Looping the Loop: Assemblage, Repetition, and Diaspora
Three Museums – Paris, France
by Ama Codjoe
I met Sophie, Greg, and their six-year-old daughter Lucie at Musee Rodin on a Sunday in February. As we meandered through the gardens, Lucie stopped to pick up rocks and examine them. Sophie explained, She likes to find rocks that can write. Sophie shrugged. I watched as Lucie chose another rock and attempted to make a mark on the ground. Later, at a café, as we adults spoke in a language Lucie hardly recalled from her childhood in Toronto, the waiter gave Lucie a pad and pen. She turned to me and said, Madame. I ordered poisson, a word I recalled from years studying ballet. But Lucie kept asking what more I wanted. Sophie, Greg, and I ordered fromage, pancakes with blueberries, beer, croissants, a baguette, salad, french fries, chocolat, and more. Lucie scribbled down our orders with a flourish of her borrowed blue pen. The top page of the notepad filled with loops and wavy lines. At one point, miming the action of stirring, I asked if she was going to cook the food for us as well. No, she said through her father’s translation, that is someone else’s job. She, it seems, was meant only to ask questions—often the same ones—and to write. To me, Lucie was a poet.
She, it seems, was meant only to ask questions—often the same ones—and to write. To me, Lucie was a poet.
If I had a narrow nose and a dead fox draped around my neck, I wouldn’t have cried at Centre Pompidou. After a heated exchange with a woman behind the Welcome Desk, I melted, but I didn’t cool down. I perked up when I saw Marc Chagall’s paintings. Eventually, traversing the endless rooms of the museum, I got lost in the artwork, but my mind continued to travel back to the woman’s red face and puffed up tone. Before I could finish my sentence, the woman behind the Welcome Desk had interrupted me. She’d raised her voice. And I’d raised my voice in reply. I had hoped to sort out an issue with my ticket. She acted as if I was attempting to steal a painting. If this incident were occurring over the phone it would have been labeled an “escalation” and I would have asked to be transferred to a manager. As it was, I circled the desk to talk with another equally rude attendant—increasingly, I became aware of my sore feet.
Walking through the gardens, Sophie tells a story about how her father, a photographer and artist, challenged Sophie and her sister to pose like Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. It is a pose ripe with contortion, though it may not seem so at first glance. The right elbow twists over to the left knee while the right hand holds the heaviness of a human head lost in thought. The feet do not rest flatly on the floor, instead they look as if they might slip from the bronze itself, the toes are racked with gnarled tension. During our walk in the garden, Sophie often touched the sculptures. Her hands were a variety of wind or rain; the guards, wherever they were, did not tell Sophie to stop; the sculptures, large and almost alive, did not shrink away from the wet warmth of her human hands.
Her hands were a variety of wind or rain; the guards, wherever they were, did not tell Sophie to stop; the sculptures, large and almost alive, did not shrink away from the wet warmth of her human hands.
The first time I saw Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) was after a long walk through Paris’s so-called Little Africa. Watching Stan Douglas’s film in a darkened room combined the pleasure of theater- or movie-going with the thrill of a live concert. During my two visits to the Pinault Collection in Paris, there were a few times when I was alone in the basement gallery, just me and the film. Throughout these stolen minutes, the space felt as wide as a summer field at night. Whether the room was empty or full, an intimacy persisted. I couldn’t get enough of Douglas’s close-ups on the musicians as they did what they were born to do. The film’s sound felt as if it was physically touching me, and it was. The music vibrated through my body. A few times I closed my eyes to understand where the sound located itself inside me: it resided in cavities and chambers. As the camera panned Douglas’s meticulous recreation of “The Church” recording studio, I fell in love with each of the foregrounded musicians. I was most excited by the drummer, Kimberly Thompson.
Stan Douglas, Lunada-Kinshasa, 2013, Single-channel video projection, 6 hours, 1 min (loop), color, sound. Overall dimensions vary with installation. @Stan Douglas Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
Behind another desk a kinder woman offered me a glass of water when, through tears, I said, I just want to see the museum. She helped sort out the issue, and said the view from the balcony might calm me. She repeated, Are you sure you don’t want to sit down? I took the escalators up and up. I drifted through the first few rooms rehearsing what transpired at the Welcome Desk and then trying to focus instead on the woman behind the second desk. The interactions played in a loop. I finally perked up when I saw paintings by Marc Chagall. The playfulness and color of Chagall’s flying brides, angels, and men have always delighted me. After figure-eighting around the galleries of Centre Pompidou’s fourth and fifth floors and resting outside on the balcony, I spotted the dome of Sacre Coeur, where I’d walked up nearly three hundred steps the previous day, before my sojourn to Little Africa. I descended down and down the escalators. I returned to the second woman’s desk, on the ground floor, in order to, once again, thank her. I wondered if she had ever experienced the feeling of so quickly slipping into a hole.
I wondered if she had ever experienced the feeling of so quickly slipping into a hole.
When I wrote to my friend Carla, a visual artist, about my surprise that Rodin’s iconic sculpture The Thinker was first conceived within The Gates of Hell, she replied, The Gates of Hell is incredible, the clay molds are some of the most alive things I’ve ever seen in my life. The monumental bronze doors are composed of hundreds of figures, characters, and scenes. A seated figure, positioned centrally on the tympanum, lost in mortal contemplation, is said to represent Dante Alighieri, whose epic poem Divine Comedy was one of the inspirations for The Gates. In reference to Dante, The Thinker was first called The Poet. As I gazed up at the towering, stand-alone version of The Thinker, I wondered why Rodin placed a thinker at the gates of hell. In Theravada Buddhism, meditation is often referred to as “sitting.” When a meditator attends a session they go to “a sit.” The teacher instructs the sitter to focus on an object of meditation, often the breath, and to notice when the mind wanders and label it “thinking” then return back to the breath. Our thoughts, any novice or veteran meditator would attest, are often dwelling in the past or the future: anxiety, regret, worry, dread, wistfulness, lust, memory, fantasy, obsession. For a short while, my father practiced meditation. He complained, though, that it was difficult. He couldn’t get it right, he said. He was always thinking. I tried, unsuccessfully, to explain that thinking wasn’t bad. The point of meditation, from my experience, was to notice the thinking without judgement—the moment of labeling the thought “thinking” was the moment of waking up to oneself: that was the point. Hell, in other words, is our unawareness, our unknowing. Half-listening, my father looked at something past my shoulder. Unwilling to budge from the omniscience of his role, he repeated, It’s just too hard, and changed the subject. It is hard, I should have replied.
Hell, in other words, is our unawareness, our unknowing.
As the sole woman musician in Douglas’s Luanda-Kinshasa, Kimberly Thompson captivated and held my attention. Witnessing her concentration and performance, self-consciousness and abandon, made me giddy. Much later, I came to understand that her appearance: a silky, colorful, paisley blouse; brown slacks; burgundy shoes; and the halo of an afro, reminded me of Kathleen Cleaver, Minnie Riperton, my own mother, and countless other recognizable and anonymous Black women of the 1960s and 70s. Thompsons’s style was deeply familiar: watching Thompson I was transported onto a sidewalk, sauntering shoulder-to-shoulder alongside Toni Morrison and Angela Davis; or to a chair at my grandparent’s kitchen table, seated beside the charming presence of my dashikied father.
The first time I saw Luanda-Kinshasa was after a long walk through Paris’s so-called Little Africa. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a flash of a familiar name “David Hammons.” Standing in place, I watched as the screen in front of the museum’s ticket center changed to a still image of Hammons’s Oh say can you see (2017), a tattered and hole-ridden red-black-and-green-American flag. Next, the screen displayed two back-to-back stills from Stan Douglas’s film Luanda-Kinshasa. I was hooked. I bought a ticket. Later, I titled an email to a friend “A Very Black Day in Paris,” and attached photos of the exhibition, the beauty supply store, and the hot peppers I’d been unable to find elsewhere.
Later, I titled an email to a friend “A Very Black Day in Paris,” and attached photos of the exhibition, the beauty supply store, and the hot peppers I’d been unable to find elsewhere.
For Luanda-Kinshasa, Douglas devised the semblance of a real-time recording session that highlighted African influences on a fictional 1970s New York City jazz-funk band, led by virtuoso Jason Moran. In the basement gallery, four large, circular cushions dotted the floor, and, on either side of the door, two benches rested against the back wall. My favorite place to view the film was from the bench to the left of the door. Douglas named the film after two cities: Luanda, the capital of Angola, and Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
I had the privilege of watching Sarah Maldoror’s recently restored film Sambizinga (1972) at the Glasgow Film Theater in March 2022. The film is set in Luanda, during the revolution for independence, but was filmed in the Republic of the Congo. It tells the story of Domingos, a construction worker and clandestine member of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, and his wife, Maria. The fictional film follows Domingos’s imprisonment and Maria’s long walk to find him. One of the first images Maldoror presents is an outline of Africa’s vast continent: white against a black background. The camera zooms in on the west coast of central Africa, on Angola, the only country further outlined; then we see the word Luanda in bright white letters. Sambizinga begins and ends with the movement of rough water crashing against itself. Sambizinga is believed to be the first film made in Africa by a woman filmmaker of African descent.
The first time I saw Luanda-Kinshasa was after a long walk through Paris’s so-called Little Africa, a large area of shops, markets, stores, and restaurants in Paris’s 18th arrondissement. I took three photographs during my walk: two of them were of the beauty supply store where I bought a jar of hair grease. From the street I could see long packages of weave hanging in transparent bags. Wigs of various lengths, cuts, and colors framed the plastic mannequins propped in the store window. After completing my purchase, I took a few steps away from the shop, but turned back to take the photographs. I wanted to document my delight in finding the quotidian comfort of black care. The familiarity of the neighborhood did not stop with the rows of oils, conditioners, spritzes, and sprays. I was enraptured by Dutch fabric with lace or with geometric shapes hanging beneath the heft of winter coats; the sight of red and green hot peppers; the smell of salty fish; and the maze of market stalls.
I wanted to document my delight in finding the quotidian comfort of black care.
The Gates of Hell contains over two-hundred figures many of which, like The Thinker, Rodin made into stand-alone sculptures. Rodin’s methodology, the inventive way he used clay models to produce multiple plaster casts, impacted the number and kinds of work he was able to produce in his lifetime and the production of his art after his death. Rodin and his assistants remixed casts into many different sculptures: a small piece became colossal; the bottom half of one sculpture merged with the top half of another; or, as in Je Suis Belle, two independent figures were slightly altered and pressed together to create a completely new work. Crouching Woman is forced into the emptied arms of The Man with a Serpent to create I Am Beautiful. Not only is the sculpture structurally compelling, but the title, Je Suis Belle, confounds: the dissonance of the title I Am Beautiful paired with the image of tension, ambiguity, and precarity is what drew me closer. At the bottom of the stand-alone sculpture, hand-carved into the plaster, are a few sentences written in French: Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre . . . I asked Sophie to decipher it. She read the lines aloud, translating them into English: I am beautiful, O mortals! like a dream carved in stone. Rodin borrowed the title from the poem La Beauté by Charles Baudelaire, and scrawled some of the lines into the plaster.
I asked Sophie to decipher it. She read the lines aloud, translating them into English: I am beautiful, O mortals! like a dream carved in stone.
I read but did not finish Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. The middle story “Melanctha” most interested me. I borrowed Three Lives from the American Library in Paris, but had to return it before finishing the story. In truth, about three-fourths of the way through, I let a few other books cut the line. I wanted to read “Melanctha” because it was a short story Nella Larsen admired. Larsen sent a copy of Quicksand to Stein and enclosed a letter praising “Melanctha.” But the repetition—not of the name “Melanctha” but of one character’s actions—began to grate on me.
The first time I saw Luanda-Kinshasa was after a long walk through Paris’s so-called Little Africa. Douglas’s film moves effortlessly. Six hours in length, it does not loop from one starting point straight through to an end, instead it turns in on itself, repeating in irregular, unpredictable ways that seduce with seeming seamlessness. The groove in Douglas’s recreated recording studio never dies; it quiets and then picks back up again. During both visits to the Pinault Collection, I watched Luanda-Kinshasa first, viewed the other exhibitions, and returned to watch Luanda-Kinshasa again before leaving. Entering and exiting this way, my viewing was interspersed with the passage of time. I noticed the symbols of the set: a glass of water on a white notepad, the iconic blue and white cups of New York City’s bodega coffee, a whirring gold fan. As the sole woman musician, Kimberly Thompson captivated and held my attention. Sometimes, Thompson’s face was framed by a small window. Other times, we watched her from the waist up as she bit her lip or raised her shoulders or swung her head from side to side, all the while playing the drums triumphantly. My favorite glimpses of her performance were when the camera allowed us to see her full body seated behind the drum set and cymbals: her legs stomping to keep time; her waist and shoulders rolling; her elbows and wrists working; her facial expressions morphing—from mean mug to sweet smile to an original language composed solely of the way she opened and closed her mouth.
…from mean mug to sweet smile to an original language composed solely of the way she opened and closed her mouth.
After the screening, one of Maldoror’s daughters, Annouchka de Andrade, shared that the cast of “non-professional” actors spoke at least three languages in the film because many were from the Republic of the Congo; some, like Domingos de Oliveira who played Domingos, were Angolan political exiles and refugees resettled in the Congo; and at least one, Elisa Andrade, who played Maria, was from Cape Verde. The actors who communicated in their mother tongues enriched the film’s dialogue with texture and depth. Then there were the indelible gestures unaccompanied by speech: wordless actions performed by women and men. One of the most poignant motifs in the film is how Domingos and Maria’s baby is always cared for, passed to and from his mother’s back and arms, at times even breastfed by women other than his mother. The word “even” in the previous sentence would not exist in the culture Maldoror portrayed. The baby is held by a woman who did not give birth to him. He rests in her lap. She grabs her own breast and puts her nipple into his open mouth. This, to her, is unremarkable. Its unremarkability, to me, is familiar.
This, to her, is unremarkable. Its unremarkability, to me, is familiar.
An interaction like the one I had with the woman behind the Welcome Desk is never only about one thing. The-many-things tugged at my ankles pulling me down: there I’d stood at the second desk crying. The woman behind the second desk had offered me a glass of water. When I returned to thank her, the desk was empty. Turning away, I saw a third desk. I told the attendant I wanted to give feedback on the treatment I’d received at the Welcome Desk. She said, If you want to make a complaint we usually send people to the Welcome Desk. She briefly searched the museum’s website and concluded that her first estimation was best. Okay, I replied, unphased, That’s fine. Thank you. I walked back to the Welcome Desk. The woman who treated me as if I didn’t have a narrow nose, which I don’t, and as if I didn’t have a dead fox draped around my neck, which I did not, was now the only person there. I asked, How can I make a complaint? I would like to make a complaint about the way I was treated. She said, evenly, as if she’d forgotten our exchange, that I could make a complaint online. That, she said, was the best way. Okay, I said. Thank you, I said. A weight lifted from around my neck. I walked outside into the blue day.
Without a map or a guide, I have climbed the hills of Paris searching for myself. I have walked in circles through a hell of my creation. I have crawled to the floor, become Crouching Woman laid on its side. I have sat still as a statue in the middle of a room of other statues. I have thought, “Thinking.” In the basement of my childhood home, my father hung a large oil painting of John Coltrane. I remember especially the green inside the blue: a hue in the middle of sea. At some point, I swam in the blues of my father and the blues of my mother, hewn from their oceans: rough water crashing against itself. Stan Douglas is said to have remarked that “life is all middle.” The middle is riddled with beginnings and ends. As it was, I circled the sculptures to study them from different angles. Flying brides, angels, and men have always delighted me. I have been on fire with desire, possessed by repetition. A small thought became colossal. I took a few steps away. Entering and exiting this way, my viewing was interspersed with the passage of time. Canto I of Dante’s “Inferno” begins: Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost. I’ve been lost in thought, staring pensively downward as if peering into the gates of an otherworld. I watched as Lucie chose another rock and attempted to make a mark on the ground. Some of the most alive things I’ve ever seen in my life have been made by people estranged from me by distance, language, death, or time. I wondered in what ways these artists had experienced the feeling of so quickly slipping into a hole. I filled the white notepad with ink from a stolen blue pen. I was hooked—I meant to ask only one question, but, as my mouth opened and closed, questions altered and pressed together. The groove quieted and then picked back up again. I wrote until the ink dried out. I wrote in the dark, on a slip of blue sky, and on the ground with a rock in my hand.