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Lessons of Belonging: Art, Place, and the Sea. John Baldacchino. Leiden: Brill, 2023, 159 p.

Catherine Bernard
Bibliographical reference

Lessons of Belonging: Art, Place, and the Sea. John Baldacchino. Leiden: Brill, ISBN 978-90-04-67891-0 (paperback), 159 p.

Editor's notes

Index nominum
Kwame Anthony Appiah, James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, Constantin Cavafy, Gilles Deleuze, Maxine Greene, Charles and Sherrie Garoian, Evald Ilyenkov, Milan Kundera, Naguib Mafhouz, Leena Nammari, E.W. Said, Arnold Schoenberg, Kwasi Wiredu

Full text

1Lessons of Belonging. Art, Place, and the Sea offers a productively disconcerting take on many of the topical, ongoing debates that have structured our reflection on the ethics and politics of art in our troubled times. Following in the wake of his previous essays, among which, Arts’ Way Out: Exit Pedagogy and the Cultural Condition (Sense Publishers, 2012), and Art as Unlearning: Towards a Mannerist Pedagogy (Routledge, 2019), John Baldacchino’s latest essay will be welcome reading for anyone intent on finding alternative ways of accounting for the emancipatory power and ethical criticity of art and literature, specifically of the modernist and contemporary periods. Harnessing a composite array of critical and philosophical references, and roaming freely across a wide spectrum of literary and visual works, Lessons of Belonging takes immense pleasure in displacing our theoretical frames and in testing unexpected forms of artistic dialogues, across media and periods. In that sense it is exemplary of a form of theoretical experimentation that resists all critical assignations or systemic forms of thinking.

2The choice of artists and thinkers explored along the eight chapters of the essay is immediately indicative of the great sense of liberty Baldacchino claims for any reading of the subversive leverage offered by art in its relation to critical thought. Eschewing any form of systemic coherence, he writes with a view to unhinging critical systems to promote instead what, after philosopher of education Maxine Greene, he eventually defines as “a wide-awakeness” (149) to art’s capacity to object and resist essentialist reductions. Baldacchino defines himself as specialising in art philosophy and education, and as might be expected, one of his central references is to Greene, whose key essay Landcapes of Learning (1978) features prominently in the last chapter of the book, and acts as the covert vanishing point to its entire critical structure. His essay, Education beyond Education: Self and the Imaginary in Maxine Greene (Peter Lang, 2008) had already paved the way for many of the notions here developed, among which that of “unlearning” re-elaborated in conjunction with the notion of dissonance and, crucially, with that of “exiting.” According to Baldacchino, art, and some of the theories developed to understand its paradoxical hermeneutic take on experience and identity open sites of belonging that are also sites of exiting, of unbelonging, that question our very relation to identity and historicity.

3What strikes the reader here is the relentless drive to think against the grain of established theories – some already highly critical of all essentialisms –, and against the grain of concepts themselves. The key premise of the essay, soberly summed up in the opening page, is that “writing about art and belonging requires us to be nowhere” (1). Rather than belonging, the eight chapters probe different modalities of un-belonging and emancipatory, if dissonant and conflicted, forms of relationality to the world and oneself. Combining artists and thinkers who, for many of them, deserve to be granted greater critical visibility, Baldacchino opens new, often surprising or even disconcerting vistas onto art’s indirect and complex efficacy; and rather than straightforwardly organising the chapters around themes or categories, he allows his exploration to be guided by a combined politics and aesthetics of site, a sense of place that paradoxically eschews essentialism and subjecthood.

4Tellingly, the opening chapter, that functions as a form of general introduction is entitled “Nowhere: Recurrent Exits”; it undoes the concepts instrumental to the fashioning of both belonging and utopia to read art as “a human act that comes into effect by transcending the boundary of a polis” (9). Consequently, there can be no nostalgia for a lost sense of place and belonging. Instead, art is characterized by a “permanent sense of becoming,” a notion borrowed from Deleuze to grasp its “becoming active” (16). Crucially the chapter establishes “exiting” as a key notion (2), pointing to art’s capacity to eschew completion and to embrace an iterative oscillation between “place and non-place” (2).

5The following chapters all explore various forms of such “exiting,” as rearticulated in the works of artists and thinkers who have all imagined modalities of unlearning, ways of renouncing completion and self-consistency, while paradoxically claiming a complex relation to hybrid or composite spaces: “Scotland, Malta, Palestine” in chapter 2, “Ghana, Crete, Andalusia” in chapter 4, or “Paris, Prague” in chapter 6. Chapters 2 and 3 successively hinge on the works of Leena Nammari – an artist born in the UK from Palestinian parents, and now based in Edinburgh – and of Charles Garoian, who is based in California and carries the memory of the Armenian genocide and exile. The artists’ identity is not here merely analysed as hyphenated, but as the very site of an ongoing negotiation with a collective memorial self, a sense of loss that cannot produce any dialectical subsumption. Central to chapter 3 is first Garoian’s notion of art as prosthesis, rather than synthesis, borrowed from Garoian’s own 2013 essay, The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art. The notion is also read side by side with a 1977 little-known essay by Soviet philosopher and psychologist Evald Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic, in which Ilyenkov covertly undoes the dominant ideology of dialectical thought to “activate ‘thinking’” (63) through “contradiction” (63).

6The following chapters further confront concepts that have conditioned our understanding of identity, both in its individual and collective instantiations. Chapter 4 dwells on the contested concepts of universalism and “cultural aesthetic” and, harnessing texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu, Federico García Lorca and Nikos Kazantsakis, proposes instead “a three-way process of recognition, specificity, and distinction” (71) that may allow us to “revisit culture (in its diverse self, and as a condition of plurality in others) as a trans-subjective mode of being” (83).

7Returning to genocide in chapter 5, and art’s aesthetics of unlearning in chapter 6, the essay eventually turns to what may rightly be read as the very heart of the text, that is a poetics of the sea and what Baldacchino defines as a “thalassic imaginary” (130). Chapters 7 and 8, in which the works of Constantin Cavafy or Naguib Mahfouz feature prominently, rework the concept of nostalgia to undo the romantic idea of the Mediterranean “as a form of cultural teleology” (137). Rather, the Mediterranean is elaborated as a “thalassic genre,” pointing to hypothesis, instead of resolution, and positing “a hope in diversity,” against “the myth of univocality” (140). These last two chapters adumbrate a discreet poetics of utopia resting on an ethics of plurality fully awake to “the relational quality of our contingent experiences” (148).

8All along, Baldacchino’s analyses are placed side by side with some of his own visual works: drawings, sketches or mixed media works. As expected from such a theoretically experimental essay, the relation between these and the textual and critical analyses are never clearly established and the reader is left to fathom the drift of the conversation between image and text. Such a choice might be considered disconcerting, but it is in line with the rejection of all systems and the poetics and politics of unlearning the author daringly defends. For any reader keen to understand what the horizon of aesthetics might be, such un-systematicity is more than welcome and intellectually refreshing. Cogently argued, and bracingly unconventional in its set of references, Lessons of Belonging offers a challenging take on many of the debates currently raging in the field of contemporary aesthetics and art; it grants renewed visibility to thinkers and artists who deserve to be more widely read and explored, in our collective attempt to lay the ground for a plural sense of (un)belonging that may eventually allow us “to live deliberately” (150).

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References

Electronic reference

Catherine Bernard, Lessons of Belonging: Art, Place, and the Sea. John Baldacchino. Leiden: Brill, 2023, 159 p.Caliban [Online], 71-72 | 2024, Online since 20 August 2024, connection on 12 November 2024. URL: http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/caliban/13206; DOI: https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/12dmv

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About the author

Catherine Bernard

Université Paris Cité – UMR CNRS 8225 LARCA

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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