Reflections on the In Between
A modern art work in the Aga Khan Museum asks us to consider what parts of our history we carry with us and what parts must be left behind.
The effect of being violently driven from home, and that home being despoiled .... it can go on and on like sea-surf against rocks. On and on within a man or a woman, or within a child as it grows up somewhere else, never at home, only away.
—Guy Gavriel Kay, All the Seas of the World
One of the contrasts between classical and modern approaches to art—especially in music and painting—is that in the classical, a high value inheres in coherent composition, i.e., the harmonious arrangement of elements that “belong together.” In the modern, works are commonly built on juxtaposition: the union of discordant, even opposed, elements to make a statement or ask a question. Unfortunately, many modern juxtapositions are attempts by artists to find meaning where none exists: banal co-locations of disjointed elements, the union of which takes us nowhere and shows us nothing. There are, nevertheless, modern works where juxtaposition achieves the goal wonderfully. A master of this approach is the American painter Edward Hopper, whose work often relies on the fusion of elements that at first seems odd yet, with fuller contemplation, reveals their meaning.
Hopper’s Night Windows (1928), below, is a good example. The world at night is a frequent subject for Hooper, and in this painting we see a dramatic contrast between the dark shadows on a building’s exterior and the bright, almost unnatural, light of an apartment in which a half-dressed woman bends forward. The work juxtaposes public and private views, just as it does darkness and light. We see part of a person, but not the whole, and even the white curtain’s movement away from the interior juxtaposes motion against the quiet stillness (so typical of Hopper) of the rest of the composition. Taken as a whole, Hooper presents a scene that is both public and personal and asks us to consider questions of intimacy and privacy in lives lived in the confines of urban spaces.
Last week, while I was visiting the Aga Khan Museum of Islamic Art in Toronto, I came across another modern work built on juxtaposition. The work, Cultured Pallets: Aga Khan Museum, is by the contemporary Canadian-Iranian artist Soheila Esfahani. Her creation comprises two large stacks of over a hundred ordinary wooden shipping pallets, on which the artist has reproduced a decorative motif from an Iranian 15th-century door, on display elsewhere in the Khan Museum.
According to the object label explaining the piece, “the work looks at the role that people, as bearers and translators of cultures, play in our current globalized state.” For the artist, the label continues, the pallets “serve as metaphors for the process by which cultures can be transferred and transformed” and symbolize a state of “in-betweenness,” which is a “space where identities and cultures are negotiated and blended.”
When the exhibition is complete, this set of pallets will be returned to normal use and travel the world in their decorated state, carrying with them symbols of past and present cultures. To help serve this purpose, the artist (who has created several sets of “cultured pallets”) has imprinted her email address on each set, so that anyone interacting with the pallets in the “real world” can contact her.
Though I do not like the term “in-betweenness,” I have thought about this work more than any other at the Museum. At first, I didn’t care for the placement of a classical motif on a mundane object, which, a priori, seemed a bit clichéd. Yet the more I considered the piece and the closer I looked at the decorations, the more I perceived its message and value. Looking at the pallets closely, I observed the artist’s application of the decorative motif across the layers of wood, and how each layer is missing sections that our minds must complete. The decoration that is present and is juxtaposed against the missing parts suggests that once an element of a culture has been removed from its original location it can never be transferred completely—something must always be left behind by the voyager in the process of “negotiation” and “blending.”
Stepping back to consider the neatly arranged pieces of wood made me think of wooden ships and how, in antiquity, sailors were often the transmitters of culture from one land to the next. I imagined, for a moment, Esfahani’s pallets on a merchant ship, which suddenly brought to my mind the disaster last month of the Adriana, when over 600 immigrants drowned as their ship sank in the Mediterranean. Like the pallets before me, these people had been stacked as cargo on the boat, causing it to capsize in the middle of the night. One survivor noted that “we knew we were in trouble” and recalled how some passengers recited Quranic verses and cried as the sea swallowed the ship.
The Adriana was a fishing trawler, a type of boat often used for smuggling because of its large cargo space below deck. On the Adriana, the space meant for fish was filled with men, women, and children. Recalling the disaster, I felt that each of the 600+ souls lost to the sea was one of Esfahani’s pallets: a piece of cargo to the transporters but also a bearer of humanity, carrying the elements of culture and faith across the journey of desperation and hope.
As I reflected on Cultured Pallets, I considered my refugee journey from El Salvador to the United States to escape a civil war. Arriving at a young age, I remember always feeling “in between” both cultures—a sensation heightened when I returned to El Salvador after graduate school and found that I did not fit any better there than in the U.S. As a boy, I had been removed from my place of origin, like a child taken from his native parents and adopted by another family, and I have carried, like one of Esfahani’s palettes, the markings of both my natal and adopted languages and traditions all of my life. Moreover, everywhere I have lived and worked—the U.S., El Salvador, Japan, Italy, and England, to name a few—has left its mark on me, with the result, as I once told a friend, that “I am comfortable anywhere because I belong to nowhere.” I am one of those suitcases one sees in old movies, decorated with hotel and cruise line decals—imprints of places visited and cultures encountered.
Esfahani was influenced by the scholar Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the “third space” as a medium of translation between cultures. For Esfahani and Bhabha, the boundaries between past and present are more fluid than commonly conceived, and a new art object can exist in the past just as an old one can exist in the present. As Bhabha noted in his 1994 book, The Locations of Culture:
The enunciation of cultural difference problematizes the binary division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address. It is the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic.
As with objects, conceptions of cultural identities and nationalities are also fluid for Bhabha, with most of us existing as hybrids of various cultures that we have negotiated (in the navigational and interpersonal sense) and fused into our individual psychology. For Esfahani and Bhabha—as perhaps for Hooper—distinctions between here and there, then and now, light and darkness, mean little. They are superimposed delineations that disappear when seen from the right perspective.
Contemplating Cultured Pallets as I wrote this post, I searched, as I often do, for a musical complement to Esfahani’s creation. In doing so, I recalled Elton John’s 1972 song, “Rocket Man,” the tale of a man cast into space and existing between heaven and earth. The song was inspired by a short story by Ray Bradbury, which presents the astronauts of the future not as heroes but as mundane workers—migrants from Earth who must travel to Mars just to make a living. Online, I came across a video by the filmmaker Majid Adin, who had been invited to make a short film to accompany the song. Adin (and his collaborator Stephen McNally) reimagined “Rocket Man” as the story of a man who leaves his world behind—a voyager who carries the beautiful memories of his culture and family. I found it a remarkable coincidence that Adin is also Iranian—a refugee forced to leave after being imprisoned for his writing—and that his film’s subject is also a traveler moving between worlds, experiencing dislocation and longing while completing the sacred carriage of what he holds dear across time and space.
If you happen to be in Toronto, I encourage you to visit the Aga Khan and see Esfahani’s work up close. If you are far from there, I think Adin’s short film captures their essence well enough.
She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour 9:00 a.m.
And I'm gonna be high
As a kite by then
I miss the Earth so much I miss my wife
It's lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no, no, no
I'm a rocket man
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no, no, no
I'm a rocket man
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them
If you did
And all this science
I don't understand
It's just my job five days a week
A rocket man
A rocket man
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no, no, no
I'm a rocket man
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no, no, no
I'm a rocket man
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
— “Rocket Man,” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin