Public sculpture without ends, by Yates McKee (Chalk)

What has just been described? A work of art? If so, who (or what) made it? And what
for? According to what means and what ends? Where does it start and where does it
stop? What separates it (if anything) from the uneven socio-spatial field in which it took
place?
These are a few of the questions set into motion by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo
Calzadilla's Chalk, which comprised the collaborative team's contribution to the III
Bienal Iberoamericana in Lima, Perú (2002)1. These questions emerge through the
hybridization by the artists of art historical and theoretical lineages frequently
understood in isolation, if not considered to be mutually exclusive: post-minimalist
sculptural procedures and the critical urbanism of the Situationist International (SI).

To be clear: by "hybridization" I do not refer to a zietgiest of pluralist eclecticism.

Against the (a)historical voluntarism implied by such "anything goes" ac-counts, Allora
& Calzadilla's hybridism consists in foregrounding divergent inheritances that might
call each other into productive crisis, contributing to the reinvention of historically
given conventions without a dogmatic appeal to purity of genre or medium. To borrow
Hal Foster's formulation, Chalk is a form of "eccentric art' that poses investigatory
questions about what [art] might be, but always within the political situation of the
time2."

Foster's quasi-ontological terms are echoed in a recent article by Benjamin Buchloh,

who remarks, It hasp roved difficult to imagine what sculpture could be at the beginning
of the new century." According to Buchloh, the historical specificity of this "difficulty"
is overdetermined by "the rapidity with which corporate enterprise and its architecture
have abrogated even the last remnants of what was once experienced as public space,"
where sculpture might have once aspired "to trace or even initiate perpetually changing
conditions of simultaneous collective spatial perception3." While we may take issue
with narratives that posit public space as a preconstituted coherence, Buchloh's
provocation to consider the possible relationships between subjects, objects, and spaces
at a moment of intensifying corporate power constitutes a substantial challenge to artists
and critics alike, particularly those with some investment in the very idea of -radical
aesthetic practice4."
Chalk can be read as a response to Buchloh's specific challenge regarding the identity
and function of sculpture within the spatio-architectural coordinates of global
capitalism, offering a remarkable instance of what Miwon Kwon has called
"interruptive" (as opposed to "assimilative") site-specific art that stages what Jean-Luc
Nancy would call the "unworking" of community rather than its -representation.- In
order to analyze the logic of this unworking, it will be necessary to consider the
specificity of the spatio-architectural context in which Chalk -took place,- both as a
sculptural deployment and as an unprogrammed performative-collaborative event. I will
argue that Chalk did not so much interrupt a site formerly at peace with itself as expose
this site as interrupted in its very constitution.
1
Reprinted in 111 Bienal lberoamericana, ed. Luis Lama (Lima, Per6: Casa Rimac, 2002)
2
Here Foster is citing Jimmie Durham. Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (New
York: Verso, 2002), p. 142.
3
"Cargo and Cult: The Displays of Thomas Hirschhorn,- in Artforum, November 2001,
p.109.
4
Ibid. p. 110.

1
Housing Peru's oldest Baroque cathedral and its neoclassical governmental palace,
Lima's Plaza de Armas resonates with Henri Lefebvre's notion of -monumental space.-
According to Lefebvre, such spaces call forth particular, embodied experience on the
part of the subjects to whom they are addressed. Through the orchestration of
architectural conventions of scale, material, ornament, inscription, and tectonics,
monumental space projects an ideal realm of -durability- that appears to reside outside
the everyday social realm, even while providing the latter with its foundation. He
writes:
Monumental imperishability bears the stamp of the will to power. Only will, in its
elaborated forms—the wish for mastery, the will to will—can overcome, or believes it
can overcome, death. Knowledge itself fails here, shrinking from the abyss. Only
through the monument, through the intervention of the architect as demiurge, can the
space of death be negated, transfigured into a living space which is an extension of the
body; this is a transformation, however, which serves what religion, (political) power
and knowledge have in common5”.
Lefebvre understands the monumental articulation of spatial order and body-image as a
key mechanism in the dominant organization of social memory and collective
identification, especially by the state apparatus. Monumental space claims to preserve
the life of a collective body over time, protecting its inner core from the wear and tear of
material history, thus ensuring the infinite extension of that life into the future. But
according to Lefebvre, the life-preserving function of monumental space is founded on
an act of obliteration, or erasure: “To the degree that there are traces of violence and
death, negativity and aggressiveness in social practice, the monumental work erases
them and replaces them with a tranquil power and certitude...6”. This erasure—and the
aura of timeless imperishability it grants to social space--is unable to achieve a complete
illusion...its credibility is nevertotal.“ Monumentalspace remains fundamentally marked
by the conflictual conditions that give rise to it, and which it is designed to neutralize.
In the late 1990's, Lima's Plaza de Armas was "revitalized" as part of an official
campaign to construct what David Harvey would cat{ the monopoly rent" of the city—
its claims to cultural, historical, and architectural uniqueness in a global field of inter-
urban competition for highly mobile foreign investment and tourist visitation. The
extraction of monopoly rent depends crucially not only the maintenance of technical and
material infrastructure, but also the spectacularization of totality as a commodity-
image7. This historical-preservationist initiative, oriented around the global
dissemination of a national image, cannot be separated from the restructuring of the
Peruvian economy more generally over the past decade. Like other Latin American
states, Peru in the 1990s was integrated into the so-called "Washington Consensus" of
free-market macro-economic prescriptions, which have adversely affected, among many
others, tow-level state employees such as those that have regularly mobilized in the
Plaza de Armas8.

5
The Monument" (extracted from The Production of Space) in Neil Leach, ed. Rethinking Architecture:
A Reader in Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 19971, p. 142.
6
Ibid.
7
The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly, and the Commodification of Culture," in Leo Pantich and
Cohn Leys, eds. Socialist Register 2002: A World of Contradictions (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2002), pp. 93-110.
8
See Duncan Green, Silent Revolution. The Rise of Market Economics in Latin America (London.
Cassell, 2000). On the Washington Consensus, see Joseph Stietgltitz, Globalization and its Discontents
New York: Norton, 2002). Stietglitz is a former head economist at the World Bank and has emerged as
perhaps the most prominent mainstream critic of the harsh neoliberal prescriptions of the IMF,
particularly since the wave of financial crises in Latin America and East Asia.

2
As part of the III Bienal lberoamericana, Chalk was implicated in a paradox in which
the monumental spaces of the state were aesthetically reinvented even as the model of
authority they were meant to reinforce underwent a crisis of legitimacy. The imperative
of urban image-management informing the state's sponsorship of this biennial was an
important dimension of the specific site addressed by the artists. Chalk functions on the
level of immanent critique, inhabiting institutional parameters in order to open them to a
detournement, or a derailing of their proper functions.
The spatial positioning of Allora & Calzadilla.s project exhibited an oblique awareness
of its context. Yet the artwork was not fully absorbed or determined by this context; it
did not endeavor to explicitly address or reflect any unique, local issue. In fact, the
chalk objects were not designed according to the place-bound specifications of Lima at
all. They comprised the second incarnation of a project originally sited in New York
City two years earlier. Following the terms of Rosalind Krauss' argument, does this fact
not in some way replicate the indifference to site and the nomadism of modernist
sculptural autonomy, disqualifying Chalk as a properly site-specific artwork?9

Rather than appeal to "the lure of the local" the artists put forward a paradoxically
-semi-autonomous-site-specificity, insisting on the trans-continental repeatability of an
abstract sculptural formula in which the articulation of materials, morphology, scale and
distribution remains, in principle, continuous10. But it is these very formal properties
that put into crisis the work's own continuity—and that of the monumental site it
inhabits.

The prefabricated geometric regularity and obdurate density of the objects suggests a
rejection of aesthetic organicism, understood as an appeal to holistic creative labor as
well as the attribution to the sculptural object of an animating, expressive interior that
seems to bring matter “to life”. For Rosalind Krauss, breaking with organicist and
vitalist conceptions of sculpture was one of the key accomplishments of minimalism,
which effected a general de-interiorization of aesthetic experience11. Any residual
anthropomorphism to be found in such work was not a matter of comforting self-
recognition for a viewer; rather, it effected an unsettling encounter with an inhuman,
uncanny presence irreducible to any space of psychological or corporeal -privacy.- In a
similar fashion, the chalk-objects illicit a bodily projection, yet the placement of the
chalk-bodies in a horizontal, prone position, refuses anthropocentric visuality and
erectness12.
9
Rosalind Krauss, -Sculpture in the Expanded Field- in The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern
Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 19831. 31-42.
10
On semi-autonomy, see Foster, Design and Crime, p. 25. Discussions of site-
specificity receive the most rigorous and critical treatment in Mivion Kwon's One Place
After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (London and Cambridge, Mass.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2002. Kwon admonishes against a simple
celebration of “nomadism”, “deterritoratization”, and “impermanence" as the conditions
of contemporary artistic labor. Yet given that such are the conditions for artists such as
Allora and Calzadilla when invited to participate in global Biennials, it is important not
to fall into moralism and to consider the tactical possibilities such inherently temporary
venues might present. Needless to say, such venues cannot be the only format for
politicized artists interested in sustaining some kind of productivist position,
11
Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge: MIT, 19771, p.253-54
12
This would resonate with George Bataille's remark in "Architecture" that "…the human order is bound
up from the start with the architectural order, which is nothing but the development of the former. Such
that if you attack architecture, whose monumental productions are now the true masters all across the

3
In its titular word play, the work reintroduces a term banished (at least in theory) form
orthodox approaches to minimalism: iconographic reference. For while they deploy
putatively “empty” geometric forms, Allora & Calzadilla cylinders bear an
unmistakable resemblance to everyday social objects: sticks of industrially molded
limestone used to make graphic inscriptions—chalk. Yet the everyday quality of this
object is obviously estranged by its colossal scale, inviting a probably inevitable
comparison with the hypertrophic objects of Claes Oldenburg. But whereas the latter
enact a de-functionalization of everyday objects, Chalk sincerely proposes the re-
functionalization of sculpture as an object of use-value—it makes publicly available a
set of mark-making instruments. Yet as we shall see, the instrumentality of these
instruments is no simple affair. Chalk is not simply chalk.

The peculiar use-value of the objects is related to both their spatial distribution and their
temporal structure, and to comprehend these dimensions it might be useful to consider
Robert Morris' famous 1968 declaration of “Anti-Form”, where he characterizes
minimalism as an “anti-entropic and conservative enterprise” preoccupied with the
imperative of "the well-built” and the "preservation of separable, idealized ends13”. This
teleological preoccupation with end product over means signaled a violent disregard for
the singularity of materials and a fetishistic anxiety about their ever-present threat to
exceed the “preconceived, enduring forms" of the artist. Against these principles,
Morris emphasized a heterogenization of materials; a deprogramming of spatial
composition (as in his "scatter sculptures"); and the foregrounding of temporal and
material volatility that would disrupt all "static and firm" perceptual gestalts. This
involved a valorization of a certain kind of finitude, as evident in Morris' remark that
“all art dies with time and is impermanent whether it continues to exist as an object or
not14”. An anti-form practice would therefore have to go "beyond objects”. Not in a
transcendental realm of virtual, disembodied perfection, but in the fallen domain of
weight, gravity, decay, and death—a process in which “chance is accepted and
indeterminacy is implied." Pamela Lee identifies Morris's remark with what she calls
"contingent temporality," a term she defines as a calculated decentering of authorial
control over the outcome of artistic processes. According to Lee, work structured by
temporal contingency "does not so much determine the nature of the chance than set up
its conditions of possibility15."
While referring primarily to the formal procedures of sculpture and drawing, Lee's
terms are nonetheless useful when considering the decentering of individual authorship
and the horizontal, participatory orientation of many artists working at the intersection
of process and performance art in the late 1960s. A cluster of relatively marginal
practices and discourses from that time (including Fluxus, Latin American
Neoconcretism, the Diggers, and the SI) have reemerged today as points of reference for
many artists who intervene in an expanded field of publicity. Exceeding the narrow
criteria of purely formal innovation and questioning conventional forms of aesthetic
address, these contemporary practices exhibit a desire to initiate collectivity or
cooperation at however microscopic a level, or fleeting a duration16.

land, gathering the servile multitudes in their shadows, enforcing admiration and astonishment, order and
constraint, you are in some ways attacking man”. In Neal Leach, ed. Rethinking Architecture, p. 21
13
Robert Morris, « Anti-Form », Artforum, 1968, vol. 6, no 8, p. 33-35.Artforum, November 1968, p. 17.
14
Ibid. p. 64.
15
Pamela Lee, The Temporality of Drawing as Process Art," in Cornelia Butler, ed. Afterimage: Drawing
Through Process (Cambridge: MIT, 1999) p. 62.

4
The elementary impulse can be taken in a number of directions. Recently, a farcical
neo-Happening tendency has emerged, exemplified in an extreme form by the jars
sessions, cooking lessons, and chill-out zones of Rikrit Tiravanija. Nicolas Bourriaud
celebrates Tiravanija as the exemplification of what he calls "relational art”, which takes
as its “point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context17”.
Bourriaud posits the task of relational art as the search for alternative forms of
communication in a society of general reification, where all conventional forms of
dialogue and conviviality have been instrumentalized beyond recognition. Thus, while
not overtly political, the unpredictable, open-ended “moments of sociability” catalyzed
by Tiravanija are seen to offer an oblique gesture of resistance. Hal Foster seems to
endorse such a model of publicity, as when he writes, "Tiravanija has made gift
offerings in galleries that point to an alternative to the capitalist nexus of art...18”.

Foster's embrace of Tiravanija gestural anti-capitalism evinces a sorely displaced desire

for the legacy of the SI, which is, along with minimal and post-minimal sculpture, a key
genealogical strand in the practice of Allora & Calzadilla. But rather than collapse the
SI into a laundry list of precursors to the contemporary art of "participation," Allora &
Calzadilla's inheritance of the SI might be productively thought through the terms of
critical urbanism, a field that has undergone a significant reinvestment over the past
three years by leftist cultural producers in response to the massive street demonstrations
across the world against the institutions of global capitalism and the unilateral policies
of the Bush administration.

In a passage describing “the construction of situations”, Guy Debord famously wrote

“[W]e see how the most valid of revolutionary cultural explorations have sought to
break the spectator's psychological identification with the hero, so as to incite the
spectator into activity by provoking his capacities to revolutionize his own life. The
situation is thus meant to be lived by its constructors...19”. This revitalization of the
spectator as life-actor proceeds not from a mere charade of intervention in the moribund
theatre of art, but from a dis-identification with the illusory fixedness assigned to the
spaces, circuits, and images of the city. Thus, “that which changes our way of seeing the
streets is more important than what changes our way of seeing a painting20”. In Vincent
Kauffman's lucid paraphrase the constructed situation would be “simultaneously, the
street reclaimed and communication reestablished. In the end, the only authentic
communication takes place in and through the street21".

16
Broadly defined, this type of work stages process-based events, encounters and exchanges that are
irreducible to a preconceived design or a final product, It is enacted in a variety of artistic and non-artistic
sites lincluding cyberspace) and depends for its unfolding on the "live" participation of subjects. Not
unlike its function in the sixties practices referred to above, spectatorial participation is here linked to an
imperative to "deprivatize" everyday life, tactically opening quasi utopian spaces in which an experience
of "active" publicity might be accomplished that is otherwise thwarted by the enshrining of the market
and the individual consumer as the organizing principles of sociality.
17
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 20021. 113.
18
Hal Foster, Design and Crime, 42.
19
Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's
Conditions of Organization and Action”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken
Knabb, (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981, p. 25.
20
Ibid.
21
Vincent Kauffman, "Angels of Purity," OCTOBER 79, Winter 1997, 63. Kauffman's subtle
deconstructive reading of situationist texts is a key point of reference for the present analysis. Although
he mentions the thematics of life and death in these texts, he does not unfold a systemic analysis of them.

5
The terms of Chalk might easily appear to resonate with this imagery of – the street
reclaimed and communication re-established”. But against such a desire for an un-
alienated spatio-communicative event, the work foregrounds in an exaggerated fashion
a technology of inscription as the condition of public space. The entropic, trace-leaving
structure of the work complicates Debord's appeal to self-present communication, and
by extension the model of a living, self-directed community it serves to reinforce22.

Jean-Luc Nancy has developed a comparable analysis of “community" and "finitude"

that art historians such as Miwon Kwon have recently drawn upon to un-secure
accounts of community-based art. Such accounts, Kwon argues, posit community as a
preconstituted essence of which art is taken to be the transparent means of expression,
providing the latter with a seemingly absolute guarantee of its social relevance and
responsibility. Kwon's Nancyian provocation to think of community as a necessarily
incomplete and 'inoperative' specter rather than a self-grounded basis provides a subtle
set of terms through which to approach the aesthetic and political specificity of Allora &
Calzadilla's work23.

In a similar vein, we might describe Allora & Calzadilla's chalk-instruments as means

without ends, which is not to say that they are autonomous ends in of themselves in a
Kantian sense. Rather than an initiate a moment of transparent communication, the
objects are anonymous and mute, their silence addressing no one in particular or in
general. If Chalk were to be read iconographically, the objects in the plaza might be said
to stand for some collective value, incarnating an ideal meaning—perhaps even that of
democracy itself. Rather, Allora & Calzadilla’s instruments set the stage for an
excessive linguistic event in which the identity of society emerges as what Claude
Lefort calls an empty place- that is incommensurable with the logics of the icon and the
monument. Both evidence what Lefebvre calls the wish for mastery- that attempts to
ward off the finitude on which spaces are founded (and which makes their mutation
possible)24.
Chalk can thus be understood as a counter-monument to democratization, which,
through its insistence on finite material, spatial dispersion, and participatory tactility,
undoes the historicist function of the monument, which is to mark in authoritative
fashion the meaning of a site, securing the continuity of its identity through time.
Against monumental inscription, which claims to express rather than produce the
meaning of a site, Allora & Calzadilla propose a different kind of land-marking that
does not affirm the present through a reference of the past, but opens a space in which
groups actively forgotten by dominant urban images might declare the right to the city.
According to Rosalyn Deutsche, this right not only lays claim to physical spaces, but
also declares the right to constitute and question our manner of living together in the

22
It is important to emphasize that the discourse of the SI is not a straw interlocutor – it
cannot be simply dismissed as an outmoded instance of sixties humanism which has
have been safely left behind. For these terms have a powerful afterlife today, and they
continue to make claims on the present, within the discourses of art and politics alike.
23
Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, p. 7.
24
The sphere of pure means or gestures (i.e., means which, while remaining such, are
freed form their relation to an end) as the properly political sphere." Giorgio Agamben
quoted in Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in
Ethics and Politics (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 19971, 176_ 26
6
city, and yet cannot be invoked in the name of 'proper' owners of space or of restoring a
once unified non-alienated spatial condition undisturbed by antagonisms25."

The figure of -the people" became an explicit Locus of struggle during the activation of
Chalk—one man inscribed in huge letters "Toledo is of the People," while a woman
associated with the demonstrators wrote "Paseo de Santa Rosa is of the People”, and
not, implicitly, of the state. The presence of the evicted workers in the plaza signaled the
inadequacy of contemporary narratives of democratization in Peru. It was precisely this
narrative of harmonious, linear democratization that was on display in the III Bienal
Iberoamericana in Lima, which no doubt accounts for the anxious reaction on the part of
authorities to the dramatic giganticization of the worker's demands through their
participation in Chalk.

In a remarkable scene captured on video by the artists, police officers are shown
awkwardly gathering the largest surviving fragments of the chalk objects into piles, and
then surrounding them in order to prevent their further deployment by demonstrators.
The artwork was thus placed under arrest—an act of spatial limitation, temporal
interruption, and juridical sanction in which post-minimalist sculptural procedures and
democratic principles were repudiated simultaneously. Equally striking are images of a
sanitation crew cleansing the plaza of the traces of Chalk, literally enacting Lefebvre's
point that monumental spaces can only maintain their aura of authority on acts of
erasure.
Following Deutsche, we can designate the state's purifying response as agoraphobic: “a
panicked reaction to the openness and indeterminacy of the democratic public as
phantom—a kind of agoraphobic behavior adopted in the face of a public space that has
loss at its beginning26”. Here Deutsche echoes Jacques Derrida, who writes: "The ruin
does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In
the beginning there is ruin27”. There is ruin at the beginning and at the end. In fact, ruins
signal the ruination of any ends whatsoever. It is this endlessness that the state set out to
obliterate in its response.

25
Rosalyn Deutsche, “Democratic Public Space”, in Things in The Making. Pragmatism and
Architecture. ed. Joan Ockman (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 20001. 79.
26
Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 19971,
323. 28
27
Cited in Eduardo Cadava, "Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins," in OCTOBER 96, Spring 2001. 43.