In the fall of 2018, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gabriela Rangel, and Asad Raza curated the exhibition Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking for the Americas Society, which I reviewed for this publication. Focusing on artists who made work addressing Martinician writer and philosopher Glissant and Cuban writer and activist Cabrera’s meditations on identity, the exhibition deepened my knowledge of the former’s inspirational thinking. It also made me aware of his friendships with artists from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, including Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, Etel Adnan, Irving Petlin, Antonio Seguí, Öyvind Fahlström, and Jack Whitten. When I learned of the current exhibition The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant, at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), the first United States showing of works from his personal collection, I knew that by visiting I would gain a broader perspective on Glissant’s relationship with artists and what their work had in common.
According to the press release, Glissant, who passed away in 2011, “gathered these works not for ownership, but in the spirit of the commons, imagining them as the beginnings of a living archive attentive to relation and difference.” Drawing upon Caribbean geography — its many islands — and his fervent desire to undo colonialist narratives, he conceived of his collection as a museum-as-archipelago, a non-hierarchical cluster of distinct but connected islands. Such a museum finds and exhibits “provisional alliances”; it does not reiterate established hierarchies nor replicate colonialist narratives. Glissant’s counter-narrative of the museum as a responsive, non-stable archive is crucial if any real change to Western art-world thinking is going to take place.
Glissant’s view of the non-hierarchical and local extended beyond art into the social dynamics of the Caribbean, its long interaction with the West, and the trade in enslaved people. Rejecting the idea of a Pan-African or essentialist identity that did not account for children of mixed marriages, he came up with the term “Creolisation” to define a non-hierarchical, local environment in which individuals could construct their own identities. This led to a different way of thinking that is practically unheard of in America and the New York art world. He had no interest in art associated with personality, entrepreneurship, style, or auction records. Instead, as the curators of the 2018 exhibition stated in their catalog essay, Glissant believed “there was always something unknowable, something opaque, inside each person, which, rather than being what divides us, is what links us.”
This current exhibition, which contains only a small part of Glissant’s collection, is an eye-opener. There are works by the Chilean-born Matta; the Chinese-Afro-Cuban Lam; the Black American sculptor, Mel Edwards; and the Jewish-American Petlin, just to name a few. Glissant met artists after moving to Paris in 1946, and became associated with the Galerie du Dragon, a major gathering place for artists and writers such as Victor Brauner, Matta, Alberto Giacometti, and Henri Michaux — independent figures who went their own way. He wrote catalog essays for many of the gallery’s artists.
One revelation in this show is a group of large pastel works, part of Argentine painter Antonio Seguí’s Titanic series (c. 1970s). In contrast to popular depictions of this event, Seguí did not see it as a tragedy, instead celebrating it as a failure of Western rationalism, belief in progress, and capitalistic arrogance. In one work, we see the ship just as it is beginning to sink. There is no sign of the iceberg or people trying to save themselves. All is calm, as if this event were inevitable.
Left: Gabriela Morawetz, “Untitled” (1985), oil on canvas; right: Enrique Zañartu, Untitled illustration for Les Indes (The Indies) by Édouard Glissant (1956), etching and mixed media on paper (both photos courtesy Mémorial ACTe, fonds Région Guadeloupe)
Another revelation is a group of small drawings in a single frame by Lam, whose landmark painting, “The Jungle” (1942–43), Glissant wrote about in Poetics of Relation (1990). Lam is mostly associated with Aimé Césaire because he notably illustrated his revolutionary masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), in which the word “negritude” first appears. The relationship between Glissant and Lam is less known and written about; this exhibition offers an opening for further exploration.
Other artists in Glissant’s collection include his wife, Sylvie Sema Glissant, Fahlström, Petlin, Brauner, Edwards, and Tania Bruguera (not included in this exhibition). Each of the artists in this collection is an island in an archipelago of relation; they undo colonialist narratives, rationalism, and logical thinking, often with a caustic humor, sense of absurdity, and a wild imagination. Their art is politically engaged and opaque, rather than didactic and self-righteous. There is no collection like this in America, and we are the poorer for it.
The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant continues at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (225 West 13th Street, West Village, Manhattan) through May 10. The exhibition was co-conceived with Mémorial ACTe, the Édouard Glissant Art Fund, and the Institut du Tout-Monde. It was curated by Manuela Moscoso with Marian Chudnovsky in collaboration with Paulo Miyada and Ana Roman.
