THE SIGNAGE OF OTHERNESS

The Tiki Bar is Closed

The title at the top of this text evokes a strange sensation. We are well aware that Polynesian-style hangouts have always been make-believe places: the wood on the walls is synthetic, the glasses shaped like Tiki heads are mass-produced, the flowered shirts that the waiters wear were manufactured in Hong Kong and are sold at Walmart and, in sum, the fruit juice cocktail is merely a shot of juice from concentrate with cheap alcohol. And when we visit a place like this, we do not expect to find Otherness, but rather, we demand to see a version of Ourselves in an exotic costume. As colonists of the remotest signs, we do not need to believe in the veracity of the space, we just need to imagine that some other patron of the bar does. That makes him the native, then, the gentle savage in the mock jungle. But then, how do we explain that slight sinking feeling that overcomes us if we find the bar closed when we get there? If our visit was just a ceremony, where does that feeling of loss come from? Is it possible to miss something that we never believed in to start with?   

 

This sign means you are far away

The New Urban Slide/The Tiki Bar is Closed is the dual title of the last song on the album by Mike Cooper, Rayon Hula (2005). The English guitarist, master of improvisation, experimenter with the blues and major collector of flowered shirts, has in common with Ángel Mateo Charris the work with Tiki imagery, understood as a giant sounding board for a culture that arose in the fifties and has been handed down to us in the form of echoes and memories of a time of wellbeing that will never return. In Cooper's instrumental music, the rusty chords of a plucked lap steel guitar mingle with sounds from a gamelan, a ukulele and field recordings of birds and waves which, in turn, are reminiscent of the founding samples by Martin Denny, to offer a slow-paced natural ambient music. He makes frequent references to the old films in which the pastoral ideal of Polynesia was created. On certain occasions, he has given live performances of some of the classics from the genre's soundtrack, such as Tabu, filmed by Friedrich Murnau in Tahiti in 1931. But more often, his albums, such as Fratello Mare, released while Charris was finishing this book, use film as a second-degree reference to evoke a far-away world. 

In a recent interview conducted by Juan Monge for Rockdelux Cooper revealed some keys to the contemporary approach to exotica. For Cooper, this music style - or rather, cocktail of styles - is defined by its capacity to create the acoustic impression of “remoteness”. This is an operation that makes use of distances, in which echo, resonance and unhurriedness in performing the riff give the impression of layers of time. His use of the lap steel guitar is based on a naturalistic analogy: “the perfect loop is like the perfect wave”. In this regard, we could say that his work can be classified within a current that uses lo-fi techniques to create an electronic pastoral, which could be traced back to Cluster's Sowiesoso. “Slow and gentle” is his translation for another Polynesian word: nahaneae, a term typically used to refer to the tone that characterizes the “local” meaning of rhythm and existence. 

This would be the kind of music alluded to in Los Mares del Tiki ('The Seas of Tiki'), in those paintings that make reference to sound as an element of the pathetic fallacy. One such painting, Merry Christmas, depicts a scene that could just as well be titled El blues tiki de la temporada baja y de las Navidades solitarias ante una piscina vacía y bajo una luz hopperiana. ('Low Season and Lonely Christmas Tiki Blues before an Empty Pool under Hopperesque Light') The sense of melancholy here is created by adding a series of symbols managed through differing degrees of proximity and distance. This dynamic includes multicultural correlations (the blues and exotica are blended in a continuum that would be part of a universal folk movement), colonial layering (the sadness of the blues has been “imposed” on the joy of popular Polynesian music) and spatial analogies (the home remembered and the silent bungalow). In turn, the mysterious portrait of Lotus Eater, the “naive artist” that Charris has invented, his heteronym, playing the ukulele at sundown, becomes an icon for original folk music, which contemporary music critics have defined as the way of returning to analogical naturalism in an era dominated by digital and manufactured pieces. These pitiful melodies, in sum, strike a nerve of nostalgia for a past that, as Fredric Jameson noted, never existed. And in doing so, they endow the subject with an intimate feature, a feeling taken from the Philosophy of History: the loss of material possession of territories and, with them, the transnational meanings assigned to them. 

 

Good Taste

Melancholy brings back to life what was dead. This is one of the possible interpretations of the inscription written on Robert Burton's grave: Melancholy Gives Life and Death. The melancholy spirit does not aim to restore, through a flash of anamnesis, what one no longer has, but rather plants in the imagination something that was never there. We live surrounded by ghosts, and the force of melancholy turns these ghosts into specters that will never disappear because they never existed to start with. 

 

Burton made great efforts to endeavor to distinguish between melancholy and the ridiculous. And while it can be said that, on a conceptual level, he accomplished this, the frequency with which this second term appears in his classic treatise and the numerous examples thereof make the latter the bastard brother of the former. All of this takes place in a text that, because of its abundance of quotes, appropriations and references, any reader today could only refer to as a "palimpsest". Thus, from the outset, the sentiment we are dealing with here is depicted as an impression (in authoritative texts) and as an escape (fleeing from the ridiculous is so important that sometimes the melancholic act can only be defined in negative terms, as "the affectation that manages to avoid ridiculum”).  

Hence, in order to be completely modern, melancholic humor must have two characteristics: erudition and embarrassment. It must be familiar with the history of ghostly apparitions, discern their texture, their movements and means of emerging. And, in order to understand them, it must become a historian of bad manners since many of the images that feed the insatiable thirst for specters turn out to be guilty pleasures, outpourings of bad taste. We can see this in one of the paintings that precedes and prefaces this series, Pacific Nostalgia (Et in arcadia ego). The postcard imagery and the mishmash of tourist icons comes into conflict here with an authentic sense of loss, embodied by a couple: the Japanese woman and the Englishman who observe, from one island to another and before an intermittent volcano, their lost possessions. Before this backdrop of 'have and not to have', the memento mori appears in the midst of a Polynesian Dollar Shop, and in today's iconography it is an element that no longer represents death: the Tiki skull, popularized in horror films and used as a stage prop by surf rock bands like the Tiki Phantoms.

For over a century now, modern painting has been involved in a long affair with embarrassing melancholy. It began when De Chirico decided to leave his metaphysical landscapes behind and, to the desperation of his colleagues in the Surrealist Movement, who spurned him, devote himself to pseudo-classical style portraits that, in many cases, looked like incompetent imitations of the works that had made him famous. The bad De Chirico found in another wayward Avant-garde artist, Francis Picabia, a traveling companion. In his later works, the pompier composition of the figures mingles with motel painting motifs, creating a shameful sublime effect. These proposals, which, at the time, were received as an Americanoid trivialization of the Avant-garde legacy, were later legitimized in the eighties when they were recovered by the bad painting current and, in particular, by David Salle, who has defined a problematic collage model – which, in his flows done in 2006, includes a primitive mask - that has influenced contemporary Spanish art, reaching post-pictorial proposals such as those by the duo, Aggtelek, whose installation Tiki Room (2012) is related to Los mares del Tiki. In Tiki Room, the technique used to make bad painting has become considerably more sophisticated: collages were created that were sent to China, where they were reproduced in oil paint. Thus, it is not the artist that travels, but rather the "work", which undergoes a globalized mechanical procedure for the production of symbols. These false paintings are displayed in a room that is decorated with ethnic motifs. Tikiland is a lounge.

As we can see in the piece, Good Taste (2012), in this mixture of codes of judgement, the once comfortable notion of “good taste” emerges as an undefinable, central enigma: it is an architectural structure located on a hillside, half sacred dolmen, half abstract sculpture.  

 

Ceci n’est pas un fake

Ever since he first depicted the young artist's condition symbolized by the image of a signpost with numerous signs, each of which contains the name of a master - and each pointing in a different direction - signs have always played an important role in Charris' work. Cards, symbols, signs and icons, catchphrases whose typography challenges or contradicts the content. In the nineties, when the heading "metaphysical" was suggested for his painting and that of other colleagues from the same generation, he felt it preferable to substitute this title for another, more precise, one:  “supercalifragimetaphysical”. Indeed, one of the features that distinguishes his work from essentialist inflections on the mystery of the landscape is his use of the ekphrasis: the insertion of slogans, signs, and keywords that desublimate the space but also complicate it. As if De Chirico, instead of placing his visionary urban designs in neoclassical squares that are the stuff of mid-afternoon dreams, had depicted them amongst the mishmash of signs in the city of Alicante, where each shop has a handmade sign, and all sorts of fonts vie with each other along every street. 

 

Two complementary cases can be seen in this series. One is a mute traffic signal, which gives no information at all and which, hanging along with a bunch of other silent signs, encourages passersby, like that meticulously drawn map by Lewis Carroll in The Hunting of the Snark (“a perfect and absolute blank!”), to set off for nowhere in several different directions. At the opposite extreme, we have a hypertrophic sign, lettering painted at a tangent on glass, seen from inside the establishment where it has been hung, mimicking the paintings of myriads of hyperrealistic reflections by Richard Estes. The two sets of signs can be interpreted as two dimensions of the production of symbols within a colonial iconic regime. On the one hand, the territory to be colonized, the terra incognita, becomes a tabula rasa: a blank canvas on which to create a supposed, imagined native land open to suggestions. On the other, the dialogy of symbols found when "indigenous symbols" appear before the colonist's eyes simultaneously, in combination with the archived symbols he carries in his baggage.

“Paul Gauguin had left Europe behind, not with the intention of finding a new art, but rather to free himself from the constrictions of the old one, to enter a vacuum that only he could fill”. These words by David Sweetman, which are part of his biography on the Parisian painter, properly summarize the most commonly held viewpoint on the mechanism of orientalist passion for the South Pacific that began to attract French art at the turn of the century. More specific and interesting is his hypothesis on the original moment at which this asymmetrical "meeting between cultures" took place. Sweetman even goes so far as to give a date: August 26, 1895. That day, Gauguin, en route on his second and final voyage to Tahiti, stopped in the New Zealand city of Auckland. He intended to visit the Auckland Museum to see in first person the pieces of Polynesian craftwork that he had imagined and written about so often in his correspondence but had yet had a chance to see. When he was just a few blocks away from the gallery a sign drew his attention. It said “Craig’s Museum” and was written on a wooden board, the same material used for the two-story building behind it. Craig's Museum was, in fact, a souvenir shop devoted to the sale of "traditional" memorabilia, often made with the growing market of European collectors in mind. Inside, newly made pieces were interspersed, in space and price, along with authentic pieces. 

Gauguin was able to contemplate - though not distinguish - the different types of works and, after a while, he left the shop convinced that he had seen things that he could never have seen in the Auckland Museum. He was not entirely wrong. When he reached the art gallery, he headed straight to the main hall, where the ethnographic collection should have been. Indeed, he found it, but displayed in a very strange way. Due to a restructuring of the museum's collections that he had not been informed about, a large part of the collection had been temporarily moved and, going against every principle of positivist historiography, the space was also occupied by the collection of European art, which was in turn disorganized, so that one could see at a single glance plaster copies of Greek statues mingled with an enormous canoe.

 The enthusiastic notes hastily taken by Gauguin in these two places were included in a notebook that experts have acknowledged as an important source of inspiration for the latter part of his career. This carnet d’Auckland, which contains his observations about the fake museum that housed, hidden amongst the counterfeits, authentic pieces, and his notes on the real museum that told an incoherent historical discourse, with its authentic Polynesian works and copies of European pieces, represents the Avant la lettre postmodern text on Tikiland and anticipates, with unsought humor, one of the favored rituals of current museum practices: self-criticism of the museum, that modern dance in which a contemporary artist intervenes in an ethnographic center.

This logic consisting of records and lapses, colonial "anarchival" science, galvanizes, in Charris' work, a recurring theme: the Archive of the Day shown as if it were a street market. This is the theme on which his different paintings about biennials and biennialisms are based, like That’s Entertainment!, in addition to the marketization that mines all things local, in his series on Mali. Cabinets of curiosities and bazaars are the real way of displaying “local treasures”, and dealers play the role of crier or smooth-talker. We find this to be the case again, with harsh irony, in what might be considered the main piece of Los Mares del Tiki. The work is titled Los saqueadores ('The Looters'), and in it, the plundered goods are depicted, in different registers and degrees of ambiguity, in the best place they could possibly be: outdoors, in a wooded setting, which itself becomes a musée imaginaire and permanent exhibition space.  

PAUL GAUGUIN 1903

The painting on the Master's grave, in turn, shows us how this logic has been extended to another cult space. We know that the mortal remains of Gauguin were laid to rest somewhere in the Atuona Christian cemetery. As the exact location is unknown, the local authorities found a spot that was large and pleasant enough to create a burial place where mourning, memorials and tours could take place. Made of stone, with the deceased's name written in yellow letters, it was erected in 1921. Since then, other allusive works have been added over time, the most famous of which is his sculpture, Oviri (1894). The statuette represents the Tahitian goddess of mourning, who was no longer worshipped by the time Gauguin came to Tahiti, and whose name means "savage". Hence, the image is linked to Gauguin's programmatic - “je suis un sauvage”- and only anachronically to one of the local traditions. Or rather, it represents one of the relationships that the self-exiled painter aimed to have with his host country, and not always based on integration, as seen in this fragment of a letter addressed to one of his collaborators: “I painted the garments greenish yellow because the fabric of these savages is different from ours” [italics are mine]  This posthumous destiny takes on greater irony when we consider the ideas that Gauguin had expressed about monumental form. “Major monuments”, he wrote, “are always built under the regime of the powerful. I believe that great things cannot be done under such power”. This phrase, preceded by an execration of the nobility and followed by a tribute to the essential qualities of clay, is found in a passage of his Cahier pour Aline, a notebook written in 1892, which is spattered with the verbiage of contempt for the French court and praise for Polynesian villages. The (supposed) recipient of the text, his daughter Aline, never actually read it, and it was published posthumously. I do not think this is to be regretted, since it is obvious that, besides the love he professed for his favorite daughter, the text does not really need this reader in particular: what it needs is for the mental image of the savage to act as an intermediary between the writer and his European readers - and for this to happen, the important thing is that the person acting as the actual model for this image does not read it.   

 

 

 

This is where Charris makes his pilgrimage to arrange his postcards of beautiful natives from the fifties. The colonial viewpoint imposes its visual categories on spaces in which those ways of seeing are inappropriate. One of the most important examples is the category of the erotic image. Remote lands are visually conquered when they are assigned certain sensual features - while at the same time denying them the intellectual capacities that are assumed to be incompatible with such features. Thus, it is possible to distinguish between hardcore and softcore primitivism. Congo is hardcore: swelling, wild libido and an excess of pleasure linked to unspeakable ritual practices. Charris broached the Congo theme in his series of illustrations based on Heart of Darkness, in which he placed the emphasis on visual props - a telescope, binoculars and glasses - depicted as if they were a rifle scope. On the other hand, in the colonial viewing process, Polynesia has been classified as softcore and vintage erotica: it is an elegant pose by Sandy Warner in a made-up paradise with ethereal, pastoral sensuality and moderate humidity, related to pleasantly landscaped nature. In an era like ours, in which hardcore porn is omnipresent while Playboy ceases to publish nudes, erotica has made a comeback and has been reassessed as the most civilized form of libidinal figurative art. In this context, Polynesia arises as the last natural reserve of softcore, a sort of expanded magazine. 

The stretch of seawater under this sign is taboo

A group of women covered from head to foot in typical Islamic State style is taking a walk along the beach. A holiday home is enclosed by a sign that, instead of announcing “A Celta soccer fan lives here” or “Due not park, will call TOE TRUCK”, merely says “Taboo”. In the film by Murnau mentioned above, to which the final diptych of Los mares del Tiki is dedicated, this kind of outrageous signage also appears in one memorable scene: a steady shot of the sea in which, in the middle of the immensity, there is a sign placed on a buoy, warning about the presence of sharks in the depths. 

 

 

Picturesque extremes and decorative restrictions are scattered throughout the Polynesian hortus conclusus, engendering a unique way of combining prohibition and permissiveness. We can account for this scene through a process of translation, recoding and borrowing in which, starting in the early 20th century, the geographic area referred to here was conquered, in successive waves, by several fields of knowledge. In light of the indifference of nature, under the acquiescent gaze of the Easter Island idols, a struggle for cognitive possession over the territory took place. Anthropology conjured up an ancestral Polynesia with a nice beat, a modern cradle of universal reasoning. Anthropological knowledge was used in the context of psychoanalysis to create a neurotic profile in which the "savage's" range of attitudes and conducts become a sort of ethology. An obsessive neurotic is ashamed of his fears, whereas a native may not be ashamed, so this lack of fear is distributed between a conscious prohibition and an unconscious tendency. In turn, the idea of the tribe as a primordial condition of civilization gave rise to sociology's proposal of an analysis of ties, associations and communities in tribal terms. 

”A Polynesian word that is difficult for us to translate because we no longer have the corresponding concept.” This is the first reference with which Sigmund Freud began to test out his influential definition of the term “taboo”, in 1912. In order to make up for this original shortcoming in the translation, Freud suggested a relative synonym: “sacred fear”, which the savage feels in the presence of that which is prohibited. The near translation adds a new meaning, which the text does not always explain; it is the fear itself that becomes untouchable, undisputable; it becomes necessary to believe in the relevance of this emotion in one's mental life. Indeed, there must always be a bridge language for the Spanish-Tahitian dictionary: Freudian. In this dictionary, the definitions themselves are always less decisive than the sample sentences, which take on the character of atavistic tales - black tales for white men, as another painting by Charris tells us - in which each term acquires a primordial drama and sound.

In vain, Freud endeavors to warn us in his earthly accounts that “he who sees ironic intentions in these macabre customs, which are so horrid to us, would be mistaken”. The irony that is inseparable from his own description was grasped, and questioned, by Bronislaw Malinowski, who, in a new inflection on the issue of primitives, suggested a different definition of the word taboo. Malinowski interpreted the feeling of fear from a perspective that is more sociological than psychoanalytical. He notes that the system of prohibitions does not comprise a “set” registered within a supposed “collective unconscious”, but rather a preventive, rational logic suited to a specific situation, which creates a system of interrelated feelings. Because “human emotions”, he notes, “do not float in empty space” –in the tribal social vacuum-, “but rather, they are grouped around a series of elements, forming well defined systems”. 

This idea explains the esthetic effect elicited by the ironic floating prohibitory signs that Murnau filmed and Charris has painted. In both cases, these signs represent vain efforts to stem the tide and, rather than warning of an actual danger, they signify the arbitrariness in the selection of the prohibited object, which is interchangeable. If, as Malinowski noted, “the conception of an isolated repressed attitude is useless in sociology”, this uselessness is represented by signs that also illustrate how, in the cultural construction of Tikiland, the prestige of the prohibition, its severe reverential effect, comes into stark contradiction with its other libidinal myth: that of an innocent, blameless Edenic sexuality - or one subject to the most nondescript concerns, as in When Will You Marry? painted by Gauguin in 1892. This is the product of a neurotic Western world that, tired of its own ghosts and its own surrender to psychoanalytical doctrine, has transferred them to a space in which the complexities of mental economics would be solved through an act of magic: in Tikiland, we have sexuality without society, unfounded restrictions and unenforceable orders. 

 

Warning! If your partner says the words ‘Bora Bora’ it can only mean that your relationship is going down the drain

At several times in this series, the spatial and iconographic devices used for observing the landscape are affected and disjointed, chilling the warmth of the land with a technical gaze. The most obvious case is El polinesio ('The Polynesian'), in which the theme of the traveler peering into the landscape has been reworked, turning the rückenfigur into a “modern native”, adorned with “urban tribe” tattoos. Hence, the subject of observation, understood as an experience of dispossession, is transferred onto the occurrence of stolen symbols. The tourist-native belongs to the landscape and yet does not, he has it but does not own it. This deconstruction of the visual space, in turn, is seen in the paintings devoted to Bora Bora, the most significant of which is a sad seashore painting in which the play of beachfront perspectives creates a space that looks desolate and disappointing, with its folding chair and dead tree. 

But then, is it not true that the words “Bora Bora” have become the verbal taboo of contemporary cinema? When a character in a noir film utters them, they are a two-fold death sentence: they mean he wants to skip town, will do anything to get out and will die in the attempt, though not without first, either accidentally or voluntarily, doing someone else in, but always as a kind of necessary and useless sacrifice in the name of Bora Bora. If the film is a romantic drama, the words assure us that the relationship is over and that the only way to keep it going is to come up with some external setting, a locus amoenus that the couple will never reach either. 

Perhaps the work that best represents Bora Bora's condition as a verbal stage is the film by Francis Ford Coppola One from the Heart. As in every romantic comedy, the accursed phrase is uttered by a woman who, at that time, was working at a travel agency. However, in this case, the dynamics between the material place and the remote setting have changed. Because the city where the lovers live is Las Vegas, the imaginary city par excellence. We catch glimpses of this feigned city in neon reflections in shop windows under construction, in characters that pretend to have jobs they don't really have, in musical scenes that, quoting Busby Berkeley romanticism, rehearse the soundtrack of an emotion that the dancers can no longer feel. This is a Las Vegas of the Mind, a blinking neon light from which one cannot escape because it only exists within the geography of the unconscious. Therefore, when the yearning protagonist says “Bora Bora”, the place acquires an authenticity that it had never had in prior film portrayals. Las Vegas, the image of the copied metropolis that defines 21st century urban design, is a ghost: there it is, in a corner of the Nevada desert, but it does not exist. On the other hand, the Bora Bora invoked in that neon oasis, is a specter: it exists, even though it is not present. 

 

All the way down on the left is the largest curve on the island

At his latest concert in Barcelona, in the comfortable intimacy of Heliogàbal Bar, in what was once village of Gràcia, an audience of some thirty or so of us crowded together to see Cooper, decked out in flowers in his corner, beating out melodies on his lap steel guitar and accompanying them, every now and then, with a murmured refrain like an ancient shaman. Something of the remote vastness of the Polynesian landscapes materialized within the narrow stone walls of the bar. Nearby, some fifty meters away along the district's steep and narrow alleys, the bar run by Carlos Pazos in the mid-nineties had once stood. It was called Jerrix and the upper level had a private room, ironically presented as the artist's fan club, which was as small and disorderly as the space in which he himself appears in this series of paintings. 

 

Narrowness and vastness.

“Pay attention now, kids, here comes the biggest curve on the island”. This is how the Canary Island poet, Andrés Sánchez Robayna, remembers an episode from his childhood in which his father, who was driving the car, with this simple sentence, gave him a picture of island life. For an island is the most mental of all places and, as Robayna notes, one's image of it begins with a gesture in the air. This gesture evokes an “intensification of the space” which bestows upon the objects and people present there a kind of poetic nature. 

Tikiland is enclosed: a unique correlation between two territorial devices. And, of course, we have the metropolis and “rurality”. However, there is also the gradual shrinking of the gentrified city, which contradicts the open panoramic views of landscapes that we would like to believe are more untouched every day, despite the fact that expanding tourism makes them increasingly predictable. And each of these loci brings an imaginary element with it. Someone in a city assumes that a distance exists, and in this assumption, a third space arises as intermediary: that oasis of wellbeing represented by the prosperous, esthetically-pleasing, delightful Unites States from the fifties, that peaceful oasis in the history of the last century which, in turn, can only be reached by making a stopover in Tikiland. The best viewpoint for observing this panorama is the one chosen by many of the characters in this series: looking from one island to another.

Hence, the last fruitful paradox of Tikiland: some of the most convincing depictions of it were made in static, miniscule, desolate or suburban places. Such as industrial Nottingham, where Paul Isherwood and Wayne Burrows created their recent Exotica Suite (2015), an excellent spoken word album based on a collection of stories by Burrows. Or like collapsed Detroit, that 20th century wreck, walking dead of the automobile industry, where the duo, Kava Kon, composed their Tiki for the Atomic Age (2009), which is another great contribution to the renewal of exotica. Or, in sum, like each of the galleries in which Los Mares del Tiki  is shown, where Charris' intervention has opened a crack in the door that leads to the biggest curve of the farthest archipelago.