The Ends of Art and the Right to Survival, Yates MCKEE

12h At noon on April 17, 2002, twenty-four identical white cylinders are scattered
across Lima’s Plaza de Armas, the monumental administrative center of the Peruvian
capital and a recently named UNESCO World Heritage site. At first glance, these
objects, each measuring 8 x 64 inches, recall the serialized, geometric forms of
Minimalist Sculpture. Yet this impression of solidity is belied by the presence of a subtle
clue as to their particular materiality and potential function: one of the cylinders has
been dragged along the ground for several feet, leaving behind a thick while line on the
bricks of the plaza.

Responding to the simple invitation implied by the original line inscribed on the plaza,
passersby begin to break the cylinders into large fragments of a familiar material,
albeit not in the context of sculpture: chalk. Soon a range of enormous calligraphic
marks have appeared across the plaza – geometric patterns, proper names,
declarations of love – each inscription eroding the geometric contours of the object, as
well as the orderly, symmetrical image of the plaza.

13h The character of the inscriptions shifts noticeably, as a procession of laid-off public
employees arrives in the plaza to make their daily demands on the postdictatorship
government of Alejandro Toledo. For the next hour, the plaza is converted into a
massive chalkboard, with a multitude of bodies straining and cooperating to lift,
disintegrate, and utilize these unwieldy graphic instruments, to publicize their demands,
mark the memory of the dead, and reclaim the space of the Paseo for El Pueblo. Among
cacophony of inscriptions appears the injunction “Vivan Los Derechos” (“Long Live to
Rights”).

14h Riot police are dispatched to the plaza. They collect the surviving chalk fragments
into clusters, which they surround and guard, preventing access by the demonstrators
and others in the plaza. Within minutes, the ruins of the chalk objects are piled onto the
back of a government truck and hauled away. Finally a sanitation crew arrives and
cleans the grounds of the plaza with water and scrub brushes, eliminating all evidence
of the event -except, that is, for the photographic traces that bear witness to it.

Mouffe, Negri

What came to pass during the two-hour period recounted above? An artwork? If so, who
or what made or unmade it, and to what ends? When and where did it start and stop?
How, if at all, does it survive in the present? As much spatiotemporal as ethico-political,
these are some of the questions set in motion by Chalk, the quasi-collaborative
countermonument comprising Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's contribution to
the 2002 Lima Biennial.

Over the past decade, Allora and Calzadilla have sustained a uniquely productive
tension between the formal imperatives of art-historical memory and the locational
uncertainties of democratic public space in the era of postcolonial globalization. The
stakes of this tension are high at a moment in which the artistic field itself is undergoing
a crisis at the hands of a Neo-Situationist call for artists to relocate their practice within
the expanded networks of activist counter-publicity that have emerged in recent years.
The curator of the 2004 Mass MoCA exhibition The Interventionists proposes that art
should now be judged as a flexible, provisional tool kit, displacing the critical-
ontological question "Is it art?" with the instrumental demand to know "What does it
do?" in the here-and-now of a given cultural-political context1. Considered in this sense
as a mere means to an end, art itself comes to an end, dissolving into a generalized field
of "creative resistance" and "tactical media."

For some, the primary appeal of Allora and Calzadilla's work has been its putative
affinity with this tendency, and the artists are indeed sympathetic to it. But in
considering their work, to jump immediately to the ends of activism would be
historically myopic and critically irresponsible. For the singularity of their practice
consists precisely in the complication of immediacy and the interruption of ends.
And this includes claims for the end of art made in the name of activism. For Allora and
Calzadilla, art never quite ends. It lives on, but as a discontinuous inheritance rather
than a vital tradition2. Probing the claims and procedures of apparently exhausted
artistic projects - from Minimalism to Arte Povera to Land Art – Allora and Calzadilla
reanimate historically given, discipline-bound problems but in a way that refuses to
enclose them in a realm of pure self-reflexive autonomy. While the artists in some cases
engage with site-specific issues and social movements, they never fully absorb
themselves into an extra-artistic arena, insisting on the political and historical
significance of the formal questions generated by apparently obsolete mediums such as
sculpture and photography.

For instance, in its mobilization of "antiform" strategies of the late 1960s—

disorientation of scale, lateral distribution, impoverished materials, ephemeral process
—in a participatory architectural space haunted by the antagonisms of post-dictatorship
Peru, Chalk stages what Jean-Luc Nancy might call the "incompleting" of both
sculptural and sociopolitical memory, exposing them to ruin and enabling them to
survive simultaneously3.

as residents of Puerto Rico, a territory with which the U.S. has maintained a
semicolonial relationship since the Spanish-American War.

Like Chalk and Puerto Rican Light, Growth (2004) retraces sculptural memory, in this
case engaging with organic life itself, a persistent figure in the history of post-Romantic
aesthetics in which the artwork is understood as an allegory for the teleological
unfolding and spontaneous self-formation of a natural being. An exemplary instance of
such organicism in modern sculpture would be Jean Arp's biomorphic objects,
especially Growth (1938), whose title Allora and Calzadilla repeat in their own work.
But they also subvert the title's meaning by drawing on the botanical procedure of the
graft, which here is made to resonate with the historical avant-garde's strategies of
cutting and pasting, aimed at undoing the organic harmony of part and whole desired by
bourgeois aesthetics. Growth is a sculptural "montage" of botanical fragments taken
1
Nato Thompson, "Notes for a Resistant Visual Cultural Glossary," Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 1,
no 3 (2003), http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org. See also Thompson's exhibition catalogue The
Interventionists: A User's Guide to the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2004), pp. 12-21.
2
My understanding of this art-historical memory-structure is indebted to Hal Foster's essay "The Funeral
Is for the Wrong Corpse," in Design and Crime (New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 123-43.
3
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter O'Conner (Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 1991), p. 35.
from different tropical plants genetically originating in Latin America, Africa, and Asia
but geographically dispersed through colonial networks of science, agriculture, and
horticulture over the past three centuries. Derailing both the biomorphic unity of Arp
and the biosystems theory informing Hans Haacke's crucial precedent Grass Grows
(1969), this hybrid monstrosity bears the traces of its violent beginnings in the form of
botanical bandages tied around its limbs, The viability of Growth is uncertain, speaking
to an historical condition in which distinctions between natural and technical, living and
dead, Third World and First, cannot be drawn with absolute certainty.
The precarious life span, geographical displacement, and titular performativity evident
in Chalk, Puerto Rican Light, and Growth inevitably calls to mind Robert Smithson's
dialectic of site/non-site, which is everywhere echoed in Allora and Calzadilla's
practice.

Allora and Calzadilla unsettle the spatiotemporal boundaries of aesthetics, politics, and
memory, exposing us to the risks and possibilities marked by Jean-Luc Nancy when he
writes, "Art is technology that stands apart from any appearance of an end outside
itself .... Technology is endless denaturing, it is in and through technology that we are or
become 'human' (which is also end-less) and it is in and through technology that the
world becomes an (endless) world. But without end can also mean: ending in its own
annihilation." "Jean-Luc Nancy and Chantal Pontbriand: An Exchange," Parachute, no.
100 (Fall 2000), p. 25.