Kobena Mercer – Wifredo Lam’s Cross-Cultural Rhizomes

Wifredo Lam’s Cross-Cultural Rhizomes
by Kobena Mercer
is entirely without precedent in twentiethcentury
art. Throughout the period 1941 to
1952, when Wifredo Lam had travelled back
to Havana, we find a poetics of space in which
one’s eye is entranced by enigmatic picture
planes whose intense ambiguity arises from
their simultaneous flatness and openness.
Wifredo Lam
Anamu, 1942
Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
One feels joyfully disoriented in the
presence of The Jungle, 1943 (collection of The
Museum of Modern Art, New York). As various
anthropomorphic figures push forward from a
dense background of tropical vegetation, the
rhythmic pulsation of the vertical lines that
pull their elongated limbs upward unsettles
any figure/ground distinction to create
instead an “all over” composition in which
one’s eye begins to wander and roam. Before
the identity of the strange hybrid creatures
becomes an issue, one is already swept up
into an all-enveloping pictorial space that
Numerous North American painters
moved towards “all over” pictorial space by
passing through the gateway of abstraction
in the early 1940s, but in the Caribbean
journey that led to his mature style, Lam
activated a cross-cultural dialogue between
modernist painting and the ritual forms of
Afro-Cuban life by reworking the pictorial
resources of figuration completely. In such
works as Anamú, 1942 (collection of the
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
Chicago), whose crescent moon face is
rendered in translucent browns and greens,
or the blue and white figuring of Femme, 1942
(Private Collection), where a horse-headed
woman emerges from a shimmering pink
haze, we notice incomplete edges in Lam’s
delineations of figure and ground. Such gaps
and pauses cut openings and passageways
that allow communicative flow among
different signifying systems otherwise closed
to one another in a colonial world dominated
by an either/or mentality of absolute
separation. To say that, with his return
to Cuba, the border-crossing practice of
hybridity comes to act as the core principle
of Lam’s artistic production -- moving
among multiple cultures so as to introduce
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Wifredo Lam
Autel pour Eleggua, 1944
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Pierre Mabille and Lydia Cabrera with Wifredo Lam, Cuba ca. 1943
change in place of stasis -- is to say that
the inscriptive space he always keeps open
and flat in his paintings was a key condition
for breaking through into a realm of crosscultural
poetics that carried far-reaching
philosophical implications.
At a time of crisis when Europe was
about to plunge into global war, forcing
Lam to flee Paris in 1940, the humanist
ideals of Enlightenment modernity were
being torn apart. Travelling by ship to the
Antilles in the company of André Breton,
André Masson, and other Surrealist Group
members, it was Lam’s friend Pierre Mabille,
an editor of Minotaure and founder of the
Haitian Bureau of Ethnology, who first
recognized what the hybridity principle
was opening up. Decentering the rules
of post-Renaissance picture-making
where monocular perspective created “a
structure dependent on a single centre,”
The Jungle inspired Mabille to argue that,
“this jungle where life explodes on all
sides, free, dangerous, gushing from the
most luxurious vegetation, ready for any
combination, any transmutation,” was
inherently counterposed to, “that other
sinister jungle where a Führer … awaits
the departure … of mechanized cohorts
prepared … for annihilation.” 1 Where
hybridity undercuts all-or-nothing absolutes
by embracing the mutability of boundaries
in the interdependent ecologies of human,
animal, and plant life, Lam’s figures --
with payaya-shaped breasts and phallussprouting
chins, with horse-like manes on
mask-shaped heads -- embody a readiness
for further metamorphosis that reveals
something unique about the Caribbean
conditions of their artistic genesis. Lam
flourished when he returned to Cuba, and
while his “homecoming” is often interpreted
biographically, as a reclaiming of ancestral
roots from his Chinese father, Lam Yam, his
mother Ana Serafina, of mixed Iberian and
Congolese heritage, and his godmother,
Mantonica Wilson, a Santeria priestess, I
would say that a broader understanding
of his Afro-Atlantic originality comes into
view when we consider the multiple routes
leading the artist toward hybridity as a
questioning of any claim to fixed or final
identity.
Where New World syncretic religions
such as Santeria combine Yoruba and
Catholic deities to transform European
and African sources in the creation of new,
translational, syntheses, 1940s debates
among artists and ethnographers cast
radical doubt on the idea of assimilation in
colonial governance. Poet Nicholás Guillén
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and writer Fernando Ortíz coined the term
“Afro-Cuban” to acknowledge the paradox
of the expressive power transmitted by
the lowest segment of their nation’s ethnic
hierarchy. Their investigations suggested
that Caribbean societies were ready for
“any combination, any transmutation” by
virtue of the counter-Enlightenment gained
in coming to terms with violent histories of
forced migration that nonetheless gave rise
to multiple recombinant potentials among
African, Chinese, South Asian, European,
and Muslim diasporas. Ortíz introduced
the concept of “transculturation” in Cuban
Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940),
showing how “the loss or uprooting of a
culture (‘deculturation’) and the creation of
a new culture (‘neoculturation’)” 2 go hand
in hand, thereby mapping altermodernity
avant la lettre.
Addressing the two commodity
crops of Cuba’s agricultural economy as
allegorical personages, Ortíz’s text acts as
a fertile interpretive source for grasping
how subversive Lam’s intentions really
were when he said The Jungle, “has nothing
to do with the real countryside of Cuba,
where there is no jungle but woods, hills
and open country, and the background of
the picture is a sugar cane plantation.” 3
Where the title of his 1943 masterwork
appropriates a key trope of primitivist
discourse to resignify la selva (‘the
jungle’) as el monte, a sacred clearing in
the forest (which has correspondences in
European folklore), the cognate term la
meleza (‘the undergrowth’) positions his
creaturely hybrids in a subtle critique of
plantation slavery. In the vertical rhyming
between the sugar cane stalks and their
dancing limbs, we behold a subaltern ritual
performed at night (for the deep blue
background casts the scene in moonlight
even as amber and green foreground tones
evoke illumination by firelight), opening
a line of flight into uncharted realms of
possibility. Since the hybrids are fully
immanent to the undergrowth, in their
transculturative dance they constitute
a rhizome, a term philosophers Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari employ to
distinguish arborescent root systems, such
as oak and pine, which organize growth in
dichotomous hierarchies, from strawberries,
cassava, and mangrove, plants which create
unpredictably interconnective relationships
with their environment, thereby facilitating
the transmutation of identity on the part
of all elements swept up in a rhizomorphic
assemblage. 4
The femme-cheval is another hybrid
figure constantly recurring across Lam’s
Afro-Cuban production from 1942 onwards.
Addressing the psychic state the Santeria
worshipper enters into when the orisha
is said to cross the border separating
gods and mortals, taking possession of
the devotee by “riding” him or her like a
horse, the femme-cheval visualizes what
happens to human identity in the liminal
state of ecstatic trance, which was a line
of inquiry Zora Neale Hurston pursued
Movie Still from The Living Gods of Haiti, Haiti 1947-51
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Wifredo Lam
Untitled 1974
in her travelogue, Tell My Horse (1938), and
which avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren
addressed in The Divine Horsemen (filmed
between 1947 and 1951 but completed
in 1977). In border-crossing practices
that allow glimpses of the multiple
identities within reach once the human
is understood as a process of becoming
rather than a fixed or final state of being,
Lam was one of the first twentiethcentury
modernists to grasp the egoloss
in ecstatic experience as a gateway
to fresh possibilities for shared modes
of belonging in a post-Enlightenment
world. Where, in Lam’s poetic space of
transculturation, “the pretensions of the
human ego are set aside for a complete
surrender to an all-encompassing force
that is not unlike the Romantic sublime and
certainly signifies the surrender of Lucumi
devotees to the will of the orisha,” 5 the
rhizomes he set into motion as a result
of his multiple journeys, from Cuba to
Spain and Paris and back again, deliver
aesthetic experiences that continue to to
resonate with the global challenges we face
in an era still struggling to come to terms
with the ethics and politics of multiplicity.
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Endnotes
1. Pierre Mabille, “The Jungle,” Tropiques n 12, 1945, reprinted in Michael Richardson and Kryztof
Filakowski, Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, London and New York:
Verso, 1996, 211 and 212.
2. Fernando Coronil, ‘Introduction to the Duke University Press Edition,’ in Fernando Ortíz, Cuban
Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar [1940 trans. Harrient de Onis], Durham NC: Duke University
Press, 1996, xxvii.
3. Wifredo Lam cited in Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam, Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A.,
1976, reprinted Paris: Editions Cercle d’art, 1989, 198.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Rhizome,” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
[1980 trans. Brian Massumi] Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 3 - 26.
5. Lowery Stokes Sims, ‘The Postmodern Modernism of Wifredo Lam,’ in Kobena Mercer ed.
Cosmopolitan Modernisms, London and Cambridge MA: Institute of International Visual Arts
and MIT Press, 2005, 90.
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Publication © Galerie Gmurzynska 2015
For the works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Wifredo Lam:
© 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich
Documentary Images of Wifredo Lam SDO Wifredo Lam
Editors:
Krystyna Gmurzynska
Mathias Rastorfer
Mitchell Anderson
Coordination:
Jeannette Weiss, Daniel Horn
Support:
Alessandra Consonni
Cover design:
Louisa Gagliardi
Design by OTRO
James Orlando
Brady Gunnell
Texts:
Jonathan Fineberg
Anthony Haden-Guest
Kobena Mercer
Annina Nosei
PRINTED BY
Grafiche Step, Parma
ISBN
3-905792-28-1
978-3-905792-28-7