Author: rainoisto

For as at a great distance of place, that which wee look at, appears dimme, and without distinction of the smaller parts; and as Voyces grow weak, and inarticulate: so also after great distance of time, our imagination of the Past is weak; and wee lose (for example) of Cities wee have seen, many particular Streets; and of Actions, many particular Circumstances. This decaying sense, when wee would express the thing it self, (I mean fancy it selfe,) wee call Imagination, as I said before: But when we would express the decay, and signifie that the Sense is fading, old, and past, it is called Memory. […] —Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 2, “Of Imagination”

Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? —Job 41: 9, King James Version

On the evening of March 24, 2022, two exhibitions opened in Tirana: The Revolution of the City around its Dream at Bulevard Art & Media Institute, curated by Stefano Romano and Remijon Pronja, and Leviathan at the Center for Openness and Dialogue (COD), curated by Ajola Xoxa.^[1] The former is a group exhibition featuring the work of Olson Lamaj, Ledia Konstandini, Driton Selmani, Lori Lako, Remijon Pronja, Alketa Ramaj, and Stefano Romano, and is organized by the MAD Center “Gëzim Qëndro” at Polis University, a private university located on the outskirts of Tirana and known for its focus on architecture, urban planning, and design.^[2] The latter is a solo exhibition by the sculptor Ergys Krisiko, and is curated by one of the co-founders of Harabel Contemporary Art Platform. While their themes and approaches are distinct, the two exhibitions nonetheless merit some extended attention for the contrasting social imaginaries that they present. Both exhibitions express a profound ambivalence about a very basic element of the human condition—indeed about the basic element of that condition, if we are to follow Hannah Arendt: the fact of human togetherness, the need to act in plurality based upon shared perceptions of a world that we can collectively transform. The ambivalence of both exhibitions (and I think it is more than ambivalence, in fact a real pessimism) on this point reflects the troubling status of the politics of imagination in Albania today. 

The Revolution of the City around its Dream (which I shall hereafter refer to as The Revolution… ) attempts to map the relationship of artists (and citizens) to the rapidly shifting urban environment of late capitalism. The works exhibited therein purportedly explore “the continuous need to re-know […] places that change faster than we start building a stable memory of them,” to quote the curatorial statement.^[3] Leviathan, on the other hand, is focused on the space and the metaphors of political power, and the relationship of the public to that power. It raises questions about the contemporary status of the polity, and about the way political force exercises itself upon and between members of society. At stake in these two approaches is the status of a shared imaginary, as a viable horizon for both artistic creation and sociopolitical action that aims to transform current material conditions. Both exhibitions set themselves the goal of imagining possible futures, or at least of assessing who has the power to envision such futures and upon what grounds we might act together to produce them. But both exhibitions also implicitly reflect the failure on the part of politicians, citizens, and artists alike to credibly construct such speculative futures. On the one hand, there is cynicism about the efficacy of any collective manifestation of imagination, and on the other hand there is an honest uncertainty about the integrity of claims (aesthetic or otherwise) to see or foresee a truly shared world. This failure—which is certainly not an aesthetic or curatorial failure on the part of either exhibition—is a constitutive one: in this sense I think two exhibitions admirably reflect the real conditions of life in Albania today (which in turn are exemplary of the conditions of neoliberal capitalism as a global phenomenon), where an oligarchic state consistently gaslights the public in response to any criticism that highlights deepening inequities, insisting that such inequities are either the inevitable result of a smoothly-functioning market or else the fault of individual citizens who are unprepared to participate in democratic society. 

The curatorial approaches employed in both exhibitions take their impetus from classic texts on political theory—respectively, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) in the case of The Revolution…, and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) in the case of the exhibition at COD. This shared reference to early modern political thought is not entirely coincidental: it seems to me to indicate an effort to return to an earlier historical stage of political development in the former West. (Of course, the idea of utopia and Hobbes’ assessment of human relations are practically speaking about as evergreen as it is possible for political theories to be, at least in terms of being citable.) Return or not, this act of looking back signals an effort to find the point from which (social) foundations could again be established. Before we think about the kinds of foundations that either exhibition proposes, let us take a closer look at each in turn.

The Revolution… is installed, as noted above, at Bulevard Art & Media Institute, an exhibition space opened in the fall of 2021 along Boulevard “Zogi I,” in the former headquarters of Bashkimi (“Unity”), the newspaper published the Democratic Front of Albania starting in 1943. Bulevard occupies the underground level below the new Destil Creative Hub, one of the most prominent and popular examples of the slew of hip co-working and multipurpose event spaces that are becoming increasingly widespread in Tirana. Bulevard’s space is relatively large, with high ceilings, but its below-ground location imposes certain limitations on the space. While natural light enters through a series of rectangular windows in the ceiling (which were formerly used to lift the printed newspapers out of the lower level of the press headquarters), the space tends to feel dark and enclosed—a challenging venue for an exhibition that aims to explore utopian dreams about the city. A wide foundational column (practically, a wall) divides the space into two distinct sections, and the rough, exposed concrete of the column’s surface provides an interesting (if sometimes intrusive) surface for both hanging artworks and projecting videos.

As the visitor descents the stairs and enters the exhibition space, they first encounter a room containing Ledia Konstandini’s Untitled (the cage balcony), Lori Lako’s On Fog, Blur, and Other Uncertainties, Alketa Ramaj’s Rritesja 1 (carrying structures), and Stefano Romano’s Unfinished Archive. To the right as one enters, in a sort of narrow dead-end hallway that also functions as its own room, is Remijon Pronja’s Home. These works set the stage for the exhibition’s encounter with the city, an encounter that moves between nostalgia, suspicion, kitsch, and documentation, constituting a series of earnest efforts to answer the question: how can we know the city, and our place within it?

The second room, on the far side of the broad concrete wall, contains a cluster of works by Konstandini (two small video installations collectively titled I Look at Them They Look Back at Me, and a separate video installation Bath Tube), as well as two videos: The Goldfinch, by Olson Lamaj, which is projected on the wide concrete dividing wall; and These Storiesby Driton Selmani, playing on a large television monitor. 

The curatorial text for The Revolution…, written by Stefano Romano, presents a markedly optimistic story about the potential relationship between art and urban life. The text begins with a kind of long history of humans living together, passing through a short discussion of More’s Utopia before arriving at the beginnings of rapid urban transformation at the turn of the century. It describes contemporary cities as being imbued with “the feeling of disorientation, as if the places in which we live did not really belong to us, as if we could not own them entirely.” This uncertainty of the city produces the “continuous need to re-know” (mentioned in the introduction above). And yet, the curators are still certain that despite this apparent epistemological quandary—that we are no longer able to know the city in the way we once believed we could and would—there nonetheless exists a singular “dream” of the city, and it is around this titular dream that the city turns, in revolutionary motion. “The dream is to be sought in small and large things, in everyday gestures and in the tallest buildings, in the corners that seem blocked in time, and in the great expressways that never stop….” The artist, according to the curatorial text, is uniquely equipped with “a gaze trained to grasp the nuances of things,” and thus art has the capability of laying bare that hidden, intangible dream that moves the urban world. Art becomes the tool through which (by means of a utopian vision) the world can be remade: “In reflecting the new world post-pandemic scenario, art can contribute by re-thinking the spaces of the city through utopia: exiting the frame imposed by the establishment, [and] entering the infinite resources of imagination. […T]he works in [the] show point at contradictions while revealing the constant pursuit of possibilities driven by utopia.”^[4]

This is all a little straightforward, although one assumes this is the point. I am less concerned with what I take to be the curatorial text’s rather predictable pairing of art with urban utopic aspirations. What I find more interesting is that I do not think the works themselves present the kind of optimistic picture that the curatorial text wants them to. Put briefly, the text wants to present the contradictions and the engagements with necessarily mediated perceptions that appear in these works as evidence of a desirably open-ended search for a future form of knowledge about the city. I see them, instead, as engaged in a thoughtful exploration of doubt, an exploration of the failure of art (and the artist) to even robustly conceive the city as a phenomenon, much less to envision a better future version of it. 

This doubt, this sense of failure is manifest, I think, in the majority of the works’ attention to first of all to distance, and to mediation. (I must say again: when I attribute to the works a sense of failure I am not accusing them of failing artistically, but rather of signaling a failure that ostensibly belongs to art, in its relationship to the city.) Consider Lori Lako’s On Fog, Blur, and Other Uncertainties, a work that I take to be emblematic of the exhibition’s approach as a whole. In this video we first see a number of views of a city: parks, alleyways, what appears to be a factory—all obscured behind a ubiquitous white fog. If the viewer watches closely, there are patterns, slight movements, that appear in this layer—showing us that it is, in fact, a layer, and not the result of some atmospheric condition. Eventually, the camera retreats and it is revealed that the fog that has obscured all these views is in fact a thin sheet of cloth held suspended between two poles by two individuals, a young man and a young woman. There are many ways to read this gesture of revealing, and some of them are optimistic (both because the gesture can be read an act of deciphering, and because the thin white sheet of fabric has in fact imbued the preceding images with such a calm beauty). But at the same time, the video challenges the imposition of this calm beauty, and it and in doing so it challenges the assumption that the artist’s role is the projection of such possible (utopic) futures. The tranquil city behind the white fog might, in its own way, be read as the possible image of a society without contradictions, without conflict, rendered peaceful but also sterile. If this is a dream of utopia, then the artwork does not so much reveal it as the central dream around which the city revolves, as it engenders a phenomenological skepticism about the sensory access we have to the city.

A similar skepticism, expanded to the scale of planetary history, seems to animate Driton Selmani’s These Stories, a video that juxtaposes footage and audio from Neil Armstrong’s moon landing with narrations from one of the artist’s relatives, speaking about the arrival of electricity at his village in Kosovo, a very late development in the former Yugoslavia’s electrification project—an event that occurred in the same period as the moon landing. The interweaving of these two stories highlights the remoteness of the moon landing from lived reality at the time, and in doing so it introduces a schism between the personal and the global, a schism that grows out of the inequities inherent in all modernization projects, and in all projects to construct the urban. 

If the scale of Selmani’s video suggests the impossibility of projecting a unified experience of history that could be shared at a planetary scale, the works on view by Ledia Konstandini, Remijon Pronja, and Olson Lamaj all focus on the domestic sphere, in different ways, approaching the urban through the lens of the home. Konstandini’s video installations—especially the pair of works I Look at Them They Look Back at Me and Untitled (the cage balcony)—play with voyeurism and the forms of (in)visibility that characterize both the body and the home. Eyes peering through wire grating, behind hanging clothes; linens hung up to dry gradually filling out the teeth in a smile; a balcony framed as the outline of a house, locked behind crisscrossing strands of thread. The balcony, as the artist says in her statement, becomes a “small stage from [which] we perform our desires, needs, and possibilities.”^[5] But the balconies in these works are also places where anxiety emerges: they are also cages, also places of concealment, where eyes peer out but also hide behind. 

Pronja’s Home ironizes the nostalgic associations of the word, suggesting its flexibility as a concept. Yet the kitschy quality of the artist’s large lightbox photograph—which shows an interior with the word ‘home’ written out in string lights on the wall behind an empty living room—also can’t help but propose that the concept is not only mobile but also increasingly empty (especially in a moment when home ownership has become more and more impossibly expensive in Tirana, and real homes are being demolished to make way for new roads and gentrified neighborhoods—more on this later). Finally, Lamaj’s The Goldfinch is a video filmed inside the villa of the former communist dictator of Albania, Enver Hoxha, located in the ‘Blloku’ section of Tirana, the neighborhood occupied by the elite under state socialism. As a goldfinch flies about, apparently trapped inside the villa, the camera pans across the modernist interior of the home, lingering on chairs, bookshelves, and tables, while Bernard Herrmann’s theme for Hitchcock’s Psycho lends a grim urgency to the bird’s flitting movements. According to Lamaj’s statement about the work, the video explores the lasting impacts of dictatorship—for which the closed and isolated villa serves as a visual metaphor, with the goldfinch (a bird often kept in captivity, but which can return and thrive in the wild if released) standing in for the society that might emerge after the end of the such a period of isolation. 

Elsewhere, Alketa Ramaj’s Rriteset: Rritesja 1 (carrying structures) presents a plaster cast (part of a series) of a structure used to ensure that recently planted trees grow straight and remain upright. Without the trees, the artist describes these structures “turn[ing] into ‘worthless bodies’”^[6]—they become vestigial organs that no longer have a specific role to play. Like the dictator’s villa in Lamaj’s The Goldfinch, the object of Ramaj’s act of artistic intervention is an object that gestures most directly at a moment past: it looks at what is left behind after the event of urban transformation, and lingers on the semiotic confusion that emerges in the wake of that transformation, turning the object of forward (and upward) mobility into something spectral. 

If there is a work in the show that captures the open-ended optimism of the curatorial statement, it is (probably appropriately) Stefano Romano’s own Unfinished Archive, a series of photographs with small drawn and written interventions that the artist has been assembling since 2006. These photographs of curious situations (a pair of legs dangling from the ceiling, for example) and strange—often apparently unintentional—interventions (a pair of dentures left in the grass) do present a kind of hopefulness about their titularly unfinished character as a collection. But even here, there is a sense of melancholy to many of these photos, which still almost exclusively appear to have the character of remnants.

All of this is to say that this is an exhibition in which the city emerges as defined primarily in terms of absence, incompleteness, doubt, and a kind of protective distance that is both furnished by and potentially exacerbated by memory. If I was to set aside the curatorial text’s hopeful assessment of art’s relation to a utopian urban future, I would say this exhibition shows that our primary relationship to the city is as something past.^[7] This does not make it any more certain as an object of reflection: with the waning credibility of modernism’s future-oriented acts of creation, the past also became something unknowable and uncertain. Imagination here serves primarily not as a productive source of new configurations, but as the waning or “decaying sense” (to briefly interject Hobbes into this framework) of the world, a sense that is always tending towards memory but that is also always skeptical of that memory. The collection of works more convincingly puts into question the possibility of assembling a plurality of experiences and perceptions into any kind of unified center around which the future (or past) city might be said to revolve. It postulates a sort of remoteness from the city, a remoteness born out of the inability for us—as inhabitants of the city—to hold on to a belief in the plural vision of humanity that urban life once represented. 

It must be said too that the remoteness manifest in the exhibition also sheds light on precisely what is not represented within its collective imagination. At a moment when Albanian citizens are being forcefully ejected from their homes, and those homes in turn demolished to pave the way for new and gentrified neighborhoods, these images of violence and destruction are absent (even if their echo can be felt in the exhibition). The towers that have sprung up around Tirana’s center, a reflection of the oligarchic machinery of money-laundering that has effectively driven urban transformations in Tirana’s recent history, are likewise absent. I am not saying that the artists represented have a duty to represent these elements of the city that most immediately gives the context to this particular exhibition; rather, I think that the desire to place the city itself at a remove, to put into question the meanings and the hope invested in that city, is itself a response to the increasing unlivability of Tirana. Reading the curatorial text’s line “as if the places in which we live did not really belong to us” in the wake of the recent demolitions in the “May 5th” neighborhood of Tirana—demolitions that are already part of a much longer series of evictions and demolitions of homes—should produce a sobering reflection on what kind of future many Tirana citizens could possibly imagine for their city.

If The Revolution… approaches the question of living together through the lens of the city (and the effort to imagine its present and future development), Leviathan instead approaches this question through the lens of the body politic. In this particular case, the embodiment—and consolidation—of political power is dually represented in both the exhibition space and the theme of the exhibition itself. Leviathan is a solo exhibition of the work of sculptor Ergys Krisiko (the son of sculptor Kristo Krisiko) presented in the Center for Openness and Dialogue (COD), a multipurpose exhibition space opened by artist-politician Edi Rama in 2015, inside the first floor of the Prime Ministerial building. The exhibition presents three distinct large-scale sculptural installations, one of which is installed outside the entrance to the COD and two of which reside inside it. One of these latter groupings—two massive hollow segments depicting the tail of an immense sea creature—is installed in the main entrance hall of the COD, while the second is a set of gargantuan, lens-shaped metal forms that take up most of the space inside the COD’s side gallery (Salla “Tako Artistin”), located immediately off the entrance hallway. 

The curatorial text for the exhibition, written by Ajola Xoxa, traces the mythological narrative of the Leviathan from its appearances in Judeo-Christian texts through to its appearance as the titular metaphor for the body politic in Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 book. If the works in The Revolution… consistently established a sense of distance between themselves and their subject matter, Leviathan forthrightly embraces its proximity to power, and Krisiko’s emphasis on the association of the building itself with centralized power is emphasized in Xoxa’s curatorial statement. Even in this proximity, however, the curatorial framework wants Krisiko’s work to question the source(s) of political power, to complicate the relationship between authority and the buildings (and political offices) that wield it. The text poses a series of questions: “[I]s the Leviathan the building or the power that it carries? Or is Leviathan […] the force that brings the power, that is, the voting people? Is it the building that enslaved the Leviathan and trapped him in a cage, or is it the Leviathan himself who clutched it? Who is the Leviathan? Should he be feared?”^[8]

The sensation of fear, or at least of awe, is indeed one that emerges in the exhibition, in which the viewer is confronted by (to quote the curatorial text again) an installation that “seeks to occupy the entire COD space, leaving little room for movement,” making the viewer “feel small.”^[9] And indeed, Krisiko’s exhibition is the first one that I have seen that truly feels like it competes with the space of the COD itself, rather than simply occupying it. Before we talk about the space itself, we need to talk about what is positioned outside of it: three life-size resin horses are placed on the steps and outside the entryway of the COD. Their bodies are completely black, and have the appearance of being composed from individual pieces of shaped leather or patches of some other material that has been sewn together. Despite this sewn-together look, the horses are quite naturalistic, and from a distance appear very real (with the exception of their black color). The three horses placed outside the COD instantly enter into dialogue with two artworks first installed when the space was opened in 2015: Philippe Parreno’s Marqee Tirana, which hovers over the entrance to the building, and Carsten Höller’s Giant Triple Mushroom, installed off to the right of the entrance in a grassy area on the building’s side. Höller’s mushroom is frequently taken indoors to prevent it from damage in protests, and as far as I know it was not on view for most of the time Leviathan has been open. However, the horses visually dialogue in a rather interesting way with Parreno’s Marquee, which (due to recent protests about the steeply rising prices of gas and food) has been covered by a layer of shielding that protects it from thrown cobblestones and other damage.^[10] I will have more to say about the role the horses play below, but their presence effectively produces a sense of calm that is belied by the shielded Parreno. They are a playful touch that counterbalances the weight of the installations inside the COD, and their visual distinctness from the metal surfaces of the Leviathan also serves quite nicely to imply a continuity between the metallic sheen of the shielding protecting Marquee and the and body of the sea creature that appears to merge with the structure itself.

As a visitor enters the COD, they pass through a metal detector (a stark reminder that one is not simply entering a gallery), and immediately confront a wall of black curtains. Moving to the right, the visitor passes behind the curtains and confronts the massive tail of a fish, made of metal and split into two sections. One section terminates in the tail fin, while the other section disappears into the wall at right. The fact that the two are split apart allows a viewer to pass between them and look into the darkness of their hollow interiors. The second section, the one that disappears into the wall, is nearly as tall as a person, and once feels that one could crawl inside. In fact, from photographs taken at the opening, this half of the Leviathan’s body held a single candle illuminating a quotation from Hobbes: “As a draft-animal is yoked in a wagon, even so the spirit is yoked in this body.” On my two visits to the exhibition, however, both sections remained dark—there was no candle, and the quotation was not visible. While this quote certainly helps frame the exhibition’s emphasis on the material shell of the COD—reflected through the material shell of the metal sea beast laid out within it—I am not convinced it is necessary. It makes the work a little too literal, and in my mind distracts from the overwhelming effect of the darkness within both halves of the Leviathan’s tail, which in turn creates the impression of a tunnel that one could enter into.

This tunnel-like effect is also important because it allows the viewer to perceive the adjacent room (the open doorway of which is also always visible from the curtained-off space in which the Leviathan’s tail languishes) as a kind of continuation of the fish’s body. This continuation is surely intentional, and thus the idea that the section of the fish would be ‘walled off,’ so to speak, by a quotation from Hobbes seems unhelpful in terms of the overall impact. Furthermore, it is this effect of continuity that makes Krisiko’s installation one of the most interesting and certainly effective uses of the COD’s space that I have seen. As the visitor passes into the adjoining room, which is bathed in red light, they immediately come to a halt before a series of massive lens-shaped metal discs mounted from one wall to another. These discs give the impression that one has entered a massive turbine, or perhaps some immense threaded grinder. One can barely even take in the contraption (which does not move, and the discs rest their lower edges on the floor), so much does it fill the space. Visitors can pass under it to reach the other side, hunching over in the process, but here again one finds oneself trapped against the wall, with no real way to take in the form as a whole. The installation does indeed make the viewer feel small, as the curatorial text suggests, and with this feeling comes a sense of awe: the idea of having gone into the beast itself, of being inside the guts of power. 

As is the case with The Revolution…, however, I am not fully in agreement with the direction the curatorial texts wants us to take in reading this work. The text not only wants to raise questions about whether the Leviathan has somehow been trapped in the COD (a reading I do not find particularly plausible); it also wants us to believe that being able to enter the beast’s insides makes it somehow less threatening, and more vulnerable. “Leviathan’s portrayal as a creature trapped within the walls of the COD – the Prime Minister’s Office – inevitably brings about a special poetics, almost melancholic: this great beast, this monster is in fact all alone despite its greatness; silent, fearful, but harmless.”^[11] I find it difficult to reconcile the scale of the work, the idea that it appears to disappear into the walls themselves, and the angry red light of the turbine room with this notion of a melancholic, misunderstood beast. It is impossible not to feel a kind of threat implicit in the Leviathan, and this is made all the more true by the elaborate theater of black curtains that keeps the viewer from understanding their relationship to the rest of the space. This not only imposes a closer proximity on the viewer—it produces a kind of disorientation that I cannot fully square with the idea that the Leviathan should be interpreted as harmless. 

According to the curatorial text, however, it is the presence of the horses—“quietly eat[ing] grass, as within a peaceful idyllic landscape, undisturbed, unafraid”^[12]—that clinch the idea that we have nothing to fear from the Leviathan within the COD. But it is here that the exhibition’s exploration of political power feels most disingenuous. The idea that the horses are in some kind of ‘peaceful, idyllic landscape’ is blatantly contradicted by the shielding covering Parreno’s Marquee. The horses seem to be meant to suggest that the public should likewise become docile, that it should pay no attention to the beast whose body has become the building of the COD, that it should content itself with ‘quietly eating grass.’^[13]  

Xoxa, Leviathan’s curator, is one of the co-founders (in 2018) of Harabel Contemporary Art Platform^[14] and also the wife of the current Tirana mayor Erion Veliaj. Those familiar with the politics of the Albanian art scene will see the rather narrow circle of political power and cultural production at work here: Edi Rama, a Prime Minister (and former mayor of Tirana) who has long used his role as an artist to propel his political career, opens an art space in his governmental headquarters. A few years later, the wife of the current Tirana mayor (himself also a prominent member of the Socialist Party, and a prime candidate for Rama’s successor as the leader of that party) co-founds a platform devoted to public art and to gathering contemporary artists’ portfolios. This platform consistently receives substantial funding from the Ministry of Culture, including for the realization of a series of public art commissions. Xoxa’s move from cultural promoter to curator, and her curation of an exhibition at the COD, closes a fairly short circuit, producing another viable artworld ambassador for Albania’s artistic elite. One imagines that Xoxa might soon appear as the curator of a future Albanian national pavilion at Venice, or else as the organizer or curator representing Albania in some other regional or transnational event. 

Although it is difficult not to interpret the exhibition at the COD as a logical career step for its curator, the exhibition also makes an interesting political statement (though one I personally find problematic). It wants to create doubt about whether or not power is actually centralized in Albania, by undermining the metaphorical Leviathan as an image of authority and instead suggesting that it is somehow trapped or vulnerable, permeated by the people who enter into the building and therefore into its inner workings. At the same time, it wants to suggest that there is nothing to fear from power: the horses grazing outside the COD to suggest that there is no reason to be concerned about the power the Leviathan represents. And both of these facts are in turn marshalled to make a statement about the enfeebled character of imagination in the contemporary world: “in the political world of 2022,” Xoxa’s text explains, “no mythological creature manages to challenge reality, because reality transcends fantasy.” That is to say, the actions of politics transcend the need for any imagined future (of the kind that might have been hoped for, for example, in the curatorial text of The Revolution…)

Does the exhibition convincingly make this argument? As a viewer, but also as a critic, it is hard for me to evaluate, perhaps because I disagree so strongly with the first two claims: power (at least power of a certain kind) is centralized in Albania, clearly so. And the actions that have been taken to further consolidate that power and tie it to certain economic interests—actions such as the destruction of homes in the Astir and May 5^th neighborhoods, as well as the destruction of the National Theater in 2020, but not only these—show that there is indeed reason to fear this centralized power. And yet the conclusion might still stand: is there any kind of art that could effectively—through an effort of the imagination—simply overcome that political reality, replacing it with something better? Is there any fantasy that could challenge the realities currently unfolding in Albania, in both its urban and rural settings?

And here I think the answer is no, and the exhibition makes that case through the very process of its own production: as a product of the political and cultural elite in Albania, staged in a space that aims transforms art into a kind of theater to hide the machinations of politics, there is certainly no fantasy that can compete with political ‘reality,’ at least in most of the ways we might construe it. I think that this fact, at least implicitly, informs the remoteness from ‘the dream of the city’ that I have tried to argue is also present in The Revolution…. That exhibition’s ambivalence about the imaginative projection of the city (or society) in its ideal form stems plausibly from the suspicion that—at least now, in this historical moment—no such utopian projection could plausibly replace what is happening in Albania today. 

In contrast to the remoteness that one finds in many of the works in The Revolution…, as I have said, Leviathan derives much of its impact from immediacy and proximity. It suggests that the public can get close to power, to the power that shapes our ways of living together and the futures of the cities (and peripheries) we live in. Whereas The Revolution…presents a series of studies in mediation—looking at our understanding of plural living through both formal and conceptual filters—Leviathan hopes to place us directly inside the mechanical beast that is at the same time the machine through which power produces its subjects and governs them. But this proximity is not intended to produce any action; it is simply intended to leave the viewer either in awe of that machine or else—paradoxically—to make them sympathetic to its isolation within the halls of the state. 

The visions of the social that The Revolution… and Leviathan present are certainly not the only ones that have been presented by artists working (and curators making exhibitions) in Tirana in recent years, but I nonetheless think it is important to map the way these two exhibitions present the relationship the plurality of human being, imagination, and art. I should stress again that this effort to find a parallel between the two exhibitions is my own conceit: there is (as far as I know) no intention for such an affinity to exist. What strikes me most about both exhibitions is that their positions on the question of imagination tell a decidedly grim story about the possibilities of the artistic imagination in Albania today: Leviathan wants to dismiss that imagination in the face of political realities (implying all along that one feels that political reality to be moving towards a better world). The Revolution… uses that imagination to outline a series of ambivalent responses to urban life, engaging with memory, uncertainty, absence, and the fragmentation of a shared sense of social existence. The urgent questions seems to me to be: how can we credibly reclaim a role for the artistic imagination that is critically engaged with existing conditions, and at the same time that shows a way beyond those conditions without falling into a kind of naïve optimism about the future (the same kind of naïve optimism that is regularly used to suggest that we, like the horses, should calmly continue our grazing)? 

Disclosures: No one paid me to write this text (I’m not sure who would have). I wrote this essay after having seen both exhibitions, and wondering—for a few weeks at least—if they had anything to do with each other. I decided they did. I spoke with some of the artists (and the curators) of The Revolution…, but here I’ve tried to analyze the exhibition using only the information that is available to the public (namely the curatorial text and the works themselves). I’m currently collaborating on research for a project that is projected to open at Bulevard Art & Media Institute later this year. My thoughts about the relationship between the arts, imagination, and society were inevitably shaped by an exhibition I have been working on while viewing both of these exhibitions, a solo retrospective of the work of Pleurad Xhafa, organized at Zeta Center for Contemporary Art and supported by the Debatik Center of Contemporary Art. That exhibition provides an alternative viewpoint on the possible ways art might frame the political—and the urban—in contemporary Albania, or at least so I believe. But I leave that analysis to visitors with a more objective perspective. 

I’ve update the text to fix some errors in the captions to the photos.

^[1] There seems to be slight confusion about the name of the exhibition. Initial press and social media materials referred to the exhibition as Leviathan, but some subsequent materials have instead used the title of the curatorial text—“Leviatani Mekanik/Mechanical Leviathan”—to refer to the exhibition itself. I have retained the former title, as it seems that this simpler version of the title, without any qualifications, was originally intended. 

^[2] Of the seven artists included, four teach at Polis University, and in a way the exhibition can be considered as a kind of effort to reinforce the university’s claim to relevancy in the Albanian art scene, a claim about its own institutional relevancy as a thought leader in terms of the relationship between art, design, architecture, and urban space. But, for the reasons I will outline below, the exhibition does not really reinforce this claim: the ambivalence that characterizes the different imaginative approaches to the city—and artistic knowledge of it—concisely undermine the kind of narrative that might position a university as a source of authoritative knowledge about building the future city.  

^[3] Stefano Romano, “The Revolution of the City around its Dream,” exhibition handout, 2022.

^[4] Romano, “The Revolution …,” exhibition handout. The exhibition’s themes clearly align with Romano’s ongoing interest in the relationship between art and public space, a set of concerns he has pursued since the seminal 1.60 Insurgent Space project in 2005­–06, through the MAPS (Museum of Art in Public Space) publication series, and in his involvement with exhibitions such as Teatri i Gjelbërimit (Theater of Greenery) at FAB Gallery, 2016. 

^[5] “The Revolution…,” exhibition handout. 

^[6] “The Revolution…,” exhibition handout.

^[7] It is also worth noting that many of the works in the exhibition are not particularly recent—several were created in the first half of the 2010s decade.

^[8] Ajola Xoxa, “Mechanical Leviathan,” exhibition handout, 2022. I am here quoting the Egnlish translation, which is also available on Harabel’s website: https://harabel.com.al/exhibition-ergys-krisiko-leviathan-cod-25-mars-15-prill-2022-tirana/.

^[9] Ajola Xoxa, “Mechanical Leviathan,” exhibition handout. 

^[10] See Armando Lulaj’s project Armored (2019), https://debatikcenter.net/strikes/armored

^[11] Ajola Xoxa, “Mechanical Leviathan,” exhibition handout. 

^[12] Ajola Xoxa, “Mechanical Leviathan,” exhibition handout.

^[13] I find it almost impossible to believe that the phrase “fare të qetë hanë bar” can have been used without some implied eye-winking about the recent declaration from the American ambassador about supporters of Democratic Party leader Sali Berisha. And the ambassador’s reference in turn hearkened back to the dictator Enver Hoxha’s declaration “Edhe bar do hamë, dhe armikut nuk i dorëzohem” (thanks to A.K. for the exact quotation). But perhaps in this case it really is simply a coincidence.

^[14] Some people have consistently referred to Xoxa as (one of the) director(s) of Harabel, but the organization’s website does not in fact list Xoxa, nor any current executive director. At the time of the space’s founding, however, she was identified as the co-founder, together with artist Driant Zeneli, and she is still identified as co-founder on the Tirana municipality’s website listing art spaces in the city. 

I have been doing a tremendous amount of scanning lately, for a number of different research projects. As always in my research on socialist-era Albanian culture, I’m on the lookout for material that will be helpful to my architecture comrades, since the literature on that topic tends to be so minimal. Today, I was looking over Drita (the weekly publication of the Union of Writers and Artists in socialist Albania) from 1976, and that year there was an extended series of discussions on the national character of architecture. Click the image below to read more.

These discussions from Drita are interesting for several reasons, but one main reason is that they represent the continued repercussions of the infamous Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Albanian Party of Labor, which took place in 1973. At this meeting, Albania’s communist dictator Enver Hoxha delivered a famous speech attaching “foreign manifestations” or “foreign influences” in arts and culture, and called for an aggressive end to liberal attitudes towards these foreign elements. The Fourth Plenum set the stage for a new era in Albanian socialist culture, one that closed off many of the forms of cultural experimentation and exchange that had been developing until the early 1970s. Instead, the subsequent decade would see an increasing turn towards national identity (although of course this had already been developing in the 1960s, in the arts and culture).

The rhetoric of national identity, however, can be clearly seen in the discussions about architecture that are included on the pages of Drita in 1976. The first essay in the series is by Kujtim Buza, then the secretary of the Union of Writers and Artists. Subsequent contributors to the series include painters, architects, sculptors, workers, heritage experts, and an economist, among others. They analyze themes as diverse as the relationship between architecture and decoration, the use of stone as a building material, the development of greenery in the city, the relationship between architecture and monumental sculpture, and the development of national styles in furniture and interior design. There are some interesting case studies discussed from Gjirokastra, Kukës, and Mat, and there’s also an article (not technically part of the series, but of interest) on new developments in Tirana.

It’s interesting to compare the ideas expressed in 1976 to those that appeared on the pages of Nëndori (also published by the Union of Writers and Artists) in June of 1971. In 1971, significant emphasis was placed on new directions and methods in architecture, and thus (implicitly) many of the discussants call for a modernist architecture. In 1976, the emphasis is on discovering ways to integrate novelty into a nationalist discourse that focuses on folk methods, motifs, materials, and types of forms.

After a long hiatus, this post returns us to a series begun years ago, featuring scans of the historically indispensable publication PamorART, a magazine published by the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana, during Gëzim Qëndro’s time as Director. The editor-in-chief of the publication was Eleni Laperi, and its editorial staff included Suzana Varvarica Kuka, Ylli Drishti, and Edi Muka. PamorART began publication in 1998, and was a crucial reflection of the artistic and cultural  scene in Albania in the late 90s, providing a specialized venue for discussion and critical assessment of the visual arts in the country. PamorART holds a tremendous significance for histories of contemporary Albanian art, since it is one of the few publications where we can get a glimpse of the relationship between the developing post-socialist and post-1997 art scene, in dialogue with the central artistic institution in the country, the National Gallery. It’s also a tribute to the important work done by the longstanding research staff of the gallery (including Eleni, Suzana, and Ylli)–work that I think is seldom recognized. The issues of PamorART are very hard to find–hence my desire to make them widely available to researchers.

This particular issue focuses on the Onufri ’99 exhibition, including interviews between the editors and many of the participants. It also includes a creative, humorous, and very compelling interview “Between the Real and the Virtual: An Interview with the National Gallery of Arts.” Written by Qëndro, the interview unfolds between PamorART (as an entity) and the National Gallery (also a self-aware entity, and explores how the gallery itself considers its own history, its role in society, and its relation to viewership.

As part of a cataloguing and ultimately digitizing project at the Center for Artistic Documentation (QDA, at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and the Study of Art, IAKSA, in Tirana), I’ve been working on gathering together materials related to institutional and exhibition histories of the 1990s and onwards. This scan is part of that project (the resolution of this one is quite low, since it’s from my phone, but there will also be a high-res scan made for the Center for Artistic Documentation). We will also be scanning copies of the rest of the issues.

I first began archiving the PamorART issues on this website back in 2016. You can see the first issue of the publication here, and the second issue here. These first two issues were scanned by Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, who received them from Gëzim Qëndro before he passed away. I think both of them for initiating the project.

This analysis was originally published on December 22, 2016, as part of a blog residency at the now-defunct Blog at ARTMargins Online. When ARTMargins Online’s website was restructured, its blog archive became unavailable, and as such the essay has not been available. In the wake of the destruction of the National Theater in Tirana on May 17, 2020, it has again become clear how few resources exist online offering a critical view of Edi Rama’s political actions and their intertwinement with art (and artwashing). For that reason, I am re-publishing this piece here. It was originally written in order to come to terms with the global artworld’s uncritical reception of the opening of the COD (Center for Openness and Dialogue), and in order to present a context for the few voices in the artworld who had openly questioned Rama (such as Eriola Pira, who confronted Rama at the reception for his show at Marian Goodman Gallery in November of 2016). I publish the essay here without any editing, merely to document its existence and to make it available to those who find its analysis and information useful. It was certainly not the first such critical view, and it cites some of earlier efforts to challenge the valorizing narrative of contemporary Albanian politics. It also provides a timeline of portions of Rama’s career and the early period of the COD, which may be useful to historians and critics alike.

_______________________________________

1. “It’s Very Exciting”

The dream of the artist’s involvement in politics is not a new one. For well over a century, artists and critics have been engaged in debating the ideal combination of an ever-growing number of approaches: realism, aestheticized politics, politicized art, art-into-life, relational aesthetics, art-as-industry, and artivism, to name just a few. In the early 21^st century, the avant-garde’s desire that the artist might take up an active role in political processes continues to exercise a strong sway over curators, theoreticians of art, and artists themselves. It should come as no surprise, however, that many of the apparent examples of artists involved in politics are drawn from geopolitical peripheries, sustaining an image of small and geographically distant cities, nations and regions as ‘research and development’ zones for debates that are then carried out at a remove in Western Europe and the United States. In this post, I examine the problematics around one particular example of an artist’s involvement in politics: the case of Edi Rama, once mayor of Albania’s capital city, Tirana, and now Prime Minister of the country.

Rama’s friendships with well-known contemporary artists such as Anri Sala, and curators such as Hans Ulrich Obrist, have made him a popular example of the possibilities of an artist entering the contemporary political realm. As Obrist put it in his introduction of Rama at a talk associated with an exhibition of Rama’s work Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, “In the artworld we talk about artist-run spaces, but it’s very exciting to talk about artist-run countries.” It may certainly be ‘exciting,’ but the actual dynamics of contemporary art, space, and political power in Edi Rama’s Albania are far more complex than Obrist’s overtly celebratory discourse would imply. In fact, in many ways, Rama’s recent artistic policies represent a retreat from the kind of utopian urbanism that characterized his earlier career. This retreat is evident only in the kinds of work Rama has recently exhibited in spaces like the Marian Goodman Gallery, but also in his recent project to transform parts of the first floor of the Prime Ministerial building into an exhibition space. Understanding the full implications of these relations between contemporary art and politics complicate our understanding of politicized aesthetics, and problematize the celebration of art-as-politics for its own sake.

1. “You Don’t Get It”

On the evening of November 12, 2016, following the opening of the solo exhibition of Edi Rama’s drawings and sculptures at Marian Goodman Gallery, a conversation took place featuring Rama in conversation with internationally renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.[1] The conversation focused (ostensibly) on the relationship between politics and art in Rama’s career and work. Rama first gained notoriety as an artist-politician during his term as the mayor of Tirana in the early 2000s, when he initiated a project to paint the facades of several socialist-era apartment blocks along one of the city’s main roads with bright colors. The project was documented by artist Anri Sala, in Sala’s video Dammi i Colori (2003), and this fusion of politics, urbanism, and art subsequently made Rama a hero for a that segment of the transnational contemporary art establishment that desires to proclaim a continued political relevance for the arts in the age of global neoliberal capitalism. Since 2013, with Rama’s election as Prime Minister of Albania, he has also begun to more actively integrate his artistic activity into his political narrative; he has increasingly emphasized not only his interventions in urban space but also the importance of his colorful drawings in his planners and on official paperwork. These images—much more intimate in scale, yet chromatically akin to his painted buildings—have provided a kind of artistic synecdoche for Rama’s political work in Albania. That is, much to the delight of the aforementioned art establishment, they appear to provide a way to talk about the possibilities of art’s effects on the political reality of Albania without actually—to put it bluntly—talking about the political or artistic reality of Albania.

Despite the fact that there is ongoing criticism of Rama’s use of art as a kind of spectacle to mask a neoliberal and autocratic tendency in his politics, this criticism largely comes from a fairly limited circle of artists, critics, and curators based in or closely associated with Albania. This critique has, at least thus far, made essentially no impact on the celebratory discourse around Rama in artworld centers such as Paris and New York. Thus, it visibly came as a shock to Rama, Obrist, and Tiravanija when art historian and curator Eriola Pira pointedly addressed both Rama and the gathered audience in the open Q&A session following the talk. Pira asked two questions, one aimed at those in attendance, and the other at Rama, and they are worth quoting in full:

“As has been evident through out the discussion this afternoon, Rama’s art is deeply intertwined with politics. But, this primarily refers to his status as a politician and not his politics. In fact, as the art
attests, it is because of his status as a politician, who dabbles in
art, that we are gathered here. Politics, and especially his politics
, are entirely absent, invisible, or art-washed. And, since Rama has of
late gained a reputation of dismissing his critics and dissenters, be
they of the opposition or civil society, I will direct this question to all of you: How many of you do know his
politics beyond the ‘painting the town,’ which as he just told us was really just an affected behavior?

Let me help you
out with this. There is: systematic dismantling of public institutions such as higher education, which has led to the jailing and prosecuting of student protesters; corruption at the highest level of government and systematic collusion with the construction and narcotics mafia; autocratic control over mainstream media, which has been followed by censorship of alternative and social media; and lastly […] the use of art as a propaganda tool to aestheticize all these problems, [which] has put art in the worst position it has been in, including the [previous] eight years of [Democratic Party leader Sali Berisha’s] right-wing government.”[2]

When Rama responded by asking, “So, where is the question, or is it just a speech?” Pira added, “How do you suggest artists counter all of this politics, how do they protest these politics, without, you know, being jailed?”

And now we arrive at the curious occurrence I forecasted at the outset: faced with a series of quite harsh accusations about the policies that have characterized his time as Prime Minister and a question regarding the possible responses open to artists operating in Albania, Rama’s response was—as he put it—“very simple.” “You don’t get it,” Rama claimed, after citing the fact that Albania had recently received a recommendation from the European Commission to open accession talks with the European Union. “I think they get it; you don’t get it.” He added, “And also, you know, it’s a very […] vibrant society in terms of freedom of speech, as the European Commission stated, […] and you are the most outstanding representation [of that] here today. Nothing will happen to you. You’ll be a very happy citizen, […] so don’t worry.” What is curious about Rama’s response (and I am of course setting aside the belligerence of his answer and the not-so-veiled threat implicit in his assurance ‘so don’t worry’) is that he did not once mention art. In fact, he was almost admirably clear in stating his position on Albanian culture: the goal should be European integration at all costs, and Europe is the best judge of the state of Albanian society. (The inescapable irony, of course, is that this attitude is directly opposed to the one he claims for himself in the narrative of his role as mayor. Earlier in the evening, Rama had repeated his oft-told story of an enraged European Union representative telling him he couldn’t use EU funds to paint the buildings bright colors, because it was against European standards.)

This answer, however, clearly caused a certain discomfort in the representatives of the artworld present, although the only response the audience managed to muster—aside from laughing and clapping at Rama’s response—was Liam Gillick’s question to Pira: “Who are you?” Obrist, however, hastened to raise a quite obvious subject that was notably absent from Rama’s explanation: the Albanian Prime Minister’s recent transformation of part of the first floor of the Prime Ministerial building into the ‘Center for Openness and Dialogue’ [COD], a combination library, project space, and exhibition venue. Obrist first cited Rama’s involvement of Tiravanija and Gillick in his painted buildings project, establishing a connection between Rama’s activity as mayor and his current projects. Obrist then brought up the recently established exhibition space and collection associated with Rama’s own government building, a space that includes works by Carsten Höller, Thomas Demand, and Philippe Parreno, asking Rama, “Could you talk about this new form of commissioning art, and bringing art into your government building?”

For the remainder of this post, I’d like to discuss the COD, [3] but it is worth pausing to consider the full import of the Rama’s response to Pira’s question, and Obrist’s rather desperate intervention (accompanied in grand style by a lot of hand-waving). Rama—either because he was too nonplussed by the question or because he simply did not care—chose to say nothing whatsoever about the role of the arts in Albanian society, neither about his own role as an artist nor about the role other artists might play in that society, and instead opted to privilege the viewpoint of an external bureaucratic organization (the European Commission). In response to this apparent rejection of the very premise of the conversation—that art and politics are productively intertwined in Rama’s Albania, that “it’s very exciting to talk about artist-run countries”—Obrist pitched Rama the topic that the Marian Goodman Gallery had in fact framed as a major conceptual facet of the exhibition. (The press release for the show asserted that Rama’s drawings transformed into wallpaper decoration—as Rama has used them in his building and as many of them appeared in the Marian Goodman space—“made sense in the context of his transforming the wider building from what had been a bureaucratic, sequestered stronghold into what’s now entitled the Center for Openness and Dialogue—including a contemporary art space, viewing rooms for public regeneration proposals, reading rooms and a lecture theatre.”) Even in pitching the talking point, however, Obrist couldn’t avoid a rather blatant retreat from what was supposedly under discussion (a productive relationship between art and society). Ultimately, his question—which not coincidentally named only foreign and quite successful artists like Parreno and Demand—was about a traditional avenue of art historical enquiry, but one that is less commonly raised in discussions of relational aesthetics and supposedly emancipatory contemporary art: the government commission of art and the integration (not to say appropriation) of that art into official state spaces.

The disjuncture between Rama’s response and Obrist’s attempt to redirect the tone of the conversation reveal the contrast between the ways that state-run contemporary art spaces can (and in this case, do) function in places like Albania, and the supposedly emancipatory possibilities that the transnational contemporary art establishment associates with these spaces. Needless to say, the import of Pira’s question at the Marian Goodman talk was precisely to reveal how out of touch with the ‘on the ground’ reality that art establishment is, and the import of Obrist’s answer was to reveal how far that establishment would go to maintain—however haphazardly—the spectacle of ‘peripheral’ contemporary art spaces as bastions of art, democracy, and dialogue.

III. “An Open and Transparent Encounter”

The question arises, then: what exactly is this Center for Openness and Dialogue? Following Obrist’s prompt, Rama went on to proclaim the space as a haven for protestors seeking to have their say? (He even, almost as an afterthought, invited Eriola Pira to have her say in the space, adding rather coldly, “But be prepared, because there will be also answers. And in Albanian you’ll be answered much better.”) However, his description was circular: “it’s not only art…it’s a center for openness and dialogue,” begging the question: what is going on with the art in this political space of supposed openness and dialogue?

The Center for Openness and Dialogue, frequently known by its acronym ‘COD,’ first opened in July of 2015. The center is housed in much of the first floor of the Prime Ministerial building located on Tirana’s axial central boulevard, the Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation. It is comprised of multiple exhibition spaces, a ‘minilab,’ a library and digital archive, and a forum area. Rama’s primary speechwriter, Falma Fshazi, directs the space, and its board includes political aide and journalist Alastair Campbell as well as artists and curators like Anri Sala, Philippe Parreno, and Christine Macel.[4] At the time of its opening, the COD was one of series of projects undertaken by Rama’s administration to open spaces that had previously been—for various reasons—inaccessible to the Albanian public. Before the COD, there was Bunk’Art in November of 2014 (a multi-purpose museum and art exhibition space opened in a large communist era anti-atomic bunker on the outskirts of Tirana), and the House of Leaves in January of 2015 (a museum housed in the former center of surveillance and torture under socialism). Bunk’Art closed for a lengthy period after its first opening, then re-opened under the private ownership and management of Italian journalist Carlo Bollino, who owns several media outlets in Albania. House of Leaves closed quite soon after a much-publicized opening to which several foreign dignitaries were invited; it has yet to re-open.

In contrast to these two architectural spaces, which relate explicitly to the socialist past and its traumas, and which were opened as part of the touristization (and consequent monetization) of Albania’s socialist-era history, the COD’s building has a longer history in relation to Albanian politics. Designed under the fascist occupation of Albania in the 1930s, the façade of the building bears a socialist realist relief executed by a group of artists that included Rama’s father, one of the most significant and celebrated sculptors of Enver Hoxha’s regime. (The fact that his father Kristaq played such an important role in shaping socialist ideology through his role in monumental government commissions is something that has curiously been left out of conversations on Edi’s relationship to politics and art.) Under previous administrations after the fall of socialism, the building functioned as most state institutions do: that is to say, it was not particularly accessible to the public.

The COD’s website proclaims that its primary goals are to “offer an open and transparent encounter between various forms of public dialogue, aiming to demystify an institution which up until now has been closed to Albanians, despite the fact that it has a tremendous effect on their lives.” It aims to function as “a laboratory that investigates the very threshold where different fields of art, politics, and research meet and their potentials overlap.”^[5] As Rama pointed out in his discussion of the space at the Marian Goodman conversation, the space has housed not only art exhibitions, but also lectures, book signings, and award ceremonies—to say nothing of numerous press conferences. In fact, the opening of the space itself coincided with the visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to the region, and documentation of her presence in the space for conversations and a press conference with Rama produced a kind of ideal media pseudo-event. Thus, the role of the space as a tool in a particular kind of political propaganda was evident almost from the start, and this tendency has been discussed elsewhere, in more detail than I can manage here.[6]

Rather than discussing the COD and its exhibitions spaces as an element of Rama’s political propaganda, I’d like to think in a general way about the model of art’s relationship to politics that the COD has produced in the nearly a year and a half since it opened. To anticipate: the COD evidences the increasing localization and partition of the utopian urbanism that Rama’s earlier painting of the Tirana buildings represents for curators like Obrist. The localization of art and art’s politics in the COD itself cannot really be treated as a fusion of art with society, unless it is imagined that society’s significant actions can be located in a particularized governmental space in which viewers encounter a certain kind of contemporary art. The COD does not just passively perform this function: the exhibitions that have opened in the space represent an active incorporation of exterior images, events, and actions, and their subsequent transformation into ideas and objects that escape the full weight of their political consequences ‘outside’ in Albania. In other words, the COD performs a quite essential function in linking Rama’s earlier urban artistic interventions (which now belong to a whole different stage of his career artistically and politically) to a kind of scaled-down and ironically de-politicized kind of art-politics that the transnational art establishment can turn to without becoming entangled in the real consequences of art or politics.

When the COD first opened, it featured a collection of works by three well-known contemporary artists: Thomas Demand, Carsten Höller, and Philippe Parreno. Three photographs by Demand—Sign, Attraction, and Tribute—were displayed in the main exhibition hall immediately within the entrance of the center. One of Höller’s mushrooms (Giant Triple Mushroom) was installed in a grassy patch immediately to the right of the main entrance. Finally, in what was (and continues to be) the most eye-catching aspect of the COD, one of Philippe Parreno’s glowing marquees (Marquee Tirana) placed over the entrance. (These latter two works were donated to the center by the artists and are thus, one assumes, permanent features of the space.)

The precise visual and ideological interaction of these three works has been analyzed elsewhere,[7] and so I would like to emphasize just a few points. The first is that there are both parallels and contrasts between the COD and Rama’s painted buildings: that project, like the COD, expanded to include the participation of other artists, although these artists were foreign, and already well known. (The list of other artists who deigned painted buildings in Tirana includes Liam Gillick, Olafur Eliasson, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.)[8] However, Rama’s narrative of the painted buildings has always emphasized it as ‘an undemocratic means to a democratic end’—according to him, the success of the project was that the citizens of Tirana began to take more ownership of their shared spaces, including the facades of their buildings and their green spaces. At least, this is Rama’s narrative—it is a quite separate question how to evaluate if the project was really successful in this way and to what degree—if at all—that success has been sustainable. In the case of the COD, from the beginning, it was decidedly more ambiguous precisely what kind of ownership citizens could take of the space, aside from taking part in the various official book signings, lectures, and award ceremonies held there. The fact that one must pass through a tall grey metal detector—a form that oddly mirrors the geometry of Parreno’s Marquee—as one enters the space makes it quite clear that certain kinds of authority are wholly surrendered by coming into the COD, and certainly does not facilitate mindset from which one might productively critique authority within the exhibitions.

The second point is that the initial works on display in the COD tried to stage a fusion of the center’s exterior spaces and its interior, while subsequent exhibitions have focused far more precisely on demonstrating the variety of spaces and objects that can be experienced—apparently fully—within the walls of the Prime Ministerial building itself. Parreno’s Marquee Tirana and Höller’s Giant Triple Mushroom can at least be viewed without going into the space of the state, but subsequent works have made the space increasingly only referenced the outside while in fact reinforcing the space as a self-contained interior, a microcosm with only tenuous connections to the ‘exterior’—the whole world of Albanian society and transnational politics. (Incidentally, this is precisely the relationship that has developed with Rama’s recent return to emphasizing his drawings: there is a presumed relationship between these ‘interior’ images, apparently produced out of Rama’s subconscious, and ‘exterior’ politics, but the relationship is left totally ambiguous.)

The second exhibition to open in the COD in fact heightened the degree to which the building’s urban surroundings are made to appear as fundamentally extraneous to whatever interaction of “art, politics, and research” is supposed to occur within the space. In January 2016, the COD opened its second season with a show of paintings by Edi Hila, a painter who represented Albania (together with his student, the well known artist Adrian Paci) at the 2014 edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Hila, whose peculiarly surrealist versions of socialist realism were harshly criticized under socialism, in the early 1970s, was clearly intended to lend the space an air of ‘resistance’ to state power. In his speech at the opening, Edi Rama spoke of Hila’s significance as an artist who showed the socialist regime its own image through the distorted mirror of painting. The cycle of Hila’s recent paintings presented in the COD was entitled Apparitions of the Boulevard [Vegimet e Bulevardit], and it focused on various architectural features of the Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation: the Prime Ministerial building, the fountain in Mother Theresa Square, and the University building located at that same square.  These objects all represented, in some way, the vacuity of previous political regimes, or at least of the violence inherent in certain architectural and urbanistic interventions in the boulevard’s plan. However, the object of this critique was firmly located in the past, and the ‘ghostly’ grey aesthetic of Hila’s paintings solidified a sense of chronological distance. (Of course, Hila’s subdued palette also reified the notion that the appropriate objects of aesthetic critique are chromatically dull, rather than vibrant.)[9]

Further, Hila’s cycle of paintings—with its evocative title—also had the very simple effect of implying the spectral character of the very real spaces and objects that shared the boulevard with the COD (including the exterior of the Prime Ministerial building itself.  Hila’s works, devoid of human presence, nearly devoid of color, presented the actual urban space of the boulevard not only as ideologically violent but also as ontologically vacuous. (Shkëlzen Maliqi, a Kosovar writer and curator, and a political advisor to Rama, wrote—in a curatorial statement—that the subjects of Hila’s paintings were represented “at an ontological zero-level.”)[10] Thus, the presence of the works within the COD did not imply the vibrant political possibilities of Tirana’s urban spaces—quite the opposite. It staged the center as a node from which the adjacent boulevard—as site not only of official buildings but also of parades, protests, and other spectacles—appeared as something de-realized. In other word, the COD itself appeared vital and vibrant in contrast to a vision of its exterior surroundings as the apparitions of ideologies past.

In May of 2016, the COD opened the third exhibition in its main hall, featuring works by Kosovar artist Alban Muja and Albanian artist Olson Lamaj. The exhibition, entitled Qiell, mbi, nën [The Sky, above and below], featured works that conceptually spanned a much broader elemental purview than the previous two exhibitions. In contrast to Hila’s predominantly grey palette, the chromatic unity of The Sky, above and below derived from a shared exploration of the color blue. Muja’s works primarily focused on the sky and aerial views: his drawings and paintings were made based on sketches produced while travelling by plane to and from the US. Lamaj’s works, on the other hand, dealt thematically with both the sky and the earth, and aimed to blend politicized content with a poetic, metaphysical viewpoint achieved through color.

The Sky, above and below continued to present the COD as an abstract microcosm of its surroundings, this time one including not only its immediate urban context but also metaphorically the sky as the realm of utopian dreams and the earth as a space of concrete action.

Perhaps the most interesting work in the exhibition, and the most exemplary of the COD’s ability to transform political dissent into aesthetic objects, was Olson Lamaj’s Blue Meteor, an installation of twelve paving stones—in a vitrine—from the pedestrian area immediately in front of the Prime Ministerial building. These stones had been thrown in protests on December 8, 2015—protests organized on the 25th anniversary of the student demonstrations that contributed to the fall of socialism in Albania. The protests had in fact damaged Parreno’s Marquee Tirana, necessitating its repair. In these demonstrations, the protesters had also hurled blue smoke canisters at the entrance to the Prime Minister’s building, and it was from this act that Lamaj drew the idea of coloring the stones a deep blue that paradoxically recalled both the immaterial materiality of Yves Klein’s IKB (International Klein Blue), and the precious materiality of lapis lazuli.

For Lamaj, Blue Meteor was an investigation of the degree to which objects of political resistance could maintain their critical possibility within the space of the COD, and for him, the work demonstrated the continued vitality of concrete political action despite the state’s attempt at cooptation. From another perspective, however, Blue Meteor was a continuation of the COD’s assimilation of political dissidence and its transformation into art that is both highly conceptual and highly lyrical. In a quite literal sense, the work showed that the COD was a space that could absorb even the most material critique against it. (This was made quite clear to me when I visited the exhibition in the summer of 2016. As I was looking at Lamaj’s Blue Meteor, the security guard from the entrance approached me. “Those stones, they’re the ones they threw in the protests.” He laughed, and returned to his post near the metal detector. Any sense that I had had that the work might disturb the institutional authority of the space evaporated, at least for me.) In Rama’s discussion at the Marian Goodman Gallery, he stated, “There are two ways to deal with power: to consume it or to be consumed by it.” There is a way of seeing Blue Meteor as the consumption of a kind of political power, its processing into art and its re-deployment within the institutional framework.

The most recent exhibition in the COD’s space opened in October of 2016, and is organized by the space’s new official curator, Erzen Shkololli. Shkololli, a Kosovar curator and artist, draws the exhibition’s title, Duke Qëndruar Pezull [Just Hanging Around] from an included work by Kosovar artist Flaka Haliti. Shkololli explains that “the title of Flaka’s work, Just Hanging Around is a watchword and at the same time, the key to openness and dialogue with the aesthetics of contemporary art that, even in seemingly ephemeral subjects, finds the seeds and spices of the sublime.”[11]As Tirana-based philosopher, artist, and curator Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei argues, the works in the exhibitions “literally appear to be ‘just hanging around,’ never—with one important exception—questioning the space or context in which they are displayed. Upon entrance, the exhibition, though well-produced and properly executed, exudes an utter harmlessness.”[12] For Van Gerven Oei, the most significant artwork in Just Hanging Around is Nathan Coley’s A Place Beyond Belief, a work that can be construed precisely as a reference to the COD’s remoteness from the actual Albanian social situation, to the confusing ambiguity of its place in relation to any historical events or political situations, local or transnational.

I would like to return now to the argument I offered at the outset. In repose to the question about what the COD really is, I posited that it is a space in which the narrative of the artist’s involvement in politics can be safely partitioned and transformed into a highly localized utopia that avoids all the messiness of politics.[13] In fact, politics itself increasingly becomes framed as something ‘external’ to the space of ‘openness and dialogue,’ but at the same time politics is always susceptible of being transformed into something far more narrow and devoid of explicit content. This makes it, in fact, an ideal example for replication and citation in the discursive networks of the contemporary art establishment. To put it bluntly, the COD allows curators and critics like Obrist to retain the illusion that artist-politicians like Rama are working for ‘democracy’ and ‘community’ and ‘change’: if they do not care to investigate the broader political situation in a country like Albania, they can simply point to COD as an apparent microcosm of the country. The COD, over its lifespan, has increasingly become a space where institutional critique is in fact made all the more difficult (if not impossible) because it disorients both art and politics. The press release from the Marian Goodman Gallery is quite explicit in this. The statement compares the COD itself to Rama’s transformation of his drawings into wallpaper for his office, explaining that upon encountering Rama’s office walls covered with his colorful sketches, “local visitors or international heads of state are immediately disarmed, even momentarily distracted by their surroundings, thus initially open to lateral ideas.” Distraction and disarmament—especially when they are wielded by state institutions and governments—sound like far less desirable possibilities for an art that aims to productively bring about political change.

1. “It’s Art in a Pure State”

Why, we might ask, does all this matter? On October 25, 2016, Hans Ulrich Obrist delivered a keynote lecture at the Creative Time Summit, held this year in Washington, DC. The theme of the summit in 2016 was “Occupy the Future,” and the conference—perhaps the best known international conferenced focused on the fusion of art and social activism—aimed to explore ways that artists and activists alike could occupy power in order to transform it. Obrist’s lecture,[14]entitled “The Case for Nonsense,” aimed to trace a lineage from Dada’s disruption through to more contemporary examples of artists attempting to produce new (political) realities in opposition to power. Obrist cited Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, John Latham and the Artist Placement Group, Edi Rama, Eileen Myles, (among others) as key figures in this trajectory. Of course, it was Rama’s actions as mayor that interested Obrist the most (though he relied on the fact the Rama is now Prime Minister to lend weight to the real possibility of artists entering politics. Obrist explained, “Anri Sala told me that very early on, Edi really wanted to rethink democracy.” Interestingly, however, Obrist chose to cite a quotation from Rama that emphasized instead the ‘purity’ of art, rather than political content: “Being the mayor of Tirana is the highest form of conceptual art. It’s art in a pure state.”[15] There was obviously still a great deal of confusion in Obrist’s use of Rama: he was at once called upon to stand for the continuation of an avant-garde model of engaged art (the return of Beuys in a new context), the transformation of aesthetics into a purely political act (the painting of the buildings as community-building rather than art), and the apotheosis of politics into “art in a pure state.” This same confusion was evident Obrist and Tiravanija’s conversation with Rama at Marian Goodman in November, although the emphasis on Rama’s drawings and Obrist’s desire to bring the COD into Rama’s narrative seemed to privilege the latter possibility: that Rama exemplifies the possibility that art can consume (political) power and turn it into pure art, and all the problematic politics will fade away.

Obrist concluded his keynote by showing a video in which Cuban artist Tania Bruguera announced her campaign for president of Cuba in 2018. Bruguera’s statement was, of course, largely performative: she called upon viewers to imagine themselves as potential candidates for president in 2018, and thus to demand something more from Cuban politicians. She asked, “What if we actually had that power? Who would we be? What would we do?” The question is certainly an urgent one, and it is all the more urgent when we are faced with concrete examples of who artists are and what they do when they become politicians. The problem is precisely that these questions are seldom really asked, and the realities of Edi Rama’s uses of art and politics in Albania are not examined critically in some of the artworld contexts where they are also most frequently held up as exemplary. Eriola Pira’s question to the audience of Rama’s talk at Marian Goodman, and to Rama himself, should serve as a reminder that alongside, behind, and above the ‘purity’ of art, there are political situations that also demand analysis. History provides us with a wealth of examples of artists involved in politics, as does the present: we must have the courage to really try to understand what is done with political power in the name of art.

[1] A video of the conversation and the subsequent Q&A session is available at https://www.facebook.com/pg/mariangoodmangallery/videos/?ref=page_internal (accessed November 27, 2016). Subsequent quotations from the event are taken from the video.

[2] For Pira’s consideration of the significance of Rama’s talk in New York, and its relationship to political speech and censorship in Albania, see “Më e Keqja e Censurës Është…,” Peizazhe të Fjalës, November 19, 2016, https://peizazhe.com/2016/11/18/me-e-keqja-e-censures-eshte/ (accessed November 27, 2016).

[3] There have been several different recent online articles and posts devoted to the COD. For varying perspectives, see: Nicola Pedrazzi, “Angela Merkel a Tirana, lo ‘show’ di Edi Rama,” Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, July 13, 2015, http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/aree/Albania/Angela-Merkel-a-Tirana-lo-show-di-Edi-Rama-163040 (accessed August 10, 2015); Gentian Shkurti, Alban Hajdinaj, and Eriola Pira, “Parreno i Kapur në Monolog,” Peizazhe të fjalës, July 13, 2015,: http://peizazhe.com/2015/07/13/parreno-i-kapur-ne-monolog/?fb_action_ids=10207294564751530&fb_action_types=news.publishes (accessed August 10, 2015); Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, “All That Frustration,” Berfrois, July 13, 2015, http://www.berfrois.com/2015/07/ vincent-w-j-van-gerven-oei-all-that-frustration/ (accessed August 10, 2015); Erion Gjatolli, “Art në oborr,” Reporter.al, July 16, 2015, http://www.reporter.al/art-ne-oborr/ (accessed August 10, 2015); Raino Isto, “Image//Anti-Image,” afterart, July 18, 2015, https://afterart.wordpress.com/2015/07/18/image-anti-image/ (accessed August 10, 2015); Romeo Kodra, “Center for Openness and Dialogue … COD-i ia bën muuuuu!!!: Pjesa 1,” AKS Revista, July 24, 2015, https://aksrevista.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/center-for-openness-and-dialogue-cod-i-ia-ben-muuuuu-pjesa-i-romeo-kodra/ (accessed November 27, 2016); and Jonida Gashi, “These are (not) the things we are fighting for!”, Reporter.al, November 29, 2015 (accessed November 27, 2016). For the most complete analysis in English of the COD as an aspect of Rama’s political propaganda, see Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, “Give Me the Colors…And the Country: Albanian Propaganda in the 21^st Century,” Art Papers (March/April 2016), http://artpapers.org/feature_articles/2016_0304-Albania.html (accessed November 27, 2016).

[4] See the COD’s website, http://cod.al/?page_id=21 (accessed November 27, 2016).

[5] See the COD’s website, http://cod.al/en/?page_id=1434 (accessed November 27, 2016).

[6] For a clear summary in English, see Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, “Give Me the Colors…And the Country: Albanian Propaganda in the 21^stCentury,” Art Papers (March/April 2016), http://artpapers.org/feature_articles/2016_0304-Albania.html (accessed November 27, 2016).

[7] For a more thorough consideration of the visual interplay of the works, see Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, “All That Frustration,” Berfrois, July 13, 2015, http://www.berfrois.com/2015/07/ vincent-w-j-van-gerven-oei-all-that-frustration/ (accessed August 10, 2015).

[8] Strangely absent from many discussions of Rama’s ‘painted buildings’ initiative (and completely absent from Obrist’s framing of the project at the Marian Goodman talk) are critical works by Albanian artists Gentian Shkurti and Alban Hajdinaj, both of whom made video works that responded to Rama’s project. Shkurti’s video work was entitled Color Blind (2004), and it chronicles a conversation in which a woman tries to explain to a colorblind man what the facades of Tirana’s buildings look like in the wake of Rama’s project. Alban Hajdinaj’s Eye to Eye (2004) considers the disorientation of the city’s inhabitants from the perspective of a citizen whose apartment window opens onto one of the painted facades.

[9] On Edi Hila’s exhibition in the COD, see Romeo Kodra, “Edi Hila dhe manierizmi,” AKS Revista, February 12, 2016, https://aksrevista.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/edi-hila-dhe-manierizmi-romeo-kodra/ (accessed November 27, 2016).

[10] Shkëlzen Maliqi, “Vegime Bulevardi,” COD: Center for Openness and Dialogue, http://cod.al/?page_id=1485 (accessed November 25, 2016).  Translation by the author.

[11] See the description of the exhibition on the COD’s site, http://cod.al/en/?page_id=1657 (accessed November 25, 2016).  Translation slightly edited for grammatical clarity.

[12] Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, “Erzen Shkololli’s ‘Just Hanging Around’: A Place Beyond Belief?,” Exit.al, November 3, 2016, http://www.exit.al/en/2016/11/03/erzen-shkololli-just-hanging-around-a-place-beyond-belief/ (accessed November 25, 2016).

[13] It is also worth noting that, so far at least, Rama has avoided being seriously and critically compared to figures like Bogdan Bogdanovic (the architect, sculptor, and urbanist who served as Belgrade’s mayor from 1982 till 1986).

[14] The lecture can be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQS5CU8WmJg (accessed November 25, 2016).

[15] This quotation, often cited in discussions of Rama’s painting of Tirana’s buildings, appears to come from an interview Rama gave in 2008. Some of the earliest sources that cite the quotation are “The art of re-imagining a city for the future,” The Irish Times, March 14, 2008, http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/the-art-of-re-imagining-a-city-for-the-future-1.903237 (accessed November 25, 2016), and “You’ve Got to Tear this Old Building Down: Tirana’s Mayor: An Artistic Politician,” International Special Reports, January 12, 2002, http://archive.li/cYgGD (accessed November 25, 2016).

Today’s post is a complete scan of Shqipëria Socialiste Marshon [Socialist Albania Marches On], no doubt the most impressive photo book published in Socialist Albania. Produced in 1969, the year in which Albania celebrated the 25^th anniversary of liberation from fascist forces, the book (aimed at projecting the nation’s success to foreign audiences, as well as reinforcing this image to domestic ones) also arrived at the close of the peak period in Albania’s cultural and ideological revolution. It also bears witness to the close of a decade during which Albania had built its new international relationship with China. In fact, it is interesting to consider the image projected by this book in the same year that the first part of Mao’s cultural revolution rounded itself out. There’s very little implication of international aid in the photos in this book, although there is one fabulous image of a Chinese engineer teaching Albanians. There’s also no hint of anything like the turbulence that China experienced in its cultural revolution; Albanian socialism appears almost as stable and conflictless as one could imagine.

It’s worth comparing this book with Artet Figurative në Republikën Popullore të Shqipërisë, published the same year, also in commemoration of the anniversary of liberation. (Likewise, Ushtria Popullore në Artet Figurative is from the same year.) There, there is a good deal more reference to the international character of socialism, although it leads to some interesting incongruities (How does a bust of Mao fit into an art book ostensibly primarily devoted to commemorating the National Liberation War?) In any case, it is worth considering the struggle to undertake the project of socialist modernization with heavy reliance on foreign aid while still projecting the image of being the (last) socialist country in Europe, embattled by the revisionism of the Soviets and Yugoslavs as well as Western Imperialism. Shqipëria Socialiste Marshon gives us an important part of the history of images that promoted Albania’s success as a socialist nation, and the life it depicts is indeed a beautiful one.

A few notes about the scan: The book is a bit too wide to accommodate even the fancy scanner I have access to, and this means the outside edges of the images, along with the occasional page numbers, are often cut off. If an image really seemed to suffer from having the outer edges cropped, I’ve tried to scan that image separately. Likewise, glare is occasionally an issue. Given more time, I’d love to correct these issues, but at the moment I don’t have that time. The goal is for people to get a good idea of what the book contains, not to have the most perfect scan imaginable. I’m never able to get the book for longer than short ILL stints, and my own personal copy is pretty beat up and lacking several pages. If anyone has a copy and wants to produce better scans of certain images (or even the whole thing), let me know and I’ll drop them into this PDF. If not, this may be the best that there will be (unless anyone knows of a better scan elsewhere).

Happy reading!

Today’s essay—an examination of Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama’s recent speech at Creative Time—is a guest post by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, the 83rd in his ongoing Unofficial View of Tirana series.

While local journalists were once again busy regurgitating worn-down, coma inducing positions about yet another spectral appearance of Enver Hoxha at the celebration of the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of Tirana, very few cared to analyze the rather remarkable speech of PM Edi Rama at the 6^th Annual Creative Time Summit on November 15 in Stockholm. According to the Creative Time website, an internationally operative (public) art organization based in New York, Edi Rama “led important post-Communist reforms, including the vetting of government officials to reestablish civic trust.” This “Get To Know” catch phrase seems to suggest that the entire period up to Rama’s advent to power, including the previous 8 years of Sali Berisha’s reign, can be labeled as “Communist.” As for civic trust, let’s hope that the currently developing scandal around several tenders handled through (or dumped on) the Ministry of Culture will not break its spell. A pull quote on the same page cites Rama as follows: “I’m not sure I am a politician. I would say that I am still an artist, and I’m trying to use politics as an instrument for change.”

Each year, ArtReview publishes the “Power 100” list, comprising the most powerful figures in the global art scene. This year’s most powerful person is Nicholas Serota, director of the TATE in London, followed by gallerists David Zwirner and Iwan Wirth on positions 2 and 3. But who on this list wields a fully functioning army, the nominal monopoly on violence across a territory the size of Belgium, and an annual spending budget of about 3.35 billion euros? Who on this list gets to reorganize city centers, decide immigration policies, and negotiate with the Worldbank? This is not to say that Rama wields all this power personally, but with a nearly absolute majority in parliament, an unquestioned authority within his own party, and an opposition that is scattered, desperate, and simply a sad joke, none of the above has proven particularly difficult to pull off. While Neue Slovenische Kunst invented a state “in time,” without territory but also without temporal finitude, whereas my colleague Jonas Staal travels to communist enclaves in the Philippines, Azawad in Mali, and Syrian Kurdistan in search of the “stateless state,” Edi Rama has captured what could have well been a “failed democracy,” and has turned it – with barely anyone noticing – from the “state art” of socialist realism into the “art state” of realist socialism, with Tony “Third Way” Blair as its counsellor. Considering this state of affairs, we would do well to look closely at Rama’s speech (which has not been published on his homepage), keeping in mind that his audience here consisted precisely of those artists, curators, intellectuals, writers, who are not featured in ArtReview’s Top 100.

Edi Rama is explicitly introduced as someone (an artist) in the position to act, that is, different from the regular artist down the street who merely contemplates, incites, reflects, suggests, complicates, and mirrors, someone who can have things done. His presentation therefore necessarily begins with an image of the place where he gets things done: the desk in his governmental office (I wrote about his desk before in the Unofficial View of Tirana 70, which unfortunately has been removed by my previous host continent.), his colored pencils in focus and the Albanian flag and founder of the nation Ismail Qemali in the blurred background: the prominence of the symbols of art is emphasized over those of the state. This is an image that will be constantly reaffirmed by Rama’s speech, which otherwise features no other images but his painting of Tirana’s façades when he was a mayor. This desk is therefore the only image of his contemporary political practice.

I have transcribed his entire lecture  in full from the video recording on the Creative Time website, and provided it with a running commentary between the different sections.

We are all, whether a country or a human being, a product of our past and of what we learn from it. A product too of our character and our ambitions. I am a prime minister now. I developed from what I was to become what I am. I am the same person doing different things. I was an artist. I still like to paint and draw, I just have less time. But in politics too, I try paint a canvas. I visualize how I want our country to be, to feel. How I want to change as the world changes around us. I am not saying that all prime ministers should be artists of course, far from it. It is good if politics is a gathering of people how come from a variety of backgrounds. From Reagan, who was an actor, to the Swedish prime minister, who is a welder, to variety in experiences is amazing. And even when the variety in professional backgrounds is less striking – Margaret Thatcher was a chemist, Angela Merkel a PhD in chemistry – their brush in the larger tableau is far from being similar, but both impressive. I think the skills we have in one field may help or hinder in another, though, in spite of all, the artist in me is never still.

The opening paragraph sets up the main metaphor of Rama’s speech, namely the idea of politics as “painting a canvas,” something he will later connect to the metaphor (if not cliche) of the “big picture.” At the same time, he suggests that not only artists would be able to engage properly in this politico-artistic act. He names a variety of politicians with vocations different from artist: an actor, a welder, and two chemists. That by far the majority of the politicians from the US, UK, Sweden, or Germany never had any other vocation than being a politician–bureaucrat–corporate manager is ignored, or maybe Rama intends to suggest that “professional” politicians would be unable to engage the political canvas on the same terms: the ancient idea that politics should never be someone’s profession.

The examples listed by Rama, supposedly from a left-wing party, are surprising. The first politician he names is none other than Ronald Reagan, hardly a thinker with left-wing aspirations, who is than followed by other right-wing hardliners such as Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel. Typically, the working class representative among the politicians remains nameless (his name is Stefan Löfven, from the Swedish Social Democratic Party). Adam Curtis, among others, already suggested that the Third Way advocated by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton at the end of the 1990s was nothing but a continuation of the neoliberal politics of Reagan and Thatcher. That these two names – and we again keep in mind that Blair is a close advisor of the Prime Minister – reappear in this context as contributing to the “variety of backgrounds” creates a certain discomfort as regards the type of canvas that is supposed to be painted with this “amazing” “variety of experiences.” Why not  Polish prime minister Ewa Kopacz, a pediatrician? Or what about José Mujica ex-guerrilla fighter and president of Uruguay or Evo Morales, anti-War on Drugs campaigner and president of Bolivia? In other words, the friendly sounding term “variety” here is used to obfuscate that his examples do not suggest any variety whatsoever – they all point into the same political direction.

Once I met someone who got really offended because I was drawing while we were talking in my office. Regular visitors are used to this, I do it all the time. I doodle all over my daily agenda. My office table is somehow my atelier. But the visitor who became offended by my drawing, thought I didn’t care about what he was saying. He said: I came here and I have a problem, so don’t draw while I’m talking to you. I apologized, put down my pen, discussed the issue, he bowed to me and he left. The next time I met with him, I remembered the offense he had taken so I push my pot of pens to the other end of the desk and I did not draw. Yet, still he was not happy. At the end he said: I feel that you are not listening. You are looking at me, but you are not here. And I said: You see, allow me to draw if you want me to concentrate. If you want me to listen to you and be myself.

This anecdote reveals several aspects of Rama’s politico-artisthood. His drawing and doodling is a compulsion. He does it “all the time,” and without it, he is not himself. Drawing here is a necessary supplement to listening, as he cannot “concentrate” without having a pen in his hand, sketching out the conversation. There is thus a direct mediation between the conversation partner, who puts forth his “problem,” and “drawing the picture” – a mediation that is thoughtless and effortless. Because of the position of this morality tale, which is at the same type an example of his political ethos and a warning not to disrupt it, just after the introduction of the canvas of politics, this image suddenly becomes much more concrete. While engaging in politics, discussing the issues of the country, studies for the larger canvas are doodled on his agenda and memos. Continuous artistic production therefore slowly contaminates and erases the minutiae of administrative language. Contrary to the slow trickle-down of bureaucracy, Rama authoritatively transforms the concerns of the citizen immediately and without interruption into the bigger, political picture. Doodling here becomes a sovereign gesture that cancels out bureaucratic and administrative procedure. It is therefore not difficult to imagine an absurdist scene in which dozens of government officials are peering over Rama’s colored notes, interpreting the colors, shapes, and forms of the doodles as if they were divining a sheep’s liver or the drivel on the bottom of a coffee cup.

The first time in my life that entered a state building in Albania was when I assumed public office, when I became Minister of Culture. It happened in a moment, in very extraordinary circumstances. Life takes many turns, and this was not one I had expected. But this is a story for another day. It was 1998 and I settled into this new life. I imagined I buried the painter in me. But then two years later I stood for elections for Major of Tirana. And I won, and I saw a city facing so many challenges. In front of us such high expectations of my campaign. That is when I felt my political impulse, the desire to offer people a better future, fused with my artistic impulse. I oversaw a plan to splash brightly colored paints on drab and soulless buildings in the city’s main entrance roads. To me it was political action with colors. Not with words, either with legislation.

Our analysis of the first anecdote is corroborated by the next story. The surface of papers, agendas, and memos is replaced by the “drab and soulless” surface of the buildings in Tirana. The unstoppable “artistic impulse” to doodle on the face of and equally “drab and soulless” bureaucracy is combined with a “political impulse, the desire to offer people a better future.” What constitutes here a “better future” – not to mention that which would have “soul” – remains utterly vague, but if we are to take a cue from the politics of the only other politicians mentioned in the speech – Reagan, Thatcher, and Merkel – this does not bode very well for anyone who had hopes that this prime minister would be true to “socialism” in any form or function. That he painted his own party’s headquarters into a fuchsia pink instead of the traditional red, has been the first indication for this, and yet the present opposition seems utterly blind to it, bleating about communism and enverism at Rama’s every move. The problem is that, different from Thatcher or Reagan, this clear political ideology is obfuscated by exciting language about “artistic impulse” and unorthodox practices of “doodling,” spoken at a conference of like-minded artistic souls, who all feel the desperate need “to act.”

When we painted the first building by splashing the red and orange on the somber gray, something unimaginable happened. There was a traffic jam and a crowd of people gathered as if it were the location of some spectacular accident, or the sudden sighting of a visiting pop star. The French EU official in charge of the funding rushed to block the painting. He scratched(?) that he would block the finances. But why?, I asked him. Because the colors you ordered do not meet European standards, he replied. [laughter] Well, I told him, the surroundings do not meet European standards too [more laughter], even though this is not what we want. But we will choose the colors ourselves, because this is exactly what we want. And if you do not let us continue with our work, I will hold a press conference right now, right in this road, and I will tell people that the old censors of the communist era have been reincarnated as EU financial officers [laughter]. He was kind of troubled and asked me for a compromise. But I told him, I am sorry monsieur, compromise in painting, in colors, is always grey. And we already have enough grey to last us a lifetime. So it’s time for change. The greens and yellows and purples and oranges that we splashed around our formerly communist capital were not going to make people less hungry or more prosperous, but this first big act had to be something telling that the space they lived in was their space. So these colors did make them feel better about the place where they lived and it made them see possibilities in a space where there appears to be no space. It made them see that change could come in different ways, in spite of the city budget, being nothing comma something.

In times of austerity, of empty national and municipal pockets, what can a mayor do? Bring some colors into people’s lives, make them feel empowered (to do what, consume, enjoy?), and “better.” It is true that Rama became mayor of Tirana under desperate circumstances, in the years following a complete breakdown of the economical system, which itself was an immediate and disastrous effect of the shock doctrine imposed on Albania after the fall of the Soviet Block – a direct consequence of the economical policies of precisely those people that Rama now seems to court. But the problem is that the current state of affairs in Albania is incomparable to the state of economical emergency that existed in the early 2000s. The tale of colorful hope and rebellious attitude now seems more like an act of simple propaganda, aiming to make people feel “better” without actually improving their economical conditions. Rama is no longer mayor of Tirana, with very limited means to increase his budget; he is the prime minister of a country with ostensibly full control over the taxation system and government budget. What in his former function was an act of resistance and defiance, would in his current function just be a sugarcoating. It is thus typical that all the images in the slide show accompanying his speech, except for the image of his desk, are from his period as Tirana mayor. He continues to bank on this rebellious image, pleasing his audience with the depiction of canvases larger than they could ever imagine – to paint an entire city! But it would have been more honest if he would have also shown all the urban projects he and a number of affiliated contractors are undertaking in every major Albanian city. The audience would then perhaps be moved to ask questions about budget allotment and tender procedures, about corruption and nepotism. Nevertheless, all these thorny, pressing, and actual issues are effectively shielded behind the happy façades of Tirana city blocks.

The exchange with the figure of the French EU bureaucrat, who becomes a caricature of petty procedural nitpicking, complaining about the paint while the “pop star” artist–mayor is completing his latest “spectacular accident,” has a similar rhetorical function. Albania recently became candidate member of the EU, and Rama has been actively lobbying for it. EU MPs and ambassadors constantly and arrogantly interfere with Albanian internal politics, and are devoutly listened to. So Rama’s rather shocking comparison between EU bureaucrats and Soviet censors is either sincere, in which case Rama’s EU aspirations are purely opportunistic, or he is disingenuous and just aiming to please his audience of fellow politico-cultural travelers. Like myself, most of the listeners in his audience were probably skeptical toward the enormous bureaucratic apparatus of the EU, which remains largely outside of any democratic control. Siding with them against they the “drab and soulless” EU bureaucracy (and drab and soulless it is) is a safe choice, which masks the serious economic and political dependency of Albania on the EU.

When I was spending most of my time as an artist, mainly in Paris, I was anti-politics, at least politics of the Albanian–Balkan kind. I think most artists are. But is through the years as mayor that I understood, and as party leader and as prime minister, I became quite sure that politics at its best is a worthy and meaningful activity which makes the world a better place. And art does the same, in different ways. I have been so happy to be in a position to bring the two together. As an artist, as a politician, or as an artist and politician, I don’t just argue with EU bureaucrats. I once had an argument with a Worldbank guy too, when I told the Worldbank director many years ago that I wanted them to finance a new reception hall for citizens to engage with public services as part of a campaign against corruption. They did not understand me. They were quite confused when I was telling that beautifying and dignifying public space would be a great contribution against corruption. But people who are waiting in long queues, under sun and under rain, in order to get a certificate, or just a simply answer from two tiny windows of two metal kiosks. Their reply to the request was met by a voice coming from this dark hole and on the other hand a mysterious hand coming out to take their papers while searching through the documents for the bribe. The system was working for the corruption, not for the people, who, if they wanted to skip the queue, had to pay the bribe. We could change the invisible clerks within the kiosks every week, but we could not change this corrupt practice. Thankfully I finally persuaded the Worldbank to fund this idea. So we removed the kiosks, built the bright new public space of reception hall that made people, Tirana citizens, think they had traveled abroad, when they entered to make their requests. We created an online system of control and so speeded up all the processes. We put the citizens first, and not the clerks. And we proved something which was very helpful. It’s not about genes. It’s not about somebody being with a high conscience, and some others not having conscience at all. For example, we cannot imagine an Albanian emigrant in Germany driving without a seatbelt. But I have seen German embassy people in Albania doing so. It’s not about genes, it’s about environment and respect, and it’s about system and partnership.

Repeating the tropes of artist-become-reluctant-politician (“I developed from what I was to become what I am”) and the “drab and soulless” bureaucrat who can only think in terms of monetary incentives, Rama again positions himself as out-of-the-box bigger-picture thinker, who in a seemingly innovative way considers architecture as an important influence on people’s behavior, and manages to convince the bureaucrat to think beyond his efficiency targets. This once again masks the obvious fact that architecture already for a long time, perhaps since its origins, has been used by those in power to influence human behavior and regulate populations. The entire restructuring of Tirana under the Italian fascist occupation would be an appropriate example, as well as the recent restoration of part of the city center along the lines of precisely this fascist template. The only difference in Rama’s example is that in his case he needed to get the funding to do so from the Worldbank, instead of from his “own” budget. If anything, this tale is therefore not a story of luminary insight into the role of art in society, but rather displaying his prowess as negotiator with institutions that practically hold the Albanian economy hostage.

So now as prime minister, I am once again trying to improve the environment in which people go about their daily lives. We are once again bringing down illegally constructed buildings, we’re once again trying to put art and culture at the heart of our economic and social renaissance, and to make culture part of our governance. And our ongoing project is to transform the Council of Ministers building into a mixed use [building]: first floor for culture, second floor for governance. And this I know, that just as politics can be a force of bad, so it can be a force for good. And at its very best it can be transforming for the world, as art can, because art encompasses the [inaudible] for change whilst it is about understanding, as Kafka once said. Artist must strive to interpret the world, being the changers of perspectives within it. So must politicians. Artists are providers of hope. So must be politicians.

Still no word about economic policies. We hear about cleaning up public space, mixed-use buildings, creative innovation (and don’t forget: economic precariousness)! Perhaps Rama is aware that artists don’t like economics, perhaps he doesn’t like economics, hell, I don’t like economics! But he is the prime minister of a country, and the Worldbank financed a whole lot more than his public reception building in Tirana, for example as a hydropower plant that threatens a protected nature reserve in Përmet. And no Kafka will be of any help in negotiating with them. Whether you like it or not, “changing perspective” and “providing hope” requires quite a budget, but again this is of no concern to his audience, which is right now imagining itself close to the real source of political power, just one floor below the prime minister’s office in a very modern mixed-use building, drafting plans in brotherhood with politicians to reshape the entire nation according to a sublime vision!

How often throughout the years have we heard political leaders talking about the need to focus on the big picture. What is the big picture? It is the vision we have for the world. What does this vision constitute? It is made of the big bold strokes that are combined to deliver the change we need for the world. What does the artists have in mind as he paints a picture? He has in mind a vision of a finished work. So today as he leader of my country, I have a vision in my mind for a country that is more modern. A country whose people are more prosperous. A country whose public servants serve the people, and not those who run them. A country where public space becomes a common space. I know what it feels like and through my leadership and decisions we now make I am trying to turn this vision into reality. These are the big pictures trying to grasp the right moment to create space where there appears to be none and even impossible to have one. Think about it and you will find a lot of examples in world history. The creators of the European Union are written down in history as people with a vision but also the ability to make it become real through politics as a force for good. We can see them as the painters of a very great tableau of nations and histories and people who put their own and their country’s narrow interests in the service of a very greater idea.

Rama here returns to his initial metaphor of “painting on the canvas of politics.” The “big picture” is a “vision […] for the world,” consisting of “bold strokes […] combined to deliver the change we need for the world.” This vision is “modern” and has to be turned “into reality.” But once again this turning into reality requires an act of interpretation. There is no immediate and self-evident link between the doodle, painting, canvas, vision, etc. and political reality. Rama gives us merely a political esthetics without ethics. He only tells us that he acts, not how he acts – the only hint of the quality of his action is prefigured in his doodling: crossing out, erasing, coloring in – bureaucratic text as palimpsest. Or in his own words “to create space where there appears to be none and even impossible to have one.” This is not an emancipatory politics of creating new “truths” or following “ideals,” this is a politics that cleans up and makes way: open the bunkers, open the archives, open the country! The only reference point I can summon here is Walter Benjamin’s text “The Destructive Character,” inspired by his banker (sic!) friend Gustav Gluck:

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air is stronger than any hatred. […]

The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. The most petty bourgeois of all phenomena, gossip, comes about only because people do not wish to be misunderstood. The destructive character tolerates misunderstanding; he does not promote gossip.

A separate article would be needed to hold Rama against the description of Benjamin’s banker friend. But his continuous emphasis on breaking down buildings and bold strokes, combined with the utter disregard he has for his political enemies, other country’s prime ministers, and the terrific amount of slander he faces on a daily basis make it difficult to ignore the parallels. If anything, Edi Rama continuously “tolerates misunderstanding.” Benjamin makes the other suggestion that “[t]he destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative.” We should take this qualification of the destructive character seriously, especially since Rama continues to claim he is an artist. But if we were to inspect his doodles as we would inspect a regular work, how much of it would withstand artistic scrutiny? Indeed very little. As simple art works his drawings are as significant or creative as George W. Bush’s shower paintings, and the latter may even show a higher level of artistic introspection. In fact, except for the enormous compulsion and drive they are a witness of, they are hardly different from the doodles we all make in our notebooks.

The metaphor of the political canvas here threatens to break down. How to actually link his own doodles with the bold strokes of politics? How are we to think the erasure of bureaucratic texts with the creation of a new beachfront walkway in Vlorë? And how are we to see the grand vision of the European Union if indeed it is now made up of petty bureaucrats? Benjamin, once again: “The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.”

Another part of my picture is of a new Balkans, a peaceful, prosperous Balkans. Now that surely would be a space such as never existed before. But think, this year, we commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the First World War, but also this week there is the commemoration of the end of it. A war which started the Balkans, which spread across continents heralding death and suffering that is hard to imagine for our generation. And this year, 2014, we have the first year of peace in every border of our region, as never before. And I come to you here today in the same week as I became the first Albanian prime minister in more than sixty years to visit Serbia. The peaceful, prosperous Balkans, a strong Albania as part of a strong European Union. These are big bold strokes that I long to make part of our big picture. It is a vision that inspires me, inspires me to work, day and night, to make it happen. And these two parts of the same vision hang together: a peaceful, prosperous Balkans would be good for the European Union, just as the European Union, despite the occasional overzealous bureaucrat, is good for the Balkans.

Think of the forces that have led to the scaring of Europe: racism, nationalism, xenophobia. Together we can beat them. Together we can create a space for a multiplicity of cultures, beliefs, and identities, to live side by side. And here is where my life as painter and my life as a politician diverge. When you do a painting, or when you do a doodle, when I doodle in my agenda, there comes a point where it is done. The job is finished. But in politics, the picture is never fully completed. Trying to paint we never have complete control of where the brush may leave. So, still we must hold on to the vision and persevere. And when people say, as far too often they do, that politics can never bring change, I say they are wrong. It can and it does. But of course we know that just as politics can deliver change, so politics can hamper change. Just as politics can bring peace in between peoples, it can bring conflict. Every step on the way we face choices, just like the artist: This color or that color? This brush or that brush? This space or that space? What is the picture we’re trying to paint?

In this penultimate section, after some quotes for international news agencies, we witness the final breakdown of the “big picture” theory of art and politics, namely on the decisive question of finitude: a picture is finished, politics never is. The “bold strokes” of the founders of the European Union, Edi Rama’s grand “vision” of Albania, all of it depends either on some version of the mistaken idea that politics is a finite process, in other words, utopia, or reduce politics to the very bureaucratic, results-oriented processes with manageable targets that Rama seems to despise. Therefore, it only seems fair to once again pose the question how he reconciles the finite with the infinite, the work of art with the work of politics, the creation of an image and the creation of a state – both are finished with a final stroke, but in case of the latter, the cost will be in human lives. Rama seems unable to pull himself out of this conundrum as he ends this paragraph with a series of rhetorical questions which on the one hand suggest bureaucratic procedure (“This color or that color? This brush or that brush? This space or that space?”) and a utopian vision (“What is the picture we’re trying to paint?”).

And if ever any of you would come to Albania and you come to see me in my office and you notice me doodling, please do not be offended, as that man once was. It is part of who I am, the hand that moves freely, creating space where there appears to be none. That is not a bad way to think of how we make progress. Thank you.

The “And” of this final paragraph is misleading. There is no continuation here, nor a logical conclusion, but rather an attempt to cut through the entire problematics encapsulated by the skewed “big picture” metaphor in art and politics: a complete regression to the subjectivity of the artist, “the hand that moves freely, creating space where there appears to be none.” It is no longer a question of communal canvas painting. Instead the bold stroke of the single artist creates the canvas, the doodle creates new policy, the hand creates the vision. “It is part of who I am”: Edi Rama is essentially this authoritative, modern, freely moving hand, making way no matter what: “What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.” Is this indeed not a bad way to think of how progress is made?

This is the first in a series of posts containing PDFs of texts that may be of interest to those studying Albanian socialist realism (and 20th-century art in general, because socialist realism is some of the 20th century’s most intriguing art). Initially I had planned to write thorough descriptions and analyses of the content of the documents, but that seemed unnecessary—the goal is primarily to make these resources available, and only secondarily to offer me a venue to ramble on about them. So, without further ado:

The first text is the portion of the April 1972 volume of Nëndori devoted to the papers delivered at the 1972 Writers and Artists Union Plenum on aesthetic criticism (held on February 24 and 25). It contains a keynote address by painter Vilson Kilica, then the general secretary of the Writers and Artists Union. This fact alone is interesting, since ’72 was the year following Kilica’s creation of the work Brigadieret, one of the more overtly Modernist works produced in Albania during the period. (In 1972, Brigadieret was printed on the back cover Shqiptarja e Re and, I believe, Ylli.)  It was also the year prior to Kilica’s expulsion from the leadership of the Union for his “liberal viewpoint”.

Of the essays included, one of the most interesting is “Kritika të Orientojë e të Hapë Horizonte për të Ardhmen” [“Criticism Orients and Opens Horizons for the Future”] by Andon Kuqali, one of the most (in my view) perceptive historians/art critics of the Hoxha years. Kuqali’s essay is insightful and intriguing for many reasons, but especially because of Kuqali’s clarity in articulating the necessity for interpretation on the part of the artist in creating the work. This interpretative stance was one of the hallmarks of the Marxist orientation towards artistic production, but it is (in my opinion) too often understood in a shallow way, as propagandistic deception (i.e. critics and historians treat the ‘interpretation’ called for by socialist realism as a ‘lie’ because it was not ‘real(istic)’). In fact, Kuqali rejects the possibility of the straightforward depiction or understanding of historical events. He insists:

We can in no way accept the correctness of the assertion that there are works that [simply] illustrate “historical facts.” […] From an eclectic position, the proponents of this assertion wish to accept the compatibility of the existence of an archaic and academic art with one that is innovative and revolutionary, to defend academicism. In doing so, art’s interpretative, conceptual-emotional essence is taken away from it. For even historical works cannot become artistic unless they express the aspirations, ideas, and worldview of our time, and for us, the worldview of the working class—the most advanced viewpoint in our times. (81)

With this essentially Tolstoyan declaration, Kuqali sets forth one of the tenets of (socialist/) realist art and criticism: that art must be an interpretation, and must be interpreted by criticism, in order to be realist. For Kuqali, artistic realism is also fundamentally metaphorical (which is to say that the socialist realist understanding of reality is metaphorical), and as such any attempt to simply paint ‘the world’ flounders in naturalism. While it has been said many times, I think it bears repeating: the perceived distance between socialist realist artworks and the ‘reality’ that prevailed in socialist countries is only significant if one assumes a literal model for (understanding and encountering) reality. While there has been sufficient theorizing on art, language, and other phenomena to  cast this model into some doubt at a general level, it is enough to restate the obvious in this particular context: when one looks at “the reality of socialist life” in socialist realism, one is looking not just at a metaphor for reality, but reality as metaphorical.

For those who do not read Albanian, I have also translated one of Kuqali’s articles, published in Drita in 1971. Its subject is Epika e Yjeve të Mëngjesit [Epic f the Morning Stars],the work that ultimate saw its author, Edison Gjergjo, imprisoned. (I have also posted my images of the article below, for those who read Albanian, with apologies for the poor quality of my snapshots.) It is interesting to consider not only Kuqali’s relatively lax critical attitude (from reading his criticism, one would not immediately assume the work went on to be so harshly denounced by the state). It is also, I think, an example that fulfills Kuqali’s own call, in his talk given at the plenum, for an aesthetic criticism that says what is in the work, not only what is not in it (which, as he notes, was all too common in communist Albanian criticism). It also praises Gjergjo—with mixed praises, to be sure—for his interpretation of the scene, for bringing his own aesthetic experiences to the depiction of a scene that still maintains a link to the reality of socialist life (albeit a confused and contradictory one).

“Expressive, But Also Eclectic”, in Drita, December 19, 1971, page 7

by Andon Kuqali

On the one hand, a use of color, a manner of composition, and a style not normally seen in our exposition; on the other hand, a complex and contradictory inner content—these factors made Edison Gjergo’s Epic of the Morning Stars [Epika e Yjeve të Mëngjesit] hold the viewer’s attention in the midst of a great number of other works in the most recent exposition in the national art gallery.

The theme of the National Liberation War has been a continual source of inspiration for our art. All our writers and artists, including painters and sculptors, have captured and dealt with not only the significant historical events of the war, but also other aspects of this great epic of our people. The subject of Gjergjo’s tableau has originated and developed against this historical background. His works speaks of happenings and ideas that characterize the century—that are perhaps even eternal. A deep, blue night, filled with stars; a village or a castle, or a still-standing mass of rock; people, partisans, villagers: full of feelings and thoughts, great, monumental. In their midst the ancient song of the rhapsodist, which comes from centuries ago and enters into new struggles, into bloody and historic wars.

A shade of blue enriched by the human figures and the twinkling of the stars: it is the atmosphere of beautiful evenings, those pure and dreamlike evenings of summer. Within this expanse of blue, the dark shadows; the deep tones of red and violet; the silent silhouettes; the sublimation of the rhapsodist, with his head hanging down, and of the partisans, with their rifles in their hands; the attention that one woman partisan directs at the blood red rose she grasps in her hand—all of these aspects create disturbing ideas and give a sad, tragic note to the work. All of this—within a closed, square composition.

Entitling his work “Epic of the Morning Stars,” Edison Gjergjo has attempted to convey his thoughts and ideas to us by means of words. But this title, it seems to me, is somewhat incomprehensible, and is of little help to us in grasping the substance of the work, for the title in figurative works is an accessory perhaps even further outside the work than the frame or the pedestal. However, in this case, it does offer us some insight. The tableau speaks of the idea of a long history, a history of centuries; of the epic, dramatic, and tragic wars of our people; it tells of the history that is carried on by the rhapsodist, that stands beneath the looming boulder, that is in the roots of the struggle of the young partisans on this blue, starry night, from which will emerge the new day and the new epoch. But this new epoch emerges, through the painting, together with both the partisans and their rifles and with something mysterious, calm, and quiet.

This slightly confused complexity and the contradiction between the foundational idea of the work and the truth of the historical moment arise from the artist’s uncertain emotional and artistic attitude and a wavering attempt to find his own path, his own creative personality. They also stem from a kind of nostalgia for the past which has taken hold of him.

We have seen these contradictory and incoherent feelings in previous works by Gjergjo: powerful dramatic struggles, youthful leaps, bursts of energy, and—at the same time—feelings of tragedy and sadness. The painter draws more from his own meditations than from our own social reality. The epic of his most recent painting is not an innovation, but a new variation on the artist’s central idea, with a more adequate subject and theme: a more mature work conceptually and artistically.

Gjergjo’s painting expresses itself by specific aesthetic means: the ideas take artistic forms and become concrete through color, light and shadow, pictorial style, and composition. This is one of the merits of this painter and of a entire group of other painters who are now in the process of advancing our art. A few technical mistakes weaken the aesthetic perception of the painting, damaging the interaction of the beauty of the colors, of light and dark, etc. But this, let us say in passing, is a problem with many of our painters and—keeping n mind the way in which a painting communicates with the spectator—cannot be ignored by the artist without artistically damaging the resulting work. Edison Gjergjo has managed to create a work that draws you in, that holds you with the intensity of its colors and contrasts and with the expressiveness of his style, even if this expressiveness here and there become exaggerated. In this manner, he has managed to create an extremely moving figure in that of the rhapsodist, who is characterized by an almost inhuman monumentality. However, this figure is not without connection to reality, especially if we keep in mind the degree to which our singers physically take part in the interpretation of their songs. The feeling of tragedy has also touched the partisans, who have the character of strong, brave warriors tested by battles. The psychology of the young female partisan and her connection to the scene is slightly unclear. But perhaps not everything in a work of art can be explained with a great degree of exactitude.

Without a doubt, the painter has greatly exploited the experience of Expressionism—which is connected with moments of tragedy and sadness—without succumbing to the melancholy of that movement. He has also exploited the experience of Cubism, especially in the treatment of the landscape, in order to arrive at universal forms that suggest monumentality but retain their connection to the suggestion of reality. Whereas in the treatment of the figures, and especially of their faces, he has taken to heart the lessons of classical painting. All of these factors make the work eclectic and damage, without a doubt, both the expression of the painter’s ideas and the unity of the work. Thus, it is impossible not to damage the content of the work as well. The unity of a work does not exclude complexity of emotion. A work without complexity risks being a poor work. But unity requires the full expression of the conceptual and emotional content of the work.

[translated by Raino Isto]

I was recently prompted—after re-reading Enis Sulstarova’s insightful essay “Mbijetesa e Përditëshme nën Komunizëm” in Përpjekja 21—to actually read De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, a text I confess that I had previously only read the introduction to. This was in part because I have always felt a (rather kneejerk) ambivalence towards De Certeau’s thesis regarding how the “tactics” of everyday life function in relation to the “strategies” of systems of authority. Part of my ambivalence comes from the fact that I think De Certeau often calls practices “subversive” could just as easily be called “collaborative” (though this would truly problematize the use of the term of “heroism,” no matter how much De Certeau wants to posit a new image of the hero). I think that his identification of certain “ways” (of reading, cooking, walking, and so forth)  as falling outside the dominant system of authority/socioeconomic paradigm comes from a failure to sufficiently conceptualize the complexity of systems of authority, not actually from the discovery of the limits of these systems. At the same time, many authors seem to face difficulties when attempting to elaborate concrete examples of the practices De Certeau repeatedly insists are so elusive. In light of Sulstarova’s essay (which is admirable in its efforts to provide real examples, but still reads more as an exercise in theory rather than an examination of phenomena), I have been thinking about examples of everyday, anonymous “manipulation and enjoying” in communist Albania. And I think I have found a rather interesting one.

            Last summer, I was lucky enough to acquire (from some very good friends in Albania) several issues of the journal Nëndori, the monthly periodical of the Union of Writers and Artists under communism. Most of the issues seem to have come from the same personal collection, an assumption I make based on the fact that many of them were individually wrapped in protective paper coverings, with the date written on the paper covering. (They are not, however, stamped on the inside of the cover with a personalized “This book is from the personal library of________”, as are many of the old books from the communist period that I’ve acquired.) When I first got the collection of Nëndoris, I thought it interesting and encouraging that the previous owner showed such concern for the preservation of books (a value, sadly, that seems to have been more prevalent in communist Albania—at least among those who owned books—than it is in Albania today).

            The books were not wrapped in just any paper, however. Most of those that were bound were wrapped in propaganda posters, which had been carefully cut to tightly wrap the individual copies of the journal. (They were wrapped so that the blank backs of the posters were on the outside, with the images concealed.) While the art historian in me is of course dismayed at seeing the use to which the posters were put—it’s not the condition I would like to have found them in, cut up and folded around books—their use does, I think, raise a number of important questions of the kind that De Certeau’s theory is trying to get at.

Where exactly do the propaganda posters re-purposed as book covers fall in the typology of practices that De Certeau wants to bring to our attention? Certainly, the fact that they have been used to wrap books, and thus would appear to be linked to the act of reading. Of course, it is also possible that the conservation of the volumes of the journal was linked to the drive to preservation but not necessarily to the drive to consumption. Perhaps the anonymous owner of the volumes never read them, or read them once, dutifully wrapped them in the posters, put them on a shelf, and forgot them. In any case, the care evident in the cutting and folding of the posters to perfectly wrap the journals was striking. What is truly striking, to me at least, is the way the use of the posters shows a casual disregard (if that is not too strong a word) for the imagery of the regime while it paradoxically acts to preserve the words of that same system.[1] This paradox represents, I think, something of the difficulty of pinning down whether or not such a use of the posters can count as “subverting” the communist system of strategies. As is so often the case, it is an act both subversive and collaborative: the owner of the books repurposed images with no regard for their impact as images—since the images were hidden in the wrapping—but did so in the interest of honoring and preserving a different form of the same propaganda present in the images themselves.[2] This raises a question not just about the status of words versus images, but also about how this “everyday” (re)use stands in relation to the power of the communist system in Albania. Should it be seen as an example of that system’s ingenuity at perpetuating itself even in the most mundane acts (one cuts up posters to save the words of the Party)? Or should it be seen as an irregular (I would not say rebellious or subversive) act of consumption, which uses (and uses up) the ideology of the regime in a way that weakens it by hiding it away, cutting it up, fragmenting it, disrespecting its privileged role as image of the New Life?

Recently, I have been unfolding the pieces of poster and using them to decorate my own walls. In the course of doing so, I was able to piece together 3/4 of one of the posters. In doing so, however, I realized that the three pieces I had, while all pieces of the same image, were not from the same poster—which thus frustrated my own attempts to make the images perfectly align. This, it occurs to me, is a perfect metaphor for the difficulty of examining evidence like the posters and their re-use. Reconstructing the motivations for such practices is always part of a new act of repurposing, one that is most accurate when it preserves the subtle evidences of dislocation and disjuncture—even if the significance of those disjunctures is not always, and may never be, clear.

I assume that the use of the posters dates from the communist period (and not afterwards) primarily because of the amount of wear on the posters and the Nëndori journals themselves. Most of the posters appears to be from the mid 1980s, celebrating various 40th anniversaries. Below are several images of the poster fragments opened up.

[1] Of course, there is some irony in the fact that Nëndori was a journal that also devoted many articles to the visual arts.

[2] It is worth noting that since several copies of the same poster were used, the owner may indeed have preserved the posters as well—but only one copy, the others of which s/he used as wrapping.

The first in a series of posts in which I haphazardly analyze several of the incredible socialist realist paintings I looked at (chiefly in reproduction) and thought about this summer in Albania. First up is Sali Shijaku’s Zëri i Masës [Voice of the Masses], 1974

“The innovative aspect of this painting is not that its author invited several other people into the studio, and depicted them alongside the painter. Its innovative, and national, character comes from the fact that it incorporates [class-]conscious workers, that their thoughts and their ideology are included within it. …the image’s novel quality stems from the artist’s attitude towards the working class and towards our new reality.” –Kristaq Rama, “Tablotë e Gjera të Jetës dhe Heroi Pozitiv në Artet Figurative,” Nëndori, May 1977, pgs. 227-228

Let us, for the moment, take Rama at his word, and accept that insofar as Shijaku’s painting represents an innovation, a new comportment towards artistic creation that accords itself to the ideological framework of the socialist ‘New Life,’ it does so because at its conceptual and compositional center stands the worker. This, of course, leaves open the question that Rama’s essay–which takes Zëri i Masës [Voice of the Masses], 1974, as its point of inception–never fully answers. Namely, what is the relationship between art, the working class and ‘our new reality’ as it actually appears in the painting? On the one hand, we must keep in mind that this ambiguity was not only endemic to the criticism of the socialist realist period in Albania, but was in fact an integral part of its functioning; it was just such an ambiguity that allowed the idea of ‘reality’ to remain so nebulous and elusive. At the same time we must accept that the socialist realist system possessed a great sense for metaphor, for the discovery of concrete hidden meanings–that is, it understood the possibility that the signs of subversive, revisionist ideology could appear anywhere, at any time, and thus that a heightened hermeneutical  sensitivity was always necessary, especially when encountering works of art. Thus, no matter how superficial Rama’s critical treatment of a work like Zëri i Masës  must seem at first glance, this should not prevent us from approaching the work as a complex system of meanings, and from accepting that that this complexity would have characterized the work in the context in which it was created and viewed. Of course, there is a right way to view and understand the painting–that is precisely what Rama’s description gives us–but that right way is not as reductivist as it might seem, for it involves  understanding how the totality of the painting’s diverse threads of meaning are to be united in the correct aesthetic comportment towards the new Albanian socialist reality.

To begin with, let me plainly state my argument: Zëri i Masës  depicts a system that encompasses the creation and reception of works of Albanian socialist realism. It describes a hierarchy of the materialization of ideas as well as of modes of perception and contemplation. In the depiction of this system, it engages with certain well-known tropes from the history of painting (the representation of the interior of the artist’s studio, of the creative process, of the absorbed reception of art, and of the blank back of the canvas, for example). One could say that Shijaku simply adapts these tropes to the conditions of socialist Albania, and to a certain extent this is true (which of course does not make the work any less important and informative as a document of that ideological territory). However, in keeping with Rama’s insistence that the work represents an innovation, I wish to proceed on the assumption that Shijaku has not merely changed certain thematic elements to make the painting at home in its political-historical context, but has in fact attempted to introduce a new structure–which is not to say that this structure is wholly innovative or without precedent, but rather that endemic to this structure is the production and sustenance of the new reality. The work does this by playing upon the same kinds of ambiguity that characterize Rama’s critical appraisal of the painting, by revealing the origin and reception of its reality without ever attempting to reflect or depict the reality itself. In this way, the work is perhaps one of the most honest works of Albanian socialist realism (a description that I will qualify below, for it certainly demands qualification), and one of the most successful, in that it understands the reality of socialist realism to be, as Dobrenko puts it, the image of production of socialist reality itself. In other words, the painting is a machine that produces socialist reality by showing the inner workings of the production of socialist reality.

At the center stands the worker, but for the time being we need merely note that the painting has a center, that all the elements and movements that make up the work as a whole take up their places around this center (which is, I will argue, not necessarily the only ‘center’ of the work in a phenomenological sense). So let us set aside the worker, caught mid-sentence, not because his role in the painting is merely formal (necessitated, for example, by the aesthetic demand for centrality in socialist realism) but because we will not fully understand his role until we examine the other elements of the painting.

There are, I think, two major movements in the painting. The first is a kind of ebb and flow that centers on the worker and his gesticulation, reflecting his own oratory back at him and then spinning it back out into the small groups of onlookers, and even into the canvas itself, seen only from the back. The second movement is the more quintessentially metaphysical one, the one that moves from the top of the canvas to the bottom and that, at first glance, seems to represent the movement from abstract ideas to concrete materializations of socialist reality. (There is also an element of the movement from the past to the present, to which I will return below.) Both movements pass through the worker, and as such he functions as the medium through which they become tangible and comprehensible to the viewer. However, both also ultimately draw the viewer’s attention down to the lower left of the painting, to the back of the painting that the onlookers are gathered to contemplate and discuss. Since the front of the canvas remains a mystery, it is left to the viewer to (re)construct the content of the work from the reactions and attitudes of the depicted viewers. The unseen painting within the painting thus functions as a second center, absorbing the viewer into its ambiguous space (since it occupies more than a quarter of the work) and then redirecting her attention back to the various modes of attention modelled by the onlookers in the studio. These onlookers display various levels of engagement with both the painting and the worker-orator at center. Two on the right (one of whom has a copy of Drita, the weekly publication of the Union of Writers and Artists, shoved in his back pocket, revealing a literary and ideological preparation to engage with works of art) gaze raptly back towards the worker who is speaking. Some of those to the left seem absorbed in their own activity, such as the man lighting a cigarette, while others either look to the worker, to the canvas at lower left , or–in one case–stare directly out of the painting. The artist himself stands unmoving just to the right of the speaking worker, his gaze fixed on the work that he has, presumably, just completed. His lowered hands, one holding his palette and the other his brushes, offer a counterpoint to the expressive gesture of the worker’s hands, and together the two suggest a definite parallelism: there is expression to be found in the work of the hands of both the artist and the laborer, both produce the kind of meaning that ecstatically pours forth (through the mysterious concealed image and through the worker’s narration) by means of gesture. Finally, at the lower right sits another worker, this one seemingly wholly absorbed in the contemplation of the canvas, his face cradled by a hand in turn braced upon his knee in an undeniably classical pose.

There is a sort of triangle formed by the central worker–the orator–the second worker–the contemplator–and the looming back of the canvas. In a certain sense, the canvas forms a second center to the painting. It not only conceptually anchors the gathering of figures in Zëri i Masës , it also visually holds sway over all other elements present, drawing the eye to its broad brown swath, even occluding part of the central worker’s body with its corner. Above all, the blank back of the canvas creates an air of mystery that pervades the experience of the painting: one wonders what is depicted on its surface. The final version of one of the sketches found on the wall behind the figures (one sketch, complete with color, is of Shijaku’s famous Vojo Kushi, another recalls his painting of Mt. Dajti)? Some other scene entirely? Perhaps even a depiction of the very people present in the room? (For one possibility is that the hidden canvas is a double of the work we are in the process of viewing, creating an infinite loop of viewing that includes both the viewer and all those present in the scene.)

The back of the canvas, placed so far forward in the scene, serves in some way to block off the space depicted within the work from the space of the viewer, but in doing so also employs the well-worn strategy of drawing the viewer into the work by just such a impediment. At the same time, the placement of the canvas (nearly, but not quite, reaching to the bottom of the painting) contributes to the hierarchical arrangement of space mentioned above, which maps the flow from ideas to their concrete materialization along the axis from the top of the painting to its bottom edge, which in turn suggests the transition to our space. At the uppermost level, the level of the artist’s sketches mounted on the wall, is the realm of ideas. The world of ideas is indistinct–devoid of color except in the case of the brilliant red and black of Vojo Kushi–and amorphous. Several different scenes form the white register, as if this ideal realm was coterminous with the artist’s mind. However, since the artist is not the central figure, I think it unlikely that the upper register of the painting merely offers a psychological snapshot, an inventory of creative ideas present for the artist, waiting to be (more) fully realized. Instead, I think that the upper level of the painting is meant to represent the metaphysical primacy of the images portrayed, and it is significant for this primacy that they are linked to the past. Images of war heroes (Vojo Kushi), of partisans, of the mountainous terrain of Albania itself: these images form part of a realm of primordial myth that both acts as the foundation for and is transformed by the ‘new reality.’ This transformation occurs through the artist, but his action alone is not sufficient to establish the full significance of the new reality–his bringing it to vision does not suffice to make it a part of the New Life. (This, I think, is one reason why we do not, and need not, see whether or not the images the artist has sketched find themselves realized on the canvas.)

Below the realm of myths and ideas is the space of the painter’s studio, where the motley group described above are gathered. In some cases (such as the man at far left) the transition between the sheet with the artist’s sketches and the figures present in the studio seems sufficiently ambiguous to warrant the assumption that there is an intentional and significant spatial bridge between the two; certain figures seem to occupy both spaces, or to be emerging from the upper space into the middle space (whose ambiguous flatness also suggests its continuity with the paper hung on the wall behind). It is in this middle space that the worker first enters the painting (and with him, Rama argues, his ideology and worldview, giving the work its revolutionary quality). Even the centrality of the worker who is explicating the canvas before him, however, cannot compete with the movement that draws the viewer’s attention down to the back of the canvas and, at the same time, over and down to the worker who silently contemplates the canvas.

As I have argued above, it is this third space or register that is meant to most closely relate to ‘our’ space. What is closest to us is most ‘real’–although I also want to suggest that it is meant to be more ‘real’ than us (a point I will return to below). Since we cannot see what is depicted on the canvas, we must default not only to the worker-orator at center, but also to the worker seated at lower right. In fact, if anything, we are more directly tied to this worker, since he models, in his rapt contemplation, the comportment towards the canvas that–presumably–we are meant to hold towards Zëri i Masës .

If the worker at lower right (who is also the final point of a sweeping diagonal beginning from the floating bust of the man at upper left), is meant to model our own engagement with the work (with a work of socialist realism in general), it is also important to note that his absorption in the work is not merely visual. After all, the very title of the painting–Voice of the Masses–reminds us that Shijaku’s painting is also about listening. Here again Shijaku references a rich tradition of images of people absorbed in listening (to music, to speech), and at the same time he creates an inner world for the worker who gazes at the canvas. This inner world is not one already populated with ideas and emotions; instead it is a world that exists only in relation to the prior to levels (the realm of ideas and the realm of the studio). (Here, we might observe, is the production of the space of the socialist subject, who can then be filled in with the ideological substance of the more metaphysically primary levels–not, we must say, with the substance of his own ‘world’).

To encounter a work of socialist realism–and thus to encounter socialist reality–the worker at right shows us, is both to look and to listen, to be shown and to be told. One need only consider the significant role played by radio and television, by speeches, in the life of citizens of socialist Albania to understand the phenomenological situation that Shijaku has translated into a strictly visual medium.

Allow me to restate some of the principal points outlined above, and hopefully to clarify my thesis about how Shijaku’s painting works as a paradigm of socialist realism. Put simply, and perhaps too bluntly, the painting shows that to understand reality is both to contemplate it and to listen to the explanation of what reality is. The image depicted upon the canvas is not just a mystery to us–it is also, insofar as we viewers imagine it is some recognizable scene of socialist life or history–but it is also superfluous in an important sense to the process Shijaku is depicting. This is what is most radical–and most honest–about Zëri i Masës : in this innovative example of socialist realism (if we take Rama’s description to be accurate) the artist has shown the futulity of comparing art to reality, as if we could examine the completed canvas with an eye towards its correspondence to some element of lived experience. Such an encounter with the image would be futile not because no such correspondence exists, but because we would learn little about the ‘new reality’ from such an encounter. The artist has chosen instead to show the new reality as a reality of mechanisms, the mechanisms of the metaphysics of aesthetic creation and interpretation. The reality of the painting is that it depicts the artistic process–both practical, in the sense of the physical production of the artwork in the space of the studio, and metaphysical, in the sense of the relationship between nascent ideas and myths and their materialization in the artwork–that gives rise to works of socialist realism. This artistic process is both visual and auditory, and it is both conceptual and ideological in addition to these aesthetic aspects. The outcome of this process is not simply the work of art depicted in the image but, by metaphorical extension, the whole ‘new reality’ occupied by the viewer.

I said at the outset that Shijaku’s painting was one of the most honest examples of socialist realism. I hope it has become clearer what I mean by this: that the work frankly depicts the production of a reality, its imposition and ideological strengthening, its genesis through different levels of metaphysical and ideological clarity to arrive in the world of the ‘new reality.’ Its truth is that the image of that reality is the image of image production, contemplation, and interpretation. To reflect this reality is not to reflect a finished object, but to reflect the mechanisms by which a viewer is produced who knows the ‘right way’ to encounter the world, to understand the interplay of authority and ideolgy as reality.

Monumenti i Pavaresise, photo by P. Cici, from the November 29 issue of Zeri i Popullit

I recently had the pleasure of meeting with sculptor Muntaz Dhrami for the second time, and he was able to clarify several questions I had regarding the Vlore Independence Monument (relatively unimportant ones, but the answers to which nonetheless shed further light on the genesis of the artwork).

First, Dhrami explained that the initial maquette that was approved by the commission did in fact include the figure of the flag bearer. I had been uncertain about this detail, since the only photo I have found of an earlier version of the monument is cropped in such a way that the top of the boulder (and thus the flag/flag bearer) are not visible. However, Dhrami did explain that initially the flag itself had been much different–it was not, as Hoxha would later take issue with in his letter to the sculptors, “flamuri i betejave”. Furthermore, in the final version of the monument, the figure of the flagbearer was sculpted exclusively by Dhrami and Shaban Haderi, as Kristaq Rama had recently fallen and suffered a head injury that made it impossible for him to work on the flag bearer.

The pieces of the monument were cast in bronze in Tirana, then transported to Flora, where the sculptors mounted and welded them. Dhrami recounted that the final piece of the monument that needed to be mounted was Qemali’s head. When the sculptors completed work mounting the head, they quickly returned to Tirana to continue work on other projects, neglecting to remove the ropes that had been used to lever the head in place from around Qemali’s neck. A concerned official immediately called Tirana, claiming that the sculptors had symbolically ‘hung’ the national hero. The misunderstanding was apparently resolved without incident, but it demonstrates a humorous level of paranoia and a heightened sensitivity to any symbolism, no matter how ambiguous or unlikely…a kind of sensitivity that is still evident today (let us only recall the Skenderbeu i Qafe-Kasharit).

I also asked Dhrami about the accuracy of Hektor Dule’s characterization of the four warriors as a Tosk, a Lab, a Kosovar (or simply a northerner), and a Myzeqar. He confirmed my hunch that the figure of the Myzeqar was not intended to be read with as much specificity, and that while the idea of alluding specifically to the four different regions of Albania (as Dule interpreted the monument) was–in his opinion–quite logical and in the spirit of the work, it had not been the specific intention of the artists.

Additionally, Dhrami informed me that after Hoxha’s visit to the studio of the three sculptors–during which time he made the observations and critique that he would later elaborate in his letter to the artists, published in Drita in June of 1969–the artists completely reworked the maquette of the monument from scratch, taking into account Hoxha’s suggestions, which Dhrami considered to be well-reasoned and productive. Hoxha never saw the reworked version of the monument until the final work was installed and inaugurated in Vlora in 1972. Dhrami interpreted this as a sign of the dictator’s faith in the skill and experience of the three sculptors; he explained (as we had discussed briefly when I met him last summer, that Hoxha’s suggestions had been just that–suggestions–and that the dictator had left the final decision about how to carry out any changes that seemed necessary or appropriate in the hands of the artists. When the monument was inaugurated, Hoxha congratulated the sculptors on the work they had done, saying that they had done well.

There are two interesting aspects to Dhrami’s description of the exchange. The first is that he was still able to quote to me, verbatim, lines from Hoxha’s letter (although of course it was reprinted in last year’s MAPO, with an introductory text explaining that it had been ‘discovered’ in the state archives–a truly ridiculous assertion that both Dhrami and I chuckled over). The second is that Dhrami considered the exchange between the dictator and the artists to be relatively two-sided; in the studio (as referenced in his letter) Hoxha seemed to have implied the need for the presence of a partisan, which the sculptors protested at the time, and which Hoxha later clarified-he did not wish for a partisan to be included, merely for the monument to link the past struggles of the Albanian people together, to unify these conflicts into a single narrative. This, as I have argued elsewhere, is one of the aspects that makes the monument so significant, and it was interesting (and self-satisfyingly encouraging) to hear Dhrami characterize the exchange as significant precisely because it offered an example of how Albanian artists could best engage in the visualization of Albanian history through the medium of socialist realist monumentality.

My conversation with Dhrami also touched on other topics, including the Mother Albania monument, but as these observations will feature in an essay for the upcoming Albanian Lapidar Survey catalogue, I will direct the reader to that publication (due out late this year).

My take on the recently opened “Farajon” exhibition

“Farajon” [roughly, “OurSeed”—”fara jonë”], an exhibition of works by Albanian sculptor Ilirian Shima at the Galeria Kombëtare e Arteve [National Gallery of Art] in Tirana, presents an interesting paradox. The exhibition, curated by Ylli Drishti of the GKA, opened on May 29 and will remain in the gallery until June 22. It contains works of varying size and material—primarily carved wood, marble, and bronze—created by the artist from the 1990s to the present day. Thus far most media response and commentary on the works in the exhibition has been focused precisely where one would expect: on the forthright eroticism of many of Shima’s sensual sculptural forms. I would like to examine the exhibition with a slightly different critical eye, to go beyond discussions of the works as a challenge to norms of Albanian society (implicitly assumed by much of the media response to be prudish and conservative, and likely to be shocked by the display of erotic material, however abstract). If I set out to explicitly problematize the exhibition, it is not because I find it entirely in poor sociopolitical taste, nor because I have any issue with the quality of the works (a discussion I wish to leave completely aside). Rather, I simply wish to consider some of the more potentially insidious aspects of eroticism—and an explicitly aesthetically Modernist realization of eroticism—when explicitly envisioned alongside ideas of historical recovery of national(ist) roots, nostalgic longing for the ancient past of the homeland (as well as diasporic longing), ethnic and genetic identity and the drive to reproduce that identity so it might flourish in contemporary society. If the show raises these kinds of more challenging questions in the minds of viewers, it will have done the job of confronting its audience (Albanian and non) on multiple levels, of provoking debate both about certain conservative Albanian values vis-à-vis sexuality and about the ways these values cannot be transformed simply by exposing the public to artfully presented eroticism.

There are two primary points I wish to discuss: first, the treatment of the female form in the exhibition (and the ways in which it interacts with the male form); and second, the implications of the interaction between eroticism, virility, and national-cultural heritage apparent in Shima’s works and Drishti’s curatorial statement. The first point raises the question of whether “Farajon”‘s implicit challenge to Albanian attitudes towards the body’s sexual nature (I will forego putting the term in scare quotes, since I take it that the discourse of the body’s ‘nature’ is still widespread in Albania) truly attempts to alter perceptions of the female body and, by extension, women. I would argue that the answer is “no,” and not because the female nude sculpted by the male artist can no longer function as a critical tool, but because the primary trend of the works exhibited associates the female form with the wild mystery of both the ancient (through references to myth and legend) and the carnally unknown and often treats the whole of the female body as analogous to the vagina. There are works, such as Eternity [wood, 2014] and Aenaon [wood, 1990], that explicitly reference the ying and yang, positing an eternal—and equal—convergence of the male and female, situating both as active forms in a circle of recurring metaphysical, sensual relationships.

Far more striking, however, is the depiction of the headless female torso, with thighs spread apart, split by a darkened crevice extending up from the vagina through the chest (as in works such as Satir [bronze, 2014]). Elsewhere, in Untitled [2002], two semicircular pieces of carven wood resting on the floor, separated by the thin gap, resolve into buttocks from one angle and thighs and a vaginal opening from the other. Shehrazad [“Scheherazade,” red marble, 2000] is a languid vaginal form. Genesis [wood, 2006] presents a full, pregnant female torso, the lines of the wood accenting its protruding round belly and curved back. Most significant is that these works present not people but bodies, or more specifically parts of bodies. (While one could read this deconstruction of the form as a kind of violence directed at the female body, I think it more likely that this is simply a result of Shima’s orthodox Modernist style, especially since nearly all of Shima’s figures and torsos are headless, regardless of sex[1]). Furthermore, the eroticism of the parts stands as a surrogate for the eroticism of the entire body—the vagina traverses the female torso and in so doing it becomes the entire body cavity, the inner life of the body imagined as the source of sexual ecstasy.

So, the female body appears in the guise of its component parts, and these parts materialize in objects imbued with a pure and mysterious sexual force. An article by Fatmira Nikolli reviewing the exhibition calls Shima’s forms “provocations.” But the question is: provocations to what? Is it not possible that these ‘provocations’ do not so much challenge a patriarchal attitude towards female sexuality as reinforce it, taking a particular pleasure in revealing secret, uncontrolled sexual urges rooted in female physicality (rather than in the lives of actual women)? Let us not forget that it has been 14 years since “PostEva,” the first retrospective exhibition of nudes by Albanian artists, opened at the GKA. One might have expected that Albanian attitudes towards the female body would have changed, and that the discussion surrounding an exhibition like “Farajon” would focus not on the potential controversy of erotic art but on the relationship between social systems of power and the politics of said art. However, lest someone protest that in fact Albanians truly remain in the midst of a deep sexual repression—the Victorians that we further-Westerners once thought ourselves to be, until we read Foucault—let us look no further than Tirana’s streets for a sort of counterexample. As usual, capitalism has already made certain that the fragments of the female body are hyper-sexualized: one can barely walk down a single major street in Tirana today without encountering one of a recent slew of new advertisements, which show a pair of bare female legs in red high heels alongside the caption “E re. Seksi. E freskët. E zhveshur. E kuqe…” [Young. Sexy. Fresh. Undressed. Red…].

If this is the image of the female body that pervades the streets of the capital city, then the eroticism of Shima’s female forms can be little more a naïve attempt to return some dignity to sexuality by retreating from capitalism’s explicit re-production of the spectacle of eroticism by adopting both Modernism’s aesthetics and its metaphysics.[2]

Indeed, the show does perhaps accomplish that social and metaphysical task which has long been perceived as the purview of Modernism (in contrast, for example, to Socialist Realism—a contrast to which I shall return later): it allows the audience to exercise taste. As a review of the exhibition in Panorama notes: “In these 23 years [since the end of Socialist Realism] a public has emerged that can judge [mund të shijojë] an artwork” (my emphasis).[3] However, this judgment remains at an abstract, formal level (appropriate to Shima’s pseudo-abstractions); one wonders what might be discovered by an audience who read the works not merely in terms of their forms but also—after Arendt—in terms of their political aesthetics. Just such a political reading, however, would raise more questions than have generally been asked about the story “Farajon” tells about the relationship between male and female sexuality.

I said above that I took for granted—in keeping with Shima’s Modernist bent—that the exhibition believes in a natural sexuality, in the immutability of sexuality materialized unambiguously in the male and female reproductive organs.It is not, therefore, my intent to critique this questionable stance, but rather to examine what its political implications are in relation to the ways certain works in the show are displayed and described in the curatorial statement. “Farajon” is most politically duplicitous in its construction of the relationship between the male and the female, and its association between these two forces and the Albanian nationa itself. The entire exhibit takes its name from the work Farajon [bronze, 2014, created especially for the show], a gleaming, stylized erect penis 141 cm in height, inspired (according to Drishti’s curatorial statement) by a phallic image on a 4,000-year-old Illyrian earring. Drishti explains that “this erotic male artwork symbolizes, for the artist, the great reproductive vigor of the Albanian nation.” Thus, the primary thrust of the exhibition (to use a perhaps unfortunate metaphor) is that of the association between the phallus, the nation, and virility required to reproduce this nation through the centuries (from the time of the ancient Illyrians to the present day).

Farajon looms large in the exhibition space, placed on the slightly raised platform (which in turn leads to the awkwardly blocked stairway to that wing’s second level). It is certainly not the most imposing work in the show—that honor certainly belongs to the multi-piece instrument-artwork Briharpa [multimedia, 2014], which lends the entire exhibition space an additional Dionysian tinge—but it does assert itself visually over neighboring works, and especially over the feminine forms of Untitled and Genesis. Indeed, there is a distinctive sense in which many of the feminine forms in the exhibit seem to place themselves in a passive relationship with Farajon. Untitled seems almost to prostrate itself before the emblem of the phallus, the languid form of Shehrazad (the reclining nude reduced to reclining vagina) complement’s the penis’ verticality. Even Genesis is diminutive in size, placement, and therefore meaning in comparison with Farajon‘s glistening shaft. (One almost longs for a vertical, monumental vaginal form in the exhibition, an Ilirian-Shima-after-Georgia-O’Keeffe, for example.)

A microcosm of this relationship between the male form (the penis) and the female form can be found in the three small bronze figure of Satir [2014]. Two female forms, one black and one gold, cavort with vaginal openings wide before a burnished green phallus on two feet (presumably the eponymous satyr). Here the male body, like the female one, is reduced to its most ‘basic’ component, but there remains a quite definite valuation of the male over the female. After all, it is the male member which is seen to express the continuity and fecundity of Illyrian-Albanian culture and, ultimately, national identity. Female sexuality is openly celebrated, certainly, but under the aegis of male “reproductive vigor.” Thus, intentionally or not, the erotic longings for homeland, history, and nation become longings that are fulfilled by the masculine materialization of sexuality, not the feminine. Perhaps even more problematically, this masculine erotic drive is linked not to some general condition of the search for continuity in the era of globalization and uncertain national boundaries; rather, it makes an explicitly ethnic claim to the purity of genetic continuity. Shima’s works are, in a sense, Modernism-as-genetics, and as if this were not problematic enough, it is also a genetics that transfers the power structures of both nationalism and genetics onto the erotic qualities found in the (universal, but also ethnically specific) body. In short, they partially conceal an ascendant biopolitical power behind the ‘life of forms.’

We might ask, in the exercise of taste that the show seems to see as its most fundamental goal: Why is Modernism the appropriate language for a statement about both the universal, fundamentally erotic character of human existence while at the same time promoting essentially the fecundity of a particular ethnic group (the Illyrians), which is assumed to have passed down this reproductive vitality to a contemporary ethno-national group (the Albanians), if not as practice then certainly as a model for the preservation of its culture? Quite simply because it allows the focus to remain primarily on the forms of the works, rather than upon an explicit sociopolitical networks of power that they reinforce or reproduce. At the same time, the qualities of the forms—their contrasts, their sensuality, their polysemic representational properties (grounded in their most-often-merely-pseudo abstraction)—retain the claim of universality for any associations they make (between the erect penis and an image from an Illyrian earring, for example). This has nearly always been both the saving grace and the danger of Modernism, that it leaves itself open to various political readings—and indeed often does not deny them—even as it presents its critique as a critique of perception in general (or, in this case, a critique of taboos and conservatism).

This is perhaps to insist too much upon the political valence of a Modernism that seeks to be apolitical (though not, of course, asexual)—except for the fact that a) the seeming neutrality and/or universality of Modernist aesthetics has always been what allowed it to be duplicitous in the political machinations of states and organizations, and b) the potential political content of Shima’s works does not seem to be hidden that deeply (since one can no longer, I think, consider references to the Illyrian ‘genesis’ of the Albanians is in any way apolitical, if indeed one ever could consider such ideas to be apolitical). Furthermore, I do not think that Ilirian Shima’s works are truly trying to ‘hide’ this ideology beneath a veneer of formalism and ‘provocation.’ However, the discourse around what an exhibition of Modernist works like Shima’s really have to say contemporary Albania will almost certainly need to go beyond endless circling about taboos, lingering ‘Victorian’ morality vis-à-vis sex and sexuality, and the degree to which Albanian audiences are ‘ready’ for abstract art. It will need to grapple with the real sociopolitical implications of the convergence of eroticism, reproduction, the body, and nationalism, to consider what kind of ‘taste’ is needed to see Modern art as truly critical of social norms, and above all to enter into a much more nuanced discussion of what social norms in Albania are in terms of sexuality.[4]

I want to return, in order to cast a different light on the political significance of Shima’s Modernism, to the contrast presented by the Panorama review of the exhibition, that between Socialist Realism’s attitude towards sex and that which is available to Albanians 23 years later. So the argument goes, the system of Socialist Realism clearly delineated what was moral and immoral, and it made certain that the immoral was not even to be thought, much less materialized in art. Thus, female sexuality was not allowed to be imagined, much less to appear. The problem, of course, is that Socialist Realism never denied the importance of female sexuality and the essential role women played in reproducing (for) the nation. It merely hid certain aspects of this sexuality, brought others to the fore, and made the task of reproduction explicitly political and patriotic. Its was an eroticism of duty, and it subsumed the individual to the collective Eros of the New Life.

However, is “Farajon” really so different? Certainly, in that it celebrates the recovery of erotic experience in art as something to be explored, savored, ‘tasted,’ as abandonment to and in a deeper, more timeless level of existence. Certainly not, in that it urges viewers to recover the sexual as the vigor of the ethnically delimited nation, to seek the ancient past of that nation in the sensual, to love and reproduce for the sake of national History. As Slavoj Žižek is so fond of saying, Coca-Cola tells you “You must enjoy.” Here, “Farajon” is perhaps not quite so demanding, nor quite so empty in its promise, but its insistence on the recovery of erotic pleasure is most certainly not without the call to fulfill the national duty of reproduction.

[1] The single significant contrast comes from a pair of bodiless heads locked together in a kiss.

[2] One might argue that the “taboo” Shima is breaking is that against the depiction of the reproductive organs,  specifically, and not any taboo against eroticism (a taboo which certainly continues to exist in some circles but which has been thoroughly assaulted by advertising and global/Western culture in others). (This is the claim implied by an article in Panorama.) This may be the case, and Shima’s works are to be praised for initiating this debate. However, the fact remains that Shima’s sculptures so explicitly graph their eroticism onto the entire body—the bodies not just of individuals, but the entire enthno-national collective body—and indeed onto the soul. Thus, I maintain that whatever taboos Shima’s works break at the level of representation of parts of the body, they nonetheless reiterate more discourses than they disrupt at the level of the body as a whole, in society.

In any case, the “provocation” in terms of the male gaze upon the female body parts depicted in “Farajon” seems to be quite straightforward: it is the provocation to possess the female body in the throes of passion, because that body—in its sexual fragments—yearns for an ecstasy that takes no account of distributions of social power. But is male sexual power really privileged in the exhibit? Yes, quite simply by the fact that conceptually the whole show centers on the virility of the male reproductive organ, which I will discuss below.

[3] Since the Albanian word for the exercise of taste in the cultural sense is also “to taste,” the statement retains a sensuous aspect lost in English.

[4] Implicit in this, I hope, is the assertion that global capitalism’s use of eroticism to sell products in Albania cannot be uprooted until it is confronted, and it cannot be confronted by a naïve embrace of Modernism paired with a nostalgia for the ancient past. At worst, this course of action only further hides the inequalities and abuses that masquerade as a ‘free’ and ‘liberal’ embrace of typically masculine (and typically consumerist) sexuality.

In light of the recent workshop I facilitated on “Creative Writing in/and Art History,” I think it may be worth returning to this blog, if still quite sporadically. In the course of researching for my thesis on the Vlora Independence Monument in Albania, I’ve been reminded of a number of different almost-completely-unrelated themes and topics which might be of interest, especially to those working on the Balkans and on Albania in particular.

Almost a year ago, I came across a truly bizarre congruence: that between communism—especially the dictatorial variety which characterized countries like Albania and Romania—and Norwegian Black Metal. In an interview in the eight issue of Slayer magazine (Spring 1991), Euronymous (Øystein Aarseth), the lead guitarist for the (in)famous black metal band Mayhem responds to a question about his opinion of the situation in Eastern Europe at the time. He says,

The question is a bit difficult because there are two answers. All the revelutions [sic] you have seen in E.E. are just as they could be taken from MARX/LENIN/MAO, and the party I’m in is totally supporting it, because communism means total freedom, and that it should be people who decide things, not the government or the capitalists. But on the other hand, I’m personally very fascinated by countries like Albania, North Korea, or Kampuchea, which have been running a very hard line and which have been closed for the rest of the world. I really regret that I didn’t get the chance to go to Romania while it was like in the old days, but at least I’ll be going to Albania soon.[1]

Earlier in the interview, Euronymous notes, “No, that [writing about his political viewpoint in the lyrics of Mayhem songs] will never happen. Even though I’m active in the most extreme communist party here (Albania inspirations), I leave to the Punks to write about that in the lyrics.”[2] (According to later interviews, he never made it to Albania.)

Euronymous’ interest in extreme, dictatorial communist states in Eastern Europe and elsewhere has already been noted. However, I think that—while there is certainly still a great deal of thinking to be done about Euronymous’ communist leanings—it is more interesting to take examples such as this one as an opportunity to rethink the significance of Hoxha’s communist model. Hoxha is so consistently identified with Albania that it is easy to forget that there are still ‘Hoxhaist’ parties elsewhere in the world which look to the example of communist Albania for inspiration. The fact that Euronymous was a member of one such party reminds us that Hoxha’s heritage is not significant only in Albania, nor even only in the Balkans more widely.

More specifically, what would it mean to think about Hoxha’s Albania as a truly global phenomenon—one which served and serves as a point of reference for the conceptualization of political ideas as seemingly unrelated as those of Mayhem’s guitarist? This is emphatically not to suggest that Albanian communism should be treated as merely an example of a universal (or global) phenomenon—whether it be ‘communist dictatorship’ or ‘totalitarianism’ or any other framework; the insistence on the specificity of the Albanian context is entirely warranted. Likewise, it is not to say that we should somehow take quite seriously the idea of Hoxha’s Albania as the last bastion of ‘true socialism’ in Europe, surrounded by the ‘imperial-revisionist blockade’ (although it might be worth taking Hoxha as a thinker of communism more seriously than authors like Arshi Pipa have done). It is to insist on the inapplicability of ‘authenticity’ to the question of (the experience of) Albanian communism—that is to say, to insist that Hoxhaist communism is really known only by those who lived it, or that their experience is the only experience of it. Of course it is true that the most significant Hoxha leaves behind is in the memories and actions of those who lived in Albania while it was under his control. However, this fact should not exclude from consideration the ways in which Hoxha’s Albania was perceived from ‘outside’—the ways in which it became an important (if starkly ‘inauthentic’) point of political and existential reference.

Part of this external experience, of course, is premised upon a lack of encounter—the fact is, Euronymous never went to Albania. (One can imagine that, if he had, he would have arrived in time to see this, which might have been a rather bitter welcome to a zealous follower of an extremist communist party.[3]) This position of externality does not, I would argue, make the significance that Albania (and Romania, and North Korea, and so forth) held for Euronymous any less worthy of consideration and scrutiny.

What would it mean to look at Albanian communism, particularly that of the Hoxha years, not as something concentrated and bounded in space and time, but rather as something dispersed, distorted, reinterpreted, misunderstood, spread thin across the world and picked up in the strangest of places: Helvete, the record from which Euronymous contributed to the short and controversial rise of black metal, another ‘national’ phenomenon which would take on a decidedly transnational character in the wake of his own death.

This is the second part of an interview conducted via email with Renee Couture, an artist working and teaching in Douglas County, Oregon. Her work often deals with issues of productive and/or repetitive work and its connection to our lives, as well as the relationship of human communities to the environment. Couture’s website is: http://www.rcoutureart.com/ .

I am fascinated that you have in a way divided your work (in terms of how you present it on your website at least) into works about work and works about (land) use. The work/use dichotomy seems to me to raise a lot of interesting points. The cautionary reminder that seems to me to be present in works like “Kindly Use” and “In the Quiet of These Great Distances” sets up a tension between “using” and “using up” resources. Do you see the artist as a person who is uniquely positioned to appreciate the need to “use” materials without “using them up”?

I actually see the themes as more related than separated, despite their separation on my website. I see the works of land use as an extension of my works that are specifically about work.  Where Marx spoke of a worker’s alienation from his/her job and jobs [being] comprised of dismembered gestures, bioregional ethics explores the other side of that coin. Through the lens of bioregional ethics, I’m starting to explore how one can work in an engaged way, full of thoughtful gestures. I’m thinking about places where a mindfulness is added to one’s action.

For me, the dichotomy between work and use is a modern invention, if you will. It is the issue of scale. On a small scale, we can use resources, and we can be engaged with our actions. On a large scale, we use up resources and tend toward dismembered gestures. This division between work and use is possible due to series of networks that have made our lives easier. But these same networks have produced a disconnection between the individual and resource at the beginning of the system [and] from the individual and commodity at the end of the system.

I see the work “kindly use” as simultaneously cautionary, but also celebratory. The locations where those signs were placed were near privately owned ranch lands – family-owned businesses run by people who are engaged with their work/labor actions. With the body of work, “In the Quiet of these Great Distances”, I am exploring a gray area of use.

I think artists are certainly in the position of needing materials for the purposes of producing their work. Considering that artists now will often select a material specifically for its cultural connotation, or its meaning, artists are able to see past a material’s usual or typical use. And hopefully using as much of a material as needed to experiment and produce the (art)work he/she is producing. There is also the idea of exploration of intellectual material, of making many works exploring a theme or exploring something deeply – to generate instead of simply consume. There’s also that notion of where the artist can be generous, and where to hold back – to not “use everything up”, to leave space for the viewer.

Do you think art also potentially “uses up”? For example, is there the danger that art “uses up” its subjects by bringing them into the light and thus laying on the table all the meaning they had as parts of our everyday lives? Or does art give its subjects a new kind of vivacity in bringing them to light?

I hope not art doesn’t “use up” its subjects. But it’s certainly possible, both on an investigative/intellectual level, and on a materials level. I mean, how many themes are there really that artists work with? It seems there are a couple dozen general themes. It would be incredibly limiting in that once a theme would be explored, it couldn’t or wouldn’t be explored again by other artists in different ways. Is it that the artist and the art uses up its subject, or does the artist exhaust the subject for him- or herself? Perhaps that’s sort of the same thing. I think that art can explore the various meanings or lines of inquiry of a subject. Expand what it is until it collapses (or until the artist collapses).

In terms of materials, there is no such thing as a “pure” material or medium. All have histories and are imbued culturally in some way. The way in which the materials are used is another conversation. Materials or modes of working which may have, at a certain point in (past or recent) history, been avant-garde can become a modes of working or materials that are commonly used.

I guess I would say that if art “uses up” its subject, material, mode of working, it would do so for a period of time, but they will emerge again. I also think that an artist needs to honor him- or herself, that is, to do what he or she feels compelled to do. An artist can give bring new life or vivacity to a subject, material and way of working, exposing something hidden within the subject and within the artist. There’s an exchange. It’s a dialogue. A dialogue between artists of different eras, artists in different places with similar and different thought processes; a dialogue between the artist and the subject; a dialogue between the artist and the material and process; a dialogue between artist and viewer.

I’d like to touch briefly on how viewers might encounter your work. How important is “making a statement” to the experience of/encounter with your work? What I mean is that, given the fact that a great deal of your work comes from everyday activity, it seems possible to encounter things like dryer lint, floss, potato chips, firewood, etc. without linking them to broader political implications, but simply pondering them as things and materials. Do you feel that your work “must make a statement” in a political or social sense? Or is it sufficient that it simply allows people to contemplate their relation to things and activities?

I think artists make work for different reasons. Some artists want to make beautiful objects, functional objects, a record of a place or moment, a record of a thought, or to make a statement, among other reasons. My work is usually driven by a curiosity, something I’m trying to make sense of, or come to some sort of position on. My work is a record of thought and investigative actions.

That said, I think our lives are political, whether we know it or not. Often we think of politics as something that happens in Washington DC, or among politicians. But I think how we live our lives is political. So, while I don’t necessary think that art must make a statement, I think I am interested in exploring the political within my work and attempting to communicate something to the viewer.  Is wanting to “make a statement” the same as wanting to communicate something?

Since post-modernism, the relationship between viewer and artists, viewer and work has shifted. The viewer has more responsibility. The viewer has to do more work in the viewing process – to ask him- or herself questions about materials, about how they are used and displayed, about the title, about the work’s relationship to other that artist has made or other objects that share its same space. Each viewer brings his or her own subjectivity to a work when viewing. Roland Barthes, in his essay Death of the Author – a basic read for all grad students – explores this idea. As an artist I have to trust the viewer to make their own understanding of the work, whether the viewer looks at the pieces purely in terms of its formal sensibilities, or if the viewer will engage on a deeper level with the work, and whether or not my intention comes through.

Finally, I’m curious about the idea of art as “gesture” (as in your work “Small Gestures”). How do you conceive of the idea of “gesture”? Would you say that all art represents a “gesture”, or is it one kind of activity which art/the artist can engage in? In describing “Small Gestures”, you called it a way of acknowledging “work” that people do, so in some way it completes a circle back to work. In some ways I get the sense that the gesture “says a lot but produces little” while work “produces a lot but says little” (or at least we don’t usually listen to what it has to say). Do you see a sort of reciprocal relation between work and gesture? Between art as work and art as gesture?

The idea of “gesture”… if you look it up in the dictionary, its definition as a noun refers to movements that express thoughts and emotions, and any action of courtesy. In that way, “Small Gestures” is both because it is a record of movement and a courtesy.

Why not acknowledge the work people do? It seems as though, as much as we may work, that it becomes invisible because it’s taken for granted, or because we operate on auto-pilot, or because it’s an expectation within our work-based society. Do we really see the “fruits of our labor” anymore? Within some jobs, certainly, within others, no. Have you ever gone home after a day of work and wondered what you did that day?

Your assertion that “gesture says a lot but produces little while work produces a lot but says little.” is interesting to think about. Some gestures “speak” more “loudly” than others, just as some work produces more, while other work very little. Maybe work and gesture actually need each other; that there is not just a reciprocal relation between work and gesture, but that there is a symbiotic relation, too. Without one, what happens to the other? Where is the overlap, or convergence of the two?

Art is so many things. Art as work, art as actions, art as gesture, art as thought, art as leisure, art as community, art as history, art as work, art as commodity…  I do view art, the making of and the final product (if one exists) as the accumulation of movements, and as an action intended to communicate with or affect the viewer.

This is the first part of an interview conducted via email with Renee Couture, an artist working and teaching in Douglas County, Oregon. Her work often deals with issues of productive and/or repetitive work and its connection to our lives, as well as the relationship of human communities to the environment. Couture’s website is: http://www.rcoutureart.com/ .

In encountering your art, one of the first things that comes to mind is a question Duchamp posed: “Can one make works which are not works of art?”. Many of your “works” are about work; do you see a strong distinction between art (the kind you do, or any art) and work? Is the relation between the two a kind of continuum? And if so, what makes the “art” end of the continuum different?

I think this might be a question of intention, and the artist’s or viewer’s willingness to consider a work as art, or not. For example, the Walker Art Museum in Minnesota had an exhibit of Eva Hesse’s sketchbooks, working notes, diaries, and experiments on display. What did Eva Hesse think of these objects? What did the museum think of these objects? How are these objects displayed, and how did the display impact the way in which viewers engaged with these objects? Another example is Gabriel Orozco’s first solo show at Marian Goodman Gallery where he presented Yogurt Caps. The work consisted of four yogurt caps; each wall consisted of a single cap placed in the center of the wall. During the opening, viewers walked in, and then left. And then they came back and really interacted with the space.

In my case, questions surrounding  work and labor – such as our cultural relationship to work – are where my intellectual inquiries begin. So what is work? In my mind, work is anything that we spend our energy on – which is great because my life and my studio practice overlap; I draw from my life for my artwork. Where does one stop and one begin? Sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes I question myself; sometimes my practice reveals my own biases. Maybe the only difference between one end of the continuum and the other is how I’m thinking about it, what my intention is, whether or not I’m documenting it.

That said, I do think of one’s studio practice as a practice and as work. A studio practice can be bliss, can be fun, can be drudgery, can be painful. Thinking back to Bruce Nauman, who asked the question, “what is art?” shortly after he finished with graduate school and he decided that he was an artist and therefore anything he [does] is art. That revelation expanded his studio practice in exciting ways. Think of what Mary Kelly did with her Postpartum Documents, Merle Ukeles Laderman with her Maintenance Art project, or the work of many artists in the 60s and 70s, where their art was their work and their work was their art. Today Santiago Sierra continues this, though thematically a bit different, but the idea of exploring labor is present.

My husband and I got an exhibit postcard in the mail from a friend once. He said, “gee, I wish I could send out a postcard for when I go to work this coming Monday. It would say my name, and then : reviews timber contract.” On the one hand, he has a point in questioning why the work of an artist should be “celebrated” when everyone else’s work is not. But on the other hand, much of the work artists do is hidden until it’s shown in a gallery, online, on the landscape, etc. Even then, within the final product or object, much of the work involved in the conception and making is missed or hidden. The artist may or may not “get paid” (i.e., sell) the work he/she produces. Does that mean the artist has worked for free?

Does the work have to be shown in a gallery to put it on the “art” end of the continuum? But that would take us into the territory of discussing the Artworld, with a capital A. What I will say is that I know I don’t consider all the work I do each day to be considered “art”, but there are times that I will document work I do with the intention of it becoming art. So I suppose the answer to the last question is a combination of variables of the artist deciding what will or won’t be art, a gallery owner/manager/collector deciding if something is or isn’t art, and the viewer deciding if something is or isn’t art. I mean, we’ve all been in a museum or gallery where a viewer questions whether or not object in that space (gallery, museum) is art, or “something a six-year old could make.” That said, I suppose the continuum shifts depending upon who you speak with.

In your statement about your “work-related” art, you note that “we live in a work-based society”. I wonder to what degree your art might constitute a critique of that society or a reinforcement of it. On the one hand, your emphasis on the product of daily activities stands in contrast to what we might produce in “jobs”. On the other hand, these works seem to be part of the pressure exerted on members of society to accumulate and produce something no matter what. Do you see your art as simply a commentary on this situation, or a step in changing it? If a step towards change, how so?

I think my work is an attempt to understand something and/or to call attention to something. I don’t think of my work necessarily [as] trying to change things. I think of myself as an observer, a record keeper, a researcher, a critiquer, a maker, among other things. My role shifts during different parts of the process and studio practice, and perhaps my role changes with each work or body of works. I suppose some viewers will see the work as a critique, while others might see the work as reinforcement, and other might see the work as observation.

I do think that people have the desire to feel productive, and to do something they can feel good about or are happy doing. But there is also this pressure, for people who have a wage-job, to produce and be productive, to be able to measure the productivity, to earn their pay. This is especially true now in our current economic time.

Also, our jobs are such a large part of our identity, not just how we see ourselves, but how others see us. I suppose the questions now is, what do we produce? Are the things that we produce necessary? As a society, we’ve certainly mastered accelerated obsolescence. And creating specialized objects for everything. How does that impact our creativity, our ability to repurpose objects within in our lives, to see another or hidden potential within an object? Since the industrial revolution and most definitely in our post World War II society, most people no longer work for themselves, that is, they work for an entity that pays. There is an even greater separation between work and leisure, work and pleasure. The home has become a site of consumption as opposed to production. There is a greater distancing between our professional lives and our private lives. Also, the advent of “specializing” we’ve lost generalized knowledge. We lost a seasonality that used to be present…now, instead of working in a seasonal way, completing activities that shift throughout the year, we do the same activities each day. How does that impact how we engage with these activities? These are some of the things I’m thinking about when I’m working.

What do you see as being the difference between work and labor? What about “activity”? How would you relate the concepts of work, labor, and activity to art?

Certainly when I think of “labor” I’m think of something that involves a physicality – an activity where the body is a tool, an activity where muscles are engaged, an activity that physically tires or strains an individual, an activity that is physically engrossing. “Work”, I suppose, involves the mind; it’s also a place where one does one’s job (“I have to go to work”). Of course, these are not entirely separate. Even though I’ve described them as quite different, I believe there is an overlap, like in a Venn diagram. And a “job” is something one does for a wage. Of course, an “activity” is some sort of action that one does when working, laboring, or at one’s job. It is the activity, or more correctly, the output of that activity this is measurable and measured to determine one’s productivity.

But I think that artists work and labor within their practices, each in his or her own way, and perhaps with a different amount of emphasis placed in these areas. Part of the process is researching, thinking, writing, and planning; and then physically making the work. The end result is the accumulation of the various activities that the artist employs within his or her studio practice.

Another theme that I see reflected in some of your works (“Blind Flicker of Nerve”, “Over and Over”, “Labor Day’s Labor”, etc.) is the theme of repetition and habit. These works seem to touch on a kind of obsession related to the repeated act, but to me they also recall Michel Foucault’s analysis of how, in society, the individual/subject is created through habits/activities that are part of a network of power. Do you feel that the sort of repetitive activities your art deals with are a product of the individual, or do they form the individual? Or is it somewhere in between?

Am I allowed to say both? Because I think the relationship is cyclic. I think Louis Althusser points to this in his discussion on Ideological State Apparatuses.

I think perhaps a factor is how engaged the individual is when completing the activity. Is the individual completing the activities with the sort of dismembered gestures of one who is alienated from the activity or mentally disengaged; or is the individual completing the activity in a way that is thoughtful and focused?

There are most definitely habits/activities that are part of a network of power that shape the individual in a variety of ways – how we think about things, our muscle memory, ……. Our body becomes an archive of the activities we do – we see it in the body of retired ballerinas or football players, workers having carpal-tunnel syndrome, or chronic headaches or ulcers due to stress, for example.

Also, studies have shown that the more education one has, the more one’s identity is derived from his/her job.

Our bodies are also not entirely our bodies. Our bodies “belong” not only to us, but also to our culture on a national, state and local level. We see this all the time in legislative acts on women’s reproductive rights, the Death with Dignity Act and objections to it, to name a couple of the more polarizing examples. They belong to families.

In connection with the above question, do you feel that art has a shaping effect or a shaped effect in relation to the artist? Does art come from the artist, or does the artist come from the artwork?

I think what you’re really asking here is what the relationship is between the artist and the work, and the question implies that the relationship is hierarchical. Really, this relationship is a dialogue between the artist and the process. The artist and the process are partners in creating a finished work. So, to answer the question: I believe that both happen within an artist’s practice, a give and take, so to speak, of shaping and being shaped.

But I think it depends upon one’s approach to that particular work, or why one is making the particular work of art. If the artist already has a firm position on the theme or content that he or she wants to present within the work, then the artist has a shaping effect on the work. If the artist is using the work to explore or investigate a question in an attempt to find a position, then the work shapes the artist. Work comes from the artist, and work makes work.

Part 2 will follow shortly. –Raino Isto

Wish you knew what was going on in this post? Part 1 and Part 2 will help.

III. Risatti’s Difficulty in Accomplishing the Post-Aesthetic Turn

As I have noted above, Risatti sets himself a substantial task in attempting to answer the question “What is a craft object?” He faces not only a significant ontological challenge, but must also make the question relevant to art historians and art critics. In other words, he must speak to them as viewers and students of art (and craft); he must speak to their experience of the work of art. Risatti’s first step towards this goal is to attempt to describe how works of craft can be meaningful to us, and in this endeavor his first step is to consider the maker of the craft object and the maker’s intention in creating it. Whether he does this because he is drawn to a Husserlian model of intentionality or whether an interest in a particular model of intended meaning draws him to Husserl is irrelevant. The result of Risatti’s first step is to place the craft-object over against the craftsperson-subject, the latter imbuing the former with intentional meaning drawn from a source Risatti does not elaborate. Presumably Risatti believes the meaning could come from any number of sources, but—in identifying the craftsperson with the meaning-giving subject—he essentially ensures that meaning must in some way relate to the intention of the maker.

In taking this step, Risatti has complicated his subsequent task: to describe how meaning reaches the viewer, and how the viewer can be open to that meaning. To accomplish this, Risatti calls upon Heidegger and Gadamer’s post-aesthetic conceptions of contemplation and understanding. In fact, I believe that Heidegger and Gadamer do provide the key Risatti is looking for in his attempt to characterize the meaningfulness of the work of craft. However, Risatti mischaracterizes the kind of meaning that Heidegger and Gadamer encounter in works of art, and thus cannot apply their theories successfully to his own model. Simply: the kind of meaning that Risatti has identified, an intentional meaning put into an object by a creating subject, is not the kind of meaning that Heidegger and Gadamer’s phenomenological approaches seek to encounter.

Risatti’s first mistake is that he misunderstands Heidegger’s concept of meditative thinking, conflating it with Kantian aesthetic contemplation. Risatti sees in Heidegger’s distinction between “calculative thinking” and “meditative thinking” essentially a distinction between a means-oriented and an intentional-meaning-oriented way of encountering things (262-5). He sees (rightfully so) calculative thinking as absorbed in what something can be used for, while meditative thinking gains access to the meaning in things “made with the intention to be contemplated” (265). Here he seems to smoothly transition from his Husserlian/Kantian model to a Heideggerian viewpoint. What Risatti misses is precisely the fact that Heidegger wishes, with contemplative thinking, to move beyond precisely the subject-object division that Husserlian intentionality presupposes as original in our encounter with things (cf. Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s Critique” 2). In fact, the later Heidegger renounced the term “philosophy” in favor of “thinking” precisely as a way of overcoming the philosophical tradition’s focus on the subject-object division (Thomson 11).

Thus, Heidegger’s “meditative thinking” is distinguished from Kant’s aesthetic contemplation precisely in that it seeks to go thinking” is distinguished from Kant’s aesthetic contemplation precisely in that it seeks to go beyond or more exactly before the Kantian description of a subject disinterestedly contemplating and object standing over against it. This is the entire goal of Heidegger’s description of Dasein’s fundamental transcendence: to show that we are, in our being-in-the-world, first in a world of things that we understand prior to any subjective contemplation of them or attempt to ascertain the meaning of them and bring it into our subjective sphere (Heidegger 162). In this sense, when I have above referred to Heidegger’s stance as “post-subjective”, I might perhaps more accurately have done so as “pre-subjective” insofar as while Heidegger comes after a long history of subjectivity in philosophy, he seeks to overcome that tradition by going behind and before it phenomenologically. Risatti sees that precisely this kind of overcoming of the tradition of aesthetic contemplation is in some way necessary, but he remains committed to his assertion that the meaning of the craft object is both a) intentional meaning from the maker, and b) meaning to be found in an object, thus presupposing a subject to both put the meaning there and find the meaning out.

Essentially, what Heidegger and Gadamer seek to do (in terms of the work of art) is to overcome the entire history of aesthetics (for a detailed account of Heidegger’s post-aesthetic thinking, see Iain Thompson’s Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, especially chapters 1-3). What I mean by this is that they seel to overcome aesthetics as the discipline which presupposes a subject which has “aesthetic experiences” and from those experiences determines a meaning for itself. Rather, Heidegger (and Gadamer follows him in this) seeks to understand things (note that we do not say objects) as meaning-full (Heidegger 158-64). In other words, our absorption into the world does not lead to us “reading meaning into” things (either as creators or as viewers), but rather we encounter a meaning that is really there in things themselves (Heidegger 173). The meaningfulness of things is what allows us encounter them as meaningful, not our subjective intentionality. Heidegger has a long argument about his own conception of (pre-subjective) intentionality, which we need not go into here (cf. Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s Critique” and Heidegger, Basic Problems). It will suffice to say that Heidegger’s “meditative thinking” is certainly not akin to Kantian aesthetic contemplation, and thus that Risatti has not yet really made the move he needs to: the move away from a subject-object account of craft to a post-aesthetic description of craft.

Likewise, Risatti’s appropriation of Gadamer’s notions of “games” and “fore-understanding” (8-10, 304). Risatti interprets Gadamer’s “games” and “fore-understanding” in terms of concrete categories of thought that we bring to bear on objects we encounter: objects of craft, in this case. He ignores the way in which Gadamer’s description of the game also relates to Gadamer’s way of following Heidegger’s movement beyond subjects and objects. As Gadamer says, in the game way are swept up in something—as we are in understanding—a situation that is prior to our individual subjectivity (“Beautiful” 22-24). Our interaction in playing the game indeed involves our following rules, but we follow these rules in a way that does not involve our confronting them or the game or other players as objects which we mist discern the meaning from. Rather, things are meaningful in the context of the game. Likewise, our “fore-understanding” is precisely a pre-subjective understanding that has not yet grasped objects and does not need to because it is part of Dasein’s absorption in the world (Truth and Method 235).

Both Heidegger and Gadamer’s ways of thinking about intentionality, understanding, and the meaning of art (and things in general) do indeed help Risatti’s argument for taking seriously works of craft. As Risatti cites from Gadamer: “We cannot understand [the work of art] without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said” (ctd. in Risatti 304). Gadamer’s clarification shows precisely this: that it is not a matter of intent to find meaning, but of being open to the meaning that is there. The meaning that we might intentionally discover in the craft object might well (through prior transcendence) be the meaning of the maker. It could as well be the meaning we as subjects put into it. It could as well come from other subjects. However, the meaning that is there in the work of craft before it stands before us as an object of craft is the meaning that is in the work of craft and we are open to it before we ever objectify and thematicize it as viewing subjects. It is this meaning that Heidegger and Gadamer seek to remain open to, and which Risatti cannot be open to in his account of the craft object.

This post will be continued in Part 4, which is where I will actually come to conclusions. So that’s the one to read.–Raino Isto

Cited:

Howard Risatti, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression, University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill, 2007.

Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Indiana , Bloomington: 1982.

Hans Georg-Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful”, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, Campbridge: New York: 1993.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Crossroad Publishing Company, New York: 1986.

Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Cambridge, New York: 2011.

Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s (and Searle’s) Account of Intentionality”, Social Research, Vol. 60, No. 1, Spring 1993.

This post is a continuation of Risatti and Craft After Heidegger’s Critique of Traditional Ontology.

II. Risatti’s Problematic Conceptions of Intentionality and Meaning

Risatti’s discussion of craft unfolds in a philosophical space provided essentially by four philosophers: Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. It is not my intention to trace the entirety of Risatti’s utilization of these philosophers and their ideas. Nor do I mean to recount Risatti’s complete theory of the craft object. Instead I want to focus on those areas in which Risatti most problematically attempts to synthesize the views of Kant and Husserl with those of Heidegger and Gadamer without fully acknowledging the difference between their theories. Ultimately, Risatti’s answer to the question “What is a craft object?” is unsatisfactory because it does cannot fully overcome the differences between what I will call a “subjective” approach and a “post-subjective” approach to finding meaning in the work of art.

Risatti clearly has what I will—perhaps crudely—describe as a loyalty to (“respect for” might be a fairer way to put it) a Heideggerian post-aesthetic, post-subjective, and therefore post-modern, philosophical approach. Beginning in his introduction, Risatti draws upon Gadamer’s analogy to the game as a way of describing the tans-subjective event that occurs in understanding (5). Throughout the book, Risatti repeatedly returns to this notion—the way in which, in understanding the work of art or craft, the work itself makes a demand on us, and we must allow ourselves to be open to that demand if we are to receive the meaning that is there. Likewise, Risatti is clearly drawn to Heidegger’s assessment of the way works of art can lose their “world” in the absence of preservers and gradually transform into no more than aesthetic objects gracing the halls of museums (Risatti 84). In the same vein, Risatti seems to be drawn to Heidegger’s notion of (non-objective) “meditative thinking” (as opposed to “calculative thinking”), and in fact Risatti seems to base his model of aesthetic contemplation on Heidegger’s meditative thinking (264-5). He does so, however, only after a detour through Kantian and Husserlian characterizations of perception, and therefore cannot fully pin down how he wants the viewer to encounter the work of craft.

While Risatti clearly wants to explore the regions opened up by Heidegger’s attempt to overcome aesthetics, he is also drawn to a Kantian model of the aesthetic experience and a Husserlian model of intentionality. Put briefly, the problem with Risatti’s characterization grows out of the fact that he wishes to grasp the craft object at both ends, so to speak. He wants to describe its creation by the craftsperson using a Husserlian intentional model, and at the same time to facilitate our encounter with it using a fusion of Kant’s aesthetics and Heidegger and Gadamer’s post-aesthetics. The task that Risatti has set himself is immense, and we can certainly sympathize if he fails to achieve entirely clear and satisfactory results in terms of offering a theory of what the craft object is. He nonetheless raises important questions about art historical (and craft historical) method, not the least of which is how tenable it is to investigate the phenomenon of art from the point of view of the creator and in the same breath from the point of view of the viewer.

I have said above that Risatti fails essentially because he cannot synthesize a view which is premised upon the subject-object division with a view that fundamentally wants to move beyond that distinction. Let me explain the former view, and how Risatti depends upon it. Risatti is concerned with the meaning works of art/craft have for us, and how we might appropriately open ourselves to that meaning. For a description of how the work receives its meaning, Risatti proceeds from a telling description of Kant’s “purposive objects” and the contrasting “free play of the maker’s imagination” that characterizes the creation of works of “fine art” (220-1). Risatti does this in part, undoubtedly, because he wishes to avoid the association between craft and function, an association which has led theorists to view the creation of craft objects as a process totally governed by the ultimate use to which the object will be put. So, from the start, Risatti is concerned to show that there is some freedom, and thus some meaning, in the activity of homo faber when he makes craft objects. Risatti says: “To mean is to signify, and for an object to signify something…two things must be present. One is that its formal demands must be such that they allow for manipulation on the part of the maker in the name of expression; and two, this allowance for expression must be intentionally exploited by the maker in a desire to express something” (221). Now that Risatti has used the word “intentionally”, he needs a way to describe this intentionality, and to do this he turns to Husserl.

For Husserl, meaning comes from “the intention to mean”: “Intention to mean is just as important as the possibility of meaning,” as Risatti summarizes Husserl’s position in the Logical Investigations (221-2). Husserl sees all perception—and thus relation to the world—as intentional. For Husserl, and for Risatti, one cannot think without thinking of something, one cannot perceive without perceiving something, and—and this is Risatti’s development of Husserl—one cannot make without making something (252-3). Risatti thinks he is avoiding Cartesianism in his Husserlian proclamation that “the act of making can never be empty; always it must be directed beyond itself to an intentional object” (253). Risatti thus treats the craft object as the intentional object of the craftsperson, whose intention causes meaning to reside in the object. He then proceeds to call upon Heidegger’s “meditative thinking” and Gadamer’s characterization of understanding to explain the attitude that would allow us as viewers to open ourselves to the meaning placed into the craft object by the maker.

Here Risatti does an injustice to both Husserl on the one hand and Heidegger and Gadamer on the other. Risatti seems to overlook precisely the fact that Heidegger’s meditative thinking—a term the later Heidegger used to distance himself from fundamentally metaphysical philosophizing—is meant to transcend the subject-object dichotomy. In his characterization of the craft object using the ideas of Kant and Husserl, however, Risatti has already firmly rooted himself in this metaphysical tradition, and he cannot overcome it by simply switching to Heidegger’s point of view.

What do I mean when I say that Risatti’s Husserlian model is rooted firmly in metaphysics? Simply this: that it depends on the division between a knowing/perceiving/creating/meaning-giving subject and a known/perceived/created/meaning-receiving object (of craft). In fact, Risatti reveals this prejudice in his very first sentence when he says that he wants to discover what a craft object is (xiii). One might say that this is simply an unfortunate choice of terminology, but in fact Risatti can never escape the traditional conception of an aesthetic object to a more post-aesthetic conception, such as Heidegger’s characterization of the work of art.

The easiest way to think about how Risatti’s interpretation of craft adheres to metaphysics is to see how it is rooted in Cartesianism. While Risatti wants to dispense with an intentionality of function (in which the function is the only “goal” of creation), he nonetheless replaces it with what we might call an intentionality of expression. In doing so, he sees himself as preserving the freedom of the craftsperson in creating the object. Perhaps this is so, but he is also characterizing the meaning of the work of craft in a metaphysical way. Basically, Risatti conceives of meaning “getting into” the work craft object thanks to the craftsperson’s metalistic/subjectivistic prior intention to express something. For Risatti, there can be nothing more basic than this relation between free intention to mean and the object wherein the meaning is fixed by the maker. Risatti, following Husserl, does not want to fall into the Cartesian trap of a subjectivity that knows only itself (Risatti 253). But in “escaping” this Cartesianism, Risatti no doubt does Husserl justice. However, Risatti’s path leads him to a point at which—in his struggle to show how we can find works of craft meaningful—he must struggle with the idea of transcendence.  Since Risatti is tied to his concern with the “sign as expression”—his citation of Peggy Kamuf makes this clear—he is forced to try to explain transcendence on the basis of intentional subject-intended object. In other words, he has to explain how meaning gets from one to the other, and the how it might get to us on the other end. Here, Risatti comes up against a problem with a long history in philosophy: “How do experiences and that to which they direct themselves as intentional, the subjective in sensations, representations, relate to the objective?” (Heidegger 62).

In other words, Risatti (like Descartes and Husserl after him) places the division between the subject (the creating craftsperson) and the object (the object of craft) at the center of his theory of craft.  This was, as Heidegger notes, the “new beginning” which Descartes instituted: an ontology of being which takes its first steps from the ego, the subject, the res cogitans (Basic Problems 123-5). As I said above, this model is perfectly sufficient from one point of view. It is quite plausible to adopt a model in which the subject, the craftsperson, confronts the raw, meaningless material of the world with an idea to be realized and sets about putting that meaning into form in the object of the crafting process. Meaning is given by the intention of the crafter to mean, as Risatti and Husserl agree. We can follow Risatti this far.

The problem is that Risatti has not fully accomplished the task he sets himself. Characterizing the process of creation from the point of view of the creator is not (entirely) Risatti’s aim. Risatti also wishes, put bluntly, to raise the status of craft objects. This is what I might call his ideological goal, although this sounds perhaps disdainful. Risatti wants to be able to ask the question “What is a craft object?” and he means to create the space in which it can be asked by giving us, the viewers, access to the craft object. To do this, he cannot of course rely on his Cartesian model.

Why not, we might ask? Because, as I noted above, Risatti has raised the problem of transcendence, and he cannot overcome it from his current position. Even if we agree that the craftsperson is somehow able to make meaning appear from nowhere, or take it “from somewhere out in the stars” and invest it in the craft object, how is this meaning to become accessible to us? And more importantly, what meaning is supposed to become accessible to us? The pure meaning of the author’s intention? A meaning totally divorced from any intention of the author that somehow comes from outside the object and the maker? Risatti rejects both of these kinds of meaning (254-5).

Risatti looks to Kant for a way to describe how we appropriately encounter the work of art (or craft). In doing so, he is being consistent in his adherence to the subject-object division, since this division is fundamental in Kant as well. However, in discussing how we can break away from the “steady stream of data through our senses” and confront the object disinterestedly as Kant described, Risatti cannot avoid the implicit question he has raised—the question of how the meaning of the isolated object standing in itself can reach me, the subject of perception (266). This is a question which resounds through the history of philosophy, as Heidegger describes in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Heidegger’s solution, briefly put, is to show that the problem only exists in a certain context: the context of a philosophy which takes the division of subject and object as the most basic distinction, and which regards the character of beings as present-at-hand for that subject (including even the subject itself).

Risatti does not seem concerned with this question, because he thinks that he can simply switch to a Heideggerian, post-subjective point of view and transcend the problem. This is true, to a certain extent. More is necessary, however, as I shall explain below. The easiest way to see how Risatti still struggles with the question, despite ignoring it, is to note the amount of effort he expends trying to “give us access” to the craft object. Having described how meaning “gets into” the craft object through intentionality, it would seem fairly simple to follow Kant’s model of intentional perception and summarize how we in turn understand the meaning in the object. Why detour through the New Criticism and Barthes at all, as Risatti does? Is Risatti simply being intellectually polite? On the contrary, Risatti perhaps senses that his model is still open to criticisms from these schools of thought because he has not yet said anything truly convincing about how the maker’s intentional meaning gets to us. He has posited a making subject and an object. Now he must posit a perceiving subject and an object. But, of course, it has to be the right kind of object—the kind worthy of the attention of art critics and art historians and the rest of us. It must be meaningful, meaning to Risatti that it must inspire in us an aesthetic experience. Here Risatti seems to shrug his shoulders: “[what matters] is that viewers are able to aesthetically behold the work of art as a contemplative, meditative object”, he says (261). Agreed, but this does not tell us how we, as subjects, are supposed to transcend our subjective sphere (the same sphere that, in the case of the craftsperson, gave meaning to the object through intentionality) and be open to the meaning which adheres somewhere in or around the object.

Having explained some of the difficulties inherent in the relationship between Risatti’s clear goals and the theoretical model of creative intentionality that he has chosen, I would next like to discuss Risatti’s attempts at adopting a Heideggerian stance. I intend to show how Heidegger and Gadamer offer a real alternative to Husserl and Kant, and why Risatti is unable successfully apply their views to his theory of the craft object.

Cited: Howard Risatti, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression, University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill, 2007.

Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Indiana , Bloomington: 1982.

This post will be continued in Part 3.–Raino Isto

I. Introduction

Howard Risatti’s excellent book, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression, raises a number of thoughtful and pressing questions about the status of craft in relation to fine art, and indeed about the status of art as an object of culture and perception. Risatti’s goal is to answer the question “What is a craft object”—or at the very least to provide an art historical space in which the question can be meaningfully asked (xiii). The task is certainly not a simple one, and Risatti marshals an array of philosophers—principally Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer—whose theories he brings to bear on both our encounter with craft objects and our broader conception of the work of art. While Risatti’s investigation of craft through the lens of phenomenology and phenomenological hermeneutics certainly brings to light important questions about how art historians and cultural critics often approach craft objects, I believe that Risatti’s model of the craft object—and indeed of the craft object—is flawed.

In this essay, I want to examine the problems that I see as inherent to Risatti’s treatment of art and craft using the philosophers he chooses. In the first part of the essay, I will show how Risatti—in developing a model for encountering the craft object—essentially swings back and forth between a Kantian/Husserlian model and a Heideggerian/Gadamerian model. That is to say, he cannot seem to make up his mind between a radical post-aesthetic approach like that favored by Heidegger and Gadamer, and a more traditional approach based on the subject-object division, such as that of Kant or Husserl. The two most problematic ideas upon which Risatti bases his account are those of intentionality and aesthetic contemplation. Ultimately, while Risatti draws on what I will call a post-aesthetic account of the meaning of the craft object (in terms of the notion of understanding meaning as an event), he repeatedly falls into Kantian/Husserlian models when he attempts to pin down how we grasp the craft’s meaning. The primary reason for this confusion is that Risatti does not fully appreciate the radicality of Heidegger’s critique of the subject-object division and the a priori character of being.

In the second part of the essay, I would like to discuss how Risatti’s approach can suggest ways in which we might move beyond its shortcomings. I will show how Risatti’s model might change to reflect a more firmly Heideggerian/Gadamerian approach to the matter of craft. A Heideggerian model of phenomenological inquiry (as opposed to a Husserlian one) opens up a number of productive ways to consider the meaning of the craft object, particularly from the point of view of the craftsperson—a point of view that Risatti clearly feels is important. Finally, I will suggest the ways in which the works of certain contemporary thinkers of the Heideggerian school (such as Dreyfus and Kelly’s book All Things Shining) offer us a way of thinking about meaning that speaks to our encounter with art in general and especially with craft.

I would like to make one final point clear: in discussing the problems inherent in Risatti’s reading of the philosopher’s in question, I do not wish imply that the Kantian/Husserlain approach is “wrong” and that Risatti could “get things right” by switching completely to a Heideggerian/Gadamerian way of theorizing craft. Both approaches clearly have their own merits. Rather, I wish to show exactly how different the approaches are, and thus to demonstrate why Risatti fails to synthesize them and thus to arrive at a satisfactory answer to his question “What is a craft object?” Risatti’s failure reveals exactly what is at stake in comparing—and contrasting—these two radically different ways of conceiving of the work of art (or craft) and its meaning. My purpose is not to dismiss Risatti’s conclusions, but to argue how his account lays bare the difficult ground that faces contemporary art—and craft—theory and history.

Cited: Howard Risatti, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression, University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill, 2007.

This essay will be continued in subsequent posts.

On May 19, 2012, roughly 30 people gathered at the Isto residence in rural Douglas County, Oregon, for the fourth annual Barrel Firing, an event which occurs every spring and brings together a number of local ceramics students and teachers of all ages for a day. Starting at about 10:00am, students and teachers loaded bisque ware into two large barrels (and one impromptu “barrel” enclosure built of firebricks on hand), surrounded them with sawdust, wood, and cardboard, and fired the pieces over the course of the day, ending at around 5:30pm.

The firing raised several questions in my mind, some of which I would like to briefly lay out here. These questions are, for the most part, quite specific to the events of that day, and are not meant as such to raise fundamental questions about art or craft or community. Nonetheless, they are questions which in many ways respond to common theoretical debates regarding the relationship of community to the creation of arts and crafts.

1)      In what ways does the process of creating art create community? This question seems quite pertinent in response to the prevailing tendency to examine art in terms of the community that works of art create, sustain, or—potentially—threaten. While certain forms of art (performance art being the most obvious example) certainly raise questions about how community is (per)formed through the creation of art, it seems to me that the question of how the “production” of more traditional forms of art (sculptures, paintings, pottery, etc.) shapes community is seldom examined in depth. The case of a barrel firing—a process which certainly does not demand the participation of a large group of people but which certainly allows for it—raises very interesting questions about how art creates a community and about how that community exists in a temporal sense.

A group of people are drawn together for a day. They are drawn together outside the strict confines of any “institution” (although of course some of them are students, others are teachers, and others are simply interested in ceramics. They are drawn together by a mutual interest in the art that will eventually come from the firing; each person has at least one piece of art in the firing and therefore has a stake in the outcome of the day. Likewise, each person brings something—food, drinks, a piece for the firing, experience, conversation—to the community that is formed around the process of firing the kiln. Thus, everyone participates in some way, even if each person may not actually take part in loading the barrel kilns, stoking them, etc. Each person has a stake, so to speak, not just in the how their individual work will come out, but in fact in the totality of the outcome of the process. Barrel firing—as one of the more uncertain methods of firing ceramics—inevitably yields mixed results. Some techniques for decorating the surfaces of pots will work, others will not. Those who participate are held together by their interest in seeing how all of the works will emerge from the firing, not merely their own. It is not just the outcome which brings the participants together, however. The firing happens in a sense for its own sake, and not simply for the sake of a particular product.

2)      It seems to me that this way of looking at the barrel firing as a foundation for the emergence of a particular, temporary community bears a strong resemblance to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s discussion of the “festive” character of art in his essay, “The Relevance of the Beautiful”. How does Gadamer’s discussion of the festival relate to the example we have here, of a group of people coming together for a barrel firing and a potluck lunch in spring in the country?

Gadamer introduces the example of the festival to his discussion of art for several reasons. First, he wishes to emphasize how the festival is “meant for everyone”. He explains, “[festivals] allow no separation between one person and another. A festival is an experience of community and represents community in its most perfect form” (39). In this way, Gadamer sees the festival as a perfect example of a situation (like that of the game, which he also draws upon in his discussion of art) in which we are prevented from “falling into…private, subjective experiences” (40). The festival “gathers” us, in the same way that Gadamer thinks the work of art gathers us—in such a way that we are not “subjects” directed at some perceived or intended “object”, but rather exist first in the relation set up by the festival or work of art. Gadamer’s discussion in aimed at revealing something about the being of the work of art, but the analogy with the festival certainly seems to speak to the situation of the communal barrel firing. Here again, we have an example of an experience which is both “meant for everyone” and which does not allow for us to be “separated” into different subjectivities.

This may seem like a very straightforward point, but it certainly challenges one common way of conceiving of the “process” of creating art, the view which sees the creating artist as an isolated subject imposing a particular psychological or existential meaning upon the work she creates. Here instead we have, first, a (part of the) process of creation which is communal. Furthermore, this “communal” character is not to be conceived as some sort of joining of subjective intentionalities towards a common goal. Rather, the event of the process itself is such that it first gathers the participants and only having gathered them and given them a common stake in the process, allows them to be individual subjects which particular goals, roles, skills, and so forth. We might add to this the element of chance which is always present in firing ceramics, particularly when using methods such as barrel firing. There is no question of “total control” over the process. Rather, there is a healthy balance between experiment and skillful receptivity to the situation. The outcome is not something known ahead of time which guides the process; the process guides the participants in the direction of the outcome, and the “success” of the outcome is not something held in mind before hand, but something that comes naturally out of how the participants engage in the process.

3)      Gadamer’s comparison of art with the festival is also meant to highlight something unique about art’s temporality.  Gadamer wants to contrast one way of thinking about time, which sees time as something that is simply “at our disposal”, with the kind of time he thinks is characteristic of the experience of the festival and of art. The time of the festival is a special time, a time which “only arises through the recurrence of the festival itself.” He goes on to say, the festival happens “in its own time and at the proper time” and in this ways “fulfills every moment of its duration” (41-42). This “autonomous temporality”, as Gadamer calls it, is also what he sees as characteristic of the existence of the work of art. That is, the work has a unity which determines itself and calls upon us to respect and engage with that unity. Like the festival, the work of art only comes to have its meaning when we venture to take part in it, but the meaning is not simply something projected by us; it is found in the “autonomy” of the work (49-50).

How does the temporality of the festival relate to the kind of temporality we might associate with the barrel firing we are discussing here?  Like the festival, the barrel firing is something that recurs. It happens every year at a particular time of year (though not on a particular day). It has, as we say, “become a tradition”. In becoming a tradition it has taken on those same temporal characteristics which Gadamer attributes to festivals. It occurs “in its own time”, and this time is something quite different from individual participants simply “spending time” on the production of art. The barrel firing stands outside of the “everyday schedule” of the colleges and studios where the participants usually create their works. While one could certainly create a “schedule” for the barrel firing (it happens on such-and-such a day, beginning at such-and-such o’clock, with a break at such-and-such o’clock for lunch, and so forth), in another, more important sense, it is an event which happens “in its own time”. This time is not simply part of a schedule, and the participants participate precisely insofar as they step out of what might be considered their ordinary “schedules”. As with any firing which relies on human participation, the “schedule” which one might project ahead-of-time must be flexible, and the event itself determines what must happen when. Likewise, what is called for from the participants is not control, but responsiveness to what is called for by the event.

It seems we are left, then, with several general questions which may be raised about the process of creating art. Certainly, what we have said about the community formed during the barrel firing may not hold true for the creation of all types of art, for all kinds of communities involved in the creation of art. However, we may ask: Can Gadamer’s analogy between the festival and the work of art also be broadly applied to the process of creating works of art? Is the process of creation something which, like the festival, draws us, gives us our place, transcends our everyday conception of time, and overcomes our subjectivity? Is the process of creation “pre-subjective” in this way even if the artist is alone? Does the individual artist ever really approach the creation of the work of art as the shaping of an object, or is she always drawn into a particular sort of relationship which elicits the receptive response of the artist to the situation of creation? Is there a way to generally conceive of the relationship of art and community without focusing on the relation of artist and community or the relationship of the community to the finished work, but rather focusing on the way that the work gathers a community in the event of its creation? Are we “preservers” of the work of art even before it is “complete” and before it takes on a tangible “significance” in its completeness? What kind of “unity” might be found, not in the completed work of art, but prior to it: in its inception, its gradual birth, the unexpectedness of its final form? Does the artist ever stand beyond the “unexpected” quality of the work of art, or is she in fact always the first to be drawn in by what is fundamentally new and previously unrecognized in the work of art?

All citations from Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, Trans. Nicholas Walker, Cambridge University Press, New York: 1986.

The Toka Jonë monument stands overlooking the central square of Lushnja, in central Albania. It looks west, gazing over a relatively small brick plaza. To its right: the municipality and prefecture. To its left, a short distance away, Lushnja’s central park, and the town’s main boulevard which spills out into the plaza. Before it, beyond the plaza: a line of souvenir and jewelry shops, banks, currency exchange windows, and cell phone stores. Behind Toka Jonë: a conglomeration of apartment buildings, some completed and some still mere concrete shells. Further back: the hills of Lushnja, covered in olive trees, farmland, the reservoir.  To the north and south of Toka Jonë, Lushnja—a long narrow city—stretches out parallel to the national highway. Beyond the highway: the fields of the region once known as Myzeqeja. Further still to the west and north: the lagoon at Divjaka, forests, the sea.

Toka Jonë—“Our Earth”—is composed of three bronze figures, mounted atop a round stone base. The central figure is a woman, raising a bundle of wheat to the sky, her body rigid and her gaze fixed. She is flanked by two men, bearing the tools of harvest, who stand slightly lower than her. One man stands relaxed, the other tense and at the ready. Below, far below, ringing the lowest level of the stone base, are the symbols of industrial and agricultural progress: a bulldozer, factories, wheat, tools of measurement, the star of communism. All of this speaks to us about the earth, the land—but what does it say?

In the following enquiry, we will attempt to confront two questions:

1)      How does the Toka Jonë monument participate in the laying bare of the earth and what has its place within the earth?

2)      How does the monument participate in the preservation and sheltering of what has its place within the earth?

This is to say: we will try to find our way to the question of Toka Jonë’s fundamental tension. This tension is to be found in Toka Jonë’s unity: its unity with the city in which it stands and its unity with the earth upon which it stands.

Toka Jonë speaks to us with an ambiguous message. On the one hand it celebrates bounty of the earth; it honors the earth’s sacrifice and glorifies the people who live close to the earth and work it for their livelihood. At the northern extreme of Lushnja, at the Martyrs’ Monument, a female partisan soldier holds up her child. So the woman of Toka Jonë offers up the harvest’s yield. As Lushnja’s fields and hills offer their bounty, so Toka Jonë offers itself to us even as it is swallowed up by looming apartment complexes, by forgetfulness, by “development”.

However, the monument also speaks, in its very name, of the possession of the earth. The notion of “Our Earth” or “Our Land” speaks of the working of the earth as both what is cherished and what is exploited and economized.  Just as the brick factory beyond the northern edge of Lushnja transforms the earth into the building blocks of progress and development, so Toka Jonë at once inherits the gift of the earth while already stretching man’s gaze over the earth beyond its reach. Anyone who knows the history of the swamps that once covered much of Myzeqeja—covered what is now farmland—and how they were drained by prisoners to enable agricultural production cannot stand in Toka Jonë’s presence without feeling the ecstatic triumph over the earth’s hiddenness, the exposure of the earth for production.

True—Toka Jonë “possesses” the earth, the land, as something kept safe, cherished as a secret beneath the surface.  Toka Jonë retreats behind Lushnja’s development, behind Italian grocery stores and offices, behind cell phone stores and German cars driving by. It retreats behind gleaming multicolored lights at New Year’s, behind bumper cars, behind fireworks. It even retreats on warm summer evenings when citizens take their xhiro up and down the main boulevard, drifting aimlessly and talking. When we say “retreats”, we do not mean merely that Toka Jonë is hidden or outshone by taller, flashier buildings, or that its grandeur is ignored on the occasion of certain cultural festivals. Rather, we mean that in all these situations Toka Jonë hides itself in its utmost being simply part of the city and part of the earth upon which the city stands.  Toka Jonë shows itself more and more as simply a landmark in the city, as a remnant of the city left from an earlier time, as the past. In doing so, it simultaneously prepares us for the nature of its revealing.

Toka Jonë retreats in its manifestness as simply another piece of the city, and ultimately as something which is there to be discovered. In its retreating, Toka Jonë makes way for our discovery of it, it leads us to it and in doing so leads us to what is most manifest about the earth—its usefulness to us and our optimization of it.

In this sense Toka Jonë is “about” technology as Heidegger uses the term: it is “about” the complete laying bare of the earth and its subsequent transformation into something which exists primarily in its usefulness for us through its productiveness. This is the tension of the monument: it retreats as the earth retreats—into “sheltering concealment”—yet at the same time it reveals itself and in doing so reveals the total “unconcealment” (to stay with Heideggerian language)of the earth through production and development.

Perhaps most ironic—and thus most striking—is the way that Toka Jonë speaks about the bounty of the earth and its use for man out of the context of the destitution of communist Albania. In a time of great hardship, the yield of the land is a great apprehension for the people—this can be seen in the concern with proper nourishment of the youth that is documented in children’s magazines from the communist period, it can be heard in the stories of Albanians who remember days of eating only bread and salt. Yet this yield—which is in such hard times a blessing—is wrenched from the earth in Toka Jonë. It is leveled, processed, maximized to sustain us and also to sustain its own continued production. Its continued yielding.  The bulldozer, the tool of measurement, and with them the bold gaze into the distance—these are the forces that make the earth pliable, and with it make us into the pliable tools which work the earth. The connection to the land, the glorification of those who work the land, is here revealed as the glorification of the yield of the earth in the fullest meaning of “yield”.  That is to say, the land does not offer up its bounty but yields it to us, as we in turn yield to the force of production which works the land.

What we are looking for here is not simply the irony of Toka Jonë’s depiction of pride and plenty even in the comparative poverty of the reality of communist Albania. Nor are looking for Marxist connotations of the plight of the worker in the system of production, nor even for the stark contrast between the socialist impetus of Toka Jonë’s origin and the capitalist context in which it now stands, outshadowed. We are seeking the questions we posed at the outset: how does Toka Jonë lay bear the earth and how does it shelter it and preserve it? We have given the simple answers to these questions. That is to say, we have discussed the ways or means by which Toka Jonë accomplishes its ambiguous revealing and concealing.  However, if we have listened closely to what Toka Jonë has to say to us, we have also seen the value of asking how it is possible that Toka Jonë speaks to us thus ambiguously.

It does so out of the fundamental tension of that which conceals and that which reveals, of that which preserves and that which gives itself up wholly. It is only in this tension that Toka Jonë can “confront us itself”, as Gadamer says. Toka Jonë “confronts us itself”, and has its revelatory capacity, in its hidden revealing. This is not simply playing with words, but expresses the way in which Toka Jonë first retreats from us, and then, in coming forth before our attention, shows us not something which was merely hidden but rather the systematic and continual laying bare of hiddenness itself. That is, Toka Jonë shows us the earth not as revealed but as hidden from us in the way that we are engaged in totally revealing it. The monument brings near our own “nearing” of the earth, our project of making it completely available to us. This is what hides in “progress” and “development” as they appear in Toka Jonë and around it in the city of Lushnja, and it is this concealed nearness of availability that Toka Jonë shows to us. Thus, it is only through what can still stay hidden and preserved that the truth of “laying bare” can come forth and issue its warning to us. Its warning speaks of the exploitation of the earth, of the exploitation that walks together with the bounty of the earth and takes that bounty without remembering what calls to be sheltered and concealed.

Hoxha’s pyramid in Tirana, the capital city of Albania, presents a curious problem. It stands as a symbol of something that many want to forget, for many reasons. Many have called for its destruction, as a symbol of a past that Albania and its people must move beyond. Others have called for it to be preserved, as an integral part of that history—good or bad. The debates surrounding the pyramid suggest the dangers of both remembrance and forgetting. Can the pyramid bear witness to the past without glorifying it? Can the pyramid be forgotten without losing the lessons of the past? These are among the questions the pyramid raises. But do these questions really touch upon what the pyramid is? When we ask these questions, are we really asking about the work of architecture itself, the pyramid?  Do these questions reach the heart of what the pyramid says to us? This is what we must discern. So, let us do what Heidegger does and “go to the actual work and ask the work what and how it is.”

The pyramid is located at the corner where the ring road and the national boulevard intersect in Tirana. We would say, it stands there.  The pyramid stands. On what does it stand? It stands on concrete, hard and flat. And beneath that, it stands on the ground. The ground is what it stands on, what holds it up. At the same time, the pyramid reaches upwards, or it rises.

We are not emphasizing so much the way in which the pyramid might tower over us as we draw closer to it; this association, however, is certainly a rich one. It reminds us of what the pyramid was, of the dictator’s towering over his people.  It reminds us of the pyramid as an artifact meant to commemorate the dictator after his death, to tower over his people in perpetuity and bear witness to his deeds. Still, these associations draw us towards the pyramid as a symbol and as an object. Acknowledging the power of this attraction, let us not allow ourselves for the moment to be drawn to the pyramid as a symbol and instead return to the pyramid as it shows itself to us.

The pyramid towers (though certainly not in the same way as the skyscrapers that surround it and hem in its horizon), and in its towering it reaches. What does it reach for? The sky, or skies. All this seems absurdly simple. What about the skyscrapers around the pyramid, the Raiffeisen bank tower, the Citibank and Banka Popullore towers? Don’t they too reach for the sky and reach even higher? Don’t they scrape it—or, as the Albania word rrokaqiell implies, don’t they grasp it? Why are we pondering some pyramid which reaches for the sky and does not even reach as high as what surrounds it? In this way, the pyramid already looks like another kind of symbol: though it towers, it does not tower as high as the new towers which have sprung up around it. The dictator’s intended museum cannot even stretch beyond the grasp of a collection of bank towers. But here again, we speak about the pyramid as object and symbol.

The pyramid rises and with it our gaze rises—to the sky. The pyramid brings us from the ground (on which it stands) to the sky. The pyramid gathers. Here we touch upon this notion of which Heidegger is so fond, the idea that the thing gathers “in its thinging” as he says. The pyramid, in being a pyramid, gathers. What does it gather? It gathers people. If we stand in the vicinity of the pyramid and look around, on a sunny day in Tirana, we will see other people: young couples, a police officer at the corner, a man selling newspapers at a kiosk. We see ourselves reflected in the broken mirrored glass of the pyramid’s windows. We are gathered, along with these other people. The graffiti covering the surface of the pyramid attests to the presence of others who have gathered there. We see photographs of the pyramid, of people gathered in protest, of overturned burning cars. A place where tourists gather, where youth gather, where protesters gather: the pyramid is all of these. In each case, however, the pyramid retreats again behind itself as symbol. A symbol of decadence; a symbol of strength; a symbol of culture; a symbol of culture squandered.

The “indignant” individual who draped a sheet across a sculpture near the pyramid—upon which a message was scrawled demanding to know why the pyramid had risen in the heart of the city when other “cultural” centers were forgotten—seems to have had just this symbolic nature in mind. We say “symbolic nature”, but this implies that the nature of the pyramid is that it is a symbol. Is this true? We must ask: does the pyramid gather us because it is a symbol, or is it a symbol because it gathers? If the former is true—and we may very well decide that this is so—then we must admit that the pyramid is fully dead to us, and to the people of Tirana. It is dead precisely because people do not “hear its calling” (as Heidegger would say) as a pyramid, in being a pyramid. However, we must first examine the possibility that the pyramid can only stand as a symbol because it first of all stands and gathers.

We have said that the pyramid gathers us. What else does it gather? It gathers the ground it stands on. We are not speaking about the way the flat expanse of concrete upon which the pyramid rests seems to blend with the somewhat expressionless façade of the pyramid in its rising up, the way in which the expanse of concrete distinguishes itself from the trees and grass nearby by virtue of the pyramid’s ugly gray prominence. Nor are we talking about the pure geometry of a pyramid, which rests on a wide base and culminates in a point. The very ground upon which the pyramid stands is gathered in its standing and taken up in its rising. All this happens regardless of what is inside the pyramid: whether it is the dictator’s museum or an empty edifice with graffiti and broken windows, the pyramid rises and with it its ground. That is to say: regardless of its symbolism, the pyramid gathers and rises.

Where does the pyramid reach in its rising? We have already said: the skies. So, the pyramid gathers the ground, the earth, and reaches upward towards the sky. At the same time, it gathers us to the sky. It gathers our gaze to the sky as it towers; in the same way it gathers the youth who climb over its surface and slide down to the ground again. It gathers us to the sky in conjunction with its ground, the earth, which is also our ground.

At this point, some of those listening to us are really upset. They insist: here you are, just picking and choosing a whole slew of Heideggerian vocabulary like “gathers” and “rises” and “earth” and “sky”, but if you jettison all that, where are you? You are just making the pyramid mystical, and therefore contributing to the symbolism you claim you want to avoid. At the same time, you are making a dangerous mistake in forgetting the historical actuality of this pyramid, which Hoxha had built to be his museum and tomb, so the people would have this huge symbol of him forever. You have reduced the pyramid to just some concrete triangle without a history, and I suppose now you are going to ask, Why destroy a triangle? Isn’t it pretty, rising up into the sky on the corner in that little park? And with that, you have gotten rid of everything objectionable about the pyramid, so who cares?

How are we to respond? First, let us admit that yes, we have been using a lot of Heideggerian words (or at least what passes for Heideggerian jargon in English). But would it really matter if we said the pyramid “rests” where it does, and “brings” the “concrete and asphalt” along with “all the people standing around” up into the “smog and clouds hanging over Tirana on this winter day”? We are still talking about the same thing: what the pyramid does in being the pyramid, and how it can do that. If the pyramid reminds us of the dictator, of the time of communism, of ugly architecture, it does so only because it first stands there and gathers us together with the earth upon which it stands. The pyramid can only “rise in the heart of the capital city” (as the banner draped in protest notes) because it gathers and rises.

Here we are going to say something else which will, no doubt, further enrage those who insist that we too are treating the pyramid as a symbol, as a symbol of Heidegger’s opaque mysticism about the work of art and the thing. We can say, after Heidegger, that the pyramid “juts up”, bringing the “earth”, its ground, “into the world”. Now we are on dangerous ground, so let us move slowly. The pyramid juts up. This, we can agree upon. We can even say that what makes the pyramid seem ugly is precisely this “jutting up”. The pyramid juts up into a flat expanse of concrete, into trees and grass, into the boulevard, into the traffic, into the surrounding towers which it cannot surpass in its jutting. In its jutting up, all those other things take their place around the pyramid. This does not mean that the pyramid defines them in some way by being the remembrance of the dictator’s power over all. It means that the horizon which the skyscrapers hem in, is a horizon because the pyramid raises its concrete foundation up to meet the open sky. It means that the trees which give shade, the yells of the furgon drivers departing for Elbasan, the police officers directing traffic turning onto the ring road—all these are in the opening that the pyramid sets up between earth and sky. The pyramid participates in the setting up of the world in which it can then come to be an object in a location and a symbol.

Only because of the way the pyramid does this gathering of earth up to sky could we ever interpret the pyramid as the presence of the bygone communist years, as the continuing presence of the communist system of power controlling the capital city. If the pyramid did not make this space, it could never then be seen to dominate it, nor could it recede from domination in being crowded out by the proliferation of bank towers and shopping malls.  The horizon that the pyramid breaches in its reaching up is part of the horizon of the city’s being this city.

Here we return to the question we asked above, about whether or not the pyramid was a symbol and thus dead to us. We agreed then that we might ultimately decide that yes, the pyramid was indeed dead to us. Now we have come to that point again, but we see that the pyramid’s being dead to us in no way comes from its being the symbol of the dictator and of communism. In fact, this being dead comes from the fact that we can see only the symbol of the pyramid (as a symbol of this or that ideology or era), and not the pyramid itself as it is the pyramid. What is necessary to “hear the calling” of the pyramid is not to give credence to this or that ideology, nor to value the pyramid as a lesson about the past or an object of culture like any other, but rather to see that these estimations can come only from the pyramid being what it is. What it is is the work which opens the space for its being, among other things, the symbol of the dictator. If we see only this symbol, the pyramid is dead to us long before it can be dead to us as this symbol.

What we have discovered about the pyramid does not negate the historical fact of its being constructed by the dictator and its intention to bear witness to his glory, nor does our discovery attempt to explain away the possibility that this bearing witness continues into the present, bringing the communist years to presence in its gathering. These interpretations of the pyramid are entirely accurate; they reflect the genuine cultural significance of the pyramid. Nor has our discussion been an effort to say: well, yes, that is one way of seeing the pyramid, but others have different views and for that reason perhaps it should not be destroyed. Rather, the richness of meaning associated with the pyramid can come only from something “deeper” so to speak. If the pyramid still speaks to us, it does so on the basis of its gathering and raising, its opening the space for horizons. Out of these horizons spring the interpretations of the pyramid and its “cultural” manifestation.

Here we may stop short of speaking about the “happening of truth” in the pyramid, as Heidegger would say. It will suffice to understand how the pyramid might still have something to say to us. To stand in the presence of the pyramid is not to stand before a cultural object and perceive a meaning invested in it by the communist dictator, or even the vestige of that meaning. To really stand in the presence of the pyramid involves hearing the myriad voices of the earth, which it gathers up and delivers to the skies. We are gathered with them, but we need not fear that somehow we are gathered by nostalgia for bygone times, or by fascination with communist history, or by morbid aesthetic interest in the pyramid’s architecture. We are gathered by what the pyramid is as a work, and we really see it jutting forth only when we allow ourselves to be in the presence of the pyramid as work.

The task of our thinking has been to see just this as the ground of what the pyramid is and how it is, and thus to understand that insistence that the pyramid should be destroyed is not the refusal to hear a call that should not be heard—the nostalgic calling of the dictator’s power resounding today—but rather the failure to hear a call that must be heard—the richness of the earth’s calling us to be gathered in its meaning.

The whole idea of this blog is to talk about art after art, after history, after philosophy, and after pretty much anything else.