Emotional Baggage: The Suitcase as Archive, Miniature, and Nostalgia

Emotional Baggage: The Suitcase as Archive, Miniature, and Nostalgia ALEX FOO Columbia University, Class of 2021 ABSTRACT This paper investigates the use of suitcases in Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise and Katrín Sigurdadóttir’s Green Grass of Home and reads them as mediated self-portraits and attempts at anamnesis in response to their geographical displacement. While Duchamp assembled his own retrospective with photographed reproductions of his past works, Sigurdadottir created miniature models of public parks near where she used to live. I posit Duchamp and Sigurdadóttir’s suitcases as heterotopic sites that subvert the art museum and public park respectively according to the archival logics of both artists. I then seek to understand how both works grapple with the anxieties of dislocation by foregrounding the utopian nature of home. Ultimately, I suggest that both Boîte and Green Grass come to terms with the impossibility of return and in doing so they present a new subjectivity where nostalgia perpetuates itself as the desire for desire, a redemptive longing that serves as its own justification. In an advertisement campaign from 1921, luxury luggage designer Louis Vuitton used the slogan “Montre-moi tes bagages et je te dirai qui tu es” (“Show me your luggage and I will tell you who you are”). Roomcritic, "The Art of Travel through Hotel Labels with Louis Vuitton.," RoomCritic, January 06, 2016, accessed January 16, 2019, https://roomcritic.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/the-art-of-travel-through-hotel-labels-with-louis-vuitton/. It is a curious divinatory proposition, that one might be able to discern a latent personality in sundry possessions, or that disemboweled contents within a bag might constitute a stable signified. French artist Marcel Duchamp and Icelandic artist Katrín Sigurdadóttir take up this proposition in their semi-autobiographical works of art—Boîte-en-valise (1936-1941) and Green Grass of Home (1997) respectively—both of which employ portable suitcases as display boxes that open to reveal miniature works of art. Housed in a nondescript brown leather carrying case, Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (Figure 1) was designed as a mobile archive. Boîte comes with additional compartments that slide out to display miniaturized reproductions of Duchamp’s past paintings and readymades, A readymade is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a “mass-produced article selected by an artist and displayed as a work of art.” including the infamous Fountain, Nude Descending the Staircase, and his riff on the Mona Lisa L.H.O.O.Q. Similarly, Katrín Sigurdadóttir’s suitcase in Green Grass of Home (Figure 2) contains scaled-down models of parks and nature reserves. Framed within modular wooden boxes, these verdant landscapes are then unstacked like a set of Russian nesting dolls to present miniature topographies. Assuming that this metonymic logic of Louis Vuitton’s slogan holds true, what might we possibly learn from the contents of these two nomads’ used and later exhibited luggage? Prima facie, Boîte and Green Grass respond to the artists’ geographical displacement and attempt to reconstruct the self from the past. Both works on transit were works in transit as well, for their construction to ok place transnationally as a result of the two artists’ diasporic lives. Boîte was conceived in the interregnum between the two world wars when Duchamp, pressed by the exigencies of war, found himself shuttling between the United Stated and France. To obtain supplies for this project, Duchamp used the pass of a cheese dealer to travel between the occupied and unoccupied zones of Paris. He eventually amassed 69 miniature reproductions of his works for Boîte, shipping these parts off to New York in 1941 under the label “household goods,” before departing for the United States as he had done during WWI. Dalia Judovitz, "Duchamp's "Luggage Physics": Art on the Move," Postmodern Culture 16, no. 1 (September 2005): doi:10.1353/pmc.2006.0007, 1. Sigurdadóttir, too, is a peripatetic artist, albeit one with a decidedly less dramatic backstory. Born in Reykjavík, she moved to the United States for art school in San Francisco and settled in New York. Green Grass depicts green spaces close to Sigurdadóttir’s former residences, and one espies famous landmarks like Golden Gate Park nestled within her 26 boxes. Green Grass was also made on the go: Sigurdadóttir would actually check the entire bag at the airport and would continue to work out of her suitcase on the installation as she travelled, in effect creating a mobile studio. This essay seeks to consider and compare Duchamp and Sigurdadóttir’s shared strategies of mining the autobiographical self as archive and their assemblage of miniatures. What is it that they are trying to recuperate? More significantly, what might their works suggest about the anxieties of the artist in exile or diaspora and the nature of nostalgia? Archival Impulses Through their use of the archive, Duchamp’s Boîte and and Sigurdadóttir’s Green Grass operate via a common mode of retrospection. In Boîte, Duchamp literally takes stock of his past works and fashions a condensed catalogue raisonné for himself. In a televised interview, Duchamp spoke of how “exhibiting one thing here and another there feels like amputating a finger or a leg each time.” Kynaston McShine, "Marcel Duchamp," in The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 52. For the French artist, the dispersal of his body of work feels as painful as the sundering of his physical body, which thus necessitates the systematic corralling of that which has been scattered. French philosopher Jacques Derrida offers a reading of archives as objects whose existence evinces an inextinguishable longing to return to an absolute origin, Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression," trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): doi:10.2307/465144, 57. In this light, we can read Boîte as a manifestation of Duchamp’s desire to recover a body in response to the traumas of becoming an artist and subsequently, a dispersed body. Organized in a strongly monographic fashion, Boîte seems to be a mini-museum at first glance, particularly with the inclusion of wall text that accompanies each reproduced work. In doing so, Duchamp assumes the additional roles of the historian, curator, and pedagogue. Okwui Enwezor. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. (Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), 40. But the archive in Boîte wasn’t simply created to suture fragments of the past and the amputated self. Boîte was created when radical avant-garde art was subjected to museological institutionalization, such as when Duchamp’s bottle rack readymade was exhibited in a glass vitrine in the 1936 Exposition surréaliste d’objets in Paris. His bottle rack, an un-original commonplace object that challenged our notion of what art is and can be, was installed within a gallery as a precious and valuable sculpture, denuding the work of its initial subversive shock value. T. J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 27-28. Notably, theorists of the archive have employed similar metaphors of imprisonment when describing how museums puts its objects in “house arrest” Derrida, 10. and a “state of historical incarceration.” Enwezor, 40. For Duchamp, this metaphor is particularly resonant as he too viewed the museum as a place that neutralizes threats, one that defangs and domesticates the experimental avant-garde, particularly with the cataloguing of the art in a series of –isms. One recalls how on the 60th anniversary of American Art News, Duchamp sent a cable to the editors of said magazine, sardonically congratulating them on their “60 ism-packed years.” Seen in this light, we can reconcile the archival practice of Boîte with Duchamp’s distaste for the sanitized space of the museum by understanding it as self-reflexive parody. Art historian Benjamin Buchloh proposed that with Boîte, Duchamp has come to recognize the inevitability of institutional forces, but he has internalized this very museological mode as a form of resistance. Duchamp simultaneously represents this insidious institutional acculturation and subverts it from within—the collection of reproductions may be monographic but there is no strict chronological or thematic order governing Boîte. After one unboxes the contents in Boîte, the various reproductions are not arranged in any particular order, entertaining a variety of different arrangements that need not conform to any greater curatorial logic. Thus, through this element of the aleatory in Boîte, Duchamp presents a tongue-in-cheek counter-archive to the neutered archival mode of art museums. Lilliputian Objects Both Duchamp and Sigurdadóttir employ miniatures in their works—the former through photographs of past works, and the latter through small-scale models. Beyond the practical reason of fitting large amounts of things within a fixed amount of space and this deliberate shrinking affords us with a unique spatial and embodied experience. With Green Grass, Sigurdadóttir invites our scrutiny and toys with our sense of scale by bringing the body of the viewer down to the level of the artwork, effectively miniaturizing and destabilizing the viewer’s body as we approach the artwork. In her writeup, Sigurdadóttir explains how her choice of green spaces in this moving assemblage was unique to her personal transnational journeys, and we might then read Green Grass as a sort of travel diary in three dimensions. Katrín Sigurðardóttir, "Katrín Sigurðardóttir Works, 1997 - 2017," Katrín Sigurðardóttir, , accessed January 14, 2018, http://katrinsigurdardottir.info/sigurdardottir_works_97-12.pdf. However, the personal significance of these chosen sites isn’t made known to us—the landscapes are only legible to a viewer insofar as we recognize certain prominent landmarks like Washington Square Park. Any trace of the artist’s identity is erased, which makes for an unconventional and impersonal autobiography. Compared to Boîte that self-reflexively thrusts Duchamp to the fore, further emphasized by the attributive museum labels that point back to him, Green Grass seems self-effacing and Sigurdadóttir almost seems to conceal her personal experiences through this unassuming depiction of public parks. She withholds any knowledge or access to her emotions and time—we only learn that she was once at these various places and nothing more—not when she visited and in what order. In the hermetically sealed world of Green Grass, these artificial green landscapes are immortalized in an eternal summer. Departing from and replacing traditional time, Sigurdadóttir presents a transcendent time where the grass will remain green forever, adhering to the reverie-like nature of miniatures that “negates change and the flux of lived reality.” Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 65. In this sense, Sigurdadóttir’s models bear a similarity to Duchamp’s use of photography as a sort of embalming fluid, creating images and scenes frozen in time, shrunk for collection. We might now consider the title, Green Grass of Home, vis-à-vis our traditional distinction between public and private spaces, a distinction muddied in Sigurdadóttir’s home country of Iceland. In an interview with BOMB Magazine, Sigurdadóttir touches on the paradoxical nature of public spaces in Iceland which grant solitude. The small Icelandic population of about 300,000 might preclude any real possibility of anonymity. However, Sigurdadóttir notes that the cold Icelandic climate often turns people indoors, which then leaves the public spaces mostly unpeopled and vacant, yielding a site where one can be solitary and free. This leads her to conclude that the only free space in Iceland is beyond the domicile and out in nature. Eva Heisler, "Katrín Sigurdardóttir by Eva Heisler - BOMB Magazine," BOMB Magazine, accessed January 02, 2019, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/katrín-sigurdardóttir/. One typically thinks of home as a private sanctity where one can be your truest self. However, Iceland reverses the commonly-held logic of the private home space and public park space. Sigurdadóttir takes this unique spatial experience in Iceland and replicates it in Green Grass, such that the title reflects a peculiar lived reality where the green grass of public parks is equated with the familiarity of home. Sigurdadóttir identifies her artistic practice with scenography, in that she seeks to create a used, symbolic space “that actually holds a much larger circumference, both in concrete space and conceptually.” Ibid. This chimes with Stewart’s observation on the inherently theatrical nature of the tableau-like miniature, whose multum in parvo quality “results in a multiplication of ideological properties,” Stewart, 47-48. surfacing questions on memory and home. Sigurdadóttir’s shrinking of public spaces here reminds us of souvenirs, except instead of collecting fridge magnets or snow globes, she takes with her and recreates pieces of her past homes wherever she goes. In the way that the wooden frames are individual and yet stack onto each other when the suitcase is packed, memory, as symbolized by the suitcase, establishes itself as both discrete and connected, a compressed but elastic palimpsest. By probing the big question of where home is, Sigurdadóttir suggests how the notion of the home is not tethered to a specific topos, but rather, it exists a protean concept that shifts with her migrations—from Reykjavík to San Francisco to New York City. In his essay “Of Other Spaces,” French philosopher Michel Foucault, introduces the notion of a heterotopia, a counter-site where real space is “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias," trans. Jay Miskowiec, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984, web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf, 3. He identifies how the heterotopia’s role is to “create a space […] as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled.” Foucault, 8. With this in mind, we can approach Duchamp and Sigurdadottir’s ordered suitcases as heterotopias that both depict and turn the art museum and the park on its head. Apropos of Duchamp and Sigurdadóttir’s archival impulse, the suitcase, which connotes collection and portable storage, corresponds directly to the condition of exile, defined by material loss, homesickness and unending mobility. Demos, 21. With its gaze fixed on the past, these suitcases then function as counter-sites within which an autobiographical anamnesis is attempted. When viewed in such a way, this is all about nostalgia. But is nostalgia necessarily sad? Misty Watercolor Memories Sigmund Freud distinguishes between how mourning and melancholia respond to loss. On the one hand, mourning causes the psyche to redirect the libido from the lost object to a substitute; this process ceases when we no longer obsess over the memory of an object and come to acknowledge its irreparable loss, which thus frees the ego. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement: Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, vol. XIV (Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1957)., 245. On the other hand, melancholia does not dissipate after grief and lingers in our unconscious; it “behaves like an open wound […] emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished.” Freud, 253. Taking off from Freud’s distinction, the late Harvard professor Svetlana Boym derives from nostalgia’s etymology two kinds of nostalgia: the first is restorative nostalgia (nostos) which “proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps,” the second is reflective nostalgia (algia) that dwells “in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance.” Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 41. For American geographer David Lowenthal, what we pine for is not exactly the abstract past, but for “the condition of having been” David Lowenthal, "Nostalgia Tells It like It Wasn't," in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 29. that “celebrates an ordered clarity contrasting with the chaos or imprecision of our times.” Lowenthal, 30. This is nostalgia afforded by hindsight, posited as an antidote to present discontents. Prima facie, we might associate Duchamp and Sigurdadóttir’s works with restorative nostalgia, in that they harken back to and recreate the past. With Green Grass, Sigurdadóttir could be referencing the wistful song Green, Green Grass of Home popularized by the Welsh singer, Tom Jones. At the start of the song, a man croons about reuniting with his parents and his wife in his old hometown, but the song later reveals that the man is actually in prison on death row, exposing the first half of the song to be mere fantasy. In fact, the “green, green grass of home” Tom Jones, "Green, Green Grass of Home," AZLyrics, accessed January 2, 2019, https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tomjones/greengreengrassofhome.html. takes on a sepulchral undertone in the final line of the song, marking the burial ground of the prisoner who sings the song. Thus, Sigurdadóttir’s charting of an affective topography resembles a Freudian act of mourning that invests its energies in the creation of a portable substitute. Boîte, however, seems to go beyond this acknowledgment of loss. Not only did Duchamp reconstruct his corpus, he also obsessively reproduced it—Boîte would metastasize into a series of nearly 300 boxes with more than 22,000 reproductions in total. Demos, 22. The very effort to counter the distribution of his works with a consolidated box was ironically met with the increased distribution of his suitcases that now find themselves displayed in places like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and the National Gallery of Australia. Designed to satisfy memory by denying loss, Boîte simultaneously foregrounds the impossibility of reconstructing the past and contributes further to the artist’s dispersal, making the mobile artist even more mobile. Therefore, Boîte has been read as an “allegory of the self caught in the compulsive repetition of reproduction,” where what appears to be the monographic shoring up of Duchamp’s artistic identity entails the repeated act of copying that “both constitutes and destroys the self.” David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001), 192. The task to recover and restore a portable home is doomed because Duchamp’s adopted medium of photographic reproduction invariably entails the proliferation of endless copies. Or perhaps Boîte manifests the “impossibility of finding refuge in art” Judovitz, 21. where Duchamp’s repeated reproductions distances us further from any originary home. Duchamp takes Freud’s metaphor of the open, bleeding wound to an extreme—loss is accepted, celebrated, and even fetishized. Baggage Claims Crucially, in response to the anxieties of dislocation, both artists suggest how one’s memories of home are idealized. As Boym elucidates, “[only] false memories can be totally recalled” Boym, 54.—the grass is forever green, the photographed art object preserved in its pristine state—conjuring sites “outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages.” Foucault, 7. As such, Boîte and Green Grass intimate that home is a utopia, both in the general sense of it being a lush green paradise, as well as in the etymological sense of it being a no-place (ou-topos), beyond the exile’s reach, but one that can be dreamt into existence. In a circuitous way, “nostalgia is the desire for desire” Stewart, 23. that creates an “ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary” narrative. Boym, 50. In other words, our nostalgic desire for a lost utopian home paradoxically ends up postponing utopia itself, such that it remains forever inaccessible. Suspended in this transitory longing, Duchamp and Sigurdadóttir’s suitcases function as sites of psychic dwelling that are not as melancholic as we would think them to be. Rather, this longing for a utopia is almost celebratory, almost as a form of compensation to make up for the originary trauma of the artists’ deracination. And so, a new subjectivity is proposed—that we linger in the longing. Perhaps only then will the bittersweet of nostalgia turn into its own analgesia. Bibliography Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Demos, T. J. The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Derrida, Jacques. "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression." Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 9-63. doi:10.2307/465144. Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias." Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984, 1-9. web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf. Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." In On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement: Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, translated by James Strachey, 243-58. Vol. XIV. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1957. Gayford, Martin. "Duchamp's Fountain: The Practical Joke That Launched an Artistic Revolution." The Telegraph. February 16, 2008. Accessed January 02, 2019. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3671180/Duchamps-Fountain-The-practical-joke-that-launched-an-artistic-revolution.html. Heisler, Eva. "Katrín Sigurdardóttir by Eva Heisler - BOMB Magazine." BOMB Magazine. Accessed January 02, 2019. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/katrín-sigurdardóttir/. Jones, Tom. "Green, Green Grass of Home." AZLyrics. Accessed January 2, 2019. https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tomjones/greengreengrassofhome.html. Joselit, David. Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001. Judovitz, Dalia. "Duchamp's "Luggage Physics": Art on the Move." Postmodern Culture 16, no. 1 (September 2005). doi:10.1353/pmc.2006.0007. Lowenthal, David. "Nostalgia Tells It like It Wasn't." In The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, edited by Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, 17-32. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. McShine, Kynaston. "Marcel Duchamp." In The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, 50-55. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999. Roomcritic. "The Art of Travel through Hotel Labels with Louis Vuitton." RoomCritic. January 06, 2016. Accessed January 16, 2019. https://roomcritic.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/the-art-of-travel-through-hotel-labels-with-louis-vuitton/. Sigurðardóttir, Katrín. "Katrín Sigurðardóttir Works, 1997 - 2017." Katrín Sigurðardóttir. Accessed January 14, 2018. http://katrinsigurdardottir.info/sigurdardottir_works_97-12.pdf. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Illustrations Figure 1: Marcel Duchamp, Boîte-en-valise, 1936-1941, cardboard, wood, paper, plastic, 40 x 37.5 x 8.2 cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Figure 2: Katrín Sigurdadóttir, Green Grass of Home, 1997, plywood, landscaping materials, hardware, open: 225 x 165 x 9 cm, Reykjavik Museum of Art, Iceland.  13 ________________________________________________________ BOWDOIN JOURNAL OF ART, 2019