Notes
Introduction
Linda Hattendorf, The Cats of Mirikitani (2006; New York: Arts Alliance America, 2008), DVD. The title of the film references one of the most frequent subjects of Mirikitani’s artworks.
Hattendorf and her producer and collaborator Masahiro Yoshikawa struggled for years to find funding to finish production of the film. For more information, see “Filmmaker Bios,” in “The Cats of Mirikitani,” Independent Lens, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/independentlens, accessed November 21, 2019.
“Linda Hattendorf Interview at the Port Townsend Film Festival,” May 6, 2010, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUpTOcTNZgw.
Jury statement quoted in Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2009), 87.
Nell McClister, “Editor’s Choice Film: The Cats of Mirikitani,” BOMB, no. 100 (2007): 20.
Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics, 87.
This particular logic that denies any motivations and intentions in hospitality relations other than personal gain is common among the responses to the works presented in this book; it will be explored further throughout. As we contemplate whether or not we would go out and welcome the homeless person, this “all or nothing” critical approach is seductive in its sophistication. As I make clear in the rest of this Introduction and throughout the book, I am mindful of the criticism that even in displaying generosity, or especially in doing so, a white middle-class privileged woman could be seen as reinforcing her sense of her own superiority and benevolence. At the same time, seeing only the gain for the woman in this example seems to justify discrediting the action presented here and rationalizing inaction. I do not dismiss the criticism, but my interest in this book is in exploring other potential readings of these artworks as I have found them useful for my own thinking about the limits and limitations of hospitality.
For information about the UNHCR’s research methodology and data, see “Figures at a Glance,” UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency, accessed November 21, 2019, https://www.unhcr.org.
I discuss the hospitality-related writings of Kant, Levinas, and Derrida in detail in my book Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Dharmasūtras: The Law Codes of Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vasiṣṭha, trans. and ed. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 47. Also see Olivelle’s translation of The Law Code of Manu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), which lists many sacrifices that “good” hosts should expect to endure for their guests.
See Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix.
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1883, inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, New York, 1903.
See Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Chris Hush, “‘An Answered Prayer’: Suburb Compromises after Resident’s Homeless ‘Slumber Parties,’” NBC Chicago, January 9, 2018, https://www.nbcchicago.com.
Hush, “‘An Answered Prayer.’”
See Janelle Walker, “Ex-Wife of Elgin Man behind Basement Homeless Shelter Calls Donations ‘Sickening’ as Thousands Owed in Child Support,” Chicago Tribune, February 20, 2018, https://www.chicagotribune.com.
Maya Salam, “Man Who Sheltered Homeless People in His Basement Stops after City Order,” New York Times, January 6, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com.
Quoted in Salam, “Man Who Sheltered Homeless People.”
Hannah Hartig, “Republicans Turn More Negative toward Refugees as Number Admitted to U.S. Plummets,” FactTank, May 24, 2018, Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org.
Irina Aristarkhova, “Exotic Hospitality in the Land of Tolerance,” in Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, ed. Stephanie Smith (Chicago: Smart Museum, University of Chicago, 2013), 353–59.
Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Scotts Valley, Calif.: CreateSpacePublishing, 2014), bk. 10.
Irina Aristarkhova, “Stepanova’s Laboratories,” in Place Studies in Art, Media, Science, and Technology: Historical Investigations on the Sites and the Migration of Knowledge, ed. Andreas Broekmann and Gunalan Nadarajan (Weimar: VDG, 2008), 167–82.
In this paragraph I have purposefully chosen to tell one specific version of an art historical trope, developed through my own research interests. As for a contemporary example of a creative maker whose art practice connects deeply to personal activism, Carol Jacobsen serves my point. She is a video art maker and photographer whose practice focuses on incarcerated women who are serving life sentences for the murder of an abusive partner in the state of Michigan. To a viewer of Jacobsen’s gallery show, other parts of her practice—working to get the women in her photographs and video art pieces out of prison by collaborating with the American Civil Liberties Union and other activists and organizations—are not apparent; only those who seek out more information about the artist learn about the other parts of her practice and her activism. So far, thirteen of the women depicted in Jacobsen’s photographs and videos have been released in the course of her activist art practice. See Carol Jacobsen, For Dear Life: Women’s Decriminalization and Human Rights in Focus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019).
See, among other titles, Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, with Mathieu Copeland (Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reel, 2002); Nato Thompson, ed., Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991 to 2011 (New York: Creative Time Books and MIT Press, 2012); Ted Purves, ed., What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Claire Doherty, ed., Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012); Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Renate Dohmen, Encounters beyond the Gallery: Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Difference (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016).
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 2007).
Michael Corris, Jaspar Joseph-Lester, and Sharon Kivland, eds., Hospitality: Transmission Annual (London: Artwords Press, 2010). I thank Maureen Connor for bringing my attention to this book, and for gifting me with a copy.
Stephanie Smith, ed., Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Chicago: Smart Museum, University of Chicago, 2013); Sally Tallant and Paul Domela, eds., The Unexpected Guest: Art, Writing, and Thinking on Hospitality (London: Art/Books, 2012). I thank Paul Domela for inviting me to contribute to earlier discussions about hospitality in Liverpool, which subsequently became a publication edited by Domela and which I revised for Smith’s Feast. Paul Domela, ed., Refugee–Hospitality–Occupation (Liverpool: Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2005).
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 161.
Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix.
1. Reclaimed Civility: Ana Prvački
Quoted in “They Forbid to Say ‘Good Morning!’ in St. Petersburg Metro” [in Russian], NTV, August 25, 2012, http://www.ntv.ru/novosti/325237. Police justified their detention of the artists by comparing Esta and Jack with the famous feminist punk art group Pussy Riot. For a television report about Esta and Jack and why they were stopped, see Olga Pispanen and Dmitry Kaznin, “RAIN Searched for the Detained Metro ‘Well-Wishing Guy’” [in Russian], Dozd’ TV Station, August 24, 2012, https://tvrain.ru/teleshow/here_and_now/dozhd_razyskal_zaderzhannogo_v_metro_cheloveka_dobro-329656. Since this incident, the artists have continued to appear at various metro stations and in other public places with similar signs expressing greetings. Archives of audio and video recordings of their interactions with police and metro authorities are available on Tesamie social media pages: Esta & Jack, “Tesamie” [in Russian], https://vk.com/te_samie; and Esta & Jack, “Tesamie” [in Russian], Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/tesamie. The artists have explained that the costumes and masks they wear are meant to enhance their messages.
Esta & Jack, “Tesamie,” https://vk.com/te_samie; “They Forbid to Say ‘Good Morning.’”
Google Dictionary, s.v. “etiquette,” accessed November 22, 2019, https://www.google.com; Merriam-Webster Dictionary online, s.v. “etiquette,” accessed November 22, 2019, https://www.merriam-webster.com.
Sue Derald Wing, Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2010), xvi.
David Farrell Krell, “Handy Etiquette,” in Etiquette: Reflections on Contemporary Comportment, ed. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 117.
bell hooks, “A Place Where the Soul Can Rest,” in Scapp and Seitz, Etiquette, 171.
Anthony Szczesiul, The Southern Hospitality Myth: Ethics, Politics, Race, and American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017).
hooks, “A Place Where the Soul Can Rest,” 177–78.
Szczesiul, The Southern Hospitality Myth, 218.
The name of the latter exhibition has appeared in various written forms. From this point onward, I use the name documenta (no italics) to refer in general to the exhibition mounted in Kassel every five years by the organization of the same name. The individual iterations of the documenta exhibition are numbered, and I treat these as the exhibition names, italicizing both elements; thus, for example, documenta 13. These are the forms most commonly used in publications mentioning the exhibitions (in quotations and citations, the forms of the names used by the sources are retained). I was involved with Prvački in conversations and worked on a joint publication about hospitality and art for documenta 13: Ana Prvački and Irina Aristarkhova, The Greeting Committee Reports . . . : 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts (Documenta Series 043) (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2012).
Prvački and Aristarkhova, The Greeting Committee Reports, 6.
“Information: Greeting Committee,” dOCUMENTA (13), https://d13.documenta.de/#/en.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
Adolf Knigge, Practical Philosophy of Social Life, or The Art of Conversing with Men (Lansingburgh, N.Y.: Penniman & Bliss, 1805), xii.
A well-known example in contemporary German literature that speaks to this concern is Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone, trans. Susan Bernofsky (London: Granta Books, 2018). The novel describes how a German man is changed by his growing involvement in the plight of African refugees in Berlin. The discussion about hospitality extended to strangers in our times is a collective endeavor, and Prvački’s work contributes to the discussion about cultural identity in Germany and elsewhere. I thank an anonymous reviewer for the reference to Erpenbeck’s work.
Ana Prvački, Greeting Committee, 2012, http://anaprvacki.com/project/greeting-committee.
Prvački and Aristarkhova, The Greeting Committee Reports.
Prvački and Aristarkhova, The Greeting Committee Reports.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “A Brief Monologue about Ana Prvački’s Art,” in Ana Prvački, Finding Comfort in an Uncomfortable Imagination: A Catalogue of Ideas (Singapore: Institute of Contemporary Arts, Lasalle College of the Arts, 2015), 124–25.
Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), 49–50.
Ana Prvački, “Ana Prvački—Exercising Table Setting and Table Manners,” May 15, 2011, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDwxIaLpgGM.
Raimundas Malašauskas, “Ana Prvački: Music-Derived Pain Killer,” in Prvački, Finding Comfort, 116.
Bala Starr, “Finding Comfort in an Uncomfortable Imagination,” in Prvački, Finding Comfort, 113, 114.
Chus Martínez, “Language Is Confusing but the Actions Are Unmistakable: On the Work of Ana Prvački,” in Prvački, Finding Comfort, 118; Starr, “Finding Comfort,” 114.
Starr, “Finding Comfort,” 114.
Prvački and Aristarkhova, The Greeting Committee Reports, 6.
2. Undoing Waiting: Faith Wilding
Mira Schor, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 111; Arlene Raven, “Womanhouse,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 58; Amelia Jones, “Faith Wilding and the Enfleshing of Painting,” n.paradoxa, no. 10 (June 1999): 17.
Faith Wilding, conversation with author, August 25, 2013.
Schor, Wet, 111. See also Lara Shalson, “Waiting,” Contemporary Theatre Review 23, no. 1 (2013): 79–82.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” 1842, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org.
Jones, “Faith Wilding,” 17.
What became the poem of Waiting, collectively imagined by participants in the FAP and then edited by Wilding, reflects the experiences of the members of the faculty and the student body, with their specific social and educational backgrounds. The early feminist art movement mirrored the racial segregation of the world at large. Years later, Judy Chicago admitted that she had overlooked the fundamentally intersectional nature of patriarchal oppression: “We cast the dialogue incorrectly in the seventies. We cast it around gender, and we were also simplistic about the nature of identity. Identity is multiple. . . . But I’ve learned a lot in these years, that one is both a woman and a person of color; an American and of African descent, as well as a person of a particular class.” Judy Chicago, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, “Conversations with Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro,” in Broude and Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art, 72.
Rose Kreider and Diana Elliott, “Historical Changes in Stay-at-Home Mothers: 1969 to 2009” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, Georgia, August 14, 2010), 10. I recognize the problem of equating a housewife with a stay-at-home mother. Wilding’s character certainly did, as she was waiting for a husband and children to appear in her life. In addition, taking into account housewife-targeted advertising and the fact that African Americans constituted less than 10 percent of the American middle class at the time (1970), one assumption (or argument) I am making here is that, as far as a concept of the housewife was concerned, both the media and the public usually imagined a white middle-class woman.
Dorothy E. Roberts, “Racism and Patriarchy in the Meaning of Motherhood,” Journal of Gender and the Law 1, no. 1 (1993): 6.
Lisa E. Farrington, Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also the following art catalogs devoted to Saar’s work: Jane H. Carpenter and Betye Saar, Betye Saar (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2003); Arlene Raven and Betye Saar, Betye Saar: Workers+Warriors, The Return of Aunt Jemima (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 1998).
Betye Saar, “Influences: Betye Saar,” Frieze, September 27, 2016, https://frieze.com.
Betye Saar, quoted in Yolanda M. López and Moira Roth, “Social Protest: Racism and Sexism,” in Broude and Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art, 152. For Wilding’s remark about Womanspace, see Faith Wilding, By Our Own Hands: The Woman Artist’s Movement, Southern California, 1970–76 (Santa Monica, Calif.: Double X, 1997), 48.
Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1977), 122.
Chicago, Through the Flower, 122.
Charles R. Lyons, Samuel Beckett (London: Macmillan Education, 1983), 178.
Shalson, “Waiting,” 79.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Internet Shakespeare Editions, “As You Like It (Modern),” ed. David Bevington, accessed November 22, 2019, http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca.
Shalson, “Waiting,” 80, 81.
Raven, “Womanhouse,” 60.
Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 80.
This and subsequent quotations from the Wait-With monologue come from Faith Wilding, e-mail message to author, August 20, 2007.
Dont Rhine, e-mail message to author, June 28, 2018.
Saar, “Influences.”
Anna Riveloté, “The Woman Waits” [in Russian], available online at “Анна Ривелотэ,” Lirta (blog), December 31, 2011, https://lirta.livejournal.com/10916.html; translations are my own. Many Internet users “perform” this poem on YouTube, similar to how Wilding’s Waiting poem is performed. Since 2010 Riveloté has published three books and received an award for literature. “The Woman Waits” remains her most famous poem, and I present it here as a link to Wilding’s Waiting, which is her most famous work as well. These two works are connected by the intense feelings they evoke in audiences about the specific kind of waiting expected in women’s lives.
Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1994), 20.
Carol Ann Duffy, “Penelope,” in The World’s Wife (London: Picador, 2000), 70.
3. The Man Who Welcomes: Lee Mingwei
I have explored this in the Introduction and in more detail in my previous book on hospitality, Hospitality of the Matrix.
For Kant, the French nation is hospitable because “the language of ladies has become the language shared by all high society. It cannot be disputed at all that an inclination of such a nature must also have influence on the ready willingness in rendering services, helpful benevolence, and the gradual development of human kindness according to principle.” Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 228.
“Artist Statement,” Lee Mingwei’s website, accessed November 22, 2019, http://www.leemingwei.com.
See Irina Aristarkhova, “Man as Hospitable Space: The Male Pregnancy Project,” Performance Research 14, no. 4 (2009): 25–30, doi:10.1080/13528160903552907.
Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Art of Participation—Seeing, Conversing, Gift-Giving, Writing, Dining, and Getting Connected to the World (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum and John Rule, 2018).
Artists who were part of the 1970s feminist art movement described in chapter 2 also engaged in the practices of cooking, serving, and hosting audience members as guests. See, for example, Broude and Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art. Since the 1970s, interaction with audiences and audience participation have become mainstream parts of the work of contemporary artists. One of the most widely known and frequently written-about examples relevant here is the work of the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. Tiravanija cooked pad thai in New York’s Paula Allen Gallery in 1990 and since then has re-created that work in various other forms. Nicolas Bourriaud has used Tiravanija’s work, as well as that of others, to develop his notion of “relational aesthetics.” See Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics. For surveys of art that deals with hosting and community participation, which art critics have framed as “the art of social practice,” see Smith, Feast; Thompson, Living as Form; Purves, What We Want Is Free; Tallant and Domela, The Unexpected Guest; Doherty, Contemporary Art.
Mary [pseudonym], interview by author, September 19, 2013. All quotations from Mary are from this interview or from our electronic correspondence, June 21–23, 2018.
See, for example, David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).
Tom Finkelpearl, “The Seer Project: Lee Mingwei, Artist,” in What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 302–12.
Aristarkhova, “Exotic Hospitality in the Land of Tolerance.”
See Finkelpearl, “The Seer Project”; Lee Mingwei and His Relations.
Eng, Racial Castration.
Lee Mingwei, interview by author, April 1, 2013.
For divergent viewpoints on this topic, see Kester, Conversation Pieces; Kester, The One and the Many; Kwon, One Place after Another; Dohmen, Encounters beyond the Gallery; Bishop, Artificial Hells; Tallant and Domela, The Unexpected Guest; Corris et al., Hospitality.
Furthermore, I would argue that Lee’s works challenge what galleries and museums have historically been and serve to push such art spaces to redefine themselves.
Kay Larson, “To Take Part in the Art, You Sleep with the Artist,” New York Times, November 5, 2000, 3; Margaret Hawkins, “Impermanence, Full of Life—and Death,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 18, 2007.
“Projects: The Sleeping Project,” Lee Mingwei’s website, accessed November 22, 2019, http://www.leemingwei.com.
Larson, “To Take Part in the Art.”
Lewis Hyde, “Isabella’s Will,” in Lee Mingwei: The Living Room (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2000), 15–21.
Lee Mingwei, quoted in Jennifer R. Gross, “Osmosis,” in Lee Mingwei: The Living Room, 9.
Aaron Betsky, “Le Corbusier and the Sexism of Architecture,” Architect Magazine, August 20, 2013, https://www.architectmagazine.com.
There is a widespread interest now in hybrid art spaces that (more often than not) re-create “domestic” spaces of homely welcome in a public art context. For example, the Raqs Media Collective created such a space in 2012 during the group’s art residency at the Gardner Museum, in a work titled The Great Bare Mat. See The Great Bare Mat, in Common Threads: Weaving Stories across Time, 2012, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, https://www.gardnermuseum.org. A less common practice is the reverse: making a domestic space public, welcoming the public at one’s home as a gallery or a small museum. Some examples of such gestures are Lee Mingwei’s The Dining Project at Yale and Mithu Sen’s It’s Good to Be Queen (2006), which I discuss in detail in chapter 5.
Lee’s practice over the years has been framed in various terms that seem to fit such more welcoming definitions of the male artist. Two larger frameworks get mentioned the most: Buddhism and other “Eastern” traditions, and relational aesthetics or social practice in contemporary art. What I want to develop and emphasize here, based on my conversations with Lee, his published interviews with others, and especially his oeuvre over the years, is his unique and sustained, highly original, and independent practice of hospitality as a welcoming man, which does not fit neatly into any of the existing categories of art movements. This is not the only aspect of his work, certainly, but it is the most relevant one for this chapter. For further reading on this topic, see Dohmen, Encounters beyond the Gallery.
In conversations, some women artists have expressed to me their anxieties around hospitality, which arise from their not wanting to be associated with stereotypically perceived women’s qualities. I discuss this kind of fear of being forced to be “welcoming women” in chapter 2, in relation to Faith Wilding’s work and the feminist art movement.
See, for example, Long T. Bui, “Breaking into the Closet: Negotiating the Queer Boundaries of Asian American Masculinity and Domesticity,” Culture, Society & Masculinities 6, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 129–49, doi:10.3149/CSM.0602.129.
Though it is not the focus of this book to compare the art of welcome with the hospitality industry, it would suffice to note here that as a business that is supposed to generate a profit, hospitality industry often exploits these and other cultural expectations. Feminist artists who have developed a unique form of “service art,” such as Maureen Connor, point out this cultural hypocrisy around the “labor of care.” For a philosophical approach to this topic, see Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
My argument that Lee’s work offers one model of a welcoming man complements and does not replace the feminist critique of associating women with “care” and “hospitality” or of not acknowledging their welcome as affective and physical effort. Thus, I share concerns expressed by Helena Reckitt that the praise of contemporary artworks involving relationality and hospitality as groundbreaking when they are made by men is often uninformed and may even work to silence those art historical precedents created by women and LGBTQ+ artists. Reckitt shows how many authors who write about relational aesthetics and social practice overlook feminist history and the complexity of gendered expectations as far as relationality is concerned. See Helena Reckitt, “Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics,” in Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, ed. Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 131. That is why earlier in this chapter I mentioned that Lee often credits Suzanne Lacy as one of his mentors and inspirations, along with women in his family—his sister, mother, and grandmother.
4. Hosting the Animal: Kathy High
When I had an opportunity to follow up with Lee Mingwei on my experience in The Living Room, I asked him about the bird’s welfare. The artist was prepared for my question. He explained that the museum followed the advice of an ornithologist on how to take the best possible care of the bird. The bird is moved out of the installation at regular intervals so that it “can rest.” Interacting with guests in The Living Room takes a toll on the bird just as it does on the volunteer hosts during their two-hour hosting periods (as discussed in chapter 3).
Jacques Derrida and others have presented many examples of animal use in human hospitality; see Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 255–87; Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock, Angelaki 5, no. 3 (2000): 3–18; Jacques Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 121–46; Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Rudinesco, “Violence against Animals,” in For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 62–76; Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).
For more on bioart, see the following texts: Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins, eds., The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac (Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 2003); Stuart Bunt and Oron Catts, “A Complicated Balancing Act? How Can We Assess the Use of Animals in Art and Science?,” in The Aesthetics of Care? The Artistic, Social and Scientific Implications of the Use of Biological/Medical Technologies for Artistic Purposes, ed. Oron Catts (Perth: SymbioticA, University of Western Australia, 2002), 12–18; Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, “The Ethics of Experiential Engagement with the Manipulation of Life,” in Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, ed. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 125–42; Robert Mitchell, Bioart and the Vitality of Media (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010); Cary Wolfe, “From Dead Meat to Glow-in-the-Dark Bunnies: Seeing ‘the Animal Question’ in Contemporary Art,” in Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature, ed. Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 129–52; Charissa N. Terranova and Meredith Tromble, eds., The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2016); Susan Squier, Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
Three relevant titles by Donna Haraway are Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997); The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2015); Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016). On Deleuze and Guattari’s theories, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978).
Kathy High, “Playing with Rats,” in da Costa and Philip, Tactical Biopolitics, 466.
“Projects: Embracing Animal,” Kathy High’s website, accessed November 1, 2010, http://kathyhigh.com; Anna Franca Milia, Lidia Ibba-Manneschi, Mirko Manetti, Gemma Benelli, Luca Messerini, and Marco Matucci-Cerinic, “HLA-B27 Transgenic Rat: An Animal Model Mimicking Gut and Joint Involvement in Human Spondyloarthritides,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1173 (September 2009): 570–74, doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04757.x; High, “Playing with Rats,” 465–78.
High, “Playing with Rats,” 489.
High, “Playing with Rats,” 489.
Kathy High, “Rat Love Manifesto,” Embracing Animal, accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.embracinganimal.com.
High, “Playing with Rats,” 489.
High, “Playing with Rats,” 466; see also High, “Projects: Embracing Animal,” Playing with Rats, video documentation, duration varied, 2004–5; High, “Rat Love Manifesto.”
Kathy High, online and telephone correspondence with author, March 2010.
Biology Online dictionary, s.v. “animal,” last modified January 31, 2019, https://www.biology-online.org.
Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 77.
David Clark, “On Being ‘the Last Kantian in Nazi Germany’: Dwelling with Animals after Levinas,” in Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (New York: Routledge, 1997), 178.
Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 73.
Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 21.
Oliver, Animal Lessons, 228.
Oliver, Animal Lessons, 306.
Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 7.
Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 77.
Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 4.
“Becoming Animal,” MASS MoCA, accessed November 26, 2019, https://massmocaorg.
Kathy High, “I Offer My Power in the Service of Love,” 3, accessed November 26, 2019, http://becoming-animal-becoming-human.animal-studies.org/img/EmbracingAnimal.pdf.
High, “I Offer My Power,” 3.
Jaina Sutras, trans. Hermann Jacobi (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968). Also see Ahimsā, Anekānta and Jainism, ed. Tara Sethia (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2004); Christopher Key Chapple, ed., Jainism and Ecology: Nonviolence in the Web of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press for the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2002).
Amy Youngs, a bioartist, has written about her unease with the use of rabbits in bioart, based on her own childhood experience; see Amy Youngs, “Creating, Culling, and Caring,” in Catts, The Aesthetics of Care?, 68–73. In this case, the artist describes why she chose “nondoing,” a concept similar to Jainism’s nonharm. Another bioartist, the curator and director of Cultivamos Cultura Foundation in Portugal, Marta de Menezes, is currently looking for a biomedical research laboratory to partner with on a project that would seek to cure the hairless rats that are born without immune systems and hence are used as models for testing immune system responses to various potential drugs and genetic modifications. If the project is successful in curing the rats, they could then be released into the wild. Once cured, they would also be unusable for biomedical experimentation. The new technology de Menezes is considering is called CRISPR gene editing. As it becomes cheaper, researchers may have other options in the near future besides using transgenic rats. This project is an example of “lessening of harm,” as a cure will stop these animals from being so attractive to experimenters. The project is also somewhat ambivalent, as the artist plans to “cure” animals from a natural mutation. Marta de Menezes, interview by author, July 8–9, 2016, São Luis, Portugal.
Biomedical scientist (who asked to remain anonymous), interview by author, July 8, 2016, São Luis, Portugal.
Jain principles have affinities with recent discussions in Europe about the dignity of plants. For example, Switzerland adopted the principle of plants’ dignity in its constitution. See Ariane Willemsen, ed., The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants: Moral Consideration of Plants for Their Own Sake (Geneva: Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology, 2008).
Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Of Mice and Men: A Fragment on Animal Rights” (2004), in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 325.
MacKinnon, “Of Mice and Men,” 326.
See Irina Aristarkhova, “Thou Shall Not Harm All Living Beings: Feminism, Jainism, and Animals,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 27, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 636–50.
5. Welcome Withdrawn: Mithu Sen
Mithu Sen, e-mail message to author, November 2, 2015.
Shireen Gandhy, “‘I Have Only One Language; It Is Not Mine,’ Film by Mithu Sen” (excerpts from the original video), October 6, 2016, YouTube, https://youtu.be/UAB7widHDq4.
Since then Bose Pacia has moved several times, and it now operates as a foundation; see its website at http://www.bosepacia.com.
Mithu Sen, It’s Good to Be Queen (New York: Bose Pacia, Artist Space, 2008), 22.
Sen, It’s Good to Be Queen, 81.
Sushmita Chatterjee, “What Does It Mean to Be a Postcolonial Feminist? The Artwork of Mithu Sen,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 31, no. 1 (2016): 37, doi:10.1111/hypa.12225.
Chatterjee, “What Does It Mean to Be a Postcolonial Feminist?,” 34, 35.
See Sen’s performance I Am a Poet, part of the exhibition Project Space: Word. Sound. Power, held at the Tate Modern, London, July 12 to November 3, 2013, https://www.tate.org.uk.
Sen to assembled guests at the opening night, 2006, in Sen, It’s Good to Be Queen, 24.
Nancy Adajania, in Half Full: Mithu Sen (exhibition catalog) (New York: Bose Pacia, 2009), 3.
Susan Krane, “Provocation and Insistence: A Conversation with Mithu Sen,” Sculpture Magazine 37, no. 4 (May 2018), https://www.sculpture.org.
Sue Bell Yank and Vasundhara Mathur, “UNHomed: The Radical Hospitality of Mithu Sen,” 2017, 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles, https://18thstreet.org.
Mithu Sen, in Krane, “Provocation and Insistence.”
Sen, in Krane, “Provocation and Insistence.”
6. A Leap of Faith: Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro
Laura King, “A Plea for Peace in White Goes Dark,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2008, http://articles.latimes.com; Elisabetta Povoledo, “Performance Artist Killed on Peace Trip Is Mourned,” New York Times, April 19, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com.
“Sposa in Viaggio—Bride on Tour,” Pippa Bacca website, November 2, 2012, https://www.pippabacca.it.
Povoledo, “Performance Artist Killed.”
Ahu Antmen, “Performing and Dying in the Name of World Peace: From Metaphor to Real Life in Feminist Performance,” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 2, no. 1 (2010): 59, http://rupkatha.com.
“Sposa in Viaggio—Bride on Tour.”
One of the most recent tributes is Nathalie Léger’s La Robe blanche (Paris: Les Éditions P.O.L., 2018). I thank Joël Curtz for bringing this book to my attention.
Joël Curtz, The Bride (La Mariée) (Amsterdam: Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, 2012), HD, 40 min.
This work, titled Intrusion, was made in February 2008. Curtz’s collaborator was artist Younes Baba-Ali. Joël Curtz and Younes Baba-Ali, Intrusion (filmed actions), 2008, video, http://www.joelcurtz.com.
Joël Curtz, interview by author, October 27, 2015.
“Hotel,” Byblos Art Hotel, Villa Amistà, accessed April 14, 2019, https://www.byblosarthotel.com/en.
I have explored the question of cosmopolitan hospitality in Brides on Tour in another publication. See Irina Aristarkhova, “Baiting Hospitality,” in Security and Hospitality, ed. Jeffrey Clapp and Emily Ridge (London: Routledge, 2016), 64–77.
Quoted in Povoledo, “Performance Artist Killed.”
For examples, see Aristarkhova, “Exotic Hospitality in the Land of Tolerance.”
For example, see Iris Veldwijk’s blog, Mind of a Hitchhiker, https://mindofahitchhiker.com.
“L’Autostop—The Hitchhiking,” Pippa Bacca website, November 13, 2012, https://www.pippabacca.it.
“L’Autostop—The Hitchhiking.”
Curtz, The Bride.
Curtz, The Bride.
Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” Constitution Center, March 18, 2008, https://constitutioncenter.org.
Two research studies have described the pattern: Yanbo Ge, Christopher R. Knittel, Don MacKenzie, and Stephen Zoepf, “Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies” (NBER Working Paper 22776, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., October 2016); Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky, “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 9, no. 2 (2017): 1–22.
In his study Men on Rape: What They Have to Say about Sexual Violence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), Timothy Beneke demonstrates that many men who have been convicted of rape downplay their own violence as ordinary, and many claim to be fearful for the safety of women around the “real monsters” in public spaces (compared to them, one assumes).
See Free-Range Kids, accessed December 11, 2019, http://www.freerangekids.com.
“Sposa in Viaggio—Bride on Tour.”
Joanna Connors, I Will Find You (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016), 38–39.
Connors, I Will Find You, 57.
I thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out a long history of feminist literary scholars, including Ruth Bottigheimer, who have engaged with the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale’s tropes. My interest here lies in how Connors refers to the fairy tale as one element in her socialization that resulted in her victim blaming herself. I find her point here relevant to my own analysis, which does not seek to offer a deeper critique of the fairy-tale canon.
Samantha Riggs and Carrie L. Cook, “The Shadow of Physical Harm? Examining the Unique and Gendered Relationship between Fear of Murder versus Fear of Sexual Assault on Fear of Violent Crime,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 30, no. 14 (2015): 2402. See also Elizabeth A. Stanko, Everyday Violence: How Women and Men Experience Sexual and Physical Danger (London: HarperCollins, 1990); Elizabeth A. Stanko, “The Case of Fearful Women: Gender, Personal Safety and Fear of Crime,” Women & Criminal Justice 4, no. 1 (1993): 117–35; Elizabeth A. Stanko, “Women, Crime, and Fear,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 539, no. 1 (1995): 46–58; Jennifer E. Cobbina, Jody Miller, and Rod K. Brunson, “Gender, Neighborhood Danger, and Risk-Avoidance Strategies among Urban African-American Youths,” Criminology 46, no. 3 (2008): 673–709.
See Bishop, Artificial Hells.
For an excellent analysis of Brides on Tour as situated in the history of radical performance art, see Antmen, “Performing and Dying.”
See, for example, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade, eds., Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (London: Penguin, 2011). This book is a result of the Gender and Space Project, which is based in Mumbai. For information, see “Gender and Space Project,” PUKAR, accessed December 2, 2019, http://pukar.org.in.
“My Letter to Pippa Trailer,” Asmin Film, 2010, Vimeo, https://vimeo.com; “Pippa’ya Mektubum,” Asmin Film Yapım, accessed April 16, 2019, http://www.asminfilm.com.
Deniz Altun, Pippa, production directed by Lerzan Pamir, Sisli Blackout Theatre, Istanbul, February 21, 2012.
I have written about this topic in relation to Brides on Tour in Aristarkhova, “Baiting Hospitality.” See also Still, Derrida and Hospitality; Pamela Tamarkin Reis, “The Levite’s Concubine: New Light on a Dark Story,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 20, no. 1 (2006): 125–46; Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). I thank Ruth Tsoffar for bringing Bal’s book to my attention.
Conclusion. Hospitality Now: Ken Aptekar
The poem is from Gabeba Baderoon’s poetry collection The Dream in the Next Body (Cape Town: Kwela Books/Snailpress, 2005), 23. See also Gabeba Baderoon, Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015), in which, through cultural texts and artifacts, Baderoon discusses the history of inhospitality to a minority Cape Malay Muslim community in South Africa.
Lysa TerKeurst, Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left Out, and Lonely (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2016), 7.
Ken Aptekar, e-mail message to author, January 14, 2016. Here is the Russian original version, which was also part of the exhibition:
1941. Продовольственные пайки для семьи Симсона Карлебаха урезаны. Евреям запрещена покупка мяса, молока, сигарет, и белого хлеба, а магазины открыты для них только между 4 и 5 часами дня.
С наступлением темноты соседи снабжают семью едой, тайком оставляя ее под садовыми воротами,—преступление, строго караемое нацистами.
Узнав, что за ними скоро придут нацисты, семья Карлебахов привязывает свое кухонное полотенце с монограммой к садовым воротам, в знак последнего выражения благодарности и прощания.
Почти пять десятилетий с тех пор, как большинство евреев Любека убиты нацистами в Бикерниекском лесу под Ригой, ганзейский город (Любек) радушно принимает Феликса, сына Симсона Карлебаха. Он спасся побегом в Англию в 1939 году.
Жители Любека почитают Феликса Карлебаха с семьей в городской думе, недалеко от синагоги, в которой Саломон Карлебах служил раввином с 1870 до 1919 годов.
К почетному гостю подходит женщина. “Наши родители были соседями. Я вам принесла вещь, которая принадлежит вашей семье,” говорит она, протягивая ему то самое полотенце с монограммой.
Ken Aptekar, “NACHBARN/Neighbors in a German Town,” Repainter Diary (blog), January 28, 2016, https://repainterdiary.com/2016/01/28.
Ken Aptekar, e-mail message to author, June 2, 2018.
The Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) project, created by German artist Gunter Demnig, remembers “the victims of National Socialism by installing commemorative brass plaques in the pavement in front of their last address of choice,” before they were sent to a concentration camp or another location by Nazi officers. Residents in separate cities in Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Norway, and Ukraine volunteer to raise funds and install plaques. A lot of research needs to be carried out to locate the victims’ former addresses. For more information, see “Home,” Stolpersteine, accessed April 5, 2019, http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en. On Lübeck’s participation in the project, see “Deutsch-jüdischer Geschichtspreis für Lübeckerin,” Initiative Stolpersteine für Lübeck, last modified January 26, 2010, https://www.stolpersteine-luebeck.de.
Aptekar, “NACHBARN/Neighbors in a German Town.”
Janet Wolff, “The Cross Purposes of Neighbours,” in Ken Aptekar: Nachbarn/Neighbours (Lübeck: Kunsthalle Sankt Annen, 2016), 52.
Aptekar, “NACHBARN/Neighbors in a German Town.”
“‘Our parents were neighbours. I brought something that belongs to you,’ she said, and handed the rabbi the kitchen towel. The scene is commemorated in the last painting.” Quoted from Stuart Jeffries, “What My Blond Jesus Could Teach Germany,” The Guardian, February 16, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com.
In reviews of the exhibition in The Guardian, The Hindu, and Kunstforum International, “gratitude” was mentioned as the key message the Carlebach family intended to send by leaving the towel. “News,” Ken Aptekar’s website, accessed April 5, 2019, https://kenaptekar.net.
Lev Rubinstein, Slovarny zapas (Moscow: Novoe Izdatelstvo, 2008), 48, my translations.
Dina Nayeri, “The Ungrateful Refugee: ‘We Have No Debt to Repay,’” The Guardian, April 4, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com.
A curator who invited Edi Hila to show his work at documenta 14, Pierre Bal-Blanc, evokes many historical events and tensions in an open letter to Hila: “A Letter of Invitation to documenta 14, part 2,” February 18, 2016, https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13559/edi-hila.