A Wheel within a Wheel A-turning, Way in the Middle of the Air

A Wheel within a Wheel A-turning, Way in the Middle of the Air

(Published in The Wheel Project, catalogue for the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, 2002.)

The Wheel Project emerges from a rich matrix of themes and debates swirling around current art-world discourses: the culture of display, the history of museumology, contemporary museum practices, and artist interventions which question and challenge all of these. The wheels also raise larger social questions surrounding these debates What is art? Who is an artist, and who gets to decide? Finally, the project nudges us to think about access, diversity, social class, democracy, and, perhaps most especially, the role of utopia in a world that has never seemed more dystopic .

From their 18th-century origins as Wunderkammern (private collections juxtaposing objects from plundered lands) museums have served as repositories of cultural memory, as secular rituals, as institutions that reproduce and reinforce existing social relations. If, as much cultural theory proposes, culture is the contested site where the ruling elites establish hegemony and the subaltern groups challenge this power, then museums are prime centres for this struggle to be played out.

“Culture has Replaced Brutality as a Means of Maintaining the Status Quo” proclaimed a banner by artists Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge in their now iconic show at the Art Gallery of Ontario upon their return from New York in 1969. (1) Today we might not state things so boldly, but in those heady days many artists felt they had agency and were part of a movement that ended a war and ushered in a new era of social critiques and actions centred on the environment and the rights of women, gays, and ethnic minorities. Ever since, there has been a tradition of artists working both within and without systems of exhibitions to expose their sources of power.(2)

German conceptualist Hans Haacke has persistently and consistently investigated the seemingly neutral exhibits of major institutions, demonstrating the links between corporate sponsors, wealthy donors, and acquisitions policies. In 1985, he targeted Mobil’s sponsorship of The Treasures of Ancient Nigeria at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2) Haacke exposed the exhibit’s apparent neutrality and the beneficence of its sponsor by discussing the role Mobil was playing in apartheid South Africa. For a one-man show at the Guggenheim in 1970, Haacke documented the practices of New York City slumlords. The Guggenheim cancelled the exhibition and fired the curator. Haacke responded by documenting and exhibiting the connections between Guggenheim trustees and corporations with real estate holdings in New York. (3)

Every museum is perforce a political institution, no matter whether it is privately run or maintained and supervised by government agencies. Whether museums contend with governments, power trips of individuals, or the corporate steamroller, they are in the business of molding and channeling consciousness. Even though they may not agree with the system of beliefs dominant at the time, their options…are limited. Survival of the institution, personal careers are at stake. But in non-dictatorial societies, the means for the production of consciousness are not all in one hand.(4)

In his award-winning and much documented intervention, the American artist Fred Wilson exhibited slave shackles in the same vitrine with precious antebellum silver at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore to demonstrate the connection between slavery and the wealth of Baltimore elites in the 19th century. In his words,

There is a lot of silver in this museum. I created one vitrine of repousseé silver with the label, “Metalwork 1793-1880.” But also made of metal, hidden deep in the storage rooms at the historical society, were slave shackles. So I placed them together, because normally you have one museum for beautiful things and one museum for horrific things. Actually, they had a lot to do with one another, the production of the one was made possible by the subjugation enforced by the other. Quite possibly, both of these could have been made by the same hand. To my mind, how things are displayed in galleries and museums makes a huge difference in how one sees the world. (5)

Both Haacke and Wilson argue that it is a responsibility of artists, and indeed of a democratic culture, to challenge art institutions, to provoke thought and debate. Yet no matter how hard these and other artists bite the hand, it does keep on feeding them. The Guggenheim’s censorship notwithstanding, the ability of institutions to absorb protest—even welcome it—and keep on with business as usual is an enduring one.

Furthermore, convergences between the worlds of art and advertising compromise the ability of artists to locate a site of resistance. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between sophisticated advertising campaigns and art installations that are meant, in the avant garde tradition, to epater le bourgeois. In 1998 and 1999, New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani objected to Chris Ofili’s “elephant-dung Madonna” and threatened to withdraw funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The predictable outcry about censorship raised some interesting issues. First, the increasing control that corporate sponsors exercised over collections in the museum, their courting by the director, and the many special favours meted out to them was eyebrow-raising. Then, the art was owned by advertising magnate Charles Saatchi, and the works therein, meant to attract notice through shock value, smacked all too clearly of successful advertising techniques, where attention-getting in an image-soaked world is the sole aim.<>

[subhead]
Can a Museum Change?

The Gardiner Museum’s Wheel Project marks a significant departure from artists’ interventions, at the same time creating a site for new discourses about art in a media dominated landscape. Uniquely, this exhibit originates with the institution itself, in an unprecedented collaboration among the lead artist, the curator and the education staff. There is no overt challenge to the power relations inherent in museum structures; indeed the Wheel Project on face value is above all a gentle undertaking. Yet factored into the very make-up of the process of creating the wheels and their exhibition are deep questions about power in the realm of art.

All museums operate through classification, and all classification implies power, the power of choice, of inclusion and exclusion. Particularly in a private museum such as the Gardiner, primarily dedicated to the exhibition of exquisite works of ceramic art, objects are contemplated for their preciousness, aesthetic value and historical interest. Their presence implies the absence of all those works not as precious, beautiful, or interesting – not deemed worthy of inclusion.

Yet in The Wheel Project we have a show whose operating principle is inclusion. All wheels are welcome, and all are of equal worth. Their makers range from retired Steelworkers to transgendered youth to African Canadian artists to children in a housing project. The Education Department simply cast their net as far and wide as it would go, the only constraint the fact that an opening date had to be set. They were given a list of community groups by an advisory group set up for that purpose, and then just let the list grow as people suggested other groups. In the end, over 350 people made wheels, and the stories of over 50 of them can be read in these pages.

The museum, through the most commendable potters who led the workshops, established a non judgmental and welcoming atmosphere. Each participant felt honoured, felt that their work was appreciated and valued. Astonishingly, based on the interviews, no one seemed to feel the weight of the other 349 artists, worried if they were “good enough”, if their wheel would be compared unfavourably to others. On the contrary, almost everyone felt that the project was valuable because it brought so many disparate groups of people together, that it somehow reflected the “real” city of Toronto. A decade of identity politics, both in the mainstream and in the art world, has shifted the landscape somewhat. But a glance, say, at the makeup of City Council, or of artists exhibiting in major institutions in Ontario, compels us to the conclusion that the vertical mosaic first proposed by John Porter in the 1950s still holds sway. Thus the visionary character of the Wheel Project, foretelling a future when institutions and social structures genuinely reflect the citizens they serve.

In 1997, when Melanie Fernandez took over from retiring Naomi Lightbourne as Community Arts Officer at the Ontario Arts Council, she codified and legitimized (with the help of a group of advisors) collaborative community arts practice in the Province. In the ensuing years, numerous community projects big and small have been undertaken, where an artist works with community members who do not self-define as artists to produce participatory works of art in various media. While the underpinnings of the Wheel Project are thus not new, the fact that it was initiated by a museum is to my knowledge unprecedented. It shifts the terrain and adds new complexity to the current democratizing force of community art. A new (as defined here) and recently legitimized art practice, community art exists on the margins of the art world. The Gardiner museum, in conferring power and prestige to this project, pulls it into the centre. As the museum further legitimizes the practice, it democratizes itself as an institution.

Who Says?

Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades in the 1920s profoundly changed the way artmaking and art exhibiting would henceforth be perceived. Duchamp’s project — exhibiting mundane found objects such as bicycle wheels, or his more famous upside down urinal – was to aver that art is art because an artist proclaims it to be. However, “despite Marcel Duchamp’s earlier claim,… that it is the artist who accords an object its status as a work of art, in reality power still rests with the framing institution….All museums, through their chosen mode of display, using the traditional devices of plinth, vitrine and label, have the potential to transform almost anything they exhibit into a work of art.” (6) These twin concepts of naming and framing come into play in the Wheel Project. Each participant enters into an unspoken contract which states that his or her wheel is a work of art by virtue of their having made it. By exhibiting the work in a prestigious institution, the Gardiner further proclaims its status as an art work, conferring preciousness and honour to the wheels, individually and collectively.

In nominating objects as art, museums typically decontextualize relics from the past. As they aestheticize, they de-historicize, stripping objects of their social or religious meaning. They then set up education departments whose job it is to interpret the works for the public, by putting them back in a historical and social context. The education staff usually plays lesser sister to the curatorial staff, attested to by its frequent location in the basement of the building. The evolution of the Wheel Project, however, is a radical departure from these norms. According to Penny Bateman, Access and Outreach Coordinator:

Sue Jeffries had met Sanjit and was excited about his work… When he came to Toronto, Sue, Diane Wolfe, Melanie Fernandez, Angie Wong (9) and I had lunch with him, and he had been talking about his interest in the wheel and we all agreed this could be an exciting project, initially with a few groups. Melanie was thinking about artists and the workplace, the wheel and a union connection. They would need to be exhibited with steel in some way, and we thought about including steelworkers. I wanted to work with youth… Angie was thinking of incorporating a teacher component, and she had contacts at the Dufferin Mall. A big issue was where it would be exhibited. My interest was let’s not do it down in the basement, or in small cases in the lobby, let’s make it a real exhibit. Sue leapt at that too, and it was presented to Alexandra Montgomery [Director of the Gardiner] and then the Board, and to their credit, they took it on, considering there were no real objects to look at, artists weren’t going to make them, and they were asked to have free admission. It was all risk taking. (10)

For all the ensuing ups and downs, conflicts, snags, and personality clashes that are the inevitable aspects of community art projects (the bigger, the worse), that lunch represents a shift, a breaking away from old patterns of museum practice towards new narratives of exhibition and display, of art and community.

Homo Faciens

Asked in an interview how he would define genius, Duchamp responded, “l’impossibilite du fer”. The impossibility of iron punning on the word ‘faire’, to make. Once artists no longer ground and mixed their own pigments, art, even painting, became a matter of choosing rather than making. Making, for Duchamp, is an impossibility. Yet just as photography didn’t kill painting, the Readymades and their children and grandchildren – conceptual art – didn’t stop artists from making, and ceramic artists, even the most cerebral and conceptual of them, are quintessential makers. Clay is prima materia, the earth from whence we spring and to which we return. Taking a bit of wet earth and fashioning a wheel out of it is an archetypal event for the psyche. A wheel is an emblem of motion and of rest, a mandala, a tabula rasa.

[clay] is a dangerous and elusive substance-the only one…that can be used without any tools, as it comes from the ground. Most common, though most complex, it has a wider range of uses and greater potentialities than any other natural substance. It has no definite form in itself. It is the ground on which we tread and it is the bottom of the oceans, but it can be pressed, coiled, pinched, thrown on the wheel, cast or jiggered into any form imaginable. (7)

The coming together of primordial substance with primordial symbol, shaped by hands, (“fingertips are the brains and heart of the potter” 8) set free an extraordinary range of images and stories: flowers, fish, mountains, trees and masks. Goddesses, the gears of a clock, roses, monkeys, waves, eyes, bridges, ball bearings, roads, swords, trains, elders and children, male and female energies, the grapes of wrath, the wheel of life, the archway to the spirit world, the absence and the presence of God. The exhibition as social bricolage.

Like the AIDS quilt, the exhibition of the wheels has no centre, and thus no periphery. “…no hierarchy, subordination, or ranking; no ‘metanarrative’ that tells a single story or even settles on a particular tone. The Quilt is the ultimate collage, one that is constantly being reformed, reinvented….no one tells the viewer where to start, finish or pay particular attention….Juxtapositions…prevent any clear or conventional response…” 11 The wheels are a book of hieroglyphs, capable of being read in any direction, up, down, sideways or crossways. Like objects in the original Wunderkammer, cabinet of wonder, the wheels coexist in a happy jumble, as disparate as a doughnut and a Catherine Wheel, a sundial and a fish, a turntable and an arbola de vida. The exhibition attests to bricoleur, the “instinctive and mysterious love of things which have no known relationship” and Sammeltreib, the “primal urge to collect”. (12) Interestingly, insofar as the Wunderkammer had any system of classification, objects were divided into three categories: naturalia, artificialia and mirabilia and the wheels fall into these same classifications. There are depictions of the natural world, flora and fauna, mountains, rivers and lakes; man made objects like the doughnut, the turntable and the sundial; and metaphysical symbols and symbolic states of mind – the unity of mankind, joy, hope, community, the above world and the below world, the path to God, and so on. The joyfully unscientific principles which dictated the way the wheels were placed is precisely what lends the exhibit as a whole its profound aesthetic pleasure.

The Identity Saga

Art, like money, has gone global. Just as currency relentlessly and virtually circles the globe, leaving no apparent trace, so art installations and the artists who make them travel ceaselessly from biennale to biennale, from Sao Paulo to Tokyo, Toronto to Venice, Belgrade to Los Angeles. The art is de-localized, it could be made anywhere, as its jet-lagged makers stagger from opening to opening.The international art journals read like glossy ad campaigns, and sometimes, if one squints an eye just a little, art criticism reads like a satire of art criticism. And the response as well, the aesthetic consciousness, becomes commodified, the gallerygoer as consumer, making a quick trip through the exhibits before the actual consumption, in gift shop and elegant cafe, can begin. The art consumer passively accepts what is shown, her solace the belief that only a few, select people are in the know, understand what this is all about. And this is about the realm of pastiche, simulacrum, semiotext; of high art status conferred on low art; of ceaseless effort to wrest attention through scale, shock value or oddity. Against all this, community art proposes the humble, the quotidian, the hand made; the return of the means of expression to the populace; the nomination and inclusion of art forms excluded from the mainstream.

“Exhibitions are the central speaking subjects in the standard stories about art which institutions and curators often tell to themselves and to us….the building, its agents and its projects have personalities and traits which combine to produce what might be called a character – the speaking and performing body by which it is known and judged, seen and heard.” (14) In the synergy between viewer and object viewed, an identity is constructed. Where the exhibit valorizes its precious and vulnerable objects, placing them in vitrines with special lighting to highlight their exclusivity, the viewer too is privileged to think of himself as special, as the possessor of aesthetic judgement and knowledge. Like the objects which are in by virtue of those that are out, the gallerygoer perceives himself in contradistinction to the non-gallerygoer: the person outside, the person not worthy of inclusion. Of course,at the same time, marketing and education departments strive valiantly to bring more and especially more non-traditional publics into the institution, and these two phenomena create a certain schizophrenia about the institution in the minds of the public.

Audiences for community art in general, and the Wheel Project in particular, have another story to tell. Rather than a person of discriminating taste, that is, a person who discriminates, the visitor to the wheel project can see herself as a creator or potential creator in a society of creators. Passivity is replaced by an image of the self as an active, responsive member of the polis, a person with agency, will, intent. “Looking at art…corresponds to our stupefied fascination before the TV set….Passivity in front of the spectacle is the very opposite of waking up, looking at events critically, seeing reality and feeling responsible…Responsibility implies that one is carrying out intentions, shaping the environment, influencing others.” (15) Just as the wheel making workshops brought diverse people together, the exhibit draws on new audiences for the Gardiner and brings them into contact with its traditional audience. Thus we have art that doesn’t atomize or isolate, but establishes relatedness:

In the past, we have made much of the idea of art as a mirror (reflecting the times); we have had art as a hammer (social protest); we have had art as furniture (something to hang on the walls); and we have had art as a search for the self. There is another kind of art, which speaks to the power of connectedness and establishes bonds, art that calls us into relationship.(16)

As a not inconsiderable bonus, the participants, having worked with clay if only once, can never again see the precious ceramics of the past as impersonal, decontextualized objects. Henceforth they will understand that these, too, were made by human hands, in a particular time and place, for a particular purpose. That they are also beautiful now tells a story about their creator’s joy and skill, rather than about their quasi-spiritual aestheticism.

And the Little Wheel Turned by Faith

As the art created for the global market grows ever more homogeneous (even, perhaps especially, in its endless quest for the shock of the new) the reality of civic life in a city such as Toronto is ever more heterogeneous. The Wheel Project makes a bold strike in recognizing, honouring and reflecting this reality. Walter Mignolo speaks about the colonial difference as a condition of not being able to be where one is, whereas the archetypal French or Englishman is always where ever he is. Mignolo sees “not being able to be where one is” as a plus, a positive stance in a globalized and brutalized world: “Not being able to be where one is is the promise of an epistemological potential and a cosmopolitan transnationalism that could overcome the limits and violent conditions generated by being always able to be where one belongs. I am where I think.” (17) We might change this to, ‘I am where I make, where I create”. The act of making a wheel places its maker in the centre of his own consciousness; her viewing of the other 349 wheels places her in a multiplicity of othernesses. One cannot create and at the same time perceive oneself to be marginal. One cannot see the exhibit of these wheels and perceive oneself to be isolated, singular, disconnected.

Everything mitigates against hope. We look back on a century of horrors, in the middle of which stands the Holocaust, the unthinkable event which made the ideal of art as the metaphysical assuager of human misery laughable, even obscene. We look ahead to what many leaders are predicting will be a forty year war against the Middle East. Postmodern thought has informed us of the death of the metanarratives: Freud,_Marx and the story of modernism in art, the heroic striving for pure form. All images and texts are equal, equally fake. In Debord’s Society of the Spectacle we are stunned into passivity by the glossy surfaces of advertising and the media. In Baudrillards’ vision, we are warned not to attempt to look for meaning in images, as they are only simulacra, imitations of imitations.
Public space–train stations, parks and even the sky-are colonized by advertising, and the unconscious itself becomes the last and best territory to be conquered and bent to the will of the corporate agenda.

To conceive of a better future, or the means to get to there, is absurd; worse, it’s unfashionable. Yet the longing for a different world, what we might call the utopian impulse, remains as a deeply buried archetype in the human psyche. Allowed no social outlet, it emerges in civic life in distorted, even perverted forms. At the time of writing, 94% of the American populace supports their government’s war on terrorism. Their own traumatic losses seem apparently unrelated to the deaths of countless of their innocent civilian counterparts on the other side of the world. It is being claimed that this is the first issue to unite both blacks and whites in the U.S. The fundamentalist right (of all stripes) has always had the remarkable ability to take human longing, deep human feeling, give it expression, and channel it towards their own ends. At play here is the impulse towards unity, the desire to act out as one people the defining American myth of preserving freedom and democracy for the world. What has not been perpetrated, what acts of man’s inhumanity to man, have not been carried out in the name of democracy (both Stalin and Pinochet claimed they were acting in its name), the secular religion of our times?

What can we set against this? So far, although artists have been tossed on the pyre of “democracy” in various contexts, art hasn’t changed the world. But we can begin, in small and humble ways, to change through art the ways people represent themselves, they way they relate to one another, and the way they are seen. Community art does not typically hold up the banner of social protest. It’s critique is a structural one. Real change, both inner and outer, is subtle and elusive. Yet in its vision, its methodology, and its exhibition strategy, the Wheel Project tells us a story about a world where people are equally valued, welcomed and able to come together in a common purpose. The circle itself is a symbol of equality, of unity. The exhibition allows us to experience our desire for utopia, our secret wish for the peaceable kingdom.

Community art is the only artistic practice which addresses, in its methodology, rather than in its content, the issue of social class. The single greatest triumph of the cold war was to win consensus for the belief that social class does not exist in North America. The disparity between rich and poor is acknowledged, but the poor are either too lazy (the conservative view) or too unlucky (the liberal view) to avail themselves of the opportunities presented by a democratic society. The denial of social class as an inherent, structural inevitability precludes social change, yet here too, it is perhaps a perversion of an unspoken longing for a genuine classless society. Again, the Wheel Project permits this longing,legitimizes it, manifests it. The wheels were made by people from all walks of life, all ages, and a plethora of ethnic backgrounds, and their placement is utterly democratic in the true sense of that word.

Carol Duncan has argued persuasively that museums are secular churches wherein are enacted secular rituals. Art museums are “sites which enable individuals to achieve liminal experience – to move beyond the psychic constraints of mundane existence, step out of time, and attain new, larger perspectives.” (18) Contemplating the wheels at the Gardiner we may redefine ideas of what is spiritual and what is beautiful. According to Duncan, the story told by modern art is one of the (male) artist heroically struggling to renounce the exterior world in the quest for pure art. “…the more artists free themselves from representing recognizable objects in space, the more exemplary they become as moral beings and the more pious and spiritually meaningful their artistic efforts.” (19) The wheel project tells the story of a different spiritual journey, one taken in communion with others, where heroism is defined as a shared vision of a new world. Beauty is not the search for pure form, but the aesthetics of individual creation within a collective utopic wishing.
For the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, the quality of astonishment is the signifier of utopian dreams.
“…what astounds is therefore not so much being itself, but rather the latency of being-to-come at work, the signs and foreshadowings of future being….astonishment constitutes an implicit or explicit perception of the future concealed within that which exists, it already carries within itself a story line, the trajectory of the not-yet-finished, the struggle of the incomplete to free itself from the as-yet-formlessness of the present.”(20) The wheels, then, are traces, signatures left of what might come to be. For Bloch, the seed of the positive lies curled within the negative, hope inside despair. We set the something of utopia against the nothing of social nihilism, against death itself. We turn to a different moon, whose tides pull us in a new direction. And we are astonished.