Domesticating Columbus

Marcus Yan for the New York Times

"Only in New York City." That's how one of the guards at the base of Tatzu Nishi's Discovering Columbus public art installation summed up the remarkable creation now open for visitors until November 18, 2012 in New York's Columbus Circle. He was correct. Though Nishi has created similar conceptual pieces elsewhere, and New York is hardly starved for spectacles, there is only one statue of Genoa's favored son, and only one Columbus Circle in the city. Nishi's audacious project required him to convince the city's administration to let him to construct a carapace around the pedestal and rostral column of Gaetano Russo's 1892, 13-foot monument to Columbus's 1492 journey to and encounters in the New World, and then, at the base of and around the Columbus statue itself, a living room. Not only did Nishi persuade the city to greenlight the project, but today, on what is actually Columbus Day (or Peoples of the Americas Day, as someone renamed it years ago) I walked through the result.

Outside the tower

Rather than air, a temporary, living room, furnished with flooring, wallpaper, couches and chairs, tables and lamps, and a flat-screen TV running last week's Vice-Presidential candidate debate, filled the space around the statue, not only bringing others and I closer to it, but domesticating it, figuratively and literally. Nishi managed to resituate the monument within a human scale, and, to my mind, transformed it, at least within the context of that space, from an emblem and symbol of the terrible centuries of domination, suffering and oppression that colonialism and imperialism unleashed and that Western History has, until recently, often effaced or downplayed into, if even briefly, a different sort of figure. A postcolonial act, it seemed, the monument and the ideas inherent in it deterritorialized, rescaled and repositioned in potency, even if for the span of one's walk around it, one's gaze upon it, one's focus on the numerous other picayune details the room offered. One could, ironically enough, ignore it for an instant or two. Instead of looming over the (metro)polis, Nishi's re-presentation of Columbus now stands nearly at our eye level--or his knees, at least; for Manute Bol, eye-to-eye might be more of a likelihood. We were nevertheless forbidden to touch him, or should I say, it.

The tower from street level

Not that history itself changes because of the exhibit, but at least symbolically, for the duration the installation and the moment of one's interaction, the exchange resets. I don't know if any of this was part of Nishi's thinking, but given that the European age of exploration also included encounters and subsequent wars with Asia, transforming that continent in the process, perhaps it subsists somewhere in his thought. I thought it quite apt that the young man checking the tickets, which were free and available only through an online website (if you were lucky enough not to be kicked out of the system repeatedly, as I experienced and as others told me they were, before I finally lucked on a date and time that had not yet oversubscribed), was, as he mentioned in passing, from the Dominican Republic, one of the two countries on the island, Hispaniola, where Columbus initially touched down (though the settlement he established there, Natividad, was on the site of what is now Cap Haïtien, in what is now Haiti).

Regarding Columbus

Mostly I felt the sheer elating strangeness of walking around, standing and sitting down in a living room high above a teeming streetscape when that's usually impossible to do--and with a giant statue nearby. I did overhear one woman standing near me in the room mentioning to a man beside her that she lived just a stone's throw away in a nearby tower and the view wasn't so unusual, but added to him that even she was a bit disoriented by this new proximity to the monument. For the majority of visitors, though, even those living in New York's or other metropolises' skyscrapers, I imagine the experience of Nishi's public installation will probably still feel a bit defamiliarizing and exhilarating. Perhaps the large numbers of billionaire New Yorkers who live in aeries brimming with multimillion-dollar pieces of giant artwork might respond with indifference, but like most of the people who entered the room with, I found myself smiling and staring with marvel. And then, because of the time restrictions and my desire to free up space for the next group, I was descending the stairs and back on the street, exiting an ingenious and surprisingly powerful work of public art. Columbus Circle did not, and will not, look the same.

In the living room

More photos:

Broadway, from the summit

The crowd, from the stairwell leading to the summit

The crowd

The doorway leading to the living room

Inside Nishi's installation

Central Park

Looking east, up Central Park South (60th Street)

Christopher Cozier @ NU + Adbustered!

Christopher Cozier (b. Trinidad 1959). Tropical Night,
2006–present. Ink, pencil, stamps.
Two hundred drawings, each 9 x 7 in.
(22.9 X 17.8 cm). Courtesy of
the artist, from Brooklyn Museum site

Yesterday, under the auspices of the X and at the invitation of my colleague Krista Thompson, Trinidadian award-winning artist and curator Christopher Cozier (1959-).  A Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of the University of Trinidad & Tobago, Cozier is also an administrator and curator of the Alice Yard art space, located in Port of Spain, which he established with architect Sean Leonard, writer Nicholas Laughlin, and others, and serves the editorial board of the Caribbean critical/theoretical journal Small Axe. He visited Northwestern to talk about his recent projects, his curatorial practice and how the two informed each other.

I remembered his name--though I did not recall his work and hadn't heard him speak about it then--from a previous exhibit at the university, Out of Sight, which Krista Thompson and another colleague, Huey Copeland, organized in 2007 on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery (1807-2007). As part of his presentation, which he divided into three parts, he talked about the evolution of his work over the last few years and how "curatorial enterprises" had shaped it and contributed to what he called its "moving locations." What became clear is that there are throughlines between the earlier work and more recent projects, with certain visual vocabularies, such as iconic or fragmented bodies; forms, such as flags; and discourses, such as the bureaucratic, repeatedly coming to the fore. Among the ironies he noted was that as a young educated Trinidadian one of his parents' hopes for him was a government job (which would have meant security in the old days), but he chose a career in the arts instead, yet has returned to symbols of bureaucracy, from his use of office furniture and implements, to his abiding interest in rubber stamps, over and over, which is perhaps more ironic in a post-colonial state.

He showed a number of pieces, such as a fenced in winners' platform that he debuted in Denmark, but then had to rethink when restaged in the context of Haiti, and which provoked very different interactions with participants, and the same was true of an installation piece/sculpture that involved Chinese rules strung from a line, which in Haiti also led to very different responses (such as, people borrowed/took the rulers). Other wonderful, simple-yet-fiendishly complex projects, which Cozier scales up and down depending upon the circumstances, included his Boxes of Fear (2006), which began as tiny boxes stamped with "FEAR" as if manufactured in the US, but which he expanded to a 2000-box installation, on pallets, ready for export, in a show in Puerto Rico. He also talked about a very recent project involving benches, which he drafted--he is a very gifted draftsman--and then turned into a rubber stamp, but which have since morphed into various kinds of benches, paper and otherwise, which can be assembled, transported, and rethought depending upon the context and circumstances.

Part of the delight in hearing him talk was seeing how he transformed each of these kernels of ideas and concepts, many as he noted originally created in his notebooks--his mobile studio--into various related projects. What was also fascinating to learn about was his work with Alice Yard and how that was informing his practice, both as an artist and as a curator, how he was rethinking the local in relation to Trinidad specifically, and the Caribbean more broadly, in relation to the global artworld and capital flows, how social media had become a new and powerful means for communication across the islands and the Diasporas (Caribbean, African, South Asian), but also for disseminating work. He described one digital catalogue he and others prepared for the Wrestling show, and how it was downloaded 33,000 times shortly after being posted. To quote him: "With the Internet  a whole new way of reading the work comes into being," and a new discursive space is inaugurated and formed. Also, as he said, with social media, the "eyeline" for the visual changes. I have been thinking around this in relation to the literary, but his statement crystallized something for me as I am now trying to write about the relationship between the digital and black literary practice.

Cozier talked about so many other things I cannot even hope to capture them here, but I'll end by noting that during the Q&A with Thompson and the audience, one of the points he focused on was "space" itself, both in terms of artistic practice and in terms of the space of Alice Yard as an exhibition and performance site. As with so much in the Americas the house and grounds, like the neighborhood and suburb, Woodbrook, where Alice Yard is located, have a history, and that is part of what Cozier and those affiliated with the center have been unearthing or reconstructing.  That is to say, there's a lineage and heritage, a cultural (and sociopolitical DNA) in this space, belonging to the family of Sean Leonard, that ties it to earlier and older artistic traditions. What Cozier also noted was that it is space suited to local arts and artists, as opposed to the sorts of sites that exist all over the globe, and which could be interchangeable, important as they are, for the global art trade. Instead, Alice Yard is, he pointed out, a space for social interactions, local, trans-Caribbean, trans-Atlantic, and yes, in some cases, global, but permeable, mutable, organic, which people of all kinds can enter and interact with. Key to all of this is the idea of action--action defines the space, which changes with it.

If you click on the Alice Yard link you can find out more about what's happening there and visit if you're passing through Trinidad. Cozier also blogs, at Visual Matters, and on there you can find lots of images of his work, as well as his critical thoughts. Small Axe is also a site to check out, for current critical Caribbean thought and practice in a range of media; Cozier oversees its sxspace blog platform, which features very up-to-date material on projects throughout the Caribbean and neighboring spaces (like Suriname). An artist, curator and thinker to follow, no doubt.
 

Christopher Cozier talking about his work

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On the personal front, C mentioned that we'd received a sizable number of the May/June 2012 edition of Adbusters' magazine, focusing on Regime Change. Though I agree with and support Adbusters' work, I wasn't sure what was going on until I remembered that they'd requested to use photo I'd snapped in the New York subway a summer ago and then posted to Flickr, and now it was appearing in this edition!

Oddly enough I'd seen this issue in a store, flipped through but had missed the photograph I took, which looks like it might serve as a lead into one of the magazine's sections. I told myself I'd buy it the next time I was in the store, but it appears I won't have to.

The cover

And here's the photo. (C snapped the photo below from the magazine, and texted it to me.)

My photo in the issue (© John Keene)

I still don't have a copy of the issue yet, but I look forward to flipping through it soon. I think this is a first for me, at least as an adult and with my permission, having a photograph featured in a magazine, and of all magazines, Adbusters no less. I won't be quitting my day jobs, but it is nice to see that even a snapshot can gain a wider audience now and then.

If you want to order copies of this or any issue of Adbusters or learn more about the organization, which played an initiatory role, in part, in the Occupy movements in the US and which seeks to do exactly as the image above says, to stop a system that forces people "to live like rubbish" by functioning as a "network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society," you can click on the links above, or visit here.