Misrecognitions, Opacity, World: Notes from an Ongoing Engagement with the Art of Vikram Divecha

I keep returning to Gallery 354, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, over and over again.  This expansive Southwest hall houses many objects from Melanesia, a part of the world I have no direct relationship with.  A few years ago, when I first entered Gallery 354, my pupils dilated to adjust to the subdued lighting.  This incremental shift in aperture within my eyes did not just bring my vision into awareness but my self as well.  A subtle reminder that I was looking from that narrow window of my subjectivity…

The objects on display at Gallery 354 are not as old as I had initially thought.  Many were even created later than the conception date of the timeless mid-century modernist bench that is found in this gallery.  I recall one visitor estimating these objects were more than two thousand years old.  His deep numbers made me realize that the dates on the wall labels are not my concern here.  These objects speak to me of another space—another period.  Possibly located within myself. About a lost knowledge, that is long forgotten. — Excerpted from the looped sound recording in Vikram Divecha, GALLERY 354 (2019).

I

At a small gathering in Brooklyn, Vikram presents me with a print he has made.  Although the print is wrapped in paper, I catch a furtive glimpse of it in the dim light as I place it into a folder for safe-keeping. I am vaguely aware that the image before me may have something to do with Melanesian or Polynesian culture, since Vikram and I have discussed how his interest in the Oceania room at the Met—gallery 354 on the museum map—features in a new exhibition at a gallery in Dubai for which he has asked me to write a catalogue essay.  But the short-legged, rectangular figure in the print doesn’t call to mind anything from the rather neglected-looking displays of Oceanic artifacts at the Museum of Natural History that I caught sight of a few weeks earlier as my nephew led me frantically from room to room, in search of dinosaurs.  (As I’m in the process of revising this manuscript, Vikram informs me that there is, indeed, a smaller figure of the same type on view in the Margaret Mead Hall of the Pacifics at the Museum of Natural History, a fact which further shakes my confidence in my visual memory.)

Vikram Divecha, High Potential, 2018. Black marker on Canson paper, 22.9 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde.

I will later study the print more carefully.  In the moment, however, the furtively glimpsed figure makes me think of a robot—one rendered, perhaps, by a mid-twentieth century artist casting their gaze toward the future.  For some reason this impression is encouraged by the words that appear in the upper right hand corner of the print: “High Potential.”  Maybe it is because these words are borrowed from the vocabulary of corporate managerialism, and because I have been reading Fred Moten and Stefano Harney on logistics, and have been thinking about the human reduced to capital as the origin and endpoint of capitalist exploitation, and because the slave labor of automatons would seem to represent some utopian or dystopian limit point in the trajectory of this history. [1] Reflecting upon this possibility, I realize that the phrase in question is used to describe someone who more closely resembles a slavedriver than a slave—though the ultimate aim of logistics seems to be to do away with the distinction altogether.  Talk about high potential.

II

Slave labor built the wealth of the wealthiest nation on earth.  In its so-called “modern” instantiation, it helped build and is building Dubai: a city, which, Vikram tells me, is what the miniature wooden model he has constructed, from memory, of the objects in the Oceania room at the Met is said, by one of the work’s early viewers, to resemble.  The suggestion is one that Vikram finds striking, first, because he is a former resident of Dubai but had not at any point while he was making the work drawn the (plausible enough) visual connection himself; second, because it seems to highlight the extent to which the Dubai skyline has become synonymous, in some quarters of the new globality, with “futuristic,” a characterization applicable to whatever urban landscape Vikram’s model may be said (plausibly enough) to conjure; and third, because this spatio-temporal misrecognition reminds Vikram of his own projection of a different time and space onto the original objects upon which the wooden model is based.

Vikram Divecha, The relationship between wood and sunlight, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde.

While he had initially assumed that to visit the Oceania room at the Met was to be transported to the distant past, it turns out that the Herman Miller visitor benches in this part of the Museum are in fact older than many of the objects on display.  However indicative the collection may be of earlier ceremonial objects and carvings, many of the pieces were created as recently as the early 1960s.  This means that although they predate the “futuristic” supertall skyscrapers that an early viewer of Vikram’s model saw in the work, they are virtually contemporary with the birth of modern Dubai, which opened its first airport in 1960, struck oil in 1966, and began to reach for the sky thereafter.

III

Another way to locate these objects in time is to say that they date from the final years of Michael Rockefeller, the anthropologist son of Republican politician Nelson Rockefeller and the great-grandson of legendary industrialist John D. Rockefeller Sr.  Many of the objects now on display in the Oceania room were collected during two expeditions undertaken by Rockefeller, the second of which ended in tragedy, in 1961, when the 23-year old disappeared off the coast of what was then Netherlands New Guinea under circumstances that remain the subject of speculation.  On Wikipedia, the entry for Rockefeller’s “cause of death” reads: “Rumored eaten by cannibals, presumed drowned.”

Vikram Divecha, Gallery 354, floor map, 2018. Black fine tip on Canson paper, 22.9 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde.

When Vikram and I arrive at the Met to look at the objects that I have grown increasingly anxious to see in person, I learn of another disappearance: that of the figure depicted in the print Vikram had given me some weeks earlier.  Apparently this figure—which I now know is a hermaphroditic uli statue, once used in fertility ceremonies—was not among the works gifted to the Met by Rockefeller, but was rather from a private collection to which it has been returned.  I further learn that the phrase “High Potential” comes from the remarks of a Japanese tourist who happened by the Oceania room on the day Vikram made the drawing that is reproduced in the print he has given me.  It is unclear whether the remark—made to Vikram in reference to the figure, which he was in the process of sketching at the time—was intended humorously, or if the man’s meaning was partially lost in translation.  Either way, it confirms something evident from the misrecognitions alluded to thus far: the extent to which hypercapitalist modernity inserts itself as the lens through which denizens of the new globality perceive their surroundings.

Gallery 354 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Vikram Divecha. 2019.

IV

One element of Vikram’s proposed exhibition for Dubai has troubled my efforts to conceptualize the show in my own terms.  It involves the incorporation of a series of paintings based on the grids of colored rectangles that are sometimes momentarily visible on the screen of a computer or smartphone when one scrolls rapidly through a Google Images search.  The effect is produced by “lazy loading,” a programming feature that, in this case, boosts the functionality of the search program by preventing too many high resolution images from loading at once.

Historically, the function of the grid has been, in Rosalind Krauss’s words, “to declare the modernity of modern art.”  By freezing grids of photographic images in a state of prelusory abstraction, Vikram’s paintings call attention to the stubborn persistence of modernism amid the increasing usurpation of visual experience by the high definition spectacles of the attention economy.  In the context of the visual materials that have inspired the exhibition, the paintings’ rectilinear forms also recall the gridwork of glass and steel that comprises the southern facing wall of the Oceania room at the Met, an architectural feature that—along with the Herman Miller benches—aids in literally enclosing the seemingly ancient but in fact quite recently constructed objects on view within a modern framework.

Vikram Divecha, Google Images search entry: Objects; Device: iPhone 3GS, 2019. Oil on linen, 30 x 20 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde.

Vikram tells me that he intends to hang his paintings on the rear wall of the main gallery space in Dubai, where they will “cut” into the field of vision of viewers as they move through the exhibition.  Thinking about the works as a kind of perforating device, and then imagining myself glimpsing the paintings out of the corner of my eye en route to the project room at the rear of the space, leads me to think of Holbein’s Ambassadors, and of the anamorphic skull at the base of the painting, so often referenced in art historical discourses, which assumes its proper proportions—cutting dramatically into the viewer’s field of vision—only when the painting is viewed obliquely.

How to consider askance this series of paintings by Vikram that have indeed seemed like a kind of perforation in the exhibition’s overall conception, or that, by a different analogy, have felt to me like a scotoma, or a grain of sand in my eye.  Is the reason I have stumbled over these works conceptually that I have failed to recognize the site of their emergence: not within the dimensionality of the other works in the exhibition as they have appeared projected before my mind’s eye, but rather on the very surface of the screen into which I had been gazing?  As I shift positions, the abstract forms resolve into a modern day vanitas.  I see the face of an android, and in its shadow, the hands of assembly line workers in Shenzhen, the bones of children in the cobalt mines of the Congo.

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (detail), 1533. Wikimedia Commons image (accessed December 6, 2019).

V

On a museum label in the Oceania room at the Met, there is an image of Michael Rockefeller among the Dani tribesmen of what was then Netherlands New Guinea.  While the tribesmen smile in the background, the pale-skinned fourth-generation heir to the greatest industrial fortune ever amassed appears absorbed in the camera in front of him—a captive to the apparatus of capture.  Though Rockefeller’s demise is shrouded in mystery, perhaps we can say, as Édouard Glissant does of the French ethnographer and poet Victor Segelan, that the young scion “died of the Opacity of the other,”[2] that is, of his mad endeavor to take account of a foreign region and culture, to grasp its art—literally, with the impulse of the adventurist-collector—and, in the words of the museum label, “understand its creators.”

The image of Rockefeller and the Dani tribesmen is the image of our inability to see beyond the apparatuses that govern subjectivity.  As viewers pass through the room, pausing to read the wall texts, and absorbing themselves as much in the devices in their palms or around their necks as in the objects in the room, the smiling faces of the Dani silently mock all personal and institutional claims to transparency.

Museum label detailing the work of Michael C. Rockefeller. Photo by the author.

VI

Not that the acknowledgement of Opacity—or, even less so, the mere laying bare of transparencies—constitutes an end in itself.  It is not enough, for Vikram, a “colonized subject” by his own characterization, to acknowledge the framework of globalized thought through which he perceives the world, or to ironize his own Malraucian impulses or the cultural-industrial complex from which his artistic aspirations remain inextricable.  Just as transparency is the seduction of specialization, of having studied at length, for instance, the culture of the Polynesian triangle, so can Opacity, misappropriated, ossify into another pretense, a glib sort of knowing unknowingness.

For Glissant, Opacity only assumes its full importance insofar as it conditions the possibility for Relation.  In opposition to the violence of a grasping and deluded comprehension, it is “the gesture of giving-on-and-with [donner-avec]”—of interest, respect, generosity, solidarity, collaboration—in the simultaneous acknowledgement of the irreducibility of the other that is necessary in order to change the world.  Or that is necessary, rather, in order to bring the world into being, to enable the emergence of world, out of a still inchoate globalism, in what Glissant describes as an open and evolving totality.[3]

Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Landscape, 1891. Wikimedia Commons image (accessed December 6, 2019).

Granted, it is often a fine line between the consent of Relation and the grasp of comprehension, as it is between poetics and exoticism—between, let’s say, Gauguin’s otherly way of seeing, which could render even the most familiar landscape obscure, and his way of seeing the other.  The first act of consent is Rimbaudian, the acknowledgment that “I is an other,” that we are made of multiplicities, that we are already obscure to ourselves.  To consent to the incomprehensible singularities of a culture encountered across a spatio-temporal divide that for all its surprising diminutiveness remains abysmal in one’s mind is a still more fraught endeavor.  The cost of venturing into the unknown, as Michael Rockefeller learned, can be steep.  Even when the undertaking is in good faith, there will always be those eager to see any glimmer of colonial fantasy served its just deserts, even or especially when the fantasy rears itself in the subjectivity of the colonized.  Nevertheless, the fact that the same Segalen who died of his consuming desire for the other, is positioned, in Glissant’s work, among “the first poets of Relation,” suggests the affirmation of a deeper, if also less transparent entanglement that the Frenchman must have felt.[4]

Vikram’s aesthetic engagement with the Oceania room at the Met, his attempts at “giving-on-and-with” the objects collected there, can be seen as an effort to tangle with a similarly felt entanglement.  To be certain, such an endeavor, in all its triviality and profundity, comes with its risks.  But it is, perhaps, just this sort of risking that is called for by the “planetary consciousness now forming”—as it already was two decades ago, when Glissant wrote of such a consciousness—if this seemingly late historical moment is to have also provided history with a new beginning.[5]  Consent to the totality of “global dynamics,” Glissant teaches us, is born in the practice of “self-break” and “reconnection.”[6]  If, in being spoken to by the objects before him, Vikram is led to the deepest opacities of his own consciousness, where he himself dissolves, then he is also intent on relaying this knowledge that “the Other is within us” back to the world—in manifesting it by way of a poetics not of self-discovery or capture, but of Relation.  Artistic practice thus conceived becomes the practice of consenting to the emergence of world, in all its radiant, echoing imbrications of order and chaos.

Vikram Divecha, Shadow over granite floor, Ancestor Figure, Gallery 354, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019. Photogravure. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde.

VII

The transatlantic slave trade is the abyss out of which modernity arises.  The abyss into which it is hurtling, under the banner of logistics, is represented by the grid of variously colored rectangles on the bow of a ship en route to China or the Arabian peninsula.  This thought occurs to me, high above the East River, en route Manhattan, as I gaze at the screen in my palm and contemplate pre-ordering a new book by Laleh Khalili.  The book has been recommended to me by algorithms designed both to “nudge” my consumer desire and transform my harvested personal data into a commodity whose market value exceeds that of the oil that still fuels war and trade in the twenty-first century.

Before and beyond these comings and goings between islands, rims, and peninsulas, a different sort of passage arises, which Glissant dubs “errantry.”  Out of an abyss deeper than modernity: an unsettled, unsettling, voyage; untriumphant, non-expansionary, not a grand tour aimed at unveiling the oppositional differences that are already in advance the re-finding of identity and rootedness, but an ambling, aimless except insofar as it consents to the opacities of the world—a voyage “in search for the Other.”[7]

Book cover of Sinews of War and Trade by Laleh Khalili. Screenshot.

Drawing a contrast to the landlocked, inveterately Greco-Abrahamic Mediterranean sea, Glissant describes the Caribbean as “a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc.”  The creolized archipelagos of his birth thus provide the “natural illustration of the thought of Relation.”  But so too, he notes in passing, do the islands of the Pacific.  And although it is to Western myths and to the wandering of the Jews that he initially turns in developing the unfinished thought of an unconquering “errantry,” perhaps it is in another Ocean and another millennium that the more apposite passage is to be found.  A passage that had been echoing quietly down through the ages only to find itself enshrined at the Metropolitan museum in the wake of a more tragic voyage that must constitute some milestone in the journey toward the geographic “end of the world,” and the concurrent arrival of the global age.[8]

Object from Gallery 354 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by the author.

What must have been risked all those thousands of years ago so that the following passage could be written, with surprising poetry, in the entry on the Polynesian people on Wikipedia, one of the few globally recognizable spaces in the digital sphere that can be said, in opposition to the economic logic of our era, to manifest a kind of Relation: “They were the first humans to cross vast distances of water on ocean-going boats.” [9]

[1] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Fantasy in the Hold,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 84-99.

[2] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 193.

[3] Ibid., 192.

[4] Ibid., 27.

[5] Ibid., 164.

[6] Ibid., 33.

[7] Ibid. 18.

[8] Ibid., 164.

[9] Wikipedia, 2019, “Polynesians,” last modified 9 November, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesians.  In his seminal essay, “Our Sea of Islands,” the Tongan/Fijian writer Epeli Hau‘Ofa describes how his “ancestors, who had lived in the Pacific for over two-thousand years, viewed their world as ‘a sea of islands’ rather than as ‘islands in the sea.’”  See Epeli Hau’Ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, No. 1 (Spring 1994): 153.  Hau‘Ofa’s work has played an important role in contemporary accounts of the region and the identities of its inhabitants and diaspora.  It should be noted, however, that recent discourses have sought to further complicate this intervention, for example, by emphasizing the importance of regional relationships to land and fauna.  For a discussion about the legacy of foundational notions of Oceania, and their relationship to decolonial politics, globalization, and contemporary art of the region and its diaspora, see “Roundtable: Thinking Through Oceania Now,” Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, Issue 4: Liquid States (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2010).

*

Beirut-born, Mumbai-bred Vikram Divecha works between New York and Dubai.  He holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and is currently a participant of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study program (2019-20).  Divecha’s projects often bring invisible structures into plain view, to raise questions about agency, ethics, and value.