Jamelie Hassan, Midnight´s Children, from The Trilogy, 1990
Photo credit: Patricia Holdsworth, Regina

Some people say that we experience a crisis of legitimacy in visual art today. Despite the fact that young people desire artistic training in numbers never before seen, would-be peers at art magazines, galleries and university departments spend time thinking about art´s diminished function in society. So, what is the problem? Is art for art´s sake out of date, artists hungrily groping for new challenges and/or recognition? Is globalisation stretching into the art world, making former centres seem relatively unimportant, or is the art world trying to make up for past sins by admitting artists from diasporic communities and all around the world a place in Artforum and Flash Art, just because it suits theoretical strands which are currently in vogue in the pages of those magazines? And who is going to do what about that? Entering the scene from the English Department, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one person who springs to the mind as answering the call. by CHARLOTTE BYDLER

The pleasure in sharing Spivak´s self-assigned task, is the urgency with which she points to an easily perceived problem in society after the age of formal colonialism: the representation of the formerly colonised. Spivak indeed widens the scope to include all people that can be said to be subordinate in relation to the observer, the one who describes. Can the academician or indeed the privileged part of the world´s population learn anything from the subaltern, the ones who are described? An Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the Department of English, Columbia University, Spivak can look back on a career achieved by few immigrant women in their mid-fifties. Born in Calcutta, educated at a prestigious university like the Cornell, Spivak is herself a good example of the "enabling violence" she talks about as a consequence of colonialism.1 Spivak is now on the top of a career built on elaborations on the consequences of colonialism, in post-colonial theory. Tanzanian/British literary critic Bart Moore-Gilbert has defined the field as preoccupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subordination - economic, cultural and political - between (and often within) nations, races or cultures, which characteristically have their roots in the history of modern European colonialism and imperialism and which, equally characteristically, continue to be apparent in the present era of neo-colonialism.2 Often, Spivak is described as a feminist Marxist deconstructivist. She is known for having introduced Jacques Derrida´s Of Grammatology (1967, translated by Spivak in 1976) to the American audience.3 Her work evolves around issues of pedagogy, the possibilities of creating a genuinely transcultural cultural studies program, gender-class subordination, counter strategies to (post-) colonial subordination, and a rigorous recognition of difference. She scrutinises what she perceives as a present "Western benevolence", which she compares to colonial practice in its destructive effects.4 Important to Spivak is the positionality of the writer or interpreter. Therefore, she always meticulously presents herself culturally, geographically, in relation to class, politics, gender etc. to the reader. To Spivak, art is no specific field within culture, but just another ideological practice. Thus, artistic practice is as good as any other activity if you want to analyse society and to take action. Characteristically writing about an artist with a migratory background, Spivak draws the reader into a teaching-room when unfolding the 1990 exhibition by Jamelie Hassan in the Regina Public Library, Canada.5 There were four works installed: Meeting Nasser (1985), The Trilogy: Shame, Midnight´s Children and the Satanic Verses (1990), Inscription (1990) and Mom, You´re Gonna Blow It (1990). The exhibition is indeed rich in text, but characteristically a literary critic like Spivak focuses heavily on "reading" the exhibition rather than "seeing" it. In her catalogue essay, Spivak approves of Hassan´s roundabout way to discuss matters of identity. Instead of her own complicated case as born to Lebanese parents in Canada and growing up in an Arabic-speaking home, Hassan has chosen to go by way of writers like Pakistani/British Salman Rushdie. In the installation Inscription, Rushdie´s name is found among other censored writers from the Arab-speaking world. Brass bowls inscribed with authors´ names, covered by ink, becomes a metaphor for the threatening quality of text. Because it is eloquently present, it is a stand-in for the author her- or himself. Text mimes presence.6 Jamelie Hassan, detail from the Satanic Verses, from The Triology, 1990 Photo credit: Patricia Holdsworth, Regina In Hassan´s video and photographic work Meeting Nasser, a young girl on the video screen reads a text on censorship by another censored writer, Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz. Depicted on a photograph behind her is another young girl handing over flowers to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the censor of Mahfouz. To Spivak, the video screen mimes the stage where identity is learned, through cultural institutions like language. The installation is also a token of difference: children the same age, same sex, same cultural "origin" but in different times and context, learning cultures differently in different languages. This, says Spivak, is an instance where we can see that "origin" is not inborn, but handed down and learned. The girl in the video is called "a new Canadian", reading the text by Mahfouz in English interpretation - forming a history, according to Spivak, written elsewhere, for the exhibition.7 Spivak points to a striking instance; the similarities and differences between the girls are indeed obvious. This could very well be what the experience of migrancy, personified by the immigrant, has to teach - but Spivak slips from talking about a "real origin", a fit between representation (history) and the living person learning his or her identity, to the limits of theory and representation too fast.8 This is a point where it is not common practice to see the work of art as "text" in the sense of historic record. Even if an artwork features an historic event, we do not judge reality by its appearance in art, but rather (however not necessarily) art by its relation to what´s not art - and this is a distinction rather easily made. To Spivak, the self, or the subject, is not innate but constructed discursively. Here, Derrida´s thoughts on the decentered subject is of value to Spivak. She writes:     A subject-effect can be briefly plotted as follows: that which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense discontiuous network ('text' in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language and so on. [...] Different knottings and configurations of these strands, determined by heterogeneous determinations which are themselves dependent upon myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating subject.9 Spivak also uses Lacan´s view of the decentered subject as constructed through language, and Foucault´s manifold subject positions into which the subject is inscribed through textuality. This puts an obstacle to making identity and consciousness fully self-present. (But what kind of exception is the all-knowing critic to tell such facts?) It further has the effect that no-one can claim to have priority in interpretation on the basis of lived experience, since no-one is fully present to her- or himself.     In Hassan´s installation Midnight´s Children, Spivak makes an excursion into autobiography, noting that she was awake (present we might add) on the midnight in question; 14-15 of August in 1947, when India and Pakistan were divided. Hassan, an immigrant Canadian, thus appropriates Spivak´s history and identity. In her usual style, Spivak registers her own emotional response, finding it "all right".10 And what right can she claim on a history of her own, indeed, being merely a "subject-effect", however ambiguously self-aware? In the installation The Satanic Verses, Spivak reads neither metaphors nor symbols into the photographs of an all-male Bradford congregation burning copies of Rushdie´s book. This is "what really happened", a slippage from discourse to material reality. Spivak eventually discovers a "heavily-coded bit of history": framing the book-burning Muslims, the photograph shows the late-nineteenth-century campanile of a public building in Bradford, in Venice or Urbino Renaissance style which in its turn inherited forms from Islamic cultures.11However much could be said, we will not dwell on the topic of truth in a photographic representation. The campanile, an easily identified instance of cross-cultural exchange - something usually approved of by Spivak - here merely gives her an opportunity for comparing it to the "real thing" on a videotape of the 10th century Al Ahzar mosque in Cairo, belonging to the installation Mom, You´re Gonna Blow It. Even if given in quotation marks, how can this be more real (may one dare think original or authentic?) than a cultural appropriation in a later day´s Western society? Analogically, Spivak accuses the Bradford Muslims for fetishising the origin statically, as compared to the dynamic movements performed by praying Muslims (presumably also an all-male crowd) on the videoscreen of Mom.... This picture serves as a metaphor for the origin in the present.12 But again, it is only a picture, a metaphor. Presumably, Muslims in Cairo vary as much in their opinions as in Bradford. Mom... also includes a written dialogue between the artist and the artisan Aly Aly Hassan, who made the brass plates for Jamelie Hassan´s exhibition without knowing that it was in support of Rushdie, who has a fatwa on his head. Jamelie makes Aly Aly admit that he would not personally kill Rushdie, if given the opportunity. She also shows Aly Aly as one of the praying Cairo Muslims. Thus, says Spivak, Jamelie Hassan not only intervenes in the artisan´s life, teaching him a humanistic lesson about himself, but also gives a humanised face of the Muslim prayers to her Canadian audience. Whether or not understood by her audience, Hassan´s work is "the clamour of her responsibility, to the trace of the historical other, in the self, as agent of history."13 Jamelie Hassan, image from installation Mom, Youre Gonna Blow It, 1990 east display cases, Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Regina, Canada Photo credit: Patricia Holdsworth, Regina Picturing myself as a gallery visitor, do I follow Spivak in her understanding of Hassans pieces, and would anyone? Praising Hassan´s placing of artworks in public spaces and living areas, Spivak asserts: "Political art that respects this history |in the sense of real events placed in artform in people´s everyday lives, to take on new meaning][...], changes minds as drops of water groove stone."14 Even if people feel they know or understand nothing of the artist´s intentions, their minds willy-nilly change. But into what? Who will receive, shape, or confront casual observations? This random way the work of art works on the present situation is actually not allowed by Spivak in her essay. Instead the interpreter (Spivak) firmly takes us by the hand and guides us along the proper path. Eventually, this discourse on identity changes the consciousness in those prepared to see the same thing as Spivak, provided that they go to the gallery and see Hassan´s work, and/or read Spivak´s essay. And who (or, following Spivak, what non-personal forces) brought Hassan´s work in the Regina Gallery in the first place? Is it perhaps once more a question of "enabling violence", in this case in cultural politics under the banner of multi-culturalism? A serious objection to Spivak thus concerns the assigned task of the artist. The favoured subject of cultural interpretation is cross-culturally experienced migrators, but they are not allowed a privilege in interpreting, their experience producing only "subject-effects". Spivak is often close to saying that the artist has a duty to express her or his cultural situation, to talk of a social setting which has produced the artist such as s/he is. But who can be the legitimate judge of such an operation, once the artist leaves the exhibition after the installation´s completion to its own fate meeting the visitors? If the enlightened cultural critic, like Spivak, is to guide the interpretation of a work of art, it would take an advanced surveillance system to make sure that the work of art is rightfully understood in relation to power-interests of the world. More problematically, this implies that the work of art is a statement which has a truth-value, or how else could there be a mis-informed representation of the subaltern. Spivak also runs into trouble with her double marxist-discursive analysis. While the former counts with a recognisable reality which can be observed and acted on, the latter says that discourse is all that matters, everything is "text" or a network of statements, actions etc. producing meaning according to certain rules. And who would want to be an artist if the allowed (interpretations of) works of art would be those that are deemed correct by political standards? If artistic practice were really conflated with politics, the artist would be held accountable and punished for making "wrong" or potentially harmful artwork-statements. This would indeed mean that it was no longer art, but political propaganda. Calling artistic practice "political" does not solve the problems in the political sphere proper. Actions in galleries still (at least with respect to short-term effects) have quite another and more unforeseeable effect than parliamentary political decisions. Which is a good thing.~ 1Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "Återbesök i den globala byn", in ed. Oscar Hemer, Kulturen i den globala byn, Lund: Aegis, 1994, p 171 and The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna Landry & Gerald MacLean, New York & London: Routledge, 1996, p 19. 2Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Postcolonial Theory, Contexts, Practices, Politics, London & New York: Verso, 1997, p 12. 3Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, (1967), English transl. Gayatri C. Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 4Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "Acting Bits/Identity Talk", in ed. K.A. Appiah & H.L. Gates, Jr., Identities, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995, p 159. 5"Inscriptions of Truth to Size", essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the exhibition catalogue Inscription: Jamelie Hassan, Regina: Regina Public Library, Saskatchewan, Canada, 1990. 6 Spivak, 1990, p 9. 7 Spivak, 1990, p 11. 8 Spivak, 1990, p 16. 9Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "Subaltern Studies", In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, (1987), New York & London: Routledge, 1988, p 204. 10 Spivak, 1990, p 27. 11 Spivak, 1990, p 31. 12 Spivak, 1990, p 31. 13 Spivak, 1990, p 33. 14 Spivak, 1990, p 16.