HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Julie Mehretu + entropy8zuper!

Julie Mehretu and students, 2002
photo: Cameron Wittig

Julie Mehretu + entropy8zuper!

entropy8zuper!
lives and works in formed 1999; based in Ghent, Belgium
Auriea Harvey
lives and works in Ghent, Belgium
Julie Mehretu b.1970 (Ethiopia)
lives and works in New York
Michael Samyn
lives and works in Ghent, Belgium

entropy8zuper! and Julie Mehretu have collaborated on a website for Mehretu's Twin Cities are East African cities residency and project.

Twin Cities are East African cities

Mehretu's biography reads a bit like an atlas. She was born in Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, educated in Senegal and Rhode Island, and now lives in New York. It is no surprise, then, that her work incorporates the dynamic visual vocabulary of maps, urban-planning grids, and architectural forms as it alternates between historical narratives and fictional landscapes. Holland Cotter noted in The New York Times: "Her paintings suggest a conceptual version of history painting with hand-wrought depictions of loose data shifting and weaving through cyberspace." Featured in the Walker's 2001 exhibition Painting at the Edge of the World, Mehretu creates beautifully layered paintings that combine abstract forms with the familiar, such as the Roman Coliseum and floor plans from international airports.

Mehretu combines a personal language of signs and symbols with architectural imagery to create her elaborate semi-abstractions. Simultaneously engaged with the formal concerns of color and line and the social concerns of power, history, globalism, and personal narrative, she explains: "I am interested in the multifaceted layers of place, space, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity." The underlying structure of Mehretu's work depicts socially charged public spaces--government buildings, museums, stadiums, schools, and international airports--drawn in the form of maps and diagrams. She inscribes her own narrative into these decontextualized, highly controlled spaces through the layering of personal markings. Encased in coats of accumulated resin, these precisely rendered idioms are drawn from an artificial, abstract cosmology. Mehretu achieves an effect of compositional maelstrom, as elements advance and recede within the graphically complex, ambiguously architectural spaces.

Mehretu was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall Award. Her work has been included in Greater New York, P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York (2000), and she has participated in group exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2000); Exit Art, New York (1999); the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1999); and Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina (1999). Most recently, she appeared in Free Style at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001); The Americans at the Barbican Gallery in London (2001); the Busan Biennale in Korea (2002); and the 8th Baltic Triennal in Vilnius, Lithuania (2002).

entropy8zuper! (Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn)
entropy8zuper! is committed to delivering fullblown interactive multimedia to the Web. We are not compromising on anything. The network is a social place. A place where people live and love and cry and play. Entropy8zuper! makes digital environments for people: emotional, engaging, entertaining. Information technology is not the future. We are.

Auriea Harvey is a sculptor who has traded her traditional tools for digital ones. Using new media to express her vision has become a passion. Seeing the Internet as an unsurpassed frontier for artists, Harvey created her first website in 1995. She continues to use design as a vehicle to spread greater understanding of what is possible in this medium--beauty, communication, emotion. . . .

Michael Samyn was trained a traditional graphic designer for print media but currently only designs for hypermedia, mostly for the web. As an artist he produced numerous analog art objects that nobody wanted. In 1995 he radically stopped that production in favor of digital media (they take up less space). Art and design merge in Samyn's work. He considers himself a bad designer and an ex-artist.

Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African cities.
Julie Mehretu + entropy8zuper!

Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African cities.
http://tcEastAfrica.walkerart.org

As an immigrant herself, Julie Mehretu has always been fascinated with urban spaces and the ways that city fabrics change as new arrivals are stitched in. The faces of Eat African immigrants that she found upon initial visits to the Twin Cities reminded her of the Ethiopian-American community where she grew up in Michigan. She knew those faces held fascinating and multi-layered stories of change, movement, community, and growth.

When the Walker subsequently invited Ms. Mehretu to develop a residency project, she immediately decided to encourage the Twin Cities East African community to give "voice" to their own stories. After developing the project concepts closely with her brother David Mehretu, Ms. Mehretu asked 30 young people, most of whom attend Edison and Roosevelt high schools, to spend several weeks recording their own lives through photographs and sound recordings. The images they took range from scenes at the dinner table to choir rehearsal and soccer practice to trips to the mall and local African supermarket. The accompanying recordings of ambient sound animate their narratives in unexpected ways that could not happen through visuals alone.

In an interesting confluence of art and philosophy, Ms. Mehretu's residency project delves into many themes that underlie her painting practice: family history, social and political themes, the individual and community in urban space, and mapping of the self within the larger whole. The self-exploration process initiated by the residency project proved to be a highly organic and creative one that moved several participants to investigate their own family histories and see their own lives in a new and refreshing light. The personal and often moving stories generated by the participants' hard word have been gathered together virtually to create a rich, multi-layered website (www.tceastafrica/walkerart.org) by the award-winning web artists entropy8zuper! (Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn), which launches in April. The photographs and sound recording themselves have become part of the permanent collection of the Hennepin History Museum.

Julie Mehretu's artist residency was made possible by generous support from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund.

Revolt, Dysfunction, Dementia: Toward the Body of “Empire”
Otori Hidenaga

that internationalization of Japan's contemporary theater has accelerated. If we consider the proliferation of international cultural exchange in the past decade, it seems natural for us to assume that practitioners of theater, visual arts, photography, and film in Japan are not creating their work in a domestic vacuum. But those cultural trends do not necessarily suggest that cultural producers are responding to the process of globalization. To respond to the process of globalization means to reflect in the work, one way or another, an understanding of this new twist that is postmodernization. Or it means to comment on various issues of the globalization process that have come into focus in artists' own representational practices. At minimum, the work should make us think about how humans are situated within the context of globalization.

From this standpoint, one could argue that very few practitioners in Japan are responding to the process of globalization. But I can think of some who, rather than merely responding to the process, are methodologically and strategically manipulating the paradigms of this universal change. This distinction is in fact very subtle, and I would like to discuss Japan's contemporary art practice--in theater, dance, and visual arts--in the age of globalization by analyzing the responses and the strategies of some key practitioners.

The first name that comes up is that of Murakami Takashi, who deals with these issues in a very explicit manner. There is an important and essential discourse going on around Murakami's work, and that discussion itself is worth considering. So I will open the issue of globalization in Japan's art practices by exploring aspects of Murakami's work and the abundance of cultural theory that it has inspired.

Murakami Takashi and a New Phase in Japanese Cultural Theory
The importance of Murakami lies in the fact that he has come up with a very articulate strategy for addressing how Japanese culture can find its way in the age of globalization. I consider the appearance of such an artist exceptional in recent Japanese history. There have been heated debates about his strategy among influential Japanese critics, both for and against his work, and key participants in this debate include historian of thought Asada Akira, philosopher Azuma Hiroki, and visual art critic Sawaragi Noi. In their discourse on the post-modernization of Japan, ideas are summoned from theorists ranging from Jacques Derrida, Alexandre Kojève, and Jacques Lacan to Clement Greenberg and Yasuda Yojuro. We have not witnessed such a phenomenon around art practices in Japan since the 1980s, though there was a similar vital period of critical discourse in the 1960s. It is undoubtedly true that the active participation of important critics from a variety of disciplines contributes greatly to the radicalization of Japan's contemporary visual art practices.[1]

We can find the beginnings of this debate in a text by Sawaragi, in which he observes a new trend in Japan's visual art practices in the 1990s:

We can detect their point of departure in Otaku culture of manga, animations, monsters, and video games. We must be mindful of the fact that those subcultural genres have their origin in America . . . [that] their creative activity began precisely when their minds were occupied by things American and when they "recognized" that they were standing in the middle of "occupied ground." [2]

Sawaragi goes on to discuss Murakami as the one who started to work from such a location and describes the strategy of his Signboard Takashi from 1993:

Murakami's aim was to expose American occupation within Japan by recycling such subcultural designs.

What comes to the surface through Murakami's ingenious manipulation is the significance of this trademark, which usually goes unnoticed because it is so self-evident. It is a paradox that made-in-Japan products, which boast the world's finest quality, could only come into being because of an Americanized class of people who prefer plastic models over menko (Japanese pasteboard cards) or beedama (glass beads). Murakami points to a paradoxical problem whereby the "quality" of such products can only be tested in a place half-colonized by America.[3]

1 Furthermore, literary critics such as Suga Hidemi and Fukuda Kazuya have come into the debate, making it even more interesting, as will be discussed later.

2 Sawaragi Noi, Japan, Contemporary, Visual Art (Tokyo: Shincho-sha, 1998), p. 52; first published serially in Bijutsu Techo 48, no. 727-49, no. 742 (July 1996-June 1997). Unless otherwise noted, all translations of material quoted from Japanese sources are by Uchino Tadashi.

3 Ibid., pp. 85-86.

Translocations
Jeebesh Bagchi, Steve Dietz, Gunalan Nadarajan, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Yukiko Shikata

What this means is that no matter where you place your work, it will be read differently depending on the context and on the works that are its neighbors. That's obvious, and not very profound, but let's complicate this picture a bit. Let's speak of neighbors both in spatial and temporal terms. What is the neighborhood of a work?

This questions a canonical understanding of what one's territory is, where one's neighborhood lies, and which cultural materials one can be intimately self-reflective and playful with. We think that it is high time that those of us in the so-called non-West (which latitude is that?) lay claim to all that is called Western, just as naturally as we lay claim to more proximate forms of cultural material. Because what may be close in spatial terms may be far away temporally, and there may be many permutations of this tension between space and time in between. This means that aspects of what is called Indian Art by art historians may be quite far away from us in time, even if it is close to us in space. And of course the larger corpus of what is called Western art is far away both in time and in space. This means that one can begin to think of one's location and neighborhood in quite unexpected ways.

Of course, another consequence of the "asymmetry of ignorance" is that even if a non-Western practitioner were to be reflective of his/her own antecedents, a Western viewer, who takes his/her own vantage point as universal, without recognizing that Euro-American culture or Euro-American modernity is no more and no less provincial than any other spatial configuration of culture and of modernity, may not even recognize that which the practitioner is being reflective about.

What then is the strategy that (for the purpose of argument) a non-Western practitioner can adopt?

To enter and create networks that do not ask (as do immigration officers or bouncers in certain discotheques) about one's cultural antecedents.

To refuse to answer any question in terms of yes or no when it comes to whether one does or does not belong to the West or the East. One can say that one belongs to above or below (?) rather than to East or West.

To make work that belongs to networks and that is uncomfortable with standing alone.

Rescension
A re-telling, a word taken to signify the simultaneous existence of different versions of a narrative within oral, and from now onwards, digital cultures. Thus one can speak of a "southern" or a "northern" rescension of a myth, or of a "female" or "male" rescension of a story, or the possibility (to begin with) of Delhi/Berlin/Tehran rescensions of a digital work. The concept of rescension is contraindicative of the notion of hierarchy. A rescen-sion cannot be an improvement, nor can it connote a diminishing of value. A rescension is that version which does not act as a replacement for any other configuration of its constitutive materials. The existence of multiple rescensions is a guarantor of an idea or a work's ubiquity. This ensures that the constellation of narrative, signs, and images that a work embodies is present, and waiting for iteration, at more than one site at any given time. Rescensions are portable and are carried within orbiting kernels within a space. Rescensions, taken together, constitute ensembles that may form an interconnected web of ideas, images, and signs.

* * * * *

From: Steve Dietz <steve.dietz@walkerart.org>
Date: Tue Mar 19, 2002 8:05pm
Subject: Re: race and the translocal

"To make work that belongs to networks and that is uncomfortable with standing alone."

This is a fine phrase, and it seems to lead, as Raqs suggest in regard to the global curator, to the notion of "shows of shows, networked iterations of works in which flexible and fluid curatorial contexts are themselves up for consideration along with the works they present."

Learning and Dislearning To Be Global: Questions at 44°53’ N, 93°13’ W and 22°54’24” S, 43°10’21” W
Paulo Herkenhoff

Is the coining of "glocal" (global + local) the construction of a euphemism? If so, a euphemism for what? The Web site Heavens-Above.com contains a database of more than two million locations, nearly every town and village around the world. How Latitudes Become Forms is not a geographic survey attempting to sum up such a multitude of "local places." Rather, it is a constellation comprising "localizations" of artistic practice developed by the individual experience of each curator. It presents not a homogenization but a poetical semblance of the parcours. How Latitudes Become Forms grasps places/latitudes/longitudes without leveling cultural differences. It seems to follow Jorge Luis Borges' proposal that for literature to be inventive it should transform the mirror into a lens. Thus, instead of a mirror, the show becomes a lens for examining latitudes and specific cultural practices. Its antisurvey format does not search for a totalizing concept of the world, an approach that would be a surefire recipe for intellectual failure in this case.

If curating implies making discerning judgments, choices, and implicit exclusions, then the present text, written in Rio de Janeiro (22°55' S, 43°12' W), will use the opportunity to discuss other curatorial possibilities and some artworks that, even though not included in How Latitudes Become Forms, present an agenda of parallel issues through different approaches. The open intellectual climate of the Walker invites such a confrontation with its own curatorial framework and acknowledges alternative models, not one of which claims the monopoly of being "right."

The Walker Art Center could be taken as a paradigm of the cosmopolitan experience with an eye on the margins and edges.[3] Umberto Eco called the universal exhibitions of the nineteenth century a "pacific arena" for dispute among the colonial empires. The primal biennial, the I Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte held in Venice in 1895, reflected that model. How Latitudes Become Forms finds distance from that format and its origins in international and intranational disputes. It avoids the issues raised in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, including regional disputes ("the narcissism of small differences"), and resists the forces of internal colonialism. Instead, it proposes a solidarity of knowledge that extends beyond any geographic borders and beyond any politics of domination. The organizers of How Latitudes Become Forms began from the point of view of a stranger, but did not act from the idea of cultural strangeness or the Freudian notion of the uncanny. Kristeva has problematized certain notions of belonging: "The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities."[4] One option for an exhibition such as this might be to look at the global, at latitudes, within its own community. However, How Latitudes Become Forms takes an approach different from Tolstoy's formula for universality, namely, the universal in your own village.

In 1519, Lopo Homem, a cartographer in Lisbon (38°43' N, 9°8' W), drew a mapa mundi showing Africa, America, Asia, and Europe all connected by a continuous land strip in the southern latitudes. Homem was trying to depict the logical "necessity" of territorial continuity to account for the dispersion of the descendants of only one couple (Adam and Eve).[5] His intention was to reconcile a metaphysical "truth" to the new geographic reality of his time. Curating, too, is about establishing crucial links. At what point do curatorial activities do the super-structural job of mapping out the symbolic groundwork needed for the capitalist expansion drive? Although How Latitudes Become Forms proposes no aesthetic truth to rule "bits & pieces" of the world, one might ask: Is globalization a mandatory violent passage for all societies and individuals in the five continents? Did the ideology behind the expansion of capital and global territory become the contemporary metaphysical truth? What are the cultural wars being fought within globalization? Who wins them? Who resists? Some artists operate in contexts of resistance or are dealing with unreconcilable attitudes toward globalism. Many fight against art becoming a pawn of diplomatic strategies or a weapon for cultural wars in a new world order. How latitudes (and longitudes) become forms is obviously not the same process as how latitudes (and longitudes) lose their forms.

3 See for example the Walker Art Center's exhibition Painting at the Edge of the World (2001),curated by Douglas Fogle.

4 Kristeva,Strangers to Ourselves, p. 1.

5 It took Portugal more than a century to develop the nautical and cartographic technology that made possible the European navigation in open oceans to reach the "four continents." From the perspective of this time and belief system,the native peoples of the Americas,lacking the skills for that type of navigation and yet being descendants of Adam and Eve,could never have reached their continent except by crossing firm land.

Julie Mehretu + entropy8zuper!

. . . I can think of some who, rather than merely responding to the process, are methodologically and strategically manipulating the paradigms of this universal change.

We think that it is high time that those of us in the so-called non-West (which latitude is that?) lay claim to all that is called Western, just as naturally as we lay claim to more proximate forms of cultural material.

The open intellectual climate of the Walker invites such a confrontation with its own curatorial framework and acknowledges alternative models, not one of which claims the monopoly of being “right.”