Denarrations in Contemporary Art.

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(originally published in ArtPulse Magazine, Winter 2009)

Big Bang, the Cristina Lucas video installation, which is currently being shown at the Pan American Art Projects in Miami, could be read from its allusions to some landmarks taken from Art History tradition. I will mention three of these images. Since the projection is unusually placed on the ceiling of the gallery, Lucas’ representation of the firmament could recall the cosmological view of mural paintings in Romanesque apses. The model’s posture, with her legs wide open, exhibiting her sex, might be immediately associated with Courbet’s painting, The Origin of the World; and the words written with a brush, which the performer has inserted into her vagina, evoke Shigeko Kubota’s Vagina Painting (1965). But Lucas’ installation works as a subversion of these narratives. Seen against the Romanesque wall paintings, the naked female body takes the place of the Christ Pantocrator. The reference to Courbet’s canvas (which was devoted to pleasing the male gaze) seems subverted by the gesture of writing with a brush attached to the vulva. Finally, in a sort of unexpected ending, the words Big Bang, light up as if somehow they were a constellation, like an advertisement made with neon lights, indicating that the feminist perspective contains a little bit of spectacle and consumerism. In Lucas’ video installation, there is not only a subversive use of a phallocentric discourse, or a Christian icon, but also the exposure of the feminist perspective as another narrative which could – and should – be subverted, or at least deconstructed. This sequence – which is a narration in itself – has to do with Gerardo Mosquera’s definition of “denarration.” As the curator has asserted, this term is related to “works that use a narrative structure, and simultaneously discuss, deconstruct, or even subvert narrative conventions.”



In Cristina Lucas’ video, the word “denarration” could bring to mind the strategic uses of Derrida’s “deconstruction.” Since there might be many conjunctions between the two terms, it is worth trying to differentiate them. Whereas deconstruction deals with language, and binary oppositions as bearers of semantic inequalities1, in denarrations, the act of analyzing, subverting, or even deconstructing narratives is an intrinsic part of the structure of storytelling. Denarrations are, therefore, paradoxical means of constructing narrations while dissecting, erasing or destroying them. If deconstruction is, above all, a tool for questioning the nature of philosophical discourses, denarration is primarily a tool for storytelling and structuring representation. That might help to understand why in some of the artists included in the show –like Vibeke Tandberg, Nina Yuen, Rodrigo Facundo and Tracey Snelling – there is an existential dimension, which is more related to storytelling and tends to be absent in deconstructionist practices. (The latter have been systematically part of the verbiage for the decentralization of hegemonic discourses, and the vindication of sexually and politically marginalized narratives).

The way Mosquera uses the term differs from the definitions developed by narratologists 2. Denarration, as he has presented it, is an open, inclusive, and rather experimental concept, which includes artists, who are working in very different, apparently unrelated, poetics. Gerardo Mosquera has curated a very plural show, in which the artworks are intended to produce meanings not only by themselves, but also by dialoguing among themselves, and insinuating the creative possibilities that could be considered within the horizon of “denarration.” By choosing seven artists, who are so different from each other, Mosquera has applied the term in a suggestive and flexible manner.



Aernout Mik, one of the creators included in the exhibition, avoids calling himself a video artist. He actually conceives his works as site-specific installations, since he adapts the sizes and formats of the screens he uses to the architectonic peculiarities of the place in which the videos are shown. The images displayed by the projector are therefore integrated into the space in which the projection takes place. Through this procedure, viewers inside the gallery become part of the artwork. Their own bodies and their own movements interfere with what is seen on the screen, in the same way that the environmental noise replaces the video’s lack of sound. The moment of projection denarrates the filmed images. In Mik’s installations, the actual gallery space subverts, or negates, the space of the representation.



In the video Alison by Nina Yuen, the author tells the story of what seems to be her own suicide. But Yuen is actually both the main character and the narrator who, as an outsider, is constructing the plot. In Alison, the author becomes a character, whose role is introducing uncommon ways of narrating the personal drama the viewer is watching. We see her inside the narration, telling the story by making drawings over some printed images, or burning and manipulating pictures of the protagonist. Yuen turns the act of storytelling into a fiction, which is integrated into the narration.



Tracey Snelling’s installations can be enjoyed through their countless small, and sometimes hilarious, details. Rear doors and windows take the viewer into inner spaces, in which there are very individualized stories. Snelling alters the proportionality of what she sees. Her use of the space is more poetic than realist. She introduces unexpected, imaginative associations, in miniatures that have the appearances of being very accurate copies of the real world. In her installations, there is a juxtaposition of imagination over everyday life. Still, in her complex artifacts that include neon lights, written words –sometimes as graffiti, painted sculptures, pictures, and images in motion- there seems to be nostalgia, and even a sense of alienation, which is negated by the impression of being in front of a playful, almost naïve, set design.



In a series of pictures, the Norwegian artist Vibeke Tandberg represents an absurd story of intimacy. In Princess goes to bed with a mountain bike, there is a woman with a small, carnivalesque crown. She wears a bathing suit and sneakers. She enters a messy space, which looks like a sort of atelier. Then she goes for a mountain bike and takes it to a bed, in which both woman and bike lie together. The images are vertically divided into two, and the right side is repeated in the following picture. Through this segmentation, the images follow a cinematic displacement in both time and space. Vibeke stresses the way the narration is conducted, combining stillness and motion, and using time as a dimension of space, while subverting fairy tales and pointing to an existential anguish in the everyday life.



The Colombian artist Rodrigo Facundo exhibits a series of drawings made in encaustic over wood. In his works, characters perform some gestures (like fighting each other). By overlapping the figures, Facundo suggests a sense of movement; however, the actions seem frozen. Facundo adds geometric lines, cubic forms, axes, and the letters x, y, and z (as if he were dealing with variables and geometric problems). These lines cluster the movements of the characters in claustrophobic spaces, and, at the same time, simulate analytical measures or sketches of unfinished projects.



In Perianes’ pieces, the handcrafted images of plants, landscapes, houses and trees are subverted by the introduction of simulated accidents that alter the traditional objectual character of the medium he uses. However, this opposition – between the conventional motives he represents and the unconventional breaks in the frames, holes in the surfaces, unexpected cuts, and assemblies – is somehow integrated in the representation, producing visual harmonies, and even keeping the sense of handcrafted labor. Perianes’ denarrations are hedonistic and, to a certain extent, formalistic ones.



Generally speaking, I would say that the display of the installations or the formal treatments of the pieces tend to denarrate the contents of the images. In the context of contemporary art, in which installations stress the objectual character of the artwork, and, as Boris Groys has said, there is a “re-auratization” of the object (2008, 80), the show “Denarrations” somehow goes against the tide. It calls attention to unconventional approaches to storytelling, ways of representing, and the subverting of narration in a self-reflective manner.

NOTES

1. Culler, Jonathan. “La crítica postestructuralista.” Criterios. [La Habana] No 21/24. Jan. 1987-Dec. 1988: 40.

2. “Denarration occurs when events or aspects of a fictional world are negated or cancelled. It is an ontological rather than epistemological alteration: the narrator does not simply correct a misremembered fact or revise an incorrect judgment, but rather changes some part of the fictional world.” (Richardson, 2006). In http://www.nordisk.au.dk/forskningscentre/nrl/undictionary/#DENARRATION, Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology, Compiled and Edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson.

WORKS CITED

Groys, Boris. “Topology of Contemporary Art.”Antinomies of Art and Culture. Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Duke University Press, 2008. 80.

ART AND IDEOLOGY IN ADORNO’S AESTHETIC THEORY

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Adorno considers that art participates in the ideological struggle by being what it is above all things: art. Adorno argues against realisms –including social realism (1970, 344)– and against cultural policies that tend to conceive of the artistic image as an instrument of class struggle. Art’s contents are only the most superficial link between the artistic image and society (229). If social critique is carried out directly and not by way of suggestion, it is propaganda and not art. It is a paradox that a work of art denouncing specific social injustice is usually framed within the system against which it allegedly struggles, sometimes even becoming complicit with this system. From the point of view of social critique, that which is hermetic is much more forceful than that which is explicit and intelligible (145).
L’art pour l’art is situated at the other end of the spectrum from the “art of social commitment,” as it puts forward a simplistic opposition between art and society. L’art pour l’art evades the perils of drawing its contents from social life. Instead, it contents itself with associating reality and ugliness (237). Under the banner of “beauty,” l’art pour l’art becomes an object that is easy to consume, it becomes one more commodity, subordinated to the very system on whose margins this art situates itself. This art’s intentional gesture of turning its back to society is at the basis of its efforts to separate artistic forms from any contents. This very same gesture provides us with an explanation for our present-day perception of l’art pour l’art’s formalisms as typical manifestations of kitsch (237).
Unlike l’art pour l’art, autonomous art isn’t synonymous with the “ivory tower” or with forms that are bereft of contents. It rather refers to a complex integration of contents within formal systems (7). The participation of empirical the empirical world in the work of art is crucial to understand Adorno’s concept of autonomous art. Even if the artistic image can’t dramatically sacrifice the contents, Adorno considers that forms are what express the work of art’s ideology. In order to perceive the ideological dimension of the image, the relation between form and content must be revisited as a dialectical one. It is necessary to delve in the contents of the forms: “What is socially decisive in artworks is the content [Inhalt] that becomes eloquent through the work’s formal structures” (230)
Critique is primarily carried out by paying attention to those artistic forms that reflect and reproduce social conflicts. In his discussion of Kafka’s style, Adorno concludes that: “In his writing, absurdity is as self-evident as it has actually become in society” (231). Yet even when the forms are vehicles for the expression of contents drawn from society, they are opposed to the empirical world (5). Autonomous art aspires to be identical to itself and, in that sense, it also aspires to be a unique and asocial object.

In this image, Adorno y Thomas Mann.

The Palace of Dreams

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I
I can’t remember ever having come across a direct reference to Kafka while reading Michel Foucault’s works. I’m not saying that Foucault never refers to or quotes Kafka but only that I haven’t read such a quote or that I’ve forgotten it. As difficult as it may be to classify Foucault as a structuralist or as a post-structuralist intellectual, his interest in the problems related to modernity is evident, as in Kafka’s case. Foucault’s inquiries run through a gamut of themes, shifting from one to the next. From his initial works up until his unfinished History of Sexuality, his thinking moves from epistemological inquiries (as he seeks out the historical horizons of thought or elucidates the structures that give cohesion to the production of scientific knowledge at a specific period) to the relations between power and knowledge that are central in his later books.
It’s this interest in the connections between knowledge and power that likens Foucault to Kafka. The biopolitics of power, the constitution of the subject (defined in relation to a body of knowledge), the legal authority over life and death, are one side of a coin whose reverse can be found in Kafka’s stories. The author of The metamorphosis shows how the individual is subordinated by the devices of power, as well as the anxiety and the sensation of absurdity that emerge from a self-sufficient and inquisitive machinery that relentlessly interferes and controls every aspect of private life
Yet, Foucault and Kafka’s worlds don’t ever meet or converge. Foucault shows no apparent interest in describing the subject’s neurosis or anxiety, whereas Kafka never investigates the meaning of the institutional machineries that oppress individuals. Instead, Kafka always reveals this system as one that is both enigmatic and unpredictable.

II
In Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré’s novel The Palace of Dreams, Foucault and Kafka’s respective perspectives are superposed. Despite its kitsch and saccharine title, The Palace of Dreams is a sinister institution, closed off from the outside world and full of dark and labyrinthine corridors. It houses a tremendous bureaucratic apparatus whose purpose is to control the oneiric life of an entire empire. It’s a storehouse of infinite reports, files, folders and notebooks. It’s also a center of labor, structured by a neatly established hierarchical structure. It’s a system that has spread its tentacles over the entire territory.

III
At the base of this pyramidal structure we find the scribes who transcribe the dreams of the empires’ subjects. Above, are the couriers who carry the oneiric materials from the provinces and outlying areas to the palace. Above them, are the receptionists and then those who select the dreams that deserve to be passed on to the interpreters. In the higher sections, are the interpreters who are in charge of unraveling the political premonitions contained in the oneiric images, and also the obscure employees who confirm the veracity of the information that they have received and often do so by resorting to coercion and even to torture. Although its operations are worthy of a delirious caricature, the palace of dreams seeks to confiscate knowledge, in much the same way as the confession, as Foucault has demonstrated it to operate: instead of freeing individuals, it subjects them even further to dynamics of power.

IV
In Kadaré’s novel, the dreams’ contents could have subversive capacities. They therefore constitute information that is vital to the State’s security, since they could be useful to prevent a scheme from being hatched, an act of insubordination or a catastrophe from being carried out. The dreams’ interpreter thus bears no relation to the figure of the psychoanalyst, since these interpreters immediately discard the dreams related to emotional life, and psychoanalytic texts are entirely absent from the institution’s library. In this novel, the interpreter’s task is much more similar to the work of an intelligence agent who deciphers the secret codes of spies, than it is to analytical practice.

It’s precisely for that reason that specific skills become vital, such as the capacity to differentiate “false” dreams from “genuine” ones, or the ability to quote the “dreamers” in police investigations, in the event that some blurry detail might endanger the government’s stability. Totalitarian power can’t exist without generating a state of collective paranoia. Much like the government’s control over life in The Palace of Dreams, socialist societies were panoptical societies par excellence, as the State’s fear of insubordination generated, in turn, the fear of being watched, even when no one was watching.

IV
The novel describes the protagonist’s anxiety in the face of such an eerie task, which he continues to carry out while feeling the constant fear of making mistakes. What is terrible in The Palace of Dreams isn’t so much the excess of information that must be managed, classified and deciphered but, rather, the ongoing exercise of judgment that is required on the employees’ part. The person who selects dreams and the interpreters must make decisions based on their impressions, their insights and their creativity, but their work also requires of them a responsibility that could easily be deemed excessive. The interpreter must be careful not to provide a mistaken reading and must even anticipate the possibility of an error that can only reveal itself in the future, when a premonition will have been fulfilled. It isn’t its scrupulous precision –as in the rigorous registers and classifications that are characteristic of the Nazi’s archives– that makes Kadaré’s palace a bureaucratic hell but, rather, that margin of indeterminacy over which the threat of punishment perpetually hovers. This is a truly Kafkian trait. Without knowing clearly what specific transgression or crime he has committed, the individual can incur at any time in an unwise act that can worsen his already weak position in the face of the law.

*I would like to thank Ariana Hernández-Reguant for introducing me to this novel and for having given it to me as a present.

Dan Graham: Beyond

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Here is a link to the review on the show Dan Graham: Beyond, that I made for Wyndwood Magazine.

Times Square and a candle’s flame

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Our perception of color is very different from what it was for nineteenth century spectators or for the Europeans of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. It is also very different from the way in which a member of a tribal community in Africa or in the Amazonas basin perceives color. Technological development produces new colors and new luminous intensities. Flashy, blinding, violent colors that rush past the gaze.

New York’s Times Square owes at least part of its vitality to light: billboards, neon signs, giant screens that transmit phosphorescent images and that seem to substitute walls with television signals, with lights like radiant jewels. The clear night sky has the effect of a glowing and uninterrupted dawn. Broadway’s luminous chaos is one of the great celebrations of capitalism, consumerism and spectacle.

The impact of these new colors is as immediate as it is intoxicating. One can’t help but be pulled into the streets’ contagious enthusiasm and participate in the chaos by walking at the same pace as the frenzied masses. Walking on Broadway stimulates the senses like a big party, as time seems more vertiginous, moments seem quicker and more fleeting. More than just a walk, this experience is best described as a blast of youth and even as euphoria.

It’s obvious that we are inserted in a sensibility that is different from that of past periods. It is ironic that at a time that has produced such diverse attempts to integrate art to life –a problem that emerged mainly with the avant-gardes– the distance between the two is far from being a thing of the past. In fact, art and everyday life may well farther apart now than in any previous historical period.


Visual arts previous to the twentieth century offer innumerable examples in which art effectively participated in society and even in political life. I would like to specifically consider the case of Flemish painting in the fifteenth century. The Flemish painters’ use of oil-based paints originates in techniques for painting armaments for tournaments and to give color to heraldic emblems outside houses. Oil-based paints produced a brighter pigmentation than tempera or encaustic. In addition to using oil-based paints, the Flemish painters saturated the color by using a technique that consisted in superposing numerous layers of a same nuance of shade, so as to smoothen transitions between dark and light shades. If we consider that this saturation of color was marshaled to render an impressive array of details, to produce diverse textures, and that it was also combined with the novel use of perspective, then we can have a fuller grasp of these paintings’ excess of reality. These paintings’ reality was perhaps more abundant and fuller than everyday life. These paintings produce the strongest effect if we imagine the gleam that they must have had in a world in which rooms were lit only by candlelight, a quiet and slower world in which a widespread faith in spiritual forces prevailed.

The colors of Flemish paintings still prove to be intense to today’s viewing public. Whether in the clothes that drape virgins, in the sheen of metallic bowls, of brooches, jewels, coins or mirrors, these paintings’ initial spectators must have contemplated these colors in awe. The candle that is lit in the chandelier of the Van Eyck brothers’ “Arnolfini wedding” didn’t only symbolize the love that consecrated the matrimonial union. Thanks in part to its color, and to the minute details with which it was reproduced, it also represented the experience of this love. The painted symbol was not reduced to its literal meaning, as it wasn’t simply an element endowed with iconographic meaning. Rather, it was an image that affected the senses. The lamp was laden, almost excessively, with a connotation that was both semantic and affective. Would we be capable today of understanding the intensity of a devotee’s fervor while contemplating a triptych narrating the scenes of a saint’s life? Doesn’t this consist in an intimate integration of art into everyday life?

The Count-Duke of Olivares’ nose.

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I
When he travelled to Rome for the second time in 1649, Velázquez was very warmly received as the personal friend of King Felipe IV. Yet Velázquez was upset that no one seemed aware of his prestige as a painter. Seeking to rectify this display of ignorance on behalf of the court and the local artists, Velázquez swiftly painted a portrait of his servant Juan de Pareja. Pareja then followed his master’s instructions as he immediately set out to show the portrait to the wealthiest families of the area, all the while signaling out and praising the striking resemblance between the model and the image. This anecdote –narrated by Ortega y Gasset (1953, IX)– is an eloquent example to how important the copy of the original was to Velázquez and his contemporaries. Even though Velázquez’ works transcend in multiple ways the mere ability to imitate the visible [1], the trade of painting could be judged according to the resemblance between the model and the image.

Aside from dealing with the praise he received for his skills, and with the drive to copy reality, one should note that Velázquez often had to deal with the malformations of his models in comparison to the aesthetic norms of the period. Juan de Pareja offers an example of this. At the time, his African ancestry must have made him seem like quite the exotic figure. It is also well known that some of the recurring characters in Velázquez’ paintings were mentally challenged, miserable or physically deformed (dwarves).

II
Considering this drive towards realism, the equestrian portraits depicting the Count-Duke of Olivares (the first of which Velázquez would execute in 1633) must have posed an uneasy challenge: how could Velázquez attenuate the model’s large nose? Aside from being a nobleman who was one of the foremost patrons of his time and one of the figures who was closest to the King, the Count-Duke of was also a large-nosed man. In the Equestrian Portrait , Velázquez depicts him donning his military outfit, with his right hand pointing forward, as if he were motioning to go forward, while the horse whinnies, and the painting anticipates to us that it may be necessary to act bravely [2]. Yet unlike Velázquez’ striking profile of Felipe IV on his steed, the Count-Duke’s face appears as slightly tilted to the right, in a three-quarter pose that attenuates the real dimensions of his nose and simultaneously offers a convincing portrait in terms of the requirement to copy the original. Why would a painter who prides himself on his ability to imitate reality resort to such a subtle trick? It isn’t difficult to come up with an answer. The equestrian portrait was a sujet that was reserved for nobility –for scenes of hunting or of military strife– while the large nose was a trait that was deemed to be vulgar. Bakthin observes that popular medieval and renaissance humor considered the size of the nose to be proportional to the size of the penis.

Charles Laurent, the famous sixteenth century physician [...] speaks of the popular belief that the size and potency of the genital organs can be inferred from the dimensions and form of the nose” (Bakhtin, 1984,316)

III
This analogy lives on to this day and it can even be found in many the caricatures that Monet drew in his youth. It’s a commonplace to consider the nose as a cursed body part. We can find many proofs of this phenomenon in European literature. Characters from Cyrano de Bergerac to Charles Swann evince the same aristocratic contempt towards the nose that is wide, large or goat-like. In his famous poem, “To a nose” that begins with “There once was a man whom to a nose was stuck”, the poet Quevedo, one of Velázquez’ contemporaries, ridicules his opponent Luis de Góngora precisely by exaggerating the size of his nose.
The equestrian portrait of the Count-Duke reveals an ideological and aesthetical conflict in the subtlety with which Velázquez attempts to reconcile the exigency of copying the original with a prohibition related to social class. It can also be considered as a minor but relevant illustration of Adorno’s thesis that social struggles and class relations were also integrated in the work of art (1970, 232). For Adorno, art couldn’t exist without ideology, even when the artwork was the antithesis of the empirical world (236).
Velázquez’ example is notorious because, among other things, it proves that despite efforts to create an effect of continuity between the pictorial representation and the empirical work –that characterizes the majority of baroque art–, painting continues to subordinate the copy of the original to imperatives that reveal an ideological dimension. Velázquez’ sophisticated maneuver is evidence of the conflicts that can occasionally arise in the relations between artistic forms and ideology within the requisite loyalty to what is visible.

CITED WORKS
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his world,
Ortega y Gasset. Velázquez. Random House, Inc., New York, 1953.


[1] Paintings such as Las Meninas or Las hilanderas are “extremely precise documents whose realism could hardly be outdone, yet they also display a phantasmagorical fauna” (Ortega y Gasset, 1950, 85)
[2] This painting possibly represents the battle of Fuenterrabia (Ortega y Gasset, 1953, LVII)

Waste Not.

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I
There is a sort of wellbeing to living frugally. The poets have offered images of such states of freedom from the material world. The opening verses of Arthur Rimbaud’s My Bohemia come to mind:

And so off I went, fists thrust in the torn pockets
Of a coat held together by no more than its name.
O Muse, how I served you beneath the blue;
And oh what dreams of dazzling love I dreamed!

As do the closing verses of Antonio Machado’s well-known poem “Portrait”:

And when the day arrives for the last leaving of all,
and the ship that never returns to port is ready to go,
you'll find me on board, with, light, few belongings,
almost naked like the children of the sea.

Not to mention André Breton’s “Leave it all behind,” a quasi-manifesto of libertarian insanity.

I also think of Tolstoi who, in his eighties abandoned all of his belongings, fled from his wealthy property and set off on a pilgrimage to nowhere, to end up dying in a train station, covered in snow.

II
And one could go on like this enumerating (collecting) images that describe a happiness which, at least for me, remains unfortunately out of reach. I’ve often longed to walk around like Machado, “with, light, few belongings”, out in the open air, with only my laptop in tow, and, in my pocket, my Ipod, headphones and my wallet (in which I would of course carry my bank cards and some of my dearest belongings). If only it were possible to live so frugally! Or if I could at least live without all of those things that end up seeming superfluous to me, and almost encumber me. But it’s stronger than me, and I can’t help but to give in to the unfortunate habit of collecting. It’s too easy for me to give in to the collector’s temptation as I accumulate postal stamps, cigar rings, matchboxes, art postcards, handwritten notes, magnets, books, DVDs, CDs. Anything and everything. I even occasionally enjoy contemplating the curious and rare objects that I’ve been able to obtain. Every collection has its gems and its exclusive objects.

III
When I still lived in Havana, I heard of the so-called “Cuban’s illness.” This condition consisted in endlessly and perpetually accumulating objects, as if any random object could be of use in the future. Apparently this trauma would have haunted Cubans in their daily lives, and would even follow them in exile.

At times, I even feared that I was suffering from this condition. My other more coincidental (and barely enjoyable) collections bear witness to this: shirts, shoes, jackets, pants that sleepily lie in my closet as the months and even years go by, without my even mustering up the enthusiasm to wear them. The other day, I opened a drawer and found cables, wires, transformers, switches, batteries and all sorts of screws, nuts and rivets. Before wrapping them up and throwing them away once and for all, a voice inside of me still enjoined me to hold on to these odds and ends that had even accompanied me from North Carolina to New York. Not to mention the dozens of plastic bags that I systematically store under the kitchen sink. Not to mention my toothbrushes. Almost unconscious collections to which I barely grant a second thought, bad habits that are so hard to lose.

IV
At the MoMa this morning, I was finally freed from the belief that I suffered from “the Cuban’s illness.” At least my condition wasn’t reserved to those Cubans who had to deal with such scarcity on the island. Right in front of me, on the museum’s first floor, the Chinese artist Song Dong had set up an abundant collection of objects that were so similar to those belongings that we accumulate as if by accident or out of inertia or laziness. At first sight, the installation resembles a warehouse or a small shop of old objects. But a closer look quickly reveals that this was a pile of useless objects.

I found, in Dong’s installation, dozens of plastic bags, neatly folded up in triangles, and so reminiscent of the ones that I keep in my apartment. I also found a row of empty toothpaste tubes, lids for plastic bottles, old toys stored in yellowing cardboard boxes, buttons, wrappers –such an incredible diversity of objects that filled me with the pleasure of knowing that my bad habit was human, all-too human, and that there were people who were even more inclined than me towards collecting useless objects. In a very direct way, “Waste Not” made me delightfully more aware of these collections that I barely noticed in my daily life.

Did I say useless objects?
I can imagine that, for Song Dong “Waste Not,” is endowed with a tremendous emotional charge. The objects that she gathered in the installations were all of his mother’s belongings, accumulated over half a century. Many of these objects had probably dwelled in his childhood home and, even worn down and obsolete, they still hold a strong sentimental value. It wasn’t only the family home that Dong had put on display, it was also his own personal fortune, from which we could trace his entire emotional itinerary.

III
To some extent, these were also historical documents. They recuperated a history of everyday life in China over the past fifty years. I can only fathom the diversity of evocations that this installation’s three thousand square feet could summon in someone who had lived their lives in Mao’s times and in Chinese socialism.