Essay on the work of José Carlos Texiera on the occasion of its installation in MAAT, Lisbon.
Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer
I
What is the meaning of darkness?
Water is a fluid, it is liquid. It moves when subject to force. Separating, it will not bond, it is shapeless. As Zygmunt Baumann wrote in Liquid Modernity, for fluids, “the flow of time … counts, more than the space they happen to occupy.” When are we fluid?
The most enigmatic element of On Exile is the presence of Lake Erie as a liquid, consentient being. Erie is held in shape by multiple territories and belongs wholly to none of them: Canada, the United States of America, Ohio, New York State, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ontario – they border this liquid being which reflects the passage of exile with indifference.
What is this lake to the refugees and to the viewer? The lake appears as a ground to the figure of voices, which then become ground to the figure of the lake. The lake opens up emotions and focuses recollection. It marks time by dissolving it. How does it do that? With a spiritualism of almost abstract elements rendering the video surface almost material as a visual hypnotic, Texeira’s momentary capture of the waterserves not to bring back the dead as a ghostly haunting, but to allow the shock of trauma to dissolve temporarily into horizons. What do these horizons mean?
Watching On Exile, we move through the day along the lake’s horizon as we move through Cirtautas’ 1957 book The Refugee –“The Cause of Homelessness,” the lake in morning; “The World of the Future,” the lake in the day, … and so on until “Time and Experience” with the lake at still point of sundown, fading to black like Rothko’s late canvasses:
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What is the meaning of darkness?
II
Moral blindness
The lake, in a day’s time, makes the book into a journal, from diurnalis, “daily.” Screened across the day, the video we are watching becomes a novel form of journalism. There are facts here larger than facts in reporting. The flow of time exceeds the date-log. There are no names at the bottom of the screen during the interviews.
In Fragments in Search of Meaning, facts move from water to sound, from waves to waves. Survivors of chronic depression from the Cleveland, Ohio metro-region share a song by which they carried themselves through bouts of depression. Music, too, is time’s medium. As we listen, we view a black screen –then our fellows in depression, soundless to us, listening to the song we just heard. Am I consentient?
What is the meaning of my soundlessness?
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The only way I can truly see people is through moral love. The problem is not that love’s vision distorts, it is that we often do not have a sound grasp of love. The difficult question is not whether or why moral love is the only way to truly see people, it is to understand how we can love when we are caught up in ourselves.
On Exile was conceived somewhat after Fragments in Search of Meaning. Both join The Book, where being in exile becomes a psychological as well as a political condition. Teixeira lays out experiences in a given society where the condition of being thrown from home –atopos, without a place- oscillates in seclusion, trauma, and sometimes shame along intertwining political and psychological interpretations. Within this political and psychological chiasmus, through an ascetics of seeing that insists on the dignity of the person by subtracting interference from our vision, Texeira proposes the moral relation that secures the safety of home. Thus we are better able to see how we have been caught up in our own world. How often have I been morally blind?
Attention to hands, to eyes, to silence, to gesture, to the structure of experience in exile shows us what it means for us to engage others fluidly beyond the constraints of territory and of stigma. I may know of the platitude, but I have to study the actions – and Texeira’s attention -its focus, editing, and juxtaposition- helps.
The use of the refugee as the figure on which to project one’s fears -as politicians have done now across Europe and in the United States of America- is an attack on ourselves, on the childhood memory of love that knows that we are brothers and sisters and deserve to be treated with dignity and care. To attack the refugee through a monstrous figure is to attack the possibility of love in oneself. Art, through its intense, studied, and elaborate making, can be part of an ascetics of seeing that helps me glimpse love’s vision of each other.
In this way, Texeira’s work, while being argument, is also therapy and protection. He is trying to climb out of the knot of himself.
III
The sound of water
What is the meaning of water? From the first interview of Fragments in Search of Meaning, I feel water streaming down the human face. Meanwhile, in On Exile, bottles of water shimmer on the table in a refugee’s apartment as we watch a video of a home destroyed by political violence. The lake rises and falls –is quiet in the rain, serene in light and atmosphere, fades into blackness.
What is it to cross the water?
The refugees have come as far as the survivors of depression, entering the ocean of a language they do not know, stuck dependently on the gratitude of others and the withering support of the state; thrown to their own improvisation, to their resources unseen to the wider world, and to each other; sucked down by the whirlpools in an economy that will find no easy use for them. They are wracked by the memory of war and of loss, visited at night and in the small corners of the day by their ghost-like homes back home and by the figures of the dead. What is it to live in death?
The most difficult and interesting part of Texeira’s work has to do with this question through the piece on depression. Certainly, the refugee has struggled with depression. But what are we to learn from those of us who are, for prolonged periods of time, refugees from hope? What can we learn from the lives of the chronically depressed? How do you live when your world is dead?
The easy thing would be to avoid such hopelessness by calling on sanity. Our agency is our sanity –the belief that we are powerful beings who can guide our own lives. But this sanity is in no small part a delusion. We are powerless beings against collective will, historical luck, state violence, ecological drift, the climate itself, weather patterns, our chemistry, the throws of abuse and deprived upbringing, the unknown in our brains, the flow of time. We have every reason to be depressed. Sanity is insane, and insanity is sane. Depression flows with every force of being, fluid and true to our shapeless reality. To be depressed is to be in the heart of a fact.
Which fact?
IV
Outside
On Exile begins with the embarrassed comment, “I’m gonna look ugly.” The person we meet is self-conscious, out of place, feeling that she cannot appear well in a video. But this is surface, like the ripples that move across Lake Erie from wind, whereas the depths are unaffected. The person we meet slowly comes into view as very strong. How can you be strong when you are powerless?
When the survivors of Fragments in Search of Meaning listen to their songs, they hear the sound of the outside, not necessarily in the song but as the song meeting their minds, stirring it. Beyond their minds is the fluidity of a sound world.
By comparison, On Exile often focuses our listening to the sound of water. This sounds takes us outside ourselves to what is beyond us. It, too, is true, like depression’s awful suffering, its soleil noir.
Water’s truth as a sound is the presence of the outside. Outside hopelessness is the Earth. It is indifferent. This indifference gives us space on ourselves, throws the wars that have shorn us from our lands into a distance, however slight, a sliver of reality that exceeds the human prison. And so too with the locked cell of our minds. Beyond it, the sound of a fluid world.
The close angles of On Exile, the cuts of Fragments in Search of Meaning are indications of a perspective we easily miss. Sanity as a form of normalcy will project the delusion that everything must be visible, perfect, and whole. Europe was always one. The white man is a unified category. Christianity is the one true religion. Reason guides the soul. But time breaks through these fantasies like water through a shell-fractured foundation. Far more interesting, and human, is the presence of fragmented perspectives that reconsolidate who we are while leaving, always, part of ourselves fluid and incomplete.
Can I move when subject to force?
~
Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer
* The author would like to thank Misty Morrison for discussing Texeira’s work, Rana Khoury for a clarification, SPACES Gallery -esp. Christina Vassallo and Karl Anderson- and José Carlos Texeira.