Slavs and Tatars: Pt II

II.


To Beer Or Not To Beer (2014), Vacuum formed plastic and acrylic paint, 64 x 91 cm. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Slavs and Tatars.

ART iT: From the start you have always worked with language, making these new aphorisms and slogans that seem to borrow from the conventions of tourist promotions and catchphrases along the lines of “Almost heaven, West Virginia.” In contrast, you come up with things like, “Once a tease, always a Kyrgyz.” You inject incongruous content and images into forms that are rooted in a very English speaking or even American sensibility. Would you say you are playing with the tension between an established form and something that exists outside its framework?

S&T: The figure of Molla Nasreddin is a latter day mascot for us. He’s a 12th-century mystic and a literary figure along the lines of La Fontaine or the Brothers Grimm, but also a kind of precursor to Ali G or Borat. The Molla Nasreddin stories have a very first-degree sense of humor. For example, someone asks Molla Nasreddin, “Molla Nasreddin, why are you always riding backwards on your donkey?” And he answers, “Well, there’s no reason for both of us to look in the same direction.” They are really stupid and first-degree but speak to complex issues of ethics, relativism, etc. In a similar way, there’s a willful injection of stupidity or idiocy into our slogans that sits uncomfortably with a certain gravitas or complexity.
Anders Kreuger wrote a four- or five-page takedown of Slavs and Tatars in Afterall, which is a pretty rare thing to see these days in itself. One thing he recommended that we’ve taken to heart is that our work should not simply juxtapose high and low, but also find the disruptive potential of the low and elevate it. So “Once a tease, always a Kyrgyz” is an idiotic, first-degree rhyme, but there’s a complexity to it because it’s also addressing Kyrgyzstan’s ambiguous position in Central Asia. I’m pretty sure it’s the only country in the world that has both a US and a Russian military base in the same territory. Looking further back into history, the Kyrgyz were often conflated with Kazakhs and with Tatars. The combining of these incompatibles or antitheticals is essential to humor – the kind of humor where you’re not laughing at somebody, but laughing with somebody. It disarms people and allows them to access more complex ideas.
We’re certainly aware that, when exhibiting outside our region, we’re dealing with subject matter that is obscure to 90 percent of our audience. So when you’re dealing with such subject matter, you have to meet your audience half way, and humor allows that. Willful idiocy allows for simplicity too. Thinking back, we studied with Rosalind Krauss and Jacques Derrida 20 years ago. At the time we were very much in the camp of the critical theorists, as opposed to the traditionalists in the English or Philosophy departments who didn’t accept post-68 theory or philosophy and considered it best relegated to literary criticism. But we have to admit in hindsight that there was an excessive obfuscation of language, a fetishization of making text difficult. And you can still see that today when you read certain publications in our milieu. So we’re more interested in the confidence it takes to write simply, and stupidity or humor requires a certain sense of self-abnegation that is all too lacking in the way we express ourselves. Complex ideas don’t have to be expressed in complex language.

ART iT: What happens when you put one of your slogans on a mirror?

S&T: For the first six or so years of our work, we didn’t hang anything on the wall at all. We didn’t feel comfortable with it. It was really through the mirror that we were able to build a relationship with the wall whereby art would not be the end point. The mirror necessarily sends you back to yourself. In the “Nations” (2007), for example, the text becomes almost like a mantra. As you mentioned, these slogans come from tourist or advertising language that, we hope, collapses onto itself. The mirror contains the idea of endlessly reflecting itself, in that it can create a mise en abyme, especially when there are other mirrors around.
There’s a Thomas Merton quote we often return to, “Quit this world, quit the next, and quit quitting.” There’s a very interesting confluence where Sufism and Russian intellectual history overlap. The Russians looked at logic as representing the world of the devil, which was this world, whereas the next, transcendental world is necessarily illogical or irrational – this despite the fact that Russia is intellectually a Western country, that is, the pedagogical model there is completely European. You find a similar suspension of these laws of non-contradiction in mystical Islam. Bewilderment or perplexity is the highest form of being, and if you want to engage with a transcendence of some sort, it has to happen outside the rational world.
So the Merton quote collapses on itself, of course, but it also suggests that even the most liberating ideology will become its own prison. At some point you have to disavow even that which liberates you. The reason why there are mirrors is that there’s a relationship to one’s own subjectivity, obviously, but with the text as a mantra.


Above: Nations (2012), reverse mirror painting, 109.5 x 160 cm. Installation view. Below: “Qit Qat Qlub,” installation view, Preis der Nationalgalerie 2015, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2015. Photo David von Becker.

ART iT: Do you think the work with texts and mirrors also spatially anticipates what you went on to explore with the Lektor (2014) installation drawing upon Soviet-era simultaneous translation techniques for films? Did the mirrors offer a way to overlay text and space, and text and different subjectivities?

S&T: We hadn’t thought of that. It could very well be. There’s definitely a maximalism to the work. There’s definitely more, more, more – even in the sense of a proliferation of media within the same space. There’s text, there’s craftwork, there’s sculpture, there’s a lecture somewhere. We joke it’s like a traveling circus that comes to town with something for everybody.
One thing we were seduced by when we heard the voiceover translation is this notion of respect and disrespect. When you speak over somebody in that way, it’s disrespectful – they’re still speaking – but at the same time you’re trying to make them understood. It’s awkward. Someone’s trying too hard to help, and they end up causing a nuisance. But in relation to history, it’s equally important to disrespect your sources, which is why we never show archives as exhibitions. We think it’s lazy. Art has already done that kind of appropriation. So what do we bring to the table?
To disrespect something means you have to respect it, because you have to know it to be able to disrespect it. You have to know it intimately to disavow it or build upon it. Our limited experience of art history, or even history as such, is that it’s always conceived in opposition to something prior. But there is an equally compelling view of history that builds upon tradition, whereby innovation can happen as a form of continuity. It doesn’t have to be a rupture all the time.

ART iT: But surely the lektor is exactly performing a rupture?

S&T: It is. It’s one voice over another voice over another voice. You start talking and then five seconds later another person starts talking, then somebody else. It’s a domino effect. It’s the same text, translated into different languages. There’s a rupture between the translation and the original, successively, but at the same time there’s a continuity as well. In that way, it extends the same dynamic of the mirrors for princes genre: these were guides for rulers that contained within them a criticism of that very ruler. But they did so not frontally but via an act of generosity.


Above: “Language Arts,” installation view at The Third Line, Dubai, 2014. Below: Behind Reason (2012), mimeograph on paper, various sizes.

ART iT: This is something that Japanese artists struggle with, so I’m curious to know your views on it, but to what extent do you have a critical awareness of the idea of performing for the Western gaze?

S&T: Our most recent lecture is about Eastern orientalism, and how Russia and even Germany looked toward the East. Edward Said admitted himself that he didn’t take German orientalism into account in his critique of orientalism, because it didn’t fit his model – it wasn’t colonialist, and it was largely esoteric and academic. There’s a fascinating book by Suzanne Marchand called German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. It shows that until the late 19th century, orientalism in Germany was very theologically inspired due to the strong influence of Kulturprotestantismus. For example, they were always trying to find out what the original language of the Bible was. The Russians were trained in the German school of orientalism at Leipzig and Tübingen. And contrary to the French and English, the Russians didn’t go half way across the world. They went right across their border and conquered people who 400 years earlier had been their conquerors. That situation negated the idea of a civilizing mission. By definition, the Russians couldn’t think they were inherently better than the people they conquered, because otherwise how did those people manage to rule the Russians for so long?
The reason I mention this is that many of these orientalists used the study of the Orient to critique their own Western cultures and governments, in a way that was counter to Said’s understanding that knowledge and domination necessarily go together – that it’s necessarily exploitative. Here we see the idea of an East not as a real East, but as a means to critique your own society. That’s what we’re trying to do, too. Maybe that’s the mirror in some sense.
There’s a proverb that if you scratch a Russian, you reveal a Tatar. Underneath the West is the East, and vice versa. These are not fixed geographies and fixed positions. And that applies to the idea of the Western gaze as well. I understand what you mean when you ask me about it, but I also don’t understand. Each person has a sense of abroad within them, whether it’s the Global South, or even the American South in relation to Northeast and West Coast intellectualism.
Some of the most transformative experiences are those that happen outside the centers of power and knowledge – not necessarily New York and London, but rather places like Istanbul and Vancouver or even Brisbane. The reason why these places are more immigrant-friendly is because they don’t have a totalizing urbanism. They are uglier than Paris, London or New York, but they also allow a more communitarian approach to identity. You can have your Chinese and Russian in the suburbs of Houston or Vancouver, and he feels fine. It’s not a Republican identity along the French model, which demands that you be French, that you be a Parisian. We find that in these places where there’s not a lot of art, there’s actually more engagement with and curiosity about our work. That goes back to our origins and our concern with a generosity that is not hierarchical, or even pedagogical for that matter. We’re not teaching people. We’re not championing things we “get.” We constantly engage with things we don’t necessarily understand or agree with. Something bothers me, and I’m trying to understand why.
Our book on Molla Nasreddin was similar. It could have easily played into the hands of Islamophobes. Why would you want to do that in 2011, just two years after the Danish cartoons? There was a crisis of confidence: do we continue or not? And again, you don’t usually spend two years working on something you disagree with. But arguably that’s where true learning comes from – when you engage those things with which you disagree. It’s the same when you befriend people you wouldn’t normally befriend. There’s a confrontation with your own blind spots.

ART iT: In the discourse on art in Japan, there’s a lot of anxiety about the idea of the international versus the domestic. You can dismiss something in Japan by saying it’s “too domestic” or “not relevant,” for example, but you can also dismiss something for being “too international” or “inauthentic.” There’s a self-Japonism as well as an externally projected Japonism, and a progressive internationalism versus a more aspirational internationalism. A lot of this stems from the pervasive idea that Japan is marginalized from international discourse. Under these circumstances, the dilemma is: to what degree do you try to join the international conversation, and to what degree do you reject it?

S&T: Hopefully it’s not a binary, right? What we try to do is find the points of convergence and not divergence – usually in the most unlikely places. Like the Muslim Chinese. That’s probably the furthest point of relevance for today’s Islam. Even theologically, in one of the Hadiths, Mohammed says to take Islam all the way to China – it’s the end of the world, not the center. But what our work tries to show is that it’s actually the center that should be looking to the margins.
The same holds for medieval texts. What does a 12th-century genre of advice literature have to do with contemporary political writing? Everything, actually. Because the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, in that there’s a diarrhea of political writing now, but very little writing on faith. So how can we reintegrate faith into the political discourse, but in a progressive way? The challenge is to find the point of convergence even if it means stretching it – really elastically – or revisiting and reworking it, as opposed to an oppositional us versus them or inside versus outside mentality.
One thing we continuously revisit is our name itself. Slavs and Tatars itself is a celebration of the multiplicity of identities. It hopefully does away with the tired identity politics of reductive categories. I read and write Russian better than I do Persian, so my intellectual history is stronger in Russian than my own cultural heritage. We all contain these multiplicities within ourselves. The challenge is to resolve those multiplicities within oneself. They are not necessarily in conflict. That’s delusional. There may be friction sometimes – it’s not about disavowing friction – but it’s about trying to find how you can make them connect. That takes a certain amount of acrobatics within oneself.


Beyonsense (2012), installation view, Projects 98, the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

ART iT: Just days after we met in Tokyo, the terrorist attacks of November 13 took place in Paris. Following my initial shock, sadness and concern for the people affected by the attacks, I was left with a sense of deflation. There’s still the possibility that cooler heads might prevail, but the rhetoric coming from François Hollande – not to mention more extreme politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy or Marine Le Pen – gives me the foreboding that we are spiraling into a cycle of ever-escalating violence.
It may take years before we can understand the true consequences of the attacks, but two writers on violence come to mind here. One is Frantz Fanon, who discussed the necessity for violence in the anti-colonial struggle, based upon his experiences and observations in Algeria. To the extent that Fanon can be taken literally, I think he can also be interpreted as advocating a “disrespect your sources” type of intellectual “violence” – a radical overturning of entrenched mentalities and values. The other writer is Walter Benjamin, who in his “Critique of Violence” identifies the law itself, and, by extension, the state, as a form of violence. A renunciation of violence would thus require us to rethink the nature of the state.
Both writers suggest to me that there is room for us to rethink the asymmetrical rhetoric of violence. Why is it that an aerial bombardment of a city in a war zone is “surgical,” producing only targeted “kills” or, at worst, “collateral damage”? Why are people relatively accepting of the violence committed by the Israeli state in Gaza, which could arguably be described as “terrorism”? We talk about “senseless violence,” but is there such a thing as “sensible violence”? (Coincidentally, I just finished reading Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys.)
What is the appropriate response to violence?

S&T: It’s all the more disheartening to see how much the rhetoric in France following the attacks resembles that of the United States post-9/11 in its simplicity and stupidity: continuing to drink en terrasse as a form of resistance or defending the Enlightenment, which we should add led to the invasion of Iraq and preparing the ground for ISIS. We also fear that the attacks will only harden France’s raging secularism which has led to a whole range of problems: from the more expected (woeful integration of immigrant communities) to the less so, like the inability to conduct a census, the wholesale suspicion of the communitarian social model, etc.
Violence lives and feeds on black and white. When the journalist Georges-Marc Benamou asked President François Mitterrand what the color of the 5th Republic would be, Mitterand answered not the clichéd blue, white, red, but: “Gray. The gray of the lavender in the south, the gray of the bunkers off the Normand coast.” Gray is what we all need to desperately hold onto, in our faiths, in our ideas, and in our hearts. The terror is in the blacks and the whites, or the bleu, blanc, rouge.


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I | II

Slavs and Tatars: The Other Side of the River

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