Navigation Points: Robert Ladislas Derr s Discovering Columbus by Michael Jay McClure, PhD

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1 Capricorn (Columbus, Wisconsin) Navigation Points: Robert Ladislas Derr s Discovering Columbus by Michael Jay McClure, PhD More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors Elizabeth Bishop, from The Map 1) You Are Here A few facets of location seem, at first glance, inarguable. Topography, relative coordinates, geological makeup, and climate: these appear as facts. Often, we want to argue those facts contrast a given terrain s subjective, historical, and cultural features. However, I want to argue, perhaps counter-intuitively, that there is no part of place that is objective, or beyond interpretation. To that end, and because it inspired the argument, I want discuss Robert Ladislas Derr s radical exploration of site in his multipart project Discovering Columbus. In this piece, or these pieces, Derr travelled to approximately a dozen towns named Columbus, documented the terrain, and played a game that looks like a hybrid of croquet and soccer where he outlined different zodiac constellations. The process inspired a number of products. One encounters a multi-channel video where different grassy expanses, from different Columbuses, overlap one another. The camera, held at a low level, rattles with the movement of the cameraman (in this case Derr) as he walks. The game that Derr played was set up with a series of stakes in a field, each of which mimicked a star in a particular zodiac constellation. Each town got a different constellation. Derr would dribble a soccer ball, actually a globe, around them. Derr documented the game with a series of photographic prints; each print is a different zodiac sign, showing multiple images of Derr as he kicks the ball by each stake. The whole background, the grassy field, is dropped out and replaced with a uniform white slab; Derr, then, becomes those celestial points which, when imaginatively drawn together, create an animal, a supposed personality type, and a sign. 2) Piece/Process One of the things that might be obvious, but remains imperative to note, concerns what this work of art is, or, even, where it is. Certainly, at one point in the history of art, a work of art was synonymous with a particular object. Èdouard Manet s Olympia (1863) is a painting; Constantin Brancusi s Bird in Space ( ) only refers to the polished brass and stone base that create the sculpture of a luminous bird blurred by the vector

2 of flight. 1 Although there are earlier examples, in the mid-1960s, certainly, a work of art could exceed a particular object. Eva Hesse s Contingent (1969), consists of multiple pieces of cheese cloth dipped in latex; the work, its multiple pieces, engages the literal space of the gallery, whose currents sway and bend the whole. More radically still, conceptual artists began to think about the immaterial, or dematerialized, aspects of art: creating instructions, or presenting data from certain thought experiments and investigations. Thus the material of art became a kind of run off from the idea that generated it. 2 Without rehearsing too much art history here, I want to turn the form of Derr s work. Some of the work is concrete a video, a print while other parts of it remain elusive. First, all of the objects cannot be held in the same visual field. We might encounter the prints, say, or the video, but at every turn the panorama would be withheld. We can t even see the video all at once it consists of a four channels shown on four walls of a room thus we must turn from screen to screen, lose part of the work in order to see another. However, it is not just the actual pieces that we cannot see as a synthetic whole. Part of the objects here are those different towns called Columbus, which can only be seen together, and seamed together, conceptually. Beyond that, there is a process here which might not only be immaterial, but be enacted again and again: find a Columbus and go to it, stake out a space, then play a game that you imported from somewhere else. Although not, by any means, entirely immaterial, material of Discovering Columbus proliferates, dovetails with a plan, with a process, with a wide geographic zone, and remains partly staked out and yet only completable using imaginative resources. In this way the work refuses to stand still: one can pick up its conceptual game again: try to hold its pieces in common long after one has left the gallery. 3) Coordinates/Coordination Thus far, however, I have only talked about the form of the piece, without engaging its content. However, even that distinction must be questioned. The form of the piece is already content: without knowing that this is about Columbus, the city, the person, and the navigational history, one could still say that this piece is predicated on a certain relativity and a certain ritual of discovery, and is, formally, about staking out spaces imaginatively and trying to document, or map, them using systems that might not be endemic to the terrain itself. The form, in other words, holds content within it. Of course, what happens in each place that Derr visits, and what happens in the gallery when the spectator sees its documentation, must be dealt with more specifically. Let us start with the gallery experience. I would categorize each one of Derr s pieces within Discovering Columbus as that most prized of new world discoveries: a map. Of the many charges that Christopher Columbus (c ) had (perfecting the spice trade, spreading Christianity, etc.), certainly one of them was cartographic: figuring out where Spain, Europe, and Asia were on the spinning, round globe. Although Columbus, himself, would only discover the island of Hispaniola and parts of Central America minute points of a global geography he could not possibly comprehend the goal was

3 clear, to fill in the globe, and to make a map that could reduce the dimensional planet into a readable plane. Why would I say Derr produces maps, then? One the one hand, they do not deliver what a map is supposed to: a comprehensive system by which we might understand where we are. On the other hand, they reveal exactly what maps falsify, despite their supposed precision. Let me explain: Discovering Columbus presents views into landscapes which confuse places, or combine places with ritual, or which try to make sense of a sense of a place through a decidedly alien measuring system. That would seem antithetical to what a normal or scientific map would do. And yet And yet we might start with the name Columbus, an explorer who came late in America s history, who never came as far North as his name would spread, an Italian who became a subject of Portugal and then Spain, who began laying down the alien system of European colonization, religion, and trade over and despite the indigenous population he discovered. Even the name, Columbus is relative, cultural, reliant on an invisible and highly subjective history. So when shown on a map, the fact of a Columbus, Ohio, say, is not objective. That place is imbricated with culture. The name hovers over the place weirdly, even in a normal map form. 3 Thus, rather than give us maps that would make a place comprehensive, which would fit a variety of places into a coordinated system, Derr makes places and their relationship with one another disjunctive. He shows places, still, as relatively situated, like a map does, and he shows places within a coordination system (namely the astronomical and astrological) and yet those systems don t seem inevitable, or natural, or coldly scientific, but improvised and arguable. In this way, Derr s project might, at first glance, seem to be eminently postmodern. In this line of thinking, we would note how the signifier of a place its name, position, video documentation, or astronomical coordinates sits only awkwardly over the experience or idea of the place. Certainly, Derr exposes a gap between how one might depict a place and what it is. We get a sense of a still enigmatic set of towns, out there, spiking the American landscape. However, what I would call attention to is not just this general breakdown of representation in this work, but Derr s plaintive emphasis on individual apprehension, and moreover on individual point of view. Note, for instance, how the camera, even if not at eye level, indexes the particularity of Derr s walk, or how the idea of the game played in each location meets the personal way in which that game was played out, there. I think, to of the fragility of the actual globe kicks; in order to not destroy it Derr must act with care. Thus, a place, or the task of describing a place, becomes filtered through the subjective and somatic intelligence of this artist. Why is this important? I am not arguing that Derr s personal journey is the preeminent, final one. Instead, I see Discovering Columbus as offering a charge to its spectators. When we encounter a place and its representation our experience can matter. Moreover, one might argue there is not a place without a representation, without a name that describes it, without a system by which we separate it from another place.

4 Thus, we might feel the disparate systems by which we understand a place jostle in relation to another we might feel the disparity of our location through the places we have been, the weather we have previously experienced, as they work within the present. Instead of seeing a place, laid out like a fact, we receive it through the complicated sieve of the self. Therefore we come closer to knowing how we know what we know about where we are. Finally, what excites me about such mapping is its open-endedness. Thus, the difference between coordinates, which would suggest a stable place, and coordination, which would suggest the dynamism of living spaces at they relate us and one another. 4) Discovery/Recovery When I think of the flawed, brutal narrative of America s discovery, I somehow always imagine process as nautical. And my imagination is helped by two resolutely cinematic images: one of the bobbing prow of a ship as it slices through the ocean, and the other of the wake of the ship and the crisscrossing vectors of disturbed water. Starting out, then, and immediate aftermath. Such is the double movement of Discovering Columbus. At first glance, what we have here are highly unreliable maps that point out where Derr has been. How a landscape met his journey. And we receive this work as a kind of aftermath, his sensory and particular documentation of a place. So like archaeologists, we might try and fail to piece those places back together. This the wake: his light stamp on those points of a map, and his disorientating documents that we might conceptually place over our once stable sense of location. We recover his journey. The more we look at it, however, the more Discovering Columbus asks us, I would argue, to set forth. To make the abstraction of place felt, to feel a location s oddity and conjunction with what we have known. And I leave the work with two images: one of the game whose rules are inscrutable but whose goal seems to be to put myself and how I move into my sense of where I am. The other is of a camera, hovering over the grassy landscape that appears oceanic nevertheless resolutely facing forward and shocked with traversal. And by thinking of recovery and discovery together, like this, I feel the pull of responsibility I might feel when entering a place, the consequences of describing it, as well as the opportunity to feel my way into where I am. Would that all processes of discovery were so generative and generous. 1 This example shows how the uniqueness of modern sculpture might already be suspect. There are multiple versions of the Bird in Space; however, each of them was supposed to be unique, and they were made out of different materials, including a somber marble. See Anna C. Chave, The Object on Trial: The Bird and the Base in Space, in Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, pp Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, The Dematerialization of Art in Lucy R. Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, (New York, 1971), originally published 1968, from which we may quote p. 259, This final post-aesthetic phase supersedes [ ] self-critical art that answers other art according to a determinist schedule. ( ) Dematerialized art is post-aesthetic only in its increasingly nonvisual emphases. The aesthetic of principle is still an aesthetic, as plied by frequent statements of mathematicians and scientists about the beauty of an equation, formula, solution Benjamin H. D. Buchloh helpfully reminds us that, despite Lippard s Utopianism, some conceptual art operated outside such aspirations. See Conceptual Art, : From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of

5 Institutions, in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, pp., Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999) esp. pp For an excellent discussion of how the colonial signifier works in a colonized landscape see Homi K. Bhabba, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Dehli, May 1817, in The Location of Culture, (New York and London: Routledge), pp About the Author Michael Jay McClure, PhD, teaches the history and theory of contemporary art in the Departments of Art and Art History at the University of Wisconsin Madison. His essays have considered artists ranging from Matthew Barney to Jasper Johns, subjects ranging from this history of modern dance to the importance of new media, and have appeared, or are forthcoming, in such journals as Discourse, Performance Research, and TDR. His first manuscript, Rematerialized: Queer Objects in Contemporary American Art is in circulation.