically when they also are white Western artists)  are not necessarily expected to produce work that invites identitarian readings, in contrast to artists from the “periphery” whose works are more often expected to speak of/to conflict.  Lastly, great artists are so unusual, and the concerns in their work so specific, that their backgrounds are not necessarily representative of the local context they came from.

Relatedly, there is the second, odious trap: the sophisticated aestheticization of conflict and the biennalization of pornomiseria, ostensibly produced to generate global consciousness but which, in spite of its noble motivations, might only result in the enhancement of a few artistic reputations that translate into market value, and not so much in actual efforts to address the social, economic or political problems that an artwork might present (psychological question: do collectors who purchase artworks about third-world problems somehow feel that by doing so they are helping solve those problems?).  I am reminded of “the stinky cheese metaphor” that Homi Bhabha was fond of using in the lecture circuit a few years ago in reference to the exoticizing  fascination that the developed world has of the informal intelligence of third world urbanism.

As to artists who come from countries that do experience conflict, the dilemma is: does one accept (and is interested in assuming) the token role of mediator and interpreter of that conflict toward the eager art world, or does one reject that platform that might at least allow to raise consciousness about some of these issues?

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, A Brief History of Architecture in Guatemala (Breve Historia de la Arquitectura en Guatemala), 2010, Performance and three foam-board costumes. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift of the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, 2016 © Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

I felt the need to pose some of these questions to artists and curators in Guatemala, and Switzerland to get their perspectives. They included Rosina Cazali, who is one of the most prominent curators in Central America and deeply knowledgeable of the art of Guatemala, Swiss artist and curator Johannes M. Hedinger. Also, as a case study, I thought of a country where I have had the opportunity to do a few projects in and get to know some of its arts community: Norway. In so many respects, Norway is a model of tolerance, social safety net, and societal health overall; by most measures Norway’s health system, political stability and civil rights record surpasses the United States by a substantial margin. Now in Norway, turns out that if you are an artist you actually can receive a grant from Arts Council Norway which amounts to a monthly salary. In 2019 the grant was 268,222 NOK which comes to about $25,000 USD a year. The question then becomes: to what extent do these kinds of financial incentives and social stability allow for the creation of a rich and vibrant art scene such as what we see in a country like Guatemala, which could only dream of having such support for its artists? I directed similar questions to members of the art collective Tenthaus, based in Oslo, with whom I have collaborated in the past.

For starters, Hedinger educated me in the fact that the cuckoo clock was most likely not invented in Switzerland but in the Black Forest  region in Germany, attributed to the clockmaker Franz Ketterer in the 18^th century— a detail that right off the bat upsets the Orson Welles quip (“sorry if I've ruined your punchline a little”, he wrote). That aside, “this question is something I think about a lot”, wrote Nikhil Vettukatil, a Tenthaus-associated artist born in India but now based in Norway. Vettukatil made the point that countries like Norway and Switzerland have small populations in comparison to Guatemala (which is bigger than both Norway and Switzerland combined) which statistically might make it more possible to produce prominent artists (an argument that reminds me those made by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers). Vettukatil also pointed out that one should not omit the fact that Switzerland is at the economic center of the art world (through its fairs, publications, galleries, and so forth) which, while seemingly an unrelated point, it does help make the case that artists careers today are no longer local but that they do usually unfold in a highly interwoven global context.

Carlos Mérida, Danzantes de Tlaxcala, 1951. Painting; Dallas Museum of Art

On her part, Cazali brought up two important points that supported my previous intuitions:  first, while countries with “our colonial wound”, Cazali says, do have a hyper-awareness of social and political issues that make their way into artworks, at the same time the external gaze of the art world implicitly assigns or demands that artists from these countries speak to those issues, “as if this was the one narrative that corresponds to us.”  “In the end”, she adds, “it is a form of exotism.”   This partially leads to her second point, which is that many Guatemalan artists who concern themselves with more formal (and not so much social) issues (read: issues that the art world want them to speak about as “interpreters” of their country) somehow recede into the background, a case that Cazali exemplifies with the work of Carlos Mérida (in contrast to the more militant political Mexican muralists of his generation).

Going back to Hedinger, he poked holes around the notions of “peaceful nations” and “localized conflict”. For all its affluence, Switzerland has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world.  And, relating to a point made by Vettukatil,  Hedinger concludes that some of the greatest crises “such as the climate catastrophe, are global ones.”  So our democratic impulse to focus on the distant exotic conflict might indirectly be a way to repress the urgency of our collective global ones. Last but not least, a country like Norway is enriched by its immigrant population, as shown by Tenthaus members Sharhrzad Malekian (Iranian artist) , and Vettukatil himself; both actively make work that is informed by their bi-national experience.

I still have much to process concerning the answers I received. I do now realize the extent to which a cliché, as sociologist Anton C. Zijderveld once wrote, “fails positively to contribute meaning to social interactions and communication, it does function socially, since it manages to stimulate behavior (cognition, emotion, volition, action), while it avoids reflection on meanings”.  

For the time being I just feel the need to go back to the cuckoo clock/Swiss theme by making a reference to what many of us consider one of the most important works of the 2010’s, made by no other than a Swiss-American artist: Christian Marclay’s masterpiece The Clock— a breathtaking editing of an almost minute-by-minute set of  movie scenes that serves both as a real-time clock and as a compendium of the history of film.

I have no idea if Marclay ever thought about Welles’s infamous cuckoo clock quote while making this piece (or if his work is precisely a riposte to that comment) but it should be noted that the climax of Marclay’s piece is a clip of another film noir by Welles’s, The Stranger, where right at the strike of midnight the main character (played by Welles) is impaled by a cuckoo-like moving figure that emerges from the clock tower.

Perhaps a timeless metaphor about the dangers of cultural determinism.