Time Capsule
Archaeology in Contemporary Art

An essay for the exhibition Time Capsule
Art in General, New York City
January 2003

Don’t Fuck with the Past, You Might Get Pregnant is the name given by Mexican artist Silvia Gruner to a series of works where she is seen flirtatiously fumbling an object resembling a ritual figurine or an ancient phallus. Interaction between a contemporary artist and his/her past, excessive rummaging in the aura of history, can get you in trouble, she says, and you may find yourself pregnant against your will. In the same amused tone, one may say that all the artists participating inTime Capsule have, to a greater or lesser extent, fucked with their past, and consequently, they are all pregnant; they all carry the fruits of that meddling. 

A dialogue with the ‘glory’ of the past, with the heavy load of history, has always been an integral part of the artistic practice. Many generations of artists have confronted their (national) collective pasts, whether through images and myths derived from history, or through metaphors pertaining to time, memory, and perpetuation.

Why Archaeology?
The artists participating in Time Capsule have chosen to address the past through archaeology—the scientific study of bygone human culture and behavior and a discipline determined by an understanding of history. Unlike earlier artistic trends that reveled in the past as part of a nostalgic yearning for lost times and unlike romantic artists who lent an ambience and patina of ancient majesty to their depictions of the past, the artists participating in Time Capsule employ archaeology as a strategy. They use it as a tool for a disillusioned and critical scrutiny of the past, and, at times, as a punching bag on which to thrust social, political, and cultural criticism pertaining to the present. Archaeology allows these artists to perceive the past as a multi-layered mass, a stratified text which bears the latent text of the present.

The artists in Time Capsule view archaeology as a key image, a fundamental metaphor, and a conceptual axis around which their work evolves. Some of them allude to either real or made-up archaeological sites; others employ archaeological findings, fragments that are presented as ready-mades (whether real or fabricated). In any event, the discipline of archaeology enables them to move freely along the temporal axis—from a reflexive gaze at an ancient past marked by the aura of its antiquity to preoccupation with current themes such as fetishism, tourism, colonialism, consumerism, urbanism, globalization, appropriation, recycling, and nationalism. It is the tension between identification with archetypes and myths of a glorified past and subversive, ironic, and critical attitudes founded on the rift between past, present, and future that distinguishes these artists’ work.

Archaeology as a Metaphor
According to its dictionary definition, the goal of archaeology as a science and a methodology is to trace, study, and preserve the history of mankind. The field attempts to account for sequence and transformations, and similarities and differences between human cultures, based on physical material. Ever since its formal advent in the nineteenth century, spurred by the discovery of the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the discipline has been divided into specialized sub-categories. The meaning of the term “archaeology” has since greatly deviated from the practical scientific function it embodies.

Freud exhibited a metaphorical use of archaeology in the beginning of the twentieth century when applying it to a reflection of the strata of the human psyche. His predilection for Bronze Age archaeology, his passion for collecting antiquities, and the elaboration of his psychoanalytical technique led him to his famous analogy between the practice of the psychoanalyst, who digs and uncovers strata of the unconscious buried within the human psyche to that of the archaeologist.

In his 1969 book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, French philosopher Michel Foucault formulated a metaphorical analogy that is well known in contemporary culture. Alongside metaphors of space: site, territory, field, displacement, horizon, and archipelago, Foucault made metaphorical use of the archaeologist’s practice as part of his philosophical preoccupation with layers of knowledge in various disciplines, strata that do not necessarily maintain a linear continuum. Thus, diggings, excavations, and layers have become pivotal concepts in the historical discussion that allows forward and backward time travel.

Based on Freud’s metaphor, and from the standpoint of a postmodern understanding of narrative, truth, and history, art critic Donald Kuspit coined the term “archaeologism,” likening post-modernism itself to an excavation. Kuspit regards archaeologism as a method of establishing meaning from the discursive and fragmented depths of the unconscious, identifying the preoccupation with archaeology in the late 1980s as a major aspect of post-modern artistic practice.

The Burden of History and the Post-Colonial Position
While the Foucaultean interpretation provides a necessary base for understanding archaeology as cultural metaphor, Time Capsule strives to focus the discussion of archaeology on its more distinctive and concrete meanings—specific sites and artifacts. Most of the artists participating in the show hail from countries whose histories have had clear repercussions on life in the present. Artists who reside in countries such as Greece, Mexico, Colombia, and Israel are accustomed to the feeling that there are uncovered strata of history buried under your feet everywhere you tread. For these artists, archaeology itself is a tool that embeds a manipulative potential by its very ability to constitute a sequence or indicate a historical break.

Other disciplines that touch upon archaeology, such as ethnography and museology, are also invoked as a strategy for self-reflection from a post-colonial perspective. Mexican-American John Leaños, Colombian Nadin Ospina, and Native AmericanJimmie Durham refer in their work to the interpretation given to archaeological finds and their confinement within glass showcases in museums, where they are condemned to eternal life outside of time and place. These artists critically observe the theoretical methods used to study non-western societies under a scientific guise. In their works, they propose another model of historiography formulated as a parasite or as an alternative to the one and only hegemonic narrative.

Archaeology, like ethnography, is a discipline made possible by nineteenth-century colonialism, whereby the ancient past is perceived as belonging to “mankind” rather than to specific nations. Under this pretext, many treasures and assets throughout the world have been “rescued” from places considered underdeveloped countries, and put for “safekeeping” in the enlightened hands of western institutions of preservation. That ownership was until recently perceived as a natural, self-evident right and these artifacts were denied the ability to be comprehended within their authentic cultural context. Greek artist Dimitris Tsoublekas and Colombian Nadin Ospina address this very issue in their work.

Archeological Reclamation
The public debate over Greece’s efforts to repatriate the original marble friezes—better known as the Elgin Marbles after Lord Elgin removed them from the Parthenon and transferred them to the British Museum in 1816—is widely known. Dimitris Tsoublekas’s photographs of the Parthenon—in which the grand archaeological vestige is digitally cloned with urban bourgeois images such as synthetic turf, elegant granite, parking lots, and escalators—comments ad absurdum on the fact that the site itself contains only imitations of the friezes. The Greek struggle has become a symbol and a test case for the moral and constitutional issue pertaining to the question of ownership of cultural assets and their repatriation that extends to other key exhibits similarly obtained from various countries. Prominent museums in Europe—the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Berlin Municipal Museum—are replete with archaeological artifacts from Asia, Africa, and Oceania, obtained when these European countries ruled over those regions.

Large museums in the United States, laden with cultural treasures from South America, as well as Indian artifacts and ritual objects that have flooded them in recent years, now face public criticism concerning similar claims. The American Law of Antiquities was enacted in 1906, declaring the rescue of antiquities as a prerequisite for any construction work. The urban boom in the Southwest exposed many layers of cultural findings. Mexican-American John Leaños’s fictitious historical narrative of Chicanos in the region of Aztlán, and Native American Jimmie Durham’s Pocahontas’ Underwear reflect upon these issues of appropriation and interpretation.

In Latin America as well, many contemporary artists delve into archaeological themes. The popular folkloristic value, alongside the poetic, conceptual, and empiric power inherent in objects that were lost and recovered in archaeological excavations have incited the imagination of many artists. Colombian Nadin Ospina, who transforms pre-Columbian ritual objects into populist American icons, sheds a grotesque light on the industry of fakes and forgeries associated with pre-Columbian archaeology. Mexican artist Silvia Grunerundermines the sacred nature of ritual figurines, shattering earthenware with iconoclastic grace, thus reinforcing our fetishist approach towards these artifacts.

Archaeology and Politics
In Israel archaeology is a major ingredient in the political realm. Informed by national, ideological, and theological interests, archaeology has a central place in the public debate. Archaeology has been perceived as central to Zionism in searching for and constituting a collective national identity, and Zionist mythology harnesses the biblical past for the sake of the present and future. The findings of archaeological excavations have been studied according to their consistency with biblical text. In recent years, as part of the tendency of de-mythicization that characterizes post-Zionism, the voices of the “new archaeologists” are questioning the historical value of the biblical stories that they perceive as myths meant to fabricate an impressive story of creation for the Jewish people.

Thus, archaeology in Israel is no longer considered a romantic-explorative activity in the service of national revival, but rather a poignant parable about the turbulent present. The attitude of contemporary Israeli artists towards their roots and history is intricate and politically charged. Their bond with the archaeology of their region cannot be confined to the restoration or reconstruction of the past. Rather, it serves as a means for articulation, often touched by irony and pessimism, of their own visions of the present and the future. Dina Shenhav andDavid Wakstein embed images originating from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the ancient technique of mosaic, thus indicating the relevance of archaeology to the current context. Gilad Efrat offers another option for traveling forward and backward in time by juxtaposing paintings depicting ancient archaeological sites in the land of Israel, taken from a bird’s-eye view, with paintings portraying the ruins of Dresden following its bombing in World War II.

Authenticity and the Archaeology of the Future
Beyond the aforementioned critical and ironic aspects, the artists in Time Capsule are also fascinated with the creation of a cultural-historic context, the storytelling, and the invention of meaning for material culture that is involved in the discipline and practice of archaeology. Irish John Kindness expresses his enchantment with classical images by depicting a scene from the Hercules stories as an analogy for the political conflict in Ireland and the struggle against terror. The artists in the exhibition correspond with their predecessors, while, at the same time, toying with the option of fiction and forgery, thus somewhat disrupting the aura attached to the original artifacts. The subjectivity involved in interpreting and assigning authenticity has prompted some of the artists to invent perfectly fictive archaeological sites (John Leaños, Shuli Sadé) to create a new identity, and to fabricate artifacts that would serve their artistic intentions (Nadin Ospina, Jimmie Durham, Silvia Gruner).

The question of authenticity is at the very heart and core of the practice of archaeological deciphering. The recently publicized identification of the alleged ossuary of Jesus’ brother, James, caused a storm in international archaeological circles due to reservations regarding the validity of this identification. This incident sheds light on the immense power of archaeology and its manipulation in the context of faith, religion, economy, and politics.

What is to become of the objects exhibited in Time Capsule when they are uncovered under ruins in two thousand years? Will future researchers think thatOrlan’s stone and flesh clones indeed existed in reality? Will Nadin Ospina’s pre-Columbian sculptures of Bart Simpson and Mickey Mouse be read as twentieth-century ritual idols? Will the archaeologists of the future lend historical value to Pocahontas’s underwear á laJimmie Durham? What will become of archaeology in the virtual era?

Archaeology of the Present: Memory, Nostalgia, and Ruins
About a month after the collapse of the World Trade Center, an image of the removal of a gigantic skeleton of one of the buildings’ facades starred in the media. The similarity to the silhouette of the Roman Coliseum was chilling. Many wondered where this giant vestige would be transferred and what was to become of America’s ruins. The public debate about the nature of the World Trade Center memorial evoked questions pertaining to the memory of the past and the swaying impact of the ruins. Could Ground Zero be considered an archaeological site?

Even though Time Capsule is not explicitly concerned with memory and perpetuation, these discursive fields are embodied in the very notion of archaeology. The perception of ruins as materials of the past, as a locus that conceals historical memory, as playing a role in the construction of national identity, and as a site of collective memory, are points of departure for Time Capsule. Civilization’s ruins archive the past, only to be unearthed, rediscovered, and reexamined years later like a time capsule. Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa, who presents today’s crumbling Havana as an ancient archaeological site, embodies another time capsule in his photographs of ruins.

There is something demanding and mysterious about ruins. They stand silent like a riddle awaiting a solution, like a question awaiting reply. It is the meaning that “artifacts” are imbued with that changes over time. The significance attributed to these objects gives them historical value and makes them the bearers of formative messages for modern times. It is this very meaning that the artists participating in Time Capsule strive to excavate and explore.

When the future is touched by horror, the past looks better than ever…

On Time Capsule artists:
Silvia Gruner’s work interfaces with the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and architecture. For over ten years, she has been exploring the myriad layers comprising the glorified heritage of Mexican culture, focusing on issues pertaining to identity and gender. Her multimedia installations and video works center on fabricated relics and artifacts, which she manipulates in order to generate a reflection of her own history. With sharp humor, she performs repetitive, obsessive acts staged with her own body. In the series Don’t Fuck with the Past, You Might Get Pregnant (1995), she performs ritualistic acts with fictive pre-Columbian figurines. In the two video works shown in Time Capsule, Gruner’s subversive-iconoclastic preoccupation with archaeological artifacts is even more conspicuous. In Situ (1995) features a close-up of the artist’s face, with an animal figurine stuck between her teeth. The tongue’s flirtation with the object takes the sexual connotation to the point of the grotesque. The play with the figure becomes an act of violation: a violation of space, an auto-rape of sorts, like a physical (erotic) interaction with an ancient (male) past, destroying the object’s fetishistic aura. In Tregua (1999) which means “cease fire” Gruner smashes clay fragments on the floor of a ceramic factory in a ritual that strives to put an end to the routine conservation and consecration of the past.

Nadin Ospina portrays Mickey Mouse and the Simpsons as humorous figurines carved in stone, ceramics, bronze, and gold to simulate antique sculptures of mythological, pre-Columbian deities. The images are drawn from collectors’ catalogs, transformed into new deities by digital means, and then commissioned from local artisans. The result is a series of sculptures marked by an ironic and satirical approach to transculturation and the subservience to North American models that typifies the Colombian state of affairs. Ospina ridicules the national and institutional aspiration to constitute a Colombian identity based on the glorious past of pre-Columbian civilizations, particularly in light of the corruption and poverty prevalent in Colombia today. Ospina’s social and cultural critique acquires yet another set of meanings when considering the plunder and destruction of pre-Columbian artifacts and the industry of fakes and forgeries marketed as tourist souvenirs. Ospina’s work also connotes the loss of cultural identity and heritage in consumerist society. The artist toys with postmodern binary pairings such as originality and appropriation, history and fiction, and representation and simulation, thereby questioning the notion of authenticity and undermining the sacred value of the original.

Gilad Efrat’s works surrender vague images of specific archaeological excavations over the painted surface. Efrat depicts politically charged archaeological sites in Israel from a bird’s-eye view, based on aerial photographs used by archaeologists since the late nineteenth century. He selects photographs that capture excavations and other sites of grand prehistoric, Canaanite, Phoenician, and Nabataean cultures. In Tel Sheva (1998), the pale contours of the archaeological site located near Be’er Sheva, the artist’s hometown, are mirror-duplicated, generating a sketch of an ideal city. In Jericho the City (2000) Efrat blurs the distinction between the contemporary city of Jericho with its wretched refugee camps and the ancient mound containing the remains of a magnificent palace complex—the Herodian winter resort for the wealthy of Jerusalem. The choice of an overview implies a desire to escape reality, to rise up and float above the historical events in the Middle East. Unlike the archaeologist who digs in the ground, groping and touching archaeological vestiges, Efrat opts for a detached position that provides him with a critical distance. That distance is reinforced in City #2 (2001), created prior to September 11, a painting based on a photograph of Dresden in ruins following its bombing in World War II. The ruins of the past, seen from an aerial perspective and as depicted by an Israeli-Jewish artist, acquire a powerful, universal, and apocalyptic meaning.

Dina Shenhav makes mosaics out of soft foam, using imagery extracted from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The medium of mosaic evolved as an architectural component in the Roman and post-Classical periods. It flourished in early Christianity during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries in ancient Palestine. By replacing the hard stones of the historical mosaic with soft foam used for mattresses, Shenhav undermines the region’s glorified past, instilling it with a sense of domestic intimacy. In previous works, Shenhav incorporated quotes from medieval Jewish and Christian mosaics. In the series Game Over (2001), she uses media images from the al-Aqsa Intifada (the current Palestinian uprising) and the Lebanon War of the early 1980s: stone throwers, a PLO flag, a burnt car, and a soldier doubled over. The title of Shenhav’s series references video war games. However, unlike games in which the end of one level marks the beginning of another, the end in Shenhav’s work is a terminal, tragic fact. Shenhav subordinates the basic materials of the war—stones, rubber bullets, barrels, tires, fire, and smoke—to a primitive, almost infantile technology of gluing together cubes of foam, thus infusing them with a sense of irony and absurdity as well as articulating her feminist and pacifist critique.

In his Photoshop hybrids of contemporary Athens,Dimitris Tsoublekas digitally manipulates typical Athenian archaeological and tourist landmarks, such as the Parthenon and the Acropolis. Tsoublekas employs a falsification strategy akin to plastic surgery in order to fabricate a new reality and introduce changes and improvements. His works respond to local urban planning and architecture vis–vis the construction boom of the 1990s. His witty photographs pierce architectural conventions of design and good taste and ironically critique chaotic, hybridized urban reality. In the series shown at Art in General, Tsoublekas focuses on archaeological sites and monuments that are historically and aesthetically emblematic of Athens. The cross between tradition and antiquity on one hand, and current, modern culture on the other, is epitomized in these works. He planted a lawn around the west entrance of the Parthenon, replaced the Propylaea (stairway entrance) leading to the Acropolis with escalators, added another floor and a parking lot, and replaced its marble with luxurious black granite. By transforming the use, form, or aesthetic patterns of ancient Greek architecture, Tsoublekas alludes to the past and comments on the present. Portraying the monument that symbolizes one of the highlights of world tourism as made of fake materials, the artist ridicules the fact that the original marble is kept in the British Museum, thus challenging the very notion of authenticity underpinning the tourist passion.

Unlike the other participating artists, Orlan offers a time capsule that attests to a different type of scrutiny into the past: a personal observation through the body—her body. In her Refiguration/Self-Hybridation Precolombiane series, the multi-media artist appropriates pre-Columbian archaeological remains, digitally crossing them with her self-portrait. Subsequent to her explorations of mythological Jewish and Christian motifs, Orlan embarked on a tour around the world in 1998 to study different standards of beauty in other civilizations and times. She began with pre-Columbian civilization in Mexico. The result was a series of digital pictures in which she reshaped her face according to representations of Mayan deities. Through what she terms “Carnal Art,” Orlan undermines beauty ideals and standards, rendering the notion of identity boundless and elastic. This parodied, grotesque, and radical combination of stone, which remains unchanged over centuries, and the artist’s ephemeral flesh poses acute questions about the constitution of identity in the age of genetic reproduction. These artifacts function as organisms; they are assimilated into a living body, literally shaping the artist’s new portrait and generating an anatomy of stone.

Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa alludes to the present-day ruins of Havana in archaeological terms. These are no longer the ruins of a grand past, but rather those of a hopeless, degenerated present that has become a past before it was ever experienced as a present. Since the early 1990s, Garaicoa has focused on clusters of unfinished buildings whose completion was abandoned. Through photography, drawing, and installation, he explores the urban reality of Havana while ironically interfering with it, changing the texture and ostensibly infusing it with a new utopian quality. In Apartment Building like Greek Agora (2002), Garaicoa associates Havana’s wretched brick and concrete ruins with the ancient Greek place of assembly, the agora. A similar approach is manifest in Solarium (1999), a photograph of excavation-like ruins of roofless buildings with a row of dilapidated columns, traces of colonialist architecture. While concealing an ironic allusion to magnificence and grandeur, Garaicoa’s work is not characterized by saccharine-sweet nostalgia a la Buena Vista Social Club, but rather is a piercing critique that digs at Cuba’s social unconscious. Preservation of the past, in Cuba’s case, is an ironic, tragic notion. Havana’s ruins elicit in Garaicoa a passion for a future, a yearning for a utopian architecture that would enable him to push the boundaries of the real into the realm of imagination and fantasy. Thus, for example, in his work Campus or the Babel of Knowledge featured in Documenta (2002)—a utopian, futuristic university complex consisting of units resembling Aztec pyramids—Cuba is described as a harsh social utopia from which people long to escape, a fusion between a past and a present-less future.

For the past three years David Wakstein has been creating mosaics. In a process of collective exorcism, he contemplates issues of identity while blurring the boundaries between propaganda, commemoration, and manipulation. As an artist whose practice has always involved educational and social activities, he now collaborates with a group of youngsters from the unemployment-stricken Israeli suburb of Ofakim. Wakstein and his “painting team” developed a body of work entitled Compulsory Service. Time Capsulefeatures several medallion mosaics from the series The Soldiers (2000), depicting portraits of soldiers, which were extracted from the artist’s private albums of the Yom Kippur War (1973), in which he was wounded, and mosaics from the series The Seven Deadly Sins, based on caricatures published in the Arab press during the first Intifada in the early 1990s. In The Butcher(2002) a soldier is seen holding a butcher knife, cutting off the limbs of a bound Palestinian boy. Made of local stones, the mosaic carries distinctive archaeological connotations pertaining to the history of the Jewish people in the land of their forefathers. Prominent archaeological sites such as Beit Alpha and Zippori have been an integral part of the formation of the Israeli consciousness. Unlike Dina Shenhav, Wakstein uses real mosaic stones, thus generating tension between the short-lived, hate-drenched caricature images and the decorative beauty of the mosaics intended to last for eternity.

John Kindness imitates ancient Athenian vase painting while shifting the archaic motifs into current critical contexts. For Time Capsule he translated the linear style of vase painting and its mythological motifs into a monumental limewash and acrylic work executed directly on the walls of Art in General.
Fusion of different periods and times is manifest throughout his work. In the early 1990s, while residing in New York, Kindness painted classical motifs on the doors of New York City taxi cabs. The resulting sculptures were reminiscent of shards of yellow pottery from ancient Greece. In 1999-2000 he painted a temporary wall installation at The Drawing Center in New York in which Hercules was relocated to the streets of present-day Belfast. Kindness set the legendary Greek hero’s adventures in a contemporary urban environment. For Time Capsule he developed the Hydra myth, one of the Herculean labors, in allusion to September 11 and the subsequent war against terrorism and to Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric in 1970s Ireland.
By appropriating the classical style and recycling figures from Greek mythology, Kindness articulates his fascination with the origins of Western civilization—Greece and Rome—while expressing his poignant social and political critique of today’s violence and economic distress.

Artist Shuli Sadé is a member of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, an international organization that promotes the study of antiquated industries. In Time Capsule, she represents a more nostalgic, mournful approach to the past, while at the same time conveying a sense of future archaeology by manipulating the temporal sequence. In her floor installation Backwards Forwards/Linear Strata (2002) she delineates an archaeological excavation within the gallery space. A crisscross of ropes and measuring tapes marks the physical and metaphorical grid of the site. Excavation is the surgical facet of archaeology. It is the place where the researcher’s proficient craftsmanship is needed in order to isolate and identify the findings. Sad?’s fictive excavation site on the sixth floor of a New York skyscraper reveals findings that belong neither in the distant past nor to some ancient civilization, but rather to twentieth-century Western civilization, to a period considered the paradigm of progress—the technological era. Unearthed within disintegrating lumps of earth are objects, either found or fictive, that look like traces of a technological world. The video screens protruding from the dig document a train ride from New York’s Penn Station to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and back. The sights visible from the train are the standard views found along railway tracks: industrial landscapes, emptied industrial shells, ruins of what had once been the temples of progress that projected power, modernity, and vision and have now been reduced to fleeting fragments and debris.

In Time Capsule, John Leaños presents parts of the installation Remembering Castration: Bloody Metaphors in Aztlan, recently featured in the Whitney Biennial (2002). Mexican-American Leaños has fabricated a comprehensive scholarly archaeological exploration including a fictitious researcher’s biography and a spectacular museum display. By inventing new language and meaning, the artist questions the constitution of memory, collective identity, and authorship. Leaños’s enigmatic findings (artifacts, documents, photographs, and commentary) are based on the reconstruction of a study by the nineteenth-century German archaeologist Helmut Mytusmacher, who allegedly explored the roots of northern Aztec migration in the region of Aztlen—the ancient Chicano homeland. The fabrication of the researcher’s biography—Leaños’s elaborately constructed alter ego—draws on mythological cliches underlying archaeological practice: his wanderings in the deserts of North America, his earth-shattering discoveries in a missing treasure recovered on the bank of Rio Grande, his tragic death subsequent to a land dispute, and the study’s rediscovery in the basement of a cattle farm in New Mexico. The study’s revolutionary findings link Aztec historical memory with the rite of passage centered on the act of castration, the sacrifice of Aztec warriors to the Moon deity Coyolxauhqui as a condition for the reinstatement of lost cultural memory. Through faux findings, Leanos criticizes the way in which archaeological research is used as a tool to further political propaganda. He subverts history’s objectivity, ridiculing the multiplicity of narratives in this postmodern era.

Native American multidisciplinary artist Jimmie Durham features Pocahontas’ Underwear, a variation on his 1985-86 installations Bedia’s First Basement andOn Loan from the Museum of the American Indian. The work underscores his ironic, parodic attitude toward our glorification of relics from the past. A pair of red underpants adorned with feathers and beads is authoritatively exhibited in a vitrine, in keeping with the fetishist tradition of museum presentation. Durham ridicules the erotic dimension inherent in the underwear vis-?-vis the exotic facet informing the Western perception of Native Americans. Pocahontas’ Underwear alludes to the virginity of Virginia, the pristine unsettled wilderness ostensibly discovered by the Europeans. The engaging artifact is accompanied by a pseudo-scholarly text that parodies the sweeping popular fascination with Native American culture. As in other works, here too Durham refers to his colleague José Bedia, a Cuban-American artist noted for his passion for collecting Native American artifacts. Durham vests Bedia with the explorer-archaeologist persona. The vitrine with the underwear and the far-fetched text are a silent testimony to collective amnesia and the wrongs committed by American colonialism. Through Pocahontas’ Underwear—an object that has lost its living presence but still carries its memory—Durham, whose entire oeuvre revolves around the politics of denial, exposes the artificial mechanisms of preservation applied to extinct Indian cultures, art, history, and worldviews.

Translation: Daria Kassovsky