A defense of art in troubled times

I wake up in the morning in New York City, where I live. There is running water and electricity. I make coffee and put on music. I switch on my computer and read my email. I take a shower, I select a scarf, I select a hat. Everything is intact. The first line of Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster reads, ‘The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.’¹ Everything is intact, but the disaster has ruined everything, the disaster I have always feared, everything is soaked through with the color of the disaster.

Far from any notion that the real disaster is yet to come, we should recognize that the disaster is totally here, simply not evenly distributed (to adapt what William Gibson said about the future). Is it that things could become very bad, or is it that things are already very bad? Is the current situation terrible, or is it already unspeakable? The question that contains the answer is: ‘For whom?’ For families torn apart by American inhospitality, the disaster is already here. For the young man slaughtered on a train in Portland for standing up in defense of women being harassed, the disaster is apocalyptic. For the people who live in zones where the ‘relaxed’ rules of military engagement are in force, life is the disaster, and nothing at all is intact.

When I was a child in Lagos, I was normal in most respects, except for my deep and private fear of disaster. I was a member of a middle class family, my parents loved each other. I was a good student, curious about my immediate world and, peripherally, the larger one as well, the world beyond Nigeria. My most notable personal peculiarity was a certain attitude to history. I saw history’s disasters, and wondered when they would touch me directly. Part of this was a longing for extremes, a wish we sometimes have to see everything upturned. But fear was the dominant note. This attitude was formed early, by the time I was ten. It was intense, and it has never left me. I perpetually felt that disaster was coming, that peace was anomalous.

Nigeria was a decade or two past a horrifying civil war in which millions had died. That war had devastated parts of Nigeria, though not the part in which I lived. It had happened elsewhere, and at the wrong time, a war that had shaped the society in which I grew up but that touched me not at all. In the Nigeria of my youth, we had dictatorships, bad government, and frequent coups, but most of us were essentially unscathed. There was no forced conscription, for most of us, and no genocide. The element of kleptocracy was powerful within the dictatorship, and the brunt of resistance was borne mostly by artists, journalists, and freethinkers. I knew of contemporary struggles far away from home: in Latin America, in South Africa, in Israel-Palestine, not to mention the astonishing horrors that unfolded later in Rwanda and the Balkans, horrors that were looped on cable TV. I was always curious: What does it mean to live in a time of disaster? Who would I be in it? What would it do to my stubborn individuality, to my hatred of interpersonal violence in all its forms, whether sponsored by the state or by sub-state groups?

I learned from books that each country compounded its disasters with disastrous responses. Each slipped into nonsensical self-injuring wars, helplessly, madly. Humanity was insane. Peace was illusory and fragile. Why should the places in which I lived be exempt? And so I reasoned that something dramatic would eventually happen in Nigeria again, that our modest and highly attenuated serenity was going to shatter. I had a sense of doom about my home country, a sense that we had been lucky so far, and that the luck couldn’t hold forever.

I left Nigeria for the United States in my late teens, in 1992. As an American citizen, I expected things to steadily improve in the US. The country, already good, would get better. My sense of doom was still there, but less tense than it had been in more volatile Nigeria. America had a civilian governmental structure, but I soon understood that its root assumptions were no less militarist than Nigeria’s. This was in the period in which I was shaping my sense of participation in American life, which I expressed to myself as not being a patriot, but being a citizen. As I grew older, I began to understand the more profound and pervasive violence of the Pax Americana, the ongoing violence of the policies that sustain the illusion of the American dream.

Then the disaster came. But it came not as my childhood self expected, with war on my street, with bodies hacked and buildings blown up. Of course, war was going on elsewhere. Massive bombs were dropped overseas with intent to kill, but non-American lives have never truly mattered, compared to ‘national interests’, and that was nothing new. The moment of disaster came, and it did not come with forced conscription or imprisonment or deportation or secret police. Well, at least not for me. The disaster that settled on the US was not visibly totalitarian. It was the nastiness of war, elsewhere; indiscriminate incarceration, of other people; the separation of families, not mine. The disaster was the dismantling of norms, the mainstreaming of vicious prejudice, the unmasking of aggression, the reiteration of racism, the re-litigation of homophobia, the escalation of misogyny ‒ the old problems, but now megaphoned, with the Klan hoods taken off. The peculiarity of this disaster was that it was a failure of democracy, but also a democratic achievement. Democracy, as it had been defined in the US, was awash in corporate money, vulnerable to falsehoods and prejudices, and saddled with an antique electoral college structure that together conspired to bring a horrifying candidate into office.

As a child I was curious about and deeply fearful of mayhem, my little heart was heavy with potential loss. That fear, when I grew up, gave me a way of understanding what I am now looking at. I had a sense of the ground, and so I had something to think with when the ground split open. In the summer of 2016, while I was in Germany, I was asked what I thought would happen should the Republican candidate be elected American president. I tried to speak with caution, making two tentative assertions. The first was that, if the polls were to be believed, he was not going to be elected president (of course, the polls, as it turned out, were not to be believed). The second was that, in the unlikely event that he was elected president, it would spell the end of the established American liberal constitutional order. This is plain fact now. The evidence is there as plainly as possible. And yet, it is insufficient proof for those who continue to wonder when the real disaster will arrive. 

An earthquake is not a precision weapon. In response to the alarm of seismic change, we are pressured not only to rethink fundamentals, but to exile from ourselves whatever is not deemed fundamental and immediate. In our hysteria, everything is jeopardized. What is lost is whatever we were hoping to save from the disaster, what we were hoping would outlast the fire. One of the key spaces requiring our vigilance and defense is art, and specifically the consolations particular to art.

I find that I have been thinking about figures who retained their faith in art even during unspeakable times. I have thought a lot about Olivier Messiaen, who wrote his Quartet for the End of Time in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. Even more, my mind has been on the plight of the great Dutch curator and typographer Willem Sandberg. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, Sandberg, who was a curator at the Stedelijk Museum, joined the Dutch resistance. He put his typographic skills to courageous use, helping to forge hundreds of identity papers for Dutch Jews, thereby saving their lives. To conceal this noble deception, he and other members of the resistance came up with a plot to burn down the Public Records Office in Amsterdam, so that the Gestapo would be unable to crosscheck the forged documents. They were betrayed, and one by one Sandberg’s co-conspirators were captured and shot. Sandberg fled, and lived in the countryside under an assumed identity.

Between 1943 and 1945, to fend off despair at the very real possibility of arrest and death (his wife and son had been arrested), Sandberg began making a series of chapbooks he called experimenta typographica. The series was characterized by strong contrasts and bold primary colors, much of it published on brown paper: in the straitened circumstances of war, Sandberg used cardboard, as well as bits of wallpaper, and pages torn from magazines. The exquisitely designed pamphlets featured his own writing as well as excerpts from literary figures of the past.

The focused, self-directed labor of the experimenta typographica helped Sandberg survive the terror and threat of war. Out of the apocalypse, in a time when all things careful and humane were being throttled, he brought forth an insistent beauty. Sandberg served as the postwar director of the Stedelijk, from 1945 to 1963, and he continued to be a major influence on the museum’s visual identity, designing pretty much all its exhibition posters and catalogs. He died in 1984.

Figures like Sandberg and Messiaen, making remarkable work during societal eclipses, serve us as exemplars and encouragement. They faced an apocalypse, while we face a disaster that could become an apocalypse. We might dare to hope that if they could make art that was responsive to the abject conditions at hand but not imaginatively limited to those conditions, so can we. 

I imagine two kinds of preparation for the arrival of the disaster. One is the kind of preparation one makes beforehand, through study, through thoughtfulness, through a certain relationship to history, and through anticipation, including anticipatory language. For example, Germans have a culture of memory, necessitated by that country’s history in the past century. This has helped Germany handle the current European vogue for ethno-nationalism better than many of its neighbors. (Better, but not perfectly, since there are willful amnesiacs there as well.)

The point of anticipatory preparation is to conserve energy and limit the number of required moves when the disaster arrives. ‘Anticipatory preparation’ sounds tautological, but there’s a second kind of preparation: the kind one undertakes while the event is ongoing. This is a dynamic preparation that is responsive to the evolution of the event. What does this second kind of preparation look like in practice? I’ll define it negatively: it is important to not mistake the daily news, the daily noise, around the event for the event itself. News media desires news generation. Noise becomes its own destination, clouding the real words. But to define it positively: I return to the earlier distinction I asserted between the patriot and the citizen. The patriot is besotted, inflexible, nostalgic, tied to origin myths, and closed off to radical doubt. The citizen is willing to fundamentally critique the bases of his or her inherited social arrangements. For citizens, as I define them, everything can be doubted and reconsidered. In the middle of the disaster, patriotism does one kind of work; oppositional citizenship, propelled by productive doubt, does another.

The disaster is the core out of which reality unfolds. Everything else is epiphenomenal. The despot’s personal style, the vulgarity, the dyslexia, the hair, the crude sentences, these are surface effects. To lose sight of the core and to treat the epiphenomena as the reality is to risk becoming, oneself, disastrous. It would be a mistake to consider any single action undertaken by the current American president or government as ‘the straw that breaks the camel’s back’, just as it would be a mistake to think we are merely en route to the disaster. It is here, and if we did not prepare for it before, we must prepare for it now, now that it is here.

‘There are no strangers.’ Thus wrote Toni Morrison in The Origin of Others, and she goes on, ‘There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from. For the stranger is not foreign, she is random; not alien but remembered; and it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known – though unacknowledged – selves that summons a ripple of alarm.’² This is a reminder in a time of constant alarm. But the thought that comes to me, finally, is one pertaining to the longue durée. There are already those in the artworld who are plumbing the depths of the ongoing moment. But I remember that Tolstoy’s first publication of War and Peace in its entirety was in 1869, and yet the main material of the novel, the Napoleonic Wars, occurred more than 50 years prior, before Tolstoy was born.

What our own shadowed era will finally be, as far as art is concerned, is possibly a matter for the distant future. But in the meantime, here we are with this disaster on our hands, this disaster that at times doesn’t even look like one, but with which everything is colored through. That is our material. And on what we do with it, everything depends.

1. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska 1995, p. 1.

2. Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2017, p. 38.

First published in the Art Basel | Year 48 book. For more information, click here.

Born in 1975, Teju Cole is a writer, art historian, and photographer. He is the photography critic for the New York Times Magazine and the author of four books, each in a different genre, including Known and Strange Things (2016), a collection of essays on art, literature, photography, and politics. He is a recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Windham Campbell Prize, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, among other honors. His most recent publication, Blind Spot, a book of photographs and texts, was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photobook Award, and his solo multimedia performance piece, Black Paper, was featured at the 2017 Performa Biennial. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.  

Header image: Teju Cole, Zurich, September 2014, (detail), 2014. Courtesy of the artist.