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Art Journal The mission of Art Journal, founded in 1941, is to provide a forum for In This Issue Vol. 77, no. 4 scholarship and visual exploration in the visual arts; to be a unique voice in the Winter 2018 field as a peer-reviewed, professionally mediated forum for the arts; to operate Rebecca M. Brown in the spaces between commercial publishing, academic presses, and artist 5 to come Editor-in-Chief Rebecca M. Brown presses; to be pedagogically useful by making links between theoretical issues Editor Designate Jordana Moore Saggese and their use in teaching at the college and university levels; to explore rela- Reviews Editor Kirsten Swenson tionships among diverse forms of art practice and production, as well as among Features Web Editor Rebecca K. Uchill art making, art history, visual studies, theory, and criticism; to give voice and Editorial Director Joe Hannan publication opportunity to artists, art historians, and other writers in the arts; Editorial Assistant Gavin Wiens to be responsive to issues of the moment in the arts, both nationally and glob- Rozita Sharafjahan, Anahita Ghabaian, Maryam Majd, Masoumeh Mozaffari, Designer Katy Homans Production Manager Nerissa Dominguez Vales ally; to focus on topics related to twentieth- and twenty-first-century concerns; to promote dialogue and debate. Table of 6 Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam, and Keivan Moussavi-Aghdam Inside Tehran: A Conversation with Iranian Gallerists Director of Programs and Publications Tiffany Dugan Editorial Board Jane Chin Davidson, Tatiana E. Flores, Talinn Grigor, Amelia G. Jones, Janet Kraynak, Tirza Latimer (Chair), Derek Conrad Murray Captions in Art Journal and The Art Bulletin use standardized language to describe image copyright and credit information, in order to clarify the Contents Kay Wells copyright status of all images reproduced as far as possible, for the benefit 00 Laboring Under Globalization: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists of readers, researchers, and subsequent users of these images. Art Journal (issn 0004-3249) is published quarterly by Taylor & Francis Group, Information on the copyright status of a reproduction is placed within LLC, 530 Walnut Street, Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106, for CAA. Compilation parentheses, at the end of the caption data. A distinction is made between copyright © 2o18 College Art Association of America, Inc. Contents copyright Forum copyright status of an artwork and of the photograph or scan of an artwork © 2018 by the respective authors, artists, and other rights holders. All rights in Art provided for reproduction purposes, where this information has been provided Journal and its contents reserved by the College Art Association and their respective owners. Except as permitted by the Copyright Act, including section 107 (the fair to us. Nora A. Taylor and Karin Zitzewitz In order to provide clear information to readers, rights holders, and use doctrine), or other applicable law, no part of the contents of Art Journal may subsequent users of images, CAA has established conventions for describing 00 History as a Figure of Thought in Contemporary Art in South and be reproduced without the written permission of the the author(s) and/or other rights holders. The opinions expressed in this journal are those of the authors and the copyright status of the works we publish: Southeast Asia not necessarily of the editors and CAA. Artwork in the public domain Artwork copyright © Name Koh Nguang How Art Journal Open, a companion website with independent content, is online at http://artjournal.collegeart.org/. Photograph copyright © Name 00 Artist’s Project: Early Performance Works by Tang Da Wu in Singapore Photograph provided by [name of photographer, image bank, or other Subscriptions and back issues: Art Journal is available both as part of an insti- provider] Kevin Chua tutional subscription via Taylor & Francis and as a benefit of membership in CAA. Artwork published under fair use For information about membership, please visit www.collegeart.org/membership Photograph by Name (where copyright is not asserted by the provider) 00 Archive as Figure in Singapore Contemporary Art or write to CAA, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. 212.691.1051, ext. Photograph by the author 12. E-mail:

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. Book reviews: Art Journal does not accept unsolicited Art, exhibition and accompanying book; Sarah Montross on Christina Bryan Art Journal is available online at Taylor & Francis Online (www.tandfonline. reviews. Books for review should be mailed to the Publications Dept. at CAA. com/rcaj). CAA members may also obtain access through the CAA website Rosenberger, Drawing the Line:The Early Work of Agnes Martin, and Suzanne Hudson, Letters: Letters should be sent to the editor-in-chief, with a copy to the reviews editor if the letter concerns a review. Letters are shown to the author of the con- portal, www.collegeart.org/login. The journal is archived in JSTOR and Agnes Martin: Night Sea; and Ace Lehner on Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Productive Failure: indexed in Artbibliographies Modern, Art Index, Arts and Humanities, and BHA. Issues tribution in question, who has the option to reply. Letters should add to the argu- on microfilm are available from National Archive Publishing Company, Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories ment in a substantive manner and are subject to editing. They may be published at PO Box 998, 300 North Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106-0998. 800.420.6272. the discretion of the editor-in-chief. Front and back covers: A list of recent books published in the arts is online at www.caareviews.org/ categories. The Vietnamese-Danish artist Danh Vo (b. 1975), recently the subject of a mid- career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, has been described by critics in ways that seem to question his identity as an artist.1 In a review of the exhibition, Roberta Smith writes, “Artist is perhaps not the right word. Mr. Vo is not a maker of original objects, but a hunter-gatherer . . .”2 Ariella Budick calls him “more collector than creator.”3 If these critics have difficulty calling an artist who uses found objects in his work an artist, they might Nora A. Taylor as well exclude most twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists from the category. Their short-sighted remarks aside, The Document as Event: the fact that Vo’s works or identity puzzle certain viewers might not displease the artist.4 Vietnamese Artists’ I first encountered Vo’s display of historical artifacts at his solo exhibition in September 2012 at the University of Engagements with History Chicago’s Renaissance Society.5 Five different framed letters hung on the walls at the entrance of the space. The letters in question were typed onto White House stationery. The date May 20, 1970, appeared on the yellowed paper of one, and the faint print read: “Dear Leonard, Vietnamese names in this essay are spelled in accordance with how they are commonly known. you must be some kind of friend. I would choose your ballets over contemplation Thus Vietnam, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City of Cambodia any day if only I were given the choice. Keep tempting me, perhaps are spelled without diacritics. Artists’ names are spelled in the way that the artists prefer to be one day, I would succumb. Warm regards, Henry A. Kissinger.”6 known; diacritics are used when appropriate. At the time, I wondered, aside from these legible words, what could be Thus, Danh Vo appears in lieu of Võ Trung Kỳ understood about the letters? Were they real? Where did they come from? Did Danh, his legal name, Ho’u’ng Ngô in lieu of Ngô Ngo.c Ho’u’ng, and Dinh Q. Lê in lieu of Lê Quang they stand for something else besides what the content states: Kissinger’s thanks Đı’nh. to Leonard Lyons, a journalist for the New York Post, for ballet tickets? Contrary to 1. Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away, organized by Smith and Budick’s search for the proper artistic nomenclature for Vo, did the Katherine Brinson, with Susan Thompson and letters show signs of Hal Foster’s “archival impulse” that makes “historical infor- Ylinka Barotto, was on view at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, February 9–May 9, 2018. mation, often lost or displaced, physically present?” 7 For me, the varied refer- 2. Roberta Smith, “Danh Vo: An Artist at the ences, both literal and figurative, direct and oblique, to Vietnamese history made Crossroads of History and Diary,” New York Times, March 7, 2018, page C13. by Vo and other Vietnamese artists discussed in this essay are not merely collec- 3. Ariella Budick, “Danh Vo at the Guggenheim, tor’s items, readymades, or historical artifacts gleaned by the artists, but rather New York—Oddments, Keepsakes and Kissinger’s can be likened to what Rebecca Schneider terms “performance remains.” She Letters,” Financial Times, March 1, 2018, at https:// www.ft.com/content/71174942-1d4e-11e8-a748- suggests that resuscitating past events, bringing them back to life, so to speak, 5da7d696ccab?fbclid=IwAR20K-WRl- and reanimating them through performance reenactments and performance pYogh8OY6JaGrb16e8FgWMc45_ KT6M8VSQ4HMRKoboM6aT9ZeQ, as of March remains recall a method of historiography through ritual. Schneider’s remarks 12, 2018. concern works of performance art, but they apply equally to Vo’s use of objects 4. See Nora A. Taylor, “Is Danh Vo a Vietnamese Artist?” lecture at the Renaissance Society in installations because his could be considered bodies that were part of an Chicago, November 7, 2012, at https://vimeo. action that took place in history. Schneider considers performance and other com/53014678, as of October 18, 2018; revised as “Is Danh Vo a Vietnamese Artist,” in Ng Teng time-based works a means of rethinking historiography as event, a series of doc- Fong Roof Garden Commission: Danh Vo, exh. cat. umentary encounters that occur in and with the archive. “History,” she writes, (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2017), “is a set of sedimented acts which are not the historical acts themselves but the 24–30. 5. Danh Vo: Uterus, organized by the Art Institute act of securing any incident backward.”8 Kissinger’s letters recall the time when of Chicago and the Renaissance Society, they were written, but they have shifted in their function. Their intended pur- University of Chicago, at the Renaissance Society, September 23–December 16, 2012. pose, letters of thanks for free tickets to the ballet and theater, is no longer rel- 6. The survey at the Guggenheim also included evant, since the act of correspondence between the two parties is over. Instead, these letters. 7. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October, no. they perform as remains or residues of that event. If we follow Schneider’s the- 110 (Fall 2004): 4. ory and the way in which the artist has presented the letters as artifacts, they are Danh Vo, Untitled, 2012, paper, dimensions 8. Rebecca Schneider, “Archives Performance variable (artwork © Danh Vo; photograph Remains,” Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001): both commemorative and critical of the processes of verifying historical mem- provided by the artist) 105. ory, because they serve, as Jane Blocker has argued, as “unorthodox historical 71 artjournal methodologies that are not about the archive, but are the archive.”9 She suggests into new awareness. Thus, the recontextualization of Danh Vo’s collectibles dem- that they replace the moment of history with a document pertaining to it. onstrate that curatorial engagements with history and display are most creative, Which might suggest that they are engaged in what Benjamin Hutchens has and most moving, when driven by an engagement with the present, and when called the “an-archive,” a type of countermemory. By inserting objects that they offer—however provisionally—a stab at interpretation.”15 She notes further played a role in historical events into contemporary art contexts, they also dis- that “the artist-curated show morphed into a creature that forsakes interpretation rupt standard notions of temporality and location.10 (historical or otherwise) for the short-term seductions of captioned sensibility.” Bringing historical objects to bear on the present also recalls what Mechtild Bishop claims that Vo’s historical objects do not elicit interpretation on the part Widrich has called monumentalization, a “fixation of a possibly fictional inter- of the viewer because they are essentially antique, historical props that are pleas- pretation of history through physical reconstruction in the present, a reconstruc- ing aesthetically and bear no connection to the present. Instead, I would argue tion that in turn is often so thoroughly documented as to make possible a that in seeing an object that has a true connection to the past, one that has its continuous point of reference in opposition to the often fragmentary or sparely own biography as an object, the viewer is prone to reflect on that moment in documented original.”11 The ontological nature of historical objects shifts when time, yes, but not only that moment. Because the object figures in a gallery or an they are included in art installations, and their role as archival documents institution, the viewer cannot help but reflect on its contemporary context. The becomes more complex. Unlike Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, they are not encounter with the object in a contemporary setting collapses the time from ordinary objects. They refer to a particularly loaded moment in history and a which it came and the present moment when it is viewed. The viewer’s imagina- temporal context that cannot be ignored: in this case, the war in Vietnam in the tion may not wonder much more than to contemplate the juxtaposition of the 1960s and 1970s. Recalling that period necessarily conjures vivid images and asso- two moments, but could easily travel back and forth between them. Vo does not ciations that go beyond the mere functionality of a letter. Because the letters jour- aim to bring the moment of the past into the present as an act of nostalgia or neyed both in time and space from the 1970s White House to the Guggenheim, memory, nor does he seem to ask how the past can teach us about the present. for example, understanding them as performance remains dislodges them from He is not trying to offer history lessons, nor is he challenging official narratives their historical and geographic specificity and draws them into a discussion about as do some artists who work in historical painting, for example. Rather, he is the efficacy of using archival documents as historical trigger for a particular event interested in these objects for what they might suggest about the past. They act as in the present moment. subtexts. Like the historian or archivist, he collects these objects as information, Artists who use historical documents in their works might also be using data to be mined: instead of serving as material for research, they invite contem- them as mechanisms for questioning the boundaries of truth and fiction when it plation as objects in their own right. Although the objects themselves may not comes to history. Like Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s examination of contemporary art lend themselves to analysis, they stand for the materiality of history and can be forays into the parafictional, these artists’ projects “have one foot in the field of seen as metonymies or synecdoches for larger narratives that include both the the real” and one foot in the fictional. “In parafiction,” she explains, “real and/or historical event in real time and how history is narrated and exhibited. By synec- imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived.”12 doche, I mean that a letter by Kissinger in itself may not bear much significance, Yet, unlike the parafictions to which Lambert-Beatty refers, the artists discussed especially one that is addressed to Lyons and that the artist purchased at auction, 9. Jane Blocker, Becoming Past: History in in this essay do not aim to convince their viewers to experience fiction as fact, but as a part of a larger picture of Kissinger’s tenure as US Secretary of State, it Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 72. but rather, in some cases, to do the opposite and experience fact as fiction. That bears the weight of history by association, especially when one considers the 10. Benjamin Hutchens, “Techniques of Forgetting? is, in bringing historical documents into view in an art installation, the artist cre- events of May 1970 more generally. Hypo-Amnesic History and the An-Archive,” Substance, no. 113, vol. 36, no. 2 (2007): 38. ates a juxtaposition that may appear unlikely and uncanny. Why this particular Letters by Kissinger are not the only historical objects that Vo collects. In 11. Mechtild Widrich, “Is the ‘Re’ in Re-enactment letter by Kissinger? Is there a historical significance to this letter? Or is it merely a addition, he has secured personal memorabilia from the estate of Robert the ‘Re’ in Re-performance?” in Performing the Sentence: Research and Teaching in Performative powerful artifact because Kissinger wrote it less than two weeks after the May 4, McNamara, dresses created for Richard Nixon’s election campaign, and more Fine Arts, ed. Carola Dertnig and Felicitas Thun- 1970, shootings at Kent State University? 13 Armed with that knowledge, viewers, spectacularly, several chandeliers that hung above the table in the Majestic Hotel Hohenstein (Vienna: Sternberg, 2014), 141. 12. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe: including myself, would undoubtedly reel at the eerie mention of Cambodia in a 15. Ibid. where the Paris Peace accords were signed in 1973. While each of the objects can Parafiction and Plausibility,” October, no. 129 seemingly mundane thank-you letter. Entangled in a scenario that involves the 16. “Make History: Danh Vo in Conversation with be associated with the time of the Vietnam War, the epistemological nature of (Summer 2009): 54. Nora Taylor,” Garage, no. 8 (Spring–Summer tragedy of the Vietnam War, the letter becomes a surreal performer in the artist’s each object can vary depending on the viewer. Vo recounts that when he took his 13. “In May 1970, students protesting the bomb- 2015): 83. ing of Cambodia by United States military forces, staged re-creation of Kissinger’s role in that historical event. 17. The artist was born into a Catholic family father to view the chandeliers from the Hotel Majestic, after he had acquired clashed with Ohio National Guardsmen on Smith and Budick’s reviews aside, Claire Bishop, in her review of Vo’s work at in the city of Ba Ria, in what was known as the them and before they were dismantled, his father remarked that they must be like the Kent State University campus. When the Republic of Vietnam, commonly referred to as Guardsmen shot and killed four students on May the Venice Biennale, expressed feeling uneasy about his use of history and “the South Viet Nam. According to him, he left with the ones hanging in the Danish royal palace and wondered how objects of such 4, the Kent State shootings became the focal point way in which the poetics of the past is prone to devolving into information as his family by boat in 1979. They were rescued at beauty could have stood at the “site of death and the place of betrayal.”16 Vo sug- of a nation deeply divided by the Vietnam War.” sea by a Danish freighter and landed in a refugee “Kent State Shootings,” Ohio History Central, ornament.”14 She seems to suggest that the objects that he exhibits are merely camp in Singapore. When the family was allowed gested that the chandeliers in themselves were innocent bystanders, but they were at www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Kent_State_ decorative and their relationship to history is incidental. She does remind us, to resettle in a host country, his father chose made powerful by virtue of witnessing the act that sealed the fate of many of the Shootings, as of October 18, 2018. Denmark due to his belief that fate had brought 14. Claire Bishop, “History Depletes Itself,” however, that the “Benjaminian model of history is fundamentally curatorial, the country to their attention. Interview with the South Vietnamese, like his own family.17 The objects in themselves are not the Artforum, September 2015, 325. revolving around the novel juxtaposition of preexisting objects that jolt the viewer artist, 2012. guilty parties, but together with the table and the paper on which the accords 72 wint er 2018 73 artjournal Danh Vo, Phuong Võ 2.2.1861, 2010, writing the content of the letter that he copied multiple times was significant to the art- performance (artwork © Danh Vo; photograph ist. He wanted his father to perform an act of illegible transcription to address the provided by the artist) idea of conversion and the proselytizing acts performed by Jesuit missionaries in Vietnam. Conversion, in the artist’s view, is an act of mimicry, rote learning, or repetition, rather than evidence of true religious understanding or faith. The artist used a historical relic, the letter by Veinard, that he also acquired at auction, in an act of performance. The performance served to reactivate the historical circum- stances that led to the original event, in this case, the act of conversion to Catholicism. The entanglement of past and present in this work is manifest through the process of rewriting the letter, thus continually and repetitiously Danh Vo, 16:32, 26.05, 2009, late nineteenth- were signed, they are as historically charged as the people who signed the docu- retrieving its content. century chandelier, dimensions variable. Centre ment. By standing in front of a viewer in the present tense, they perform the past Historical letters also take part in the work of another diasporic Vietnamese Pompidou Foundation (artwork © Danh Vo; photograph by the author) by association. artist, Ho’u’ng Ngô (b. 1979). Fascinated by the story of Nguyễn Thi. Minh Khai, A more performative work by Vo, albeit not one that concerns the war, also the Vietnamese woman revolutionary fighter born in 1910 and executed by the involves the artist’s father and contains both the personal and the historical, French Sureté in 1941, Ngô embarked on a project to retrieve archival docu- Phuong Võ, or 2.2.1861, from 2012, is a letter in cursive script. The letter was origi- ments pertaining to the anticolonial feminist resistance heroine. Lesser known nally penned in Fench by the missionary Théophane Veinard before his execution to American audiences, Minh Khai figures prominently in Vietnamese history in 1861. In creating the work, Vo asked his father, who does not speak or read textbooks, but details of her life remain somewhat sketchy. As Faye R. Gleisser French, to hand-copy the letter several times. That his father did not understand wrote in the exhibition brochure accompanying Ngô’s 2017 exhibition To Name It 74 wint er 2018 75 artjournal Ho’u’ng Ngô, To Name It Is to See It, 2017, Is to See It, at the DePaul Art Museum, “Though hotels, schools, and streets in laser-cut onion-skin paper on a teak backing, Vietnam carry her name, a record of her life’s work as one of the prominent framed, 10½ x 15 x 1 in. (26.7 x 38.1 x 2.5 cm) (artwork © Ho’u’ng Ngô; photograph provided by leaders of the Indochinese Communist Party during the 1930s exists only the artist). through disparate scraps of information later stitched together by historians.” The work is based on a copy of the 1941 clemency She sees Ngô’s installation as making “materially manifest the discursive and request for Nguyễn Thi. Minh Khai from her father (Nguyễn Văn Bình) to Marshall Philippe Pétain, collective historical process of ideology formation: the making and unmaking of Chief of State of Vichy France, Nguyễn Thi. Minh Khai the event.”18 As in Schneider’s remarks about artists’ reenact- ments, Gleisser considers Ngô to be engaged in a process of historiography through ritual. Centered on the act of retrieving documents from the colonial archive, Ngô considers her interventions to be performances of texts through acts of translation. Unlike Vo, Ngô does not exhibit the actual letters in question, but instead manipulates the photocopies that she made while visiting the archive, laser-cutting them and sometimes rendering them illegible in order to reflect the means by which Minh Khai herself eluded colonial forces. Ngô says that “because of the nature of the original documents (old and smudged ink), the laser-cut documents come out with varying degrees of legibility. Added to that, I am only translating parts of the document. Having this power of with- holding information and creating some doubt about what/how something was translated was interesting to me from the beginning because it created a space for speculating and performance for me, the reader.”19 Minh Khai signed the original typed letters under a number of aliases. They were often printed using a method called “hectography,” which employed agar- agar, a gelatin derived from algae. She also used invisible ink from boiled water which paradoxically revealed, according to Ngô, that “a person’s actions necessary for her survival contribute to the erasure of her story.”20 Ngô’s installation at DePaul included a letter by Minh Khai’s father to the French head of state during the Vichy occupation, Marshall Philippe Pétain (1856–1951). The letter is a plea for mercy for his daughter, who was imprisoned by the French. The letter is writ- ten in French, and Ngô presented it with her own annotations in the margins. Those notes reveal her active engagement with the document and her participa- tion in its translation. The notes form a record of her reading and engage the viewer in a form of historiography that brings together the personal and the his- torical. Ngô considers herself privileged to have access to the archive and to information to which her own family was not privy. As Ngô explained, “It has always been difficult to get stories about my family history, especially from my mom. This was a kind of roundabout way to arrive at something that is not quite 18. Faye R. Gleisser, “The Archives within Nguyễn Thi. Minh Khai’s story, and not mine either, but some kind of hybrid.”21 the Archive: Ho’u’ng Ngô and the Making and Unmaking of Nguyễn Thi. Minh Khai,” brochure Using historical material to connect to one’s homeland is also of concern to for the exhibition Huong Ngo: To Name It Is to See another diasporic Vietnamese artist, Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968). As he explained to the It, organized by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, DePaul curator Zoe Butt several years ago, seeking the past was a way of reclaiming his Art Museum, Chicago, April 27–August 6, 2017. 19. Ho’u’ng Ngô email to the author, July 19, 2017. heritage: “I started collecting with a desire to reclaim my identity as a 20. Ho’u’ng Ngô conversation with the author, Vietnamese. Learning the cultural histories that are embedded in the objects I June 2017. 21. Ho’u’ng Ngô email to Faye Gleisser, rep. Huong found was a way of reclaiming my heritage, my identity. If you know a history, Ngo: To Name It Is to See It, exh. cat. (Chicago: you own it. An individual with no knowledge of his or her history is an indi- DePaul Art Museum, 2017), n.p. 22. Dinh Q. Lê, blog conversation with Zoe Butt, vidual without an identity.”22 In 2012 Lê created an installation for the presti- at “Guggenheim UBS Global Map Initiative,” blog, gious quinquennial contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, Documenta January 22, 2013, at https://www.guggenheim. org/blogs/map/dinh-q-le-in-conversation-with- 13. Titled Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War, it consisted of drawings zoe-butt, as of October 18, 2018. from his own collection, dating from the 1960s and early 1970s, made by twelve 76 wint er 2018 whose drawings he has included in his installation—and considers their contri- bution to be a collaboration, because many of them are no longer living and he is the featured artist in the exhibition roster—the drawings seem to take second place. They can be considered historical artifacts of the kind that Vo exhibited in his installation, which also take part in a contemporary artist’s retelling of the role of art during the Vietnam War. Like Vo and Ngô’s documents, they enact his- tory. Understanding them as historical remains of the time in which they were made, we may consider the process by which some Vietnamese artists, from the period of independence from French colonial rule (1954) through reunification (1975), and to some extent until the opening of the market economy in the late 1980s, were recruited to capture the ideals of a communist society as promoted by the state. This is the main reason that Lê was interested in them and why they appear “surreal.” To him, they reflect a time when art was used for propaganda purposes. Although he is interested in the historical context of the drawings, he does not necessarily draw attention to their art historical importance. That is, he does not seem to wish to explain the artistic contexts in which they arose, the schools where the artists trained, and the evolving methods and techniques that were part of artistic education in twentieth-century Vietnam. Rather, he is inter- ested in the content of the drawings and the political affiliations of the artists at the time. The drawings depict life on the fringes of war, but not the war itself. That detail may not be important to the viewers who saw them in 2012. As I observed, when I saw the cabin installation in Karlsaue Park, viewers took a con- templative and somber stance. I overheard comments about the war and its atroc- ities. The drawings themselves did not need to illustrate war for viewers to be reminded of it. Like Vo’s letters from Kissinger, mere suggestion of a temporal Dinh Q. Lê, in collaboration with Vu Vietnamese artists who followed the guerilla movement along the Ho Chi Minh and special proximity to the war was sufficient to enact it, to recall its events, to Giang Huong, Quang Tho, Huynh Phuong Trail. The drawings hung in a small wooden cabin built for the exhibition and perform the ritual of remembrance. Dong, Nguyen Thu, Truong Hieu, Phan Oanh, Nguyen Toan Thi, Duong Anh, situated deep in Karlsaue Park, one of the many venues around the German city The Documenta 13 exhibition is not the first instance in which the drawings Minh Phong, Kim Tien, Quach Phong, and for the exhibition, which included works by over one hundred eighty artists were shown. A 2005 exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York reflected on Nguyen Thanh Chau Le, Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War, 2012, from around the world,. In addition to the drawings, the installation included a their historical content as illustrating an aspect of the war not generally seen by 102 drawings: pencil, watercolor, ink, and oil on film featuring interviews with surviving artists and graphic animations of some American audiences. The curators of that exhibition, Catherine de Zegher and paper, installation view, Karlsaue Park, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012 (artwork © Dinh Q. Lê; of the drawings, as if they were being drawn in front of the viewer’s eyes. The Katherine Karl, highlighted the contrast between how Vietnamese saw the war, as photograph by the author) animations made the drawings come to life, but also added to the surreal quality evidenced by the drawings, and how Americans experienced it through photo- that the artist was trying to capture. As he wrote to me, “These artists seem to be graphs and television reports. In their essay for the catalogue the curators go so living in a world removed from reality. Their belief in Ho Chi Minh and the far as to question whether these drawings were not perhaps more “true” than communist party leaders during the war and now seems very cultish. It is so photographs: “The North Vietnamese artists took up drawing to reinvest the hard for me to understand their blind belief but it helps me to understand image with meaning, mixing fantasy and reality in ways that are more idealized clearly how these surreal drawings came into being.”23 and more documentary than in photography. The question of which medium, Lê’s description of these drawings as surreal suggests that the artist, like Vo, drawing or photography relates more of the “truth” then becomes a complex questions the ontological nature of the drawings as straightforward representa- issue.”25 Either way, they recall that era. As with Vo’s Kissinger letters and Ngô’s tions of their subject matter: scenes of soldiers performing ordinary tasks along letters of Minh Khai letters, hanging them in a large contemporary exhibition the Ho Chi Minh trail. By inserting them in a contemporary art installation, as removes them from their original context, distant from the actual events that they does Vo, the artist prompts the viewer to reflect on both their historical nature capture, but also elicits an immediate response on the part of viewers by the and their functions as works of art. Visitors to the exhibition in Kassel could not 25. Catherine de Zegher and Katherine Karl, power of suggestion. They stand in for a larger history. As de Zegher and Karl sug- 23. Dinh Q. Lê email to the author, July 24, 2013. “Drawing Like Singing Drowns Out the Sound 24. Nora A. Taylor, “Re-authoring Images of overlook the time and place in which the drawings were made; but, as I have of Bombs,” in Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from gest, they prompt viewers to question the very nature of historical memory. the Vietnam War: Dinh Q Lê’s ‘Light and Belief ’ argued elsewhere, because they were shown as part of a contemporary artist’s the American-Vietnam War (New York: Drawing While Lê may have selected the drawings to refer to his own biography as Installation at Documenta 13 and the Role of the Center, 2005), 31. The exhibition, organized by Artist as Historian,” South East Asia Research 25, work, the drawings become entangled in complex notions of authorship.24 de Zegher and Karl, took place at the Drawing an artist born in Vietnam during the war, who left the country with his family no. 1 (2017): 47–61. Although Lê, invited to participate in the German exhibition, credits the artists Center November 5, 2005–February 11, 2006. after it, his project may have also been selected to partake in a larger discussion 78 win t er 2018 79 artjournal of world conflict that hovered thematically around Documenta 13 as a whole. cesses of history and the institutions of archival records pertaining to Vietnam. As While American visitors may have compared the drawings made by Vietnamese Rebecca Schneider writes: soldiers and their own memories of the war in Vietnam, German and European What happens to linear history if nothing is ever fully completed nor dis- visitors might have made parallels with their own experiences of World War II cretely begun? When does a call to action, cast into the future, fully take and Cold War politics. Lê’s installation need not be seen solely from an place? Only in the moment of the call? Or can a call to action be resonant American-centric perspective. His filmed interviews with the surviving artists in the varied and reverberant cross-temporal spaces where an echo might whose drawings hang in his work reveal the passionate belief in Ho Chi Minh’s encounter response—even years and years later? Can we call back in time? patriotic communist ideals. While Lê questions the continued relevance of com- Across time? What kind of response might be elicit? What are the limits of munism in the “new” Vietnam that he has chosen to make his home since 2000, the future? What are the limits of this now?27 one that has embraced capitalism and a global economy, the interview footage documents an unwavering loyalty to revolutionary ideals. This is where the col- The letters and drawings used in the art installations by these three artists of lapse of past and present takes on an uncanny quality. The artist sees an anachro- Vietnamese descent cross time and space and arrive in our view as mechanisms nism in the artists’ ties to communism, as if to suggest that for them the war for engaging audiences in the rituals of reading, understanding, translating, and never ended. But it is possible that the curator of Documenta 13, Carolyn historicizing them in the present tense. In using epistolary and other documen- Christov-Bakargiev, understood the artists’ statements as reflecting a more accu- tary records of bygone actions, these artists point to history as event through the rate version of history than the one perpetuated in American history books. The ritual of recollecting and resurrecting the past, and therefore compel us to think war in Vietnam was not just about fighting against American imperialism, it was about how history is represented and accounted for in archival records. also about fighting for independence from foreign rule and for socialist ideals. Nora A. Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art at the School of the Art Indeed, many of the other works in the overall Documenta 13 exhibition Institute of Chicago. A specialist in modern and contemporary Vietnamese art, she is the author of Painters reflected on the legacy of American intervention in Asia and the Middle East, in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Hawaii and NUS Press, 20o4 and 2009) and coeditor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Cornell SEAP Press, 2012). and seemed to place value on the efforts at preserving local history and culture. Because exhibitions such as the one in Kassel tend to dehistoricize artworks or render them ahistorical, one may consider whether viewers entering Lê’s instal- lation are invited to truly reflect on the political importance of the war in Vietnam. The artifice of a large international exhibition may not be conducive to a serious reconsideration of historical events, but including objects that partici- pated in or bore witness to a moment in history can facilitate reflection, and the object in question can function as a means of recovering ideas associated with that moment. In other words, the act of exhibiting the object can in itself be a form of ritual and serve as an act of remembrance. For those who survived the Vietnam war, memory and trauma have been the principal tropes used to explain its legacy. Indeed, as the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen notes, “Much of the writing, art, and politics of Vietnamese refugees is about the problem of mourning the dead, remembering the missing, and consid- ering the place of the survivors in the movement of history.”26 Because of its impact on the psyches of both nations, the war in Vietnam has generated count- less memoirs, novels, documentaries, fictional narratives, and artworks. For decades, war was the only visual reference that international viewers had of the country and stood as the most recognizable symbol of Vietnamese cultural iden- tity for displaced Vietnamese. As the drawings that figure in Lê’s installation illus- trate, Vietnamese artists within Vietnam rarely made explicit references to the war, choosing instead to focus on themes of nation building by portraying domestic scenes, landscapes, and portraits of their families. This essay has looked at artists’ engagements with Vietnamese history differently. First, as Vo and Ngô’s works demonstrate, this engagement extends beyond the war and touches on 26. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Speak of the Dead, colonialism and the formation of the Vietnamese state. Second, it has considered Speak of Vietnam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of 27. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and Minority Discourse,” New Centennial Review 6, no. instead how artists over some thirty years have seen history as a site of perfor- War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: 2 (Fall 2006): 8. mance and initiated the process of recovery in order to question the very pro- Routledge, 2011), 180–81, emphasis in orig. 80 win t er 2018 81 artjournal