Читать книгу Brian Jungen - Brian Jungen - Страница 5

Interview with Homi K. Bhabha

Solange de Boer and Zoë Gray

ZG: The term “cultural hybrid” is increasingly widely used whenever two or more cultures come together, applied with almost the same ease as the label “Asian fusion” is to cuisine. In your writing, however, you have highlighted the need to examine the specific context of each culture involved and stressed that hybridity does not occur when one culture simply absorbs another, but only when there is an ongoing process of entanglement between cultures. This interaction is rarely harmonious – as many proponents of multiculturalism would have us believe – yet it is during this struggle that a third space is created where new forms and new cultures can be invented. With the increasing visibility of cross-cultural and non-Western artists over the past decade, do you see a serious broadening of this third space in contemporary visual art and the emergence of new forms and cultures?

HB: Let’s start with what you said about questions of hybridization. Before you can make any claims about the hybrid nature of any object or any location, or any practice, I want to make one qualification. Very often hybridity is now used to describe an identity: somebody is half Caribbean, say, or part Italian; it is used as an identity issue. I never meant it that way or elaborated it as such. The concept was not meant to address people’s identities, but has become used in that way because people are eager to bring up multiculturalism and multiple identities – both issues of which I have some problems with. When I said that before you make any judgments of claims to hybridization, you have to look at specific situations, what I meant was that hybridization does not simply assume two given cultures coming together. Rather, for any culture, practice, locale, space, or site that we might consider as unitary, I wish to emphasize that it, too, is the product of a range of hybridizations. That then brings up the question: isn’t this counter intuitive to what I am saying?

When I spoke of hybridization, I was referring to the negotiation of differences – and differences are very slippery and snaky things. You might have a unifying sign of nationality: we may all be British, say, but within that Britishness you still have differentiating signs of race, class, gender, poverty or degree of access. Hybridization, then, should not simply be seen as a way of thinking about cultural differences. It has to be understood as an ongoing process through which questions of difference and discrimination are being negotiated. So when you say: Homi, are you basically saying that wherever there are differences, they have to negotiate with each other when they are spatially proximate, or politically advantageous? Are you basically saying that hybridization is the way in which one thing begins to resemble something else – or appropriates a part of that other thing in something else? And then I would answer: No, that is not simply what I mean. It is not hybridization in a naturalistic sense, where you take one bit of one plant, one bit of another, put them together, and then are capable somehow of tracing the genealogy.

If we go back to one of my earlier expositions of hybridization, it can be seen to have emerged out of an archival narrative I was working on while thinking about cultural transmission in nineteenth-century India. ¹ The question really was: how did missionaries disseminate their Christian knowledge and the English language at the same time – the word of man and the word of God? And how did the Indian natives, or colonial subjects, to whom this was addressed, at once resist and absorb this transmission? You can see in this historical situation a rich ground-plan for the hybridizing of knowledges and cultures; and what I discovered was something quite interesting. The Bible was widely distributed as a book amongst the peasants in North India. In Hindu communities, to own the book of God was something for the priesthood; it was not simply given out. So it was a very great honor if you were brought up in the respectful traditions of Hinduism to hold the book of God of another culture, whereas your own book of God was in the hands of the Brahmin. When you went to the temple, they would expose it, but they were the ones who read it. This missionary enterprise began after 1814; before then, missionaries were not allowed to convert Indians into Christians, according to the East India Trading Company, the governing body. It was a very unsuccessful mission, even though much money was given by Dutch and Scottish missionary bodies. They weren’t getting the converts – although they were distributing Bibles, setting up classes, teaching languages, setting up small clinics and schools. Indian colonial subjects had no problem sending their children to the schools or drawing upon the medical benefits, but they would not convert. This phenomenon got me quite interested in the whole process, so I investigated one particular case. What I found was that the converted Hindu – one of the earliest converts who then worked for the Church of converts – would go around and speak to the Indian peasants in great detail. And they would say “Oh this is wonderful, the words of your Christian God are so wonderful, just to listen to them makes us feel so pure, what a wonderful God you have,” etc. Then the local head of the Mission as well as the people back in Amsterdam or in England or wherever would say, “But you have no conversions!” So finally the converted Indian would say to the peasants, “You have received all these books and so praised our Lord, wouldn’t you think about converting?” And they said, “Well, we would love to convert, of course we would, who wouldn’t want to convert to your religion? Look what a marvelous person you are, how you have helped us. But you know there is one problem: you are a meat-eater and the truth of God cannot come from the mouth of people who eat meat.” They were making a demand for a vegetarian Bible! To which, of course, the convert would answer, “No, that is irrelevant. It is not what goes in a person’s mouth that is important, it is what comes out.” And they would say, “Well, that’s the difference between us. This is no reason for us not to live together, not at all.”

So, what is happening there? This is the scenario I took to explore the notion of hybridization as a third space. It is also a form of thinking about a resistant knowledge, counter knowledge in a context of hegemonic power. They don’t simply say, “Yes, thank you very much, we will take some of your Christian ideas and some of our Hindu ideas and we will put it together and we will have a coat of many colors.” No, they do participate: they send their children to a missionary school, they make use of the medical offerings. They are not fundamentalists at all. Yet what they want to resist is the colonial practice of conversion. At that point, they make a demand that cannot be satisfied by their colonial masters. That is the opening up of a third space, another area of negotiation, where they take a particular cultural idea of theirs, impose it on a practice that cannot absorb it, display their own agency in relation to it. That is what I call the third space.

Cultural power is often imagined as a clash between two forces, akin to the “clash of civilizations” idea. Each civilization comes equipped with its own ideas, philosophies, values, etc, and clashes with the other; somebody wins and somebody loses. What I’m interested in is what happens when they clash. They are negotiating – however asymmetrically – different forms of power and authority. Doesn’t something open up and get taken in, which was not something they were already equipped with? They come armed with certain knowledges, but when contact is made, a space opens up that will not let either of them return to where they started. Hybridization is therefore all the meanings, positions, movements, negotiations around difference and power generated in that space. It is a particular strategy – and a strategy in the context of a larger struggle for authority.

ZG: But to bring that – as you do yourself in a lot of your writing – to contemporary culture, do the same to-ing and fro-ing of negotiations happen now with writers or artists who are not colonial subjects?

HB: Unquestionably so. We are really in a period of to-ing and fro-ing, and this is quite interesting because it has a sense of passage. Culture, even multi-culture, is to-ing and fro-ing in the sense of translation: when you translate you move back and forth. There is always restlessness, as you can never find a direct equivalent. That kind of cultural translation is very much present in contemporary work. And what it means, really, is to put the viewing subject, the reading subject at the position where different systems of signification and meaning-making can intersect. When you are in the moment of that intersection, there will always be ambivalence, ambiguity. I think that is very important.

SdB: Do you think that since the exhibition Les Magiciens de la terre in 1989² – which was very much criticized – there has been much progress in how non-Western artists are shown?

HB: Well, the question is, what are West and non-West today, amongst younger artists working in the area we are talking about? If you see an artist like Y.Z. Kami, a Persian artist, he is very interested in Sufi ideas and meditation.³ But when you look at his work, you see large portraits of Americans (a truck driver, a college girl), which are part of a meditation camp. After they come out of the process of meditation, he takes a photo. So, there are Sufi ideas about the everyday rapture of religious ecstasy in the portraits, but they remain part of American everyday life. The icon you see is of an American sophomore student, but with a certain light. Is this West, is this non-West? One of the portraits has the look of a Bellini Madonna, who always looks away from the child. She has that kind of askance, oblique look and yet she is in this Gap-looking sweater and jeans. Is this West, is this non-West? I think what artists do, what they help us to do, is to go beyond these categorizations, to show how the system of world knowledges is deeply intersected.

With Brian Jungen’s work you have something very close to what I have been talking about. What is so interesting is how he takes the totemic icons of contemporary so-called Western youth culture and reshapes them. He re-fabricates them, translates them into things, which do not simply represent, which are not imitations of the motifs of certain aboriginal totemic icons. They are something much more complex, because in the process of transformation, they are continually mobile and itinerant. They are works, which, even at the level of pattern or design, are continuously restless and moving. He reconstitutes the Nike shoes in a kind of totem object of a different cultural milieu, but that mask or that totemic icon is also a reflection of the way in which the culture and authority of those aborigines is made consumable, both within the culture itself and for those outside. So it is not a discourse between two cultures at all. It is continually a discourse of two different kinds of cultural iconicity, opening up a whole third area, even a virtual area of representation, which questions or interrogates the larger question of object, culture, consumption and fetishization. That is what I think was happening.

ZG: Brian Jungen’s work revels in the cultural crossovers….

HB: Let’s not use the word “crossovers”, let’s try to find a word. They are more like cultural intersections. It is not as if something comes and “crosses over” into something else, it is more that cultures abut on one another. There is a kind of internal struggle. As Walter Benjamin in his essay on translation says of the word “brot” and the word “bread”, it is not as if one word says hospitably to the other “Come, come. You can replace me with you.” He says there is a struggle, and that struggle is what we have to confront in translation. That’s what makes the thing alive.

ZG: Coming back to your earlier point that Jungen’s works are not simply a transformation of one thing into another: they do comment back on the commodification of both cultures.

HB: It’s indeed a commodification of both and also a comment on them – what it means to identity within a culture or from outside, so they dramatize the internal and the external. They open up that axis.

ZG: Jungen talks about how, when North America was first colonized, the First Nations artists and craftsmen incorporated the objects the settlers had brought with them into their cultural production, for practical and for resistant reasons. Yet, once anthropologists arrived and started collecting “pure” examples of First Nations art and put that in museums, that fixed what First Nations art could and should be for people outside of that culture, but also for the people making it. In his work, Jungen seeks to free up these traditions, revealing them to be more fluid than has previously been thought. Is there not always, however, an unavoidable arrestation when a work of art enter an institution? Despite his increasing interest in working outside of the museum context, Jungen’s works now form part of several major collections, including those of the Tate and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Whilst these are not anthropological or ethnographical museums and whilst – hopefully – his work will not be taken to exemplify that of a whole community of First Nations’ artists, how can it escape the reduction to a stable and authoritative representation once presented within an art institution?

HB: I want to take this question first at a slightly more philosophical level and then move on to the question of institutionalization. I think it is one of the paradoxical and yet very powerful characteristics of aesthetic objects – which can be anything you would care to keep and show in that way and anything which seems to produce an aura and an affectivity beyond the instrumental – that it ignites or sets off two kinds of responses from the viewer.

One, we are still enough the children of our own times to want to understand them, to have knowledge of them in relation to a history. The newer they are, the more challenging they are. We want some sense of: this is what happened before them, this is what is happening after them. That historicist impulse. And museums don’t simply institutionalize that. Museums can do all kinds of curatorial things. But to some extent, one of the most common fixities of work in a museum is to produce a framework, where the work is presented in relation to a historical narrative, a developmental one, or – as in Les Magiciens de la terre – more a juxtapository narrative, putting one work next to the other, or an evolutionary narrative. All these narratives – let us call them epistemological narratives – always have a tendency to some extent to fix the work for a period of time. Not necessarily because the curator or the institution wants to give the work a stolid, heavy canonicity, but simply because you’ve got to put some object before the work and you’ve got to put some object after the work; the space is restricted, the meaning is more contained. So it is a relational fixity. That is one thing.

However, there is another counter-instinct that we have with aesthetic works, a cross-axis, because aesthetic objects perform. They appeal to us and address us in an affective way. It is that anti-historicist or counter-historicist narrative, it is that present moment of capture or identification, the experience, the phenomenological contact and contract with the work, that blasts it open from knowledge as continuum, and creates for us another notion of time. It creates a “now time”, a time that Walter Benjamin beautifully describes. He says, to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. That’s what I wanted to say, that every work leaps out of this framework of fixity, or this epistemological narrative, to address us and say “Well, you know that about me, but now what do you make of me?” It’s not transcendent – I don’t want to talk about it as if it were some spiritual, abstract thing – it really is the fact that the structure of art objects, the structure of representation, even when it’s in a glass box, is moving. Because it does not have a notion of an embedded referent. When it appeals to you, the experience of actually standing in front of that work makes the more epistemological, museological knowledge irrelevant. It is a different kind of knowledge, because it asks you to understand it in terms of this passing, fleeting moment. You have to make your own reading of it.

I think that when we talk about fixity and movement, we have to bear this in mind. Otherwise we can talk very moving about how works that try to break the framework or break the boundaries simply become consumerable again. But what I’m trying to say is, yes, something about them becomes consumerable, and often museums and collections are seen to be the institutions of that kind of consumerability and connoisseurship, but at the same time there is a force that resists that consumerability and that force is a phenomenological experience.

This argument is often related to minority artists. These were artists who were rejected from the Salon, they were kept outside the museum, and then all of a sudden the art market discovers them, and they become as consumerable as anything else. I think it is a bit naïve to say simply that this is a takeover. The more important and challenging thing to do is to argue for different types of institutionalization. That is when you have First Nations art of this transformative, hybridizing quality, that touches and transforms so many other kinds of art practices and raises so many other questions about consumerability, canonicity, and so on. Maybe the time has come not to locate this work within the general history of modernism or postmodernism, but to start from the very specific symbolic and semiotic structure of this work and allow works from minority artists to shape the larger institutions and the discourses. Not to fit them in, but for them to re-translate the traditions followed by larger institutions, older cultures, more traditional forms of knowledge.

SdB: In her essay On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag saw a weakness in the medium of photography in the way that it allowed space for speculation. She suggested, “Only that which narrates can make us understand.” You have explored the notion of textual ambivalence and the “slip of the tongue,” which can enable us to understand the hidden narratives within larger, official narratives, thus allowing us to see history in its full complexity. Whilst you write mainly about literature, you have often referred to other forms of creativity, such as dance, poetry and visual art. These media create narrative in very different ways. For example, one could argue that there is no “slip of the tongue” in visual art, yet the knowing, conscious use of ambivalence is widespread. For you, do these different forms of creativity enable us to “understand” in the same way?

HB: I think I take a different line here. We could have a long discussion about what is narrative, but I think it is very difficult to think of any art form as not being engaged in a narrative practice. Now, there are certain art forms – say, historical painting in the nineteenth century – where you can actually see the narrative, just like in the novel, as a form. Narrative is the medium. All the time and trouble is taken by the person to produce a narrative. If you see some Surrealist works, then there isn’t the same attention to a narrative internally in the work, or if you read a lyric poem, or a sonnet or a haiku, there isn’t the same investment of narrative. But narrativity cannot be left out of the process of engagement with a work.

Having said that, I want to make a distinction between a proper use of narrative and a weak use of narrative. The weak or sentimental use of narrative would be to somehow take a work that internally resists the narrative impulse and to create a story out of it, to facilitate the exchange between the viewer and the work, or between the work and the world, not acknowledging its resistance to telling a story in a particular kind of way. The strong use of narrative neither imputes to nor imports into the work a kind of narrative that resists its obscurity or its difficulty. It tries to extract or engage with the work to find its own transformative process and structure. It allows the work itself to make problematic our normal or normalizing ways of viewing or producing meaning. So a good form of narrativity is a relationship of productive tension and conflict with the work. A bad form of narrativity always tries to reframe the work in order to find a consensus.

ZG: We were interested in the way you see reading, not as a passive but as an active and productive process. Today, so much emphasis in cultural policy (and thus public funding) is placed upon participation. Whilst the impetus behind this new focus is admirable, few politicians seem to have really questioned what kind of participation they are seeking, instead limiting their concerns to “bums on seats” statistics, or the number of new visitors that pass through the doors of a cultural institution. Few people seem to be asking how audiences participate, how they might benefit from such participation in culture, and how culture might be altered or improved in return.