Bottle Talk in Miami
Carrie Mackin
Tucked beyond the glut of art fairs in Miami, Trong G. Nguyen’s Messages from Guantanamo added a poignant dosage of socio-politically conscious work to the hedonistic fray otherwise known as Art Basel and friends. On a glorious Saturday morning on South Beach, it was easy and not so easy to miss the installation of 200 bottles washed upon the sand across from the Cavalier Hotel. Plastic and glass bottles carried messages, leaflets, photographs and other objects supposedly set adrift by enemy combatants illegally detained by the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The sprawling installation was an unsightly yet elegant collection of containers which viewers were encouraged to pick up and investigate. The bottles contained not only hand-written accounts of ill treatment and abuse appropriated from interviews of released detainees, but also meditative thoughts, imaginary musings and excerpts from such diverse sources as Hitler’s Mein Kampf, The Diary of Anne Frank, Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, and CCR’s Bad Moon Rising. Issuing a collective cry for help, many of the messages were translated into foreign scripts including Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Swedish, German and French, driving home the little known fact that the remaining 500 detainees comprise over 30 nationalities. They are identity-less individuals who are protected away from the "quaint" Geneva Conventions.
By late morning, the steadily rising tide continued to wash the bottles higher up the sand, covering a swath about 150 feet across. Morning beachgoers encountered the stretch of littered paradise as they were jogging, walking their dogs and sunning. Nguyen, a New York-based artist who will be included in the upcoming 2006 Havana Biennial, engaged in a few lively discussions with passersby, including one with a Cuban-American gentleman who took umbrage and criticized the artist for honoring terrorists while at the same time ignoring the fact that there were Cuban political prisoners similarly holed up by Castro. His were heated words that missed the central points of the project however, and connected little to the actual truth.
Messages from Guantanamo effectively preaches what Momma used to teach, which was "two wrongs don’t make a right." Nguyen essentially holds a two-way mirror up to the most opaque administration in U.S. history. Thus, can we truly criticize Castro when the same abuse goes on in our own backyard? The detainees at Guantanamo have yet to be charged with a crime, and for three years have languished without access to due process, a cornerstone of the American legal system. A blind person can see straight through the wicked hypocrisy that threatens not only basic constitutional rights, but dangerously sets precedence for what might also happen to American combatants caught by parallel-thinking, copycat regimes.
One of the most striking bottles was a two-liter, green plastic container carrying a hand-colored photographic image of a handsome Middle Eastern man wearing a turban, posed with his left hand over his right chest, face gazing emotionless at the lens. The background is tinted a bright sky blue. He is wearing a gold watch on his wrist and the Technicolor saturation of his skin contrasts a mundane black button-up shirt. The photograph is more reminiscent of a staged Pierre et Gilles composition than a soldier going off to war. Like that famous image of the Tibetan monk set afire, this picture similarly brings a collective dimension of humanity and suffering to conflict. It closes the nationalistic divide that separates and is replete with dignity, not to mention seemingly unreal.
But the prerequisite question to all debate is still, who are these people?
Lastly, it is worthwhile to note that even though Miami Beach is a mere 90 miles from Cuba, the path of the bottles themselves tell an odyssean tale. Wanting the containers to be authentically Cuban, Nguyen asked a friend of a friend in Havana to find him 200 discarded bottles and have them shipped to another friend in Montreal, beyond the solitary confinement of our embargo. The essentially "valueless" bottles were immediately "re-gifted" and shipped to Florida, where they recycled themselves on the beach. Their journey was not easy, and Nguyen marveled at the generosity of the friends across the way who despite living in a state of poverty themselves, found the industriousness and generosity to help a complete stranger in need connect art to life and vice versa. Many boundaries were breached in Messages from Guantanamo, and one can only hope the borders continuing giving way.
Carrie Mackin is the founder and director of Covivant Gallery in Tampa, Florida, one of the south’s most uncompromising art spaces. Covivant has recorded a number of envelope-pushing exhibitions in its six-year reign, including See You See Me (2001); Detour (2002); Transatlantic Relations (2003); From New York with Love (2004); and most recently Family Values (2005), a portrait project responding to Hillsborough County’s ban on gay pride. Mackin also serves as an art consultant to the City of Tampa for the Office of Arts and Culture.
