Annotations

Antonia Hirsch’s The Surplus Library on Affect and Economic Exchange considers the library as a unique social space in which knowledge is circulated through a system of non-monetary trade or interpersonal exchange. The project’s website displays cover images of books on the subject along with the email addresses of their owners, and an open invitation to participate in the completely inefficient process of borrowing a book via mail. (To be included in the library, a book must be deemed worthwhile by Hirsch.) By facilitating the global exchange of these books about exchange—containers for ideas, but also personal objects marked by marginalia, dog-eared pages, personal inscriptions—Hirsch examines the relationship between social bonds and the production (and consumption) of knowledge. The Surplus Library, begun in 2011, currently includes around one hundred titles. In the past two years, Hirsch has also edited Intangible Economies, a thematically related series of articles published in the Canadian art magazine Fillip, where she is an editor at large; an anthology of the same name was published in the fall. Triple Canopy's Brittany Paris discussed the project and the book with Hirsch over Skype and email in November and December.

Brittany Paris: You’ve described The Surplus Library as a globally distributed library whose books are circulated through the website. The library might also build globally distributed social networks, with borrowers and lenders corresponding through email. I gather it is your intent for The Surplus Library to render online interaction more tangible, or to circumvent more impersonal modes of online interaction.

Antonia Hirsch: The library started in a completely analog way. Originally, it wasn’t even necessarily intended to be online. In early 2009, I was going back and forth between Vancouver and Berlin. I was working on various writing projects and I had started to do research on the Intangible Economies project. My writing and research were exclusively in English at the time; in theory, while in Berlin, I could either go to an English language bookstore and buy everything I needed in terms of reference material, or go to a university library and hope to find what I was looking for in English.

What happened instead was that I started to call on my network of friends and acquaintances in Berlin. I would, for example, ask whether anyone had an English copy of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. If someone did, I would often receive a book—perhaps already bought secondhand—with lots of notes and marks in it. When you exchange books with friends, they don’t just hand you the book; you talk about the book and why you’re reading it. You have tangential conversations. These conversations often turn to recommendations, whether thematically related, by the same author, or secondary literature on the book in question. It was a very interesting and useful way of broadening my horizons—even in terms of how to circumscribe the topic I was working on, because every time I had such an encounter the very concept was reinterpreted by the person I was talking to based on her own knowledge, experience, and interests.

In the end, my temporary Berlin sublet became a library specializing in books on economic exchange and desire, and I became the custodian or librarian of this special collection of borrowed books. That’s where the whole idea was born to reconsider the notion of exchange and think of it as a non-fiscal activity (borrowing and lending) within an affective network. The materiality of the books was an important marker. Of course we can go to Amazon and be told what we might want to buy, based on other customers’ preferences. But a mathematical, and therefore limited, algorithm produces these selections, and the process is exactly about buying, not borrowing. Borrowing is, fundamentally, built on trust—a significant social bond. With the book, you give something of yourself—something that may hold some of your thoughts and deliberations in the form of notes, or indicate part of your personal history in that the book may be heavily used or not used at all; it may be a special edition or translation; it may show traces of having been dropped in the bath, speaking to your reading habits. And you’ll think about whether you want to risk handing it over: Will the borrower treat it respectfully, and return this part of you?

BP: It seems that the connection between the materiality of the books in the library’s holdings as something unique—personalized by the owner—and the affective activity of borrowing and lending based on trust and shared values is fundamental to the project. Could you talk more about how you understand value as it operates within The Surplus Library?

AH: Value can refer to economic value—exchange value or use value—but also ethical value. The intersection of these meanings of value is interesting because for a notion of value to arise, there has to be an exchange, a negotiation. By definition, a value is something that is shared. If I am the only person on the planet and I say this apple I hold in my hand is worth two dollars, it doesn’t matter, because I don’t have anyone to give it to. Similarly, ethical (and moral) values only make sense within a social matrix. The Surplus Library proposes the non-fungible sharing of ideas as a value, and this value is actually enacted in exchange. Sometimes the people I initially borrowed books from later became contributors to Intangible Economies, for example Olaf Nicolai and Monika Szewczyk. And the conviviality of this process of borrowing also carried over into the Intangible Economies conference that took place in Vancouver last November. It’s important to mention, too, that the organization that made this entire project possible, Fillip, often operates with complete disregard for economic viability. While Fillip works hard to adequately pay contributors to the magazine, much of its internal activities are carried primarily by an affective charge, so obviously there was also a philosophical and structural affinity.

BP: Today’s networked communication technology is often said to exploit social ties to the ends of capital. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue in Empire, the circulation of capital extends through space and time. “Capital tries to annihilate … space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum time spent in motion from one place to another.” How does The Surplus Library respond to this understanding of exchange?

AH: The Surplus Library is absolutely and purposely inefficient. The website shows the covers of books, and if you want to read one of them you have to email the owner and ask for it to be sent to you. You can’t download the PDF. The point is to make that contact and to become conscious of the material conditions of the object travelling. The books combine the personal experience of a text with the notion of an idea as object, one that is specific, owned by someone; they operate on the level of material, image, and language.

I’m totally into efficiency in many aspects of my life. But ultimately it’s the lack of efficiency that often creates a contemplative space, where serendipitous stuff can happen. You’re looking for a book in the library and you walk by the shelves and as you’re looking, as you’re wasting time trying to find a book, you come across something else. Maybe you come across another person. Maybe you find that someone left something interesting on the shelf. I think it’s the inefficiencies that are sometimes most productive, but they are just not predictable and not quantifiable, which makes it difficult to embrace them.

BP: What types of networks do you hope to encourage with The Surplus Library?

AH: I actually didn’t think about that very carefully. I was trying to recreate or extend something that I had experienced personally as valuable, and beyond that it was like wanting to experiment with an impulse and see what happens. Any project you engage with—and I consider this an art project—ideally pushes you beyond what you already know. When The Surplus Library first launched, there was a bit more attention drawn to it; I got book requests, to my own surprise, from strangers. I had thought that I would just receive responses from friends and extended acquaintances. But I also got book suggestions from people I didn’t know, who, interestingly enough, hadn’t gotten their information through art channels, either. I remember there was one woman from California who emailed complaining that there weren’t enough female authors. I asked her to suggest some; we ended up having a really interesting exchange and it caused me to look at the collection a bit differently.

BP: It’s interesting to think about how these conversations might make their way into the holdings of the library. I’m also curious about how these interrelated notions of borrowing, lending, and exchange manifest in the library’s structure and the ways in which you envision the project growing as a result of the interactions between borrowers and lenders.

AH: I’m interested in showing how ideas proliferate, and one way to do that is to accumulate multiple copies of books. There are, for example, three copies of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. One is mine. Two belong to a couple—“his and hers” copies of the same edition. The more these doublings occur, the more you can see how prominent certain ideas are. I also really like to see books in other languages. Some works aren’t translated widely; for example, Maurizio Lazzarato’s work is hard to get in English, so the French version is in the library, but this also means that his ideas are probably not that well known among English speakers. Whereas, unsurprisingly, there are multiple copies of Marx’s writings, even in the same language. Those sorts of representations are really crucial to this project.

BP: Looking at The Surplus Library website reminded me of the aesthetic structure of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, in which photographs showing the relationships between ancient sculptures and the physiques of female golfers, for instance, were tacked to wooden panels covered with black fabric, salon style. Warburg’s interdisciplinary approach to theory and research served as the impetus for his massive library; The Surplus Library also performs a multimodal demonstration of the relationship between affect and economic activity. This may be a shot in the dark, but I was wondering if you had the Mnemosyne Atlas in mind when you were conceiving of The Surplus Library.

AH: Warburg’s work is so omnipresent in artistic practice these days—it’s difficult to escape, and almost tiresome. However, I recently wrote an essay that centred on notions of exchange, the proliferation of ideas, and astronomy, and in a roundabout way this made me reconsider Warburg’s various projects. Warburg was very interested in astronomy and particularly Johannes Kepler, who established that planets move on an elliptical path rather than a circular path, as Nicolaus Copernicus had proposed not too long before. Acknowledging the importance of the ellipse, Warburg built the reading room of his Hamburg Library in that shape, which I thought was really beautiful. He declared the ellipse to be describing “space for thought”; the ellipse is a particular figure in that it orders itself around two poles and therefore implicitly proposes a relationality. Warburg’s project seems to have been all about a dynamic way of relating things to one another—mostly images and text, but from wildly different contexts, whether academic, artistic, or quotidian—and thereby permitting complex and equally dynamic patterns of meaning to appear. You could say that, in a modest way, The Surplus Library attempts to do something similar by virtually placing all those privately owned books on a table, like so many pictures and texts pinned to one of Warburg’s panels. Warburg came up with the notion of the “pathos formula,” an embodiment of universal affective forces. He drew attention to the importance of affective forces in cultural formations, and I think he tried to express this architecturally in the elliptical reading room. The Surplus Library attempts to build a dynamic architecture of relationships (rather than of mortar and brick).

Screenshot of scanned drawings that make up “Were I to Write a Longer Letter.”

Kate Shepherd speaks with Triple Canopy’s Lucy Ives about taking liberties with the alphabet, the personalities of letters, and the “piles of lines” that constitute “Were I to Write a Longer Letter,” her 113-part drawing published in Triple Canopy issue 17.

Lucy Ives: When I first looked at your piece, my impression was that I was looking at lines that had been printed in some way.

Kate Shepherd: The impulse was that it address both tactile art making and the format of the magazine itself. I had in mind the image of a kid walking down a hall with a piece of chalk, holding the chalk out and marking the walls as he went. The beauty of it was not only in making the drawings but also in playing matchmaker afterward. Editing this on a computer, you get to copy and paste. I tried to do that as much as I could, to point to the medium. To envision it, I recreated the website’s page on my table right here.

LI: On this particular table?

KS: On this table. I wanted to find a graphic system that was playing off the crispness of a computer screen, where mark making is seen but not felt. I had strips of tape that had measurements on them, and I used thread, putting individual pieces paper on top and going over them with carbon. I never knew how the thread would move under the paper, so there was an element of blindness. And there are subtle things the lines do, bends I could never have done by hand. That’s the nature of thread. It’s like being with somebody you find predictable and then noticing a little quirk.

LI: For example?

KS: I started to attribute characteristics to certain elements, like a button may have been having a cigarette. Or maybe it has a leash, and it’s a dog smoking a cigarette. There is a feeble “P,” and there are forward buttons to usher the eye, and then something that looks to me like a Joel Shapiro. There are steps and uneven arrows that I call breasts, doors that open and play with the planes of the page. As an excuse to make a word in lines and almost unreadable, there is a “NINA,” since I grew up with the Hirschfeld drawings every Sunday in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. I probably should have made two, to be true to Hirschfeld’s practice. He would make one super skinny, and another obscured in a different way—they were really crazy at times. The “W” here is taking creative liberties, the “N” could have been written by a preschooler. And there is a repeating line that looks like a clothesline. I love that the “V” looks like a woman’s legs that are just way too open. And the poor “T” fell down. The letters act as signs and personalities but then can be reduced to their components: lines.

LI: It reminds me of learning to write, that problem of figuring out how many horizontal lines need to participate in an “E.”

KS: I think the beauty of the alphabet is that it points to how we inhabit two worlds. We inhabit both a conscious, shared world and the world of the unconscious. It’s a very romantic idea, but we actually do. The pile of lines I drew threatened either to connote something or to not connote something, but I preferred that they did. I’m talking about a collaboration between what’s available and how we recognize. In this sense, I think of language as a way of evoking parallel systems. And for the colors of the piece, I wanted there to be only three, and I wanted them to be the classic Bic-pen trio. You may or may not recognize that, but then maybe you start thinking about something else, like how the black and the blue when they touch are like siblings who are so close in age you almost think they’re twins.

LI: It seems like you are telling a joke very skillfully, but I don’t have to laugh if I don’t want to. The joke is good even if it doesn’t make me laugh the first time I hear it.

KS: It is an interesting cognitive process that requires a great deal of honing, to bring words to looking. With other people’s paintings, I look in a very rational way. I like to ask them questions and see if I get an answer. If I don’t, I might ask a different question. Then I might lose patience and move on. I’ll do this with really old paintings. I’ll say, “How can you get away with that composition?” or, “What’s your palette and dominant color?” And the painting will invariably tell me about its geometric premise, and what its color system is. I’ll say, “OK, what’s your dominant shape? How are you constructed?” I’ll ask about the hierarchy of points of interest. Nowadays I’m most fascinated by how things are constructed. Vermeer, Morandi, and certain Velazquez are of great interest because of the way they’re put together. And Chardin. By the way, Morandi, in my book, is really making visual puns. Show me just about any Morandi, and I’ll tell you the pun he’s making. But really, I have a harder and harder time looking at paintings. Perhaps it’s shameful, but nowadays looking is a little like shopping.

LI: It’s not a question of learning?

KS: If you’re thinking about learning as meeting a stranger, then, no. I think it’s about having more profound learning, about understanding a visual vocabulary more because you’ve already been aware of it and taken stock if it. Once you take stock, you add and refine.

LI: Do you want to have the sense that your work refers to other work, or could be a meeting point for other work?

KS: I think a lot of artists ask themselves that.

LI: What do they decide?

KS: They’re trying to claim a lane. But I’m not concerned with that because I’m mainly trying to excavate by recognition. When I look at some work of mine, if I see a very clear connection, I know that I have to either enjoy and articulate that reference more strongly or back off. Plus, if I can’t get a hold of a personal visual memory or a certain emotional association, then it doesn’t fly. In the museum, I locate what I may already have intuitively discovered in my studio. Finding affinities allows me to expand image references, validate them, keep them company.

LI: It seems like much of your work is about figuring out problems of relation. You aren’t simply putting references together or being influenced by some trajectory that already exists; rather, you want the interrelatedness of visual information to take on new forms.

KS: Yes it’s true; it’s almost like it is in grammar. In the past perfect, we jump behind to go ahead. And often painting is to me like the past perfect, a future looking forward from within the past. I intend to start here, in the present, but then I want to go back into the past, and then look forward once I’m there. It’s not nostalgia, because I’m not just looking back. It’s almost like going behind nostalgia.

Instructive contemporary images of the brain.

In the 1980s and ’90s, as the standard model of physics gathered dust and the field moved from front-page philosophy into the murk of mathematics, neuroscience emerged as the discipline most likely to demystify the natural world—or at least one particularly interesting element of it, ourselves. Modern physics had seemingly gone from promising a holistic explanation for why things are the way they are to suggesting that the universe is fundamentally inscrutable, its mysteries multiplying with each discovery. Neuroscience, meanwhile, turned inward—mirroring the putative narcissism of the era—and strived to reveal the immaculate mechanics lodged within our skulls. This nascent discipline cannibalized psychology, linguistics, and sociology, planting flags in far-flung realms of academia, medicine, and law. Today neuroscience is a central prism through which nearly all aspects of life are regarded.

With the popularization of functional MRI (fMRI) technology, the workings of the brain began to be broadcast in color, with cartoonish images of neural activity accompanying newspaper and television reports on the efforts of researchers to explain our most intimate drives, locate our souls, read our minds. Though neuroscience has provided a preeminent narrative of the twenty-first-century self—look to the nonfiction best seller lists for evidence of its reach—the discipline is still in its infancy and its promises remain largely unfulfilled; the workings of the brain are, of course, far from wholly comprehended by researchers, much less the public. We now know more about diseases and disorders like epilepsy, aphasia, Alzheimer’s, and Tourette’s syndrome than ever before, but none have been cured. We have an inkling of the cognitive processes that beget consciousness, which is both a product and central feature of the brain; but philosophers and neuroscientists alike still have trouble defining, much less locating, the phenomenon and explaining the emergence of subjectivity—if not the more mundane matter of self-awareness. (Even if we could define consciousness, we might not be able to understand it except at the level of the neuron’s cytoskeleton, through quantum mechanics—the physics for which is incomplete. Or our brains might be unconsciously following a program so complex that we could never grasp the entire thing at once. If so, one could theoretically simulate cognition, or at least the underlying processes, though not without an excellent quantum mechanical computer.) We have not found the brain’s “God spot” or “buy button.”

“Common Minds,” a series of essays and conversations on the contemporary infatuation with the brain, will address the limits of neuroscience and how the knowledge produced by researchers and clinicians operates in other realms of culture and society. “Common Minds” was coedited by Dawn Chan and is being published in issues 17 and 18 of Triple Canopy. The series aims to facilitate discussion about ideas that are too rarely scrutinized outside of a specialized setting, despite their sweeping effect. Recent criticism in magazines and academic journals has justifiably deflated—and perhaps tempered public enthusiasm for—the tumid, reductive claims of pop-science scribes. But such venues tend be dominated by professional journalists and scientists debunking other professional journalists and scientists. Departing from the conventions of this discourse, Triple Canopy has invited artists, poets, novelists, philosophers, historians, and psychologists to contribute analytic essays, linguistic compendia, and prose poems; a video rumination on blindness and perception, a collage-survey of the persistent vocabulary of phrenology, and a two-thousand-year genealogy of images of the brain.

In preparing this series, we considered how psychoanalysis became a prevailing cultural narrative in the 1960s and ‘70s and how profoundly it altered the way we construct our own experiences and selves. The standard model may have imparted an all-encompassing theory of the natural world, but to most people that theory is incomprehensible. And those who do understand know that the failure to reconcile the general theory of relativity and quantum theory—the so-called macro and micro worlds—keeps the model incomplete. As such, the standard model speaks to ontology only indirectly. Psychoanalytic theory proffered a softer science, a framework for interpreting—if not resolutely explaining—our thoughts and behaviors, which could be elaborated as a worldview. Even if many who invoked Freud had little purchase on psychoanalysis beyond the rudiments, they could assimilate that worldview (which was confirmed in their own daily lives).

Neuroscience awkwardly straddles these two bodies of knowledge, in terms of the potential to link visceral experience to vanguard science in the construction of a more or less complete picture of the world—inasmuch as the world is a construct of our own cognitive faculties (and therefore a projection of biology). And yet generally, especially in nonclinical settings, what neuroscience has to offer is interpretation, not explanation. And too often the two are confused.

In March 2008, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience published an article called “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” which grappled with the question of why people are much more likely to believe a statement when it includes a neuroscience gloss and fail to recognize when that information is illogical or irrelevant. The researchers asked subjects to evaluate various descriptions of psychological phenomena, both inaccurate and accurate, with and without perfunctory references to neural circuitry. For instance, they were told that “the curse of knowledge”—the tendency to assume other people know what you do and are ignorant of what you don’t know—arises from our innate inability to judge others and that brain scans reveal the curse “happens because of the frontal lobe brain circuitry known to be involved in self-knowledge.” Subjects found that such bilge made circular arguments “significantly more satisfying.”

To most people, neuroscience supplies a skein of novelty and credibility to propositions that might otherwise appear unoriginal or even outlandish. Among the beneficiaries of the public’s susceptibility to science-inflected language and imagery are neuromarketing companies wielding brain scans to help clients sell everything from politicians to Super Bowl ads to social media campaigns. For example, MindSign Neuromarketing’s “neurocinema” service will “take your trailer or spot and show you what parts or scenes cause activation (good) and what parts cause deactivation (bad).” Many in the humanities have responded by insinuating neuroscience into their work—the so-called cognitive turn, which has given rise to disciplines such as neuroeconomics, neurotheology, neuroaesthetics, and neuroethics.

For the most part, neuroscience has given us an empirical basis for assertions made decades or centuries ago by linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and ophthalmologists. And yet one effect of the rapid rise of neuroscience is the comparative diminution (and, coincidentally, defunding) of the very branches of science and the humanities upon which the discipline draws. The result is a creeping assumption that the brain makes the mind. “Although we do not know how, it is widely accepted that a complete neural explanation is, in principle, possible,” writes psychologist William Uttal in Mind and Brain: A Critical Appraisal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2011). “Those who labor in the laboratory rarely make this monistic assumption explicit, and yet few cognitive neuroscientists would challenge this fundamental idea.” The guiding principle of much contemporary neuroscience is “without any compelling empirical foundation.”

The work in “Common Minds” aims to disclose and debunk, but more orthogonally than polemically, by charting the origins of the brain-as-computer metaphor, considering fMRI scans as part of the history of photography, evaluating the claims of neuroscience alongside the observations of seventeenth-century Japanese anatomical illustrators, and so on. To us, this work is itself a strike against biological reductionism. There have been many enthralling, if provisional, discoveries regarding the unconscious processes underlying our behavior, the adaptive and plastic nature of the brain, and the relationship between vision and cognition. But what, besides consciousness, prompts such efforts, impels us to engineer experiments, parse data, invent theories? The core of who we are and why we do what we do—that union of memory, consciousness, and the body that marks us as human, grounding our various representations of the world in what Kant called a “single common subject”—remains obscure.

“Common Minds” questions the expectation of revelation, especially as advanced by popular neuroscience books that mostly work to inspire awe by assigning biological explanations to every aspect of our behavior. The brain “is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us,” writes David Eagleman in Incognito: The Brains Behind the Mind (2012). Eagleman’s book is wrenchingly typical for making unconscious mechanics responsible for the preponderance of what we do and say and for obscuring certain material facts that suggest otherwise. For instance, Eagleman uses Ulysses to analyze the housing bubble: By bounding himself in anticipation of his ship passing the Sirens, Ulysses shorted the same “instant-gratification circuits” that produced the subprime-mortgage crisis. But this account neglects predatory lending practices and the failure of government regulation—anything besides the cognitive processes of homeowners.

Rather than trouble what neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran calls our “cognitive state of grace” in relation to other species, such books tend to strip away the construction of subjective experience from objective reality in order to reveal the gears at work and marvel at the mechanics. The conscious mind becomes an evolutionary product of these unconscious operations; it is dismissed as an incidental aspect of the brain, a tool for achieving certain rarefied tasks. (Aside from being the basis of higher-level thinking, consciousness is the crux of the liberal democratic project. The terminal point of which might be the erosion of the free, autonomous political subject, in favor of a biologically constituted self, which has dramatic implications for the exercise of power and the production of social life.) Authors are expected to edify initiates while catering to their relative ignorance, acquaint them with the basics of brain functioning but not muddle the material with too much neuroanatomy. Often this means pitching a ream of case studies and summaries of academic papers as a “journey,” “search,” or “quest.” At the end of the road there tends to be either a solution to everyday problems—leadership, love, sales, addiction, productivity—or a sense of pure wonder. Dwelling on the magic of cognition, while insisting on its biological basis, returns the brain to a fantastical realm just as it is being demystified.

The quest for a purely biological account of consciousness seems, paradoxically, to point to something about our cognitive configuration that eludes such an understanding. Neuroscience has illuminated the brain’s constant efforts to make sense of the world, to form an astonishingly coherent narrative out of a welter of information. Our eyes capture fragments of objects in mere moments—fleeting records of passing cars, gathering clouds, familiar faces—which are strung together by the brain, giving the impression of a continuous visual flow. Cognition is enabled by regular communication between different regions of the brain, a kind of discourse between neuronal factions that, over a lifetime, actually restructures the brain, in what neuroscientist J. P. Changeux has labeled “the Darwinism of the synapses.” Furthermore, the brain develops a model of the outside world that enables it to anticipate rather than merely respond to sensory data. We are, in effect, always constructing the setting of our own story just before it happens. Somehow this seemingly effortless assembly of memories and impressions inspires the vague but tenacious belief in the presence within us of something that exceeds our circuitry, a more or less authentic self. And this self seems to be as real, if not more real, than anything else in the world.
—ALEXANDER PROVAN

Lisi Raskin, X Wing Fighter (detail), as displayed at Churner and Churner Gallery, New York City, February 23, 2012-April 07, 2012.

When I was ten years old, my babysitter's husband, a craggy, soft-spoken man who had once been a Soviet astrophysicist, showed me what he claimed was a piece of Sputnik. He lifted something small and hard from atop the media cabinet in his fantastically clean apartment and placed it in my hands. I ogled the chunk of plastic as he watched approvingly. "Spoot-neek," he intoned. His pronunciation thrilled me. I barely knew what Sputnik was, but the rocket's name transformed the thing in my palm from unrecognizable spare part to a talisman. An artifact is a strange sort of object: Its power rests on a physical connection to the past, and yet its representational power exceeds the material. Of the many foreign objects in that apartment—lacquered red-and-gold spoons, a massive sack of potatoes, a VHS collection of Russian-language cartoons, carpets that smelled like lemon—the putative Sputnik relic was the most exotic, simply because its foreignness was hidden at first.

In late June and early July, as part of Triple Canopy's residency in Sarajevo, Perfect Strangers, five Bosnian artists chose seemingly banal objects and figures that refused to square with any one narrative of the fragmented nation's identity. Among these were a now-overgrown Olympic bobsled track; the national car of Yugoslavia, the Zastava 101; and a first-person shooter game set during the Sarajevo siege and starring American snipers. By evading settled history, Perfect Strangers expressed a profound faith in its chosen objects and figures—faith in their ability to express complex historical information and serve as a means of sorting unresolved symbols of war and recovery. A counter-history is buried in the present landscape. And an object—maybe not a literal object, but the object as framework, as portal—is a potent medium for exhuming narratives that are not commonly known or officially recognized.

The Perfect Strangers activities recall the work of Lisi Raskin, whose project in Triple Canopy's fifteenth issue, "Endgame Tourism," recorded her wanderings in the massive underground bunker built by Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito in the late 1970s. To Raskin, the bunker "queers reason and historical analysis." She explored the bunker without a guide or map, picking up the structure's subtle frequencies—the irony of its officious readiness coupled with the "fact of its impossible use." Like the participants in Perfect Strangers, Raskin illuminated the bunker's latent inconsistencies, bringing forth historical details that resist being packaged and politicized.

But Raskin doesn't just observe; she builds anew. Drawing from the visual language of the military sites she frequents, Raskin creates temporary, immersive environments built with seeming haste. Take, for example, 2009's Armada, at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, a colorful garden of painted boards set at crooked angles, their raw undersides exposed. Or the scale model of a military control panel in Control Room (2008), at Bard College. Flanked by construction-paper maps smeared in glue, the replica seemed to be the product of fantasy. Raskin's work hovers in a historical ether, but the links to a particular time or place are obscured.

Raskin's first commercial gallery show in five years, "Shots in the Dark," was held this spring at Churner & Churner Gallery in New York City. Raskin recycled and re-mounted pieces from past installations; instead of creating new objects, she became the archeologist of her own storage unit. Her work appeared as a collection: a balsa-wood replica of a machine gun; a pine-cone rocket mounted on a roughly-hewn pedestal. Raskin's constructions represented history in two senses: they stood in for objects of war while also acting as relics of Raskin's nomadic career. A miniature rocket wrought delicately from a roll of toilet paper looked like something survivors of the apocalypse might build to show their children how the world once looked. Raskin's sculptures read as fakes, and yet they resonate as genuine remains—remains of play, of war, of the artist's process, of history.

In Perfect Strangers, participants encountered objects as bearers of historical incongruities, and so they became, like the artifacts in Raskin's recent show, evidence of a slightly different kind—not of history but of an artist's act of translation. In rendering an artifact ambiguous, both Raskin's show and the Sarajevo project ask us, in their own way, to experience "evidence" as a representational category, not as history or even fact.

How else might the history of a city be understood through its artifacts? A recent New York Times article, "A History of New York City in 50 Objects," offered a list assembled by historians and museum curators: a mastodon's tusk (about 11,000 BC), a Singer sewing machine (1851), a jar of 9/11 dust (2001). The Times exhorted readers to "tell us what objects represent New York City to you" in the comments section.

"Uh, subway tokens? Hello?" said Chris from Brooklyn. Angela, writing from Salisbury, CT, agreed. "I was born in Brooklyn in 1946," she added. "As a high school student I commuted to Queens on the QJ 'el' and had a 'bus pass.'"

"Ahh...the Brooklyn Bridge," marveled Barbara, all the way in San Diego. "My parents grew up in Brooklyn and my mom gazed at it romantically growing up."

"A History of New York in 50 Objects" was an innocuous version of the one-size-fits-all approach that Raskin and Perfect Strangers sought to avoid: various fragments collapsed into an ill-fitting official story, with each plot point serving only to advance the narrative. The most loaded historical artifacts are also personal—just ask Barbara from San Diego. But an object can also elide historical narrative despite, or even because of, resonance with the personal. The writer Mirco Kovač describes himself as "a Croat on my father’s side, a Montenegrin on my mother’s side, [and] breast-fed by a Muslim. Such combinations meant nothing to me." Our own memories sometimes refuse to reaffirm or deny the strength of a historical narrative; like an ambiguous object, meaningful stories about the passage of time are not so different from subway tokens—they're as weighty or as inconsequential as we make them.

The Times article also brought place, not personality, to the foreground. It construed New York in terms of inclusiveness and diversity, but also expansiveness—indicated by the presence of a map, an arrowhead, and mussel shells—New York stretches as far into the ground and the ocean as it does back in time. History defines physical as well as temporal parameters; herein looms the question of whether ancestral possession of a plot of land trumps someone else’s current occupancy. By demarcating space, history colonizes the present—whether in Bosnia or New York City.

What happens when historical objects cannot reinforce our notions of place—when they work to displace us? What happens when history can no longer be thought of in terms of territory, or must be thought of in terms of overlapping territories that refuse to give rise to a concrete sense of ownership or understanding? A paper gun or bullet-ridden bobsled sit awkwardly in the face of official histories. Their incongruity is their ability to evade placement; and this in turn is a strange sort of peace.—LIZZIE FEIDELSON