“Linear time is a Western invention, time is not linear, it is a marvelous tangle, where, at any moment, points can be selected and solutions invented, without beginning or end.”
— Lina Bo Bardi1
In the prologue to his 1944 text “Nueva Refutación del Tiempo” (“A New Refutation of Time”), the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges writes that time is “an indocile matter.” He not only refutes linear time but also argues that there is no such thing as time. “Time is a delusion,” he writes, “the impartiality and inseparability of one moment of time’s apparent yesterday and another of time’s apparent today are enough to make it disintegrate.”2 Borges questions the notion of historical time, or the chronological determination that is imposed on any particular event. “Let us imagine,” he continues, “that, by a not impossible chance, this dream repeats exactly the dream of the master. Having postulated such an identity, we may well ask: Are not those coinciding moments identical? Is not one single repeated term enough to disrupt and confound the history of the world, to reveal that there is no such history?” Just as Borges provokes, the artists in what flies but never lands? disrupt dominant forms of communication and knowledge in order to offer glimpses of a non-linear temporality.
Borges’ temporal reconfiguration comes together with the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s perspective on time as a “marvelous tangle”, which likewise resonates with the propositions in this exhibition. Together, the artists featured in the room swirl may be likened to one of excavation of fragmentary histories, or regarded as commitments to operating outside of codified canonical culture or master narratives. Jacobo Zambrano-Rangel’s photographic montage, Too Close in Time For the Comfort of Mythmaking, assembles images that the artist accumulated over the past several years in his pursuit of tracing how birds became synonymous with Venezuelan (and more broadly, Latin American) exoticism. The images, hung against an entire wall in the gallery, were collected from National Geographic magazines, photographs taken by the artist from the Field Museum in Chicago and the Museum of Natural History in New York, as well as scans of books from the Field Museum’s bird collection’s library, with particular attention to books that catalogue European and American bird collectors.
One such central figure in Zambrano-Rangel’s research is William Henry Phelps (1875–1965), an American ornithologist and businessman who owned the largest private bird collection in the world. After completing his studies at Harvard University, Phelps settled in Venezuela in 1897; during his stay, he established a media and commerce empire that includes coffee plantations and companies ranging from television and radio networks (Radio Caracas and RCTV) to those that imported automobiles, typewriters, refrigerators, and even introduced baseball. By the late 1920s, Venezuela had become the world’s leading oil exporter, attracting foreign investors that acquired vast territories in the country. The role of ornithology for Phelps “was just a pretext,” as Zambrano-Rangel explains, “in order to insert himself in the country’s economic and cultural development.”
The way that Zambrano-Rangel arranges the images—both displayed and displaced—recollects the German art historian Aby Warburg’s 1920s Mnemosyne Atlas, in which Warburg arranged with an intuitive logic nearly a thousand images from books, magazines, newspapers, and other daily sources to map the “afterlife of antiquity.” A hundred years after Warburg, Zambrano-Rangel’s installation conveys the “afterlife of colonialism.” We see images of taxidermied birds and headdresses from Latin America suspended in museological cases, pointing to the colonial and capitalist influence that nationalist actors like Phelps had on Venezuela. Zambrano-Rangel clarifies that the birds, as colorfully recognizable objects of South America, are “a sort of currency that justify the exploitation and accumulation of capital that characterizes Venezuela not only as a nation in a post-colonial context, but also in the present, as the protagonist of its tragic development.” Like Warburg, Zambrano-Rangel combines his images in a maximalist manner to reanimate and denaturalize them, allowing the viewer to see them anew and to viscerally sense their polarities.
Displayed on the opposite side of the gallery, Ana García Jácome’s installation We Protest Against Polio is a “speculative exhibition”; that is, one that does not present direct historical veracity, but could still exist according to archival narrative. Drawing on real sources from Mexico’s Historical Archive of the Secretariat of Health, Jácome creates a parafictional installation about the infectious disease polio. In 1959, the oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) was introduced as an anti-epidemic measure in Mexico, seven years after its development by Jonas Salk. Jácome’s installation combines real and fictional materials of this vaccination campaign as if the exhibition was constructed by the Secretariat of Health with a bureaucratic, propagandistic tone. The included materials––newspaper clippings, photographs, objects, medicine vials, and a demonstration banner that reads “Protestamos Contra La Polio” (We Protest Against Polio)––center on Dr. Reinaldo Martínez, a historical figure who deceived the public into believing he was a doctor under the guise of advancing his hoax vaccine cure. Jácome explains that what she found fascinating about Dr. Martínez was that “this ‘magical cure’ he presented reflected the desire for a ‘less disabled’ future, pushed by mainstream institutions and media that portrayed disability as a tragedy.”
Jácome’s installation also includes an “exhibition catalogue” in the voices of both The Secretariat of Health and the artist. First we read a text in the voice of the State, authored as a fictional Secretariat of Health, and at the end of the catalogue, Jácome intervenes with her own voice:
*We Protest Against Polio* is a speculative exhibition that, by unearthing Martínez’ proposal from the Historical Archive of the Secretariat of Health in Mexico City, turns the spotlight away from polio as the villain to ask questions about how villains are formed and how abnormality is defined and represented. It inquires about where the desire for a cure comes from and what lays behind it. The investment in a cure is rooted in an investment in a future and that it will be as familiar as the past. A cure that guarantees the restoration of the body and any physical damage done by a disease to an earlier, healthy, undisturbed stage pushes disability out of the picture.”
With this parafictional exhibition, Jácome both questions the authority of the archive and develops an alternate history from the archived narrative that centers on disability. Her project asks, what does it mean to protest against a disease?
Who is the narrator? Who is writing history? Who is historicizing? These questions are central in both of Zambrano-Rangel and Jácome’s works. Their installations ask us to consider the impossibility of the neutrality of archives, as they are often crafted by non-neutral people and situations. Museums and exhibitions are often guilty of presenting archival materials as the sole truth, and in doing so validate master narratives. As artistic authors of historical condition, Zambrano-Rangel and Jácome problematize the methods of historicizing; in doing so, their works support Borges’ proposition that time is in fact an indocile matter that remains in suspense.