Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla.
Under Discussion. 2005.

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YATES MCKEE

Wake, Vestige, Survival:
Sustainability and the Politics
of the Trace in Allora and
Calzadilla’s Land Mark*

The authentic artist cannot turn his back on the
contradictions that inhabit our landscapes.

—Robert Smithson

Will we struggle to ensure that everyone has a right
to survival?

—Vandana Shiva

1. Et in Vieques Ego

At the beginning of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s video Under
Discusión (2005), a young man wades into the sea toward an upturned rectangular
table floating in the water and performs an unlikely act of collage-engineering.
He attaches an outboard motor to the table, revs it up, and sets out to re-trace the
coastline of a picturesque tropical landscape, the passage of the vehicle leaving an
ephemeral trail or wake in the crystal-blue water like a kind of drawing. The soli-
t ar y tour guide does not speak or even gesture, and he has no apparent
destination or purpose other than to train our eyes on the verdant contours of
the land; yet gradually the angle of the camera begins to take us away from an
imaginary position aboard or alongside the watercraft, and we find ourselves fol-
lowing its trajectory from an aerial perspective.

Inhabiting the elevated gaze of a military strategist or development surveyor,
our view begins to alternate between the pathway cut by the table through the water

*
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the conference “Uneven Geographies: Zones
of Conflict” organized by T. j. Demos at the University College of London on January 24, 2009, and at
the panel “Rights to Expression vs. Regimes of Power” organized by Noah Chasin and Susan Merriam
at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the College Art Association’s 2009 Annual
Conferencia. In developing this paper, thanks are due to the organizers of the aforementioned events,
as well as to Steve Lam, Matthew Friday, Vittoria Di Palma, Rosalyn Deutsche, Hannah Feldman, Jaleh
Mansoor, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty. This paper is dedicated to Sofia Hernandez Chong-Cuy, a
groundbreaking curatorial advocate of Allora and Calzadilla who first gave me the opportunity to
write about their work nearly a decade ago on the occasion of their first solo exhibition, Puerto Rican
Light, at The Americas Society in 2003.

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OCTUBRE

and a defoliated terrain pock-marked with craters. We then witness a series of planes,
bunkers, and airfields—rusting and overgrown like so many ancient ruins—followed
by an elaborate building complex under construction at the edge of the sea and what
appears to be a cemetery. After following the vehicle in a vertiginous spiral, we are
returned to the horizontal perspective of the helmsman. Passing close to the shore,
we see two pieces of apparently incongruous signage. One reads “Welcome to the
Vieques Wildlife Refuge,” entreating us to “please help us protect the plants and ani-
mals” and specifying the “permitted activities” of “nature observation, hiking, y
photography.” The second is marked with a skull and crossbones and reads, "No
Trespassing, Authorized Personnel Only: Danger—Explosives.”

In its counterpoint to the landscape’s apparent vitality, the warning comes to
us as a distant echo of Et in Arcadia Ego (“I too am in Arcadia”)—the address made
by the death’s head to the Arcadian shepherds in the Baroque allegory of worldly
mortality famously depicted by Guercino and Nicolas Poussin in their questioning
of the genre of the pastoral, and its idealized, atemporal harmony between
humanity and nature.1 But in Under Discussion, the skull and crossbones do not so
much speak to the universal ravages of mundane decay as they mark the extremes
of simultaneous duress and negligence to which a specific population and its life-
support systems have been exposed for more than half a century.

Under Discussion is part of a long-term, multi-phased project concerned with
the political and ecological conditions of what Allora and Calzadilla describe as
the “transitional geography” of Vieques, an inhabited island off of Puerto Rico
used by the U.S. Navy as a weapons-testing range from 1941 a 2003. It is
informed by the following questions, as formulated by the artists: “How is land
differentiated from other land by the way it is marked? Who decides what is
worth preserving and what should be destroyed? What are the strategies for
reclaiming marked land? How does one articulate an ethics and politics of land
usar?”2 Involving photographs, sculptural installations, collaborative design pro-
jects, and videos addressing the conditions of the island during and after its
military occupation, the works comprising Land Mark have appeared in various

1.
Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition” (1938), in Meaning in the
Visual Arts (Nueva York: Anchor Books, 1955), páginas. 295–320, cited in Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden:
Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1965), pag. 26. Robert Smithson
recodes this axiom as “Et in Utah Ego” in “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), in Robert Smithson: Collected Writings, ed.
Jack Flam (berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pag. 149.
2.
Allora and Calzadilla, "Introducción,” in Allora and Calzadilla: Land Mark (París: Palais de
Tokio, 2006), páginas. 4–5. As a long-term, multifaceted investigation of the landscapes of U.S. colonial
expansion, Land Mark bears comparison to Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri’s Camp Campaign. See T. j.
Demos, “Means without End: Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri’s Camp Campaign," Octubre 126 (Caer 2008)
páginas. 69–90. Land Mark and Camp Campaign occupy the more politically engaged end of a broad spectrum
of contemporary landscape investigations in which the oblique public pedagogy of the Center for Land
Use Interpretation plays a crucial mediating role. On these developments, see “Remote Possibilities: A
Roundtable Discussion of Land Art’s Changing Terrain,” Artforum (Verano 2005), páginas. 289–95; máx.
Andrews, ed., Land, Arte: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (Londres: Royal Society for the Arts, 2006); Nato
Thompson, ed., Experimental Geography (Hoboken: Melville House/ICI, 2008); and Kelly Baum, ed.,
Nobody’s Property: Land, Space, Territory (nuevo refugio: Prensa de la Universidad de Yale, 2010).

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Wake, Vestige, Survival

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Guercino. Et in Arcadia
Ego. 1618–1622.

iterat ions in an array of public venues ranging from the Tate Modern to
UNESCO to the Utopia Station programming at the 2005 World Social Forum.

Land Mark in some ways bears comparison to what has recently been
described by the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) as “Tactical Cartography”:
“Spatial representations that confront power, promote social justice, and are
intended to have an operational value . . . ‘tactical cartography’ refers to the cre-
ación, usar, and distribution of spatial data to intervene in systems of control
affecting spatial meaning and practice.”3 IAA emphasizes the “connotations of
instrumentality” that come with the umbrella term “tactical media,” a paradigm
they describe as “fundamentally pragmatic, utilizing any and all available tech-
nológico, aesthetics, and methods as dictated by the goals of a given action.”

Using a range of media and means in its “confrontation of power” and “pro-
motion of social justice” in relation to Vieques, Land Mark shares something of
this tactical orientation. Yet Allora and Calzadilla’s project is also distinctively
compelling in artistic terms: its spatial investigations are made in terms of what
the artists call “the trace.” At once a poetic trope and a set of material operations,
the trace links presence and absence, inscription and erasure, preservation and
destruction, and appearance and disappearance, and is exemplified by the wake
created by the watercraft as it redoubles the shoreline in Under Discussion.

Allora and Calzadilla have gone so far as to remark that “we could say that
the trace is our medium,” which they characterize as a kind of “marking and

3.
Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat (Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2007), páginas. 29–30.

Institute for Applied Autonomy, “Tactical Cartography” in An Atlas of Radical Cartography, ed.

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OCTUBRE

effacement . . . that unsettles any linear relation between past, present, and future.”4
Keeping in mind the etymological link between trace, track, and drawing, Podríamos
understand Allora and Calzadilla’s embrace of the term “medium” in the sense of
the word developed in recent years by Rosalind Krauss, in her challenge to re-think
the conditions of possibility governing artistic practice in the aftermath of mod-
ernist medium-specificity.5 Krauss displaces any essentialist investment in the
“material support” with an attention to what she calls the “technical support,” a
complex term that encompasses the art-historical, ideological, and technological
overdetermination of a specific set of formal procedures and processes of art-mak-
En g. In a polemical allusion to Marshall McLuhan, Krauss posits that “the medium is
the memory”6; but her appeal to memory is less a matter of a continuous tradition
than of the enigmatic remains of previous practices and techniques that must be
“reinvented” in a singular fashion across the oeuvre of a given artist.

Krauss defines the political stakes of her project over and against the menace of
what she decries, following Frederic Jameson, as “the globalization of the image in
the service of capital.” But a more challenging target against which to measure the
stakes of what Krauss calls “reinventing the medium” would be the radically politi-
cized counter-globalization discourses of tactical media, the axiom of which was
canonized by Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) in the early 2000s: “By Any Media
Necessary.”7 CAE and allies such as IAA unapologetically posit a neo-Situationist end-
of-art narrative in which artistic practice is dissolved into an expanded field of activist
visual culture to be judged by what IAA would call “instrumental” criteria.

Allora and Calzadilla are in no way opposed to the overall activist impulse of
tactical media, but for them art never quite ends. In Hal Foster’s terms, art “sur-
vives” or “lives on,” precariously encompassing “formal transformation that is also
social engagement,” so as to “restore a mnemonic dimension to contemporary
arte,” albeit in ways that treat memory not in terms of nostalgic preservation but
rather as what Foster calls a condition of “coming-after.”8

Guillermo Calzadilla, in Jaleh Mansoor and Yates McKee, “The Sediments of History: Un

4.
Interview With Allora and Calzadilla,” Parkett 80 (Septiembre 2007), pag. 48.
5.
See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Nuevo
york: Thames and Hudson, 1999). Though Allora and Calzadilla undoubtedly inhabit the “post-medium
condition” in that they do not identify as painters or sculptors, por ejemplo, it should be noted that their
account of “the trace” puts their work into close proximity with the vexed quasi-medium of drawing.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “trace” derives from “Middle English, track, from Old French,
from tracier, to make one’s way, from Vulgar Latin *tractire, from Latin tractus, a dragging, curso, from past
participle of trahere, to draw.” For an important statement on the resilience of drawing as an expanded and
“self-differing” medium quietly informing a wide range of contemporary practices, see Jaleh Mansoor,
“Panel I,” in Drawing Papers 31: Symposium: Drawing (como) Center, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Nueva York: El
Drawing Center, 2002), páginas. 9–11. The enigmatic contemporaneity of drawing is the raison d’etre of the
still-unfinished Scorched Earth project (Gareth James, Sam Lewitt, and Cheney Thompson).
Rosalind Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, Masa.: CON prensa, 2010), pag. 19.
6.
7.
On tactical media at the intersection of artistic and activist discourses, see Third Text 94
(Septiembre 2008), a special issue edited by Gregory Sholette and Gene Ray on the topic.
8.
york: Verso, 2002), pag. 130.

Hal Foster, “The Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” in Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (Nuevo

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Wake, Vestige, Survival

Si, following Krauss and Foster, we approach art itself as a series of precarious
memory-structures, we recognize that much of the most compelling contemporary
art is concerned both formally and thematically with the relation between history,
memory, and the political. Exemplary in this regard is the self-recursive analogy
staged by William Kentridge between the temporality of inscription/erasure in the
animated film, Por un lado, and the traumatic histories of South African
apartheid, por otro lado. Emily Apter points out that for Kentridge, the after-
math of apartheid is often staged in terms of the degradation of postcolonial
landscapes and the life-support systems of subaltern populations, an observation that
leads her to interpret his work in terms of an “aesthetics of critical habitat.”

“Grafted from the lexicon of environmentalists, who use it to refer to the mini-
mal conditions necessary to sustain the life of an endangered species,” Apter’s
paradigm of critical habitat links questions of environmental sustainability to the
“coming-after” of postcolonial globalization.9 Programmatically defined by the 1987
United Nations’ report Our Common Future in terms of “development that meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs,” sustainability has all too often been taken for granted as a self-evi-
dent good in artistic discourses, as exemplified by Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The Land
(1998–ongoing).10 Such projects have led many Left-oriented critics to dismiss the
term out of hand as so much neoliberal “greenwashing” serving to neutralize prop-
erly political analyses and demands in favor of superficially eco-conscious forms of
lifestyle, diseño, and consumer-citizenship.11 While there is much truth to such jaun-
diced assessments, sustainability should be recognized as a contested concept with
the potential to be re-marked in relation to struggles for what Allora and Calzadilla
call, following the work of low-income activists of color in the United States, “envi-
ronmental justice.”12 In the artists’ words, Land Mark aims to “extend the parameters
of the term sustainability to include the very survival of the indigenous civilian popu-
lation of the island, and as a result complicates and broadens mainstream notions of
environmentalism and sustainability to include questions of social justice.”13 Allora
and Calzadilla state that their project is concerned with “what and who counts as an

Emily Apter, “The Aesthetics of Critical Habitat," Octubre 99 (Invierno 2002), páginas. 21–22.
United Nations Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future

9.
10.
(Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1992), pag. 1.
11.
For a thorough critique of sustainability as an “empty signifier” of socio-ecological responsi-
habilidad, see Janet Kraynak, “Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The Land and the Economics of Sustainability” (paper
presented at CAA’s 2009 Annual Conference, Los Angeles). Kraynak’s critique is echoed by design the-
orist Adrian Paar in Hijacking Sustainability (Cambridge, Masa.: CON prensa, 2009).
12.
See Giovanna De Chiro, “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and
Social Justice,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (Nuevo
york: norton, 1996), páginas. 298–330. Also see Robert Bullard, et al., Just Sustainabilities: Development in an
Unequal World (Cambridge, Masa.: CON prensa, 2002). For a deployment of these models in relation to
contemporary architecture, see Yates McKee, “Haunted Housing: Eco-Vanguardism, Eviction and the
Biopolitics of Sustainability in New Orleans,” Grey Room 30 (2008), páginas. 84–113.
13.
Sustainable Art, ed. Stephanie Smith (chicago: Smart Art Museum/ICI, 2005), pag. 39.

Jennifer Allora in Stephanie Smith, “Interview: Allora & Calzadilla,” in Beyond Green: Toward a

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OCTUBRE

endangered species—and how this discourse [environmental justice] reconceptual-
izes the relationships between nonhuman and human nature, y, como resultado, fosters
new forms of environmentalism.”14 This resonates with the project of political ecol-
ogy formulated by Bruno Latour, which aims to undo the “work of purification” that
separates properly “social” actors and problems on the one hand from the realm of
“natural” phenomena on the other. Latour tracks the ways in which human and non-
human “actants” become entangled in ecological imbroglios that mix “chemical
reactions and political reactions. A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and
sordid politics . . . dangers on a global scale and the impending local elections or the
next board meeting.”15 Allora and Calzadilla add to this their insistence that the
intersection of ecology and politics is always marked by historically uneven dis-
tributions of environmental vulnerability, which is bound up with postcolonial
dynamics of race, class, and region. These are dynamics traditionally effaced in
the discourse of so-called “eco-art,” the idealism of which is exemplified by
Barbara Matilsky’s remark in the exhibition catalogue for Fragile Ecologies that
“an understanding of ecology—the interrelationship of all forms of life in their
diverse environments—is essential to the survival of the planet . . . . An important
new art movement has emerged to reestablish a vital link to nature by communi-
cating an experience of its life-generating powers.”16

The trace-as-medium is the key principle mobilized by Allora and Calzadilla to
undo an ecological idealism in which “survival” is posited as a transcendental moral
mandate addressed to a generic humanity, rather than as a matter of what Judith
Butler has called the biopolitics of “survivability.” For Butler, survivability concerns
access to the “sustained and sustaining conditions of life.” This simultaneously
encompasses ecological and economic life-support systems (aire, agua, alimento, land, shel-
ter, income) and political struggles concerning “the representability of life,” which is
to say, the discursive, legal, and aesthetic frames that enable lives to appear as livable,
grievable, and worthy of protection: “in this way media and survival are linked.”17

Ibídem.
14.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Masa.: Harvard University Press,
15.
1989), pag. 1. For a productive application of Latour to the early ecosystems-related work of Hans Haacke,
see Luke Skrebowski, “All Systems Go: Recovering Hans Haacke’s Systems Art,” Grey Room 30 (Invierno
2008), páginas. 55–83.
16.
Barbara Matilsky, Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists Interpretations and Solutions (Nueva York:
Queens Museum/Rizzoli, 1992), pag. 3. While this exhibition deserves credit for identifying environ-
mental degradation as an ongoing matter of concern among U.S. artists in the sixties, seventies, y
eighties, the depoliticizing idealism of writers such as Matlisky has proven to have an insidious legacy
in subsequent discussions of art and ecology. For recent correctives to this longstanding tendency, ver
Brian Wallis, “Survey” in Jeffrey Kastner, ed., Land and Environmental Art (Nueva York: Phaidon, 1998),
páginas. 18–43; Yates McKee, “Art and the Ends of Environmentalism,” in Nongovernmental Politics, ed.
Michel Feher with Gaelle Krikorian and Yates McKee (Nueva York: Zone Books, 2007), páginas. 538–83; y
t. j. Demos, “The Politics of Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Ecology,” in Radical Nature: Art and
Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009 (Londres: Barbican Art Gallery, 2009), páginas. 16–30.
17.
Judith Butler, “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect,” in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (Nuevo
york: Verso, 2009), pag. 51. For an account of «the right to survival» claimed by subaltern groups, ver
Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justicia, Sustainability and Peace (Bostón: South End Press, 2006), pag. 62.

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Wake, Vestige, Survival

2. Chalk (Lima)

Allora and Calzadilla’s interest in the trace precedes their work on
Vieques. The most exemplary instance is Chalk, a paradoxically site-specific
process-sculpture that has been reiterated in three separate locations over the
past decade, albeit in ways that expose the principle of location itself to a cer-
tain dissemination or drift: El Museo del Barrio on Fifth Avenue in New York
City during the yearly Museum Mile event (2000); the Plaza de Armas in Lima
for that city’s first biennial exhibition (2002); and again at the Boston Common
on July 4th under the rubric of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art’s “Vita
Brevis” public art program (2004).

In each iteration, the artists ordered the industrial manufacture of twenty-
four identical white cylinders six feet long and one foot in diameter, which were
then unceremoniously placed in clusters and rows in the nominally “public” site
selected by the artist. Laid out prone, the serialized, monochromatic objects
recall the “blank forms” of high-Minimalist sculpture; yet in each case, any impres-
sion of physical solidity or formal coherence was belied by the presence of a slight
clue as to their particular materiality and potential function: one of the cylinders
had been dragged along the ground for several feet, leaving behind a thick white
line. In each iteration, passersby picked up on the cue, and began almost immedi-
ately to cooperate in breaking the unwieldy cylinders into large fragments of what
was gradually revealed as a familiar material—chalk—and using them to inscribe
enormous calligraphic marks over the surfaces of the spaces in question. In Chalk,
Allora and Calzadilla repeated a sculptural formula that could, in principle, ser
mobilized in “one site after another” across the globe to infinity.18 But in decon-
structive fashion, every repetition of Chalk involved a rupture, each contextually
precise iteration giving rise to an unforeseeable transformation.

Shifting from a set of static geometrical objects to an unprogrammed,
performative-collaborative event of graphematic proliferation with an indetermi-
nate lifespan, Chalk represent s an extremely dense working-through of
art-historical legacies. Primero, the chalk-objects confound the programmatic distinc-
tion drawn by orthodox Minimalism between the purified phenomenological
experience of the abstract gestalt, Por un lado, y el (debased) cultural
legibility of the Pop icon, por otro lado. Sin embargo, unlike either Minimalist or
Pop artworks, the chalk-objects are fashioned from an organic, perishable mater-
ial, announcing themselves as such in the title. The chalks are thus “chalk” in two
senses: they are morphologically and culturally legible as hypertrophic chalk-
st icks, but also, like all chalk- st icks, made of a geological subst ance, el
compressed remains of prehistoric marine organisms. Chalk was utilized in vari-
ous ways by post-Minimalist sculptors concerned with the dissolution of abstract
form at the hands of gravity and entropy. Sin embargo, the objects lose their form not

18.
Masa.: CON prensa, 2002).

See Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Locational Identity and Site-Specific Art (Cambridge,

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through simple exposure to time or the elements, but by becoming objects of use
for passersby whose curiosity has been activated by the interruption of their every-
day movement through the urban landscape.

The graffito is a vexed problem set inherited by Allora and Calzadilla from post-
war artists in Europe and the United States, ranging from the figure of the child
drawing in the street celebrated by the proto-Situationist COBRA group to Cy
Twombly’s recoding of the “expressive” Pollockian trace as the forensic remainder of
an “auto-mutilative” event that severs, rather than guarantees, the relation between
subject and mark.19 Thus, as their form comes undone, dispersing into an infinity of
ephemeral traces, the chalk-objects of Chalk unseal an entire series of art-historical
and socio-political memories; a reciprocal re-marking of sculpture and site alike.

The stakes of this re-marking became most dramatically evident in the itera-
tion of the work that took place at Lima’s Plaza de Armas, a monumental colonial
plaza recently designated by the UN as a World Heritage Site. The Plaza functions
as an element in the construction of what David Harvey would call the “monopoly
rent” of the city. By this, Harvey means the city’s claims to cultural, historical, y
architectural uniqueness in a global field of inter-urban competition for highly
mobile foreign investment and tourism—a spectacularization of locality in which
contemporary art and its promotional infrastructure play no small part.20 In
researching the site, the artists learned that at noon once a week, el gobierno
permitted a two-hour demonstration in the plaza by a coalition of unemployed
public workers laid off due to neoliberal austerity measures imposed by the post-
dict ator ship government of Victor Toledo. The art ist s arranged for the
chalk-objects to be placed on the plaza a half hour in advance of the weekly
demonstration. As demonstrators began to arrive, a range of political inscriptions
began to appear, transforming the monument al plaza into an enormous
palimpsest that threatened to overspill the officially designated spatiotemporal
boundaries of the art event and the protest alike due to the physical portability
and mark-making potential of the chalk-fragments.

Within a half hour, sin embargo, the disseminating sculpture-event was put
“under arrest”: police in riot gear were dispatched to the plaza, where they gath-
ered up the chalk fragments into piles, guarding them until they could be loaded
into the backs of sanitation trucks and hauled away. Sanitation workers then set
about erasing the marks with water hoses and brooms, obliterating all traces of
the short-lived event—with the crucial exception of the photographic documenta-
tion made by the artists.

19.
On the idealization of “drawing in the street” by COBRA, see Mark Wigley, “Paper, Drawing,
Scissors,” in The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond, ed.
Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley (Cambridge, Masa.: MIT Press/The Drawing Center, 2001), pag. 36.
Citing Derrida, Rosalind Krauss suggests the “auto-mutilative” logic of Twombly’s work in The Optical
Unconscious (Cambridge, Masa.: CON prensa, 1993), páginas. 256–66.
20.
David Harvey, “The Art of Rent: Globalización, Monopoly, and the Commodification of
Cultura,” in Socialist Register 2002: A World of Contradictions, ed. Leo Pantich and Colin Leys (Nueva York:
Monthly Review Press, 2002), páginas. 93–110.

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Allora and Calzadilla.
Chalk (Lima). 2002.

One inscription documented by the artists is especially relevant to the
ethicopolitical implications of the problem of the trace: “Que Vivan Los Derechos
[Long Live Rights].” The inscription simultaneously resists and succumbs to
imminent perishability, suggesting that because rights are as vulnerable to viola-
tion as an ephemeral chalk-mark is to erasure by a broom, our vigilance in
claiming, protecting, and sustaining them must be endless as well.

3. Land Mark (Foot Prints)

Best known over the past six years as an emergent tourist destination,
Vieques gained a certain visibility in the global media in 1999, when a resident
named David Sanes was killed by an errant bomb that fell in the civilian area of
the island. Though accidental, this concentrated overflowing of violence into the
civilian portion of the island became an occasion for the reactivation of griev-
ances spanning several generations of Viequenses concerning the decades-long
degradation of the life-support systems of the island. In the mid 1970s, the mili-
tary occupation of Vieques had become a locus of popular antagonism in the

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OCTUBRE

Flotilla of Vieques fishermen confronting
Estados Unidos. Marina de guerra, 1979. Reproduced in
Allora and Calzadilla, Land Mark
publicación (Palais de Tokyo, 2006).

form of a fishermen’s movement against the contamination and restriction of the
island’s common fisheries. Fishermen used civil disobedience tactics to interrupt
naval operations, incluido, most dramatically, a flotilla of fishing boats that laid a
huge net of buoyed chains in the path of a warship, tangling and incapacitating
its propeller. The fishermen also regularly trespassed into the primary bombing
range itself, activating the military’s security protocol, which each time required a
temporary cessation of exercises. This history of resistance informed the response
by citizens to David Sanes’ death, inaugurating a transnational advocacy cam-
paign, the visual culture of which revolved around repeated acts of trespassing on
the part of Viequenses and their supporters.21

En 2000, Allora and Calzadilla began a collaboration with Vieques activists to
develop a set of protest technologies that would explore the relay between the physi-
cal action of the body in space and the semiotic articulation of political claims. El
artists invited those engaged in civil disobedience to design their own protest graph-
circuitos integrados, which were then cast into rubber reliefs that could be attached to the soles of
normal shoes. Demonstrators’ bodies thus became mobile print-making machines;
with each step or stamp in the restricted zone of the beach, these pedestrian pros-
thetics would leave a mark of pressure—both a physical impression of bodily weight
in the receptive surface of the sand and, simultaneously, a metaphorical bearing-
down upon the intolerable actions and indeed the very presence of the Navy.

21.
For histories of Vieques, see Mario Murillo, Islands of Resistance: Puerto Rico, Vieques, and U.S.
Política (Nueva York: Seven Stories, 2001); and Deborah Berman Santana, “Vieques: the Land, the People,
the Struggle, the Future,” in Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution: The Quest for Environmental Justice,
ed. Robert D. Bullard (berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) páginas. 222–39.

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Allora and Calzadilla. Land Mark (Foot Prints). 2001–2002.

Land Mark (Foot Prints) bear s a cert ain affinit y to other examples of
“interventionist” tactics developed in tangency with the post-Seattle counterglob-
alizat ion movement in t he early 2000s. Sin embargo, unlike t he frequent
neo-Situationist appeals during that period to the physical immediacy of “direct
action” in the space of the street, Land Mark (Foot Prints) complicates “presence”
in every sense, starting with the fact that it is, among other things, a highly self-
reflexive series of photographs in which we witness the traces of absent bodies
coming-to-pass in the perishable surface of sand.22

In this self-reflexivity, Allora and Calzadilla are in dialogue with Rosalind
Krauss’s famous discussion of the indexical sign: “As distinct from symbols,” Krauss
writes, “indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to
their referents. They are marks or traces of a particular cause . . . . Into the cate-
gory of the index we would place physical traces (like footprints), shadows, y
photographs.” She goes on to suggest that the distinctness of the index “is felt
through the absoluteness of physical genesis” as opposed to the representational
or compositional conventions of traditional artmaking—a logic she refers to as a

22.
See Nato Thompson, “Trespassing Relevance,” in The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere
ed. Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette (Cambridge, Masa.: MIT Press/North Adams: MASS MoCA,
2004), pag. 17. For a sympathetic critique of neo-Situationist rhetorics of immediacy in the early 2000s,
see Yates McKee, “Suspicious Packages," Octubre 117 (2006), páginas. 99–121.

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OCTUBRE

“trauma of signification.”23 Allora and Calzadilla stage Krauss’s structural parallel
between photograph and footprint, but put the “absoluteness of physical genesis”
into question by the fact that the spatio-temporal instant simultaneously interrupted
and preserved by Allora and Calzadilla’s camera was itself already marked by a range
of other pre-organized matrices.24

Allora and Calzadilla have said that the Land Mark photographs should be
understood in relation to perhaps the most monumental footprints in history: those
impressed into the surface of the moon by the astronauts of the Voyager spacecraft in
1969. Allá, the figure of the footprint was wedded to a humanist mythology in
which the agent of the moon-marking was imagined as an unmarked representative of
humanity-in-general conquering the lunar landscape for science, progress, e incluso-
tual inhabitation by the human species—photographic evidence of “one small step
for man” and a “great leap for mankind.” The Voyager photographs had already
received a critical, if oblique, artistic response within a year of their publicization by
Robert Smithson in a contribution to Aspen magazine.25 Strata: a Geophotographic
Fiction (1970) is a layering of linguistic and photographic fragments derived primar-
ily from paleontology textbooks, displacing the monumental march of “mankind”
with the fossilized tracks of extinct prehistorical creatures. Smithson recognized a
future-oriented potentiality in these “obscure traces of life,” as when he remarked a
year earlier at the Cornell “Earth” symposium that

. . . if you think about tracks of any kind you’ll discover that you could
use tracks as a medium. Like it is possible to rent a Buffalo herd and
then just follow the traces. This is a sign language in a sense. It’s a situa-
tional thing; you can record these traces as signs . . . . These tracks
around a puddle that I photographed, in a sense explain my whole way
of—going through trails and developing a network and then building
this network into a set of limits.26

Smithson’s situating of what he calls the “sign language” of “tracks,” “traces,” or
“trails” within a play between the expansive logic of the network and the framing or
demarcation of limits suggests a link between Krauss’s account of the indexical sign
and the works she grouped as “marked sites” in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.”27

Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index, Part 1” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other

23.
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Masa.: CON prensa, 1985), pag. 203.
24.
A further complication is the fact that Allora and Calzadilla’s photographs are digital, y
thus are not ‘literally’ physical traces of light bouncing off the sand onto film. For a grappling with the
ambivalent status of the index in a digital era, see Mary Ann Doane, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign:
Introducción,” Differences (Primavera 2007), páginas. 128–52.
25.
Anne Reynolds discusses the Voyager photographs in relation to the “time travel” operative
in Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements 1–9 (1969). See Anne Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Aprendiendo
from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, Masa.: CON prensa, 2004), páginas. 167–69, 181–83.
Robert Smithson, “Earth: A Symposium,” in Robert Smithson, pag. 181.
26.
27.
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979), in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths, pag. 279. For a re-reading of this canonical text in light of different modalities of the photograph in
contemporary art, see George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field," Octubre 114 (Caer 2005), páginas. 120–40.

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While often associated with the “classical” definition of site-specific art as inextrica-
bly bound to the physical actuality of site, Krauss notes that many works by artists
such as Smithson and Richard Long were constitutively bound up with what she
called “the photographic experience of marking.” For such artists, the photo-
graphic recording of ephemeral interventions in remote sites was central to the
work itself. En otras palabras, it was only when the mark-making process was cleaved
from its actual instantiation that it was able to survive within artistic discourse,
addressing a future public as witnesses to an event that had otherwise come to pass
without a trace. As more recent scholarship has argued, site-specificity, y más
específicamente, Land Art, was in many cases conceived from the beginning as a matter
of deterritorialized media-events.28

Of obvious relevance to Land Mark (Foot Prints) is the work of Long, cual
involved the photographic recording of the trails left behind by the artist as he
undertook repetitive walks governed by predetermined routes or distances over par-
ticular terrestrial expanses. Long’s body became a kind of drawing-machine, el
products of which were photographically displayed in the gallery as a kind of memor-
ial to the absent site and its otherwise short-lived marking by the artist. Throughout
his career, Long has treated landscape as a politically neutral surface for the projec-
tion of a universal phenomenological exploration of time, espacio, and embodiment,
pretending to provide an antidote to a tragic alienation between humanity and the
being of the earth. Long has often presented his work as the antithesis of the pur-
portedly domineering approach to the landscape of U.S. Land Art, treading lightly
upon the earth at the intimate scale of the walker rather than cutting, moving, o
manipulating it via large-scale equipment in the manner of Michael Heizer. Sin embargo,
Long shares an affinity with Heizer in that both treat “nature” and “humanity” as
unmarked terms, in the process effacing the violent postcolonial histories inscribed
into the landscapes within which their artistic interventions were made (como el
A NOSOTROS. Southwestern desert or the Himalayan mountains).29

A more complex approach to the problem of “marked sites” in general and
the problem of the track or trail in particular is to be found in the work of
Dennis Oppenheim. Along with Smithson, Oppenheim was among the only
artists of his generation to acknowledge the irreducible mediation of any land
whatsoever in terms of its technical and administrative inscription qua territory.
In Time Line (1968), por ejemplo, Oppenheim used a snowmobile to draw an
ephemeral linear cut through the middle of the frozen St. Johns River, marking
the invisible latitudinal boundary between the United States and Canada, sobre el
one hand, while also intersecting the vertically-oriented international line
demarcating Eastern and Central time zones, por otro lado. The ephemeral

28.
See David Joselit, “Navigating the New Territory: Arte, Avatars, and the Contemporary
Mediascape,” Artforum (Verano 2005), páginas. 276–79; Jane McFadden, “Toward Site,” Grey Room 27
(Primavera 2007), páginas. 36–57; and Yates McKee, “Land Art in Parallax: Media, Violence, Political Ecology,"
in Nobody’s Property, páginas. 45–63.
29.
see McKee, “Land Art in Parallax,” in Nobody’s Property, páginas. 48–52.

On the secret complicity of Long and Heizer in their neocolonial approach to landscape,

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cut was preserved as a photographic document, and presented alongside both a
cartographic representation of the site and a photograph of the actual administra-
tive boundary-marker.

In the same year, Oppenheim realized Ground Mutations (1969), an exem-
plary “marked site” project suspended between sculpture, actuación, dibujo,
and photography: as stated in the informational caption appearing alongside the
photographic documentation of the project, “shoes with 1/4 diagonal grooves
down the soles and heels were worn for three months. I was connecting the pat-
terns of thousands of individuals . . . my thoughts were filled with marching
diagrams.” Though not overtly concerned with any specific political or territorial
conflicto, Oppenheim’s work acknowledges the social overdetermination of the trope
of the footprint in several ways. Primero, contrary to the generic “pathways” charted by
Largo, and the passage of the human body as such, Oppenheim counters a shoe-print
embossed with a mechanically readymade and anonymous matrix. Segundo,
Oppenheim associates this mechanical matrix with the ordering of social if not polit-
ical behavior—“marching diagrams.” However, rather than simply highlight such a
disciplinary “pattern” as an unalterable and predetermined horizon of bodily activ-
it y—as is the case in Warhol’s Dance Diagram paint ings—Oppenheim’s
photo-recording of his pedestrian circulation suggests both the enactment and the
violation of such orderings in everyday life, in the manner described by Michel de
Certeau in his account of the pedestrian derive.30 The linear groove of the shoe cre-
ates both a graphic “figure” against the terrestrial ground into which it is impressed
as well as a material “mutation” of the ground itself, transforming the latter into a
miniature dialect ical topography of elevat ions and depressions spanning
Oppenheim’s three-month pedestrian trajectory.

In Land Mark (Foot Prints), Allora and Calzadilla connect Oppenheim’s concern

30.
On the regimentation of bodily activity in Warhol’s Dance Diagrams, see Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art,” in Andy Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, Masa.:
CON prensa, 2000), páginas. 13–14. For Michel de Certeau’s post-Situationist account of the possibilities of pedes-
trian ambulation vis-à-vis the prescribed routines of urban circulation, see his “Walking in the City,” in The
Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), páginas. 91–110.

Dennis
Oppenheim.
Ground
Mutations.
1969.

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Wake, Vestige, Survival

Oppenheim.
Time Line. 1968.

with the simultaneous overdetermination and indeterminacy of the track with a
“marching diagram” that speaks less to a generic form of social control than to the
site-specific bodily and visual tactics of civil disobedience in Vieques. Rather than
document such activities according to the standard protocols of activist photojour-
nalism, why do Allora and Calzadilla insist on the photographic doubling of the
track or trace?

The answer lies in the figure of the vestige, cual, as Jean-Luc Nancy informs us,
derives from the Latin term vestigium, “the sole of a shoe or the sole of a foot, a trace,
a footprint: ‘a vestige shows that someone has passed but not who it is.’”31 The vestige
marks an irrecoverable passage, as in the smoke of a fire that burns itself out.
Confronting the legacy of Hegel’s end-of-art narrative, Nancy suggests that art itself is
a kind of vestige, surviving its alleged sublation into the ideality of world-historical
consciousness—but only barely, as the traces or tracks of something that has come to
pass: “the vestige bears witness to a step, a walk, a dance, or a leap . . . it is just a touch
right at the ground. The vestige is the remains of a step, a pas. It is not its image, para
the step consists of nothing other than its own vestige.”32 Nancy looks to the paradox-
ical temporality of both art-as-vestige and the vestige-as-art—a series of marks that
are simultaneously punctual and anachronistic—to resist idealizations of history and
community alike that would claim to ground themselves in the unity of a figurative
imagen. The displacement of the image by the vestige gives rise for Nancy to a politics
of what he calls the “passerby”—a term that signals not an indifferent nomadism of
one-place-after-another but rather a common condition of shared non-identity in
which “community” can only ever emerge as a provisional, temporary negotiation.33

Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Vestige of Art,” in The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (stanford: stanford

31.
Prensa universitaria, 1997), pag. 94.
Nancy, “The Vestige of Art," pag. 96.
32.
33.
Nancy’s linking of the “passerby” to an unsettling of the “common” dovetails with his notion of
“inoperative community,” which was productively used by Miwon Kwon in her critique of so-called “com-
munity-based art” of the 1990s. See Kwon, One Place After Another, páginas. 153–55. Nancy’s work has recently
been extended in Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick,
editores., Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

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OCTUBRE

Regardless of any artistic intervention, Vieques has always already been
marked by an uncertainty about the status of community, and the aims, ends, o
goals such a community would set for itself. Keeping in mind their own status as
two among the many “passersby”—the crowds of activists, journalists, and politi-
cians—converging on Vieques during the disobedience campaign, Allora and
Calzadilla set out to make this condition of uncertainty explicit, and to suggest
something of the precarious temporality of the transnational attention given to
the island—a prescient concern in light of the reconfiguration of the political
conditions of Vieques that would occur in 2003 when the Navy finally vacated
the island. Fuera a la Marina—Navy Out— was the explicit , uncondit ional
demand shared by the Vieques protesters. While this phrase was incorporated
into the design of many of the individual shoe-soles, the latter did not add up to
express a homogenous political will. Among the most striking shoeprints is one
featuring a cartographic outline of Vieques in which the bombing ranges on the
two extremes of the island have each been marked over with an “X.” Often
deployed in historical Land Art as a kind of forensic marker simultaneously indi-
cating and cancelling human presence in “remote” landscapes,34 the X in Allora
and Calzadilla’s photograph speaks to the uncertain future of the island itself as
a “target” of conflicting aims and representations.35

In late 2003, the Navy officially vacated Vieques due to a combination of
civil disobedience, critical media coverage, and legislative pressure. With this
undoubtedly salutary victory achieved, transnational attention to the island by
both media outlets and activist groups began to dissipate; yet for local activists
and residents, this victory was precarious, and a new struggle was beginning to
take shape with respect to the status of the land.

Along with the political and operational inconvenience caused by the
protest movement, an important factor in the Navy’s ultimate decision to vacate
the island was the fact that new Geographical Information Systems (GIS) had to
some extent rendered the physical terrain of Vieques obsolete: war games could
now be conducted in the open ocean using a precise spectrometric simulation
of the island’s topography. Using funds provided by the Tate Modern for the
exhibition Common Wealth, Allora and Calzadilla were able to purchase this data
from the private GIS company contracted by the military. In the hands of the
Marina de guerra, these spectralized traces of Vieques were being made to function in ballis-
tic experiments ultimately intended for material targets in Iraq and elsewhere.

34.
On the relation between forensics and site, see Anthony Vidler, “X Marks the Spot” in Warped
Space: Arte, Arquitectura, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Masa.: CON prensa, 2000). In her remark-
able but flawed book Overlay (Nueva York: New Press, 1983), Lucy Lippard makes the important observation
that the “X” regularly appeared as a structural design in earthworks by artists such as Long, Oppenheim,
De Maria, and Morris; sin embargo, she assimilates this to an essentialist ecofeminist account of the “mascu-
line” negation of the “feminine” fertility of the earth.
35.
For an intensive close reading of all of the activist sole-designs used by the artists in Land
Marca (Foot Prints) that reflects upon the inherent difficulty of doing so in light of physical and sym-
bolic cross-cancelling of the mini-landscapes created in the sand by each mutually overlapping
shoeprint, see Kelly Baum, “Reading Land Mark (Foot Prints)” in Nobody’s Property, páginas. 84–87.

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Wake, Vestige, Survival

Detourning this data-set, Allora and Calzadilla translated it into what they
described as an “alternative testing range” installed at the Tate: working from
the precise measurements provided by the military contractor’s infrared satel-
lite, they inscr ibed the ent ire floor of the massive galler y space with a
mathematicized topographical grid that reproduced to scale the crater-marked
surface of a portion of the Vieques bombing-range. While composed of two-
dimensional white lines overlaid on a black ground and forming a latticework of
rectangular sectors, the latter were stretched, torqued, and folded in various
ways so as to generate the same virtualized illusion of a three-dimensional topog-
raphy as that used by Navy pilots in their target-practice. Yet whereas for the
pilots the topographic data of the island would appear as a miniaturized simula-
tion inside a pair of electronic training goggles, for spectators at the Tate the
data was transformed into a phenomenologically ambivalent experience of
visión, escala, and site in which the ambulatory body could take its measure
against a decidedly abstract landscape whose volumes and elevations were still
palpably evoked in their very absence—positive landforms themselves defined
differentially by crater-depressions.

Allora and Calzadilla’s displacement of the “site” of Vieques into the “non-
site” of the Tate Gallery complicated any appeal to the sheer materiality of the
location in question, as in the classic formulation of site-specificity as something
“grounded,” in which the artwork “gave itself up to environmental context,
being formally determined or directed by it.”36 Allora and Calzadilla’s interven-
tion suggested instead that the ruined environment of Vieques is inseparable
from its inscription in and as media, demonstrating what Emily Apter calls, en
her discussion of “critical habitat,” “the extent to which media and environment
are increasingly difficult to disentangle as a semiotic system.”

In this respect, Allora and Calzadilla radicalized a series of insights devel-
oped by Robert Smithson concerning site and media during his work on the
(unrealized) Dallas/Fort Worth Airport project between 1967 y 1969, cual
constitutes a highly generative moment in the emergence of what were called
for the first time “earthworks.”37 Smithson was acutely interested in the various
spatial techniques and displacements involved in the airport as a construction
site, leading him to the realization that “all air and land is locked into a vast crys-
talline lattice” of computationally-based aerosurveying devices, electronic media
redes, and cartographic positioning systems.38 Smithson was especially inter-
ested in the possibility that artworks might be designed at a scale to address an
audience traveling at thousands of feet above the surface of the earth, y
invited Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, and Carl Andre to contribute proposals for

This is Kwon’s rehearsal of the “classical” model of site-specificity in One Place After Another, pag. 12.
See Suzaan Boettger’s contextualization of the airport project in Earthworks: Art and the

36.
37.
Landscape of the Sixties (berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
38.
páginas. 52–60.

Smithson, “Toward the Development of an Air Terminal Site” (1967), in Robert Smithson,

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OCTUBRE

the airport site. While the others each proposed a project that, however hetero-
dox, would in principle be plausible, Andre adopted a more sardonic tone:

A crater formed by a one-ton bomb dropped from 10,000 pies
o
An acre of blue-bonnets (state flower of Texas).39

Whereas Smithson was primarily concerned with the “aesthetic potential”
of the fact that “aerial photography and air transportation bring into view the sur-
face features of this shifting world of perspectives,” Andre’s proposal linked these
technologically-enabled perceptual shifts to a dialectics of extremity shadowed by
military violence.40 “Aerial photography and air transportation” is here associated
not only with the perceptual experience of the airline passenger to whom the
emergent genre of earthworks might be addressed, but the airborne bombardier
test ing nuclear weapons in the Southwestern desert or flying sort ies over
Vietnamese villages. The other hyperbolic extreme proposed by Andre evokes the
encoding of the landscape with iconographies linking geographical territory, bio-
logical life, and supposed regional character in the interest s of cultural
identification and tourism-promotion.

A similar complicity of apparent opposites has emerged in Vieques since
el 2003 victory of the demilitarization movement, for the land in question was
transferred not to the municipality of Vieques, where its future might be democ-
ratically debated, but rather to the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI),
where it was redefined as a wildlife refuge. Ironically, in claiming to restore the
land to its natural balance the DOI was enacting its own form of destruction and
obliteration. Marking the site as purely “natural” required marking over the his-
tory of subaltern claims made upon the territory. In a further irony, the new
status of the land as a “preserve” provided an alibi for not addressing the contin-
uing contamination of the air, agua, and soil of the entire island, even as
Vieques was becoming a site of potentially lucrative private tourist investment
centering around its remarkable ecological features, such as a rare breed of peli-
can and a bioluminescent bay. Vieques activists have thus been faced with a
more insidious governmental apparatus than the U.S. Marina de guerra, which had lent itself
quite well to a David and Goliath narrative during the period of civil disobedi-
ence. In place of a symbolically potent war machine bent on death and
destruction, the question became how to engage tactically a new regime of
biopower whose raison d’être is the optimal management of the interrelation
between living beings and their ecosystems.41

Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art” (1969), in Robert Smithson, pag. 117.
These citations come from Smithson’s first published text pertaining to the airport project,

39.
40.
“Toward the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” páginas. 52–62.
41.
For the original theorization of biopower as a set of techniques for governing the relations
between populations, resources, and environments, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Un
Introducción, volumen. 1 trans. Robert Hurley (Nueva York: Vintage, 1978), páginas. 140–44.

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Wake, Vestige, Survival

Allora and Calzadilla set out to explore these questions in their Tate installa-
ción, staging the future-oriented potentiality of Apter’s “critical habitat,” an
entwinement of environment and media that she associates not with the tragic
loss of a grounded sense of place but rather with the emergence of new political
groupings “whose interests are panglobal and whose community of feeling spans
the parameters of the earth itself.”42 Indeed, according to the artists, the irre-
ducibility of Vieques to its own material territory is what might enable the island
to be de-isolated from itself and to share its physical and psychic wounds with
other times and places; they set into motion a small-scale articulation of such a
“community of feeling” by using the mediatically displaced topography of Vieques
in London as the location for a conference involving artists, estudiantes, planners,
and activists concerned with the politics of ecological remediation in sites
throughout the world.

In using their artwork as a pedagogical platform concerning the life-support
systems of the “earth itself,” Allora and Calzadilla were conjuring, among other
cosas, the fraught legacy of Joseph Beuys. This point of art-historical reference
was all the more evident in a crucial sculptural dimension of the Tate installation.

Allora and Calzadilla.
Land Mark (Felt). 2003.

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While the floor of the gallery was marked by the abstract traces of the absent non-
site of Vieques, the installation provoked its own mode of sensory embodiment
through the placement of the latticework, which was overlaid on the floor as a
kind of carpet made of felt panels that could be peeled up and rearranged by view-
ers, gradually dispersing the simulated, displaced topography over time. Felt was
frequently employed by post-Minimalist sculptors in the United States, who val-
orized the physical and behavioral properties of the industrial material. Por
contrast, Beuys insisted on the metaphorical, poético, and indeed mythic determi-
nation of particular materials. For Beuys, felt was associated with bodily warmth,
psychic insulation, organic survival, and shamanistic healing, a self-mythologizing

42.

Apter, “Aesthetics of Critical Habitat," pag. 23.

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OCTUBRE

elevation of a base industrial material for which the artist was famously lambasted
by Benjamin Buchloh.43 While Allora and Calzadilla have stated their basic agree-
ment with Buchloh’s critique, they have also expressed their intention to revisit
and revise Beuys’ approach to materiality. “Rather than a one-to-one correspon-
dence with some transcendental meaning or spiritual substance, we are interested
in the unstable and polysemic quality of materials.” Among these materials is felt,

a compressed material with a certain familiar texture, as well as the verb
“to feel”; both in the sense of an active process of handling a specific
object or material as well as the passive sense of being affected by a force
that comes from outside oneself—in the way one might feel the death of
a loved one, o, in the case of Vieques the blast of a carpet-bombing raid.

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“Detail of the Greensward Plan
# 5. Photograph of area of park
before construction, 1858."
Reproduced by Robert Smithson in
“Frederick Law Olmsted and the
Dialectical Landscape,"
Artforum (Febrero 1973).

De este modo, through a conceptually dense re-marking of this sculptural material
Allora and Calzadilla draw a remarkable link between aesthetic practice and the
affective conditions for what Apter calls a “community of feeling” around transna-
tional ecological crisis-conditions. Apter frames the “aesthetics of critical habitat” in
terms of a resistance to what she calls, drawing on Gayatri Spivak, “a green globalism
that would consign a politics of class to the shadows.” Such a concern with the
uneven allocation of ecological vulnerability across the globe is crucial to Allora and
Calzadilla’s Land Mark in general and to their relation to Beuys in particular. Para
while the artists are avowedly interested in a tentative rapprochement with certain
dimensions of Beuys’ legacy, they deliberately distance themselves from the artist’s
self-presentation as a “shamanic healer” of the rift between “man” and “nature.”

43.
Benjamín H.. D. Buchloh, “Joseph Beuys: Twilight of an Idol” (1980), in Neo-Avantgarde and
Culture Industry (Cambridge, Masa.: CON prensa, 2000), páginas. 41–64. For Allora and Calzadilla’s discussion
of Beuys, see Mansoor and McKee, “The Sediments of History,” páginas. 47–48.

Wake, Vestige, Survival

Beuys has routinely been held up in catalogues and anthologies devoted to
“ecological art” as an ideal embodiment of social and environmental responsibil-
idad. Taking for granted the self-evident benevolence of ecology, many curators and
critics have failed to question the organicist model of community professed by
Beuys in his visionary quest to provide an “Energy Plan for Western Man” that
would transcend the interested realm of politics in favor of a universal concern
with the life of the human species itself. Many curators and critics have—amaz-
ingly—collapsed the projects of Beuys and Smithson in their desire to establish a
thematic foundation for more recent iterations of ecologically engaged art. Todo
too often, such attempts at synthesis have resulted in a depoliticization of ecology,
and an idealization of the role of art in addressing ecological crises.

Disentangling this micro-canon of so-called eco-art is an important task to initi-
ate if we are to comprehend the full stakes of Allora and Calzadilla’s Land Mark, y
it warrants a detour into the rigorous critique of the relation between art and ecol-
ogy presciently developed by Smithson himself, who used the term “the dialectical
landscape” to recode the aesthetic legacy of the picturesque, with special reference to
Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park. If the picturesque is traditionally understood
as a dynamic but comfortable synthesis of the harmonizing pleasure of the beautiful
and the painful force of the sublime, for Smithson it had to be recognized in its “con-
tradictory” status as a matter of “chance and change in the material order of nature”
that gives us a “physical sense of the temporal landscape.” “Dialectics of this type,"
Smithson writes, “are a way of seeing things in their manifold relations, not as iso-
lated objects. Nature is indifferent to any formal ideal . . . . [Pero] this does not mean
one is helpless before nature, but rather that nature’s conditions are unexpected.”44
Among the generative “contradictions” identified by Smithson in the work of
Olmsted was the relation over time between the site on which Central Park was
built—a “man-made desert”—and the proliferating non-sites (maps, photographs,
surveys, planes) that fed back into the reconstruction of that site as a picturesque land-
scape caught dialectically between the natural and the artificial. Noting the centrality
of media technologies to constructing—rather than simply representing—the land-
scape in question, Smithson makes a remarkably counterintuitive comparison
between Olmsted’s documentary folios of the construction-process and the cinema
of Dziga Vertov, especially in terms of the dialectic of stillness and motion at work in
Man with a Movie Camera (1929).

The implications of Smithson’s own montaging together of Vertov and
Olmsted are profound for the subsequent development of his argument concerning
ecology. Smithson calls upon what Peter Bürger would call Vertov’s “non-organic”
cinematic procedures of cutting and fragmentation not only to reorient our under-
standing of Olmsted, but also to critique neo-Romantic approaches to landscape
that would call for the artist to become, in the words of the artist Alan Gussow, a
“spiritual caretaker . . . [de] Mother Earth” who would “make these places visible,

44.
1973), repr. in Robert Smithson, pag. 160.

Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” Artforum (Febrero

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OCTUBRE

communicate their spirit—not like the earthwork artists who cut and gouge the land
like Army engineers. What’s needed are lyric poets to celebrate it.” According to
Smithson, positions such as that of Gussow involve a “spiritualism [eso] widens the
split between man and nature,” by presuming that social, económico, and technologi-
cal alterations of the physical landscape constitute a violation of a pristine original
nature that might otherwise be restored, rather than “a concrete dialectic between
nature and people. Such an artist,” he says, “surrounds himself with self-righteousness
and pretends to be saving the landscape; this is not being an ecologist of the real, pero
bastante, a spiritual snob.”45

Smithson himself was not able to enact the proposals for ecological remedia-
tion of sites such as exhausted strip-mines that he began to work on between 1971
y 1973, though numerous artists were to pursue such projects in the following
decade, including Robert Morris. en un 1979 statement entitled “Notes on Art as/and
Land Reclamation” that pertains to his own transformation of an abandoned gravel
quarry into a phenomenologically dynamic “amphitheater” in southern Seattle,
Morris ruminates on the possibility that art concerned with ecological remediation
could become an aestheticizing alibi for the very forces it would claim to oppose, por-
forming a kind of clean-up operation for environmentally destructive corporations
and government agencies. Morris cites Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s 1974 New Left
Review article “A Critique of Political Ecology”: “the notorious ‘pollution of the
earth’ . . . is misleading insofar as it presupposes a ‘clean’ world. This has naturally
never existed and is moreover ecologically neither conceivable nor desirable.”46
Enzensberger’s axiom calls for a displacement of the moralistic polarity of pollution
and purification with a political analysis that would link ecological crises to capitalist
resource-extraction, military-industrial activity, and social inequalities, rather than a
generic conflict between “man” and “nature” to be resolved through a shift in so-
called cultural values instigated by the visionary artist. Whereas mainstream
discourses of ecological remediation called for artists to assist in the neutralization of
the marks of environmental destruction left behind by corporations and govern-
mentos, Morris suggested that a critical art of land reclamation would need to
highlight the violent historicity of the landscapes in question rather than smoothing
them over in favor of a spuriously “original” topography.47

6. Protesting with Proposals

Allora and Calzadilla’s Land Mark extends the projects outlined by Smithson
and later by Morris, displacing an aesthetics of purification with a critical atten-
tion to the violent historicity of landscape. But Land Mark reorients the question

Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape," pag. 164.
45.
46.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “A Critique of Political Ecology,” New Left Review 84 (Marzo-
Abril 1974), quoted in Robert Morris, “Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation," Octubre 12 (Primavera
1980), pag. 94.
47.

morris, “Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation," pag. 99.

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Wake, Vestige, Survival

Robert Morris.
Untitled. 1979.

of “art as/and land reclamation” from an agonized concern with how artists might
engage with governmental agencies—the U.S. Department of Mines, o el
Environmental Protection Agency, for instance—than with nongovernmental
activist organizations concerned with making dissensual claims on those govern-
ment al agencies that are, in pr inciple, responsible for the economic and
ecological well-being of citizens.48 Exemplary in this regard is the work of the
Coalition for the Rescue and Development of Vieques (CRDV), the local NGO
that formed in the aftermath of the civil disobedience campaign. Along with
demanding that the land be properly decontaminated by the federal government
and returned to the municipality, CRDV has had to grapple with the risks and pos-
sibilities of ecotourism as an engine for the re-development of the island.

Of particular resonance with the concerns of CRDV is a series of experimental
proposals for the former bombing ranges created by art and architecture students in
a workshop held by Allora and Calzadilla at the University of Puerto Rico in 2004.
These projects evidence a critical working-through of the inheritance of experimen-
tal architecture of the 1960s and ’70s, exposing the “visionary” impulse of that period
to questions of post-traumatic stress and environmental justice. Neftali Carreira’s
Memorial Watching Tower, por ejemplo, projects a network of pathways and observation
nodes suspended above a desolate pock-marked landscape, calling to mind the
ambiguous post-catastrophic bleakness of Constant’s “experimental utopias” such as
New Babylon (1959–1974).49 Carreira writes that “the Live Impact Zone is an area so
polluted that it will most likely never be able to be used for civil purposes. Hay,
per square meter, more craters in this area than on the moon.” Echoing Allora and
Calzadilla’s own evocation of the moon-landing footprints, Carreira inserts an image
of an astronaut into her design-collage, transforming the space suit into a form of

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See Michel Feher, “The Governed in Politics” in Nongovernmental Politics (Nueva York: Zone

48.
Prensa, 2007).
49.
Constant’s New Babylon,” Grey Room 33 (Caer 2008), páginas. 84–95.

See Tom McDonough, “Metastructure: Experimental Utopia and Traumatic Memory in

OCTUBRE

biopolitical bearing-witness to what she calls the “physical and psychological wounds”
of the area. This survival gear, she writes, “will enable the visiting public to walk in
this extreme geography as aliens in their own estranged earthly environment.”

Another student project is Miguel Velez’s Re-Direction, a monumental ventila-
tion and hydrological system whose output of effluents could be “re-routed
directly to those governmental agencies which deny the continuing existence of
deadly pollutants on the island.” The residues of such governmental negligence
are to be found in the trace-amounts of heavy metals that mark the life-support
systems of the island—soil, agua, air—and thus the bloodstreams and organic tis-
sues of island residents themselves. Against ideologies of environmental design
that would aim for the optimal adjustment of natural ecosystems and human com-
munities conceived in a depoliticized vacuum, Velez insists instead on what
Jacques Derrida would call a “disadjustment” between past, present, and future as
the condition of environmental justice.50

In a third student project
by Julio Morales, one of the
crater s on the bombing
range has been transformed
into a massive loudspeaker,
“transforming this wound
into a speaking device, a site
from which a ser ies of
test imonies can emerge.”
Morales foregrounds the
outer membrane of the
hypertrophic speaker, cual
would indexically pulsate in
a visually dramatic fashion
with the force of the
voices issuing from it—a
simultaneous reminder and
displacement of the barrage
of explosions that could be
heard echoing across the
island for half a century.

Morales’ project can be
seen as relat ing to what

Student projects, Esculea de Artes
Plasticas de Puerto Rico (dejado para
bien): Neftali Carreira, Memorial
Watching Tower; Miguel Velez,
Re-Direction; Julio Morales, Loud
Speaker. Todo 2004.

50.
The student project-descriptions cited here appear in the “Protesting With Proposals” section of
Allora and Calzadilla, Land Mark (Londres: Tate Modern Gallery, 2003), np. For Derrida’s account of the
endless “disadjustment” between calls for justice and legal norms, see Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of
the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Nueva York: Routledge, 1994).
Since its conception in 2004, Velez’s hypothetical project has taken on increasing urgency; grievances
voiced by local advocacy groups concerning the toxic aftermath of the Navy’s occupation have recently
begun to receive a response from federal authorities. En noviembre 2009, the Agency for Toxic Substances

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Wake, Vestige, Survival

Hannah Feldman has identified in Allora and
Calzadilla’s recent work as “an auditory turn”
concerned with “the unique perceptual status
of the sonic trace” and it s sociopolit ical
overdeterminat ion.51 A key example for
Feldman of Allora and Calzadilla’s spatio-tem-
poral investigation of how “sound etches itself
. . . on the surface of reality, as trace, as mem-
or y” is a video pert aining to Land Mark
entitled Re-Turning a Sound (2004). Aquí, a
young man takes a moped that has had its
muffler replaced with a trumpet around the
newly- opened roadways of the formerly
restricted areas of the island. As the driver accelerates, slows down, or hits a bump,
the acoustic output of the bike/trumpet changes, generating through indexical
means a kind of noise-composition that amplifies rather than muffles its own disso-
maricón. Allora and Calzadilla conceive of this clamorous “sound track” as an anthem
for post-occupation Vieques, which at once celebrates the victory of 2003 y
sounds an alarm with respect to the ongoing emergency conditions of the island.

Allora and Calzadilla.
Re-Turning a Sound. 2004.

Re-turning a Sound is thus a companion-piece to Under Discussion, the video with
which we began. The quasi-surrealist vehicular assemblage featured in Under
Discussion “turns the tables,” as it were, on rationalist planning paradigms of conflict-
management, resisting the reduction of island residents to one set of supposedly
equal stakeholders sitting around a table whose rules of engagement are assumed to
be shared in advance. This resistance is articulated not only by the helmsman’s
detournement of the figure of the conference table, but also by the locally recognizable
identity of the helmsman himself: Diego de la Cruz, a Vieques activist and son of the
leader of the fishermen’s movement from the 1970s. En efecto, the vehicle might be
thought of as a transgenerational homage to the fishermen’s re-purposing of their
own equipment during their confrontations with the Navy (little-known archival pho-
tographs of which were used as one of the graphic templates for the shoe-soles in
Land Mark (Foot Prints) and were also reproduced by the artists in the Land Mark pub-
lication). In conjuring the historical memory of the fishermen’s movement, Under
Discussion suggests that certain patterns of domination and exclusion can only be
addressed by exceptional, even “absurd,” means, ones capable of putting into ques-
tion given configurations of politics and ecology—such as those that would privilege

and Diseases Registry reversed a Bush-administration pronouncement that remaining residues of military
activity on the island did not constitute a public health risk. In announcing this reversal, el gobierno
has committed itself to an intensification of clean-up activities, and in principle, financial compensation to
local residents. See Mireya Navarro, “Reversal Haunts Federal Agency,” New York Times, Noviembre 29, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/science/earth/30agency.html (accessed June 15, 2010).
51.
Hannah Feldman, “Sound Tracks: The Art of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla,"
Artforum (Marzo 2007), páginas. 336–41, 396; and Feldman, “Orchestral Maneuvers in the Light,” in Allora and
Calzadilla, ed. Hamza Walker (chicago: Renaissance Society, 2010), páginas. 29–39.

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OCTUBRE

the putative value of a bomb-scarred “wilderness” over the long-term amelioration of
the precarious living conditions of indigenous populations.

Circulating around the former fishing routes now made unusable by the
residues of military waste on the ocean floor, de la Cruz takes us on a kind of subal-
tern “detour” of Vieques, moving us between picturesque scenery, remainders of
military violence, and signs of the island’s incipient large-scale redevelopment, a tri-
angulation that speaks to the aporia of ecotourism. For good reason, critical art
writing has tended to treat tourism in all its guises as a subspecies of the culture
industry—as bound up with the spectacularization of place and the exploitation of
site-specific environmental, cultural, and economic differences.52 Under Discussion
takes such a critique to heart, but radicalizes it by suggesting the following questions:
Can the legacy of the picturesque, linked from its inception to the political economy
of tourism and its penchant for “images of decay,” be mobilized along the lines of
Smithson’s anti-idealist ecology rather than simply as a commodification of place?53
If a certain “commodification” is not only unavoidable but in some cases desirable for
marginalized locations and economies, on whose terms will this “monopoly rent” be
extraído? And how will it be combined with other forms of economic life-support
less dependent on the aesthetic whims and seasonal patterns of Northern con-
sumers? Can the ruined landscape be strategically “preserved” as a resource without
marking it as unmarked nature and thus obliterating the memories of dispossession
and ongoing claims for justice encrypted in it? How to avoid superficial forms of
“tragic tourism” that would acknowledge violent histories only to repackage them as
a matter of local “flavor,” if not outright entertainment, as in the case of an aban-
doned military bunker in Vieques recently reconverted into a night club?54 Can
ecotourism be organized in a way that is sustainable not only for nonhuman ecosys-
tems, but for redistributive democracy as well?55

52.
For a classic statement, see Dean McCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class
(Nueva York: Schocken Books, 1976). See also Joan Ockman and Salomon Frausto, editores., Architourism:
Authentic, Escapist, Exotic, Spectacular (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005). For a highly nuanced account of
the relation between art and tourism in its multiple scales, registers, and contradictions, see Lucy
Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Turismo, Art and Place (Nueva York: New Press, 1999).
53.
See Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in
Bretaña,1760–1800 (stanford: Prensa de la Universidad de Stanford, 1989). For a critical account of the enduring
hegemony of the picturesque as an “aestheticization” of ruin, decadencia, and dereliction produced by
uneven capitalist development, see Wolfgang Kemp, “Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque
Tradition," Octubre 54 (Caer 1990), páginas. 102–33.
54.
On modes of “tragic tourism” ranging from Holocaust memorials to nuclear test-sites in the
Southwestern desert, see Lippard, On the Beaten Track, páginas. 118–134. On the bunker-nightclub, ver
Hugh Ryan, “36 Hours in Vieques,” New York Times (Febrero 21, 2010).
55.
As Lippard writes, “Ecotourism only deserves the name when it includes humans in its ecosys-
tems; otherwise it’s likely to be ‘ecolonialism’. . . . Grass-roots control of so-called alternative tourism has to
be a prime consideration, and no community is so homogenous that it will immediately agree on what is
both economically and ecologically best for its own turf," pag. 146. Lippard makes important mention of the
paradigm of so-called “reality tours” developed by the NGO called Global Exchange, which aims to bring
together public pedagogy, political advocacy, and small-scale income-generation projects in sites of politi-
cal conflict and/or experimentation in the Global South. See Global Exchange, “Be a Socially Conscious
Traveler,” available at http://www.globalexchange.org/tours/SociallyConsciousTraveler.pdf.

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Wake, Vestige, Survival

Under Discussion stages these questions via the formal logic of the trace that we
have encountered in various guises across the oeuvre of Allora and Calzadilla, incluir-
ing the graffito, the index, and the vestige. En cada caso, the artists set into motion a
series of structural couples—inscription and erasure, presence and absence, appear-
ance and disappearance — that link processes of mark-making with
counter-memorial claims for rights and justice vis-à-vis specific sites. In Under
Discusión, this logic is exemplified by the re-tracing of the coastline by the vehicle,
which we witness both from the airborne camera and from an imaginary position
aboard the tour-boat itself. This operation of re-tracing returns us once again to the
legacy of the picturesque, an aesthetic modality concerned with viewing landscapes
“with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing.”56 With the important exception of
Smithson’s heterodox recoding of the term, the picturesque had often been dis-
missed in modernist discourses as a series of readymade formulae depriving us of the
capacity to experience sites in their original immediacy. Yet it is precisely for this rea-
son that the picturesque, in its emphasis on mediation, repetition, and artificiality,
becomes a potentially critical resource. Sin embargo, rather than adjust the site to a
stereotypical touristic formula, the tour-guide’s re-tracing of the island in Under
Discussion cleaves the land from itself, displacing it into a kind of endless spiral of

56.
Garde” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, pag. 162.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, quoted in Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-

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Allora and Calzadilla. Under Discussion. 2005.

OCTUBRE

environmental remediation in which any appeal to the actuality of place or the self-
evidence of “nature” is short-circuited in advance.57 It is here that we might
identify a certain politics of fictionality in Under Discussion: rather than simply
expose the “dark side” underlying the illusory appearance of landscape as con-
structed by the mainstream tourism industry,58 Allora and Calzadilla, con el
mobilization of their absurd vehicle, stage a fictional counter-appearance, "el
introduction of a visible field of experience, which then modifies the regime of
the visible. It is not opposed to reality. It splits reality and reconfigures it as its
double.”59 As a video, Under Discussion enables us to witness this “poetic doubling
. . . of the future of this area” in time as the simultaneous creation and dissipation
of the vehicle’s trail as it moves through the water.60 At once echoing and supple-
menting the rhythmic cresting and breaking of waves against the shoreline, el
vehicle and its wake constitute a kind of fictive counter-memorial informed by
what Butler would call a biopolitics of “survivability” concerning equitable access
to life-support systems and spaces of political appearance alike.

In conclusion, given Allora and Calzadilla’s interest in polysemic wordplay,
perhaps we should consider Barbara Johnson’s reading of “wake” as simultaneously
“a service held for the not-yet buried dead . . . the expanding wedge of ruffled water
that results from the passage of a ship, and also . . . a state of nonsleep.”61 Johnson’s
reading of this term nicely compresses both the aesthetic and ethico-political con-
cerns of the Land Mark project as a whole. Appearing as they disappear, reminding
as they slip into oblivion, the wakes and vestiges of Allora and Calzadilla’s Land
Mark impart themselves as an uncertain inheritance from the past and an incalcula-
ble promise to future generations: sustainability without guarantees.

57.
Jeffery Kastner notes the important echo of “the spiraling trajectory” in Under Discussion with
Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in “There, Ahora: From Robert Smithson to Guantanamo,” in Land, Arte, pag. 31. On
the endless re-tracing at work in Spiral Jetty as a kind of diagram “vectorized” between site, sculpture,
texto, and occasionally airborne film-camera, see George Baker, “The Cinema Model,” in Robert
Smithson, Spiral Jetty: True Fictions, False Realities, ed. Lynne Cook (Nueva York: Dia, 2005), páginas. 96–98.
58.
Here I allude to the foundational Marxist art-historical critique of landscape in its pastoral
and picturesque modes: John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting,
1730–1840 (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 1983).
59.
Jacques Ranciere, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Mineápolis: Universidad
of Minnesota Press, 1999), pag. 99, quoted in Vered Maimon, “The Third Citizen: On Models of Criticality
in Cotemporary Artistic Practices," Octubre 129 (Verano 2009), pag. 96. On the politics of fiction, also see
Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility," Octubre 129, páginas. 51–84, and Felicity D.
Scott, “Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture," Octubre 106 (Caer 2003), páginas. 75–101.
60.
George Baker uses the phrase “poetic doubling” in his consideration of the “cultural dis-
placement of what could be called natural” in the site-specific sound-recordings undertaken by Lothar
Baumgarten at the riverfront of Beacon, Nueva York, prior to the construction of the Dia Center for the
Arts and its attendant art-driven tourist economy. See Baker, “Lothar Baumgarten,” in Watershed: El
Hudson Valley Art Project, ed. Miwon Kwon (Nueva York: Minetta Brook, 2002), páginas. 73–74.
Barbara Johnson, The Wake of Deconstruction (Londres: Blackwell, 1994), pag. 17.
61.