El Dorado

El Dorado Jo-Anne Balcaen, Stephan Kurr Galerie SAW Gallery Ottawa Canada March 2003

The drunken delusion of a swashbuckler past his prime: El Dorado, like all dreams of plenty, pictures a world upside down. Lubberland, Schlaraffenland, Big Rock Candy Mountain, paradise and the land of Cockaigne are all siblings to this fantasy of perfect satisfaction. Born of extreme want, these dreams were typically the products of peasants, who imaginatively inverted their destitution to cope with starvation and disease.1 Similar inversions come into play during carnival festivities, as the harsh dialectic of social relations is temporarily overturned. Men become women, children become adults and, for a time, the profane jostling of the marketplace supplants the sacred order of the church. El Dorado was also an imaginary land of luxury and idleness, but with these differences: its sources may, in fact have been non-European,2 and the driving force behind its literary development in Europe was apparently not destitution or wretched social status, but privilege and imperial opulence. In 1597 Sir Walter Raleigh: soldier, poet, entrepreneur, explorer and ‘sea-dog’ pirate extraordinaire set out to claim El Dorado for the glory of England. It was a delirious attempt to regain the favour of his sovereign: Elisabeth I. Long a favoured courtier (perhaps even furtive courtesan) to the Virgin Queen, Raleigh3 was given the royal cold-shoulder after his marriage to one of her attendants. Past his prime, already having achieved his greatest successes and secured his legacy, Raleigh’s bloated gesture came during, and in a sense announced, his retirement from history.

1

Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore, University of Chicago Press, 1989. Camporesi discusses the widespread production of bread spiked with hallucinogens during times of famine in pre-industrial Europe. 2 The legend of El Dorado is said to have originated in what is now Columbia with the Chibcha people. Once a year the chief, gilded in gold dust would cast off emeralds and gold objects from a raft in the middle of a lake. 3 Raleigh is the chivalrous noble who, according to legend, laid his cloak over a puddle of mud so Elizabeth could cross it unsullied.

The image of the gilded king surrendering his treasures to the murk (the sacrificial excrement), and its opposite: the overstuffed Raleigh trying to steal it for himself (the gluttonous heathen) together well evoke the instability and specificity of value: how slippery the distinctions are between riches and waste. They are potent analogues to Balcaen and Kurr’s intervention. The state of idle grace inspired by the orientalized fantasy of El Dorado finds a quixotic resting place on the gilded ceiling of SAW Gallery. It is no accident that this same basement ceiling: extremely utilitarian and normally disguised (with black paint), was used as the fantastic (and literally inverted) landscape for a previous installation.4 -In a key series of essays pondering the hidden conditions necessary for the display of Modern art5, Brian O’Doherty claimed that the ‘white cube’ was missing two of its planes: that the architectural space posited by Modern art demanded a repression of the floor and the ceiling. After all he asked, what to do with air ducts, wiring, plumbing and especially “the cultivated garden of fixtures”6 ensuing from the electric light? El Dorado dispenses with the two-dimensional horizontality of the white cube. It responds to the puritanical discipline of Modern viewership and its attendant repressions with the decadence of a Baroque ceiling: “an arch, a dome, a sky, a vortex [of] swirling figures until they vanish through a celestial hole, like a sublime overhead toilet.”7 Marcus Miller Artistic Director Galerie SAW Gallery [email protected] 4

Channa Boon and Petra Halkes, LIGHTSHIP, SAW Gallery, Ottawa, Canada, April 11 – May 8, 1999. A closed circuit camera was mounted (upside down) on the engine of a model train, running around a track suspended from the ceiling of the gallery. Live images; with the ceiling oriented as the ground, and ducts, wires and pipes standing in for landscape features, were broadcast on a monitor in the gallery. 5 O’Doherty coined the critical term ‘white cube’ in three essays, originally published in “Artforum” between 1976 – 1986. These were reissued with an afterword in Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991. See esp. chap. 3. 6 Ibid. pg. 66. 7 Ibid.