Nari Ward’s Anchoring

Nari Ward’s Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca: On Time and the Return of History

by Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D.

It is customary to understand our modern, global sense of time as a universal, even natural, horizon of experience. Western time seems rational, neutral, and beyond the pale of history. Yet, a work of contemporary art such as Nari Ward’s Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca: On Time and the Return of History, recently gifted to the Redwood, suggests all such assumptions may be outrageously inaccurate (Fig. 1). In fact, our current temporal regime is a direct inheritance of European Enlightenment values, science and economics, such that the accelerated, 24/7 culture that we associate with global contemporaneity merely forms the tail end of a massive, global project of regulating time that began in eighteenth-century Europe. There, amidst modernization, urbanization and industrialization, a burgeoning working class was increasingly awakened by factory criers rather than the rooster’s crow, their working day measured by a plethora of (suspiciously slow) clocks.1 In the American colonies, public, mechanized time was already established when the Redwood was built in 1747, and wholly entrenched by the late nineteenth century, when the Ithaca clock company began producing tall case clocks in upstate New York. 2

Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca inhabits the casing of one such Ithaca clock, strategically altering the outmoded timepiece to prompt questions about how time lies embedded in colonial modernity’s regimes of progress and labor, rationalization and control. In this work, now on display at the Redwood, Ward marshals the vintage clock as a Trojan horse, appropriating its traditional facade and air of old-world luxury to install Bakongo culture, temporality and experience in the heart of the Redwood’s historic interior. This centering of African culture is long overdue, not only because the U.S. was built on the forced labor of Africans taken from the Bakongo and neighboring regions, but also because as Robert Farris Thompson, the late, great Yale scholar of the Kongo noted: you will never understand American culture if you don’t understand African culture. In Ward’s clock, the stately shell from Ithaca camouflages a series of covert operations that has transformed its interior: the clock’s face has been effaced and its insides removed, save a pendulum, trapped in a cavity. Here, deep within the clock’s insides, the artist has placed an image of historical trauma, then closed the door. The clock has now become a container of unspeakable truths, sent into the world to speak of containment (Fig. 2). The Enlightenment did not only bequeath our current horizon of time; it also gave rise to the notion of the “self as container,”3 an idea implicit in the influential model of the Cartesian subject as a thinking, self-reflective entity ruled from inside. The birth of the Enlightenment subject and subjectivity was thus the birth of the individual as a doubled, self-contained conceptual agent, a subject fortified from the objects of the world by a carapace of intellect that constituted humans as thinking subjects of culture, substantively different from, and superior to, the rest of the natural world. Not surprisingly, eighteenth-century clockmakers projected this notion onto the emblems of culture they built, designing standing clocks like human containers: an exoskeleton scaled to a person’s height, grounded by feet, rising to a central waist, with a clock “face,” topped by a “bonnet.” Hands keep time, but the clock as a whole “runs,” its fragile interior mechanics encased, womb-like, in a cavity protected by glass. The design of an anthropomorphized container like a tall case clock materializes not only the period conception of the bounded subject of culture as separate from the world of nature, but also encompasses the larger metaphysical yearning to “keep” and thereby control time through a material aesthetics of containment. But Ward’s clock exposes the ethics that underpins this aesthetics, situating the modern drive to contain and control time as continuous with a colonial-era, technocratic mindset of dominating the land, the natural world, and

Figure 1. Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca, grandfather clock case, copper nails, patinated copper panel, African statues, 87 x 18 x 10.5 inches, 221 x 45.7 x 26.7 cm. Redwood Library & Athenæum Special Collections.

other humans. Hence in the central cavity of Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca, where one would usually find the working mechanism of the timepiece, one encounters a pile of West African sculptures crammed into the interior chamber. (Fig.2) The vertical pendulum, weighted by its circular bob, is trapped in their midst. At first, it might seem that the literal objectification of Black subjects into wooden sculptural objects (typically for sale to tourists) reproduces the violent logic of enslavement which turns human subjects into objects for sale. Yet Ward mobilizes such literal objectification to make a different point: to insert the Black body into the center of the clock as the veritable motor of modernity. If he highlights histories of enslavement, it is to repudiate standard narratives of U.S. history that explain increased production and greater wealth as a series of “natural” effects produced by technical progress, whether the cotton gin or better timekeeping. Ward challenges the notion that the miraculous inventions of white men purely account for the U.S.’s accumulation of wealth and power; instead, he inserts the Black body—contained, constrained, captured—at the heart of North American modernity. Here interiority becomes entrapment; European rationalism a cage; and the “womb” a hold.4

Escape/Escapement

The sculpture’s title, Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca, redoubles the emphasis on entrapment by naming a counterspace of openness and flight that renders all the more acute the claustrophobic space of unfreedom. Ward here mobilizes the clock’s literal mechanics to jog the viewer’s associative leaps: for the clock interior also traditionally houses the escapement, the wheel-like mechanism that nudges the wheel forward into motion, then dips down to pause its advance. It thus regulates its pace in a two-step rhythm of halt and pause, a push and pull that has paced Western timepieces for centuries. The “anchor” escapement typical of this Ithaca clock is a simple trident shaped part or “catch,” so named for its resemblance to the marine weight, which in the seventeenth century largely replaced earlier circular escapements. Ward’s title “anchors” time in its “escape,” reframing technical notions and literal instruments, such as anchors and escapements, as metaphorical counterweights, or philosophical counterpressures that shape the space of Blackness and Black history.

At the most abstract level, time is always inescapable, as everyone from seventeenth-century poets such as Andrew Marvell to Stephen Hawking in his A Brief History of Time (1988) have affirmed.5 And its unstoppable course is usually, ultimately, felt through the body’s own clocks: the tick of the heart, the rhythm of breath. But Ward seems less interested in such generalized truths than in recovering specific, embodied histories that affirm the widely divergent ways that individual gendered and raced bodies feel or apprehend the subjective force of histories or theories, including such seemingly

neutral theories as time. In so doing, he carefully elevates specific associations over pseudo-universal truths. For instance, the word “escapement,” especially in concert with “anchor,” might suggest for many white Americans maritime leisure; an innocent escape from the quotidian pressures of terrestrial life. But here such a reading is obliged to face the narrow limits of whiteness. Ward, by presenting a history of Black subjects transported from Africa by force, invites audiences to imagine how, for the descendants of enslaved peoples, the maritime architecture of miniaturization can never be a space of comfort, for it is fraught with memories of forced incarceration and enslaved labor. Likewise, the word anchor resonates with horror in this image, suggesting shackles weighing down limbs, anchoring people to a piece of metal in the hold of a ship. At the same time, the trapped pendulum renders any actual movement of the clock impossible, suggesting impasse or historical standstill. Time collapses around the contained Black body as an image that elides the past with the present, tethering histories of enslavement to its contemporary incarnation for Black subjects in the U.S.: incarceration.6 “The Four Moments of the Sun” In the top section of the clock, Figure 2. Detail of Nari Ward, where the face is usually positioned, Ward Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca. replaced the generic “Western” clock face with a specific Kongo cosmogram (a cross within a diamond), thereby displacing linear time in favor of a central African time-space schema: a map of the four cardinal directions that divides the earthly and celestial realms, while also representing the “four moments of the sun” as it moves across the sky.7 (Fig. 3.) Ward’s foregrounding of the rich and poetic Bakongo temporal system doesn’t simply refresh a familiar dominant image of time with an alternative African conception, it decenters the universalist assumptions of Western time. Nari Ward did not encounter the cosmogram in central Africa (where the Bakongo reside across Angola and the DRC) but in the American south, where Bakongo art, music and dance left an indelible imprint. He remembers noticing it on a visit to the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, built in 1794 by a still enslaved population, and long presumed to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. The church floor is “patterned” with multiple Kongo crosses, a design that masked the functional “breathing holes” that allowed air into the four-foot crawl space built to harbor runaways beneath the church floor (Fig. 4). In Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca, Ward has embedded the circular incisions not in a floor, but in what appears more like a ceiling: an image of celestial transcendence, where an array of glinting copper nail heads is scattered across the cerulean blue of the patinated copper. This radiant, heavenly image, when placed above a cavity of trapped figures, radically cleaves the symbolic space into a spiritual realm

Photo: John Klippel

Photo: John Klippel Figure 3. Detail of Nari Ward, Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca.

Figure 4. Photograph of the floor of the First African Baptist Church, Savannah, Georgia, 1794, showing “breathing holes” in the shape of the Kongo cross.

Figure 5. Bakongo artist. Power Figure (Nkisi Nkondi), 19th century, with 20th-century restoration. Wood, iron, glass, resin, kaolin, pigment, plant fiber, cloth, 33 7/8 x 13 3/4 x 11 in. (86 x 34.9 x 27.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Expedition 1922, Robert B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 22.1421.

of transcendence and freedom above and an earthly hell of capture beneath. In this way, Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca not only maps a cosmogram of the “four corners” as a crosscultural convergence of heaven above and hell below, but also recreates the architecture of escapement, recreating the body of the clock in the memory of the historic Baptist church of Savannah where, like so many other spaces of terror and escape, escapement lay above and hiding below. The sculpture imagines worlds in tissue-thin proximity, yet separated by life and death, connected only by the fragility of a breath.8

Ward delineates the Kongo cross with a radiant constellation of copper nails, a material that recalls Bakongo visual culture, often made with the copper abundant in the region; the nails here especially quote the nails used in the famous nkisi sculptures.9 Like the Ithaca clock, nkisi treat the body as a container, and as a burying ground or hiding place. In the nkisi, each hammered nail seals a covenant, oath, or legal agreement (Fig. 5). Inside the wooden figure, the stomach has been hollowed out to house potent objects such as medicine or herbs, often in turn, wrapped. Then a piece of glass or mirror is placed over the chamber to conceal and protect the contents. Even as Ward’s copper nails visually reiterate the nailstudded surface of the nkisi, his excavation of the clock interior and his insertion of powerful agents of trauma and memory in the cavity suggests the whole clock is a life-sized nkisi.

In this way, Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca reimagines not just time (the manifest subject of the work) from a cross-cultural perspective, but also containment and interiority, smuggling global, contemporary counterarguments into Enlightenment ideals of order, universality and control. The resulting installation dislodges Western time from its pretension to universalism. And it questions the ideals of containing time, the self and the world. The Cartesian fantasy of interiority—of the subject as fundamentally different from and superior to nature, and as born to dominate by projecting rational order onto the chaos of the world—collapses in Ward’s work. Interiority comes to suggest, instead, less a vaunted threedimensionality and fullness of self than a hopelessly inadequate, even infantile mode of hiding and repression, a removal from sight of a traumatic history due to the difficulty of confronting it. Ultimately, the sculpture, by materializing the restless flows and promiscuous exchanges of syncretic global cultures, concretizes the failure of containment as a strategy. Escape may be hindered by anchors of all kinds, but in a global present of dynamically mutating, ever-changing flows, aren’t leaks and spills inevitable?

1 In a landmark 1967 essay, British historian E.P. Thompson tied time to changes in labor and the emergence of capitalist societies. He noted workers complaining that clocks seemed rigged, moving slowly during shifts, and sped up during breaks. E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): pp. 56-97. 2 William Claggett had set up shop in Newport in 1716. 3 “We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world—as containers with an inside and an outside.” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press) 1981, 58. 4 Saadiya Hartman writes: “The slave ship is a womb/abyss. The plantation is the belly of the world.” Saadiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (18:1): 2016, 1. 5 Andrew Marvell To his Coy Mistress, 1650s, “Though we cannot make our sun stand still; yet we will make him run.” 6 See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (NY: New Press, 2010). 7 See Chapter 2, “The Sign of the Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art and Religion in the Americas” in Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy (NY: Random House, 1983). 8 The breathing holes form part of Ward’s larger engagement with this image, which has often stood alone in works Ward calls simply Breathing Holes, and which he has linked with incarceration such as Correctional Circle 1802 (2018). 9 The DRC is the second largest country in Africa, and the world’s fourth largest copper producer, with mines in the mineral rich Katanga. Purchase of the clock made possible by the generosity of: Belinda Kielland, Mr. and Mrs. William L. Leatherman, Mr. and Mrs. John Rovensky Grace, and The Edward W. Kane and Martha J. Wallace Family Foundation. Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Global Contemporary Art Dept. Head, Theory & History of Art & Design, Rhode Island School of Design Curator of Contemporary Projects, Redwood Library & Athenæum