While his writings have become ubiquitous in contemporary art theorising, Glissant’s actual involvement with the artworld remains understudied
During the early 1970s, Agustín Cárdenas carved Édouard Glissant, a narrow, charred and eerily biomorphic wood sculpture rising about one metre high. The sculpture is a ‘portrait’ of the Martinican poet-philosopher (1928–2011) who theorised Caribbean self-formation through concepts such as ‘relation’ (the ongoing exchange between the self and the ‘other’ from which identities are coproduced) and ‘creolization’ (an alternative to Négritude) during the latter half of the twentieth century, amid worldwide anticolonial movements and rapid globalisation. In ‘Seven Landscapes for the Sculptures of Cárdenas’, an encomium penned as a catalogue essay and later collected in Caribbean Discourse (1989), Glissant writes, ‘I have a great piece of sculpture by him’, referring to the work above, made when Cárdenas visited the Institut Martiniquais d’Études in Fort-de-France. Glissant, in his typically drifty, anarchic and electrifying style, describes how, in the revelatory sculptor’s hands, the ‘flatness’ of a piece of hard mahogany ‘became patience and transparency… lost time took shape in our consciousness’. Cárdenas ‘revitalizes us’, Glissant writes. ‘The foaming form of his marble is rooted in the sky. His bronze, projected upwards, oozes new blood.’
Édouard Glissant is now housed at Mémorial ACTe in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, which holds around half of the some 200 artworks from Glissant’s personal collection. A selection of around four dozen of these, including major diasporic and transnational figures such as Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam, is touring in the exhibition The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant, conceived as ‘a gesture toward one of Glissant’s unfinished projects: the M2A2, the Martinican Museum of the Arts of the Americas’.
While his writings have become ubiquitous in contemporary art theorising, Glissant’s actual involvement with the artworld remains understudied; by the time of Cárdenas’s visit, the poet had been writing about exhibitions for at least a decade. When he lived in Paris (1946–65), having arrived at age eighteen on a scholarship from the Sorbonne – years before he became prolific in his craft, cofounded the Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l’Autonomie party, was temporarily barred from returning to Martinique and published his seminal text, Poetics of Relation (1990) – he wrote catalogue essays for Galerie du Dragon (1955–95) in the 6th arrondissement, which was popular among literati, Surrealists and Latin American artists. It showed Jean Bouvier, Antonio Seguí, José Gamarra, Pancho Quilici, Matta, Cárdenas and others who would become Glissant’s friends and appear periodically in his essays on poetics and politics.
What is evident in Glissant’s art writing is, first, its conviviality. Glissant describes the artists in his circle with untempered delight and hospitality, as if to invite them into relation with him and his philosophical project. Regarding Matta, of whose oil paintings Glissant owned at least two – The Pelée Mountain no longer smokes, it blooms (1958) and Witnesses of the Impossible (1987) – Glissant wrote in Poetic Intention (1969), ‘the spaces of Matta uproot us, seize us: making us, fixed before the canvas, sensitive to our own movement’. In a 1984 piece for The UNESCO Courier, Glissant writes, ‘Depth in Matta’s painting is achieved by a projection forward in front of the canvas of pictural space, a proscenium which saw his first attempts to render visible the convulsion of modern thought’. If the language sounds familiar, it is because Glissant so often uses roots and rootedness in his essays to symbolise totalitarianism and intolerance and the inverse – uprootedness – to figure diaspora. Another aspect of his thought concerns the tension between Baroque or rhizomatic ‘expansion’ and the dubious ‘depth’ that is the demesne of Western metaphysics and science.
The works of art in Glissant’s orbit became imbricated in his expansive yet specific aesthetic and political views. In the same Courier article, he calls Seguí ‘Baroque’, a historical sensibility he extols in Poetics of Relation for the way it opposes the pretenses of Western rationalism. In his collection, Glissant possesses at least 12 of Seguí’s works on paper – a series of soft pastels depicting the voyage and sinking of RMS Titanic. Then there’s Lam, whose Afro-Cuban idioms or ‘creolizations’ resonated particularly well with Glissant. He owned at least four of Lam’s lithographs: three illustrations the artist made for The Restless Earth (1955), a book of poems Glissant published through Galerie du Dragon and an untitled print on vellum dated 1974. In Glissant’s eyes, Lam had earned a place in the same ‘archipels de la démesure, de la révolte et de la beauté convulsive [archipelagoes of excess, revolt and convulsive beauty]’ as the poet and theorist Aimé Césaire, and artists André Breton and Picasso. He wrote sensuously about Lam’s gouaches, such as The Jungle (1942–43), the artist’s best-known work, now housed in MoMA’s collection, lavishing attention on the hands, handlike feet, breasts and buttocks of its hybrid figures, as well as the reeds, canes, dry clays, curved masks and moons with which the figures are enmeshed.
If relation seeks to avoid reducing the other to a transparent, seemingly knowable object, Glissant appears to model this in his art writing by layering thick description onto an analysis that does not so much penetrate as encrust, does not so much explicate as abstract and does not so much critique as anoint. But encomiums can also be reductive. They momentarily expand the work before circumscribing it within the
values of the writer’s project, values often external to the work itself. Perhaps relation plays out differently in the space of cultural production than in the space of cultural self-formation. When artists and those championing them encounter one another, what is exchanged is not only knowledge and mutual recognition but also social capital, historical legitimacy and, at times, physical artefacts. The fact that Glissant accumulated a sizeable personal collection and aspired to build a museum from donated works of Latin American and Caribbean art – works whose prestige would have grown in tandem with the institution’s own – imparts a view of the complexities of relation, with all its interpersonal, material and discursive entanglements on display.
The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant is on view at Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York, 28 February – 10 May
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