Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), Martinican poet, novelist, and cultural theorist, was among the most influential voices in the Francophone literary sphere as well as in postcolonial theory broadly. In the art world, too, Glissant’s understanding of the rhizomatic relation between cultures, histories, and geographies has informed approaches to creation and curation since the early 2000s. Glissant’s concepts of relation, density, and opacity have proved especially vital, as museums try to think beyond imperialist methods that have homogenized, appropriated, and silenced subalternity in the arts. Now, a traveling exhibition of Glissant’s personal art collection—recently on view at the Center for Art, Research and Alliance (CARA) in Manhattan—further clarifies the thinker’s influence.
The show at CARA featured a selection of works on loan from its sister exhibition in Sao Paolo, Brazil. These include works sourced from Glissant’s own art collection—by surrealist luminaries like Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, and Gerardo Chávez—alongside a web of artists and filmmakers who engage with his theoretical concepts. The concurrent exhibition at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake is itself an archipelagic linkage across the Americas, the kind that Glissant hoped that his art collection could provide the seed for cultivating. The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant dusted off this dream, but instead of rooting it in the generative soil of Martinique, where Glissant was born, the collection was strewn across the American continent, in a deliberate homage to several of Glissant’s key ideas. The exhibition at CARA reflected Glissant’s fascination with an evolving, global exchange, a fitting initiation into the dazzling poetic paysage, or landscape, of this influential thinker.
The gallery, on West 13th Street in Manhattan, offered an airy space, providing a kind of porous “shoreline” from which to contemplate Glissantian ideas. The Executive and Artistic Director at CARA, Manuela Moscoso, explained in a recent conversation with the Brooklyn Rail that the exhibit aimed to reject the traditional museum experience, creating a physical space where the visitor wasn’t directed toward particular corners of the cube, but instead found themself engulfed in a “reverberation room” which was “curated like a collage.”
And so, in the gallery, relations between works emerged symbiotically and by chance. The closest thing to a didactic explanation the Museum of Errantry offered was a filmed conversation between Glissant and fellow Martinican writer, Patrick Chamoiseau. Called Abécédaire (perhaps an off-shoot of the televised series of the same name that featured conversations between Gilles Deleuze and his student, Claire Parnet), the film acts as a dictionary of Glissantian terms. It played on a loop, allowing visitors to stumble upon explanations that illuminate their experience of the exhibit in unpredictable ways.
Those with a glancing familiarity with postcolonial theory would have recognized many of these terms. R, for example, is for Relation: Arguably Glissant’s most well-known theoretical term, it refers to the formation of identities and cultures shaped by disruption, evolution, and creolization rather than by fixed lineages. Or A, for Archipelago: Glissant defines archipelagic thought as “[being in] harmony with whatever in the world is scattered through archipelagoes [the kind of diversity stretched out across the world that joins shores and horizons together].” The archipelago opposes “continental thinking,” a totalizing approach that subsumes or dismisses whatever is marginal to its purview.
The Museum of Errantry adopted this archipelagic ideal in its exploration of lieu (place), a term that for Glissant, referred less to a singular homeland, but to the idea of ici-là (or “here-there”) a way to frame the present as it is continually shaped by an elsewhere. While Glissant’s home island of Martinique is the focal point for his rhizomatic thought; this lieu behaves like a shoreline—an encounter between land and water whose union erodes territorial stability. The assemblage of works on display at The Museum of Errantry represented just such a shifting shore.
This presentation of place as relation was admirably disclosed in A Museum of Errantry. It emphasized how Glissant’s philosophy took root in New York, where he spent sixteen years teaching French at the CUNY Graduate Center. Beyond the collection of visual art, CARA arranged four accompanying performances tracing the archipelago between Martinique and the current art scene in New York. Organized around the titular elemental nodes of the exhibition—earth, fire, water, and winds—the events featured musical performances, dance, and poetry readings from New York–based artists.
During my visit to the gallery, I encountered the documentary A Letter from Yene, from Mali-born filmmaker Manthia Diawara, which resounded through the exhibition. The film documents the social and environmental impacts of plastic pollution on the small Senegalese fishing village of Yene. In the part that I happened upon, Diawara remarked: “We are undermining ourselves and our humanity by treating the ocean so cheaply, like a garbage dump.”
While the exhibition drew its interest in ecology from the theorist’s more widely read late-career texts, like Poetics of Relation (1990) and Le Traité du Tout-monde (1997), it succeeded also in offering a panoramic primer of early Glissant as well. Throughout his oeuvre, the Caribbean landscape and its relationship to history is of critical importance to Glissant, as it is to other Afro-Caribbean writers. As he explains in Caribbean Discourse (1989): “The [Caribbean writer’s] relationship with the land, one that is even more threatened because the community is alienated from the land, becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character . . . the individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history.”
CARA’s exhibition visualized this nexus of human and ecological suffering. In many of the pieces on the gallery’s second floor, one could witness the island environment “emerging as a full character.” An untitled oil on canvas painting by the Haitian artist M. Emile depicted a ceremony unfolding under the gathering shadows of a blue night sky—a group of people assembling stones, candles, fires, and other ritual objects under the dominating presence of two interlocking trees. The absence of depth in this picture placed the celebrants—who would typically be rendered in the foreground—on the same grade as the forest. The trees, sky, and ochre earth were no longer mere background but became equal and active participants in the creation of a shared ecological reality. According to Glissant, “art in the Americas relies on layering, accumulation filling the canvas, flatness; there is no perspective, no depth. There is an endless expanse that even tends to overflow the canvas frame.” The depthlessness of New World painting mirrors the experience of time in the Caribbean: The past does not root down into subterranean depths, but is legible on the surface, through “expansive” and “overflowing” linkages between cultures, geographies, and languages. Unlike depth, expanse has no “attainable goal,” except for its own vegetal proliferation.
Commanding the middle of the room was a welded steel sculpture by the late Black American sculptor, Melvin Edwards, which he dedicated to Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. Rusted metal implements of bondage are twisted into impossible curves and angular lines, through which one could glance at Lam’s paintings of Caribbean flora hung on the walls behind the steel. Ultimately, contemporary threats to human and non-human communities by a changing climate are born out of the same “alembic of suffering” that writer Suzanne Césaire attributed to the immiseration of the Caribbean: New World colonization, environmental extraction, and plantation slavery.
In his work from the 1950s–1970s, Glissant’s nascent ecological consciousness is disclosed through a fascination with density (notably in La Terre inquiète,Le Sang rivé,Le sel noir, and Boises). Poetic density, which refers to the physical and sonic attributes of language, carries the traces of an otherwise occulted past, one that has been interred over centuries. Glissant’s early poems act as petrological prisms (“I build my language out of rocks”) from which he explored the afterlife of memory and colonial extraction in the Caribbean and its diaspora. As he writes in the epigraph to Le Sang rivé, (Riveted Blood) his poems are “always dislocated, always recovered, and beyond completion—not works but matter itself through which the work navigates.”
One of the most significant contributions of the exhibition was its revelation of the network of artistic collaborations and friendships that shaped Glissant’s politics and poetics in the first half of his career. Beginning in the 1950s, Glissant was lived and studied in Paris, where he embedded himself in a diverse community of artists, sculptors, poets, and writers, including Lam, the Chilean painter Robert Matta, and Jewish-Romanian surrealist Victor Brauner. Works from each of these artists feature heavily in the exhibition at CARA.
In spite of the centrality of visual art in shaping Glissant’s trans-Caribbean cosmology, this Parisian sojourn has gone largely unremarked in the literature on Glissant, with a few notable exceptions. One specific interlocutor’s influence stands out as especially symbolic of Glissant’s relational poetics: Agustín Cárdenas, whose friendship and numerous artistic rencontres provided a narrative proxy for the exhibition at CARA. Sculptures and prints by Cárdenas were primarily housed at the beginning of the exhibition, their “density” grounding Glissant’s thought as it reverberated throughout the gallery space. Besides his impressive carved wood sculptures that stretch across surfaces like connective tissue, the exhibition exhumed a series of prints that Cárdenas contributed to Glissant’s 1969 poetry collection, Boises (Yokes).
Glissant and Cárdenas frequented the same social and artistic circles in Paris, sharing much in common as fellow Caribbean expats. The two crossed over most frequently at the Galérie du Dragon, an exhibition space that was popular among a younger generation of postwar surrealists. While Glissant himself was never explicitly a surrealist, he was very involved with Galérie du Dragon and often contributed pieces in support of its various shows and exhibitions, eventually writing the text that accompanied Cárdenas’s first solo exhibition in Paris in 1961. After Glissant’s return to Martinique in 1965, he established a cultural center in Fort-de-France called the Institut Martiniquais d’Études. The institute represented Glissant’s concern with documenting, cultivating, and safeguarding Martinican cultural heritage. Among others, he invited Cárdenas to Martinique to take up a residency at the IME, which is likely where their collaboration deepened. When Glissant published the essay collection L’Intention poétique (Poetic Intention) in 1969, he devoted an entire essay to Cárdenas’s work in his pantheon of important New World artists, alongside the surrealist painters Matta and Lam. The late 1970s and ’80s were a particularly fruitful time for their collaborations: Besides Cárdenas’s eaux-fortes, an engraving for Boises, Glissant also published “Sept paysages pour les sculptures de Cárdenas” (“Seven landscapes for the sculptures of Cárdenas”), introducing the sculptor’s exhibition at Le Point Cardinale, another gallery in Paris. When Glissant’s Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) was published in its original French in 1981, Cárdenas contributed the first cover illustrations for the paperback edition.
Since their first encounters in the 1950s, Glissant had noted in Cárdenas’s work a kind of dialectical opening: On the one hand, his pieces revel in stillness and materiality, and on the other, they achieve an elasticity that opens up the space around them. The union between stasis and movement, between aridity and abundance, that Cárdenas evoked in the sculptural form fascinated Glissant. In L’intention poétique, he writes, “in the most torrid desert, where no surge of life solicits the sky, one feels, in the very shimmer of the air, that inside light its opposite principle awaits: inside blinding clarity the temptation of the shadow.” Cárdenas’s prints for Boises capture the tension between light and shadow, dull surface and vital growth. While the illustration echoes the asperity of the text, it adds an additional dimension, depicting a series of interlocking bones “yoked” together using tools of torture. Like Glissant’s rocky, arid landscapes, the bones looked bleached out by the passage of time. However, Cárdenas’s drawings were also linked to each others—or to the shackles themselves—by a fossilized yet malleable tissue: A living, marrow-like substance extends from within the bones, fusing with the imagery of chains to suggest the possibility of a Caribbean chronology emerging from violence.
Glissant identified in Cárdenas’s work the “dry presence of historicity,” and he referred to his sculpture in “Seven Landscapes for the Sculptures of Cárdenas” as a solar “gate” or portal which opened the viewer up to the experience of Caribbean history, “[showing] us a new way forward.” In this passage, Glissant is likely describing one of Càrdenas’s two wood sculptures currently on view at CARA, entitled “Édouard Glissant”: “Cárdenas has sculpted this gate, which is not the creation of an individual’s narrow demands but brings an infinite dimension to every object the sculptor erects. In it our space coils and twists . . . I could discern in the dark the marble sculpted by Cárdenas, the dazzling portent he planted in the primordial mud.” From these apparently mute features of landscape, Cárdenas’s sculptures trace the arabesques of Caribbean history, which does not proceed in a single line but spreads out like a dense tangle of tropical vegetation.
In the essay, Glissant also recounts the genesis of these works, when Cárdenas visited him in Martinique at the IME and offered to create a sculpture for his friend. Hoping to source the materials locally, Cárdenas scoured the countryside for a suitable tree, but found only a few dried-out pieces of wood. Glissant writes, “But we could only find, for him to work on, tall narrow pieces of mahogany that we collected on the heights of Morne Pitault, just above the plain of Lamentin where the Lézarde River trickles in agony. We had not the time to find him thick chunks of wood or stone, which moreover, we may never have found. Our lands do not contain treasures that can be transformed.”
In the absence of any living trees, Cárdenas made do with dead, scavenged logs from trees that had already fallen. Glissant continues, “his hands did not resist the hard, brown mahogany for long, even if it was not thick this time, and there soon emerged the undeniable figure of an Ancestor who is broken in silence. In it, the flatness of the original wood became patience and transparency, the tiny opening became the eye of lineage, and lost time took shape in our consciousness.” In a sense, Cárdenas provides the sculptural analogue to Glissant’s poetic ambitions. Cárdenas engages the scorched landscape, the dead tree, the dried-out wood, and sculpts a beginning—a way into the future eked out of a barren present. This approach is resonant in present-day Martinique, as the island faces the repercussions of a decades-long pesticide contamination that may endanger the island’s biosphere for centuries to come. (The chemical pesticide chlordecone (a close relative of DDT) was used by the white planter class on Antillean banana plantations from the 1970s through the 1990s to eradicate the banana weevil, even after being banned in the US and Europe due to its toxicity.) The devastation of the cultural landscape that is so presciently figured in Glissant’s poetry and Cárdenas’s sculptures takes on new dimensions today as the soil, waterways, and plant and animal life are poisoned by accumulating crimes of neocolonial apparatus.
Far from being created in isolation, the poetic synergy between these two artists exemplified the concepts recalled in Abécédaire, that weave throughout Glissant’s entire geopoetic oeuvre. The transnational linkages woven through the Museum of Errantry enriched the legacy Glissant’s thought just as he would have wished—through the prism of an ever-evolving and unpredictable relation.
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