Failing Better - Salcedo's Trajectory

Doris Salcedo

Failing Better - Salcedo's Trajectory by Rod Mengham

Up until 2002, the work of Doris Salcedo consisted largely of installations in galleries: assemblages of objects whose relationships of part to whole could be transferred from one location to another. In the main, these coordinated objects were relics of a kind: fragments, sometimes very large fragments, of furniture torn from its original context and function; fractions of tables, cupboards and chairs, all compacted together; uncertain components, interlaced, pressured and cajoled into various forms of precarious mutuality. The prosthetic inventiveness with which Salcedo combined and re-combined the same motifs and materials turned a succession of installations into a ritual sequence. The ritual concerned was that of commemoration, the testing of memory whose proportional relationship to the risk of forgetting was constantly challenged and reconfigured. The objects being recalled were the victims of the protracted violence that had afflicted Colombian society for over five decades. 

The research that Salcedo always conducts for each of her projects traces the histories of individuals, gauges the effects of those people's loss on others, and makes use of extensive interviews with survivors. Yet despite this concentration on specific identities, the artist's work rarely evokes the singular; it quite literally homes in on the communal aspects of daily life, reminding the viewer of what is lost when an individual is subtracted from the community. Social structure is undermined and social bonds weakened; state force and guerrilla and paramilitary violence both contribute to the chronic destruction of the social.

A significant number of the hybrid objects in Salcedo’s work of the 1990s utilised sets of tables and chairs. This powerful use of metonymy – employing motifs that do not merely symbolise social relationships but which are materially involved in them – provides the most concise expression of the bond between the individual and the social unit. Single chairs evoke and stand in for single persons, while their being placed around a table is a primary instance of what draws the individual into the social group. In the work from this period, strange versions of both chairs and tables were forced into unnatural and disturbing combinations.

In 2002, Salcedo abandoned her usual ensembles and moved dozens of chairs out into an open, public space which dwarfed these objects, conceived of on a domestic scale. The occasion was the seventeenth anniversary of the events of the 6 and 7 November 1985, when the supreme court in Bogotá was seized by Leftist rebels; the subsequent counter-offensive by government troops produced over 100 fatalities. Salcedo’s performance, entitled Noviembre 6 y 7 (2003), conveyed a sense of the scale of the massacre by using 280 chairs, lowering these piecemeal over the facade of the new Palace of Justice, during a 55 hour period that corresponded to the length of the original siege. The dual temporality of the performance subjected the viewers to a real-time experience of duration inflected with a sense of historical displacement. Siege and artwork were implicated in the same historical narrative as complementary events. 

The simultaneous experience of a length of time unfolding in the present, and of an equivalent amount of time folded up in the past, is a crucial element in Salcedo’s conception of the function of art. There has always been this duality in her work, which relates to history as to a condition of viduity.1 (This word is central to Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which is a classic instance of the art of commemoration in all its postmodern ambivalence.) For Salcedo, viduity is not confined to specific individuals but is the underlying, general condition of society as a whole. One of the most important of her works of the early 1990s was La Casa Viuda (‘The Widowed House’), a title that renders widowhood an environmental condition. For the widowed society, history revolves around the moment of loss, which the imagination returns to with obsessive intensity across ever-increasing intervals of time. The general experience of time is thus one of simultaneous convergence and divergence, at a level and to a degree that a normally functioning society could not tolerate.

Less than one year after Noviembre 6 y 7, Salcedo created her largest installation to date, which lasted for the duration of the 8th International Istanbul Biennale (2003): a huge stack of 1,550 chairs that occupied the vacant space between two buildings on a commercial street in the centre of the city. The chairs were piled anyhow, in a spectacle of chaos that was nonetheless subject to rigid controls. The work filled the interstice between two buildings, its surface rendered perfectly flat. The combination of human chaos, precision engineering and the sheer size of the operation prompted comparison with the intimidating paradox of the mass grave. Salcedo has confirmed that the work was in some sense an epitaph to historical atrocities. The contradictory structure of the installation, which meant that each of the 1,550 standard units was placed in an intricate, unrepeatable relationship with those surrounding it, echoes the tension between commemoration and anonymity that has always problematised the social psychology of cenotaphs and the graves of unknown soldiers – the temporary nature of the installation underlines the fragility of commemoration. 

Modern arts festivals, like the Dionysian festival of ancient Athens, provide a means for art to question the presiding values of any given ideological formation. The most enduring works of art, irrespective of the time it takes to perform them, are those that do not defuse the questions they address, but keep them open. Salcedo’s work always agitates the relation between art and history, between performance and pretext, occupying a temporality that does not end with exit from the gallery or with the dismantling of the installation, but which brings to the surface a process of psychological resistance that is deeply embedded in the social consciousness.

Embeddedness and emergence are literal components of Salcedo’s latest project, Neither (2004), installed recently at White Cube. Here, industrial quantities of chain-link wire fence appear to have been embedded into the gallery wall, although they have in fact been pressed into a skin of plasterboard that stands just in front of it. The entry into this wire compound does not exactly match the outline of the entry into the gallery’s main exhibition space. Two of the dozens of panels that comprise the work’s continuous mesh have been lifted away slightly from the plasterboard substructure. They suggest a possible escape route from the perimeter fence – they might have been loosened in an escape attempt. However, any attempt to puncture the barrier is met with denial: beneath one layer of wire is another, firmly ensconced in the plaster. 

The chief material used in this installation is the most common type of fencing now being produced in unimaginable quantities by manufacturers in the security industry. It has been seen increasingly on our television screens, as a means of confinement in concentration camps in Bosnia and Guantanamo Bay, and in various parts of the world in the form of holding pens for illegal immigrants. However, a more widespread although less spectacular use has been as a means of exclusion from private property as a result of an increasingly paranoid insistence on non-permeability. From the back-garden fence to the border between the Israelis and Palestinians, the twenty-first century understanding of security renders the relationship between inclusion and exclusion increasingly ambivalent. This ambivalence is present in Salcedo’s wire cage, which reverses the architecture of the White Cube building, shifting the barrier between exterior and interior from the outside wall to the perimeter of its innermost recess. This hesitation of thresholds, rendering uncertain the point at which security is an issue, suggests the extent to which the contemporary self has interiorised a defensive posture. The precise degree of emergence from plaster that Salcedo has extablished for the wire mesh posits the security fence as a symbolic structure for our everyday habitus, deeply embedded in homes, workplaces, minds.

The fusion of wire and plaster also invokes the tension between opacity and transparency. Foucault has argued that the carceral imagination of the late twentieth century originated in the early-nineteenth-century's investment in panoptical systems of control. Restraint of the individual prisoner was ensured not by physical force but by conspicuosness. In a panoptical society, subjectivity was formed by awareness of exposure to the gaze of power, and provoked resistance in the form of inscrutability, of lack of amenability to surveillance. Salcedo’s hybridised barrier both obstructs transparency and suggests the degree to which it has been psychologised, rendering solid walls permeable to ideas, perceptions, fears of control. The predominance of surveillance in nineteenth-century society was commensurate with the development of other forms of visual culture, including the origins of practices used in modern museums. Display became a means of imposing taxonomies of order. The gallery predisposes its visitor to understand the work of art as part of a specific history and topography whose connection with more explicit forms of power and control can be made more or less obscure. Neither is aptly titled in the context of an exhibition strategy that reverses the polarities of inside and outside, of implicit and explicit.

It is not unusual in the contemporary art world to encounter works for which a radical meaninglessness is claimed. But it is extremely rare to engage with works whose resistance to meaning is subject to such specific historical constraints. Salcedo has spoken of the degree to which this resistance seemed to mount in proportion to the effort required to produce the work: the installation period proved to be insufficient, requiring ever-increasing amounts of assistance. But the more time and effort given to the project, the less it seemed to give back. ‘This is a piece that I don’t understand,’ Salcedo concluded, at the end of a process of dehumanising work which involved its creators in progressive isolation from anything that did not contribute directly to its installation. The more sinister undertones of the end result call to mind places in which the rhythms and interactions of daily life are completely suspended. But the incongruous overtones of the gallery space all too often obliterate evidence of the ways in which the process of composition can involve a parallel form of suspension. This work, which empties the gallery and forces the viewer’s imagination outside, returns ultimately to the history and conditions of its own construction – paradoxically, one of collaboration and communality. One remaining sign of the human cost expended on this re-casting of the space of art is the uneven suturing of the individual wire panels, patched together in slightly varying configurations that hesitate the viewer’s sense of horizontal and vertical hold. These marks of fabrication contrast with the high technological finish of the overall design. The inhumanity of the material is offset by teamwork and individual variation.

But perhaps the most disturbing form of intervention in the conditions of the production of contemporary art is that which gives no clue to its temporality. As the simulacrum of concentration camp confinement, Neither evokes those spaces in which nothing is done except waiting; time is suspended, the prisoner’s life is on hold, and history unravels into an interminable present tense. The visitor to White Cube can step in and out of the exhibition at a moment’s notice, but however brief the visit, she or he can never be certain of the length of time required to make the work begin to speak, or to realise it will say nothing. If the temporality of the postmodern is that in which the relations of past, present and future cannot be made coherent, then Neither is the epitome of the postmodern interval, grasped and recognized for what it is, as something produced by the ruthless logic of history, in which the meanings of history are all lost.

Notes:

1 The state of widowhood

Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at Cambridge University where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College.

http://www.whitecube.com/artists/salcedo/texts/134/