Bordering on cultural vision: Jay Dusard's collaboration with the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo

The colonialists are incapable of grasping the motivations of the
colonized.
--Frantz Fanon, 1959

Within the field of visual culture it would seem that writers should focus their attention on how the concept of vision qualifies and modifies that of culture. Reading the various attempts that have been made at defining vision, however, one quickly realizes that it is not a universal constant. Hal Foster, for instance, has outlined how physiological vision and sociological visuality complexly intertwine and yet are not equivalent, thereby suggesting culturally determined differences "among how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein." To complicate matters further, "with its own rhetoric and representations, each scopic regime seeks to close out these differences: to make of its many social visualities one essential vision, or to order them in a natural hierarchy of sight." Thus, it is no surprise that "vision has a history" and that it requires rigorous historical and cultural analyses before one can define it and use it intelligently. (1)

In order to avoid this requirement, a writer might try inverting visual culture into cultural vision, or into how the concept of culture qualifies and modifies that of vision (perhaps somewhat similar to the "period eye" in social art history). Yet, it just as quickly becomes apparent that culture is no more a universal constant than vision. Raymond Williams defined culture in three ways: "a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development," "a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general," and "the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity." (2) In fact, Williams noted that culture belongs to a select group of the "two or three most complicated words in the English language." (3) It would seem that scholarship within either field--visual culture or cultural vision--is an equally, perhaps hopelessly, complex enterprise. Nevertheless, the basic thrust of what follows will be an attempt to employ the concept of cultural vision.

To reduce the incredible intricacy of cultural vision, this paper will focus primarily on just one cultural event and one visual representation thereof: a work of performance art captured in a photograph by Jay Dusard entitled Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, End of the U.S.--Mexico Border, California/Baja California. The event depicted took place between the Border Field Park in San Diego and Tijuana's Plaza Monumental bullring in November of 1985, just one year after the artist David Avalos organized the founding of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF). The photograph was published in Alan Weisman and Dusard's 1986 book La Frontera: The United States Border with Mexico. (4) This essay will attempt to map the cultural vision of Dusard and Weisman as self-proclaimed "gringos" (5) visiting the border, and how they intersected with the BAW/TAF's collective cultural vision as a group of artists of varying ethnicities who lived and worked on the border, and thereby shared Williams's second definition of culture. (6) The BAW/TAF skillfully staged this scene with and for Dusard in order to send a critical message about the borderland in general and the specific situation in Tijuana and San Diego at that time. That message depended upon an unusual linkage between Dusard's modernist landscape photography and the BAW/TAF's postmodernist performance sensibilities. Their collaboration resulted in subversive content that would exceed both the performance itself and any traditional "documentary" photograph of it.

Furthermore, "readings" and/or interpretations of this image using the well-known, perhaps even institutionalized, approaches of theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Guy Debord, and Walter Benjamin would seem to yield only a cynical view: that it reinforces the epigraph to this article. But one of the particular strengths of the photograph is its resistance to such formulaic critiques; in fact, such academic processes blind us when we examine it. As an artistic and intercultural collaboration between a self-identified "gringo" modernist photographer and a multiethnic, Chicano-led postmodernist performance group, the photograph seemingly affirms but also simultaneously resists Fanon's claim regarding the incommensurability of different cultural visions, at least in terms of the place known as "the border" circa 1985.

The photograph is in black and white. A gleaming lighthouse rises into a cloudless sky on the upper left side. Immediately to the right of the tower, the back side of a sports stadium spreads out across the horizon, its structure mimicking that of a large fence that follows the contours of the earth into the distance. The fence separates the background of lighthouse and coliseum from the sandy beach in the foreground and the picture's subject, members of the BAW/TAF engaged in a mid-1980s site-specific performance on the U.S. border near Tijuana.