Carlos Capelan: Fragments of a Friendship Between Cities
He is like a medieval city in the twenty-first century. No matter the hot or cold breath of weather the walls are still standing. With inscrutable alleyways and well-worn stones he hides, resists and absorbs. And then with a curious transposition of the familiar and the foreign he claims a luminous presence. Together we have wandered through many cities and alone I have revisited the subjects we discussed and examined. His ironic gaze still penetrating in the darkness of my memory. He has come into my life and is always welcome. I now write as if the city is there, before me, like a thumb print.
Shortly after 9/11, at a time when politicians around the world were qualifying their commitments to historical conventions on human rights, Jimmie Durham claimed that this was an opportune moment to re-define the function of art. Drawing on Sarat Maharaj’s comment that artists produce knowledge he proposed an even more fundamental task:
This is a time when we ask: “Who are we humans?” It’s not the American invasive kind of globalization, but globalization where humans try to talk to each other. I think that humanity is trying to talk to itself now, for the first time in human history, maybe. We don’t necessary like each other, or like what we are trying to say to each other, but to me it looks like we trying to see ourselves.
Durham is suggesting that art is part of an historic dialogue between different people and this could lead towards a more honest self-evaluation. Obviously such a conversation would require more than the congregation of people in a forum where they articulate their differences and negotiate over fixed boundaries. As it has been often noted, it requires an ethics of hospitality towards the other and an attitude of meekness towards the risks and benefits that may accrue in the exchange. In this process Durham notes that art has the capacity to explore human bonds that are not reliant on an economic system of credit and debit or confined to nationalist categories of loyalty. A decade earlier the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben posited a communal structure in which “humans co-belong without a representable condition of belonging”. Cosmopolitanism begins in such propositions. It also exists in numerous events in which it is barely mentioned. Jimmie, Sarat and Carlos, all from the South but also in Malmo-Lund.
Ottawa
In the middle of the summer in one of the most northern capital cities with a bad case of insomniac jet lag ambo I met Carlos Capelan. Finger-nail clippings arranged like little clouds in a vitrine. Floating chairs and suspended bag of water. An elevated platform with ellipses extracted from the surface. A room full of the traces of leaving and the offering of hospitality. Such things are never said in the open. They do not arrive with banners, cards and require check points. They are already in the whispers that surround the rumours. They remain in the steps long after the journey is completed.
It never got dark in Ottawa. I kept bumping into him and sitting next to him. I didn’t know at the time that a friend of his from Panama had sent him a small green book that I had written in Manchester called ‘The Complicities of Culture’. At the airport he taught me how to buy presents for children. A great gift. I told him a story about painter who allowed the subject to see himself in art that imitates life. It kind of flattered the haughty lazy Greeks with foresight
He returned to Costa Rica and told his wife about this strange guy that he kept meeting. She said: “it sounds like you made a friend”.
Sydney
The story from the airport arrived as a book about the self and the other.
He walked into Artspace with Mosquera after they had attempted to shake off the creases of their journey by walking around the Botanical gardens. “The orchids are wonderful, the birds are healthy, and none of the children and throwing stones!”
Angelsea
We are driving along a dirt track looking for kangaroos. “My kids will never forgive me if I don’t return with an image.” The track is unpromising. In order to turn the car around I pull into a driveway that leads to someone’s house. Carlos sees a light on in the house and imagines a Swedish couple sitting by the window not daring to express the wish for companionship. He mimics the man, “Quick put the coffee on, we have visitors.”
Melbourne
In the night that information was gathered for the 1998 Australian census a male: born in Uruguay: occupation artist, was entered into the records as staying in St Kilda.
Madrid
I’ll meet you at ARCO.
The taxi drops me at the entrance of what seems to me another airport. Where to begin? Which entrance? At the coat check I hear, “hey Nikos!”
At the Prado we walk past acres of canvas by Velasquez. A prince on a horse. A princess with a fan. A duke with moustache. A Queen on a throne. Etc. etc. etc. Then Las Meninas. The mystery of the order in which everyone looks at you, sovereign, dwarf and child. And yet the eyes of the painter and those that appear in reflection are the ones we see as coming from a void.
We cross the road and buy some toys and trinkets. Later you take me to the private of a Baron. For the first time I see a Mondrian and I am shocked that his lines were hand painted, sometimes not very straight and other times he even used electrical tape that eventually lifted and curled. You move your index finger across the surface of Turner’s stormy skies and the Lucien Freud’s flesh. It like a rehearsal of a primal act from the cave of imagination and revelation. Tracing the shadowlines between of life and art.
LAX
The south begins at the departure gate of TACA Airways. No it starts when the hostess announces: ‘TACA Airways would like to invite…’ STAMPEDE! As I get to my feet a four foot tall cowboy rams two of his seven pieces of hand luggage up my backside. He didn’t notice, why should I, nothing personal.
Guatemala City
Sunrise and customs checks, bright and barely noticeable. The passport does not seem so sacred anymore. I spy Carlos waiting on a balcony above the concourse, he is the one smoking. His first words: ‘This is the real thing.’ The space for sentiment and silence is different here. In Australia the colonizer acted as if the bloody violence of colonialism never happened, here it is a sign of glory and sacrifice that is celebrated in the stained glass stairwell of the Presidential Palace. Even outside a gallery the blood from the nocturnal murder is still there the day after. The bronze sculpture of the poet Asturias is high on its plinth. He is not poised in heavy contemplation but with arms flung backwards, his coat open like wings that will lift him into a future with head full of bursting energy. It is a Hermes of a man. His folder is behind him. Rossina tells us that the sculpted bronze pages that were placed as if falling in his trail were stolen during the previous week. By his young admirers I am sure.
Antigua
One of the earliest colonial cities in Meso-America. Built in 1592 with a cathedral and the administrative buildings lining the central square and neat blocks running on strict North- South, East – West axes. Geometric order the gift of colonialism. All the homes are surrounded by high walls. The rooms run off the cloisters and in the centre a garden dominated by a Jacaranda tree. Carlos and Pablo talk about the pleasures and anxieties of the periphery – the perennial problem of visibility. I realize that all the complaining that I here in Melbourne, ‘we are provincial’, ‘we are not at the cutting edge’, ‘we are excluded from the global’, is of course an index of where it belongs in the hierarchies, but also a pathetic way of blaming the city for not being ‘cultural enough’, when the real problem is that we are not cultural enough to assume a place in the world. Forget the competitive avant garde fantasy of being ahead, and just get on with doing, as Jimmie said, what is necessary where you are!
San Jose City
Eerie is the word that keeps coming back like the reflux breath at the lip of a volcano. Carlos’s work is at one level, an act of leaving. He usually leaves a mark of his presence in the space his work is exhibited. This also traces the moment of arrival. Between these moments in time the space yawns and folds. His work questions the distance between visual and textual signs and the things, places, feelings, experiences and memories that they seek to represent. These signs and events will never meet. We live in a permanent semantic limbo. But here the gaps are even more palpable.
Who is missing?
In which dream did the city begin?
So many words and buildings arranging the space
Here is your self, your furniture, your mirror
There are the plates with which neighbours exchange glances
Slide and collide
Spaces in between squeezed like a trigger
Who pressed the switch?
That summoned the father you love, the father you kill
The father that was never there and the father that is still to arrive
In the city that awaits you
With its art whispering
Graffiti remembering
And the body that leaves her bloody footprints
The journey cracks the mirror
With all its incessant maybe maybe maybe
Its not just me who hangs on to the promise
That boats return
Waiting in foreign ports is as good a place as any
For answers that to the question
In which city do you stay?
Hotel Conference
In the past decade a paradigm shift has enabled a new discourse on migration and migrants. As Nestor Garcia Canclini has argued the state-centric views on belonging have been challenged by new transnational perspectives on the formation of social spaces and a redefinition of the universal definitions of human rights. The teleological claims on social evolution that privileged, what Harald Kleinschmidt called ‘residentialism’ have been discredited,[1] and there is now both a finer appreciation of the complex feedback systems that arise from cross-border movements, and an affirmative valuation of the role of cross-cultural interaction in re-vitalizing and ensuring the viability of social structures. From this perspective migration is now seen as a dynamic and often ongoing feature of social life. Similarly, migrants are no longer typecast as either passive victims that are ‘pushed and pulled’ by external forces, or deviants that threaten social order. It is therefore more appropriate to consider the way migrants plot their journeys and utilise extensive networks of information as part of the normal and conscientious efforts by which people dignify their lives. In Hardt and Negri’s spirited defence of a new form of critical agency migrants are pioneers of what they call the ‘multitude’ and, as Kleinschmidt argues, the new discourse on migration has the potential to extend the notion of citizenship to ‘universalistic principles of human rights irrespective of loyalty to a particular institution of statehood’.
The limitations of the nationalist paradigm have become increasingly self evident in contemporary visual studies and art history. With the hyper-visibility of non-western artists, critics, curators, the adoption of nomadic project based art practices, the accelerated frequency of foreign travel, the wider availability of information through digital technology and the incorporation of the art market in global capital networks the boundaries of art no longer fit within national categories. As Kobena Mercer rightly observed the signs of cultural difference which was a of matter of urgency and contention in previous decades has now become a banality. He goes so far as to say that there is now a ‘widespread acknowledgement of multiple identities in public life’ and the normative incoporation of multiculturalism has both ‘enriched our experiences of art and enlived the entire setting’. Between the recognition of the visibility of the other and a redefinition of the status, a redistribution of the historical significance, and reconfiguration of the terms of negotiation that would otherwise continue to make other cultures invisible, there is, as Mercer also argues, a lot of work to be done. Let us say that the task of bringing the art historical house into an order that is capable of addressing the range of sites, complexity of modes, and diversity of agents that are engaged in artistic production is not just a process of updating the existing anthologies, but more like a more radical project in which concepts, categories and narrative structures require revisiting.
In a Berlin Hotel, Bergen’s Art Academy and along the foreshore of the Baltic we discussed the necessity and the limitations to an institutional critique of the genealogies in art history. If cosmopolitanism is an open outlook towards the world and a practice of relating together ideas and materials that orignate from foreign places, then why has art history failed to make this the central concept for articulating the constitutive features of the artistic imaginary. Cultural difference has become a normal feature of everyday life in all major cities and surely it is time to also address the unconsious factors that shape a cosmopolitan ‘disposition’, what Mica Nava calls the ‘feelings for attraction and identification with otherness’ that produce an intimate and ‘visceral cosmopolitanism.’ Cosmopolitanism is not just about private consciousness, but also a social activity of mutual respect and a shared commitment in developing inclusive and hybrid rituals.
Kings Way
Driving to work this morning I played the same song seven times. Those bloody Greek songs are made for Autumnal dawns in the South, with their pagan whispers of rose-petals and that tremulous first kiss. In the chorus she summons: ‘Young-young like the gods, whoever loves should be spared in battle’.
There is something wild about Greeks. Always hungry, crying at their open wounds and laughing at the sky. You cannot forget how much they are in their landscape. And yet Seferis would say: ‘The truth is one seeks not to get away from a place, not to travel, not to see again the people one loves, not even to create something. At bottom, one is seeking to get out of oneself, and perhaps the criterion of a man’s worth is the way he manages to get out of himself.’
The cover of the first issue of the journal Acephale, drawn by Andre Masson, showed a naked, headless human figure. Bataille: ‘Man has escaped from his head, as the condemned man from prison’.
Auckland
My mother watched you paint a mural that would remain only as long as the exhibition. ‘And then’, she asked, ‘what will happen to it?’ It will not disappear but neither will it remain. It will not be repeated anywhere else but it will be reiterated in another time and place. It comes again and again. Because across the South there are the common inter-linking histories of indigeneity, colonialism and modernization. The struggles for justice are not the same everywhere, but it is part of the problem that we know so little of each other’s examples. What parallels exist between these places? These are questions that Carlos ponders in a new series that he takes from New Zealand as a contribution to another project in South Africa.
Memento Mori
Death has no city. It just surrounds everything. In Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors it stretches across the foreground of the subject’s feet. Hell was then below us, now our spatial imagination is more multi-dimensional. It appeared as a skull, it is in the vortex of signs from different languages, either way it is place that remains unknowable. It cannot be compared with anything that we know or imagine. Death is the only outside. Severo Sarduy – ‘If anamorphis – the point at which perspective plunges into the illegible … was used in the old baroque to codify a surplus that was often moral – allegory or vanitas – it reappears in South American baroque without the trope of double meaning, reduced to a pure critical artifice and presented, beyond any didactic ambition as a ‘natural’ technique: neither a deceptive shell nor an encoded landscape.”
Maroubra
Paper bark trees, ochre lined cliffs – the material with which art begins. On the other hand, we pause for lunch at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. ‘Look!’ I point. ‘On the other side of this horizon is the beginning of your home.’ A longer drag of the cigarette. Is there where the dream of art begins.
An artist from Chile comes to Australia. He and Carlos have worked together for a long time. The diaspora never forgets. Supplies come in both directions. He greets me with a bear hug. Every time our eyes cross he sings like Frankie, ‘Only you’. All night he keeps this refrain with a smile and a feint tear in his eyes. Who else is he seeing? I think of Carlos’s fotos of the Andes taken from a plane window. I try to imagine an island called Chiloe where Carlos lived and the missing people.
Onlyme
Onlyyou
Who do you see?
When you bow to the Mountain’s crown
And its peasant wrinkles of glacial frowns
When you place your hand beneath the sleepy hollow
Of a damp dog afternoon
When you measure the blue pulse
In her marble veins
Onlyme
Onlyyou
There is nothing worse than a statue’s curse
Nor more blessed than the jacaranda’s smile
As you lifted the stone with your muscule and mind
My thigh twinged
Rush
Neither youth nor discovery
Just the nod from the other side of the pacific
Persian Promises
Once upon a time there was a Persian King, who had conquered many territories and achieved much glory. Looking into the courtyard of his palace, he decided one day to arrange a competition that would celebrate his power. He summoned to his palace the two finest artists in the world. One from the East and one from the West. A Chinaman and a Greek.
Once these artists had arrived the King explained the rules of his commission.
The two artists would be taken into the courtyard and allocated an exact half portion. The courtyard would be divided by a heavy curtain. No conversation between the artists was permitted and they were forbidden from entering each other’s space. They had one month to complete their work. At the end of the month the King would enter the courtyard and judge the work. The successful artist would be awarded a small principality.
He then turned to the two artists to check that these rules were acceptable. The Chinaman immediately confirmed his acceptance. The Greek added: ‘If it is acceptable to the Chinaman, then it is also acceptable to me.’
The two artists were then shown to their respective half of the courtyard. The Chinaman unpacked his tools and immediately commenced work. The Greek examined the walls and its relation to the sun, and feeling rather pleased with his portion he decided to make his way to the city square.
As the days passed the Chinaman remained hard at work in his half of the courtyard. The Greek by contrast was barely seen in the palace. He had acquainted himself with all the taverns. The city folk enjoyed his stories and generosity. He laughed and enjoyed the sun. This, however, did not please the King.
At the end of the month the King summoned both artists and asked if they had completed their tasks. The Chinaman, who was exhausted but also slightly intoxicated by his own sense of accomplishment, declared that his work was complete. The Greek, well tanned and with a distinct smell of wine in his breath, smiled back to the King and declared that if the Chinaman’s work was complete, then so too was his.
The King frowned, thinking to himself that there would hardly be any need to judge. He led the procession towards the courtyard, stepping first into the Chinaman’s half. As they entered a collective sigh of enchantment was released. They had stepped into a walled paradise. The most exotic flowers, serene ponds and lush fields decorated the walls. The courtiers began to snicker to themselves. ‘Surely, this is the winner.’
The King was equally entranced and impressed. But he also noticed that the Greek was also thrilled by the Chinaman’s work, and that his confidence was not dampened but lifted by the pleasure that was being expressed. The King had also noticed how the Greek’s spirit was rising in proportion with his own approval. The King ordered the curtain to be dropped, not out of a sense of calm justice but more the gambler’s nervous right to check the bluff.
Again the King was transported into a celestial garden. Here the horizon had blurred. Everything was in perfect harmony. Everything that the Chinaman had painted was perfectly reflected on the wall. The same flowers. The same still waters. The same depths of green and shade. However, in the Greek’s garden there was also a moving image of the King. Whenever the King took a step to his left or right there was a responding movement in the image. As the King stepped closer his image magnified.
The Greek had built a mirror.
History does not record the victor of the competition. However, archaeologists have recently confirmed that the two works survived side by side for many centuries.
Nikos Papastergiadis
[1] See Harald Kleinschmidt, ‘Migration, Regional Integration and Human Security: An Overview of Research Developments’ in Harald Klienschmidt (ed.), Migration, Regional Integration and Human Security, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006, pp. 61-102