Elhaik cont’d:

This expansion of professional curatorial practice through the emblematic figure of fieldwork–the production of the anthropologist-as-curator–is one possibility to generate Niklas Luhmannís second-order observation. And curatorial work, as a practice of montage, of montage of the work of our interlocutors reflecting on the legacy of cosmopolitan modernism, is an expanded form of anthropological practice. But because I am still in the process of refining this tool, it is difficult for me to decide whether ‘curatorial-workí is a distinctive or surrogate form of ‘fieldworkí. Moreover, traditional film curatorial practice for the movie theater seems to be inadequate to ‘installí neither the discrepancies of cosmopolitan modernism nor the second-order observation distinctive of the anthropological mode of production of knowledge (and its pedagogical vocation). Through dialogues with curatorial laboratories in Mexico City, curatorial labs involving moving-image makers, artists and anthropologists, I am in the process of rethinking my curatorial work for the context of the museum or art space through the trans-medial practice of installation. I am beginning to wonder how a refined version of curatorial work, one that would bid farewell to the experimental ethnographic texts and films of the 90s, could result in something we could provisionally call an ‘installation bookí: an experiment with form that would create a montage effect by juxtaposing curatorial work and field-work.

Marcus:

Could you give me some specific examples of what goes on in the curatorial laboratories of Mexico City– and how they fit into the framework of your own investigation into cosmopolitan modernism, which seems to be an object of both theoretical and ethnographic construction for you. Also I am intrigued by your evocation of the ‘installation book” as an alternative to the production of the ethnographic text or film. It was precisely such custom-designed alternative forms emerging from fieldwork that I had in mind when I called for ethnographics at the conclusion of my 1990 ‘montageí article. This will lead us, I think, into a consideration of how you are using montage as concept and technique in your work.

Elhaik:

I established a dialogue with two curatorial groups in Mexico City: Curare and Teratoma. Biomedical metaphorics aside, both Curare and Teratoma invoke a diagnostic dimension I too see as a component of my own curatorial work. In addition to being an ethnographics, curatorial work is also a diagnostics in the specific conceptual sense of Paul Rabinow⁷. Indeed, Teratoma co-founder, the art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina, designed this convergence of affinities, art and concept work, as “a multi-disciplinary group composed of art historians and critics, curators, artists and anthropologists who explore contemporary shifts in cultural, intellectual and aesthetic productions from a wide range of practices. Teratoma is a site of encounters, debates, exhibitions, residencies, pedagogy, dialogues, archiving of textual, visual, physical and virtual information in order to allow production, debate and reception of the various cultures to come through the Latin American continent”. I had the opportunity to attend the meetings and have access to the fascinating collaborative work of these curatorial labs. Teratoma stood out, in particular, for its commitment to the role anthropology had played in shaping the contours of (Mexican) modernity as well as its effort to de- and recompose the conceptual, aesthetic and affective dispositif of cosmopolitan modernism as a contemporary problem. At the time, I had read polemical anthropologist Roger Bartraís experimental ethnography The Cage of Melancholy⁸, a scathing critique of Mexicanist discourse that diagnosed a contemporary ‘post-Mexican conditioní. I was also interested in examining how the post-Mexican condition was mediated through film and contemporary art curatorial practice, and how the art of curating post- Mexican life troubled the all too neat dichotomy between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Through the work of these curatorial labs, I was probing the de-linking of cosmopolitan modernism and nationalism (and the making of a third figure) in contemporary Mexico.

Among the many projects that emerged from these curatorial laboratories that immediately caught my attention was Olivier Debroiseís attempt to re-assemble Sergei Eisensteinís legendary and unfinished avant-garde film Que Viva Mexico! (1931-32). Debroise was Teratomaís co-founder and a Mexico City-based French art historian who had moved there in the 70s, a fascinating cosmopolitan modern in the tradition I have spoken about during this conversation: filmmaker and curator, art historian and experimental novelist who has collaborated with major intellectual figures in and out of Mexico City, from Nestor G. Canclini to Susan Buck-Morss. His project of re-assembling Que Viva Mexico! was of course not the first of its kind. Others had done it before. But I was specifically intrigued by its research-based approach and rigorous engagement with the intersections between Mexican nationalist anthropology, cosmopolitan modernism and the historical avant-garde at work in Eisensteinís unfinished film. Debroise had ushered a radical break with the trope of Mexicanism and redefined curatorial practice in 1990s Mexico by calling for both a sensorial and conceptual approach in order to ‘sing the swan songí of that strange alliance constitutive of Mexican post-revolutionary nationalist aesthetics: the alliance between the Mexican vanguardia, the nationalist intelligentsia, and Manuel Gamioís nationalist/indigenista anthropology of the 1920s. Re-assembling Que Viva Mexico! in the late 1990s was an intelligent and timely move. Eisensteinís film had not only relied on Gamioís iconography and his political use of anthropology as a tool of social engineering, but had also contributed to establish a nationalist aesthetics that would have an enduring vocation in film and the visual arts in Mexico (the usual sublime-like iconography portraying landscapes punctuated by Volcanoes, Maguey plants, Indios, eroticized tropical Tehuantepec, etc).

Elhaik cont’d:

Debroiseís methodology was also interesting to me for its affinity with the site-specific installations of contemporary art. He returned to Tetlapayac, the hacienda where Eisenstein had shot Que Viva Mexico in 1931-32, to research the director’s Mexican episode. The result is the intriguing experimental film and art project, A Banquet at Tetlapayac, in which contemporary artists and scholars, including art historian Serge Guibault, curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, conceptual artist Andrea Fraser and other key contemporary figures, play the main historical characters involved in the making of Que Viva Mexico!. During the making of Debroiseís project, Tetlapayac, the hacienda that had given birth to a Mexican nationalist film aesthetics, had become the target of a site-specific intervention. Debroiseís project is a watershed because 1/ it is a reflection on Mexican modernity and the Mexican avant-garde, its articulation of cosmopolitan modernist sensibility and 1920s Mexican anthropology, 2/ it is a reflection on the greatest figure of cinematic montage, 3/ it is a montage of contemporary Mexico (Bartraís post-Mexican condition) with nationalist Mexico of the 1920s / 30s, so a montage of past, present and a new future-in-the-making, and finally 4/ it is a montage between experimental documentary film techniques with the procedures of installation, performance arts, relational aesthetics, site-specific art practice.

My curatorial work resulted in the film program Soy Mexico⁹ that been touring for two years from Rice Cinema, the Institute of Design in Rome, to the Tangiers Cinematheque. It is designed as a juxtaposition of Debroiseís film with the work of other filmmakers/curators who had done more or less similar site-specific interventions, as for instance Jesse Lernerís experimental piece Magnavoz/Phonograph. In 2005 Lerner set out to turn former Estridentista poet Xavier Icazaí s 1926 essay “Magnavox/Phonograph” into an imaginary experimental film. The Estridentistas were a Dadaist-inspired, avant-garde group of the 1920s and 30s Mexico, known for their exaltation, not of the rural-indigenista iconography found in Eisensteinís Que Viva Mexico, but of technology, radio and other wireless forms of communication. Unlike Eisenstein, the Estridentistas were interested in a modernity saturated with what media historian F. Kittler refers to as ‘phonographs, radios and typewritersí. As in Debroiseís A Banquet in Tetlapayac, Lerner also invited contemporary experimental filmmakers, visual artists and art historians to perform similar connections between the historical avant-garde and the contemporary international visual art scene, including the experimental theater director Juan Jose Gurrola to narrate the poem and art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina to play the character of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera who figures extensively in Icazaís poem. Magnavoz elegantly adapts Xavier Icaza’s Estridentista essay on Mexico’s future. Writing in 1926, Icaza fused poetry with polemics in an attempt to make room for another form of mediation of Mexican modernity.

The point of departure for my experiment with form–the installation book emerging from myRemains of Mexico– was to orient my curatorial attention towards such site-specific gestures. The ethnographics of curatorial work requires a heightened sense of attention to the montages one encounters during fieldwork. It transforms ethnography into a process/scene of encounter with montages that eventually exceed the trans-cultural dimension of cosmopolitan modernism. But this outline of curatorial practice is just the first step towards the ecology of the installation-book. My curatorial work is a montage of montage practices and a form of media history. It is a montage of the techno-cultural and ethnographic-surrealist imaginary of the Mexican historical avant-garde. The juxtaposition of Lernerís and Debroiseís experimental works is a strategic montage that underlines the shift of contemporary moving-images in Mexico from the ruptures of the post-revolutionary 1920/30s to the secessions of contemporary visual arts. My aim is to curate the present and the futures of cosmopolitan modernism in the context of ‘the post-Mexican conditioní and its attendant undoing of nationalist figurations of Mexican modernity. I recruit curators/visual artists/historians who deploy contemporary art strategies. The ‘Installation bookí is the juxtaposition of these historiographic gestures, intersections between avant- garde film and contemporary art, and re-readings of cosmopolitan modernisms. Curatorial work is what enables, simultaneously, the ethnographics of the installation-book and the re- making of the cosmopolitan modernist imaginary.

But an installation book is not an art exhibit catalog. It curates these multiple passages across affinities set in motion by a fascination for (and commitment to) cosmopolitan modernism: a re-making of the cross/trans-cultural in the context of carefully designed ethnography and via the temporality of long-term fieldwork. It is auto-ethnographic in the sense that it refines my curatorial practice; it is a montage because I work with professional editors to prepare the film fragments to be screened or to prepare video loops for an upcoming installation; it is collaborative because it co-produces in-betweens made possible by the object and mode of existence we still refer to as ‘cosmopolitan modernism;í and it is a multi-media form of theoretical production that gradually displaces the emblematic figure of fieldwork through curatorial work.

Marcus:

Thank you for this really informative, and spirited detailing of your way of working. I want to make just a few comments about its more general implication for the ways anthropologists produce ethnography today, across the quite diverse range of topics that animate their research. Juxtapositioning strategies of both thinking and writing in ethnography since Writing Culture have become more and more dominant. Theoretically, at least, I think they have escaped the dead hand and formal logics of a preceding binarism which they have effectively critiqued. Yet they remain rather undynamic, or at least, controlled by a narrow sense of what it is to experiment or to participate in the experiments of subjects–both as the frame and medium of an ethnographic project. Based on my continuing discussions with Douglas Holmes, among others, concerning anthropological research in a very different sector of cosmopolitan modernism (that dealing with projects of the rational and the hyperrational–law, technology, markets, banking etc), ethnography at its most powerful has become very much a second order enterprise– evoked in your expression of a movement from ethnographics to diagnostics, and your references to Luhmann and Paul Rabinow. But what kind of research practices does this enterprise of working within, alongside, and beyond the experiments, projects, and organized para- ethnography of subjects entail? You may have an advantage because you so identify intellectually with the historic movement of which your subjects are a part and seem to be very aware, but your account of the fashioning of an intricate way of,again, working alongside, within, and beyond your subjects has broader application and resonances. Certainly, it provides specific solutions to problems of practice that I have more generally posed as themes to develop at the Center for Ethnography which I established when I moved to the University of California, Irvine four years ago (see http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~ethnog/): the problem of the fully recognized reflexive subject in ethnography to whose projects and experiments the anthropologist defers in order to make progress on her own (not dissimilar to the ethical deferral to ‘nativeí cultural knowledge in classic anthropology, but across the gulf of alterity, which we can no longer establish in an age of cosmopolitan modernism); the problem of collaboration not as the conventional notion that working together and empathetically is ‘goodí, but collaborations challenge the highly individualist form of inquiry entailed in classic ethnographic fieldwork, and for which the complex evolution of curatorial practice as the primary form of your research is an exemplary improvisation of alternative; and more lately the use of design thinking and techniques as a means to rethink the classic idea of fieldwork, which opens it to exactly the sort of tailor-made invention in method that your own project, again, exemplifies.

Design thinking insists upon a highly reflexive and political practice of collaboration; it allows for the sort of mimesis of subjectsí methods and designs as a source of oneís own, still pursuing distinctively ethnographic ends (that is, it encourages the formation and intense relationships with ‘laboratoriesí and other kinds of entities which organize experiments and knowledge quests among oneís subjects these days ,e.g., most every student these days works her way into fieldwork by passing within and through the projects of NGOs which dominate the terrains of fieldwork everywhere today); and it allows for the conception of the products of research in terms other than the monograph or the film. Indeed, the idea of the installation, while a genre of the art world, has strong associations with the maquette, the model, and the presentation within design studios. As a wayofintroducingalternativeformsintothe methods that still retain authority, especially in the training of ethnographers, I have encouraged the production of para-sites. In the flow of highly conventional fieldwork investigation, para-sites provide space and occasion for the emergence of designed events of presentation and discussion where subjects and ethnographers develop collective, if not collaborative, thinking about an ongoing ethnographic project. No better example would be your development of curatorial practices in a range of venues and media across your ‘field.’ The terms are set by the experiments of others to which you have a complex, appropriative relationship by curatorial presentations. These presentations expand the publics, so to speak, for your work within its evolving multi-sited boundaries. This may sum up to more abstract discussions–even a treatise–on “cosmopolitan modernism today among the artistic avant-garde of Mexico.” But what we become exposed to through the forms to which you are actually devoting yourself is something far more embedded , yet in a performative and design way. You make accessible by public events in the varied venues that you have described what once resided in the private archives of fieldwork notes and recording, to which Writing Culture gave only minimal legitimated access as the limited forms of reflexive writing and expression that we have today. The installation, or installation book, poses a good example of an alternative and its challenges –clear in their occasions of presentation as ‘second orderí, but also powerful in their own ethnographic voice and detachment

Marcus cont’d:

And, finally, evoking your discussion of the installation returns us to montage and its renewed potentials in these shifting coordinates that define fieldwork. To allude to the point with which I began this set of comments – that prevalent strategies of juxtaposition as the core of ethnographic styles of representation and analytics have become flat. Once inspired by theory and practices of montage, the deployment of juxtaposition becomes a way of managing representations and casting interpretation, though more subtly and richer than a preceding structuralist binarism. In the ethnography that invents practices for itself from its deferral to subjectsí experiments, in adapting creatively to imperatives to collaboration, and in the application of ideas from design process and the studio, the example of montage emerges again as a way to think about juxtapositioning as a key modality not only of analysis, but of movement, performance, and composition (editing?) as three operations of invention in ethnographic research that develops its distinctive thinking in a range of contexts of reception. Issues of representation are just as important as they were in the 1980s but these issues are now embedded in the folds of the relations of research. I think the evolution of curatorial practices as you have described them reflects this distinctive spirit of anthropological research today, in which montage performance animates the enduring importance of juxtaposition without its flattening analytic compass, ending in mere irony. Instead montage is inherently tied to the dynamics of constructing the performances that are shaped by and in turn shape the path of ethnography.

This essay was originally published in: George Marcus. “Disenos Curatoriales en la Poetica de la Etnografia Hoy / Curatorial Designs in the Poetics & Politics of Ethnography Today” in Iconos (Dossier: Visual Anthropology in Latin America), 42: 89-104, Ecuador: Flasco, January 2012.

NOTES:

(7) Paul Rabinow. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment, Princeton University Press, 2003.
(8) The Cage of Melancholy: Identity & Metamorphosis of the Mexican Character. Rutgers University Press, 1992.
(9) The title of the program is inspired by the eponymous little known essay by Chris Marker (1966) for what he called a film imaginaire (Commentaires 2, Editions du Seuil). The curatorial project Soy Mexico fabulates on Markerís essay and can be called a curatorial program imaginaire.