Francesco Clemente: Encampment

Francesco Clemente Encampment

As Francesco Clemente once wryly noted, “I’m told I’m a nomadic artist.” 1 And indeed, transience is embedded in the artist’s transcontinental migrations —he has spent the last few decades working between Varanasi, India, and New York City—but also in his approach to art-making itself.

For Clemente, the “value of images is to remind the Self of its limitations and, at the same time, of the possibility of an endless journey.” 2 His work incorporates symbols and philosophies spanning many cultures and times, rewarding viewers’ own voyages through his installations with multilayered imagery that simultaneously perplexes and delights. His conception of existence as a journey—variously physical, psychological, and spiritual—is at the heart of Encampment.

On the flag hanging from his sculpture Hunger —one of four altar-like constructions installed beneath the mezzanine, past the village of tents that first greets visitors—golden embroidery traces the words “the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.” The phrase is taken from Guy Debord’s seminal text Society of the Spectacle (1967) in which the French philosopher describes the modern condition as essentially alienated, the culture of consumerism having driven a wedge between makers and their products, and between us and a life directly lived. The spectacle, Debord writes, makes this fundamental schism visible: “The more the spectator contemplates, the less he lives; the more he accepts himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and desires.” 3 The omnipresence of the spectacle results in a spectator who must wander, always hungering— as Hunger’s title perhaps suggests—for union with the objects of his creation and the world around him.

Hunger, 2014 Fabric, embroidery, bamboo, aluminum, iron 1005⁄8 × 643⁄4 × 533⁄4 inches Courtesy of the artist.

Clemente’s tents, created in collaboration with craftspeople in Rajastan, India, and exhibited together for the first time at MASS MoCA, serve as mobile anti-spectacles for the unmoored viewer. Viewers enter the exhibition from a raised vantage point.

From this angle, the bright peaks of the tents filling the museum’s immense Building 5 gallery overlap like a colorful mountain range. Descending into the encampment, we become its temporary denizens.

Up close, we might note the golden embroidery that overlays the brilliantly colored camouflage prints of the tents’ exteriors. These metallic lines trace out words and symbols that span centuries of Eastern and Western visual cultures, ranging from all-seeing eyes and overlaid outlines of hands (reminiscent of those found around the world in millennia-old rock art) to the hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades found in a deck of cards.

Beneath the golden tracery, hand-printed woodblock camouflage patterns oscillate between figure and ground, alternately visible and receding from view.

Standing With Truth Tent, 2013 (interior view) Tempera on cotton and mixed media 1181⁄8 × 236 1⁄4 × 1571⁄4 inches Courtesy of the artist and Blain|Southern Gallery.

Clemente has said, “I believe in this movement of generating and dissolving, generating and dissolving.

I think this is a technique for the mind to stay awake.” 4 Inside the tents, washes of watercolor describe figures ranging from Byzantine angels and grotesque devils to top-hatted businessmen and —in the case of Museum Tent—Clemente himself reaching out from a series of framed self-portraits.

Each viewer brings his or her own visual conditioning to these tents: depending on one’s background, some figures, words, and symbols may be more eye-catching than others, or even mean different things. Though the colorful camouflage may strike some viewers as purely decorative, for example, for those who have spent time near the India/Pakistan

border, where these tents were fabricated, the prints will perhaps recall the uniforms and weaponry of the omnipresent military in that much-contested region.

The four sculptures installed under the mezzanine, built from lightweight aluminum, likewise lend themselves to the needs of a traveler. Enclosing Debord’s words on Hunger’s flag is an ouroboros, an ancient symbol of a snake biting its tail. Found in traditions ranging from Greco-Roman antiquity to Hinduism, the ouroboros signifies the cyclical nature of time and the eternal return. For Debord, “Cyclical time already dominates the experience of nomadic populations because they find the same conditions repeated at every moment of their journey.” 5 Clemente’s four structures juxtapose

modern-day objects within the traditional forms of shrines or altars, perhaps denoting a kind of contemporaneity that the artist has related to the Hindi word kal, which “refers to both yesterday and tomorrow—they are just brackets that surround the present moment.” 6 According to psychiatrist Carl Jung, the archetype of the ouroboros represents not only cyclical time but also the unity that transcends physical existence: “the god hidden in matter.” 7 For Clemente, this push-and-pull between physical, material experience and spiritual transcendence is at once erotic and painful. In his series No Mud, No Lotus, on view for the first time in MASS MoCA’s mezzanine gallery, Clemente layered detailed gouache patterns, in the tradition of Mughal miniature paintings, with dreamy watercolor paint, depicting encounters where the penetration might be either of a wound, or bodily orifice.

Throughout Clemente’s series of paintings, the titular lotuses sprout from the edge of the picture, as well as from figures’ bodies. The series takes its title from a book by Buddhist scholar and monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, which advises readers to seek to understand and embrace suffering as refuse from which “flowers of understanding, compassion, and joy” 8 may grow.

For Clemente, such moments of transition— from suffering to joy, from place to place, from physical to spiritual ecstasy—are the substance of life itself. He devotes himself to “rewriting, retelling, repainting” 9 iconography, creating works that demand that a viewer be constantly on the move, never settling in a single place, or on just one interpretation. As he has said, “Every single moment of the unfolding experience of the work is just a pretext to move on, o move forward from that moment. It’s never supposed to be a beginning or an ending; it’s supposed to be a transition.” 10

No Mud, No Lotus 13, 2013-2014 (detail) Watercolor and miniature on handmade paper 20 × 22 1⁄4 inches Courtesy of the artist

1 Francesco Clemente, “Tents,” Blain|Southern YouTube Video, beginning at 1:13.

2 Francesco Clemente in conversation with Alex Bacon, The Brooklyn Rail, 3 May 2013.

3 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), Thesis 30, n.p.

4 Francesco Clemente, “Tents,” Blain|Southern YouTube Video, beginning at 1:03.

5 Debord, Thesis 127, n.p.

6 Francesco Clemente in conversation with Alex Bacon, The Brooklyn Rail, 3 May 2013.

7 C.G. Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (1957) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 64.

8 Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2014), 28.

9 Francesco Clemente in conversation with Pamela Kort, New York, 26 March 2011, 2.

10 Francesco Clemente in conversation with Alex Bacon, The Brooklyn Rail, 3 May 2013.

Francesco Clemente was born in Italy, and lives and works in Varanasi, India, and New York, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the Rubin Museum of Art, New York; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Uffizi Gallery, Florence; Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Dia Art Foundation, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Clemente is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Francesco Clemente: Encampment On view June 13, 2015 – January 2016 This exhibition is supported by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Blain|Southern Gallery.

Interior flap: No Mud, No Lotus 5, 2013-2014 (detail) Watercolor and miniature on handmade paper 20 × 22 1⁄4 inches Courtesy of the artist.

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