The Right Way to Look at Things

To begin this brief consideration of Matthew Buckingham’s
extraordinary exhibition at Henry Art Gallery, and also his artistic
project as a whole, let us read the opening sentence of a very old
book, Aristotle’s The Politics: “Observation shows us, first,
that every polis is a species of association, and, secondly, that all
associations come into being for the sake of some good….” The second
observation in this sentence (“the sake of some good”) is
worthless—there is no good or bad reason for anything to be or
not to be. The first observation in the sentence, however, is golden.
Its value is this: A city is a species of association, and, as
the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde was to argue at the end of the
19th century, everything is a species of association (flesh, stone,
stars).

We find this understanding at work in Buckingham’s films,
narratives, photographs, and installations. For example, Play the
Story, the exhibition at the Henry, is the democratization of
several associations—historical event, political movement,
geological development, urban situation, cinematic sequence, and
architectural form. In the installation called The Spirit and the Letter, we see the historical (Europe at the end
of the 19th century), the political (the emergence of the modern
feminist movement), and the architectural (neoclassicism as a space of
importance, wealth, and prestige). The subject of the installation is
Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th-century feminist and the mother of a
woman, Mary Shelley, whose fictional creation, the monster in
Frankenstein, is one of the leading symbols of an age, the 19th
century, that established the world that we now occupy—a world
characterized by international commerce, industrial capitalism, finance
banking, urbanization, and a full reliance on the advances made in
science and technology.

As if reversing (and reversing again) the way one sees an image
within a room-sized camera obscura, The Spirit and the Letter has a neoclassical hall that’s projected on the west wall, a golden
chandelier that rises from the middle of the floor, and a heavy mirror
hanging on the east wall. Walking toward or away from the chandelier
gives one the feeling of walking upside down on the ceiling. And in the
image projected on the wall, an actor playing Wollstonecraft walks
upside down on the ceiling. Who is upside down? You or her? The
confusion is aesthetically pleasing. So, too, is the ghostly
Wollstonecraft, who reads passages drawn mainly from her book A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the white light that
brightens a window, and the deep mirror on the east wall that reflects
this delicate arrangement. The marvelous thing about this and
Buckingham’s other installations—False Future (which
concerns the “arrival of cinema”) and Everything I Need (which
concerns the late life of the Jewish-German doctor and scientific
hand-reader Charlotte Wolff)—is that these associations are not
prioritized or resolved. Each association retains its independence.

Bruno Latour, a French social theorist, once pointed out this series
in a lab: a rat, the brain of that rat, a neuron in the brain of that
rat. Each part in this series has no resemblance to the other parts,
though they are of one thing. There is no visible continuity from the
rat (one association) to its brain (another association), and from the
brain to a single cell in that brain (yet another association).
Something similar is at work in Buckingham’s art. There is a cinematic
association (the projection), there is a political association (the
speech), and there is an architectural association (the neoclassical
interior). One is not dependent on the others, and one does not
overwhelm the others. And what underlies these discontinuities is the
absence of an organizing teleology—Aristotle’s “the good.”

But there is one installation that ultimately fails us: The Six
Grandfathers, which concerns the history of what is now called
Mount Rushmore. A series of notes posted on the wall describe its
geological and social history. We learn that Mount Rushmore, originally
called Six Grandfathers by the Lakota Sioux and shaped by geological
events that happened 66 million years ago, is the site of a lot of
suffering, greed, state-sponsored terrorism, and broken promises. The
series of notes ends with a poster that imagines the monument 500,000
years from today: rubble rising up to four time-effaced presidents. The
message is clear and wrong and classical: All that is done by humans is
done in vain. Geological events, therefore, are seen as more real than
human events. But in reality, human processes—be they
architectural, political, or cinematic—are natural processes.
The Six Grandfathers is the only crack in a perfectly democratic
exhibition.